perfect.’
‘I know that,’ he agreed heavily. ‘In the meantime, I’m forgetting my job. Mr Alleyn presents his compliments and wonders if you’d be kind enough to give him a few minutes.’
‘Ach! I too am forgetting. You are the police.’
‘You wouldn’t think so, the way I’m running on, would you?’
(Alleyn had said: ‘If she was an anti-Nazi refugee, she’ll think we’re ruthless automatons. Jolly her along a bit.’)
Mrs Bünz gathered herself together and followed Fox. In the passage, Simon Begg was saying: ‘Look, old boy, all I’m asking for is the gen on the 1.30. Look, old boy –’
Fox opened the door of the sitting-room and announced her.
‘Mrs Bünz,’ he said quite successfully.
As she advanced into the room Alleyn seemed to see, not so much a middle-aged German, as the generalization of a species. Mrs Bünz was the lady who sits near the front of lectures and always asks questions. She has an enthusiasm for obscure musicians, stands nearest to guides, keeps handicraft shops of the better class and reads Rabindranath Tagore. She weaves, forms circles, gives talks, hand-throws pots and designs book-plates. She is sometimes a vegetarian, though not always a crank. Occasionally she is an expert.
She walked slowly into the room and kept her gaze fixed on Alleyn. ‘She is afraid of me,’ he thought.
‘This is Mr Alleyn, Mrs Bünz,’ Dr Otterly said.
Alleyn shook hands with her. Her own short stubby hand was tremulous and the palm was damp. At his invitation, she perched warily on a chair. Fox sat down behind her and palmed his notebook out of his pocket.
‘Mrs Bünz,’ Alleyn said, ‘in a minute or two I’m going to throw myself on your mercy.’
She blinked at him.
‘Zo?’ said Mrs Bünz.
‘I understand you’re an expert on folklore and, if ever anybody needed an expert, we do.’
‘I have gone a certain way.’
‘Dr Otterly tells me,’ Alleyn said, to that gentleman’s astonishment, ‘that you have probably gone as far as anyone in England.’
‘Zo,’ she said, with a magnificent inclination towards Otterly.
‘But, before we talk about that, I suppose I’d better ask you the usual routine questions. Let’s get them over as soon as possible. I’m told that you gave Mr William Andersen a lift –‘
They were off again on the old trail, Alleyn thought dejectedly, and not getting much farther along it. Mrs Bünz’s account of the Guiser’s hitch-hike corresponded with what he had already been told.
‘I was so delighted to drive him,’ she began nervously. ‘It was a great pleasure to me. Once or twice I attempted, tactfully, to a little draw him out but he was, I found, angry, and not inclined for cawnversation.’
‘Did he say anything at all, do you remember?’
‘To my recollection he spoke only twice. To begin with, he invited me by gesture to stop and, when I did so, he asked me in his splendid, splendid rich dialect, “Be you goink up-alongk?” On the drive, he remarked that, when he found Mr Ernie Andersen he would have the skin off of his body. Those, however, were his only remarks.’
‘And when you arrived?’
‘He descended and hurried away.’
‘And what,’ Alleyn asked, ‘did you do?’
The effect of the question, casually put, upon Mrs Bünz was extraordinary. She seemed to flinch back into her clothes as a tortoise into its shell.
‘When you got there, you know,’ Alleyn gently prompted her, ‘what did you do?’
Mrs Bünz said in a cold-thickened voice: ‘I became a spectator. Of course.’
‘Where did you stand?’
Her head sank a little further into her shoulders.
‘Inside the archway.’
‘The archway by the house as you come in?’
‘Yes.’
‘And from there you watched the dance?’
Mrs Bünz wetted her lips and nodded.
‘That must have been an absorbing experience. Had you any idea of what was in store for you?’
‘Ach! No! No, I swear it! No!’ She almost shouted.
‘I meant,’ Alleyn said, ‘in respect of the dance itself.’
‘The dance,’ Mrs Bünz said in a strangulated croak, ‘is unique.’
‘Was it all that you expected?’
‘But of course!’ She gave a little gasp and appeared to be horror stricken. ‘Really,’ Alleyn thought, ‘I seem to be having almost too much success with Mrs Bünz. Every shy a coconut.’
She had embarked on an elaborate explanation. All folk dance and drama had a common origin. One expected certain elements. The amazing thing about the Five Sons was that it combined so rich an assortment of these elements as well as some remarkable features of its own. ‘It has everythink. But everythink,’ she said and was plagued by a gargantuan sneeze.
‘And did they do it well?’
Mrs Bünz said they did it wonderfully well. The best performance for sheer execution in England. She rallied from whatever shock she had suffered and began to talk incomprehensibly of galleys, split-jumps and double capers. Not only did she remember every move of the Five Sons and the Fool in their twice-repeated dance, but she had noted the positions of the Betty and Hobby. She remembered how these two pranced round the perimeter and how, later on, the Betty chased the young men and flung his skirts over their heads and the Hobby stood as an image behind the dolmen. She remembered everything.
‘This is astonishing,’ he said, ‘for you to retain the whole thing, I mean, after seeing it only once. Extraordinary. How do you do it?’
‘I – I – have a very good memory,’ said Mrs Bünz, and gave an agonized little laugh. ‘In such matters my memory is phenomenal.’ Her voice died away. She looked remarkably uncomfortable. He asked her if she took notes and she said at once she didn’t, and then seemed in two minds whether to contradict herself.
Her description of the dance tallied in every respect with the accounts he had already been given, with one exception. She seemed to have only the vaguest recollection of the Guiser’s first entrance when, as Alleyn had already been told, he had jogged round the arena and struck the Mardian Dolmen with his clown’s bladder. But, from then onwards, Mrs Bünz knew everything right up to the moment when Ralph stole
