Case with 4 Clowns by Leo Bruce Page B

lamb’s tail.
    â€œWell,” said Mrs. Jackson. “I must go to put the supper on. If you’ve done with the cups, dears, I’ll take them with me.” The band in the tent had begun to play the music for the last turn, and Mrs. Jackson stood as if it had been a command and opened the door. “Well, good-by, dear,” she said. “These little trials do us good sometimes, I always say.” And forgetting to shut the door, she was gone, half-running, half-walking across to the proprietor’s wagon.
    â€œI often wonder,” said Beef ruminatively, “how it is some of these people get into a circus. Why they join up with you. Now people like your mother, I suppose, were born in the circus. But how do those like Mrs. Jackson ever come to be here at all?”
    â€œYour guess is quite wrong, Sergeant,” said Anita. “Actually mother wasn’t born in a circus at all. She used to be on the halls. That was a long time ago, of course. But she had an act with her brother.”
    â€œWhat did they do?” asked Beef.
    â€œOh, some sort of a mind-reading act. It depended a lot on hypnotism, you know.”
    â€œHypnotism?” said Beef. “Can your mother hypnotize people then?”
    â€œDepends on the person,” answered Anita. “She can’t hypnotize me, for instance. I’m the wrong sort of material. But she hypnotizes Helen sometimes.”
    â€œHas she done so lately?” I asked. “I mean within the last few weeks?”
    â€œWhy, yes,” Helen said. “Actually, she hypnotized me this morning. Why do you ask?”
    I looked at Beef. “Well?” I asked, “what do you think about it?”
    â€œTownsend means,” explained Beef, “that there might be some possibility of your mother putting Helen under the influence, so to speak, so that she’d try and stab you.”
    But both the girls disagreed completely with the possibility of this half-formed theory. They said that their mother could not control them to that extent—at least she had never done so in their experience. She was only able to put them into a sort of trance which, if anything, made one physically weaker. Beef seemed to be persuaded by them, and eventually led me out of the wagon. I was still unconvinced, but it was no use to argue with Beef. I saw that the only thing to do was to keep it in mind.
    â€œWell,” said Beef with a broad grin as we left the wagon, “do you still want to go home?”
    â€œMost certainly not,” I answered. “Things are just beginning to look exciting.”
    As I lay awake in bed that night I let my thoughts wander over what we had already witnessed in the circus, and its difference from the sort of life led by the rest of society. It was, I thought, exciting enough without the promise of a case. There seemed to me so much more vitality in the people. Already there had been an attempt at a murder, and I felt, as I lay there, that almost anything might happen in the future. That was the whole point about circus folk. They were not predictable, as most other people were. One felt that one had to be prepared for anything, when one was with them. It might be something quite small and ridiculous, or it might be something huge and terrifying. One could not foresee it anyway. But it was exciting. I decided that I would stay on with Beef.
    Since so many little things happened each day which were not in the usual logical order of our previous “cases,” I realized that it would be best to keep a continual account of them in the form of a rather full journal. Then, if anything did happen, I should have all the possible details of what led up to it already written down. It would certainly save time later. That was, of course, if a case ever came of the business. And even if it did not, I thought to myself, it would still be worth staying on.
    I turned to Beef to tell him about my decision, but he