Death of a Fool by Ngaio Marsh Page A

deeply disturbing. Somewhere, hidden in the wood, a grown man was crying.
    He cried boisterously without making any attempt to restrain his distress and Camilla guessed at once who he must be. She hesitated for a moment and then went forward. The path turned a corner by a thicket of evergreens and, on the other side, Camilla found her uncle, Ernie Andersen, lamenting over the body of his mongrel dog.
    The dog was covered with sacking, but its tail, horridly dead, stuck out at one end. Ernie crouched beside it, squatting on his heels with his great hands dangling, splay-fingered, between his knees. His face was beslobbered and blotched with tears. When he saw Camilla he cried, like a small boy, all the louder.
    “Why, Ernie!” Camilla said, “you poor old thing.”
    He broke into an angry torrent of speech, but so confusedly and in such a thickened dialect that she had much ado to understand him. He was raging against his father. His father, it seemed, had been saying all the week that the dog was unhealthy and ought to be put down. Ernie had savagely defied him and had kept clear of the forge, taking the dog with him up and down the frozen lanes. This morning, however, the dog had slipped away and gone back to the forge. The Guiser, finding it lying behind the smithy, had shot it there and then. Ernie had heard the shot. Camilla pictured him, blundering through the trees, whimpering with anxiety. His father met him with his gun in his hand and told him to take the carcass away and bury it. At this point, Ernie’s narrative became unintelligible. Camilla could only guess at the scene that followed. Evidently, Chris had supported his father, pointing out that the dog was indeed in a wretched condition and that it had been from motives of kindness that the Guiser had put it out of its misery. She supposed that Ernie, beside himself with rage and grief, had thereupon carried the body to the wood.
    “It’s God’s truth,” Ernie was saying, as he rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands and became more coherent, “I tell ’e, it’s God’s truth I’ll be quits with ’im for this job. Bad ’e is: rotten bad and so grasping and cruel’s a blasted li’l old snake. Done me down at every turn: a murdering thief if ever I see one. Cut down in all the deathly pride of his sins, ’e’ll be, if Doctor knows what he’m talking about.”
    “What on earth do you mean?” cried Camilla.
    “I be a betterer guiser nor him. I do it betterer nor him: neat as pin on my feet and every step a masterpiece. Doctor reckons he’ll kill hisself. By God, I hope ’e does.”
    “Ernie! Be quiet. You don’t know what you’re saying. Why do you want to do the Fool’s act? It’s an Old Man’s act. You’re a Son.”
    Ernie reached out his hand. With a finnicky gesture of his flat red thumb and forefinger, he lifted the tip of his dead dog’s tail. “I got the fancy,” he said, looking at Camilla out of the corners of his eyes, “to die and be rose up agin. That’s why.”
    Camilla thought, “No, honestly, this is
too
mummerset.” She said, “But that’s just an act. It’s just an old dance-play. It’s like having mistletoe and plum-pudding. Nothing else happens, Ernie. Nobody dies.”
    Ernie twitched the sacking off the body of his dog. Camilla gave a protesting cry and shrank away.
    “What’s thik, then?” Ernie demanded. “Be thik a real dead corpse or bean’t it?”
    “Bury it!” Camilla cried out. “Cover it up, Ernie, and forget it. It’s horrible.”
    She felt she could stand no more of Ernie and his dog. She said, “I’m sorry. I can’t help you,” and walked on past him and along the path to the smithy. With great difficulty she restrained herself from breaking into a run. She felt sick.
    The path came out at a clearing near the lane and a little above the smithy.
    A man was waiting there. She saw him at first through the trees and then, as she drew nearer, more clearly.
    He came to meet her. His