He paused for confirmation—or perhaps denial. It was the confirmation he got in the shape of an emphatic nod and an equally emphatic:
“Oh, yes.”
“All very well to talk,” grumbled Doreen from her driver’s seat. “You would have just the same.”
“Oh, yes,” agreed Bobby once more, and Doreen did not know whether to be still more offended or to be placated.
“He was awfully plausible,” Kenneth continued, too absorbed in the telling of his story, in the recollection of those days of dawning doubt and suspicion, to pay much attention to any interpolations. “He wasn’t only a first-class cook, a wonder cook. He could jolly you along almost as he pleased. He could talk our tourists into doing any odd job for us on the yacht without their having the least notion it wasn’t all their own idea. He could have served up a dried haddock and made you think it was the greatest delicacy on earth. Mind you, what he did serve up was rather more than jolly good—it was superb. I don’t know why he wasn’t head chef at some swell hotel. Or why he wasn’t in Parliament, the way he could talk. I rather think perhaps he just liked doing things the crooked way.”
“I know,” Bobby agreed. “There are people like that. They think it’s clever, and then they won’t, or can’t, settle down to any regular discipline. A man like that can take a good job for a short time and do well, and then he gets restless, or feels he isn’t making money fast enough and starts playing tricks. But please go on with what you were saying.”
“All the same,” Kenneth went on, “I don’t think I was altogether taken in. I still felt uneasy in a way. But I agreed to go to his flat. It never struck me there could be any danger or any sort of trap. Anyhow, I shouldn’t have cared. I expect I felt I was quite able to look after myself.” Bobby was aware that at this Doreen muttered to herself: “Men always think they can, only they just can’t”, but Kenneth, unhearing, continued: “But then, just as I was starting out, there was a ’phone call. I couldn’t make much of it.”
“Did you recognize the voice?”
“No. It was a woman’s I think. I didn’t notice much. Whoever it was rang off in the middle of what she was saying. It all seemed to add up to telling me not to go out that evening and, if I did, to mind what I had to drink. I said why and what was it all about, and that was when she rang off.”
“Do you know where the call came from?”
“From a call box,” Kenneth replied. “I did ask that. Well, I didn’t feel like taking any notice, and I went to Abel’s just the same. He was waiting, and he was very jolly and friendly, and said between us we could soon get to the bottom of what was going on behind our backs. He said we could talk about it while we were having something to eat, and he had done my favourite speciality for me.”
“What was that?” Bobby asked quickly.
“Fried chicken and apple fritters,” Kenneth answered. “He had some special way of doing it, and I had told him once I thought it jolly good. I didn’t know it was my favourite exactly. There was smoked salmon on the table. I remember that. Smoked salmon is a bit of a weakness of mine. I was skippering a big yacht once, and the owner used to have it at almost every meal. Abel kept bustling about and talking, and he mixed cocktails and gave me one, and the moment I had it I knew it was doped. I can’t describe the feeling exactly. It was just as if one part of me wasn’t there at all, and one part of me was looking on, and one part was still me. It was all awfully muddled and confused like a bad dream, all of it except one thing. Abel’s face, looking much larger than it was really and quite close and grinning like hell. Then—I don’t know how to describe it—it was damn queer. It was just as if the part of me that was looking on was saying: ‘You have been warned, and now you’ve had it’, and the part of me that was still me said: ‘Got to do something about it’, and then all three of us seemed to rush together again and something else as well from outside, so I became all at once all different and a lot bigger, and I hit that grinning face of Abel’s with—I was going to say with all my force. But it was more than that—much more than that. I don’t know where it came from—the power I mean. I don’t believe any heavy-weight champion ever got in a blow like that. I don’t believe any human being could have stood up to it. Poets are supposed to be inspired sometimes, and if a fist can be inspired—well, mine was. That big, outsize grinning face of Abel’s seemed just to crumple up, and then there he was, lying flat on his back on the floor, with his face all changed and different and blood all over it, and I was looking down at him, wondering what had happened and hanging on to a chair to keep myself from falling.
“I think all this must have happened in split seconds. I could see Abel’s head was hanging half over the fender, and I remember thinking quite coherently that I was too weak on my legs to move him, but I could get a cushion to put under his head. I grabbed one from the couch, and then I went down flat, and the chair and cushion and all, and me, right on top of him where he lay. All at once I felt most awfully sick, and I was beginning to see things that weren’t there.”
“What sort of things?” Bobby asked when the other was silent for a moment of two, as if finding difficulty in expressing himself.
“Faces mostly,” Kenneth said then. “A procession of faces, horrible, grinning faces. I can remember saying out loud: ‘You aren’t real, you know’, and at the same time thinking that of course they were, more real than reality, for that matter, and I was afraid. Besides I didn’t want to be sick there, as I felt I was going to be. I managed to get on my feet somehow and to get to the bathroom. The faces weren’t there, thank God, I had got away from them, and I wasn’t sick either. It just wouldn’t come, though I did my best to bring it up. I couldn’t, and then I was on the floor again, and I knew I would be unconscious very soon. I could feel it coming in waves, and I still had sense enough to know that if Abel came round first and found me there like that he would kick the inside out of me, and I had better get off, and the sooner the quicker.” He paused and looked slightly embarrassed, even shy. He said: “I don’t think I put it quite like that at the time, but I daresay what was at the back of my mind was—well, I’m no film star, but I didn’t want Doreen to see me next time with a broken nose and all my teeth knocked out or an eye gone perhaps. So I did—got off, I mean. Luckily I didn’t meet anyone on the stairs, and I don’t think there was anyone in the street, and anyhow it was beginning to grow dark. The house next door has been pretty badly bombed, you remember. I was feeling most awfully ill and muddled, but I just managed to get inside, and then I was sick all right. I don’t think there can have been anything at all left inside me. It went on Lord knows how long, and long after I had stopped bringing anything up. That was the worst part of it, trying to bring up what wasn’t there. I know I honestly thought I was going to die, and then I suppose I went off again, lost my senses, I mean.”
“I suppose I shall have,” Bobby remarked, “when I’m giving a talk to our chaps, to stress again they must always make a thorough search all round where there’s been any crime committed, especially if it’s murder. Excusable in a way perhaps this time. I don’t know that I should have thought of doing it. You could hardly expect to find a suspect having a snug little sleep next door. It’s got a big ‘danger’ placard on it, too, hasn’t it?”
“Snug little sleep,” grunted Kenneth indignantly. “Well, anyhow, when I came round it was morning. I lay for a time trying to remember where I was and what had happened. I simply couldn’t get it all clear. My head was going round and round, and I couldn’t stand upright at first without hanging on to something. What I felt I had to do was to get back somehow or another to my lodgings. When I’m in town I can generally get an old shipmate of mine—a C.P.O., he’s retired now—to put me up, even if it’s only on a sofa in their sitting-room. But in the street outside there was a small crowd, all staring as hard as they knew how at next door, where Abel had his flat, and there was a policeman telling them to move on, and none of them taking much notice, except to drift
away a few yards and then drift back. They were all too busy gaping to pay me much attention, or notice where I came from, but one man did tell me there had been a murder, and another man next to him said he hoped they would get the man who did it, and hang him, and the other chap said he hoped so too, and they generally got their man, and if they didn’t it wasn’t for want of trying.”
“It certainly isn’t,” Bobby interposed, much gratified by this spontaneous tribute to the work of the Force, and wondering if he could manage to get it published in the next issue of the Gazette.
Probably not. The poet sang of Lord Roberts long ago: “’E don’t ever advertise.” Nor do the police. Kenneth was continuing:
“I didn’t quite take it in at first, but when I did it sent shivers all up and down my back, and I was sure they were eyeing me with a sort of ‘Thou art the man’ look in their eyes. The policeman was still walking up and down with his: ‘Now then, move along there, please.’ When he came to where we were, he evidently didn’t like my looks, and I don’t wonder. I expect I looked like nothing on earth. I hadn’t found out then that I had only one shoe left. Anyhow, he gave me a special ‘Move on you’ all to myself. And then he said: ‘Stop gaping and get out of it quick, unless you want to be taken in.’ I’ve thought since that’s probably about the only time on record a suspected murderer has been ordered to stop gaping and get out of it quick unless he wanted to be arrested.”
“Oh, all things can happen in police work,” Bobby observed with resignation.
“Well, anyway,” Kenneth resumed, “I thought it good advice. My head was all muzzy, and I couldn’t think clearly and couldn’t quite take it in about it’s having been murder, which it wasn’t, but all the same I didn’t feel I wanted to stop and argue. I just went.”
CHAPTER XX
DOREEN INTERVENES
“SILLIEST THING ever,” Bobby commented when Kenneth was silent so long it seemed almost as if he had said all he wished to say. In reality he was lost in memory of that strange, bewildering moment when there had first, as it were, begun to seep into his mind some sense of what had happened. “Very worst thing you could have done,” Bobby said, with undiminished severity. “Running away.”
“You would have done just the same,” Doreen snapped. “So would anyone.”
“Very likely, especially me,” Bobby agreed. “Doesn’t make it any the less silly though.”
Unheeding this exchange of side-line talk, which indeed he had hardly heard, Kenneth went on:
“I got a taxi to take me home. The driver didn’t want at first. I expect I looked disreputable enough. I told him I had been on the tiles all night, and then he was very jolly and friendly. When I got in I told Mrs Green the same thing. I expect even a C.P.O. had been there when he was younger, and she knew it all. Anyhow, she didn’t say much. She got me to bed and got me something from the chemist’s, and I went off to sleep and only woke up when I had a nightmare about watching a man being hanged. I tried to tell myself there must be a mistake somewhere, or perhaps someone else had been murdered and it was nothing to do with Abel or me. I just simply couldn’t take it in. I had knocked Abel out all right, but that’s nothing to kill a man, and I knew he had been alive when I got away. I was sure of that, if of nothing else. But then Mrs Green brought in the evening paper, and there it all was. Great fat letters sprawling all across the front page—‘Choked to death by feathers’. That made me remember falling, me and chair and cushion and all, right on top of Abel where he was lying, knocked out. So I had to face it that the cushion might have burst with the fall and the feathers come out, and somehow in breathing he had drawn them into his mouth and died. Could it have happened like that? While he was unconscious, I mean?”
“I don’t know,” Bobby answered. “That will be for the doctors to say. There was something said about the feathers looking as if they had been deliberately and forcibly pushed down the throat.”
“Well, they never were, not by me,” Kenneth said. “For one thing, I was in no state to do anything forcibly, or deliberately either. I hardly knew what I was doing. I told you. After that cocktail everything was all a muddle, with my head going round like a top, and that endless procession of grinning beastly faces going on and on round the room just over the picture-rail. It wasn’t much different next morning in the bombed house. My head was funny, and I couldn’t think straight or make out what had happened or what it all meant. Nothing seemed real, except getting to bed.”
“Didn’t you realize it was all very real after you had had your sleep? Wasn’t your mind clearer then?” Bobby interposed.
“Oh, yes,” Kenneth agreed. “All except for a splitting headache. The fact is that then, after that evening paper, I panicked, so I was sweating with fear, and the bed shook under me. It wasn’t so much that I was afraid of dying. I knew all about that. Most chaps who served in the war did. You don’t crawl along under water trying to fix a mine full of high explosives on a ship’s bottom without knowing what it’s like to be afraid. It was the idea of the trial and then being taken out one morning for an eight-o’clock end, attending your own funeral. I tried to tell myself that if only I kept out of the way for a time it would all come right somehow. Weak minded, I suppose. I thought they might find something to show it wasn’t murder at all, or if it was, that I had nothing to do with it. I made up my mind to disappear till I could see better how things were shaping, and then when I knew more I could either give myself up—or not. Only then I saw those advertisements Doreen put in the paper. I knew I had no business to answer them. I knew I had no right to get Doreen mixed up in the mess and—”
But at this Doreen—twisted round in her driver’s seat, listening intently to every word—could contain her indignation no longer.
“What do you think is the good of me,” she demanded furiously, “if I’m to be kept out of everything?” Both men looked at her in a startled way. It was evident she was in a highly nervous condition, and was having difficulty in controlling herself. Not surprising perhaps. “I’ll never forgive you,” she threatened, and this time even more furiously.
“Please,” Bobby said, holding up his hand, “please don’t interrupt. You can tell Mr Banner all you think about him later—and I don’t wonder you do,” and that drew the full glare of her angry, excited eyes upon him, though his louder voice, as he went on, drowned what she was beginning to say to him and about him. “It is important Mr Banner should keep strictly to what he was saying,” Bobby declared. “Please go on, Mr Banner.”
“That’s about all,” Kenneth replied. “I did answer those advertisements all the same, and Doreen got me to say I would meet you here to-night and tell you the whole thing and be sure to leave nothing out. Well, so I have, and I don’t expect you believe a word of it.”
“What I believe,” Bobby said, as he had said so often before in similar circumstances, “doesn’t matter in the least. I’m neither judge nor jury nor prosecuting counsel. Our only duty in the police is to find out as much as we can, and everything that seems to us to be true and relevant we put before the Public Prosecutor. Then it is for him to decide if there ought to be a trial, for the jury to decide if guilt is proved or not, for the judge to say what ought to be done about it. In this case, what you’ve told me is unfortunately entirely your own uncorroborated story. There’s rebuilding, you know, going on in the bombed house you mentioned. That means all trace of vomit will have disappeared, so it can’t be analysed to see if it shows any sign of a drug having been given you. At the time, if you had come forward and told your story, that could have been done, and would have been a most important corroboration. If that’s what the analysis showed, of course. Nor any chance of finding your lost shoe either. Then, again, in none of the reports made at the time—I’ve read them all—is there any mention of any overturned chair on or even near Abel’s body. Can you suggest what Abel’s motive could have been for drugging you?”
“Well, I expect they wanted to stop me worrying. They could
see I meant to get to the bottom of what was going on.”
“Such a lot of other explanations could be suggested,” Bobby told him. “I’m afraid I must ask you to come back to the Yard with me so that what you have to say may be taken down in a formal statement you will be asked to sign.”
“No,” Kenneth said at once, and repeated: “No. Doreen told me it would be all right. You had promised, and she said it would be safe to trust you. I didn’t much believe it, but I thought I had better come. I wanted to get it off my chest for one thing. I wanted to pretty badly. And I wanted Doreen to hear. And I thought it would be a good idea to find out if it sounded convincing. Well, jolly plain you don’t find it convincing. I’m not complaining about that. I don’t expect I should in your place. No,” he said once more, and with even more emphasis than before. “I’ve made up my mind. I’m not going to stand a trial with everything against me and no chance of being believed. I’m not taking any eight-o’clock-in-the-morning walk, I can stand a good deal, but not that. I expect I had a sort of hope you would say it was good enough, that it would stand up O.K. Well, you don’t, and most likely no one else would. So I’m not accepting your kind invitation. I’ve got other ideas. Even if I did get off, I should always be known as the fellow tried for murder, and people would always be saying: ‘Jolly lucky to get off’, ‘Guilty as hell’, they would tell each other. ‘Wonderful how a smart Q.C. can bamboozle a jury.’ And if the trial turned out the other way, then—the gallows. Or possibly life imprisonment. I’m not having that either. There’s something else. I expect it’ll sound silly. I got a decoration for that limpet-mine job. They would take it away, they always do. I don’t see why. What you’ve done in the past has nothing to do with what you’ve done or are supposed to have done later on. But they would, and every other chap who had it would feel it had been disgraced and lessened. But if there’s no trial and no verdict, that can’t be done.” He paused. He had been talking quickly and feverishly. He resumed in a calmer, slower tone, choosing his words, it seemed, with greater care: “There’s something else. It counts for more. I haven’t asked Doreen to marry me. I never will. She says we must, and at once, and nothing must stop it. Well, that’s her idea, but I’m not having it. She’s not going to be the widow of a man hanged for murder. She’s not going to be tied for life to a man serving a life term in gaol. Or even to a man the police would never stop trying to catch. Would you?” he appealed to Bobby.
Strange Ending: A Bobby Owen Mystery Page 14