“Never,” Bobby answered.
“You see,” Kenneth said to Doreen. “So I’m going to get out of this world altogether. Save the cost of a rope, if nothing else,” he said with a twisted grin. “As soon as I feel it’s come to that. But Doreen has made me promise to wait a bit. Drowning, I think, the way so many good chaps went during the war. It’s a sort of debt I almost feel we owe them. And easy. All you have to do is to swim till you can’t any more, and then the sea takes you.”
Doreen said in a very low voice.
“Kenneth. Please don’t.”
They were all three silent then—a strange and heavy silence. Bobby had been trying to watch both her and Kenneth at the same time. A difficult task. He said:
“All that makes it still more necessary you should come back with me. Only cowards despair.”
“All right. I’m a coward if you like,” retorted Kenneth. “But I’m not giving in, all the same. Not to you, I mean. That’s that.”
Doreen said:
“I must take an aspirin.” She opened her hand-bag and began to fumble in it. In spite of the steadiness of her hands, and the calmness of her voice, Bobby could feel that she was wrought up to the highest pitch of nervous tension. Once more she said: “I must take an aspirin.” To Bobby she said: “You promised, and I believed that I could trust you.”
“I told you plainly,” Bobby replied, “that what I felt to be my duty must be my over—the overriding consideration. I warned you any promise I made was subject to my duty.”
Doreen put something in her mouth—apparently the aspirin she must have managed to find at last in her hand-bag, in which she had been fumbling so long. She was trembling violently as she did so, and there seemed to be something of finality and of despair in the gesture that she made.
“Very well,” she said. “Now then.”
To Kenneth, Bobby was saying:
“If you won’t come quietly, I shall have to use force. After all, I’m a bigger man than you.”
“I was prepared for that,” Kenneth said. He took a small pistol from his pocket, slipped back the safety catch. “If you try that on, if you try to lift a hand, I’ll drill you full of holes.”
“That, of course,” Bobby told him quietly, “will make no difference, it will only mean you’ll have another murder to answer for.”
“Damn you,” Kenneth said, and flung the pistol down. “It wasn’t loaded anyhow. You can have it if you like, for all the good it is.” Bobby stooped, picked it up, saw it was in fact unloaded. Kenneth was saying: “You may be bigger, but I’m younger, and I know a bit of boxing, and I expect I’m in better training.”
“I always keep myself in good training,” Bobby said with dignity, and almost afraid that next thing Kenneth would be starting to call him fat.
“Well,” Kenneth suggested, “shall we have it out here and now, in the road I mean?”
Bobby had taken a pair of handcuffs from his pocket. They were things he did not often carry. This time he had thought it a wise precaution.
“I’m going to put these on you,” he said. “I hope you won’t resist. It will only make it worse for you if you do. Oh, Miss Doreen, I’ll just warn you, if you try to interfere, I shall have no hesitation in knocking you out. For I think you are getting yourself into a state in which you are hardly responsible any longer.”
“Oh, I am,” Doreen said, very gently. “Quite responsible as you call it. But do you mind listening for a moment while I tell you about Tom. He’s my brother.”
CHAPTER XXI
THE PILL OF RELEASE
THE INTERRUPTION was so unexpected, the words so entirely, as it seemed, irrelevant, that the two men entirely forgot each other and only stared in a sort of bewildered silence. Bobby’s first thought was that under the strain of that intense internal struggle in Doreen, of which he had been conscious, in which he felt she was only holding her own by an equally intense inner effort, her mind had at last given way, even if only temporarily. But her expression, calm, collected, even serene, as of one who now knew the appointed path and meant to follow it to the end, put that idea out of his mind. Then he thought that perhaps it was all some sort of trap, so that in that first moment of surprise he could be taken unawares. He said sharply to Kenneth:
“Hold out your wrists.”
But Kenneth did not seem even to hear him. So far from being prepared and ready to take advantage of Doreen’s surprising interpolation, he was still staring at her with every appearance of being even more taken aback than had been Bobby himself. And Doreen was bending forward, stretching out her hand between the two men with a gesture that was at once commanding and beseeching.
“Please listen,” she said. She was speaking more directly to Bobby. She went on: “When I’ve explained what I mean, if you still want to make Kenneth go back with you, I’m sure he will. I promise that for both of us.” She paused as if expecting some answer. Bobby did not speak. Kenneth was still staring at her as if what she said hardly penetrated his mind; and then it came to Bobby that what held him so still and silent was an agony of fear, a terrible and devastating fear. And of that fear Bobby now began to feel in himself an echo as it were, an infection of terror, so that he could have believed there had come to sit with them in the motionless car on that dark and silent and deserted road running like a tunnel through the night the figure of death itself, waiting for one of them at least, and perhaps for all. But why he felt this he had no idea, for Doreen’s voice was calm and quiet as ever, and her hands, which she now held clasped together between her breasts, were perfectly still, the fingers interlaced and quiet.
“Please listen,” she said again, and she might well—so calm was her manner, so quiet her voice—have been about to begin a talk to one of her cookery classes on how to prepare some dish needing a little more care than usual. “It’s about Tom at first. He’s my brother. I told you. He was in the R.A.F. during the war. After the fall of Singapore he was sent out to the East. By that time they were beginning to understand what the Japanese did to their prisoners. So when any airmen were likely to fly over the Japanese, they were given poison pills, for them to use if they felt they couldn’t stand it any more. When the Japanese got to know they called it ‘The Pill of Release’. Tom was given one like the others. He was taken prisoner when he was shot down, and he was tortured like the others. Please, if you don’t mind, I won’t tell you how. I’ve seen his hands. Even after he got back to England they had to be dressed, and I did it, and sometimes afterwards at night I would hear him screaming, and when I went and woke him he had been dreaming it was happening all over again. He would never talk about it if he could help, but in the dark when I was sitting by him after he had been dreaming, he did once or twice. He said the poison pill had helped, because he knew it was there if he had to. A sure refuge he called it. He brought it back to England with him—he kept it, though they didn’t want him to—and mother managed to get it from him, and she has always kept it ever since. You see, poor dear, she has an awful lot of pain, and it’s often very bad. She says the poison pill helps her just in the same way, because it reminds her if Tom could bear it, then she could.”
“Doreen,” Kenneth said, and then again, “Doreen.” Then he said: “For God’s sake,” and was silent.
“I don’t see,” Bobby began, but he did—very plainly. “I don’t know why you’re telling us all this,” he said, but he did—he knew exactly.
Doreen said to him:
“I took the poison pill from where mother had it, and it wasn’t an aspirin I put in my mouth, it was the poison pill. I shall swallow it if you try to do anything to Kenneth. Please, Kenneth, don’t interfere. Mr Owen, will you agree to let Kenneth go and promise, and never mind duty, not to do anything about him till we’ve got back to town? Because if you don’t promise—”
She left the sentence unfinished. There was no necessity to finish it. No need to put into words what she intended.
Bobby said, trying to impose h
is authority:
“Don’t be a fool. Give it me at once.”
She took no notice. She might not have heard. Indeed, there was almost an indifference about her, as if she waited, with patience and tranquillity, a decision for which she was in no way responsible. Bobby wondered wildly if he dared grip her by the throat and force the poison pill out of her mouth before she had time to swallow it. Oddly, perhaps, it never even occurred to him to doubt her will or, for that matter, the fact. He dared not make the least movement, for he knew that even the lifting of a hand she might interpret as a hostile intention. He found himself perspiring slightly. Kenneth was saying:
“Give it him, Doreen, give it him. You can’t do that. For God’s sake, give it him.”
“Please be quiet, Kenneth,” Doreen said. “This is between me and Mr Owen. Only please, Mr Owen, could you be quick? You see, these pills had a sort of protective covering so you could hold them in your mouth, only it’s been so long I’m afraid it may have worn off or something.”
What it was his duty to do, Bobby was not sure. But he knew very well what he was going to do. Impossible to sit there and watch the girl die before his eyes. He had a vision of her crumpling up where she sat. He knew he could not face it. Sulkily, resentfully, angrily, he said:
“All right. I promise. Only take the damn thing out of your mouth.”
Doreen put her hand up and then paused.
“You haven’t said, ‘Never mind duty or anything’,” she reminded him.
“Never mind duty or anything, to hell with duty,” Bobby said. “Does that satisfy you?”
She put out the pill between her lips into her hand. Bobby snatched it from her. Viciously he crushed it to dust between his fingers, and the dust he threw out into the road.
“You needn’t have done that, Mother will miss it,” Doreen said rebukingly; and to Kenneth she said: “Please go. Quickly. I can’t stand it much longer. I’ll write to you at our Post Office, and don’t try to do anything silly. You’ve promised, too, you know.”
Kenneth, a dazed, bewildered Kenneth, a Kenneth who even yet had not fully taken in what had happened, looked rather helplessly at Bobby. Bobby fairly shouted at him:
“Get out. Can’t you hear? I’ve had enough, too.”
Kenneth obeyed the joint injunction. They heard his machine chugging away into the darkness. They sat in silence listening. Bobby spoke first. He said:
“You little devil.”
“If you would like to box my ears. . .” Doreen suggested. “Because you know you sound like it. I rather wish you would. I’m feeling as if I might begin to laugh or scream or something.”
“Laugh away,” Bobby growled. “It’s your laugh. We’ll get him all the same. I shall take very extra special care of that. I’m thinking now what I can charge you with. Attempted suicide? What you want is a term in gaol, and I’ll see you get it,” but he knew very well this was pure bluff and temper—a rather mean effort in fact to get a little of his own back by frightening her. She knew it, too, and took no notice.
“Do you mind driving?” she asked. “I don’t think I can, I’m feeling so funny,” and then suddenly she slumped over the wheel in a dead faint.
Not too tenderly, for he was in a vile temper, Bobby got her out of her driver’s seat and dumped her at the back of the car, there to recover as best she could. Nor was his temper improved by this new complication. A nice position she had got him into, he thought angrily, alone with an unconscious girl in a car in the dark on a lonely and deserted side road. Anyhow—faint or no faint, unconscious girl or none—he meant to get back to the Yard at the earliest possible moment, there to start a nation-wide hunt for Kenneth. He drove fast, hoping he was taking the right direction. Once he thought he heard a bump behind him, as if by the motion of the car Doreen had been jerked off the seat on to the floor of the car. He didn’t care. If she got a black eye or so, that was all right as far as he was concerned. Never, he supposed, in all the long history of Scotland Yard had a senior official been so bullied, bluffed, bamboozled—and by the cheekiest little chit of a girl anyone had ever heard of.
As a matter of fact, the chief effect of the bump had been apparently the recovery of Doreen from her faint. For soon he heard a small voice say rebukingly from behind:
“You’ve just jumped traffic lights.”
“Mind your own business,” growled Bobby, even more ill-temperedly than before, but all the same, began to drive more carefully.
A fitting end it would be to this night of ill-success, he thought, if he were summoned and fined for a traffic offence. But one he had no wish should happen.
The small voice from behind said meditatively:
“You do sound most awfully cross.” This time it was Bobby who took no notice. The small voice continued: “You know, I really am most awfully sorry about it all, but I had to, hadn’t I?” Bobby still took no notice. “You see,” it went on when no answer came. “I told Kenneth it would be all right, and so I had to be sure, hadn’t I? and I was afraid you might be stuffy over it, as soon as you began talking about duty.” Was there a faint accent of contempt in her pronunciation of this last word? The voice paused, and suddenly, more loudly, with absolute conviction, it said: “You see, I know Kenneth didn’t do it.”
“How do you know?” Bobby asked.
Doreen was leaning forward now, over the seat next to the driver’s. She replied:
“Well, I just know. Someone must have been there afterwards and done it.”
“Who?” Bobby asked this time.
“That’s what I want you to find out,” Doreen explained.
“Oh, do you?” Bobby snapped. “Didn’t seem like it to-night.”
“There’s no need to be beastly,” protested Doreen in a very injured tone.
“We’ll find out all we can,” Bobby assured her, he hoped threateningly.
She sat back then, and before long they had reached the Yard. Bobby stopped the car and alighted. A constable, seeing there was someone in the rear seat, opened the car door and helped Doreen out. Bobby was making for the entrance to the building. The constable called after him: “The young lady, sir,” much as if he were saying ‘Your umbrella, sir’. Bobby resisted his first impulse to shout back: ‘Tell her to go home and stop there.’ Instead he called: “Oh, yes. Get someone to drive her home and garage the car. Better get a doctor for her if she wants one.”
“Yes, sir,” said the constable in a rather more than slightly astonished tone.
Quite distinctly and in a clear and loud tone, Bobby heard, as he was meant to, Doreen’s voice saying:
“Doesn’t he sound bad-tempered.”
CHAPTER XXII
DAMAGED PRESTIGE
BACK AT his desk, Bobby first wrote a report of the night’s events. He had no illusions about its probable reception. It would be agreed that in the circumstances he could not have acted differently. Responsibility for causing death could not be accepted. It would, however, also be made plain that the circumstances in question should never have been allowed to arise. Unfortunate that an officer of his rank and experience had permitted it. What steps he could have taken to prevent their arising, or how he could have foreseen Doreen’s desperate and terrible device, would not be gone into. The fact that he had had a ‘wanted’ man, a ‘suspect’, within arm’s length and had not ‘brought him in’ was the bare fact that would be remembered.
Bobby felt that Fate had played him a dirty trick. But then that is a little way that Fate has, and no doubt it is good for the soul. It was some slight consolation that he could add a brief note to the effect that Doreen had at any rate clearly indicated exactly when, where, and how, she and Kenneth planned to remain in communication. If careful watch were kept on the spot so clearly indicated, it might well be there was at least a good chance of Kenneth’s arrest being soon effected. Bobby’s secret hope was that this cryptic remark would not be understood, and that one of his critics—of whom he was sure there would be several—
would have to come and ask for an explanation. This he would give with an air of faint surprise that anything so obvious had not immediately been understood. Which would be a salve to his injured feelings and help to restore his slightly damaged prestige.
This task finished, he remembered his supper he hoped his patient Griselda of a wife was keeping hot for him. So he locked up his desk, filled in his diary, and went home, there to relate the mischances of this woeful night to a duly and properly sympathetic Olive.
“A chit of a girl,” he said, still very crossly, “to put me on a spot like that. Had to let my man go for the first time in my life.”
“Do you think she would really have swallowed it if it had come to that?” Olive asked.
“I’m jolly sure she would. I knew it then, and I know it now,” Bobby answered. “That girl is all softness and sweetness, sugar and spice, on one side, and all burnished steel on the other. It was the burnished-steel side I came up against.”
“Well, there’s one thing certain,” Olive told him. “It means she believes every word of Kenneth Banner’s story, or she would never have had the courage. I mean she believes him not by what you call the softness and sweetness side of her but by the burnished-steel side. It’s not so much believing as knowing. I think you had better work on the theory that he was telling you just exactly how it happened.”
Strange Ending: A Bobby Owen Mystery Page 15