“Yes, but,” Olive objected, “you were saying he had taken them away to give to Mrs Adam as the widow?”
“That was when I was trying to see if a plausible case could be made out against her,” Bobby replied. “I wanted to see if she could be eliminated, and she can’t be. Not yet, not by a long way. There’s nothing to show he did in fact give them to her. He may, for that matter, have simply brought the stuff back with him. More likely there was some safe hide-out he knew about. The only one thing we can be sure of is that he knew Abel’s address, and was therefore to some degree in touch with him, and that he had come under suspicion of black-marketing activities—and that he is a bitter and frustrated man and calls himself ‘The Enemy of Society’.”
“But,” Olive objected again, “if he is guilty, surely he would hardly try to get the inquiry into his own crime re-opened as he was doing by all those nasty articles he published about you?”
“That could be clever camouflage again,” Bobby suggested. “You don’t suspect the murderer of wanting a re-investigation of a murder he committed himself. But there’s the Doreen girl. She was the prime mover, and we know she had begun to visit Jasper. It wouldn’t take him long to see that nothing was going to stop her—as impossible to stop her as to stop some force of nature.”
His voice was still heavy with rebuke and indignation as he said this. Olive looked at him, a little curiously. He looked back at her, a little uncomfortably.
“My lad,” she said, “you’ve been getting a bit above yourself. Too much of always coming out on top isn’t good for anyone, and now you can’t forget a mere girl’s getting the better of you for once.”
Bobby considered this, and the more he considered it, the less he liked it. He decided he would change the subject. But Olive was speaking again:
“There’s the same thing about Doreen,” she said. “If she was guilty, she wouldn’t be doing her best to start up the investigation all over again when her name had never been so much as mentioned at the time.”
“There might be two answers to that,” Bobby said. “Murderers sometimes feel their secret is too much for them. They can’t leave it alone. The Freudian theory is that their unconscious burdens them with too great a sense of guilt, tells them the spilt blood must be atoned for, and that this may even take the form of a repetition, a second murder, as if to appease the angry ghost by showing it it is not alone. Diving a little too deep into the human mind, perhaps, and even getting lost there. Or again, a murderer may only feel safe if and when someone has been convicted. We can leave all that on one side though. The main fact is that Doreen can’t be eliminated. That’s all I’m trying to do—see if anyone can be ruled out. None so far. Go on to Ossy. He clearly knew all about the plan to implicate Kenneth, if, of course, that story’s true. He would certainly be going to Abel’s flat to help carry it out, so there’s identity of time and place established. Always the first thing we have to think of. After that, almost everything I’ve said about Jordan can apply to Ossy. It may as well have been the one as the other who found the flat door ajar and Abel dead or unconscious, and who in the second case decided to make sure, ‘mak sikker’ as Robert Bruce’s friends said, so as also to make sure of the Swiss-watch consignment for his own private benefit.
“There is one thing, however, that does point to Ossy rather than to Jordan. Pyne’s statement is that when he answered the door and got knocked out and tied up for his pains, his visitors were a man and a woman, possibly Ossy and Imra. We know Ossy was a good boxer at one time, and he would know how to place his blows so as to get a quick K.O. And Jordan wasn’t and wouldn’t.”
“How can you be sure of that?” Olive asked.
“Oh, you can tell—the way a man moves, the way he holds his hands. It shows at once,” Bobby answered. “But then Ossy strikes me as the common-crook type, and the common crook seldom or never takes to murder. I don’t know why—different psychological make-up, probably. There’s a big difference between the crook and the gangster. Anyhow, impossible to rule Ossy out. He stays on the short list. So does Stanley Foster, though much more doubtfully so, just hovering on it so to say. A sly little man, I think. He would have to be well paid to keep him quiet, for he must have known about the smuggling. But I also think he would be careful to keep safely on the side lines.”
“That’s four,” Olive commented. “You said five. Do you mean your Mr X? No other man has ever had anything to with it, has he?”
“Oh, yes,” Bobby answered. “My Mr X perhaps, only now I’ve given him a local habitation and a name. He has been mentioned all right, but nobody has ever given him a second thought. Rather like Edgar Allan Poe’s purloined letter or G. K. Chesterton’s postman, so inevitably on the spot he was never noticed or remembered.”
CHAPTER XXIV
DEAD END REACHED
OLIVE RECEIVED this last remark with a puzzled stare.
“There isn’t anyone else,” she protested. “You can’t mean Mr Pyne, surely?”
“Oh, dear no, he’s out of it if no one else is, was never in it for that matter,” answered Bobby. “No, I was thinking of Marks, the porter at the flats. His wife looks after the stairs and landings and so on. He does the odd jobs and that sort of thing. They have the basement flat. Porters at flats generally know all about their tenants, and if the Marks couple didn’t know that Abel was not the normal more or less respectable tenant, it would be a world’s wonder. On Kenneth Banner’s story there must have been a good deal on the evening of the murder they could hardly have failed to notice. Odd noises from the flat itself when Abel and Kenneth were fighting, odd-looking people coming and going, quite enough, anyhow, to make them curious. If Mrs Marks went up to have what she would call a ‘dekko’ and saw the door ajar she would be sure to tell her husband, he would go to see if there was anything wrong, and then—well, as before. The temptation of the watches, if he found them, might be too strong, and then equally the temptation to ‘mak sikker’. He is a small man in bad health, and he would argue no one would suspect him of knocking out a man like Abel, a tough customer. But Abel, once dead, could say nothing about the unCustomed watches, and there would be nothing to connect him with them.”
“I don’t know yet,” Olive complained, “if you do or don’t believe Kenneth Banner’s story.”
“Well, I don’t either,” Bobby told her, “so that’s quite natural. Sometimes I do, and sometimes I don’t, and in between I don’t know. It fits, and it doesn’t fit, turn and turn about. Talk about a kaleidoscope. An entirely fresh pattern every time. I began by wanting to see if there was anyone I could rule out, so as to be able to concentrate on the rest. No luck. There’s the beginnings of the making of a plausible case against every man jack—or woman jill.” He paused, and this time Olive offered no comment. They were both silent for a moment or two. Bobby went on slowly and thoughtfully: “You know, Kenneth is inclined to suspect himself. He doesn’t admit it. I don’t suppose he admits it even to himself. But the doubt is there at the back of his mind. That rather futile suggestion of his about Abel’s being more or less accidentally choked by the feathers from the torn cushion shows that all right—an attempt of the unconscious to relieve deep anxiety. Fear of the truth drove him into hiding, and now it’s put the idea of suicide into his mind. I think he would at once if he came to be sure. It may happen any moment if the doubt grows too much to be borne. Good Lord, am I beginning to talk like one of those awful psychiatrists? Heaven preserve me from that at least, but the silly stuff’s awfully catching, a sort of mental measles.”
“If he had really done it, he would know and remember,” Olive declared—with conviction. “If you do it, you don’t forget it.”
“I don’t know so much,” Bobby answered—with doubt. “Remember he claims he was under the influence of some drug. One thing he says is that he saw a succession of faces passing by—ugly, threatening faces. Drugs do sometimes have that sort of effect—like seeing pink rats in delirium tremens. I’ve hear
d of that procession of faces before. What the explanation is, goodness knows—or badness. The faces always seem evil and angry. Well, there are all the facts as far as I know them, so you can make up your mind for yourself where you think they point.”
“All ways at once,” answered Olive. “Just like a compass a little boy with a magnet is playing tricks with.”
Bobby agreed, and remarked that it was late, nearly two indeed. Long past bedtime anyhow, though he didn’t suppose he would sleep a wink all night, for worrying.
Olive smiled secretly. She had never yet known Bobby to stay awake much longer than five minutes after getting into bed. Often and often when she herself was having a bad night, she had been tempted almost beyond endurance to wake him up and tell him how unfair she thought it he could slumber so soundly and she get hardly a wink of sleep.
This time, however, by exception, for almost the first time on record, Bobby did stay awake, staring out into the darkness, and it was he this time who nearly succumbed to the temptation to wake her up to tell her all about one or other of the new theories constantly flooding his mind. It was nearly morning before he did in fact sleep, and late morning before he woke to find Olive shaking him by the arm and offering him a cup of tea.
“I had my breakfast ages ago,” she informed him, “and I’ve rung up to say you had overslept after being up all night nearly on the Mayfair Crescent case.”
“What did they say?” Bobby asked, drinking his tea.
“Oh, they were quite nice about it,” Olive assured him.
“Sounds bad,” Bobby said. “I had better get a move on.” He showed no disposition to do so, and instead yawned mightily. “Doesn’t look to me,” he said with resignation, “as if there’s much we can do, except go on trying to find Kenneth and Mrs Adam, and no easy job to pick out two people from forty or fifty million others. And of course keep an eye on Mr Jasper Jordan. Not easy either, he knows all the tricks, the ugly little brute.”
“Don’t call him that,” Olive said. “It isn’t right.”
“Well, isn’t he as ugly as they make ’em?” asked Bobby.
“Of course he is, uglier,” Olive agreed as she retired with the empty teacup. “That’s why you shouldn’t say so—taking a mean advantage of what he can’t help.”
Bobby at once thought of several crushing retorts to which no possible answer could be given. But as Olive wasn’t there now, it didn’t seem much use uttering them. So he got up and dressed instead, and after his belated breakfast arrived at the Yard, where he found his view that for the moment they had reached a dead end was already held—even strongly held. The routine search for Kenneth Banner would go on, of course. Kenneth had become one of various other ‘wanted’ men, though it did still seem a little doubtful what charge could be preferred against him if and when he was found. Unless, of course, he was willing to repeat the story he had told Bobby, and that no one thought likely. Efforts, too, to get in touch with Mrs Adam would be continued, but there again only because it was thought she might be ‘able to give useful information’, to use the stock phrase. In fact, all that seemed possible was to continue with a kind of watching brief, more especially with regard to Jasper Jordan. And naturally the Customs authorities would be warned again that attempts would probably soon be made to dispose of a large consignment of smuggled Swiss watches.
It was also rather broadly hinted by the Assistant Commissioner, to whom Bobby was talking, that it might be as well for him now to leave the Mayfair Crescent case to others. For the moment a dead end seemed to have been reached. There were plenty of other matters requiring attention. Questions of organization, requests for a new series of lectures from some of the smaller provincial forces, and so on.
“Seem to be quite keen on your talks,” remarked the Assistant Commissioner with an air of baffled surprise. “Should have thought they had plenty of their own chaps to do that for them.” Bobby coughed modestly, his popularity as a lecturer was in fact always a considerable surprise to himself. “This other thing,” the A.C. went on, “is becoming a sort of general paper-chase—the smuggling gang chasing the watches, the Customs people chasing the smugglers, and us chasing a suspected murderer, and what will come out of that, goodness knows, I don’t. No substantial proof even that there is any big consignment of smuggled stuff at all.”
“I think,” Bobby suggested mildly, “that the consignment, a big valuable consignment, is a logical deduction necessary to make any sense at all of what’s been going on.”
“Logical deductions are all very well,” the A.C. admitted, “but you can’t slap ’em down under a jury’s nose. That’s what counts. Of course, something may turn up at any moment to give a fresh start. You never know. Important clues do drop out of the skies sometimes.”
“So they do,” agreed Bobby. “The thing is to recognize them when it happens.”
“Of course, of course, it’s all there,” agreed the A.C. in his turn, and somewhat impatiently, for what was this but pointing out the obvious? “By the way, there is a report in from one of our chaps, Sergeant Evans. He is working on the Manton jewel burglary. In one jeweller’s shop where he was making some inquiry he was told a young woman had been in offering stuff she wanted to sell.”
“Swiss watches?” Bobby asked hopefully.
“Not a bit of it,” answered the other, who had in fact been more or less playing for this question so as to be able to squash more effectively any such dawning hopes. “Old-fashioned stuff. Valuable, but hard to sell. The shop bloke said he was suspicious at first because some of the Manton stuff had been listed as old fashioned. But the description didn’t agree, and the young woman didn’t boggle about waiting while he sent round to the bank for the notes she said she wanted as she hadn’t a banking account and needed ready money immediately. So it seemed all right, and he paid up, but thought he would just mention it in case the Manton list wasn’t complete and these particular items had been omitted by mistake. But there is one rather odd detail that wasn’t noticed at first. It turns out now that the address given was West King Street, Mayfair.”
“Jordan’s address,” exclaimed Bobby. “What on earth—?” and then he was silent.
“Exactly,” said the A.C. “Can’t say I see any connection with either the murder or the smuggling. Do you?”
“Did Evans get a description of the woman?”
“Young, tall, dark, striking looking, rather sulky expression, silent,” the A.C. answered, reading from a slip on his table.
“Sounds as if it might be Imra Guire,” Bobby said.
“One of your suspects,” the A.C. commented. “She may want the money to make a get-away. I don’t see how we can stop her.”
“How much did the jeweller pay her?” Bobby asked.
“Two hundred, half in fivers, half in ones. He claimed it was a good price, but he admitted that it was only about breaking-down value. Old-fashioned stuff like that he said he might have to keep for years to sell as it is, and then have to break it down finally.”
“Well, I can’t see any connection at the moment either,” Bobby admitted. “I wonder—”
He paused suddenly. There had come back into his mind a memory of a casual item of information casually mentioned during his talks at Seemouth. The A.C. was watching him curiously.
“Had a flash of inspiration?” he asked, half-teasingly, half-impressed.
“It’s only that I’ve just remembered something,” Bobby answered slowly.
CHAPTER XXV
“OUT”
WHEN BOBBY went on to explain what it was he had heard at Seemouth and that he had just remembered as possibly significant, the Assistant Commissioner was not much impressed. He did agree, though doubtfully, that possibly it might give a useful lead. As for its linking up with the other piece of hitherto rather disregarded information Bobby had also picked up during that visit to Seemouth, well, it might, or it might not. Most likely merely an unimportant coincidence.
Bobby never trusted c
oincidences during an investigation. To him they were never that and nothing more, whatever a primrose might have been to Peter Bell. Often they had their own significance. All the same, it didn’t do to attach too much importance to them. But he would have to ask a few questions when he had time to get round to it. No hurry. The proper timing of a question was almost as important as the question itself.
Later on, just as Bobby was going out to lunch, a fresh report came in. It concerned Mrs Adam. Of the others, Ossy Dow, Imra Guire, and Stanley Foster were all three known to be back at Seemouth, where, however, the office of the Banner Agency still had up the sign, ‘Temporarily Closed’. Nothing had been heard of Kenneth. Nothing suspicious had been observed in the conduct of Doreen. Jasper Jordan, self-styled Enemy of Society, appeared to be pursuing his usual activities, though it was not too easy to say what these were. But now Mrs Adam, and it was clear from the description given that she was the person referred to, had driven up in a taxi to a City jeweller’s establishment, and there had offered for sale a valuable gold wrist-watch. The assistant she was talking to had not thought she looked the sort of person likely to own so valuable a watch, had asked one or two questions, and finally had asked her to wait while he went to fetch the proprietor. Whereon she had snatched back the watch, run out of the shop to the waiting taxi, and driven off in it. The assistant had been alert enough to take a note of the taxi’s number and to report the incident to the City Police. They, in their turn, had passed on the information to the Metropolitan Police for action, if thought necessary.
Bobby did think it necessary, since all this seemed to raise a strong presumption that Mrs Adam was in possession of the smuggled watches. So he sent out instructions for the taxi-driver to be found and questioned with as little delay as possible.
Strange Ending: A Bobby Owen Mystery Page 17