“If you really had the watches as you say you wish you had,” Bobby countered, without attempting to answer this question of high political philosophy, “what would you do with them? Hand them over to Mrs Adam?”
“I suppose you think that’s clever,” Jordan snarled, for now his once deep-throated, menacing growl had degenerated into little more than a mere feline snarl.
“Not clever,” Bobby assured him mildly. “Just a guess.”
“Ask her if you want to know,” Jordan said.
“Got to find her first,” Bobby pointed out, “and she seems to have gone missing—common form in this case.” He waited, hoping for some comment, but got none, though he noticed Jordan showed no sign of surprise. Bobby went on: “Item: a basement flat with its door left open for anyone who wanted to walk in. It’s the duty of the Guardians of Society—us—to warn the Enemies of Society—you—that when that happens, other enemies of Society may walk in and make a clean sweep.”
“Wouldn’t pay the cost of taking the stuff away,” Jordan said, “and the Guardians of Society can go to hell for all I care.”
“Well, so we do sometimes,” Bobby told him. “In the course of our duty—or at any rate to a good imitation. You know, Mr Jordan, you don’t look as if the sea air has done you much good. Quite a nasty little scratch on your throat, isn’t it? Shaving, I suppose?”
“Is that another item?” Jordan asked, but, Bobby thought, with a touch of uneasiness in his voice, as though he were not best pleased that this had been noted and commented on.
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Bobby answered. “Well, I’ll be going.” He got to his feet. He pointed to the ceiling, where conspicuous against the general grime, showed some freshly broken plaster he had only now noticed. “Someone trying to break through to the room above?” he asked.
“Piece of damned carelessness,” Jordan said angrily. “Might easily—” and then he stopped short, as if suddenly conscious that he had been about to say too much.
“Exactly,” Bobby agreed. “Might easily have killed someone—even Mr Jordan. Shall we see if there’s still a bullet there?”
“What’s it matter if there is?” Jordan demanded. “It was accidental. Silly ass fooling about with a gun he didn’t understand. Thought the safety catch was on, and it wasn’t. That’s all.”
“Quite enough,” Bobby said. “I hope whoever it was had a certificate. Astonishing, the number of people who don’t seem to know it’s an offence to be in possession of a pistol without one. Or who don’t care, and hang on to the thing all the same. Don’t mind risking a fine. Do you mind telling me who it was?”
“Yes, I do,” Jordan retorted. “Why don’t you follow up the clue, as you would call it I suppose, and track the scoundrel down? That’s your job, isn’t it?”
“So it is, and very good advice, too,” Bobby agreed. “Let’s start. Observed fact: a hole in a ceiling. Deduction: a bullet made it. Problem: track down the man who fired the bullet. Well, well. We’ll do our humble best. Well, I must hurry off and get down to it. Evening, Mr Jordan, I may be seeing you again before long.”
“Don’t trouble,” Jordan said. “The less I see of your sort, the better I like it.”
“I know, I know,” Bobby agreed. “A common sentiment with all the different varieties of the Enemies of Society.” Suddenly he changed the bantering tone he had hitherto adopted since he thought it the one most likely to penetrate Jordan’s armour of self-importance and self-confidence. “Mr Jordan,” he said, “why not drop this rather silly pose of yours? I think it’s already taken you farther than you intended. I wish you would believe that you could trust us a little and be sure of getting a fair deal.”
Jordan yawned. Then he said:
“I prefer my own fair deals. Don’t forget to shut the door as you go, or there’ll be more excitement and more wild searches going on—seaside and all.”
“Well, think it over,” Bobby said. “Good evening,” and therewith he went.
CHAPTER XXX
MR PYNE IS RETICENT
THAT SOMETHING very odd had been going on in Jordan’s flat, was now sufficiently plain. And when that ‘something very odd’ was mixed up with an unsolved murder mystery and a consignment of smuggled watches of unknown but probably high value, it was clearly an immediate and pressing duty to find out what that something was.
“Won’t be too easy either,” Bobby told himself ruefully, as he walked away. “Jordan’s not talking. The Guire girl and Miss Caine aren’t talking either. Probably all set to protect either themselves or someone else, and all three of them hard nuts to crack in their own private, different ways. Mrs Adam and Kenneth Banner not to be found so far. Stan Foster and Mr Pyne both at present in the wings, but liable to take the centre of the stage any moment.” Bobby shook his head still more ruefully at the prospect before him. “And the only clue, if you can call it one, a passing reference to a ‘silly ass’ who thought a safety catch was on when it wasn’t.”
He had reached Mayfair Crescent now, and when he knocked at the door of Mr Pyne’s flat, it was opened by a sedate-looking elderly lady, nearly as prim in manner and dress as Mr Pyne himself. She might, indeed, have been a replica of him—or he of her—in the other sex. When Bobby asked if he could see Mr Pyne she countered by asking if it was anything she could attend to, as Mr Pyne was unwell and confined to bed.
“Sorry to hear that,” Bobby said at his most amiable. “I hope he wasn’t really badly knocked about in that nasty little scrimmage.”
“Oh, how did you know?” she exclaimed, very much taken aback, and then, when he only smiled at her benevolently, went on in uneasy protest. “I didn’t say anything like that.”
“Oh, no,” Bobby agreed. “Only—well, our job to know things. From information received, that’s our stock phrase. I’m afraid it’s necessary I should have a talk with your husband. It’s really rather serious, what with one thing and another and the murder committed here.”
Mrs Pyne was by now thoroughly frightened. She mumbled something indistinct and went off, leaving him standing on the door-mat. He took the precaution of advancing a step or two into the entrance lobby, in case she got the idea of banging the door to and leaving him on the wrong side. Mrs Pyne came back, looking as if she were on the verge of something, Bobby didn’t know what, but hoped it wouldn’t be tears, hysterics, or fainting, three feminine trump cards to which he knew no answer. In a faltering, unsteady tone, and without apparently even noticing his journey into the interior, she asked him to come this way, please. She introduced him into a fair-sized bedroom as trim and neat and tidy, Bobby was certain, as any office in the whole vast Ministry of Priorities with all its many annexes and all its myriads of employees. In the large double bed lay Mr Pyne, anything but trim and tidy, with a bandaged head, two lovely black eyes, a badly cut and swollen mouth, and a sprouting beard it would evidently not be possible to introduce to a razor for some time yet, all affording strong circumstantial evidence that he had not been entirely a stranger to the unexplained incident Bobby was more than ever certain had recently taken place in Mr Jordan’s basement flat.
“Dear, dear,” he commiserated. “I had no idea it was as bad as that. Must have been quite a rough house over there in West King Street.”
“Has Jordan been telling you about it?” Mr Pyne asked, a new lisp in his voice coming from the fact that two of his front teeth were missing.
“We won’t go into that,” Bobby said, drawing up to the bedside a chair Mr Pyne was indicating. He saw no reason for explaining that he had acted simply on his memory of how on a previous occasion Mr Pyne had shown himself rather hazy on the subject of safety catches, of how Mr Jordan had expressed an opinion that someone had shown himself equally hazy or more so over their usage, and of how he himself had seen reason to believe that Mr Pyne had obtained, through Jordan’s agency, another pistol in place of that taken possession of by the local police. It was indeed to this capacity of his to remember and to corr
elate detail that he owed his success as an investigator, rather than to any superhuman powers of logical deduction leading, from a footprint to a personality. “Observe and remember, all is there,” he was inclined to say at times. Now he was continuing aloud: “‘From information received’ is the cliché we like to use. I am suggesting that you and Jordan were both concerned in a recent incident taking place at his flat.”
“I must consider my position carefully,” Mr Pyne said, in his new lisping voice, “before attempting to reply or committing myself in any way. There are others concerned to whom certain undertakings have been given. I can, however, give you my emphatic personal assurance, which I stress, that if—assuming for present purposes that such is indeed the case—anything of an unseemly or even of a regrettably violent nature, lying possibly outside the stricter limits of legality, of which I am in no way convinced, did in fact occur in the locality or habitation you have mentioned, then it was, on the assumption aforesaid, in no way connected with the crime committed in this flat. It might well be that any occurrence of the nature now suggested was in fact”—here Mr Pyne paused and frowned, evidently deep in thought—“a drunken orgie,” he brought out at last and lay back on his pillows, exhausted but triumphant.
“Mr Pyne,” Bobby said gently, “doesn’t it strike you that you may very well find all this turning out very awkwardly? It’s got to come out sooner or later. I don’t know how you as a Civil Servant will be affected, but there it is.”
Mr Pyne put his finger-tips together, regarded them seriously and in silence for some moments, and then spoke even more deliberately than usual.
“It is a contingency to which I have given,” he said, “my most careful consideration. In my settled view—one not lightly arrived at—the publicity given to the events you have referred to would probably lead to the termination of my term of service.”
“What I was thinking,” Bobby observed.
“If such an unfortunate contingency did arise,” Mr Pyne continued, “I am unable to express at present any decided opinion as to what course of action I should consider it advisable to adopt, though few indeed would be open to me. I might possibly take to drink.”
“Rather hard on your family,” Bobby suggested, a little alarmed, for he somehow felt the remark had been made quite seriously in all good faith.
“My daughter,” Mr Pyne assured him earnestly, “would be very pleased—at any rate at first. She has informed me on various occasions that you might as well be dead as respectable. ‘Dead and buried alive’, was the expression she used. When I pointed out that this was in the nature of a contradiction in terms, she became much annoyed, and did not return home till far on in the small hours, even refusing next morning to say where she had been. Indeed, she was not in a condition to do much more than express a strong wish that she was in fact both dead and buried—or at least that her head was. My wife, I think, would thoroughly enjoy the efforts she would undoubtedly make to reform me. She, too, has recently expressed much dissatisfaction with the intolerable tedium of a housewife’s life—get up, wash up, clean up, bed. She had not, I think, been so acutely aware of this till her attention was directed to it by a recent ‘Mass Observation’ report. Fruitless attempts to reform me would be a welcome change, and no doubt you have noticed that no woman is ever so happy as when she is attempting to reform someone—preferably her husband.”
Bobby made no comment on this. He felt it was a side issue he had no right to consume official time in discussing, but all the same, for the moment, he and Mr Pyne were one—no longer investigator and investigatee, but just two married men. Then Bobby said, now official again:
“Would you be prepared to make a statement?”
“You must excuse it if I seem to be evasive,” Mr Pyne answered, with earnest politeness, “but after thirty years of knowing the future precisely—from to-morrow’s task to probable promotion by seniority and presently retirement on pension—I find it intoxicating, bewildering, to contemplate instead a future entirely problematic. It is not indeed wholly without a certain pleasurable excitement—a perverse and unnatural pleasure no doubt, but in its way, enjoyable. I must have time to decide. I have entered into certain obligations, and observing them affects other people. I know my recent conduct must appear highly unbecoming, indeed unpardonable, in anyone connected with the Ministry of Priorities, of which it is not too much to say that on it the smooth working of the whole economy of the country finally depends. Yet, I repeat, I have committed no action of an anti-social nature. The contrary indeed.”
There was no more to be got out of Mr Pyne, and Bobby decided to follow his usual plan—that of not pressing witnesses too hard at first, but to allow them time to remember and to reflect. Mr Pyne, Bobby thought, might well feel ‘on further consideration’, as he himself would have said, that the prospect of dismissal, and of then taking to drink, contained the less of pleasure, and even of excitement, the nearer it drew. It would be merely the exchange of one monotonous routine for another fully as monotonous, and much less agreeable.
So Bobby took himself off home, and there sat in silence, staring hard at the ceiling, till presently Olive came into the room to tell him to get going. Supper was nearly ready, and time he started to lay the table. So he settled himself more comfortably in his chair, transferred his fixed gaze to her, and said:
“Jasper Jordan disappears from his flat, leaving the door open. The flat is much as usual, no sign of any disturbance. Jordan reappears and seems to want his return to be noticed. He says he has been on a trip to the seaside, but his flat now shows a good many signs that things have been happening—including a bullet hole in the ceiling—and Jasper himself appears much the worse for wear. Ditto Mr Pyne, who suggests a drunken orgie in the flat as an explanation. Unconvincing somehow. But what does it all add up to?”
“I don’t know,” Olive answered, gently impelling him to his feet. “The plates and things are all in their usual places.”
“Are they?” said Bobby abstractedly. “Listen—”
“There’s something burning,” said Olive, and disappeared.
“Mrs Adam,” continued Bobby to the vacant air till Olive returned, “claims that an attempt was made to hustle her into a waiting car. Has something of the same sort been tried with our Jasper, and was it more successful? There’s that waiting car seen outside his flat to remember. Probably driven by Imra Guire. If so, is it possible Mr Pyne helped and that’s how he got damaged? There must have been someone else on the job if it was like that, someone who raked in Pyne. Who?”
“Why should anyone want to run away with Mrs Adam or Mr Jordan either?” demanded Olive. “I’m sure I never should.”
“We aren’t the only people interested in those smuggled watches,” Bobby reminded her. “Secondary with us, priority with them. But how fit in the rough house at Jordan’s flat? He can’t have been held there? I went all over it with Doreen Caine, and there was no sign of him or anything else out of the way. Or—or—or—”
“Never mind ‘or’,” said Olive. “Come and get your supper.”
“Or,” Bobby said, as meekly he followed her to the supper-table, she, and not he, had laid, “does the explanation lie in the door of the flat being left open? As were those other doors.”
The ’phone rang. Bobby went to answer it. Olive said:
“Bother the thing. Tell them you haven’t got home yet, and you must have your supper, and it’s been waiting for ages.”
Bobby listened, put back the receiver.
“They say,” he told her, “they’ve had a ’phone message that a lady I know will be waiting in the Embankment garden next to the Houses of Parliament at ten to-morrow, and if I come alone she will have something to tell me. Now which of the three of them will it be? Doreen, Imra, or Mrs Adam?”
“Wait and see,” said Olive.
CHAPTER XXXI
RENDEZVOUS
THE NEXT morning therefore Bobby was punctual in his attendance at the spot
suggested. He took the precaution, since one never knew what might not be behind this kind of appointment—even pistol shots from a distance, for instance—to get a C.I.D. man who lived near to accompany his wife and their two small children to the same gardens. There the children could play in the sand-pit provided by a benevolent County Council, while father and mother, one with the morning paper, the other with her sewing—for women must work, though men may read—watched the gambols of their offspring. An idyllic picture, in fact, of a family outing when father has a day off, and no one could dream there was anything else in the background. Though Bobby’s suggestion that to make the whole set-up even more realistic the day could really be counted as a day off, and deducted from annual leave due, was received with such pained surprise that he had hurriedly withdrawn it.
On one of the seats overlooking the river Bobby, on his arrival, saw at once a solitary woman: Mrs Adam, and when he joined her she wasted no time in preliminaries.
“I’m fed up,” she announced. “Chased and chivvied. That’s me. From morn to night, and never know what next.”
“Too bad,” said Bobby sympathetically. “No wonder you’re fed up with it.”
“That Miss Caine,” said Mrs Adam with venom. “Her and her foreign stuff. Muck I call it. No sort of a meal to give a decent, hard-working chap.”
“What’s Miss Caine been doing?” Bobby asked.
“Poking her nose in where not wanted,” Mrs Adam explained succinctly. “Nosing after me as only want to be left alone. What I say is what belonged to him that’s passed away, did ought to be mine, him and me being man and wife, decently married in church, and as good as two hundred pounds in the Post Office he had off me and then done a bunk—well, hadn’t I a right to what was his, and now it’s mine by lawful rights?”
“Suppose you tell me,” Bobby suggested, “what it was had been his you are talking about? Smuggled watches?”
Strange Ending: A Bobby Owen Mystery Page 21