“How was I to know as they were smuggled?”
“If you hadn’t a pretty good idea, why did you walk out of that jeweller’s near Liverpool Street Station in such a hurry?”
“Nosey, he was, and me with a train to catch and all.”
“Nosey he was,” Bobby agreed, “and nosey, as you call it, I’m afraid you’re going to find me. Come, come, Mrs Adam, out with it. Where are they?”
“A-hh,” Mrs Adam said thoughtfully. “That’s just it. Where? Suppose I gave you a sort of a hint where you might find ’em—at least, supposing it turns out I’m right, not knowing but putting this and that together—would it be all right? None being touched, and all same as they were. And a reward for their recovery, as would be only right?”
“I can’t make you any promises,” Bobby told her. “Wouldn’t be any use if I did. I don’t think there will be any question of a reward. I wouldn’t try that on if I were you. But I don’t at the moment see what charge could be laid against you. Of course, unlawful detention. That sort of thing. But if you hand them over voluntarily, it would hardly be pressed. At least, I don’t think so. Not my responsibility of course.”
“Oh, well, if I’m not going to get anything out of it, I’m not saying anything,” Mrs Adam retorted, “and there’s no charge nor nothing you can have me up on if you can’t find ’em ever, same as you never will without me.”
She made to get up as she spoke, and to walk away. But Bobby made a gesture to her to remain seated, and at the same time waved to the C.I.D. man who had been watching them over the top of his paper, and who at once got up and began to walk towards them.
“One of my men,” Bobby explained. “After what you have told me, I shall have to ask you to go with him to Scotland Yard. For further questioning.”
“Proper put my head in the lion’s jaws,” Mrs Adam grumbled. “I might have known. With cops. They’re in the left-luggage office at Willesden.” She fumbled in her handbag, produced the receipt, and handed it to Bobby. “Left ’em there last night. Got the Manchester train at Willesden in case of being looked for at Euston, and got out there again coming back.”
“Where were they at Manchester?” Bobby asked.
“Where you wouldn’t never have found them if I had had sense enough to hold my tongue,” she retorted. “At a dining-rooms where I worked once. In an old cupboard with some other belongings of mine I was let leave there. Safe as snuff unless that there Doreen came poking around, her being in the profession, too, and knowing too much and where to ask, pretending she had a good job going as was a wicked lie. But I’m not saying I’m so awful sorry to be done with the things.”
The C.I.D. man had reached them now. Bobby handed him the receipt, told him to go to the Willesden Junction station, collect the dispatch-case referred to, and bring it to the Yard. He went off accordingly, and Bobby turned again to Mrs Adam.
“How did they come into your possession?” he asked.
“Left where I was lodging,” she explained. “A boy brought it. A dispatch-case. Locked. He said a man had given him a shilling to bring it and to say it was left in charge of a friend by my late husband, and him being deceased and me his widow, it was my lawful property, same as it did ought to be,” and her wandering and wistful eyes sought the retreating figure of the C.I.D. man on his way to Willesden.
“Mr Jasper Jordan, I take it?” Bobby remarked.
“There wasn’t no names mentioned,” Mrs Adam answered cautiously.
“Well, never mind,” Bobby said. “No evidence, but at this stage I think we can take that for granted. As also that the man who invited you to go for a drive with him was Ossy Dow, and that he meant to try to get you to hand the watches over.”
“If it wasn’t bloody murder they was meaning,” Mrs Adam said; and this time it was the quietly flowing river to which her gaze was turned, as though she were thinking how easily in its swift depths a dead body could be swept out to the sea. “Same as happened to Bert, and him no loss to me or no one, but not murder, which I never meant nor thought, but they was hinting at plain enough.”
“What did they say?” Bobby asked.
“As how Bert had had his, and I might get mine if I didn’t watch my step, so I said to mind theirs, or I’d tell what I saw that night, and he looked at me something awful with fiery eyes, and it’s my belief if he had got me into that car of his I wouldn’t ever have left it alive.”
“Possibly not,” agreed Bobby grimly. “What was it you saw on the night of the murder?” When she hesitated, he added quietly: “You’ve said too much not to say more.”
“It wasn’t anything really,” she answered uncomfortably. “I was trying to get hold of him for long enough—him doing me down on my maintenance and all—and then I heard where he was and living like a lord. A swanky flat it was, sure enough, and I nipped up the stairs quiet as I could for fear Mr Soclever might hear. The door wasn’t close shut, and there was people talking. I couldn’t hear what they said, them talking low and hurried and queer like, but one was a woman—I could tell that—and I knew there was funny work going on.”
“What made you think so?” Bobby asked, as she paused with a little catch in her voice and a backward glance over her shoulder, as if she feared what might be there, listening.
“I don’t know,” she answered. “I just knew. I knew no one talked that way except there was something happened to make them. I wanted to slip away, but some way I didn’t, because of wanting to know, and I took a peep round the corner of the door. They didn’t see me, they didn’t hear.”
“What did you see—or hear?” Bobby asked, a vivid picture in his mind of this stout, elderly woman trembling on the small, ill-lighted landing, terror urging instant flight, terror holding her there motionless, as she watched the murderers of her husband whispering together by the side of his dead body.
“I saw there was two of them,” she told him then. “A man and a woman, but I couldn’t see the woman’s face, her back being to me, and her stooping.”
“And the man?” he asked.
“Not being certain, I don’t want to mention names,” she said.
“Don’t you think you ought to help us to find your husband’s murderer?”
“He was no husband to me,” she said sullenly. “Run out on me he did, him and my maintenance, too.”
“You should at least have let us know what you had seen,” Bobby told her. “Why didn’t you?”
“I didn’t know then what it was,” she protested. “I never thought it was murder. I reckoned it was burglars what had laid him out and me too, if they saw me, and I reckoned the best thing was for me to get off while I could, and so I did, and as for Bert, served him right, but not the time to go after him to get him to pay up. It was only when I got a paper that I knew what I had seen that night.”
“You could have come to us then,” Bobby said sternly.
“I was scared to,” she answered. “Of you cops bringing me in. I had been shooting off my mouth. Talking about putting a bullet in him or slipping him a dose of something as he wouldn’t ever want any more after it, and him using my maintenance on any fancy woman he could pick up as was more than flesh and blood could stand.”
They were both silent then, but the picture in Bobby’s mind had changed. It had become that of a woman, her natural feelings for her husband changed to bitter hate, gaining admission to the flat by the unlatched door, finding him lying unconscious on the floor—possibly she had seen the man and woman she talked of hurrying away and had guessed already that something was wrong—and then in an access of rage stuffing those fatal feathers, so strange an instrument of death, into the mouth that once had kissed her and then had betrayed her. If that was how it had happened, then perhaps also without full intention or full realization of what must inevitably happen. He said heavily:
“I put it to you that the man you say you saw was Ossy Dow.”
“I don’t know as I could swear to it,” she answered, still cauti
ously. “He almost as good as said it when he wanted to get me to go along with him. Not me,” she said, shivering as she spoke, though the sun was warm that day.
“And the woman?” he asked next.
“I told you, I didn’t see her clear, and me in no state either to take particular notice, but if you ask me, most like it was that Doreen Caine, or why is she so busy meddling? and her one of his fancy women as is plain and clear.”
“Why do you say that?” Bobby asked.
“If she wasn’t, what was she always meeting him for, pubs and places?”
“They could have been talking about cooking,” Bobby suggested.
Mrs Adam snorted contempt and disbelief.
“You don’t talk about it once you’ve done it,” she pronounced. “Only too glad to forget it—talking about the moon more like or something else as is more tasty than cooking.”
“You may be right,” Bobby said. “We’ll get a taxi, shall we? I shall have to get all this in writing and then ask you to sign it. It’s important.”
“Proper fool, I’ve been, haven’t I?” she lamented. “Telling you all, instead of keeping my mouth shut same as I meant.” She looked at him resentfully. “Led me on,” she complained. “One thing and another. Not what I call fair does.”
“Perhaps your husband might have thought he hadn’t had altogether fair does,” Bobby suggested, but she only looked contemptuous.
“Him and fair does,” she said, “they didn’t never go together.”
CHAPTER XXXII
SECOND RENDEZVOUS
MRS ADAM’S statement, taken down, finally approved, signed, she was allowed to depart with stern injunctions not to try to stage any more disappearances and assurances that every precaution would be taken to see that no more attempts were made to molest her or to invite her to go for a drive.
All of which meant, Bobby reflected, that enough was now known fully to justify holding Mr Ossy Dow, if and when he could be found. Not that that was apparently going to be easy, any more than it had been easy to find Kenneth Banner. Probably Doreen Caine knew his whereabouts, but not much hope that she would tell. Again, Imra Guire most likely knew where Ossy was, but she, too, would certainly keep that information to herself.
“It’s the very devil dealing with two women like those two,” Bobby moodily informed Olive, who retorted that it was nothing like so bad as having to deal with any two men like nothing on earth, except two other men, and all of them past human understanding.
Thus crushed, Bobby subsided into silence and then offered to take Olive to the cinema, since that was a nice quiet place where you could shut your eyes and think undisturbed and uninterrupted, free from the insistent clamour of the telephone. The offer was promptly accepted.
“A lovely film, wasn’t it?” Olive said enthusiastically as they left. “I did enjoy it—awfully exciting, and so sad.”
“Splendid,” agreed Bobby. “If all of them were like that, I wouldn’t mind going every evening almost.”
“What was it about?” Olive asked, dark suspicion in every tone of her voice.
“Eh?” said Bobby. “Why—er—you know. Boy and girl, and in the end she gets him good and tight.”
“I don’t believe,” Olive said sternly, “you ever looked once, and I paid for us both out of housekeeping because you said you had no change, and you’ll please give it me back as soon as we get home.”
“Not me,” Bobby said firmly, but he had to, all the same, and when he had discharged this debt he uttered a gloomy prophecy that anything either Imra or Doreen knew they would keep to themselves, and no way he knew of making them speak.
“Mum as the Sphinx, both of ’em, if I know anything,” he announced, and only had to wait twenty-four hours to have it proved that at any rate he didn’t know everything, for then there was a long-distance call from one of the ladies in question.
Answering it, the small, distant voice announced that Imra Guire was speaking, that she was coming to town on the morrow, and that she would like to meet him. When he suggested that he would be very glad to see her in his room at Scotland Yard any time she liked, the prompt answer came that she certainly wasn’t going there. She would be in Hyde Park, however, about two in the afternoon, next day, near the Marble Arch. There were always deck-chairs on the Park Lane side, near the Arch, and she would be sitting there. But he was to come alone. If he didn’t, if any of his private ‘snoopers’, man or woman, were near, then she wouldn’t say a word. Did he clearly understand that? Bobby replied meekly that he did, and before she rang off Imra added:
“I can tell you, for one thing, where Mr Dow got a room when he left his hotel.”
“And what the dickens does that mean?” Bobby demanded, both looking and feeling very bewildered. “She can’t be meaning to give him away surely?”
“Of course not,” Olive said. “Something’s happened to frighten her, and she wants help, and so she’s thought of you. Almost sounds as if you had made a good impression on her. I can’t think why.”
“Trouble is,” Bobby said, “people only come to us for help when things have gone so far no help is possible. I hope it doesn’t mean Ossy has been bumped off. I don’t see why he should be, now the smuggled stuff has been recovered.” He relapsed into silence then, and only when Olive made some tentative suggestions about bed did he rouse himself sufficiently to say: “That open door—what did that mean? Why?”
“Why what?” Olive asked. “Which open door? There’ve been such a lot. What a door left open generally means is that anyone can walk in.”
“Police or crook,” Bobby agreed. “Anyhow, first thing to do is to hear what Miss Imra means to tell us—if anything.”
He took care to be punctual at the suggested meeting-place. Imra was there, waiting in one of the deck-chairs she had mentioned. She got up as soon as she saw him and came to meet him.
“There’s an open space just beyond the tea-house, overlooking the Serpentine,” she said, without preliminary greeting. “We can sit down there and talk without anyone being able to listen. That’s just in case you’ve got some of your men here to follow us.”
“None at all,” Bobby assured her, walking by her side as she crossed the road to the paths leading to the tea-house. “I got the idea that this time it wasn’t necessary, and, anyhow, if I did you would soon notice it and dry up. When Mrs Adam made the same sort of suggestion, I did take my precautions. But then I don’t think she would be so quick to notice things, and I do think she could easily be made use of for—well, for other purposes. And I don’t think you could be.”
“Don’t you?” she said, with some bitterness. “I’m not so sure.” Then she asked: “Mrs Adam? what did she want?”
“Well, you know,” Bobby answered smilingly. “I thought you were going to tell me things, not ask me questions.”
They walked on in silence till, on that pleasant, sunny slope overlooking the Serpentine, they found two chairs sufficiently far from others, from any path, to make it certain nothing they said could by any possibility be overheard. When they had settled themselves Bobby said:
“Well, now then. You were going to give me Mr Dow’s address?”
“The address where he got a room after he left his hotel,” Imra corrected him. She gave him a street and number in Finchley. “But he’s not there now,” she said, “though all his things are. He went out last Monday evening to get a drink at a public-house near, the ‘George and Dragon’. His landlady saw him there just before closing-time. She spoke to him, and he said he wanted to finish a game of darts, and then he would follow her, and not to lock up till he came. He said he wouldn’t be more than a few minutes. He seemed rather jolly and excited, as if he had had a good deal more than only a drink. She waited for him till nearly twelve, and then she went to bed. She hasn’t seen or heard anything since, and all his things are there still, everything, toothbrush, razor, everything. It’s an electric razor he bought only the other day. A new toy—he would never leave
it behind like that unless—”
“Unless?”
“Unless he had to,” she answered steadily.
“What do you want us to do?”
“Find him. Find out what’s happened. Find out why he rang me on Monday to tell me it was going well and to expect him first thing Tuesday and then didn’t come or ’phone or anything.”
“What was going well?” Bobby asked. “Why should you think something may have happened?”
“You know very well,” she answered impatiently. “that some of them on the ‘As You Like It’ were smuggling as a side-line. Ossy had an idea of what was going on, and he told me earlier that he thought he knew what it was being brought in and where to find it.”
“What was he going to do if he did find it?” Bobby asked. She made no answer. He asked again: “What you mean, isn’t it? is that looking for valuable stuff of that nature, no appeal for police help possible, has its dangers, and that Dow may have found that out too late?”
“You can put it that way if you like,” she told him. “Well?”
“I can assure you,” Bobby went on, “we are already doing our best to find him. And Kenneth Banner, too. Always difficult, though, to find those who don’t want to be found. England’s an outsize haystack for needles to hide themselves in. If you can give us any help, we shall be very glad. Is there anyone, anything you suspect?”
“A man called Jordan. You know him, don’t you? He’s mixed up in it somehow. Mrs Adam may know something. I asked Ossy’s landlady at Finchley if she had ever seen anyone like them or like Kenneth Banner either. She wasn’t very sure, but she did say she thought there was a young man like I said in the ‘George and Dragon’ Monday evening.”
“Miss Guire,” Bobby said, “are you sure you have told us all you know? I think you are keeping a good deal back.”
“Why should I?”
“There’s such a thing as laying false trails, red herrings in the vernacular,” Bobby answered. “Or telling part of the truth to hide the whole truth more effectively. You want me to believe you knew nothing about the smuggling that was going on. My suggestion is that, on the contrary, it was you who started it, who was behind it all.”
Strange Ending: A Bobby Owen Mystery Page 22