“Oh,” she said. She turned in her chair and stared at him long and intently, trying, he knew, to probe his inmost thoughts. “No,” she said abruptly. “Why?”
“I’ve talked to all of you of the Banner Travel Agency,” he told her slowly, “and I’ve got the clear impression that only you have the necessary brains, energy, initiative, to put through a scheme of this sort. Dow I take to be a bully, apt for violence if it seems safe, otherwise a small-time crook, but not the man to plan long-term crime.”
“Is smuggling a crime?” she asked. “What harm is there in buying honestly a watch in Switzerland and selling it here at a fair rate of profit?”
“We won’t discuss the ethics of defrauding the revenue, that is, the nation, either in income tax or smuggling,” Bobby answered. “I’m not at the moment so much concerned with smuggling as with murder. That, at least, is a crime—the worst of crimes, even though murderers are not always the worst of criminals. It is a thing that can so easily be done.”
CHAPTER XXXIII
IN HYDE PARK
FOR A TIME there was silence. It might almost have been thought that Imra had not heard those words Bobby had spoken so slowly, so quietly. Then she stood up. She did not attempt to walk away, but stood there entirely motionless, nor did she even look at Bobby. But he, watching her closely, felt that for once those dark and hidden depths of memory in which her spirit so often hid itself had been profoundly troubled, as though upon its surface a passing wind had blown. She sat down again.
“Herbert Abel?” she said. “Yes. Yes. Well?”
“I don’t think,” Bobby went on then, “from what I know of him, that he, any more than Dow, had the initiative or the capacity to plan any such elaborate fraud. I credit Kenneth Banner with both—brains and initiative—but not with the temperament. He might, in my judgment, very well let his temper run away with him, even betray him into violence. Stanley Foster has nothing to make him a leader in any way. His place would always be on the side-line. Though willing to pick up anything that came his way without too much risk. That leaves only you.”
“Then you credit me,” Imra asked, “with both—with intelligence and initiative? It is always interesting to know what other people think of you.” She had recovered that composure which for a moment had seemed shaken, and her tone was light enough, though Bobby thought he could recognize the tense, underlying strain. She was still not looking at him. She seemed to be concentrating her attention on the scene before them, the long, grassy southern slope studded with people taking their ease in the afternoon sun and farther on the Serpentine, where the boats went to and fro, rowed by cheerful, unskilled oarsmen. She said, still not looking at him: “Do top-rank policemen often say things like this without anything to back it up, reasons, evidence? Or have you?”
“Evidence?” Bobby asked. “Not enough to satisfy me. We are talking confidentially—off the record as they say now. By your wish, not mine. May I ask you another question? You told me once you were thinking of marrying Mr Dow. If you have, and if you have a child, whose will that child be?”
“You ask too many things,” she told him, her voice now slow and level. “I suppose you’ve noticed. I didn’t expect you to. You are good at noticing. You are quite right. I am going to have a baby. At least, that’s what the doctor thinks. Perhaps he’s wrong. Time will show. The father—” She paused, and once again it seemed as if that cold dark reserve, so characteristic of her, was about to break down. Then: “My affair, not yours,” she said.
“An investigating officer’s job,” Bobby told her, “is to find a pattern, the pattern, there is only one, into which every detail fits. Even selling jewellery and asking to be paid in cash, half in one-pound notes, suggests that you had pressing need of ready money for some special purpose. Apparently a cheque wouldn’t do. Why?” She made no answer when he paused to allow her to reply if she wished. Already she was drawing back into the deep, hidden silence in which so often she sought refuge with her own thoughts and, Bobby thought, her own memories. He resumed: “There’s one more question I must ask. You remember, perhaps, you told me once, and there is information that you made the same remark to a third person, that all the newspaper talk about an extremely elaborate meal Abel was said to have been preparing for his expected guest was all nonsense. That is correct. The menu the papers got hold of was picked up in the flat by one of our men. The reporters saw it, and jumped to the conclusion—through some misunderstanding perhaps, something said—that it referred to that night’s supper. So the twopenny Sundays splashed it in the headlines. ‘Death and the Banquet’. ‘Lucullus at the fatal feast’. That sort of thing. But you knew that what was prepared and was ready on the table was something quite different. Smoked salmon. Fried chicken and apple fritters. How did you know that?”
“I suppose someone told me,” she answered carelessly. “I don’t remember. There was a lot of talk about it. No, I don’t remember,” she repeated. “Well!” and with this last word both challenge and defiance had come into her voice.
“Were you in the flat at any time on the night of the murder?”
“If I said ‘Yes’, you would call it a confession. If I said ‘No’, you wouldn’t believe me.”
“I have information now to the effect that a man and a woman were seen there that evening.”
“Have you?” she said, as if not much interested, but watching him warily all the time. “Kenneth Banner and that girl of his—Doreen something? Was it?”
“There is nothing else you care to say?”
“I have said too much already,” she retorted. “You won’t get me to say more. Are you going to try to find out what’s become of Mr Dow?”
“You may rest assured,” Bobby told her formally, “that every possible step is being taken to find both him and Kenneth Banner. Sooner or later, of course, they will both be found. One or the other—or both—will then almost certainly be charged. If the Public Prosecutor agrees. If there is not enough evidence to connect them with Abel’s death, then one of them may talk on the smuggling issue. It may happen that, even when the evidence seems at first too weak to support a verdict of guilty, what does come to light during the trial turns out to be enough. There is a starting point now in the information we have about the two people seen that night.”
“I don’t believe anyone saw anything,” she retorted. “No one was there.”
“Shall I ask you why you are so sure of that?”
“Because, of course,” she answered readily, “if anyone had seen anything they would have done something, called for help, come forward long ago.”
“Yet someone was there,” Bobby repeated. “On the landing outside. Peeping through the door that wasn’t quite shut.”
“I don’t believe it,” she said loudly. “You are trying to bluff. Aren’t you? All right. All right.” Quite suddenly she began to talk in a low, rapid voice, at times running her words together as if she could not get them out fast enough, as though at last the flood-gates were open and the waters freed. “That door,” she was saying, “it was open when we got there, just a little. A crack. Not latched. The latch hadn’t caught. When we noticed we went in. Bert was there. He was lying on the ground all over blood, and his mouth was wide open, his mouth he had kissed me with and lied as he kissed. The day before Mrs Adam had come to see me, and she told me she was his wife and she wanted to find him to get her maintenance money. I thought I was his wife. We were married at a Registry Office. He gave a false name—Abel, not Adam. Still Biblical. I had let him have all my money my aunt left me. The usual trusting female fool. I mortgaged the house, too, and all the furniture. He had everything. You are wrong about it being all my idea. It was his in the first place—the smuggling, I mean. What I did was to go to France and make contacts with people there, get the thing into running order. I know French almost as well as English. Don’t try to take notes of what I’m saying. If you do, I shan’t say another word. I shall say you invented it all. We were making
a lot of money, smuggling. Bert said when we had enough we would go to America. South America perhaps. But I found out there wasn’t any. Money, I mean. He had spent it. One thing and another. In the West End. You can spend a lot of money there—night clubs and things. He had been betting, too. So then he told me he had done with me. The discarded glove. He said that, those very words. He said he had got a new girl. He wouldn’t say who it was. I asked him, and he told me to shut up, and he kicked me out. I mean literally. He turned me round and pushed me to the door and kicked me so that I fell down on the landing, and I heard him laughing as I lay there, because I couldn’t get up just at first. He banged the door and I went away. It was the time when Kenneth was beginning to be troublesome. I knew there was a plan fixed up between them—him and Ossy—to make Kenneth keep quiet. I didn’t know exactly what it was, I didn’t care. I kept thinking about Herbert and who it was he called his new girl. I believe now it was that Doreen Caine. It was her knowing about cooking that made him interested in her. She hasn’t any looks or anything like that. But cooking was almost the only thing he cared about. He had a passion for it. Did you ever hear before of a man with a passion for cooking? He told me once there was a man cook who committed suicide because the fish was late for the dinner he was getting ready. I don’t know if it’s true, but he said he could quite understand it, he said he could feel like that himself. He tried to teach me. I can cook, but not what he meant by cooking. Cooking was to him what politics, power, money, music is for other people. Ossy was going to his flat—the one I was kicked out of—to fix it up about Kenneth. I went with him. He didn’t want me to. I told him Herbert was meaning to keep the last lot we had got through for himself, and I had to be there because I knew what he meant to do and I could stop it. I don’t know if Ossy believed me, but he let me come. I had a pistol I bought in France when I went there to make arrangements. I had to visit some queer places, and I got the pistol just in case. I never needed even to show it. I took it with me that night. I don’t know what I meant to do. I didn’t think about that. But I didn’t mean to be kicked out again, and I meant to try to get some of my money back. I wasn’t going to have him spending any more of it on Doreen Caine or whoever it was, and inside me I was all frozen up. I told you. On the way I told Ossy I was going to make Bert give me his share of the watches. It was by far the most valuable lot we had ever got through. When we got there the door wasn’t properly fastened, and we went in. Ossy said: ‘They’ve been fighting. Where’s Kenneth?’ There was a chair overturned, and the cushion had been torn open and the feathers all over everything, and he was lying there with his mouth open, and I picked up a handful of the feathers and I crammed them into his mouth, and I remember saying out loud: ‘That’ll stop you telling any more lies’, and Ossy called to me to come and help him look for the watches, because he thought Kenneth must have taken them, but he would get them back. Afterwards he didn’t think so. He told me Herbert had them hidden for fear the flat might be searched. Ossy went back to look at Herbert, and he said he was dead, and we must get away at once before anyone saw us, and I don’t believe anyone ever did. Ossy said to leave the door open, and as soon as we had got away he would ring up and go on ringing and that would be an alibi. I don’t know if he did.”
“Most likely he changed his mind,” Bobby said. “Wouldn’t have been much of an alibi anyhow.”
Imra got up again, and for a moment or two stood in silence by the side of her chair, staring absently before her. She said:
“If you tell anyone, I shall say you invented it all. Remember that.”
“I’ll remember,” Bobby promised. Something, some obscure foreboding made him add: “At any rate, you have your child to live for.”
“Or to die for?” she said.
Without waiting for a reply, she began to walk away while Bobby watched. She turned back. She said in a strange, wondering voice:
“Why have I told you what I did? I never meant to. I thought that I could fight you off. Why couldn’t I?”
“There are some things that must be told,” he answered. “Sooner or later, they must be told.”
CHAPTER XXXIV
NO CORROBORATION
LONG AFTER Imra had vanished from his sight over the brow of the hill, on her way to the Marble Arch, Bobby remained sitting there, a sense of frustration and defeat heavy upon him.
For he felt that he knew well what Imra intended, and he could see no way to stop her. Doreen had defeated him by leaving him no alternative but either to watch her die before his eyes or allow Kenneth to go free. Now Imra had told him all he wanted to know, and to his mind at least had made it equally clear what she planned. But of what she had told him he could make no use, since at present anyhow, there was no corroboration, either of fact or word. What she had said to him could easily be denied, and certainly would be. For now that she had obtained relief from the intolerable burden of her secret, any new denial that she had to make would undoubtedly be given with force and conviction.
“Women,” he told himself bitterly, “never play fair—stick the responsibility on you. ‘Hit me if you dare, you great brute.’ That sort of thing. Or else tell you all about it after making sure you can’t use it.”
Very discontentedly he went back to the Yard. There he dictated a full account of his talk with Imra, unnecessarily pointing out that in default of supporting evidence or other corroboration, it could not be used. Then he sent for Ford, to whom he gave a brief explanation of what his plans were.
“Altogether too many doors in this case,” he said. “Kenneth Banner says if he left the door of Abel’s flat open, it was because he didn’t know what he was doing. According to Miss Guire—or Mrs Dow if they are really married—Dow wanted it left open because he meant to go on ringing up till he attracted attention with the idea that when the murder was discovered, he would have an alibi. Not a very good alibi, if you ask me, and most likely he began to think so himself, as he didn’t carry it out. But why was the door of Jasper Jordan’s flat left open the time I found Miss Caine in possession?”
“Well, sir,” Ford answered, rather doubtfully, “all I can think of is that Jordan was expecting her and left the door like that when he went out, meaning to be back soon. Only he wasn’t.”
“Ye’es,” Bobby said with hesitation. “It’s an idea. But there are two things to remember. A car was seen waiting outside, and if it was waiting for Jordan, he can hardly have expected to be back at once to meet Miss Caine, and if it was for someone else—well, who? Then again, it’s clear there was a bad scrap in Jordan’s flat later on and that hardly fits in with the kidnapping theory. If anything of that sort happened, and then he escaped or was rescued the scrap should have been where he was held.”
“There’s another thing, sir, if I might say so,” Ford put in rather hesitatingly, “there’s only Miss Doreen’s word for it that the flat door was open. My own idea is she’s a young lady would lie the hind leg off a mule if she thought it would help her boy.”
Bobby nodded in complete agreement.
“Women have no scruples,” he pronounced. “Always put the particular before the general.”
“Yes, sir,” agreed Ford, wondering very much what this meant.
“The thing is,” Bobby continued, “we’ve grounds now on which to charge Dow, but we’ve got to find him first. A slippery fish. And until we do find him and question him I don’t see how we can hold Imra Guire, which is rather more than urgent. Because unless we can act quickly with her, I doubt whether we shall ever be able to. I shan’t feel comfortable till we have her safely in our hands. The only way to save her life is to arrest her and charge her with murder. Queer, but there it is.”
“Yes, sir,” agreed Ford, still wondering what Bobby meant.
They talked a little longer, Bobby explaining in more detail what was in his mind, aware, too, that he had been expecting a little too much in thinking that Ford, who had not been present at the Hyde Park talk, would understand what it w
as he feared. So then Ford went off, and Bobby rang up Mr Pyne at his flat to ask if he might pay him a brief visit at once for another little chat. Mr Pyne, in his new lisping voice, agreed, though without any marked enthusiasm. So Bobby departed to find a convenient ’bus, and on arrival the door was opened to him by Mr Pyne himself, still showing signs of wear, but with repairs evidently making good progress.
Bobby expressed his gratitude to Mr Pyne for being always so ready to co-operate, and Mr Pyne looked equally pleased by this compliment and doubtful of it. As soon as they were seated and Bobby had accepted a cigarette and declined a drink, he began.
“You remember,” he said, “that when we had our last talk you told me you must think things over before saying more. I had been rather hoping to hear from you.”
Mr Pyne did not respond to this opening. He remained silent, placed his finger-tips together, and regarded Bobby thoughtfully. Finally, he said:
“The conclusion I eventually arrived at is that substantial reasons, but I hope not entirely unworthy reasons, compel me to remain silent for probably another twenty-four hours. That period of time elapsed, I shall be at your service.” He gave a little regretful sigh. “I am commencing to look back,” he admitted, “with a certain nostalgia on an earlier daily routine in which one was seldom confronted with such contingencies as seem inseparable from visits by officers of police. Even my daughter appears now to be inclined to believe that respectability has advantages, hitherto perhaps too lightly regarded. A—tip is, I think, the usual word—a tip to her that I may soon be relieved of my responsibilities at the Ministry and consequently take to drink seems, paradoxically, to have had a sobering effect.”
“Oh, I hope it won’t come to that,” Bobby said. “I don’t see why it should. But I’m afraid I can’t wait that long—or at all for that matter. I have information now that seems to implicate a man named Dow—Ossy Dow. He may be married to a Miss Imra Guire. I don’t know about that, but if he is she won’t be able to give evidence against him unless she wants to, which isn’t likely. Complicates things, and makes it all the more urgent to find Dow as soon as possible.”
Strange Ending: A Bobby Owen Mystery Page 23