He took his departure then, leaving Dick sitting there in pyjamas and dressing-gown and looking very angry and tousled and disturbed. He was on the whole inclined to accept Dick’s story and yet there was no support for it, except Dick’s own word and the evidence of Dick’s unbruised face. But that did not prove that Dick’s complicity might not have gone very far indeed. Whoever it was who had been engaged in the fight with Sir Alfred and had shot him, might easily be an accomplice or an agent of Dick’s. Nothing to show. All the same, even if all that were true, not much light seemed to be thrown on the disappearance of Mr Crayfoot or, for that matter, on that of the old hermit.
“And why,” Bobby asked himself as he drove slowly home through the blackout to his belated bed, “why was there no hatchet or axe in the old man’s hut and why was there blood on the floor?”
CHAPTER XXIII
BUSINESS TALK
FROM A DEEP sleep that had lasted, Bobby supposed, rather less than a minute and a half, he woke next morning to the sound of the alarm he had been careful to set before tumbling into bed. By his side stood Olive, looking at him severely.
“I suppose,” she said, her voice as severe as her looks, “you won’t have any time for breakfast? So I needn’t waste my time getting it ready.”
Bobby, who realized that the neglected, forgotten, uneaten dinner of the previous night still rankled, answered meekly that he thought he might find time for a cup of tea and even possibly to eat a bite of anything that might happen to be going.
Only very slightly placated, Olive observed that no doubt it had been merely a further waste of time to get his bath ready for him, and then retired to spread throughout the house an appetising odour of bacon frying. Presently Bobby, his eyes a trifle red, but otherwise looking very fit, and much the better for bath and shave, arrived to do porridge, bacon, tomatoes, toast, the justice they deserved. As he ate he told Olive something of the previous day’s happenings.
“Instead of getting any further,” he complained, “all I do is get a fresh problem to worry over. Who chucked that half brick at me? And why? Who shot Sir Alfred? What was he doing there? Is Dick Rawdon all right? Am I right in feeling sure he was there first? What’s behind all that long story they told me, diabolic candelabra and all? Talking for talking’s sake? Red herring-ing, so to speak? Or some definite purpose? Is that lawyer bloke an accessory, a principal, or just accidental? One thing,” Bobby added thoughtfully, looking with some surprise at a toast rack entirely empty and wondering how it had become so, “one thing pretty plain is that Mr Dick Rawdon isn’t in love with the Floyd young woman. His uncle evidently half thought he might be and didn’t much like the idea either, if you ask me.”
“Why do you think he isn’t in love with her?” asked Olive.
“Well, I told you,” Bobby reminded her. “Talked about there being a smut on her nose. You don’t say that about the girl you’re in love with, do you?”
Olive looked at him pityingly.
“Men are dense,” she said. “If Mr Dick wasn’t half way to being in love with Miss Floyd, do you think he would have noticed that smut? Or remembered it?—or thought it worth mentioning?”
“Oh, well, now then,” said Bobby.
“Anyone but a man,” said Olive, shaking a dispirited head, “would see at once that it was a case of reflex defensive action.”
“A—how much?” asked Bobby, slightly awe-stricken, even though he knew that Olive had recently attended a lecture on the new psychology.
“Not,” added Olive, though secretly much pleased by the effect she had produced, “that it needed any stuffy old psychologist to tell any woman when a boy’s fighting hard against it, but he knows it’s no good, because he’s already half way, and when a boy’s half way, well, he’s there, isn’t he? And all over but the asking.”
Bobby rubbed the end of his nose thoughtfully, and, reaching automatically for the toast rack, once more looked surprised and pained to find it empty.
“If you wouldn’t mind saying that all over again in words of one syllable,” he suggested meekly; but Olive looked at the clock and said she hadn’t time to explain and he had better be off as all the clocks, including the alarm clock, were an hour slow, having been put back an hour by her the night before, since, in her considered opinion, it was better for Bobby to have an hour’s extra sleep than to break down presently and have to take a week off for want of proper rest.
“I rang up to let them know you would be an hour later than usual,” she added.
In the face of this revelation of feminine duplicity and guile, Bobby could only utter a howl of mingled remonstrance and protest as he fled away. Fortunately when he did reach his office he found nothing of any very pressing importance to need his personal attention. The usual crop of documents marked ‘Urgent’ ‘Very Urgent’, ‘Secret and Confidential’ were all purely routine, and could safely be left to subordinates. The rest of the day he felt he would be able to devote almost entirely to the ‘Rawdon Case’ as he was beginning to call it.
A ’phone call to the Barsley Forest police sergeant told him that there was as yet no sign of the missing hermit’s re-appearance. Another put through to the hospital brought the reply that Sir Alfred was still in a very precarious condition. Yet another call to Mr Weston’s Tombes address informed him that Mr Weston was in Midwych, at the office of his firm. So Bobby rang him up there, received a promise that he would come round at once to have a chat, as Bobby had put it, over last night’s excitement. Before Weston arrived Bobby learnt from yet another ’phone call put through to the Tombes A.R.P. centre, that as Mr Weston was a traveller, and often away on his rounds, he did not undertake regular work but acted as a relief. It had been by his own suggestion that the night before he had taken the place of the warden who would normally have been on duty at that particular time and spot. The warden in question had been very pleased at the time to get an unexpected night off, but now was slightly disgruntled at having missed so much excitement. Tombes A.R.P. centre showed in fact some disposition to discuss the whole sensational affair at length, but Bobby confined himself to expressing his thanks for the information received and then firmly rang off. Then Mr Weston appeared, took the chair Bobby indicated, and remarked breezily that what beat him and Mrs Crayfoot, too, was not only what Sir Alfred was doing there but how he had got in.
“Deuced odd, eh?” remarked Mr Weston. “You got any idea, inspector?”
Bobby agreed that it was deuced odd, and said there were just one or two things he would like to ask Mr Weston about, if Mr Weston had no objection.
“You are a traveller by profession, I understand?” he said. Mr Weston nodded.
“Corsets,” he said.
“Eh?” said Bobby.
“Corsets,” Mr Weston repeated. “You know. Things women wear,” he explained.
“Oh, yes,” said Bobby.
“A dying trade,” said Mr Weston moodily. “If things go on the way they are, in fifty years women will be wearing nothing at all.”
“Too bad,” said Bobby.
“Except,” conceded Mr Weston, “slacks and a permanent wave.”
“Oh, well,” said Bobby, a trifle shaken by such a prospect.
“You can’t trust women,” pronounced Mr Weston as one who knew. “I had a pal whose family did well once on hatpins. Where are they now?”
Bobby wasn’t sure whether this referred to the pal’s family or the hatpins. As in neither case did he know the answer, he said nothing.
“Not that it hasn’t turned out all right for him,” Mr Weston admitted. “He’s switched from hatpins to pin tables.”
“Quite a change,” agreed Bobby.
“Profitable,” Mr. Weston said with envy in his voice. “Wish I could get into pin tables. Easy money. Always easy money for you when the mugs think it’s easy money for them.”
Bobby thought that very true and then as Mr Weston seemed to be settling down for a comfortable but not very relevant chat, Bobby sa
id:
“I really asked you here because there’s something I thought you might do to help me.”
“Delighted, I’m sure,” declared Mr Weston. “Anything legal, as they say in the agony column adverts.”
He chuckled at his little joke, beamed on Bobby, and waited. Bobby said:
“Would you mind repeating in a rather loud angry sort of voice, ‘Take that, you red-headed swine.’”
CHAPTER XXIV
MORE BUSINESS
MR WESTON GASPED, turned pale, stammered, tried to speak and failed, stared at Bobby helplessly.
“I’m pretty sure I recognized your voice while we were chatting, but I should like to be quite sure,” Bobby explained when still there was no answer.
“That’s why you got me talking, is it?” complained Mr Weston. “I thought . . . thought we were just being matey. A low trick,” he said severely.
“You might have killed me,” Bobby remarked, by way of bringing the conversation back to actualities.
“You . . . I . . . I mean . . . it wasn’t you, was it?” Mr Weston asked.
“Oh, yes, it was,” Bobby assured him. “Very much me.”
Mr Weston was beginning to recover himself. He said, but rather feebly:
“Well, anyhow, it wasn’t me.”
“Come, come,” said Bobby smilingly. “We both know it was.”
Mr Weston gave in.
“How did you know?” he asked.
“Easy enough,” Bobby answered. “Your voice, for instance. Part of a policeman’s job is to remember and recognize voices.”
“You’ve got it all wrong,” protested Mr Weston, trying to recover lost ground, but Bobby shook his head.
“Now, please, Mr Weston,” he said, “as a business man, don’t let us waste time.”
“You can’t prove anything,” Mr Weston said, trying now to make his voice sound confident and not succeeding very well.
“I might, I think, if I wanted to,” Bobby answered, “but I don’t know that I do. No great harm done. Attempted assault and all that, of course. No ill feeling either. All trades have their inconveniences and I suppose a policeman’s troubles include half a brick occasionally. Nasty things, though, half bricks. It might have been attempted murder. Or even murder outright.”
“I only wanted to give the swine a scare,” Mr Weston said. “I took care to miss. Very careful I was.”
“Care in the blackout?” murmured Bobby.
“I aimed high,” Weston protested. “To make sure it didn’t hit,” and though Bobby remembered how close the thing had passed by his ear, he made no comment. Weston added: “I don’t see what made you think of me?”
“Easy exercise in logic,” Bobby answered. “You were interested in Miss Floyd’s chocolates. Thought there might be money in them. So was someone else, someone who visited both Miss Floyd and the shop that sold the things for her. Both Miss Floyd and the shop girl mentioned the red hair. He was plainly interested in the chocolates, presumably from the same money point of view, and he was a stranger in the district. So probably he had heard about them from a resident. You are a resident. And you knew about the red hair, witness your remark that accompanied that half brick of yours. Proof it was the same man and someone you knew. You were on the spot as an air raid warden but at your own suggestion, not doing a regular tour of duty.”
“That’s all just guess-work,” grumbled Weston. “You couldn’t prove a thing.”
“I daresay I could swear to your voice,” Bobby answered. “I wouldn’t mind betting I could pick out your voice from fifty others. We needn’t discuss that, though. At least, I hope not. If you’ll just answer a few questions. I gather from the half brick incident and the accompanying remark that you aren’t friends any longer. I shouldn’t wonder if he hadn’t tried to do you down.”
Weston nodded gloomily.
“That’s right,” he said.
“What’s his name?” Bobby asked. “And his address?”
“Sammy Stone, ‘Sammy to you,’ he says before you’ve known him two minutes—pally. Pally with everyone to see what he can get. I don’t know where he lives. Somewhere near London.”
“Do you know where he is staying in Midwych?”
Weston shook his head.
“What does he do?”
“He calls himself a financial agent. His real job is buying up retail businesses cheap, nursing them a year or two, and then finding a sucker to sell to at a profit. You can always boost a business for a time if you spend a bit. What you spend on the boosting doesn’t go through the books and so there’s a big and growing profit to show.”
“Have you known him long?”
“Met him at the Brightwell Hotel, you know, opposite the Central station. Everyone on the road knows the Brightwell. Very well run. Cheap, too. All the boys stop there when they’re in Midwych. I drop in now and then for a chat and hear the news. Stone has been on the road, too, and knows a lot of the boys. He’s a great lad for standing drinks, and ‘Sammy to you’ and all that. That’s how he hears of his bargains—retailers who have died and the widow might be ready to sell out cheap. That sort of thing. He heard me telling some of the boys about the chocolates Walters was selling like hot cakes at seven and six a pound, and calculating what the profit must be. Afterwards he stood me a drink and we got talking. I didn’t tumble to it at the time but then I began to think he had asked a good many questions. One of the boys told me he was in Midwych about a picture dealer and framer’s business he had bought up and was trying to boost. I thought I would like another talk so I went round and found him there. Welcomed me like a long lost brother, he did. Played me for a sucker all right—me,” said Mr Weston bitterly, “that’s been on the road where they don’t grow suckers ever since I was a kid. What he said was he had been thinking over our talk and we might do a deal. Stood me another drink at the local and it was all settled up I was to get Miss Floyd to tell us what she put in her chocolates to make ’em taste the way they did. Then we would put them on the market.”
“Where was Miss Floyd to come in?” asked Bobby.
“Her?” asked Mr Weston, slightly surprised. “Oh, we would have paid her for the recipe, of course—a fiver, perhaps. She could never have handled it herself, you know, not in a big way. Just a girl,” he explained, waving her aside, as it were. “Business this was,” he added.
“Quite so,” said Bobby, reflecting that business resembles charity in that it covers a multitude of sins.
“Not a job for amateurs, marketing a new product,” Mr Weston went on. “Well, what do you think? Sam said not to press the girl. Not to hurry. Wait for him to explore the ground. I was to get samples and he would take them round to the big firms and get a contract and then we could get an advance from the bank. He said he never put up his own money, always the bank’s. All the bank has to do, you see, is to make an entry against your name, and there’s your capital in a stroke of the pen. Glad and ready to do it, too.”
“Can’t say I’ve noticed any gladness and readiness myself,” Bobby murmured, a little dazed by these revelations of high finance.
“Ah, you aren’t in business, got to be a business man to understand it,” explained Weston tolerantly. “Why, Sammy Stone told me once he had credits from seven banks going all at once, using one to keep t’other quiet, if you see what I mean. Lord, if he can put it across me that knows the road from A to Z and back again, don’t you think he can with a bank manager and them with their mouths open for half a chance to use customers’ money?”
Bobby could only shake a bewildered head at this picture of bank managers so different from his own impression of those aloof and godlike creatures, incarnate and immortal spirits of the universal negative.
“Well, now then,” he said feebly.
“So you can guess,” continued Mr Weston, “I felt pretty sick when I found he had been round to see Miss Floyd on his own, got her to give him a sample of her flavouring, had it analyzed, applied for a provisional paten
t, and,” said Mr Weston, his voice quivering with indignation, “when I tackled him, tried to put me off with a fiver.”
“Just like Miss Floyd,” Bobby murmured.
“Yes, but this was me,” said Mr Weston with an innocent sincerity that was perfectly genuine. “It wasn’t so much the money. It may not amount to anything after all. The public may not cotton to the flavour, not enough to count. It’s a gamble, is public taste. What hurt,” said Mr Weston gravely, almost solemnly, “was the insult to me as a business man.”
“I see,” said Bobby.
“Wouldn’t you?” asked Mr Weston earnestly, “have felt like half a brick?”
“At any rate,” retorted Bobby, “I’m glad I didn’t feel half a brick.”
CHAPTER XXV
EL GRECO PRINTS
BOBBY’S INTENTION HAD been to call next on Dr Maskell, but after what Weston had told him, he decided to try to have first a talk with this Mr Sammy Stone, so adroit with bank managers, so interested in the new flavour discovered by the solitary of the forest.
A little nervous at the thought of confronting one so gifted in matters of finance, Bobby was half inclined to leave his wallet behind and empty his pockets, just as a matter of general precaution. However, he decided to risk it. The address given him by Mr Weston was in a street at no great distance and thither he took his way. The shop was in a good position and looked prosperous and well stocked but at the moment was without customers. A man came forward at Bobby’s entrance and observed gloomily that if it was drawing pins, they hadn’t any and weren’t likely to, either, not till the war was over. Bobby explained that it wasn’t drawing pins, it was Mr Stone he wished to see. He was told Mr Stone wasn’t there. He might be in later, perhaps, or he might not. So Bobby said he would call again, and was business good, and the shopman said still more gloomily that it was neither good nor bad, there just wasn’t any to be either the one thing or the other.
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