But now Nixon, who had been watching from afar, made his appearance.
“I saw you talking to Manners,” he said. “Did you get anything out of him?”
“Nothing much,” Bobby admitted, “except that he was trying to make sure we realized B.B. was the only one of them with an opportunity to smuggle the murder weapon away. He did it quite cleverly. But it would have been cleverer still if he had taken it for granted that we could see that much ourselves. Then we wouldn’t have to wonder whether he had any reason for throwing suspicion on someone else.”
“Well, just possibly he has,” Nixon said. “I’ve got something at last, but I’m blessed if I know what it adds up to. Our dabster” (Nixon’s name for his finger-print expert) “has identified Manners’s finger-prints on the bureau in the room Mr Outers used for himself.”
CHAPTER XIV
AN ANCIENT RIDDLE
BOBBY REMAINED SO irresponsive to this piece of what Nixon regarded as startling, and indeed ‘vital’, information that he began to think Bobby had not taken in its full significance. In reality Bobby was trying—and failing—to relate it to the vague fleeing, fleeting, glimmer of a theory that was beginning to try to shape itself in his mind.
“Well, what was Manners doing there?” Nixon was saying now. “What call had he to fiddle about with Outer’s bureau immediately Outers was dead and out of the way? How about his being after that uranium field map you told me about? The girl said there was something missing. Not there any more, she said. Well, how did she know?”
“Nothing to show the locks have been tampered with, was there?” Bobby asked.
“No. They look new—good quality, too,” replied Nixon. “I asked Miss Outers where her father kept his keys and she said he always had them on him. Well, they weren’t on him when we got here. One of my chaps reported that at once. Most men keep their keys in their pockets, so he noticed it immediately. Well, who has them? Manners?”
“If he has, not in his pockets now,” Bobby remarked. “Baynham says there’s been some talk in Midminster about Outers knowing where there was an undeveloped gold-mine. That may mean the uranium field story getting changed into a gold-mine yarn, gold-mines being more picturesque and exciting—and more familiar—than uranium fields, though uranium fields are much more important. Did Miss Outers say anything else?”
“Well, no. I asked her what made her think something wasn’t there any more, but I couldn’t get anything out of her. Then I asked her if it could be what you called a medicine bag, and she just looked at me like—well, like thunder and blue lightning. Then she said if it were it had been better left where it was. Not good enough,” Nixon pronounced, looking very firm and determined. “The young woman will have to be a bit more open or there’s going to be trouble,” but for all the firmness and determination in his voice he managed to give the impression of not being altogether sure on whom this threatened trouble was likely to fall.
“Did you take statements from the women?” Bobby asked. “There weren’t any among those you showed me, were there?”
“Well, not from Mrs Outers. She was in a state of collapse. The doctor wouldn’t let us. He put her to bed and I put a man at the door till we got a policewoman out to help search for the murder weapon. Not a sign of it, of course. We did get a word or two out of Miss Rosamund, but she kept rushing off to see to her mother. You couldn’t rightly call it a statement. In a general way, a knife’s easily hidden, but how it’s been managed this time I can’t think. What did you say?” for Bobby murmured something Nixon had not caught.
“Only an old riddle I’ve just remembered,” Bobby replied. “When is a knife not a knife? I’ve forgotten the answer. Perhaps there isn’t one.”
Respect for Bobby’s reputation and his position in the London police alone kept back the sharp retort that was on the tip of Nixon’s tongue when he heard what he considered this ill-timed piece of frivolity. Instead he said crossly:
“This thing’s getting me down. Everything contradicting everything else. I’ll send a report to the Home Office. If there’s anything in this uranium field story and those old fellows doing the vanishing act round here, I suppose they ought to know.”
Bobby nodded agreement.
“Though I don’t see what they can do,” he said.
“What they will do,” Nixon grumbled again, “is to acknowledge receipt of my report, which is receiving attention, and then push it in a pigeon-hole, where it’ll stop till next office clean-up. I must go and see if my lads are ready to pack up. Done about all we can here.”
“I’ll slip across to Freres Lodge,” Bobby said, “and see if I can get a chat with Dewey James. Unless it was one of those vanishing and probably non-existent Negroes, who else can have been smoking cigarettes that evening in the old burnt-out ruin?”
“Claims he was asleep in bed all night,” Nixon pointed out. “If he sticks to that, how are we to prove he wasn’t? And if he wasn’t, does it help? He wasn’t one of those there when it happened?”
“No; I know,” Bobby admitted. “Only if it was Dewey, it may have been because he thought something was going to happen. If it was that, then we want to know why and what.”
Nixon grumbled that he supposed so, but didn’t see how it could be managed, Dewey not being the sort likely to break down under questioning.
“Not even if we could put the heat on, which we can’t,” he added; and went off, while Bobby made his way by the footpath running round the Tower and the ruin to Freres Lodge, where he found some half-dozen journalists hanging about in a lugubrious group, waiting, as newspaper men, detectives and soldiers have so often to do, for something to happen and if it does, and you not on the spot, probably the end of your career. Not so bad, of course, if there’s a bar handy where you can exchange gossip and buy drinks for each other, but in this case only the wind and the drizzle and the open road. So Bobby’s appearance was hailed with enthusiasm as a possible harbinger, not of spring, but of news, consequent release from waiting about, and then a gallop full speed to the nearest telephone box. Their disappointment therefore was profound though resigned when Bobby told them there was nothing fresh and his present errand was merely to check up on one or two unimportant details.
“Better mind your step, then,” one reporter warned him. “The old lady nearly laid the lot of us out with that crutch of hers.”
“Shut up, you ass,” a comrade exclaimed. “If you had held your silly tongue, we might have got a story out of that: ‘Old lady empties pail on high-up police officer.’ Would have rated banner headlines.”
“Poked Bill in the tummy with the end of the thing,” a third man remarked with sadistic pleasure.
“A super poke,” confirmed the first speaker, who was apparently ‘Bill’. “And then twirled the thing round her head as if she meant to brain the lot of us.”
“Would that be possible?” Bobby murmured; and, under a barrage of indignant and bitter retort, escaped to the Lodge, where, when he knocked, Mrs James appeared, a pail of dirty water in one hand.
“Oh, it’s you, is it?” she said. She put down the pail, though with an air of slight disappointment. “I told those jackanapes outside if they came worrying any more, they would get what they wouldn’t like. Come in. They seem to think no one has anything to do but talk about things you only want to forget, but you can’t. One of them had the impudence to ask if I wouldn’t like my picture in the papers. I gave him what for.”
“Bravo,” applauded Bobby. “You can’t give those chaps what for too often.”
Pleased apparently by this expression of sympathy, Mrs James repeated her invitation to enter. Not without some hope that the watching journalists would note the difference between the reception accorded to him and that they had received, Bobby followed her into a most comfortable-looking, well-kept kitchen, all glamorous with shining brass and gleaming polish. Clearly Mrs James did her best to compensate for the loss of one leg by making her two hands do double work. The table
was laid for tea, but not for one of your frivolous four o’clock affairs. A man-sized meal indeed, with sausages keeping hot in a frying-pan, an egg or two in the offing, a pile of buttered toast on the hob. Bobby indeed, whose chief nourishment since breakfast had been a meat-pie—not his favourite article of diet—surveyed these preparations with a touch of envy. Mrs James having laid aside her crutch, carefully balanced across the table with the end pointing towards him—perhaps a warning, he thought, that he, too, might get a ‘super poke’ if he didn’t mind—made one of those prodigious hops of hers to the stove. There, balancing herself on her one leg, with a hand on the mantelpiece for additional support, she poured out a cup of tea. By the aid of a chair-back, she brought it to him, swung back to her own chair and pushed over to him a plate of scones.
During all this she had not spoken a word, but equally she had not ceased to watch him. He had never noticed before how bright and keen and searching were those rather hard, clear light blue eyes of hers, how intent and questioning. But perhaps they had not been so before. It might be that only since what had so recently happened had they gained this new strange intensity of vision. But now she broke into the thanks he was beginning to express for tea and scones, saying:
“It’s Dewey you want, isn’t it?”
“Well, yes,” Bobby admitted. “But I should like to ask you a question or two if you don’t object, just so as to get things clearer in my own mind.”
“I told the police all I could,” she grumbled. “A statement, they called it. I thought they would never stop asking questions—most of them silly or the same thing over again. They’ve been at Dewey, too, though what can he say when he was asleep in bed all night?” She paused and stared at Bobby, apparently challenging him to reply. When he did not, but remained silent, she went on: “You’re police too, aren’t you?” He nodded. Still staring at him in the same challenging, defiant way, she said: “One of us six, that’s what you all think, isn’t it? Which?”
“Well, that’s exactly it—which?” Bobby agreed. “Often there’s a very limited circle of suspects. But this time, just the six, and it seems certain it must be one of them.”
“It certainly wouldn’t be his wife or the girl,” declared Mrs James positively. “There is one thing I do remember, though, that I don’t think I told the other police with their note-books and their pencils and all the rest of it—taking your finger-prints, too. What for? We were all there, weren’t we? I don’t expect anyone else bothered to say so, but in all the flurry and scurry someone, I don’t know who it was, knocked me down—you’re not too steady on one leg. So there I was on the floor and I could see under the table and I saw Ludo Manners bending over Mr Outers and slipping a hand into his pocket. I don’t know if he took anything out. I don’t think he did; he might have. But why should he?”
“Yes. Why should he?” Bobby repeated. “Manners isn’t a pick-pocket. Only, for that matter, why should anyone want to kill Val Outers? He had no enemies, had he? He was a newcomer in the neighbourhood—had hardly had time to, for that matter.”
“Doesn’t take some people long,” she retorted. “Mind you, I’m not swearing to anything. It’s what I thought at the time, but there I was on the floor, hardly knowing what was happening, only trying to get up before getting trodden on with all of them stamping round in the dark and shouting at each other to get a light.”
“It’s just possible some of them may have noticed something,” Bobby remarked thoughtfully. “I expect Mr Nixon would like another talk with you as soon as he knows. He’s sure to want to follow it up. You’ve not mentioned it to anyone else?”
“Only Dewey,” Mrs James answered. “He didn’t take any notice. He never takes any notice of his old mother or what she says, though I always try to do my duty by him. Look at the time. Long past when he said he would be in, and everything ready and waiting, and all the washing up to be done he never thinks of helping in. And what’s he doing? Fiddling about outside, that’s all. Never forgets it’s me made him as he is so no woman will look at him twice without giggling or being silly scared.”
CHAPTER XV
RESOLUTE IN SILENCE
ALL THIS LAST outburst had been spoken by Mrs James with such extraordinary bitterness, her features so contorted by the passion with which her words had been, as it were, flung at Bobby, that he was considerably startled. There came back to his mind his wife’s dictum that Mrs James had never forgiven herself for her son’s deformity. Gently, but also a little uneasily, for who could tell to what extremity such self-reproach, so long brooded on, might not lead, he said:
“Don’t you think you exaggerate a little? I noticed Miss Outers talking to him. It was the only time I’ve seen her chatting and laughing like any ordinary girl.”
“Oh, her,” Mrs James said, and seemed with a casual gesture to dismiss her from consideration. “Showing off. That’s all. To annoy her father.”
“Why?” Bobby asked. “Has there been any ill feeling between them?”
“Not on Dewey’s side,” Mrs James assured him. “Mr Outers seemed to think Dewey was something so different, the girl oughtn’t to talk to him. A black man was all right. Not Dewey the way he was born. We heard about his saying that people like Dewey often had minds as twisted as their bodies, and he didn’t like his girl talking to him. Not that Dewey minded, or me either. We’re used to being looked at as if we weren’t the same as others. Freaks. Not by everyone, I don’t mean, but some, like Mr. Outers. Dewey has a right to be treated as an ordinary human being, hasn’t he? If you want him, you had better go and have a look round the outhouses. He’ll be somewhere at the back most likely.”
So Bobby thanked her for the cup of tea, and, taking her advice, made his way to the back of the lodge.
He went slowly, deep in thought, puzzled not so much by Mrs James’s loquacity and her confidences as by the impression strong in his mind that behind her flow of words had been a clear and steady purpose. He knew well enough that those who endure such a shock as the happenings in the summit room of the Folly must have inflicted on them all, are often inclined to seek relief in endless talk. It was a trait well known to police, sometimes helpful to them, sometimes not. But that did not seem to Bobby to be quite the case with Mrs James. She chattered, or so he thought, with a purpose, for a reason, with a controlled aim in view. But what that might be he found it hard to imagine.
Difficult, too, to be sure what were her real feelings, her deeper feelings at least, towards her son, to whom her attitude seemed so oddly compounded of mingled devotion and aversion. He put the problem aside for further consideration and began to wonder instead if Dewey would prove as willing to talk as had all the others he had questioned. But when rounding the corner of an outhouse he saw Dewey standing there, leaning on a spade in a kind of heavy immobility, he knew at once that from him would come no easy flow of words. Not in talk would this man seek relief from his thoughts, no matter how much he might need it, but rather in silence and restraint. Of Bobby’s greeting he took scant notice, but one could not say that his bearing was in any way hostile. He merely waited, and why that waiting was impressive Bobby could not tell.
“Mrs James told me I might find you out here,” he began, and still Dewey waited, but again, not so much as in indifference, but only as if he were attentive not to what had been said but rather to what was going to be said. “You know I am an officer of police?” Bobby went on, and this direct question brought now a faint gesture of acquiescence, so that Bobby began to grow irritated at such persistent taciturnity, but which nevertheless, he felt instinctively, was not being deliberately adopted, but was rather an attitude habitual with one who knew that words are but light and transient and treacherous things whereby to express emotion. Perhaps, however, on this occasion there was also in this persistent silence of his, an element of defence. Against what? For of all of those directly or indirectly concerned, he alone, by the unanimous testimony of the others, could not possibly be implicated in any
conceivable way.
Nevertheless, Bobby decided to try to break down this barrier of silence by sudden, abrupt assault. He said:
“There’s reason to believe that someone was in what is left of the old house last night. Was it you?”
Slowly Dewey answered:
“Why should you think so?”
“Who else could it be?” Bobby asked in return; and in the same slow, deliberate, unemotional tones, Dewey countered simply:
“I do not know.”
Bobby asked again:
“Who else could it be?”
This time, to this twice-repeated question, Dewey still made no reply. Bobby waited. In silence—a heavy brooding silence—the two men waited, Dewey leaning motionless on his spade, Bobby erect and equally motionless, looking down from his more than six feet on Dewey’s less than five. But somehow this gave to Bobby no sense of dominance, nor, seemingly, to Dewey any feeling of inferiority. It was the first time that Bobby had been so close to him. That early impression, founded on a brief glimpse from some distance, had been of a body so oddly distorted as to be almost grotesque. Now he recognized that this distorted body was also solid, firmly knit, and that the great head, sunk between its shoulders showed features of a noble form, finely shaped. There was a contradiction, though, or so Bobby thought, between the sad, soft brown eyes, placed far apart, clear as a summer’s dawn, yet pleading, too, like those of a faithful dog waiting its master’s will, and the ruthless-looking mouth, set in such hard lines above the granite-like protruding chin.
Now it was Bobby who spoke first, asking for the third time:
“Was it you waiting there that night while a man was murdered nearby?”
“That is for you to say,” Dewey retorted then, and to that Bobby retorted in his turn:
Six Were Present: A Bobby Owen Mystery Page 10