Six Were Present: A Bobby Owen Mystery

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Six Were Present: A Bobby Owen Mystery Page 13

by E. R. Punshon


  It was while he was still staring meditatively into that deep Stygian darkness beneath that a sudden fall of plaster reminded him he was in a burnt-out building long since labelled ‘dangerous’ and marked for demolition. Had he heard something else as well—a hurrying and furtive footstep? He did not know. He jumped aside only just in time to avoid a heavier shower, not only this time of plaster, but of brick as well—a narrow escape from, at any rate, incapacitating injury. As it was he found himself enveloped in dust and dirt, and, tripping over another pile of rubbish, down upon his hands and knees. He cut his hand slightly in falling and it began to bleed. Another fall of brick and plaster followed and somewhat hurriedly he removed himself from the danger spot. He heard sounds as of someone making a cautious approach. He got to his feet and took out his handkerchief to wrap round his injured hand. A face appeared, peering through the gap above. It was that of B.B. Bobby said:

  “Oh, it’s you, is it?”

  “Are you all right?” B.B. asked, and was there—Bobby asked himself this time—a faint note of disappointment in a question to which the answer was clearly “Yes”?

  “You might come down here, will you?” was Bobby’s response.

  “As soon as I can get,” came the reply. “Have to be careful. The whole place looks as if it might collapse any moment.”

  “I’ve just noticed that,” Bobby answered.

  CHAPTER XIX

  FOOD FOR THOUGHT

  THE DESCENT WAS fortunately accomplished without disaster, and once he was on the comparatively safe surface at ground level, Baynham made his way easily enough to where Bobby was still trying to brush away the dirt and dust with which he was covered. He looked round as he heard B.B. approaching, and perhaps in that quick and searching glance there was more of questioning suspicion than he fully realized.

  “Been having a look round?” he asked.

  “I thought I saw someone up there,” B.B. answered. “I wondered who he was and what he wanted.”

  “Did you find out?”

  “No. It wasn’t you, I suppose?”

  “It was not,” Bobby answered. “I would like to know myself. It is always interesting to know who is poking about near the scene of a murder and why. Had you any special reason for returning here?”

  “Is there any objection?” B.B. asked, belligerent now.

  “At any rate,” came Bobby’s quick response, “there’s a strong objection on my part to being nearly knocked out by a shower of bricks and plaster.”

  “Well, damn it, man,” B.B. began angrily. “How was I to know? I nearly came through myself. Of course, I’m beastly sorry.” He paused, for Bobby was looking at him rather hard. “I had no idea,” he concluded, somewhat lamely. “You don’t think I did it on purpose, do you?”

  “The thought did just cross my mind,” Bobby admitted. “After all, there is a murderer loose somewhere around here—one of six. As you are. And if the murderer begins to feel things are warming up it may occur to him that it would be rather a good idea to put one or two investigators out of action. You haven’t told me yet if you had any special reason why you’ve returned?”

  “Only to call at Freres to ask how they were—Mrs Outers and Miss Outers I mean. I’ve been out on business and I had to come back this way anyhow, so I parked my car near the Lodge and came round by the Tower track. That’s all.” He paused, hesitated, and then said: “It’s hard to realize you’re suspected of murder.”

  “Don’t you suspect any of the others?” Bobby asked.

  “No. No; I don’t,” B.B. answered, just a little too quickly perhaps, or so Bobby thought at the moment. “No,” he repeated, now a little too firmly. “I did just think when I saw someone up there that it might be some chap looking for the knife. I’ve always thought it might be hidden there. I don’t see how it could have been, but the police couldn’t find it. It must be somewhere not far away. Now I suppose you’ll say it was me trying to get it before there was another search?”

  “It might be like that,” Bobby agreed. “In this case anything is possible, except everything. You remember telling me there was talk in Midminster of Mr Outers possessing a map showing the position of an undeveloped gold-mine in Africa? Did he ever say anything to you about it or about an African witch-doctor’s medicine bag?”

  “He showed me what he said was a medicine-bag,” B.B. answered. “It was because I gave him an old book I found in Father’s library after his death, The Night Side of Nature. It was a collection of ghost stories by a Mrs Young, I think. I knew he was interested in that sort of thing and we got talking, and he got the medicine bag out of that old bureau of his and showed it me.”

  “Did he say what was in it?”

  “He said he didn’t know. I asked him why he didn’t open it and see. He didn’t seem to want to. He pushed the thing back in the bureau in rather a hurry. I thought he seemed a bit scared. I expect it was only my fancy. There may have been something infectious in it, or something like that. I didn’t press him—couldn’t very well. I remember thinking if it was mine I would have it open in a jiffy. I don’t see what all that has to do with it.”

  “The bag seems to have disappeared, at least Rosamund says so,” Bobby told him. “I suppose it may turn up somewhere. Rosamund says it’s not in the bureau. Two things happening about the same time may be connected—cause and effect. Or, quite possibly, they may have nothing to do with each other. Was that all, or did he say anything else?”

  “Well, he went on talking for a time. He said there might be anything in a witch-doctor’s medicine bag, from a dead man’s bones to the hairs from an elephant’s tail. Just anything. An old torn copy of Tom Paine’s Rights of Man in one case he heard of.”

  “The Rights of Man?” Bobby repeated. He had read the book many years ago and remembered it as a vigorous and effective answer to Burke’s Reflections, but he had never thought of it as having any connection with the supra-normal—a development that would certainly have equally annoyed and bewildered its atheistical, free-thinking author. “What on earth makes them imagine it has anything to do with magic or anything of the sort?”

  “Well, all the natives know there’s a part of Africa—West Africa—where the African ruled and the Europeans were their servants, and they have heard, too, that it was all through this little book. Mr Outers said he thought they weren’t so far wrong. It was doing in Africa what John Stuart Mill’s Liberty did in India—making our position untenable by showing what we professed—and so what about a little practice as well?”

  “Books always have been strong medicine in a sense,” Bobby agreed. “Not much help here, though. You can’t give me any idea who it was you say you saw just now?”

  “I only had the merest glimpse, I couldn’t possibly say,” B.B. repeated. “It might have been anyone.”

  They had been slowly approaching the house as they talked, and now Rosamund appeared. Apparently she had been waiting for them.

  “Lunch is ready,” she began, and then interrupted herself with a quick exclamation of dismay. “Oh, Cousin Owen,” she said, “whatever have you been doing to yourself?”

  Bobby was greatly annoyed. He hadn’t been doing anything to himself. He never had. It was always other people who did things to him. Somewhat tartly he said:

  “Nothing.”

  “Whatever would Cousin Olive say?” demanded Rosamund, thinking but small beer of this excuse.

  “Well, don’t you try to say it for her,” retorted Bobby, even more tartly; and Rosamund, probably feeling she had been warned off the matrimonial grass, went on:

  “Did you find Mr Peel?”

  “Has he been here?” interposed B.B.

  “Do you think it could have been Peel you saw?” Bobby asked him, and this question alone of the three produced a reply.

  “Well, at the time I did think it might be,” B.B. admitted. “I didn’t want to say so when it might just as well have been anyone else. The only thing is there was a bicycle leaning ag
ainst the Tower wall. I noticed it was blue and I thought it looked like Peel’s. He always uses a bicycle, getting about.”

  “Sounds like him,” Bobby agreed. “No telling, though.”

  “Lunch is ready,” Rosamund repeated. “Come along.”

  B.B. said with obvious sincerity that he was awfully sorry, but he couldn’t stay, he had a business appointment in Midminster he must keep.

  “I only called to ask how Mrs Outers was,” he explained.

  “The doctor’s been,” answered Rosamund. “He said I was to keep her as quiet as possible. She’s asleep now.” Rosamund paused and looked at Bobby. “He’s trying to find out all about it,” she said with the same odd mixture of trust and mistrust she had shown before, and then Bobby saw, or thought he saw, that B.B. was looking at Rosamund with very much of that same strange mixture of trust and mistrust.

  “Until the truth is known,” Bobby said, and now his voice had grown heavy and sombre, “this thing will always lie between you six,” and the silence that followed his words lay like a cloud, heavy and sombre, too, upon the three of them.

  “I must be going,” B.B. said, though it cost him an effort to speak.

  With no other word uttered, he turned and went. In equal silence Rosamund watched him go and then returned to the house. Bobby was left standing alone, and the sun that all at once broke through the heavy clouds above did nothing to cheer him. He was facing the possibility of a dénouement more dreadful than he had ever known before. He drifted away into the house, but avoided the dining-room. He went into the room the dead man had used and sat there. He had food for thought. There presently Rosamund found him.

  “Lunch is waiting,” she said. “The sauce is spoiled. Turbot needs sauce.”

  “I did not know if you would want me there,” he said. “I think perhaps I ought to go.”

  “Wouldn’t that be running away?” she asked. “Don’t mind me. It’s only that sometimes I feel I can’t bear it any longer. I do so desperately want to end it all. There’s always the top of the Tower. Don’t look at me like that. I’m not going to jump from it just yet. There’s still Mother. Come and get your lunch, or the fish will be ruined as well as the sauce. One must always eat and everything has to go on just as usual. If it wasn’t for having to keep things straight, I think I should go mad. Can you go mad sweeping and dusting and polishing?”

  Without waiting for the answer, Bobby would not anyhow have known how to make, Rosamund went back into the dining-room, where the turbot, grown cold, and the ruined sauce, awaited them, and where they ate a gloomy and a silent meal. Afterwards he offered to help her with the clearing away and the washing up. Those homely tasks completed, Rosamund vanished, and Bobby got out his car and was soon on his way to Midminster.

  CHAPTER XX

  IMPOSSIBLE MURDER

  IN MIDMINSTER BOBBY paid his first visit to the West Midshire Police Headquarters, where he found Mr Nixon flushed and excited after another talk over the ’phone with the Chairman of his Joint Committee. This gentleman, a bustling, ‘go-getting’ man of business, whose slogan was always ‘Small profits, quick returns, or ‘S.P.Q.R.’, initials under which, as he was never tired of informing others, a great Empire had marched from victory to victory, though as the ‘others’ were never tired of telling each other it was the ‘Quick returns’ he was chiefly interested in.

  “I gave him my personal assurance,” Nixon complained, “that we were leaving no stone unturned, no avenue unexplored, and all he said was that everyone had heard that one before. I don’t know what he meant. You can’t do more, can you?”

  “Oh, he was only talking,” Bobby explained, and this seemed to satisfy Nixon, who continued:

  “He got on to that yarn about old fellows seen hanging round the Constant Freres place. He didn’t like it a bit when I told him I didn’t believe there ever had been any. Do you?”

  “No clear evidence as yet,” Bobby said. “One way or the other. Got to follow it up, though.”

  “Yes; of course,” Nixon agreed. “The Chairman had what he called a clue. About a fellow seen at a lodging-house here. Turned out to be an Italian on his way to try for a job in the North. The poor devil was scared half out of his life when he heard we were making inquiries. He thought the Miners’ Union had ordered his arrest and imprisonment.”

  Having thus let off steam, Nixon now was prepared to listen to Bobby, who proceeded to give as full an account as he could of his own recent activities, laying special emphasis on Rosamund’s account of her long walk through the African bush and also on his own somewhat narrow escape from death or injury in old ruined Constant Freres. To all this Nixon listened with close attention and then asked:

  “Do you think that was just an accident or a deliberate attempt to do you in, or at least knock you out.”

  “If it was, and if it had come off,” Bobby remarked, “it would have been what the papers like to call a perfect murder on top of an apparently impossible one. Prowling about an old tumbledown ruin—nothing more likely than an accident. I can’t say I much like it. Luckily, it didn’t come off, but I did let Baynham know what was in my mind. I calculated that if I did it might fluster him a bit. Just as well to fluster a suspect if you can; shakes his self-confidence.”

  Nixon said he supposed that was psychology, and the way in which he pronounced that word left no doubt of what was his opinion of it and all it represented. Then he opened a drawer of his desk and took out a small sheaf of papers.

  “I’ve been jotting down some of my own ideas,” he explained. “All ready to show the Chairman next time he buzzes in. First the three women, to get them out of the way.”

  “Can you?” Bobby asked doubtfully. “They were there.”

  “Yes; I know,” Nixon admitted. “Wife, daughter, and a one-legged cripple, though. In my view, not very likely, any of the three of ’em.”

  “Even one-legged cripples can commit murders,” Bobby commented. “Though I can’t remember a case,” he added thoughtfully.

  “Yes, of course,” agreed Nixon. “But it is a handicap, isn’t it?” and to this proposition Bobby had in turn to agree. So Nixon continued: “So do wives.”

  “Murder their husbands, you mean?” Bobby asked. “Oh, yes; that happens. So do daughters their fathers. Much more rare, though.”

  “Almost always a history of bad feeling and quarrelling over money or something to give a pointer,” Nixon observed.

  He spoke carelessly, almost casually, as if speaking as much to himself as to Bobby, but Bobby knew that Nixon was watching him closely and trying to decide where Bobby stood, situated as he was between the claims of kinship and childhood memories and his duty as a member of a force that is never off duty for a moment by night or by day. Possibly, Bobby thought, the Chairman of the Joint Committee, evidently a busy gentleman, had heard that Bobby and Mrs Outers were relatives and had told Nixon to try to make sure which Bobby put first—kinship or duty. Very much what Rosamund had shown were her feelings, too. An equivocal position, Bobby reflected gloomily, but none of his seeking and not one he had felt he could avoid. So there it was, and he told himself he was not going to withdraw, unless asked to by Rosamund or ordered to by his superiors. Unless Rosamund and her mother were cleared, as they could only be by the discovery of the actual murderer, then they would have to bear such a load of suspicion as might well prove unendurable and drive Rosamund at least to the suicide at which she had already hinted.

  But now or so at least it seemed to him he was caught in such a net of circumstance as he could not honourably extract himself from.

  These thoughts, though in less coherent form, flashed swiftly through his mind, yet not so swiftly but that Nixon could see how deeply troubled he was. Not without sympathy, Nixon now said:

  “It’s a fair mess-up, isn’t it? One thing and other. It’s getting round that Outers deliberately sent off those two boys of his on purpose to discover what they could about secret native rites he wanted to describe
in a book he was writing. So that Mrs Outers did him in, and serve him right.”

  “Well, that’s a point of view,” Bobby remarked. “There’s something else I ought to mention, though it’s only a personal impression. I got the idea somehow that Myra—” Here he paused for a moment. He had used the Christian name deliberately so as to make it plain that he had no intention of glossing over in any way the kinship between them. Then he resumed: “Nothing that could be called evidence or that could be put before a jury, but it did strike me that there was a curious air of relief she showed, a kind of peace and tranquillity, as though she felt now the worst was over and there was nothing more to fear. You get it sometimes when a sick person understands that at last the doctors have given up hope. It may have been nothing but my fancy, and anyhow I don’t see that it need have anything to do with any feeling of guilt or innocence.”

  “No,” agreed Nixon. “No. I don’t either. But does it tie in with these stories of warnings that there was murder in the air or what the old witch-doctor said to Miss Rosamund?”

 

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