Six Were Present: A Bobby Owen Mystery

by E. R. Punshon

  “No, I know,” Bobby said. “That’s got to be remembered. And it does sometimes happen that a person contemplating murder goes out of the way to attract attention with the idea that to attract attention is the last thing anyone guilty would do, and so it’s a kind of reverse proof of innocence. All that has to be considered. But what does it all add up to? A kind of general atmosphere of suspicion, no solid fact. There is one fact, though, that points the other way. Physical strength was needed to inflict such a wound. A man’s strength, not a woman’s, to drive that knife home.”

  “If Mrs Outers is feeling like you say,” Nixon asked, “do you think she might say something if she were pressed?”

  “I don’t think that ought to be tried,” Bobby told him flatly. “It would be difficult to justify in her present condition. Her doctor would certainly protest strongly.”

  “Yes; I see that,” Nixon admitted. “How about the girl, though? She looks as if she had the physical strength all right. That walk of hers. All day, all night, and all day again. Not so many men could have stood up to a walk like that.”

  “Endurance rather than muscular strength,” Bobby suggested. “Endurance under great emotional stress.”

  “In my view,” declared Nixon, evidently not much impressed by this argument, “she’s the pick of the basket. It was her brothers she lost, and it must have gone deep if it was that held her up. Another thing. The women weren’t searched immediately on the spot like the men were. Couldn’t be till we got a woman officer to do the job. That means if one of them had the knife, she must have had opportunities to get rid of it.”

  “Defending counsel would get busy if you put that forward,” Bobby remarked. “You would be asked, ‘Do you admit your officers were so incompetent that the two women under their escort from the summit room to the room where they were searched could manage to get rid of the murder knife under their noses? If so, what value can you expect the jury to attach to their general evidence?’ Almost enough to make the jury want to stop the case on the spot.”

  “That may be,” admitted Nixon, though reluctantly. “All the same. In my view—sufficient grounds for suspicion to justify positive action.” Bobby nodded agreement to this, though wondering what form the ‘positive action’ could take at this stage and Nixon continued: “Old Mrs James there too, but no conceivable motive. At the table she was sitting right opposite Outers, the furthest away from him. To get at him, she would have pretty well had to climb on the table, and she couldn’t have managed that without all the rest of them knowing, could she?”

  “She’s astonishingly nimble,” Bobby remarked.

  “Well, yes, I know,” answered Nixon. “But in my view—utterly impossible.”

  “The whole thing seems utterly impossible as far as that goes,” Bobby said. “The impossible murder. There must be a way round somehow.”

  “Then I wish to God we could find it,” Nixon exclaimed. “The whole blessed set-up is getting me down. Well, that’s for the three ladies. Then there’s the three men. Young Mr Baynham. Very popular, and being popular is a good cloak sometimes. Ludo Manners, pushing type, but in my view not likely to push himself into murder. And Teddy Peel. Doubtful character, very, but no actual record. In my view, if it’s not the girl, then it’s him, and how about it being the two of them acting together?”

  CHAPTER XXI

  NEW EVIDENCE

  IT WAS NOT a possibility that Bobby much liked to contemplate. It was, moreover, altogether opposed to a theory at last beginning to formulate itself more clearly in his mind. But he had long been conscious that it was also a possibility that would have to be faced and to which would have to be given full weight and consideration. Nor did any one know better than he did himself how sadly often the most promising theory is killed off by even a single fact. He said now:

  “Yes; I know. It has to be kept in mind. But I don’t think it very likely. Miss Outers strikes me as one of those self-contained, self-reliant personalities who act by themselves and for themselves alone. I think that walk of hers through the African bush shows that, though, again, she’s a woman, very much a woman, and if she did surrender to another I fancy it would be absolute. I may be wrong, but that’s how I feel, and I certainly can’t see her making any sort of surrender to Teddy Peel of all people.”

  Evidently, Nixon, who looked wholly unimpressed, had either not followed all this or it had failed to convince. Bobby could almost see the fatal word ‘psychology’ trembling on his lips. However, he managed to suppress it. Instead he said:

  “Well, I don’t know. She goes about looking more like a cat in a thunderstorm than any ordinary human girl. Mrs Nixon says it’s most likely sulks, unless it’s indigestion. I’m thinking of having Teddy Peel pulled in. Even if he is tough, I may be able to get him talking.”

  “Worth trying,” Bobby agreed, though privately of opinion that Teddy was not so much ‘tough’ as slippery, and it is easier to crack the toughest nut than to get a grip on a jellyfish. “Clearly,” he continued, “if there is any link between them, Teddy may have learnt from her that phrase in the local African dialect they all claim to have heard. What common motive could they have had, though?”

  “A share in the gold-mine or whatever it is for him and her brothers’ death for her,” Nixon replied promptly. “We don’t have to prove motive; only fact.”

  “Of which last there seems at present to be precious little,” commented Bobby. “Have you taken any further statement from Baynham?”

  “I will now you’ve told me what happened at the Constant Freres ruin.”

  “Or from Ludo Manners?”

  “I sent one of my chaps to ask him about those finger-prints on the old bureau Outers had in his room at Constant House. Well, he got on his high horse at once and said, of course, none of us—‘coppers’ he called us, trying to be offensive, not that we mind—would have been likely to notice that the bureau was a very fine piece of old furniture no intelligent person could help being interested in. All very la-de-da, you understand, nose-in-the-air stuff, and it was the bureau that interested him, not what was in it. If Miss Outers said something her father used to keep there wasn’t there any longer, well, why ask him? What was he supposed to know about it? Of course, he had heard chaps talking of a gold-mine or something—a new diamond field, one man said—Outers knew about. Rot. Stands to reason. If you knew anything like that and had good backing evidence, you didn’t lock it up in an old bureau. You took it to one of the big City swells and asked him to finance you. And now he had business to attend to and would our men go away, and stay away if possible.”

  “Had quite a lot to say, hadn’t he?” Bobby remarked thoughtfully. “Just a little too much perhaps.”

  “In my view,” declared Nixon, “it all sounded very like a carefully prepared statement. And now a little bit of fresh evidence has just come in though I don’t know exactly what to make of it. Haven’t had time to consider it properly as yet. But it may prove important if we can follow it up. Re motive.”

  “Yes?” said Bobby, interested at once.

  “It’s from the woman who was the daily help at Constant House. She’s left now, because, she says of not caring for being mixed up in such goings on.”

  “One way of describing a murder,” Bobby remarked. “Is it first-hand what she says, or does it sound more like hearsay stuff?”

  “She claims it’s what she heard with her own ears,” Nixon explained. “Her story is that when she was sweeping the stairs, she heard Mr Outers shouting at the top of his voice, and it wasn’t like him, as he was a very quiet gentleman. But this time he was shouting so loud no one could possibly help hearing especially,” Nixon added, “if you had your ear to the keyhole, as I expect hers was. But that’s neither here nor there. What she says she heard was Mr Outers shouting he wouldn’t ever stand for such a marriage, not over his dead body he wouldn’t, and he thought it was insolence even to think of it. Unluckily, according to her story, then Mr Outers seemed t
o calm down a bit and, the sweeping of the stairs being finished, she went to get on with her other work, so she didn’t hear any more and didn’t know who it was, except that it must have been one of the two young gentlemen, meaning Baynham and Manners, I suppose.”

  “Probably what happened,” Bobby commented, “was that she heard Mr Outers beginning to move, and scuttled off as fast as she could for fear of being caught at the keyhole. But it certainly does suggest a possible motive. Did your man say anything to Manners about Mrs James thinking she saw him with his hands in Outer’s pocket immediately after the murder?”

  “Oh, no,” Nixon answered at once. “I gave instructions that nothing was to be said about that for the present, not until we know a good deal more,” and to this Bobby nodded approval, for he knew well that the effect and value of information often depends as much on the timing of its disclosure as on the information itself. Nixon was speaking again now. He was saying: “In my view, there’s the makings of a good case against Manners. He was after the map, whether it was gold or diamonds or uranium or what-not. Once he had it, he could raise money for a trip to West Africa to look for it, knowing all the time where it was likely to be. He could easily memorize the map and destroy it if he thought it too incriminating to hold. It would all seem safe enough, and so it is unless we can get more evidence.”

  “The makings of a case certainly,” Bobby agreed, “but so far no more than the makings. There’s one other thing though with no direct bearing on the murder that I can see. Both young men turned up for tea the first afternoon I was here, and they managed to make it sufficiently plain that they were hating each other quite energetically—rivals for Miss Outers’s favours, the two of them. Quite a natural, healthy hatred I thought at the time. I’m not so sure about that now.”

  “Well, that fits in a way, don’t you think?” Nixon asked. “If Ludo could get the map by marrying the girl, much the easiest way. Nowadays you can always get rid of your wife if you want to—divorce, like scrapping an old car and buying a new one. I can’t imagine anyone being really keen on marrying that girl. I would as soon marry a nightmare.”

  “My own impression,” Bobby told him, “is that Baynham wanted to rather badly, and I thought Miss Outers was trying hard to snub him and encourage Ludo. As she’s a woman, a contrary lot, as every nursery knows, it may mean she feels safe with Ludo because she knows she can handle him, but is frightened of losing out to Baynham. The important thing at the moment, though, is to try to decide who it was Outers thought was being insolent in wanting to marry Rosamund. Nothing serious against either of them, is there? They seem eligible. Both have good positions, apparently, and nothing against their characters?”

  “Oh, no,” Nixon responded quickly. “Both very well thought of. Only—”

  “Yes,” said Bobby encouragingly, for he felt there was more to come.

  “Well, the fact is—we keep it very much to ourselves, of course—but the fact is Manners’s father is doing a seven-year stretch for long-term frauds. Nothing to do with Ludo himself. His mother died when he was a baby, his father disappeared, and an aunt took the child and brought him up. It came out when your Yard people asked us for help to trace the old Manners’s activities, as there were threads leading to Midminster.”

  “Does the young man know?” Bobby asked.

  “No idea,” Nixon answered. “He may or he may not. We dropped the whole thing, of course, as soon as we were sure he was in no way implicated. He was never questioned.”

  “Not very likely then that Val would know anything about it?” Bobby suggested.

  “I don’t see how he possibly could,” Nixon repeated. “We took every precaution to prevent anything leaking out. Might have done young Manners a lot of harm if it had.”

  “Yes; of course. All the same, there’s the off-chance. Got to be remembered. What about the other chap—young B.B. I hope he hasn’t got a father in gaol?”

  “Oh, no,” exclaimed Nixon, more than a little shocked. “Old B.B. was always most respectable, most. But—”

  “Yes?” said Bobby again, and even more encouragingly than before, sure this time that there was indeed more to come.

  “Married,” said Nixon.

  “What?” exclaimed Bobby, really startled.

  “Oh, he’s got a divorce, or, rather, she got it. So it’s on record that he was the guilty party, which he wasn’t. It was when he was at Oxford. He got mixed up with his landlady’s daughter and was bamboozled into marrying her. Compromised her good name and so was in honour bound. All that guff. Once she had hooked him she carried on regardless. If old B.B. hadn’t come to the rescue the young man would have been ruined for good. Old B.B. offered her a thousand if she would consent to a divorce. She would only agree on condition that she was allowed to bring the suit and that it was not defended—to preserve her good name, she said.”

  “I take it all that would be well known and talked about,” Bobby remarked. “You don’t get a divorce on the quiet, not when your father’s a well-known business man in your home town. I don’t know what Val’s views were though about divorce, but it seems going rather far to talk about insolence if it’s true he did. It doesn’t strike me as an adequate reason for getting excited and shouting and so on. And it hardly seems at all likely that Val could have heard of the father in prison.”

  “Well, it must have been one of them,” Nixon said. “No one else after the girl.”

  “No, no,” agreed Bobby. “Not that we know of. You can never tell, though, can you? ‘Must, must,’” he repeated. “Just as the murderer must have been one of the six who were present. I don’t like ‘must’ somehow—a dogmatic, thought-stifling, initiative-quelling, word. It ought to be banned. Anyhow, we must think it over,” and Nixon looked at him curiously, wondering what he meant and deciding very reasonably that most likely he meant nothing at all—just talk.

  CHAPTER XXII

  LUDO’S THEORIES

  WITH THAT OPINION firmly fixed in Nixon’s mind, their colloquy came to an end. Nixon, indeed, had much else to attend to and Bobby had nothing more to say, though much to think about, for it did seem to him that from this prolonged and somewhat wandering talk there might well be presently distilled something more than merely the beginnings of a tenable theory. It was largely in the hope of getting to hear something that might strengthen this vague possibility that he now suggested his paying a visit to Ludo Manners. Nixon thought it would be well worth while. Ludo he said would very possibly prove more willing to be communicative to a man from distant London than to members of the local force.

  To Ludo’s office in the High Street, only just round the corner, Bobby therefore now made his way, though when he arrived he was greeted with no great show of enthusiasm.

  “Are you taking over?” Ludo demanded. “I’ve had the local coppers here till I’m damn’ well sick and tired of saying the same thing over and over again.”

  “Vain repetition,” Bobby admitted. “I expect sometimes we overdo it, but all the same it’s really necessary. Every detail has to be checked and then rechecked or else some vital clue may be missed and a murderer go free to have another try. That’s detection routine, and a jolly dull routine most of the time, too. Only now we’ve got to know—from information received as we say—that Mr Outers was heard shortly before his death quarrelling violently with an unidentified person.”

  “Well, not with me,” Ludo said, looking slightly puzzled. “Seemed a peaceable old bloke as a rule. Someone got in his hair, I suppose. Not me, though. I was doing my best to keep all hunkadory with him. For why? Well, I was, that’s all. He might have been having a row with Baynham—the chap they call B.B., you know. He was making himself a nuisance running after Rosy. Not that I blame him. She’s a jolly fine girl, though she wants shaking out of the way she broods on what’s over and done with.”

  “Over no doubt, but perhaps not done with—few things ever are,” Bobby replied. “Done with, I mean. Didn’t someone once say that
we all live both in eternity and in time?”

  “What the hell does that mean?” demanded Ludo suspiciously.

  But to this question Bobby made no attempt to reply. Possibly because he did not know. Instead, he said:

  “You may think it a question I’ve no right to ask and most certainly you need not answer it if you feel you would rather not, but were you and Mr Baynham in any sense rivals for the hand of Miss Outers?”

  “Well, now, that’s a question,” Ludo said with a sort of would-be shy snigger. “She’s O.K., but I’m not sure that she’s my cup of tea, if you see what I mean. When it’s a girl you’ve got to look before you leap. Once you’re in, you’re in for good, aren’t you?” He sniggered again, quite unaware that Bobby was longing to throw something at his head, and continued: “She does rather grow on a chap. At first you think she’s just sulky and you’re apt to sheer off, and then you begin to see it isn’t that exactly. I can tell you one thing, though, I’m pretty sure of—she’s got no use for B.B., and I don’t wonder. Forces himself on her like a salesman trying to push second-rate goods. She don’t like it. Now, I don’t do that. No need,” and he grinned at Bobby in a way that intensified that secret longing Bobby was so increasingly aware of. “The truth is,” he went on after a pause, “I haven’t made up my mind yet. If it’s O.K. Outers was having a row with anyone, it might be B.B., because of how he had been pestering the girl, and Outers was telling him to keep out where he wasn’t wanted. But don’t take that from me and don’t get it into your head I’m hinting it might be B.B. did him in, because I’m jolly sure it wasn’t. Not his line. But what about Teddy Peel? Ever thought of him?”

  “He’s not been forgotten,” Bobby said. “He’s one of the six who were present. But we’ve found nothing to implicate him in any way.”

  “You wouldn’t. He’s a cunning little devil,” Ludo said, and said it with an angry emphasis that Bobby did not fail to notice. Ludo had paused to light a cigarette and Bobby noticed also that his hand was shaking slightly. Something more between them, Bobby told himself, than Ludo wished to reveal. His cigarette safely lighted, Ludo was continuing to speak. He was saying: “I tackled him. I always go straight to the point. All cards on the table. That’s me. In business too. I said: ‘What made you do in the old man?’ You ought to have seen him. He went pale as death. He started to swear at me. I told him to shut up. Then he said he would take me into court, and I said that was O.K. by me. He quietened down a bit then and I said: ‘If you didn’t, who did?’ He had nothing to say to that.”