“Then you did take seriously the stories the natives were telling?” Bobby said, not liking it. “Did Val, too?” Myra made no answer, and he did not press her. He went on: “Rosamund says the old witch-doctor told her ‘Death sets free’ just before he died himself. What did he mean? What can it have possibly meant?”
“Val thought he was telling us that only the dead can help the dead,” Myra replied. “That’s what he told me. But you have to wait till you are sent for and your path prepared. Or you may miss your way and be lost yourself.”
Bobby was silent then. He felt confused, even angry, but most of all bewildered, by ideas that all his education and training, all his instincts, innate or acquired, taught him to disregard as fit only for the nursery, but that the father, the mother, the sister of the dead boys seemed to be inclined to accept to a greater or less degree. However, he reminded himself that for him the question was not whether these stories had any truth in them, but simply what effect they might have on those who did, to some extent at least, believe. It was Myra who spoke first, saying quite calmly, gently, even with a faint smile:
“I expect you think we were all mad. We weren’t really. It’s hard for anyone to understand who hasn’t lived out there in the deep bush.”
“Well, I don’t pretend to understand,” Bobby admitted. “Fortunately, I don’t have to. It seems to me a monstrous idea, even a wicked idea. All I’ve got to do is to try to clear up how Val died and why; who murdered him? I am sure that must be your wish, too. Are you quite certain you can’t help in any way?”
“But I’ve told you everything I know, you and Mr Nixon, too,” she protested. “I’ve told Mr Nixon I don’t think it could have been anyone there. It’s no good his going on saying it must have been, if it wasn’t, is it?”
“I have to take it, then, you don’t suspect anyone,” Bobby said. “Do you think Rosamund does? Could she have seen or known something only she was aware of? I’ve got the impression once or twice that there was something on her mind.”
“She hasn’t said anything like that to me,” Myra answered. “It’s all been such a terrible shock. I think often she can’t quite believe it really happened. Of course she knows it did. It’s just like a nightmare, and you know all the time you’ll wake up soon and it’ll be all right. Only this time you won’t. It’s funny how you can believe two different things at the same time.”
“Rosamund has never said anything definite, has she?”
“Oh, no. She won’t unless she chooses to. Even when she was quite a tiny you couldn’t budge her once she had made up her mind.”
Bobby gave it up then and asked instead:
“Rosamund says you saw a light in the old Constant Freres ruin last night. About what time would that be?”
“I looked at my watch and it was soon after twelve,” Myra told him. “Do you think it could have been Mr Peel? He’s been here this morning. I do hope Rosamund doesn’t give him any lunch. I don’t like him very much. I don’t know what he could be doing if it was him. You could ask him.”
The door opened then and Rosamund appeared to say lunch was ready, and would they come at once, or the omelet she had made would be spoilt.
CHAPTER XXVI
PRESSURE OF EVENTS
A GLOOMY AND A silent meal it proved to be for all three of them. It was indeed as though there weighed upon them, and not least upon Bobby himself, a sense of a heavy and impending doom. As soon as the meal was over—the omelet was a masterpiece—Bobby explained that he wished to go into Midminster, and went off to get out his car. While he was busy doing this, Dewey James came up and stood for a time silently watching, as if he found this operation of great and unusual interest. But to Bobby, himself silent, it seemed that Dewey’s generally impassive features, calm as those of a marble statue, showed plain signs of strain. Indeed, for all his air of close attention, he was in fact hardly conscious of what Bobby was doing, so deeply was his mind engaged with its own problems. Not till Bobby was in the driving seat and ready to start did Dewey speak, and then it was only a mumbled remark to the effect that the reporters and the gapers seemed to have alike departed.
“I expect the rain discouraged them,” Bobby said, always ready for one of those apparently irrelevant chats from which so much useful information could so frequently be gathered. “Looks as if it was coming on again,” he added, glancing up at the rapidly darkening sky.
“I told my mother to go back in,” Dewey said. “Is it true she knocked out one of the reporters?”
“Well, not exactly,” Bobby explained. “But she smashed the camera of one of them with a swing of her crutch. She can make good use of that crutch of hers.”
“She has to,” Dewey muttered, and not as if the fact pleased him. He put one hand upon the car, gripping it as though he meant to try to hold it back, and the thought flashed into Bobby’s mind that this gesture came from a deep-seated wish, strong within him, to hold back the investigation in conflict with his inner knowledge that he could no more do so than he could hold back the car by physical force. As if more consciously recognizing this, he took his hand away, his manner grew less strained, his voice more normal as he went on: “Yes; she is wonderfully active. I tell her sometimes she ought to have been an acrobat, the things she does. We match, don’t we? Me as I was born and she as unlucky chance has made her. How is your inquiry going?”
“Well, it’s hard to say,” Bobby replied. “We don’t find it easy, and I can’t say that we seem to be getting much help. Nobody seems to know anything, and what they do know seems to add up to the impossible. Personally, I don’t happen to believe in the impossible. I have my own private theory, and I believe I know who it was.” He paused and he saw that Dewey’s glance, hitherto wandering and restless, sometimes as if searching the far horizon, sometimes fixed upon the ground, had now become firm and clear, fastened upon Bobby himself.
“Who?” he breathed rather than asked. Bobby made no answer. Dewey said: “You don’t . . . you can’t. . . .”
“Can’t what?” Bobby asked. In his turn he got no answer. Then he said: “Can’t prove it, you mean? No satisfactory evidence. Well, not yet, but it may come. Or the murderer may confess when he feels the pressure is getting too strong and the strain becomes so great he feels it intolerable, and yet knows that it will never end till the truth is known.”
“Especially,” Dewey said, and not too pleasantly, “when the pressure comes from Bobby Owen.”
“Not my pressure,” Bobby answered gravely, “but the pressure of events of what has been done. That is always there, except for the few who are more nearly brute than human.”
“There may be those who kill who feel that they are justified, that they had a right or even a duty to do it,” Dewey said. “What then?”
“All the more likely,” Bobby told him, “that confession will result. If there is no sense of guilt—no guilty mind, as the lawyers say—why not tell all? The urge to tell is always strong and the urge to justify yourself still stronger.” He paused. Dewey was looking straight at Bobby and in his eyes there had come a strange, troubled expression. Bobby felt he knew exactly what was being suggested and that this disturbed him greatly. Bobby resumed: “Mr James, are you sure there is nothing on your mind you feel you ought to tell us? Remember, it is not only the guilt of one, but the innocence of others. If this is not cleared up, there are some who will live under a terrible suspicion for the rest of their lives, and that may prove a burden too heavy to bear.”
“And do you think,” Dewey asked with a slow and formidable anger, “that I have never thought of that—or of anything else indeed since it happened?”
With that he turned and began to walk away. Bobby watched him go and it seemed to him that Dewey was perhaps faced with a dilemma too great for mortal strength. Then he seemed to change his mind and turned again.
“Mr Peel has been here all morning,” he said. “Did you know? I think now he is at the Lodge, talking to my mother. Mother,”
he repeated, it was not quite clear why, for he had spoken the word clearly and loudly.
“Do you know what he wants?” Bobby asked. “I would like a word or two with him myself. I was thinking of looking him up in Midminster.”
“I’ll tell him, shall I?” Dewey offered; and it was not long before Teddy Peel himself appeared, wheeling the bicycle which seemed to be his invariable companion.
“How’s it all going?” he demanded as he greeted Bobby with a cheerfully casual wave of the hand. “But there, you won’t tell. I know. Mum’s the word till ready to pounce. I don’t blame you. It’s doing me no good. I can tell you that. Consultations being cancelled by every post nearly. They all know I was there, and so I’m in the front line of suspects. I shall be on the rocks soon unless you can make an arrest. What about Ludo Manners? If you ask me, he’s your best bet.”
“Doesn’t seem very likely, does it,” Bobby remarked, “that he would murder the father of the girl he was making it clear he wanted to get engaged to?”
“Ah!” Peel said, and repeated an “Ah-h!”—this time much more long-drawn. “But supposing he hadn’t an earthly? And, if you ask me, he hadn’t. What he was after was a map of a uranium field Mr Outers knew of, but was keeping strictly Q.T.”
“How do you know about it?” Bobby asked sharply, and Teddy grinned and winked.
“You would be surprised,” he said. “The things my clients tell me. And then their eyes near drop out of their heads when I tell it ’em back again. Mind you, things do happen. Only, take it from me, there’s no spirits to it. Just electric magnetism and people ready and wanting to believe.”
“It is said that man is first of all a believing animal,” Bobby agreed. “I expect you know too that the bag Mr Outers kept it in has vanished?”
“And who has got it?” demanded Peel. “Take it from me, find it and there’s your murderer.”
“Someone was in the Freres ruin last night,” Bobby said. “A light was seen. Looking for it, perhaps. Was it you?”
“Me?” Teddy asked in a voice a little too full of injured innocence. “I was in bed and asleep, same as per usual. But I could tip you off where it was hidden after the murder. Only what’s the good when it isn’t there now and nothing to show who put it there?”
“How do you know all that?” demanded Bobby. “Electric magnetism?”
“Smell,” came the prompt response; and Bobby remembered that Rosamund had spoken of the strange odour that had seemed to emanate from the medicine bag. “Funny sort of smell, too. Brought the prickles out all down your back, and that’s a fact. There’s things I’ve seen, and some I didn’t like too much, but this was different, and I tell you straight I wouldn’t be the one to open that bag, not for all the uranium fields in or out of Africa. There’s some things best left alone.” He gave a sickly and uneasy laugh. “Poison or germs or something of that sort, it might be,” he concluded.
“If we could find the thing, I would risk that,” Bobby said. “Can you show me exactly where you noticed this smell or whatever it was?”
“Oh, yes,” Teddy answered at once. “Not that I’m anyway keen on catching another sniff. It may have gone off by now, though. There was a heap of rubble I noticed, heaped up together like as if someone had been at it. I gave it a kick, casual like, and that smell fair leaped out like a cork out of a champagne bottle. But nothing to show what made it.”
“What sort of a smell?” Bobby asked.
“Like a dead man mouldering in his grave,” Teddy answered.
“Oh,” Bobby said, rather taken aback by this reply, noticing, too, that Teddy had gone a little pale. “Oh, well. Well, when was this?”
“Yesterday afternoon,” came the prompt reply, “when I was having a dekko on my own, just in case. I don’t know as I was expecting anything, not knowing even what to look for, but I got an urge, as I do sometimes. Come on sudden like, they do, and often a dead loss, but then again sometimes it comes off.”
“Electric magnetism?” Bobby asked. “Or what your clients have already told you without knowing it?”
“Oh, you can laugh,” Teddy said.
“Sure it wasn’t last night?” Bobby asked again. “If it wasn’t you, who was it? Never mind. It’s not an offence to take midnight strolls even in rather dangerous ruins. I would like a look round myself, though, if you will show me where it was.”
“If you like,” Teddy said, though with no great show of eagerness. “Safest way is up Folly Tower and then through the old communicating door. Can’t say I much like messing about up there. If you ask me, what I say is, the whole caboodle ought to have been pulled down long ago, and if it isn’t then it’ll come down of its own doing first time there’s a bit of wind.”
CHAPTER XXVII
ROSAMUND’S FEAR
THIS WAS A prediction Bobby was inclined to agree with, and it was with some degree of apprehension that both of them surveyed those uncertain ruins of what once had been the great house of the neighbourhood. However, Folly Tower itself was still solid enough, and, picking their way with care, they reached safely a spot, where, in front of and partly sheltered by what had evidently been a recess in an inner wall, lay scattered plaster and rubble that did undoubtedly give the impression of having been swept or raked or gathered together from elsewhere, since here walls and ceiling were alike comparatively intact, though part of the flooring had gone.
“There you are, Mr Owen,” Teddy said, pointing. “All in a neat little pile it was, kicked together, if you see what I mean, and when I kicked it, idle like, wondering who had taken the trouble and what for—well, as I said, that smell flew out and took me by the throat, so as I nearly choked, and that’s a fact. Gone now,” he added, sniffing the air. As he spoke he bent down, turning over as he did so some of the bigger pieces of plaster. One of these he lifted, putting it to his nose. Instantly he dropped it again with a loud exclamation and jumped hastily back. Had not Bobby caught hold of him he might easily have fallen.
“What’s the matter?” Bobby asked.
Teddy, pale, gasping, still not quite steady on his feet, seemed for the moment incapable of speech. He gestured towards the lump of plaster he had been smelling at and had now let fall. Bobby picked it up, examined it, looked closely at it, half expecting to find bloodstains, smelt it. It seemed to him in no way different from any other lump of plaster or rubble, entirely innocuous. Teddy panted:
“Can’t you smell it? You can’t help.”
“Smell what?” Bobby asked suspiciously.
“Strong enough to knock you down,” Teddy insisted. He seemed to be recovering now from whatever it was had so affected him. “Nearly did me. Mean to say you can’t smell anything?”
Bobby shook his head. He brought the plaster lump as close to his nose as possible and sniffed vigorously.
“Not a thing,” he declared.
“You aren’t a sensitive,” Teddy told him. “Not like me.”
Bobby did not attempt to dispute this verdict. But inwardly he wondered if ‘sensitive’ in this instance was not the equivalent of the common phrase, ‘putting on an act’. He repeated that he could find nothing unusual about this very ordinary bit of fallen plaster, either by touch or sight or smell. Teddy was beginning to walk away. He said over his shoulder:
“I’m getting out. I’ve had enough.”
Bobby followed him, and, once more by way of the Tower, so reassuringly solid a support to the tottery walls of the old ruin, they reached the ground without mishap. Teddy at once disappeared, almost at a run. Gone to get his bicycle, Bobby supposed. He himself returned, but more slowly, to Constant House, where his car was still waiting. He went into the house and found Rosamund, busy as usual, as though only thus could she keep her thoughts at bay. To her he handed the fragment of plaster he had brought away with him and asked if she noticed anything peculiar about it, any scent clinging to it, or anything like that.
“No. Why?” she asked, puzzled. “Is it from the old ruin?”
Briefly Bobby told her what had happened.
“The thing is,” he explained, “was it all eyewash, or did Peel really smell something that rather scared him? He certainly seemed a good deal shaken.”
“I don’t think you can ever trust him,” Rosamund said. “But he does often seem to know things, and you can’t imagine how. But why should he pretend about a piece of plaster smelling if it didn’t, and, besides, how could it?”
This was one of those questions to which there seems no possible reply. Bobby, at any rate, did not attempt to offer one, and Rosamund took advantage of the pause to smell ‘something burning in the kitchen’, so went off in a hurry to attend to it. Not the first time Bobby had noticed that she had a certain faculty for discovering ‘something burning in the kitchen’ when she wished to avoid further questioning. An innocent manœuvre? Or possibly not so innocent? Anyhow, there it was, and so he too went off in his turn to get his car and start at last on his delayed visit to Midminster.
There at Headquarters he found Nixon in a gloomy mood he was attempting to alleviate by the aid of strong tea and buttered toast from the canteen. Bobby’s appearance he greeted with mingled hope and resignation.
“Got anything?” he asked. “Stuck, we are. Nothing to go on. Nothing to get hold of. Nowhere to start. Just like that.”
“Well, there is one small development,” Bobby told him. “There was someone prowling about the old Constant Freres ruin last night. Mrs Outers is quite clear she saw a light there,” and he went on to repeat Teddy Peel’s story of the strange odour he had noticed. Nixon did not seem much impressed.
“You can’t offer a smell to a jury,” he pointed out. “What could you expect them to do with it?” Bobby admitted that once again here was a question to which he had no reply, and Nixon went on: “Sounds to me like a red herring to put us off. What the guilty chap would want to do. Means Peel himself is the man we want? You agree?”
Six Were Present: A Bobby Owen Mystery Page 17