Six Were Present: A Bobby Owen Mystery

by E. R. Punshon

  “Might be like that,” Bobby agreed. “Peel is a slippery character all right, but that’s still a long way from murder. If he did it, then the motive would be possession of Outers’s medicine bag that was kept so carefully locked up. But Peel did seem really scared of the thing. I doubt myself if he would be very keen on opening it. There’s a lot of humbug, and even downright fraud for that matter, but I do believe there is something about him he doesn’t understand himself and is more than half-frightened of.”

  “Well, I don’t know about all that,” Nixon said doubtfully. “Not a police matter, anyhow. Do you think it was his light Mrs Outers says she saw?”

  “He claims he was in bed all night and hints most likely it was Ludo Manners. That does link up with Mrs James’s story of having seen Manners taking something from Outers’s pockets after the murder. And I did get a strong impression when I was talking to Manners that there was something going on between him and Peel. My own idea is that Peel suspects Manners, but is not sure, and was feeling his ground, possibly with blackmail at the back of his mind. But Ludo strikes me as a tough customer, and he might retaliate by suggesting, as he did, that Peel is the man we want.”

  “If it’s Manners,” Nixon said, “then it would be this medicine bag thing, or, rather, what’s in it, he was after. I don’t see any of these old wives’ tales scaring him from opening it. And there’s evidence of Mr Outers having had a bad row with someone unknown shortly before the murder. Could that be Peel if Outers had caught him out in some of his tricks?”

  “Well, it could be,” Bobby agreed. “But nothing to show it was, and, of course, if the quarrel was with the murderer, he’s not going to admit it.”

  “Another dead end,” commented Nixon, as gloomy as ever. He took a drink of his tea, now not only strong, stronger, strongest, but also stone cold as well. “Mrs Nixon says it’s poison,” he remarked. “The tea I mean. The chaps like it that way. Always get so far and then stuck. The closed door. If it was Ludo Manners in the old ruin last night, it would be the medicine bag he was looking for. Precious little medicine about the thing as far as I can see. Anyhow, how did it get there?”

  “Someone—perhaps Manners—took it after the murder and hid it where Peel says he noticed a queer smell when he was having what he calls a ‘dekko’ on his own. But it could be that the murder was only the occasion of the taking of the thing, not the cause. It has to be remembered too that Baynham—B.B., as everyone seems to call him—was the only one of the six out of the summit room after the murder. He would have ample opportunity to get at the bureau while he was supposed to be ringing up police and doctor, and it would have been easy for him to get a duplicate key made for the bureau drawer. Whoever it was would soon realize it was too risky to keep it on him, and would hide it till there was a chance to remove it again.”

  “What sticks in my throat,” complained Nixon, “is all this crazy stuff about ‘Death sets free’, and those two dead boys being under some devilish power or another. You’re not going to get anyone outside a lunatic asylum to believe that.”

  “Well, for that matter,” Bobby observed, “there’s a good deal now that fifty years ago no one outside a lunatic asylum would have believed possible, but common form now. Besides, it’s not what we believe. It’s not even what is or isn’t fantastic Stone Age superstition. It’s what other people may have believed. I have it in mind as a possibility that the motive behind all this hasn’t been any uranium field and the millions it might mean, but some deep-seated emotional urge. I don’t know, of course. Just an idea.”

  “Well, there’s a lot of feeling between them,” Nixon agreed. “B.B. and Ludo Manners. If one of them had been killed, I should have looked at the other at once. But it wasn’t.”

  “No,” agreed Bobby. “It wasn’t anything like that I meant. But the Outers, husband, wife, daughter, have all been living under a very great emotional stress. Val Outers felt himself responsible for what had happened and knew other people put it more strongly. His wife had not only lost her sons, but there was also the rather horrible suggestion, however absurd and even impious as it would seem to many people—I don’t like it myself—of the children’s fate after death. I think it’s certain that all that had worked on her a lot. Then Rosamund. She took that tremendous journey on foot through the African bush to ask the old witch-doctor’s help, and got the message ‘Death sets free’, made all the more impressive by the old man’s own death immediately afterwards. And then on top of it all there’s what they all say they heard at one of Peel’s sittings and that made my cousin write to me. One of Peel’s tricks perhaps. No telling, but it may well have brought things to a head.”

  “Rosamund, Rosamund,” Nixon was saying, half to himself. “You know, there’s not much I would put past her. She has a way of looking at you. You never know with a woman. Meek and quiet as a mouse one moment and like a volcano on the loose the next. A Lady Macbeth in the making if you ask me. She’s been the one for me all the time. Only how did she bring it off?”

  “That’s a question,” Bobby said. “How did any one bring it off, for that matter? But, personally, I am sure of one thing. There’s something very much on her mind. My idea is that all the time she’s trying to prevent herself from thinking because she daren’t, and what she’s thinking is that it was her mother killed her father.”

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  B.B. QUESTIONED

  NIXON HAD LISTENED in silence; nor did Bobby attempt to say more. The two men sat still, staring at each other across Nixon’s desk, and the same picture was in both their minds, that of a young girl, driven by such a fear, struggling against such a doubt. Or was it—for this, too, was a fear running in both their minds—not doubt but certainty?

  “If it’s that,” Nixon said at last, “we’ll never bring it home to her or anyone else. I’m beginning to think no one did it at all. No good saying that to our Chairman or the Press—or the public either. Give me a good, clean, healthy murder. Chap doing another chap in because he’s been messing about with the first chap’s girl, or something like that. Or a gangster, meaning no harm; just after a bit of easy money. It’s all this damn’ witchcraft that’s getting me down.”

  “I’m beginning to feel like that myself,” Bobby admitted. “It’s like trying to get into things beyond knowledge or understanding where you are all lost and helpless. Hard enough to get to grips with this world without trying to barge into the next.”

  “That’s what Mr Jones would say, I’m sure,” declared Nixon, as if citing authority. “All wrong to try, he would tell you.”

  “Who is Mr Jones?” asked Bobby, puzzled by so sudden an introduction of this new name.

  “Our parson,” Nixon explained. “Parsons ought to know.”

  “Oh, well, yes,” Bobby said. “Yes. No more than the rest of us, perhaps.”

  “All the same, witchcraft or none, it must have been one of the six of ’em,” insisted Nixon, this time with the air of a man struggling hard to return to common sense and sanity.

  “Well, there’s always the chance of an X turning up,” Bobby told him. “The unknown quantity.”

  “What’s that?” Nixon asked, now vaguely hopeful.

  “I’ve worked out a theory,” Bobby explained slowly. “Pure theory. Not a shred of solid fact to support it, but it might suggest a line to follow up. I’ve one or two other theories as well—all very much in the air at present. The one that’s most in my mind at present would bring in one of the six as a helper, but possibly one ignorant of what was really intended. We’ve got to accept it that the door of the summit room was locked and bolted. But it would have been perfectly easy to have a duplicate key made. The room was in pitch darkness, the gramophone blaring away full tilt, and the other five of them all keyed up, all waiting for and expecting—well, whatever it was they were expecting. It wouldn’t have been too difficult—I’m afraid all this points to Teddy Peel, though I hadn’t intended to mention any names—to slip away from the tab
le controls, draw the bolts and leave the way open for an X to slip in and do what he did. I said there wasn’t a shred of evidence to bring forward in support. Well, there is, light and insubstantial, though, as the ash on which the whole theory starts from. You remember I told you I had noticed a cigarette butt in the Freres ruin, near the old door communicating with the Tower. Someone waiting there that night. Why? What for?”

  “Dewey James?” suggested Nixon and repeated the name, this time with less of a note of interrogation in his voice. “Dewey James.”

  “Can you imagine him working in with Teddy Peel?” Bobby asked.

  “Why not?” demanded Nixon. “Teddy would work in with anyone, cash or credit, and why shouldn’t James want to be a uranium millionaire as much as anyone else? Or more. It wouldn’t count then that he’s the way he is. Women running after him then instead of running away. You know there are stories about him and the Rosamund girl? Well, he might have a hope there, too. I expect it’s been done before now.”

  “Killing the father to get the daughter?” Bobby asked. “Well, possible, I suppose. Anyhow, it seems we have one more suspect to add to the six who were present. Or should we say two more, if we still keep in mind an unknown X—someone who up to now has managed to keep under cover. Let’s ignore that. Six present, and another, probably Dewey James, waiting outside and what for? Then Mrs Outers. And is that new manner of hers of peace and tranquillity she seems to me to show so plainly mean that she has accomplished the task she feels laid upon her to save her two sons in the next life from something even worse than their ill luck in this?”

  “If it’s that,” Nixon said, “then it’ll be Broadmoor for her and not hanging. Can’t say I like hanging. Not for women, anyhow.”

  “Then Rosamund,” Bobby went on. “And what is it on her mind that’s driving her to such a frenzy of activity? Is that so she won’t have time to think?”

  “She’s my man,” declared Nixon. “Blamed her father and brooded on it till she felt he must go the same way, and up to her to send him. You’ve only got to look at her to feel it wouldn’t be beyond her. It might be Broadmoor for her, but most likely not. I don’t like hanging, but there’s cases and cases, and when it’s a father . . .”

  He left the sentence unfinished and Bobby continued:

  “Get on to the three men. Take Teddy Peel first. He seems the only one who knew from Val Outers himself about this uranium field map. And what is it that’s between Ludo and him? I’m certain there’s something—each hinting it’s the other. I should say Ludo is the one among them all the most likely to go to any length to obtain possession of the thing. Finally, Baynham, who seems to be keeping very much in the background, which is exactly where any intelligent murderer wants to be.”

  “I’ve heard say the most unlikely suspect is the one to watch,” Nixon commented. “Is that it? A decent sort, B.B.”

  “Murderers often are,” Bobby said. “I always tell my chaps that murder’s the worst of crimes, but murderers not always or often, the worst of criminals. Well, there they all are, all in line. And which is it?”

  “Pick the loser,” Nixon said dismally. “Yes. All right. But how?”

  This poignant question Bobby left Nixon to wrestle with while he himself went on to visit B.B. at the offices of B.B. United, Ltd.

  “Sorry if I seem to be going once again over the same old ground,” he began, “but there are one or two details I feel it might help to try to get a fresh angle on.”

  The questions he asked were all unimportant and to all appearance aimless. B.B. began to show signs of impatience, but he replied to them all fully and carefully, and presently Bobby switched the talk to Constant Freres.

  “You haven’t called at Constant House since I saw you there, have you?” he asked.

  “No,” B.B. answered. “Why? Is that suspicious?”

  “Oh, no,” Bobby said. “I just wondered. That’s all.”

  “I wonder myself,” B.B. retorted, “if you ever say ‘that’s all’ till you’ve got it all fixed up in your own mind.”

  “Which I certainly haven’t,” Bobby assured him. “I do believe I know who it was and even how it was done. One thing, though, to think you know and quite another to prove it, even to yourself. I fancy Mr Manners has been over at Freres once or twice, hasn’t he?”

  “How should I know?” growled B.B. “He mayn’t have been told to keep away,” and this was a remark that interested Bobby more than anything else—it wasn’t much that had transpired during their talk.

  So he drove back to Freres, not wholly dissatisfied with what he had learnt and not learnt. There the first person he saw was old Mrs James, who came hopping out from somewhere—he did not see exactly whence—and was at his side before he knew of her presence.

  “Well?” she said. “Well?” and, when he did not immediately reply, added: “Got your eye on the right one at last?”

  “I wouldn’t go quite so far as that,” he answered then. “Is there anything you could tell us to help?”

  “Oh, I could,” she said with her thin sardonic laugh. “I know. But I’m not telling. Not me.”

  “Why not?” he asked.

  “Why should I? Your affair. Not mine. What you’re here for, isn’t it? Anyhow, you would only have my word for it.”

  “Anything you chose to tell us,” Bobby assured her, “would certainly be followed up with the greatest care. We neglect nothing.”

  “It’s all about here,” she said, ignoring this, “how some papers of Mr Outers have been stolen and that’s what he was killed for, to get hold of them. Means a fortune, they say.”

  “Who are ‘they’?”

  “Everybody,” she told him. “Everybody.”

  “Who is everybody?”

  “The milkman,” she answered and gave him a queer twisted grin. “Milkmen know it all.”

  “I wish they would tell me, then,” Bobby retorted. “Why are you saying all this?”

  Instead of answering, she took out a police whistle and blew it loudly.

  “That’s for Dewey,” she explained. “To let him know he’s wanted. There’s times I tumble over and can’t get up so easy if my crutch is out of reach. He tries to do his duty by his old mother, but deep down inside him, there’s hate. Oh, I know.”

  “Why should he?” Bobby asked. “I haven’t noticed anything like that.”

  “Wasn’t it me brought him into the world the way he is?” she asked in return. “More like a gorilla than a man.” And for a moment, a moment only and no more, her old face seemed to break up as it were and then immediately change again to its normal expression.

  Dewey had joined them now. To his mother he said:

  “I thought I heard you whistle.”

  “I was talking to Mr Owen,” she said. “I told him I know who did it. I shouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t know, too. But I won’t tell him. Not me. Why don’t you? You ought to, oughtn’t you?” And now she spoke with a faint, mocking imitation of what Bobby’s wife was accustomed to call his official voice.

  “You know very well, Mother,” Dewey answered, “that even if I knew for certain, and I do not, I should never say.” And Bobby remembered. It was the first time Bobby had heard him use the word ‘Mother’ to her, and Bobby fancied that even now there had been a hint of rebuke in his tone, as though Dewey felt that in some way she had been taunting him, issuing as it were a secret challenge Bobby himself was not meant to understand. Uneasily he wondered why. “I was busy with the asparagus bed,” Dewey was saying now after a momentary silence. “There was no need to call me away for that.”

  “There are those papers people are saying Mr Outers was killed to get hold of,” Mrs James said. “I expect if Mr Owen can find them, then he’ll be sure whoever has them was the murderer.”

  “It might very well be thought so,” Dewey agreed and walked away.

  Bobby made no comment. Behind all this he felt there was something he did not understand, something he had not
been meant to understand, some hidden significance to which he had no clue and this troubled him deeply.

  “Whoever it was didn’t ought to get away with it,” Mrs James said more to herself than to him. “I don’t expect she will.” And with that she turned and followed her son to their own part of the Constant Freres land.

  CHAPTER XXIX

  INTERRUPTED SUPPER

  IT WAS MRS JAMES’S use of the feminine ‘she’ in what she had last said that stuck in Bobby’s mind as he watched her go more steadily and slowly than was her wont, for indeed that old and crippled woman seemed often to use her crutch more like a witch’s broom than like an ordinary, awkward substitute for a lost limb. It was as if, consciously or unconsciously, she were in perpetual protest against her disability, to show to all the world that she made nothing of it.

  Soon she was out of sight and Bobby turned away, still wondering about that ‘she’. Had the word slipped out accidentally? Or ‘accidentally’ on purpose, to use a common phrase? Or had it been uttered with the deliberate intention of suggesting that the guilty person was a woman? But only three women were involved—Mrs James herself, Mrs Outers, and Rosamund. And then Mrs. James’s strange, defiant challenge to her son to name to Bobby whom it was they both ‘knew’ to be the killer, a challenge she apparently equally ‘knew’ Dewey would not, could not, accept? And whom was it that both seemed determined to protect?

  Questions hard to answer, and yet for certain the answer was there for him to find if he could.

  Now he had come to the house and as he entered Rosamund was crossing the hall. She saw him entering and she must have thought he looked strangely at her, for she stood still, evidently expecting him to speak. When he did not she spoke herself.

  “Is there anything new?” she asked, and then again “Is there . . . ?”

  “No, no,” he answered. “No. I was only thinking I would give much to go back to London and leave the rest to Nixon.”