Six Were Present: A Bobby Owen Mystery

by E. R. Punshon

  “More fools they,” Peel retorted equally sharply, and looked as though he would have liked to substitute a more personal pronoun for the ‘they’. “As much use talking to a deaf mute as to some people. O.K. I’ll tell them I worked it all out, reason, logic, all the rest of it, as there’s plenty fool themselves there’s nothing else. Slide-rule cranks, I call them. O.K. O.K. Only common sense that it must have been one of us six who were present as saw his chance or made it for himself purposeful like, to get hold of the bag as someone pinched for what’s in it—and who did the pinching did the killing, too, and that’s a fact.”

  “If you’re right,” Bobby said, though rather doubtfully, “and the thing really is in that tool-chest—”

  “Oh, I am,” interposed Peel. “This one,” he said, putting his hand on that he had been busy with before Bobby’s unexpected appearance put a stop to his proceedings.

  “Why that one?” asked Bobby and got the reply:

  “It’s the smell, like dead men and vomit mixed. What about getting on with opening it?”

  “It must only be opened in the presence of witnesses,” Bobby told him. “What you say is enough for asking Mr Nixon to come at once and bring with him a magistrate if possible. I don’t want to give any possible ground for a suggestion that the thing was planted by us.”

  From the door came suddenly the slow, deep voice of Dewey James. In one hand he held the pail he had brought with their morning feed for those still clamorous hens. He said:

  “What’s all this? What are you doing here?”

  “Looking for what you went and pinched before you did in poor Mr Outers,” Peel retorted before Bobby could speak. “Or how else did you get hold of it to keep it hidden? And don’t go for to try to out us, too. Two of us and you only one.”

  “Only one of you that matters,” Dewey said, quiet contempt in his voice. “You hardly count.”

  “Oh, don’t I?” Peel snarled, and his hand went to that pocket which instinctively it had sought before, though this time when it emerged it held a small deadly-looking automatic.

  But Bobby reached out a long arm and took the weapon from him, took out the clip, put that in one pocket, the pistol in another, and said:

  “Mr James, a statement has been made by Mr Peel. It seems sufficient to justify me, acting as an officer of police, in taking charge of both these tool-boxes till they can be opened and examined in the presence of witnesses, and in asking you to remain here till that has been done. Have you any objection?”

  “Need you be so very official?” Dewey asked with that slow, grave smile of his, and then added with a touch of irony in his voice: “Can’t I even go and feed the hens? Never mind. Mr Peel is quite right. Mr Outers’s medicine bag is there. I don’t know how he managed to find out.”

  “Smelt it,” Peel explained. “Stinks like hell. And why for not, seeing as that’s what it is?”

  But Dewey only looked puzzled.

  “Smell?” he repeated. “I can’t smell anything. You couldn’t, not while it’s in that chest.” He turned to Bobby. “I’ve had it ever since the murder,” he said, and again Peel interposed:

  “If you put your ear close you can hear it wriggling,” he announced. “It’s the blood it senses that’s woke it, and now it wants more.”

  Neither of the other two took any notice of this remark, and Dewey continued to Bobby:

  “I suppose I can take it you mean to have me arrested? For murder? Very well. I’ll say nothing now—except that I admit nothing, and that I think you’ll have a job to prove it.”

  Privately Bobby was of the same opinion, but he made no comment, and indeed had no time to do so. For now they were joined by Mrs James, standing there in the doorway, where she had been in fact for a minute or two, unnoticed, regarding them with that cold, sardonic grin of hers as she balanced herself with such apparent ease on her one leg, using her crutch to point it at them.

  “Quite a conference,” she said. “Well, well.” Speaking directly to Dewey, she said: “Well, my son, found out, haven’t they, what you thought your old mother didn’t know? But then you always were a fool about her. Well, it’s all over now,” and now that pointing crutch of hers was levelled at Bobby as she went on: “I know what you want. How did you know? I was a fool not to take the blow-lamp to it. I meant to and then to bury it deep, but some way I couldn’t bring myself to touch it. It’s there, waiting for you, and there’s blood on it still. His blood.”

  “Don’t try to knock me out,” Bobby said, watching her warily.

  “It wouldn’t be any good,” Dewey warned her, and came to stand by her side. “It’s gone too far.”

  She nodded acquiescence, and to Bobby she said: “All your doing, and in the end—why, well done.” She paused and her expression changed as she swung round upon Dewey: “Dewey, my son,” she snarled, “if I had borne half a man instead of all a monster, you would have helped, and the girl yours by now.”

  With that she went as quickly and as silently as she had come, while the three men looked uneasily at each other.

  “What’s the old witch mean?” Peel asked of no one in particular.

  “I think, perhaps,” Dewey answered him, “as she said in the end—why, well done.”

  “I had better see,” Bobby said.

  He moved quickly to the door and opened it that Mrs James had shut behind her. She was already at some distance, hurrying, not towards the Lodge, but in the direction of the Folly Tower. She was using her crutch, not as a mere aid to walking, but rather as a pivot for those strange, prodigious hops of hers that enabled her to cover the ground with such uncanny speed. Bobby saw at once that the chance was small of overtaking her before she reached whatever goal she was aiming for. He snatched out the police whistle he always carried with him and blew it loud and long. Mrs James, startled by that shrill summons, stopped for an instant to look round. Simultaneously the uniform man Nixon had left in charge came tumbling out of the house. He had chanced to be in the hall, hoping for a cup of tea to have with his sandwiches.

  “Stop her,” Bobby yelled at the top of his voice. “Stop her,” and then set off to run at utmost speed.

  Doubtful if the constable heard, but at least he understood. He ran at an angle, trying to cut across her path. In turning to look round, Mrs James had lost a little of her momentum by so breaking the long rhythm of her hops. The constable was young and active. He was there first, standing between her and the entrance to Folly Tower he had seen she was making for.

  “Look out. Look out,” Bobby yelled, even more loudly than before.

  But this time, even if the constable heard he did not understand. Hearing or not, he saw nothing to ‘look out’ for. Only an old crippled woman helping herself along by her crutch.

  “What is it, missus?” he asked amicably.

  She balanced herself for a moment and then without a word, delivered that poke or thrust of hers. Unexpectant, he took the full force of it below the belt and went sprawling. Mrs James left him there and disappeared within the Tower.

  Bobby and Dewey arrived almost together, but Bobby by a yard or two, the first. Almost he threw himself up those steep, winding stairs, but not with the same wild energy Mrs James had shown, for he was driven by no such wild and fierce need. Yet at the end he was so close that his hand was outstretched to seize her as she fled into the summit room, banging the door behind her, shooting the bolts.

  Baffled, he stood a moment. Nothing he could do to break down that door, so solid and so secure. He turned and began to descend. The sound of shouting reached him from below to tell him what had happened—nor did he know whether he regretted that he had failed in his purpose or to be glad.

  At the foot of the Tower, a little group had gathered. Nixon was there and the uniform man and Dewey, supporting his mother’s body in his arms. He looked up as Bobby came to join them. He did not speak. Nixon said:

  “We saw her plain. She threw her crutch away as something she had no more need fo
r, and then she jumped. She was still alive when we reached her. She said something. I don’t know what. Then she died.”

  “She said, ‘Goodbye, my son,’” Dewey answered.

  Some hours later, Bobby, Mr Nixon, Dewey James were together in a room at the Headquarters of the West Midshire Police. On the table before them lay the crutch and something else that looked like a kind of lazy tongs with its interlocking levers. Apparently it could be put into action by a wire running to the head of the crutch. Nixon had just placed this wire back in position and had been showing how firmly, when the wire was pulled, the lazy tongs held, and held in its grip six inches of a kitchen knife, ground to a fine point. Here and there dull spots of a reddish hue dimmed the brightness of the steel.

  “Deadly,” Nixon was saying. “A spear! That’s what it is.” He repeated: “A spear, and a jolly fine mechanical job, too. Explains how a blow across a table could be delivered with such force. She knew how to use her tools all right.” He turned to Dewey and said sharply, as he had said previously and more than once: “You must have known—couldn’t help.”

  Dewey did not reply. He saw no use in repeating a denial already twice given. Nixon frowned. That was to show he did not regard such silence favourably. He turned to Bobby and complained:

  “I still don’t understand how you built up all that out of nothing at all as far as I can see,” and in this there was, or so Bobby thought, an underlying implication that he had been keeping to himself facts, privately given that he ought to have shared equally with Nixon.

  He felt himself bound to explain—a thing he always hated doing. Anyone, he told himself, ought to be able to follow a process so essentially simple and straightforward. For just as one straw floating by can show the way the wind is blowing, so a steady flow of straws can prove they point to one fixed compass point.

  “Oh well,” he began now, “the very first time I saw Mrs James she showed us a rather odd hostility. Not that I thought much of it. Just a grumpy old woman’s bad temper. Later on, in the same way, the first time I was in the tool-shed she seemed very unwilling to let me see what she was doing. Trifles in themselves, no doubt, but I remembered them. They helped.” He turned to Dewey: “Had you never seen that contraption of your mother’s?”

  “No,” Dewey answered in his calm, untroubled voice. “I knew she liked to work at little mechanical devices of her own. I did suspect she had something on her mind. Something she felt she had to do, but didn’t want to. I thought it was in her mind to leave me, to leave here altogether.”

  “What made you think that?” Nixon demanded. “Had you been quarrelling?”

  “We did not quarrel,” Dewey answered. “It was because she could no longer endure to see every day what she had brought into the world with such pain and effort. Me.”

  Nixon only looked puzzled. He clearly did not understand, did not believe or accept what Dewey had said. But he did not speak, and Bobby continued:

  “Then there is the fact that the murder weapon—apparently a knife—could not be found. It seemed certain it could not have been removed and even more certain that it was no longer in the room. It was then that the old, childish riddle—when is a knife not a knife?—floated into my mind. I forgot all about it until presently it revived itself with the answer—when it’s a spear. But that was after I had begun to notice, half-unconsciously again, the use Mrs James made of her crutch. As a kind of weapon, I mean. To thrust or swing like a club, or even to plank it down on someone’s toe. A picture began to emerge. That of Mrs James standing against the wall, supporting herself unnoticed on the murder weapon because it was a knife that was being looked for, not a spear. And if anyone noticed the crutch was splashed with blood, what of that when everything in the room was the same?”

  “Well,” said Nixon. “Well. Beats me,” he said, and collapsed into his chair.

  “Of course, all the time I was trying to eliminate the others,” Bobby continued slowly. “I was sure that what was secretly devouring Rosamund was her dreadful fear that it might be her mother who had killed her father. But then obviously if that really was her secret terror, as I was certain, she could not be guilty herself. Then her mother showed a most strange tranquillity after her husband’s death that I could not reconcile with the idea that she had acted with such cunning, secret violence. I think what she felt was that her husband had been called away on a mission to save their boys—as any father might visit a far country to help his sons in trouble there, and that presently she would join them and all would be well.”

  “Psychology,” interposed Nixon disapprovingly, but Bobby took no notice and went on:

  “So I ruled her out and then I ruled out B.B. on the ground that you don’t murder the father of the girl you hoped to marry. Ludo Manners was unscrupulous in business, a ‘get there’ man at any price almost, but not that of physical murder. It was the medicine bag both he and Teddy Peel wanted. Each suspected the other of having it, and each tried to throw suspicion on the other. That left Mrs James, but the final demonstrable fact I needed to link my theory to proof, only came with the last words of Ludo Manners—‘she poked me’—not ‘she pushed me’ as Peel turned it into. The ‘she’ meant a woman, and it couldn’t have been Rosamund, as I had locked the door behind me and she would have had to go out by the back, following, not preceding, me, as I knew someone had done.”

  “That’s all very well,” grumbled Nixon. “I know we haven’t to prove motive, but juries like it, and I don’t blame them. I like it myself.”

  “It was for me,” Dewey answered him, “for my sake she did—what she did.”

  “For your sake?” Nixon repeated sharply. “When you’ve just been telling us you thought she was intending to leave you because she couldn’t bear the sight of you any longer?”

  “Is that so very strange?” Dewey asked. “I was her son, and therefore she loved me as mothers will. I was an ill-shapen monster—you heard her call me so. A living reproach. She convinced herself I held her to blame for—for me. Does the card-player blame the dealer for giving him bad cards and the other man all the aces and kings? But then she began to notice Rosamund was beginning to make a friend and confidant of me. It was because she pitied me. Pity is a hard thing to bear. But not hers. I loved her for it, but not so that she should love me in return. Love is not a bargain that you should expect it in return. It is a gift, a free offering. Then Mr Outers noticed that Rosamund and I were growing close together. He called me into his room over there in the house. He was very angry. He used words it was hard to listen to in silence, and the less I said the more loudly did he shout at me. He asked me if I wanted to bring more abortions like myself into the world, and he would rather see Rosamund dead than married to such as me. He said he would take care she never spoke to me again. He said he would send her away till she had got over her infatuation. That night I broke down. I put my head on the supper table and cried like any child, and Mother got it all out of me. I must have said something—I don’t know what—that made Mother think I had really hoped Rosamund might marry me. But for Mr Outers. A thought to make the sun and moon and stars to dance with mirth. But Mother entertained it and accepted it and told herself it was for her to remedy what she had come to believe was the wrong she had done me in her failure to give me the normal man’s normal hope of a happy married life, a complete life. So she did—what she did.”

  “That’s all very well,” grumbled Nixon. “But what it comes to in plain language is that you knew very well what she intended to do or else why were you waiting there that night? Hiding. Waiting to see how it went off?”

  “If you like,” Dewey said with one of those rare smiles of his. “I imagine a more experienced criminal would have known better than to leave that cigarette butt Mr Owen found. I expect it formed an important link in the chain of evidence he has been building up. In a sense, I suppose I did know. But not as a fact. Can you know what you only surmise?”

  But this was a question Nixon did not a
ttempt to answer. Instead, he turned on Bobby and demanded:

  “Where does the second killing come in? Why should Mrs James kill Manners! If she didn’t and there’s still a second killer we haven’t spotted yet, knocks your whole case endways, doesn’t it?”

  It was Bobby he asked, but it was still Dewey who replied. He said:

  “I think that was accidental in a way. I think Mother was watching. I think she knew Mr Owen was drawing so near the truth he was sure presently to reach it. That meant that in removing one obstacle she had created another, for even if I had been different—I mean, even if I had been normal, no marriage would have been possible between the son of the woman who killed the father of the girl he had married, and killed him simply and wholly to make that marriage possible. But she still clung to the hope that Mr Owen might be less near the truth than she feared. So she watched, and when she saw a light—I dare say Mr Owen used a torch—and someone leave Constant House, she followed, but got there first by cutting across. She evidently had no idea how closely Ludo Manners and Teddy Peel were watching each other, and that the one of them who decided to search again for the medicine bag had been followed by the other. So when in the old ruin she saw the figure of a man standing over a recently formed gap she pushed him to make him fall through it. But not with any deliberate intention of killing, I think. To incapacitate so as to prevent Mr Owen from carrying on till she had had time to make it more difficult or indeed impossible for him to arrive at complete proof.”

  “How do you know all this?” demanded Nixon. “Sounds to me more what you and she had planned together?”

  “She left on the kitchen table rough notes and scribblings. I found them and read them,” Dewey answered.

  “Where are they?” Nixon demanded.