Turning these thoughts over in his mind and finding little profit in doing so, Bobby drove slowly back to Cobblers, where by good luck he arrived just in time to find Oxendale returned from his visit to Town. Bobby explained that he thought it might be helpful if Mr Oxendale wouldn’t mind answering a few questions, and Mr Oxendale looked uncomfortable and said it was a sordid business and he wanted to have as little to do with it as possible, but he was, of course, entirely willing to do anything he could. Which was, he feared, very, very little. Of Baldwin Jones, he knew, for example, almost nothing.
“He called in at the office sometimes,” Oxendale admitted. “I dodged him when I could. He was very persistent. Always trying to pull strings, and I hadn’t any idea of pulling strings to please him. What influence I have—rather less than some people seem to imagine—I try to use to help talent, real talent. If I think a script is good, I say so. If I can give a hint about casting, I do. Where I see promise, that is. Jones was always trying to influence me. Annoying. One has to put up with that sort of thing in my position, but I shut down on it as much as I can.”
“You have a position with a theatrical firm, I understand?” Bobby said.
“Bury’s,” said Oxendale; and if he did not say it with quite the almost religious fervour with which Jack Longton pronounced the word ‘theatre,’ he very clearly expected it to impress.
“I believe there were rather unfavourable rumours current about Jones, weren’t there?” Bobby went on.
“Oh, there are unfavourable rumours about lots of people,” Oxendale answered. “The theatre world is full of gossip—we are a self-contained community and we talk about each other. I make a point of never remembering what I can’t help hearing.”
“Very wise,” Bobby agreed, and wondered if Mr Oxendale were always as prudent and discreet as he claimed.
Clearly, however, he meant to say as little as possible, and Bobby decided that for the moment he would leave Baldwin Jones. He got out his notebook, glanced through it and then said:
“Oh, yes. Mr Longton. Another theatrical gentleman. You know him professionally, I take it?”
“Can’t help knowing Longton if you are with Bury’s,” Oxendale answered, and there was evident dislike in his voice. “A producer. I can’t say I admire his work. Meretricious, I consider it. All for immediate effect. No depth. Of course, that’s only my opinion, but if his theories are right, mine are wrong.” Oxendale smiled as he said this, as if implying that to say this was a little like saying that if the Longton theories were right, then that two and two make four was wrong. “He is producing for Bury’s at the moment. I fully agreed. Test before the footlight is the only test that counts—for informed opinion, that is. I don’t mean the popular appeal, as with his Arden of Faversham. You remember that?” Bobby had never heard either of the production or the play, but he did not say so. Taking his silence for acquiescence, Oxendale went on: “I don’t deny the thing did attract some attention. I keep my own opinion, though, of course, I agreed he was entitled to his new hat.”
“What for? What was that?” Bobby asked.
“Oh, I promised him a new hat if the thing went to the West End. Well, as it happened, it did. Not that it ran, but it was put on. Of course, I told him to go ahead and get his hat and send me the bill. Of course, he went to the most expensive shop he could think of.”
“Bailey and Bailey?” Bobby asked.
“That’s right,” Oxendale said, surprised. “You know them?”
“I’ve heard of them,” Bobby said without betraying that he found this piece of information of any interest. “You both know Miss Maureen Carton as well, I suppose, as I understand she intends to go on the stage?”
“In my considered opinion,” Oxendale said impressively, “a genius—undeveloped as yet, but with all the marks. She should have started her training earlier, but Lord Rone made objections. Unless she is ruined by overwork, unless her native gift is forced into conventional orthodox channels, if she is allowed to develop as Nature intended—then a Siddons in the making.”
“You have a very high opinion of her, then?” Bobby remarked.
“The highest,” Oxendale said, “and my position at Bury’s gives me exceptional opportunities for forming an opinion. The danger is that she may get into the hands of producers like Longton, who merely want to use her genius for their own glory. I shall try to save her from that fate.”
Bobby was consulting his notebook again. It was beginning to seem to him that Maureen was rather in the position of the corpse of the Homeric hero for possession of which Greek and Trojan warriors fought so desperately. Not a very happy metaphor, perhaps, since Maureen was certainly a very lively kind of corpse indeed. Clearly, however, the rivalry between the two young men was keen. And had that any bearing on Baldwin Jones’s fate? A possibility, Bobby supposed. And he could not help thinking that the odds in what might be called the Maureen stakes were clearly very much in Oxendale’s favour, since Longton apparently was offering only hard work and lots of it and Oxendale was promising success through a trust in native genius that could trust itself alone. Pretty clear which road would seem most attractive. High stakes, too, since they probably included winning Maureen’s hand, and marriage with the daughter of a wealthy peer has its advantages even in these days of perfervid equality when Procrustes and his bed have become the patron saints of the new society. Bobby closed his notebook and said:
“By the way, you knew Mr Baldwin Jones’s address, I think.”
“He gave it me once when he asked me to go to see him. I’ve entirely forgotten it. I never had the least intention of going.”
“Why did he suggest it? I understand he made rather a mystery of where he lived.”
“Well, it was in some slum or another; that was all,” Oxendale explained. “He didn’t like that known, but he had got hold of some play about the slums he wanted to read to me and then to take me round where he lived so I could see for myself how true to life it was. I expect he had written the thing himself. I told him to send it in in the usual way, and if I liked it, then we could think about going slumming together.”
A plausible explanation, Bobby thought—even too plausible.
“You told Miss Maureen, I think, didn’t you?”
“Did I? I had quite forgotten. I may have. I don’t know. Why? Does it matter?”
“Everything matters,” Bobby told him. “Everything—in murder. Our information is that Jones was not above petty blackmail if he got a chance. Do you know anything about that?”
“Nothing,” Oxendale answered. “I don’t pay any attention to the sort of gossip that does go on. I’m always being blackmailed myself, for that matter. At least, that’s what I call it. Authors, stage aspirants—all trying to bring pressure on me to say something about them to Bury’s. It gets on one’s nerves at times.”
Bobby said he could well believe it, and how much obliged he was to Mr Oxendale for answering his questions so frankly and fully, and Oxendale said he fully realized how important it was to give the police every possible assistance, and had the investigation made any real progress or oughtn’t he to ask? There was that ’phone call, for instance? Was there anything yet to show who made it?
Bobby said nothing at all so far, but he still hoped whoever it was might yet come forward. Therewith he went to find Moyse, now busy again with his typewriter and Lord Rone’s correspondence.
Moyse proved to be a good deal less communicative than had been the other two young men. He protested he knew nothing. Especially he knew nothing about anyone else at Cobblers. A complete stranger to all of them. He had wanted a job, and it had been a lucky break for him to get this one with Lord Rone. No, he had not been formally engaged, but it came to much the same thing. At any rate, he hoped so. It wouldn’t be his fault if he lost what promised to be a very comfortable berth. And the less he had to do with the murder investigation the better he would be pleased. Murder was a nasty, rather frightening business, and Moyse was
a little pale as he said this. He didn’t want to be mixed up in it in any way whatever.
Bobby assured him that no one would be mixed up in it unnecessarily, but there it was. Everyone on the spot at the time had to be considered, and Moyse said it was just his luck and went on with his typing.
So Bobby returned to the village police station, where he became immersed in all the routine work that was waiting his attention. But first he got a call put through to Olive to ask her to get hold of a copy of one of Tudor King’s books and of one of those written by Mrs Cato—Cynthia Cairn—before lack of public appreciation had driven her to accept whatever was the exact position she held with Mr Tudor King. If possible, Bobby said, he would like it to be the one she had mentioned, entitled Just Life—a title apparently meant to convey a grim, ironic comment on human existence. Olive might be able to find a copy on the shelves of the local public library—even if only the shelves in the cellars. If not, would she make an excursion to Charing Cross Road in the morning and see what the twopenny boxes there could yield. Olive asked in return why this sudden interest in literature, and Bobby said he would explain when he got home—if she wasn’t asleep, that is, for he would probably be late.
CHAPTER XXIV
MESSRS BAILEY AND BAILEY
BOBBY, RETURNING HOME late, as he had anticipated, found this prognostication correct and Olive fast asleep. But on the floor by the bedside lay a copy of Just Life. So apparently the local library had risen successfully to the occasion.
He picked it up and turned over the leaves. Page after page of closely printed paragraphs. It gave him an uncomfortable feeling of being back at College, confronted with one of those learned pronouncements that had always seemed to him as remote as mountain peaks he had no desire to climb.
Putting the book down, he prepared for bed, and soon was as fast asleep as Olive herself. For her slumber was profound, and Bobby’s last thought as he drifted into sleep was to wonder if this depth of slumber were a result of the attempted perusal of Just Life. At breakfast next morning he asked Olive how she had liked the book, and was answered by a prodigious yawn, as if the very thought of it nearly sent her to sleep again.
“It’s all psychology,” she explained. “Tremendously clever. If anyone does anything, there’s always a complete analysis of heredity and environment and all the rest to account for it. That is, when anything does happen, because most of the time the characters never do anything; they just sit about and talk of their sorrows and disasters and how rotten everything inevitably is. And I must say they do rather get it rubbed in, poor dears. But it’s awfully funny.”
“Doesn’t sound it,” said Bobby as he made two mouthfuls of his share of the week’s bacon ration.
“I don’t mean funny,” Olive told him. “I mean—funny. Because I got the feeling I had read it all before and I knew I hadn’t. And then I discovered—what do you think?”
“I never think at breakfast,” Bobby answered firmly. “One of the things definitely not done.”
“It’s all,” Olive explained, “almost exactly the same as Life at Manor Abbey Castle.”
“What’s that?” Bobby asked. “Life at how much?”
“It’s one of the Tudor King books,” Olive answered. “Almost all the same thing—even down to the names of most of the characters. Not exactly, but very similar. Agatha instead of Angela. Like that. And in Just Life there’s a barrow-boy—Bill Veale—who works hard at deserting the girls he loves passionately—sometimes the brutal police have packed him off to prison, so he has to—and then they die in the gutter of hunger and T.B. Tudor King has a young, rising Cabinet Minister millionaire—William Vere—who spends all his time doing the same. Only with him it’s affairs of State that take him away from the titled young ladies he loves so devotedly. In fact, it’s all much the same, except there’s a happy ending: the T.B. cures itself, and the scene is Mayfair and Monte Carlo instead of Shoreditch and Southend.”
“How art thou translated, Bottom,” Bobby said.
“That’s a quotation, isn’t it?” Olive asked suspiciously. “I suppose it does seem not so bad if it all happens in mink coats and pearl necklaces. Tudor King’s heroine ends up yachting in the Mediterranean in the exclusive company of dukes and princes and the Just Life heroine ends in the Thames off Battersea Bridge—takes her two whole chapters, though. There’s another thing. In Just Life the author does know what she’s writing about. Tudor King doesn’t.”
“You know,” Bobby said slowly, “all that does seem to add up to something rather fantastic that I’ve had in my mind. Only I don’t see how it ties up with the Baldwin Jones affair.”
“Suppose,” Olive said, “Mrs Cato found out Tudor King had been using her books to write up, only differently, and had made a lot of money doing it?”
“It’s an idea,” Bobby agreed. “Something like that may have been happening. Only there again—I’m supposed to be investigating a murder and not whether author number two has been cribbing from author number one.”
“Well, you think Baldwin Jones wasn’t above a little blackmail when he got the chance?” Olive said, and before Bobby could reply the ’phone rang and he had to answer it.
The message was of no real importance, but it required attention, and even Bobby’s attendance at his office as soon as possible. So he went off in rather a hurry. Later on, as soon as he had dispatched all on his desk of immediate importance he went to Mock Street, there to visit that well-known, very exclusive, and even more expensive establishment—Messrs. Bailey and Bailey, for some years now a subsidiary of Miram H. Haxton, Jnr., Inc., of New York, N.Y., and various other of the larger cities of the United States.
He was received with traditional suavity and gravity by an assistant who had less than a hundredth of Mr Hiram H. Haxton’s income and more than a hundred times his dignity. Learning Bobby’s errand and profession, the suave assistant lost some of his suavity, looked pained, and passed him on to the last surviving Bailey, who might be placed as about halfway between the dignity of the assistant and the income of Hiram. He seemed more than a little puzzled when he understood the purpose of Bobby’s visit.
“I don’t know how we can help you,” he said. “Certainly we have many credit customers. We have, for instance, pre-war accounts still outstanding, but we do a considerable cash trade as well. Not unusual for a customer to choose what he wants, pay for it, and take it away with him. Then we have no record, except, of course, in the ledgers.”
“Have you any record of the sale of a black Homburg to a Mr Longton? He is well known in theatrical circles, I think.”
Mr Bailey said they valued highly their connection with the stage, and he would make inquiries. He did so, but without result. If there had been such a sale, it had been for cash. But among the names of credit customers appeared those of Lord Rone and Saine and of Sir William Watson, the latter still owing for a black Homburg hat, price £5 5s., and for a golf cap, 12s. 6d.—both purchased during the week.
Bobby said he was much obliged, apologized for the trouble he had been giving, and asked that nothing should be said about his visit. This assurance he received with an alacrity which did not suggest that Messrs Bailey and Bailey considered that visits from the police added anything to the prestige of an establishment founded in the reign of Queen Elizabeth and claiming credit for having introduced the tall steeple-shaped Puritan hat from which in course of time the Victorian ‘topper’ evolved. All the same, when Bobby departed he left behind him a young C.I.D. man to keep observation that he was warned with severity must be as discreet as the shop itself—if indeed ‘shop’ is not too plebeian a word to apply to the Bailey establishment. As a result, there was presently a ’phone call to say that a man answering to the description of Mr Dick Moyse had been seen there, had admitted his identity, and had agreed, though under protest and with many loud expressions of indignation, to visit the Yard.
Into Bobby’s room he was in fact presently shown, still very indignant and
even more sulky.
“What’s it all about?” he demanded without giving Bobby time to speak. “Can’t you think about buying a new hat without being picked up by dicks?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say ‘picked up,’” Bobby protested, though noting with interest the use of the expressions ‘picked up’ and ‘dicks,’ underworld slang not very common in ordinary life. “The fact is, we think we have some reason to be interested in hats. Have you?”
“Well, it’s all over the place that a hat was found in the plantation between Cobblers and the New Bungalow, if that’s what you are getting at. Near where that poor devil of a Baldwin Jones was done in.”
“I thought everyone would soon know all about it,” Bobby said sadly. “I wanted it kept quiet. No such luck. But why Bailey’s?”
“Oh, come off it,” Moyse protested. “It’s where Lord Rone goes, and it’s him you’re after, isn’t it?”
“We are after the murderer,” Bobby said, more than a little surprised, though, by this suggestion. “Do you mean you suspect Lord Rone is guilty?”
“Well, you do, don’t you?” Moyse retorted.
“At the moment,” Bobby told him, “we suspect everybody and nobody. The whole case is muddled up by a number of side issues that may mean nothing at all. You may be one of them. But now you are here I may as well tell you frankly that I am not satisfied by all that about Lord Rone’s recovered dispatch case and his heroic rescue from under the wheels of a motor car. As the Americans are so fond of saying—it stinks. All the signs of a put-up job, don’t you think?”
“Oh, well,” Moyse answered, “anyhow, you can’t deny it was a jolly good act.” He permitted himself a self-satisfied smile. “Went like clockwork. Only you never can tell how things will turn out. No reason to expect any of you busies would be interested. Sheer bad luck.”
The Golden Dagger: A Bobby Owen Mystery Page 16