Murder Abroad

by E. R. Punshon

  They talked a little longer and later Bobby went back to the hotel. There he told how he had lost a hundred- franc note and how he would share it equally with any one who found it and returned it. Monsieur and Madame Camion thought this a very generous offer and promised to make it widely known. They also produced a letter that had arrived earlier for Bobby, but that had been overlooked in the general excitement caused by the commissaire’s visit. It was from Olive, in part of purely private interest, but also giving the information that the bottle and glass he had secured from the café and had sent to her, had been tested by the finger-print people at the Yard, as he had asked her to get done for him. Of various finger-prints found, one set had been clearly identified as belonging to a man known as William or Joseph Weston or Williams, real name unknown, who had served various sentences for assault, for burglary, and, in addition, one for a not very serious assault on his wife. He was regarded as a violent and dangerous criminal, and Bobby whistled softly when the further information was given that though Williams seldom did any honest work, he had at one time secured a position as porter at the branch establishment of Messrs. Polthwaite, Ltd., in Paris. He had worked there, giving full satisfaction for nearly a year. He had left of his own accord. A month later an audacious attempt at burglary there had been fortunately frustrated. There was no evidence whatever against Williams, but the coincidence had been noted and he had been traced and questioned, but entirely without result. For one thing, he had a perfect alibi. There was also reason to suspect that he had been concerned in a notorious gang murder that had taken place in Soho some years previously. For the actual murder he had again an unimpeachable alibi; on this occasion, that of having been at the time under arrest on a charge of ‘drunk and disorderly.’ All the same, there was reason to believe he had planned the murder though someone else had carried it out. Who that someone else was had never been discovered or even suspected.

  “And now he is here,” Bobby mused, “here where there was a murder not long ago, the murder of a woman who bought most of her store of diamonds through a firm he had worked for. He might easily have got to hear of her purchases. Only again it seems he has an alibi.”

  CHAPTER XVII

  BOBBY WRITES

  The next day or two Bobby spent on the slopes of the Bornay Massif, ostensibly sketching, though in reality he hardly touched brush or pencil, but sat idly, or else walked to and fro, trying to compose recent happenings into some sort of consistent pattern. When his tired brain refused to work any longer he refreshed it by long and often difficult and always tiring walks across the Massif as far as that great crevasse which cut it in two and made further progress too difficult. He made friends also with one or two of the neighbouring farmers, from whom he learnt more of the topography of the district, and from one of whom, much to the worthy man’s amusement, he bought a supply of binder twine. Bobby needed it for an experiment of which the vague and doubtful outline was beginning to appear at the back of his mind, but the farmer thought it merely another instance of the well-known eccentricities of the ‘artiste-peintre’, and Bobby did not try to enlighten him, could indeed hardly have done so, since his own mind was as yet not clear. In any case the purchase provided an excuse for a chat about the Massif and its desolate and waste expanse, which the farmer, a man of some intelligence and education, had certain plans for bringing into use. They were plans, Bobby learnt, that, some two or three years previously, had nearly cost the farmer his life, when, in pursuing his explorations of the Massif and its possibilities, he had lost his way in that bewildering maze and had only been rescued when in a state of almost complete exhaustion. It had been a lesson to him, he said, to treat the Massif with more respect, and his use of the word ‘maze’ in speaking of it, interested Bobby greatly. It might all prove, Bobby told himself, valuable in one way or another, or else of no value or interest whatever, and certainly so far he saw no way of fitting the things he knew or suspected or believed into a coherent whole.

  Much depended, for instance, on the significance to be attached to the disappearance of Volny, a matter of which Bobby felt too little was at present known for any clear opinion to be formed. Was it voluntary, and, if so, what was the reason? Funk? A desire to avoid the duel to which Camion apparently had challenged him? Or a deeper fear for another reason? Or if there were a darker reason for his disappearance, then again what was that reason and who was responsible?

  Rumours, of course, were current all the time in the village that Volny had been seen in Paris, recognized in Marseilles, heard of in Cherbourg, but these were silenced when again the smiling commissaire of police appeared in the village asking more questions and bringing with him once more a sentiment of foreboding and unease. The same day Bobby heard another piece of news, overshadowed indeed in the village by the proof that the authorities were still concerned about Volny’s disappearance, but one that Bobby found of curious interest. It was to the effect that sudden and important business had summoned Mr. and Mrs. Williams to Paris. They had departed at once, though expressing the hope that they would be able to return to finish their holiday, as they had taken the Pépin Mill for the whole summer.

  The next morning Bobby, instead of going out to sketch as usual, announced that he had letters to write, and settled himself with pen and paper in a shady corner on the hotel ‘terrace’. In every case that so far he had been connected with, it had been his practice, indeed his duty, to submit a full report to his superiors, for them to consider, and, if they thought fit, take action on. This time he had no superiors to satisfy. He did not wish to say too much to his direct employers, Lady Markham and her relatives, till he had arrived at more definite conclusions. He fell back therefore upon writing a long letter to Olive, since he had always found it useful to clarify his thoughts and his impressions by putting them upon paper. More than once indeed as soon as he had arranged all he knew in orderly fashion on paper, in black and white, then the truth had seemed to leap upon him from the written words, as though in pen and ink there were some kind of magic to reveal it.

  From what he wrote the private matter may be omitted and indeed there was but little of it, for chiefly he concerned himself with the tangled and troubled problem he saw at the moment small hope of solving.

  ‘I am beginning to wish,’ he wrote, ‘that I had never touched the case. It has more points than a hedgehog and all of them liable to prick. And then what seemed to afford a chance of a promising beginning was knocked on the head from the start when I got here and found the Pépin Mill in the occupation of some one else. I thought a careful examination of the locality was sure to help, but the Williams couple got in first and I didn’t much think by chance.

  ‘It is hard enough to get at the truth in the ordinary way when you are right on the spot from the start. After all this long delay it looks pretty hopeless, like trying to solve a crossword puzzle with all the clues destroyed. Then, too, I never realized before what a difference there is between playing a lone hand and having a big organization behind you. Mere matters of routine inquiry in London, if I were working on such a case there, are hopelessly out of my reach here.

  ‘Every trail is dead cold. If any material clues ever existed, they have long ago vanished. I have to depend entirely on memories months old. I have no chance of examining official records. Nor did I understand before I got here how much more difficult it is to judge people of another country, with an entirely different background, than it is to form an opinion of your own countrymen. There are so many differences, often quite tiny differences, in habit and outlook. In London I can almost always tell whether people are telling the truth or not. Here, I simply don’t know.

  ‘One difference is that I am probably the only person here able to believe that Miss Polthwaite’s interest in young Camion was entirely innocent. I’m not saying that psycho-analysts couldn’t dig down to all sorts of hidden motives, all disreputable. If there was any such hidden motive, I am quite sure myself it was only sexual in the sense that
it was maternal. But I’m jolly sure you would never get the average Frenchman to understand how entirely the cruder sex emotions are sublimated—I think that’s the correct word, anyhow it sounds rather good—by the habitual self-restraint and self-respect of most of our unmarried women, by the armour of their respectability, if you like, and never mind how big a sneer Bloomsbury and Chelsea put into that word. And if you could persuade the average Frenchman to believe it, he would remain quite unconvinced and merely murmur to himself something about British hypocrisy.

  ‘So there, you see, we start from entirely different standpoints—I mean myself and the official investigators. They were as convinced of one thing as I am of another.

  ‘I am sure not a soul here believed there was, or could be, anything innocent in the relations between Camion and Miss Polthwaite. I think the whole village was inclined to be shocked—there is a strong Puritan strain in the Frenchman though it works differently from ours. The difference between their ages was disliked; and I think Camion was aware of this general disapproval and yet I fancy he did not choose to try to explain the true position, because then he would have risked being laughed at and youngsters like Camion face moral disapproval more easily than ridicule.

  ‘So I am putting aside any suggestion that Miss Polthwaite committed suicide, since the only motive suggested is disappointment or quarrelling in a love affair with Camion that I am perfectly certain had no existence.

  ‘Taking it for certain then as I do that murder was committed, there are the usual questions to be answered: Who? How? Why?

  ‘The “How?” is plain and unimportant. She was thrown down the well, unconscious, one hopes, but certainly, by medical evidence, while still alive. The bruises on the face and body may have been caused by the fall down the well or inflicted beforehand. I don’t know if expert medical examination could have told more. The examination made at the time was only superficial as suicide was taken for granted.

  ‘The “Why?” is equally clear, since I’m not having the illicit love motive. Robbery. It had got about that she possessed what one calls here a “stocking”. Lucille Simone knew. And the curé knew she had a store of jewels, since she had given him several of the stones. No doubt there was general gossip in the village.

  ‘The conclusion I draw, therefore, is that the murderer was not in any way a stranger but some one who in some way knew something.’

  Bobby paused here and laid down his pen. Then he took it up again and wrote slowly:

  ‘There is a formidable list of possibles, most of them probables as well. Here they are:

  Charles Camion,

  Henri Volny,

  The Abbé Granges, curé of the village,

  Shields, Miss Polthwaite’s friend and art teacher,

  Eudes, the village schoolmaster,

  The Abbé Taylour,

  Père Trouché,

  Williams,

  Mrs. Williams (or do they count as one?),

  and of course the inevitable and possible but improbable X no one knows anything about.

  ‘Anyhow, for my part, I am fairly certain I have written above the name of the murderer of Miss Polthwaite and it’s no “X”.

  ‘But which among the nine, for you’ll see there are nine in all, and a very nasty number, too, when you remember that the last case I had anything to do with had just that same number we had good reason to suspect and that the truth only came out by the accident of a blunder the murderer made. But if in this case whoever’s guilty made any comparable blunder, what chance is there of finding it after all this delay?

  ‘The evidence will have to be largely psychological, and what jury in England or France or anywhere else is going to convict on purely psychological evidence?

  ‘ Of course, if we can trace the stolen diamonds— supposing they have been stolen—to the possession of any one, that any one will have some questions to answer. But it’s a kind of vicious circle. Not much use looking for the culprit till you know who stole the diamonds. Until you know who stole them, not much use trying to prove who is guilty.

  ‘Take them all in turn.

  ‘To start:

  Charles Camion’.

  Carefully and in full detail Bobby wrote all he knew and had observed about the young man. He dwelt, too, upon the explosive stage at which the relations between him and Miss Polthwaite seemed to have arrived and on the proof that there had been a violent quarrel and threats, overheard by two witnesses, just previously to her death and caused by the queer misunderstanding between them. It was at least possible that Miss Polthwaite’s fury of indignation at Camion’s misconception of the meaning of her invitation and desires had led her to say things that might in turn have roused in him an equal fury. And with two people in a fury anything may happen. Then, too, there was the fact that Miss Polthwaite had excited his ambitions, had promised him help to realize them, and that their quarrel would put an end to any such hopes. Camion was again the last person known to have been in her company. His statement that she had told him she was afraid of some other, unknown, person rested only on Camion’s word, and might easily bear the explanation of an attempt to divert suspicion. His romantic, undisciplined and emotional temperament, as shown also by his challenge to Volny to meet him in a duel, suggested, too, a tendency to resort too easily to violence. Then in addition there was the odd incident of the visit to the bishop of the diocese, since a bishop alone can give absolution in cases of murder. Was it possible a confession had been made to the curé with a view to closing his mouth, since what has been learnt in confession must not be revealed, and had therefore the curé insisted on the confession being repeated to the bishop?

  Bobby laid down his pen once more and looked grave. It seemed to him that under motive, association, opportunity, temperament, a formidable case existed. He felt that in England he could have submitted it with some confidence to Treasury counsel.

  Yet he reflected, too, that there was no material proof. Romantic and emotional temperaments are precisely those that shrink from cold-blooded murder, they are inconsistent with such brutality as the throwing of a still living woman down a well.

  ‘If Miss Polthwaite had been found with her head bashed in, I could have believed it of Camion more easily,’ Bobby wrote, ‘though of course he may have been quite off his head with fear and fury, and when, and, if he threw her down the well, he may have thought only of concealment and not realized she was alive. But all’s conjecture.”

  Bobby shook his head again, ill-satisfied, and wrote slowly the name of the next upon his list:

  ‘Henri Volny’.

  Again he wrote all he knew and had observed about the young man, the state of poverty in which he was kept by his father, his ambition to become a first-class boxer, his need of funds for the preliminary training, his attempt to drive away Mr. and Mrs. Williams from the Pépin Mill and his secret association with the Abbé Taylour, his tendency to resort to violence when he felt himself of superior strength, as when he had threatened Bobby after the visit to the Abbé Taylour he was apparently anxious should not be known. Finally Bobby dwelt upon his recent disappearance that seemed to suggest guilty flight. There was, too, the fact that he was a rival of Camion’s for Lucille’s favour, and that rivalry might possibly have been a motive urging him to try to get hold of the cash Miss Polthwaite was contemplating giving to Camion, so putting him in a favourable position for urging his suit with Lucille.

  ‘Jealousy, poverty, rivalry, all strong motives,’ Bobby wrote, ‘but again no material proof, though Volny’s disappearance is suspicious; and it is clear he knew or suspected something or why was he trying to chase away the Williamses?’

  Once again Bobby laid down his pen and once again took it up.

  ‘Père Trouché’.

  He wrote, and wrote of him at length, for the old blind beggar interested him and of him, too, he felt doubtful, suspicious even, finding it difficult to come to any decided opinion about him.

  ‘An old scamp,’ he wrote,
‘but what kind of old scamp? and is he really blind? There’s my hundred-franc note test, of course, but that can’t be full proof unless I can trace it back to his possession. Some one else may have picked it up. He is said to have had a grudge against Miss Polthwaite for her threat to complain to the police about him—and he is not a man to forget a grudge in a hurry—and by his own admission he was on the spot on the night of the murder. If he heard Camion’s threats, he may have thought them good cover for himself. He boasts himself indifferent to money, and perhaps that is suspicious, too, for is there any one really indifferent to money? I think there’s a case against the old man. On his own showing, he is fond of revenging himself on people who happen to offend him. Apparently, too, there is a record of violence and at least a suspicion that he has already killed. He seems, too, to know so much of what goes on, that almost certainly he would have heard talk of Miss Polthwaite’s supposed hoard.’

  The next name Bobby wrote was:

  ‘Basil Shields’.

  Of him, too, Bobby wrote in great detail, dwelling on the terms of intimacy on which he stood with Miss Polthwaite, the likelihood, therefore, that he knew a good deal of her private affairs, on the significant fact that he had acted as her art teacher. Then, too, he had kept up his connection with the village in a somewhat marked manner. Bobby went into specially full details of his own first encounter with Shields when Shields had talked pointedly about ‘coincidence’, as if he had felt it necessary to explain his reappearance in the district.

  ‘Is there anything,’ Bobby wrote, ‘in Shields’s friendship with Eudes? On the face of it, they would not seem to have much in common. Why was Shields interested in my arrival? Simply because he had heard I was a fellow-countryman and a brother artist? Is that likely? Or had he been warned by Eudes, and was his visit to make sure that I really was what I seemed to be—a casual tourist fond of sketching? If so, then he and Eudes are partners—and partners may mean accomplices. Yet if they are guilty and are in possession of Miss Polthwaite’s valuables, I still do not see why the mere appearance of a stray Englishman should so much upset them when the authorities appeared satisfied.