“Could any of you tell me where Mr Chrines lives?”
A cottage was indicated and Bobby knocked. No answer. He knocked again. He was still being regarded with the same sort of rather hostile, sullen indifference as before. Apparently it was recognized that, while murder was different, all the same it was no concern of theirs, and, anyhow, on general principles visits from the police were not to be encouraged. A third time Bobby knocked. A woman called out:
“Most like he’s in bed—fair upset he was.”
“It must have been a terrible shock,” Bobby agreed; and this time not so much knocked as banged at the door with an emphasis that seemed likely to knock it off its hinges and that now produced from within a muffled shout, coupling a demand to know who was there and a demand that whoever it was should go away. So Bobby called back “Police” and pushed the door open.
He entered a small room, not very tidy, not very clean, furnished with rickety and probably third- or fourth-hand chairs and tables, an old dresser and so on. The only unusual feature was provided by two enlarged photographs on the wall above a rusty fireplace. One of a young and very pretty woman, the other of an older man with a small pointed beard and carefully tended moustache, and a general overall resemblance to others Bobby had seen in Bloomsbury public-houses and Soho restaurants. Bobby noticed that in the photograph one hand was carefully held out so that it could not fail to be seen—and admired. It was a slender well-shaped hand of which the owner was obviously proud and one finger was adorned by a large signet ring. Shuffling footsteps descending the stairs that led directly from this room to that above suggested that Chrines had in fact been in bed till Bobby’s summons roused him. He appeared; the tall, shambling young man Bobby remembered, with his odd little blob of a nose, his small tight mouth, his pale watery eyes behind large horn-rimmed spectacles. He was wearing a torn and dirty dressing-gown, his hands thrust deep into the pockets, and he looked pale, shrunken even, a little afraid, too, Bobby thought. He said sourly:
“I had a policeman here practically the whole of yesterday. Never stopped asking questions. I told them everything several times over. What’s the idea, beginning all over again? I can’t tell you any more. You’ve got no right to keep on at it all for nothing.”
“I’m afraid,” Bobby explained, “it is generally necessary in these cases to go over the same ground more than once. People often know more than they realize, and sometimes it is only gradually that small significant details come out to prove a great help. Especially when compared with what other people say. I think I saw you in the Hillings churchyard the other day.”
“Well, what about it if you did?” Chrines demanded with that weak truculence Bobby was beginning to recognize as the other’s chief characteristic. “I remember seeing someone. I didn’t take any notice. There are always tourists staring and gaping, people who have probably never read a line of poetry in their lives. They seem to think the grave of a poet’s love is just a penny peep-show.”
“I am told a great many people visit it,” Bobby agreed. “A romantic love-story, even for people who don’t read poetry. Now this has happened, there will be more visitors than ever, most likely.”
“Why?” demanded Chrines angrily. “What’s it got to do with a man being shot and robbed by his own chauffeur? Look, if there’s anything you want to know, just ask it, will you? and then please leave me in peace. It’s all nothing to do with me. I just want to forget it. People like you can’t realize what more sensitive people—people with nerves—suffer. What an ordeal it’s all been to me. But I know you can’t understand a poet’s temperament,” and for a moment Bobby was almost afraid this outburst in words was about to be followed by another outburst—tears.
But Bobby, always liable to retreat in dismay before a woman’s tears, would have been more inclined, if necessary, to take Chrines by the scruff of his neck and put his head in a bucket of water. He said sharply:
“Pull yourself together, please. Are you quite sure it has nothing to do with you? I believe Mr Pyle came to see you a few days ago?”
“Well, why shouldn’t he?” Chrines asked, his voice suddenly steadier. He looked at Bobby warily, slyly, hesitated, and went on: “He only came that once. We had mutual interests.”
“It was in connection with those common interests that he came?” Bobby asked.
“I expect you know all about it,” Chrines complained. “What’s the good of asking? He knew I was a son of Stephen Asprey. I’ve no idea how he knew, but he did. I never tell anyone, never. People say it’s a wise child that knows its own father. They ought to say it’s a damn wise child that can prove it. How can you? So I never say anything.” He moved a hand that Bobby saw, now he had taken it out of the pocket of his dressing-gown, was adorned by a large signet ring more or less resembling that on the hand of the figure in the enlarged photograph. “But I’m not going to be bullied into giving up the photographs of my own parents,” he declared.
Bobby went across to look more closely at the woman’s photograph. It was not a good photograph, nor had the enlargement been carried out very skilfully, but it did suggest a woman of character and intelligence, as well as of unusual beauty.
“Janet Merton?” he asked, turning to Chrines, who made no answer, unless a smirk is an answer, and Bobby decided that what the young man really needed was a good spanking.
A spoiled child, Bobby told himself; and spoiled children can be as dangerous and unpredictable as those who are lost and bewildered in their new environment. Chrines said:
“If that’s all you want to know—”
“Oh, but it isn’t,” Bobby interrupted. “Sorry and all that, but I would like to know a little more about Pyle’s visit to you. Was it in connection with a proposed biography of Stephen Asprey?”
“I should think I had the best right,” Chrines said. “I’ve done a lot of preparatory work. Pyle had no business to come butting in. I have unique qualifications. Mine will be the definite biography of one of the greatest figures in English literature, even if for the moment the general public neglects his work. That often happens to the greatest genius. It did to Shakespeare.”
“So I believe,” Bobby agreed. “I think I remember Pepys thought the Midsummer Night’s Dream the ‘silliest fantastic play that ever he did see’.”
“Pyle actually dared,” Chrines went on, much encouraged by this sign of sympathy, “to try to buy certain family papers in my possession. As if I would ever dream of letting them be used for the sort of piffle a cheap, sensation-mongering paper like Morning Daily gives its readers. Impudence. To tell you the truth, I told him off good and proper, and, if you must know, in the end I kicked him out—literally. Literally kicked him out.”
“The poor man seems to have had a rough time all round,” Bobby remarked. “You kicked him out. The Duke of Blegborough threw him out of his car. Someone else threatened to shoot him, and now he has actually been shot.”
“Who was that?” Chrines asked. “I mean, who threatened to shoot him? It wasn’t Hagen, was it?”
“Has he a pistol?” Bobby countered, but Chrines shook his head.
“I don’t know,” he answered. “I think he has a shot-gun, that’s all. He caught Pyle hanging about in the churchyard one night, didn’t he? I’ve heard him say if he found anyone monkeying about in his churchyard he would pepper them good and proper. Souvenir hunters he meant, I think.”
“I see,” Bobby said. “Have you a pistol?”
“Me?” Chrines asked, and looked dismayed, and again a little frightened. “No. Certainly not. What should I want with a pistol?”
“We have received information,” Bobby replied, watching him closely, “that following on some sort of scuffle or dispute in which you were mixed up, you stated you had procured a revolver and would use it if anyone tried to interfere with you again.”
“That’s what Duncan Day-Bell has been telling you, isn’t it?” Chrines exclaimed angrily. “He came here trying to bully and blust
er about those photographs. A pretty thing if you can’t show your own family photographs. I told him off good and proper, and he went off with his tail between his legs. That’s all. He tries to bully if he thinks he can get away with it, but stand up to him as I do and he soon climbs down.”
“Did you ever have in your possession a pistol of any sort or kind?” Bobby asked.
“Never,” Chrines answered emphatically. “Just a pack of lies. What should I want a pistol for? I can defend myself, I hope.” He paused to give Bobby a look of brave defiance, much as if it were Duncan himself he was challenging. “I’ll tell you something I heard this morning. The people here are saying there was a light showing in the rectory late last night. Do you see what that means?”
“I am afraid I don’t,” Bobby confessed.
“I thought you wouldn’t,” Chrines said, with more than a touch of patronage in his voice. “I didn’t myself at first. Then I remembered about Mr Thorne. When he went out at night he always left a light burning to guide him home, and Mr Day-Bell did the same thing. Very sensible, too, if you haven’t my rather unique sense of direction. But it shows Mr Day-Bell was out late that night, though he’s never said so, has he?”
“Not that I know of,” Bobby said when Chrines paused for a reply.
“Well, then,” Chrines continued, looking very knowing, “I wonder if it’s possible he did happen to see someone, only he doesn’t want to say. I can’t think why,” and these last words were accompanied by such an air of ‘I could if I would but I won’t’, that Bobby, in spite of the seriousness of it all, nearly smiled.
“I shall have to inquire into that,” he said, and Chrines nodded approvingly. Speaking with more assurance, as if he felt he had now fully established himself in Bobby’s confidence, he went on: “Naturally we all understand you’ve got to suspect everyone. But in my case there would be more sense to it if Mr Pyle had murdered me. He looked like murder all right when he got out his cheque-book and his fountain pen and I only laughed at him. You see, he wanted those family papers I have—wanted them the very worst possible way. He knew if he could get hold of them they would give the biography of my father he said he wanted to write—like his infernal impudence—a cachet it would never have in any other way. Why, he even began talking about using his influence to make sure that my next poems had a favourable reception from the critics. A full column he promised in the leading literary papers—Sundays and weeklies as well. Or getting his own Daily Evening to choose it for their book of the month,” and here Chrines’s voice trailed off into a kind of yearning, dream-like, far-off whisper, as again there swam before his eyes the vision of so great a ‘might have been’. There were indeed tears in his voice, if not in his eyes, and Bobby experienced for him a touch of real respect, well deserved by such a show of stoic virtue as Bobby wondered Chrines had had the strength of mind to display. Surprising, he thought, and Chrines, recovering slightly, said:
“That was when we both got rather heated. I said my work didn’t need that sort of string-pulling, and he said I was a fool, and I suppose I was by his standards and—well, I told you, the end was that out he went on his ear.”
CHAPTER XXII
MIST ON THE MOOR
BUT AS Bobby rode away on his motor-cycle he began to wonder if possibly this feeling of respect for Chrines’s artistic integrity was in fact fully deserved? Only his own word for it that such an offer had really been made and declined with so lofty a Roman virtue. Was it perhaps what Bobby himself had once called the lie imaginative, common with children and with communists and not unknown elsewhere; the lie, that is, telling what it is felt ought to be, and soon will be, and may therefore be quite properly described as already being—a mere transition from ‘will be’ to ‘is’. And, doubts growing, had Mr Pyle really gone out ‘on his ear’? With regrettable vulgarity, Bobby said aloud to the wind and to the moor:
“I don’t believe that young man could throw out a sick cat.”
Abruptly he brought his motor-cycle to a standstill. Two thoughts—arresting, even startling thoughts—had entered his mind almost simultaneously. The first, that these doubts might just possibly be pieces to fit into the jigsaw puzzle he was trying to put together; the second, that he had entirely forgotten his lunch—a thing that had hardly ever happened to him before.
So he alighted, sat down on a convenient bank, chose another with some speed when he found a nest of ants had staked a prior claim, produced the packet of sandwiches he had brought with him, and as he munched, meditated. But still he felt he could not quite be sure of the true significance of Chrines’s story. It might mean much or nothing; and when he had come to the end of his sandwiches and rose to continue on his way, the only decision he had arrived at he expressed in the simple words:
“I shall have to ask McKie.”
All the same, though his talk with Chrines might lack the strange significance he seemed to see hovering about it like a discarnate spirit seeking a body to inhabit, none the less there had emerged one statement it was necessary to follow up. If Chrines’s story of the lamp burning in a rectory window did in fact carry with it the meaning that the elder Day-Bell was out on the moor on the murder night, then it was possible he had seen someone or something he had either not wished to speak of, or possibly that he had not thought worth mentioning. And while the most wearisome witness is the one who wanders off into a maze of irrelevant detail, including a full account of his or her own personal ailments, the most difficult is the one who only tells what he himself happens to think important.
So it was to the Hillings rectory that Bobby now directed his way. His approach was evidently seen—or heard, silence is no accessory of the motor-cycle—and before he had time to knock Mr Day-Bell opened the rectory door.
“I was half expecting you,” he remarked as he led the way into the room Bobby had seen before. “Do you seem to be making any progress in this dreadful affair?”
“It’s too early to say as yet,” Bobby answered. “At present we are concentrating on trying to trace the weapon used.”
“A difficult task,” Mr Day-Bell suggested as he offered Bobby a chair and took another for himself. “Surely the murderer, if he is, as seems generally believed, this man who has disappeared, will have had ample opportunity to get rid of it. I hear he was seen taking the train to Bristol. He could easily throw it into the river there or somewhere like that, couldn’t he?”
“There’s that, of course,” Bobby agreed, “but we can’t take anything for granted, and Item Sims does seem to have a fairly strong alibi, though of course we are doing our best to find him. Till we do, I am trying to check up on every pistol we have heard of in the possession of anyone in the district. Your son, young Mr Day-Bell, had one, I think?”
“I believe he had at one time, but I’m not sure whether it is still in his hands,” answered Mr Day-Bell and added: “You could ask him, of course.”
“I have,” Bobby said. “He states he lent it to Miss Christabel Merton, but she tells me she hasn’t got it now and doesn’t know what has become of it. She states that the last time she saw it was not long ago when she asked you to unload it for her.”
“Oh, yes, I remember,” Mr Day-Bell answered at once. “I thought it very sensible. But surely that was some considerable time ago.”
“What did you do with it when you had taken out the cartridges?” Bobby asked.
“Well, I suppose I gave it back to Miss Merton. I don’t remember precisely. But there’s nothing else I can have done with it—I expect I put it down somewhere. I really don’t know.”
“You could have taken it away with you,” Bobby suggested. “You might have thought you had better return it to your son?”
“Oh, no, I should remember if I had done that. Besides, if I had, he would have it, and you said you asked him.”
“It seems, then,” Bobby said, “that this revolver has been in the possession at different times of yourself, of your son, and of Miss Christabel, and tha
t none of the three of you has now any knowledge of what has become of it. I am sure you will agree that that is a somewhat disconcerting situation, and I hope you will all make every effort to clear it up. I would like to stress how important that is. I am sure we can rely on your fullest co-operation.”
“I must say,” Mr Day-Bell protested, sitting very upright and speaking a little as if he were addressing some peccant parishioner, “I do not at all like the suggestion that seems to be implied. Do you really wish me to understand that because this pistol has been mislaid for the moment, you therefore suggest it was used in this unfortunate man’s murder? I consider any such suggestion unreasonable in the extreme, most uncalled for.”
“There is no need to suggest anything at present,” Bobby replied quietly. “I can only stress again that it is most desirable in the interests of all concerned that it should be produced with the least possible delay. There is another matter I have to ask about. Information has reached us that you were out late walking on the moor on the night of the murder. Is that correct?”
Mr Day-Bell looked—and felt—still more indignant, still more taken aback.
“I don’t understand that question,” he said. “I must ask if I am to take it that you suspect me of any kind of complicity in this dreadful business?”
“I don’t remember that I’ve said anything to suggest that you are,” Bobby retorted, now somewhat impatiently. “In a case like this we require every scrap of information anyone can give us. I’ve asked a simple question. Were you out on the moor on the night of the murder? Or do you prefer not to say?”
“I was,” Mr Day-Bell answered; and shut his lips tightly, as if nothing would induce him to let another word escape.
“Was it with the intention of visiting Mr Pyle’s caravan?”
“I had that intention in my mind,” Mr Day-Bell admitted. “On the way I decided not to, and I turned back.”
“Was there any reason for that?” Bobby asked.
Brought to Light: A Bobby Owen Mystery Page 17