Brought to Light: A Bobby Owen Mystery

by E. R. Punshon

  “No,” agreed Bobby; “outside the rules. Well, if you think so, I’ll have talks with Mrs Asprey and Chrines to-morrow morning, and then I want to run up to town. I want to make a few more inquiries about Pyle’s background and to see if I can pep up the search for Sticker Sims. I don’t mean to let that get into a routine rut—it’s always a danger you have to look out for. On your toes all the time, not routine, is what our job wants. Oh, I mustn’t forget one thing I thought of. Do you think, Major, you could double the reward you offered your small boys you’ve let loose on the common, if they find the revolver used? And do you think it would be a good idea to stress that they should all remember to have a second look where they have looked before. A check up. Very important, I always tell our chaps, to check up on everything. First time is so apt to be hurried with you thinking what you’re looking for is sure to be just round the next corner.”

  With that the conference broke up; and a little before ten next morning—not so early, Bobby had decided, that Mrs Asprey might be still invisible to callers, not so late that it was likely she would be out—he arrived at Two Mile End. Again he crossed that desolate patch where once a garden had flourished, again he found Mrs Asprey, grim, gaunt, and grey, waiting for him at the side door she used.

  “Found out all about it yet?” she greeted him, half seriously, half mockingly. “Well, what do you want this time?” Without waiting for a reply, she turned back into the house. “Come in if you want to,” she said over her shoulder, “and shut the door behind you. It’s chilly this morning.” She had turned to face him, and she did not herself sit down. She said: “If you think I’m going to tell you anything, you are badly mistaken.”

  “If there’s anything you know or think you know that might help, don’t you feel you ought to tell us?” Bobby asked. “Isn’t that a general duty when it’s murder?”

  “Will hanging one man bring another back to life?” she asked in her turn. “Let sleeping dogs lie.”

  “Sleeping dogs sometimes wake and bite,” Bobby retorted.

  “No reason to suppose so this time,” she said. She had lighted a cigarette for herself, but had not offered one to Bobby. He thought it a sign she was more troubled than her outward composure showed. “If only you would stop from meddling, everything would be all right,” she complained.

  He looked at her steadily, but did not reply. She threw away the cigarette she had only just lighted and immediately took another. She seemed to have forgotten his presence. The cigarette she had thrown away had fallen on the linoleum covering the floor and was smouldering. Bobby went to pick it up and put it in the old rusty iron grate. He returned to his seat. Mrs Asprey said nothing. He was not sure that she was even aware that he had moved. When now he spoke she started violently, and he had to repeat his words a second time when she looked at him blankly. He said again:

  “A witness has come forward to say you were seen late that night near where Mr Pyle’s caravan was parked.”

  “Who told you that?” she asked, but not as if she cared much. “One of the village people? I wouldn’t trust too much to what they say if I were you. Liars all, and fully capable of putting you wrong on purpose. Few of them really like police poking about. Hagen? No, it wouldn’t be him; he’s a stickler for the truth. He thinks truth is important. I don’t know why. He says it is what he is looking for in his books. Did you know truth was to be found in books? I didn’t. That leaves no one but Day-Bell, that old dodderer. He ought to be stuffed and put in a glass case in a museum. I wanted to buy a plot of land in Hillings churchyard, next to Janet Merton’s grave. Then I could be buried here, so she would always remember who was his true wife. He was deeply shocked. I don’t know if I really meant it. Did he tell you that about seeing me near the caravan?”

  “We never say more than from information received,” Bobby answered. “Our information is also that there was a man in your company. Was it Mr Chrines?”

  “Are you worrying about him now?” she asked. “He’s a fool, a weakling, he’s not a murderer. His stabs would only be from a pen in the back. Look somewhere else if you must. Me, for example? You asked me, didn’t you? How many others have you asked?”

  “Only you,” Bobby answered calmly, and at that she at first looked considerably surprised and then laughed, but not quite naturally.

  “Oh, well, perhaps you are right,” she said. “I remember telling you I knew who it was. So I would if it was me, wouldn’t I?”

  “You haven’t told me yet if it was Chrines with you,” Bobby reminded her.

  “He couldn’t be if I wasn’t there myself,” she answered; but only after a pause, as if she had had to consider how to reply. “I’m not going to say anything more, so you needn’t ask me. You’ve a way of talking and chatting as if you were making conversation at afternoon tea and all the time ferreting out what you want to know. Janet Merton lies quiet—or does she? Edward Pyle lies quiet—or will he? Let you be quiet as well—or can you?”

  “No,” said Bobby, “do not count on that.” They were both standing now, facing each other, watchful, hostile indeed. “And Mr Thorne,” he asked, “does he also lie quiet?” and at that she stiffened and was still, her dark, strange, smouldering eyes unmoving in their fixed gaze that never left his face.

  “You ask too many questions,” she said, almost whispering now, “though I told you I would answer no more. I think that you had better go.”

  “As you wish,” Bobby said. “I had meant to ask about those letters and manuscripts your husband placed in Janet Merton’s coffin. But if you are not willing to say more, I suppose it would not be much good. Only, please remember—a question that remains unanswered is sometimes answered all the more.”

  CHAPTER XXVI

  FAMILY PAPERS

  WHEN BOBBY had said this, he went away, leaving her still standing motionless and brooding, nor could he guess what thoughts of new things or of old were passing through her mind—memories perhaps of past triumphs and defeats that to-day could hardly be distinguished the one from the other.

  In the road where he had left his car there was now another car waiting—a small sports car. In it sat Sandy McKie, waving a cheerful greeting as Bobby appeared.

  “Oh, you,” Bobby said, not too welcomingly.

  “Me, all right,” McKie agreed. “You might say how glad you are to see me.”

  “I always try to stick as closely as possible to the truth,” Bobby retorted.

  “Been having another heart-to-heart with the old girl?” McKie asked, ignoring this. “I guessed it might be that when I saw your car standing here. Get anything out of her?” He evidently expected no reply to this and he got none. He went on: “I was thinking of coming to join in, but I wasn’t sure of my welcome.”

  “You might have been,” Bobby growled.

  “Do I seem to recognize a double entendre?” McKie inquired doubtfully, trying to look hurt. “Last time I tackled the old girl she got reaching for the broom—not that I would have minded that so much, but there was a slop-pail as well and I had on my very best reach-me-downs. Violent old party. Do you think she did it?”

  “What I think,” Bobby said tartly, “is that I’ve no time to waste listening to you asking questions you know perfectly well I shan’t answer.”

  “No, I know,” McKie agreed. “It’s just a vague hope you might let something slip I could turn into a front-page scare headline. And let me tell you if we weren’t such pals, and always ready to help each other, I should probably get up on my own hind legs, too, and turn over the hot bit in my pocket to my editor, same as is my professional duty, instead of to you, like the good little citizen from Golders Green I am, and no hope of lollipops in return from hidebound officials like Mr Bobby Owen, may his digestion soon be even as mine.”

  “Cut the back chat,” Bobby told him. “If you’ve anything to tell me, let’s have it. Is it Sticker Sims?”

  “There’s perspicacity for you,” exclaimed McKie, and this time meaning it.
“Always know it all before being told, don’t you?” He produced from his pocket-book a dirty scrap of paper and handed it to Bobby. “Delivered by special messenger last night,” he said. “Must be Sims. Can’t be anyone else.”

  Bobby took the paper. There was neither date nor signature, and the writing was in block letters, crudely formed. The message ran:

  “In confidence like, how about coming in on a deal with his Highness, you know what I mean, for what’s his by rights and might save from unpleasantness what could land him where a gent like him wouldn’t want to be, same being all on the square, fair price, fair deal, fair shares for a pal come in to fix it right, fair does all round. If he don’t want, there’s others. Ring up later.”

  “That’s Sims sure enough,” Bobby said.

  “Does it mean he killed poor old Teddy Pyle?” McKie asked, rather doubtfully.

  “Sounds to me more like blackmail,” Bobby said thoughtfully. “There was a whiff of that earlier in the case, you remember. I don’t know, though. I shouldn’t have expected Sims to go in for blackmail. Nothing much he would draw the line at. Bad enough record in all conscience, but—blackmail. In gaol men will boast about every crime under the sun, exaggerate it. But men who would rob their mother on her death-bed, or sneak his last penny out of a blind man’s tray, won’t admit to blackmail if they can help. Nobody without his own little private scruple somewhere. There’s a sort of emphasis, too, on fair deals all round. But then, how did he get hold of what he thinks the Duke of Blegborough will pay up for? Plainly that’s who he means by ‘his Highness’.”

  “Gone one up from Your Grace to His Highness,” commented McKie. “Look, all us chaps feel rather badly about it. Pyle wasn’t such a bad sort as proprietors go. Not that we common, garden, three-a-penny chaps ever saw much of him. He liked to sit above the turmoil and the strife and let go an occasional thunderbolt to show he was still there. Nobody ever took much notice. And quite reasonable if firmly tackled. Of course there’s a lot to be said for bumping off a proprietor or two from time to time, but we don’t like outsiders butting in. Why, when I told my boss I had something hot I meant to pass on to you blokes first, he said that was all right by him if it would help you get your man. That shows you—an editor turning down a bit of hot news.”

  “Did you get a ring?” Bobby asked.

  “Oh, yes,” McKie said. “It wasn’t Sims. A woman’s voice. My guess is Sims was there, telling her what to say. There were long pauses when I expect she was putting her hand over the receiver so I couldn’t hear when she was talking to him. I told her I had to know more before I took it on, and they must ring me again when they were ready to tell me a bit more.”

  “Have they?” Bobby asked.

  “No. I’ve got two of our brightest boys on the job. One to stall as long as possible if they come through, and one to ring the office to let your chaps know.”

  “When was all this?”

  “Late last night, getting on for twelve. If it’s Sims, he may have taken fright—cold feet?”

  “Might be,” Bobby agreed. “You haven’t said anything to the Duke, have you?”

  “Knocked him out of bed last night,” McKie admitted. “I thought it better, in case Sims changed his mind and tried to do a deal direct. I don’t think he quite liked it when I warned him not to try to handle it himself. If he didn’t want the police in on his private affairs, us chaps were always ready to help him, and he could trust us implicitly—that is, when it was Morning Daily, though not always everyone else. Because there were one or two papers that did sometimes fail a little in tact and good taste.”

  “He didn’t fall for that guff, did he?” Bobby asked incredulously.

  “Well, you know,” McKie said. “I rather think he did. It’s not brains the poor fish wants, just experience. If I could have him to teach him the facts of life for a time, he would be fully up to standard—police standard, I mean, not newspaper standard. We’ve got one of our best men—the best I might say, after me,” McKie interposed modestly—“to handle that end. Look. What is it Sims has got hold of he wants to sell? Are they the ‘family papers’ Chrines talked about and Pyle was trying to buy? If they are—well, are they the same that were supposed to be in Janet Merton’s coffin? If they are, how did Chrines get hold of them? What about Pyle getting them from him by some bit of funny work. Chrines finding out, trying to get them back, and in the row Pyle being shot?”

  “It’s a plausible theory,” Bobby admitted. “There are difficulties in the way though and half a dozen others equally plausible.”

  “My editor told me,” McKie said carelessly, but with a wary eye on Bobby to see how he took the suggestion, “to try to get a talk with Chrines—we thought he might talk more freely to us than to you with your handcuffs in your pocket. Or how about me going along with you and nothing published till passed?”

  “You know very well I never carry handcuffs in my pocket,” Bobby retorted.

  McKie’s suggestion was not very welcome, though it had been plain that it was coming. But he had no power to prevent McKie interviewing Chrines sooner or later and he had well-grounded fears that no warning he could give Chrines against talking to the Press would avail against McKie’s powers of persuasion and cajolery. Far better for any such interview to take place while Bobby was present and able more or less to control the talk. Besides, McKie did deserve some recognition. He had brought a piece of information that might prove of great importance and that did appear more or less to fit into the private theory Bobby had in his mind and still hoped would in the end prove correct.

  “Well, what do you say?” McKie asked, breaking in suddenly on Bobby’s prolonged meditation. “Guff apart, us chaps can do a lot one way or the other, and I know a good deal already.”

  “Oh, tag along if you want to,” Bobby said. “I never know whether you Press boys are the greatest nuisance ever or such a help we should have to invent you if you didn’t exist.”

  “Give us the benefit of the doubt,” McKie retorted, and then they started off without further palaver.

  Soon therefore the two cars drew up by Chrines’s cottage, and, under a battery of doubtful and suspicious eyes, their occupants alighted. This time Bobby’s knock was soon answered by an unwashed, unshaven sleepy-eyed Chrines, who, though it was now beginning to draw near noon, had apparently not been long out of bed. He acknowledged Bobby’s greeting with a surly scowl, looked doubtfully at McKie, muttered something half inaudible about why were they coming bothering him again, and went back into the cottage, where the remnants of an uninviting looking breakfast—or was it lunch?—stood on the table by the window. Bobby and McKie followed, and Chrines said over his shoulder:

  “How anyone is expected to get any work done with these perpetual interruptions, I don’t know. Not that I suppose that interests you at all. What’s poetry to you, I wonder? Nothing probably. Never heard of Manley Hopkins, have you?”

  “Never,” promptly answered Bobby, not very truthfully, but anything to humour a witness, especially if it put that witness into a good temper, and gave him a sense of superiority than which nothing makes people more talkative. He went on: “Awfully sorry about bothering you, especially when you’re busy, but one or two things have come to our attention we would like cleared up if possible. We have information that a woman was seen in your company shortly before Mr Pyle was killed. Who was it?”

  “Who told you that?” demanded Chrines. “All nonsense. I’m always alone when I’m out late on the moor, and I often am. It is there in solitude, in the loneliness, in the darkness, in the beauty of the starlight night that inspiration seems to come to me most easily.”

  “Cripes,” said McKie, but turned the word into something between a choke and a cough as he saw the outraged poet give him a furious glance.

  “I can well understand that,” said Bobby politely, making an effort, dexterously avoided, to tread on McKie’s toe as a warning to him to be more careful. “Was it Mrs Asprey you met?�
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  “Well, it wouldn’t be, would it?” Chrines retorted. “We aren’t so friendly as all that. I’m a living reminder to her of what she wants to forget. I know nothing about her and don’t want to.”

  Bobby looked at him doubtfully. He felt Chrines was lying, he noted that Chrines had given no direct denial, merely evading the question; he did not quite understand why. After a short pause, filled by McKie’s offer of a cigarette to Chrines, its acceptance and lighting, he said:

  “There’s a footprint, a woman’s, near the caravan. You’ll have heard about that. Everyone has. It may have been any woman’s. It may also have been Mrs Asprey’s. It seems most likely it is hers.”

  “Well, if it is, I don’t know anything about it,” Chrines persisted sulkily. “She may be there all night and every night, for all I know. Get that? I’ve never seen her on the moor, I didn’t see her that night, and I never have. Never. Neither that night nor any other.”

  “Don’t protest too much,” Bobby said. “Are you prepared to repeat all that in court? On oath?” Chrines did not answer, but he looked uncomfortable, for even to-day a difference is felt between the lie, common or garden variety, and the lie under oath, perjury. Bobby saw that momentary hesitation, that passing discomfort, and resumed, speaking slowly and gravely: “If you do, can you stand up to cross-examination by a Q.C.? Not everyone can, I think, for in cross-examination sometimes the truth comes out, or at least the lie is made plain and evident.”

  “Oh, well,” Chrines muttered, sulkily, resentfully, evidently badly frightened by the picture Bobby had drawn, “if you must know—she was there all right. So was I. Why not? I promised I wouldn’t tell anyone. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to put you on her. She hasn’t been even halfway decent to me, but still—well, she was my father’s wife, wasn’t she? and I suppose it’s natural for her to feel sore at me.”