“How did you know?” she demanded. “Can’t you leave the poor boy alone? He is nearly crazy, distracted with the way you keep on at him, nagging and threatening and bullying.”
“He has nothing to fear unless he is guilty, as I think he may be,” Bobby answered gravely. “He would be well advised to tell us all he knows, and I think that is much.”
“Nonsense! he’s just an irresponsible child,” Mrs Asprey retorted. “It’s a disgrace the way you trapped him into saying I was there—bawling at him till he hardly knew where he was, catching him out in trifles, and pretending that showed he was lying, and you were going to arrest him then and there. No wonder the poor boy broke down.”
“The poor boy seems to have given you a rather highly coloured account of our talk,” Bobby remarked drily.
“Well, don’t try that with me,” Mrs Asprey warned him, and he assured her—both smilingly and truthfully—that nothing could be farther from his thought and intention. “Not that I mind your knowing,” she interrupted these assurances. “It’s only the way you wormed it out of the child. If you want to know, I’ve been there every night since Mr Pyle came, watching to see what he and that man of his—the man who shot him, I mean, before he ran off—were going to do. It didn’t take me long to guess he was meaning to open the grave himself, if he couldn’t get permission. I suppose he thought he was so important he could do things like that. I was there, though they didn’t see me, when Hagen chased them away. Pyle didn’t know then what a careful watch Hagen kept. But even if he did manage somehow to get Hagen out of the way, he wouldn’t me. I was making sure of that.” She paused, and when she spoke again, it was with a low, steady flame of determination in voice and manner alike. “His letters are mine,” she said. “Stephen’s letters, and no one shall have them but me.” Again she paused, and still when she spoke it was as if every fibre of her being was concentrated into what she said. “Neither God nor devil nor man,” she said, and while she was speaking, Bobby was almost persuaded that so great a force of will, so fierce an energy, must somehow, sometime, someway, achieve its purpose. Was there indeed anything from which, to do so, it would shrink? Then, she said—an anti-climax, he felt: “No, nor you either,” and with that sank back in her chair as though exhausted.
Bobby allowed two or three minutes to elapse to give her time to recover herself, so emotionally shaken did she seem, before he said:
“I can assume, then, that he told you of the loss of what he calls his family papers?”
“Assume what you like,” she answered in a voice now grown tired and faint.
“He didn’t tell you what they were?”
“If he had done,” she retorted, with a flash of her former energy, “I shouldn’t tell you. I don’t repeat what has been said to me in confidence.”
“It’s a point that interests me a good deal,” Bobby explained. “I mean why they were so important as to cause their loss to be such a shock. If he panicked as he did, it was because of their loss, not because of anything I said. He strikes me as a very unbalanced young man, and he may easily do something to make things still worse. If he tries to recover his papers himself, he may find he’s running bigger risks than he knows. Did he seem to suspect anyone?”
“He mentioned that man Mr Pyle brought with him. Sticker he called him.”
“Did he, though,” Bobby exclaimed. “That may be important.”
“Why?” Mrs Asprey asked; and when Bobby did not answer, went on suspiciously: “How did you know he was here?”
“Oh, I just thought he might come to you,” Bobby explained. “He wants someone to hold his hand all the time—mothering. The mother complex,” and now Mrs Asprey was really angry, not as she had been before, with the stark, strange wrath of the tragic heroine, prepared for all, since all was at stake, but angry with the anger of an offended virago, with a broom-and-slop-pail anger.
“I . . . you . . . he . . .” she stuttered, so near to choking she could hardly get the words out. “Mothering him . . . me . . . mothering . . . me . . . him . . . that . . .” and now words failed her, and she lapsed into a bewildered, astonished, protesting surprise.
“I’m so sorry,” Bobby said, getting somewhat hurriedly to his feet, startled by the violence of the storm he had aroused and a little afraid that next thing would be the appearance on the scene of a broom-and-slop-pail complex. “It was only an idea I had he might come to you, make a clean breast of having let it out he saw you, and be comforted—the way kiddies run to Mother to tell her all about it. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“I’ll mother him,” she stormed, “next time I see him, if I ever do. You as well if you come poking round here any more.”
“Oh, I say,” protested Bobby, more than a little alarmed at this threat; and then, in the hope of averting her wrath, or at any rate changing its channel, he added: “A revolver has been found on the moor. Did you know?”
“Are you going to pretend that poor child used it?” she demanded. “Don’t be silly. You keep talking and talking, as if what Stephen put in Janet Merton’s coffin had anything to do with him. It hasn’t. He’s not her son. He knows he isn’t. He likes to pretend. That’s all. He may be Stephen’s son, but not hers. His mother was a Mrs Chrines. I remember her quite well. Her husband kept a public-house near where we were living then. I knew all about it. I always did. Her husband didn’t care. He was doing the same sort of thing. Stephen was infatuated. He always was at first. With all of them in turn. Then he tired and came back to me. But before he tired he generally wrote a sonnet—to her nose or her hair or something. Very bad most of them, and often the same one when he couldn’t work the new love’s name in. Mrs Chrines’s was Gladys, but he wrote her the usual routine sonnet, all the same. That boy showed it me. He had a few letters, too, notes rather. Promises to see her soon and excuses for not coming. It all amounted to less than nothing, and so I told him.”
“I see,” Bobby said, without pointing out that now she had given him all the information he had asked for previously and that then she had indignantly refused to supply. But he had still to ask himself if Chrines had told her everything. Probably not, he thought, for in what Mrs Asprey had said there seemed nothing to induce the panic into which Chrines had been thrown by the discovery of his loss. “Well, thank you very much,” Bobby said finally. “I won’t trouble you any longer.”
He went away then, leaving her looking more subdued, more thoughtful, more troubled, or, at least, less self-confident, than always before she had seemed to be.
These talks, with Hagen and with Mrs Asprey, had delayed him so much that it was late before Bobby got back to Penton. Neither Major Rowley nor his second in command, Superintendent Evans, was there, however, both being still engaged in following up the discovery of the revolver on the moor of which Bobby had heard from Hagen, and other less important aspects of the case. So till their return Bobby busied himself drawing up a full report of his day’s activities and of some deductions, but not all, that he thought could properly be drawn from them. Facts he never attempted to hold back for even the shortest time, but his opinions he liked to keep to himself till he had evidence to support them. This task he had only just completed when McKie appeared to show Bobby the story he had written for Morning Daily of recent happenings.
It was a masterpiece of ‘I could if I would but I won’t’, leaving the reader—unless he were unusually ‘newspaper resistant’—convinced that Morning Daily knew it all, and was only waiting for dilatory official action to catch up for everything to be told in succeeding ‘exclusives’. But there was nothing that could reasonably be objected to, even if Bobby did rather wince at the implied picture of dim-witted police slowly blundering on in the wake of, and under the guidance of, Morning Daily.
“Got a good conceit of yourself, haven’t you?” Bobby growled, handing it back.
“It is important,” McKie pronounced solemnly, “that the implicit faith of readers in the omniscience, benevolence, and
wisdom of Morning Daily should never be diminished but, on the contrary, continually increased.”
“Oh, stow it!” retorted Bobby, “and don’t try to infect innocent-minded policemen with your horrible journalistic cynicism. By the way, did you see Chrines when he got back?”
“No, first thing I knew was when I heard him starting off on his motor-bike. I didn’t know he had one. Any idea where he was likely to be going?”
“I wish I had,” Bobby answered. “You never know what sort of fool trick he won’t be playing next. As soon as Rowley gets back I’m going to ask him to have Chrines picked up as soon as possible.”
“Are you, though?” McKie said, surprised. “You really think you’ve got enough to go on? Well, that’s all right by me. I don’t mind who you pinch—that ‘exclusive’ of mine covers every possible candidate.” He got up to go, and then seemed to remember. “I had nearly forgotten,” he said. “You wanted to know if poor old Ted Pyle had taken a gun with him to guard against the perils of voyaging in a solitary caravan. So I set my spies to work. Always ready to help—that’s me. They report that Pyle borrowed a gun from one of our subs—probably he had it for protection against some poor devil like me whose best ever story he had cut to hell—and then had sent the thing back through the post. Sticker Sims had undertaken to clean it, and then found it wouldn’t work. Safety-catch stuck fast at off.”
Bobby stared at him, as completely taken aback, as utterly surprised as ever he had been in all his long experience.
“If I had known that before,” he said slowly and then, more slowly still: “I ought to have known that before.”
“What’s biting you?” McKie demanded; but Bobby made no answer.
So lost in thought he was, indeed, he hardly heard McKie repeat the question. Nor when McKie, who knew these moods of complete abstraction, gave it up and took himself off, did Bobby notice his departure, beyond a vague wave of the hand and a muttered:
“You’ll know some day.”
But presently Bobby gathered his papers together and went to see if he could find Major Rowley, who in fact had just returned and who was looking flushed and excited.
“Case practically closed,” he told Bobby. “The revolver those kids found is the one belonging to young Day-Bell, and it was the one used in the murder.”
CHAPTER XXIX
BEATEN UP
BY THE last train leaving Penton for London that night, Bobby travelled to town. He had the compartment to himself, and his thoughts were so busy with the conclusions that he had so little desired to reach, but that it seemed were now being forced upon him, that when he reached the London terminus he nearly forgot to alight.
There was much, he felt, that needed his personal attention; and it was still early next morning when he started out, his first task to prepare the papers he had brought with him for the conference it would be necessary to hold, since for the action he contemplated, authority superior to his own would be required—and unless he could put his case very clearly and convincingly, that authority might not be granted. Then there were urgent instructions to be issued for every possible effort to be made to find and ‘bring in’ both Sticker Sims, and young Sam Chrines.
“The ‘Sticker’,” Bobby remarked to the Chief Inspector to whom he was talking, “is no meat for a youngster like Chrines, who is a mere baby in practical matters. If Sticker hears that Chrines is making inquiries about him, he may easily take alarm.”
“More than likely,” agreed the Chief Inspector. “There are times when fools rush in—”
“Where police fear to tread,” Bobby completed his sentence for him, but not as had been intended.
“Well, I wouldn’t say that altogether,” protested the Chief Inspector, more than a little offended by the use of the word ‘fear’.
“I should have said ‘angels’,” Bobby explained. “Quotation—‘where angels fear to tread’.”
“Oh, I see,” said the Inspector, but now more than a little puzzled by the use of the word ‘angels’, for, proud of his men as he was, he wasn’t sure that he could describe all of them as angels’—at any rate, not all of those under the rank of Chief Inspector.
“I wish,” Bobby went on, “we could keep an eye on Mr McKie, but I don’t think that can be done. Got to remember the power of the Press when it gets cross. I must ring McKie, though, and get old Tom Long’s address.”
“Old—who?” asked the Chief Inspector, trying to remember any criminal of that name.
“Professor of poetry at some University or another,” Bobby explained. “McKie told me about him. He is the great authority on Stephen Asprey’s work. He may be able to help. Heard anything from the Home Office?”
“They wrote Pyle,” replied the other, consulting a note he had by him, “that ‘up to the present no adequate reason seemed to have been presented demonstrating that an order for exhumation should be made available, but that the decision arrived at was tentative and remained open for reconsideration if more substantial grounds for the issue of the order heretofore referred to should at any future date be brought to their attention’.”
“What a mort of words,” commented Bobby, “for saying ‘no, but have another go if you want to’. What it means is that with a little more pressure and persistence Pyle would get his order all right. I shall have to pay them a visit and see what I can do in the ‘more substantial’ line. And I think we had better send a good man down to Blegborough to see if anything has been happening there and if Sims has put in an appearance. If I can manage it, I’ll pay Blegborough a visit myself later on. You might remember to see there’s a fast car available for me if necessary. You know there’ve been approaches to the Duke that rather smell of blackmail? I should call him the dark horse in all this. I’ve got a fairly clear idea in my mind of all the others, but not of him.”
“It’s about his wife and this Asprey bloke, and did he do her in out of jealousy, isn’t it?” the Chief Inspector asked.
Bobby nodded. He said:
“Any man—duke or dustman, innocent or guilty—faced with the prospect of a story like that being dug up after all this time, might react very violently. No telling. I think some would.”
“Smearing his wife, too,” the Chief Inspector commented, “and her dead as well. No good asking for an injunction either. Only make more talk. Sort of caught every way.” After a short pause, he added: “Might think there was only one way out.”
That ended their talk. The Chief Inspector went off to see that the measures Bobby had suggested were put into effect, and Bobby rang up the Morning Daily office to ask if he could be put through to McKie. Fortunately McKie was available, and soon Bobby heard his voice.
“Always come running to Papa when you’re up against it, don’t you?” it was saying. “What does little Tommy want now?”
“Less cheek, for one thing,” Bobby retorted. “When you were talking to Sam Chrines, do you remember saying anything about ‘Sticker’ Sims? It’s possible Chrines may be trying to find Sims to get back those papers of his. If he is, it might mean trouble.”
“So it might,” agreed McKie, and now his voice sounded a little uneasy. “Especially if ‘Sticker’ got it into his head Chrines was working for you. His sort don’t hold with amateurs interfering—don’t like it, offends their sense of fair play. I do remember warning Chrines to keep clear of Sims and laying it on a bit thick about Black Tom’s café in Soho, and how if you went in you were lucky to get out with your life—read ‘wallet’ for ‘life’ and perfectly true, whether extracted by cosh or by girl. Had I better ring Black Tom and tell him if Chrines turns up asking questions to get a Nannie to take him back to you?”
“I think perhaps the Nannie had better be me,” Bobby said. “I’ll go round there at once.”
He rang off then, made a note in his diary, caught a ’bus going Soho way, and was soon at Black Tom’s café. Incidentally Black Tom was not a coloured man, but an Irishman of a cautious and pacific temperament, who
always liked to stay in the background and to leave to other people any fighting that might be necessary. His real name was Tom Black, and, since he was of the dark type of Irishman, it had soon got itself transposed into Black Tom. Whereon, Mr Black, who had no colour prejudice so long as the money was right, changed the name of his establishment to ‘The Negro Boy’, though as Black Tom’s it was generally known.
Bobby’s entrance produced the usual atmosphere of uneasy tension that was so oddly apt to result among Black Tom’s customers from the appearance of a policeman—especially one of rank. Even those whose consciences were—for the moment—comparatively tranquil began to drink up their coffee or their soft drink, for it was, of course, not yet the permitted hour, and to decide to carry on their often confidential talk elsewhere. Bobby ordered a cup of coffee and a bun he had no intention of consuming—especially not the coffee—by way of paying his footing, assured Black Tom in answer to that gentleman’s solicitous inquiry that his health remained good, begged him not to be disappointed by this information, and explained that he wanted to get into touch with a youngster whose mother was anxious about him; and how Bobby wished Mrs Asprey could have heard that observation. The young man in question, Bobby went on to explain, had come up to London from Penton, and it was feared he might have got into bad company.
Mr Black listened very attentively, didn’t believe it, wondered what was behind it and then said:
“Now, could it be it’s the poor lad I took in last night after closing time, just as we were going to bed, keeping early hours here as we do? If you’ll step upstairs you can see for yourself if it’s like to be him you’re asking about. I’ve had the doc. in to see him. No bones broke and as well as ever in a day or two, but mighty lucky for him there was a bloke like me ready to do what I could out of Christian charity, same as a good Christian should,” for Mr Black was still a more or less devout member of the Church into which he had been born, and fully intended to go to confession as soon as his bank balance permitted, obtain full absolution, no matter how severe a penance a stiff-minded priest might impose, and so retire to his native island, there to live with a tranquil mind, his future secure both in this world and the next, of whose existence he never doubted for a moment or of the validity of the rules governing their acceptance or rejection. “Might have been dead by morning,” Mr Black added, “if left lying there all night, same as could have easy happened but for me,” and then he smirked and looked at Bobby, hoping—optimistically—for a word or two of commendation.
Brought to Light: A Bobby Owen Mystery Page 22