Death Among the Sunbathers

by E. R. Punshon

‘If you get to know anything more, especially about any idea you think this Owen fellow you talk about may have got in his head,’ Mr Bryan remarked, ‘let me know. You understand my interest? A scandal might be absolutely fatal to the establishment. Fatal,’ he repeated.

  ‘Daresay it might,’ agreed Bobs-the-Boy. ‘Fatal,’ he repeated in his turn. ‘Fatal – anyway, that’s what it’ll be to some if Owen gets to the bottom of who it was really did in that bit of skirt.’

  He chuckled as if he thought the joke a good one, an opinion Mr Bryan apparently did not share, since he did not indulge in the contortion of the muscles round the mouth that with him did duty for a smile. Instead he scowled and turned away, but had only gone a yard or two when Bobs-the-Boy called him back.

  ‘There’s something I could show you, mister,’ he said, regarding thoughtfully the ten shilling note in his hand, ‘something as might be interesting and then again it mightn’t.’

  ‘What is it?’ Mr Bryan demanded.

  Bobs-the-Boy said nothing but continued to regard with the same interest the ten shilling note in his hand.

  Mr Bryan produced his pocket-book again and taking out a pound note – he had no more of the ten shilling notes left – regarded it with equal interest.

  It was a silent contest of will power in which Bobs-the-Boy was the winner.

  ‘Oh, well,’ Bryan said, ‘give me that ten shilling note back and you shall have this one instead.’

  He held it out as he spoke and Bobs-the-Boy accepted it but omitted to hand back the other, on which indeed his grip tightened.

  ‘Come along of this way, mister,’ he said, and led Mr Bryan to a spot behind some bushes not far away where, hidden in a convenient hole, were two or three bottles.

  ‘Whisky,’ Mr Bryan exclaimed; ‘they are whisky bottles.’

  ‘They are that,’ agreed Bobs-the-Boy, ‘only empty now,’ he added with a kind of lingering regret.

  ‘Where did they come from?’ demanded Mr Bryan sternly.

  ‘Half a crown’s what I was give to take them away,’ Bobs-the-Boy explained, ‘a measly half-crown, and every one of ’em drained as dry as a pub after closing hours. Half a crown, and that not give willing neither, but along of me happening along just as they was being put outside like.’

  Mr Bryan was bending over the empty evidences of guilt.

  ‘I thought yesterday I noticed something about Dodd’s breath,’ he said gloomily. ‘Peppermint... I wondered why... I shall speak to him.’

  Bobs-the-Boy grinned, looked at his two notes, and seemed suddenly to decide that the two of them deserved full candour.

  ‘I don’t know nothing about him,’ he said, ‘it was the lady.’

  ‘Miss James,’ cried Bryan. ‘You don’t mean Miss James...?’

  Bobs-the-Boy nodded.

  ‘Her all right,’ he said, ‘but don’t go for to give it away as it was me put you on her. But it was down her throat that little lot went all right, and she showed it, too. Else as like as not that half-crown would have been twopence and no more,’ he added, ‘judging from the time it took to get that much out of her.’

  ‘You can trust me,’ Mr Bryan repeated mechanically. He looked more troubled and disturbed still. ‘That’s why she went to bed with a headache,’ he observed, ‘so early last night.’

  ‘Got up with one more like, if you arst me,’ retorted Bobs-the-Boy.

  ‘It’s all this murder,’ Mr Bryan exclaimed. ‘It’s got on her nerves, it’s got on Zachary Dodd’s nerves, it’s got on my nerves, too. It’s the only possible explanation... it’s been working on their nerves, the thought of it.’

  ‘I shouldn’t wonder,’ agreed Bobs-the-Boy.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Curtis is Afraid

  While this conversation had been going on between little Mr Bryan and the man who called himself Bobs-the-Boy, and so establishing for them a certain sense of intimacy and co-operation, Superintendent Mitchell was back once more busy at his desk. There, while he was occupied with fresh reports that had come in during the day, he received with some surprise the unexpected information that Mr Curtis had called and wished to see him.

  On Mitchell’s desk lay a fresh copy, just obtained from the office of the paper, of that number of the Evening Announcer he and Ferris had found in the Leadeane Grange outbuilding. The actual paper itself was now with a handwriting expert, together with some specimens of Curtis’s writing to compare with that in which the crossword puzzle had been partly filled in. There was also on the desk a note of the reply given by the publisher of the paper to Mitchell’s questions regarding the exact time at which the various editions of the Evening Announcer, from the noon betting sheet of the last issue, would be on sale in Leadeane village and in the various districts on the way there.

  It was with a certain warmth of manner that Mitchell greeted his visitor whom he had directed should be shown in at once.

  ‘You know, I was rather hoping for a chat with you,’ he said genially. ‘Sit down and have a cigarette?’

  He launched into a discourse on the pleasures and advantages to be derived from the practice of smoking, but Curtis refused the proffered cigarette and interrupted the discourse, for he had not come to talk of tobacco.

  ‘What I want to ask,’ he said abruptly, ‘is how you are getting on and how near you are to success.’

  ‘By success, meaning – ?’ asked Mitchell.

  ‘The arrest of the murderer,’ Curtis answered, staring at him. ‘Isn’t that what we want?’

  ‘It is often easy enough to arrest a murderer,’ Mitchell answered quietly. ‘What’s more difficult is proof that that’s what he is.’

  ‘Have you got any proof at all yet?’ demanded Curtis. Mitchell, with an eye on the copy of the Evening Announcer lying on his desk, replied that as yet they were not sure; they had something, but whether it was proof he could not say as yet, and Curtis snorted indignantly.

  ‘There’s another thing I wanted to speak about,’ he said, ‘there’s one of your men, Owen, I think he’s called.’

  ‘Owen? Oh yes,’ said Mitchell, interested. ‘Have you seen him?’

  ‘No. I’ve heard about him, though.’

  Mitchell shook his head.

  ‘Owen’s different from the good little girls that are seen and not heard,’ he remarked, ‘because he’s heard of but not seen, though I’ve made an appointment with him for ten to-night. But what about him?’

  ‘He’s been making a fool of himself,’ Curtis grumbled; ‘he’s been following Miss Frankland and asking a lot of fool questions.’

  ‘But if we don’t ask questions in our line,’ protested Mitchell gently, ‘no one would ever tell us anything, and if no one ever told us things, how should we ever find anything out? But that’s what makes this case so difficult,’ he added complainingly, ‘no one comes forward to tell us anything.’

  ‘Is that what you wait for?’ demanded Curtis scornfully, ‘for people to come and tell you things?’

  ‘It’s the only way,’ Mitchell answered, ‘to get those who know already to come and tell you all about it.’

  Curtis fairly snorted his contempt.

  ‘If that’s the way you go to work,’ he said, ‘whoever murdered my wife seems fairly safe, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ protested Mitchell as mildly as before. ‘It’s astonishing the things that people come and tell us, sometimes even the truth,’ he added musingly. ‘I’ve known it happen. More often lies, of course. The only people who aren’t any help are those who don’t tell us anything at all. I’m hoping there is something you have come to tell us, Mr Curtis.’

  ‘Yes, there is,’ Curtis answered, ‘and I only hope it means something. My wife had a cigarette-case – tortoiseshell mounted in silver. It’s in the possession of Mr Hunter now.’ Mitchell looked at him keenly.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Either it or one so exactly like it...’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said Mitchell, for the
qualification seemed to him to be important. There are so many cigarette-cases in tortoiseshell mounted in silver, and he was not sure that Curtis was as yet sufficiently calm, sufficiently recovered from the shock of recent events, to be a good witness. ‘You mean Mr Hunter, the wholesale fur dealer of Howland Yard?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ll tell you something else,’ Curtis went on. ‘I’m certain in my own mind Jo was following up what she thought was going to prove a big story. It was something big she thought she had got a hint of. It was that took her out to Leadeane Grange, and I think you know already she had been to Howland Yard once or twice recently?’

  ‘Might that not have been to get a new fur coat?’ Mitchell asked. ‘That’s how it was put to us.’

  ‘She had one already, she wouldn’t want another.’

  ‘Some women, even if they had two, wouldn’t object to a third,’ Mitchell observed.

  ‘In any case,’ Curtis said impatiently, ‘she wouldn’t have gone to a stranger for a new coat, when one of her oldest friends is in the fur trade. But she went to Howland Yard for some good reason, and – this is important – Hunter used to visit Leadeane Grange.’

  ‘For the sun bathing?’ suggested Mitchell.

  ‘I don’t believe that, that was only a blind; he went there to meet someone, it’s up to you to find out who,’ Curtis said with vehemence. ‘Her sister has the same idea, she won’t say so but I know she has; Sybil I mean, Sybil Frankland. There was something Jo was following up and it was to stop her she was murdered.’

  ‘What makes you say Sybil Frankland thinks so too?’ Mitchell asked.

  ‘Well, I know she does,’ Curtis insisted. ‘She won’t say, but I know what she’s thinking. I got her and Hunter together to see if she would recognize Jo’s cigarette-case, and I saw the way she looked at him.’

  ‘Did she identify the cigarette-case?’ Mitchell asked.

  ‘He wasn’t using it,’ Curtis answered. ‘I asked him where it was and he said he had lost it.’

  Mitchell shook his head gently.

  ‘That’s the way with you amateurs,’ he said, ‘probably now we’ve missed what might be a valuable clue. If you had come and told us first instead of letting Hunter know you were suspicious and had noticed the thing, we might have managed to get hold of it.’

  ‘I wanted to be sure first,’ Curtis said, a little disconcerted. ‘I can still swear he had a cigarette-case in his possession exactly like the one belonging to Jo. And I’ve been through the list of things recovered from the fire. The cigarette-case wasn’t mentioned.’

  ‘I’ll have another examination made,’ Mitchell promised. ‘It’ll bear looking into, though if Hunter’s guilty all that’s happened is that you’ve warned him to destroy a piece of highly incriminating evidence. But it doesn’t seem very likely, if he is guilty, he would keep a thing like a cigarette-case and use it. Of course it’s possible. One can never tell. Criminals do odd things at times. Oh, Mr Curtis, there’s a thing I wanted to ask, and as you’re here I’ll take the opportunity if I may. Do you take any interest in crossword puzzles?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Just that – do you ever try to do crossword puzzles?’

  ‘Sometimes. Why?’

  ‘Ever try to do this one?’ Mitchell asked, handing him the back number of the Evening Announcer that had been lying on his desk.

  Curtis took it and looked at it.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he said, ‘no, I’m sure... I think I’ve seen it before, or something like it. Why?’

  ‘One of the clues,’ Mitchell remarked, pointing to it, ‘is “Crossed the Rubicon”. I suppose the answer would be “Caesar”? Do you mind writing that in?’

  The eyes of the two men met, Curtis’s angry and inquiring, Mitchell’s merely inscrutable. It was again a conflict of rival wills, but Mitchell’s was the stronger, for he knew his purpose while Curtis was merely puzzled. He began to write, using his own fountain pen, since Mitchell had offered him none and no other was in sight. When he had written the word, he said,

  ‘What’s the idea?’

  ‘It may help me to find out the truth,’ Mitchell answered gently. ‘This other clue now, it says, “Man’s name”. “Cyril” would do, I suppose, or “Cecil”, for that matter. Will you write them both in, if you don’t mind?’

  Curtis, frowning and puzzled, did as he was asked. In each of the three names, ‘Caesar’ ‘Cyril’ ‘Cecil’, he employed the same characteristic twirl to the capital ‘C’.

  ‘What next?’ he demanded.

  ‘I’ll have another examination made of what was left of the Bayard Seven,’ Mitchell promised, ‘to see if any sign can be found of a cigarette-case. I know there’s no mention of anything of the sort in the list of articles identified. Perhaps something not recognized before may be now we know we are looking for a cigarette-case. If not, we shall have to try to get hold of the one in Mr Hunter’s possession. If it can be proved to be the same – that would mean a lot. But tortoiseshell cases mounted in silver are common enough, unless this one had anything special about it you could swear to.’ Curtis shook his head and Mitchell went on,

  ‘Your statement is that on the day of the murder, after you gave up waiting for your wife outside the George and Dragon public-house on the Leadeane Road, you went straight back to your flat in Chelsea. I suggest that that is not true. Instead you went on to Leadeane Grange. You meant to wait for Mrs Curtis there. There was a slight shower of rain. It only lasted a minute or two. Partly for shelter perhaps, or because you did not wish to be seen, you went inside one of the outbuildings near the car park. While you were waiting you amused yourself doing a crossword puzzle in that night’s Evening Announcer you must have bought in Leadeane because it was not on sale before then.’

  Curtis had listened in silence. The only comment he made when Mitchell paused was,

  ‘How did you find out?’

  ‘You agree that is so?’ Mitchell asked. ‘You agree you did not tell the truth when you said you went straight back to your flat?’

  I daresay you won’t believe it,’ Curtis answered slowly, ‘but at the time I thought it was the truth. Afterwards I began to have a vague idea – that it wasn’t. I had had a good deal to drink. I couldn’t remember clearly, my mind was all hazy and confused. All I knew was I had been saying things Jo wouldn’t forget in a hurry. That was all I was really clear about, that and waiting for her outside that little wayside pub. It was only some time afterwards that I began to think I had been to Leadeane as well; even now I don’t remember anything about a crossword puzzle. I suppose I hardly knew what I was doing, what with having been drinking and my quarrel with Jo.’

  ‘Then you agree your first story was false and instead of returning at once to your Chelsea flat you went on to Leadeane and waited there in a kind of concealment till Mrs Curtis left?’

  ‘So far as I know I was there only a very short time,’ Curtis answered. ‘I think I began to feel that Jo wouldn’t even let me talk to her while I was like that. I went straight back to Chelsea and started drinking again, and I don’t know much more till I heard the phone ringing and Sybil telling me what had happened. What with my head still a bit dizzy, and that coming on the top of it – you know, it is a bit of a shock to hear your wife’s been murdered – well, I wasn’t in any state to remember very clearly what I had actually done.’

  ‘Is there anything else you’ve forgotten?’ Mitchell asked dryly, and though he had not meant much when he put the question he saw Curtis shrink terribly before it, shrink in a literal way as though he grew physically smaller.

  ‘That’s not... possible,’ he croaked rather than spoke, ‘not possible,’ and startled at the idea, Mitchell realized that sometimes the thought came terribly to Curtis that perhaps it was in fact he who was guilty, that, distracted and half drunken as he was, he had committed the crime, in some abnormal, as it were, unconscious condition, so that all memory of it had passed from him.

  ‘Not p
ossible,’ Mitchell decided to himself, ‘couldn’t be that... yet it’s what he’s afraid of.’

  After a long pause, while Curtis sat downcast and brooding and Mitchell in equal silence turned this new thought over and over in his mind, the superintendent said at last, ‘Well, Mr Curtis, that’s all I’ve to ask you at present. Tomorrow perhaps I shall want another talk. I’m seeing Detective Owen to-night at ten to get his report, and perhaps after that we shall be able to see our way more clearly.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Miss James’s Nerves

  Little Mr Bryan’s determination to speak very seriously to Miss James about the consumption of whisky she had been indulging in that Bobs-the-Boy had so treacherously revealed, he put into force that same evening in dramatic fashion.

  While she was taking a rest, full length on the sofa in her room just by the open window after a laborious and even exciting day – a new client, enjoying a sun bath on the roof, had dropped off to sleep and wakened to find all the skin off her nose and most of it off the rest of her face as well, her reaction to these facts taking the form of violent hysterics – Mr Bryan knocked gently and, being bidden to enter, came in. Without speaking, while she watched him, he began to conduct an ostentatious search, looking behind chairs and curtains and in other obvious and unlikely places. After a time she said sourly,

  ‘What’s the game?’

  ‘I am looking,’ explained Mr Bryan, ‘for bottles of whisky.’

  Miss James put out her hand for her bag and produced a bunch of keys that she threw across to him with such good aim or luck that it caught him on an elbow that had but little flesh to protect it. He said something or another, and Miss James waited till he had finished. Then she said,

  ‘There’s two in the first-aid cupboard. Any one but a fool would have looked there first. One’s empty,’ she added, and as an afterthought, ‘the other’s got nothing in it.’

  Mr Bryan went across to the indicated cupboard and verified these facts.

  ‘You know what we agreed?’ he asked.

  ‘What’s happened wasn’t in our agreement,’ she answered moodily.