Death Among the Sunbathers

by E. R. Punshon

  ‘I saw you taking – her – away. What have you done...?’

  ‘You saw me when someone pulled the curtain back up here and the light showed me up, eh?’ Bobs-the-Boy asked. ‘Gave me a scare that did, I nearly dropped – what I was carrying, to run for it. Any one else see me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Gave me a scare,’ Bobs-the-Boy said again. ‘It’s always the way, things happen just as they didn’t ought. Just another half second and I should have been in among the trees and no one wouldn’t have seen nothing. It’s a wonder I didn’t just drop her and run for it. Good thing I didn’t though, if no one saw me but you. You’re sure of that?’

  ‘Yes. What have you... where have you... suppose they find...?’

  ‘Well, they won’t,’ Bobs-the-Boy retorted, ‘and never you mind what I done about it. What folk don’t know, they can’t tell. But you can take it from me – her dead corpse won’t never be found by no one, not never.’ He said that quite quietly, but with an accent of profound confidence and conviction it would have been difficult indeed to doubt. ‘Not possible,’ he repeated, ‘the way I’ve fixed things, not possible, no more than jumping over the moon or picking winners in a string without ever going wrong.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Miss James asked. ‘You can’t be sure! How can you be sure?’

  ‘Sure and certain,’ he asserted once again, ‘sure and certain as me and you sitting here, her dead corpse won’t never be found just simply because it never can be, not possible.’

  ‘What do you mean? What have you done?’

  ‘That’s my affair,’ he answered coolly. ‘I don’t tell everybody how it’s done... no one will ever find her dead corpse; why, I couldn’t even myself supposing I wanted to, which I don’t. But if I did, I couldn’t.’ He paused to chuckle softly to himself. ‘Don’t you worry none about that,’ he said. ‘It won’t be found, because – well, because it don’t exist no more, it just simply isn’t there to be found, that’s all.’

  ‘How can... you mean you’ve burnt it up or something?... you couldn’t... not so quickly.’

  ‘I’m not telling you no more,’ he answered coolly, ‘and I didn’t say anything about burning anything – anyone could do that, or try rather. I’m just telling you her dead corpse can’t be found because it don’t exist now and that’s gospel truth. Where’s the Guv’nor?’

  ‘He’s gone. He thought the police would be coming. So he’s gone.’

  ‘Bunked?’ cried Bobs-the-Boy, disgusted. ‘Well, I did think he had more sense than that – where’s he gone?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Abroad or somewhere?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she repeated. ‘He’s had his plans ready for long enough – he used to say you never know when things mightn’t go wrong. Oh, he’s clever, he thinks of everything. And no one will ever find him. Some snug hole he’s made ready where they’ll never find him.’

  ‘And Dodd, Mr Dodd, what about him?’ Bobs-the-Boy asked. ‘Lost his head and bunked too, I suppose?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she answered. ‘He hasn’t come back; he ran after Maurice Keene, he meant to kill him if he caught him, but I don’t know if he did. But he ran after him and he hasn’t come back again yet.’

  ‘Things seem to have been a bit lively after I went,’ observed Bobs-the-Boy drily. ‘I thought the Guv’nor had a cooler head on his shoulders, though. And that Hunter chap – what about him?’

  ‘I suppose he went away, some time or another,’ she answered. ‘We didn’t notice; when we remembered him he wasn’t there any longer.’

  ‘And me,’ complained Bobs-the-Boy, ‘fixing things up nice and quiet like, making it sure and certain no one couldn’t ever be charged with putting out that girl’s light, and I done it proper, too, so no one can’t ever be pinched for that, and then I come back here to find everyone’s done a bunk, and all the fat’s in the fire all over again. Suppose the “busies” had come before, what could they have proved? But suppose they come now and find every one’s run for it? Giving yourself away, I call it. What was it happened next after Zack Dodd unlocked the door into the corridor and told me to clear, same as I was only too glad to do?’

  ‘Maurice Keene came. He was looking for her. He kept asking questions, he suspected something. Esmy Bryan wanted to know if he would like to look in the next room, as he seemed to think the girl was hiding there. Of course Bryan thought that would be all right now you had gone and taken – taken her away as well. So he told Mr Keene to go and look for himself, and he did, and he found a handbag lying on the floor. I suppose you hadn’t noticed it. There was your handkerchief, too – the one you made into a noose. You left it lying on the floor. Keene knew the handbag belonged to – to her. You could see what he was thinking, and all at once he said he would show them both to Owen. And we knew what that would mean, and he saw us looking at him, and he understood, and he ran. He knocked Esmy over before he could do anything, and ran out of the house as hard as he could and Zack after him – we heard them run, the two of them, as fast as they could. Zack’s big and heavy, but he can run fast when he has to. And that’s all, for Zack’s not come back as yet.’

  ‘Well, now,’ Bobs-the-Boy exclaimed, ‘there’s a nice mess, and just when I thought I had everything fixed right. Why haven’t you bunked with the others anyhow? Bad for you as for them, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m waiting for Zack,’ she informed him. ‘I thought perhaps he would come back, and if he did and I wasn’t here, then he would kill me – he’s my husband, you know,’ she added as if to explain.

  ‘Oh, married, are you?’ Bobs-the-Boy grunted; ‘married – that means you act under his influence, in law, of course. I know that much. Rummy thing, the law. But it doesn’t help much. Who would have thought of Mr Bryan losing his head that way? Lay the best plans that ever were; and then they all go west, because someone acts the way no one ever could have dreamed of.’

  ‘I would have gone, too, if I had dared,’ she said moodily.

  ‘That means you’re as big a fool as he is,’ Bobs-the-Boy retorted angrily. He was evidently a good deal disturbed, and for a time he was silent, deep in thought apparently.

  Presently he went on. ‘They had no real evidence – the police I mean. What did it matter if Miss Frankland’s handbag was found here? Or my handkerchief either? Couldn’t I have picked it up in the grounds somewhere and brought it to you as instructed in all cases of lost property? And I might have wrapped it up in my handkerchief, mightn’t I? To keep it clean. What’s there in all that to make Dodd give himself away by trying to murder Keene?’

  ‘It wasn’t only that,’ she answered. ‘There’s the other thing, too. They’re suspecting us of that, too. There’s one of them called Owen – he’s everywhere, asking questions, questions; you can tell when you hear about them, what he’s thinking.’

  ‘What’s it matter what he’s thinking? What’s it matter what the whole boiling of them’s thinking?’ scoffed Bobs-the-Boy. ‘We should worry – what matters is what they’ve got they can put before a jury, and that’s not much. Don’t you realize the police haven’t got to know? – They’ve got to make a jury know, and know on the facts put before ’em. Why, I’ve heard of a fellow walking straight into the Yard where they were working overtime on a job he had done, and he knew they knew he had done, and ask them cool as you like, how they thought they were getting on, and tell them just the piece of evidence they wanted to bring it home to him – only he knew they couldn’t ever get it themselves, and what he said himself of course they couldn’t use. You lot were as safe as he was, if only you had had the sense to sit tight instead of bolting for it – or trying to murder Keene and perhaps succeeding for all I know – and you may get away with it once easy enough, and twice with a bit of luck, but not three times, unless you’ve been rubbing luck off all the sweepstake winners that ever were. What evidence was there against you? Not much that I can see, unless of course you tell yourself how you did it.
’

  ‘Well, we shan’t do that,’ Miss James remarked, smiling a little, for under the encouragement administered by Bobs-the-Boy she had become almost normal again – quite normal, indeed, but for a certain underlying excitement of reaction that showed itself in a necessity to talk and chatter, ‘not likely.’

  ‘Was it you did in the other bit of skirt?’ Bobs-the-Boy asked curiously, as if realizing that in this new garrulous mood she was likely to be willing to explain to him details he had often wondered about.

  ‘No, it wasn’t. I had nothing to do with it till it was all over,’ she answered passionately. ‘That’s why it’s so unfair I should be always dreaming of it, when I didn’t even know what they meant to do until it was over. And it was all her own fault.’

  ‘Trying to find things out that was no concern of hers?’ observed Bobs-the-Boy. ‘I suppose that was it?’

  ‘Yes, somehow she guessed. I expect it was something her sister, Sybil, said or told her; most likely Maurice Keene let out something to Sybil and then she told enough to Jo for her to guess. I expect that was it, but I don’t know. Then Jo came prowling about here to see what she could find out to make a big story for her paper. “The Announcer Unveils Sensational Plot”, all that sort of stuff. And she hid in that room next to this to hear what we were saying when we were talking together. Afterwards she tried to slip out, but most likely she had got nervous and excited by then, and she managed to knock something over and we heard it. So then we knew we had to stop her. But I had nothing to do with it. What I said was we must give it up. But they said it was too late for that, she knew too much already, and Esmy kept her talking and talking, while Zack went round to the car park and waited for her there. We got the attendant out of the way up here to look after a leaking tap. I went down to hit it with a hammer and make it leak worse, but only because they told me to. I didn’t know what for. Esmy left the girl outside the car park, and I came back here, and pretended to be busy with letters, and then I slipped out through the next room and the back stairs, without anyone seeing me, and across to the road, to wait there till Zack brought her car round. When he did, he told me he had shot her just as she was starting up, and I was to put on her hat and coat, and I was to speak to the A.A. scout so he would swear she had left the Grange quite safely, and then I was to run the car over the railway embankment by the bridge and set it on fire. We hoped it would pass for an accident; and that anyhow she would be too burnt for it to be noticed she had been shot first. But we had no luck, and it all came out, and even somehow they made sure it wasn’t her driving the car at all, but someone else.’

  ‘There was a little oversight there,’ Bobs-the-Boy explained. ‘You wore her hat tilted down on the left so that you couldn’t be seen plainly by anyone you passed on the one side. But Jo Frankland’s photograph showed she wore her hat tilted over on the right, and she couldn’t very well have worn it the other way, unless she had changed her style of doing her hair. If it hadn’t been for that, or if it hadn’t been noticed, most likely Curtis himself would have been charged.’

  ‘We couldn’t understand why they seemed so certain it wasn’t her in the car,’ Miss James said slowly. ‘I remember thinking how lucky it was the hat, low down on one side, and the coat collar coming up to meet it, nearly met, so my face was hidden.’

  ‘It didn’t turn out lucky,’ observed Bobs-the-Boy, ‘for it was that set them all thinking so hard. Only what’s the good of their thinking, if there’s no evidence to show? And the evidence they’ve got shows Mr Bryan leaving her outside the car park, and you back in your room when the thing happened, and nothing against Zack Dodd at all. So as long as you don’t tell the “busies” yourself how it all happened, what’s the panic? And there never will be any evidence about the other girl; for no one will ever find her dead corpse, and till they do, which they can’t, there’s nothing they can charge you with. They may know all right, but who cares about that, so long as they haven’t proof? And how can they get proof? Where are their witnesses?’

  Under the influence of this stream of encouragement, so well argued and presented, Miss James was quickly recovering her confidence.

  ‘Esmy Bryan thought it was all over. He said our only chance was to go into hiding,’ she remarked.

  ‘Silly,’ commented Bobs-the-Boy, ‘when there’s no evidence against you except anything you say yourselves.’

  ‘You mean we’re all quite safe still,’ she said slowly.

  ‘That’s right,’ he declared. ‘You can take it from me everything’s O.K., so long as you keep your mouths shut, except for Mr Bryan having bunked, and unless Zack Dodd’s done anything that’ll put us all in the cart again. Haven’t you any idea where Bryan is? We must get in touch with him somehow.’

  ‘I don’t know at all,’ she answered. ‘He never told us, only that he had a safe hiding place where no one would ever find him. He seemed quite sure of that, that he would be safe there, I mean.’

  Bobs-the-Boy looked rather gloomy.

  ‘If he’s got some hole all ready to crawl into,’ he observed, ‘some friend, a woman perhaps, ready to give him shelter, it would take the “busies” themselves all their time to find him.’

  ‘No one ever will,’ Miss James insisted, ‘he’s much too clever.’

  ‘Well, that’s torn it, that has,’ Bobs-the-Boy muttered.

  ‘But he told us,’ Miss James went on, ‘he would see anything we put in the agony column in the Announcer if we headed it to “Jim” and signed it “Rose Ann”. He wrote out a list of a dozen places and gave each a key letter, where we could arrange to meet.’ She paused and added abruptly, ‘Someone’s coming. It’s Zack, I think. It’s his step.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  ‘It’s Always Open’

  They heard his heavy, lumbering step it was not difficult to recognize, come up the stairs and slowly down the passage. He opened the door of the room and stood there, scowling at the woman who said she was his wife, scowling still more viciously at Bobs-the-Boy. In a kind of scream his wife cried out,

  ‘What did you do, what did you do? What’s happened?’

  He said, ignoring the question,

  “There’s Mitchell and his lot all round the house... waiting they are. Well, they’ll never get me alive... nor you neither,’ he added, looking sideways at his wife with a dark significance it seemed she understood well from the way in which she shrank back and trembled. ‘Where’s Bryan?’ he demanded. ‘It’s all his doing, I’d like to twist his scraggy neck for him and save the police the trouble.’

  But at that Bobs-the-Boy let loose a sudden torrent of invective that made even Zack blink his eyes, so violent and so fierce it was. Indeed Zack seemed even a trifle daunted by it.

  ‘You needn’t talk,’ he muttered, when at last Bobs-the– Boy paused, though more apparently to take breath than from any adjectival shortage. ‘You’re done in same as us, you are, with all that crowd all watching outside.’

  ‘Let ’em watch,’ retorted Bobs-the-Boy. ‘I’ll go out presently and tell ’em trespassers will be prosecuted. It’s all O.K. unless you’ve torn it, doing in young Keene. And I reckon most likely you haven’t, or you wouldn’t have come back here. That so?’

  ‘He was too quick, he got away,’ Zack answered. ‘He called out back to me, “If it wasn’t I’ve got to show these things to the police, to Owen, I’d have it out with you all right”. If he had, I’d have done him in, I could do him in with one hand tied behind me. But he got away, and now he’s telling that blasted Owen all about it; and that’ll finish us and you, too,’ he added with a vicious grin at Bobs-the-Boy, ‘and I wouldn’t have come back here, either, only for not having any money on me, not so much as a penny piece, and not knowing where else to go. So I thought I would risk it, and I came in the back way by the car park, but there was one of Mitchell’s fellows waiting there, and then there was another close behind. So I came on here because I didn’t know what else to do, but I reckon it’s the
end for all of us.’

  ‘No sense in getting the wind up yet,’ retorted Bobs-the-Boy. ‘There’s no evidence Mitchell’s got yet he would dare take into court, for fear of being laughed out again. You can take that from me, that’s straight goods, that is.’

  He went on talking rapidly and fluently. As convincingly as before he persuaded Miss James, he now showed Zack how small was the real amount of evidence in the hands of the authorities, how little real proof in the legal sense there was against any of them.

  ‘Not enough to charge a lost dog on,’ he concluded. ‘I don’t say there mightn’t have been if you had done in Keene, but as you haven’t, that’s all right. You know how this sort of thing is worked? They draw up a report at the Yard, Mitchell and the rest of them, and send it in to Treasury Counsel and Treasury Counsel read it and say it won’t do, and send it back to have all the weak points tightened up, and if they can’t be, well, it’s all off, because Treasury Counsel aren’t going to risk taking any case into court there’s any chance of being turned down on. Professional reputation is what they think of more than anything else. What’s Mitchell actually got – I mean in evidence he can take into court, not just mere guesses? Precious little if you ask me. Who saw anything? And where’s the motive? A jury always wants to know that, and there’s none the police can talk about. Even if they guess it was to keep her mouth shut, they aren’t let talk about guesses. It cuts no ice what the police know, it’s what they can prove – lummy, if the police could act just on what they know, a nice look out it would be for us chaps.’

  ‘There’s always Owen,’ Miss James said, speaking for the first time.

  ‘Ah, you’ve got Owen on the brain, you have,’ Bobs-the-Boy said, looking at her benevolently. ‘Bless you, scared of him, you are, and yet you’ve never seen him. No more have I.’

  ‘Keene will have gone straight to him,’ Zack said.