When he alighted, his way into the village took him past Prospect Cottage. At a first glance he thought there was no one in the garden, and then he noticed in it the same small elderly woman he had seen on the occasion of his first visit and took to be Mrs Roman Wright. As before, she seemed somehow to be there only to be overlooked, so insignificant did she seem, so like something left over and forgotten. He had an impulse to speak to her on some excuse or another, but when he looked again she was no longer visible—“non est”, Bobby remembered the sergeant had described her, and the quaint expression now seemed to him appropriate. Odd, too, how she had slipped away, as if she had by practice acquired a special skill in disappearance.
He went on to the Pleezeu Tea Gardens, and there met, hovering undecidedly near the entrance, Captain Sidney Dunstan. He greeted Bobby without enthusiasm. Bobby asked if he were having tea here. Captain Dunstan said, no, he wasn’t. Why should he? Plenty of places where a bloke could have his tea if he wanted it, weren’t there? Washy sort of stuff anyhow. Then he scowled more dreadfully even than before, though the scowl seemed intended more for the universe in general than for Bobby in particular, and therewith marched away, very much as if he were on a forlorn hope from which he never expected to return.
“Now, what’s up?” Bobby asked himself. “General Bad temper? Had a row? Who with? Well, well.”
Therewith he entered the tea gardens and found himself a convenient seat. It was early still, and he apparently the first customer; though almost immediately he was followed by a youngish woman, burdened with packages and accompanied by a curly-headed, solemn-eyed little boy some three or four years old. She chose a table not far from Bobby’s. The child pointed a finger at Bobby and said firmly “Man”. Kitty appeared, took first the new-comer’s order, produced a tall chair for the small boy, and then came over to Bobby, but very much as though she would have greatly preferred to do nothing of the sort.
“I thought you would be back,” she said.
“I always shall,” Bobby told her quietly, “till all this is cleared up.”
“Will it ever be?” she asked.
“I hope so,” he answered. “Will you ask Mrs Bloom if I can have a word with her—later on will do if she is busy now?”
“What for?” Kitty asked, and then said: “I will tell her.”
“Thank you,” Bobby said. “I saw Captain Dunstan outside here as I came in,” he added.
Kitty managed to convey without speaking that nothing in all the world interested her less than anything concerning Captain Sidney Dunstan and that it was totally incomprehensible why Bobby should even mention his name to her.
“I have some fresh information now,” Bobby continued. “Till now I’ve not been able to find that any one had seen Ned after he left my office. Now I’m told he was seen later that day on the road to Miles Bottom Farm.”
Kitty could hardly turn more pale than the strain of these last few days had left her. But the quick glance she gave him and away again was full of fear and trouble. Profoundly disturbed she seemed. She said:
“That’s a road that goes to many places.”
“He was in company, I’m told,” Bobby went on, “with a tall young lady. Was it you?”
But she went away without answering, and when his tea came it was brought to him not by Kitty, but by Liza, the same zealous if not overexpert child he had seen before.
Kitty had to appear presently, however, as more customers arrived and the tea garden grew busy. Bobby made no effort to attract her attention. Further questioning could wait. The question might work upon her, as such questions sometimes did work on people, and produce spontaneously an answer more significant than any pressure could have drawn. So he was content to sit and watch and to notice how often she looked in his direction, to see, perhaps, if he were still there. A war of nerves, he supposed, and it is not only in politics and war that that can be effective. He fancied he saw Captain Dunstan once more hovering and scowling at the entrance. But he was not sure, for he had had no more than a glimpse, and the captain did not come in. Later on, Miss Jane Wright appeared and took her place at a table away from the others. Bobby watched with interest. She gave an order to the zealous Liza. When it arrived she poured herself out a cup of tea, but he did not see that she drank. Something attracted his attention—another glimpse of a hesitant young man at the entrance, who, however, was not Captain Dunstan, but probably some one waiting for a friend. When Bobby looked again, Mrs Bloom was sitting at Miss Wright’s table. She had not come from the house, of that Bobby was sure. She must have made her way round by the back somehow and then by the side of the hedge. He could not see that either of the two women spoke, or indeed were so much as aware of each other’s presence. Nor did he know why, as he watched them sitting there so quietly, he found himself experiencing a strange sense of unease and wonder—even of fear—so that he felt a pricking of the skin, an odd dryness of the tongue. He beckoned with authority to Kitty, whom he saw close by, but when she came he did not know what to say. She seemed to understand, though. She said to him:
“It is often like that. Not every day, but often.”
“What does it mean?” he asked.
She did not answer, and went away. Bobby got to his feet, intending to go and speak to them. He did not do so, though he did not know why. He told himself it might be better to wait rather than to interrupt them, but he knew that was an excuse. He began to move towards the gate, since now that he was on his feet he had to go somewhere. He passed by the table where the woman with the child was still sitting. The child had been running about and playing while his mother rested after finishing her tea. Now he had run back to her, and she was telling him placidly not to be so silly. She was saying:
“But, darling, there isn’t any man there. There never was, only two ladies.”
The child insisted.
“Funny man,” he said, “and now he isn’t any more. Where did he go, mummy?”
“Darling,” said his mother, not taking much notice, “I don’t know what you are talking about.”
Bobby stopped and said to her:
“Does your little boy think he saw a man sitting there at the table where those two ladies are?”
The mother looked surprised. The child, overcome with sudden shyness, did not speak, but nodded vigorously, then buried his face in his mother’s lap. She said:
“It’s only his fancy. There hasn’t been any one there.”
“Funny man,” said the child, looking up. “Where did he go, mummy?”
“Never mind, darling,” said his mother, beginning to collect her parcels. To Bobby she said smilingly: “Children have such quaint fancies. I’m afraid my Tommy’s worse than others. Imagining things. It’s not telling lies,” she explained, “it’s only that they can’t quite tell the difference between what’s real and what isn’t.”
“Or perhaps we can’t,” Bobby said.
“The bear under the table is quite real to Tommy,” she assured him. “He’ll grow out of it.”
“I expect so,” agreed Bobby.
“Anyhow,” she concluded, “there certainly wasn’t any man at that table. If there had been I should have seen.”
“I saw no one, either,” Bobby said, “and they were sitting just in front of me.”
The mother smiled again, finished collecting her parcels, took the child’s hand, and went off with a “Good afternoon” to Bobby. He went back to the table where now Mrs Bloom was sitting alone, for Miss Wright had just got up and had gone away. Still with that air as though she watched from an immeasurably remote distance, Mrs Bloom sat waiting for him. He said to her without preliminary:
“You haven’t had any news of your son yet, have you?”
She replied only by a slight negative gesture of the head.
“What do you think has happened?” he asked.
“I do not know,” she answered slowly. “But I do not think he can be still alive, or I should have had some word by now, or
else he would have come back to me.”
“Is that all you can tell me? You know no more?”
“No.”
“Why does Jane Wright come here so often for her tea she never seems to want when she gets here?”
“I do not know, but I think it may be there is something she would tell me if she dared.”
“Has she ever said anything?”
“She has never spoken a word, that I know of, to me or to any one else.”
Bobby stood looking down at her gloomily and doubtfully. He had made no attempt to seat himself, nor had she asked him to, nor had she risen herself. Yet his feeling was that she looked down on him from above, rather than he on her, as was in fact the case. But it did not seem so. She made no effort to speak again, nor did she seem to expect him to say more. He told himself she was like an iceberg, as easy to question as an iceberg would have been. He said:
“One would think you did not much wish to help.”
She did not answer in words, but when she looked at him and he saw the remote, deep glow in those strange greenish-hued eyes of hers he was no longer sure whether it was an iceberg he spoke to or a volcano. He said presently:
“You say you do not think your son is still alive. But you will not tell me why. Surely you have some reason, something more than merely that he has gone away. Do you think there may have been foul play?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“He was strong and healthy except for being lame. If he had been taken ill, I should have heard. If there had been an accident, I should have heard. If he were safe and well, he would have written. What else is there?”
“Yes, I know,” Bobby agreed. “That’s how I’ve worked it out, too. But I don’t get any farther. In a way I feel responsible. I feel if I had been more tactful, more sympathetic, when he came to see me that day, he might have told me what he knew, and then it would never have happened.”
She considered this for a long time and in silence. Presently she said:
“He had a secret. He would not have parted with it so easily. He loved a secret more than anything else. Whatever you had said or done he would still have kept his secret, for a time at least.”
“All the same, it makes me feel the more strongly,” Bobby said, “that I’ve got to know, that if there’s been foul play, then I’ve got to see it doesn’t go unpunished. You, too, you suspect foul play?”
“I said so.”
“By whom?”
“I do not know. I only—guess.”
“Will you not tell me your guess?”
When again she shook her head with that slow, solemn negative movement she had used before, he said in an exasperated tone:
“Well, why not? I don’t understand you. Why not?”
Hitherto she had spoken with that same strange manner, far distant and remote, she had always shown, as of one who spoke from another world. But now on a sudden she blazed into an intensity of emotion that seemed somehow both more understandable and more human than her former icy detachment from all earthly things.
“I only guess; a guess may be wrong,” she said with a fierce intensity of emotion in her voice. “I’ll say nothing to put doubt, suspicion on any one when she may be innocent, or when it may be what she did she did against her will. I’ll not help you send any one else to go through it all, to stand and wait and watch and listen, while those you’ve never seen before decide what they’ll do with you, and all the time questions, questions, questions go on and never end.” She stopped, and the heat of her emotion died down as suddenly, as swiftly as it had arisen. Once more she was her own emotionless, unutterably remote self. She said: “What was I saying? I’m so sorry.”
“Questions must be asked if truth’s to be known,” Bobby said. “Murderers must be found and dealt with, or else they murder again and none are safe.”
She seemed to ponder this, and it was as though for the first time into her distant and aloof detachment there broke an element of doubt.
“No,” she said at last. “If you have killed once, you never kill again. That would be too dreadful. Not again. No.” She got to her feet and now stood facing him. She said in a voice less calm, more broken: “I can’t talk any more. I must go. There’s nothing I know, nothing I can tell you.”
“Could Miss Wright, do you think?” he asked gravely.
She did not answer that. Instead she said:
“When Ned was a baby, it was told me what would happen, but what is the good of remembering that now? I must go,” she repeated.
She turned and went away gropingly by the hedge, and Bobby watched, more troubled than he cared to think by what she had said.
CHAPTER XXVI
PETROL DUMP
ALL THIS HAD taken so much time that by now it had grown late, teas were over, customers had departed, Kitty and her zealous little helper were busy at the task of clearing up. A humble task enough, and yet once more, as he glanced in her direction, Bobby was struck by a certain stately grace in all her movements; as though in gathering up cups and saucers, and shaking and folding cloths, none the less she remained still the great lady. He told himself she could have scrubbed a scullery floor in the same grand manner. He fancied, too, that she was well aware of his presence and his actions, but he decided not to speak to her. He left the tea gardens and went on to the Threepence police station where he found Sergeant Young in the company of the Scout-master, Mr Fletcher, who had just arrived there with unexpected information.
“Mr Fletcher’s boys have made a find he wants to tell us about,” the sergeant explained to Bobby.
Mr Fletcher, a tall thin man with an M.C. and an artificial arm from the first German war, explained that his boys had been putting in a busy time roaming through the forest.
“I don’t know that we’ve got what you want,” he said, “but two of the lads have found a petrol dump.”
“A petrol dump,” repeated Bobby, astonished.
“Yes, not a very large one,” Mr Fletcher said. “A dozen two-gallon tins, very carefully hidden underground in a kind of enlarged rabbit burrow. I’ve left two boys on watch.”
Bobby thought they had better be relieved at once. Not at all a pleasant idea, two boys in that lonely forest on guard over what might well prove an essential link in the chain of evidence needed to bring a murderer to justice.
Considerably disturbed by this view of the situation, a perturbed Mr Fletcher undertook to conduct a constable to the spot forthwith, and it was with some relief that Bobby saw him start off again, this time in the company of a bewildered and resentful Sergeant Young, snatched literally at a moment’s notice from his comfortable official desk, without even so much as a sandwich or a thermos flask, to spend what might prove to be a whole long night out in the forest. Certainly Bobby had promised that he in turn would be relieved as soon as it could be managed, but the promise had been made so hurriedly, and both the inspector and the Scout-master seemed so upset, that Sergeant Young had his doubts—but no supper. In his view, a desperate lot of fuss to make about a couple of kids.
Besides, even if a relief were duly dispatched, would the relief ever find him? Sergeant Young gloomily contemplated a relief lost in the forest wastes and himself wearily waiting all the long night through.
Alas! his fears proved to be but too well justified; his relief did get lost, and the sergeant still remembers resentfully that long chill vigil, all on account of a couple of kids. Nor has he yet overcome a consequent tendency to take but a jaundiced view of Boy Scout activities.
This settled, unheedful of the martyrdom to which he had condemned his unhappy sergeant, Bobby left the little cottage police station and found, to his surprise, Kitty waiting for him.
“When I went home,” she said, “I told my father you were here. He would like a few words with you.”
“Oh, yes, certainly,” Bobby said, slightly surprised, for it was seldom when he was engaged on an investigation of this sort that any one ever showed any kee
n desire to talk to him. As they started to walk along together, he said: “I asked you a question just now. You didn’t answer it. Are you the young lady who, I am told, was seen with Ned walking towards Miles Bottom Farm on the afternoon of the day on which he disappeared?”
“Father said,” she replied cautiously, “that I was not to say anything till he had spoken to you.”
“Well, that’s prudent,” Bobby agreed, “but perhaps there arc one or two things you would rather I asked you first. To begin with, I take it you know that suppressing evidence—that is, not telling all you know—may become quite a serious offence? It might even in some cases amount to what is called being an accessory, after or before the fact.” She looked at him, her eyes nearly level with his own, and she had that air of haughty self-possession and control that went so ill with her assumed position of waitress at the beck and call of all.
“I am ready to answer for what I do,” she said briefly.
“Well, yes,” he agreed, “I think you would be. A self-reliant young lady, if I may say so. Yet I wonder if that answer of yours would be always fully satisfactory. However, to leave that. The question I want to ask is this: why have you quarrelled with Captain Dunstan?”
“I haven’t,” she told him with cold indignation. “There has been no quarrel. How do you know?”
For all her dignity of mien and manner, as little logical as any other woman, Bobby thought. He said with a faint smile:
“Well, you see, when a young man hangs about a tea-garden and then says, very bad-temperedly, that anyhow tea is washy stuff and he doesn’t want any, and when a young woman in that tea-garden shows a complete and utter indifference at the mention of that same young man’s name, even a mere dull-witted policeman like myself can put two and two together.”
Secrets Can't be Kept: A Bobby Owen Mystery Page 15