“Alas! they are ruined,” he informed his two listeners. “They were always poor. Now they are ruined. The war. They have nothing. But then to-day, we are all poor, all ruined. Me also. So what would you?”
Bobby asked what was Count Ariosto’s profession. Ariosto replied that he was a financier. Bobby remarked that that was a difficult occupation for a poor man. Financiers were generally wealthy unless they were bankrupt. Ariosto became voluble. It began to appear that what he really meant was that he speculated on the Stock Exchange.
“Oh, but cautiously, so cautiously,” he protested. “Not like our poor Ivor. I do not put on my shirt when I buy, as Ivor does with his horses, and I sell as soon as I see a profit. No one ever went bankrupt by taking a profit,” he added, quoting one of those wise maxims current in a market that seldom pays them any attention in practice.
He had been fairly successful, he admitted. Some of his profits he had invested in the Hotel Bliss, where he lived when he was in England. He let drop, however, that he was often invited to spend his week-ends at the country houses of his many wealthy and well-known friends. It was at the bridge table at these week-ends that he had first met his dear friend, Mrs Findlay. Impossible, he declared, to imagine his relief when he heard that the story of her death was false. Yes, indeed, an inconceivable relief.
“How close was your friendship with her?” Bobby asked. “Was there anything in it to cause trouble between her and her husband? Did he ever show any sign of resentment?”
Ariosto protested vehemently, and with every appearance of genuine surprise at the question, that there never had been any reason or appearance or hint of the faintest suggestion of any such feeling. Sibby Findlay and himself had been merely bridge-table friends.
“Our play fitted,” he said. “We did well together—so well indeed that sometimes it was not liked when we cut together. That is all. Nothing more,” he declared with emphasis. “My God, no.”
This last expression broke out with such vehemence that Bobby glanced up quickly and Simons stared. Ariosto did not notice. He gave the idea of being lost in thoughts that were not too pleasant.
“You see,” Bobby explained, “our information is that both the Findlays were rather free and easy—tolerant in the modern manner—with friends of the opposite sex. But people may be tolerant outwardly and less so inwardly, and their tolerance may break down rather suddenly.”
Ariosto protested again that he knew nothing about that. Jealousy was out of date, wasn’t it? Certainly he had never seen or heard of any sign of it. Never. Sibby Findlay had many friends—well, acquaintances. People were afraid of her. She was in fact an extraordinary woman. She gave somehow the idea that she was the surgeon and you the patient on the operating-table. Vivisection. That was it.
“How do you mean—vivisection?” Bobby said, puzzled by this description.
“It is not to be explained,” Ariosto answered slowly, and he seemed worried, even afraid. “A woman compels by her beauty, her charm, her—her womanliness. It is her right, and how gladly we others yield. It is for us a duty and a joy. In the desert, when I was serving with the Eighth Army”—this was said with a not altogether unconscious touch of swagger—“we would queue up merely to peep at a woman pouring out tea. But when all she shows is a kind of cold curiosity—ugh, it is against nature. Against nature,” he repeated, almost shouting now and raising both hands in the air as if in universal protest.
“You called her your friend,” Bobby remarked.
“It is better than to call her your enemy,” Ariosto answered, and there was little of friendliness in the tone he used.
“We have it suggested,” Bobby went on, “that it was she who wanted the marriage with Mr Findlay. In fact, the expression ‘blackmailed him into it’ has been used.”
The effect of this on Ariosto was unexpected. He jumped to his feet, began to speak, then changed his mind, and sat down again. He seemed suddenly oblivious of his surroundings, as if lost in what was apparently a mixture of surprise, bewilderment, and fear. Once again he opened his mouth to speak, and once again he changed his mind and was silent. Bobby said: “Well”, and Ariosto suddenly became voluble.
“If it was that, if she blackmailed him, too,” he burst out, “why did she kill him? But why should she? The dead are safe, she had no power to impose her questioning on them. If he had killed her, yes, that would make sense. But it is not so. No? You are not having me on?” This time there was an unmistakable note of disappointment in his voice, rather as if there had remained with him a lingering hope that it really was Mrs Findlay and not her husband who had been the victim. He went on: “When I heard what had happened and it was Sibby, I thought: ‘Ah, then, it has come, with one she has gone too far, and now one has freed himself’.”
“You thought she had been blackmailing—?” Bobby began, but Ariosto interrupted him.
“No, no, not blackmail in your sense, in the police sense. No,” he explained. “It was her probing, her trying to find out, to push you along so as to see what you would do. It could become past bearing. And always bad, bad things, because if it was something not bad, then it was not interesting.”
“Was it like that with you?”
“Ah, no,” Ariosto protested. “No. I do not stand for that, and then it was I who had a hold on her, for there was no one who could play bridge with her as I could, and I said to her: ‘If you do not stop this trying to poke into my inside, listen, I play no more with you. You understand?’ After I had made that plain I had no more trouble. None.”
“Was she so fond of bridge as all that?” Bobby asked.
“Ah, no. No. But at the bridge table people show themselves, and that is what she wanted. To pry into them, and then when she knew their weak points, she could play upon them. Experience she called it. Getting to know. Bah.” He almost spat in the rush of his angry recollections. “So when I was told, I thought that a slave had revolted—the rabbit turned on the snake, the guinea pig on the vivisector. Do you understand how that could be? All suddenly.”
“Oh, I think so,” Bobby answered, though indeed it would have been more truthful to reply that the greater his experience became, the less he understood how, in the tangled minds of men, one motive among others could suddenly and violently become imperative.
“But it is not like that,” Ariosto went on, much as if he were talking to himself rather than to them. “It is the poor Ivor, it seems. Why? Ivor no one took seriously, no one was troubled by him. He was not serious. Oh, in his work, that was different. There he was solid, firm as a rock. But in other things, a trifler, a nothing. No woman was ever deceived by anything he said, no man cared what he said for that matter. It was always, ‘Oh, it’s only Ivor’. A butterfly.”
This was said with a half-amused, half-tolerant contempt that in its turn amused Bobby, since it was a verdict passed by a man whose chief contribution to life seemed a flair for Stock Exchange speculation and a gift for bridge and social chatter, on a man of solid professional achievement and scientific repute. However, there were more serious matters to be considered than Ariosto’s standard of values.
“Our information,” Bobby went on, “is that Mr Findlay would on occasion give his lady friends a key to what is called the garden door here, so that they could slip up to his room on the attic floor without any one seeing.”
“But how should I know?” Ariosto demanded. “It may be so. It would be secret between them, they would not be likely to tell others. I don’t know. How was the murder committed? Was it poison? or shooting? or what?”
“He was stabbed in the back with an ordinary kitchen knife,” Bobby answered. “By some one who knew where to stab to the best effect. Some one who had been in the army perhaps, where a man was taught the best and quickest way of killing.”
“Every one has been in the army,” Ariosto remarked. “A kitchen knife? Nothing to do with me, I have nothing to with kitchens, only what comes out of them—when you can get it.”
&nb
sp; “Yes, that’s sometimes the trouble, isn’t it?” Bobby agreed, and went on: “Another thing we have been told is that on one occasion a lady gave you a key and asked you to return it to Mr Findlay. If that was so, and if it was the key to the garden door, it would mean that you could get up to his room without being seen at any time you wanted.”
“But it is not true,” Ariosto protested angrily. “It is absurd. It is ridiculous.” His protests ended abruptly as he saw how quietly and steadily Bobby was regarding him. He became silent, he seemed as it were to shrink into himself: “You do not mean,” he asked in a very small voice, “that you—you—suspect . . .”
His voice trailed off into silence, and Bobby said very amiably:
“So far we have no reason to suspect any one person in particular. Let’s get back to the key to the garden door. It may turn out to be also the key to the murder. We have a clear statement that a lady did once give you such a key and asked you to give it back to Mr Findlay.”
“I remember now,” Ariosto admitted reluctantly. “What about it? I did not know what the key was. I did as the lady asked. Naturally. Why not? It was not in my hand more than two minutes. That is all.”
“Who was the lady?”
“I do not know, I never knew,” Ariosto insisted with more of the gesticulation that became more frequent and more pronounced at his nervousness increased. “It was at a cocktail party. At a cocktail party it is not necessary to know each other—very often you do not even know your host.”
“Who was he that time?”
“I have no idea. Very likely I never knew. Besides, I do not remember what cocktail party it was—one goes to many. One forgets. It is absurd, indefensible—”
Bobby cut short protests which threatened to become an excited flood of anger and incoherence. He asked some more questions, but failed to secure any more definite information, and when he asked for an account of Ariosto’s movements that morning, all he learned was that Ariosto had been for a stroll in the park.
“One often meets a friend there,” Ariosto explained.
That morning, however, this had not happened, and Ariosto was then allowed to depart, further protestations of entire innocence having to be suppressed with the firm assurance that there were at present no grounds for bringing any charge against any one. But this had to be coupled with the admission that no one as yet could be considered entirely cleared. Not even one so palpably innocent—innocent with an innocence comparable only to that of a new-born babe—as was Count Ariosto, and so that gentleman had to retire, unconsoled and uneasy. His rather curious, quick, shuffling sort of walk gave him as he went an odd resemblance to an agitated duck.
“Flat feet—bad, too,” Simons remarked, and Bobby nodded in thoughtful agreement.
CHAPTER XII
“SHE WANTS TO BE WICKED”
“WELL, ONE THING,” Simons remarked as the door closed upon the shuffling, hurrying figure of a retreating Ariosto, “that’s about the only time there hasn’t been a try on at passing the buck.” Bobby, deep in his own thoughts, made no comment. Simons, who knew all about Bobby’s ways and habits, added slyly: “Bit suspicious, don’t you think?”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Bobby answered, rousing himself from his meditations. “I fancy Ariosto was too flustered at finding he might be a suspect to think about anything else.”
“Admits he had a key to this garden door of theirs,” Simons remarked, “and only his own word for it that he passed it back to Findlay. And he doesn’t know who the lady is he got it from, so we can’t check up on that either. Isn’t getting us much further forward, is it?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Bobby answered. “Anyway, we’re getting a very good build-up of the Findlay background. A lot of interesting facts, but wholly disconnected at present. It’s going to be a job to sort out what is relevant from what isn’t. And still more of a job to be sure where Mrs Findlay comes in. We come across some queer customers from time to time, but I’ve never before met any one quite like her.”
“Going to give eighteen months to sin, but crime’s vulgar,” grunted Simons, who had had this phrase repeated to him. “Well, I ask you,” he said with a gesture of hopeless resignation. “Crazy talk. Only talk? Or is it more?”
“That’s what we’ve to be sure about,” Bobby told him. “The one thing I am sure of at present is that it does mean something, and something pretty nasty. But as to whether it means murder, I don’t know.”
“Oh, well, I suppose we’ve got to sort it out,” declared Simons, still more hopelessly resigned. “What next? There’s this Noel Lake bloke. We haven’t seen him yet.”
Before Bobby could answer, the constable on duty at the door reappeared. The man on the beat that morning had sent in a report. He had gone off duty at two p.m., and had not heard of the murder till later. Now he had rung up to say he had seen a car parked in the narrow opening from which access was obtained to the garden door. A complaint had been made that it was blocking the way through to what had originally been the Dagonby House stable-yard and mews, now in the occupation of a somewhat mixed community. Complaints of this nature had been made before. Mr and Mrs Findlay had been communicated with, and both had promised to see it didn’t happen again and also to warn their friends. This car, however, was not theirs. As it was unoccupied he had taken a note of the number, and was waiting for the owner to appear when he was called away to attend to a collision elsewhere between a taxi-cab and a private car. He had given his station sergeant the number of the obstructing car, and its owner was being traced. The hour noted was some thirty minutes or so before the estimated time of the murder.
Bobby remarked that this might be important, and Simons went to ring up the station sergeant and ask if the owner of the car had yet been identified. He came back almost at once with a name and address, that of a Mrs Ida Tinsley, Topper Court, N.E. 1, and Bobby and Simons both had at once the same idea that this might possibly be the lady from whom Ariosto was said to have received a key to the Dagonby House garden door. So Bobby said that was where they would have to go next, only what about a cup of tea first?
Simons thought this an excellent idea—as did Bobby himself—and they forthwith put it into operation at a neighbouring tea-shop. Thence they proceeded to Topper Court, one of those great fortresses of habitation that have sprung up in such profusion of recent years. The flat occupied by Mrs Tinsley was on the top floor, and Simons expressed his thankfulness that no electricity cut was preventing the automatic lift from working. Nor did he seem to notice Bobby’s offer to race him up the stairs to the top. No better way of keeping in training than running upstairs and down again, Bobby remarked. But Simons was already in the lift, his finger hovering over the appropriate button. So Bobby followed, Simon’s finger descended, and the lift ascended.
Fortunately Mrs Tinsley—she wore a wedding ring—was in. She was a small, dark, active-looking woman, restless and quick in her movements and strongly built. Her full lips, her large, flashing eyes, gave the impression of a passionate nature, not too well controlled, and to Bobby, at first sight, there seemed something of a contrast between a certain fluffiness in her attire and a degree of business-like severity in the furnishing of the flat. There was a typewriter on a side table, together with books and papers. At the moment she was plainly very excited and nervous. She showed them the evening paper, and was voluble in her expressions of horror and surprise.
“I can’t believe it,” she said more than once. “I suppose it’s true? I saw him this morning, and he was just as usual. It doesn’t seem possible. I—I—I—”
She was doing her best to control herself, but Bobby began to be afraid that she was going to break down. He tried to say something sympathetic, but she did not listen. She went out of the room abruptly, and then came back, looking more self-possessed.
“I am sorry,” she said. “It has been such a great shock.”
Bobby murmured sympathy, said he was sure they could depend on her help, and
went on to ask a few questions. She was a widow, she said. Her husband had been a scientific worker, and as he had not left her very well provided for, she did a little work in the way of copying difficult scientific articles or translating from the French or German. That was how she had first met Mr Findlay. Yes, she had called to see him that morning, and he had admitted her himself. She had seen no one else there, and as far as she knew no one else had seen her.
“It is such a wilderness of a place,” she said. “Dozens of rooms and miles of passages. You could camp out there for weeks and weeks without any one knowing.”
Answering more questions, she declared that her visit to Mr Findlay had not been connected with any work she was doing for him. He had not asked her to do anything for him for some time. Her visit had been of a private nature. She did not intend to say what it was. Others were involved. No, she was in no way an intimate friend of Mr Findlay’s. They were just friends, that was all. Nor was she in any way intimate with Mrs Findlay. In fact, she had only met Sibby Findlay on very few occasions, and the fewer such occasions were, the better she was pleased. In her opinion Sibby Findlay was not so much a Woman, as a Nightmare, a Vampire. Most people tried to avoid her, only of course they didn’t dare show it. She had a way of looking at you—ugh. Yes, she was more than sorry for Ivor. Any one would be sorry for any man who was Sibby’s husband, and she, Mrs Tinsley, couldn’t imagine why he had ever married her. She was perfectly sure he hadn’t wanted, but men somehow often seemed so helpless. They got themselves into a hole and didn’t know how to get out again. Bobby wondered if he were being a bit unfair in thinking that this remark concealed a well-founded belief of Mrs Tinsley’s that for her part she could always get out of any hole she ever got into. He was also inclined to think that possibly she had had certain successful experiences in that way. She was telling him now what a charming man Ivor Findlay was and how much everybody liked him. Oh, no, no one could possibly call him a flirt—just pleasant and agreeable. Inconceivable he should have been murdered. If it had been Sibby now—Mrs Tinsley left the sentence unfinished, but gave the impression that in that case she would have felt very little distress.
Everybody Always Tells: A Bobby Owen Mystery Page 10