The Conqueror Inn: A Bobby Owen Mystery

by E. R. Punshon

  Wintle made no reply, but he passed an uneasy finger round his neck under his collar, as if he felt a growing tightness there that made breathing difficult. It was an unconscious gesture Bobby had seen before, when the net of circumstantial evidence seemed to be drawing closer and tighter. Bobby went on:

  “Suppose again that on the Monday night you thought you would take an hour or two when you would not be missed because it would be thought you were inspecting someone somewhere, to run over by car or cycle perhaps—or even on foot. About fifteen or sixteen miles, isn’t it, or more? Well, a man in good hard army training might manage that in two hours on foot, going straight across the moor. Stiff going, but possible. Well, suppose that happened, whether on foot or by car or cycle, and suppose he took with him a service revolver—oh, not his own, of course, he would hardly be so simple as that—and suppose—”

  “Suppose,” interrupted Wintle, “suppose he found the same fellow again entering or leaving the Conqueror Inn and suppose this time he shot him. You are good at supposing, Inspector. How many men have you supposed to the gallows?”

  “Why, none, I think,” Bobby answered quietly, “but there are some I have supposed to answer before the law for their acts and so others have been able to go in peace and quiet about their daily business. Does that strike you as an unworthy activity? Undesirable, no doubt, from the point of view of an—assassin. Well, let’s leave supposing. Here’s another fact. Miss Rachel Christopherson.”

  Wintle’s self-control, already strained, snapped.

  “Leave her name out of it,” he said in a low, intense voice.

  “Captain Wintle,” Bobby answered sternly, “in a case of murder, no name, either yours or mine or any man’s, can be left out. Miss Christopherson is very clearly ‘in’ already. You’ll find mention in every newspaper account of the landlord of the Conqueror Inn and his wife and daughter. Reporters already know that entry was made one night but that nothing was missed and that no complaint was made. Reporters know, too, of the presence of Miss Rachel in the inn, and I am afraid they are cynical enough, or experienced enough, whichever way you look at it, to start guessing. They daren’t say anything yet, because they aren’t sure, and they have a healthy respect for libel actions and contempt of court and so on. But I have already had them coming to see me and dropping hints about crimes of passion and father avenging his daughter’s honour and all that sort of thing.”

  “Dirty-minded brutes,” growled Wintle, his cheeks that had been so pale before now flushing red again.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Bobby said tolerantly. “Such things do happen. Of course, I told them to do their own guessing—and on their own responsibility. That shut them up for the time. But I shall be very surprised if some of them pretty soon don’t find out that a certain young man has vanished from his usual surroundings. Do you know anything about a young man named Larry Connor?”

  “No,” said Wintle.

  But then he got up and went to the window and stood there, his back to Bobby. Bobby said:

  “Do you know—I think perhaps you do.”

  Wintle did not move for a minute or two. Then he came back and sat down and again those quick yet steady eyes of his looked straight at Bobby.

  “I know nothing of him,” he said. “To my knowledge I have never seen or spoken to him. But I do remember hearing Rachel—Miss Christopherson—say to her father that Larry Connor was there and would he attend to him because she was going to keep out of the way till he had gone. I believe he was driving a lorry and stopped at the Conqueror Inn in passing for a drink or something. I never saw him.”

  “You see,” Bobby explained, “we think it just possible Larry Connor may be the dead man. But there’s no proof. Identification made difficult by the rather horrible mutilation that was carried out. Perhaps proof will turn up somewhere. Perhaps this Leader you’ve told us about may know. He’ll be asked. Oh, there’s another point. Miss Christopherson seems to be in possession of a revolver.”

  “I’m sure she isn’t,” Wintle said quickly. “I told her to make sure—I mean, I asked them if they had any firearms. They haven’t, not even a shotgun for rabbits. Nothing.”

  “Why did you ask that?”

  “It’s a lonely spot,” Wintle answered.

  “A curious question all the same,” Bobby remarked. “I wonder—well, never mind. But I think it is a fact that Miss Rachel is in possession of a pistol. I heard a shot fired at the inn, and when I ran round to see what was happening, Miss Rachel and Miss Kram were together and I could smell powder in the air.”

  “Miss Kram,” Wintle repeated. “What was she there for?”

  “They both denied a shot had been fired,” Bobby went on. “I think they lied. I think somehow only a strong motive would make Miss Rachel lie. A difficult case. Difficult to see a way clear through such a tangle of emotional relationships. Two girls talking and a shot fired. Why? Was it one of the girls fired? Or someone else? No one else visible but plenty of hiding places in those vast old barns and stables. If one of the girls fired, why? When women take to shooting, generally the cause is jealousy. Was it this time? If so, who was jealous and of whom? I will ask you to regard it as confidential, but a suggestion has been made to us that Miss Kram was interested in Larry Connor.”

  “You seem to have got it all taped out,” Wintle muttered.

  “Not by a long way,” Bobby retorted. “Nothing like it. There is only a confusion of possibilities, no one of which may be correct, and a wooden box stuffed with bank-notes that fits into none of them.”

  “If a shot was fired,” Wintle asked, “why should you think it was Miss Christopherson rather than Miss Kram?”

  “I don’t,” Bobby said. “What I said was that Miss Rachel had a pistol in her possession. At least, I thought so. But I was helpless. I had no grounds for arresting her. I couldn’t search her. A man can’t search a woman. She ran a bluff on me and brought it off. All the same she had that pistol on her, and I am wondering if it is the one that fired the shot that killed the man whose name I do not know.”

  CHAPTER XVII

  ON WATCH

  CAPTAIN PETER WINTLE had gone, looking an older man by far than when he had come, and Bobby still sat and stared at the blank wall opposite. He roused himself presently to set in motion various routine inquiries. Obviously important to get in touch with the man, Leader, as soon as possible. Already instructions had been given for unostentatious watch to be kept on him. Soon information came that both Leader’s lorries were out, and he with one of them. Nothing unexpected in that, for it was known Leader was working on a contract with a Fleetwood firm. But the lorries required only one driver each, and the lorry driven by Leader had carried Alf Hall also, as a passenger apparently. Nothing therefore to prevent Leader from alighting at some spot or another and being picked up again on the return trip.

  A small independent road transport business had its advantages, Bobby reflected, for those who wished to play hide and seek with the law. He remembered, too, that examination of the box of bank-notes found on the scene of the murder had revealed the presence of fish scales as well as of coal dust. Fleetwood suggested fish, but then both fish and coal were common loads. K. and K.M.T.C., for instance, carried both often enough, as he had taken pains to find out.

  Not much help there, Bobby felt, and as he could not expect to hear the result of other inquiries just yet, he turned his attention to work waiting on his desk. That dealt with, he got out his own small two-seater he was using now for official work since it needed less petrol than the ordinary police car, and started off once more on the now familiar moorland road that led to the Conqueror Inn.

  Once more as he drew near he was struck by its aloof and secret air. Solitary it stood on the ridge of the great bare moor that fell away in a gentle slope on either side and none could approach without being seen and noted. Then came a rush of great lorries, four of them racing past the inn towards Bobby. The road was narrow and he drew aside to let t
hem pass. As he did so, the thought came to him to wonder whether this renewal of traffic on the road that, until the K. and K. people found it, had been so little used, was welcome to the inmates of the inn. It certainly did not seem, he thought, that much effort had been made to attract the patronage of travellers.

  He had halted to let those lorries pass. There was a pair of binoculars in the car. He adjusted them on the inn. No movement was visible, no sign of life. Was it only his fancy, he wondered, that gave the place its curious air of silent watchfulness, of being, as it were, eternally upon its guard? All England, for that matter, was to-day silently watchful on guard. But against a known and open enemy, and what strange fear or danger was it that forced the Conqueror Inn to wear this aspect of attention? As he watched he saw a movement at the attic window, the window he supposed from which light shining by reason of a displaced curtain had attracted the attention of a Home Guard patrol.

  The distance was too great for him to be able to see who it was, but certainly some human being had stood for a moment at that upper window and then had closed it and gone away. Almost at once he saw a woman come out from the inn door and stand there looking in his direction. Rachel, he thought, for though he could not be sure at that distance, he seemed to recognize the rhythmic grace, as of some free creature of the open lands, one who knew nothing of the cramping life of cities, that he remembered as instinct in every movement she made.

  “A watch kept up there in the upper windows,” Bobby muttered to himself, “and a warning called down that someone was coming. So the girl comes out to see who it is. And now everything will be all nicely ready for me by the time I get there.”

  He started his car again. When he drew up before the inn Rachel was standing in the road before the door. She had a little the air of being on guard and he wondered if she hoped to prevent him from entering. He greeted her and asked if Mr. Christopherson was in. It appeared not. He had gone to Midwych on business and Rachel did not know when he would be back. So Bobby said he was sorry to have missed him and added carelessly that he had thought he saw him at the attic window as he drove up.

  “Someone else perhaps?” he asked and Rachel said:

  “There is no one in the house but myself and my mother.”

  “Perhaps it was her, then?” Bobby remarked.

  “It may have been, why not?” Rachel said. “Why do you ask?”

  Bobby did not explain that the impression made upon him had been of someone constantly on watch or how that thought had instantly linked itself in his mind with his recollection of Mr. Christopherson out on the moor as if searching. Watch at home, search on the moor. Watch and search. But why? For whom or for what? He said:

  “Will you let me go over the house and see for myself there is no one else here?”

  She looked at him steadily and delayed answering for a time. Then she said:

  “No. I think not. No. Why should I? You can come again when my father’s here and ask him if you like.”

  “May I come in and wait till he gets back?” Bobby asked.

  As before she looked at him steadily and in silence for some moments before replying. He felt she was asking herself what reason lay behind his request, and that it troubled her. She said finally:

  “Why do you ask that? You know this is a public house and licensed, and everyone has a right to accommodation.”

  She went back into the building. He followed her; and she made no comment when he followed her, too, into the kitchen, where Mrs. Christopherson was sitting with some sewing before her, but not as though she were much occupied with it. She took no notice when Bobby entered, she might not even have been aware of his presence, but he noticed that she was fidgeting with her feet and that her toes seemed restless inside her shoes. People exercising self-control so often forget that agitation may show in movements of the feet as easily and as plainly as in the features or as in restless hands.

  “If you don’t mind, I’ll wait here,” Bobby said.

  Rachel sat down by the window, her hands in her lap. She sat upright and still and yet even so managed to convey an impression of a lithe and active grace. Bobby, who had a natural eye for form, told himself she would make an ideal model for a painter, that is, for one with genius enough to reproduce that effect of, as it were, a still and motionless rhythm. Mrs. Christopherson gathered up her sewing materials and without looking at Bobby went out of the room. Bobby said:

  “I am sorry if I have disturbed your mother.”

  But the thought in his mind was that Mrs. Christopherson had gone to make sure all was in order and everything as it should be—and not solely from the careful housewife’s point of view either. He told himself sadly that police work must be a lot easier when you could use Gestapo methods and just bang about anywhere and anyhow, without bothering at all about people’s rights and privacies. Or would it? Perhaps after all Gestapo methods were not the best fitted for arriving at the truth.

  Rachel, still motionless, her hands folded in her lap, said:

  “Why do you torment us so?”

  “Because a man was done to death near here not yet a week ago,” Bobby answered.

  “Yes, I know,” she said, and gave somehow the impression of admitting his reply.

  “Because also,” he went on, “I think you know more than you have told me yet.”

  “I have told you all I can,” she said.

  “But not perhaps all you know,” he replied. “‘Can’ is a word that may have its own meaning.”

  Again she looked at him long and steadily before replying. Then she said:

  “You are very clever, aren’t you? Very quick.”

  “Very persistent might be nearer the truth perhaps,” he answered. “I’ve just had a talk with Captain Wintle,” he added, after a pause.

  She made no comment, but her attitude stiffened suddenly. If before she had seemed like deep water flowing so quietly it appeared still, now she gave the impression of water frozen suddenly into immobility. When she continued silent, Bobby went on:

  “You see, he is uneasy because he thinks he is suspected of complicity in the murder.” Still she made no comment, but he felt that she was listening with almost anguished intensity, listening as a condemned man might listen to the reading of his death sentence. “Of course, he is quite right about that,” Bobby added.

  At that she turned on him sharply and angrily.

  “Why?” she asked. She got to her feet, erect and fierce and graceful still in her attitude of strong resentment and indignation. Like an offended deity she stood, tall and upright, one hand held out. “Why?” she repeated. “Why not my father as well? Or do you?”

  “Yes,” said Bobby.

  At that she stared, losing her aspect of offended goddess to turn into a bewildered and very astonished young girl.

  “Oh, that’s silly,” she protested. “Perhaps you suspect me, too?”

  “Yes,” he said once more.

  She stared again and then she laughed outright, a rich, bubbling laugh. She sat down once more and Bobby thought somehow that mingling with her first surprise and indignation and her later amusement, there was also a feeling of a great relief.

  “Oh, well,” she said. “We can’t all be guilty—all three of us, can we?” she asked with once more that low bubbling laugh of hers.

  “Why not?” said Bobby.

  “Oh, well, now then,” she said, looking at him.

  “Not all of you could have fired the shot that killed,” Bobby agreed, “but you could all three have been concerned in what happened.”

  “I suppose we could, I suppose you are right,” she admitted with an air of considering an entirely new and not very welcome proposition. “I see what you mean. Yes. Well, we weren’t. Why should we?”

  “If I knew why the murder was done, I should know it all, I expect,” Bobby said. “I have to remember that there is at least identity of time and place both for you and for your father. I have reason to think Captain Wintle was near h
ere on Saturday night and if that’s so, it does suggest that possibly he was here also on the night of the murder. Difficult to think there is no connection between the fact that he got a bruised eye that Saturday night and the other fact that the dead man’s body also showed bruises probably received on the same night. And I’m not satisfied about the attempt, whether it succeeded or not, to force an entry here. I think you must know more about that than you have told me.”

  “All the same, we don’t,” she retorted with energy. “We found the glass out on Sunday morning and father put it back and that’s all we know.”

  “Or need to know?” Bobby asked. “There is a young man named Larry Connor. I think you know him, don’t you?”

  He could see the question troubled her profoundly and again she took time to answer. But this time her gaze was on the floor, not on him.

  “You mean the young man who helps with a K. and K. lorry?” she asked. “You don’t think he is the man who was killed, do you? Father heard that he had gone away.”

  “I must ask you this,” Bobby said. “It is suggested he was in love with you. Is that true?”

  At that she stared again, her eyes wide, her mouth a little open, apparently very much surprised.

  “Good gracious, no,” she said. “Whatever made you think that? Why, we had hardly spoken.”

  Bobby thought to himself that sometimes lovers are oddly tongue-tied and that there have been cases when men have loved—and women too perhaps—with no word spoken on either side.

  Rachel was still looking at him in what seemed genuine astonishment. But how could he be sure that it was genuine? Deep waters he had always felt from the beginning of this case and in them strange eddies. Neither had spoken again when they heard a step approaching down the long flagged passage that led to the kitchen. The door opened and Mr. Christopherson came in and stood there, looking gloomily at Bobby.