“What do you suppose?” growled Wintle. “Think we stopped to talk it over? I had to report back as quick as I could. I knew they wanted that S.A. ammunition in a hurry. I had to let them know I had been knocked out so they could send for more.”
“And Christopherson, did he go with you?”
“No. Why should he? He was driving a lorry. There were two or three other men in it—wounded, mostly, he was taking down to the beach. He went back to the lorry. A Stuka came along and made a dive. I saw the bomb fall square on the lorry. A good size bomb. I was thirty or forty yards away but the blast knocked me flat. When I got up I ran back to see what had happened. There wasn’t any lorry or any wounded men any longer—just a hole where the lorry had been and bits of it and of the men scattered all round. That’s all.”
“You didn’t actually recognize Christopherson’s dead body?” Bobby insisted.
“It’s hard to recognize small scattered bits,” Wintle answered grimly.
“Yes, of course,” agreed Bobby.
“One of Christopherson’s platoon N.C.O.s saw it happen,” Wintle said. “He was driving another lorry just behind—man named Bradley, I think. If you want to check up, you can ask him. I know he reported it.”
“It was your account I wanted,” Bobby explained. “You see, what is in my mind is that all you can tell us of your revolver is, that you had it in your hand when Derek Christopherson started to help you out from under your car. Now it turns up here, buried on Derek’s father’s land. You see what that suggests? Obviously either you brought it back with you or it was someone else. I have to consider whether it was you, or, if not, who that someone else can be. You tell me you can’t remember anything about it. The possibility does suggest itself, doesn’t it? that Derek picked it up if you let it fall, as might happen very naturally when you were trying to get from under the car as he lifted it up. So it might have been in his possession when the bomb fell. After that anything might in theory happen to it, but does it seem likely that anyone but Derek Christopherson could have brought it back here to Derek Christopherson’s father’s farm? Isn’t that a fair and logical conclusion?”
“Damn cold-blooded reasoning,” Wintle said, “but there’s a flaw in it. You are trying to prove that one of us must have brought the thing here—and I suppose buried it as well. But if you prove it was one of us, that shows it wasn’t the other, and that applies to both.”
“Isn’t there a flaw in that reasoning, too?” Bobby asked. “That one of you two didn’t do a thing, isn’t proof that neither did it.”
“Oh, well,” Wintle muttered. “We can talk round and round like that all night. Anyhow, I didn’t bury any revolver anywhere, and why should I?”
“Captain Wintle,” answered Bobby, “the first instinct of a murderer is to try to hide the weapon used.”
“You have got back to that now then?” Wintle asked. “Got as far as calling me a murderer?”
“I have not done so,” Bobby said quietly. “I am pointing out certain circumstances, pointing out the suspicions they cause, and I am asking you if you wish to, or can, offer any explanation. At present I am obliged to accept your statement that you know nothing of what became of your revolver. But I am not at all sure. What they call an open mind. Another piece of evidence may turn up and throw quite a new light on things. But I do know very well that blast has very funny results. I have seen some even here at home in Midwych. Sometimes even more strange non-results, if I may put it that way. I remember two A.R.P. wardens. In our first blitz. They were standing close together at a street corner. One was blown to bits. The other was hardly hurt. The idea was the blast had made a kind of whirlpool so to say—a cyclone rather. With a comparatively calm centre, where the one warden had been standing, while the other got the full force of the blast, though only a yard or two away. Only theory of course. No one seems to know much about how blast acts. Anyhow, everyone thought both those men must have been killed. One was. The other man just picked himself up and began to brush the dust off his clothes. So then everyone thought he was all right. He wasn’t. He was in a sort of mental haze. He was in a kind of dazed condition for some hours, didn’t seem to know where he was or what had happened. I am asking myself if something of that sort may have happened in this case, to Derek Christopherson. A musician, I understand. More sensitive than most of us perhaps. More easily thrown off his balance. Shell shock. That’s what they call it for want of a better name. Suppose in that sort of dazed condition he got back to England and then made his way home to the Conqueror Inn. I have seen and talked to Mr. Christopherson, the boy’s father, and I don’t much think that without very good reason he would give shelter to a deserter—even though his own son. But if Derek were in that kind of mental condition I think he might, he and his wife and Miss Rachel. Especially Miss Rachel. I think she is a strong character. I think her father is a strong man but I think she is stronger still. If that is what happened it was foolish of them, I suppose. They may have feared for his reason. They may have thought that if the army authorities got to know and arrested him as a deserter it might complete his mental upset, drive him permanently insane. Would the army have understood quickly enough or would they only have found out that highly skilled medical care and attention were necessary when it was too late? When the balance of the boy’s mind had been destroyed for good? I think that was the danger Miss Rachel saw and I think she made up her mind it was too great and she would not let her brother face it. I think she would tell her father they were justified, since Derek was plainly unfit for military service. I think they—she and her parents—were caught between two duties. There was the duty to their country at a moment of deadly peril, at a moment when men and women worked at their machines till they dropped and rose up again from where they lay to go on working, at a time when old men and boys were drilling side by side on every common and village green in the land. Against that was their duty to brother and son, to save his sanity they saw in danger. I don’t think it was an easy choice, but I think I know which choice they made.”
“Why are you telling me all this?” Wintle asked.
“So that you may tell it to Miss Rachel,” Bobby answered. “She does not trust me. She sees me merely as the official, the policeman, the man whose duty it would be to pounce on her brother and hand him over to a court martial. If she would trust me, I think I could help. That is, if I am right in what I’ve been saying and it has happened like that.”
“Who put you on to it?” Wintle asked.
“Do you agree it is more or less the truth?”
“Who put you on to it?” Wintle repeated, ignoring Bobby’s question.
“No one,” Bobby answered. “It is merely what I think is a logical reconstruction from the facts. I had to ask myself why the Conqueror Inn didn’t seem to want custom. Why an attic was occupied by someone who according to Mr. Christopherson was himself, though it didn’t seem he was the type of man likely to be occupying a separate room from his wife, more especially a room on another floor. Why there was hidden on his farm a revolver, lost you tell me, where at any rate Derek could have picked it up. I don’t know whether you will feel willing to repeat what I have said, and why I have said it, to Miss Rachel. Before you do, and if you do, I think I must warn you of one thing though I am not sure that, as a policeman, I ought to. But all this does not seem to be quite the ordinary crime. I know I am not dealing with ordinary criminals. I want you to understand this—that my duty must always come first. I have this in my mind. Is it possible that Derek Christopherson, still more or less mentally unbalanced, believed he was still at Dunkirk, still in danger of being attacked by German soldiers? If so, is it possible—I take it he would go out for fresh air sometimes after dark—is it possible that if someone came upon him abruptly in the dark one night, that his mind flew back to Dunkirk, that he thought a German soldier was attacking him, and that he drew the revolver he had in his pocket and fired and killed?”
Wintle had taken out his
handkerchief and was wiping his face and forehead.
“I don’t believe you are being straight with me,” he muttered. “I don’t believe you’ve built all this up just by adding one thing to another. You must know more, someone must have told you something.”
“Oh, yes. Naturally they have,” Bobby answered. “But not intentionally and sometimes more by what they failed to say, rather than by what they did say. The most important thing I learnt, the so to say key word to the puzzle, was from something you yourself told me.”
“I did? What was that? Rubbish,” Wintle exclaimed. “What do you mean?”
“You told me you had asked whether there were any firearms kept at the Conqueror Inn.”
“Well, what about it?” Wintle asked. “Why shouldn’t I? What could you get out of that? What do you mean, key to a puzzle?”
“So much the key that it seemed to open the door to everything I’ve just been saying,” Bobby answered. “Why should you ask that unless you were afraid of firearms being used? And why should you be afraid of that unless you knew there was someone at the Conqueror Inn who might use them dangerously? But that someone wasn’t likely to be either Mr. Christopherson or his wife or Miss Rachel. So who could it be? I had to think that out. You see, the whole of my—speculation—follows in logical succession from that one remark of yours.”
“You build a lot on one remark,” Wintle said.
“Yes,” agreed Bobby. “Yes.”
“You’ve no proof of what you say.”
“No,” agreed Bobby. “No.”
“I suppose this means my commission goes,” Wintle said. “I suppose I might be able to join up again in the ranks.”
Bobby said nothing. He did not see that there was anything he could say usefully. Presently Wintle said:
“If all that’s true, can you blame them?”
“It is never for me to blame anyone—except myself,” Bobby answered. “My duty is to get at the truth and that I must do and will to the best of my ability, no matter at what cost.”
“Oh, well,” Wintle muttered. “Well, now then, there it is.”
“The cost of truth is sometimes high,” Bobby said. “In this case it may mean destroying a man’s reason, it may mean breaking a girl’s heart, it may mean wrecking a soldier’s career.”
Wintle gave Bobby another of those long stares of his, but one in which now curiosity and doubt seemed predominant.
“You see all that,” Wintle asked, “and yet you mean to go on?”
“Yes,” said Bobby.
“Oh, well,” Wintle said and grew silent again, deep in thought. “Is truth worth all that?” he asked presently, though a little as if speaking to himself. “Not a question for us to answer, I suppose, either for you or for me. Well, can I go now? I have told you all I know and apparently a good deal more than I knew I had told you. Well, I would like you to believe that anyhow I have never deliberately lied. I had no real knowledge that anyone—either Derek or anyone else—was hidden there in the Conqueror Inn. They never told me. I never asked. The first time I went there I felt there was something—I didn’t know what. Just imagination, I thought. The second time I went I got there late, after dark. I heard someone shouting in the yard, something about Germans. I thought I knew the voice but I wasn’t sure. I looked out and I thought I recognized the figure. But it was dark and I couldn’t be sure. All Rachel said was that it was a man who was suffering from the shock of what he had been through. I didn’t ask who the man was and she didn’t say. I expect you think these are pretty feeble excuses.”
“No,” said Bobby.
“If it was young Derek Christopherson,” Wintle went on, “he had saved my life. If he was a deserter, if Dunkirk had been too much for him—well, what had happened to him was because he had stopped to help me. If he had driven straight on, he would have missed that bomb. It may have been my duty to report that I thought a deserter might be hiding in the Conqueror Inn. I just couldn’t do it. I knew I ought. I didn’t. It’ll mean my commission—cashiered probably. I take it you’ll make a report at once?”
“Not till my case is more complete,” Bobby answered. “Not then unless I have to. I suppose I’m like you. I ought to report that I think a deserter may be hidden at the Conqueror Inn. But I’ll make that subsidiary to my first duty of discovering the truth about the killing there. In the meantime don’t you think that if the military authorities knew, they might take a sympathetic view?”
“After they had established the facts and by that time the mischief might be done,” Wintle answered. “You don’t know our brigadier. It would have to go to him first. One of the old school. To him a deserter would be just a deserter. Only that and nothing more. And shell shock just a sissy word—nothing more.”
“I mustn’t give you advice,” Bobby said. “I merely mention that if the Press got hold of such a story as you have told me and if the chief actor in it didn’t get sympathetic treatment—they would kick up a shine that would rock the Government itself. Imagine one of the sob writers in the Sunday papers letting himself go about it.”
“Yes, I know,” Wintle answered. “But it might be too late. That’s what Rachel says.” Bobby noticed this use a second time of the Christian name. “That’s always the snag—long before the Sunday papers got to work, the mischief might be done and the boy’s mental balance upset for good. What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know yet,” Bobby answered. “Even if the theory I have built up is correct as far as it goes, there’s still a lot unexplained. No theory is satisfactory till it covers the whole ground and there’s a lot left out in this one. I am afraid there are still a good many questions I shall have to ask you yourself—for instance what happened outside the Conqueror Inn the night you tell me you ran into a door and got a black eye, the same night the dead man cut out a pane of the kitchen window and broke into the Inn. Two nights that was before the killing.”
“Whoever it was hiding there,” Wintle said, “and I don’t know for certain he isn’t there now. That’s the truth—Derek or another, they have not seen or heard of him since that night, the night Rachel heard the pistol shot.”
Bobby wondered gravely if this was true. He thought so, or rather he felt sure that Wintle believed it to be true. He said:
“Does that mean the dead man is Derek Christopherson?”
“I have never dared to ask,” Wintle said.
CHAPTER XXVI
THE FORGOTTEN MAN
AN UNSATISFACTORY INTERVIEW, Bobby told himself; and so he told Sergeant Payne when Payne reported next morning on the apparently equally unsatisfactory and uninformative evening he had spent at the little wayside snack bar that called itself the Ritz.
“Nice little place,” Payne said, “clean and tidy and all that. Popular, too. I asked for tinned eggs, same as you said, sir, and it seems a sort of private joke there for sardines on toast. Goes back to Micky Burke. Some other lorry bumped into his parked outside, and he got into a panic and yelled out to be careful, he was loaded up with eggs, he said.”
“Eggs?” repeated Bobby.
“Yes, sir,” Payne answered. “I did prick up my ears a bit at that, seeing how often eggs have been spoken of, incidental like. But there was nothing to it. It wasn’t eggs at all. One case was knocked off Micky’s lorry and burst open and it was sardines, inside. Micky said he called out it was eggs just to make the other chap careful, so they all got chaffing him about his eggs and calling sardines tinned eggs to tease him like. Sort of family joke, sir, if you see what I mean. Funny to them that’s in the know but not to anyone else.”
“No,” agreed Bobby. “No, doesn’t sound first-class humour, does it?”
“Sorry I hadn’t better luck, sir,” said Payne apologetically.
“As good or better than mine with Wintle,” Bobby remarked consolingly. “If you get a man talking, nine times out of ten he’ll tell you something you want to know. Wintle did tell me a lot but not a thing that matters. Now, is th
at because he knows nothing or because he knows so much?”
Payne shook his head, looked doubtful, and said he didn’t trust Wintle any further than he could see him after blackout and Bobby agreed. He remarked that he had seldom met a man about whom he found it more difficult to make up his mind than he did about Wintle.
“A difficulty in this case,” Bobby went on, “is that you can’t help feeling most of them are up against it pretty badly, and most of them have reasons you can understand for not wanting to tell what they know. Tough on a detective if he can’t get any co-operation. The Maggie Kram girl won’t tell us what she knows or suspects about what’s happened to her husband for fear of implicating her father. A father hanged for the murder of a husband doesn’t bear thinking of. But her suspicions do mean Mr. Kram is lying when he says he was at home the night of the killing and what’s the good of our knowing that? The girl would certainly commit perjury in the witness box to back him up. Then there are the Christophersons—father, mother, and daughter. They had to choose between what seemed like sheltering a shirker and deserter or risking the sanity of a son and brother. Even now they won’t tell the truth for fear of the consequences to him. Perhaps they don’t even know the full truth.”
“I think they know all right, only they aren’t saying,” Payne interposed. “If you ask me, there’s nothing they would stop at to help that boy. They are the conscientious type and once you are up against a conscience—well, you are up against it, aren’t you?”
Bobby nodded in full agreement.
“So you are,” he said. “Sound psychology, Payne. A thoroughly conscientious crime is the hardest of all to deal with.”
“If this Larry Connor spotted there was a deserter hidden there,” Payne went on, “and tried to make trouble—perhaps to use it as a lever for having his way with the girl if there was any real cause for the other girl’s jealousy—well, I wouldn’t put it past them to finish off Larry to save Derek.”
The Conqueror Inn: A Bobby Owen Mystery Page 18