First: Why had Lady Cambers gone out alone so late at night without warning anyone, and why had she taken a suit-case with her?
Secondly: Who had lain and watched so long that night in the rhododendron-bushes, and for what object, since the watch must have continued long after the murder had been committed?
Thirdly: Who was it who had been served with refreshments in Lady Cambers’s business room? And by whom?
CHAPTER 10
LANDLADY’S PHILOSOPHY
Having concluded this survey of the case, identified his long list of suspects, decided on the first three points to aim at, Bobby descended from his seat on the five-barred gate, brushed his trousers, put his note-book back in his pocket, and felt depressed.
It began to seem to him that in the dark and complicated background to the tragedy must lie the secret of its cause and perpetration. The murder of Lady Cambers was, he felt, no isolated occurrence, but the perhaps inevitable and, so to say, destined, outcome of a long series of events, of passionate emotions that in the end had broken loose, of deep conflicting interests in which love and ambition and greed of money and position were all inextricably confused.
But how to find the path that through such a labyrinth would lead to the truth, how to discover with what degree of passion and intensity these ten different people had pursued their various aims so that, in one instance at least, there had supervened so black a crime?
And then in the background the enigmatic figure of Amy Emmers, with her aloof and proud indifference, her gentle, ready explanations?
To Bobby it seemed clear that the truth was to be found almost certainly, in this case at least, in a study of character rather than in an examination of fact. Once the detective had grasped character and motive, then he would know ‘why’ and, once the ‘why’ was understood, then it was comparatively simple to follow out the ‘how’. One might easily have, so to speak, all the facts in one’s hand, and yet fail entirely to read their message for lack of comprehension of the motives that had inspired them. Whereas once those motives were understood, then the most puzzling facts would fall quickly and easily into place and present themselves in one coherent story of simple and straightforward reading.
It was a theory of detection – to concentrate more on spiritual motive than on material fact – Bobby had learned in part from his immediate superior at the Yard, Superintendent Mitchell, in part from the writing of Mr. G.K. Chesterton.
A microscope, infra-red rays, supra-violet rays and their effects, finger-prints and footprints – all had their valuable, and, indeed, essential, part to play, but they could only be interpreted correctly in the light of character and motive. And to do so is a task both more difficult and less spectacular than to analyse a speck of dust from the pocket of a suspect and draw therefrom scientific conclusions.
Bobby shook off these somewhat depressing thoughts to find he had now reached the village. It was easy to see at the first glance how profoundly the small community had been stirred by what had happened. The women, their household tasks forgotten, were gathered in little groups, talking in subdued, frightened whispers. The men, if they could not always leave their work so easily, were none the less talking just as hard and much more loudly. Bobby’s appearance as he walked up the street produced first a pause and then a renewed gush of talk, for they all knew both that he was connected with the London police and that he had been staying at Cambers House as a guest. From all parts of the straggling, sunny street curious eyes were turned in his direction, and one could almost feel the ache of the longing to question him.
At one spot the postman and the milkman were exchanging condolences. Both had just been getting into trouble with their clients for being so late upon their rounds, and both had been protesting that they could not help it. People would insist on asking them a mort of questions, and they couldn’t get away without being downright rude.
‘Look at Mrs. Roberts – her that’s cook up at Bowmans’,’ complained the milkman. ‘I know I was over an hour late getting there; nine it was striking when I knocked, instead of half-past seven and a good twenty minutes before I got away again, all along of her wanting to know what was up, and having heard nothing about it. And just as I was telling her, there was Mr. Bowman himself came walking in at the gate; gave us both a turn, and cook and all thinking him in his office, for like a ghost he looked – white as a sheet.’
Bobby, who had overheard this, and who had previously chatted with both men, with one while delivering the letters, the other the milk, at Cambers House, thought this conversation sounded promising. So he joined in, and soon, since he had made up his mind it would be well to try to find out all he could about the stranger from London said to have been staying in the village and to have vanished that morning with a somewhat suspicious speed, he was inquiring about him. But the milkman knew nothing, and, remembering waiting customers, departed, and the postman did not seem inclined to be very communicative.
‘The gent that was stopping at the Cambers Arms?’ he asked. ‘Jones was his name – Samuel Jones. Left this morning, they say, but there’s no letters for him.’
Bobby tried to pursue the subject further, but the postman grew suddenly official. It was forbidden to give any information about the mail without special authority. If any more letters came for Mr. Jones they would have to be dealt with in the ordinary way, and authority to hand correspondence over would have to be obtained from headquarters. As a matter of fact the good man had been telling in full detail everything he knew to everyone he met all the morning long, and had most thoroughly enjoyed doing so. But it was a different matter altogether to talk to a detective who had behind him all the mysterious powers of Scotland Yard. So he grew suddenly silent, and Bobby tactfully applauded this official discretion, felt fairly confident that, so recognized, it would in time easily dissolve in a pint or two of good ale, and moved on to the Cambers Arms, where all morning, during that generally mournful period when the licensing laws forbid the sale of ‘wine, beer, or spirits’, the consumption of lemonade and ‘minerals’ had touched unprecedented heights.
It was luncheon-time now, and, indeed, past it, and in the bar and the cosy sheltered dining-room the talk was largely about mysterious Mr. Samuel Jones and his equally mysterious disappearance. Most of the company appeared convinced he was the murderer, and, with various glances Bobbywards, wondered he had not already been found and arrested. But the landlady pointed out that he had always paid regularly and had settled his bill before he departed, which, as she justly observed, was more than could have been expected from a murderer.
But it seemed that neither she nor anyone else had much real information about him. He had appeared abruptly in the village, and at first everyone had accepted his story that he was on the look-out for a cottage, with a bit of land attached, whereon to settle down on his retirement from business. This had seemed to explain the many questions he asked, until it began to be noticed that the questions increased in number and detail in proportion as the prospective purchase grew vaguer and vaguer.
Still, he had made himself fairly popular; he had won a good many pints and half-pints at darts, and lost others at shove-halfpenny; he had received several letters with typewritten address, and those he had written himself, it had been noticed, he never seemed to care to post in the village. For that purpose he had invariably gone to Hirlpool or elsewhere, and he had taken pains to explain that his wife was very anxious to know how the search for a new home progressed.
All this seemed interesting to Bobby, and after luncheon he managed to get the landlady aside. From her he learnt the further fact that Mr. Jones had been very fond of smoking a late pipe out-of-doors – so much so that finally he had been given a key of the side-door in order that he might let himself in when he was late without making anyone wait up for him. There were also hints that these late strolls had a way of taking him in the direction of Cambers House, but the landlady was quite clear that on the night of the murder the heavy
rainstorm had brought him in fairly early and wet through – and that he had not gone out again, but had proceeded straight to bed.
If this were so, and could be confirmed, it provided, of course, a complete alibi so far as the actual murder was concerned, but of one thing Bobby felt convinced: that Mr. Jones’s assumption of the character of a retired business man seeking a country home was an invention to conceal his real purpose, whatever that might have been – burglarious or otherwise.
Bobby got permission to see the room he had occupied, but close examination showed nothing of interest. Nor had Mr. Jones left anything behind. His room was on the first floor, so that exit from it during the night without attracting attention would have been easy enough, especially as there was a convenient gutter-pipe adjacent. As for his address, he had given it simply as ‘Cromwell Road, London’, which struck Bobby as about as helpful as ‘Everywhere, Anywhere’, since, indeed, there are probably few parts of London into which the Cromwell Road does not extend its interminable length. However, Bobby got as full a description as possible of his personal appearance, and a promise that the room should not be disturbed until a finger-print expert had visited it. If good impressions could be obtained from any of the furniture, and if Mr. Jones happened to be a gentleman who had had previous commerce with the police of the country, his identity would be very quickly established.
One thing that came out in further talk was that Mr. Jones had seemed specially interested in Eddy Dene and his archaeological researches in Frost Field, on Mr. Hardy’s farm. He had explained to the landlady that he himself had studied the subject, and was extraordinarily interested in old castles, cathedrals, and so on – that, in fact, he, so to speak, ‘collected’ them – and it took Bobby some time to deduce that in Mr. Jones’s mind there probably existed a slight confusion between archaeology and architecture. This interest displayed by Mr. Jones had not, however, much surprised the landlady, for, she explained, Eddy Dene was by way of being famous, and had even had his picture in the papers. And when once a gentleman came from Oxford to see him, Eddy had conducted the conversation as man to man, ‘just as it might be you and me,’ said the landlady, suitably impressed by Oxford, its accent, its general affability.
‘Not that I hold with this proving we all come from monkeys,’ the landlady went on, ‘as those can believe who like, and, if it’s true, what’s the sense of raking up the past?’
As an answer was evidently expected, Bobby said meekly that he didn’t know, and asked if Mr. Dene wasn’t engaged to one of the maids at Cambers House.
The landlady shrugged her ample shoulders and opined that no self-respecting girl would put up with a boy who hardly ever took any notice of her.
‘I wouldn’t be taken for granted the way he takes her,’ declared the landlady. ‘It’s all been the old people’s doing. They brought Amy up, and they always had it fixed she and Eddy were to marry, but there’s nothing he thinks of but his bones and stones and things, though I don’t hold with all vicar says, because if it’s a judgement, why’s it fallen on her, poor lady, instead of him? But mark my words, there’ll be a bigger congregation at church next Sunday than there’s been for long enough.’
‘Mr. Andrews felt strongly about it, then?’ Bobby asked. ‘I don’t see why.’
‘If Eddy Dene proved we were all apes before we were made,’ explained the landlady, ‘then the Bible’s all wrong, isn’t it? And if Bible’s wrong, where’s church? And church is vicar’s living, isn’t it? Why, my old man himself heard Eddy and vicar telling each other off proper, and vicar saying how God would speak, and Eddy saying he hoped, anyhow, God wouldn’t speak with a sniffle like vicar’s, him having a cold, poor man – which,’ said the landlady, lowering her voice reverently, ‘God wouldn’t – and vicar tearing straight off to talk to Lady Cambers and how she was imperilling her mortal soul and all of ours as well, because of us being apes perhaps and so having none. But what I say is,’ concluded the landlady, a little breathless, ‘don’t go raking up anyone’s past, but see dinner’s cooked and ready on time and the floors swept proper.’
CHAPTER 11
EDDY DENE’S ROOM
From the inn, Bobby went on to the shop kept by Eddy Dene’s parents – theoretically a grocery establishment, but stocking many other things as well, from hardware to stationery, from cigarettes to aspirin. At the moment it was full of customers, most of whom, however, seemed less occupied in making purchases than in general converse. Even that Draconian law which forbids one commercial traveller to enter a shop while another of the fraternity is present there, seemed to have been abrogated for the time, since a gentleman who sought orders for paper bags was talking quite amiably to another who had for mission to establish a market in an entirely new brand of ink for fountain-pens, neatly named the ‘Perennial’, in the hope that a simple-minded public would accept the implication that it ‘flowed for ever’. His instructions were to give away one sample bottle and one only – ‘one only’ much emphasized and strictly observed – in each neighbourhood, so that the great opening day of the sales campaign might arrive to the accompaniment of the slogan, ‘Every Retailer has Tried It Himself.’ But though conversation in the shop was both general and animated, on one detail none touched. What had in fact brought all these people hither was the story spread already through the village that the police wished to question Eddy Dene, but were unable to find him. Even the fountain-pen-ink merchant had delayed his departure from a locality in which he had completed all his business the previous weekend in order to discover for himself whether there was or was not any truth in the story. For, oddly enough, the state of a traveller’s order-book depends very largely on whether he has the latest funny story to relate, the latest bit of local gossip to recount. Unfortunately the attitude of Eddy’s parents had not been of a nature to encourage much inquiry concerning his present whereabouts.
Mr. Dene, a small, withered, anxious-looking man, nervous and even excitable in manner, but plainly used to keeping himself well in hand, as befits a good tradesman whose motto has to be that the customer is always right, was behind the counter, making occasional, distracted, and not very successful, efforts to lead the conversation from the recent tragedy to current needs. Mrs. Dene, large, plump, and comfortable-looking, hovered in the background, occasionally vanishing into the parlour behind the shop, and then again emerging to listen to, or join in, one of the many discussions going on.
Bobby’s entrance caused a sudden hush, for most of those present knew who he was. And since everyone was looking hard at him, and was on the evident tiptoe of expectation, he thought it best to ask at once for Eddy, and, on being told with a certain hesitation that he was out, to go on to request a few moments’ talk with Mr. and Mrs. Dene.
Mr. Dene looked more worried than ever, paused to sell a frying-pan to a customer who didn’t want it but could think of no other excuse for presence in the shop, remarked that he had enough to do to mind his own business, bad as business was with things the way they were and the motor-buses taking people to Hirlpool, where they seemed to like paying more than others nearer home charged for exactly the same thing. As for Eddy, Eddy looked after his own affairs, and little enough he cared about the business; and Mrs. Dene interposed with the remark that Eddy was so upset by what had happened it was no wonder he felt he couldn’t face company, but if the gentleman cared to step into the parlour and wait, most likely he wouldn’t be long, and then the gentleman could ask him any questions he wanted to, not that there was anything Eddy knew more than others.
It was an unpopular suggestion with the customers in the shop, who did not at all like this manner of ravishing from their ken one into whose every word could be read according to taste a meaning and a significance for general retailing and discussion. But Bobby accepted it at once, and in the little parlour Mrs. Dene set herself instantly to explain how terrible a shock it had been to them all, and in especial to her boy.
That she was vaguely uneasy and more or le
ss on the defensive was perfectly plain, though with her this unease took the form of nervous chattering just as with her husband it took the form of an equally nervous restraint. She was bitter about the rush of customers to the shop, and especially bitter about the two commercial travellers. With some detail she explained that one had finished his business in that district and should have left before this for another, and that the second traveller, the paper-bag gentleman, had left a district he had not even begun to work in order to visit this one.
‘Gossip, that’s all they want,’ she said indignantly. ‘Just something to talk your head off, and then push an order-form under your nose before you even know what it’s for.’
Bobby agreed that commercial travellers were undoubtedly the pest of all the ages, and gently brought the conversation back to Eddy. Mrs. Dene had evidently no idea where he was or what had become of him, but thought it no wonder he wished to be by himself, away from everyone.
‘It’s terrible for him,’ she explained. ‘Everything he owed to her ladyship, and wrapped up in his work so nothing else counted; and now, very like, it’ll all have to stop with no more help coming from her, and even his chance of a situation with the American gentleman will be gone now, most likely.’
‘What American gentleman is that?’ Bobby asked.
Mrs. Dene was a little vague. All she was sure about was a magnificent opening had been as good as promised, through the good offices of Lady Cambers, with an American gentleman of enormous wealth. Now, most likely, no more would be heard of it. Misfortunes never came singly.
She went on to relate that as usual Eddy had been up early. A good hard-working boy he was, even if it was his own mother said it. But everyone would say the same. It was his habit to work in the shop in the mornings. After dinner, at noon, he would go on to his diggings at Frost Field – or, rather, to examine and check the results of the morning’s work done there by the two workmen whose wages Lady Cambers paid. After tea, he would help in the shop again as a rule, unless business was slack, and then as soon as the shutters were up occupy himself again with his studies.
Death Comes to Cambers Page 9