“She has been playing all evening,” Olive said. She went to the window and opened it. The strains of distant music floated in. “The queerest stuff,” Olive said. “It makes you feel—oh, I don’t know.”
Bobby came to her side and they listened together for a time. Abruptly, in the middle of a chord, as if the player’s hands had dropped even as they hovered over the keys, the music ceased.
“Now why was that?” Bobby said, and then he laughed angrily. “I’m letting it get on my mind,” he said. “What made her stop like that?”
“I think it sounded as if it was the end,” Olive said. “I think she knew it was no longer any good going on.”
Bobby remained for a moment or two standing at the window, listening to the enormous silence that now as it were enveloped all things. He shut the window and went back to his chair.
“Oh, well, I don’t know,” he said. “What’s playing the piano got to do with murder? Let’s begin again. Facts first. Raid. Opal ring. Motor cyclist, who looked like Biggs but can’t have been because Fielding gives him an alibi. Or could he?”
“Could he what?”
“Be Biggs. Anyhow, there’s the foundation.”
“I don’t call it a foundation,” Olive said. “I call it quicksands.”
“Well, a background,” Bobby conceded. “Take the people who come into it. Mr. Fielding, for instance. Call him ‘A’.” Bobby had paper and pencil now and was jotting down disconnected and mostly illegible notes. “What do we know? Respectable, middle aged, well off, long established in the village, well thought of. Typical bourgeois pillar of society. Very last man to be mixed up in smash and grab raids. Sort of semi-retired, apparently—that is, has stopped being a go-getter, but if any promising deal comes his way doesn’t refuse it. Was a sort of free lance of business. No record.
“Very good so far.
“Queries.
“Was it by pure luck or was it by design that he let us have this house? If it was luck, why is luck taking a hand in it all and why does it all begin to happen as soon as we get here? If on purpose—well, what purpose? Why should anyone want a cop for a neighbour?”
“Why indeed?” echoed Olive with some feeling. “Why should anyone be a cop? Oh, Bobby, why can’t we have a shop and stand like gods behind the counter, telling people what they can’t have?”
“Yes, I know,” said Bobby yearningly. “Saying to one ‘Go’ and she goeth in tears and to another ‘Come’ and she cometh—if she’s waited long enough in the queue. Oh, well, too late now. Let’s get on. Everyone in the village seems to think Fielding is in love with Miss Bellamy and is going to marry her.”
“I don’t know about being in love with her,” Olive said. “I told you. I thought—well, not afraid exactly. A sort of fascination, resignation, waiting.”
“Waiting?” Bobby repeated. “What for?”
“For something to happen and you know it has to. Like hearing a flying bomb coming and waiting for it to cut out. Only more as if it were one you had started off yourself.”
“I don’t know where you get all that from,” Bobby said.
“From watching her watching him watching her,” Olive explained. “I think he attracts her, I think she is sorry for him. But all that’s not going to make any difference any more than it makes any difference being sorry for the worms you cut in half when you’re in the garden. You go on all the same because what’s sown has to be reaped. That’s what her playing has been saying to me.”‘
“That’s not the sort of stuff you can put into a police report,” Bobby commented.
“Repulsion creates attraction and attraction repulsion again. A sort of dialecticism. An affect of opposites. That’s how I see their relationship,” Olive told him. “It’s all in her playing.”
“Strikes me it’s what you got out of those lectures you went to,” Bobby said accusingly. “No good taking lectures seriously. I hope no one takes mine like that. What it all comes to is that there’s something between them and we don’t know what, and they won’t tell. So we’ll have to try to find out.
“Take the next.
“Cann, for instance, Call him ‘B’.
“B.
“Queries.
“Why did he leave when he did and why did he come back when he did? Why do he and his aunt want to establish an alibi for twelve o’clock which is just about the time the doctor thinks Myerson was killed? And is that nice savoury smell in the Cann kitchen in any way relevant?”
“Good gracious,” Olive protested, “you’re not going to bring what the Canns had for dinner into it, are you?”
“I’m fairly sure it’s one of the items that has to be fitted in,” Bobby said. “Don’t you see why? Well, you ought to, and you a housewife.”
“Oh, well,” admitted Olive. “If you put it like that …”
“I do,” said Bobby. “Quite clear. Another query. Does he or does he not bear a grudge against Biggs for displacing him at Fielding’s? Yet it seems clear he left of his own accord so why should he? Not reasonable, but then so few of us ever are. But the possibility does seem to bring him into touch with the missing Biggs on one hand and Rogers on the other. We’ll have to return to him when we get to them. Take his aunt next.
“Miss Cann and call her ‘C.’
“C.
“Queries.
“Is she telling the truth about Biggs visiting Miss Bellamy late at night? If it’s a lie, what’s the object? Another point we’ll have to come back to when we get to Biggs. It was she who told us the story about the fight being between Rogers and Biggs, not between Cann and Biggs. There is some corroboration there fortunately to support her version.”
“What?” asked Olive.
“Cushion,” said Bobby. “I mean—pillow.”
“Oh yes, of course,” agreed Olive.
“On the other hand the village seems to think it was Cann and Biggs who fought and the village generally knows, but not always. How about its being all three? Cann sore about Biggs having his job and Rogers joining in because no pacifist or conscientious objector can help joining in a scrap, provided it’s not his concern or his duty.”
“Bobby,” said Olive rebukingly, “you’re very unfair and prejudiced.”
“Not me,” protested Bobby. “I love the whole lot of ’em, the little dears. We needs must love the highest when we see it, you know, and we know they’re the highest because they always tell us so themselves. And who are we to doubt or question?”
“Well, take ’D’ next.”
“D.
“Biggs.
“Query.
“What’s become of him?”
The ’phone rang and Bobby went to answer it.
CHAPTER XVII
THE PASSER BY
The message was from Bell at county police headquarters. He had sent Sergeant Shaw, his fingerprint expert, to London, with the dabs obtained in Mr. Fielding’s garage. Shaw had now ascertained, as Bobby had felt certain would be the case, that those of neither Fielding himself nor of Biggs were to be found in the Yard files.
“Something else,” Bell went on. “I rang up the City blokes re the financial angle. They generally know all there is to know about that side to it. They got on to the manager of the branch of the London and Central Bank where Biggs had his account. It’s a new account, what the banks call a ‘de-mob’ account, and they know nothing about any investments. He made none through them, he has never paid in any divi. warrants, and they have nothing of his in their care. And Biggs’s name isn’t in any list of shareholders or in any recent transfers. What do you make of that? Why no trace of any of the securities on his list?”
“Plenty of possible explanations,” Bobby answered. “Trustee, nominee, bought in another name, anything you like.”
Bell said he didn’t like anything about it. It only made it all more difficult, and Bobby said perhaps it made it easier, and Bell said he was glad Bobby thought so and rang off. Bobby went back to Olive and told her.<
br />
“Another little bit of information to fit in,” he said. “It all helps. Let’s see. We had got to Biggs in the catalogue, hadn’t we? Call him:
“D.
“Queries.
“First and most important, what’s become of him?”
“Run away?” Olive asked.
“I hope so,” Bobby answered. “Next, is he identical with the motor cyclist I followed till he disappeared in a way to suggest he knew all about the vanishing lady stunt? If he is the same man, what about the alibi Fielding gave him? Rather suggests they are pals, but are they?”
“No,” said Olive.
“Agreed,” said Bobby.
“They watch each other,” said Olive.
“Agreed,” repeated Bobby. “Then there’s the way Biggs does seem to have wished himself on Fielding. But if they aren’t pals, why the alibi Fielding offered at once?”
“It may be true,” Olive pointed out. “Or it might be that Mr. Fielding didn’t like the idea of his chauffeur being mixed up in a smash and grab raid. You called him the perfect type of bourgeois respectability. Bourgeois respectability doesn’t like the idea of a gangster chauffeur.”
“Possible,” agreed Bobby. “We’ve got to remember, too, that Biggs certainly knew me as soon as he saw me. Though it’s true more know the police than police ever know. Well. Next. And important. What is his exact relationship with the Bellamy woman and with the Rogers girl? I’m assuming, of course, that the story about his visiting Miss Bellamy late at night is true, and not merely Miss Cann’s invention. Miss Bellamy denies it but the evidence seems fairly strong. And we have only Miss Rogers’s version of her connection with Biggs. Until we find him, we can’t know if he had the same idea about marrying. It might be there’s a clue there,” he added slowly.
“Where?” Olive asked.
“We’ll come to it later when we come to her,” Bobby said with an expression even more worried than before. “Leave it for the moment. Next, why, with a capital of £3,000 in hand, if he had it, that is—”
“It’s all ‘if’ and ‘if’ and nothing but ‘if’,” interrupted Olive impatiently.
“You’re telling me,” said Bobby, who always liked to keep up with the latest verbal development in literary circles. “If he didn’t have those investments, why the list? Nostalgia for lost gilt edged? It was a gilt-edged list all right. And if he still has them, why isn’t his name to be found?”
“Because Biggs isn’t his real name,” Olive said promptly.
“Exactly,” said Bobby. “So what is? Bellamy?”
“Oh-h,” said Olive. “Oh-h, do you mean they’re married?”
“Only a guess,” said Bobby. “Probably a bad one. She’s a good deal older.”
“Haven’t you seen his identity card?”
“No. It hasn’t turned up. Probably in his pocket wherever he is. Identity cards don’t mean much anyhow. They are three a penny—if you know where. Biggs must have been the name on his army discharge papers. Not that that goes for much either. Also he was in possession of ammo, which seems to fit the automatic used to kill Myerson. That is going to take some explanation. I think that’s all we know about Biggs, but not all we need to know, not by a long chalk. Well, Miss Bellamy next. Call her ‘E.’
“Queries.”
But then he became silent and remained silent so long that Olive said:
“Yes. Miss Bellamy?”
“Her playing,” Bobby said.
“I know,” Olive said. She repeated: “I know. It makes you feel—”
She was silent in her turn. Bobby said:
“It makes me feel it’s all there. And there,” he added, “it’s likely to stay as far as I’m concerned. You can’t put piano playing into a report to the public prosecutor.” He went on: “With her, it’s all one long query. What’s she doing here? What has she to do with Fielding? If he is afraid of her, why? Is it just the impact of a rather tremendous personality on a grubby little business man, who never knew before that there were such things as art and music and emotion? Is he afraid because she has opened new worlds to him and he doesn’t know where he is in them, or is it because she is reminding him of a world he had hoped to forget for ever? Which?”
“I think,” Olive said, though without answering this directly, “she rather makes me afraid, too.”
“Leave her,” Bobby said impatiently. “She is all one query all to herself. She may be in the centre of it all or she may have nothing to do with it. Miss Cann’s tale may be merely a malicious invention and very likely the motor cyclist’s vanishing act happening so near her cottage was only accidental, not her fault. Or was it?”
“You went over her cottage, didn’t you?” Olive asked. “I thought you made certain he wasn’t there.”
“I thought so at the time,” Bobby agreed, “but I thought she was helping, wanting to make sure, too. I wasn’t thinking then she might be in it, and I wasn’t looking out for prepared hiding places—trap doors, loose floor boards, that sort of thing.”
“I don’t see how that’s possible,” Olive said. “Not in that cottage. It’s so tiny.”
“No,” agreed Bobby. “No. I don’t think so either. No. I think we can rule out prepared secret hiding places. Give her up and go on to the other. Miss Rogers. Call her:
“F.
“Queries.
“What does she know that makes her so afraid Biggs may be the murderer?”
“Is she?” Olive asked, startled.
“It’s why she lied about the pistol the vicar says he saw her cleaning,” Bobby asserted. “Does she know about the visits Biggs is said to have made at Miss Bellamy’s cottage? We don’t know why Biggs wanted to be here, in this neighbourhood. But did she know? And is that what is worrying her? Jealousy? Or something else? Jealousy is a strong motive. You can’t help remembering that she has killed twice already.”
“Oh, Bobby, no,” Olive cried. “You can’t mean that? Myerson was killed, not the other.”
“I don’t know what I mean,” Bobby said. “But I must consider everything.” He said slowly: “There is in this business a tangle of human relationships that we’ve got to understand before we can even begin to get at the truth. Well, leave her as another unsolved enigma and go on to her brother.
“George Rogers.
“G.
“Query.
“First, the reported quarrel and fight between him and Biggs. Did it take place and, if so, what was it about? Why did he and his sister come to this particular village to live? They were here before Biggs. How does that fit in? If they had followed Biggs, it would have been easier to understand.”
“Why couldn’t Biggs have followed them or her rather?” Olive asked. “He may have wanted to be near her and she may have told him about Cann leaving?”
“It’s an idea,” Bobby agreed, “but why, when he was well off for money, had he to wait to get a job before he came? Unnecessary, one would think. Besides, that seems to leave Fielding out of it altogether. Perhaps he is, for that matter. Next, we come to the vicar. Call him:
“H.
“Query.
“Why did he find the opal ring?”
“Because he did, I suppose,” Olive said, puzzled. “It just happened to be lying there and he saw it.”
“There’s one thing in all this that is quite certain, one thing and only one,” Bobby told her, “and that is that nothing in it just happens. We’ve got to do with a long prepared, careful plan—and if I’m wrong in that, may bread rationing go on for ever.”
“Oh, Bobby,” cried Olive, terrified, “don’t. I don’t know how you can say such awful things.”
“To impress you,” Bobby explained. “What I mean is that I don’t think the ring was dropped there by accident. I think it was there to be found, and it had to be found by someone who could be trusted to take it at once to the police and tell them when and where. The idea might be that the vicar could be trusted but that anyone else might pocket it and say
nothing.”
“Yes, but,” Olive asked, “why should they want the police to know about it?”
“Perhaps to lay a false trail,” Bobby suggested. “If the inquiry into the smash and grab affair could be canalized here, instead of where it ought to be, there would be a good chance of its failing to get anywhere. In every inquiry, time is of the essence of the contract. Delay means safety for the criminal. There may be some quite different explanation. But there has certainly been a deliberate attempt to get the inquiry started here—true scent or false scent and with what object, is just something else to puzzle out. Continue with the motor cyclist and call him:
“J.
“Query.
“Is he Biggs or someone else? Simple and solitary question re him, as Bell would say, but what’s the answer?”
“Could it have been Myerson?” Olive suggested.
“No. Myerson never rode like that. Whoever he was, Biggs or another, he knew how to handle his machine. Myerson wasn’t the man to take the risks that chap took. Finally: Myerson himself. Call him:
“K.
“Query.
“Why was it necessary to kill him?
“He was only a kind of office boy of the underworld and you don’t kill office boys—even though you do feel like it often enough.
“The opal ring is direct evidence of connection with the smash and grab raid and the sham stuff was probably there for proof of dewy-eyed innocence in case of arrest. One ring is easily disposed of.
“So far as I can see,” Bobby concluded, looking dispiritedly at his notes and wondering if he would ever be able to reduce them to order or even to read them, “that about covers the ground.”
“I don’t call asking a lot of questions and getting no answers,” Olive remarked, “covering the ground or anything else.”
“If you ask the right questions,” Bobby told her, “you are well on the way to get the right answers.
“I take the fundamental right questions to be:
“Why did Biggs want to get taken on as Fielding’s chauffeur?
“What was the relationship between Biggs and the two women, Miss Bellamy and Miss Rogers, and between Fielding and Miss Bellamy?
Music Tells All: A Bobby Owen Mystery Page 13