Bobby shook his head.
“I can’t think it’s that way,” he declared. “I don’t believe those two would ever work together. Each one of them might kill—and that’s true of most of us—but not in collusion. What’s the next move?”
“Better have a go at Miss Bellamy, see if we can get anything out of her,” Bell suggested. As they walked along, he said: “What about Rogers’s idea that it’s her we want? Anything in it or just him trying to put us wrong to save himself?”
“I don’t somehow think it’s like that,” Bobby answered, though with some hesitation. “He’s an odd type. Confused. Like most of the rest of us these days, for that matter. A mass of contradictions. I think one trouble with him is that he wants to walk by himself, like Kipling’s cat, but doesn’t know where to—or how. All dressed up mentally, so to say, but nowhere to go.”
“Do you think he would kill?—and him a conscientious objector?”
“Oh, yes. Goes with it. They are all like that. Pacifism nine times in ten is a result of an inner tendency to violence. There’s a subconscious awareness of that, and so there’s a feeling, too, that it must be kept down at all costs. That’s why the pacifists are always so ready for a fight and to defend violence when it’s on their own side. It was a well-known conscientious objector who tried to find excuses for the King David hotel murders in Jerusalem. Remember what Rogers said about Miss Bellamy’s playing being all about war and killing?”
“I thought he was just talking through his hat,” Bell said. “It struck me as more muddled up like—rather the way I feel in all this business.”
“The first time my wife and I heard it,” Bobby said, “we both thought it was a kind of warning of trouble to come. That was because we were both a bit uneasy without knowing it, over our getting Fern Cottage. Too good to be true, Olive said. I think that’s the way with Miss Bellamy’s playing. What you hear in it is what is already in your mind.”
“Psychological stuff,” Bell complained. “Gets you nowhere. No more evidence than what the soldier said.”
“Psychological stuff,” Bobby retorted, “means character and in a case like this character means everything.” He went on, ignoring Bell’s violently shaken head: “It shouldn’t be difficult to trace the man Rogers says he knew in gaol and saw in Biggs’s company. We can look up the records and see who was doing time with Rogers. Most likely we shall find there was one of the smash and grab lot we know about but can’t pull in yet. If so, there’s just a chance some of them may know something about Biggs and be willing to talk.”
“Not likely, no such luck,” Bell declared. “It’s never so easy as that. Afraid of being implicated.”
“There’s that,” Bobby agreed. “Anyhow it’s the first hint we’ve had of Biggs’s past and it is a definite link between him and the smash and grab business. It may prove important—very important. The lead we want.”
“I don’t see how,” protested Bell in his gloomiest tone. “Ten to one, only another dead end.”
They had reached the Bellamy cottage now. When they knocked Miss Bellamy came at once to the door. She showed no surprise, little interest. She stood aside to let them enter, and, but for that gesture, it might well have been that she was not even aware of their presence. As soon as they entered they were in the large front room—large that is by comparison with the other rooms in this tiny cottage. Miss Bellamy crossed slowly the floor and seated herself before the grand piano, her back to the instrument. Bell stood by the fireplace, Bobby by the window. Bell spoke very loudly, as if he wished or hoped by mere effect of emphasis or noise, to recall her from that infinite distance to which it seemed she had again receded.
“Very sorry, miss,” he began in this new loud voice of his, “to have to trouble you again, but we’ve got to. Our duty, ma’am. Necessary. You’ll have heard about this new development?”
“Murder.” she said. “Murder,” she repeated. “Is that what you call a new development?” To Bobby, she said: “You found his body in the shelter where you and I and Rhoda were last night. Did you know while we were watching?”
“No,” said Bobby. “One does one’s best to draw conclusions and sometimes they are right and sometimes they are wrong. After you had left, Mr. Fielding came.”
“Yes,” she said, and then she said again: “Yes.” Then she said: “That made four.”
“Did you know?” Bobby asked.
She did not answer. It was growing quickly dark now, for all this had taken time and it was late. The shadows were heaviest where she sat at one end of the room and it was out of the gloom that she spoke now—and was it only fancy that made it seem as though her eyes glowed there in the increasing dark as though lit by strange inner light? She said, and her words dropped slowly into the shadow filled room:
“Was he there when you found the body?”
“Why do you ask?” Bobby said, but again she did not answer, and again she seemed to have withdrawn herself into a remote and distant contemplation—or was it memory?
Bell said with some irritation:
“Ma’am, you’ll be called at the inquest and you’ll have to give evidence.” When she was still silent, still, as it were, withdrawn, he said: “You’ll be asked what you know about Biggs and you’ll have to answer.”
“I shall say—nothing,” she replied, and they did not know whether she meant she would say nothing or that she knew nothing.
“You still deny that he was in the habit of visiting you at night?” Bell asked.
She took no notice. She was cupping her chin in her hand and seemed again withdrawn into the intensity of her own thoughts. Even when Bell repeated his question she remained silent, but not so much as refusing to answer as ignoring the chatter of a child to which even the child itself expected no answer. Bobby interposed. He said:
“I don’t think you often played late at night. When you did, was it a signal to Biggs to tell him to come?”
That startled her. For the first time the armour of her remote indifference was pierced. There was a kind of dark high anger, or even alarm, in the glance she directed at him. She said:
“That’s the gossip you’ve been listening to. I told you before he came occasionally. It may have been late sometimes. I daresay it was. Mr. Fielding sent me flowers now and then. Sometimes he got things for me in town and Biggs would bring them me. Or a message to ask if I would go for a drive or could he take me to town if I wanted to do some shopping or any business.” She paused; and there was a certain softness, a kind of reluctant and hesitating tenderness in her voice as she added: “Mr. Fielding has always been kind and thoughtful and I have not met so many who are that.” After another long pause, she said: “I think he meant it.” She went on: “I expect that’s what started the gossip. I knew people from the village hung about outside. Sometimes I played to them. They said my music was indecent but it wasn’t my music, it was their own minds. Peeping Toms, you call them.”
“Did that often happen?” Bell asked. “Was Biggs one of them, do you think?”
For the first time in their knowledge of her, she nearly laughed. At any rate there was something like the semblance of a smile that for a moment seemed to touch the corners of her mouth. But it vanished at once, as though alarmed at finding itself where none like it had been for so long. Still, there did remain a touch of something more closely resembling ordinary human emotion in her voice as she said:
“Oh, no. No. No, he was never one of them. Anyhow, he was never like that.”
“Did he come to see you the night he was killed?” She shook her head. “Did anyone? Or did you hear anyone outside?”
“I thought I heard something,” she admitted, “but when I went to look there was no one there. The man who used to be Mr. Fielding’s chauffeur, Alf Cann, was coming up the lane. There was another man with him. I’m not sure, but I think now the other man was the man who was killed, Myerson—wasn’t that his name?”
“Myerson? With Cann that night? Why
didn’t you say so before?” Bell was both startled and angry and he spoke with emphasis. “It’s the last time he was seen alive, it may be most important. Ma’am, don’t you know it’s a most serious offence to withhold information?”
“I didn’t know I was,” she answered, unmoved. “It was dark. I didn’t take much notice and I couldn’t see either of them very clearly. It only struck me to-night that it might be the same man. The woman who does my washing for me was here and she was talking all the time about what’s happened. No one is talking of anything else. You can’t wonder. She had seen the man you call Myerson and it’s what she said about him made me think it might be the same man. But I’m not sure, it was dark. I did wonder a little.”
“Are you sure it was this man, Cann, you saw?” Bell asked.
“You’re not going to suspect him now, are you?” she demanded scornfully.
“I tell you plainly, ma’am,” retorted Bell, “there’s some we are suspecting, but not so much Mr. Cann, at least, not yet, not so much as others I could name.”
“You mean you are suspecting me, you think it might have been me?” she asked, but with complete indifference. “It wasn’t. Or was it? But not in the way you mean.”
“In what way do you mean?” Bobby asked, interrupting suddenly.
Miss Bellamy turned her attention once more to him, her generally remote and far off gaze now grave, intent, inquiring.
“In no way you would understand,” she said presently. “Or any policeman.” She was still watching him gravely, doubtfully. “If you are a policeman,” she added presently, as if not quite sure.
“I am certainly a policeman,” Bobby told her, “and it is part of a policeman’s duty to understand many things. I will ask you again: In what way do you mean?”
“I killed neither of those two poor men,” she said, without answering him directly. “I think if I ever killed anyone I should kill myself, too. And I do not know who did kill either of them, though I may think that I could—guess. Even if I knew I do not think I should say. When a thing is over and done with, isn’t it better to let it stay so lest worse comes?”
“Nothing is ever over and done with,” Bobby said. “It goes on.”
CHAPTER XXV
DIFFERING INTERPRETATIONS
“And now,” said Bell gloomily as they walked away, “there’s four bundles of hay for the donkey that’s me. First, this Cann bloke we’ve never thought of before—at least, I haven’t, not in any serious way, I mean, just in the margin, so to say, and her as well. Because, blessed if I don’t think it might just as well be her as not. She’s holding back on us all right.”
“We’ve got to find out what and why.” Bobby said.
“I know,” agreed Bell with a hopeless sort of gesture. “Only how? And then this Cann business. What was he doing and why was he with Myerson, if he was? How about this? He knew Myerson had some good stuff as well as the costume stuff that was just a cover. Well, he wanted it, and he got it all right—up there by the air raid shelter. What do you say?”
“It’s an entirely new line,” Bobby said, and he sounded very worried. “You’ll have to follow it up, of course. If it’s that way, it cuts out a lot.”
“Too much?”
“You can’t tell yet,” Bobby answered, and he still sounded very worried indeed. “It would simplify everything enormously. Everything we’ve been working on there all right, but all quite irrelevant, because Cann cuts in, and it turns out to be a chance murder for money—or for money’s worth, jewellery. But how could Cann know Myerson had anything as valuable as all that with him? There’s been no suggestion of any previous connection between them. Again, would a man like Cann—quiet, peaceful, respectable, in steady work, no record as far as we know—is it credible he would become so sudden and so desperate at a moment’s notice?”
“Anything’s credible about anyone,” asserted Bell, “especially if it’s something bad. And we’re all respectable till we’re found out. Besides, remember that first time we went to see him?”
“You mean the very agreeable smell in the kitchen?” Bobby said, and he was on the point of rubbing the end of his nose in perplexity when he remembered in time that was a gesture wifely authority did not permit, so he stopped. “There is that,” he admitted. “It might be important. You’ll have to follow that up, too.”
“Easier said than done,” grumbled Bell. “How do we know Miss Bellamy is telling the truth? Invented the yarn to put us off as like as not. It might just as well be her as any one. Jealousy. Jealousy accounts for a lot. Always does. Much more reasonable to my mind than Cann thinking Myerson he’s never seen before and knows nothing about, might have worth-while stuff in his pocket, so knock him off and that’s that. A bit of a stretch, don’t you think? Now, take it Miss Bellamy was carrying on with Biggs and she found out about him and Miss Rogers having been together in Egypt and perhaps were still. How about that?”
“Good working theory,” agreed Bobby, “only it works just as well the other way round—Miss Rogers finding out about Miss Bellamy.”
“Yes, I know,” Bell said in tones of the deepest despondency. “The fourth bundle of hay and me, the donkey, not knowing which to start nibbling at.” They had been standing still as they talked and now Bell looked at his wrist watch. “Not too late,” he decided, “to pay Cann a visit and check up. Most likely he’ll trot out something entirely new he’s only just thought of and it turns everything upside down again. It’s what’s generally happened so far. Every time we think we really are on something at last.”
“It all helps to getting a complete picture in the end,” Bobby told him, but this was a cheerful view that Bell could not feel was in any way tenable.
He was indeed just about to voice a protest as they started to walk on, when he paused suddenly.
“Listen,” he said, and from the cottage they had just left there came pouring out into the night a flood of melody. “She’s at it again,” he said in a voice full of resentment.
They stood still, listening almost against their will. The music seemed to envelop them, to flood the whole earth as it were till it was almost as though nothing existed in all the universe save these passionate, possessive strains. To Bobby the impression came that some other mind was striving to enter into his mind and control it. Bell was trying to light a cigarette, but he kept forgetting, letting the match burn out and then striking another. They heard slow footsteps approaching. The night was not so dark but that soon they were able to recognize Mr. Fielding. He recognized them, too. He said:
“That’s her playing. I must go.” But he did not stir. The music continued and they remained standing there, listening, as it flowed around them, like the slow rising of deep water. Fielding said in a loud, accusing voice: “You’ve been asking her questions.”
“So we have and we’ll have to ask her more,” Bell answered, he, too, speaking more loudly than usual and even angrily, giving indeed an odd impression of defying the music that now was not nearly so loud but equally insistent. Then it ceased, broken off in the middle of a strain. “Well, now then,” Bell said, and this time there was relief in his voice.
“I’ll go back home,” Fielding said, and Bobby thought there was relief in his voice, too, as if with the cessation of the music the compulsion it had laid upon him ceased also.
“I’ve never heard anyone play like her before,” Bobby said, and was not sure that he did not to some degree share in the relief his two companions so evidently experienced.
Fielding had turned and was in the act of moving away as Bobby spoke, but now he said, over his shoulder:
“You’ve never known a woman like her before.”
“One moment,” Bobby said as Fielding began again to move away. “One moment, please. There’s a question I think we must ask you. You may think it impertinent. It isn’t. It’s necessary. In the village they seem to think there is some probability of you and Miss Bellamy getting married. What they say is that you are court
ing her. Is that true?”
Fielding was silent; and yet, in spite of the darkness that made it impossible to see his features clearly, Bobby felt that the question affected him profoundly. Twice he began to speak and twice he stopped. At last he broke out in a queer, half strangled voice:
“We should have met before.”
“Are you in love with her?” Bobby asked.
“My God, there’s a question,” Fielding said.
“Well, are you?” Bell interposed.
“There it is again,” Fielding said; and once more that strange music poured out into the air, passionate, enigmatic, questioning. “I’m going home,” he muttered, but still he made no effort to stir, and still the three of them stood and listened as all around them flowed that dark, compelling music.
When presently it stopped, and how long this time it had lasted none of them had much idea, Fielding said for the third time:
“I’m going back home.” Then he said: “I can’t stand any more.”
“Is she wanting you? Expecting you?” Bobby asked.
“What do you mean? Why should she?” Fielding retorted; and this time Bobby was not sure whether there was more of fear, of anger, or of surprise in his voice, but something, Bobby was sure, of all three.
“Well, why?” he asked again.
“She’ll have to talk at the inquest,” Bell said. “So will you, Mr. Fielding. You’ll be called, too.”
“I’ll be getting back,” Fielding said, taking no notice of this, as if indeed he had not even heard it. “It’ll begin again if I don’t.”
He hurried away, almost running at times. He vanished in the darkness. When even the sound of his footsteps had died away, Bell said:
“Well, now then, what are you to make of all that? Is he going home, do you think?”
“If he does, I don’t think he will stop there,” Bobby said. “He is certainly under some strong nervous strain.”
Music Tells All: A Bobby Owen Mystery Page 18