There's a Reason for Everything: A Bobby Owen Mystery

by E. R. Punshon

  Payne sniffed again even more contemptuously than before. Bobby said:

  “An unpleasant story.”

  Indeed it impressed him unpleasantly with some kind of dim and vague foreboding. He found himself reflecting that such tales have, at times, a way of working out their own fulfilment. He felt very certain that something, though what he had no idea, was going on in this vast deserted building where opportunities for concealment were endless. He supposed, moodily, that those of whom they had neither knowledge nor warning might well be watching, waiting. The silence, the stillness all around took on a sinister, menacing aspect, as if expectant and eager for evil things known to be at hand. Something of the same feeling the others must have had, too, for they all went warily along that dark and silent corridor, like men doubtful and on guard.

  “It’s through here,” Parkinson said; and, though he did not know he had done so, he dropped his voice to a whisper, though a whisper that was easily heard in that all-pervading silence. Then he said: “Jones promised to wait here for me.”

  Bobby opened the door. Within was a long, still, silent room. As he threw the beam from his torch around, there leaped into its light, then passed into the shadows again, one after another tall, sheeted figures, like ghosts presiding over the memories of past glories or past crimes, of long forgotten festivities or of ancient mourning.

  Slowly, with a kind of instinctive reluctance, Bobby moved forward.

  Still more slowly, more reluctantly, the other two followed. Even the light of all three torches left great patches of gloom and darkness with here and there shadows yet more baffling. For the darkness was void, but the shadows seemed to contain and hide and hint at unknown menaces, only to withdraw again into nothingness when the torch rays came searching.

  “Might be those things were all watching us,” Payne muttered, “watching from behind those sheets of theirs.”

  Bobby was counting the statues, upright on their pedestals.

  “Eleven in all,” he observed. “You said thirteen, didn’t you?” he asked Parkinson.

  “Jones insisted there were only twelve. Got quite excited about it. Said twelve was the number Mr. de Tallebois mentioned, and it was twelve. But I know there were thirteen.”

  “There’s one pedestal with nothing on it,” Bobby said “Looks as if it might have held a bust, too.” He went closer and examined it. “I should think it’s the one where the bust came from that didn’t like us. Now, how did it manage to get from here to topple over the gallery balustrade just as we were underneath? Couldn’t have walked, you know. For why? Because busts haven’t legs.”

  “That’s right,” agreed Payne seriously. “No legs hasn’t a bust,” and he appeared to derive a certain vague encouragement from this reflection.

  Mr. Parkinson was inclined to think Bobby was being frivolous, and he was quite sure this was no time for frivolity. He was still much shaken by the complete disappearance of the stain he knew so well he had seen on the floor boards where now no sign of it remained. He found himself wondering whether if he returned to the communion of his church he would be welcomed, or whether, first of all, penance and proof of repentance would be required. With a return of cynicism he told himself that probably there would be open arms at first, and then a continued pressure to keep observance and subscriptions—especially the latter—well up to the mark. This reflection was a sign that after the first shock his mind was beginning to return to its normal attitude.

  Bobby had been standing staring at the vacant pedestal in deep thought for some moments. Now he turned away and began to walk the length of the room and back, pacing slowly, directing again the beam from his torch into every nook and corner of floor and wall and ceiling as he went.

  The apartment answered well to the description given by Mr. Parkinson. Long, narrow, lofty, with doors at each end, windows to one side, and, between the windows, niches where stood seven of the sheeted statues. On the other side of the room were four other pieces of sculpture, equally covered with dust sheets, and two of them so much larger than the rest that Bobby supposed they must be the groups—a goddess reclining by a stag, and a river god, recumbent, with attendants, of which Parkinson had spoken. The best feature of the room, or at least the one that struck Bobby most, the ceiling decorated with a motif of birds in flight, very skilfully executed, Parkinson had apparently not noticed.

  “I take it you looked behind all the coverings?” Bobby asked him.

  “Oh, yes, but there was nothing, absolutely nothing,” Parkinson answered.

  “I think we’ll have another look,” Bobby said.

  He began at the side where were the windows. One by one he scrutinized with care each of the pieces of statuary. All apparently represented gods or heroes of Greek mythology—Hercules resting on his club, Hermes with winged sandals, and so forth. The dust sheets had kept them all clean and fresh-looking. There was nothing to cause attention or rouse suspicion about any of them, though with each one he looked at Bobby’s wonder grew—that one small gallery should hold so much so absolutely worthless stuff it would be flattery to call even second rate. When he had given a look to each of the figures on the window side of the room, he said:

  “Awful stuff, all of it. Crude isn’t the word. Those Italians must have thought de Tallebois a gift straight from heaven.” He sniffed contemptuously, and added with a depth of scorn beyond description: “Even an art expert who was also an Honourable—what was the name? Marmaduke something or other—wouldn’t need to look twice to see this lot was fit only to break up for road ballast. I don’t expect the groups over the other side will be any better.”

  They were not. At least the first he looked at—that of the recumbent river god—moved him almost to tears.

  “Could it be worse?” he demanded. “Design, proportions, workmanship. Might be kept though, perhaps, as an Awful Example. Probably turned out in a hurry for fear de Tallebois went back to England before it was ready for him. They must have sized him up pretty well, though, to expect to be able to palm off a thing like this on him. Imagine carting that atrocity all the way back to England.”

  He shook his head, replaced the dust sheet—or rather sheets, the size of the group had required two to cover it completely, and went on to the next, that of the goddess reclining by the side of a stag. Payne, anxious to be done with all this, had jerked off the coverings, ready for Bobby to look.

  “Why, it’s even worse,” Bobby murmured, standing spellbound in a kind of horrible amazement. “Look at that stag—look at the goddess standing on one leg—leg—leg,” he repeated, his voice trailing off into a whisper barely audible.

  “What is it, sir?” Payne asked.

  With a slow gesture of one lifted hand, Bobby pointed. There, in a space between the prostrate stag and posturing goddess, there showed a human leg, a twisted, motionless leg in a strained, unnatural position.

  “God in Heaven,” Payne muttered. “God have mercy.”

  “What is it?” Parkinson said, coming to join them, craning forward to look. “Why, that’s Jones…Jones…is he…is he…dead?”

  CHAPTER VI

  MARMADUKE

  An unnecessary question. There is that about death which is not easily mistaken. Bobby put out his hand to stop Parkinson, who had made as if to stoop and lift the body.

  “No, don’t touch anything,” Bobby said. “He is past our help or any help.”

  “But—but—but,” stammered Parkinson, and suddenly, and once more and for the last time, he crossed himself.

  “That caretaker chap told us Jones had gone,” Payne said.

  “So he did, didn’t he?” agreed Bobby absently. He had moved his position slightly, and now was bending over the body, examining it with care. “Not been dead so very long,” he said, “No ‘rigor mortis’ yet. No visible cause of death, no wound or blood.”

  “Are you sure he’s dead?” Parkinson asked, as if trying to confirm a certain fact that yet he found impossible, incredible. “I saw
him this morning, I talked to him. Who…I mean, why?…I can’t understand.” In a quick, high, changed voice, he said: “Is it murder?”

  “At any rate,” Bobby said, “it is certain the body has been put where it is after death—to conceal it. And why should that be, unless there’s foul play?”

  “But Jones…Jones…why should any one?…” Parkinson muttered, still as if he could not bring himself to believe what he saw.

  Bobby did not try to answer this, and remained silent and thoughtful.

  “If that bust had been a bit more to one side,” Payne commented moodily, “we might all three of us have been dumped here like this poor gentleman, all nicely out of the way.”

  “Oh…really…really…” spluttered Parkinson, in protest against a suggestion he found most disconcerting.

  “Well, no,” Bobby said, “hardly that. Only room for one of us here—behind that other group. No room behind the single upright figures. Necessary to think up something else for the other two of us.”

  “Oh, really…really,” muttered Mr. Parkinson, who found this remark even more unpleasant.

  Bobby, during these moments, had been examining as best he could by the light of his torch, the vicinity of the group, and the group itself, hoping to find something to give some clue to what had happened here.

  “Nothing I can see,” he said now. “I’m only wasting time, losing time. I wonder where’s the nearest ’phone? We must get through to headquarters for help, we must have a doctor, too, though there’s not much he can do. No good us three trying to search a place this size. Any one who was here when we came in is probably miles away by this time. We did immobilize the car, didn’t we?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Payne. “Not that it makes much difference. There’s ways and means.”

  “So there are,” agreed Bobby. “If it’s still there, you had better take it and find a ’phone as soon as you can. Get a doctor, and the help we need. While you’re away I’ll go and have a chat with the caretaker. He wasn’t too anxious to let us in, and he did tell us Dr. Jones had gone. Mr. Parkinson…”

  But Bobby got no further than the other’s name. Parkinson was so bewildered, so disturbed, in such a nervous condition, that it was plainly useless to ask him, as Bobby had intended, to stay there in the picture gallery with the dead man till help arrived. He was in no condition for any such task. He was standing there in a kind of frozen horror, a picture of sheer terror and confusion. To Payne, confident that Parkinson was too lost in fear and wonder to hear or heed, Bobby said: “Better take him with you and dump him somewhere as soon as you can. He’s in no state to be any help, only a hindrance.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Payne, lowering his voice to a whisper. “Think it could be him, sir? He was the last to see Jones, as far as we know. They had been quarrelling, he said. If you ask me, he’s putting on an act, the way he is. Over-doing it.”

  “It’s a thing to keep in mind,” Bobby answered; and he remembered now that Parkinson had not waited at the Union Club as had been arranged, but had left it on some unspecified errand or another. Where had he been in the interval between leaving the club and the moment when Bobby had picked him up outside the hall where the civil defence meeting had been held? “We had better get moving now,” Bobby said abruptly, telling himself these were thoughts best postponed for a time. “There’s a lot to see to, and the sooner the better.”

  “Are we going to leave—that—alone here?” Payne asked; making his meaning plain by a glance at the body of the dead man, thrust into so strange and contorted a position between the wounded stag and the posturing goddess.

  “Have to,” Bobby said. “He’s beyond all harm or hurt now. If the body’s disturbed while we’re away we shall know it, and it will tell us something, and we must have help. Not but that I would ask Parkinson to wait here if he were in a fit state. Which he isn’t.”

  “Over-doing it,” grumbled Payne again. “You don’t get me to swallow any yarn about bloodstains that are there and then they aren’t. Wants explaining.”

  Bobby was of the same opinion. An explanation was certainly required. But he made no comment except for an inarticulate grunt, and Payne went on:

  “Remember all that about it’s being a sign someone was going to get done in. Only those prophesy who know,” pronounced Payne with emphasis and conviction.

  “Something in that,” agreed Bobby; and, turning to the still dazed, bewildered Parkinson, told him they were leaving to get help.

  Together the three of them made their way through the great, grim, silent house and out and down the short approach avenue to the entrance gates where they found their car still standing safely where they had left it. In it Payne, Parkinson with him, drove away, and Bobby turned back to knock again at the door of the small lodge. It opened more quickly this time. A woman appeared. She was fully dressed, and that, when she spoke, there was surprise and disappointment, even dismay, in her voice, was plain. She said:

  “Who is it? They’ve gone. I heard the car. Who are you?”

  “I am so sorry to trouble you again,” Bobby said. “I was here before.”

  From above Bailey’s voice called:

  “Who is it, Marty? The car’s gone.”

  “I didn’t go with it,” Bobby called back. “Can I have a few moments’ talk with you, Mr. Bailey?”

  “You had better come in,” the woman said, reluctantly enough.

  She drew back. Bobby followed her into a kitchen, small, tidy, well kept, still warm from the embers of a dying wood fire in the grate. The room was lighted by an oil lamp hanging from the ceiling above a plain deal table, scrubbed till it shone again. She turned up the lamp to give more light, threw some more wood—broken twigs and bits of branches—on the fire, and Bobby’s impression was that these bustling activities were in part designed to gain time to hide embarrassment—or fear. She was small and slight in build, middle-aged, with a short, slightly-crooked nose that rather spoilt the effect of otherwise good features. Good looking in her youth, Bobby thought, though showing the scars of the passing years. Eyes that had once been bright were heavy now, dimmed perhaps by many tears. That she was in a highly nervous condition, controlling only with difficulty what seemed as though it threatened to become panic, was also not difficult to see. Bobby wondered why? Surely even this irruption of a stranger into her house at so late an hour was not enough to explain that pale face, those twitching lips, those sudden sideway glances. He said to her:

  “You are Mrs. Bailey?”

  She did not answer. She was listening to heavy footsteps descending slowly the stairs. She went out of the kitchen, shutting the door behind her, but, in her agitation, not securely, so that it swung slightly open again. The footsteps reached the foot of the stairs. They paused. Through the crack of the door Bobby heard the woman say: “Tell him it all,” and in response what sounded like a surly negative.

  The door was pushed open and Bailey came in, his wife close behind. He looked more sullen, more hostile, more truculent even than before. He gave the impression, with his lowering looks and hangdog expression, of one it would not be well to meet alone on some dark, solitary night. Bobby knew the type. He and Bailey exchanged quick glances, but almost as quickly Bailey looked away again. Behind him showed the white, anxious face of his wife; her dull and red-rimmed eyes full of pleading, and fearful. Bobby said:

  “Your name is Bailey, isn’t it? Alf Bailey? You are caretaker here, I think? My name is Owen. Here is my official card.”

  Bailey did not attempt to look at it. He stood there, hostile, sullen, at bay, one might have thought. He mumbled:

  “I know. It was in the paper about you being deputy. So what’s the odds?”

  “I only want you to know,” Bobby explained formally, “that I am here as an officer of police, and not out of curiosity or anything like that. I have, therefore, a right to ask for your help and assistance in every way possible. Also I have the right, as you know probably, acting as a police officer,
to ask to see your identity cards. Another thing. When Mrs. Bailey left the room just now she didn’t quite close the door behind her and I heard her ask you to ‘tell it all’. I only want to say that that was very good advice, even necessary advice. It is not wise to keep anything back. Even small, unimportant things must be told.”

  “I thought cops always knew it all,” Bailey muttered.

  “Alf,” his wife murmured; and her face was more pale even than before, and there were tears in those red-rimmed eyes of hers. “Alf,” she repeated.

  Bailey had turned away from Bobby, and now he was looking at her. Awkwardly he shambled across to where she stood, taking his place at her side. Half to her and half to Bobby, he said:

  “All right. All right.” To Bobby more directly he said: “Go ahead. Get it over, can’t you?”

  “When we got here,” Bobby said, “you told us Dr. Jones had been here before us.”

  “Them ghost hunters?” Bailey asked. “They had a letter. Wasn’t it O.K.?”

  “Oh, yes,” Bobby answered, “but you also told us that Dr. Jones had left again before we arrived?”

  “Well, so he did.”

  “Are you sure? Did you see him yourself?”

  “That’s right. Knocked at the door to hand back the key and say he was done for the night.”

  “You recognized him then?”

  “I dunno what you mean—recognized him. It was dark; and if you show a spot of light when you open the door, likely you hear about it from the O.P. up on the hill.”

  “What I’m trying to get at,” Bobby explained, “is how you can be sure that it was really Dr. Jones?”

  “Well, who else could it be? There wasn’t no one else but him up there, was there? He said his name, and gave back the key, and said that was all, thank you, and half-a-crown with it, like a gentleman, and if it wasn’t him, who was it?”

  “That’s what I want to know,” Bobby explained again. “I can take it you didn’t see him clearly and you couldn’t swear to his voice?”

  “It was a sort of gent’s voice anyway,” Bailey insisted. His manner had grown a good deal more confident now, and even his wife had a more relieved air. It was as though the turn of the conversation had lightened apprehensions they had felt before. “A sort of la-di-da voice,” Bailey went on, “if you know what I mean, silly like, just the way you talk yourself,” this last being evidently added merely in further explanation and without the least intention of offence.