“It’s not a lodger, it’s a police officer from London about the poor man who was killed last week.”
“You are Mrs Mars?” Bobby said to her.
“That’s right,” she replied, looking at him doubtfully, distrustfully. “Mr Lawson has been on at us. We told him we didn’t know anything. He never came here—never set eyes on him, any of us. Did we, Annie?”
Annie did not seem to think it necessary to answer this. She was listening with her accustomed air of gentle, serene tranquillity, and yet Bobby had the impression that mother and daughter, though they had hardly looked at each other, had yet somehow managed to convey to each other some kind of secret message—or was it warning?
“None of your neighbours saw anything of him, did they?” Bobby asked.
“If they did, they’ve kept it to themselves, and why should they?” Mrs Mars retorted. “Ready enough with their tongues, they are, all of ’em.”
Bobby asked one or two more questions and then went away, a little puzzled, vaguely uneasy. An unusual family, he reflected, with the strange contrast between mother and daughter on the one hand and father and son on the other. Not that it seemed likely there could be any connection between them and the murder he was investigating. But he could not quite forget the hint—if it were so meant—that Mars had growled out about the possibility of another murder being on the way. Of course, the man had been drinking, and what he had said might mean nothing, but he would have to be questioned further.
“When there’s a girl with this Annie Mars’s looks,” he reflected from long experience, “there’s always apt to be trouble one way or another.”
He decided reluctantly that he must add all the members of the Mars family to the list of possible suspects, and he found himself wondering if Annie Mars, as the inexorable years rolled on, would come to resemble her mother and grow into no more than a sad memory of the glory of her youth.
He walked back the way he had come till he reached the ‘Good Grocery Stores, (proprietor William Jones)’. Business hours were over, but he knocked at the private door, and when he got no reply he knocked again. This time his knock was answered by the same tall, gaunt woman he had noticed before. She had not, she never could have had, any pretension to good looks. But a striking personality, all the same. Her strongly marked features, her deep-seated, sombre eyes, a nose that jutted out like a promontory from a rather flat face, the tight small mouth—all seemed to contrast most strangely with a curious impression she gave of being only half aware of her surroundings, of being somehow withdrawn into some inner secret dream in which alone she truly lived. Just as Bobby had thought of Mrs Mars as of a stately ruin, so now he thought of Mrs Jones as of a sleeping volcano. He wondered what queer freak of fate had cast her who seemed meant for a tragedy queen for the commonplace role of a village grocer’s wife, spending her days slicing bacon and handing rations across the counter. She was showing no flicker of interest in her visitor as she stood there waiting for him to speak, her dull and heavy gaze passing him indifferently by. When he asked if Mr Jones were in, she said slowly:
“From London, aren’t you? He said you might be calling. If you’ll come in, I’ll tell him you’re here.”
She led the way into a large sitting-room. Probably in former days, when the house was still a private residence, it had been the dining-room. Now it had a chill, unused, uncared-for appearance. It was overfull of late Victorian mahogany furniture. The steel engravings on the walls were chiefly Landseer and Alma-Tadema. There was even a cluster of wax fruit in the centre of the table, on which, too, lay in neat piles copies of the recent issues of various film journals, and Bobby guessed that the enormous aspidistra on a table near the window was the forbear of the other two he had noticed in the hall. It all gave the impression of receiving only a rare and hurried share of Mrs Jones’s housewifely activities. No doubt, what with helping in the shop and her other work, she had small time or energy to spare for keeping this large, awkward, little-used room spick and span.
There was one exception, though. In the big, old-fashioned grate, dating from the days when coal, like gold and silver in the days of King Solomon, was nothing thought of, an electric fire had been fitted. Before it, however, there remained a heavy old steel fender and a set of equally ancient and heavy fire-irons. All these—fender and fire-irons alike—had been polished till they shone like—like a guardsman’s boots on the day of a ceremonial parade. Bobby wondered if they had been sold to some collector of antiques who hoped that time would give to them a new value. Or possibly to some wandering American who thought them just too cute. Certainly in their shining splendour they made an odd contrast to the two dull brass candlesticks on the mantelpiece all this polishing zeal seemed to have passed by. But, then, possibly Mrs Jones was an amateur of steel, not of brass.
The door opened, and there came bustling in a round little spectacled, cheerful, smiling man, ebullient with the sort of welcome he no doubt bestowed on his more valued customers.
“You’ll excuse me keeping you waiting,” he began volubly. He had a rapid, breathless way of talking, as if he felt there was hardly time to get out all he wanted to say. “Down in the cellars I was, sorting ’em out—goods, I mean, not the cellars. Them cellars—I never saw such places. If you could have too much storage space in our line, it’s here all right. Wine cellars, coal cellars, lord knows what cellars. Dark as pitch, all of them. Heaven only knows how they used to manage. Farthing dips, I suppose. Now we’ve the electric light, thanks to Mrs Holcombe. Very generous, public-spirited lady. I wired ’em all. Did it myself. Put in electric heaters, too, in case of damp. Have a cigarette, won’t you? Not that I’ve seen any signs of damp, unless it was damp made one or two of the walls down there collapse. Don’t think it was, though. Probably the idea was to knock them into one. Boiler-room, perhaps. No telling. I’ve had to turn bricklayer and build ’em up again myself. Do have a cigarette, won’t you?” He was again offering a packet, but never seemed to offer it long enough for Bobby to have much chance of getting one. Not that he tried. “Do everything myself; no hope of getting any help,” continued the voluble Mr Jones. “Mrs Holcombe pays a bigger wage than I can afford. You know I was expecting you. It’s all over the village you’re taking over from Mr Lawson. Very good man, Mr Lawson, very popular. Quite natural, though, he should feel a bit out of his depth in a thing like this. I’ve been saying myself he ought to get help.”
He paused, as if at last he really had run out of breath. He twinkled through his glasses at Bobby like a benevolent elderly Pickwick. Bobby was feeling a little overwhelmed by such a torrent of eloquence; and in the sudden silence that had ensued on the abrupt cessation of Mr Jones’s chatter, Bobby was nearly, but not quite certain he heard a faint sound coming from the direction of the door. He was not sure, but it did suggest that Mrs Jones was there, listening. That might indicate nothing more than curiosity about any new development in so sensational an event as the recent murder. Or it might indicate a measure of uneasiness, for one cause or another. He raised his voice so that any eavesdropper who might be there—Mrs Jones or some one else—might hear better. A little encouragement, a little rope so to say, might give useful results, if not now, then on some future occasion. He said:
“What I really called for was to ask if you could suggest any reason for Mr Winterspoon’s visit. We’ve been able to find none.”
“Ah, now you’re asking,” Mr Jones said brightly. “Puzzled me a lot, that has. Mr Lawson, too. What was the poor devil here for? I can’t tell you, and I can’t even guess. Doesn’t seem to make sense, does it? It looks like there must have been something special to bring him to a little, out-of-the-way place like this. Only what? There it is. After closing time when he turned up here. Knocked at the side door and asked if he could see me. Said it was business. He gave the missis his card. I thought at first he was taking over this territory for his firm, but it wasn’t that. A bit funny like, his coming that way after business hours, on
a Friday evening, too, when most of ’em—commercials, I mean—are making for home as fast as they know how. But there didn’t seem anything against having a bit of a chat, and I gave him a glass of our best sherry—seven and six a bottle—and let him talk. Just as well to keep in with commercials. They can give you useful tips now and then the way things are going and what prices are likely to jump next, so you can keep your stock up and hold it back for the rise. So I let him talk away, sitting there where you are now, same as you might be him, and now he’s dead and gone. Here to-day and gone to-morrow. Well, well, as it might be us,” and Mr Jones shook a melancholy head at the transitoriness of human life, and Bobby felt that when he said ‘us’, he meant ‘you’.
“What did he talk about?” Bobby asked.
“Now there,” admitted Mr Jones frankly, “you have, in a manner of speaking, got me. Pretty nigh everything under the sun, I should say, and got me so mixed up I couldn’t rightly say what he didn’t talk about. Business, and how was I doing, and about the village being so unspoilt—which it is—and that’s Mrs Holcombe, and some wish it wasn’t—teas, for one thing.”
“Teas,” repeated Bobby. “Why teas?”
“There’s plenty in the village would like to serve teas to visitors come to have a look at the old church—very interesting and special to them as find it so,” Jones explained. “But Mrs Holcombe is dead against it, and when Mrs Holcombe is dead against a thing, it’s—well, in a manner of speaking, it’s best to lay off. Very nice lady—I’ve nothing against her, and very free-handed; but she does like her own way, and if you get in it, you’re liable to be hurt. And your fault, because she always knows she’s in the right.” Mr Jones smiled tolerantly at so prevalent a human weakness. “Same as the rest of us,” he said. “Always dead right, all of us. Natural. I did rather think at one time maybe he had an idea of starting up here himself. But it didn’t seem to be that either. No room for two of us, and me doing so well ever since I came more than a year ago. Besides, had he the capital? Didn’t seem likely. Or I thought it might be he was one of these blokes who go round trying to find out if you’ll sell, and then they’ll buy and sell again for double what they’ve given. Big demand for businesses just now, you know. Mrs Jones thought it might be Mrs Holcombe wanting to take over from us and run it same as she does everything else in the village, and he had the job of sounding us on the q.t. But I don’t think it was that, though he did ask about her and what she was like to do with. I wasn’t sorry to get rid of him. Funny, it seemed, and Mr Lawson thought so, too. Very friendly with Mrs Holcombe is Mr Lawson.”
“I’m told there’s a certain amount of village gossip about that,” Bobby remarked, and Mr Jones threw up his hands.
“Just you tell me,” he challenged Bobby, “anything at all there isn’t gossip about in Pending Dale. And me and the missus, we hear it all, every word. Goes in at one ear and out at the other mostly, but there it is. You can’t help hearing; you can’t shut up customers, you can’t stop ’em talking to each other. ‘Have you heard what they’re saying, Mrs So-and-So?’ That sort of thing. Gossip!” and Mr Jones waved his arms round as if to indicate the all-embracing nature of the gossip in Pending Dale. “Nothing stops ’em—except when Annie Mars happens to come in. They stop then all right, till she goes again.”
“Why is that?” Bobby asked.
“Search me,” Mr Jones retorted, and for the moment ceased to look like a benevolent elderly Pickwick, so that Bobby guessed that Mr Jones very much tended to encourage gossip in all possible ways, in the hope probably that his shop would become a kind of recognized village news-centre where all would resort in the hope of hearing the latest talk. But almost instantly this expression, if it had ever really been there, vanished, and Mr Jones was once again his own ebullient, bubbling self. He went on: “Sort of Godsend it’s been for them as have it in for Mrs Holcombe. Very public-spirited lady, and I’ve nothing against her, though I don’t get much of her patronage. After I bought the business I made bold to call and ask for a share of it, knowing she got most of her stuff from town, and me able to supply same more convenient like and at competitive prices. Nice about it, she was; but I didn’t get much satisfaction except for collecting what comes for her by rail. A goodish distance to send special, and no trouble to me, seeing I’m often that way, delivering or calling for orders, and there’s always the chance it may lead to something. She was quite agreeable, petrol being still rationed then and her glad enough to save some, and too much the lady to stop it now, me having obliged.”
CHAPTER IV
“A DEAD MAN ASKS IT”
BOBBY HAD found Mr Jones’s discourse extremely interesting in the picture it had given of life in Pending Dale. It was at any rate a beginning towards building up a background against which it would be possible to assess more accurately the character and motives of those concerned. Always it was his theory, belief, and practice that to obtain such background was of the first importance in every investigation. Without it, investigating officers are like navigating officers deprived of chart and map.
It was getting late now, so Bobby returned to the ‘Black Bull’, where he ate an extremely unsatisfactory dinner—the ‘Black Bull’ knew all about beer and nothing about cooking. Afterwards he went out, hoping that a brisk walk might give aid and encouragement to a digestion struggling with Yorkshire pudding of an incredible stolidity. Following the road used by the ’buses serving the village, he came presently to the path providing a short cut to the Holcombe residence, Castle Manor, by way of the copse where the body of the murdered man had been found. A full moon was brilliant above in a clear sky, and even from where Bobby stood the copse was visible like an island of the dark in the midst of the sea of light streaming down from the brightly shining moon.
He had with him the sketch-map with which he had been provided, showing clearly the position of the copse in relation to the road, the village, and Castle Manor. All distances were clearly marked, and so when he reached the copse he knew the precise number of paces he had to take before reaching the spot where the body had been discovered. There he sat down on a convenient bank. A pleasant, quiet spot enough in the daytime, no doubt, but now at night, with the knowledge of what had happened here so recently, it seemed to take on a vaguely sinister, faintly menacing air. That solid slab of Yorkshire pudding having by now been more or less subdued, Bobby got presently to his feet, uncertain whether to return to the inn or explore further. As he did so, he heard approaching steps, slow, hesitating, cautious. Not the steps of one going briskly about his lawful affairs, but rather of one who had cause to be prudent, to shun, to avoid all notice.
Bobby drew back silently into the deeper shadow of the trees. The steps drew nearer, though with many a pause, and now Bobby could see gleams of light that came and went uncertainly. Evidently an electric torch was being used to examine the ground and the undergrowth on both sides of the path. The thought crossed Bobby’s mind that this might be the murderer visiting again the scene of the crime. Not very likely, he decided. If any such impulse had ever actually existed in past days, it had probably been ‘sublimated’ under modern conditions into a safer, less noticeable urge to read every newspaper account available. He shrank farther back into the shade as the steps drew nearer. Cautiously as he had tried to move he must have made noise enough to be heard, for at once the light of the torch came searching, questing, and picked him out. A man’s voice, a young voice, called:
“Who’s there? Who is it? What are you doing there?”
Bobby moved slowly forward, but at first he did not speak. Nor did the other, and the two stood facing each other silently, silent in the moonlight that came struggling through the branches of the trees, but remained strong and clear enough for them to see each other fairly well. A young man, this new-comer, Bobby made out. Not one of the villagers, for he spoke with what is sometimes described as an Oxford accent. He seemed well dressed, too. He repeated impatiently:
“What is it? What
do you want?”
“I think,” Bobby answered then, “there was a murder here last week.”
“Well, suppose there was,” the young man said. “Come to have a stare at the spot and tell your friends all about it? I thought the sight-seeing ghouls had all cleared off by now.”
“You see,” Bobby explained, “I happen to be a policeman.”
There was a pause, as if this information were being slowly and not very comfortably considered. Then the young man said, and his voice sounded now a good deal less confident—less loud as well:
“Are you the chap from London father said was coming?”
“I am,” Bobby answered, “and I suppose then you are Norman Lawson—Mr Lawson’s son?” There came some sort of mumbled assent. Bobby went on: “And now perhaps you’ll tell me what you are doing here at this time. Looking for something, weren’t you?”
“No, I wasn’t,” Norman answered. “At least, I mean to say, not for anything special. I just thought I would have a look—why shouldn’t I?”
“The point,” Bobby retorted, “is why should you? Come, Mr Lawson, wouldn’t it be better if you told me just what it was brought you here? Are you merely playing amateur detective? Or what is it? And does your father know?”
“Oh, no. Besides, I wasn’t. I just thought I would sort of look round. That’s all. Well, I mean to say...” He paused and stood awkwardly, evidently very ill at ease. “Oh, well,” he said, “I suppose I had better get off, if you think I’m meddling.”
The Attending Truth: A Bobby Owen Mystery Page 4