“He seemed to think photographs might be taken?” Bobby said questioningly.
“We heard about that,” Lawson answered. “Vicar got hold of the camera and smashed it. High-handed action. He could have been summonsed and fined.”
“The suggestion is,” Bobby said, “the photographs might have been used for blackmail.”
“Blackmail?” repeated Lawson, surprised. Evidently it was a new idea, and one he contemplated with considerable distaste, even with alarm. “Why,” he protested uneasily, “you couldn’t get enough out of most of those village kids to pay for the cost of the films.”
“The photographs taken might not have been of village kids,” Bobby answered. “That’s what I understood Mr Duggan to mean,” and then Lawson was silent for a long time.
“That cuts a wide swathe,” he said at last, going back to the days when he had worked as a youth in the hay-field. “It brings in almost every one.”
“Exactly,” Bobby agreed. “Mrs Holcombe herself, for instance. The weak point in her story is that there is no very satisfactory explanation of why that evening she took a walk as far as the copse where the body was. You can’t help wondering if she knew. She says she often does take a stroll before bed when she’s been working. No confirmatory evidence, though. If she were meeting a man there and was being spied upon, that might explain a good deal. But why meet in the copse? In secret. And why should any secrecy be necessary? Nothing to prevent her marrying again if she wanted to. Of course it might be a married man.”
“She is in complete control of the business as it is,” Mr Lawson remarked. “She might feel if she married she might lose it. She’s very much the boss,” and now he was looking very relieved at this veering away of the cold winds of suspicion to another quarter.
“Much the same thing applies to the girl Livia,” Bobby went on. “I don’t like all this about the lost wrist-watch. I feel there must have been something else they were looking for, and I would like to know what. Yet they must both have known the whole copse had already been thoroughly gone over by your men. Another thing. Why was she so sure, if the wrist-watch story is true, that it was lost in the copse? Is it because something happened there—a scrimmage of some sort, or perhaps just hugging and kissing, that sort of thing? That might make it come loose, or that’s what she may have thought. Then bricks have been taken out of the garden wall close to her outhouse studio. It looks as if it was to help her get out and come back without any risk of being noticed. She locks herself in apparently when she is what she calls studying the nude. So if any one found the door locked and got no answer, they would probably go away and think that was all it was.”
Mr Lawson was looking very worried again now that the wind of suspicion was back again in its old quarter. For whom could Livia have been meeting thus but his son? He said, and with an effort:
“Not much evidence.”
“None,” agreed Bobby. “It’s just possibilities we have to consider and keep in mind in case evidence does turn up. I’m sure Mr Duggan had something definite in his mind, and my next job must be to try to get it out. Let’s consider him next.”
“Mr Duggan? The Vicar?” exclaimed Lawson, really astonished. “It’s the one thing he’s always so dead against.”
“That’s what interests me,” Bobby told him. “He may be all the more horrified by it because he may have yielded to it.”
“Oh, well, but—” began Lawson, and stopped, puzzled, even a little frightened by such a glimpse into the depths as he had never contemplated. “I can’t believe—” he began again, and again stopped.
“I felt rather worried by the way he talked,” Bobby went on. “It seemed an obsession, and obsessions are dangerous things. It’s the modern equivalent of what the Bible calls possession by an evil spirit. Look at the Dean of Canterbury and his obsession about Russia. It’s cost him his soul. A psychiatrist might very soon discover very ugly things in Mr Duggan’s unconscious. Even in talking of Church forms and ceremonies he had to describe them as the clothing of the mysteries of the Church. Even the way he said it suggested he was a little too ready to think of clothes as hiding mysteries he had a right or a duty to penetrate. Anyhow, it’s certain he was always haunting the copse, and psychiatrists tell us half of what we do has motives we never even guess at.”
“Well, I don’t know,” Mr Lawson said doubtfully. “That sort of thing strikes me as getting rather a long way from police work.”
There was a knock at the door. Norman appeared:
“Sorry,” he said. “But Sergeant Stubbs is on the ’phone from Pending Dale. He wants to speak to Mr Owen. It’s something about the Vicar.”
“I’ll come at once,” Bobby said, jumping to his feet.
CHAPTER XIV
“SHORT LIST”
IT WAS some minutes before Bobby returned, and when he did he had a somewhat worried look. Norman was still in the room, and at first seemed inclined to stay, but retired when his father gave him a nod of dismissal.
“They’ve found a wrench,” Bobby said then. “Heavy thing. The suggestion is that it may have belonged to Mr Duggan. Apparently it’s been in a hot fire. Or in the flame of a blow-lamp. A blunt instrument again, and this time one that has had any possible clues left on it, burnt off. And belonging apparently to the one person who hangs about the copse more than any one else.”
“Why do they think it was the Vicar’s?” Lawson asked.
“I asked that, too,” Bobby said. “What Stubbs says is that Mr Duggan has an ancient car that’s always breaking down. It’s in a garage for repairs at the moment.”
“I know,” Lawson said. “It’s a standing joke, that car. He’s always having to be rescued. People say: ‘If I’m late you’ll know I’m stopping to tow the Vicar home.’”
“About a week ago,” Bobby went on, “Stubbs was on his rounds on his motor-bike and came across young Holcombe trying to fix Mr Duggan’s car. The Vicar himself had gone to get help from a garage. Holcombe rather fancies himself as an amateur mechanic, Stubbs says.”
“He tried once,” said Lawson resentfully, “to show me. I had to be polite,” he added—regretfully this time.
“Holcombe wasn’t getting very far with the job, but he had been rummaging in Duggan’s tool-box, and it was such an odd collection both he and Stubbs were rather tickled. Stubbs specially remembers an outsize wrench, too old and worn and bent to be much good. Stubbs is sure it’s the same one they’ve found. There couldn’t be two like it in the world, according to him.”
“That wouldn’t be much good in the witness-box,” Lawson said. “Where was it found? Did he say?”
“On a rubbish-heap. No proper collection of rubbish in the village is there? People get rid of it as best they can. But Stubbs says that at Castle Manor they have a man to cart it off regularly. He collected it yesterday as usual, dumped it in a pit near by they are trying to fill up and then noticed the wrench. I expect he rakes over the stuff on the chance of finding something useful he can sell to the rag-and-bone dealers.”
“Is Stubbs sure the wrench was put back in the Vicar’s toolbox? It might have been forgotten.”
“I asked about that,” Bobby replied. “He says he is quite sure—remembers distinctly Holcombe throwing it back there. He remembers wondering if its weight wouldn’t knock the bottom out of the thing. But it doesn’t amount to much, anyway, because Holcombe was still there when Stubbs left, so it could easily have been taken out again.”
“Seems to bring him in,” commented Lawson. “As much as the Vicar, anyhow. Found in the rubbish coming from Castle Manor, too.”
“We can’t even be sure of that,” Bobby pointed out. “It was on the rubbish-heap all right. We have to accept that. But it may have been there before the dumping of the refuse. It may even have been just chucked there by a third person altogether. By a passing tramp, for instance. I expect the dump is often visited by tramps on the chance of finding something useful.”
“Doesn’t
seem to help much,” Lawson commented.
“Just another line, probably leading to another wash-out,” Bobby agreed. “But it does link up both Holcombe and Duggan with a blunt instrument rather suggestively treated by heat—in the ordinary way, why should any one put a wrench in a fire? And, then, they both have links with the copse, especially Duggan. I wouldn’t think so much of it only for some of the things Duggan said. I had another talk with him on my way here—at a tea-place, ‘Happy Return’ they call it. Do you know it?”
“Oh, yes. It’s getting quite a reputation. Well conducted.”
“We had tea together, and we got talking about the murder. Natural he should be very upset about it—not a nice thing for a clergyman to have happening in his parish. He seems to feel responsible, in a way. I didn’t think anything of that—lots of clergy would, no doubt. But he said one thing I did notice. He seemed to suggest that killing might be justified if it was to avoid public scandal or harm. I couldn’t help wondering if he meant to the Church. Killing no murder, in fact.”
“You think it might be in his mind,” Lawson asked, very doubtfully, very hesitatingly, “that he would feel it would be better than permitting a scandal like that if he were threatened with exposure—those photographs he talked about.”
“Which might, for that matter, be wholly innocent,” Bobby remarked. “It might be merely snaps of him ‘rebuking’ as he would say some one or another. But such a photo would be very open to misconstruction, and plenty of people would be quite ready for that.”
“They would,” agreed Lawson. “They always are. See the worst in everything. He’s not too popular as it is, and there’s many would like to think him tarred with the same brush,” but though he said this and meant it, once again a certain note of relief sounded in his voice, as again the chill wind of suspicion seemed to veer away from his Norman.
“It brings in young Holcombe, too,” Bobby went on. “To some extent. I shall have to question him about this wrench business. Nothing so far to suggest he is one of these copse habitués, is there?”
“Not that I know of,” Lawson said and added: “There’s been some talk about him and a girl in the village—Annie Mars.”
“That’ll be the girl I saw when I called at their house,” Bobby said. “Very pretty girl. Something unusual about her, too.”
“Nothing against her that I know of,” Lawson said. “Some in the village don’t seem to like her. Mrs Holcombe wants to get her away. Thinks she is setting her cap at young Holcombe. She has a job in their office, so they see each other there, and they may meet in the copse, too. Awkward for them both if any snap was taken. He is entirely dependent on his mother, and of course any sort of scandal would put the hat on his chance of being chosen to fight the constituency at the next election. Mrs Holcombe is very keen on that—very keen. Sees him as the next prime minister, in the cabinet, anyhow.”
“Two more on the short list, then,” Bobby said. “Outsiders, though.”
“Better add Norman—and me,” Lawson said moodily. “I know that’s at the back of your mind. I don’t blame you. Norman’s made a fool of himself over that lost-watch story and sticking to it.”
“If he would tell us what he and Livia Holcombe were really looking for,” Bobby remarked, “it would help to clear things up. Hard on him, I know. He feels he has to choose between his father and the girl he’s fallen in love with. Tough on a youngster.”
“It’s the girl every time,” the father said bitterly, as fathers and mothers have said so often all through the centuries.
“Very likely he’s been made to promise not to say,” Bobby remarked. “A girl can do strange things to us when we are young.”
Mr Lawson sat upright in bed, as though jerked into action by a sudden vivid memory.
“I tried to commit suicide once,” he said. “A girl. She laughed when she told me she was going to marry some one else. No one ever knew. I wonder what’s become of her. The rope stretched, and my toes just touched the ground. Then dad found me and cut me down. Another two or three minutes would have done it. Dad was old and mum was ill, and my wages about all they had to keep them from the workhouse, but I never thought of that.”
It was a strange confession to hear from this middle-aged, sedate official; still possessing, however, such well-preserved, strikingly good looks that Bobby found himself wondering how any girl had ever been able to reject him. Mr Lawson was still sitting up in bed, lost in memories of what evidently now seemed to him an utterly incomprehensible incident of long-past days. Bobby was the first to break the silence. He said:
“Perhaps if you told Norman that, he might understand better, and if it’s a promise that’s bothering him, he might get the girl to let him off.” But this, Bobby felt, was doubtful, as there came back into his mind a memory of that strange scene when mother and daughter had faced each other with such intensity of emotion. “Well, anyhow,” he said, “it would help you to understand each other better. But I’m afraid we shall still have to remember Norman.”
“And his father as well,” Lawson said. “If you haven’t already, you’ll soon hear of my visits to Castle Manor and what for! Well, Mrs Holcombe has a lot of influence; she knows most of the Joint Standing Committee members, and it’s only sense to keep in with her. Besides, she is a very capable woman, and has been a great help more than once. But of course that doesn’t stop people from talking.”
“Nothing ever does,” Bobby said. “Not very relevant, though,” and he thought to himself that for visits to an attractive and wealthy widow excuses could easily be found, and also he reflected that unacknowledged and even unknown—deeply hidden in the unconscious, according to the fashionable theory of the day—there might also have been an awareness that just possibly those still unusual good looks of which Mr Lawson could still boast, might sometime or another produce their effect. One never knows; and now Mr Lawson, indulging in the common luxury of making the worst of it, was saying:
“Of course, I’ve been there often enough. In the copse, I mean. Not with Mrs Holcombe; never saw her there. But if I had, and if the sort of snaps you talked about had been taken—well, jolly awkward. When you have to keep in with a lot of busybodies like Joint Standing Committee members who know nothing about police work, you have to watch your step.”
“Don’t I know it?” interrupted Bobby, who had his own memories of dealings with committees.
“If the Vicar got raising all that stuff about the copse with any of them,” Mr Lawson continued, “I wanted to be able to say I had made a personal investigation on the spot and had seen nothing on which police action could be usefully taken.”
“That’s the way to talk to committees,” approved Bobby.
“I did see Yeo-Young there once or twice,” Lawson said. “Coming back from Castle Manor—dining there, probably. They play bridge. I don’t. No time, and I don’t like cards, anyhow.” But this was said a little regretfully, as if in reluctant admission that bridge was perhaps even more effective than good looks—more especially elderly good looks. He added: “Mrs Holcombe was with him once, I remember. They walked nearly as far as the ’bus stop, and then he came back with her. They didn’t see me.”
“Yeo-Young,” Bobby repeated. “Got to remember him. He strikes me as a bit of a bully. There’s that dog of his. Uses it as a means of asserting power—bullying. And carries a blunt instrument. And has the sort of background that would make him think it a duty to tackle any one he thought had been spying on them. I’m not sure he isn’t my favourite suspect for the moment. Probably just a personal reaction because I don’t like him, and means he’s nothing whatever to do with it.”
“All the same,” Lawson said, and paused, but once again he was evidently relieved, as he always was when Bobby said something to show he had a fresh suspect in mind. “It might be like that,” he agreed.
“The time I saw Annie Mars,” Bobby continued, “her father was there, too. A surly-looking customer, and went out of his wa
y to tell me there might be another murder coming. I didn’t like the way he said it. Yeo-Young told me he had seen Mars in the copse, and I’m sure he meant it for a hint. Young Holcombe’s name has been mentioned with hers. Is it possible Mars thinks there may be something going on between him and the girl—Annie Mars?”
“She’s an odd girl, by all accounts,” Lawson said. “Nothing against her that I know of,” he repeated, but he said it as if he felt that, if only you knew, there always was something against any one who had a name for being ‘odd’. “Mars is very proud of her, and at the same time very frightened of her. Feels she is, so to say, superior, and he has to live up to her, and doesn’t want to.”
“Which one of our psychiatrist friends,” observed Bobby, thinking aloud, “would probably say meant that on one hand he would react with extreme violence against any threat to her ‘superiority’, and at the same time break loose rather badly if he found that her ‘superiority’ didn’t exist—that it was only a case of her giving herself airs, as he would call it. Both attitudes might lead to odd results. I must try to have another talk with her.”
Lawson was lying back in bed now, and still looking much relieved.
“Quite a long ‘short list’,” he remarked.
“Oh, there’s still one more,” Bobby said. “Your village grocer Jones. I don’t know his first name. The newest new-comer, isn’t he?”
“Yes. I’ve heard his wife call him ‘William’, I believe,” Lawson said. “I don’t see where he comes into it. I don’t say it wouldn’t be a relief all round if it turned out to be him. Take away the responsibility from the village people themselves. A stranger here, they would say, and feel all right again, which they don’t at present, when it may be one of themselves. But Jones keeps close to business, and I doubt if he’s ever been near the copse, or if he even knows the copse is there.”
The Attending Truth: A Bobby Owen Mystery Page 11