The Attending Truth: A Bobby Owen Mystery

by E. R. Punshon

  Bobby watched him disappear again into the vestry, and then resumed his own way into the village. He did not feel he had gained much insight into or further knowledge of Mr Duggan’s character and beliefs, though these, it was plain, were what would chiefly influence his conduct. Clear, though, that he would follow entirely his own judgment, with little regard for anything else, and that nothing would make him change any course of action he had once decided upon.

  “Two of them as like as two peas,” Bobby grumbled to himself, discontentedly and not quite accurately—“the Mars girl and the Vicar,” and which of those two would have been the more surprised had they heard this verdict, it would be hard to say.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  “NONE CAN TAKE IT”

  BOBBY HAD had it in his mind that he must take the first opportunity he could find or make for another talk with Mr Jones, the only inhabitant of the village in whom, so far as was known, Winterspoon had shown any interest. In addition, Jones had boasted that his shop was the centre of village gossip, and in the information that can be picked up from gossip Bobby always put much faith. Indeed, one of his colleagues at the Yard had once complained—a trifle enviously, perhaps—that listening to old women’s gossip was Owen’s trump card. To which Bobby had retorted that he had the greatest respect for old women’s gossip. In it they embodied their vast experience of life, lived by women in so much closer relation to the elemental facts of nature than by men, confused and entangled as men are in all their busy schemes for making this and that—especially money. Bobby knew, too, that in his attempt to build up a larger trade than the village could provide, Jones made a point of promising prompt delivery for even the smallest order, so that he and his light delivery-van were familiar over a wide stretch of the surrounding country. So a fair assumption that wherever he went the Pending Dale murder would provide the chief subject of converse and gossip in which the smiling, friendly, plump little man would certainly take a big share. In that way, too, some useful hint or another might possibly be picked up.

  Bobby, then, was in no way displeased when, as he reached the ‘Good Grocery’ establishment, half-way down the long, straggling village street, Mr Jones himself appeared in the doorway, rotund and smiling as ever, and waved him a cheery greeting.

  “Clack, clack, cluck cluck,” he said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder towards the interior of the shop. “All of ’em at it—tongues wagging faster than fifty to the dozen. But not your affair this time.”

  “Oh! What is it, then?” Bobby asked.

  “Margery Maine,” Jones explained, naming with suitable respect the reigning film star of the moment, a lady of whom it was said that she had emulated Cleopatra by dissolving a pearl in wine she then drank. “She’s coming herself in person to Felstead next week to open the flower-show. They all seem to think it’s much the same as if the whole Royal Family were coming, all together. My missis is plumb crazy about the pictures.”

  “Most people are,” Bobby remarked. “I don’t get much time to go myself.”

  “Nor me,” declared Mr Jones, “but the missis, bless her—about all she lives for. Me, I’m only too glad to put my feet up and listen-in after being out all day, driving round and delivering orders that don’t pay for the petrol I use, even if it’s all building up. But the missis will always rush off to the pictures, even after we’ve had the busiest day ever.”

  “I suppose you find people everywhere talking about the murder here,” Bobby suggested.

  “Well, you can’t wonder, can you?” Mr Jones countered. “Murder’s juicy and rare. What more do you want? I have to tell all I know, and you would be surprised at what I do know. A lot more than you. Did you know you had arrested three different people last night, all seen by eye-witnesses being marched off in handcuffs? What I’ve heard.”

  “No, I didn’t know that,” Bobby said, not pleased, for this was not at all the sort of gossip he hoped to hear. “Who are the three supposed to be?”

  “Annie Mars,” Mr Jones answered promptly. “Mrs Holcombe—Miss Livia collapsed when she heard and had to be put to bed. Norman Lawson, the chief constable’s boy.”

  “I hope you told people not to talk such rubbish,” Bobby said crossly.

  “Not me,” retorted Jones, with some reason. “First place, how was I to know? Might be true. And I don’t ever contradict a customer. I just listen and look interested and let ’em see how clever I think them to know all that. It pays. Then they come to the shop on purpose to tell me some more and see me gape again, and if they do—well, they are morally bound to buy something, aren’t they?”

  “You’ll be the head of a whole chain of grocery stores before long, Mr Jones,” Bobby said, laughingly, but Jones shook his head.

  “All the missis will ever let me do is save up enough to retire and live at Hollywood,” he explained. “That’s what she’s set her heart on—thinks she’ll get in with all the film stars then.”

  “Nice climate, anyhow, I suppose,” Bobby remarked, not very greatly interested in Mrs Jones’s ambitions, however eccentric. “If you hear any more stories about people being arrested, you might remind them there are such things as actions for scandal.”

  “Not me,” retorted Jones once again and grinning more cheerfully than ever. “No affair of mine. If people go hunting trouble, not my job to warn ’em off. There’s some would like to bring in the Vicar as well—only they don’t quite dare. It’s chiefly them as he’s been after over the copse he’s got on the brain like. I have thought myself it might be Winterspoon stumbled accidental like on something of the sort Vicar’s always talking about, and so got what he did from some chap who didn’t like being interrupted and was all heated up anyhow. I know that’s what Vicar has in mind. And if it had been him it had happened to, I shouldn’t have been an awful lot surprised. Only it wasn’t.”

  “Winterspoon was a stranger here,” Bobby said. “Why should he have gone to the copse? How was he to know it was a trouble-centre?”

  “Quite sure he was such a stranger as all that?” demanded Jones, cocking his head to one side and looking very knowing indeed.

  “There’s nothing to suggest he had ever been here before,” Bobby pointed out.

  “If my first idea’s right,” Jones said slowly, “and what he was really doing was scouting round for one of these agents trying to find businesses open to offer, he may have known quite a lot about local conditions. Plenty of commercials doing well on that lay. Fat commission if they bring it off. You wouldn’t believe the way I keep getting rung up by agents, telling me they can offer me the best price ever. Nothing doing, unless it’s enough to mean us retiring to Hollywood. That’s the missis’s dream. Not mine.”

  “I don’t quite see what there could be in all that to lead to murder,” Bobby remarked.

  “Rival touts trying to cut in on the other bloke’s line,” Jones told him. “Murder’s been done for the price of a pint before today. Not that I’ve anything to go on, only, if it isn’t something like that, then it looks as if it must be one of us in the village.” He waited, as if expecting confirmation or denial from Bobby. Bobby did not speak, however. Jones went on: “What none of us likes to think. Spoiling everything. Everybody thinking ‘Maybe it’s you’. Gives a funny feeling, wondering if the bloke you’ve been having a pint with at the ‘Black Bull’ is a murderer, or maybe the bloke you’ve been serving his rations to over the counter. If you don’t get to the bottom of it soon, Mr Owen, there won’t be one of us dare look at his next-door neighbour, for fear of seeing murder in his eye. That’s what lots of them are saying.” He paused again. He said abruptly: “It’s like a sort of creeping sickness.”

  “I know,” Bobby agreed, though a little surprised, and even troubled, at the force and energy with which the other had spoken. More deeply moved, evidently, than Bobby would have expected, somehow, from what hitherto he had seen and heard of him. He had become quite pale, indeed, and now he had taken out his handkerchief and was wiping his f
orehead. Bobby said: “It’s often the consequences that are the worst part of it.”

  “That’s right,” Jones agreed. “It’s the way people talk that gets me. I told you. About Mrs Holcombe, a lady like her, rich as you like, and Annie Mars, which is plumb absurd, and young Lawson, which is only because he isn’t one of us here in the village, and so if it’s him, then we’re out, and that’s all we care about.”

  “Well, I suppose Mrs Holcombe did find the body,” Bobby said, “and young Lawson might come in somewhere; but why Miss Mars?”

  “I don’t know; can’t say,” Jones answered, a little to Bobby’s relief, since this seemed to show that the story of the recovery of the mallet had not yet got about, as he had not wished it to do so soon. Jones went on, slowly, as if he were trying to think it out: “I expect maybe it’s because they don’t trust her. I don’t myself, as far as that goes, though I’ve nothing against her. The missus says she’s sly, always snooping.” Jones’s round little face looked quite different as he pronounced this last word, but almost immediately his customary smile was back. “It’s not natural,” he complained, though now more quietly. “Never says much, just sort of standing waiting, so you feel she’s watching all the time, so you feel you’ve got to be careful. People don’t like it. She’ll be getting hers if she don’t mind. As for obliging a customer—stares as if she couldn’t believe her eyes.”

  Bobby didn’t pursue the subject or ask what it was that, under the heading of ‘obliging a customer’, had so surprised Annie. Not his business, he supposed. He said:

  “Well, I must be getting on.”

  “So must I,” agreed Jones. “Always plenty to do in a shop. Shop-keeper’s work’s never done, you know. I’ll tell you one thing, though, and it’s gospel. If any one knows anything it’s Annie Mars. She always does. Gets you to tell her things, leads you on, and then she knows, and when you know and people know you know—well, then you’ve got ’em. See what I mean?”

  “Blackmail?” asked Bobby.

  “Oh, I didn’t mean that,” Jones protested quickly. “Nothing like that. No scope for it here, for one thing. No.” He was looking startled now, almost frightened, as if the word so spoken had been something of a shock to him. “No, no,” he said again. “You didn’t take me as meaning that, Mr Owen, did you? A girl like her never could. Stands to reason. It’s just that them knowing you know makes them mind, if you see what I mean. All the same, people don’t like it. And if she did happen to let slip something at home, and Mars his own self got to know—well, I wouldn’t trust Mars, not me. And all I can say is the sooner it’s cleared up, the better for all of us; and we all wish you luck, Mr Owen, sir.”

  “Except, perhaps, the murderer,” Bobby suggested.

  “Ah, him,” Jones said darkly. “Maybe he’ll up and confess. It must be an awful weight on a man’s conscience.”

  “It doesn’t seem to be in every case,” Bobby told him. “Mr Somerset Maugham—the author, you know—questioned the murderers in a French prison once. He says none of them seemed to be much troubled by what they had done. Defensive mechanism in action, perhaps. But, then, he never questioned them at three o’clock in the morning, when they were alone with their memories. It does seem, though, as if some get so they take killing as just another job of work. It may be because it gives them a sense of power. Like God, they hold life and death in their hands. All the same, no murderer can take it.”

  “Why not?” Jones asked, and he looked very startled. “You’ve just been saying yourself.”

  “It’s the not knowing,” Bobby explained. “The uncertainty. It’s a strain. Must be. Take this case. I know what I know and what I don’t know, but the murderer, whoever he is, has no idea. For all he can tell, I may be entirely at sea, or I may be just getting ready. He never knows when I may not say to him, as politely as possible: ‘Should you mind coming with me to answer a few questions we want to put you?’ And the moment that’s said—well, he knows it’s the shadow of the rope. Why, I might be going to end any casual chat, like this one, by saying just that.”

  “Here, I say,” protested Mr Jones, “you didn’t ought to go saying things like that, so you oughtn’t.”

  “Just an illustration,” Bobby explained. “But it’s that the murderer can’t take. The uncertainty. The suspense.”

  “He might feel so safe it wouldn’t worry him,” Jones remarked. “Hullo! Looks like the chin-wag inside there’s breaking up at last,” and in fact at this moment three or four people were emerging from the shop with full baskets and that peaceful, satisfied look which comes from a really satisfactory exchange of impressions, beliefs and ideas.

  They might have lingered for a further round with Mr Jones, but they all knew who Bobby was, and his errand in the village, and so they all looked a little scared, and hurried on their way. From within the shop a shrill cry came:

  “Jones! Jones! Where are you?”

  “That’s the missis,” Mr Jones explained, grinning. “Now I’m for it, wasting time talking, and not even to a customer,” and he shouted back, like a good, obedient husband: “Coming, missis, coming.”

  CHAPTER XIX

  “BECAUSE I DIDN’T”

  FROM THE Good Grocery Store, Bobby went on to the village police-station—police-cottage would be a more appropriate term. There, as he had hoped might be the case, had now arrived from Felstead headquarters, together with various other exhibits, the piece of paper picked up in the copse after the murder, written on it in block letters a puzzling reference to a verse in St Luke.

  It had already been tested for finger-prints, without result. The paper itself was of poor quality, and there seemed nothing whereby to trace its origin. Bobby studied it long and carefully, however, for it was running in his mind that this torn and dirty scrap of paper somehow contained what, if only he could read its message, would prove the key to the mystery. Finally he put it away carefully in one of his cellophane envelopes, and, as he did so, heard a car draw up outside. He glanced out of the window, and saw Harry Holcombe alighting. A moment later the young man himself was shown in. He entered with a good deal of his usual self-assurance still showing. Ignoring Bobby’s greeting, he demanded:

  “What’s all this about?”

  “Murder—murder in the copse near Castle Manor,” Bobby retorted grimly, and then, in a more ordinary voice: “Why not sit down? Have you seen Miss Holcombe?”

  “She’s asleep,” Holcombe answered. “Annie said she mustn’t be wakened.”

  “Annie? Miss Mars? Is she there?” Bobby asked.

  “She always is,” Holcombe answered, with a kind of angry, discontented pride. “Seems to think it’s her job to be a sort of maid-of-all-work if there’s any upset anywhere. Scrubs the floors and makes the beds, and that sort of thing, and sits for hours listening to any old woman’s grievances. Practically ordered me downstairs in our own house. Shouldn’t be surprised if she doesn’t do the same to mother.” His angry scowl faded into a faint smile. It was almost confidentially that he added: “It’s worth something to see her and mother going for each other.”

  “Do they often?” Bobby asked.

  “Oh, it happens,” Holcombe said. “I believe mother’s a bit scared of her. I think every one is. I know I am. She’s different.”

  “She is in your employ, isn’t she? I thought she worked in your office.”

  “Well, she doesn’t let that make any difference, if that’s what you mean,” the young man retorted. “Mother wouldn’t either. Mother’s bossy as hell, but she does play fair. I mean she wouldn’t try to come it over Annie, because of her working for us. Besides, Annie could get another job any time she wanted, any girl could, especially when she’s jolly good, like Annie. Look, Annie said you wanted her and that’s why she didn’t turn up at the office this morning. She said she was waiting for you to send for her. She wouldn’t say why. Told me to ask you. What did she mean about wanting her, and what’s up about Livia?”

  “That,” an
swered Bobby gravely, “is what I want to know, what I’ve got to know. Last night I found the mallet your sister lost. It was in the ditch near the Felstead ’bus stop. I think Miss Mars had put it back there only the minute before. She will neither admit that nor deny it. Of course, in the long run she will have to.”

  “Not if she doesn’t want, she won’t,” Holcombe interposed. “You don’t know Annie.”

  “I took the mallet back to the ‘Black Bull’ with me,” Bobby went on, ignoring this. “This morning I went to Castle Manor, meaning to question Miss Holcombe. I found her in no fit state to answer. She had apparently not been to bed all night, and she had been keeping herself going on brandy and milk. She said she was drunk, but I don’t think myself it was quite that. I told one of your maids to get her to bed, and I rang up Mrs Holcombe to say I thought she had better come at once.”

  “She’s in town,” Holcombe said. “I couldn’t get in touch with her. She’s gone to look at some new premises we’ve been offered.”

  “Both you and Mrs Holcombe,” Bobby went on, “must realize that I have to know what it was caused the rather curious, almost hysterical condition in which I found Miss Holcombe this morning. I think it had something to do with an odd scene I witnessed in which Miss Holcombe seemed to be challenging your mother.”

  “What do you mean?” Holcombe interrupted. “Challenging her? What about?”

  “There again,” Bobby said, “that’s exactly what I want to know. But it did seem as if they were each asking the other a question and each afraid to answer it. And I have to ask myself if this question each was asking and each refusing to answer had not some connection with what happened in the copse.”