The Attending Truth: A Bobby Owen Mystery

by E. R. Punshon

  “The best defence is always the truth,” Bobby said. “That is for those not guilty. In this case a certain economy of truth, if not deliberate lying, has been practised by some of you. I do not yet know, for instance—I have not been told—what was the cause of the scene I have just mentioned between Mrs Holcombe and Miss Livia. By the way, I forgot to mention that it did happen to come out while we were talking that Miss Livia’s real name, as the daughter of Mrs Holcombe’s first husband, was Summerson. I didn’t think much about it at the time, but I have since.”

  “Why?” Mrs Holcombe asked. “What’s that to do with it? Livia has always been known as Holcombe, but there was no secret about it.”

  “Don’t you see yet what he’s after?” Livia asked. “It’ll all come out now, I expect.”

  “There was something else,” Bobby went on, “where what I have called an economy of truth was practised. Colonel Yeo-Young never said anything about his own whereabouts at the time of the murder. Very likely he was never asked. There was no apparent reason why he should be. But I have found an eye-witness who is prepared to say that he saw the colonel enter the copse that evening and after a few minutes heard the dog howling—which is important, of course, very important—and then saw the colonel return, hurriedly, apparently greatly disturbed.”

  CHAPTER XXXVI

  “NO ONE ANSWERED”

  “MAY I ASK,” Yeo-Young said, the first to break the silence that followed as Bobby turned once more to his notes and the others round the table sat still and mute, “why the howling of the dog is important? Or rather, why you think it is important? But perhaps you don’t want to say? Anyhow, I agree you have produced a very neat—psychological pattern was, I think, your expression? But isn’t it just a trifle one-sided? I didn’t, I think, hear you mention that your eye-witness is a disreputable scamp I caught trying to break into my place. I may have treated him a little roughly, and of course he wants to pay off the grudge he owes me for that. No doubt I ought to have called in Mr Owen and given him in charge.”

  “Yes, I know,” Bobby agreed, “but I’ve already said why I do accept his story. There is circumstantial evidence—always much more satisfactory than the psychological sort—to support it. You have yourself agreed, colonel, that you were there. The only difference is that you don’t remember actually entering the copse. Growing dark, you said, and a rough path on which you could easily get a nasty fall. An accepted fact, then, that both Colonel Yeo-Young and Mrs Holcombe visited the copse on the night of the murder, and that neither offers any explanation beyond that of taking an evening stroll. Well, I didn’t feel satisfied. I began to consider afresh if there could be any connection with what had happened there, and, further, if there was any connection with the visit paid later on, the evening of my arrival here, by Miss Livia and Mr Norman Lawson, in an attempt to find something unspecified. Miss Livia must have thought it important, and yet she wouldn’t say what it was.”

  “I didn’t know,” Livia said wearily. “I just wondered. That’s all.”

  Bobby, disregarding this, continued, choosing his words slowly and carefully:

  “Most of what had been collected by Mr Lawson’s orders, and I doubt if so much as a twig had been left undisturbed or a fallen leaf unturned, was plainly useless. Been there for weeks or months. More recent stuff had been sorted out very carefully. I asked to see it, and I went through it again in the light of what I had learned and of the vague possibilities I was beginning to get glimpses of. One item caught my attention. It was a scrap of torn, dirty, crumpled paper, but I could still read, in block letters, a reference to a text in the Bible. In Luke. It runs: ‘And he that was dead sat up and began to speak.’ That didn’t seem to mean much, and yet I felt it did. We couldn’t find any dabs on it of any use. I showed it to the Vicar—association of ideas, I suppose. Clergyman and Bible and, besides, I knew he frequently visited the copse. However, he couldn’t help in any way. But I still remembered, and kept remembering, that there was a dead man both in the copse and in the text. And there was still that haunting idea I had that somewhere, if only I could get it out, there was a sequence of connected events—cause and effect, so to say. I knew, for instance, that Miss Livia had complained of insolence from a tramp she had met in the copse—always the copse, you see. I worried it out as a possibility that something of the sort might have happened again, that Mrs Holcombe had been told, and had gone to the copse to see for herself. Again in all this was there somewhere to be found the reason for the strangely emotional scene between mother and daughter I spoke of just now?

  “Well, I felt I was getting into very deep waters of conjecture, but so far I had found no clear contradictions, and it was then that I began to take notice of the two names—Winterspoon and Summerson. It is an odd fact that if a man takes a new name, the one he chooses often has some reference to the old one. In this case Summer and Winter. And then I knew men sometimes died for their own reasons in South America, only to live again elsewhere under a new name. If a man is wanted, and we have reason to believe he has retired to South America, we are rather inclined to expect careful documentary evidence before long both of his premature death in the Argentine, perhaps, and then of his resurrection in the U.S. So I got the idea that it might be worth while working on the line that Winterspoon was really Summerson trying to get in touch secretly with his former wife by sending her a message she would understand, but no one else, and that that might be why he was hanging about the copse. Why, too, he had spoken to Miss Livia to ask her to deliver it. I knew, of course, that Miss Livia had been annoyed shortly before in the copse by a tramp, and had said that in the future she was going to take with her for protection a mallet she uses in her work. It seemed possible that Miss Livia had refused, and that the scrap of paper with the reference to a text on it might be what she and Mr Norman Lawson were looking for. It seemed likely, too, that some suspicion of the truth, if my ideas were getting anywhere near the facts, might account for the scene of emotional tension that took place between her and her mother. That, too, seemed consistent with the further idea that on the night of the murder Mrs Holcombe had visited the copse to see who the stranger really was. Or—which I thought more likely—that she had rung up Colonel Yeo-Young and asked him to go.”

  “I am supposed to have done so, and promptly decided that the best way out was to murder the chap?” Colonel Yeo-Young interposed. “Is that it?”

  “We’ll consider that later, shall we?” Bobby said, again annoyed by the flippant interruption. “I daresay, though, you will all have noticed one or two points where fact and theory don’t quite fit. One—very significant, I mentioned it before—is that the dog howled. A curious incident.”

  “Dogs do at times,” the Colonel said. “Even Pompey. What about it? Well, go on.”

  “The second point,” Bobby continued accordingly, “is that in all this that I had tried to work out there seemed no explanation—none, at least, that I could see—of Winterspoon’s presence waiting in a copse of which there was nothing to show he could have had any previous knowledge. One idea that did come to me was that some third person might have told him he might very likely meet Miss Livia there when she was returning from a visit to Felstead. So then I had to try to consider who that third person might be.”

  “What third person?” demanded Yeo-Young impatiently. “There isn’t one that I know of,” and then he turned suddenly and, indeed, as it were involuntarily, to look at the silent and listening Mars by his side.

  “I am trying,” Bobby explained, “to sketch out the admitted facts from which I have tried to deduce a reasonably consistent explanation. And I had to try to think out what any such third person might have said to Winterspoon to get him to visit the copse. Well, if he were really Summerson, and Mrs Holcombe’s first husband, then he was also Miss Livia’s father. It might well be, then, that he had a real urge to see her, to speak to her. Even without actually saying who he was.”

  “It only came to me afte
rwards,” Livia said. “Not at first. I think I said to mother: ‘There’s a man in the copse. I think I know him.’ ‘Do I know him?’ And I think I said ‘Is it him?’ and I ran up the stairs because I didn’t dare wait. He pushed a paper into my hand when he stopped me and he said to give it to my mother. He said: ‘You have no father, have you? You don’t remember him?’ and there was something in the way he said it that—oh, I don’t know. I think I said: ‘Who are you? What do you want?’ I had a torch and I shone it, and I saw how he was looking at me, and I was afraid. I didn’t know why. I ran as hard as I could. I think I threw away the paper he gave me, and I never stopped till I got in, because I didn’t dare, in case it was true. And it was true. He was my father, and he had come back, and all I did was to run from him, and if it’s true what you’ve said, it was because of me he was killed.”

  She was crying now, very softly, like a child whose misery is too great for it even to wish to be comforted.

  Mrs Holcombe said:

  “I had official papers to prove it. There was the certificate of burial and a letter from the priest who had been with him when he died, and another from the doctor. They came through the British Consul. I sent him money to pay all expenses.”

  “It is easy to switch identities in a foreign country where there are no personal friends or acquaintances,” Bobby said. “All you have to do is to take the dead man’s papers from his pocket and put your own there instead. Some of the South American republics are not inclined to bother too much about details. No reason why they should, and a good tip here or there is often a help. Then when you get back to this country you take a new name.”

  “I felt I must go and see for myself,” Mrs Holcombe said. “No one was there. I called out. No one answered. It was dark and no one answered. It was all silent. I think that I was frightened, too. Like Livia. When no one answered.”

  “I think no one was there to answer,” Bobby said. “Most likely murder had already been done. Perhaps the murderer heard. Perhaps it’s as well you were frightened.”

  CHAPTER XXXVII

  “I’M A BASTARD, THEN?”

  THIS TIME it was Mars who broke the uneasy, troubled silence that followed on Bobby’s last remark. Bobby himself was again consulting his note-book, ticking off in pencil such points as he had already made and making sure there was none he had overlooked. The others round the table were very quiet and still. Livia was still crying gently, despairingly, and Mrs Holcombe had become very pale. The picture presented to her of how she had called her summons through the dark night for none to hear save a dead man and a lurking murderer, had evidently deeply shaken her. Mars said suddenly, speaking rather loudly:

  “All this talk...it’s my girl I want to know about.”

  Bobby turned to him, and as he did so, changed, his whole personality changed—changed from the suave, scrupulous, restrained interrogator, almost apologetically asking for confirmation for the theories, the doubtful theories, he was putting forward, to a dark and strong intensity, so much the more formidable because it was being so plainly and so forcefully held in check.

  “I’m not forgetting her,” he said, and the pencil he held in his hand snapped in his grasp. He looked at it in surprise, and meticulously he laid the two broken pieces down side by side. “I’m not forgetting her,” he repeated, though in a more ordinary tone. He looked at his wrist-watch. “There’s not too much time, either,” he said.

  “Well, now then,” Colonel Yeo-Young muttered, and he looked at Bobby with surprise, as if in Bobby’s new voice he had recognized a fundamental, ruthless determination deeply akin to, and yet entirely different from, that same quality which he was dimly, though only occasionally, aware lay at the base of his own character. “Oh, well, now then,” he repeated.

  But now Bobby was speaking again. He said:

  “There’s something else I want to ask about. So far what I have suggested as being very likely what happened has been largely accepted. But it does seem to assume an unusually close friendship—co-operation indeed—between Mr Yeo-Young and Mrs Holcombe. There seem to be in the village hints, gossip, rumours, whatever you like to call it, about secret marriages. I am bound to ask if there is any truth in these stories?”

  “You mean about Mrs Holcombe and myself?” Yeo-Young asked, smiling slightly. “You certainly manage to pick up the most extraordinary yarns. Not of course,” he added, with a little bow in Mrs Holcombe’s direction, “that I mean the idea would have been in any way unwelcome on my side.”

  Mrs Holcombe took no notice of this piece of gallantry. She was looking merely annoyed, so much so that all trace of her recent nervousness had vanished. It was in a very sharp tone that she said:

  “Rubbish. I never heard such nonsense. Preposterous.”

  “Regrettably so,” Colonel Yeo-Young said. “After all, I am a very poor man. Even if I had ever dared entertain hopes—well, there you are.”

  “I’ve money enough; what’s money got to do with it?” demanded Mrs Holcombe, still evidently much annoyed.

  “Oh, everything,” Yeo-Young told her. “Just everything.”

  “Fiddlesticks,” said Mrs Holcombe comprehensively.

  “Anyhow,” Yeo-Young asked, turning to Bobby, “why secret? Is there supposed to have been a midnight elopement, or what? Mrs Holcombe had no reason to suppose her first husband was alive and, besides, doesn’t seven years’ absence make it all right?”

  “Was it seven years?” Bobby asked. “I don’t know. I did think it possible there might be something in Mr Holcombe’s disposition of his estate?”

  “My husband knew,” Mrs Holcombe said. “He had to. Livia was there. I showed him the papers and letters I had from South America. He said that was all right—good enough. Later he told me he had made arrangements to cover everything. A deed of gift.”

  “Well, then, I’m a bastard,” Harry Holcombe interposed. “Is that what it comes to?”

  “Secret marriage?” Mrs Holcombe was repeating, and a new idea seemed to strike her. “Harry, is it about you? This story, I mean?”

  “You mean me and Annie?” Harry asked. “No, it isn’t. Not my fault, though. Perhaps she will, now I’m a bastard. Am I?”

  “I think that had better be talked over in private,” Bobby said. “I don’t think it’s relevant.”

  Livia had stopped crying now, though still from time to time a dry sob shook her whole body. She looked across the table at Norman Lawson. “It’s us,” she said. “You tell them, Norry. Three months, and I think very likely there’s a baby coming.”

  “Livia,” Mrs Holcombe said. There was an accent of protest in her tone, but no anger. “Did you have to keep it from me?” she asked.

  “I think we thought you might want to stop us,” Livia said. “Norry did want to, but I wouldn’t let him. There was his father, too, and Colonel Yeo-Young is on that police committee thing. They just do what he tells them. I made Norry promise to wait till I got the job at the Felstead Museum. Then it wouldn’t have mattered if mother had turned me out.”

  “Oh, Livy!” Mrs Holcombe said, “I never knew you thought of me like that,” and she spoke in the lowest, least confident tone Bobby had ever heard her use.

  “Well, mother, you can be pretty frightening, you know,” Livia said, and Norman Lawson looked very much as if he thoroughly agreed with her.

  “Now I’m only a bastard,” Harry said, and he said it very much as if he felt that in some way a certain sense of control and restraint had slipped away from him, “I don’t see why I shouldn’t have a go at Annie.”

  “I suppose I’ve deserved that, too,” Mrs Holcombe said. “Have I?”

  “Need we go into all this?” Yeo-Young said. “Mr Owen has thrown us all off balance. I don’t think he had any right to drag out all these private, personal matters.”

  “Murder is not private, though it may be personal,” Bobby said. “I agree some unexpected things, irrelevant things—private, too—have come out somehow. I don’t
quite know how. Perhaps they had to. I felt it was essential I should know the whole set-up. I had to know exactly where you all stood, where I stood. None of you was entirely free from some touch of suspicion. There were circumstances that had to be explained.”

  “I hope they have been,” Yeo-Young said. “Or are you still contemplating arresting one of us?”

  “I think on the whole,” Bobby answered, ignoring this, “that what has been said to-night has explained a good deal.”

  “I think,” the Vicar suddenly interposed, speaking for almost the first time, “that I, too, had suspicions. Unworthy suspicions. I suspected Mr Mars. I suspected Colonel Yeo-Young. I was justly punished when I found I was myself suspected for reasons quite as strong,” he said humbly. “I shall not forget. Think no evil,” he said.

  “Everyone has been suspecting everyone else, especially me, apparently,” Yeo-Young said, not without resentment. “Probably Mr Owen does still. Even my walking-stick counts against me, it seems.”

  “There are rather a lot of blunt instruments about,” Bobby agreed. “All belonging to people whose names come into it, and all could have been used.” He was looking at his wrist-watch, but he showed no sign of moving. “Your walking-stick, colonel, as you say. The vicar’s old wrench, Mr Holcombe had had that, too. Miss Livia’s mallet. And all four rubbed up one way or another so there were no dabs.”

  “That’s three,” Mrs Holcombe said. “What’s the fourth?”

  “I wouldn’t ever do a bloke in,” Mars protested. “Out him I might if I caught him meddling where he didn’t ought. That’s all.”