The Attending Truth: A Bobby Owen Mystery

by E. R. Punshon

  “Makes me a bastard,” Harry said, and he put his hand to his forehead. “So I thought it would be all right, but now they say she’s dead. Is it—true? It can’t be, not Annie,” and now there were tears on his cheeks.

  “It’s them,” Mars repeated, pointing at Jones and his wife. “If they get let off, I’ll see to them myself, so I will. The two of them!”

  “I don’t understand,” the Vicar was saying. He, too, was staring at Jones. “One of the most zealous, most valued members of my congregation,” he said.

  “Buttered you up,” Mars said. “That’s what she told us. Buttered you up—up to the eyes, so they did.”

  Unheeding this, Mr Duggan said to Bobby:

  “I came to tell you. It seemed important. If Annie’s dead, perhaps it isn’t any more. Livia said after you had gone that she told Annie this morning she knew the moment she saw him it was her father come back, but she tried not to believe it, and Annie said she thought perhaps Mr Jones had known, too, and she would ask him.”

  “So that’s the reason,” Bobby exclaimed. “They were afraid if that came out it would show a motive if they knew from the first. Colonel, will you help me? I must search the place at once, and I may need help—a witness, too. Sergeant, call your men in to make sure neither Jones nor Mars gives any trouble—or Mrs Jones. Then come and join us.”

  “You needn’t bother about upstairs,” Jones said. “I told you. All the stuff’s in the cellars. You’ll see for yourself if you look.”

  “Which means, I expect,” Yeo-Young remarked, “most of the worthwhile stuff is in the attics.”

  Bobby, without answering this, ran up the stairs. Yeo-Young followed. They went into every room. They found nothing. The colonel told himself that so rapid and superficial a search was of small value. He hinted as much, though with some hesitation, for he was beginning to entertain a much increased respect for Bobby’s capabilities. Still, what about a hidden cache under the floorboards? And a good many nylon stockings could be hidden in the small boxes and drawers, Bobby had not bothered even to open.

  Bobby answered these hints as he hurried from room to room.

  “I’m not looking for that kind of thing. Didn’t you notice? Jones was quite different after his wife told him she knew what she was doing? It struck me that he thought most likely she did, and it was after that he kept telling us to look in the cellars.”

  “I don’t think I see what that has to do with it,” Yeo-Young began, but Bobby was already out of the room and running down the stairs again to where in the hall the others were waiting, joined now by the two men of the local police force Sergeant Stubbs had summoned from outside.

  “Found nothing?” Jones said almost jauntily. “Well, what did I tell you? It’s all in the cellars, all of it. In packing-cases. I keep them all together, piled up against the wall, separate from the other stuff.”

  “Stubbs, come along; I want you now,” Bobby said, taking no notice of Jones. “You two,” he added to the local men, “keep your eyes open. Shout for us if you want us.”

  “We shall be all right, sir,” one man answered. “We can handle them all right,” and it was evident from his tone that he felt rather insulted by any suggestion that he and his companion might need help.

  “You put electricity down there, didn’t you?” Bobby said to Jones. “Is it working?”

  “Works a treat,” Jones said. “Made a thorough good job of it. You can see everything as plain as day.”

  The switches were at the top of the cellar steps. Bobby pressed them down, and below light sprang at once into being. They hurried down, Bobby leading the way with an eager, apprehensive haste that communicated itself to his two companions, though they did not fully understand it. At the foot of the steps was a long passage, brick lined. Doors on each side opened into a series of cellars, evidently originally meant for coal, for wine, as a larder, for laundry work—for general storage purposes, in fact. Now one or two were empty; one was stocked with grocery supplies clearly for the use of the shop above; in another a pile of all kinds of odds and ends had been thrown into a careless heap. In the farthest away, the last, the darkest of all, one that had no outside light or ventilation, that probably extended under the old, weed-grown garden at the back of the house a number of packing-cases were arranged against one of the walls. Hitherto Bobby, in spite of all the anguished sense of urgency he had seemed to show, had given but a cursory glance into each cellar in turn. Swiftly he had thrown the light of the strong electric torch he held into each corner, up and down the cellar’s roof, and then he was away, hurrying into the one next to it, there to repeat the same process. But here he paused and stood still, his torch-light concentrated on the heaped-up packing-cases. Yeo-Young, sure now there was some strong reason for the anxious haste Bobby had been showing, as well as for his sudden still concentration on those packing-cases, said in almost a whisper:

  “Are you looking for the body?”

  “I am hoping, hoping,” Bobby said.

  ‘Hoping’ seemed both to Yeo-Young and to Stubbs to be an odd word to use in this connection, and Stubbs said from behind:

  “There was something said up there about packing-cases. It might be—”

  His voice trailed off uncertainly into silence. Bobby moved forward, to the wall where stood the piled-up packing-cases. He threw one down. It fell heavily and burst open, and some of its contents—sugar—was spilt on the brick floor. Bobby took no notice. He was running the light of his torch up and down the wall behind the packing-cases. He said:

  “Recent work, look at the mortar. Stubbs. There was an iron bar with some tools at the foot of the cellar steps. Get it for me. Hurry.”

  Stubbs went off at a run. Bobby, calling Yeo-Young to help, began pulling, tugging, overturning with a feverish energy, one case after another. A second case broke open and spilled more sugar. The colonel, still puzzled, said:

  “I saw a report of the theft of three lorry-loads of sugar. Looks like it.”

  By now Stubbs had returned with a heavy, pointed iron bar. Bobby took it and began to attack the wall. Stubbs said:

  “That’s the stuff all right. Likely as not more bricked up behind.”

  “Give me a hand,” Bobby said, still fierce in his attack on the wall already showing signs of his assault.

  “Jones made a lot of alterations down here,” Stubbs said. “Then him and the builder fell out, so he carried on alone.”

  The other two helped as best they could, for Bobby was using his iron bar with little thought for them, either for their heads or their fingers. The bricks began to fall. The mortar had not yet set fully, and so the work was easier. Soon there was a hole. Bobby ceased work for a moment, snatched his torch, shone the light through the hole, looked.

  “Thank God,” he said, and through the hole just made he shouted: “It’s us. It’s all right now. We’re here.”

  Yeo-Young was beginning to understand now, though Stubbs was gaping in wonder at this shout through a hole into apparent emptiness. The wall was crumbling fast. They were all three almost smothered in dust and dirt, and they did not even notice that they were nearly choking. The wall crumbled faster still. The hole became large enough for Bobby to scramble through. Annie was standing there, calmly, her hands folded before her. Bobby said:

  “You all right?”

  “Yes, thank you,” she answered. “I was afraid perhaps it was Mrs Jones come back with the bacon knife. But I think perhaps,” she added pensively, “they never meant to any more. Oh, dear, what a state you are all in!”

  Bobby helped her through the hole into the somewhat better air of the outer cellars. Yeo-Young had run up the cellar steps to shout that Annie had been found alive and safe and that a doctor must be sent for at once. Then he came hurrying back, Harry close behind.

  He had been running, but when he saw Annie he stood still, and came towards her very slowly.

  “I knew it wasn’t true; I knew it couldn’t be,” he said as if to him
self.

  It was Annie now who moved towards him.

  “Why, your face is all wet,” she said, and then wonderingly: “You haven’t been crying, have you?”

  “No,” he said, surprised, and he thought it was the truth. He took her hand and held it. “Annie,” he said in almost a whisper and repeated, “Annie.”

  CHAPTER XL

  CONCLUSION

  THERE WERE still, of course, many arrangements to be made, much to be seen to, and Bobby had not even begun his final report when late the next day, towards evening, word was brought to him that Colonel Yeo-Young and Mrs Holcombe were there and were asking if he could spare them a few minutes. To say the truth, Bobby was not sorry to have an excuse for putting down a pen he was thoroughly tired of using, and then, too, it was possible—indeed, more than possible—that on some points they could give information that would help to make plainer recent developments and their causes, far distant in that past which lives again so often in the present.

  So he was more than willing to have them shown in and to give them the further information he knew they, on their side, had come to seek.

  “Jones,” he told them, “has begun to talk. Not Mrs Jones. She is tougher—women often are. We’ll get nothing out of her. She was the backbone of their partnership, I think. But she’ll get off the more easily. Acted under the influence of her husband. That will be the line. Pure nonsense, of course, in this case. No doubt it was all very much the impelling force of her obsession over Hollywood. A one-track mind. Only thing she could think of was getting to Hollywood and being in touch with the film world there. Almost a form of insanity, and yet entirely responsible for both thought and deed.” Bobby had been thinking aloud as much as talking to them, and in a way it was the very intentness with which the two of them were listening that made him stop. “Oh, well,” he said, “all that psychological stuff is no business of a mere policeman. All our concern is law and order. Jones is a much more ordinary type—the get-rich-quick type who thinks he can be above the discipline of ordinary life. All right for others, he thinks, but not for him.”

  “I take it you mean he has confessed?” Mrs Holcombe asked.

  “Well, talking,” Bobby corrected the word she had used. “I don’t put much stock in confessions. They can be withdrawn, and clever counsel gets on the right side of the jury by explaining they were made under the unfair pressure of a brutal police. But we got plenty of good dabs of his from shop and house, and our people at Central have identified them with those of a man named Webb who was given a stiff term of prison for a complicated long firm swindle. He was released several years ago. A man named Summerson was tried with him, but was acquitted, though the judge told him the jury had taken an extremely merciful view. Your first husband, Mrs Holcombe?”

  “The jury may have taken a merciful view,” Mrs Holcombe said; “but he lost his position, his character, everything. I don’t know that I took a merciful view. I suppose it was the disgrace. I was having a baby at the time of the trial, in hospital. It died. They all knew.” She paused for a moment—only a moment, but long enough for Bobby to realize what this proud, authoritative, ambitious woman had suffered. She resumed: “I never saw Jones, or whatever his real name is, and I never knew what my husband could have said in defence. He never tried to. All he said was that it was all true and he would go away and I would never hear of him again. And I said that was what I wanted, and he did. Then I got the news that he was dead. It all seemed in order, and I never thought of doubting it. Mr Holcombe was asking me to marry him. I had been working for him, and the business was growing fast. It was trying to forget, perhaps, made me work as I did. I told him everything when he suggested marriage, and I showed him the papers from South America, and he said that was all right. But afterwards, when the doctors told him he must give up active business and he made arrangements for me to take over, the lawyers thought it would be better to take precautions, just in case. I don’t know how my first husband knew about us.”

  “From what Jones says now,” Bobby explained, “when Summerson got back to this country he had some idea that you might be hard up and willing to let him help you in the money way. Not that he seems ever to have had much to spare. Possibly he even hoped you might come together again. He managed to find Jones—through the underworld. Jones was well enough known there, and so was his record, and his former identity as Webb. Indeed, he seems only to have become Jones when he arrived at Pending Dale. The success of the Longlast shirts had made your name familiar in business circles, and Jones had identified you as the wife of the man who had stood in the dock with him. Because he knew it, and supposed no one else did, was really why he chose Pending Dale as the centre of his activities, which were on a pretty big scale. He thought it might come in useful one way or another to have a hold on you, and he appears at first to have had an idea he might implicate you as an active partner. But when he got here and got to know more about you, he decided he had better not try that on, except in the very last extremity. ‘Too tough to squeeze easily’, was how he put it.”

  “The fellow’s impudence,” growled Yeo-Young, interrupting, and Mrs Holcombe smiled grimly, as if not altogether displeased at this description of herself. Bobby resumed:

  “As soon as Summerson knew Jones had established himself as such a close neighbour to Mrs Holcombe he began to get worried. At first he was very cautious. He never came nearer than Felstead, for fear of your seeing him and recognizing him and I suppose he picked up as much as he wanted to know in Felstead pubs. Plenty of Mrs Holcombe’s work-people live in Felstead. And once it seems he saw his daughter, shopping in Felstead, though he never ventured to speak to her.”

  “If we had known—” Mrs Holcombe said and stopped.

  “He took care you never should,” Bobby said.

  “I take it you think I come out of all this much worse than he does,” Mrs Holcombe said, and took no notice of Bobby’s quick interjection:

  “No, no, nothing to do with me,” he said and hurried on: “He got more worried still when he found that Jones was collecting parcels from the railway addressed to Castle Manor, but parcels he didn’t believe Mrs Holcombe knew anything about. He taxed Jones with trying to implicate her in his schemes—and those were pretty big and pretty extensive, and all the time getting more so. Jones laughed at him, apparently, and told him now they had his former wife where they wanted her, because she had committed bigamy and wouldn’t dare face exposure. Bigamy much more serious than merely being the widow of a swindler. Now she could be squeezed. Summerson’s reaction was violent and immediate, as that of men of rather weak character often is. He said he was going straight to warn you, Mrs Holcombe, and tell you the whole thing. Jones knew that would mean the immediate end of all his schemes. He knew you would ring up the police at once.”

  “I certainly should have,” Mrs Holcombe agreed. “At once.”

  “Jones would hardly have had time to get away before the police arrived. Leaving everything behind. No time to lose. What he told me was—I took down his actual words—‘The missis woke up all sudden like, the way she did at times, so you felt what she said had to be, and she told him if he meant it, then he could go and wait in the copse. He would be able to meet his girl there, she having been in Felstead all day and would be coming back by ’bus same as usual. And she told him how to get to it, and when he had gone she picked up the poker from the hearth and she said to me, just like that, “Go and do it”. And I did.’”

  “So that was how it came about,” Yeo-Young said when Bobby paused.

  “It needn’t have,” Mrs Holcombe said, “if I had been different—not so hard, not so bitter. I married him because he was so quiet and gentle and yielding, and I thought I could push him and make him rich and successful. But being quiet and gentle and yielding isn’t how to succeed in the City. Very likely it was the way I kept prodding him that made him get mixed up in Jones’s long firm frauds. I’m sure he never understood. The jury were right to take
a merciful view. It always is, isn’t it? I didn’t.”

  Colonel Yeo-Young was looking as if he thought there had been more than enough of this dwelling on the past. He said now:

  “Well, this time you’ve promised to marry some one who isn’t, from what people tell me, at all quiet or gentle or yielding. Me,” he explained when Bobby gave him a quick glance. He went on: “Looks like being a ding-dong battle to see which of the two of us will boss and bully the other.”

  “Oh, indeed. Congratulations,” Bobby said, and hoped no trace of doubt had sounded in that last word.

  “I’m so tired of being bossy,” Mrs Holcombe said.

  “You won’t feel like that for long,” Yeo-Young told her. “Only hope is that two aggressors will equal one peace.” He went on: “I suppose all this black-market business explains why Jones was so willing and anxious to deliver orders. Gave him the chance to meet his pals and take over any loot they had.”

  “Sometimes stolen property as well as black-market stuff,” Bobby said. “That’s why he made those alterations in his cellars and that secret hiding-place he meant for stuff he didn’t dare try to dispose of immediately—stolen stuff, identifiable, not like nylon stockings or a bag of sugar. Well, you know what use he made of that in the end.”

  “The idea of that faked confession of Mrs Jones’s must have been to stop you making too close a search?” Yeo-Young said questioningly.

  “Oh, yes,” Bobby agreed. “She calculated that if the black-market stuff was found we should be satisfied, and if she could send us off looking for a packing-case with Miss Mars’s dead body in it, dumped somewhere miles away, we should never find out the truth. It might have come off. But there was the way Jones’s first surprise and anger at what his wife said subsided so suddenly. I saw her look at him when she told him she knew what she was doing, and that gave me a hint that she was up to something. I didn’t think there was much hope, but there was a chance the poor girl was still alive, hidden away somewhere till they had made up their minds what to do with her.”