“Hiding?”
“Who? Mrs Field, you mean?” Bobby asked. “If she were hiding she would hardly choose to work in a place like the ‘Bell and Boy’, where the story is that if you only wait there long enough you’ll meet everybody you ever knew. No, not hiding, I think. Seeking perhaps, only what?”
CHAPTER XII
COMPLETE CIRCLE
KIMMS MADE NO attempt to answer this question. His mind was busy with more immediate problems.
“Double life,” he said suddenly.
“Looks like it,” agreed Bobby. “You can get identification through the ‘Bell and Boy’ people, but it’s fairly certain their missing barmaid and your murdered woman are the same. Certain, too, she must have been living somewhere else.”
“Got to find it,” Kimms said. “Can you help?”
“We’ll do our best,” Bobby promised. “Obviously it won’t be far from Mrs Grady’s place, and probably in a direct line with the ‘Bell and Boy’, so that she could stop off without going out of her way. To change her clothes, I take it. We can ask our chaps in the district to report any case of a woman vanishing they get to know of. The snag is that so many women take themselves off without our hearing—no reason why we should, very often. Leaving one man for another, or family row or something.”
“Anything,” agreed Kimms.
“Finding where else she lived is the next step, obviously,” Bobby said, frowning at the problem presented. “Not too easy, perhaps. But until you have some idea of her background it’s more or less working in the dark. Identification of Mrs Grady’s lodger and the ‘Bell and Boy’ barmaid won’t help much in itself.”
“No,” said Kimms.
After that they parted, Kimms returning to Twice Over and Bobby to his room at Central, where he put in hand the inquiry he had promised Kimms would be undertaken at once. Every boarding-house was to be inquired at, every porter at every block of flats questioned, plain-clothes men were to wander in and out of pubs and cafés on the chance of hearing some stray bit of gossip—gossip was always Bobby’s favourite lead. All without result, as was also without result the look-out being kept for Maxton, for Mr Dowie no longer pursuing his interminable inquiries in Soho. Nor was even Jolly Rogers to be seen any longer in his accustomed haunts.
But then when Bobby was talking to a Divisional Superintendent about an entirely different case a passing reference was made to a recent ‘breaking in’ at a block of rather expensive flats much nearer the ‘Bell and Boy’ than was Mrs Grady’s establishment.
“We can’t get in touch with the occupant,” the Superintendent was complaining. “Lady living alone and working somewhere in the city. A Mrs Meadows.”
“Meadows,” Bobby repeated. “Meadows, not Fields? No? Know anything about her?”
“Not much,” the Superintendent answered. “Don’t talk to me about iron curtains—give me a high-class block of flats like this Oxton Court for a curtain you can’t get through. No one knows anything about anyone. Mrs Meadows lived very quietly in very good style. Rent of flat about three or four hundred or so. Very few visitors, as far as noticed. Out most of the time on her job, whatever it was. You know what some of these women in business are—always trying to get the edge on the men just to show they’re as good or better.”
“Yes, I know,” Bobby said. “Forcible entry or key?”
“Oh, the old trick with the Yale,” the Superintendent told him. “Tongue of the Yale forced back. The porter noticed it, but nothing to show when it was done. He rang us up, and Sergeant McGiven went along. He says the whole place was a shambles. Everything chucked everywhere.”
“Looking for something,” Bobby said. “I wonder what—money and jewellery, most likely. But it might tie up with the Twice Over affair. There’s a man you remember—Jolly Rogers they call him; anything but jolly by nature. Thought of him? He rather specialises in that sort of thing—breaking in unoccupied flats by the Yale-lock trick.”
“Oh, yes; we thought of him all right,” the other answered. “But the last we heard of him he was reporting—on licence, you know—in Edinburgh. Of course, you can easy get from Edinburgh and back in twenty-four hours and no one know a thing about it. Difficult to get going when we don’t even know if anything’s missing. What’s it to do with the Twice Over case? Kimms is handling it, isn’t he? Not our pigeon. I haven’t heard much about it.”
“Well,” Bobby explained, “here we have a missing barmaid—a Mrs Fields. You have a woman you can’t get in touch with—a Mrs Meadows. Kimms has a dead woman not yet formally identified. And the address given us of the missing barmaid is one where she certainly never lived.”
“I see. Yes. Well,” said the Superintendent. “Rather thin tie-ups, but you never know. What’s behind?”
“Also a man,” Bobby went on, without attempting to reply, “seen in a Twice Over pub shortly before the murder. Reported as of suspicious appearance and might be Jolly Rogers, but only vague description, with—if Jolly Rogers it was—a lead from him, just recently released from gaol, to a pal of his, the Milkman, otherwise Charley Cream, who died in the same gaol a few weeks before Rogers’s release, was probably concerned in the first P.O. van robbery, and may have known part of the proceeds were hidden in Twice Over and so back there again.”
“The complete circle,” commented the Superintendent. “Sounds as if there were a lot to uncover.”
“Might be,” agreed Bobby cautiously. “Add a retired gentleman who did not find the dead body and incidentally possesses a lovely happy little daughter. Also a somewhat free-living baronet who became mysteriously rich about the time of the P.O. robbery. Not to mention a rising young journalist, and an habitué of Soho with a treasure detector gadget, both of whom have retired into obscurity forgetting to leave their addresses behind them. And there you are.”
“Thank Heaven I’m not,” said the Superintendent devoutly. “You may like that sort of thing, but give me honest-to-goodness, down-to-the-ground police work.”
“Got your car?” Bobby asked. “How about giving me a lift to this Oxton Court? I’ve been over the missing barmaid’s flat. I would rather like a look at Mrs Meadows’s. Mrs Meadows, Mrs Fields. And a dead gangster, name of Farmer. Quite a coincidence in names. Quite bucolic. Precious little to see where Mrs Fields hung out—or rather where she didn’t. But I might spot something at this other place to show if the occupiers were the same.”
“An eye for detail,” said the Superintendent, half enviously, half smilingly. “Well, it counts,” he said.
They started off accordingly; and at Oxton Court were assured by the porter in charge that there was no fresh development, that no suspicious characters had been noticed anywhere near, that no word, no sign of any sort, had been received from the still missing Mrs Meadows. The damaged lock on the flat door had been replaced by another. The key to this was in the porter’s care, and with it he admitted them to the flat, remaining himself at the open door, whether as a measure of precaution, out of curiosity, or from a sense of duty.
Much of the ‘shambles’ reported by the police on their first visit had been sorted out into tidy heaps and carefully examined to make sure it contained no useful clue or information about either the tenant or the intruders. But the whole place remained as impersonal as an hotel suite. It had been comfortably, even expensively, furnished in a conventional Tottenham Court Road style, the only sign that the occupant was a woman being a complete absence of comfortable armchairs, and a certain care that seemed to have been taken to arrange the colour scheme. There were no books. On the walls were a few engravings, generally sentimental representations of children and animals. Even some of these had been taken down and thrown on the floor. No letters seemed to have been delivered. No newspapers either.
“All her interests outside,” said the Superintendent. “No private life, if you see what I mean. Bleak sort of place it must have been. Looks more homely in a way now it’s all upside down. Just for sleeping and eating. Sort of
hermit’s cell, but with all modern comforts.”
“A dedicated life,” Bobby said slowly. “Dedicated to what?” He neither expected nor received an answer. He pointed to the mantelpiece. “See that?” he said.
“You mean that tin of loganberries?” asked the Superintendent. “Why? What about it? She probably fed out, but if she did eat at home it would be tinned stuff. Boiling an egg is about the limit in cooking for most women when they’re alone.”
“Yes, I know,” Bobby agreed. He added: “Mrs Meadows and our missing barmaid both seem to have had a liking for loganberries—a tin on the mantelpiece here and one kept well in view of all customers at the ‘Bell and Boy’. Rather odd.”
“Well, yes, in a way,” agreed the Superintendent, but not as if he really thought it mattered. He went across the room, picked up the tin and gave it a shake. “It’s not been opened,” he said. “Can’t have been anything put inside.”
“Mrs Meadows wasn’t no barmaid,” the porter interrupted with a touch of indignation in his voice. “Barmaids don’t run to Oxton Court, they don’t, and Mrs Meadows was a real lady and no mistake. Had a mink coat, she had.”
Finding this conclusive, the Superintendent nodded in agreement. Bobby was either less impressed or else more interested in the tin of loganberries. He was staring at it with concentrated attention, not so much thinking as waiting for thought to come.
“Can’t say I see much here to help,” the Superintendent announced.
“No, there isn’t,” Bobby agreed, waking from his meditative trance. “That’s what’s so interesting, isn’t it?”
He removed his attention from the loganberry tin and wandered abstractedly into the other rooms: the bedroom and kitchen. Both these presented the same scene of overturned drawers, ransacked cupboards, of a busy and intensive search that seemed to have missed nothing—a chaos imposed, as it seemed, upon a meticulously tidy, carefully maintained background and made to seem even more chaotic by the sorting and examining that the police had carried out without attempting to put things back in their original places. He returned to the sitting-room, to the patient Superintendent and the watchful porter. He began to look through a small pile of papers that had apparently come from the upturned drawers of a small writing bureau.
“Nothing personal there,” the Superintendent told him. “No letters, no addresses; only receipts, bills—that sort of thing. Anonymous,” he said with sudden irritation. “Where do you go when there’s nowhere.”
Bobby made no attempt to reply. He wandered through the flat again and then went back to where the Superintendent was waiting, now a trifle impatiently.
“There’s one thing, if you notice,” Bobby said to him and paused, staring hard at the other, as if challenging him to reply.
“There are a lot of things I notice,” was the prompt retort, “but none that seems to help much.”
“That’s just it,” Bobby declared, looking pleased, as if this was the very answer he had hoped for. “Nothing to help. Which means, I take it, that whoever broke in here broke in for that very reason. To remove everything that could in any way be any help, especially anything that could throw light on her past life or real identity.”
CHAPTER XIII
HIDDEN COTTAGE
ON BOBBY’S DESK next morning was a note from Edinburgh. It contained the information that John Rogers, known as ‘Jolly Rogers’, convict on licence, had left the address from which he had reported. It asked further if London wanted him brought in? If so, was there any specific charge on which he could be held? To which Bobby sent a reply explaining that there was at the moment nothing definite against Rogers, but it was believed he could give useful information that might help in the investigation now going on into a recent murder. If he could be located he might perhaps be induced to talk. There was even a chance that Rogers might have some idea where a part of the loot from the first Post Office van robbery still lay hidden.
Not that this possibility was considered very likely by Bobby’s colleagues, some of whom were still inclined to think of him as too imaginative and fanciful for so matter-of-fact and prosaic a job as police work.
“Spent as soon as got,” one of them said. “A hundred a night in the West End is nothing to ’em when they’ve brought a big one off—and then betting. A hole without a bottom.”
“One of the gang,” Bobby reminded him, “had his head blown off almost immediately afterwards. We never knew why, but before he had had time to do much spending. And there’s the chance that Charley Cream—another of them, only he got caught—stowed his share away and Rogers, who was in gaol with him, got a hint where. It might be at Twice Over, where one of them came from.”
“Well, it’s an interesting case,” admitted the other. “Plenty for us to do, though, without opening up the old jobs. I hope there won’t be any more murders on the way.”
With that he departed, half believing that Bobby Owen was going to bring it off again, even though it seemed at present that there was so little to go on.
“Except tinned loganberries,” he added to himself with a chuckle; for already the tale of Bobby’s interest in tinned loganberries had become known and caused a certain amount of amusement.
Later on there came a ’phone call from Twice Over, where Mr Kimms had established temporary headquarters at the Over All Arms.
“Information just received,” said the distant voice—not that of Kimms, who disliked the telephone and seldom used it, “that a light was seen at Mr Maxton’s place, Hidden Cottage, last night. No one there now, and no sign of breaking in, but Mr Kimms is thinking of effecting entry. As our inquiry overlaps yours, Mr Kimms wondered if you might think it advisable to be present. Will you let us know if you agree?”
“Oh, yes, I agree,” Bobby answered at once, strongly suspecting though that Kimms, a cautious soul, still a little surprised that he had reached so high a rank in the force, still a trifle unsure of himself, was anxious for the moral support while ‘effecting entry’, of the presence of a London ‘high up’. For ‘effecting entry’ into private premises is a procedure requiring ample justification.
So time and place were duly settled and then the telephone went on:
“I am to inform you also that the identity of the murdered woman with Mrs Fields, Mrs Meadows, and the ‘Bell and Boy’ barmaid has been fully established. ‘Dabs’ coincide, and the Assistant Manager of the ‘Bell and Boy’ identified the body at once. A report is in the post. Mr Kimms says he doesn’t suppose it will surprise you much.”
“No, only puzzles me a bit more,” Bobby answered. “All these disconnected leads ought to get us somewhere—that is, if we ever do get there.”
“To the dead woman’s murderer or to recovery of the P.O. pound notes. Or both?” asked the telephone.
“Both,” Bobby said, but without much conviction, and with that their talk ended.
The case was sufficiently important—and more than sufficiently interesting—for him to feel justified in putting aside all other work for the time being. Soon therefore he was on his way to Twice Over and then, in company with Kimms, to Hidden Cottage. This, well deserving its name, was situated two or three miles from the centre of the village in the midst of a small wood. Access to it by wheeled traffic was almost impossible—and in bad weather sufficiently difficult even by foot—though close by was a footpath running between a neighbouring farm and the road where now Kimms parked his car. Even from this path, however, owing to the lie of the land and a close-growing thicket, the cottage was almost invisible, so that some of those who habitually used the path could not have told its exact position.
Originally it had been intended for a gamekeeper’s residence at a time when the owner of the land had wished to provide good shooting for himself and his friends. But the war had left little money to spare for such aristocratic luxuries as game preservation—or paying gamekeepers, for that matter—and the cottage had become vacant. Then it had been occupied, repairs and some structural i
mprovements carried out, by one of the more swiftly rising lights of post-war literary London. It had been his intention there to retire to commune alone with nature and his soul. But presently he had discovered that cocktail parties are perhaps more truly inspiring, and that, for literary London, out of car reach, is out of mind. He had therefore been deeply grateful when Martin Maxton had offered to take the cottage off his hands, and had done his best to show it by two brief but highly flattering references in Heights, that well-known periodical, to Martin as a ‘coming man’—and to be so mentioned in Heights is equivalent in the more intellectual circles of London to being awarded the D.S.O. in the army. For Maxton, the cottage had provided a cheap and convenient headquarters to return to after his frequent visits to other parts of the country in search of material and for making that close and patient observation of nature on which he did in fact base much of his work. Indeed, his initial success—modest enough—had been his book ‘Hidden Cottage’, from which, and not the other way round, the name had been derived.
To it now Bobby and Kimms were drawing near, and Kimms said, pointing to a thicket which at least was visible enough.
“Behind there.”
“Easy to pass without seeing it,” Bobby remarked. “It’s been given a name that suits it. But suits it for bird-watching and that sort of thing or even for quite other activities there would be no one to notice?”
“Ah,” said Kimms.
He led the way round the thicket and through some further trees to where before the cottage a sergeant and a constable waited, sitting on a veranda. Kimms nodded a greeting; they put their cigarettes away and stood up; Bobby, examining the lock, agreed there was no sign of forcible entry.
“No reason for it,” he commented. “Anyone could open a lock like that with a hair-pin.”
Kimms gave a nod of agreement to Bobby, and, to the sergeant, one of permission to begin operations. The door was soon opened—though not by means of a hairpin—and then the sergeant stood back to allow the two senior officers the first look. It showed them just such a chaos, just such a scene of violent, hurried search, as had been presented by the Oxton Court flat.
Dark is the Clue: A Bobby Owen Mystery Page 10