“Very good, sir,” said Ford briskly.
The reply from Applegarth next morning—a Saturday—when Bobby got his call through, proved to be non-committal and, in Bobby’s opinion, unsatisfactory. No trace in it of the burning energy—restlessness his critics called it—that always consumed Bobby when he had a case of this kind on his hands. No one answering to the description of Mr Dowie was known to the Applegarth police, said the distant voice from Applegarth, and added that not much that went on in Applegarth was unknown to the Applegarth police. Bobby said he was of course fully aware of that. Applegarth promised that ‘all possible steps would be taken’, and Bobby, most unfairly, detected in this reply a devotion to the second-hand cliché that inspired in him no confidence in Applegarth efficiency.
However, he had made his plans beforehand. If he and Ford set off at once they could reach Applegarth—a six or seven hours’ drive if you weren’t afraid of using the accelerator—before dark and return on Sunday, in time to be on duty again by Monday morning. Not much time in this schedule for sleeping or eating, but C.I.D. men have often to regard sleeping and eating as purely subsidiary and incidental.
“Only mind,” Bobby added severely to Ford, when he saw that young man’s eyes beginning to glisten at the prospects thus sketched out—for Ford’s fixed belief was that he had missed his vocation in joining the police and that he had really been intended by nature for a racing motorist, driving endlessly at record speed round and round a closed circular track. An odd ambition, perhaps, but it was his. “Only mind,” Bobby repeated, still more severely, “you aren’t going to hog all the driving—turn and turn about and fair shares.”
“Yes, sir; of course, sir,” Ford answered meekly—but with mental reservations.
In due course they started, in due course they arrived, in due course, between start and finish, Ford managed to ‘hog’ fully three-fifths of the driving, for Bobby was too often plunged deep in thought, reviewing mentally the whole history of the case, noting afresh those small, possibly significant, details that might in the end add up to a solution, to remember exactly when the change-over was due.
The Applegarth Chief Constable had been duly warned by ’phone of Bobby’s arrival, but had little information to give, and was plainly inclined to consider the Yard man’s rush from London more as an attempt to beat the London–Applegarth speed record than as serious police work.
He was emphatic also that none of his men knew anything of an Applegarth resident possessed of a treasure detector, and he ventured to think there wasn’t much about the town and its inhabitants that he and his men didn’t know. But of course the matter ‘would be borne in mind’, and Bobby, again most unfairly, concluded that a mind so apt to express itself in secondhand clichés was also a second-rate mind.
“Of course,” the Applegarth man pointed out, “here we are at the hub, so to say, of a number of roads radiating from four of the biggest towns in the county, and none of them far away. Easy to come here to ring up anyone you didn’t much want to know your address.”
Bobby agreed, expressed his thanks for help given, and departed. But he knew that police do not take—and have no reason to take—much interest in such local eccentrics as inventors of treasure detectors. Whereas they are always worth a paragraph, or even a column in a local newspaper. So from the police station he proceeded to the office of the ‘Applegarth Evening Times’.
As it was a Saturday afternoon, he found it closed, but he was able to get the address of one of the staff, a Mr Upton, who lived close by in the High Street, where he combined his journalistic activities with the much more lucrative occupation of a retail tobacconist. The shop was easily identified by various adapted journalistic slogans placarded in the windows, such as ‘First with the cigs’ and ‘All the baccy that’s fit to smoke’, and it had the air of being a prosperous little concern. So Bobby entered, explained his errand to the brisk, business-like-looking woman behind the counter, and was thereon shown into a room behind, a combination of office, store-room, and snuggery. Here Mr Upton was accustomed to entertain the magnates of the town, and thus pick up what he liked to call the ‘inside story’ of local affairs. At the moment he appeared to be busy with the books of the business. But he seemed quite willing to push these aside as he waved Bobby to a chair and offered him a cigarette.
“Anything we can do,” he declared. “But I hope it’s not urgent. We don’t appear again till our first late extra special Monday noon.”
Unfortunately, however, his answers to Bobby’s questions soon made it clear that he had never heard of Mr Dowie and knew nothing about him or of his treasure-seeking activities.
“Not an Applegarth man,” Mr Upton declared with decision. “If he ’phoned from here he must have stopped off going somewhere else. If he were local we should know of him. Always a story in treasure-hunting, always worth a bit of space. There is an old legend about jewels of untold value hidden where Applegarth Castle stood till it was pulled down last century. Very old story everyone had forgotten till Marty Maxton cooked it up again in one of those Fresh-Air books of his.”
“Oh, yes, I know,” Bobby said, carefully concealing his interest—even his excitement—at this casual reference to the vanished Maxton. “I’ve heard of him. The book made a big hit, didn’t it? I suppose you couldn’t put me in touch with him. I’ve always been interested in these buried-treasure stories.”
“Nothing in ’em,” declared Upton. “If a woman dropped a brooch or something of the sort when she was out for a walk, that was good enough for a start. But Maxton built this one up a treat. Found all the required trimmings, or else invented them. I don’t know which. Love-lorn page of lowly birth and high-born-maid cruel-tyrant papa was bargaining off to a pal. Love-lorn page serenades at night. High-born maid drops him a casket of jewels to cover runaway overheads. Page buries the treasure, goes away to arrange for the get-away, returns next night and shows a light to signal all is ready and will she join him pronto? But tyrant papa is there first, so page gets buried as well as the casket of jewels, which the legend claims is still there—and very likely it is if it ever was. But that’s another story. Maxton told the old tale wonderfully well. Inspired him, so to say—set his imagination on fire, as if he were the page himself and had lived all through it again. We got permission to reprint it in our Weekly Supplement, and we had to reprint two or three times to meet the demand. It may be it’s that your man—what’s his name? Dewey? Dowie?—has got hold of.”
Bobby was silent, staring at Upton with an odd intensity of vision that Upton did not understand, did not like. It seemed, he thought, to indicate that in this tale Bobby had found a significance plain to him alone, and what that might be Upton could not imagine. He broke the silence, saying abruptly:
“Anything wrong?”
“No, no,” Bobby answered. “No. Why should there be?”
“Well,” Upton grumbled, “you were staring as if you could see something that wasn’t there. Same trick Maxton has. I saw him twice when we were getting his permission to publish. A haunted man, my wife called him, though generally like anyone else. Only he isn’t. If you want to get in touch with him, the Holmford ‘Grand Universal Hotel’ might be able to tell you where he is. His sister is the manager’s wife, and one of our staff saw him there the day before yesterday, I think it was.”
CHAPTER XXII
GRAND HOTEL
BOBBY WALKED AWAY from Mr Upton’s establishment in a mood of mingled doubt, surprise, bewilderment. Impossible, he told himself firmly, that this old-world tale of the love-lorn page, his nightly serenades, his tragic end, should throw any light on the problem of the barmaid of the ‘Bell and Boy’, her double life, and her tragic end by the loganberry bush. Yet somehow it ran about in his mind that it did, or rather would, if only he could see through the obscurity in which it was veiled. But he knew he would never dare suggest any such association to Superintendent Kimms, whose practical, competent mind would certainly be highly al
lergic to such flights of fancy. Surprising, though, that Maxton, seen on his way to France, should next be heard of, and so soon, in this northern English county. Easy enough, of course, in these days of aeroplanes, to get back again from Paris within a couple of hours or so of arriving there. A bit of a rush, though, all the same; and what object could there have been? Laying a false trail? It looked very much like it; and then again it had to be asked—and very seriously—‘What object?’ More than a little bewildering, too, the way in which, in this almost unique case, following the trail to one clearly indicated end seemed so often to result in arriving somewhere entirely different.
“Like going gunning for wild duck and bringing home a basket of fish,” he grumbled to himself.
Only at present neither wild duck nor fish were in his bag.
He went on to collect Ford and the car, explained briefly to the former what had happened and that their next visit would be to the ‘Grand Hotel’ at Holmford, a prospect which made Ford look serious, for though he was fully prepared to tackle burglars and cosh-boys and such small deer, a ‘Grand Hotel’ in a big town like Holmford sounded a trifle intimidating. Indeed, on arrival they found it showed every intention of trying to live up to its name, and even more so.
Rooms safely booked for them both, however, and Ford happily busy in the hotel garage, making sure that the car was in good order and re-fuelled after their long run—Ford viewed hotel garage-men with a jaundiced and suspicious eye—the first thing Bobby did was to ring up the Holmford police headquarters both to let them know of his arrival and to ask them to report it to London. Until he was more sure of his ground here he did not wish to risk a direct communication from the Yard to the hotel prematurely betraying the purpose of his visit. It might result in a complete silencing of all tongues, for hotels are as sensitive to visits from the police as is a woman out in tearing wind and rain to her make-up. Then he sent Ford, happily returned from the garage in the sure conviction that all was well with the car, to get a drink at the bar and to get on terms with the barman—or barmaid—while Bobby himself would try to have a chat with the receptionist, a young lady who had seemed just a trifle more affable and a little less aloof than are some of her kind. But this time there was with her in her office, talking to her, another woman—older, but still young. They both looked up as Bobby came to the office counter, and the instant that he saw this second woman Bobby knew who she was.
The resemblance was striking. Even if he had not been warned that Martin Maxton’s sister was here, he would have known her at once. The dark, brooding eyes were the same, the cast of feature was the same, the same loose, sensitive mouth. She had, too, something of that air of nervous apprehension, that hint of strange hidden memories ready at any moment to spring to life, which others had said they had seen in Martin, though Bobby himself had not. But, then, Sylvia Wynne had been there, and beneath the sunshine of her presence such signs, if they had real existence, might well have melted away.
There was something else even more surprising, more significant, too. Not only had he recognized her at sight—but, then, he had been forewarned—she also had instantly recognized him, and as instantly been afraid, as Maxton also had known him and also been afraid. Yet in his memory, trained as it was, there remained no recollection of either of these two, striking though both were, both in manner and in personal appearance. And somehow Bobby felt at once it would be no good trying to beat about the bush with her—necessary rather to go straight to the point.
“I am trying to get in touch with Mr Martin Maxton,” he said. “A matter of business. I think you are his sister?”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes.” She spoke with some effort, and she had one hand against her breast, as if to still the beating of her heart. “He is not here,” she said. “You had better see my husband, Mr Toosoon.”
“I should be glad to later on,” Bobby said; “but this is rather a personal, one might say a family matter. You will naturally know more about your brother than he does,” and at that Mrs Toosoon grew even more pale and her eyes more terrified. Bobby produced his official card. “A matter of business,” he repeated. “Private business.”
“Yes,” she repeated. “Yes.” She came out of the office and began to walk away. “I will tell Mr Toosoon,” she said over her shoulder.
“If you prefer it,” Bobby said, and followed her through one door marked ‘Private’ and down a passage to another door, marked ‘Manager’.
It opened on a small office. It was unoccupied. She left him there and hurried away, with such flurried speed, indeed, it had rather the air of a panic flight.
“Hysterical, not very stable mentally,” Bobby said to himself, and then he thought that here perhaps was another of those tiny, apparently insignificant details that might have to be fitted in before the pattern he was weaving, or trying to, could be called complete.
He looked carefully round the room in which he had been left. But offices are impersonal things, and this one offered him no such clue to the character of its occupant as he was wont to look for. Then a tall, dark man in a dinner-jacket came quickly into the room. He had an authoritative, busy air—the air of a man with the chief direction of a big business and control of a large staff.
“What is the trouble?” he asked, a nice mingling in his tone of unease, resentment and the touch of deference due to anyone who was an hotel guest, even for a night. “Mrs Toosoon is very upset. Something to do with her brother? We don’t know anything about him.”
“I am sorry if Mrs Toosoon is disturbed,” Bobby said. “I trust quite unnecessarily. I am anxious to get in touch with Mr Martin Maxton. In connection with the murder of a woman at a place called Twice Over. You may have heard about it?”
“I saw something in the London papers,” Mr Toosoon answered with a slight suggestion in his voice that only Holmford things did he find of much interest. “What’s it to do with Martin? Anyhow, we can’t tell you anything.”
“Our information is that he was here very recently,” Bobby answered. “He left where he lived near Twice Over immediately after the murder. He seems to have told no one where he was going. We think he may be able to help us check up on times in a way that might be exceedingly useful.”
“I don’t see what we can do,” Toosoon protested. “He only stayed the night here. He always says his business is with residents, not with transients—people with roots in the places he’s writing about. You may take it he’s mooching about somewhere, getting material for his next book. He may be anywhere—Holmshire, Yorkshire, Lancashire, anywhere; and the more out of the way and old world a place he can find, the better he likes it. He wrote columns once about a village he found up on the Yorkshire fells of about a dozen cottages and everyone in the place with tales going back to the Pilgrimage of Grace, or the wars of the Roses, or further. Took him a month, he says, to get them talking. It may be something of the sort this time. We don’t know.”
“Well, if you do happen to hear from him,” Bobby said, “you will be sure to let him know—won’t you?—how necessary we feel it to ascertain if he can tell us anything useful. In fact, he must be found as soon as possible, or certain steps may have to be taken.”
The nature of such steps Bobby deliberately left vague, having a well-founded belief that the vague is also both impressive and disturbing, since so many meanings can be read into it. But somehow he did not feel that this accustomed effect was being produced on Mr Toosoon. Perhaps the manager of an hotel—a Grand Hotel at that—has too much experience of those who arrive in style and depart by night to be much impressed by anything short of a receipted bill.
It was now too late for anything more to be done that night. So Bobby expressed a hope that before he left in the morning he might be able to have another chat with Mrs Toosoon, and so retired to bed. But next morning, when he and Ford were having an early breakfast, Mr Toosoon came to their table; with him a companion whom he introduced as Dr Laper, and who at once gave it as his professiona
l opinion that Mrs Toosoon, whom he had just examined and who was an extremely highly strung woman, had sustained a severe nervous shock and was in no fit condition to undergo further questioning.
Bobby said he was indeed sorry to hear it and he hoped no further interview with her would be found necessary. Probably, suggested Bobby, Mr Martin Maxton would soon be letting them hear from him, and he added, laughing lightly at the absurdity of the idea, that even if he were deliberately keeping out of the way—and why on earth should he?—he would soon be ‘picked up’. In case the meaning of this technical term was not fully understood, Bobby explained it, and explained, too, that there wasn’t so much as the smallest farmhouse, the most isolated cottage, that was not in the purview of a local police officer.
“A well-policed country,” Bobby claimed. “People would be astonished to know how much we get to hear one way or another, even though we have to be jolly careful to keep it to ourselves.”
Mr Toosoon made no comment on these remarks. Instead he and his companion drifted silently away. So Bobby paid the bill and went out to the garage, whither Ford had preceded him and was now snugly established in the driving-seat. But this was a bit too much for Bobby, who sternly ordered him to remove himself elsewhere, and indeed almost determined to stay at the wheel the whole of the return journey without allowing Ford to so much as lay a finger on it again. But then he reflected that this would be both extremely fatiguing and rather cruel. So Ford was allowed his ‘fair share’, in compliance with the great political slogan of the day.
Dark is the Clue: A Bobby Owen Mystery Page 16