“Covers a lot of ground. Dowie out?”
“What he says hangs together,” Bobby answered. “It’s clear he had no idea that the story he had picked up—it seems to have been all over the London underworld—about the proceeds of a big robbery having been concealed hereabouts meant paper money. Not even the most sanguine inventor could expect a machine designed to detect the precious metals to react to paper, too. Confirmation as well, from Rogers.”
“Yes,” said Kimms. “What about him?”
“Rogers? Well, we’ve got to accept his alibi. The story of the wallet is quite clear from the man taken ill in the train to Rogers, from Rogers to his wife in her café, from her to the dead man’s relatives, and it couldn’t have been like that if at the time Rogers was committing a murder in the Twice Over copse.”
“Others still in,” said Kimms, after he had again nodded agreement.
“Stuart, who found the body,” Bobby said slowly. “Maxton, who has been missing ever since. Wynne, who grows loganberries.”
“Eh?” said Kimms, startled by this last word. “What?”
“Loganberries come in somehow,” Bobby told him. “A link. They aren’t often a feature in crime, but they seem to be this time. Fantastic, of course; but, then, crime so often is. Mrs Field kept a tin of the things on a shelf behind her in full view of everyone who came in for a drink, and she was killed near a loganberry bush. Wynne has a sort of fence or barricade of loganberry bushes arranged under the wall between his garden and the copse—to keep small boys, he said, from raiding his apple trees. The loganberry bush where Mrs Field died didn’t plant itself; it must have been put there for some reason. A quite innocent reason possibly, a mere whim it might be. No telling. But also it may be for a purpose, just as Mrs Field may have kept her tin on her shelf behind her for some very definite reason.”
“What?” Kimms asked doubtfully, and still more doubtfully added the one word: “Loganberries?”
“Rogers, when I was talking to him,” Bobby went on, “happened to mention casually that Charley Cream’s real name was Logan, and one of the gang killed in the bombing was called Berry. I imagine that’s where they got the idea, and showing the tin was a kind of rallying signal or something of the kind to convey a message to members of the gang. Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing if any of them was likely to hit on such an idea or think it amusing.”
“Amusing?” repeated Kimms. “Why amusing? Nothing funny I can see.”
“Not ‘funny’—amusing,” Bobby explained gravely. “‘Tickle the fancy’—amusing.”
“Oh,” said Kimms, trying to fathom this and failing.
“If I’m right so far,” Bobby continued, “Mrs Field, at the ‘Bell and Boy’, which it is said all visit sooner or later, hoped to get in touch with one of them again.”
“All accounted for,” Kimms said. “Aren’t they?”
“The four who actually carried out the raid, yes,” Bobby said. “Two killed in the bombing. Charley Cream died in prison recently. Farmer found murdered in a ditch. But there seems to have been a hanger-on, a runner or scout, known as ‘Fingers’, and a man they called ‘the Boss’.”
“Farmer himself, most likely,” Kimms suggested.
“It might be. The ‘Boss’ is an illusive character,” Bobby answered. “Perhaps non-existent. No telling. But I think we may regard it as certain that the display of the tin was meant as a signal to someone who would know what it meant. Another little item of information that came out casually when I managed to get Rogers talking is that Farmer had recently gone to live with a woman and that he was, according to Rogers, ‘dead gone’ on her, she being what he called ‘an eye-full’.”
“Jealous rival?” Kimms said.
“It might be,” Bobby agreed once more. “I’m just groping here and there, but it does seem to me there’s some sort of pattern beginning to show itself. So much shows signs of fitting. The dead woman had been pretty once; she went by the name of Field—Florrie Field, the same initials as Frank Farmer’s. Then she certainly had more money than she earned as barmaid; indeed, apparently had no need to work at all, though we never found out where her money came from or where she kept it. All half hints, I know, but they work in together just as when in a crossword puzzle a letter fits both across and down you feel you are on the right track. For myself, I am adopting as a tenable theory, and one worth trying out—of course, you mayn’t agree.”
“No,” said Kimms thoughtfully. Then he said: “Yes. Go on.”
“Well, then,” Bobby continued, “my idea is that the dead woman is the one Farmer was living with and, according to what Rogers said, ‘dead gone on’. We know Farmer had a big share of the proceeds of the P.O. van robbery. A possibility is that he may have divided it into three parts, given one to his woman to keep for him, and that is what she’s been living on; a second part he hid somewhere in Twice Over; a third he kept in his own possession, and it was for that he was murdered. It’s the second part, hidden here, that Mrs Field came to recover, or try to. She may have heard the same story Dowie got hold of. You hear many things serving behind the bar at a place like the ‘Bell and Boy’.”
“Doesn’t tell us who killed her or why?—or him either,” Kimms said. “Or what brought her there at midnight to her death.”
“No,” Bobby agreed, “but I think it’s a foundation on which to build.”
CHAPTER XXVIII
AN EXPLANATION
PRESENTLY, AFTER THE conclusion of his talk or consultation with Kimms, Bobby went on to Overs Abbey; though what it was he hoped for there he was not very sure. All he knew with certainty was that references to dealings in diamonds with the gentleman apparently widely known as ‘Fatty’ Veale had served markedly to abate Sir Charles’s truculence and to lessen his self-confidence. In place thereof uneasiness, even fear, had begun to show themselves, and these are things that, as Bobby well knew from long experience, are as apt to loosen the tongue as ever is strong drink. Few indeed are those with restless consciences who are able to resist the instinct to justify and to excuse—the even stronger instinct to mislead. Indeed, it was in just such a mood of troubled talkativeness that Bobby found Sir Charles when he was shown into the room where Sir Charles was waiting. Drinks were immediately produced, and Sir Charles’s uneasiness was in no way allayed when Bobby declined the proffered hospitality.
“You see,” he explained apologetically, “this might be considered an official visit, and it would never do for a senior officer to break the taboo on drinking while on duty. Many thanks, all the same.”
“Oh, just as you like,” Sir Charles growled, and showed by the strength of the drink he mixed for himself that at any rate to him no such ‘taboo’ applied. “I thought you told me once Kimms was in sole charge. Are you taking over?”
“Dear me, no,” Bobby answered. “But his inquiry and mine interlock at almost every point. There’s a lot of unpleasant talk going on—”
“Don’t I know it?” interrupted Sir Charles angrily. “And don’t I know who I have to thank for it? Wynne. Remember the way he fixed it so it should be me find the body. If you ask me, he’s the man you want to watch.”
“There seems no motive in Wynne’s case,” Bobby remarked. “At least, none that we can find even the shadow of.”
“I suppose that means,” Sir Charles growled, as angrily as before, “you’ve been hearing that damfool yarn about me being blackmailed by the woman who tried to make a scene on my doorstep. Blackmail.” He snorted contemptuously. “Do they think I’m a curate in my first job? Or a married man scared of my wife finding out?” He paused to help himself to another drink, even stiffer than the earlier one. “Thank God, I’m neither,” he said. “Mind you, I don’t want to see Wynne hanged. Not that he would be any the worse for it, but it would be hard luck on that jolly little girl of his.”
“Well, as far as I can see, Mr Wynne is a long way from running any risk like that at present,” Bobby remarked, and thought to hims
elf that ‘jolly’ was the last word he would have thought appropriate for that serene and confident joy in life Sylvia seemed so strangely to spread around her wherever she went.
“Maxton, then,” Sir Charles suggested, and let his hand hover for a moment over the whisky bottle and then slowly withdrew it. “He’s bunked, hasn’t he? Why? Tell me that. Journalist, isn’t he? Whole place lousy with them. They wanted to get me talking. When I wouldn’t, one of ’em tried to make me drunk. As if I couldn’t drink any journalist under the table any day and every day.” Clearly fortified by this reflection, he now allowed his again hovering hand to perform as usual with the whisky and the soda-water, though but gently with the latter. “And here’s the only one of the whole crew on the spot able to supply local colour gone missing. Good enough for me. Can’t the French police find him?”
“No known motive in his case either,” Bobby remarked.
“Well, there’s Wynne’s girl,” Sir Charles suggested. “He was keen on her. Anyone could see that; and she ought to come in for a goodish bit if Wynne’s been anything like as good in doing other chaps down as he has me. If this woman knew anything to put a stopper on that—motive all right. In the village they are saying there was a woman visited Maxton in that hide-out of his every so often and got money from him. Hire purchase, perhaps. I don’t know.”
“No doubt Mr Maxton will be able to explain when we get in touch with him again,” Bobby said. “We expect to, soon. We are already with his sister.”
“His sister isn’t him,” Sir Charles pointed out, rather as if he thought this was a novel point and one of some importance and Bobby should be reminded of it. Then he rose very firmly to his feet and even more firmly replaced whisky and soda in the cupboard. “Very seldom drink between meals, except for a nightcap,” he informed Bobby as he returned, though a little less firmly, to his chair.
“Well, thank you for what you’ve told me,” Bobby said. “You may be sure all the points you’ve mentioned have been carefully considered—or will be. There’s nothing else, is there, you would care to say? The plain fact is we’re only groping about in the dark, hoping somehow or another to lay our hands on something useful. If we do run across anything that looks odd, even if it doesn’t seem to have much to do with it, we follow it up on the chance that finally it may give us a lead. Of course, if we find a satisfactory explanation or we are given one—well, then we just forget all about it. Nothing else you can think of?”
Sir Charles made no reply. He got to his feet, shook hands in silence and in silence accompanied Bobby to the front door. Apparently it was to prove a fruitless visit, though sometimes it happened that persons who had said little or nothing in response to questions would yet at the last moment show a willingness to talk as great as had been their previous reluctance.
And that something like this was about to happen Bobby began to hope when Sir Charles muttered that he might as well walk down the drive as far as the gate.
“In there,” said Sir Charles moodily, with a backward glance over his shoulder, “I catch ’em listening when they think they see a chance.” In his turn Bobby was silent, making no comment. They had reached the gate before Sir Charles spoke again. “About those diamonds,” he said abruptly. “Veale has been buying some from me now and then. Nothing wrong in that, is there? What put you on it?”
“We get to hear a lot in one way or another during an investigation like this,” Bobby explained. “Some of it we forget at once. Our business is with the law, not with private morality. Some of it may seem worth filing, or even worth following up. Some of it is helpful.”
“My old aunt bought them in the first place,” Sir Charles said. “She was scared out of her life about the Germans coming. There was an awful invasion flap here, you remember. I didn’t know at the time. I was in the army, in the thick of it out there.” He waved a hand vaguely, presumably to indicate where the ‘thick of it’ was. “I couldn’t make out what she meant when she wrote me a rambling sort of letter about an old suitcase of mine in the attics, and it was for me and it mightn’t be in her will; but there it was, and everything in it to go with the title—I had that, of course, since uncle’s death; and a fat lot of good it did me, too. The bombing soon got too much for her, though, so she ran off to Ireland, and didn’t live very long afterwards. When I got demobbed at last—they hung on to some of us like grim death; found us specially useful, I suppose—the executors had everything cleared up except that they couldn’t find out what she had done with her money. Speculating, they thought. Sunk without trace, and there was I left high and dry, no cash to carry on with, and likely to be sold up any day almost. Then I got a letter from Veale to say he had been acting for the old lady and had I any of the diamonds he had been buying for her? If I had, would I like to dispose of any? What would you have done?”
“Well,” Bobby answered smilingly, “I expect I should have started to look round—with special reference to any old suitcases I could find.”
“Exactly,” said Sir Charles, much pleased at what he seemed to take for official approval. “Just what I did. There it was in the attics as before. It had been sent back from Ireland when the old lady died, and, what’s more, it was as near as may be sent off again to a jumble sale, only for being full of old junk they thought I might like to look at. Well, the diamonds were there all right. Where do you think?”
“In envelopes under a false bottom,” Bobby answered promptly.
“That’s right,” Sir Charles admitted, though now looking slightly disappointed at receiving so immediate and correct a response. “Unset stones all of them, and all of high quality—not a ‘rough’ among them. All ‘cleans’ or ‘V.V.S.’s’. So I’ve been selling through Veale. I must say he gets good prices. Knows the market from tip to tail, and waits his opportunity. What he calls ‘grouping’. He says a good stone will often go through half a dozen hands, price up each time, till it gets where it belongs. Veale cuts out all that. Goes direct to the man who wants it most.”
“The discovery must have been a pleasant surprise,” Bobby remarked.
“You can bet your last potato it was,” declared Sir Charles fervently. “Made all the difference. I wake up all in a sweat sometimes thinking how easily it might have gone off to that jumble sale. Wound up in Petticoat Lane, perhaps, or on a dust-heap. It just shows, doesn’t it?”
“It does indeed,” said Bobby, with almost equal fervour, though without the least idea what it did in fact ‘show’. “Anyhow, many thanks for what you’ve told me.”
“Clears everything up, doesn’t it?” Sir Charles asked, though now just a little anxiously, as if he had hoped to hear a rather stronger note of reassurance in Bobby’s voice. “You’ll regard it as highly confidential? Veale is always keen on none of the other dealers getting to know anything about it.”
“Everything told a police officer,” Bobby answered, repeating a so often given assurance, “is always strictly confidential, unless it is relevant evidence. Then it isn’t. As far as I can see at present, your dealings with your aunt’s diamonds can hardly have any bearing on either Mrs Field’s murder or on the inquiry into the possibility of the proceeds of the P.O. van robbery being still hidden somewhere in Twice Over.”
In spite of the deliberately cautious and official tone of this pronouncement—or possibly because of it—Sir Charles seemed now to find his former anxiety much relieved. He went back to the house; and Bobby walked slowly on to the village, pondering as he went over the story he had just heard, and, in the orthodox police phrase, finding himself ‘not fully satisfied’.
Extraordinary as the tale was, yet he felt it could not be dismissed as totally incredible. There were, he knew, many stories of people who had concealed money or valuables when invasion seemed imminent and had then forgotten exactly where, or else died or been killed in the bombing without having passed on the secret of the chosen hiding-place.
Fantastic, of course, to think of a battered old suitcase, with a fortune i
n diamonds hidden in it, going from hand to hand, finally to come to a last resting-place on a heap of rubbish. But, then, these are days when it sometimes seems as if the fantastic had become the commonplace.
All the same, there was one weak point.
“No satisfactory reason,” Bobby remarked to Kimms when he had given him a brief account of the interview with Sir Charles, “for all the secrecy. Taken with Rogers’s story, it sounds much more like black-market dealing. Why sell through a man of Veale’s character at all? You can understand Veale getting hold of an old lady in a state of near panic, but Stuart strikes me as having quite a bit of experience in the shadier walks of life.”
“Ah-h,” said Kimms when Bobby paused, and managed to make that non-committal exclamation sound like an emphatic agreement.
“There is one obvious explanation, of course,” Bobby added thoughtfully. “Guesswork, but holds water.”
“Yes,” said Kimms. “What?”
“Death duties,” Bobby said.
“Oh,” said Kimms, considering.
“Dodging ’em,” Bobby said. “If the executors had found diamonds, and if they were as valuable as Stuart’s story suggests, then a good share would have gone in death duties.”
“There’s that,” Kimms agreed. “No proof. Can’t do anything now.”
“No,” agreed Bobby. “Stuart could say their real value was only a hundred or two, Veale would back him up, and the duty payable would be trifling.”
“Fishy,” said Kimms. “Very. Clears Stuart, though? More or less.”
“More or less,” agreed Bobby. “There’s another possibility. Pound-notes is what every thief hopes to get hold of.”
“No fence to take half,” commented Kimms.
“Exactly,” said Bobby. “But not quite so easy when it’s a sum in tens of thousands. Could Stuart have been mixed up in the original robbery, used his whack to buy diamonds, and then resold them to get clean money?”
“Opens possibilities,” said Kimms.
Dark is the Clue: A Bobby Owen Mystery Page 20