The ’phone rang. He answered, listened, said: “Good, carry on,” hung up the receiver and came back to Bobby.
“From Magna Minor,” he said, naming the ancient market town a few miles from Twice Over. “Young man answering the description of Martin Maxton reported seen in company of girl believed to be Miss Sylvia Wynne. All our chaps alerted.”
CHAPTER XXIX
UNASKED QUESTION
AT THIS ANNOUNCEMENT Bobby relapsed into one of those ‘Bobby Owen trances’, in which he seemed somehow to combine two contradictions—complete oblivion to all around with instant apprehension of any relevant word or act. Kimms, equally silent, concentrated his gaze upon the ceiling, as if seeking inspiration there. It was he who spoke first.
“Off again double quick,” he said. “Jack-in-the-box business.”
“Who? Maxton?” Bobby asked, sitting up in his chair exactly as if he had been suddenly awakened from deep sleep. “Yes. Or he may have made up his mind to come forward.”
“Why should he?” demanded Kimms. “What for?”
“Hotels are very sensitive to police observation,” Bobby reminded him, “and the one Maxton’s sister and her husband manage up North has been watched pretty closely since I was up there. Staff soon notice that sort of thing. They gossip, and then trade is apt to fall off. Maxton may be showing here simply to draw us away from the hotel. His sister may have told him to. Or he may just be wanting to see the girl once more before disappearing for good. No telling.”
“Miss Wynne?” Kimms muttered uneasily. “We can’t put her through it. Like brawling in church, that would be.”
“Well, she’ll have to be questioned, all the same,” Bobby insisted. “I think there are things she can tell and no one else. It was from her we heard of lights seen in the copse the night before the murder.”
“If people get the idea we are bothering her, we’ll be lynched,” Kimms said, still uneasily. “Or questions in Parliament,” and it was clear he thought this last the alternative most to be dreaded.
“It’s a risk,” Bobby agreed. “And I think Wynne would make himself very nasty indeed if he thought we were trying to bring her in in any way whatever. An ugly customer I fancy he could be if he wanted. But there’s a still worse risk.”
“What?” Kimms asked, incredulous.
“That she may lose that lovely smile of hers for good,” Bobby answered.
“Oh, well,” Kimms said. “Even if she is in love with Maxton, she’s young enough to get over it.”
“Perhaps,” Bobby said; “though I don’t think she’s the kind to get over things easily. Let’s hope there’ll be no need. But the road must be followed wherever it leads, and she’ll have to be asked if she can put us in touch with Maxton. Unless, of course, he does come forward.”
“If he is really in love with her,” Kimms complained, “why does he want to go committing murders on her doorstep almost?”
“Why indeed?” echoed Bobby; “but, then, we don’t know that he did. There are others, and even those who seem cleared we may have to pop back again. How about my trying to get hold of Miss Wynne by myself? It would seem less formal, and no one could object to her being asked to give a message to Maxton. You wouldn’t risk local criticism and it wouldn’t bother me so much. Besides, you would still be available here if there’s any fresh development.”
Kimms accepted this suggestion with very evident relief. He even took out his handkerchief to wipe his forehead.
“I had rather tackle a bunch of armed gangsters any day than her,” he said.
“I know,” Bobby agreed; “but there are things that have to be done, and this is one.”
So it was agreed, and Bobby was soon driving to Magna Minor, a detour which did not in fact take him far from the direct road back to London. As he had hoped might be the case, presently he saw another car coming towards him, a car he recognized as Mr Wynne’s. Sylvia seemed to be alone in it. As soon as he was sure of her identity he alighted and waved to her to stop. When she did so he went across to her.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said, opening the car door, and though she smiled as she spoke, it was but a poor watery thing, very different from some he had seen before. The sunshine had gone from it as she asked anxiously: “Is anything the matter?”
“Oh, no,” Bobby assured her. “But we would like to get in touch with Mr Maxton if possible. Could you give me his address?”
“It’s Hidden Cottage,” she answered simply. “Didn’t you know?”
“Well, you see,” Bobby answered, “he doesn’t seem to have been there for some time. You remember the cottage was broken into the same day Mr Wynne found an intruder in his study?”
“Oh, yes,” she answered at once; “but he didn’t say anything about that, and I didn’t either.”
“Was that this afternoon?” Bobby asked, and when she nodded, he went on: “Did Mr Maxton say anything about his future movements?”
“Only that he was going away for a long time,” she replied. “He didn’t say why. I suppose it’s his work. He said he didn’t know when he would be back,” and now there was visible a faint quivering of her upper lip that Bobby noticed and that then was gone.
“That makes it difficult,” Bobby said. “We can’t do much about the cottage break-in till we know if anything is missing. If there isn’t, it’s only trespass—and damage to property. Not a police matter. Could you give him a message from us, do you think?”
She shook her head, and when she answered, it was in a very small voice that she almost whispered:
“He said he didn’t think it was likely we would ever meet again.”
“I see,” Bobby said. After a pause, he continued: “I must apologize, then, for troubling you. I thought it was just possible you might be able to help. I’m sorry.”
He stepped back then and made as if to return to his own car, but she leaned forward and called to him by name, though in a voice so low he was not even sure he had heard correctly. But he stayed to listen again, and she said:
“It’s because of what’s happened you want to see him, isn’t it? But he doesn’t know anything; he told me so,” and this was said with a simple faith that Bobby felt he could hardly share.
“The inquiry is going on,” he told her, “and must and will, both here and in London, till we get at the truth. You remember the light you saw in the copse the night before the murder. You don’t feel you can say anything more about that? It may mean—though of course I don’t know—that you will be called as a witness. I think myself you ought to tell Mr Wynne, or it might be better if I called to see him. You said at the time that you didn’t know who it was. Could it have been Mr Maxton?”
“I asked him afterwards,” she admitted, “and he said it was. But he wasn’t there the next night, when it happened. I asked him that, too, and he said No, he wasn’t there,” and this once again she said with her air of simple faith as though his denial were conclusive, though once again that was hardly how Bobby regarded it.
“It wakened you. You heard something that second night about twelve, didn’t you?” Bobby went on. “But you saw there was a light in your father’s room—it overlooks the copse, too—so you went to sleep again. Mr Wynne tells us he heard what he thought was a cry. He got out of bed to look—he was lying awake reading—and thinks that was probably what wakened you when he opened the window and then shut it again.”
“I expect it was,” she agreed when Bobby seemed to expect an answer. “I was awfully sleepy, but so long as Daddy was there I knew it was all right. Sometimes when he’s very wakeful he does go out to walk about a little, and it always makes me so nervous, because of course anyone might easily slip in in the dark, couldn’t they?”
“I suppose they could, but it wouldn’t be likely,” Bobby told her. “Not unless Mr Wynne made a habit of it and it was known. Have you any idea what Mr Maxton was doing there so late on the first night?”
“It’s his books and things,” she explained.
“He likes to know about what happens after dark. Ever such a lot goes on, he says—quite as much as in the daytime—only most people don’t know, because they’re in bed. And that’s why, when no one’s there, the little frightened people in the fields and the woods haven’t so much to be afraid of.”
“Isn’t that why he took Hidden Cottage?” Bobby asked doubtfully. “That’s what I understood. To get material, I mean. Couldn’t he have done that just as well where he lived, instead of two or three miles away?”
“It was all awfully silly of him,” she explained, her colour slightly heightened. “I never thought he meant it. It was an old story he found, only quite true and awfully sad, and he put it in his book he was writing, about a page ever so long ago, and he was serenading a girl he loved; only her brothers came and killed him. It’s most awfully exciting because now he’s found out a lot more about it, and he thinks the page was a son of Blondel—you know, the man who went about singing till he found King Richard.”
“I expect that will set all the historians talking,” Bobby agreed. “But I don’t quite see—” He paused, remembering he had heard this tale of an unlucky page before, and that then a vague, fleeting thought had passed through his mind and been at once dismissed as too far-fetched. “Or was Mr Maxton intending to follow the page’s example and serenade you?” he asked.
“It was just too silly of him,” she repeated. “He said he wished he could, only he hadn’t a guitar and wouldn’t know how to play it if he had. So I got the giggles and he was offended, and he said he would be there all the same, and he would shine his torch for me to see when I went up to bed if I looked out. I told him I never would, and not to be such an idiot.”
“Did you? Look out, I mean.”
“Well, not exactly. I did just have a peep, and the light was there, but that’s all.”
“The next night—the night of the murder—something woke you, didn’t it, just about the time it happened?”
“Yes, but Martin wasn’t there. I told you. I asked him.”
“Well, thank you for what you’ve told me,” Bobby said, and he was thinking to himself that this queer little romantic tale, so simply told, at once touching and absurd, of boy playing troubadour to the girl he loved, would win over at once any jury in the land. No jury would believe, nor would the general public, that a young man seeking to find favour in the eyes of the girl he was courting would turn abruptly to commit what had all the appearance of a premeditated and deliberate murder. Bobby himself was not so sure. Murder and Love. Both born of passion, and sometimes they prove twins in action. “Thank you,” he repeated. “It all helps to give a clearer idea of what happened that night. By the way, I hope you found that photograph I heard you say you had mislaid?”
“Oh, yes,” she answered, looking both surprised and relieved by this rather abrupt change of subject. “I had it in my bag all the time. Daddy was almost cross at my being so stupid”—and this she said as if she had never till now thought it conceivable that her father could ever be cross with her. “And then he only burnt it when I gave it him,” she added.
Bobby spoke no word in answer, but still stood staring at her, and she looked back at him, puzzled by his silence and his expression, and still he stood and stared in silence, till she grew a little frightened.
“Have I said anything I shouldn’t?” she asked at last.
“No, no,” he muttered, and again was silent.
She said good-bye then and drove away; and long after her car had passed out of sight he was still standing there, a question that had been trembling on the tip of his tongue still unspoken, unasked, unanswered. Then he turned his car and followed her. It was the shortest way back to the direct London road he had left in order to make this detour.
A feeling of guilt, of failure, weighed upon him. It was the first time, he reflected, that he had ever allowed personal or private considerations to interfere with his duty. For he knew it had been his plain duty to ask that question, and yet his tongue had refused to utter it.
Presently he stopped at a telephone booth and rang up Kimms. It was some minutes before he got through. When he did, he gave Kimms an almost verbatim account of his talk with Sylvia down to the last words they had exchanged. But still he did not mention that last unuttered dreadful question that to him seemed to emerge so clearly from all that had been said before. If that seemed so to Kimms also, and Kimms thought it should be asked, then, Bobby decided, he would at once agree, and indeed offer to return immediately, so as to be present when it was posed. No such suggestion came, though Kimms seemed surprised both at the detailed nature of the report and at its coming from a wayside booth. He even sounded a little impatient at having to listen so long at the ’phone, while at the same time he was being promised a full typed report as soon as it could be prepared.
Back at the Yard, Bobby stayed late to write this out in the fullest possible detail, and next morning he was busy reading the typed copy when a message came to say that a Mr Martin Maxton was below asking if Mr Owen wished to see him, as he had heard was the case.
“Very much so,” Bobby answered. “Keep him safe till I send, and then bring him along,” and then, with the reflection that life is much easier when those you are searching for turn up of their own accord, continued with his task of reading, correcting and signing the Kimms report.
CHAPTER XXX
TOKEN SERENADE
IT WAS FULLY half an hour before Bobby chose to declare himself ready to receive Martin. No bad thing, he knew by experience, to leave a suspect for a time alone with thoughts that were apt to increase nervousness, suggest pitfalls in his way and how to avoid them, and generally to distract his attention from the confident and plausible story he had presumably prepared. Otherwise he would hardly be willing to submit himself for the close questioning so apt to reveal flaws if concentration wavered for even a moment.
Of course, these considerations did not apply to the witness of truth who came forward with the simple desire to tell all he knew and remembered, and no more. But Bobby did not think this was a category to which Martin Maxton was likely to belong.
When Martin was at last summoned he did in fact show clear signs of being under extreme mental tension, but a tension held in firm control. Unless it broke, and now Bobby was inclined to think that unlikely, equally unlikely that Martin would in any way allow whatever story he meant to tell to collapse or allow himself to walk into any trap of his own preparing. That often happened with the most carefully constructed story; often the more carefully constructed the more easily broken down. But not, Bobby was telling himself, not with Martin Maxton.
Indeed, even from the first, the interview did not take the normal course, as between detective and suspect. For when Bobby sat back in his chair and began to subject Martin to that long, scrutinizing gaze, under which so often a suspect’s self-confidence crumbled, it was Martin, settling himself in the chair offered him, who spoke first and with emphasis, saying:
“First of all I want it clearly understood that I am willing to tell you anything you want to know about myself. But I will tell you nothing about anyone else—nothing, at least, that I feel they must tell you themselves if they are willing to.”
“Dear me,” Bobby remarked, surprised for once. “You know, that sounds much more like a declaration of war, instead of a wish to help.”
“I should call it,” Martin retorted, “not so much a declaration of war as of armed neutrality, and I have never said I wanted to help.”
“If it is not to help us, why have you come to see us?” Bobby asked.
“Because I preferred to come at once rather than wait for you to dig me out. When my sister told me you had been to see her and your men were watching their hotel and how terribly difficult it was and upsetting both her and Tom—her husband, he is—well, it was what I jolly well had to do. Not that I wanted to, but there it was.”
“You tried to make us think you had gone to France?”
“Rath
er a wash-out, that,” Martin admitted. “An amateur’s trick. At the time I thought it quite a good idea—to choke you off, I mean. I knew that girl would talk if she saw me on board, so I let her see me, and then came straight back on the same boat without even landing.”
“Why did you go through such a performance?” Bobby asked. “Was it because a murderer always thinks first of flight?”
“Does he?” Martin asked; and only a slight drawing in of his breath showed that he had noted that dread word Bobby had at last pronounced. Indeed when Martin repeated it, he did so without a tremor in his voice. “I didn’t know. But, then, I’m not a murderer, though I suppose I should say so anyhow. Even confessed killers protest they are innocent, don’t they? Killers perhaps, but not murderers. I am neither.”
“You seem,” Bobby said, “to have taken an interest in the psychology of murder.”
“Murder,” answered Martin, “has become a subject of overwhelming interest to me since I realized I was under suspicion of having committed one myself—and even before, even before,” he said, almost to himself, in a tone and with an accent Bobby did not fully understand. “Not,” he added with a sudden, rather charming smile, “that I’m in the least afraid that you will ever be able to prove I did something I didn’t do. But aren’t we rather talking round and round? Or is this an example of your famous technique McKie told me about—an amiable chat about nothing in particular to lull the other fellow to sleep and then pounce.”
“I wish McKie would keep his nose out of things that don’t concern him,” Bobby said crossly.
“He’s a journalist; that’s their job, pushing their noses in,” Martin explained, superfluously, for that was something Bobby knew all about, from which at times he had suffered many things—and gained more. “He offered me a hundred down to write a full confession if I were guilty, with a firm undertaking not to use it until after I had been convicted and hanged, and then another four hundred to anyone I liked to name.”
Dark is the Clue: A Bobby Owen Mystery Page 21