Death of a Beauty Queen Page 16

  ‘So you were going to smash my head in if I had been going to arrest him?’ Bobby asked again. ‘Well, if you had, what good do you think it would have done?’

  But at that Paul laughed, suddenly and harshly.

  ‘You don’t think,’ he said, ‘you only feel. Afterwards, you find something’s happened. That’s often the way things do happen.’

  ‘Oh, is it?’ grumbled Bobby. ‘I suppose you mean that’s how it happened at the Central Cinema the other night?’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ Paul retorted. ‘I don’t mean that at all, and Leslie’s innocent – innocent.’

  ‘There’s not much doubt you know he’s guilty,’ Bobby countered, ‘or why do you talk like this? Why did you think I was arresting him?’

  ‘That was because I saw you with him,’ Paul replied. ‘I know you think he’s guilty, but he isn’t. He is innocent. I’ll swear that before God Himself, by any oath you like.’

  ‘You aren’t going the way to make us think so,’ Bobby said. ‘Especially not by grabbing bricks to argue with.’

  ‘That won’t happen again,’ Paul said gravely. ‘It just – well, something came over me; it won’t again.’

  Bobby grunted. He wasn’t so sure of that, and, besides, he could not help wondering if once before ‘something had come over ’ Paul Irwin – at a time when he was alone with a girl in the office of the manager at the Central Cinema.

  ‘If you want us to believe you,’ he said, ‘you had better tell us what you know. It’s quite certain you know something you haven’t told us. That means you are hiding the truth. So long as you do that – well, you must take the consequences, and you mustn’t wonder if we draw certain conclusions. I wasn’t arresting your son to-night, hut I tell you quite clearly that’s likely to come – so long as you refuse even to answer questions.

  ‘Look,’ Paul said, ignoring this, to which, indeed, he did not seem to have been listening, and pointing to a window above the house door, where a light had just appeared. ‘That’s Leslie’s room. He is going straight to bed. Do you know why? Because he daren’t stay up – because we sit and stare and never speak for fear of what we know.’

  ‘Mr Irwin,’ Bobby said, ‘you’re saying too much, or too little – much too much, or else much too little.’

  ‘I’ve been giving an address,’ Paul explained, ‘down there in the little chapel in East Street. That started me, I suppose. Then seeing you with Leslie, thinking he was going to be arrested – something seemed to go then. Leslie’s innocent – quite innocent – but you may have found out things making you think he isn’t. ’

  ‘Mr Irwin,’ Bobby said again. ‘You lost your hat to-night, if you remember, when you picked up that brick you meant to use if I had really been making an arrest. And I think there was another time when you lost your hat, wasn’t there?’

  ‘Yes,’ Paul answered deliberately. ‘That’s right. I did. At the Central Cinema. And you found it. Well?’

  Bobby did not answer. They stood there, still and silent in the dark night, for some minutes. Then, with an abrupt motion, Mr Irwin pushed open the garden gate.

  ‘As I told you before, I’ve nothing to say,’ he said. ‘Good night.’

  He went on towards the house, and for some time Bobby stood there, staring after him, thinking deeply, or rather with his mind so possessed by such a medley of dancing, changing, incoherent ideas as made him almost dizzy but hardly deserved the name of thought.

  ‘Of course, they may be both of them mad – Leslie and the old man too,’ he thought, catching at a theory he felt might help to convince him of his own sanity he was on the verge of beginning to doubt. ‘Only, the old man knows something – something that’s made his hair turn white.’ In spite of himself Bobby shivered as he stood there with one hand on the garden gate, for he had been half-minded at one moment to follow Paul to the house. Indeed there was something strangely terrible in that mute witness of his whitened hair to an old man’s agony, so that the very latch rattled again as the garden gate shook under Bobby’s shaken hand. Frowningly Bobby moved away, resolutely turning his mind from that thought of terror – an old man’s snow-white hair that had shown so short a time ago not so much as a streak of grey. ‘The boy knows something, too,’ Bobby muttered to himself. ‘Something that’s driving him half crazy. Does that mean one or other of them is the murderer and the other knows it? But then, what about Maddox, and why was Mitchell so keen on that silver challenge cup, and why has it disappeared, and why has the knife been traced to Wood, and what has Quin got to do with it?’

  Growing only more and more confused the more he tried to see reason and coherence in this whirling chaos of events, he went back to the local police station, and there, while the memory of them was still fresh in his mind, wrote out as full a report of these two strange conversations as he could contrive. By the time he had finished it was late, and he was given permission to go off duty and home to bed.

  Night brings counsel, say the French, but morning found Bobby still as helpless as ever to pick out any meaning or significance from the chaos of conflicting evidence in which the case seemed so hopelessly entangled.

  Only one point seemed to him quite clear – namely, that if he had in fact been about to place Leslie Irwin under arrest, then the papers this morning would have had another mysterious tragedy to record in telling of a certain promising young detective having been picked up with his skull smashed in by a brick from an adjacent garden wall.

  ‘The old boy meant that brick right enough,’ Bobby remarked, later on, to Ferris, who had just been reading his report. ‘There’s not much he would stick at where his boy’s concerned – talk about a love drama, it would have been one all right, though no one would have called it that.’

  Ferris was searching his memory.

  ‘Didn’t Mitchell say something about there being more kinds of love than one?’ he asked. ‘Perhaps that’s what he meant.’

  ‘Shouldn’t wonder,’ said Bobby. He added: ‘I’ve heard of mother love, but this – this is father love.’

  ‘Looks to me as if it accounted for the whole thing,’ declared Ferris. ‘Looks to me as if he wanted to stop his boy marrying Miss Mears, and that’s how he did it. Anyhow, it’s sure they both know more than they mean to tell if they can help it. If we could trace the knife to cither of them it would be good enough.’

  ‘Only,’ Bobby pointed out, ‘it’s been traced to the doorkeeper at the cinema instead.’

  Ferris agreed, with a gesture of mingled despair and bewilderment.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Nothing sticks together in this business. I’m to see what Wood has to say to-day about that, though. You’re to come along.’

  That Monday afternoon, therefore, Inspector Ferris, bobby accompanying him, appeared at the Brush Hill cinema, where they found Wood on duty as usual.

  Cautiously, Ferris, a cautious and a patient personality, approached the subject. Had, he asked, the mysterious seeker for a Miss Quin, by whom it was now probable had been meant Carrie Mears, been seen again? Wood answered in the negative – classic phrase indicating exactly the involved and roundabout reply actually made by the door-keeper. But he was keeping a sharp look-out, he declared, and he was quite sure he would know him again anywhere, at any time. But this assurance was not one that carried much weight with Ferris, who knew that when shown the Scotland Yard collection of photographs of criminals, Wood had picked out two, of entirely different types – one of a man known to have been dead some years, and the second of a man who for the last three years had been enjoying the hospitality of the country in a south-country gaol.

  ‘Looks as if he was keeping out of the way on purpose,’ Ferris commented.

  ‘Take it from me,’ said Wood impressively, ‘he’s the man you want. That’s what I’ve said from the very start.’

  ‘Well, go on looking out for him,’ Ferris directed. ‘By the way, were you ever shown the knife the murderer used?’

  Wood shook his
head. He had been asked about the knife – he had given his assurance that he had never seen any sheath knife in the possession of anyone employed at the cinema, and certainly never in Mr Sargent’s office. But in the general excitement and confusion reigning that night he did not think he had ever actually seen the weapon used. At any rate he had had no more than a passing glimpse of it.

  ‘Bought a sheath knife yourself, a little while ago, didn’t you?’ Ferris remarked. ‘At Sadler’s, round the corner, in the High Street.’

  Wood seemed a little startled, but agreed at once that he had done so. He had purchased it for a nephew, due presently to join a ship in London, but at the moment staying with his parents in Devon. It was a sheath knife of a type much used by sailors. After buying it, he had put a good edge on it, and then had locked it up in a drawer ready for the nephew when he called for it.

  ‘Let’s have a look at it, will you?’ asked Ferris casually.

  Wood, very pale now, very uncomfortable, made some pretence of searching in various drawers, but finally, under questioning from Ferris, grown sharper and more imperative, admitted that it was missing. But he’ had only discovered that fact quite recently, and till then it had never occurred to him to connect his knife with the murder. Indeed he still protested vehemently that, though he could not account for its disappearance, he was certain it could not be identical with the one that had been used. Ferris demanded sternly why he had not immediately reported a fact of such importance, and Wood, stammering and by now badly frightened, protested that at first he had simply never thought of it – it had never entered his mind to mention a knife he believed safely locked up in a drawer of his own table, indeed he had not even remembered it. And when he discovered it was missing, then, though he would not actually make the admission, he had evidently been too terrified to say anything.

  But he asserted passionately that it could not possibly be the one used in the murder. How could it be, when he kept it safely locked up? Ferris retorted that if it had been in fact kept locked in a drawer, locked in a drawer it should still be. But it wasn’t. So where was it?

  Desperately seeking for corroborative evidence, Wood remembered that on the night of the murder he had shown the knife to a friend, who now kept a small shop near, but had at one time been at sea. He rang up this friend, whose name was Abbott, and when Mr Abbott appeared he confirmed that the knife had been in a drawer Wood had unlocked to show it to him.

  ‘Asked me if I thought it was the kind of thing would be useful on shipboard,’ said Mr Abbott, ‘and I said it was.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us all this before?’ demanded Ferris angrily.

  ‘Wasn’t none of my business,’ retorted Abbott sturdily. ‘What was the good, anyway? I suppose you don’t reckon it was Mr Wood did the girl in, do you? Him and me was talking here, in this very room for that matter, when it must have happened.’

  It was pretty clear he had kept silent because he had not wished to seem to throw suspicion upon Wood – a suspicion, too, that no doubt he had felt quite convinced had no foundation in fact. But Ferris glowered at them both.

  ‘Keeping back information,’ he growled. ‘Ought to be an offence. What do you suppose we can do if people keep things back? Serious, I call it.’

  But Wood was recovering his courage now he found his neighbour supporting him.

  ‘Never entered my head,’ he protested, ‘it could be anything to do with the knife I bought for Stevie. If it is, then it must have been pinched without my knowing. The chap that was in here asking for Miss Quin, most likely. You remember?’ he appealed to Abbott. ‘He asked for a Miss Quin, and I told him there wasn’t any name like that on the list – the fellow that said he had come by motor-coach.’

  ‘Not much to go on in that,’ observed Ferris, at whom Wood had looked as if he felt he was offering a valuable clue. ‘Any number of motor-coaches. Now, if he had said where it came from –’

  ‘He didn’t say anything about that,’ Wood answered. ‘All he said was – when I told him if he had wanted to see one of the young ladies he ought to have been earlier, before they started doing themselves up – that he would have been earlier only the coach got in a bit late.’

  ‘Not much help there, either,’ grumbled Ferris. ‘Lots of ’em come in a bit late.’

  ‘I suppose,’ asked Bobby, speaking for the first time, ‘he didn’t say what made it late?’

  ‘Ran over some lady’s pet dog, just as it started,’ answered Wood. ‘The chap said he thought they were never going to get off, along of the fuss she made,’

  Ferris, a reserved and patient man, became eloquent. Bobby listened with sympathy, and now and again, when Ferris seemed to hesitate for a word, which was seldom, he supplied one. Wood gaped and cowered under the storm he had aroused. Abbott edged towards the door, but on die threshold paused to listen with an awed admiration.

  ‘Heard nothing like it,’ he said, in a thrilled aside, ‘since a deck hand on the old Eutropus dropped a bucket of tar on the old man’s shore-going togs the day we docked in New York.’

  ‘What’s the matter now?’ Wood demanded, in an injured voice, when presently the storm showed signs of abating.

  ‘Can’t you see,’ demanded Bobby, Ferris being still slightly hysterical, ‘that gives us just the clue we want. It’s a million chances only one motor-coach ran over a lady’s pet dog that day, and you say it was just as the coach started. It ought to be quite easy to find out where it happened, and then we’ll know what district to look in for this man you talk about. I expect we shall want you to go there for a day or two, to see if you can see him.’

  ‘What about my work?’ asked Wood, somewhat sullenly.

  ‘I think, for your own sake,’ observed Ferris significantly, ‘you had better do all you can to help us now.’

  His meaning was evident, and Wood went slightly pale again as he hurriedly promised to do all he could to help.

  ‘Why on earth couldn’t you tell us before?’ Bobby demanded.

  ‘Well, no one asked me,’ explained Wood.

  ‘It’s like Mitchell says,’ lamented Ferris. ‘The things people know and don’t tell is just about as bad as the things they don’t know and do tell.’ Then he turned sharply on Wood again. ‘Anything else,’ he demanded bitterly, ‘you’re keeping up your sleeve and never saying a word about.’

  ‘I’ve never kept anything up my sleeve I knew mattered,’ asserted Wood sullenly.

  ‘About that knife of Mr Wood’s,’ remarked Abbott, from the door. ‘It can’t have been the fellow you were talking about that took it – I remember now. After he had gone, Lily Ellis came in to ask about a parcel she was expecting from a shop in the High Street. A boy brought it in just then, and she wanted to open it to see if it was right, so I picked up the knife, from where it was on the table, and give it her to cut the string with.’

  ’Did she give it you back?’ Ferris asked quickly.

  ‘I don’t think so; I don’t remember,’ Abbott answered. ‘The phone went just then, and I answered it, and then I had to call Mr Wood to speak. But after that I don’t remember seeing either Lily Ellis or the knife.’

  Ferris made a gesture of a new despair.

  ‘That means,’ he almost wailed, ‘that now we’ve traced the thing back to Lily Ellis. This isn’t a case, it’s a nightmare.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The Handbag Found

  However, Mitchell did not seem unduly impressed when this new development was reported to him.

  ‘We knew already Miss Ellis had handled the knife,’ he pointed out, ‘as her finger-print is on it. What we need is proof who used the thing. As the case stands, it is still riddled with doubt. Half Brush Hill is whispering about the way Mr Irwin’s hair has turned white since the murder, and the other half about Sargent’s connection with the girl – it seems to have got about now they had been seen together in restaurants and places like that. Then there’s Miss Perry’s statement. It gives us valuable pointers, of
course, though a good deal will depend on a cable I’m expecting to-day or tomorrow. And we’ve no idea yet what became of the missing handbag, or who took it, or why. Meanwhile, as soon as we can be sure what motor-coach ran over a dog that day, and where it happened, it must be followed up for all it’s worth. It may mean a good deal if we can get in touch with step-father Quin Miss Perry told us about.’

  ‘He must be lying low on purpose, that’s certain,’ observed Ferris. ‘And why? – unless he’s the murderer himself. That s what I’m coming to think. Miss Perry says he staged a sham suicide to try to get money out of his wife. Well, suppose he staged a sham murder, threats and all that, to try to get money out of his step-daughter, and went just a bit too far – so the sham turned into the real? There was a case the other day where a woman tried to stage a sham accident to get money out of a motorist, and it went too far, turned into a real accident – and a fatal one, at that.’

  ‘It’s a possibility,’ agreed Mitchell, ‘though still only one among a whole lot of others, and possibilities aren’t good enough for Treasury counsel, let alone juries. For the present we must just carry on. Owen, you had better stand by ready to follow up as soon as there’s a report comes in about any place where a motor-coach ran over a pet dog the day of the murder.’

  ‘Very good, sir,’ said Bobby, and, after he and Ferris had left the room, he remarked to Ferris:

  ‘Sounds as if Mr Mitchell were following up some fresh line. I hadn’t heard of any development abroad, but there must be if he is expecting a cable.’

  ‘It’s all fresh lines in this affair,’ grumbled Ferris. ‘Give me a nice simple straightforward case where a burglar pots a householder, or a wife gives hubby a dose of poison to teach him to keep his eyes in the boat. Then you know where you are, but in a business like this – well, where are you?’ Bobby felt himself unable to answer this question, and so made no attempt to do so.

  ‘Mr Gilbert,’ he remarked, ‘you’ve heard of him, of course – Mr C.K. Gilbert, I mean – said in one of his broadcasts that a detective’s first need is to put himself in the criminal’s place, so as to understand his motives, and then he’ll understand his actions, too. But how can you do that when there’s any number of different motives suggested, and any of them may be the true one – jealousy, panic, anger, theft, revenge, preventing a marriage, a quarrel, blackmail, goodness knows how many more?’