It Might Lead Anywhere: A Bobby Owen Mystery Read online

  CHAPTER II

  THE PREACHER

  Here was no built-up area and Bobby, turning sharp by Mrs. Cox’s cottage as directed, was soon flying along at the best speed his car was capable of, though indeed the twists and turns of the narrow country road with its overhanging trees and high banks and hedges did impose a frequent slowing down.

  Soon he came to Chipping Up, a typical small country village with its one long, straggling street, its church that was said to stand on the site of a Roman temple, its great house now empty, half ruinous, wholly desolate, because its last owner had died in the wars, and the Australian heir showed small eagerness to bother about an inheritance that was chiefly mortgage and debt.

  Sweeping round by the churchyard wall bordered by tall elms, Bobby came in sight of the village green. Along one side ran a small stream, the Becker, now swollen by recent heavy rains. Here swayed to and fro an excited crowd and on the banks of the stream stood a huge giant of a man, roaring defiance.

  “If any come against me,” he was thundering, “I turn the other cheek, as it is written, and then will I smite them also, as it is written again—yea, and cast them in the water hereby for the betterment of body and soul.”

  No one in the general excitement had paid any attention to Bobby’s arrival. He stopped his car and jumped out. Nearby, a little group was clustered round a burly fellow who was half sitting up, half lying down, and whose bleeding and bruised face a woman was busy bathing with cold water. Bobby wondered if this were the man, Brown by name, reported killed and certainly showing signs of having been pretty roughly handled. Bobby said:

  “What’s all this? What’s going on here? Who’s this man?”

  “It’s Big Bill Barton,” a bystander answered and added admiringly: “Yon chap outed him proper, easy as picking apples.”

  The woman engaged in bathing the prostrate man’s battered face looked up angrily and said:

  “Pity it wasn’t you, George Simpson, and all the pack of you scared like mice when the cat comes in and daren’t say a word when that big bully scandalized us all and named my own girl a whore to her face. Duck him, why don’t you? if you’re men. No wonder the war goes on the way it does if all the men’s like you.”

  “Hold your tongue,” Bobby told her sternly, for her voice had been shrill and loud, addressed really to the milling crowd through whom it ran like fire through dry autumn leaves.

  Now there followed her exhortation one of the most formidable of all sounds—the low muttering growl of a mob in the grip of a mass emotion, about to translate that mass emotion into mass action. It swayed forward, then backward for an instant, hesitating before the grim, undaunted figure on the bank of the stream.

  “I forgive you,” he was shouting. “I forgive you all freely. Now come on and feel the weight of an arm that the Lord upholds.”

  For just one moment more the crowd hesitated, not so much because of the other’s formidable aspect but because of an uncomfortable feeling that it was best to proceed with caution against one who claimed to be upheld by the powers above. It might be true. But a voice from behind, a shrill girl’s voice, cried:

  “Give him something to forgive us for if you aren’t too frightened.”

  Again from the crowd came the response of that low muttering, prelude to action. But this second or two of delay had given Bobby his chance. He dashed between the crowd and the grim, solitary figure waiting its onslaught. He shouted:

  “What’s all this about? Get back to your homes or your work, all of you. Who is responsible for this? I’ll see he answers for it.”

  He paused. The crowd gaped, taken by surprise, unwillingly impressed by so confident a tone of authority. Bobby noticed one hulking fellow who had pushed to the front and who held half a brick in one hand. Bobby pointed a threatening finger at him.

  “You,” he ordered. “Drop that. Drop it at once. What’s your name?”

  The fellow he spoke to obeyed instinctively. He dropped the half brick, but then seemed inclined to pick it up again. There came a menacing forward surge among others in the crowd and someone yelled:

  “Who are you, anyhow? Mind your own business.”

  And a boy shouted:

  “Throw him in, too.”

  “Who said that?” demanded Bobby. “All right. I see him. I’ll attend to him later. I’m a police officer and deputy chief constable of this county. In the name of the law I call upon every man here present to come to my assistance. I warn you, any who refuse are liable to prosecution, and, if found guilty, to fine or imprisonment at the discretion of the magistrates.”

  Probably only in this country could such an appeal by an officer of the law to a mob, already half out of hand, for assistance by itself against itself have been effective. Most of them, all of them perhaps, would have faced far more willingly a baton charge than this threat of fine or imprisonment, if found guilty. No glamour in appearing in a police court in peril of fine or imprisonment; no fun in that as there might be in testing yourself with a cudgel against a policeman with a baton. The man who had held the half brick put his hands in his pockets and began to stroll unconcernedly away. The one or two noisy youths at the back looked sheepish and grew silent. Bobby saw the day was won. His voice was milder as he said:

  “Has anyone here been hurt? What about a man named Brown? Is he here or what’s happened?”

  The woman who had been looking after the man called Big Bill Barton had joined the others now. Bill himself was sitting up and taking notice in the intervals of feeling in turn each one of his separate bruises. Now it was this woman who called out:

  “That’s him what’s dead and drownded and yon’s who did it.”

  Bobby swung round on the grim defiant figure at whom had pointed the woman’s accusing finger. Before Bobby could speak, however, the man said:

  “It was my arm and hand, but guided by the Lord, for now Brother Alfred Brown will never deny the Vision, the Vision that I tell of, though these in their folly and their blindness willed not to listen or heed. Yet I forgive them; and for all that they have done or willed against me, I thank them. I thank you, dear friends, and I forgive you.”

  “Stop that sort of talk,” Bobby ordered, for he knew, of course, that nothing is more likely to rouse angry passions than to be forgiven. It is an intolerable assumption of superiority. He said: “If you’ve been killing someone, you’ll need forgiveness yourself before you start forgiving other people. Where’s this man’s body?”

  “They took it out of the water,” someone told him. “They took it into Widow Adam’s.”

  “Do you admit that?” Bobby asked the big man and went on when no denial came: “You had better say nothing now. You will have to come with me. You will be charged with manslaughter. The charge may be altered later on. That depends. You can make a statement presently if you wish to. But not now.”

  “Nay, friend, I’ll make it now,” answered the other, his voice rivalling or even excelling that of Mr. Goodman in volume though not in tone. “I am Duke Dell, man of Belial and winner of many fights, gaining much money thereby, till there came the Vision of which I am here to tell these poor brethren of mine, though they will not to listen.”

  “Vision be damned,” interrupted one of the crowd. “Called himself a preacher and said our girls were bad girls and our lads worse; given over to the devil, he said, and suchlike. So we up and told him plain if he came again with talk like that he would get a ducking. But he came all the same and laid his tongue about worse nor ever, especial about our girls what’s as good and decent as any ever you could wish for; you ask Vicar and Sam Wiggins, our policeman here, if you’re the boss. Sam will tell you the same. So some of the lads tried to rush him, and a chap as had come along with him got between just as he lit out an almighty swing that caught his own chum and knocked him in there. He pointed to the little stream. “But no one didn’t notice at first, what with all what was going on, and when they pulled the chap out he was a goner, they said, drown
ded as well as put out by the swing he took.”

  “I meant it not,” said the big man who had given his name as Duke Dell, a name that was beginning to stir memories in Bobby’s mind of former reports, in days gone by, in the sporting columns of the papers. “I aimed it not. It was the Lord guided my arm, for thus Alfred Brown is saved; and better far it is so, for now he can no longer doubt the Vision or say maybe it came with drink.”

  Bobby looked at him doubtfully, uncertain what to make of this. A huge, magnificently made man, past his prime now, no doubt, but still hung about as it were with all the splendour of his former strength and vigour. Nor did his features seem to show much sign of the prizefighting profession that had once apparently been his. It was his eyes that chiefly caught Bobby’s attention. Sunken beneath great craggy brows, they seemed to change from moment to moment, now dull, half closed, indifferent, indeterminate in hue; then fixed and fierce and glaring, and of a burning angry blue; then again veiling themselves behind a kind of glassy film, remote and unseeing. To Bobby it seemed that sometimes they took in everything around down to the smallest detail, and sometimes that they saw nothing save what was invisible to others.

  “Come with me,” Bobby said to him. To the crowd Bobby said: “Which cottage is it? The one where the body was taken I mean?”

  They pointed it out to him. He went towards it. Duke Dell went with him. The others followed. Duke Dell said:

  “I meant it not, it was not my doing. Yet it is well. My arm was guided. It is very well.”

  “Say nothing now,” Bobby ordered. “You can talk later.”

  The door of the indicated cottage opened as they drew near. Two men appeared. One was a tall, slim youth, fair-haired, with that far-off look in his eyes often to be noticed in the eyes of seamen and airmen used to watching for the wonders of the Lord in the great distances of air and sea. By his side was a little man, narrow-chested, stooping, with pale unhealthy complexion, a small straggling moustache, pale watery eyes, so lacking indeed in every marked feature that one might almost have believed nature had intended him for a kind of universal camouflage. Even his clothes, evidently made for a much larger man, seemed to aid this impression of general concealment, as if into the folds in which they draped him he could and might at any instant retire completely. Duke Dell said loudly:

  “Why, it’s him, he’s not dead, no more than me.”

  “No thanks to you, Duke Dell,” retorted the other, a little like an angry rabbit, “and my head ringing so I hardly know what I’m doing or where I am.”

  CHAPTER III

  HIS MASTER’S VOICE

  Bobby, very much surprised and rather doubtful, said, speaking half to Duke Dell, half to the bystanders:

  “Is this the man you’ve been talking about?”

  At first no one answered. They all seemed as surprised and puzzled as was Bobby himself. Getting no reply, Bobby repeated his question, this time more directly to Duke Dell. The moment before the big man’s eyes had been on fire, fierce, overbearing and arrogant, their harsh gaze so formidable that Brown shrank visibly away, as from a threatened blow. But now they changed, their light faded, they became dull, withdrawn and strange beneath those great craggy brows which, to any professional boxer, are so valuable an asset. It was now as if they still saw, and saw intently, but with an interior, not an exterior vision, and therefore things not visible to others. Dell’s voice, too, had changed from its former loud reverberating sound to the kind of harsh and toneless whisper in which now he muttered:

  “It is not well. It is not well. No, it is very ill.”

  “What is?” demanded Bobby, but again got no answer. He turned to the tall, fair-haired youth who also was looking on with a very puzzled air. He said: “Can you tell me what’s been happening?”

  “Well, I don’t know much,” the young man answered. “There seemed to be a bit of a row on so I stopped to see what was up. Some of them seemed to be trying to rush this chap here.” He nodded as he spoke at Duke Dell, still remote and distant in his own secret world, his own unseeing sight. “He stood them off all right,” the young man continued, “and then this other bloke got in the way of one of his swipes and went flat into the brook there. I didn’t notice at first but someone yelled out he would drown and I thought he had, too. He was lying face down in a good foot of water. We got him up here and he soon came round when we had emptied his tummy and he had been dried and had changed his things. I don’t think he’s much the worse except for a lump as big as your fist on the side of his head.”

  “I might be dead,” said Brown himself, speaking in the same thin, resentful tone, “Easy as nothing I might be dead.” He looked reproachfully at Duke Dell. “Through you,” he said, timidly vicious.

  “It had been better so,” Duke Dell told him, his eyes still veiled and distant, his voice still the same harsh, unnatural whisper, as though a dead man spoke. “The Vision was given. You saw. You accepted. Then you doubted. ‘Drink perhaps, drink or just dreaming,’ you said, blaspheming. Had none meddled, now you would be in the presence of the Vision itself, for ever without end.”

  “Well, that’s a thing to say,” protested Brown. “Sorry about it, aren’t you?” he snarled.

  “For your sake, yes, for you it had been better so,” Duke Dell repeated.

  “If it had been like that,” Bobby interposed, “you would soon be in the dock, answering a serious charge.” But he had a feeling he might as well have said this to the wind, so little was it heard or heeded. To Brown, he said: “Do you wish to make a charge?”

  “What? Me?” Brown asked and looked more like a frightened rabbit than ever. He even retreated a step or two inside the cottage as though to withdraw himself from so dangerous a proposition. “Oh no,” he breathed, “it was only an accident. One of those things. It just happened. Accidental.”

  Bobby turned to Duke Dell.

  “Apparently there has been an attempt at assault,” he said. “Do you wish to make any complaint, any charge?” Duke Dell’s expression changed abruptly. It was as though he were jerked back from the unseen world in which his spirit had wandered to the everyday world of material things. His gaze was no longer remote, withdrawn, strange. Nor was there in it now any trace of that fierce, dominating glare before which Brown had so shrunk away. Now, too, the big man no longer spoke in that dry and harsh whisper, unnatural, as though another power used his lips and tongue. In his earlier loud, reverberating tones, he replied:

  “Charge? Complaint? Charge whom? What complaint? A little hearty horseplay. That’s all. No harm meant, none done. Even otherwise, I should freely forgive, and you cannot both forgive and yet complain and charge.” He spoke to Brown. “Come along,” he said. “The sooner I get you home and into your own things, the better.”

  “Not so fast,” Bobby ordered. He turned now to the little group of staring, curious bystanders. “Have any of you anything to say? I am an officer of police if anyone wishes to make any complaint of any sort.”

  At first there was no answer. Then someone shouted from behind:

  “It’s same as he said. There wasn’t only a bit of fun.”

  “I think there wasn’t,” agreed Bobby. “I think more was meant.”

  He paused, hesitating. But there was nothing to be done. Plainly no one wanted any further trouble and without willing witnesses no charge could be sustained, even if one could be made. No harm had been done—unless Mr. Brown developed a cold. Still he could give them a lecture on the consequences of breaking the peace and of what a repetition of such a scene would involve. He proceeded to do so. They did not seem much impressed though they looked sulky and resentful. One man said:

  “He didn’t ought to come calling us the way he did and our girls bad names and him a stranger and all.”

  “It’s a free country,” Bobby retorted. “A man has a right to say what he likes. If he goes too far, a charge can be laid and he can be summoned. But don’t try to take the law into your own hands. If you do, you pu
t yourselves in the wrong at once.”

  They only looked sulkier still and began to shuffle away, muttering to each other. For the first time Bobby noticed a tall, ascetic-looking clergyman standing at the back of the rapidly dispersing crowd. To him Bobby said:

  “Are you the clergyman here?”

  “No, though I’ve taken duty here in Mr. Roberts’s absence. He is away now, in hospital. My name is Childs, Alexander Childs. I am vicar of St. Barnabas, in Oldfordham. I was passing and there seemed something going on, so I stopped. Has Mr. Dell been making trouble again?”

  “There’s been a little horseplay from what I’m told,” Bobby answered, as it vaguely crossed his mind that this was the second person who had happened to be passing and had stopped to see what was going on. “It looked more than that to me. Anyhow, it’s all over now.”

  “Mr. Dell’s activities are highly mischievous,” Mr. Childs said loudly and severely. He turned, looking straight at Dell who had been standing quietly by, aloof, waiting for Brown to join him, taking no notice of Bobby’s little speech or indeed of anything else. But now he responded to this direct challenge.

  “Satan and his ministers find them so,” he retorted, his voice thundering out with sudden and startling effect.

  “That’s enough,” Bobby interposed, fearful a theological argument was about to develop, for Mr. Childs was evidently struggling to find words in which to express an indignation that for the moment had deprived him of the power of speech. “There’s been too much talk already.”

  Bobby had taken care to speak directly to Duke Dell, but also loud enough for Mr. Childs to hear and take note, if he would. But the vicar’s voice was still shaking with indignation as he said:

  “I’ll push on. I’ve an appointment with Mr. Goodman. I mustn’t be late.” In a lower voice, to Bobby alone, he said: “The man is a public danger. You must see what you can do. I’ll have a talk with you later. Something must be done.” Then he turned and called to Brown, now still farther withdrawn into the interior of the cottage. “Are you going my way, Mr. Brown? I’ll walk along with you if you are.”