The Conqueror Inn: A Bobby Owen Mystery Page 2

  Christopherson ignored the two women as completely as they ignored him and Bobby. He walked on through the room and Bobby followed. A short passage, stone flagged, led into a small room. Another door opened from it into the bar. The room seemed to be used as an office. Christopherson unlocked a cupboard and took out a wooden box or small packing-case, such as wholesale dealers use for deliveries to retailers of what are called packed goods. The lid had been nailed on but now was loose. Christopherson lifted it and showed it was filled with tightly packed bundles of one-pound notes. He made no comment but stood waiting and Bobby said:

  “Was the lid like that when you found it?”

  “No. Nailed,” Christopherson answered.

  “You opened it, then?”

  Christopherson let this go unanswered. He gave the impression of considering the question one that so obviously carried its own answer that no reply was necessary.

  “How much is there?” Bobby asked.

  “I don’t know,” Christopherson replied. “I’ve touched nothing.”

  “We must count it together and I’ll give you a receipt before I take it,” Bobby said.

  He was experiencing some surprise at finding that the tale told over the ’phone had been in no way exaggerated. The report received by ’phone that a wooden case full of bank-notes had been picked up by the roadside, had not sounded very convincing. A practical joke had been suspected, and there had been a certain amount of chaff about the probable size of the ‘case.’ The general feeling was that the ‘case’ would turn out to be a small box wherein some motorist had placed a few notes for convenience and that somehow or another it had fallen from his car. A routine matter really. One for the nearest constable. There had been no opportunity to ask for further information for after giving his name and message and where he was speaking from, Christopherson had rung off. The inn itself had no ‘phone. He had spoken from a roadside A.A. ’phone cabin, so once he had left it there was no way of communicating further.

  The usual thing would have been to ring up the nearest constable and order him to report. But there was something rather queer about this story of a case filled with bank-notes having been picked up in so lonely a spot and Christopherson himself had seemed to think so, for he had asked that an officer of experience should be sent. Besides, decisive factor, Bobby, with a flash of lightning insight, had seen that here was a chance to get away from his eternal office work for an hour or two in the open air.

  “I had better spare the time to run out myself and see if there’s anything in it,” he had said with an air of annoyance and impatience that deceived no one. “Not likely, but you can never tell.”

  After all, these are strange days when strange things happen. And when someone suggested that perhaps the bank-notes had been dropped by parachute, Bobby nodded gravely and promised that that possibility would not be forgotten.

  Now looking at that not so small box stuffed with those neatly packed bundles of bank-notes, Bobby was thinking to himself that certainly it had been worth while to come in person. People don’t usually carry about wooden boxes stuffed with bank-notes. If they do, and if the box is lost, one would expect them to be prompt to report the fact. Few would be careless about keeping an eye on so valuable a package or in noticing its disappearance.

  “Where exactly did you find it?” Bobby asked.

  “Two miles south, near the road, in a dry gullet,” Christopherson answered and went on: “Near by there’s what looks like a grave—a new dug grave.”

  CHAPTER II

  THE GRAVE

  THE WORDS CAME SO slowly, so quietly, almost so indifferently from this big, slow, tranquil man, that for a moment or two Bobby could only stare blankly, hardly knowing what significance to attach to them. Then he said questioningly:

  “A grave?”

  Christopherson did not answer. It seemed that having said a thing once, he saw no necessity to repeat it.

  “Why do you think it’s a grave?” Bobby asked.

  “It is long and narrow and newly dug in a hidden place,” Christopherson answered. He paused, seemed to hesitate, and continued: “After dark yesterday, about seven or eight, I think, Rachel heard something that may have been a pistol shot. At the time she thought it was a lorry backfiring. She thought she heard voices, shouting. She told me when I came in. I took a lantern and went to see if help was needed. A breakdown or an accident, I thought. There was no one, but I found that.” He lifted a hand towards the box of bank-notes and resumed: “When I saw what was in it, I went to the road ’phone box to let the police know. It must have been nearly ten by then. This morning I went to look again. There are marks on the road and on the turf near.”

  A good witness, Bobby thought. Able both to observe and to describe. All the essentials given and nothing omitted. Or—was nothing omitted? A policeman learns to accept no story at face value and Bobby had not yet made up his mind what to think of this quiet, slow-moving man. ‘Still waters run deep,’ he remembered, and difficult to know what such ‘stillness’ may conceal in its depths. He said:

  “What sort of marks do you mean?”

  “Confused. Footprints. Tyre tracks. But it rained in the night and they are hard to make out.”

  That much was true anyhow, for Bobby remembered having been wakened by the heavy pelting of the rain. For a little he had lain awake listening to it and then had slept again.

  “Is Rachel your daughter?” he asked. “Is she the young lady I saw as we came through the house?”

  “She is my daughter, she is young, she is not a lady,” Christopherson answered.

  “I suppose,” commented Bobby, “that in the Brains Trust Professor Joad would say that depended on what you mean by a lady. Anyhow, she was doing a lady’s job—lady means kneader of bread, you know.”

  Christopherson received this piece of information in silence. Bobby, who had spoken while trying to make up his mind what to think of the landlord of the Conqueror Inn and of what he had just said, fell silent too.

  “I think first of all we had better count this money,” he said finally. “I’ll give you a receipt for it and then I’ll get you to show me where you found it and what you say looks like a grave.”

  “I will be in the yard when you are ready,” Christopherson said. “I have work to do.”

  “I think you had better stay till the money’s counted, hadn’t you?” Bobby suggested.

  “Why?”

  “Well, for one thing, to make sure that it is counted correctly.”

  “That is your business, not mine,” Christopherson answered.

  “The receipt I shall have to give is very much your business, isn’t it?” Bobby asked, but Christopherson shook his head, and turned towards the door.

  “There is no need for a receipt,” he said. “You have the money. What else is necessary?”

  Bobby, faintly puzzled, looked again at the big, quiet man. He could not decide whether such apparent simplicity was genuine or whether it was a pose assumed for some hidden purpose. Yet what that purpose could be, he was unable to imagine. He said:

  “Suppose there’s a thousand pounds here—and I should guess there’s all that, perhaps more—and I said there was only nine hundred, you might be asked what had become of the other hundred when we find the owner.”

  “I could only say I did not know,” Christopherson answered. “If you mean, as I think you do, that I should protect myself against your cheating, how can I help what you do? It is you who must answer for your actions, not I.” He opened the door and on the threshold turned to repeat: “I shall be in the yard when you are ready.”

  Bobby listened to his slow, firm step retreating along the whitewashed stone passage towards the kitchen.

  “What are you to make of a chap like that?” Bobby asked himself doubtfully. “Either too simple and too innocent for this world or too deep and too cunning for any world whatever.”

  He set himself to his task of counting the notes and presently made the t
otal an even £2,000. He replaced the lid, nailed it, wrote out the receipt Mr. Christopherson had scorned and left it on the table, and then went into the kitchen. The bread-making had progressed. The loaves were nearly ready for an oven heated by the peat the elder woman had worked to a glowing mass by the aid of her bellows. Bobby said:

  “I am sorry to trouble you, but could you give me some cord or stout string to tie round this?”

  He had spoken to the girl, Rachel. She lifted her eyes from the dough she was shaping to a loaf and for the first time, from eyes dark and deep as the night, looked at him steadily and long, and though he was not sure he thought there was both fear and challenge in her gaze. He returned it with one as steady and as searching as her own, and when presently she looked away he felt somehow as though issue had been joined between them. If that were so, then he felt, too, that such an issue whatever it might be, for whatever cause, would not be lightly fought or swiftly won. Turning her attention again to the dough on the board before her, she said to the older woman the one word:

  “Mother.”

  Apparently between themselves this family practised the same economy of words. Mrs. Christopherson put down the bellows, went to a drawer, came back with a length of cord and put it down by Bobby’s hand. He said “Thank you” and just caught the glance she gave him as she turned away. No mistaking what that quick look signified. A passion of fear and dread and anger, so great he wondered how she could control it, so great he was certain it would burst forth immediately. He waited, expectant; and Rachel looked up quickly and seemed to understand, for, again beyond doubt, there was quick and urgent warning in her voice when she repeated the one word she had uttered before:

  “Mother.”

  Strange to see how utterly, how completely, that fire of dread and passion in the older woman seemed to die down and vanish at the sound of the girl’s warning voice. As instantaneously as the glow and fire of an electric furnace dies when the current is switched off. But that, as with the electric furnace, it could be switched on again as swiftly, Bobby had no doubt. He noticed that she had not returned to her bellows but now was fumbling among some knives that lay on the kitchen dresser. She selected one and went out of the room. Bobby tied the cord given him round the box of notes. Then he said to the girl:

  “You are Miss Rachel Christopherson, are you not?”

  She made a slight affirmative gesture, without ceasing her work. It was the last of the dough she was busy with now, shaping it in her strong brown hands. Bobby watched the lump of dough taking its final form. Rachel seemed to be paying him no attention. She might have forgotten he was there for all the apparent notice she took of him. Yet none the less, he thought he could perceive a certain tension in her, an acute awareness of his presence. He wondered why. Already, by the habit of his profession, he had tried to notice everything in the room and so far had seen nothing out of the way. Now he looked again, searching, inclined to believe there must be something somewhere to explain the sense of strain he was so conscious of. His glance rested on the window. He went across to it. Rachel had just that instant put the last of her loaves in the oven. She stood up sharply and said as sharply:

  “What are you looking at?”

  “At this,” he answered and pointed to the window pane. A small piece of the glass had been cut out just above the catch and had been as carefully replaced. Looking more carefully and closely he could see traces of a sticky substance on the glass and guessed the old trick had been played of placing in position a strong piece of paper smeared with some adhesive, so as to avoid the risk of the cut out piece falling and breaking with resultant noise. He said: “It looks as though someone had cut a hole there. You could put your hand through and release the catch. I’ve seen that trick played before now. In London. Skilled burglary. An old hand’s work. Have you had a burglary here?”

  She stood tense and upright and did not speak. More than ever those great eyes of hers seemed dark pools of night against the pallor of her face, a pallor that showed even beneath the wholesome tan of wind and rain. She did not speak. Watching her, and more and more puzzled, he repeated:

  “An old hand’s work. Have you had a burglary here?”

  “What is that to do with you?” she asked, and her voice was low and harsh and indistinct.

  “Well, I’m a policeman, you know,” he answered mildly.

  “That’s no reason for peeping and prying,” she told him.

  “When people complain of police peeping and prying, it generally means they have something to conceal,” he answered. “Have you something to conceal?”

  She came towards him, came quite close. Upright, pale, controlled, intense, she stood and faced him. For a moment they stood thus, like two duellists. A moment of strange and silent drama, instinct with a sense of mystery and passion of which Bobby at least understood nothing, nothing at all. She said in the same low, half-strangled tone:

  “You have no right to ask me questions. Will you please go?”

  “I am here by your father’s request and on public duty,” Bobby told her.

  “Your duty,” she flashed back, “is not to meddle with things that don’t concern you.”

  “Well, that’s the whole question, isn’t it?” he retorted in his turn. “You see, what does not concern me as a man, may be very much my concern as an officer of police. And when strange things seem to be happening, they may turn out to be connected.” He put his hand on the box of bank-notes he had just corded up. “There’s this,” he said, “and I understand you heard a pistol shot last night.”

  He had the impression that this slight change of subject relieved her considerably. She answered in a more normal tone:

  “I heard something. I thought it was an engine backfiring. That is all.”

  “Very well,” he said gently. “All the same I think you are in trouble and I think it has something to do with that window and I think you would be wise to tell me what it is. Because, you know, that’s what police are for. To help, to protect. Our job.”

  She shook her head.

  “God may help us,” she said very softly, “but not you, not police.”

  CHAPTER III

  HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY

  WHEN SHE HAD said this she gave him a startled look as if both surprised and alarmed at her own words, and turned and went suddenly and quickly out of the room. It seemed she felt she had said too much and that she was afraid of saying more. Something not far removed from despair had sounded in that last cry of hers. Yet it seemed to Bobby difficult to associate her with hidden secrets that would not bear the light of day; so fresh, open, and candid was the impression she had made on him. Experience reminded him though that the most unlikely people may be betrayed by passion or by circumstance into strange paths, and that if a woman’s affections or her sympathies are engaged there is nothing she will shrink from.

  It came into his mind that if this story of a grave were true, and if murder had been done, then possibly Rachel might know the murderer’s identity, might even have consented to give him ‘aid and comfort.’ He might even be concealed somewhere beneath this very roof.

  But at this point in his meditations Bobby checked himself. He was letting his imagination run away with him. If murder had been done and the girl—or her parents—knew it, and had given the murderer shelter, was it conceivable they would have called in the police and started an investigation obviously certain to include themselves? Besides, if it were like that, how to fit in that forcible entry of which the patched window bore witness?

  Bobby rubbed the tip of his nose as if he wanted to rub it clean away. He abandoned that pastime, picked up his precious box of bank-notes, and went into the yard. No one was visible; but almost at once Mr. Christopherson appeared from one of the outbuildings, and Bobby noticed, too, that someone was watching from behind the curtains of one of the upper windows of the house. Mrs. Christopherson, he thought, not Rachel. He said to Mr. Christopherson:

  “If you are ready we
might as well go now. Perhaps we had better take a spade if you’ve got one handy.”

  Christopherson went back into the shed he had just left and came out with a spade and a pick. Bobby said:

  “Your place faces east, doesn’t it? And your kitchen due south?”

  Christopherson nodded an affirmative. Bobby continued:

  “The heavy rain last night came from the north, I believe? A driving rain with a strong north wind?”

  Again Christopherson, now looking a little puzzled, nodded in agreement. He said:

  “It is high open ground where I found the box. Spigot’s Slope it’s called.”

  “Get the full force of the gale,” Bobby observed. “Bad enough to call a gale?”

  Once more Christopherson nodded agreement, but his eyes had grown not only puzzled but wary. Plainly he guessed there was some hidden reason for these questions and he was uneasy. Bobby tried the direct approach. He asked:

  “Who is the man who broke into your house the other night and what did he want?”

  The effect on Christopherson of this question reminded Bobby of that seen in the boxing ring when a sudden and unexpected blow gets well home. Christopherson, that calm, tranquil, self-reliant man, who seemed as elemental and eternal as the earth and sky, took a staggering step back, changed colour, stammered in a voice entirely changed:

  “Who told you? how do you know?”

  Questions Bobby had no intention of answering. As a judge should give his decisions, which may be right, but never his reasons, which are probably wrong, so a detective should state his facts, when he has them, but never his methods, which may be inexcusable or worse. So all his answer was to ask again: