Four Strange Women Page 2
He brought the name out so shyly and yet with such deep pride that Bobby’s heart warmed to him. A kind of wondering delight was all about him as he spoke, as though even to himself the thing still seemed incredible. He said presently, his low voice now like a chant of gratitude and praise:—
“Me with my mug and she as lovely as the dawn.”
So she might be, Bobby thought, but she lacked the one essential all the same—she wasn’t Olive and never could be. Not that the name, Gwen Barton, meant anything to him. A pretty chorus girl, very likely, only there had been a depth in Lord Henry’s voice that had set in him sympathetic chords vibrating. Now, though, he did remember vaguely recent news items about the well known polo player, Lord Henry Darmoor, second son of Lord Whitfield, having found the expense of financing the Whitfield polo team too heavy and having decided to withdraw from the game.
“Giving it up now though,” said Lord Henry. “Engaged, you know, and all that.”
“You haven’t come here at this time to talk about that, have you?” Bobby asked.
“Cripes, no. It’s about Billy Baird.”
“Who is he?”
“Pal of mine. We were in the sixth together. He went up to Balliol. They wouldn’t have me, but Billy and I stopped pals all the same. He is going in for politics now after a spell at banking. Standing at next election for some god-forsaken London suburb, and the other day went caravanning on his own.”
“Why shouldn’t he?” Bobby asked. “If there is a point, please get to it. If there isn’t—”
“Get out,” interposed Darmoor, to show he knew what Bobby meant. “Don’t get shirty, old man,” he begged in those organ-like notes of his. “You know what it is when you’re engaged. You are, too, aren’t you?” he added hurriedly as Bobby looked more impatient than ever. “Gwen says she doesn’t half like it. You see, she knew poor old Byatt, you know, Viscount Byatt of Byatt, and she says it’s all happening again just the same way.”
“Byatt?” Bobby repeated. There had come into the other’s voice as he pronounced the name a note that even against Bobby’s better judgment impressed him with a curious sense of dread and of foreboding. He began to search his memory. “There was something—a year or two ago,” he said. “Wasn’t there?”
“Found dead in his car,” Lord Henry’s deep, expressive voice replied. “Right away in the middle of Dartmoor. No one knew what he was doing there. Not the usual exhaust pipe business. Car all right. Nothing to show cause of death. Just dead. That was all. Been dead a week or two before he was found, the doctors said. He left piles of money but he had been getting rid of a whole lot and nothing to show how or why.”
“There was an inquest?” Bobby asked.
“The last time he was seen,” Lord Henry went on, “was at a night club. Well known place. The ‘Cut and Come Again’. You chaps raid it sometimes, but you’ve never got anything on it.”
“No,” agreed Bobby. “I know the place. What about the inquest?”
“He was at the ‘Cut and Come Again’ with a Miss Hazel Hannay. They had supper and danced. He drove her home. He was never seen again till they found him way out on Dartmoor.”
“The inquest?” Bobby asked once more.
“Wash out,” answered Lord Henry briefly. “Just said there was nothing to show what had happened.”
“Who is Miss Hannay?”
“Then there was Andy White,” Lord Henry went on, unheeding this question, too, as seemed to be his habit, perhaps because he was so intent on what he wished to say that questions made small impression on his mind. “Rich bloke. In the millionaire class or thereabouts. You know. White’s Fish Cakes, White’s Pocket Vitamins, all sorts of dodges like that. Andy’s old man started the show. Andy himself played a jolly good game—polo I mean, in goal. That’s how I knew him. They found him in a cottage miles from everywhere in Wales. Nothing to show what he was doing there. Nothing to show what killed him. Been dead a month, the doctors said. Or more. Nasty business. Rats and all that, you know. Door had been left open. No sign of violence. No trace of poison. No disease. He had been getting rid of pots of money, too, buying jewellery and that sort of thing. One extra swell necklace was worth a fortune, twelve or fifteen thousand.”
“What did he do with it?” Bobby asked.
“No one knows. No trace of it. An uncle or someone heard of it, though, asked him what he was up to, splashing his money about like that. He said it was a present for Lady May Grayson. Lady May sticks to it she never had a thing from him—friendly they were all right, she says, but nothing more, and anyhow she didn’t take presents like that from her friends. She’s rather a night club bird and often at the ‘Cut and Come Again’. She used to dance with Andy there sometimes. No one knows exactly when Andy went off to his Welsh cottage, so no one knows who saw him last.”
“I remember the case,” Bobby said. “We were notified he was missing, but we didn’t handle it except in the usual routine manner. It only looked like a rich young Mayfair playboy going off on his own affairs. Afterwards the Welsh police dealt with it. I don’t remember this Lady What’s-her-name being mentioned.”
“Lady May Grayson. No. They kept her name out of it. Her old man’s the Earl of Merefield. Old family, big pot in his way, owns castles and things all over the show, but hasn’t a penny to bless himself with. All mortgaged up to the hilt or else tied up in settlements or something. Lady May doesn’t do so badly herself though. Gets photographed smoking somebody’s cigarettes or washing herself with somebody’s soap and a whacking big cheque for it. Two or three of her photos were in the cottage. Nothing much in that. Lots of her photos about—she’ll always sit for one if she’s paid enough. The photo goes in the weeklies and the man who took it gets known. A woman had been seen there—at the cottage, I mean. No one had seen her close enough to say anything. No one lived very near. One story said she was tall, another that she was short and another that she wore a mask. There was something about her coming on a motor bike, too, but no one was very clear about that or anything else. There you are.”
Now the name had been brought to his memory, Bobby recollected enough of Lady May, prominent as she was in society circles, to know that she was a tall woman. Divinely tall, a daughter of the gods, and so on, were epithets no self-respecting writer of a gossip column ever failed to use in speaking of her.
“Who is the Miss—Hazel Hannay, was it?—you mentioned before?” he asked.
“Daughter of General Sir Harold Hannay with a string of letters a mile long after his name. Her mother’s dead. Two or three brothers all abroad. Their place is Crossfields, just outside Midwych. He’s chairman or something of the Wychshire Watch Committee. She’s pally with Lady May. Gwen says they like to go about together, because of being an effective contrast. She’s tall and dark, and the other, Lady May I mean, she’s tall and fair. Colonel Glynne is a neighbour of the Hannays. I believe their grounds touch or something. Old Glynne has a daughter, too, Becky Glynne. Becky and Hazel Hannay play a good deal of tennis together, Gwen says.”
Bobby sat up abruptly. He had been wondering where all this long rambling tale was getting to; he would have cut it short long ago but for a note of urgency, even of alarm, he seemed to be aware of in his visitor’s deep, rolling tones. But now abruptly he saw deep water ahead, and it flashed with absolute conviction into his mind that here was the explanation of why he had been offered what on the face of it had seemed so easy, so comfortable, so snug, so altogether desirable an appointment. Colonel Glynne was looking for no assistance in his everyday routine, for no aid in that football pools suppression campaign of his, for no suitable young man to be trained in his methods to carry on in the same way after his own death or retirement. Now it seemed to Bobby that the offer he had received was like a cry for help from one who felt the powers of darkness encompassing him around. Bobby was silent. Darmoor got up and went to the window where again he raised the blind, signalled with his hands, lowered the blind, returned to his place.
“Poor old Gwen’s been waiting there for hours,” he said. “That was just to tell her that now we shan’t be long.”
“I don’t think I caught the lady’s other name,” Bobby remarked, thinking to himself that she must be a meek, self-effacing little person to be willing to wait so long out there, so patiently.
“Barton, Gwen Barton,” Darmoor answered, with again that note of shy adoration in his voice. “It was partly her idea, my coming here. Last new hat she bought, she heard all about it. I mean all about how Miss Farrar was giving up because you and she were getting spliced now you had got a job in Midwych and how the assistant—she talked Gwen into paying twice what she had meant to give, and Gwen hasn’t too much of the ready, and she never runs bills—how she was going to carry on the business, and she told Gwen all about it, and how you were seeing Colonel Glynne to-morrow to fix it all up, and then Miss Farrar would join you, only that didn’t mean the shop was going to shut down.”
“But why did Miss Barton want you to tell me all this at this time of night?” Bobby asked. “You understand I shall have to report to Colonel Glynne, to Scotland Yard as well. They may want to see both you and Miss Barton.”
“That’s O.K. with us,” his visitor answered. “There’s nothing more, only Billy Baird.”
“What about him?”
“Well, we’re pals, you see, me and Billy,” Lord Henry explained; and if his rich, deep tones that seemed almost a language in themselves, did not now tremble with the deep adoration that before had vibrated in every syllable, yet none the less they showed a deep and genuine emotion, “we’ve been pals ever since we were kids at the same prep school. It was through Billy I met Gwen. Gwen likes him, too.”
He paused. Bobby, looking at him, saw that he had become a little pale, saw that enormous mouth of his quiver at the corners, saw a small bead of perspiration trickle down the side of his nose and hang there, ridiculously suspended. Why, Bobby did not know, but the close air of the room seemed filled suddenly with dark and strange forebodings, and the shadows in the corners, as it were, to hide monstrous and incredible things. He said sharply, for he knew well there was more to come:—
“Yes. Well?”
The answer came almost in a whisper, yet every syllable full and clear.
“First there was Byatt and then there was Andy White and now Gwen thinks that perhaps Billy is going the same way.”
CHAPTER II
ACCIDENTAL
Bobby remembered ruefully that Olive had sent him home with strict injunctions to get a good night’s rest so as to be sure to be looking his very best and brightest for his forthcoming interview with Colonel Glynne. It was fortunate that the arrangement was for him to dine at the colonel’s house in the evening—‘so that we can make each other’s acquaintance’, the colonel had written—and for the formal interview to take place the next morning. He could therefore leave London by a comparatively late train, so that he would be able to lie late in bed, provided, that is, he ever got there, which was beginning to seem to him increasingly doubtful.
“Miss Barton is waiting outside, you said, didn’t you?” he asked. “Will you ask her to come in for a moment?”
“Right-oh,” responded Lord Henry with alacrity, making for the door, and on the way knocking over a chair with a crash that Bobby fully expected would bring an indignant and protesting landlady on the scene.
In the hall Lord Henry fell over the door mat, got the door open, called in what he meant for a whisper but that sounded like the leader of community singing giving out an announcement:—“I say, Gwen, old girl, can you come in for half a sec?”
Further sounds suggested that Lord Henry had fallen either up or down the front door steps; and Bobby was a little glad to think he was leaving and would not have to face the reproaches of his landlady and his fellow lodgers over a nocturnal disturbance that was beginning to sound like a minor air raid. Then Lord Henry returned, ushering in a small, reluctant figure in a neat, close-fitting tweed costume.
Bobby somehow had been expecting someone of what is called the ‘glamour’ type. His first impression now was of a shy, hesitating, rather ordinary-looking girl, not noticeable in any way except for the unusual pallor of her complexion. She did not seem to be much made up, except that her lips were unnaturally crimson. Like a small curved splash of red they showed against that strangely pale skin, and behind them he caught a glimpse of two rows of white, regular teeth, small and pointed. Her features seemed to him small, regular, undistinguished; and when she came into the room she gave him first a shy, embarrassed, almost apologetic smile, and then seemed to be trying to efface herself in a corner of the room, as if offering mute apology for being there at all. Bobby was aware of a momentary amusement as he contrasted this timid, insignificant little figure with the almost passionate adoration Lord Henry’s tones had managed to convey. Strange, he felt, that a girl whose presence could be so easily forgotten, as he indeed was already almost forgetting it, could awake so much devotion. He remembered vaguely a case he had once heard of in which a man of experience and social standing had fallen wildly in love with a little typist who struck everyone else as entirely insignificant, who had entirely failed to understand the man’s passion, who had indeed been merely frightened by it, so scared, in fact, that finally she had disappeared in a panic, whereon the man had committed suicide. Apparently this was a similar case, with the fortunate exception that Gwen Barton, whether she understood or not, appeared at any rate to be accepting the devotion offered her. Bobby hoped it would not turn out badly, that she would have sufficient character and self-control to live up to the part for which she had been cast, though he was not sure that the frightened air with which she seemed to wish to hide herself in the nearest corner was altogether promising in that respect. But Lord Henry had no idea of letting her efface herself like that.
“Now then, Gwen,” he said, “don’t look so scared even if Owen is a policeman.”
She came forward then, and Bobby noticed that she moved with an unusual, silent speed and certainty, hovering for a moment in her corner as if afraid to issue from it, and then across the room and by his side almost before he knew she had moved. Lord Henry muttered the usual formula of introduction, and she held out a small hand with long, curved, pointed crimson-tinted nails—coloured finger nails being apparently the only concession apart from the use of her brightly-coloured lipstick, she made to the prevailing craze for cosmetics, since the thin, almost transparent pallor of her skin seemed untouched by powder or rouge. Hitherto he had not noticed her eyes, hidden behind heavy, half-closed lids, and now when she looked up at him he thought how dull and almost lifeless they seemed, and yet with a pin point of light somewhere safely tucked away in their dark depths as if at any moment they might blaze into sudden, unexpected life. He took her hand and felt a kind of heat run through him from her grip, as from equally unexpected hidden fires. The vigour of that grip told him, too, that for all her slight build she possessed plenty of strength, nervous though, perhaps, rather than muscular. Something unusual about her, Bobby thought, if only one could find it out, but whatever it was, probably explaining and no doubt justifying the evident depth and sincerity of Lord Henry’s devotion. Now his deep voice boomed out:—
“Beauty and the Beast, eh? that’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?”
Bobby wasn’t thinking anything of the sort, for ‘beauty’ was the last epithet he would have thought of applying to Gwen Barton. ‘Ordinary, insignificant, commonplace’ were more appropriate adjectives, he thought, except for that hint of something hidden in her, ‘burning bright’ within, as it were, that no doubt explained Lord Henry’s—‘infatuation’, was the word that came to Bobby but he felt it so obviously unfair that hurriedly he changed it in his mind to ‘passion’. Gwen was saying in her quiet little voice:—
“I’ve heard such a lot about you, Mr. Owen. At darling Olive’s. The girls there can’t talk of anything else; only when they stop, you find yo
u’ve spent twice as much as you meant to. Only you don’t mind, because they always find something to suit you better than you ever thought anything could.”
Bobby was not pleased. He knew enough of the powers and capacities of Olive’s head assistant to believe what Gwen said, and he did not wish to think of himself as a selling point in a campaign for more and better and ever dearer hats. He said:—
“Miss Barton, Lord Henry tells me—”
He paused abruptly. He had hardly seen her move, and yet now she was back across the room at Lord Henry’s side. As she reached him she looked up at him, and he, though brought up in all that tradition of restraint and self-control so strong in the British governing class, went pale and was visibly shaken. There was indeed as it were a flame of passion passing between the two of them that quite startled Bobby. She seemed to feel this, for abruptly she veiled her eyes behind those dark lashes of hers and those heavy lids, and then turned and facing Bobby again seemed once more to be the small, pale, hesitating ordinary-looking young woman she had appeared on her first entrance. She said softly:—
“Mr. Owen, if ever I tell this stupid boy I won’t have anything more to do with him, it’ll be because he will keep on about Beauty and the Beast. I’m no May Grayson, worse luck, and if Harry’s a beast, he’s rather a nice one. Only if he keeps on calling himself one, I shall make him wear a collar and chain and go about on his hands and knees.”
“Right-oh,” said Lord Henry, and promptly dropped on hands and knees at her feet. “Anything you say.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, get up,” she told him sharply, yet with a note in her voice that showed, Bobby thought, she was gratified by his prompt obedience. “Mr. Owen, isn’t he just too silly?”
“Lord Henry has been telling me,” Bobby said, unheeding this and thinking it was time to get to the point, “that you are disturbed about a friend of his. Will you please tell me why? You know, of course, that I am a police-officer. I believe that is why you’ve come?”