There's a Reason for Everything: A Bobby Owen Mystery Page 5

  “Oh, Alf,” said Mrs. Bailey. “He didn’t mean it that way, sir,” she explained anxiously to Bobby.

  “That’s all right,” Bobby said, smiling at her. “We can’t help our voices, and we can’t all be B.B.C. announcers.” He hoped this small attempt at a joke would help to put the Baileys more at their ease, but it missed fire completely. They merely accepted it as a plain, if somewhat irrelevant, statement of fact. He went on: “It comes to this. Someone knocked, said he was Jones, handed back the key, said he was going. But it was dark, you didn’t see him clearly, you can’t be sure it was the same voice you had only heard once before. Isn’t that so?”

  “That’s right,” answered Bailey. “What’s it all about?”

  “Could anyone else have been in the house without you knowing?”

  “I don’t see how,” Bailey answered. “It’s all locked up, windows boarded, doors bolted, all except the side door I use when I sweep up every week, according to orders, and have a look round, and no one hasn’t had the key, except Mr. Jones as brought it back—if it was him,” he added doubtfully. “There hasn’t been no one else except that other gent a week ago or thereabouts.”

  “Who was that?”

  “A gent what had come to have a look at them statues. He had a letter from the agents, hadn’t he, Marty?” Mrs. Bailey, thus appealed to, nodded an assent. “Very interesting they was, he said, and took long enough about it, too, so as I went up to see, in case of him having done a bunk with the key and there being only the one. But he was there all right, though I had to knock quite a time before he come along, him being so stuck on them there statues, which is more than I am, them being like ghosts you more than half expect to come walking after you.”

  “Do you know his name?” Bobby asked.

  Bailey didn’t. It was on the agent’s card, but he had forgotten it. But Mrs. Bailey did remember that it was ‘Marmaduke’ something. She had forgotten the surname, too, but she was sure the first name was ‘Marmaduke’, it being ‘funny like’ and staying in her mind.

  The soi-disant art expert again, Bobby thought with immense contempt. An art expert who had to spend time examining those deplorable specimens of sculpture when anyone who knew anything at all could see at the first glance that they were mere rubbish. But what could you expect from an art expert who was also an ‘Honourable’? Or—a new idea struck him. Was it possible that this ‘Marmaduke’ of the unknown surname had had some other reason for so prolonged an inspection of the obvious? Was he perhaps not an incompetent ‘Honourable’—and this time Bobby pronounced that unlucky word with less contempt than before—but instead a perfectly competent crook? Only what could attract any crook to pay a visit to an uninhabited, unfurnished house like Nonpareil? Something to think about there, Bobby decided. He asked a few more questions. Had ‘Marmaduke’ given his address? No. Had the Baileys kept the card from the agents he had shown? No. Had he said if he was remaining on in the vicinity? No. The only piece of information that came out from a fairly close examination was that when leaving he had asked if the Baileys knew a Major Hardman, and could they give him his address? But they had never heard of any Major Hardman.

  “What’s it all about?” Bailey asked, as Bobby fell silent, digesting this information or rather lack of it. “What’s wrong?”

  “If it was Dr. Jones you saw,” Bobby said slowly, “he went back to the house after speaking to you, and how did he get in if he had given you the key? Unless, of course, he had left the door open. Why should he? But he is there now, or at least his dead body is, dead in the picture gallery.”

  CHAPTER VII

  SEARCH

  This information did not seem at first to be fully grasped either by Bailey or by his wife, for indeed knowledge often remains no knowledge till the emotions are as fully possessed by it as is the mind.

  At any rate at first they seemed merely puzzled and surprised; and whether this apparent failure to apprehend the full meaning of what they had been told was genuine or assumed, Bobby could not decide. In any case, there was no time to spare for further explanation or for answering the questions they seemed inclined to put. He did not even stay to look at their identity cards, but told Bailey to accompany him back to the house and Mrs. Bailey to wait for and expect the arrival of a doctor and the return of Payne with help.

  This was not long delayed, and soon all the accustomed routine of such an inquiry was in busy progress. With but little result, for nothing of significance emerged. All the doctor could say was that death had occurred, as Bobby had already remarked, only a comparatively brief time before the discovery of the body; and that the cause was strangulation during unconsciousness caused by a severe blow on the side of the head, delivered by the traditional blunt instrument. As soon as Bobby was satisfied that all necessary steps were being or would be taken, he sent Payne off duty, and for himself sought home and supper and bed. Both of them, he knew, would need all their faculties for what lay before them later on.

  In the morning, as arranged, he and Payne met again at Nonpareil, where, after the completion of the routine work, a constable had remained on duty. Now this man was sent home. Payne had brought with him as many helpers as he could scrape together, six in all, including two secured—per impossibile—from the astonished Superintendent Jenks, so swept off his feet by the audacity of the request that he had put up but a poor resistance.

  Together with Bobby and Payne to help, that made up a total of eight men available for the search of the house and grounds. Four men were assigned to the grounds and outbuildings, together with the—this morning much subdued—caretaker for additional help and guidance. Bobby and Payne chose for themselves the first and ground floors of the house; and, as is the callous way of senior officers, sent off the two remaining constables to search the cellars, an interminable labyrinth of subterranean vaults where neither air nor light penetrated, where the dust and dirt of many months had accumulated, where the cobwebs hung in thick, impenetrable sheets, where rats and mice and spiders went their ways undisturbed. The upper portions of the building were fairly free from dirt and dust, since it was the duty of the Baileys, a duty well and regularly performed, as it seemed, to keep the floors, stairs and passages of the great house properly swept. But the cellars were never visited, and when the two unfortunate constables assigned to their examination did finally emerge again into the upper world, even their seniors could not resist a pang of sympathy.

  “In the force you have to take the rough with the smooth,” Bobby explained to them, words received with respectful lack of appreciation; and he further resolved that if either of them put in an application for leave, it would be considered sympathetically—though probably not granted. Still, he would not at least throw it heatedly and instantly into the waste-paper basket.

  “There’s a locked door down there we couldn’t open. Caretaker said he hadn’t the key,” explained one of the men as he tried to free himself from a wad of cobweb that had somehow slipped down the back of his neck. “He said it had always been locked, and spiders’ webs all over it to show it hadn’t been opened, so we thought it would be all right to leave it. The whole place doesn’t look as if anybody had been there since the year one.”

  Bobby remarked that they would have to get the locked door open, but that could wait for the present, and then sent the two of them off to examine the attics. He and Payne, having completed a careful tour of the ground floor, including a vast, stone-flagged kitchen in which one felt the food must have grown cold even on the journey from oven to door, went up to the first floor, coming soon to that room in which, according to Parkinson’s tale, there had been a stain of fresh blood that then had vanished quite away.

  In this room they removed the boarding from the windows to gain the benefit of the daylight—elsewhere they had been content with their electric torches and the hurricane lamp they carried. They did the same in the next room they entered. Here also there seemed, at first, to reign the same placidity of entire e
mptiness they had found everywhere else, but as the clear light of the day flooded in there showed on the flooring, midway between the fireplace and the windows, a patch in part more fresh and clean, in part more soiled, than elsewhere. They both went to look more closely. Easy enough, then, to see what had happened. The floorboards had first been carefully and thoroughly scraped with some sharp instrument and then dust and dirt rubbed over the place in an effort to conceal what had been done.

  “Parkinson was right enough then,” Bobby remarked. “There was blood on the floor, though in this room, not in the other. Someone has been at a good deal of trouble to hide it. Careful and cunning. Reproduced in the next room the chalk mark, and the precautions taken to seal the door. Even the cigarette ends weren’t forgotten. Quite smart work.”

  “Looks to me…” began Payne, and then paused to look at Bobby for permission to continue, in case Bobby, as the senior, wanted to expound his own views first.

  “Go ahead,” said Bobby, “looks to you…?”

  “Like this,” said Payne. “Jones and Parkinson were mooning round looking for ghosts, and when they saw marks of blood on the floor in here, that’s what they thought. Ghosts, they thought, and they marked it off with chalk, so as to be sure where it was, and went off, meaning to come back and see if the ghosts had been up to anything else they could write a book about. Very excited they were; and, with their heads full of ghosts, never thought of letting us know, probably thinking police and ghosts don’t go together. As they don’t. Jones turned up first, and what he ran into wasn’t any ghosts, but blokes who didn’t want any nosy parkers around, and made sure that what Jones saw he wouldn’t ever tell. That little job had only just been finished when we came along, so they dropped that bust thing to give us something to think about, and if it brained the lot of us, so much the better, while they themselves did a bunk fast as they knew how.”

  “That’s rather what I was thinking, too,” Bobby said. “It does look like that. Only who are ‘they’? And what were they doing Jones saw and they didn’t dare let him tell? And what was going on in an empty house like this?”

  “How about this?” Payne said. “Washing all that out and noticing that Parkinson admits a bit of a quarrel between him and Jones. Suppose there was more to it than that. Very hot some of these literary and learned gentlemen get about things you wouldn’t think mattered two hoots to anyone with any sense. Suppose words came to blows, as words do at times, and suppose Parkinson laid Jones out, not exactly meaning to, but just in the way of argument. Then he gets scared at what he has done, makes sure Jones won’t ever tell and get him disgraced with all his learned friends. So he pushes the body away where we found it, and that’s the way it was.”

  “I had something of the sort in my own mind,” Bobby agreed again. “Not quite like that, but on the same lines. I don’t know that it fits everywhere, though.”

  “Things often don’t at the start,” Payne said.

  “True enough,” Bobby agreed for the third time. “Anyhow, we’ll check up on where Parkinson went while I was at the Civil Defence meeting, and why he didn’t wait at the club as arranged. One more thing, though. We mustn’t forget the shot Major Hardman and Reed say they heard. Shots sometimes result in bloodstains.”

  “But that was a good two miles from here,” Payne protested. “Can’t be any connection, can there?”

  “There might be,” Bobby answered thoughtfully. “Pistol shot heard there. Blood found here. And now a dead man. All one series? What do you think? Coincidence? I never did like coincidence.”

  “Coincidences happen,” said Payne, a proposition none can dispute.

  They continued their search, but found nothing more of interest, no indication of any sort or kind to show what had really taken place or what had caused the tragic death of Dr. Jones. The two constables had also completed their search of the attics, where they were certain none before themselves had penetrated for months, even years, so thickly lay so undisturbed the dust. For to the attics, it seemed, the caretaker and his wife had no instructions to extend their weekly sweepings.

  “Time to have something to eat,” Bobby announced.

  They had brought some provender with them, supplied by the canteen at headquarters. By this time, too, the party dispatched to search the grounds, not very extensive for a house this size, had completed their task, and returned, reporting nothing of interest.

  “Except this,” one of the party said, producing a heavy walking-stick with a solid silver-mounted handle, quite a formidable weapon in its way. “It was lying in some bushes, and hadn’t been there so very long, either.”

  Bobby asked who had found it, and was told the caretaker, Bailey, had noticed light reflected from the silver mounting.

  “Some weight there,” remarked Payne, who had been examining it with considerable interest. “You could give a K.O. with that all right.”

  Bobby, too, was thinking that here, perhaps, was the instrument that had been used to knock senseless the unfortunate psychical researcher before the final act of strangulation. Probably tests would decide whether that were so or not.

  “Polished surface, sir,” one of the constables said. “Take dabs all right, and we’ve handled it carefully.”

  “That was sensible of you,” Bobby commended them, but without any marked enthusiasm.

  “If Bailey’s dabs are there,” objected Payne, “what’s the good if it was him found it, and perhaps knowing where to look?”

  “That’s another idea,” Bobby remarked. “I expect Bailey’s will be there all right enough—and, as you say, we’re not much farther forward if they are.”

  “Professionals in it somewhere,” Payne pronounced next. “They know their way about all right, whoever it is. Gloves, to stop leaving dabs. Knew enough to give a door a look over to see if it had been fixed. Don’t you think, sir,” he added directly to Bobby, “it might be as well to get Bailey’s dabs, and see if he has a record?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Bobby answered. “Nothing much against him yet. Except his looks. Deceptive things, though—looks. No authority to take his dabs, either.”

  “We could put it to him,” Payne suggested, wondering vaguely why Bobby seemed so indifferent to so obvious a suggestion. “Press him a bit. If he stuck out, well, ask him why? Besides,” added Payne, “there’s ways and means.” When Bobby still shook his head at these suggestions, Payne, a trifle annoyed, added: “Well, anyway, they’re very likely on the walking-stick.”

  “‘Very likely’ not good enough,” said Bobby. “No harm, though, in letting our dabs man have a go.”

  Their meal they had all had in common was over now, and the men had dispersed here and there on one errand or another or just for a quiet gossip away from the two senior officers. Payne, a good deal puzzled by Bobby’s lack of interest in Bailey’s ‘dabs’, went away to speak to those who had been engaged in the outdoor search and came back looking excited.

  “Bailey never touched the stick,” he said. “Took care not to. Called our men to show it them, and only they handled it. And now he’s there in the room where he keeps his brooms and cleaning stuff. It’s off the passage where we came in, and he’s as busy there as you like. What do you think he’s doing?”

  Bobby, whose night’s rest had been short, indulged in a terrific yawn.

  “Most likely,” he said, his yawn completed, “giving things a rub over to make sure he’s left no dabs for nosy police to work upon.”

  “That’s right, so he is,” agreed Payne, disappointed that Bobby had guessed first time. “Doesn’t it smell to you, sir?”

  “Oh, yes,” agreed Bobby. “Only what of?”

  CHAPTER VIII

  FOOTSTEPS

  It was to The Tulips, the residence of Major Hardman, that Bobby took himself next, and thither he decided to go alone, for he did not, at this present stage of the inquiry, wish to draw attention to the Hon. Marmaduke, of the unknown surname, who had paid a doubtful visit to Nonpareil
and left inquiring for Major Hardman’s address. Quite possibly the illusive Marmaduke might be a perfectly innocent, if evidently incompetent, dabbler in art matters, and probably as incompetent in everything else as well, as Bobby was convinced, in his bones, all ‘honourables’—ridiculous title—must necessarily be.

  He knocked and the door was opened by a tall, ungainly, somewhat untidy young woman, with large, irregular features, large hands and feet, and a countenance less made up than is usual in these days when paint and powder, and lots of ’em, is regarded as beauty’s secret. This young woman’s tribute to fashion seemed to be confined to her hair, of a reddish-brown tint, arranged in as an elaborate a permanent wave set up as Bobby had ever seen. Her voice was deep and harsh for a woman’s, and her manner was not too agreeable as she admitted Bobby and undertook to inform her uncle, Major Hardman, of his arrival.

  The Tulips was not a large house, eight or nine rooms in all, perhaps. The one into which Bobby had been shown was evidently the dining-room, and was as commonplace and ordinary an apartment as Bobby had ever seen. Nothing in it to give the least clue to the tastes, the habits, or the personalities of its inhabitants. It had a well-kept appearance, though, and Bobby supposed that the young woman he had seen must be a capable housekeeper, by exception more inclined, it might seem, to give attention to her household duties than to her personal appearance. One thing at least was certain. She was not the owner of the size four shoe found on the path that led through the forest from the high road past the new bungalows to the village. This stalwart, bigly-made young person probably took a No. 7 shoe or even a No. 8, for that matter.