“Yes, it had to, hadn’t it?” Longton said bitterly. “I thought it was Bill.”
“Who is Bill?”
“The bloke who wrote the stuff I’m trying to lick into shape for the theatre,” Longton explained, investing this last word as always with almost religious significance. “What’s it all about? Why had you got to come along just when I’m beginning to get things straight?”
“In every murder investigation every minute may count—does count,” Bobby told him.
“Oh, well, I don’t see how I can help,” Longton grumbled. “I hardly knew the poor devil.”
“It’s partly that I wanted to ask you about,” Bobby explained. “A very little information may mean a good deal.”
He went across the room to where by the window stood a small table. By it was an overturned chair. On the table was a child’s toy theatre, on its stage and nearby various small toy soldiers. Unfortunately, when Longton, unable to bear any longer Bobby’s rhythmic thumping on the door and his handle rattling, had leaped into action, he had not only overturned his chair, but had also upset his careful arrangement of his toy soldiers, all placed in their appropriate places to illustrate the action of the play.
Longton had followed Bobby to the window. He picked up the chair and then swept his little soldiers together.
“Got to start again from scratch,” he complained, “just when I was beginning to see how I could get rid of two characters altogether and at the same time improve the dramatic sequence.” He smiled happily. “Bill will go pretty well of his head. All these authors always swear anything you have to cut is the best thing in the script. What do they care if cutting a character means cutting the salary list, too? Or if cutting a scene means letting the audience out in time for a drink and supper before going home? Expenses mean nothing to them, and Bill had the cold cheek to tell me audiences were the curse of the theatre. I should say—authors.”
“Would anyone suggest producers?” Bobby asked.
Longton pondered. Then he shook his head.
“No,” he decided. “I don’t see how anyone could say that.” He added, with some vague memory in his mind of a certain famous saying by a famous statesman: “Give us the stuff and we’ll do the job.”
Bobby was not only permitting, he was encouraging Longton to talk. He always liked to begin by a little casual chat, believing that thus was obtained a more natural, more easy approach. But he was also wondering if Longton was talking to gain time and if this was due to an uneasy conscience, or if it was merely that to him the theatre alone was real and all that happened outside, even murder, was as it were in another world. Bobby, asking himself this, fiddling the while with the overturned toy soldiers, observed:
“Settling your exits and your entrances, and so on? With the toy soldiers for the characters in the play? How do you tell which is which?”
“Oh, you remember,” Longton explained. “And then I always take the bigger ones for the chief characters and the small ones for the smaller parts. The bandsmen stand for the women. Because bandsmen as bandsmen are always playing and women as women are always talking.”
“Have you explained that to Miss Maureen Carton?”
“As soon as I thought of it,” Longton answered proudly. “Set her off all right. She’s jolly good in a temper, too. I told her she would be fine as Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew. So now she’s studying the part.”
“You know,” Bobby said, still fiddling with Longton’s soldiers, “I’m rather taken with this idea of yours. It might be useful to try to reconstruct the crime in that way. A sort of game, so to say. The French do it—with the actual persons concerned, of course.”
Longton was at once interested. The toy theatre stage was too small for what Bobby had in mind. He put it on one side. With Longton’s help, he placed a pot of shaving cream to represent Cobblers. A hair-brush and a comb, one on each side of a piece of string, served to show the plantation through which ran the path where the body had been found. A packet of cigarettes at the other end of the bit of string stood for the New Bungalow. Longton joined in quite happily. Bobby picked up one of the toy bandsmen to represent, he said, Linda walking down the path that night. He had noticed, too, that one of the figures had had its head broken off.
“This will do for the murderer,” he remarked. “No head and therefore unidentifiable, as is the case—at present. We must hope to find a head to fit. And a stud will do to mark the place where was found the hat the murderer apparently left behind. By the way, you bought a new hat from Bailey’s recently, didn’t you?”
“Bailey’s? Good Lord, no,” Longton answered. “They charge about twice what anyone else does. Why?”
“Not even,” Bobby said, “if it was a bet you had won and someone else would have to do the paying?”
“You mean about Oxendale?” Longton asked. “How on earth did you get hold of that?”
“Our information,” Bobby said, “is that you told Mr Oxendale you were getting the new hat he owed you at Bailey’s and that he told you to send him the bill?”
“That’s right,” Longton admitted. “I suppose it was Oxendale told you? He didn’t tell you also, did he, that I never sent him the bill for the very good reason that I never bought the hat and so there was no bill to send? I never meant to. I only wanted to rub it in that I had been right. Oxendale isn’t so flush as all that. Three or four guineas counts for most of us.”
“You haven’t bought any new hat recently, then, and never one from Bailey’s?” Bobby asked.
“No, I haven’t,” Longton said. “Not for a year or two. My hat’s downstairs in the hotel lobby on a peg. And it’s a grey felt, not a black Homburg either.”
He went back to the table and swept aside the brush and comb and shaving cream and so on Bobby had arranged with such care.
“I don’t like this game of yours,” he said.
CHAPTER XXVII
MRS CATO AGAIN
BOBBY MADE NO COMMENT. But he found the gesture interesting. Longton glared defiance at him. A gong sounded from below.
“Tea,” Longton said. “I think I’ll go and get some.”
With that he walked out of the room, leaving Bobby in possession. Bobby could not help wondering if this were another gesture, aimed at demonstrating that here there was nothing to conceal and that Bobby was at full liberty to search as much as he liked. More likely, though, that it was spontaneous, a result of his anger at Bobby’s questions and apparent suspicions—or perhaps by fear? Or even due merely to Longton’s theatre sense of an effective exit?
Bobby began to push, somewhat aimlessly, Longton’s toy soldiers about the table. He was still thinking it might on occasion be useful to reconstruct, so to say, a crime in this manner. Too unorthodox, perhaps, and would the more stolid, self-contained Englishman be likely to react in the way in which it was said the Frenchman did at times? A rattle of tea cups sounded from below to remind Bobby that at any rate tea was always a good idea. So he returned to his car and soon was driving back to Lower High Hill village, where he hoped the tea ritual, essential to every proper Englishman’s afternoon, could be suitably performed.
This accomplished, he spent some time reading and considering reports and listening to what his assistants working on the case in the locality had to say. Ford, for instance, had managed to unearth a worker on a neighbouring farm who stated he had seen Baldwin Jones, whom he knew by sight as a visitor at Cobblers, leaving the New Bungalow, and leaving it as though he had not been made very welcome. This visit had, however, been made the Saturday before the murder, but all the same Bobby thought it might be worth following up, especially as he felt he would like to know, and that for more reasons than one, how seriously his warning not to use the plantation path had been taken.
Not very seriously, he soon discovered, from what Mrs Cato had to say when he found her at the bungalow. That might, of course, be due to the genuine inability to accept such warnings often shown by those who, having alway
s lived a quiet, safe, well-regulated life, find difficulty in admitting that lawless violence can suddenly intrude upon it. Or, a grimmer thought, from a knowledge that no such danger could menace those who were themselves its source and origin.
However, it did seem that Linda, though she still visited the bungalow every day, did now sometimes come by the long way round, through the village. If she returned, as she generally did, by the much shorter plantation path, then Mrs Cato herself went with Linda as far as Cobblers.
“I take the hatchet with me,” Mrs Cato added with a little nod at Bobby, as if to ask him what he thought of that. “What’s more, I’ve had it sharpened up. I’ll tell you something else. There’s been someone watching, hiding in the trees and watching.”
“Who was it?” Bobby asked. “Did you see?”
“What I wondered,” Mrs Cato said without answering either of these questions, “was whether it was the murderer come back to look for his hat he knows he left behind.”
“Yes, there’s that,” Bobby said thoughtfully. “Might be something else, though.”
“Makes you think,” Mrs Cato said; “makes you wonder. I mean, hiding there in the trees and, it may be, near desperate when for all he knows you’ve got hold of it and are only just waiting—waiting your time.”
“Yes, I know,” Bobby said. “The snag is that as a matter of cold fact we haven’t got it and if the murderer hasn’t either, who has? Have you?”
Obviously taken aback by this direct challenge, Mrs Cato first stared and then gave a short, hard laugh.
“No,” she said. “Why should I? If I had, I wouldn’t keep it. You could have it and welcome.”
“If it is the case that the murderer is really trying to find it,” Bobby remarked, “that may spell danger for anyone he suspects has got it. He may very well believe that his safety hangs—and that’s a nasty word in this connection—hangs on getting hold of it again.”
“Oh, well,” Mrs Cato said, though she was beginning to look a trifle uneasy, “I don’t see why it couldn’t have been picked up by a tramp or gipsy or someone like that. He may simply be wearing it without ever connecting it with what’s happened.”
“We’ve been making inquiries on those lines,” Bobby told her. “We can generally trace gipsies, but tramps are a lot more difficult. They don’t read papers much and if they do they may have their own reasons for not coming forward. I’m afraid the hat is a very illusive kind of clue,” and again he did not add that even for the very existence of that clue there was no evidence beyond the unsupported word of Linda Blythe, whose repeated and continuing visits to Mrs Cato had as yet received no satisfactory explanation. Nor had, for that matter, Mrs Cato’s interest in Linda. Bobby said instead:
“You have not told me yet who it was you saw?”
“I only said I thought I saw someone,” Mrs Cato answered. “I didn’t mean to mention names. It might be libel and I don’t want to be hauled into court. You have to be careful with the law as it is.”
“So you have, and just as well,” retorted Bobby. “People are a lot too fond of talking. They’ve been saying things about you yourself in the village, you know. Scandal, of course, not libel, and I hope we’ve stopped it. But anything you say, or write for that matter, to police engaged on an investigation is privileged. I think I must ask you to give me the name.”
“I didn’t know it was privileged,” Mrs Cato said. “Besides, I expect lawyers could get round that all right. They can generally. You can libel people without ever having heard of them.” She paused for a moment, frowning as if at some past, unpleasant unforgettable memory. “Oh, well,” she said, “if you must know, it was that tubby little man staying at Cobblers.”
“Sir William Watson, you mean?” Bobby asked. “Are you sure?”
“It’s what I thought at the time,” she answered. “I was rather glad it was only him.” She smiled grimly. “I was getting my axe ready,” she admitted, “after what you said. But then I saw who it was and I thought it was all right. Only afterwards I did begin to wonder. But it was dark and it may have been someone else. Linda says she has seen Lady Watson there once or twice, and she thought perhaps it might have been her I saw. That’s silly, though. It was certainly a man. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. It doesn’t amount to anything.”
“Oh, even the tiniest detail helps,” Bobby assured her. “Noticing a button is missing may be the key to the whole thing.”
“Well, don’t look at me like that,” she snapped. “I’ve no missing buttons, have I?”
What she had just said had in fact induced him to look at her with a renewed and closer attention. Not indeed because of any missing buttons, though Mrs Cato was hardly remarkable for any very special care in her attire. But he did notice now that her finger and thumb were freshly stained with ink, that on the table near the window lay an uncapped fountain pen she had apparently just laid down and several sheets of paper covered with writing. A typewriter nearby was still covered, and close by was an unopened packet of typing paper and some carbon sheets.
It was almost mechanically, and because it was his habit and his trade to notice things, that he tucked these details away in his memory, but now he was wondering, too, if they tended in any way to confirm the vague, indeed fanciful idea that had been floating for some time at the back of his mind. Hard, though, to see their relevance to the fate of the unfortunate Baldwin Jones. Mrs Cato was still watching him with a kind of indignant challenge, and he said:
“Oh, yes; sorry. No, no, no missing buttons. Nothing like that. Is there anything else you think you can tell me?” He thought she seemed to hesitate for a moment, but then she shook her head. So he went on: “Or that Linda could say? But it would be better if I spoke to her myself, wouldn’t it?”
“No, certainly not. What for? She doesn’t know anything,” Mrs Cato told him angrily, again with that half-unconscious air of protection she was apt to assume when the girl’s name was mentioned. “She’s worried enough already, frightened out of her wits of having to appear as a witness or something, and lawyers bullying her and all that.”
“Lawyers don’t try to bully nowadays,” Bobby answered smilingly. “At least, not unless they want to make a present of their case to the other side.” But he was remembering that the girl had given him the impression of being badly frightened on his first visit to Cobblers when he announced himself and his companion as police officers. He went on: “There is another point. I understand Mr Baldwin Jones was an acquaintance of yours?”
“Then you understand wrong,” she retorted. “He wasn’t.”
“We have information,” Bobby said, “that he was seen calling here two or three days before his death.”
“Oh, that,” she said, and gave him a distinctly unfriendly look. “You’ve managed to rake that up. I sent him away with a flea in his ear, if that’s what you call being acquainted.”
“Well, it does seem to suggest you weren’t total strangers,” Bobby remarked. “He had some reason for calling?”
“I had never set eyes on him before in my life,” she declared emphatically. “He said Mr Tudor King had employed him recently. To get some facts for some of the stuff he writes—for Glamour of the Footlights. It’s selling better than most of the rest of the tripe he turns out,” and these last words were pronounced with an undisguised contempt, as if in her mind she were comparing it very unfavourably with her own novels of earlier days that the public had so lamentably failed to appreciate. Bobby found himself wondering if she used a similar tone when Mr Tudor King was present, and thought also that contempt so deep, scorn so scathing, would be difficult to hide successfully. However, that was no business of his—or was it? Mrs Cato was still speaking. She was saying: “But he really is extremely careful to get all his work exactly right in every detail. Goes to all kinds of trouble. It was information about stage life he wanted, and he thought Baldwin Jones could get it for him.”
“Theatre again,” Bobby observe
d with a kind of sad resignation in his voice.
“Well, why not?” Mrs Cato demanded, this time as if defending, and even admiring, such care for detail. “Any slip, and you soon hear about it. To make people think you know what you are writing about is half the battle. Mr King would tell you that if you can use professional slang in a familiar sort of way, then it’s taken for granted you know all about the profession.”
“I’m getting to know quite a lot of technical detail,” Bobby observed, “but I don’t know that it’s getting me much further forward. But wasn’t it generally known that Mr Tudor King had not arrived here yet?”
“Oh, yes,” Mrs Cato agreed. “Jones was only trying to do a bit of snooping. That’s why I packed him off again in a hurry. I thought what he was really after was trying to get hold of Linda. I wasn’t going to have that,” she added, again with the protective air she so often assumed when Linda’s name was mentioned. “It was through him Linda got to Cobblers and then through Linda that Mr King heard of this bungalow. Baldwin Jones knew Linda was looking for a new place to go to, as Mr King was leaving England, and Linda knew Mr King wanted somewhere to live till his Capri house was ready. I expect he felt he couldn’t start flirting with her at Cobblers, but he thought he could here. He found out different.”
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE ILLUSIVE CLUE
IT WAS A VERY perplexed and worried Bobby Owen who from the New Bungalow drove on to Cobblers. He had the impression that he had been told a good deal, including, he thought, more than Mrs Cato had intended. One thing he felt certain of was that she had deliberately given him a hint of her own belief—or was it knowledge? Or again, had she merely attempted to divert suspicion from herself? But he was little inclined to accept her tale that Baldwin Jones’s call at the bungalow had been an attempt to start or continue a flirtation with Linda Blythe. In Baldwin Jones’s reputation as a picker up of unconsidered trifles in the way of bits of information of which he could afterwards make use for his own profit and advantage seemed to lie a much more probable explanation.
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