“Flirtation story not a very good invention,” Bobby told himself disapprovingly. “Hasty improvisation,” he added as a kind of excuse. “Ten to one Jones thought he was on the track of something.”
If that were so, then his being sent away with what Mrs Cato had called ‘a flea in the ear’ was explained. But, an uncomfortable thought, blackmailers are at first very frequently sent away with this ‘flea in the ear,’ till presently their victims weaken and are tempted to take the fatal path of surrender—appeasement as it is called to-day, as a more respectable word. Was it possible there had been a second meeting in the plantation on that fatal Monday night? If so, had ‘appeasement’ been abandoned and ‘a flea in the ear’ seemed inadequate?
A possibility that had to be considered.
Of one thing alone was Bobby sure. He had seldom met a personality more puzzling, more interesting even, than that of Mrs Cato. Those deep eyes that could flash with such sudden fire, the firm, even fierce, lines of the mouth. There were moments when her whole being appeared to throb with a controlled yet passionate appetite for life. Put that against the background of a broken career that seemed to have started so promisingly to the applause of those who are supposed to be the arbiters of literary fame, only to be followed by a slowly growing indifference ending in complete oblivion. Then a necessity to gain a livelihood watching the success of a Tudor King whose work she made it so devastatingly plain she hated and despised from the bottom of her heart. What sort of psychological complex might not such a situation produce?
Had, for instance, that contempt and hatred slowly extended from Tudor King’s work to Tudor King’s person?
Once again a possibility that had to be considered.
Or was it that Tudor King had made his projected move to Capri an excuse for getting rid of a housekeeper of whose feelings he must have been aware, and was it that decision that had precipitated a crisis?
Bobby shook his head at himself, feeling he was becoming lost in a welter of incompatible, improbable theories. Yet in a murder case everything is improbable by the very nature of the deed, and still he could not get wholly out of his mind that first glimpse of her he remembered when she had come striding out from behind the bungalow—a Judith, a Jael, a Jeanne de la Hachette in modern dress.
There was that hat, too—that illusive, possibly non-existent hat. Mrs Cato’s prompt and firm denial, her hard, brief laughter at the suggestion that it was in her possession, had not altogether satisfied him. He thought the denial a little too prompt, the laughter a little too hard. But it was not a point he dared press. A hat is so easily destroyed, and he had no right or power to search the bungalow, as he would have liked to do.
“An investigator in this country is tied hand and foot,” he grumbled to himself, but knew all the same he would not have it otherwise, since proof of murder must be not only proof but proof above doubt.
But all these thoughts, buzzing interminably through his mind, had brought him no nearer a solution, and now he had reached Cobblers. He stopped his car and alighted, and when he knocked at the front door it was Maureen who opened it.
“I was expecting you,” she said. She stood there, regarding him with a grave, measured, reproachful disapproval, much as a mother might regard a too forward child who had disappointed her. “The first time I saw you,” she announced, “I thought you seemed fairly intelligent in a way.”
She paused as if expecting to see Bobby wither slowly, or even swiftly, away. No sign of this being apparent, she turned and went back into the house. He followed her. She led the way into the inner lounge hall where she had apparently been sitting. A book was open on a chair, and Bobby saw it was a copy of Shakespeare. He said as sadly as he could:
“Does that mean you’ve felt you must change your opinion?”
“Well, I ask you,” she said. “Suspect—Jack—Longton—of—murder!” and between each word as she uttered it she left a pause as if to give it time to sink into the universal consciousness—and Bobby’s in particular.
“Has Mr Longton been over here to tell you?” he asked.
“I expect,” Maureen went on, still grieved, still reproachful, “you’ll be suspecting me next thing?”
“Why next thing?” Bobby asked.
“You don’t mean you do?” she cried at this, forgetting at once entirely her air of grieved reproach. And when he nodded she breathed an “Oh, I say!” that might have meant either dismay or mere surprise, or even—gratification.
“At this stage of an investigation like this one,” Bobby repeated once more, “we suspect every one automatically.”
She looked a little disappointed and then said:
“I’ll have to tell Jack he’s not the only one,” and this time there was certainly in her voice a faint note of satisfaction. “Of course, he is the most awful bully and I simply hate the very guts of him. But he wouldn’t ever murder anyone, and I don’t think—” Here she paused, plainly giving the most careful consideration to what she was going to say: “I don’t really think I ever would either—unless it was Jack himself.”
“Is he such a bully as all that?” Bobby inquired.
“Worse,” Maureen answered. “I’m studying ‘Isabella’—Measure for Measure, you know.”
“I thought it was Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew, Mr Longton said.”
“Oh, no,” Maureen exclaimed with fervour. “That’s such a silly part. I can’t imagine what Shakespeare was thinking of.”
“Well, you know,” Bobby said, “in our job we do meet women like Katherine and even more of a shrew for that matter.”
“I don’t mean that,” Maureen explained indignantly. “Why can’t you stand up for yourself without being called a shrew? I mean the way Shakespeare makes her knuckle down. Didn’t the man know that any woman who can’t make life plain hell for her husband till he does the knuckling down just simply isn’t worthy the name of woman at all?”
“How old are you?” Bobby demanded abruptly.
“You asked me that before,” Maureen retorted, “and you were rather insulting about it, too.”
“So I did,” Bobby agreed. “I had forgotten. Let me see now.” He did a little mental arithmetic. “Your exact age is five thousand, nine hundred and fifty odd.”
“Oh, it isn’t,” cried Maureen, quite appalled. “What do you mean?”
“Well,” Bobby explained, “you are evidently as old as Eve, and she dates from four thousand and four B.C.—see Archbishop Usher. Add the present date and there you are.”
“I think that’s rather silly,” replied Maureen, dignified now. “Don’t you?”
“Why is Mr Longton bullying you over Measure for Measure?” Bobby asked, in his turn ignoring her question.
“Well,” Maureen explained, picking up her book, “the Twenty-first Century Club is putting it on for a Sunday performance and I’m doing Isabella. She’s the most awful, cold-blooded prig imaginable, you know, and of course that was how I was going to play her. Only when I told Jack he went simply mad—and was most abusive as well. I slung the book at his head.” This with great satisfaction. “Only it missed.” This with equal disappointment. “He dodged. Just like him, the mean thing.” She went on, quite carried away by her sense of grievance: “He says she isn’t a prig at all, only she’s of her age, and being a virgin then was most awfully impressive and important, most likely because it was so jolly rare, and if you were, then you were sort of supernatural and liable to do miracles any moment almost. Giving it up to save your brother was like asking you to-day to save someone by torturing a small child. That’s what Jack says I’ve got to get into what he had the cheek to call my empty head.”
“Too bad,” Bobby agreed. “Rather insulting, in fact.”
“And then he said,” she went on, “I had to study every other character in the whole play just as carefully, so as to understand how they felt towards her and she felt towards them. So I said there wasn’t time and he simply went in off the deep end.
He told me”—she paused impressively—“unless I wanted to be just a fashion plate on the stage, then I had to work like a donkey day and night till my hind legs fell off. I haven’t got any hind legs,” she concluded, almost in tears.
“Well, I must say I think that’s simply too bad,” Bobby declared, though without making it quite clear whether he referred to the absence of hind legs or the prospect of such unremitting toil. “Is Lord Rone in?”
“Yes. Why? Is it about hats? I expect you want to look at all we’ve got, don’t you? Silly, I call it.”
“You’ve heard about that?” Bobby asked.
“It’s what everyone in the village is talking about,” Maureen answered. “Didn’t you know?” And her opinion of him evidently fell to even lower depths. “You can look in the cloak-room if you want to.” She indicated a door in the outer hall. “In there,” she said. “All Dad’s things are there and everyone else’s, too—Oh, here is Dad.”
Lord Rone was in fact approaching from the inner recesses of the house. Maureen hailed him to explain that Bobby wanted to see all his hats, just in case one of them might be what she called ‘the murder hat everyone’s talking about.’
“And if he finds it, you’ll be for it, Dad,” she added.
“Be quiet, Maureen,” said her father mechanically. “Hat?” he went on to Bobby. “Oh, yes, of course. Certainly. Quite right.” He led the way to the cloak-room, followed by Bobby, and indicated a row of hats, coats, scarves, and so on, hanging on pegs. “They are all there, I think.”
“Are they all yours?” Bobby asked.
“Oh, dear me, no,” Lord Rone answered. “I’m not so well provided as all that. Moyse’s will be there, and Watson’s as well. There may be others, too,” He went to the door and called: “Maureen. Maureen. Where’s the new one I got from Bailey’s the other day? I don’t see it anywhere.”
“I’m most awfully sorry, Dad,” Maureen said, answering his summons. “You know that parcel I sent off to Oxford for displaced persons if you remember? I’m awfully afraid it went off with that by mistake.”
“Really, Maureen,” said Lord Rone, very crossly indeed. “You must be more careful. You did that once before—with my second-best dress trousers, and I’m almost certain there was a five-pound note in a pocket. This time I shall stop the cost of a new hat out of your allowance.”
“I expect it would teach me to be more careful,” Maureen admitted, putting a penitent thumb in her mouth and looking her saddest. “But you won’t, Daddy dear, will you?”
“Certainly I shall,” declared Lord Rone with great firmness, but knowing perfectly well he wouldn’t.
“What was it like?” Bobby asked.
“A black Homburg, quite new,” answered Lord Rone, and Bobby saw that Maureen was looking at him sideways.
CHAPTER XXIX
WORLD OF MAKE-BELIEVE
POSSIBLY IT WAS BECAUSE she saw Bobby had noticed—and noted—that sideways glance of hers that Maureen now said abruptly:
“I expect you want to see Uncle Bill, too, don’t you? I’ll tell him,” and therewith ran off, while Bobby watched her go and was not pleased.
He felt he could never be quite certain which Maureen he was talking to, so swiftly did she seem to change from one mood to another. As for scruples, he was inclined to believe that she simply did not know they existed. Both Maureen and Jack Longton seemed to him as if they existed in a kind of borderland between the everyday world and the theatre world of make-believe; and which of these was to them the more real, he was not sure. He heard Lord Rone saying, half to himself, in a confidential, meditative voice:
“Besides, I don’t really see what use dress trousers could be in a refugee camp in Germany.”
“Well, if there was a five pound note in a pocket, that might help,” Bobby suggested.
“True, true,” Lord Rone agreed, evidently much impressed by this observation.
Maureen came hurrying back, and after her, though at a more mature pace, came Sir William, smiling and alert, and Lady Watson, wearing a formidable frown.
“I must say I entirely fail—” she began, but her husband cut her short.
“Oh, come, my dear,” he said, “the police are simply bound to make inquiries when a thing like this happens—inquiries everywhere,” and if she frowned the more at this, at any rate she said no more. Sir William continued to Bobby: “It’s about this story of the hat you’ve found that’s all over the village that you’re here again, isn’t it? Everyone with a different version. Anyhow, it can’t be mine, unless by some miracle the one I lost on my way here has turned up again somehow.”
“Nonsense,” said Lady Watson very loudly, and then repeated the word more loudly still: “Nonsense.”
“Now, now, my dear,” said Sir William.
“You lost a hat on the way here?” Bobby repeated questioningly, and he noticed that Lord Rone looked surprised and that Maureen had eyes and mouth both open to their widest.
“I was stupid enough,” Sir William confessed, “to put my head out of the window, trying to read the name of the station we were passing. It was as small and inconspicuous as usual. I don’t know why the railways like to keep the names of their stations to themselves in the way they do. Cost me a hat. It blew off as I was trying to see where we were.”
“Too bad,” Bobby said, and reflected rather grimly that hats seemed to have a most unfortunate habit of disappearing just now, and that if the papers got to know they would probably at once produce headlines ‘Missing Hat Murder.’ “Did you make any inquiries?” he asked.
“Well, it hardly seemed worth while,” Sir William answered. “I couldn’t have said within fifty miles or so where I had lost it. We were coming up from a visit to Cornwall, and I don’t know the line at all.”
“Did you say anything about it to anyone?”
Bobby asked. “Dear me, no,” Sir William exclaimed. “One doesn’t bore one’s friends with all the little misadventures that happen to one.” He paused to smile broadly at his wife. “Besides,” he continued, “it was rather a sore point at the moment. I had had a thorough good scolding for my carelessness, and I didn’t want to hear another word about it.”
“You deserved to hear a lot more,” Lady Watson said severely.
“You got here bare-headed then?” Bobby asked, and now they were all looking at him with a kind of puzzled and uneasy attention.
“Luckily, no,” Sir William answered. “Or I should probably have got a bad cold. My golf cap was in our hand baggage.”
“Could you identify it again if it were found?” Bobby asked.
“Oh, dear me, yes—a black Homburg, nearly new, bought recently from Bailey’s in Mock Street, near Piccadilly. And it has my initials in it, hasn’t it, my dear?” he asked Lady Watson.
“And your address, too,” Lady Watson said. “It’s not the first time you’ve lost your hat. May I inquire the purpose of these questions?” she asked, turning suddenly on Bobby.
He did not reply to this question. They were still all watching him with that kind of puzzled, uneasy attention they had begun to show. It was Maureen who broke the silence, either because she did not wish any answer or perhaps because she had remained silent as long as, for her, was possible.
“Are you going to grill Mr Oxendale, too? I’ll ask Linda to try to find him, shall I?” she demanded. “And oughtn’t you to have warned us that anything we say may be taken down and used in evidence against us?”
“No,” said Bobby with more than a touch of temper in his voice.
“Well, don’t get cross,” Maureen said in her most injured tone.
“Be quiet, Maureen,” said her father.
“Well, Dad,” Maureen protested, “he has been a bit third-degreey, hasn’t he?”
“You probably most of you know,” Bobby said, “what with all this talk that seems to be going on, that the housemaid here, Linda Blythe, reported having seen a hat that may have been the murderer’s. Could I have a word or two
with her alone?”
“I’ll tell her,” Maureen said, and was starting off.
“One moment, please,” Bobby called after her. “I should be glad if you would merely say I wanted to ask her a question or two without going into details.”
His tone was severe, and Maureen looked offended.
“I don’t know why you are always so horrid to me,” she said over her shoulder as she vanished.
Lord Rone had an air of wishing to support his daughter’s protest, but also of not quite knowing how.
“She’s a little chatterbox,” Lady Watson said. “But then, what girl her age isn’t?”
“Or what woman of any age?” asked Sir William with a little private chuckle, all to himself. “Present company always excepted of course, my dear.” He turned to Bobby and spoke more gravely: “Lady Watson,” he said, “asked a moment ago what was the purpose of your questions. May I take it you are merely following a very proper and necessary routine or have you something more serious, more direct in your mind?”
“All questions in a murder investigation are serious,” Bobby answered. “Any may lead direct to—the gallows.”
Lady Watson gave a low cry and collapsed on a chair near. Indeed, she would probably have fallen had not her husband caught her in time to support her. A momentary confusion ensued. Maureen came running back and said Linda wouldn’t be more than a moment or two.
“What’s happened?” she asked, seeing them clustered round the half-fainting Lady Watson. She pointed an accusing finger at Bobby, a kind of ‘thou art the man’ finger. She asked severely: “What’s he been saying now?”
“Be quiet, Maureen,” said her father. “I must say, though, that I think a little more consideration might be shown.”
“Not much was shown to Baldwin Jones,” Bobby said.
The Golden Dagger: A Bobby Owen Mystery Page 19
