Four Strange Women

by E. R. Punshon

  “There is no proof of that as yet, sir,” Bobby answered cautiously.

  “No, I know, but it’s what you think,” Glynne answered. After a pause, he added: “So do I.”

  CHAPTER VI

  JOURNALIST

  The Midwych News does not go to press at so early an hour as do those ‘national’ papers, whose endeavour is to appear on the universal breakfast table from one end of the country to the other. Their offices were still in full activity when Bobby, duly deposited in the town by his new chief, arrived to ask for Mr. Eyton. He had gone home, but Bobby got his address. Fortunately it was not far, and the constable of the city police, with whom he had been provided as guide, took him there by a short cut through side streets.

  The hour was late by now, but a light in the window, the rattle of a typewriter, suggested that Mr. Eyton was still busy, making the most of his ‘scoop’. Bobby’s knock brought him to the door in person, the other inmates of the house having probably retired for the night. He was a small, plump, middle-aged man, rather prim in dress and manner, with small, inquisitive eyes behind large, rimless spectacles. He seemed a little surprised when he saw Bobby’s tall form.

  “Oh, I thought it was someone from the office,” he said, blinking up at him. “Are you police? I’ve told everything I know, I think, but come along in.”

  He led the way into a small room, fitted up much like an office, with two large card index cabinets, an enormous stationery cabinet, shelves filled with row upon row of box files, all neatly labelled, and a few, but not many, reference books. On the gas fire a kettle was boiling, and on the oak writing table stood a tin of cocoa, a cup, milk and other requirements, as also a typewriter, a pile of newly-completed scrip and another pile of fresh paper.

  “You look busy,” Bobby observed.

  “I am busy,” said Mr. Eyton seriously. “When a thing like this comes your way, you’ve got to make the best of it. I suppose it’s what you’ve come about?”

  Bobby nodded.

  “Colonel Glynne,” he explained, “thought perhaps there might be some further details you could give us— more especially why you seem to think it’s a case of murder.”

  “Don’t you?” asked Eyton simply, and that rather silenced Bobby for the moment. “Of course,” Eyton went on, “if there is anything more I can tell you, I’m perfectly willing. But I don’t think there is. Anything special, do you mean?”

  “Well, if you wouldn’t mind going over it all again from the very start,” Bobby said. “Then I might ask a question or two to clear up points we aren’t quite certain about.”

  “Just as you like,” Eyton agreed. “Only too ready to help, of course, though I think I’ve put everything in my story. It’ll be in the Midwych News to-morrow, but there’s a carbon here you can look through if you like. It’ll be in the London Daily Announcer to-morrow, too—front page stuff, fully signed,” he added, closing his eyes for one brief ecstatic moment at the thought. “Sunday Illustrated will have it as well, for Sunday, and Weekly Pictures next week—with photographs.”

  Bobby’s breath was a little taken away by this hail of announcements, and he perceived that the Great British Public was indeed in for a feast.

  “You’ve lost no time,” he remarked.

  “A journalist never loses time,” said Mr. Eyton firmly.

  “You took photographs, then?” Bobby asked.

  Mr. Eyton looked at him pityingly.

  “Of course,” he said. “Do you suppose there wouldn’t be photographs? what’s a journalist for?”

  Bobby was tempted to reply that he hadn’t the least idea. Instead he said:—

  “I don’t think that was mentioned before.”

  “It was not,” agreed Mr. Eyton. “Your people would have wanted to see them, and I wanted to get them off. They’ll be in the News to-morrow and in the London Announcer. The Sunday Illustrated will have them too— they pay big,” he couldn’t help interposing with a deep satisfaction—“and so will Weekly Pictures next week—just too late for the current issue, worse luck.”

  “Are they all the same?” Bobby asked.

  Mr. Eyton pondered the question.

  “Well, they are and they aren’t,” he said. “They are all ‘exclusive’ of course—editors will hardly look at anything that isn’t these days. But they’re all the same really—just different shots from different angles. Makes them seem different, but they’re all much of a muchness. Care to join me in a cup of cocoa?”

  “Thanks very much,” said Bobby with more gratitude in his voice—he hoped—than in his heart.

  Possibly Eyton felt a certain lack of true warmth in Bobby’s acceptance for he said:—

  “Sorry I’ve nothing else, but spirits disagree with me and I hate beer. I have to drink the stuff sometimes, because there’s a sort of convention that beer’s a proof of manliness and good fellowship, but afterwards it always feels to me like a wad of cotton wool inside. Now cocoa”—a touch of enthusiasm came into his voice—“cocoa warms you up, keeps you going, clears your mind, calms your nerves. I do all my best work on cocoa.”

  While he was speaking he busied himself making that strange brew, and he made it lovingly and with care, carefully measuring the amount he put in the cups—he procured a second for Bobby—mixing it with just the right amount of sugar, adding a little milk, beating it into a paste of exactly the right consistence, pouring on water and hot milk in the correct proportions. As he was thus occupied he said but now without enthusiasm:—

  “Smoke, if you like. I don’t myself, but I don’t mind it.” He coughed delicately in a way Bobby accepted as a hint, and so made no effort to produce his own cigarettes. He accepted the cup of cocoa Eyton handed him and said:— “One thing we would like to know, if you don’t mind, is how you happened to come across the spot where the fire was, and if you had seen Mr. Baird before? You knew his name, didn’t you?”

  Mr. Eyton leaned forward in his chair. He looked earnestly at Bobby through the steam rising from his almost boiling cup of cocoa. He said:—

  “I am writing a book.”

  “Yes,” said Bobby, and looked as impressed as he could, though indeed he had never known a journalist who was not so engaged.

  “Not,” said Mr. Eyton sternly, “not a novel.”

  “No,” said Bobby.

  “Any one,” said Mr. Eyton, this time with deep contempt, “can write a novel.”

  “They generally do, don’t they?” agreed Bobby.

  “Two a penny,” said Mr. Eyton.

  “I thought,” said Bobby, “it was one for twopence— if returned within seven days.”

  Mr. Eyton ignored this. His was a serious temperament, as befits his grave profession.

  “Have you any idea,” he asked, “how much money Musings in British Gardens brought in?”

  Bobby admitted his ignorance, though he had often seen announcements of the numberless editions that popular production had run into.

  “Have you any idea,” Mr. Eyton insisted, “how much Dreaming ’Midst the Flowers made?”

  Once again Bobby had to admit a lamentable ignorance. “Both,” said Mr. Eyton with quiet triumph, “written by journalists. Mine will be Twilight Thoughts Beneath the Trees.”

  “Good title,” agreed Bobby.

  Mr. Eyton nearly got up to shake hands, but compromised on an offer of more cocoa. Bobby, however, was able to escape honourably by showing that his cup was still three parts full—or even more.

  “I’ve been working on it for some time,” Mr. Eyton explained. “Whenever I can, I take my bicycle and go to the forest. I describe what I see; above all, what I feel. That’s the secret,” he said, wagging his finger at Bobby. “Any one can see. Few can feel; at least, I mean, few know what they feel till the author tells them. Explain to the average man exactly what he thought when he saw the sunset, the rabbits at play, heard the wind rustling through the trees, that’s the secret of success.”

  “But suppose,” Bobby objected
, “he didn’t feel a blessed thing—except wondering if he could get there before closing time?”

  “Ah, the homely touch.” Mr. Eyton beamed approval “My dear sir, it is, in fact, the public who never felt anything, who couldn’t feel anything, at whom an author aims—that is, if he wishes for a large circulation. You see, it pleases people to know what they would have felt if, in fact, they had felt it. You follow me?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Bobby, though he felt a little dazed. “Then I take it you were—”

  “Of course,” interrupted Mr. Eyton, “you mustn’t startle your reader by anything he couldn’t recognize as his own ideas if he ever had any. All is there.”

  “I see,” said Bobby patiently, “then I take it you mean you were getting material for your book and you came across Mr. Baird?”

  “Exactly,” agreed Mr. Eyton, though looking a little surprised now, as if he did not quite know how Bobby had reached this conclusion. “About a week or ten days ago. He was making tea on a primus stove just outside the caravan—very smart and expensive-looking affair, too, I noticed. I stopped and we got chatting. I rather hoped to—to—”

  “To get material,” suggested Bobby, as the other hesitated.

  “Well, yes,” agreed Mr. Eyton, again looking a trifle surprised at this shrewd guess. “That was in my mind,” he confessed. “I expected a fellow lover of the forest—I am one of the ‘Men of the Trees’, indeed I had something to do with the founding of that admirable society. I felt I might get to know his thoughts in those still and lonely evenings under the rustling—rustling—” He paused.

  “Just a moment,” he said, “I must make a note of that phrase—rustling—rustling what? ah, yes.” Apparently he got the word he wanted. He wrote it down on a card, moved over to the card index, opened it at the drawer marked ‘phrases’ and filed the card away. Then he turned back to Bobby. “Any ideas he had had, anything he had seen, noticed, all that would have been very useful to me. I take what I want where I find it.”

  Bobby, who knew his Kipling, remembered those lines beginning ‘When ’Omer smote ’is bloomin lyre’, but made no comment. After all, isn’t all authorship picking other people’s brains? He went on listening patiently. He had long learned that with people of the Eyton type it is better to let them talk rather than try to put them through a close examination.

  “I was disappointed,” confessed Mr. Eyton. “On this first visit, I soon found Mr. Baird was simply bored and lonely. I almost thought that was why he was willing to talk. He was the pure townsman. The forest bored him, puzzled him. He preferred lamp-posts to trees. He hated the silence by day, the darkness at night. He hardly knew the difference between—between a robin redbreast and a rabbit, and anyhow didn’t care. His spiritual home was Piccadilly Circus round about midnight, noise, advertisements, and neon lights.”

  “As bad as that,” murmured Bobby.

  “Worse,” said Eyton firmly, “and I must say I wondered what he was doing there in that expensive-looking caravan right in the very heart of Wychwood Forest. I thought it—well, funny. Caravanners ought surely to be lovers of the country and of solitude. Why pitch a caravan in the middle of a great forest if you can’t tell an oak from a fir; have no feeling for the loveliness of trees? Did I tell you I was an original member of the ‘Men of the Trees’?”

  “You did,” said Bobby patiently.

  “Mr. Baird was plainly out of tune with his surroundings. I sensed a story. Had I not,” said Mr. Eyton earnestly, “possessed an intuitive feeling for the human story, I should never have achieved my present position—for some years now I have written regularly the Midwych News second leader—I sign ‘Z.Z.’ and some of my readers have been good enough to say they prefer ‘ Z.Z.’ to ‘ Y.Y.’ —a quite unintentional rivalry, I assure you.”

  “You went back again another time, then?” Bobby asked.

  Once more Mr. Eyton seemed surprised, and he looked suspiciously at Bobby, plainly wondering how he knew, that.

  “Well, yes, I did,” he admitted.

  “You noticed a change?” Bobby suggested.

  Mr Eyton was evidently growing uneasy.

  “Well, yes, there was a change,” he agreed. “You have had information?”

  Bobby waved this aside, not bothering to remind the other that he had spoken of Mr. Baird as apparently bored ‘on this first occasion’.

  “Please tell me everything exactly,” he said. “I’m trusting a good deal to your journalistic sense. Every tiny detail may help. About this change now.”

  “It struck me very much,” Eyton said. “It was remarkable.” He looked very thoughtful and still hesitated, balancing his now empty cup on his open hand. “He glowed,” he said abruptly.

  “He—what?” said Bobby, not understanding at first, and then abruptly there came back into his mind a memory of how Lord Henry had looked up with a kind of bright adoration at his betrothed, of the look of eager happiness that had so transfigured his homely features, making them almost beautiful.

  “He—glowed,” Eyton said again. He put down his empty cup and got to his feet. He seemed to feel that what he had to say he must say standing. “He seemed to glow,” he repeated. “I have never seen anything like it. It was like a brightness all around him. There’s a passage in the Bible—you remember? ‘His face shone.’ Moses, wasn’t it? He made me think of that. The first time I was there Baird was morose, gloomy, dull, out of sorts, bored with himself and everything else. But this time—it was almost embarrassing,” Eyton concluded abruptly.

  “Have you any idea what caused it?” Bobby asked.

  “What could cause it?” Eyton retorted, and then answered his own question: “A woman,” he said.

  “You think one was there?”

  “I think he had been waiting for her and she had come and everything was changed,” Eyton answered.

  “Did you see her?” Bobby asked.

  “No. But she was there all right. Everything was different. There were flowers, things like that. Flowers in a vase on the caravan steps and a huge box of chocolates. Someone had been arranging the flowers, and I didn’t think it was Baird. And I didn’t think he bought those chocolates for himself.”

  “You didn’t get even a glimpse of her?”

  “No. I could hear someone moving inside the caravan, but she didn’t come near the door. She didn’t want to be seen. I sensed that. I’m sure it was a woman, and she didn’t want any one to see her. I didn’t stop long. It wasn’t my business, nothing I could use whoever it was. Baird was very pleasant. He never even hinted he wanted me out of the way. I knew he did, though. It’s difficult to explain. He asked me about my book. The other time I didn’t think he had even heard what I said about it. Now he said he would look out for it, buy a copy, tell his friends. It sounded as though he really cared. I thought—”

  “Yes?”

  “I thought,” said Eyton, a trifle shyly, “he felt so good, so happy himself, he wanted every one else to be happy, too. It was as if he felt he had so much happiness himself he wanted every one else to feel the same.”

  They were both silent then. Eyton lost in a memory of an experience that he knew had not left him quite as he had been before; Bobby troubled and thoughtful, for vaguely he seemed to catch a glimpse of strange and dreadful things that hid behind a lovely mask. Eyton said:—

  “Well, anyhow, I’ve seen one happy man. It’s hard to explain. I felt as if I had seen a man as we are all meant to be—just happy and wanting every one else to be happy.”

  “Did you go again?” Bobby asked.

  “Only to-night. There was nothing then but ashes—the ashes of the caravan. And he was dead. I knew that even before I looked. The first time he was sullen and depressed. The second time he—glowed. The third time he was dead.”

  He paused and the two of them looked steadily at each other.

  “Murdered,” Eyton said loudly and abruptly.

  “It might have been accident,” Bobby said, but without
conviction in his voice. “It might have been suicide.”

  “It wasn’t an accident,” Eyton declared. “Why should a caravan like that catch fire? If it did, why couldn’t Baird have escaped? Not like being trapped on a top floor. All he had to do was to open the door and walk out. It was no accident.”

  “Suicide?” Bobby suggested again.

  The little man shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “No man could have looked the way he looked and then killed himself within a day or two.” He paused and said again, quietly but with conviction:— “It was murder.”

  CHAPTER VII

  EAVESDROPPER

  Early the next morning before Colonel Glynne arrived, Bobby presented himself at the county police headquarters. He had sat up to the small hours, writing a report of his conversation with little Mr. Eyton, and now, borrowing one of the office type-writers, he copied it out. He had just finished when Inspector Morris came in and nodded a greeting. Bobby explained what he was doing and the inspector asked one or two questions about Scotland Yard methods.

  “Our C.I.D. is a bit out of date,” he confessed. “There wasn’t much serious crime about here till they started the new factories and got in a lot of Irish riff-raff from Birchespool. Know Birchespool at all?”

  “No,” answered Bobby. “I was never up here before, but I know at the Yard we used to think the Birchespool C.I.D. pretty good.”

  “ So it ought to be,” declared Morris. “One of the biggest towns in the country and fat rates to draw on, not starved like us poor devils of the county force. We used to get them to help us in C.I.D. work, but they made us pay through the nose till the Watch Committee wanted to know why we didn’t run a show of our own. I suppose that’ll be your job—helping the old man start a real C.I.D. here.”