Four Strange Women

by E. R. Punshon

  “You’ve got me a new customer by the way,” Olive added. “Miss Glynne. I expect it was because of you she wanted one of our hats.”

  “Has she been to your place to-day?” Bobby asked, very interested.

  “No, is she in town?” Olive countered. “It was a ’phone message last Friday evening, just as we were closing. We do business sometimes with a Midwych firm, exchange stock if Midwych wants what London doesn’t or the other way round, or sometimes it’s a special model we supply ‘exclusive to Midwych’. Miss Glynne wanted one of our creations she had seen and she went to them for it so they rang up and I had quite a long talk with her, making sure what she really wanted.”

  “I saw her in town to-day,” Bobby said, wrinkling his brow. “I’ll tell you presently. Last Friday, you said? Are you sure?”

  “Last Friday,” Olive repeated, “I remember she said she had just seen General Hannay off at the railway station before she rang up about the hat. She had been talking to him about her father, I don’t think she believes he is really ill. I think she thinks he is staying away on purpose and I did wonder if what she really wanted was for me to tell you that.”

  “I don’t see why,” Bobby said, frowning more deeply even than before. “I don’t see that has anything to do with me—unless it’s to let me know again I shan’t be interfered with.”

  “I expect that’s it,” Olive said. She added:— “Now tell me all about what you’ve been doing. Stuck, aren’t you?”

  Bobby nodded.

  “Stuck, and badly stuck,” he agreed. “The general pattern and idea is growing fairly plain. I’ve looked up French history and legend and the Inca legends too. The book I got hold of seemed to think the French yarn was only a yarn and very likely the Inca legend is that, too. But the idea is there, it’s old, old as evil itself, and I believe there’s always been some foundation for it, though one didn’t expect it to be turning up again in modern days.”

  “I’ve forgotten all my French history,” Olive said, “except Joan of Arc. The Incas had something to do with gold, hadn’t they?”

  “Yes, but Joan of Arc and gold don’t come into it,” Bobby told her. “Let’s go over it all from the start. The thing I want to do is to pick out the essentials.”

  Rapidly he went over the history of the case in full detail as he knew it. Olive listened intently. She knew the whole story well enough, of course, but she noted now the points on which Bobby laid the most stress and made him explain fully the deductions that he drew. When at last he finished, she said:—

  “It all comes to this; you feel sure you know who she is and the explanation of it all, but you have no proof you can act on.”

  Bobby nodded gloomily.

  “Three lives depend on what I do,” he said, “and I haven’t the right to do anything—De Legett, Lord Henry Darmoor, Mr. Eyton, any one of them, all three perhaps, may go next, and there it is. It’s like one of those nightmares when you know you must do something but there’s a great weight holds you helpless.”

  “Don’t you think,” Olive suggested, “that just because Lord Henry told all those lies, it means he has some plan of his own?”

  “I did wonder if that was it,” Bobby said. “If so and if half what I suspect is true, he has about as much chance as a rabbit has with a rattlesnake.”

  “One does rather feel like that,” Olive agreed, “though he may be less of a rabbit than you think. Isn’t it likely Mr. Eyton is in greater danger?”

  “No, he’ll be all right for the present.”

  “Why?”

  “He won’t get his cash for a day or two. It always takes a few days to make sure that a title to land is secure, and purchasers don’t part till they are sure. He’s safe enough till the cash has been handed over.”

  “Mightn’t he get an advance from a bank or his lawyers?” Olive suggested.

  Bobby looked uneasy. It was a possibility he had overlooked, and one which he did not much like.

  “There’s that,” he admitted. “Still, it’s a land transaction, and even a bank would have to make sure there wasn’t a prior charge of some sort—a mortgage or something like that. ‘Once mortgaged, always mortgaged’ lawyers say sometimes.”

  “You didn’t say anything to him about being careful?”

  “No. I wonder if I ought to. I should have to go to Midwych to see him. I could make a report direct to Colonel Glynne if I did. It’s just possible that what Miss Glynne said when she rang you up was a roundabout sort of hint. Though I don’t much think he is awfully keen on seeing me.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, he’s in a very awkward hole. Leonard Glynne’s name has been mentioned and so has Miss Glynne’s. On the one hand, if he resigns, which, strictly speaking, I expect he feels he ought to, then he is as good as saying publicly that he thinks they may be guilty. Not quite fair to them and if the business is never cleared up, it might mean they would be under a cloud for the rest of their lives. In their case, his resignation would point them out at once. On the other hand, if he runs the investigation himself, he feels he might be influenced, even unconsciously influenced, in their favour—failing to push home points telling against them and so on. It’s a very awkward dilemma and he’s solved it in a way by leaving it all to me, with orders to consult the P.P.’s office or the Yard at my own discretion.”

  “I suppose it is difficult,” Olive agreed. “For General Hannay, too. You really think it all links up?”

  “Sure of that much, anyhow,” Bobby answered with decision. “Three men dead: Byatt, White, and Baird, all in similar circumstances. One man, Ted Reynolds, vanished—circumstances similar again. Three men in danger: Darmoor, Count de Legett, Mr. Eyton, and still the same general pattern clearly apparent. And four strange women, Becky Glynne, Hazel Hannay, May Grayson, Gwen Barton; not to mention Mrs. Ted Reynolds I can’t get to see, and, dodging about in the background, the street singer woman, who may or may not have something or nothing to do with it.”

  “There may be someone else,” Olive said, “someone you know nothing about.”

  “No,” Bobby answered. “It’s one of them. I’m sure of that much at least.”

  “Yes. Yes,” Olive said. “One of them,” she almost whispered, “and I’ve seen them all and it doesn’t seem possible.” They were both silent, looking at each other across the table, and it was as though a cloud of horror rose there between them as from the heart of evil itself. “How could a woman—any woman?”

  “How could any human being for that matter?” retorted Bobby. “Only once you get going—once you get playing with hell...”

  He left the sentence unfinished. Olive was looking round, she seemed to draw a sort of comfort, a kind of re-assurance from her commonplace, familiar surroundings, as though they told her the ordinary framework of everyday life still existed, that in and around and about it still moved ordinary, everyday people, people whose lives touched no such dreadful depths as those of which now they two seemed to have caught a glimpse. She said musingly:— “Saints seem incredible, too. If some of us can be saints, then I suppose others—” She paused, and only by an effort did she control herself. “Do you know,” she said in a surprised tone, “I think I feel a bit hysterical.”

  “Well, that’s no good,” Bobby told her. “Take a hold on yourself. Of course, I do, too, sometimes,” he conceded.

  “No good kicking and screaming, I suppose,” agreed Olive. “Bobby, it can’t go on. Surely you know enough to do something?”

  “If I go to the P.P. with a yarn like this and no more proof than I’ve shown you, they’ll have me certified,” Bobby answered. “If I go to the Yard, they’ll call up Midwych and suggest that a senior officer of greater experience should be appointed to handle the case. You see, it’s so entirely, so awfully, outside ordinary knowledge.”

  “There’s what Henry Darmoor told you about his having been to see Higham’s, in Bond Street?”

  “Yes, that’s how I got my first hint of
the truth,” Bobby agreed. “Not much by itself, though.”

  “There’s what Mr. Higham told you about the jewellery vanishing?—”

  “The deduction is plain to my mind,” Bobby agreed again, “but other people would call it a bit thin to act on. Deduction isn’t proof, not by a long way.”

  “There’s all that about May Grayson’s photographs...?”

  “All of which might bear another interpretation,” Bobby said.

  “Even together with what you saw when you went to Gwen Barton’s flat?”

  “They would just say that amounted to nothing,” Bobby said. “Which of course is quite true.”

  “There’s Mr. Eyton’s story?”

  “Yes, thank God,” Bobby said. “I think even the P.P. would admit that that clears one—but only one. Negative, you see, not positive. Same with your ’phone message. What I want is something clear and hard and concrete, something calculated to impress the official mind. Not mere reasoning from this to that. They are right in a way—there can always be a flaw in reasoning. You want facts to hang people on, not logic.”

  “Well, what the porter at Henry Darmoor’s flat told you is definite—I mean about heels. Isn’t that direct evidence?”

  “It’s more the sort of thing I need,” Bobby admitted, “but it’s not much by itself. Defending counsel would have the time of his life poking fun at the fatal proof of the high heels that weren’t worn.”

  “But surely there must be something?” she urged once more.

  “Very likely,” he answered grimly, “but I haven’t found it. I feel I know who it is and why, and just possibly I could make out a sufficient case for her to be watched in the hope of more proof turning up somewhere or somehow. But there’s no immediate proof, and the question is—how to stop it happening again? If I put my theory forward, and if, after that, what I expect happens and there’s another death, as in my belief is certain, then some notice of my ideas would be taken. She would be questioned perhaps. She would know she was suspected and she wouldn’t dare go on. That would be something. In the meantime, there are Darmoor, De Legett, Eyton, and for one of them at least, it will be too late.”

  They had been sitting there talking for so long that by now it was nearly closing time. They rose to go and as they left the restaurant, Olive, holding Bobby’s arm, said:

  “It’s all like some awful nightmare, you feel you must wake up presently and find it’s morning and it’s just been a dream. What makes it even worse is that it’s all mixed up with love—is it love?”

  “Love gone wrong,” Bobby said slowly, “love gone wrong and bad, worse than bad.”

  CHAPTER XXII

  AGAIN

  Next day Bobby took the first available train to Midwych and all the journey long he found his mind less occupied by the errand he had come on or by the details of the investigation, than by a memory of those last words he and Olive had exchanged as they left the restaurant the night before and by the confused and troubling thoughts to which they had given rise.

  Was it really this strange passion or instinct or necessity of life, or what you will, which men call love, which irresistibly draws together the two sexes, on which indeed depends the existence both of the individual and of the race, which may in the last analysis be best defined perhaps as the urge to completeness, was it then this mystery of mysteries that had traced the dark and dreadful pattern of secret murder now slowly taking form and shape before his eyes? Was it really, he asked himself, of the same kin and kind, coming under the same category, as the steady and the tranquil force of his own feeling for Olive?

  He found himself wondering a trifle uneasily if this emotion he himself experienced was the weaker or the less intense because it burned steadily, controlled and yet strengthening, rather than consuming utterly all things else? A difference, he thought, like that between the fire upon the hearth that warms the house and makes life possible and the fire that consumes all, even to the burning the house to the ground. A greater fire, no doubt, a fiercer heat, but one the sooner over and leaving behind it only death and a handful of cold ash.

  Was love, then, he asked himself bewilderedly, a tree like that other one which bore upon itself the fruit of good and evil—fruit both of life and of death?

  He remembered how continually there had been mention in this case of that excited restlessness he had himself noted both in Henry Darmoor, when he had first met him, when he had been inclined to attribute it to drink, and again and more recently in his recent talk with little Mr. Eyton. He himself had never felt like that in Olive’s company, he had felt instead repose and gentleness and a freshness of the mind, and afterwards a clearer insight into other things.

  He reflected that Love seemed like a gate opening on two different roads. Well, he supposed birth was like that, a gate to life, and each man’s life was his own, duality of the necessary body and of the controlled and yet directive mind to be shaped into such common form as the will might choose. Was Love, too, a kind of birth to a fuller, ampler life, a duality again of physical and spiritual, of the necessary body and the dependent and yet directing mind, to be shaped into such form as again the will might choose?

  Puzzling thoughts, and troubling, and the riddle one that Bobby felt beyond all powers of his own, though it was one that each must solve in his own way. A riddle, he reflected again, that had been too much for wiser heads than his own, and he remembered with a smile having read somewhere that Martin Luther had once expressed a wish that God had asked his advice and arranged to continue creating fresh members of the human race direct from clay, and so saved all the trouble and worry and confusion caused by what the philosophers have sometimes called the ‘most troublesome of all the passions.’ Then, too, there was that common phrase ‘Sacred and Profane Love’. Perhaps that was it, and just as life can choose, if it will, to follow the paths of hell, so also love can make the same choice. Perhaps that was the sign of its supreme value, that it can turn to evil as well as to good, even as the greatest gift of God to man is the right to sin.

  With a start he realized that he had reached his destination, and indeed he had only bare time to collect himself and his belongings and tumble out on the platform as the train started off again. At the county force headquarters he found that Superintendent Oxley, now acting deputy chief constable, was not there, having been unexpectedly called away on unexpectedly important business. Bobby, who had rung up from London to announce his coming arrival, was inclined to suspect that this ‘unexpectedly important business’ was chiefly important because it saved Oxley from too close contact with an affair which he did not understand and which threatened uncomfortable repercussions. Besides, Bobby had to admit that there was also the excuse that Oxley probably felt he had been so far deliberately excluded from the investigation and that therefore those engaged in it could clear it up for themselves as best they could.

  From the county headquarters Bobby went on to Asbury Cottage, where he was told that Colonel Glynne, on the advice of his doctor, had entered a nursing home for a few days’ complete rest and quiet. He could be reached on the ’phone, naturally, but it was most undesirable that he should be worried. The doctor had declared that only matter of life and death could be sufficient justification for disturbing him. Bobby said grimly that this was precisely that—a matter of life and death. So, after some more argument, he was given the ’phone number of the nursing home, and, when he got through, heard his request for speech with the colonel received with undisguised horror and amazement. Quite out of the question, he was told, but with that quiet persistence which was one of his most valuable characteristics, he explained that he was going to ring up again and again, every five minutes if necessary, unless and until he got a direct refusal from Colonel Glynne himself. He did not quite succeed in obtaining that, but he did get from the doctor in charge a personal statement that his message had been given to the chief constable who had replied that Inspector Owen had his instructions and if he felt himself in an
y difficulty must consult the Public Prosecutor’s Office or call in the assistance of Scotland Yard. The doctor also added that he was to tell the inspector that Colonel Glynne felt himself so near a complete breakdown that he had actually written out his resignation though as yet he had not sent it in. This, of course, was confidential, and only for Inspector Owen’s own private information.

  Not much help there, Bobby thought, as he put down the receiver. He went back to Midwych very doubtful what action he could take next, and yet stronger every moment in his deep instinct that immediate action was required. He had, of course, still to attend to the other of the two errands that had brought him to Midwych. But when he tried to find little Mr. Eyton, to deliver to him that warning he had been too late to give to Count de Legett, it was only to be informed that Eyton had resigned his post on the Midwych paper he worked for, had given up his house and sold his furniture, and that no one knew his present address.

  “He just said he would find some place in London but he didn’t know where yet,” one of his journalistic colleagues told Bobby. “I expect he’ll ring through some time and let us know. He’s been a bit queer lately, all raggy and nervy. Needed a rest cure all right.”

  Bobby went away, trying to console himself for this second failure with the reflection that this warning, too, would almost certainly have been ineffective and might have served merely as a warning not to the victim, but to that dark unknown of whose identity he was growing more and more certain, but against whom so far he had been able to secure so little of the proof that a court of law requires. Not an uncommon dilemma, of course, for again and again police authorities know very well who is guilty but cannot act for lack of material, definite proof.