Death Among the Sunbathers

by E. R. Punshon

  ‘If he has, that’s all right,’ Bobs-the-Boy retorted. ‘Owen’s one of the sort that likes to keep things all to himself till he’s got everything ready. That means he doesn’t speak till the last moment and no one knows what it is he’s got. Very well. That’s all right, gives us a chance to fix him before he ever says a word at all. See?’

  They looked at him silently, a little doubtfully, and yet with a certain dreadful hope as well.

  Presently Dodd dropped a single word.

  ‘How?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ll fix that, you leave that to me,’ Bobs-the-Boy answered. ‘All you’ve got to do is to hold your tongue. Most of those that hang, it’s their own tongue they swing by.’

  ‘It’s easy, if there’s nothing to it but saying nothing,’ Zack said. ‘I was never one to blab and talk,’ and his wife nodded confirmation, agreeing on both points.

  ‘Well, stick to that, saying nothing to anyone, and you’ll be safe as houses, once this Owen’s fixed,’ Bobs-the-Boy repeated. ‘Only just let me be sure I’ve got it right the way things happened. It won’t do for me to make any bloomers.’

  He asked a few questions, and Zack’s replies confirmed fully the account his wife had already given.

  ‘That’s O.K. then,’ Bobs-the-Boy pronounced presently. ‘I’ve got the hang of it now, it’s going to pan out just the way it ought.’

  ‘There’s always Owen,’ Zack remarked, repeating unconsciously the same form of words that his wife had used earlier.

  ‘You aren’t getting him on the brain, too, are you?’ asked Bobs-the-Boy, with his familiar and always slightly disconcerting grin. ‘Never seen him, have you? No more have I, but I’ve got my own idea about him.’ He paused and his grin grew wider, displaying that black gap in his upper jaw where it seemed a tooth was missing. ‘Leave Owen to me,’ he repeated. ‘But now our next job is getting hold of Mr Bryan again.’

  The other two looked at each other blankly, and Dodd shook his head. .

  ‘I don’t know how we’re to do that,’ he said. ‘He always said he would only bolt when the game was properly up, and when he did no one would ever find him again. He said that more than once. I expect he had a bolt hole all ready; some woman most likely he knows he can trust to keep him hidden. He’s got money, and he’ll have it all thought out, and once he stops bleaching his hair he’ll look quite different – he’s nothing like as old as he pretended, you know; he put that on to make the suckers think it was all that fake stuff made him so brisk and strong; he even got his dad’s birth certificate and hung it up on the wall for his own. He always said he could disappear any moment and not all the police in all the world would ever find him — I believe him, too. He had everything all thought out, and he’s clever as they make ’em.’

  ‘Sounds it would be a tough job,’ agreed Bobs-the-Boy thoughtfully; ‘if I were Mitchell I should be afraid of having to give him best there. If a man’s got brains and money, and his plans made, and a place all ready to go to, and somebody to help him – well, then, you might as well look for the needle in the haystack. Unless he gives himself away.’

  ‘Esmy Bryan won’t do that,’ declared Dodd.

  ‘No,’ agreed Bobs-the-Boy, ‘not that sort – it was always supposed you and he didn’t hit it together and he wanted to get you out of the show here. Was that only put on?’

  Zack nodded.

  ‘Just so as no one would think we were too thick,’ he said.

  ‘I thought as much,’ Bobs-the-Boy remarked. ‘I daresay your Owen friend would tumble to that much. Only if one of us cuts and runs well, it looks bad for the rest, don’t it? It’s up to us to make him see everything’s O.K. – always providing there’s no talking.’

  ‘There’s always Owen,’ Miss James put in, or Mrs Dodd, if she had real claim to that name.

  ‘I told you I knew how to fix Owen, didn’t I?’ Bobs-the-Boy snapped.

  ‘There’s that girl to-night,’ Zack reminded him. ‘How about if they find out–’

  ‘That’s O.K., too,’ Bobs-the-Boy interrupted. ‘Haven’t I told you I’ve got that fixed so no one will ever find her dead corpse? And unless they do, which now they can’t, there’s nothing they can bring up against you or me or anyone.’

  ‘How can you know it won’t be found?’ demanded Zack. ‘You’re mighty clever, to hear you talk, but how can you make sure of that? It don’t matter where you’ve hid her, any bit of luck–’

  ‘Only,’ interrupted Bobs-the-Boy once again, ‘only no one can ever find what simply doesn’t exist.’

  ‘What do you mean? Doesn’t exist? Why doesn’t it exist?’

  ‘Because it doesn’t,’ Bobs-the-Boy answered with the same quiet, assured confidence.

  ‘How’s that? How could you manage that?’ demanded Zack. ‘It’s not possible, not so quick as that. How could you?’

  ‘That’s my affair and I’m not telling,’ Bobs-the-Boy answered, still with the same calm and assured confidence that almost persuaded them against their will that he was speaking only the simple fact. ‘Take it from me, it’s all O.K. about her,’ he went on. ‘Only we had best get rid of Mitchell and his lot if they’re still hanging about, same as I expect they are. I’ll go and tell them trespassers will be prosecuted. Coming with me?’

  But Dodd not only objected to accompany Bobs-the-Boy, but tried also to prevent him from going himself, arguing that it was both useless and dangerous. Bobs-the-Boy insisted, however, went off, and, a little to the surprise of the other two, presently returned, not only unarrested but smiling and triumphant.

  ‘I cleared ’em off,’ he said. ‘Most likely they’ll hang about in the road, but we can’t help that, and maybe with luck some of the cars going home late in a hurry will run over some of ’em. I told ’em, too, I had found a girl trespassing earlier in the evening and how I told her she ought to be run in, and she was so scared she ran off and dropped her bag, so I took it up to the house. That’s just in case Keene’s found Owen, and Owen’s reported at the Yard, but he won’t, not if I know Owen. Keep it to himself, he will, till he thinks he’s ready to produce his story all complete, to the last button on the last gaiter. There’s always some like that, don’t want to say anything till they’ve got their case complete. So then, when they’re that way, if you can fix them first – well, there you are, you’re O.K. just as if they had never found out a thing. And I’ve my own idea how we can fix Owen all right, good and plenty, too.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘If you wait, you’ll see, if you’ve luck. First thing is to get hold of the Guv’nor again. I did think he had more sense than to go and bunk – an advert in the Announcer will fetch him, won’t it?’

  ‘We can try,’ Zack answered. ‘He’ll see it most likely and I suppose he’ll answer it, unless he thinks it a trap.’

  ‘What’s to make him think that?’ demanded Bobs-the-Boy. ‘Only if he won’t answer, and we can’t find him, well, that tears it, tears it good and hard. Suppose he does see it and makes up his mind to answer, which I should think he’s sure to, unless he’s gone clean off his nut, what’ll he do? Phone you?’

  ‘No. He said he would put a reply advert, in the Announcer, a lot of letters all muddled up like a cypher, only it won’t mean anything except that the first letter will be the key letter according to a list he’ll send us, and the middle letter will be the time, starting at one in the morning and going round the clock, and the last letter will show the minutes past, each letter covering two minutes, so that “e”, for instance, will mean nine to ten minutes past and “z” from ten minutes to the next hour to the hour itself.’

  ‘Got it all thought out,’ observed Bobs-the-Boy with admiration. ‘You would think anyone with his brains would have more sense than up and run at the first little thing going wrong.’

  ‘Owen has him scared,’ Mrs Dodd explained, shuddering a little as if in full sympathy, ‘it’s knowing he was always there, always asking questions, never showing.’

 
; ‘Oh, well,’ Bobs-the-Boy answered, shrugging his shoulders, ‘it seems it’s always Owen, just as you said yourself.’

  ‘How’s Bryan answering us, if he does, going to help you get hold of Owen?’ demanded Dodd.

  Bobs-the-Boy looked oddly at him.

  ‘We’ll let Owen know where we’re to meet,’ he said slowly, ‘then he’ll follow us. If I know anything about his type, he’ll follow us alone. But we’ll make sure of that. If he does, if he follows us alone – why, then there’ll be another mysterious disappearance.’ He paused and looked at them slowly, from one to the other. ‘Never seen him, have you?’ he asked. ‘No more have I, never, no more than you. But this’ll be your chance all right,’ and Zack Dodd nodded in slow and ponderous agreement.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Mr Bryan Keeps His Appointment

  If indeed, as is commonly reported, there are those who make it their hobby to unravel every cypher advertisement that is inserted in the agony columns of the daily Press, they must have had a bad time trying to discover the meaning of the jumble of letters addressed to ‘Jim’ and signed ‘Rose Ann’ that presently appeared in the Announcer. For that the first letter, a ‘B’, meant, in accordance with the key Zack Dodd possessed, ‘Cleopatra’s Needle, Thames Embankment’, that the middle letter, a ‘V’, the thirteenth of the twenty-five composing the message, meant twenty-two o’clock or ten at night, and that the last letter, a ‘C’, meant half past that hour, no human ingenuity could very well have discovered, any more than it could discover in the totality of the message a meaning that was not there – did not exist, as Bobs-the-Boy so repeatedly declared did not the ‘dead corpse’ of Sybil Frankland.

  ‘It’s a rummy place to choose,’ Bobs-the-Boy observed a little distrustfully, when Zack told him the designated spot was in front of Cleopatra’s Needle. ‘Do you think it’s O.K., or is he just pulling our leg?’

  ‘There may be more to it than that; this may be only the first stage,’ Zack explained. ‘Heard anything about Owen? Seems to be keeping quiet, don’t he? He and the rest of the bobbies as well.’

  But Bobs-the-Boy shook his head.

  ‘They’re busy enough,’ he said, ‘trust them for that, the “busies” that they are. So am I,’ he added, nodding with a certain air of grim assurance. ‘I’ve been putting out a bit of ground bait Owen’s nibbling at already. It’s him or us for it now, and I mean it to be him.’

  He would say no more, but there was a kind of tense, grim resolution about him that impressed even Zack Dodd’s dull mind, that brought, too, a certain measure of reassurance to the woman now said to be his wife.

  ‘If it wasn’t for Owen,’ she remarked, ‘I wouldn’t be half as much afraid – but I shan’t ever think we’re safe till–’

  She did not complete the sentence, but Zack understood and nodded an agreement.

  ‘We can leave it to Bobs-the-Boy,’ he declared; ‘he means business all right – it’s him or us for it, and Bobs-the-Boy intends it’ll be him wins through.’ He added thoughtfully, after an interval, ‘I’ve got a hunch Bobs-the-Boy will come out on top; he’s a chap who knows what he’s doing, all O.K.’

  This time it was Mrs Dodd’s turn to nod in silent agreement, for she, too, was conscious of the same odd – presentiment, foreboding, anticipation, call it what you will – that Bobs-the-Boy would carry to a successful end the enterprise he had in hand.

  Later on, when Bobs-the-Boy came to them to suggest that they should all meet on the appointed evening at the Temple station and then walk on to where the obelisk stands, watching the flow of the Thames and dreaming perhaps of the distant Nile, Zack said to him,

  ‘Do you know they’ve been broadcasting for information about the Frankland girl?’

  ‘What about it?’ asked Bobs-the-Boy coolly. ‘There’ll be a pile of letters that high, that’s all, and none of them worth the paper they’re written on. Don’t I keep telling you no one can find what doesn’t exist?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean, “Doesn’t exist”,’ complained Zack irritably. ‘You may be as sure–’

  ‘Sure and certain,’ interrupted Bobs-the-Boy. ‘I know what I’m talking about, and you just stick to what don’t exist, can’t be found.’

  Again he spoke with that air of complete and assured confidence that always, for the time at least, soothed away Zack’s fears.

  ‘Only I can’t think what he means when he talks that way,’ Zack confided to his wife when the two of them set out that evening to keep their appointment with Bobs-the-Boy at the Temple station, ‘but he seems as sure and certain about it all as you are of a pint of beer after you’ve drunk it.’

  ‘He makes you feel that way when he talks to you,’ she admitted, ‘but I wish he would tell you straight out what he means; I never heard of any way of getting rid of a dead body so that it didn’t exist any longer. I shan’t feel easy till I understand.’

  ‘Most likely we shall soon,’ Zack said, though the need to understand troubled him less than it did his quicker-witted partner.

  They found Bobs-the-Boy waiting for them. Together they walked along the Embankment, and by Cleopatra’s Needle they halted to wait. They were a little early. The hour struck, and then the half hour. A little later a taxi cab drew up. The driver got down and started whistling to himself and looking about expectantly. Bobs-the-Boy and Zack went up to him. The man said,

  ‘I was told I was to pick up two gents here and they would know who it was I came from.’

  ‘Mr Bryan?’ asked Bobs-the-Boy.

  ‘That’s right,’ said the driver, ‘hop in, I’m to drive you to Oynton Square, No. 7.’

  ‘He hasn’t come himself?’ Zack remarked, somewhat unnecessarily since the cab was evidently empty.

  ‘Said he couldn’t,’ answered the driver, ‘but he paid down, and told me I could look to you gents for something handsome.’

  Bobs-the-Boy had already suggested to Zack that his wife had better be left behind in view of the nature of what in all probability lay before them. Zack agreed at once, and she herself showed no desire to accompany them.

  ‘I don’t want any more dreams,’ she said. ‘I’m looking to sleep better when I know Owen’s fixed, but I don’t want to have to dream about the way it happened.’

  They left her therefore to make her own way home, while they two entered the cab. Oynton Square proved to be on the north side of Hyde Park, a vast mausoleum of Victorian respectability, enormous houses put up apparently to solve the problem of unemployment by providing endless work for innumerable servants, the vast expanse of the reception rooms on the first floors contrasting oddly with the rabbit warren of small, stuffy bedrooms above. One or two of these buildings had been expensively converted into inconvenient flats, one or two were still in occupation by inmates holding out grimly against the tide of modern improvements, and one or two more were in process of demolition. No. 7, boarded and shuttered, reared itself in uninhabited solitude, a dreary witness of the social changes a century can bring about.

  But there was no sign anywhere of Mr Bryan, and when they had paid the taxi driver and told him not to wait, he remarked with some hesitation, but Bobs-the-Boy had given him a generous tip,

  ‘It ain’t no business of mine, Guv’nor, but there’s been a motor-cycle following us pretty near all the way from the Embankment.’

  ‘Oh, that’s all right, we know all about that,’ answered Bobs-the-Boy cheerfully, and when the taxi had departed to seek a fresh fare in that rich hour when the theatres empty, he observed to his companion, ‘Take it from me, Owen’s coming along all right – there’s always Owen, isn’t there?’ he said, chuckling grimly.

  But Zack did not share in this mirth. His wrath and fear rumbled heavily in his throat, and Bobs-the-Boy asked him,

  ‘Got a gun?’

  Zack nodded.

  ‘And this,’ he said, showing a brass knuckle-duster, an ugly, formidable weapon on the hand of a trained boxer.

  ‘Let’
s see the gun,’ Bobs-the-Boy demanded; and when Zack produced a small automatic, Bobs-the-Boy calmly opened it, slipped out the magazine, put that in his pocket, and handed back the empty weapon to the staring Zack.

  ‘Shooting’s too noisy,’ he vouchsafed to explain. ‘I’m taking– no risks of that going off and everyone hearing it miles round. The other thing’s all right. Keep it in your coat pocket, do you? Good. But what we have to do to-night we’ll do quick and quiet – quick and quiet,’ he repeated, and though Zack muttered and grumbled to himself, he made no other protest, yielding to his companion’s superior force of decision and knowledge of what he meant to do and how.

  All the same he did not seem easy in his mind.

  ‘Suppose there’s other “busies” following after Owen!’ he muttered.

  ‘There won’t be,’ Bobs-the-Boy answered. ‘I know Owen – he always likes to play a lone hand when he can, and he won’t risk having others trailing along after him that we might spot and take alarm. Besides I’ve put down ground bait, and I know he’s nibbled. If it’s Owen, he’s alone, and everything is going so far just as I want — only where’s Bryan?’

  But to this question there was no reply, for of Bryan there was still no sign. Zack began to ask for the magazine for his automatic back again, but Bobs-the-Boy flatly refused.

  ‘I’ve got my plan all ready,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to risk having it spoiled. Guns are noisy, and noise – well, you never know who hears it. What we do to-night, we’ll do quiet, and I’ll promise you one thing – Detective-Constable Owen and Bobs-the-Boy will both be there, but only one will go away again.’

  He spoke once again with that strange air of certainty he had, and then when there was still no sign of Bryan he commenced to fidget and move about. He was beginning in fact to feel a little uneasy, and to be afraid something had gone wrong, or that Bryan had taken alarm.

  ‘He may have seen we were being followed, and didn’t like it and cleared off,’ Zack suggested.

  ‘If it’s like that, we’ll have to try again,’ Bobs remarked, and then, after another look round that showed no sign of anyone in sight, it struck him that possibly Bryan might have gained admittance to the house and be waiting for them inside while they waited outside. But the doors and windows all seemed securely fastened, and not until he looked more closely did he discover a bit of paper pinned to the front door. He took it down. On it, printed in block characters, was a message directing them to follow the road through Uxbridge, and then, turning from it at a described spot, to go on by a certain route till they came to a wood bordering the road. At a spot where a tall birch tree grew, half way through this wood, they were to wait by the roadside till Bryan came; and it was added that to carry out these instructions a car hired for the occasion would be waiting for them in an adjoining garage, where the staff had been instructed to hand it over to anyone claiming it in the name of – ‘Owen’.