She gave him another stare of haughty indignation and surprise.
“The conclusions policemen come to do not interest me,” she said.
“You know, I’m afraid this time they’ve got to,” Bobby told her quietly. “I will tell you how I see things, and you can correct me if I’m wrong. It is true you were on the road leading to Miles Bottom Farm in the company of Ned Bloom. I am inclined to think it was an accidental meeting, due to your both wishing to see Captain Dunstan and expecting to find him at the farm. I don’t know what Ned Bloom wanted—”
“You are quite wrong,” she interrupted; “he was going away from Miles Bottom Farm, not towards it, when I met him.”
“You stopped to talk to him. Then you went on, and so did he, the other way?”
“Were you watching us?” she asked with angry suspicion.
“Dear me, no,” he said. “Merely putting two and two together to see what they make. For instance, I don’t think you would be walking out to Miles Bottom Farm to see Captain Dunstan except for some very good reason, and as I know there had been a quarrel between him and Ned, and threats had passed, I suggest you wanted to make Captain Dunstan promise to take no notice of Ned.”
“Well, what’s there in that?” she asked when he paused.
“Only this,” Bobby continued. “I suggest that when you found Ned had disappeared, and the time passed, and nothing was heard of him, you began to grow uneasy, and the longer Ned was away the more uneasy you grew, especially when you knew that Mrs Bloom believed the boy was dead. So finally you asked Captain Dunstan if anything had happened, and he thought you were accusing him of being a murderer and—well, he was extremely angry, and you were angrier still at his being angry, and that was that.”
All Kitty’s former self-possession had vanished. It was, in fact, a very subdued and even frightened young woman who was looking at him now.
“I don’t know how you know all that,” she faltered. “How do you? You can’t have put it all together. It’s just guessing.”
“What matters,” Bobby said, “is not how I know, or if I’ve guessed, or even if I’ve guessed right, but whether your suspicions are correct.”
“Besides, you’re all wrong,” she told him eagerly. “It wasn’t like that at all. I never called him a murderer. He had no right to say I did. I thought perhaps it was a duel.”
“A duel?” repeated Bobby, considerably taken aback, for this was an idea that had never occurred to him.
“When I met Ned that day,” Kitty continued, “he said Captain Dunstan had been trying to bully him. He was angry because he thought I was going to Miles Bottom Farm to see Mr Dunstan, and I wasn’t at all—I was going for some eggs Mrs Jenks promised to let me have for mother. Mrs Jenks lives a long way past Miles Bottom Farm. Ned wouldn’t believe me. He said Captain Dunstan thought he could say what he liked because of Ned’s lameness. Ned was always awfully sensitive about it. He hated you to notice it, and at the same time was always making sure you couldn’t help. He said he might be lame, but he could use a pistol as well as any one, and he would challenge Mr Dunstan to a duel. I told him not to be so silly, but when Ned didn’t come home and it was so long I—I did wonder a little. I don’t see that it was anything for Captain Dunstan to get so angry about.”
“You say you met Ned,” Bobby remarked. “You mean he was coming away from the Miles Bottom Farm direction. Had he been there?”
“No. He said he hadn’t, and it was true, because I asked afterwards.”
“I am wondering,” Bobby explained, “how he managed to get to where you met him. I had all possible inquiries made. No one saw him on the Threepence ’bus, no one saw him about here except you. He leaves my office in Midwych, and the next that’s heard of him he is on the road on the farther side of Threepence on the road leading back to Midwych.”
“I think he came away from Midwych by the Barsley ’bus,” Kitty explained. “There’s a stop on the road where it turns away from Wychwood forest. I think Ned got off the ’bus there and walked across to the Threepence road. It’s a very lonely part of the forest, all scrub and rock, and there isn’t any path, but you can get through if you don’t mind scrambling and climbing and getting your clothes torn.”
“That explains a good deal,” Bobby said. “Only what made him come back by that round-about way?”
“He always liked doing things in a secret, round-about way,” Kitty said. “Poor boy! Father said once he had been dealt a bad hand in the game of life, but that he made it worse by playing it more badly still.”
“I expect that’s true enough,” Bobby said thoughtfully. “I suppose the important thing is not the cards we are dealt, but how we play them.”
But what he was really thinking to himself was that almost certainly, from Mr Fletcher’s description, any one crossing the forest from the Barsley road to the Threepence road, coming out near Miles Bottom Farm would pass near that hidden cache of petrol now discovered by Mr Fletcher’s Boy Scouts.
CHAPTER XXVII
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THEY HAD REACHED the Skinner cottage by now. Kitty pushed back the door and they entered, the door opening immediately into the kitchen. Mr Skinner was sitting there in his chair, in his accustomed place, near the window. Like a bearded Jove he seemed to Bobby’s fancy, dominating this simple room where poverty had taken on a dignity of its own by sheer power of acceptance. He looked up at them frowningly as they came in, his manner not at all that of one with a confession to make or excuses to offer. He did not speak for a moment or two; nor did Bobby, through whose mind were buzzing the many thoughts and speculations roused by what Kitty had just told him.
A duel? A queer, disturbing idea. Could that possibly be what had happened? he wondered. If it were, it might explain much.
“Young man,” said Mr Skinner in his most severe, authoritative voice, “what is the meaning of your having put one of your police on watch outside this cottage?”
“You’ve noticed that, have you?” Bobby asked. “Too bad. I told them they were to be sure to keep out of sight. The trouble is,” he added apologetically, “we have to put up with any one we can get these days—men we wouldn’t have looked at before the war, and now I hardly dare say ‘bo’ to one of them. They know I can’t sack them, and though they can’t clear out themselves, they can go sulky. And what is the good of a sulky policeman?”
“I’m not asking for information about your men,” Mr Skinner said in the same severe tones. “Young man, you talk too much.”
“Well, you know,” Bobby explained with what was meant for his most winning smile, “if there’s anything more useful to a policeman than knowing when to hold his tongue, it’s knowing when to talk too much.”
Mr Skinner gave Bobby a long and searching look.
“I think you seem an intelligent young man,” he said finally.
“Well, I’ve often thought that myself,” admitted Bobby, “but I never say so, in case other people disagree—even violently.”
“He knows things without any one telling him,” interposed Kitty, suddenly and indignantly. “I think it’s beastly.”
“Oh, I say, come now,” exclaimed Bobby, equally indignantly. “What a thing to say.”
“At this moment,” said Mr Skinner, “you are simply trying to put me off by smart talk.”
“You’ve noticed that?” asked Bobby. “I’m almost afraid I shall have to return your remark about being intelligent. I daresay it was fairly obvious, though. I often am. Obvious, I mean. It pays. The more obvious you are, the cleverer other people think you, and then they start being clever, too, and then you get ’em.”
“I don’t know what you mean by that,” Mr Skinner said, but now not so much sternly as uneasily. “I ask you again: why have you put a constable here to keep observation on us?”
“Because,” Bobby answered with a sudden change of tone, “I think it proper in the exercise of my discretion as the responsible officer of police in this neighbourhood
.” Less sharply, he added: “I may remind you that I am answerable only to my immediate superior, the Chief Constable of Midwych, and through him to the Home Office—which in turn is answerable to you, though no doubt at rather a long remove.”
Mr Skinner was still looking at Bobby in a somewhat puzzled manner.
“Obvious, you call yourself, do you?” he grunted. “Full of tricks as a ship’s monkey, if you ask me. All that doesn’t get away from the fact that you’ve started a lot of gossip about me.”
“Why, no,” Bobby said. “No, not I. Ned Bloom.”
“What do you mean? Ned Bloom? He’s left the place.”
“Yes,” agreed Bobby, “he’s left, and he has not come back, and that is what has started any gossip there may be.”
Kitty said from behind:
“It’s not that he’s left, it’s not that at all. What people are saying is that he’s been made away with.”
“Is that what you think?” Mr Skinner asked.
“Not what I think, but what I fear,” Bobby answered.
“Is every young scamp who leaves his mother and his home to go off on his own affairs necessarily murdered?” demanded Mr Skinner.
“Far from it,” Bobby agreed. “Very few of them, in fact—very few indeed.”
“He’ll come back when he thinks he’s been away long enough,” declared Mr Skinner. “In the meantime, there’s a lot of gossip going on, and some of it is about me. I don’t like it, and I expect you to put a stop to it.”
This was said so much like an order from higher authority that Bobby could not help smiling a little.
“My dear sir,” he protested, “if you really think that any police in the world—even a Gestapo working full blast—can stop gossip, you must have a good deal less experience of life than I should have expected.”
“What do you mean by that?” growled Mr Skinner.
Mrs Skinner came into the room from behind. Apparently she had heard and recognized the danger signal in her husband’s low, rumbling tones.
“Now, Jerry, now,” she said rebukingly. To Bobby she said: “It’s very sad if anything has really happened to that poor boy; but, if it has, we know nothing about it. How could we? Mr Skinner is very annoyed.”
“Well, I’m sorry about that,” Bobby said. “But there it is. It seems certain the young man knew something—or thought he knew something—that some one else didn’t want others to know. And now he has disappeared, and as long as he remains disappeared, he can’t be asked what it was he knew. It worries me, because he came to tell me he knew something, and I let him go without making him explain. I can’t help feeling that with more tact and patience I might have got it out of him. Makes me feel responsible, in a way. His mother says it would have taken more than tact and patience to get him to part with any secret he knew. Perhaps that’s so. Anyhow, he has vanished, and his secret with him—if he had one. What’s more worrying still is that I don’t get much help. People seem to be keeping things back.”
“Nothing that has anything to do with his going away,” Mr Skinner growled.
“How can I tell that till I know?” Bobby asked. “I don’t like secrets. They are so apt to make trouble, mischief. If you know any and would tell me, trouble might be saved.”
“An impertinent remark,” pronounced Mr Skinner. “We all have private affairs that are no concern of any one else.”
“Then there’s the story,” Bobby continued, “that you had threatened to put a bullet into Ned.”
“He’s always saying things like that,” explained Mrs Skinner, intervening. “No one ever thinks of taking any notice.”
“Oh, they don’t, don’t they?” roared Mr Skinner. “Let me tell you—”
“Yes, of course, dear,” interrupted Mrs Skinner soothingly. To Bobby she said: “Wouldn’t any one be annoyed if there was a young man prowling about the garden at night with a camera as if he wanted to try to take photographs?”
“Photographs?” repeated Bobby sharply, remembering at once that photograph of heaped-up jewellery he had found in the missing lad’s ‘den’. Here was the first reference to photographs he had so far come across. “What of? Photograph what?” he demanded.
Kitty had vanished into the back part of the cottage, the scullery. Mrs Skinner gave Bobby a maternal look as if to say: “You’re much too young.” Mr Skinner growled:
“I had heard of ’em before—country Paul Prys, I mean. The first time I had come across it, though. In the garden. If I could get about, lay my hands on them . . . I can’t. Tied to my chair. So I said that—about putting a bullet into the next one. I didn’t. If I did, what am I supposed to have done with the body? Boiled it up for soup in the scullery copper?”
“Father. Don’t be—disgusting,” said Kitty’s voice from the scullery.
“Shut the door, my girl,” retorted her father, “and then what you don’t hear won’t hurt you.”
Kitty accepted the advice with a most emphatic bang. Mrs Skinner said three times over, each time more reproachfully than before:
“Jerry, Jerry, Jerry.”
Taking no notice of this, though thrice repeated, Mr Skinner said to Bobby:
“There’s no bathroom here.” He seemed to expect Bobby to be surprised by this information. When no astonished comment resulted, he went on: “I don’t know why. Easy enough to add a bathroom. It means we have to use the boiler in the scullery—at night generally. Takes too long to heat up in the morning for the three of us. Some young blackguards started hanging about outside in the evenings. I waited for them in my chair. I thought one of them might come near enough for me to get hold of him and shake his life out. I had a stick with a hooked handle I meant to use for a gaff. I didn’t manage it. Kept off far enough. But I recognized Ned Bloom by his limp. He had his camera with him. I shone my torch on him and saw it plainly. He cleared out fast as he could. I called after him by name that I would put a bullet in him next time. By gad, sir, I meant it, too, at the moment. But I never saw him again, or any of the rest of the young blackguards either, so I never got the chance. I think they were really frightened, and I hope it did them good.”
“Yes, I see,” Bobby said. “A bit unlucky it happened just before Ned vanished, and I suppose it explains why there is this undercurrent of talk. Anyhow, thank you for telling me.”
He went away then, troubled in his mind. Possible, he thought, that now he had been given the true story with cause and motive. Conceivable, he thought, that an old man of passionate and headstrong temper, carried away by a fury of indignation against village ‘peeping Toms’, might have fired a shot to frighten them away, rather than with actual intent, and yet by bad luck have killed.
A trifle suspicious even that Skinner had so quickly pointed out how impossible it would have been for an invalid like himself, tied to his chair, to conceal the body. But there was Kitty. Bobby had conceived a considerable respect for her strength of will, resolution and resource. Not beyond her, he thought, when the safety of her father was concerned, to carry out such a task.
He found himself thinking of their garden, a fairly large piece of ground. Graves have been dug in gardens before to-day.
Yet there was that other suggestion put forward almost by accident, almost reluctantly, apparently drawn out by his own questions, but possibly questions provoked and anticipated—the suggestion of a duel between the missing Ned and Captain Dunstan. Both suggestions could not be true, but one might be, and both had to be most carefully considered and followed up. Or was it merely an invention of Kitty’s by which she hoped to divert suspicion from her father?
Bobby felt his head was beginning to whirl—too many possibilities, too many considerations altogether. A duel in these days seems fantastic. All the same, Bobby felt the idea could not be too lightly dismissed. Dunstan might have been taunted into compliance by more of such sneers at his courage as Ned seemed already to have been responsible for in trying to hint that Dunstan’s wound had been self-inflicted—a stor
y none the less likely to anger a high-spirited young man for being so entirely unfounded and improbable. Dunstan might conceivably have accepted the challenge with some idea of ‘teaching a lesson’ to Ned, and then by unlucky accident, rather than by intention, a fatal conclusion have resulted.
Two alternative explanations. Either might be true, or neither. But each got over the difficulty Bobby had felt before that neither Mr Skinner nor Captain Dunstan seemed like murderers, even though Bobby knew well that murder is the one crime that almost any one may be guilty of in just one single instant of loss of self-control.
Both were men of passionate and head-strong temperament, and Bobby could easily picture either one of them as trapped by circumstance and his own temper into hasty action, with tragic, unintended results.
Taunts from a spiteful tongue, anger at indecently prying eyes, these at times have roused a height of temper overtopping reason and control.
A hard task, Bobby told himself, to disentangle the truth from so many conflicting considerations, and he was both looking and feeling worried when at last he reached home. Olive, alone in the house—the woman who came in ‘as a favour’ to help had long since departed—gave him first his belated supper and then showed him a paragraph in the evening paper.
Bobby read it with interest. It was to the effect that a Government grant of £5,000 had been made to Mrs Billings, widow of the late Lawrence Billings, on account of suggestions made by him for the improvement of the detection of sound-waves under water. It was added that Mrs Billings, now a resident of Threepence, near Midwych, was receiving many congratulations on this long-delayed recognition by the Treasury of the value of her late husband’s work.
“I suppose it must be true?” Olive said.
“Oh, yes,” Bobby agreed. “An item like that couldn’t be a fake.”
“Well, then,” Olive said.
Bobby went to the ’phone. He called up in turn the two local papers as well as the offices of the ‘national’ papers that produced local editions. Each one he asked to insert in the personal column of the next issue a notice he dictated. It ran:
Secrets Can't be Kept: A Bobby Owen Mystery Page 16
