Everybody Always Tells: A Bobby Owen Mystery

by E. R. Punshon

  “Isn’t it Mrs Tinsley he was said to be flirting with?” Olive asked.

  “Yes, but there again, it’s only evidence—hearsay evidence. No direct proof. Finally—”

  “But there isn’t any one else, is there?” Olive interrupted, surprised. “You said ‘finally’ before.”

  “There’s Ivor Findlay,” Bobby answered.

  “But it’s he who was murdered,” protested Olive.

  “That’s the fact about him—the important fact. Another fact is that one cage had two live guinea pigs in it, and the other cage was empty.”

  “You can’t possibly mean that that has anything to do with it?”

  “I told you before,” Bobby said severely, “I’m only recording facts for the moment. All the relevant facts as far as I know them. Though I don’t know if they are all relevant to Ivor Findlay’s murder. But I think it’s fairly clear we’ve got the names of all directly concerned and equally clear that one of them must be the murderer—or murderess.”

  CHAPTER XVI

  “IT’S ALL AWFULLY DIFFICULT”

  AFTER ALL BOBBY was able to secure an hour or two of sleep and yet have a more or less satisfactory plan of campaign ready to show his colleagues.

  “Something to work on,” he told Olive in the morning, and added reproachfully: “There’s no red ink in the house.”

  “What do you want red ink for?” asked Olive, hurrying to get breakfast ready before there arrived the daily woman who took so little pains to hide her conviction that Olive existed only in order to get in other people’s way—the people who really had work to do.

  “Good gracious,” exclaimed Bobby, pausing with razor upheld—he was in the act of shaving—“don’t you know yet that red ink is essential to every self-respecting report.”

  “Well, there’s some on your writing-table,” Olive told him.

  “Oh, is there? I never thought of looking there,” said Bobby, deflated, and Olive remarked that it was just like him, and how long would he be? Because breakfast was ready and waiting.

  Bobby said he was ready, too, but he didn’t know if he could spare time to eat anything, there was so much to be done, so much to be set in motion.

  Olive said very firmly that she had never heard such nonsense in her life, and Bobby was on the whole inclined to agree.

  Accordingly, he settled himself at the table, and though there very busy, nevertheless found time to go over his notes again.

  “The beginning of it,” he told either himself or Olive, it wasn’t quite clear which, “seems to have been this odd business of ’phone calls talking about murder but naming the wrong person. How far are they relevant? If they were taken seriously, was the husband’s murder a precaution to save the wife’s life? Were they part of a prepared plan of some sort or merely used by the murderer as a kind of incidental cover? Nothing to show who was responsible, but all the same I’m going to work on its being one of this little group of people. It hardly seems likely when they are all so mixed up with one another that there can be some one else who has never been mentioned.”

  “Well, anyhow,” Olive pointed out, “Miss Grange can’t have made the calls, because she took one, didn’t she? And wasn’t Mrs Jacks there at the time? So it wasn’t her either.”

  But Bobby shook his head.

  “Can’t take that for granted,” he said. “Miss Grange may have been giving herself an alibi. No independent proof there was in fact any such call at that time. And what Mrs Jacks says is that she had gone out to do some shopping and had just come back that minute for something she had forgotten. So it is possible her absence had been counted on and the idea had been to induce suspicion, not to dispel it.”

  “Well, I don’t see how you are ever going to find out who it was,” Olive remarked, starting to clear the table because she thought it was now time for Bobby to get off—there was plenty to do in the flat, goodness knew.

  “If you want to know anything,” Bobby remarked as he began to gather his things together, “the best way is to ask those who do know.”

  “Expecting them to tell you?” Olive asked, not without sarcastic intent.

  “They’ll tell all right,” Bobby assured her. “They always do, especially when they try not to. The difficulty is to recognize it, and then to condition it to judge and jury level. A pernickety lot,” he added, not without reproach.

  “Tried it yet?” Olive asked.

  “Not been much time so far,” Bobby pointed out. “I asked Noel Lake. He said it wasn’t him, and he did produce an alibi. Said he was in Scotland at the time. Not that it does to take too much notice of alibis. Perfectly true that there’s nothing like an alibi, and equally true that an alibi is often nothing like the truth.”

  “Even if you do get some one to admit they thought Mrs Findlay was in danger of being murdered and wanted to warn her,” asked Olive, “how does that help when it wasn’t her but her husband who was killed?”

  “One possibility,” Bobby said, “is that she made the calls herself if she had murder in her own mind. A way perhaps of working herself up to it, of justifying what she was thinking of doing by pretending to herself that it was what he was meaning to do to her. She may even have thought she had reason to suspect he really was intending to.”

  “That’s getting awfully difficult,” protested Olive.

  “It’s all awfully difficult,” Bobby agreed, “and Mrs Findlay very much so in herself. More than difficult to know what to make of her with her declared intention to find herself in sin as she had failed to do in religion. But not in crime, because crime’s only vulgar. But would she think murder was among the vulgar crimes, or would she call it tragedy?”

  “I think she might,” Olive agreed in her turn. “She might see herself as a kind of Deborah or Judith in private life.”

  “I was thinking more of another Old Testament character—Eve.”

  “Eve didn’t kill any one,” Olive pointed out.

  “But she ate of the fruit of the tree of good and evil,” Bobby said. “Led to killing. Lots of it. Another thing about Mrs Findlay is that when the word blackmail crops up, as it has done once or twice, it’s always in connection with her. Blackmail might come under her definition of sin that isn’t merely vulgar crime. Still, why should she bother about using blackmail to get a husband? With her money and position she could have bought one practically anywhere, any day.”

  “What a horrid thing to say,” protested Olive indignantly.

  “Murder’s a horrid business,” Bobby pointed out, “and it’s murder we’re talking about. What the Findlay woman says is that she wants to find herself, and I’m wondering if she’s succeeded and if so what it is she’s found.”

  “I don’t see what any one can do about that,” Olive remarked.

  “Watch and collect facts, both old and new,” Bobby answered. “One of the first things will be to find out all we can about Mrs Jacks and her peepholes and about Count Ariosto. He seemed startled when the word blackmail cropped up as if it had some sort of significance for him. Also I think he both much dislikes Mrs Findlay and is mortally afraid of her. Is it conceivable she’s been blackmailing him? Then, too, Miss Grange will have to be asked how she knew the exact price offered for her fur coat if she hadn’t seen or spoken to Findlay that morning. That may mean that if she’s lying about it, she, not Mrs Tinsley, was the last person to see him—apart, of course, from the murderer whoever that was. Which may mean also that one or both of them may have told less than they know.”

  “There doesn’t seem anything to connect it up,” Olive remarked. “It would be a lot simpler if it had been Mrs Findlay who got killed.”

  “So it would, only it wasn’t,” Bobby retorted. “And it’s what we have to think of. All of it must fit in somewhere—guinea pigs, winnings at bridge, everything. I ought to get Professor Haynes’s report on the guinea pigs soon. By the way, he has let us have a copy of his report on Acton’s invention of the everlasting razor blade. Quite ent
husiastic, especially about the prospect of applying it to all edged tools, if the present resulting brittleness can be got over.”

  “Doesn’t that affect the razor blades?”

  “Oh, yes. Only there’s no great strain on a blade when you’re using it. You may have to be a bit careful in drying it and so on. Then there’s Mrs Tinsley, who was probably the last to see Findlay, but won’t say what her business was.”

  “She may have all sorts of reasons she doesn’t want to talk about,” Olive said.

  “She may, but there may have been one that was urgent and that may have been murder.”

  “Had she any motive?”

  “None known, but between man and woman there is always one possible motive. Till we know more about her, she has to be rated fairly high in the list of suspects.”

  With that Bobby departed to set in train the various lines of inquiry he had sketched out, and this task was hardly completed and various plain-clothes men given their instructions when he was informed that Professor Haynes had called. He proved, when introduced into Bobby’s room, to be a tubby little man, rather smartly dressed, looking indeed more like a prosperous business-man who was accustomed to do himself well than the conventional professor of common imagination. But Bobby did not know that Professor Haynes was a famous gourmet in the correct sense of that much misunderstood word, and that his opinion on the merits of a wine was regarded with deep respect. It was said that on one occasion he had narrowly escaped death from apoplexy when an American visitor had informed him that on account of the difference in price, French wines could not compete with those from California.

  In answer to Bobby’s questions he repeated that he had the highest opinion of Acton’s invention. Immense possibilities. When the company was floated, he intended to get in ‘on the ground floor’.

  “Acton,” he explained, “has promised to let me have an initialled application form. Very good of him considering what I wrote a few months ago in an issue of ‘Matter, Man and Mind’. I described him as a charlatan, I’m sorry to say, and I still think his scheme for an artificial radio-active satellite to revolve round Mars and make it habitable is mere fantasy—stuff for a boy’s story, Jules Verne stuff. I must say he seems to bear no grudge, and in fact he told me it was precisely because of my attack on him that he wanted my report—to make it plain there was no prejudice in his favour on my side.”

  “Yes, I see,” Bobby said. “Very interesting. Have you come to any decision about those guinea pigs? I mean, those apparently missing from the cage in Findlay’s room.”

  “A dreadful affair,” the Professor said. “Stabbed in the back, wasn’t he? Have you any idea who did it?”

  “We haven’t made a great deal of progress,” Bobby admitted. “A great many lines to follow up, and all of them contradicting each other.”

  “Look out for the woman,” the professor advised. “Where there’s a woman, there’s trouble. The poor fellow’s reputation in that way was no secret.”

  “So I understand,” Bobby answered. “About the guinea pigs.”

  “Got them on your mind?” The professor smiled. “Very mysterious. It’s really what I came to see you about. You want to know the cause of death? But you don’t know if they really were dead. You haven’t found bodies?”

  “No, there’s nothing but an empty cage,” Bobby admitted.

  “Well, you’re asking rather a lot, aren’t you?” suggested the professor, still smiling. “I’m to discover a possible cause of death of two guinea pigs which perhaps aren’t dead at all? Or even were never there at all. I don’t see quite why you think they might have been.”

  “An empty cage,” Bobby repeated. “I’ve a”—he only just stopped himself in time from saying ‘flair’—“I’ve a feeling,” he said instead.

  “Probably you don’t know,” the professor went on, “that Findlay was carrying out research into the after-effects of radio-activity. In my humble opinion he was working on entirely wrong lines. Not that he was at all explicit. Very secretive, very secretive in all his work. His own private iron curtain so to speak. He had an article in ‘Matter, Man, and Mind’ last month that did suggest some interesting possibilities, but that was all. Far too vague to form any real opinion, but clearly he was starting from a totally unproved hypothesis. Occasionally very important results can follow from what’s really no more than a lucky guess.”

  “Radio-activity can be pretty lethal, can’t it?”

  “It can—and is,” agreed the professor grimly. “In ways we don’t fully understand. If poor Findlay had subjected his guinea pigs to some form of ray or injection, they would very likely have died, and he may have wished to get rid of the bodies in his mania for secrecy. Not unlikely. You’ve told me all the facts?”

  “All that I know.”

  “Well, Mr Owen, I won’t deny I think the deduction you’ve drawn from those facts rather doubtful, to say the least. But I’ll certainly try it out if you wish. Only you know it’ll be fairly expensive. I charge for my time.”

  “I know,” Bobby said glumly, “and if I’m all wrong I shall get it in the neck. They’ll want a long report justifying the expenditure, and they won’t like it when they get it.”

  “Oh, well, that’s your affair,” said the professor heartlessly. “I should like to see Findlay’s notes. It might help me to make out what he was driving at and what experiments he may have made. Gould you let me have then?”

  “I understand there are none or very few,” Bobby answered. “And what there are are written in some kind of private shorthand or cypher. In any case, they would have to be regarded as the private property of Mrs Findlay, except in so far as we could claim that they might throw some light on the murder. We should have to prove it, too, because I doubt whether we should find Mrs Findlay very co-operative.”

  That ended the interview, and after the professor had departed Bobby remained sitting there for long enough, thinking over what he had been told, and trying to decide whether or no it had any relevance to the concrete problem he had to solve of finding sufficient evidence to justify an arrest.

  “And if,” he told himself gloomily, “there’s anything in these blackmailing hints, there may soon be another problem for us to deal with.”

  CHAPTER XVII

  “IT MUST BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY”

  A DAY OR two passed in the usual routine of such an investigation. C.I.D. men were kept busy here and there, searching for any small indication or hint that might lead towards the truth, interviewing various people, all of whom had either nothing or far too much to say. All this, as Bobby told Olive, with little apparent result.

  “We’ve got a few facts,” he said, “but they don’t seem to lead anywhere much. Rather a dead end at present. We’ve made some inquiries about Mrs Jacks. She was married in a small village near Aylesbury. The husband is dead, and there was one daughter. Then we know Findlay was a frequent visitor to Mrs Tinsley’s flat. The porter says he was there three or four times a week. But that doesn’t take us much farther forward, and we could have guessed as much anyhow. Except perhaps that it does seem as if his connection with her was rather more serious than with most of his other lady friends. No new development otherwise.”

  “I suppose,” Olive said, looking a little superior, “you never thought of asking Mrs Brett, did you?”

  “Mrs Brett?” repeated Bobby, puzzled, for that was the name of the daily woman of the passing moment. “What’s she got to do with it?”

  “You,” explained Olive.

  “Me?” Bobby repeated. “What on earth are you getting at?”

  “She works here, comes here every day,” Olive pointed out. “So she sees you every day, and so of course, she knows all about it. All her friends regard her as getting it ‘straight from the horse’s mouth’. The horse,” Olive added, with a kind smile, “being you. And that’s better than being another sort of smaller animal with a shorter name.”

  “She’s not turning amateur detectiv
e and using my name, is she?” Bobby asked, slightly alarmed.

  “Very likely she tells all her friends she is your chief assistant,” Olive answered. “And one of them has another friend who knows another who works for some one who knows the Actons, and what it comes to is that Mrs Findlay and Mr Acton are going to get married, though they’re not saying anything yet.”

  Bobby was not often taken aback, but this time he was very much so.

  “If that’s true, I wonder if it is,” he said slowly. Olive expressed no opinion. Bobby said: “It may be only gossip.”

  “Haven’t you always said in your lectures no one should ever despise gossip?”

  “What a man says in his lectures isn’t evidence,” Bobby retorted, but he had still a very worried air. “Most likely it’s all nonsense,” he decided. “But it’ll have to be looked into.”

  “Could it—” Olive asked hesitatingly, “could it be a motive?”

  “For Findlay’s murder?” Bobby said. “But which of them? It seems like deliberately asking to be suspected. Acton was certainly dancing attendance on her in rather a marked way, but he also took care to tell me he was very happily married.”

  “If he is married already,” Olive said uneasily, “he can’t, can he? I mean, not marry Mrs Findlay.”

  “Not while his wife is still alive,” Bobby said.

  “Only he could, if anything happened to her,” Olive remarked, almost to herself.

  “He would be free then,” Bobby said, “just as Mrs Findlay is free now something has happened to her husband. You know, Olive, I don’t like this. I don’t like it at all. It does suggest Mrs Acton may be meant to follow Ivor Findlay. Only it’s incredible. Too open, too barefaced. Yet sometimes people do incredible things and get away with it just because they are incredible. And then I’m not sure but that you couldn’t call Mrs Findlay incredible.”