Everybody Always Tells: A Bobby Owen Mystery

by E. R. Punshon

  Bobby agreed that this was hard luck on the Vicar, especially when Mr Acton was so well known through his inventions. He remarked that he expected visitors to the village often asked about him. The post-mistress said that was indeed so. Only the other day there had been a lady asking quite a lot about him and Mrs Acton, too.

  “Very curious like,” said the post-mistress, eyeing Bobby now a little doubtfully, as if she thought he were showing the same quality in an unusual degree.

  In all this there had been no hint or suggestion, though Bobby had left the way open once or twice, that Mr and Mrs Acton were anything but a model married couple. So Bobby changed the subject to more general topics, such as the weather, and then strolled off to the village public-house, the Abels End Arms, for a glass of beer and a chat. There he was told much the same thing, learning once again that the Actons were Roman Catholics, and that Mrs Acton regularly, and Mr Acton frequently, attended their own church in the neighbouring town.

  “Seems wrong to me,” pronounced the landlady, who served him. “What I say is people ought to be more broad-minded like, taking good money out of the village is what it comes to.”

  Bobby remarked it was a pity more people couldn’t take a broad-minded view and what a really pretty village this was. He had never seen one more charming and picturesque. He thought he would take a stroll round and secure a few snapshots. By the way, a lady he knew had told him what a lovely little place this was. He wondered if she had been recently. He gave a brief description of Mrs Findlay, but the landlady shook her head. No one like that had been recently so far as she knew. Bobby produced two small photographs he had secured, one of Kitty Grange and one of Mrs Tinsley. The landlady recognized Mrs Tinsley’s photograph at once.

  “That’s her,” she said. “Asked a lot of questions when she came in for a bite of lunch. Said she would like to settle down in a quiet place like this, but as I told her, there isn’t nowhere to let for miles. Snapped up immediate if one comes empty.”

  Bobby said it was like that almost everywhere. Leaving his car in the Abels End Arms yard, he walked across the village green to the church and thence on and up the hill towards the Acton dwelling—Abels End Cottage he noticed it was called. The path he followed led past the house, on by a ruinous, deserted cottage, and then over the hill.

  From what had once been this cottage garden, now a desolation of weeds and straggling grass, there was a fine view over the village and the country beyond. Bobby sat down on an old tree-stump that had apparently at one time been within the cottage garden, now only to be distinguished from the hill-side by a greater luxuriance of wild and unchecked growth. It was a fine, warm, sunny day, but Bobby was in no mood to enjoy either the sunshine or the view.

  What, he asked himself uneasily, was the meaning of this abrupt re-entry of Mrs Tinsley on the scene? Why had she come here making inquiries about the Actons and more especially about Mrs Acton? Was there any connection between this recent visit and the visit she had paid to Findlay before his death on some errand or for some purpose she had refused to explain? Disturbing, too, disturbing in the extreme to know that the Actons were practising members of the Roman Catholic church. For that seemed to rule out any chance of a divorce to make possible marriage between Acton and Mrs Findlay, if it were true that such a thing was in contemplation.

  Only through divorce or death can a second marriage become possible. Death had freed Mrs Findlay, and was it going to be death once more that would free Charles Acton?

  It was such dark, unhappy thoughts that possessed him as he sat there in the warm sunshine, conscious of ominous possibilities and responsibilities he saw small hope of meeting with success. For police action can be taken only on accomplished fact, not on doubt or on suspicion, however well founded these may seem. Presently he saw a woman come out of Abels End Cottage. Two small children were with her. A common enough sight—common-place indeed. A mother with two little, laughing children by her side, sometimes leaving her to run after some treasure they had noticed, and then running back to take her hand or show for her admiration what they had found. The sentimentalist, but fortunately there are few in these days, might call it the loveliest sight on earth, and all the lovelier for being as yet not too rare.

  But to Bobby as he watched the little party, mother and children, slowly making its way down the hill-side to the village, it seemed they went from the light and sunshine on the hill to the brooding shadows lower down where the light no longer lay and into which soon they vanished from his sight.

  He turned his thoughts to Mrs Findlay, that amateur of evil, that seeker after knowledge by a road that might lead, Bobby felt, to a knowledge of little worth, to a knowledge not of truth but of falsehood.

  He roused himself from such troubling thoughts, and looking round he wondered idly why this cottage had been allowed to fall into such ruin. The landlady of the Abels End Arms had declared that there was no vacant habitation for miles around, and yet here was what apparently had been a perfectly good cottage no one had troubled to keep in repair. Even now it would certainly cost no great sum to make it habitable again. Even if no one in the village required accommodation, there is a steady demand for week-end cottages. Especially for those in such a pleasant situation. Lack of labour possibly, Bobby thought. Even the garden could soon be brought back into cultivation, and Bobby noticed that there was a well.

  He went across to look at it. Once there had been a high stone surround, but this, like the cottage, was now in ruin, some of the stones of which it had been made lying about near by. It rather looked, Bobby thought, as if there had been wilful damage. Mischievous children perhaps, though the stones looked heavy for children to displace. Bobby noticed too that the well, fairly deep, had no covering. It seemed to have run dry. Dangerous, he told himself. If children did come here to play, a bad accident might easily result.

  He went back to the village, collected his car, and drove a mile or so along the London Road till he came to a railway cutting. There, as had been arranged with the local superintendent, punctual to the minute, waited for him the constable stationed at Abels End. Bobby invited him to a seat in the car and drove on slowly, asking a few questions on the way. The answers confirmed much of what he had already learnt. The Actons were well liked in the village. There was not the least hint that their married life was not perfectly happy. They were Roman Catholics, and Mrs Acton was zealous in her support of her church. Mr Acton was less zealous perhaps and a little apt to stay at home on Sundays, but still he attended fairly regularly, and after all he did live outside, well outside the three-mile limit which is sometimes supposed to excuse occasional absence.

  Bobby asked if visitors to the village often inquired about Mr Acton and his inventions. The constable said fairly frequently, more especially since there had been so much talk in the papers about his suggestions for manufacturing an artificial, radioactive satellite or planet to warm Mars and make it habitable. Yes, there had been a lady in the village a day or two ago, asking quite a lot about the Actons. Bobby described Mrs Findlay and showed his photographs of Kitty Grange and Mrs Tinsley. Again it was Mrs Tinsley who was picked out. The constable had noticed that she went off up the hill towards the Actons’ house, but he did not think she called. She might just have gone to look at the old tumble-down cottage up there. She had said something about the village being a lovely place to settle down in.

  “Oh, yes,” Bobby said, “that reminds me. I took a walk that way myself just now. There’s an open well. It’s dry but it’s quite deep and no covering at all. A little dangerous, don’t you think? It looked as if some one had been meddling with the stone parapet round it, too. If children got playing near, one of them might easily fall in.”

  “That’s old Mr Moss’s doing,” explained the constable. “I’ve been on at him about it. Only found out the other day. He says it wasn’t him took the well cover, but most like that’s a lie. Good sound bit of wood such as isn’t so easy to get these days. I had a look
round his place, but I couldn’t identify it. Most like sawn up and used for repairs soon as took. But he had to own up he had been carting some of the stones from the well-head. I told him I was reporting to Mr Acton, and he could be summonsed for wilful damage and such. But Mr Acton said not to bother, if he put the stones back where he got them, in position again. Moss promised faithful, and I’ll see he does, though there won’t be an excuse he won’t think up. A good weight, too, some of them. Wanted them for a new pigsty seemingly.”

  “I suppose he never troubled his head about the danger to other people,” Bobby remarked. “Any one might fall down there in the dark or even simply through carelessness and not looking. Does the cottage belong to Mr Acton? I was wondering why it had been allowed to go to ruin.”

  “Well, it was like this,” the constable explained. “When Mr Acton built his house he had a well sunk, and it tapped the old cottage well. Went dry as a bone. There was talk of the law and damages, only one of the two old people who lived there died, and the other went to live with a daughter. So Mr Acton settled the law talk by buying the cottage. But now he can’t let it, along of there being no water. Runs short himself, too, when the weather’s a bit dry. So it’s just going to rack and ruin.”

  Bobby remarked that it was a pity with housing so short everywhere. He added that he was much obliged for the very clear answers he had been given. A little disturbing, he had found them, he said. He did not explain why, though the constable was plainly surprised at the observation. Bobby went on to say that if there were any more visitors who seemed unusually interested in the village and its inhabitants, he would like a report made. He would ask the local superintendent if that could be arranged. He would like photos taken, if possible. Of course, the visitor must have no idea it was being done for police purposes. Probably, if that got into the papers, there would be a question in Parliament.

  The constable turned pale at this, and Bobby’s own voice had sunk to a cautious whisper as he made the suggestion. For a question in Parliament is the present-day equivalent of the ancient thunderbolt from high Olympus. The constable, recovering slightly, said he didn’t think his superintendent would much like taking such a risk. Bobby said, no, of course not, but it could be done quite easily and no risk at all. Did the constable know, no doubt it was an extreme demand, but did he, by any chance, know an intelligent boy who could be trusted, and who understood photography?

  The constable said, a little doubtfully, that he had a nipper of his own who wasn’t any worse than others and liked playing about with his camera.

  “Good,” said Bobby. “Tell him when he sees a visitor to take a snap quite openly and then offer a card promising to supply any copies required for half a crown or so. Quite likely he’ll get an order or two. He might even work up a little business of his own like that. In any case whether he does or not, get him to develop all his snaps and send copies to me. I’ll ’phone your people and get their consent.”

  The constable, much impressed, said it took brains to think up a scheme so simple, easy, safe, and effective. Nor did Bobby, who had learned by experience never to deflate admiration by explanation, tell him that in London streets men were doing just that, and that already it had in one or two cases proved useful to the authorities. There was an international crook of the ‘con man’ type, who had hitherto always most successfully avoided having his photograph taken, but of whom two or three excellent snaps were now on file at Scotland Yard.

  CHAPTER XX

  “WAS IT A BOY?”

  THE VILLAGE TO which Bobby now drove on, the one where Mrs Jacks’s marriage had taken place, was of a type very different from Abels End. In the course of years it had changed from its original rustic and self-contained community to what is sometimes called a ‘dormitory’—that is, a place where a high proportion of the inhabitants earn their living and spend their working life in a neighbouring town.

  Here, then, there was no such continuity of communal memory as can often be found in the true village. Nor were there any postcards of local beauty spots to serve as a start for a friendly chat. Even at police headquarters, generally a veritable mine of local information, the name Jacks was totally unknown. It was only as the most forlorn of forlorn hopes, and because he felt he must do something, however hopeless, however vague a gesture, that Bobby decided to look up the record of Mrs Jacks’s marriage in the parish registry.

  He had no idea what he could find there to help, but almost the first thing he noticed was that one of the witnesses was a Ferdinand Findlay. A mere coincidence, perhaps, for Findlay is not a very uncommon name, but Bobby never trusted coincidence. Behind coincidence he used to say was almost always cause, and over this coincidence, if such it were, he thought a good deal as he drove home.

  “Just as well to look up things yourself when it’s at all possible,” he told Olive. “Any one who hadn’t known the background would very likely never have noticed the names of the witnesses. Or have thought it worth mentioning if they had.”

  “I don’t see how it’s going to help,” Olive said. “I suppose you’ve got some idea in your head, but it all seems pretty dim and remote. Like those guinea pigs that weren’t there you’re always worrying about.”

  “I’m not,” protested Bobby. “I only like things explained. The guinea pigs aren’t there, so where are they and why aren’t they? That’s all. And if there is any connection between witness Findlay some thirty years ago and murdered Findlay the other day—well, I want to know what it is.”

  Accordingly, the next day found him alighting at the small Monmouthshire station nearest to New Dagonby Hall. On the Dagonby estate surrounding it—still of undiminished size, for the owners of the estate had always been successful merchants and traders as well as landlords—one of the farms was that which had been occupied ever since mediaeval times by a Findlay. First Bobby went to the cottage that served as the village police station. By arrangement, the sergeant in charge of the district was there waiting for him. Naturally the murder had caused much interest and general talk in the district, both because it had taken place in the London home of the great man of the neighbourhood and because the Ferdinand Findlay occupying the ancestral farm was a cousin of the victim.

  “Not that we ever saw Mr Ivor down here,” the sergeant told Bobby. “Not since his old father’s death. Nor did people want. He hadn’t a good name in these parts. Mr Ferdinand told him straight he wouldn’t be welcome there.”

  “Mr Ferdinand took over the farm, I suppose,” Bobby asked. “Was there any ill feeling over that?”

  “Oh, no, Mr Ivor was glad enough to be quit of it by all accounts,” the sergeant answered. “Had his own job in London and didn’t want to give it up. So that they settled it between them Mr Ferdinand was to carry on. They’ve never had anything to do with each other since though.”

  Bobby asked how old Mr Ferdinand was, and learned he was comparatively young. So clearly he was not the Findlay who had acted as witness at Mrs Jacks’s marriage. From further questions Bobby learned that there had been two brothers, Ivor, the father of the murdered man, and Ferdinand, presumably the marriage witness. Ivor, the elder of the two, had stayed on the farm, succeeding his father as tenant. Ferdinand had been apprenticed to a Birmingham firm. Both were dead, and each had left one son—the murdered Ivor and the Ferdinand who had taken over the farm on his uncle’s death.

  “Farming’s in the Findlay blood,” said the sergeant, “but not in Mr Ivor’s seemingly.”

  Discreetly he hinted that Mr Ivor had, however, taken after his father in one respect.

  “The old man was always after the women,” the sergeant explained when Bobby asked about this. “Thought more of skirt chasing than the land. They do say he would have been sold up only for marrying a by-blow of his lordship’s. But maybe that’s only talk and gossip, and I wouldn’t mention it to anyone, only to you, sir, being official as you might say.”

  “I want you to tell me everything, everything,” Bobby said
. “You never know what may not help.”

  “Gossip,” repeated the sergeant. “Before my time. May be nothing in it.”

  “There’s often something to start gossip,” Bobby said. “Not always but often. Do you know if there was in this case?”

  “Well, the girl had been in service at Dagonby Hall,” the sergeant answered. “And a baby arrived only two or three months after the wedding. That’s in the registers here.”

  “A baby?” Bobby repeated. “Was it a boy? Ivor?”

  “That’s right. A deal of talk there was, too. But the child died in a year or so, and people forgot. The Mr Ivor that’s been murdered up in London was born the same week the other died.”

  Bobby sat considering this for some minutes in silence. He felt obscurely excited, vaguely aware of meanings and implications he at the moment could not fully grasp. He saw the sergeant looking at him curiously. He said:

  “At any rate, there’s no doubt about this Ivor being really his father’s son?”

  “Oh, no,” the sergeant agreed. “Old Mr Ivor was very sweet on his wife, by-blow of his lordship’s or not, and she kept him up to the mark, too, as long as she lived. Some said she had the whip hand in the money line, along of what his lordship settled on her to keep her tongue still. But there, it’s all long ago, and it’s hard to know the rights of it.”

  “It always is,” Bobby agreed, “and things that happen long ago sometimes start to work themselves out to-day. Didn’t you say the young Ivor had the reputation down here of being like his father in running after women?”

  “He had a bad name for it,” answered the sergeant. “People haven’t forgot either, not about Mary Jacks they haven’t.”

  “Mary Jacks?” Bobby repeated, startled. “Who was she?”

  “Buried in the churchyard,” the sergeant explained. “Drowned. Accident, the jury brought it in, but there was many believed she did it herself because of what Ivor Findlay had done and left her. But others said it was as much her to blame as him. And some thought maybe it was him did it—pushed her in to still her tongue. None believed it was accident no more than did the jury that brought it in. Being official as accident Vicar let her be buried in the churchyard, though hesitating.”