A derrick was being quickly got into position. One of the younger men let himself down into the well and adjusted in the lowered sling the topmost of the stones piled up there. The stone came to the surface and was tilted to the ground. Bobby was stepping forward to look at it more closely when he heard scuffling movements going on quite near and raised voices. He turned to see what was happening. The Abels End sergeant was coming towards him, emerging into the circle of light the lamps of the rescuing party made around the well. He had a woman with him, and was holding her by the arm.
“Lady,” he announced, releasing her now he thought he had brought her near enough to Bobby to be free of responsibility for her safe keeping, “as was watching what we was doing, curious like. I could tell there was some one, so I slipped round, and she tried to get away, so I brought her in.”
“Why, Mrs Tinsley,” Bobby exclaimed, recognizing her, “have you been here all the time? What for?”
“Why shouldn’t I?” she retorted. “If she’s there . . . I had to know . . . I knew you would do something . . . I waited to see.”
“We shall soon know,” Bobby said. Then he said: “We must find out next how it happened.”
“I told you, didn’t I?” she asked. “I told you I saw Mr Acton meet her, and then I saw him go away, and I never saw her again. That was Saturday, three days ago.”
“His story is the same,” Bobby told her. “He says he saw you and her together, and then after that he saw you alone but not her.”
Another heavy stone came to the surface. It weighed probably about twenty pounds. It was deposited gently on the ground close to where Mrs Tinsley and Bobby were standing. She was saying excitedly:
“He’s lying, lying to save himself. I don’t believe he saw us at all.” She pointed to the heavy stone that had just been raised. “You don’t think I could even lift a great thing like that?” she asked.
“It wouldn’t need lifting,” Bobby replied dispassionately. “It would only want pushing over. Please don’t think I’m making any accusations,” he added. “There’s not enough evidence yet even to think of charging any one. Even if Mrs Findlay is really there—her body rather.”
“No one could live long,” Mrs Tinsley said. She pointed again to the stone at their feet. “Not with things like that tumbling on you. Could they?”
“No,” Bobby agreed. “No not if there was any one there for them to fall on, but we don’t know that yet for certain.”
She gave him a quick glance.
“I think you’re sure and so am I,” she said.
There was a sound of scrambling. A pale and startled face appeared, rising from the well as from a grave. It said:
“There’s a whispering plain as plain: ‘Leave me alone, leave me be,’ it says and says. If she’s dead down there, she’s speaking still.”
CHAPTER XXXIII
“LET ME BE”
THE WORDS, SO loudly uttered in a kind of muffled scream, acted like a spell of immobility. All around heard them, all around stood and stared, as if abruptly paralysed. The Abels End sergeant was the first to speak and move. He expressed the sane, common-sense attitude. He said simply:
“Oh, come off it, Joe.”
Mrs Tinsley expressed another, and even more sane, common-sense point of view. She said:
“If she’s there and talking, she’s alive.”
Joe, scrambling hurriedly out of the well, said, speaking to the sergeant:
“All right, skipper, you go down and see for yourself.” To Mrs Tinsley, he said: “Alive? and her down there three days with that heap of stones on top of her?”
He had scrambled from the well-mouth to firm ground now. Bobby moved forward. He took hold of the rope and swung himself down till at the bottom of the well he stood uneasily on the stones roughly piled there as they had fallen when dislodged from their position in the old parapet.
“Mrs Findlay?” he called. “Mrs Findlay. Can you hear me?”
A faint whispered answer came:
“Let me be.”
“Mrs Findlay,” he called again, but this time there was no reply. He shouted to those on the surface that he was sending up more of the heaped-up stones till he had got away enough to see what had really happened, for the doctor and a stretcher to be in readiness, and for a lantern to be lowered. Then he set to work, feverishly and yet with care; since, if one of these heavy stones slipped as it was being hauled up, it would crash on him. Now by the light of the lantern lowered at his request he could see how this apparent miracle of survival had been brought about. To one side at the bottom of the well was a kind of hollow or cavity where at one time the spring feeding it had seeped through. Apparently when the well had first been dug this spring had been missed, but then reached by digging a few feet sideways. A rough attempt had been made to line the resulting cavity with brick so as to prevent it from collapsing. Into this small cavity or kind of cave, Mrs Findlay had managed to crawl, though indeed it seemed hardly big enough to hold a child, much less a full-grown woman. Here, then, she had lain, safe from the stones rained down as the parapet above was hastily demolished, as Acton hoped by their means both to consummate his crime and to conceal it. Yet by the eternal irony of events, his own action in diverting the spring that fed this well for his own use had provided the means whereby his victim had now escaped the last effect of his directed malice.
Bobby, working with all the fierce energy at his command, soon had enough of the stones cleared away, either hoisted to the surface or piled on one side, to free the entrance to Mrs Findlay’s refuge. Yet even so it was not easy to liberate her, so narrow and confined was the space into which she had managed to squeeze herself. Nor did she give any help, she seemed unconscious of what was happening, Bobby feared indeed that the whispers just heard had been but a last flicker of life before it became extinct. But presently he had her free, and then she seemed to revive again—with the pain she felt once circulation began to return to her cramped and stiffened limbs. She opened her eyes and closed them again, dazzled even by the faint light of the lowered lantern. She said faintly:
“I thought that you might come.”
As he was trying to get her into a convenient position for bringing her to the surface, she said:
“I think I was dead. I thought I was. Why have you brought me back?”
And a third time she said:
“It was better so. Are you alive?”
“Oh, yes, I’m alive all right,” Bobby answered. “So are you. Put your arm round my neck and hang on. That’s right. Lift a little. So. Now, hold tight.”
He had one foot in the sling by which the stones had been lifted. With one hand he held the rope, with the other he supported Mrs Findlay in position across his shoulder. He shouted to those above that he was ready, and they began to haul. Mrs Findlay muttered in his ear:
“If you had let me be, I should still be dead.”
He had no breath to answer. They were at the surface now, and hands were thrust out to help. The doctor was waiting, and a stretcher. The doctor took charge. He made a quick, hurried examination.
“Rest and warmth,” he said. “Then she should be all right. How long has she been down there?”
“Three days I think,” Bobby answered.
“Under all those stones?” the doctor asked. “She’s no right to be alive, or to have a whole bone in her body for that matter.”
“Oh, I wasn’t,” Mrs Findlay said, loudly and unexpectedly. “Alive, I mean. Not till he came and brought me back.”
“Yes, yes, of course, quite so,” the doctor said soothingly. “Just lie still and keep covered.” To Bobby he said aside: “Delirious. Quite natural. Any one would be after this.”
“I should think so,” Bobby agreed.
The doctor, the stretcher with its bearers and its burden, began the journey down the hill. To the sergeant, Bobby said:
“It’s too late to do much to-night. Tell your superintendent I’ll be along in the morning for
a conference. We must pick up Acton as soon as we can. He won’t have had time to get far, and he’s well known. It oughtn’t to be difficult.”
“Yes, sir,” the sergeant said. “Very good, sir. I’ll let the super know. All the same, I can’t believe it, not of Mr Acton, I can’t.”
“It might have been difficult to prove, difficult to bring it home to him,” Bobby said thoughtfully, “if she had really been dead when we found her. And it seemed impossible she could be alive. Now we shall have her statement.”
“Make it all plain and straightforward,” agreed the sergeant. “Open and shut as you might say. Sort of a miracle though. You can hardly believe it, and she didn’t herself. Kept saying she had been dead before we found her—brought her back, she said. Must have seemed like that, buried and all in that hole twenty feet down.”
“Anyhow, she is alive now, and the doctor seemed to think she was likely to stay so, unless pneumonia sets in,” Bobby said. “So she’ll be able to tell us exactly what happened—and why Acton thought it necessary to try to murder her. That is, when she is strong enough,” he added, remembering her strange, drawn, earth-stained face, like a mask of death.
CHAPTER XXXIV
“ . . . NO MAN PURSUETH”
IT WAS IN fact some days before Bobby was informed that the hospital authorities had given permission for a visit to be paid to Mrs Findlay. It was her own stipulation, though one warmly approved by her doctor, that Bobby was to come alone and that there was to be no question of a formal interrogation. Even her father, an inmate of the same hospital, and not in much better shape than herself, had only seen her once or twice, and then only for a very few minutes at a time.
Bobby had a talk with the local police authorities. It was agreed that anything Mrs Findlay was able or willing to say would be important, even though formal, official use could not be made of it until it was in writing, witnessed, and signed.
“Once,” said the chief constable of the county to whom Bobby was talking, “once we have her full story in proper form, we can go ahead,” and with this Bobby fully agreed.
Up to the present, however, the search for Acton had been without result, and though his name had appeared in the official “Police Gazette”—a periodical no member of the public is ever permitted to see and that every policeman will tell you is his most precious aid, so much so that without it efficient police work would be impossible—and though paragraphs had appeared in the press, all that was in the form of a polite request to Mr Acton, ‘believed to be on holiday’, to let his present address be known, as it was thought he might be able to give the police useful information.
The only result so far had been that Mrs Acton, in her seaside retreat, bewildered and unhappy, had been obliged to change her lodgings and even then to appeal for police protection to clear from her doorway numberless pressmen all anxious to extract from her the information she had made it abundantly plain she did not possess.
To the hospital therefore Bobby came alone, and was surprised to find Mrs Findlay much stronger and looking very much better than he had expected. When he said as much, possibly letting a little of his surprise appear, she remarked quite calmly:
“Oh, well, I expect I’ve been rather putting it on. I had to be sure what I was going to say, and then I expected it would be you coming, so I had to be ready for you, hadn’t I?”
“Why?” Bobby asked. “Why for me in particular?”
“I never thought you so very clever,” she told him, speaking slowly, with the air of one considering a problem not very well understood. “Father didn’t either. He told me he would think twice before giving you a job anywhere unless it was being a chucker-out at a night club.”
“Well, anyhow, I shall know where to apply,” Bobby remarked, trying to look pleased.
“I wonder if there’s more to it than being clever,” Mrs Findlay went on in the same meditative way. “Clever people do like to go roundabout ways sometimes, don’t they? I’m clever, and I did. I think you always go straight forward.”
“Well,” Bobby said, a good deal puzzled by these remarks, “suppose you leave me out of it. I’m only a part of the machinery of the law, and we all depend on law for safety in our homes and our beds. I’m just a grubber-up of facts for really clever people like lawyers and judges to get to work on. What we would like is for you to tell us who it was pushed you down that well. We think we know, but we would like you to say.”
She looked at him steadily and was silent. Then she said:
“No one.”
“Eh? what?” exclaimed Bobby, quite taken aback, for this was the very last answer he had expected.
“I said ‘no one’,” she repeated.
“Well, then,” Bobby said.
“I fell in by accident,” she told him.
“Nonsense,” said Bobby.
“That’s my story,” she said, and now she was smiling to herself in what seemed a kind of mischievous enjoyment of his very evident surprise. It struck him that she was looking much younger, in a way more human, than previously. “You won’t get me to alter it, either,” she added.
“Do you want to tell me that all those stones, they would certainly have killed you but for the lucky accident of that hole you found, did they fall by accident, too?” he asked.
“Oh, those,” she said, still smiling at him with only half-hidden amusement, “No, no, of course not. You see I made a grab, trying to save myself, and I pulled one down and that dislodged the others, so that they all came tumbling after, just like Jack and Jill in the nursery rhyme.”
Bobby found himself wondering if ever before in all her life she would have quoted a nursery rhyme. It seemed significant somehow, though he did not quite know what of. He said:
“Why are you saying this?”
But to that she made no reply, only still watched him with that amused, mischievous air of hers, a little like that of a naughty child who feels that parent or teacher has been manoeuvred into an awkward position and does not know what to do next. Bobby got up and moved restlessly about the room. He came back to the bedside and said:
“It was Acton, wasn’t it?”
“I’ve told you it was an accident,” she retorted, and he would hardly have been surprised to hear her add: “Put that in your pipe and smoke it.”
He sat down again and was silent for a time while she continued to watch him, clearly asking herself what he would do or say next.
“If you mean to stick to that story,” he remarked presently, “I don’t see there’s much we can do about it.”
“No,” she agreed, and added: “That’s what I thought.”
“Just between ourselves,” he asked, “it was Acton, wasn’t it?”
“You haven’t got any dictaphones or things fitted up, have you?” she asked cautiously.
“Oh, no,” he answered. “I don’t think the hospital would approve. And I don’t think the courts would be very pleased, most likely they would say it was un-English and not fair.”
“Of course it was Charley Acton, the silly man.”
“He tried to murder you, then?”
“He didn’t succeed,” she pointed out.
“What it comes to is that you don’t want Acton punished in any way?”
“If you had been really clever, you would have found that out long ago.”
“You know he murdered your husband?”
“Yes. Well?”
“You don’t want anything done about that, either?”
“If it were, would it bring Ivor back to life?”
“It might save some one else’s life. Murderers who succeed once sometimes think themselves so clever they try again—as Acton tried with you.”
“Not Charley,” she declared. “He’s not like that. It was only that he felt he had to save his invention that was his life and more, and Ivor’s life was such a small thing in comparison. And I was trying to make him marry me, and he very much didn’t want. I expect the well seemed an easy way out
.”
“The murderer’s defence,” Bobby commented. Then he asked: “What made you want to marry Acton? I don’t think there was any question of being in love with him?”
“Good gracious, no. Just to be as bad as I knew how, to make people shudder and tremble when they thought of me. To marry the man you knew murdered your husband and at the same time make him leave his own wife. I told him he had got rid of my husband, so now he could get rid of his wife. Poetic justice I told him. You know you can’t blame him if he tried to get rid of me instead.”
“Speaking as a policeman,” Bobby answered, “I find that quite irrelevant. A policeman’s duty is to establish facts, not to judge them. Speaking as a man, I must say I think it seems quite understandable.”
“So do I,” she agreed and seemed to mean it.
He was looking at her thoughtfully, and he was silent so long, that at last she said:
“Well, is that all?”
“I was wondering,” he said, “what has changed you so?”
“If you had spent three days dying in a hole in the ground, in your grave, you might understand,” she told him. “It doesn’t leave you quite the same. A grave is so very real. Sometimes I think I did die. I don’t know. I know I slept, and in that sleep had many dreams—if they were dreams. You began it.”
“I did? How?”
“You made me look so silly. Marrying Ivor so as to be like Manfred on his mountain peak. I told you. I wanted every one to shrink away from me in horror and fear, and you—you made it all so silly, marrying like any one else. That was one dream.”
“Marrying like any one else?”
“No, no,” she said impatiently. “A sort of universal chuckle, as if all the heavens were being so frightfully amused. I don’t suppose in the other place any one ever is amused. But up there it must be hard for them to take being bad very seriously. It’s so silly.”
Everybody Always Tells: A Bobby Owen Mystery Page 24
