The Conqueror Inn: A Bobby Owen Mystery

by E. R. Punshon

  “Well, now perhaps you’ll tell me the truth. What did actually take you to the Conqueror Inn? What were you after in that barn?”

  “What I said was the truth, same as I’m sitting here,” protested Leader. “Looking round I was. Because there’s things going on.”

  “What’s it to do with you if there are?” Bobby asked.

  Leader looked sideways at Bobby and hesitated for a moment before replying. Then he said:

  “Listen. There’s a man been killed. That’s straight, isn’t it? Listen. If there’s one been done in, why not another? And how do I know who mayn’t be next? Suppose it’s me?”

  Somewhat startled, Bobby took his attention for one brief moment from his driving to bestow it on his companion.

  “Why should it be?” he asked.

  “There’s more going on than you know nor me either,” Leader answered moodily.

  Bobby made no comment, hoping more would come if he remained silent.

  “You’ve put one of your blokes on trailing me,” Leader resumed. “I reckon that’s why you came along, though I did think as I had given him the slip. Seeing as I hadn’t told even Alf Hall what was driving where I meant to drop off the lorry. Followed us on a motor bike, I reckon, though I watched and never saw, and then went and rung up when he spotted me pedalling off this way on my own.”

  “Never mind that,” Bobby answered; having no intention of explaining how unexpected to him had been Leader’s appearance, since the more that worthy believed in the omniscience of the Wychshire County Police, the better.

  Nor was he either surprised or disappointed to know that Leader was aware he was being watched. The officer told off for that duty had been informed he need not be too careful to remain unobserved. A man who knows he is being watched by the police often grows nervous and inclined to come forward with information he would otherwise have kept hidden. Or again, a man who knows he is both guilty and under observation will occasionally try to avert suspicion by offering explanations that help in the end to prove the very guilt he was trying to conceal.

  “Not as I mind,” Leader went on. “Gives you a comfortable sort of feeling to know there’s always a busy within call if so be as you should want him.” He spoke jeeringly enough and his grin was pure impudence, and yet Bobby had the oddest feeling that behind the jeer and the impudence there hid a substratum of fact. Hardly possible, Bobby told himself, that a man like Leader should really feel ‘comfortable’ at the thought that a policeman was always near at hand. Yet that was the impression he received and he wondered if it were connected with—or perhaps merely a result of—Leader’s strange remark that since one man had recently been killed, so might be another soon and perhaps himself. Leader was saying now, without either jeer or grin this time: “At least, if it doesn’t mean as you’ve got it in your head it might be me as done in that poor bloke me and Alf Hall saw you digging up?”

  “It means at any rate,” Bobby answered, “that I am wondering if it was only a coincidence that you came by that morning?”

  “Well, it was, just chancy like,” Leader asserted. “You can take it from me, I’m no murderer. And if I was I wouldn’t do a thing like bash a dead man’s face in, so I wouldn’t. That’s a thing will bring no luck to who done it.”

  It came back to Bobby’s mind that Alf Hall, Leader’s companion that Tuesday morning, had said the same thing and with much the same emphasis of genuine feeling that Leader himself was showing now. Abruptly he said:

  “Why have you been asking questions at Ingleside Camp about Captain Wintle?”

  “Know about that, do you?” Leader said, looking a little disconcerted. “Not much you miss, is there?”

  “No, there isn’t,” agreed Bobby, sadly aware nevertheless how much nearer the truth it would have been if he had answered ‘Yes, a lot.’ He repeated: “Well. Why?”

  “Along of what I said before,” Leader answered. “There’s more going on than you or me knows about.”

  “Why should you think Captain Wintle has anything to do with it?”

  “Hanging about that there Conqueror Inn, isn’t he? And for what?” Leader retorted. “Another thing, he was seen prowling round there that Monday night when the killing happened.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Bobby, doubtful but interested, for if this could be established, the implication was plain. Almost good enough for an arrest, he supposed. “Who saw him?” he asked. “Did you?”

  “No,” Leader answered with haste and emphasis. “No, me and Alf Hall were far enough off by then, same as I told you. Alibi all right we’ve got, Alf and me.”

  Bobby let this pass without comment, though thinking to himself that it was not a wholly satisfactory alibi, since it rested on statements made by Hall and Leader themselves, without any other confirmation. Leader had paused, evidently hoping for an agreement with his alibi claim that did not come. All Bobby said was:

  “Well, who did see him if you didn’t?”

  “Now that,” Leader answered, “I can’t tell you and I only wish I could. It was a chap I don’t know, only by passing him sometimes on the road, as said to me when we was stopped somewhere for a bite to eat as how a pal of his had seen an officer he served under in France walking along the road near the Conqueror Inn about eight o’clock that Monday night. So I said just by way of talking like, what was he doing, and was it a spot of necking, and who was the officer, and the other fellow said he didn’t see no girl and it was Captain Wintle. Never gave it another thought till after me and Alf had unloaded Tuesday, along of what we saw what you had gone and dug up giving us such a turn everything else was drove clean out of our heads.”

  “Pity you didn’t come forward with your story before,” Bobby said drily.

  “Now, Inspector,” Leader protested earnestly, “what would you busies have said to a tale like that and us not knowing who it was told us or where to find him, and him only repeating what another bloke had been and told him? Thrown us out on our ears if we had come pitching a yarn like that.”

  Bobby had to admit that this was true enough. Certainly the tale was one to which not too much credence could be attached.

  “If you can find that man,” he said, “we shan’t forget it. It would be a great help.”

  “You can depend on me,” Leader said earnestly; and Bobby resisted an impulse to retort that he was very much afraid he couldn’t. “I suppose,” Leader added, “you’ll keep that bloke of yours hanging round my place so as I can always tip him off if I do get to know anything?”

  “All depends,” Bobby answered. “There’s always the ’phone anyway, isn’t there?”

  Leader grunted in a dissatisfied sort of way, as if to indicate he did not think much of ’phones, and Bobby found himself wondering if Leader really did like the idea of having a member of the police force always at hand? Unique, Bobby reflected, in the full sense of that much misused word, to find a suspect relieved to know himself under observation. It added one more to that huddle of irreconcilable, inexplicable details of circumstances and aspects of character that in their totality were making this case the most perplexing of all those so far he had had to deal with.

  A captain in the army with a good fighting record behind him; a business man, head of a flourishing concern like K. and K.M.T.C.; a straight-living, straight-thinking countryman like Christopherson, without a hint of a black mark against his character or he would never have held a licence; a suspect like Leader who seemed actually to like the idea of being kept under observation; finally, two young girls like Maggie Kram and Rachel Christopherson. How could one hope to pick a likely murderer among such people?

  There was Micky Burke, too, of course, and Bobby had never much liked the look of that dour and silent Irishman, or of his cold, still eyes of the fanatic, but everything Bobby had learnt went to show that Micky’s affection for his nephew had been genuine and deep. He said to Leader:

  “Why were you asking questions at farms and cottages on the moor? About eggs, was
n’t it?”

  “Know about that, too,” Leader grumbled. “Know it all, don’t you?” He paused, and this time Bobby was not sure that there was not a touch of mockery in the question. Leader went on: “No harm in asking questions, is there? And eggs is eggs, as they say, and sometimes something else as well.”

  “Bombs, you mean?” Bobby asked, remembering the theory so hesitatingly advanced by Sergeant Payne.

  “Oh, well,” Leader muttered, evidently slightly taken aback by the prompt response. “On that, too, are you?”

  Interesting, at any rate, Bobby told himself, to meet thus again Payne’s suggestion. Could there be anything in it, he wondered? Half a hundred or more such stories had come before him already—mysterious lights like signals soon shown to have been caused by the careless opening and shutting of outhouse doors, suspicious strangers who turned out to be harmless evacuees, parachutists seen descending on the moors and proving to be stray sheep on high ground, and so on and so on, all of the stories needing careful investigation and taking up long hours of work before the innocent truth became clear. And all of it no guarantee of course that the fifty and first story would not prove to be extremely well founded.

  “I suppose you know,” Bobby remarked, “that if you know or even suspect anything of the sort, the penalty for keeping it to yourself would be pretty serious. Death perhaps.”

  “So it ought to be,” agreed Leader with emphasis. “But I hadn’t anything to go on except a bloke talking in a pub, about why wouldn’t it be possible to drop spies out on the moor there, with bombs in their pockets all ready to blow up factories and such-like. So I thought it might be a good idea to ask a few people round about, but none of them had ever heard of anything of the sort.”

  “The next time,” Bobby warned him, “you had better leave a job of that sort to the police or the Home Guard. Give us any information you get hold of and leave it at that. Or you may be getting yourself into trouble.”

  “Very well, Inspector,” Leader answered meekly. “I’ll remember.”

  They had by now reached the outskirts of Midwych and Leader asked to be set down. Nor did Bobby feel that any further questioning of Leader was likely to be useful just at present or till more was known.

  So Leader was allowed to alight with his bicycle and Bobby drove on to his office. There on his desk he found waiting for him a result of one of the lines of investigation he had started. It was a copy of the marriage certificate of Margaret Jane Kram and Laurence Connor, performed some four months previously at a Midwych registry office.

  CHAPTER XX

  DAUGHTER AND FATHER

  BOBBY, SITTING THERE with this unexpected document before him, thought how strange it was that so continually there came into prominence first one and then another of the actors in this drama of which it was as difficult to understand the beginning as to foresee the development. It was as though some power, unseen and unknown, shifted the limelight hither and thither at will, either by caprice or design.

  Now apparently it was the turn of the Krams, father and daughter, to take the centre of the stage.

  What light all this threw upon the two problems he had to solve—the identity of the dead man, the identity of his slayer—Bobby was not sure. The only thing quite clear was that now there opened up a whole new range of possibilities, a hint of many fresh and different motives that each one must be taken into consideration.

  On his desk lay, too, other reports, and of these the one that seemed most interesting, even suggestive, was that on the career of Merton Kram, of the K. and K.M.T.C.

  A varied career apparently and one of many ups and downs. He had been the prime mover in at least half a dozen enterprises of one sort or another, and in every case these had begun well, flourished exceedingly for a time, and then fallen by the way, overcome apparently by the burden of their own success. Merton Kram, it seemed, was in business like the runner in a race who holds the lead for three-quarters of the course but has so exhausted himself by his efforts that he collapses before the winning post is reached.

  Not uncommon perhaps. Success is intoxicating, and it is difficult to believe when things go well that presently they may go badly instead. Also the temptation to launch out too far for available resources is never easy to resist. One or two of the concerns Kram had originated were still in existence and sufficiently prosperous but in different hands. Others had disappeared. K. and K. Suppliers, an attempt to out-Woolworth Woolworth with no price above threepence, had ‘vanished without trace,’ K. and K. Caterers, founded to rival Lyons, was still doing well, reorganized as Kook and Kitchen Limited and aiming at a different class of trade. K. and K. White Kitten Cigarettes, intended to shake the tobacco trade to its depths, had apparently found an unknown grave, and K. and K. ‘Homes for You,’ meant to eclipse the Halifax and all other building societies, had collapsed into a slightly discreditable bankruptcy soon after the outbreak of the war. And Merton Kram had been granted an exceedingly benevolent discharge on the indulgent theory that it was the war that was responsible for the breakdown.

  In all this there were two or three points that seemed to Bobby to be of interest. There was suggested a restless energy always prepared to launch out into fresh ventures. There appeared, too, an odd lack of originality leading every time to imitation of already established successes. Apparently a constant search for success in directions in which the success of others seemed to show success was easy. Again the constant use of the initials ‘K. and K.’ hinted at a vanity perpetually anxious to assert itself; and Bobby knew well, for he had often seen it, that vanity, which so often seems pardonable weakness, can corrode and twist a character into strange shapes, can make the statesman a traitor, the general a coward, persuade the upright business man to fraud. The double initial, too, hinted at a sort of, again, vainglorious affection on the part of Kram for his daughter, since it was always two ‘K’s’—K. and K.—and the second K was there from the very beginning, long before Maggie could have been an active associate with her father in any business, and yet after the death of her mother, to whom therefore the second K could never have referred.

  Bobby thought that Kram must be one of those parents whose conviction that their children are most wonderful comes from the possibly unconscious conviction that they themselves are wonderful and must therefore have brought forth the wonderful.

  Not much in all that record though to suggest the potential murderer, though again Bobby found himself reflecting that an unbalanced vanity has been known to issue in murder.

  Suppose, for example, Kram had known of his daughter’s marriage to Larry, who was after all little more than a hanger-on of one of his own workpeople? Might not results have ensued? Reproaches, defiance, a quarrel, a struggle, death? Or again, suppose Micky Burke knew of the marriage, and disapproved, as apparently he would have done, and there again a quarrel had resulted, this time between two hot-tempered Irishmen.

  Possibilities, either of them, Bobby felt, but possibilities only.

  And could Micky Burke be described with any accuracy as a hot-blooded Irishman? Irish certainly, but hot-blooded? Remembering those cold, still eyes of his of greyish blue, Bobby doubted it. Nor was there any record of any sort of violence or rowdiness in his life; except, of course, for the story of the recent dispute with the zealous, recruit-seeking, unidentified sergeant from Ingleside Camp, threatened by Micky with the heavy spanner that the sergeant was said to have confiscated.

  From these reflections Bobby turned again to the account of Kram’s business activities. Another point now struck him. In every other case, when Kram had made a new start, there was something to show where and when and how he had obtained the fresh funds necessary. Something had been saved. He had sold out at a price sufficient to allow a fresh start in another venture. He had been able to secure the help of associates with money. But after his last and worst failure—a bankruptcy, not merely a reconstruction, and a bankruptcy in which the creditors had fared badly—Kram had been
forced to take a humble, poorly-paid position as night watchman. That indicated very clearly not only no money but also a loss of business friends and of reputation as well, as if this time it was generally felt he had gone too far. Yet before very long he had made a re-entry in the business world as owner of a road transport concern of quite respectable size, with his own premises and his own fleet of lorries.

  Now where, Bobby wondered, had the money come from for this new venture?

  A puzzle, but on the face of it nothing to do with the murder near the Conqueror Inn. Gloomily enough Bobby perceived that once again, as so often in this affair, he was running up against curious, unexplained matters that yet seemed unconnected with the only thing with which he was officially concerned, the identity of murderer and of victim.

  He found it interesting, too, that the report ended with the remark that everything tended to show that in spite of the fierce competition in the road transport business, in which anyone can start who can scrape together enough to buy a lorry, in spite of all war-time difficulties, in spite of a start entirely from scratch without any of those connections that count for as much in road transport as in other businesses, the K. and K.M.T.C. appeared to have been highly prosperous from the very beginning, even though rumours were current at the moment of a recent severe loss.

  “And that,” Bobby told himself, “is interesting, too, especially if it should turn out that the ‘severe loss’ amounts to £2,000.”

  But to follow up that idea was once more to become lost in a bog of mere conjecture, a bog in which Bobby was painfully aware he had more than once in this case risked losing himself entirely.

  He picked up the ’phone and rang up K. and K.M.T.C., to ask if Miss Kram could possibly spare the time to see him for a few minutes, and would she prefer that he came round to her, or would she rather come to him.