“A question for the B.B.C. Brains Trust,” Bobby remarked. “Is a pension a curse or a blessing, good or bad, wise or foolish?—safety first, and is that O.K. in a universe that seems meant to be full of risk and change and peril? What do you think, Payne?”
“I never thought of it like that, sir,” answered Payne. “I think you sleep better if you know there’s a pension waiting when you have to lay off.”
“I expect you do,” agreed Bobby. “Some day I’ll have to ask our philosophic landlord at the Conqueror Inn what he thinks.”
The ’phone bell rang. Bobby answered it. He hung up the receiver and said:
“Talk of the Conqueror Inn and it’s there. That was our local man we told to keep an eye on it. He says Captain Wintle has been there and has just left. Came for luncheon and now he’s gone again. Driving. These military blokes never seem hard up for petrol the way we mere policemen are.”
“What’s he been up to?” Payne asked suspiciously.
“I hope,” Bobby said, “he went to tell Miss Rachel what I said. I hope he has taken the hint to advise her to tell us all about it at last.”
“Do you think she will?” Payne asked.
“Might,” Bobby said. “And it might be a good idea to try to find out at once, strike while the iron’s hot idea. If only we could get her to make a statement. The whole theory we’ve built up is a pure logical deduction—from observed facts certainly, but you can always put another interpretation on observed facts. That’s why induction is a sounder method, only you can’t often use it in police work.”
“No, sir, you can’t,” agreed Payne firmly, making a mental note to consult a dictionary as soon as possible and find out the difference.
“Up to now,” Bobby went on, “we may think we know it all—or know we know it all—but we’ve hardly a shred of evidence of fact we can plump down in court. Every single thing we’ve rooted out could be twisted to another meaning. I tell you what it is, Payne. There’s nothing for the moment you can’t deal with. I’ll take a run out to the Conqueror Inn and see if I can get anything there—anything solid you can use to bang a jury’s head with.”
There were, however, one or two minor matters that cropped up and then the journey made at the economical speed officially recommended took some time. It was beginning to be late therefore when Bobby arrived, nor did he find Mr. Christopherson at the inn. Seldom now indeed that he was there. His frequent absences were already beginning to show their effect in signs of neglected fields and work postponed. To Rachel when she told him her father was not there, Bobby said:
“He is often away just now, isn’t he? I think I can guess why.”
Rachel’s glance was grave and calm as ever, but she made no comment.
Bobby went on:
“He is searching for your brother, isn’t he? And he has never found him?”
For once Rachel’s habitual composure seemed shaken. She hesitated. Her lips quivered, her voice was less steady when she replied with the counter question:
“Who tells you all these things? How do you know? Who tells you?”
“Well, now then, look here,” Bobby exclaimed in tones of extreme exasperation, “nobody ever tells me a thing. In this case, if I ask anyone the time, they look down their noses and say they don’t know, and then if I look up at the sun in the sky and say it’s about noon, they want to know who told me. It’s true, isn’t it? Mr. Christopherson is out so much because he is looking for your brother?”
“I don’t know,” she answered. With a gesture that had in it something of despair, she said: “We don’t even know if it was his body you found or another’s.”
CHAPTER XXVIII
RACHEL SPEAKS
AN ADMISSION AT last, Bobby told himself, though only an extremity of doubt and anguish had torn it from her. Yet the words she had used puzzled him as well and he said:
“You mean your father knew that morning, knew all the time we were digging there, that it might be his son buried in that grave?”
Rachel made a slight affirmative gesture. Bobby’s mind went back to the grey morning when from its lonely moorland resting place they had recovered that naked, mutilated body. By no sign, by no word, by no least tremor of voice or muscle, had Christopherson disclosed the dreadful fear in his mind. A miracle of self-control Bobby could only think of with wonder, indeed with awe. Abruptly Rachel said:
“It was worse when still we did not know, when father said he could not tell.”
“Surely there was something—some sign—something to show?” Bobby exclaimed.
“How could he tell?” Rachel asked. “Or I? Or mother?”
“Did you see—it? Did your mother?” Bobby asked. “Did you both?”
“Yes,” she answered quietly. “We had to. I went first. Then mother went. The body was there in the barn. We had to see if we could tell.”
Bobby said nothing, but again there was wonder in his mind as he thought of those two women going one by one to look on that dreadful corpse and still unable to tell whether or no it was that of the son and brother for whom they had done so much and risked so much. He seemed to see them standing silently in the great empty barn, looking, doubting, anguished, coming away unknowing and unsatisfied, doubting still.
“We did not know, we could not tell,” she repeated. “It was a long time that night before we even knew Derek had gone. Sometimes he used to slip out at night. At first one of us would try to go with him, but he would not let us; and if we tried to follow or keep near, it made him so excited. Once he attacked father and father had to fight him off. But he never went far away and he always came back, so we gave up worrying. Lately he seemed so much better we came to think it was quite safe. We thought he was getting over it. When I told father what I had heard that Monday night, we thought at first it was only a lorry back-firing. We never thought of Derek. We didn’t even know he had gone out. None of us had seen him go and we thought he was still upstairs. Father went to see. He said perhaps a lorry had broken down and he might be able to help. Or send for help or lend the driver a bicycle to go for help himself. We always tried not to have people at the inn more than we could help. So he went out and there wasn’t any lorry, but he brought back the box he gave you full of pound notes. So then we thought he had better say so at once because there was sure to be an inquiry when it was such a lot of money. And then he went to look again and he found the revolver and the map, and we could see the revolver had been fired and there was blood upon it, and mother came to say Derek wasn’t in his room. So when it was morning father went once more to look for him and mother and I waited, hoping he would come back. But he never did and father found a new dug grave instead and that is all we know. Nor have we ever seen Derek since that night, and perhaps it is his body that was buried there, and perhaps he is still wandering somewhere without knowing what has happened and perhaps he will never be right in his mind again.”
“I wish you had told me all this before,” Bobby could not help saying.
“How could we,” she answered, “when all our hope was to find Derek first ourselves?” She added: “It was more than his life we were trying to save, it was his reason.”
“You didn’t give the army authorities credit for much understanding or sympathy,” Bobby said.
“Would you have risked your brother’s reason on soldiers’ understanding?” she asked. “Captain Wintle,” she went on, “said that, too. But Derek might have been driven out of his mind for ever before they did come to understand.” After another pause she went on again. “If you knew my father’s ideas, you would know what it meant to him to seem to be hiding a runaway.” She lifted her head. “Derek wasn’t a runaway but it looked as if he were. Father is a hard man in some ways and a proud man. He put all his life behind him when he put Derek first.” Once more she was silent and once more added: “Mother said she would kill herself. I mean she said she would unless we helped Derek and hid him from everyone. Sometimes she used to carry a sharp kni
fe about with her.”
Bobby remembered that first morning he had been at the Conqueror Inn and the gesture Mrs. Christopherson made when she picked up a knife and went out of the room as he came in. Odd to think so much of this strange story was hidden in that gesture which at the time he had barely noticed and now only just remembered.
“You have all been through a good deal,” he said.
Rachel till now had preserved a composure almost above the powers of ordinary humanity, but that simple, indeed conventional word of sympathy suddenly broke down, at least momentarily, her powers of resistance. She sat down and with the immemorial gesture of the stricken woman she flung over her head the apron she was wearing, so that her face was hidden, her sobbing muffled. Bobby went to stand by the window. A minute or two passed and Rachel was strong again and her voice hardly less steady than before as she said:
“Peter said it would have been better to tell everything, I mean Captain Wintle did. Perhaps we might have done so if we had known you better. None of us could think of anything but the danger that Derek might never be his own self again. Now perhaps he never will, if he is wandering about the country, and perhaps it is he who was killed that night for none of us could tell.”
“If he is alive and wandering about anywhere,” Bobby said, “we will find him and I promise if we do find him we will do everything possible to avoid any shock. I will see warning is issued of a possibly disturbed mental state and that medical help must be got before any action is taken.”
He was going to leave then but there was so plainly something else on Rachel’s mind that he waited.
“If you have any feeling you can trust me,” he said as gently as he could, “tell me what else is troubling you. You know I must put my duty first. I remember your father saying he would not ask anything else. But I can see what a difficult position you were in and I am quite sure everyone will feel the same—even the hardest boiled sergeant-major that ever made a battalion tremble on parade.”
He smiled as he said this, hoping for a return smile to prove that he had really won her confidence. No smile came, instead there was once more a full flood of terror in her voice as she said:
“Perhaps it is even worse, for perhaps the dead man isn’t Derek but perhaps it was Derek killed him.”
“Yes, I know,” Bobby agreed. “Of course, I’ve felt for a long time that was a possibility, but there’s nothing to show it was like that. I take it that was in your mind when you hid the revolver. What made you use the map to wrap it in?”
“It was the first thing handy; father picked them both up together,” she answered, evidently quite unaware that the map was of any more importance than any other piece of paper. But there was a fresh tremor in her voice as she went on: “If it was like that, they would send him to Broadmoor, wouldn’t they?”
Bobby had no reply to make, though he understood well that that dread had lain deeper than all other in their minds. Nor could he deny that if Rachel’s fear turned out to be justified, then authority would very probably say that for the sake of the safety of others such a course would be necessary. All he could do was to repeat that the possibility was only one among others and certainly no more likely than another. He tried to explain that to his mind it was not the most probable explanation and not the one upon which he was working. All the same he knew how clearly she realized that it was one of the possibilities he had to take into account; and that if it proved to be the true one, there would be inevitable consequences. Impossible indeed to feel in any way sure of what might have happened in the confusion and the darkness of that tragic night.
Bobby departed then and when he got back to headquarters found a sulky, resentful and badly frightened Alf Hall waiting for him, brought in for questioning. So Bobby said how pleased he was to meet Mr. Hall again and Mr. Hall made it plain that the pleasure was in no way mutual.
“You haven’t got no right to go and drag a respectable hardworking man away from his job,” he protested and desired to be informed whether this was England or whether it was Germany.
Reassured that he was in fact still in England he remarked with sarcasm that he was surprised to hear it. He added challengingly:
“You ain’t got nothing on me.”
“Only a thumb mark,” Bobby said.
“There you go,” said Hall bitterly. “That’s a cop all over. Once a bloke’s been inside, coppers can’t think of nothing but rising up his dabs against him. It didn’t ought to be allowed. Call it justice when a bloke’s done his time, to hold up his fingerprints? There’s British justice for you,” said Mr. Hall indignantly. “Give me Hitler.”
“No great loss anyhow if instead we gave you to Hitler if he would have you,” Bobby observed; and Hall, very much shocked and still more indignant, wanted to know if Bobby called himself an Englishman and was that his idea of patriotism?
So Bobby said that he did and it was, and could Mr. Hall explain how dabs on record as his had come to be found on a revolver buried near the Conqueror Inn and therefore near the scene of the recent killing?
Hall shook his head and looked Bobby straight in the eye, very straight in the eye indeed, in the manner in fact which Bobby had long learned to associate with a forthcoming downright and barefaced lie.
“I don’t know nothing about that, guv’nor,” he said. “I’ve never so much as touched one of them revolver things in my life. Never did like ’em, nasty things, the less you have to do with ’em, the better. Give me a broken beer bottle every time. So there can’t be no dabs of mine where you say—except,” he added, as if suddenly remembering what till then had entirely escaped his memory, “except that time in a pub when a bloke showed me one and asked me to give him ten bob, was it? for it. A bit too much he had had, not drunk, you understand, sober as a judge, only a bit jolly like, if you see what I mean, and he showed me this pistol he had and I had a look at it, and he offered to sell it me. But I wasn’t having any and if you’ve got my dabs on any pistol, that’s how it happened.”
An ingenious story, Bobby reflected, and one difficult to disprove.
“What pub was it?” Bobby asked. “Who else was there?”
On both these points Mr. Hall’s memory was a complete and unfortunate blank. First he suggested one pub and then another, corrected himself and thought most likely it was a third—at least unless it was a fourth. He couldn’t be sure. But he didn’t think anyone was present who knew him or whom he knew. He confessed that just possibly he himself, though sober as a judge, had perhaps taken enough to deprive his memory of its usual crystal clarity.
“What have you to say about the map?” Bobby demanded.
This time, however, Hall’s denials were more convincing though less picturesque. He protested he knew nothing of any map; and Bobby, who from long experience believed he had developed a kind of instinct for telling when a man was lying and when he was speaking the truth, was inclined to believe him. Reverting to the question of the revolver, Bobby said:
“Have you any idea who the man was who tried, you tell me, to sell you a revolver?”
“Oh, yes” Hall answered readily. “Knew him all right. Course I did. Rather.”
“Who was it?”
“Bloke called Kram, Merton Kram,” Hall asserted. “In the same line of business as us, only bigger.”
CHAPTER XXIX
STOLEN LETTERS
MR. HALL was allowed to depart then. Bobby was doubtful whether he had sufficient grounds on which to base a charge; and in any case knew it was generally wiser to defer arrest as long as possible, since so often under the threat of arrest the suspected person himself provides in panic the further evidence needed to make a conviction certain.
“I don’t know if there is anything behind Hall’s story,” Bobby told Payne at the end of a long talk during which they had reviewed together the whole present position of the case, “but it may be worth while to wait a little to see how Kram reacts and what Hall does next. Anyhow, from what we know and ca
n guess, Kram’s part in the business is growing clearer. I think there ought to be every chance of getting a statement out of him.”
It was late now and Bobby decided to postpone his talk with Kram to the morning, but he rang up the K. and K.M.T.C. to ask what hour would be convenient. A nervous voice asked the reason. Bobby said something vague about unexpected and important developments and rang off. He hoped Mr. Kram’s slumbers would be uneasy and that he would arrive for the morning’s talk in a state of nerves whence might emerge some of that positive and confirmatory evidence which was now Bobby’s first need; now that he felt fairly sure that, from the various indications he had gathered, he could put together a fairly clear picture of what had really happened. Little use though to do that without what he called ‘evidence of fact,’ in default whereof any clever counsel could fill a jury’s mind with such doubt and hesitation as to ensure an acquittal. And Bobby did not want an acquittal; for though a trial and acquittal may often serve that purpose of prevention and warning which is alone man’s justification when he condemns to punishment his fellow man, yet this time Bobby felt there were far-reaching implications that went beyond even the primary duty of a police force—that of ‘making sure to each his own,’ whether that ‘own’ referred either to his life or to his possessions.
On his arrival next morning at county headquarters, however, he found there was another and equally unexpected development. Some days previously he had asked the city police to keep an eye on Micky Burke and the house where Micky dwelt alone, and now a ’phone message had been that moment received to say that Mr. Kram had a few moments before been seen to let himself into the Burke residence.
“And what,” Bobby asked Payne, “what does that mean?”
Without waiting for a reply to what was after all a purely rhetorical question, Bobby rang up once more the K. and K.M.T.C. He learnt that Mr. Kram was out on business and that Micky Burke was on the road, having left early with an urgently required load of supplies for a bombed town.
The Conqueror Inn: A Bobby Owen Mystery Page 20
