“I suppose they were right about that, weren’t they?” Bobby remarked.
“And how could we,” Micky demanded, “seeing what our load was meant to be? And could the meanness of man go lower than to take and seek a cowardly advantage of the sort? Only there was no load we had, only two thousand pounds in a wooden box. It was that Larry thought the black scoundrels were wanting, and so he outed a small automatic he had with him for protection, and so the shooting started; and it was the bad luck was Larry’s when he dropped with a bullet through his heart. Dead he was and when they knew it and all for nothing because we hadn’t the load they thought, then the panic came upon them with what they had done and a dead man on their minds to the day they die. So off they went, and left me there by Larry, and him dead, and none other in the world I loved, and all around the darkness of the night like that in my own soul. Then came Mr. Kram driving to meet us, and when he saw what had happened he said how none must know or there would be such a deal of questions asked as would land us both in an English gaol; and that was what I knew was always a risk for me, but now it bore the meaning of all our mission here in England laid bare and betrayed and the secret business of the I.R.A. made plain. I wasn’t for that to be, and Larry’s life lost in doing it, and Mr. Kram and I, we dug a grave, thinking it so solitary a spot none would ever know. Then Mr. Kram said that was not enough, because of the singular danger the grave might be found; and we must take all clothing away, so we undressed the boy on the cold bare road and bore him to his grave and no priest to say a word but only Mr. Kram telling me again it was not enough for safety. And what he meant I did not know or ask, for there was a sorrow in my mind for Larry dazed me so I knew not rightly what he said. Mr. Kram came back with the big spanner from my lorry, and with it he broke up my boy’s face, till not the mother that bore him would have known him from another. But while Kram was doing it, and me thinking of my great lonely loss, there was another came on us suddenly from the darkness and stumbled on my poor dead Larry; and who it was who came like that I had no knowledge then, but now I think it was Derek Christopherson they had hid away as a deserter from the army. And I think it was a great upset to him, for he let out a great cry and he began to run, and as he ran he let out a pistol shot that did no harm, only to himself, for in the hurry and rush of it he fell down as he was running and then got up and away again across the moor.”
“What happened to the box of money?” Bobby asked.
“Of that we never thought again,” Micky answered. “When a man dies as Larry died, there’s little else you think of. Afterwards we read a piece about it in the papers but we didn’t dare say a word for fear of having to tell what was best kept hid. If there was any pistol you found, it would be the one the man that came upon us, Derek or another, threw down as he ran. Most like Larry had the money box still in his arms when the bullet struck him and it fell when he fell, and if there was a map you found, maybe it came from his pocket when we were taking off his clothes, the poor lad, and the night all dark and cold.”
CHAPTER XXXII
ATTRACTIVE BUT DANGEROUS
THIS NARRATIVE, VIVID though it was, had in fact added but little to what Bobby already knew or guessed. To the solving of the two main problems to which for so many days he had devoted all his energies, Micky’s tale gave no help. Bobby’s belief that he knew, as he had always felt he knew, who was responsible for the death of Larry Connor still remained no more than a belief founded on evidence too weak to take into a court of justice, too weak indeed, too much merely deductive reasoning for him himself to find it entirely convincing. Certainly he had confirmation now of his earlier theory that the black market activities of the K. and K.M.T.C. concern had been both planned and used as a camouflage for the even more dangerous activities of Irish revolutionaries. But then that much had been fairly certain ever since the first interview with Mr. Kram, who had talked to Micky in Bobby’s presence with so odd a mixture of familiarity and hostility as to make clear that they were not merely employer and employed, master and man. At the time indeed Bobby had been inclined to think that might mean complicity in the Conqueror Inn crime but he had soon realized the greater depths beneath. Little help then that now Micky himself had confirmed their existence.
Bobby rose from his chair and said:
“Well, Mr. Burke, all this has been very interesting and I am very much obliged to you for being so frank. I have not,” he went on with more exact regard for truth and fact than Micky realized, “had any opportunity yet to examine your letters you kept under your bedroom floor. What is interesting me most at the moment is how far you are directly responsible for all this and how far you have been acting under the orders of others?”
Micky nodded.
“I know,” he said. “Well I know it. It’s what you would wish you had the truth of, isn’t it? But you’ll not get it from me, for I’ll say no word and haven’t either, beyond what you knew already from its being set down plain in my own writing in my private papers for them to read that wouldn’t have a scruple in their souls about another’s property or privacy.” When this thrust left Bobby quite unmoved—Micky seemed even yet not to have given up all hope of seeing Bobby burst into remorseful tears and return with apologies the missing documents—Micky went on: “And what’s left is in secret hidden writing no man will ever read one word of, except them that know the way of it.”
“In cypher, you mean?” Bobby asked, reflecting that Micky had evidently small idea of the skill now attained in the unravelling of such puzzles.
“I’ll make you an offer as fair as man can make,” Micky said. “If that’s your wish I’ll read you out the exact precise meaning there’s in those letters for you to write down in plain English words and keep by you, if you’ll let me afterwards take them away with me for the refreshment of my memory.”
Bobby looked thoughtfully at Micky. He guessed what lay behind this apparently innocent suggestion. There had come into Micky’s attitude as he sat there a new tension, in his eyes a new and fiercer light. Bobby felt this was Micky’s last card he had now played and that his purpose and intention was to throw himself upon the letters the moment they were produced in an effort to tear them and destroy them beyond all hope of reconstruction. A little tempting, Bobby felt, to produce an envelope or packet supposed to contain them and watch the dash to seize and destroy that Micky would be sure to make. Tempting, Bobby told himself, but unofficial in the extreme nor serving any really useful purpose, and though Bobby was occasionally unofficial in his methods, it was always with a useful end in view. He shook his head.
“Can’t do that, I’m afraid,” he said, and was glad Micky did not know that the ‘can’t’ was not conventional this time, but factual.
Micky got to his feet, too.
“Well, if that’s the way of it,” he said, “and you are going, I’ll be going, too, if your mind’s made up I’m not to have what’s my own property and I’ve a lawful right to.”
“I’ll get you to wait a little longer if you don’t mind,” Bobby answered. He went to the door and called in one of the constables on duty. “Mr. Burke’s waiting here for a time,” he said. “I want you to stay with him. Understand?”
“Yes, sir,” said the constable.
“You’ll keep me here only by force,” Micky exclaimed and moved towards the door.
“That’s all right,” said the constable, who was about twice Micky’s size and weight, and he put up a large, restraining hand.
“It’s false imprisonment it is,” Micky said gloomily, reseating himself however. “There’s whacking big damages you’ll have to pay when I get you in the courts.”
Still unaffected by this final threat, and indeed Micky himself had plainly lost hope in the efficacy of the assortment of threats, cajolements, and stratagems he had tried in succession, Bobby went into another room and rang up the Regional Commissioner’s office, giving a very brief account of his talk with Micky.
“Rather an attractive l
ittle man,” Bobby said, and the line spluttered with such indignation Bobby half expected it to fuse.
“Fifth columnist,” said the line, crackling as if all the atmospherics in the universe had concentrated on it.
“Oh, yes,” Bobby agreed, “dangerous little man, dangerous as any rattlesnake but attractive all the same. And apparently quite anxious to come in on our side as soon as he thinks we are sufficiently near drowning for us to be grateful to him for diving in to save us—which he is quite ready to do and quite convinced he can do.”
Here the telephone line became simply indistinguishable from an electric storm of the highest and best variety.
“Yes, sir,” said Bobby soothingly. “Quite so, sir. The difficulty is, I’m not sure if I’ve enough to hold the man on. Yes, sir, I quite realize that we can hold anybody for anything under the defence of the realm act. But there is always a right of appeal, and some of the courts set up still go all stuffy about evidence. Yes, sir, more’s the pity, but there it is. Worse off than we are now if we had to let him go again. I’m holding him for the present. Would your people like to interview him? My own feeling is he will say no more than he has said already and he only said that because he thought I had it all in the letters he believed I had taken from his hiding place.”
The voice at the other end of the line began to sound less indignant and more worried. Bobby reminded it that his own primary duty was to investigate a case of murder. The voice said the murder had become unimportant, almost irrelevant. Bobby did not contradict this, though it was not his conception of his duty. The case, said the voice at the other end of the line, had broadened out far beyond any question of private killing. That was merely the unimportant start. It had gone beyond even black market activities, serious as those were, more serious than murder since murder was but private and personal and the black market a public crime. This new development touched the safety of the realm, since the possession of a map showing the position of factories engaged in war work would be of immense assistance to the enemy, incalculable assistance since this is largely a war to be won on the factory front.
“Once that map’s in Ireland,” said the troubled voice at the other end of the line, “easy enough to get it to enemy hands—through the German Ambassador so comfortable and handy there in Dublin for such a job. Or direct to one of the submarines that we know touch the Eire coast sometimes.”
Finally after more delay, after much further telephoning, after consultation even with High Authority in London, it was decided that Micky should be allowed to go for the present, though he was to be kept under close observation. In that way some knowledge might be obtained, it was thought, about his associates. Little attention was paid to Bobby’s expression of opinion that this was not likely, since, in his view, Larry Connor had been probably the sole medium of communication. The danger, Bobby also foresaw and mentioned, that Micky might carry out whatever scheme of vengeance was symbolized by the burning candle on his mantelpiece, was waved aside as an inevitable and necessary risk. Bobby was inclined to think that in some quarters such a development was regarded as likely to have useful results, an opinion he himself was not much inclined to share. Everything else, including the murder, now plainly regarded as of merely minor interest, was to be put aside for the present, and all effort was to be concentrated on securing the papers which it was to be supposed were in Mr. Kram’s possession.
All this took considerable time, and though Bobby did remember to give instructions for Micky and his attendant constable to be provided with their tea, none the less Micky was in a very sullen and indignant mood when at last given permission to depart.
“A long time it’ll be,” he said, “before ever I come to tell what I know to police, thinking that so I might help, and the world’s own fool I was ever to come near the place.”
“Well, you know, Mr. Burke,” Bobby remarked, “the only reason why you came was your rather cheeky hope that you might be able to bamboozle or bluff me into giving you back these letters you’ve lost. Can’t blame me, can you, if it didn’t come off?”
“And isn’t it the smarty of all the worlds together that you are, Mr. Inspector Owen,” Micky snarled, “the way you work it out what’s in a body’s mind, and may the ill luck of the unluckiest man that ever lived be a drop in the wide oceans to the ill luck that’ll come to you.”
“Now, Micky,” Bobby protested gently, “if you say things like that, I shall almost begin to think you don’t quite like me.”
Micky looked as if he were going to say a good deal more, but the large constable uprose and looked so longingly, so yearningly, at Bobby that Micky judged it prudent to retire. Bobby was still occupied with the necessary arrangements for keeping him under close observation when he was told that the man detailed to watch the K. and K.M.T.C. had reported over the ’phone, first, Micky’s arrival there—which Bobby had expected since presumably Micky would want to offer some explanation concerning that urgent load for the bombed town he had apparently deserted half-way to its destination on hearing of Bobby’s visit to his home—and, secondly, his departure again, driving an empty lorry at a speed as high as so heavy a vehicle could well be driven at in the tangle of streets and crossings and other traffic that made up the busy quarter where the K. and K.M.T.C. had its head office. This departure, the report continued, had been followed by signs of bustle and excitement in the K. and K.M.T.C. yard. Then a car had appeared, driven by Maggie Kram, and she had started off, possibly in pursuit and certainly at as high a rate of speed as was consistent with escaping the attention of the city police.
This time, domestic disapproval quite forgotten, Bobby rubbed the end of his nose very hard indeed. He felt uneasy. The news seemed ominous, ominous both in regard to Micky’s departure in such haste and to Maggie’s equal haste to follow.
Sufficiently ominous and doubtful indeed for him to feel that prompt and personal inquiry was desirable. He sent for his small Bayard Seven he used now so much on official business, to be brought round; told the big constable, a man named Peel, who had been guarding Micky, to come with him; and with Peel at the back of the car—he filled it so completely he had rather the air of overflowing here and there—he set off for the K. and K.M.T.C. premises.
There at first it seemed no one knew anything beyond the bare facts already reported. Micky had arrived, had asked for Mr. Kram, had been told he was out, had said he would wait for his return, had refused to answer inquiries concerning his own unexpected return. Then, suddenly, without warning or known cause, he had jumped on an empty lorry standing in the yard, and, before anyone realized his purpose, he had driven off at a breakneck speed. One of the men had then gone to inform Miss Maggie in the office of such eccentric behaviour. Whereupon she, offering no word of explanation, ran into the yard, seized on an old car, long unused, its licence surrendered some time previously, and so had driven off herself in the same great haste.
With growing unease Bobby listened to this story, getting it from the not highly articulate tellers by quick, imperious questions, for somehow he too seemed to feel that the need for haste was great.
“Didn’t Mr. Kram say where he was going?” he asked.
One of the men didn’t know. The other said that the boss had left word in the office that if anyone wanted him, more especially with regard to one bit of business about which he was expecting a call, he was to be rung up at the Conqueror Inn. If he wasn’t there, a message was to be left with the landlord. When Bobby remarked that the Conqueror Inn had no telephone, it was explained that the message was to be given to the post office in the nearby village, with the promise of a liberal tip for anyone who would take it up to the inn. Bobby’s informant added that apparently Mr. Kram had gone to meet Loo Leader with whom he had some business to discuss. At any rate he had tried to ring up Leader at Ingleside camp, where Leader had a load of dannert wire to deliver. Failing to make connection he had decided to try to catch him at the Conqueror Inn by which Leader would have to pas
s on his return.
Bobby found this information but little reassuring. It sounded to him as if Kram, anxious to place Micky’s stolen letters in safety, had decided to hand them to Loo Leader. Did that imply, Bobby asked himself, that in some way Kram felt sure of Leader’s loyalty and obedience? He asked if the message had been put through and was told that had been done. The postmistress was alone when she received it and had replied that it must wait the arrival of someone able and willing to deliver it to the Conqueror Inn. Later on, she had rung up to say that Captain Wintle had driven by with a friend, and, as she knew him as an occasional visitor to the inn, she had stopped his car and asked him, if he was going there, to deliver it for her. He had promised to do so.
Bobby thought that things seemed to be converging on the Conqueror Inn in a somewhat curious way. Only coincidence, he wondered, or was there at work some cause of which he knew nothing?
“Did Micky Burke know where Mr. Kram had gone?” he asked.
“Oh, yes,” the other answered. “It was when I told him where the boss had gone that he said he would wait.”
“It wasn’t then that he went off in such a hurry in the lorry you say he commandeered?” Bobby asked again.
“That was afterwards,” replied the man. “I just happened to say my sister what lives in the same street as Micky told me she had seen the boss there near Micky’s house, as if he was coming away. She thought maybe Micky was ill and the boss had been to see him, so she asked me on her way to work—she’s on second shift. When I told Micky, he let out a sort of yell and grabbed the lorry and off before any of us suspicioned what he was up to.”
The Conqueror Inn: A Bobby Owen Mystery Page 23
