Death Comes to Cambers

by E. R. Punshon

  With that he led the way to the top of the building, where Sergeant Weatherby was waiting outside a closed door.

  ‘Busy as bees, sir,’ he announced, with a grin as his chief appeared.

  ‘What are?’ Colonel Lawson asked.

  ‘Shall we listen, sir?’ Bobby asked; and when they were all silent they heard coming from within the room a curious indeterminate kind of shuffling, jerking noise, very much as if someone or something were moving to and fro.

  ‘What’s that?’ Colonel Lawson demanded. ‘Who’s there?’

  ‘No one, sir,’ answered Weatherby, evidently enjoying a joke to himself.

  ‘Mrs. Dene,’ Bobby said slowly, ‘hearing sounds like these coming in the middle of the night from her son’s room would naturally conclude they were caused by him. She would think it could be nothing else, and so would be certain that was what it was. Her belief would be quite honest and sincere, and her getting no answer to her knock she would put down to his state of nerves over his supposed toothache – perhaps the toothache was genuine, though; the dentist said there was an exposed nerve anything could start. Dene may have started it himself, with a pin or something, so as to make his face swell, or the swelling I saw may have been a bit of cotton-wool Norris, too, hearing sounds coming from the room, and hearing afterwards that Dene had had an attack of toothache that night, would be ready to believe just in the same way that he had heard him walking up and down the room.’

  ‘What is causing it?’ Lawson asked impatiently.

  Sergeant Weather by opened the door. In the middle of the floor were two old carpet-slippers, and attached to the toe of each, by a short piece of string, was a kind of open wire framework or cage, each enclosing a captive mouse. In their efforts to escape from their confinement, their legs having been left a certain freedom of movement, the mice were dragging the slippers to and fro. The effect was one that could easily with the aid of a little imagination and suggestion, be mistaken for that of a person shuffling up and down a room.

  ‘What the devil...?’ began Lawson.

  ‘If you remember, sir,’ Bobby went on, ‘Eddy Dene’s room had a new linoleum, very highly polished. Mrs. Dene remarked on it. That was to let the slippers move more easily and naturally, and this is how Dene produced the effect of sounds coming from his room that his mother and Norris heard and interpreted as proof of his presence, since they could imagine no other cause.’

  ‘You know, I suspected Dene from the first,’ declared the chief constable.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Bobby.

  ‘What made you guess he had played a fantastic trick like this?’ Lawson asked, and a mouse that had managed to wriggle its way through wire put together with less care than perhaps Dene had used scampered across the floor and disappeared.

  ‘Now we shall be overrun with mice,’ said Moulland severely.

  ‘I wondered why Dene had put so much energy into polishing his lino,’ Bobby answered. ‘And then I noticed that he was using the old-fashioned kind of mouse-trap that catches the little beasts alive. Apparently he had gone to some trouble to explain that was because he thought the break-back kind were cruel. I thought that was a little surprising, too, and then I found he had been telling Ray Hardy that it was only a silly sentimental fad to object to the use of spring-traps for rabbits. It seemed contradictory – a contradiction always wants explaining – and I thought about it till I seemed to see how he could have brought off his fake. His trick had the great advantage of using life to imitate life, as mechanism never does. Life is always variable and spontaneous, mechanism just the opposite. Reproduction of the human voice by gramophone or wireless can always be told at once – it’s mechanical and unvarying. Dene used life itself to give the illusion of the presence of a living creature – himself.’

  A constable appeared on the stairs.

  ‘Beg pardon, sir,’ he said. ‘There’s a gentleman just come in – name of Dene, Eddy Dene, and it’s very pressing and important – about the Cambers murder, sir. He has important information.’

  Behind the speaker appeared Eddy himself.

  ‘I’ve just come to tell you,’ he said, ‘I’ve found out where the stolen Cambers jewellery is hidden, and if you come along with me you can see the murderer coming to fetch it from its hiding-place.’

  CHAPTER 34

  EDDY DENE ACCUSES

  The abrupt appearance of Eddy Dene and this announcement that he made were alike so unexpected and so startling, none of them could do anything but gape bewilderedly. It was Station-Sergeant Weatherby who had presence of mind enough to close the door of the store-room so that Dene might not grasp the nature of the experiment they had been making, and the constable who had come to announce his arrival said to him severely: ‘You did ought to have waited down below, sir, same as I told you.’

  Eddy took no notice. From where he stood on the stairs he smiled up at the chief constable and his companions, and though he was thus below them he somehow gave the impression of looking down from some superior height. He showed himself amused, even a little flattered, by their evident disarray, and the arrogance of his dark and haughty glance seemed more than ever emphasized by the smile lurking in it as he looked from one to the other.

  ‘Well?’ he said at last, much in the manner of the indulgent parent who has given his children a new toy to play with and is waiting to see what they will do with it.

  They made no answer still, only stood and watched, finding, indeed, the situation a little overpowering, a little beyond them, now the man whose guilt had just been demonstrated was come, smiling and confident, lightly to denounce another.

  ‘Bowled you over a bit?’ Eddy suggested, still with that lofty smile of his.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ agreed Colonel Lawson nervously. ‘Yes... we were examining stores.’ He paused to turn and look at Bobby, and his look said as plainly as words: ‘Well, now, are you sure you aren’t mistaken? If Dene were really guilty, he couldn’t surely come swaggering here like this.’ Bobby remained impassive. The colonel turned back to

  Dene. ‘Yes, examining stores, you know,’ he repeated.

  ‘Very necessary work, I’m sure,’ agreed Dene, scarcely troubling to hide his scorn. ‘More necessary than pressing, perhaps. But then everything always depends on a proper routine – we all know that.’ And now it was almost an open sneer that played across his small and chubby features that contrasted so oddly with the breadth of his forehead and the dark lightning of his eyes. ‘Hampers original work, perhaps, but it has to be done, of course.’

  ‘Mr. Dene,’ Lawson said, beginning to recover himself to some degree. ‘You say... I understand... very serious,’ he mumbled, looking helplessly at Bobby, as if wondering what ought to be done and what Bobby was thinking. ‘Very serious what you say,’ he concluded. ‘You have serious grounds for your statement?’

  ‘I shouldn’t be here if I hadn’t,’ Dene retorted.

  ‘You have found out where the stolen jewellery is?’ Bobby interposed.

  ‘That’s what I’m telling you, if you could try to take it in,’ retorted Dene again.

  ‘You know also, you say,’ Bobby went on, and into his voice crept now, against his will, a strange and sombre note, ‘who murdered Lady Cambers last Sunday night?’ For the fraction of a second Dene hesitated, as though for just that one fleeting moment he recognized a warning. But the next moment he could almost be seen pushing it aside, recovering his self-confidence, too sure of his superiority to others to trouble himself about them, so that all his habitual insolence was in his voice and manner again as he said: ‘You’re the London man, aren’t you? Teaching the clodhoppers their business, I suppose. Well, I’ve found out one or two things very likely you’ve all been too busy to notice, but that may interest you. I can show you where the jewellery stolen from Lady Cambers’s safe is hidden. It’s just – there. And I know who put it there, and I know he is coming in an hour or two to remove it. I know that because I know he has booked his passage by air fro
m Croydon to Paris, and I take it as certain the jewels will go with him, especially as the place where they are hidden is evidently only temporary. I am ready to show you where it is; if you like you can watch for yourselves and see who comes to fetch them. You can draw your own deductions – if you can, that is. Anyhow, here’s a sequence. Murder. Jewels stolen. Jewels hidden. Who hides, can find. Who steals, hides. Who murders... You can go on for yourselves. I don’t see myself that it matters much, though. The murder’s done and can’t be undone; it belongs to the past. But the jewels are there still – they do matter.’

  ‘You mean that whoever committed the murder, stole the jewellery?’ suggested Lawson.

  ‘As an exercise in logic,’ Dene retorted, and shrugged his shoulders. ‘You must work it out for yourselves – none of my business.’

  ‘It’s our business,’ agreed Bobby softly, and again Dene looked at him, and again dismissed him as evidently counting for little.

  ‘How do you come to know all this?’ demanded Colonel Lawson.

  ‘By using my brains,’ Eddy answered, with rather too evident an implication that those to whom he spoke had none. ‘I don’t think the process would interest you. I gave you a broad hint once, if you had chosen to follow it up.’

  ‘What was that?’ asked the colonel sharply.

  ‘Mr. Dene means, I think,’ interposed Bobby, ‘that when he entered Lady Cambers’s locked room by the window he tore the curtain.’

  ‘That showed,’ Dene pointed out tolerantly, ‘that no one could have entered the room by the window without leaving traces. That showed the key had been used to open the garden door to get into the house. That proved the murderer was the thief as well, didn’t it, since how could he have got the keys except from her dead body?’

  He paused for a moment, as if expecting an answer. But no one spoke, and Bobby wondered to himself if Dene really expected reasoning with so obvious a gap in it to be accepted. If he did, his opinion of their intelligence must be poor indeed – as it was, in fact. Dene went on: ‘But it’s results you want, not intellectual processes. Well, it’s results I’m giving you. Well, what do you say? Are you coming along to see for yourselves? There’s not too much time.’

  ‘Oh, yes, we’ll come along,’ Lawson answered.

  They moved down the stairs. At the door the cars were still waiting. The chief constable gave the necessary instructions to the chauffeurs. They all took their places – Lawson, Moulland, Bobby, and Dene himself in the first car, and three uniformed constables in the second. Dene had suddenly grown silent. It was as though his supreme self-confidence, hitherto so unshakable, was now at last a little troubled. At any rate he was very silent, and, as the others did not speak, no word was uttered during that brief and sombre journey. When Dene, who had already indicated the direction, gave the signal to stop, Bobby jumped to the ground first, and, when Dene moved a few steps away, Bobby followed him.

  ‘You needn’t keep so close,’ Eddy said to him. ‘I’m not going to run away, you know.’

  ‘Mr. Dene,’ Bobby answered formally, ‘the position is that you have made a very serious accusation against some person you have not yet named. Unless you show good and sufficient reason, it may be our duty to take proceedings against you.’

  ‘Oh, it’s public mischief, as they call it, you’re afraid of,’ Eddy said, and laughed, as if relieved. ‘Oh, that’s all right, if that’s what you’ve got in your head.’ And he made no further objection to Bobby’s keeping close by him as he led them through some close undergrowth, by a grove of young oaks recently planted, to a spot where ash and beech grew more closely round a hollow in tie ground, the bottom of it thick with high bracken.

  As the little procession moved along, Dene said to Bobby: ‘They say in the village Lady Cambers wouldn’t have had anything by the time she had paid off what her husband lost in the City.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know for certain,’ Bobby answered, ‘but I’ve a strong idea this jewellery is about all she had left. Unless it is recovered, I don’t imagine there will be anything to speak of for her heirs.’

  ‘Yes, that’s what I thought,’ Dene answered; and added, half to himself: ‘The dirty swine who took it wants all he’ll get – and that’ll be more than he bargained for.’

  They had reached now the hollow round which the trees grew so thickly, and there Dene arranged them about it, making sure they were well hidden and no part left unguarded.

  While he was so occupied Colonel Lawson took the opportunity of drawing Bobby aside, and saying to him in a very troubled voice: ‘How does all this go with your theory? Dene seems very sure of himself – and really anxious the jewellery should be recovered. How does that go with the idea that he’s guilty?’

  ‘Well, sir,’ Bobby answered, ‘I think myself he probably is quite keen on the jewellery being recovered.’

  ‘If he’s guilty, why doesn’t he keep it himself, if he knows where it’s hidden?’ Lawson asked.

  ‘He has sense enough to see he would find it difficult to dispose of,’ Bobby answered. ‘And probably impossible while he was still going on with his work and his book. It’s always that he thinks of first. I gather he doesn’t know Lady Cambers destroyed the will making Sterling her heir. His calculation, as I see it, is that his being responsible for the recovery of the jewellery would go a long way to discount any suspicion that he was concerned in the murder – there’s no logical connection, but the fact is, people would very likely feel like that. And he calculates, too, that as the jewellery would, as he thinks, go to Sterling, Miss Emmers, as Mrs. Sterling, would see he got enough to carry on his work. He could reasonably claim ten per cent, as due to him for recovering it. Then, on the strength of that, he could finish his book.’

  Eddy Dene came hurrying back to them, contemptuous that they should be chatting together in what seemed so casual and indifferent a manner while he was arranging the positions of their men.

  *We were only just in time,’ he said. ‘Our man’s coming.’

  He pointed as he spoke, and they saw approaching through the trees the round squat figure of Oscar Bowman, coming furtively and cautiously and slowly, as though dreading each tree or bush might hide an enemy.

  ‘Mr. Bowman,’ Colonel Lawson exclaimed.

  ‘Never thought of him, did you?’ smiled Dene, with even more arrogance in his tone than usual. ‘You never spotted there was an odd little time-lag. I saw it at once. Bowman vanished from the shed in Frost Field before eight. He said he felt too sick and upset to go on to his office and was going home instead. Well, it’s not far, but it took him an hour and a quarter. Proof – his cook remembers it was exactly nine when he did get there, because she was grumbling at the milkman for being late and pointed to the clock to show him what the time was. Now, what was Bowman doing during that hour and a quarter? I suppose you might say that perhaps he was sitting under a hedge holding his head in his hands?’

  Colonel Lawson was beginning an indignant outburst when Bobby, throwing all thoughts of discipline to the winds, and daring greatly, trod upon his superior officer’s toe. As it was a toe provided with a corn the device was successful, and the interval prolonged and stormy before Dene went on: ‘So I thought I would nose around a bit, and I can give you the name of a woman in a cottage – Mrs. Jenks – who remembers seeing Mr. Bowman hurrying along a bypath that morning, from Cambers House towards his own home, carrying a brown-paper parcel. She is fairly sure of the time, because of having got the children off to school. I should say that what happened was this. Bowman was pressed for money; he knew all about Lady Cambers’s jewels; and he knew there wasn’t going to be any divorce, because Lady Cambers meant to get her Albert back, and in any case wasn’t meaning to let anyone else have him. Bowman got her to come out that night by telling her some yarn about his sister and Sir Albert.’

  ‘What made her take a suit-case with her?’ Bobby interposed.

  Dene looked slightly discomposed.

  ‘How should I know?
’ he snapped. ‘Some idea of her own, most likely. But Bowman was waiting, and he polished her off, very neatly. Once the cord was round her neck she wouldn’t even know what was happening. An easy death.’

  ‘Did she struggle much?’ Bobby asked.

  ‘No; all over in no time,’ Dene answered, too absorbed in his story – perhaps in his memories, too – to notice the look of stricken horror that Colonel Lawson gave him, or the grim tightening of Bobby’s mouth. ‘Like that,’ Dene said, with a gesture of one hand, and they who were listening knew a murderer was showing them unconsciously just how his crime had been committed. ‘No struggle even. But then,’ Dene went on, in a slightly different tone, though he himself was not aware of the change, ‘Bowman found himself up against a snag. He knew Lady Cambers always had her keys with her. That was all right. She had, and he took them. But he had reckoned on the door she had come out by being open for her return. Unluckily for him someone had found it open, thought it had been forgotten, and locked and bolted it. So there was Bowman with his keys that were no good to open a door bolted on the inside. That did him. He was no burglar, and had no idea how to force an entry. He must have thought it over, and finally planned to be on hand in the morning, when the body was discovered, so he would be able to take advantage of the confusion and the excitement to slip into the house and Lady Cambers’s room and open the safe and clear off with the jewellery. It would only take a moment or two, and in the general excitement he could reasonably hope to escape notice.’

  Colonel Lawson was just about to remark there was satisfactory evidence that as a matter of fact Bowman had spent the night asleep in his bed as usual when Bobby made a sudden movement, and the chief constable, whose toe was still painful, moved hurriedly away and was silent, and Dene, who had not noticed this by-play, said: ‘Look out, he’s nearly here. You can see for yourselves now... and you can decide for yourselves whether you think the man who took the jewels had anything to do with the murder. Not my business.’