He told Inspector Hall of his intention, asked him to keep an eye on Stokes, and ran down the stairs into the blackness of the street outside where lay the enormous darkness thrown by the shadow of the tall, blank warehouse wall opposite. He hurried in the direction Stokes had indicated. The second turning on the right, about a hundred yards down the street, would lead him straight to a call-box some distance farther on, Stokes had said. Here too, at the indicated corner the darkness lay heavily in the shadows cast by tall buildings on either hand and relieved only by one street lamp showing a faint gleam some distance away. But he could distinguish the outline of a car that was waiting near. He stood still. It was all very quiet, and he could hear distinctly a shuffling of heavy feet approaching and a muttering of low, hoarse voices. He flashed his torch. In its light he saw a group of three men, of whom two were partly supporting, partly carrying, partly dragging, the inert body of a third towards that waiting car of which he saw now that the door hung open.
Only a momentary glimpse was he allowed, for at the instant that he stood and flashed his torch a violent blow from behind sent him reeling. With difficulty did he keep his footing, and only because by good luck he was brought up by a lamp-post—unlighted for economy’s sake, but affording a support that saved him from falling. He clutched it, swung round it for protection, as instinct rather than sight warned him another blow was coming. He still held his torch. He flung it hard and straight, and by good luck it struck his assailant full in the face, checking effectually any attempt to follow up that first attack. But Bobby, too, though he had recovered his footing, made no effort to follow up his own attack. Instead he shouted at the top of his voice, in the hope of attracting attention and help, and ran towards the little group now nearing the waiting car. His shout, however, was lost at once in the reverberating report of a pistol shot. He found out later that that fortunate throw of the torch had made his assailant drop a big Luger pistol that then a subsequent kick had exploded.
The thought flashed into his mind that this shot would give the alarm very effectually, and that he need waste no more breath in shouting. Just as well. Probably he was about to need it all and more. There was shouting enough, in any case, going on now, for the man behind him was yelling a warning to those in front, and they, in their turn, were shouting to know what was happening, what the shot had been fired for, and at the same time to each other to get their victim or prisoner or injured companion, whichever he was, into the waiting car.
He lay limp and helpless in their grasp—whether dead or unconscious or drugged, Bobby could not tell. Now they were trying to bundle him into the car. One of them snarled a hoarse order to Bobby to keep out or it would be worse for him, and another thinner, shriller voice cried: ‘Cosh him—quick.’ Bobby said: ‘Stop it’, and made a grab at a protruding leg sticking out through the open car door. In the confusion and the darkness no one was quite sure what was happening, who was friend or enemy. Somebody tried to push Bobby away, and in return Bobby thrust him violently against his companion, who hit out viciously, apparently taking him for Bobby, and was hit himself in return before each of them discovered who the other was. Meanwhile Bobby was pulling away at that protruding leg, but without great effect, for some one inside the car was pulling with equal vigour the opposite way. The same thin voice Bobby had heard before screamed through the darkness and the noise and the confusion:
“Steady, you fools. It’s Pitcher Barnes. Look out, look out; he’ll have him out of the car in a minute.”
Bobby did now, in fact, with a final yank, get both legs and a part of the body outside. It came incongruously into his mind that so Trojan and Greek contended for the bodies of slain comrades. Then he had to turn to meet a rush from the two who had given up fighting each other for a joint attack on him. He dodged aside and hit out with what aim he could in that baffling darkness. The impact told him that one blow at least had got well home. But now the inert body he had succeeded in getting half out of the car was back within it, huddled on the floor, and over it came trampling a burly figure that Bobby thought was that of Pitcher Barnes. He greeted it with a violent punch below the belt, for this was no time for Queensberry rules, and whoever it was—Pitcher Barnes or another—sat down suddenly. There was neither wind nor fight left in him. But at the same time some one from behind caught Bobby in an expert wrestling grip, tripped him; he found himself flat on his back, and some one else took the opportunity to deal him a hearty kick in the ribs. He was on his feet again almost at once, but the interval had been enough for the gangsters to pile into their car, and it went roaring away just as a Flying Squad car came roaring up from the opposite direction. Bobby had only time to escape being run over by flattening himself against the wall. He was still a little dazed and breathless. The Flying Squad crew jumped out. Bobby shouted to them to get in again and follow the car that had just escaped.
“It’s Cy King and Pitcher Barnes,” he said. “They’ve a kidnapped man with them—or else a dead man. Send out a general alarm.”
The car departed, though on a hopeless errand, for the fugitives had a start that made escape almost certain. In the silence that followed the disappearance of the two cars, a voice from the darkness said calmly:
“You’ve got it all wrong. I’ve not been kidnapped, and I’m jolly well not dead. But I’ve a lump on my head the size of the dome of St Paul’s—bigger probably,” the voice added thoughtfully.
Bobby, a good deal surprised by this unexpected development, went across to where he could make out a figure sitting on a doorstep.
“What happened?” he asked. “How did you manage to get out?”
“I don’t know quite what did happen. I suppose I got knocked out. I remember hearing some one behind, and next thing I knew I was on the floor of a car with two blighters swearing at each other and trying to pull me in half. One of them won and got me inside, and he started to scramble over me, only he sat down instead. I think something must have hit him.”
“It did,” said Bobby, not without complacence.
“He seemed quite busy trying to hold himself together,” the other continued. “So I wriggled from under, got the other door open, and tumbled out just as the car went off. That’s all I know. Are you chaps police?”
“Yes. You are Mr Leofric Godwinsson, aren’t you?”
“That’s right. How did you know? I say, I feel awfully groggy.”
“There’s a doctor coming. I’ll ask him to have a look at you, and then we’ll send you home. There’s a car coming now,” Bobby added.
It was the Flying Squad men back. One of them jumped out and reported that the pursued car had been abandoned and the occupants had escaped in the maze of dark, ill-lighted side streets near which they had stopped. There had been no chance of overtaking them. The Flying Squad man was interrupted by Leofric saying suddenly:
“I’m awfully sorry. I think I’m going to faint or something.”
Promptly he fitted fact to word. The Flying Squad man flashed his torch. He said:
“Hullo. I know him. It’s the young gent, we picked up outside Wharton House the night of the jewel robbery there. We had to let him go though. Nothing definite we could hold him on, though it smelt a mile off.”
CHAPTER XXI
SEVEN GOLDEN WHYS
The next day was a Sunday, and though a police investigation must go on, Sunday or weekday, Sundays generally bring a considerable slackening of routine work. Incidentally, reporters are occasionally just a little less active on Sundays than on other days, and for this brief and partial respite Bobby was grateful. He had been anxious to keep the news of the strange return of the Wharton jewels from general knowledge as long as possible. No good this time adopting the usual plan of telling the reporters in confidence; the only way, as Bobby was ruefully aware, of keeping a newspaper man quiet. Because it was perfectly certain that by this time the news had already leaked out, whispered, in a confidence not at all likely to be respected, from one member of the Wharton
household to another, and then again to those outside, till by now it was sure to be widely known and sure to be in every paper soon.
However, though it was Sunday, a conference had been called of all those actively engaged in this case of so many strange ramifications. It was to be held in the afternoon, and Bobby, wandering in and out of the kitchen, was seriously interfering with the preparations for dinner—Olive knew too well what conferences meant for her to consider for even one moment having that meal at night as usual. Lucky she would be, she told herself resignedly, if she saw Bobby back by midnight.
“The whole thing will be splashed in all the papers tomorrow,” he was saying moodily. “They haven’t taken much notice of the Joey Parsons murder yet—crowded out by this latest political crisis. But it won’t take them long to link it up with the death of Lady Geraldine and the return of the Wharton stuff.”
“Well, of course, that’s obvious,” agreed Olive. “I wish I knew what time you are likely to be back. There’ll be some corned beef, but when I asked Mrs Vere de Vere in the flat opposite if she would go shares in a cabbage she said they couldn’t afford.”
Bobby said abstractedly: “Who could?” Olive said she had put the arnica on the table in his room and he had better apply it again to his ribs where he had been kicked. Bobby accordingly wandered back, but forgot about the arnica. Presently he emerged, and found Olive on the brink of tears.
“Look,” she said, “there are three points left in your ration book I had forgotten all about, and now they aren’t any good any more, now it’s the end of the period.”
Bobby took the ration books from her and placed them on the top of a cupboard, where she couldn’t reach them except by standing on a chair.
“Never mind all that,” he said. “I’ve got to clear my mind. You listen.”
“Yes, sir,” said Olive meekly, but all the same eyeing wistfully her out-of-reach ration books.
“To begin with,” said Bobby, “it’s clear there’s some connection between the deaths of Joey Parsons and Lady Geraldine and the jewel robberies that have been going on. But which comes first—which is, so to say, the prime mover? There isn’t much we know so far to suggest what is cause and what is consequence.”
“All three both cause and consequence, perhaps,” suggested Olive, wondering if she could slip a chair near the cupboard of the ration books without Bobby noticing, and deciding it would be worth trying.
“Joey Parsons,” Bobby said. “Who was he? Is there some one else in the background, or was he the mainspring of the whole affair?”
“If he was,” Olive asked, “why is it still going on? He isn’t, and a watch doesn’t go on if the mainspring is broken.”
“False analogy,” Bobby told her. “Cut off a hen’s head and it will still go on running round in circles. The difference between life and a machine. The noticeable thing about Joey Parsons is the entirely different character he seems to have presented to every one he met. In Kilburn the admirable, hard-working, conventional, eminently respectable householder, devoted to wife and family. At Lady Geraldine’s flat and among her friends, the strict, severe, somewhat puritanical clergyman. At the boys’ club the jolly, hail-fellow-well-met social worker. For Stokes, he was at first the go-between, the errand-boy of the gang, a timid, frightened sort of bloke, liking to keep in the background as much as possible. The rest of the gang don’t seem to have been so sure. But all contrasting and opposed characters. And how are you to compose a whole out of so many opposites? Notice, too, this sort of secret rendezvous over the Yates shop—the same violent contrasts. A sort of super luxury flat that must have cost a lot to fit up in what is one of the worst slum districts in London. How to pick the truth out of that medley of contradiction?”
“Perhaps”, Olive remarked, “it isn’t contradiction, but a question of the point of view—just as a soldier may be decorative or dreadful. He may have been a quiet, respectable householder in Kilburn, and a narrow-minded puritan, and a jolly pal among boys, and a secret roué, and the scared errand-boy of a criminal gang, all in turn, all real for the time.”
“Well, then, in which of those characters was he killed?” Bobby asked, “and why? And by whom?”
“Better bring in those seven golden whys you are always talking about in those lectures of yours,” suggested Olive, not without the faintest possible touch of malice in her voice, for she was still feeling very sore about her ration books so unfairly placed where she couldn’t reach them.
“Lectures?” Bobby repeated, slightly surprised that any one should think of taking them seriously. “Talk,” he said, and dismissed them with a gesture. “All that counts is experience—and luck. Of course,” he conceded, “they do buck the chaps up a bit. Gives them more self-confidence, because they think they’ve learnt something.”
“The Seven Golden Whys,” repeated Olive, who always read over Bobby’s lectures for him, so as to be sure he had made his meaning plain. “What? Who? When? Where? In What Way? What with? Why? There you are.”
“Theory, that’s all,” Bobby commented. “But take them in turn. What happened? Answer. Two deaths and a whole lot of stolen jewellery returned to its owners. Who? An enigmatic personality and a young society woman and what else were they? When? Well, we know that more or less accurately, thanks to the medical evidence, and apparently both within twenty-four hours of each other, but the doctors aren’t sure which was first. Where? In a deserted room in a bombed house, marked dangerous, and in a luxury hide-out in an East-End slum. In what way? The man shot at close range, the woman suffocated, probably while in a stupor from drink. What with? An old style automatic and a cushion filled with down. Why? Yes. Why? Nothing to show. Joey may have been double-crossing his pals—an errand-boy has his opportunities. Rival gangsters may have been trying to get hold of the Wharton stuff—hi-jacking, I think they used to call it in the States in prohibition days. Or for some reason we know nothing about—and perhaps never shall.”
“Don’t you think,” Olive asked, “that just possibly Lady Geraldine wasn’t there on her own account? Couldn’t they have got her there by some sort of trick—or kidnapping, like last night with Mr Godwinsson?”
“She was living in good style, spending a lot of money,” Bobby pointed out. “No known source of income, so where did it come from? We’ve always been inclined to think that in most of these recent robberies the thieves had good inside information. They know where the key of the safe is kept or when the family jewels are taken out of the bank for special occasions. Who told them? Was it Lady Geraldine? And her money, her share of the loot, perhaps?”
“You don’t like to think it could be that,” Olive protested. “Not her own friends.”
“There’s plenty going on just now you don’t like to think,” Bobby answered. “There is the possibility of an illicit love affair. If there really is a ‘boss’ in the background, Lady Geraldine may have been his mistress, and he may have given her money. If it was that, then there’s the possibility of her death resulting from jealousy, or even some drunken quarrel. That sort of connection does sometimes end in tragedy if one or the other grows tired of it or if the woman gets troublesome—wants marriage, for instance. But that’s bringing in an entirely new element. And nothing much to show there really was a ‘boss’. Quite likely it was Joey himself, using an imaginary figure as cover.”
“Could the boss be Cy King?” Olive asked.
“I suppose there’s that,” Bobby admitted. “That would mean it was probably Cy King who committed the murders. He’s capable of it all right. But I can’t see Cy in connection with that extraordinary hide-out over the Yates shop. Cy is only an ordinary vicious little street rat—rattlesnake, rather. Clever enough in his cunning little way, but that’s all.”
“Isn’t there enough for you to act on?” Olive asked.
“No; I wish there was. I am sure it was Cy who was trying to put a knife into me in that scrap at Angel Alley. But I couldn’t swear to it. Masked all the t
ime. It was certainly Cy again at Lady Geraldine’s flat, but only Miss Leigh saw him, and again he was masked and Miss Leigh couldn’t swear to him. At Kilburn, Mrs Porter only saw him masked, and I only had a glimpse of him looking at me through a window. Same thing last night, too dark to be sure who anybody was. In any case I can’t relate him to the strange dark hidden personality you seem to glimpse behind the scenes in all this affair. In my idea all Cy has been trying to do is to get his fingers on the Wharton loot.”
“Does that mean,” Olive asked, “that was why he was trying to get hold of Mr Godwinsson last night? Because Mr Godwinsson might have it or know where it was?”
“Most likely. The Godwinssons come into it somewhere. It may be only as friends of Lady Geraldine’s concerned about what’s happened to her. Leofric was trying to find her. Perhaps he knew, though, and was merely laying down a smokescreen against discovery. But again it might have been the stolen jewellery he was trying to track. The colonel and both his sons know something. I told you one of our men spotted Leofric as having been picked up the night the Wharton stuff was stolen. Nothing in that, perhaps. Interesting, though, and worth remembering. None of the Godwinssons will talk, but that may be only because they are trying in their old-world, gentlemanly way to protect Lady Geraldine’s reputation. Or is there some other reason?”
“I thought there were three sons,” said Olive, who by now had managed to edge a chair up to the cupboard on whose top reposed her ration books.
“Gurth and Leofric,” Bobby said. “Old family tradition to give the sons ancient Saxon names—Harold, Gurth, Leofric, Athelstane, always in strict order of birth. I don’t know what number five would be. Hengist or Horsa, perhaps.” He paused and stared with intense concentration at nothing at all. “Is there a hint there?” he asked.
The House of Godwinsson: A Bobby Owen Mystery Page 14
