Music Tells All: A Bobby Owen Mystery

by E. R. Punshon

  “I think,” Bobby said, “that I had better be there.”

  “At dinner?” Bell asked. “But … well, a bit awkward?”

  “I’ll try to get there as near the sweet and coffee stage as I can manage,” Bobby explained. “I think that will be about right. Bad if it isn’t, but I think it should be time enough.”

  “Why not a bit earlier?” Bell asked. “Safer and you might come in for a share of the what’s its name stuff.” The words were light but the tone was grave. “Shall I come with you?” he asked.

  “I think I shall have a better chance of pulling it off if I go alone,” Bobby said. “The important thing is to be there before she gets down to her piano playing.”

  “Yes, of course, I see that,” Bell agreed. “Have it your own way. But there’ll have to be someone on hand. Outside. Waiting. Got to be on the safe side. You never know how a thing like this may turn out.”

  “Thank you,” Bobby said. “If you don’t mind posting one of your chaps near, it might be as well. I suppose you couldn’t spare the time yourself, could you?”

  “Well, I might,” Bell answered. “I would rather like to be in at the death.” He paused and looked uneasy. “That slipped out,” he said.

  CHAPTER XXXII

  AFTER DINNER

  Bobby timed his arrival well. It was almost at the exact moment when Miss Bellamy returned from the kitchen with the coffee she had just prepared that he knocked at the door. When she opened it and saw him she said simply: “Oh, it’s you,” and went back into the room.

  Bobby followed. Fielding was sitting at the table on which now only the coffee pot and cups stood, the other dishes having been cleared away. It all looked very homely and comfortable and ordinary. Fielding glanced up as Bobby entered and he, too, said “Oh, it’s you”, but made no other comment. Miss Bellamy was pouring out the coffee. She went back into the kitchen and returned with a third cup. She was beginning to fill it when Bobby said: “Please. If that’s for me, please don’t trouble.”

  “It’s good coffee,” Mr. Fielding said. “You don’t often get it like this. And it’s not poisoned.”

  “I’m sure it isn’t,” Bobby said. “Poison is not in Miss Bellamy’s line.” He glanced at the grand piano, standing Open behind where Fielding sat and he saw that both the others noticed the direction of his glance. “But I’m here on duty,” he explained.

  “That’s not it,” Miss Bellamy said. “You mean you won’t eat or drink with suspected murderers.”

  Her former manner or air Bobby had so often noticed of a remote indifference, of an almost total unawareness of surroundings, had vanished. Now her eyes were quick and alert, her every movement brisk and to the point. One might have said she was displaying now the eager attention of a young child to every detail of a world entirely new, so closely did she seem to focus the full concentration of her thought on each passing moment. It was a change of mood that seemed to Bobby significant and full of meaning and that made him uneasy. It suggested she had come back from the distant realms into which she had apparently so often wandered, come back with her decision taken, her purpose at last determined. But he could not be sure. It might mean her spirit had returned from its wanderings, as for ever baffled and now merely acquiescent.

  “Murderers?” Fielding was saying. “Well, that’s not us, is it?” he asked comfortably. To Bobby he said: “Well, have a cigar. That’s not eating or drinking.”

  He offered his cigar case as he spoke but Bobby thanked him and begged to be excused.

  “I so seldom smoke cigars,” he said. “I would really rather not if you don’t mind.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind,” Fielding said chuckling. “Ten bob each they cost and a favour at that.”

  “I’ve some brandy,” Miss Bellamy said. She went to get it from a cupboard in a corner of the room. “Would you like a little in your coffee?” she asked Fielding. She added some to her own. “We shall need it,” she said, “when he starts asking questions. It’s hell when he asks questions.”

  “That’s O.K. by me,” Fielding said as he held out his cup for the offered brandy. “I have dined well and fate cannot harm me now. Those poussins au Henri Quatre—marvellous. You ought to have been here a bit earlier,” he said to Bobby. “Then you might have had some. Marvellous.”

  “If there is hell in any question of mine,” Bobby said, “it is not I who put it there.”

  “Perhaps we shan’t answer and what the hell then?” asked Fielding, still chuckling. “Hold your tongue, and let anyone who wants make what they like of that.” He added, sipping it: “This coffee—it’s up to what went before. Marvellous.”

  “If you don’t answer,” Miss Bellamy said, “that’s as good an answer as any—so he says.”

  “Bluff,” explained Fielding. “You come across it in business. ‘You won’t show the figures? We know what that means,’ the other bloke tells you and expects you to wilt. Well, you don’t, and he has to guess. No good guessing. You can’t make an estimate on a guess—or a balance sheet, either.”

  “Very true,” Bobby agreed. “A guess is useless. A logical deduction from accounts presented may be different, more reliable. It’s that I should like to attempt with your assistance.”

  “Suppose we refuse our assistance?” Miss Bellamy asked. “What then?”

  “Oh, I do hope you won’t,” Bobby said. “The logical deduction then might be unpleasant, and surely it’s better in every way for us to talk it over together now than for you both to have to stand up to cross-examination by a K.C. at the inquests when they take place.”

  “Ask away,” Fielding said, waving his cigar in the air. “It’s O.K. by me, though I don’t know there’s much I can tell you you don’t know already. I’ve told you how that poor devil of a Biggs wished himself on me. Nobody’s sorrier than I am for what’s happened to him, but I don’t see what I could have done. Well, go ahead, if you want to.”

  “Thank you,” Bobby said. “Well, the point we have to arrive at is who killed these two men.”

  “That’s right,” Fielding said, shaking his head gravely. “A bad business. You ought to get to the bottom of it.”

  “I’ll try,” Bobby promised. “The point we have to start from is how did it happen that Mr. Fielding out of all the replies he received to a very attractive advertisement, picked ours?”

  “I told you,” Fielding said, looking surprised. “Pure luck. It had to be someone. I simply took the first that came along.”

  “I have so little faith in pure luck,” Bobby said, “especially when purpose seems to appear. There is so little need to advertise a house to let to-day, unless the purpose is to secure the highest rent possible. Every house agent has a long list of waiting applicants. But Mr. Fielding didn’t ask a high rent. He quoted a most moderate, reasonable figure. Hardly the figure indeed the keen city man might have been expected to ask.”

  “Oh, come,” Mr. Fielding protested smilingly, “we are not such sharks in the city as all that.”

  “I wondered,” Bobby continued, “if there could be some other, special reason why the house was being offered to us. It might of course have been merely our bit of good luck and in any case at the moment it didn’t seem important. Or else getting a decent house at a fair rent seemed to be a whole lot more important. I expect what I thought was that I would wait and see—wait developments. The first development was that a man who took part in a smash and grab raid and who bore what struck me as a resemblance to Mr. Fielding’s chauffeur—the one who had wished himself on Mr. Fielding, as Mr. Fielding says—was followed to this neighbourhood where he vanished close by this cottage. I had to ask myself if there was any connection between our being given a house here and this vanishing act here. It began to occur to me that possibly suspicion that a gang of criminals was operating, or had their headquarters somewhere near, had induced a good, law-abiding, but possibly nervous citizen to feel he would like extra protection. Such a citizen might not have wished to risk makin
g a fool of himself, and perhaps getting laughed at, by going to the police with an unsupported story and possibly unfounded suspicions. Alternatively he might simply want to avoid being mixed up in any sort of criminal affair. Some people rather like a bit of newspaper publicity and some people dread it like the pestilence. So it did seem possible that our good citizen had thought it would be a bright idea to get hold of a fairly highly placed police official as a neighbour. The idea would be that his presence would soon become known to the possible criminal gang and would act as a kind of disinfectant, so to say. It might get the gang, if it existed, to fade away without fuss or bother, and a good riddance to bad rubbish. It seemed an attractive idea and I very nearly put it straight out to Mr. Fielding. Only one soon learns in police work not to be in too much of a hurry. Hasten slowly has to be the policeman’s motto.”

  “Well, as you put it like that, and very smart of you, too,” Mr. Fielding said beamingly, “I don’t mind admitting it was rather that way. I was beginning to notice little things. I couldn’t even tell what they were. Trifles. Looks. And then this crime wave the papers are full of and the way I found myself with a new chauffeur, though I hardly knew how or why. By pure chance—just that, believe it or not—a man I had a deal on with dined one night with a friend at the hotel where you were staying. You were pointed out to him as a big noise at Scotland Yard, and it struck me that I wanted a responsible tenant for Fern Cottage on a short lease. If it suited you, it suited me, and if you answered the advertisement—well and good. If not, no harm done. I suppose now you’ll be telling me all that may be used in evidence.”

  “Well, yes, now you mention it,” Bobby admitted, “I suppose I ought to remind you both that anything you say may be used like that.”

  “I told you to take care,” Miss Bellamy interposed. “He’s making you answer his questions already.”

  “He hasn’t asked any,” Fielding retorted.

  “No, he’s just rambling along,” Miss Bellamy said. “That’s worse.”

  “Questions or rambling, all one to me,” Fielding assured her smilingly. “Besides, I take it I may put forward a humble claim to be a good citizen and as such ought to be willing to help. You, too.”

  “I never claimed to be a good citizen,” she answered. “Or wanted.”

  “Fire away,” Fielding said to Bobby.

  CHAPTER XXXIII

  SOME SUGGESTIONS

  Bobby took a moment or two to express with much feeling his appreciation of Mr. Fielding’s readiness, as a good citizen, to co-operate. He hoped, he said, he would not have to trespass too far upon Mr. Fielding’s kindness.

  “Though indeed,” he concluded, “it’s no less than I expected. Or should I say no more than I expected?” He paused to consider this nicety of language and Mr. Fielding smiled in his genial way and Miss Bellamy stared at him even more intently and more challengingly than before. He resumed: “My first idea when the gangster I was after vanished near here was that possibly he might be hiding in this cottage or one of its out-buildings. People in the country do sometimes leave their front doors open or the door key hanging up in some quite conspicuous place. Disturbing idea that a gangster might be hiding in a cottage where a lady lived alone. Suppose she found him under the bed or something like that?” He smiled at Miss Bellamy who did not smile back. He continued: “Besides, I wanted the fellow rather badly. So I got hold of Miss Bellamy and we went through the cottage carefully. No sign of him and no sign of any possible hiding place. It was only later that I remembered how Miss Bellamy had shown—I don’t quite know how to put it—a sort of girlish—no, not girlish, decidedly not, considering the modern girl—no, a kind of old-fashioned, old maidenly reluctance to let me into her bedroom. I remembered how she stood in the doorway with her back to the half-open door. Plainly, she didn’t like the idea of my going in and there seemed no reason to. I could see the whole room. I could see that nowhere, neither under the small, low iron bed nor in any cupboard, was there any spot where man or boy could be concealed. Later, it did occur to me that I hadn’t seen behind the door. Miss Bellamy stood with her back to it. There was room there all right for a man to be hidden, and then, too, neither old maidishness nor girlish modesty struck me as very characteristic of Miss Bellamy.”

  Miss Bellamy showed no sign of wishing to make any comment though Bobby stopped to give her the opportunity. But Mr. Fielding was plainly indignant and was moved to protest.

  “Oh, well, come now,” he said. “Isn’t that all rather far fetched?”

  “Not so much so as two dead men,” Bobby answered, “two dead men and music so strange as that Miss Bellamy lets us listen to.”

  “What on earth,” demanded Fielding, “has Miss Bellamy’s playing got to do with it? Magnificent, of course, but all the same … well, let’s keep to the point.”

  “The next thing,” Bobby continued, “was the appearance of the unlucky Myerson with his satchel of jewellery he showed off in the pub, having had too much to drink, apparently. Well, naturally I wondered if that was the genuine loot from the smash and grab raid. Apparently it was, for a ring found on Mr. Fielding s drive was easily identified as part of it. The inference seemed obvious. That it had been dropped by Myerson on his way to dispose of the loot to a receiver.”

  “Me?” said Mr. Fielding, amused. “Did you really think that?” he asked incredulously.

  “I began at least to think that that was what I was intended to think,” Bobby answered. “You see, I was sure I had been deliberately led here by the gangster I followed but failed to catch. A careful plan and careful preparations were evident. I was equally sure the ring had been deliberately put where it was so that it could be found there and that it was there specially for the vicar to find. I expect the idea was that the vicar could be trusted but that it might have been kept and nothing said if it had been found by, for instance, the laundry delivery boy who, by a most extraordinarily fortunate coincidence, called only a little before.”

  “Why fortunate?” asked Miss Bellamy abruptly.

  “What on earth—” protested Mr. Fielding. “First music and then the laundry boy! Really, aren’t we rather wasting time?”

  “The connection will appear,” Bobby promised, “and all apologies to the laundry boy who is, I am sure, perfectly honest. Anyhow, I felt pretty sure there was some deep and strange business going on. I couldn’t for the life of me imagine what, but obviously it was up to me to find out.”

  “All this seems so very much in the air,” Mr. Fielding remarked. “Theory. Guess work. Oh, ingenious, I admit, but still—nothing solid to go on. Airy fairy stuff. All in the air.”

  “It might have remained in the realm of theory,” Bobby said, and now his voice was a little grim, “had not two dead men intervened. For dead men are matter not of the air but very much of the earth.”

  “Earth to earth,” Miss Bellamy said and laughed harshly.

  “There was the background to whatever was going on,” Bobby continued. “Miss Bellamy’s playing Mr. Fielding mentioned a moment ago. A disconcerting background. I heard someone say once in a lecture on music—a very highbrow lecture—that music tells all. I thought the same of Miss Bellamy’s music, but of course only for those who knew the language. But that it had a purpose and a meaning was clear to me and I thought sometimes that it was clear to Mr. Fielding, too.”

  “Oh, well,” Mr. Fielding said. He turned where he sat and stared at the grand piano behind him, and for a moment it seemed he was going to say something. But he turned back and looked at neither of the other two. “Oh, well,” he said again, and was silent.

  “There was an odd contradiction to be faced,” Bobby went on. “For if there were, as it seemed, a plan to direct suspicion to Mr. Fielding as some sort of criminal—or else why was I led here and why the opal ring where it was?—and if there were any truth in it, then why had Mr. Fielding himself helped to engineer my arrival on his doorstep, so to speak?”

  “That’s easy,” Fielding
said. “The gang knew I suspected something wrong, they guessed it was me got you here, and they wanted to get a bit of their own back.”

  “I did think of that,” Bobby said. “But they would have been running a big risk to satisfy a very small grudge. It could have been managed much more easily with much less risk. Besides, I didn’t think it likely there would be any very serious resentment felt. These men are oddly reasonable. They don’t bear malice against police for instance. They feel we are just doing our job. They quite see the public has a right to look after itself and to be looked after by us. They do object very much to what they call outside interference. But I couldn’t feel that getting a policeman on tap, so to say, would call for anything more than a few hearty curses—quite impersonal curses. Certainly not for such elaborate, carefully thought out plans. I turned down that idea.”

  “I’m not so sure,” said Fielding reflectively. “I may have been treading on the toes of a pretty big organization.”

  “It was plain though,” Bobby resumed, “that Biggs had something to do with it, and why had he thought it necessary to become Mr. Fielding’s chauffeur? It seemed part of the plan. And what had he to do with Miss Bellamy, for I was getting more and more to think she had deliberately hidden him behind that half-open bedroom door of hers. Another conclusion followed. It was two or three years since Miss Bellamy came here to live and therefore, if she was in it, the plan, whatever it was, must have its roots in the past. Possibly even the distant past.”

  “All very well, all very pretty,” Mr. Fielding said, puffing hard at his cigar. “Quite frankly, I’m a business man. In business these fancy frills don’t go. We prefer an ounce of fact to any number of tons of theory. In business, we don’t think much of the ‘it might be this’ or ‘it might be that’ line of country.”