Suspects—Nine

by E. R. Punshon

  Bobby shook his head.

  “We don’t work that way,” he said. “But I think I recognize that stunted oak behind the car. I think I saw one like it on the road near Weeton Hill, not far from the big patch of bracken that goes half way up the hill, nearly.”

  “I don’t know what you’re getting at and I don’t care,” Judy said. “If there’s any funny work behind sending me that photo, well, I’ll wait till whoever it is comes out in the open. What about those bits of envelope you raked out of the dust-bin? Nice job, raking through other people’s dust-bins. Are you going to hand them over, or have I got to take them? My property, you know.”

  “In the first place,” Bobby explained, “I’m certainly not going to let you have them and though I’m still a bit groggy from the whack you hit me when I wasn’t looking, I daresay I can still manage a bit of a fight. In the second place, I’m a policeman and a policeman moves in the sanctity of the law. If you hit me, you hit the British Constitution, and there’ll be a chance to run you in—a chance some of our people want very badly indeed. In the third place, the pieces of envelope have already been identified both by me and by the man you saw, so destroying them wouldn’t make any difference. That man, by the way, wasn’t a pal of mine. He was under arrest. Thanks to your idiocy he has escaped. I don’t know if you can be charged with rescuing him but I’m jolly well going to suggest it.”

  “Rot,” Judy said, though uncertainly. “The chap was with you,” he pointed out.

  . “Prisoners are often with some one,” Bobby retorted. “He is a man named Martin. We’ve been trying to pick him up. He is mixed up in the affair somehow. He may even be the actual murderer. We don’t know. We want to question him. He’s one of the suspects—like you,” said Bobby viciously, and was pleased to see Judy wince. “Now, thanks to you, he’s got away again. I had word he might be in this neighbourhood so I was sent to have a look round. It struck me he might be trying to get in touch with you. Accomplices, perhaps.”

  “Never heard of him,” interrupted Judy sulkily.

  “Sure?” asked Bobby. “Did you know Lady Alice Belchamber was employing a private detective to watch Mrs. Tamar?”

  He paused. Judy did not answer but looked more sullen still, more disturbed, too, so that Bobby guessed that he had in fact known.

  “I expect you know,” Bobby continued, “it was Martin Lady Alice employed. Silly. Martin would double-cross any one for pay, even for the fun of it, just because he would rather be crooked than straight any day. Anyhow, there are a lot of questions we wanted to ask him. I was put on the job and I came along here to ask if you had seen anything of him. By a bit of luck I found him here. He was at the back, busy with your dustbin. He had collected scraps of shipping announcements—Kenya chiefly.”

  “Anything wrong with that?” demanded Judy.

  “Bless you, no. Nice place, Kenya, I’m told, that is, for any one with a bit of capital. He had also collected the pieces of envelope I told you about that I think want explaining.”

  “You can go on wanting,” growled Judy, looking more and more uneasy.

  “I, also,” Bobby continued, “noticed that a window had been forced open. Martin said he had found it like that. I didn’t believe him, but it might have been true and I considered it my duty, as a police officer, to find out what had happened; to see if there had really been an attempt at housebreaking, and if there had been, if there was any one still inside the house. I told Martin I was going to charge him—‘found on enclosed premises’ and all that. Well, I could hardly leave him out there to do a bunk the moment I got inside, so I took him along. I made sure there was no one in the house, and no sign of disturbance. I saw the photo of Miss Maddox’s car, couldn’t very well help, it was lying right on the top of that little desk thing. I was climbing out of the window again when you knocked me out—from behind. Dirty trick, going for me like that when I hadn’t a chance. Of course, Martin cleared off at once. Naturally. What’s more, now he knows we want him, he’ll go into hiding. He has any number of bolt holes, it’ll take us all our time to dig him out and lucky if we do.”

  Judy listened quietly to all this, looking all the time sulkier and sulkier and more and more like the naughty, small boy in a corner.

  “All very well,” he grumbled. “How do I know that isn’t all a yarn you’ve just made up?”

  “Luckily,” Bobby explained, though, indeed, he might fairly have claimed there had been more in it than mere luck, “luckily I took a snap of Martin rooting about in the dust-bin.”

  “Oh, well,” Judy grumbled, “how was I to know?”

  “Preferred,” said Bobby bitterly, “to hit a fellow when he wasn’t looking.”

  “Oh, for the Lord’s sake,” cried Judy, his defences broken through at last, “let up on that. I”—he gulped, he got it out with difficulty—“I apologise. I didn’t think of anything but you snooping round while my back was turned. So I went for you.” He gulped again. “I saw red,” he said.

  “Often do, don’t you?” asked Bobby.

  “I try not to,” Judy assured him, earnestly. “I expect it’ll get me into trouble some day. When I was quite a kid, matron at school told my people I would do murder some day if I wasn’t checked. Well, I never have yet, no matter what you think, though you did give me a bad scare once when you told me I looked murderous. I keep it under, generally, but it did get me when I saw you climbing out of that window. Of course, I’m sorry about that now. Look here,” he said, generously, “how would it be if you swiped me one, hard as you like, and make it evens?”

  “How about,” said Bobby, “coming down to the gym some time—six-ounce gloves and twenty rounds, or till one or other can’t stand?”

  “Right,” said Judy eagerly. “Jolly decent of you, too. I suppose,” he added wistfully, “you wouldn’t prefer the knuckles?”

  “Gym people wouldn’t stand for it,” explained Bobby. “You can do a lot with six-ounce gloves,” he added reassuringly.

  “Yes, I know,” agreed Judy. “Awfully decent idea, I call it.”

  “That’s a bargain, then, though we’ll have to wait till this Munday business is cleared up.”

  “If I swing, bargain off, I suppose?” Judy asked grimly.

  “Have to be,” agreed Bobby. “Now we’ll drop private affairs, please. And remember, please, I’m a police officer helping in the investigation of a murder, and you’re—”

  “A suspect,” interposed Judy.

  “An important witness,” Bobby corrected him. “The Miss Maddox car photograph came through the post? Have you the wrappings?”

  “I expect they’ll be in the dust-bin, too,” Judy answered. “I couldn’t make out who it came from. I didn’t recognize the handwriting and I couldn’t make out the postmark.”

  “Do you mind if we do some more dust-bin rooting?” Bobby asked. “I should like those wrappings.”

  They went outside, accordingly, and presently discovered at the bottom of the dust-bin, somewhat damaged by proximity to an empty sardine tin, the brown-paper wrappings in question.

  “Getting things out of dustbins isn’t all fun,” Bobby remarked, as he did his best to make the oily, dirty and torn piece of brown paper as respectable as possible. “Woman’s handwriting, I should say. Not Mrs. Tamar’s, not Lady Alice’s, either. I’ve seen hers. I’ve never seen Miss Maddox’s.”

  “It’s not hers,” Judy said quickly.

  “Looks an uneducated sort of hand,” agreed Bobby. “Have to get our experts on it. Can’t read the postmark. Perhaps the experts can. Violet rays and that sort of thing.”

  “First letter looks like a ‘B’ to me,” Judy said.

  “So it does,” agreed Bobby. “That’s an idea.” He paused, and looked excited. “I believe that explains whose writing it is,” he exclaimed.

  “What do you mean?” asked Judy. “How does the first letter of a postmark looking like a ‘B’ tell you anything about handwriting?”

  They went ba
ck into the house to get a bit of string Bobby wanted. When he had the wrapping papers secured to his satisfaction, he said,

  “There’s another thing I want to ask you about.” He produced the dried-up lipstick of once vivid hue he had found in the upstairs bedroom. “This,” he said, “was in a drawer of the dressing-table.”

  “What about it?” asked Judy. “Thought you said you didn’t do any snooping or disturb anything?”

  “Not while I was looking round officially,” Bobby answered. “Martin’s my witness. But after our—er— misunderstanding, after you had dumped me upstairs, I messed about a bit, bathing my chin, and I found this.”

  “What if you did?”

  “Flora Tamar’s, I think. Are you in love with her?”

  “Did it sound just now as if I was? You heard us.”

  “I think she is in love with you,” Bobby said.

  Judy looked extremely uncomfortable.

  “I don’t think it’s that exactly,” he said hesitatingly. “I don’t know. I told her from the start. She was just another woman to me. She was willing and so was I. Shocked?”

  “I’m not a judge of morals,” Bobby answered.

  “I think now she may have taken what I said as, a kind of challenge,” Judy went on slowly. “I don’t know, though. I think at first I was just another man to her. Eating, drinking, sex, it’s all part of nature. She couldn’t see a man, I think, without wanting to make him feel her power. Power. That’s what it was. If you didn’t go on your knees to her, it was a challenge and an insult. If you did, she lost interest. You were one of the crowd. If you didn’t, then she got after you. She got after me. I didn’t mind. One woman had had me down but I didn’t mean any other to. Quite willing to give them their fun and to take my own fun, too. That’s all.”

  “Is it all?” Bobby asked. “Because it never is, you know.”

  “No, I suppose it isn’t: Never,” Judy agreed. “The more I held off, the more she came on. I never meant it to last, I told her so. She meant it to last, though—at least, I mean, she didn’t want me to be the one to tire first. Lost her head a bit, sort of insulted, I suppose. Woman scorned and all that. Well, you heard her yourself. Talked like a couple of Covent Garden porters, didn’t we?”

  “Much worse,” said Bobby. “They’ve generally some idea of decency.”

  “Oh, well,” Judy continued, “Look here. She’ll get over it. It’s just her vanity hurt. I wasn’t the first man and I don’t suppose I shall be the last. Look here. All this is rather rotten. You heard part of it and you seem to have got hold of the rest. I don’t know how. But it’s nothing to do with Munday’s murder that I can see. Why not leave it alone?”

  “Exactly because it may have something to do with Munday’s murder. It is murder, not morality, we’re concerned with. Only it just happens that if you throw morality out of the window, murder may come in at the door.”

  Judy said nothing. Bobby said,

  “A beginning’s one thing, but the end’s another.”

  “Oh, well,” Judy muttered. “It’s pretty beastly.”

  “Touching pitch and all that,” said Bobby. “What made Mrs. Tamar jealous? Because you met Ernie Maddox?”

  “You heard what she said,” Judy muttered. “All rot, of course.”

  “Are you in love with Ernie Maddox?” Bobby asked.

  “No,” shouted Judy.

  “Is she in love with you?”

  “Leave her name out of it,” Judy shouted again. He was on his feet once more. “Leave her out of it or I’ll —I’ll—”

  “Now, now, we’ve got it fixed up about the gym,” Bobby reminded him. “Wait for that. What beats me, though, is how you can put up even a half decent show at poker when you go in off the deep end every two minutes?”

  “Well, why can’t you leave me alone?” Judy muttered. He wiped his forehead and his wrists, they were damp with perspiration. He said, presently, “When you play poker, well, you know where you are and you know the other chaps and you know what it’s all about and what you’ve got to do, but when you lie awake at night thinking—I do that now, I never used to—thinking how different everything might have been if you hadn’t been such a fool—and it’s not even fun being a fool—you lark about and then you find you’re trapped for life—it isn’t fun seeing all your life go down the drain.” He paused: “You meet a girl and what’s the good? What’s the good of drawing two kings if you’ve thrown away the two dealt you? It’s when a girl looks at you, and you know you’ve done the dirty often enough without doing it on her as well. You know she’ll forget. That’s one thing sure. So will Flora. And all the time you know the police are working all round you, asking questions, watching, finding out things, twisting things, waiting till they’ve got you where they want you. Gets on your nerves. I never knew I had nerves before. It’s only since I met Ernie. I didn’t care before. I do now. That’s the difference. Once I wouldn’t have cared for all the coppers in creation.” He began to laugh, not very naturally. “I suppose it’s got me down,” he said. “Done in. Poker, too. Damn funny, that. I can’t play now. Lose when I try. I’ve dropped over three hundred since this started. I put up such a rotten show the other night I swore I would never touch a card again. I think I meant it, too. I don’t know but I think I meant it. Perhaps I shan’t have the chance, though, when you are through with your job.”

  “Did you kill Munday?” Bobby asked.

  “No, but I think I shall confess soon. I know now why chaps confess to things they never did. Like those Russian johnnies. You get so you want to end it and you don’t care how. Suppose I told you I had killed Munday. What would you do?”

  “Ask you to make a statement.”

  “And then?”

  “Check it up in every detail and prosecute—-either on a charge of murder or else on a charge of public mischief.”

  “Well, then, I won’t say it.”

  “Who do you think is guilty?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “You said it was Flora Tamar?”

  “Only trying to be nasty.”

  “Rather mean.”

  “I know. I felt that way.”

  “There’s reason to believe she and Holland Kent were out together that Friday evening for dinner. We can’t tell where they dined. Apparently, not at any restaurant. Inquiries have been made. Would it be here?”

  “Here? No. Certainly not. Nothing to eat for one thing.”

  “They could have brought things, tinned stuff, some of the big shops make up lunch and dinner baskets.”

  “There would have been something to show. There wasn’t. Besides, the place was locked up and they had no key.”

  “Mrs. Tamar had no key?”

  “No. If she was coming I met her and brought her along.”

  “You haven’t told me, yet, why she sent letters here addressed to Holland Kent?”

  “Ask her.”

  “I will. Though I think I can guess.”

  “The devil you can,” muttered Judy, disconcerted. “Have you a pistol?”

  “No. I suppose I should say so, anyhow, but I haven’t.”

  “I heard you say you had taken one from somebody at one of your poker parties?”

  “Oh, that. Yes, I did. I dumped the thing in the river. Over Westminster Bridge.”

  “You showed one once in a Soho café to a gang there, didn’t you?”

  “Good Lord,” exclaimed Judy, startled, “who told you that? You do get hold of things. It was only a toy. Scared ’em all right, though. No guts unless they’re ten to one, like Nazis kicking a Jew. Anything else you want to ask?”

  “I don’t think so,” Bobby said, getting up. “So long till we meet again.”

  “At Philippi?” asked Judy.

  “At the gym,” retorted Bobby as he departed.

  CHAPTER XXII

  MURDER WEAPON

  From Judy’s cottage, so ingenuously named ‘Whatah Ope’, Bobby proceeded on his fortunately recovered mo
tor-cycle no one had disturbed to the nearest police station, whence by ’phone he reported briefly what had happened. He suggested, too, that Martin might now be placed on the list of the ‘wanted’, on the ‘found on enclosed premises’ charge.

  Afterwards he went on, at the best speed possible—and a good motor-cycle is probably the fastest of all road vehicles with its high speed and its power of slipping through gaps in the traffic where the large and powerful car has no chance to penetrate—to Scotland Yard, where he reported again, left the snapshot of Martin to be developed, and then, having obtained permission to try out the idea that had occurred to him when Judy suggested, that the first letter of the postmark on the photograph wrapping was a ‘B’, continued to Barnet and the public house where he had called before.

  The somewhat dusty motor cyclist, in riding kit and goggles, was not recognized at first, and Bobby, ordering a drink, said to the barmaid who served him and who was the one he had seen before,

  “Mr. Martin got back yet?”

  “Mr. Martin?” repeated the barmaid, ‘registering’, to borrow a useful word from the cinema, a somewhat too marked surprise. “Who is that? Some one you know?”

  “Some one you know,” retorted Bobby. “I want the parcel he left in your charge.”

  The barmaid looked startled, ‘registered’ in fact, and involuntarily this time, sufficient doubt and hesitation to make Bobby fairly certain he was on the right track, that the deduction drawn from the postmark and the apparently feminine handwriting on the packet sent to Judy, had been correct. He laid his official card on the counter.

  “You addressed a postal packet to a Mr. Patterson for Martin the other day,” he said.

  “Why shouldn’t I? What’s the harm?” demanded the barmaid, who now was registering something very like panic. “How do you know?” she asked, still more uneasily.

  “We know a lot at Scotland Yard,” said Bobby, impressively. “Mr. Martin left a parcel in your charge. Please give it me. You shall have a receipt, of course.” The barmaid hesitated, stammered, looked very pale, suddenly fled away. Bobby hoped she had gone to get the parcel he was now sure she had in her possession. It would be awkward if she refused! He could ask but he had no right to demand. Many formalities would have to be gone through before such a demand could be enforced. When the barmaid came back, it was not with the parcel but with the landlord whom Bobby greeted with a cheerful,