CHAPTER XXIX
CONFESSION
Inspector Payne, much more interested in catching murderers than in the whereabouts of any painting whatsoever, however great a masterpiece it might be, was inclined to consider Bobby’s visit to The Tulips as a much greater success than did Bobby himself.
“That evidence you got is just what we wanted,” he declared, though adding more thoughtfully: “Of course, that is, if Wakefield confirms.”
Bobby agreed. Wakefield has won a reputation for scientific police work that gives its verdicts authority; and until Wakefield pronounced, Wychshire county police must wait. Then Bobby asked if any message had been received from the Midwych Central Hotel, of which the management had been asked to ring up the moment Tails returned. They had not done so, and Bobby looked uneasy.
“It may be all right, of course,” he said, “but I don’t feel too comfortable. A big fortune on the loose, two deaths already, and Tails used to auction rooms, not rough houses. He does you down with a smile not with a club, and some of this present lot are more accustomed to use the club.”
“Nothing we can do about it,” Payne declared. “I take it, sir, you feel sure the Vermeer was tacked on behind the Hardman portrait?”
“There had clearly been something there,” Bobby said, “or why all that business of nails and bits of string?”
“Yes, sir,” agreed Payne, wrinkling his brow, “the fact is, sir, I don’t quite see what made you suspect it was there.”
“The portrait,” Bobby explained, “was evidently shown as a sort of guarantee of respectability, social standing, to impress the vicar or the doctor or anyone else who happened to call—including the daily help when there was one. Grandfather a general, and there he was in full view over the mantelpiece in full uniform, and if that doesn’t impress—well, it ought to. And then all at once it is moved into a dark, out of the way corner. There’s a reason for everything, and I wondered what it was this time. One picture pushed out of the way in the corner. Another missing. Any connection? I thought there might be, and I thought that if the Vermeer had to be hidden in a hurry, then that was as good a place as any. No one very likely to look behind one picture to find another. The old story though. Being too clever. If Hardman had been content to leave grandpa where he was at first over the mantelpiece, I should never have given him another thought. As it was, I saw there had been a change since Clavering was there and described the room to me. So I wondered and I worried till I guessed what the answer might be.”
“From observed fact to reasoned deduction,” said Payne thoughtfully. “Simple enough if you know how. Perhaps Clavering worked it out that way, too?”
“There’s that,” agreed Bobby gravely.
“I take it,” Payne went on, “Hardman’s hiding the thing is clear proof he knows he can’t put in any claim to rightful possession. Do you think there’s any chance Hardman moved it himself somewhere else?”
“The way he lost his head,” Bobby pointed out, “is pretty good proof he had no idea the picture had gone again. Shook him off his balance altogether when I began to take an interest in grandpapa, and he saw I knew where the Vermeer was, and meant to have it. Upsetting when you see a fortune you thought all snug and secure suddenly threatened. I don’t know whether he actually meant murder when he rushed away for that revolver of his. I expect he couldn’t think of anything except that he had got to stop me walking off with the Vermeer. And a worse shock still when the Vermeer wasn’t there to walk away with. Miss Hardman kept her balance much better. Quite calm and composed, made him pull himself together. Probably she told him if the Vermeer had gone there was nothing he could do about it, and anyhow his revolver was safe in my pocket.”
“Just as well it was, too,” commented Payne. “Next thing—where’s the Vermeer thing now?”
“Anybody’s guess,” Bobby told him, not too happily. “Not our job, really, even if some of our local big-wigs are beginning to hint it would be a good idea if we could nobble it for the Midwych art gallery.”
“Oh, Lord,” groaned Payne, “and I suppose we’ll get it in the neck if we don’t.”
“Most likely,” agreed Bobby cheerfully. “That’s what police are for. But I did just drop a gentle hint that our job is spotting a murderer, not a picture. And even if we did manage to trace it, that wouldn’t prove that whoever has it now is also the murderer. Possibly someone quite different. Possibly Clavering. He is quite smart enough to make the same guess I did if he knew grandpa had stepped down from the mantelpiece. But did he? Then there are the Hardman twins, and are they or aren’t they? Anyhow, I don’t trust Miss Frankie. Playing her own game all right. And there’s Parkinson. A dark horse,” he pronounced gloomily.
“Yes, sir,” agreed Payne, and nearly added: ‘And so are they all.’ Instead he said: “And now the city blokes have rung up to say he’s been talking to Mr. Clavering, and they didn’t seem to be agreeing any too well, either.”
“If we question them,” Bobby remarked, “all they’ll say is that they are trying to find the Vermeer, and why not? Tails, too, takes the same line. A public duty. But I shouldn’t be a bit sorry to hear he was safe back again. It looks as if the man he’s been in touch with might be Lovey Doors, the dead man’s brother. I don’t see how the likeness can be merely a coincidence. But we can’t be sure till we can bring him in and have him properly identified. There’s always the chance that Lovey wasn’t in it at all, or dropped out, and that the man we want, the man who talked to Tails, I mean, is someone else altogether.”
“Looks to me,” declared Payne, “as if, whether it’s this Lovey Doors or not, he is working in with the Nonpareil caretaker, Bailey and his wife, I mean.”
“We mustn’t forget them,” Bobby agreed, “or young Claymore and Miss Anson either. She’s got to be made to tell what she knows—or what she did.”
“Did?” repeated Payne, startled by this last word.
Without replying, Bobby went on:
“Difficult to get the truth out of anyone who collapses into a faint or worse as soon as questioned. All the same, Miss Betty will have to face it—and young Claymore, too, for I’m pretty sure she’s told him all about it. Anyhow, there is the one piece of evidence I got at The Tulips.”
“Conclusive,” agreed Payne. “Absolutely.”
“Unless Wakefield turns it down,” Bobby reminded him; and Payne looked rather taken aback, for this was a contingency he had not before seriously contemplated. “That’s the way it goes,” Bobby complained. “One point cleared up or so we hope, and two fresh ones turn up at once—who has the Vermeer and what’s become of Tails?”
“Done a bunk,” pronounced Payne. “Perhaps because he’s managed to get hold of the Vermeer. Or perhaps because he is guilty and scared. Running away is as good as confession.”
“Yes, I know,” agreed Bobby, “only is it a case of running away, or is it something else?” and what that something else might be he did not specify, and Payne did not ask, because he knew.
To these two questions, the whereabouts of Mr. Tails, of the Vermeer painting, the morning of the next day brought no answer, nor was there as yet any reply from Wakefield concerning the Major Hardman revolver sent to them. Not that a quick reply was to be expected since the examination had to be careful and detailed. As for the Will-o’-the Wisp of a Vermeer—Bobby was beginning to think it a veritable Mrs. Arris among paintings—of that, too, there was no news, nor had Bobby expected any. But the continued absence of Mr. Tails was making him really anxious. At the hotel they still knew nothing; and indeed were beginning to cast an anxious and a doubtful eye upon an unpaid bill, though a much-comforted one upon the personal belongings left behind.
We’ll have to get cracking,” declared Payne, who now he was an inspector felt it incumbent on him to keep fully up-to-date. “Get cracking, he repeated, pleased with an expression that sounded so thoroughly efficient and effective.
Before, however, the ‘cracking’ process coul
d get really started, Payne, who had it in hand, came back to tell Bobby that Miss Betty and young Claymore had arrived, and were asking to see the Deputy Chief Constable.
Come to confess, do you think, sir?” he asked, though somewhat doubtfully.
“Hope so,” Bobby said. “Have them in, and we’ll hear what they have to say.”
Payne told a constable to bring in the two visitors. Betty looked pale but composed. She had the air of one who had at last decided to face the worst, and in doing so had found both courage and resignation. That she was still weak physically was, however, sufficiently apparent and the chair Payne put for her she accepted with both thankfulness and evident relief. Young Claymore was plainly much more agitated; had himself under much less strong control. If either of them broke down, Bobby thought, it would be the young man, not the girl. He had, indeed, a wild and desperate look, and it was he who began the talk, blurting out in a high, unsteady voice:
“It’s all been me. She would have come before if I hadn’t stopped her. So it’s me just as much as her. If you want her, you must take me, too. I’m in it just as much.”
“Hush, hush,” Betty said, and put her hand on his, an odd contrast, hers small, slender, and steady, his large, strong, shaking.
“Suppose,” Bobby said, “we let Miss Anson tell her own story.” He added sharply, for he thought the warning needed: “If you interrupt I shall clear you out. And I think Miss Anson would rather you stayed.”
“Oh, yes, yes,” the girl said, with a grateful look, and Claymore said nothing, but took out his handkerchief and began dabbing at his face and wiping his wrists, which had become damp and clammy.
“Now, Miss Anson, if you’ll begin and tell us all about it,” Bobby said, “perhaps you may find it’s not so bad as you think.”
“Oh, it is,” she answered, and then with a little sort of gasping rush, she said: “I killed him.” When Bobby, listening gravely, made no comment, she repeated: “I shot him.”
“Please begin at the beginning,” Bobby said. “Who and where?”
“A man. I don’t know who he was. In the wood, on the Barsley footpath. I didn’t mean to, but I did, and so it’s murder, isn’t it.”
CHAPTER XXX
RE-ASSURANCE
“All depends,” Bobby said. “Please go on. Tell us all about it. From the beginning, mind.”
Betty’s voice was steadier again, her self-control fully regained. In a quiet, narrative tone, she said:
“I get home much quicker if I come by the company’s Barsley ’bus. It puts me down on the Barsley Road, and then I have to cross Wychwood by the footpath. It’s always very dark and lonely. Mother was nervous about me using it, and so was I. Mother wanted me to wait for the train but that’s such a long time, and there’s the long walk from the station as well. Mother was nervous, too herself, about being alone, I mean, after it got dark, and there were the air raids. So I went on coming by the ’bus, and I used to run home along the path as fast as I could, only it was difficult to run fast in the dark. It was all right at first, but then I began to meet a man, and he tried to follow me, and he whistled. He got so close up once I slipped behind a tree and he went by, and somehow that made me awfully frightened, seeing him, I mean, because he looked so horrible.”
“When I could get away in time, I tried to meet Betty,” Claymore interposed, “but I couldn’t always. I had an idea I knew who it was Betty had seen, but when I tackled him he swore it wasn’t, and, anyhow, he’s gone away now, so he can’t have had anything to do with what happened. I did think once or twice it might be Frank Hardman, because I heard he had turned up again and he used to be fond of boasting about girls. But I don’t know.”
“It wasn’t Mr. Hardman,” Betty said. “It was someone quite different. I didn’t tell mother, but I knew where she had the pistol thing that belonged to father when we lived in China when I was little. I put it in my handbag. It was the very next night.” She paused a moment, struggling to retain her self-possession. “I was hurrying along as fast as I could in the dark when a man came out suddenly from some bushes, just as if he had been hiding there waiting for me. He called out something, I don’t know what, and I said: ‘Go away. I’ve got a pistol. I’ll shoot you,’ and I ran, and he ran after me. He kept calling, and I could hear him swearing most awfully, and he ran so fast I thought he would catch me. So I thought I would try to frighten him away, and I pointed the pistol over my shoulder up in the air, and I pulled the trigger, and it went off most awfully loudly, and I heard him cry out and fall down, and I ran and ran. I fell down twice, and I lost my shoe and I cut my foot, but he wasn’t after me any more, and I knew that, because it was all quiet, only I never once thought that I had killed him. Because I meant to shoot it off right up in the air, only I suppose I didn’t with running so hard, and then the letter came, and I knew what I had done. It was in the papers, too, and I knew that I had killed a man, and so I must die as well. I am quite ready now.”
“For God’s sake, Betty, don’t talk like that,” Claymore groaned. Then he said very wildly: “If they do, I’ll hang myself, too.”
“Oh, shut up, you young ass,” Bobby said roughly. “We don’t want heroics, we want common sense. Much rarer, too, and much more difficult.” To Betty he said, as gently as he had spoken roughly to Claymore, whom, indeed, he judged to be nearer hysterics by a long way than was the girl: “I see. Yes. Well, what did you do with the pistol?”
“I gave it to Len,” she answered, looking at Claymore. “You mustn’t let him.”
“Let him what?” asked Bobby. “Hang himself, do you mean? Of course not. Though it’s not such a bad idea, either. A good deal to be said for it.” To Claymore he said: “Where is it?”
“I threw it in the canal,” Claymore answered.
“Nothing you’ve forgotten,” Bobby observed resignedly, “to make it more difficult. I suppose you can show us where? We’ll have to get hold of it, even if it means draining the canal and holding up war transport. I’m getting more and more to feel that that idea of yours about going off and hanging yourself has more and more to be said for it.”
Claymore was too relieved by the turn things seemed to be taking either to look or feel either sheepish or annoyed. Betty had passed beyond the stage of feeling anything, she was just waiting. Bobby was speaking aside to Payne. Payne left the room and returned with some half-dozen pistols—automatics and revolvers from the small police armoury. Asked to select the one most like that used by Betty, both she and Claymore picked out separately a point thirty-two automatic. Pressed about this, they were both emphatic that Betty’s weapon had exactly resembled this one. Satisfied, Bobby had the pistols returned where they were kept. He asked Betty:
“How was it your pistol was loaded? Did you load it yourself? Were there clips with it?”
Betty looked puzzled. She said hesitatingly that she didn’t know. What did he mean by ‘clips?’ What sort of clips? She had apparently taken it for granted that a pistol is always ready to fire, just as it has always a barrel and a stock.
“It was just as I took it from where mother kept it in one of her boxes,” she explained. “I never thought about whether it was loaded.”
“What about the safety catch?” Bobby asked, though slightly bewildered by this apparent tendency to regard the loading of the weapon as a mere detail. “Did you touch that at all?
“I don’t think so. What is a safety catch?” Betty countered.
Bobby looked at her sadly. Apparently a fully-loaded automatic, the safety catch off, had been lying about, probably for years, in the Anson household. Why no one had been killed he could not imagine.
“Oh, well, never mind,” he answered Betty’s last question. “I suppose you never heard that a licence is required for firearms?”
“Oh, yes,” Betty declared, quite triumphantly this time. “I know that. If you buy one, but we didn’t, we’ve always had it.” Bobby gave it up then, and went on to ask about the letter to which Be
tty had made a passing reference.
“What letter did you mean?” he asked.
“I found it in the passage next morning,” Betty explained, “when I went to take in the milk. It said the man who wrote it had been there, and had seen it all, and I was a murderess—it began ‘Dear little murderess.’ It said I was a good shot to hit anyone when firing over my shoulder, and I must have worked it all out very carefully. And it said it was rather cold blooded of me to have shot and killed a man I had met there before when I had kissed him other times, but that wasn’t true, because I never had. I expect it was someone else he used to meet, but I don’t know. And the letter said the writer wouldn’t tell if I kept quiet and said nothing, because then no one would know, and so I would be quite safe. But if I said anything he would tell what he had seen, and then I would be hanged, and there was a little picture of me hanging, and it was awful—I can’t tell you how awful. I think it was worse than it will be when it happens. I don’t think it will matter so much after seeing that.”
“My good girl,” interrupted Bobby irritably, “for the dear Lord’s sake, don’t be in such a hell of a hurry to jump to conclusions.” He paused, vaguely aware there was something a trifle odd about the juxtaposition of the words he had used. Betty looked puzzled; and now a faint relief began to show, dawning behind her desperate self-control. Claymore started to say something, and then stopped when Bobby made him an abrupt gesture to keep quiet. To Betty, Bobby continued: “A very interesting and suggestive letter; and if either you or that young man of yours had as much common sense as would go on the point of a needle, you would have guessed at once that it was phoney, that its one object was to make you believe yourself guilty, and so make sure you wouldn’t say anything. And then you would have brought it straight to us. Where is it? I suppose you have it still?”
There's a Reason for Everything: A Bobby Owen Mystery Page 21
