“He would only be a casual, not a well-to-do regular,” he said. “It’s only good payers the women tell each other about. I’ve inquired about Maxton. He seems well known as a writer on country topics. Very popular with townspeople living in flats. Does the ‘A Farmer’s Wife’s Diary’ column. It runs in several big provincial city papers. His last book, An Ignoramus in Arcadia, did rather well. On the strength of it he’s got a contract with a publisher for a new series of country books. He bought a new car the other day. The publisher provided the money.”
“Fishy yarn?” suggested Kimms doubtfully.
“Oh, no—payment in advance, that’s all. But he’s left his brand new car in a Hammersmith garage and cleared out, and why the devil should he do that?”
“Ah,” said Kimms.
“He may have hired another car,” Bobby said. “You could follow that up, couldn’t you?”
“Gazette?” asked Kimms.
“Oh, too early for that, don’t you think?” Bobby asked in return. “If he got to know he was in the Police Gazette he might be off abroad or to the U.S., and that would rather do us. Difficult to make inquiries about a man who isn’t there unless there’s something very definite to go on.”
Kimms nodded agreement and then said:
“Anything fresh about Dowie?”
“Only confirming what we know and have passed on to you already. Quite a lot of it, too. Know him like the palm of your hand, except who he is, where he lives, what he does, what he’s up to, whether his treasure-hunting gadget is a fake or whether there is something in it on the water-diviner lines.”
“Fake, ten to one,” Kimms declared. “As per usual,” he added.
“He was getting known in Soho pubs and cafés,” Bobby went on. “Especially at the ‘Bell and Boy’ in Kinsman Street, Piccadilly. Sort of centre for respectables who like to think they aren’t, and of very much not respectables who like to pretend they are. Queer sort of joint. They say if you only go there often enough you are bound to meet everybody in time. I don’t know about that, but one report just in says Dowie was in real danger of getting beaten up on the general principle that no one would ask so many questions if he wasn’t a police agent. One of our men tipped him off that asking questions in Soho was asking for trouble. After that he disappeared, only to turn up in Twice Over, where your chaps saw him leaving the copse in a hurry on the night of the murder. Before it took place, though, unless the doctor’s made a bad bloomer.”
“I wouldn’t hardly expect that,” protested Kimms, who still preserved much of the awe once so universally felt for the ‘medicine man.’
“No, no,” agreed Bobby, though he didn’t. “Besides, for that matter, if it’s Dowie, he might have gone back. The thing is, have these people vanished because they knew of, took part in, had some connection somehow, with the murder? All of them? That’s hard to believe.” Kimms here gave one of his customary nods of assent. “If not, how else are you to account for it?”
“Ah,” said Kimms. “Needs it, too.”
“Accounting for? So it does,” agreed Bobby. “What it does suggest to me is a very tightly woven pattern with no loose threads.”
“Ah,” said Kimms again.
“But that also means,” Bobby went on, “that if we can manage to find any loose thread, or rather to pick one loose, then the whole thing may come unravelled comparatively easily.”
“Yes,” said Kimms, but very, very doubtfully. “There’s this Jolly Rogers chap, too. One of the disappeared.”
“Common form with him,” Bobby said. “He’s on licence and up to now has reported regularly. If he does, we’ll let you know and you can try to pick him up. Not yet, though. No proof he is the man I had nearly collared when your Sir Charles jumped on my back.”
“Fishy?” said Kimms. “Pals? Eh?”
“What about lunch?” Bobby asked, leaving these suggestions unanswered. “It might help you to have a look at the ‘Bell and Boy’ for yourself. They put on a fair to average lunch at a more than fair to average price, but I might get it through the expense sheet.”
“Both?” asked Kimms cautiously.
“Oh, yes,” Bobby reassured him. “They know me there, and they’ve been asked to let us know if Dowie shows up any time. Nothing against him, of course; just a friendly question or two.”
“Co-operative?” Kimms asked.
“Anyhow, they don’t want to run any risk of finding us opposing the renewal of their licence,” Bobby retorted.
“Ah,” said Kimms; and therewith he and Bobby took themselves off to the ‘Bell and Boy’, to enjoy there a fair to average lunch at a more than fair to average price, and then, after it, they were joined for coffee by the Manager, who knew very well that important police officers did not visit his establishment without good reason.
“Sorry we’ve seen nothing of the gentleman you were asking about, Mr Owen,” he said; “but there, you know what they say of us? Wait at the ‘Bell and Boy’, Piccadilly, long enough and sooner or later you’ll meet the man you want. I won’t say Mr Dowie might not have popped in and had a drink and gone again without being noticed. That might be, but no talk about discovering hidden treasure and no gadget to do it being shown. Confidence trick, to my mind, especially his get up being so different from the general run of confidence men and so like the general run of half-looney inventors.”
“Well, he may turn up again,” Bobby said; “but he does seem for the time to have vanished, and we should like to be sure he’s all right, if only for his own sake. Don’t forget.”
“Oh, you can depend on us,” declared the Manager, privately resolved that forgetting would take no longer than common decency required. “Vanishing seems quite usual just now,” he went on affably. “One of our staff took herself off the other day without a word, and I can assure you, gentlemen, a first-class barmaid like her is hard to find—I mean one who knows how to jolly a man along and yet keep him at a distance, keep things going but know when to stop ’em, know when to bully and when to coax, how to listen and never to talk. Perhaps you knew her, Mr Owen? Mrs Field. Flossie everyone called her.”
“Not that I remember,” Bobby said. “Perhaps she’s ill.”
“I sent round to where she lives,” the Manager said. “No answer, and no one seen her lately. Some of the staff said she seemed a bit quiet the last day or two, and there were some thought she had a second address, but none of them knew it. I didn’t pay any attention. She was always a bit queer. She kept a tin of loganberries, of all things, on the shelf behind her. When she was told to take it away she said if it went, she went. Queer.”
“Very,” agreed Bobby. “And her name—Flossie Field? I think we might try to look her up, just to be on the safe side.”
“Well, you don’t think that she’s run off with your Mr Dowie, do you?” the Manager asked, chuckling.
CHAPTER XI
LODGING OF CONVENIENCE
KIMMS WAS UNUSUALLY silent, even for him, as he and Bobby started off for the address given them by the Manager of the ‘Bell and Boy’. It proved to be that of a large, early Victorian mansion in North London, built solidly in an age that intended what it built to stand, and when, too, it seemed that since we had been told that the poor would always be with us, then it followed that an abundant supply of domestic help would likewise always be with us. Now this house of many rooms had been turned into furnished flatlets occupied by an odd diversity of swiftly changing tenants and looked as if it had had its last coat of paint, its last repairs done, some considerable time before the first world war. Kimms viewed it with marked distaste.
“Do you really think,” he asked, “that this barmaid woman will have anything useful to say? I don’t see where she’s likely to come in?”
“I never think,” Bobby explained. “Hard work, thinking, and too abstract for down-to-earth police work. I only try to notice facts and add ’em up till they seem to be getting somewhere.”
“Such as . . . ?” asked Kim
ms.
“Such as,” Bobby said, “a missing barmaid, name of Flossie Field. The same initials as those of Frank Farmer, the gangster in the P.O. van robbery case found dead in a ditch.”
“Ah,” said Kimms.
“That name of hers may mean nothing or a lot,” Bobby added. “But that can wait. Something else. Barmaids, especially in a place like the ‘Bell and Boy’, get good money and could generally afford a better hole than this. Something was said, too, about another address, though nobody knew what it was, and this one does rather look like an address of convenience. Well, shall we see what we can find?”
The front door was open, and they entered a dingy, neglected-looking hall. On one wall hung a printed notice, warning tenants the door was locked and bolted every night at eleven p.m. sharp, that tenants creating a disturbance after that hour would be asked to go, that laundry must not be hung out to dry on landings or out of windows under the same penalty. There were various other severe regulations, culminating in a brief statement that rents must be paid in advance every Monday morning and that no credit was allowed in any circumstances.
“Very strict rules,” said Kimms.
“Very,” echoed Bobby and, throwing Shakespeare back at Kimms, he added: “Honoured in the breach or the observance?”
“Observance, this one,” said Kimms, putting his finger on that one dealing with the prompt payment of the rent, and now it was Bobby’s turn to say:
“Ah.”
The ‘flatlet’ said to be occupied by the missing Mrs Field was No. 1, probably the dining-room in former days. Bobby knocked. No reply. He knocked again, with the same result or lack of it. He stooped to examine the lock. An ordinary Yale, and Bobby knew the technique of opening Yales without too much fuss. He knocked a third time, more loudly still. A woman was coming down the stairs from the upper region of the house, a much-made-up, shabbily smart woman who had once been pretty but was so no longer. At the foot of the stairs she stopped and looked darkly and angrily at the two men.
“Can’t you busies ever leave anyone alone?” she demanded. “You’ve nothing on her; she’s a decent girl. Cut it out.”
Bobby turned, regarding her with extreme disfavour. There was nothing annoyed him more than being recognized as a policeman at first sight. What he liked, only it never happened, was to present his credentials and see result a look of extreme surprise and bewilderment. He tried to lay to his soul the flattering unction that no doubt it was only Kimms who had been so swiftly recognized, but something seemed to whisper to him that it was not so. He was tempted to retort that no doubt she had plenty of experience of busies in Piccadilly and St James’s Street, but a little ashamed of it, he put that idea aside and contented himself with asking:
“Do you know Mrs Field?”
“She’s a good sort,” the woman answered. “No airs and always ready with a shilling or two when work’s slack, as it is, with so few G.I.s about and amateur competition so strong. She paid the fare home and a bit over for a girl here when she didn’t find the job any fun. It wasn’t long before she was back, though—once the street has got you, it never lets you go.”
“Have you seen her lately?” Bobby asked.
“Ask me another,” she retorted. “I never tell busies anything. It isn’t safe. You never know where they’ll go from there. Bye-bye.”
“One moment,” Bobby said. “We have nothing against Mrs Field. She’s been absent from work, and her employers are uneasy about it. So are we. I can’t tell you why just yet, but we are.”
“I’m not talking,” was all the response this appeal elicited. “Keep off busies, that’s my rule. Ask old Mother Grady if you like.”
“Is she the landlady? Where do we find her?”
“In the basement. Private. She don’t like visitors. I don’t know why. When you want her you go to the top of the stairs and yell. If you say: ‘Mrs Grady, can I settle up with you now,’ she’ll pop up like the demon king through the trap-door in panto. If you don’t, she may take no notice—having no time to spare for the likes of tenants. Bye-bye,” she said again, and began to hum a gay little tune. “Sounds jolly and friendly,” she explained. “Fetches the men a treat.”
She paused and looked at them, and her eyes were tragic, and then she went away.
“Makes you almost ashamed to be a man,” Kimms said.
Bobby went to the head of the stairs leading down to the basement.
“Mrs Grady,” he shouted, and when there was no reply he shouted again: “Mrs Grady, can I have a word with you, please? Police.”
This last word was effectual. A sort of underground rumbling and grumbling ensued, rather like the threat of an eruption from some small underground geyser. Toiling up the stairs, wheezing, panting, grunting, came a stout, elderly, untidy woman, giving a general impression that she and soap had long since parted never to meet again. A faint odour of beer as she arrived seemed to impregnate the whole surrounding atmosphere.
“Police?” she panted as she got to the top of the stairs. “This is a respectable house, this is, and never no police and no call for ’em since I took over, and me as well thought of as any and well known to all.”
“Quite so,” interrupted Bobby. “I believe the occupant of your No. 1 flat is a Mrs Field, isn’t she?”
“That’s right,” Mrs Grady assented, “and what might you be wanting with her? As respectable a lady as ever was, and if all tenants were like her and as punctual with her rent—”
“Yes, yes,” interrupted Bobby again; “but she has left her work without explanation and her employers are worried, so we are making inquiries. Can you tell us when you saw her last?”
“She won’t have done a bunk, will she?” inquired Mrs Grady anxiously. “The best tenant heart could wish for, and a month’s rent paid in advance as regular as Christmas; never missed and due next Monday, too.”
“There’s no reason to suppose anything of the sort,” Bobby assured her. “I’m asking if you can tell me when you saw her last.”
“Not as I remember since she paid her rent last month and due again next Monday,” Mrs Grady answered cautiously. “Not to speak to, anyway. I might have seen her in passing, so to say. I’m no snooper. Tenants mind their own business, and I mind mine.”
“Were there any of your lodgers she ever seemed friendly with?”
“How should I know?” Mrs Grady demanded. “You can ask them yourself if you like. Nothing to do with me.”
But she was beginning to look uneasy now, and she lumbered across the hall to knock at the door of No. 1 flatlet. It produced no reply. With much wheezing and grunting she lowered herself to her knees and applied first her nose and then one eye to the key-hole. Laboriously then she hauled herself to her feet.
“Can’t see nothing, and no smell of gas,” she said, “though I never took her for one to do the dirty on you same as that. Only you can’t never tell with tenants, them being as they are, with never a thought for the good name of the roof that shelters them. I’ve known a girl come in, as jolly as you like, laughing and singing, and go straight up to her room and turn the gas on, no one knowing till all was over, poor dear, and the rent paid up and all.”
“You’ve got a key?” Bobby asked.
“Same as obliged,” Mrs Grady said. “If they bunk, they’ll leave their doors locked sure as hell. No consideration for others, they haven’t, and how can I get to clean up thorough if I’ve no key, or let the gasman in to collect. Not that Mrs Field ever used hers much. I’ve known her meter as empty as when last opened.”
“Well, if you’ll get her key, I’ll take the responsibility of entering,” Bobby said; and when he saw Kimms looking just a little doubtful at this proposed intrusion upon private property, he added: “If she’s not there, I’ll leave a note explaining and asking her to get in touch with her employers as soon as she can conveniently.”
Mrs Grady hesitated, grumbled, saw how Bobby watched her, decided she had better comply, and, from under her volu
minous skirts, fished up a bagful of keys. From these she selected one, and with it opened the door of No. 1 flat, taking the precaution of calling out before entering.
“Are you there, dearie?”
No reply coming, she went in, followed closely by the two men. It was a large, sparsely furnished room they thus entered. Two wooden chairs, two ancient basket arm-chairs, a table, an iron bedstead covered by an old rug, a rickety wardrobe, a strip of carpet, about completed the list. One corner of the room had been partitioned off to make a ‘kitchenette’, and here was provided also running water and a small gas cooking-stove—other less fortunate lodgers had to content themselves with a gas ring. Here, too, for the first time signs of recent use and occupation could be detected. A kettle on the gas-stove still had water in it. A box of matches lay near. On a shelf above stood a tin of cocoa and a packet of tea.
Bobby went back into the main room. He pulled away the rug that covered the bedstead and showed that beneath there was only the bare wire mattress, neither sheets nor blankets. The chest of drawers contained only a few trifling odds and ends. In the wardrobe were none but articles of outdoor clothing. Bobby said to Kimms:
“She never slept or ate here—a lodging of convenience,” and Kimms did not think it necessary to utter his customary ‘Ah’, of assent.
“If it was,” Mrs Grady said earnestly, “it’s such as I wouldn’t ever have believed. Strike me dead if I ever saw any gentlemen visitors. Particular I am about that, as none can say the contrary.”
“There is nothing more for us to do here,” Bobby said, and added to Mrs Grady, “I shall be sending a plain-clothes man to make further inquiries and a closer examination of the room. He’ll want to see some of your other lodgers. The rent is paid till Monday, you said? She may return to pay next month’s or send it, perhaps.”
“If she don’t, out she goes,” declared Mrs Grady, “such being the rule as must be kept, or where should we all be?”
“Where indeed?” agreed Bobby. “We must be off,” and as they were walking to where they could get their ’bus back to the Yard, Kimms said:
Dark is the Clue: A Bobby Owen Mystery Page 9
