Death Among the Sunbathers (10 page)

Keene without speaking walked away as far as the narrow limits of the passage permitted. Bobs-the-Boy, apparently forgetting him, apparently lost in bitter memories of the past, leaned against the wall, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders hunched up till it seemed they nearly met his ears, his half-closed eyes fixed upon the ground. Keene came back to him. In a low, strained voice, his long arms swinging, his great bony hands opening and shutting convulsively, he said,

‘I know what you are saying all this for... to find out if I'm weakening... if I'm scared... well, I'm not. You hear? I'm not. I'm going through with it.'

‘Even if it comes to a ten-year stretch, same as I told you I had done?' asked Bobs-the-Boy coolly. ‘Well, suit yourself. You must go your own way same as I went mine.'

Keene was breathing heavily. He put his face close to the other's and said in the same strained, unnatural voice.

‘I've made up my mind. There's no going back even if I wanted to. It's that or ruin, and I'm going through with it. That's what you can say I said, if you like.'

‘And that's that,' observed Bobs-the-Boy, ‘only don't say you never had a chance, and, if you ask me, this place down here is just about right for starting a jolly little fire in.'

‘Hold your tongue,' Keene almost roared at him. ‘What do you know about it? Nothing to do with you.'

‘Now, Mr Keene, sir,' Bobs-the-Boy protested mildly, ‘you did ought to give a bloke credit for having eyes in his head and some idea how to use them. I've done what I've been told to do, and had my pay, and never said a word, and never asked no questions, neither. But I've got my eyes, haven't I? Brains, too, and if you kid yourself I don't know as well as the next man that you and the other blokes mean to have some nice little fires – one in Deal Street and another here – and if you think I don't know why you and him have been meeting regular at that place where the loonies sit in the sun in their natural – well, what did you think I had got in my brain-box? Putty?'

‘If you... you... you...' stammered Keene.

He was more excited than ever; his long arms flew round like a windmill. Whatever it was he wanted to say, he could not get the words out. Bobs-the-Boy surveyed him with a kind of good-humoured contempt.

‘Lumme, Mr Keene, sir,' he said, ‘if you can't keep your end up better nor that... well, where do you think you're going to find yourself when the real thing comes along? You had better take my tip and trot along to the Yard and tell 'em all about it while there's time. That's what I would do if I was in your shoes, feeling the way you do.'

‘Do you mean that's what you are thinking of doing yourself, giving us away?' Keene asked darkly.

‘Have some sense,' Bobs-the-Boy implored. ‘You know as well as I do, fixed the way I am, me on licence and not having reported, with what else they have against me into the bargain – why, I daren't. I'm not like you, I'm not free. But I'm not denying I wouldn't be sorry if you did, so as to be safe out of it. I tell you straight, I'm scared of how all this'll finish.'

‘You can drop that sort of talk,' Keene said sharply. ‘I know what it means, you've been set on to talk that way. You can tell those who sent you I'm going through with it. I double-cross no man. Understand?'

‘Yes, sir,' answered Bobs-the-Boy calmly, ‘and though what I said was all well meant, and for your own good, and there's time yet to think it over, and though I'm making no admissions, still if there was anyone who had sent me and told me what to say, why, then, I'll tell 'em just what you say. So we'll drop it, and if you'll let me say this, I do think it was a downy trick to choose that sun bathing monkey house to meet... nothing suspicious about going there... harmless cranks is always the last anybody worries about, their crankiness keeping 'em busy, and their harmlessness being took for granted, which is most convenient at times. All the same, sir, I tell you straight, I'm worried about this here business in the paper. I don't hold with putting any one's light out, I never did, and I don't want to be mixed up with such like. Your girl's sister, weren't she?'

Keene did not answer. He was standing with his arms folded now, as if he wanted to control them. He stared gloomily at his interlocutor and remained silent, but Bobs-the-Boy was sure that he had heard him.

‘Don't think,' he asked slowly, a pause between nearly every word, ‘don't think... she was rooting round the monkey house... along of having suspicioned anything... anything about barbed wire?'

Keene knew these last two words meant ‘fire', for the old rhyming slang still exists, indeed seems continually to be born afresh among those who can hardly have had any knowledge of its history. Probably there is a natural tendency in the oblique and crooked criminal mind to avoid calling a thing by its true name, and a word that rhymes with that name is the substitute that springs most naturally to the tongue when one is required. Keene said,

‘How could she know anything about it? That's absurd... there was no way she had of getting to know... all she went to the Grange for was to write it up... she hated me, but God knows I never thought of hurting her.'

‘There's a story going about you was heard to tell her to leave you and your girl alone or it would be the worse for her,' the other said.

‘If you've been asking questions...' began Keene, very angrily, ‘you had best be careful... What business is it of yours what I said to her?'

‘What I want to know,' retorted Bobs-the-Boy, ‘is what business it is of mine, and if it's none – so much the better. As for asking questions, there wasn't any need. It's all about the neighbourhood that Mrs Adams what's the charlady there heard you and her quarrelling and you saying that.'

‘We weren't quarrelling, and Mrs Adams is a gossiping old fool,' Keene exclaimed. ‘All I meant was to tell her to leave us alone. And look here, my man, you be careful what you say.'

‘Oh, I will,' the other assured him. ‘You don't think she came snooping round here because she was on to – to something? What about Mr Hunter?... I suppose there isn't no chance...?'

Keene's patience or else his self-control seemed to break, and he burst into a torrent of abuse, to all of which his companion listened unmoved. When Keene at last was silent, more for lack of breath than for any other reason, he said quietly,

‘It's what I said before; all I want to be sure of is that it is no business of mine, for murder's a thing I never did hold with or want to have anything to do with.'

A new idea seemed to strike Keene. He was silent for a time, once more staring hard at the other, though now with a different expression. Then he said,

‘I had nothing to do with it, it's only silly to think so. I don't suppose Hunter had either; why should he? But you – you seem to know a lot, you seem very interested, you've talked of nothing else; what are you asking all these questions for, dropping all these hints?'

Bobs-the-Boy for once seemed quite taken aback, disconcerted even. He could not quite control his features, the cackle of laughter he emitted sounded anything but genuine; his voice was less well under control than usual as he answered,

‘Oh, it wasn't me as did it, if that's what you're trying to put over. I don't say I've a alibi same as you and the bloke upstairs, but it's not a thing I had anything to do with, why should I? If she suspicioned anything, it wasn't me... it wasn't me she was trying to take my girl from... she hadn't come snooping round me, asking funny questions same as she did here. What's worrying me, what's making me interested like, is what for Mitchell and that other bird, Ferris, are hanging round here.'

Keene did not answer, but he was still looking hard and doubtfully at his companion, and then from above Hunter called cautiously.

‘You can come up now, both of you... it wasn't Mitchell... not the police at all... it was only Curtis. I don't know what he came for; he asked a lot of silly questions, I had to clear him out at last. A bit off his head if you ask me. I'm jolly glad it wasn't Mitchell anyhow.'

‘If it was Curtis,' Keene said as he came slowly up the basement steps into the office again, Bobs-the-Boy following close behind, ‘why, then, perhaps that explains what Mitchell was doing here... They may be watching him and they followed him.'

‘That's right,' agreed Bobs-the-Boy from behind, ‘explains it, that does.'

‘Over this business of his wife's murder?' Hunter asked. ‘I thought the account in the paper sounded a bit fishy... only what did he want?... Seems he knew she was here that time... He saw you, too, Keene.... I think he imagined you and she had been flirting on the quiet. I suppose you hadn't, had you?'

‘Of course not,' Keene retorted. ‘She hated me like poison.'

‘Well, I should keep quiet about that if I were you,' Hunter observed.

‘What for?' demanded Keene aggressively, and then with a gesture towards Bobs-the-Boy, slouching in the background, ‘He's been hinting you or I had something to do with it.'

‘I only asked straight out, not wanting to be mixed up with such like,' Bobs-the-Boy protested. ‘I thought perhaps she had suspicioned something... anyways, if I was you, with the “busies” snooping round the way they are, I wouldn't go for to deliver the barbed wire just yet awhile.' Hunter, who also knew well enough what ‘barbed wire' stood for, told him angrily to shut up.

‘And don't come messing round here on your own again,' he added; ‘wait till you're sent for, or you'll be sorry for it.'

‘You mean you'll put my light out, same as–?' Bobs-the-Boy asked grinning. ‘Only that mightn't be so easy, I'm not a bit of skirt,' and when at that, with an angry growl, Keene came threateningly, his long arms swinging, towards him, he grinned again and dodged out of the room and away down the yard with his characteristic swift, furtive, sidelong gait that took him over the ground with such speed.

Staring after him furiously, Keene said,

‘I'd... I'd... I'd like to knock his head off.'

‘Well,' agreed Hunter, ‘if his light were put out, as he calls it, I don't know that I should worry an awful lot.'

‘Do you think he can be trusted?' Keene asked.

‘Anyhow, he won't dare say a word,' Hunter declared, though looking a little uneasy all the same; ‘not with all they have against him. But I wish he had never been brought into it.'

‘He's been hinting to me I had better go to the police, give the whole thing up, chuck it while there's time,' Keene said. ‘I suppose it means he's been set on to try me out... see if I'm weakening.'

Hunter was looking at him rather oddly.

‘He was talking to me like that the other day,' he said; ‘as good as advised me to go to the police and tell them all about it... I thought perhaps it was you...?'

Keene denied it with oaths.

‘He's just been trying us both,' he said, ‘to make sure we'll stick it.' He paused and then said slowly, ‘Anyhow, it's too late for that... too late for anything... except to go on.'

‘Too late for anything,' Hunter agreed, ‘except to go through with it now we've begun.' After another long pause he said, looking sideways and doubtfully at Keene, ‘Do you think Curtis...?'

He left the sentence uncompleted but Keene understood well enough.

‘He had been drinking pretty hard,' he said. ‘He was half off his head with drink and jealousy... He threatened her... He had a pistol like the one found on the spot and he can't explain what's become of his own... He is known to have been near the spot... Sybil says they were going to arrest him and then seemed to change their minds... She couldn't understand why... Something about Jo's hat or the way she did her hair, unless Sybil got hold of the wrong end of the story... Anyhow, they changed their minds at the last moment.'

‘If he feels they still suspect him,' Hunter said, ‘perhaps that's why he came here... to prove he didn't do it by showing them he was trying to find out on his own.'

Keene had gone to the door and was staring down the yard along which Bobs-the-Boy had just passed and vanished. He came back into the room and said darkly,

‘That Bobs fellow was dropping all sorts of hints... I suppose he–' He paused and swallowed in his throat. ‘He couldn't have had anything to do with it himself, could he?' he asked in a low voice.

‘Well, why should he?' Hunter asked, and then they were both silent, looking doubtfully and darkly at each other.

After his early morning visit to Ealing, imposed upon him by the unwelcome report Detective-Constable Owen had furnished of Curtis's appearance there, Superintendent Mitchell returned to seek his bed once more. For he was sufficiently advanced in years to have found that he could no longer, as in former times, neglect sleep for two or three nights consecutively without much inconvenience, as still could Inspector Ferris or the still younger Owen. Ferris indeed spent all that day out in the country on a promising clue that, like most promising clues, led nowhere, and all the time, except for a slight occasional tendency to yawn, had shown no sign of having missed a night's rest.

Not that Mitchell allowed himself many hours of repose. By early afternoon he was back again in his room at Scotland Yard where, with the knowledge and consent of the Assistant Commissioner, he set to work to clear up as many of the other cases he had in hand as possible, or at least to get them into condition to hand over to a colleague, so that he might devote himself entirely to the Leadeane Road tragedy.

He was not a man very easily affected – how could he be with so many years of police work behind him and all its contacts with shame and misery and despair? But this case had made on him a deep impression; it had become indeed to him not so much a ‘case' as something with which his association was far more intimate and personal. The memory of the look the dying woman had given him was still vivid in his mind, so that sometimes it seemed to him that he had been called as much in his personal as in his official capacity to bring her murderer to justice.