Death Comes to Cambers (25 page)

‘Nobody ever thought more of anyone than he did of her when they married first,' Miss Bowman said, ‘and he used to think it fun, then, to be ordered about and told just what to do. But she kept it up. Like a little boy she treated him, and what made it so bad was that she was nearly always right. It was very trying. A man,' Miss Bowman pointed out with profound truth, ‘does like to be looked up to, and I think it's quite right and only natural. But Lady Cambers never looked up to poor Bertie – never. She just told him what to do till he could hardly bear it any longer. And he found it so restful to come to me. Lady Cambers misunderstood dreadfully. It was nothing but the merest friendship – at first. He felt he needed a true woman's sympathy. Ours was a beautiful friendship, and everything might have gone on just the same only for Lady Cambers herself, and never shall I forget the things she said.'

‘To whom?' Bobby asked.

‘To me – one afternoon when she happened to call just as I was bathing his poor head. The things she said – even now she's gone I can't help remembering them – lump of putty, half a pound of Russian butter. Russian,' she repeated bitterly, ‘and me a member of the Primrose League and hardly able to sleep at times for thinking of those dreadful Bolsheviks.'

‘I gather Lady Cambers was a rather authoritative lady,' Bobby observed.

Miss Bowman burst into a fresh flood of talk, from the hazy intricacies of which emerged once more the picture of Lady Cambers as a strong, resolute, managing woman, well-meaning and kindly, determined, indeed, to do good to others whether they liked it or not. Not that this picture of the dead woman was a new one, but Miss Bowman provided fresh and convincing touches, made it, in fact, clear that only by accepting Lady Cambers's benevolent dictatorship could you retain her friendship. On her active, and, indeed, eager help you could fully rely so long as she approved your aim, but if she did not, then she expected you to change it for one that did meet with her approval.

‘She was the same with everyone,' Miss Bowman said. ‘There's that nice Mr. Sterling, her nephew. She simply told him who he was to marry, and she quite thought that was settled. But I happen to know it wasn't.'

‘She did a good deal for young Mr. Dene, didn't she?' Bobby asked.

‘Oh, yes, everyone talked about it,' Miss Bowman answered. ‘Hundreds of pounds she spent to help him. No wonder he knuckled under the way he did. Everyone else he looked at as if they were dirt, even when serving behind the counter and handing you a pound of tea like spurning you for wanting it, but with Lady Cambers it was always. “Just what you think best.” Of course,' she added thoughtfully, ‘he had always taken care to tell her first what was best.'

‘He knew how to manage her?' Bobby suggested.

‘So as to get money out of her,' said Miss Bowman.

This had, indeed, been apparently a minor cause of the breach between husband and wife. He had resented an expenditure for objects he had no sympathy with, and she had persisted in her patronage of a young man whose talents she believed she had been the first to appreciate. Apparently too, Sir Albert's business dealings had been entered into chiefly in the hope of securing a greater measure of independence than his wife's stronger personality allowed him at home.

‘You know,' Miss Bowman said, in a sudden burst of candour and of insight, ‘Lady Cambers could make people very fond of her. I used to adore her. I thought she was – wonderful. And she would always go to any trouble to help you. It was through that Bertie and I got friendly at first – because I admired his wife so tremendously. And then somehow... it was always being told just what to do. Golf,' she added abruptly, after a moment's pause.

‘Golf,' repeated Bobby, puzzled.

‘The last straw,' she explained, ‘that made the cup overturn. She said he must take up golf for his health. She said he was getting fat. Really, as I told him, it was only a dignified filling-out. He joined a golf-club to please her. Only it's such a tiny ball they use, so different from the one they have when they're playing football. Dear Bertie found it so difficult always to hit it, and then a stupid man got in the way of Bertie's club when he was trying and Bertie had to pay for his false teeth and his spectacles, and I don't know what else, and everybody seemed to think that that was so funny. People have such funny ideas of what's funny, haven't they? Lady Cambers wanted him to go on playing, all the same. But I said: “It's beneath your notice, don't have anything more to do with them,” because I saw that's what he wanted me to say. It was just about then business went all stupid, just as business always does, doesn't it? And what made everything worse was when Lady Cambers walked right into our drawing-room without knocking, while I was bathing his poor head. So rude of her. And the things she said. I told you about that. Bertie was splendid. He asserted himself just as a man ought to. He gave her one look, and walked straight out of the house. And, of course, it was all over the village at once – the servants having heard it all as well as the butcher's boy bringing the chops.'

‘What happened after that?'

‘He was splendid still. He came to live in Town. So did I. Not together, of course,' she explained hurriedly, going very red. ‘Only I couldn't stay there with all the things people were saying. So horrid of them. Besides, Oscar said it was upsetting for his business; and it was bad enough already. But then business always is, isn't it? And I don't think he need have been so horrid about it.'

‘Thank you,' Bobby said. ‘I think you've made all that quite clear.'

‘You know,' she said timidly, blushing harder than ever, ‘Bertie and I – we, we mean everything to each other now. Everything.'

‘I realize that,' Bobby answered gravely, very sorry for the poor little feeble, futile woman to whom dreams of romance had come so late in life only to find themselves at once face to face with such tragic realities. ‘Have you ever heard Sir Albert mention his wife's jewellery?'

Miss Bowman gave a little gasp, like that you may sometimes hear from a boxer when a blow has got home. She hesitated, and that odd, lurking terror she had shown before was once more plain in her eyes. She stammered, hesitated, said nothing very coherent.

‘I think Sir Albert claimed it as his own property, didn't he?' Bobby asked.

‘He never took them, if that's what you mean,' the little woman cried, fierce as a kitten defying a mastiff. ‘I don't know how you dare...'

‘But I don't dare, because I didn't say he had,' Bobby pointed out, for, indeed, to him the disappearance of the jewellery seemed to suggest the innocence rather than the guilt of Lady Cambers's husband.

However, Miss Bowman collapsed into a flood of tears and a state so near hysteria that it was almost impossible to get anything more out of her. He did try to ask one or two questions about her car, and she insisted that it hadn't been used for several days, that certainly she had given no orders to have it cleaned – why should she, when it hadn't been used? – and that naturally Sir Albert had a key to the separate lock-up garage in which it was kept.

Why not? Most certainly, though, he would not take out the car without letting her know, and still more certainly he had not had it out on Sunday. He had had tea with her that day. He had been suffering from a very bad cold; on her advice he had gone home early to bed, and now the cold had turned to influenza, just as she feared, and very likely pneumonia next – and how cruel, cruel it was that she couldn't go to Cambers to nurse him.

Perhaps Bobby did not look as if he thought a bad cold a perfect alibi, for now, desperately and palpably lying, she announced that she had paid a visit to the garage at midnight, and had assured herself the car was there.

‘Was there any special reason for your visiting the garage so late?' Bobby asked.

‘Only to make sure it was safe,' she answered, after what was evidently a pause for reflection, and Bobby thought it unnecessary to pursue the subject further.

He took his leave then, quite convinced that Miss Bowman at least more than half believed in Sir Albert's guilt.

‘If they got her in the box, they would make her say what they liked,' he thought. ‘Her evidence alone would be nearly enough to hang Sir Albert.' And as he slowly and thoughtfully walked away down the street, there sidled up to him an elderly woman in whom he recognized the ‘charlady' who had admitted him to Miss Bowman's flat.

It seemed she had a grievance against her employer. She hinted darkly that Miss Bowman was not all she seemed, not the ‘class' that she, the ‘charlady', was accustomed to. There was a gentleman, she said, and left the rest to be understood. Also, there had apparently been trouble about a bottle of whisky, of which the contents tended mysteriously to diminish, though no lady as was a lady would ever have thought so low as to use her tape-measure, and the ‘charlady' herself a teetotaller from her earliest days, and ready to take her dying oath she never tasted anything except a glass of port at the King's Arms, and very cheap, too, with just a drop of gin, perhaps, at times, to give it a flavour.

Bobby hinted gently that all this was very interesting, but hardly any business of his, and the woman looked at him sideways, and said: ‘You're police?'

‘I expect you saw my card when I gave it you for Miss Bowman,' Bobby reminded her.

‘There's a Lady Cambers been murdered,' she said. ‘It's on all the placards.'

‘Yes,' said Bobby. ‘Well?'

‘Sir Albert Cambers what's her husband – isn't he? – visits – her,' the woman went on.

‘You mean Miss Bowman? Yes. I know.'

‘Stays all hours he does, as the porter will tell you if you ask, and me always most particular them I obliges is respectable same as me.'

Bobby made no comment, but waited for what he felt was coming.

‘There, you read that,' she said, and thrust a letter into his hand.

‘Where did you get it?' he asked.

‘Found it,' she answered; and, when Bobby still looked at her, she added: ‘In her desk. Why not? She hadn't locked it.'

Bobby looked at the letter. It was addressed to Miss Bowman, signed by Sir Albert. It was long. It was couched in affectionate, if hardly passionate, terms. Certainly it testified to a considerable degree of intimacy. There were references to marriage and a future to be spent together. One passage ran, and Bobby read it twice: ‘I won't go into details. It would be more prudent for you not to know them. But I have made up my mind things can't go on like this, unbearable for both you and me. I shall go through with it, no matter at what risk or cost. My dearest, I give you my solemn word. By Monday morning next, the obstacle that keeps us apart will no longer exist.' 

Once again Bobby read this passage that seemed as though it stood out in blood-red letters, and the thick voice of the charwoman said, by his side: ‘We've all got our duty to do, and now I've done mine.'

From the local police-station, whither Bobby had conducted the charwoman, there to deposit her letter and to repeat her statement before the C.I.D. officer for the district, Bobby took another bus to Fleet Street, to the office of the
Daily Announcer
, his next destination.

That incriminating letter was almost enough in itself, he thought, to bind the rope about Sir Albert Cambers's throat. An ugly meaning it had seemed to bear, and one only too easy for a jury to understand, and yet how completely this new re-marriage motive, as it might be called, seemed to clash with the rabbit-trap theory they had previously been working on, and how entirely left to one side were such odd incidents as Amy Emmers's prompt washing-up of the plate and glass found in Lady Cambers's den, or the discovery of Eddy Dene's pen on the scene of the murder.

To Bobby, as he sat and brooded, the general pattern of the case seemed more puzzling and confused than ever till there broke upon his troubled thoughts the voice of the conductor.

‘Penny more if you're going on,' said the conductor, and Bobby apologized and hurriedly scrambled down as the bus began to climb the slope towards St. Paul's.

He had a few yards to walk back to where a gilded figure with a brazen trumpet presided over the magnificent portal of the imposing building whence the editor of the
Announcer
directed the world each day on the course the proprietor of the
Announcer
wished it to take – not that the world took any overwhelming notice.

A file was available, and once more Bobby studied intently the issue for that day on which there had occurred the quarrel between Amy Emmers and Lady Cambers that had so startled the rest of the household staff, had seemed to have no visible result, and had been so simply explained by the Emmers girl as due to neglected darning.

The tearing of the morning's newspaper Farman had mentioned might of course have been the merest incident, with no real connection either with the actual quarrel or its underlying cause. A newspaper is easily torn when tempers rise. Once again Bobby scanned it with care, noting every paragraph, examining even the advertisements. It was a long and tedious task, and in the end he was left with nothing but the two advertisements he had already noticed in the agony-column, the one a figure cipher, the other apparently a mere meaningless jumble of words.

He inquired what was known of the circumstances of their insertion, but they had attracted no special attention at the time, and such routine information as had been supplied was soon found to be false. So that line of inquiry was blocked, as Bobby had fully expected it to be; and with the two agony-column advertisements in his pocket he adjourned to a small restaurant near-by, where he ordered dinner, for it was now late in the day. While he was waiting for his meal and eating it, he would have, he thought, good opportunity to see what he could make of the two ciphers.