Death Among the Sunbathers (26 page)

‘Well, we shan't do that,' Miss James remarked, smiling a little, for under the encouragement administered by Bobs-the-Boy she had become almost normal again – quite normal, indeed, but for a certain underlying excitement of reaction that showed itself in a necessity to talk and chatter, ‘not likely.'

‘Was it you did in the other bit of skirt?' Bobs-the-Boy asked curiously, as if realizing that in this new garrulous mood she was likely to be willing to explain to him details he had often wondered about.

‘No, it wasn't. I had nothing to do with it till it was all over,' she answered passionately. ‘That's why it's so unfair I should be always dreaming of it, when I didn't even know what they meant to do until it was over. And it was all her own fault.'

‘Trying to find things out that was no concern of hers?' observed Bobs-the-Boy. ‘I suppose that was it?'

‘Yes, somehow she guessed. I expect it was something her sister, Sybil, said or told her; most likely Maurice Keene let out something to Sybil and then she told enough to Jo for her to guess. I expect that was it, but I don't know. Then Jo came prowling about here to see what she could find out to make a big story for her paper. “The
Announcer
Unveils Sensational Plot”, all that sort of stuff. And she hid in that room next to this to hear what we were saying when we were talking together. Afterwards she tried to slip out, but most likely she had got nervous and excited by then, and she managed to knock something over and we heard it. So then we knew we had to stop her. But I had nothing to do with it. What I said was we must give it up. But they said it was too late for that, she knew too much already, and Esmy kept her talking and talking, while Zack went round to the car park and waited for her there. We got the attendant out of the way up here to look after a leaking tap. I went down to hit it with a hammer and make it leak worse, but only because they told me to. I didn't know what for. Esmy left the girl outside the car park, and I came back here, and pretended to be busy with letters, and then I slipped out through the next room and the back stairs, without anyone seeing me, and across to the road, to wait there till Zack brought her car round. When he did, he told me he had shot her just as she was starting up, and I was to put on her hat and coat, and I was to speak to the A.A. scout so he would swear she had left the Grange quite safely, and then I was to run the car over the railway embankment by the bridge and set it on fire. We hoped it would pass for an accident; and that anyhow she would be too burnt for it to be noticed she had been shot first. But we had no luck, and it all came out, and even somehow they made sure it wasn't her driving the car at all, but someone else.'

‘There was a little oversight there,' Bobs-the-Boy explained. ‘You wore her hat tilted down on the left so that you couldn't be seen plainly by anyone you passed on the one side. But Jo Frankland's photograph showed she wore her hat tilted over on the right, and she couldn't very well have worn it the other way, unless she had changed her style of doing her hair. If it hadn't been for that, or if it hadn't been noticed, most likely Curtis himself would have been charged.'

‘We couldn't understand why they seemed so certain it wasn't her in the car,' Miss James said slowly. ‘I remember thinking how lucky it was the hat, low down on one side, and the coat collar coming up to meet it, nearly met, so my face was hidden.'

‘It didn't turn out lucky,' observed Bobs-the-Boy, ‘for it was that set them all thinking so hard. Only what's the good of their thinking, if there's no evidence to show? And the evidence they've got shows Mr Bryan leaving her outside the car park, and you back in your room when the thing happened, and nothing against Zack Dodd at all. So as long as you don't tell the “busies” yourself how it all happened, what's the panic? And there never will be any evidence about the other girl; for no one will ever find her dead corpse, and till they do, which they can't, there's nothing they can charge you with. They may know all right, but who cares about that, so long as they haven't proof? And how can they get proof? Where are their witnesses?'

Under the influence of this stream of encouragement, so well argued and presented, Miss James was quickly recovering her confidence.

‘Esmy Bryan thought it was all over. He said our only chance was to go into hiding,' she remarked.

‘Silly,' commented Bobs-the-Boy, ‘when there's no evidence against you except anything you say yourselves.'

‘You mean we're all quite safe still,' she said slowly.

‘That's right,' he declared. ‘You can take it from me everything's O.K., so long as you keep your mouths shut, except for Mr Bryan having bunked, and unless Zack Dodd's done anything that'll put us all in the cart again. Haven't you any idea where Bryan is? We must get in touch with him somehow.'

‘I don't know at all,' she answered. ‘He never told us, only that he had a safe hiding place where no one would ever find him. He seemed quite sure of that, that he would be safe there, I mean.'

Bobs-the-Boy looked rather gloomy.

‘If he's got some hole all ready to crawl into,' he observed, ‘some friend, a woman perhaps, ready to give him shelter, it would take the “busies” themselves all their time to find him.'

‘No one ever will,' Miss James insisted, ‘he's much too clever.'

‘Well, that's torn it, that has,' Bobs-the-Boy muttered.

‘But he told us,' Miss James went on, ‘he would see anything we put in the agony column in the
Announcer
if we headed it to “Jim” and signed it “Rose Ann”. He wrote out a list of a dozen places and gave each a key letter, where we could arrange to meet.' She paused and added abruptly, ‘Someone's coming. It's Zack, I think. It's his step.'

They heard his heavy, lumbering step it was not difficult to recognize, come up the stairs and slowly down the passage. He opened the door of the room and stood there, scowling at the woman who said she was his wife, scowling still more viciously at Bobs-the-Boy. In a kind of scream his wife cried out,

‘What did you do, what did you do? What's happened?'

He said, ignoring the question,

“There's Mitchell and his lot all round the house... waiting they are. Well, they'll never get me alive... nor you neither,' he added, looking sideways at his wife with a dark significance it seemed she understood well from the way in which she shrank back and trembled. ‘Where's Bryan?' he demanded. ‘It's all his doing, I'd like to twist his scraggy neck for him and save the police the trouble.'

But at that Bobs-the-Boy let loose a sudden torrent of invective that made even Zack blink his eyes, so violent and so fierce it was. Indeed Zack seemed even a trifle daunted by it.

‘You needn't talk,' he muttered, when at last Bobs-the– Boy paused, though more apparently to take breath than from any adjectival shortage. ‘You're done in same as us, you are, with all that crowd all watching outside.'

‘Let 'em watch,' retorted Bobs-the-Boy. ‘I'll go out presently and tell 'em trespassers will be prosecuted. It's all O.K. unless you've torn it, doing in young Keene. And I reckon most likely you haven't, or you wouldn't have come back here. That so?'

‘He was too quick, he got away,' Zack answered. ‘He called out back to me, “If it wasn't I've got to show these things to the police, to Owen, I'd have it out with you all right”. If he had, I'd have done him in, I could do him in with one hand tied behind me. But he got away, and now he's telling that blasted Owen all about it; and that'll finish us and you, too,' he added with a vicious grin at Bobs-the-Boy, ‘and I wouldn't have come back here, either, only for not having any money on me, not so much as a penny piece, and not knowing where else to go. So I thought I would risk it, and I came in the back way by the car park, but there was one of Mitchell's fellows waiting there, and then there was another close behind. So I came on here because I didn't know what else to do, but I reckon it's the end for all of us.'

‘No sense in getting the wind up yet,' retorted Bobs-the-Boy. ‘There's no evidence Mitchell's got yet he would dare take into court, for fear of being laughed out again. You can take that from me, that's straight goods, that is.'

He went on talking rapidly and fluently. As convincingly as before he persuaded Miss James, he now showed Zack how small was the real amount of evidence in the hands of the authorities, how little real proof in the legal sense there was against any of them.

‘Not enough to charge a lost dog on,' he concluded. ‘I don't say there mightn't have been if you had done in Keene, but as you haven't, that's all right. You know how this sort of thing is worked? They draw up a report at the Yard, Mitchell and the rest of them, and send it in to Treasury Counsel and Treasury Counsel read it and say it won't do, and send it back to have all the weak points tightened up, and if they can't be, well, it's all off, because Treasury Counsel aren't going to risk taking any case into court there's any chance of being turned down on. Professional reputation is what they think of more than anything else. What's Mitchell actually got – I mean in evidence he can take into court, not just mere guesses? Precious little if you ask me. Who saw anything? And where's the motive? A jury always wants to know that, and there's none the police can talk about. Even if they guess it was to keep her mouth shut, they aren't let talk about guesses. It cuts no ice what the police know, it's what they can prove – lummy, if the police could act just on what they know, a nice look out it would be for us chaps.'

‘There's always Owen,' Miss James said, speaking for the first time.

‘Ah, you've got Owen on the brain, you have,' Bobs-the-Boy said, looking at her benevolently. ‘Bless you, scared of him, you are, and yet you've never seen him. No more have I.'

‘Keene will have gone straight to him,' Zack said.

‘If he has, that's all right,' Bobs-the-Boy retorted. ‘Owen's one of the sort that likes to keep things all to himself till he's got everything ready. That means he doesn't speak till the last moment and no one knows what it is he's got. Very well. That's all right, gives us a chance to fix him before he ever says a word at all. See?'

They looked at him silently, a little doubtfully, and yet with a certain dreadful hope as well.

Presently Dodd dropped a single word.

‘How?' he asked.

‘I'll fix that, you leave that to me,' Bobs-the-Boy answered. ‘All you've got to do is to hold your tongue. Most of those that hang, it's their own tongue they swing by.'

‘It's easy, if there's nothing to it but saying nothing,' Zack said. ‘I was never one to blab and talk,' and his wife nodded confirmation, agreeing on both points.

‘Well, stick to that, saying nothing to anyone, and you'll be safe as houses, once this Owen's fixed,' Bobs-the-Boy repeated. ‘Only just let me be sure I've got it right the way things happened. It won't do for me to make any bloomers.'

He asked a few questions, and Zack's replies confirmed fully the account his wife had already given.

‘That's O.K. then,' Bobs-the-Boy pronounced presently. ‘I've got the hang of it now, it's going to pan out just the way it ought.'

‘There's always Owen,' Zack remarked, repeating unconsciously the same form of words that his wife had used earlier.

‘You aren't getting him on the brain, too, are you?' asked Bobs-the-Boy, with his familiar and always slightly disconcerting grin. ‘Never seen him, have you? No more have I, but I've got my own idea about him.' He paused and his grin grew wider, displaying that black gap in his upper jaw where it seemed a tooth was missing. ‘Leave Owen to me,' he repeated. ‘But now our next job is getting hold of Mr Bryan again.'

The other two looked at each other blankly, and Dodd shook his head. .

‘I don't know how we're to do that,' he said. ‘He always said he would only bolt when the game was properly up, and when he did no one would ever find him again. He said that more than once. I expect he had a bolt hole all ready; some woman most likely he knows he can trust to keep him hidden. He's got money, and he'll have it all thought out, and once he stops bleaching his hair he'll look quite different – he's nothing like as old as he pretended, you know; he put that on to make the suckers think it was all that fake stuff made him so brisk and strong; he even got his dad's birth certificate and hung it up on the wall for his own. He always said he could disappear any moment and not all the police in all the world would ever find him — I believe him, too. He had everything all thought out, and he's clever as they make 'em.'

‘Sounds it would be a tough job,' agreed Bobs-the-Boy thoughtfully; ‘if I were Mitchell I should be afraid of having to give him best there. If a man's got brains and money, and his plans made, and a place all ready to go to, and somebody to help him – well, then, you might as well look for the needle in the haystack. Unless he gives himself away.'

‘Esmy Bryan won't do that,' declared Dodd.

‘No,' agreed Bobs-the-Boy, ‘not that sort – it was always supposed you and he didn't hit it together and he wanted to get you out of the show here. Was that only put on?'

Zack nodded.

‘Just so as no one would think we were too thick,' he said.

‘I thought as much,' Bobs-the-Boy remarked. ‘I daresay your Owen friend would tumble to that much. Only if one of us cuts and runs well, it looks bad for the rest, don't it? It's up to us to make him see everything's O.K. – always providing there's no talking.'

‘There's always Owen,' Miss James put in, or Mrs Dodd, if she had real claim to that name.