Death of a Beauty Queen (20 page)

‘Do you mean about Carrie Mears?' Bobby asked.

‘I loved her, you know that?' Leslie said, still in the same quiet, abstracted tone that was such a contrast to his previous excited, almost hysterical manner. ‘She had a way of looking at you that made you near crazy – quite crazy; only it was worse when you saw her look at other chaps just in the same way. I could have killed them – I felt like it. I expect they felt the same. She used to laugh when she saw us – she used to see how near she could go to making us lose our heads. Power, that's what she liked. That's why I felt I had to make sure, and I didn't care about anything else so long as I made sure – so long as I didn't lose her. Very likely that's what Maddox felt, too. Only, what would make him mad would be the idea of anyone else having her – he was always like that; it isn't so much lie wants things himself, but he can't stand another chap having them. That's why she and I – I don't know what I'm telling you all this for. I expect you think I'm drunk. Well, I'm not.'

‘Mr Maddox told me he and Miss Mears were engaged,' Bobby said. .

‘That's just a lie – a silly lie,' Leslie answered. ‘Just one of Claude's lies – if he couldn't get there first, he would' always pretend he had, and lie about it, too, if he got the chance. How could he be engaged to her?'

‘Was she to you?' Bobby asked.

Leslie leaned forward. He spoke with a suddenly renewed vehemence, though a vehemence more controlled than before.

‘I didn't care what I did,' he said, ‘so long as I made sure of her – you can't understand, no one could. I didn't care about anything else so long as it made me sure of her. Only then... afterwards... well, you know what happened. Trying to find out who did it, aren't you? You never will – never!'

He turned away sharply, pushed open the garden gate, and hurried through towards the house, banging the gate behind him as if to intimate that Bobby was not to follow. Bobby hesitated, not knowing what to do. He felt profoundly that the young man was in no fit condition to be left alone, and yet he himself had no right or power to thrust his company upon him. The tall, dark, silent house into which Leslie was now entering seemed to take on, to Bobby's excited imagination, a sinister and threatening aspect, and he made up his mind he would ask the doctor at the corner if he could possibly manufacture some excuse to call, even at this late hour. He turned away to carry out this intention and then he was suddenly aware of a movement in the shadow of the wall close by, between it and one of the trees that here bordered the road. Some man, it seemed, had been standing there and listening, and, as Bobby turned sharply towards this unknown, first he heard a soft, long– drawn sigh, as of an infinite relief, and then a low, uncertain voice that said:

‘I thought you were arresting him. You aren't, are you?'

‘Is that you, Mr Irwin?' Bobby asked, recognizing the voice.

Paul came forward – an old, stooping, shaken man, bareheaded – and Bobby's startled glance perceived that in his right hand, gloved in black kid, he held, incongruously, a brick lifted from the wall near by, where it had been lying loose.

And Bobby saw, too, that, where the light from the street– lamp near fell on his uncovered head, his hair showed white – white as snow.

For a moment or two Bobby felt too bewildered to speak, nor could he keep his eyes from the brick Paul Irwin had been holding, or his mind from questioning what use it had been meant to serve. Unutterably changed, also, did the old man seem, as if he had passed, in these last few days, from a hale and sound maturity to extreme old age. And yet, in spite of his bowed form and silvery hair, there was still a smouldering fire in his eye that seemed as if it yet had power to turn to momentary flame; there was still a hint of power in his bearing, as though all was not yet decay. He said, almost childishly:

‘I've lost my hat.'

But in Bobby's voice there sounded a touch of terror, of horror even, as he muttered, half to himself:

‘What's changed you so?'

A moment or so later he added, this time aloud:

‘Your hat's there – just behind you, on the ground.'

Oh, yes, so it is,' Paul said, and stooped and picked it up. He continued, his voice no longer childish or shaken, but charged with an intense emotion: ‘I thought you were arresting Leslie. I thought you were arresting the boy.'

‘Why had you that brick?' Bobby asked. ‘What were you going to do with it?'

‘Brick?' repeated Paul, as if puzzled. ‘Brick?'

‘Yes. What were you going to do with it?'

‘God knows,' Paul answered sombrely. ‘I found it in my hand. When I saw you together, I thought you were going to arrest him.'

‘Was that why you grabbed the brick?' Bobby repeated, quite convinced now that he had had a narrow escape of getting his head smashed in.

‘I've been preaching to-night,' Paul said, ‘at the chapel in East Street. They said they would get someone in my place, but I would not let them, for I needed help myself. Now they tell me I have never spoken with more conviction than to-night – never made them fear more God and His damnation.' He flung out his hand, and took Bobby by the shoulder with a grip that seemed as though it must make the bone crack. With a kind of fierce anguish, he cried out: ‘What do I care what he's done? He's still my son; my son.'

‘What has he done?' Bobby asked, whispering a question whereto he in his turn dreaded the reply.

Paul stared at him without replying, then turned and walked a step or two away and back again. Once more his mood had changed, and now lie spoke quite calmly.

‘Nothing at all,' he said, ‘that I am not to blame for. Nothing that is not my fault – all my fault.'

‘What is it you mean?' Bobby asked again, but Paul shook his head.

‘I told you before,' he said, ‘didn't I? I have nothing to say – nothing.'

‘Not even why you had that brick in your hand?' Bobby asked, pointing to it.

‘I thought, at first, you were arresting him,' Paul answered. ‘You see, he is my son – my son Leslie – and nothing makes any difference to that, does it?'

‘So you were going to smash my head in if I had been going to arrest him?' Bobby asked again. ‘Well, if you had, what good do you think it would have done?'

But at that Paul laughed, suddenly and harshly.

‘You don't think,' he said, ‘you only feel. Afterwards, you find something's happened. That's often the way things do happen.'

‘Oh, is it?' grumbled Bobby. ‘I suppose you mean that's how it happened at the Central Cinema the other night?'

‘No, I don't,' Paul retorted. ‘I don't mean that at all, and Leslie's innocent – innocent.'

‘There's not much doubt you know he's guilty,' Bobby countered, ‘or why do you talk like this? Why did you think I was arresting him?'

‘That was because I saw you with him,' Paul replied. ‘I know you think he's guilty, but he isn't. He is innocent. I'll swear that before God Himself, by any oath you like.'

‘You aren't going the way to make us think so,' Bobby said. ‘Especially not by grabbing bricks to argue with.'

‘That won't happen again,' Paul said gravely. ‘It just – well, something came over me; it won't again.'

Bobby grunted. He wasn't so sure of that, and, besides, he could not help wondering if once before ‘something had come over ' Paul Irwin – at a time when he was alone with a girl in the office of the manager at the Central Cinema.

‘If you want us to believe you,' he said, ‘you had better tell us what you know. It's quite certain you know something you haven't told us. That means you are hiding the truth. So long as you do that – well, you must take the consequences, and you mustn't wonder if we draw certain conclusions. I wasn't arresting your son to-night, hut I tell you quite clearly that's likely to come – so long as you refuse even to answer questions.

‘Look,' Paul said, ignoring this, to which, indeed, he did not seem to have been listening, and pointing to a window above the house door, where a light had just appeared. ‘That's Leslie's room. He is going straight to bed. Do you know why? Because he daren't stay up – because we sit and stare and never speak for fear of what we know.'

‘Mr Irwin,' Bobby said, ‘you're saying too much, or too little – much too much, or else much too little.'

‘I've been giving an address,' Paul explained, ‘down there in the little chapel in East Street. That started me, I suppose. Then seeing you with Leslie, thinking he was going to be arrested – something seemed to go then. Leslie's innocent – quite innocent – but you may have found out things making you think he isn't. '

‘Mr Irwin,' Bobby said again. ‘You lost your hat to-night, if you remember, when you picked up that brick you meant to use if I had really been making an arrest. And I think there was another time when you lost your hat, wasn't there?'

‘Yes,' Paul answered deliberately. ‘That's right. I did. At the Central Cinema. And you found it. Well?'

Bobby did not answer. They stood there, still and silent in the dark night, for some minutes. Then, with an abrupt motion, Mr Irwin pushed open the garden gate.

‘As I told you before, I've nothing to say,' he said. ‘Good night.'

He went on towards the house, and for some time Bobby stood there, staring after him, thinking deeply, or rather with his mind so possessed by such a medley of dancing, changing, incoherent ideas as made him almost dizzy but hardly deserved the name of thought.

‘Of course, they may be both of them mad – Leslie and the old man too,' he thought, catching at a theory he felt might help to convince him of his own sanity he was on the verge of beginning to doubt. ‘Only, the old man knows something – something that's made his hair turn white.' In spite of himself Bobby shivered as he stood there with one hand on the garden gate, for he had been half-minded at one moment to follow Paul to the house. Indeed there was something strangely terrible in that mute witness of his whitened hair to an old man's agony, so that the very latch rattled again as the garden gate shook under Bobby's shaken hand. Frowningly Bobby moved away, resolutely turning his mind from that thought of terror – an old man's snow-white hair that had shown so short a time ago not so much as a streak of grey. ‘The boy knows something, too,' Bobby muttered to himself. ‘Something that's driving him half crazy. Does that mean one or other of them is the murderer and the other knows it? But then, what about Maddox, and why was Mitchell so keen on that silver challenge cup, and why has it disappeared, and why has the knife been traced to Wood, and what has Quin got to do with it?'

Growing only more and more confused the more he tried to see reason and coherence in this whirling chaos of events, he went back to the local police station, and there, while the memory of them was still fresh in his mind, wrote out as full a report of these two strange conversations as he could contrive. By the time he had finished it was late, and he was given permission to go off duty and home to bed.

Night brings counsel, say the French, but morning found Bobby still as helpless as ever to pick out any meaning or significance from the chaos of conflicting evidence in which the case seemed so hopelessly entangled.

Only one point seemed to him quite clear – namely, that if he had in fact been about to place Leslie Irwin under arrest, then the papers this morning would have had another mysterious tragedy to record in telling of a certain promising young detective having been picked up with his skull smashed in by a brick from an adjacent garden wall.

‘The old boy meant that brick right enough,' Bobby remarked, later on, to Ferris, who had just been reading his report. ‘There's not much he would stick at where his boy's concerned – talk about a love drama, it would have been one all right, though no one would have called it that.'

Ferris was searching his memory.

‘Didn't Mitchell say something about there being more kinds of love than one?' he asked. ‘Perhaps that's what he meant.'

‘Shouldn't wonder,' said Bobby. He added: ‘I've heard of mother love, but this – this is father love.'

‘Looks to me as if it accounted for the whole thing,' declared Ferris. ‘Looks to me as if he wanted to stop his boy marrying Miss Mears, and that's how he did it. Anyhow, it's sure they both know more than they mean to tell if they can help it. If we could trace the knife to cither of them it would be good enough.'

‘Only,' Bobby pointed out, ‘it's been traced to the doorkeeper at the cinema instead.'

Ferris agreed, with a gesture of mingled despair and bewilderment.

‘I know,' he said. ‘Nothing sticks together in this business. I'm to see what Wood has to say to-day about that, though. You're to come along.'

That Monday afternoon, therefore, Inspector Ferris, bobby accompanying him, appeared at the Brush Hill cinema, where they found Wood on duty as usual.

Cautiously, Ferris, a cautious and a patient personality, approached the subject. Had, he asked, the mysterious seeker for a Miss Quin, by whom it was now probable had been meant Carrie Mears, been seen again? Wood answered in the negative – classic phrase indicating exactly the involved and roundabout reply actually made by the door-keeper. But he was keeping a sharp look-out, he declared, and he was quite sure he would know him again anywhere, at any time. But this assurance was not one that carried much weight with Ferris, who knew that when shown the Scotland Yard collection of photographs of criminals, Wood had picked out two, of entirely different types – one of a man known to have been dead some years, and the second of a man who for the last three years had been enjoying the hospitality of the country in a south-country gaol.