Murder Abroad (26 page)

‘In the shade' is French slang for prison, and Madame chuckled again as she moved away, for Williams had never been a favourite of hers. But Bobby's face was very grave, for to him it was as though all suddenly he had been aware of the chill presence of death passing slowly by.

It had been not far from a full day's work to get down upon paper and to consider all the various details in all their different and generally doubtful implications, mere hints indeed, that in the end seemed to him to point so clearly in one unwelcome direction.

Nor did Bobby take immediate action when at long last this conclusion had become firmly established in his mind. For one thing, he was certain that if there were any justification for those chill fears Madame Camion's story of Williams's trouble with the police in Paris had put into his mind, then it was too late for that to be prevented which he so darkly feared. For another, he was very keenly aware of the heavy responsibility that would be his if he decided to inform authority of the conclusions at which he had now arrived. Once again he found himself remembering wistfully how much easier it had been when his sole duty was to place his views before senior officers, running no other risk than that of a snub if they decided that his theories were unwarranted and that his report had best go into the waste-paper basket.

Now, it was for him alone to decide whether to take action. Easy to keep quiet, to await events, to allow the official investigation to continue without knowledge of the facts that he had gathered. No one could blame him for failing in a mission so difficult, one in which the French police with all their advantages had not succeeded. Only then the guilty would go unpunished; and Bobby's looks were dark as he thought of the well at the Pépin Mill and of the still living, perhaps still conscious woman thrust down into those black depths. More important yet, suspicion would continue to rest here and there, and Bobby knew well how corroding can be the effects of unfounded suspicion upon all but the strongest characters.

Again, he had to remember that upon his decision rested any chance his employers, Lady Markham and her relatives, might have of recovering their lawful property.

On the other hand, he risked, if his theories and his deductions from the impressions he had noted, proved ill-founded—and that they were correct he had no firm, material proof to show, it was all a matter of argument and reasoning—he risked inflicting great, perhaps irreparable, harm on the person he would then have wrongfully accused. Incidentally it might also lead to unpleasant personal results, to his being asked to curtail his visit to France, to hints reaching Scotland Yard that one of their officers had been meddling foolishly abroad in matters that did not concern him. It would mean a big black mark against his name if that happened.

Yet it was perhaps this fear of possible personal consequences he felt he must not allow to influence him, that helped him in the end to make his decision. All the same he decided to wait till morning before taking the final step of communicating with the authorities. The delay would do no harm, and after a night's sleep he would be able to review his decisions and see if his resolve seemed weakened or strengthened.

He found it strengthened, but when he came downstairs for his morning rolls and coffee, he found also that his projected journey to Barsac would be unnecessary, for almost the first thing he heard was that once again the commissaire of police was in the village, that he had established himself at the Mairie, that, in spite of the early hour, he was already beginning to interview people. Of this, too, he had further proof when presently a message, extremely polite in form but all the same equally firm, informed him that Monsieur the Commissaire Clauzel would esteem greatly the privilege of a short interview with Monsieur Owen, at Monsieur Owen's entire convenience, at any hour before ten that morning.

Bobby sent back word that naturally he would be only too willing to attend as requested, and that, in fact, he believed himself to be in possession of certain facts he had already determined it would be well to place before Monsieur Clauzel.

“Monsieur Clauzel,” Bobby said to Madame Camion who, pale, restless, and red-eyed, was wandering uneasily to and fro, between reception desk and door, “is the official of the police who was here before?”

Madame Camion promptly began to cry, slowly and with difficulty, for tears come less easily as the years pass.

“He searches my son for the guillotine,” she said, a touch of wildness in her voice. “He hunts him down. Where is the good God that He permits such things? Since I swear to you that Charles is innocent, innocent as the blessed saints themselves.”

“That is the important thing,” Bobby said, though he thought he detected in the vehemence of these last words a dreadful fear in the mother's heart that possibly her son was in truth guilty. “The innocent have nothing to fear.”

“The innocent have suffered before now,” she answered with the same touch of wildness latent in her voice so that Bobby feared she might at any moment break down. “He is there at the Mairie, this Clauzel, he sits there and asks questions, lays traps, twists answers, makes things seem different, so that if a boy sharpens a knife, there is the proof that it is for murder. Next, it will be the juge d'instruction.”

“They seek only to discover the truth,” Bobby repeated.

“They have sent for you, they have not sent for Charles,” the poor woman said, and evidently felt, as Bobby himself felt, that that was no good sign. She added: “Besides, for that matter, he is not here.” Seeing that Bobby looked startled at this piece of information, she said quickly: “Oh, he has not run away. He went very early, before even Monsieur the Commissaire arrived.”

“Do you know where he has gone?” Bobby asked, hoping that to all the other complication was not to be added yet another flight or disappearance.

“He did not say. I think it is in search of Volny fils. It was foolish, their quarrel. If it was for fear of him that Volny went, then Charles feels it is for him to get him to return. Oh, Charles will return,” she added, for Bobby was still looking doubtful. “He went once before to try to find him and was back for the evening service. He promised he would try to be back to-day in time for that.”

“Well, I hope he will,” Bobby said. “It is not wise to be absent at these times.”

“In the village they whisper, whisper all the time, but when I come near they are silent,” Madame Camion went on. “They will whisper and whisper and whisper till they whisper us out of our minds. Charles, he is calm and proud, oh, so proud and calm—without. But within it is different. He said to me that none will be content till they have driven him to seek his own death himself. Then perhaps they will know remorse.”

“Remorse?” repeated Bobby, startled and uneasy, for he felt young Camion was exactly the type to stage a dramatic suicide in a state of gloomy anticipation of how sorry every one would be when finally his innocence was established. “Not they, not likely. They would only feel how right they had been; and even if some one else were proved guilty, they would all remain quite sure he had been mixed up in it somehow. He is not going to give in so easily as all that, is he?”

Madame Camion looked impressed.

“I will say all that to him,” she told Bobby. Then she added: “It has comforted me to talk to you.”

With that she went off and Bobby retired to his room and collected all the material he had got together. When he came down Madame Camion was there again, looking more troubled than ever.

“Lucille Simone,” she told Bobby, “is proclaiming to all the world that she and Charles are affianced. How can that be? To me, to his father, he has said nothing, and yet, she, a young girl, proclaims it aloud. What is one to think of such happenings?”

“Well, for one thing that Mademoiselle Simone is sure of your son's innocence,” Bobby answered, but felt, too, that the girl's gesture had more than a touch of the defiant, of the melodramatic, not altogether consistent with assured and certain confidence in the young man's innocence.

He went on to the Mairie, where a curious group of spectators had collected, for to-day work in the village was very much at a standstill. His appearance and his admission by the gendarme placed at the door to keep out the unauthorized was watched with much interest. He was shown into a large, empty, sparsely-furnished waiting-room, its white-washed walls adorned with various notices and proclamations—including the latest speech delivered by the deputy for the district. Almost at once Eudes appeared from an inner room. He looked flushed and excited. He said indignantly:

“They are a pack of imbeciles, these officials. No wonder the republic is in danger when she is served by such a crew. For myself, I care nothing. My innocence proclaims itself. But when they seek to accuse others of the village, our cure for example, it is too much. Those black crows, it is the mind they seek to enslave and I resist them to the death. Corrupters of the mind, a thousand times, yes. Assassins in secret of the body, to think that is mere folly, and I say it, I, who have watched and fought the subtle trickeries of the church all my life. Bah!”

Whether this last angry ejaculation was aimed at the church or at the police, Bobby was not sure and had no time to inquire for he was hurriedly summoned to the presence of the commissaire. He found Monsieur Clauzel delivering an indignant harangue to an unfortunate official evidently held responsible for permitting a departing witness to meet and talk to one not yet examined. Bobby waited by the window till the storm should be over, and from it he could see at a distance down the street where Eudes and the curé were standing and talking together with every appearance of a mutual sympathy and understanding.

“You shall hear of it later,” Clauzel was saying in low angry tones to his guilty assistant, “and in the interval, see that it does not happen again.”

“I assure you, monsieur the commissaire,” Bobby interposed, “no harm was done. Monsieur Eudes said only that for himself he was innocent and that none but”—Bobby hesitated, looked more embarrassed than he felt, went on—“imbeciles was, I believe, the word thoughtlessly used, only they could imagine for a moment that a curé could be also an assassin. It is an opinion, for Monsieur Eudes is, I believe, strongly anti-clerical.”

Clauzel grunted and did not look either very impressed or much placated.

“Altogether irregular,” he repeated, voicing an official's severest condemnation. “For that matter, priests have been also murderers before to-day, and I have known, too, the guilty protest furiously the innocence of others in order to impose a conviction of their own innocence.” He grunted again and looked at some papers on the table before him. “As for that,” he said, “the Abbé Granges was not far from threatening us with excommunication when we questioned him about the schoolmaster. Yet it seems they are bitter enemies and rivals, as indeed is only natural since it is war to the knife between them for control of the minds of the children.”

“Enemies, perhaps, but loyal enemies,” suggested Bobby. 

“It may be,” agreed Clauzel, “yet it would seem that both or either may be implicated, and indeed I thought we were to be faced with a confession when the good abbé began to speak of his guilt. But it seems merely that his conscience troubles him because he heard quarrelling and threats one night by the Pepin Mill and yet because he thought it of little importance, and also because he had come far and was fatigued and it was late at night, he did not stop. Because of that he seems to think he is responsible in a way for the woman's death, since had he stopped to inquire, he might have prevented what was to happen. A sensitive conscience perhaps? One does not know. He admits, too, that he has in his possession uncut diamonds which he says, but has no proof, were given him by the unfortunate Mademoiselle Polthwaite. Then it seems the schoolmaster was trying to secure possession of the Pépin Mill garden. Was that to hinder investigation, to destroy any evidence that might still exist? Again, one does not know. Is it possible, one wonders, that these two enemies in public are accomplices in private? There is so much to be considered. For yourself, monsieur—”

He waved Bobby, who had been standing till now, towards a chair that Bobby had already noticed with some amusement was so placed that its occupant sat with his face in full light, while Clauzel himself, sitting at his table, had his back to the window. Routine, of course, in police work all over the world, but the first time, Bobby reflected, that he had been passive in it and not active. The only other occupant of the room was a clerk—the ‘greffier'—sitting unobtrusively at a smaller table in one corner, in readiness to take down question and answer.

Bobby being seated, Monsieur Clauzel began on a most apologetic, friendly note. Infinitely did he regret that his duty compelled him to trouble a visitor, a guest of France, involved in these unfortunate affairs by the merest accident. All the same it was quite plain that a good many inquiries had been made about Bobby and his recent activities.

Clauzel, for instance, knew all about Bobby's recent long solitary days on the Bornay Massif, and had even heard of his chats with various farmers of the district and of his purchase of binder twine, which had evidently amused the commissaire almost as much as it had done the farmer himself. Not that he made much effort to question Bobby closely. He merely let it be seen that he knew a lot about him and he expressed once or twice his conviction that Monsieur Owen would realize how important it was in such an ‘enquête' as this, that nothing should be over-looked. The tiniest detail had its importance, it might be its overwhelming importance. Unfortunately the affair of the young Volny was taking on an aspect of increasing seriousness. True, it might well turn out in the end to be no more than a youthful escapade, but still, there it was, the days passed, the uneasiness of the family increased, nothing was heard of the missing lad. So far as was known, he had only a little money with him. It was certain he had not his papers of identity, for all of them, including his ‘carnet militaire', had been found in his room in his father's house.