Death Comes to Cambers (37 page)

‘What made her take a suit-case with her?' Bobby interposed.

Dene looked slightly discomposed.

‘How should I know?' he snapped. ‘Some idea of her own, most likely. But Bowman was waiting, and he polished her off, very neatly. Once the cord was round her neck she wouldn't even know what was happening. An easy death.'

‘Did she struggle much?' Bobby asked.

‘No; all over in no time,' Dene answered, too absorbed in his story – perhaps in his memories, too – to notice the look of stricken horror that Colonel Lawson gave him, or the grim tightening of Bobby's mouth. ‘Like that,' Dene said, with a gesture of one hand, and they who were listening knew a murderer was showing them unconsciously just how his crime had been committed. ‘No struggle even. But then,' Dene went on, in a slightly different tone, though he himself was not aware of the change, ‘Bowman found himself up against a snag. He knew Lady Cambers always had her keys with her. That was all right. She had, and he took them. But he had reckoned on the door she had come out by being open for her return. Unluckily for him someone had found it open, thought it had been forgotten, and locked and bolted it. So there was Bowman with his keys that were no good to open a door bolted on the inside. That did him. He was no burglar, and had no idea how to force an entry. He must have thought it over, and finally planned to be on hand in the morning, when the body was discovered, so he would be able to take advantage of the confusion and the excitement to slip into the house and Lady Cambers's room and open the safe and clear off with the jewellery. It would only take a moment or two, and in the general excitement he could reasonably hope to escape notice.'

Colonel Lawson was just about to remark there was satisfactory evidence that as a matter of fact Bowman had spent the night asleep in his bed as usual when Bobby made a sudden movement, and the chief constable, whose toe was still painful, moved hurriedly away and was silent, and Dene, who had not noticed this by-play, said: ‘Look out, he's nearly here. You can see for yourselves now... and you can decide for yourselves whether you think the man who took the jewels had anything to do with the murder. Not my business.'

‘Oh, you've made it your business, Mr. Dene,' Bobby could not help answering, and Dene looked at him and said nothing; and soon Bowman came out from the trees into the comparatively open border round the rim of the little hollow.

He was plainly nervous and excited, constantly stopping to look and listen, and vet too restless and uneasy to take note of what it was or the significance of what he saw and heard. For a little he stood or moved to and fro uneasily, and then he came to a standstill beneath an ancient elm. Into it he climbed, drawing himself up by an overhanging branch and when he let himself down again he was carrying a brown-paper parcel.

This he opened, and showed, all piled together, a great heap of those glittering toys for which, from time immemorial, men and women have been so apt to barter their immortal souls, though dewdrops on a spider's web 

in the dawn are lovelier by far, and their possession scarce less transitory.

So there they lay, on their brown paper, on the green grass, while Bowman bowed himself above them in a kind of ecstasy; and in his excitement one of the watching constables moved, letting his helmet become visible. Bowman heard the movement, saw the helmet. With a loud cry, all the terror latent in him unloosed and rampant, he turned and ran, and, as it chanced, ran straight towards where Eddy Dene lay hid.

Seeing him coming, Eddy sprang to his feet from the bracken that had kept him concealed.

‘Oh, no, you don't,' he called, mocking the fugitive. ‘No getting away this side, Bowman.' And Bowman snatched a pistol out and fired.

Eddy screamed, a shrill and dreadful scream, and his expression was that of a man who had received some gross and unexpected insult; nor was the arrogance in his dark eyes one whit diminished. Bowman was rushing on. They met, they grappled, they rolled together, over and over in the bracken that grew red where their writhing bodies passed, and three times more the pistol snarled. When the others came to separate them, Eddy had been shot three times – once in the chest, twice through the stomach – and Bowman had the tiny bullet of his own small automatic buried deep in his heart.

That Oscar Bowman was past all aid was plain, for as evident as strange is the difference between the body wherefrom the soul has fled and the body wherein the soul lingers still. But Eddy lived and was conscious, lifting himself on one hand and coughing a little, blood and froth gathering on his lips that he kept wiping with his other hand, the gesture with which he did so one of anger and impatience.

Later on, a doctor who examined his body denied the possibility of this, and asserted that a man shot at point-blank range through the chest, the stomach, and the lungs could not possibly have had the strength to think or talk consecutively.

But this doctor was a man of science, trained on scientific lines, and had no knowledge of the fierce, prideful will of Eddy Dene's that could bend to itself most things, though not all. None the less, though his will was passionate still, and it was that alone held him, body controlled and mind clear, he well knew and well understood; and when Bobby came and knelt beside him, he said aloud: ‘Of all the luck, of all the crossway ends... there's no one left to carry on my work.'

‘I wouldn't talk,' Bobby said to him. ‘They've sent for a doctor.'

‘You'll never hang Bowman now,' Eddy said; and Bobby answered sternly, for the words offended him: ‘We never should have. We knew the truth.'

Eddy stared at him, and one could almost see his grasp upon his life slackening, as though that stern reply had loosened it.

‘What do you mean?... You knew?' he asked; and then: ‘That chap at Hirlpool said something about mice... you knew about that?'

Colonel Lawson came up in time to hear this, and it was he who answered.

‘We do,' he said. ‘Also we have reason to believe that the fountain-pen you say you lost on Wednesday you filled with ink not available till the following Friday. I think you had better say nothing more at present, Dene. There are other questions you will have to answer.'

‘Not I – not one,' Eddy answered, in a loud, unnatural voice; and, a little startled, the chief constable said to Bobby: ‘Is it serious? There's not much bleeding.'

‘That's why it's more than serious, you fool,' Eddy retorted, and, with that last characteristic word upon his lips, he sighed deeply, twice over, and was dead.

Only a day later the adjourned inquest on Lady Cambers was to be held. So now two more were conducted at the same time and the whole story made clear.

There could be no certain knowledge, since both concerned were dead, how Lady Cambers had been tempted out alone that tragic Sunday night, but there could be little reasonable doubt that Eddy Dene had played upon her fears of the consequences flowing from his pretended discovery of a fossil or fossils proving his contention. Almost certainly – as he had hinted to Amy he would do – he had added a suggestion that he might reinforce this supposed evidence by a little judicious faking; and Lady Cambers, simple-minded, direct, authoritative, had fallen headlong into the trap, and had determined to secure the fossils for herself.

Dene had laid his plans carefully and well, and the complications he had so astutely introduced had done much to confuse and mislead the investigation, aided to an unexpected degree by the imaginative exercises of Mr. Samuel Jones.

It was sufficiently plain, too, that Bowman, on discovering the body, had seen his opportunity to secure the keys of the safe in which the jewellery was kept. Nor had it been difficult, in the excitement and confusion of the morning, to slip unperceived into the house by the garden door – the key for that, too, was one of those he had obtained – rifle the safe, leave the keys in a convenient drawer, and slip off again, still unseen by any of the inmates of the house all gathered together in panic in the hall.

From the first, Dene, alone in his knowledge that since he himself had not touched the keys they must have been taken by who first found the body, must have been certain Bowman had the jewellery. That meant Bowman was attempting to secure for himself the whole of the material gain from the crime, and Eddy was as determined to prevent that as he was to take his revenge upon the man thus crossing his careful plans.

Unless Amy Emmers, as Mrs. Sterling, was put in a position to carry out her promise to continue to assist his work till there was completed his book he fondly dreamed was to bring him fame and fortune, all he had done was wasted, except, indeed, as removing one whom he had come to regard as intolerable meddler and tyrant.

And with his private knowledge that it must be Bowman who had taken the keys, and therefore the missing jewellery, it was easy for him to see that a scapegoat lay ready to his hand, amiably offering himself.

A careful, steady watch on Bowman's movements would soon tell Eddy where the stolen jewellery was hidden, and it was quite reasonable to suppose that the possession of it would be taken as proof of guilt of the murder as well. Even if Bowman were acquitted, for lack of sufficient proof, of the charge of murder, no one would be likely to think that the real murderer was the clever disinterested tracker-down of the thief.

In the end these calculations had proved vain, and, though it was plain Bowman had yielded to the sudden temptation to secure the jewellery, it was equally clear that Eddy was the murderer. The verdicts were given after but brief deliberation – in the case of Lady Cambers, ‘wilful murder' against Eddy Dene; in the case of Dene himself, and of Bowman, ‘death by shooting'.

Of the others who had played their part in these events there is little to be told. The Cambers estate had to be sold. The jewellery had to go, too. Mr. Tyler seized his opportunity, and Mrs. Tyler now proudly appears, with her ‘Cleopatra pearl ear-rings', on the front page of nearly every issue of the
Pictorial Babbler
, so that she is almost as famous as the last divorced film-star. After all the liabilities resulting from Sir Albert Cambers's violent assault upon the City had been cleared, there was no very large sum left. But on the four or five hundred a year remaining, Sir Albert and the new Lady Cambers (
née
Bowman) live very happily and comfortably in a Cheltenham villa, golf by day and contract by night filling their simple, peaceful, yet colourful days, since at golf no hole, at contract no bidding, is ever the same.

They have made many friends, too, for they are an amiable and reasonable couple, and quite content to leave the money Lady Cambers lent to her nephew as an investment in his wireless business, which is developing very satisfactorily. He has had several offers already from larger firms prepared, and even anxious, to take it over, but so far has preferred to remain independent, largely through the influence of his wife, for Amy is taking a very keen, efficient, and increasingly important share in the development of the commercial side of the business.

By her advice, too, Mr. and Mrs. Dene sold their shop and retired to a small seaside bungalow. With their own small savings supplemented by the allowance she makes, they live their days as peaceful as their tragic memories permit – for in the end it was they who suffered most, and at nights they still whisper to each other of the strange misguided lad, talented, arrogant, and lost, whom it was their lot to have brought into the world. And, though there is not a word of it they can understand, they still read over, at times, pages of the disjointed, fragmentary manuscript notes, all that is left of the great book he planned.

As for Sammy Jones, he, released with what he graphically described as a ‘flea in the ear', and stern warnings about keeping his imaginative faculties in rein for the future, may be found any day working in a fairly good job he has obtained in a fairly good restaurant fairly near the West End of London. And Bobby, returning to duty, was told off at once to track down the headquarters of a band of miscreants reported to be endangering the morals of the country by carrying on raffles for boxes of chocolates at country fairs.

E.R. Punshon was born in London in 1872.

At the age of fourteen he started life in an office. His employers soon informed him that he would never make a really satisfactory clerk, and he, agreeing, spent the next few years wandering about Canada and the United States, endeavouring without great success to earn a living in any occupation that offered. Returning home by way of working a passage on a cattle boat, he began to write. He contributed to many magazines and periodicals, wrote plays, and published nearly fifty novels, among which his detective stories proved the most popular and enduring.

He died in 1956.

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