The Bath Mysteries (29 page)

“If Beale sits tight,” Bobby told himself gloomily, “he's safe as houses – and so he is even if he doesn't. There's not a thing against him a smart K.C. wouldn't make rings round as easy as winking.”

There would even be the testimony, tending to establish an alibi, of the local police set to watch Beale – for his own protection and safety from that threat of murder Bobby was so certain was his own. They had already reported that to the best of their knowledge and belief he had not left his house on the evening of Norris's death. Not that Bobby attached much importance to that evidence. Easy enough for Beale to direct his wife to take his place in the study, to work the typewriter so that its rattle could be heard, to switch on the light at the proper time, to let an unidentifiable but accepted shadow appear on the blinds. That Mrs. Beale was so much under her husband's control as to obey implicitly any directions he gave her was certain enough, and he would have found little difficulty in leaving the house unseen, bicycling to some neighbouring station where he was not known, taking a train to town, and returning in time to show himself in person when the local sergeant of police came to make inquiry about the car accident Dr. Beale might have witnessed had he been on the spot at the time as, the sergeant explained, was understood might possibly have been the case.

But once again all was conjecture – probable, even certain in a way, but yet far from the solid, unequivocal proof British law requires.

To Bobby it looked very much as if the man guilty, as he was well convinced, of this long series of murders would escape all human punishment, escape with the rich profit of his crimes, escape perhaps to begin again elsewhere.

In this depressed mood he returned to his rooms from Paddington, to write out there his report in surroundings more comfortable than the crowded conditions at Scotland Yard permitted. As soon as he got in, his landlady appeared to say that Miss Yates was in her room upstairs and wanted very urgently to speak to him, if he would spare her a few minutes. He sent up word accordingly that he would be glad to do so, and she came down at once, blinking, hesitating, nervous. He noticed that she was carrying a small attaché case. She said without preamble of any kind:

“A woman called Magotty Meg stole this for me. I expect you know her. She said she had been seen and she has been keeping out of the way or I should have had it before. It was in a bus. There was a woman there. She was half asleep and she had an attaché case just like this. Meg changed it for this one. It was Dr. Beale's. I mean this one. He kept his hand on it tight, but Meg is very clever. She jerked his hand away somehow, and before he put it back she changed his for the woman's and put his on the woman's seat. Neither of them knew, and then in a minute or two she picked it up from beside the woman and got out with it, so when it was missed the woman thought it was hers had gone. But Meg thought the bus conductor had seen her, so she had to keep out of the way till she could get it to me safely. It's locked, and I haven't tried to open it. I want you to do that.”

Bobby took the attaché case Alice was offering him, and held it on his knee.

“I don't think we will open it now,” he said. “I think we had better take it along with us to the Yard and let them open it there.” He added: “You mean Dr. Beale?”

She nodded.

“What made you suspect him?”

“I always knew,” she answered slowly, “there was something queer going on. If a man is starving on the Embankment one night, like Mr. Lawrence was, and then he is put in charge of an office, you know there's something behind, something secret. And if it's secret, then it's crooked.”

“Yes. Yes,” agreed Bobby thoughtfully. “Yes, I expect that's so.”

“If it was crooked,” she went on, “then there was a crook to make it so, and there were only three of them – Dr. Beale, Mr. Norris, Mr. Lawrence – unless it was someone else nobody ever heard of. But I soon got to be sure there wasn't anyone else – only those three. And it wasn't Mr. Lawrence, because he didn't care enough – a crook has to be wide awake, and he was living in a dream. Besides, he had only been brought in after the thing had been started; 1 felt sure he was meant just for cover. At least, I did till I found out they had him insured for a lot of money. They thought nobody would ever bother about what happened to an exconvict picked up on the Embankment. I knew very well that was why they had chosen him. For a long time I thought it was Mr. Norris, but then I found out he was worried, too, and was asking questions about things. He did that on the Embankment, and he tried to get out of me what I knew, but I didn't tell him anything, because I didn't trust him. Only, especially because he seemed to suspect Mr. Lawrence, that meant he wasn't the one who was doing it all.”

“If he was suspicious something was wrong, why didn't he come to us?” Bobby asked. “He knew I was working on the case.”

“I think,” she answered slowly, “because he saw there was a lot of money concerned, and he hoped to get hold of it for himself. I think he hoped to be able to say: ‘I know all about the game that's going on here, and I'm going to the police about it, but, if you hand over enough of the money you've got, I'll let you have warning in time for you to get away first.'”

She paused, as if inviting comment, but Bobby made none. The explanation seemed to him plausible enough; it fitted in with what he knew of Norris's character, and his association with the Berry, Quick Syndicate explained his recent affluence. He might have suspected he had been selected as a victim of the future, but in the interval he was receiving more money than ever before, and he might easily have thought himself clever enough to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, so securing a large share of the booty for himself before taking action to expose the conspiracy he suspected.

Alice went on:

“That left only Dr. Beale. I hadn't thought of him at first, because it looked more as if he were one of the people they were planning to rob. But afterwards I felt sure it was he, only I couldn't be sure he and Mr. Norris weren't working together. So I got Meg to watch and see if Dr. Beale went to visit Mr. Norris's flat. If they were partners, they would have to meet there – they were never both at the office at the same time. And, from the way Mr. Norris had asked me questions, I was sure something was going to happen. Meg watched Dr. Beale go to the flat, and then she saw Mr. Lawrence. She saw Mr. Lawrence leave, and afterwards Dr. Beale came away, too. He was carrying an attaché case he hadn't had with him when he came, and he looked all worked up and funny, as if something had happened. She thought she would follow him and try to get hold of his attaché case. And she did, and there it is; and I don't know what's in it – nothing perhaps,” she added, with sudden discouragement.

Bobby, nursing the attaché case on his knee, wondered, too, what it held – nothing of interest possibly, or it might be the evidence needed. He said:

“You had never met Lawrence, had you, before that night on the Embankment?”

“No.”

“How was it you were there? There was a man who was looking for you?”

“Does that matter?” she asked wearily. “Step by step – there was a book in the sitting room at home:
Step by Step
it was called – that's how I got where I was that night – and birth control,” she added. “When I was a girl,” she went on – she could not have been much more than twenty-five, but she spoke of her girlhood as might have done a woman of eighty – “I thought birth control made everything just the same for girls and men, too. They all said it did. It doesn't – nothing ever makes it the same for a girl and for a man; and after a time nothing seems to matter any more; and you have to live, or you think you have, and you don't care much – only, one day you are with the others, standing in the street, for sale. And I got to know Sandy – Sandy Watson. I thought he was sorry for me. He used to say I was such a kid. He promised to help me. He said he would see I got a square deal. I was glad to have someone who seemed a friend, and he was good to me at first; only, presently, he began to show he was a devil, really. He knocked me about, too. I didn't mind that so much – you expect that – but there were other things he wanted me to do, and one night I went down to the Embankment. I meant to jump off the steps when no one was looking – they said it was quite easy once you were in the river, and no one could interfere. But Sandy followed, and he found me, and he was putting the lighted end of his cigarette on my wrist when Mr. Lawrence stopped him. I've never seen him since. Mr. Lawrence spoke to me, and what he said showed what he really felt. If he had said anything nice or kind or comforting I shouldn't have noticed so much. He just thought of me as a bit of dirt that he had trodden on, and yet he had done that for me. I hated him worse than anyone ever hated before, and I followed him, and I watched, and I found out he had got a job in an office. There was one girl in the office and no one else, and it was quite plain there was something funny going on. I made up my mind to find out what, and I borrowed some money from Meg and I scared the girl who was there into going away and letting me be there instead. Mr. Lawrence hardly even noticed. He was like – like what I had been the first time I stood in the street. You just feel nothing matters because nothing's real any more – it's not you, only a kind of doll that's there. Mr. Lawrence might have been dead.”

“You wanted to make him come alive again?” Bobby asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“When you thought something was wrong at the office, why didn't you come to us?”

“A street woman, an ex-convict,” she answered simply, quite without bitterness, merely as stating an incontrovertible fact. “They don't go to the police so easily as that.” She added: “Besides, I was not sure what Mr. Lawrence had to do with it.”

Bobby supposed that was the real reason. She had been afraid, had probably at first believed, that Lawrence was involved or at least had guilty knowledge.

“You would never have believed or understood how dead he was to everything,” she continued. “How little anything mattered to him any more.” She stared at Bobby, and was silent. Then she said: “Did you know they had flogged him?”

Bobby nodded.

“It killed all feeling in him,” she said. “Whipping people isn't any good except for people it doesn't make any difference to. All it did to him was to make him go dead all over.”

“He told me once it was being treated like a thing, not like a man,” Bobby observed. “I don't quite know what he meant. I think he must have realized after a time what the Berry, Quick Syndicate was up to.”

“Yes,” she agreed. After a pause, she let fall the one word: “Murder.”

She was silent then, and so was Bobby. Somehow that one word had dropped into their talk like a prohibition. Bobby got to his feet to go. He looked across the table at her. He said:

“Are you ready?”

She seemed then to think there was another question in his eyes. Answering it, she said:

“Yes, he knew after a time, but I knew first. If I had told you, you would have been sure he was doing it all; the only thing you would have thought of would have been getting him hanged. He would have had no chance when there was so much you thought you knew about him. So I waited and watched, and that's why I got Meg to watch, too, and some of the other girls. And that's why I had to have money – I had to have money to pay them, and pay Meg what she had lent me, and to have some, too, for Mr. Lawrence to go abroad with, if it turned out he had to.”

“That's why you were working yourself blind, then,” Bobby said. “Your sight wouldn't have lasted another week.”

Her gesture put that aside as of no importance.

“My eyes were always bad,” she remarked, “but they would have lasted more than a week. They only said that at the hospital to frighten me. They would have lasted till it was over. I would have made them.”

It was Bobby's turn to stare at her now, for she had uttered that last sentence almost casually in a way, and yet with such an accent of tremendous will it almost seemed as though she could at her wish have compelled the natural event to her obedience.

“I suppose all this means,” he said, half to himself, “that you're in love with Lawrence.”

Again her gesture waved aside a detail without importance.

“He was dead, as I once had been,” she answered, “and I knew it was my job to make him come alive again.”

“Oh, well, now then,” Bobby muttered, and it seemed to him these were waters of emotion and of feeling too deep for his plumbing.

They went out together, and, on their arrival at the Yard, Bobby explained their errand and surrendered the attaché case to be opened with all due form and ceremony. During the delay while the preliminaries were being accomplished Bobby was summoned to the phone, and found it was his cousin, Chris Owen, who was ringing up in considerable agitation.

“Is it true Dick Norris has been murdered?” he asked “And what's the trouble about the piece Lady Endbury bought? Hang it, man, you don't suppose – ?”

“I don't think so,” Bobby answered, “but it's true enough Norris has been found dead in his bath. Murder has not been established yet. I think it might be as well if you came round here. Some of the chiefs might like to see you.” Chris agreed, and soon made his appearance, still very agitated and disturbed.

“Lady Endbury told me,” he said. “What's that piece she bought got to do with it?”

“We hope you'll tell us that,” Bobby answered. “We've been trying to get hold of you the last day or two. The man in your shop said you were cataloguing Lord Westland's collection, but now we find all his stuff is packed away for the time.”