Crossword Mystery (21 page)

All except Bobby, who sought his room, indeed, but not his bed, and in his room, with his handkerchief to his cheek, paced up and down – up and down, without pause or rest. And the pacing up and down, up and down, of a thirteen-stone man who has neglected to remove a pair of somewhat heavy boots, can be distinctly disturbing, and even trying, to the occupants of adjoining rooms, especially when now and again a stumble over a chair, or a stool kicked from one end of the room to the other, varies the performance.

It was not long before Colin was hammering at the door and begging Bobby, in terms more forcible than polite, to stop that infernal stamping about. Bobby contritely promised compliance, explained that it was that beastly tooth of his, and threw himself on the bed with a crash that shook the house. But in two or three minutes he was up again, once more pacing his room in entire oblivion of Colin's protests. Then came Mrs. Cooper, and again Bobby explained that his tooth simply wouldn't let him rest; the only way he could get relief was by keeping in violent movement. He wished to goodness now that he had taken Mrs. Cooper's advice and gone to the dentist she had told him about; if there had been a chemist near, he would have knocked him up and got something to relieve the pain – ow-w, it was just like a red-hot needle very slowly boring right up through the middle of his head.

“I know there's nothing you can do,” he told Mrs. Cooper; “no one can.”

Mrs. Cooper smiled. To be told there was nothing she could do always put her on her mettle. She came back with a bottle and some cottonwool.

“Try a little of this,” she said.

“Laudanum?” Bobby asked eagerly. “I say, you are a wonder, Mrs. Cooper. But I thought people weren't allowed to buy this stuff now.”

“I had some by me,” she answered. “I've had it for years. It's nearly finished now,” she added, showing a two-ounce bottle very nearly empty.

Bobby accepted the soaked bit of cottonwool she offered him and put it in his mouth. He drew a long breath of almost instant relief. That was much better, he said, and Mrs. Cooper retired, and at last the disturbed household was able to settle down to sleep. Indeed, Bobby's cure was so complete that by morning the swelling had entirely disappeared and he felt sufficiently recovered to go for a swim.

It was a beautifully fine and warm morning, but he had the sea to himself. Few of the fisherfolk of the village indulged in early-morning bathing, and Colin, who was a good swimmer and generally enjoyed an early dip, evidently did not feel up to it to-day. Neither did Miss Raby appear, though she, too, was an excellent swimmer, and generally bathed when the weather was good. While Bobby was drying himself, one of the villagers came up and began to talk, evidently eager for all the latest news about the previous day's tragedy. There were three or four newspaper men, he said, who had passed the night in the village and were offering liberal payment for even the least scrap of fresh information, and Bobby remarked that the police were threatening very severe penalties on anyone who indulged in any gossip, while he himself, for his part, knew simply nothing at all. So, changing the subject, he talked about the bathing, got confirmation once again of the fact that Archibald Winterton had been a strong and practised swimmer whose death by drowning on a morning as fine and calm and warm as was this one was frankly inexplicable. His brother George, however, had quite frankly preferred a warm bath in the house to all the sea could offer, wherein he had had the sympathy of the fisherfolk, whose own view of the sea was quite simply that it was best kept out of. Few of them could swim a stroke, it seemed, and Miss Raby had been quite distressed by this indifference and ignorance of something so likely to be useful to those living by the sea, both near it and on and from it, and had offered to teach some of the children. She had offered to teach Mrs. Cooper, too, and Jane, the day-girl, but had given up when Jane objected to the risk of having her permanent wave ruined and after Mrs. Cooper had nearly drowned the two of them by clasping Miss Raby round the neck and upsetting her in deep water.

“Fair lost her head, she did,” said the fisherman, chuckling. “There's always some as can't abide the sea.”

“Generally she seems such a very capable woman,” Bobby remarked.

“It was the sea did it,” his companion replied. “If she had the chance she would tell us all when to go to bed and what time to get up, but the sea was too much for her. There was a tale she was to have a job with that gent who wanted to buy up the whole place only Mr. Winterton wouldn't let him. Lord, if she had, she would have been a sort of king like round here, and there's some of us would have cleared out.”

Bobby asked a few more questions, but got nothing more than that there had been a general rumour that, if the London man's scheme had gone through, Mrs. Cooper was to have had employment under him as compensation for losing her place with Mr. Winterton. The defeat of the scheme had undoubtedly been a great relief to some of the villagers, but an equal disappointment to others, who had been dazzled by the thought of all the money that would be brought by it into the district.

“But money's not everything,” said Bobby's companion wisely, “and as for swimming, I don't hold with it. What's it good for when you've a sound boat under your feet? And if you get swamped – well, swimming only means you drown slow instead of quick.”

Bobby suggested that sometimes ability to swim might mean that you would not drown at all, but his new friend did not agree. You kept out of the water as long as you could, but once it got you – well, it had you, what was the good of prolonging the agony by splashing about?

“Look at Mr. Archibald,” he said triumphantly; “best swimmer ever was, they said, and what did it do for him? Calm, fine morning just like this, but he drowned all the same, all along of swimming.”

“Perhaps it wasn't all along of swimming,” Bobby suggested, and stored this talk away in his mind, for there was some of it, he thought, that might, if only he knew how, be woven into the pattern which he felt, once he could complete it, would make a picture coherent and complete of all these tragic happenings.

He went back to the house, where all day long there was a constant coming and going on matters connected with the investigation. But Mitchell did not appear, and for Bobby there was nothing to do but to watch and wait and think, think perpetually without respite or pause.

The special task he had been allotted of watching Colin was not one that occupied him much, for Colin never stirred from the house. With his inevitable companion,
Ruff's Guide
, before him, and a sheaf of papers on which he was apparently making those elaborate calculations of weights and ages he was always so careful to let no one else get a glimpse of, destroying them utterly to the last fragment so that no one else should have any idea of the conclusions he had arrived at.

For Miss Raby's movements Bobby was not specially responsible, but she, too, spent the whole day in the house, occupying herself with the morning's correspondence and afterwards with the typing of a fair copy of the chapter of his book on which Mr. Winterton had been at work. Bobby, finding her thus occupied, introduced the question of the crossword puzzle Mr. Winterton had been amusing himself with composing.

“He never let you see it, did he?” Bobby asked. “I think I remember he said he wanted to finish it alone, all by himself.”

“He was rather funny about that,” she answered. “He seemed quite anxious to keep it away from everyone – I can't think why.”

“You've no idea what it was ?” Bobby asked again. “I should like awfully to have a look at it, but it seems to be missing somehow.”

“Perhaps he got tired and tore it up,” she suggested. “I made a copy of it once – the first version, I mean.”

“You did,” Bobby exclaimed, controlling his excitement. “Have you got it still?”

“I don't think so,” she answered. “I made it one afternoon before I realised he was so keen on finishing it by himself. It seemed rather silly, but, of course, if he wanted to complete it himself, all alone, I didn't mind. I copied it with the idea of helping, but if he didn't want to be helped it wasn't any good.”

“Don't you think you might have it by you still?” Bobby insisted, with an anxiety he could not quite conceal, for somehow he had grown in his thoughts to attach an odd kind of importance to this crossword puzzle, and Mr. Winterton's insistence on keeping it from the sight of other people.

But Miss Raby shook her head.

“I've looked,” she said. “I remember taking it home to work at it, but I can't remember anything else about it. I expect it got destroyed with my rough tries – when you are making up a puzzle you have to make all sorts of tries. I always have a big pile to burn after I've got one finished, and I expect the copy of Mr. Winterton's got torn up with some of them. Anyhow, I'm sure I've not got it now, because they asked me about it yesterday, and I looked very carefully and there's not a trace of it anywhere. It can't be anything important, can it?”

“No one can say, if it can't be found,” Bobby answered moodily.

Miss Raby, dismissing the question as one that at any rate had little interest for her, went on with her typing.

“Though I don't suppose the book will ever be published now,” she said regretfully to Bobby, still glooming over the loss of the crossword, “and it's such a pity; it's awfully clever, and poor Mr. Winterton was so wrapped up in it – he really thought he had a message to give the world: that there was no safety except in gold; real money that's always real, and not paper you can burn or mice can chew or anything.”

“I suppose that's what his book was about,” Bobby remarked, rousing himself from his crossword meditative gloom, and asked if he might look at it.

Miss Raby saw no objection, and Bobby took the typed sheets and found himself plunged into a highly technical discussion of currency theory of which he could understand very little. He was still struggling with it all when there arrived a tall, good-looking young man in a quaint, old-fashioned car that must have been quite four or five years old and that looked antediluvian, so that garage hands crowded round it as round some prehistoric relic. He was Miles Winterton, the murdered man's second nephew, and Miss Raby gave him a greeting that was by itself enough to show on what terms they were. She introduced him rather shyly to Bobby, and Mrs. Cooper, previously warned that he was coming, appeared to say she had got ready for him a room just across the passage from the one Bobby occupied. She had before suggested to Bobby that he ought to go to the dentist, and now she suggested it again, evidently fearing another disturbed night. But he protested her cure had been so complete there was no fear of that.

“I haven't had a twinge since you gave me that stuff of yours,” he assured her. “You know, I don't believe it was really toothache at all; it was just the result of all that excitement and worry, if you know what I mean. I suppose a girl would have fainted; I got the toothache instead. Girls always know what's best. It's made Mr. Cooper quite ill, too, hasn't it?” he added sympathetically.

Cooper, indeed, was plainly still in a highly nervous condition, going about his work with a deathly white face and hands that shook and trembled, but getting little sympathy from his almost openly contemptuous wife.

But, indeed, none of them felt quite normal yet, unless it was Mrs. Cooper, who seemed her usual quiet, dignified, efficient self.

Even Colin, though he hardly spoke and kept his nose close to his
Ruff's Guide
and his calculations he was so careful to let no one else see – precautions he had redoubled recently, covering his notes with his hand or his book the moment anyone drew near – was obviously in almost as nervous and wrought-up a condition as was Cooper. Miss Raby held herself in better control, but Miles was very restless and agitated and made no attempt to conceal the fact that he felt himself under suspicion.

“The first I knew of it was when they came to root me out at old Aunt Aggie's I had asked to put me up for the night,” he told them more than once. “They wouldn't believe at first I knew nothing about it. I hadn't seen the paper. I did notice something on a placard about ‘Seaside Murder,' but how was I to know that meant poor old uncle? At me for hours, they were, asking all sorts of fool questions, and now, just when I thought I was sure of a job in South Africa – big public works contract; seven years' safe at least – they've given it to another johnny and I'm on the street again, just as Mary and I were fixing it up to get married whether uncle liked it or didn't.”

“You're all right now,” Colin grumbled, without looking up. “Aunt Archy comes in for the money, apparently, and she'll hand out a good whack to you – she was always pally with you, and thought it was so sweet and romantic about you and Mary. Jimmy will get something, too. I shan't. She thinks I'm a lost soul. I shan't get a penny, unless I–” He paused. “Uncle George meant us to have it all between us, but Aunt Archy won't mind that. No sportsman; a woman never is.” He paused again. “I'll do the sporting thing,” he said. “If I make good my claim to what he meant us to have, I'll go straight whacks with you and Jimmy.”

“What on earth are you talking about?” Miles demanded. “Haven't got another will up your sleeve, have you?”

“Perhaps,” retorted Colin. “Why not? Uncle George always said he meant to make one.” He added: “With a few more thousands I could start a stable that would have the rest of 'em beat standing. Anyhow, you've nothing to worry about; you're all right either way.”

“Well, I don't see why that should make the police johnnies look down their noses at me,” Miles complained. “The worst of it is, I can't prove I spent the night tucked up in the car. I did, but I suppose I could have got over here all right enough and done in poor old uncle and got back again without anyone knowing.”