Four Strange Women (10 page)

“Did you go again?” Bobby asked.

“Only to-night. There was nothing then but ashes—the ashes of the caravan. And he was dead. I knew that even before I looked. The first time he was sullen and depressed. The second time he—glowed. The third time he was dead.”

He paused and the two of them looked steadily at each other.

“Murdered,” Eyton said loudly and abruptly.

“It might have been accident,” Bobby said, but without conviction in his voice. “It might have been suicide.”

“It wasn't an accident,” Eyton declared. “Why should a caravan like that catch fire? If it did, why couldn't Baird have escaped? Not like being trapped on a top floor. All he had to do was to open the door and walk out. It was no accident.”

“Suicide?” Bobby suggested again.

The little man shook his head.

“No,” he said. “No man could have looked the way he looked and then killed himself within a day or two.” He paused and said again, quietly but with conviction:— “It was murder.”

Early the next morning before Colonel Glynne arrived, Bobby presented himself at the county police headquarters. He had sat up to the small hours, writing a report of his conversation with little Mr. Eyton, and now, borrowing one of the office type-writers, he copied it out. He had just finished when Inspector Morris came in and nodded a greeting. Bobby explained what he was doing and the inspector asked one or two questions about Scotland Yard methods.

“Our C.I.D. is a bit out of date,” he confessed. “There wasn't much serious crime about here till they started the new factories and got in a lot of Irish riff-raff from Birchespool. Know Birchespool at all?”

“No,” answered Bobby. “I was never up here before, but I know at the Yard we used to think the Birchespool C.I.D. pretty good.”

“ So it ought to be,” declared Morris. “One of the biggest towns in the country and fat rates to draw on, not starved like us poor devils of the county force. We used to get them to help us in C.I.D. work, but they made us pay through the nose till the Watch Committee wanted to know why we didn't run a show of our own. I suppose that'll be your job—helping the old man start a real C.I.D. here.”

He was looking a little curiously at the long report Bobby had just finished typing; and Bobby explained that the night before he had had a chat with Mr. Eyton, of the
Midwych News
, who had been the first to report what had happened.

“Talkative little chap,” Bobby remarked. “He told me all about a book he's writing on the Wychwood forest.”

“Talked about it, did he?” asked Morris. “I'm glad to hear he has started again. Looks as if the poor little devil were getting over it.”

“Over it?” repeated Bobby, puzzled.

“Wife left him in the spring,” Morris explained. “Hit him hard. He got blazing drunk one night. We had to bring him in; he was threatening murder and suicide and Lord knows what. Had to keep an eye on him till he quietened down a bit. Might have been murder if he had known who it was the bitch went off with. Just as well he didn't. I'm glad, too, he's started his book again. He burnt it when she left him though it was more than half done, he told us that night we had him here.”

“What made him do that?” Bobby asked.

“I think he had an idea it all happened through the book,” Morris explained. “He was dead keen on it, thought it was going to bring in a pot of money and make him famous. I've heard books do sometimes,” Morris added, doubtfully, “though it seems queer to me. He used to rush her off to the forest every chance he got, and he would sit and make notes or wander off by himself, getting the air, he told us, or something like that. I don't know what he meant.”

“Getting the atmosphere, perhaps?” Bobby suggested.

“That's what I said, getting the air. Anyhow, his wife got fed up. Don't much wonder. I expect my old woman would cut up rough if I wanted her to go and sit under trees all day. But it seems she ran across some chap—camper or hiker or someone like that. Wychwood swarms with them in the spring and summer. They got pally, and while hubby was mooning around, watching the trees grow, wifey and this other chap were having fun on the side. Eyton never noticed anything. Wrapped up in his book. That was last year. In the winter it was much the same, he was either shut up with his writing or busy at the office, or rushing off to the forest to have another squint at the trees. Wifey began to run up to London on one excuse or another—to see her aunt, her sister was ill, a visit to her dentist, all the usual excuses. Eyton went on being quite happy, putting all his spare time into his book. When the spring came he talked about buying a caravan and going to live in the forest. Most likely that put the lid on it. Anyhow he came home one day to find a note saying she had gone and she wasn't coming back, but he wouldn't miss her because he had his book instead. Broke him up. Burnt his manuscript and went on the razzle. We had our hands full with him that night, took three men to bring him in. Talked of murder, suicide. Luckily it couldn't be murder because he had no idea where she had gone or who the man was. He quietened down afterwards, turned teetotaller, and if he's got to work on his book again, I expect he'll be all right now.”

Bobby had listened with close attention. Human nature, he told himself, was always unexpected, unpredictable. Even we ourselves do not know what is within us till the test comes. Who could have guessed such a story lay behind the prim, smug exterior of the chatty little journalist? Difficult to imagine him, with his careful brewing of his cup of cocoa, ‘on the razzle', or its needing three big policemen to ‘bring him in'.

Hidden lives, Bobby thought, and hidden fires. He looked out of the window, watching the Midwych citizens, hurrying to their day's work, with their bowler hats and their umbrellas, their morning papers, their trim little attaché cases and their powdered noses, according to age and sex, and he wondered how many of them hid behind their commonplace exteriors such storms of hate and love and passion as must have raged within the heart of quiet, dull looking little Mr. Eyton.

The inspector, who was not given to such speculations, was going on talking. He said:—

“Did you go into that front room of his?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Used to be his wife's sort of show place,” Morris explained. “She was one of the arty sort, design and that sort of thing. She did the setting for the Midwych Amateur Dramatics—jolly good shows they put on, too, what with her settings and Miss Hannay's acting. Up to professional level every time.”

“Miss Hannay?” Bobby repeated. “Is that Miss Hazel Hannay, General Hannay's daughter?”

“That's right. It was her pulled in Mrs. Eyton. Eyton was secretary and stage manager. He chucked it after the scandal, and he cleared all her fal-lals out of that front room of hers and turned it into a sort of office. Didn't want anything to make him remember.”

Bobby thought to himself that memories lie within, not without, and he seemed to see again the little man sitting there alone at his work, surrounded by memories all the more poignant perhaps for the resolute effort he had made to clear away all sign of the past.

The conversation languished. Morris became busy with routine work, muttering comments the while. Presently he spluttered indignantly over a civilian complaint made against one of the city police, but sent in to the county force, under the evident impression that all police forces are one and the same.

“Nothing to do with us,” grunted Morris.

It seemed a woman had been singing Welsh songs outside a public-house. A possibly too zealous constable had told her to move on. A patriotic Welshman had protested. There had been an exchange of pointed comment, and this vitriolic letter was the outcome.

“Nothing to do with us,” Morris repeated. “The city blokes can have it.”

“I think we passed her last night,” Bobby remarked, inclined to be on the side of the woman singer. “I thought she was jolly good, and singing jolly good stuff, too.”

Morris, quite uninterested, made no comment. Bobby decided that if he saw the woman again—he felt he would recognize her—he would give her a shilling and perhaps some day, if they got settled here, get Olive to do something for her. Then he forgot all about her when Colonel Glynne arrived.

All the usual routine of such cases was now in full swing. A medical report was already in to the effect that the remains were too badly burnt for anything useful or definite to be said. Death might have been caused by the fire or by anything else almost. Impossible to say even whether death had occurred before or after the fire reached the body. Equally impossible to say how long since death had taken place. Some time certainly—two or three days or even longer. Fire destroys thoroughly, and this fire had certainly been fierce while it lasted. Identification would have to depend very largely on the teeth—teeth are almost indestructible—and on various faint traces and more or less accurate deductions which suggested that the hair had been plentiful and a light brown in colour, the sex certainly male, the height about five foot nine, the build slender, the age about thirty-five, the features well-shaped and prominent.

“Quite a packet all the same,” commented Morris, “to get out of what didn't look much more than a pile of bone and ash.”

It all agreed, however, very well with what was known of Baird. Efforts were being made to get in touch with his relatives, and as at the moment there seemed nothing else to do—the arrangements for the inquest being of course in the hands of the district coroner—Bobby received instructions to take charge of the other efforts being made to secure further information from the residents in the locality, few and scattered as they were.

He could only be given one constable to help him, and they started off accordingly on bicycles; Bobby, as befitted his superior rank, being allowed a motor cycle, while the mere constable had to manage with the push bike variety. So Bobby got there first. The day was fine, the ride pleasant; and he had no difficulty in finding his way, for Eyton's articles in the
Midwych News
and in the
London Announcer
, had brought out a host of sightseers in cars, on bicycles, on foot, so that Bobby had merely to join in the procession.

He found the glade roped off, and the harassed constable on duty with his hands full, keeping away curious spectators and eager souvenir hunters, who by this time, had they been allowed, would have carried away every morsel of the burnt caravan—probably even of the turf on which it had stood. Bobby, having succeeded in convincing the at first sceptical constable of his identity, helped in this task of keeping the curiosity-mongers at bay in the intervals of making as close an inspection of the actual spot and the vicinity as the swarming crowd permitted. For efforts to clear the spectators away were a complete failure, since, as some of them pointed out, this is a free country, and Wychwood Forest is public property, open to all. Nor could they be said to be obstructing traffic, so that usual trump card of the police could not very well be played. Indeed they protested they weren't obstructing any one, all they wanted to do was to help, and now and again one of them would find footmarks left by others of them and excitedly draw attention to an evidently important ‘clue'.

So they had to be endured, and when presently the official photographers Bobby had asked for arrived, together with an expert to examine the burnt debris more minutely still, Bobby strolled away to mingle with the crowd in the hope of picking up some useful scrap of information—and information, whether useful or not, they were all only too eager to give him.

Evidently it was the general and firm conviction that murder had been committed, which perhaps was not surprising since that had been plainly suggested in Eyton's articles. An opposition theory had, however, been started by a disgruntled representative of the ‘scooped'
Midwych Herald
, which had been too late in hearing of the tragedy to do more than include a brief mention of it in their stop press column. Now they had brought out a special edition with many deprecatory remarks about the sensational interpretation certain irresponsible elements in the town, in defiance of every canon of decency and good taste, were endeavouring to put on this most unfortunate accident. A kind of accident regrettably common, it added, since so few people cared to adopt the simple precaution of using the Brown Safety Oil Stove, to be secured at the emporium of Messrs. Brown, in the High Street, as advertised on the front page.

“Trying to make the best of things,” Bobby thought, “and after all what proof is there it wasn't pure accident?”

Nevertheless he remembered very clearly the intense and almost passionate conviction with which Eyton declared that murder had been done. He found himself wondering why it was that Eyton had seemed so sure, had spoken with such certainty.

He wandered about a little, made one or two discoveries he thought might turn out to be of interest, and proceeded to arrange for either himself or his assistant to visit every place, farm, cottage, or inn, in the neighbourhood to inquire if anything had been seen of the fire, if any strangers had been noticed, to pick up any other crumbs of information.

Once or twice he rang up to report and to learn if there were any fresh instructions. There were none, so he worked on till nightfall, by which time he and his solitary assistant had covered a good deal of ground and visited every habitation within a wide circuit. It began to rain slightly. He went back to the scene of the fire, where he found a squad, by the light of acetylene lamps, preparing to remove the debris, which the coroner and his officer had already visited. One of the small boys they all considered such a frightful nuisance had made a discovery of some interest and significance that Bobby decided was worth including in his report to headquarters. When he got back to Midwych, however, he found orders to make it personally to the colonel at Asbury Cottage, and thither accordingly, after a wash and a meal, he proceeded.