Mystery Villa (26 page)

If so, so terrible a thought working in his mind might well account for the change, both mental and physical, now apparent in him.

It was to the flat occupied by Mr Yelton and his daughter that Bobby now proceeded. That he should see for himself whether the daughter showed any sign of the nervous strain and agitation the father had so clearly betrayed seemed to him important, but when he knocked at the door of the flat he at first got no answer and yet heard sounds from within to show the flat was occupied. He knocked again – again – a loud, authoritative knock. This time the door was flung open almost immediately by an excited, flushed-looking Dorothy, who evidently recognised him at once.

‘Oh, it's you,' she cried, with an old mixture of relief and apprehension, and, not stopping to ask him his business, dashed back across the box-like hall into the tiny sitting-room.

Bobby followed quickly, without waiting to be asked, for it was evident enough that something unusual was happening, and in the sitting-room he found presented an interesting tableau of young Mr Aske with clenched fists, blazing eyes, and a face white with passion, standing over the prostrate figure of another man, whose face was covered with blood streaming from an extremely swollen nose, while above it one eye was rapidly becoming eclipsed in a rainbow blaze of many colours and a swiftly rising Mount Everest kind of a bump.

‘That'll teach you,' said Aske, without specifying what teaching was supposed to be implicit in the scene.

The prostrate man began somewhat unsteadily and hesitatingly to get to his feet.

‘What's all this?' demanded Bobby.

Aske bestowed on Bobby a glare that seemed to indicate entire willingness to continue towards him the teaching already offered to the gentleman unsteadily and doubtfully rising from the floor.

Dorothy, drawing a long breath in preparation, let herself go in a swift and indeed torrential explanation of just exactly what she really thought of Mr Alfred Aske. It was long; it was emphatic; it was detailed; it concluded with a passionate peroration expressing a fervent hope that never again would those orbits cross each other wherein moved respectively herself and Mr Aske; and pitiable indeed was it to watch how the triumphant swagger of the proud male who has just knocked his rival down – glorious gesture throughout the ages – became changed to that of the naughty little boy caught stealing jam by his nurse and well aware that now it's across the knee and the slipper for him.

‘And just look,' added Dorothy, with fierce finality, ‘just look at the mess on the carpet.'

‘I'll get you a new one,' muttered Aske.

‘When we require you to refurnish the flat for us, Mr Aske,' declared Dorothy with great dignity, ‘we will inform you of the fact.'

By now the formerly prostrate gentleman was on his feet again. His nose was still bleeding; his eye was still swelling; there was, indeed, not much sign that either process was ever likely to stop again. With a handkerchief already little more than a sodden mass, he was trying to mop up the so freely flowing gore, and Bobby led him into the bathroom and there administered first aid on the most approved principle of the ambulance classes it had been part of his duty to attend in the early days of his service. He said to the sufferer:

‘I am a police officer. If you wish to take proceedings, I am available as a witness.'

‘No question of proceedings,' mumbled the other through Bobby's handkerchief he had now borrowed and was rapidly reducing to the same sodden condition as his own. ‘Pure accident... boxing lesson... own fault entirely... misunderstanding... nothing more.'

‘I see,' said Bobby, and went back into the sitting-room, where Dorothy was abusing her victory – for no woman is ever magnanimous in triumph – by rubbing the salt of silent scorn into the wounds already inflicted by the lash of her indignant tongue.

‘May I ask what this is all about?' Bobby said.

‘Mr Aske,' said Dorothy loftily, ‘has been behaving like... like... like...' But there she gave it up, obviously quite unable to think of anything in the whole created universe to which it was even possible to think of comparing Mr Aske's conduct.

‘Who is the other gentleman?' asked Bobby, as gurgling sounds from the bathroom became more and more apparent.

‘Mr Markham, father's partner,' Dorothy explained, a little colour coming back into her cheeks that had before been pale with anger or fright or both.

‘And if he says anything of the sort again, I'll lam him another,' interposed Aske.

‘Oh, oh,' gasped Dorothy, quite bewildered by this sudden effort at self-assertion on the part of one who had appeared so thoroughly and deservedly crushed, brow-beaten, and subdued. One could almost see her thinking that this insolent uprising must be suitably dealt with. ‘I think you had better go, if you don't mind, Mr Aske,' she said very firmly. ‘I hope you will please understand that after your disgraceful behaviour to-day I never wish to see you again.'

It was a knock-down blow as cruel as effective. Mr Aske metaphorically sprawled. Bobby felt quite sorry for him, and also a little contemptuous, for indeed his own day was not yet. Aske – how little he cared for Bobby's presence! – drooped, wilted, wailed:

‘Oh, I say, Dorothy, I say...'

For all answer, Dorothy looked extremely determined and resolute; indeed, one could only wonder that so small a face could find room for the expression of so much determination and resolve. Thoughtfully and kindly Bobby collected for the dazed youth his hat from one corner, his gloves from another. He said:

‘Your gloves, Mr Aske. Do you always get them from Barselod's?'

‘I never go to Barselod's; I get my things from the Stores generally,' Aske answered, with all the meekness imaginable, for in fact the spirit had gone out of him.

Bobby was turning the gloves over in his hands. They were tan; they were leather; they showed faint scratches here and there, but only such as normal wear might cause. He said:

‘As you know, I am a police officer, and, since proceedings in court may follow all this, I must ask you to tell me what has happened.'

But that neither of them seemed in any way anxious to do. There had been a quarrel. Bobby observed that he had already managed to deduce that fact for himself. Markham was a bounder and a cad. That was Mr Aske's contribution to the desired explanation. Mr Aske had behaved like a brute. That was Dorothy's contribution. Mr Markham, emerging from the bathroom with a fresh handkerchief – one belonging to his assailant that Bobby, having exhausted his own, had commandeered – held firmly to a still uncertain nose and an eye swelling as visibly as ever did widow under the influence of successive cups of tea, repeated that it was all due to a misunderstanding, an accident.

‘Next time,' observed Mr Aske moodily, ‘the misunderstanding will be worse,' He added to Bobby the palpable lie: ‘We had a row about politics – Russia and Fascism and all that, you know.'

‘Exactly,' confirmed Mr Markham. ‘Next time I shall be better prepared with more effective arguments,' he added viciously.

‘I think you had better both go at once, please,' interposed Dorothy.

Mr Markham moved towards the door.

‘I hope you will think over what I was saying,' he said to Dorothy. ‘It wasn't exaggerated in any way whatever.' To Aske he said: ‘I don't intend to take legal proceedings, but you needn't think that this ends it. It doesn't.'

He vanished. Aske looked piteously at Dorothy. She looked relentlessly at the door. Mr Aske crept towards it, very, very slowly. Dorothy remained the picture of Nemesis in the most severe mood possible. Aske opened the door a crack – hardly enough to let a mouse pass through. Dorothy drew herself together.

‘You need not call again, Mr Aske,' she announced.

‘Oh, I say,' wailed the unhappy youth. He vanished through the door as though those fatal words had fairly flung him through it. The next moment it opened again and Aske's head reappeared. ‘Wish I had lammed him twice as hard, and next time I will, too,' he announced, and with that vanished once more.

‘Well, I never!' gasped Dorothy, breathless again.

Then she looked at Bobby, evidently inviting him to follow the other two. But that he had no intention of doing, though this somewhat tumultuous scene on which he had stumbled had not exactly helped him in his purpose of discovering whether Dorothy showed any signs of nervous excitement and strain as her father had disclosed.

‘I've called again,' he exclaimed, ‘to see if you can't help us on one or two more points about Tudor Lodge. You've no idea how important even the smallest detail may turn out.'

‘Oh, but I've told you everything over and over again,' she protested.

‘There are just one or two points,' he insisted. He added with intention: ‘Nothing you can say now can hurt Miss Barton.'

‘No, I know,' she answered. ‘But it's all so sad and dreadful to think of her living like that, and dying like that.'

‘You know we think it was her pearl necklace she was murdered for?' he asked.

She made a little gesture of assent. She seemed fairly composed, however, except for the after-effects of the scene they had just gone through, and Bobby thought to himself that either she was entirely innocent or else that she possessed an extraordinary power of self-control. But, then, women often do possess that power. Changing the subject a little, Bobby said:

‘I am afraid I called at rather an unlucky moment – or perhaps at a lucky one.'

‘Mr Markham was rude and Mr Aske was very silly,' she answered briefly. ‘That's all.'

He tried to get her to be more explicit, though without at first much success. But it was easy to see that the two men were rivals; and it appeared that Markham had been pressing his suit for some time, though until recently Dorothy had hardly been inclined to take him or it very seriously. To her he had always simply been her father's partner, but apparently Markham himself had, until Aske's arrival on the scene, entertained stronger hopes than Dorothy had ever realised.

‘Of course, I always had to be nice to him,' she explained. ‘He was dad's partner.'

But now it appeared that what had disturbed her so much was that this afternoon, calling on the pretext of leaving a message for her father, Markham had begun to use towards her a mixture of threats and of claims upon her gratitude.

‘I don't care,' she burst out, ‘if he has saved father and the firm and me, too, from bankruptcy. I'm not going to marry him for that. I can earn my own living, can't I?'

‘Of course,' agreed Bobby, even though he knew well that earning a living in the chaotic, lunatic-directed world of today is not always an easy task; ‘but if Mr Markham is a partner, he saved himself when he saved the firm, didn't he?'

‘It was about some money he got on the Continent,' Dorothy explained. ‘Father told me. It was some speculation of his own. I suppose he could have kept the money. I don't know. He put it all in the business. He said there were all sorts of silly laws, and if he had been found out he might have been hanged for it. Father says there are new regulations about money and speculating in the exchanges and that sort of thing, and that in some countries you might be shot if you were caught doing it.'

‘I didn't know it was a capital offence anywhere,' Bobby observed.

‘Mr Markham said what he had done he wasn't a bit ashamed of or sorry for. He said it was only stopping silly waste – a sort of madness – but he risked his life, because, if he had been caught, that's what would have happened. And he wanted to make out I owed him father's fife, because he would probably have committed suicide if the business had failed, and I said I didn't know anything about that but I wasn't going to marry him. And he got so excited I ran to the door to get away from him, and he followed me, and then, when I opened it, Mr Aske was there, and they quarrelled, and Mr Markham said something and Mr Aske – oh, he was angry; he just hit out, and Mr Markham went down such a flop, and I was glad. Of course,' she added primly, ‘I wasn't going to encourage Mr Aske to behave like that.'

Bobby reflected that it rather looked as if Aske were less far from pardon than at the moment he probably feared. It was also fairly plain that the dressing-down he had received had been in part merely Dorothy giving vent to her excitement, just as now, once started, she was finding it a relief to talk.

‘I shan't dare say a word to father,' she said.

‘I called partly to make some enquiries about him,' Bobby observed. ‘I thought he looked very ill.'

Dorothy, who had been moving about the room putting back in position the disarranged furniture, and who hitherto had been talking fairly freely, paused and straightened herself. Her expression changed. It became alert and watchful and a little uneasy.

‘He is very worried,' she said. ‘It is making him ill... the business, I mean,' she added quickly, as if afraid Bobby might think she attributed his worry to some other cause.

He tried to persuade her to answer him more freely, insisting that every shred of information she could give, however apparently irrelevant, might yet prove important. But she only repeated what she had said before – that she had already told everything she knew – and Bobby had to retire, a little disappointed, with no fresh information, except that the claims Markham had put forward, though no doubt exaggerated, since speculation in the exchanges, even if a sufficiently serious offence in many countries, is nowhere punishable with death, yet appeared to corroborate Mr Yelton's story of the source of the money used to pay off the bank overdraft.

‘Unless they made up the yarn together,' Bobby mused; ‘and that would imply Markham as an accomplice, which doesn't seem likely. Still, it does point to him as a possible new candidate for suspicion, though there is nothing to suggest he knew anything about Tudor Lodge, or had ever heard of the existence of the pearl necklace.'