Four Strange Women (31 page)

“Yes. Yes,” Olive said. “One of them,” she almost whispered, “and I've seen them all and it doesn't seem possible.” They were both silent, looking at each other across the table, and it was as though a cloud of horror rose there between them as from the heart of evil itself. “How could a woman—any woman?”

“How could any human being for that matter?” retorted Bobby. “Only once you get going—once you get playing with hell...”

He left the sentence unfinished. Olive was looking round, she seemed to draw a sort of comfort, a kind of re-assurance from her commonplace, familiar surroundings, as though they told her the ordinary framework of everyday life still existed, that in and around and about it still moved ordinary, everyday people, people whose lives touched no such dreadful depths as those of which now they two seemed to have caught a glimpse. She said musingly:— “Saints seem incredible, too. If some of us can be saints, then I suppose others—” She paused, and only by an effort did she control herself. “Do you know,” she said in a surprised tone, “I think I feel a bit hysterical.”

“Well, that's no good,” Bobby told her. “Take a hold on yourself. Of course, I do, too, sometimes,” he conceded.

“No good kicking and screaming, I suppose,” agreed Olive. “Bobby, it can't go on. Surely you know enough to do something?”

“If I go to the P.P. with a yarn like this and no more proof than I've shown you, they'll have me certified,” Bobby answered. “If I go to the Yard, they'll call up Midwych and suggest that a senior officer of greater experience should be appointed to handle the case. You see, it's so entirely, so awfully, outside ordinary knowledge.”

“There's what Henry Darmoor told you about his having been to see Higham's, in Bond Street?”

“Yes, that's how I got my first hint of the truth,” Bobby agreed. “Not much by itself, though.”

“There's what Mr. Higham told you about the jewellery vanishing?—”

“The deduction is plain to my mind,” Bobby agreed again, “but other people would call it a bit thin to act on. Deduction isn't proof, not by a long way.”

“There's all that about May Grayson's photographs...?”

“All of which might bear another interpretation,” Bobby said.

“Even together with what you saw when you went to Gwen Barton's flat?”

“They would just say that amounted to nothing,” Bobby said. “Which of course is quite true.”

“There's Mr. Eyton's story?”

“Yes, thank God,” Bobby said. “I think even the P.P. would admit that that clears one—but only one. Negative, you see, not positive. Same with your 'phone message. What I want is something clear and hard and concrete, something calculated to impress the official mind. Not mere reasoning from this to that. They are right in a way—there can always be a flaw in reasoning. You want facts to hang people on, not logic.”

“Well, what the porter at Henry Darmoor's flat told you is definite—I mean about heels. Isn't that direct evidence?”

“It's more the sort of thing I need,” Bobby admitted, “but it's not much by itself. Defending counsel would have the time of his life poking fun at the fatal proof of the high heels that weren't worn.”

“But surely there must be something?” she urged once more.

“Very likely,” he answered grimly, “but I haven't found it. I feel I know who it is and why, and just possibly I could make out a sufficient case for her to be watched in the hope of more proof turning up somewhere or somehow. But there's no immediate proof, and the question is—how to stop it happening again? If I put my theory forward, and if, after that, what I expect happens and there's another death, as in my belief is certain, then some notice of my ideas would be taken. She would be questioned perhaps. She would know she was suspected and she wouldn't dare go on. That would be something. In the meantime, there are Darmoor, De Legett, Eyton, and for one of them at least, it will be too late.”

They had been sitting there talking for so long that by now it was nearly closing time. They rose to go and as they left the restaurant, Olive, holding Bobby's arm, said:

“It's all like some awful nightmare, you feel you must wake up presently and find it's morning and it's just been a dream. What makes it even worse is that it's all mixed up with love—is it love?”

“Love gone wrong,” Bobby said slowly, “love gone wrong and bad, worse than bad.”

Next day Bobby took the first available train to Midwych and all the journey long he found his mind less occupied by the errand he had come on or by the details of the investigation, than by a memory of those last words he and Olive had exchanged as they left the restaurant the night before and by the confused and troubling thoughts to which they had given rise.

Was it really this strange passion or instinct or necessity of life, or what you will, which men call love, which irresistibly draws together the two sexes, on which indeed depends the existence both of the individual and of the race, which may in the last analysis be best defined perhaps as the urge to completeness, was it then this mystery of mysteries that had traced the dark and dreadful pattern of secret murder now slowly taking form and shape before his eyes? Was it really, he asked himself, of the same kin and kind, coming under the same category, as the steady and the tranquil force of his own feeling for Olive?

He found himself wondering a trifle uneasily if this emotion he himself experienced was the weaker or the less intense because it burned steadily, controlled and yet strengthening, rather than consuming utterly all things else? A difference, he thought, like that between the fire upon the hearth that warms the house and makes life possible and the fire that consumes all, even to the burning the house to the ground. A greater fire, no doubt, a fiercer heat, but one the sooner over and leaving behind it only death and a handful of cold ash.

Was love, then, he asked himself bewilderedly, a tree like that other one which bore upon itself the fruit of good and evil—fruit both of life and of death?

He remembered how continually there had been mention in this case of that excited restlessness he had himself noted both in Henry Darmoor, when he had first met him, when he had been inclined to attribute it to drink, and again and more recently in his recent talk with little Mr. Eyton. He himself had never felt like that in Olive's company, he had felt instead repose and gentleness and a freshness of the mind, and afterwards a clearer insight into other things.

He reflected that Love seemed like a gate opening on two different roads. Well, he supposed birth was like that, a gate to life, and each man's life was his own, duality of the necessary body and of the controlled and yet directive mind to be shaped into such common form as the will might choose. Was Love, too, a kind of birth to a fuller, ampler life, a duality again of physical and spiritual, of the necessary body and the dependent and yet directing mind, to be shaped into such form as again the will might choose?

Puzzling thoughts, and troubling, and the riddle one that Bobby felt beyond all powers of his own, though it was one that each must solve in his own way. A riddle, he reflected again, that had been too much for wiser heads than his own, and he remembered with a smile having read somewhere that Martin Luther had once expressed a wish that God had asked his advice and arranged to continue creating fresh members of the human race direct from clay, and so saved all the trouble and worry and confusion caused by what the philosophers have sometimes called the ‘most troublesome of all the passions.' Then, too, there was that common phrase ‘Sacred and Profane Love'. Perhaps that was it, and just as life can choose, if it will, to follow the paths of hell, so also love can make the same choice. Perhaps that was the sign of its supreme value, that it can turn to evil as well as to good, even as the greatest gift of God to man is the right to sin.

With a start he realized that he had reached his destination, and indeed he had only bare time to collect himself and his belongings and tumble out on the platform as the train started off again. At the county force headquarters he found that Superintendent Oxley, now acting deputy chief constable, was not there, having been unexpectedly called away on unexpectedly important business. Bobby, who had rung up from London to announce his coming arrival, was inclined to suspect that this ‘unexpectedly important business' was chiefly important because it saved Oxley from too close contact with an affair which he did not understand and which threatened uncomfortable repercussions. Besides, Bobby had to admit that there was also the excuse that Oxley probably felt he had been so far deliberately excluded from the investigation and that therefore those engaged in it could clear it up for themselves as best they could.

From the county headquarters Bobby went on to Asbury Cottage, where he was told that Colonel Glynne, on the advice of his doctor, had entered a nursing home for a few days' complete rest and quiet. He could be reached on the 'phone, naturally, but it was most undesirable that he should be worried. The doctor had declared that only matter of life and death could be sufficient justification for disturbing him. Bobby said grimly that this was precisely that—a matter of life and death. So, after some more argument, he was given the 'phone number of the nursing home, and, when he got through, heard his request for speech with the colonel received with undisguised horror and amazement. Quite out of the question, he was told, but with that quiet persistence which was one of his most valuable characteristics, he explained that he was going to ring up again and again, every five minutes if necessary, unless and until he got a direct refusal from Colonel Glynne himself. He did not quite succeed in obtaining that, but he did get from the doctor in charge a personal statement that his message had been given to the chief constable who had replied that Inspector Owen had his instructions and if he felt himself in any difficulty must consult the Public Prosecutor's Office or call in the assistance of Scotland Yard. The doctor also added that he was to tell the inspector that Colonel Glynne felt himself so near a complete breakdown that he had actually written out his resignation though as yet he had not sent it in. This, of course, was confidential, and only for Inspector Owen's own private information.

Not much help there, Bobby thought, as he put down the receiver. He went back to Midwych very doubtful what action he could take next, and yet stronger every moment in his deep instinct that immediate action was required. He had, of course, still to attend to the other of the two errands that had brought him to Midwych. But when he tried to find little Mr. Eyton, to deliver to him that warning he had been too late to give to Count de Legett, it was only to be informed that Eyton had resigned his post on the Midwych paper he worked for, had given up his house and sold his furniture, and that no one knew his present address.

“He just said he would find some place in London but he didn't know where yet,” one of his journalistic colleagues told Bobby. “I expect he'll ring through some time and let us know. He's been a bit queer lately, all raggy and nervy. Needed a rest cure all right.”

Bobby went away, trying to console himself for this second failure with the reflection that this warning, too, would almost certainly have been ineffective and might have served merely as a warning not to the victim, but to that dark unknown of whose identity he was growing more and more certain, but against whom so far he had been able to secure so little of the proof that a court of law requires. Not an uncommon dilemma, of course, for again and again police authorities know very well who is guilty but cannot act for lack of material, definite proof.

“A rest cure,” Bobby repeated to himself uneasily, remembering the last casual remark Eyton's journalistic friend had made, and he found himself hoping that it was only his own troubled imagination which had felt the phrase so ominous, though indeed there were too many names in his mind of those who had reached a ‘rest' lasting beyond the confines of this present world.

He returned to the station to take the next train back to London and there was surprised, so far as the developments of this case were not removing from him all capacity for surprise, to find Lady May Grayson. Apparently she had learned of his visit to Asbury Cottage and of his attempt, and of its failure, to get in touch with Colonel Glynne. Guessing that he would be likely to return to London she had come here on the chance of meeting him. Very evidently she was troubled and alarmed. For one thing she knew of Bobby's visits to Leonard and its result and evidently she feared consequences.

“Becky's in London, too,” she said, “though her father's so bad. When I ring up she is either out or she won't answer, and Leonard hasn't heard either.”

“Would he be likely to?” Bobby asked. “I understood they were not on very good terms.”

“You mean about me?” Lady May countered, and then when she saw that Bobby looked surprised, she added quickly:—“Oh, you mean about poor Mr. Cadman. He had behaved very badly to Becky and it set her against every one almost. She seems to think it was all every one's fault, and especially Leonard's for finding out and telling.”

“I suppose it was a great shock,” Bobby agreed, wondering if he knew all the story, or if Lady May knew it, and, if so, if he could induce her to tell it.

“You see,” Lady May said, “she always felt that it didn't matter so much about what Mr. Cadman had done—she thought she could change him.”

Bobby winced. ‘Changed' was a word he little liked to hear in connection with this case. It had acquired an ugly sound. He said:—

“Have you any idea why Miss Glynne has gone to London?”

Lady May did not answer at once. She was looking at him very closely and attentively, and somehow it seemed as though she had ceased to be the professional beauty and had become simply human, beset by secret doubts and fears, troubled by some deep misgiving. Bobby had an idea that what she was about to say might be of great importance and yet he dared not press her; for how easy it would be, in this crowded railway station, for her simply to turn and walk away. She said:—