Comes a Stranger (20 page)

“It's not a question of ‘why' at present,” answered the Major. “It's still a question of ‘who.' The murder was committed with a three-two revolver. You are known to have had one in your possession and you are unable to produce it. You are unable to offer any independent confirmation of your statement that you were in your room at the moment of the murder. Mr. Kayne was a trustee of the library and on his death you take his place.”

Broast was fidgeting nervously with the various articles on his desk. He said after a pause:

“It's simply absurd to suppose I had anything to do with it. Why should I? The trustee business is merely formal—merely a precaution against Miss Kayne marrying some-one unsuitable. I'm sorry if I lost my temper. I apologize. I'm afraid I didn't understand. I never, never in my wildest dreams,” he declared with emphasis, “expected to be under suspicion for murder.” He paused again, glaring at them challengingly. He gave a harsh laugh. “I suppose next,” he said, “I shall be accused of murdering the original of that photograph you've got there. It wouldn't surprise me. Is that the next item?” he asked with a dark irony.

“All we require at present is that you should answer the questions put you,” the Major retorted. “You may refuse to do so. You may require the presence of a lawyer if you wish. You understand that our questions are connected with our inquiry into the murder of Mr. Nat Kayne. Are you willing to answer them or do you refuse?”

“Certainly, certainly I am perfectly willing,” Mr. Broast answered now. “I must apologize again. I am afraid I didn't quite understand at first. If you really think I murdered young Kayne or the man whose photograph you've got there and that I've hidden the body—well, you are perfectly welcome to look on all the shelves to see if I've got it tucked away somewhere behind the books. To me, this young American's story sounds obvious invention. If you think differently, if you take seriously this tale of something seen through thick shutters in the dark—” He shrugged his shoulders with an evident sneer. “After all,” he said, “it should be easy to find a hidden body here. I haven't had much time to hide it, have I?”

The Major paid no attention to this. He asked a good many more questions, repeating some of them over again, but he always got the same answers, and he got no further information. Probably, Mr. Broast agreed, everyone knew he possessed a pistol. Probably most of them knew where he kept it. Most of them could have taken it, if they wished, and waited their opportunity. Young Kayne himself, for that matter, or his co-trustee, Sir William.

“The ladies as well,” went on Mr. Broast. “Miss Kayne, Miss Farrar,” this last name he accompanied by a malicious glance at Bobby, “my typist, Miss Perkins, the rest of the servants, including the charwomen who come in to clean, that sham American professor, Mr. Adams—I suppose it would not occur to you he might be worth questioning?”

“He has been interrogated,” the Major answered. “Any-one else?”

Mr. Broast added the names of one or two other visitors.

“Including,” he finished with emphasis, “the young man whose preposterous story seems to interest you so much, who says he saw a dead body here at the moment when there was actually a dead body not far away. To my mind, highly suggestive.”

Major Harley observed that the point had not been over-looked, and after one or two more questions he and Bobby retired. Mr. Broast made no attempt to accompany them to the door, and when he and the Major reached it, Bobby looked back and saw Mr. Broast standing there in the shadows at the further end of the library, watching their departure. It was growing late now, and in that dark and airless place of gloom, cut up by the transverse book-cases into little bays where all day long the light was dim, already the coming night lay heavily. This library seemed to Bobby no place of peace and calm and learning, but of lurking evil, a place of darkness and old death, a place of hidden whispers and secret device, and the aged, white-haired librarian, standing there in the distance, watching them with a malign intentness, gave him the impression of an ancient spider for ever spinning webs in which his victims were to be entangled.

Major Harley, unimaginative army man as he was, seemed to experience something of the same feeling.

“Wants some air here, some light, too,” he muttered. “I don't like the place. I don't like the man. Inhuman. He would commit a murder as easily as you or I would eat our dinners.”

“Only,” said Bobby thoughtfully, “not without cause.”

He turned abruptly and walked back towards Broast. He had seen him lift his hand. He had seen something gleam in it. As he approached the librarian raised his hand again, and again there was something bright and hard in it. Bobby walked on. Broast slipped away behind some book cases. Bobby paused. Broast appeared again from behind. He had slipped round somehow. His smile was dark and thin. He was holding in his hand a small electric torch. Bobby wondered if it was that he had seen or if it had been something else. Broast said:

“You have forgotten something?”

“Not at all,” Bobby answered, looking at him steadily.

If it had been a pistol in his hand, the weapon had probably now been well hidden. Bobby went back to the Major.

“I thought I saw a small pistol in his hand,” he explained. “When I got up to him, he was holding an electric torch. If it was a pistol I saw, he hid it again.”

“Oh, well,” the Major said thoughtfully.

They opened the heavy, fireproof door and went into the ante-room where Miss Perkins was sitting before her typewriter, though she was making no attempt to use it. She looked up when they entered, and then got to her feet with her accustomed giggle.

“Oh, I'm so sorry,” she said, “but I couldn't help hearing a little—I mean, when Mr. Broast was talking. He has such a penetrating voice, hasn't he? especially when he's at all upset.”

“I shouldn't have thought anything could have been heard through that door when it was shut,” observed the Major, looking at it.

“Oh, no, only it wasn't shut, it was open,” explained Miss Perkins, giggling again. “I'm so sorry, but it was.”

“How was that?” demanded the Major.

Miss Perkins did not explain. Instead she said:

“So I couldn't Help hearing, could I? It's so dreadful about Mr. Broast's pistol being lost, isn't it? Only I'm sure you can't think he would murder Anyone—not even Mr. Kayne, even if he did Dislike him so much.”

“Why do you think he did?” demanded the Major sharply.

“Mr. Broast always said so himself,” answered Miss Perkins, “only of course he didn't Mean it—I mean to say, not like that. Because if people murdered everyone they disliked, it would be so Dreadful, wouldn't it?” She stopped to giggle again, and then went on: “Oh, I'm so sorry, only I do think now, though it's most Unpleasant, perhaps I ought to confess.”

“Confess?” snapped the Major, startled. “Miss Perkins, please remember this is a serious matter.”

“Oh, yes, indeed it is, isn't it? that's just what I've been thinking,” said Miss Perkins, looking more like a frightened canary than ever, too frightened even to produce her accustomed giggle. “Only of course it isn't Really important, only it isn't Quite True what I told you about the photograph, I mean to say, about its being his, because I haven't got one, not of him, and I daresay now he never really meant it, and when I told people they didn't very often look as if they believed it, so when I found the photograph, and Mrs. Somerville didn't know who it was, and hadn't ever seen it, and no one else here had ever seen it either, I thought it might have been him if I had ever had one, and so I mean to say I said it was him, and he really was an American gentleman, and when I saw this one had New York on the back, I thought perhaps it was Meant, so I didn't think it was Really Wrong, at least not very. I mean to say, with me expecting a letter every day, and always looking in the paper to see when the post was in from America.”

“Good God,” said the Major feebly, looking at Bobby as though asking for help to stand up against this torrent of words to which Bobby himself had been listening with close attention.

“May I put a few questions, sir?” he asked, and when the Major nodded a relieved assent Bobby proceeded to try to disentangle the facts that Miss Perkins's involved observations seemed to contain somewhere.

Ultimately it emerged that Miss Perkins had no special reason to think Mr. Broast disliked the dead man, other than the fact that a good deal of quarrelling went on between them all, the two trustees and the librarian, jointly, variously, and severally. Nat Kayne was quarrelsome argumentative, and resentful. Sir William was authoritative and bullying. Mr. Broast was prickly, hated interference, contemptuous of all opinions that did not coincide with his own. Fertile breeding ground for displays of bad temper, but hardly for murder, Bobby thought. As regards her own corrected story she now told, Miss Perkins insisted that she had, in fact, been very friendly with a young American during her term of employment in London. He had taken her out a few times to dinners and theatres. What grounds had really existed for her belief that he was actuated by anything more than a good-natured sympathy for a pathetically lonely and helpless woman, did not appear. A few kisses seemed to have passed, nothing more. But Bobby, watching her more attentively now, remembered what Olive had said about Miss Perkins's potential good looks being quite up to the average if she would only try to make the best of herself. He noticed specially the perfection of form and regularity of her small white teeth Olive had mentioned. After all, there are few girls who do not possess at any rate a share of attractiveness, real ugliness is as rare as great beauty, even though Miss Perkins did seem as much inclined to emphasize her bad points as are most of her sex to bring out their good ones. She admitted quite frankly though that there had been nothing of the nature of a formal engagement.

“We understood each other,” she said, and seemed to think that was all that was required.

Then the young man returned to America, promising to write, and assuring her he would be back soon. Even at the time when she came to take up her new post in the Kayne library, she was growing uneasy at his prolonged absence and silence. She had already declared herself engaged, Mr. Broast having complained, at their first interview, of her predecessor's interest in young men that had interfered with attention to work. So Miss Perkins had told him he need not be afraid of that in her case as she was already engaged. She told Mrs. Somerville the same thing when engaging her room, but Mrs. Somerville, more curious than Mr. Broast, had asked questions. When, therefore, Miss Perkins found, pushed away behind a drawer in a wardrobe in the room given her, a photograph of an attractive young man, taken in America, she had apparently regarded it as a kind of omen or promise. While she was still looking at it, she said, Mrs. Somerville came into the room, and at once jumped to the conclusion that it was the ‘young gentleman' Miss Perkins had spoken of. Certain doubts Mrs. Somerville had not entirely concealed being thus laid to rest, Miss Perkins had allowed her assumption to go uncorrected, and had afterwards shown the photograph to others in the village to make sure she was safe in adopting it as that of her missing fiancé.

“I'm so sorry,” she told them, when at last all this had been elicited by Bobby's patient questioning, “I know it wasn't quite nice, but then he really did promise me his photo, and I'm sure he only forgot, or else he would, and so I thought it wouldn't be Really Wrong to pretend. I used to put it on my table at the library sometimes, it was so Comforting, if you know what I mean, when I was feeling low or Mr. Broast was more cross than usual. Of course, I never let him see it, but I do remember it was on the table once when Mr. Virtue was there, asking if he might see over the library, only Mr. Broast wouldn't let him, and he was looking at it—Mr. Virtue, I mean—so I told him who it was—at least, I mean to say, I told him who I said it was.”

This story finally got down in more or less coherent form and Miss Perkins's signature to it obtained, the Major and Bobby departed. Once outside, the Major said:

“Well, I don't see that her story helps much, but it does clear up one point—how the little fool got hold of the photograph and why Virtue's description corresponded with it.”

“Yes, sir,” Bobby agreed, though in a troubled and worried voice, for there were points in the story as she had told it that did not seem to him quite consistent, and yet he did not see what bearing it could have upon the main problem of Nat Kayne's murder.

Major Harley did not seem fully satisfied either, or else he noticed the hesitation in Bobby's voice.

“Well, if she's lying, what's she lying for?” he demanded irritably. “Doesn't seem to link up anywhere that I can see.”

“No, sir,” answered Bobby. “Only I can't help thinking there's a lot more to this case than we've any idea of yet—a lot going on behind the scenes, cross currents, old hidden enmities and motives, things like that. I can't help getting the idea that it's all centred on the library somehow, though I can't imagine how.”

The Major grunted and muttered and growled uneasily and inaudibly. Finally he said aloud:

“Can't see it—nothing more innocent than a library surely, lots of old books dating from the year one, most of them.”

“Yes, sir,” agreed Bobby. “I know a library doesn't seem quite a likely centre for crime—murder. Only—” He turned and stared at the building they had just left, and his eyes were dark and heavy with thought. “I can't help feeling, too,” he said, “that the Nat Kayne murder is only on the fringe. There are so many little points that seem as if they ought to give a lead somehow if we could only find it, and yet none of them seem to point towards Nat Kayne. For one thing, if Virtue had seen that photo before, why did he seem so surprised when we showed it him—rather more than surprised, indeed.”