Death Among the Sunbathers (20 page)

‘How did you find out?'

‘You agree that is so?' Mitchell asked. ‘You agree you did not tell the truth when you said you went straight back to your flat?'

I daresay you won't believe it,' Curtis answered slowly, ‘but at the time I thought it was the truth. Afterwards I began to have a vague idea – that it wasn't. I had had a good deal to drink. I couldn't remember clearly, my mind was all hazy and confused. All I knew was I had been saying things Jo wouldn't forget in a hurry. That was all I was really clear about, that and waiting for her outside that little wayside pub. It was only some time afterwards that I began to think I had been to Leadeane as well; even now I don't remember anything about a crossword puzzle. I suppose I hardly knew what I was doing, what with having been drinking and my quarrel with Jo.'

‘Then you agree your first story was false and instead of returning at once to your Chelsea flat you went on to Leadeane and waited there in a kind of concealment till Mrs Curtis left?'

‘So far as I know I was there only a very short time,' Curtis answered. ‘I think I began to feel that Jo wouldn't even let me talk to her while I was like that. I went straight back to Chelsea and started drinking again, and I don't know much more till I heard the phone ringing and Sybil telling me what had happened. What with my head still a bit dizzy, and that coming on the top of it – you know, it is a bit of a shock to hear your wife's been murdered – well, I wasn't in any state to remember very clearly what I had actually done.'

‘Is there anything else you've forgotten?' Mitchell asked dryly, and though he had not meant much when he put the question he saw Curtis shrink terribly before it, shrink in a literal way as though he grew physically smaller.

‘That's not... possible,' he croaked rather than spoke, ‘not possible,' and startled at the idea, Mitchell realized that sometimes the thought came terribly to Curtis that perhaps it was in fact he who was guilty, that, distracted and half drunken as he was, he had committed the crime, in some abnormal, as it were, unconscious condition, so that all memory of it had passed from him.

‘Not possible,' Mitchell decided to himself, ‘couldn't be that... yet it's what he's afraid of.'

After a long pause, while Curtis sat downcast and brooding and Mitchell in equal silence turned this new thought over and over in his mind, the superintendent said at last, ‘Well, Mr Curtis, that's all I've to ask you at present. Tomorrow perhaps I shall want another talk. I'm seeing Detective Owen to-night at ten to get his report, and perhaps after that we shall be able to see our way more clearly.'

Little Mr Bryan's determination to speak very seriously to Miss James about the consumption of whisky she had been indulging in that Bobs-the-Boy had so treacherously revealed, he put into force that same evening in dramatic fashion.

While she was taking a rest, full length on the sofa in her room just by the open window after a laborious and even exciting day – a new client, enjoying a sun bath on the roof, had dropped off to sleep and wakened to find all the skin off her nose and most of it off the rest of her face as well, her reaction to these facts taking the form of violent hysterics – Mr Bryan knocked gently and, being bidden to enter, came in. Without speaking, while she watched him, he began to conduct an ostentatious search, looking behind chairs and curtains and in other obvious and unlikely places. After a time she said sourly,

‘What's the game?'

‘I am looking,' explained Mr Bryan, ‘for bottles of whisky.'

Miss James put out her hand for her bag and produced a bunch of keys that she threw across to him with such good aim or luck that it caught him on an elbow that had but little flesh to protect it. He said something or another, and Miss James waited till he had finished. Then she said,

‘There's two in the first-aid cupboard. Any one but a fool would have looked there first. One's empty,' she added, and as an afterthought, ‘the other's got nothing in it.'

Mr Bryan went across to the indicated cupboard and verified these facts.

‘You know what we agreed?' he asked.

‘What's happened wasn't in our agreement,' she answered moodily.

‘All the more reason–' he said and paused.

‘There's half a dozen more coming,' she told him in the same angry, moody tones, ‘marked “Malted Milk”. Don't you try to stop them.'

He closed the cupboard very carefully and slowly, and came back towards her.

‘I suppose you've gone quite mad,' he said.

‘I can't sleep,' she answered. ‘That's what's done it. I can't sleep.'

He made no comment on this, but his eyes gleamed like those of the weasel before it springs. She mumbled,

‘It's all very well for you, you've no nerves. I have. I tell you I can't sleep. I just lie and I can't sleep.' Her voice rose suddenly from its mumbling to a scream. ‘Not without that stuff,' she cried.

He continued to watch her in the same slow, malevolent silence. Still he did not speak, and now she struggled up to a sitting position on the sofa and sat, staring back at him.

‘It's not only me,' she said presently. ‘Zack's the same... it's all very well for you... you took jolly good care you weren't in it... nothing you saw... we did, Zack and me.'

‘Zack's as big a fool as you, bigger,' the little man snapped out at her. ‘What you want, both of you, isn't whisky, it's prussic acid.'

‘Well, fetch it along, quick as you like,' she answered, staring at him still.

It was in a milder voice, as if that defiance had a little affected him in one way or another, that he answered,

‘It's all right if only you and Zack don't lose your heads. We're perfectly safe.'

‘Safe,' she almost screamed, her face flushing suddenly, her eyes bloodshot and wild. She was on her feet now, gesticulating with both hands, ‘Safe?...' she repeated. ‘With him... following... watching... waiting... there all the time and making sure you know it.'

‘Who's that?' Bryan asked.

‘You know,' she answered, ‘you know all right... that Scotland Yard man... Owen they call him... Owen... knows, he does... and now he's only waiting till he's ready.'

‘Nonsense,' Bryan answered, ‘he doesn't know anything... how could he?... and it wouldn't matter if he did... You're just panicking... why, you've never even seen the fellow, have you?'

‘No,' she admitted, ‘but he's there... all the time... that's what gets on your nerves... you never see him, but all the time you know he's there and all the time you keep hearing things...'

‘Nonsense,' Bryan repeated. ‘What's all that amount to?... He can't know anything.'

‘He suspects,' Miss James answered. ‘If he doesn't, why is he always... always just not there?'

‘You're letting your nerves run away with you,' Bryan insisted. ‘It's just your nerves... that's all... Only once you start giving way to nerves, you're no good, and you're only making it worse with whisky. All you've got to do is to keep yourself in hand.'

‘Zack's just the same,' she said, sitting down again. ‘He feels just the same... He says he thinks Owen was one of the men in the private enclosure yesterday, only he's not sure which.'

‘Zack's as big a fool as you,' Bryan retorted. ‘You and he, you have got to stop this whisky game, both of you.'

‘Can't be done,' she answered sullenly, and then, when he turned his cold patient eyes on her, she added in the same sullen way, ‘Not till you've got rid of that detective fellow... Owen... if that's his name.'

‘All in good time,' Bryan answered quietly. ‘There's that new odd job man, Bobs-the-Boy he calls himself. It seems he doesn't like this Owen person any more than you do, or even less perhaps. Got you both scared seemingly, but perhaps this Bobs-the-Boy may be useful.'

Miss James began to laugh, a low cackling laugh that went on and on, breaking at times into a high note, and then resuming its low tone.

‘Shut up, can't you?' he said to her fiercely.

 ‘All right, all right,' she answered. ‘But you're so funny... You've always someone else on hand to do the dirty work for you... Don't forget to tell him if he can't sleep, then whisky's the boy, whisky, not Bobs-the-Boy then.'

‘Oh, shut up,' Bryan snarled at her again. ‘Besides, he's not the sort of sniveller you are, and Zack too... he let out a lot... I'm not quite sure what he meant, but whatever it was, it didn't trouble his sleep. And he thinks it's him this Scotland Yard fellow's watching. I don't know if he's right, but that's what he thinks, and he don't like it, either... he was hinting what he would do.'

‘Well, then...' Miss James said, ‘well, sounds like he's the man we want.'

‘We should have to take him into our confidence,' Bryan observed.

‘If it's right what you say,' she observed, ‘we can risk that... if it's right Owen's after him, too.'

‘Owen seems to have got on all your nerves pretty thoroughly.' Bryan grumbled. ‘I don't know how he's managed it... he isn't on mine... but then I don't cultivate nerves... Why do you think he's so dangerous?'

‘I just feel it,' she answered. ‘If he wasn't... he suspects... he's watching all the time, never showing himself, just watching, asking questions, putting everything together; I can hear him when I lie awake... I can hear him making notes... only you never see him... other people do but you don't... you just feel him all the time... laying a trap there... noticing something here you've never thought of yourself... I would rather be a fox or a hare with the dogs after me; at least they can see what's following them but you can't.'

‘He's just got on your nerves,' Bryan repeated, ‘that's what it is... he's got on your nerves and you've made it worse swilling whisky... If you had kept off whisky you would have forgotten all about him by now.'

‘If it wasn't for whisky,' she retorted, ‘I wouldn't ever sleep.. If you don't sleep, then you go mad. Whisky's saved me from that; at least, I think it has.' She stopped and gave her cackle of laughter again. ‘Set on your Bobs-the-Boy to save us from Owen; if he does, then I'll stop the whisky, too.'

Mr Bryan did not answer. He was deep in thought, his sharp chin cupped in one skinny hand. There seemed something uncanny about him now; he had the air of a skeleton musing upon death.

Miss James lay back again on her sofa. The evening was warm and still and the window at her side was open. She stared out idly at the garden below where the shadows were lying thickly as the darkness increased. Presently she said, half to herself,

‘I wouldn't wonder if he wasn't there now, just watching us.'

Bryan took no notice, and indeed did not seem to have heard. He was still deep in thought. After a long pause she turned her head and flung at him angrily,

‘All very well for you... you stop in the background... you take care you don't risk your own precious skin... It's different when you have to do things yourself.'

‘I have done – things myself before to-day,' he answered calmly, ‘and perhaps I shall again soon.'

‘Oh, well,' she said, letting her head fall back and resuming her stare at the garden, watching it intently as if she expected to see at any moment some sign of that watcher who some secret intuition seemed to tell her was there, implacable in patience and resolve.

It was a thought that set her trembling as she lay back on her couch, and then the door opened and Zachary Dodd came in, with a kind of clumsy silence, treading on tiptoe, but making the boards creak beneath his elephantine weight, closing the door behind him with infinite caution, and as he turned from doing so knocking over a chair to fall clattering backwards. He said in a rumbling whisper as loud as most men's lifted voice,

‘Has Hunter come yet?'

Neither of the others answered. Apparently they thought reply superfluous. In the same loud whisper, Dodd said,

‘If he hasn't, that detective has; Owen, I mean.'

‘What's that?' Bryan snapped, roused at once, and Miss James jumped to her feet.

‘You saw him? You've seen him?' she almost screamed.

But Dodd shook his head.

‘When I do, I'll scrag him,' he said, mingling his words with many oaths. ‘I'm fed up... You know he's always there and yet he never is.'

‘If you didn't see him —' began Bryan, but Dodd interrupted impatiently.

‘I tell you no one sees him,' he almost shouted. ‘You only... one way or another, you know he's been there and that's all... when I see him, I'll do him in,' he added and confirmed it with fresh oaths.

‘What's the good of talking like that,' Miss James interposed. ‘You'll never see him, none of us will, not till he's ready... then it'll be us that'll be done in, not him.'

‘Well, then...' Dodd muttered, ‘well... now then.'

‘If you haven't seen him,' Bryan repeated once more, ‘how do you know...?'

‘Oh, this time he left his card,' Dodd answered, laughing harshly, and while the others stared at him he produced a slip of pasteboard from his pocket and threw it on the table. ‘There it is,' he said.

It bore in fact Owen's name and in addition to his address the legend: ‘C.I.D. Scotland Yard'. Round it the three of them stood, grouped in a common and disturbing fear.

‘Where was it?' Bryan asked.

‘In my room, on the floor, down there,' Dodd answered, with a jerk of his head over his shoulder towards that portion of the grounds where was the men's private enclosure he was in charge of. ‘He must have dropped it... accident or purpose... he must have been there half an hour ago... Bobs-the-Boy says he saw a man walking down that way, but he thought it was one of the members and took no notice. Half an hour or more he may have been there, looking round.'