Death Among the Sunbathers (22 page)

He led the way to the house, and close behind him followed Bobs-the-Boy, like a second, darker, more threatening shadow.

When they came back to the room on the first floor where Bryan had left his two associates, Zachary Dodd and Miss James, he saw to his surprise that during his absence they had been joined by a newcomer, Horace Hunter, the wholesale fur merchant of Howland Yard.

‘You,' Bryan exclaimed sharply, standing still in the doorway. ‘What's brought you here?'

Hunter was at the other end of the room, standing before the fireplace. He looked flushed and excited, and had evidently been talking and gesticulating freely. Zachary Dodd was sitting at the table and Miss James was still on the couch before the now curtained window. Before Hunter could answer she called out shrilly to Bryan,

‘Did you find him? But you wouldn't... it was Owen, I know it was, and you never saw him.'

‘Owen?' Hunter repeated, catching at the name. ‘You mean he was here? It was Owen you saw...? Are you sure?'

‘Sure and certain, too,' Miss James answered him in the same loud, shrill tones. She added, ‘He's everywhere, he's nowhere.'

‘Never mind that now,' commanded Bryan from the doorway. ‘You're making a bogey of the fellow; you're letting him get on your nerves. That's only silly, losing your head that way.' He flung out an accusing skinny hand at Miss James. ‘You're letting yourself get hysterical,' he said, but she only muttered to herself and took no other notice.

Bryan still did not move from his position in the doorway. Bobs-the-Boy, standing a yard or two back, escaped the notice of the three in the room. Zachary Dodd grumbled in his heavy, muttering tones,

‘We've got to do something about him... I don't know what we can do about him.'

‘It was him brought Horry Hunter here,' Miss James told Bryan. ‘Whenever anyone does anything, it's always because of him.'

‘Is that true? What about him?' Bryan asked Hunter.

‘I haven't seen him myself,' Hunter began, and Miss James interrupted him shrilly,

‘Oh, you wouldn't... no one ever does... not yet.'

‘Shut up, will you?' Bryan screamed at her, but her flushed face, her heaving breast, her heavy breathing all remained the same.

‘I haven't seen him myself,' Hunter repeated, ‘but he's been around a lot... I didn't know who it was at first, then I found out... asking questions, wanting to know... There's something he's got hold of.'

‘That's us,' Miss James muttered, ‘it's us he's got hold of.'

‘Oh, shut up,' Hunter shouted at her in his turn, but he had now become very pale, and Zachary, at the table, had begun to wipe perspiration from his face.

Even Bryan was silent, and all of them had the feeling that an unknown grip, invisible, impalpable, inescapable, was closing slowly in upon them. It would not have taken much at that instant to have set them all into some such access of hysterics as that the woman amongst them was fighting against. They were like men choking in a fog from which they did not know how to seek relief, and alone, Bobs-the-Boy, looking on from behind, neither speaking nor moving, only watching, seemed immune from this miasma of panic. Bryan, glancing back and seeing him there, seemed to derive a certain courage from the other's silence and immobility.

‘That won't do, no sense to it,' he repeated. ‘Pull yourselves together, can't you? You're like a lot of babies frightened at a nursery tale.'

‘Yes, I know,' Hunter agreed, ‘but this sort of thing is a bit worrying, upsetting. If one knew what the fellow was after, I mean, what he really knew...'

He took out his cigarette-case as he spoke and helped himself. Miss James pointed a trembling finger at it.

‘Put it away, put that thing away,' she said, ‘I don't want to see it... I tell you I don't want to see it.'

‘Elsie,' Bryan told her, ‘if you go on like this, I'll... I'll–'

He left the threat uncompleted, and she looked round at him with the same wild stare.

‘I don't want to see that thing,' she repeated. ‘Tell him to put it away.'

‘Oh, all right, have your own way,' Hunter exclaimed, shrugging his shoulders, ‘but it's my own, it's not that other one. This is one a girl gave me a long time ago.' He put it back in his pocket and began to laugh in a nervous jerky way. ‘It reminds Elsie of another one she gave me herself just the other day. But that one's at the bottom of the river. This one's mine, and lots of people have seen me use it.'

‘Why shouldn't they? What are you talking about, the two of you?' demanded Bryan.

‘Elsie gave me a cigarette-case just like this one the other day,' Hunter repeated. ‘She didn't tell me where she got it from, all she wanted was to get rid of it the quickest way she could. But when I looked I found inside it one of Jo Frankland's cards. I don't know what happened to Jo Frankland. How should I? I've never asked and I was miles away. But all the same when I saw that card, I went out to the Tower Bridge and flung the cigarette-case and the card with it into the river.'

Bryan turned his small, cold eyes on Miss James. He seemed quiet now and more controlled, but none the pleasanter for that.

‘What fool trick...?' he demanded.

‘It wasn't my fault,' she answered, sulkily enough, but also a little more calmly. ‘It just happened. Just as I was jumping out of the car I noticed a cigarette-case lying on the seat. I thought it was mine, it looked like it. I thought I must have taken it out of my bag without thinking and put it down there and it was mine. I knew if it was I didn't care to leave it, and I grabbed it, and then afterwards I saw it wasn't mine at all, it was – hers. She – must have left it lying there herself. I gave it to Horry to get rid of it.'

‘So I did, no need to worry,' interposed Hunter.

‘That thing of yours looks like it,' Miss Jones said doubtfully.

‘Most tortoiseshell cigarette-cases look like each other, especially if they happen to have silver mountings,' Hunter retorted.

‘It makes me remember,' Miss James said; ‘brings it all back.... I tell you I can't stand it... not when I know that Owen man is prowling about without ever stopping.'

If you don't stop it, if you can't control yourself,' Bryan snarled from his place by the doorway whence he had still not moved, ‘you'll have to go the same way as Jo Frankland... You're getting a danger to everyone else, breaking down this way.'

‘Murder me too, would you, you beast?' she asked, but without much emotion. ‘That what you mean?'

He nodded quietly but rather horribly. Miss James opened her mouth wide, as if she meant to scream, but saw him looking at her, and closed it again. She seemed to collapse now; the flush on her face faded to a ghastly pallor, her heavy breathing to a kind of whimper. She did not speak at all. Zachary Dodd, equally silent, looked from her to Bryan and back again, and then wiped his face once more. His handkerchief had become a wet rag from which one could easily have wrung the moisture. The silence in the room had lasted some time when Hunter said abruptly,

‘There's someone out there in the passage, listening to all this.'

‘Owen,' breathed Miss James, ‘that'll be Owen.'

Bryan's patience, or what was left of it, gave way, and he turned on her in a silent fury, choking and gesticulating, his angry hands hovering furiously in the air as if at any moment they might descend to fasten round her neck. But she paid him and his silent anger, though it was terrifying enough, no attention at all, only stared past him into the passage, where, from her position, nothing was visible. She said again,

‘It's Owen, and he's there, all the time, listening to all we've said.'

‘Of all the fools that ever lived you're the worst,' Bryan almost screamed. ‘Do you think I'm as mad as you are? Do you think I've brought a Scotland Yard man up here to hear us talking? Owen, indeed! you're out of your senses if you ever had any. It's Bobs-the-Boy, the fellow who was working here. We can be useful to each other, he and us; he's tired of Owen just as much as we are, more.'

‘That's right,' agreed Bobs-the-Boy from behind, ‘tired of him, sick of him, never rid of him, had enough of him.'

He went on darkly muttering to himself; they could hear his voice die away in a mumbled menace. Looking at each other they listened with a kind of secret content, a threatening and evil satisfaction.

‘Mr Owen seems a busy sort of man, here, there, and everywhere,' Bryan went on after a pause. ‘Maybe he's a bit more busy than wise. It's not only the – accident to Jo Frankland he's bothering about. It seems there was another accident a little time ago.'

‘That's right,' confirmed Bobs-the-Boy. ‘Accident it was, nothing to do with me in a manner of speaking. I only caught her a clip on the ear same as you might, or anyone else without meaning nothing much, and she went and corpsed herself on it. But will them busies believe it was that way? Not them, not Owen, messing round the way he is and asking questions everywhere.'

‘That's right,' agreed Bryan, ‘that's the sort it seems he is.'

‘Won't leave nothing alone,' Bobs-the-Boy said again. ‘Don't give a bloke no chance, not while – not while Owen's still... alive.'

Again they were all silent, looking at each other in the same secret way as before, but not speaking. Bryan had moved now from his place in the doorway. Bobs-the-Boy was standing there instead. He did not look at any of them, but yet it seemed he watched them all from behind his half-closed eyes. All at once Miss James began to laugh, a high-pitched, hysterical laughter. Bryan came across to her side and, taking her arm, twisted it viciously. She stopped laughing and looked at him, but made no sound, though the pain must have been severe. Bryan said,

‘You leave whisky alone, you hear me? Or you'll get worse than that.' He gave her arm a final twist, more vicious than before, but still without eliciting from her the least sound. As if her silence exasperated him beyond control, he shouted at her, ‘What's the matter with you, anyway? You've nothing to worry about. I planned it. Zack did it. You did nothing but drive the car away. And yet it's you breaks down and starts this fooling... Elsie, my girl, you had best be careful.'

He dropped her arm that hung numbed and powerless by her side and moved back to the other side of the table. She said,

‘You hurt me; what's the good of hurting me? It's all because I can't sleep, and if I could I daren't, because when I do I dream I am back there in the car with her all huddled up between the seats.'

‘You're a nice lot to be working with,' grumbled Hunter. ‘Now we all know all about it, don't we? Telling the world... pity this Owen fellow isn't here so he could hear all the news.'

‘Well, he isn't,' Bryan snapped, ‘so that's all right. You mean the same fellow has been making inquiries round your way?'

Hunter nodded.

‘Asking a whole lot of questions, got at some of my staff, told 'em who he was, got 'em scared. Lucky there's nothing they can tell, because there's nothing they know. But it looks to me as if he had got hold of something or knew something or suspected it...'

‘Has Keene been saying anything, do you think?' Bryan demanded.

‘He wouldn't dare,' Hunter answered, ‘not him; he's too much of a skunk. He's a coward, got scared, but he would hold his tongue for his own sake. It's that other Frankland girl's got hold of him if you ask me. But I don't believe he's told even her anything.'

‘Sybil Frankland you mean?'

‘Yes. I think she guessed something was on, and she's made him give it up. But I don't think he's ever told her much. He wouldn't dare, he was always panicking about something, about what was going to happen, or what she would think if she knew, or some blessed thing or another. But all the same I think it's because of her, and because she let him see she had spotted something was on, that he's backed out.'

‘It might be through her the other girl came fooling round here and got more than she expected,' Bryan said. He looked at Bobs-the-Boy, still silent in the doorway, and went on, ‘You had better know how it all happened. We had to have some more money or else close down. I didn't mean to close down. I've spent a lot building this place up, it's a big thing, it means a lot.' He paused, and for a moment his whole expression changed; for just that moment it was as though a blaze of relief, of fanatical devotion, transfigured him entirely. For just that moment he had the look of one lifted by a passionate creed to higher levels. Then once more he was back, once more he was the hungry, questing weasel tracking down its prey. He went on, ‘We made our money in the first place from one or two fires we arranged, one on a liner that brought in almost nothing because the whole thing was muddled and others we had better luck with. Only during one of them some old fool we had never heard of, knew absolutely nothing about, managed to get himself suffocated. It wasn't our fault, we couldn't help it, only you never know what an accident like that mightn't get called.'

‘I know,' agreed Bobs-the-Boy gloomily, ‘same here... Something happens, you didn't never mean it... but what do them busies up at the Yard care?... Swing you for it all the same, so they will, if they can.'

It was a remark that did not seem to raise the spirits of any of the others. Even Bryan looked appreciably paler as he went on,

‘What made it worse was that Lord Carripore, it was his company had to pay up most, began messing about, trying to find out things, and we had to slow down operations for the time. This place costs a lot to run at present, it will till it gets fully established, and though we managed to collect a bit of coin from our operations, expenses were heavy – assessors, for instance, scandalous, what we had to pay them when they did nothing at all, nothing till it was all over and then walked off with the fat. So we had to try some more, and Mr Hunter and Mr Keene came in to help. But we wanted a good trustworthy odd job man as well.'