Murder Abroad (12 page)

“I must go. My aunt will be expecting me. Good day.”

She hurried off. Williams did not make any attempt to stop her. It was quite plain that he was controlling his anger with difficulty as he muttered to Bobby:

“Well, what do you want? Hey? What the devil, snooping round. What's the game? Heh?”

“What were you saying to that girl?” Bobby asked.

“For two pins I would knock your head off,” Williams told him. “For two pins I would give you a sound thrashing, you interfering, meddling fool.”

He made a threatening movement forward, but Bobby was so obviously unalarmed, so plainly prepared, that he hesitated. Bobby said:

“What was it I interfered with? What is it I meddle in?” He paused and repeated: “What were you saying to that girl?”

“Mind your own business,” Williams snarled and then added: “She wanted to see the well where they say some old woman or another drowned herself a while back. Got scared when I took the cover off and told her to look. I thought at first she was going to faint.”

“Well, I should put the cover back now if I were you,” Bobby suggested. “Once is once too often. We don't want it to happen again.”

Mrs. Williams had joined them now. She said:

“I told you so, I told you not to, Joe. I knew she would get frightened if you let her peep. Morbid, I call it, the way people come and ask if they can see where it happened.” She looked at Bobby. “Did this gentleman want to see the well, too? Morbid, I call it,” she repeated severely. “Morbid.”

“Curiously enough,” Bobby said, “I've been asked to give you a message. About this well. I didn't mean to, but now I may as well. The message was to ask you to remember that where one had gone, another might follow.” The Williams looked at each other. Then the man spoke, Bobby thought in response to a sign his wife made. He said:

“Who was it?”

“I wasn't asked to give you the name and so I don't think I will,” answered Bobby. “The message is enough. I never meant to give it you but now I have. I wonder what it means?”

Williams did not answer. He began to put back the well cover. It was heavy and he seemed to have some difficulty in adjusting it. His wife went to help him and Bobby saw that they exchanged whispers. Williams straightened himself and said once more:

“What's your game, hanging about here the way you do?”

“When I do hang about,” Bobby said slowly, “things seem to happen, don't they? The other night I thought I heard a shot fired. A mistake, you told me, though there was certainly a window broken. Just now I thought—well, never mind that. Another mistake. They tell me in the village you are from Scotland Yard?”

“What about it?”

“Is it true?”

“What's it to do with you if it is?”

“Oh, I was just wondering. Odd, though, if British police are trying to investigate something that happened in another country. No jurisdiction. The French police say what happened here was suicide. Perhaps they are right. Perhaps they are waiting to see if anything else happens. You can never tell with police.”

Williams was looking now even more puzzled than angry. Mrs. Williams pulled at his sleeve and whispered something. Then she said:

“Joe, ask the gentleman to come in and have a cup of tea with us. It's just a misunderstanding, I'm sure the gentleman didn't mean to trespass. We've been so bothered with trespassers, stealing fruit and vegetables and things and peeping in at the windows,” she explained to Bobby, “Mr. Williams wants to complain to the police, only I asked him not to, because it would make such a lot of bother, and then it's foreign police, so you can't ever tell, can you? Do come in and have a cup of tea with us.”

“Please don't trouble about tea,” Bobby said, “but I should like to have a bit of a talk.”

They went back to the mill together. Mrs. Williams disappeared into the kitchen. Williams pushed a chair towards Bobby and sat down himself. Bobby noticed that the broken window had not yet been repaired. A piece of paper had been pasted over the hole to keep the wind out. He could see nothing in the barely-furnished room in any way personal, nothing to throw any light on the aims, pursuits, or characters of these two people. Williams was evidently feeling very worried and disturbed. He began to fill his pipe and then laid it aside. He took out a small gold pencil case and began to scribble something on a piece of paper and then changed his mind and tore it up. The gold pencil case attracted Bobby's attention.

It was a pretty, dainty thing, incongruous between Williams's thick, hairy fingers, and the incongruous always interested Bobby. There were initials on it, a monogram, but Bobby could not see what they were. Williams noticed his interest and scowled and pushed back the pencil case into his pocket, somewhat hastily, almost as if he regretted having let Bobby see it.

“What are you staring at?” he demanded angrily. “What's the game? I mean to say, you had better look out or you'll be getting hurt.”

“You haven't told me yet,” Bobby said, ignoring this—he had always found it best to ignore threats, “if it is the fact that you are from Scotland Yard.”

“No, it isn't,” Williams admitted sulkily, “and what's more, I never said I was. What I did say in the café one night when I was having a drink there, was that Scotland Yard would have found out fast enough what happened to Miss Polthwaite. When we took this place for a quiet holiday—saw it advertised in the Paris papers—we didn't know an old girl had been done in here. If we had known, we shouldn't have come. Not that it matters a lot, only you don't choose where there's been a murder for a holiday stay. That goes for us. What about you? You a private detective?”

“No,” said Bobby, promptly and emphatically, for he did not like private detectives.

“Well, then,” said Williams. “I take it you can't be one of the regulars—they couldn't very well shove in their noses in France. Get told off if they did. So what's the idea, you hanging round here all the time?”

“I didn't know I was,” Bobby said. “I knew about Miss Polthwaite's death. I read about it at the time. The night I got here I was out for a stroll and just thought I would have a look at the place where it happened. I thought I heard a shot. You say I was mistaken. To-day I came to ask if you had any objection to my making a few sketches here.”

“Well, we have,” interposed Williams, “a lot of objection.”

Unheeding this, Bobby went on:

“I saw you and a girl standing by the well. I thought she looked afraid—upset.”

“What about it?” interrupted Williams again. “So she did. So she was. Wanted to have a peep where it happened and then got the wind up. Like a girl, little fools, all of them.”

“There has been one death there already,” Bobby said. “Enough to frighten any girl, fool or not.”

He noticed a sudden change in Williams's expression. The truculence went out of it. All at once he seemed uneasy as if for some reason he felt no longer so sure of himself. He began to laugh loudly but not very naturally. Bobby, puzzled, wondered what had brought about this change. Mrs. Williams, tray in hand, was standing just behind him now. He had not heard her come in. She must have entered, have moved, with extraordinary quietness, and a memory stirred vaguely in Bobby's mind of how on his first visit to this mill, on the night when he heard a shot fired, he had seemed to be aware of something small and silent and secret creeping softly behind him. Williams stopped laughing and said boisterously:

“Why, of course, do all the sketching you want to. Why not? All day if you like, all night, too, for that matter. At least, as long as you don't want us to buy your stuff.”

He began to laugh again as if he thought this an excellent joke. Mrs. Williams moved forward with her soft prowling step, put down her tray, and began to pour out the tea, chatting amiably as she did so. The conversation grew general, almost genial indeed. Williams appeared to be trying his best now to be friendly. Bobby presently took his leave, receiving again a fresh invitation to return as often and do as much sketching as he liked.

He felt a good deal puzzled by this sudden change to geniality and very little inclined to believe the plausible stories he had been told. Yet he had no real reason to doubt their declaration that their presence here was entirely accidental and the interest they showed in the Polthwaite case merely a natural result of their chance tenancy of the mill. All the same he was little inclined to dismiss the possibility of some connection existing between their presence and the Polthwaite murder. But surely they themselves could not be guilty, since even the most callous murderers would hardly choose for residence the scene of their secret crime? Or would they? hoping so perhaps to watch or hinder any investigation. Or was it the store of diamonds Miss Polthwaite was believed to have had in her possession, that they had heard of and hoped possibly to secure for themselves? It might be the diamonds were still concealed somewhere about the mill and they hoped to find them?

But then again, if Miss Polthwaite had been murdered, as Bobby now felt was certain, must not the crime have been committed for the sake of the diamonds and was it not certain they would be now in the possession of the assassin?

Bobby sighed and shook his head at himself, vexed to think he could find no way through the tangle of doubt and hesitation in which he felt himself ensnared. One thing alone stood out clearly in his mind: that he disliked and mistrusted both Mr. and Mrs. Williams. Nor was he sure now that Mrs. Williams was quite so colourless and insignificant as she had at first seemed to be.

When he reached his hotel again he went in for a few minutes and then on to the little postcard shop near, where, when Madame Simone appeared, he asked if he could have a word or two with her niece. The old lady looked very doubtful and grumbled inaudibly to herself, but this time seemed a trifle less unfriendly. Finally she took him into the small living-room behind the shop. Lucille was there and Bobby said to her:

“Mademoiselle, I have come to ask if you will tell me exactly what happened this afternoon.”

“Oh, no,” she answered quickly, looking terrified at the suggestion.

“It was Mr. Williams and his wife who asked you to go to see them, wasn't it?” he asked.

“Why? How do you know?” she retorted.

He let that pass, not bothering to explain that the guess had been an easy one. He said instead:

“I wish I could persuade you to trust me. I know I am a stranger. I don't like Mr. and Mrs. Williams. I think they have some reason for being here and I don't think it is a very creditable reason.”

She still shook her head and then after a time she said suddenly:

“I was glad when I saw you this afternoon. I was terrified before but not then.” She added when he did not speak: “Please do not think I am ungrateful.”

Bobby took a photograph of Olive from his pocket. “That is the girl I am going to marry,” he said. “If some one was trying to bully her, I hope any one who saw what was happening would try to interfere.”

She took the photograph from him and looked at it and then at him and then back again at it. He thought she looked doubtful and he said:

“I will give you her address if you like and you can write and ask her if you can trust me. Because I think it is important you should tell me about this afternoon.”

“If she loves you, then of course she will say you can be trusted,” Lucille answered. “If you love a man, you trust him, too. It is the same thing.” She looked at Bobby: “Do you love her?” she asked.

He did not answer, suddenly shy and embarrassed. She gave him the photo back and smiled:

“You need not say it,” she told him. “It is in your eyes.”

“Oh, well, now then,” he muttered, scarlet now. With an effort he recovered himself. He said: “A woman died in that well. You were afraid when Williams lifted the cover.”

An almost imperceptible nod answered him.

“He was threatening you?”

She hesitated again. It was a moment or two before she gave another almost imperceptible nod. Then she said:

“But not in the way you mean.”

“Well, then. How?”

“He said—” the words came slowly, hesitatingly, with long pauses between. “He said—there was proof—down there—somehow—proof—something dropped—proof who was—guilty.”

“Proof? What sort of proof?”

“He did not say. I think perhaps it was not true. But he made me afraid. I think he is a bad man.”

“Proof against whom?”

“He did not say.”

“If he knows anything, it is his duty to tell the police. It is serious if he does not.”

“Yes, he said that,” she almost whispered.

Madame Simone had gone back into the shop, but she was watching them from behind the counter. She came to the door now and said to Bobby:

“That's enough, you'll make the child ill.”

That Lucille was very distressed was in fact plain enough and Bobby felt he could not press her further. “Can I see you again some other time?” he asked.

A customer appeared in the shop and knocked for attention. Madame Simone went to answer the summons. Lucille said:

“Perhaps. Another day. Please go now.”

“Very well, thank you,” Bobby said, and was in the act of retiring when she called him back and asked if she could see again Olive's photograph. Flattered, he produced it. She took it and studied it carefully and gravely for some moments before she gave it him back.

“I was wondering,” she explained, “if that style she has of doing her hair, would suit me.”

It was not yet the dinner hour, but feeling a need to be alone for a little to try to think out the implications of all that he had seen and heard during the day, Bobby returned to the hotel. Since the evening of his arrival, he had seen nothing of Eudes, the village schoolmaster, but now as he entered the hotel he saw him in the background, talking earnestly and quickly to young Camion. They heard Bobby come in and both looked round, and, when they saw him they moved away. Bobby wondered if it was self-consciousness that gave him the impression it was of him they were talking.