Suspects—Nine (24 page)

Nice prospect for an engaged man, trying to save up enough to buy furniture, Bobby thought, dismally. And then a prospective official demand for explanations: ‘Re Martin, suspect, escape of.' What a world! Mechanically, Bobby pulled open one of the little drawers of the dressing-table to which he had again resorted to examine how the cold-water treatment was affecting that chin of his. Inside was a lipstick, old and dried, so that it must have been there some time. Bobby regarded it with extreme disfavour. Vivid, for one thing. It must have made the feminine mouth look like a vampire's. Horrid kissing a mouth all smeared over with stuff like that. Like kissing a paint-box that had broken loose! He opened one or two other drawers and found more small insignificant evidence of former feminine occupation. He told himself, thoughtfully, that the lipstick suggested Flora, whose mouth did sometimes look like a vampire's, rather than Ernie, who never spoiled what good looks God had given her by excessive and unnatural make-up.

The cottage seemed very quiet. He went to the door and opened it. There was still no sound elsewhere. Apparently, he had been carried upstairs, dumped on the bed, and left there. He noticed, now, a still-damp towel lying by the pillow where he had displaced it as consciousness returned.

“Judy's idea of first aid,” he muttered, “I suppose that's why there was fresh water in the jug. I'll give him first aid all right as soon as I get the chance. Dirty trick, taking me off my guard like that.”

He was still feeling a trifle shaky and so dismissed the idea of going to see what had happened to his motor-cycle, since, if it was still there, another little half hour wouldn't hurt it, and if it wasn't, well, it wasn't, and no good worrying. Going back to the bed he lay down again, and, with the dried-up lipstick in his hand, tried to think out its implications and its meanings—apart, of course, from the obvious explanation that would have brought a knowing leer to Martin's lips once more had he been the one to make the discovery. Bobby was a little glad it had not happened that way.

But thinking is hard work. It was very quiet and peaceful in the silent and deserted cottage. Bobby's recent experiences had a little exhausted him and presently his deep and troubled thoughts, all those vague and fleeting glimpses of the truth the discovery of that old, dried-up lipstick had seemed to give him, all was lost in a deep, refreshing slumber from which presently he was awakened by a sound of loud and angry voices in the room below.

He could hear every word distinctly. It was Judy speaking, answering the shriller, higher voice, that of a woman, of which the excited tones had broken his own slumber.

“Shut up, will you?” Judy was saying, angrily. “I tell you there's a copper upstairs. He can hear everything we say.”

The answer was provided by a sound that Bobby recognized with gratitude and deep joy. It was that produced by the vigorous and emphatic application of the palm of the human hand to the side of the human cheek.

“Here, I say,” protested Judy's voice.

Bobby smiled, happily. How good to know that Judy was getting his, too. There was a sound of scuffling. Judy said,

“Damn it, drop that.”

Followed a feminine scream, a bump as of some one deposited with some violence in a chair. A shrill protest, 

“You brute, you've hurt me.”

“If you try scratching again,” came Judy's voice, loud and emphatic, “you'll get hurt a whole lot worse. That drew blood,” and Bobby fairly hugged himself as he lay back on the bed and smiled up, oh, so happily, at the ceiling. He remembered how once, in his uniform days, he had been sent to remonstrate with an elderly lady whose neighbours thought nine and twenty cats excessive in one small house, and how, without prefix or warning, she had implanted all ten of her very long and sharp finger-nails in his cheeks.

How painful the memory was! how agreeable to know that that selfsame experience had now been Judy's! He touched his own bruised chin and smiled seraphically. Ah, now the inevitable sequence had followed and up the stairs floated a storm of sobs. Bobby, still smiling at the ceiling, hoped Judy was enjoying that, too. He misjudged Judy. He had forgotten that Judy was, as they say, ‘tough'. The sobs ceased abruptly. An even more furious voice screamed,

“You beast, you sit there and smoke and don't care a scrap.”

“Not a scrap,” agreed Judy, quite cheerfully, to judge from the tone of his voice. “Howl all you want to. Pleases you and don't hurt me. I told you there was a copper upstairs. He must be hearing all this unless he's dead. And that,” added Judy wistfully, “is too much to hope.”

“All right,” thought Bobby, his smile vanishing, “you just wait, my lad.”

“A copper,” said the woman's voice. Bobby had not been able to recognize it before, distorted as it had been by temper and by sobs. Now he felt certain it was Flora Tamar's. “A policeman?” she asked.

“That's the dictionary word,” agreed Judy. “Otherwise, known as a bluebottle in those higher circles where before the motor era he was usually considered a darling. It's that detective johnny you have hanging about your place. If you want to wash your face, which,” said Judy thoughtfully, “needs it pretty badly, I'll hoof him out for you, shall I?”

So it was Flora who was here. Bobby looked thoughtfully at the bit of dried-up lipstick in his hands, remembered those envelopes addressed to Holland Kent in the fragments whereof Martin had seemed so interested, and began to see a possible explanation. Downstairs Flora was saying,

“Mr. Owen? Nonsense. It's a lie, you're lying.”

“Look and see,” retorted Judy.

There came a rush of swift steps up the stairs. Bobby sat up on the bed. Flora flung back the half-open door and glared at him. Bobby said,

“Oh, how do you do?”

He was not sure whether this was a rather silly remark or quite a brilliant one. Flora stared at him, her raddled lips drawn back to show behind them those small, white teeth familiar in a thousand photographs to the readers of the weekly illustrated papers. She put one hand to her throat as though she wished to say something, but could not get it out, and her eyes were like those of the leopard before it springs. She turned and fled down the stairs again.

“You've got him there just to trap me, to spy,” she said to Judy, quite softly. “Oh, I could kill you, I could kill you, I could kill you.”

Her voice was low this time, low and intense, in odd contrast to the shrill, screaming tones she had used before. But, now, there was in it such intensity of emotion, of passion so unrestrained, that Bobby would hardly have been surprised if it had been followed by a burst of revolver shots. He was half way to the door when he was reassured by Judy's unconcerned retort,

“Very likely you would if you could. But I'm bigger than you are, you haven't got a gun and if you had you wouldn't know how to use it, and this is not a favourable opportunity for dropping arsenic in the tea cup.”

“How do you know I haven't got a gun?” she asked slowly. “How do you know I couldn't use it?”

“Well, you couldn't, could you?”

“Give me yours and I'll show you,” she answered. “Give me yours and I'll hit the top bar of your garden gate five times in seven. Give me yours and you'll see. Or, perhaps, you won't give me yours and you'll see all the same.”

“Don't talk like a fool,” said Judy, a certain unease in his voice now. “Owen is listening to every word you say. You're only putting ideas in his head.”

“I'll put some more there, then,” Flora said. She had evidently lost all self-control now. From her voice all ordinary expression or variety of tone had gone, it was just one slow level monotony of hate, a kind of toneless monotone through which a dreadful passion made itself somehow felt. She went on: “If he's listening, he can hear this, too. You killed Munday. Munday had found out about us. He was trying to get money out of you. You've got none, really, in spite of all your boasting of what you make out of the people you bring down here and fleece. So you shot him.”

“I am just wondering,” Judy said, “whether to lay a stick about your back. It's what you want.”

“Why don't you? You daren't, you know you daren't.”

“No,” he agreed. “I daren't. That sort of thing gives a woman too much of a claim on a chap.”

She ran to the foot of the stairs. Bobby was standing half way down them. She said to him,

"You heard him! He can't deny it

“You heard him! He can't deny it, even. He did it.” Without waiting for a reply she ran back to Judy. “There,” she said. “There. He knows now.”

“Nice little bit of poison, you are, aren't you.” Judy retorted.

“You got him up there to trap me,” she said. “Well, now then, you're trapped yourself.”

“You're off your head,” Judy answered. “I didn't get him here. He was here when I came because of your wire. I didn't want to, but I got your wire and so I came and I caught him crawling out of a window at the back. Sneaking in when I wasn't here to see what he could find. I'm going to take him along to the police station and charge him with burglary.”

“The mischief you are,” thought Bobby. “Nasty, vicious idea.”

Judy went on,

“The infernal cheek of it got me, and I just went for him and knocked him out. He had a pal with him. Pal bolted like one o'clock—to get help, I suppose.”

“You got me when I wasn't looking,” protested Bobby, appearing indignantly in the doorway. “Dirty trick. I hadn't even time to put up my hands.”

“Well,” retorted Judy, defending himself, “what do you expect a chap to do when another chap comes spying round? You've no right to break into people's houses.”

“Thought it was burglary just now,” murmured Bobby, but the remark passed unheeded by Judy, who, like most other people, had no knowledge of the legal distinction between burglary and housebreaking.

“Raking through dust-bins, too,” Judy said bitterly.

“I don't believe either of you, liars both,” Flora said, still in that dreadful monotone of passion. “You got me here to trap me.”

“What for? Why should we?” demanded Judy, not unreasonably, Bobby thought.

“You've thrown me over, thrown me away like—”

“Like an old glove,” suggested Judy sardonically, and Flora gave a fresh gasp of rage and Bobby thought it was just as well she had no means then of venting her rage, for, certainly, there was an impulse to kill behind those still eyes of her, behind the small, white teeth that showed though the thin and parted lips.

“Oh, you—you—” she gasped, “you murderer.” To Bobby she said, “He's there. You heard me. Why don't you arrest him?”

“No authority, no orders,” Bobby explained.

Flora turned to Judy again.

“It's all been since you met that girl, that cunning little slut, that Ernie Maddox, that—” she added a word that made even Bobby start, for even in West-End night clubs where you can hear expressions that Limehouse never knew, it was one not often used. “She's got her claws into you and you—you thought you would like a change. Done with me, you thought, and on with her, that little lying milk-and-water prig, and it was her aunt worked it, Alice Belchamber worked it, because she hates me so, the dried-up stick no one would ever look at twice.”

She paused then. She took out her handkerchief from her bag, and. then her compact and looked at it and put it back. She was making an almost visible effort to restrain herself, a physical effort as of one endeavouring to lift some enormous weight, to close some heavy door.

She stood quite still. Very quietly she seemed, as it were, to draw herself in, to compose herself. Almost visibly, she seemed to be calling to her aid all the resources of her beauty, of her femininity, of her womanly appeal. She made herself alluring, pitiful, appealing, the woman asking for sympathy and for support. She transformed herself entirely, as in the twinkling of an eye; in place of the fierce and storming virago, stood the pleading, anxious woman, offering all she had, her tenderness and her love.

“Judy,” she murmured, drawing out the name till it sounded like a whispered caress, “Judy, have you forgotten... everything? Judy, have you forgotten once you cared for me... terribly? Judy, my dear one... Judy, once there was... love? Wasn't there?”

It was a last, in a way, a splendid effort. It had in it that essential drama there must always be when a human soul stakes its all, all that makes it essentially itself, upon a single appeal that must be answered then and now, when pride and all else are laid aside and bare sincerity is left. The very air seemed still as she waited for the answer, an answer that was not needed, for it was clear before sound or movement came. Then Judy spoke.

“Flora,” he said, “there has never been any question of love. How could there be? when you came here first, I told you I had no use for women except for what I wanted women for. I told you a woman had settled all my chances when I was a boy. She got me all right. My fault, too, of course. The old tale. The woman tempted me but what business had I to be tempted? I told you all that. I told you I never meant to let a woman count for me again, not for more than a night or two. By God, I made that plain to you. I made it plain as I made things plain to every one who came here to be fleeced, as you said just now. I told you I knew women and what they were and what they were good for—something to be used and to watch out for in case they used you instead. I told you that and I think that then you thought the same of men—something to be used, you thought. Well, there it is. You made a mistake. So did I. A different mistake, for the devil himself, I think, took care I should meet a girl—the sort of girl a decent man should have met, not 
me. Bully and gambler and fleecer and all the rest. So now I've done with women. Finished,” he said with a slow, rather dramatic movement of his hands.