Death of a Beauty Queen (28 page)

‘Mr Irwin's quite got over his illness: he has been back at his office some days,' Mitchell said. ‘You can see him either there or at his home. Of course, it may not have been Maddox at all our coffee-stall friend saw; in a case like this there are always plenty ready to swear they've seen anyone missing. Or there may be some quite simple explanation – the more impossible a thing seems, the simpler the explanation, as a rule. Or the bank may have made a bloomer. You had better check up there, first, I think, Owen.'

‘Very good, sir,' Bobby answered.

‘Well, there's one thing,' observed Ferris, who had been called into consultation. ‘We can depend on old Mr Irwin to give us all the help he can now. There won't be any more of that “I have nothing to say” business, that's like a stone wall in front of you, now he knows Maddox did it, and but for Maddox his Leslie would be alive still, most likely. A tough old boy,' he added musingly. ‘Something rather terrifying about him – no softness or sympathy; hard on himself, and hard on others. The sword of the Lord and of Gideon style.'

‘If he had been a little less hard,' observed Mitchell, ‘a little less sure of being right, most likely all this would never have happened. It's that was the root of it all.'

‘Anyhow.,' repeated Ferris, ‘he'll be willing to do all he can to help. He was so wrapped up in that boy of his, he won't want Maddox to get off scot-free.'

Bobby was of the same opinion. Anything that stern, relentless old man could do to help, would certainly be done. Of that much, Bobby felt sure, and yet had to confess himself both worried and puzzled by the coffee-stall keeper's story. It seemed against all reason, common sense, and credibility, but then so was, in the conditions, the disappearance of Maddox. He was inclined to suspect that there must be some mistake at the bank, but this suggestion, when he put it forward somewhat light-heartedly to the branch manager, was received with cold contempt. Banks, it appeared, above all the Brush Hill branch of the City and Suburban Bank, did not make mistakes. Customers might – customers, indeed, made little else; science and religion could err, and art follow false paths; proneness to error might be integral in human nature, but banks – well, one did not so much define banks in terms of the infallible, as the infallible in terms of banking. More especially, the manager implied, did all this apply to the Brush Hill branch of the City and Suburban.

Bobby, suitably crushed, but rallying bravely, inquired if it were equally certain that Mr Irwin, in person, had received the money.

Of that, too, there was no doubt. Mr Irwin was well known – as well mistake Trafalgar Square for a cocktail before dinner as Mr Paul Irwin for anyone else.

‘It's all told on him,' the manager observed. ‘He looks his age now, especially with his hair turned white, but he keeps up wonderfully. He's begun to use a bicycle, too, instead of walking so much, but that's about all – wouldn't hear of a car, I'm told. It must have been a terrible blow to him; he was wrapped up in his boy.'

‘I always felt that,' Bobby said. ‘It makes us feel we can rely on him now for all the help he can give.'

‘You know,' the manager went on, ‘young Leslie thought a lot of his father, too. Only he was afraid of him as well. Fear. Love drives out fear, perhaps, but fear masks love. Don't wonder, though, at anyone being afraid of Mr Irwin.

Everyone respects him, but they all know he makes no allowances – no discount given in his accounts.'

‘He is like that, isn't he? He makes me feel all weighed up and found out and judged,' agreed Bobby. ‘Yet thaw follows frost,' he added, and then felt surprised at his own expression of this thought that had come abruptly and unexpectedly into his mind.

From the bank Bobby proceeded, after some hesitation, to Mr Irwin's private residence rather than to his office. It was beginning to grow near the close of business hours, for one thing, and for another he thought that there would both be fewer interruptions at the house, and that there Mr Irwin would be more likely to talk freely.

The old housekeeper, Mrs Knowles, told him that Mr Irwin was not back yet, but that she expected him in soon for his tea. Afterwards he would probably return to the office, and be there till late – so late that now she did not wait up for him, but put his supper ready on a tray in the study and then retired, for, now that her sick relative was convalescent, she was again sleeping at home. .

‘It's because of another society joining up with them,' she explained. ‘He works till all hours – making things right.'

‘How does Mr Irwin seem?' Bobby asked.

‘Well enough,' she answered, with a certain air of disapproval, ‘as you may say, but he's a changed man, for all that. It'll be different, very like, when you've done your duty and got that Maddox safe under lock and key – where he ought to be, and a shame and a scandal such as him should be running free.'

‘We are doing our best,' Bobby explained meekly, and a snort from Mrs Knowles showed very clearly what she thought of that ‘best.' Bobby added: ‘You were saying Mr Irwin had changed?'

‘There's something gone out of him. He's not the same man,' she answered. ‘Broken, you might say, though he has his faith that ought to keep him up.'

‘Do you mean he seems feeble – ill?' Bobby asked.

‘Not in body,' she answered. ‘It's something in him that's clean gone – why, he preached and prayed last Sunday same as usual and never once did he so much as mention hell or God's punishment on sinners, but all about understanding each other, as if sin was to be understood and not just stamped on. What I say is, it's this Maddox getting away scot-free that's telling on him.'

‘Maddox hasn't gone scot-free yet,' Bobby reminded her. ‘In fact, we have some idea he may be hiding somewhere in this part – in Brush Hill itself, perhaps.'

‘Well, then, why don't you find him, if you know where he is?' she demanded fiercely. ‘I would, if I had to tear down every house with my own hands, rather than let him go free that's been the cause of Mr Leslie's killing himself.' She spoke with great bitterness and vehemence, and then added, more quietly: ‘The papers say he murdered Carrie Mears, and very like no more than she deserved, and no better, I daresay, than she should have been. But it was all on account of that Mr Leslie shot himself, and worse for Mr Irwin, for he thought all the world of that boy. Worse than murder, I call it: and when Maddox hangs I shall go down on my knees to thank God right's been done at last on him, that Mr Leslie would be alive and well to-day but for what he did.'

‘I daresay Mr Irwin feels like that, too,' Bobby remarked. ‘If you had seen his hair go white, day after day,' she answered sombrely, ‘you wouldn't need ask that, young man – and enough to turn the mind of anyone, and him so strong and young before. If I wake in the night, I can hear him praying, and I know what for, for he told me himself it's for God's punishment to fall on Claude Maddox.'

A grim old man, Bobby reflected, repelled, even appalled by this picture presented to him of one who had striven so long, and with such prodigies of self-control and self-denial, to serve Him, now battering His Throne with cries for the revenge of a private wrong. But it was perhaps this very intensity of his desire for vengeance that kept up the old man's strength, and when Bobby expressed, though vaguely, some such idea, Mrs Knowles seemed to understand.

‘He's keeping well enough,' she admitted. ‘He doesn't sleep much, for often and often I hear noises in the night that's him moving about; and he's at his prayers early and late, but he eats well – better than he used. Now that he's late at the office almost every night, I put the tray ready for him in the study, and there's little left when I clear away next morning. He was a bit queer after Mr Leslie shot himself, poor lad, with that fit he had while you were here, but that didn't last.'

‘In what way do you mean he was queer?' Bobby asked.

‘In his ways, like. One night he took back all the housekeeping money he had given me for the bills. Said he wanted it, when it was the middle of the night then – so how could he? But he took it, and got more next day for me. And he wanted me to go on sleeping at my sister's – pretended he would rather be alone at night. I told him flat I wouldn't have it. He wasn't fit to be left alone that way. Excited and funny-like, too. He went over Mr Leslie's things, when I wanted to do something about them, seeing the poor lad will never want them more. Told me I wasn't so much as to touch a thing in his room, not even to open a drawer or a cupboard, nor even his old tools in the attic he's never been near for years.'

They heard a key in the door, and Mr Irwin came in – old and bowed now; his thin form bent; his features pinched and thin beneath the mass of snow-white hair. He looked a little startled, Bobby thought, at seeing him, but said a word or two of greeting, and then led the way into his study.

‘You can bring us some tea here,' he said to Mrs Knowles, and then indicating a chair, he said to Bobby: ‘Sit down, won't you? You've come to see me, I suppose?'

Bobby seated himself, feeling curiously at a loss. It was not only physically that Mr Irwin had changed, there were other and more subtle alterations more difficult to define. His snowy hair certainly now served to accentuate that air of the prophet there had always been about him, and his eyes had still that clear bright stillness that shows in those used to gaze upon a light others do not see. The word that Mrs Knowles had used had been ‘broken'; the word that came into Bobby's mind was ‘benign,' though why he hardly knew, and it astonished him.

‘You wanted to speak to me?' Mr Irwin repeated. He smiled slightly – very slightly – yet with a smile that seemed to caress and to understand. ‘You are very young,' he said. ‘As young as Leslie, I suppose?'

‘I think I must be a little older, sir,' Bobby answered, wondering to notice how simply and how naturally the reference to the dead boy had been made.

‘Yes, yes. Perhaps you are,' Mr Irwin agreed. ‘I suppose it is about Claude Maddox you are come? You have no idea yet where he is?'

It was an assertion more than a question, and yet it had in it a faint touch of uneasiness. Bobby repeated briefly the coffee-stall keeper's story.

‘It seemed so incomprehensible,' Bobby concluded, ‘that a pound note apparently paid out to you should turn up in that way that we felt we would like to know what you thought about it.'

Mr Irwin listened gravely. When Bobby paused, he was silent for a time, and then he answered, as he had answered before:

* I have nothing to say.'

But this time he uttered the words with a tone and accent singularly changed. Before his voice had had the hardness, the clarity, the finality of ice; now there sounded in it a certain tenderness, a touch almost of humour, that Bobby recognized, and that again a good deal puzzled him. He said, half-defensively, half-questioningly:

‘‘Maddox is a murderer. He killed Miss Mears. And he would have let your son hang for it, too – or at least never said a word when he knew Leslie was suspected and likely to be arrested. But for him, and what he did, Leslie would be alive to-day. Surely we can depend on you to do all you can to help us find him?'

The old man did not answer. He was looking, as it were, far away – to distances beyond the sight of every day. Embarrassed, though why he hardly knew, Bobby muttered:

‘Mrs Knowles said... told me...'

‘What?' Paul Irwin asked, as Bobby's voice trailed into silence; and now there came again into the old man's tones something of their former tremendous force, of their old fierce vigour. He said: ‘I know. She woke in the night. She thought I was ill and came downstairs and heard. She told you I was praying for punishment to fall on Claude Maddox. Well, she is right – but there are many kinds of punishment.'

But as if he felt that he now had said too much, betrayed too clearly the intimacy of his private feelings, Paul Irwin, after this, grew silent, and would answer no more questions. His refusal was very gentle and very quiet, but none the less determined. At times he would make a brief and smiling comment on Bobby's questions; once or twice, even, he replied with a quiet pleasantry that in him, or rather in contrast to him, as he had been before, astonished Bobby considerably. But never came a single word that offered any enlightenment on the points Bobby was attempting to clear up. When Bobby remarked that the cheque, on which the one-pound note traced to the supposed Maddox had been paid out, had been drawn for an unusually large sum – especially for clearance in cash over the counter – and that an explanation would be welcome, he was answered by a non-committal ‘personal reasons,' beyond which Mr Irwin was plainly determined not to go.

Utterly baffled, completely at a loss, Bobby retired to headquarters, where first he told his tale to Ferris, who received it with gloomy head-shakes.

‘I don't trust that old chap,' he declared. ‘Got something up his sleeve, as like as not.'

‘I had a little bit that idea myself,' agreed Bobby, ‘only I can't imagine what – or why?'

‘It's hard enough to worry out the truth in these murder cases,' Ferris observed, still gloomy, ‘but when you get religion, too – well, it's the devil.'

‘Religion so often is,' murmured Bobby, and now Ferris looked shocked.

‘That's not at all what I meant, young man,' he said sharply. ‘We had better see what Mr Mitchell thinks.'

But Mitchell was as much at a loss as anyone. He cross-examined Bobby closely on every detail of the interview with Mr Irwin, and evidently regretted he had not had time to go himself, as he would have done had not some important returns to the Home Office, on the sale of chocolates after prohibited hours, required completion.