Everybody Always Tells by E.R. Punshon

Author:E.R. Punshon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dean Street Press
Published: 2019-10-07T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XVII

“IT MUST BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY”

A DAY OR two passed in the usual routine of such an investigation. C.I.D. men were kept busy here and there, searching for any small indication or hint that might lead towards the truth, interviewing various people, all of whom had either nothing or far too much to say. All this, as Bobby told Olive, with little apparent result.

“We’ve got a few facts,” he said, “but they don’t seem to lead anywhere much. Rather a dead end at present. We’ve made some inquiries about Mrs Jacks. She was married in a small village near Aylesbury. The husband is dead, and there was one daughter. Then we know Findlay was a frequent visitor to Mrs Tinsley’s flat. The porter says he was there three or four times a week. But that doesn’t take us much farther forward, and we could have guessed as much anyhow. Except perhaps that it does seem as if his connection with her was rather more serious than with most of his other lady friends. No new development otherwise.”

“I suppose,” Olive said, looking a little superior, “you never thought of asking Mrs Brett, did you?”

“Mrs Brett?” repeated Bobby, puzzled, for that was the name of the daily woman of the passing moment. “What’s she got to do with it?”

“You,” explained Olive.

“Me?” Bobby repeated. “What on earth are you getting at?”

“She works here, comes here every day,” Olive pointed out. “So she sees you every day, and so of course, she knows all about it. All her friends regard her as getting it ‘straight from the horse’s mouth’. The horse,” Olive added, with a kind smile, “being you. And that’s better than being another sort of smaller animal with a shorter name.”

“She’s not turning amateur detective and using my name, is she?” Bobby asked, slightly alarmed.

“Very likely she tells all her friends she is your chief assistant,” Olive answered. “And one of them has another friend who knows another who works for some one who knows the Actons, and what it comes to is that Mrs Findlay and Mr Acton are going to get married, though they’re not saying anything yet.”

Bobby was not often taken aback, but this time he was very much so.

“If that’s true, I wonder if it is,” he said slowly. Olive expressed no opinion. Bobby said: “It may be only gossip.”

“Haven’t you always said in your lectures no one should ever despise gossip?”

“What a man says in his lectures isn’t evidence,” Bobby retorted, but he had still a very worried air. “Most likely it’s all nonsense,” he decided. “But it’ll have to be looked into.”

“Could it—” Olive asked hesitatingly, “could it be a motive?”

“For Findlay’s murder?” Bobby said. “But which of them? It seems like deliberately asking to be suspected. Acton was certainly dancing attendance on her in rather a marked way, but he also took care to tell me he was very happily married.”

“If he is married already,” Olive said uneasily, “he can’t, can he? I mean, not marry Mrs Findlay.

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