Comes a Stranger (5 page)

Olive said, however, that there was no other, and tried to interest him in the printing press. But Bobby didn't care two hoots for ancient printing presses when Olive was there and they were alone. He agreed the press was in wonderfully good order, cleaned and oiled and ready for use, and awfully interesting, of course, and with that the press was forgotten and the interlude resumed till a familiar giggle sounded from above to recall them to more mundane things.

“Oh, I'm so sorry,” said Miss Perkins, fluttering in her vague, helpless way at the head of the stairs, “but it's Mr. Broast. He's asking where you are.”

“Tell him I'm showing Mr. Owen the old press,” Olive called back, hastily smoothing hair that somehow had got ruffled during the showing process. “We'll be up in a minute.”

She sternly repressed Bobby, who tried to put that minute to a use inconsistent with Olive's felt need of reconditioning her hair. They heard Miss Perkins's giggle die away in the distance, and Bobby, cross at the waste of that minute he could have put to such good use, said:

“Well, I'm glad I haven't got to put up with that eternal giggle.”

“It's not eternal,” said Olive severely. “It's only that the poor thing's nervous, and you're not to talk about her like that.”

“All right,” said Bobby meekly. “I won't, I suppose there are worse things in life than a giggle, though it doesn't seem so at the moment. Does she get on all right with Mr. Broast?”

“Well, she's cheap,” Olive explained. “I don't know how she manages on what she gets. She never seems to want a holiday. She's good at shorthand and typing, too, and she did it all by herself.”

“Did what?”

“Shorthand and typing, she taught herself both, and I think it was awfully clever of her.”

“So do I,” said Bobby without conviction.

“Nobody's a bit fair to her,” Olive said, “just because she's nervous and shortsighted and giggles. When she was a little kiddy, her mother ran away from her husband with some man. There was a divorce and the husband allowed her to be given charge of the child. Then he shot himself, the blackguard his wife had run away with and married after the divorce, deserted her when he had spent all her money, and her own family, and her former husband's family, refused to have anything more to do with her or with the child. Finally she died or something. She had left the poor little kiddy in some cheap lodging-house and at first sent money to pay for her keep. Then one day she sent her boxes and a message to say she was coming herself and that was the last heard of her. When the money stopped coming, first the landlady sold the contents of the boxes—at least, everything that was worth selling, Miss Perkins has a few things still. Afterwards the landlady kept the child out of charity, she said, but really because she saw a chance of getting a maid-of-all-work on the cheap. Charity pays in the kitchen. Miss Perkins didn't mean to stop there, though. She taught herself shorthand and typing, and it takes something to do that by yourself at night in your bedroom after you've been cleaning and scrubbing and cooking and washing up all day, sixteen hours on end attending to lodgers. She learnt typing on the keyboard of a broken machine she got from a rag and bone man. It was all to get money to try to find her mother again, but he never did. I think it was rather wonderful of her, even if she is nervous and does keep giggling. I expect I should have been washing dishes still in that woman's scullery.”

Olive had grown quite flushed with the warmth of her defence, and Bobby was not so much interested in it as in thinking how becoming that flush was to her thin and pale cheeks, though indeed just recently that thinness and that pallor had seemed to grow less pronounced. He kissed her suddenly.

“You're wonderful,” he said, “and if you say so, Miss Perkins shall giggle as much as she likes—I can't say handsomer than that.” 

Entering the main library hall from the cellar, Bobby and Olive saw standing there a little group of three men. One, who seemed to dominate the other two by some innate force of personality, so that it was on him the eye rested first, was a tall, thin man, whom Bobby guessed at once to be so Basil Reardon Broast, the custodian of the Kayne library. His hair, plentiful still, and worn a trifle long, was snowy white, though his easy and upright carriage, the bright intensity of his clear, blue greyish eyes, the swift certainty of his movements, showed plainly that as yet age had laid no withering touch upon his powers. Nor was there anything here of the scholar's stoop that Bobby had remarked in Mr. Adams, his acquaintance of the Wynton Arms, nothing of the scholar's dim and peering gaze. In his hand he held gold-rimmed spectacles, it is true, but he only wore them for really close work. At a distance his sight was still good. He wore a small moustache and a small, pointed beard, both now perfectly white, and his curved, arrogant nose stood out like the beak of a bird of prey. A distinguished-looking figure, Bobby thought, though one that suggested more the man of action, the leading politician or the controller of some great business, than the timid, unworldly and retiring scholar of tradition. In his youth he must have been strikingly handsome, and with his flashing glance, his upright figure, his finely carved, ascetic features, he still had the air of one fashioned to dominate and to command.

His two companions were both big, heavily-built men, one much older than the other. This elder man had a large, flat face, but well-formed features and a good forehead, though with a small chin jutting out obstinately beneath a little pursed-up mouth. A face of many contradictions, Bobby thought, and one that in youth must have been handsome too, though never with that air of arrogant, compelling beauty of which the librarian still showed traces. The skin, too, was blotched and unhealthy looking, and the eyes showed beneath them a puffiness that suggested a tendency to self indulgence. The third member of the little group was a tall, exceedingly handsome youngster with hair that was a mass of yellow curls, features of classic perfection, that ‘schoolgirl complexion' the advertisements talk of, a head beautifully modelled, though perhaps a little small, and set on square, athletic shoulders of a singularly graceful body. At the moment, however, these remarkable good looks of his were somewhat spoiled by a black and scowling expression and the nervous twitching of his rosebud mouth. Bobby indeed had the impression that he had just been shaking his fist at one or other or both of his companions. At the opening of the cellar door, when Olive and Bobby came in, he swung round, gave them an even blacker scowl, and then marched away. They heard Miss. Perkins's nervous giggle, they heard the library door banged with considerable force, and in a whisper Bobby said to Olive:

“Who is the film star in the naughty temper?”

“Nat Kayne, Miss Kayne's cousin,” Olive answered. “He is the heir and he is always wanting to get the library sold to the Welsh University because then he would get a half share at once. The other man is Sir William Winders, the senior trustee.”

Mr. Broast had watched Nat Kayne's stormy exit with a kind of amused and yet regretful tenderness. He made an expressive gesture with those fine, white hands of his as if to say that to the young much must be excused and then came forward and very pleasantly introduced himself and Sir William.

“We were all quite excited,” he said smilingly, “to know Miss Olive was bringing a real live Scotland Yard detective to visit us. Evidently only a spotless conscience would allow its owner to get engaged to a detective.”

“Police,” growled Sir William, who seemed less inclined to be amiable, “used to be a very decent set of men—getting a bit above themselves now. Fussy. Cars and all that,” he concluded vaguely, from which Bobby instantly deduced that there had been some trouble about speeding or leaving a car unattended or something of the sort.

“Can't fuss too much with the deaths on the road what they are,” declared Mr. Broast with another smile at Bobby. “Sometimes I wish they would fuss a bit more. But I don't suppose Mr. Owen has much to do with the traffic problem?”

“No, nothing at all,” agreed Bobby, and began to be aware that for all the smiling ease Mr. Broast showed, those clear, bright eyes of his were regarding his visitors with an almost fierce intensity.

Natural enough, no doubt, that Olive's friends should be keenly interested in the policeman on whom they probably—and reasonably—considered that she was most foolishly throwing herself away.

“And then,” Mr. Broast continued, “I had a special reason for feeling so interested when I knew you were a detective officer. A very special, personal reason.”

“Oh, yes,” said Bobby, suddenly afraid that Mr. Broast, like Miss Kayne, was about to declare that he also had in the past committed the perfect murder. Bobby was quite relieved when Mr. Broast merely continued:

“Because, you see, I'm a detective, too.”

“Indeed,” murmured Bobby.

“Much of my work,” explained Mr. Broast, “lies in tracking down rare editions, association books, and in identifying them by all manner of small details. I could tell you a story of how I traced the Caxton Mandeville leaves half across Europe. You start after your murderers from a dropped button or a burnt-out match, and the end is the gallows. I start—once I did so literally—from the burnt match, and I end with the discovery of a book perhaps unique.”

“Prefer your sort of hunt,” growled Sir William. “Hate to think of hanging people,” and he shuddered slightly, with a kind of uneasy sensibility his somewhat heavy and slow appearance did not quite suggest.

“The excitement of the hunt must be much the same in both cases,” said Mr. Broast. “I daresay when Mr. Owen lay his hand upon the murderer's shoulder, he feels much the same sort of triumph that we do when we run to earth say a complete set of
Pickwick Papers
in original paper covers, or, as I did last year, a copy of the quarto edition of
Titus Andronicus
that till then no one had even believed existed. A triumph, that, a triumph to equal any of Mr. Owen's,” declared Mr. Broast with a kindling eye, a flushed cheek, at the memory of that ecstatic moment.

“I don't think we feel much triumph,” Bobby said slowly. “What one does feel is duty done and the knowledge that peaceful folk can sleep safely in their beds again.”

“Does that follow?” Mr. Broast asked. “Surely a murder is never committed without a cause, and surely a cause for murder seldom repeats itself?”

Bobby shook his head.

“Murder breeds murder,” he said. “There's the sense of power for one thing. A murderer may begin to feel himself a kind of god with power in his hands of life and death over lesser mortals. Or again he continues to kill for security, to make himself safe. You remember
Macbeth
? The start is just one murder—that of Duncan. But that one leads to many more—inevitably.”

“Surely that hardly applies under modern conditions,” Mr. Broast argued. “My point is that it may be necessary once, but that necessity would hardly arise again. In
Macbeth
, the environment and circumstances were quite exceptional.”

“They always are, unique rather,” Bobby said.

A faint giggle from behind heralded the fluttering approach of Miss Perkins.

“Oh, I'm so sorry,” she said. “Briggs says Miss Kayne is asking for Mr. Nathaniel.”

“Tell her he's gone,” Broast said abruptly, and Miss Perkins fled, evidently so scared by his sharp tone that she even forgot her customary giggle.

“I'll be off, too,” Sir William said. His large, flat face was a little pale, his hands shook slightly. “Don't like this sort of talk,” he muttered. “Murder, hanging. Ugh.” One unsteady hand went to his throat and pulled at a collar he seemed to be finding too tight. “Sets you dreaming,” he complained. “I shall dream to-night. I shan't sleep.”

Muttering adieus, he hurried away, and Miss Perkins had by now sufficiently recovered from her recent fright to contribute once more her accustomed giggle as she let him out.

“Well, if our friend doesn't sleep, he won't dream,” Broast remarked, looking after Sir William's retreating form with a smile that was more than half malicious, Bobby thought. “He's a very nervous type, very nervous,” the librarian continued. “Ought to have taken up something less exciting than book collecting.”

“I suppose it is awfully interesting,” observed Bobby, though without much conviction in his tone.

“It leads you on, leads you on, just like you say murder does,” declared Mr. Broast and chuckled over a joke that he evidently thought excellent, but that Bobby considered in poor taste. Perhaps the librarian felt something of Bobby's unexpressed disapproval, for he added: “But Winders was right—murder's not a pleasant subject. Unnecessary to talk about it. We'll forget it, shall we?” He paused to smile again, as though he found a secret amusement in this suggestion, and went on: “You must look at some of our treasures, Mr. Owen. All that section behind you for instance is devoted to my Incunabula—in the general sense of books printed before 1500. Really of course the word means books produced before printing was properly organized in any country so that America and Australia have their own Incunabula. After all, the word only means swaddling clothes. But these of mine are all pre-1500.”

“I suppose they are awfully valuable,” Bobby remarked.

“Well—er—to be perfectly frank, their value's a good deal exaggerated in popular idea. Of course, there are exceptions—the great 42-line Bible, for instance, or the 36-line Bible for that matter, and others of real interest. But most of them are just school books—Delectuses, Latin grammars, Donatuses. Catlo's Delectus had a big circulation in the fifteenth century. I was offered another copy the other day. The owner wanted a thousand pounds for it. He thought I was trying to swindle him when I suggested—well, a good deal less. But after he had tried the Museum, and Christie's, and one or two other places he was glad to come back and take what I gave him. All the same, Mr. Owen, they form the foundation on which the library has been built up. But for them”—Mr. Broast's voice took on a slow solemnity of tone—“the Kayne collection would never have come into existence.”