By Tuesday Inspector Bull was no farther along towards a solution of the Colnbrook Outrage than he had been when he and Mr. Pinkerton discussed the matter Saturday evening.
“If there was a motorcycle,” Bull explained to Commissioner Debenham, “it managed to disappear without a sign.”
“How about the old lady in Cranford, Bull?”
Bull grimaced.
“She saw a man with a leather helmet go by about twenty minutes to ten. But the sergeant there says she’s a noted liar, sir. He says she’s been eyewitness to every misdemeanour within three miles for the last twenty years; when they run her down she was at church or drinking tea in her kitchen. He says she goes to bed at seven-thirty anyway. That’s no good, sir. Then the garage man at the London end of the bypass couldn’t remember anybody then.”
“What about your other idea? That he turned back towards Windsor at the by-pass.”
“He could have done that,” Bull said thoughtfully. “He had a furlong or so between the turn and the garage. But even then the garage man ought to have heard him. There’s a tobacconist at Slough says he saw three men on motorcycles a little before ten that night when he was going home from his shop. Two of them went through on the Windsor road and the other turned down towards the station. He didn’t notice the licence plates of course. But even if we assume that the man came to Slough and boarded the London train—for instance—it doesn’t help much. We might still pick that motorcycle up, sir, if he did that.”
“What about young Royce? You say the butler saw him come in about eleven?”
Bull nodded.
“He says he went out after cigarettes when the Coltons left Then he dropped in on some friends in Staines about ten, and stayed there half an hour or so. Had a drink and that sort of thing. I called on them—it’s a young Oxford gentleman who has a private printing press and his wife. They say Royce did come, in his car—a racing Hispano—; he comes in often when he’s in Windsor. Well, nobody knows about that hour from nine to ten. I didn’t want to make a point of it—not yet.”
Debenham lighted one of the mild cigars he smoked incessantly, in self-defence, he said, because they were the only form of tobacco his wife and daughter didn’t borrow from him.
“Well, Bull,” he said patiently, examining the tip of it critically, “you’ve got to do two things, at least Find out if there was a motorcycle. Find out who drove it”
Bull allowed himself a grin.
“Sounds simple, sir.”
“I know it isn’t simple. All we can do is cover the ground. He’s getting rope enough now, these few days. He’ll do something more. Let him make a mistake and we’ll have him.”
“I don’t want to let him do any more of the same, sir,” Bull replied. “And I don’t seem to be getting on with it. I was wondering if you didn’t want to put Dryden on it . . . He’s got a theory. I haven’t.”
“Bother Dryden’s theory. You go find who killed George Colton, Bull, and I’ll let you have a week in France.”
In his tiny office Bull read two trivial reports from the men who were watching Michael Royce and Mrs. George Colton, put on his hat and coat and went out to Cadogan-square. He reflected as he rang the bell that what he had ahead of him was what he detested most of all parts of his job.
A new maid conducted him into the back parts of the Colton house to the cook, who, he soon found, was in charge of the household management.
“Coggins is my name, or was my husband’s name, but it’s all I ever got from him but trouble so I call it mine nevertheless. I tell all these girls that comes here no good comes of a girl marrying when she’s got a post no matter how bad it is.”
Bull sat down and took a cup of tea.
“Do you call this a bad post, Mrs. Coggins?”
(“There’s what I calls a gentleman. No hoity-toity about him. Drank his tea like my own son, if I’d had one, but Coggins wasn’t much good,” Mrs. Coggins reported for many a day after the settlement of the Colnbrook Outrage to her cronies gathered at the post office for the payment of weekly insurance.)
“Bad, indeed, sir! The finest post these girls’ll ever have. Why the madam is as sweet a lamb as ever drew her breath. And that’s saying something.”
Inspector Bull agreed. He was fond of old women of whatever social level, unless they reeked of gin too much.
“Now mind you, I don’t hold with marrying more than once. I always says that it’s tempting Providence. So after I’d slaved, girl and woman, for the Mrs. Colton before her for twenty years and more, it seems a bit hard to have the master up and marry the first pretty face that’ll have him. I packs my box ready to leave when she puts her foot in the door. I says to the house-maid as was then, ‘No hoity-toity young miss, barely a madam, is telling me her new-fangled thoughts about cooking.’ “
In complete agreement, Bull joined Mrs. Coggins in a further cup of tea, strong as witches’ brew.
“Tea is tea,” said Mrs. Coggins, “and dishwater is dishwater. There’s no use using them for purposes God didn’t make them for. What was I talking about?”
“Mrs. Colton,” said Bull.
“So I was. But no, she no more than gets in this house than she comes straight down here and says, ‘Mrs. Coggins, you’re a wonderful cook and I’m going to pay you ten pounds a year more, and I wants you to continue just like you’ve been and wouldn’t you like some new curtains for the windows?’ As I says to the house-maid, Wot could you do?’
“I says, ‘Yes, madam,’ and unpacks my box and a sweeter body mortal’s never had to do for. That was two years Whitsunday and never a cross word.”
Mrs. Coggins pursed her lips in admiration and wagged her grey head.
“And if you should ask me, I don’t think it’s all been roses.”
“Ah?” said Inspector Bull between sips.
“Ah. It’s not for me to say, but the master, rest his soul, wasn’t so jolly as he looked, all pink and shiny and pleasant. Look at the way he’s treated that poor lamb his own daughter!”
Bull realised perfectly that no comment was needed.
“Wouldn’t let her so much as have young Mr. Royce in the house. Many’s the time them two have met here in my kitchen and me standing like the Horse Guards in the pantry till I was ready to drop and the mistress seeing him coming rings the bell so Mr. Royce can get out—and him up at the University too.”
“I thought it was Mr. Field who was fond of Miss Colton?” Bull asked with innocence.
“That’s according to the master. He was bound and determined that that lamb should marry Mr. Field, but Mr. Field, there’s no doubt of it, he gave his blessing to Mr. Royce. Those two precious birds have been set on each other since they were in pinafores and longer, and the master was just plain going against Nature. And as I says to the housemaid I’d sooner go against the master than against Nature because you can always get another master and Nature can strike you dead in your tracks. So I helps them all I can.”
It took Inspector Bull forty-five minutes and seven cups of tea to lead the conversation gently around to the subject of the maid whom he had seen before.
“I gave the worthless baggage the sack,” said Mrs. Coggins promptly. “She going around saying—openly, mind you—that the mistress had killed him! The lying little scamp! I always said that girl was no earthly good from the day I hired her. Accusing the mistress of talking to Peskett and Miss Agatha too. I told her Friday night to pack her box and get! And she did.”
“Where did she live?” Bull ventured.
“You’re not going to listen to any of her talk?”
“Certainly not, Mrs. Coggins. She’s been writing letters to the papers. I’m going to tell her to quit it.”
Bull saw no reason for avoiding the truth in this instance.
“I just want to stop her before she gets anybody—or herself—into trouble.”
Mrs. Coggins got an insurance booklet from her cupboard.
“Well, here it is. 246 Ifield-road. S.W.—I can’t make it out. It’s out Earl’s-court way.”
Bull wrote the address in his black note book, for the sake of courtesy; he remembered such things perfectly. It was also a part of his qualifications to need no direction to such roads as Ifield-road.
“Now you’re a pretty good judge of people, Mrs. Coggins,” he said next. “What about Mr. Peskett?”
“Mr. Peskett’s a nice, well-spoken young man,” said Mrs. Coggins promptly. “Not that he isn’t a bit above himself, be-because he is. But never a word that’s unpleasant from him, and once when the master was away and the mistress said he could he drove me to Haslemere to see my sister and was as nice as you please even to buying me sweet chocolate to eat on the way back. There’s not many young men driving people’s motor cars that’d do as much. He says, ‘Glad to, Mrs. Coggins, you remind me of my aunt that raised me,’ ”
Scoring one for Mr. Peskett, and marking down another interrogation point for him at the same time, Bull took his way when it was decently possible to Ifield-road. Miss Mabel Gaskin would not have a tongue dipped in motherly kindness as Mrs. Coggins had, but he had some hopes.that his interview would not, on the other hand, take so long.
Miss Gaskin gave the impression that she had been waiting some time for a call from the Press but had not expected Detective-Inspector Bull. Bull glanced around the cheap back bedroom with gas ring, shilling metre, chipped basin and pitcher and distorted mirror from Woolworth’s over a deal bureau, and modified the severity of his more professional tone.
“I have the letter you wrote to the Telescope, Miss Gaskin,” he said.
She sat down weakly on the side of her wretched bed. Brazen it out, her voice said; but her eyes were frightened. Bull hated above all to badger servant girls. They had so little but fear to fall back on.
“I guess I’ve a right to write to papers if I choose.”
“You have to be careful about it, though,” said Bull, “or you might be guilty of malicious slander.”
His voice was gentle, but the words were not pleasant. He hurried on.
“But what I want to find out is this. What did you have in mind when you wrote that? Don’t you like Mrs. Colton?” “I hate the lot of them.”
Miss Gaskin might be frightened, but she was not frightened out of her firm beliefs.
“And Mrs. Coggins always being so pleased because the new mistress depended on her—all because the new mistress was too lazy to run her own house. She didn’t bother about nothing in the kitchen. Paid Mrs. Coggins ten bob a week more instead of hiring a housekeeper. But I wasn’t taking any of her fancy talk.”
“That’s no sign she killed her husband,” said Bull sensibly. “A lady can like not to do housework without being a murderess.”
That was a little hypocritical of Inspector Bull; of two women, one housewifely and the other not, he would have put money on the second as a possible murderess without a second’s thought.
“No, but they fought all the time. Whenever he was home there’d be trouble about something. He didn’t like the way she left Mrs. Coggins to run the house. He used to say she spent too much money on clothes and things, he wasn’t a millionaire and she’d bankrupt him. And she used to let Mr. Royce come there to see Miss Colton when the master had said she wasn’t to. He locked them both in their rooms once. I took their dinner up on a tray. Bread and tea was all he let them have.”
Bull listened with inward surprise to this straight-forward tale. It had all the marks of truth as far as it went. If it was true, Bull hadn’t a doubt Mrs. Colton had killed her husband. Bull didn’t blame her.
The girl was quick enough to see what he was thinking.
“And why shouldn’t he, sir?” she demanded, to his further surprise. “It was his money, when they had any.”
Again she caught his thoughts.
“We had to wait for our wages, once. It was her fault—the fighting, I mean. She knew he’d be set in his ways when she married him. It wasn’t her place to set herself up against him—no matter what he did. He gave her a home.”
Bull would not have been English if he had not had at heart much the same belief.
“Had they quarrelled at all that day he was killed?”
“Rather.”
“When?”
“When they were dressing to go to Windsor for dinner.”
“What about?”
“Well, I didn’t hear it all, but I heard him say if she left the top off the toothpaste again she could leave his house. And stay.”
For the first time Bull felt some sympathy for the dead man.
“Was he always cross?”
“No. Sometimes he was lovely, when they pleased him. His wife and daughter. Mostly they’d just set themselves up to provoke him.”
“But still, it’s quite another thing to say she killed him.”
Miss Gaskin’s lips set and her eyes gleamed.
“So she and Peskett could go away together. They did it. He’s not a driver. He’s above that. And she was always as nice as pie to him. Never treated him like a servant.”
That, Bull found by careful questioning, was the total reason for Miss Gaskin’s belief. As it came out in the course of the questioning that she was out of work he added, to some sound advice about anonymous letters, one of the Crown’s pound notes. Of Mrs. Copeins and Miss Gaskin, he thought, one was a much better judge of character than the other. Which it was he had little doubt, though he hated to admit it to himself.