The Secret Search: A Bobby Owen Mystery

by E. R. Punshon

  “He has the evil eye,” had declared Jimmy Joe, who was of Italian descent, but the evil eye is not officially recognized in this country, and so Jimmy Joe was informed, and informed also that he was bound to serve all comers.

  Fortunately for Jimmy Joe, Russky was no regular patron, and indeed wandered in and out of the Soho underworld at his own good pleasure and often at long intervals. Sometimes he would disappear for months at a time, especially during the summer, when he was said to take to the open road, and then again, when the fine weather broke, returning to the Soho streets. No one seemed to know how he lived or where, and somehow he had managed to make himself regarded with an odd mixture of fear and respect. It was not only Jimmy Joe who believed that he brought bad luck to those who crossed him, and he was credited with strange powers. There were rumours that he peddled drugs, but there had never been the least evidence of this or any discoverable grounds on which to take action.

  “Russky?” Bobby repeated once again. “Where does he come in?”

  “Ma says it might be him gives Cy what he’s using to keep Betty so she won’t know anything what’s happening,” Ada explained. “It’s something Russky has that makes people funny in the head and say just what you tell them. Ma knows about it, because once Russky asked her to get him some honey when it was on points and he hadn’t any or any ration book either.”

  “What did he want honey for?” Bobby asked.

  “It’s what he uses for mixing,” Ada answered. “It has to be done just right. He told Ma what he mixes the honey with comes from India, only the Russians have found out how to make it a lot stronger and how to control it. It’s not honey they use but something else, Russky doesn’t know what, and it’s what they give you to make you confess when you are being tried for something you don’t know anything about.”

  A vague memory was stirring in Bobby’s mind into which had come suddenly a picture of his tutor’s room in an Oxford college and of an essay he had produced on Greek history. The tutor had not been pleased with it. But then tutors seldom were pleased with Bobby’s efforts even though in the end he had managed to take his degree. On this occasion in that distant year the talk had been about Xenophon, and had Xenophon not recorded how some Greek soldiers had been given honey to eat, with very odd results? Bobby’s troubled and confused thoughts were struggling in his mind to reach a conclusion always evading them. He went to the window and stood there, looking out. Ada and Sergeant Kitty watched him curiously, wondering what was disturbing him so. A familiar quotation came into his mind:

  ‘For he on honey-dew hath fed.’

  Was this honey dew of the poem other than the familiar honey dew of our gardens, and was the reference to something possessing strange qualities of its own, something of which the poet had acquired a knowledge in the course of his wide reading? No use though, Bobby told himself, letting his mind wander into such vague speculations, and then what he had been trying to remember came back to him and he turned away from the window to his chair and sat down and said loudly and abruptly:

  “Datura.”

  The word evidently meant nothing to either of the other two. Bobby’s memory was stirring again. Years before there had been a curious law-suit in the English courts. A Hindoo had laid claim to a great position and great wealth in his native land, alleging that for years—since his childhood, indeed—he had been kept under the influence of a decoction of datura, so that until he had been rescued from those who had subjected him to this treatment he had had no memory or knowledge of his true identity, but had been purely passive in their hands, docile to all their wishes. It was a civil case in which Bobby’s interest had been no more than that of any other newspaper reader, and his memory of it was anything but clear. But one thing had become very clear to him.

  “This Russky will have to be found,” he said aloud.

  “You never will,” Ada told him—“not unless he wants. If you go looking for him he just isn’t any more. All any one can do is to wait and keep a look-out till he turns up some time.”

  “Time,” Bobby repeated angrily. Outside Big Ben struck the hour. “Time,” he said again, now with something like despair in his voice. “There isn’t any. It goes. We had no time to save poor old Mr Smith, and now I think there’ll be no time to save the girl.”

  “You’re awfully upset about her, aren’t you?” Ada said.

  “Oh, that’s professional,” Bobby answered, for he did not wish to seem sentimental; and indeed in all his cases he held emotion as far from him as he could, since he knew how easily emotion could disturb the clarity of thought so necessary in his work. “You don’t want to fail to bring off what you are trying for,” he said. “We would do as much for you if you were in the same sort of fix.”

  “Not in the same sort of way you wouldn’t,” Ada told him quietly. “It wouldn’t be right if you did. It isn’t her fault. Her uncle was good to me as no one else ever was and I wasn’t much good to him, was I? I think really I knew all the time, only I wouldn’t let me. It’s different when it’s happened, and you think about it and remember he was kind.” Then she said: “I would help you find her if I could. I expect he would want me to if he knew. Only I can’t. Ally Hidd might know something.”

  “Ally has gone off, too,” Bobby said. “It’ll take just what we haven’t got to find him—time.”

  “There’s others might know,” Ada said. “I don’t know but they might. Perhaps Sunday might. Only he wouldn’t dare tell. Tiny wasn’t half near doing him in last time he talked and Sunday knows if he did again, he wouldn’t ever get another chance. Or there’s Russky might have a notion where she’s being kept.”

  “Why?” Bobby asked. “Why should he?”

  “If it’s right that Cy is giving her Russky’s stuff, then Russky has to get it ready the way he knows and no one else. What he wanted the honey for. It has to be mixed just right and it has to be given immediate or it doesn’t work proper. If you knew where Russky meets Cy, it’s near certain Betty’s somewhere near.”

  “We should have to find Russky himself first,” Bobby said. “Time again and so little of it.”

  He lapsed into silence. It was a new and in some ways a more difficult situation with which this new information confronted him. He had had to arrange for a search for the missing girl to be carried out in each of the several districts where it seemed possible that yesterday’s sudden showers might have caught and drenched any one hurrying on foot to catch a London train. ‘Wide and vague,’ he found himself muttering once again. Moreover some of these districts were outside the Metropolitan police area and the co-operation of the local forces had to be asked for. Now a new search had to be instituted for the illusive Russky who came and went at his own pleasure, and little hope there was that that would be successful in time for any useful result to be achieved. Then, too, fresh effort would have to be made to get hold of Ally Hidd who might well be in Dublin by now, and all this under the imminent and dreadful pressure of time, that ceaseless, everflowing river into which no man steps twice.

  Ada interrupted his thoughts. She was saying:

  “There’s some might know where to look for Russky. Only they wouldn’t ever tell you or any cop. They might me, but not now, not when they’re thinking I may have turned nark.”

  “It wouldn’t be safe for you to try,” Bobby agreed, but he spoke with a touch of hesitation and because he felt he had no right to encourage in any way Ada to undertake so dangerous a task.

  Her former associates would certainly all know that she had been taken away by the police and then released. They would be asking themselves what could be the reason for so quick a release and if she began to ask questions, they would think they knew.

  “I wouldn’t ever dare,” Ada told him. “Asking for it,” she said loudly.

  “Yes, I know,” Bobby agreed, once more deep in thought.

  “Tiny’s been doing all he can to find her, where Cy’s got her hidden,” Ada went on. “Ever since Cy told
him he had her and how about fair shares, or else he would let her go to claim her rights. That’s what they met to talk about. But they aren’t going to trust each other. Not likely.”

  “No, I know,” Bobby said, still more than half absorbed in his own thoughts.

  “She must be safe enough till now,” Ada went on, “or it wouldn’t be any good. I mean to say, if she isn’t, Cy can’t bring her out and say all the money’s hers by rights.”

  “It may only be,” Bobby said, “that Cy has to make Tiny believe she is.”

  “Well, I shan’t be for long—I mean to say, not alive,” Ada remarked, more than a little tremulously. “Not if they get to know I’ve been talking.”

  “We’ll take care of that,” Bobby assured her. “You stop with us and you’ll be perfectly safe. Sergeant Yates will see to that.”

  “I’ll stay all right,” Ada promised. “I don’t want to be done in. I’ll be for it all right if Tiny gets half a chance.”

  “You’ll be perfectly safe with us,” Sergeant Kitty repeated with a reassuring smile.

  But later that night, very late, after Bobby had done all that he could, after he had made all possible arrangements for the morrow, after he had impressed upon all concerned how important it was that inquiries so far without result should be resumed first thing in the morning and pressed with the utmost energy, after indeed he had actually begun to undress, the ’phone bell rang. Resignedly Olive went to answer it for him.

  “Most likely it’s to say you’re urgently wanted the other side of London,” she remarked, from long and sad experience, as she picked up the receiver. But when she laid it down again it was to say: “It’s Miss Yates. Ada’s run away, she says. Climbed out of her bedroom window and gone off. Miss Yates says very likely she’s just been having you on all the time.”

  CHAPTER XXXI

  “LISTENING TO A MURDER”

  IT WAS hardly an encouraging note on which to end a long and trying and doubtful day, but Bobby had known only too many such disappointments when those who had involved themselves in crime had shown signs of a desire to escape to better things, and then had been unable to cut away the ties that bound them to their former life. He knew how often it is not so much the wish as the will that is weak, the inability, after long indiscipline, to accept the steady control of social life.

  Something of this he said to Olive, trying to make light of what was to him a real disappointment, and Olive said:

  “I expect the poor girl is really frightened. She just simply daren’t. Is she really in danger?”

  “Very much so,” Bobby agreed, “if they do suspect that she is giving information. It’s possible a message or warning has been passed to her by some means. If she could climb out of her window, some one else could climb up to it and tap and beckon, and she might not dare disobey.”

  It was a picture that Olive did not like to let her thoughts dwell on—this picture of a beckoning hand at the dark window in the dead of night there was no courage to repel, even though it might well turn out to be a summons to die.

  Bobby told her to put such thoughts out of her mind—a task in which he succeeded better, for it was one he had trained himself to accomplish, finding it necessary. But next morning he was awake and up the earlier of the two, for, after a long tormented night, Olive had dropped into a sound sleep, so that he had had his breakfast before she appeared.

  Yet, early as he was at his office—while, indeed, the cleaners were still in possession—there was little to be done except sit and wait. The search had been resumed with promptitude and was in full progress. Ada’s name had been duly added to the lengthening list of those whom it was so urgent to find immediately. There was nothing else he could think of that needed attention. So he sat at his desk, waiting, occupying himself with routine matters, and every time the ’phone rang, or there was a knock at his door, he hoped it might mean that at last there was news on which action could be taken.

  Ted Wyllie rang up twice; and all Bobby could say was, in the customary official phrase, that everything possible would be done. But the second time it was made this reply produced an expression of such grumbling distrust and impatience from Ted that Bobby told him rather sharply that until there was definite news any attempt at action was only too likely to precipitate disaster.

  “These people know a good deal of what we are doing,” he said. “If they suspect we are coming too near, they’ll get desperate.” The only reply to this was an impatient snort. Equally impatiently and perhaps not very wisely, but his own nerves were at breaking point, he added: “You messed things up pretty badly the other night. If you do it again, it’ll be the end of every hope we have. But for your infernal meddling—”

  “All very well to talk like that,” interrupted the distant angry voice. “If they know what you’re doing, it’s more than I do. Nothing much, I should say, that’s been any good. Officialism and red tape all the time. If Hidd comes along with anything, I’ll let you know, but I shan’t sit around and wait for you to make up your official minds.”

  “Are you expecting him? Have you seen him?” Bobby asked eagerly.

  “He rang up, that’s all. I’ve promised a hundred quid if he can get hold of anything useful,” and with that Ted hung up, most probably, as Bobby guessed, to avoid being questioned further.

  Nor was Bobby pleased. The offer of a hundred pounds was one very considerably in advance of anything Ally Hidd could hope to receive from police sources, as Ally very well knew. Consequently, if he did manage to get hold of any useful information it would certainly go to Ted Wyllie first, and on it that obstinate, rash and self-confident young man was only too likely to act at once, on his own responsibility, and to regard letting the police, in the person of Bobby Owen, know what he was doing as quite a secondary consideration.

  Another period of waiting, and then Detective Constable Miller appeared to report. Good progress was being made, he thought; the ground was being methodically covered. If the missing girl were anywhere in one of the districts indicated by Bobby—that is, within a two-mile radius, roughly speaking, of one or other of seven railway stations—then certainly it would be only a question of time before she was found. But Miller made it clear—unnecessarily clear, Bobby thought—that in his view the ‘if’ was a very big one. Nor did Bobby try to make it any clearer than he had already that the question of time was exactly and precisely and most urgently that on which all depended.

  The next visitor was Sergeant Kitty Yates, very apologetic and apprehensive, evidently fully expecting to receive what war-time slang used to describe as a ‘rocket’—and one of the most explosive kind.

  From such fears, however, she was soon relieved, for Bobby did try, so far as was possible to weak human nature, to suppress the natural instinct to point out to others, especially subordinates, how badly they had done and how much better their performance would have been if only they had carried out their task more intelligently.

  “Bad we’ve lost her, of course,” he said, “and I know I, for one, got the impression that she had made up her mind to help. She did seem as if she really wanted to make some amends and had really been fond of and sorry for old Mr Smith. Apparently she hadn’t—just putting it on—and of course that means she may have done us more harm than good. We have to consider now how far we can trust what she did tell us. It may have been only a lot of hooey. Could any one have climbed up to the window and threatened her, do you think?”

  “It’s a thirty-feet drop,” Miss Yates said. “No gutter-pipe or anything to climb by. Besides, how could any one know which was her room or where she was? She knotted the sheets together to let herself down by.”

  “I was only wondering,” Bobby explained. “We could have put a man on guard under her window. But she might easily have taken alarm at that and turned frightened and sulky. We had to have her confidence and good will if her help was to be of any real value. Anyhow, no good crying over spilt milk.”

  So Sergeant Kitty w
ent away somewhat consoled, and eager to prove her worth another time, and Bobby resigned himself to fresh waiting and filled up some forms—all wrong—and wrote a letter or two and tore them up again.

  He did not even go out to lunch. He contented himself with sandwiches and bread-and-cheese sent in, and still he waited, and thought to himself this was as bad a patch as he had ever known in all his years of service.

  Then at last the ’phone rang with at last a piece of news. It was to say that an old man had been picked up the night before on the outskirts of Epping Forest, that he was apparently suffering from exposure and was now in hospital. He seemed to answer to the description of the man known as Russky, but had denied it, and had given his name as Roberts. The doctors had not allowed him to be questioned further, as his condition was thought to be serious. A young woman had called at the hospital and had identified him as her uncle, giving his name, however, as John Day. Unfortunately, the hospital had not attempted to detain her and had not informed the police of her visit until after her departure. Bobby could do nothing more than ask that if the young woman came again she should be held and he himself informed at once. He also arranged for a constable to be on duty at the hospital to report on any other visitors.

  It began to seem to Bobby that things were drawing to a climax, though of what nature he could as yet form no opinion. It was fairly certain the young woman must be Ada; and if she knew where Russky was, then again almost certainly that was known to Tiny Garden, and most probably to Cy King and his associates as well. But what developments this presaged, why there was concern about Russky’s whereabouts, why he had suddenly appeared in the Epping Forest district, were questions to which as yet no answer could be given. Or any action taken with much hope of profit. All Bobby’s instincts urged him to hurry at speed to the Epping Forest district, where now it seemed things were beginning to happen. All his reason told him to be patient still and to wait for the definite lead that might come at any moment.