The Secret Search: A Bobby Owen Mystery

by E. R. Punshon

  But it was hard waiting, even though he got rid of some of the nervous tension he was experiencing by using the ’phone to make sure that nowhere was there any relaxation of the intense effort he had demanded from all. But he knew well enough that he could never hope or expect to communicate to others that awful need for passionate speed that he felt himself.

  “Talk about frustration,” he muttered, glaring at the ’phone on his desk as though that harmless instrument were responsible for all.

  Then, as if to pacify his wrath, it rang. A wrong number. He said so with commendable self-restraint. It rang again, and this time when he answered there was a voice he knew:

  “Ada Day speaking,” it said. “Is that you, Mr Owen?”

  “Yes, I’m here,” Bobby answered. “I’ve been hoping to hear from you. Where are you? What made you go off like that?”

  He heard her laugh lightly. He thought she sounded excited, and he even wondered if she had been drinking.

  “Tell Miss Yates I’m awfully sorry,” she said. “I would have liked to see her face next morning, though.” Her tone changed again. “Russky’s in hospital,” she said. “Did you know?”

  “You’ve been to see him, haven’t you?” Bobby asked, noticing that she had not told him yet where she was speaking from and yet afraid to press the question lest she took alarm and fled.

  She had to be handled with extreme care, and now she was laughing again, and this rather excited merriment puzzled him and made him uneasy, for he had never known her in such a mood before and there seemed nothing to account for it; nor anything in her voice to suggest that she had been drinking, as his first thought had been. She was saying now:

  “Oh, you know that, too. You always know everything, don’t you? After I was in bed last night I couldn’t sleep and I got to thinking again how good old Mr Smith had been to me, like no one ever had before, and how I hadn’t been much good to him, and it was just as if he was there, poor old Nunks, and if I hadn’t any business to call him that, he liked it, all the same. I began to wish there was more I could have told you, because I expect Nunks would have wanted his really own niece helped out. Only I didn’t want, and I thought it wasn’t up to me to go and get killed, trying to find out more, and then there I was up and getting dressed again and I didn’t want or know why. And I went to the window and I thought it would be easy to tie the sheets together and climb down, and I did, and it was no good telling Miss Yates because she would never have stood for it, would she?”

  “Did you think you could get hold of any useful information at that time of night?” Bobby asked.

  “It was being so late made it a better tale to tell,” Ada explained, and now again she was laughing. “You see, I could say I had got away from you and been hiding till dark, so as to get back, and I told Tiny things I said you had told me, and he told me things, too. He said Russky had done a bunk, and I said why, and he said Russky was an old fool, but he had got to find him and he expected Russky had gone off to his hide-out in Epping Forest. Did you know?”

  “No,” Bobby answered. “What hide-out?”

  “Every one thought there was one, but no one knew for sure,” Ada answered. “They say he has a sort of dug-out, same as in the war, and sometimes he’ll lie up there for days, sleeping most of the time. Ally Hidd used to say he thought he knew where, but I don’t suppose he ever did, though he was good at picking things up, and some day he’ll pick up too much and get outed himself, and now it looks like he has got hold of something, and he’s telling Mr Wyllie, so you had better get going before he’s for it, too, because of not knowing what he’s up against.”

  “I’ll do that immediately,” Bobby told her, though it was a warning he did not need, and a task he had no means of accomplishing, since he had neither power nor authority to restrain the rashness of a hot-headed boy—one who had in addition already himself described himself as ‘half off his head.’ “Why did you go to the hospital?” he asked. “Did Russky tell you anything? Where are you speaking from?”

  “They wouldn’t let me,” Ada replied. “See Russky, I mean.” She was laughing again in that odd, new, hysterical way of hers, and her words came sometimes in a gush of speech, all the words run together, and sometimes with long pauses between them, as if she kept putting down the receiver and hesitating. It made Bobby afraid that any moment she might ring off. Nor did he dare put down the receiver on his side even for a moment, lest she should ask some question, and, getting no reply, take quick alarm and disappear. What was the matter with her he did not know, but she was clearly in a strange, exalted mood he did not understand. She was saying now: “The hospital let me see his clothes and what had been in his pockets—such a collection, and money, too, and while they were counting it to make sure I hadn’t pinched any, I pinched an old note book of his there was among the torn dirty old papers and stuff he had.”

  “Anything in it to help?” Bobby asked eagerly.

  When she replied her voice had changed again. Now it was brisk, clear and quiet, unemotional, as if she had come to the gist of what she wanted to say and was being careful to say it as clearly and quickly as possible.

  “It said about meeting ‘C.K.’ at a fresh place every time,” she was answering, “and always a long way from before, and was it possible that was why the effects seemed different this time? So doesn’t that mean they had to bring her in a car to where Russky was waiting with the stuff to give her?”

  “It might be that,” Bobby agreed. “Where are you speaking from?”

  “I am going straight back to Miss Yates’s,” she answered. “I did think there was some one following me, but I gave him the slip. I thought it might be one of Tiny’s lot, and I want to get back where I’ll be safe. Listen. At the hospital they wouldn’t let me see Russky, but a nurse said he kept muttering about the effect being different, and he didn’t know why, but he was going to stop it, and he didn’t care what they said, because he had seen her twice when she wasn’t there, and he didn’t want that any more.” She paused. Her voice changed again, so changed that for the moment Bobby almost believed it was another person speaking. “I thought I had given them the slip,” she said in that new voice of hers, “but I haven’t. They are here now. At the door. I’m trying to keep it shut. I can’t. It’s opening. Good-bye. Good-bye.”

  With the receiver to his ear Bobby heard the sound of breaking glass and splintering wood. He heard a scream, the sound of a heavy fall, of blows. His deputy had just come hurrying into the room with news. He cried out: “For God’s sake, what’s the matter? Why do you look like that?”

  “I think I’ve been listening to a murder,” Bobby said.

  CHAPTER XXXII

  “HURRY! HURRY!”

  IT TOOK now only a very few seconds for a general warning to be sent out and received. Nor was it very much longer before a report came back that the body of a young woman had been found near a call-box in the Epping district. That the murder had been instigated, and probably actually committed, by either Cy King or Tiny Garden, Bobby was well persuaded. But in those last few pitiful sentences Ada had managed to gasp out, she had spoken no name. Equally well, it could have been the one or the other, since each might have thought himself betrayed and each have sought thus brutally, protection against further revelations.

  Enough information, though, Bobby decided at once, to justify, if not an arrest, at least ‘detention for questioning’, both of Cy and of Tiny. Such questioning, on a firm basis of what is already known, even though that knowledge may still be short of legal proof, can often produce the further evidence required before a formal charge can be laid. But, as Bobby reflected ruefully, before questioning could begin, Cy and Tiny had to be found, and that, he suspected, was not going to prove easy. Both must be desperate by now; must know by now how hotly pursuit was pressing on their heels and both had many friends and associates willing to provide, through bribe or threat, help and shelter.

  Bobby had given his deputy a brief account
of that last tragic talk over the ’phone—he was still, in spite of long experience, a little shaken by it, helpless at his desk as he had been, forced to sit and listen, with no possibility of finding relief in action. His deputy broke in upon his thoughts and regrets, saying:

  “This girl’s murder may help the other girl. Ada can’t be passed off now as the heir to the Smith money. Nothing to gain from holding the real Betty any more, so they may let her go, don’t you think?”

  “They may; let’s hope so,” Bobby said, but doubtfully, and his face was grave. “Or they may panic, and panic may lead to anything. And we don’t yet know who was the actual murderer—Cy King or Tiny.”

  “Tiny,” declared the deputy at once. “She was one of his gang.”

  Bobby nodded, for that was what he thought also. He went on:

  “How will Cy react? Serious offence, kidnapping, and carries a long sentence. Fourteen years for what the lawyers call abduction, but that generally means an attempt to enforce marriage. Kidnapping for fraud and personation should come under the same statute, but I don’t know, or what the penalty is. Have to look it up. Ought to be life, but sure to be something Cy won’t care about. He’s always said he would rather face the gallows than a long term—he didn’t like one little bit the short one I got him before, and he may go to extremes, trying to save himself.”

  “You mean suppress the evidence?” the deputy asked, and when Bobby nodded assent, he added gloomily: “Means suppress the girl?” and again Bobby nodded assent.

  “Then there’s Tiny,” Bobby went on. “What’s he going to do? He probably blames Cy for the whole thing. He’s right enough there. But for Cy we should never have known anything about it, and but for his sending Gladys to Canada, and for her tumbling on Miss Betty at once and letting such a lot of the cat out of the bag, it’s certain Miss Betty wouldn’t have chosen this particular time to come over looking for her uncle. Cy’s putting his oar in ruined as promising a plot as any one ever hatched. But for him Tiny might well have got hold of the Smith money—the biggest haul ever and they must have thought perfectly safe. And none of us knowing a thing about it. Now he knows he’ll never touch a penny and he has committed two murders he must realize we do know a lot about. He can’t even tell how much Ada had time to tell us. I don’t think Cy King need feel too safe and comfy just now. I should be inclined to put Tiny in the mad dog class at the moment. Still, that doesn’t matter much. The main thing is, how much nearer are we to finding the real Betty safe and sound?”

  “Do you,” the deputy asked, a little doubtfully, “put any stock in the story about Russky supplying some sort of drug to keep her quiet? Is anything of the sort known?”

  “Well, there is always datura,” Bobby said. “Quite a lot about it in the Adams’ edition of Dr Gross’s book. In India, it is believed to have the property of destroying all sense of responsibility or personality. What is said is that erring Indian wives give it their husbands who then watch placidly the appearance of the wife’s lover and his entertainment, and afterwards remember nothing. I don’t know what actual evidence there is for that being a fact. There’s the case, too—authentic, it’s on record—of a Russian husband whose wife eloped with her lover, and he went with them as the lover’s valet. If you like, you can put that down to masochism, which seems to be a bit of a Russian speciality, or it might be datura again. If the communists in Russia have learned how to control the stuff, and even strengthen its effects, it would explain why they are able to pull confessions out of the hat whenever they want to. Then there was something in the papers only the other day about the American discovery of a gas that would destroy an enemy’s will to fight—destroy his will and personality, that is, and make him wholly passive and docile. Much the same as what is said about datura. It may be only newspaper talk. You can’t tell.”

  “Russky may be able to say something if we can get hold of him,” the deputy remarked, though doubtfully. “Well, drugs—they are funny things. Look at operations. Doctors give you something and you are practically dead, and then you come back to life. But I’m not falling for all these ghost stories going about—I mean the yarns about this girl being seen when she wasn’t there. Drugs—well, that’s science. But ghosts is just superstition.”

  “No question of ghosts,” Bobby pointed out. “I hope she’s still alive, and she almost certainly was alive when Wyllie’s mother thought she saw her in the cellar of their house. It may be one effect of the drug if that’s what she’s been given. Releases the spirit and sets it wandering, so to say. It’s a possibility. You can take it or leave it. It might be what Professor Rhine calls E.S.P.”

  “What on earth’s that?” demanded the deputy.

  “Extra Sensory Perception. Much the same as thought-reading. A kind of visual impression. You don’t see what isn’t there. You see a picture in your mind’s eye you get by reading some one else’s mind. I’ve been looking it up,” Bobby added in half-apologetic explanation. “It seems to hang together in a way.”

  “All the same, it’s not evidence,” the deputy pointed out. “Is it? You can’t call it evidence, can you?”

  “Not even information to act on,” Bobby agreed with a sudden return of the sense of strain he was under but that he had relieved a little in talking. “If only this mind-reading or whatever it is could give us a hint where to look or what to do instead of having to sit and wait and wait.”

  “There’s one thing,” the deputy said, glad to leave these suggestions of ‘E.S.P.’ and the like, all so remote from the hard, practical, every-day routine of police work. “I expect you’ve noticed it. If it’s correct Russky always had to meet Cy at different places a goodish distance away from each other, then it looks like a car was used.”

  “There’s another alternative,” Bobby said. “Might be a caravan. Caravans don’t stop long enough in one place to attract attention, and there are plenty of them. No one looks at them twice, and anyhow country people think them and their inmates a queer lot. I’ve told our chaps to pay special attention to caravans.”

  The deputy went away then to take Bobby’s place at a conference being held over another case, for Bobby had made up his mind to hold himself in complete readiness to leave all else immediately if and when something definite in the way of information came in. Nor did he think this could now be long delayed. But for the time being all he could do was to sit and wait, hoping every moment to hear definite news. Moodily he reflected that even if his caravan idea was correct, there would be innumerable caravans in the districts where the search was going on. All would have to be found and examined, and probably the very last one to be visited would be the one they wanted, and probably when they did find it, it would be empty, ‘without trace’. Indeed, the case was so long a record of disappointment and frustration that his mood was one of such depression as he had not often known.

  Then again the ’phone rang. He picked it up. The voice said:

  “Detective Constable Fred Ford speaking. As instructed, tailed Mr Wyllie, and saw him meet party answering description of Ally Hidd. Mr Wyllie showed excitement and stopped a taxi. I then spoke to him, showing warrant card and offering to accompany him. Was refused, Mr Wyllie stating that surprise was necessary, and three was too much like a party and would be spotted as soon as seen, especially with me looking like a policeman—as I don’t,” Ford could not help adding. “I warned him against taking law into his own hands and was told to go to hell. He then said for me to tell you to wait at Honor Broome if you like, at the police station, and he would ring up. I noted number of taxi and,” he added in a voice charged with all the emotion he felt but had deemed it would be unofficial to express, “if ever there’s orders to pinch him, I hope it’s me to do it.”

  “Never mind that,” said Bobby, though fully understanding. “You had better get along to Honor Broome and report there. Wait till you hear from me.”

  “Very good, sir,” Ford answered.

  Bobby put down the receiver and w
ondered if there ever had been a case so bedevilled by outside interference. Tiny Gardner’s cunning scheme might well have succeeded but for Cy King; and Bobby was sure that but for Ted Wyllie’s meddling, Miss Betty would have been found and rescued long ago. It was very possible that this time Ally Hidd really had got hold of something important, and of course he was going to pass it on first to the man who had promised him a hundred pounds rather than to officials who would have difficulty in getting permission to pay a tenth of that sum. Bobby found himself reflecting that if this time Ted got himself knocked on the head, he, Bobby, would be very willing to subscribe for a wreath to be sent to the funeral. As likely as not, he told himself bitterly, Ted’s rash, headstrong impetuosity would precipitate final catastrophe.

  The ’phone rang again. Bobby picked it up. The distant voice said:

  “Information from contact that Tiny Garden has beaten up Sunday pretty bad and is now proceeding to Honor Broome. Tiny stated to be in bad mood and uttering threats. Reason and purpose not known.”

  “Good,” Bobby said. “Thank you very much.”

  He slammed down the receiver and hurried away, pausing only to let it be known where he was going and why. Outside was standing ready the car he had arranged should be in waiting.

  “Honor Broome, hurry,” he told the driver, and a constable came running up.

  “Beg pardon, sir,” he said breathlessly. “Report just come in from North Nodding. Cy King and a companion seen driving along Road 1593. General warning sent out to intercept, but not so far see again.”

  “North Nodding?” Bobby repeated. “Isn’t that in the Honor Broome district?”

  “Two or three miles south, I think, sir,” the constable answered. “There’s a side road.”

  “Good,” said Bobby again, and, to the driver, he repeated: “Hurry. Hurry.”

  CHAPTER XXXIII