Helen Passes By: A Bobby Owen Mystery

by E. R. Punshon

  He went towards the indicated spot. There was no one there. He had not expected there would be. But he could see a figure going swiftly away, a figure easy to recognize as it passed, sombre and heavy, before a background of greenery. No mistaking that long, menacing stride, that form surrounded, as it were, by an aura of purpose and threat. Bobby turned back to Lord Adour.

  “It was Mauley Bain,” he said.

  “What’s he want?” Lord Adour said, and there was uneasiness in his voice. “I’ve seen him hanging about here before. He never speaks. What’s it for?”

  “Well, it’s where his brother was murdered,” Bobby said. “There may be some instinctive feeling that he’ll find something here to tell him who it was.”

  “I’ve heard he’s been making threats,” Lord Adour said. “I hear he’s been saying that if the police can’t, he will.”

  “So I believe,” Bobby agreed. “I’ve warned him already. I will again. I’ll tell him that if I hear any more of that sort of talk, I’ll have him bound over. That is,” Bobby added more doubtfully, “if we could show cause. The magistrates mightn’t want to take it too seriously.”

  Lord Adour looked as if he took it seriously enough. Evidently he thought Mauley’s threats might have a personal bearing. Then he said:

  “I remember now. When I put the gun down it nearly toppled over. There was a biggish stone I hadn’t noticed. I rested the butt end on it and it nearly overbalanced. I remember thinking that if it had fallen the noise would probably have scared the kingfisher away.”

  “Well, let’s see if we can find a biggish stone under a tree,” Bobby suggested, and, moving in a direct line towards the tall birch, they soon found one, underneath a sturdy young oak, the only oak apparently anywhere near. “You see,” Bobby explained, “there’s been a suggestion that someone may have found the body, and instead of reporting it have stolen the gun. If you left the gun here, some distance away both from the murder scene and the path, that doesn’t seem very likely.”

  Lord Adour blinked as if he did not quite follow this argument. More did Bobby, for that matter. But he had wanted to say something. He was feeling a good deal worried. Jane Felgate, if she had been near, might have seen her uncle, have seen him put down his gun and run off towards the house. There was a vision in his mind of the strong, calm face of Jane, tense with resolve, of the loaded gun ready to her hand, close by the man who had deserted her and now was lurking near for a glimpse of her successful rival passing by.

  No pleasant picture, and Bobby dismissed it from his mind. Mere phantasy, he thought and hoped.

  Lord Adour wanted to know if Bobby had now seen enough. Bobby said he thought so, and they went back to the house, silent companions, for Bobby’s thoughts were troubled; and his Lordship of Adour and Avon was in an extremely bad temper, resentful and contemptuous of this futile poking about and raking up of unessentials.

  At the house there was still no sign of Helen Adour. Jane had left a message that she thought Helen must have gone down to the river, and she was going there to see. Bobby said it didn’t matter. He would wait another opportunity another day. For one thing, he reflected, Miss Adour’s absence, intentional or accidental, would give him an excuse to call again at Kindles, as he thought he might well wish to do. So he took his leave, Lord Adour showing no visible regret; and, returning to his car where he had parked it by the side of the drive, he arranged with some care a small defect that prevented it from starting. After a few minutes spent in lifting the bonnet and looking rather helplessly within and another minute or two in crawling rather vaguely under the car, Bobby went round to the back of the house. There he found a grumpy-looking, elderly—more than elderly—man who stared at him suspiciously. Bobby explained who he was, said his car refused to start, and he wondered if he could ask for a little help. He was talking to Mr. Pearson, wasn’t he? Lord Adour’s chauffeur, and therefore no doubt knowing a lot more about cars than he did himself. Mr. Pearson evidently thought that was very much more than likely, and agreed, though grudgingly, to come and have a look. He was grimly amused to find that so trifling and so easily adjusted a defect had baffled the London police swell.

  Bobby expressed profuse gratitude, admiration for such skill, half a crown changed hands, a cigarette was offered and accepted. The ice thus broken, and Mr. Pearson put in a good temper by such a display of superiority as never fails to please and flatter human vanity—the fundamental human characteristic Bobby went on to mention that Miss Felgate had said that Mr. Pearson believed the recent tragedy was a case of suicide, not murder. Was Mr. Pearson still of the same opinion?

  Mr. Pearson emphatically was. He proceeded to expound his theory. By this time the old man was thoroughly enjoying himself. He liked teaching other people their own business, as do most of us for that matter. Often enough he had tried to put Sergeant Gregson in the right way. The sergeant had seldom shown much appreciation, but here was this London chap listening with proper attention. That showed intelligence and deserved encouragement. Bobby mentioned Miss Adour, and the old man’s rugged face, lined with the years and much complaining, softened visibly.

  “If it wasn’t for her,” he said, “I wouldn’t be here—got another job long ago. There’s plenty would be glad enough to know as I was looking. But there”—the hard, wrinkled, old face, the sharp, suspicious eyes, softened even further—“but there, when she passes by it lightens all the day. You just stand and watch like as you do at times when the sun comes up at dawn.”

  Bobby remarked that he hoped to meet Miss Adour soon. Pearson said he had just missed her. A few minutes ago, she had gone through the yard, on her way to the river probably. She liked to sit there, quiet like, watching the water go by. Just by herself without being bothered by people buzzing round as if they were wasps and her a pot of honey. Bobby remarked that he had, however, met Miss Felgate, who seemed a very pleasant young lady. Pearson agreed, though a trifle grudgingly, as if reluctant to admit that anyone or anything could be pleasant in this thoroughly unsatisfactory world. For one thing, she wasn’t such a “know-all” as most young people nowadays, who didn’t want to listen to them as knew a thing or two before they were born. She would make a good wife, would Miss Jane, and Itter Bain had been a fool to throw her over, especially when he knew very well that Miss Helen wouldn’t even ever so much as look at him. Not likely. She wasn’t for the likes of Itter Bain. She kept herself to herself, did Miss Helen. But Miss Jane took it bitter hard. Not that she showed her feelings. She wasn’t one for that, not her. But he knew. You couldn’t fool old Pearson. He knew all right. He saw her look the way Betty Haines looked the day she heard she had been jilted and went down to the sea to drown herself. But then Miss Jane wasn’t one to take it that way, and when Bobby drove off he was still wondering whether she was one to take it another way.

  That night Bobby wrote, among other things:

  “Of course, Olive, you see from what I’ve told you that I have been given one clear hint to the murderer’s identity. It may be a misleading hint, and it does seem to suggest the guilt of a person whom the other evidence shows equally clearly can have had nothing to do with it. A contradiction I don’t for the moment see my way to get round. Possibly the hint in question means nothing though it’s glaring enough. It’ll all need a lot of checking up, and at present I feel it’ll be a lot easier to know the truth than to prove it. But then knowledge that can’t show itself in action is sterile knowledge, the knowledge of the dry-as-dust scholar who keeps all his learning to himself, the miser of wisdom.

  “One thing I shall have to do is to check up Seers’s dossier pretty carefully. There is nothing in it about Jane Felgate’s engagement to Itter Bain. Seers probably thought it irrelevant. Lord knows what else he may not have left out because he thought it irrelevant.

  “I haven’t met Helen Adour yet, though it seems to the other results produced by her merely passing by you have to add that of keeping crabby old Pearson in his job. I gather Lord Adour wants
to get rid of him—a cantankerous old boy, I expect—and he wants to go, but he won’t because he can’t make up his mind to miss the chance of sometimes seeing her!

  “I’m not sure I shouldn’t call that the most remarkable of all the results she seems able to achieve.

  “Incidentally, what do you make of this story of her liking to go down to the riverside and ‘watch the water’ flowing by? Would psychoanalysts deduce a Narcissus complex? Does it mean that she is in love with no one because she is in love with her own beauty? The vanity of Lilith?”

  The rest of the letter is of a personal nature and would not interest the reader.

  CHAPTER XIII

  MEDITATIONS

  Bobby spent most of the rest of the day in a careful re-examination of the dossier compiled by Commander Seers. In the light obtained during the last day or two by personal contacts, it seemed to Bobby even more inadequate and incomplete than he had previously believed.

  Not to be wondered at, perhaps, that there was no mention of the motor launch or its sale. Bobby himself was by no means sure that that was in any way relevant. But more and more clearly did it appear that Commander Seers had carried out the investigation under the strong influence of preconceived ideas.

  One was the assumption that in any crime committed in the neighbourhood, one of the newcomers, the workmen in dock or factory drawn by the promise of high wartime wages, must certainly be involved. That was where the Commander had started his search and there it had almost automatically remained. Another was the axiom that people in Lord Adour’s position did not commit crimes of violence, and, of course, they seldom need to. If proof were shown, naturally the Commander would know and do his duty, but the proof would have to be fairly obvious before he recognized it. Again, he was quite clearly under the influence of the simple belief that it was the first duty of everyone worthy of the name of English gentleman to protect any woman from “talk” or “scandal,” these being regarded as much the same. This dogma applied especially if the woman in question came under the technical description of “young lady.” Jane Felgate, for instance, was never mentioned. From Helen Adour no statement had been taken and the references to her were vague and incidental. Those made by her father or by Wing Commander Martin Winstanley had been thought sufficient.

  In this way Winstanley’s evidence that he had accompanied her through the spinney on her way home had been accepted as proof of innocence, nor had the possibility that she had returned later been taken into account. True, there was the evidence of the Kindles maidservant that on her return with her eggs she had gone direct to the kitchen, but there was nothing to show that she continued there. The cakes and other dishes she used the eggs for might have been prepared later. Nor indeed was there anything very conclusive to show that the death of Itter Bain had not occurred before her arrival at the River Farm, though other considerations did make this seem unlikely.

  There was again nothing to show that any real attempt had been made to confirm that Prescott Bain had been in the company of the two bank officials during the whole of the fatal afternoon. Apparently Seers had been content to ring up the bank and get confirmation of the fact that there had really been such an interview. The important question of the actual hours covered had not been gone into at all thoroughly.

  “Slipshod,” Bobby pronounced severely. “There may be a loophole there as big as a barn door. I shall have to go along and see the bank blokes myself.”

  Finally, at the end of the dossier, came a brief record dealing with Mr. Harry Haile, not at all flattering in tone, and hinting that he was lying when he denied having been in the district before his appearance there as a reporter in the employ of the Seashire Herald. However, no attempt had been made to follow this up, no motive for supposing he was implicated in the murder was suggested. All that really emerged was a fairly strong suggestion that any excuse for arresting Mr. Haile or otherwise dealing with him would be warmly welcomed and any such action strongly supported.

  “Me, too,” said Bobby, who also had acquired some dislike for the activities of Mr. Haile, even apart from the instinctive disapproval of all professionals for all busy amateurs.

  The theory, however, that the murder had been committed by some tramp or other casual passer-by who had seen Lord Adour’s gun, apparently forgotten, had recognized its value, had decided to appropriate it, but had been seen and checked by Itter Bain, who then had been shot in a subsequent scuffle, was a theory that had to be considered very carefully. If it were true, a speedy and successful solution to the case would become even more unlikely. The unpremeditated murder, no known connection between culprit and victim, is always the one that presents the greatest difficulty.

  “It’ll have to be gone into,” Bobby decided, shaking a gloomy head. “Only how did it happen that Itter Bain was there? Pure coincidence?” and at pure coincidence Bobby shook a still more doubtful head, for pure coincidence was a thing he much disliked and still more distrusted, all the more because he knew well that sometimes it happened.

  At this point in his meditations he was interrupted by the appearance of Mrs. Gregson with his tea. She brought it in on a tray with a plateful of hot scones on which the poor lady had lavished nearly the whole of the week’s ration of butter for herself and the sergeant. Bobby was both severe and pathetic. What had he done, he asked, that he was to be condemned to eat his meals in solitary confinement? And why had he been put permanently in the sergeant’s bad books by this raid upon a whole week’s supply of butter?

  Would, therefore, Mrs. Gregson please take the tea and scones —for which his mouth was already watering—into the kitchen he supposed they had now to use as their sitting-room since he and his papers were occupying this one? Moreover, tea was never what you could really call tea unless a lady poured it out, and was Mrs. Gregson going to refuse him that kindly office?

  Slightly flustered, Mrs. Gregson retired. A little unnerving to pour out tea for one so high in the police hierarchy, one on a special mission from almost legendary Scotland Yard. But this feeling grew less as the meal proceeded, and by the time it was over Mrs. Gregson had heard all about Olive, knew that Olive, like herself, had a light hand with pastry, but was inclined to be a little envious on hearing that Olive could turn dried eggs into admirable omelettes. But then omelettes for Mrs. Gregson had always been a doubtful and unexplored territory into which she had never dared to venture. Bobby, for his part, had heard all about Mrs. Gregson’s boy in Burma and how there he had become very pally with an American boy—after two or three black eyes given and exchanged to decide the burning question of whether London or New York was the bigger, better, brighter town. Mrs. Gregson only wished she had them both there to give them a real good talking-to. Also Bobby heard about Mrs. Gregson’s girl, Gwen, in the A.T.S., and how she had been given a “mention” for returning to carry on with her ’phone after bomb blast had blown her twenty feet away. In Mrs. Gregson’s opinion —and in Bobby’s, too—Gwen deserved a medal, let alone a “mention,” but Gwen said that if they gave medals in the “Ats” for things like that, almost every girl would have one, and what would be the good?

  Incidentally, Bobby gathered a good deal of useful local information supplied by Mrs. Gregson in what it would be unkind to call a general gossip. It seemed clear, for instance, that the engagement between Jane and Itter had either never been generally known or else entirely forgotten. No hint appeared in Mrs. Gregson’s chatter of any sign of strong friendship or feeling between them having ever been apparent. Bobby also gathered that Commander Seers’s unconcealed belief that one of the dock or factory workers must be guilty, had caused a good deal of resentment.

  The sergeant, Mrs. Gregson made it plain, had had to exercise tact, and plenty of it, in making the inquiries ordered by Seers. The dock workers, of course, were not “casual” labourers, but skilled “directed” men, not in any way recruited from such an irresponsible floating vagabond population as Seers imagined, and could not be persuaded otherw
ise. The same was true of the men employed by Bain Products. Besides, Itter, if undoubtedly a bit of a bully, was a good deal admired by most of the men for his boxing abilities, since, in their illogical British way, they were inclined to associate a “straight lead” with a “straight deal.” And Bobby soon realized that both the Gregsons shared the general impression in the neighbourhood that Lord Adour was guilty, but that, as it was assumed he was protecting his daughter from unwelcome attentions, a good deal of sympathy was felt for him.

  “Any decent man would do the same,” declared Mrs. Gregson, and was not much impressed by Bobby’s remark that to kill was always to kill, and a thing no man must ever do on his own responsibility.

  Quite an interesting talk, and, by the time tea had been cleared away, Bobby and his hostess were on the best of terms, and she a little inclined to assert over Bobby the strict authority she wielded over the sergeant. Because, of course, as every man knows, give a woman an inch and she takes an ell or two. Bobby was lucky to get off with no more than a sharp reminder to wrap up well if he went near the sea after dark, the sea air being notoriously treacherous. Mrs. Gregson, indeed, had a very poor opinion of the moral qualities of the atmosphere. In her view it was always lying in wait to get in some stab in the back or another.

  However, it was to the harbour that Bobby now took his way, in spite of all lurking dangers from the sea air. Various small craft were lying there, and he asked one of the men on the jetty to point out the launch formerly belonging to Lord Adour. He explained he had heard it was for sale. He was shown where it lay alongside the jetty, but was told that the engine was out of action. Mr. Itter Bain, on his return from his last trip, had in part dismantled the engine, though whether with the idea of introducing some new gadget to increase power or improve running, or simply because one part or another needed renewing, no one seemed to know.

  Bobby also learned that the launch could be taken out under sail, but it would require skilled seamanship to handle her. She had the reputation of being awkward under sail. The cabin was locked of course, and Mr. Mauley Bain had the key. Naturally a watch was kept on the launch, as on all the other boats in the harbour. They paid their dues and no unauthorized person would be allowed the use of any of them.