Helen Passes By: A Bobby Owen Mystery

by E. R. Punshon

  For Mauley ran as one possessed, and for all the hindering night, the treacherous dark, he ran as strongly, as securely, with as assured a foot, as though it were full day. So, too, ran the former Commando, ran Bobby. Further back, the other constable slowed to a trot. He told himself he was no half-mile champion. Seers more or less kept his place, only a few yards behind the foremost three. But then he ran on his will and the second constable only on his feet.

  It came to Bobby that they were heading for the sea, direct for the sea. Its immensity was drawing near, the sound of its restless waves was plainer every moment. Nothing save an open stretch of sandy beach was before them now. The former Commando slackened speed a fraction. He gasped out to Bobby:

  “He’ll have to turn. If you go right and I go left, we’ll cut him off.”

  Bobby made no answer. Already the ex-Commando had dropped behind, losing time and speed by speaking. Very certain was Bobby that that swift, direct race, unswerving to right or to left, would end in no turning aside. Straight Mauley had run, and straight and direct he would continue. Bobby made yet another effort to increase his speed. Possibly he did gain an inch or two. Certainly no more. The former Commando tried, and tried in vain, to regain the few yards he had dropped behind, now he saw that neither of the others slackened or swerved, but fled straight on to the sea. Nor did Mauley pause or hesitate or alter his wild rush, even when the first small waves lapped his hurrying feet.

  Straight on he continued; and splashed and struggled through the water and Bobby was knee deep in the water, too, when the Commando caught him by the arm.

  “Plain suicide, that’s what he means,” the Commando said. “Don’t you, sir. No man could live long in that sea, not with tide and current the way they are. And even if we did follow up, he could drown us easy, grabbing hold.”

  Bobby knew well this was true. He stood still, the water lapping about his feet. The next wave hardly reached them, for the tide was running strongly seawards. Seers came running up, panting heavily. He said between gasps:

  “He’s a class swimmer. He means to try to swim in again, somewhere up or down the coast.”

  “He could never make it,” the Commando said. “No man could. Not with this tide running.”

  “He’s a strong swimmer,” Sears repeated. “In the front rank.” Bobby said:

  “What’s that light—straight in line?”

  “Which?” asked Seers. “Oh, that. It’s the mine, closer in than I like. We fastened a burning buoy to her.”

  “I think we ought to give a warning,” Bobby said.

  “Why?” Seers asked. “She won’t go off. Why should she? She’s being watched. In case she drifts nearer. But she won’t, not with this tide. There’s no danger.”

  “I think there is,” Bobby said. “But there’s no time to do anything about it. Not if I’m right.”

  “God in Heaven,” the Commando cried, and turned as if to run, and checked himself. “No time,” he said a little wildly. “Not if he means—that.”

  “Means what?” Seers said irritably. “No time for what?”

  The Commando said once more:

  “He’ll never make it, not with this tide running, not at night, and in his clothes and all.”

  But this time he spoke without conviction.

  “See that?” Bobby said. “Did you see?”

  “Yes sir,” said the Commando. “Him right enough.”

  “See what?” demanded Seers, still more irritably. What it is now the fashion to call his sub-consciousness knew well that his sight, once so keen, was no longer what it had been. But this had never admitted, not even to himself, not even in the small wakeful hours of the night when in the quiet darkness so many things grow so crystal clear. “You can think you see anything when it’s dark like this,” he complained.

  “There was the figure of a man,” Bobby said. “He showed for a moment clear against the buoy fight. He was climbing on the mine.”

  “Oh, that,” Seers said, trying to persuade himself he had seen it, too, and remembering in fact that for a moment the light of the burning buoy had been obscured. At the time he had supposed it was merely the movement of the sea that had hidden it. He said: “What I told you. Wants a rest. Or to take off his coat and shoes. Then he’ll try to swim in somewhere along-shore. There ought to be a lookout. I ought to ’phone.”

  But he made no attempt to move away. What he had said had brought no conviction even to himself, for he was beginning to understand. They stood waiting, three still and silent figures in the night, and before them the sea drew itself slowly away. The second policeman arrived. He said to the ex-Commando:

  “Swam out to sea, didn’t he? He’ll drown; sure thing he’ll drown. His body won’t come in yet awhile, not this tide. What’s the big idea, waiting?”

  No one told him.

  They were still standing there, in the same small silent group, when it happened, and the sea rose up in fire and flame, and all the air rushed together and then apart again, and over the little town and harbour roared the wind, as it were the breath of the Lord in anger.

  “Magnificent suicide,” Bobby said when they four, whom the blast had thrown here and there, had come together again and found they were unhurt. “We had better go see what help is needed.”

  Bobby wrote the next day.

  “… So with poor Mrs. Gregson in tears and in despair over fallen ceilings, glassless windows, a gaping roof, broken crockery, and all the rest of it that the raided towns know so well, I have had to move, and, as you will see from this address, Seers is putting me up. I hope his offer means he has forgiven, if not forgotten, the way in which I was dumped upon his doorstep, like an outsized and most obstreperous foundling.

  “Though now, I am more than happy to say, the case may be regarded as closed, I shall have to hang on here a bit longer. I shall have to appear at the inquest on Wayling and possibly at the adjourned inquest on Itter Bain. There can be little doubt of the verdict in both cases—wilful murder against Mauley Bain. Whether there will be an inquest on Mauley seems uncertain. The point has been raised that there is no corpse and no certain proof of death. The argument seems to be: No corpse, no inquest. But I'm told that's not valid and that there are precedents for inquests without corpses. The other suggestion is that though a man was seen to go into the sea and a man was seen to climb out of the sea on the floating mine, there is no proof of identity. To my mind, that is merely a technical point over which lawyers can have a bit of professional fun if they want to. The courts will certainly give leave to presume death, if that is required.

  “As so often happens, Mauley went out of his way to draw suspicion on himself. The first time I had a talk with him here, he said that when I saw him earlier he had been to the harbour to have a look at the Seagull launch, but had not gone on board as her engines had broken down and would have to be repaired. He made that statement twice over. Clearly he wanted me to believe that he had not, in fact, boarded the launch, But when a possible suspect—not that till then I had had any special suspicion either of him or of anyone else—clearly wishes one thing to be believed, it is a sound rule to believe the opposite. Moreover, while a broken-down engine is a sound reason for not taking a motor launch out to sea, it seems less adequate as a reason for not boarding her while she is lying at anchor in harbour.

  “So I began to think rather seriously about Mauley, but at once met with a snag, for it was Prescott Bain who betrayed knowledge of the exact spot under the oak where Lord Adour had left his gun when, according to his own story, he had put it down to run off for his camera on seeing the kingfisher no one else saw but himself.

  “Guilty knowledge, Prescott Bain seemed to be showing; and so there was a switch to him as first suspect and probably a quarrel over the firm’s finances as murder motive. But Prescott had an alibi that seemed unbreakable and in fact was so, since it was genuine. Moreover, his alibi seemed to cover Mauley as well; since apparently Mauley had been either in the room wi
th the two bank officials, or available over the house ’phone, during the significant time. That could be explained by complicity on the part of Prescott; but complicity between Prescott and Mauley against Itter meant the cousin and the brother lined up against another brother, whereas all the evidence suggested that what differences existed were between the cousin, the finance man, on the one hand, and the two brothers, the operative side, on the other. Again, such a prearranged plan to murder Itter would have involved previous knowledge of Itter’s presence in the Coldstone Spinney at that particular time—though such knowledge was unproved and unlikely.

  “Anyhow, I had also to consider the possibility that Lord Adour was guilty, according to the theory put forward by the Bain uncle—the pamphleteer who calls himself Jack Cade, Junior, and who was Haile’s employer. I mean the suggestion or belief that his lordship’s guilt was being covered up and with the underlying idea that, if that could be proved, it could be used as a spur to prick on our socialistic Government to more extreme measures. It was, of course, quite clear from Seers’s attitude and his pukka sahib complex he showed at our first talk that he would never believe a peer of the realm guilty of crime, not even if he had himself been an eyewitness. It was plain his faith in the House of Lords would always transcend any belief in his own eyes. Not conscious or deliberate, of course. It was merely that in his mind crime—especially violent crime—was for the ‘lower classes’ alone. Of course, he knew very well there were many instances to the contrary, but for him they were merely the exceptions that confirmed the rule. Lord Adour continued in his mind—or his unconscious if the unconscious exists—to be above suspicion.

  “That much seemed clear. What seemed less clear was whether there existed any good reason why his lordship should in fact be regarded with suspicion. The gossip that he had shot Itter as an unwelcome suitor for his daughter didn’t seem convincing. One doesn’t shoot the unwelcome suitor; one shows him the door.

  “But then it began to appear that there were in fact transactions, though of a different nature, nothing to do with the girl, between Lord Adour and the dead man. There was the sale of the Seagull, which began to take on the air of a bogus transaction. There was the chart I found showing a course picked out to a solitary spot on the French coast.

  “Love and jealousy began to my mind to fade out of the picture as the murder motive, and money to appear instead. There is a good deal to be made just now by black market smuggling between here and the Continent.

  “But once more, a snag. On that new theory, where did the kingfisher business come in? For by this time I was feeling fairly certain that the kingfisher yarn was an invention.

  “Why? What for?

  “It took some pretty hard thinking to worry that out, but it did begin to seem that it might have been an invention to persuade Helen to enter the spinney and so give Itter, waiting there, a chance to urge his suit. Later facts that turned up made this likely, and so brought the motive swinging back to love and jealousy. I think now that Lord Adour told Jane about the kingfisher, feeling sure she would tell Helen and they would both go at once to look for the bird themselves—the almost certainly non-existent bird. I think it probable that Itter Bain, in talking to Lord Adour, had shown a disturbing degree of excitement and that the idea in Adour’s mind was that Jane’s presence in the spinney would be a precaution, while at the same time Itter would not be able to complain that the promise had not been kept. The undertaking was he should have a chance to see Helen and talk to her. There was no promise that Jane should not be somewhere near. The letter would be honoured, if not the spirit.

  “I feel it was most likely the same underlying uneasiness that made Lord Adour leave his gun where he did, leaning against the oak tree—another precaution. For one thing, though his story was that he put it down in a hurry, on the spur of the moment, yet he remembered the exact spot. Itter was young and an athlete. Lord Adour was elderly and none. On my theory, the obscure uneasiness he experienced over the inner excitement he felt Itter was betraying at the prospect of meeting Helen, made him wish to have his gun handy—-just in case. Not that I imagine he felt this consciously or would now or at any time have acknowledged it.

  “But now the more the case developed, the more facts I collected, the more it began to seem that everything was consistent with the guilt of Helen herself. Easy to suppose that Itter Bain had frightened her, that she had seen her father’s gun and that she had used it to defend herself and that much of the difficulty and obscurity surrounding the case was due to lying by friends determined to protect her. From what I could learn of her, her strange, aloof and solitary character, her attitude of almost religious awe towards her own beauty as of something to be guarded for itself alone, it seemed likely she would resort to any extremity to protect it from even the semblance of a threat. For a time, then, everything I got to know appeared consistent with her guilt. Then Jane mentioned that, though she did see the gun in Helen’s hands, Helen told her she found it lying under bushes and that it had already been discharged. But her father had left it standing against the oak, so there was proof the gun had been previously used by someone else and pushed away by him under the bushes where Helen found it.

  “Unless, of course, it was a clever, made-up yarn. But I was quite unable to believe that Jane was lying or that Helen had been cool enough, immediately after killing a man, or Jane either, for that matter, to invent a story to meet a contingency not yet arisen. How could she or either of them know that it would turn out of such importance whether the gun had been standing against a tree or lying under bushes?

  “Plainly, then, if the gun had been used by another person before Helen found it, then that person was the criminal, not Helen.

  “Plainly, too, it was of ever-growing importance that the gun should be found.

  “Three alternatives apparently.

  “If Lord Adour or Helen were in fact guilty, then the gun might be hidden at Kindles and so out of my reach unless I could get a search warrant. And that I knew I should never be granted against a man in Lord Adour’s position unless I could show grounds for suspicion so strong that the discovery of the gun would be almost superfluous. A sort of vicious circle. No search for the gun without evidence. No evidence without the gun. That’s the sort of thing that makes a detective old before his time.

  “Secondly, the gun might, as was freely suggested, have been stolen by some stray tramp or vagabond. In that case, if recovered, its value as evidence would be nil.

  “Thirdly, the murderer had himself hidden it somewhere. Only where? I’m afraid I rather jumped to conclusions and felt sure it would be at the bottom of the sea. It seemed so obvious and easy, and, of course, if that was it, would never be found. Then it struck me that for safety it would have to be taken out a good distance from land. I remembered the weather had been bad for small boats. Not impossible, but bad enough to make it noticeable and to be remembered if any small boat had gone out. And I remembered the time I talked to Mauley and his apparent wish to stress that he had not boarded the launch. Perhaps he had, I thought, and perhaps he had boarded it to hide the gun, or even had it hidden there already, in preparation for taking out the launch to sea and getting rid of the gun. I held off for a while, on the chance that Mauley might try to remove the gun and could be caught in the act. Instead, the launch disappeared—first upriver to the factory and then, when I still showed an interest in it, altogether. And a wholly improbable story that it had been stolen. Not difficult to think out where it might be; and that is what brought about the climax when Mauley realized the gun had been found and his liberty of action was likely to be soon and seriously curtailed.

  “Before that, though, there had been another diversion. The sudden production by Prescott of a large sum of money, with no very convincing explanation of where it had come from. That brought back the idea of the money motive and Prescott as the murderer in order to secure cash to save the business. But there was always that alibi of his there was no way of g
etting round. Also it seemed certain that the money was the product of Itter Bain’s black market smuggling undertaken with the very object of getting the cash needed to tide over the Bain Products concern during the outbreak of peace difficulties. Itter must have hidden it somewhere and Prescott found it and was using it for that same purpose. It seemed, therefore, that he was probably within his rights. Anyhow, Mauley had made no objection, though he must have known or guessed. No complaint received and no apparent connection with the investigation. In no way a police matter and no cause for action.

  “Of course, all the time I had to keep an eye open for other possibilities. I knew I might well be working on the wrong track. There was Prescott with his convenient and unbreakable alibi that always seems so suspicious, but that this time was really genuine and conclusive. There was Haile, and there was evidently something that was making him uneasy. It might be consciousness of guilt. In fact, he was afraid that his intrigue with Miss Lambert might come to light and with it his connection with the contemplated illegal operation, about which he was very nervous. But his pose as a private detective and his anxiety to help me might well have been camouflage. Martin Winstanley soon faded out of the picture, but I knew might appear again at any moment. By the way, Jane and he are engaged now, so I suppose there’s a happy ending for him. And for Haile and Miss Lambert, too, for I think her influence, and his new sense of responsibility as husband and father, will sober him down a bit; and he seems to have really got the new job he talked about, though I was half inclined to suspect it was merely an excuse for borrowing a little cash and fading out. A mistake to be too suspicious. Then there was poor little Wayling who told me so fiercely he would always be willing to kill for Helen’s sake, and who might have done so, but who, in the end, died for her instead.

  “Mauley’s motive, of course, was simply plain, old style jealousy, though that, I think he never realized, so overlaid was it in the secret places of his mind, in such a world of suppressed feelings and unrecognized emotion had he come to exist.