The Dusky Hour

by E. R. Punshon

  “He employs a chauffeur, doesn’t he? Young fellow named Thoms?”

  For the first time he had the feeling that a question had embarrassed and troubled her. Her gaze was as direct as ever, but now her clear, far-seeing eyes seemed to show a troubled look.

  “You are asking a great many questions,” she said suddenly. “You seem to know the answer to them all.”

  “I am investigating a murder,” he reminded her.

  “Well,” she said, with an air of admitting his answer.

  “Last night,” he went on, “I happened to come across young Moffatt and Thoms fighting each other.”

  “Fighting?” she repeated, this time with a very startled air.

  “By Battling Copse,” he added.

  She made no comment, but sat staring straight in front of her.

  “Breach of the peace,” Bobby went on. “I’m a police officer. So I had to interfere. I asked what the trouble was. They wouldn’t say. Can you guess?”

  Again she did not answer, but her expression remained moody and troubled.

  “This may be a case of – murder,” he reminded her.

  “It can’t have anything to do with the murder,” she told him with an emphasis that made him wonder whether she did not in fact either guess or fear that some such connection might exist.

  “Are you sure of that?” he asked.

  “Of course I am; it can’t, how could it?” she replied, again very emphatically and again a little as if it were as much to herself as to him that she gave the assurance.

  He left the point, feeling it would be useless to press her just then. He said:

  “I want to be as frank with you as possible. There is your sister, Miss Molly. Anyone can see she is an exceedingly pretty and attractive young lady.”

  He paused, and she gave him a look strongly reminiscent of a tigress suspecting interference with her cubs.

  It was very clear that anyone who touched Molly, or Molly’s interests, or Molly’s happiness, would have an exceedingly determined and formidable guardian to reckon with.

  “Sorry,” said Bobby. “You see what I mean? If two boys quarrel about a girl they both want to please – well, it’s nothing much to do with the police, though we have to stop it if we actually see them trying to punch each other’s heads. But if they were fighting for any other reason...”

  He left the sentence unfinished. For the first time she was no longer looking directly at him. She got up and went to stand by the window, looking out of it. She said over her shoulder:

  “Who was winning?”

  This question was so unexpected that Bobby could only gape. She did not follow it up. After another pause, she said, still throwing the words at him over her shoulder: “Boys fight about anything. I’m sure it had nothing to do with the poor man who has been killed.”

  “We are groping in the dark,” Bobby said. “We must, if people won’t tell us what they know.”

  “There’s nothing I can tell you,” she said moodily, and came back to her seat. “I don’t think I want to answer any more questions.”

  “Miss Towers,” Bobby said earnestly, “refusing to answer is itself an answer. I don’t want to press you, of course. I have no right to. I am merely asking for help. A man has been murdered.”

  “There are things worse than murder,” she muttered. “Why do you say that?” he asked.

  “Well, there are, aren’t there?” she retorted gloomily.

  “No,” he answered then. “There may be worse criminals than murderers; there is no worse crime.”

  She did not seem to be listening to this. She said:

  “They were saying here his name was Bennett. Is that true?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “I knew a Bennett once,” she said. “Or, rather, father did. In business. It can’t be the same, though.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, why should it be? It’s a common enough name. Besides, that Bennett was a tall, big man. Six feet. They say this man was small, with small hands and feet.”

  “Yes, that’s true,” Bobby agreed. “You have heard a good many details.”

  “We have heard nothing else all day,” she answered. “Has young Mr. Moffatt been here to-day?”

  “No.”

  “Or Thoms?”

  “Why do you ask about him? I don’t think he has ever been here. Why do you ask?”

  “Well, Mr. Hayes is a customer of yours, and so I thought perhaps his chauffeur...”

  “He has never been here, never,” she repeated, with what he felt again was unnecessary emphasis.

  “But Mr. Hayes buys a good deal of stuff from you, I understand? Eggs, chickens, and so on?”

  “Yes, he does. But he always comes himself for what he wants. He is the best customer I have. He buys a lot, and I always charge him double.”

  “Oh,” said Bobby, faintly surprised. “How’s that?”

  “He’s trying to seduce me,” she explained.

  CHAPTER 11

  HENRIETTA’S STORY

  Bobby did not quite know what to make of this somewhat embarrassing declaration, made, as it had been, in the most matter-of-fact way conceivable. He was not even sure at first that it had been made quite seriously. He wondered vaguely what the somewhat conventional-looking elderly woman – to judge from her photograph – who was Henrietta’s mother, would have thought of the remark. Glancing again at her photograph where it stood on the window-ledge in that frame intended to hold three pictures but in which her own was now solitary, he was more struck this time by the quality of the sketches flanking it. For a moment he thought he saw in them a curiously vivid and exceptional quality, and then he looked again and thought they were quite simple and ordinary little things, such as almost anyone could produce, with a certain fancifulness in their manner that made them unlike anything he ever remembered seeing in nature. He jerked his mind back from them to what Henrietta had just told him and said:

  “You don’t mean –”

  He paused, uncertain how to complete his sentence, and she answered:

  “I just thought you ought to know, perhaps. There’s a lot of gossip going on. I expect you are sure to hear. Mrs. O’Brien was very upset. Only she would think it was Molly. She couldn’t believe it was only me. Molly always makes him uncomfortable. She often does – his sort, I mean. If it had been Molly –” She paused, and again that look of the tigress defending her young burned for a moment in her eyes. Bobby had the impression that she would have sent the whole world crashing to its doom rather than see her sister threatened by the smallest danger. “I can look after myself,” she said abruptly. “It amuses me to charge him threepence for a one-ha’penny egg.”

  “I see,” murmured Bobby, thinking that she looked fully capable of putting the withered-up little Mr. Hayes across her knee and administering the required chastisement. But then he remembered a certain veiled menace he had thought he detected in Hayes’s half-closed and peeping eyes, and he was not sure of what might happen after. A little worried by thoughts he felt could have no connection with the inquiry it was his duty to pursue, he put them out of his mind and said: “You know Mrs. O’Brien has left Way Side?”

  “I heard there had been a row,” she answered. “Everyone was talking about it till this other thing happened.”

  “It’s not often,” he remarked, “that there are two such exciting pieces of news in a quiet place like this, I suppose?”

  “You mean there may be some connection,” she said in her frank, direct way, looking full at him. “I don’t see why you should think so.”

  “I don’t either,” he agreed. “Coincidence, that’s all, I suppose, like your having known a Mr. Bennett and that being also the dead man’s name.”

  “Well, they can’t be the same,” she repeated. “There are lots of Bennetts.”

  He asked one or two more questions, trying to find out something more about the Mr. Bennett she had known. But she said again he had been a purely busine
ss acquaintance of her father’s, and that neither she nor her mother had ever seen him. In speaking of her mother she again referred to her as Mrs. Oulton, and, seeing that he noticed this, she said:

  “Mother has been twice married. My own father died before I was born. When I was ten, mother married Mr. Oulton. I always called him father; he was like my own father. No one could ever have told there was any difference between any of us.”

  Bobby noticed, too, the expression, “any of us.” He said:

  “Were there other children?”

  She did not answer for a moment or two. He had the idea that this question had been singularly unwelcome; it was even something like a momentary fear that seemed to flash for an instant across the placid depths of those direct and open eyes of hers. Then, as if reflecting that there was no point in attempting to withhold from him information he could easily obtain elsewhere, she said:

  “Yes. A boy. Two years older than Molly.”

  “Does he live with you?”

  “No.”

  “Can you give me his address?”

  “I could,” she answered, “but I don’t see why I should, and I don’t think he would want me to.”

  “May I ask why?”

  “Not everyone enjoys being cross-examined by the police about things they know nothing of,” she answered deliberately.

  “Very well,” Bobby said. He never, if he could possibly help it, pressed a reluctant witness. Pressure was apt to produce lies for one thing, and lies were a nuisance, misleading and also embarrassing to the liar, who often then had to tell more lies to bolster up the first, till finally he himself grew confused between lie and truth. And an interval for quiet thought and reflection was often much more effective in producing a readiness to give the required information. It was his general experience that one thing told willingly was worth half a dozen resulting from what are called “third degree” methods.

  “There’s mother,” she said abruptly. “Excuse me a moment, I must tell her you are here.”

  An elderly woman, whom Bobby took to be Mrs. Oulton, had just come in by the garden gate. Henrietta got up quickly and left the kitchen. Bobby thought it was like her direct methods to have said outright that she wished to tell her mother of his presence instead of making some excuse or another. He got up and went across to look at the tiny water-colours hanging on the wall – almost a schoolgirl’s work in their extreme simplicity and yet with a haunting quality about them that was difficult to appreciate. And how had she been able to imagine that effect of light on the dew-drops caught upon a spider’s web spun between the twigs of a rose-bush? Sentimental, he decided, only that it was austere as well; and then Henrietta came back into the kitchen, looking very cross.

  “Molly’s just too trying,” she declared. “She’s torn up the thing she’d just done of the beeches, and it was lovely.”

  “She is a severe critic of her own work,” Bobby remarked, making up his mind now that the one he had been looking at of the dew upon the spider’s web was, after all, quite ordinary – anyone could have done it who had happened to see it like that.

  “I could shake her,” declared Henrietta formidably. “Molly’s wonderful, but no one understands. Mrs. O’Brien did.”

  “Did she?” exclaimed Bobby, interested.

  “She said Molly was a genius,” Henrietta said, a little as if challenging him to deny it, and, if he did, then he would get the shaking Miss Molly merited. “She gave her an introduction to an agent – someone she knew – Fisher, his name was, off Fleet Street somewhere. He has got Molly one commission. Twenty pounds. She goes up to town once a week to see him now and to try other places as well. Mrs. O’Brien wanted us to go back and live in town; she said you had to be on the spot; she said Molly was wasted here. Of course, she wanted to get Molly away; away from Mr. Hayes, I mean.”

  “Mr. Hayes goes up to town pretty regularly, too, doesn’t he?” Bobby remarked.

  “Yes. He hates the country really. I can’t think why he ever came to live in it,” she answered.

  Bobby couldn’t either. But, then, Hayes might have thought he would enjoy country life before coming to experience it; expectation so often outruns reality. He went on:

  “You said Mr. Hayes was here for tea the day before yesterday?”

  “Yes,” she answered, looking at him again in her grave, direct way. “He got here about ten past four. Is it true that – that whatever happened at Battling Copse happened at four exactly?”

  “We have evidence,” he told her, “that shots were heard at four o’clock and further evidence that almost immediately afterwards a noise was heard coming from the copse of something heavy falling. Presumably that was the car going over into the chalk-pit. Also a man, in what the witness calls gentleman’s clothes – which seems to mean an ordinary lounge suit with a bowler hat – was seen leaving the copse somewhere about four. Unluckily, that’s all the description we have of him, but all of it together fixes the time pretty accurately. You are sure of the time Mr. Hayes got here?”

  “Oh, quite sure,” she answered, smiling a little. “He happened to say it was a quarter past. We were in the egg-shed, and he said he had been waiting so long without seeing anyone he thought we must all have gone off for the afternoon and there was no chance of tea. It struck the quarter” – she glanced as she spoke at the clock above the mantelpiece that Bobby had already noticed possessed a loud strike, and chimed both the hours and quarters – “and Mr. Hayes looked at his watch and said we were just right.” She smiled again. “It’s a good quarter of an hour from Battling Copse here,” she said, “even hurrying. Mr. Hayes hadn’t been hurrying, and he had been here some minutes.”

  “Has there been any talk about him?” Bobby asked.

  “There’s been a lot of talk about everyone,” she retorted. “I don’t think I heard anything about him specially, though, only you were rather anxious to know the exact time he was here.”

  “Well, it’s always a help,” Bobby admitted, smiling, “to know the exact whereabouts of everyone in the neighbourhood.”

  But to himself he thought that the alibi she had thus provided depended a good deal upon clock and watch being both correct, and that it is by no means difficult to alter clock or watch when necessary. For that matter, apparently no one else had been present, so that the Hayes alibi depended solely upon Henrietta’s word – as hers presumably would do upon his. Not completely satisfactory, he thought.

  “I am sorry to have asked you so many questions,” he said presently. “I am afraid you thought a lot of them very stupid and boring. It’s just routine. We have to go on worrying and worrying till perhaps we do – or we don’t – get hold of something. There’s just one other thing, and after that I shan’t have to worry you any more, I hope. You said your father – Mr. Oulton – had business dealings with a Mr. Bennett. Very likely the coincidence means nothing. But you said he was unusually tall, and yet you also said you had never seen him.”

  “It was what father said once,” she explained. “Molly found a pair of gloves in his car. We knew they weren’t dad’s, because they were too big. Dad said he and Mr. Bennett had been making business calls together and Mr. Bennett must have forgotten them. Molly laughed about their being so big. She tried them on and we all laughed – her hand would have gone into the thumb nearly – and dad said Mr. Bennett was a very big man, over six feet. That’s all.”

  A memory had been stirring faintly in Bobby’s mind.

  “I don’t want to distress you,” he said, “but the name – Oulton. Was there not – two or three years ago or more...?”

  “He was found shot,” she answered steadily. “They said it was suicide. We never believed it. But that was the verdict.”

  “At the seaside, wasn’t it?” Bobby asked.

  “Yes. They found him in the car. He had lost all his money. He had always been very well off. We lived like that – I mean a big house and so on. When he died there wasn’t anything. Even mother’s
bonds had gone. They said that was why – why they believed he shot himself. But dad wasn’t like that.”

  “No,” said Bobby, who knew, however, that sometimes those who are not “like that” break down before the threat of poverty and the imagined shame of failure. He added:

  “I think I remember vaguely something about bonds.”

  “We were sure they had been stolen,” she told him. “They said dad must have sold them, but we knew he wouldn’t do that because they weren’t his; they were mother’s, her very own.”

  “Couldn’t they be traced?”

  “They were bearer bonds,” she explained. “It was about the income-tax.”

  “Income-tax?” he repeated, puzzled.

  “Mother thought it was such a shame she had to pay such a lot after she married again,” Henrietta explained. “Before, with the allowances and so on, the tax wasn’t so very much. But after she got married she had to pay super-tax as well. It took more than half her income. Dad said he would manage it for her. He told her to take her money out of consols and buy bearer bonds from America and put them in a safe in a bank in Paris. Twice every year they went to Paris – they made a little holiday of it – and mother cut off the coupons and dad got them cashed for her, and it was all right. Money invested in America and cashed in France had nothing to do with the Government here, had it?”

  “I don’t think I can give an opinion on that,” Bobby answered, a little stiffly.

  “It was quite all right,” she insisted, in tones that suggested very strongly she was not quite comfortable about it. “I asked father once, but he showed me what Dean Inge said about under a purely predatory Government it was not clear there was any duty to make a true declaration of income. And he said of course that meant the Labour Government, and, anyhow, he and mother were making a true declaration of their income, only what they got in France was different. Besides, the bonds have all gone now.”

  “We needn’t discuss that, fortunately,” Bobby said. “You mean these bonds disappeared?”

  “Yes. After father’s death, mother and I went to Paris to get them and the safe was empty. There was nothing to show what had become of them. Mother didn’t even know what they were for; she had never noticed. She says she would know them again, because they were all stained with ink she upset over them once in Paris when she was cutting off the coupons. But you can’t trace them by that. You see, everything was done privately.”