The Dusky Hour

by E. R. Punshon

  “There’s hardly anything about this business that I do understand,” Bobby sighed. “My head’s nearly bursting with guesses, too – some of them about you, Mr. Hayes, and none very complimentary.”

  Hayes greeted this with a scowl.

  “Keep them to yourself,” he snapped. “Do your job you’re here for and that I’m paying for. See?”

  “That job being, I suppose,” Bobby remarked, “to make sure that nothing happens to-night, so that you may get away in the morning with anything valuable safe in your pocket, and anything here you don’t want to be seen safely destroyed. Safety first, in fact, all the time and all the way. You know, Mr. Hayes, there are times when I think you’re a very clever man.”

  “Thank you for nothing,” growled Hayes. “Anyhow, perhaps I could teach you a thing or two. Have you brought my automatic back? I asked for it when I rang up.”

  Bobby produced two formidable-looking weapons.

  “One for you, one for me,” he said.

  Hayes snatched the weapon from Bobby’s hand.

  “It’s not loaded,” he said, looking to see. “I think I’ve got a clip somewhere, though.”

  “I wouldn’t bother,” Bobby told him. “They’ve a tame expert at headquarters here, and I believe he’s fixed it so it can’t be fired – not until it’s unfixed again. Fear of accidents, you know.”

  Mr. Hayes stared, gaped, verified Bobby’s statement, indulged in an outburst of profanity. Bobby looked pained. He said:

  “Mine’s not loaded, either. Safer that way, don’t you think? The great British public doesn’t expect police to shoot. Awful fuss if we do. Not playing the game. Cheating almost. Bad as body line, or kicking a goal at Rugby when you haven’t said you meant to. Worse if a policeman lets someone he’s with do the shooting. The High-Ups simply won’t stand for it. A funeral if you’re shot, and the sack if you shoot – that’s their idea, and no wonder a policeman’s lot is not a happy one.”

  “What’s the good of the bally things if they aren’t loaded?” demanded Hayes – only he didn’t say “bally.”

  “Well, the other fellow doesn’t know that, does he?” asked Bobby.

  “It’s playing the fool,” cried Hayes angrily. “I’ve a good mind to tell you to get out.”

  “The merest hint will be accepted,” Bobby told him. “Even a gesture towards the door and I’m off.”

  Hayes nearly choked. Bobby watched him unsympathetically. Hayes gasped, gurgled, swore. He said finally:

  “What’s your game, anyhow?”

  “The truth,” Bobby answered, and he said again: “The truth.”

  Hayes hesitated, and seemed to come to a decision.

  “Now you’re here, you had better stay,” he said.

  “Better the policeman that you know than others that you know not of,” Bobby suggested.

  “I thought they would send one of their own lot along,” Hayes muttered.

  “And I’ve come instead,” Bobby answered. “You builded better than you knew.”

  All this had passed in a kind of outer hall or lobby that was just within the front door, separated by another door from the main hall that had also been intended for a small lounge. Through this Hayes now led the way, past the stairs, to the side passage that ran past the room he called his study to the garden door. He said over his shoulder:

  “I’m going to bed. You can do what you like. If anything happens, you’ll be on the spot. I don’t suppose it will, now you’re here. I’ll have a drink first.”

  He opened the study door and went in.

  “What’s up?” Bobby asked, for Hayes was standing on the threshold staring, gasping, making strange noises in his throat.

  Bobby, whose own nerves were taut, looked over his shoulder, expecting to see he hardly knew what. Something strange, daunting, formidable, perhaps. Armed enemies, it might be, or some imminent threat of danger or of death.

  But to his eyes all seemed perfectly normal. A fire burned in the grate. The lights were switched on. On the table stood a bottle of whisky, soda, glasses. Pushed out of the way on a side table was a tray with plates and the remnants of a meal of cold meat and tinned fruit. A pile of torn-up letters and bills and other papers was on the floor near the fireplace, and more papers had evidently been burned. Bobby said:

  “What is it? Anything wrong?”

  Hayes pointed a shaking hand at an empty glass on the table.

  “Look there,” he stammered. “Look.”

  “That glass?” Bobby asked. “What about it?” Hayes looked at him wildly.

  “It was full,” he said in a strangled voice. “It was full when I went out, when you knocked.”

  “Are you sure?” Bobby asked.

  “I had just filled it,” Hayes said. “I was putting in a splash of soda when I heard you.” He looked at Bobby again. “It’s empty now,” he said.

  Empty it certainly was. Bobby looked at it thoughtfully. He did not touch it, but stooped and smelled it, and then, taking out his handkerchief and holding it very carefully, he put it aside on the top of the wireless cabinet.

  “There may be finger-prints on it,” he said. “Seems as if there must be someone else in the house.”

  Hayes had collapsed on one of the chairs.

  “Who... why...?” he muttered. “There can’t be. Every door and window’s locked.”

  “If someone drank your whisky while we were talking,” Bobby said, “there must be someone – well, someone who did drink it. That,” he explained meditatively, “is what is called deductive reasoning. Anyhow, we had better have a look round. Coming?” he added, as his companion showed no sign of moving.

  “I... I think we had better stop here,” muttered Hayes. “What’s the good... if anyone... well, we are all right here... let it alone.”

  Bobby shook his head.

  “Wouldn’t look well,” he explained, “if I had to report to-morrow the house had been broken into while I was sitting still, doing nothing.”

  “It wouldn’t matter,” Hayes said. “There’s nothing anywhere else – nothing that matters.”

  “Dear me,” observed Bobby, “that’s interesting. Means that anything your expected visitors are likely to be after is in here? More deductive reasoning.”

  Hayes still muttered protests. He was evidently very unwilling to be left alone, but Bobby insisted that the rest of the house must be searched. Necessary, he repeated, to root out anyone who might be there in hiding. Hayes could lock the door, and at any suspicious sound he could ring the bell and Bobby would return at once, even if he himself had heard nothing. Bobby made sure the window was fastened securely, and a glance round the room told him there was in it no possible place of concealment.

  “I shan’t be long,” he told the still protesting Hayes. “Why not come along, if you don’t feel like being left alone?”

  Hayes, however, preferred solitude to the proposed expedition. He adopted the suggested precaution of locking the door as soon as Bobby left the room, and Bobby listened thoughtfully to the sound of the key turning in the lock.

  “Scared all right, and pretty badly, too,” he told himself. “That part’s genuine enough, whatever else he’s up to.”

  Carefully and methodically Bobby proceeded to go through the house, paying special attention to outside doors and windows, and, when he could find the key, locking the door of each room he had entered as he left it again. The back door was secured by two strong looking bolts he withdrew to make sure they had not been tampered with. He looked in all the kitchen cupboards and store-places. He went into the dining-room, and there even looked under the table over which was a damask cover that hung nearly to the ground. The drawing room, he found, had never been furnished, but he saw the bolt of the French windows was pushed home. Neither of these rooms had keys in their doors. Upstairs, he went into all the bedrooms, looked everywhere, took the opportunity in Hayes’s own room of giving a glance inside the drawers of the different pieces of furniture. There w
as plenty of clothing in them still, so that Hayes had apparently not as yet done much packing. In one of the drawers, thrust among some shirts in what seemed but a half-hearted effort at concealment, he found an automatic pistol.

  Lifting it with every precaution, he examined it carefully. He had no note with him of the registered number of Mr. Moffatt’s lost automatic, but in make, calibre, in the dent on the barrel and slightly damaged foresight Noll had spoken of, it seemed to correspond with that weapon. Bobby placed it in one of his cellophane envelopes and then put it in his pocket.

  By now he was convinced there was no other living being in the house, and he returned downstairs, wondering whether Hayes had been allowing his imagination to run away with him, or whether, as seemed more likely, the whole thing had been a trick to obtain a few moments’ solitude wherein to carry out some operation or another for which he desired no witness.

  “No one in the house,” Bobby assured Hayes when he had been readmitted to the study, “but I found this in one of the drawers in your room. Looks to me like Mr. Moffatt’s missing automatic the murder was committed with.”

  Hayes stared and gaped for a moment, then jumped to his feet in a passion of fear and anger.

  “That’s a lie!” he shouted. “You never did! If you did, you put it there yourself.”

  Bobby shook his head.

  “I found it where I said,” he answered, “and I certainly did not put it there.”

  “Well, someone did,” Hayes repeated. “If you think you’ve got something on me, you haven’t. I didn’t shoot Bennett, and, what’s more, I can prove I didn’t, and I can prove who did. I’ve the evidence right here in the house; it’s the same man who planted that thing where you found it.”

  “Who’s that?” Bobby asked.

  A slight noise at the window made them both turn. Someone was looking in at them from outside, through a gap where the curtains did not fully meet. The face, pressed closely against the glass, was clearly visible.

  “Noll Moffatt,” Hayes cried.

  CHAPTER 29

  CHASE AND PURSUIT

  Instantly the face vanished, withdrawn into the night. Bobby jumped to the window, jerked aside the curtains, threw up the sash. He heard Hayes shouting to him to stop, not to go out; that it was dangerous out there. Without heeding him, or his final wailing appeal not to be left alone, Bobby flung a leg over the sill, jumped out. It was only a drop of some four or five feet. He ran forward, sideways, paused, ran back, and then on again. He found himself blundering across flower-beds, colliding with shrubs and bushes. In the darkness he could see nothing. The moon had not yet risen. No stars showed. The light from the open window poured out into the night, cutting into it, as it were, leaving on each side the darkness more intense.

  Noll had vanished as though he had never been. Bobby half wondered if their glimpse of that pale, pressed face against the window-glass had been a kind of joint illusion. He stood still and listened. The air was very quiet, full of all those small innumerable sounds that together make up the strange stillness of the night. Far away a dog barked and was silent. A bat, or a beetle perhaps, went blundering by. From somewhere near, quite near, came the sound of running footsteps as of one in desperate haste. Bobby began to run in the direction whence he thought the sounds came. They ceased. Bobby paused to listen again. From behind, whence he had come, he heard a faint and cautious tread, as of one who went in deadly fear of being overheard.

  The light from the open window suddenly vanished. Someone had closed the window, drawn the curtains.

  Uncertain what to do, whether to follow where the desperate runner had seemed to pass, to return to seek that other who went so silently, so cautiously, Bobby stood still. It was all quiet again, quiet and very still. Now the silence seemed complete. It was as though those running footsteps, that stealthy tread, had hushed all other sounds; as though the house, the garden, the surrounding night, all alike waited in a breathless pause for what might happen next.

  Someone not very far away cried aloud, as if in fear or pain. A more distant voice called out twice over:

  “Take care, take care.”

  “Who is it? Who is there?” Bobby shouted, and then was inclined to be sorry he had so announced his presence.

  There came no answer, nor was the warning cry repeated, or that cry he had taken to be of fear or of pain. As he had spoken once, he thought he would try again. He shouted at the full force of his lungs:

  “There is a police officer here – police.”

  He thought he heard someone laugh and that was all. He moved in the direction whence he thought this last sound had seemed to come. He ran into a growth of rhododendrons and then blundered into a holly hedge, with no resultant improvement to his temper, which was becoming sadly ruffled. Backing away from that prickly hedge, his foot caught in some obstruction and he fell. He got to his feet again and stood listening. He had the absurd idea that all the garden was shaking with secret laughter at his expense. He found his cheek was cut and was bleeding slightly. He thought to himself:

  “I’m getting scared. Nerves. Never knew I had any. I’m doing no good here. I’ll get back to the house.”

  Then he thought:

  “I was a silly fool to leave it. Most likely I shall get told so when I report.”

  He began to make his way back towards the house. It stood up black and heavy in the night, a huge overpowering shadow with no glimmer showing anywhere, a dead thing uninhabited in the night, it seemed, and yet Bobby was aware of an impression that it was the scene of fierce and swift activities, of uncontrolled passions that had broken at last through the veneer of civilised life. The garden seemed to have fallen quiet now; it was as if all that was happening had become concentrated on the dark and silent house. He began to run. He nearly fell again. The treachery of the darkness made him slacken his pace. The thought came to him that most likely he would find the house closed, barred and shuttered against him, so that he would have to remain without, shut out and helpless.

  It had been foolish, he told himself again, to yield to his first impulse that had sent him running in pursuit of Noll Moffatt, a pursuit he might have realised the darkness would render futile. A nice fool he would look if, for instance, the deputy chief constable arrived before his time and had to be told that he, Bobby, had been locked out.

  He reached the wall of the house. The study window he had jumped from was a little further on – to the right, he thought. He groped his way along by the wall, got tangled up in a border planted with rose-bushes, and a beam of light shot out suddenly a little way ahead. The curtains over the study window had been drawn a trifle aside. Someone was peeping out into the night. Hayes, presumably, anxious for Bobby’s return, but no more anxious, Bobby thought, for that return than Bobby was himself.

  He hurried on. He reached the window. The curtain, drawn aside, gave him a clear view of the lighted interior. Someone was standing there between the half-open door and the table. It was Noll Moffatt. He looked very pale, and in one hand he held a pistol. By the table, near the chair Hayes had been sitting in, lay a still and crumpled human form. By it was the bottle of whisky, overturned, its contents spreading out in a slowly increasing pool.

  Bobby leaped to a standing position on the windowsill. With his elbow he smashed one of the upper panes. The glass fell in a tinkling shower; the crash sounded like an exploding bomb. The thought crossed Bobby’s mind that perhaps Noll would shoot. If he did, he could not want an easier target. Bobby put his hand through the opening he had made, unlatched the window Hayes had evidently fastened after Bobby’s precipitate exit, and flung it up. He tore the curtain down and jumped through into the room.

  All this had taken not much more than thirty or forty seconds, but that had been long enough for Noll Moffatt to vanish. The door was still quivering, though, with the vibration from the bang wherewith it had been closed.

  Bobby turned to the crumpled form lying there, supine, by the chair. He turned it over. He
saw that it was not Hayes, but Pegley, unconscious, bleeding from a contused wound in the forehead.

  Bobby merely gaped for a moment or two. In the first paralysis of his astonishment he did not even ask himself how Pegley had got there. It came into his mind that he must be suffering from some strange illusion. He looked all round, almost expecting to find that the room, too, had endured some strange transformation. But it at least was still the same as it had been before, though the man prostrate there was Pegley and not Hayes.

  Bobby put a hand upon the table, as if to keep hold upon some solid fact that would not change and alter. This person, this Pegley-not-Hayes, was not dead, anyhow. He had been knocked out by that blow on the head, but, possibly, if he could be revived, he could give some explanation of his appearance and what had happened. But then there was Noll Moffatt, too – seen twice, so he could be no dream – and what was he doing here? Bobby was still standing there in this kind of frenzy of bewilderment when he heard the door open.

  He swung round instantly. In the doorway Reeves was standing, calm and imperturbable as a well-trained servant should be, neat, unruffled, as if he had just come in with the letters or to announce the arrival of a guest. Bobby blinked at him. For a moment or two they remained looking at each other. Then, without a word, without a change in his expression of the butler carrying out his ordinary duties, Reeves stepped back, closed the door gently. Bobby heard quite plainly the key turn in the lock.

  That galvanised him into life. With a kind of muffled roar he leaped across the room, seized the door-knob, turned it, shook the door with all his force and in vain, for it was securely locked.

  He stood back a little way and hurled himself against it. With no effect. It was a strong, well-made door – a pre-war door, in fact, of the time when solid work and wood were still put into construction. Most post-war doors would have gone down before the fury of his assault, but this held fast. It had not even panels to offer a point of attack, but was all one solid piece.