The Dusky Hour
Page 28
“I’ve got two,” he said. “A cousin of mine had a tea garden or something out there and when it went smash and he came home he brought them with him. I gave him a fiver for the two – just backed a winner,” he added, apparently in explanation of an evidently somewhat unusual fiver.
But then quite abruptly he remembered what he was there for, since indeed it is not easy to switch a nose like his from the path to which it points.
“I heard you had joined the police. That’s why I’m here,” he explained.
“My dear chap,” protested Bobby, “if it’s a police matter, you ought to go to H.Q.”
Waveny took no heed. He continued:
“It was a pal of mine in the Home Office told me about you.”
“Oh, Lord,” said Bobby.
“He told me the Home Secretary –”
“Now look here, Waveny, old man,” interrupted Bobby again, even more firmly this time. “The Home Secretary doesn’t know me from Adam, and I never set eyes on the blighter in my life. The only thing is when he was a kid he used to leave the milk at uncle’s back door, and now he’s so thundering cocky about it, he thinks he owns the whole family. I wish,” said Bobby bitterly, “he had drowned himself in his own milk can.”
Waveny ignored this. Bobby began to perceive that he was a young man of one idea, not easily diverted, a young man indeed of considerable perseverance. That nose, Bobby thought moodily.
“My pal didn’t know where you hung out,” Waveny went on, “so I looked up Lord Hirlpool – I knew he was your uncle.”
“He gave it away, I suppose,” Bobby said, meditating removal without letting any of his relatives know.
“It cost me a quid,” observed Waveny wistfully, a wistfulness of that small mouth and chin, not of the domineering nose. “He promised to pay it back next week.”
“Well, he won’t,” said Bobby viciously.
Waveny nodded with melancholy resignation.
“So I came along,” he said.
Bobby got up from his chair. He felt disturbed. It seemed to him that work threatened. And he had a feeling that now he would arrive at Lord’s just in time to see Mr. Hammond bowing his acknowledgements to the cheering crowds as he returned to the pavilion after scoring another double century or so. Waveny remained seated. It was evident his nose was in command now. No shifting a nose like that till it was ready to go.
“Do you know Dictator’s Way?” he asked. “It’s out by Epping Forest somewhere.”
Bobby stared. He knew Dictator’s Way very well but he did not wish to say so. Dictator’s Way was the name Mr. Judson, a wealthy city man, had given a stretch of roadway he had succeeded in closing to wheeled traffic, though not to pedestrians. There had been a good deal of talk about it at the time. Echoes of the controversy had even reached the London papers in the shape of indignant letters protesting against Mr. Judson’s high handed and intolerable action. He had been nicknamed ‘Dictator Judson’, compared to Hitler, Stalin, and others of those picturesque contemporaries of ours who have done so much to bring back prosperity to the world by inducing us to spend all our money on battleships, bombs, tanks, and other pleasing and instructive toys of modern civilization. In defiance Mr. Judson had retorted, once he had established his legal right to bar wheeled traffic from the piece of road in dispute, by naming it ‘Dictator’s Way’.
As a matter of fact the whole thing had been very much a storm in a tea-cup, for in the upshot drivers had only to make a brief detour of a few hundred yards that in any case most would have made, both to avoid a sharp bend and for the sake of a better surface. Mr. Judson always protested that all the excitement had been worked up by a local paper anxious to prove its public spirit and to provide its patrons with interesting reading matter. All he really wanted, he said, was the right to prevent people parking their cars, making themselves a nuisance by picnicking there, especially on Bank holidays, and by blocking his own access to the gates admitting to the grounds of a big, rambling old house, known as The Manor, where he was then living.
All this had happened some time previously, it was indeed almost forgotten, even locally. The name, however, ‘Dictator’s Way’, remained, though Mr. Judson had now left The Manor as his usual residence and was established in one of those huge new blocks of flats that of late years have risen in the West End of London like fungi in a field after heavy rain.
But recently Dictator’s Way and The Manor had been brought again, as Bobby knew, to the attention of the authorities. There were rumours that Mr. Judson not only used the house, since a block of West End flats must be respectable, as a convenient place where to meet his numerous and successive – even rapidly successive – lady friends, but that he also gave there parties at which cards were played for high stakes and at which sometimes were shown films that had not passed the censor.
But lady friends are no affair of Scotland Yard, the censor’s business is his own, and there was no proof that the play was anything but perfectly straightforward, even if occasionally foolish people lost foolish sums. Apparently, too, Mr. Judson was careful to admit none but his own friends, or those for whom his own personal friends vouched. The Yard indeed had taken steps to assure itself that strangers were never admitted, it had also discovered that such high personages as the Etrurian Ambassador were occasional visitors – the Etrurian Military Attaché was a frequent one and was known to have had heavy losses over which he shrugged the shoulders of resignation – and since there is nothing illegal about playing cards in a private house, would have entirely disinterested itself in Dictator’s Way and The Manor, but for vague, persistent, quite unsubstantiated rumours that occasionally the evenings did not pass off altogether peaceably. But then Mr. Judson was known to be liberal with his champagne and to possess an excellent brandy – a Denis Mounie of 1830, though not every one got that.
“There’s a city chap called Judson –” Waveny went on, but Bobby interrupted him.
“Look here, Waveny,” he said, “I don’t know what it’s all about, but if you think there’s anything wrong or have any information to give, it’s no good coming to me. You want to go to Scotland Yard. They’ll listen to you there. Or the nearest police-station. They’ll take it up all right, if there’s anything in it. All I could do anyhow would be to go round with you to the one in the High Street, and you can do that just as well by yourself – or better,” added Bobby, with a lingering thought of Lord’s and the sweet sound of Mr. Hammond’s bat meeting the ball full face.
“That’s just what I can’t do,” mumbled Waveny.
But Bobby was not listening. He was watching two newspaper sellers go by, the first with a placard announcing ‘Fresh European Crisis’, the second proclaiming briefly: ‘Hammond Out.’
“I thought as much,” said Bobby bitterly, though not making it clear to which placard he referred.
“You see,” Waveny went on in his stolid, deliberate way, “there’s a girl.”
“I thought as much,” said Bobby again.
Waveny nodded. His nod seemed to say he was not disappointed in his estimate of Bobby’s intelligence and that he had fully expected Bobby to perceive the indicated presence of a girl.
“There’s a bounder, too, bothering her,” Waveny went on, “I ought to thrash within an inch of his life – or a bit more.” He spoke with such a sudden and unexpected vehemence that Bobby gave him a somewhat startled glance. Waveny continued more quietly: “Only, you see, you’ve got to keep her name out of it, so I thought I would come along to you.”
Published by Dean Street Press 2015
Copyright © 1937 E.R. Punshon
All Rights Reserved
This ebook is published by licence, issued under the UK Orphan Works Licensing Scheme.
First published in 1937 by Victor Gollancz
Cover by DSP
ISBN 978 1 910570 39 5
www.deanstreetpress.co.uk