“To M. P., from E. X. Dean. Be in the church porch at midnight to-morrow.”
CHAPTER XXVIII
NEW SUGGESTIONS
AT LAST BOBBY finished all his ’phoning. Olive had been listening thoughtfully. She said:
“Even if he is there in the church porch so late—what made you say midnight?—how much farther forward will you be?”
“Don’t know,” Bobby answered, “but you’ve a better chance to find the right road if you can mark others ‘no thoroughfare’. I said midnight because I want it to be quite dark, so he won’t be able to see who is there and sheer off, and also to make it more difficult for any one else to stop him from turning up.”
“Oh, well,” admitted Olive. She held up her hand and told off each finger in turn. “One,” she said. “Mr Skinner and that daughter of his, and why is she pretending to be a waitress, and why is he pretending to be poor?”
“Miss Kitty is a waitress, and a jolly good one and no pretence,” Bobby said, “though I don’t know why; and if Mr Skinner is pretending to be poor, it’s a very realistic pretence.”
“Only,” Olive pointed out, “he can’t be, can he? I mean, not poor, not if what you’ve worked out about him is right.”
“And how in blazes,” demanded Bobby, “do you know what I’ve worked out? I’ve never told you.”
“You’ve said quite enough for any one to see what you are thinking,” retorted Olive, “and you’ve only not said because you’re afraid it’s all wrong and then I shan’t think you are really so awfully clever after all. As if,” said Olive with quiet scorn, “any woman ever thinks her husband awfully clever. Poor things! We get to know them too well.”
“Hum,” said Bobby. “Huh. Hah.”
“Two,” Olive went on, without requiring these quaint sounds to be translated into words—she supposed it was probably Basic Language. “Two. Mr Martin Pyne, though that’s pretty clear now, isn’t it? Only there’s still why did Mr McRell Pink run away, and you can’t really truly believe it even now, can you?”
“Well, it is pretty incredible,” Bobby admitted, “only it does—” He broke off abruptly: “What do you mean by ‘it’?” he demanded.
Olive had reached her third finger by now, and she made no attempt to answer his question.
“Three,” she said, “and that’s the Roman Wright family, and what did Mr Roman Wright mean by calling his water-colour the most remarkable picture ever painted, and is it?”
“A daub if ever there was one,” declared Bobby—“a daub even among all the rest of his daubs.”
“And what,” continued Olive, “is the effect it never fails to have on Mrs Roman Wright, and why has Miss Jane Wright taken to going to Mrs Bloom’s for her tea?”
“If I knew—” began Bobby, and paused.
“Well, of course, but you don’t,” Olive said, “and it is still a very big ‘if’, isn’t it?” Her little finger was lifted. “Four, the Theodores business, and who got away on the motor-cycle, and who fired the pistol shot?”
“Not to mention,” Bobby added, fixing a stern eye on Olive, in case she showed any sign of being amused “that young female who had the cheek and insolence to put out her tongue at me, and where does she come in?”
“Needs a good slapping,” said Olive absently; “but don’t you think the key to everything is why the poor boy took the Barsley ’bus to go home by, instead of the Threepence ’bus, and walked back across the forest? It’s not so very far, but it’s awfully rough going, especially for any one lame.”
“I shouldn’t wonder,” Bobby agreed. “But there you are again. All guesswork. There is this petrol dump, of course, Mr Fletcher’s boys have found, but there may be no connection. Some one who had petrol saved up or bought on the black market, didn’t dare use it or keep it in his garage or near his house, and hid it there for an emergency. Like the story of the chap who is said to have hidden two or three hundred pounds in gold in Wychwood for use in case the invasion came off, and now he can’t find it. All theory, guesswork. No solid evidence. Shut your eyes, make a dab with a pin, and you may pick a winner and you may not. There’s still the chance Ned may turn up smiling any moment and want to know what all the fuss is about, and he never meant anything at all and never had any private secret knowledge.”
“If he does—” began Olive.
“If he does,” interrupted Bobby, “I shall feel like murder myself.”
“If he does,” repeated Olive, “there’s still a lot to explain.”
“The dickens of a lot,” agreed Bobby, “but nothing on which to continue police action.”
“The photograph of all that heap of jewellery?” Olive suggested.
“What about it? Nothing you can identify. Might be a deliberate fake—Master Ned Bloom’s peculiar sense of humour. Or just nothing at all. Can’t be sure.”
“There’s Mrs Bloom,” Olive said. “She could tell you a lot.”
“Yes, but she won’t,” Bobby said. “Sends shivers up and down your back looking at you, but won’t tell a thing. I can’t make her out. Ned was her son and she loved him, and all the more, I think, for his lameness. But I’m not so sure what form that love of hers might not take.” He stopped abruptly and looked long and hard at Olive, so that she looked back in a puzzled way. He said slowly: “You know, I think perhaps she might you.”
“Me what?” asked Olive.
“Talk to you. She won’t to me, but she might to you.”
“Oh, I couldn’t,” Olive exclaimed.
“You did once,” Bobby said, thinking of a time when she had persuaded one in great distress to tell things she had hitherto kept hidden.
“But—Mrs Bloom,” Olive said uneasily.
“You needn’t do anything, ask anything,” Bobby said. “Much better not. Only go there and order tea and tell them who you are. If she likes to talk, listen. If she doesn’t, come away.”
“She frightens you,” Olive reminded him still more uneasily. “Doesn’t she?”
Bobby nodded.
“She frightens every one,” he said. “I expect every one was frightened when Lazarus came out of the tomb. If she says any thing, it will be like that, like some one coming from the grave.”
“Very well,” said Olive.
It was Bobby who was looking uneasy now.
“No,” he said. “You had better not. I wish I hadn’t thought of it. It just struck me. I didn’t realize.”
“Bobby,” Olive said, and her voice was a whisper, “Bobby, you don’t think there’s any truth in—in—”
“In its being what they call a ‘mercy killing’?” Bobby asked. “I don’t know. Apparently it’s one of the two favourite theories in Threepence itself. Two parties at the ‘Green Dragon’, Young tells me. One says it was Mrs Bloom because she couldn’t bear any longer to see the boy a cripple and his telling her it was her fault. The other party says it was Skinner and why don’t I have their garden dug up? because then we should see what we should see, and anyhow that girl of his is a proud piece and walks as if the ground wasn’t good enough for her to tread on.”
“I think it’s horrid of them,” began Olive heatedly, “only . . . well . . . I suppose I’m the same. You can’t help wondering.”
“I believe some of them are making bets about it,” Bobby said, “and that is going a bit too far—indecent. Young says he has heard that Roman Wright gave them a lecture the other night. Told them they ought to be ashamed of themselves; and they had no right to say such things about their neighbours, just because Mrs Bloom was a bit queer in her manner and Mr Skinner rather violent in his. Wound up by offering to bet the lot of them they were all wrong, and for his part he would be ashamed to suspect any one of being a murderer—any one at all. And ended by saying that Inspector Owen would be sure to get at the truth in the end, if he were only half as clever as every one said.”
“Well, that was very nice of him,” said Olive, “very nice indeed.”
Bobby shook his hea
d.
“Not too good,” he declared. “Getting a reputation for being clever, I mean. Makes people expect too much, and then they are apt to be disappointed. Much safer for them to think you are stupid. Then they don’t expect anything and never feel let down. I say, what about bed? Look at the time.”
Olive said she had been looking at it long enough, and therewith they retired. Bobby, indeed, slept well—he had the habit—but Olive was pale and red-eyed in the morning from restless and broken slumber.
“Every time I did manage to go sleep,” she said, “Mrs Bloom was there, telling me things I didn’t dare to listen to.”
“See here,” began Bobby uncomfortably, “it was only an idea of mine.”
But Olive shook her head when he went on to try to persuade her to forget the suggestion he now regretted having made.
“I don’t want to a bit,” she said frankly, “but I’ve got to. I don’t know why. I suppose it’s silly, but I feel somehow as though she were waiting for me.”
Bobby repeated that he thought it was better left alone, but after that he said no more.
So, after a somewhat hurried breakfast—for his own feeling was that things were approaching a climax, and the day might not be long enough—Bobby departed for his office. There he found with satisfaction the result of a line of inquiry he had instituted concerning the Skinner family. However, there was no time to follow that up for the present, the less so that now there arrived a plaintive report from the unfortunate Sergeant Young, telling how all that long, long night—the longest in human history—he had waited, waited, waited in the chill drear forest for a relief that never came, never came till long after dawn, and then so exhausted with hours and hours of wandering in the forest, lost and forlorn, as to seem less a relief than a rag.
“Poor devils!” said Bobby, filled with pity and regret, “and it’s nothing to grin at, Payne,” he added severely to his assistant; “you wouldn’t have liked it yourself.”
“No, indeed, sir,” agreed Payne. “Quite another ‘the boy stood on the burning deck’ stunt, isn’t it?”
“Quite different,” pronounced Bobby coldly; and grabbed the ’phone and sent out a soothing message, all honey and sympathy, advising bed for the rest of the day—Young was already there, with no intention whatever of leaving it—and going on to arrange for the succour of the other unfortunate, relief or rag, as soon as possible. Next he rang up Mr Fletcher, the Scout-master, and confirmed arrangements, already completed, for meeting him and the two boys who had made the original discovery, and who claimed as by right permission to themselves show the exact spot to the police. Then as soon as all other necessary steps had been completed or arranged for, he set out for the appointed rendezvous, taking with him in the car Sergeant Payne and large and brawny Constable Watts, this last-named a little puzzled by instructions to bring with him a spade and pick.
CHAPTER XXIX
OAK SEEDLING
AT THE APPOINTED spot Mr Fletcher and two small boys—slouch hats and poles all complete—were duly waiting. Bobby greeted Fletcher, paid the two small boys a grave compliment—as man to man—on their discovery, and then they all started off. As far as possible they went by car, then alighted to continue on foot, though this did not so much mean walking as scrambling, climbing, even crawling in one place to make a short cut through a kind of tunnel of bramble. The large Constable Watts, carrying reluctantly and he thought most unnecessarily both spade and pick, made but heavy going of it. In this part of Wychwood forest the trees were stunted; the undergrowth a jungle; bracken often impassable; here and there sullen pools still lingering in spite of the recent dry weather, the water held in small rocky basins sometimes quite deep under the surface. Sometimes, too, there were bare patches where stone and rock came to the surface in outcrops often steep and rugged. Some miles farther on this formation culminated in a quarry that had been a source of much building material in former days, but here the stone had never been worked. No doubt transport had always presented difficulties.
As desolate and as deserted a part of the forest as any its great expanse could show, Bobby thought. It reminded him strongly of the scene shown in that water-colour of which Mr Roman Wright had boasted that it was the most remarkable ever painted. Somewhere about here, it seemed likely, the original of that scene was to be found.
Now, not without a bruise or two, some damage to clothing that is always so serious in these coupon-ridden days, an occasional fall, and one small boy lost till it was found he had wriggled his way ahead, they came to the scene of the discovery, where the relief sent from headquarters was waiting, smoking a meditative pipe. For this, he felt, was an occasion when the order against smoking on duty might be considered “temporarily abrogated”—“washed out for the time,” he said, preferring five short words to two long.
In one respect Bobby was disappointed, for a vague hope he had cherished that this might prove to be the scene of the water-colour was plainly unfounded. As lonely, as desolate, as that, no doubt, but in aspect and surroundings entirely different. He permitted himself, too, a faint regret that initiative was quite so thoroughly taught and practised in the Boy Scout movement. Most desirable, of course, but this time initiative had induced the lads to haul out the petrol tins and make a neat pile of them to one side, whereas Bobby would have much preferred it if they had been left in their original position. Also there had been a good deal of running and tramping to and fro, so that Bobby did not suppose there would be much chance of signs or tracks being left to provide any clue to the identity of whoever was responsible for this petrol depot in the woods.
The hiding-place selected had been under a huge boulder where the long processes of time and weather had washed away the earth. The sort of small natural cavity thus formed—it was almost a cave—had been further enlarged apparently to contain the petrol tins, and yet not enlarged enough, since no room had been found for four, which had merely been concealed close by under a covering of twigs and leaves. It was these which had been noticed first by some sharp-eyed lad, and then further search had discovered the rest of the tins in the deep cavity under the great upstanding boulder.
Bobby was a little puzzled, though, by certain signs which indicated that the efforts to widen and deepen the cavity were quite recent, and yet they had not succeeded in making it big enough to hold all the petrol tins. Moreover, it seemed curious that the four apart under the bushes had apparently not been long in that particular spot, while those under the boulder showed every sign of having been in place some considerable time. An inconsistency there, Bobby thought, and inconsistencies he never liked. He was still puzzling over it when Payne, who had been hunting round on his own account, came up.
“Something to show you here, sir,” he said.
He led Bobby to a spot outside the kind of glade where they were standing and showed him tyre tracks on a spot of soft ground where underlying water had kept the ground soft in spite of the recent drought.
“Motor-cycle,” Payne pronounced. “Too deep for a pedal machine.”
“Yes,” Bobby agreed, and went down on hands and knees to look more closely, and especially more closely at a spot Payne had marked by a twig thrust into the ground near. After a very close examination he said: “Yes, it’s only faint, but it’s the same triangular patch there was near Theodores. The same man who was dodging about Theodores that night was here recently.”
“Came for petrol; this is where he got it,” Payne said. “Who is he?”
Bobby did not answer.
“Captain Dunstan?” ventured Payne. “It was him before.”
This time Bobby had no chance to answer, for Mr Fletcher was calling.
“I wanted to tell you the boys think they have found a place rather like your description of the one you wanted,” he said. “Quite close. A hundred yards or so. I expect they would have spotted it before only for being so excited about the petrol tins.”
Bobby called Watts, told him to mark off the damp spot
where the tyre marks showed, by means of a circle of branches he could cut from the trees near. Then he and Payne accompanied Mr Fletcher to the new discovery. When they reached it Bobby recognized it at once.
Here was the very scene the water-colour had shown, and there the curiously distorted tree to which, in the picture, Roman Wright had drawn attention as, in his opinion, tying the whole composition together.
A dreary place, a queer place, Bobby thought, to choose for subject. Wychwood Forest has many beauty spots, but this was none. Here bracken grew, and weeds, and the trees were stunted and the bushes a tangle, and it seemed as if here the sunlight never came and that here the air was always stagnant and the ground only waiting for a little rain to turn into a foetid swamp.
Payne, who was standing behind, said:
“It looks to me as if no one has ever been here since creation day.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Mr Fletcher answered. “Not very often, perhaps. Not attractive—gives one the shivers, somehow. But I think I remember being this way with a few of the elder boys some years ago. It’s the smell I remember. There had been a good deal of rain, and there was a smell of rotting, a smell of things decaying. I don’t think any of us ever came again.”
Bobby was concentrating every faculty of his mind on the scene before him, intently struggling to reproduce mentally every feature, every line of Mr Roman Wright’s drawing. It had impressed itself on his mind, and feature by feature he went over it in his memory.
“Why should any artist choose a scene like this?” he asked Mr Fletcher.
Mr. Fletcher said he didn’t know. Payne suggested that artists are a rum lot and you never knew. Watts, who now had joined them, yawned. He thought it would be a good idea if they set off home. For his part he was quite ready for his supper. The two lads, equally bored, had been chasing each other through the rock and undergrowth. Now one of them, anxious to show off his woodlore, came up to Bobby and said:
Secrets Can't be Kept: A Bobby Owen Mystery Page 17