Secrets Can't be Kept: A Bobby Owen Mystery

by E. R. Punshon

  “‘Never meant’ is a poor excuse,” Bobby said. “You never meant, perhaps, but all the same you did—and what you did, that is done.”

  “That is a hard thing to say. Hard like stone,” Olive answered. “It is all so long ago.”

  “Facts are hard, life is hard,” Bobby answered. “The world God made is hard—stone and iron, too. And I don’t think Mrs Bloom feels it is long ago. I think she always feels it only happened yesterday.” He began to walk up and down the room. “A race,” he said. “A race with all the odds against us. Can we find Jane and get hold of her before she goes back to Roman Wright? For that’s what she’ll do. She won’t be able to keep away now she’s told, and that’s where the odds are against us. She won’t help us. Irresistibly, fatally, he’ll draw her. And he’ll soon know she’s talked. A race, the odds against us, her life the prize, and that, I think, she knows.”

  “She knows,” Olive agreed—“or I think she does—but I’m not sure either how she’ll choose.”

  “Nor am I,” Bobby agreed. “Death has its fascination, too. Mrs Wright—but she’ll make no choice.”

  “No,” Olive said, “but if you could manage to get her away, then, after a time, I believe she would tell you everything. But she won’t let you take her away if she can help it.”

  “I suppose I could arrest her,” Bobby said thoughtfully. “I don’t know why. I might think up some charge or another to hold her on. False imprisonment, of course. Action for damages, perhaps. Have to risk it. Or hold her for questioning. Her life won’t be safe if I can’t manage to get her away somehow. I imagine Roman Wright has only kept her there still alive because he hates her so, and if he sees he can’t any longer, then he is altogether likely to give his hate vent in killing. Two women’s lives at stake and not too much chance of saving either, for neither of them will help.”

  The ’phone rang to tell him the orders and instructions he had given were in process of being carried out.

  “Now I can go,” he said, returning from the ’phone.

  He started off at once. At a little distance from Prospect Cottage he left his car and continued on foot to join the two men now on watch, one just arrived as a result of Bobby’s recent orders. The other, who had been there since much earlier in the day but till now under strict orders to subordinate closeness of observation to avoidance of attention, reported that he had seen Jane return and enter the cottage. As far as he knew she was still there, but it was possible she had gone out by the back, whence escape into the shelter and concealment of the neargrowing trees was so easy. Bobby asked him about Roman Wright and Mrs Wright, but he had seen neither of them.

  “But that Mrs Wright,” he said, “she’s a queer one. You look and look and you think there’s no one, and then all at once you see she’s been there all the time. Sort of natural born camouflage, as you might say.”

  Bobby warned both men to keep very much on the alert. Roman Wright, he told them, was probably armed and certainly desperate, desperate as only those can be who see inevitably closing upon them the doom they have long dreaded but long thought they could evade. The newly arrived constable had brought two revolvers. Bobby put one in his pocket. He went to the house and knocked. There was no reply. He waited and knocked again, and still got no response. He went round to the back, but there, too, his knocking won no answer.

  “Can’t be any one in, sir,” said the constable who had come round to the back with him, the other man having remained on guard at the front.

  “I’ve no search warrant,” Bobby said. “No time. Too much red tape about search warrants. An Englishman’s house is his castle, but castles can be taken by storm. Are you any good at burglary, Jones?” he asked his companion.

  “Well, sir,” answered Jones, warily, “I wouldn’t say—”

  “I am,” said Bobby, interrupting. “One of my specialities. Castle or not, search warrant or none, I’m going to have a look. You can stand by and watch.”

  Jones, grateful he wasn’t an inspector and hadn’t to take the responsibility, watched accordingly, while Bobby satisfied himself the back door was bolted as well as locked so that an assault on the lock alone would be useless. He turned his attention to the kitchen window. It had a special patent burglar-proof fastener. Mr Roman Wright, as one of the profession, evidently knew how to baffle his colleagues. Bobby went back to the front, though he would have preferred to effect less conspicuous entry at the rear. The front door had a Yale type lock. Such locks enjoy a well-deserved reputation for security, but all the same present no great difficulty to those who know how to deal with them, though it may be as well not to explain too precisely the method Bobby adopted. Soon he had it forced with little to show what had happened and with small injury to the lock. Fortunately the door had not been bolted, and once the lock had been dealt with it opened easily.

  Bobby did not enter immediately. He stood on the threshold in the open doorway and called.

  “Any one at home?” he shouted, and there came no answer.

  Once again he called, loudly and clearly, and then again. He crossed the threshold into the small entrance hall. He entered the sitting-rooms. They were empty, showing no trace of recent occupation. He gave another shout up the stairs and still gained no answer. He went on into the kitchen and at first glance thought that was empty, too, till he perceived that the motionless shadow in the darkest corner was Mrs Wright.

  “Oh, how do you do?” he said. “Do excuse me, won’t you? I hope you don’t mind my barging in like this, but I couldn’t make any one hear. Fact is, I’m wanting to have a bit of a talk with the young lady staying with you—Miss Jane Wright, isn’t it? You don’t know where she is, do you?”

  The silent, motionless figure contented itself with a faint shake of the head, a gesture so slight as hardly to be perceptible.

  “Or your husband? Has he got back yet?”

  Mrs Wright made again that almost imperceptible gesture of denial. Then she said in her low tones that were hardly above a whisper:

  “I didn’t let you in, but he’ll say I did.”

  “Well, that won’t matter,” Bobby told her cheerfully, “not a scrap. You’ll come away with us, won’t you? I hope you will.”

  Again that faint movement of the head that was hardly so much as a gesture, scarcely even an indication of one.

  “I can’t,” she said in her low whisper. “I can’t. He won’t let me. He won’t let you. I can’t.”

  “Oh, that’s all right,” Bobby said. “Don’t you worry about that. We shan’t ask him. I’ll get one of my men to go to Midwych with you, and we’ll find a lady there to look after you. She’ll take care of you, and you’ll be perfectly safe.”

  Mrs Wright did not answer. She might not have heard. But she began to tremble. Bobby thought it better to say no more for the moment. He was afraid of a complete breakdown. He had a small brandy flask in his pocket, but when he poured a little out and tried to make her swallow it, she could not for the chattering of her teeth, the tight constriction of her throat. He put it on the table, telling her to drink it when she felt better. He called in Jones from outside.

  “I want you to look after her and get her away as soon as you can,” he said. “But be careful. She’s in a queer state, she might collapse any moment. I told her we would take her to Midwych and take care of her and see she was quite safe, and the threat of safety has been too much for her. Not used to being taken care of, not used to feeling safe. I’ll send a car along and a doctor, too, if I can find one. Be as gentle as you know how, handle her like a new-born baby that’ll die on your hands if you don’t watch out. Do your best.”

  Jones promised, though uneasily, and hoped the car and the doctor would not be long delayed. Bobby went back to his own car and started off for that spot in Wychwood forest where he supposed that by now, following his recent orders, a squad would be hard at work.

  CHAPTER XXXVIII

  JEWELS AND DEATH

  IN WYCHWOOD FOREST, in t
he heart of that curious kind of peninsula or spur of rough and lonely land, strewn with rocks and boulders, marshy in places, avoided alike by hikers and holiday-makers and by the tramps and gypsies who occasionally made use of parts of the forest as a base for their operations, there was now busily at work with spade and pick and crowbar a small group of the Wychshire county police; all of them grumbling bitterly at having been called back to duty after dismissal, but all of them equally excited to know the cause and upshot of this emergency call.

  “Our Bobby’s got something,” they told each other, using the nickname his men were beginning to give him among themselves; “our Bobby mostly knows what he’s up to.”

  “Found a corpse last time, so he did,” one of them observed. “Now it’s another, or I’ll stand the first man that asks half a pint—”

  “That’s me,” said one of them quickly.

  “Provided he pays for it himself,” said the other man.

  The pleasantry earned the laugh any pleasantry will when men are at work together. A third member of the party, grave and elderly, rebuked them.

  “No time for laughing,” he said, “if it’s that poor crippled lad from Threepence village lies buried here.”

  “A queer-like corpse, anyway,” yet another said. “Take a look.”

  They were at work under and around the great outcropping boulder where previously the hidden petrol tins had been discovered. Their task had been to excavate still further the kind of cavity or cave beneath it, partly natural, worn by the long, slow forces of Nature, partly plainly enough the work of other unknown human hands. Now the last speaker had felt the point of his pick strike on a wooden box, and it was a gold watch and chain that he withdrew, caught on his tool. Groping with his hands, enlarging the gap already made in the side of the buried box, he freed still more of its contents. Forth there came a small cascade of shining things, splendid, sparkling, earth-stained. He threw them out to his companions in careless handfuls.

  “Here, catch,” he said; and tossed over his shoulder a glorious tiara that once had shone upon a duchess’s head. Followed more such brilliancies—brooches, bracelets, pendants, rings, all in turn. “Here’s another,” he said, and out came a diamond necklace, followed by a crimson ruby pendant. “That’s the lot, I think,” he said. He scrambled out from the cavity they had made under the great rock. “A ruddy jeweller’s shop,” he said. “Now, how did our Bobby know all that stuff was there?”

  A strange sight indeed, all that great pile of lovely shining toys spread out there in the failing light, in that rough and lonely spot on that barren earth, things meant for the adornment of their women when the great of this earth were met to display to each other their riches and their power. Yet these sophisticated toys seemed as lovely—lovelier indeed—in their present strange surroundings as ever they could have done at banquet or ball. It was with a kind of half-embarrassed awe that there stood gazing at them the little group of men who had wrenched them from their cunning hiding-place.

  “Now I wonder who put them there and why?” said one of them, and another said, half in jest and all in earnest:

  “Wouldn’t my old woman like to have her pick? But how ever did our Bobby know?”

  “Here he comes,” a third man said.

  Bobby had in fact arrived, and was in the act of making his way towards them as quickly as permitted the rough and broken ground that made all progress about here a mixture of scramble, climb and crawl.

  “We’ve found it, sir; it was there all right,” one man called to him.

  “Now we can go ahead,” Bobby said; and then, when he came nearer and saw what formed the centre round which the men were gathered, he stood still and looked again and said: “That’s not what I thought you would find.”

  “Well, sir, it’s something anyway, isn’t it?” one of them remarked. “What’s there must be worth a mort of money.”

  “Enough to stock a jeweller’s shop,” said another.

  Bobby was still looking worried and disturbed. He went on his hands and knees before the great cavity they had scooped out under that enormous rock. Then he lay flat so that he could reach farther; and he groped with his hand first and then with the end of a crowbar he asked should be passed to him.

  “There can’t be any more of the stuff there, sir,” one said to him. “It’s solid rock behind.”

  “Feels like it,” Bobby grunted, still probing and feeling.

  “Smart idea,” another of the men said, “to hide one thing on top of another, the petrol tins on top of the jewellery. When you had found the petrol, well, you had found it, and you didn’t think of looking any more, not when it all seemed solid earth behind, well packed and beaten in.”

  “Smart all right,” Bobby agreed, he having now withdrawn himself from his probing and scraping, “and smart once may be smart twice. How would it be if some of you had a try at shifting that bit of rock or stone or whatever it is you touched behind the jewel-box?”

  The men looked somewhat doubtful as they obeyed. It was no easy task, but crowbars and picks did their work, and presently, with grunting effort and much strain, they hauled forth the great slab of stone that had been so ingeniously fixed in position as to seem a part of the boulder above it.

  “Who ever put that there,” they said to each other, “did a job.”

  “He had cause,” Bobby said, a picture in his mind of the grisly task a desperate man had accomplished here, working for his life in solitude and darkness. He said to his men: “Go ahead. That stone was not put there without reason.”

  A few more minutes, a further clearing away of earth; and then, in the twilight of the declining day, beneath the stunted trees, side by side with the heaped-up, shining jewels, there lay the grisly thing they had at last uncovered.

  “It’s the lame boy all right,” one man said—“young Ned Bloom of Threepence village. See that club foot of his?”

  Bobby knelt down by the body, a body already not much more than recognizable. No one now was paying any attention to the jewels, their glitter and their splendour quite forgotten. The body was fully clothed. Bobby thought a doctor would be able to establish the cause of death. From damp and mouldering and clammy pockets, Bobby drew out little things of one sort and another that would help to make identification even more certain. Among them was that note of which Jane Wright had spoken, the note she had been given to hand to the unhappy lad, to lure him to his death. Roman’s signature was still legible.

  “Even if there was nothing more,” Bobby said, “that would be enough.”

  He gave a few orders to his men and he told them, too, to make a quick inventory of the recovered jewels.

  “Mustn’t forget them,” he said.

  Then he left them, for he was eager to get started immediately the hunt for Roman Wright. Two murders, he knew for certain, lay at that man’s door, and there was a very grim likelihood that he might soon be guilty of two more if he were not checked in time. But Bobby had not gone more than fifty yards from where these discoveries had been made, fifty yards or less towards where he had left his car, when he heard behind him shouting and running. He turned and hurried back. Most of his men had scattered; he could hear them running and calling. One had remained prudently on guard by the piled-up jewels and the body of young Ned Bloom, whose luck in life had been but ill. Bobby called to this one man left on guard to know what had happened.

  “It was a chap,” the man explained, “who came up from somewhere so quiet like we never heard him, never saw him, us thinking of the stuff we were writing down and ticking off, and when he saw what we were doing he let out a yell like a madman. ‘Oh, my pretties,’ he said, ‘there’s all my pretties.’ We all turned round quick, and I said, ‘Your pretties? who are you?’ and he didn’t say a word, but was off like a good ’un, and most of us after him, but I stopped to make sure of things, and it’s not in my mind they’ll catch him, he ran that light and easy; quick like he ran, as if he knew the place well and where to pu
t his feet.”

  Bobby listened in silence. He did not much think either that any of his men, none of them young, most of them reservists or pensioners called back to duty, would outpace Roman Wright, for that it was Roman Wright who had thus appeared to them Bobby had no doubt.

  All the more reason, then, all the more need for desperate haste to bring to justice, to render harmless, one who had already shown himself so reckless, cunning and remorseless. Yet even before throwing all his energy into pursuit, Bobby felt that first he must return to Prospect Cottage to make sure that Mrs Wright had been removed to safety.

  To his surprise and disappointment, however, when he arrived it was to see still standing in the road outside the cottage that police car he had sent there and that he had hoped would by now have conveyed Mrs Wright to safety. Standing by its side was a man whom Bobby recognized as a doctor practising in the district.

  “It seems my patient is missing,” the doctor said as he nodded recognition to Bobby, jumping from his car. “How much longer do you expect me to wait? If she has dodged away into the wood behind the house there won’t be much chance of finding her in a hurry.”

  The constable Bobby had left on guard had seen Bobby’s arrival, and came up hurriedly, looking somewhat uneasy.

  “It’s this way, sir,” he explained. “We was getting along fine, her and me. Chatting away I was to put her at her ease, sir, if you see what I mean, and offering to make her a cup of tea, what ladies are always ready for and bucks ’em up wonderful, and then I heard the car coming, so I said to her: ‘I’ll open the front door for ’em,’ and my back wasn’t turned no longer than needed to do that, and take a look to make sure it was our car all O.K., and so it was, and when I went back to the kitchen to tell her, blessed if she wasn’t there any more, and how she managed it beats me, with the back door still locked and bolted same as you said to keep it and me only at the front door and never hearing a sound, so how she done a bunk like that beats me.”