The Dark Garden: A Bobby Owen Mystery

by E. R. Punshon

  “Anyhow, no business of ours,” Bobby agreed. “We aren’t guardians of people’s morals, thank goodness. Your men haven’t made a report of that, surely?”

  “Oh, no, sir, that’s just the talk that’s going about and leaving out the nods and winks that go with it. It was Smith made a report. He saw a young man climbing out of an upstairs window and sliding down the drain-pipe. Looked like breaking and entering and there had been a complaint already so Smith started to challenge him and then someone—Smith couldn’t see who—fired a couple of shots out of the window, either at the young chap or just to give him a scare. Smith yelled up to the window to stop that and pounded off after the young chap. Well, sir, you know yourself, you don’t get quicker on your legs as you get nearer pension age and so that was no good. Smith says that anyhow what with the shooting and one thing and another the chap had so good a start no one could have caught him before he got to the forest. That’s as may be, but anyway he got there all right and of course once in the forest he was safe enough. We never traced him. Fair haired, long legged young chap was all the description Smith could give and not much to go on.”

  “Hardly enough,” agreed Bobby, who remembered Smith as a sound and comfortable presence with a good many years of service to his credit, but not likely to be at his best across country.

  “The funny thing,” the sergeant went on, “is that when Smith got back the window was shut and when he knocked he couldn’t get an answer at first. When Mrs Jordan did come to the door, she as good as accused Smith of being drunk or lying. Said she had been indoors all the time, and nothing had happened and no one had fired any shots. Smith sticks to his story and he says, too, that Mrs Jordan was all hotted up and had a bruise under her eye that showed plain, though she had been plastering powder and stuff on it. Smith says when he asked her about it she just used some more language and banged the door in his face.”

  “Probably she had her reasons for keeping the young man’s name quiet,” Bobby remarked. “Not to mention the shooting, didn’t care to have police know she took pot shots out of bedroom windows.”

  “Yes, sir, only what was that young man sliding down drain-pipes for? Miss Anne Earle wasn’t there, she’s in town during the day.” He permitted himself a faint smile. “If you had ever seen Mrs Jordan, Mr Owen, sir, you wouldn’t think any young man would want to go sliding down drain-pipes on her account.”

  “You said something about a previous complaint?” Bobby remarked.

  “Attempt at breaking and entering. Two or three weeks earlier. One morning when there was no one at home, Miss Earle at her office and Mrs Jordan in town—she takes the bus in for shopping or a show once or twice every week. She rang up and I went round myself. There had certainly been attempts to force both the doors, both at the front and the back, and one of the ground floor windows as well. It hadn’t been managed, though. Interrupted perhaps or got the wind up, if it was an amateur. But why did Mrs Jordan complain then and next time swear black and blue nothing had happened? Besides as good as telling Smith he was drunk. Hurt Smith cruel that did, him being strict chapel and T.T. since birth. Why, they say he wouldn’t take his mother’s milk till he was sure she hadn’t had any drink to keep her strength up.”

  “Nothing we can do about it, anyhow,” Bobby remarked. “Probably she knew she hadn’t a firearms licence and was afraid of being fined and having the pistol confiscated.”

  “It might be that,” agreed the sergeant, but doubtfully. “After that, Smith kept an extra special sharp look-out there whenever he was on that beat, on account of Mrs Jordan’s telling him he had been drinking, making him a bit resentful like, not to say spiteful, which seemingly you are apt to catch from being extra strict chapel and T.T. I reckon human nature being what it is it’s got to find a way out somehow.”

  “That, Sergeant,” said Bobby, much impressed, “is a remark of profound psychological significance.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the sergeant suspiciously, thinking that if any one but an inspector had said that, he would have given him his choice of taking it back or having it pushed down his throat.

  Would Smith know the drain-pipe-sliding young gentleman again?” Bobby asked.

  ‘He said not, he only saw his back and his long legs going as he made off. City clothes, bare headed, light-coloured hair and that’s about all.”

  “Smith’s extra special watch produce anything else?” Bobby asked next.

  “It was what he heard—threatening language like,” the sergeant answered, and Bobby looked a little startled, for here it seemed was talk of threats again.

  “What threats? Who?” he asked sharply.

  “Last week it was, Wednesday. Smith was on day duty and seemingly he hung about Rose Briar Cottage a bit, feeling sort of sore and brooding like over being called drunk, and he heard quarrelling going on. A woman and a man, he said.”

  “Did he see who they were?”

  “No. He hung about so long I ticked him off for keeping me waiting or I don’t suppose he would have said anything. He must have been in the garden close up, to hear all he said he did, and he might have got ticked off again for entering private property without reasonable cause, it not being part of police duty to listen at windows. He said they were fair shouting at each other. The woman was yelling she wouldn’t put up with it and he had better mind what he was doing, and the man telling her to mind herself, because if it was blackmail she meant he knew how to deal with that all right. And she said something about him trying to push her in the canal and he back answered he was sorry he hadn’t, because then she wouldn’t have bothered any one any more. But Smith didn’t seem too clear about which of them said what, what with their both shouting at each other at once and him uneasy about listening at all.”

  Bobby liked this talk of the canal and people pushed therein even less than he had liked the mention of threats. Confused and doubtful as it all appeared, like passing glimpses of sketches for a picture not yet completed, there seemed to him to be ugly, underlying implications. He was aware of a feeling that the picture when completed would be no pleasant one. But these scant scraps of knowledge, these vague and doubtful hints gave no ground for action. Nothing to be done. Bobby asked a few more questions but learnt no more. Constable Smith stuck to his story, had plainly the very worst opinion of Rose Briar Cottage and everything connected with it, admitted he had possibly exceeded the strict limits of his duty by entering the Rose Briar garden to overhear a private conversation, stuck to it that threats had been exchanged and that they sounded as though they had been meant, regretted that he was not sure of being able to recognize the voices, though certain that one was that of a man, one that of a woman, and, finally, hinted a determination to keep a sharper eye than ever on the cottage, its inmates and visitors.

  “Me drunk?” he complained through a heavy walrus moustache, “folks who say things like that about other folks did ought to be respectable folks themselves.”

  Bobby did not much think that ‘respectability’ would in any case justify unfounded accusations, but agreed it might be as well to keep a careful but discreet—he laid an emphasis on the last word—watch on the cottage. It also came out as a result of this talk that the unfavourable opinion held in the village of Rose Briar Cottage and its inmates was at least in part due to the fact that Mrs Jordan made all her purchases in Midwych, buying nothing in the neighbourhood unless it was some trifle she had forgotten to get in town. It was also matter for comment that all that came from Midwych came from the best and most expensive shops there. There had even been deliveries of cases of champagne, a fact that had stirred the village to its depths, for while the production of champagne at any special festivity, a wedding or other unusual celebration, met with approval, even with awed approval, its use as an everyday beverage suggested somehow extreme depravity. The complaint was general that the only money of Mrs Jordan’s the village ever saw was that paid to the woman who went to the cottage three mornings a week to help in the hou
sework and brought back tales of the lavish, careless, and untidy style of living prevalent there.

  “Everything of the very best, money no object, fair chuck it about so they do,” she would say.

  Bobby went away in a puzzled and uneasy mood. There was nothing in all this on which police action could be taken, and yet it seemed to him a situation unstable and full of menace with so many vague ominous hints coming from so many different quarters. Nor did he like this tale of a pistol fired from the cottage window at an unidentified fugitive or the recurrent mention of the canal that had already been the scene of one sudden and mysterious death linked in some way with those people of whom he was already beginning to think as centring upon Rose Briar Cottage.

  Nothing to be done. Any inquiry about the firing of the pistol would only be met with renewed denial. Nothing to be done but await the event that it was to be hoped would never occur. But mingled curiosity and unease combined to make Bobby think he would like to have a look himself at this cottage around which there seemed to revolve so much that was ominous, mysterious, and disturbing.

  The way took him over the canal of which so often mention had been made. He crossed it by a high, steeply arched bridge known as Ends Bridge. On the further bank he stopped, got out of his car, and went back, descending from the roadway to the canal bank by steps running down from the side of the bridge. The water ran dark and sluggish, stirred at the moment to faint oily ripples by a chill, damp breeze that blew beneath the bridge. The towing path in spite of recent dry weather, was wet and muddy. Probably the water seeped up through the foundations of the bridge. One had the impression that here the sunshine never came, that always it lay under the brooding shadows cast by the bridge overhead and the steep embankment of the road. Just about here, Bobby knew, young Mr Youngman, once Miss Vigors’s suitor, had walked into the canal one dark night and been no more known in the world of living men. The water lapped lazily, softly, evilly, on the bank of the towing path. Bobby, his hands in his pockets, stood staring at it thoughtfully. A man bemused with drink might drown easily enough on a dark night. Or, in panic, he might splash away from safety and the bank into the middle of the water and so drown there. Or, on a cold night, an old man or a man with a weak heart, might lose consciousness as a result of the sudden shock of immersion. But, normally, there seemed little reason why any one who had slipped accidentally into the water, should not rescue himself easily enough by catching hold of the brick-lined edge of the path and hauling himself on to the land again.

  Bobby found his mind oddly obsessed by thoughts of that past tragedy. A young, strong man should not have died so easily, he thought. But all that had happened long ago. Useless now to wonder or ask questions.

  The dead, swollen body of a drowned cat came floating down the canal’s slow, greasy current. With a shudder of repugnance Bobby turned away. A lonely spot, for the road by which he had come was not much used, and the canal carried little traffic, since the railway company to which it belonged preferred that goods should be carried on the more expensive and more profitable railway line and took steps to see that that happened. A hidden, solitary spot, fit indeed for stratagems and treasons—or for worse. Bobby did not like to think of any fellow creature choking out his life in the darkness in that yellow, sullen flood.

  Quite a relief to come presently to a cheerful-looking village where the gentle, accustomed life of the everyday world was pursuing its ordinary course. There were even no signs here as yet of the war strain that was fast approaching. Young men were still going about their work, and friendly signs on cottage windows still offered teas with severe rationing as yet only a distant speculation. Beyond the village, following the directions given him, Bobby found the fork in the road he had been told of. Taking the westerly branch he came soon to Rose Briar Cottage.

  A pretty, almost theatrically pretty place, it seemed, with its steep thatched roof—though this was a district in which thatching was not practised—its dormer windows above and bow windows below, all with diamond panes twinkling in the sun, its creeper-clad walls, its ostentatiously rustic porch. A lovely little garden, too, bright with flowers all neatly bedded out, and a lawn on which not a blade of grass was out of place. Charming, Bobby thought it at first, and then the longer he looked at it, the less he felt it so. Something was wrong. Too artificial, he decided presently, out of touch with its surroundings, a business man’s idea of what a country cottage ought to be, founded probably on unconscious memories of musical comedies. Bobby would hardly have been surprised to see the heroine come round the corner and begin singing some popular air.

  He had stopped the car to get a good look at the place. A window opened and a woman thrust out her head and stared at him suspiciously across the flowering hedge. A woman not young, now, with hair of so intense a raven hue as instantly to suggest dye, with red inflamed eyes that had rolls of swollen flesh beneath, a great hooked nose, a thin rat trap of a mouth. A plentiful application of powder, an equally lavish use of rouge and lipstick, had removed all human expression from the face, except that implicit in the small, uneasy eyes and in the hungry, thin-lipped mouth. An unpleasant face, Bobby thought, but he thought also the opportunity was not one to be lost. He got down from the car and opened the garden gate. He noticed that it was a lich gate and he wondered, as he had done before, if people knew the meaning of the word ‘lich’, or what was the original use and purpose of the lich gate. He went on up the flagged path, under a kind of pergola of climbing roses, and at the cottage door found waiting him, hostility and suspicion expressed in her every attitude and movement, the woman whose face he had seen at the window. A big woman, he saw now, fat and unhealthy looking, with a suggestion about her that she both ate and drank too much, sloppy and untidy in appearance as well, with her hair ill arranged, her dress unfastened at the throat, one stocking holding itself up in uneasy wrinkles, her feet in loose slippers. Nor were her hands too clean, and from her there exuded a strong odour of some cheap scent.

  “She is expecting something, she is afraid of something,” Bobby thought, and he wondered if between this woman and Anne Earle there could be either kinship or friendship or any kind of mutual sympathy and understanding, such different types they seemed. This woman would never know a scruple or a hesitation save those dictated by fear or self interest. The girl would probably know many, both scruples and hesitations, though her inner demon might drive her on to override them all.

  Lifting his hat, adopting his most conciliatory manner, Bobby said:

  “Excuse me, madam, I’m so sorry to trouble you but could you put me on the right road to Midwych?”

  “Turn back the way you’ve come,” she answered, her voice harsh and grating. “There’s a sign post there. You must have passed it. I suppose you can’t read?”

  “Oh, I can read,” Bobby assured her. “I must have over-looked it somehow.”

  “Pity you haven’t better eyes,” she retorted, and added viciously: “Mr Policeman.”

  If there was one thing that annoyed Bobby more than anything else, it was being recognized and greeted as a policeman when he was in plain clothes. He was quite sure he did not look like a policeman, and he thought it strange and unfair that so many people should make what were, he was convinced, merely lucky guesses thrown out at random. He felt he disliked and mistrusted the woman—Mrs Jordan, he supposed—more than ever, and he asked crossly:

  “Why should you think I am a policeman?”

  “Snooping around,” she retorted.

  “Is that what you call asking the way?”

  “Asking my hat. You aren’t in uniform so you aren’t a soldier, though you’re young enough to be called up. But you’ve a straight back, a well drilled back, a policeman’s back if it isn’t a soldier’s.”

  With that she banged the door in his face and he went back to his car, convinced now that not only did he dislike Mrs Jordan but that she was a formidable as well as an objectionable person.

  CHAPTER IV

>   MESSRS CASTLES

  IT WAS ONLY the next morning that Bobby, returning from one of the numerous conferences on A.R.P. at which he had for the time to represent the absent Colonel Glynne, found on his desk the card of Mr Nathaniel Anderson, the senior partner in Castles.

  Bobby looked at it thoughtfully. Something else about Rose Briar Cottage or about Osman Ford, perhaps. Was it possible that these reported threats Osman was supposed to have uttered Mr Anderson took so seriously that he was going to apply for police protection? The address, that of the firm, was Chief Building; a large, new and imposing block of offices in the centre of the town, just off Market Street, where, from time immemorial, until comparatively recent years, a market had been held twice a week. But the market had waned as the town had waxed, and now was little more than a collection of cheap stalls banished to that Bye Street which now crept humbly along at the back of magnificent Chief Building.

  Mr Anderson had left no message or hint of the nature of his business, and Bobby found himself wondering what this man could be like, this sober business man, head of a responsible firm of solicitors, who apparently kept a country cottage for the benefit of one of his staff; who seemed to have aroused in her who was no common type such strong emotions; who equally had aroused in Osman Ford such strong emotions of quite another kind; who again, according to what current gossip you chose to listen to and believe, had swindled the son of his former chief out of his rights and installed himself in the place rightfully belonging to the boy, or alternatively had treated the young man with extreme generosity, providing him with his education and his opportunity in life.