The Dark Garden: A Bobby Owen Mystery

by E. R. Punshon

  “I can quite see how you feel,” Bobby said. “You are perfectly certain it was in the locker of your car when you parked it at Chief Building?”

  “I remember it distinctly. I think you could probably get the evidence of the lad who brought it from Lander. Dickens his name is. I should think he probably remembers seeing me put it away in the locker. He might not, but I expect he would.”

  “I’ve made one or two inquiries,” Bobby said, “and it seems it would be difficult for any stranger to get into the Chief Building car park without being seen. That seems to rule out any ordinary casual pilfering. Probably, therefore, the thief was someone known to the porter or the car attendant, someone neither of them would challenge if they saw him. That means someone working in the building.”

  “It’s getting more and more unpleasant,” Blythe said. “What you mean is that the thief was probably someone belonging to our own staff?”

  “I think we must begin by working on those lines.”

  “It’s incredible,” declared Blythe with energy. “Why should they? I’m sure there’s not one of them would do such a thing.”

  “Nevertheless it was done—by someone.”

  “It means one of our staff is trying to get me hanged. I refuse.” said Blythe, still more energetically, “to consider such an idea.”

  “It may not be that so much,” Bobby suggested, “as someone very anxious to escape a hanging. We have two concrete facts to start from. First: The murder. Second: Your glove, not in your possession at the time of the murder, was found near the spot where we believe the murder took place. The murderer may be merely trying to confuse us. Or the idea may be that if someone else is hanged for the crime, so much the better. That would mean safety.”

  “One partner murdered, the other hanged,” Mr Blythe murmured. “A drastic sort of clearance.”

  Bobby looked up sharply. Blythe had not mentioned any name, but it seemed fairly evident he was thinking of Castles.

  “If that did occur,” Bobby said, “what would happen to the business?”

  “To the practice,” Mr Blythe corrected him gently. “Upon my soul, I don’t know. It’s a contingency I have never contemplated. I should imagine it would collapse pretty completely. I suppose Castles might try to carry on.”

  “He could start afresh under the same name, as it is his own name, I suppose?”

  “Why not? Nothing to prevent him. A curious situation. It cuts a little too near the bone for my taste—as an interested party. I have felt at times that Castles was inclined to brood too much on the past. He was in a very unusual and difficult position. There he was, only a clerk in the practice his grandfather had built up, that his father had inherited. It’s no wonder if he let it prey on his mind rather too much. But that’s all. I don’t believe there was anything more. I can’t.”

  There was again a silence. Blythe, a little pale now, was evidently very deeply disturbed. Bobby felt that was not surprising. He himself was remembering how Castles had told of his strange, divided thoughts, how at times he had seemed even to doubt his own sanity, how on one point he had shown so strange and obstinate a reticence. Was it possible, Bobby wondered, that that tortured mind of his had really given birth to so diabolical a scheme—the wrecking by the murder of one partner, the hanging for the crime of the other, of the practice that his grandfather had made and his father lost, so that a new Castles might be built up from the ruins?

  Grimly Bobby reflected that here was his job—to find out.

  “Do you think there is anyone else on your staff likely to bear a grudge against you?” he asked.

  Blythe made a faintly deprecatory gesture.

  “Before this,” he said, “I should have answered that we all got along exceedingly well together. Now I simply don’t know what to say.”

  “I think you told me you had noticed that Mr Anderson seemed to be on friendly terms with Miss Earle?”

  “Hardly that,” Blythe protested. “I noticed—I thought—well, as I told you, I ventured to drop a discreet hint that it wasn’t very wise to show any partiality for any member of the staff. What I said wasn’t very well received. I never returned to the subject.”

  “I think you knew that they had been living together for some time?”

  Mr Blythe protested it was a great shock to him to find how far matters had gone. He had never dreamed it was so serious an affair. Enough to ruin the firm, if it had come out. He repeated that he could hardly believe it.

  “I’ll pack the girl off at once,” he protested, flushed with indignation. “I have always very much disliked this mixing of the sexes in offices, but I never thought it could be so bad as that. Never. I’ll get rid of her at once.”

  Bobby begged him very earnestly to do no such thing. It would, he said, hinder, disturb, and complicate matters very seriously. Blythe, though reluctantly, promised to do nothing for the time.

  “Though I dislike it intensely,” he said; and with almost passionate intensity, so that Bobby remembered what he had been told about Blythe’s unhappy childhood experience and the ‘complex’, to use the now common expression, it had left him with, he brought out the one word: “Disgusting.”

  “There are Mr Green and Miss Harris, too,” Bobby said. “Do you know if there is anything between them? Should you object, if there were?”

  “In office hours, most decidedly,” Blythe answered, with something of the—repugnance, is hardly too strong a word—of the emotional repugnance he had just displayed. More mildly he added: “But then, that is so well known that I expect I should be the last person in the office to hear about it. Engaged couples, thinking themselves in love, as they call it, are apt to be very difficult in offices. Outside, of course—” He seemed to wave outside away with an uninterested gesture, and Bobby wondered if it was only the outward and visible signs, so to say, of courtship that troubled him and renewed those old, deeply seated, morbid memories of his childhood. “I hope,” he went on, “I’m not unduly severe, but on that point I am strict and everyone knows it. But surely you don’t mean either Green or Miss Harris would try to get me hanged so that they could flirt more comfortably in office hours. Preposterous.”

  “Murder is always preposterous, don’t you think?” Bobby remarked. “Yet it happens. Do you think Mr Anderson had any knowledge of any attraction Green may have felt for Miss Harris?”

  “Now you mention it,” Blythe answered slowly, “I do remember Anderson saying something about having to write to Green’s father. I didn’t pay much attention. I thought it was because we were both inclined to think Green wasn’t working quite hard enough at his studies. We shouldn’t have been pleased if he had failed to get through his exams. Naturally, one likes one’s articled pupils to make a good showing. Just possibly, if what you say is correct, Anderson knew about Miss Harris and meant to drop a hint to Green’s father. Hardly a principal’s fault if a pupil gets mixed up with the office typist. But an angry parent might think it was, and the elder Mr Green has a good deal of influence.” He paused again and looked hard at Bobby: “You haven’t got in your mind,” he said, “that the boy might be so angry and upset at the, threat, and so anxious to prevent his father knowing, that he would go to such extremes as murder?”

  “One has to consider everything,” Bobby said. “People in love get into highly emotional states in which almost anything can happen.”

  “Yes, I expect that’s true,” Blythe agreed. “You seem very certain it must be someone in our office. Frankly, I find that quite incredible. Quite.”

  “I can understand that,” Bobby said. “Can you give me any information now about Mr Anderson’s estate?”

  “So far as I can ascertain at present,” Blythe said slowly, “it will be very small. Recently he sold out a good many of his holdings. Up to now I’ve found nothing to show what he did with the money. I doubt if the total value, all debts cleared, will be more than a couple of hundred or so, taking into account everything. At the present moment, the va
lue of the practice is almost nominal. There are one or two small bequests, including £50 to myself as executor and the residue to his wife. I don’t think there will be any residue. Beyond a hundred or so.”

  “At any rate,” Bobby said, “he wasn’t in difficulties or anything like that.”

  “Oh, no. There will certainly be a margin left after everything has been paid up. The surprise is that the residue will be so small. I know for a fact that quite a short time ago, it would have touched five figures or thereabouts. Now it won’t be much over the three figure mark. And nothing to show why, or what has become of the rest of the estate. Possibly he has been speculating on the Stock Exchange.”

  “Did he speculate?”

  “I’ve never known him to, though he said himself he always had the itch. As a young man he had an object lesson in the losses incurred by Castles’ father. That served as a warning, he used to say. If he gave in to the temptation at last, that would explain where the money went.”

  “I ask,” Bobby explained, “because Mr Osman Ford seems to be nervous about the safety of a trust fund.”

  “Oh, I know,” Blythe said, smiling. “He’s convinced that Anderson embezzled it, isn’t he? It’s quite safe. You can assure him of that. Anderson had to give him a serious warning—point out the penalties attached to libel and slander and so on. I know Anderson took a strict view of his duties as trustee—unnecessarily strict, perhaps. But that was no excuse for the attitude Mr Ford chose to take up.”

  “I understand you become trustee now,” Bobby said. “Shall you be guided by Mr Anderson’s views?”

  “No, I don’t think so. No. I shall take advice. Get an agricultural expert’s opinion. If it’s favourable, as it will be most likely, I shall consent to the release of the fund, I think. But, of course, I shall have to go into it carefully. From the national point of view, I suppose the more capital put into the land just now, the better. I shan’t act in a hurry though. Legal caution, you know.”

  “One result of Anderson’s murder, then,” Bobby remarked, “is that Osman Ford gets possession of £5,000 would otherwise not have been able to touch.”

  Mr Blythe stared open-mouthed.

  “I never thought of that,” he said.

  Bobby reflected that an experienced lawyer might well have thought of ‘that’ very quickly; and perhaps Blythe guessed Bobby was thinking this, for he said apologetically:

  “All this is so bewildering—so utterly bewildering, so incredible indeed—that I can’t realize it, can’t take it in. My mind seems almost paralysed when I try to. It—well, it doesn’t seem real.”

  Bobby said he could well understand that, and then Blythe went away and presently Wright appeared with his report. As regarded what might be called the alibi of the glove, the report was thoroughly satisfactory. The glove had undoubtedly been in the possession of Landon, the Hopewell House porter, from six o’clock on the Tuesday evening till seven the following morning, when it had been handed to the boy, Dickens, to be left at Mr Blythe’s private residence. It must, therefore, have been placed where Roy Green said he had found it well after the commission of the murder, and in any case could not have been in Blythe’s possession at the time.

  “Means,” said Wright, “someone is trying to frame Mr Blythe, and once we know who that is, we shan’t have to look any further.”

  “Not much help, though,” Bobby remarked, “till we do know. What about Mr Ford and Rose Briar Cottage?”

  On that, Wright had secured some interesting and puzzling information. Osman had been seen once or twice entering or leaving the cottage, apparently trying to avoid observation while doing so. Also, when something had been said in his wife’s presence about these visits, he had denied them angrily and emphatically, protesting that he had never been near the place and that he had no knowledge whatever of Mrs Jordan, whom he had never seen, with whom he said he had never exchanged a word.

  CHAPTER XV

  VARIOUS POSSIBILITIES

  THOUGH WITH SOME hesitation, the doctor attending Colonel Glynne, chief constable of the Midwych county police, had at last given permission for his patient, recovering from a severe attack of pleurisy, to receive Bobby’s report. So now Bobby, seated by the colonel’s bed, was giving a very detailed and careful account of the Anderson case and also explaining in full the various steps he had taken.

  “It’s difficult to get a complete grasp of it all,” he said finally, “because so much of it seems to have its roots in the past. I try to find out what’s going on today and I’m always getting referred to past happenings. Babies found on doorsteps a quarter of a century ago. Bankruptcies nearly as far back. Wives leaving their husbands years since. Divorces further back still and children, mixed up in them. Unexplained drowning in the canal of a young man who would be middle-aged today. And so on.”

  “It does seem like that,” agreed the Colonel, “As if everything went back to the way in which Anderson got possession of the Castles practice when the Mr Castles of that day came to grief with his speculations.”

  “I am wondering, sir, if there is any real reason to think Anderson was in any way responsible?” Bobby remarked.

  The colonel hesitated before he answered.

  “There was a lot of gossip,” he said. “I remember thinking at the time it was rather a case of ‘Thou shalt not kill, but need not strive officiously to keep alive.’ Gossip never quite died down. No one knows the truth—except Anderson. And he’s dead. It must have been a big temptation to get hold of what then was the leading firm of solicitors in the town. Though probably it didn’t turn quite as well as expected. People are nervous about solicitors who speculate, even if it is only the solicitor’s own money he loses. Not a penny of clients’ money had been used, but the idea was there. It might have been. That made some clients leave. Then, there was the gossip about Anderson having—well, not tried very hard to put the brake on. That made other clients leave or prevented new ones from coming in. Of course, a good many clients remained. You can’t change your solicitor quite as easily as you can your grocer. Solicitors often have too many threads between their fingers for them to be disentangled very easily. I’ve always thought,” the colonel added hesitatingly, “that the old scandal was really the cause of Anderson’s wife leaving him. I think she knew of the talk that went on, and it led to distrust and quarrelling between them. She suspected. He knew and resented it. In the end, she left him.”

  “Perhaps,” mused Bobby, “that accounts for the feeling that grew up between Miss Earle and Anderson. They both felt in a way separated from other people—she because she was a foundling, and he because of this talk and gossip that was still going on. Do you know, sir, how Blythe came to join the firm?”

  “Anderson wanted a partner—above all, a partner in good standing in what you may call philanthropic and religious circles. Not that Blythe has ever stressed the religious side of his work. You might call him merely a social worker. He was prominent at the time in the Old Street Settlement, which has always been purely humanitarian and ethical—it was founded by an ethical society. He left that though to give all his time to Hopewell House. And he has done very good work there on extremely slender resources. Hopewell House is quite famous, and how he has managed to keep it going is a miracle of finance. If he had given as much care and attention to his own business he would have done a good deal better for himself—and for the firm.”

  “I haven’t come across any suggestion that Anderson resented that,” Bobby said.

  “I was only giving you my own opinion,” the colonel explained. “Anderson may not have felt like that at all. Quite probably he felt the Hopewell House connection helped the firm—publicity for one thing, very creditable publicity, too.”

  “Yes, I see that,” Bobby agreed. He went on, “Mr Blythe seems to have very strict ideas about any sign of flirtation in the office. A kind of left-over apparently of the scandal when he was a child.”

  “An unpleasant affair,” agreed the
colonel. “I remember it very well. I suppose Blythe never quite managed to get free from that memory—left him with what they call a complex today.”

  “It’s that sort of background which makes it so difficult to understand motives and actions in this case,” Bobby said. “Everyone concerned seems to be a sort of different mental study. Difficult even to make up your mind about Anderson. There’s his rather doubtful record, complicated by his relations with the son of the man he supplanted. There’s his connection with Miss Earle, Mrs Jordan looking on, and his gift of £5,000 to her—a large sum, especially when it seems it was almost all he had. At any rate, Blythe says there’s nothing much left. And then there’s his uncompromising attitude towards the Ford money he was trustee for.”

  “What that means,” the colonel said meditatively, “is that the motive for his murder may be either revenge, or jealousy, or money. Three of the chief motives for murder, I suppose.”

  “Yes, sir,” agreed Bobby, “and it makes this case stand out— three separate and distinct possible motives and nothing to show which was active. Generally you can ask ‘Who benefits?’ and get a pointer like that. Even Blythe benefits. He is left sole partner in the practice. If he wants to buy Anderson’s share he’ll probably get it at his own price. There’ll be no need for him to carry out Anderson’s promise to Castles. And he was apparently afraid of the results of the scandal if Anderson’s connection with Miss Earle got known. He was certainly morbidly sensitive to anything of the sort, as a result of what happened to him as a child.”

  “You are making out a strong case against him—in the way of possibilities,” the colonel said, “but you are forgetting his glove alibi, aren’t you? Someone evidently trying to fake evidence to bring him in and you don’t fake evidence against the guilty.

  “Why not, sir?” Bobby asked quietly. “I think that is conceivable. If X believes Y to be guilty but thinks there’s no proof, X might make an effort to supply the proof required and think himself justified.”