Night's Cloak: A Bobby Owen Mystery

by E. R. Punshon

  There in the procession of the long dance through his dreams was Thomasine Rowe, the tall, dark secretary, of aloof and sombre beauty, one framed as it were by nature to receive the homage of young men, but who apparently had laid all the full richness of her gifts at the feet of the most commonplace of youths. Then, too, if he were right in his belief that it was her voice he had heard as he approached Weston Lodge Cottage on the night of the murder, what had been her errand there, and why had she denied it? What, too, was the significance of her purchase of a Japanese dagger? If a coincidence, how strange! Yet could it mean what on the face of it it seemed to mean?

  Then into the orbit of his dreams swung the figures of two other women: Florence Severn, the athlete, still with much of that lithe ease in movement which had won her her triumphs on the links and the tennis-court, and Olga Severn, welfare officer, who had lost a vanity case, and between whom and her aunt enmity burned like fire.

  To and fro they seemed to weave in his dreams, first one and then the other to the front, and he thought that continually they passed one to the other an envelope that bore on it the inscription, “Family Papers re Aggie”, and he thought that each as she received it or tossed it away again, looked at him in mockery because she knew but he did not, and he thought that always enormous finger-prints were showing on this envelope, but always fading away again into nothingness just as he was about to examine them more closely. Then in the background, not joining in the dance, but looking on, there stood, he thought, a man, a dead man, holding out a diamond and ruby ring, yet not so much in explanation as in warning.

  “One’s enough,” this dead man seemed to say; and then it was an indignant elbow inserted with dexterity and effect in his ribs that recalled him to wakefulness.

  “What is the matter with you?” Olive’s voice demanded in the dark. “You keep twisting and turning and grunting.”

  “Sorry,” Bobby said. “I think I’ve been thinking in my sleep.”

  “What have you been thinking?” Olive asked.

  “I don’t know,” Bobby answered. “Tell me, what makes two women hate each other?”

  “Jealousy,” Olive answered.

  “Jealousy of whom?” Bobby asked. “Of the old rich man with both feet on earth or the poor young man with his head in the clouds?”

  But Olive had gone to sleep again; and following that excellent example he slept more soundly, till there broke on his slumbers the unwelcome tinkle of the alarm clock.

  “The first thing to do,” he remarked as he began to dress, “will be to find out if Martin Wynne was out late that night, and if he was, to look for a summer-house.”

  “Well, a summer-house, yes,” Olive conceded, “but how will it help—even if there is one?”

  “Dabs,” said Bobby.

  “I should say the first thing,” Olive objected, “is to find out if it was really Miss Rowe who bought that Japanese dagger. Any one can give any name.”

  “I’ve great respect for that young woman’s intelligence and willpower,” Bobby told her, “and I shall be very much surprised if it turns out to be any one else.”

  “You mean, don’t you?” Olive asked, “if it does turn out to be her?”

  “No, I mean, if it doesn’t,” Bobby answered. “If I allowed myself ten inches of water in the bath this morning, should we lose the war?”

  “I expect so,” Olive said; and, in a spasm of wifely devotion: “Look here, you have seven and a half, and I’ll make do with two and a half.”

  “Oh, I say, will you?” said Bobby, deeply touched. He added as he was about to depart for the bathroom. “The real puzzle is: Why were ten fifty-pound bank-notes in an envelope marked: ‘Family papers re Aggie’?”

  “I can tell you a bigger puzzle than that,” Olive called after him. “What are you going to have for breakfast when I’ve forgotten what an egg looks like and the last of the bacon ration went yesterday?”

  CHAPTER XX

  BETTER DEAD

  ON HIS way to county police headquarters that morning Bobby called at the shop where his city colleagues had discovered that a Japanese knife had recently been purchased by a customer giving the name of Thomasine Rowe. Nor was it difficult for Bobby to assure himself that the Thomasine Rowe of the purchase was identical with the Thomasine Rowe who had been the dead man’s secretary. She was not one to be easily forgotten, nor one whom it was difficult to identify by description.

  “Very striking young lady indeed,” the shop assistant said, and Bobby agreed.

  “I have heard her called that before,” he remarked. “I think it’s true.”

  The shopman did not quite understand.

  “You wait till you see her,” he said. “Then you’ll agree.” He leaned across the counter. “Is it about the murder?” he asked in a low, confidential voice. “The paper says Mr Weston was stabbed and that Miss Rowe was his secretary. If he got monkeying about with a girl of spirit like her—well, I wouldn’t blame her, would you?”

  “If police jumped to conclusions the way some of you people do,” Bobby remarked severely, “I don’t know what would happen. Probably I should arrest you on the spot as a likely accomplice.”

  “Here, I say,” protested the shopman, feeling this was going much too far.

  “Jumping to conclusions,” said Bobby. “Don’t you do it. And remember there are such things as actions for libel. Wouldn’t like to pay a few hundred pounds damages, would you?”

  “Here, I say,” protested the shopman again, feeling this was going very much further than going too far.

  “Besides,” added Bobby, more mildly, hoping that for a time at least he had scotched that love of gossip so deeply implanted in fallen human nature, “you sold the thing as a paper-knife. Paper-knife. Japanese. One,” he read aloud from the ledger entry shown him.

  “That’s right,” agreed the shopman; and so Bobby said “Definitely?” in a questioning voice, and the shopman said: “Definitely right,” which Bobby decided was probably the strongest affirmative (polite) the other knew.

  “All the same,” added the shopman, “it was steel, and good steel. I will say that for the Japs. Steel’s a thing they know about. Not much of a job to sharpen it up.”

  “I suppose you didn’t do that?” Bobby asked; and the shopman looked alarmed again and said “Definitely, no,” and Bobby went away, feeling he had at least done his best to keep the man from talking.

  All the same he was not much surprised when that afternoon the Midwych Evening Intelligence announced that an important clue had been discovered, the county police having been informed of the provenance of the murder weapon by the active and intelligent city police—the reporter of the Intelligence thought it important to keep in with the city rather than with the county police and moreover had a grudge against Bobby, whom he considered much too secretive. And this statement was all the more impressive and all the more to the prestige of the city police as so few of the readers of the Intelligence knew what “provenance” meant.

  “So now,” Bobby said to himself moodily, as he proceeded on his way, “now we have traced a connection with Japanese knives to three of them—Miss Rowe, old Dan Edwardes, and the Wilkie chap.”

  At headquarters there were various matters needing attention, and then Sergeant Payne appeared with his report. It was a fact that Martin Wynne had returned home very late on the night of the murder. No one could say the exact time, but it was certainly well on in the small hours. Very unusual, for Martin, though he often sat up late, was seldom out after supper.

  “Very cheap sort of place where he lives,” Payne added. “Guinea and a half for bed, breakfast, dinner and full board on Sundays, and how they do it on present prices beats me. Looks it, though—everything on the cheap, I mean. Got to be, at that price. He has the name of being hard up, and you have to be hard up all right for it to be noticed in a place like that. Sort of doss-house, if you ask me. Only some of them seem to think it’s not so much that he’s hard up as that he’s
mean. They say he gets a good screw where he works.”

  “Four hundred a year, he told me,” Bobby remarked.

  “There you are,” said Payne. “It would run to something better than a hole like that, wouldn’t it?”

  “Knows a better hole but won’t go to it—and why?” mused Bobby. “Perhaps he is like Miss Bessie Bell—scraping and saving. To carry out this new idea of his for stratosphere flying, perhaps.”

  Payne looked as if he thought achieving flight in the stratosphere would be but poor compensation for the discomforts of a guinea-and-a-half boarding-house. He added that it would take a lot of “scraping and saving” on four hundred a year to get together the five thousand pounds Martin had spoken of.

  “Though that’ll be all right,” added Payne, not without intention, “when he comes in for his whack of the old man’s coin.”

  Bobby agreed, and presently went off to visit Miss Bessie Bell at the Wych and Wych Arms. The house was not yet open, though every one was very busy getting ready for the hour the licensing laws permitted. Bobby explained his identity, and was shown to a small, dark sitting-room at the back of the building. Thither soon came Bessie, and stood in the doorway, looking at him. She did not speak, but stood silently. He was a tall man, but she was not much below his height, and her plain black dress suited her well, toning down the full exuberance of her personality. The ill-lighted room, too, hid some of those traces that a certain rich carelessness of life had marked her with. He thought again that she looked a splendid animal as she stood there waiting in her blonde magnificence. Somehow she reminded him of a lioness at bay, with her head thrown back, her upright attitude, the steady gaze of her blue and challenging eyes fixed full upon him. He could well believe the stories told of her. Of how, for instance, when some man had offended her by a licence of speech passing beyond even her liberal standards, she had simply taken him by the scruff of the neck and had run him out into the street. Or the other story of how, when a young girl had appeared in the bar obviously the worse for drink, Bessie had administered physical correction across her knee with, it was said, good reformatory effect.

  Yes, a lioness poised in defence, he thought; only what was she defending, and why? He found himself comparing her with Thomasine Rowe, as upright, as poised, almost as tall, though so much more slender and finer in build. Of her he thought as of the tigress pacing through the deep jungle, alert and seeking—only seeking what? And the memory came to him also of those other two, the aunt and niece, Florence and Olga Severn, unknown factors, with wrath about them like a cloud. If these first two were lion and tiger, the Severn women were like hovering falcons, ready to swoop and strike—only striking where?

  Abruptly Bessie spoke.

  “I’ve been expecting you,” she said. “I knew you would never leave me alone.”

  “Oh, well, you see,” Bobby explained apologetically, “you were one of the last to see Mr Weston alive.”

  “Suppose I was,” she asked, “does that show I killed him?”

  “Has any one suggested you did?” he asked.

  “If that’s not in your mind, why are you here?”

  “For information.”

  “You’ll get none from me,” she retorted, “for I’ve none to give.”

  “Why did Mr Weston send for you to visit him that night—the night that proved to be the night of his murder?”

  “Only he could tell you that, and he is dead. I don’t know.”

  “Is it as well for you, I wonder,” Bobby asked, “that he is dead and cannot tell?”

  She looked at him angrily.

  “Think so if you like,” she said. “What do I care what you think?”

  “Are you really asking me to believe,” Bobby said slowly, “that Mr Weston sent for you and you did not know why and yet you went and he talked to you and you went away and still you do not know why?”

  “You are clever, aren’t you?” she said. “That’s a question, isn’t it?” She came from her position by the door where she had been standing and sat down. She looked up at him, her magnificent wide blue eyes, that in her girlhood had so emphasized her claim to more than mere prettiness, fixed full upon him. She lost her likeness to the lioness at bay. It was with a simper that suited her ill that she said:—

  “Oh, well, I suppose I guessed. If you’re in the hotel business you soon get to know men like Mr Weston. Well, of course, he’s dead now, but every one knew. Plenty of money, and free with it if he liked you. Well, there you are. I mean, if you took his fancy, like, there wasn’t hardly anything he wouldn’t do for you.”

  “You mean Mr Weston wanted you to be his mistress?” Bobby asked.

  “Well, now,” Bessie simpered, “that’s a way to put it. But I suppose it’s what it comes to.”

  “Miss Bell,” Bobby said, “why are you lying? I know enough of you and about you not to believe a word of that story. Besides, it doesn’t stand up. If it had been like that, Weston wouldn’t have gone about it that way. No need. Now, won’t you tell me the real reason?”

  “It’s no good me telling you things if you won’t believe me,” she said sullenly.

  “Who was the man you spoke to at the window of the garden room there?” Bobby asked abruptly.

  For a moment she looked disconcerted, but recovered almost at once.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she said. “I didn’t talk to any one at any window. Why should I?”

  “That’s what I want to know,” Bobby answered, but did not pursue the subject, since, after all, his memory of fresh footprints in the earth under the window of the garden room was no proof that a conversation had there taken place. Instead he asked abruptly:—

  “Why did Mr Martin Wynne ring you up the morning after the murder?”

  For a moment she looked more disconcerted still, and this time she recovered more slowly.

  “Martin Wynne?” she repeated. “He is Mr Weston’s nephew or something, isn’t he? How do you know he rang up? Why shouldn’t he? How do you know?”

  Bobby did not answer this, especially as he had not known, but only guessed. His silence won an answer, though, as silence often does, and Bessie said:—

  “He wanted to ask if I had heard about the murder, and of course I had. We hear everything here, and he wanted to know if I could tell him anything, and I couldn’t, and that’s all.”

  “How did he know that you had been there that night?”

  “Did he know? He didn’t say so. If he did Mr Weston told him, I suppose.”

  “Hardly likely,” Bobby said drily, “if Mr Weston had asked you to come for the reason you gave. Is Mr Wynne a friend of yours?”

  “No,” said Bessie, and spoke as if she meant it. She went on: “He’s been in sometimes. He doesn’t use the house, but he has been in. You don’t think he had anything to do with it, do you?” She looked scornful. “Him,” she said, “why, he wouldn’t notice you enough to kill you. Flying—that’s all he thinks of.”

  “There’s nothing you can tell us would help us in any way?” Bobby asked once more, and once more she shook her head, this time without speaking. He went on: “Mr Weston let you out himself, didn’t he?”

  She nodded, looking at him warily, as if afraid of what this admission might be taken to imply.

  “I’ve been told,” Bobby said, “that sometimes Mr Weston let a woman visitor out by the front door and then let her in again by the french windows of his study.”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” she said sullenly. “I came straight back here, and that’s all there’s to it, and no more you can make of it.”

  “Meet any one on the way, or speak to any one when you got in?” Bobby asked.

  “No,” she admitted. “No. I had plenty to think of. It was a fine night then, and moonlight, and I didn’t hurry. When you’ve been behind the bar all day a breath of fresh air isn’t so bad. I’ve my own key, and when I got back I went straight to bed.”

  Bobby rose to his feet.

/>   “I’m afraid I shall have to ask you to let me have another chat,” he said. “You see, there’s only one thing I’m sure of, and that is that there was something between you and Mr Weston you don’t want me to know. Something you are so anxious to keep hidden you are prepared to let yourself be thought lightly of, rather than risk its disclosure. It is very foolish of you. Now I shall have to find out what it is, because it may have something to do with Mr Weston’s death, and so I’ve got to know. If it hasn’t, then it’s no business of mine or of any one else, and you would never hear another word about it. Police keep many secrets. Much better tell me, because the truth is bound to come out.”

  “Why should it?” she retorted. “I won’t tell, and he can’t now he’s dead. And better dead, thank God.”

  CHAPTER XXI

  BOX OF CHOCOLATES

  FROM THE Wych and Wych Arms, where Bobby felt his talk with Bessie Bell had done little more than increase the dark bewilderment in which he walked, he went on to Weston Lodge Cottage. Miss Rowe had to be asked about that Japanese dagger she had bought, sold to her as a paper-knife, but so easily provided with edge and point.

  He knew she was still working at the Lodge and was likely to continue to do so for some time, since winding up the dead man’s estate would be a long and complicated process, and in the present dearth of clerical help Mr Anderson would be only too glad to retain her services.

  Hargreaves, looking much younger, though also less dignified, now that his hair had resumed its natural shade of reddish brown, took Bobby on his arrival to the study, where Thomasine was busy with her typewriter and a great pile of documents.

  Strong nerves had Thomasine Rowe, Bobby told himself, to be sitting so quietly at her work in the room where death so short a time before had struck so swiftly and so suddenly. When he said something to this effect she gave that proud and scornful smile he was coming to think characteristic of her, but made no comment. He explained that he wanted to ask a few questions, and she left her place at the typist’s table by the window where she was working and seated herself in one of the big arm-chairs.