Night's Cloak: A Bobby Owen Mystery

by E. R. Punshon

  “Well, it’s an idea,” agreed Bobby, without mentioning that it was one he and his assistants had often canvassed as among the possibilities to be considered. Nor for that matter did considerations of time and place to-night put it beyond possibility. Bessie could well have reached Weston Lodge Cottage before he got there, and Bobby was much inclined to believe that the doctor at the nursing-home would always be willing to swear an alibi or so for her. Bobby continued: “I think Mr Weston had a hold on you, hadn’t he? Not only for what he knew, but for what he might still find out. The Weston West Mill books have been gone through again, you know.”

  “Nothing fresh there any one could prove,” Wilkie declared hastily, and once more Bobby thought he heard a faint sound, as of some one who moved at a little distance.

  But he was not sure, it might well be only the murmur of the faint breeze that sometimes stirred, only to die away again. Or one of the creatures of the night, busy about its own concerns. Helplessly he stood and stared into the black obscurity that held him as in a prison from which there was no escape, since where he moved, it moved with him baffling and impenetrable. He said:—

  “Have you seen anything of Franks?”

  “Franks? No. Is he here, too?” Wilkie said, and, as if with some vague idea of looking for him, switched on his torch once more and flashed the ray around.

  “Don’t do that, didn’t you hear the alert?” Bobby exclaimed, and snatched the torch away and switched it off again.

  “I forgot. Anyhow you can’t look for any one without showing a light,” Wilkie grumbled. “I thought I heard some one about here. That’s why I came. Then I heard you. I thought it was you I heard, but if Franks is here, perhaps it was him. Over there it was.”

  Bobby took a step or two in the direction indicated, though still he would not show a light when for all he knew some German, with engine cut off, might be gliding down, finger on bomb release, ready to launch it in the direction of any gleam of light he saw. As he moved he said to Wilkie:—

  “I’m pretty sure it was Olga Severn I heard call out, and if Franks is about here, too—”

  He left the sentence unfinished, but Wilkie completed it—to Bobby’s equal surprise and unease.

  “If he is, he’s not alone,” Wilkie said, “and you had better get a move on. Because I think there’s things happening that had best be stopped—if it’s not too late.”

  “What things?” Bobby asked, and Wilkie answered:—

  “I don’t know, but you said just now I wasn’t being frank with you and I was keeping things back, and so I was, because I didn’t know what they meant or how you wouldn’t twist them against me or how much you knew already. But now I’ll tell you what I saw a minute ago, and if you don’t believe me it’s gospel true all the same, so help me God, unless I was dreaming, as I thought almost I was.”

  CHAPTER XXXVI

  OVERHEARD

  BOBBY WAITED till Wilkie began to speak again, in a slow and hesitating voice, as though he himself were still not persuaded of the full reality of what he had seen.

  “It was some one running I heard first, and I knew, I don’t know why, that it was some one terribly afraid. I switched on my torch, and it was Florence Severn, and by the way she ran she made me think of a rabbit with a weasel close behind. I could see that she was afraid and that she had no hope as she slipped and dodged through the trees. And when the light from my torch caught her she cried out, not very loud, but twice over, and she put her hands over her eyes as if she knew it was the end, for I think she did not know it was me, but thought who ever followed her had found her. But then she cried out again and began to run once more, and I saw Thomasine Rowe. She had a strong torch in one hand that she kept flashing in and out, so that sometimes I saw her plainly as she ran in between the trees and sometimes she was just a shadow there. In one hand she held this torch and in the other hand she had a handbag and a knife—a Japanese knife like the one belonging to Mr Edwardes I borrowed to-night. It was frightening somehow, because they looked so different, the handbag like any handbag any woman carries and the bare knife in the same hand—and her face was like the fires of hell. What were they doing, running like that, through the trees in the night, one behind the other, and why?” He paused and then he said: “I suppose you think I invented all that to put you off or something?”

  “No, I don’t think that,” Bobby said; and once more he was conscious of an immense frustration, for what could he do, and how could he tell what was happening or not happening out there in that baffling, impenetrable darkness that held its secrets more securely than ever could have done high walls or triple gates?

  The picture in his mind was vivid of the two women running thus in the darkness of the lonely night—pursuing and pursued. He felt he could reconstruct now what had happened at Mayfield. Florence Severn, waiting for her niece, the niece she had hated as a rival but to whom she had turned in her fear, had heard a knock or a ring and had answered it, thinking it was Olga come at last, but finding there upon the doorstep, not Olga, but Thomasine.

  A moment of fear, Bobby supposed, but perhaps a fear only fully understood in time for that flight from kitchen within to the night without, whereof it seemed Wilkie had witnessed a phase that might by now have worked itself out to its destined end.

  “Was it you they were running away from, trying to hide from?” Wilkie asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Bobby said; and fingered his torch, wondering if he dared use it yet, or whether he must still consent to be the prisoner of the night. No gun-fire had yet sounded; but who could tell what death was not lurking up there in the skies, ready to launch itself at any moment on any glimmer of light that showed, just as who could tell what grim, strange tragedy was not being enacted in the shelter of this all-pervading darkness, where two women had vanished in dreadful flight and pursuit more dreadful still.

  “If you saw them running by,” Bobby said, “it can’t be either of them you heard or thought you heard near here. So who was it?”

  “You said something about Ron Franks?” Wilkie said. “Do you mean he has something to do with it? Could it be him?”

  Bobby’s mind was busy for a moment or two before he answered. The chance was slender; but in this extremity of doubt and helplessness, any chance was worth taking. Making his voice loud and clear so that it should travel as far as possible through the silent night, he said:—

  “Oh, that’s certain, and he’ll hang, that’s more certain still.”

  “Oh, I say, come now,” Wilkie muttered; “do you mean—hang?”

  “I mean the rope is around his neck and there’s nothing to do but pull it,” Bobby answered, still in the same clear and strong voice. “A pity, too, but there you are. Nothing can save him—unless of course even now he tells what he knows. Though it’ll be too late for that soon, because we know it nearly all by now.”

  “Oh, I say, come now,” muttered Wilkie, and felt rather than saw Bobby’s fierce gesture to him to be silent.

  They waited. At a distance they heard the sirens again calling, this time to tell the countryside that peril had passed for the time.

  They waited still, and heard at last what Bobby had hoped for—the sound of stealthy movement near by, a low branch brushed aside, the grass rustling at the contact of careful feet.

  “That’s you, Franks, isn’t it?” Bobby said. “Well, are you ready to speak out? I think you have no chance unless you do.”

  He flashed the torch. A shadow drew nearer, shuffling and uncertain, became plain in the beam of the torch. Franks said:—

  “You can’t bluff me, you can’t touch me. I had nothing to do with it. I didn’t know a thing about it. You know yourself I was miles away—at the cinema. There’s witnesses saw me there. You can’t make anything of that.”

  “Conspiracy,” Bobby answered. “In conspiracy all concerned are equally guilty. Another conspiracy to-night, perhaps, or why are you here? Or not a new conspiracy, but just the old one goi
ng on?”

  “There’s no conspiracy,” muttered Franks, but his voice was uncertain. “Why should there be? What about?”

  “To prove your claim to be Mr Weston’s legitimate son, and so heir to his whole estate if he died without a will,” Bobby answered.

  “I—I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Franks muttered, and the ray from Bobby’s torch showed him dabbing at a perspiring forehead. “I—there wasn’t any conspiracy,” he muttered again.

  “If there wasn’t,” Bobby said, “why all that careful planning of an alibi at the cinema when, exactly in the way in which the conjuror forces a card on people, you forced recognition on your friends of another girl, whose hat and coat Thomasine Rowe had copied and wore, and who you had made sure beforehand would be there that night. You pointed her out in the half-light of the cinema foyer as Thomasine, they recognized hat and coat and so thought they recognized Thomasine. So you had two honest independent witnesses to swear to an alibi, and though we never accepted it for a moment, it would have been hard to disprove. Good enough to make a jury doubt. Only there was the weak point that the other girl’s hat didn’t suit Miss Rowe—not her style, so why was she wearing it? Miss Rowe has what women call ‘dress sense’, and there had to be some strong reason to make her wear what she must have known was an unbecoming hat. That was what made me sure the alibi was faked.”

  “All that’s only talk,” Franks said, trying to bluster, but his voice was hoarse and indistinct. Then it grew shrill, high. “You can’t prove anything,” he cried. “I’ve never said I thought he was my father.”

  “Oh, yes, you have,” Bobby said, speaking with more confidence than he really felt, for though he was sure of his facts, he knew there was still much for which he had none of that proof a court of law demands. “It was plain from the very beginning there was that sort of idea floating about, and it was plain Mr Weston knew it, or why that envelope marked ‘Family papers, re Aggie and child’, and why did it contain bank-notes but no sign of papers? Were the bank-notes a bribe—or perhaps a trap? Mr Weston was hardly the sort of man to leave important private papers lying about in a safe to which his secretary must have had frequent access. If there really were a living child, presumably he or she was one of those concerned, and of them all you were the only one showing any family likeness—the very first time I saw you I noticed hat, especially the mouth and nose. Mr Weston was your father, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes, he was,” Franks answered defiantly, “and he did me out of my rights just as he did my mother, too. They were married all right, Scots fashion, perfectly legal; she told me so herself. Only I had to have lawyer’s proof; and when I wrote to him, all I got was my letter back, torn in half, and saying if I wrote again he would put the matter in the hands of his lawyers. There’s a father for you. God, how I hated him! And I told Thomasine, and she said she would get the proof for me, and then we could marry, and I didn’t much want, but she had a way with her so you couldn’t call your soul your own when she was there, and I never dreamed she meant to do what she did, or she had that knife with her, or that was what she wanted it for, when she made me buy it.”

  “You bought it?” Bobby asked sharply.

  “At Farquhar’s, in the Strand in London,” Franks admitted. “She made me. To make sure I was in it, too. She had one already, but she said we must each have one. She talked about all the things we could do when we had made Mr Weston acknowledge me. She made me buy her a swanky ring, too—took nearly every penny I had. More. What did she care so long as she had her ring? I couldn’t stand her really, the way she bossed a chap; you couldn’t dare call your soul your own. Made you sick the way she thought she owned you. That ring—cost the most out of all they showed us, but of course it was the one she had to have.”

  He stopped abruptly, and through the darkness, from very near at hand, there came a long, low, fluttering sigh, and then a gentle sob, a half-heard sob, as it were of faith and hope and love all together gone—and for ever.

  “Miss Rowe,” Bobby called. “My God, she heard you,” he said to Franks, and as he dashed away into the darkness, calling, shouting, flashing his torch, he heard Franks’s last protest:—

  “I didn’t know ... I didn’t mean ... I couldn’t help . . .”

  CHAPTER XXXVII

  CONCLUSIONS

  IT WAS towards morning when Bobby, unshaven, dishevelled, worn out, half dead with fatigue, at last reached home. Olive, who also had not seen bed that night, heard the car and came running to the door. Bobby was in the act of half leading, half carrying Florence Severn from car to house. To Olive he said:—

  “She’s pretty well done in. Collapsed. The doctor will be along presently. Do what you can till he turns up, will you? She’s been out all night. It was hours before we could find her. In a ditch. Unconscious.”

  Olive asked no questions. She had the rare quality of preferring action to chatter. While she did her best with her unexpected and only half-conscious guest, Bobby, in reckless mood, not caring a hang about the consequences to the war, filled his bath with a good ten inches of water, and just revelled in it. Indeed, for the customary two pins he would probably have made the depth a foot. Then he shaved and changed, wondering ruefully whether those trousers of his were repairable—coupon shortage was acute, he knew, in the Owen household—and finally sat down to breakfast, looking, as Olive remarked thoughtfully, rather more like the man she once had known, and rather less like a dilapidated scarecrow found by accident in the remotest corner of a rag-and-bone dealer’s yard.

  Bobby acknowledged the compliment with a bow—his mouth being too full for speech. Presently, however, between two fresh forkfuls, he asked:—

  “How is she?”

  “Asleep,” Olive answered. “Restless, though. She keeps tossing and turning and muttering to herself. I’ve left the door open so we can hear if she moves.”

  “She has been babbling incoherences all the way,” Bobby said. “I had to bring her here. At Weston Lodge Cottage they have their hands full, what with our own man and Martin Wynne, who got himself knocked out last night. I want to get a statement from Miss Severn if I can.”

  “What has happened?” Olive asked.

  “Thomasine Rowe has poisoned herself,” Bobby said. “Using the chocolate creams stuffed with arsenic with which Miss Severn first tried to poison her, and then in turn Thomasine Miss Severn last night. Olga Severn is still missing. She was somewhere around last night, but we can’t find her. I hope to God no harm has come to her. Her aunt knew Thomasine meant mischief and sent for her for help, and Olga came. Apparently she went first to Thomasine to find out what was really happening. I don’t suppose Thomasine told her anything much, but the visit frightened Thomasine, and probably that is why she tried to put us out of action. Olga may have threatened to make her aunt tell me the truth at last. It was certainly Thomasine whom Bessie Bell saw in our kitchen. What happened next I don’t know. I wish I did. I think Olga must have sent for Martin. He got a crack on the head for his pains, and he’ll be laid up for a day or two. Nothing serious. Mr Edwardes has gone home to bed. He took Wilkie with him. Franks is being held for the present. Bessie Bell is still in the nursing-home. I rang them up to ask. Mr Abel died during the night.”

  “Did Thomasine know you knew it was her?” Olive asked. “Is that why she . . .?”

  “There was more to it than that,” Bobby explained gravely. “She heard us talking in the ordered—Wilkie was there. He had got it into his silly head that Martin Wynne was guilty, and he was trying to play detective on his own—apparently not without some sort of hope that somehow he might be able to establish a claim for himself on the Weston estate. He kept flashing his torch, and naturally that served as a kind of rallying point for us when we were chasing each other round and round in a night as black as the inside of a blind man’s hat. Thomasine left her hunting of Florence Severn whom she had followed out there in the dark to kill, and crept up to listen. None of us heard her, b
ut she heard Franks giving her away to save his own skin and telling us all how little he had ever cared for her. I think it broke her up, to realize all she had done for him and how ready and eager he was to throw her over. She had suspected before, perhaps, and now she knew. Her world crashed. We found her at last, but she died while we were carrying her to the house. Perhaps she wouldn’t have hanged. Not premeditated murder, I think. She took the Japanese knife with her that other night as protection, without any intention of using it, even though she had put an edge on it herself where she lodged with the village carpenter. Anyhow, it would have meant penal servitude for life, and I don’t think she would have stood up to that very well. A bad business. She had the makings of a fine woman, an unusual woman. A fighter through and through. She might even have escaped conviction. I think she would have faced it out to the last. Only for hearing the way Franks talked about her. That broke her up. She had lost her soul for his sake, and all he could think of was to whine about the money he had had to spend on buying her a ring.”

  “I suppose you can’t get him hanged instead, can you?” Olive asked wistfully.

  “I don’t think so,” answered Bobby, almost as regretfully. “Nothing to show he had any reason to suppose there was anything more on hand than an attempt to get hold of private papers he hoped would prove his legitimate birth.”