Dark is the Clue: A Bobby Owen Mystery

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Dark is the Clue: A Bobby Owen Mystery Page 8

by E. R. Punshon


  “You’ve allowed a man to escape we very badly wanted to interview,” Bobby told him. “A man who might have helped to clear up the murder last night.”

  “Take ’em off,” roared Sir Charles once more, and in his wrath committed the indiscretion of kicking Ford on the shin.

  “Ai-e-e,” said Ford. “Ooo—now you’ve made me drop the key.”

  “Just like you, clumsy ass,” Sir Charles snarled. “Here, one of you others—hurry up.”

  “I’m awfully sorry,” Bobby said, while Ford searched diligently and without success, “but I’m afraid our London handcuffs are a different pattern from the local ones, and I don’t think the keys fit.”

  It was some time before this information penetrated the bemused mind of Sir Charles. By then Inspector George and his men had stolen silently away, judging that this was a case in which swiftest departure was safest. Afterwards it was officially explained on more than one occasion, both verbally and in writing, that Inspector George had considered that his first and most urgent duty was to take all available steps for the pursuit, and, if possible, recapture, of the suspect who had so unfortunately escaped through the equally unfortunate but so understandable intervention of Sir Charles himself.

  It was in the midst of the tumult and the shouting that a new figure had appeared—that of Mr Wynne. He came forward now.

  “I was sitting up, wondering what was going to happen,” he explained, “when I heard such a commotion I came out to see what it was all about.” He paused to survey Sir Charles. “Isn’t there some mistake?” he asked mildly, no sign of a smile this time, either secret or broad. “That gentleman is Sir Charles Stuart, perfectly well known all round here. I can answer for him as for myself.”

  “An unfortunate misunderstanding in the dark,” Bobby explained, “and now the key has been lost, so we can’t get the handcuffs off.”

  “How very awkward,” said Mr Wynne, more mildly even than before.

  “As soon as we can get a new one,” Ford said, “the gentleman will be quite all right.”

  Sir Charles said nothing at all, so reduced was he. He simply stood in silence and looked at his outstretched fettered wrists.

  CHAPTER IX

  IRONICAL

  THEY ALL BEGAN to move back towards the house, now with more than one window lighted up, so that it was easier for them to see their way. Ford was devoting himself with an almost maternal tenderness to the guidance of the handcuffed, handicapped Sir Charles. Wynne said to Bobby as they walked along:

  “I saw someone running full speed through the garden past the house. Like a shadow. I shouted to him to stop, but of course he took no notice. I couldn’t see who it was. Was it the man you were hoping to arrest?”

  Bobby said gloomily that it was, at least he supposed so, and he told how he actually had his hand on the fugitive’s shoulder when Sir Charles had so unhappily intervened.

  “He has trespassers on the brain,” Mr Wynne remarked. “Most unfortunate all round. I am afraid you have made an enemy.”

  Bobby offered no comment, and now Sylvia came running to meet them.

  “Oh, Daddy,” she cried, “are you all right? I heard you call out. Oh, Daddy, dear, are you sure you aren’t hurt?”

  “Quite sure,” Wynne answered, with the new gentleness that always came into his generally calm, impersonal tones when it was his daughter he was speaking to. “It’s all right, except that unfortunately a man Mr Owen hoped might be able to help him, escaped in the darkness.”

  “I’ve been so frightened,” Sylvia said. “There was such a noise, and I woke up and you weren’t there and, Daddy, you did say you wouldn’t ever go out again late at night without telling me, and you didn’t. Oh,” and she grew silent as in the lighted study they had now all entered she turned and saw Sir Charles with his fettered hands held so awkwardly before him. “Oh,” she said again, and was evidently not quite sure whether or no to believe her eyes.

  “Sylvia,” Mr Wynne explained smilingly to Bobby, apparently without noticing her sudden appalled, embarrassed silence, “Sylvia had a scare the other evening when she heard someone moving about after she had gone to bed. It was only me coming in again after a few minutes outside for a breath of fresh air and tumbling over a chair in the dark. But she made sure it was burglars.”

  Sylvia was still looking at Sir Charles with bewildered, incredulous wonder. He returned her gaze with such a scowl as can but seldom have darkened human countenance. He managed to recover the use of a voice from which an immense emotion had deprived him for the last few minutes.

  “I insist,” he said in little gasps, “on that key . . . being found . . . immediately.”

  “Flew right out of my hand,” said Ford. “When you kicked me. Might be anywhere . . . pitch dark, too.”

  “Well, go and look for it, and don’t come back till you’ve found it,” Bobby told him, rather sharply; for Bobby had his own ideas as to where that key might be.

  “Yes, sir; very good, sir; if it takes me till to-morrow morning,” Ford promised and vanished.

  “All of you—go—help,” said Sir Charles hoarsely, pointing with his hands.

  “I can’t say I feel responsible myself,” Mr Wynne said, “but I think we might all feel better for a drink. Sit down, both of you, won’t you? I won’t be a minute. Sylvia.”

  Sylvia, persuaded now that what she saw was factual, though inexplicable, had been hovering round Sir Charles for the last minute or two, anxious to do something but not knowing what, and, with all her sympathy, distinctly frightened by what can best be described as the muffled, smouldering ferocity of Sir Charles’s scowl. Now she seemed a trifle relieved by her father’s summons and followed him at once. Sir Charles managed to get out between his teeth in a barely audible mutter:

  “You’ll hear a good deal more of this young man, a—good—deal—” And what immeasurable threat did not lie in those last three words.

  “I don’t suppose it’ll take the papers long to get hold of it; they’ll run it in headlines a yard high,” Bobby remarked. He permitted himself to smile broadly as he glanced at those so unfairly fettered hands. “Sort of story people enjoy telling when it’s someone else. All over the place in no time. The papers will want to take snaps of you like that. I wouldn’t let them if I were you.”

  Sir Charles received this excellent but possibly unnecessary advice in silence. It dawned on him, slowly penetrating through his red-hot, raging anger, that possibly other people might be more inclined to giggle than to flame into wrathful sympathy. Besides, all that publicity, and interfering newspaper-men poking about. An unattractive prospect. After all, there were things in every man’s life . . . he began to look even a little afraid. He saw that Bobby was watching him closely, and the truculence faded slowly from his expression. Now, almost simultaneously, there appeared at the still-open french windows, Ford, holding triumphantly aloft the recovered key, and, at the door, Mr Wynne with whisky, a syphon of soda, glasses. Smiling benevolently, Ford released Sir Charles from his fetters and then stepped warily back, more than half expecting to have to ward off immediate attack.

  “Say when, Stuart,” Wynne called with almost equal benevolence as he began to fill one of the glasses.

  “Yah,” said Sir Charles, and banged out of the room.

  “Now he’ll go trampling all over the flower-beds the other chap missed,” complained Wynne. “Why couldn’t he wait and leave by the front door?” Then to Bobby he repeated: “Say when?”

  But Bobby, too, declined to ‘Say when’. The sooner he and Ford, he said, got back to London the better. They might even arrive in time to snatch a brief interval of sleep before going on duty again, and, in any case, no one should ever have a drink before starting on a long drive by night—or even on a short one by day for that matter.

  Mr Wynne was in thorough agreement, and said so as he sipped thoughtfully his own whisky and soda—chiefly the former, Bobby noticed.

  “I need a stiffener,” Wy
nne said; and went on to express a hope that the whole thing would soon be cleared up and the culprit brought to justice. Bobby said the case was in the very capable hands of Mr Kimms, though the Yard would certainly be asked to help in tracing the vanished Mr Dowie, the departed Mr Maxton, the fleeing Mr ‘Jolly’ Rogers, if indeed it was he who had been their midnight visitor, as seemed most likely. And then there was also the even more pressing and important task of identifying the murdered woman.

  “Ironical,” pronounced Mr Wynne. “You came hoping to solve an old crime and you have instead a new one, and a worse one, on your hands. Ironical,” he repeated.

  They were in the entrance hall now where stood the ‘Atropos’, the holder of those shears which so short a time before had cut the thread of an unknown woman’s life. From wherever she had been waiting, Sylvia appeared, a pale, nervous, frightened-looking child.

  “Has Sir Charles gone?” she asked. “I didn’t hear him. Oh, Daddy, isn’t it all awful?” and she looked as if, had they been alone, she would have fled to the refuge of his arms for safety and for comfort, as she had been used to do when she was very small, and there had never failed to find them. “Oh, Daddy, suppose it had been you if you had been there that night.”

  “But it wasn’t me and I wasn’t there or anywhere near,” Mr Wynne told her with a reassuring smile, “and the sooner you are back in bed, child, the better.”

  “Yes, Daddy,” she said obediently.

  Wynne unlocked and unbolted the front door and asked if they could find their way to where they had left their car and could he help? Bobby said that was all right. Unless it had been stolen—which wasn’t likely—he and Ford could manage very well. Indeed, though dawn was still far off, the night now seemed less dark, for clouds had dispersed and the young moon and many stars were becoming visible. They had, too, their electric torches to show them the way, and as they went Bobby said:

  “How is your ankle now, Ford?”

  “My ankle, sir?” Ford repeated. “Where Sir Charles kicked me? Oh, much better now, sir, thank you; doesn’t hurt any more.”

  “Had no trouble in finding the key the second time, had you?”

  “No, sir; funny thing, sir,” Ford said, a little uneasily. “There it was quite plain. Strange, isn’t it? How first you can’t see what you’re looking for and then there it is, large as life.”

  “Very strange,” agreed Bobby. “I suppose it wasn’t in your waistcoat pocket all the time, by any chance? No, I thought not. Ford, you’ll go far, I’m sure. But I’m not sure yet which way.”

  “No, sir; yes, sir; thank you, sir,” said Ford; and added, anxious to change the subject. “Do you think, sir, by any chance that Sir Charles was in it all the time? But for him jumping on you the way he did from behind, you would have nailed that chap who was running, sure as eggs is eggs.”

  “Yes,” agreed Bobby, “but there has been all this talk of hidden treasure in the copse. He could reasonably have been on watch, suspected us, been sure that’s what we were there for, and when he saw us running, thought it was time he came in.”

  “And the other gentleman?” Ford asked. “He was there, too, and the young lady letting slip he had been out at night before.”

  “Yes, I know,” Bobby said, and was silent.

  “Tight-lipped gentleman,” Ford said presently.

  “Yes, I know,” Bobby repeated. Then he said: “And Sir Charles came into a lot of money from a long-lost uncle in America just about the time of the Post Office van robbery; and did Wynne know where that dead woman lay and made sure it was Sir Charles who found her? Nothing much to go on yet; they couldn’t reasonably be classed as suspect. All the same, we don’t want either of them to take alarm and wander off on a voyage round the world—enough of one sort or another to track down in this thing as it is.”

  They had reached their car by now, and in it they drove back to town, both of them uneasy and thoughtful, for they both felt that they were faced with a problem as complicated as any the Yard had ever had to deal with.

  “There’s one thing, sir,” Ford said, an envious eye on the driving-wheel that his fingers itched to get hold of—and was it not slightly beneath the dignity of a ‘high up’ to drive when a mere constable was there to take on this wholly subordinate job?—“whoever did that woman in, it doesn’t look like it was Jolly Rogers. If it had been him, he would never have gone near the place again—stayed as far away as he could if he had known.”

  “There’s that,” Bobby agreed, still keeping up a mere crawl of forty m.p.h., though there was a perfectly clear stretch of straight road before them and sixty m.p.h. would have been wholly in order. “I said so myself to Kimms. But there’s no telling. Murderers do strange things. A vague feeling that the body would be safer if better hidden. Or even strange ancestral memories whispering that the least you can do for your victim is decent burial. In any event, we must do our best to pick up Rogers. He probably has a good idea who she is, and very likely knows a good deal more as well.”

  CHAPTER X

  THE ‘BELL AND BOY’

  SO, EVEN THOUGH the main investigation remained in the hands of the local force in whose territory the murder had been committed, there was still much, very much, for the London C.I.D. to do. More especially for those of its members who, unrecognized and unknown even to their uniformed colleagues, wander here and there in London’s underworld, which is by no means confined to Soho, listening to gossip there, starting it here, keeping discreet eyes open all the time, and sometimes both eyes very hard indeed on particularly busy gentlemen, some days learning nothing at all, on other days obtaining valuable information entirely irrelevant, perhaps, to the particular inquiry on hand, but possibly contributing to the smothering before birth of highly undesirable enterprises.

  In this way, gradually, on Bobby’s desk, and in the file devoted to the Twice Over murder case, there began to accumulate quite a wealth of detail, all duly passed on to Superintendent Kimms, but of some of which the significance would be less immediately apparent to him than to his London colleagues. Then one day Kimms himself walked into Bobby’s room.

  “Hello,” said Bobby.

  “Hello,” said Kimms, and there the conversation seemed to be stranded. “Getting nowhere,” Kimms said presently, having filled the interval by filling his pipe, as Bobby had filled it by finishing the report with which he had been busy. “Too hard a knot,” he announced.

  “Shakespeare,” said Bobby promptly.

  “Sick of him,” said Kimms. “Morning, noon, and night. Local dramatic society doing him, and my girl taking over from Miss Wynne. Giving it up. Shock?”

  “No wonder,” Bobby said. “Young girls and murder don’t fit, and this was almost on her own doorstep, and her father in it as well. What about him?”

  “Nothing wouldn’t ever phase him,” pronounced Kimms.

  “Or, if it did, he wouldn’t show it,” Bobby suggested.

  “Now, Sir Charles, he talks,” Kimms said. “Loud and big.”

  “Not about handcuffs?” asked Bobby.

  Instead of answering, Kimms collapsed into a silence that gradually changed to a slow, suppressed, muted laughter that shook his whole vast body from tip to toe.

  “Maxton turned up yet?” Bobby asked when he judged this paroxysm had reached and passed its climax, and when, in response, Kimms shook his head and dried his streaming eyes, Bobby asked next: “Have you found anything to identify the dead woman with the one reported visiting Maxton regularly to collect money? According to Wynne, the dead woman was near Maxton’s cottage earlier in the day. He gave a very accurate description of her.”

  “Must have seen her,” Kimms agreed. “No one else did, as far as is known. Maxton’s visitor seen by a good many, but descriptions vary. Tall, short, middle size; dark complexion or light; fair hair, dark hair; take your choice. Descriptions,” he added bitterly. “Eh?”

  “I know,” Bobby agreed sympathetically. “No sign of the missing handbag?”<
br />
  “None,” Kimms answered. “If there was another hundred pounds in it—eh?”

  “Might explain a lot.” Bobby agreed. “Done any digging?”

  “Dug up loganberry bush and all round. Nothing. Can’t dig up whole copse.”

  “No,” agreed Bobby. “Take bull-dozers to do the job, and cost more than anything you are likely to find. But that loganberry bush comes in somehow.”

  “Where?” said Kimms. “Eh?”

  “Ah,” said Bobby by way of variety.

  “Jenkins,” Kimms went on, “reports gossip re blackmail, re Sir Charles.”

  “Is there, though?” Bobby said, interested. “In what connection?”

  “Women,” answered Kimms. “Visitors. Young and pretty. Frequent.”

  “That’s morals,” Bobby pointed out. “Not crime.”

  “Older woman,” Kimms explained. “Not young. Not pretty. Overheard using threats. Not clear re what or why. Sir Charles threw her out. Hard. Used violence.”

  “Might be a line to follow up,” Bobby said, considering it. “If she ran one or two of the pretties and there had been some funny work. Possibilities there.”

  “Possibilities aren’t evidence,” Kimms retorted. “If your boys could get a line . . .” Bobby, adopting Kimms’s technique, answered by an affirmative nod to indicate willingness to try. Kimms nodded in return to indicate thanks and appreciation and then said: “There’s queer things go on in the West End.”

  “In the country, too, at times,” Bobby retorted, willing to let the country share the discredit. “It does rather look though as if the blackmail yarn started about Stuart and then got tacked on to Maxton because of these mysterious visits and the hundred pounds business. We’ll see if we can hear of Sir Charles being known anywhere in night clubs and places like that. Some of the Piccadilly girls might know of him. Probably a good payer if blackmail was thought worth trying, and a good payer soon gets known.”

  “Maxton too? Eh?” suggested Kimms, but Bobby shook his head.

 

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