Dark is the Clue: A Bobby Owen Mystery

by E. R. Punshon

  “Well known at the time,” Martin agreed. “But people soon forget, and then Sis and I had gone to live with relatives in Canada. I was five when it happened and fifteen when I promised. It was Sis asked me. She was old enough at twelve to feel it all, not old enough to throw it off. For a long time she was half afraid she might go the same way. She told me once she never dared look at a baby. That wore off in time. When we came back to England she met Tom Toosoon. Tom’s a good chap, but I always think he puts his hotel before wife and family and everything else. Anyhow, Sis picked him out as her man from the start. I remember finding her one day writing ‘Mrs Thomas Toosoon’ on a scrap of paper to see how it looked. She got the idea that if Tom knew he might sheer off, and then, if there were children—and she meant there to be because she knew Tom would want them—well, she had it on her mind that they must never hear about their grandmother. So she won’t go to visit mother because of the risk of Tom and the children getting to know. I believe myself, though she never says so, that there’s still fear at the back of her mind that if she thinks of it too much—and seeing mother would bring it all back again so vividly—then she might go the same way. Perhaps she might.” He paused and said softly: “Nightmares; I have them, too. But she helps with the money when she can wangle some without Tom knowing. It’s not that he’s mean; it’s that an hotel’s like a farm—there’s always something extra you want and kid yourself it will pay off in the long run, though no guest will ever notice it. Anyhow, that’s the whole thing; and now I’ve told you, I must take my promise back.”

  “It is an unhappy story,” Bobby said. “I am sorry you had to tell it, but I think it was right to do so. Your disappearance immediately after the murder was of course highly suspicious, and other things puzzled us as well.”

  “I can see all that now,” Martin admitted. “I didn’t at the time. But when you got going I knew you would dig it all up in time—and probably get it all wrong.”

  “We shall have to ask you for a written statement,” Bobby said.

  “No,” Martin said. “Written stuff goes on record and stays there. Spoken’s different.”

  “Well, that chiefly concerns Twice Over,” Bobby said. “Naturally we are working together, but they are in charge of the murder investigation, while what we are after is recovering stolen property. All one pattern, no doubt; but, for the murder, Mr Kimms is in charge.”

  “I thought you were,” Martin interjected.

  “Strictly speaking,” continued Bobby, “I ought to have sent you to Twice Over to see Mr Kimms. But we might have lost you again on the way, and it’s a sound rule to let a man speak when he’s feeling like it. Mr Kimms will want a full report from us, and I’m sure he will want to see you himself—and for you to make that written statement I spoke of.”

  “He won’t get it,” said Martin simply.

  “We must hope you will change your mind about that,” Bobby said, ignoring Martin’s shake of the head. “You will be at Hidden Cottage for the next few days, in case we want to get in touch with you?” Martin nodded this time. “Then I don’t think there’s any need to keep you any longer, except of course that we are greatly obliged to you for coming forward of your own accord.”

  “I’m beginning to be sorry I did,” Martin grumbled as he left, and Bobby made no comment.

  Nor had he often felt more doubtful than he did as he pondered over Martin’s tale, and wondered what effect such an experience might have had not only on his sister’s psychology, but also on Martin’s own.

  Presently he rang up Kimms and gave him the gist of the story, promising also that he should have a full report as soon as possible. He would send it, Bobby said, by special police dispatch rider, and if Mr Kimms agreed, he would come down himself next morning. It might, he thought, be useful if they talked it over together. Kimms answered that he thought it would be very useful indeed. He added gloomily that it seemed as if they had got to the complete dead end, and Bobby said that on the contrary he felt that now at last things were beginning to move. He went on:

  “When you get the full report, as near verbatim as I can manage, you’ll see there are various weak points. It doesn’t quite ring true. Which may mean nothing—or everything.”

  He rang off then, made the necessary arrangements, and next morning, with Detective Constable Ford for chauffeur, drove to Twice Over, there to find Kimms looking more excited than was often the case with that normally placid individual.

  “All made up,” were almost the first words he uttered when Bobby arrived. “That statement. Eh?”

  “Well, there are certainly serious inconsistencies,” Bobby agreed. “According to Maxton it was so dark that even he, though used to being out at night, wasn’t sure of his whereabouts. Yet he knew the other two he talks about met by the loganberry bush where the murder took place. He says he assumed it was a case of boy meeting girl. Not a likely idea to occur to anyone at that time of night—earlier on, perhaps, but not then. He says he was near enough to be sure it was no lover’s meeting, but not near enough to hear what they were saying. But can all that be put across to a jury? Defending counsel would pooh, pooh objections like that, call them frivolous and trivial; and it’s not easy to make a jury understand that the frivolous and the trivial may be also the serious and the significant. The Public Prosecutor will want a lot more.”

  But Kimms didn’t look as if he were altogether inclined to agree.

  “Others all out,” he said. “He’s still in.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” Bobby said doubtfully. “All very much still in the melting-pot, isn’t it? I agree they all have their explanations pat—rather too pat, to my mind. I agree, too, we may take it as certain the murderer is one of the five: Stuart and Wynne, Rogers and Dowie, and Maxton himself. It revolves round them, but opposite which one the wheel will stop is still, for me at least, a problem. Rogers seems to have a water-tight alibi, but there is a leak in it, all the same. It might be not Rogers but a pal who was at the railway terminus that night and robbed the dying man of his wallet, passing it on afterwards to Rogers, as arranged, for the very purpose of proving an alibi. Not a shred of evidence, but it might be. Stuart’s diamond-dealing may have been no more than a dodge to evade death duties, though it would certainly cost him more to deal through a man like Fatty Veale than paying what was legally due. But some men instinctively prefer the crooked way. Equally it might be an elaborate scheme for getting rid of the compromising pound-notes. In that case he may be the unknown ‘Boss’. Again, there may be more to Mr Dowie and his treasure-detector than we’ve been able to find. And if Stuart was right—and he put up a good show of really believing it—Wynne knew where the murdered woman’s body lay. If he did, how and why, and is it an acceptable explanation that he only wanted to avoid fuss and bother and publicity when he fixed it for Stuart to make the discovery?”

  By this time Kimms was beginning to feel his head going round. He said presently:

  “Back again where we were before we began.”

  “Or further back still,” Bobby said gloomily. “Is it just possible that Maxton has brooded so much and so long on what his mother did that he has become obsessed with murder to such a degree the idea has had at last to be translated into action?”

  “Eh?” said Kimms, who had not quite followed this. “That’s his sister, isn’t it?”

  “It might be him as well,” Bobby said. “Only more firmly repressed and all the stronger if at last it did break out. I don’t know.”

  “Evidence,” said Kimms, abandoning all this that he found merely bewildering, and certainly nothing to do with police work. “Got none.”

  “None a jury would recognize,” Bobby agreed. “I don’t think I’ve ever had a case where we know so much and yet can do so little. What do you say to my going on to try if I can get anything more out of Mr Wynne?”

  “Wynne?” repeated Kimms. “I don’t see . . .” and there he paused.

  “I don’t either,” Bobby told
him. “I just have a feeling I might get something, perhaps even the one necessary clue we need. He has a trick of smiling to himself when he thinks you aren’t looking. A worrying little half-hidden smile you can hardly see, as if there were some joke he knew and you didn’t, and so it amused him all the more.”

  “I never noticed it,” said Kimms doubtfully.

  “Perhaps he only shows it to me,” Bobby said, and repeated: “I don’t know.”

  “Want me to come?” Kimms asked.

  “Well, I always have the feeling that people talk more freely if there’s only one of us. You’ve seen him once or twice, haven’t you?”

  “Got a statement. Written. Nothing in it,” Kimms replied.

  “There was a photograph,” Bobby went on, speaking almost as much to himself as to his companion. “I happened to hear Miss Wynne telling her father she had found it and then mislaid it again. I thought it rather disturbed him. My fancy, perhaps. But I did think at the time that he looked at me rather as if wondering if I had heard and hoping I hadn’t. Next time I saw her I asked her if she had ever found it. She said she had, and her daddy had been nearly cross with her at first for being careless, though he had only burnt it immediately. It keeps nagging at me.”

  “What does?” Kimms asked.

  “Oh, wondering whose photo it could be Wynne wanted so much he had to burn it immediately he got it,” Bobby explained.

  “Never know now,” said Kimms.

  “No, not now it’s burnt,” agreed Bobby. “Well, I’ll push on, shall I? To the Old Dower House. I might pick up something.”

  “I’ll send Jenkins to pick up Maxton,” Kimms announced, and obviously thinking that that was a ‘picking up’ much more likely to be useful, he added, “Second time they often open up more. Once they start, they go on.”

  “So they do,” agreed Bobby. “Especially when they aren’t sure they’ve been quite convincing, try to think up more detail, and start contradicting themselves. Shall you press the loganberry-bush point?”

  “No,” answered Kimms with decision. “Not till we have it on paper. Or he’ll deny he said it.”

  Bobby nodded approval; and went on to the Old Dower House for an interview to which he did not altogether look forward, though he had the thought in his mind that it might well prove decisive.

  CHAPTER XXXIII

  BATH AT NOON

  IT WAS NO great distance to the Old Dower House. In the mellow sunshine of this fine morning the ancient building, set in its well-kept garden, had a peaceful and a gentle air, as if of grief, strife, and trouble it had known little during the long years of its existence. Or so at least it seemed to Bobby as he walked up the rhododendron-bordered avenue by which it was approached. He knocked, but had to knock again before the door was opened by Mrs Griggs, the village woman who came every day to help Sylvia in her household duties.

  “I don’t know where the master is, or missy either,” she told him, “but if you will wait in the hall I’ll try to find them.”

  Left sitting there, he noticed at once that the fine Atropos statue he remembered so well from his first visit here had now tied round its neck a label marked in large letters: ‘Sold’. He got up to look at it, wondering why the label, when he heard Sylvia come running down the stairs; and it seemed to him that she had regained some of that clear, sweet gaiety she had shown before, such as men have imagined there must have been in the primal dawn when innocence prevailed. The thought came to him that this might be because Maxton, for all his declaration that they must never meet again, had now returned to the neighbourhood and she had seen him. It was a thought that did not please him. He said to her:

  “I see you’ve sold the Atropos.”

  “She’s going to a museum, sulky old thing,” Sylvia announced happily. “I’m so glad. Daddy didn’t want, but I simply made him, and it’s ever such a lot more than he paid, and he’s giving it all to me, and I’m going to give it to the Vicar for the church, so that will be the absolute end, and we won’t have anything more to do with her. I know she would have done something awful and horrid if she had been here any longer.”

  “And the label?” Bobby asked. “Are there prospective purchasers waiting to make offers?”

  “Oh, no,” replied Sylvia. “No. I just wanted to remind her now we have nothing more to do with each other and she can be horrid to someone else. Only she can’t in a museum, can she?”

  “Well, no, I shouldn’t think so,” Bobby agreed, smiling, and yet somehow impressed against all his common sense. “It’s a remarkable piece of work. More suited to a museum, though, than to a private house.”

  “I only hope the men will come to-day to take her away,” Sylvia said. “I shall be ever so glad when she’s gone. Was it Daddy you came to see? I’m afraid you can’t—not now, at least.”

  “Is he away?” Bobby asked.

  “Oh, no, he’s upstairs; but you can’t see him.” She paused for a moment and looked at him with something of that old lovely smile of hers that had seemed to proclaim so clearly that in her world at least all was well and very well. He had a momentary impression that she was going to give him three guesses. Instead she announced: “He’s having a bath.”

  “A bath?” Bobby repeated; and involuntarily glanced at his wrist watch, for it was now nearly noon—an unusual time for taking a bath.

  “He’s been moving the coal in the cellar,” she explained, “and you just simply can’t imagine what a state he got into.” Now it was that soft laugh of hers, so gay, so spontaneously happy, that came bubbling forth. “I simply had to chase him upstairs to make himself fit to be seen. He was sure there was a smell of gas all over the house, and it must come from the cellar, so he had to find it.”

  “Did he?” Bobby asked.

  “Oh, yes; it’s all right now,” she answered. “So we shan’t get blown up and I needn’t write to the gas people. They do take such a time to do anything.”

  “Gas leaks are always a little dangerous, especially in cellars,” Bobby remarked. “Do you think Mr Wynne will be long?”

  “Oh, no,” she assured him. “No. Will you wait? I suppose it’s all the same thing? Mr Kimms has been here. He made Daddy and me talk and talk, and it was all the same old thing all over again. Are you going to as well?”

  “I hope not,” Bobby said, “but there are some points that we think perhaps Mr Wynne might be able to clear up. Details—background—that’s often so important.”

  “Nobody can talk of anything else,” Sylvia said as she led the way to the room which seemed to be the one more especially used by Mr Wynne. She continued as they entered it, “I do hope something will be found out soon. It’s spoiling everything. I asked Vicar if he thought it would be wrong for me to pray that it might be.”

  “What did he say?” Bobby asked.

  “I don’t think he wanted me to,” Sylvia replied, “but he didn’t say it would be wrong, so I did. I don’t see it can be wrong to want wicked people to be punished. Do you?”

  “I suppose that is what I have to try to get done,” Bobby said. “If it isn’t, it may spread, like cancer. So it has to be cut out, at any cost.”

  “Yes,” she agreed. “Yes. I’m sure it can’t be anyone here. Everyone knows everyone else, so how could it be?”

  Bobby did not think the conclusion necessarily followed from the proposition. But neither did he think it necessary to make any reply, nor did she seem to expect one. She pushed forward an armchair for him, said she would knock at the bathroom door and tell her father he was waiting, and so departed.

  Left alone, Bobby went to the window and stood there, looking thoughtfully at that kind of hedge or barrier of loganberry bushes running the length of the wall between garden and copse. It was no doubt a very effective check to the depredations of small boys, who could climb walls with the agility of monkeys, but might find a tangle of prickly bushes more difficult to negotiate. Bobby was inclined to suppose it would well protect the rest of Mr Wynne’s fruit.
And at these bushes he continued to stare as if he thought that from among them might issue the solution to the problem that so tormented him, to find which, indeed, he was risking, as he well knew, his whole future.

  The sound of an opening door made him turn. Mr Wynne was there, spruce and smiling from his pre-luncheon bath, all trace of his struggle with the coal in the cellar completely removed.

  “Is there any fresh development in this unhappy business?” he asked. “The sooner it’s settled, the better for us all. The whole place is full of all kinds of rumours. People are even beginning to look over their shoulders at their neighbours. A most unhealthy situation,” and this he said with some severity, as if inclined to lay the blame for it upon the shoulders of the police, individually and collectively.

  “Well, not exactly,” Bobby said, “though there are one or two small points it’s possible you may be able to help us to clear up.”

  “The police here,” Wynne protested, “took very full statements both from me and from my daughter. Unnecessary to bother Sylvia, I thought. I found her in tears afterwards. Almost the first time, I think. I’ve tried to shield her as much as possible.”

  “At any rate, I’m sure she has had a very happy life so far,” Bobby said. “That will always be something she owes you.”

  “I’ve tried,” Wynne said, but somehow a little doubtfully, as though he were feeling that might not be enough. “I don’t think there was much new either Sylvia or I could say. Or, as far as that goes, much I can add to it now. I’ll do my best, naturally.”

  “Thank you,” Bobby said. “I was sure you would say that.” He saw that Mr Wynne was looking at him sharply, even questioningly. He went on, “Do you think it possible that the murderer—possibly the victim as well, either separately or together—made use of the door in your garden wall to get into the copse? You keep it locked?”