The Secret Search: A Bobby Owen Mystery

by E. R. Punshon

  “Means,” suggested Bobby’s colleague who was assisting him in his work, “that this girl can’t be the ‘she’ Wyllie is to meet. So it is just possible it’s the other Miss Smith—the one you think is the genuine niece.”

  “Hope so,” Bobby said. “But then ‘she’ applies to half the human race—the better half in quantity, anyhow. It may only refer to some woman Ally Hidd thought, or pretended to think, might be able to help. Or if Ted Wyllie had anything to do with the girl’s disappearance, the ‘she’ may be an accomplice getting a bit panicky or turned blackmailer, perhaps. Anything is possible in this case.”

  “Even that we may yet be in time?” the other asked doubtfully, and Bobby left that question unanswered.

  Then again, thirdly and fourthly, every effort had to be made to continue the watch on Cy King and Tiny Garden and their associates. A difficult task, for they were all of them slippery customers, almost always able to evade observation when they chose—at any rate for a time, though it was also almost always possible to find them again in their accustomed haunts where familiar surroundings tended to give them a sense of security. Much in the same way as places strange to them seemed to them instinct with a kind of hidden hostility.

  Then there was Ally Hidd. Once the flying-squad men had put him down, he had swiftly disappeared. He would certainly not be easy to track. But, then, Bobby did not think it likely he would be of much further use. He had had a bad scare when told that some of Cy King’s associates were waiting for him. Probably now his only desire was to get as far away as possible until things quietened down. As well, though, Bobby decided, that a look-out should be kept for him in case he turned up again.

  It was at this point that the ’phone rang. Bobby answered it, and then said:

  “Bournemouth. They report that Miss Poore has left by the London express. Can Miss Poore be Ally’s ‘she’? She’ll have to be tailed. Suspects and ‘tails’ tumbling over each other all over everywhere,” he grumbled.

  So new arrangements had to be made to meet this new complication. They were not successful. There had been delay—delay at both ends in sending as in receiving and in passing on the information; delay in finding a spare man to undertake the new assignment; delay in his reaching Waterloo through a hold-up on the tube, short itself, but long enough to be fatal. A chapter of accidents that resulted in the Bournemouth train having arrived and Miss Poore having departed some five or ten minutes before the plain-clothes man got there. All Bobby could do was to grumble at such bad luck and direct the frustrated plain-clothes man to watch Ted Wyllie’s boarding-house.

  “She may never go there, though,” he remarked as he hung up after giving these instructions. “Quite likely they’ve arranged to meet somewhere else.”

  “If it’s her that’s the ‘she’ we want,” observed Bobby’s colleague, “doesn’t it rather suggest she may be in it? Might have been as well to have a good look at Mrs Wyllie’s cellar, as well as at Cy’s. Bournemouth is where the missing girl was going when last heard of, and if Mrs Wyllie knows—well, no wonder she thought she saw things.”

  “Might be why Tiny went there,” Bobby said thoughtfully. “As keen as we are on knowing what’s happened, and looking for something to tell him. Awkward for him if the real Betty turns up before they get hold of the money.”

  “Well, things are on the boil,” said his colleague as he rose to depart to his own room and his own special work. “Nothing to do for the moment but wait till you hear something.”

  Now again, therefore, Bobby had to exercise that most ordinary, exceptional, essential quality a detective needs—patience inexhaustible and unending.

  It grew late. Bobby had returned home now, and was sitting as near the ’phone as he could get. Olive was sitting near, occasionally hinting at bed. The wireless, having finished an excursion into swing, was now giving a talk on the fundamental resemblances between the philosophies of Hegel and of Whitehead, with occasional very contemptuous interruptions by a logical positivist. They had forgotten to turn it off, but it didn’t matter, as neither of them had heard a note of the ‘swing’, or a word of the talk.

  Olive’s hints grew broader. Bobby was still not so much ignoring them as ignorant that they were being made. The ’phone bell went. Bobby grabbed the receiver and put it down.

  “Wrong number,” he said bitterly. “Never get anything else,” he grumbled—indefensibly.

  “Well, we do seem to get a lot,” Olive agreed, mildly, and was about to abandon her system of hints for direct action when the ’phone rang again.

  Though with less alacrity, Bobby picked up the receiver once more, listened, and was on his feet and at the door almost in one movement.

  “Miss Poore and Ted Wyllie seen on a 14 ’bus,” he said over his shoulder. “Expect me when you see me.”

  He was off. Resignedly Olive made some cocoa, set it to keep hot on the gas and herself to get what rest she could on the couch. At the appointed rendezvous Bobby found a flying-squad car waiting for him.

  “Latest report,” one of the occupants said. “Suspects seen to alight at Cambridge Circus. Being tailed. Suggest wait Palace Theatre, Avenue side.”

  There accordingly by the long blank wall where so often the camp-stools stretch as to eternity, Bobby once more waited. Now and again the flying-squad car passed, taking no notice, but ready for any emergency, to all appearance just one car more in the busy evening traffic. An urgent message came. A smash-and-grab raid to take precedence of all else. They delayed a minute, not more, to sign to Bobby that they were called away, and scarcely had they gone when young Fred Ford appeared.

  “Jay’s Passage, off Lower Street,” he said. “Looks as if they were expecting some one. Sergeant James is watching. He told me to report. Lower Street is at the back of Mock Street.”

  “Mock Street?” Bobby repeated. “Where Jimmy Joe’s café is, and isn’t there a back way in from Lower Street?”

  “The Sarge said so,” Ford answered. “By way of a lock-up wardrobe dealer’s shop. You jump over the wall from Jimmy Joe’s, and the shop door’s always on the latch, back and front.”

  They had been hurrying along as they talked. Now they reached the west extremity of Jay’s Passage, one of those dark and secret alley-ways that here and there penetrate the intricacies of the great city, like tunnels bored by some industrious mole through a hillock in a pasture-field.

  It was badly lighted—one lamp at one end only, and that not always burning, for there were some of the residents in the vicinity who took steps to see that no inconvenient illumination spoiled for long those pools of darkness into which in times of need they could dive and vanish.

  To-night, however, this lamp was burning, and they could distinguish one standing, solitary figure—that of a woman, upright and rigid—about half away along the passage. There was no sign of any one else, no sign of life anywhere, except for one lone light burning high up in an uncurtained window.

  “There was a man with her,” Ford muttered. “He must have gone off and left her. Sarge must have followed.”

  They hurried towards her. She turned her head at the sound of their approaching footsteps, but otherwise did not move. Bobby said:

  “Miss Poore, isn’t it?”

  “And who are you, young man?” she demanded, and then, seeming to recognize him: “Oh, it’s you. Well?”

  “Where is Mr Wyllie?” Bobby asked sharply.

  “He went away and he has not come back,” she answered. “He said to wait.”

  “How long ago?” Bobby asked.

  “Long enough,” she answered. “It might be ten minutes. More.”

  “Which way did he go?”

  She pointed with her umbrella in the direction of Lower Street, at the opposite end of the passage to that by which Bobby and Ford had arrived. Bobby said:

  “Did any one follow him?”

  “I haven’t seen a soul till you came,” she answered.

  “Where was James?” Bobby ask
ed Ford.

  “In a doorway near by where we came,” Ford answered. “He can’t be there now, though, or he would have seen us.”

  “Run back and look,” Bobby told him, and there was uneasiness in his voice. “See if you can see anything. He may have left a message of some sort.” Ford hurried away, and Bobby turned to Miss Poore again: “What was Mr Wyllie doing here?” he asked. “What did he want you for?”

  “That’s for him to say,” Miss Poore answered, and then they were interrupted by a shout from Ford:

  “He’s here, sir—here, in the doorway where I left him.”

  CHAPTER XXIII

  “CY’S SWEET-SHOP”

  BOBBY WENT running when he heard this. Miss Poore followed. Ford, looking in the doorway where he had left the sergeant, had found him there, huddled at the back, unconscious. He had received a heavy blow on the back of his head, inflicting severe injuries. Ford was trying to lift the unconscious man from the doorway to the pavement. Bobby, seeing that the sergeant’s injuries were too severe for first aid to be of much avail, told Ford to find the nearest call-box.

  “Get a doctor and ambulance,” he said. “Urgent. Nothing we can do. Then let them know at the Yard. Hurry. I’ll wait here.”

  Ford disappeared at a run. Miss Poore had joined Bobby. She said disapprovingly:

  “What’s happened now? Nice goings on.”

  “A man has been hurt,” Bobby said. “Do you know anything about it?” She shook her head. He said: “Did Wyllie do this?”

  “Him? Master Ted?” Miss Poore asked indignantly. “Haven’t you got more sense than that? Master Ted indeed!”

  “Why has he left you?” Bobby asked. “Why did he send for you in the first place?” When she still appeared to hesitate, he said with sudden, sharp authority: “Tell me what you know—everything. And at once. Wyllie’s life may be in danger; others too.”

  “We had a telegram this morning,” she answered then; and if still with a certain hesitation, yet none the less impressed by what he said and by the tone in which he said it. “It said for me to come. It said it was important because he had news. We both thought he meant about Miss Betty. So I came.”

  “What else?” Bobby demanded. “He must have told you more when you met him. Tell me everything,” he said. “I must know if there’s to be any hope of seeing him again alive, or Miss Betty either.”

  “He said as there might be a chance of finding her to-night,” Miss Poore answered. “If we waited here, a man was to meet us, and he might be able to tell us where she was.”

  “Ally Hidd?” Bobby asked. “Was that the name?”

  “Mr Ted didn’t say any name; he just said a man. He was trying to find out why Miss Betty had never come, or written, or anything. He was fretting and worrying his life out about her. Only another job for you, Mr Ted said, but it meant everything to him.”

  “Another job?” Bobby said angrily. “We’re putting all we have into it. Look there.” He pointed to the injured man by whose side he was kneeling. “Is that enough for your Mr Ted?” he asked. “Would that convince him we were doing our best? What else did he tell you? Why did he bring you here at this time of night?”

  “I couldn’t make out rightly,” she answered. “I don’t think he knew himself altogether. It’s somehow mixed up with the old gentleman at Seemouth—him they found dead in his bath. Mr Ted thought it may turn out he was Miss Betty’s uncle—the one she always said she wanted to find. Mr Ted said he had found out Miss Betty was met at Euston by some one who said her uncle was waiting for her, because he had heard she was coming, and he was very ill and frail, so she must come at once if she wanted to see him alive. Only now it may be perhaps him that’s dead at Seemouth is her real uncle and the other was just a mistake, and she might be coming to-night to make sure, and if we waited here we might see her. Master Ted wanted me to come so I could take her back to Bournemouth. He was that excited and worried you couldn’t rightly tell what it all meant.”

  “I shouldn’t have thought,” Bobby growled, “that any one out of a lunatic asylum would take that rigmarole seriously. Has Mr Wyllie been handing out good money for it? Why couldn’t the fool come to us?”

  “If you mean Master Ted,” Miss Poore retorted with spirit, “he’s no fool, and not like some I could mention who do nothing but stand about and talk and anything happening to Miss Betty all the time and he wasn’t saying a word till he knew about Miss Betty and what she wanted.”

  Bobby took it that this meant that Ted feared the girl might be mixed up in some way with the Seemouth tragedy. He spent a moment or two thinking yearningly of all the things he would like to say to Ted the next time he saw him. He said:

  “Why did Mr Wyllie leave you here alone?”

  “Well, the man he was expecting never came.” she explained, “and Master Ted thought he might be waiting somewhere else instead of here, so he went to look, and he came back and said there were two men he had seen before in a café close by, and he thought one of them was a big man who might be him as broke into our house at Bournemouth, and he was going to wait to find out where they were going because it might be a sweet-shop the man he was expecting to meet here told him about.”

  “Why didn’t you say that at first?” Bobby cried. “Wait here till help comes. I can trust you to do that? Tell them Cy’s sweet-shop.”

  With that he set off running—running with swift, noiseless steps, leaving Miss Poore staring after him, the unconscious sergeant at her feet, she herself so bewildered and flurried that from the incoherent story she told when Ford returned with help, it was difficult to extract much meaning. With delay and difficulty it was at last gathered that Bobby had suddenly rushed away on hearing that the man she and Ted were to meet had not turned up, and that Ted, going to look for him, had seen a man resembling the housebreaker of Bournemouth. Then he had come back to tell her to wait while he tried to follow him. In the hurry and confusion of the swift questions rained on her, she entirely failed to mention those three words, ‘Cy’s sweet-shop’, which, besides, she had only caught imperfectly and without realizing that they were of any significant importance. But her reference to a ‘big man’—big as the one seen at Bournemouth—made Ford think at once of Tiny Garden and of Jimmy Joe’s café not far distant.

  Thither therefore it was that he and another plain-clothes man hurried, finding when they got there everything as quiet, peaceful, orderly and calm as could be desired. Just as Bobby, arriving in that side street where was situated Cy’s sweet-shop, found there, too, everything perfectly normal, with no trace or sign to be seen of Cy himself or of Tiny Garden or of any one of their associates.

  The shop itself had a deserted air. Closely fitting shutters were over the window. On the door was a notice ‘Closed temporarily. Reopening shortly under New Management.’ There was no bell, and when Bobby knocked on the closed door, he got no answer. A passer-by, returning late from work and probably an occupant of one of the flats overhead, said to him:

  “No one there, mate. Lock-up shop, and been empty a week or two.”

  Bobby said “Thank you,” and walked away, not quite certain what to do next. He told himself uneasily—and very crossly—that whatever happened to Ted Wyllie would serve him right for a blundering, interfering jackass, but that none the less the safety of every citizen, including the jackass variety, was the direct responsibility of the police.

  Then again the rather confused story which, according to Miss Poore, Ted had heard from Ally Hidd, had seemed to him at first to be, as he called it, ‘rigmarole’. But now, thinking again, he was not so sure. A bogus uncle was no more difficult to provide than had been a bogus niece, and some such scheme, effective in its simplicity, might have been used to get hold of the genuine Betty. Any letter of explanation she wrote to her Bournemouth friends to explain her non-arrival might have been intercepted and a forged reply sent in such terms as to make Betty reluctant to write again.

  All attractively simple, and for a ti
me plausible enough. But hardly a deception that could be kept up for long. Betty was no simple, guileless child straight from convent or from school. She had served in the Waafs during the war, she had worked in a lawyer’s office in Canada. Sooner or later, and probably sooner rather than later, she would be sure to realize something was wrong. And then what would happen to her, alone in the hands of those already guilty of the murder of a helpless old man, the sole obstacle between them and easy acquisition of a great fortune?

  Even if Ally Hidd’s story had in it some elements of fact, the missing girl’s situation, the urgency of finding her, both seemed as desperate as ever, the pressure of time no less immediate. As well, Bobby told himself gloomily, never find her at all as find her five minutes too late. He thought wrathfully of Ally Hidd sending messages to Ted through Bobby himself, warning him to keep away, and then telling him this long, confused, hesitating story which could only have served to excite him still further.

  “If ever I get hold of that little rat of an Ally,” he muttered, and knew very well there was nothing he could ever do. Except give Ally a tongue-lashing that would have about as much effect on that gentleman as Sidney Smith thought stroking the dome of St Paul’s would have on the dean and chapter.

  By now he had wandered round to the next side street running parallel with, and behind, that in which the sweet-shop stood. Here was the site, only partly cleared of rubble, where once had stood an ancient church till one of the last of the flying-bombs to reach London had fallen upon it. Now this vacant plot, marked for the building of a block of flats when labour and material were again available, had become a playground for children and an occasional retreat for courting couples seeking privacy in discomfort. But the hour was too late for children, even in this neighbourhood, where children’s hours differed little from those of adults, and, as a light rain had begun to fall, the most ardent lovers were not likely to be lingering there to-night.