The Dusky Hour

by E. R. Punshon

  “Shall we go into the drawing-room?” he said. “I expect Ena’s got the coffee waiting for us.”

  They all three rose, Mr. Moffatt still forgetful of his port he left untouched in its glass on the table – a circumstance that made the pale, thin, softly moving butler, a man named Reeves who had not been long in his present situation, lift his eyebrows in surprise before he drank it off himself, and another to keep it company.

  In the drawing-room, Mr. Moffatt’s daughter, Ena, was sitting alone, waiting for them. She was small, slim, with small, attractive, well-shaped features, solemn eyes, about her a general look of health and the outdoors that went oddly enough with her reddened lips of an unnatural crimson, her painted finger-nails, the plucked ugliness of her eyebrows whereby she claimed her right to share in all the bored sophistication of modern youth. She was dividing her attention between her own thoughts, a Persian kitten – named Gwendolene – a cigarette she had allowed to go out because really she hated the things, a new novel, a magazine that told how to knit jumpers of incredible fascination, and a small table on which stood a coffee-pot, a spirit-lamp, a kettle, cups, and so on. In another part of the room stood a bridge-table, with cards and scoring-pads all ready. Mr. Moffatt was, somewhat unexpectedly, a keen and successful bridge-player who had even taken part in tournaments. Remarkable to see how neatly and swiftly those big, rather clumsy-looking hands of his could shuffle and deal the cards.

  The coffee was already brewed, and Ena began to pour it out as the three men came in.

  “Where’s Noll?” her father said to her.

  “Messing about with the snaps he’s been taking,” Ena answered. “Wants to develop some of ’em.”

  “Better tell him the coffee’s ready,” suggested Mr. Moffatt.

  “He can come for it when he wants to,” replied Ena with sisterly indifference.

  Mr. Pegley, sipping his coffee, began to praise it. Ena listened indifferently. She knew she could make coffee as it should be made and so seldom is. Now, if anyone had praised a cocktail of her mixing – but, then, no one ever did, nor even drank it if that extremity could be avoided.

  “There’s a legend,” Mr. Pegley was saying, “that you only get good coffee in Turkey, the States, and France. In France it’s half chicory, in Turkey it’s just mud, and in the States it’s all cream. Now this is the real thing.”

  Then he began to talk about a coffee-making machine about to be put on the market, for which, he said, he was providing the finance.

  “Speculative side-line,” he explained; “not the sort of thing I could recommend to the clients who do me the honour to consult me about their list of investments.”

  Apparently with this machine you put the raw beans in at one end, touched a button, and in a minute or two a stream of perfect coffee poured into the waiting cups at the other end.

  Ena listened, polite but bored. She hated machines. She felt they had a secret grudge against her. Whenever she went near one, it always refused to work, while her brother, Noll, had only to touch the wretched things and at once they would purr away contentedly. Ena felt it was hardly fair. She said:

  “How lovely, Mr. Pegley, but it wouldn’t do for us. We haven’t electricity. Dad says he can’t afford to install it.”

  “Ah, yes, of course,” Mr. Pegley agreed. “Unfortunately, there is that.” He paused. “So unnecessary,” he murmured, as if to himself; “so very unnecessary.”

  Mr. Larson strolled over, his coffee in his hand, to Mr. Moffatt, and dropped before him the card he had written in the dining-room. It bore the words:

  “Share Pusher.”

  Mr. Moffatt looked very startled. His eyes and mouth opened to their widest. His face, red with an outdoor life, went redder still. Before he could speak the door opened and there appeared the pale, soft-moving butler, a little more pale, more softly moving even than usual.

  “Colonel Warden to see you, sir,” he said. “In the library, sir. On business. I was to say he wouldn’t keep you more than a minute or two.”

  “Colonel Warden?” repeated Mr. Moffatt, surprised. “Our chief constable,” he explained to the two men.

  “Oh, dear,” exclaimed Ena, turning quite pale. “I do hope Noll hasn’t been speeding again or anything.”

  “Warden wouldn’t come himself about that,” her father said. “Is Colonel Warden alone?” he asked the butler.

  “No, sir,” Reeves answered, glancing uneasily over his shoulder. “A Scotland Yard man’s with him – a detective-sergeant. Bobby Owen his name is.”

  CHAPTER 2

  FIRST ENQUIRIES

  Mr. Moffatt put down his cup and rose to his feet. Mr. Pegley looked startled and uneasy. Mr. Larson was staring straight at him, and Mr. Pegley, catching his eye, looked more uneasy still. Ena, too, continued to look a little frightened, for she had a well-founded mistrust of her brother, once he got into that sports car of his that seemed to go to his head as cocktails went to her own. With a word of apology to his guests, Mr. Moffatt left the room.

  The library was at the back of the house, a pleasant, comfortable apartment overlooking the rose-garden and the tennis-court and containing, too, some really fine old eighteenth-century furniture and one incongruously new roll-top desk in fumed oak. Mr. Moffatt had seen it advertised as necessary to all aiming at modern efficiency, and had reduced Ena nearly to tears by insisting upon installing it in the library, which served also as his business room and general sanctum and defence against all domestic worries and intrusions. It was here Ena came once a month with her housekeeping books, and here that she extracted with difficulty the sums necessary to settle the amounts owing, for Mr. Moffatt had a firm conviction that houses could easily be run without cash. An appeal for money for another new frock or for an extra visit to town met as a rule with a generous response, but a greengrocer’s bill or the coal-merchant’s account came always as a fresh surprise and a fresh imposition. Thither, too, came Noll Moffatt to be informed stormily that that sort of thing had got to be stopped, that when he, Mr. Moffatt, was his, Noll’s age, etc., etc., and finally to depart with sufficient to cover all pressing liabilities, since Mr. Moffatt’s worst roarings were the more tolerable in that they generally ended in the production of a chequebook. Noll Moffatt, by the way, was supposed to be reading for the Bar. In actual fact his chief interest was photography and his one ambition was to become a camera-man in a film studio. But there Mr. Moffatt drew a very thick, black line, seeing, as he did, little difference between a camera-man in a film studio and a seaside photographer touting on the beach. The Church, the Army, or the Bar – the Stock Exchange at a pinch – for a Moffatt of Sevens, on the Berkshire boundary; no other profession existed.

  As up to the present the film companies seemed to share Mr. Moffatt’s objections to Noll’s securing work with them, the young man spent most of his time at home, exploring the possibilities of novel “shots” and producing occasionally results of some interest. There was, for instance, one sequence in colour of chickens, hatching out, taken on a small poultry farm near – the Towers Farm – that had induced the Super Production Picture Company to show a gleam of interest in his work.

  In this room, then, there now waited Colonel Warden, the county chief constable, a tall, strongly built, military-looking man, standing with his back to the fire. At a respectful distance stood his companion, Detective-Sergeant Bobby Owen, of the C.I.D., Scotland Yard, studying with interest a map of the surrounding country and looking rather puzzled over it.

  The door opened and Mr. Moffatt came in. The colonel apologised for troubling him at so late an hour. Mr. Moffatt said that was all right; always pleased to see the colonel; at least, unless it was any fresh performance of his young hopeful in the sports car rashly presented to him on his twenty-first birthday; and the colonel said, oh, no, nothing like that: the young man had of late been more careful to confine his exploits to the unrestricted roads where you could break your own neck or your neighbour’s within the four corners of
the law.

  “It’s really,” explained the colonel, “about that bad smash there was yesterday near Battling Copse on your west boundary. You’ve heard of it?”

  Bobby, putting a finger on Battling Copse as shown in his map, looked up to hear the reply. At first, when the duty inspector at the Yard had packed him off down here at a moment’s notice to see, at the request of the local police, if he could identify the unknown victim of a motor accident, he had been inclined to suppose his mission meant no more than an agreeable interlude in serious work; a pleasant country trip, in fact.

  But it was beginning now to look as if it might turn out very differently.

  “I heard something about it,” Mr. Moffatt answered. “No one I know, is it? Battling Copse? I didn’t know it had happened near there. Something about a chalk-pit, I heard, and you couldn’t run a car into that one near Battling Copse unless you tried.”

  “Exactly,” said Colonel Warden.

  “Eh?” said Mr. Moffatt, startled by the other’s tone.

  Battling Copse was nearly three miles distant from Sevens, forming, in fact, the further boundary of an outlying portion of the Sevens estate. It had its name from a tradition that there a Roman legion, marching to the relief of London, had been cut off and utterly destroyed by a British force during the Boadicea rising. Tradition declared that the ground had been reddened with the blood of the defeated and that the clash of spear on shield, as the Roman soldiers died where they stood, could yet be heard once every twelvemonth in the stilly winter nights. Oddly enough, though there was historical proof, confirmed by entries in the parish registers, that the copse had been the scene in the civil wars of a hot skirmish between the Parliamentary and the Royalist cavalry, no local memory thereof seemed to have survived. Apparently the earlier tale had swallowed the later one, though of the truth of the first story there was no proof whatever; and Mr. Moffatt was never quite sure whether to regret such forgetfulness of historic incident, or to be thankful for it, in view of the fact that the Roundhead force had been commanded by the Moffatt of Sevens of that time. Regrettable in the extreme, undoubtedly a sad blot upon the family escutcheon, and yet highly satisfactory proof that the escutcheon had been there to be blotted three hundred years ago. Mr. Moffatt could only hope that eight generations of unbending Toryism served for atonement, even though ever since then the eldest son of the family had always been christened “Oliver,” and known as “Noll,” in memory of the great Protector. Even Mr. Moffatt’s father, a Tory of the Tories, had respected that tradition, though he had tacked on an “Albert” in honour of the Prince Consort, and had hoped that in time the “Albert” might displace the “Oliver.”

  “Do you mean you think it was suicide?” Mr. Moffatt asked.

  “It’s a possibility,” agreed the colonel, “but some rather odd facts have turned up. One thing is that yesterday afternoon a car was noticed by our man here – Norris his name is.”

  Mr. Moffatt nodded. He knew Norris well enough, the constable stationed in the village, a civil, intelligent fellow, though less active against poaching than one could have wished, and reported, though one hoped untruly, to have been seen reading the Daily Herald – a bad sign.

  “It was standing in the lane that turns out of the road just beyond your entrance gates,” Colonel Warden continued, “going west, that is.”

  “The lane leading to Markham’s farm?”

  “Yes, and nowhere else,” said the colonel. “Apparently, however, it did not go there, for there are no tracks higher up the lane, and no one at Markham’s knows anything about it. Norris thought it an odd place to park a car. He took a note of the number, and it is the same as that of the car found in the Battling Copse chalkpit. More curious still, when Norris went on, towards Sevens, he saw a man standing on the bank behind the hedge just before the Sevens entrance, watching the house through a pair of field-glasses.”

  “What on earth for?” exclaimed Mr. Moffatt.

  “That,” said the colonel, “is what Norris asked. The fellow seemed confused. Norris had come up quietly on his bicycle and had taken him by surprise. He said something about Sevens being a fine old house and he was interested in architecture. Then he made off. Got into his car and drove away, or seemed to. Must have come back again. Nothing Norris could do, of course. Bad manners, but no legal offence in watching people through field-glasses. But Norris says he is certain the dead man found in the car in the chalk-pit is the man he saw.”

  “Don’t understand it,” said Mr. Moffatt. “If he wanted to see the house, nothing to stop him coming and asking.” In point of fact, Sevens was not a fine old house. The original building had been burnt down in mid-Victorian days and re-erected in a sham and inappropriate Gothic that always made Ena feel she loved her birthplace less than she should have done. Once, under a misapprehension born of old prints, a representative of Country Life had arrived, full of enthusiasm and belief that the ancient building survived. Ena had never forgotten his expression as he gazed upon the actual edifice. It had even battlements.

  “Norris,” continued the colonel, “says the car went on up the road. Now you know that way leads nowhere once it is past Sevens except to Mr. Hayes’s place, to the Towers, and to two or three cottages and then back to the main road again in a long circuit. So what was he after?”

  “Excuse me, sir,” said Bobby, looking up in rather a puzzled way from the large-scale map he was studying, “is the Towers Mr. Hayes’s place? I thought that was Way Side. That’s marked here, but I can’t see any Towers.”

  “Poultry farm,” explained the colonel, “first place past Battling Copse – run by Miss Towers and her sister, London ladies who lost their money in some smash and are probably now on the way to lose what’s left.”

  “Sure to, sure to,” grumbled Mr. Moffatt, scowling and frowning as if he hoped as much. “I’ve told them so myself. Much better get back to town, much better.”

  He spoke with so much apparent feeling that Bobby wondered if there was any reason why these Londoners were unwelcome as neighbours, or if Mr. Moffatt merely thought it a pity people should lose money in undertakings for which probably they were quite unsuited.

  “Then Way Side is Mr. Hayes’s place?” Bobby asked.

  The colonel nodded, and to Mr. Moffatt he said:

  “Hayes is an American, isn’t he?” To Bobby he explained, as if fearing Scotland Yard efficiency might lift an eyebrow at ignorance of any of the more prominent residents in the district: “Only been there a few months. It was empty for some time after the last owner died, and then this man took it.”

  “I don’t think he is American,” Mr. Moffatt answered. “Pleasant fellow to talk to; seems anxious to be neighbourly. Of course, I don’t know him well; he’s hardly got settled in yet. He’s called once or twice, though, and we’ve been over there. He did say he had made his money in America – a place called Denver; mining town apparently.”

  “We found some papers in the car of the poor chap that’s got himself killed,” the colonel explained. “They make it seem as if he may have been in the States, too. We thought possibly he might be going to call on Mr. Hayes, especially as there is some suggestion he had been asking how to get to Way Side. We wondered if he could have confused Sevens and Way Side?”

  “Don’t see how,” said Mr. Moffatt, “curious, though. I’ve a man here to-night – came down from town to chat and talk business. A Mr. Pegley. I believe he’s been in America, and I think he mentioned Denver. I asked him if he knew Hayes, but he didn’t seem to. Quite a big town, he tells me – Denver.”

  “Interesting,” said the colonel, who had known about Mr. Pegley before, but had wished Mr. Moffatt to be the first to mention him. “Perhaps he can help us. I must ask him, if I may.”

  “He is in the drawing-room,” Mr. Moffatt explained. “If you’ll come along, Ena will give you a cup of coffee and you can ask Pegley himself. Do you know his name? The dead man’s, I mean.”

  “We think it is Be
nnett – Arthur Bennett,” Colonel Warden answered, “but it’s an odd thing again – there were no papers or letters or anything of that kind in his pocket; no personal card either; nothing in the way of name or address. The papers we found were rather tucked away – in an envelope behind a cushion. And,” continued the colonel slowly, “they rather suggested Mr. Bennett – if that’s his name – was engaged in – well, share-pushing, they call it.”

  Mr. Moffatt fairly jumped. The card Larson had so negligently dropped before him was in his waistcoat pocket and now seemed suddenly to bulk enormous there, so that he expected Colonel Warden to point at it an inquiring finger. Bewilderedly he wondered if he ought to produce it, and how doing so would conform with his duty as a host.

  “That is why,” Colonel Warden continued, apparently as unaware of that hidden card as though it shouted not its presence and its message to the whole world in the way Mr. Moffatt felt it must surely be doing, “we rang up Scotland Yard, as we knew they had been chasing American share-pushers lately, and asked them to send us down someone who might perhaps be able to identify the body. Detective-Sergeant Owen was good enough to come along by the next train.”

  He indicated Bobby as he spoke. Bobby bowed slightly. Mr. Moffatt said:

  “Oh, yes – Reeves told me. Knew him, apparently.” The colonel looked surprised, even startled. Bobby looked a trifle surprised, too, and said:

  “Your butler? He knew me? I didn’t recognise him.” He took out his notebook and made an entry. But Mr. Moffatt was thinking of something else. He said: