Secrets Can't be Kept: A Bobby Owen Mystery

by E. R. Punshon

  On Constable Watts’s large moon-like countenance a smile dawned. It spread. Slowly it spread and spread, and Bobby watched fascinated as the whole of that enormous countenance became transformed into the very image of transcendent mirth. Then the huge Wattsian body—all eighteen stone of it—started tremendously to shake and quiver. Finally, a mouse from a mountain, emerged a tiny chuckle.

  “Well,” said Bobby, “does that mean you have?”

  “Begging your pardon, sir,” said Watts, returning suddenly to his customary official gravity, “every Friday, sir, as and which duty allows.”

  “What’s he do?” asked Bobby, who himself had never patronized the New Grand, though he had often seen posters advertising the name ‘McRell Pink’ in large letters.

  “Well, sir,” Watts answered slowly, “he—you see, sir—he—it’s like this, sir, it’s not so much what he does as the way he does it.”

  “Sing, dance, what?” Bobby asked, still curious.

  Watts didn’t seem quite sure, but did show signs of breaking into reminiscent mirth once more.

  “There’s times,” he said presently, “he’s that funny you’re fair apt to cry being so sorry for him.”

  “I think I’ll have to go and have a look,” Bobby remarked.

  “Yes, sir,” said Watts. “You’ll enjoy it, sir. That young fellow’s mother what was here just now has been ringing up to ask about him. Seemed fair worried like.”

  “What about?” asked Bobby. “What did she say?”

  Constable Watts didn’t succeed in making that very clear. Solid and trustworthy as the Rock of Gibraltar, he was not highly gifted in the way of exposition. All he managed to convey was that Mrs Bloom seemed excited and alarmed—more than alarmed, frightened indeed. Apparently she had meant to ask that if the boy paid a visit to county headquarters he should not be allowed to leave till her own arrival. She had sounded very upset on hearing that she was too late and that the boy had already made his visit and departed.

  Watts withdrew, and Bobby looked up the ’phone number of the Pleezeu Tea Gardens. He put through a call, only to learn that Mrs Bloom was out, had been out all afternoon. She had said she was going to Midwych, but had not said when she would be back. Bobby asked who was speaking, and was told it was Miss Bates, who worked for Mrs Bloom as cashier and book-keeper and who had not seen Mr Ned Bloom all day. Miss Bates’s tone suggested that this fact in no way grieved her, and so Bobby rang off. He went on with his work, and after a time his chief assistant, Sergeant Payne, appeared on some routine errand or another.

  “By the way, sir,” he said, this disposed of, “wasn’t there a young fellow, Ned Bloom, in here just now?”

  “Yes. Why?” Bobby asked.

  “Watts seems worried,” Payne answered. “He says Bloom’s mother rang up to ask about him, and now she’s rung up again.”

  “What’s she want this time?” asked Bobby, mildly interested.

  “Watts wasn’t very clear about that. Something about had the boy come, and, if he had, what had he told us, and was he here still? What worried Watts is that he’s sure it wasn’t the same voice. Quite different this time, and when he said so, whoever was speaking shut down in a hurry.”

  “A bit odd,” Bobby commented. He hesitated and then on the intercom. system rang through to the outer office, telling them if Mrs Bloom ’phoned again to put the call through direct to him. “By the way,” he went on to Payne, “do you ever go to the New Grand? Know anything about a McRell Pink appearing there?”

  Payne smiled, though not quite so all-embracingly as the massive Watts.

  “Comic, sir,” he said. “I’ve seen him once or twice. Very good, too. Has the whole house in a roar in no time.”

  “What’s he do?” Bobby asked. “Sing, dance, or what?”

  “Well, pretty nearly everything in turn and never the same twice. One time I saw him he was giving an imitation of a man in the kitchen after listening to Freddie Grisewood of the B.B.C. on the kitchen front, as they call it.” Payne paused to grin. “Killing,” he declared. “He has a ventriloquist act sometimes—clever patter. There’s a long argument he does with Lord Haw Haw, and you could almost swear it was the Joyce skunk answering him. Then there’s a song of his that made quite a hit, something like this: ‘Eire’s a new, new, new land, so she is; and she wants to be neu-neu-neu-tral, so she does.’ I forget how it went exactly. About how nice it is to be neutral and safe. Catchy tune.” Payne tried to hum it, not very successfully. “Never the same thing twice, though. Oh, and only three days a week—Mondays, Fridays, and Saturdays.”

  “You mean he only appears those three days?”

  “That’s right.”

  “How do they manage the rest of the time?”

  “There’s a sort of fill-in act those three nights—bar turn generally. When McRell Pink is on you can hardly get a seat. Other nights it’s different, though of course anything goes in the theatre just now.”

  Bobby knew enough to realize that for a turn to be put on three nights only was unusual. What was the reason, and where was Mr McRell Pink the other three nights? And why had young Ned Bloom asked in that significant tone if Bobby had ever seen him?

  “Doesn’t he appear somewhere else when he’s not on at the New Grand?” Bobby asked.

  Payne had no idea. Puzzling, all this, Bobby thought, and he didn’t like being puzzled. In fact, there was nothing he disliked more. Payne was feeling a little puzzled, too, by these inquiries. He said:

  “Nothing against him, sir, is there?”

  “No, no,” Bobby answered. “It’s just that his name happened to crop up and made me wonder.”

  “The New Grand makes a bit of a mystery about him,” Payne went on. “Advertisement most likely. They sort of smuggle him in and out; and he never mixes with any of the other performers, though you know how pally music-hall people are as a rule. If any of them speaks to him he just mumbles something and bolts like a frightened rabbit. Publicity stunt, I expect, but it does seem to be a fact that quite big noises in the Variety line have tried to get in touch with him and failed. He doesn’t answer letters or telegrams. Even when a well-known agency wrote, offering to book him on a swell circuit, he didn’t reply.”

  “Funny,” Bobby said thoughtfully, “but I suppose he knows his own business best. Doesn’t want to leave Midwych most likely.”

  “And that,” commented Payne, “is more than funny. It’s the only tiling most Midwych people want, even if they want to come back again as soon as they have.”

  The ’phone rang. Bobby answered it. A voice said:

  “Are you the county police? This is Mrs Bloom speaking, from the Pleezeu Tea Gardens, Threepence. I believe my son, Ned, wants to see you. Can you tell me if he has been yet?”

  “Hold the line a moment. I’ll inquire,” Bobby said. He put his hand over the receiver. He said quickly to Payne: “Ask Exchange to check up. Three mothers to one son is two too many.” He uncovered the receiver and spoke again: “Are you there?” he asked. “Is it Mr Ned Bloom you are asking about? Have you rung up before?”

  “No. Why?” the voice answered. A woman’s voice, Bobby thought, and yet a disguised voice, he thought as well, for it did not sound to him quite natural. The voice went on: “You haven’t answered me. Has Ned been?”

  “Hold the line, please, and I’ll inquire,” Bobby repeated.

  Payne came quickly into the room. Bobby put his hand over the receiver again. Payne said:

  “Exchange reports Call Box, Love Lane, Threepence, speaking. I’ve ’phoned our man there to check up who it is.”

  “Good,” said Bobby, and uncovering the receiver, put it to his ear again. By one of those tricks the ’phone sometimes plays, he heard distinctly a man’s voice say:

  “Aren’t they answering?”

  “No,” replied the first voice. It sounded hurried. It said: “There’s something up. I can hear them talking. They’ve rumbled something.”

  Said the man’s vo
ice, distinct over the line:

  “The young swine’s been already. We’ll have to out him pronto.”

  “Are you there?” Bobby asked, but this time there was no reply, only a silence complete and ominous.

  CHAPTER III

  MISSING

  LATER ON THAT day there arrived a report from Sergeant Young, the officer in charge of the Threepence police station. This was to the effect that when the sergeant, who had undertaken the duty himself, arrived at the Love Lane call-box, it was empty. On one side of Love Lane were open fields. On the other was a small spinney. No one was in sight in the fields. Young had made as quick a search as possible of the spinney, but without success. Then he had gone on to where Love Lane joined the high road and had found Mr Roman Wright, the artist, sketching in the garden of Prospect Cottage, where he lived with his wife and niece. He had questioned Mr Wright, but Mr Wright was sure no one had gone by there down Love Lane that afternoon. Then Young had returned to the other end of the lane to make inquiries at a small group of labourers’ cottages there situate. But none of the inhabitants had noticed any stranger nor had the vicar, the Rev. Martin Pyne, who chanced to be making a parochial visit at one of the cottages.

  “Painstaking man, Sergeant Young,” observed Bobby approvingly. “Whoever it was must have slipped off in quick time, across the fields perhaps, dodging behind hedges, or else through the spinney. Time enough before Young could get there. But why should they unless there’s something queer going on?”

  “Yes, sir. Only what could that be?” Payne countered, and Bobby answered thoughtfully that he hadn’t an idea in the world.

  “Young Ned Bloom certainly thought he was on to something,” he went on, “and I didn’t much like what I heard on that third call. Sounded nasty somehow. And why did three people ring up, each claiming to be the boy’s mother? Exaggerated claim in two cases anyhow. May not amount to much, of course. Storm in a teacup, very likely. You never know. You might ring up Young, thank him for his report—his very complete report—and ask him to get in touch with Bloom. Tell him to tell Bloom I would like to see him again. You might tell Young, too, to keep an eye on the Pleezeu Tea Gardens for the present.”

  Payne, though evidently thinking all this was making mountains out of molehills, went away to put through the suggested instructions. Sergeant Young, inwardly wondering what it was all about, undertook to carry them out. It was much later—nearly midnight, in fact, and both Bobby and Payne had gone home—when Young rang up again to say that Ned Bloom had not returned and that Mrs Bloom was uneasy at his unexpected absence.

  The officer on duty made a note for Bobby’s information next morning, but saw no reason to do more. The wise and prudent sergeant does not disturb inspectors off duty save for very good cause. It was getting on for eleven next morning before Bobby, overwhelmed as usual by a fresh batch of correspondence, every single item marked urgent, secret, very confidential, or something similar, arrived at the note recording Young’s report. He found it worrying. He rang up Threepence and heard that Ned was still missing, that Mrs Bloom had sat up most of the night waiting for him, that the constable on the beat—the one beat that included the whole of Threepence—had seen a light in the small hours in a shed at the bottom of the tea gardens, the part farthest from the house and used chiefly for growing vegetables and herbs. It was separated by a hedge from that portion of the gardens where teas were served in fine weather. The constable, shocked by such a breach of the black-out regulations, had investigated, but without success. He found no one and no sign that there was or had been any one in the shed in which he thought he had seen the light. He had, however, gone on to the house, and Mrs Bloom, still sitting up in the hope that Ned might return, had accompanied him back to the shed. It was one used by Ned for his own private purposes, and there was nothing to show that it had been entered or any of its somewhat miscellaneous contents in any way disturbed. True, the door was unlocked, but Mrs Bloom had not seemed to think that very unusual. So she went back to the house, there to resume her vigil, the constable had continued to give the Pleezeu Tea Gardens his special attention, and nothing else had happened. If indeed anything at all had happened, for nothing is easier than to imagine a light where no light is.

  Another day went by and still there was no news of Ned Bloom. Officially it was not a police matter. No complaint had been made, and there may be many reasons why a young man should wish to absent himself from home. None the less, Bobby was uneasy. He could not get from his mind the memory of that whining threat he had seemed to detect in the snatch of conversation overheard from the Love Lane call-box. Finally he decided to spare time for a visit to Threepence, a talk with Mrs Bloom, and perhaps a look at the shed or out-building or whatever it was where a mysterious light had been seen and then, like Ned himself, had disappeared. If Mrs Bloom’s cakes and scones and her home-made jam remained anywhere near pre-war standard, the visit would not be entirely without compensatory features.

  After lunch accordingly, he cycled out to Threepence. A pleasant ride and a pleasant change from office work. He turned off the main road down Love Lane, though that was hardly the nearest way. At the corner stood Prospect Cottage, where lived Mr Roman Wright, generally referred to in Threepence as ‘the artist’, and mentioned by Sergeant Young as declaring that he had seen no one pass that way about the time of the ’phoning from the call-box. Professional artists are somewhat rare birds in the Midwych area, and Bobby wondered vaguely who Mr Wright was and what his work was like. A pleasant little home he seemed to have, newly built—a product, indeed, of that ‘ribbon development’ along the new highways that so many deplore and condemn. For the present, until building took place opposite, as no doubt it would the moment the war was over, the cottage commanded a wide view over open country, towards the south. At the back a row of tall trees, oaks and beeches, the border of a small spinney, grew so close to the house as to deprive it of any rear garden, but gave good, if overshadowing, shelter against winds from the north.

  At the front door a tall, buxom young woman was standing, smoking a cigarette in a long holder. Something of a chain smoker apparently, and extravagant as well, for Bobby saw her jerk from her holder a cigarette but half smoked and immediately light another. Or, rather, try to, for her match broke off short, without catching. She tried again, with the same result. This seemed, quite in the Hitler style, to exhaust her patience. She swore aloud so that Bobby heard her plainly—she used a word young women do not often employ, even in the most advanced circles—flung the match-box on the ground, stamped on it, kicked it away, and retired indoors, banging the door angrily behind her.

  A young woman in a highly nervous state, Bobby told himself, and had she been a young man he would have been tempted to diagnose a hangover of some sort. Only after her disappearance did he become aware of another woman in the small front garden, near some bushes; a woman so oddly inconspicuous, so motionless and silent, that even he, accustomed and trained to quick observation, had not at first perceived her presence. An elderly woman, small, thin, pale, giving an impression somehow of looking much older than her age. Bobby wondered in what relationship she stood to the impatient damsel who had just retired indoors. Payne had spoken of aunt and niece, Bobby remembered. But not many aunts, not even in these days of the rule and supremacy of youth, would have suffered such a display of temper and impatience to pass without some sort of comment or sign of surprise or disapproval. But she had given none, had not even seemed to notice. Nothing to do with him, Bobby thought, and when he looked again he was surprised to see that this possible, hypothetical aunt was no longer there, though he had not seen her go. Then he saw that she had merely changed her position slightly, but seemed somehow to have so great a gift for being inconspicuous that not till he looked twice did he distinguish her where she was now standing, as still and silent as before.

  “Sort of cap of invisibility she must possess,” he told himself smilingly as he continued on his way.

  A
little farther on he saw a man whom he supposed must be Mr. Roman Wright himself—at any rate an artist engaged in painting the scene before him.

  Bobby got off his bicycle and stood looking on with deep envy. A wonderful life—nothing to do but sit on a campstool all day watching the play of light and shade on all the loveliest bits of landscape in the neighbourhood. How bitter, bitter a contrast with the toilsome existence of a C.I.D. inspector! How spiritually elevating, this daily communion with Nature at her best, as compared with his own dusty job of struggling ever to protect a society that sometimes he was moved to think but little deserved protecting. Sighing, he remembered his own youthful dreams of an artist’s life, ended for ever by realization of the fact that, though he could draw well enough, his colour sense was poor. Nor is drawing well enough much of a foundation on which to build hopes of earning a living. None the less the sight of an easel still drew him as a honey-pot draws flies. But, since he was on duty, he would certainly have ridden on, had not his passing glimpse of Prospect Cottage aroused in one detail a faint surprise in his mind. Nothing much, but anything that puzzled him and roused his curiosity was always to him quite irresistible. The two women, too, remained in his memory—one with her display of temper and exaggerated nervousness, the other with her odd gift for escaping notice.

  So he leaned his bicycle against the hedge and, passing through a gap in it, approached the artist: encouraged, when that gentleman looked up, by a friendly smile.

  Bobby expressed a hope that he was not intruding, not interrupting. The artist, who was working in water-colour, added a fresh touch to his sketch and said ‘Not at all’. Bobby gave his own name and wondered if he was speaking to Mr Roman Wright, and Mr Roman Wright appeared much gratified and said that was so and how did—Mr Owen, was that the name?—how did Mr Owen know? So Bobby explained he had heard a friend of his resident in Threepence mention Mr Roman Wright, but did not add that the friend in question was the local sergeant of police. He had no wish to emphasize his profession, mention of which, he knew, often made people shy and embarrassed. Instead he passed some remarks on the work in progress—remarks more laudatory than candid, for privately he thought the composition poor. Besides, he knew enough of drawing to know a good line when he saw it, as he did not in Mr Roman Wright’s work. He decided inwardly that Mr Roman Wright must be one of that wise band of artists who have taken the precaution to provide themselves with a sufficient private income before embarking on their profession. Rather a surprise to learn casually, in the course of conversation, that Mr Roman Wright had been commissioned by a London dealer to provide him with half a dozen water-colours of Wychshire scenery.