The Dark Garden: A Bobby Owen Mystery

by E. R. Punshon

  “I just have the idea,” Bobby continued now, “that there’s something else going on we haven’t quite got the hang of. If it breaks, it may help us—or it may not. Only at present you know, Wright, even if I am correct in thinking I know who killed Anderson, I haven’t a notion how it’s going to be proved.”

  “No, sir,” agreed Wright, who knew Bobby’s theory and was not inclined to attach much importance either to it or to the incident on which it was founded.

  “Besides, of course, I may be entirely wrong,” added Bobby.

  “Yes, sir,” agreed Wright again, more heartily than he intended.

  “Motive generally gives a lead,” Bobby went on, “but here there are half a dozen different people, with half a dozen different motives, and nothing to suggest which one was operative—revenge, greed, hate, love, jealousy, they all come into it.”

  “So they do, sir,” said Wright, still in agreement and now beginning to scratch his head, which was the gesture natural to him when he was puzzled, and then instead rubbing the tip of his nose, since that, since Bobby’s arrival, had become the fashionable sign of bewilderment in the Wychshire county force.

  “As for identity of time and place,” Bobby continued, still thinking aloud, “that possibility can be established for every one of our suspects.”

  “Not a single sound alibi,” sighed Wright, “in the whole boiling.”

  “As for the famous ‘principle of exchange’,” Bobby went on, “it’s a wash-out. Even if, as very likely happened, the contact of murderer and victim did leave signs in the way of exchange of traces of some sort—well, the murderer had plenty of time to get rid of them before anyone knew there had been a murder. Anderson’s car was carefully cleaned before we got to it. So was Blythe’s glove. Examination of the body has been no help and wasn’t likely to be after a couple of days in the canal. The weapon used may be anywhere. Very likely at the bottom of the canal and nothing to show where within ten miles or so, so it’s hopeless to drag for it.”

  “If we drained off the water we could make sure,” suggested Wright, who had large ideas.

  “Mean another ha’penny on the rates probably,” Bobby pointed out; “and what would the Watch Committee have to say to that?”

  Wright turned pale at the thought and offered no reply. Bobby went on:

  “Besides, with the pressure on transport what it is, can you see our getting permission to hold up canal traffic for lord knows how long just on the off chance?”

  Wright agreed meekly that he certainly couldn’t ‘see’ it.

  “Not a hope,” he admitted. Then he said: “That Miss Earle, she’s feeling it. Did you notice her at the inquest?”

  Bobby nodded. The memory indeed was clear in his mind of her dark and passionate restraint as she stood, immobile and silent, at the back of the room during the brief formal inquest proceedings; looking, as one of the reporters present had remarked, Tike the wrath of God’. A little strange, Bobby remembered thinking at the time, that one who had never spoken, scarcely moved, had yet been able so to impress her personality on others, even on a newspaper man, who, as a class, are not as a rule too easily impressed. The memory of her still and sombre figure had remained with Bobby ever since. So apparently had it with Sergeant Wright, who said now:

  “There’s plenty round about Long Barsley think she did it herself. So she would all right, if you ask me, if she thought Mr Anderson was going to give her the go by.”

  “Nothing to suggest that,” Bobby said.

  “You never know,” Wright answered. “Outside marriage, you can chuck ’em when you want.” He added thoughtfully: “And nothing they can do except perhaps what this one did.” He paused again and once more added: “There’s that £5,000 we’ve heard about, and what I say is—where is it?”

  “Yes, I know,” Bobby agreed. “I expect that comes into the story somewhere, but nothing we can lay hold of—yet.”

  “No, sir,” said Wright, but a little doubtfully, and then withdrew to spend most of the rest of the day following up yet another illusive and finally worthless clue, while Bobby went back to his pile of statements and other papers, to re-read them all with the melancholy thought in his mind that probably it would soon be necessary to put them away, marked:

  “Inquiry closed temporarily, in default of further information.”

  That it is always the unexpected that happens is, however, as true of the work of the detective as of anything else, and the next day, in the afternoon, Mrs Jordan came to see Bobby. The Government reports he was busy with he put aside at once, for he hoped she might have information of importance to give him. To his surprise he found that what she seemed chiefly concerned about was a rumour she said she had heard that the arrest of Mr Blythe was contemplated. It puzzled Bobby, for in the first place he did not know that any such rumour was in circulation, and secondly he did not see why, if it were, it should trouble Mrs Jordan.

  “Why should anyone think Mr Blythe is under suspicion?” he asked.

  “Don’t come the innocent over me, young man,” she retorted. “It’s all over Long Barsley and everywhere else about his glove.”

  “Curious,” commented Bobby. “Nothing has been said about that or about whom it belonged to, and I’ve heard nothing about any talk going round.”

  “More’s said than police ever know,” declared Mrs Jordan, and Bobby admitted sadly to himself that this was only too true.

  “Do you mean people are saying that Mr Blythe is the murderer?” he asked.

  “I mean people are putting two and two together and making five, same as they generally do,” she answered. “If a man gets done in and something belonging to someone else is found on the spot, aren’t people going to talk?”

  “Well, they shouldn’t,” Bobby told her.

  “I know,” she said. “Don’t I know? But they do all right. No stopping them. They’re wrong of course. It wasn’t Blythe.’

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Because it was someone else.”

  “Who?”

  “Billy Dwight.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “The way he keeps hanging around, watching Anne. It’s her next.”

  Bobby sat upright with a jerk. This was unexpected, unpleasant, and disturbing. He had been wondering what lay behind Mrs Jordan’s visit, and here it was and sufficiently alarming, too. One murder may well lead to another, and Mrs Jordan seemed very much in earnest.

  “What grounds—?” he began, and his visitor interrupted him sharply.

  “Plain as the nose on your face,” she snapped. “He’s off his head with jealousy, same as they get sometimes. He’s that type. He was keen on Anne from the start.”

  “Did she encourage him?” Bobby asked.

  “Her being her was all the encouragement he wanted,” she answered. “Her looks, the way she held herself, how she walked.” She said this with a sort of vicarious pride that sat a little oddly on her now. Yet, Bobby supposed, in her lusty youth she, too, must have made a strong appeal. She went on: “The less Anne noticed him, the keener he got; and if she was rough with him, then she only put an edge to it, like a knife gets when it’s put to a grindstone. She was the same to all boys and most of them were afraid of her.”

  “I can believe that,” agreed Bobby, thinking to himself that indeed the average youngster would not much know what to make of Anne Earle’s dark reserve. “She wasn’t like that to Mr Anderson, though, was she?”

  “No. He was older, he was alone, there was no family to meet. It was always that she couldn’t face. A family when she had none herself. Morbid about it, she was. I mean, about being abandoned, as she called it; about being found on a doorstep. Morbid. Seemed to think that people knew it just by looking at her. Morbid. And hard. Hard. Hard as can be. That’s her. Hard.”

  “Hard?” Bobby repeated, not quite understanding. “In what way?”

  “She won’t understand, she can’t forgive or forget,” Mrs Jordan
muttered, and she spoke with an emotion Bobby had hardly thought her capable of. “It’s hard to hear the things she says about her mother. That’s my sister, you know. You don’t like to hear your own sister…”

  She broke off abruptly and Bobby said:

  “I suppose it’s natural she should feel it. You can’t think much of a mother who could treat her child like that.”

  ‘‘Do you suppose she wanted to?” Mrs Jordan asked passionately. ‘‘You’re a man. You can’t understand. A man always gets out of it. To hell with all men. She ought to understand. She could try. She won’t. She said she might be brought to kill a baby she had borne, but never to put it down on a doorstep and go off herself all safe and comfortable. That’s what she said—safe and comfortable. She’s right about that though. She’s different. Proud and bitter, hard, and keeps her rage within her. She told me once when she was still a child she got alone into a church and there before the altar she knelt down and put a curse upon her mother,” and suddenly, and to Bobby’s discomposure, Mrs Jordan burst into tears.

  He waited a little. The violence of the storm of sobs that had shaken her, died down. She began to mop her face with her handkerchief. Opening her handbag she started to repair, though awkwardly and with a shaking hand, the ravages her storm of weeping had done to her complexion. She said:

  “Wasn’t that a dreadful thing to hear? I went upon my bended knees to her to take it back and she would not.”

  Bobby had a keen pictorial imagination. There was in fact a certain latent artistic ability in him, so that he always tended to see things as interpreted in line and form. But for a defective colour sense he might even have been tempted to become an art student in the hope of earning his living as a professional artist. Now he seemed to see the tableau clearly—the implacable young girl, the older woman crouching in vain at her feet. Such power has an evil deed, not only to injure another’s body but to corrupt also that other’s spirit.

  “My own sister,” Mrs Jordan said again and loudly, as if she wished him to realize that. “It was what cut so deep, to hear such things said of my own sister by her own girl.”

  “You hadn’t seen your sister or been in touch with her for a very long time, though, had you?” Bobby asked.

  “What’s that to do with it?” she asked suspiciously. “I didn’t ought to have told you, only so damn smooth you are you get it out of folk. It isn’t what I came about. You want to know who killed Anderson? You can take it from me, it wasn’t Mr Blythe, and his glove being there has just nothing to do with it. It was Billy Dwight did him in, and if you aren’t careful, it’ll be Anne next.”

  “Can’t you give me something more definite?” Bobby asked. “You must see how difficult, impossible in fact, it is for us to take action without something definite to go on. Facts are what we want.”

  “It’s a fact Billy Dwight was mad jealous,” she told him. “You know yourself it’s a fact he broke into Rose Briar Cottage.”

  “He denies it,” Bobby said, “and though I’m inclined myself to believe you, there’s no proof. It’s your word against his, you see. Besides, if it ever came into court, you would have to admit that first you denied the whole thing.”

  “That was only because I didn’t want any coppers snooping round and raising a stink,” she explained. “It was only a stink I was afraid of then, I never dreamed it would come to murder. But it was him all right did it. If it isn’t, what’s he watching Anne for the way he is, and if it isn’t murder in his mind, what’s twisted his face the way it is, what’s put the look in his eyes there’s there now?”

  “We can’t take action on a look,” Bobby told her. “Jealousy gives a possible motive, but that’s all. If we could identify the pistol as his, that would be something.” He said this because he thought there was just a chance that Mrs Jordan knew more about that pistol than she had so far revealed. But she gave no sign and he continued: “But we don’t know what’s become of the pistol and if we can’t produce it we can’t make any use of it. The only thing I can do at present is to put on a man to try to keep an eye on Miss Earle and see that nothing happens. And we’ll try to keep an eye on Dwight, too.”

  “Well, that’s something,” she said ungraciously, getting to her feet. “If you lay off Blythe and attend to Dwight, you’ll stand a better chance of getting your man. That glove didn’t mean a thing.”

  “What makes you so sure of that?” Bobby asked; and as she merely shrugged her ample shoulders and moved towards the door he said, pleasantly but quite firmly: “No, don’t go yet, please. Why are you so interested in that glove? And are you really sure there is any gossip going on about it—or about Mr Blythe?”

  “Yes, I am,” she answered defiantly.

  “Well, it’s curious,” Bobby said, “because though the lad who found it or his mother may have talked about the glove, or it may have got out in some other way, Mr Blythe’s name has never been mentioned.”

  “Don’t talk silly,” she retorted. “Everyone knew those swell gloves of his—at least, there’s plenty did, and couldn’t help, the way he liked to show them off because those lads of his at Hopewell House clubbed together to buy them for him.”

  “Well, there’s that,” Bobby admitted. “But I don’t see that that explains your interest.”

  “My interest’s Anne,” she flashed out. “That’s all. I don’t want her murdered next.”

  “More do we,” Bobby agreed, “and I can promise you we shall take every possible precaution, but at the moment we are talking about Mr Blythe and his glove.”

  She snarled an angry and somewhat blasphemous wish about both Mr Blythe and his glove and again she moved towards the door and again he stopped her.

  “Have you any idea how the glove came to be where it was found?” he asked. “Someone must have put it there, you know, and you seem sure it wasn’t Blythe himself. So who was it?”

  “How should I know?” she snarled.

  “Was it Miss Anne?”

  “No, it wasn’t, you leave my girl alone,” Mrs Jordan almost screamed at him.

  “No one can be left alone in a case of murder and you yourself have just this minute asked me to have her looked after,” Bobby reminded her quietly. “The glove must have been put there by someone who knew Mr Blythe and who had access to his car at the Chief Building car park. There aren’t so many people who come under that heading but Miss Earle is one. Do you think it likely or do you know anything to suggest?_____”

  “No, I don’t,” Mrs Jordan shouted, interrupting him, and this time banged open the door and rushed away, and Sergeant Wright, who had been in the passage outside, looked into the room and asked:

  “Is anything wrong, sir? I mean that woman—she looked like murder, if ever woman did.”

  CHAPTER XVII

  ANNE THREATENS

  BOBBY WAS NOT much surprised when only a day or two later Anne Earle herself came to see him. He had expected her and had left instructions that she was to be shown to his room as soon as she arrived, for he thought it likely that anything she might wish to say would be of interest. When she entered he got up to put a chair for her, but she would not take it, waving it away with one of those slight, almost imperceptible and yet strangely dramatic gestures which seemed characteristic of her. Dark and secret with hidden passion, she stood with her heavy glance fixed on him, and yet not much as if she saw him, but only some reflection of her own brooding thoughts. He went back to his chair and said formally:

  “What can we do for you, Miss Earle?”

  “Why are you having me followed?” she asked, yet still as if speaking from some far-off loneliness.

  “Oh, have you noticed that?” he asked in his turn and without surprise, for somehow he had always felt that for all her hidden manner of living in her own secret world, there was yet little of her immediate surroundings of which she was not aware. Now for answer she made another of her slow gestures that this time seemed deeply scornful of so unnecessary a question. She sai
d again:

  “Why are you having me followed?”

  “From information received,” Bobby said then, “there seems reason to believe that it may be advisable for your own safety.”

  “Why?” she asked, and then: “Nonsense,” she said.

  “Oh, very possibly,” he agreed, “but we can’t afford to run risks.”

  “Nonsense,” she repeated. “What risks?”

  “It would be easier if we knew,” Bobby answered carefully and slowly. “It has been suggested to us that your life may be in danger. It was pointed out that one murder has been committed and that perhaps there might be another. I am very much inclined to agree with you that the idea may be nonsense. But as the suggestion has been made, we are bound to take notice of it. For your sake first of all, for your safety. For our own sake next. We should hate to have another murder on our hands. And if that did happen, and it came out, as it certainly would, that we had been asked to give you protection, and we had failed to take even ordinary precautions—well, you’ve simply no idea of the fuss there would be. You see, honestly, it’s not only your life and safety I’m thinking of, but my own job as well.”

  As he had hoped she might, for he was beginning to have some knowledge of her strange and powerful personality, so warped and twisted by the circumstances of her birth, she rewarded this frankness with a faint smile, a smile that lightened wonder fully the habitual tragic intensity of her expression, that even touched it in passing with a fleeting and a momentary sweetness. Then it was gone, quickly as though she put such weakness from her, but Bobby took advantage of the moment to say:

  “Won’t you sit down? I wish you would. You see, if you won’t, I shall have to stand, too.”

  She seemed to consider this gravely, to accept the argument. She seated herself, and in so doing became much more human, much less aloof.

  “Who told you all that nonsense?” she asked.

  “I’m afraid I can’t tell you that,” he explained. “Everything said to the police is under the seal of the confessional so to say, except of course, so far as the claims of justice are concerned.”