Night's Cloak: A Bobby Owen Mystery

by E. R. Punshon

  Again she stared at him, long and challengingly.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she said at last. “Mr Franks is very highly strung. He is extraordinarily sensitive and delicate. I suppose you think that makes it easy to bully him into saying anything you want him to? Only a brute would try.”

  “I suppose so,” agreed Bobby. “You know, sometimes I feel I am a bit of a brute, and then I’m sorry I’m a policeman, and then again I feel there’s no thrill in all the world like the pursuit of a murderer—your wits against his, your life against his, life for a prize, and one little bit of the world at least made safe for ordinary people. A worth-while job. Because, you know, sometimes assassins strike twice.”

  Thomasine greeted this last remark with something as much like a snort as one could expect from a lady.

  “You leave that poor boy alone,” she said. “A coarse, brutal character like yours can’t understand the delicacy and sensitiveness of his,” and again Bobby noted with wonder the deep tenderness in her voice.

  Head over ears in love with him and only the good Lord knows why, he thought, and made no attempt to defend himself against her wrath. All the same, he hoped she was wrong; he hoped he understood Ronald Franks much better than she did. He said:—

  “You haven’t mentioned that chocolates affair to any one, have you?”

  “No. But I wish you would take that man of yours away,” she said petulantly. “He is only a nuisance; just sits there like a great goop.”

  Bobby was pleased at this moment to observe the “goop” in question peeping cautiously round the corner of the street.

  “I’m sorry you find him a nuisance,” Bobby said, “but after what’s happened, we have to think of your safety. Really, he ought not to let you out of his sight.”

  Miss Rowe looked contemptuous. The “goop” had withdrawn his cautious head by now. Miss Rowe said:—

  “He gets all excited if I even look out of the window, but I came away by the back door and he didn’t know.”

  “Too bad,” said Bobby. “By the way, we’ve had those chocolates analyzed. Arsenic all right, and lots of it. But it seems the amount the puppy took was about the total amount in each separate one of the top row of chocolates. And there are six chocolates missing.”

  “Oh, yes,” Thomasine said. “I threw some away. I remember. Into the waste-paper basket. Some I cut open and there was that same funny white powder in them all. Afterwards, after you had gone, I remembered about them, and I thought it wasn’t safe to leave them there, so I went into the kitchen and put them in the fire.”

  “Oh, yes, that explains it,” Bobby said; and to himself he wondered if this were the truth or if—but he did not much like to think of alternatives.

  CHAPTER XXVI

  LOGIC

  AS HE made his way homewards that evening, Bobby was still thinking uncomfortably about these four women who seemed by the logic of events and by their own emotional entanglements to come in turn, one after the other, into the limelight of suspicion. First, the dark and enigmatic Thomasine with her strange obsession for the seemingly commonplace and unattractive Franks. Bessie Bell, too, her fierce blonde beauty and her air of stark defiance—against what? And Florence Severn, the athlete, hovering in the background like a hawk waiting to swoop—upon whom? Finally, her niece, Olga, welfare officer, upon whom the twists and turns of the investigation seemed ever and anon to throw fresh gleams of suspicion, only for them to fade away again almost at once—but did they?

  It was after dinner that Bobby began to set himself in real earnest to try to think out his problems. Over the meal Olive had presided with smug triumph, not only because a long cycle ride had tested and proved true a strange rumour she had heard about a far-away small-holder who had a hen, an aged hen, a very Methuselah among hens, he might be willing to sell—as he was, and never mind the price—but also because by her most recondite and delicate arts she had made it seem almost young again. In fact, a veritable miracle of rejuvenation. So now, that achieved, she was ready to turn her attention to the perplexities and the difficulties with which Bobby found himself confronted.

  “Four women and four men,” he said gloomily, “and if it’s a case of a pair of them teaming up together—well, almost any variety of complication is possible.” He began to tick them off on his fingers. “First the men,” he said. “Take old Dan Edwardes. Do respectable old gentlemen, hitherto leading blameless lives devoted to Greek grammar and cooking, take to murder?”

  “What has age to do with murder?” Olive asked; “and does respectability count when you have lost three sons?”

  “I don’t know,” said Bobby. “There are his dabs on those glasses we found to show he was with Weston late that night. He hasn’t said a word about it. If he is innocent, why not?”

  “If he is guilty, he wouldn’t,” Olive said, “and if he is innocent he may not want to draw suspicion on himself while he is trying to put through his new plans for the Weston West Mills. I think he feels it’s something he owes his sons, and he won’t let anything interfere with it.”

  “Perhaps he hasn’t, not even a life,” Bobby said. “All the same, would any normal man commit murder merely to put right what he has come to think of as a social wrong?”

  “Is any old man normal when he has been sitting brooding over the loss of three sons and now he’s left alone?” Olive asked. “Bobby, if you prove him guilty, I’ll never forgive you.”

  “If he did this thing,” Bobby answered gravely, “he must answer for it to the law. Neither you nor I have the right to condemn, but neither have we the right to absolve.”

  “Well, I don’t believe he did,” Olive retorted, shifting her ground. “Besides, he hasn’t been sitting and brooding; he’s been cooking. I expect that’s kept him sane, even though it’s enough just now to drive any one mad.”

  “You’re being inconsistent,” Bobby pointed out. “No logic.”

  “You and your logic,” said Olive, and metaphorically threw logic out of the window. “I wonder,” she added thoughtfully, “if he’s such a howling swell at cooking, what he would have thought of that old hen—before and after,” and if it hadn’t been Olive, one would have said that she smirked.

  “That chicken—or hen—has no after,” Bobby reminded her. “Besides, the evidence isn’t so very strong. We do believe he was the last person in Weston’s company—unless he himself really is the murderer. We think he may be unbalanced mentally after what he’s suffered. We know Weston bitterly—passionately—opposed his plans and he was just as strongly—passionately—bent on carrying them through. We know that now Edwardes will get his way—in the only way in which he could get it. By Weston’s death. And though we can’t prove it, the murder weapon may certainly have come from his collection. Not too good when you think of it like that. It may be when he thinks of his sons and of all the others all the world over, another death may not have seemed to matter so very much. I’m afraid we can’t leave him out.”

  “He has always lived so quiet a life,” Olive remarked musingly. “I think sometimes if things break loose inside you, they break loose all the more because of that. Like pent-up waters through a broken dam.”

  “If there were nothing else, if he were the only one,” Bobby decided, “there might be grounds for an arrest. But, then, he isn’t. There are the others. Martin Wynne.”

  “I’ve never seen him,” Olive remarked. “Didn’t you say he was very good looking?”

  “That,” said Bobby severely, “has nothing to do with it.” Without paying any attention to Olive’s murmured and nearly inaudible “Oh, but it always has,” he continued: “He was on bad terms with Weston, too; pretty hot they were when I heard them. Then the dabs in the summer-house do suggest he was hanging about fairly late that night, and what for?”

  “I thought you said there were dabs to show a girl had been in the summer-house, too,” Olive reminded him. “Mightn’t that be the ‘what for’? I’ve heard it is sometimes,�
� she added demurely.

  “If it was only a spot of courting by night,” Bobby asked, “why that night, and why a damp, neglected summer-house in some one else’s garden on a rainy night?”

  “When it is what you call a spot of courting—and I do think that’s a horrid vulgar way to talk, and you might just as well say if it was a true lovers’ meeting,” Olive said, “I’ve been told that then its sometimes ‘Who cares?’—time, weather, place, or anything.”

  “Yes, but this isn’t true love,” Bobby protested. “It’s murder. That’s different.”

  “True love as well, perhaps,” Olive said, and Bobby frowned.

  “If it is, it’s a complication,” he said.

  “It always is,” said Olive. “The most complicated thing in the world. Crime is always simple, love isn’t—ever.”

  “I don’t know what you think you’re getting at,” Bobby grumbled uneasily. “Anyway, you’re growing too complicated for me. Come back to facts. Martin Wynne gets a big slice of the estate. He had access to Japanese knives at Edwardes’s place, he is liable to crazy notions, as witness that crazy story he told about the message he had from a dead woman in the stratosphere.”

  “How do you know it’s a crazy story?” Olive asked. “You weren’t there. Of course, he is an inventor. I remember Mrs Klein—”

  “Who’s she?” asked Bobby, stricken by a sudden fear that Olive was about to introduce a new suspect.

  “Mrs Melanie Klein,” Olive explained. “She writes about children’s psychology and understanding them. I’ve a book of hers.”

  She produced it. Bobby looked at it, and said thank the Lord he left all that sort of thing behind him when he left college, and what on earth did Olive want with stuff like that, and Olive took the book from him and showed him a passage to the effect that strong desire could overcome will and training and conscience, too, and that artist, scientist, inventor, might take any road, even that of murder, which seemed to lead towards the wished for goal.

  “I think she is right,” Olive said. “If you want anything passionately—how to fly in the stratosphere, for instance, or to carry out plans which you think your dead sons wanted—I think a life may come to seem a small thing if it’s in the way. I’m afraid you must keep Martin Wynne at the back of your mind.”

  “I’m not sure he isn’t in the front of it,” Bobby said gloomily. “There’s a jolly good case.”

  “It would be better,” Olive said, “if he wasn’t so good looking.”

  “There’s a woman all over,” declared Bobby tolerantly. “As if his looks mattered one way or another. Now, let’s come to Franks. A bit of chewed-up rag, Payne calls him.”

  “What about his alibi?” Olive asked.

  “I know,” Bobby agreed. “It bothers me. Sound as a bell. Direct evidence of eye-witnesses—Reynolds and his girl. No reason why Reynolds should tell lies to help Franks. Intelligent young chap, good character, no special pal of Franks, not in the least likely to tell lies to help a murderer to escape. All the same, that half-crown business does seem to be a bit too pat. We’ve got to accept it, and yet I feel sure there’s a catch in it somewhere. And why is Franks so keen on joining up all at once? Doing a bunk, Payne says, but why?”

  “I think I could guess,” Olive said. “But only a guess. What about Mr Wilkie and his story about Mr Weston having married and there may be a son? If there’s any truth in the knife-throwing artist’s story, Mr Wilkie may have got hold of a Japanese dagger, too.”

  “The whole thing seems lousy with Japanese daggers,” Bobby complained. “Perhaps the murderer knew it, and that’s why one was used. Between them Mr Anderson and Payne drew up a pretty strong case against Wilkie; and if we could identify him with Weston’s hypothetical son, it might be good enough.”

  “Why son?” asked Olive. “If he really was married and had a child, why not a daughter?”

  “Well, you know,” Bobby said slowly, “I never thought of that, not once.” He began to look excited. “It’s an idea. Thomasine Rowe. Could that be why Weston engaged her? Wanted to have his girl by him, and though she is such a good looker, she sticks to it he never tried to make love to her. Bit queer, with his reputation. Might explain it, though, if it’s like that. Or Bessie Bell? Is that why he got her there? I can’t trace any hint of their ever having had anything to do with each other, and she says she has no idea what he wanted. She looked scared to death that night, though. Or Florence Severn? But it can’t be her. She’s too old.”

  “Is she?” Olive asked. “What are the dates?”

  Bobby started to rub his nose, recollected himself, stopped, and whistled instead.

  “Good gracious!” said Olive, startled, and Bobby continued:—

  “She says he had asked her to marry him. Every one seems to have thought that’s what she was after.”

  “It might be what she wanted was for him to acknowledge her,” Olive said, “and the story she told you was because she knew of the gossip and wanted you to accept it. She might think a disinherited, abandoned daughter too much of a likely suspect and an expectant wife no suspect at all.”

  “It’s got to be considered,” Bobby agreed. “I can see another year or two spent looking up births, marriages and deaths. Irregular marriage in Scotland, though. No official record. Illegitimate child. Father may be entered unknown—sometimes women won’t give away their lovers, and sometimes they are promised money not to. And we don’t know the mother’s name. Except Aggie at a guess. Not much to go on, and not much help anyhow. If you ask me, I should say the niece was a good deal more likely. It was Weston gave her her job, and we mustn’t forget that vanity case.”

  A knock at the front door interrupted them. Bobby went to answer it, as he and Olive were alone in the house, Olive’s only domestic help being an elderly lady, who, with fine impartiality, “obliged” Olive and the vicar’s wife each three days a week, thus keeping as she hoped on the right side of both church and law. Cautiously Bobby opened the door, alarmed lest any ray of light should escape and thus bring upon him the wrath of the air-raid wardens, who, and well he knew it, would chuckle for a week if they had the luck to catch a police inspector bending. A voice he recognized said:—

  “Is Mr Owen in?”

  “Miss Olga Severn, isn’t it?” Bobby said. “Come in, please.”

  Carefully he adjusted the black-out curtain after her entry. He ushered her into the small dining-room and as he did so, she said:—

  “I was on my way to a welfare concert at the General Aircraft factory.”

  “Oh, yes,” Bobby said. “Where Mr Martin Wynne works?”

  “Yes. I thought I would stop on the way to tell you. It’s about a box of chocolates. One of your men has been asking me about Mr Weston giving me one. He didn’t say how he knew, but it’s quite true.”

  She paused as if expecting or hoping for an explanation. Bobby said:—

  “When we are making inquiries in a case like this, all sorts of things turn up. Sometimes they are important. More often they aren’t. But we have to follow them up. You never know.”

  “Your man wanted to know what I had done with them,” she continued. “I don’t know why. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t want to send them back. It would have made Mr Weston awfully angry, and I might have lost my job, and I didn’t want to. I like it. When I saw who the chocolates came from, I just put the box away. I’ve just moved from aunt’s and my things are all anyhow still, but I said I would try to find it. Well, I can’t. I rang up my aunt, but she doesn’t know anything about it either and she is sure it isn’t anywhere there. I can’t think what has become of it. That’s all I wanted to tell you. I must go on now, or I shall be late.”

  Bobby did not attempt to detain her. But he thought he knew only too well what had become of it. He followed her into the dimly lighted entrance hall. There she was half hidden in the shadows, and the thought came to him that her soul and her mind were as hidden from him as was here her outward appearance.
He said:—

  “Did Mr Weston often send you chocolates?”

  “No, never before. Only that once.”

  “Was there any special reason this time?”

  “I think,” she answered in a low voice, “it was because he wanted me to marry him.”

  CHAPTER XXVII

  SIGNIFICANT FACTORS

  BOBBY WAS going back to rejoin Olive when the ’phone bell rang once more. This time it was Sergeant Payne, reporting on inquiries he had just completed. These included much of the information Olga herself had just given. They proved in addition that both Thomasine and Franks had been at work at the hour at which the post-mark showed the box of chocolates to have been sent off from the central Midwych post office. But that office was only a few yards from the Wych and Wych Arms, so that Bessie Bell could easily have slipped out to send it off without her absence being noticed. Then both the Misses Severn, both Florence and Olga, had been in town that day, the one shopping, the other on some errand connected with her welfare work. Also both Wilkie and Mr Edwardes were masters of their own time. Further, Martin Wynne, as a research worker, was freer than most from the ordinary discipline of office or workshop, and would have had no difficulty in leaving his desk—or rather his drawing-board—without his disappearance attracting any attention.

  “Looks,” Bobby said to Olive after he had rung off, “as if any one of them could have sent the thing. Except Thomasine and Ronald Franks. Which doesn’t mean any of them did, of course. No one at the post office remembers anything about it. Not likely to. Again, who ever is responsible may have got some one else to do the actual posting.”

  “You never really thought it was Miss Rowe herself, did you?” Olive asked.

  “Oh, no,” Bobby agreed. “You can never tell, though. It had to be considered. Anyhow, she and the young man are both cleared as far as that goes. She couldn’t herself, and I can’t see her employing any one else. A self-reliant young woman. Still, we are broadcasting an appeal to any one who posted a package addressed to Weston Lodge Cottage to come forward. I don’t expect any result.”