Dark is the Clue: A Bobby Owen Mystery

by E. R. Punshon

  “I have the greatest respect for the police and the very high level of efficiency they invariably display. You may naturally rest assured that I shall be most happy to co-operate in every way in my power,” and as he spoke there came and went a smile, so small, so swift, so fleeting, it had vanished almost before it could be seen. It was as though in his quiet, hidden way it amused him to think of taking part in police operations. He laid down the outsize horn spectacles he had been holding, and thus allowed Bobby to notice that the forefinger of his right hand was missing. A war wound, perhaps, or some accident. Possibly the ‘blitz’. On a finger of his other hand he wore a large signet ring. Opening a drawer of the writing-table at which he was seated, he took out a box of cigarettes, offered one to Bobby, gave him a light, lighted his own cigarette, and went on: “I am wondering if the Mr Dowie who has been staying at the Over All Arms for the last day or two is one of your men. If he is, I fear it is a little too late to hope to avoid attention. I should imagine he is about the only topic of conversation all through the village.”

  “He has nothing to do with us, whoever he is,” Bobby said quickly. “What makes you think he might have?”

  “Well,” Wynne answered, “it seems he has some sort of contraption he claims will show the whereabouts of any hidden treasure. Do you know of the old story about the monks of Over Abbey burying the church plate and so on at the time of the Reformation to save it from Cromwell’s Commissioners? When you spoke of stolen property buried in the copse, I began to wonder if there was any connection. Very likely it is only a coincidence, but I thought I had better mention it.”

  “I am very glad you did,” Bobby told him, and he was beginning to look a little worried. “If it is a coincidence it is a most unlucky one. It is the first I have heard of it. Has he said anything about where it is supposed to be hidden or what it is?”

  “Not that I know of,” Mr Wynne answered, “but really I didn’t pay much attention.” Again that same small fleeting smile came and went almost in the same fraction of a second. “I’m afraid I’ve no great belief in hidden-treasure stories,” he added apologetically.

  “Can you give me any description of him?” Bobby asked.

  “I’m afraid not,” Mr Wynne answered. “I’ve never even seen him, that I know of. I heard him spoken of as a tough-looking customer who might give our Sir Charles Stuart as good as he got if it came to that. Evidently Stuart has heard about it and is very much on the alert as a result. He’s saying he’s not going to have anyone trespassing on his property looking for treasure or anything else. If there is anything there, then that’s his business and no one else’s.”

  “I see,” Bobby said, and looked even more worried than before. It was clearly going to be all much more complicated than he had expected. But, then, village life so often is. And who was this Mr Dowie so suddenly making so abrupt an entrance on the scene? Mr Wynne, however, for all his manner of reserve, seemed inclined to be communicative, and Bobby’s habit was always to encourage people to talk. The more they talked, the more information came out—some of it entirely irrelevant, of course, but also some of it sometimes very much to the point. Occasionally, too, it was information they themselves had not known they possessed. ‘You understand all this is highly confidential’, was a favourite gambit of his, and one that seldom failed to loosen the tongues of even the shyest, the most taciturn, the most distrustful. He made up his mind suddenly and went on: “As a matter of fact I came to ask your help because I heard it was so much more secluded here than at Over Abbey. As well as easier to get to the copse unobserved. If the attempt we think from our information may be made tonight to recover the stuff if it’s still there, then a sharp look-out will be kept beforehand to make sure all’s clear. The least hint of a suggestion we are on the look-out, and that will be the end of it for goodness knows how long, and we can’t continue watching indefinitely. The initiative is always with the criminal.”

  “You don’t mean Dowie may be one of the gang, do you?” Mr Wynne asked. “On the look-out? If gang is what you call it,” he added doubtfully. “Gang sounds so melodramatic, doesn’t it? Unreal.”

  “Oh, gangs are real enough,” Bobby told him. “Much too real for my liking or the safety of the public. Criminals do tend to work in gangs. They have cut themselves off from society, and so they feel the need to create a fresh society to belong to. Solitary criminals are rare, but when they exist they are formidable. Like rogue elephants.”

  “I can understand that,” Mr Wynne said. “But I should have expected, too, a tendency, after a really big haul, to slip back into society and shelter in the shadow of an accepted respectability. Even to make oneself as prominent as possible, so as to get accepted, so to say. Rather on the principle of Edgar Allan Poe’s lost letter. The easier to see, the more conspicuous, the less likely to be noticed. But that might be too dull a life for gangsters, and no doubt you speak from experience, not theory. You have evidently given much thought to the subject—gone into it very deeply, if I may say so. No doubt a great help to you in your work, though I am afraid all that would rather puzzle our good Sergeant Jenkins in charge in the village here. I was going to suggest your getting Dowie to try out his machine and see if it was any help. Water-divining works, so perhaps that might, too. But hardly advisable if Dowie is one of the gang himself. Though it would be rather amusing,” and now again came and went that faint, fleeting smile so nearly imperceptible it was more communicated than seen. A secret and hidden sense of humour, at any rate. “Amusing, I mean,” he explained, “to enlist the help of one of the gang responsible for the theft to recover what he himself had helped to hide.”

  “I think, perhaps,” Bobby remarked, “that we will wait and see what happens to-night. We hope, of course, that whoever appears will go straight to the hiding-place. If we can arrest them with the stolen property in their possession it will be much easier to get a conviction. Clever counsel won’t be able to persuade the jury it was only blackberrying or taking an innocent midnight stroll before bed, or something like that, took them there.”

  “You’ll have to keep a sharp look-out for Stuart as well as for your other visitors,” Wynne warned him. “He is very much in evidence just now. Sylvia—my daughter, you know: you’ve seen her, her room overlooks the copse—says she’s seen a light there two or three times lately. It may have been Dowie and his machine. More likely Stuart on the prowl for trespassers. Very possessive person, Sir Charles. Likes to keep his own to himself.”

  Bobby had made up his mind now. He said:

  “You understand all this is highly confidential? Anyhow, even if Dowie and his machine are both genuine, they wouldn’t be much help. What we believe may be hidden in the copse isn’t jewellery or anything like that. Do you remember the robbery shortly before the war ended of a Post Office van? A number of mail-bags were taken. They contained used pound-notes from branch banks in the provinces sent up to be cancelled. There was another such robbery later on, but they don’t seem to have been connected in any way. In this first one notes to the value of about £200,000 were secured. The driver of the van tried very pluckily to resist. He was shot and wounded by the gang leader. Fortunately he recovered.”

  “Well, that was a good thing,” declared Mr Wynne. “I don’t expect killing was ever intended. They shouldn’t have had guns at all. Most likely told not to, but thought they knew best. But what a tremendous haul! I’m afraid I don’t remember much about it. Seven or eight years ago, wouldn’t it be? A long time, and I daresay I wasn’t very much interested even then. All that sort of thing seems so remote from this quiet little backwater of ours. A dull life you may think it, but at least a safe one. Isn’t it all rather ancient history by this time? Are you taking it up again? There was no arrest at the time, was there?”

  “No,” Bobby answered. “But we knew very well who had carried out the robbery. Names were being mentioned in pubs and cafés in Soho, and we were getting together a fair amount of evidence. But what we
didn’t know, and very much wanted to know, was who did the very highly efficient planning and staff work—the ‘backroom boy’, as they say, or the ‘master mind’, as the papers like to put it.”

  “Are you still hoping to find him?” Mr Wynne asked; and once again Bobby had the impression, though this time no least shadow of a smile had shown, that any such hope was regarded as distinctly amusing—which annoyed Bobby. “A ‘master mind’,” Wynne was repeating. “I confess I always thought the ‘master mind’ idea was just newspaper talk—journalistic colouring. I should expect any ‘master mind’ to do a lot better in the city—and very likely a peerage thrown in as well.”

  “Well, there’s always that,” agreed Bobby; “but this time there was definite information to go on. There was certainly someone of the sort in the background—very carefully in the background. But all the same, though the other members of the gang never saw him, they all seem to have gone in deadly fear of him. He kept very strict discipline. Even among themselves when they met to receive his instructions they always wore gloves. There was one member of the gang we thought we had identified, but he turned out to be only a hanger-on, a runner or scout. We got a glimpse of him once or twice—generally running away—and even he always wore gloves.”

  “Finger-prints,” said Mr Wynne, nodding understandingly. “I’ve heard of them.”

  “Well, finger-prints—‘dabs’, we call them—aren’t much use unless there are others to check up with,” Bobby explained. “Of course, if ‘dabs’ are on record at Central, we know at once who to look for. So we should if everybody had to have them registered on a kind of identity card. But the public wouldn’t have that at any price.”

  “Well, you know, I rather feel like that myself,” Mr Wynne remarked.

  “Most people do,” Bobby agreed. “So do I, for that matter, as a private citizen, that is. As a policeman I should find it a great help.”

  “You don’t expect this unknown leader to be one of your visitors to-night, do you?” Wynne went on. “The men who carried out the actual raid, perhaps, but surely not the mastermind gentleman?”

  “Not the actual men,” Bobby said. “Their heirs and successors, perhaps. The actual thieves are all dead.”

  “Dead? All of them?” Wynne exclaimed. He was showing more animation now—to have grown, so to say, less grey, less secret and withdrawn. “Surely not all of them? All?” he repeated.

  “Two of the gang,” Bobby said—“the two against whom the strongest case had been worked up—were killed the very night their arrest was to have been made. A direct hit scored on the house where they were hiding by one of the last V2’s to fall on London. Nothing much left either of them or of the house. We believe their share of the stolen notes went up with them—probably £20,000 each.”

  “Ironical,” pronounced Mr Wynne. “The notes had been sent up to London to be destroyed, and destroyed they were—very efficiently. A tale for a moralist. And the remaining two men? What about them? Were they killed the same way?”

  “No,” Bobby answered “One was a man named Frank Farmer. He was apparently what might be called ‘Operation Chief’. He was always in charge of actual raids, and we were able to get good evidence that he was the man who shot the driver. But before he could be brought in he was discovered in a ditch outside London with half his head shot away.”

  “A quarrel over sharing out the stolen money, probably,” Mr Wynne suggested. “I imagine these sort of people often fall out among themselves. One of them made drunk, put in a car, taken out into the country, shot, and dumped where you found him. The American technique I’ve read about. It must have been a great disappointment to you.”

  “Oh, it was,” Bobby agreed. “There had even been hopes he might turn King’s evidence, as it was then, and tell who it was did the planning—the ‘Boss’, as the others called him.”

  “What about him?” Mr Wynne asked. “But perhaps he had the sense to leave the country?”

  “His difficulty would be in getting the money abroad,” Bobby remarked. “A hundred thousand pounds or more in paper money would make a sizeable package to smuggle out of the country. Several suit-cases, I should think. And then there’s the changing into foreign currency. We worked on the idea, but it came to nothing.”

  “What about the other man?” Mr Wynne inquired. “Did he get away with it? Or was he unlucky, too?”

  “He was a man named Charley Cream,” Bobby answered. “Charley Cream. Naturally he got called ‘The Milkman’. He was brought in for questioning, and enough came out for him to be charged with an entirely different offence. A burglary. Violence had been used and he was given rather a stiff sentence. Twelve years. We tried to get him to talk, but he wouldn’t. We knew though that he was boasting to other convicts that there was money waiting for him, safe put away, enough to live on like a gentleman for the rest of his life. Only he died first.”

  “Their success doesn’t seem to have brought any of them much luck,” Mr Wynne observed thoughtfully.

  “No,” Bobby agreed. “Now another convict has been released. A man named Rogers—Jolly Rogers they call him. I don’t know why. He was the Milkman’s special pal in gaol, and we have information that he’s boasting he got a tip from the Milkman before he died about where the money is hidden, and it’s somewhere in Twice Over, so he’s going to give Twice Over the once over.”

  “How very extraordinary!” said Mr Wynne. “A treasure hunt in our quiet little village! Sylvia will be excited. Oh, I won’t say a word till it’s all finished and done with. I know how to hold my tongue. So does she, for that matter,” and he smiled affectionately in a way that seemed to change his whole personality, to open it out as it were and show beneath that cold outward reserve of his unexpected depths of warmth and goodwill, as at the magic touch of his daughter’s name. “I wonder,” he went on, “if you’ve ever thought of the possibility that this unknown ‘Boss’ in the background was merely camouflage for the Frank Farmer you mentioned. A useful screen for him to operate from if he really was the hidden ‘master mind’. It would give him a claim, too, for a double share—one for himself, one he would collect for the non-existent ‘Boss’, both of them big ones—and he could dodge responsibility for unpopular orders and for failures and mishaps—if there were any.”

  “Not many,” Bobby said, surprised Wynne had so soon suggested a plausible idea it had taken the investigating officers at the time much longer to arrive at. “An objection is that Farmer doesn’t seem to have had the necessary brains, from what we heard of him. A good subordinate, but had to be told what to do. First-class sergeant, but no staff officer. Anyhow, we’re still hoping that if the attempt we expect is made to-night, and the buried money is recovered, we may also recover with it, or from the men concerned, information as to the identity of the man behind it all. Personally I feel sure there was one—and not Farmer. It may be Farmer discovered who he was, and that’s why he was shot. That information, if Farmer had it, may have been buried with the money. At any rate there seem to be hints like that in the talk that we’ve heard is going on.”

  “Well, if you brought that off,” exclaimed Mr Wynne with sudden unexpected enthusiasm, “that would be splendid, wouldn’t it? A big feather in your cap,” he said, positively beaming.

  CHAPTER III

  LOGANBERRY BUSHES

  THE VEHEMENCE, the emphasis, with which this was said surprised Bobby. But natural enough, he supposed, that the sudden prospect of the arrest of a violent criminal almost at his own back door should prove rather exciting to any normal citizen, especially one who, like Mr Willoughby Wynne, seemed to live so quiet and cloistered a life. Wynne had risen from his chair now and had gone to stand at the french windows overlooking garden and copse. Perhaps, Bobby thought, he wished to reassure himself that the old familiar scene remained the same, even though strange events might soon be enacted there. He turned round and said:

  “I am wondering if you would care to take a stroll through the copse to
get an idea of the lie of the land. There’s rather a tangle of undergrowth, and it’s not too easy always to follow the right-of-way path. Especially at night, of course.”

  “Thank you very much,” Bobby said warmly. “It would be a great help, if it’s not troubling you too much.”

  “Not at all,” declared Mr Wynne. “For that matter, a plain duty to help the police. We are all indebted to them. We’ll go out the front way, shall we? I had better tell Sylvia, or she won’t know what’s happened.”

  Bobby followed him into the hall. Mr Wynne, murmuring something about a cap and scarf, disappeared into a cloakroom. Bobby, waiting, turned to look again at the Atropos statue which had previously caught his attention. A magnificent thing. He was still looking at it with increasing admiration when he found the soft-footed Mr Wynne back at his side.

  “You’ve noticed my Atropos,” he remarked. “A fine bit of work, isn’t it? The experts seem to think it does really date from very early Greek times. At the moment an art dealer’s trying to buy it for an American client—very persistent. I expect he scents a big profit. I thought at first that’s what you had come about. Sylvia wants me to get rid of it,” he added reflectively.

  “Miss Wynne told me you had come across it somewhere near here,” Bobby said. “A wonderful find. If it were mine, I should hate to part with it, and yet—something rather ominous and strange about it. But that may be what the sculptor intended. I can quite imagine Miss Wynne wouldn’t be altogether sorry to see it go.”

  “She makes faces at it sometimes,” Mr Wynne observed. “I’ve seen her put her tongue out at it as she passes,” and now, as he was speaking, his voice was no longer low and toneless, but charged with a sudden great tenderness.