The Dusky Hour E-Book

E. R. Punshon

• Herausgeber: Dean Street Press
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

'The hour of dusk was the climax in the strange case of the man found dead in the chalk pit. Who was the murdered man? And why did so many clues lead to that infamous London nightclub, the 'Cut and Come Again'? E.R. Punshon leads the redoubtable Sergeant Bobby Owen and his readers on a dizzy chase through a maze of suspicions to a surprise ending - though the clues are there for anyone astute enough to interpret them. The Dusky Hour is the ninth of E.R. Punshon's acclaimed Bobby Owen mysteries, first published in 1937 and part of a series which eventually spanned thirty-five novels. "What is distinction? The few who achieve it step - plot or no plot - unquestioned into the first rank… in the works of Mr. E.R. Punshon we salute it every time." Dorothy L. Sayers "Mr E.R. Punshon is one of the most entertaining and readable of our sensational novelists because his characters really live and are not merely pegs from which a mystery depends." Punch

Leseprobe

E.R. PUNSHONThe Dusky Hour

The hour of dusk was the climax in the strange case of the man found dead in the chalk pit. Who was the murdered man? And why did so many clues lead to that infamous London nightclub, the ‘Cut and Come Again’?

E.R. Punshon leads the redoubtable Sergeant Bobby Owen and his readers on a dizzy chase through a maze of suspicions to a surprise ending – though the clues are there for anyone astute enough to interpret them.

The Dusky Hour is the ninth of E.R. Punshon’s acclaimed Bobby Owen mysteries, first published in 1937 and part of a series which eventually spanned thirty-five novels.

INTRODUCTION

“It was dusk, the dusky hour that lingers in the English countryside before the closing in of night....”

“Murder was certainly a dreadful thing, but also, in a way, impersonal. It was like a war in Spain, a famine in China, a revolution in Mexico or Brazil, tragic, deplorable, but also comfortably remote....[Now] Mr. Moffatt was beginning to feel vaguely uncomfortable. Murder seemed somehow to be creeping near--too near. No longer was it merely a paragraph in the paper, something fresh to chat about, an occasion for a comfortable shiver over a comfortable glass of wine.”

E. R. Punshon’s suspenseful and engrossing ninth Bobby Owen detective novel, The Dusky Hour, was not well-received by the Bible of stout detective fiction orthodoxy, originally published over forty years ago but still turned to today for instruction by traditionalist mystery fans: Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor’s A Catalogue of Crime. In its general dismissal of The Dusky Hour, Barzun and Taylor’s Catalogue even condemns the “adolescent name” of Punshon’s series sleuth, Detective-Sergeant Bobby Owen. Evidently in the opinion of the august co-authors of the Catalogue, a mystery writer’s investigator was not allowed something so vulgar as a diminutive cognomen, even one that, in the case of Punshon’s Bobby Owen, calls to mind actual British slang for a cop. Yet despite this later carping from the Catalogue, during his lifetime Punshon was a great favorite of two Golden Age stalwarts of Great Britain’s Detection Club, the renowned Dorothy L. Sayers and Sayers’ esteemed successor as Sunday Times crime fiction reviewer, Milward Kennedy. (Punshon became a member of the Detection Club in 1933, three years after the formation of the prestigious social organization, of which Sayers and Kennedy were, along with other notable mystery writers like Agatha Christie, Anthony Berkeley and Freeman Will Crofts, co-founders.) Sayers’s rave review of Punshon’s debut Bobby Owen mystery, Information Received (1933), gave a great lift-off to the Bobby Owen series (see my introduction to that novel), while Kennedy declared explicitly of The Dusky Hour, “I do not think that Mr. Punshon, another front-rank man, has ever done better work than this.”

Why the divergence between these two pairs of generally discerning critics, Barzun and Taylor, Sayers and Kennedy? Surely it arose from their differing aesthetic views. Looking back at the Golden Age of detective fiction from the vantage point of the 1970s, the pining traditionalists Barzun and Taylor no doubt would have preferred from The Dusky Hour a more strictly functional narrative, along the lines of, say, a mystery by Christie or Crofts. The Dusky Hour, on the other hand, is a fairly long book for its period, and Punshon’s narrative style is expansive, his sentences sometimes structurally rambunctious. In the midst of the 1930s, however, both Sayers and Kennedy had enthusiastically embraced the ascending movement within the mystery genre to merge the puzzle-oriented detective story with the mainstream, literary novel, making it more emotionally compelling and psychologically credible; and they deemed Punshon an important player in this bold artistic advance, an author to be celebrated, not castigated, for his narrative flourishes.

To be sure, Milward Kennedy commended the plot of The Dusky Hour, which concerns the discovery of a dead body in a car dumped into a Berkshire chalk pit (in a case of life imitating art, the novel preceded by nine years England’s notorious real-life chalk pit murder, committed in the neighboring county of Surrey by the infamous Thomas Ley) and the net of suspicion that tightens around the inhabitants of three nearby country houses, including Sevens, the hideous “sham and inappropriate” Victorian Gothic residence of the local squire, Mr. Moffatt, and his young adult children, Ena and Noll. Also implicated in the affair are some Americans with agendas and denizens of the Cut and Come Again, a dubious arty West End nightclub, introduced by Punshon in his immediately preceding detective novel, Mystery of Mr. Jessop (1937). In my own view, the mystery plot of The Dusky Hour, which culminates in a final chapter with sixteen pages of elucidation, is of a complexity that ought to please the most exacting of puzzle fans. Whenever I read the novel, I invariably find myself admiring how Bobby, already at the beginning of the story called to the scene by the county constabulary because they believe an emissary from Scotland Yard may be able to identify the murdered man, fits all the author’s intricately cut puzzle pieces together. Yet Milward Kennedy also praised--again most astutely, I believe--the “sharply and economically” drawn characters in The Dusky Hour, as well as the novel’s writing, pronouncing it “irreproachable in style” and “spiced by the author’s wide reading and acute observation.”

There indeed are nicely individuated characters and pleasingly unorthodox authorial asides that enhance this fine crime tale. For example, Punshon on several occasions wryly mocks the High Tory, agrarian conservatism of Mr. Moffatt, as in the following passage, which makes mention of a prominent, real-life English newspaper with a left-leaning, working-class readership: “Mr. Moffatt nodded. He knew Norris well enough, the constable stationed at 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.” Yet again, a Punshon mystery confounds long-prevalent conventional wisdom that the Golden Age English detective novel invariably expressed instinctive longing for the more securely fixed social structures of the Victorian and Edwardian eras.

Through the perspective of the liberal-minded Bobby Owen, the author also indicates doubts about the efficacy of both capital punishment and harsh police interrogation (“It was [Bobby’s] experience that one thing told willingly was worth half a dozen resulting from what are called ‘third degree’ methods”); and he recognizes that English police actually do need to concern themselves, as a matter of law, with obtaining search warrants before conducting a search--surely something that would have come as news to the police characters of Freeman Wills Crofts, whose implacable popular series crime buster, Inspector Joseph French, armed with his startling array of razor blades, bent wires and skeleton keys, routinely flouts English law on this subject with cheerful abandon. In The Dusky Hour I for my part was positively thrilled when a character--a chauffeur no less--evicts the police from his abode after they admit to him that they have no warrant to search it.

On this matter I say three cheers for the people! And three cheers as well for Mr. Punshon and his Detective-Sergeant Bobby Owen--a likable, young British cop who once again cleverly cracks a most complex case, adolescent name or not.

Curtis Evans

CHAPTER 1SHARE-PUSHER?

The little man with the round red smiling face, the soft alluring voice, the ingenuous eyes, sipped with keen appreciation his glass of port, vintage, Dow, 1904; a sound drink.

“Yes,” he was saying meditatively, “I sold him those Woolworth shares for £20. He wasn’t keen; thought they were speculative; talked about preferring something sounder. But he took them all right. Now he’s drawing £20,000 a year from them. Not so bad, eh?” The speaker paused and gave a faint chuckle. “I won’t deny,” he said, “that if I had had the least idea how that deal was going to turn out, I mightn’t have broken my first rule, even though it’s to that I owe what success in business has come my way.”

“What rule is that?” asked his host, Mr. Moffatt, a big, heavy-looking man with a general air of liking to do himself well and at the same time of trying to keep himself in condition by plenty of open-air exercise.

The other sipped his port again. His name was Pegley – Edward George Pegley, generally known as “Peg” or “Ted,” for he was a genial soul and hated all formality. He spoke with a faint American accent. Born in a London suburb, he had spent a good many years in Denver, Colorado.

“My first rule,” he explained seriously, “and I’ve never broken it yet, is that if I know a good thing, I offer it to my clients first. My first duty, I consider, is their interest. In that respect I rank myself with a lawyer, a doctor. The client comes first. Professional duty. Only if my clients pass it do I consider it for myself. Even then –” He shrugged his shoulders. “Lack of capital, and then again – not my business. I’m not an investor. I’m an adviser of investors. If my clients got the idea that I was nosing round for good things for myself, my standing would be gone.” He paused, grinned, winked. “But I own up,” he said, “if I had dreamed that that £20 – good thing though I knew it to be – was going to turn into a steady £20,000 a year, I should have advised it all the same, but when my client turned it down at first, perhaps I shouldn’t have gone on pressing it quite so strongly. All the same, I do feel a bit pleased I can say my rule stands unbroken. I don’t, for instance, own a single share in Cats Cigarettes, though I’ve advised three or four clients to make investments in Cats that bring them in at least a hundred per cent – more, when they bought early. I remember one man – a bank manager – was so impressed by what I told him that he went home, mortgaged his house, furniture, insurance policy – raised fifteen hundred, I think it was – sank the whole lot in Cats Ordinary. I was a bit taken aback myself; more than I had bargained for. His wife was furious; thought he was mad; wept, hysterics, threatened to leave him, sent me a letter from her lawyer threatening I don’t quite know what. Then he died. Wife thought she was ruined. Talked about learning typing and shorthand.

“Now she draws a steady £3,000 a year from that investment, lives in a swell West End flat, learns contract bridge instead of shorthand and typing. I must say she sends me a case of whisky every Christmas and that’s more than some clients do, no matter how much they’ve profited. Of course, I’ve had my fee, so that’s all right.”

“It sounds like a fairy-tale,” said Mr. Moffatt, listening greedily, his eyes alight, his port forgotten – unprecedentedly.

There was a third man present, sitting opposite Mr. Pegley. He was tall, thin, active-looking, with a small head on broad shoulders and a large imposing Roman nose above the tiny moustache and the small pointed imperial that in these days of shaven chins helped to give him his distinctive and even distinguished appearance. His long, loose limbs ended in enormous hands and feet, and on one hand shone a valuable-looking diamond ring, a solitary stone set in platinum. He seemed between forty and fifty years of age, and at the back of his head was beginning to show a bald patch that he admitted smilingly worried him a little, so that, in an endeavour to cure it, he had taken to going about without a hat. He had a habit of silence that added weight to his words when he spoke; grey, keen eyes; an aloof, imperturbable, slightly disdainful manner; and, when he chose to produce it, a most charming, winning smile that seemed to show a store of geniality and friendliness behind his somewhat formal air. His name was Larson – Leopold Leonard Larson. He was in business in the City, and, though he had listened to Mr. Pegley’s monologue in his habitual silence, he had stirred once or twice uneasily in his chair. He was spending the week-end at Sevens, Mr. Moffatt’s place near the Berkshire boundary, and Mr. Pegley had not seemed best pleased to find him there when he himself arrived from London to dine and talk business. He was watching Mr. Larson now with eyes that had grown alert and wary as he went on chatting.

“More than I can understand,” he said, “especially after living so long in the States, the way people on this side leave their money as good as dead. An American would think himself crazy if he kept half his capital on deposit account or tied up in the good old two and a half consols that may have been all right in our fathers’ time, when land was land and brought in a decent return, and all a country gentleman needed was a trifle of ready cash coming in twice a year to meet any delay in the payment of the rents, or any extra estate expense – a new row of cottages, a new wing to the house, or what not. But to keep good money tied up like that to-day – why, it’s like a farmer keeping his seed corn in the barn instead of sowing it in the field. Safe in the barn, no doubt, but where’s next year’s harvest?”

“Ah,” breathed Mr. Moffatt, and he pushed his glass of wine away – a thing that he had never done in all his life before – and he forgot to pass the decanter to Mr. Larson, ruefully aware his own glass was empty, and had been for some time. “Ah,” said Mr. Moffatt again.

“I don’t know why they do it,” Mr. Pegley protested earnestly. “I don’t know even how they meet their liabilities in these days, with all the taxes they clap on land. Why, to-day, the five thousand acres in a ring fence our fathers used to dream of – more a liability than an asset.”

“Pretty heavy liability, too,” declared Mr. Moffatt, still neglectful of that excellent and sound port of the 1904 vintage, still forgetful of Larson’s empty glass, “and you’ve got to pay taxes on that liability, too – talk about four and six in the pound! Jolly lucky if you get off with double that.”

“I know, I know,” said Mr. Pegley, with a world of sympathy in his soft, caressing tones.

“I admit,” said Mr. Larson, but a little as if he deeply regretted having to agree with anything Mr. Pegley said, “I admit the landed classes are at present most unfairly taxed. The trouble is, Moffatt,” he told their host, with one of his rare and charming smiles, “you country gentlemen don’t command votes enough. I was dining” – he paused, checked himself on the edge of what would evidently have been a breach of confidence –”I have personal knowledge,” he went on, “that the Chancellor has been told so himself in the plainest language. He admitted it; all he said was, he could do nothing. As the – the person I am speaking of said afterwards, ‘Politicians never can do anything.’”

Mr. Moffatt expressed a brief but lurid hope anent the future of all politicians.

Mr. Larson, twiddling his empty glass, for his host was still far too absorbed to remember the port, relapsed into his accustomed silence. Mr. Pegley went on talking. Mr. Moffatt continued to listen, to listen as uncertain heirs listen to the reading of a rich man’s will.

“I mustn’t give names,” said Mr. Pegley smilingly, “but I can assure you for one list of investments my clients show me that I can O.K., take my fee for examining, and never worry about again, I get half a dozen that are simply deplorable in their neglect of opportunity, and at least one or two where a very slight readjustment can treble the return. Even in a really good list there is often opportunity for a change that may mean a few hundreds extra with equal security – not to be sneezed at these days. I remember after the war – I had just come out of hospital and was trying to pick up the threads again – I was shown a list; £50,000 capital. A lump in the two and a half’s – good enough if two and a half suits you and you can meet your social position on it. Another lump in the five per cent war loan – good enough then, but, as I told my client, liable to a cut as soon as the Government was ready.”

“Ah,” said Mr. Moffatt again, thinking ruefully of his comfortable little £100 a year from war loan abruptly and bewilderingly turned into £70.

“The rest,” Mr. Pegley went on, “the weirdest stuff you ever saw. I remember one item. Three thousand in a dead alive old family business that just about kept itself going but had a valuable freehold that made the capital safe. Well, I drew up a scheme for that man. No. Thanked me, but wouldn’t change a thing. His look-out. I got my fee. Whether he acted on my advice or not was his affair. I met him a few months back. He was getting twelve hundred a year from his consols. His thousand from war loan had been cut to £700. The rest of his capital brought him about £500. His estate in the Cotswolds put him in wrong a tidy sum every year.”

Mr. Moffatt groaned sympathetically. His own land did not “put him in wrong” by any means, but when he looked at his yearly outlay he often believed it did.

“Meant he had under a thou, to keep up his position on couldn’t be done, of course. Well, believe me or not,” said Mr. Pegley, using a favourite expression of his, “that man still had by him the list of suggested investments shown in the scheme I drew up for him. The first item had gone down the drain – total loss. It happens even with a deal you feel sure of, though I had marked it ‘Speculative.’ But the rest showed a return for that year of grace as near £17,000 per annum as makes no difference. I admit that was partly because the other item I had marked ‘Speculative’ had turned up trumps – much better than I expected, though I thought it good. That happens, too. It was bringing in more that year than the whole of the poor devil’s actual income – and then some. Not so bad, eh? I agree it was a gold-mine, and therefore a wasting asset. But, all the same, good for another twenty years in full yield and for another twenty tailing off. Besides the chance of another strike. ‘If I had done as you advised’ he told me, looking a bit thin about the gills; and then the bus he was waiting for because he couldn’t afford a taxi came along, and he jumped on. I felt a bit sorry for him – and sorry there wouldn’t be any Christmas whisky turning up from him either. I own up, I do appreciate it when clients show they haven’t quite forgotten.”

He sighed sentimentally and lapsed into silence. Mr. Moffatt continued to stare solemnly at his glass of port, still forgetting to drink it, still forgetting to pass on the decanter. He was lost in dreams, dreams of golden streams pouring automatically into his banking account, enormous ceaseless quarterly dividends declared by benevolent directors for the benefit of their shareholders. Why not? he thought. Mr. Larson, with the regretful look at the motionless decanter of one who finally abandons hope, took a pencil and card from his pocket and began to write in his small, precise hand. Mr. Pegley watched him sideways, scowling a little. Mr. Moffatt woke suddenly from his abstraction.

“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 2FIRST 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 Bennett – 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:

“There were papers in the car but none on the body? Isn’t that rather queer?”

“We thought it so,” answered the colonel cautiously. “Everyone has some sort of document in his pocket,” declared Mr. Moffatt, “if it’s only a notebook or an old envelope. Can they have been taken by someone – removed?”

“We thought it possible,” agreed the colonel, still cautiously.

“But, then, that would mean,” said Mr. Moffatt hesitatingly, “that would mean – murder?”

“We thought it possible,” agreed the colonel once again.

CHAPTER 3STORY OF CARD-SHARPERS

Mr. Moffatt looked very disturbed, even uneasy, but excited and interested as well. Murder was certainly a dreadful thing, but also, in a way, impersonal. It was like a war in Spain, a famine in China, a revolution in Mexico or Brazil, tragic, deplorable, but also comfortably remote. Startling, certainly, that this time it had come even as near as Battling Copse, three miles away, on the west far boundary of the Sevens estate, but none the less utterly remote from oneself.

“Are you sure?” he asked. “I mean, what for?... Have you any idea?”

“Well, we haven’t much to go on at present,” the colonel answered. “One of Markham’s men, on his way to work this morning, noticed car-tracks and broken bushes near the Battling Copse chalk-pit. He didn’t think much of it – not a quick thinker, probably. Later he mentioned it to some of his mates and Mr. Markham heard of it, and went down to have a look himself. He saw at once something had gone over the edge of the pit, and there below was the car, upside-down, with the poor chap who had been driving it lying all smashed up by its side. He sent word to Norris, Norris reported, and when I heard I thought I had better come along myself. From the first I didn’t think it looked like an accident. Of course, a skid at a high rate of speed might have done it. But there was no sign of that. And to get there off the road would mean a sharp turn for no apparent reason and then forcing a way through bushes that even in the middle of the night or a fog would have shown any driver he was off the road. It looks as if the car had been parked there for some time, out of the way, and then deliberately driven over the edge.”

“But that would be suicide,” Mr. Moffatt exclaimed.

Colonel Warden made no reply. Detective-Sergeant Owen still seemed absorbed in his map, even though at the same time he was watching and listening attentively. Mr. Moffatt was beginning to feel vaguely uncomfortable. Murder seemed somehow to be creeping near – too near. No longer did it seem merely a paragraph in the paper, something fresh to chat about, an occasion for a comfortable shiver over a comfortable glass of wine. Besides, the impression was growing upon him that these two men, the burly, elderly, soldier-like colonel, the good-looking but quite ordinary young fellow from Scotland Yard, were both watching him closely, though he could not imagine why. He said:

“You have no” – what was the word? ah – “no clues?”

“There was a woman’s lipstick,” the colonel answered, “picked up near where the car went over. Nothing to prove any connection, but it certainly hadn’t been there long and Markham says he saw it long before, so far as is known, any woman had been near. And a fragment of the wrapper of a roll of photographic film. Someone found it and handed it to Norris, and Norris is sure no one had been taking snaps. No connection, most likely; it’s not usual to take snaps of murders.”

Bobby, as if in answer to the colonel’s nod, opened an attaché-case he had with him and produced a small metal lipstick case and a fragment of a paper wrapper with enough printing on it to show what purpose it had served. Both were carefully preserved in cellophane envelopes, though the lipstick case had been trodden deep into the mould by the foot of its finder, and the fragment of wrapper had been handled by half a dozen persons before finally coming into Constable Norris’s possession.

But routine is routine, regulations must be observed, and “Protect the evidence” remains the first standing rule of all investigation.

“Not much chance of finding anything in the way of footmarks or finger-prints,” observed the colonel. “Everything was pretty thoroughly trampled over and pulled about long before Norris got there. The car had been turned right side up, the dead body carried up to one of the farm outhouses. Of course, they had no idea it was anything but an accident. There’s nothing much for us to go on – except the lipstick case and the bit of Kodak film wrapper. Oh,” he added carelessly, “and that odd incident Norris happened to see – the watching Sevens through field-glasses.”

“Seems extraordinary,” agreed Mr. Moffatt uneasily. “Not quite – well, not normal even. Why on earth should anyone...? Looks to me like suicide – or accident.”

“Accident we can rule out,” the colonel answered. “The tracks show the car had been standing some time before being driven over the edge. Suicide is possible. People intending suicide do sometimes destroy all papers and evidence of identity. Even the tailor’s tabs seem to have been removed. But, then, the papers we did find were there, and it’s more likely they were overlooked by someone else than forgotten by the dead man himself – especially as they seem somewhat compromising. We may trace him through the car, of course. And we haven’t the report of the doctors yet. They are doing the post-mortem, and they may find something to show one way or the other. There’s another point. There’s evidence two or three shots were heard close together about four o’clock, and a noise that it seems likely was the car falling. A delivery-van driver, it was. He didn’t trouble to investigate; didn’t think much of it, and was late on his rounds anyhow. Someone shooting rabbits, he thought. But he did mention it when he got back, so there is proof he actually heard something and he seems fairly sure about the time. Also a man working in the field beyond the chalk-pit says he saw someone leaving the copse late in the afternoon, though he’s pretty vague about the exact hour. He can’t give the least description of him, except that it was a man dressed in what he calls gentleman’s clothes, which means, I gather, a dark lounge suit, and that he was holding a hat before his face. No hat can be found belonging to the dead man, and, though plenty of people don’t wear one nowadays, especially when driving, still, Norris says the man he saw had one. Only why take away a hat of all things? It might be it was being held before the face by way of disguise,” he added thoughtfully.

“Is Norris quite certain the dead man is the same as the man he saw before?” Mr. Moffatt asked.

“Oh, yes, he is quite clear about that; thought his behaviour so queer he noticed him particularly. I was wondering – most unpleasant, of course – I hate to do it – but I shall have to ask you to see if you can recognise the body. There must, one supposes, be some reason why he was watching your place.”

“I can’t imagine...” Mr. Moffatt insisted. “Of course, if you think it necessary...”

“I knew we could depend on you,” declared the colonel heartily. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am to have to ask you. Oh, by the way, Mr. Pegley – was that his name? – have you known him long? You have another friend staying with you, too, I think?”

“Yes. A man named Larson; very nice fellow, down for the week-end. City man – finance, companies, all that sort of thing. Ena and I met him on the Berengaria two years ago, when we went to Boston to visit Ena’s uncle there. Larson put me under a considerable obligation during the voyage.”

“May I ask in what way?”

“Well, in confidence, of course. As a matter of fact, I had been playing poker a good deal. Silly, no doubt. Bridge is my game, not poker. I ought to have known better. Dropped a tidy sum. Larson looked on one night. Never said a word. He’s like that. Just watched. Next day told me the play was crooked. Said it just like that. ‘Crooked play last night,’ like ‘Nice morning, isn’t it?’ or ‘Lunch bell gone yet?’ I – well, I didn’t know what to think. He offered to prove it. He joined us next night. Told me what to do. I won back all I had lost and nearly fifty more. Spoiling the Egyptians, eh?”

“And Larson?”

“Dropped a fiver. He wouldn’t let me return it; said he had had more than his money’s worth in fun. He watched them, saw how they stacked the cards, was able to sign to me when to back my hand, when to throw in. They didn’t like it. Kept muttering and whispering to each other. Broke up the game finally, and there was no more card playing that voyage.”

Mr. Moffatt chuckled delightedly, thoroughly enjoying the memory of that past triumph. The colonel asked:

“Did you make any complaint?”

“No. Impossible. Those fellows don’t give you the chance. No proof. Larson told me they don’t even use marked cards or anything. They just rely on their own smartness, palming an extra ace and so on. Besides, I had got my own back and some more, too. Not so bad to sit down with a brace of card-sharpers and get up nearly fifty to the good.”

“Since then you have been friendly together?”

“Well, I gave him my card and asked him to look me up when he was back in England. He never did, and then I ran across him in town about six months ago. He had quite forgotten me and he had lost my card. Not the only time, apparently, he has had a bit of fun with card-sharpers. I insisted on lunching him, and we’ve seen something of him since. But he’s a very busy man. Reserved, though. Especially about business. Says it’s second nature with him now; so much often depends on not letting the other fellow know what you’re doing. He’s in with some very big people indeed.”

Bobby was making notes again. The colonel said:

“And Mr. Pegley? Have you known him long?”

“A few months, not more,” Mr. Moffatt answered. “He wrote offering to buy a few shares I had in a West African gold-mining concern. Worth nothing at all. He offered a penny a share – they are two-shilling shares. He was quite frank about it – said there was a possibility of a new paying vein being found. One of his clients was buying up all the shares he could find – purely speculative. Pegley said I must decide for myself whether to sell out or hang on. I said I would think it over. Pegley sent me a wire next day to advise me to sell, but before I decided the bottom fell out of the whole thing and I lost the £20 I might have sold for. The shares are waste paper now.”

“Do you often operate on the Stock Exchange, Mr. Moffatt?” Bobby asked, looking up from his notebook in which he had been making entries.

“Rarest thing in the world,” declared Mr. Moffatt. “My money is nearly all in consols – safe two and a half; not much, but safe.”

The colonel smiled to himself at the virtuous tone in which this had been said. That Mr. Moffatt was the fortunate holder of a very large block of old consols was fairly well known, for when he was not grumbling about the poor return derived from land in these days he was generally lamenting the niggardly return of two and a half per cent he derived from his invested capital. As the investment had been made a good many years before, when consols stood well over par, there really had been a considerable shrinkage in nominal capital value, even though they had recovered from those dreadful war days when they had dropped so low that Mr. Moffatt felt himself face to face with ruin.

“You have kept in touch with him though?” the colonel asked.

“Well, no, not exactly. It just happens we have run across one another once or twice – we met in the train again some time back. He got into my compartment. I was coming back from town. He was going on somewhere to see a client – he’s an investment consultant.”

“What’s that?” inquired Colonel Warden, and Bobby, too, seemed interested as his busy pencil hovered over the pages of his notebook.

“Well,” Mr. Moffatt answered slowly, “he advises people about their investments. Has most amazing stories to tell. He tells of one client he advised to invest a trifle in Woolworths and now he draws £20,000 a year from them.”

“Oh,” said the colonel, with a certain touch of incredulity in his voice, for, though the tale might be true, he had heard it before.

It was the hint of scepticism in the other’s voice that decided Mr. Moffatt. He drew out the card Larson had dropped before him earlier in the evening.

“Larson doesn’t like him,” he blurted out. “I saw there was something wrong the moment I introduced them. Larson says he’s a share-pusher.”