The Secret Search: A Bobby Owen Mystery Read online

  “The beds have been made,” Ted said to him. “They can’t have been gone long. They must be all right. They’ll be back soon.”

  “The beds may never have been slept in,” Bobby said. “Can you tell if any of Mrs Wyllie’s outdoor clothing is missing?”

  “I don’t know,” Ted answered. “Her fur coat’s there.” He pointed to it lying on the floor. “For God’s sake, do something!” he burst out.

  “Seems to me,” the inspector said, “as if what’s happened was late last night. Beds not slept in, two hot-water bottles in kitchen waiting to be filled, supper-things washed up and put away, and no sign of breakfast.”

  Bobby nodded agreement, and went back to the kitchen. Their first hurried glance had shown him a door opposite the window. He said to Ted:

  “What’s that door?”

  “The cellar. It’s empty. The coal’s kept outside. Mother didn’t like the cellar steps, carrying the coal up. It’s kept locked. The key ought to be there. It always is.”

  “I’ll open it, if you don’t mind,” Bobby said.

  It was a simple lock, and Bobby had previously had occasion to use his quite unofficial skill as a locksmith. In a minute or two he had it open. Within there showed the head of a steep flight of steps. Bobby switched on the torch he always had with him. Ted said:

  “Mother had the shoot blocked up in the war. She was afraid of poison gas.”

  At the foot of the stairs was a strong door. It had been securely fastened by a wedge thrust beneath it and by two screws driven into the door-post. Bobby removed the wedge and turned his attention to the hinges. He thought them more vulnerable than the screws. Soon he had them wrenched away and the door forced back. Within, the light of his torch showed two women, one standing up before another, who was half sitting, half lying on the cellar floor. Ted pushed past Bobby. He called:

  “Mother! Are you all right? Mother!”

  “No thanks to you if she isn’t, Master Ted, and you so long coming,” snapped the standing woman. “Help me get her to bed, and then put the kettle on.”

  CHAPTER XVI

  “SHE THOUGHT SHE WAS THERE”

  THE LITTLE house became all bustle and activity. A small crowd gathered outside, stared, obeyed a request to move on, re-gathered, continued staring. Indoors Mrs Wyllie had to be got to bed. A doctor had to be sent for, though Miss Poore made it plain she had a very low opinion of doctors and a very high opinion of her own home-made remedies. Miss Poore herself had to be almost forced to sit down and rest and take some food, with the result that she nearly collapsed, whereas before she had seemed prepared to take full charge of everything—including, and especially, the police. Of them she expressed the opinion that she didn’t want a lot of men trapesing all over the place now, when there had been no sign of them when wanted. As soon as she had emerged from the darkness of the cellar into daylight it was seen that her face was badly bruised and swollen, but for these injuries she firmly refused attention. She knew what to do for them, she declared. Cold water and a preparation of her own were all that was required. No doctor’s stuff for her. Indeed, she seemed to have suffered very much less than had Mrs Wyllie from the treatment they had received and their long confinement.

  Then, too, the team of police whose arrival had drawn from Miss Poore the already noted protest was showing itself extremely active, while Ted had been asked to make a careful examination of the contents of the house, so that it could be known what was missing.

  At last, however, Bobby was able to find time to question Miss Poore. She was in the kitchen, whence she had just driven the doctor with the remark that she had done without doctors for sixty years and wasn’t going to start now. She was heating some concoction of her own in a saucepan on the gas, and when Bobby tried to say something sympathetic about the injuries to her face, she observed that anyhow it hadn’t spoiled her beauty, she having none nor ever had.

  “Could you tell us just what happened last night?” asked Bobby, who was accompanied by the Bournemouth inspector.

  “It was when we were listening to the wireless,” she said. “The mistress likes to listen, and it isn’t such a waste of time as you might think, because of being able to do your sewing and not pay attention. Most like along of the noise the wireless was making I never heard a thing till the mistress started to scream, and I turned round, and there was a man in the door with a bit of stuff over his face so as to hide his ugly mug. He said to put our hands up, and I tried to get at the poker, but he hit me first, and, I suppose,” admitted Miss Poore reluctantly, “I must have tumbled down, and then somehow—I don’t quite remember how—we were being pushed along into the kitchen and down the cellar.” She paused and fixed a severe and exceedingly swollen eye on Bobby. “Young man,” she said, “are you police?”

  “Well, yes,” Bobby admitted, somewhat apprehensively.

  “What for?” demanded Miss Poore.

  “But not Bournemouth,” Bobby explained, hurriedly and pusillanimously. “My friend here is from the Bournemouth force.”

  “Oh, is he?” said Miss Poore. “And what’s the good of you if you let decent respectable people be put in cellars in their own houses, and might be there still, only for being let out?”

  “We are very sorry indeed about that, ma’am,” said the Bournemouth man meekly, far too prudent to attempt any defence. “We’ll do our best to see it doesn’t happen again. And then, of course,” he added, getting a little of his own back, “we didn’t know anything about it till Mr Owen told us. He’s from London.”

  “From London?” repeated Miss Poore, and her tone made it plain what she thought of London and those who came therefrom. She surveyed the two of them with impartial disapproval, and indeed they had rather the air of two small boys each trying to excuse himself and put the blame on the other. “I never did think police were much good,” she remarked. “A lot of men! Except for asking the way,” she added, trying to be fair.

  Bobby, a little afraid of drawing fresh fire, inquired cautiously if she could give any further description of their assailant. Any, even the smallest, detail would be helpful, he said. But she shook her head. She had had, she said, only the merest glimpse of him before diving for the poker and getting knocked out. She was not even sure if he had been alone or if he had a companion, though her impression was that that there had been a second man. It was plain that as a result of the brutal and stunning blow she had received her memory of subsequent events was very hazy. Nothing more emerged than the statement already made—that the intruder had been a very big man.

  Bobby went on to ask if she or Mrs Wyllie could tell him anything more about the young lady, a Miss Betty Smith, who had been coming to stay with them but had never arrived.

  “She stayed with you during the war at different times, I understand,” Bobby said.

  “And her room ready this time and all,” Miss Poore said, “and then she never came. And don’t tell me she wouldn’t if she could have helped. Something happened. There’s been an accident, or she’s ill. She wasn’t one to do a thing like that if she could help it.”

  “What makes you say that?” Bobby asked.

  “Because she wasn’t,” Miss Poore answered conclusively. “Not like most of the girls to-day, all paint and silliness and powder, and not an idea in their heads except their boys. She had a way of cheering you up, somehow—had you laughing when you didn’t want.” Miss Poore pursed her lips and shook her head, evidently feeling it a duty to condemn the memory of a cheerfulness she had nevertheless enjoyed at the time. “Always ready to help, and wanted me to sit down while she did the washing-up. As if I would. The mistress thought a deal of her, and all last night kept talking to her off and on. She thought she was there.”

  “Thought she was there?” Bobby repeated, puzzled. “Who do you mean?”

  “Miss Betty,” snapped Miss Poore. “That’s what I said, isn’t it? A bit light-headed she was, and so would you, if you had been knocked about unexpected in your ow
n house and pushed in the cellar, and the air so you could cut it with a knife.”

  “Do you mean Mrs Wyllie thought she saw her? Did she say she did?”

  “She wouldn’t have been trying to talk to her if she hadn’t thought she was there, would she?” Miss Poore retorted. “Kept asking her where she had been and why she had been so long, and things like that, and I couldn’t hush her, though I tried.”

  “Did she seem to get any reply?”

  “How could she when I keep telling you there was no one there and it was all because of being treated the way she was?”

  “Me, O.K.,” Bobby said.

  “What’s that mean?” Miss Poore asked suspiciously, and Bobby’s Bournemouth colleague gave him a surprised stare.

  “Oh, nothing,” Bobby answered quickly. “Just a sort of catchword I seem to have picked up somehow. About Miss Smith. Do you think there was anything between her and Mr Wyllie?”

  “That’s for them to say,” Miss Poore answered severely. “She might have done worse, and so might Master Ted. I’ll tell you one thing. It’s a lie about her meeting a strange young man in London and going off with him. She wouldn’t ever. Not that sort—not with a young man she didn’t know.”

  “But it might have been some one she did know?” Bobby suggested.

  “There wasn’t any,” Miss Poore answered. “She said in her letter there wasn’t any she knew any more in England except us. And if it was—though it couldn’t be when no one knew she was coming—she would never have gone off without letting us know, not when she had told us to expect her, and knew we were.”

  Miss Poore was beginning to show signs of exhaustion, and Bobby suggested she would be better in bed. She snapped out a demand to be told who was going to look after the house and the mistress and Master Ted and all if she was in bed, where she said, with great firmness, she had no intention of going. With even greater firmness, Bobby told her to bed she was going, if he had to carry her there, and that the attendance had been arranged for of a nurse, who would be arriving almost any minute. Miss Poore told him sharply that she didn’t hold with nurses, whom she described as a lot of simpering minxes, and she wasn’t going to have them in her house.

  However, the conflict thus threatened between Bobby, irresistible, and herself, unmoveable, was resolved when Miss Poore suddenly collapsed into a half faint. Before she had fully recovered the expected nurse appeared, as tart, resolute and efficient as Miss Poore herself. The ensuing battle was short, ending in complete victory for the nurse, though it is only fair to remember Miss Poore was by no means up to her usual fighting form. Before she well knew what was happening she was in bed, her bruised face was being attended to—and with ‘doctor’s stuff’, her own cherished concoction having gone contemptuously into the sink—she had been given a pill so briskly she hardly knew she had taken it before, as a result, she was sound asleep, and the nurse set free to organise fresh victories.

  Bobby, meanwhile, relieved at this happy outcome, went to look for the sergeant who had been in charge of the examination of the house. From him Bobby learned that no ‘dabs’ had been discovered, nor anything else of interest. The weather had been dry, and the garden showed no footprints. The back door had been found locked, but the lock was one, according to the sergeant, that a ten-year-old could pick with a match stalk. The key had been picked up lying on the floor near the door, and it looked as if the door had been locked on the outside and the key then pushed beneath it. There didn’t seem to be anything much missing, or so the young gentleman said. He was in the front sitting-room now, and there accordingly Bobby found Ted.

  “Nothing missing, as far as I can tell,” he repeated to Bobby. “Mother hadn’t much jewellery, but it’s all there, I think. So is what silver she had—a tea-set and some other things. It all seems all right, in spite of the way everything’s been thrown about. I can’t make it out.”

  “Would Mrs Wyllie be likely to have any money by her?” Bobby asked.

  “No, just the housekeeping. Anything big she pays by cheque. There’s four or five pounds in her handbag, and that hasn’t been taken either. There’s one thing, but mother may have put it away—a photo of Betty she sent from Canada. It used to be in a silver frame on the piano, but it’s not there now.”

  “That’s very important,” Bobby said. “Helps to make the picture a lot clearer.”

  CHAPTER XVII

  “THE ONE THING MISSING”

  LATER ON the same day Bobby returned to London. For there it was, he felt, that the main investigation would have to be carried out. Seemouth and Bournemouth could be left to attend to the routine inquiries necessary on the spot, but it was highly improbable that anything very useful would be discovered in either locality. Not there, but in London, was to be sought the cause, the perpetrators, of both crimes, and only there could be found the evidence and the proof required to bring the criminals to justice. Even more important, only in London was there, Bobby felt, much hope of securing the information necessary to prevent the success of what it now seemed certain was a daring and ruthless scheme to obtain possession of the Smith fortune. Already one life had been sacrificed in that aim, and it was heavy on Bobby’s mind that more were in the balance.

  His responsibility it was, he told himself unhappily, to save those endangered—a heavier responsibility by far than merely to avenge a life already lost.

  “If, that is,” he said to Olive, “it isn’t in fact too late. There is one hopeful sign—the photograph missing from Bournemouth.”

  “The one taken from Mrs Wyllie’s?” Olive asked.

  “The one thing missing,” Bobby said. “Bournemouth has confirmed from her that it was in the front sitting-room and that now it isn’t.”

  “All that just to get hold of a photograph?” Olive asked, a little doubtfully.

  “And felt to be so important that jewellery and cash and silver were all left alone,” Bobby said. “There’s only one explanation for a photograph being wanted so badly as all that—to identify somebody. And that means that that somebody must be still alive. And that’s what’s troubled me ever since I knew the second Betty Smith had disappeared. Easier to hide the dead than the living,” he said grimly.

  Olive said don’t and it gave her the shivers when he talked like that. Then she said:

  “Suppose these people do find her now they’ve got her photograph to work from?”

  “Now you give me the shivers,” Bobby told her, and there was silence for a time. Then he said: “Gay and happy, every one said, even Miss Poore, and it must have been a bit of a job to make that old battle-axe laugh.”

  “Bobby,” Olive said, “you just simply must.”

  “I tell myself that,” Bobby answered. “I don’t know that it helps. It’s time that matters. If we had all the time, we could be sure of finding her in the end, even if we had to go all over the country with a fine tooth-comb. It’s not only finding her, but finding her first. There’s so little that we know.”

  “You do know it must have been Tiny Garden who was at Bournemouth?”

  “Oh, yes,” Bobby agreed. “We can work on that. Description agrees well enough, and the whole thing is like him. Unnecessary and stupid brutality. And there’s no doubt about his being guilty of the murder of old Mr Smith. Cy King has established his alibi. He knew, or guessed, what was going to happen, but he has made it plain he had no part in it. Ted Wyllie has an alibi, too. He was in London.”

  “But you don’t suspect him, surely?” Olive protested.

  “Why not? He seems to have been the only person in a position to know when the second Miss Smith from Canada would arrive, and therefore apparently the only person in a position to meet her—as she was met. And Miss Poore says she would never have gone away with a stranger, so it must have been some one she knew.”

  “But why? Why should he?”

  “The whole thing is obviously aimed at getting hold of the Smith fortune—two hundred thousand pounds,” Bobby told her. “Th
e only way of doing that is through the first Betty Smith. She inherits the money by a will no one would even think of disputing, since she passes as the only living relative. The easiest way of getting hold of the money after that is by marrying her. After which, again, she may meet with a sudden death. Oh, yes, it’s on the cards,” he added, as he saw Olive about to protest. “She may be induced to hand it over or share it out, and she may refuse. Plenty of possibilities there. She may find herself in deeper water than she ever thought of when it began. There’s this story of the fit of hysterics as soon as she got back from Seemouth, which does rather suggest that she hadn’t been contemplating murder, and had a shock when she found others were.”

  “You feel sure she is an impostor?”

  “Nothing else makes sense,” Bobby said. “My idea is that she is really the daughter of old Mrs Day, the housekeeper. There is a certain family resemblance. They’ve both the same shaped, rather prominent noses. Nothing very marked, but it’s there. Probably Mrs Day discovered that the old man was feeling very much alone in the world, and found out he had a niece in Canada he had never seen. Or heard of for years. What easier than to provide him with this unknown niece in the form of her own daughter? So the girl is sent off to Canada to find out details and get the necessary local colour. She comes back, introduces herself, and is welcomed. Some one of his family to look after him in his old age, Mr Smith must have felt, and didn’t dream it was his own swift and sudden death that he was welcoming. I don’t expect either Mrs Day or the girl were thinking of murder at first. Their idea was probably a good fat cheque on some pretext—buying a business for the girl or something like that—and then disappearing with a small but quite satisfactory loot. But she got such a warm welcome and was soon so well established that bigger possibilities began to show up. Still, very likely no thought of murder yet. Then the man called Sunday comes on the scene. Pretty clear he is Mrs Day’s son and the girl’s brother. Quite a family affair. Notice the ‘day’ termination? The ‘Sun’ may come from his red hair, or maybe because he is Mrs Day’s son. Anyhow, it’s clear he soon got to know their plans. Couldn’t keep it to themselves. Felt it a bit too big for them to handle, and wanted help probably. And Sunday would want quick results. Mrs Day had a good job as housekeeper, and the girl was comfortably fixed as favourite niece. So they two may have been ready to wait, even though it’s weary waiting for dead men’s shoes. But not Sunday. Or again, the girl may have wanted action. She may have got tired dancing attendance on an old man and humouring and flattering him all day—a change she may have found intolerably dull after the sort of life she had probably been leading.”