The Dusky Hour (12 page)

“There's mother,” she said abruptly. “Excuse me a moment, I must tell her you are here.”

An elderly woman, whom Bobby took to be Mrs. Oulton, had just come in by the garden gate. Henrietta got up quickly and left the kitchen. Bobby thought it was like her direct methods to have said outright that she wished to tell her mother of his presence instead of making some excuse or another. He got up and went across to look at the tiny water-colours hanging on the wall – almost a schoolgirl's work in their extreme simplicity and yet with a haunting quality about them that was difficult to appreciate. And how had she been able to imagine that effect of light on the dew-drops caught upon a spider's web spun between the twigs of a rose-bush? Sentimental, he decided, only that it was austere as well; and then Henrietta came back into the kitchen, looking very cross.

“Molly's just too trying,” she declared. “She's torn up the thing she'd just done of the beeches, and it was lovely.”

“She is a severe critic of her own work,” Bobby remarked, making up his mind now that the one he had been looking at of the dew upon the spider's web was, after all, quite ordinary – anyone could have done it who had happened to see it like that.

“I could shake her,” declared Henrietta formidably. “Molly's wonderful, but no one understands. Mrs. O'Brien did.”

“Did she?” exclaimed Bobby, interested.

“She said Molly was a genius,” Henrietta said, a little as if challenging him to deny it, and, if he did, then he would get the shaking Miss Molly merited. “She gave her an introduction to an agent – someone she knew – Fisher, his name was, off Fleet Street somewhere. He has got Molly one commission. Twenty pounds. She goes up to town once a week to see him now and to try other places as well. Mrs. O'Brien wanted us to go back and live in town; she said you had to be on the spot; she said Molly was wasted here. Of course, she wanted to get Molly away; away from Mr. Hayes, I mean.”

“Mr. Hayes goes up to town pretty regularly, too, doesn't he?” Bobby remarked.

“Yes. He hates the country really. I can't think why he ever came to live in it,” she answered.

Bobby couldn't either. But, then, Hayes might have thought he would enjoy country life before coming to experience it; expectation so often outruns reality. He went on:

“You said Mr. Hayes was here for tea the day before yesterday?”

“Yes,” she answered, looking at him again in her grave, direct way. “He got here about ten past four. Is it true that – that whatever happened at Battling Copse happened at four exactly?”

“We have evidence,” he told her, “that shots were heard at four o'clock and further evidence that almost immediately afterwards a noise was heard coming from the copse of something heavy falling. Presumably that was the car going over into the chalk-pit. Also a man, in what the witness calls gentleman's clothes – which seems to mean an ordinary lounge suit with a bowler hat – was seen leaving the copse somewhere about four. Unluckily, that's all the description we have of him, but all of it together fixes the time pretty accurately. You are sure of the time Mr. Hayes got here?”

“Oh, quite sure,” she answered, smiling a little. “He happened to say it was a quarter past. We were in the egg-shed, and he said he had been waiting so long without seeing anyone he thought we must all have gone off for the afternoon and there was no chance of tea. It struck the quarter” – she glanced as she spoke at the clock above the mantelpiece that Bobby had already noticed possessed a loud strike, and chimed both the hours and quarters – “and Mr. Hayes looked at his watch and said we were just right.” She smiled again. “It's a good quarter of an hour from Battling Copse here,” she said, “even hurrying. Mr. Hayes hadn't been hurrying, and he had been here some minutes.”

“Has there been any talk about him?” Bobby asked.

“There's been a lot of talk about everyone,” she retorted. “I don't think I heard anything about him specially, though, only you were rather anxious to know the exact time he was here.”

“Well, it's always a help,” Bobby admitted, smiling, “to know the exact whereabouts of everyone in the neighbourhood.”

But to himself he thought that the alibi she had thus provided depended a good deal upon clock and watch being both correct, and that it is by no means difficult to alter clock or watch when necessary. For that matter, apparently no one else had been present, so that the Hayes alibi depended solely upon Henrietta's word – as hers presumably would do upon his. Not completely satisfactory, he thought.

“I am sorry to have asked you so many questions,” he said presently. “I am afraid you thought a lot of them very stupid and boring. It's just routine. We have to go on worrying and worrying till perhaps we do – or we don't – get hold of something. There's just one other thing, and after that I shan't have to worry you any more, I hope. You said your father – Mr. Oulton – had business dealings with a Mr. Bennett. Very likely the coincidence means nothing. But you said he was unusually tall, and yet you also said you had never seen him.”

“It was what father said once,” she explained. “Molly found a pair of gloves in his car. We knew they weren't dad's, because they were too big. Dad said he and Mr. Bennett had been making business calls together and Mr. Bennett must have forgotten them. Molly laughed about their being so big. She tried them on and we all laughed – her hand would have gone into the thumb nearly – and dad said Mr. Bennett was a very big man, over six feet. That's all.”

A memory had been stirring faintly in Bobby's mind.

“I don't want to distress you,” he said, “but the name – Oulton. Was there not – two or three years ago or more...?”

“He was found shot,” she answered steadily. “They said it was suicide. We never believed it. But that was the verdict.” 

“At the seaside, wasn't it?” Bobby asked.

“Yes. They found him in the car. He had lost all his money. He had always been very well off. We lived like that – I mean a big house and so on. When he died there wasn't anything. Even mother's bonds had gone. They said that was why – why they believed he shot himself. But dad wasn't like that.”

“No,” said Bobby, who knew, however, that sometimes those who are not “like that” break down before the threat of poverty and the imagined shame of failure. He added:

“I think I remember vaguely something about bonds.”

“We were sure they had been stolen,” she told him. “They said dad must have sold them, but we knew he wouldn't do that because they weren't his; they were mother's, her very own.”

“Couldn't they be traced?”

“They were bearer bonds,” she explained. “It was about the income-tax.”

“Income-tax?” he repeated, puzzled.

“Mother thought it was such a shame she had to pay such a lot after she married again,” Henrietta explained. “Before, with the allowances and so on, the tax wasn't so very much. But after she got married she had to pay super-tax as well. It took more than half her income. Dad said he would manage it for her. He told her to take her money out of consols and buy bearer bonds from America and put them in a safe in a bank in Paris. Twice every year they went to Paris – they made a little holiday of it – and mother cut off the coupons and dad got them cashed for her, and it was all right. Money invested in America and cashed in France had nothing to do with the Government here, had it?”

“I don't think I can give an opinion on that,” Bobby answered, a little stiffly.

“It was quite all right,” she insisted, in tones that suggested very strongly she was not quite comfortable about it. “I asked father once, but he showed me what Dean Inge said about under a purely predatory Government it was not clear there was any duty to make a true declaration of income. And he said of course that meant the Labour Government, and, anyhow, he and mother were making a true declaration of their income, only what they got in France was different. Besides, the bonds have all gone now.”

“We needn't discuss that, fortunately,” Bobby said. “You mean these bonds disappeared?”

“Yes. After father's death, mother and I went to Paris to get them and the safe was empty. There was nothing to show what had become of them. Mother didn't even know what they were for; she had never noticed. She says she would know them again, because they were all stained with ink she upset over them once in Paris when she was cutting off the coupons. But you can't trace them by that. You see, everything was done privately.”

Bobby nodded. Precautions had plainly been taken to cover up even the cashing of the coupons so as to avoid any risk of difficulty with the British revenue authorities. Quite possibly they had not been stolen at all, but Mr. Oulton, hard pressed, had disposed of them, even if they were his wife's property, hoping, as people will, to be able to replace them quickly. All the same, the story seemed to him curious and interesting, and he wondered a little if she had any purpose in relating it to him in such full detail.

“Couldn't they help you at the bank where the bonds had been kept?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“They wouldn't help much,” she said. “They were afraid of being sued for negligence. We did hear that a little, shabbily dressed man had shown the bank a note from father, authorising him to open the safe to obtain some papers from it. But we couldn't prove it, and the bank would admit nothing. We don't know ourselves if that's true, but we are sure, if there was such a letter, it was a forgery. Because there was nothing in the safe ever, except mother's bonds. There was one thing. The bank had one of father's cards. It was one of some new ones he had just had done, in a different type. We knew he hadn't been in France since they had been printed. So how did that card get there? We thought perhaps the bank had accepted the card as proof of identity or as authority. Someone might have got hold of it and shown it at the bank, and a careless or stupid clerk or porter or someone might have thought it was all right. Or there might have been bribery. But they denied it, and we had no proof, and, anyhow, the bonds were gone. It seemed hopeless to think of getting them back. Our lawyers said, both in France and England, there was nothing to be done. Mother always said it was Mr. Bennett.”

“Was he asked?”

“No. We couldn't trace him. We heard he had gone to America but we couldn't find out. It seemed very – well, funny.”

“So it does,” agreed Bobby. “How did Mr. Oulton meet Mr. Bennett?”

“That was in Paris once, when he and mother were over there to get the coupons. He saved father from a bad accident – pulled him out of the way of a car that was skidding or something. Father was knocked down but he wasn't hurt. He told mother, but when they went to Mr. Bennett's hotel to thank him, he had left. Then they happened to meet by chance in London, at Charing Cross. Father used to joke about always meeting everyone at Charing Cross if only you waited long enough. Father said Mr. Bennett didn't know him at first, and didn't like being recognised, because he was meeting some Americans on important business. It was confidential, and he thought at first father knew something and was trying to force his way in. After that they got very friendly, and mother was always wanting father to bring him to dinner, and he was always coming and then he couldn't because of business – he had a lot of business abroad. Then he had to rush off to America – he had a cable asking him to go at once; it was about two big banks that were joining up.” She paused and then went on slowly: “After that, father invested a lot of money in America and everything went wrong. And after they found him in the car at High Beech, near Deal, there wasn't anything left at all. When we found the bonds had vanished as well, none of us had a penny except our clothes and a few hundred pounds an aunt left me when she died. So we bought this farm with that and came here to try to make a living.”

Bobby, who had been watching the clock, rose to go. It was fully time he was off, but before he went, after he had thanked her again for having spoken so freely, he added:

“Do you think you could let me have a photograph of Mr. Oulton? It might be useful if we came across any trace of this Mr. Bennett.”

The request evidently both surprised and disturbed her. She glanced, as it were involuntarily, towards the frame made for three photographs but now holding only that of her mother, flanked by Molly's two sketches, and Bobby was very sure it was again a momentary uneasiness that flickered and passed in those deep, wide-set eyes of hers. Then she faced him resolutely.

“No,” she said. “I do not wish to do that.”

 “It is, of course, for you to say,” he agreed, and took his leave, and he was aware that as long as he was still in sight she stood there, watching him.

In all that district there was nothing in the shape either of a mortuary or a coroner's court. Any available shed or barn had to serve for the one, any convenient room for the other. In this case the inquest was to be held in one of the rooms of the Red Lion. In a barn near by the post-mortem had been performed and the body still remained, waiting there till it had been seen by the jury. To-day the Sevens party was to view it in the hope that one or other of them might be able to identify it, and when Bobby arrived after his long talk with Henrietta Towers this ceremony was already over.

Bobby asked one of the police present to report his arrival to Colonel Warden, and so was soon summoned to that gentleman's presence. He had established himself in the small room that served as an office for the landlord of the inn, and he listened with a somewhat worried attention to the very full report Bobby made of his talk with Miss Towers.

“I don't see what all this about stolen bonds has to do with us,” he complained irritably when Bobby had finished. “Most likely they were simply sold by Mr. Oulton, only his family prefer to think of him as a victim of theft and murder rather than as an embezzler of his wife's money and a suicide.”