The Dusky Hour (31 page)

The light from the open window suddenly vanished. Someone had closed the window, drawn the curtains.

Uncertain what to do, whether to follow where the desperate runner had seemed to pass, to return to seek that other who went so silently, so cautiously, Bobby stood still. It was all quiet again, quiet and very still. Now the silence seemed complete. It was as though those running footsteps, that stealthy tread, had hushed all other sounds; as though the house, the garden, the surrounding night, all alike waited in a breathless pause for what might happen next.

Someone not very far away cried aloud, as if in fear or pain. A more distant voice called out twice over:

“Take care, take care.”

“Who is it? Who is there?” Bobby shouted, and then was inclined to be sorry he had so announced his presence.

There came no answer, nor was the warning cry repeated, or that cry he had taken to be of fear or of pain. As he had spoken once, he thought he would try again. He shouted at the full force of his lungs:

“There is a police officer here – police.”

He thought he heard someone laugh and that was all. He moved in the direction whence he thought this last sound had seemed to come. He ran into a growth of rhododendrons and then blundered into a holly hedge, with no resultant improvement to his temper, which was becoming sadly ruffled. Backing away from that prickly hedge, his foot caught in some obstruction and he fell. He got to his feet again and stood listening. He had the absurd idea that all the garden was shaking with secret laughter at his expense. He found his cheek was cut and was bleeding slightly. He thought to himself:

“I'm getting scared. Nerves. Never knew I had any. I'm doing no good here. I'll get back to the house.”

Then he thought:

“I was a silly fool to leave it. Most likely I shall get told so when I report.”

He began to make his way back towards the house. It stood up black and heavy in the night, a huge overpowering shadow with no glimmer showing anywhere, a dead thing uninhabited in the night, it seemed, and yet Bobby was aware of an impression that it was the scene of fierce and swift activities, of uncontrolled passions that had broken at last through the veneer of civilised life. The garden seemed to have fallen quiet now; it was as if all that was happening had become concentrated on the dark and silent house. He began to run. He nearly fell again. The treachery of the darkness made him slacken his pace. The thought came to him that most likely he would find the house closed, barred and shuttered against him, so that he would have to remain without, shut out and helpless.

It had been foolish, he told himself again, to yield to his first impulse that had sent him running in pursuit of Noll Moffatt, a pursuit he might have realised the darkness would render futile. A nice fool he would look if, for instance, the deputy chief constable arrived before his time and had to be told that he, Bobby, had been locked out.

He reached the wall of the house. The study window he had jumped from was a little further on – to the right, he thought. He groped his way along by the wall, got tangled up in a border planted with rose-bushes, and a beam of light shot out suddenly a little way ahead. The curtains over the study window had been drawn a trifle aside. Someone was peeping out into the night. Hayes, presumably, anxious for Bobby's return, but no more anxious, Bobby thought, for that return than Bobby was himself.

He hurried on. He reached the window. The curtain, drawn aside, gave him a clear view of the lighted interior. Someone was standing there between the half-open door and the table. It was Noll Moffatt. He looked very pale, and in one hand he held a pistol. By the table, near the chair Hayes had been sitting in, lay a still and crumpled human form. By it was the bottle of whisky, overturned, its contents spreading out in a slowly increasing pool.

Bobby leaped to a standing position on the windowsill. With his elbow he smashed one of the upper panes. The glass fell in a tinkling shower; the crash sounded like an exploding bomb. The thought crossed Bobby's mind that perhaps Noll would shoot. If he did, he could not want an easier target. Bobby put his hand through the opening he had made, unlatched the window Hayes had evidently fastened after Bobby's precipitate exit, and flung it up. He tore the curtain down and jumped through into the room.

All this had taken not much more than thirty or forty seconds, but that had been long enough for Noll Moffatt to vanish. The door was still quivering, though, with the vibration from the bang wherewith it had been closed.

Bobby turned to the crumpled form lying there, supine, by the chair. He turned it over. He saw that it was not Hayes, but Pegley, unconscious, bleeding from a contused wound in the forehead.

Bobby merely gaped for a moment or two. In the first paralysis of his astonishment he did not even ask himself how Pegley had got there. It came into his mind that he must be suffering from some strange illusion. He looked all round, almost expecting to find that the room, too, had endured some strange transformation. But it at least was still the same as it had been before, though the man prostrate there was Pegley and not Hayes.

Bobby put a hand upon the table, as if to keep hold upon some solid fact that would not change and alter. This person, this Pegley-not-Hayes, was not dead, anyhow. He had been knocked out by that blow on the head, but, possibly, if he could be revived, he could give some explanation of his appearance and what had happened. But then there was Noll Moffatt, too – seen twice, so he could be no dream – and what was he doing here? Bobby was still standing there in this kind of frenzy of bewilderment when he heard the door open.

He swung round instantly. In the doorway Reeves was standing, calm and imperturbable as a well-trained servant should be, neat, unruffled, as if he had just come in with the letters or to announce the arrival of a guest. Bobby blinked at him. For a moment or two they remained looking at each other. Then, without a word, without a change in his expression of the butler carrying out his ordinary duties, Reeves stepped back, closed the door gently. Bobby heard quite plainly the key turn in the lock.

That galvanised him into life. With a kind of muffled roar he leaped across the room, seized the door-knob, turned it, shook the door with all his force and in vain, for it was securely locked.

He stood back a little way and hurled himself against it. With no effect. It was a strong, well-made door – a pre-war door, in fact, of the time when solid work and wood were still put into construction. Most post-war doors would have gone down before the fury of his assault, but this held fast. It had not even panels to offer a point of attack, but was all one solid piece.

He gave up the effort to smash it down by his own strength and looked about the room for some implement to aid him. He found none. Even the fire-irons in the grate were small, finicking modernities with no weight to them. In a fury he pounded on the door with his fists and shouted, and then was ashamed of so futile a display of temper and of helplessness.

He found himself beginning to wonder if he had really seen Reeves or if he had dreamed him. He turned to make sure it was in fact Pegley lying there, unconscious and bleeding, by the chair that Hayes had been sitting in just before.

It was all, he thought, exactly what one would expect to happen in a madhouse suddenly deprived of doctors, nurses, and keepers.

What had happened to Hayes? Who had attacked Pegley, and why? What was Reeves of all living people doing here, and why did he continue to look so exactly like the butler that he was? And what was Noll Moffatt up to?

Standing looking bewilderedly from fastened door to prostrate Pegley, Bobby reminded himself ruefully that he had come here to-night precisely and exactly because he had thought developments were possible.

But not developments like these.

What was happening now was outside, he felt, the boundary of sane explanation. It was because of that belief of his that events were drawing of themselves to some unknown crisis that he had asked Colonel Warden's deputy, the chief superintendent, for permission to come alone, and why he had been careful to arrive at dusk and as unobtrusively as possible. It had seemed to him a good idea to allow full scope for their development to whatever plans might be in progress; and so again he had not wished to be accompanied by anyone in uniform. For he knew well how much virtue there is in a uniform, how intimidating, how authoritative in quality a uniform can be, containing, indeed, in itself so strange a magic it can even make a dictator and throw whole nations into thraldom.

But now Bobby felt that the presence of a constable or two in uniform would be a help, and, though the chief superintendent had promised either to come himself, or at least to send help, before midnight, that hour was still far distant.

He made another attack on the door, again without result. No doubt he could break it down in time, but time the task would take, and time was precisely what he could not spare, he who had no knowledge of what might or might not be happening on the door's further side. He turned to the window. Exit there would be easy enough, but would he be any better off outside? He might find all the rest of the house secure against him, and even this window barred and barricaded if he tried to return by it. Again the vision came into his mind of the chief superintendent on his arrival finding him standing helplessly outside, on the doorstep.

As he hesitated there broke out a wild tumult of noise, a rush of feet, shouting, a confused and general clamour, wood breaking and splintering, glass smashing, blows given and returned, then someone screaming wildly, incoherently. Bobby turned towards the open window. Anything was better than standing helplessly there, listening and wondering.

He heard someone at the door and stopped abruptly, half way to the window. The door flew open and a man rushed in. It was Thoms. Bobby jumped forward to stop him. The impact and impetus of Thoms's rush flung him aside. Thoms seemed hardly even aware of Bobby's presence. He made a dive through the open window and Bobby heard him running fast as the darkness hid him.

“Oh, well, now then,” Bobby said aloud.

He ran out and along the study passage into the hall. It was quiet and deserted now. Clear enough though were the signs of the struggle or pursuit Bobby had heard. Furniture was upset and broken, crockery and vases were lying about in fragments; a gaping breach in the banisters showed where three or four had been broken off, the door into the small room used as a cloak-room hung drunkenly on one hinge, the front door was wide open, and through it from the night without came a sound of more shouting, more running to and fro.

“Mr. Hayes! Hayes!” Bobby shouted.

There was no answer, and Bobby ran out through the open door to take part in the lunatic pursuit and chasing to and fro that seemed in progress without. He ran down the drive, keeping to the gravelled path. From his left there rang out pistol shots in swift succession, and he saw how little darting flames stabbed through the darkness.

Someone screamed.

Bobby ran wildly in the direction whence the shots had come.

Another shot rang out, and then silence dropped, dropped as the curtain drops when the play is over and it is time to go home.

The holly hedge again checked Bobby's progress. He turned back towards the drive, listening intently, walking slowly and carefully. In the silence that had followed on that earlier tumult he thought he heard small steps creeping slowly, not far off. He turned in that direction and caught his foot and fell full length. It was a body he had tripped upon. He could not tell whose it was. He felt for a match. By its light he was able to recognise the blood-stained face of Hayes. Those creeping steps were nearer now, and Bobby thought he saw near by a shadow move. He leaped and seized it in a grip that was not gentle, for indeed he was in no gentle mood. A muffled scream and he relaxed at once his hold.

“The devil!” he exclaimed.

“No, it's me,” a low voice answered – the voice of Molly Oulton.

For this night at least Bobby's capacity for surprise was entirely exhausted. In a matter-of-fact tone, as one greeting a casual acquaintance in the street, he said:

“Oh, it's you. What are you doing here?”

“I'm looking for Noll,” she explained, equally matter of fact. “Have you seen him?”

“He's up there somewhere,” Bobby answered, nodding towards the house. “What's he doing here?”

“Henrietta sent him,” Molly answered. “She hadn't any right to. She wanted him to stop Teddy. You can't stop Teddy, he's so stupid and pig-headed. Reeves told me, and I told Henrietta, and she got Noll to go after them, and so I came for him.”

“Oh, yes,” said Bobby, trying to get this clear. “Yes. Have you seen your brother? He's Teddy, isn't he?”

“Well, of course,” she said, and before she could continue, at a little distance, the headlamps of a car blazed suddenly, making in the vast ocean of night a little island of bright light.

Its radiance hardly reached them where they stood, but in its full glare there showed the figure of a man, quite still, as if astonished and held fast by that sudden beam of light flung at him from the darkness.

“There he is,” said Molly calmly. “Teddy, Teddy,” she called.

Teddy – Thoms – Oulton turned at the summons. At the same instant another pistol-shot rang out, and Bobby heard plainly the wicked, evil scream of the bullet as it flew by, between him and Molly, snarling, as it were, its disappointment that its message of death had failed. Simultaneously Bobby tripped Molly up, and pushed her, as she fell, under the shelter of a near-by bush.

He heard her cry out in surprise and anger at this rough handling; he snapped an order to her to lie still; he ran towards that bright illumined oblong patch the motor headlights made and that he saw was now empty.

He heard a hoarse, passionate voice shout: