The Secret Search: A Bobby Owen Mystery by E.R. Punshon

Author:E.R. Punshon [Punshon, E.R.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Dean Street Press
Published: 2017-01-01T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XIX

“ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE”

BOBBY WENT away then, more worried and troubled even than he had been on arrival. To Olive that evening he said:

“Means I’ve not only to take care that Wyllie doesn’t get murdered himself, but also that he doesn’t murder any one else. I’ve told Sergeant James and young Ford to keep a sharp look-out and let me know at once if they see him anywhere in the Jimmy Joe café neighbourhood. I wish now I hadn’t mentioned Ally Hidd’s message.”

“Why?” Olive asked. “What’s that matter?”

“I don’t know, but Wyllie is nearly off his head, and you can’t tell what he may not be up to next. He looks it, too—off his head, I mean. James has noticed that. Only—”

“Only what?”

“Well,” Bobby answered, half apologetically, “it’s rather far-fetched, but all the same it’s got to be considered. James put it to me that the only man he has ever seen with that sort of wild, distraught look of Ted Wyllie’s, was a man who had murdered his sweetheart and was being driven slowly mad by the memory. So James is saying it may be like that this time, and he thinks possibly Mrs Wyllie more or less unconsciously suspects that that’s what’s happened, and that’s why she keeps thinking she sees or hears the dead girl. Her subconscious presenting her secret hidden fears to herself in visual form.”

“He’s been reading psycho-analysis books,” Olive commented.

“We all do,” Bobby answered. “There’s something in them if you observingly distil it forth. My own idea was that it might be some form of spontaneous thought-reading, like that broadcast, you remember, the other day. Quite outside police routine, though. Not the sort of thing you would ever dare put in an official report.”

“If it was thought-reading—and after that broadcast, you can believe anything,” Olive said musingly—“wouldn’t that mean that she is still alive?”

“I don’t know,” Bobby answered. “I don’t think it follows. If thought-reading is possible . . .”

He left the sentence unfinished, and they were both silent for a time. Olive looked at the clock and said it was bed-time. Then she said:

“If it’s Mr Wyllie, why should he be going to these places, trying to find out things when he knows all about it and they don’t? And why should that bother them so much that Ally Hidd thinks they may do something to him?”

“Well, anyhow,” Bobby pointed out, “there’s no doubt about the plot to get hold of the Smith money, and no doubt about there having been one murder already. If Wyllie starts hanging about and asking questions, it’s quite likely they may think he’s after the Smith money and had better be got rid of. But there’s always the hope that the real Betty Smith is still alive, being held as a kind of hostage to make sure that when the Smith money is secured, it’s shared out.”

“But could any one be kept shut up like that nowadays?” Olive asked. “Is it possible?”

“Anything is possible to-day,” Bobby told her.

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