The Dusky Hour Read Online Free

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.
    â€œIt’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.
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œExactly,” said Colonel Warden.
    â€œEh?” 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.”
    â€œDo you mean you think it was suicide?” Mr. Moffatt asked.
    â€œIt’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.
    â€œIt was standing in the lane that turns out of the road just beyond your entrance gates,” Colonel