Bombing of Mrs Bortz’s car

The bombing of Mrs Bortz’s car is both a frightening attack and a plot mechanism: its noise and smoke make a bomb initially resemble a possible gunshot, while its intended effect is to delay Mrs Bortz rather than kill her. The wreck draws the boys into an urgent rescue attempt, leaves physical evidence under the car’s hood, and eventually helps expose John Murphy’s connection to the theft of the Carpathian Hound.

Causes and Intended Effect

Before the explosion, Fenton Prentice remarks that Mrs Bortz often has to summon men from the garage. Her sedan backs into the street and starts forward slowly. In the pre-dawn stillness, an explosion and a scream abruptly replace the quiet. Prentice jumps up from the sofa, and Jupiter Jones rushes to the window to see the car swerving from side to side, smoke billowing from beneath its hood.

The attack has a specific purpose, revealed later when Jupiter reconstructs the crime. John Murphy had heard Mrs Bortz announce that she intended to drain the pool; her words startled him, and he drove away later that evening. He went to a friend who manufactured chemicals and obtained the explosive device he wired to her car. According to Jupiter, it was not really deadly: it was designed to make noise and smoke and to upset Mrs Bortz enough that she would forget about the pool for a day or two. The delay mattered because that was the time Murphy needed. The device’s limited lethality does not make the attack harmless: the uncontrolled car still crashes, and Mrs Bortz is left screaming behind the wheel.

The Crash and Rescue Attempt

The sedan’s movements turn the bomb’s theatrical smoke into immediate physical danger. It veers left, then right, before smashing into the kerb and blowing both front tyres. It then hits a hydrant head-on with a crunch. The hydrant snaps off level with the ground, and water spurts up around the wrecked car.

The boys reach the courtyard as John Murphy, wearing a bathrobe, and Sonny Elmquist, who has put a coat over his pyjamas, head out through the front gate. Murphy runs toward the car after calling to Mrs Bortz. The boys pass Elmquist and overtake Murphy, wading through ice-cold water and pushing through the cascade from the broken hydrant to reach the sedan. Mrs Bortz remains rigid behind the wheel, staring straight ahead and screaming. Jupiter pulls at the door handle, but the car is locked. The scene makes the damaged vehicle more than the site of an explosion: its locked door and the surrounding flood turn reaching its occupant into a physical struggle.

Evidence at the Wreck

A breakdown truck and police officers arrive. A plain-clothes man initially considers whether someone fired at Mrs Bortz, but Jupiter insists that he heard a shot or an explosion just as she began driving down the street. The inspection resolves the uncertainty: there are no bullet holes. Under the bonnet, the officers find scraps of paper and what appears to be singed cotton wadding scattered over the engine block; the radiator hoses are scorched, and the fan belt has snapped. The plain-clothes man concludes that the damage came from an explosive device under the bonnet, not a gunshot, and orders the car taken to the police garage.

The physical traces confirm the nature and placement of the device, but they do not immediately identify who planted it. At the scene, John Murphy has rejoined the boys, Sonny Elmquist is hunched near the stairway, and Alex Hassell has come outside wearing slacks over his pyjamas. The gathering of these men around the wreck gives the incident several possible points of connection, while the evidence under the hood establishes that the apparent accident was deliberate.

Revelation and Significance

Jupiter’s later reconstruction places the bombing within the larger investigation of the Carpathian Hound’s disappearance. Both John Murphy and Alex Hassell had been away from home at the time of the burglary, and both had heard Mrs Bortz announce that she would drain the pool. Murphy’s reaction to that announcement, followed by his departure that evening, becomes significant once Jupiter understands that delaying the pool plans would give the burglar time.

The ransom arrangements supply a separate clue that helps Jupiter distinguish Murphy from Hassell. The money was to be left in a waste-paper bin in the park at exactly five o’clock, the time when Hassell fed the cats. Jupiter reasons that Hassell would not have chosen that hour if he were the burglar; the timing points instead to Murphy. This deduction identifies Murphy as the culprit and retrospectively clarifies the car attack: the bomb was not an isolated act of violence but an attempt to control the schedule around the pool. Its immediate effect is chaos and danger; its intended effect is delay; and the evidence and later reasoning turn that delay into a link in the case.