Bobby’s failed night-time break-in at the Grange to find Moira

Bobby Jones’s failed night-time break-in at The Grange is a rescue attempt that turns into an ambush before he can discover whether Moira Nicholson is inside. Moving under a disguise and carrying his service revolver, he reaches the house intending to search it while Dr Jasper Nicholson is occupied. A rotten branch betrays his attempt to enter, and after he avoids the search that follows, an unseen attacker knocks him unconscious. The scene turns his urgent search for Moira into a fresh danger to his own life.

The decision to search

After leaving Frankie Derwent in Brook Street, Bobby begins putting his plans into operation. He avoids the Mews, where he suspects someone may be keeping watch, and decides that his identity as Hawkins is no longer safe to retain. He believes Dr Jasper Nicholson will need some time to arrange the accident Bobby fears, but he does not intend to wait: if Moira is at The Grange, he means to find her before that interval has elapsed.

That evening Bobby reaches Ambledever in disguise, wearing a cheap dark-blue suit and a moustache and registering at a hotel near the station as George Parker. After leaving his suitcase, he goes out to negotiate the hire of a motorcycle. At ten o’clock he rides through Staverley and stops on a deserted stretch of road near The Grange. The borrowed identity and change of transport make the approach part of a deliberate effort to avoid notice, not a sudden visit.

Entry and reconnaissance

Bobby hides the motorcycle in bushes, checks that the road is empty, and walks along the wall to a small door, which is unlocked. He slips inside and touches the service revolver in his coat pocket; its presence reassures him. The grounds seem quiet, but his immediate concern is whether Moira is alive and what Dr Jasper Nicholson may have done with her. He refuses to assume she is dead, then carefully circles the house.

Some upstairs windows are lit, as is one ground-floor window. Bobby creeps toward the latter and peers through a narrow gap in its curtains. Inside, Dr Jasper Nicholson is writing calmly and methodically in his study, pausing as if to choose a word and once removing and polishing his pince-nez. The sight gives Bobby a possible opening: if he can enter through an upstairs window while the doctor remains occupied, he can explore the house later in the night. The plan depends on stealth and timing, and for a moment the doctor’s absorbed writing appears to provide both.

The failed attempt

Bobby circles the house again and chooses a first-floor window whose sash is open at the top. The room is dark and seems unoccupied; a nearby tree appears to offer easy access. He climbs it, but just as he reaches for the window ledge, the rotten branch beneath him cracks and snaps. He is pitched headfirst into hydrangea bushes, which fortunately break his fall.

The noise draws Dr Jasper Nicholson to the study window farther along the same side of the house. Bobby springs up, disentangles himself from the bushes, and runs across a dark patch toward the path leading to the small door. Rather than continue along the path, he dives into bushes and holds still. Lights move near the damaged hydrangeas, and voices approach the place where he fell. When Dr Jasper Nicholson asks a question, Bobby cannot make out the words; he hears only a hoarse, uneducated voice answer that the rounds have been completed. The searchers and their lights eventually disappear back into the house.

The ambush and its consequence

Once the grounds seem still, Bobby cautiously comes out of hiding and takes a few steps toward the house. Before he can resume the search, something strikes him on the back of the neck. He falls forward into darkness. The break-in therefore fails at the moment he returns to the path: he has neither entered the house nor established whether Moira is there, and the blow makes the unanswered question of her whereabouts more urgent.

The scene’s reversal lies in the difference between apparent quiet and actual safety. Bobby has taken precautions, selected a concealed entrance, and survived the fall, but the household’s orderly response and his own careful waiting do not protect him from an attacker concealed in the dark. The episode ends with him unconscious rather than with a discovery, turning a planned search into a renewed threat and leaving the identity of the person who struck him unresolved in this scene.