The Golden Dagger: A Bobby Owen Mystery

by E. R. Punshon

  “Did you make all that up yourself?” Maureen asked, evidently much impressed.

  “A quotation,” Bobby told her. “Alexander Bain. A Scotsman.”

  “He would be,” declared Maureen with conviction.

  “And the black eye?” Bobby asked.

  “I never heard anything about this before,” protested Lord Rone.

  “Darling,” Maureen said, “I can’t help your having a daughter, but I do try to spare you all I can.” To Bobby she said: “At any rate, when I’m the kissee I do like to choose my kisser. So when Baldy tried it on his own, I took a swing at him with my umbrella—one of those stumpies you get in Switzerland.” She produced her sweetest, most childlike smile, and she could look very sweet and innocent and childlike when she chose. She went on: “You just ought to have seen him go flop. Jack Longton says the black eye wasn’t me at all, but I’m sure it was, even if Baldy did go over whack against a gate-post. Jack’s an awful beast. He always tries to take you down. I told him he was just jealous, and I expect he was.”

  “Who is Jack Longton?” Bobby asked, interested by this introduction of a new name.

  “Jack Longton? Oh, everybody knows him,” Maureen declared. “He’s a jolly good producer, though nothing like as good as he thinks he is. He writes, too. He had a play on at the Central last year.”

  “Had he, though?” said Bobby, impressed as everyone is on hearing of that remarkable feat.

  “Ran nineteen nights,” Maureen told him. “He groused a lot. I told him it was a jolly good run, considering what the play was like.”

  “I am sure Mr Longton must have felt it very nice of you to say that,” remarked Bobby, unable to resist the comment. “Has he ever stayed here?”

  “Not him,” Maureen replied. “He offered to stand me a lunch at the Bay Leaf if I would ask him down for a week-end, but I told him nothing doing. And then he had the cheek and impudence to turn up as a Saturdayer.”

  “What’s that?” Bobby asked.

  “The house and grounds are open to the public on Saturdays,” Lord Rone explained. “Most inconvenient. But it was put to me that the public should be allowed an opportunity of seeing the Cobblers collection. I agreed.”

  “It’s to improve their little minds,” Maureen put in. “Quite a lot come along. Half a crown a head. Catalogue, abridged by Uncle Bill himself from his big one, five bob. With reproductions, including a frontispiece of the ‘Young Stallion’, seventeen and six. Jolly dear if you ask me, but they pay up like lambs. Or did. More sales resistance now with less money about.”

  “The money received,” Lord Rone said stiffly, “only just covers expenses. It is necessary to have an attendant in every room. There was one most unpleasant incident. A man was seen apparently trying to open one of the cases in which part of my stamp collection was shown—including the eighteen-seventy stamp, which you probably know is extremely valuable.”

  “The one,” explained Maureen, seeing that Bobby did not much look as if he did know, “on which the old Queen’s head was printed upside down. Only six of them got into circulation and no one knows what became of the other five. So this is unique, and every other collector goes green whenever he remembers that Henry’s got it and he hasn’t.”

  “I have had high offers,” Lord Rone admitted. “It was a great find. I was called at the time of the incident I mentioned. The person concerned was full of apologies. I did not accept them. I had him removed from the house and I gave instructions that he was not to be admitted again on any account. Fortunately, he had a distinct cast in one eye, so he could easily be recognized.”

  “I act as guide sometimes when I’m on tap,” Maureen interposed. “It’s rather fun. I’ve had tips sometimes, but not often. People are getting jolly close with their money.”

  “Mr Longton would know all about the Cellini dagger, then, and where it was kept?”

  “Well, he ought to,” answered Maureen, “considering he’s had the cheek to come two Saturdays running and asked all the fool questions he could think of, trying to stump me. He doesn’t miss much; not him.”

  “Can you give me his address and that of Mr Baldwin Jones?”

  “They might know at the Bay Tree. Baldy hangs around there a good deal,” Maureen said doubtfully. “He keeps it rather dark. I expect it’s in some awful slum when it’s not the Superb or some other swell hotel. He alternates.”

  “And Mr Longton?”

  “Oh, he has a flat in Town somewhere. Anyhow, he’s in the ’phone directory. Just now he’s staying at the Cobblers Oaks Hotel. He is studying a new play he’s to produce—and probably writing a new one himself he hopes will run twenty nights instead of nineteen.”

  “That’s not very far, is it?” asked Bobby, knowing that Cobblers Oaks, a famous beauty spot, was only a few miles away.

  “Oh, no; half an hour’s drive. He had the impudence to say he would be over every Saturday morning till further notice.”

  The thought crossed Bobby’s mind that if Mr Longton could get over every Saturday morning, he could equally easily get over every night. It would be as well, he decided, to have a chat with Mr Longton and probably with Mr Baldwin Jones, too. Mr Longton could be seen on the way home, but presumably the other young man would have to wait till his address was known. In the meantime, as no more information was likely to be obtained and as it was growing late, Bobby decided it was time to depart.

  It was an announcement received with few signs of regret, and Bobby and Ford were hardly out of the house before Ford said:

  “That young lady, sir. Do you think she’s all there?”

  “Why? What makes you say that?” Bobby asked.

  “Well, the way she talks, never the same two minutes together,” Ford replied. “And then giving people black eyes! Not what you expect.”

  “She’s in with a stage and arty lot in Town,” Bobby said. “Apt to go to the head with young people. At present she is seeing everything in terms of the theatre. She hasn’t realized yet that it’s life that often holds up a mirror to the stage.”

  Ford pondered this. Then he pronounced his verdict.

  “Not what you expect from a young lady,” he said.

  “Well,” Bobby admitted, “I did rather think at first all her chatter and the way she kept putting her oar in might mean there was something she was trying to keep back. I don’t know. May have been the black eye incident. Most likely it was just a way she’s got into and hasn’t learned to tone it down yet. I think myself, we were lucky she didn’t start calling us ‘darling’ and wanting to kiss us goodbye—especially you as the younger.”

  Ford looked alarmed at this and then gradually let his features relax into a faint smile.

  “Oh, well,” he said—contentedly.

  “Now, Ford,” said Bobby—sternly.

  A cryptic exchange both seemed to understand, and then they had arrived at the Cobblers Oaks Hotel.

  The receptionist’s desk was closed, but a porter appeared. To him Bobby said:

  “I think Mr John Longton is staying here. He will be expecting us. There’s been a ’phone message, hasn’t there?”

  “Yes, sir, a few minutes ago,” the man answered. “I’ll let Mr Longton know. He’ll have finished dinner by now.”

  The porter went off accordingly, leaving both Bobby and Ford consumed with envy, for they had had no chance even to begin their dinner. Ford said in rather a hesitating voice:

  “’Phone message, sir? Were you expecting there’d be one?”

  “First thing that young woman did was to warn Longton about us, most likely,” Bobby answered. “Or at any rate, as soon as she thought her father wasn’t looking.”

  A young man was coming towards them. He was sturdy and well built, with broad face and high cheekbones, his most noticeable features his eyes, large, bright, and quick, under heavy, overhanging brows, and his chin, which stuck out defiantly, as if challenging all the world to try to hit it and then see what happened. There was, too, a ce
rtain quick agility in all his movements, as of one who knew he had to hasten, if there were to be time for him to do all he had to accomplish; and Bobby was soon thinking that these movements he made could easily degenerate into a nervous fidgeting. What is called ‘highly strung,’ indeed, in spite of the rather contradictory solidity there seemed to show in his manner and physique.

  “Mr Longton, isn’t it?” Bobby said. “I think Miss Maureen Carton has ’phoned to tell you to expect us?”

  “Yes. Did she tell you she was going to?” Longton said, evidently surprised. “She asked me not to let on.”

  “A misunderstanding,” Bobby answered, waving it aside. “You and she are friends, I think?”

  “Well, we are more or less on terms of mutual insult,” explained the young man. “What’s it all about?”

  Bobby asked if there was somewhere where they could talk for a few minutes, and Longton led the way to an alcove sheltered by an enormous palm. When they were settled, Bobby said:

  “Didn’t the young lady explain?”

  “Only that two blokes from Scotland Yard were on my track and I had better mind my p’s and q’s. And something about the golden dagger they think is a Cellini piece turning up in a ’phone box I couldn’t make head or tail of. Then she rang off. I think her father came along and she thought she had better dry up. I thought at first it must be about Baldy Jones. He was threatening blue murder.”

  “Oh, yes. Why was that?”

  “Well,” Longton explained. “It was at the Bay Tree—Monday night, I think. I—well, I poured my coffee down his neck and when he seemed a bit peeved I said to come outside, and then the waiters came hovering round so we both did. Go outside, I mean.”

  “Anything happen?”

  “Oh, no; there’s no guts to Baldy. He said he was going to summons me. I didn’t much expect him to. Is pouring coffee down a chap’s neck a summonsable offence?”

  “Well, really, I hardly know,” Bobby admitted. “Might depend on how hot it was.”

  “Oh, just restaurant coffee,” Longton explained.

  “I take it Mr Jones had been saying something about Miss Maureen and—”

  “Oh, no,” Longton interrupted with every appearance of extreme surprise. “Her name was never mentioned. Why should it be? It was my production of that new play from the U.S., Desire Up Under. I welcome criticism, of course, but mere vulgar abuse and an idiotic trying to be funny, I do draw the line at. Hence the coffee. Where does the Cellini dagger come in?”

  Bobby answered this sudden change of subject by explaining what had happened. Longton said he was sure he had seen the dagger in its place on the Saturday. He had asked Maureen, acting as guide, some questions about it.

  “Ragging her,” he explained. “She doesn’t know the first thing about Renaissance art, or anything else much for that matter. But she played up jolly well, invented like one o’clock, made a great impression. I heard two of the party telling each other she must have made a profound study of Italian art.”

  Bobby asked a few more questions. Longton had little more to say. Nor did he know—or for that matter want to know—Mr Baldwin Jones’s address. If you wanted him—Heaven alone knew why anyone ever should—you could generally find him hanging round one of the West End pubs.

  There seemed nothing more to be learned; and so Bobby and his companion were soon on their way back to Town and to the suppers they so ardently hoped they would find waiting for them.

  CHAPTER VIII

  BLOODSTAINS

  LATER ON THAT NIGHT, Bobby, smoking a meditative cigarette after a home-produced supper that had left within him no room for any more envy of Jack Longton’s hotel-produced dinner, began to let his thoughts dwell again on his Cobblers visit.

  “Of course,” he told Olive, his wife, who was already looking at the clock and hinting at bed, “it all depends on the result of the analysis of these stains on the golden dagger.”

  “Well, then,” Olive suggested, “why not wait till you get the result before worrying about it?”

  “Don’t be so painfully commonsensical,” Bobby ordered.

  “There’s no such word,” retorted Olive. “So I can’t be, can I?”

  “There are a lot of worrying little things,” Bobby went on, ignoring this most justifiable protest. “They may not amount to much, only why are they? Lord Rone, for example. Why was he bothered because I wasn’t so awfully impressed by the ‘Young Stallion’?”

  “Well, if you had a picture worth thousands and thousands of pounds and someone came along and hinted it wasn’t, you would look bothered fast enough. I know I should.”

  “More to it than that,” Bobby said. “At least I think so, but I’ve no idea what. There’s the girl, too. She didn’t at all like telling me about the Jones young man’s black eye and she wouldn’t if she hadn’t felt she had got to before someone else did.”

  “No really nice girl would want to talk about a thing like that,” Olive assured him. “Be your age, Bobby. Would any eligible young man be attracted by the prospect of a black-eye-dealing wife?”

  “Well, there’s that,” Bobby conceded. “Sir William Watson, too. Interesting case. Henpecked door-mat and all that, and yet somehow you get the idea that at bottom she’s a bit scared of him. She closed down double quick when he told her to.”

  “He may have given her a scare some time,” Olive suggested. “Men are so unaccountable, aren’t they? Some silly little trifle or another set him off, perhaps, and now she’s trying to forget it by asserting herself. And he may be trying to forget it, too.”

  “Now you’re going all psychological and Freudian, and Lord knows what,” Bobby protested. He went on: “Then there’s that young man, Richard Moyse. He didn’t look to me at all the sort of person to dash about rescuing people from under motor cars and recovering stolen dispatch cases. A bit unfair, I suppose. You can’t go by looks, but there is a lot of very valuable stuff lying about at Cobblers—including a stamp collection there seems to have been one attempt on already. A gentleman with a cast in his eye found meddling with one of the cases. Stamps are about the most valuable loot you can get hold of in these days. Easily negotiable. Prices rising. Current everywhere. Almost impossible to identify. Give me stamps or diamonds and it’s stamps for me every time.”

  “What’s the golden dagger got to do with it if it’s stamps?” Olive asked.

  “May be some sort of red herring,” Bobby suggested. “I don’t know, but then I don’t know anything.”

  “Well, then, why talk?” Olive asked simply.

  “There’s the Oxendale young man, too,” Bobby went on, again ignoring a question to which he knew he had no reply. “He seemed the most ordinary of the lot and, of course, that makes him the most open to suspicion.”

  “That’s being subtle,” Olive rebuked him, “and you’re always saying in those lectures you give recruits and people that fifty cases are solved by the simple approach to one that’s solved by being subtle.”

  “I ought,” declared Bobby firmly, “to put the ratio at a hundred to one, but this may be the one exception.”

  “Maybe,” agreed Olive. “And it may not, and, anyhow, what is there to solve as yet?”

  “Well, I do rather want to know,” Bobby explained, “what the golden dagger, as they call it, was doing in a ’phone box? All very curious. The parlourmaid, too. Belinda something—Blythe, I think. Belinda Blythe. An improbable name. And why was she so flurried at first seeing us and then perfectly calm and collected again? Takes a bit of explaining. Bad conscience?”

  “She was nervous most likely. That’s all,” Olive said. “A name like that,” she pointed out. “Well, it would, wouldn’t it?”

  “What about her former employer, Mr Tudor King?” Bobby went on. “Is it only a coincidence that he has rented a bungalow nearby, but hasn’t shown up yet? Tudor King seems quite well known. Miss Maureen called him sloppy. I seem to know his name somehow.”

  “Well, I don’t see how y
ou could help, the way it’s splashed about,” Olive said, and cast an uneasy eye at a cushion near under which she was uneasily conscious there was coyly sheltering at the moment the latest Tudor King—nor were by any means all the tear-stains on its pages those shed by previous readers alone. “I’ve read one or two books of his,” her conscience forced her to admit, and her artistic sensibility forced her also to add: “I dare say he is a bit sloppy, and why shouldn’t he be? So was Dickens, and worse, too.”

  “Dickens is Dickens,” Bobby told her, “and that is all that here below we know or need to know. Try to get one of Tudor King’s books from the library, will you? I would rather like to have a look at one of them.”

  “I’ll try,” Olive promised, one guilty eye still on that concealing cushion close by. “Or I’ll get you a copy of The Teen-Ager. He has a story running in it. What about bed?”

  Bobby yawned and got to his feet.

  “To-morrow,” he announced, “I’ll see if I can get hold of this Baldwin Jones chap. I would like to have his version, both of the black eye business and of the coffee at the Bay Tree. When people start talking about murder and the whole set-up seems so screwy, you’ve got to sit up and take notice. There’s Jack Longton, too. He was on the spot like the others and he knew about the Cellini dagger. Add it all up and what do you get?”

  “Precious little,” Olive said as she gently but firmly propelled him out of the room and bedward.

  Next morning, as soon as he arrived, Bobby found waiting for him on his desk the analyst’s report. His face was grave and troubled as he went to consult a senior colleague.

  “‘Undoubtedly human blood’,” he quoted. “Means we’ve got to go into it more closely.”

  “No corpse,” commented the other.

  “No corpse known,” Bobby corrected him.

  “No report of anyone missing,” came the prompt retort.

  “Tudor King,” said Bobby.

  “Oh, the author bloke,” said the colleague doubtfully, and he said it as if it were the sort of thing you would expect from an author, and nothing to worry about anyhow.