The Golden Dagger: A Bobby Owen Mystery

by E. R. Punshon

  “Though, for that matter,” Bobby remarked as they drove through the village, “blood may mean no more than a cut finger or a bloody nose.”

  But he did not believe for one moment that this was all that was meant by the stains on the golden dagger.

  The car was left in Higgles Lane in charge of its driver while Bobby and Ford followed a faint track, only barely visible, across two fields to where, at the further end of the second field, against the green background of the West Plantation, stood the New Bungalow.

  Still further behind it, like a dark distant cloud, lay the great plantation of fir and pine planted by Lord Rone and Saine under pressure from the Forestry Commission and now hanging there on the slope of the hill like an army of the night gathering to descend upon the valley.

  At the moment, however, the bungalow was bathed in sunshine; it faced south, and looked a pleasant and inviting habitation, even though one that somehow had strayed from its fellows and not yet found a way to rejoin them. From behind it came the sound of hammering or knocking. Before it lay a small, not very well kept garden, and when Bobby pushed open the gate admitting to this garden, a bell jangled loudly. It had been hung on the inside of the gate, apparently so as to give early notice of the approach of visitors. Promptly from the back regions, presumably in response to the summons of the bell, issued a tall, gaunt, elderly woman, carrying a hatchet in one hand.

  She looked at them unwelcomingly from heavy, deep-set eyes that yet seemed somehow to hint of hidden fires well capable of bursting into unexpected flame. Firm, even fierce lines, too, about the wide mouth. A vivid, unusual personality, Bobby thought, one it was a little surprising to find content with the generally rather quiet, suppressed life of the secretary and housekeeper. She said:

  “Police, aren’t you? About the dagger from the Cobblers collection someone found lying about somewhere? Well, nothing I can tell you. I know nothing about it.”

  She had a bitter and a hostile air as she stood there, swinging the hatchet in one hand. Into Bobby’s mind there flashed a memory of a performance of the Agamemnon he had once witnessed years before, and of Clytemnestra standing thus, axe in hand, after the murder, just as this woman stood watching them darkly from her sombre, slightly bloodshot eyes.

  “Not only about that,” he answered, producing and offering his official card, of which, however, she took no notice. “I think you told the constable here that you have heard noises and seen lights in the woods nearby?”

  “Something going on,” she said. “At least I thought so. No business of mine, but I didn’t like it. If you want to talk about it, you had better come inside. I don’t suppose it has anything to do with this business of the lost dagger or whatever it is.”

  With long swift steps, she crossed to the bungalow, pushed open the door—it had apparently only been on the latch—and entered, leaving them to follow. The door opened directly into a long, low room, well lighted by three windows and somewhat scantily provided with furniture almost entirely of the bamboo type. A portable typewriter stood on a more substantial wooden table near one of the windows. On the walls were several cheap engravings—Landseer chiefly as well as, for the sake of variety probably, one or two of ships in full sail. For animals and ships in full sail make an irresistible appeal to the great British public. On some shelves, originally, Bobby suspected, meant for crockery, stood a number of books.

  As Bobby and Ford followed her into this room, the woman indicated two of the basket chairs, took herself the chair standing before the wooden table, turning it so that she could face them. She still swung in one hand her hatchet from which she did not seem to wish to be parted and she stared at them with a sort of controlled malignancy, as if she hated the sight of them, but did not mean to let that influence her in any way. Bobby noticed that Ford was watching the swinging hatchet rather carefully, as if half expecting she might soon be using it on them. Apparently she too noticed his somewhat doubting expression, for now she produced some sort of harsh rumbling sound, probably intended for a chuckle.

  “I’ve been chopping wood,” she explained. “They wanted to make an absurd charge for bringing coal across the fields. I told them I didn’t come here to be robbed. There’s plenty of wood to be had for the gathering, but it has to be cut up.”

  “Oh, yes,” Bobby said. “Are you the tenant? I understood it was Mr Tudor King, an author.”

  “Don’t let him hear you call him an author,” she retorted with another of those harsh and little mirthful chuckles of hers. “The author, if you please. Tudor King, the author. Yes, he is the tenant. My name is Cato if you want to know—Charlotte Cato. I’m housekeeper and secretary and everything else. The domestic Pooh-Bah. Old enough to be his mother, so that’s all right.” She paused and stared at them challengingly, as if defying them to deny it. She waved a hand towards the books on the shelves. “Those are his on the bottom shelf,” she said. “He always has them by him. The trophies of his spirit, he says. Those on the upper shelf are mine.”

  “Yours?” Bobby repeated, not quite understanding.

  “That’s what I said. Nothing to make goggle eyes about,” she snapped, and got up and crossed to the bookcase. This time she left her hatchet behind. She passed her hand slowly and lovingly over those on the upper shelf—nine in number. “Cynthia Cairn,” she said. “That’s me. ‘An’ author—never ‘the’ author. Charlotte Cato née Cato and married a Cato, a cousin, and wrote as Cynthia Cairn.” She took down one of the books, seemed inclined to offer it to Bobby and then changed her mind and put it back again. “It wouldn’t interest a policeman,” she told him. “It’s serious work, a study of social conditions as affecting the development of a writer of genius. Rather like George Gissing. You won’t know his name. But it probes deeper, much deeper, and so, of course, it was even less popular.” Now her hand was flicking lightly across the books on the lower shelf, rather as if she meant to flick them away into nothingness. “All about dukes and earls,” she explained, “all the men brave and handsome, all the women lovely beyond compare, except one plain brave little thing who finally gets the duke and then, after a hair-do and a visit to a West End dressmaker or two, turns out the loveliest of the lot. The Cinderella story. It always works. I showed my readers life as it is, squalid, sunk in mud and dirt. Tudor King shows life as it isn’t, but how nice it would be if it was.” She snorted—the only possible word—with deep contempt, and added: “He makes money. Lots. I could have starved.”

  “Well, I’m glad that didn’t happen,” Bobby remarked.

  “It nearly did,” she told him, “when the business went bankrupt. Customers began to stop away. They seemed to think it was getting above herself for a small grocer’s wife in the filthy little out-of-the-way town where we lived to start writing books. Nobody ever read anything there, anyhow—except Ally Sloper. Some of them said my books were immoral, too. They always do if you face facts honestly. Luckily Tudor King doesn’t or I should be out of a job and he would be doing something useful for a change.”

  “You don’t think very highly of Mr Tudor King’s work, I gather,” observed Bobby. “I’m told the critics don’t either.”

  “That’s what sent him off,” she said moodily, but without explaining where to, and when Bobby asked she only stared at him and was silent for a time. Then she said: ‘Abroad’, but Bobby felt sure that was not what she had meant at first.

  Since now she did not seem to wish to say more about either her work or her employer’s, Bobby asked if she could give him an address where Mr. King could be found. She shook her head.

  “He’s travelling,” she said. “Gathering material. Getting experience. It’ll probably ruin his work if he does. But he won’t. Experience slips off him like water from a duck’s back. I know. I’ve tried to tell him things. He’ll return when he wants to. He hasn’t said when.”

  “He has always been rather secretive about himself, hasn’t he?” Bobby asked. “No one in London seems to know anything about him
or even where he lives?”

  “Rubbish,” she retorted. “Newspaper talk, that’s all. He has to do his work and you can’t with newspaper reporters always on your doorstep and silly fool girls ringing you up to say they couldn’t bear it if there wasn’t to be a happy ending. Has life happy endings?” she demanded, giving Bobby another of those challenging stares of hers. She went on: “So he cut out all publicity—he hated it, anyhow—and then his agent saw his chance and worked it up. That’s all.”

  “I see,” Bobby said, though wondering if this were the true and complete explanation and if it were the agent alone who had ‘worked it up’. He went on: “Could you tell us exactly what it was you heard? On Monday night?”

  “It was after I had gone to bed. I was asleep and it woke me up. A cry. There was something about it. I don’t know what. I’m not easily frightened. Only I had never heard anything like it. I got up to look, but I didn’t hear anything more. Then it began to rain. Torrents. A cloudburst. I told the woman who comes to clean. She said there were often strange noises in the wood and no one liked to go there after dark. There’s an old story about some earlier Lord Rone and Saine discovering his wife there waiting for her lover, and killing her with the golden dagger all this talk’s about. So now her ghost haunts the wood. The village policeman heard and came to ask about it. I saw lights the next night, Tuesday, and I told him about that, too.”

  Bobby asked one or two more questions without learning much more, and then he and Ford walked back across the fields towards their waiting car. Bobby was silent, but halfway across the second field Ford ventured to ask:

  “Lady talked quite a lot, sir, didn’t she? Didn’t amount to much, though.”

  “Oh, I think so,” Bobby said, rousing himself from his thoughts. “Always listen, Ford, when anyone wants to talk. The more they talk, the more they tell. Partly reaction in this case, though. I dare say she doesn’t get much chance to let off steam when Tudor King’s about. Curious position. Highbrow novelist—dead failure—secretary and everything else to lowbrow novelist—howling success. Doesn’t like it but sticks it. So does he. I wish we had been able to take a shorthand note, but it wouldn’t have done to try. She would have dried up at once.”

  “Shorthand note, sir?” Ford repeated, much surprised. “You think it may be important, what she said?”

  “Oh, yes,” Bobby said. “But goodness only knows in what way and whether it’s relevant. Background stuff very likely. As soon as possible, write out the best and most complete account you can of what she said. I’ll do the same. Between us, we ought to get most of it down. Underline anything that strikes you as useful. If we both hit on the same thing as significant—then it probably is. There’s a kind of odd, hungry look about her, too—a lean and hungry look.”

  “Well, sir,” Ford said, puzzled, for he was not as familiar with Shakespeare as he should have been, “what with the rations and all, it’s a wonder we all haven’t.”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean that sort of hunger,” Bobby explained. “I meant hunger for life, experience, that sort of thing. And hunger, either sort, can explain a lot.”

  CHAPTER XI

  TWO-LEGGED LAP-DOGS

  IN THE VILLAGE, at the little half police station, half country cottage, Bobby left Ford, with renewed instructions to write out, white his memory was still fresh, all he could recollect of their talk with Mrs Cato. He himself, he said, would go on to Cobblers, but return presently to pick Ford up again.

  “Two people we can’t get in touch with,” he remarked in rather a worried way, “though it’s too soon to call them missing. We’ve got a bit of a background view of one of them, Tudor King. The other one, Baldwin Jones, seems to have been a visitor at Cobblers, so they may know something about him.”

  He did not say, though it was in his mind, that at Cobblers there might be a greater readiness to talk if he were alone than if he were accompanied by Ford. Ford’s presence might make the visit too obviously official, and what Bobby hoped was to get them at Cobblers chatting as freely as Mrs Cato had done.

  “In talk is my faith,” he told himself, thought it a good motto, and on the way tried his hand at putting the words into Latin—with inconspicuous success, since he had forgotten almost all the Latin he had ever known.

  Three-quarters of the way up the long Cobblers avenue he saw Maureen standing under one of the trees and looking rather lonely. Seeing him, she waved, and he stopped the car and got out, telling his policeman chauffeur to wait. Maureen, he saw now, had on what he was beginning to call her Lady Macbeth look.

  “Have you seen Lady Watson?” she demanded without giving him time to speak.

  “No,” he answered. “I haven’t noticed anyone. Are you looking for her?”

  In her deepest, most tragic voice, Maureen answered:

  “She’s pinched my man.”

  “Dear me,” said Bobby, not knowing what else to say.

  With one of her sudden, bewildering changes of mood, Maureen bestowed on him a broad grin.

  “It’s not much of a loss,” she announced. “Norman—Mr Oxendale, you know. But so humiliating. Such an awful let-down. Why, she must be fifty if she’s a day—well, forty, anyhow. Besides, she’s fat,” and these last three words she rolled out with such denunciatory force that Bobby’s chauffeur, though he had not been listening, though he was too far off to distinguish words, yet looked up with a startled air, evidently wondering what was happening.

  “Oh, well, you know, fatness is sometimes rather reassuring,” Bobby said, and it was in his mind that he would have felt more at ease after the interview with Mrs Cato if she had been comfortably fat instead of being so tall and gaunt and grim. Who can imagine a fat Clytemnestra? He asked: “Does Lady Watson often—er—pinch young men?”

  “As often as she gets the chance,” Maureen said, returning to her former Lady Macbeth scowl. “My fault for giving her the chance. I let out I was going down to the village and Norman asked if he could come with me, and he was waiting, so off she went and bagged him. It wasn’t even as if I had kept him waiting either—at least, not much.”

  “How much?” Bobby could not help asking.

  “Practically punctual to a dot,” Maureen assured him. “Not more than a quarter of an hour, anyhow. Or maybe twenty minutes. You can’t complain of that, can you?”

  “Well, at any rate, not until after you are married,” Bobby answered.

  She surveyed him with grave disapproval.

  “What an awfully beastly thing to say,” she complained. “So cynical. So disillusioning,” and she managed to look as if all illusion had left her for ever. “Just as I had been done out of a proposal, too.”

  “From Mr Oxendale?”

  “I’m practically certain he meant to”, she lamented. “And I do so like being proposed to. Isn’t it heartbreaking?”

  “Another time, perhaps,” he suggested.

  “The first fine careless rapture has gone,” she told him gravely. “It’s boring when it becomes a habit, like Jack.”

  “Mr Longton?” Bobby asked. “Does he very often?”

  “Every time we meet. I’ve begun to tell him we might as well get it over, and if he’ll pop I’ll say ‘No’, and then that’ll be done with till next time.”

  “And does he always—er—pop?” Bobby inquired solemnly.

  “Oh, well, sometimes he sulks,” she admitted. “It’s a bad fault of his. Still, I can generally wangle a proposal sooner or later.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t say ‘No’ too often,” Bobby warned her. “One day he might think you really meant it.”

  “Oh, I do,” she cried; “and I do think that’s a most awfully rude thing to say.” With great dignity she said: “I think we had better talk about something else if you don’t mind. Unless you would like to propose to me yourself,” she added hopefully.

  “I’m married already,” Bobby confessed.

  “I thought as much,” she told him. “That’s why you were so horrid and
cynical just now. Have you brought back the golden dagger? Daddy’s beginning to fuss. I expect he’ll be starting pulling strings soon, if you don’t look out. He can be jolly nasty when he starts doing that. I tell him it’s the black market of the spirit, and a fat lot he cares.”

  “I’m afraid,” Bobby answered, “it’s going to be nastier than probably Lord Rone expects. The report says the stains on the blade are human blood.”

  “Oh,” she said, startled; and stood still, staring at him, and there was that in his expression as he looked back at her that once again made her change. She seemed to grow more natural, all her affectations, her frivolity, seemed to fall away, leaving her stripped and bare, for once entirely herself, a rather frightened, rather lonely young woman, who saw in Bobby’s eyes a stark reality she had never known before. “Oh,” she repeated softly and then more loudly, but still very quietly: “What does that mean?”

  “It is what I am here to find out,” he answered.

  “Not—not,” she began, and he could see that her lips were framing the word ‘murder.’ But then she boggled at pronouncing it and said instead, and rather quickly: “Well, that needn’t mean anyone has been killed? There isn’t anyone could have been.”

  “There are two people we want to get in touch with,” Bobby said. “One is Mr Tudor King, who has taken a bungalow here, but who hasn’t arrived yet and whose present address isn’t known.”

  “Can’t Mrs Cato tell you?” Maureen asked quickly. “I’ve seen her in the village. She’s rather grim. She would be splendid in a murder part. If ever I play one I shall build on her.”

  “I think we had better not talk too much about murder at present,” Bobby told her. “This isn’t acting, you know. This is real life.”