The Golden Dagger: A Bobby Owen Mystery

by E. R. Punshon

  “You will have to be asked to make a full and formal statement in writing. I shall have to ask you to go to the Yard to do that. You can ring up Lord Rone and Saine and ask him to be present if you wish.”

  “Oh, no,” Maureen exclaimed, looking now, with one of her remarkable changes of personality, much more like a frightened child and much less like the tragic muse even than before. “I don’t want him to know anything. He would be so awfully upset.”

  “Or your lawyer?” Bobby asked.

  “Well, that would be just the same, wouldn’t it?” she replied. “Lawyers are so stuffy. He would go rushing off first thing to tell Daddy all about it, and make the very worst of it as well. He thinks I’m just awful.”

  “Are you twenty-one yet?” Bobby asked next.

  “Last month,” she replied. “Why?”

  “It means you are of age,” Bobby explained, and could not help adding: “And by a fantastic legal fiction supposed to be grown up and fully responsible for your own actions. In your case, that’s a wholly absurd assumption, of course.”

  “I say,” Maureen murmured, “you can rub it in, can’t you?”

  “If you had happened to be born next month instead of last,” Bobby continued relentlessly, “I could treat you as the naughty child you are, and I should communicate at once with your parents or guardian. I suppose we can do that still. Nothing against it.”

  “It’ll be rather beastly of you if you do,” protested Maureen. “I don’t think you really want to be beastly, do you? . . .”

  “Well, then, how did you first come to meet Mr Jones?”

  “I don’t know exactly. A cocktail party, I expect,” she answered. “You are always meeting people somewhere. He could be—well, rather fascinating. Somehow he made you feel—” She hesitated for a word and then wound up rather lamely: “I don’t know exactly.”

  “Grown up?” Bobby suggested.

  The shaft struck home. She began to go slowly red, and still redder, till there was no high church dignitary or learned professor in all the land so red as she—or any rose in June either.

  “I was such a kid,” she explained defensively.

  “And are still,” Bobby retorted, rather brutally, as Olive was at some pains to point out to him later on. But he was still extremely angry, even if at times he did feel it rather hard to go on being angry with someone he was mentally classifying as the most hopeless little idiot he had ever known. “How did you come to know Jones’s address? He seems to have managed to keep it dark generally.”

  “Oh, one or two people knew. I don’t know if he told them or if they found out. I think he didn’t like to say because of it’s not being very grand or like the stories he told people. Or he may have had other reasons. I don’t know. I don’t quite remember who told me. Unless it was Norman Oxendale.”

  “How did you get in here?”

  “The woman downstairs gave me a key.”

  “How much?”

  “Well, I gave her a ten-shilling note, if that’s what you mean.”

  “It is,” Bobby agreed drily. “Was Mr Oxendale a friend of his?”

  “I don’t think so. Not specially. You see, everyone rather sucks up to Norman in a kind of way. Anyhow, they all feel he’s worth being civil to. Miniatures are only a sort of sideline with him. He reads for Bury’s.”

  “Reads what? Who is Bury?” Bobby asked, puzzled.

  “Don’t you know Bury’s?” Maureen asked in her turn and in her turn puzzled by such ignorance. “The big theatrical managers. They have seven plays running in the West End at this moment.”

  “Have they?” asked Bobby, less affected by so portentous an announcement than Maureen seemed to have expected.

  “I think it’s seven,” she was saying now, counting on her fingers. “Yes, seven. Three American, three revivals, and one translation from the French. Bury,” she repeated, “commonly known as the Author’s Graveyard, because if you send them a play to read, it’s generally buried for good.”

  “Why does that make Mr Oxendale a person worth being civil to?”

  “Oh, authors always hope, poor dears,” Maureen explained. “You can never tell. There might be a miracle, and they all feel their own special script ought to have one. They all feel Norman must give it a good report. He often does. Bury’s never read them, of course—the reports, I mean.”

  “It all sounds rather complicated,” Bobby said, giving up all hope of understanding these matters, but interested to know that Norman Oxendale had been regarded as a person worth cultivating. Even the smallest piece of information might, he felt, be useful as a clue to a fuller comprehension of this strange make-believe world of the theatre, into which the grim shape of murder seemed to have thrust its way with such incongruous reality.

  “Besides,” Maureen was saying, “he always pretends he has a lot to do with casting. No one believes him, but everyone thinks, ‘Suppose it’s true,’ and, if it is, just as well to keep on good terms with him. And, of course,” she added, “he has a desk at Bury’s and he might put in a word sometimes. I don’t like him much, but I do try to be civil.”

  “He would have a good position there, I suppose?”

  “I don’t expect Bury’s pay much,” Maureen said doubtfully. “I don’t know. He always seems jolly hard up, anyhow. But then,” she added brightly, “everyone is, aren’t they?”

  Bobby agreed wholeheartedly—especially from the personal and private point of view. He said:

  “Will you tell me what was in these letters Baldwin Jones thought he could get money out of you for?”

  “It wasn’t so much what I wrote,” Maureen said. “There were only about half a dozen. Just notes really. Promising to meet him somewhere. Things like that. Sometimes he would stand me a dinner and we would go on to a dance. You see, he found out about Father being a peer, and he had an idea that was important, and, of course, it isn’t a bit nowadays. So he wanted to be friends and I was feeling awfully out of it at first and I was jolly glad to pick up a man who seemed to know everything about everyone.”

  “But surely you have many family friends and relatives? I don’t see why you should feel awfully out of it,” Bobby said.

  “Oh, they weren’t any good for the people I wanted to meet—people who mattered, I mean,” Maureen explained. “The top-rankers in the theatre. I kept away from relations as much as I could—a stuffy lot, all of them. When I went to the Dramatic School I put down my name as Jones, and that gave Baldwin Jones a chance to pretend he thought we must be relatives.”

  “Why not use your own name?” Bobby asked.

  “Dad was so dead against it. He said the stage was top-heavy with gilded youth, and I did so awfully hate being called gilded youth. I wanted to show him I wasn’t, and then I got rather a nice letter from the School—it said I did show some signs of being possibly worth training. I was awfully bucked because generally they say, ‘N.B.G.’ and please don’t call again.”

  “Well, then,” Bobby said, still feeling rather lost with all these revelations thus thrust upon him, “if there were only a few letters and nothing much in them—why did he think you would pay to get them back?”

  “I dare say,” Maureen admitted reluctantly, “there might have been one or two things he could have twisted. I don’t know. Besides—did you know he was awfully good at forging?”

  “Baldwin Jones? No. Was he?” Bobby exclaimed, and he told himself that all this rather desultory talk seemed as if it might pay rich dividends. “Did he do much in that line?”

  “He did when he got the chance,” Maureen answered. “He had a way of coming along with small post-mortem cheques after you were dead.”

  “Post-mortem cheques,” Bobby repeated. “How did he manage that? Cheques aren’t valid if the drawer is dead.”

  “That was why,” Maureen explained. “If you’re dead, you can’t say it isn’t yours, can you? And if the relatives are really nice people, they don’t want not to pay on what seems a perfectly g
ood moral claim—especially if it’s a cheque on a bit of paper and supposed to be because of playing poker or something and you’ve always been awfully respectable. Baldy was always careful to have a good story to tell and only for small sums.”

  “Had he a cheque of yours?” Bobby asked.

  “Oh, no, nothing like that,” Maureen answered, and suddenly looked older, more responsible, much more angry, too. “He was a foul beast,” she said, “and I don’t care if he is dead, he just was. He put in disgusting postscripts, horrid things. Forged so you couldn’t tell they had been added. To frighten you out of your life. Well, so it did, but I wasn’t going to let him get away with that.” Her lips set into hard lines and her eyes were fierce and bright. “I said Jack Longton—” She stopped abruptly as she remembered what she had said previously and she did not repeat it. She said instead: “When I heard he had been killed, I made up my mind no one else was ever going to get hold of the things, and now no one ever will. You can call me a fool as much as you like, but you can’t do anything about it. No one can.”

  CHAPTER XIX

  A PHOTOGRAPH

  MAUREEN WAS ALLOWED to go then—a very, though probably only temporarily, subdued Maureen. She was warned, however, that a much fuller and more detailed statement would be required later on. She was also given the good advice to tell her father everything and to consult that lawyer whom she had described as thinking her ‘just awful.’

  “She has managed,” Bobby said crossly after her departure, “to muddle it all up even worse than before. Makes it look much worse for three of our suspects. Young Longton is evidently in love with her, and he may have thought it his bounden duty to play the knight errant and rescue her from the blackmail threat. Then her father may have felt her reputation was in danger and gone to extremes to save it. Both had easy access to the dagger and either might have taken it, perhaps as a kind of measure of precaution.”

  “Wouldn’t you say that pointed to the father rather than to Mr Longton?” Ford asked. “Longton looks to me as if he would feel quite up to handling Baldwin Jones without bothering about golden daggers. Only you said it made it worse for three suspects, didn’t you, sir?”

  “The Maureen girl,” Bobby explained. “She may have worked herself into a state of hysteria. We’ve only her word for it that what she called the beastly parts were forgeries. If the little idiot hadn’t burnt the things, that could easily have been established. Now there will never be any positive proof. She may have made up her mind to get them back at any cost and taken the golden dagger with her to back her up. Or even as a bit of play-acting for that matter. It all has to be taken into account.”

  “Seems to be getting more and more of an open field,” Ford commented ruefully. “Plenty of trails, but which is the right one? And Mr Tudor King no one seems to know anything about, except that he isn’t there any more. I don’t get Miss Maureen somehow. Is she—well, responsible, if you see what I mean?”

  “Oh, yes,” Bobby answered. “As much so as any of these theatre people is likely to be—not that that’s saying much,” he added.

  Therewith Bobby departed, leaving Ford in charge till a relief could be procured and arrangements made for the safe custody and expert examination of the dead man’s belongings. He himself went back to ‘The Turk’s Tail,’ where he found Mrs Abbott, though still very distressed, in a more composed mood.

  At his request she showed him the series of presentation volumes Baldwin Jones had given her. But, to Bobby’s disappointment, they proved not to be the works of Tudor King. They were, in fact, the collected edition, recently put on the market, and now remaindered, of a writer of whom Bobby knew as little as he had done of Tudor King until these recent events. He made a note of titles, and of the names of the author and publisher, and then went on to ask a few more questions. He learned very little.

  Baldwin Jones had been at first just a chance, casual customer like many others who visited ‘The Turk’s Tail’ from time to time. Gradually his visits had grown more frequent till he had come to occupy a privileged position. He began to be an occasional, and then more frequent, guest in the intimacy of the comfortable apartment, half office, half sitting-room, in which Bobby and Mrs Abbott were now talking. But it soon appeared from what Mrs Abbott said that there had been a certain reserve on both sides. Baldwin Jones had preserved his air of mystery as of a man of genius moving aloof and alone among common folk. On the other hand, Mrs Abbott’s common sense and business sense had alike prevented her, at least so far, from yielding completely to the odd fascination Baldwin Jones seemed able to exercise over women—whether the landlady of a Hoxton pub or the daughter of a wealthy peer or indeed almost any of the sex. When Bobby approached delicately the subject of money, Mrs Abbott was emphatic that ‘the poor boy’ had no feeling for money at all. He had certainly come to be treated as a guest rather than as a customer and after a time had never been asked to pay for the food or drink he was supplied with. Occasionally he would confess to being hard up and Mrs Abbott admitted that occasionally she had slipped a few notes into his coat pocket when he wasn’t looking. He had always been very surprised to find them there and would tell Mrs Abbott, as a joke against himself, that this money had been in his pocket all the time he had thought he had hardly enough to pay for his ’bus fares.

  “Playing his fish carefully,” was Bobby’s unspoken comment on this.

  Possibly also Baldwin Jones had realized that Mrs Abbott was a woman of considerable strength of character and that he had better not tie himself up to her too completely until he was sure no easier game was in sight. All the same, Bobby told himself on his way back to the Yard that Mrs Abbott had had a very narrow escape. It was an opinion that was strengthened when, as a result of a few inquiries and ’phone calls he made after his return, he learned that the books he had seen, presented to Mrs Abbott by Baldwin Jones and claimed by him as his own work, were in fact by a gentleman who occupied a very important and influential—and highly paid—post in journalism, and entirely unable to understand why his prestige in the literary world was not on the same level. Even this collected edition of his books, produced at his own expense, had attracted little attention—except from a few critics with a proper respect for the hand that fed them or might do so in the future.

  Bobby’s first impression was that here was another complete dead end. Then he began to wonder. It might be that Jones, unable to present Mrs Abbott with his own books, since that would disclose the pen name under which he wrote, had hit on this idea of giving her another writer’s books, confident, as he would be, that for her one book was much like another, as indeed for many of the great British public one book is much the same as another. All a part possibly of the mist of mystification in which ‘Tudor King’ seemed to like to move. But no kind of proof that Jones was in fact a professional writer at all or in any way to be identified with the elusive Tudor King. Except of course, that Tudor King was a kind of mystery man and so was Baldwin Jones, and that Baldwin Jones claimed to be a writer, while Tudor King was certainly one.

  It had grown too late by now for much more to be done, and Bobby wanted as well to give Maureen full opportunity to take any action she wished. To give her such opportunity was indeed one of the reasons why he had let her go. It seemed to him specially important to know how close was her intimacy with Jack Longton, and whether it was to him that she would turn for help. Just a chance, he thought, or even more than a chance, that between them was the link—the dreadful link—of a guilty knowledge. But that was for the morrow, and now he went home for supper and bed.

  He was early in his room at the Yard next day, and there he found, amid the usual mass of material waiting for him, one small and very interesting item. One of his men had managed to dig up a photograph of Tudor King published in a woman’s paper several years previously. It was a bad photograph, badly printed on cheap paper, and from it recognition would not be easy. It showed a young man with a moustache and short, curly beard, wearing cr
icketing flannels and a loose blazer. Not a striking face by any means—indeed, with something rather soft and effeminate about it, Bobby thought, in spite of the moustache and curly beard. There was no photographer’s name. Very likely an amateur’s effort, Bobby decided. Oddly enough, he had a feeling that there was about it an impression of someone he knew, someone he had seen recently. Who this could be he entirely failed even to imagine. Certainly not Baldwin Jones, whom the photograph did not seem to resemble in the least, though, of course, it had to be remembered that the subject of the photograph was wearing beard and moustache, while Baldwin Jones, like most men to-day, had been clean-shaven. And the wearing of beard and moustache can make a vast difference in personal appearance.

  “Take all that hair away and it might almost be a woman’s face,” he told himself, and he tried to make a sketch, reproducing the face in the photograph as he thought it might be without those appendages.

  The effort was no great success. Nor was he much more successful when he first made a sketch of Baldwin Jones and then tried to add beard and moustache.

  He threw these attempts into the waste-paper basket as useless, put the photograph in his pocket, made sure by a ’phone call that Longton was at his hotel and would be there all morning. Then he went out to the car he had asked should be provided for him and in readiness and drove off, meaning to call at the hotel to have a talk with Longton before going on to Cobblers.

  When he reached the hotel, however, some slight embarrassment seemed to result when he announced his wish to see Mr Longton. The receptionist appeared uncertain as to Mr Longton’s whereabouts. She pressed the bell that summoned the manager in moments of stress or urgency. He also showed some hesitation. Mr Longton was, he thought, engaged on important business. Bobby said his business was also important and indeed pressing, and the manager gave a hesitating glance down a short passage near the entrance to which they were standing. Up it was coming the sound of distant voices Bobby had at first attributed to a radio set going at full strength. The manager saw Bobby was listening with renewed attention. He said: