The Golden Dagger: A Bobby Owen Mystery

by E. R. Punshon

  “Yes, indeed,” agreed Bobby sympathetically. “The best laid plans of mice and men, you know. But there it is. We are interested, and even very much so. But so far only if there’s any tie-up with—murder. Mr Moyse, I want you to get this. At present we have nothing against you. But I do ask you to remember that a man has been murdered. Murder—isn’t that a thing apart?”

  “I don’t hold with murder,” Moyse admitted, but still in his sulkiest tones. “There are limits.”

  “Isn’t it because you felt that from the start that you put your ’phone call through to us?” Bobby asked.

  “Me? What ’phone call?” Moyse asked with such starry-eyed innocence that Bobby was at once convinced his guess had been a good one. “Me?” Moyse repeated, still wide-eyed with surprise and innocence. “You mean the one telling you about it? What on earth put it into your head that was me? I knew nothing about it; not a thing.”

  “Well, if you don’t very much mind,” Bobby said, “and just for the sake of argument, shall we pretend that perhaps it was you—or someone very like you? You know this is a wholly private talk. It’s not a statement. No one taking notes, and we don’t go in for dictaphones or anything of that sort. Not a bad idea, but, Lord, what would the papers say? Why, they might even call it un-English. That wouldn’t do, would it? So you can talk perfectly freely if you will. No one will ever know what you do say.”

  “Except you,” Moyse interrupted.

  “Not officially,” Bobby answered; “and what a policeman doesn’t know officially, he doesn’t know at all. Mr Moyse, I repeat, I am asking you for help and I promise you nothing you say now will be held against you or even remembered. Except,” Bobby added gravely, “as regards anything that might in any way help a murderer to escape.”

  He was silent then and Moyse was silent, too, wriggling the while uncomfortably on his chair and throwing occasional glances towards the door, as if wishing very heartily that he was on the other side of it. Bobby waited. He had a curious way of waiting, patient and grave, that others besides Moyse had found carried with it a strange compelling force of its own, as though behind it were a strength it would prove in the long run useless to resist. It was Moyse who spoke first, muttering as it were to himself in an effort to make up his mind.

  “I never did like murder,” he said, almost whispering. “Gives you the shivers.”

  CHAPTER XXV

  THE DICK MOYSE THEORY

  BOBBY MADE A GRAVE gesture of assent, but he remained silent. He felt it might be better to let Moyse himself pursue his own thought to its own end, uninterrupted by outside comment. At last, with a final uncomfortable wriggle, Moyse seemed to make up his mind.

  “O.K.,” he said. “I’ve always heard you play straight—considering. Suppose you, knowing how to keep your eyes open, get to Cobblers, all innocent like, but knowing there’s something a bit screwy somewhere, how long would it take you to spot Baldwin Jones was on the same lay? ‘Soup’s a bit thicker than said,’ you would soon be thinking; and if there was one of the maids was new, and if that maid went off every chance she got to a newcomer in a bungalow close by, and if you saw her making notes and not liking being seen, wouldn’t you wonder more than ever what it was all about? There’s a lot of valuable stuff lying round at Cobblers. Stamp collection worth a lot for one thing.”

  “Oh, yes,” Bobby agreed. “You are interested in stamp collections, aren’t you?”

  Moyse looked very startled, and for a moment or two Bobby was afraid that this remark had been indiscreet and might possibly result in Moyse taking fright and refusing to say more. Men of his type have to be handled with the most extreme tact, the most delicate line must be drawn between letting them see a great deal is known, so they might as well talk, and making them feel so much is known they had better say no more. So Bobby produced his most friendly smile and said:

  “Quite off the record, of course, and not even under investigation. Obviously, though, if a burglary or theft of some sort were being planned and you could do something about it, your position at Cobblers would be much stronger.”

  “Well, there was that,” Moyse agreed, apparently somewhat relieved. “Anyway, I thought I might as well see if I could find out what was going on, and I kept an eye on Linda—the new maid, you know—and I followed her once or twice. To see if she met anyone or I could get any idea of what the game was.”

  “I can understand,” Bobby said, “it was a big shock when doing that to stumble on the body of a dead man on the path where Linda had gone by.”

  “That’s right,” Moyse muttered. He had become very pale. He began to mop his face with his handkerchief and his hands were shaking. “Shock it was all right. Dark under those trees, and I switched on my torch and there was a foot sticking out from behind a bush. It was so still, if you see what I mean, I thought at first it must be someone took ill or asleep, only now I think I knew all the time, and when I looked he was lying there and me holding a dagger I must have picked up, though I didn’t know it. All over blood it was, and me thinking: If I was seen now, I should be for it; be sure I had done it, they would, and next thing I knew I was running hard as I could. Proper scared I was and so I am still. You don’t want to be mixed up in anything like that. You never know where it’ll end.”

  “No, you don’t, do you?” Bobby agreed.

  “When I stopped running,” Moyse continued, “because of not being able to any more, I was still holding the dagger. My first idea was to throw it away, only there was my fingerprints I remembered just in time, and then when I looked again I saw it came from Cobblers, from a show case in the Long Gallery. Made me think.”

  “It is catalogued as the Golden Dagger, attributed to Cellini,” Bobby remarked.

  “I didn’t know what to do,” Moyse said. “I cleaned up the handle best way I could and then I left it in a ’phone box I called you from. I wish I hadn’t now. But for me doing that, nothing might ever have been known.”

  “Nothing,” Bobby agreed gravely, and added: “Except by you, and you would never have forgotten.”

  “It wasn’t that,” Moyse said. “It was like as if that poor devil was there at my elbow all the time, wanting to know what I was going to do about it, not forgetting that if it was Lord Rone he might go on—if he knew it was me found the body and thought I knew more than I did.”

  “Mixed motives?” Bobby remarked. “Well, they generally are. Very mixed. ‘All sorts’ kind of minds we have, all of us. I don’t think I quite follow why you think Lord Rone must be guilty?”

  “Well, it was his dagger, wasn’t it? Easier for him to get than anyone else.”

  “Other people could have got hold of it,” Bobby pointed out. “Not very difficult. Linda herself, for example.”

  “I didn’t think of her,” Moyse said doubtfully. “No cause, had she? It was a man’s hat that was found, wasn’t it?”

  “Oh, yes,” Bobby agreed, but without saying that the story of the discovery of the hat rested solely on Linda’s word.

  “I never saw any hat,” Moyse said. “But then I wasn’t stopping to look. There might have been one. I thought it might give a lead if Lord Rone had been buying a new one. Very snorty they were at Bailey’s, though, and wouldn’t say.”

  “What made you go to Bailey’s?” Bobby asked. “Did you know he dealt there?”

  “Their name in all his other hats,” Moyse said. “I looked.”

  “So far as the hat goes,” Bobby remarked, “it may not have been left behind at the time of the killing. Mrs Cato reports seeing lights the next evening, and that may have been when the body was moved from where you saw it, as it certainly was. The hat may have been forgotten then. Linda does not seem to have seen it the night the murder took place, though she may have passed before it happened. We haven’t got the exact times fixed.”

  “Well, it was Lord Rone I thought of at once—his dagger, and he had a motive all right. You can take it from me Jones wasn’t at Cobblers for his health, any mor
e than me, though he had wangled it the easy way through the old girl he was making up to—Lady Watson, I mean. I mean to say, he knew all right there was something screwy, and what he wanted was to gate-crash so as to share—only on his own. Not doing a straightforward, honest job like me, but out for what pickings he could get.”

  “What were they?” Bobby asked, “and what was this straightforward, honest job of yours?”

  Again Moyse hesitated, and again Bobby waited. This time Moyse made up his mind a little more quickly.

  “The way you’ve jollied me along,” he grumbled, “you might as well have it all. More fool me for talking. The only thing with a busy is to keep your trap shut.” He was silent again, wrapped in gloomy meditation. Bobby once more waited in silence, thinking the while how strangely apt criminal slang often is. For in truth the too readily, too widely opened mouth often does prove itself a trap wherein men may easily find themselves taken. “Ever heard of Geoffrey Carton?” Moyse asked suddenly.

  “Geoffrey Carton?” Bobby repeated, and then remembered the name had been mentioned by Maureen with the additional qualification of ‘swine.’ “Oh, yes,” he said. “Next of kin and heir to the title and estates, but not on the best of terms with his relatives.”

  “That’s right,” agreed Moyse. “Fair poison to each other, if you ask me. And there aren’t any estates either, only the title and Cobblers, which is like getting a millstone for your neck when you are swimming in deep water. No money. Doesn’t come into the entail. But there’s the heirlooms all right and they are worth thousands—thousands, and they go with the title seemingly.”

  “Do you know what started this ill-feeling?” Bobby asked.

  “Money,” Moyse answered briefly. “Same as it always does, except when it’s a girl—and girls mean money mostly.” He paused, apparently slightly surprised himself by this profound aphorism he had just coined. “Seems Geoffrey tried to borrow money on the strength of being heir and he got some, but when Lord Rone shut down on it, there was a blazing row. Well, you see, Geoffrey is a writing bloke.”

  “Oh, not another,” Bobby groaned, utterly dismayed.

  “A lousy lot, aren’t they?” Moyse observed sympathetically. “So he started writing about Cobblers and the family. Fair snorters. Lord Rone could have sued him for libel or scandal or something, only he didn’t want. Make more stink. But he soon thought of another way of hitting back, or at least that’s what Geoffrey says. Selling heirlooms on the Q.T.”

  “It’s an idea,” Bobby said as he had often said before. He was thinking of the Paul Potter painting, ‘The Young Stallion.’ If the original had been in fact disposed of and he had seen only a copy, that would explain a certain uneasiness Lord Rone had shown at Bobby’s comparison of it with ‘The Young Bull,’ its companion picture. Perfectly safe, Bobby supposed, since it would be almost impossible to prove when the substitution of copy for original, if that were the case, had taken place. He said: “But if the heirlooms can’t be sold, what good would they be to Mr Geoffrey Carton?”

  “He has two sons,” Moyse explained. “The entail can be broken with the consent of next heirs. For good reason, such as poverty and keeping up the dignity of the title. That line of country.”

  “Well, I suppose if the heirs agree,” Bobby said. “But is that all that makes you think Lord Rone may be guilty?”

  “Well, there isn’t anyone else, is there?” Moyse demanded.

  “Oh, I don’t know that I would go as far as that,” Bobby answered. “There’s always a possible someone else.”

  “You don’t mean all that village talk, do you?” Moyse asked. “I mean about Mrs Cato at the New Bungalow having done in her boss, or why hasn’t he turned up, and Linda helping, and all that? Well, I mean to say . . .”

  “I’m keeping an open mind for the present,” Bobby told him.

  “If you ask me,” declared Moyse, “their game’s plain enough. Old as the hills. Plant a girl somewhere. Easy doings now when people are so glad to get help they don’t care a hoot about references. She gets to know where the good stuff is, best time to operate, lay of the house, all that, and there you are.”

  “Yes, I know,” Bobby answered, “but it’s a murder we have on our hands, and murder doesn’t fit so well in that scheme of things.”

  “Oh, if you ask me,” Moyse said, “you don’t ever know. One thing and another,” he said vaguely.

  CHAPTER XXVI

  TOY THEATRE

  MOYSE WAS ALLOWED to go then, a somewhat scared, disgruntled Moyse, wondering as he walked away how much he had told, why he had told it, whether he had been believed or not, and yet, in some odd way and much to his surprise, feeling considerably relieved.

  “Jollies you along,” he grumbled to himself, recognizing at last how he had been gently led from assumption to admission. He comforted himself with the reflection that now he wouldn’t have to worry any more about what to do, since he had done it, and now no longer would he have to fancy a restless, disembodied Baldwin Jones, in whose continued existence he did not for a moment believe, might be whispering in his ear, a complaining ghost.

  Bobby, too, was wondering if he could accept Moyse’s tale as the plain, unvarnished truth. A guilty man does sometimes try to satisfy the old instinctive feeling that the spilt blood cries aloud for vengeance, by telling, though with most careful, misleading economy, some portion of the truth. No doubt also there is the mixed motive that a partial truth-telling is often the best way of concealing the greater part of it.

  One thing, however, was clear. Moyse had been carefully introduced into the Cobblers household to do what he described and apparently considered to be, the ‘honest, straightforward’ job of discovering whether valuable heirlooms were being illegally disposed of, though whether this was an offence under the criminal law or ground only for civil action, Bobby was not at the moment quite sure. But certainly, if anything of the sort had happened, Lord Rone would be extremely unwilling to let it become publicly known—indeed, ‘unwilling’ would be probably a considerable understatement.

  Bobby surveyed this new complication with distaste, even though it was one he had already more than half anticipated. He put it out of his mind, as he had the most happy knack of being able to do with doubtful points until again they came up for consideration, and turned a carefully co-ordinated attention to the sandwiches he had sent for, since he saw no hope of any more substantial lunch, and to the latest reports on his desk. One to which he paid special attention was from the Hendon laboratory and concerned a two-inch-deep layer of soil removed from the scene of the crime. A small natural hollow in the ground had served to collect the blood of the murdered man as in a kind of basin, thus thoroughly soaking the earth there. Analysis of the layer of earth removed had given information of much interest, though sometimes information more of scientific than of practical interest. Bobby was, however, fascinated to see that it had even been possible to discover the exact blood group.

  He had finished his sandwiches now, so he entered up his diary—the first duty of all good police officers—gave a few instructions to his secretary, and departed in his car to that small country hotel where Jack Longton was busy quarrelling with the author of the play he had been engaged to produce.

  At the hotel, when he arrived there he was informed by a slightly nervous-looking receptionist that Mr Longton had locked himself in his room and had left instructions that on no account was he to be disturbed. Not even, he had said fiercely, if the hotel caught fire, and he had said this in such a threatening tone that the receptionist was still a little shaken. He had also informed her that his room telephone would be muffled and that anyone interrupting him would be at once thrown down the stairs.

  “Very pleasant gentleman,” the receptionist explained, “but very violent-tempered when upset. It’s best not to,” she added warningly.

  “Too bad, too bad,” Bobby said. “Is he still in his room or has he gone out?”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,�
� the receptionist answered. “His hat’s there still, at the end of the pegs,” she added, looking at where two or three hats were hanging on a row of pegs. “It’s that one at the end.”

  Bobby gave the hats an apparently uninterested glance, which told him, however, that none of them was a black Homburg—the last one on the pegs, as it happened rather apart from the others, was a grey felt. He asked the number of Mr Longton’s room. This the receptionist seemed unwilling to supply, and Bobby had to produce his card and explain he was on official business before he obtained it. He nodded approval when he saw it was on the first floor.

  “It won’t be so far if I do get thrown downstairs,” he explained to an even more scared-looking receptionist, who knew only too well where managerial blame would fall if anything occurred to disturb the decorum of the hotel.

  He ascended in the automatic lift, and when he knocked at the door of Longton’s room there ensued an inarticulate roar from within, indicating, Bobby supposed, extreme displeasure on the part of the inmate. Proof, anyhow, that if the room’s ’phone was muffled, the muffling did not extend to the room’s occupant. So Bobby knocked again—and louder.

  This time that mighty roar became translatable into an injunction to go away at once, before the worst happened.

  Bobby hoped it wouldn’t, and continued a rhythmic thumping on the door to the accompaniment of a persistent rattling of the handle that would, he thought, have an even more disturbing effect on anyone trying to work.

  Nor did it take long for these tactics to produce the desired result. There was a crash within as of a chair hurled to the floor, a sound as of a hungry tiger leaping on its prey. The door was hurled open and there stood Longton, shirt-sleeved, wild-eyed, hair almost on end, his mouth open to emit a roar that died away, however, when he saw who it was.

  “Awfully sorry, Mr Longton,” Bobby said as he dexterously inserted himself into the room. “Official, you know. Duty of every good citizen, etcetera. If I’ve spoiled your afternoon’s work, I’m afraid that just had to be.”