Brought to Light: A Bobby Owen Mystery

by E. R. Punshon

  “Mr Hagen, isn’t it?” Bobby asked as the other came up. “Mr Day-Bell has been telling me about you. My name is Owen.”

  “The police gentleman?” Hagen asked. “You’ll excuse me, sir, but when I saw you I thought it was the Duke of Blegborough. Mr Day-Bell told me he was expecting him.”

  “He still is, I believe,” Bobby remarked. “Sorry if you’re disappointed, Mr Hagen. I’m afraid a policeman is a poor substitute for a duke. Mr Day-Bell seems to think he’s coming about Janet Merton’s grave. Something to do with the manuscript poems and the letters said to have been placed in her coffin. Illegible by this time, I should think.”

  “Well, no, sir,” Hagen said. “Not if it’s true that they were enclosed in a leaden casket.”

  “Oh, I didn’t know that,” Bobby said. “Looks as if Asprey had his reservations at the back of his mind. I wonder. May I see your postcards? I must have one or two. Do you sell many?”

  “It all helps,” Hagen admitted. “Stephen Asprey’s poems, too, but not many buy them. Most seem to think ten and six is a lot to pay just for a book. Mr Chrines wanted me to sell his poems, too—those he published last year. Very successful, too, he tells me.”

  “Mr Chrines?” Bobby repeated, puzzled for the moment. “Oh, yes. The young man who claims to be a son of Stephen Asprey and Janet?”

  “That’s him, sir,” Hagen said. “Mr Samuel Chrines. He was here just now; perhaps you saw him leaving? A tallish young man, going bald, in corduroy trousers and a loose jacket?”

  “Oh, yes,” Bobby said. “He went off on a motor-cycle. You sell his books, too? Do visitors buy them at all?”

  “Well, sir,” Hagen answered, “I thought it best not to try. I don’t think Mr Day-Bell liked the idea any more than I did. It might have looked as if we endorsed his story about being the son of Stephen Asprey and Janet Merton.”

  “Is that at all generally believed, do you know?” Bobby asked.

  “I don’t think so. Mr Chrines is a very pleasant young gentleman, and there’s nothing against him that I know of, but most seem to think he’s only trying to attract attention to his own poetry. I’m no judge of poetry—never read it”—this with a slight accent of contempt—“but a good many papers said he was only imitating Asprey’s work. Miss Christabel was very angry about the story. She got her lawyers to write to him. They called it a libel. I didn’t know you could libel dead people.”

  “In some circumstances you can, I believe,” Bobby said. “It depends. Did it have any effect on him?”

  “Well, sir,” Hagen answered, smiling a little. “At any rate, now he always says he is telling you in confidence and you mustn’t repeat it. He told me he had proof and he would show it when he was ready—documentary proof he called it. I must say it rather impressed me, what he said. He seemed so confident that some day he would have complete evidence and that was all he was waiting for. He said, too, there were references in one of Asprey’s poems, ‘The past still lives’, that meant him.”

  “I see,” Bobby said, looking thoughtfully at this grave where perhaps more secrets than one were hidden. “Mr Chrines lives near here, doesn’t he?”

  “Well, it’s not very far. He has a cottage where there’s what’s left of the village,” Hagen explained. “Rather more than a mile and a half from here. There are a few other cottages, and the post office and the ‘Green Man’. If things go on the way they are, Hillings will soon be a parish without inhabitants—except the dead,” and his glance, too, wandered to the grave by which they stood.

  “How do the people live?” Bobby asked. “Small-holdings or what?”

  “Well, sir,” Hagen answered slowly. “Maybe it’s just as well not to ask. We’ve a bad reputation here. Always have had. It’s said Hillings-under-Moor means the men of hell near the moor, and that in some old maps the place is simply marked ‘Hell’. I don’t know about that. I’ve never tried to go into it. Too busy. But if there’s sheep disappear from a farm, or a poultry run is raided—well, it’s always blamed on Hillings. There’s been talk of having a policeman stationed here, but it’s never come to anything. He would have a bad time, I’m afraid, if it ever did.”

  “What about Mr Chrines?” Bobby asked. “How does he get on?”

  “Oh, no one minds him,” Hagen said. “He doesn’t interfere and he’s left alone. He stands treat at the ‘Green Man’ sometimes, and plays a game of darts now and then. Otherwise he keeps himself to himself—busy with his writing, he is. What he calls an ‘An Epic of Despair and the Modern Age’. It’s to be his masterpiece, he says. He used to come here and read bits of it to me, but he’s stopped now. I haven’t the time to listen, and anyhow I couldn’t make head or tail of it, so I started to read him parts of my own work, and that choked him off. He said he couldn’t make head or tail of it, and I daresay he couldn’t. Not very well read or highly educated, I think, and wholly ignorant of the subjects that happen to interest me.”

  “Mr Day-Bell told me you had a remarkable library,” Bobby said.

  “Well, sir,” Hagen answered with something of an air of defending himself against possible criticism, “in a place like this you have to have something to keep you occupied, and with me it’s always been books and trying to puzzle things out for myself. I can’t claim to be a scholar in any sense. That’s not possible when you’ve had no proper education, but I like to read and think. And I rather fancy, sir, this must be the Duke of Blegborough Mr Day-Bell said he was expecting.”

  Bobby turned sharply. An imposing-looking car was drawing up before the rectory. Two men alighted, and in one of them Bobby recognized Mr Pyle. From the rectory Mr Day-Bell was emerging, all bland welcome. But now he stood motionless upon the doorstep, bland welcome changed to an indignant, bewildered dismay as he recognized Mr Pyle, already, as it appeared, snugly established as the Duke’s companion. Bobby devoted one moment to entranced admiration of Mr Pyle’s enterprise—no wonder he was a great figure in Fleet Street—and then decided that he had better join them. With a word of farewell to Hagen, he went quickly back to the rectory.

  CHAPTER VII

  DUCAL VISITOR

  WHEN BOBBY, hurrying, reached the rectory, Mr Day-Bell was still standing frozen in that attitude to which his first dignified yet deferential, welcoming approach to his ducal visitor had changed as he recognized that visitor’s companion. The two of them, the Duke and Mr Pyle, had paused by the side of the car, and Mr Day-Bell could see with anguish that the Duke was listening attentively to whatever Mr Pyle was saying. To Bobby, as he came up, Day-Bell said with fierce intensity:

  “It’s Mr Pyle—Pyle. How dare he . . . intolerable . . . Pyle,” he repeated as one who could have said so much more had not his cloth forbad.

  The Duke and Mr Pyle had finished their little preliminary talk now and were quite close; Mr Pyle wearing the smug, complacent air of the man who has just trumped his opponent’s ace. The Duke was a portly, middle-aged man with a long, melancholy face and a manner at once aloof and ingratiating; as of one who knew well that in these days dukes and such like exist only on sufferance, but knew also that while they did exist, they existed by a natural right nothing could change or take away. Indeed, he so much, in so many ways, corresponded to the American idea of the British butler, at once subservient and dictatorial, perfectly sure of himself in his environment, but aware he may be given his final discharge at any moment, that had he appeared in Hollywood he would certainly have been offered such an engagement on the spot.

  “The Duke of Blegborough, no doubt,” Mr Day-Bell said, advancing in as stately a manner as his inner dismay permitted, and trying at the same time to offer a respectful greeting to the Duke and to ignore as completely as possible his companion. “I received your telegram earlier to-day.”

  “I hope I’m not inconveniencing you by turning up like this,” the Duke said, with his odd mixture of apology and authority. “You have met Mr Pyle already to-day, I think? I was lucky enough to be able to offer him a lift w
hen his car broke down on his way here.”

  Mr Day-Bell ignored this, and proceeded to introduce Bobby as a high official of Scotland Yard.

  “I considered his presence and assistance might be of value, and so I asked him to join us,” he explained; and he would have dearly loved to add: ‘As I did not Mr Pyle’, but then thought he had better not.

  “In my view,” interposed Mr Pyle, who seldom thought he had better not, “it is somewhat premature, even undesirable, to invoke police aid at this stage. I personally see no good reason for it.”

  “I am afraid,” Bobby interposed in his turn, “the presence of the police is often felt to be undesirable. Quite a natural attitude, but one that on our side we are apt to notice.”

  “I can assure Mr Owen,” declared the Duke, speaking now with the firm yet deferential authority of the butler laying down the correct order of serving the wines, “that his presence is more than desirable. But I trust it does not mean there have been fresh developments?”

  “No doubt your Grace is right,” Mr Pyle cut in. “Possibly I was a little over-anxious in fearing the police being here might mean unwelcome publicity. My journalistic training, no doubt. One has to be so careful—so strait-laced, I might say—in our profession.”

  “I was in the act of preparing a cup of tea for Mr Owen and myself while we were waiting,” Mr Day-Bell said, in his confusion forgetting to answer the Duke’s question. “If, sir, you would care to join us we could talk more comfortably,” and it was by no means forgetfulness that made him fail to include Mr Pyle in this invitation—though after all ‘you’ is a plural and may be so regarded.

  Nor had Mr Pyle any intention of not so regarding it.

  “A cup of tea is the one thing we were both longing for, wasn’t it?” he declared, appealing to the Duke for confirmation.

  “Yes, indeed; it is most kind,” agreed the Duke, though in fact he had not known till then that thoughts of tea had entered into his somewhat troubled mind.

  Mr Day-Bell, baffled, defeated, and well aware of it, led the way back into the house; followed by the Duke, faintly puzzled by exchanges he did not quite understand; by Mr Pyle, grimly persistent; and by Bobby, in full enjoyment of this little scene of high comedy whereof no detail had escaped him, the flavour of it for him so much enhanced by his dark foreboding that behind it might well lie grim issues of life and death. But, then, often had he had occasion to observe how strangely in life tragedy and comedy become inextricably intermingled.

  His Grace of Blegborough had already forgotten his desire for a cup of tea whereof Mr Pyle had so recently reminded him. Mr Pyle seemed equally forgetful, for his cup, too, stood untasted before him. Bobby alone showed signs of appreciation as he stirred and sipped and sipped again. True, it was a somewhat weak brew, for Mr Day-Bell had either forgotten or ignored the fact that a pot of tea prepared on economical lines for two is hardly adequate for four.

  At first no one seemed inclined to speak. Bobby waited to see who would begin. Mr Day-Bell, exhausted perhaps by his efforts to press a plate of extremely stale-looking currant buns on his guests, had subsided into silence. The Duke was looking more melancholy than ever and was evidently ill at ease. To Mr Pyle, the Duke was equally evidently the only one of those present who had for him a real worth-while existence. It was Mr Pyle who broke a silence beginning to grow a little awkward.

  “Difficult as it all is,” he said suddenly, “I see no reason why it should not be dealt with satisfactorily. My utmost efforts—” He paused and bowed to the Duke, who looked rather startled and did not seem sure whether or not to bow in return. Mr Pyle continued: “The thing is to avoid undue publicity. I shudder to think of some of the less responsible organs of the Press—such as Daily Intelligence—getting to hear of and exploiting all this. I am inclined to suggest we should each undertake formally to observe the utmost privacy. I hope we all agree. For my part most willingly. And you, Mr Owen?”

  “Certainly not,” Bobby answered, handing up his cup for more tea and helping himself to another of those stale and uninviting buns; for he was beginning to feel that prospects of dinner were slowly but surely fading away, leaving not even a grin behind. “I never,” he told Pyle, “make promises I might not be able to keep.”

  “In that case,” Mr Pyle said, slowly and weightily, “may I suggest that it might be as well if Mr Owen left us to discuss this matter between ourselves, less bound as we are by what perhaps I may venture to call official red tape?”

  “I am here,” Bobby said, “on the invitation of Mr Day-Bell to see if I can be of any assistance—a kind of watching brief, so to say. Of course, I am perfectly willing to retire, if that is Mr Day-Bell’s wish. But in that case I shall advise Major Rowley that I am not satisfied, and that in my opinion he should take further action. Of course, it would be for him to decide.”

  “Oh, we don’t want that, not at all,” exclaimed the Duke, fluttering protesting hands. “It’s not in any way secret. It’s merely that I’ve had two anonymous letters, a ’phone call as well, and there was a pretty plain hint that an old absurd and most offensive story might be raked up again soon and would I like it stopped?”

  “Was any specific sum demanded?” Bobby asked.

  “No. No. I don’t think so,” the Duke answered. “It was all put rather vaguely, but the meaning was clear enough.”

  “Have you the letters with you?”

  “I tore them up at once and threw the bits into the waste-paper basket,” the Duke answered, and it was exactly the reply Bobby had expected.

  “If you get any more,” he said, “please be very careful to keep them, especially the envelopes. There might even be fingerprints—‘dabs’ we call them—we could trace. If there’s another ’phone message at any time, keep the line open as long as you can and arrange to let us know, so that we can try to get who ever it may be. A thin chance, I know. People who make those sort of calls don’t hang about. But worth trying, all the same.”

  “My own suggestion,” put in Mr Pyle, “would be that one of my staff should remain permanently by his Grace’s ’phone—Mr McKie, I think. A most able experienced man with a wonderful knowledge of the underworld. The moment McKie—”

  “Most undesirable,” Bobby interrupted curtly, “and might indeed come very near to interference with the course of justice.”

  “Nothing like that could possibly happen; in any case I would take full responsibility,” Mr Pyle declared, looking hopefully, almost pleadingly from Bobby to the Duke and back again, his mind full of exciting dreams.

  If once he could get his foot in—or rather Sandy McKie’s—the rest would follow automatically. A vision of vast headlines floated before his eyes—‘My stay at Blegborough Castle’, ‘Waiting for the fatal ’phone call’, ‘My race to the call-box and what I found’—each one more alluring, more ‘reader creating’ than all the others. The Duke was looking somewhat bewildered. His less alluring vision was of a reporter camped permanently in his study; and he did not like it very much, but was half afraid it was going to happen, unless someone came to his aid. You never knew where you were with these Press johnnies. Bobby took no notice of Pyle’s last remark. If the Duke were fool enough to admit one of Pyle’s staff to his house, that was his affair. At any rate he had been warned against it. Bobby said:

  “May I take it that the scandal in question is concerned with Stephen Asprey and the letters said to be buried in Janet Merton’s grave?”

  The Duke nodded gloomily.

  “I think I had better tell you the whole thing,” he said, speaking directly to Bobby, for he was really beginning to be a little afraid of Mr Pyle and of what action that gentleman might next propose. “My wife, the late Duchess, was greatly impressed by Stephen Asprey. I don’t know why. The man struck me as an ill-conditioned bounder. These literary geniuses often are. Asprey may have been one—a genius, I mean. My wife seemed to think so, and there is one thing of his very well known—something about ‘to hold the gorgeous E
ast in fee’, I think it runs.”

  “Wordsworth,” murmured Bobby, unable to let this pass.

  “Yes, yes, of course,” agreed the Duke. “I meant the one beginning ‘In gold and sumptuous velvet go the stars’. Always coming across it. Very fine, no doubt. But all the same I would have soon kicked the fellow out if I had had my way. But you know what women are, and he wasn’t worth quarrelling over. Any idea that I ever thought of being jealous is merely silly. One isn’t jealous of people of that sort. I understand Asprey’s father was a plumber—no doubt a most worthy man,” the Duke hastened to add in deference to the democratic standards of the age. “Asprey was staying with us when I had the misfortune to lose my wife. It was most sudden, wholly unexpected. I strongly suspect that it was Asprey who started the abominable lie that I was responsible. I’ve been told he was very resentful of the speed with which I got rid of him. As if at a time like that I wanted perfect strangers hanging about. He may even have believed the lies he spread. The man’s vanity was so colossal he was capable of believing—or imagining—anything to flatter his self-importance. I wanted to take proceedings. My lawyers advised against it.”

  “It was good advice,” Bobby told him. “Much better to let groundless scandal die of its own falsehood rather than spread it further.”

  “I happen,” the Duke said, “to have been fond of my wife. I have never married again and I still miss her—I think at times I even miss her very often highly objectionable protégés she used to have to stay with us,” and quite suddenly he blew his nose—loudly, and Mr Pyle blew his more loudly still, probably as a sign of sympathy. “You can imagine,” the Duke went on, “my feelings when I found it was being widely hinted that I”—he hesitated and resumed—“that I had murdered her, for that is what it came to.”

  “Was that said?” Bobby asked, startled.