Triple Quest: A Bobby Owen Mystery

by E. R. Punshon

  “If they were all in your bedroom, they wouldn’t be seen by most of your visitors?”

  “Only when we had a cocktail party or something like that,” she agreed. “At a cocktail party you find people you never remember seeing before, all over the flat—everywhere. And of course if Mr. Atts was having possible purchasers to dinner and they brought their wives, I would take them into my room.”

  “Was it often remarked on—the cabinet, I mean?”

  “Oh yes. No one could help noticing it, it was such a lovely thing.”

  “Old pieces of furniture are always interesting,” Bobby remarked. “They often have secret drawers in them, haven’t they?”

  CHAPTER XIII

  MOTIVE ENOUGH

  THE QUESTION SEEMED to pass her by. Either it held for her no special significance, or else she was exercising an extraordinary self-control, in spite of all the signs of nervous tension she was showing. But then these are not always contradictory.

  “I don’t expect I shall ever get them back,” she was saying. “The lawyers think it is only my word against theirs, and now Mr. Tails has them it will be very difficult.”

  “I can see that,” Bobby agreed. “The onus of proof would be on you, and possession is still nine tenths of the law.”

  “Mr. Shirley was so angry,” Mrs. Atts went on. “He said he didn’t care what the lawyers thought—he would get the Sheraton cabinet back anyhow. He could pick that out at once. I hope he doesn’t do anything foolish.”

  “Let us hope not,” Bobby said. “He had seen the cabinet then, if he could pick it out at sight?”

  “I showed it him once,” Mrs. Atts answered, “and so did Mr. Atts another time. I remember that. Mr. Atts was very proud of it because he had got it for only a pound or two and he thought it was really worth hundreds and getting more valuable all the time. He refused an offer of two hundred and fifty a little while ago.”

  Bobby did not attempt to enter into the difficult question of the ethics of buying, for very little, an article your special knowledge tells you is worth a great deal. Nor did he feel very happy about these answers to his questions. It seemed established that Philip Shirley knew all about the cabinet, knew where it stood in the flat, possibly knew as well about the secret drawer of which Mrs. Atts had made no mention. He remembered well that at the very beginning of this investigation there had been talk of poison, and then, too, the word had occurred again later on. Now the thing itself was there. He did not like it but he decided he would say no more at present. It was a mistake to show your hand too soon. Be sure before you speak is always a good motto, or your suspects may take alarm.

  “The total value of the articles you claim were wrongfully removed would be considerable then?” he asked.

  “I suppose I oughtn’t to be thinking of money just now,” she answered. “But I haven’t got any and bills keep coming in. Mr. Atts made a big income but it all went so quickly. What Mr. Tails took would come to hundreds of pounds.”

  “A considerable sum,” Bobby commented. He got to his feet as if to go. She rose, too. They stood facing each other and he had the sudden conviction that she knew there was another question coming and that she dreaded what it might be. He said: “Mrs. Atts, if you have any idea what may be the cause of Mr. Atts’s disappearance, will you tell me what it is? I think you must have come to some conclusion.”

  “No, no,” she exclaimed. “I haven’t . . . I . . . daren’t,” and her voice had sunk to the merest whisper.

  “At any rate do you believe he is still alive?”

  She did not answer in words but she shook her head, and when she looked at him he could see the horror and the terror in her eyes, and he knew what that unspoken answer was.

  “Do you think he could have committed suicide?” he asked then.

  “Oh no,” she exclaimed. “He never would, never.”

  “Not even if he had found that the lecture he was going to give was based on some blunder or misunderstanding?”

  She looked rather bewildered at this. She said:

  “It couldn’t be, how could it? He was very happy and confident when he went out that morning. I had never before seen him quite like it. Almost the last thing he said to me was that I was to be sure to look my best that evening because after what he was going to say all the papers would be wanting photographs.”

  “You knew that Mr. Atts and Mrs. Bardolph were friendly?”

  “She wasn’t the only one,” came the slow, reluctant answer. “Need we go into that?”

  “I am afraid it is necessary,” Bobby answered. “I have to ask about anything that seems likely to help in finding out what has happened. If we rule out accident—and if there had been one it would have been reported by now—or suicide—as out of the question—or loss of memory—as most improbable—or absence abroad—neither passport nor money taken—and all unlikely in themselves with this important lecture due, then there is left only the suggestion I heard you make in the South Bank Gallery.”

  “I know,” she almost whispered. More loudly she added: “I don’t know why I said it. I oughtn’t to have said it. It just came out.”

  “I must ask you something else,” Bobby continued. “Was divorce at any time suggested either by you or by Mr. Atts?”

  “He began to talk about it,” she answered reluctantly. “After he got so friendly with Mrs. Bardolph.”

  “What was your attitude?”

  “I don’t think any woman would give up her husband easily to another woman,” she answered. “Besides”—she hesitated—“he wanted it to be me.”

  “To be you?” Bobby repeated, puzzled for the moment.

  “He asked me to confess, he called it, so he could have his divorce, and everyone would believe it was me. I was to tell a wicked lie and he was to be the innocent one.”

  “What did you say?” Bobby asked, for once in his life taken completely aback.

  “I don’t quite know. I was very angry. I told him I never would, never, never. Philip—Mr. Shirley—is a friend and he’s been very kind, but it’s a lie, a wicked, horrible lie, to pretend it was anything else.” She paused, breathless, and sat down, apparently exhausted by the sudden storm of emotion she had experienced. “Now he is dead,” she said. “I don’t think he believed it himself. I hope he didn’t. Please God he didn’t. He’s dead. I know he is.”

  “What did he say when you refused?”

  “He was angry, too. We shouted at each other. He said I would have to because if he didn’t get his divorce one way he would another. I don’t know what he meant. I said nothing would ever make me confess to something I hadn’t done, or tell lies about Philip, not for ten times the money he talked about. I expect I said a lot more. I don’t remember very well.”

  “What money did he mean?”

  “Old Mr. Atts’s. He’s his uncle. He’s very rich and John expects to get it all when he dies, but he has very strict ideas about divorce and all that. Old-fashioned ideas, I suppose. Victorian ideas. He might very likely alter his will if John left me for another woman—a married woman—and I got a divorce.”

  “Do you think that even if you had agreed, Mr. Bardolph would have agreed to divorce his wife?”

  “I am sure he wouldn’t. He is very fond of her. He would never have let her go. Besides, he thought she belonged to him, he is one of those men who think of a wife as a bit of property, however much they are fond of her as well. I know he was talking of going to live right in the country so they won’t be able to see each other so often.”

  Bobby went away then, greatly disturbed. It seemed fairly certain now, he thought, that Mr. Atts was dead, probably murdered. From this it followed that Mrs. Atts and Philip Shirley would be free to marry, and Mrs. Atts had hardly denied that they were in love, even passionately in love, however technically faithful she had been and intended to remain. Also it followed equally that Mr. Bardolph was no longer in danger of losing a wife to whom he was apparently strongly attached. All this,
too, against such a background of the utter and complete egotism shown by Mr. Atts as might well have aroused fierce resentment.

  Motive, even abundant motive, Bobby told himself. With such thoughts in his mind, with his ‘hunch’ that Mr. Atts’s disappearance was somehow connected, even fatally connected, with the famous Rembrandt ‘Girl Peeling Apples’, hanging in the S.B.G., receding far into the hinterland of his mind, Bobby alighted in the entrance hall from the lift in which he had descended. Ex-C.S.M. Manley was back in the cubby-hole wherefrom he had been absent when Bobby arrived earlier on. Once again he was majestically surveying a scene of which he gave the impression that he felt it existed only that he might supervise it. But the moment he saw Bobby he emerged—a kind of ponderous deus ex machina—and advanced towards Bobby as one potentate welcoming another to his domain. Bobby gave him a pleasant greeting and Manley said:

  “I thought you might care to be informed, sir, that I have had occasion to observe a highly suspicious character loitering in this neighbourhood the last day or two.”

  “Newspaperman?” Bobby suggested.

  “Oh no,” Manley protested, a little shocked, for he held newspapermen in the greatest respect. “Quite different. I always find newspaper gentlemen most affable.”

  “I’m sure you do,” said Bobby. “So do I. What sort of suspicious character. What did he look like?”

  Mr. Manley responded by giving a description that did credit to his powers of observation and that enabled Bobby to identify the ‘suspicious character’ in question as Private Investigator Marmaduke Groan.

  “He seemed to be aware of your presence here,” Manley concluded.

  “Indeed,” Bobby said, not best pleased, for this sounded as if Groan were keeping either Bobby, or Crescent Court, or both, under observation; and Bobby did not like others meddling with an investigation he had in hand. “Any idea what he wanted?”

  “Snooping and spying,” declared Mr. Manley. “Things I could never stand for. I told him if I caught him here again I would dial 999 and give him in charge, found on enclosed premises for a presumed unlawful purpose,” and Mr. Manley was obviously very pleased with this last resounding official phrase.

  “What did he say to that?” Bobby asked, though not quite sure whether the entrance hall to a block of flats qualified as being ‘enclosed premises’.

  “He attempted, sir, to offer me a bribe,” Manley replied, almost visibly swelling with such indignation that that magnificent moustache of his nearly curled round to meet beneath his nose. “Two half-crowns,” said Mr. Manley fiercely, and Bobby found himself wondering if all this bristling indignation arose from the offer of a bribe in itself or from the inadequacy of the amount offered—and somehow two half-crowns did certainly seem much less than five shillings. “I simply took him,” Mr. Manley continued as his moustache began to uncurl and his indignation to subside, “by the scruff of the neck and ran him out before he knew where he was.”

  CHAPTER XIV

  SHERATON CABINET

  THE HEADQUARTERS OF Messrs. Wilkinson, Morgan, and Tails, art dealers, of which firm the last-named was the head and chief, was situated, as Bobby knew, in Mayfair Square, No. 17, a fine old Georgian mansion where once a V.V.I.P. of the period had lived in great splendour and state, though without c.h.w., or all mod. con., to quote the advertisements of the estate agents of to-day.

  A convenient bus took Bobby thither, for he had it in mind that it might be useful to learn a little more about the Sheraton cabinet now in that firm’s possession, but of which it seemed Mrs. Atts still claimed to be the rightful owner, and also of the circumstances of the discovery in it of a packet of poison. He was feeling rather worried, too, by the sudden reappearance of Mr. Groan, for that gentleman, in Bobby’s considered opinion, was little likely to interest himself in any investigation unless after payment in advance, or the clear prospect of likely remuneration in some other shape or form. But then who could be promising or providing any such payment or reward? Not Mrs. Atts for she apparently had no money. Nor either Bardolph or Philip Shirley, since probably nothing would please those two better than that Mr. Atts should never be heard of again. Nor yet Mrs. Bardolph, most certainly not with the knowledge of her husband and hardly possible without. Who else then?

  A minor problem, but it worried Bobby who had a congenital objection to allowing any problem to remain unsolved. A challenge in fact his self-respect obliged him to take up. However, as he had often said himself, the best way to get an answer is to put your question to the person most likely to know—this time Mr. Groan himself.

  As soon therefore as he alighted from the bus, Bobby found a callbox and rang up the Groan Investigating Agency. In reply he was informed that Mr. Groan was out, engaged on a most important and urgent investigation. As Bobby suspected that all Mr. Groan’s investigations automatically became most important and urgent as soon as he was employed on them, Bobby was less impressed by this announcement than was perhaps intended. So he merely replied by requesting that Mr. Groan should call at the Yard that afternoon without fail. He hung up then and walked on to Mayfair Square into which the next turning led.

  The square still retained much of that air of aloof disdain for common things which had distinguished it in past days. Owing partly to its position, partly to the terms and conditions set out in certain clauses of the nine hundred and ninety-nine year Crown lease under which it was held, it had largely escaped being turned into an open-air garage as has happened to so many fine old London squares.

  When Bobby entered it, it was, as it happened, unusually quiet. He noticed that a car—popular make, Du Guesclin Twelve—its engine running, was standing outside the establishment of Messrs. Wilkinson, Morgan, and Tails, and that into this car two burly, aproned porters were carefully loading something that certainly looked like a Sheraton cabinet. Bobby stopped to watch. Mr. Tails dispatching his loot to a safer place, Bobby supposed, and supposed wrong, for now things began to happen with remarkable speed and unexpectedness. The cabinet, if it were one, duly, safely, and securely deposited within the car, the first porter returned to No. 17, presumably to report that all was ready. The second porter remained standing by the car, holding its door open for the driver when he appeared, and conveniently in position to receive a tip if one chanced to come the way of an expectant hand.

  Now from the door of No. 17, there hurled himself a young man in whom Bobby recognized immediately Philip Shirley. Behind, followed at almost equal speed two older men; one tall, thin, with silvery hair and a small, pointed, imperial beard, the other short, fat and bald—the first, Mr. Tails, the second, Mr. Morgan. Both were running and shouting as they had never run or shouted since boyhood’s happy days. Bobby thought he could just distinguish in that loud, breathless crying the one word, Stop. Behind them came the first porter, fast and ponderous. The second porter made a move as if to intercept the running Philip and was incontinently knocked down. But, in the true bulldog spirit, he grabbed Philip by the ankle, so giving Mr. Tails time to come up, only to receive a violent push that sent him reeling into the unwelcoming arms of Mr. Morgan. The second porter, trying to regain his feet, emitted a piercing yell of anguish as Philip trod with all the weight of his thirteen stone on the outspread hand with which the porter was supporting himself as he tried to rise. The first porter, dodging the interlaced forms of Messrs. Tails and Morgan, aimed a heavy blow at Philip who, in the most approved boxing style, took it on his arm and returned a right swing—with effect. The mêlée became general. Bobby thought it was time to intervene and began to run. So did a policeman appearing at the other end of the square. Philip stood before the open door of the car, a little like Horatius defending the bridge. Mr. Tails, recovering his balance, took Mr. Morgan by the shoulders and hurled him into the thickest of the fray. At the door of No. 17 appeared two young ladies, both with note-book and pencil in hand, both screaming at the top of their voices. No one noticed that Philip had jumped into his car and was beginning to drive away
. One of the young ladies had lost her spectacles, her note-book and pencil, but not her voice. The other ran out and gasped to Mr. Tails:

  “Oh, Mr. Tails, are you hurt?”

  “Dial 999, you little fool,” Mr. Tails shouted, surely a discourteous reply to so kindly an inquiry, and away she scuttled.

  “Now what’s all this about?” demanded the policeman, coming up.

  “Smash and grab,” said Mr. Tails, glaring after the vanishing car.

  “A raid,” said Mr. Morgan, glaring fiercely at the second porter from whom he was sure he had received the blow that was making his nose bleed all over his pale-grey waistcoat and his striped trousers.

  “My word, sir,” exclaimed the second porter with the most admirable presence of mind as he noticed that ominous glare and hurriedly offered his handkerchief to help staunch the so swiftly flowing gore, “you would have copped the bloke all right if he hadn’t got that one in when you wasn’t looking, by a bit of luck as never was.”

  Mr. Morgan, even in that moment of frustration and anguish, perceived clearly that by accepting this version he would acquire much kudos. Between kudos, as a man of action, vis-à-vis Mr. Tails, man of loud protest, and the transitory satisfaction of sacking the second porter no sensible man could hesitate.

  “Thank you, Jones,” he said, accepting the proffered handkerchief and so sealing a pact of peace and understanding between them.

  All this had happened not so much in sequence as recorded but rather in simultaneity. Even Bobby was not quite sure what exactly had happened or in what order. The only thing really certain was that Philip Shirley and his car and the presumed Sheraton cabinet had passed from the scene. The policeman, still slightly bewildered by such unaccustomed proceedings in such a neighbourhood, said: