Triple Quest: A Bobby Owen Mystery

by E. R. Punshon

  Fortunately Bobby knew fairly well the lay out of this ground floor, and knew also that there were but two ways down to the basement: by the great northern and southern stairs respectively. Keeping to the right of the central hall and thus being able to search the rooms on that side, he and his two men reached the head of the northern stairs without seeing anything suspicious or any sign of recent disturbance. At the head of these northern stairs he posted one of his men and with the other man returned to the southern stairs by the left of the central hall, so making sure that the rooms on that side were equally free from any sign of intrusion. Then he made his way back to the Sculpture Hall, where Ford was now cautiously moving around; one prudent eye upon the statues themselves, and one alert to make sure that here also no intruder lurked.

  “No sign of anything wrong,” he said softly as Bobby came back, and Bobby thought he detected a note of relief in Ford’s voice, the unconscious relief he felt at being no longer alone.

  “I’ve got a man at the head of each of the stairs,” Bobby told him. “If anyone is down there he’s cut off now. No one up here either. We’ll go down ourselves now and have a good look round. The chap must be somewhere, whoever he is. No sign of the night watchman.”

  “Sound asleep in the boiler-room where it’s nice and warm,” muttered Ford, who regarded night watchmen with a kind of tolerant cynicism as more ornamental than useful. “I remember one chap who had an alarm clock with him that he used to set to wake him each time he had to make his rounds.”

  To the basement the two of them accordingly proceeded and found the boiler-room by the simple device of opening a door they saw marked “Private—No admittance”. Within was indeed the night watchman, snoring stentorously, stretched out on a by no means uncomfortable bed composed of old sacks and two or three rugs. On a table near stood a bottle of whisky, no longer full, and two glasses. Also a powerful electric lamp which lighted up the room very satisfactorily. Probably the Gallery electric-lighting system was turned off at the main switch and this lamp was for the watchman’s use on his rounds.

  “Dead to the world,” said Ford.

  Bobby bent over the sleeping man. He said:

  “Drunk or drugged—both perhaps.”

  Ford looked at two buckets full of water that stood by the door, presumably for use in case of fire, but also apparently providing washing facilities, as soap was near and a towel hung on a nail close by. Then he looked at Bobby. Bobby nodded approval. Ford lifted each bucket in turn and emptied it over the sleeping, drunken, drugged man. Bobby skipped nimbly away from the ensuing flood. Ford regarded it with bland satisfaction. The watchman, half drowned, bewildered and dripping, scrambled to his feet.

  “I wasn’t asleep,” he said. He saw Ford. “Here, you,” he said to him. “Private this is.”

  “Pull yourself together,” Bobby said sternly. “Who has been here with you to-night?”

  The watchman, still not fully awake, trying hard to grasp what had happened, chiefly aware that he was soaked from head to foot, made no reply, but only stared and gaped. Bobby, impatient, afraid of what might be happening elsewhere in this home of many treasures, told Ford to come along.

  “You stay here,” he ordered the watchman in a tone and with a look that did more than anything else to recall that unlucky individual to a consciousness of his surroundings.

  The electric lamp on the table gave a strong light. Bobby picked it up and with it in one hand and Ford close at his heels hurried away up one corridor, down another, passing cellar after cellar, throwing open doors, finding within sometimes nothing, sometimes such a pile of oddments as tends to accumulate in the attics of old houses, and sometimes rows of racks in which were arranged an endless series of paintings and drawings, all carefully wrapped, labelled, ticketed, and always everywhere an aroma of dust and stale air. Once they saw, or thought they saw, a figure hurrying away and they ran after it. But even if it had been real, it had disappeared where the passage they were in turned at right angles and lost itself in impenetrable darkness.

  Once, too, they heard shouting and dashed in its direction full speed, to find it was only the watchman, bawling at the top of his voice an inquiry to know who was there.

  “Burglar alarm—” he began as Bobby and Ford appeared.

  “Go back to the boiler-room and stay there,” Bobby roared at him; and from behind, from the group of cellars from which they had just come running, they heard a sound as of something falling.

  Back they ran, saving their breath to express their feelings later on, and the electric lamp, as Bobby held it higher, showed them a cellar door wide open, within some pictures on the floor, apparently taken from the racks and thrown down at random.

  “Someone been here,” Ford said. “Having us on,” he added indignantly.

  “A trick to draw us away from where we were,” Bobby said. “Might mean we were getting too close.” He held up the lamp yet higher, trying to make its strong ray carry further still, so that the long passage where they stood was illumined all the way till at a distance it turned and continued out of sight. “Hi, you, whoever you are,” he shouted. “You can’t get away. The stairs are blocked, the place surrounded. Better give this silly game up.”

  The sound of his voice died and was lost in the uncanny silence and darkness around. Then out of it, but from behind, came a missile flying and knocked from his hand the lamp he was holding up. It fell, smashing the bulb.

  “That’s done it,” said Ford.

  CHAPTER XXXVII

  THE CELLARS

  FOR A MOMENT or two this unexpected, abrupt change from comparative light to almost complete darkness held both Bobby and Ford motionless. But also it had one unexpected, odd result. For as they both turned instinctively to stare into those deep shadows from which had come the missile that had deprived them of their lamp and light, they both saw at the turn of the corridor on their left a thin little line of light that seemed to creep out as it were from under a door into the darkness that alone now made it visible.

  “Look,” Bobby said, and then: “You didn’t see anything did you?”

  “No, sir,” Ford answered. “Or hear anything either. That light—it must be a cellar we haven’t been in.”

  “We’ve passed several,” Bobby said. “We may not even have noticed there was a door there—it’s pretty baffling, down here. The chap who chucked whatever it was at us may have been trying to draw us off,” and as he spoke he picked up the object in question. “An old electric torch,” he said.

  “It’s cold like inside a refrigerator down here,” Ford said. “You could keep a dead man’s body in one of these cellars for years and it never be found or suspected.”

  “So you could,” Bobby agreed. “I’ve been thinking that myself. Or even two—or even two more. Is that what you’ve been thinking?”

  “Well, sir,” Ford answered, “you do get ideas in a place like this.”

  Bobby was examining the door that the tiny strip of light now showing had so opportunely revealed to them. He tried it and found it locked as he had expected.

  “We’ll have to break in,” he said. “There may be some tools in the boiler-room. You might have a look.”

  “Very good, sir,” Ford said, and started off, but almost at once Bobby called him back.

  “It’s only a Yale type,” he said. “I expect I can manage. Show a light, will you?”

  Ford, well aware himself how easily a Yale-type lock can be opened by those who know how, switched on his own police regulation lamp. Bobby fiddled for a few minutes with the thing and then it yielded. The door opened. From it poured out a flood of light and on the threshold the two men stood staring, no word spoken.

  For there before them was what seemed a small private picture gallery, tucked away here in the heart of this subterranean labyrinth where none penetrated save at rare intervals those who came to bury or to resurrect the pictures there stored, as might be demanded by the mood and fashion of the day.

&n
bsp; The cellar was much larger than any they had seen till now. There were several rugs on the floor, of good design, Bobby noticed. Museum quality indeed. In the centre stood a table and chair, a small comfortable modern chair. On the table was another such electric lamp, powered by its own battery, as Bobby had taken from the boiler-room and that now lay useless with broken bulb in the corridor outside. In front of the chair was an easel facing the door and on it a large oil painting. On the walls all around hung others, a score or so in all, and each more unpleasant and revolting, Bobby thought, than all the others put together. Especially that upon the easel facing them.

  Like all police officers in all countries, Bobby, Ford too, had plenty of experience of that strange, dim, rather horrible lost region where are carried on such sexual practices and perversions as the ordinary citizen has no conception of. So much so, indeed, is this the case that, as Bobby himself had said, in some of the talks he gave from time to time to younger men, when anything of the kind comes into court an acquittal often results, since most of the jury can’t believe that anyone would behave like that and don’t even know what the witnesses are talking about, and the others do it themselves.

  All the same this exhibition in sheer brutality of representation and delight in sadism went far beyond what either Bobby or Ford had ever seen before displayed as here in all its native shamelessness. For a moment or so the two of them stood thus, staring, without moving. Then Bobby said:

  “Oh well, no business of ours, all very snug and private. Unless it shows a motive. Blackmail? Is that it? Doesn’t look like it. I wonder.” Quite deliberately he went up to the easel, pushed it over and put his foot through the painting as it lay on the floor.

  “Oo-oo-ooo,” said Ford, inarticulate and dismayed.

  “Yes, I know,” Bobby said. “Private property. I can be sued for damages. I won’t be. No one would ever dare bring that thing into court. Taking the law into my own hands. Don’t you ever do a thing like that, young Ford.”

  “No, sir, I won’t, sir,” Ford assured him earnestly, edging as he spoke a little nearer the cellar wall where those other paintings hung in arranged succession, and then he gave a sudden loud exclamation of astonishment and fear. “Look, look,” he cried, “a dead man,” and he threw out one shaking hand to where, behind the table, that till now had hidden it from view, a supine form lay motionless.

  Almost at the same moment a voice from behind inquired coldly:

  “May I ask what you are doing here?”

  They both turned sharply. Sir Walter Welton was standing in the doorway. Ford continued to stare at him, a little as though he did not think him quite real. Bobby turned back, pushed aside the table, and bent over the prostrate man behind.

  “It’s Groan,” he said. “He’s not dead. What was he doing here? He’s been knocked out.” To Sir Walter, Bobby said: “Did you do that?”

  “I did,” Sir Walter answered calmly. “Is he one of your associates? I think an explanation is required. I take a serious view of this intrusion.”

  “So do I,” Bobby agreed. He lifted the table lamp and swung its ray slowly the round of the paintings on the wall. “Though those, I think, explain themselves.” He waited a moment for any comment but none came. Ford, who had, of course, like all policemen, a training in first aid, was doing what he could for the now half-conscious Groan. Bobby handed Ford the small flask of brandy he always carried with him for emergencies. He said: “Give him some of that as soon as he can swallow.” To Sir Walter he said: “A man was seen climbing in here by one of the windows. Was it you?”

  “Nonsense,” Sir Walter retorted. “What are you talking about. I don’t climb in here by windows. I let myself in with my own key. What man?”

  “It may have been Groan,” Bobby said, and that individual, now sitting up and fast recovering under Ford’s ministrations, said:

  “That’s right. Me. Monkey Baron and his lot was what I was tracking.” He pointed at Sir Walter. “Found him instead. I watched him. He didn’t know. Sitting there he was, enjoying every detail of it, vicarage like.”

  “Vicarage like?” Bobby repeated, puzzled, and then realized that the word intended was ‘vicarious’. “Go on,” he said.

  “I protest,” Sir Walter exclaimed. “This is preposterous. You’ve no right—”

  But Bobby silenced him with a quick, authoritative gesture.

  “Go on,” he repeated to Groan.

  “Fair gloating, he was,” Groan continued accordingly. “It was that beauty.” He pointed to the painting Bobby had thrown down and then put his foot through. “A oner. Talk about peanuts. I said out loud as he was having a good time, wasn’t he? And he up and laid me out without a word, took me unawares, me not suspecting. Ask him what else he’s got hidden here.”

  “The fellow’s drunk or mad,” Sir Walter said. “You’ll all hear more of this, you know. A most insolent outrage. There’s nothing hidden here. How could there be?”

  “Not even any more like these?” Bobby asked, indicating the paintings on the wall. “Never mind. That can be gone into later.” To Groan he said: “What else did you think might be hidden here?”

  “It’s what Monkey Baron thought, not me,” Groan explained. “He said as it might be two deaders, or just the picture as the old boy with the fancy tastes was hiding, meaning to sell it to the Yanks on the Q.T., so his Nibs could buy more for his own extra special private collection.”

  “This is monstrous,” Sir Walter almost shouted. “Monstrous. Absolutely fantastic. You know. I protest. I shall take legal action. That picture you seem to have destroyed. Not for public view, of course, but of the highest artistic value. I value it at several hundred pounds. I shall ask for damages. I shall get them if there’s justice in England.”

  “Oh, there is,” Bobby assured him. “You’ll get your verdict—and your damages. I’ve no defence. One farthing. No order as to costs and a scandal which won’t please your trustees. Never mind all that.”

  But at this point they were interrupted by the sudden intrusion of the watchman, who had been drawn from his retirement in the boiler-room by the sound of voices.

  “I’ve rung up the police,” he announced. “I can’t get through.” He pointed to Groan. “I’ve seen his credentials. Where’s yours?” he demanded truculently of Bobby, who had already noticed that the watchman was a little unsteady on his feet and a little thick in his speech and guessed that the man had been imbibing fresh confidence and courage from the whisky bottle left on the boiler-room table.

  “Get away back to the boiler-room and stay there,” Bobby told him sharply.

  But the watchman was not listening. With bulging eyes he was staring at Sir Walter, of whose presence he had apparently only just become aware.

  “It’s the Director,” he gasped. “I’ve had a drop—” He shut his eyes and looked again. “He’s real. It’s him all right—Ugly Wally his own self.”

  “Get out!” roared Sir Walter. “I’ll deal with you in the morning.”

  The watchman fled. Bobby swung round on Groan, now sitting placidly in the chair by the table.

  “What’s this about credentials?” Bobby demanded ominously. “Have you been passing yourself off as an officer of police?”

  “Now, Mr. Owen,” Groan protested. “You did ought to know me better than that. I never would, sure as a pennorth of peanuts, I wouldn’t. I did show that old dodderer a little bit of paper just to let him see everything was quite all right, O.K., and above board.”

  As he spoke he produced an official-looking document, headed by what at first sight looked like the Royal coat of arms but was really nothing of the sort, and beginning:

  “Know all ye therefore by these present that our trusty and well beloved Marmaduke Groan, Investigator, is hereby authorized and directed to afford to all officers of the Police Forces of this Realm such assistance as may be required and therein shall he fail at his peril . . .”

  There was more of this rigmarole over which Bo
bby cast but a hasty glance.

  “Have you had the colossal impudence—” he began.

  “Now, guv,” Groan interrupted, “don’t go and get cross. Nothing there as isn’t absolutely O.K., and nothing anyone can object to. All very careful drawn up.”

  “Indeed,” said Bobby. “We’ll see. To begin with, who gave you this authority?”

  “The common law of England,” answered Groan simply, and for once Bobby was completely silenced.

  CHAPTER XXXVIII

  NOCTURNAL PURSUIT

  IN THE SILENCE that ensued, while Groan sat smugly triumphant, his hands folded before him, his feet crossed under his chair, his quick little eyes darting hither and thither, missing nothing, Sir Walter tried once more to assert himself.

  “Do I understand,” he asked with slow emphasis, “that this—person—is endeavouring to suggest that the body of a dead man—”

  “Not one, two,” Groan interrupted. “Mr. Atts, as I’m interested in, and rightly so, as even Mr. Owen must admit, being still in his employ and so owing him obligations and him owing me money, all fees and expenses not yet settled, and Mr. Jasmine, as fine a young man as ever I met, only taken to sniffing, though still young enough to be cured. And not my saying it, or suggesting either, not having evidence enough, only suspicion. It’s Monkey Baron and his lot have the evidence, if any. From information received, the Groan Investigating Agency, having its own sources, I have reason to believe, action was contemplated for to-night re the picture reported missing, and a reward offered, and all I found was that old geezer and his funny stuff. The papers won’t half lap it up.”

  This last sentence was uttered with the most innocent air in the world, but Sir Walter was visibly shaken.

  “Preposterous, a monstrous suggestion,” he protested. “These pictures. Indefensible of course, some of them. You know. But there’s the question of artistic merit, of the relation to the other work of the artists concerned. Most interesting. I’ve had it in mind for some time to deal with them. I had never really seen them properly and I felt it was my duty, however distasteful, to give them a close and careful examination before coming to any decision. My intention was, is, to remove them to some more suitable place for consideration, and for inspection by the Trustees, if desired. In that way any risk of involving the South Bank Gallery would be avoided.”