Triple Quest: A Bobby Owen Mystery

by E. R. Punshon

  Monkey said:

  “Dangerous old party, if you ask me, her and her gun. Next thing she’ll be letting it off and killing someone. If I was what I was once I could climb up there and grab her gun when she pokes it out before she knew a thing.”

  “The gutter pipe’s broken, no one could do that,” said Ford, who had swept the front of the house with the light of his torch and seen that the gutter pipe had wrenched loose and now hung dangling, ready at a touch to come away altogether.

  “Was that you, trying to get in?” Bobby asked Monkey.

  “Child’s play to me once, gutter pipe or none,” Monkey answered sadly. “I could do it now if the pipe held. But it won’t. I started, but clumsy like, and the pipe came away with me not balancing proper.”

  “You might have killed yourself,” Bobby told him. To the Inspector, he said: “If she comes to the window again yell ‘police’ before she has time to open her mouth. I’ll knock and perhaps she may listen.”

  “I wouldn’t do that, sir,” said the Inspector earnestly and anxiously. “She would only have to point the gun down and she would be sure of hitting.”

  “It may not be loaded, it may not be a gun at all,” Bobby said.

  He went up to the door and began to hammer at it. Monkey followed him and said:

  “I wouldn’t do that, sir, I wouldn’t really. That old devil up there is clean off her head, the way women go.” He thrust something into Bobby’s hand. “No more use to me,” he said, “me and Joe being pushing off while we can. It’ll do the trick for you. Return when done with.”

  With that he disappeared into the darkness, calling to his companion to follow him, and Bobby heard their footsteps die away as they hurried off round the side of the house.

  Rather surprised, Bobby looked at the instrument Monkey had bestowed upon him. It was a short crowbar, sharp at one end, known in Monkey’s former profession as a ‘jemmy’.

  “Oh, well,” Bobby said, “it’ll do to knock with,” and so using it he began to beat a tattoo on the door.

  CHAPTER XL

  FIRE

  LOUD SOUNDED THAT knocking in the quietness of the night, loud and urgent, but louder yet, more urgent still, the cry of the Inspector:

  “Fire. Fire. Look. It’s on fire up there.”

  Bobby jumped back to see more clearly. No mistaking that dull, all pervading glow showing at the windows of the top, the attic floor.

  “The old woman may be there still,” Bobby said hurriedly. “We must get in. I’ll force the door if I can. Ford. Where’s Ford?”

  “Gone to call the fire brigade,” the Inspector answered. “Top speed. As soon as we saw it.”

  “Good,” Bobby said. “See what they are doing at the back. Try if there’s any other way in. Call me if you find one. I’ll go on trying to force the door here. We must get her out somehow.”

  The Inspector rushed away. Bobby renewed his assault on the door with all that fierce abandonment of energy on which in moments of need or peril he had had to call more than once in his past career. For indeed all men have within them a reserve of strength far beyond what they know, though not all know how to call it to aid.

  Now, wielding the jemmy like a man possessed he smashed in a panel of that stout old door. He inserted the jemmy. He strove, he heaved, he flung all he had, and more, too, into the effort he was making. One hinge gave, so that the door swung drunkenly upon the other. A fresh, a last, a final effort, and the door swung further back, giving space for him to scramble, pull, tug himself through. Another man came running, rushing. He hurled himself forward. Bobby taken unawares, off balance, went reeling against the wall but did not fall.

  “Hyams,” Bobby gasped, as he recognized that rushing wild-eyed, breathless intruder.

  “My pictures, my lovely pictures,” Hyams cried. “Up there. Quick.”

  The stairs faced them, stairs on which small glowing embers were falling, on which already little flames were crawling, increasing, growing swiftly, fanned by the draught from the door still swinging half-open on one hinge. Unheeding their bright menace, Hyams raced on up the first flight of stairs, on, up the second to where the fire flamed most strongly. Bobby was close upon his heels. In the blinding, suffocating smoke that now was filling all this attic landing, Bobby might well have missed his way, been trapped, lost his life, for now only split seconds lay between life and death, now that the flames were leaping up on every side, now that the little dancing flames upon the stairs were meeting and gathering as in a joyous achievement of destruction.

  What saved him was that Hyams was still shouting to him to follow, still crying aloud something about his pictures. Guided by his voice, Bobby reached him just as, groping through the smoke, caring nothing for the increasing heat, Hyams tore open the attic door. A rush of wind from open window to opened door cleared smoke and fire aside on either hand for just one instant, one instant and no more, though then immediately the flames leaped up again with horrible, swift vigour. In their light, Bobby had a glimpse of the old woman trying desperately, blindly, to crawl towards him. He dropped on his hands and knees, reached her, seized her, dragged her towards the door, the landing. A voice was crying from the heart of the fiery furnace the attic had now become:

  “My pictures, my pictures, where has she put them?”

  Bobby heard and yet heard not. Half suffocated, his clothes alight in places, his desperate strength near its end, he managed somehow to get the old woman on his shoulders where, unconscious, she hung like a sack.

  The stairs were on fire now from top to bottom. Behind still sounded that lost voice, crying “My pictures, my pictures, my lovely pictures”. Bobby staggered on across the entrance hall, through the door, out into the open air and behind him sounded the crash of the falling stairs as he collapsed, he and his burden together, to the ground. The Inspector came sliding down a ladder he had found and put up to one of the windows, only to be driven back when he opened it by an angry spurt of flame. Now the whole old house flared like a torch to the dark heavens above. Bobby scrambled to his feet and stood unsteadily. The Inspector said:

  “Are you hurt, sir? Touch and go.”

  “I’m all right,” Bobby panted, though he did not look it, though his face was black and bleeding where he had scratched it rather badly, though his hands were burned, though one trouser leg was smouldering. “I don’t know about her. Get help,” he said.

  Round the corner came Ford, full speed, coatless. He cried as he came:

  “I’ve sent for the fire brigade, the ambulance. We’ve found Hall. He had been knocked out, tied up. They can’t get in round there. Monkey Baron’s dead. Oh, Lord,” he exclaimed, seeing Bobby clearly for the first time. “I’ll send for the first-aid box.”

  He was off again. Between them Bobby and the Inspector lifted the old woman to a more comfortable position, protecting her as far as possible from the chilly night air with their own coats. She was conscious now. She was murmuring:

  “It was all those pictures. He loved them. He killed to keep them. I helped him. My son.”

  She seemed to lose consciousness then, babbling softly, inaudibly, to herself. There was nothing they could do till help came. They heard the clanging of a fire-engine’s bell as it came tearing up between the bungalows. Ford was back once more. The Inspector said:

  “Hall knocked out, you said. Does he know who it was?”

  “No, didn’t know anything till he came round to find himself tied up and gagged. Monkey Baron and Irish Joe. But Monkey’s dead and Irish Joe says it wasn’t them. He would, of course.”

  “Monkey dead?” Bobby repeated. Ford had said so before, but Bobby, concerned with the old woman he had rescued, had hardly taken it in. “How did that happen?” he asked. “Hyams, too. He must be. He was still there when the stairs went, shouting something about the pictures. They’ll be gone, too.”

  “They’re all right,” Ford said. “Last thing he did. He got to the window and threw them out. He yelled to us
to catch them. The last thing he said. He wouldn’t let them go till coats were held out for him to drop them in and break their fall. We called to him to jump, too, but the fire took him.”

  “The beloved first,” Bobby said slowly. “He was a man who loved pictures better than his own life, than his own soul. And Monkey Baron?”

  “He was trying to get in by one of the top windows,” Ford explained. “No one noticed what he was doing till he was half-way up the gutter pipe, the one from the roof to the water butt. We shouted to him to come down. He didn’t take any notice. He went on climbing. With that arm of his. He managed it somehow. I don’t know how. He hauled himself up on the roof. He stood up and yelled: ‘Not so bad for an old has-been of a cripple!’ His last words. He crawled along the roof till he got above one of the windows. He lowered himself to the sill. I had my torch on him and I saw him plainly as he stood there. He was looking down at us. I think he expected a cheer. He nearly got it. The window opened behind him and the old woman was there. She had a lighted oil-lamp in one hand and I think it was a broom in the other. She gave Monkey a push with it and he fell. Broke his neck. He was dead when we picked him up. The old woman stood there at the window, laughing like a maniac. Irish Joe picked up a stone and threw it at her. It was a good shot. Took her full in the mouth, wide open as she stood and laughed and laughed. She tumbled over backward. She must have dropped the lamp. That started the fire.”

  Help had come now. The old woman was carried away to the waiting ambulance. The attendants wanted to take Bobby, too, much to his annoyance. “What do you think I am made of?” he asked them indignantly, and they retired in confusion before his biting scorn. The firemen were busy playing their hoses on what was already a dying fire, for it had spread with such devastating speed, done its work so well and so swiftly, that already the old house was little more than a glowing, smouldering heap of embers. From them had now been extracted what was left of the body of Hyams, burned beyond all recognition.

  “Human remains,” a fire-brigade officer said. “That’s about all you can say. Hadn’t time to get away. In bed probably and didn’t know anything till too late. But the old woman was fully dressed?”

  “He lived here,” answered Bobby, to whom these remarks had been addressed. “But he wasn’t in the house when the fire started. I don’t know where he was or where he came from. Ford, do you know?”

  “He ran out of that bungalow on the right,” explained Ford. “‘Mon Repos’, the one where a woman wanted to know what was the matter and said she was frightened because she was all alone. She must have been harbouring him and said that to put us off.”

  “He must have meant to lie up there a day or two,” Bobby agreed, “and then to make his getaway with his pictures, calculating we would never look for him so close at hand. He may have hoped we would write him off as murdered like the other two missing men. Where is Irish Joe?”

  “Buzzed off,” Ford answered. “Groan, too. They went running off together and no one thought to stop them what with everything happening so quick and sudden, all begun and over before you knew it.”

  CHAPTER XLI

  CONCLUSION

  FOR BOBBY THERE followed a period of alternate petting and scolding, of patching and nursing. But he was a restless patient and it was not long before he was back at work, catching up with what had been happening while he had been away and trying to get all relevant threads into his own hands again.

  “Thinks no one can do his job but himself,” grumbled some of his colleagues, all of whom, incidentally, had exactly the same attitude towards their own work. Then, before Bobby had really had time to settle down, he had to try to explain the case to these same colleagues, many of whom, till recent dramatic events had filled columns of the papers, had not been much interested in it, tending to regard it chiefly as a kind of private quarrel between art experts and critics concerning the authenticity or otherwise of a painting in the S.B.G. Well, that sort of thing was not uncommon, they had been telling each other, and hardly called for police intervention, at any rate not on a large scale. Had not another painting in the National Gallery itself been now declared a forgery?

  “Of course,” Bobby remarked, talking to them, “the chief difficulty was to be sure what we were really up against. Nothing certain. Atts and Jasmine might both, for all we knew, turn up again, safe and sound, and with real grievances over what I had been doing. The S.B.G. painting might have been genuine all the time. All the same, I didn’t think so. Too many straws all suggesting the same wind blew them, and even a bare suspicion of murder can’t be put away in a pigeon-hole. It was long enough, though, before I began to feel sure that if the picture had really been stolen, Hyams was the only one who had both opportunity and motive. The very first time I went to have a look for myself at the ‘Girl Peeling Apples’ he tried to draw my attention away from it to the larger Rembrandt, much better known, in the Long Room—the ‘Elijah’. Then there were his rather crude efforts to suggest an alibi for himself, by writing a postcard to Jasmine, asking why Jasmine hadn’t kept the appointment he had suggested, and Hyams’s claim later on that he had been made ill eating tinned Russian crab bought ten years previously. You can’t be sure, but I should be very surprised if the stuff was on sale ten years ago, so soon after the war ended. And it was Hyams himself who drew my attention to the mahogany panel the painting was on. All small, suggestive details Hyams hoped would put him outside the inquiry, but that really brought him nearer to the centre. Then, too, there was the question whether, if he were really at the bottom of it all, was he on his own or was there someone else in the background? That, too, had to be cleared up before anything could be done. Next thing, he disappeared in circumstances that did suggest he might have been murdered himself, though it did seem more likely he had run for it. Mrs. Taylor—”

  “That’s a new name,” someone interrupted. “Who is she?”

  “The old lady we got out of the burning house only just in time,” Bobby explained. “Hyams’s mother. She had married again, been widowed again, and the house was in her name—one reason why we failed to find the second address we knew Hyams had. Her story is that he meant to remove several more of his favourite pictures, providing copies for them all to hang in their places. Even experts tend to see what they expect to see, and as all of them knew all about the paintings shown and had seen them over and over again—well, it was their memory of them they saw on the S.B.G. walls, that the Director saw when he went by, and not what was actually and in fact hanging there. But when Atts began to seem so specially interested in the ‘Girl Peeling Apples’ Hyams got into a panic. Discovery imminent, he feared, and he seems to have felt there was only one thing to do to save himself. Probably he span Atts some yarn—perhaps told him that he had picked up what he had always thought was an old copy and would Atts come and look at it on the chance that it might be a replica or even the original itself? Atts would have fallen for that immediately. But the chance meeting between him and Mr. Bardolph made him late for his appointment with Hyams at the S.B.G. So he went straight on instead to the address Hyams gave him on the pretence that it was there he kept his version of the ‘Girl’. That made things easy for Hyams. But then presently Hyams got panicky as discovery still seemed threatened, so he disappeared, too, in a way that did suggest he might have been murdered as well. All through he showed great resource and initiative in trying to turn every new development to his own advantage. But for that very pardonable error in using mahogany for the Rembrandt panel he might even have got away with it.

  “The possibility that Hyams was a third victim had to be considered very seriously, however, especially as by that time it was plain that both the Monkey Baron lot and Duke Groan were joining in and I certainly didn’t think murder outside the activities of the first. Three thousand pounds is a big temptation to men like that. Both Monkey and Groan had been hanging about the Jasmine studio and Jasmine had been dropping foolish hints about what he knew. Both Groan and Monkey
seem to have interpreted that as meaning Jasmine had it himself. Anyhow by then Jasmine must have realized what had been happening and I take it he told Hyams the picture had to be returned. Hyams would promise and tell Jasmine to come to the old house and collect it. Making it easy again. A difficult case altogether. No firm official ground anywhere. Murder but no body. A recent theft or an old forgery? Well, it’s all over now and we can get back to routine, thank goodness.”

  A few more questions, one or two additional comments, and then the others drifted away, and Bobby turned to his own work. Not for long, however, for soon a message was brought to him to the effect that Mr. Marmaduke Groan was below, asking very urgently if he might see Mr. Owen for a few minutes.

  “What’s the interfering, meddling little scamp want now?” growled Bobby. “He and that ‘authority’ of his. The sheer impudence of the thing. Oh, well, send him up. I suppose we do owe him something for his hint that Monkey Baron and his pals were out that night and meant business. Made me realize there was no time to lose, evidence or none. As it was, we only arrived just in time. Luckily their objective was plain when I remembered those two cyclists I saw near Bungalow Row.”

  Groan was accordingly introduced and began to express with some volubility his extreme pleasure at seeing Mr. Owen so soon back at work. Abruptly, Bobby cut these observations short.

  “I have to warn you,” he said, “against ever again using that precious authority of yours. It’s been touch and go whether to prosecute or not. Another time you certainly would be.”

  “Very well, Mr. Owen, just as you say,” Groan answered, looking for once a trifle subdued. “The papers say both bodies have been found in the garden of the burnt house, Mr. Atts’s and poor young Mr. Jasmine’s too. All for the sake of a picture that isn’t much more than two foot by two. Hyams. Can’t make it out. Wanted to have it all to himself?”

  “In a way, yes,” Bobby agreed. “He had worked himself up into such a state over the failure of S.B.G. visitors to show proper appreciation that he could think of nothing else. Looked on it much as a devout worshipper might look upon continued desecration of the altar. By the way, what about those two pawn tickets? Picked them up in Jasmine’s room and gave them to that girl to keep because you make it a rule never to keep anything compromising in your own place.”