Crossword Mystery

by E. R. Punshon

  “Drop that,” she said. “No use. Too late.”

  And then they saw a strange thing happen, for at once it was as though all strength and energy drained from him. Almost visibly he shrank; almost visibly his vigour and the passion of his wrought-up will went from him; as they watched it seemed as though that which had sustained him vanished quite away and he grew small again. There was no more light in his eyes, the fierce alert determination of his pose changed, so that now he sagged and drooped. Very carefully he put down upon the table the iron bar he had been holding, and went, shuffling, dragging his steps, to sit down carefully in a corner by the nearest window. He had the air of having suddenly been emptied, so that one felt there was no more in him.

  “I’m not sorry,” Andrews muttered below his breath. “If he had fought the way he ran, the four of us would have had our work cut out.”

  And he took care to get possession of that short iron bar, and to put it safely out of the way.

  They forgot Cooper now, and turned their attention to his wife. At the further end of the kitchen where she was standing was an enormous, old-fashioned, coal-using range. In it a great fire burned, making the air in the room on that warm summer day intolerably hot. On the fire stood a huge iron cauldron, and in one hand Mrs. Cooper held a great ladle. That end of the room, even at high noon, was always dark, and perhaps it was the effect of the shadows clustering there, of the great fire that burned and crackled behind her, of the heat waves and currents of hot air that filled the room, that together combined to give them, as they looked at her, an impression of almost superhuman size. Gigantic she seemed as she stood there in the shadow against that background of fire, and smoke, and the steam from the huge iron cauldron. No one spoke, and slowly she lifted both arms with a gesture alike of defiance and despair, as of one who knew that all was lost yet repented nothing, regretted nothing, and even in the dust would yield and acknowledge nothing. Irresistibly, Bobby was reminded of a drawing by William Blake he had once seen somewhere, depicting Satan calling on the fallen angels to rise and resume their hopeless struggle against their God. Just such was Mrs. Cooper’s gesture of her lifted arms. She lowered them, and said aloud:

  “Little men, little men, have you found me at last?”

  Major Markham stepped forward, and cleared his throat. Somehow the usual formulae seemed to him oddly banal now, and he hesitated to make use of them. Mrs. Cooper turned back to her cauldron, picking up her huge iron ladle, and stirring gently with it the contents of the cauldron.

  “Is she making soup?” Andrews muttered in a very puzzled tone.

  “Odd soup, I think,” Mitchell answered in the same low tone.

  As if she had heard them, she lifted her ladle, and let the contents stream back into the cauldron. It shone as it fell; it glittered, like the sunshine, in a great stream of light – of liquid, running light – against the mirk of that background of dark shadows and shifting smoke and steam. The flame that leaped upwards from a displaced coal was not brighter or more living than that downward stream she poured back again into the cauldron.

  “My God, it’s molten gold,” Markham whispered. Yet his whisper sounded almost loud, so clearly did they all hear it.

  “Molten gold,” she repeated, looking at them over her shoulder. “It wasn’t much of a chance. We thought, if I melted the sovereigns down, they could not be identified.” Then suddenly she laughed, quite naturally, even pleasantly. “‘Double, double toil, and trouble,’” she quoted, and looked at Bobby, who, with his two companions, had now joined the others. “Was that what you meant,” she said to him, “when you got talking about Shakespeare and Macbeth? But in the play the cauldron and the witches come at the beginning, and this is the end of it all. Or was it as Lady Macbeth that you saw me? I never thought of myself like that, you know.”

  Bobby did not answer, and she went on slowly:

  “No, I never thought of myself like that, and yet I suppose that like her I wanted to rule, to be a sort of queen, too, for to-day it is the rich who are kings and queens, and I meant to be rich, and I meant no old men to stand in the way – but they had no silver hair to lace with golden blood, because they were both bald. You know, I expect Lady Macbeth would have made a good queen. She knew her mind, and what she wanted, and if only you had left me alone” – she paused and drew a deep breath – “I would have done great things,” she said. “I would have made all this part the biggest pleasure resort in the world. I had every detail thought out. But that would only have been a beginning. It’s the land that counts, always the land, and at my pleasure resort I would have used English fruit and English meat, and English birds, and fish straight from the sea, till no one would have dared to talk of good living till they had been here and seen what we could do, till every English farm was flourishing again with providing, not beetroot and corn and turnips anyone can grow anywhere, but the apples and cherries and strawberries, the cream and butter, and the beef and mutton, only our soft, rainy climate can give in perfection. Why, I would have made all England a garden once again, if only you little men had let me be.”

  Major Markham stepped forward again.

  “All that has nothing to do with us,” he began. “We are police officers and–”

  Involuntarily he shrank back. With a quick, fierce gesture, she had whirled the great iron ladle she held so that a portion of its molten contents splashed on table and floor, searing and burning where it fell.

  “Take care, take care,” she said. “Stand back a little time, for I am not ready yet.”

  “The woman’s mad,” Markham exclaimed, and Mitchell said:

  “Not mad, I think, but there’s a kind of greatness in her, a greatness that’s turned sour now.”

  She pointed with her ladle at the huddled figure of her husband.

  “You’ll hang him, I suppose,” she observed, meditatively. “It’s not worth while, it’s not even fair, for there’s not a thing he did but I did it – all he did was my doing, and only mine.”

  For the first time Cooper seemed aware of what was going on.

  “No, it’s not worth while hanging me,” he agreed; “but they will – at least, not me, but the bit of me that was left alive after you said it was no use, too late.”

  “Come, Mrs. Cooper,” Markham began again, “be reasonable–”

  “Why, you fool,” she interrupted, “only the dead are reasonable, and so will I be soon, but not yet, so keep your distance for a time,” and again, with a twirl of her great ladle, she sent a sprinkle of molten, burning, golden death to fall like a barrier between them, and to smoke and burn and sear where it fell. “But I suppose that boy who trapped me with his innocent face, and his talk about toothache, and lost watches, and all the rest of it, that I never saw through till just the other day when it dawned on me, too late, he was the detective old George Winterton had babbled about – I daresay he is right enough. Very likely, if I had been in Lady Macbeth’s place, I should have done what she did, and in my place she would have done as I did. She wanted rule, power, to make things go the way she wanted them to go. Why shouldn’t I,” she demanded suddenly, “when I felt I could? Who had the right to stop my doing what I knew I could do? Was I to let two doddering old men stand in the way ? Hadn’t I the right to remove them? I knew what I could do; I felt it burn inside me; it would have killed me instead of them if I had held it back – rather them than me, I said, that’s all. As for young Ross – well, I won, and he lost, that’s all there’s to it. Now I’ve lost myself, but better try and lose, than sit and dodder all day long, like those two old men. Why, there were things I meant to do, plans, schemes, all thought out, all ready, all – but that wasn’t what I wanted really; at the bottom of it all, what I wanted was just to be myself, to use myself – power. And to-day that means gold – it wasn’t the gold I wanted, it was power to do things – power that’s gold, gold that’s power – that’s what I tried to get; that’s what I lived for; that’s what I’ll die by,” and before
they knew her dreadful purpose, or could prevent it, she had lifted a great ladle full of the molten gold of the sovereigns she had melted down and had emptied it, pouring it on herself, on her upturned face, into her open mouth, down her throat, and so fell writhing and choked, a dreadful, disfigured thing no longer human; nor was there one of them that could move a muscle, or utter so much as a cry, so held in utter stillness were they by the horror and the greatness of the deed.

  About The Author

  E.R. Punshon was born in London in 1872.

  At the age of fourteen he started life in an office. His employers soon informed him that he would never make a really satisfactory clerk, and he, agreeing, spent the next few years wandering about Canada and the United States, endeavouring without great success to earn a living in any occupation that offered. Returning home by way of working a passage on a cattle boat, he began to write. He contributed to many magazines and periodicals, wrote plays, and published nearly fifty novels, among which his detective stories proved the most popular and enduring.

  He died in 1956.

  Also by E.R. Punshon

  Information Received

  Death Among The Sunbathers

  Mystery Villa

  Death of A Beauty Queen

  Death Comes To Cambers

  The Bath Mysteries

  Mystery of Mr Jessop

  The Dusky Hour

  Dictator’s Way

  The next title in the Bobby Owen Series

  E.R. PUNSHON

  Mystery Villa

  Con Conway, the notorious cat burglar, was not the kind of person to be scared out of his wits for nothing. So it seemed odd to Sergeant Bobby Owen, when he met Con quite by chance rushing, terrified, along a road in the Brush Hill district just before midnight. Afterwards he investigated the house where it seemed Conway had been, yet there was nothing, not a shred of evidence to suggest that swag had been hidden there or taken from there.

  It was a strange place, Tudor Lodge; it had an eerie atmosphere and disturbing associations. Twice Sergeant Owen returned to look it over but all he encountered was a very pretty and very frightened girl. Finally he found in the house a murdered man – murdered years ago. Yet still he could not make out why Conway had been quite so frightened – until he went to work in earnest on the job.

  Crossword Mystery is the third of E.R. Punshon’s acclaimed Bobby Owen mysteries, first published in 1934 and part of a series which eventually spanned thirty-five novels.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Con Conway’s Terror

  Sergeant Bobby Owen, B.A. (Oxon. pass degree only), recently promoted as a reward for what his superiors considered good work accomplished, realised abruptly that he had missed his way, and, simultaneously, that it was beginning to rain.

  Both facts annoyed him; the first, because it would probably mean missing the last train from Brush Hill station to Baker Street; the second, because it might necessitate unrolling the beautifully neat, gold-mounted, brand-new, silk umbrella he had treated himself to that very day, for he knew that a plain-clothes C.I.D. man should always make a good impression, and he understood well how universally a man is judged by the umbrella he carries.

  However, this last necessity was not upon him yet, for the warning rain-drops ceased as suddenly as they had begun. But there remained his doubt concerning the best way to take whereby to reach the railway station.

  At Brush Hill police-station, which he had been visiting in connection with some not very important bit of routine business and had left only a few minutes ago, he had been given clear enough directions for finding his way to the railway, since the buses whereby he had journeyed down from the Yard would at this hour have ceased running for the night. But somehow he had gone astray.

  By the light of a street lamp near, he made out that he was in Windsor Crescent, and was none the wiser for the knowledge, since he had no idea how Windsor Crescent stood in relation to the railway station, nor at this late hour did there seem a single soul abroad in all the sedate, desperately decorous, highly respectable, slowly decaying suburb of Brush Hill, once a favourite home of prosperous City merchants, but now so derelict it had not one single block of up-to-date miniature luxury flats to boast of, nor even so much, in all its borders, as a county council estate of dolls’ houses for workers.

  Perplexed, Bobby stood at the corner of Windsor Crescent where Balmoral Grove cuts it at right angles on the way to join Osborne Terrace, and watched two cats prowl, sinister and swift and silent, across the road – but silent not for long, since, a moment later, there came from one of them a long, ear-splitting, nerve-piercing, sleep-destroying howl, a little like the product of a circular saw undergoing thumbscrew treatment in some machinist inquisition. Instinctively Bobby’s eyes went searching for the stone we have the warrant of the poet for believing it is a proper man’s first impulse to heave at any cat in sight, and then upon the silence following that fierce feline howl broke the sound of running footsteps, as there fled the length of the Crescent one who seemed driven by some dreadful fear.

  Bobby stiffened to attention. It seemed to him there was a quality of terror needing investigation in those uneven, rushing, running steps whereof the sound troubled so suddenly and strangely the quiet of the suburban night. No man, he told himself, ran like that, save for bitter need.

  He stood back a little into the shadow cast by the house near which he had paused. He could see now, by the dim light of the street lamps, the dim figure of the approaching runner. None pursued, it seemed, and somehow that gave an added terror and a keener poignancy to this unfollowed flight through the indifferent darkness. Nearer the fugitive came, and nearer still, still running in the same wild, panic-driven manner, and, when he was so near he was about to pass, Bobby shot out a long arm and caught him by the collar.

  ‘What’s up?’ he began; and then, with extreme surprise, ‘Good Lord, why it’s Con Conway.’

  The startled scream the fugitive had been about to utter died away. He was a wizened shrimp of a man, undersized, pale faced, and now he hung limp in Bobby’s grasp, rather like a captured rabbit held out at arm’s length by a gypsy trapper. He was trembling violently, either with fear or from the extreme physical exertion he had been making; the perspiration was running down his cheeks, whether from terror or from effort; his breath came in great, wheezing gasps, till at last he managed to pant out:

  ‘Lor’ blimey, guv’nor... s’elp me, if ever I thought to be glad to meet a ruddy dick.’

  ‘Meaning me?’ asked Bobby.

  ‘Meaning you, Mr Owen, sir,’ Con Conway agreed; ‘and no offence meant, so hoping none took neither.’

  ‘Oh, none,’ agreed Bobby pleasantly. ‘Only I’m wondering, Conway, if you’re really so very glad to meet me, for you know you seemed in the dickens of a hurry, and I’m rather wondering why.’

  ‘Mr Owen, sir,’ Conway assured Bobby earnestly, ‘I was gladder to see you than ever I was to see the bookie still there after I had backed the winner at long odds.’

  ‘That so?’ said Bobby, with some doubt, and yet impressed by the strength and fervour of this declaration.

  As he spoke he leaned his umbrella against the garden railing by which they were standing, and, still holding Con Conway with one hand, ran the other lightly over him. Conway, who knew the significance of this gesture well enough, submitted meekly, merely remarking:

  ‘You won’t find no tools on me, guv’nor.’

  ‘I didn’t much expect to,’ retorted Bobby, for Mr Conway was an expert of that species of the genus burglar known as the ‘cat’ variety, and had no need of any aid but his natural talents and his painfully acquired technique for swarming up the gutter-pipe that seemed to pass near some conveniently open window. From his own pocket Bobby produced a small electric torch, and flashed its light on the other’s knees and elbows. ‘Doing a bit of climbing lately?’ he asked, for both knees and elbows showed certain suspicious signs of dust and dirt.

  ‘Oh, them,’ said
Conway, interested. ‘Oh, them’s where I slipped on a bit of banana-skin some bloke had thrown away, and went right down on my hands and knees. The mercy of providence,’ added Conway piously, ‘I wasn’t worse hurt; and a fair scandal, if you ask me, the way them banana-skins is throwed about. If I ’ad my way, that’s what you Yard blokes would be looking after, instead o’ persecuting poor hard-working chaps what only wants a chance to earn their living quiet and peaceful like.’

  ‘We know all about the honest, hard-working side of it,’ retorted Bobby. ‘Any objection to turning your pockets out?’

  ‘As one gentleman to another,’ answered Conway frankly, ‘none whatever, seeing as there’s nothing in ’em.’

  This statement at least proved to be true enough, for in fact they contained only a dirty handkerchief, an empty cigarette carton, an equally empty matchbox, some bits of string, and one solitary and somewhat battered penny.

  ‘O.K.,’ commented Bobby. ‘Any objection now to telling me what you were in such a hurry about? Old Harry himself might have been after you. What was it all about?’

  ‘As one gentleman to another,’ said Conway slowly, ‘it was just this – I was running to catch the train at Brush Hill station. And now,’ he added reproachfully, ‘you’ve gone and been and made me lose it.’

  ‘How were you going to pay your fare?’ Bobby asked.

  ‘Well, now, do you know, guv’nor,’ declared Conway, with a great air of surprise, ‘I hadn’t never thought of that – me being always used to my money in my pocket when I wanted it.’