“Is that what you found out in what you call your grave?” he asked.
“You think a lot when you are three days dying—dying very slowly,” she repeated. “Sometimes I thought you might come. I knew you would be looking. But I didn’t much expect it. So I went on thinking—dreaming. If they were dreams. Were they dreams? Well, you know, I wanted to experience everything. I remember father told me once that experience was a universal human need—the need to know everything. Well, I’ve had it—experience.”
“You have,” Bobby agreed. “Does Lord Newdagonby know what you’ve decided?”
“Oh, yes, I told him.”
“What did he say?”
“He said I was a fool, and he went on saying it so long that I told him he was getting to be a dreadful old bore. That shut him up. It’s the one thing he dreads—becoming a bore in his old age. Afterwards he said it would save a lot of talk.”
“Does he know that you, and you alone, can give the evidence to prove who was the murderer?”
“Oh, you know that, do you?” she cried, surprised.
“Of course I do,” Bobby answered impatiently. “How else could you have got such a hold on him as to make you think you could force him to divorce his wife and marry you? No wonder he thought that well rather a good idea.”
“I saw him on the stairs, coming away from Ivor’s room,” she explained. “I had been there earlier on to ask Ivor about a cocktail party we were going to give. You found my fingerprints, didn’t you? I didn’t want to say. You would have gone on asking those beastly questions of yours, wouldn’t you?”
“I expect so,” Bobby agreed.
“I had forgotten something I meant to ask about, so I had to go back,” she continued, “and there was Charley hurrying away, almost running down stairs. He looked funny, and he was trying to stuff a dead guinea pig into his pocket. I couldn’t think what he had been doing. Ivor’s door was locked, and there wasn’t any answer when I knocked. It was like that sometimes. He would lock his door and muffle the ’phone, and you just had to wait till he came out. I expect really he was unconscious. At any rate I didn’t get any answer or hear anything, and I came away. It was only afterwards I began to think. I don’t mind telling you all this, and it was rather fun watching you blundering along. But if you tell any one, or try to get me to tell any one, I shall say Charley was out with me all morning. He was most of it. I’ve only to stretch the times a little.”
“Well, in that case,” Bobby said once more, “I don’t see that there’s much we can do.”
“No, there isn’t, is there?” she agreed.
“You think it right your husband’s murderer should escape all punishment?”
“I don’t think I know any more what’s right and what isn’t,” she answered. “Except not trying any more to hurt any one. But I’ll have no share in sending any one to prison—prison must be a little like where I was. Or getting any one hanged. Death’s so serious. You’ll get no help from me.”
Bobby got to his feet.
“Well, that’s that,” he said. “I suppose it’s no good saying anything more. I won’t bother you any longer, though I can’t promise other people won’t. You can be brought into court on a subpoena,” he added.
“Did you ever hear of the horse they brought to the water and couldn’t make drink?” she retorted.
“I can only say again,” he repeated, “you’ve changed. Shall you change again?”
“I don’t think so,” she told him. “No. You see, well, after three days in your grave, you aren’t quite the same when you come back to life. Was Lazarus, I wonder?”
“It wasn’t your grave,” he pointed out.
“I thought it was,” she answered slowly, and added: “In a sense I think it was.”
Later on, when Bobby was called to the Public Prosecutor’s office for a conference, he could do no more than repeat that the case was complete, but depended on the evidence of a witness who showed no sign of weakening in her determination to refuse to testify—or alternatively of providing the accused with an alibi.
“Means,” said the Public Prosecutor’s office disapprovingly, “that a known murderer, guilty also of an attempted murder, is going to get away with it because the wife of the murdered man, and herself the victim of the attempt, wants it that way for reasons best known to herself.”
“I don’t much think myself,” Bobby remarked meditatively, “that it’s altogether a case of entirely getting away with it. He’ll get his punishment all right.”
“If you mean remorse and all that sort of thing . . .” said the Public Prosecutor’s office, for that is a department where a certain atmosphere of cynicism is apt to prevail.
“Oh, dear me, no,” Bobby answered. “I think Mr Charley Acton is the last person in the world to feel remorse. I expect he considers himself badly ill-used in having such regrettable necessities forced upon him. No, what I mean is that wide publicity has been given to our wanting to get in touch with him because we think he could give us valuable information. Well, he knows—or rather he thinks he knows, having a guilty conscience—what that means. So he has gone into hiding, and in hiding he’ll remain, never sure when he won’t feel the hand of a policeman on his shoulder. It means the end of his career as an inventor. It means he’ll never dare return to this country. It means he’ll never know again what it is to feel safe. No, I don’t think he’ll escape all punishment. I think there’ll be a good many days when he’ll ask himself if it wouldn’t have been better to be hanged and done with it.”
“You mean,” asked one of the least cynical of those present, “that the wicked flee when no man pursueth?”
E.R. PUNSHON – CRIME FICTION REVIEWER
E.R. Punshon was for many years a reviewer of crime fiction for the Guardian newspaper in the U.K. The following five reviews by Punshon were published together in The Guardian on 25 June, 1936.
Busman’s Honeymoon, Dorothy L. Sayers
Double Cross Purposes, Ronald A. Knox
Death on the Board, John Rhode
They Found Him Dead, Georgette Heyer
Cry Aloud for Murder, Paul McGuire.
Not since those spacious days when Sherlock Holmes bestrode the world like a colossus has any writer of detective stories made such an impression on the reading public as has Miss Dorothy L. Sayers. It is interesting, then, to consider the cause of so startling a success. It can hardly lie altogether in the attractiveness of her chief character, Lord Peter Wimsey, for he indeed may be found by some just a little too great and good for a circulating library’s daily food. In the three essentials of the art of fiction Miss Sayers emphatically excels, for her characterisation and her skill in narrative are both of the first order and her style is not only admirable in itself but touched with an agreeable flavour of scholarship. But all that can be said of others who have not so impressed the general public, and it seems as if the secret of her achievement must lie in the strange gift of personality—most imponderable of the imponderables. It is the gift by which, for example, Dickens has won a greater fame than has his rival, Thackeray; by which in the last century Henry Irving triumphed over natural defects and made himself the master of the theatrical scene as to-day Miss Sayers is mistress of the detective novel. To adopt the slang of the theatre, Miss Sayers “gets it across.”
The plot of her new book, “Busman’s Honeymoon,” is already familiar, since a stage version has been running for months past in a London theatre, so that many will know that the story deals with the discovery of the body of a murdered man in the cottage Lord Peter and his newly wedded wife have taken for their honeymoon. But knowledge of how the tale goes only enhances admiration for the skill with which Miss Sayers pushes forward the significant clue, plucks it away, dangles it once more before the reader, once more as he attempts to grasp it whisks it away up her sleeve, till he would be ready to swear it was never there at all, but that presently it dawns upon him that all the time it was only Miss Sayers making th
e quickness of her mind deceive his thought. Nor is this detective interest all there is in the book, for Miss Sayers has included also a careful study of the efforts of two sophisticated, highly intelligent people, already experienced in life, to adjust themselves to the married relationship, with all that it so surprisingly demands and gives so amazingly. Perhaps, for most readers, the greatest interest in the book will lie in watching how she combines the subtle and delicate treatment such a theme demands—a Henry James theme, indeed—with the more robust requirements of the detective interest. There can be nothing but praise for the skill and courage with which Miss Sayers attacks a problem demanding the highest qualities a novelist can display.
***
“Double Cross Purposes,” by Father Knox, proves again that he possesses a style to which any young writer might do well to play the sedulous ape as well as an abundant wit. But only writers of the highest order have all talents in equal measure, and Father Knox falls a little short in his power of creating character, as also in that direct and clear sense of narrative which many lesser writers possess, that gift which explains how it is that some apparently commonplace authors achieve a success that many learned critics find incomprehensible. The complications in this tale of a treasure found and lost by the banks of a remote Scottish river, of a dead man in a locked garage, of the somewhat tortuous manoeuvres of Miles Bredon grow indeed so tangled as at times almost to bring the narrative to a standstill. In the end Miles Bredon explains everything quite clearly. It may be urged he could have followed a simpler line of country and been more candid both to his companions and to his employers, but then Father Knox would have had smaller opportunity first to tie and then to untie as elaborate a series of knots as any for which even he has been responsible.
***
As Miss Sayers dominates the field of detective fiction by sheer force of personality, as Father Knox reigns by brilliance of wit and style, so Mr. John Rhode may well claim the title of Public Brain Tester No. 1. As befits one who is a “big noise” in detective fiction, he starts his new book, “Death at the Board,” with a resounding bang—that of an explosion which destroys together a business magnate and his house. Careful details the author gives seem to prove the explosion can have been neither purposed nor accidental. The police are baffled, so is the reader. Both are plunged still deeper in bewilderment when there follows another death, equally contradictory in proven detail. Third, fourth, and fifth murders follow, all of colleagues of the first two victims, all equally puzzling. Fortunately Dr. Priestley is there, and he finally explains both the baffling How and the Who, though the Who the reader may have been as quick as the doctor and a good deal quicker than the police in identifying.
***
The reader, too, will probably be quicker than was Superintendent Hannyside in solving the problem set by Miss Georgette Heyer in “They Found Him Dead.” Culprit and motive are indeed soon obvious in this tale of how in sequence two senior partners of a business firm are murdered and how on the life of the third in the succession other murderous attempts are made. All that, however, goes for little compared with the excellence of the narrative, the grace and humour of the style, the growing tension of the story. Miss Heyer hardly shows that chessboard ingenuity some writers can display, nor is her work remarkable for originality of plot or characterisation, but within its limits it is of a high order and certain to afford pleasure and entertainment.
***
The chief constable who tells the story in the first person in Mr. Paul McGuire’s “Cry Aloud for Murder” is an engaging figure, with his modest confession of lack of experience in police work and his ability, when necessary, to call St. Thomas Aquinas in evidence. He is also probably the quickest worker on record, who can combine meeting a girl for the first time, getting engaged to her, getting knocked out by a suspect, and solving a murder mystery in a seaside town all in a day or two. The interest of the book lies, however, less in the solving of the mystery than in the author’s clever and interesting study of the psychology of a mind dwelling morbidly upon foolish nightmare terrors of the past that lead in the end to tragedy.
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.
The Bobby Owen Mysteries
1. Information Received
2. Death among the Sunbathers
3. Crossword Mystery
4. Mystery Villa
5. Death of a Beauty Queen
6. Death Comes to Cambers
7. The Bath Mysteries
8. Mystery of Mr. Jessop
9. The Dusky Hour
10. Dictator’s Way
11. Comes a Stranger
12. Suspects – Nine
13. Murder Abroad
14. Four Strange Women
15. Ten Star Clues
16. The Dark Garden
17. Diabolic Candelabra
18. The Conqueror Inn
19. Night’s Cloak
20. Secrets Can’t be Kept
21. There’s a Reason for Everything
22. It Might Lead Anywhere
23. Helen Passes By
24. Music Tells All
25. The House of Godwinsson
26. So Many Doors
27. Everybody Always Tells
28. The Secret Search
29. The Golden Dagger
30. The Attending Truth
31. Strange Ending
32. Brought to Light
33. Dark is the Clue
34. Triple Quest
35. Six Were Present
E.R. Punshon
The Secret Search
“There’s a spot of trouble this morning. Old gentleman found dead in his bath.”
Bobby answered: “there may be one chance in a million it’s natural death.”
When the notorious gangster Cy King was imprisoned thanks to Commander Bobby Owen’s investigation, he spent a good deal of time talking about avenging himself. Now Cy’s out of jail, linked to a notorious London nightclub owner, while a man impersonating Bobby has been spotted snooping around in a remote London suburb. The same suburb, as it happens, where a young woman, recently arrived from Canada, has seemingly vanished into thin air. All Bobby’s investigations lead to the unassuming borough of Southam, where the disappearance of Elizabeth Smith is compounded by the sudden death of a respectable old man. Cy keep dodging around in the background of the case, but can Bobby bring it home to the old villain – or find an alternative solution?
The Secret Search, a classic golden age whodunit, is the twenty-eighth novel in the Bobby Owen Mystery series, originally published in 1951. This new edition features an introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans, and a selection of E.R. Punshon’s prolific Guardian reviews of other golden age mystery fiction.
“What is distinction? … in the works of Mr. E.R. Punshon we salute it every time.” DOROTHY L. SAYERS
CHAPTER I
“MASQUERADING AS ME”
“AND HOW,” asked Olive, looking sternly at her husband across the table—“how did you like your nice whale-steak?”
“Eh, what?” asked Bobby, rousing himself from that deep abstraction in which he had been sunk during the meal. “Oh, jolly good! Yes, definitely. Jolly good!”
Olive rose to her feet, majestic in wrath.
“Heaven defend me from all men, especially husbands,” she declaimed. “Here I stand hours and hours in a queue for liver: calves’ liver, En
glish calves’ liver. I get it and I cook it and I serve it, and the man doesn’t even know! Whale-meat indeed!”
“Oh, sorry,” said Bobby, feebly apologetic. “It’s only—well, I’m a bit worried.”
“If you had told me,” Olive retorted, unappeased, “you could have had your whale-meat, and my feet wouldn’t ache the way they do.”
“Sub-consciously,” Bobby argued, trying to talk himself out of it, “I really did know it was something special. I did say ‘Jolly good’, didn’t I? It shows, doesn’t it?”
“Shows what?” demanded Olive; and, as Bobby didn’t know, he didn’t answer, but passed his cup for more coffee instead, and Olive filled it and said: “Well, what’s worrying you?”
“Remember Cy King?” Bobby asked.
Olive nodded, uneasily, for Cy King was the name of a notorious gangster who for long had managed, by a combination of daring, skill and cunning, all in an unusual degree, to keep out of the hands of the police. At long last this immunity had been broken down, and, chiefly through Bobby’s instrumentality, he had been convicted and sentenced. But on a comparatively minor charge, so that his term of imprisonment had lasted only a few months. His vanity, his influence among his companions, his prestige, had, however, all suffered badly from this misfortune, and prestige is as necessary to a successful gang leader as it is in any other profession. Moreover, now his finger-prints and general description were on record, his photograph had been circulated in the official ‘Police Gazette’, and so immunity had become merely a dream of a happier past. He now spent a good deal of time talking about all the unpleasant things he would like to do to Bobby as and when opportunity served.
“Has he been doing anything?” Olive asked.
“Apparently, according to a report from one of our contacts, getting up a pal of his to look like me,” Bobby answered.
Everybody Always Tells: A Bobby Owen Mystery Page 25
