“But for him,” Fielding said, and again looked angrily at Bobby. “Rooting out what’s best forgotten.”
“Only in time, as time passed,” Miss Bardsell went on in the same slow and now almost dreamy tone, as if she were slipping back into one of her earlier moods of deep, far off abstraction, “I think I should have known and then I think I should have killed both you and me.” She indicated Bobby with a slight, almost imperceptible gesture. “Only for him,” she said.
“Yes, I know,” Fielding said unexpectedly. “I thought of that. I thought perhaps in time you would know. Things can’t be kept quiet for always. They pop up somehow. I thought if that was the way it had to be, it had to be and O.K. by me.”
“Did you think that?” she asked, turning her gaze full upon him.
She put out her hand and he laid his upon it; and as she and her brother had looked at each other across the dead body of their mother, so it was now that these two looked at each other across as it were the dead body of her brother. And Bobby, looking on, wondered.
Fielding turned to him and now with defiance.
“I’m not done yet,” he said. “All this stuff you’re trying to put across—no proof, no evidence, no witnesses. Nothing. Just guesswork. Take it into court and you’ll be laughed out again. Guesswork,” he repeated, and he wiped his forehead on which now stood cold drops of perspiration.
“I’ll guess some more,” Bobby said. “You soon recognized Miss Bardsell and it didn’t take you long to recognize her brother. There had to be some reason why Biggs wanted to wangle a job with you. And once you knew who he was, it again didn’t take you long to understand that his visits to Miss Bellamy—Miss Bardsell, that is—were to lay plans and to push her on to help in what he meant to do. You must have realized very soon that your idea of getting me here as a kind of warning to scare him off what he intended, wasn’t going to work. Indeed I expect you began to see that it was going to be the other way, that he was intending to use my presence to make things even worse for you. So I think you made up your mind you had to do something and you tried to come to some arrangement with him.”
“I offered to go fifty-fifty,” Fielding said gloomily. “I put it to him to let bygones be bygones. Fair enough. It was what I cleaned up when old Mr. Bardsell wouldn’t go on—everything would have been all right but for him turning pig-headed at the last and I did warn him—well, that was what put me first into the big money. I said then his sister and I could settle down comfortably and forget what was all over and done with and couldn’t be helped any more. Wasn’t that fair enough?”
“Fair enough,” Bobby said, but his voice was grim and hard. “What did he say?”
“He lost his head completely. Raved. Shouted. Threats. I reminded him how I had gone out of my way to give him an alibi over that smash and grab raid when you thought you saw him. I said: Didn’t one good turn deserve another? No good. He wouldn’t listen. He got his pistol and began to wave it about. He said he would put a bullet through me and her, too, if I ever dared so much as mention her name again. Well, I had a pistol, too.”
“So you shot him?” Bobby said.
“That was Myerson,” Fielding repeated.
“Why should he?” Bobby asked. “No motive—and no pistol. He wasn’t the man to go armed. Why had you taken a pistol with you?”
“It was only common sense. I made up my mind I had to have it out with him and I knew he could be violent. I knew his temper. I had a right to defend myself, hadn’t I? Self defence, that’s all.” He was speaking not so much to Bobby as to Miss Bardsell, to her in self justification. “Self defence,” he said again, watching her anxiously. “That’s what it was. He said he would never rest till he had me where I put his father. He said there wasn’t ever going to be a smash and grab raid but something would be found to bring me in. Or if there was a big burglary, then my car, or a car with my car’s number, would have been seen, or something of mine would be found near. It was going to be like that every time.”
“He hadn’t a very high opinion of us,” Bobby remarked. “We aren’t so easily taken in as all that. I daresay he could have made it awkward for you, though—especially with a record like yours to work on.”
“There’s been nothing against me for years,” Fielding said indignantly. “But I could see I was up against it. He didn’t sound sane. He started waving his pistol about again. He said it would save trouble and he had a good mind to use it right away. I thought he meant it. I saw it had to be him or me and I got in first. Self defence. Nothing else. You see that?”
“No,” said Bobby.
“I didn’t mean it was,” Fielding said with a sudden change of manner. “I mean it would have been if it had been like you’re trying to make out. But it wasn’t. You’ve no proof,” he said.
Miss Bellamy, Miss Bardsell, raised her head from her cupped hands on which she had been resting it. She looked at Bobby.
“Have you?” she asked. “You talked about a handkerchief. What handkerchief?”
“There isn’t any,” Fielding said. “Not to count, I mean. How could it?”
“You gave me one of yours that night,” Bobby reminded him, “and it was sent for examination and analysis by our experts.”
“Why? What for?” demanded Fielding angrily, scornfully, and yet with unease as well. “Wanted to find blood on it, I suppose? There wasn’t. There couldn’t be. You can’t bluff me. If there had been, is it likely I would have given it you or let you have it?”
“There’s no question of bloodstains,” Bobby told him. “The analysis doesn’t mention blood. No reason to. It was brickdust that I was thinking about.”
“Brickdust?” repeated Fielding, puzzled, uneasy, still defiant.
“You told me that night,” Bobby explained, “as you may remember, that you had a painful blister on your hand which had kept you awake. I could see more work, a good deal in fact, had been done in the way of pulling down the shelter walls. Yet the odd job man from the village—Sadler was his name, I think—who had been engaged on the job had himself told us just before that he hadn’t done anything there for some days. So who had? Was it you, I wondered? And if so, why? And was that how you had hurt your hand? An interesting speculation. And it struck me that anyone busy throwing down the shelter walls would be working in a good deal of dust. And I thought that a lot of that dust would have got up his nose and very probably he would have had to sneeze once or twice. A homely and useful inference. If so, it seemed likely that the mucus on the handkerchief would show a high proportion of brickdust. We knew it was a clean handkerchief, fresh from the laundry, for the laundry delivery had been made that same evening, and your house-keeper had happened to mention that it had been so late you hadn’t had a handkerchief left and she had been obliged to borrow some for you. This one, however, was your own, with your initials on it. So I asked myself two questions. Had the blister on your hand any connection with the work done on the air raid shelter walls, that work not having been done by the man on the job? Secondly, how had brickdust got on your handkerchief, clean from the laundry only a few hours previously? The blister might have been explained as a mere coincidence. But how had the brickdust, if the analysis found it, got there? That seemed a question difficult to answer. And if you like to look for yourself, and see what the analysis says, there’s the report for you to read if you want to.”
He flung it on the table as he spoke. Fielding made no effort to pick it up. He sat very still and he knew that doom was upon him.
“I thought all the time you had something up your sleeve,” he said. “Natural place for a handkerchief,” he said and laughed. “Well, you win and good-bye.”
He sprang to his feet as he spoke and without pause or hesitation dived clean through the window, glass and frame and all, straight into the arms of one of Superintendent Bell’s men, waiting there.
“This way, Mr. Fielding, please,” the man said. “I’m afraid you’ve cut your face but we’ll soon fix that,�
�� and as the two in the cottage sat there silently they heard the sound of retreating footsteps.
“Father and mother,” Miss Bardsell said, “and Frank, too, and now him as well.”
“There is nothing I can say or do,” Bobby said and got to his feet. “If you think there is, or if my wife—I may ask her to come to see you, may I?”
She was not listening. She picked up the analyst’s report Bobby had thrown on the table, by the side of those three cigars that to him at least had told so plain a story of a slowly mounting sense of coming doom so well controlled so long, but in the end breaking down so suddenly.
“He was very clever,” she said. “So are you. If it hadn’t been for the handkerchief you wouldn’t have been able to do anything.” She paused and said in her old abstracted voice: “We could have been happy together if only things had been different.”
And to Bobby it was as though he listened to humanity’s eternal cry, repeated through the ages.
A little awkwardly, he said:
“You have your music still.”
“No,” she said. “I shall never play again.”
“Your opera you were working on?”
“Oh, that,” she said. “He—” She did not mention any name but Bobby knew. “He had sent it to people—big people. He paid any fee they asked. They all said the same—stiff and imitative. I expect they are right.”
Bobby said nothing. But he was surprised. He remembered that wild and passionate playing of hers, like nothing he had ever heard before, like nothing, he believed, that anyone anywhere had ever heard before. Stiff and imitative were the last epithets he would have anticipated. But perhaps it was only the doubt and anguish she had known that had released powers that otherwise would never have reached the level of expression. She was looking idly at the analyst’s report and her expression changed. In bewilderment she looked at Bobby. “But it says,” she exclaimed, “that the traces of mucus are entirely normal with no trace of any unusual substance.”
“I know,” Bobby agreed. “I suppose my idea that the brick-dust he was working in must have made him sneeze, was all wrong. I told him if he didn’t believe it, if he didn’t think it possible, as he knew bloodstains weren’t possible, as he would have known it wasn’t possible if it all hadn’t happened much as I suggested, then I said he could look for himself. He didn’t. He knew it might be as I said and he daren’t put it to the test. He thought he had better try to escape instead and so with safety there before him on the table, he proclaimed his guilt instead.”
THE END
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 House of Godwinsson
Bobby Owen stood for a time in silence, looking down thoughtfully at the dead man’s face. A small, insignificant face, lacking even that touch of repose and dignity which death, even violent death, so often gives, and one that Bobby had never seen before. Of that at least he was sure.
YET this same man was found dead with a detailed and accurate plan of Bobby Owen’s new London flat. Why? The plot soon thickens when a man with a grievance against Bobby turns up to identify the dead man … But Bobby will need to thread many more beads on the thread before he understands the murderous connection to an old Army Officer, and what necessitated the death of a ‘burglar’.
The House of Godwinsson was first published in 1948, the twenty-fifth of the Bobby Owen mysteries, a series eventually including thirty-five novels. This edition features a new introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.
“What is distinction? … in the works of Mr. E.R. Punshon we salute it every time.” DOROTHY L. SAYERS
The House of Godwinsson
CHAPTER I
IDENTIFICATION PARADE
Bobby Owen stood for a time in silence, looking down thoughtfully at the dead man’s face. A small, insignificant face, lacking even that touch of repose and dignity which death, even violent death, so often gives, and one that Bobby had never seen before. Of that at least he was sure.
“Age about forty or a little under,” said the doctor. Then he added: “Well nourished. Took care of himself. First-class condition. Not like most of those we get about here. Hard muscles and all that.”
The speaker was the house physician in this small London hospital in whose mortuary they were standing. On hearing of Bobby’s arrival, and because he was still young and believed that the life of a highly placed official at Scotland Yard must be full of the colour and variety so sadly lacking, in his opinion, in that of a house physician, he had himself conducted Bobby to the mortuary, instead of leaving it to the attendant. He had been hoping to hear strange tales of crime and mystery, but he had not found Bobby very responsive. In fact, he had already classified Bobby as a rather dull, routine-ridden official. Nearly as much so, he considered, as his own seniors at the hospital.
In happy ignorance of this unfavourable verdict, Bobby was still staring at the quiet, dead face, wondering what answer those silent lips would have given to the questions that could never now be asked. A typical ‘little man’, to all appearance, insignificant and ordinary, one of those whom cartoonists to-day delight to depict, complete with bowler hat, umbrella, dispatch-case, for the gratification and delight of other ‘little men’, who do not so see themselves, since they are so well aware—and rightly—of their own immense significance. But about this man there was nothing in his outward appearance to distinguish him from any of those many millions who go daily to and fro about their business in the great cities of the world.
Yet there had been found in his pockets a careful, accurate, and detailed plan, correct to the last item, showing even the position of each piece of furniture, of Bobby’s own flat in a West-End London square, now less fashionable than once it had been. This flat had recently been obtained for him under what is at present called ‘top priority’ when his tenancy of the country cottage where he and Olive, his wife, had hoped to settle down had been terminated by untoward circumstances. Olive still at times lamented that lost country garden from which she had hoped to obtain fruit g
alore—rare and refreshing fruit, as fruit is in very truth in these days. Bobby’s own regrets, however, were less poignant. He had found reason to fear that he suffered from a weak back, one that much bending, as for instance, when planting out cabbages, might injure permanently. Olive had been less sympathetic than good, kind wives should be, nor had her suggestion of a mustard plaster and plenty of them been received with any favour. But she admitted that a flat in town had its advantages, and of course to obtain possession of one did mark them out as among fortune’s favourites. Fallen human nature always finds it pleasant to be conducted to the head of the queue.
It was the report of the discovery of this plan that had made Bobby leave his work at Scotland Yard—and there was plenty of it, for a fresh crime wave was in full vigour, with a new, and important jewel robbery reported almost every week—to see if he could identify the dead man in whose possession the plan had been found. He had already seen and examined it, and he was puzzled. Great trouble and much care and thought must have been involved in its preparation. But generally speaking plans of that sort are prepared only when there is some specially valuable loot in sight—such as for example the jewels of the Duchess of Wharton, whose famous diamonds and rubies had recently vanished without trace. Nor had either duke or duchess been slow in expressing their opinion of a police unable either to prevent such a robbery or recover the lost jewellery. Yet very certainly in Bobby’s flat there was nothing of any outstanding value. Nothing to tempt the experts who had given the Wharton duke and duchess such a display of skill in planning and knowledge of jewellery, even though that demonstration had been received with small gratitude.
It might just possibly be bravado, Bobby supposed. The idea of burgling the home of a prominent Scotland Yard man might have been found amusing. It might have seemed a bit of fun. But crime is too serious a business for the idea of fun to enter into it. Too healthy an idea, perhaps, for the twisted mind of the criminal. Or again the idea might have been to discredit Bobby, whose appointment to the Yard was comparatively recent. But that seemed too far-fetched to be taken seriously. Or defiance? A challenge? But who could associate defiance or bravado with that insignificant, commonplace looking little man to whom even death had failed so entirely to lend dignity or meaning?
Music Tells All: A Bobby Owen Mystery Page 25
