Strange Ending: A Bobby Owen Mystery

by E. R. Punshon

  He shook his head sadly and looked round for Ford, hoping for sympathy, but Ford had already departed. He returned unharmed, however, from an errand that had turned out to be quite peaceful, since indignation and a wild surprise had held the unfortunate Mr Sandford spell-bound in silence till Ford was well out of earshot. And if then the flood-gates had been opened wide, what cared Ford? since out of hearing is out of minding. Getting back, he found Bobby at the ’phone, looking rather worried. He hung up and said:

  “I rang up to ask if that precise little Mr Pyne had been to see about the certificate for his gun. He has, and they’ve kept it and told him his application would be dealt with in due course. After that raid on Pyne’s flat, which seems as if it had been a kind of bright spot in an otherwise only too well regulated life, all their men know him, and the chap on the beat has reported seeing him with J. J. once or twice and once leaving J. J.’s basement lair. We shall have to ask Pyne about it. Seems a bit odd. But ladies first. Miss Caine now.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Ford doubtfully, “only you wouldn’t think a Civil Service gentleman like Mr Pyne, would you?”

  “Never think, Ford,” Bobby warned him. “Never. Not till you’ve got enough facts for a foundation. Come on. Time we were off.”

  “Shall I go for a car, sir?” Ford asked hopefully this time, but Bobby shook his head.

  “Economy’s your only wear these days,” he said. “A ’bus for us, my lad.”

  So a ’bus it was, and fortunately there was one that brought them close to their destination, a small house in a terrace of small Victorian houses, now, small as they were, all divided into flats that were not so much small as miniature. On the house they were seeking two name-plates showed, the lower one ‘Walker’, the upper one, ‘Caine’. A bell above this last Bobby pressed, and a thin voice from above called:

  “Will you come up, please?” and looking up they could see at the top of the stairs a woman in an invalid chair in which apparently she had just propelled herself from one of the upper rooms to the landing.

  CHAPTER XIII

  COOKERY AND POETRY

  THE TWO of them ascended the stairs accordingly. Waiting for them was the occupant of the invalid chair, which she seemed able to manipulate fairly easily. She had already backed it away from the head of the stairs into the open doorway behind so as to leave more room on the narrow landing. Her wasted appearance, the pallor of her face, the features drawn and thin, all proclaimed the sufferer from long illness. But her eyes bright and alert, her voice brisk, low, and pleasant, both equally proclaimed one who had preserved her strength of character in spite of all that prolonged illness and suffering could do. She was saying now, a little doubtfully:

  “Are you from the gas company?”

  “No,” Bobby said. “We had been hoping for a word with Miss Caine. You will be Mrs Caine?”

  “Yes,” she answered. “I thought you had come about the gas,” she repeated, and Bobby guessed she was beginning to think she had been a little precipitate in asking them up. “My daughter is out. Can you call another time?” Then she said: “Are you the two police gentlemen she met at Mr Jordan’s? She told me she had been followed home.”

  “It was necessary to obtain her address,” Bobby explained.

  “Why didn’t you ask her for it?” Mrs Caine demanded, with more than a touch of severity in her voice. “Would not that have been more straightforward?”

  “It would indeed,” Bobby agreed, “but I am afraid that in inquiries of this sort we cannot always be as straightforward as we might wish. We are not dealing with straightforward matters or straightforward people. Sometimes if we ask for an address and are given it, we find that it’s entirely false.”

  “My daughter is not like that,” Mrs Caine said with dignity, but Bobby reflected that mothers do not always know everything about their daughters.

  “We are inquiring about a Mr Kenneth Banner, of the Banner Yachting Cruises,” he went on. “We think he might be able to help us. I understand he was a friend?”

  “I am afraid there is nothing we can tell you,” Mrs Caine answered. “It is a long time since we heard anything—three or four months.”

  “About the time,” Bobby remarked, “that the murder took place in Mayfair Crescent of a Mr Hugh Newton. So far as we know, Mr Banner has not been seen since.”

  “Good gracious,” Mrs Caine exclaimed, “you don’t suppose Mr Banner had anything to do with that, do you? That’s simply incredible.” She began to back her chair into the room behind. “You had better come in and sit down. I suppose you mean you want to ask Doreen about him, though I’m sure there’s nothing she can tell you. She won’t be long. She is giving a talk on pressure cookery at the Polytechnic near here. She should be back soon.”

  “I gathered Miss Caine was a teacher of cookery,” Bobby said, as he and Ford followed her into a pleasant, comfortable-looking room, though one, from a masculine point of view, with too many cushions, too few arm-chairs, and a superfluity of little china ornaments, some of which, however, looked good.

  On the wall, too, with some line engravings, was an enlarged photograph of a young man in Air Force uniform, and this caught Bobby’s eye from the strong resemblance it bore to Doreen. It might almost have been herself in masquerade.

  “My son,” Mrs Caine said proudly, seeing Bobby looking at it.

  “I see he was awarded the D.F.C.,” Bobby remarked, noticing the ribbon shown.

  “He was taken prisoner by the Japanese,” Mrs Caine said. “They tortured him dreadfully to make him tell things, and he wouldn’t. It’s such an inspiration to me when I think the little tiny pains I have are so hard to bear. I still have the pill they gave him to use if he had to. Poison, you know. Instantaneous. But he never did, no matter what those dreadful Japanese did to him. Won’t you sit down?”

  “Thank you,” Bobby said, seating himself accordingly, though with some caution, on one of the fragile-looking chairs in the room. “Do you think it wise to keep a thing like that? There might so easily be an accident.”

  “Oh, I keep it safe at the back of a drawer,” she told him. “I like to know it’s there. I like to remember he could bear his pain and so I can mine when it’s so much less.”

  Bobby made no comment. Not that he liked this idea of the potentiality of instant death tucked away at the back of a drawer, but he did not feel it was a matter he could pursue. He went on:

  “Mr Newton was interested in cooking. A hobby apparently. The evening he was murdered he had been busy preparing a rather elaborate meal.”

  “I remember Doreen talking about it,” Mrs Caine answered. “She thought it must have been difficult to get ready in a small flat. And there was one dish that was new to her, and she was interested. Of course, that was before we had any idea it was the Mr Newton Doreen had met at her work.”

  “There were full details in all the papers,” Bobby remarked. “Mr Newton’s name was given.”

  “We don’t read the papers very much,” Mrs Caine said. “Never murders,” she added firmly.

  Bobby was beginning to notice, or so he thought, that Mrs Caine was showing signs of feeling the strain of answering even these few questions. So he suggested that it might be better to wait till Miss Caine could make an appointment to suit her own convenience.

  “Or do you think,” he asked, “she would prefer to come and see me at Scotland Yard? I could arrange for almost any time to-day or to-morrow.”

  But Mrs Caine shook her head.

  “It’s never any good putting things off, is it?” she said. “I think this is her now,” she added, as they heard the front door open and a light, quick step on the stairs. “She is a little earlier than usual. People often stop to talk and ask questions, but I suppose they haven’t this time.”

  A moment later the door opened and Doreen entered quickly, coming, however, to a full stop as she saw who was there.

  “Oh, you,” she said with evident dismay. “Have they been trying to
bully you, mother? I do think—” she flashed, turning upon Bobby, but Mrs Caine interrupted.

  “They’ve been quite nice, dear,” she said. “Of course, they must ask questions. It’s about that dreadful murder in Mayfair Crescent and Mr Banner. I’m sure he can have had nothing to do with it.”

  “Mr Banner?” repeated Doreen, and now her dismay was still more evident, as if this, at least, she had not expected. “Why? What about him? We don’t know anything. Why should we?” She looked across at Mrs Caine almost imploringly. “Do we, mother?” she asked.

  “I’ve just been saying we hadn’t heard of him for a long time,” Mrs Caine answered, and plainly she, too, like Bobby had recognized the underlying dismay, even fear, in the girl’s voice, and this had both puzzled and alarmed her.

  “It’s all right,” Doreen said quickly, in an obvious attempt to re-assure. She turned sharply to Bobby, all aflame now. “I don’t see why you should come to us,” she said. “It just happened that I met him, and he walked home with me once or twice and I asked him up to see mother. She hasn’t many visitors. Well?”

  “It also happens,” Bobby reminded her, “that he disappeared without explanation at the same time as the murder of Hugh Newton took place,” and as Bobby spoke, rather slowly, those last few words, it seemed as if there came into the room the chill, dark shadow of death itself, and Doreen turned away and occupied herself pulling forward a chair.

  She had been standing, but now she seated herself. A change, too, had come over her. Before she had been facing him, alert, defiant, a small flame of anger and of indignation. Now she sat very upright, prim and patient, waiting, her hands folded on her lap, her feet placed precisely side by side, as if she were calling on her essential femininity to protect her against what she felt to be Bobby’s hard, male aggressiveness. He had been watching her closely. She remained upright and still, apparently unaware of, or indifferent to, the searching scrutiny of his clear, thoughtful eyes. Mrs Caine was looking on with a kind of puzzled unease. The pause was prolonged. Doreen seemed prepared to wait indefinitely. Her mother evidently feared to speak. Finally Bobby said:

  “You have shown a rather curious interest in Hugh Newton’s murder. I met you at Mr Jordan’s, and he seems to have been trying to get the case re-opened. I am wondering if that was owing to any suggestion made by you. You were also acquainted with both men, with Hugh Newton, who was murdered, and with Kenneth Banner, who has disappeared. Do you care to say anything? To tell me, for example, what it is you really know or fear?”

  “Oh, Doreen,” Mrs Caine cried.

  “Hush, mother,” Doreen said. To Bobby she said: “I don’t think I have anything to say, and I don’t think I quite follow you, or what you mean. Because I had met them both, does it follow that I know all about them now?”

  “Well, then,” Bobby said, and he had recognized an inflexible determination in that low, soft voice of hers, “would you care to tell me how you first met Mr Banner? You did tell me of your first meeting with Hugh Newton, didn’t you?”

  “I don’t see that it matters,” Doreen answered. “We were all three interested in cooking. I teach it. Mr Newton knew about it. Mr Banner’s agency made a point of serving first-class meals. When I realized that it was the Mr Newton I had met who had been killed in what the papers talked about as the good-dinner murder, I think it was natural I should be interested as you call it. I knew about Mr Jordan. They talked about him at ‘The Rose and Crown’. He often went there in the evening. They used to say he was half-mad, but they were afraid of him, too. They said there wasn’t anything he didn’t know, especially about people living in the district. So I asked him one evening what he thought about it, and he told me to come and see him, and I did, and he was so interesting I went once or twice again. He said the police had made an awful muddle of it all, and he was going to wake them up. They needed it.”

  “Oh, Doreen,” exclaimed her mother, for those last words had been spoken with a really vicious little stress laid on them.

  “You haven’t told me,” Bobby reminded her, “of how you came to meet Mr Banner?”

  “I don’t see that that matters,” Doreen protested again. “If you must know, he came to one of my private cooking classes. I get men quite often. They may be living alone or want to know how to manage if their wives are out working or sometimes simply so as to be able to help. Or they are just interested or have an idea of taking it up seriously. Some of them are very good. I understood Mr Banner wanted to know about it because of being connected with some travel agency that was trying to serve good meals to its clients.”

  “Did he strike you as having any turn for it? Could he, for instance, take a few left-overs and odds and ends and produce something really first rate?”

  “Good gracious, no,” Doreen exclaimed, and smiled faintly. “He had no sort of real gift, if that’s what you mean. Only a very few have that. It’s exceptional. Of course, anyone can learn to cook. But that’s not what one means. You can show anybody there’s more to eggs and bacon for breakfast than most people ever bother about, but they could never invent a new dish or blend flavours. Wouldn’t know how to set about it.”

  “Interesting,” Bobby remarked. “I mean, that about there being more to bacon and eggs for breakfast than most ever know. Very. And about inventing a new dish. Like the Peach Melba, for instance. That’s just to show I do know something after all.”

  “Doreen always says,” Mrs Caine interrupted, as if she hoped the questioning was now going to be diverted to cooking and she would do her best to keep it there, “that there’s not one in ten thousand can tell when butter’s been used and when it’s margarine, or even that awful cooking-fat they give you now.”

  “Like asking you,” said Doreen bitterly, “to do fine embroidery with a darning-needle.”

  “Was Hugh Newton one of those who can turn left-overs and so on into something first class?” Bobby asked next, and again the mention of that name seemed to bring with it into the room a cloud of darkness and of dread.

  “I don’t know,” Doreen answered. “How could I? He talked about cooking as if he really cared, and so I’m sure he would be good, or else he couldn’t. Talk like that, I mean. You can tell. Really caring about a thing is the same as being good at it, isn’t it? But you can’t tell how good, not till you’ve worked together. He may have been clumsy or heavy with his hands. I don’t know. But he could recognize flavour. He knew I used garlic.”

  “Garlic,” repeated Bobby, surprised, for he only knew garlic as something in the south of France, against the general effects of which the use of a gas-mask was desirable.

  “I’m a garlic fan,” Doreen explained. “So was Mr Newton. That’s why he wanted to meet me. I was rather annoyed at first. The ‘Rose and Crown’ would probably have lost half its customers if it had got about that I was using garlic. Of course, it has to be used awfully carefully. Just rub a clove of it round a dish you are going to use. Giving garlic to the average cook would be like giving a four-year-old a box of matches to play with.”

  “Mr Newton spotted it?” Bobby asked.

  “It was in a new dish I had thought up and wanted to try out,” Doreen explained; she, too, very willing to keep their talk on this comparatively safe level, where, not knowing Bobby, she hoped it would remain. “Cod,” she said. “Cod is awfully nutritious, but it hasn’t much taste. The dullest fish there is, and the most valuable at the same time.”

  “Like some men,” Bobby suggested.

  “All it wants is flavour,” Doreen went on, “and it’s up to the cook to put it there. Broken-up fillet of cod, with the tiniest ever touch of garlic and other things, like milk now it’s not rationed any more. I had several tries before I got it right. When I did, they used to ask to have it again at the ‘Rose and Crown’. It was getting so often asked for—they called it the ‘Rose and Crown’s Special’—I had to promise not to let any other restaurant in the district have it, and I got five shillings extra on my fee. I
called it ‘Poisson Caine à la Marseillaise’. They loved it, except the people who think any prepared dish is unEnglish and don’t want anything but meat and two veg.”

  “You should patent it,” Bobby suggested. “Or copyright it or something. Was it the same thing as something on the menu the papers published after Hugh Newton’s murder? Mrs Caine was telling me you said it was new, and you would find out about it?”

  “Oh, no,” Doreen said, slightly indignant. “Mine was quite original, I thought about it a long time—cod is both so dull and so good, and I wanted to make it more interesting. I only meant about ‘caneton pressé’ in that menu the paper fussed about being hard to prepare in a small flat. It’s a ‘Tour d’Argent’ speciality. I don’t know any restaurant here that serves it.”

  “It wasn’t that, dear,” Mrs Caine interposed. “It was the one about oysters, I meant.”

  “Oh, I remember,” Doreen said. “‘Huitres Flambées’, it was. I couldn’t imagine what that meant. I expect really it was oysters served on a bed of hot salt. That,” she added severely, “strikes me as just eccentricity for the sake of being eccentric.”

  “Like modern poetry,” Bobby suggested.

  She nodded a grave agreement.

  “Cooking is like poetry,” she said. “The poetry of taste and flavour.”

  “I’m afraid,” Bobby admitted, “all this is getting beyond me—both cooking and poetry. Out of my depth. Eh, Ford?”

  “Cooking with butter,” Ford murmured in a low, awed tone, and he had the dazed air of one listening to tales of cities not so much paved with, as built of, gold. “My old woman is going to pass out when I tell her.”

  “One other thing,” Bobby said to Doreen, “and then I shan’t have to bother you any more just now.” He laid the merest touch of emphasis on these last two words. “I gather you brought Mr Banner home sometimes, but not Mr Newton. You only met him in pubs, I think you said. He never told you where he lived. Did you never ask?”

  “No,” she answered. “He hinted sometimes, but—I think I was afraid. There was something about him. Something—dangerous,” she broke out suddenly. “I mean you knew he could easily make you lose your head. I don’t know why. No one knew. Everyone felt it. He only had to lift a finger, and you went all watery inside and you hated it and him, but it didn’t make any difference. I never knew before there were men like that. It was rather awful and rather frightening, and I knew I had to be careful, and I knew he was waiting for me to ask where he lived and I knew if I did it would be the end, and so I never did and I never would—never.”