Strange Ending: A Bobby Owen Mystery

by E. R. Punshon

  “Am I to understand that in your opinion he may be the murderer?”

  “I said ‘implicated’,” Bobby reminded him. “The way we like to put it is that we think he may be able to help. A really large-scale search has been going on. Without much success, so far. I am hoping that to-night—but I mustn’t go into that. May be all wrong, what I’m working on. There’s something else I wanted to ask. You remember telling me that after the attack on you here, you got yourself a pistol as a protection against anything of the sort happening again. I believe our people here didn’t think that necessary, refused to issue you a certificate, and kept the pistol?”

  “Officialdom and red tape at its worst,” Mr Pyne pronounced.

  “That’s the worst of a uniformed body,” Bobby admitted sadly. “Goes to the head somehow—a uniform. So different when everyone wears civvies to remind them they are just citizens like the rest of us. Human nature no doubt. Never mind. And I seem to remember I suggested that possibly you had provided yourself with one through the help of a gentleman who likes to call himself an enemy of society and likes, I think, to give a helping hand at times to rather different enemies of society?”

  “You were very perspicuous,” Mr Pyne complained. “All the same a mere hypothesis. I consider it irregular in the extreme to formulate hypotheses so insecurely based.”

  “Hypothesis indeed,” Bobby protested indignantly. “A logical deduction from observed facts. No guesswork about it.”

  “Guesswork,” repeated Mr Pyne with unexpected firmness. “I have no such weapon in my possession. I give you my full and free permission to search every room here. You will find nothing.”

  “Because, after what happened at Jordan’s flat, you thought it just as well to throw it into the river from Westminster bridge?”

  This time Mr Pyne fairly jumped.

  “How did you—?” he began, and then paused. “More hypothesis,” he said. “Guesswork,” he insisted, feeling apparently now that he must not apply so dignified a word to a process so irregular.

  “Never mind that,” Bobby said, and did not stop to explain that this time it was neither guessing nor deduction from fact, but merely the knowledge born of experience that those in London who want to get rid of compromising possessions generally drop them into the Thames from a handy bridge, and that Westminster bridge, as the one nearest to Whitehall, that home—or fortress rather—of officialdom was the one most likely to be familiar to Mr Pyne.

  Wise of him not to explain, for this last display of unexpected knowledge had shaken Mr Pyne badly, as was indeed the whole object of Bobby’s visit.

  “I suppose,” Mr Pyne was saying now, not without a faint trace of complacence in his voice, “you have had me trailed, as is, I apprehend, your custom with the more dangerous gangsters. My colleagues, if they knew—” He left that remark unfinished.

  “I have heard,” Bobby remarked—and knew he shouldn’t, but simply couldn’t help—“of objects thrown over bridges into the river falling plump into boats passing underneath and then being handed over to the police.”

  With that parting shot he went away, leaving Mr Pyne still more shaken, contemplating with ever-rising dismay the ever-rising waters into which he had so rashly ventured. And outside Bobby was saying to himself.

  “Now, will it work? Is Pyne busy at the ’phone? If only they weren’t so sticky in this country about tapping ’phones, what an awful lot we should get to know. But sticky’s the word, sticky to the last state of stickiness and beyond.”

  CHAPTER XXXV

  SEARCH WARRANT

  LATER ON that evening, once more Bobby, Ford in attendance, descended the area steps to Jordan’s flat, that now it seemed—though Bobby was as yet by no means sure how or to what extent—had become the focus of all that followed upon the smuggling activities of the crew of the ‘As You Like It’.

  “A misnomer to call their yacht the ‘As You Like It’,” Bobby had commented to Ford earlier that evening. “Not at all as they or anyone else likes it. I don’t suppose any of them ever expected it was going to lead to all this.”

  “If we are able to pick up Miss Guire,” Ford asked doubtfully, “have we enough to hold her on?”

  “I’m jolly well going to make it enough,” Bobby declared with all the emphasis at his command. “Short of committing perjury or too bare-faced faking of evidence, I intend to be as devoid of scruple as any female woman that ever lived.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Ford, turning pale at such deliberate defiance of all he had been taught and trained to regard as sacrosanct.

  “When it’s a case of saving a damn-fool woman’s life or trying to—” said Bobby, and lapsed into a silence Ford did not dare disturb.

  Now Ford was banging at the door of Jordan’s flat. Bobby was close behind, urging him to greater and ever-greater efforts. No result, except for a small crowd beginning to gather on the pavement above and at once moved on by a uniform man suddenly and unexpectedly emerging from the unknown. All the same, Bobby knew well enough there were people behind that so obstinately closed door, for a careful watch had been kept, and two figures seen slipping through the evening shades, disappearing down those area steps to be at once admitted, and not seen to leave again. So he did not feel inclined to continue too long this contest of endurance between hammering at a door and a determination to lie low. He took his card from his pocket, wrote on it: ‘I have a search warrant. If the door is not opened at once, it will be broken in’, signed it, and poked it through the letter-slit provided when the basement qualified as a flat.

  “We’ll give them five minutes,” Bobby said, fairly certain the dropping of the card on the stone floor of the passage within would be heard in the silence following the sudden cessation of Ford’s knocking, and that one of those present would come to see what had been left.

  Nor had more than a minute or two elapsed when they heard cautious footsteps approaching and then retreating.

  “Considering it,” Bobby commented. “Well, we’ll give them the full five minutes. Then one final knock, and after that we shall have to take it they mean to go on playing the fool.”

  But the final knock was not required, for the door opened and appeared a scowling, angry and—or so Bobby thought—a very uncomfortable and disturbed Jordan.

  “What is it now?” he growled with a not too successful attempt to regain his earlier defiant truculence. “I’ve not been well, not at all well. The doctor says I must have peace and quiet, and then you come hammering and banging all the time. What do you want?”

  “Well, for one thing,” Bobby answered, “I want Kenneth Banner.” He raised his voice: “I think you are here, Mr Banner, aren’t you?”

  Jordan grumbled something inaudible, turned, and trailed dispiritedly up the passage. Bobby followed into that front room, former kitchen, he and Ford had visited before. Jordan said:

  “He knows you’re here, Banner. Spotted it somehow—all ears and eyes that fellow.”

  “Mr Pyne, too, I expect,” Bobby said, and in fact both of them were standing there like two schoolboys caught smoking by the unexpected visit of the headmaster. “Good evening, Mr Banner. Mr Pyne I’ve seen before to-night. I’ve been looking for Mr Banner a very long time and for a certain young lady I was rather hoping might be here, too.”

  “Well, she isn’t,” Kenneth said. “Thank heaven,” he added. “You can leave her out of it.”

  “Oh, I meant the other one,” Bobby explained, and Kenneth looked blank, as if he could not very well conceive the idea of there being anyone in all the world but Doreen. “I knew Miss Caine wasn’t here,” Bobby added. “Doing a lecture on the right way to boil eggs or something of the sort. And thankful I am she’s not here to do any more of her blackmailing tricks, if you remember.”

  “Remember,” Kenneth almost shouted, a whole battery of exclamation marks following the word. “Good God, I dream of it still. I always shall, I think. She would have done it, too. If she had . . .” He paused,
the memory of that awful moment still strong upon him. He said: “If she had, I should have killed you.”

  “Well, I’m glad it didn’t come to that,” Bobby remarked. “Don’t see what good that would have done, though. You want to keep that temper of yours more under control. If you had, that night at Mayfair Crescent, none of this would have happened.”

  “How did you know we were here?” put in Pyne, who was looking very uneasy and depressed. “You always know it all, don’t you?”

  “My job would be a lot easier if I did,” Bobby retorted. “Just a matter of trying to—to frame a suitable hypothesis to cover probable reaction. To guess, that is, what you would be likely to do when I had let you see I was getting near the bone. Fairly certain your first idea would be to tell your—shall I say pals, accomplices, or colleagues?—about it, and what had you all better do? So we just came along to sit in at the conference.”

  “Simple, the way you put it,” Mr Pyne commented resentfully.

  “My greatest fault,” Bobby admitted. “Explaining. Takes all the glamour away, the credit, too. Never explain. The last words of Solomon on his death-bed, I’m told.”

  “It’s one of his little tricks,” Kenneth remarked from behind. “Makes you feel a fool for not seeing it before. Gets you down, so you’ll talk. Doreen put me on.”

  “I’m getting,” Bobby confessed, “to dislike that girl more and more day by day. I’m sorry for any man who marries her.” Kenneth scowled, but didn’t quite know what to say, and Bobby was already continuing: “But just at the moment I’m not so much interested in her as in another young woman—Imra Guire. Tell me. Do you want me to take the three of you into custody to be held for questioning on suspicion of being concerned in smuggling, or are you willing to talk?”

  “Depends entirely on what you mean by talking,” answered Kenneth, who seemed now to have constituted himself the spokesman and leader of the party.

  “I want to know what you can tell me about Miss Guire,” Bobby said. “I am more than anxious to get in touch with her. I believe it’s urgent I should.”

  All three of them looked blank. Kenneth waited for a moment, as if to give either of the others a chance to speak, and then said:

  “I don’t think any of us know anything about her. I’m sure I don’t. Why should you think we do?”

  “You’re on the wrong track this time,” Jordan put in. “It was Mrs Adam I gave the dispatch-case to. A boy left it here. Abel sent him. With a message it belonged to a friend who might want it soon, and he couldn’t leave it where he lived, because he was often away. I had no idea the thing was stuffed with smuggled watches. How could I? It was only after you came poking about I began to think it was all a bit fishy. I didn’t want to get mixed up in it if it was, so I gave it to Abel’s widow. That’s all. Anything wrong in that?”

  “I knew all that,” Bobby said. “Mrs Adam has handed the dispatch-case over to us. She also offered some useful information. She claims to have been an eye-witness of part, at least, of what happened on the night of the murder. She saw a man and a woman. There are two women concerned that I know of—Miss Guire and Miss Caine. Two young ladies remarkably like each other, and at the same time remarkably unlike. If it was the first of those two Mrs Adam saw, then probably the man with her would be Ossy Dow. If it was Miss Caine, her companion would presumably be Mr Banner.”

  “Doreen was never near the place,” Kenneth asserted emphatically. “I can swear to that.”

  “A partial witness, I’m afraid,” Bobby said, “and without complete knowledge. On his own showing in no fit state for accurate observation. None of you can tell me more? No. Well, then, tell me, what was it happened here, and why. I mean on the evening when Mr Pyne let a pistol off by accident or design”—as he spoke Bobby was pointing to the bullet hole still visible in the ceiling—“and incidentally lost two front teeth.”

  “Nothing happened,” Jordan said, “except that Mr Pyne was showing me his pistol—small automatic it was—and I was telling him to put the damn thing away because he didn’t know how to handle it, when he managed to trip up over that hole in the linoleum. The pistol went off, and in trying to recover himself he hit himself such a smack against the table he was clean knocked out. And lost two teeth.”

  “A most convincing tale,” Bobby said drily. “I wonder if Mr Pyne and Mr Banner would be willing to confirm it on oath. There are still some people who rather jib at perjury. Old fashioned no doubt. Well, what about Mr Dow? Was he present when Mr Pyne had that unlucky accident? If so, is there any connection with Mr Jordan’s recent visit to an unnamed seaside resort?”

  “Why should there be?” Jordan growled. “No friend of mine. Never heard of him till the other day.”

  “I think,” Bobby said. “I must have a look round—to satisfy myself as we like to say. Any of you care to say anything?”

  There was no attempt to answer that directly. Kenneth said:

  “I knew that was coming.”

  “It’ll all come out now,” said Pyne. “The termination of my career, but I shan’t take to drink.”

  “Oh, all right, all right,” Jordan said. “Poke about as much as you like.”

  “I may as well tell you,” Bobby said. “I have two of my men at the head of the area steps, and two more at the back door.”

  CHAPTER XXXVI

  INCREDIBLE SCENE

  WHATEVER BOBBY had expected to see, whatever dark thoughts had been lurking at the back of his mind, however fearful his misgivings, he was absolutely and totally unprepared for what he now saw as—leaving the front room of this basement flat, where so far his keenest scrutiny had been able to detect nothing in any way suspicious—he, Ford following him, entered the second, the back room.

  For in the common phrase, this time almost literally true, they could hardly believe their own eyes. It is a moot point indeed who stared the hardest—he or Ford; whose eyes were opened the widest; who looked the most utterly and helplessly taken aback.

  “Just a practical joke,” announced Jordan from behind.

  “Oh,” said Bobby, and that was all that for the moment he felt able to get out.

  “Prac—prac—practical joke,” gasped Ford, and that was all he managed to get out for his part before he, too, subsided into silence.

  For what they saw was that the tall narrow oaken cupboard Bobby remembered having seen before was now lying flat on the floor, the clothing it had previously contained heaped in a nearby corner. The top of the cupboard had been hinged, removed, replaced, a hole had been cut in it, and through this hole protruded, supported on a dirty pillow, the head of a man, of Ossy Dow, his mouth covered by a strip of surgical tape so that he could utter no sound.

  “Practical joke,” Bobby repeated angrily, recovering quickly from his momentarily dazed condition. “We’ll see about that. Get him out of there at once. And hurry.” As he spoke he crossed to the helpless victim and removed the surgical tape. He said: “It won’t be my fault if you three don’t get a few months in gaol to correct your sense of humour. Ford, ’phone for an ambulance and a doctor.”

  “My ’phone’s not working,” Jordan said. “Got damaged when Mr Pyne had his accident, and they haven’t sent to repair it yet.”

  “There’s a call box quite near,” Ford said, and disappeared.

  “Practical joke,” Jordan repeated as he and Kenneth began to obey Bobby’s order of release. “Wasn’t it?” he appealed to the hapless Ossy.

  “That’s right,” came Ossy’s response—rather feebly uttered, but clear enough. “Practical joke—pushed it too far, that’s all.”

  “We’ll see what they think of that in court,” Bobby retorted.

  “I’m not prosecuting,” Ossy said, by now removed from his strait and narrow prison and helped to lie down on the truckle bed by the window. “I’m all right. I don’t want an ambulance. I don’t want a doctor. I don’t want police nosing round. All friends here.” He glared at Jordan, at Kenneth, at Mr Pyne, and it w
ould be impossible to say at which of them he glared with the deepest fiercest hate and rage and fury: “I want a drink.”

  “Yes, of course you do,” Jordan said hospitably. “Sorry,” and he bustled off accordingly to get one. “That’s right,” he said over his shoulder as he went. “All friends together.” He was back again almost at once, while Bobby was still endeavouring to adjust his thoughts to this new development, these unexpected declarations of amity. Jordan was bringing a bottle of whisky and a syphon of soda-water. He poured out a generous portion of whisky, added a little soda, gave it to Ossy and said: “Score even, and no hard feelings on either side. Eh?”

  “None,” agreed Ossy, putting down his empty glass and looking more than ever charged to explosion point with fury, rage, and hate.

  “It was him began it, fixed me that way, he did, just the same,” Jordan explained to Bobby, still slightly bewildered by this incredible scene. “Me first, and then him, and it was him fixed the cupboard, hinged lid and all, so your head went through and nothing you could do, held in a vice, and his surgical tape I used as they did on me. Turn and turn about so to say, and that’s fair all the world over. And,” Jordan added, “for all the help you were, Mr Clever Detective, I might have stayed there till I rotted.”

  “That’s right,” said Ossy, viciously as ever. “Till he rotted.”

  “Was it part of the practical joke that he should?” Bobby asked. He produced his note-book. “I want full details,” he said.

  “You can put that thing away,” Ossy growled. He seemed better now, stronger and apparently little the worse for his confinement. “You’ll get nothing in writing.”