Strange Ending: A Bobby Owen Mystery

by E. R. Punshon

  In the sink a glass was standing. Rinsed and left there to dry apparently, as Jenkins had said.

  Near by stood unwashed tea things. The unhappy man had evidently had a solitary tea, before priming himself with gin. Bobby’s nose assured him that gin had not been taken with the tea, and for some minutes he stood there, thinking, vaguely uneasy.

  He went back into the sitting-room, and looked again at the collection of articles taken from the dead man’s pockets. His vague, faint feeling of uneasiness increased.

  From the landing outside came the sound of angry voices raised in dispute. Women quarrelling apparently. He opened the door and when the little group of flushed and angry-looking women saw him standing there, they dispersed. One, he noticed, let herself into the opposite flat.

  When they had all gone, Bobby retired, but soon a knock came. He went to answer it and saw standing there the woman he had noticed going back into the flat opposite. She was holding out a handbag.

  “It’s Mrs. Clements’s,” she said. “You had better have it. I don’t want to have anything to do with her.”

  “Mrs. Clements?” Bobby repeated. “Oh, yes. It’s because of leaving her Mr. Allen got so depressed, wasn’t it?”

  The woman snorted indignantly.

  “If you ask me,” she said, “he was only too glad of a chance to get away from her.”

  “Well, then, what made him commit suicide?” Bobby asked.

  “Because of being so ashamed of the way he treated his wife,” she answered promptly, “and her as good a wife as any man ever had, and I don’t mind who hears me say so, if she is my sister.”

  “I’m sorry,” Bobby said. “Didn’t they get on well together?”

  “They did till that Clements slut got her claws into him,” she answered with dark anger in her voice and eyes. “That was when he took to drink and her encouraging him all the time at the Red Lion where they met because she knew it was the only way she could keep him, drinking together.

  “A wicked, wicked shame, and him with a good wife and home waiting. No wonder he put his head in a gas oven and if it had been me I would have put it there for him long ago.”

  And then she saw how he was looking at her for she had spoken with a sudden fierce energy that startled him. For a moment they were both silent. But not surprising, Bobby reflected, that she spoke with such heat.

  “Had they been drinking together to-day, do you think?” he asked.

  “He was sober enough, and not a smell of drink on him,” she answered, “last time I saw him. He knocked to ask if I could give him a shilling for two sixpences to put in the gas ready to boil some water for tea for Carrie—that’s my sister—when she got back. He had had his, he said.”

  “I noticed that,” Bobby said. “The tea things are there.” He was still holding the handbag she had given him. “How did you come to have it?” he asked.

  “She had the impudence to say she wanted to tell me how sorry she was about it all. Came knocking at the door, the cheek of her, and walked in before I could say a word. If you ask me, she wanted to get round me the way she gets round people, so I wouldn’t say anything about her and how she had been carrying on. We got to having words and I told her to get out and she must have forgot her bag answering back.”

  “Do you think she was really fond of him?” Bobby asked.

  “She wanted him awful bad, if that’s being fond of him,” the woman retorted. “She was one as couldn’t get on without a man. Well, that’s natural. You couldn’t blame her for that. Only it didn’t ought to be another woman’s man, lawful wedded for years, as she tried to get.”

  “No, it oughtn’t,” Bobby agreed, and the conversation ended.

  But he was more thoughtful than ever as he went back into the little sitting-room, standing there, staring alternately at the nearly empty bottle of gin and at the things spread out on the table.

  A loud knocking came at the door. He went to answer it. A tall woman was there, well built, good looking, rather flushed and a little untidy.

  “You’ve got my handbag,” she said. “I want it.”

  “You are Mrs. Clements?” Bobby asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “I forgot it and the lady opposite says she gave it you. Like her cheek and I only hope my money’s all right. It’s got my pay packet in it.”

  What made Bobby hesitate, he hardly knew. No harm surely in returning a handbag to its owner. Yet some vague feeling of dissatisfaction made him say:

  “Sorry, madam, I am afraid I must ask you to wait till the Inspector comes. He won’t be long.”

  “What for?” she asked angrily. “It’s my handbag, isn’t it? You’ve no right to keep it.”

  “Regulations,” Bobby explained amiably. “Lost property.”

  “It’s got my money in it,” she protested. “My pay packet. I want it. Four pound notes and four shillings except for one shilling I spent after I got home, and now I want another for the gas.”

  “I could lend you one for that,” Bobby offered, “till the Inspector comes.”

  She still protested and with vigour. Bobby remained firm. Finally she accepted his shilling though with bad grace and went off muttering threats of complaints to be made to the Inspector when he arrived.

  Nor was it long before that gentleman was knocking at the door of the flat. He did not look too pleased as he came in.

  “New to the job, Owen, aren’t you?” he said. “Well, don’t start chucking your weight about too much. The public won’t stand for it. What’s all this about refusing to give back her handbag to a lady?”

  “Well, sir,” Bobby explained, “in a case of suspected murder, I thought I couldn’t be too careful.”

  “Murder?” the Inspector almost shouted. “What do you mean? It’s suicide, isn’t it?”

  “I thought,” began Bobby, but the Inspector cut him short.

  “Don’t you get thinking, my lad,” he said. “Learn your job first and leave thinking to your seniors.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Bobby.

  “And if it’s murder,” the Inspector went on, “who is the murderer? Has your thinking got you that far?”

  “Oh, yes, sir,” Bobby answered. “I think I can hear the murderer coming now.”

  “Eh?” said the Inspector, startled. There came a knock at the door. The Inspector looked doubtfully at Bobby and then went to the door and opened it. “Oh,” he said in a relieved tone, “it’s you, Mrs. Clements. Come for your handbag. Where is it, Owen?”

  “Here, sir,” Bobby answered, showing it. “Mrs. Clements says her pay packet is in it—four pound notes, three shillings. Her pay is four pound four a week and she says she spent a shilling after she got home this evening leaving four pound three.”

  “That’s right,” Mrs. Clements said resentfully. “What about it? Any objection?”

  “Only wondering,” Bobby answered, “how you managed to spend a shilling after getting home when it’s early closing day and all the shops shut since one?”

  “I didn’t come here to be insulted,” Mrs. Clements said, but she had become a little pale. “What’s it to do with you? Give me my bag and I’ll be going.”

  “Mrs. Allen’s sister who has the flat opposite,” Bobby went on, “states that she gave Mr. Allen a shilling for two sixpences as he hadn’t a shilling for the slot meter and wanted one. But he didn’t use it, because there is still a one-shilling piece with the other money found in his pockets. I suggest that the shilling used was the missing shilling from Mrs. Clements’s pay packet.”

  “Lies, nonsense, it never was. I’m going,” Mrs. Clements said and turned towards the door but Bobby was standing now between her and it.

  “I think,” Bobby went on, “that taking care no one saw you, you slipped up here so as to have what you told Mr. Allen was to be a farewell drink with him, so you could part friends and no ill feeling. You got him fuddled with the gin you brought—was it doped, I wonder?—and when he was unconscious with it you got him with his
head in the gas oven and turned on the gas. Is that the way it was?”

  “Good Lord,” the Inspector said softly.

  “I didn’t, never, never, never,” Mrs. Clements cried. “What should I for when he was the only man I ever loved?”

  “Perhaps,” Bobby said softly, “because you could not bear to lose him again to the woman from whom you had taken him.”

  “And if I did,” she screamed, “was I to stand being chucked away like that and him running back to her after all I had done for him and all the neighbours sneering?”

  “I think you had better say no more just now,” the Inspector told her, “but I’ll have to ask you to come with us.” Later on, he said to Bobby: “What put you on it in the first place?”

  “Well, sir, I think first of all it was that glass in the sink so carefully rinsed out but the tea things left unwashed. It didn’t seem to fit in, not even with a man full of gin and meaning to commit suicide.

  “And then when I saw the shilling hadn’t been used. I began to ask myself whose shilling it was. Mrs. Clements went out of her way to tell me that.”

  “I see,” said the Inspector, approvingly this time. He added: “New to the job, Owen, aren’t you? Well, I don’t say but that you’ve made a good beginning.”

  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

  Brought to Light

  The stage was set, Bobby thought, the actors in position; but how the drama would develop, that he could not even guess.

  The churchyard at Hillings-under-Moor is the final resting place of Janet Merton – buried, so everyone believes, along with celebrated poet Stephen Asprey’s unpublished verses and love letters. The potential value of the poems has posed a constant danger of grave-robbing, but the Duke of Blegborough has a new cause for alarm. He has heard that there is an official move to open the grave, and its contents may shed a most unwelcome light on his dead wife.

  Bobby Owen of the Yard also discovers the former rector of the church, Rev. Thorne, had gone for an evening stroll two years earlier – and disappeared into thin air. Whether his disappearance was in connection with the contents of Janet Merton’s grave is something Bobby will come to find out, with the help of Edward Pyle, of the Morning Daily, Janet Merton’s formidable niece Christabel, John Hagen (church sexton and self-taught classical scholar) and a man named Item Sims.

  Brought to Light is the thirty-second novel in the Bobby Owen Mystery series, originally published in 1954. This new edition features a bonus Bobby Owen short story, and an 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

  CHAPTER I

  APPEAL FOR HELP

  DEPUTY COMMANDER BOBBY OWEN, C.I.D., his hands in his pockets, whistling very badly the latest popular tune from the latest American musical, was looking out of a window of the West Mercian police headquarters in the pleasant little country town of Penton, once upon a time the capital of the kingdom of Mercia, but now not even the capital of the county. That distinction had been basely stolen by some upstart of a place in East Mercia, not more than six or seven hundred years old, at a time when Penton was still recovering from having been burnt down once or twice during the wars of the barons. And what the Deputy Commander was thinking as he gazed absently into a street where Tudor, Stuart, and even earlier buildings rubbed shoulders with the latest multiple-store buildings in the latest fashionable style was that when he became a policeman he had never expected to become a schoolmaster as well.

  Recently he had been giving a course of three lectures to the West Mercian police, basing them largely on the Howe edition of Gross’s Criminal Investigation. Members of neighbouring police forces had been invited to attend, and had done so in large numbers. There had been discussions following each lecture, and finally Major Rowley, West Mercian Chief Constable, had offered small money prizes for the three best essays on these Bobby Owen lectures.

  To this offer the response had been almost embarrassing in its plenitude, and as Major Rowley had not wished to adjudicate himself, for fear of being thought to show bias towards his own men, he had asked Bobby Owen to undertake the task. So here Bobby was, playing schoolmaster, as he told himself, trying to mark fairly what were in effect examination papers, and more than a little worried by the unfamiliar task, since on its competent performance so much depended for the essayists. Not so much, of course, on account of the monetary value of the small prizes offered, as because success would mean better prospects of promotion in a service in which promotion is often slow and difficult.

  And very difficult Bobby was finding it to penetrate both behind the stiff and formal official language too many of the men had been trained to use, and also behind the difficulty others found in expressing themselves. Yet only thus could be formed a clear estimate of the degree of clarity of thought and grasp of essential principles lying nearly smothered beneath turgid language and muddled syntax.

  Now, as he was turning back from the window to resume his task, there came a knock at the door, and Major Rowley appeared with an apology for an interruption which as a matter of fact Bobby welcomed rather than otherwise. The Chief Constable was a brisk, energetic man, of middle age, but still something of an all-round athlete, slightly below average height, but of square, strong build, with a quick, glancing eye that missed little, and a prominent nose above a firmly closed mouth. Behind him were many years of police service in India. He had the name of being a strict disciplinarian—too much so, indeed, in days when the emphasis has passed from demanding obedience to winning cooperation. Bobby had, however, found him pleasant to work with, appreciative of the lectures delivered, and, as Bobby knew, he had the reputation of having considerably improved the efficiency of the force he commanded.

  “Getting on all right?” he asked, with an approving glance at a desk where the piles of essays were evidently being sorted out into groups of differing merit.

  “More or less,” Bobby answered, still slightly worried by h
is unfamiliar task. “I’ve weeded out about half that I don’t think amount to much. I don’t know if you would care to look through them yourself and see if you think any of them should have another reading?”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” Rowley answered. “I want to be able to say I’ve had nothing to do with the judging.” He began to fidget in an awkward and rather embarrassed manner with the piled-up essays on the desk. “There’s a local big-wig here,” he said. “He wants to know if you can spare time to see him. I had to promise to ask. No confidence in country bumpkins like us. He wants the pure milk of Scotland Yard.”

  “Well, he can’t have it, that’s all,” declared Bobby, well aware of all the work waiting for him in London. “There’s a discipline board I’ve got to attend as well as the newest re-organization committee. Who is he, anyway?”

  Major Rowley countered by another question.

  “Ever heard of Stephen Asprey?” he asked. “You know that thing of his: ‘In gold and sumptuous velvet go the stars’? Always being quoted.”

  “Oh, is that his?” exclaimed Bobby, surprised. “I always thought it was Shakespeare or somebody. I remember Asprey was all the go when I was up at Oxford. Hadn’t heard much about him lately. Dead, isn’t he? Where does he come in?”

  “Mr Day-Bell,” the Major went on, reverting now to Bobby’s earlier question, “is the clergyman at Hillings-under-Moor, about ten or twelve miles from here. On the fringe of the Great Mercian Moor and a scattered, lonely sort of place. Janet Merton lived near there, and she is buried in Hillings churchyard.”

  “Oh, yes, of course,” Bobby exclaimed, as old memories began to return to him. “They were lovers, weren’t they? Asprey and her. Isn’t there some story about Asprey having put their love-letters in her coffin to be buried with her?”

  “All his last poems, too, according to one version,” Rowley said. “I don’t think that’s known for certain, but it is certain that he wrote to her continually when they were apart, and that he published nothing during those years, though he used to say Janet had rekindled his Muse and the world would one day know what it owed her. There’s always been a good deal of talk about reopening the grave and recovering the letters and manuscripts if they are really there, and recently it’s been revived. There was a question about it in Parliament, and the Home Secretary said the request would receive favourable consideration if application were made.”