“I suppose it does,” agreed Olive. “Do you think it was really Mr Dick Rawdon at the Crayfoots’ house the evening Sir Alfred was shot?”
“Oh, yes,” Bobby said. “I think we can accept his story. He very badly wanted another look at that portrait and when he couldn’t get any answer at the front, he went round to the back, saw the window open Coop had left like that for a quick get-away—if necessary, and nipped in. He had said something to make his uncle guess where he was going. Sir Alfred had a suspicious sort of mind and he thought it was the El Greco paintings Dick meant when he said something about a picture at Crayfoot’s house. So he went along, too, and frightened off Dick who cleared out in a hurry when he was scared by a knock at the front door. Coop had been lying low upstairs after he heard Dick arrive. He had a fresh scare, tried to get away, and was caught by Sir Alfred who tried Jo stop him. Coop was a rat all right, but like any rat, he could fight when cornered, and he shot Sir Alfred in order to escape. I thought at first Coop had been hired by someone else to have a look round, but now I know Crayfoot and the old hermit had been seeing each other. I expect Coop knew that—possibly through Loo or from his own observations—and was trying to get hold of the pictures on his own account. It must have been from watching Loo that he guessed about the cave. That’s what made it all so difficult. The El Greco paintings meant big money to anyone who got hold of them. A generalized motive, so to say. There they all were, buzzing round the hermit’s hut like so many wasps round the honey pot, and which particular wasp had done the stinging was pretty hard to tell. Minor complications, too, like Dick Rawdon falling in love with Mary Floyd and Coop getting money out of him on the strength of it—that is the simple explanation of what seemed Dick’s suspicious interviews with Coop. It worried me a bit at first when I heard they had been seen together.”
“I wonder what will become of Loo?” Olive remarked. “She is such an odd child.”
“I’m certain she’ll be much less odd now,” Bobby declared. “Had a bad shock and it means she’ll be shocked the reverse way from usual—from the abnormal to the normal. She’ll not want to go wandering alone in the forest any more.”
“I hope they’ll leave that cottage of theirs,” Olive said. “It will be all different now and perhaps they won’t mind so much, though that first day we were there, Mary and her mother seemed to think it would be the end of everything if they had to move. Do you remember how they talked about it in such a desperate sort of way?”
“I remember it sounded jolly suspicious when things began to happen later on,” Bobby agreed. He got to his feet, groaning a little as he did so, for movement was still painful. “Do you really think,” he asked, “that Dick Rawdon and Mary Floyd are going to fix it up?”
“Why, of course,” Olive said, surprised. “It’ll make up for those poor dears fifty years ago who weren’t allowed, and isn’t it a good thing something nice has come out of it all at 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 CONQUEROR INN
“I wouldn’t come any nearer if I were you. It’s not a thing to see unless you have to.”
THE REMOTE Conqueror Inn, possibly the oldest licensed house in England, has an unexpectedly key role to play in World War Two. Lorry drivers, army camps, black marketeers and even the IRA become entangled in the sinister web which draws this novel’s plot together. Bobby Owen, after finding a case of banknotes, has to identify a corpse mutilated in its grave, ignore the red herrings thrown in his way … and identify a ruthless killer who uses the confusion of war to conceal his tracks.
The Conqueror Inn was first published in 1943, the eighteenth of the Bobby Owen mysteries, a series eventually including thirty-five novels. This new edition features 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
The Conqueror Inn
CHAPTER I
PLAYING TRUANT
INSPECTOR BOBBY OWEN, of the Midwych County Police, chief indeed of the Midwych County C.I.D., doubling with that office the post of secretary to the chief constable, Colonel Glynne, had an uneasy conscience.
Because he was playing truant.
He knew very well that this errand he was on should have been confided to a subordinate. He knew very well that at this moment he ought to be sitting in his office, before a paper-strewn table, dealing with all that flood of orders, instructions, regulations, counter orders, instructions, regulations, that the bureaucratic machine turned out day by day; calm, regular, and unceasing, as the procession of the seasons. Not one of all of them, of course, but its issue could be reasonably defended. None the less Bobby was inclined in his more rebellious moments to wonder if a severe rationing of such activities, every government office limited strictly to such or such a number each month, would seriously impede the war effort.
However, for the time he had left all that behind. Sergeant Payne, young and intelligent, with a first-class education—he had gone from a Midwych elementary to a Midwych secondary school—could deal for to-day with the paper stuff. Meanwhile, in spite of the murmurings of a dissatisfied conscience, Bobby was thoroughly enjoying his drive through the fresh, clean, autumn air.
It was weeks, and it seemed like years, since he had spent a day away from the office. He wished he had been able to bring Olive with him. But a policeman on duty has to be careful, and the company of a wife would have made this trip look too much like what it really was, a mere pleasure excursion.
The road he was following was one he did not know well, even though his duty took him so often to and fro in the county, deputizing for the Colonel, who was growing more and more used to leaving everything to the young man already recognized as his successor. Driving had to be done with caution for the surface was bad—a second-class road the county surveyor had been inclined, in the stress of war time, to neglect of late. Then it had a good many sharp corners and awkward hairpin bends. It left the main Midwych and Scotland road som
e miles north of the city, served occasional small villages, isolated farms, country mansions, and then divided, one branch running on to join the Holyhead road, the other turning back to meet again the main Scottish route, having thus made a detour of about thirty miles or so.
A little-used road then and less used than ever in these days of war with pleasure motoring nearly at a standstill and none of the new factories, airfields, camps, in the district it served before its division. To the east, as Bobby drove northward, lay in the distance Wychwood proper, a dense vast mass of woodland, where trees had grown and flourished, decayed and fallen and died, since times beyond the memory of man, before perhaps man was. Further on, east and south, lay the vast industrial district of which Midwych city was a centre. On Bobby’s other hand, to the west lay the bare uplands of Wychwood forest, waste land, thin and hungry, swept by every wind, giving scant sustenance to a few flocks of sheep, though bearing still the name of forest from that vast antiquity when ‘forest’ meant merely beyond the bounds, the desolate, outside lands.
‘Outside’ indeed all that lonely country seemed, with no hint anywhere of human life or habitation. It was this enormous loneliness that helped to give a touch of the bizarre to the odd story Bobby had managed to persuade the chief constable and himself ought to be investigated, as the message over the phone had requested, by an ‘experienced officer.’
It was almost like driving through an uninhabited land, he thought, and he supposed that ancient Briton and Roman soldier, Norman knight and Tudor gallant, Roundhead and Cavalier, Georgian dragoon and the Home Guard of to-day, all had passed this way and would none of them have seen change or alteration.
An ancient land and a lonely, and it was something of a relief when he saw in the distance a building that must, he supposed, be his destination.
The Conqueror Inn.
He paused to draw up for a moment to consult the large-scale map he had brought with him. No other building shown near, so this must be it, and who, he wondered, wanted an inn in so desolate a spot? And how did the innkeeper manage to make a living?
The inn stood high, at a point whence the road descended in both directions. It had a grim, bare, weatherbeaten appearance, a defiant aspect to it somehow, as if it challenged the elements to do their worst. Behind it were a few outbuildings, and on the southern slope of the rising ground, whose height it crowned, were a few cultivated acres. On them a cow or two, some sheep, and a few pigs were visible. A farmer, or smallholder rather, was then apparently the tenant of the Conqueror Inn, as well as landlord, and that probably explained how he was able to achieve the difficult feat of continuing to exist.
Outside the inn, Bobby drew up and alighted. He noticed that already, though it was barely closing time, the inn doors were shut. Somewhat cynically, he wondered if such strict obedience to the licensing laws was always practised, or whether an expected visit from the police had anything to do with this admirable adherence to the law. He sounded his horn. Nothing happened. So he went through the proscribed motions for immobilizing the car—pedantic perhaps out here in this wilderness, but officials must needs be pedants—and walked round to the rear of the building. A man carrying a pitchfork came from one of the outbuildings and stood watching him gravely. He did not speak and Bobby said:
“Mr. Christopherson?”
The other nodded. He was a big man with a big square head, and his enormous hands held the pitchfork like a weapon. More of a farmer than an innkeeper in his appearance, probably more in his element behind a plough than behind a bar, Bobby thought. He showed his card and said:
“There was a ’phone message late last night. It was from you?”
Mr. Christopherson nodded again. He seemed a man of few words. He glanced at the card, glanced at Bobby, and said in a deep, slow voice:
“You’re young for an inspector. Come into the house and I’ll show you.”
He moved towards the inn and Bobby followed him, slightly offended. He didn’t feel at all young. He doubted if he was really much younger than Christopherson himself, even though about this farmer-innkeeper there seemed to hang something of the ageless past of the lands in which he lived. A fantastic notion came into his mind that perhaps this man had always been here, and himself had watched the passage of Briton and Roman and knight and cavalier. An ageless man in an ageless land. He gave himself a little angry shake to get rid of such fantasies. Through a door so low both his guide and himself had to stoop to pass beneath, they entered a long, low kitchen, stone floored. A bright fire burned in a fireplace almost as big itself as many rooms in modern houses. It was of peat and it was bright because a woman was blowing it with a pair of long-handled bellows. She was tall and square and elderly. Bobby could not see her face clearly as her attitude hid it from him. She took not the least notice of their entry. She did not even turn round. At a table near the window a girl was kneading dough. She was tall and strong and young and the rhythmic movements of her arms and body as she worked had a kind of solemn grace and beauty of their own. She looked at the two men as they came in but did not speak. It was as though the eternal silence of the moors had penetrated here, too, and that here, too, things happened as they happened without need for comment or chatter. Hardly a pretty girl, for her features were too large and too irregular, but impressive in her way all the same. And slightly disconcerting, Bobby found the utter indifference with which her eyes, dark, sombre and hidden, swept over him and left him and returned to her task. It seemed to convey to him the message that war or no war the fundamental task of all was the making and baking and breaking of bread.
Christopherson ignored the two women as completely as they ignored him and Bobby. He walked on through the room and Bobby followed. A short passage, stone flagged, led into a small room. Another door opened from it into the bar. The room seemed to be used as an office. Christopherson unlocked a cupboard and took out a wooden box or small packing-case, such as wholesale dealers use for deliveries to retailers of what are called packed goods. The lid had been nailed on but now was loose. Christopherson lifted it and showed it was filled with tightly packed bundles of one-pound notes. He made no comment but stood waiting and Bobby said:
“Was the lid like that when you found it?”
“No. Nailed,” Christopherson answered.
“You opened it, then?”
Christopherson let this go unanswered. He gave the impression of considering the question one that so obviously carried its own answer that no reply was necessary.
“How much is there?” Bobby asked.
“I don’t know,” Christopherson replied. “I’ve touched nothing.”
“We must count it together and I’ll give you a receipt before I take it,” Bobby said.
He was experiencing some surprise at finding that the tale told over the ’phone had been in no way exaggerated. The report received by ’phone that a wooden case full of bank-notes had been picked up by the roadside, had not sounded very convincing. A practical joke had been suspected, and there had been a certain amount of chaff about the probable size of the ‘case.’ The general feeling was that the ‘case’ would turn out to be a small box wherein some motorist had placed a few notes for convenience and that somehow or another it had fallen from his car. A routine matter really. One for the nearest constable. There had been no opportunity to ask for further information for after giving his name and message and where he was speaking from, Christopherson had rung off. The inn itself had no ‘phone. He had spoken from a roadside A.A. ’phone cabin, so once he had left it there was no way of communicating further.
The usual thing would have been to ring up the nearest constable and order him to report. But there was something rather queer about this story of a case filled with bank-notes having been picked up in so lonely a spot and Christopherson himself had seemed to think so, for he had asked that an officer of experience should be sent. Besides, decisive factor, Bobby, with a flash of lightning insight, had seen that here was a chance to get away from
his eternal office work for an hour or two in the open air.
“I had better spare the time to run out myself and see if there’s anything in it,” he had said with an air of annoyance and impatience that deceived no one. “Not likely, but you can never tell.”
After all, these are strange days when strange things happen. And when someone suggested that perhaps the bank-notes had been dropped by parachute, Bobby nodded gravely and promised that that possibility would not be forgotten.
Now looking at that not so small box stuffed with those neatly packed bundles of bank-notes, Bobby was thinking to himself that certainly it had been worth while to come in person. People don’t usually carry about wooden boxes stuffed with bank-notes. If they do, and if the box is lost, one would expect them to be prompt to report the fact. Few would be careless about keeping an eye on so valuable a package or in noticing its disappearance.
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