Sometime in the 1950s an increasingly fragile Punshon took a dreadful tumble down the landing steps at the Detection Club premises at Kingly Street, an event Christianna Brand vividly recollected many years later in 1979, with what seems rather callous amusement on her part:
My last memory, or the most abiding one, of the club room in the clergy house, was of an evening when two members were initiated there instead of at the annual dinner [possibly Glyn Carr and Roy Vickers, 1955 initiates]. As they left, they stepped over the body of an elderly gentleman lying with his head in a pool of blood, just outside the door . . . dear old Mr. Punshon, E.R. Punshon, tottering up the stone stair steps upon his private business, had fallen all the way down again and severely lacerated his scalp. My [physician] husband, groaning, dealt with all but the gore, which remained in a slowly congealing pool upon the clergy house floor. . . . However, Miss Sayers had, predictably, just the right guest for such an event, a small, brisk lady, delighted to cope. She came out on the landing and stood for a moment peering down at the unlovely mess. Not myself one to delight in hospital matters, I hovered ineffectively as much as possible in the rear. She made up her mind. “Well, I think we can manage that all right. Can you find me a tablespoon?”
The club room was unaccountably lacking in tablespoons. I went out and diffidently offered a large fork. “A fork? Oh, well . . .” She bent again and studied the pool of gore. “I think we can manage,” she said again, cheerfully. “It’s splendidly clotted.”
I returned once more to the club room and closed the door; and I can only report that when it opened again, not a sign remained of any blood, anywhere. “I thought,” said my husband as we took our departure before even worse might befall, “that in your oath you foreswore vampires.” “She was only a guest,” I said apologetically.
“Dear old Mr. Punshon,” no vampire he, passed through a door to death in his 84th year on 23 October 1956, four years after his elder brother, Robert Halket Punshon. On 25 January 1957 the widowed Sarah Punshon presented Dorothy L. Sayers with a copy of her husband’s thirty-fifth and final Bobby Owen mystery, the charmingly retrospective Six Were Present. “He would like to think that you had one,” wrote Sarah, warmly thanking Sayers “for your appreciation of my husband’s work during his writing life” and wistfully adding that she would miss her “occasional visits to the club evenings.” Sayers obligingly invited Sarah to the next Detection Club dinner as her guest, but Sarah died in May, having survived her longtime spouse by merely seven months. Sayers herself would not outlast the year. As Christianna Brand rather flippantly reports, Sayers was discovered, just eight days before Christmas, collapsed dead “at the foot of the stairs in her house surrounded by bereaved cats.” Having ascended and descended the stairs after a busy day of shopping, Sayers had discovered her own door to death.
* * * * *
Dorothy L. Sayers’s literary reputation has risen ever higher in the years since her demise, with modern authorities like the esteemed late crime writer P.D. James particularly lauding Sayers’s ambitious penultimate Peter Wimsey mystery, Gaudy Night--a novel E.R. Punshon himself had lavishly praised in his review column in the Manchester Guardian--as not only a great detective novel but a great novel, with no delimiting qualification. Although he was one of Sayers’s favorite crime writers, Punshon was not so fortunate with his own reputation, with his work falling into unmerited neglect for more than a half-century after his death. With the reprinting by Dean Street Press of Punshon’s complete set of Bobby Owen mystery investigations—chronicled in 35 novels, five short stories and a radio play—this long period of neglect now happily has ended, however, allowing a major writer from the Golden Age of detective fiction a golden opportunity to receive, six decades after his death, his full and lasting due.
“Death on the Up-Lift”
E.R. PUNSHON’S 1941 radio play, “Death on the Up-Lift,” is a major rediscovery (by mystery genre authority Tony Medawar) for fans of Golden Age mystery: not only a fine fair-play puzzle that makes most diverting reading (as it assuredly made most diverting listening for a war-stressed British audience), but also a forty-first criminal case for Punshon’s most famous series sleuth, Bobby Owen, complementing the thirty-five Bobby Owen novels and five Bobby Owen short stories. Those vintage mystery fans who have followed the Bobby Owen saga as Dean Street Press has reprinted it over the last couple of years should be interested to know that “Death on the Up-Lift” takes place around the time of the cases chronicled in the 1941 Punshon detective novels Ten Star Clues and The Dark Garden, after Bobby Owen has left Scotland Yard to become an inspector in the police force of Punshon’s fictional English county of Wychshire. The play technically joins the nine Bobby Owen novels, published between 1940 and 1946, that form what one might term Punshon’s chronicles of Wychshire, though it takes place entirely in the West End of London, at the hoity-toity Hotel Elegance, where an extremely obnoxious British business tycoon, Sir John Briggs, holds court in a private suite on the ninth floor. In the play Bobby Owen has come to warn Sir John of a plot to steal his precious Blue John diamond, providentially putting Bobby on the scene when Sir John is murdered. The Blue John diamond, incidentally, made its original appearance in Punshon’s fictional world as the eponymous bauble in the author’s 1929 non-series mystery novel The Blue John Diamond, and the gem also makes a dazzling cameo appearance in the 1940 Bobby Owen detective novel Four Strange Women.
The unlamented Sir John Briggs’s early background as a sailor ties in with Punshon’s own family history. Not only had Punshon’s maternal grandfather, David Halket, made much of his ephemeral fortune as a convict ship owner, Punshon’s younger brother, Alfred Douglas Punshon--evidently as adventurous a soul as his immediately elder brother, who left a clerkship in the 1890s to roam the American West--had joined the navy at the age of sixteen in 1893, eventually rising to the rank of Chief Signal Boatswain aboard the renowned HMS Hood. Commissioned in 1920, “The Mighty Hood,” as she was dubbed, was one of the world’s largest and most powerful warships and the pride of the British navy until it shockingly exploded and sank during a Second World War confrontation with the German battleship Bismarck. Alfred Punshon served for only four years on HMS Hood, having died from a heart attack in Melbourne, Australia, in 1924, when he was but 46 years old, during Hood’s 1923-24 circumnavigation of the globe with the Special Service Squadron. He was described as an “excellent” officer who “carried out his duties with zeal and ability.”
Curtis Evans
CHAPTER I
CONSTANT FRERES
BOBBY OWEN, on leave from Scotland Yard, and intending to spend that leave in touring the country with his wife, Olive, brought the car to a standstill and stared in rather a bewildered way at the scene before them.
“This is where the entrance used to be,” he said, “and there’s the old lodge-keeper’s cottage, but it seems to be all wired off now and the grounds turned into a market garden by the look of them.”
A little distance from where the car had halted stood the burnt-out shell of Constant Freres, once a fine old Georgian mansion till it had been destroyed in a disastrous fire towards the end of last century. The great pillared entrance had remained standing, and behind it rose a magnificent marble double stairway, apparently largely undamaged, though the gilt iron balustrade had long since vanished, and now it rose only to a desolation of fallen floors, crumbling ceilings, burnt-out rooms. Three-quarters of the roof gaped open to the sky, and what the fire had begun wind and rain were in process of completing.
But the great tower—Folly Tower as it was locally known—a landmark for miles around, a kind of annexe built on later to the east wing and, of course, entirely out of harmony with the rest of the old building, seemed also to have largely escaped damage. It still reared its sixty feet or more into the air, intact, ugly and defiant. Further away stood Constant House, a bleak, early Victorian building to which the family had retreated after the fire—temporarily as it had been hoped, per
manently as it had proved. It stood at right angles to the ruin, at which, through its curtained windows, it seemed to be peering with prim disapproval.
“What on earth is that great tower for?” Olive asked, for though she had heard of it before she had not been prepared for the way in which it both dominated and fascinated.
“Goodness knows,” Bobby answered. “No one else, unless it’s my late respected great-great—or thereabouts grandfather, and if he did he never told. Folly Tower it soon got called. There is a story he wanted to have his coffin kept there after his death so he could have a kind of grandstand view of the Day of Resurrection when it came along. But his heir didn’t approve and had him buried in the family vault, so I suppose he’ll have to take his chance with the rest.”
“He must have been a funny old man,” Olive commented. “All the same, I rather wish it had come to you, ruins and all, and that horrid tower, too, instead of to your cousins. So swanky to be able to talk about your country estate.”
“Not much swanking about it when it came to paying for the upkeep,” Bobby pointed out. “Police pay doesn’t run to playing at landed gentry—that’s for stockbrokers. I don’t know how Val Outers and Myra manage. I thought he only had his pension from the Colonial Service, and that won’t amount to much. Pensions never do. Only what do we do next? As far as I remember, there’s no way round for cars—only a footpath.”
“Sound the horn,” Olive suggested. “Someone may hear. I’m beginning to wish we hadn’t come.”
“Couldn’t very well help,” Bobby said. “After all, they’re both cousins, though I’ve never even seen Outers. But Myra and I were kids together. She used to spend her holidays with us. Her letter rather sounded as if she were worried about something.”
“Just as we were starting on our holidays,” Olive grumbled, and Bobby said:
“I can’t imagine how she came to know that.”
Then he sounded his horn, shattering with its blast the quietude of that peaceful country scene. The sound died slowly away. From the one-storey, stone cottage which Bobby had identified as in former days that of the lodge-keeper—the family coat of arms was still visible above the doorway—there now emerged a bent and aged woman, crippled apparently, supporting herself on a single crutch. She stood there, quite still, staring straight at them, but otherwise taking no notice. Bobby gave another little, he hoped, apologetic-sounding hoot, and alighted, expecting the old lady to come to that odd wire barrier so that he could speak to her. Instead she retired into the cottage, closing the door behind her.
“Well, I never,” said Olive indignantly.
“She may have gone to get someone else,” Bobby said.
“The way she shut the door,” Olive said.
“I think I saw a chap working over there behind those bushes,” Bobby said. “He showed for a moment when I hooted,” and then he tried again, wishing he could make it sound as cross as he was beginning to feel.
There was no result. The cottage door remained shut, the gardener stayed invisible.
“They don’t mean to take any notice,” Olive said. “Perhaps it’s just that they hate motorists.”
“Nice sort of welcome to the ancestral home,” complained Bobby.
“There’s a cyclist coming,” Olive said.
Bobby moved round to the other side of the car and, as the cyclist rode up, spoke to him.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I want to get to Constant House over there, beyond the tower. The entrance used to be here, but it seems to have been wired off.”
“That’s Dewey James’s part,” the cyclist answered, and he seemed slightly amused. “You ought to have taken the left-hand fork about five or six miles back. Your best plan is to go back there. It’s rather a rough road, but it takes you straight to Mr Outers’s place if it’s that you want.”
Bobby said it was and the cyclist looked as if he were going to say something, and then he changed his mind and rode on. Bobby began to turn the car. Olive said:
“That man looked funny when he knew it was Mr Outers you wanted.”
“Did he?” Bobby asked absently, fully occupied turning the car on this narrow road without running into the deep ditch that bordered it on both sides.
The drive back and then on again by the left-hand fork did not take long. It was to the back of the house that the road brought them and they might well have passed the entrance but for an open gate marked simply with the word ‘Freres’.
“I suppose this will be it,” Bobby said, a little doubtfully, for of the house itself nothing was to be seen.
He drove through the gate, following an apparently little-used, weed-grown gravel drive. On his right was a path that seemed to be more used and to lead directly to the house, of which the chimneys were now visible above the trees that till now had largely concealed it. But that was only for foot-passengers or for cyclists and then a sharp turn in the drive brought them round to the house. Evidently their approach had been heard, for the front door was open and a tall girl was coming down the steps, guarded by stone lions, that led to it. Bobby halted the car and alighted as the girl came up.
“It is Cousin Owen, isn’t it?” she said.
“It is,” Bobby answered. “And you’ll be Rosamund. And this is your Cousin Olive,” he added as he turned to assist her to alight. “I’m afraid,” he went on, “we both thought of you as quite a small girl.”
“That’s Mother,” Rosamund explained. “She calls me ‘That child’ and makes people think I’m still in my cradle.” As she said this she smiled faintly—coldly indeed and rather indifferently much as if it were just another of the absurdities life was constantly presenting and that you had to put up with as tolerantly as possible. She was handsome rather than pretty, dark of complexion with strong, well-formed features, her nose prominent, even thrusting above a firm-looking mouth and chin. Her teeth were magnificent, though the generally closed mouth seldom showed them. Her hair was a kind of shining darkness, as though an unseen light lurked within it, and her eyes so deeply black they seemed twin pools of light. Much more a Juno than a Venus, Bobby thought, and the impression he had of her was of one who held herself reserved and aloof, as though within her were forces she knew instinctively she must control. Even when she shook hands with Bobby her grip was firm rather than welcoming, and the kiss she submitted, as it were, to exchange with Olive remained formal and distant. “Here is Mother,” she added as an older woman came running down the front-door steps.
Myra Outers was a small, plump woman, between whom and her daughter only slight resemblance existed. In her youth she had been extremely pretty, but it had been largely a prettiness of youth and colouring, of that ‘schoolgirl complexion’, and also of a certain quick, eager grace in movement. But long residence in Africa and the heavy passage of the years had robbed her of these, though of the last something still remained, and when she removed the spectacles she was wearing her eyes even yet showed clear and large and of a blue as deep and pure as Rosamund’s were deep and black. Her greeting of her two guests was as exuberant and fussy as that of Rosamund had been contained. She fairly swept them both into the house under a barrage of questions, comments, and exclamations, while Rosamund with the aloof efficiency that seemed characteristic of her seated herself in the car and drove it to the adjoining garage, or, rather, cycle shed, for, as Bobby had noticed in passing, it held only three or four bicycles.
“I don’t know where Val is,” Myra was saying. “I thought he was in the study, but I looked and he isn’t—oh, here he is now,” she added as there came to the head of the stairs, and then began slowly to descend them, an immensely tall, immensely thin man, six feet and a half in height at the least, Bobby thought, though possibly his exceeding thinness might tend to exaggerate his apparent height, and then in this narrow and ill-lighted entrance it was not easy to see him or judge accurately.
But it was at least abundantly evident that this was the one of her parents from whom Rosamund derived her loo
ks, even though the great black beard Mr Outers wore made it almost impossible to distinguish his features.
The likeness was there, though, all the same, but less perhaps in individual feature than in a kind of general overriding resemblance. The nose, however, in both father and daughter was similar, prominent and thrusting, a Roman conqueror’s nose, in fact, and then too there were the eyes, deepest black in both, and in both showing something of that same elusive quality of a clear and hidden light deep in their darkness, even though with him this light in darkness had grown a little dimmed with age till now his eyes seemed withdrawn and hooded, as from long brooding over things beyond understanding. There was, too, in his manner as he greeted his visitors, much of that air of remoteness which Rosamund had managed to convey, as if they both brought themselves back with difficulty from their inner lives to the details of everyday existence. He was cordial enough, however, as he shook hands, and expressed, in what Bobby privately thought could have been suitably described as a ‘few well chosen words’, his pleasure in meeting relatives previously unknown in person.
“A quarter of a century—more—in deep African bush does rather isolate one,” he said. “It is quite a change for us to have visitors. You understand?”
CHAPTER II
THE MEDICINE BAG
GIVING BOBBY no time to reply to this question—but probably no answer was expected—Myra bustled him and Olive upstairs to the room in which already their two suitcases had been deposited. An apologetic reference to them passed Myra by without response. It rather seemed as if she were so fully accustomed to finding necessary things done that she felt no comment was required. Then she withdrew, leaving them to themselves. Olive started to unpack—they were to stay the night—and Bobby said:
Six Were Present: A Bobby Owen Mystery Page 2