Brought to Light: A Bobby Owen Mystery

by E. R. Punshon

  He spoke with an air of absolute certainty that carried conviction with it, and Bobby nodded in agreement, feeling he could accept this.

  “If I get in touch with the Duke again,” he remarked, “I’ll tell him what you say. But I don’t wonder the poor man’s worried. It seems there were hints that an application might be made for permission to exhume his wife’s body. You can imagine what the cheap Press would make of it if they got hold of a story like that.”

  “But surely,” began Hagen, “surely that isn’t likely. After all these years.”

  “Oh, I’ve no doubt it’s mere bluff,” Bobby agreed, “but disturbing, all the same. Well, I must be off. Got to get back to Penton. You have a fine library, Mr Hagen. May I have a look?”

  The titles of some of the books were familiar—to Bobby, sad to say, more familiar than their contents. Others he had never heard of, nor could he even guess at the subjects they treated of. A number were in Latin, and Bobby, who had long ago forgotten his ‘mensa—a table’, and his ‘Hic, haec, hoc’, regarded these with a doubtful eye. He had a feeling he might suddenly be called upon to do an unseen translation and probably get kept in as a result. There were a few of those early books known as ‘incunabula’, and others were in black letter. Generally the subjects dealt with seemed to be philosophy, theology, comparative religion, mysticism; this last appearing to be the largest separate class. There were many medical books, too, mostly treating of abnormal mental states.

  “You read a great deal, Mr Hagen,” Bobby remarked. “Do you write as well?”

  Hagen made a gesture, a somewhat deprecating gesture, towards the manuscripts on the table before the window.

  “A beginning,” he said. Then he pointed to one of the great wooden cases near the filing cabinet. “Material. Memoranda. Notes,” he said. “Preparatory. Thought has published one article of mine, and there have been two in the Herbert Trust Quarterly. And only this week I had one back from The Eastern Road they had sent me a proof of, though they did warn me that did not necessarily mean they meant to publish it. To send round to members of their editorial board, they said.”

  “Too bad,” Bobby remarked.

  “I may try to recast it,” Hagen observed meditatively. “It’s an attempt to compare Bergson’s approach to intuitive knowledge as a universal sympathy, giving complete insight, with Spinoza’s theory of intuitive recognition of a thing’s essence through immediate union with the perceived object. I feel now I did not go deep enough.”

  Bobby, gasping a little under the influence of this pronouncement, which he was sure meant something, though he was not sure what, picked up his hat and said it was very interesting, but he must be off if he were to get back to Penton before dark. Hagen, still apparently wrestling with Bergson and Spinoza and getting, it seemed, rather the worst of it, went to open the door, where a splash of rain driven in by a gust of wind served to recall him from his philosophic heights to the more common needs of humanity.

  “It’s raining,” he said.

  “Rather a nuisance,” Bobby remarked. “I never did like getting wet through. May I wait a few minutes, to see if it clears off?”

  Hagen had stepped outside and was looking up at the clouds now veiling the declining sun.

  “I don’t think it will last,” he said. “If it does come on heavily I’m sure Mr Day-Bell would let me have his car to drive you into Penton and then bring it back. It would be a long walk in the rain.” He stepped back into shelter and closed the door upon the driving rain. “The other gentleman—Mr Pyle—did he go with the Duke or back to his caravan?” he asked. “I intended to mention it before, but I forgot. I think perhaps he might be told that that man of his isn’t making himself at all popular.”

  “Oh. What’s he been up to?”

  “Well, sir, the people round here don’t like gypsies. Gypsies have a name for picking up unconsidered trifles, and our villagers feel they can do all that’s necessary in that line—and rather more, too, for that matter. So when they heard there was a caravan parked on the moor near the church, Mrs Davis—she lives near the ‘Green Man’—thought she would see if it was gypsies, and give them a hint to move on before there was trouble and the Penton police coming to see what it was all about. She came back rather fussed and complained about being sworn at and told to get out unless she wanted a clip on the ear. I don’t want any trouble either, so I went myself—the caravan’s only a few minutes’ walk away—and told a man who was there about the time when caravaners quarrelled with our villagers and woke up in the middle of the night to find a bonfire blazing under the caravan. It didn’t do any great harm, but it might have been nasty.”

  “Yes, indeed,” Bobby agreed. “Looks to me as if it would be rather a good idea to station a constable here. I hope the chap you saw was grateful for your warning?”

  “Not him, sir,” Hagen answered. “I fancy he had had a drop too much. Been visiting the ‘Green Man’, probably. He used a good deal of bad language and showed me a revolver he was busy cleaning, I suppose. He said anyone trying tricks like that on him would get a pill to stop him ever needing another.”

  “Did he, though?” Bobby exclaimed, so startled and surprised that Hagen in his turn seemed almost equally surprised. “I think I had better tell Major Rowley. He may think it worth while to find out if the chap has a certificate—or Mr Pyle either. I don’t like people who take a drop too much and flourish guns. It looks as though the rain was stopping now, thank goodness. By the way, Stephen Asprey’s widow has a place somewhere about here, hasn’t she? Does she ever visit Janet Merton’s grave?”

  “Oh, yes,” Hagen said at once. “I’ve often seen her. She doesn’t speak much, except to answer, and not always that, if you say something. I remember once—”

  He paused and seemed doubtful whether to continue.

  “Yes,” Bobby said as Hagen still hesitated. “Yes?”

  “It was one time,” Hagen said. “It was strange. It’s stuck in my memory somehow. I don’t think she knew I was there. She had been sitting perfectly still, there on the churchyard wall, not moving a finger, just sitting. All of a sudden she got up and went to the grave and stood for a minute, rather like a statue, so still and motionless she was, and then she straightened herself up, so she seemed to grow taller, and she made the victory sign they used in the war—you remember? Two fingers held up like a ‘V’. She stayed like that for a minute and then she went away.”

  CHAPTER X

  TRAGIC MEMORIES

  WITH THIS strange, tragic picture in his uneasy mind of the widow, watchful and waiting, by the grave of her rival till at last she came to make above it her sign of triumph and of victory, did Bobby begin his long walk back on the lonely Penton road.

  The triumph and the victory of the living over the dead? You, you have gone, it seemed to say; but I remain. But was it not rather, Bobby asked himself as he strode along, more truly that the triumph and the victory lay with the quiet, untroubled dead?

  He put that question aside. One of the many which must indeed be asked, but to which no answer can be given, unless indeed it is that triumph and disaster are equally the impostors they have both been called. More useful, more necessary, he felt, if ill things that threatened were to be stayed, for him to consider what might lie behind that strange gesture and for what reason Stephen Asprey’s widow had left her Bristol home to establish herself for long periods in two or three barely habitable rooms of a house that was nearly a ruin. Was it merely some kind of morbid attraction that drew her to the grave of a woman she had never seen in life? Or was it because of those buried letters and their rumoured or possible recovery? Or was it rather a belief that in fact they had never been there to recover? Was it conceivable that she was the Duke’s anonymous correspondent?

  Fortunately the gust of rain and wind that had delayed Bobby’s departure had died away as quickly as it had arisen. For though he had, perhaps a little boastfully, declared his indifference to the risk of being overtak
en by darkness during his long walk, it was not, all the same, an experience he was in any way anxious for. Especially if the rain came on again. The road was not in the best possible condition, and bad weather and consequent mud would soon reduce his present five-mile-an-hour pace or over to a much more moderate speed.

  But now first he heard and then he saw a motor cyclist speeding towards him. As they neared each other the motor cyclist dismounted and stood waiting. Bobby, close now, could see that he was a fair, red-haired youth and that he had a slight limp in his left leg. That answered to the description Mr Day-Bell had given of his son, and Bobby, as he came up, was the first to speak.

  “Mr Duncan Day-Bell, isn’t it?” he said.

  “Why, yes; how did you know?” the other countered. “Are you the man from Scotland Yard my father has been talking about?”

  “I am,” Bobby agreed. “I might ask how you knew, but I won’t. A fair guess on both sides, perhaps. As another guess, you are on your way to ask what the Duke of Blegborough wanted?”

  “Well, it’s all been worrying Dad quite a lot,” Duncan admitted. “Dukes aren’t everyday birds in Hillings, and it did rather look as if something fresh had turned up about those Asprey letters.”

  “So it has,” Bobby told him. “In confidence, it’s not a story that ought to be allowed to get around too much, but your father is sure to want you to know; there’s been what looks like the beginning of a blackmail threat.”

  “Has there, though?” Duncan exclaimed. “Do you know, I half expected there was something like that in the wind. There’s been a lot of talk about those letters, and more than ever lately. Sort of started up again. The idea seems to be that it’s all mixed up with Mr Thorne’s going off the way he did and that he or someone else had got hold of them. Cracked sort of notion, if you ask me.”

  “Could the grave have been opened secretly, do you think?” Bobby asked, “and the letters recovered?”

  “No, I don’t,” Duncan answered. “Quite impossible. You can trust old Hagen. He keeps a pretty close eye on that grave. He says if he didn’t, soon there wouldn’t be any grave at all, what with souvenir hunters chipping bits off and pocketing handfuls of earth and all that sort of thing.”

  “I’ve been having a long talk with Hagen,” Bobby said. “He seems a remarkable character.”

  “He jolly well is,” Duncan agreed. “Never been to school to speak of, and now reads Latin right off, the way you or I read the morning paper—I mean me, of course.”

  “Oh, you can count me in,” Bobby said smilingly. “He has a fine library—must have cost something to collect.”

  “You can buy a lot of books if you buy nothing else,” Duncan pointed out, with great truth. “His idea of a really cosy evening is sitting by the fire reading blokes like Kant and Hegel. Just now he’s exchanging letters with some howling swell of a Jesuit father about Thomas Aquinas. I can’t for the life of me imagine why he hangs on here.”

  “I wondered about that myself,” Bobby said. “Your father told me he refused offers he’s had because his knowledge of Latin has no commercial value and his lack of general education would make him unfit for any academic appointment.”

  “Rubbish,” declared Duncan. “Dad got him an offer from old Sir Thomas Alexander, who is about the leading classical scholar of the day, even if he hasn’t a bean to his name. He was looking for someone who was a Latin scholar, didn’t mind living in the country miles from anywhere, wouldn’t be too proud to help in the washing up, and all for thirty bob a week, board, lodging and washing included—and never want to stop working. Not too easy to fill that bill, especially with a snag like that thirty bob a week. Hardly enough to keep most people in cigarettes to-day. The very thing for Hagen, you would have thought, but he turned it down—God knows why.”

  “Probably,” Bobby agreed. “Probably He does. I suppose Hagen had his reasons. I always tell our chaps there’s a reason for everything if they do but diligently seek it out. Your father told me he found it a little embarrassing to have so learned a sexton.”

  “I know,” Duncan said, grinning. “A bit awkward, if you see what I mean, being the boss of a bloke like Hagen. I believe Mr Thorne felt that way, too. No one could help. Hagen seems quite content, though, and you can’t sack him.”

  “Did Mr Thorne ever try to get him other employment?”

  “I don’t know—couldn’t say, I’m sure,” answered Duncan. “I believe he used to complain sometimes that Hagen was getting too big for his boots. Jealous, perhaps, and rather more than didn’t like it when Hagen put him right over a quotation from some old johnnie or another—St Jerome, I think it was. It got into the papers somehow. Hagen wasn’t too tactful, and Mr Thorne was peeved, and Dad says he’s always jolly careful to keep off the classics when Hagen’s near.”

  “Mr Thorne’s disappearance has never been explained, has it?” Bobby asked.

  “Well, the general idea,” Duncan answered, “is that he did a bunk. Got into a mess about money and went off with a woman who left Penton about the same time. Dad says it was the moor, and I expect that’s about the size of it. Dad nearly had his there once. He got caught in one of the moor mists that can come up before you know, and if it does you can easily lose your way and wander round in circles till you die from cold and exposure. Luckily for Dad, the mist cleared, but he’s never trusted the moor since.”

  “It sounds a likely explanation,” Bobby said. “I expect you know a young man named Chrines?”

  “Oh, yes. Why? You mean the chap who tells everyone he is the son of Stephen Asprey and Janet Merton, only you mustn’t say so to anyone else. Has he been pitching you that yarn? Miss Christabel Merton is very angry about it, and I told him to lay off or I’d break every bone in his body.”

  “What did he say to that?”

  “Bought himself a gun and sent a note to tell me he wouldn’t hesitate to use it if he were attacked,” answered Duncan, grinning widely. “So next time we met I stood him on his head to see if he really had a gun with him. He hadn’t, but what he says is that I took him by surprise, and now he always carries it. Miss Merton got to hear and made me swear blue black and white to lay off myself, so that’s that.”

  “Then Miss Merton doesn’t accept his story about being Asprey’s son?” Bobby asked.

  “No. I told you. She’s really angry, and when she gets that way—well, you have to look out for squalls. She went off to her lawyers, and they wrote to Chrines and charged her six and eight, I expect. I would have shut Chrines up free gratis and for nothing if she had let me. You never know with women.”

  “Do you know if Miss Christabel has any definite reason for disbelieving Chrines’s story?” Bobby asked.

  “She told me her aunt—Janet Merton, you know—said when she was dying that there had been nothing physical between her and Asprey. They had only met very occasionally and their friendship was entirely intellectual and spiritual. I can’t say I put much stock in the spiritual and the intellectual when it’s a pretty girl on one side and a chap like Stephen Asprey on the other. Only I suppose on your death-bed you do rather tend to speak the truth. No reason not to, and then you feel you’re going where it’s all known already.”

  “Death-bed statements have always been taken seriously,” Bobby agreed. “More so in earlier times than to-day, perhaps. I must be getting on, though. I don’t much like the look of those clouds.”

  “Walking?” Duncan asked.

  “Eccentric, isn’t it?” Bobby said. “Practically antediluvian. I feel as if I ought to charge for admission. Might I ask you again to say nothing about the Duke of Blegborough’s complaint of what looks like a hint of blackmail in the wind? I can’t help thinking there’s more behind all this than we know of and the less said for the present, the better.”

  He nodded and went on, leaving Duncan standing thoughtful by his motor-cycle, and it was some time before the distant rhythmic beat of the engine told him that the young man was once more on his way. />
  It was growing dark now, not only because the hour was late, but because of those heavy clouds Bobby had remarked piling up overhead. The rain still kept off though, and there was even a gleam of the westering sun breaking through by the time he came to Two Mile End, that three parts ruin where Mrs Asprey had made a lodging for herself.

  A light was showing at the back of the building, so presumably Mrs Asprey had returned. With a somewhat hesitating glance at those still threatening clouds, and another in the direction of Penton and shelter, Bobby left the road and started to pick his way across the tangled growth that once had been a garden and on to where the light showed. It might be, he reflected—in fact, it almost certainly would be—his last opportunity to see or talk to Mrs Asprey, and he was curious to meet the woman of whom Hagen had told that strange story of the victory sign made above a rival’s grave. To-morrow would be too late, for he must be back at the Yard as soon as possible, and there were still those unread essays heavy on his conscience, only barely placated by his promise to it to sit up till all had been read, no matter how late the hour.

  His approach had evidently been heard, for now a door opened, a ray of light shot out, and a harsh voice called: