Triple Quest: A Bobby Owen Mystery

by E. R. Punshon

  “Friends!” she snorted. “If them’s his friends, it’s a queer lot he has and him educated and all. One of ’em I saw trying to poke out a card I pushed under his door, seeing it lying there in the hall where the postman leaves letters and liable to be lost if left.”

  “Had you ever seen him before?” Bobby asked, and received in return a sufficiently good description to be able to recognize Mr. Groan.

  “What’s up?” she asked. “None of ’em let on anything, only act funny like. Something wrong?”

  “I don’t know,” Bobby replied. “There may be. There was another man you said was here—a man with a crippled arm. Have you seen him again?”

  “Twice,” she answered, “and I don’t know as I like his looks so much I want to see him any more. Settled down on the stairs one time he did, smoking his pipe, all at home like, as if he meant to stay all night which I wouldn’t have had a wink of sleep, so my old man told him to get and he got. And another chap that looked as if he had only just come out, and only half one ear left. Let on he wanted to buy one of Mr. Jasmine’s pictures which wasn’t no way likely, him not being the sort for pictures, only for beer. Not but that Mr. Jasmine would be glad of the chance with the rentman saying he’ll have to go if he doesn’t pay up arrears by next Monday, and five bob extra for damaging landlord’s property by painting on his door without permission like.”

  “Well, I shouldn’t call it damage,” Bobby remarked, turning to look again at that beautifully painted wreath of jasmine. “What happened to the postcard you spoke of?”

  “I made the chap give it me,” Mrs. Montgomery answered. “I’m keeping it till him it’s for comes back.”

  “That may be a long time,” Bobby said, more to himself than to her, but she gave him a quick and questioning glance, rather as if those few half-heard words responded to some deep, hidden fear in her own mind. “Could I see it?” he asked aloud.

  “I suppose there ain’t no harm in that,” she answered, though somewhat doubtfully, “so long as you don’t aim to take it away. Better come in,” she added. “I put it away that careful like I’m not sure where it is.”

  “Oh, I shan’t want to take it away,” Bobby assured her as he followed her into a poor and sparsely furnished room with permanent drying lines stretched from wall to wall, on them hanging almost equally permanent though ever varying washing to dry or air. It was badly lighted, for the one window had been broken and the glass in the upper half replaced by brown paper. A few toys, mostly broken, were visible. Above the fireplace where stood a small cooking gas-stove, the only visible means of providing warmth in the room, hung a painting. At the sight of it Bobby stood still to stare, for the moment forgetting all else.

  “Our kids,” said Mrs. Montgomery proudly. “Matt and Molly and got them to the life, he has.”

  “Good Lord,” said Bobby under his breath; and in his voice as he spoke there was a touch of wonder or indeed of something more.

  “I like it better than them snaps they take next street,” Mrs. Montgomery told him. “They give you forty for a bob there though.”

  “Very cheap,” Bobby murmured abstractedly.

  He went a little nearer and stood intent. The painting, a small one and done on one of those mahogany slabs Bobby had noticed in Jasmine’s room on the occasion of his previous visit, showed two children, boy and girl, sitting together side by side, the boy, the older of the two, gravely intent on mending a broken doll, and the girl watching with an equal intent and lovely gravity. The background showed a poorly furnished room, a kitchen living-room, obviously that in which Bobby was now standing, the whole bathed in such a light, streaming in through the window, as made Bobby think of that which never was on land or sea. It all reminded him of that picture, entitled ‘The Age of Innocence’, he had seen in another of the London galleries; or indeed of one of Blake’s ‘Songs of Innocence’, translated into terms of form and colour, and of light, the loveliest of all created things.

  But difficult, and indeed perhaps impossible, to convey by the clumsy and wholly inadequate word that strange sense of an almost heart-breaking innocence, of a perfect trust in life before its harsh realities had betrayed. Nor can those who have not seen the painting, where it now hangs, well realize that magic quality in the light which seemed to dwell upon the children as if to shield, to bless, and to protect, and to give to that poor dingy room a glory a palace might not, perhaps could not, possess. Again Bobby drew his breath in wonder and delight and he heard the woman at his side once more say softly:

  “Them’s our kids.”

  “It’s jolly good,” Bobby said, and was at once ashamed he had found no better word.

  “Matty and Molly,” Mrs. Montgomery repeated, “and got ’em to the life, he did, only their father, he says, for making them look like little angels, as they ain’t. Proper young limbs, he says, both of ’em and want the strap reg’lar every night, but never gets down to it. Shows it ’em and tells ’em to come and get what they’ve asked for and they runs up and looks at him and says ‘Yes, Daddy’, and he gives ’em sixpence, only next time, says he, he says, threatening like, and they say ‘Yes, Daddy,’ and run off to buy a toffee apple and not back till long after bedtime.”

  “Are they at school?” Bobby asked.

  “That’s right,” she answered. “Matty been going more’n a year and Molly just started.”

  Bobby turned away from his intent contemplation of the picture. Strange, he thought, that a quest so grim, so doubtful as that he was now engaged on should have led him to such a thing of beauty. A minor masterpiece, he told himself, and was not sure that ‘minor’ was the right word to use.

  “Not long since it was done, is it?” he asked.

  “Oh, it’s quite new,” she assured him. “Only thing is, if you go to a proper photo shop they puts things nice for you to be took against. I said to Mr. Jasmine, I said, ‘Do ’em in the park where it’s pretty like’ and I would make ’em look proper little nobs. But there, he said he would have to charge more if he did. Said it laughing like as though it was something else he meant. Now here’s that card of yours,” she added suddenly, beaming triumph at this final success. “I knew I had put it somewhere, only I couldn’t think where.”

  CHAPTER XXV

  ANCIENT HOUSE SOUGHT

  THE CARD HAD neither signature nor address. It was one of those for which the South Bank Gallery was famous, providing as they did most excellent reproductions of the paintings there exhibited—in this case the famous Turner ‘Alpine Dawn’—all sold to the public at something under the overall cost of production. On the other side was a brief message in a small, crabbed, not very legible hand, running:

  “Waited for you till past eleven last night. Why necessary? Any time to-morrow as suits you.”

  Bobby read this cryptic message over twice and then took out his notebook and copied it therein—a proceeding Mrs. Montgomery watched with some mistrust as though she thought this hardly consonant with Bobby’s promise to return the card. She looked quite relieved when he handed it back to her.

  “Don’t say much, does it?” she remarked as she carefully restored it to its hiding place, a broken teapot on a shelf.

  “Well, not a great deal,” Bobby agreed aloud, but inwardly reflected that it did convey a certain amount of information. For instance, that Jasmine had made an appointment—apparently in urgent terms, or why the word ‘necessary’?—but had not kept it. The card had been posted the day before, so its to-morrow meant to-day. Any time that suited Jasmine was suggested, so the writer must be someone with whose habits Jasmine was well acquainted. The wording did not suggest an educated person but the use of an S.B.G. card did suggest someone connected therewith. The vital questions remained though. Why was the appointment not kept? Why had Jasmine not returned home and where had he spent the night? What was it that made him use the word ‘necessary’? And to Bobby these three questions seemed to carry with them grave implications.

  “You’ll
take care of that card,” he said. “It may help us in finding out where he is.”

  “Seems like as if something’s happened to him,” Mrs. Montgomery agreed. “All them cars and things and you taking your life in your hands every time you cross the road.”

  “Well, I think I had better have another look round his room,” Bobby told her. “His door wasn’t fast when I was here before. I locked it then for him so I suppose I can unlock it now. It’s just possible he may have returned and be there all the time.”

  “Not with all the knocking and banging what’s been going on,” she retorted. “Unless drunk bad,” she added.

  Bobby was already out on the landing. In her capacity as self-appointed guardian of the absent Jasmine’s interests, Mrs. Montgomery followed him. It did not take Bobby long to unlock what he had locked that other day. The room, when he went in, showed no signs of any other intruder having been there. All seemed to be exactly as he had left it, except perhaps for a further thin coating of dust. Now, however, he gave it a more careful and close examination than before, especially to the little pile of sometimes incomplete, sometimes half-daubed-out, paintings in one corner.

  From none of them did he get even a shadow of the response invoked in him by that of the two Montgomery children. But then he had been searching not so much for artistic merit as for anything that might shed light on Jasmine’s life, habits, character. Such signs were there, he felt sure, for it is himself every artist puts and must put into his own work. But these he could not see or, if he did, he failed to recognize them. True, here and there, by fits and starts, were faint suggestions of the insight, skill, imagination, that to his mind the Montgomery picture had shown—whispers, as it were, of the trumpet tones that might one day come. It seemed as if for Jasmine, and for that once only, the curtain that hangs between us and the ultimate reality had been drawn aside and the young artist permitted a single brief glimpse into the eternities.

  But presently Bobby, continuing his search under the watchful and distrustful eyes of Mrs. Montgomery discovered where, in his somewhat hurried search of the day before he had overlooked it, a sketch-book containing many drawings, and these, slight, often incomplete, often no more than a few hurried lines, though they were, yet seemed to him to give a better idea of Jasmine’s powers than did all that small pile of canvases in the corner. In these sketches, in the wreath painted on the door, and in the painting of Mrs. Montgomery’s children, Jasmine had approached the heights, or so Bobby thought.

  Then as he turned over the leaves, admiring here a pair of lifted hands, there a cat—the very essence of smug self-satisfaction—or a pipe leaning against an overturned glass, or two children sharing an ice cream, lick by lick in turn, or a man clinging to his hat in a gust of wind, and so on, he found between the two last pages a small painting in gouache at which he stared for long without quite knowing why.

  At first sight indeed it seemed no more than the representation of an old tumbledown, weatherbeaten building, in a very bad state of repair with ivy climbing up its sides. Passing it, most people, if they had noticed it at all, would merely have wondered why it had not been pulled down, or fallen down, long ago. But to Bobby it seemed, in this drawing of it at least, to be much more than that. Then Mrs. Montgomery, noticing how Bobby stared, came to see what held his attention thus. She looked and looked again and then turned away. She said:

  “There’s that done there as shouldn’t be.”

  Bobby made no reply, but the words expressed exactly what he had so obscurely felt. By what queer magic—or was it insight?—of the painter’s brush had this very ordinary, commonplace, half-ruinous and ancient house been invested with such an aura of ill-doing and foreboding, he did not know, could not guess, or even be sure that any such intention had been present in the artist’s active mind. It might well have sprung from what lay deep in his unconscious; he, it might be, still unaware of it.

  “Oh, well,” Bobby said irritably, irritated as he always felt irritated, and yet challenged, too, by any problem to which, at first sight, there seemed no solution.

  He put the painting back where he had found it, glad in a way to have it out of sight, and turned over to the last page of the sketch-book. On this, and in the same medium, was shown a young man lying on a bier, his hands folded on his breast, tall, lighted candles at the head and at the feet. The likeness was unmistakable. Mrs. Montgomery it was, drawn back by the startled exclamation Bobby had uttered, who voiced it.

  “That’s him,” she said. “It’s him to the life as never was, only it’s him dead, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Bobby agreed.

  “What for?” she asked, bewildered. “Who done him like that? It must be him done it, mustn’t it?”

  “I suppose so,” Bobby answered.

  “Well, then, he’s alive,” she said. “So why’s he made himself dead?”

  “Yes, I know,” Bobby said.

  “It ain’t natural like,” she persisted.

  She had become a little pale and she went back quickly to her rooms leaving Bobby alone, troubled, asking himself if these two paintings stood in any sort of relationship to each other, or to the still, and apparently so destined to remain, unsolved mystery of the disappearance of Mr. Atts, or to the question of what had become of the first South Bank Gallery ‘Girl Peeling Apples’—the one that was certainly hanging there, whether the true original or not, till replaced by the rather obvious copy later on found in its place.

  He got up presently, wrote a note to say briefly that a sketch-book had been removed and was now in the care of Scotland Yard, placed it conspicuously on the table, picked up the sketch-book and left. Across the landing he knocked at Mrs. Montgomery’s door. She opened it immediately and he could see that she was still more than a little shaken.

  “Gave me a turn, so it did,” she said. “It’s not along of his having done himself in, is it?”

  “Dear me no, why should it?” Bobby protested. “Artists are like that. Something comes into their head and they’ve got to draw it to get rid of it.” Mrs. Montgomery looked as if she thought this an inadequate explanation as indeed it was. Bobby went on: “I only wanted to ask you not to say anything about it to any of the other people here and to tell you that a look-out will be kept to make sure, if Jasmine returns, we shall know at once, or if anything else happens. So don’t be uneasy if you see strangers. If anyone you don’t know comes up here ask him where he’s from. If he says from the South Bank Gallery, it’ll be all right. If he says anything else, go down to the front door and just stand there and someone will come along at once.”

  “You’re a copper, aren’t you?” she asked doubtfully. “I though you was a bookie that other time, but Bert held out you was a copper, only not so bossy as some. Bert don’t hold with coppers—took him in twice they have.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” Bobby said. “Not serious, I hope?”

  “Forty bob, or ten days,” she answered. “That’s serious enough, especial when you haven’t got forty bob and he wasn’t drunk either, just lively like, trying to do a dance and song act, only no talent, and not wanting to go away when said to. But there, as I told him, he hadn’t no right to trip the copper up and then try to sit on him to talk it out.”

  “In my view,” said Bobby severely, “he got off very lightly.”

  “The other was all on account of nothing at all,” she went on. “Just a little private turn-up with bare fists as was got up for him and another bloke—a fiver each and twenty more for the winner. Only someone let on and you coppers took all of ’em inside, except them as got away, as Bert didn’t, him being in nothing but shorts.”

  “Against the law,” said Bobby, still more severely. “When it’s bare fists.”

  “Five-pound fine it was that time,” she said, “and us not having it or anything like, I had to pawn my wedding ring to make up.”

  “Hard luck,” Bobby said. “You got it back though, I see.”

  “I made Be
rt cut out his ’baccy and beer till I had,” she explained and then added, in a shy, sly, half-frightened tone, “It was lucky for me Bert never guessed it was me told on ’em, not wanting Bert bashed no more, same as he would have been. You won’t let on, will you?”

  “Good gracious me, no,” Bobby declared, looking, he hoped, suitably shocked by such a suggestion. “You will remember what I said, won’t you? And now I must be off.”

  “Won’t you come in and have a cup of tea first?” she urged, for indeed Bobby had been so long, so intent, upon his examination of Jasmine’s studio and in considering the possible implications of the two gouache paintings he had found there, that luncheon-time had long gone by, unnoticed, unregarded.

  But this invitation, her evident disinclination to see him go and so be left alone, her unusual loquacity, made Bobby realize how frightened she had been by those two drawings coming on the top of Jasmine’s prolonged absence. Well, it was an uneasiness he himself was much inclined to share though for different reasons. No more than she, though, did he like that macabre study by Jasmine himself of himself in death. A few moments more Bobby spent in an attempt to re-assure her and to remind her that help would always be at hand, though it was certainly not likely to be needed, and so departed, the sketch-book under his arm.

  CHAPTER XXVI

  SINGLE COMBAT

  BUT THROUGH THE haze of thoughts and of forebodings that still obsessed him as he descended the stairs, Bobby became aware that something unusual was happening. Near, a door opened and a woman came out and stood still, looking at him suspiciously. Below, in the entrance passage, he could see through the open front door, children running, some in one direction, some in the other, some standing still, as if not sure which way to run or whether just to wait and see. A woman rushed out of another room and, halting on the doorstep, began to scream. From the street came a confused babel of shouts and cries. A cry of ‘murder’ became audible and was taken up. Bobby ran forward, past the screaming woman. A few yards distant he saw a struggling group—three men attacking one who was trying to defend himself but now near collapsing under a hail of kicks and blows. A final blow from a cosh sent him to the ground just as Bobby appeared.