Triple Quest: A Bobby Owen Mystery

by E. R. Punshon

  “Stop that, stop it,” he shouted, and ran towards them.

  “Busies,” one man yelled and turned and fled.

  “Out him,” screamed the one with the cosh and rushed at Bobby, cosh uplifted.

  The third stood still, plainly hesitating whether to join the one in flight or the other in fight. He compromised by aiming a vicious kick or two at their victim lying bleeding and three-parts unconscious on the ground, and then pausing again to see how the assault on Bobby was progressing.

  Not very well. Aware and heedful of that brandished cosh, Bobby had not waited attack—that would have been fatal. Instead he had himself dashed forward to meet his opponent, closing, thus allowing the other no room to swing his weapon, but himself hitting hard and fast with both hands, letting the sketch-book fall unheeded to the ground. Under that hail of blows, thus robbed of the initiative, Bobby’s assailant gave way, seeking space to use his cosh effectively. Bobby followed, allowing him no respite, scoring with every blow. It was almost like hitting a brick wall. He was a youngish man, in his twenties, with projecting heavy brows that served to protect his eyes, an enormous jaw, a general overall likeness to a gorilla, and apparently an infinite capacity for taking punishment. But he was slow in movement, hampered by his efforts to get space to use his cosh, and moreover plainly bewildered by the speed, the fury, the accuracy of Bobby’s counter-attack before which he constantly retreated towards the quickly gathered, gaping crowd which always prudently drew away to allow him room.

  For a moment the fierceness of Bobby’s attack slackened, allowing his opponent a passing respite. He availed himself of it to step still further back, gaining space to swing his cosh aloft. For less than a fraction of a second he poised thus, and had he seized that fleeting opportunity he might well have delivered such a blow as could have ended it all then and there—and Bobby’s life as well perhaps. Instead he flung the cosh at Bobby who had to dodge to avoid it, and then dashed into the thickest of the crowd. It opened to let him pass for indeed none cared to try to stop him, so wild and dangerous he looked, with blood streaming down his face and froth gathering on his lips. And meanwhile, the third of the gang, seeing Bobby momentarily unbalanced and unaware, made a sudden rush at him, dealt him a heavy blow just below his right eye that sent him reeling and staggering against a lamp post, and then was off like a hare pursued by greyhounds.

  As often happens after brief, violent, unexpected action, now there was complete immobility, absolute silence, as though none could believe it would not start again immediately, as though each held his breath in expectation of what was to happen next.

  Through it came the warning hoot of a car arriving at speed. It swung round the corner and halted. A police car. Somebody must have dialled 999. A Sergeant and a constable jumped out. To the constable the Sergeant said, pointing at the same time to the prostrate and now wholly unconscious victim of the gangster attack:

  “See to him.” To the driver, he said: “Ambulance call—urgent.” To Bobby, still a little dazed from the impact of that sudden unexpected blow, still clinging to the lamp post that alone had saved him from falling, he said: “Now then, what’s all this?” Then with an abrupt change of tone, “Why, it’s Mr. Owen, sir.”

  “So it is,” agreed Bobby, though not at the moment too sure of that or of anything else. Cautiously he detached himself from the lamp post and found terra firma much more so than he had supposed. He felt a salt taste in his mouth and became aware of a trickle of blood down his cheek from a cut under his right eye. He said ruefully: “It’s swelling already, it’ll be a sight to-morrow, and shan’t I hear about it when I get home? Not my fault either. Three of them beating up that chap and I wonder why.” He moved across to where the constable was doing what he could for the still unconscious victim. Bobby exclaimed aloud: “Why, it’s Manley.”

  “You know him, sir?” the Sergeant asked.

  “Porter at the Crescent Court flats,” Bobby said. “Where Mr. Atts used to live before he went missing. What was he doing here? Eh? And why . . . eh? . . . why? . . . why? . . . and now Jasmine as well? . . . Jasmine, too . . . painting himself dead.”

  “Sir?” said the Sergeant, completely puzzled by this example of what it is now fashionable—and impressive—to call the stream of consciousness though this time an unenlightened Sergeant merely concluded that Bobby was still suffering—and badly—from the effects of the blow he had received.

  The arrival of an ambulance prevented any explanation; and only after the unfortunate Manley had been deposited therein, after Bobby himself had submitted reluctantly to the treatment of his bruised eye by the first aid constable delighted to get such a chance to show off his skill on the person of a ‘High Up’, did Bobby remember abruptly something he should have thought of long before—the Jasmine sketch-book. To the still lingering crowd of bystanders he said:

  “Anyone seen a sketch-book—like an outsize exercise book with drawings inside? I must have dropped it when the fellow with the cosh went for me.”

  No one answered. They had all been far too absorbed to notice anything so trivial as the dropping of a book. Then a small boy piped up:

  “I saw a bloke pick something up. I don’t know what it was. My, mister, that was better’n the pictures.”

  “Think it was all for your special benefit I suppose,” growled Bobby. “Here’s sixpence for you for having sharp eyes and now, tell me—what was this man like?”

  But on that, the boy had not much information to give. His attention had been far too concentrated on the fighting for him to have much more than a hazy, dim impression, from the corner of his eye so to say, of a small figure darting in and out. One or two of the bystanders now came forward to say they, too, had noticed the incident. The first of these confirmed the impression of a small quick man, others spoke of him as tall and heavily built, while yet another description was ‘in between like’. An ample choice, it seemed.

  “We shan’t get much out of any of this lot,” Bobby said gloomily. “The thing’s probably gone for good. All present having a good time watching the scrap and never thinking of helping.”

  “Yes, sir, free entertainment, sir,” agreed the Sergeant. “Some chap thinking it might be worthwhile seeing what was in it. Picker-up of unconsidered trifles,” he added, remembering school and boring days spent with Shakespeare. “What about the men who attacked you, sir? Know any of them?”

  “No,” Bobby answered, “though I’ve an idea they knew me. I can’t even give you any description worth anything. I only saw the back of one of them as he made off. I was much too busy with No. 3 to pay any attention to No. 2 till he caught me off guard. All I can say about No. 3 is that he looked a tough customer and felt like a brick wall.”

  However, this rather vague description he now proceeded to amplify by various small details. The Sergeant listened carefully and then said:

  “Sounds, at a guess, like Irish Joe—Joseph O’Connor when he’s charged. Robbery with violence but always has a first-class watertight alibi. Same this time most likely. Always ready to take a beating-up job.”

  “I wish you could bring him in,” Bobby said wistfully. “I should like to see how his face looks.” He looked at his own knuckles, sore and bleeding. “Worse than mine, I hope. Never mind, I can make a guess at the fellow who went off with the sketch-book—Duke Groan as they call him.”

  “What about bringing him in?” asked the Sergeant who had small love or respect for ‘private eyes’. “Could charge him with theft?”

  “No evidence,” Bobby said, shaking his head. “And the sketch-book safely tucked away out of our reach by now. No. Bad luck, I couldn’t hold on to it with that fellow going for me with his cosh. I would give a lot to get it back. It may hold the key to all that’s been happening. If it’s Groan got hold of it that may explain Manley’s being here. They had a bad quarrel the other day, I know, and perhaps there was more to it than they told me. They may have come together again by now. I’ve always suspect
ed Groan of knowing more than he tells.”

  “Do you think it’s them two put Mr. Atts away?” the Sergeant asked.

  CHAPTER XXVII

  £3,000 REWARD

  THIS, HOWEVER, WAS a question to which Bobby knew no reply. That evening therefore, safe at home, his rapidly swelling eye having received adequate domestic treatment, and an equally adequate domestic opinion having been expressed concerning his apparent inability to keep out of trouble, Bobby spent two or three frustrated hours trying to reproduce from memory that painting of an old, desolate, half ruinous house which had made so strange an impact on his imagination.

  Indeed he had half filled a wastepaper basket with discarded efforts before he threw into it his latest effort to join the others there and exclaimed aloud:

  “It’s no use, can’t be done.”

  “Well, then, why go on trying?” his wife inquired, very sensibly.

  “My dear Olive,” Bobby retorted, “there’s a lot of fun to be had trying to do what you can’t do.”

  “I don’t notice it shopping,” Olive retorted in her turn, “when I’m trying to make the housekeeping money do what half of it used to.”

  But Bobby, unwilling to be drawn into a discussion of the higher mysteries of life, only grunted in reply, and then said:

  “You see, the devil of it is that I’m jolly sure Groan is sitting somewhere snug and safe with the real thing to work on. And if he does get results, goodness knows what use he’ll make of them. Mess it all up perhaps—or worse.”

  “I don’t see why just looking at the sketch-book should make all that difference,” Olive remarked. “What can a painting of an old house tell you to help? You don’t think Mr. Atts is living there in hiding, do you?”

  “You haven’t seen it,” Bobby reminded her. “It cried out in every line and curve that secret things and evil were within. I don’t know how Jasmine managed to put all that into a few strokes of the brush, a few dabs of colour. And I’m sure it was meant to lead up to that thing he did of himself lying dead I told you about.”

  “Ugh,” said Olive with a slight shudder, and Bobby continued:

  “I meant to have it reproduced—the house I mean—and circulated, on the chance that some of our chaps might recognize it. I want very much to know who lives there—if anyone does. It may be only a sort of rendezvous. If it is, then I want to know who uses it. Probably Monkey Baron and his pals—including Irish Joe. There’s a bare thread of connection leading through them from Jasmine to a man called Hyams, one of the attendants at the S.B.G.”

  “I do hate initials,” Olive interposed, and asked him to pass the scissors lying near him on the table.

  “—and to the ‘Girl Peeling Apples’ there, which has gone missing, too, whether original or copy,” Bobby went on, picking up the scissors but holding them thoughtfully in his hand till Olive leaned over and took them from him, murmuring ‘Bless the man’. Looking a little surprised at this, Bobby continued: “Jasmine took drugs—I’m sure of that—and the Sergeant told me Irish Joe is mixed up in that racket, though he never delivers the stuff. Kind of a cat’s cradle of clues but where’s the knot to unravel the thing?”

  “I don’t know,” Olive said as the question seemed addressed to her and an answer expected, “but I do know it’s nearly bedtime.”

  But this was a suggestion that passed unheeded, for Bobby was already at work on a new attempt with which this time he was a little better satisfied. Not at all a bad copy he thought, considering it was done from memory, though for the life of him he could not recollect how many there were, or how arranged, of those chimney-pots which in the original had seemed to sneer their iniquity at the heavens above. Nor was he sure whether the front door was on street level or whether it was approached by stone steps, even though he did feel that on these details depended much of the hidden warning the thing had seemed to convey.

  However, he felt it was the best attempt he was likely to produce. Next day accordingly he made arrangements for copies of it to be shown when ready in all London police stations, in the hope that it might be recognized and its location established. But when it was suggested, as it quickly was, that all this was of very doubtful utility and that the house he sought—in which no one else saw anything odd—might well have no existence in time and space, he could not but agree.

  “I feel pretty sure it’s real enough,” he told Olive that evening, and then added slowly: “and bad enough.”

  One result it had, however, and that came a day or two later in the shape of a phone call from busy Mr. Groan to say he had heard a photograph of an old, half ruinous house was being shown in the London police stations in the hope that it might be recognized and its location established.

  Could he, asked Mr. Groan, in a voice so full of humility as to be a measure of the complacence he felt, be allowed to have a copy? He might, he suggested, be able to help. He had so many contacts. One never knew.

  Bobby, half amused, half annoyed, replied that indeed one never knew, and he would see about it. Then he sent for Sergeant Ford.

  “It’s like Groan’s impudence,” he said when Ford appeared and had been informed of this request. “One never knows indeed. I jolly well know he’s got the sketch-book himself, probably on his desk at this moment, and we’ve as much chance of getting hold of it as if it were at the North Pole. What he really wants is to see how good a copy I’ve made. All the same I think we must play along with him for the time being. He has the edge on us all the way. If he can recover the lost picture he’ll pouch the reward and be featured in all the papers—probably get on television as well.”

  “O-oo-ooo,” said Ford.

  “Yes, I know,” agreed Bobby. “After that they would probably make him Commissioner as well. And if he fails no one will ever know anything about it. But we’re responsible, our job is to succeed. And then he can concentrate on the painting. But we must put Atts first and what has happened to him.”

  “And Jasmine, sir?” Ford asked.

  “And Jasmine,” repeated Bobby. “I think I’ll get you to take Groan one of our copies and see if you can get anything out of him. Ask him about Manley, too, and let him understand he was seen while the scrap was going on. He’ll deny it, of course, and we can’t prove it. Not much good if we could anyhow. But tell him Manley will be interrogated as soon as the Hospital says he’s up to it.”

  “What about putting a tail on Groan?” Ford suggested, but Bobby shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “Groan would know at once and it’s easy enough to drop a tail when you want to—if you know the ropes. Groan does, no one better. No, what I thought of was putting a tail on me.”

  “Sir,” exclaimed Ford, startled, for though he was fairly well used to Bobby’s highly individual and often unconventional methods who had ever heard before of a senior officer having himself tailed by his own men?

  “Because,” Bobby went on to explain, “I feel pretty sure Groan will want to know what I’m doing and if I’m working on the same lines as he is. So our chap’s job will be to see if I am being followed or not, and, if so, if it’s Groan or Monkey Baron and his pals. They must know something—something about Jasmine, too, or why was Monkey Baron seen twice over by Mrs. Montgomery? Monkey will have to be watched, I’ll pay him a visit myself soon.”

  “What about picking up Irish Joe?” Ford asked. “We could charge him. Of course, he would have an alibi—watertight support.”

  “His face wouldn’t support it,” Bobby remarked, with a touch in his own voice of that complacence he had detected in Mr. Groan’s. “He’ll have gone into hiding till it’s more like itself again. It’s Monkey Baron who’s running that little sideshow—if it is one.”

  “I’ve been having a shot at trying to work it out for myself,” Ford said rather hesitatingly. “Good man,” interposed Bobby; and, thus encouraged, Ford went on: “What I thought, sir, was that it might be him and Irish Joe and their pals got away with the lost picture, being put up to it
by Mr. Atts, and then wouldn’t turn it over to him and—well, went a bit further than intended if he cut up rough.”

  “It’s quite possible,” Bobby agreed thoughtfully. “Yes, it’s an idea worth keeping in mind. But no direct evidence as yet. No direct evidence against anyone as yet for that matter, though bits and pieces do keep coming in. There’s a report this morning that Bardolph was in possession of a revolver. No certificate apparently but he made no secret of it.”

  “If we could only find Atts’s body somewhere with a bullet in it we could match ’em,” Ford exclaimed, and then: “Too much to hope for.”

  “Oh, we can always hope,” Bobby said; and Ford looked up sharply, for he felt Bobby had touched the word ‘Hope’ with an emphasis not to him quite clear. “Mrs. Bardolph is still somewhere on the Continent,” Bobby continued. “Is that because she knows too much and to keep her out of the way of questioning? We’ve nothing like a strong enough case to do anything about it. Then there’s that postcard Mrs. Montgomery let me see. It’s an S.B.G. card. They are on sale to visitors of course, but to my mind it does rather suggest that the writer may be one of the staff there. I must ask Sir Walter for permission to make inquiries. If we can find the writer it should be important—it’s the last known link with Jasmine and might give a lead. But there again we’re up against it. No official knowledge that he’s missing, no complaint made. For all we know he may be sketching happily away in Cornwall or somewhere.”

  Ford said he supposed that was so, though it didn’t look like it, but then you never knew with artists, they being a queer lot and not running true to form like ordinary criminals, and so departed for his interview with Mr. Groan. Nor was it long before Bobby departed for the S.B.G.; on his way noticing the placard of an evening paper, announcing in the scrawled lettering of a street vendor: ‘Lost masterpiece. Enormous reward for recovery’.