Triple Quest: A Bobby Owen Mystery

by E. R. Punshon

  They left the room together, neither Bobby nor the inspector tried to stop them. As they went, upon the old man the whole weight of his years seemed suddenly to have fallen.

  “That’s the sort of divine fool women sometimes are,” grumbled Bobby. “Ready to sacrifice her own happiness to save her grandparents.” He turned to Frank and said: “Perhaps she hoped you could love her enough—but that’s your affair.”

  Frank picked up the engagement ring. “I’ll buy another twice as good, if I go bust on it,” he said. “But how could you tell?”

  “Plain Miss Jenny was lying as hard as she knew how,” Bobby answered. “Why? To shelter someone else? Who? Her grandfather? Then she picked up those three sovereigns and put them in the coffin because she said he had earned them. What did that mean? When she said they had gone up a penny in value, Mr. Jerome said that made the total value—” He mentioned again the sum £1,467 17s 6d—and went on: “If you had that much you would never have to ask for public assistance. That amount is the value of seven hundred and thirty-seven sovereigns at today’s rate. When I heard about George’s generosity, that clinched it. The flowers and the fruit and all the attention to the old lady were just soothing syrup for his conscience. Must have been going on for years, little by little, and when the old man found out it was too much for him.”

  “It sounds simple the way you put it,” Frank said. “What will happen?”

  There was concern in his eyes.

  “I don’t think Mr. Jerome will ever come to trial,” Bobby said, “if that’s what you mean. I don’t think he will live long now his wife is dying and it’s all known.”

  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

  Six Were Present

  “You’re the murder man, aren’t you?” Mrs. James demanded.

  “Well, that’s not exactly how I describe myself,” Bobby answered.

  Bobby Owen and his wife Olive are on holiday, enjoying a motor tour of England, when they visit Bobby’s old ancestral home and his cousin Myra. An eerie air hangs over the household, where Teddy Peel, a psychic medium of dubious repute, has become a fixture. Myra’s husband himself is a specialist in African folklore, the owner of a genuine witch doctor’s bag. What’s inside the bag, and how that connects to the promise of riches, whispered threats and very real murder, forms another absorbing puzzler for Bobby.

  Six Were Present (1956) is the thirty-fifth and final novel in the Bobby Owen Mystery series, here presented with a new introduction and additional notes. This new edition also features the script of the rare radio play Death on the Up-Lift (1941), starring Bobby Owen, here published for the first time.

  “What is distinction? … in the works of Mr. E.R. Punshon we salute it every time.” DOROTHY L. SAYERS

  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, permanently 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 h
olidays,” 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 looks, 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?”

  Published by Dean Street Press 2017

  Copyright © 1955 E.R. Punshon

  Introduction Copyright © 2017 Curtis Evans

  All Rights Reserved

  This ebook is published by licence, issued under the UK Orphan Works Licensing Scheme.

  First published in 1955 by Victor Gollancz

  Cover by DSP

  ISBN 978 1 911579 12 0

  www.deanstreetpress.co.uk

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