“Jealousy. Being jealous of some one he called Joey. And then, by way of piling it on, he said Dad had murdered Joey, too. But if Dad would put down a thousand quid, then, he would keep quiet. If not, then he would go straight to Scotland Yard. I can’t imagine why Dad listened for so long. I suppose he wanted to see what was coming next.”
“Possibly,” Bobby agreed. “Was your name mentioned or that of your brother, Leofric?”
“There was something,” Gurth admitted reluctantly. “I couldn’t get it exactly. I think it was something about it being through us two that the chap said he had got on to Dad’s being in it. I can’t be sure. It was like listening to a madman.”
“Colonel Godwinsson didn’t say anything?”
“He just sat there, listening—at least, he did till the chap brought that out about the thousand quid to keep quiet.”
“What did he say then?”
“He asked the chap if he was serious, and anyhow he was taking a big risk, wasn’t he? Talking that way to a man he thought was a double murderer, and why shouldn’t a double murderer be a triple murderer, too? So now he was going to wring the chap’s neck and bury his body down in one of the cellars out of the way where no one would ever look for it. Of course, he was only meaning to give the chap the scare of his life.”
“Yes,” said Bobby. “Go on.”
“I had to laugh,” Gurth repeated. “It was funny to see the chap’s face. It was rather silly of Dad, though. It wasn’t safe with a scoundrel like that. You see, he thought Dad meant it.”
“Yes,” said Bobby again. “Go on.”
“I saw the chap bring out a knife, and Dad jumped up. I tried to get out then, but I couldn’t. The door was locked. I didn’t see it all, because I was trying to get the door open and it wouldn’t, and then those books fell over and blocked it so I couldn’t any more. Look at my hands. Can you see them? They are bleeding a bit still where I banged at the door. It was no good. I couldn’t do a thing. I just had to watch. I saw Dad had hold of the chap, and I saw his knife go in and out and Dad fell across the writing-table.”
“There is blood on it,” Bobby said. “A little. Not much.”
“I couldn’t see the rest,” Gurth went on. “I told you. I couldn’t do anything at all. I had to watch my father being killed and there was nothing I could do. My God! What made him lock the door so I couldn’t get out to help him?”
“I think that was why,” Bobby said. “I think he wished you to know, but not to be able to interfere.”
“You aren’t going to pretend,” Gurth said, “you aren’t going to pretend you think there could be even a word of truth in all that mad, fantastic tale?”
“Sometimes,” Bobby said, “the truth is both mad and fantastic, too.”
CHAPTER XXXVI
CONCLUSION
While Bobby had been talking to the imprisoned Gurth, various sounds had proclaimed the arrival in full measure of the help that had been sent for. Now the door of the library opened and there came in two people. One was a locksmith, who set to work at once on the door of Gurth’s prison. The other was a nurse, who seemed a little excited.
“It’s Colonel Godwinsson,” she said. “We thought he was dead, but now he isn’t, and he says he must see you at once—I mean, you are Mr Owen, the police gentleman, aren’t you?” Bobby said he was, and hurried upstairs. On the landing he was met by the doctor, looking almost as flushed and excited as the nurse.
He was dead, he said angrily, for he was a man of science, and resented it bitterly when the established and accepted dogmas of science seemed flouted by mere brute fact. “I’ll swear he was. Every sign of it. And now he’s sitting up. Giving orders. Told me to go. As if he had the right. Absurd.” He paused and gave what was meant for a contemptuous laugh, but Bobby noticed that all the same he had obeyed. “Something he wants to say to you.”
Bobby went into the room. The nurse and the doctor followed, the doctor still muttering crossly that when a man died he was dead and ought to stay so. Mrs Godwinsson had been taken to another room. Colonel Godwinsson was sitting upright in bed. He was most strangely pale, but his eyes blazed with such an inner light as Bobby had never seen before. He had always had an impressive air, a kind of poise and absolute assurance that had made him seem almost majestical in this our present world of tumult and confusion. And now there was about him, too, a hint of something far off and remote, as if he had returned from some distant land with new authority. His voice was strong and clear as he said to Bobby: “You have arrested a man. You are to understand that he is innocent. What he did, I did through him. He had a knife in his hand, and I forced him to use it against me.”
“Everything you say will be put in evidence,” Bobby told him. “How exactly did it happen?”
“It was his hand and his knife,” the colonel repeated, “but my action and my will. While we talked, I was willing him to kill me. It had become necessary. None of the House of Godwinsson has ever committed suicide, and I could not be the first. We die fighting. But it was necessary for me to die, for I could see that you had guessed the truth, and I knew that you were sure to drag it out, sooner or later. But though he felt my will, he was afraid. A man willing to kill, but only in the dark; ready to stab, but only in the back. At last I had to use threats. I had to use force to make him use his knife.”
“If there is time,” Bobby said, “I will put what you say in writing for you to sign.” He had his note-book out and was taking the colonel’s words down in shorthand, though indeed his stenography was more than a little rusty. He said: “Luckily there are witnesses.” He turned to the doctor and nurse standing near. “Please listen very carefully,” he said, “and try to remember the exact words. It may be very important.” He turned back to the colonel. “Colonel Godwinsson,” he said, “I think you know you are a dying man.”
“I have died already,” the colonel answered in the same strong, resonant voice so that every syllable was clear, spoken with emphasis and decision. “Ask the doctor. He knows. But I came back because there were things I had to say.”
The doctor looked more angry than ever, and was evidently about to utter a protest, but hesitated, not quite knowing how to phrase it. Bobby motioned to him to be silent and said: “Tell me this, for there is justice to be done—justice to a child. Why did you kill your eldest son, Harold Godwinsson?”
“You knew that?” the colonel asked. “You knew it was my son I killed? How did you know?”
“When he was dying, his last words were ‘Don’t do that, Dad’,” Bobby answered. “Strange words, I remembered them. I wondered what they meant. I began presently to think I knew.”
“I thought there must be something like that,” the colonel said slowly. “Ever since I saw his photograph lying on the hall porter’s desk at the club. I knew it was a sign.” He paused and said more slowly still: “Till that moment I thought it would all remain hidden and none would ever know how the House of Godwinsson had ended. But when I saw that photograph lying there—the photograph of my eldest son whom I had killed—then I knew my deed pursued me and that some day all the story would be told.” He smiled faintly, indulgently, as if at some hopeless, rather pathetic childish effort he only dimly remembered. “I tried to put you off by showing you an old photograph of myself as his. I hoped it would make you suppose Harold was like the rest of the men of our family—tall and fair, ‘goodly in form and face’, as the old chronicle says of us. But Harold took after his mother’s side. He was like her father, very like. Not like me, no trace of Godwinsson in him. In body or in mind. His mother went off with him to America. That was how it began.”
Bobby wondered if rather it had not begun with the old man’s almost insane family pride, that was apparently the chief cause of his first wife’s leaving him. But that was immaterial. He remarked instead:
“It was that photograph convinced me when you showed it me. It was clearly of a much earlier date than you said. It ought to have been taken somewhere
about the nineteen twenties if it had been of your son, Harold. It showed a group of young men. They nearly all had on straw boaters, and none of them were wearing Oxford bags as they used to be called. Several had small union jacks in their button-holes or portraits of popular generals. But in the twenties boaters were out of fashion, and so was patriotism. No self-respecting young man at that time would have dreamed of sporting a union jack. Moustaches, too. I looked up a volume of Punch while the Boer War was on. The whole set-up of that photograph was there, just as it was entirely different from the set-up twenty years later. And again you told me Harold had never been in this country owing to a clause in his mother’s will. But that photograph’s background showed this house, so either he had been here, or else the photograph was of some one else. If so, then clearly you wanted me to believe that he was tall and fair and handsome like your other sons, and that made it equally clear he was none of those things. The man known as Joey Parsons was none of them either, so was he perhaps Harold Godwinsson? Why did you kill him?”
“His identity, yes,” Colonel Godwinsson said. “You reasoned that out well enough. But why should you think I killed him? Why shouldn’t it have been one of his associates?”
“Why should you try to hide the killer of your son unless you were that killer yourself?” Bobby retorted. “None of his associates had any motive, but in your library there was a treatise on the ‘patria potestas’ as the old Romans used to call it. And that treatise had been read. I remembered your claim to ancient and royal descent. If Harold Godwinsson, your eldest son, had become a common criminal—for he was, I think, the head and chief of the gang who got hold of the Wharton jewels I think you found at Angel Alley where Cy King looked for them too late, and that then you returned. And if he had made himself known to his younger brother, Leofric, and was trying to entice him to become an active member of the gang; if you knew he had already succeeded in enlisting your ward, Lady Geraldine; if you knew that he had murdered her—did you?”
“He told me he had, he boasted of it,” the colonel answered. “He said she had become a nuisance. She was trying to make him marry her, and he said he couldn’t. He didn’t say why. Only that it was impossible. But she was threatening that unless he did, and unless he cut loose from his gang and went abroad with her, she would tell the police. He laughed about it. He said she was weakening, her conscience was troubling her. But it meant he had to get rid of her. He boasted of what he had been doing. He had a plan of your flat, he said, and he was going to burgle it, just to show his friends you were nothing to be afraid of. He said he had worked for the Gestapo. He said he was going to get hold of Leofric in spite of all Mona Leigh could do. He said he would very likely have to get rid of her, too, if she went on meddling. He had let her off once, but never again. He had been a fool to do it that once.”
“He told you Miss Leigh was working to save Leofric from him?” Bobby asked.
“That’s what he said. Apparently she knew Leofric was going to meet him at Angel Alley. Leofric told her something, and she guessed the rest, and that it had to do with the Wharton jewels. It was at the room at Angel Alley where I found them in an old tin box. She is in love with Leofric, I think. I don’t know about him. You can ask her. She is coming here to-day. Her uncle rang up to say so. He is bringing her. They want to see me. They’ll be too late.”
This, Bobby supposed, cleared up the story Stokes had told, and the apparent confirmation it had received when Mona’s hotel stated that a car had called for her and she had left in it. Evidently the car had been that of her uncle and solicitor. Bobby said:
“Harold admitted he worked in France for the Germans?”
“You hadn’t known that?”
“It seemed likely,” Bobby answered. “No proof, though. But the details sent you of his supposed execution were so detailed, so thorough, so carefully official, that they had either to be true—or else faked by the German authorities themselves. All strictly official on the highest plane and backed up by private letters from an old friend. But if Joey Parsons were in fact Harold Godwinsson, then all that was official faking and could only be because the Germans meant to make use of him. I expect when they arrested him they gave him the choice of being shot out of hand as a spy or of working for them. Very likely talked him into believing it didn’t mean more than making himself useful in establishing good relations with us when England surrendered. Only England didn’t surrender, and once they had him compromised, the rest was easy.”
“The rest was easy,” Colonel Godwinsson repeated. “Yes, perhaps it was. There was the boys’ club, too. Harold boasted that that was where he picked up his best recruits. He kept on laughing and saying he was telling me all about it because there was nothing I could do without bringing everlasting shame on the House of Godwinsson. So I shot him. It was a surprise to us both,” he added simply.
“As soon as I can get this written out,” Bobby said, looking at the shorthand notes he had taken and hoping they would prove readable, “I will get you to sign it.”
“Yes. What was that you said about a child?” the colonel asked suddenly. “Harold wasn’t married.”
“There’s a wife and two children—boy and girl. All perfectly legal and in order, as far as I know. On one side of him, your son seems to have been a good husband and father, fond of his family and his home. Perhaps in time he would have settled down with them. It’s possible. Hostages given it may be, not only to fortune, but to Heaven, too.”
“Who is she—the wife, I mean? You said there was a boy? The estates are entailed on male issue.”
“The eldest child is a boy,” Bobby answered. “I think your son met her when she was a waitress in a cafe at Southend. A working-class family. Good stock. Parents dead, I understand; but she has one brother, a foreman road-cleaner for the borough council and a sergeant in the Tower Hamlets during the war. Fine record. Means he is both capable and responsible.”
“The child will be heir, then,” the colonel said. “Don’t let him grow up in dreams and die in truth—like me.”
He closed his eyes, sighed heavily, and lay back. The doctor bent over him. He said:
“He is dead; but, then, so he was before.”
“I don’t think he will return a second time,” Bobby said.
“But what,” asked Olive, looking very puzzled, after Bobby had finished telling her on his return home how these things had fallen out—“what is going to happen now?”
It was Bobby’s turn to look puzzled.
“As far as I can see,” he said presently, “nothing very much. So far as the public and the records are concerned, the two murders will have to be regarded as unsolved. Colonel Godwinsson can’t be tried for killing his son, because he is dead. And his son can’t be tried for murdering Lady Geraldine, because he is dead, too. I imagine the verdict at the adjourned inquests will be murder with insufficient evidence to say by whom. Mona Leigh will get her Leofric, and very likely she’ll make a man of him. If she had been more frank with us, it would have saved a lot. But she wasn’t going to say anything to get her man into trouble. Probably she never knew for certain how far he was involved in the Wharton jewel robbery. Not very deeply, I think, or Harold Godwinsson wouldn’t have been trying to get him into the job of disposing of the loot. It’s pretty clear that’s why Leofric was hanging about the Angel Alley area. For that matter, Harold hinted as much to their father. It will be an equal shock to Harold’s widow to learn the truth about her husband and to know that her son is heir to probably the oldest family name in England—not to mention substantial landed estates. I expect the child will be made a ward in Chancery. I don’t know. Possibly with the two uncles, Gurth Godwinsson and the foreman road-sweeper, as joint guardians. There may be a try on to squeeze the road-sweeper uncle out, but if he has any sense—and I think he has lots—he won’t stand for that. He has both the right and the duty to look after his sister and the two kids. I must have a talk with Eddy Heron. We owe him something, both for t
he information he gave and for his not having waited where Cy King told him to. Even if he did get it all wrong about Mona Leigh. If he hadn’t cleared off with the car, Cy would have got away again. Quite possibly Eddy will turn over a new leaf. The smacking our chaps gave him, quite indefensibly, seems to have impressed him a lot, taught him that even cops can be human. He has earned his chance, and he shall have it. Odd if he turns into a cop himself. He is due for the Army soon, and if he comes out with a good record, and if the Army has bucked up his physique, as it does sometimes, we might take him on. Cy King will get off much too easily. We can have him for resisting arrest, for attempted blackmail, conspiracy perhaps. You can often work that in. But nothing that will get him anything like the term he deserves—which ought to be life and a bit over. At least,” Bobby added, but without hope, “unless the Public Prosecutor boys can think up something else. Not likely. That outfit can only think up things to show there isn’t sufficient evidence to convict any one of anything.”
THE END
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
The House of Godwinsson: A Bobby Owen Mystery Page 24