Night's Cloak: A Bobby Owen Mystery

by E. R. Punshon

  “I suppose it all means everything is over between Martin and Olga,” Olive said sadly. “I’m so sorry. Can he get a divorce? I suppose it was because of their being married, and his trying to use it to blackmail Martin into doing what he wanted, that Mr Weston brought you into it?”

  “Probably,” Bobby growled, still sore, still unforgiving. “Bluffed Bessie I was there to take her into custody if he said so, and she knew what that meant to the dying man she loved. I don’t suppose she knew bigamists aren't arrested offhand like that. She was scared all right. And Martin Wynne was in a nasty spot. No wonder he was so excited and upset. Unless he gave way, the whole story would come out, and the woman who was legally his wife, whom he still felt in a way bound to protect, whom he had taken ‘for better or worse’, to whom he was still handing over a good part of his earnings, would have to face prosecution, and perhaps a term in gaol. She was still his wife, and he didn’t like the idea of being called on to appear as chief witness for the prosecution. That’s what he and Olga were talking about half the night through in the summer-house. But I’m afraid it’s bound to happen now.”

  “You don’t mean Bessie will have to be brought up for bigamy, do you?” Olive asked, dismayed.

  “I don’t quite see how it can be helped,” Bobby answered. “Can’t suppress facts. There it is. Plain case of bigamy.”

  Olive looked very worried, and said it was a shame. Bobby patted her on the head—a gesture which always annoyed her, it seemed so patronizing, and if he did happen to be a few inches the taller, no need to show off—and said that that was that—meaning bigamy—and she asked him what was the good of being practically Chief Constable if he couldn’t arrange a little thing like that, and wasn’t he sorry for Bessie? So he said he was, but that made no difference, and if he was practically a Chief Constable, he only got an inspector’s salary, so now he was going to snatch an hour’s sleep before going on to headquarters. If Olive, in the meantime, could think of any way of bilking the bigamy laws, she was to let him know and he would be all for it.

  Olive said thoughtfully that never before had she realized how absolutely Brutal and Unfeeling men could be, and it would be a most awful shame if Olga and Martin could only be married at the expense of sending Bessie to gaol, and she had never heard of anything quite so heartless, and anyhow—this with satisfaction—he couldn’t have his nap now, because here were Martin and Olga themselves, coming up the garden path, evidently to have a talk, and if he, Bobby, failed to find with them some way of what he so coarsely called ‘bilking the bigamy laws’, then he wasn’t the man she thought.

  Bobby promised to do his best, admitted the newcomers, and listened gravely to Martin’s stammering confession of how he had married Bessie when he was an undergraduate at Oxford and she a barmaid at a small inn not far from the city.

  “I thought you most likely knew all about it by now,” Martin explained, “so we made up our minds I had better come along and make a clean breast of it.”

  Bobby agreed gravely that when people reached the conclusion mentioned they often came to a similar decision.

  “It didn’t take us long,” Martin continued, “to find out we had made fools of ourselves, but there we were—tied up and no way out. Uncle Weston got to know, and tried to put the screw on. I expect it was Wilkie told him. Wilkie was up at the time, and I always had an idea he knew about me and Bessie.”

  “It always seemed likely there was something of the kind,” Bobby remarked, “but I can’t understand why we failed to find any trace of your marriage. We made a pretty thorough search everywhere.”

  Martin permitted himself a faint smile at the memory of past astuteness.

  “We fixed that all right,” he said. “It wouldn’t have done for either of us to let it be known. Besides, we were both under twenty-one by a few weeks. A pal of mine, Len Bolton, an Australian, awfully nice chap—R.A.F., killed in the Battle of Britain—had the idea. He lent me his birth certificate. Bessie borrowed her elder sister’s, Jane. Jane is dead, too, poor girl—killed in an air raid. But of course it was all O.K. and perfectly legal, so long as we both knew what we were doing. Len made us write letters to each other so that should be quite clear.”

  Bobby sat silent for some moments, struggling with an emotion too deep for words—far too deep indeed. His prolonged silence, the intense feeling his expression showed, finally alarmed them both.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Martin.

  “Aren’t you well?” inquired Olga.

  “No,” said Bobby, turning on her a glittering eye that made her fairly jump. To Martin he said bitterly: “Nothing’s the matter. Why should there be? Merely I don’t know how many of the marriage laws broken and your marriage about as valid as a Vichy law.”

  “Why not? Of course it is,” declared Martin stoutly. “We both knew.”

  “That,” explained Bobby, “is why. Because you both knew. If one of you hadn’t known, then it would have held. As you both knew, you were merely acting a sham, for which,” said Bobby, glaring, “you both have incurred and deserve all manner of penalties. And I hope you get ’em too, hot and strong,” he added viciously.

  “I still don’t see it,” Martin complained. “We both knew, so what’s the harm?”

  “The harm is, you were fooling the law,” Bobby snapped.

  “Well, why not?” asked Martin. Then he added thoughtfully: “If you can.”

  Bobby, again overcome by emotion, again found himself speechless. Olga broke a silence that had become a little dreadful by saying:—

  “You mean they weren’t ever married—not really. Either of them? Then there isn’t any bigamy or anything?”

  “No,” said Bobby, “especially anything,” and he relapsed into gloomy silence as he thought of all the work and expense and time spent trying to trace this marriage that had been no marriage.

  “I still don’t get it,” Martin said.

  “Simple enough,” Bobby told him. “I mean simple to any one gifted with intelligence above that of a sub-normal, lame dog born deaf and dumb.”

  “Meaning me?” asked Martin anxiously.

  “Yes,” said Bobby.

  “Oh,” said Olga.

  “People who break laws the way you broke them—wholesale, that is,” Bobby explained, “can’t be allowed to claim their benefit. You staged a farce, and you can’t be allowed to pretend it was real. If one of you hadn’t known, then the thing would have held, because for him or her it would have been genuine, and the other couldn’t be allowed to wriggle out.”

  “Oh, well,” admitted Martin reluctantly, “if you put it like that. Bit upsetting, though, to find you aren’t married when you thought you were. Anyhow, if I’m not married now I soon shall be.” Then he seemed to remember something. “What are we in for?” he asked. “You said ‘penalties’? What are they likely to be?”

  “They ought,” said Bobby fervently, “to be penal servitude for life at the very least. But I’m not sure how to proceed. You’ve made a verbal statement with no supporting evidence. If you choose to hand me a written statement with details that can be checked, I’ll consider it. Even then all you could give me proof of is that two persons—both now dead—were married at a certain time and place. What proof is there they weren’t? I don’t at the moment see how I am to get evidence to show those two persons were in fact two other persons.”

  “We but . . .” said Martin, trying to think this out.

  Olga was quicker.

  “If Martin and Bessie don’t say anything, then no. one else can?” she asked.

  “Not so far as I can see,” Bobby agreed.

  “Then it’s all right, and they are quite safe, both of them?” Olga insisted.

  “I very much regret to say,” Bobby told her, “that from the most barefaced and deliberate defiance of the law ever known, they will most probably escape scot free”; and how fiercely he scowled, for all his most deeply rooted official instincts were deeply, deeply hurt.
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br />   They were interrupted by a knock at the door, and Olive appeared.

  “Headquarters—on the ’phone,” she announced, and when Bobby went to answer the call she asked anxiously:

  “What have you been doing?”

  Bobby looked at her gloomily.

  “Bilking the bigamy laws,” he answered, and she clapped her hands and cried with delight:—

  “Oh, I’m so glad, and I think it’s rather nice it’s all ending in a love story.”

  A little later, as he and Olive watched their two visitors walking away together, Bobby said reflectively:—

  “It’s all been a love story from the start, only in different keys. Lawless love in Mr Weston. Calf love with Martin and Bessie. Money love in Florence Severn. Possessive love in Thomasine Rowe. No love at all in Ronald Franks. Self-sacrificing love in Bessie for John Abel. And now normal love in Martin and Olga—and so good luck to them, even if they have fooled the law and got away with it.”

  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

  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

  SECRETS CAN’T BE KEPT

  Deep in bucolic Wychshire something dreadful is stirring …

  THE DISAPPEARANCE of a club-footed and inquisitive youth leads to a tangle involving two instances of stolen jewels, a water-colour which may be the most remarkable picture ever painted … and eventually to the discovery of a body in a forest with ‘a smell of rotting, a smell of things decaying’. The scene abounds with the macabre and the darkly humorous in classic Punshon style. But the murderer himself is on a collision cause with fate – aided of course by Inspector Bobby Owen.

  Night’s Cloak was first published in 1944, the nineteenth of the Bobby Owen mysteries, a series eventually including thirty-five novels. This edition features a new introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.

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

  Secrets Can’t be Kept

  CHAPTER I

  A VISIT

  “GENTLEMAN TO SEE you, sir,” announced Constable Watts, putting his head into the sanctum where sat Inspector Bobby Owen, chief of the still embryo Wych County C.I.D., that the war had prevented from coming to full birth—and alas for Bobby’s beautifully complete plans, all carefully pigeon-holed till the war should be over and for goodness knows how long afterwards as well, most likely.

  Bobby looked up from the piles of orders and counter orders, instructions and counter instructions, directions and counter directions that multitudinous authority showered upon him day by day. His head was still a little dizzy from his efforts to reconcile so many and so varying demands. He was almost grateful for an interruption that was at least straightforward and simple. He said:

  “Who is it? What’s he want?”

  “Name of Bloom—Mr Ned Bloom,” answered Watts. “Comes from Threepence. Says he has important information to give, but won’t say what. Sergeant said to report.”

  Bobby hesitated, aware of a table piled high with papers, all of which would have to be disposed of that afternoon so that the way might be clear for the sure and certain renewal of the flood next morning. But a policeman is at the beck and call of every citizen, and it is never safe to dismiss any complaint as trivial, any information as insignificant. The complaint may be anything but trivial in some one’s eyes, the information may turn out to be of life-and-death significance.

  “Oh, well, fetch him in,” he said at last. “May as well hear what he has to say.”

  Watts retired and returned to introduce the visitor. This was a youngster of about twenty with a pale, handsome, discontented face, a small, angry mouth, eyes of a curious greenish tint but bright and soft as a girl’s, and eager, sensitive hands, long and narrow—temperamental hands, Bobby thought, and hands with which their owner seemed to express his meaning almost as plainly as with his tongue. A spoilt, wilful, not unattractive personality, Bobby told himself, and then he noticed that the new-comer was lame, suffering from the unfortunate disability known as a club foot. It was perhaps this unhappy deformity that accounted for the slightly provocative impression he managed to convey, as though the grudge he had against fate for so ill-using him he extended towards all mankind.

  “Sit down, Mr Bloom—isn’t it?” Bobby said. “I understand you have some information to give us.”

  Bloom did not answer at once. He was watching Bobby closely, and those soft and lustrous eyes of his had grown hard, shrewd, calculating. Bobby was reminded somehow of the ‘gold-digger’ type of young woman, forgetting her charm and glamour as she calculated how much and what she is likely to get out of her newest acquaintance.

  “Not to give, to sell,” Bloom said abruptly.

  Bobby raised surprised eyebrows. Police certainly do pay on occasion for information brought to them. But this young man did not look like those who sometimes come to the police, offering to sell a pal for the price of a drink. Bobby was puzzled, but his voice had a sharper edge as he asked:

  “What do you mean? What do you want?”

  “Oh, not money,” Bloom explained. “A job.”

  “A job,” Bobby repeated, still more puzzled. “What do you mean? This isn’t an employment agency.”

  “Aren’t there any vacancies in the police force?” demanded Bloom.

  “We want men badly,” Bobby agreed. “There’s a fairly high physical standard though, you know. Policemen have to be fit.”

  “You mean—that,” Bloom said aggressively, pushing forward his deformed foot, at which Bobby had been careful not to look. “Why can’t you say so? I’m not a fool. I don’t mean I want to pound a beat and yell ‘Move on’. I’ve heard of you. You’re a detective. That needs brains, doesn’t it? Brains. Not brawn. You aren’t sitting there, looking superior, because of brawn. You’re supposed to be clever, aren’t you?”

  “Only supposed,” said Bobby sadly. “A detective needs brawn, too, you know. I’ve had to fight for my life before to-day.”

  “Then you fell down on your job,” his visitor in
formed him. “Not a detective’s business—to fight. Your job is to find out things, and leave the rough-and-tumble stuff to others.”

  “Dear me,” said Bobby, beginning to be a little amused by his self-assured young visitor. “You know all about it, don’t you? But don’t you think that often enough it’s only by the rough stuff that you can find out things?”

  “Nonsense,” pronounced Mr Bloom. “Not if you know your job.”

  “Oh, well,” said Bobby, slightly less amused now. “If you mean you want to join the police force, either this or any other, I’m afraid it’s not possible.”

  “The detective branch,” interposed Bloom. “The special branch.”

  “We only take men from the ranks,” Bobby explained. “Every one has to go through the uniformed ranks. Necessary. Where you learn your job. And for that the physical standard has to be high. Sorry, but there it is.”

  “In that case,” said Bloom, “I’ll take my information somewhere else, and when the case breaks, the sickest man in all England will be Inspector Bobby Owen, who muffed the biggest chance that ever came his way and he hadn’t sense enough to see it.”

  Bobby looked up sharply. He had not been very favourably impressed so far, but there was something about the boy—a mixture of sulkiness, determination, assurance—that made its mark.

  “You live at Threepence, don’t you?” he asked. “What’s your address there?”

  “The Pleezeu Tea Rooms.”

  “Oh, yes, I know;” Bobby said.

  He had in fact occasionally patronised the Pleezeu Tea Rooms when routine duty or visits of inspection had taken him in the direction of Threepence, a favourite holiday resort for Midwych trippers and hikers. It lay in a valley between Wychwood Forest proper and the high-lying moorlands west and north, and was in process of being transformed from a picturesque, isolated, self-contained little community into a dormitory for prosperous Midwych citizens and a place for them to retire to when their active business life was over. Though no railway served it, a line of motor-’buses had before the war brought it into close touch with the city, and even in days of petrol shortage an attenuated service was still maintained. Bobby retained an agreeable memory of the excellence of the tea, the home-made jam, the scones, and cakes provided at the Pleezeu Gardens, and of how pleasant and well arranged had been the garden where the outdoor teas were served. How Threepence itself had come by its odd name no one seemed to know, though local antiquarians loved to propound and wrangle over rival theories. That put forward by a jealous and rival community, attracting fewer visitors, that the name was the result of a general conviction that the whole place, inhabitants and all, was worth exactly threepence, neither more nor less, had won general acceptance only in the place of its origin.