“Well, most of it wasn’t relevant to the simple question of whether Clinton Wells did or did not commit the second murder,” Bobby answered. “Nothing either need or should be said at a trial that isn’t strictly confined to the question of guilt or innocence in the one particular instance. The fact that Clinton had also shot the old earl was implicit in the evidence, but, strictly speaking, was irrelevant to the charge on which he was being tried. A man can only be hanged once, and once that one charge was proved there was no need to open another. The evidence was as strong as evidence could well be. There was Messrs. Blacklock’s office boy to identify the dead man as haying called at the office and as having left with Clinton Wells. There was evidence that he had accompanied him home. They were seen entering the forest together. Clinton Wells was seen leaving it alone. There was Martin’s evidence that he heard shots and the evidence of the farmer he was talking to at the time. Martin’s story that he found the automatic under the Charles the Second oak is confirmed by the traces of soil on it. There are the footprints to show Clinton Wells was actually on the spot earlier, there are half a dozen other points adding up to complete certainty. Clinton Wells had grown careless. I think he had no idea how closely he was being watched or that our suspicions were already pointing very strongly to him.”
“I suppose it was through him that Ralph went off on that Glasgow visit that looked so suspicious?”
“Oh, yes. Ralph refused, or rather he thought he had refused, to take Clinton’s advice about not having his ‘show down’ with his great-uncle. Actually, of course, Clinton, while pretending to dissuade him, had been cunningly egging him on, just as he took every opportunity to talk to us about Ralph’s hot temper, so as to give an edge to our suspicions. But Ralph trusted him, felt he mustn’t neglect his advice a second time, and so when Clinton came along with his tale of someone staying at the Northern Lights Hotel, who could give proof of the claimant’s real identity, he went off obediently to see about it. So that no one should know, Clinton persuaded Ralph that secrecy was necessary, and that he must get off quietly without letting any one know why or where he had gone.”
“And then I suppose rang him up again to send him off to another promised meeting near the Charles the Second oak?”
“That’s why,” Bobby explained, “he dropped those hints he knew would reach us, about the oak. Then he got the genuine Bertram there by telling him some yarn or another, shot him, hid the body, and took care to leave the Wych estate office automatic he had used once before where he knew it must be seen. That was to make sure we would search further and find the body we were expected to think had been hidden by Ralph. The calculation was that we should with luck discover Ralph on the spot, or if not, at least we couldn’t help knowing he had been there. Clinton Wells thought that would make Ralph’s arrest certain. So it would. And Ralph’s arrest he thought would make his own position secure and put Bertram No. 1, the sham Bertram, in full possession of title and estates—and at the same time entirely in his power. Probably as soon as he knew that the genuine Bertram had been released and had reached England, he decided that only fresh murder could save him. A pretty desperate gamble, though it might have come off. But he didn’t expect little Sophy Longden to guess, in some way she knows best, that mischief was being planned against Ralph, that somehow it centred round the old oak, and then to make up her mind that she was just jolly well going to see he was warned in time. Not every girl would have faced that long trip into the forest at that time of night. Not every one would much care for being alone in Wychwood at midnight. Lucky for me she took it on, though, or that fool of a Martin might have potted me. And Clinton Wells had not reckoned either on Martin’s spotting there was something on and trotting off to see what it was. It was he who found the automatic left there for our benefit, and he got a nasty jolt, too, when he and I ran into each other, and he realised he was caught with the murder weapon in his possession. Lost his head completely. Well, the king’s evidence he gave was very useful. Blackmail was his game from the first and it was the hope of blackmail, of course, that made him hold his tongue so long about what he saw on the night of the old earl’s murder.”
“Do you think Lady Wych suspected Ralph?”
“Very likely. She won’t say. She knew, they all did, that there was sure to be a violent quarrel between the old earl and Ralph that night. Apparently her husband had promised to come in to say good-night and tell her all about it. When he didn’t, she went to find him. She found his dead body on the terrace, but she didn’t give the alarm. I imagine her first idea was that Ralph had done it and that she couldn’t bear to help in his capture. When she had had time to think a bit, she began to wonder whether it might be someone else and not Ralph at all, and so she made up her mind to say nothing. Sophy knew nothing of the murder till morning. She had been to see how Lady Wych was and found her room empty. So she followed her downstairs and saw her leaving the library. Sophy went into the room, but it was empty, Lady Wych had drawn the curtain, and all Sophy did was to turn off the wireless and go back to bed, having first made sure Lady Wych was safe in her room again. When she heard about the murder in the morning she supposed Lady Wych must know something. Possibly she wondered if Lady Wych herself were guilty. She could say nothing without seeming to implicate the old lady, and so she made up her mind to say nothing. I expect she would have gone to the stake rather than speak. Obstinacy is her middle name. You should hear the colonel talk about her.”
“You might call it loyalty,” Olive said, “loyalty to an old woman who had been kind to her.”
“Well, you might call it that,” Bobby conceded. “The colonel doesn’t. He says ‘pig-headed’. To the ninth degree. Of course,” added Bobby slyly, “what he means is:— ‘She’s just a woman.’”
Olive let this pass. She had another question to ask. She said:— “What’s become of the sham Bertram?”
“Oh, he’s off back to the States—scot free, money in his pocket, better luck than he deserved. Though he was never more than a pawn in Clinton Wells’s game. Lucky to be out of it. Even if their plot had come off, Clinton Wells would have squeezed him dry. Anyhow, he’s fully convinced that being a British peer is no soft job, and that marrying Anne Hoyle would be a fate worse than death.”
“He was just a silly,” declared Olive, dismissing him with a flick of her fingers, “but I do feel a little sorry for Anne. Still, even if she had married Ralph, it would have been a disaster. She would have wanted her way, he would have gone his, and the result would have been catastrophe.”
“You needn’t worry about Miss Anne Hoyle,” Bobby told her. “She will soon land an American millionaire; a millionaire, too, who, bossing others, will then himself be bossed. But I do wonder a little what old Lady Wych will think of Sophy as the new Lady Wych.”
“She ought to think what I think,” Olive answered with decision, “that Ralph’s in luck at last. How many girls would have had the courage to make that trip through Wychwood at midnight just on the chance of being able to find him and warn him?”
“Yes, I know, I’ve said that, too,” Bobby remarked. “All the same, it’s odd to think of that quiet, shy little thing as Countess Wych; even if no longer of Wych Castle, now the county council has taken it over.” After a pause, he added:— “She does make you feel though that whoever she married, duke, dustman, costermonger, earl, burglar for that matter, she would understand her husband so well, she would understand his job, too, and play Aaron to his Moses’s arm, so that her man would make a better job of his duking or dusting or costering or burgling, as the case might be.”
“What you mean,” said Olive, “only you go such a long way round, is that Sophy is just a woman.”
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 n
ext 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.
Also by E.R. Punshon
Information Received
Death Among the Sunbathers
Crossword Mystery
Mystery Villa
Death of a Beauty Queen
Death Comes to Cambers
The Bath Mysteries
Mystery of Mr. Jessop
The Dusky Hour
Dictator’s Way
Comes a Stranger
Suspects – Nine
Murder Abroad
Four Strange Women
Dark Garden
Diabolic Candelabra
The Conqueror Inn
Night’s Cloak
Secrets Can’t Be Kept
E.R. Punshon
COMES A STRANGER
“You see,” Miss Kayne said, “I committed a murder once myself.”
Miss Kayne’s proud boast to Detective-Sergeant Bobby Owen is that she has committed the Perfect Murder – a crime with no clues. Bobby thinks at first it is a macabre joke, but before long a body is reportedly found, stabbed in the world-famous Kayne Library. When Bobby gets to the scene, the corpse has disappeared. But instead Miss Kayne’s cousin, Nat, is found in a nearby country lane – shot through the heart. Were the two murders connected – or were there even two? Bobby finds himself embroiled in one of the most ingenious and sinister cases of his career. Can he prove this was not a case of Perfect Murder?
Comes a Stranger, originally published in 1938, is the eleventh novel in the Bobby Owen mystery series. This new edition features an introduction and afterword by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.
CHAPTER I
THE PERFECT MURDER
“You see,” explained Miss Kayne, wheezing a little, her tiny voice issuing as it were with difficulty from the mountainous flesh encasing it and her, ‘‘I was so interested when I saw that paragraph about dear Olive engaged to a detective. So exciting.”
“Oh, yes,” answered Detective-Sergeant Bobby Owen, polite but bored, wondering vaguely why everyone thought a detective’s life exciting when in reality it consisted chiefly of routine work any city clerk would think deadly dull.
“Because, you see,” Miss Kayne went on, “I committed a murder once myself.”
“Oh, yes,” said Bobby brightly, getting ready to laugh as soon as he saw exactly where the joke was supposed to lie.
“The perfect murder,” mused Miss Kayne in her small and distant voice. “I think—the perfect murder.”
“Indeed,” said Bobby, still brightly, still wondering what, exactly, was the joke, and when he would have to laugh.
“You would call it that, wouldn’t you?” Miss Kayne went on, looking at him earnestly, “when there’s never even any suspicion—when the murdered person just vanishes and is never even missed, and no questions are ever asked?”
“Well, I suppose so,” agreed Bobby. “Only it doesn’t happen like that, you know.”
“Are you sure?” she asked.
“Why, er—” Bobby said, a little taken aback by the direct question, by something forceful, too, he seemed to feel in it.
“Do have another cup of tea,” she urged. ‘‘Or a whisky and soda? You would prefer that? If you’ll ring the bell, Briggs will get it.”
“Oh, no, thanks, I never touch spirits in the day time,” Bobby explained. “Sometimes at night just before going to bed. But that’s all.”
The conversation languished. Bobby supposed the subject of the perfect murder, of the victim who vanished and was never even missed, had now been exhausted. Certainly this enormous old woman, sunk in fat, her swollen feet in great, shapeless slippers, so ponderous that, as he knew, for Olive had told him, it was all she could do to rise from her chair without assistance, in no way suggested a murderess.
Bobby was paying this visit at Olive’s request, and because it is part of the duty of the newly-engaged to present themselves for the inspection and approval of the friends and relatives of the other party. Miss Kayne was, he knew, a very old friend of Olive’s, though one from whom she had not heard for a number of years till there had appeared paragraphs in the papers announcing their engagement. The papers noticed it, because it came as a sequel to a sensational case of murder that on account of its political aspects had attracted general attention, and so there had been various headlines about Romantic Sequel to Sensational Political Killings.
As a result there had arrived a letter from this old friend of Olive’s, asking her and Bobby to spend a week at Wynton Lodge, Miss Kayne’s residence in the village of Wynton, near Mayfield, a town of some size. Wynton Lodge was, too, the home of the famous Kayne library Miss Kayne’s father had built up through many ardent years, till now it had a world-wide reputation. Olive had accepted the invitation, glad to renew an old friendship, but Bobby’s duties at Scotland Yard had only permitted him to run down this afternoon on his new motor cycle for which he had just finished paying, and now was wondering for much he could sell it again, since, in view of his engagement, pots and pans, curtains and carpets, were all becoming of more importance than motor cycles.
So far it had proved rather a boring visit. Of course, Miss Kayne was an important person, as the owner of the celebrated library that held all sorts of bookish treasures. But then Bobby did not know much about books, nor was he overwhelmingly interested in them. He was wondering now what to say next. He wished Miss Kayne would make some remark, and with something of a start he realized how closely she was watching him from small, malignant eyes, deep hidden like knives in ambush behind huge rolls of fat. It was almost as though she expected him to take her remark seriously. It was almost as though she challenged and defied either him or the impersonal authority of the law that sometimes he represented. Then he supposed that perhaps she was annoyed because he had not yet seen the point of her joke about the ‘perfect murder’, and had made no suitable response. Or perhaps she didn’t like detectives, or perhaps she just simply didn’t like him, or, more probably and naturally, merely thought it was a pity a girl like Olive should be throwing herself away on a detective-sergeant of police.
He wished Olive would come back. She had gone to see if they might visit the famous library. He let his gaze wander out of the window to rest on the tall, blank wall of the annexe built out from the main body of the house, like a thrusting arm, wherein the great Kayne collection of books was contained. There were no windows, it was just a great blank wall, like that of a gaol or a fortress to guard some secret prisoner.
Silly, of course. What secret prisoner could a famous library hold? But why should a library be built like a gaol?
Suddenly he became aware that Miss Kayne was shaking with a hidden, silent mirth. Her laughter seemed to run all over her huge body, and yet it found no outlet in sound.
Even her chair, an enormous construction in solid oak, shook with it, and her cushions that were about her like a sea. There she sat and rumbled with an inner merriment, but a merriment in which her small, bright, deep sunken eyes had no share, for in them as they peeped out at Bobby he thought he recognized a secret, hidden hate. She said:—
“That’s the library building you’re looking at, the Kayne library.”
Was it the library she hated, he wondered? Or something that the library stood for? Or was he himself, for some reason, the object of her anger?
“I was wondering,” he said slowly, “why there are no windows.”
“South wall,” she explained. “When my father built it he wanted no windows on that wall because he thought direct sunlight might be bad for the books, their bindings especially.”
“I see,” said Bobby.
&nbs
p; “There are windows on the other wall, the north wall and at the west end,” she told him. “They all have steel shutters, though.”
“Steel?”
“Protection against burglars,” she explained. “Some of the books are very valuable. Against burglars—and fire.”
Her mirth had ceased now, but she pronounced this last word with a strange and puzzling accent, lingering on it as though she loved its sound and yet dreaded it as well. A strange old woman, Bobby thought, and with a certain disquiet his mind returned to that declaration of hers about the perfect murder she said she had once committed. Nonsense, of course, and yet those small, malignant eyes of hers were still watching him, he saw, like enemies in ambush.
“We must take every possible precaution against fire,” she said again, and again her small, clear voice lingered on the final word.
“Oh yes, of course,” agreed Bobby, who knew, for it was common knowledge, that there were many valuable treasures in the Kayne library.
There was the Glastonbury Second Psalter, for instance, snatched from under the very nose of the British Museum authorities hesitant on an authenticity now triumphantly established, so that the thousand pounds for which it had been purchased had increased tenfold. Or those so precious fragmentary pages of the Travels of Sir John Mandeville, printed by Caxton. Till their discovery by Mr. Broast, the Kayne Library custodian, in the South of France, it had not been known that Caxton had ever printed the Mandeville Travels, even though the guess had often been hazarded that so popular a work was almost certain to have passed through his press. The discovery of these fragmentary pages—a score of them, twelve consecutive—the sole relics of an edition that otherwise had vanished utterly, provided therefore a first class sensation, and the eight odd pages had been sold for enormous sums, mostly in America. The other pages, the consecutive ones, remained in the library, all offers, no matter how extravagant, being sternly refused. No wonder, then, that precautions like steel shutters were employed against theft and fire. Only it was odd how strangely that thin, remote voice of Miss Kayne’s lingered upon this last word, as though it held for her some dreadful and unnamed attraction.
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