The Attending Truth: A Bobby Owen Mystery

by E. R. Punshon

  “What do you mean? There isn’t one,” exclaimed Miss Salter indignantly, and snapped open her handbag to take out and consult her mirror, and the C.I.D. man looked, too, as with one hand Bobby pointed and with the other dexterously flicked the signet ring recovered from the coffee into the open handbag that now Miss Salter snapped to again, as, reassured, she declared once more: “Rubbish, there isn’t one.”

  “It doesn’t matter; quite unimportant,” answered Bobby. “Let’s go back to this signet ring I certainly haven’t got. What was it like?”

  “It had three little fishes on it; I saw them plainly,” Miss Salter said. “If it’s not in your pockets—” Bobby had turned these inside out while talking—“then you’ve swallowed it. Obvious.”

  “I’ll be X-rayed if you like,” Bobby smiled. “More likely you’ve imagined it like the rest of your story—or, perhaps, so as to make it sound convincing, you’ve described some ring of your own, subconsciously—or consciously. One you’ve got in your hand-bag, perhaps.”

  “I haven’t,” snapped Miss Salter, and snapped open her bag again. “Oh. oh,” she gasped, for there was the ring.

  “Hullo,” said the C.I.D. man, puzzled—obviously puzzled indeed.

  “You put it there,” Miss Salter cried, glaring at Bobby.

  “Oh, really, come now,” protested Bobby. “Three fishes on it, just as she said,” he pointed out to the C.I.D. man. “Conclusive, eh? Quite obvious, I think.”

  The C.I.D. man remained puzzled.

  “Better both of you come along to the station,” he said.

  “One minute,” said Bobby. “If the chap who put his hat and the attaché case down here hasn’t gone out again—well, he must be here still. Obvious, eh?”

  “Yes, but he isn’t,” pointed out the C.I.D. man, “that’s even more obvious. No one else in the shop.”

  “When the obvious disagrees, who’s to decide?” murmured Bobby.

  He looked carefully all round. Certainly no sign of the missing man was visible. Bobby walked towards that part of the shop roped off from the rest, marked “closed,” plunged in darkness since there all lights had been extinguished. The manageress called out:

  “That part’s closed; we don’t serve there, no one there.”

  “A dull mind,” explained Bobby. “Investigates even the obvious.”

  He stepped over the rope and walked on. A moment later he called, “Here we are,” and from behind one of the tables, between it and the wall, rose a tall young man of about Bobby’s size and height, wearing, like him, a light grey suit, and, as Bobby noticed with extreme annoyance, on one finger a signet ring that had—obviously—been secured at a sixpenny store for perhaps half that sum.

  “Oh, it’s you, Tommy High, is it?” said the C.I.D. man.

  “It’s a fair cop.” said the gentleman addressed as Tommy High. He jerked a thumb at Bobby. “Hoped he’d lose his head and kick up a row and give me a chance to clear,” he explained.

  “Dirty trick, putting it on me,” growled Bobby, now that the danger was over knowing deadly fear, as he realised how narrow his escape had been.

  “No malice about it, mate,” protested the other amiably. “We’ve all got to take our luck as it comes.”

  Bobby nearly choked but found no adequate reply. The C.I.D. man said to Miss Salter:

  “Do you identify him?”

  “I could swear to him anywhere,” she answered emphatically. “I could never forget his face, it’s graven in my memory.”

  Then she added, triumphantly: “Besides, look, there’s his signet ring, just as I said.”

  To Bobby, the C.I.D. man said: “Lucky for you you kept your wits about you. You might easily have got sent up on the lady’s identification and the hat and bag on your table.” He added: “I suppose you flicked that ring into her handbag when we weren’t looking?”

  “Had to get time somehow,” Bobby answered. “It made you doubt her story or you might have walked me off right away.”

  “So I might,” agreed the other. “Quite smart. You ought to be in the police yourself.”

  And in a flash Bobby perceived that his problem was solved, his future career settled.

  “How do you set about joining?” he asked.

  The C.I.D. man told him.

  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

  Strange Ending

  “The poor devil’s mouth was filled with feathers. An unconscious man with his mouth full of feathers wouldn’t have had much chance of surviving, and this one didn’t.”

  The press gleefully dubbed it the ‘Banquet Murder’. The murdered man, Hugh Newton, had apparently been making a sumptuous feast for two in his flat, before his own goose was cooked.

  Bobby Owen of the Yard is drawn to the cold case. Starting with the curious fact that the apartment building has experienced two break-ins since the murder, Bobby starts investigating the colourful, or faintly macabre, inhabitants. Elsewhere in London, Doreen Caine, cookery instructor, is excited that the case has been reopened. And further afield, a travel agency specializing in gastronomic tours comes under suspicion. It’s a bouillabaise of a mystery, one of Punshon’s finest, in which Bobby will discover whether retribution – if not revenge – is a dish best served cold.

  Strange Ending is the thirty-first novel in the Bobby Owen Mystery series, originally published in 1953. This new edition features a bonus Bobby Owen short story, and an 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

  CHAPTER I

  RE-OPENING A CASE

  COMMANDER BOBBY OWEN, C.I.D., Scotland Yard, had suggested to his wife, Olive, that they should take an evening stroll together. This had surprised Olive very much. For, in this respect at least, she was well aware she had married a man of extremes, one who knew no golden mean between sprawling in an arm-chair at home, most likely with his feet on another chair unless she were on the look-out, and doing six miles or so round the pa
rk in the hour before breakfast, all in the sacred name of keeping fit.

  She asked no questions though, since, as Bobby spent his life both in asking questions and answering them, they were things she tended to avoid. Now they had reached Mayfair Crescent, once upon a time so fashionable, so exclusively the home of the great, that even the crossing-sweeper at the corner had a cachet of his own and was apt to refuse mere coppers with a bow of such mingled dignity and reproach as seldom failed to achieve a transmutation into silver. But its glory had fled, as is inconstant glory’s habit, and in place of former magnificence the Crescent now consisted of gaps where stray bombs had fallen, a private hotel, two mansions still in the ‘stately homes of England’ class, others turned into single-room apartment houses, three in a row devoted to the needs of the overflow from the Ministry of Priorities, and others that had been converted into blocks of highly rented flats.

  Of these last was No. 7, once the residence of a Duke, then of a wealthy brewer, whose intrusion into those then sacred precincts had been an omen of the decadence to come, and now reconstructed to provide nine more or less convenient, and much more rather than less expensive, ‘residential flats-de-luxe’, to quote the agent for the property.

  Opposite No. 7’s front door was a pillar-box, and by it stood a girl, gazing up at No. 7 with an odd intensity of gaze as though she were putting to it a question she had little hope would receive an answer.

  “See that girl?” Bobby asked.

  “Why?” asked Olive, for indeed there was little chance of not seeing her, since she was so directly in front of them and so near.

  A policeman came up from behind.

  “That’s her, sir,” he said in passing, and then, without looking and crossing the road, disappeared down a side street opposite.

  “Pretty girl,” remarked Bobby.

  “Is she?” asked Olive with some doubt. “She looks worried, as if she had lost her boy and was wondering how to get him back, instead of being sensible about it, getting another, and never noticing the difference.”

  “Don’t be cynical,” Bobby rebuked her, for cynicism was a reproach Olive sometimes hurled at him—not without effect.

  The girl turned away from the pillar-box and came towards them. She was tall, fair, and young, her face pale and peaked, a certain light grace of movement visible in her walk and bearing. She certainly had claims to be called pretty, in spite of the signs of nervous strain Olive had remarked, though perhaps she was no more so than every young girl considers her birthright. Her best features were her complexion, which owed much to God and little to artifice, and her nose, which managed somehow to add a touch of piquancy to her face. Indeed, she did occasionally, when regarding herself in the mirror, murmur ‘tip tilted like the petals of a flower’, though she could not have told you where the line came from. She was wearing a neat little coat and skirt, ‘utility’ Olive decided, and she went by them with a hurried, uneven step, as though suddenly remembering some pressing errand.

  “Who is she?” Olive asked, and she asked the question uneasily, as if already she had received some subtle warning of impending tragedy.

  “A young lady who seems curiously interested in Number Seven Mayfair Crescent,” Bobby explained. “Number Seven Mayfair Crescent mean anything to you?”

  “I don’t think so,” Olive said. “Why?”

  “Remember what the papers called the Banquet Murder or the Chef Crime or things like that?”

  “Oh, that,” Olive exclaimed. “The one nothing was ever found out about. Months ago, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes. It was while I was in the U.S. over that atom-bomb scare that fizzled out like a damp squib. No clues in the Mayfair Crescent affair. Nothing to go on. A wash-out as far as the investigation went. I’ve been going through the dossier again. I didn’t see what else could have been done. Man found dead in the first floor front flat at Number Seven. Name of Hugh Newton. Probably he had more names than one. He always paid, rent included, in cash. No bank account, and some of his underclothing marked ‘H. A.’, not H. N. Nasty death. Mean sort of end. First he had been knocked out. Must have been a tremendous blow given with all his force by an exceptionally powerful man. Either by accident or design a cushion cover had been torn open and the poor devil’s mouth filled with feathers. It rather looked as if the feathers had been deliberately rammed as far down as they would go, but you can’t be sure, because before our chaps got there the caretaker, a man named Marks, had tried to clear the feathers away. An unconscious man with his mouth full of feathers wouldn’t have had much chance of surviving anyhow, and this one didn’t.”

  “Weren’t there any friends or relatives?”

  “None that we could hear of, and none came forward,” Bobby answered. “Somewhere or another there may be people wondering why they never hear now of a friend or relation with the initials ‘H. N.’. We may get an inquiry in time. There are men like that. They cut themselves off entirely from their past and live in the heart of London as the old hermits used to live in the Thebiad. Of course, sometimes they are just hiding.”

  “Criminals?” Olive asked.

  “Well, not as a rule,” Bobby answered. They had moved on now, and were walking slowly the length of the Crescent. “If they are, it is more often not from us but from their pals they’ve double-crossed. The double-crosser is always in danger, and if there isn’t much honour among thieves, there’s a very lively sense of what’s likely to happen to you if you turn informer. Or it may be their families they are hiding from—especially their wives.”

  “Good gracious,” said Olive, incredulous and astonished.

  “Or again merely a morbid love of solitude. Anyhow, London is full of such minor mysteries. Nothing to show what the explanation was in this case. Not that Hugh Newton can have been entirely without outside connections. He had been expecting a visitor. The table was laid for two, and there was a most elaborate meal in course of preparation.”

  “What was it?” Olive asked, interested.

  “Oh, I don’t know exactly, it’s all there in the reports,” Bobby told her. “But the care taken over it did rather suggest the expected visitor was someone it was advisable for some reason to treat extra well. Did I say he was wearing a chef’s cap and apron? But I doubt if our people would have paid much attention, only for Johnny Staples.”

  “Who is he?”

  “He’s the Daily Announcer’s crime expert and also their cookery editor. Queer mixture—cookery and crime. No accounting for tastes, though. The Announcer being a cultural paper, he signs as ‘Lucullus’, and what he says, goes. Whacking sale of his articles in book form.”

  “I know,” Olive admitted dispiritedly, for often these articles soared to elysian heights she felt she could never climb, not at least till wine became less expensive and butter more plentiful.

  “Johnny did rather lay it on thick,” Bobby continued, “but he did come along to us to insist it was a line our chaps ought to follow up. Someone known to the Food and Wine Society, or something like that. He said there weren’t a dozen men in England, outside the professionals, who could live up to that dinner on their own. It was tried, but got us nowhere. No professional chef missing, and there are so many first-class amateurs there wasn’t much chance there. Astonishing number of men fancy themselves as cooks, and really good at it, too.”

  “I wish all men did,” said Olive, and gazed wistfully at the stars above.

  “No robbery,” Bobby went on unheedingly. “Money and some jewellery left untouched. At the time it was thought two people must have been concerned, even though it looked as if only one guest was expected. A man—no woman could have knocked the poor devil out the way he was. A good straight left right in the middle of the face. A tremendous blow, must have been a whacking big chap who landed it. Expert opinion. There was even some idea of rounding up all the known swell boxers. Came to nothing. But the idea of killing by pushing feathers down your throat looks more like a woman.”

  “Ugh,”
said Olive and complained: “Why always put it down to a woman when it’s something specially nasty?”

  “Because,” Bobby explained, “when women are, they generally rather specially are.”

  Olive tried to unravel this remark so far at least as to be able to decide whether it was meant in a complimentary sense or not. As it was the utterance of a husband, she came to the conclusion that most likely it wasn’t. But not being sure, she thought it would be as well to change the subject, and she asked:

  “What has it all got to do with that girl you were making eyes at just now?”

  “I wasn’t,” protested Bobby. “I never do—anyhow, not when my wife’s there. Things have been happening. As no claimant turned up for Mr Newton’s goods and chattels, the Crown took over, stored the furniture, used what ready cash there was—not much—to pay expenses and fees, and then released the flat. There have been two breakings-in since the murder. The first immediately afterwards, and a very thorough job was done, ransacking the place. Nothing taken as far as is known, except oddly enough a pile of travel agent’s advertisements, and a lot of postcards of continental resorts. Suggested, of course, that Hugh Newton liked to go abroad, but that wasn’t much help either. The second time was soon after new people had moved in—a Mr Pyne and his wife and daughter. Pyne is a Civil Servant—Ministry of Priorities. The two women were out one evening, and when they got back they couldn’t get in. Our people were called, climbed in at the back, and found Mr Pyne tied up in a corner, most uncomfortably, with a sheet thrown over him so he couldn’t see what was going on. Once again the place had been ransacked and nothing taken, except two wrist-watches. An odd feature is that both were returned anonymously through the post a few days later. So it does look as if the flat were still an object of interest to someone for some reason.”

  “Morbid attraction of the scene of a murder,” Olive suggested.