The Attending Truth: A Bobby Owen Mystery
Page 30
“Might be,” Bobby agreed, but with some doubt. “There are often staring crowds for days after a murder, but I don’t know that I’ve ever heard of it leading to breakings-in—two of them at that. Now there’s the girl you saw by the pillar-box. Chap on the beat reported noticing her hanging about. He had been warned to keep an eye on the place, just in case of any more breakings-in. The D.D.I. passed the report to me. Then she was found on the stairs outside the flat and no explanation, except some vague story about looking for a Mr Smith.”
“Who found her?” Olive asked.
“Mrs Marks. She has the basement flat with her husband at a reduced rate on condition of keeping the stairs clean and so on. The husband looks after the boiler and does odd jobs after he gets home from work—he is a packer with one of the big stores. And then there’s Mr Jasper Jordan, who is beginning to try to make himself unpleasant, as is, I gather, his chief aim and desire in life.”
“Oh, that man,” Olive exclaimed, bristling visibly. “That silly paper you brought home—Freedom’s Bugle Call, didn’t it call itself?”
“That’s it,” Bobby agreed. “Organ of the Mayfair Nihilist Group, which, besides, doesn’t exist unless one man can be a group. I don’t know why Jordan is interested, but he does seem to think, and even to say, that Commander Owen is an incompetent nincompoop who owes his promotion solely to influence: he’s found out that for my sins I went to one of the sacred nine as well as Oxford—the whole bag of tricks, in fact; and, as a kind of head-piece, with a distant cousin of sorts in the House of Lords—at least, he would be if he ever went near the place. Which, of course, he never does.”
“What’s the sacred nine?” asked Olive. “Aren’t they the Muses or something?”
“In this case,” Bobby explained, “they are the nine Public Schools, which are so far above all others that those who have been to them never tread the common earth again. Unless, of course, they join the police, and then they jolly well have to.”
“Oh,” said Olive, suitably impressed.
“All of which means,” Bobby continued, “that, in Mr Jasper Jordan’s opinion, Commander Bobby Owen came up by the back stairs instead of by the hard way, as he himself thinks he did. So I want to drop in for a chat and see if I can find out if there’s anything behind this sudden and rather vicious interest in me. But I’ve had a hint not to take any notice of it officially. All the same, I can’t help thinking there’s something behind it all. If I take you with me, no one can say it was in any way official, just a mild protest by a private citizen out for an evening stroll.”
“Me as a camouflage?” asked Olive, rather doubtfully.
“Well, you could put it that way,” Bobby admitted. “I wouldn’t. But it will stop him writing to Centre to demand what it means and how dare the police, etc., etc. Also there’s another report that a young woman, the one we’ve just seen, has been visiting Jordan as well as hanging about the flat where this Banquet Murder, as they call it, took place. It all seems to add up to there being some connection between the flat, the continuing interest in it as shown by two breakings-in, the murder of the man, Hugh Newton, and Mr Jasper Jordan.”
“What you mean,” Olive said resignedly, “is that you’re off again.”
“Well,” Bobby answered, “it’s not too good when murderers get away with it. My job to see they don’t.”
Published by Dean Street Press 2017
Copyright © 1952 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 1952 by Victor Gollancz
Cover by DSP
ISBN 978 1 911579 04 5
www.deanstreetpress.co.uk