Death Among the Sunbathers (29 page)

‘Should have almost expected them to fall to that,' observed Mitchell. ‘Anyone almost might have spotted what you meant.'

‘Well, sir,' admitted Owen, ‘I think I did overdo that bit – all at once I had a feeling I might be giving myself away, and so I dried up. Lucky they weren't smart enough to tumble to what I meant, though it's a wonder they didn't; most people would, I think. Of course, they had seen me carrying away what they took for her dead body on my shoulder, and I suppose they were too sure of what they had seen for it to occur to them that I meant her “dead corpse” didn't exist because her live body was in a nursing home. Then the broadcast asking for information was a good dodge; I expect that took away any doubts any of them might have developed afterwards.'

‘A terrible experience for her,' Mitchell agreed. ‘Did you ask her what made her go telling her mother it was she herself who had murdered her sister?'

‘She mentioned that herself,' Owen answered. ‘I think she had an idea I overheard her. She says she still feels it all happened through her. It was what she half told Miss Jo Frankland, and half didn't tell, that set Miss Jo trying to ferret out the truth for herself – partly, I suppose, in the hope of proving young Keene wasn't a desirable person to marry; she was quite set on breaking Sybil's engagement off if she could. I expect when Miss Sybil gets stronger she will realize she's no cause to blame herself.' Owen paused and smiled faintly, ‘I don't know if you remember, sir,' he said. ‘She saw me once in their garden at Ealing, just after the murder, when I was dodging round there as Bobs-the-Boy. We bluffed her by my slipping inside your car that was waiting and our people swearing, quite truly, there hadn't been anyone but police there. It seems to have worried her quite a lot, made her think perhaps she was subject to hallucinations; she was quite relieved to know the truth and that she really had seen me and not a ghost of some sort.'

‘All the same,' observed Mitchell, ‘I don't know so much about her not being to blame. If she had come straight to us and told us all she knew, she would have saved us a lot of work – and herself a good deal more.'

‘Well, sir, I think she was too scared,' Owen remarked. ‘She knew Keene was involved, she had no idea how deeply; I think she was even afraid at times he might be implicated in the murder of her sister in some way or another – and then she wasn't sure she was thinking straight, especially after we had bluffed her into believing she had an hallucination when she thought she saw “Bobs-the-Boy” in their garden. It was all that taken together drove her on to try to find out the truth by herself and in the end to do just exactly what cost her sister her life – hide in the room next to the one they were talking in to try to overhear what they said. And when she heard them telling how it was poor Jo Frankland had betrayed herself – well, I think she lost her nerve altogether. I think it was a kind of auto-suggestion made her do the same thing, just as when you're learning to cycle you're apt to run into the very obstacle you're trying to avoid. I hope I didn't go too far, when I told her I didn't think any question of any prosecution of Keene would arise?'

‘No, he gets off,' answered Mitchell, ‘no overt action on his part we can take notice of. Hunter, too. It ought to be a lesson to them both, though Keene, at any rate, has done his best to make good again. None of them seem to have had any suspicion of your identity?'

‘I don't think so, sir, not once.'

‘Not even when you sounded Keene, and Hunter as well, about making a clean breast of it? I was afraid that might set them thinking; it wasn't quite in character.'

‘Miss Sybil had been saying much the same before me, and I suppose it only seemed like repetition,' Owen remarked. ‘I expect they both felt they had heard it all before.'

‘She was lucky to escape,' Mitchell said. ‘You told her we should have to ask her to appear and give evidence?'

‘Yes, sir. I explained that was necessary because a jury might hesitate to accept my story without corroboration. I told her that was why after I had got her away we didn't proceed to arrest at once, as we didn't know how much she had heard, or what she could say, and if we had enough to be sure of a conviction. So we had to wait till she was able to tell us what she knew.'

‘You'll have a fairly hot time at the trial, I expect,' Mitchell remarked cheerfully. ‘Police spy, agent provocateur, is the best you'll get called. Defending counsel will let himself go because he'll have nothing else to say, and you'll get a gruelling all right. We'll get our man to bring out that you had instructions to warn Hunter and Keene, and did so. Funny thing, though, I made a bloomer myself at the very beginning that would have given you away entirely to anyone smart enough to notice it. I told them Bobs-the-Boy was a burglar, and a convict on ticket-of-leave, and of course that's a thing no responsible police officer would dream of saying if it were true – cost him his position if he did, and it came out. But they let it pass all right; wonderful what people never notice. But it shows how careful one ought to be, even to keep one's thoughts right. I ought to have been thinking of you as the “Bobs-the-Boy”, the released convict, it was my duty to help and protect, like any other citizen so long as he was keeping within the law. Instead I was only thinking of trying to warn Keene he was getting into bad company and had best be careful. The real “Bobs-the-Boy” seems to be doing all right. Quite a good account from where he's working up north. Good thing for him he came to us for help when that swine they call Mousey was trying to get him back into the crook world again. If he hadn't, and hadn't given me a chance to send you to take his place, we should never have known what was happening, most likely Jo Frankland's murderers would have escaped, and by this time probably we should have had two or three more big fires to investigate – and Esmy Bryan still pursuing his career among the sun bathers where, I own up, I should never have thought of looking for a super crook of his sort. I suppose you think you would like a holiday now?'

‘Well, sir, of course there's the trial,' Owen said, but brightening visibly at the sound of the word ‘holiday'.

‘That won't take long,' declared Mitchell. ‘Perfectly plain case now – Bryan and Zack Dodd will hang as they deserve, and Mrs Dodd or Miss James, it doesn't seem clear which she is, will be lucky to get off with penal servitude. After that–'

‘Yes, sir,' said Owen, visibly waiting for the magic word ‘leave' to be pronounced.

‘After that,' said Mitchell cruelly, ‘there'll be a little job waiting for you on the east coast. There's something on there apparently that's worrying the local people because they can't make out what it is. So they've asked us to send down a youngster able to show at a country house as an ordinary guest and warranted not to give himself away by eating peas with a knife or putting his feet on the dinner table or doing anything else natural and friendly and sociable. Also required to be good-looking, smart, and intelligent. Think you can fill the bill?'

‘Yes, sir,' said Owen.

‘Lucky,' observed Mitchell, ‘that modesty isn't one of the qualities indented for. You can cut away to bed now and I'll let you know when your fresh instructions are ready.'

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.

Information Received

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

What could be more innocent than a crossword puzzle? A game to while away an idle hour, a diversion for the lonely. And yet its cunning formula could still be turned to sinister purpose. The curious crossword devised by Mr. George Winterton turned out to be part of a game for high stakes – it was the creation of a man whose brother had just drowned and who feared for his own life. Yet the dog hadn't barked...

When Detective-Constable Owen (B.A. Oxon, pass degree only) arrives in the picturesque village of Suffby Cove, he is faced with the mystery of an appallingly ingenious murder – one whose ramifications reach out of England to the continent, and touch the lives of many men and women.

Crossword Mystery
is the third of E.R. Punshon's acclaimed Bobby Owen mysteries, first published in 1934 and part of a series which eventually spanned thirty-five novels.

It was one of the loveliest days of a lovely summer, and Detective-Constable Bobby Owen, B.A. (Oxon. pass degree only), as he jogged placidly along on a brand-new motor-cycle (Government property) at a quiet forty or fifty m.p.h., with an occasional burst up to seventy or eighty when he was quite sure there were no traffic police about, was almost able to persuade himself that after all there are on this earth, though rare, worse jobs than police jobs.

He was even not indifferent to the fact that he was wearing a new and expensive suit, cut by a first-class tailor and paid for by a generous country, whose head presumably had been a little turned by a recent announcement of a possible Budget surplus. Even the contents of the suit-case strapped on behind – dinner-jacket and so on, all very smart and new – had been provided for him in the same way; and, though he had no doubt his chief, Superintendent Mitchell, would jolly well make him work for them, at any rate he had no tailor's bill to fear – the happy, happy youth.

There appeared before him by the roadside Ye Olde Englyshe Petrol Pumpe Station for which he had been instructed to look out. He passed, and took the next turning north, a by-road that led to Deneham, the smart little east coast resort that had recently been winning favour by its stern refusal of hospitality to trippers – for whom, besides, its rather remote situation made it lack attractiveness, so there was no risk of hard feeling on either side. A mile or so along this road Bobby came to a small tea garden, a lonely, forlorn-looking little place, though bravely announcing itself as Ye Olde Sunke Tudor Tea Garden, presumably in a fine frenzy of rivalry with Ye Olde Englyshe Petrol Pumpe Station on the main road. Here Bobby alighted, parked his nice new motor-cycle in a convenient shed provided for the purpose, noted with a slight involuntary shudder that shrimps were fourpence a plate, sixpence shelled, and understood at once what strange subtle odour it was had mingled with the scent of the roses and the honeysuckle growing around. In the garden – why it was called “sunke” did not appear – were half a dozen tables with attendant chairs, all in rickety wicker. He seated himself at one, and ordered tea and toast and eggs to satisfy an appetite his long ride from London had provided with a fine edge. But the toast was a mistake, toast in “ye olde Tudor” days having evidently been chiefly used for roof repairs.

However, the eggs were new laid in the literal, not the commercial, sense – that is, they had come into being that same morning; and, if the tea were stewed, Bobby's young life, that had progressed from a well-known public school to an Oxford college and thence to London lodgings, had given him no knowledge or experience of tea that was not well and truly stewed.

So he drank it contentedly, enjoyed his new-laid eggs, and, if the toast baffled him who did not easily acknowledge defeat, he made a good exchange of it for plain bread and butter. This simple repast completed, he was about to light a cigarette when he heard a car approaching. Reflecting that Superintendent Mitchell smoked excellent cigars, and, since it was a fine day, since there was no specially trying case on at the moment, and, since above all, the Assistant Commissioner was away on a holiday, might well prove in a liberal and generous mood, Bobby hurriedly put his own gaspers away and hoped for the best. Then he rose respectfully to his feet as there entered the garden that redoubtable personage, his chief, Superintendent Mitchell, the biggest of the “big four,” as the papers called them, who were at the moment in charge of the destinies of the Scotland Yard C.I.D.

Following him was a tall, thin man with a narrow, lined face, hair that seemed prematurely grey – for he did not look much more than half-way between forty and fifty – and a complexion tanned a dull brick-brown by presumably a sun hotter than that this climate usually provides. Bobby guessed he would be Major Markham, formerly of the Indian cavalry, and now Chief Constable of Deneshire, in accordance with the happy rule that a thorough grounding in drill, especially cavalry drill, is the best possible preparation for police work. They came across to where Bobby was waiting, and Mitchell nodded pleasantly.

“Constable Owen,” he explained to his companion. “He was with me in the sun-bathing case, and he was with me, too – or I was with him, I never quite knew which – in the Christopher Clarke case – ‘
Hamlet
in Modern Dress,' as some of the newspaper wits called it.”

“Some smart work in those cases,” remarked Major Markham, with an approving glance at Bobby.

“Oh, I wouldn't say Owen was quite the thickest-headed of my men,” confessed Mitchell. “Of course, we've got to wait and see what a few more years' red tape and officialdom will do to him. Ruin him, probably. Why, I used to be thought quite smart myself, and now you ought to hear what the junior ranks say about me when I'm not there. ‘Premature senile decay,' when they're in their more kindly moods. Well, what about toast and an egg, Major? The young and greedy,” he added, with a glance at the remnants of Bobby's meal, “probably have two and expect the British taxpayer to stand for their gluttony.”