Ten Star Clues (32 page)

“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

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

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

“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.

“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.

“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.