The Conqueror Inn: A Bobby Owen Mystery Read online

  E.R. Punshon

  THE CONQUEROR INN

  “I wouldn’t come any nearer if I were you. It’s not a thing to see unless you have to.”

  THE REMOTE Conqueror Inn, possibly the oldest licensed house in England, has an unexpectedly key role to play in World War Two. Lorry drivers, army camps, black marketeers and even the IRA become entangled in the sinister web which draws this novel’s plot together. Bobby Owen, after finding a case of banknotes, has to identify a corpse mutilated in its grave, ignore the red herrings thrown in his way … and identify a ruthless killer who uses the confusion of war to conceal his tracks.

  The Conqueror Inn was first published in 1943, the eighteenth of the Bobby Owen mysteries, a series eventually including thirty-five novels. This new edition features 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

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page/About the Book

  Contents

  Introduction by Curtis Evans

  CHAPTER I. PLAYING TRUANT

  CHAPTER II. THE GRAVE

  CHAPTER III. HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY

  CHAPTER IV. NAKED HORROR

  CHAPTER V. THE K. AND K.M.T.C.

  CHAPTER VI. THREE REPORTS

  CHAPTER VII. EVERYTHING HAS A MEANING

  CHAPTER VIII. DEEP WATERS

  CHAPTER IX. SLOGANS

  CHAPTER X. MICKY BURKE

  CHAPTER XI. PISTOL SHOT

  CHAPTER XII. LIARS BOTH

  CHAPTER XIII. WHY EGGS?

  CHAPTER XIV. A WOMAN’S TEARS

  CHAPTER XV. VOLUNTARY STATEMENTS

  CHAPTER XVI. CAPTAIN WINTLE’S INDIGNATION

  CHAPTER XVII. ON WATCH

  CHAPTER XVIII. GUESSES

  CHAPTER XIX. MARRIAGE CERTIFICATE

  CHAPTER XX. DAUGHTER AND FATHER

  CHAPTER XXI. MICKY BURKE AT HOME

  CHAPTER XXII. CONSIDERATIONS AND CONJECTURES

  CHAPTER XXIII. BURIED REVOLVER

  CHAPTER XXIV. CAPTAIN WINTLE’S STORY

  CHAPTER XXV. THE COST OF TRUTH

  CHAPTER XXVI. THE FORGOTTEN MAN

  CHAPTER XXVII. FIFTH COLUMN

  CHAPTER XXVIII. RACHEL SPEAKS

  CHAPTER XXIX. STOLEN LETTERS

  CHAPTER XXX. MANY QUESTIONS

  CHAPTER XXXI. PROMISE OF FRIENDSHIP

  CHAPTER XXXII. ATTRACTIVE BUT DANGEROUS

  CHAPTER XXXIII. CHASE AND PURSUIT

  CHAPTER XXXIV. FOUND

  CHAPTER XXXV. CONCLUSION

  About the Author

  The Bobby Owen Mysteries

  Night’s Cloak – Title Page

  Night’s Cloak – Chapter One

  Copyright

  Landmarks

  Cover

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Foreword

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  Detective novels by E.R. Punshon have long been greatly prized by collectors of vintage mystery fiction, not only because of their high quality but because of their plain scarcity. One reason the books so often have been difficult to find (until the recent Punshon reprint revival) lies in the fact that historically Punshon’s publication record--like that of the author’s exuberantly imaginative Detection Club colleague Gladys Mitchell, another leading Golden Age British crime novelist highly sought by collectors--was rather spotty in the United States. Only a dozen of Punshon’s nearly three dozen Bobby Owen detective novels were published in the US, six of them from the 1930s and six from the 1940s.

  Information Received and Crossword Mystery, the first two Bobby Owen detective novels which appeared in the US, had major American publishers (Houghton, Mifflin and Alfred A. Knopf respectively), but the four later Thirties Punshon titles--The Bath Mysteries, Mystery of Mr Jessop, The Dusky Hour and Dictator’s Way (retitled Death of a Tyrant)—were issued by Hillman-Curl’s “Clue Club” imprint, a short-lived concern which during its brief time in existence aimed squarely at the American rental library market. Assuring readers that the death’s head logo emblazoned on every Clue Club book served as a guarantee of originality and good writing, the Clue Club published 44 mystery novels between 1937 and 1939, the most distinguished of which, in my estimation, are the four Punshon titles. After the Clue Club went defunct on the eve of the Second World War, Punshon had no publisher in the United States until his detective novels were picked up by Macmillan, who in 1944 published The Conqueror Inn, which in the UK had been issued the previous year by Punshon’s longtime English publisher, the highly-regarded Victor Gollancz. (On publisher Hillman-Curl and its Clue Club imprint see Bill Pronzini, “Hillman-Curl [1936-1939],” in William F. Deeck, ed., Murder at 3 Cents a Day: An Annotated Crime Fiction Bibliography of the Lending Library Publishers: 1936-1967, 2006).

  An important American publisher, Macmillan already included several notable British mystery authors in its stable, including a promising new writer, George Bellairs; Punshon’s Detection Club colleagues G.D.H. and Margaret Cole, prominent Socialist intellectuals; and Eden Phillpotts, who though primarily a mainstream regional novelist produced a sizeable body of crime fiction over his very long life. (Among mystery fans he is best known today for having encouraged a young Dartmouth neighbor, Agatha Christie, to write fiction professionally.) Additionally, Macmillan had recently scored great successes with Who Killed Aunt Maggie? and Blood on Her Shoe, two regional mystery novels set in the American Deep South (both of which were later adapted to film) by Atlanta journalist Medora Field, a close friend of Margaret Mitchell, author of the massive bestseller Gone with the Wind, which also had been published by Macmillan.

  Publishing not only The Conqueror Inn but Punshon’s next four Bobby Owen detective novels (as well as a slightly later Bobby Owen title, So Many Doors), Macmillan--in contrast with Gollancz, then laboring under severe government restrictions owing to wartime paper shortages—did full justice to their prestigious new English mystery author, issuing books of good production quality with attractive dust jackets illustrated by first-rate cover artists like Arthur Hawkins, Jr., modernist designer of jackets for William Faulkner novels, and H. Lawrence Hoffman, some of whose artwork was shown in 2015 at an exhibition, “Mystery, Murder & Mayhem: The Paperback Book Cover Art of H. Lawrence Hoffman (1940-1948).” Macmillan boosted The Conqueror Inn as a “meaty, satisfying mystery for readers who like a real puzzle,” and American reviewers concurred. In the New York Times Book Review Isaac Anderson praised the novel as an “extremely intricate crime puzzle with an equally intricate solution,” while in the rival New York Herald Tribune Book Review Will Cuppy lauded it as an “impressive baffler by one of the better English practitioners.”

  Meanwhile, out west, Anthony Boucher--who was soon to replace Isaac Anderson at the NYTBR, where until his death two decades later he would reign as the leading American mystery critic (the Anthony Awards are named in his honor)--made note in the San Francisco Chronicle of the “solid construction” and “distinguished characterization” which he discerned in The Conqueror Inn; and in Tucson, Arizona, a book reviewer for Hoofs and Horns, an idiosyncratic but popular American rodeo magazine, enthusiastically took up Punshon’s cause, lavishing The Conqueror Inn with a veritable encomium: “One of the foremost British thriller-writers here gives us a first-class mystery, replete with creeps, thrills and tingles of foreboding as one grim scene builds into another and suspicion is expertly thrown in turn against each actor in this sinister drama of greed and hate couched in wartime datelines. … A better tale of dark deeds would be hard to come by.” T
his latter review likely would have particularly pleased the 72-year-old Punshon, who in the 1890s had partially spent several vagabond years of his adventurous young manhood punching cattle in the American West.

  In Golden Age British mystery the pub often is portrayed as a place of good cheer and hearty fellowship, despite the inconvenience of a little local murder or two; yet Punshon’s lonely moorland public house in The Conqueror Inn is anything but a cheerful abode, being rather a forbidding locus of desolation, deception and death. At the beginning of the novel Inspector Bobby Owen--whose superior, Colonel Glynne, chief constable of the Wychshire County Police, is “growing more and more used to leaving everything to the young man already recognized as his successor”—is driving though the “fresh, clean autumn air,” grateful for any excuse to get out from behind his desk, to investigate a report concerning the discovery of an abandoned box of banknotes a couple of miles distant from the isolated Conqueror Inn (so named because of a tale that William the Conqueror had been served with wine at the inn “when he and his men were on their way to lay the north country waste”). Bobby soon finds, however, that there is much more than a matter of lost banknotes at hand. Near where the box was discovered lies a newly dug grave that when disinterred gruesomely reveals the naked, mutilated body of an unidentified—and seemingly unidentifiable—man. “[C]oldly, deliberately, almost scientifically, the dead man’s face had been battered out of all resemblance to human features,” writes Punshon. “Bobby … had seen many strange and dreadful sights, but nothing, he felt, quite so shocking as this careful disfigurement of the dead, this refusal to allow to a dead man in his grave even a semblance of humanity.”

  Once again Punshon insightfully explores ageless human passions which can lead to violence, but he also for the first time in the Bobby Owen series draws significantly and fascinatingly on topical wartime questions, concerning which I will leave readers of The Conqueror Inn to discover for themselves. Punshon also enjoyably develops Bobby’s relationships both with his subordinate Sergeant Payne--“young and intelligent, with a first-class education--he had gone from a Midwych elementary to a Midwych secondary school,” the egalitarian author notes pointedly—and the woman who is very much Bobby’s equal, his wife Olive, who now routinely discusses Wychshire’s invariably fiendishly perplexing murder cases with her spouse, gently upbraiding him when she sees fit. “I don’t … call that deduction,” she challenges him at one point. “I call it guessing.” However, Punshon readers can rest assured that the tenacious Inspector Owen will, with an occasional nudge from Olive, get there in the end.

  Curtis Evans

  CHAPTER I

  PLAYING TRUANT

  INSPECTOR BOBBY OWEN, of the Midwych County Police, chief indeed of the Midwych County C.I.D., doubling with that office the post of secretary to the chief constable, Colonel Glynne, had an uneasy conscience.

  Because he was playing truant.

  He knew very well that this errand he was on should have been confided to a subordinate. He knew very well that at this moment he ought to be sitting in his office, before a paper-strewn table, dealing with all that flood of orders, instructions, regulations, counter orders, instructions, regulations, that the bureaucratic machine turned out day by day; calm, regular, and unceasing, as the procession of the seasons. Not one of all of them, of course, but its issue could be reasonably defended. None the less Bobby was inclined in his more rebellious moments to wonder if a severe rationing of such activities, every government office limited strictly to such or such a number each month, would seriously impede the war effort.

  However, for the time he had left all that behind. Sergeant Payne, young and intelligent, with a first-class education—he had gone from a Midwych elementary to a Midwych secondary school—could deal for to-day with the paper stuff. Meanwhile, in spite of the murmurings of a dissatisfied conscience, Bobby was thoroughly enjoying his drive through the fresh, clean, autumn air.

  It was weeks, and it seemed like years, since he had spent a day away from the office. He wished he had been able to bring Olive with him. But a policeman on duty has to be careful, and the company of a wife would have made this trip look too much like what it really was, a mere pleasure excursion.

  The road he was following was one he did not know well, even though his duty took him so often to and fro in the county, deputizing for the Colonel, who was growing more and more used to leaving everything to the young man already recognized as his successor. Driving had to be done with caution for the surface was bad—a second-class road the county surveyor had been inclined, in the stress of war time, to neglect of late. Then it had a good many sharp corners and awkward hairpin bends. It left the main Midwych and Scotland road some miles north of the city, served occasional small villages, isolated farms, country mansions, and then divided, one branch running on to join the Holyhead road, the other turning back to meet again the main Scottish route, having thus made a detour of about thirty miles or so.

  A little-used road then and less used than ever in these days of war with pleasure motoring nearly at a standstill and none of the new factories, airfields, camps, in the district it served before its division. To the east, as Bobby drove northward, lay in the distance Wychwood proper, a dense vast mass of woodland, where trees had grown and flourished, decayed and fallen and died, since times beyond the memory of man, before perhaps man was. Further on, east and south, lay the vast industrial district of which Midwych city was a centre. On Bobby’s other hand, to the west lay the bare uplands of Wychwood forest, waste land, thin and hungry, swept by every wind, giving scant sustenance to a few flocks of sheep, though bearing still the name of forest from that vast antiquity when ‘forest’ meant merely beyond the bounds, the desolate, outside lands.

  ‘Outside’ indeed all that lonely country seemed, with no hint anywhere of human life or habitation. It was this enormous loneliness that helped to give a touch of the bizarre to the odd story Bobby had managed to persuade the chief constable and himself ought to be investigated, as the message over the phone had requested, by an ‘experienced officer.’

  It was almost like driving through an uninhabited land, he thought, and he supposed that ancient Briton and Roman soldier, Norman knight and Tudor gallant, Roundhead and Cavalier, Georgian dragoon and the Home Guard of to-day, all had passed this way and would none of them have seen change or alteration.

  An ancient land and a lonely, and it was something of a relief when he saw in the distance a building that must, he supposed, be his destination.

  The Conqueror Inn.

  He paused to draw up for a moment to consult the large-scale map he had brought with him. No other building shown near, so this must be it, and who, he wondered, wanted an inn in so desolate a spot? And how did the innkeeper manage to make a living?

  The inn stood high, at a point whence the road descended in both directions. It had a grim, bare, weatherbeaten appearance, a defiant aspect to it somehow, as if it challenged the elements to do their worst. Behind it were a few outbuildings, and on the southern slope of the rising ground, whose height it crowned, were a few cultivated acres. On them a cow or two, some sheep, and a few pigs were visible. A farmer, or smallholder rather, was then apparently the tenant of the Conqueror Inn, as well as landlord, and that probably explained how he was able to achieve the difficult feat of continuing to exist.

  Outside the inn, Bobby drew up and alighted. He noticed that already, though it was barely closing time, the inn doors were shut. Somewhat cynically, he wondered if such strict obedience to the licensing laws was always practised, or whether an expected visit from the police had anything to do with this admirable adherence to the law. He sounded his horn. Nothing happened. So he went through the proscribed motions for immobilizing the car—pedantic perhaps out here in this wilderness, but officials must needs be pedants—and walked round to the rear of the building. A man carrying a pitchfork came from one of the outbuildings and stood watching him gravely. He did not speak and Bobb
y said:

  “Mr. Christopherson?”

  The other nodded. He was a big man with a big square head, and his enormous hands held the pitchfork like a weapon. More of a farmer than an innkeeper in his appearance, probably more in his element behind a plough than behind a bar, Bobby thought. He showed his card and said:

  “There was a ’phone message late last night. It was from you?”

  Mr. Christopherson nodded again. He seemed a man of few words. He glanced at the card, glanced at Bobby, and said in a deep, slow voice:

  “You’re young for an inspector. Come into the house and I’ll show you.”

  He moved towards the inn and Bobby followed him, slightly offended. He didn’t feel at all young. He doubted if he was really much younger than Christopherson himself, even though about this farmer-innkeeper there seemed to hang something of the ageless past of the lands in which he lived. A fantastic notion came into his mind that perhaps this man had always been here, and himself had watched the passage of Briton and Roman and knight and cavalier. An ageless man in an ageless land. He gave himself a little angry shake to get rid of such fantasies. Through a door so low both his guide and himself had to stoop to pass beneath, they entered a long, low kitchen, stone floored. A bright fire burned in a fireplace almost as big itself as many rooms in modern houses. It was of peat and it was bright because a woman was blowing it with a pair of long-handled bellows. She was tall and square and elderly. Bobby could not see her face clearly as her attitude hid it from him. She took not the least notice of their entry. She did not even turn round. At a table near the window a girl was kneading dough. She was tall and strong and young and the rhythmic movements of her arms and body as she worked had a kind of solemn grace and beauty of their own. She looked at the two men as they came in but did not speak. It was as though the eternal silence of the moors had penetrated here, too, and that here, too, things happened as they happened without need for comment or chatter. Hardly a pretty girl, for her features were too large and too irregular, but impressive in her way all the same. And slightly disconcerting, Bobby found the utter indifference with which her eyes, dark, sombre and hidden, swept over him and left him and returned to her task. It seemed to convey to him the message that war or no war the fundamental task of all was the making and baking and breaking of bread.