The Dark Garden: A Bobby Owen Mystery Read online

  Patricia Wentworth

  The Dark Garden

  Late in the afternoon a man, unidentified, had been seen to throw a glove into the Midwych, Wychshire and Southern Canal…

  OSMAN FORD said he would kill the lawyer Mr. Anderson. So when the latter is found dead, with a bullet in the back, the disagreeable Mr. Ford is top suspect. But the lawyer’s office was also a cauldron of repressed feelings, and not all the staff are sorry to see the lawyer’s demise. In particular, Inspector Bobby Owen fears the dark, brooding clerk Anne Earle. Will her quest for justice lead her to a terrible fate of her own, amid family secrets and lies? The novel combines a satisfying whodunit with elements of the fantastic and macabre, and contains some of Punshon’s best set-pieces.

  The Dark Garden was first published in 1941. It is the sixteenth of the Bobby Owen mysteries, a series 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

  To

  the members

  of that

  Battalion of the County of London Home Guard

  in

  whose guard room

  much of this book was conceived and written

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page/About the Book

  Dedication

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter I. Osman Ford’s Wrath

  Chapter II. The Farm

  Chapter III. Rose Briar Cottage

  Chapter IV. Messrs Castles

  Chapter V. Mr Blythe’s Problem

  Chapter VI. Missing

  Chapter VII. Facts and Surmise

  Chapter VIII. The Glove

  Chapter IX. Inquiry and Discovery

  Chapter X. Ursula’s Tears

  Chapter XI. Mrs Ford’s Anger

  Chapter XII. Castles’ Story

  Chapter XIII. Question of Alibi

  Chapter XIV. Alibi of a Glove

  Chapter XV. Various Possibilities

  Chapter XVI. Mrs Jordan Uneasy

  Chapter XVII. Anne Threatens

  Chapter XVIII. Her Own Father

  Chapter XIX. The Dark Garden

  Chapter XX. From Out The Pit

  Chapter XXI. Arrest

  Chapter XXII. Conclusion

  About the Author

  Also by E.R. Punshon

  Diabolic Candelabra – Title Page

  Diabolic Candelabra – Chapter One

  Copyright

  Introduction

  The years of the Second World War meant not only major changes in E.R. Punshon’s personal life but in his Bobby Owen detective fiction as well. After a successful investigation, as part of an unusual personal commission, into the strange slaying of a British citizen in a French village in Murder Abroad (1939), Detective Sergeant Bobby Owen left Scotland Yard and joined the county police force of Wychshire, where he doubles the parts of, as Punshon explains, “head of the not very extensive Wychshire C.I.D. with that of private secretary to the chief constable,” Colonel Glynne. Along with Four Strange Women (1940) and Ten Star Clues (1941), previously reprinted by Dean Street Press, seven additional Bobby Owen detective novels are set within the mysterious confines of Wychshire: The Dark Garden (1941), Diabolic Candelabra (1942), The Conqueror Inn (1943), Night’s Cloak (1944), Secrets Can’t Be Kept (1944), There’s a Reason for Everything (1945) and It Might Lead Anywhere (1947). In addition to being set in Wychshire, these seven novels constitute, along with Ten Star Clues, Punshon’s body of wartime crime fiction, though the war only starts to intrude significantly into Wychshire everyday life with The Conqueror Inn. Bobby takes the lead in all of Punshon’s fictive Wychshire murder investigations from The Dark Garden onward, Colonel Glynne being conveniently sidelined for various reasons. (In The Dark Garden he is suffering from a “bad attack of pleurisy,” while in later novels he often is in London, trying to obtain, despite being overage, some sort of overseas post in the armed services.)

  In contrast with Bobby Owen and his newlywed wife Olive Farrar, E.R. Punshon and Sarah Houghton, Punshon’s spouse of nearly four decades standing, never left London during the war, steadfastly remaining in the city even as German bombs rained down around their house on Nimrod Road, putting them in peril of their lives. In correspondence from October 1940, Dorothy L. Sayers and Anthony Gilbert (Lucy Beatrice Malleson), two of Punshon’s colleagues from the Detection Club, a social organization of many of Great Britain’s finest detective novelists, worriedly discussed the fortunes of the couple, both of whom were now nearly in their seventies. For her part Gilbert professed belief to Sayers that any bomb surely would deliberately go in another direction rather than fall anywhere in the vicinity of kindly Mr. Punshon. (See my 2011 CADS Supplement Was Corinne’s Murder Clued? The Detection Club and Fair Play, 1930-1953, p. 21.) Indeed, far from being put out by a bomb, Punshon during these months managed to complete Ten Star Clues, despite having to spend a great amount of time on duty with the Battalion of the County of London Home Guard. The sixteenth Bobby Owen detective novel, The Dark Garden, which followed Ten Star Clues into print later in 1941, fittingly carries a dedication from the author to his fellow members of the Battalion, “in whose guard room much of the book was conceived and written.”

  Set in June 1940 (“that dreadful month when all the world held its breath to watch the British Empire fall, when a Marshal of France was earning himself that title—“enfant chéri de la défaite” [darling of the defeat]--by which history will know him, when German officers were jovially inviting each other to dinner in London, when Britain, all unaware of the doom so unanimously pronounced, was making her public preparations and going about her private affairs in her usual and accustomed manner”), The Dark Garden presents Inspector Bobby Owen with a thorny problem involving Messrs Castles, a well-known firm of lawyers in Midwych, the county town of Wychshire. It all begins when Osman Ford, a farmer of most forbidding aspect, makes his way into Bobby’s--or rather Colonel Glynne’s--office, complaining that Nathaniel Anderson, the senior partner in Castles, is refusing to turn over to him funds the firm is holding in trust on behalf of Ford’s wife, funds which the proud and ambitious farmer needs to finance the expansion of Roman Ends, his 750-acre landholding located “on rising ground on the outskirts of the great Wychwood forest.” With some difficulty Bobby manages to send Ford packing, telling the outraged petitioner that his dispute with Castles simply is not a police matter. Soon Anderson goes missing, however, and Bobby finds that there are additional people besides Osman Ford who might have had some desire to do away with the lawyer, including the passionate Ann Earle, a secretary at Castles and Anderson’s reputed mistress, about whom there is “something oddly impressive … belonging much more to some heroine of old tragedy than to a twentieth-century office worker.” With The Dark Garden E.R. Punshon once again crafts a complex and compelling drama about the lethal interplay of powerful human emotions.

  Punshon himself would learn firsthand the challenges confronting those entrusted with funds when in 1946 he accepted, after much importuning from Dorothy L. Sayers, the office of Treasurer of the Detection Club. On account of the war the Club had essentially gone defunct for six years, and, at the time Punshon became Treasurer, no one was quite sure where what remained of the Detection Club’s prewar treasure actually was located. Commencing a lengthy search for the lost funds, Punshon eventually discovered a cache of Detection Club savings certificates, then worth about £185, which had been deposited to the Westminster Bank a few days before the London Blitz began on 7 September 1940. Aft
er an audit held with Richard Hull, an accountant and fellow Detection Club member best known today for his droll inverted mystery The Murder of My Aunt (1934), Punshon was pleased to report to Sayers that the Club had a bank balance of just over £300, close to £10,000 today in real price (see Corinne, p. 23). As far as we know, no one was murdered in the process.

  Curtis Evans

  CHAPTER I

  OSMAN FORD’S WRATH

  IN THE SEAT of the mighty, that is to say in the office chair of Colonel Glynne, chief constable of the Wychshire County Police, sat Inspector Bobby Owen, who doubled the parts of head of the not very extensive Wychshire C.I.D., with that of private secretary to the chief constable, just now absent from duty with a bad attack of pleurisy.

  On the table before Bobby was piled a formidable heap of the war-time instructions, counter instructions, circulars, regulations, with which he was dealing. Some he was reserving for future consideration, some required immediate attention, others he was putting aside for action by the deputy chief constable, Superintendent Allenson, an old time officer on the point of retirement and only too glad to leave to Bobby everything with which Bobby was willing to deal.

  At the moment he was wrinkling his forehead and rubbing perplexedly the tip of his nose over an elaborate scheme for a network of police blocks and controls whereby, necessity arising, parachutists, either as hordes of invaders or merely as solitary spies, could be swiftly dealt with. The scheme seemed to him clever enough but extremely complicated, so much so as to be very likely to break down in execution. It had been drawn up by one of the younger officers, and Bobby knew its author was very proud of it, so that any modification would have to be suggested with great tact, unless mortal offence were to be given. Bobby’s introduction into the force from London had roused a certain amount of jealousy and suspicion, since there were several of the senior officers who still held him for an intruder and thought his probable succession to the office of chief constable on the retirement of its present holder, in the nature of a slight to themselves. The measure of success he had achieved during his service with the Metropolitan police had earned him his present position, but that had not prevented murmurs about ‘favouritism’ and ‘influence’, and these prejudices he was still trying his best to overcome by showing himself as friendly as possible and very willing to accept help and advice.

  But it was going to be a difficult task to suggest the simplification he felt necessary without causing a good deal of that heart burning which makes difficult the smooth and efficient running of any organization, and so it was with a touch of relief that he relegated its solution to the future as he looked up to greet the visitor who had just been introduced. This was a tall burly man of middle age, with the weatherbeaten complexion of the outdoor worker, heavily built, with heavy, strongly marked features and small, close-set, suspicious eyes. He sat down with a kind of ponderous deliberation in the chair Bobby indicated, but did not speak, and Bobby, looking at the card brought to him, said:

  “Mr Osman Ford, isn’t it? What can we do for you?”

  Mr Osman Ford made no answer for a time. He continued to stare darkly and angrily at Bobby, his large hands planted on his knees, his square, powerful-looking body leaning stiffly forward. The impression he gave was of a forceful, somewhat arrogant personality, one intent on pursuing its own aims and possibly not too scrupulous about the means employed to attain those ends. There was even something a little disconcerting about the way in which he sat there, silent, still, and watchful, and it was with a touch of being, as it were, on guard in his voice that Bobby repeated:

  “Well, sir, what can we do for you?”

  “You’re the detective chap they fetched up along from London, for by way of being smarter than the chaps here?” Mr Ford asked, or, rather, asserted, in a voice like himself, deep, compelling, in it a curious undertone of suspicion and hostility.

  “I served in London before being transferred to Midwych,” Bobby agreed, not best pleased by the other’s remark. No business of his, Bobby thought. But a non-Midwych man had to be careful about treading on Midwych toes, and there was often a directness of speech about these people that was apt to sound challenging and even offensive to a Londoner, though not meant to be either. Bobby said: “I understood you wished to see us on a matter of some importance.”

  “That’s right,” Mr Ford answered. His small eyes grew angrier, his expression darkened, but still he did not explain. It was as if he were brooding over a secret grievance he was unwilling to bring into the light lest thereby he should lose some part of it. “That’s right,” he repeated. “Important.”

  “Well, sir, what is it?” Bobby asked, making now no attempt to conceal the impatience in his voice. “We are exceedingly busy. As you may see for yourself,” he added with a comprehensive wave of his hand towards the various small piles of papers covering his desk. “So I should be very glad if you could be as brief as possible.”

  But all the same he was well aware that nothing would persuade to haste the slow, angry obstinacy of the man before him.

  “Aye, I’m busy, too,” Mr Ford answered. “Maybe you’ll know the name—Osman Ford.” He paused, evidently expecting assent and Bobby was almost childishly pleased to shake his head even more emphatically than was necessary. “Of Roman Ends,” he said, and again paused as if for the sign of recognition that Bobby was still pleased not to be able to give since in fact he had never heard either of Osman Ford or of Roman Ends. “Seven hundred and fifty acres of the best and all in good heart,” Mr Ford continued, “and now seemingly I’m to break up old pasture that’s fed cattle since most like the Romans themselves were here tens of thousands of years ago.”

  Bobby thought this estimate of time a trifle exaggerated but made no comment. He waited, convinced now that the quickest way of getting rid of his visitor was to let him tell his story at his own pace, but sighing at the thought that every minute expended now would have to be made up later on. Mr Ford continued in his slow, forceful way:

  “That means capital. Capital. Up there in London they seem to think all land is just land, and as easy to switch from grain to pasture and back to roots as for a London politician to change his coat. Well, it ain’t. You’ve got to have your plans laid all ahead. So many head of cattle requiring so much pasture, so much home grown feed, so much to be bought, so much in roots, so much in grain, all settled and not so easy to unsettle again as them thinks that does it all on paper. There’s machinery to think of and labour that’s scarce even when it’s worse than bad, but at the end of it, it all comes back to capital. You’ve to feed the land if you want a return, just as you have to feed calves if you want fat steers.”

  “I’m afraid we can’t help you there,” Bobby said. “This is a police office.”

  Mr Osman Ford took no notice.

  “Capital I want and it’s my right to have,” he went on, “and I won’t say I haven’t it in my mind to take over the Roman Middles, two hundred acres, that is, and only needs handling to be better than good, even if the Middles will never be same as the Ends.” The anger left his small, dark eyes. A sort of heavy enthusiasm took its place, yet an enthusiasm still charged with defiance and mistrust, as if he foresaw an enmity it would be necessary to overcome. “The money’s there,” he said, “and Castles’ have it. But they won’t part. And for why? Not along of what they say but along of it’s not being there."

  To Bobby, this last reason seemed adequate, even though in conflict with the remark made just previously. He said:

  “I’m sorry, Mr Ford, but all this does not seem to be in any way a police matter. I’m afraid we can’t help you.”

  He said this with great decision and as he spoke rose from his chair, hoping that Mr Ford would follow his example. He was disappointed. Mr Ford remained more solidly, more securely seated than ever. It looked as if nothing but physical force—and considerable physical force at that—would ever get him out of it. He said:

  “Aye, it’s a police
matter all right. You’ll see. Or I wouldn’t be here.”

  Impressed in spite of himself by the heavy, slow power of the man, Bobby sat down again. It was almost as if he were in contact with some elemental force of nature it was useless to attempt either to deflect or to resist.

  “Castles’,” Mr Ford said suddenly. “You’ll know them.” Without giving Bobby the time to signify the assent he could not on this occasion deny, Mr Ford continued: “Five thousand pounds it is, them sitting on it tight as a broody hen on her nest and not with one penny will they part. For why? Where is it? That’s a police matter all right, isn’t it?” he asked triumphantly. “That’s your job, Mr Detective that’s for you to find out—where the money’s gone. That’s what I want done.”

  He relaxed, letting his square, stiff body sink back into his chair as at a task accomplished. He said again while Bobby watched him in puzzled silence:

  “That’s a police matter all right. Five thousand pounds. That’s a job for a Grade One detective. I’ve heard of you. Stick to a job like a pup to a root, they say, till you have it all worked out. Well, work that out. That’s what I want. My wife’s money. Five thousand pounds. Detect it.”

  “Mr Ford,” said Bobby, amused, annoyed and a little puzzled too, “do you mean that you are accusing Messrs Castles, the lawyers, of being in possession of money that is yours?”

  “Aye. That’s right. My money. Belongs to my wife. I want it. For the farm. I don’t say that I mightn’t take over the Dry Fields, as well as Roman Ends and the Middles. That’d make all of twelve hundred acres.” He spoke those last words, longingly, almost lovingly, behind them still the slow force that seemed characteristic of the man. “Castles’,” he repeated. “The lawyer’s. Not Georgie Blythe. It was him humming and hawing and being uneasy like that put me on it. Old Nat Anderson it is, him as did down young Castles, and got the firm into his own hands same as he got my money and means to stick to it if he can.”