The Dusky Hour Read online

  E.R. PUNSHON

  The Dusky Hour

  The hour of dusk was the climax in the strange case of the man found dead in the chalk pit. Who was the murdered man? And why did so many clues lead to that infamous London nightclub, the ‘Cut and Come Again’?

  E.R. Punshon leads the redoubtable Sergeant Bobby Owen and his readers on a dizzy chase through a maze of suspicions to a surprise ending – though the clues are there for anyone astute enough to interpret them.

  The Dusky Hour is the ninth of E.R. Punshon’s acclaimed Bobby Owen mysteries, first published in 1937 and part of a series which eventually spanned thirty-five novels.

  INTRODUCTION

  “It was dusk, the dusky hour that lingers in the English countryside before the closing in of night....”

  “Murder was certainly a dreadful thing, but also, in a way, impersonal. It was like a war in Spain, a famine in China, a revolution in Mexico or Brazil, tragic, deplorable, but also comfortably remote....[Now] Mr. Moffatt was beginning to feel vaguely uncomfortable. Murder seemed somehow to be creeping near--too near. No longer was it merely a paragraph in the paper, something fresh to chat about, an occasion for a comfortable shiver over a comfortable glass of wine.”

  E. R. Punshon’s suspenseful and engrossing ninth Bobby Owen detective novel, The Dusky Hour, was not well-received by the Bible of stout detective fiction orthodoxy, originally published over forty years ago but still turned to today for instruction by traditionalist mystery fans: Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor’s A Catalogue of Crime. In its general dismissal of The Dusky Hour, Barzun and Taylor’s Catalogue even condemns the “adolescent name” of Punshon’s series sleuth, Detective-Sergeant Bobby Owen. Evidently in the opinion of the august co-authors of the Catalogue, a mystery writer’s investigator was not allowed something so vulgar as a diminutive cognomen, even one that, in the case of Punshon’s Bobby Owen, calls to mind actual British slang for a cop. Yet despite this later carping from the Catalogue, during his lifetime Punshon was a great favorite of two Golden Age stalwarts of Great Britain’s Detection Club, the renowned Dorothy L. Sayers and Sayers’ esteemed successor as Sunday Times crime fiction reviewer, Milward Kennedy. (Punshon became a member of the Detection Club in 1933, three years after the formation of the prestigious social organization, of which Sayers and Kennedy were, along with other notable mystery writers like Agatha Christie, Anthony Berkeley and Freeman Will Crofts, co-founders.) Sayers’s rave review of Punshon’s debut Bobby Owen mystery, Information Received (1933), gave a great lift-off to the Bobby Owen series (see my introduction to that novel), while Kennedy declared explicitly of The Dusky Hour, “I do not think that Mr. Punshon, another front-rank man, has ever done better work than this.”

  Why the divergence between these two pairs of generally discerning critics, Barzun and Taylor, Sayers and Kennedy? Surely it arose from their differing aesthetic views. Looking back at the Golden Age of detective fiction from the vantage point of the 1970s, the pining traditionalists Barzun and Taylor no doubt would have preferred from The Dusky Hour a more strictly functional narrative, along the lines of, say, a mystery by Christie or Crofts. The Dusky Hour, on the other hand, is a fairly long book for its period, and Punshon’s narrative style is expansive, his sentences sometimes structurally rambunctious. In the midst of the 1930s, however, both Sayers and Kennedy had enthusiastically embraced the ascending movement within the mystery genre to merge the puzzle-oriented detective story with the mainstream, literary novel, making it more emotionally compelling and psychologically credible; and they deemed Punshon an important player in this bold artistic advance, an author to be celebrated, not castigated, for his narrative flourishes.

  To be sure, Milward Kennedy commended the plot of The Dusky Hour, which concerns the discovery of a dead body in a car dumped into a Berkshire chalk pit (in a case of life imitating art, the novel preceded by nine years England’s notorious real-life chalk pit murder, committed in the neighboring county of Surrey by the infamous Thomas Ley) and the net of suspicion that tightens around the inhabitants of three nearby country houses, including Sevens, the hideous “sham and inappropriate” Victorian Gothic residence of the local squire, Mr. Moffatt, and his young adult children, Ena and Noll. Also implicated in the affair are some Americans with agendas and denizens of the Cut and Come Again, a dubious arty West End nightclub, introduced by Punshon in his immediately preceding detective novel, Mystery of Mr. Jessop (1937). In my own view, the mystery plot of The Dusky Hour, which culminates in a final chapter with sixteen pages of elucidation, is of a complexity that ought to please the most exacting of puzzle fans. Whenever I read the novel, I invariably find myself admiring how Bobby, already at the beginning of the story called to the scene by the county constabulary because they believe an emissary from Scotland Yard may be able to identify the murdered man, fits all the author’s intricately cut puzzle pieces together. Yet Milward Kennedy also praised--again most astutely, I believe--the “sharply and economically” drawn characters in The Dusky Hour, as well as the novel’s writing, pronouncing it “irreproachable in style” and “spiced by the author’s wide reading and acute observation.”

  There indeed are nicely individuated characters and pleasingly unorthodox authorial asides that enhance this fine crime tale. For example, Punshon on several occasions wryly mocks the High Tory, agrarian conservatism of Mr. Moffatt, as in the following passage, which makes mention of a prominent, real-life English newspaper with a left-leaning, working-class readership: “Mr. Moffatt nodded. He knew Norris well enough, the constable stationed at the village, a civil, intelligent fellow, though less active against poaching than one could have wished, and reported, though one hoped untruly, to have been seen reading the Daily Herald--a bad sign.” Yet again, a Punshon mystery confounds long-prevalent conventional wisdom that the Golden Age English detective novel invariably expressed instinctive longing for the more securely fixed social structures of the Victorian and Edwardian eras.

  Through the perspective of the liberal-minded Bobby Owen, the author also indicates doubts about the efficacy of both capital punishment and harsh police interrogation (“It was [Bobby’s] experience that one thing told willingly was worth half a dozen resulting from what are called ‘third degree’ methods”); and he recognizes that English police actually do need to concern themselves, as a matter of law, with obtaining search warrants before conducting a search--surely something that would have come as news to the police characters of Freeman Wills Crofts, whose implacable popular series crime buster, Inspector Joseph French, armed with his startling array of razor blades, bent wires and skeleton keys, routinely flouts English law on this subject with cheerful abandon. In The Dusky Hour I for my part was positively thrilled when a character--a chauffeur no less--evicts the police from his abode after they admit to him that they have no warrant to search it.

  On this matter I say three cheers for the people! And three cheers as well for Mr. Punshon and his Detective-Sergeant Bobby Owen--a likable, young British cop who once again cleverly cracks a most complex case, adolescent name or not.

  Curtis Evans

  CHAPTER 1

  SHARE-PUSHER?

  The little man with the round red smiling face, the soft alluring voice, the ingenuous eyes, sipped with keen appreciation his glass of port, vintage, Dow, 1904; a sound drink.

  “Yes,” he was saying meditatively, “I sold him those Woolworth shares for £20. He wasn’t keen; thought they were speculative; talked about preferring something sounder. But he took them all right. Now he’s drawing £20,000 a year from them. Not so bad, eh?” The speaker paused and gave a faint chuckle. “I won’t deny,” he said, “that if I had had the least idea how that deal was going to turn out, I mightn’t have broken my fi
rst rule, even though it’s to that I owe what success in business has come my way.”

  “What rule is that?” asked his host, Mr. Moffatt, a big, heavy-looking man with a general air of liking to do himself well and at the same time of trying to keep himself in condition by plenty of open-air exercise.

  The other sipped his port again. His name was Pegley – Edward George Pegley, generally known as “Peg” or “Ted,” for he was a genial soul and hated all formality. He spoke with a faint American accent. Born in a London suburb, he had spent a good many years in Denver, Colorado.

  “My first rule,” he explained seriously, “and I’ve never broken it yet, is that if I know a good thing, I offer it to my clients first. My first duty, I consider, is their interest. In that respect I rank myself with a lawyer, a doctor. The client comes first. Professional duty. Only if my clients pass it do I consider it for myself. Even then –” He shrugged his shoulders. “Lack of capital, and then again – not my business. I’m not an investor. I’m an adviser of investors. If my clients got the idea that I was nosing round for good things for myself, my standing would be gone.” He paused, grinned, winked. “But I own up,” he said, “if I had dreamed that that £20 – good thing though I knew it to be – was going to turn into a steady £20,000 a year, I should have advised it all the same, but when my client turned it down at first, perhaps I shouldn’t have gone on pressing it quite so strongly. All the same, I do feel a bit pleased I can say my rule stands unbroken. I don’t, for instance, own a single share in Cats Cigarettes, though I’ve advised three or four clients to make investments in Cats that bring them in at least a hundred per cent – more, when they bought early. I remember one man – a bank manager – was so impressed by what I told him that he went home, mortgaged his house, furniture, insurance policy – raised fifteen hundred, I think it was – sank the whole lot in Cats Ordinary. I was a bit taken aback myself; more than I had bargained for. His wife was furious; thought he was mad; wept, hysterics, threatened to leave him, sent me a letter from her lawyer threatening I don’t quite know what. Then he died. Wife thought she was ruined. Talked about learning typing and shorthand.

  “Now she draws a steady £3,000 a year from that investment, lives in a swell West End flat, learns contract bridge instead of shorthand and typing. I must say she sends me a case of whisky every Christmas and that’s more than some clients do, no matter how much they’ve profited. Of course, I’ve had my fee, so that’s all right.”

  “It sounds like a fairy-tale,” said Mr. Moffatt, listening greedily, his eyes alight, his port forgotten – unprecedentedly.

  There was a third man present, sitting opposite Mr. Pegley. He was tall, thin, active-looking, with a small head on broad shoulders and a large imposing Roman nose above the tiny moustache and the small pointed imperial that in these days of shaven chins helped to give him his distinctive and even distinguished appearance. His long, loose limbs ended in enormous hands and feet, and on one hand shone a valuable-looking diamond ring, a solitary stone set in platinum. He seemed between forty and fifty years of age, and at the back of his head was beginning to show a bald patch that he admitted smilingly worried him a little, so that, in an endeavour to cure it, he had taken to going about without a hat. He had a habit of silence that added weight to his words when he spoke; grey, keen eyes; an aloof, imperturbable, slightly disdainful manner; and, when he chose to produce it, a most charming, winning smile that seemed to show a store of geniality and friendliness behind his somewhat formal air. His name was Larson – Leopold Leonard Larson. He was in business in the City, and, though he had listened to Mr. Pegley’s monologue in his habitual silence, he had stirred once or twice uneasily in his chair. He was spending the week-end at Sevens, Mr. Moffatt’s place near the Berkshire boundary, and Mr. Pegley had not seemed best pleased to find him there when he himself arrived from London to dine and talk business. He was watching Mr. Larson now with eyes that had grown alert and wary as he went on chatting.

  “More than I can understand,” he said, “especially after living so long in the States, the way people on this side leave their money as good as dead. An American would think himself crazy if he kept half his capital on deposit account or tied up in the good old two and a half consols that may have been all right in our fathers’ time, when land was land and brought in a decent return, and all a country gentleman needed was a trifle of ready cash coming in twice a year to meet any delay in the payment of the rents, or any extra estate expense – a new row of cottages, a new wing to the house, or what not. But to keep good money tied up like that to-day – why, it’s like a farmer keeping his seed corn in the barn instead of sowing it in the field. Safe in the barn, no doubt, but where’s next year’s harvest?”

  “Ah,” breathed Mr. Moffatt, and he pushed his glass of wine away – a thing that he had never done in all his life before – and he forgot to pass the decanter to Mr. Larson, ruefully aware his own glass was empty, and had been for some time. “Ah,” said Mr. Moffatt again.

  “I don’t know why they do it,” Mr. Pegley protested earnestly. “I don’t know even how they meet their liabilities in these days, with all the taxes they clap on land. Why, to-day, the five thousand acres in a ring fence our fathers used to dream of – more a liability than an asset.”

  “Pretty heavy liability, too,” declared Mr. Moffatt, still neglectful of that excellent and sound port of the 1904 vintage, still forgetful of Larson’s empty glass, “and you’ve got to pay taxes on that liability, too – talk about four and six in the pound! Jolly lucky if you get off with double that.”

  “I know, I know,” said Mr. Pegley, with a world of sympathy in his soft, caressing tones.

  “I admit,” said Mr. Larson, but a little as if he deeply regretted having to agree with anything Mr. Pegley said, “I admit the landed classes are at present most unfairly taxed. The trouble is, Moffatt,” he told their host, with one of his rare and charming smiles, “you country gentlemen don’t command votes enough. I was dining” – he paused, checked himself on the edge of what would evidently have been a breach of confidence –”I have personal knowledge,” he went on, “that the Chancellor has been told so himself in the plainest language. He admitted it; all he said was, he could do nothing. As the – the person I am speaking of said afterwards, ‘Politicians never can do anything.’”

  Mr. Moffatt expressed a brief but lurid hope anent the future of all politicians.

  Mr. Larson, twiddling his empty glass, for his host was still far too absorbed to remember the port, relapsed into his accustomed silence. Mr. Pegley went on talking. Mr. Moffatt continued to listen, to listen as uncertain heirs listen to the reading of a rich man’s will.

  “I mustn’t give names,” said Mr. Pegley smilingly, “but I can assure you for one list of investments my clients show me that I can O.K., take my fee for examining, and never worry about again, I get half a dozen that are simply deplorable in their neglect of opportunity, and at least one or two where a very slight readjustment can treble the return. Even in a really good list there is often opportunity for a change that may mean a few hundreds extra with equal security – not to be sneezed at these days. I remember after the war – I had just come out of hospital and was trying to pick up the threads again – I was shown a list; £50,000 capital. A lump in the two and a half’s – good enough if two and a half suits you and you can meet your social position on it. Another lump in the five per cent war loan – good enough then, but, as I told my client, liable to a cut as soon as the Government was ready.”

  “Ah,” said Mr. Moffatt again, thinking ruefully of his comfortable little £100 a year from war loan abruptly and bewilderingly turned into £70.

  “The rest,” Mr. Pegley went on, “the weirdest stuff you ever saw. I remember one item. Three thousand in a dead alive old family business that just about kept itself going but had a valuable freehold that made the capital safe. Well, I drew up a scheme for that man. No. Thanked me, but wouldn’t change a thing. His
look-out. I got my fee. Whether he acted on my advice or not was his affair. I met him a few months back. He was getting twelve hundred a year from his consols. His thousand from war loan had been cut to £700. The rest of his capital brought him about £500. His estate in the Cotswolds put him in wrong a tidy sum every year.”

  Mr. Moffatt groaned sympathetically. His own land did not “put him in wrong” by any means, but when he looked at his yearly outlay he often believed it did.

  “Meant he had under a thou, to keep up his position on couldn’t be done, of course. Well, believe me or not,” said Mr. Pegley, using a favourite expression of his, “that man still had by him the list of suggested investments shown in the scheme I drew up for him. The first item had gone down the drain – total loss. It happens even with a deal you feel sure of, though I had marked it ‘Speculative.’ But the rest showed a return for that year of grace as near £17,000 per annum as makes no difference. I admit that was partly because the other item I had marked ‘Speculative’ had turned up trumps – much better than I expected, though I thought it good. That happens, too. It was bringing in more that year than the whole of the poor devil’s actual income – and then some. Not so bad, eh? I agree it was a gold-mine, and therefore a wasting asset. But, all the same, good for another twenty years in full yield and for another twenty tailing off. Besides the chance of another strike. ‘If I had done as you advised’ he told me, looking a bit thin about the gills; and then the bus he was waiting for because he couldn’t afford a taxi came along, and he jumped on. I felt a bit sorry for him – and sorry there wouldn’t be any Christmas whisky turning up from him either. I own up, I do appreciate it when clients show they haven’t quite forgotten.”

  He sighed sentimentally and lapsed into silence. Mr. Moffatt continued to stare solemnly at his glass of port, still forgetting to drink it, still forgetting to pass on the decanter. He was lost in dreams, dreams of golden streams pouring automatically into his banking account, enormous ceaseless quarterly dividends declared by benevolent directors for the benefit of their shareholders. Why not? he thought. Mr. Larson, with the regretful look at the motionless decanter of one who finally abandons hope, took a pencil and card from his pocket and began to write in his small, precise hand. Mr. Pegley watched him sideways, scowling a little. Mr. Moffatt woke suddenly from his abstraction.