Music Tells All: A Bobby Owen Mystery Read online

  E.R. Punshon

  Music Tells All

  “Gets on your nerves, doesn’t it? I mean, that playing of hers. I’ve never heard anything like it.”

  “I haven’t either,” Bobby said.

  BOBBY OWEN (now ‘temporary-acting-junior-under-deputy-assistant-commissioner’ of the C.I.D.) and his wife Olive are house-hunting. Finding the perfect country home, every prospect pleases … until they meet their neighbours, including the odd, piano-playing Miss Bellamy, and Mr. Fielding, whose jollity is unsettling. The incessant piano music seems to jar on everyone, and Bobby Owen even wonders if the recent murder of a stranger might have been provoked by it. The true significance of the music, and what it has to do with a recent jewellery theft, is at the heart of a classic mystery set in the English countryside.

  Music Tells All was first published in 1948, the twenty-fourth of the Bobby Owen mysteries, a series eventually including thirty-five novels. This edition features a new 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

  Epigraph

  Introduction by Curtis Evans

  Chapter I HOUSE TO LET

  Chapter II MUSIC OF DOUBT

  Chapter III CROSSED FINGERS

  Chapter IV HOUSE AT LAST

  Chapter V INEFFECTIVE PURSUIT

  Chapter VI INEFFECTIVE SEARCH

  Chapter VII COSTUME JEWELLERY

  Chapter VIII THE REAL THING

  Chapter IX SUPERINTENDENT BELL

  Chapter X MURDER BEGUN

  Chapter XI DUD STUFF

  Chapter XII NIETZSCHE IN MUSIC

  Chapter XIII CROSS-EXAMINATION

  Chapter XIV WEALTHY CHAUFFEUR

  Chapter XV THEORY AND DOUBT

  Chapter XVI DOUBTFUL FOUNDATIONS

  Chapter XVII THE PASSER BY

  Chapter XVIII NOCTURNAL TRYST

  Chapter XIX A HANDKERCHIEF

  Chapter XX MURDER AGAIN

  Chapter XXI ON SPECIAL LEAVE

  Chapter XXII RHODA’S DENIAL

  Chapter XXIII SIMPLE TEST

  Chapter XXIV PSYCHOLOGICAL STUFF

  Chapter XXV DIFFERING INTERPRETATIONS

  Chapter XXVI SOUND ALIBI?

  Chapter XXVII PURSUING MUSIC

  Chapter XXVIII IDENTIFICATION

  Chapter XXIX POUSSINS AU HENRI QUATRE

  Chapter XXX THE END IS NOT YET

  Chapter XXXI FURTHER DOUBTS

  Chapter XXXII AFTER DINNER

  Chapter XXXIII SOME SUGGESTIONS

  Chapter XXXIV ATTRACTION-REPULSION

  Chapter XXXV CONCLUSION

  About the Author

  The Bobby Owen Mysteries

  The House of Godwinsson – Title Page

  The House of Godwinsson – Chapter One

  Copyright

  “That two and two make four, and never five nor three,

  The heart of man has long been sore, and long is like to be.”

  —A.E. HOUSMAN

  Introduction

  “Bobby,” [Olive] gasped, all trembling with excitement, “listen to this. ‘To Let. On a three-year term. Attractive country cottage. Four bed, two rec., garage. All services. Large garden. Twenty miles from town. Rail and ’bus convenient. References required. Apply: Box 3752.’ Oh, do you think … ?”

  “No,” said Bobby, “I don’t. Too good to be true. Practical joke, very likely.”

  But Olive refused to think so basely of human nature.

  “I am going to answer it,” she said firmly.

  Some mystery writers from the Golden Age of detective fiction had so many clever murders in their minds that they needed more than one series sleuth to investigate them all on paper. Over the course of her crime writing career Agatha Christie, for example, set a whole pack of fictional detectives--Hercule Poirot, Miss Jane Marple, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, Parker Pyne, Harley Quin, Superintendent Battle--chasing after her ingeniously conceived criminals. Superintendent Battle, a comparatively minor figure in the Christie crime fiction canon, appeared not only solo in a few novels but with Hercule Poirot in Christie’s Cards on the Table, a 1936 mystery mashup which also saw the debut in novel form of Poirot’s future investigative gal pal, crime writer and Christie self-portrait Ariadne Oliver. Miss Marple, on the other hand, though Christie’s only other true Great Detective besides Poirot never crossed paths with the brilliant little Belgian in any of the author’s books, to the disappointment of fans around the world. However, in his 24th Bobby Owen detective novel, the superlative Music Tells All (1948), E.R. Punshon in this case went where the Queen of Crime evidently dared not tread, having Sergeant (now Superintendent) Bell, one of the two sleuths from his earlier, critically-lauded “Carter and Bell” mystery series, investigate a murder case in tandem with Bobby Owen.

  Perhaps comparing Sergeant Bell with Miss Marple is not strictly accurate, for by 1948 Miss Marple’s fame as a sleuth was waxing, while Bell’s had most definitely waned. After only a couple of appearances in book form before the Second World War (one novel and a short story collection), Miss Marple in the 1940s appeared in two new novels, The Body in the Library (1942) and The Moving Finger (1943). Moreover, the novel which arguably is Miss Marple’s investigative tour de force, A Murder Is Announced (1950), was lurking, so to speak, just around the corner. Sergeant Bell, on the other hand, had debuted with Inspector Carter in E.R. Punshon’s The Unexpected Legacy in 1929 (a year before Miss Marple made her first bow in novel form in The Murder at the Vicarage) and as a co-sleuth with Carter had solved his fifth and seemingly final case, chronicled merely three years later in Truth Came Out (1932). One might justly speculate that comparatively few of even Punshon’s most devoted Bobby Owen fans recalled Sergeant Bell by the time Punshon finally resurrected his original series sleuth for a joint investigative outing with his current star detective in 1948.

  Those late Forties readers who did remember Sergeant Bell had reason to welcome the policeman’s return in Music Tells All. Back in the Thirties the five-book Carter and Bell series had been highly praised by reviewers, including Dorothy L. Sayers, a warm admirer indeed not only of Bobby Owen but of Carter and Bell, whom she affectionately dubbed “that blest pair of sirens.” The highly original conceit of the Carter and Bell series was that in truth it was the self-effacing Sergeant Bell who did all the hard work of actually collecting facts and deducing solutions, though it was Inspector Carter, a consummate publicity seeker and headline grabber, who received all credit and promotions. It was as if the Sherlock Holmes series had been reconceptualized with Holmes as a preening fraud and Watson as a wise drudge. That by 1948 the confidently pessimistic Bell had, seemingly against all professional odds, made it up the career ladder to the post of county superintendent must have gratified Punshon fans who still recalled the melancholy policeman, who pleasingly stays true to form in Music Tells All, as if he had never been away for sixteen years.

  Even without the presence of Superintendent Bell, Music Tells All would stand as one of the best of Punshon’s Bobby Owen mysteries from the 1940s. This well-plotted and interestingly-peopled novel constitutes a key turning point in the series, marking the return of Bobby and his wife Olive from Wychshire, the county where the couple spent the war years (as chronicled by Punshon in nine novels, beginning with Four Strange Women and ending with It Might Lead Anywhere), to the environs of London. In the previous Bobby Owen novel, Helen Passes By (1947), Bobby, wearied with local politics in Wychshire, accepted a position with Scotla
nd Yard as deputy assistant commissioner. In that novel, Bobby had been specifically requested to take on an especially sensitive murder case involving a certain titled personage, and by his successful conclusion of which he had saved the current Government “from the possibility of a few unpleasant moments of question time in the House [of Commons].”

  In Music Tells All, however, a murder case comes most unexpectedly to Bobby and Olive, after the couple leases, in what seems a remarkable bargain during a time of drastic housing shortage, the enchanting Fern Cottage, located near the village of Much Middles, twenty miles from London. Soon Bobby and Olive are looking with uneasy suspicion at their new neighbors: the charming and chatty Mr. Fielding, lessor of the cottage; taciturn Miss Bellamy, who manages making omelettes with fresh-laid, rather than dried, eggs (rather a feat in postwar austerity England) and plays the piano with disturbing intensity; Biggs, Mr. Fielding’s handsome chauffeur, who is said to visit Miss Bellamy; Alf Cann, formerly Mr. Fielding’s chauffeur and currently something of a ne’er-do-well, and his snappish aunt, Miss Cann; Miss Rhoda Rogers, lately demobilized from the A.T.S. and now residing with her brother, George, a prickly pacifist; and even the local vicar, Mr. Gayton, who idealistically insists that “It is less important. … to bring a murderer to justice than to bring him to repentance.”

  To which Superintendent Bell gloomily replies, with his characteristic pessimism about human nature: “In my experience … they only start repenting when they’re caught.”

  Curtis Evans

  CHAPTER I

  HOUSE TO LET

  “If,” said Olive moodily, “we wanted a house with twenty bedrooms and ten bathrooms, we could pick and choose.”

  “But,” remarked Bobby, a trifle nervously, for he was never quite sure to what lengths Olive might not be driven in her desperation, “we don’t, do we?”

  Olive thought the remark superfluous and unhelpful. She said so. Then she said:

  “What’s the good of being a what-d’you-call-it at Scotland Yard if you haven’t a roof to your head?”

  “I am not,” said Bobby at his most dignified, “a what-d’you-call-it at Scotland Yard. I am temporary-acting-junior-under-deputy-assistant-commissioner—unattached.”

  “Don’t use so many long words,” said Olive.

  “Well, head cook and bottle washer might convey the same idea,” Bobby conceded, “but still we have got a roof to our heads, haven’t we?”

  “An hotel roof,” Olive said. “What’s the good of that except to keep out the rain? Especially when all they want is to get you out so they can get in someone else who’ll pay more. Especially us, because they daren’t overcharge a—a cop,” said Olive, who knew wives should never allow their husbands to get above themselves. She added: “Old Mrs. Hague is being pushed off.”

  “No loss,” grunted Bobby.

  “She was rude to one of the chamber-maids,” said Olive, slightly awe-struck, “and the maid complained so Mrs. Hague has to go. The manager said he could have as many guests as he wanted but maids mattered.”

  “Mrs. Hague was rude to us,” observed Bobby, and Olive pointed out that the manager didn’t mind that. Guests, he considered, could settle their own affairs, but he had to look after the staff, and to-day the staff is always right. Bobby said he supposed he must be going. He had a dull day before him, he said. Nothing but a lot of dry routine work. Any intelligent typist could do it just as well. Olive, who had been looking at the paper, gave a sudden startled exclamation and grabbed him by the arm.

  “Bobby,” she gasped, all trembling excitement, “listen to this. ‘To Let. On a three-year term. Attractive country cottage. Four bed, two rec., garage. All services. Large garden. Twenty miles from town. Rail and ’bus convenient. References required. Apply: Box 3752.’ Oh, do you think … ?”

  “No,” said Bobby, “I don’t. Too good to be true. Practical joke, very likely.”

  But Olive refused to think so basely of human nature.

  “I am going to answer it,” she said firmly.

  “What is one more twopence ha’penny stamp among so many?” Bobby asked and departed.

  Bobby thought of it no more. Olive tried not to. No good indulging in wishful thinking. But two days later she found a letter waiting for her on the breakfast table. She opened it without expectation. She read it again to make sure. Then she gasped: “Bobby. Look,” but could get no further.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Bobby, who had just arrived, fresh from shaving in cold water because there was no hot, as the hotel’s stock of coal had run out. He said: “The coffee can’t be any worse than usual and this isn’t the morning for bacon—or anything else much,” he added, surveying the bleak prospect on the breakfast table.

  “It’s an order to view,” said Olive faintly.

  “View what?” asked Bobby.

  “That cottage. You remember? The advertisement I answered. There’s an order to view. It says how to get there. Look.”

  Bobby looked. Doubtfully. He said:

  “You can bet your life there’s a snag somewhere. Most likely it’s been bombed and repaired by the village carpenter. Or burnt down. Or the previous tenants all died of smallpox.”

  “Bobby, be quiet,” ordered Olive.

  “Or it’s haunted,” Bobby continued relentlessly. “A poltergeist very likely,” and Olive looked troubled, for recently they had both listened to a broadcast about poltergeists and Olive’s general faith in the stability of furniture in general and lumps of coal in particular was not yet fully restored.

  But she rallied bravely.

  “I don’t care if there is,” she said, untruthfully. “Better a poltergeist and a house than no poltergeist and no house. Ring up the Yard and tell them you can’t come to-day. ‘Urgent private affairs’ is what you say, isn’t it?”

  “Just like that?” asked Bobby.

  “Just like that,” said Olive firmly. “And do be quick. I expect there’ll be dozens and hundreds of people there and a queue miles long. Don’t let’s bother about breakfast.”

  “My girl,” said Bobby, and now it was his turn to be firm, “you sit down and eat what there is to eat—if any.”

  Olive sighed but obeyed. After all, even a husband must be humoured at times, and Bobby’s appetite was one thing that remained constant in a kaleidoscopic world.

  “Only do be quick,” she urged.

  “No good breaking our necks for nothing,” Bobby told her. “There’s sure to be a snag in it somewhere. No need to advertise if there wasn’t. Besides, I may not be able to get away.”

  But he knew, and so did Olive, that there was not likely to be any difficulty. For at present his position at the Yard was undefined, his duties and responsibilities not yet clearly laid down. In a week or two there was to be a conference at which the work of the department would be re-organized. Bobby had an idea that his job would be largely advising, helping and directing both the new men joining a G.I.D. sadly depleted during the war, and those returning after six years in the forces. All would need instruction in the new methods available for fighting the new methods always being evolved in the underworld. It was a recent case he had managed to bring to a successful conclusion, so saving the Government of the day from the possibility of a few unpleasant moments at question time in the House, and even from the risk of the loss of votes in the country, that had earned him his present appointment. He had a feeling that perhaps it was really intended to keep him in reserve for emergencies. But emergencies are rare, even in these sadly troubled days, and no doubt he would find his time fully occupied with instructing and advising till the Yard could adapt itself to new peacetime conditions. So far, however, he had had little to do except routine work. Not that he minded. A period of comparative leisure was welcome enough while he himself settled down in new surroundings and while Olive wrestled with her housekeeping problems—or rather, tried to find a house to keep.

  “I suppose,” she said now, as impatiently she watched Bobby chew
ing his way through what the hotel management called ‘omelette aux choux’ because they thought it sounded better in French, “it wouldn’t be any good sending a telegram or something to say we’re taking it?”

  “It would not,” said Bobby. “For one thing there’s no ’phone number and no address, except the cottage itself and most likely that’s empty. For another, there’s sure to be a snag in it somewhere and probably a pretty big one. Something fishy somewhere.”

  “I don’t know how you can be so horrid,” Olive protested. “If there is,” she added ominously, “I don’t suppose I shall ever forgive you. For goodness gracious sake, hurry up and tell the Yard and get the car out. There isn’t a moment to lose,” and in her mind’s eye she saw an ever-lengthening queue outside that attractive cottage, with themselves always at the far end. “It’s no good looking for the marmalade,” she added, “we finished the preserve ration the day before yesterday, and besides, you can’t possibly want to eat any more.”

  “More?” asked Bobby, surprised. “Did you say ‘more’? Oh, well, I suppose ‘more’ is a relative term.”

  However, he went off then to get the car and make sure there was enough of the petrol ration left for the needs of their trip. Fortunately, when they arrived at their destination, it was to find all Olive’s gloomy anticipations of mile-long queues totally unfounded. A quiet and peaceful scene, with no sign anywhere of the eager, clamouring crowd they had both expected. The house itself really had, just as the advertisement said, an attractive appearance. It stood well back from the road in a large well-tended garden and the design was simple and pleasant. There was a tiled verandah on which on warm days it would be possible to sit out. There were convenient-looking outhouses, a garage large enough for two cars, which meant ample room for all the impedimenta cars collect by some deep-seated law of attraction. In front were flowering trees and shrubs, at the back were fruit trees, and Olive said: