The House of Godwinsson: A Bobby Owen Mystery Read online

  E.R. Punshon

  The House of Godwinsson

  Bobby Owen stood for a time in silence, looking down thoughtfully at the dead man’s face. A small, insignificant face, lacking even that touch of repose and dignity which death, even violent death, so often gives, and one that Bobby had never seen before. Of that at least he was sure.

  YET this same man was found dead with a detailed and accurate plan of Bobby Owen’s new London flat. Why? The plot soon thickens when a man with a grievance against Bobby turns up to identify the dead man … But Bobby will need many more beads on the thread before he understands the murderous connection to an old Army Officer, and what necessitated the death of a ‘burglar’.

  The House of Godwinsson was first published in 1948, the twenty-fifth 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

  Introduction by Curtis Evans

  Chapter I IDENTIFICATION PARADE

  Chapter II MISFITS

  Chapter III VISITORS

  Chapter IV MASKED MEN

  Chapter V ROUGH HOUSE

  Chapter VI TECHNICAL DISCUSSION

  Chapter VII “THE LINE”

  Chapter VIII LADY GERALDINE

  Chapter IX URGENT MESSAGE

  Chapter X RESCUE AND DENIAL

  Chapter XI BACKGROUND?

  Chapter XII 27495?

  Chapter XIII THE KILBURN HOUSE

  Chapter XIV UNAVAILING SEARCH

  Chapter XV AN UNEXPECTED VISIT

  Chapter XVI SEARCH BEGUN

  Chapter XVII THE SHOP OFF EMMETT STREET

  Chapter XVIII THE ROOM OF THE SEVEN LUSTS

  Chapter XIX TIM STOKES AGAIN

  Chapter XX FIGHT IN THE DARK

  Chapter XXI SEVEN GOLDEN WHYS

  Chapter XXII ROYAL BLOOD

  Chapter XXIII COLONEL GODWINSSON’S DREAM

  Chapter XXIV CY KING AGAIN

  Chapter XXV STOKES IS AFRAID

  Chapter XXVI HELD FOR QUESTIONING

  Chapter XXVII MONA’S STORY

  Chapter XXVIII IDENTIFIED UMBRELLA

  Chapter XXIX FRIENDLY CHAT

  Chapter XXX CONSULTATION

  Chapter XXXI TIM STOKES TELLS

  Chapter XXXII MUMPS

  Chapter XXXIII AMONG THE RHODODENDRONS

  Chapter XXXIV DESERTED HOUSE

  Chapter XXXV GURTH’S STORY

  Chapter XXXVI CONCLUSION

  About the Author

  The Bobby Owen Mysteries

  The Dark Garden – Title Page

  The Dark Garden – Chapter One

  Copyright

  Introduction

  In 1933 crime writer and critical authority Dorothy L. Sayers gave a terrific boost to E.R. Punshon’s mystery writing career with her “What is distinction?” Sunday Times review of Information Received, Punshon’s first Bobby Owen detective novel. From the glowing review Victor Gollancz, Punshon’s English publisher, copiously extracted Sayers’s brightly affirmative words, emblazoning them on the covers of Punshon mysteries for more than two decades, right up until the author’s death in 1956. That Sayers’s publicly expressed admiration for the detective fiction of E.R. Punshon, a fellow member of the Detection Club, was both genuinely felt and of considerable duration is indicated by a private letter she wrote Punshon over fifteen years later, on 6 January 1949, in which she noted that she was enjoying reading the author’s 25th and latest Bobby Owen mystery, The House of Godwinsson (1948). Sayers lauded a particular exchange in the novel with clear feminist implication that took place between Bobby Owen and his wife Olive, resoundingly declaring that this passage “should be written in letters of gold on tablets of iron and circulated to the entire male population of this country”:

  Olive wasn’t listening. She said:

  “That’s the week’s meat ration I got to-day. Will you have it all now, or shall we save some for to-morrow?”

  “Let us eat to-day and be merry,” Bobby answered, “for to-morrow there may be fish.”

  “Dreamer,” said Olive.

  “Well, anyhow,” Bobby said, “to-day is here and now, and let to-morrow look after itself.”

  So he spoke, but what he really meant in his carefree, masculine way was that not itself but the woman should look after it. However, on second thoughts he left enough of the dish for the next day.

  Over the course of the Bobby Owen series the police detective’s spouse, the former Olive Farrar, had gone from being a chic career woman (Suspects–Nine, 1939) and no less than a political revolutionary (Dictator’s Way, 1938) to a housewife intensely preoccupied, as British housewives in the 1940s admittedly had ample reason to be, with matters of domestic help and goods rationing. Although during the war years Olive occasionally participated more actively in Bobby’s cases (Diabolic Candelabra, 1942), even to the point of obtaining valuable information (Secrets Can’t Be Kept, 1944) and putting her own life at risk (Night’s Cloak, 1944), by the late 1940s she seems much more to have withdrawn within the confines of her own household. Though some critics over the years have expressed disappointment with this development, it was one which reflected contemporary trends not only in crime fiction but in the real world, as women who had patriotically taken jobs in service of their country during the war were urged after the end of the conflict to leave the public sphere to marry and make families. (In this latter respect Olive diverged from cultural expectations, for she and Bobby, like Punshon and his wife Sarah, would never have any children during the recorded years of their marriage.) Yet Olive continued to serve as Bobby’s most important confidant concerning the course of his criminal investigations, and often Punshon would spice these exchanges between the two spouses, as in The House of Godwinsson, with the sort of feminist commentary that had so appealed to Dorothy L. Sayers when she was reading the novel. (Given her strong religious faith, Sayers doubtlessly also noted that Bobby’s cavalier comments to Olive--“Let us eat to-day and be merry, for to-morrow there may be fish” and “To-day is here and now, and let to-morrow look after itself”--paraphrased passages from the Bible.) By this time Olive may be very much a policeman’s wife, but she remains a more interesting policeman’s wife than earlier incarnations of such women, like Emily French, bland helpmate to Freeman Wills Crofts’s archetypal dauntless striver, Inspector French.

  The House of Godwinsson reflects another important contemporary social development in the United Kingdom in its focus on the rise of postwar crime and violence which so concerned the British public at the time. In Punshon’s immediately previous Bobby Owen detective novel, Music Tells All (1948), the author had included in the plot of what was in most ways a classic village mystery a smash-and-grab gang of jewelry shop robbers. In Godwinsson Punshon went several steps farther, producing a suspenseful London crime story wherein the violent criminal activities of urban toughs and outright gangsters take center stage (though the murder puzzle element demanded by fans of classic crime fiction is retained). More realistic portrayal of crime was a preoccupation in both books and films of this time, both in the United States, where the hard-boiled, noir and police procedural subgenres had gained great popularity, and in the United Kingdom, where gang activity was being portrayed not only on the screen in such groundbreaking acclaimed cinema as Brighton Rock (1947) and Night and the City (1950), but in novels by Punshon’s own Detection Club colleagues, notab
le examples of the latter being Michael Gilbert’s They Never Looked Inside (1947) and Fear to Tread (1953), Henry Wade’s Be Kind to the Killer (1952) and, no doubt most familiar to modern readers, Margery Allingham’s much lauded The Tiger in the Smoke (1952).

  The greater level of criminal carnage in The House of Godwinsson--book reviewer and future poet laureate John Betjeman praised the novel’s “tense horror”—quickly becomes apparent to the reader. During the first few chapters of Godwinsson we see Bobby examining the gunned-down corpse of a “spiv” (British slang for fast talking, flashily dressed petty criminals of the day who illicitly dealt in rationed goods on the black market), then getting violently set upon, along with a strapping police constable, by a trio of murderous hoodlums led by the notorious knifeman Cyrus “Cy” King. When Divisional Detective Inspector Ulyett, whom Punshon devotees may recall from Mystery of Mr. Jessop (1937), shows up on the scene, classically shouting “Now, then; what’s all this about?”, he is promptly stunned by a hurled brick and falls back bleeding, “into the arms of his attendant sergeant.” Later, after Bobby has emerged, seemingly rather a tough bloke indeed, from the melee with Cy King and his thuggish henchmen, he confides to Ulyett, “it was a good clean turn-up on both sides while it lasted. … I don’t think I’ve ever known better,” which produces this ironic exchange:

  “Sounds,” grunted the Superintendent—“sounds as if you rather enjoyed it.”

  Bobby looked alarmed.

  “For the lord’s sake,” he exclaimed, “don’t let my wife hear you say that, or I shall never hear the last of it—never.”

  E. R. Punshon, who for part of the 1890s had lived a vagabond life in the still frontier-like North American West and had published a novel, Old Fighting Days (1921), about bare knuckle brawling in Georgian England, handles the roughhousing sections of Godwinsson with an aplomb that American pulp fiction writers might have envied; yet he does not neglect the novel’s fine formal puzzle, which classically involves a missing London socialite of dubious morals, a duchess’s priceless lost jewels and an elite family, the Godwinssons, of most distinguished lineage. (The family traditionally claims descent from Earl Godwin, father of King Harold, famously slain in 1066 at the Battle of Hastings, and considers the royal descendants of William the Conqueror mere upstarts.) Between plots and counterplots by ancient aristocrats and modern-day gangsters, Bobby has his hands full in The House of Godwinsson, much to the reader’s enjoyment.

  Curtis Evans

  CHAPTER I

  IDENTIFICATION PARADE

  Bobby Owen stood for a time in silence, looking down thoughtfully at the dead man’s face. A small, insignificant face, lacking even that touch of repose and dignity which death, even violent death, so often gives, and one that Bobby had never seen before. Of that at least he was sure.

  “Age about forty or a little under,” said the doctor. Then he added: “Well nourished. Took care of himself. First-class condition. Not like most of those we get about here. Hard muscles and all that.”

  The speaker was the house physician in this small London hospital in whose mortuary they were standing. On hearing of Bobby’s arrival, and because he was still young and believed that the life of a highly placed official at Scotland Yard must be full of the colour and variety so sadly lacking, in his opinion, in that of a house physician, he had himself conducted Bobby to the mortuary, instead of leaving it to the attendant. He had been hoping to hear strange tales of crime and mystery, but he had not found Bobby very responsive. In fact, he had already classified Bobby as a rather dull, routine-ridden official. Nearly as much so, he considered, as his own seniors at the hospital.

  In happy ignorance of this unfavourable verdict, Bobby was still staring at the quiet, dead face, wondering what answer those silent lips would have given to the questions that could never now be asked. A typical ‘little man’, to all appearance, insignificant and ordinary, one of those whom cartoonists to-day delight to depict, complete with bowler hat, umbrella, dispatch-case, for the gratification and delight of other ‘little men’, who do not so see themselves, since they are so well aware—and rightly—of their own immense significance. But about this man there was nothing in his outward appearance to distinguish him from any of those many millions who go daily to and fro about their business in the great cities of the world.

  Yet there had been found in his pockets a careful, accurate, and detailed plan, correct to the last item, showing even the position of each piece of furniture, of Bobby’s own flat in a West-End London square, now less fashionable than once it had been. This flat had recently been obtained for him under what is at present called ‘top priority’ when his tenancy of the country cottage where he and Olive, his wife, had hoped to settle down had been terminated by untoward circumstances. Olive still at times lamented that lost country garden from which she had hoped to obtain fruit galore—rare and refreshing fruit, as fruit is in very truth in these days. Bobby’s own regrets, however, were less poignant. He had found reason to fear that he suffered from a weak back, one that much bending, as for instance, when planting out cabbages, might injure permanently. Olive had been less sympathetic than good, kind wives should be, nor had her suggestion of a mustard plaster and plenty of them been received with any favour. But she admitted that a flat in town had its advantages, and of course to obtain possession of one did mark them out as among fortune’s favourites. Fallen human nature always finds it pleasant to be conducted to the head of the queue.

  It was the report of the discovery of this plan that had made Bobby leave his work at Scotland Yard—and there was plenty of it, for a fresh crime wave was in full vigour, with a new, and important jewel robbery reported almost every week—to see if he could identify the dead man in whose possession the plan had been found. He had already seen and examined it, and he was puzzled. Great trouble and much care and thought must have been involved in its preparation. But generally speaking plans of that sort are prepared only when there is some specially valuable loot in sight—such as for example the jewels of the Duchess of Wharton, whose famous diamonds and rubies had recently vanished without trace. Nor had either duke or duchess been slow in expressing their opinion of a police unable either to prevent such a robbery or recover the lost jewellery. Yet very certainly in Bobby’s flat there was nothing of any outstanding value. Nothing to tempt the experts who had given the Wharton duke and duchess such a display of skill in planning and knowledge of jewellery, even though that demonstration had been received with small gratitude.

  It might just possibly be bravado, Bobby supposed. The idea of burgling the home of a prominent Scotland Yard man might have been found amusing. It might have seemed a bit of fun. But crime is too serious a business for the idea of fun to enter into it. Too healthy an idea, perhaps, for the twisted mind of the criminal. Or again the idea might have been to discredit Bobby, whose appointment to the Yard was comparatively recent. But that seemed too far-fetched to be taken seriously. Or defiance? A challenge? But who could associate defiance or bravado with that insignificant, commonplace looking little man to whom even death had failed so entirely to lend dignity or meaning?

  There had been nothing else on the body of much interest. An identity card made out in the name of Joseph Parsons and already known to have been lost by the genuine Mr Parsons some time previously, a small sum in notes and change—about £10 in all—keys, a pen-knife, and so on. Some of these things had been sent to experts for further examination. It had been noticed, too, that while the outer clothing was old, shabby, and as inconspicuous as its wearer, the under-garments were new and of fine quality, silk and wool; most certainly not what might have been expected.

  Nothing, however, to give any clue to identity. No laundry marks, for example. A hanger-on of the underworld, Bobby supposed, a dabbler on the fringe of criminality. A ‘spiv’, to use the new word momentarily popular. Possibly this time one who had dabbled a little too deeply and had paid the penalty. It might be that his possession of a plan so
clearly the work of an expert hand meant that he had been acting as a messenger between the expert and the expert’s employer, and had tried to double-cross one or other.

  The house physician was growing a trifle bored by Bobby’s silence. He said now:

  “Common little East-End type, except that he took care of himself. Most of them are riddled through and through with drink and disease. This chap had good teeth, even. Cleaned them, evidently. Quite rare.”

  “He never recovered consciousness, did he?” Bobby asked.

  “No. Whoever shot him knew where to put the bullet. Passed out within ten minutes of admittance. Only thing was that while the nurse was trying to dress his wound he opened his eyes and said: ‘Don’t do that, dad,’ and next moment he was dead. Like that. Unusual. I mean dying chaps do sometimes talk about their mothers, call the nurse ‘mum’—that sort of thing. But not about their fathers. I expect he was an orphan and his dad brought him up—and gave him a good thrashing at times. Eh?”

  Obviously the house physician was a trifle pleased with this exercise in deduction. He looked at Bobby to see what the Scotland Yard man thought of it. Bobby said very likely that was how it was. The house physician glanced at his wrist watch and said he must be off. Matron would be on his track if he didn’t look out. He departed accordingly, confiding to the sister who had been searching for him everywhere that he didn’t think much of the Scotland Yard johnny, who didn’t seem to have anything to say for himself. Nor had he been gone more than a minute or two, and Bobby was on the point of following his example, when the door opened and there appeared the mortuary attendant, accompanied by a big, burly man of middle age.

  “Beg pardon, sir. I didn’t know any one was here,” the attendant said. “Gentleman for identification,” he explained.