Night's Cloak: A Bobby Owen Mystery Read online

  E.R. Punshon

  NIGHT’S CLOAK

  “I’ve got to hurry,” Bobby said. “Mr Weston has been found dead from a knife-wound in his study.”

  IT’S NOT easy for a county police Inspector to handle prominent local citizens diplomatically, while getting on with the real work of crime detection. But it’s particularly hard when Bobby Owen finds himself the victim of a sinister swindle worked by a millionaire business executive. Not to mention the machinations of a radical political movement, a secretary with a puzzling alibi, and a young scientist-inventor, willing to do anything, even murder, to put his schemes into action …

  Night’s Cloak was first published in 1944, the nineteenth 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. IMPERIOUS SUMMONS

  CHAPTER II. BARMAID BESSIE BELL

  CHAPTER III. COUSINS

  CHAPTER IV. BOBBY INDIGNANT

  CHAPTER V. FAMILY PAPERS

  CHAPTER VI. LINES OF APPROACH

  CHAPTER VII. BALANCE OF POWER

  CHAPTER VIII. HIGH STAKES

  CHAPTER IX. SOMETHING WRONG

  CHAPTER X. STAFF UNDERSTANDINGS

  CHAPTER XI. REMINISCENCES

  CHAPTER XII. MISSING KNIFE

  CHAPTER XIII. THREE SONS

  CHAPTER XIV. HONEY AND STEEL

  CHAPTER XV. MOTIVE

  CHAPTER XVI. VANITY CASE

  CHAPTER XVII. OYSTER

  CHAPTER XVIII. PERFECT SECRETARY

  CHAPTER XIX. ENIGMA

  CHAPTER XX. BETTER DEAD

  CHAPTER XXI. BOX OF CHOCOLATES

  CHAPTER XXII. FISH SOUP

  CHAPTER XXIII. NEW DEVELOPMENT

  CHAPTER XXIV. DRAWING NEARER

  CHAPTER XXV. MISSING CHOCOLATES

  CHAPTER XXVI. LOGIC

  CHAPTER XXVII. SIGNIFICANT FACTORS

  CHAPTER XXVIII. BOBBY PERTURBED

  CHAPTER XXIX. OLIVE VISITS

  CHAPTER XXX. NURSING-HOME

  CHAPTER XXXI. FAITH

  CHAPTER XXXII. LOST TORCH

  CHAPTER XXXIII. NO ONE THERE

  CHAPTER XXXIV. INTERRUPTED MEAL

  CHAPTER XXXV. GAOLER NIGHT

  CHAPTER XXXVI. OVERHEARD

  CHAPTER XXXVII. CONCLUSIONS

  CHAPTER XXXVIII. CONCLUSION

  About the Author

  The Bobby Owen Mysteries

  Secrets Can’t be Kept – Title Page

  Secrets Can’t be Kept – Chapter I

  Copyright

  Introduction

  On 1 December 1942 the British wartime coalition government led by Prime Minister Winston Churchill published “Social Insurance and Allied Services,” a report authored by Liberal economist and social reformer Sir William Beveridge, in which Beveridge called for the provision in the United Kingdom of a comprehensive system of cradle-to-grave social insurance. The Beveridge Report, as it became known, quickly sold 70,000 copies and its ambitious agenda was embraced by much of the British public, although there were naysayers to be found as well, including certain British crime writers. For decades it has been contended of most British Golden Age detective novelists that they leaned toward the Right and supported the Conservative Party, popularly known as the Tories. Indeed, the late leftist mystery writer and critic Julian Symons in his popular mystery genre history Bloody Murder sweepingly characterized as politically and socially reactionary the British detective novelists belonging to the generation that preceded his, memorably declaring that “[u]npleasant things were ignored in almost all the detective stories in the Golden Age. … The social order in these stories was as fixed and mechanical as that of the Incas.” Yet E.R. Punshon was, like Sir William Beveridge, a member of the Liberal Party and he supported many of the progressive aspirations for a more equitable society that were outlined in the Beveridge Report. In his Bobby Owen detective novels Punshon had long criticized social privilege and satirized reactionary members of the business and gentry classes. These long-familiar elements in Punshon’s mysteries were given greater prominence than usual in Night’s Cloak (1944), the first detective novel entirely written by the author after the publication and popular dissemination of the Beveridge Report.

  Night’s Cloak opens with Bobby grumbling about having been imperiously summoned for an ambiguous evening audience at the mansion of William Weston, a former Midwych Lord Mayor and MP and the current “chairman, managing director and virtual dictator” of the Weston West Mills, as well as a millionaire (“or at least a ‘near millionaire’”), “with all that implies,” Punshon notes sardonically, “in our present-day civilization of power, prestige and influence.” Bobby’s meeting with Weston at the misleadingly named Weston Lodge Cottage (an “enormous building, though more like a factory than a house”) gets off to rather a bad start, with the industrialist, seemingly in expectation of some favor, ham-handedly referencing Bobby’s aristocratic background, ironically a status which the policeman had fondly hoped had gone undetected in Wychshire, his having “done his best to live down his connection with one of Britain’s most impecunious peers.”

  From there things get even worse. Weston darkly implies that Bobby has socialist leanings, menacingly adding that “[s]ome of the County Watch Committee are a bit—well, worried,” while Bobby bluntly reminds Weston that in Wychshire the industrialist enjoys no greater privileges in relation to the police than any other citizen. The meeting abruptly ends with Weston promising Bobby, “Young man, you’ll hear more of this.” In this prediction Weston proves gravely wrong, for the next morning Bobby receives a telephone call informing him that his wealthy antagonist has been found stabbed to death in the very study where he and Bobby had their stormy altercation. Bobby reflects that in this particular murder, he might be considered a suspect.

  Fatally obnoxious millionaires (or “near millionaires”) done to death in their studies may at times seem a dime-a-dozen in Golden Age country house mysteries, yet Punshon’s novel is distinguished not only by an intricate problem and interesting characters (the Saturday Review judged it the “very best British brand,” with a “deftly portrayed” background and characters and an “air-tight” plot), but by the originality of the plot’s political and social elements. One of the suspects in the murder of Mr. Weston is Dan Edwardes, a major Weston West Mills shareholder who has turned to socialism in an attempt to find meaning in his life after the deaths of his three sons in the current war. In a long speech to Bobby which echoes popular sentiment of the day, Edwardes explains that he learned from his late sons that the common people of Britain, having labored so dutifully for victory in the war and made so much personal sacrifice, deserve, after the war has ended, a far greater say in the way things are run in their country: “Churchill has got to answer to the dustman; and if the dustman isn’t satisfied, Churchill has got to go.” Edwardes wants to concede control over the factory to the Weston West Mills workers and he had passed along to Weston a socialist political pamphlet, “What It Will Be Like”, explaining his views; but in doing so he only incurred the late manufacturer’s wrath.

  Night’s Cloak initially may seem to adhere more to Golden Age norms in its treatment of the retinue of house servants at Weston Lodge Cottage. After the murder is discovered we are informed, for example, that the “women servants were having hysterics by turn in the kitchen.” And
Hargreaves, Weston’s elderly, white-haired butler, is a domestic picture of perfection, looking “so much like the English butler in an American film that Bobby was almost inclined to ask him if he took other roles.” Yet with the servants as well cracks are discernible in the purportedly immutable Golden Age mystery social order. Hargreaves complains to Bobby that the two prewar footmen have been called up (“Mr Weston was refused exemption for them”), forcing him to resort to the services of William, who is “less a footman than a boot-and-knife boy masquerading as such.” And even the deplorable William “has been directed to join the Home Guard, though that will interfere seriously with his duties,” Hargreaves adds gloomily.

  Although Hargreaves has every semblance of the perfect butler (“I can picture the admirable Hargreaves appearing on the Day of Judgment to announce ‘Dinner is served,’” quips Dan Edwardes), in truth he presents something of a false front to the privileged elite for whom he labors. First, there is the matter of names:

  “Let’s see, your name is Hargreaves, isn’t it?” Bobby asked when the butler appeared. “First names?”

  …

  “Well, sir, when applying for a situation, I generally give it as Thomas. Ladies seem to consider it more suitable.”

  “Do you mean it’s not your real name?”

  …“I was christened Lancelot Galahad. My father, sir, was a great admirer of Tennyson.”

  Then there is the matter of Hargreaves’s dignified mane of white hair:

  “Ladies, sir, frequently display a preference for white hair in those holding a position as butler. It seems to be a general belief among ladies that a sense of responsibility and discretion is thus indicated. So it has been my habit, sir, to rub in each morning a certain—er—bleaching preparation, so to say, of my own invention. In my profession, sir, if I may so, is it often necessary to play up to the gentry’s most fat-headed ideas.”

  “I expect it is,” agreed Bobby. …

  Traditional—if not to say fatheaded—ideas were being roundly challenged in the United Kingdom during the years of the Second World War, both in weighty political documents like the Beveridge Report and the light crime fiction of E. R. Punshon. In the 1945 UK general election Winston Churchill’s Conservative Party, having failed, one might say, to satisfy the dustman, was resoundingly turned out of power and replaced by Clement Atlee’s Labour Party, which began energetically implementing the proposals contained in the Beveridge Report. (Punshon’s Liberal Party collected only 9% of the vote in 1945, compared to 48% for Labour and 36% for the Tories.) Many prominent Golden Age mystery writers of the time, such as Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr and Henry Wade, viewed the state of the UK under the Labour government, which held power into 1951, with mounting pessimism. In future Dean Street Press reprints we shall judge what E.R. Punshon’s attitude was.

  Curtis Evans

  CHAPTER I

  IMPERIOUS SUMMONS

  “AND WHO,” demanded Inspector Bobby Owen, addressing his question to the universe in general and to the Wychshire County Police in particular, “who is Mr William Weston, if you please?”

  The question was purely rhetorical, for Bobby knew perfectly well—as did every one in the city of Midwych and most in the county of Wychshire and many elsewhere—all about that great man. Was he not a former Lord Mayor of the city; a former M.P. for the Stimmell Division of Midwych; the present chairman, managing director and virtual dictator of the Weston West Mills and its subsidiary undertakings, above all, was he not a millionaire, or at least a “near millionaire”, with all that implies in our present-day civilization of power, prestige and influence? Did not his position therefore resemble that of one of those great feudal lords who, in the Middle Ages, were the powers behind the throne—and not so very much behind, either? True, he did not wield the power of the High Justice, the Middle, and the Low, but he did wield the power of job or no job, which comes to much the same thing.

  A great man, then, but none the less, as the great and the powerful so often are, a disappointed man. He had expected at least a knighthood—stepping-stone to the peerage—on the conclusion of his term of office as Lord Mayor of Midwych. He had not received it, whereon in a fit of pique he had resigned from the City Council. Again at the last general election, though Tory successes had been widespread, he had lost his seat for the Stimmell Division in spite of the fact that the Stimmell Division was largely inhabited by his own workpeople.

  This misfortune Mr Weston was accustomed to cite, not without bitterness, as a classic example of working-class ingratitude—a “biting of the hand that fed them”—and as a not surprising result of recent political pampering. And he would quote figures from the annual reports of the Weston West Company to show how much money had been spent on such amenities as a canteen where meals were provided at a cost that showed only a trifling profit, as a playing-field laid out on a site purchased cheaply for that purpose and possibly one day useful for an extension of the mill buildings. Indeed, as Mr Weston was accustomed to say, on a thousand and one other benefits that were neither more nor less than free gifts. Why, there was even a welfare officer, if you please, a Miss Olga Severn, though the fact that she was a rather charming girl, fresh and lively, certainly counted as an alleviating factor. Nor was it necessary to pay too much attention to her recommendations, even though old Dan Edwardes, another director, and holder of as many ordinary shares as were held by Mr Weston himself, had recently gone all sappy and sentimental. Age, and the loss of all his three sons on active service in the early stages of the war, no doubt accounting for this, and indicating, Mr Weston felt, a sad loss of mental stability, as shown in certain suggestions recently put forward by him for the future control of the business.

  And that at a time, Mr Weston would add quietly, when the shareholders, thanks to the former general business depression and present war-time difficulties, had received no dividend for some years, though certainly their property was of great potential value.

  Furthermore, Mrs Weston, expressing a pedantic disapproval of a certain largeness of heart that could refuse a welcome to no—feminine—visitant, had departed to the south of England, where she had recently died, leaving a will which bequeathed all her possessions—these were both few and small—to her husband, with the exception of a block of five thousand one-pound ordinary shares in the Weston West Mills Company. These she had left to young Martin Weston Wynne, her husband’s first cousin once removed and his nearest living relative in England, though there were other cousins in the Dominions.

  Not that this bequest seemed of any great pecuniary value, since not only had no dividend been paid on the shares for some years, but none could be paid until the very heavy arrears on the preference shares had been entirely cleared off. But it was an open secret that Mr Weston’s feelings had been much hurt, and that he had expressed himself as being entirely unable to understand what had induced his wife to do such a thing.

  “Not that I mind her remembering the boy and leaving him anything she wanted to,” he had been heard to remark. “But why these shares in my company that the young man has never shown any interest in? He was with us for a time. I meant him to take my place some day. Threw it all up and went off on his own!”

  All this Bobby knew well, and Sergeant Payne, his chief assistant in the much-depleted Wychshire County C.I.D., knew he knew it. Which did not prevent a very shocked tone appearing in Payne’s voice as he said:—

  “Mr Weston, sir? Mr Weston? Why, sir . . . well, sir . . . the Weston West Mills, sir. ...”

  “Yes, I know,” snapped Bobby, somewhat illogically. “Look at that.”

  “That” was a note from Mr William Weston, requesting, indeed demanding, that Inspector Owen should call at Weston Lodge Cottage at eight o’clock that evening.

  Payne read it gravely, but made no comment. No comment annoyed Bobby still more. He said:—

  “Does the fellow think we have nothing to do but run about after him?”

 
Payne coughed.

  “Well, sir,” he said, “you know, sir—very influential gentleman, Mr Weston. Mayor a few years back. Very friendly with Sir Merrick Templemore, and you know yourself, sir, Sir Merrick—well, he just is the County Watch Committee.”

  “No reason,” growled Bobby, “why this Weston bloke should think we’ve got to be at his beck and call. Seems to think he can give us orders—he might be our chief, from the way he writes.”

  “I expect it’s only his way,” Payne suggested placatingly. “Very autocratic gentleman, Mr Weston, I’ve always heard. Used to giving orders and expects to be obeyed.”

  “Oh, does he?” said Bobby, the light of battle beginning to gleam in his eyes.

  “Colonel Glynne,” murmured Payne, apparently changing the subject and gazing in an abstracted way at the ceiling, “thinks Sir Merrick will be likely to approve of the plans for the new headquarters going through.”

  Bobby nearly choked. New headquarters for the county police was the pet dream of the Chief Constable, Colonel Glynne. He had even spent some of his own money in getting plans prepared for the projected building. By careful diplomacy, strengthened by the discreet use of a special port, Sir Merrick Templemore had been induced to promise support when the scheme came before the Wychshire Watch Committee, notorious for turning down every suggestion even remotely threatening an increase in the rates. If Mr Weston got to work on Sir Merrick and Sir Merrick withdrew his support, then the project would certainly be wrecked and Colonel Glynne’s heart broken—which would be a pity. Moreover, the county police would lose their nice new headquarters Bobby wanted as much as any one—and that would be an even greater pity.

  He picked up the note again.

  “Written in the third person,” he grumbled. “Not a hint what it’s all about. Miles out of the way, his place. Suppose a dustman wrote to us like that, what would you do?”