Helen Passes By: A Bobby Owen Mystery Read online

  E.R. Punshon

  Helen Passes By

  “I don’t like it, Olive. No good, plain evidence, not so much as the smell of a fingerprint. Nothing but psychology and an atmosphere of doubt, menace, and suspicion.”

  BOBBY OWEN’S latest case begins with him warily lending five shillings to an old reprobate. But this is driven from his mind when he hears of the murder of one Itter Bain, found shot in the woods. Bobby is called into the case, one already made controversial by the alleged shielding of an aristocratic suspect. The evidence certainly ought to make the aristocrat a figure of particular interest to the police. But Bobby needs to tread lightly to prevent a national scandal.

  Other suspects include the irresistibly beautiful Helen, Wing Commander Winstanley (a rival for Helen’s affections), and a suspiciously well-informed reporter on a local newspaper. All the while the killer is biding time before striking again – unless Bobby can unmask the fiend first.

  Helen Passes By was first published in 1947, the twenty-third 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 FAIRY TALE

  Chapter II AN OFFER

  Chapter III A MISSION

  Chapter IV A DOUBTFUL DOSSIER

  Chapter V TACT

  Chapter VI WAYLING REAPPEARS

  Chapter VII RIVER FARM

  Chapter VIII BAIN PRODUCTS, LTD.

  Chapter IX SILENT THREAT

  Chapter X SALE OF A MOTOR LAUNCH

  Chapter XI PLAIN JANE

  Chapter XII PRECISE POSITION

  Chapter XIII MEDITATIONS

  Chapter XIV WAYLING TRANSFORMATION SCENE

  Chapter XV NOCTURNAL EXCURSION

  Chapter XVI HIDE AND SEEK

  Chapter XVII A TWEED CAP

  Chapter XVIII NINE THOUSAND POUNDS

  Chapter XIX BEAUTY UNDER THE MOON

  Chapter XX UNTIDY WORLD

  Chapter XXI CHANGE OF HEART

  Chapter XXII NURSING HOME

  Chapter XXIII AN ENGAGEMENT

  Chapter XXIV LAUNCH LOST

  Chapter XXV FRESH INFORMATION

  Chapter XXVI AVOIDANCE

  Chapter XXVII LORD ADOUR’S STORY

  Chapter XXVIII NEARING THE TRUTH

  Chapter XXIX BOBBY INSISTS

  Chapter XXX LAUNCH FOUND

  Chapter XXXI HASTE! HASTE!

  Chapter XXXII IT HAD TO BE

  Chapter XXXIII AN EPITAPH

  Chapter XXXIV MAGNIFICENT SUICIDE

  About the Author

  The Bobby Owen Mysteries

  Music Tells All – Title Page

  Music Tells All – Chapter One

  Copyright

  “To desire the desiring of her own beauty is the vanity of Lilith.”

  —C.S. LEWIS

  Introduction

  “Well, you know,” Bobby said, and there was a distinct touch of exasperation in his voice, “all this makes it very difficult. If everyone goes looney whenever they come near the girl, how are you to work out any reasonable pattern of behavior?”

  Like the legendary Helen of Troy--whose enchanting face, Christopher Marlowe tells us in his play Doctor Faustus, “launch’d a thousand ships and burnt the topless towers of Ilium”-- the eponymous Helen of E.R. Punshon’s twenty-third Bobby Owen detective novel, Helen Passes By (1947), with her matchless beauty arouses men (and even women) to decisive actions, some of which they might well come to regret later. As Bobby carries out his latest murder investigation in this novel, he is repeatedly informed how astonishingly lovely this Helen is--so much so, indeed, that she has utterly captivated every man who has beheld her. With a show of bravado Bobby declares that as a policeman he naturally is immune to such things (“Duty, you know, and all that”), yet during the course of Bobby’s questionings the fabled lady somehow keeps eluding him, thus denying him the chance of putting to test his claim of immunity to her “all-conquering charms.” If it ever comes to the point, however, will Bobby indeed be able to resist Helen’s siren spell while bringing yet another murderer to justice?

  The more prosaic (if practically important) matter which preoccupies Bobby Owen at the beginning of Helen Passes By concerns his now nettlesome employment situation in Wychshire. At the opening of the novel, Bobby, his patience exhausted over continual conflicts with the staid and conservative Watch Committee, has just offered to hand in his resignation as Wychshire Deputy Chief Constable. Happily Scotland Yard shortly afterward offers Bobby a position as a Deputy Assistant Commissioner, provided that he handle for the Yard a politically sensitive murder case involving Lord Adour of Adour and Avon, “a V.I.P. of the first vintage.”

  At the quaintly named Toad-in-Hole—a formerly tiny Seashire fishing village that since the outbreak of the late war has “grown into a busy port, if ‘growth’ is a word that can properly be used to describe such a shooting up, unparalleled since the days of Jonah’s gourd”—manufacturer Itter Bain, a partner in Bain Products, Limited (the other partners being Itter Bain’s brother, Mauley, and cousin, Prescott), has been shot and killed; and circumstances suggest that Lord Adour might be implicated, the aristocrat having objected to the attentions Itter Bain was paying his daughter, Helen. (You see, she’s very beautiful,” explains the Scotland Yard Assistant Commissioner to Bobby. “Takes your breath away. Bowls you over. The K.O.”) Inconveniently for the newly empowered Labour government, the late Itter Bain was a nephew of the leftist pamphleteer “Jack Cade Junior” (so named for the leader of a fifteenth-century English popular revolt), whose booklets “are said to have had a good deal to do with the Labour Party’s winning the election,” while the law enforcement man in authority in Seashire is Superintendent Seers, “the Toriest Tory in the country” who “seems to think it’s socially incorrect to suspect a man like Lord Adour. …” (In the mind of the highly traditionalist Seers, confides the AC, “men in Adour’s position don’t commit murders.”) Dissatisfied with the lack of progress in the criminal investigation and distrustful of Seer’s motives, Jack Cade Junior is threatening to make trouble over the whole affair in Parliament; and it is hoped in the government that a timely intervention by Bobby will smooth political waters that threaten most boisterously to roil.

  Once arrived in Toad-in-Hole, Bobby takes lodging with the local police sergeant, Gregson, and his wife, the latter of whom plies the investigator with such delicacies as hot scones--upon which she has “lavished nearly the whole of the week’s ration of butter” (rationing remained very much in effect in England during these postwar years of Labour government)--and regales him with accounts about her family that illustrate the late war’s social impact in the United Kingdom:

  Bobby … heard all about Mrs. Gregson’s boy in Burma and how there he had become very pally with an American boy….Also Bobby heard about Mrs. Gregson’s girl, Gwen, in the A.T.S., and how she had been given a “mention” for returning to carry on with her ’phone after a bomb blast had blown her twenty feet away. In Mrs. Gregson’s opinion—and in Bobby’s too—she deserved a medal, let alone a “mention,” but Gwen said that if they gave medals in “ats” for things like that, almost every girl would have one, and what would be the good?

  The establishment of cordial relations proves more challenging for Bobby in the case of the imperious Lord Adour. The aristocrat is extr
emely protective of his daughter Helen, who potentially is an important witness in the murder investigation, and rather dubious about this quietly assertive new investigator: “All this was not quite what [Lord Adour] had expected—something more like Hawkseye the [dime novel] detective, of happy childhood memories, was what he had looked for. Not a man who could spot a [Richard Parkes] Bonington [painting] at a glance and showed no sign of being overawed by the other’s title and social position.”

  Once again Bobby finds occasion to remind a literally entitled murder suspect that “It is the first duty of all police to be no respecter of persons.” But Bobby must draw upon all his mental fortitude to solve what proves a particularly challenging case, involving not only a lord and his mesmerizingly lovely daughter, but a missing motor launch, a meddling journalist, a mysterious Frenchman, a plain Jane poor relation, a cadging old school chum and other vexing complications. This time around Olive, holding the domestic fort back in Midwych with the providential assistance of a new maid named Phyllis (“just released from Ack-ack service”), is present in the case only in spirit, when Bobby writes her a series of letters about his investigation, which are quoted extensively throughout the tale. Sadly, we never learn just what Olive thinks about Helen.

  Curtis Evans

  CHAPTER I

  FAIRY TALE

  Slightly ruffled in his usually fairly equable temper, the Wychshire Deputy Chief Constable, Bobby Owen, was walking back to his office after a meeting of the Watch Committee that had not been so calm and smoothly working as usual. The question of deaths on the road had been discussed—the figures had risen unpleasantly of late—and Bobby was discovering that one of the drawbacks of holding a responsible position is that of being held responsible for things over which you have not the least power or control. Very plainly had it been intimated to him that the duty of the police was to reduce road deaths to an absolute minimum, though of course without in any way interfering with the natural and inalienable right of the motorist to drive as fast as he liked, built up areas included, if the police weren’t around. Bobby, goaded by criticism, had remarked that if he were given the power, he could reduce road deaths by seventy-five per cent, in a few weeks. Asked how, he had suggested prohibiting the use of the horn, since too many motorists drove on the horn and believed that by sounding it they automatically relieved themselves of all responsibility. A taximan, he had remarked, would sometimes drive all day without sounding his horn once.

  This had not been well received. It had indeed ruffled some tempers considerably. It was stigmatized as reactionary. Something was said about Bolshevism, plain hints were dropped that though the Deputy Chief might have had his successes as a detective, this success had been obtained at the cost of some neglect in the administrative sphere. Instances were quoted of police duties less adequately performed than was desirable. Bobby retorted by quoting man-power figures. Impossible, he declared, to carry out duties there were not the men to perform. Thoroughly annoyed by now, he offered to resign, promised to hand in his resignation that very day, but had his hurt feelings and injured dignity assuaged by prompt, ample, and hurried expressions of confidence, even from motoring members of the Committee, still shaken to the depths of their souls by his audacious, unprecedented, revolutionary and totally impracticable suggestion.

  “I didn’t know you were like that, Owen,” Sir Merrick Templemore, the Chairman of the Committee, remarked to him aside as the meeting was breaking up, and when Bobby asked, “Like what?” Sir Merrick shook a doleful head and said people, young people, were never satisfied nowadays unless they were trying to stand the world on its head. Give him, said Sir Merrick, the good old days when things stayed as they were and people knew where they were, and Bobby did not try to tell him that such days had never been nor could be and now less than ever.

  All the same, Bobby was still feeling a little ruffled as he walked away, for never before had he been subjected to so much criticism; criticism he resented all the more because an uneasy conscience suggested that possibly the lure of the problem to be solved, the criminal to be brought to justice, attracted him more than did the steady, solid work of administration, conscientiously and capably performed as he knew it to have been. Also there was the road deaths question itself, and none more troubling, more difficult, more pressing. Nor did he see what answer there could be, since the lives of children and speed on the road seem two incompatibles. It was for the community, he felt, to give to one or the other—in the new wartime slang—“first priority.”

  On these not too pleasant meditations a voice broke suddenly, a deep, melodious voice, a voice indeed like that of the organ in its full command of every note and tone.

  “Dear old boy,” the rich, full tones were saying, “this is a piece of luck. I am really glad to see you again,” and the last words sounded like a whole orchestra welcoming its collective and dearest, long-lost friend.

  Therewith, before he quite knew what was happening, Bobby felt his hand seized and held in a brotherly grasp. Thus roused from his thoughts, Bobby saw a smallish man of about his own age, a trifle seedy in dress—but what is that in these days of early peace?—and of an almost fantastic ugliness. His enormous head was set upon an ill-proportioned body, with arms too long and legs so short he waddled rather than walked. There was a slight cast in one eye, his nose was flat and squat and yet managed to be twisted, too; an enormous mouth showed large, discoloured and uneven teeth, his ears flapped like a young elephant’s—the legend was that he could waggle them at will—his chin seemed to have been lost; and his complexion resembled that of an imperfectly poached egg, diversified by a mole or two and patches of reddish brown hair a blunt or careless razor had failed to remove.

  No one, even those not possessed of Bobby’s trained memory for faces, could have failed to recognize that strange, gnome-like figure and face—once seen, never to be forgotten. Bobby, though without much enthusiasm, said at once:

  “Why, hullo, Wayling. It’s a long time since I saw you.”

  “Not since we both went down,” agreed Wayling, who incidentally had not “gone down,” but been “sent down,” as Bobby well remembered. “Dear old St. Barnabas,” Wayling went on, still holding Bobby’s hand in a warm and friendly grasp. “Best college ever. Don’t talk to me about Balliol, All Souls, the House—you were there, weren’t you?”

  “No. They wouldn’t have me,” Bobby said, managing at last to release his hand from the other’s clinging grasp; and he named his own college, libellously asserted to have the lowest standard of admission in all Oxford.

  “Of course, of course,” declared Wayling. “I remember now. Ah, well, we can’t all be Barnabites. But I ought to be congratulating you. I saw in the papers you were a big bug now in the police. Bit of a surprise to find an old pal high up in the cops. Nice to know there’s a friend at court, though, if you want one.”

  “Let’s hope it won’t be wanted,” Bobby remarked with a sub-acid tone that Wayling, quick in the uptake as a cat after a mouse, did not fail to notice.

  “Now, don’t tell me,” he remonstrated, “you still remember that old pack of lies about me and the empty till at the ‘Fox and Grapes,’ I did make a bit of a fool of myself over that barmaid, but the little brute took it out of me good and proper with all those lies she told. Oh, well, that’s over and done with, and I had my lesson. Yes, yes, I had my lesson and I’ve profited by it. Dine with me to-night? I’m staying at the Midwych Central.”

  Bobby said it was very kind of Wayling, but Olive, his wife, would be expecting him, and he had some paper work to see to that he would have to take home. Wayling said they must arrange a dinner some other time. Unluckily, he was only in Midwych for a day or two and didn’t know when, if ever, he would be back.

  “If you take this new job on, though,” he added, “we might fix up an evening somewhere, if you think Mrs. Owen would like that. I’m only a poor, solitary bachelor with a couple of rooms off Park Lane, so it’ll have to be one of the c
ook shops—I prefer the Savoy myself.”

  “What new job do you mean?” Bobby asked suspiciously.

  “Oh, haven’t you heard?” Wayling asked, and laughed again, a pleasant, jolly, slightly embarrassed laugh. “Perhaps I oughtn’t to have said anything. You’re going to be offered a Deputy Assistant Commissionership at the Yard.”

  “Rubbish,” said Bobby. “Where did you get that cock-and-bull yarn?”

  Wayling threw back that enormous head of his and laughed once more.

  “Dear old boy,” he said. “Never you mind how I know. You just wait and see. It’s over this Bain murder they want you.”

  “Deputy Assistant Commissioners don’t take on murder cases,” Bobby said sharply.

  “They do, if they are Bobby Owen and the murder is the Bain murder,” Wayling asserted smilingly; and his smile was one that somehow managed to transform his ill-formed, twisted features with an odd and baffling charm. “Just as Deputy Chief Constables don’t take on murder cases unless they happen to be Bobby Owen, and even then they have to leave the administrative side to others just a bit at times.”

  This was a thrust that went home. Bobby knew, remembered, that Wayling had had the reputation of knowing all the secrets of everyone in Oxford, from dons to freshmen, with most of the citizens of the town thrown in. An exaggeration, no doubt, as was certainly the story that he was always hidden under every separate dinner table everywhere every night. Nevertheless, it was the case that somehow or another he managed to pick up every bit of gossip in the whole University. One explanation put forward was that all the women he met always told him everything within five minutes of their first meeting. Another exaggeration, no doubt, but not such a wild one this time. Anyhow, somehow or another, though the man was a complete stranger in the town, he had apparently already managed to get wind of recent Watch Committee criticism. Bobby looked at him sourly, but made no comment, beyond saying briefly that he must be getting back to his office.