Diabolic Candelabra Read online

  E.R. Punshon

  DIABOLIC CANDELABRA

  “Ode to a chocolate,” murmured Bobby.

  OLIVE, Inspector Bobby Owen’s wife, is on a mission to obtain the recipe for some uncommonly good chocolates. But the most innocent beginning means trouble for Bobby Owen: take one wood-dwelling hermit, a girl who talks to animals, an evil stepfather and two exceedingly valuable works of art, and you have the recipe, not for chocolate, but for one of Punshon’s most satisfying and devilish mysteries.

  This beguiling story of labyrinths and seemingly impossible murder is a challenge and a treat for armchair sleuths everywhere. Diabolic Candelabra was originally published in 1942. It is the seventeenth of the Bobby Owen mysteries, a series including thirty-five novels. This new edition features an 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. CHOCOLATES

  CHAPTER II. WOODLAND RAMBLE

  CHAPTER III. UNSEEN FOLLOWER

  CHAPTER IV. LOO

  CHAPTER V. STOLEN ESSENCE

  CHAPTER VI. BEARS

  CHAPTER VII. FOREST HUT

  CHAPTER VIII. MISSING AXE

  CHAPTER IX. RICHARD RAWDON

  CHAPTER X. OLD BOOKS

  CHAPTER XI. DR MASKELL

  CHAPTER XII. ‘HUMAN BLOOD’

  CHAPTER XIII. PORTRAIT IN OILS

  CHAPTER XIV. WALTERS’S

  CHAPTER XV. BARSLEY ABBEY

  CHAPTER XVI. LAWYER HART

  CHAPTER XVII. FAMILY HISTORY

  CHAPTER XVIII. AN EARLIER PETER

  CHAPTER XIX. DIABOLIC CANDELABRA

  CHAPTER XX. BURGLARY

  CHAPTER XXI. NOCTURNAL VISIT

  CHAPTER XXII. FINGERPRINTS

  CHAPTER XXIII. BUSINESS TALK

  CHAPTER XXIV. MORE BUSINESS

  CHAPTER XXV. EL GRECO PRINTS

  CHAPTER XXVI. DR MASKELL’S SUGGESTION

  CHAPTER XXVII. STORY OF A STRANGER

  CHAPTER XXVIII. UNEASY BEES

  CHAPTER XXIX. THE SEARCH

  CHAPTER XXX. PICTURE OF A HERMIT

  CHAPTER XXXI. BIRDS AFRAID

  CHAPTER XXXII. DISCOVERY

  CHAPTER XXXIII. QUESTION OF IDENTITY

  CHAPTER XXXIV. COOP’S THEORY

  CHAPTER XXXV. “SAMMY TO YOU”

  CHAPTER XXXVI. SMITH, FINN AND FINCH

  CHAPTER XXXVII. MR FINN EXPLAINS

  CHAPTER XXXVIII. DR MASKELL’S SYMPATHIES

  CHAPTER XXXIX. SUSPECTS

  CHAPTER XL. TWELVE NAMES

  CHAPTER XLI. BOGGART’S HOLE

  CHAPTER XLII. HIDDEN LADDER

  CHAPTER XLIII. THE CAVE

  CHAPTER XLIV. FORGED CONFESSION

  CHAPTER XLV. THE FIGHT

  CHAPTER XLVI. CONCLUSION

  About the Author

  The Bobby Owen Mysteries

  The Conqueror Inn – Title Page

  The Conqueror Inn – Chapter One

  Copyright

  Landmarks

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  “There are bears in the forest.”

  “There are bears everywhere,” Bobby answered.

  “There’s been a bear at Peter’s cottage,” she told him.

  “Has there?” Bobby said. “What did it do?”

  E.R. Punshon’s seventeenth Bobby Owen detective novel, Diabolic Candelabra (1942), appeared on my list 150 Favorite Golden Age British Detective Novels, published on 2 October 2010 at the website Mystery*File. Blog reviews of the novel by John Norris (Pretty Sinister Books), Les Blatt (Classic Mysteries) and Martin Edwards (Do You Write Under Your Own Name?) followed between 2011 and 2014, making Diabolic Candelabra the most reviewed Punshon mystery title on the internet until Dean Street Press began reprinting his books in 2015. It is gratifying to see the novel, one of Punshon’s finest detective yarns, now in its turn reprinted by Dean Street Press, for it might be said to be the single book in the author’s oeuvre that did the most to effect the modern Punshon revival.

  “[H]e reveals a rather manic imagination, fired by powerful emotions and driven personalities,” the distinguished mystery scholar Barry Pike once wrote of E.R. Punshon (see John Cooper and B.A. Pike, Detective Fiction: The Collector’s Guide, 2nd ed., 1994). Nowhere in the author’s large body of detective fiction is this quality of “manic imagination” more evident than in Diabolic Candelabra, a Grimm’s faerie tale in modern dress centering on an ominous forest wherein frightening secrets lie hid. In The Dark Garden (1941), the immediately preceding Bobby Owen detective novel, Punshon had briefly alluded to Wychwood, the great forest lying within the boundaries of Wychshire, the English county to which Bobby Owen and his wife Olive relocated from London several books earlier; but it is in Diabolic Candelabra that Punshon realized the dramatic possibilities of Wychwood, a strange and ancient realm evocatively described by the author:

  Here the trees grew more thickly, here there reigned a deeper silence. It seemed that here the birds did not come, nor any living thing, and over all the forest brooded the heavy silence of the warm autumn afternoon. They alone might have been living as they paced side by side through what seemed a perpetual twilight, beneath the heavy growth of entwining branches overhead. No breath of wind penetrated here, little sunshine either, only on each side grew the great trees, and beneath them a tangle of undergrowth, so that to Bobby and to Olive it was as though they were compassed in on every side.

  (There is, in fact, a remnant of a Wychwood Forest in existence today in Oxfordshire, England, the name having been derived from the Anglo-Saxon appellation Huiccewudu; Punshon’s interest in Anglo-Saxon lore would later surface prominently in a 1948 Bobby Owen detective novel, The House of Godwinsson.)

  Diabolic Candelabra initially concerns a matter of chocolates—not deadly treats, as in The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929), a famous detective novel by Punshon’s Detection Club colleague Anthony Berkeley, but what are, quite simply, delicious ones. “They’re just the most scrumptious chocolates that ever were, and they’re a mystery too, and Mrs Weston gave me some to taste, because she wants a lot more to sell at the bazaar next week, and she wants you to find out,” an enraptured Olive rather breathlessly and somewhat incoherently explains to Bobby after popping one of the exquisitely flavored morsels in her husband’s mouth. In quest of the recipe for these divine delicacies, the sleuthing knight and his damsel journey into Wychwood to find pretty young Mary Floyd, the maker of the chocolates, who resides at a lonely cottage with her invalid mother and cruel, ne’er-do-well stepfather. Mary has, additionally, an odd younger sister named Loo, who, like Rima in W.H. Hudson’s exotic Edwardian romance, Green Mansions (1904), dwells in the forest, a child of nature. It is Loo who tells Bobby and Olive that a bear has been to the Wychwood cottage of Peter the Hermit, an elderly herbalist and dear friend of Loo’s who created the wondrous essence with which Mary Floyd so lusciously flavors those chocolates. When Bobby and Olive investigate this matter, the couple finds Peter’s cottage violently wrecked and Peter mysteriously vanished. Has the old hermit departed for purposes unknown, or has he been murdered?

  Additional enigmas arise as the tale continues. What has become of another vanished individual, Charles Crayfoot, proprietor of a prosperous confectionary and bakery business, who on the day of his disappearance is believed to have visited Peter the Hermit’s cottage? What, if anything, does precious artwork--two grotesque paintings by El Greco and the so-called “Diabolic Candelabra,” a devilishly-designed piec
e in silver attributed to Benvenuto Cellini—that has gone missing from Barsley Abbey, the ancestral home of the Rawdons, have to do with these human disappearances? Like a classic storybook hero, Bobby Owen must undergo a fearsome ordeal before these puzzling questions are answered.

  While there are memorably scary moments in Diabolic Candelabra, there are also a number of amusing asides, many of them occasioned by the sudden presence of several businessmen of little scruple in the vicinity of Wychwood, which are splendidly characteristic of the author at his most wryly satirical. At one point Bobby thinks to himself that “business resembles charity in that it covers a multitude of sins.” Elsewhere Bobby wonders “why Mr Stone was not a millionaire,” as “he seemed to know so well how to transfer money from other people’s pockets to his own.” Nor do the gentry go unscathed. “I reckon the gentry can go dotty just like anyone else,” allows a Wychshire police sergeant, to which observation Bobby bluntly replies: “Or even more.” Reflecting his recent experience of the London Blitz, the author notes that the coffee Olive brews to revive Bobby is “of the strength of an R.A.F. bomb and of a blackness to satisfy even an Air Raid Warden on his nightly prowl.”

  Late in Diabolic Candelabra Punshon hearkens back to the first Bobby Owen detective novel, Information Received (1933), when, as Olive makes Bobby sandwiches and fills a thermos flask in preparation for her spouse’s climactic and potentially quite perilous venture into Wychwood, Bobby recollects sage advice from his early mentor, Scotland Yard’s Superintendent Mitchell: “Years before, when he was a raw beginner, a senior man had warned Bobby that a good detective never forgot his sandwiches. …” Unlike Hansel and Gretel, however, Bobby and Olive never find occasion to leave a trail of breadcrumbs behind them while boldly traversing the forbidding forest of Wychwood.

  Curtis Evans

  CHAPTER I

  CHOCOLATES

  OLIVE CAME QUICKLY, even excitedly, into the garden where, on this warm, calm, autumn evening, Inspector Bobby Owen, of the Wychshire County Police, wherein he doubled the parts of head of the somewhat scanty Wychshire C.I.D. with that of secretary to the chief constable, Colonel Glynne, was busily gardening. True, the gardening was being done at the moment from the depths of a comfortable deck chair, but spiritually Bobby was hard at it, digging with fervour, hoeing, sowing, mowing, pruning, weeding, one and all with extreme and extraordinary energy. Not quite realizing what a bustle of work she was interrupting, Olive said:

  “Oh, Bobby, shut your eyes and open your mouth.” Disappointedly she added: “Oh, they are.”

  Bobby opened the first named, regarded her severely, spoke with dignity.

  “If you are trying to insinuate—” he began, but as to utter these words his mouth had to remain open, Olive saw and seized her opportunity and popped something therein.

  “Um-m-m,” Bobby concluded his observations.

  “Well?” said Olive expectantly.

  “Not so bad,” said Bobby critically.

  “It’s heavenly,” said Olive conclusively. Then she added: “If you had been more appreciative you could have had this one, too, but now I’ll have it myself.”

  Therewith she popped a second something into her own mouth and contentedly sat down to munch on the grass by his side. Bobby watched her. He said wistfully:

  “If you had told me that before—”

  “Ah-ha,” said Olive.

  “What is it?” asked Bobby.

  “That’s for a good little detective to find out,” said Olive.

  Scared by even this faint suggestion of work, Bobby sank back into his chair.

  “Nothing doing,” he said.

  “Oh, yes, there is,” said Olive, firmly this time. “They’re just the most scrumptious chocolates that ever were, and they’re a mystery, too, and Mrs Weston gave me some to taste, because she wants a lot more to sell at the bazaar next week, and she wants you to find out.”

  “Chasing a chocolate to its lair,” murmured Bobby. “What’s the difficulty, anyway?”

  “Mrs Weston always does her shopping in Tombes, or at least most of it, because she says there aren’t any queues there, like there are in Midwych, and besides she knows people, and she gets these miracle chocolates at Walters’s, the big tea shop, and they cost seven and six a pound, and Walters’s say now people know about them they sell out ever so quickly, and they could sell more if they could get them, but they can’t. It’s the flavour. Isn’t it wonderful?”

  “Not bad,” admitted Bobby.

  “Not bad,” repeated Olive, surveying him with scorn. “I wish I had kept that one I gave you for myself, instead of wasting it on you. It’s absolutely different from anything else I ever tasted, sweet and not a bit sickly and sharp, too, and refreshing and scented as well—makes you think of woods and fields and the early morning and dew and things like that.”

  “Careful,” Bobby warned her. “Careful now, or you’ll be dropping into poetry.”

  “They are poetry,” Olive answered with conviction.

  “Ode to a chocolate,” murmured Bobby, and Olive went on unheedingly:

  “You see, they’re homemade and Mrs Weston wants the recipe so she can make lots and lots for her stall at the bazaar. She says she’ll charge ten shillings a pound, because they’re so awfully delicious and you can at a bazaar, can’t you? And she says they’ll sell like anything and I expect they will, too, because they really are so nice and absolutely different.”

  “Well,” commented Bobby, “I suppose it’s no worse giving ten bob for a pound of chocolates than four or five bob for a pound of tomatoes.”

  “I should like the recipe myself,” Olive added thoughtfully.

  Bobby composed himself to resume his gardening by lying back in his deck chair and closing his eyes. Olive poked him violently in the ribs. Bobby opened a reproachful eye—only one though, so as to be able to resume his gardening more quickly.

  “Here. I say,” he protested.

  “It’s where you come in,” Olive told him.

  “Me,” protested Bobby. “My good girl, I don’t know anything about making chocolates.”

  “You see,” explained Olive, unheeding this unnecessary disclaimer. “Walters’s say they get them from a Miss Floyd and they don’t know her address and they send the money to the Barsley Forest post office, and they are always asking her to send more, and she never does, so Mrs Weston wants me to try to find Miss Floyd and ask her for the recipe.”

  “Why can’t she go herself?”

  “It’s a long way for them, we’re much nearer, and then there’s the petrol. Mr Weston wants it all. Mrs Weston says she daren’t even fill her lighter. He’s a sort of inspector for salesmen or something, and he has to use his car all the time. Besides,” added Olive candidly, “I offered, because if I can get the recipe I should like to try myself.”

  “Suppose this Miss Floyd doesn’t want to tell?”

  “Well, she mightn’t,” admitted Olive, “but it would be mean, and besides Mrs Weston said she wouldn’t mind paying her. She told Mr Weston and he was awfully interested and said that would be all right, she could pay as much as she liked, as it was for the church bazaar. Mrs Weston was rather surprised, because Mr Weston doesn’t take much interest in church work generally.”

  Bobby mused on this. He thought Mr Weston sounded very generous, but then he didn’t know Mr Weston, and quite possibly that gentleman was of a liberal and generous disposition by nature.

  He said thoughtfully:

  “It may be a girl who lives in a lonely sort of cottage near Barsley Forest village, but right in the forest. I think her name is Floyd and I think there’s an invalid mother who has married again. I remember altering the beat of one of our chaps so as to pass by their cottage. It’s a lonely sort of place for one thing and the man’s a bit of a bad lot, too, or supposed to be, so I thought it might be as well to keep an eye on the place occasionally. He’s under suspicion of having been mixed up in a burglary or two, and he’s been sent up f
or petty larceny, I think. I don’t remember exactly. Stealing rabbits out of traps, too, I think. Anyhow, I know I thought it might be as well to let him see we existed. Possibly that’s why the girl has her money sent to the post office, to keep it safe from step-papa.’’

  “We’ll go and see her to-morrow, Bobby, shall we?” decided Olive. “You know, Bobby, those chocolates are really delicious. I’ve never tasted anything quite like them. I’m sure that girl could sell as many as she liked to make. It’s what Walters’s said. She could work up a very good business if she wanted to.”

  “Perhaps she doesn’t want,” Bobby said. “Are you going to try to cajole her out of her valuable secret?”

  He spoke half jestingly, but Olive was beginning to look serious.

  “Bobby,” she said, “do you think it might really be valuable? I mean, suppose a manufacturer began to make them and advertised a lot and all that?”

  “Might mean a fortune,” Bobby said, still half jestingly. “It all depends.”

  “I was only thinking they would be nice to make,” Olive explained. She was looking troubled now. “Mrs Weston says Walters’s say people are beginning to ask for them and they charge seven and six a pound and that’s rather a lot for chocolates.”

  “Suggests a fair margin for profit,” Bobby agreed. Now he, too, was beginning to look interested. “What sort of a chap is Mr Weston?” he asked.

  “She’ll have to be told,” Olive declared. “I mean I don’t want the recipe, if it’s going to be worth a lot of money. I don’t think we’ll go, shall we? Mr Weston? I don’t like him very much. I’ve only seen him once or twice, though. I expect he’s all right. Only I promised Mrs Weston I would try and get it for her—the recipe, I mean.”

  Bobby was thinking hard. The official part of him warned him that it was no affair of his and that only the most utter, hopeless fool of a policeman would ever risk seeking trouble when trouble was always so persistently finding him. The human part of him suggested that a girl who might possibly have hit upon some unusual flavouring for her homemade chocolates ought to be given a hint not to part with her secret without due consideration. In the confectionery trade a new flavour might well have its value. Olive’s voice broke in upon his thoughts.