The Golden Dagger: A Bobby Owen Mystery Read online

  Sometime in the 1950s an increasingly fragile Punshon took a dreadful tumble down the landing steps at the Detection Club premises at Kingly Street, an event Christianna Brand vividly recollected many years later in 1979, with what seems rather callous amusement on her part:

  My last memory, or the most abiding one, of the club room in the clergy house, was of an evening when two members were initiated there instead of at the annual dinner [possibly Glyn Carr and Roy Vickers, 1955 initiates]. As they left, they stepped over the body of an elderly gentleman lying with his head in a pool of blood, just outside the door . . . dear old Mr. Punshon, E.R. Punshon, tottering up the stone stair steps upon his private business, had fallen all the way down again and severely lacerated his scalp. My [physician] husband, groaning, dealt with all but the gore, which remained in a slowly congealing pool upon the clergy house floor. . . . However, Miss Sayers had, predictably, just the right guest for such an event, a small, brisk lady, delighted to cope. She came out on the landing and stood for a moment peering down at the unlovely mess. Not myself one to delight in hospital matters, I hovered ineffectively as much as possible in the rear. She made up her mind. “Well, I think we can manage that all right. Can you find me a tablespoon?”

  The club room was unaccountably lacking in tablespoons. I went out and diffidently offered a large fork. “A fork? Oh, well . . .” She bent again and studied the pool of gore. “I think we can manage,” she said again, cheerfully. “It’s splendidly clotted.”

  I returned once more to the club room and closed the door; and I can only report that when it opened again, not a sign remained of any blood, anywhere. “I thought,” said my husband as we took our departure before even worse might befall, “that in your oath you foreswore vampires.” “She was only a guest,” I said apologetically.

  “Dear old Mr. Punshon,” no vampire he, passed through a door to death in his 84th year on 23 October 1956, four years after his elder brother, Robert Halket Punshon. On 25 January 1957 the widowed Sarah Punshon presented Dorothy L. Sayers with a copy of her husband’s thirty-fifth and final Bobby Owen mystery, the charmingly retrospective Six Were Present. “He would like to think that you had one,” wrote Sarah, warmly thanking Sayers “for your appreciation of my husband’s work during his writing life” and wistfully adding that she would miss her “occasional visits to the club evenings.” Sayers obligingly invited Sarah to the next Detection Club dinner as her guest, but Sarah died in May, having survived her longtime spouse by merely seven months. Sayers herself would not outlast the year. As Christianna Brand rather flippantly reports, Sayers was discovered, just a week before Christmas, collapsed dead “at the foot of the stairs in her house surrounded by bereaved cats.” Having ascended and descended the stairs after a busy day of shopping, Sayers had discovered her own door to death.

  * * * * *

  Dorothy L. Sayers’s literary reputation has risen ever higher in the years since her demise, with modern authorities like the esteemed late crime writer P.D. James particularly lauding Sayers’s ambitious penultimate Peter Wimsey mystery, Gaudy Night--a novel E.R. Punshon himself had lavishly praised in his review column in the Manchester Guardian--as not only a great detective novel but a great novel, with no delimiting qualification. Although he was one of Sayers’s favorite crime writers, Punshon was not so fortunate with his own reputation, with his work falling into unmerited neglect for more than a half-century after his death. With the reprinting by Dean Street Press of Punshon’s complete set of Bobby Owen mystery investigations—chronicled in 35 novels, five short stories and a radio play—this long period of neglect now happily has ended, however, allowing a major writer from the Golden Age of detective fiction a golden opportunity to receive, six decades after his death, his full and lasting due.

  Crime Fiction Reviews by E.R. Punshon

  E.R. PUNSHON reviewed crime fiction for the Manchester Guardian, a newspaper congenial to his own Liberal Party sympathies, in 70 insightful and witty columns published between 13 November 1935 and 27 May 1942. A total of 369 books were included in Punshon’s near-monthly column, making his reviews one of the larger bodies of crime fiction criticism by a Golden Age detective novelist. (In Punshon’s company we also find, among others, Dashiell Hammett, Anthony Boucher, Todd Downing and Punshon’s Detection Club colleagues Dorothy L. Sayers, John Dickson Carr, Anthony Berkeley, Milward Kennedy, Julian Symons and Edmund Crispin.)

  Punshon’s crime fiction reviews, selections from which are included in Dean Street Press’s new editions of the novels So Many Doors, Everybody Always Tells, The Secret Search and The Golden Dagger, indicate a partiality on the author and critic’s part toward classical detective fiction, especially works by present and future Detection Club members, including, for example, both richly literary whodunits by Dorothy L. Sayers, E.C. Bentley and Michael Innes and ingenious yet austere efforts by John Rhode, J.J. Connington and Freeman Wills Crofts. Yet though Punshon figuratively threw bouquets at the feet of Dorothy L. Sayers, whose own rave review of Punshon’s first Bobby Owen detective novel, Information Received (1933), was a great boon to Punshon’s career as a mystery writer, in his columns he forbore neither from occasionally criticizing works by other Detection Club members nor from tendering advice on improvement. He also demonstrated interest in American crime fiction, reviewing not just detective novels by classicists like S.S. Van Dine and Ellery Queen, but suspense novels by Mignon Eberhart and tougher fare like Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely. Altogether Punshon’s crime fiction reviews offer both the mystery scholar a valuable research tool and the mystery fan wise pointers for further reading.

  Curtis Evans

  CHAPTER I

  THE ’PHONE CALL

  COMMANDER BOBBY OWEN, Scotland Yard, was very busy indeed. Almost as busy indeed as bored. For all the huddle of papers on his desk, all his overflowing ‘in’ and ‘out’ trays, all the letters he had been dictating and all the reports he had been signing, all dealt with such matters of detail, routine, procedure as any fairly intelligent boy of twenty could have dealt with almost as well.

  It was with alacrity therefore, in the hope that it might presage something a little more interesting, that he answered a tap on his door with an invitation to come in. Detective Constable Ford appeared.

  “’Phone message just received from a Lower High Hill call-box,” he announced. “Sarge said he thought you ought to see it.”

  He laid a paper on the desk as he spoke. Bobby picked it up and read it aloud.

  “Begins: ‘Speaking from call-box on road X79, near Lower High Hill. There’s been a murder at Cobblers if that interests you. Goodbye.’ Ends.”

  Bobby laid it down again and looked annoyed.

  “Some silly ass trying to be funny most likely,” he said.

  “That’s what Sarge thought, sir,” answered Ford.

  “Better check up all the same,” Bobby said. “Ring up our Lower High Hill man and ask him if anything unusual has been happening. Let me see. Cobblers? Isn’t that Lord Rone and Saine’s place? The chap the Daily Trumpeter keeps calling ‘Export Dictator’?”

  “That’s right, sir,” agreed Ford. “The Trumpeter has a piece about him every day nearly. Extra big headlines this morning.”

  “What about?” Bobby asked.

  “There’s a long letter from him, nearly a column of it, to say calling him Export Dictator, or any other sort of dictator, is too silly to need a reply. So they’ve put a big photo of him on the front page and a whole lot inside about Cobblers and the Carton family history. Especially the scandals, and there’ve been lots of them—very old family. Old-world pomp and state, they say, and the finest private art collection in the world, outside America. Worth thousands of pounds.”

  “Trying to be nasty, I suppose,” Bobby remarked. “A tall poppy and ought to be cut down.”

  “That’s right, sir,” agreed Ford, though it is to be feared the classical allusion was lost upon him.

  “Well, let me know
if you get anything from Lower High Hill,” Bobby said.

  Ford retired. Bobby yawned and signed another report—on the style, cut, and colour of the ties the police are now permitted to wear on duty, and told himself that a drive out to Cobblers by way of the famous Cobblers Oaks would be an agreeable change, even if only to uncover a mare’s nest.

  “Ought to have had sense enough to take the opportunity,” he reflected, and put out a languid hand to collect the next triviality which had been ‘passed to you’ for consideration.

  But before he could apply his mind to the particular problem involved, Ford reappeared.

  “Sarge said to inform you at once, sir,” he announced. “Constable Yates, Lower High Hill, states: ‘Re ’phone inquiry to hand, Mrs Jane Williams, Rose Cottage, this parish, reports finding knife, one, fancy handle, apparently bloodstained, in call-box near village, on road X79.’ He asks for instructions.”

  Bobby sat back in his chair, a little startled. It might, of course, be part of some elaborate practical joke. The knife, with its ‘fancy’ handle, might have been used for skinning rabbits or killing pigs, or something of that sort. It might even be some new stunt of some specially enterprising young gentleman on the staff of the Daily Trumpeter, since that journal announced almost every day that Lord Rone and Saine was ‘murdering’ British exports. But then again it might not. What, he wondered, did ‘fancy’ handle mean?

  “This private art collection the Trumpeter talks about,” he said slowly, “doesn’t it include what is supposed to be the finest collection of arms and armour ever got together? I seem to remember reading something of the sort.”

  “I didn’t notice the Trumpeter said so much about that,” Ford answered. “It talked a lot about Dutch interior pictures and about a stamp collection Lord Rone has got together himself recently and worth thousands.”

  “Dutch interiors, old arms and armour, and postage stamps,” Bobby remarked. “Seems to show a catholic taste. Well, you know, I don’t much care about bloodstained knives turning up after a ’phone call about a murder. Report back to your sergeant and tell him I think I had better drive out to Lower High Hill and have a look round, and I would like to take a man with me, just in case. Most likely it’s a leg-pull, but one can’t be sure. Ask your sergeant to spare you if he can.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir,” said Ford, looking very pleased—so pleased indeed that Bobby wondered if his message would not reach Ford’s sergeant in a slightly more peremptory form, as regarded at least Ford’s personal share in the proposed excursion, than Bobby himself had given it.

  Not that he minded if that did happen, since Ford was an intelligent and reliable young man, who had already proved himself useful in emergency.

  So he entered in his diary what he proposed to do and why, left a message or two with his secretary, and went out to find Ford had a car ready and waiting.

  “Shall I drive, sir?” he asked when Bobby appeared.

  But Bobby thought he would prefer to drive himself, and soon they were out in the country, both of them secretly aware, though neither of them would have admitted it for worlds, that even in a policeman’s life there are moments less arduous, difficult, and trying than others.

  Lower High Hill is one of those oddly placed villages produced by modern conditions. It remains remote and solitary, living its own life in sleepy content, and it is in close touch with all modern developments. Television sets even are not unknown, and a good ’bus service puts the village within half an hour’s ride of two fairly large towns, west and north-west. London itself is not more than an hour away by motor coach, though this runs at much rarer intervals. True, the main road along which these ’buses and the coach pass is nearly two miles away over wooded and hilly ground, but an active walker can cover this distance in half an hour. On a bicycle even less time is required. This wooded and hilly country serves to act as a kind of curtain—not iron—between the village and the outer world and so helps to preserve much of its original character as a self-contained entity.

  The village itself—there is hardly a building in it less than a century old, and gas, electricity, and piped water are alike unknown—is dominated by the enormous bulk of Cobblers, almost entirely rebuilt soon after the Napoleonic Wars, when a disastrous fire destroyed its Carolean forerunner. It is approached by a stately avenue of ancient elms, and if the house has small claim to architectural beauty, its very size gives it an imposing air.

  “You wouldn’t think anyone could manage to keep a place like that going in these days,” Bobby remarked as it first came into view. “It must need a regular army of servants, and they aren’t so easy to get.”

  “Well, sir, I suppose everything’s easy if you’ve got the money,” observed Ford, and Bobby in reply spoke those two dreadful words that in these days weigh so heavily on all.

  “Income tax,” he said simply; and in the depressed silence that followed the utterance of those two sad words he drove on past the open entrance to the avenue of elms—the iron gates formerly guarding it had gone long ago to make munitions—past a lodge still clearly in occupation, and on to the village, where he drew up before the cottage that served both for police station and for the residence of Police Constable Yates, who represented law and order in Lower High Hill.

  Yates was expecting them and the weapon found by Mrs Williams of Rose Cottage was carefully laid out for their inspection on a clean sheet of paper.

  It looked both a lovely and a deadly thing with its long, narrow blade, inlaid with gold, tapering to a point of needle sharpness, and showing on it ominous brown stains at which both Bobby and Ford looked doubtfully. The handle was in the shape of a nude woman in ivory and gold—a magnificent piece of work. Italian, Bobby thought, of the Renaissance period, and at once a work of beauty and of death—in that, typical of its time.

  “You can’t identify it in any way, I suppose?” Bobby asked presently.

  Yates shook his head.

  “No, sir,” he said, “though they do say as up at Cobblers there’s the like of it as was used before guns were thought of.” He paused and added: “That handle now, there’s times you could swear she was smiling wicked like, telling you to do the same and why not?”

  “Why not what?” Ford asked, and Yates answered sombrely:

  “Kill.”

  “Oh, well,” Ford said.

  Bobby had taken out his notebook and was putting down a full description of the weapon. He went on to make a sketch of it, and as he did so he, too, began to be aware of something of the same sensation that Yates had just spoken of. There were moments when it was as though the figurine was watching him as he worked, watching him with a sort of secret, hidden glee. He could almost have believed that the stains upon the blade had wakened it from long sleep to a life of its own, and that from it was proceeding waves of impulse imploring, urging, demanding that this fresh life imparted to it should be strengthened and continued in the same way.

  “And the sooner, my dear,” he said as if he were addressing it and it could understand, “the sooner you are back again safe in your glass case, the better.”

  Neither Ford nor Yates seemed to find anything strange in this remark, and indeed they were both of them regarding the thing with much the same sort of uneasy mistrust.

  “No chance of finding any useful finger-prints on it, I suppose,” Bobby remarked as he finished his sketch. “I expect the woman who found it didn’t think about that.”

  “No, sir,” agreed Yates. “I asked her. She had handled it quite a lot, wondering what it was and showing it to neighbours. Some of them said to take it straight back to Cobblers, but she thought I had better see it first—and quite right, too.”

  “It’ll have to go for expert examination at Hendon,” Bobby said. “What about the call-box?”

  “I’ve shut it up,” Yates answered. “Stuck up a sign ‘Out of Order,’ but I couldn’t see anything to notice. I had a look round, but it all seemed as usual. No bloodstains, no sig
ns of a struggle. I hadn’t time to make a proper search.”

  “Good,” Bobby said approvingly. “You’ve done all you could. I’ll go and have a look at the call-box myself, though I don’t suppose you’ve missed anything, but I may as well see what it’s like; and then we’ll see if Lord Rone can identify the dagger as his property. If he can’t identify it from my sketch, I’ll bring him back here. Keep it safe, and above all don’t let anyone touch it. There may be a dab or two somewhere that might be useful.”

  “There’s some young gents staying up at Cobblers,” Yates said. “I did think as it might be some of them up to their larks.”

  “If it’s that,” Bobby said, hoping that it might be so, “they’ll be sorry for it before I’ve done with them. There is such a thing as causing a public mischief.” He paused and added, almost against his will: “I don’t believe it’s that way, though,” and when he turned to look again at the knife lying on the table he could almost have sworn that the features of the figurine had only just returned to immobility from a smile of evil, secret joy.

  CHAPTER II

  HENPECKED HUSBAND

  BOBBY’S VISIT TO THE indicated call-box brought him in fact no fresh information. He was able to see for himself that the telephone directory whereon, according to the finder, Mrs Williams, the dagger had been lying, showed no trace of blood. Presumably therefore any stains on it, whether of blood or not, were dry before the weapon was placed there. But blood dries so quickly that that piece of deduction seemed of little practical value.