The Attending Truth: 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 eight days 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.

  Short Stories by E.R. Punshon

  FIVE BOBBY OWEN detective short stories complement E.R. Punshon’s 35 Bobby Owen detective novels, and these short stories are reprinted, one to a volume, with the new Dean Street Press editions of Punshon’s The Attending Truth, Strange Ending, Brought to Light, Dark Is the Clue and Triple Quest. Although Punshon’s Bobby Owen detective novels appeared over nearly a quarter-century, between 1933 and 1956, the publication of the Bobby Owen short stories was much more concentrated, with the first one, “A Study in the Obvious,” appearing in the London Evening Standard on 23 August 1936 and the remaining four, “Making Sure,” “Good Beginning,” “Three Sovereigns” and “Find the Lady,” in the Evening Standard in 1950, on, respectively, 15 February, 1 August, 17 October and 21 December.

  “A Study in the Obvious” appeared as part of an Evening Standard series devoted to “famous detectives of fiction,” edited by Dorothy L. Sayers. Besides Bobby Owen, fictional detectives included in “Detective Cavalcade” were Sherlock Holmes, Sexton Blake, Raffles, Eugene Valmont, Father Brown, the “Man in the Corner,” Max Carrados, Dr. Thorndyke, Dr. Priestley, Dr. Hailey, Hercule Poirot, Reggie Fortune, Philip Trent, Albert Campion, Lord Peter Wimsey, Roger Sheringham, Ludovic Travers, Mrs. Bradley, Mr. Pepper, Mr. Reeder, Mr. Pinkerton, Chief Constable Sir Clinton Driffield, Inspector French, Superintendent Wilson, Inspector Head, Uncle Abner, Trevis Tarrant, Charlie Chan and Ellery Queen.

  As editor of the series Dorothy L. Sayers warned Gladys Mitchell, who was contributing an original Mrs. Bradley short story, that the Evening Standard “will probably say they want it as short as possible and as cheap a possible! Don’t let them screw you down to 4000 words, because I know they are prepared to go to 6000 words or thereabouts. . . . I have almost broken their hearts by pointing out to them that all the older people, like Conan Doyle and Austin Freeman, run out to something like 10,000 [words] and their columns will be frightfully congested.”

  In her Evening Standard introduction to “A Study in the Obvious,” (2814 words) Sayers wrote:

  E.R. Punshon’s detective novels are distinguished by two things: a delicate, sub-acid humour and a fine vein of romantic feeling. They fall into two groups—the stories about Inspector Carter and Detective-Sergeant Bell, and the more recent series about Superintendent Mitchell and Detective-Sergeant Bobby Owen.

  In this short story . . . Owen—that nobly-born and Oxford-bred young policeman—appears alone, exploiting his characteristic vein of inspired common sense.

  The crime here is a trivial one; those who like to see serious crimes handled with delicate emotional perception should make a point of reading some of the novels, such as “Mystery Villa” and “Death of a Beauty Queen.”

  “A Study in the Obvious,” which appeared the same year as The Bath Mysteries, a Punshon detective novel that delved into Sergeant Bobby Owen’s aristocratic family background, is Bobby Owen’s origin story, showing how he came to be a policeman. Though light, the tale is one of considerable charm that should delight Bobby Owen fans.

  The later Evening Standard stories are shorter affairs, though they are all murder investigations. “Good Beginning” and “Find the Lady” take us back to earlier years in Bobby Owen’s police career, when he held the ranks of, respectively, constable and sergeant. “Making Sure” and “Three Sovereigns” capture something of that quality of what American mystery critic Anthony Boucher called “the obscure destinies that drive [Punshon’s] obsessed and tormented characters,” which so impressed Dorothy L. Sayers about Punshon’s novels.

  Curtis Evans

  CHAPTER I

  “CAESAR’S WIFE”

  MR LOUIS LAWSON, chief constable of Westshire West, had a slightly embarrassed air as he entered the room of Commander Bobby Owen at Scotland Yard. It was the first time they had met in person, though of course each knew the other well enough by name and reputation. True, Bobby had taken the precaution to refresh his memory regarding such facts as Mr Lawson’s long service, his steady if unspectacular rise to be chief of the force he had joined as a young man, his stubborn and so far successful resistance to the recent attempt to amalgamate Westshire West with Westshire (East and Central).
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br />   Now in the late fifties, Mr Lawson was still a well-set-up, strikingly handsome man. Bobby had gathered that these good looks of his—had he not been born too soon, his obvious and inescapable fate would have been Hollywood—had played their part in his rise to the position he now occupied. But so had his quality of a dogged, determined perseverance that never forgot and never let go. And that is a quality which brings success as often as do others more immediately spectacular. It has also the advantage of being within the reach of all.

  He and Bobby shook hands and said how glad they were to meet each other. Bobby produced the inevitable cigarette, the equally inevitable remark on the weather, added a reference to a recent complimentary comment by one of the Home Office inspectors on the smartness and efficiency of the Westshire West police. Then, as Mr Lawson still seemed hesitant over explaining the object of his visit, he began to search among the papers on his desk.

  “I’ve your letter here somewhere,” he said. “Suspected murder, isn’t it? At a place called Pending Dale—quite a small village?”

  “It was till Holcombe Manufactures changed all that—Longlast shirts, you know.” Bobby didn’t know, but said nothing, though in point of fact he had on a Longlast shirt at the moment. Mr Lawson went on: “And it’s murder all right; no one could bash his own head in the way this chap’s was. Nasty sight.” He added resentfully: “The first murder we’ve had in all my forty years of service.” He paused once more, shook his head, sighed, and said sadly: “It’s all extremely awkward.”

  “Yes?” said Bobby, reflecting, but not saying, that all murder cases are extremely awkward—especially for the person most intimately concerned: the murderee.

  “There are complications,” said Mr Lawson.

  “Yes?” said Bobby again, again reflecting that complications are not uncommon in murder cases.

  “Rumours,” said Mr Lawson darkly, and still more darkly and with an interval between each word, he added, first “Dynamite” and then “Caesar’s wife.”

  “Yes?” said Bobby for the third time, inwardly wondering what was the bearing of these isolated and apparently disconnected observations. By way of encouragement, he continued: “Of course, we are always prepared to help whenever we can. Here to co-operate, you know.” He referred to Mr Lawson’s letter again. He said: “The victim was a Mr John Winterspoon, a commercial traveller—groceries—so far as is known, a complete stranger in the district, which is outside the territory he worked for his firm. Two calls known to have been made by him. One at the ‘Black Bull’, where he had a double whisky and was thought to have had already as much as was good for him, and one on the village grocer, a Mr William Jones of the Pending Dale Good Grocery Stores. There he made a few business inquiries, as if he expected to take over the representation of his firm in the district. The firm say, however, that no such change had ever been suggested or thought of. You said something about rumours?”

  “There’s talk going on about Mrs Holcombe,” explained Mr. Lawson. “She found the body. Some one had to, hadn’t they?”

  “Is Mrs Holcombe connected with the Longlast Shirt people?”

  “She is Longlast Shirts,” said Mr Lawson simply. “Chairman, managing director, everything. She’s a widow. Her husband founded the business. He made it over to her when his health broke down a year or two before he died. Of course, death duties had to be paid, all the same, if the idea was to dodge them. Mrs Holcombe says it wasn’t. The doctors had told him plainly he couldn’t expect to live the five years that has to elapse before settlements can escape them. She says it was his wish that she should have complete responsibility while he was still there to advise and help. The business has grown enormously under her control. Expanding all the time. She owns most of the land round about, too. Very generous lady. She gave the village the Holcombe Institute; she’s chairman. There’s a communal laundry as well. Another gift of hers. She’s chairman of the Rural District Council. It’s owing to her that Pending Dale has electricity. She owns most of the shares in the Pending Dale Electric Supply Company she founded. Wired all the houses at her own expense, and supplies current at less than they pay in Bristol or Bath.”

  “Dear me,” said Bobby, quite overwhelmed by this list of activities and benevolences, and with already stirring in his mind a faint suspicion that possibly the Pending Dale inhabitants might feel rather as if they lay beneath a Holcombe eiderdown on a Holcombe feather bed, and in that situation found it just a little difficult to breathe.

  “People are not so appreciative as you would expect,” pronounced Mr Lawson, with stern disapproval. “So—well, ungrateful.”

  “They often are,” agreed Bobby. He shook his head. “Too bad,” he said. “But doesn’t suggest a background for suspecting the lady of murder, if that’s what it is,” and he added mentally: ‘Different if the lady herself had been murdered; one could understand that better.’

  “Most unlikely person in the world,” declared Mr Lawson.

  “Tut, tut,” said Bobby. “That does look bad.”

  “Naturally,” Mr Lawson continued, ignoring a comment he considered somewhat frivolous, “in the course of my duties I have often been in contact with Mrs Holcombe. I have always found her most pleasant, most agreeable, always ready to help, always ready to make what often turn out to be most useful suggestions.”

  “I see,” said Bobby when the other paused, though Bobby wasn’t quite sure what it was he did see, unless a vague possibility that just possibly the association between this still extremely handsome man and the highly eligible widow had given rise to village gossip that might not be wholly without foundation.

  “Caesar’s wife,” repeated Mr Lawson unexpectedly, and when Bobby looked as surprised and puzzled as he felt, Mr Lawson explained: “Means you haven’t only to be O.K., it means you have to look it.”

  “Oh, yes, very true,” agreed Bobby. “Only—well, what’s the application?”

  “Mrs Holcombe has two children—a daughter, Miss Livia, a most talented and artistic young lady, by her first marriage, and young Mr Harry Holcombe, who will be standing for Parliament at the next election. Er—” Mr Lawson was looking embarrassed again. “It happens that my boy, Norman—Norry—is reading for the Bar, but he has strong artistic tastes. A water-colour painting of his was hung at the Academy one year. I think he would like to take it up professionally, but of course he has to think about earning his living. Can’t do that in art.”

  “No, indeed,” agreed Bobby, nodding acceptance of this axiom.

  “But it has brought him and Miss Livia together. Common tastes. Naturally.”

  “Naturally,” agreed Bobby once more, beginning to see light. “Does Mrs Holcombe—?”

  He left the sentence unfinished, but Mr Lawson knew what was meant.

  “One can understand a certain hesitation,” he said. “I don’t say it’s very marked, but there it is. Of course, Mrs Holcombe is a wealthy woman, and you know yourself what pay in the police is like.”

  “I do indeed,” said Bobby, now all yearning sympathy. “Rather. I should say I did. And the Bar—all right when you get going, if you ever do. I’m told the best plan is to marry the daughter of a busy solicitor,” and to himself he thought: ‘All this means they are saying in the village that any case there is against Mrs Holcombe won’t be pressed because Lawson hopes his boy may get the girl and wants to make sure Mrs Holcombe gives her consent. Nasty. Bit of an awkward situation.’ He said aloud: “Dynamite all right.”

  “Oh, that’s Colonel Yeo-Young,” said Mr Lawson, looking surprised.

  “Something else?” asked Bobby, beginning to understand now why Mr Lawson had described the case as ‘complicated’. “Who is he? Where does he come in?”

  “The Yeo-Youngs used to be the big people about there,” Mr Lawson explained. “Very old family, owned all the land for miles round. Years ago, that is. There was a peerage once, not now. There’s still a tradition. Everyone quite glad to see one of the old family back, ev
en if there’s still no money. He is on the county council and a member of the Standing Committee. He just about is the local Tory party, and very keen on winning the seat back from Labour at the next election. There’s talk about him and Mrs Holcombe being likely to make a match of it. Nothing in it, probably, but people will talk. Can’t stop ’em.”

  “No, indeed,” Bobby said. “Useful too, sometimes.”

  Mr Lawson evidently didn’t agree with this remark, and seemed inclined to object, but instead went on:

  “She has the money, and he has the old family name. If young Harry Holcombe does get in at the next election, they’ll all stand in big with the Tories, and some say if the colonel and Mrs Holcombe did make a match of it, then they might get the peerage back. Might make all the difference. Very susceptible to titles, the ladies.”

  “Yes, indeed,” agreed Bobby. “All the men always tell you they only accepted a title to please their wives.”

  “Any hint of a scandal,” Mr Lawson continued, “and any chance of that—done in. Just dynamite. If you see what I mean.”

  “Dynamite all right,” agreed Bobby again. “Caesar’s wife as well. Plenty of reason for a nasty line in gossip getting started. Family, social, political. Jolly awkward. You’ll have to watch your step, or next thing we know there’ll be questions in Parliament, and no one wants that.”