So Many Doors Page 2

  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

  “FULL MOON TO-NIGHT”

  Bobby Owen, lately honoured, slightly to his embarrassment, by the somewhat ambiguous title of ‘Commander (unattached), Metropolitan Police’, raised his eyebrows.

  This was a trick he had learned since his return to Scotland Yard. He had found it useful both to indicate disagreement with his superiors and disapproval of too zealous subordinates. His wife did not even notice it. But she was waiting for a reply. He said:

  “My dear child, I can’t do anything. No one can. Even if a silly girl runs off with some undesirable or another, it’s not a police matter. We can’t interfere.”

  “Yes, but they’re so terribly upset,” pleaded Olive. “Mr Winlock was almost crying himself. Isobel’s their only child, and they say they believe Mr Mark Monk is married already.”

  “Enough to upset any one,” Bobby agreed. “It’s always pretty bad when your children make fools of themselves. It’s not the one who goes to gaol who suffers most, it’s wife or husband, the parents or the children. But there it is, and elopement’s no crime—or, if it is, it’s one that carries its own punishment with it.”

  “Mrs Winlock says some of her jewellery is missing, too,” Olive said.

  “Of course, that’s different,” Bobby admitted gravely. “If jewellery is missing and there are reasonable grounds for thinking that Miss Winlock has taken it, and if it is reported to the police, action will be taken at once. But do the Winlocks really want this Isobel girl prosecuted for theft?”

  “Oh, no,” exclaimed Olive, shocked. “Only Mrs Winlock thought if you could find out where Isobel is before it’s too late and you went to see her—and—” Olive subsided, for Bobby was looking at her very sternly indeed. “Well, you’ve often said yourself,” she protested defensively, “that more things are done by pulling strings than this world ever knows.”

  “That,” Bobby explained, “only applies to politicians and the topmost social peaks. But I’m neither an M.P. nor a duke, I’m only a humble cop, and I’m not going to risk my job tripping up over any string-pulling. If the loss of jewellery is reported, action will be taken as usual, and if Miss Isobel is caught she’ll go into the dock like any one else. Of course,” Bobby added thoughtfully, “a clever counsel might pull off the kleptomania stunt. If he did, nothing to prevent the g
irl going back at once to what’s-his name—Mark Monk, did you say? I suppose she’s of age?”

  “A month ago,” Olive said.

  “Well, then,” Bobby said with finality. “We don’t know them, do we?” he asked. “What brought them here? Cheeky, wasn’t it?”

  “Mrs Winlock is a sister of Mrs Barrett in the flat opposite,” Olive explained. “Isobel was her favourite niece, and she’s almost as much upset as Mrs Winlock. Oh, Bobby, can’t you do anything to help?”

  “No, I can’t,” Bobby told her crossly. “You ought to have told them so. I know it’s a tragedy, but it’s a private tragedy. I can’t do anything, any more than I could if the girl got pneumonia and died. Hang it all, don’t you see enough trouble and tragedy in the Force without having this sort of thing pushed on you as well?”

  “It’s the man, too,” Olive said. “He frightens them—the Winlocks, I mean. Mr Winlock tried to forbid him the house, but he went on coming all the same.”

  “He doesn’t seem to have frightened the girl,” Bobby remarked.

  “Mrs Barrett says she’s sure he did,” Olive told him. “Isobel is such a quiet little thing, awfully timid and shy. Mrs Barrett says the man must have terrorized her. Very likely pushed her into a car and drove off with her.”

  “Oh, well, if there’s any reason to suppose that, that’s different again,” Bobby agreed once more. “But it must be reported in the ordinary way.”

  “They do so want to avoid any scandal,” Olive said pleadingly. “It might ruin her whole life, and she did seem such a nice, sweet little thing. She was at that party the Barretts gave that we went to, sitting in a corner all by herself and hardly speaking to any one. Different from most girls to-day. Don’t you remember her?”

  Bobby searched his memory. He was growing rather tired of this tale of the escapades of Miss Isobel, who, having made her bed, must lie on it. Olive had evidently been a good deal upset by the sight of the very natural distress of the parents, and that did not make Bobby any more sympathetic towards the young woman who was the cause of so much trouble. He did not in the least see why Olive should be asked to share a grief that neither he nor she could do anything to help. Gradually into his mind came a faint recollection of a small, nondescript young woman, sitting alone and taking very little part in the proceedings. He thought he remembered offering to get her a cocktail and of the offer being flutteringly refused in a rather shocked and frightened tone. But the image was so faint that it faded away almost at once. Bobby shook a disapproving, slightly uneasy head.

  “Just the sort of innocent little fool,” he pronounced, “likely to let herself be bullied into doing anything any one wanted who got hold of her. That’s no help, though. Not unless some definite charge is laid. And that wouldn’t help the girl much—or the father and mother’s happiness either, if it’s her they’re thinking of and her future.”

  “Oh, it is,” Olive declared. “I wish you had been here when they called.”

  Bobby was devoutly thankful that hadn’t been the case. The police have quite sufficient experience of listening to sad and tragic tales where they can do nothing to help, without seeking more.

  “All they can do,” he said briskly, hoping the subject was now disposed of, “is to wait till they hear from the girl. It may not turn out so badly. She may be married by now, or if there’s already a wife in the background Mr Mark Monk may get a divorce and Miss Isobel settle down as a respectable married woman.”

  “I suppose it might happen,” Olive agreed, though doubtfully. “Mrs Barrett saw him once, and she says, too, that there’s something about him that’s positively frightening, the way he looks at you. It makes you chilly all up and down your back. Even when he’s being most awfully formal and polite. I told you Mr Winlock tried to forbid him the house and he just listened and said of course, of course, but he went on coming all the same. And then it’s so funny about the money.”

  “What money?” Bobby asked.

  “Isobel had a small allowance as well as all her salary, and she’s a little extravagant, so generally there wasn’t any left at the end of the month,” Olive explained. “Sometimes she tried to coax a little more from her father. But just lately she never did, and instead she’s been paying quite large sums into the Post Office. Mr. Winlock found the old book, and it had all been drawn out the day before Isobel went away. Five hundred pounds.”

  “That’s a bit unusual,” Bobby agreed. “Sounds as if this Mr Mark Monk had plenty of money and had been handing it out. Funny, though. Generally, it’s rings and bracelets and wrist-watches you make the running with—not crude cash. What’s the value of the missing jewellery?”

  “Mrs Winlock didn’t say exactly, but I don’t think it was anything very great,” Olive answered. “Mrs Winlock did say something about it’s being some Isobel had been promised when she got married.”

  “That means she may have thought she had a right to take it,” Bobby remarked. “I suppose they’ve no idea where the runaways are likely to have gone?”

  “Mr Winlock talked about Thameside Village,” Olive answered. “Isobel was rung up sometimes from there by an old schoolfellow she met recently—a Miss Bella Brown. She’s a journalist, and Isobel thought she would like to be one, too, and Miss Brown promised to help. The Winlocks met her once. They say she tried to be very nice to them, but they didn’t care for her—thought her common. She let Isobel come with her sometimes on some of her assignments, and once or twice Isobel stayed the night with her. But there’s no Bella Brown in the ’phone book living anywhere near Thameside. You know, Bobby, there’s something very queer about it all. I don’t believe it’s just an ordinary elopement.”

  “Well, what else can it be?” Bobby asked. Olive shook her head and said she didn’t know. Bobby said he didn’t either. Then he said: “It’s a bit queer, too, about Thameside. I don’t suppose there’s any connection, but we think there’s gambling going on there in one of the big houses along the river-bank, and we think we know the house. And the chap handling the case thinks it may be a black-market centre as well—the gambling possibly a cover for the black marketing.”

  “Mrs Barrett has a photograph of Mr Monk,” Olive said. “She showed it me. He did look horrid. The Winlocks found it in Isobel’s room after she had gone. It was pushed away at the back of a drawer. I’ll slip across and ask Mrs Barrett to let me have it to show you. You might recognize it.”

  “Wouldn’t help if I did,” Bobby told her. “Not unless it’s some one wanted, and that’s not likely.”

  But Olive had gone already, and soon was back with a small photograph she handed to Bobby. She said:

  “Mrs Barrett says it doesn’t show the look in his eyes she thought so horrid. Bobby, why do you look like that?”

  “I know him all right,” Bobby answered slowly. “I’ve seen him once. He was Matt Myers then, and he was in the dock, charged with the murder of his wife—if she was his wife, which seemed doubtful. Some one had put a knife into her, but he had a good alibi, and he was brilliantly defended. He was acquitted—after the jury had been out nearly six hours. I had nothing to do with the case, but I was in court part of the time, and had a good look at him. An ugly customer, but women were said to fall for him in the way women do sometimes for ugly men. They like the contrast, probably. After that we didn’t hear of him again till he was questioned three or four years ago about a girl he had been friendly with and who had disappeared. She has never been heard of since. There were no grounds on which proceedings could be taken. The Public Prosecutor’s office made that clear. Part of my job at the Yard just now is to help in the periodic revision of uncleared cases, and I’ve been reading the papers in this one. I quite agree with the Public Prosecutor people. Nothing was dug up to take to a jury. Strong suspicion only. Very possibly the girl is living quite happily somewhere or another—or, again, quite possibly she isn’t. I don’t suppose any one will ever know.” He paused and added slowly: “I expect it’s only a coincidenc
e, and I would never dare shove it into an official report, but the first murder was on the night of a full moon. And it was full moon again when the other girl disappeared.”

  “It’s full moon to-night,” Olive said.

  CHAPTER II

  “NOT A POLICE MATTER”

  They were both silent. Olive was remembering uncomfortably the quiet, demure, gentle-looking young girl she had seen sitting in a corner at the Barretts’ party, content, as it seemed, to be alone with her thoughts, and yet brightening with shy gratitude if any one spoke to her. Bobby was asking himself what he ought to do and finding it difficult to decide. No grounds for official interference. It is an inalienable right of all young women to run away from their homes if they wish to. A man formerly acquitted on a murder charge retains his full rights as a citizen and can resent, like any one else, any attempt at police interference that has not full legal justification. Mere suspicion gives no ground for action. And yet . . . and yet . . .

  Nor was Bobby altogether unaware of another consideration. People, both in and out of the police force, are very fond of being wise after the event. Suppose, in fact, these faint hints, premonitions—what you will—of impending tragedy that were troubling him did become concrete fact, almost certainly he would be asked why he had done nothing, knowing and suspecting what he did? It would be a question not too easy to answer, and one that would certainly be pressed by those, not a few in number or uninfluential in position, who had watched his rapid rise in the Service with a certain envy. Nothing fails like success, some one has said, and very certainly nothing else breeds such an envious and often malicious jealousy.