Murder Abroad (36 page)

“Where are you? It's dark. I can't see a thing.”

A familiar chuckle answered him.

“Now it is you who cannot see,” the voice from out the darkness said. “Eh, well, that is amusing. Forward, march, but more to your right. No. More still. That's it. I am here but be quick for I think that I am dying though I do not understand why.”

Bobby made his way on through the dark night he felt like a hostile force, holding them back, impeding them, that was almost like a palpable thing, hindering every movement. Behind him he could hear Dr. Mendel, stumbling and grumbling, but no longer thinking of turning back, now he knew a living patient might need his care. Behind them the darkness was broken by an increasing glow where some of the gendarmes had heaped together dry wood to make a bonfire that would give at least a little light. Bobby called again:

“Where are you. I can't see. I can't see a thing.” Once more there sounded that familiar chuckle. “But I am here,” came Père Trouché's voice. He said compassionately: “No doubt it is difficult when one is not accustomed to the dark. Tell me then, what happened? I remember only that I fell down and then I think I must have fallen asleep for when I woke I was alone. I tried to find you but it tired me to walk and presently I began to understand that I was dying. It is surprising, for I do not seem to remember having been ill.”

Bobby, groping desperately, stumbling forward, striking now and then a match that was of little use, came at last to where the old man lay, propped up against one of the boulders that were scattered around.

“It was the Williams woman,” Bobby said. “She fired at us. I thought she had killed you. Now she has killed herself. Doctor, he's here.” He stood up and lighted another match that was of small service, so small it seemed in the vast, enveloping, tremendous darkness that was as though it covered the whole earth, as though nothing else existed save eternal night. “Doctor, here, he is here,” he called again.

“You have brought a doctor?” Père Trouché asked. “A doctor for the old blind beggar? It is very good of you, but also it is useless.”

“It's so dark, black as pitch. There is no light anywhere,” Mendel's voice came complainingly.

“That is difficult for you others, is it not?” Père Trouché commented, “but for me, it is nothing, for I have always lived in darkness all my life and now it is only natural that I should die in it. Only I wish that I could just once have known what is this light that people talk about so much. Always, I have wondered.”

Doctor Mendel came up at last, to join them.

“Ah, there you are,” he said, “but I have used my last match and what can I do in this darkness?”

“Darkness? Here is no darkness,” Père Trouché said in a voice louder than any Bobby had ever heard him use before. “There is only light, light everywhere, shining all round; oh, how lovely a thing is light.”

He slipped away from the half recumbent position he had held before. Bobby thrust into Mendel's hand his few remaining matches. Mendel struck them one after the other. He said:

“The man's dead.” A moment later he said: “He has been shot twice, right over the heart, through the heart. He must have died on the spot. It is inconceivable that he lived more than a moment or two.” He stared up at Bobby, the light of the match he was holding flickering uncertainly on his face, on the face of the dead man. He said: “He was shot clean through the heart, twice. Well, after that, how could he walk and talk?”

Bobby had no answer to make. Mendel got to his feet, mechanically trying to brush dirt and earth from his clothing. He muttered:

“What was all that about light? It's black as pitch all round.”

Again Bobby made no attempt to answer. Help came. Improvised torches of dry wood and brush gave uncertain illumination. The body of the old blind beggar was placed on the rough stretcher that had hastily been put together and was carried away. Bobby, conscious now of an immense fatigue, followed slowly. Clauzel said to him:

“Well, now it is finished. Shields has paid for his murder of Mademoiselle Polthwaite, of the unfortunate Volny. The Williams woman has escaped us. True, there is still Monsieur Williams to deal with but we shall soon put a hand on his collar.”

In this, however, Monsieur Clauzel was mistaken, for from that day to this nothing has been heard of Williams. Evidently he took the alarm in time and in the car he had succeeded in hiring he must have escaped across one of the frontiers—possibly by means already prepared in advance for his and his wife's escape with their projected booty.

From his own private point of view, Bobby was not sorry, since it saved him from being involved in long legal proceedings and a sensational trial that might have dragged on for months. As it was, nothing could be done and nothing more was required from him except a long statement to be added to the enormous dossier of the case.

Of the others who had played their part in working out the drama to its end, there is not much to be told. The reconciliation between the Abbé Granges and schoolmaster Eudes still holds good and Citry-sur-l'eau remains one of the few places in provincial France where church and school work together in their common task of showing youth how to attain the good life. Charles Camion, cleared of the suspicions of which he had so long been the object, and finding himself as a result ceasing to be so generally of interest, made up his mind at last to leave Citry. By help of the publicity still attaching to his name, and with the aid of introductions given him by some of the journalists who came to hear his story, he was able to join a small travelling theatrical company. There he found his own special niche in life so rapidly that already he is becoming known, if not yet to the public, at least in the profession, and he has even had the good luck to get work on the films. The contract he secured made his position seem sufficiently sure, especially as his parents' hotel was beginning to do well again, to make possible his marriage with Mademoiselle Simone. It is likely to take place very shortly, and Bobby, returning to England, in the hope both of claiming the reward due to him and of securing the appointment promised, felt that now he ought to be able to induce Olive to follow so admirable an example.

THE END

E.R. Punshon was born in London in 1872.

At the age of fourteen he started life in an office. His employers soon informed him that he would never make a really satisfactory clerk, and he, agreeing, spent the next few years wandering about Canada and the United States, endeavouring without great success to earn a living in any occupation that offered. Returning home by way of working a passage on a cattle boat, he began to write. He contributed to many magazines and periodicals, wrote plays, and published nearly fifty novels, among which his detective stories proved the most popular and enduring.

He died in 1956.

Information Received

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Crossword Mystery

Mystery Villa

Death of a Beauty Queen

Death Comes to Cambers

The Bath Mysteries

Mystery of Mr. Jessop

The Dusky Hour

Dictator's Way

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Suspects – Nine

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Secrets Can't Be Kept

“You think it's murder, don't you?”

“There is no proof of that as yet, sir,” Bobby answered cautiously.

“No, I know, but it's what you think,” Glynne answered. After a pause, he added: “So do I.”

Viscount Byatt was found dead in his car without a mark on him. Millionaire Andy White's corpse was discovered in a remote cottage in Wales – no clue to the cause of death. When a grotesque-looking visitor calls on Detective-Sergeant Bobby Owen in the middle of the night, the latter's help is urgently needed – if a third young man isn't to suffer the same murderous and mystifying fate. Accompanied by his fiancée Olive Farrar, Bobby is up against more than one femme fatale in this delicious and diabolical golden age mystery.

Four Strange Women
, originally published in 1940, is the fourteenth novel in the Bobby Owen mystery series. This new edition features an introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.

“What is distinction? The few who achieve it step – plot or no plot – unquestioned into the first rank… in the works of Mr. E.R. Punshon we salute it every time.”
Dorothy L. Sayers

Detective-Sergeant Bobby Owen had spent a most enjoyable evening—dinner, theatre, dance, supper—with his fiancée, Olive Farrar, and was now on his way home. In his pocket was his application for permission to transfer to the Wychshire County Police, and on the morrow—or to-day, rather, for now it was in the small hours—he was travelling up to Midwych, the county town of Wychshire and a busy manufacturing centre, there to interview Colonel Glynne, the chief constable.

The fortunate conclusion of a recent semi-private investigation on which he had been engaged had put money in his pocket, won him influential friends, and gained him the promise of an appointment as inspector in the Wychshire county force, with special duties as private secretary to the elderly Colonel Glynne, and with the additional prospect, therefore, of some day succeeding him as chief constable. Indeed the rich, enchanting words, ‘deputy chief constable', had already been breathed to Olive by Lady Markham, who, in gratitude for Bobby's services in the semi-private case already mentioned, had been busy pulling those necessary strings by which such comfortable appointments are generally to be obtained in our happy land of England.

Bobby, therefore, was in a very contented, not to say complacent mood as he strolled along. He wondered a little what his future chief would be like. Lady Markham had described him as both efficient and considerate to those working under him, though with a bee in his bonnet about football pools, against which he had been conducting a kind of crusade. He had indeed obtained a certain notoriety by an attack he had delivered on them in public, in which he described them as a menace to society and produced figures to show how badly trade in Midwych was suffering from the diversion to the pools of money that would have been so much better spent in other more productive and useful ways.

Bobby wondered if his future work would include taking part in this campaign. He would be quite willing to do so. Not one of the ways in which he wasted his own money, and every policeman, like every social worker, knows well what harm is done by unrestricted gambling. A little awkward though, if it were true, as he had heard, that a son of the chief constable's, a young man who had occasionally himself played as an amateur in first division football, was rather a devotee of those same pools. However, that, Bobby supposed, would be papa's trouble, not his. He turned into the street in which he lived and noticed without interest a large, imposing-looking car standing near his door. He supposed vaguely that perhaps the doctor occupying the next house had bought a new car and was now suffering under the doctor's tenth plague— a night call. As he passed it on his way to his own door, he was aware of an odd impression that some one from within the car's dark interior was watching him intently. It was almost like a physical sensation and one curiously disturbing, this idea he had that from out that darkness so intent a gaze was fixed upon him. He almost turned back to ask who was there and why such intensity of interest, but then, putting aside an idea he felt absurd, he inserted his latchkey in his door and entered. To his surprise his landlady, who should have been in bed long ago, made a prompt appearance. “There's a man to see you, Mr. Owen, sir,” she announced.

“At this time,” protested Bobby, for by now it was less late than early, nearly two in fact, since theatre, supper, dance, escorting Olive back to her little hat shop where she lived near Piccadilly, had eaten up the night.

“I couldn't get rid of him,” the landlady explained resentfully. “Said he was going to stop if it was till the milk came. I don't like his looks,” she added, “and me all alone, and should have been in my bed at a Christian hour long ago.”

“Too bad,” said Bobby, “I'm sorry.”

“As villainous looking he is as ever I saw,” the landlady went on, “ so I asked him if he would like a drop of beer, and I gave it him in a glass with a bit of butter rubbed on it so as to leave his fingerprints and then you'll know who he is.”

“By Jove,” said Bobby admiringly, “that was smart.”

“I won't say it wasn't,” admitted the landlady complacently; “but then I've not had a Scotland Yard gentleman with me so long without picking up a bit of how it's done.”

“We shall have,” Bobby told her gravely, “to get you a job on the staff at Central. Did he say what his name was?”

“His sort,” sniffed the landlady, “has as many names as a cat has lives.”

“So they have,” agreed Bobby, “Smith to-day and Brown to-morrow. You run along to bed. I'm sorry you've been kept up. Most likely it's only an old ‘con' trying to borrow the price of a bed because he's sure of an honest job to-morrow and wants to look his best. Half a crown will get rid of him.”

He bade her good night and opened the door of his sitting-room. One of the ugliest men he had ever seen was there and got up as he entered. A low forehead; a long, crooked nose; a mouth framing teeth too widely separated and irregular in shape, and stretching, it seemed, almost from ear to ear; ears themselves enormous and standing out nearly at right angles; eyes small and hidden, indeterminate in colour, the left eye with a cast in it; all that combined with a squat, ungainly figure and sprawling hands and feet to produce an effect so remarkable that Bobby found himself reflecting that fingerprints would hardly be required for identification if the Records Department at the Yard knew anything of him. He appeared to have omitted to shave, but this unfortunate impression was, in fact, due merely to an abnormal growth of beard, so that a shave twice a day at least was necessary to avoid an appearance of not having shaved at all. His hands, his brows, his ears, all showed, too, the same strong growth of hair, and Bobby noticed that though his clothes looked of good cut and material, they were old and worn, and as shapeless as if the coat had never known a hanger or the trousers a press. He was smoking a short pipe full of some exceptionally vile tobacco, so strong that Bobby, getting a whiff of the smoke, nearly choked. But when the stranger spoke from behind the vile, odorous cloud that half hid him, his voice was singularly pleasing, of a rich, musical tone—organ tones they might have been called. He said as Bobby came in:—