The Bath Mysteries (32 page)

“What about that leopard-skin coat?” the Home Secretary asked. “Wasn't that traced to her?”

“No proof of identity; no way of nailing it down as the same coat,” declared the other. “Oddly enough, though, it was that coat made Alice Yates first suspicious of Beale – a case of fearing the Greeks when they offer gifts. She spotted it had come through Beale, and she felt there was something behind. Fur coats aren't given away to typists without a reason. By the way, we have evidence, now, Beale had a nice little hideaway all prepared and ready. With a bit of luck he would have been safe enough in it if he had managed to get away.”

“Just as well he didn't,” commented the Home Secretary, and the Assistant Commissioner warmly agreed.

Chris Owen's antique business is still flourishing, and Bobby was glad to put in for a month's special leave after the strain of so much doubt and worry, culminating in an escape so narrow. Lawrence, his identity becoming known through the publicity the papers gave him, was informed that he was entitled, as the sole heir to his mother's estate under her will, to a legacy of a few thousands she had received from an uncle of hers. Part of it Lawrence invested to bring him in a small weekly income, part of it he used to buy a tiny fruit and poultry farm, and part he kept in reserve as additional capital and to meet the inevitable losses till he should have learned his job. He also sought out Alice Yates, and informed her of his intention to marry her. She refused passionately to hear of such a thing, so he went away to have the banns put up in church and give notice at a register office, then returning to explain that the only choice left her was that between church and register office. She persisted in her refusal; he persisted in his preparations, calling for her quite regularly in a taxi to take her to church or register office as she preferred, till suddenly one day, appalled at the money she was making him spend in fares and fees, her resistance collapsed, and the ceremony was duly performed, with Magotty Meg as a somewhat scandalized and wholly surprised witness.

“It's not what you might call much in my line,” she protested, “but there, the best of us never know what we may come to.”

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

Death Among The Sunbathers

Crossword Mystery

Mystery Villa

Death of A Beauty Queen

Death Comes to Cambers

Mystery of Mr Jessop

The Dusky Hour

Dictator's Way

Who killed Mr. Jessop? Who stole the Fellows necklace? Who attacked Hilda May? The web of suspicion encompasses a dealer in ‘hot goods', respected jewellers, a millionaire, an ex-pugilist, a playboy, members of the nobility, a hard-boiled moll and a girl who could not forget her past.

All the clues are there, as the indefatigible Bobby Owen works his way through a real peasouper of a London mystery and pierces the fog – displaying not only magnificent analytical powers but and admirable courage in the face of danger.

Mystery of Mr. Jessop 
is the eighth of E.R. Punshon's acclaimed Bobby Owen mysteries, first published in 1937 and part of a series which eventually spanned thirty-five novels.

Along Chesters Street, which runs its full length by the west side of Lonesome Fields Common, the furniture van lumbered clumsily on its slow way. On its roof, an old-fashioned mangle with heavy wooden rollers wobbled dangerously, restrained only by a loosely tied rope from toppling over into the street. Next to it a horsehair sofa, such as our fathers and our mothers loved, held up its four legs into the air, as if in dumb protest against the cruelty of fate that had driven it from the place of honour in the drawing-room to a doubtful perch on a van roof, without so much as even a shred of cover against the lightly falling rain that was turning this dull London Saturday evening into a misty night. On the tail-board balanced a sickly looking aspidistra, apparently nearly forgotten during the loading of the van and then hurriedly gathered up at the last moment but not thought worthy of the reopening of the van. By its side sat a burly person enveloped in an enormous green baize apron, a sack drawn over his head to protect him from the drizzle. He was smoking a short clay pipe, and he stared out into vacancy with the blank indifference of a man for whom, between the jobs of packing and unpacking, life held little of interest.

Evidently a family whose roots went back into the dim Victorian past effecting a change of residence.

The street was not well lighted, and the falling rain, the mist drifting in from the common, the oncoming night, threw a dim veil around, through which the few passers-by, the big old-fashioned houses each standing aloof in its own grounds, an occasional stray passing vehicle, all loomed up, vaguely indistinct, as though half proclaiming, half withdrawing, the testimony of their presence. With many of the inhabitants this bad lighting of their street was a perennial grievance, but somehow repeated complaints to the borough council produced no effect. Improvement was always promised but never carried out. There seemed mysterious opposing influences, a kind of “hidden hand” operating in the background. Rumour said that this was because some of the youthful inhabitants of the borough, including some whose parents were influential councillors, found the obscurity prevailing in the long, straight street resulted in their being able to use it for trying out their motor-cycles and their sports cars with less risk of possible complainants seeing their registration numbers.

Probably that explanation was worth little. Motorcycles seemed to go banging up and down this street with no unusual frequency. Another, perhaps more likely, theory – since, after all, the saying that “money talks” is as valid for borough councils as for other bodies and persons – points out that Chesters Street has very sadly come down in the world. Its big early Victorian houses, all with unnecessary basements, all planned on the assumption that domestic help would remain cheap and frequent, all void of such conveniences as a hot-water supply or central heating, boasting at best but one bathroom, and that generally tucked away in a dark and inconvenient corner, as something not quite proper, were now either vacant or let off at the rate of a family a floor, with no restriction upon lodgers. An additional disadvantage, too, was that, abutting, as they did at the rear, on the common, they afforded many facilities to the enterprising burglar. It used at one time to be a local joke among the police that no London burglar considered himself out of his apprenticeship till he had broken into at least three Chesters Street houses.

De Montfort House, for example, past which the furniture van was now slowly lumbering, had at one time been occupied by a well-known financier, whose magnificent garden-parties had been the talk of London, had indeed transferred to themselves in their heyday all the glamour and the prestige of Mayfair, then in the height of its glory before sacrilegious hands had been laid even upon Park Lane itself. Since the financier's arrest and trial, and sentence to a term of penal servitude, the house had remained empty, and even the notice-board “To be Let or Sold,” whereon the man in the green baize apron turned now a lack-lustre and indifferent eye, seemed to have given up hope as, half obliterated by wind and rain, it drooped sadly and unsteadily earthwards.

The next house, The Towers, was an exception to the general air of shabby depression pervading the street. For many years it had been occupied by a prosperous City man who had been born there, who had hoped to die there, but whose family, by long, persistent effort, aided by a timely burglary or two, had finally succeeded in uprooting him to what was at that time the novelty of a block of West End flats. After having remained empty for some years, it had been let to, and was still occupied by, a Mr. Timothy Thomas Mullins. Mr. Mullins was not much known in the neighbourhood. It seemed he liked privacy. He took no part in the life of the borough; but, then, few of the residents in London suburbs do interest themselves in local affairs. He described himself as “Import and Export Agent”; it was understood he had an office in the City, though no one knew exactly where, and certainly his attendance at it seemed somewhat irregular. At any rate, he appeared to be very comfortably off. The house had a prosperous air. The grounds, between one and two acres in extent, were well kept up, especially in the front of the house, which stood well back from the road, wherefrom it was further screened by what could almost be called a labyrinth of trees and shrubs, planned, planted, and maintained by a well-known firm of landscape gardeners. Inmates of the house might well have thought themselves living in the heart of the country, with what looked like the outskirts of a forest before them and the open expanse of the common behind; and incautious visitors, following the broad gravelled path that seemed to lead from the entrance-gate to the house, were apt to find themselves conducted to what once had been the stable yard and was now only a vacant space before the garage. Such visitors had often to retrace their steps to the inconspicuous turning screened by a hawthorn copse that did in fact lead to the front entrance. Mr. Mullins always thought it a good joke when his visitors were caught into making this blunder, and for his part, if he wanted to proceed on foot to the street, he took a short cut from a side-door through a gap in the hawthorn copse to the path used by tradespeople and others on their way to the back premises.

At the rear of the house, too, the garden was well looked after, and, even in this time of early autumn, was still gay with flowers. The lawn was such a lovely expanse of velvety green as only the British Isles can show, and on each side of it ran two paved, sheltered alleys, bordered by trellis-work, on which grew climbing roses and other plants trained on cross-pieces between the borders of trellis-work, so that in summer the alleys were completely covered in by a green growing roofery. But many people have little private fads, and, though Mr. Mullins spent money freely on his garden and saw that it was always beautifully kept, he appeared to grudge even the smallest sum for the repair of the fence running between his domain and the common. Not even occasional trespassing by children and others, flower stealing, raids on the gooseberry-bushes, and so on, could induce him to have the many gaps in the fence attended to. Sometimes he talked about having a wall put up to replace it, and he had even gone so far as to obtain an estimate of the probable cost. But the project remained in abeyance. Apparently Mr. Mullins hesitated at the expense of erecting a wall and yet did not wish to spend anything on a fence he contemplated replacing.

Exactly opposite The Towers there opened, from Chesters Street, West Lane, as it was called – originally, no doubt, a country lane between common and village, but now a wide street, lined at the end near the common by smart little villas that further on changed gradually to shops, and then, at the corner of the first cross-street, blossomed into two magnificent public-houses, facing each other across the Lane. Naturally, at a third of the four corners stood the natural companion of flourishing public-houses, an equally flourishing pawnbroker's shop. Only a short distance further on was the chief shopping-centre of the district, with the local tube station. As the lane ran due west, the setting sun, when visible, shone down it full upon The Towers, and along it now drove a big old-fashioned car no second-hand dealer would have given more than a five-pound note for, if as much. In spite of its age, it was travelling at fully the thirty-mile speed-limit. Perhaps because of its age, its steering or its brakes may not have been in perfect order. At any rate, at the corner of West Lane and Chesters Street it blundered full into the furniture van, damaging itself pretty badly, apparently; less so the van.

The van driver jumped down and expressed himself with fluency and vigour. He seemed, indeed, to be thoroughly enjoying such a chance for self-expression. The two men in the car that had done the mischief got  

down too, and looked dejectedly at the damage done, and commented to each other on the impossibility of moving car or van. The man in the green baize apron alighted from the tail-board and came up to join the others and to look on in his uninterested way. Miraculously, as though rising from the earth or falling from the heavens, for there had been no sign of them before, two policemen appeared. One, in the uniform of a sergeant, said it was a bad smash, and such was a disgrace, and, if he had his way, six months' hard was what all concerned would be the better for. His companion, a constable, produced an enormous pocket-book and began to write with slow diligence. A motorcyclist sped by – built-up area or not, he was doing a clear forty mile an hour, but he seemed to care nothing for the presence of the two policemen.

“What ho! she bumps,” he cried, “she bumps,” and so sped on, forty m.p.h. again, police or no police.

Through the gate admitting to The Towers drive emerged Mr. Mullins, a short, fat, smiling man with pale blue eyes, a big bald head, and quick and secret movements, so that unless you watched him closely you were never quite sure of what he had been doing last, or what he would be doing next.

“Dear, dear,” he said, his somewhat high-pitched voice full of solicitude, “another accident? Really, the roads these days – intolerable.”