Crossword Mystery (35 page)

Major Markham stepped forward again.

“All that has nothing to do with us,” he began. “We are police officers and–”

Involuntarily he shrank back. With a quick, fierce gesture, she had whirled the great iron ladle she held so that a portion of its molten contents splashed on table and floor, searing and burning where it fell.

“Take care, take care,” she said. “Stand back a little time, for I am not ready yet.”

“The woman's mad,” Markham exclaimed, and Mitchell said:

“Not mad, I think, but there's a kind of greatness in her, a greatness that's turned sour now.”

She pointed with her ladle at the huddled figure of her husband.

“You'll hang him, I suppose,” she observed, meditatively. “It's not worth while, it's not even fair, for there's not a thing he did but I did it – all he did was my doing, and only mine.”

For the first time Cooper seemed aware of what was going on.

“No, it's not worth while hanging me,” he agreed; “but they will – at least, not me, but the bit of me that was left alive after you said it was no use, too late.”

“Come, Mrs. Cooper,” Markham began again, “be reasonable–”

“Why, you fool,” she interrupted, “only the dead are reasonable, and so will I be soon, but not yet, so keep your distance for a time,” and again, with a twirl of her great ladle, she sent a sprinkle of molten, burning, golden death to fall like a barrier between them, and to smoke and burn and sear where it fell. “But I suppose that boy who trapped me with his innocent face, and his talk about toothache, and lost watches, and all the rest of it, that I never saw through till just the other day when it dawned on me, too late, he was the detective old George Winterton had babbled about – I daresay he is right enough. Very likely, if I had been in Lady Macbeth's place, I should have done what she did, and in my place she would have done as I did. She wanted rule, power, to make things go the way she wanted them to go. Why shouldn't I,” she demanded suddenly, “when I felt I could? Who had the right to stop my doing what I knew I could do? Was I to let two doddering old men stand in the way ? Hadn't I the right to remove them? I knew what I could do; I felt it burn inside me; it would have killed me instead of them if I had held it back – rather them than me, I said, that's all. As for young Ross – well, I won, and he lost, that's all there's to it. Now I've lost myself, but better try and lose, than sit and dodder all day long, like those two old men. Why, there were things I meant to do, plans, schemes, all thought out, all ready, all – but that wasn't what I wanted really; at the bottom of it all, what I wanted was just to be myself, to use myself – power. And to-day that means gold – it wasn't the gold I wanted, it was power to do things – power that's gold, gold that's power – that's what I tried to get; that's what I lived for; that's what I'll die by,” and before they knew her dreadful purpose, or could prevent it, she had lifted a great ladle full of the molten gold of the sovereigns she had melted down and had emptied it, pouring it on herself, on her upturned face, into her open mouth, down her throat, and so fell writhing and choked, a dreadful, disfigured thing no longer human; nor was there one of them that could move a muscle, or utter so much as a cry, so held in utter stillness were they by the horror and the greatness of the deed.

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

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Death Comes To Cambers

The Bath Mysteries

Mystery of Mr Jessop

The Dusky Hour

Dictator's Way

Con Conway, the notorious cat burglar, was not the kind of person to be scared out of his wits for nothing. So it seemed odd to Sergeant Bobby Owen, when he met Con quite by chance rushing, terrified, along a road in the Brush Hill district just before midnight. Afterwards he investigated the house where it seemed Conway had been, yet there was nothing, not a shred of evidence to suggest that swag had been hidden there or taken from there.

It was a strange place, Tudor Lodge; it had an eerie atmosphere and disturbing associations. Twice Sergeant Owen returned to look it over but all he encountered was a very pretty and very frightened girl. Finally he found in the house a murdered man – murdered years ago. Yet still he could not make out why Conway had been quite so frightened – until he went to work in earnest on the job.

Crossword Mystery
is the third of E.R. Punshon's acclaimed Bobby Owen mysteries, first published in 1934 and part of a series which eventually spanned thirty-five novels.

Sergeant Bobby Owen, B.A. (Oxon. pass degree only), recently promoted as a reward for what his superiors considered good work accomplished, realised abruptly that he had missed his way, and, simultaneously, that it was beginning to rain.

Both facts annoyed him; the first, because it would probably mean missing the last train from Brush Hill station to Baker Street; the second, because it might necessitate unrolling the beautifully neat, gold-mounted, brand-new, silk umbrella he had treated himself to that very day, for he knew that a plain-clothes C.I.D. man should always make a good impression, and he understood well how universally a man is judged by the umbrella he carries.

However, this last necessity was not upon him yet, for the warning rain-drops ceased as suddenly as they had begun. But there remained his doubt concerning the best way to take whereby to reach the railway station.

At Brush Hill police-station, which he had been visiting in connection with some not very important bit of routine business and had left only a few minutes ago, he had been given clear enough directions for finding his way to the railway, since the buses whereby he had journeyed down from the Yard would at this hour have ceased running for the night. But somehow he had gone astray.

By the light of a street lamp near, he made out that he was in Windsor Crescent, and was none the wiser for the knowledge, since he had no idea how Windsor Crescent stood in relation to the railway station, nor at this late hour did there seem a single soul abroad in all the sedate, desperately decorous, highly respectable, slowly decaying suburb of Brush Hill, once a favourite home of prosperous City merchants, but now so derelict it had not one single block of up-to-date miniature luxury flats to boast of, nor even so much, in all its borders, as a county council estate of dolls' houses for workers.

Perplexed, Bobby stood at the corner of Windsor Crescent where Balmoral Grove cuts it at right angles on the way to join Osborne Terrace, and watched two cats prowl, sinister and swift and silent, across the road – but silent not for long, since, a moment later, there came from one of them a long, ear-splitting, nerve-piercing, sleep-destroying howl, a little like the product of a circular saw undergoing thumbscrew treatment in some machinist inquisition. Instinctively Bobby's eyes went searching for the stone we have the warrant of the poet for believing it is a proper man's first impulse to heave at any cat in sight, and then upon the silence following that fierce feline howl broke the sound of running footsteps, as there fled the length of the Crescent one who seemed driven by some dreadful fear.

Bobby stiffened to attention. It seemed to him there was a quality of terror needing investigation in those uneven, rushing, running steps whereof the sound troubled so suddenly and strangely the quiet of the suburban night. No man, he told himself, ran like that, save for bitter need.

He stood back a little into the shadow cast by the house near which he had paused. He could see now, by the dim light of the street lamps, the dim figure of the approaching runner. None pursued, it seemed, and somehow that gave an added terror and a keener poignancy to this unfollowed flight through the indifferent darkness. Nearer the fugitive came, and nearer still, still running in the same wild, panic-driven manner, and, when he was so near he was about to pass, Bobby shot out a long arm and caught him by the collar.

‘What's up?' he began; and then, with extreme surprise, ‘Good Lord, why it's Con Conway.'

The startled scream the fugitive had been about to utter died away. He was a wizened shrimp of a man, undersized, pale faced, and now he hung limp in Bobby's grasp, rather like a captured rabbit held out at arm's length by a gypsy trapper. He was trembling violently, either with fear or from the extreme physical exertion he had been making; the perspiration was running down his cheeks, whether from terror or from effort; his breath came in great, wheezing gasps, till at last he managed to pant out:

‘Lor' blimey, guv'nor... s'elp me, if ever I thought to be glad to meet a ruddy dick.'

‘Meaning me?' asked Bobby.

‘Meaning you, Mr Owen, sir,' Con Conway agreed; ‘and no offence meant, so hoping none took neither.'

‘Oh, none,' agreed Bobby pleasantly. ‘Only I'm wondering, Conway, if you're really so very glad to meet me, for you know you seemed in the dickens of a hurry, and I'm rather wondering why.'

‘Mr Owen, sir,' Conway assured Bobby earnestly, ‘I was gladder to see you than ever I was to see the bookie still there after I had backed the winner at long odds.'

‘That so?' said Bobby, with some doubt, and yet impressed by the strength and fervour of this declaration.

As he spoke he leaned his umbrella against the garden railing by which they were standing, and, still holding Con Conway with one hand, ran the other lightly over him. Conway, who knew the significance of this gesture well enough, submitted meekly, merely remarking:

‘You won't find no tools on me, guv'nor.'

‘I didn't much expect to,' retorted Bobby, for Mr Conway was an expert of that species of the genus burglar known as the ‘cat' variety, and had no need of any aid but his natural talents and his painfully acquired technique for swarming up the gutter-pipe that seemed to pass near some conveniently open window. From his own pocket Bobby produced a small electric torch, and flashed its light on the other's knees and elbows. ‘Doing a bit of climbing lately?' he asked, for both knees and elbows showed certain suspicious signs of dust and dirt.

‘Oh, them,' said Conway, interested. ‘Oh, them's where I slipped on a bit of banana-skin some bloke had thrown away, and went right down on my hands and knees. The mercy of providence,' added Conway piously, ‘I wasn't worse hurt; and a fair scandal, if you ask me, the way them banana-skins is throwed about. If I 'ad my way, that's what you Yard blokes would be looking after, instead o' persecuting poor hard-working chaps what only wants a chance to earn their living quiet and peaceful like.'

‘We know all about the honest, hard-working side of it,' retorted Bobby. ‘Any objection to turning your pockets out?'

‘As one gentleman to another,' answered Conway frankly, ‘none whatever, seeing as there's nothing in 'em.'

This statement at least proved to be true enough, for in fact they contained only a dirty handkerchief, an empty cigarette carton, an equally empty matchbox, some bits of string, and one solitary and somewhat battered penny.

‘O.K.,' commented Bobby. ‘Any objection now to telling me what you were in such a hurry about? Old Harry himself might have been after you. What was it all about?'

‘As one gentleman to another,' said Conway slowly, ‘it was just this – I was running to catch the train at Brush Hill station. And now,' he added reproachfully, ‘you've gone and been and made me lose it.'

‘How were you going to pay your fare?' Bobby asked.

‘Well, now, do you know, guv'nor,' declared Conway, with a great air of surprise, ‘I hadn't never thought of that – me being always used to my money in my pocket when I wanted it.'

‘Other people's money,, you mean,' retorted Bobby. ‘What made you so glad to see me, then?'

‘Why, that was just it, guv'nor. I just remembered like as I had no money to buy my ticket, and then there was you; and all in a flash I thought: “Why, there's Mr Owen, always generous, free-handed as the day. He'll lend me my fare all right, he will.” '

‘Confound your impudence,' Bobby exclaimed, half laughing in spite of himself. ‘Why not tell me what was really making you run like that?'

‘Guv'nor, I will,' declared Conway earnestly. ‘It was all along o' me not having only the one brown in my pocket, same as you saw, and not knowing where to get the price of a doss nowhere, and so I says to myself: “Con, my boy, run; run, my lad, that'll keep you warm anyways.” So I run, guv'nor; and then, guv'nor, you collared me.'

‘Cheese it,' Bobby exclaimed. ‘I suppose the fact is, you had been paying someone a visit, and got greeted with – with a cold bath, eh?'

This was a reference to a painful incident in Mr Conway's past career when, having been discovered by two stalwart undergraduates in a bedroom where he had no obvious business, he had been obliged to submit to a sound and thorough ducking in a cold-water tank before being kicked off the premises. The last part of the proceedings he had taken in good part, and glad to get off like that, but the ducking, he still felt, had been carrying the thing too far – he might easily have died of it, pneumonia or something, and where would his thoughtless assailants have been then? Why, he had swallowed pints of the stuff as they held him down in it with brooms, and altogether it was not an experience he cared to think about or be reminded of. His tone was more than a little reproachful as he answered: