Strange Ending: A Bobby Owen Mystery by E.R. Punshon

Author:E.R. Punshon [Punshon, E.R.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Dean Street Press
Published: 2017-01-01T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XX

DOREEN INTERVENES

“SILLIEST THING ever,” Bobby commented when Kenneth was silent so long it seemed almost as if he had said all he wished to say. In reality he was lost in memory of that strange, bewildering moment when there had first, as it were, begun to seep into his mind some sense of what had happened. “Very worst thing you could have done,” Bobby said, with undiminished severity. “Running away.”

“You would have done just the same,” Doreen snapped. “So would anyone.”

“Very likely, especially me,” Bobby agreed. “Doesn’t make it any the less silly though.”

Unheeding this exchange of side-line talk, which indeed he had hardly heard, Kenneth went on:

“I got a taxi to take me home. The driver didn’t want at first. I expect I looked disreputable enough. I told him I had been on the tiles all night, and then he was very jolly and friendly. When I got in I told Mrs Green the same thing. I expect even a C.P.O. had been there when he was younger, and she knew it all. Anyhow, she didn’t say much. She got me to bed and got me something from the chemist’s, and I went off to sleep and only woke up when I had a nightmare about watching a man being hanged. I tried to tell myself there must be a mistake somewhere, or perhaps someone else had been murdered and it was nothing to do with Abel or me. I just simply couldn’t take it in. I had knocked Abel out all right, but that’s nothing to kill a man, and I knew he had been alive when I got away. I was sure of that, if of nothing else. But then Mrs Green brought in the evening paper, and there it all was. Great fat letters sprawling all across the front page—‘Choked to death by feathers’. That made me remember falling, me and chair and cushion and all, right on top of Abel where he was lying, knocked out. So I had to face it that the cushion might have burst with the fall and the feathers come out, and somehow in breathing he had drawn them into his mouth and died. Could it have happened like that? While he was unconscious, I mean?”

“I don’t know,” Bobby answered. “That will be for the doctors to say. There was something said about the feathers looking as if they had been deliberately and forcibly pushed down the throat.”

“Well, they never were, not by me,” Kenneth said. “For one thing, I was in no state to do anything forcibly, or deliberately either. I hardly knew what I was doing. I told you. After that cocktail everything was all a muddle, with my head going round like a top, and that endless procession of grinning beastly faces going on and on round the room just over the picture-rail. It wasn’t much different next morning in the bombed house. My head was funny, and I couldn’t think straight or make out what had happened or what it all meant.

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