The Bath Mysteries E-Book

E. R. Punshon

• Herausgeber: Dean Street Press
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Bobby Owen is on a mission of unusual delicacy, finding himself conducting an investigation which involves his own titled but impecunious family. This time the cards were stacked against Bobby. He knew full well the cause of his cousin's mysterious disappearance, but he could not understand the baffling circumstances surrounding Ronnie Owen's death. Ronnie was a drunkard, but even a drunkard has sufficient presence of mind to refrain from remaining in a tub of boiling water for thirty-six hours! Was Ronnie's death caused accidentally, or was it a deliberate case of murder? Moreover, why had Ronnie taken out a heavy insurance policy shortly before his death? The Bath Mysteries is the seventh of E.R. Punshon's acclaimed Bobby Owen mysteries, first published in 1936 and part of a series which eventually spanned thirty-five novels. Praise"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"Mr E.R. Punshon is one of the most entertaining and readable of our sensational novelists because his characters really live and are not merely pegs from which a mystery depends." Punch

Leseprobe

E.R. PUNSHONThe Bath Mysteries

Bobby Owen is on a mission of unusual delicacy, finding himself conducting an investigation which involves his own titled but impecunious family. This time the cards were stacked against Bobby. He knew full well the cause of his cousin’s mysterious disappearance, but he could not understand the baffling circumstances surrounding Ronnie Owen’s death. Ronnie was a drunkard, but even a drunkard has sufficient presence of mind to refrain from remaining in a tub of boiling water for thirty-six hours!

Was Ronnie’s death caused accidentally, or was it a deliberate case of murder? Moreover, why had Ronnie taken out a heavy insurance policy shortly before his death?

The Bath Mysteries is the seventh of E.R. Punshon’s acclaimed Bobby Owen mysteries, first published in 1936 and part of a series which eventually spanned thirty-five novels.

INTRODUCTION

On 23 March 1915, Scotland Yard formally charged George Joseph Smith with the murders of Bessie Williams, Alice Smith and Margaret Lloyd. After nine days’ trial Smith was found guilty on 1 July and hanged six weeks later, on 13 August. Justice (and sometimes, it must be admitted, injustice) was swift in those days, but although Smith’s legal ordeal was brief, his infamy is imperishable. Today, a full century after his trial, Smith remains one of England’s most notorious killers, the man who executed the infamous “Brides in the Bath” murders. Each of Smith’s victims was a woman he had bigamously wed, then drowned in a bathtub. The sensational case was referenced in works by Golden Age mystery writers, including the Crime Queens Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Margery Allingham; but in 1936, E.R. Punshon--who the same year published, in the Detection Club true crime anthology The Anatomy of Murder, an essay on the infamous French serial killer “Bluebeard” (Henri Desiré Landru)--devised an entire detective novel that pivoted on the plot device of a sinister succession of bathtub deaths. In this novel, The Bath Mysteries, Punshon mentions not only the Brides in the Bath Murders, but the Rouse burning-car killing and the Brighton trunk slayings, further evincing his interest in true crime. It is one of Punshon’s most interesting works of detective fiction, despite the fact--or perhaps, indeed, because of it--that it is a challenging book for the period, difficult to pigeonhole, as we are wont to do, into a convenient genre mystery category. The plot of the novel is interesting, to be sure, but it is the quality of Punshon’s empathy for his victimized characters that makes The Bath Mysteries exceptional for its time and still resonant today.

The first couple of chapters in The Bath Mysteries raise the reader’s expectation that what she has in her hands is a witty manners mystery in the fashion of the detective novels of Sayers, Allingham and Ngaio Marsh, yet something rather different soon emerges. The tale opens with Punshon’s series sleuth, Detective-Sergeant Bobby Owen, visiting a London conclave of his aristocratic family held at the Lords of Hirlpool’s decayed white elephant of an ancestral abode, in which none of them could afford to live since the 1850s. As Bobby surveys the mansion’s grand hall, from which arises the majestic double stairway, Punshon writes amusingly, in a passage reflective of the waning of England’s traditional landed aristocracy and the waxing of crass commercial enterprise, that with all its marble and gilt “it would have done credit to almost any tea shop or cinema in the land. Indeed, one well-known provincial department store had recently made a tempting offer for it, though, unfortunately, trust deeds prevented its sale.” Here in this magnificent ruin Bobby encounters his grandmother, the dowager Lady Hirlpool, whom loyal Punshon readers had already met in the previous Bobby Owen mystery, Death Comes to Cambers; his uncle, Lord Hirlpool; Christopher (“Chris”) Owen, Bobby’s cousin and an antique dealer who is “the heir to the title and the family mortgages”; Cora Owen, wife of Bobby’s other cousin, Ronald (“Ronnie”), vanished for the last three years after being named as a party in an especially scandalous divorce action; and Dick Norris, who though strictly speaking is not family, was a close friend of the missing Ronnie Owen.

The family has recently learned that a man giving his name as Ronald Oliver, whom there is reason to believe may have been Ronnie Owen under alias, was found dead in his bath, apparently “from the effects of boiling water coming from a lighted geyser during approximately thirty-six hours.” (The inquest concluded he was “the worse for drink” when he ran the bath.) Oliver’s—or Owen’s—life was insured for 20,000 pounds, which was duly collected by a woman claiming to be his wife. Sometime afterward the same woman pawned a signet ring—Ronnie Owen’s signet ring, bearing the family crest of three dolphins. Lord Hirlpool and the family want Bobby to investigate the matter personally, and Lord Hirlpool complacently informs his nephew: “I had a chat with the Home Secretary yesterday. He rang up the Commissioner while I was there, and you’re to be seconded, or whatever you call it in the police, to look into the thing and find out what really did happen to poor Ronnie.”

Bobby, who is acutely embarrassed within the police force by his aristocratic connections, desperately resents these elite behind-the-scenes machinations and prays fervently that the next general election will “hurl this Government and all connected with it into outer darkness.” Until that fine day arrives, however, he has yet another investigative job to do, in what proves a singularly bizarre case. It turns out that the gruesome demise of “Ronald Oliver” in his bath is only one of several such fatalities that have taken place over the last few years, all of them involving obscure men whose lives have been insured for 20,000 pounds. Have these men been ground up in a kind of remorselessly efficient “murder factory,” Bobby begins to wonder, some “carefully prepared, widely spread organization of death, working in a strange and fearful secrecy”? Bobby’s investigation takes him into the pits of London, exploring life among the down-and-outs in a decade overtaken by what the prominent socialist intellectual and detective fiction writer G.D.H. Cole in 1932 aptly termed “world chaos” (see The Intelligent Man’s Guide to World Chaos, published by Victor Gollancz, who also, not altogether incidentally, published the detective fiction of Cole’s Detection Club colleague E.R. Punshon).

The characters of greatest interest in The Bath Mysteries are not found among the genteel sleuth’s aristocratic family members, as one might expect in a novel from this period by, say, Ngaio Marsh (see Surfeit of Lampreys, for example), but rather are drawn from the ranks of the downtrodden. For these people Punshon memorably conveys sympathy in the most striking passages of the novel, with words, no doubt partly inspired by his own past personal circumstances (see my introduction to Death Comes to Cambers), that are powerfully condemnatory of human exclusion and exploitation:

Leaning against the parapet with his back to the river, Bobby watched how, in the darkness of the night that now had fallen, there drifted by a shadowy procession of the lost, of the outcast, of the disinherited, of those who had fallen or been thrown from their places in a society that knew them no more—men and women shuffling by like ghosts of their own past, like phantoms of the dead waiting only a signal to return to the graves they had deserted....Perhaps in the gloom of some other night another had leaned as he was doing upon the parapet, back to the river, and watched the shadowy line of the lost trailing aimlessly by, and watched them with the appraising eye of the butcher searching out the fattest sheep for the slaughterhouse.

It is in this netherworld of vice and despair that we catch glimpses of such striking individuals as the elderly sneak thief Magotty Meg, a colorful personage of whom Punshon readers were soon to see more, and the coffee-stall keeper George Young, nicknamed “Cripples” on account of his missing left arm and right leg. The arm was lost in a Durham coal mine accident, we learn, the leg from the impact upon him and his stall of an inebriated young gentleman’s space-hurtling sports car. “Lucky...it was a left arm and right leg,” reflects “Cripples” phlegmatically, “keeps you from being lopsided like.”

It is between two denizens of this dark place that we find what Milward Kennedy, another of Punshon’s Detection Club colleagues, in his Sunday Times review of The Bath Mysteries called “a love-interest…as moving as any which I can recall in a detective story.” More about this element of The Bath Mysteries cannot in good conscience be divulged by me to the neophyte reader of the novel, so I will simply conclude by urging that you read it posthaste.

Curtis Evans

CHAPTER 1FAMILY CONFERENCE

Detective-Sergeant Bobby Owen, leaving the Park, crossed Carlton Lane. Through the dark shadows cast by a cliff-like block of flats opposite he passed on, round the mews, into stately Carlton Square itself, where on the north side, No. 1, the ancestral home of his race, sprawled its interminable and depressing length.

Bobby surveyed it with a sigh, thinking what a difference would be made in the family fortunes if only legal complication, jointures, mortgages, reversions, Lord knew what, permitted it to be pulled down, and a new block of spacious, super-luxury, one-room flats erected in its stead. But that could not be – at least, not without a special Act of Parliament whereof the expense would eat up all possible profit; and so Bobby sighed again, and then cast a glance of professional interest at the third window from the southeast corner on the top floor, that of the room where legend told that, a hundred and fifty years ago, a servant-maid had been murdered in mysterious circumstances never cleared up. Then, ascending the steps leading to the huge front doors, he knocked; and as from the very bowels of the earth a thin voice floated up to him.

“Beg pardon, sir,” it said, "I can’t get them doors open; they haven’t been used so long they’ve stuck someway, or else it’s the lock. His lordship was proper vexed.”

Descending to the street-level again, and peering over iron railings, Bobby saw, far below, the ancient retainer of the house whose services had been rewarded – or punished – by the job of caretaker of this mansion, which none of the Lords of Hirlpool had been able to afford to inhabit for three-quarters of a century past.

“Do you mind coming this way, sir?” quavered again the voice from the depths. “His lordship had to, and proper vexed he was, too.”

“Righto,” said Bobby, and accordingly descended the long flight of steps that led down to the area door, where the old caretaker waited. “Bit of a climb,” he commented; “if uncle had to, I can believe he didn’t like it. Do you have to climb those steps every time you want to go out?”

“Oh, no, sir,” answered the caretaker, “there’s the back door, sir, opening on the mews, but it’s nearly ten minutes’ walk to get round there from here. This way, sir.”

Bobby followed the old man through a series of grim, dark, chill, dust-strewn chambers, compared with which the vaults of the Spanish Inquisition would surely have seemed cheery, homely abiding places. They came to a spot whence steep and narrow stone steps led both up and down, though whether to a gloom more intense above or below was hard to say. But it seemed to prove that even beneath these depths there stretched depths lower still.

“Good Lord,” Bobby said. “Are there cellars under these?”

"These aren’t the cellars, sir,” answered the other rebukingly. “This is the basement floor. Over there’s what used to be the kitchen, and that’s the door of the old servants’ hall. Very spacious apartment, sir, and very different everything looked when there was a staff of twenty or more busy here.”

“It’s a wonder they didn’t die of T.B. or rheumatism,” observed Bobby, peering into the dark cavern that once had been a kitchen. “Probably they did, though. What about the breakfast bacon? How long does it take to get from kitchen to dining-room?”

The caretaker considered the point carefully.

“I don’t think it would take more than ten minutes,” he decided; “not much more, anyhow. His lordship will be waiting, sir,” he added; “her ladyship, too.”

“Oh, has granny got here already?” Bobby said. “All right, I’ll cut along. What about Mrs. Ronnie? Has she turned up?”

“Yes, sir, she came the first. They’re all there except Mr. Chris. Mr. Norris came immediate after Mrs. Ronnie. It’s the small room to the right at the top of the big stair.”

“Right, I’ll find my way; don’t you bother,” Bobby said, and began to ascend the steps leading to the upper regions of the house.

As he went he wondered again what could be the meaning of this family conference to which his uncle, Lord Hirlpool, had summoned him; his grandmother, the dowager Lady Hirlpool; his cousin by marriage, Cora, who was Mrs. Ronald Owen; his other cousin, Chris Owen, the heir to the title and the family mortgages, debts, tithes, income-tax, and all the rest of the financial encumbrances that went with their old and historic name; and finally Dick Norris. He wondered, too, why Dick Norris had been included, since Norris was not one of the family, though he had been a very intimate friend of the vanished Ronnie Owen. It was a friendship that had been formed and consolidated on the links, for Norris was a famous amateur golfer, known to a wide circle through the articles he contributed to the golfing press under various pseudonyms, as “B. Unkert,”, “N.B. Luck,” and others, all in the breezy, healthy type of humour that made him so popular a writer.

“Hope,” Bobby thought uneasily, as he groped his way up the dark, twisting steps, “Ronnie hasn’t been up to something they think I can hush up because I’m at the Yard.”

But he did not think this very likely, as, though Ronnie had been wild and reckless enough, and had been badly involved in that disastrous and scandalous divorce case after which he had vanished from the ken of all his former friends and acquaintances, including his justly offended wife, he was not likely to have mixed himself up in anything of a criminal nature – at least, not unless he had been more badly drunk even than usual.

“Must be something pretty serious, though,” Bobby told himself, as he emerged from the stairs and discovered he was by no means certain which was now the right direction to take.

However, after one or two attempts that brought him back to his starting-place, he arrived at last in the huge sepulchral entrance-hall, a bare, desolate void ringed round by possibly the worst collection of statuary in the whole wide world.

From the centre of this hall there rose the great double stair; so magnificent in marble and gilt, it would have done credit to almost any tea shop or cinema in the land. Indeed, one well-known provincial department store had recently made a tempting offer for it, though, unfortunately, trust deeds prevented its sale.

At the top of these stairs Bobby turned to the right, and, guided by the sound of voices, found his way to a small room at an angle of the building. Its door was open, and into it daylight streamed through one open and unshuttered window. At a second window a tall, thin, elderly man, with a long, thin, melancholy face, a very short body, and very long legs, was engaged in a free-for-all struggle with shutters that seemed as fixed as the decrees of fate. A woman’s voice said:

“Chrissy, dear, if they won’t open, get Mr. Norris to swot ’em with a chair or something.”

“My dear mother,” answered gloomily the man at the window, “maintenance and repair are ruining me as it is.”

He made a final effort, retired defeated before those immovable shutters, and turned round as Bobby entered the room.

“Morning, uncle,” Bobby said to him. “Hullo, granny,” he said to the lady who had advised the “swotting” of the difficult shutters, and he dropped a kiss upon her hair, that would very likely have been grey had either she or her maid ever dreamed of permitting such a thing. To a dark, tall, slim, sombre-looking, youngish, very handsome woman who was smoking cigarettes opposite, he said: “How do, Cora?” With a big, loose-limbed, brown-faced man in plus fours who was Dick Norris, and who was seated in the background, straddling a chair with his face to its back and his arms resting thereon, he exchanged silent nods, and again he wondered why Norris was there. Most likely there was nothing in it, but there had been stories that Norris, too, had been a competitor for Cora’s hand, and that the disappointment had been bitter when she bestowed it upon Ronnie Owen.

Bobby’s uncle, Lord Hirlpool, the tall, thin man, mumbled an indistinct reply to his greeting. The dowager patted his hand absently. Cora took not the slightest notice, but lighted another cigarette, though the one she was smoking was but half finished. Bobby asked himself whether it was quite an accident that her back was turned to Norris, while Norris, in his reverse position on the chair he straddled, was exactly behind her, his curiously expressionless, light blue eyes fixed full upon her. Of a feeling of tension, of expectation, in the room, Bobby was at once aware, and he began to think that perhaps Cora and Dick Norris were intending to get married – or, rather, to do without getting married, since Ronnie’s disappearance only dated from about three years back. No denying that Ronnie had treated Cora disgracefully, and perhaps there had been some foundation for the stories representing Dick Norris as a disappointed rival, though there had never seemed to be any breach in his friendship with Ronnie. Even when the scandal broke upon a London most delightfully shocked, Dick had still stood by Ronnie when others of his friends deserted him. Emerging abruptly from deep thought, Lady Hirlpool said:

“If only we could let the place – even if there’s no one left in England with money enough to live here, surely some American millionaire...?”

“American millionaires,” her son answered bitterly, “think of nothing but bathrooms. The last one wanted nine put in, five for the family and four for the servants. Imagine the miles of plumbing...”

“Why not,” suggested Bobby helpfully, “flood the basement and call it a swimming pool? Very likely you would catch a film star then.”

Lord Hirlpool did not seem to think much of the suggestion. He looked at his watch and mumbled:

“Chris ought to be here by now. He’s always late.”

A slow and hesitating step sounded without, paused as if in doubt, and then came on, and there entered languidly a youngish man of middle height with the long, melancholy face and legs too long in proportion to the body that often characterized members of the family of Owen of Hirlpool, and that Bobby himself was thankful some trick of Mendelism had allowed him to escape. The newcomer was Christopher Owen, eldest nephew to Lord Hirlpool, who was a childless widower and to whom, therefore, Chris was heir- presumptive. It followed that he was also grandson to the dowager Lady Hirlpool, cousin by marriage to Cora Owen, cousin by blood to the missing Ronnie Owen and to Detective-Sergeant Bobby Owen, and anything but friend to Dick Norris, with whom he had had in the past certain complicated financial relations which had ended in a common loss and mutual ill-feeling. He was the proprietor of a small antique shop, of which the extremely fluctuating profits afforded him his means of livelihood, and he had the reputation of often picking up for a pound or two in the houses of his friends and acquaintances bits of china, drawings, old furniture, and so on, that afterwards he disposed of on trips to America at a fantastic profit. But it was also believed that most of what he gained in business he promptly lost again, gambling on the Stock Exchange. He had a considerable reputation as what is vulgarly called a “lady-killer,” since his long, melancholy face had its own attractiveness, his eyes could take on a look of infinite appeal, and many women seemed unable to resist the languid and melancholy indifference of his manner that seemed positively to challenge them to relieve it. Often they managed to convince themselves that that was a breaking heart which was in reality only wonder whether an offer of a couple of guineas for the bit of Sèvres – worth ten – on the mantelpiece would be accepted or resented. He spoke with a slight, indeed very slight, stutter, intermittent and at times scarcely perceptible, and yet, in a general way, oddly noticeable. Slight as it was, it had had a great effect on his life, it had made impossible for him a stage career to which he had been strongly drawn and for which he had real aptitude, and at Cambridge it had been the cause of his having been sent down without taking his degree. Absurdly sensitive always to what was a very trifling defect, he had resented so strongly a mocking imitation of it given by a fellow-undergraduate, at a party at which the cocktails had been frequent and strong, as to express that resentment in terms of a carving knife. A serious criminal charge had been narrowly averted; there had even been a few hours when a death and a charge of murder had seemed a possibility; in the end the injured man’s lie that he had inflicted the injury himself had been accepted. But the incident had brought Chris’s university career to a conclusion, and with it his hopes of entering the Civil Service with an eye upon the Foreign Office. Now, the moment he entered the room he announced gloomily, his little stutter more marked than usual:

“T-t-those Chippendale chairs I bought at the Lawes sale are all duds – made in Birmingham year before last. R-rather a bore – means I shall drop a couple of hundred on them.”

“Hard times all round,” agreed the brown-faced Norris. “It’s hardly any good writing anything about golf – every editor you try has a drawerful of stuff already. All they want to know is if you’ve won the Open, and, if you haven’t, then yours goes down the drain.”

“You shouldn’t buy duds, Chris,” his grandmother told him tartly. “Antique dealers sell duds, they don’t buy ’em.” Having delivered herself of this aphorism, Lady Hirlpool turned to Norris: “Why don’t you turn pro, Mr. Norris?” she demanded. “They make plenty of money; they charge you a guinea for advising you to buy one of their own clubs at twice what they paid for it.”

“I know,” sighed Norris, “but if you’re a pro you have to compete with pros – not good enough.”

“Got any tips to give away?” asked Chris, dangling eyeglasses of which he had no need, since his sight was excellent – the eyeglasses were in reality powerful magnifiers, enabling him to give a close examination to objects on which he seemed to be bestowing a merely casual glance.

Norris answered this inquiry for tips by a dismal shake of the head.

“The last three blokes I wasted a spot of coaching on stood me one dinner, one week-end invite, and one ‘Thanks awfully’ between them,” he said dejectedly, “and one of them knew jolly well what was going to happen to ‘Emmies’ and never said a word.”

“Too bad,” murmured Chris, more sympathetically than believingly. To Cora, Chris added: “I don’t know when I shall be able to pay back that couple of thou.”

Cora took not the least notice of this remark. She might not have heard, and yet they all felt in her a kind of hidden heat of attention, as though no word was spoken but was fuel to some secret fire in her. Chris’s remark had reference to a sum of £2,000 Ronnie Owen had lent to him in a mood of unusual benevolence, affluence, and less unusual intoxication. That, of course, had been before the crash, and Bobby remembered the occasion well, for he had chanced that night to be in his cousins’ company; had had made to himself, but had not accepted, similar generous offers; and had admired a fur coat in ocelot skin Ronnie had happened to see in a shop window, taken a fancy to, and bought then and there for Cora. She had been less grateful in that she had already two fur coats, and did not care for ocelot fur or consider that it suited her. The loan to Chris had been for the purpose of buying out an unsatisfactory partner in the antique business and for extending it, and the windfall which had permitted Ronnie to display such all-round generosity had been the result of a highly successful speculation in gold-mine shares, undertaken on the strength of information passed on by Dick Norris that it was commonly said he had failed to act on himself since he had not believed it reliable – otherwise he would not have passed it on but kept it to himself, was the unkind comment generally added when the story was told. By an added irony of fate, it was only this lucky hit, resulting in such unusual affluence – for the £2,000 lent to Chris had been a comparatively small part of the gain – that had put Ronnie in a position to propose to Cora. Chris said to her now:

“No news yet of Ronnie, I suppose?”

“Yes,” she answered. “I believe he’s been murdered.”

CHAPTER 2A TASK FOR BOBBY

The last word fell like a stone into a quiet pond. One could almost see the slow ripples of surprise, horror, incredulity, spreading in each listener’s mind – but incredulity predominating. Lady Hirlpool was the first to speak. She said protestingly, a little with the air of thus finally disposing of the matter:

"My dear Cora!”

Cora picked up the half-smoked stump of one of the cigarettes she had discarded and put it between her lips without appearing to notice that it had long been extinguished.

“I expect I shall begin to scream soon,” she remarked dispassionately.

“Oh, I say... Cora,” exclaimed Norris, his first expression of blank disbelief changing to one of acute alarm.

“When people start to scream at the Yard,” observed Bobby as dispassionately as Cora, “we just let ’em. Then we go on when they’re through.”

His grandmother turned on him with a flash of genuine indignation.

“I call that simply brutal,” she declared heatedly.

“So do they, granny,” agreed Bobby.

Lady Hirlpool snorted, and took refuge in her lipstick.

Lord Hirlpool said:

“It’s because of this idea of Cora’s that I asked you to come along here. Mother’s flat is too small.”

“’Tisn’t,” snapped Lady Hirlpool, still indignant. “I can get two bridge tables in quite easily, and three if someone sits in the lobby.”

“Besides, it’s in West Kensington,” Lord Hirlpool added clinchingly. He still thought of West Kensington as others think of Central Africa, and, before his mother could frame another angry protest, he went on: “At my hotel one can’t be private, so I thought it would be better to meet here to talk.”

“If I had known,” interposed Norris, “I would have suggested my place. I’ve a flat in Park Lane now, you know,” he added with a certain complacence, since this suggested an affluence altogether new and the more unexpected in view of his recent lament over the present difficulty of selling articles about golf in a world in which possibly not everyone played golf, but certainly everyone wrote about it.

“But... murdered?” protested Chris, as if the word had only just sunk into his mind. “Old Ronnie... murdered...? Oh, come...”

“If Cora has any facts to go on,” Bobby pointed out, himself incredulous, “she ought to give information to the C.I.D.”

“Well, you’re the C.I.D., aren’t you?” asked Chris. “Jolly good, too; people like it, when you’re buying bits of things from them, if you tell them you’ve a cousin in the C.I.D. Makes them feel so safe,” he added, his voice the soft purr of a cat lazily absorbing a saucerful of cream.

Bobby, very indignant at this shameless use of a family connection, tried to think of some effective protest, but failed. All he could do was to grumble out:

“I’m not the C.I.D. I’m a detective-sergeant, and a detective-sergeant is just an errand-boy running about where he’s told. It’s the big hats upstairs do the brainwork. If Cora’s got anything to show...”

“I’ve this,” said Cora, and put a signet ring on the table. “It was Ronnie’s.”

“It was offered me,” explained Lord Hirlpool, “by a dealer who had noticed the crest and motto and thought I might like to buy it for family reasons – it was a man in quite a small way out in Islington,” added Lord Hirlpool, explanatory, since it was obvious no West End dealer would ever have thought of Lord Hirlpool as a likely market for the purchase of anything whatever. “I thought the ring must be Ronnie’s from the description, but to make sure I went to see. It had been pawned.”

“Oh, well, nothing in that,” observed Dick Norris as the speaker paused; for, indeed, to Norris, in spite of his present remarkable Park Lane affluence, the pawnshop still seemed the natural and indeed inevitable home for all unattached jewellery.

“Ronnie would never have parted with it,” Cora said, her long-extinguished cigarette still between her lips.

“Oh, well, when a chap’s put to it,” Chris observed tolerantly. He himself was not without experience in such matters.

“Ronnie would have starved first,” Cora insisted.

“It was not Ronnie who pawned it,” Lord Hirlpool said. “It was his widow.”

“Widow?” repeated Bobby, a little uneasily.

“Widow,” repeated Cora. “But not me.”

“The pawnbroker made inquiries,” Lord Hirlpool went on. “The ring is of some value – he advanced £30 on it, and I suppose rings worth that much don’t often turn up in Islington. He found it had been the property of a man on whom an inquest had been held a few days previously. The name was given as Ronald Oliver. If any of us saw the report of the inquest in the paper, that name wouldn’t suggest anything. It was mentioned in the evidence that Mr. Oliver had recently taken out an insurance on his life for £10,000, as well as an accident insurance for another £10,000. Both amounts were paid.”

“Well, that couldn’t have been Ronnie,” Chris pointed out. “Rotten heart, always getting knocked up, daren’t even run for a bus. No company would have insured him for ten thousand pence.”

“Then why had he Ronnie’s ring?” Cora asked, looking with an air of surprise at the cigarette-end she had just taken from her mouth, as if wondering how it had got there.

“When pawning the ring,” Lord Hirlpool went on, “Mrs. Oliver explained that the insurance was all taken up by business liabilities. Mr. Oliver was described at the inquest as a stock and share dealer, but apparently not a member of the Stock Exchange.”

“Well, that’s nothing against him,” said Norris, somewhat defiantly. “Just as straight blokes outside as inside – straighter, if you ask me.”

“As well as the life policy there was an accident policy – both for ten thousand,” Bobby repeated thoughtfully. “Do you know if they were recent?” he asked.

“The accident policy had been taken out only three months before,” Lord Hirlpool answered.

“Nothing in that,” observed Norris. “I took one out myself for £20,000 only the other day.” He smiled, and seemed inclined to wink, but did not. “Useful in business sometimes, and blokes don’t always spot the difference between an accident and a whole-life policy. You can always raise a bit of coin on a policy with a good company.”

“I suppose the company made some inquiries before they paid?” Bobby remarked. “What was the verdict at the inquest?”

“Death by misadventure.”

“What caused it?” Bobby asked.

Lord Hirlpool hesitated, and looked at Cora. She put both hands on the table before her, holding them firmly together. In a loud, clear voice she said:

“Boiling.”

“What?” said Bobby, thinking he had misunderstood. Cora got up and walked out of the room.

“Boiling,” repeated Lord Hirlpool.

“But, good Lord,” protested Chris, “you mean he scalded himself... kettle of boiling water...?”

“No, I don’t,” said Lord Hirlpool. “The evidence showed he died in his bath from the effects of boiling water coming from a lighted geyser during approximately thirty-six hours.”

“I think I’ll go and see what Cora’s doing,” said Lady Hirlpool, getting up and following her niece.

“She means she’s going to be sick somewhere,” said Lord Hirlpool gloomily. “It does make you feel a bit like that.”

“Yes, but hang it all,” spluttered Chris. “Well, I mean... how could it – happen?”

“The evidence,” said Lord Hirlpool, “was to the effect that Ronnie – Mr. Oliver – was the worse for drink when he returned on Saturday night to the flat he occupied alone. The charwoman he employed didn’t come on week-ends. It was only when she arrived on Monday morning that what had happened was discovered. The flat is in a big new building, meant chiefly for working people, and the overflow from the bath ran off into a main waste-pipe, so there was nothing to attract attention there. Neighbours said that ‘the gentleman often came home jolly.’ They thought nothing of it when he was seen like that on this occasion. It seems quite clear Ronnie was alone. There was a half-empty whisky bottle in the bathroom. The suggestion adopted was that Ronnie had decided to have a bath, possibly to sober up on; that he got ready – his clothing was lying about the room – and that he lighted the geyser and then, overcome by the steam perhaps, had managed to fall in his intoxicated condition into the bath in which the boiling water from the geyser continued to pour continuously for a day and a half.”

“I suppose it might happen like that,” Bobby said slowly.

“The jury thought so,” answered Lord Hirlpool. “The police were called in, and found papers showing that he was living separated from his wife, to whom under the deed of separation he had to pay £7 a week. The insurance policy was in her favour, to assure her a continuance of that income in case of his death.”

“I thought the money had to go to pay business liabilities,” interposed Bobby.

“There seems an inconsistency there,” agreed Lord Hirlpool. “The wife’s name was given as Mary Oliver, at a Bournemouth address. The police communicated with her, she came to London, seemed decently distressed, made all necessary arrangements, collected the £20,000 insurance, and that’s all.”

“Why does Cora think it was murder?” Norris asked. “It might have been a genuine accident.”

“Had Cora heard from him at all since – since the scandal?” inquired Bobby.

“Yes,” answered Lord Hirlpool. “At the time she told him she would never forgive him, and never wanted to see or hear of him again. He had the grace to be thoroughly ashamed of himself, and he went away accordingly. He took nothing with him except a few clothes and a little ready cash – not more than £50 at the most. He saw his lawyers and instructed them that Cora was to have everything else, and signed the necessary papers. Apparently as Mr. Oliver he took up some sort of stockbroker’s business, and was doing quite well at it. He wrote once or twice to Cora, He gave no address. He said that was so she wouldn’t be able to return his letters unanswered. He said he supposed she would never forgive him but he always read the Announcer, and if one day he saw his name in the agony column, with the word ‘Return’ with it, he would give her a week to make sure she meant it and then, if there was no other advertisement to cancel the first, he would take it she was willing to have him back and he would come.” Cora had returned to the room. She had been listening intently and smoking furiously. Abruptly she said:

“Father hated cigarettes; he said they were poison.” Her father had been a doctor, and she herself, chiefly to please him, had begun medical studies. But she had never made much progress with them, and on his death she had abandoned them. A lingering regard for his teaching made her a rare smoker, but today she was helping herself to one cigarette after the other, though indeed it was more a case of burning them up than of smoking them. Bobby reflected her abrupt remark probably meant she was longing to have again her father’s presence and advice. He said:

“Did the pawnbroker give any description of the woman who pledged the ring?”

“‘Tall, dark, slim, wearing a leopard-skin coat,’ he said,” Cora answered. “I had one in ocelot fur once. I got rid of it long ago. It was one Ronnie gave me. I went to the shop. The man said it was someone like me but not me – someone older and darker, much darker skin. There was no one Ronnie knew like that.”

“Did you do what he asked about the advertisement?” Bobby inquired.

“At first I tore up the letters he sent,” she answered. “If I had known his address I would have sent them back. I hated thinking of him. One day in March last year I was near the Announcer office, and I went in and got them to put in the advertisement he wanted. I thought there was a whole week I could change my mind in if I liked. I didn’t, and I waited, and he never came.” Her tone was monotonous and dull, but one felt the strong emotion in it. In the same carefully restrained voice she added: “It was that week-end it happened.”

“Perhaps Ronnie never saw the advertisement,” Chris suggested.

“There was an answer in the Announcer next morning. It said: ‘Thank God,’ and there was his name, too – ‘Ron.’ I always called him ‘Ron,’” answered Cora, and in the same passionless voice she added: “I got everything ready. I thought we would start fresh. He never came.”

“It may have been an accident. Why not?” Chris said. “There’s nothing to show it was murder.”

“Apparently his death was worth £20,000 to somebody,” Bobby remarked.

“To a woman,” Cora corrected him. “I think she knew he was going back to me. She wanted to stop him. She took that way. She knew about the insurance. She was passing as his wife. It was my advertisement that made it happen.” She lighted a fresh cigarette, puffing at it till it glowed.

“It’s all more than a year ago,” Bobby said musingly. “Makes it difficult. Hard enough to remember exactly what happened a fortnight ago, let alone fifteen months. It’s a job to get at the truth when it’s fresh. After a year’s cold storage it’s almost impossible. But there’s something queer about that insurance. It’s jolly certain no insurance company would have accepted Ronnie, with his heart in the state it was – not as a life risk. They might for accident. Besides, the woman who collected it wasn’t his wife, and can’t have had any insurable interest, and there can’t have been any genuine deed of separation. There must have been some pretty tall forging going on. I think Cora ought to see her lawyers, and then, if they agree, they could put the whole thing before our people.”

“I’ve arranged all that,” Lord Hirlpool explained in a very satisfied tone. “I had a chat with the Home Secretary yesterday. He rang up the Commissioner while I was there, and you’re to be seconded, or whatever you call it in the police, to look into the thing and find out what did really happen to poor Ronnie.”

CHAPTER 3INQUIRY BEGINS

Bobby received this announcement with mixed feelings. On the one hand, it seemed to promise him an independence in investigation that, so often fretted by the red tape inherent in the working of every large-scale organization, he had come to think of as an ideal never likely to be realized in actual experience. On the other hand, he disliked above all things any appearance of privilege due to family influence – he knew only too well the jealousy and anger that always aroused. He reflected, too, that the grounds for suspecting murder were of the slightest, and that in any case the time- lag would make the inquiry one of extraordinary difficulty, while failure in it would be what failure always is, no matter how inevitable. For, if nothing succeeds like success, it is even more true that nothing fails like failure.

However, it would look worse still to try to back out, especially now all arrangements were made. He began to ask questions, to note down replies and details, and he understood now why Dick Norris had been asked to be present. As Ronnie’s most intimate friend, Norris was the most likely person to know something of his movements after his disappearance. However, Norris had no information to give. Ronnie had simply walked out of the court after listening to a severe, ecclesiastically minded judge’s denunciation of his conduct, and since then none of his former friends or acquaintances had heard anything of him. Even the arrangements by which the whole of his capital had been put at his wife’s sole disposition had been made beforehand.

“He must have gone straight to the lawyers,” Cora said in her dull, expressionless voice, “the day before, immediately after Mrs. Stanley’s evidence in the divorce case, when I told him I never wanted to see or hear of him again – and I never did, I never shall.”

Lady Hirlpool had come back into the room. She was standing by the window, busy with her vanity case in an effort to repair the ravages certain recent events had made in her appearance. She said gently:

“We don’t know anything for certain, Cora. Perhaps that poor man who died so dreadfully wasn’t Ronnie at all.” Cora did not answer, but her slow gaze rested with a kind of blank despair upon the signet ring still lying on the table in front of the case of wax fruit, as if to emphasize artificially the dread reality the signet ring proclaimed.

“He walked sooner than any of the rest of you, before he was a year old even,” Lady Hirlpool said, trying to polish her nails with her lipstick and then looking in astonishment at the result. “Ronnie...” She turned abruptly and fiercely upon Bobby. “You’ve got to find out,” she told him, as nearly shouting as her thin old voice permitted.

“I’ll try, granny,” Bobby answered.

He went on asking questions. He learned little more, however. Lord Hirlpool had already told all he knew. Chris explained that, like Norris, he had heard nothing of or from Ronnie since the scandal, but then he had never been on very intimate terms with Ronnie. Ronnie, like many other people, had a strong dislike for weaknesses to which he was not prone himself, and he had expressed open disapproval of some of Chris’s business methods and of those dexterous flirtations by which occasionally he supported them. Cora was able to produce a few newspaper cuttings from which Bobby learned such details as the names of the life and of the accident insurance companies concerned, and the address of the flat that had been the scene of the tragedy; a photograph of Ronnie just before his disappearance she allowed Bobby to take possession of; and finally the name and address of the business in the City mentioned at the inquest as that of which the dead man had been the principal.

“The E. & O.E. Development Syndicate,” Bobby read out. “Bit of a rum name – Errors and Omissions Excepted. Might mean anything: being funny, warning, or sheer cynicism.”

“The coroner remarked on it,” observed Lord Hirlpool, who was glancing through the newspaper cuttings. “He said it appeared to be an outside stockbroker’s business. He was trying to find out if there was any suggestion of financial trouble, and apparently a clerk produced the books to show there wasn’t; quite fair profits had been made.”

"Well, why not?” asked Norris, and added in not too pleasant a voice: “Ronnie knew a good thing all right when he saw it.”

“He never had anything to do with the Stock Exchange except just once,” Cora said. “He said he never would again. He used to say: ‘Once a mouthful, twice shy.’”

“Still, when he found himself at a bit of a loose end, the fact that he had done so well with those gold-mine shares might make him think of trying again,” Bobby remarked. “Only I don’t see where he got the capital from – unless he had more with him than £50.”

“I am sure he hadn’t,” Cora said. “I got someone who understands accounts to go through his papers and things. He couldn’t possibly have had more.”

Bobby thought the possibility existed, though perhaps not the probability. But a man may always have sources of income he does not choose to put down in his accounts. It was not likely, perhaps, but it was a point that had to be remembered. Chris remarked:

“He may have got in touch with some pal who had coin to spare.”

“Everyone who knew him has been questioned, apparently,” Bobby pointed out. “What was the name of that clerk who gave evidence? I should like to hear what he has to say.”

“His name’s Albert Brown. Elderly man, lives in Ealing,” Lord Hirlpool said, referring to the newspaper cutting.

Bobby made a note of name and address in his pocket-book, and remarked:

“Jolly difficult when it’s all so long ago. This chap may be dead by now or Lord knows where.”

The fact that so long an interval of time had elapsed since the occurrence of the events he was to investigate made Bobby’s mood somewhat gloomy as he returned to Scotland Yard for official confirmation of his uncle’s statement that he was to be released from other duties in order to concentrate his energies on this affair. In criminal investigation a time-lag of a few minutes is often of such importance as to make the difference between success and failure, and here there was an interval, not of minutes, but of months.