Wider and wider still, darker and darker yet, the whole thing seemed to show itself to Bobby’s eyes.
He turned out of the street he had been following into that behind Park Lane, where stood the block of flats to which he had been directed, and for a moment or two stood watching it with awestruck admiration, so vast it seemed, so high it reached to the heavens above, so far it stretched on either hand, so plainly had the architect derived his inspiration from the workhouse of the Victorian era.
Extremes meet, Bobby thought, as he reflected how entirely at home Oliver Twist would have felt in this grim and bleak abode of twentieth-century luxury and wealth, where a room twelve feet square, with a bath and a cupboard called a kitchen attached thereto, was labelled “Mansion Flat de luxe,” and rented at the kind of figure more familiar to astronomers than to ordinary mortals.
Dick Norris’s flat was, however, of a more spacious kind, though, the supply of adjectives being finite, it was entered like the others in the books of the letting office as “Mansion Flat de luxe.” It possessed no less than three rooms, not counting a bathroom and a kitchen, both of reasonable size, or even the cupboard for hats and coats in the lobby, a cupboard almost as large itself as some of the rooms elsewhere in the building. The apartment was fitted up, too, with every contrivance – useful or not – ingenuity could imagine, from provision of a television set to an automatic victrola contrivance in the bedroom guaranteed to play the Reveille at any desired hour of the morning until turned off by pressure of a button that could not be reached from the bed.
Norris had furnished and decorated the flat in the most completely modern day-after-tomorrow style the youngest futuristic heart could have desired. In the decoration not a curve was to be seen – Hogarth being quite out of date. All the furniture was in chromium and red leather.
On his arrival, and on his giving the number of the flat he required, Bobby found himself treated with great deference by porters arrayed as never was Solomon at the height of his glory, for deference to the visitors to certain of the more expensive flats was strictly exacted by the management and duly considered in the rent. An equally deferential elevator attendant wafted Bobby heavenward, and as soon as he stepped out of the elevator he saw Norris himself standing in a doorway nearly opposite, apparently saying goodbye to a stocky little man in whom Bobby thought he recognized a prominent amateur golfer.
Norris nodded a greeting to Bobby, and, stepping aside from the doorway, told him to go in and sit down. The amateur golfer, shaking hands with Norris, said:
“Well, so long. Sorry you can’t manage it.”
“Only wish I could,” said Norris, waiting to see him enter the elevator, and then turning back into the flat, where Bobby was standing looking round with wonder, admiration, and a general feeling that he had never seen anything in all his life so strongly reminiscent of a dentist’s operating-room. There ought, he felt, to be a drill and a case of shining little instruments – picks and pincers and so on – but these were missing, and on the table, instead of illustrated papers months out of date, were scattered two or three financial papers, the prospectuses of some new companies, what seemed a typed draft, corrected in blue pencil, of a circular headed “London, Brighton & South Coast Syndicate,” and a letter with the printed heading of that Berry, Quick Syndicate from whose offices he had just come and beginning in capital letters: “WE RECOMMEND –”
No doubt the Berry, Quick Syndicate, like other businesses of its type, distributed its recommendations wholesale and at random – bait flung upon the waters in the hope some fat fish would bite, and no waters more likely to hold a better catch than these blocks of flats. Before Bobby had time to notice more, Norris came back into the room, and, as if he did not much want Bobby to see them, swept all these papers and documents from the table into a drawer. He said:
“That was Pips who was just going – you know, P I. Phipps, high up in the Open last year; means to pull it off some day. He wanted me to join in a freak foursome competition he’s getting up, but I can’t manage it. I may be off to China any day almost.”
“China?” repeated Bobby, surprised. “Why? Anything special?”
“Silver,” explained Norris mysteriously. “Not in your line, of course, but there’s a big game on in silver. The U.S. trying to buy cheap, and the rest of us trying to buy cheaper to dump it on them at as fat an increase as they’ll stand for. Big money in it.”
“I see,” said Bobby, who had, in fact, noticed various headlines in the papers about the silver situation. “I suppose that explains –”
He glanced round as he spoke at surroundings very different from those in which he had last seen Norris, when he had had occasion to call at the rooms Norris had formerly occupied in a square, half offices, half lodginghouses, where Bloomsbury tails off towards Islington.
“Not a bad little place, is it?” Norris asked, with a gleam of satisfaction showing for once in those generally expressionless light blue eyes of his. “You know, I was half expecting you. About that notion of Cora’s that Ronnie was done in, I suppose? But how did you know where I was? I’ve only been here a week or two.”
“Chris told me,” Bobby explained, and Norris grumbled: “Oh, did he? I never told him I had moved even. Do you know how he knew?”
“No. How?”
“He’s on the board of the company running the show here – gets twenty guineas for doing a doze at the directors’ meeting once a month. If I had known in time I would have gone somewhere else. But I heard he had been recommending the place – not to me; didn’t think I had the money. Chris knows a good thing all right though, I’ll say that much for him, and of course I didn’t know that he had a reason for plugging it. So I came round to have a look, and liked it and signed the lease before I tumbled to why Chris was talking the way he was.”
“You’ve got it fixed up all the very latest,” observed Bobby, his tone full of insincere admiration, for there still haunted him painful memories of the last dentist’s apartment he had visited, so that he almost expected to hear Norris inviting him to be seated and uttering the usual perjury about not going to hurt.
“Well, anyhow,” agreed Norris, “I haven’t got any of that junk off the dust-heap Chris palms off on suckers.”
“No,” agreed Bobby. “He’ll be able to drop that sort of thing, though, if he’s getting on boards of shows like this. Wonder how he managed to get the job.”
“Big stockholder,” Norris explained. “He’s taken up sixty thousand in five percent debentures in three instalments of twenty thousand each in the last three years.”
“Oh, he has, has he, though?” Bobby muttered, and, because he feared that something of the discomposure he felt might show itself in his expression, he stooped as if to pick up something he made pretence of having dropped. Fortunately, Norris did not seem to have noticed anything, or, if he had, his brown, tanned face and those cold, light-blue eyes of his gave no sign, and in his voice sounded nothing but envy, as he added:
“Pretty good to have come out of a lot of mouldy old rubbish.”
“I never thought you could make such a pile out of antiques,” agreed Bobby, wondering in spite of himself if it had come out of antiques; telling himself, too, that it was absurd to let the mere mention of the sum of £20,000 affect him so unpleasantly, like a nervous shock; his nerves must be getting out of order, he thought. “Better than golf – better even than silver,” he added, trying to make his voice sound as natural as he could, “though it looks as if silver did you pretty well, too.”
“Oh, it’s not only silver,” Norris explained. “I’ve brought off one or two other little things just lately. You can, if you get inside information. Now you’re here, come and have a look round; the bathroom’s a regular box of tricks.”
Bobby was taken round accordingly, shown the television screen – there was no television programme on at the moment, unfortunately – the working of the air-conditioning plant – it was out of order temporarily –
the lighting scheme governed by so many switches you had to make the tour of the room to turn them all on and then generally found you had forgotten several; and finally the bathroom, a very pearl and nonpareil of bathrooms, the bathroom of a hundred dreams that were perhaps not very far removed from nightmares, at any rate for the simpler souls never likely, however, to have to use it. The bath itself was almost big enough to swim in, the walls were lined with glass decorated with mermaids and water nymphs not always behaving with a strict propriety, and with various fishes in whom, somehow, the artist had managed to express a certain shocked consciousness of that fact. In addition there was provided every conceivable fitting; a sunray apparatus at the head of the bath, a heating-lamp at its foot, and so on in an endless catalogue.
Even Norris’s curiously unchanging, light-blue eyes glowed with enthusiasm as, like a child with a new toy, he showed off all the complicated wonders the twentieth century has added to the simple act of washing; but Bobby paid but scant attention, for somehow it was as though he had a vision of that wide and ample bath with a dead man lying in it. He said abruptly:
“Might be a bit awkward if either of those things fell into the water.”
“What things?” Norris asked. “Oh, the sunray lamp and the heater, you mean? That’s all right, they fit into slots; quite secure, you see; screwed down as well.”
He showed how they were held in place, and Bobby said: “Yes, I know, but accidents happen, and you can’t be too careful of electricity in a bathroom. There’ve been one or two cases of people electrocuted, you know.” He added: “Didn’t you say the other day you had insured yourself for – for £20,000?”
It was odd, but he had a certain difficulty, or hesitation rather, in pronouncing that figure, as if something warned him against uttering it, or at least wished him to understand there was menace there. But Norris only laughed lightly.
“You are thinking of Ronnie?” he asked. “If he was done in, he got no more than he deserved after the way he let Cora down, the swine.”
“Sounded as though she meant to take him back,” Bobby remarked.
“Good thing she didn’t get the chance,” Norris said. “It would only have been the same thing over again.” He paused, and added slowly: “It saved her.”
Then, almost as if he thought he had said too much, he led the way quickly into the adjoining room, and, opening a drawer and bending over it, produced a box of cigars.
“Have one?” he said, pushing the box carelessly across the table; but the idea in Bobby’s mind was that he had done all this to hide how he had looked.
“No, thanks,” Bobby answered the invitation. “You think Ronnie was murdered, then?”
“I don’t think anything about it one way or the other,” Norris retorted sharply. “So long as Cora knows the chap’s dead and done for, that’s all that matters. Oh, yes,” he added, staring hard at Bobby, who had looked up at him suddenly, “I’m still keen on Cora. I’m trying to get her to come on this China trip with me. Do her good. A change, that’s what she wants. What’s the good of brooding things now the truth’s out?”
“It must have been a bad shock for her,” Bobby said. “She’ll want a little time to get over it.”
“Why?” demanded Norris. “She ought to be jolly glad to know she’s rid of the bounder after the way he treated her. I can tell you she felt it pretty badly. At the time she would have killed him herself if she had had the chance. She told me so, and she meant it, too.”
“Did she?” murmured Bobby, a little startled to hear this.
“You would have thought so if you had heard the way she said it,” declared Norris. “I was there with her when she first understood what it all meant.”
Bobby was inclined to suspect this meant it was Norris himself who had first told her what was happening; he even wondered whether it was through Norris’s instrumentality that the scandal had finally become public. Norris continued in the same somewhat excited manner:
“Now she knows he’s been dead a couple of years she won’t go on brooding about the past. I could have told her at the time he was dead, but she wouldn’t listen to me, though I knew all right.”
“How was it you knew?” Bobby asked.
CHAPTER 12
LAWRENCE’S RECORD
If Norris’s remark about Cora had startled Bobby, Bobby’s question in return more than startled Norris. He looked thoroughly disturbed; even those generally unchanging light-blue eyes of his showed now something almost like alarm. His voice was shaken as he said:
“I didn’t mean that. I mean I didn’t mean I knew, only it stood to reason, didn’t it? Cora puts in that silly fool advertisement; he answers it quick enough, trust him, and that’s all. Plain enough something happened to stop him coming back to her, and what else could it be when he never gave another sign? Everyone knew his heart was rotten and he was liable to pass out any day.”
Bobby did not answer. Uncomfortable thoughts were crowding into his mind. Norris had spoken with deep feeling, and evidently still cherished his old passion for Cora. Any reconciliation between her and Ronnie would have put an end to all such hopes. When that reconciliation appeared likely to take place, the prospect of it had been put an end to forever by Ronnie’s strange and sudden death. And now Norris declared he had had previous knowledge of Ronnie’s death, this death timed so precisely to avoid the ruin of his hopes.
Bobby’s silence – and silence can be as significant as speech – began to affect Norris. His eyes were still troubled, his skin a little pale beneath the sun-tan, his feet uneasy, and it is often in movements of the foot that inner nervousness betrays itself. In a harsh and angry voice he broke out suddenly:
“Look here, Owen, did you come just to pull this C.I.D. stuff on me?”
“No,” Bobby answered. “Or, rather, I suppose – yes. What I really wanted was to ask if you could suggest the name of anyone likely to have known anything of Ronnie between the time he disappeared and the time he answered Cora’s advertisement. He was in London all the while, it seems, in business in the City; he knew plenty of people; there seems a good chance he may have been seen by someone. Any scrap of information might be a big help. What we want is to get some idea of who were his associates and what he was doing during that time.”
“Nothing I can tell you,” Norris answered. He seemed to have recovered his self-possession now, though his voice was still sullen. “I never heard a thing about Ronnie after he cleared out, and didn’t want to either – or anyone else, I should think, after what the judge had to say about him in his summing-up that day in court. If you ask me, he showed his sense in getting out before he got kicked out. Anyhow, I never heard anything more of him, and I never heard of anyone who did.”
Bobby asked one or two more questions that Norris answered in the same sullen and resentful manner. He made no attempt to deny the fact that he still regarded Ronnie’s death as a fortunate circumstance, leaving his own path free; or that at the time it had been a great shock to him to learn from Cora herself that she was once more in touch with her husband, and even expecting his return. But it was equally plain that he either actually knew nothing that could help the investigation, or that, if he did, he had no intention of telling it.
“The bounder’s dead; why not leave it at that?” he demanded. “I told you just now, I was certain something had happened when Cora never heard any more. If he hadn’t meant it, he wouldn’t have answered her advertisement at all, let alone putting in that sloppy ‘Thank God’ I expected he reckoned was just the way to fetch a softhearted, sentimental woman. And, of course, he was only too jolly glad of the chance. If Cora had taken him back again, everyone else would have had to accept him, and he would have been back at once in his old position. What I guessed was that he had gone an extra burst in the excitement, and it had been too much for him, with his heart in the state it was. Pretty near the truth of what did happen, too, don’t you think?”
“I see what you mean,” Bobby answ
ered cautiously, a noncommittal reply that set the other scowling afresh.
‘‘Plain enough,” Norris insisted. “He came home carrying a stiff load, thought he would have a bath to sober up on, filled it, thought another little drink wouldn’t do him any harm, and that and the steam and the heat altogether were too much for him. That’s all there is to it. The bath was full of boiling water when they found him, but that could happen easily enough. Most likely he put in cold water first to save steam in the room, and then turned on the geyser to warm it up. Take it from me, that’s the way it happened.”
“I suppose it might be that,” agreed Bobby. “There’s the insurance, though, collected by the woman who passed as his wife and wasn’t.”
“Well, hang it,” Norris argued, “if he had taken out an insurance, someone was going to collect it. A woman got it, didn’t she? Most likely he had been living with her, and she had talked him into making provision for her if anything happened to him. 1 don’t see much in that.”
It was a theory Bobby, too, might have been willing to accept – even though it seemed to agree little with Ronnie’s evident anxiety to return to Cora and win her forgiveness – but for those other deaths, here and on the Continent, so strangely resembling each other, forming such a series of coincidences as seemed beyond all natural explanation.
However, there was nothing more to learn from Norris, and Bobby took his departure, receiving no invitation to come again. It was late now, for time soon slips by in these journeys and inquiries, but Bobby made his way back to Scotland Yard knowing some of his colleagues would still be on duty there. Arrived, he first took his carefully preserved cigarette case to the fingerprint department and then went to report to the officer in charge, Inspector Ferris, who greeted him with a worried frown.
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