The Bath Mysteries

by E. R. Punshon

  The Reader, Mr. Allen by name, was out, and Bobby, awaiting his return, found a volume of Hegel in which he was somewhat doubtfully immersed when Mr. Allen appeared and noticed at once the book in Bobby’s hand.

  “I heard you had taken to tracking down the nightly burglar and the festive forger,” he said. “You don’t expect to find one in Hegel, do you?”

  “No,” Bobby answered, “it is a murderer I am looking for.”

  “Dear me,” said Mr. Allen, from whom many years of experience of undergraduates had taken all capacity for surprise, “in the Logic. Had any luck?” he added with interest.

  “I think so,” Bobby answered. “One of our uniform men gave me a tip when I saw an old lady nearly run over, and it looks as if Hegel confirms. Would you call Hegel a philosophic realist?”

  “Would I call Zeno an Epicurean?” retorted Mr. Allen, growing sarcastic.

  “The monad theory?” Bobby asked. “Do you find that in Spinoza?”

  “You do not,” replied Mr. Allen, feeling sarcasm was useless here and falling back on patience. “You find it in Liebnitz.” He returned to sarcasm. “If you want to ask any more questions like that, go and find some ten-year-old schoolboy – backward, of course.”

  “But I want to ask you,” Bobby protested. “Oh, do you mind looking at this?”

  He handed Mr. Allen the report of Dr. Beale’s paper and retired to the window, whence he was recalled by various sounds of indignation and contempt and finally by that of the typescript being flung violently on the table. From one of the shelves Mr. Allen took down Whitehead’s Process and Reality and opened it.

  “That stuff,” he said, with an indignant glance at the typescript on the table, “is a muddled-up copy of the beginning of this chapter. It hasn’t even been copied right – whole paragraphs missed out. Is it a joke or what?”

  “I shouldn’t call it a joke,” Bobby answered gravely. “Did you know a Dr. Ambrose Beale? I’ve been looking him up. He got his doctorate of philosophy in 1903 for a thesis on ‘The Conditioning of the Unconscious.’”

  “A very fine piece of work, too,” declared Mr. Allen. “I remember it well. It suggested ideas that were entirely novel then, though they are common enough now. In its way, a landmark of thought. He went to Australia to study the Unconscious in the Primitive Mind.”

  “To Australia?” repeated Bobby, remembering that Australia had been mentioned in the Priestman case.

  “Yes. There was an article in Mind giving some tentative conclusions, and I’ve always hoped he would follow them up some day. Very brilliant man, most original outlook, wonderful grasp of his subject. I should be glad to get in touch with him again. Do you know anything about him?”

  “It was he who wrote that,” Bobby said, nodding towards the typescript.

  “He did not,” said Mr. Allen, very positively.

  “Why?”

  “Because he was not a humbug, a charlatan, an impostor,” declared Mr. Allen heatedly. “That typescript is ignorant rubbish – unless it’s a practical joke?” he added, relenting a little.

  “I don’t think it’s a joke,” Bobby answered; “anything but a joke indeed.”

  “What is it, then?” demanded Mr. Allen.

  “The gallows, I hope,” Bobby answered grimly, and went away.

  CHAPTER 28

  SUFFICIENT EVIDENCE?

  But in the train, on the journey back to Paddington, Bobby felt he had after all drawn only very little nearer to his goal. True, he was assured now that Dr. Ambrose Beale was an impostor, with no right to the name he had assumed, no right to call himself a doctor of philosophy, ignorant indeed of the very elements of that study. Yet between the proof of all that he now held in his hands, and proof to satisfy a jury that Beale was actively responsible for the long series of murders under investigation, the gap was wide; nor did Bobby at the moment see any means of bridging it.

  He had no doubts himself. He felt he ought to have guessed the truth at the moment when Beale, thinking himself safe talking to a policeman – probably he was more cautious with people he supposed better educated – had babbled absurdly of Hegel’s realism and had attributed the Liebnitz theory of monads to Spinoza.

  He wondered if ever before in the history of crime a better knowledge of philosophy would have led to a quicker detection of a murderer’s guilt. But he had also to admit to himself that there had been other indications that might have roused direct suspicion in him, instead of only that vague unease which it had needed the casual remark of Markham, the uniform man on street duty, to crystallize into conviction of the truth. For, though he was not instructed in higher mathematics, he did know enough to be aware that equations are seldom represented by such neat columns of figures as Beale had on his blotting pad, and that were in reality no doubt, the imaginary stock and share transactions sent to Lawrence to be copied into the books of the firm in readiness for the possible inspection by insurance company assessors that was being prepared for. In the same way the clean, unsoiled, in a way untouched, appearance of the books on the shelves in Beale’s study might have let him guess they were there only for show and deceit.

  Looking back, now he was assured of the truth, every detail seemed to fall into place.

  But it was a good deal less certain that all of it put together amounted to anything like that direct, simple, and unquestionable proof the law requires.

  The coat of ocelot fur, for instance, that had been mentioned as having been worn by the supposed Mrs. Oliver at the inquest on the unfortunate Ronnie Owen, and that it was now fairly certain had been passed on to Alice in order to confuse the issues, as well as, most likely, to get rid of a possibly dangerous identification – what was there to show it was actually and in fact the same coat? “Fairly certain” and “most likely” are not phrases that can be used in courts.

  Obvious, too, that the supposed Mrs. Oliver had been in reality Mrs. Beale, the timid, nervous woman, at home only in her kitchen, of whom he had once had a glimpse. Probably she had been provided with a dark “transformation” to cover her own fair hair, and other steps would have been taken to give her a superficial likeness to the genuine Mrs. Ronnie Owen, but there again, what proof of all that could be produced? Most likely, too, she had had no guilty knowledge of the purpose she was being used to serve, but had simply done as her husband bade her, partly coerced, partly persuaded, accepting some such explanation as that it was all part of obscure business transactions, credits, loans, debts, financial arrangements, that site herself neither could nor was expected to understand. Any evidence she could give, even if it could be obtained, would probably be useless, and at such a distance of time there would be no hope of there being obtainable proof of her identity with the self-styled Mrs. Oliver.

  Everything, Bobby told himself gloomily, had been prepared and carried out with the utmost care and foresight. No doubt it was when Beale was in his study, ostensibly writing his philosophical treatise, that he composed the imaginary transactions to be entered in the books of his syndicates with such care and detail that the accountants who had examined them had noticed nothing suspicious, and had accepted the entries as genuine. The precaution had even been taken of showing a moderate profit, on which income tax had been duly paid – and there is no document on earth more satisfactory and convincing in its stark, bare realism than a demand note or a receipt of the Income Tax Commissioners. In the safe seclusion of his study, too, Beale had probably prepared the necessary forged documents, marriage certificates, and so on, that had been necessary to satisfy the insurance companies and prevent their suspicions developing into a refusal to pay.

  No doubt it would be easy to establish that the business of the Berry, Quick Syndicate and other concerns had been entirely imaginary, but there is no legal offence in inventing business transactions or in paying income tax on non-existent profits, and in them is no proof of murder, however suspicious they may seem. Bobby supposed that very likely evidence on such points would not be admitted
at a trial, unless and until it could be linked up with more direct proof. Confirmatory testimony was all that could be considered.

  Nor was there any hope that Lawrence could give evidence of identity. Plainly he had had no suspicion of Beale; he had regarded him simply as a prospective victim, though one safe for the time, both because Lawrence believed he was himself first on the list, and also because Beale had been wise enough to refuse to insure his life.

  Bobby had learned, too, in further conversation with Mr. Allen, that the genuine Ambrose Beale had been a little over thirty when he received his doctorate in 1903, so that his age, if he were still alive, would be somewhere about sixty-five. And that was why the sham Beale had professed that age, though Bobby was now perfectly certain he was at least fifteen years younger.

  “I ought to have followed that pointer up,” Bobby told himself with self-reproach.

  Actually, though a vague unease had troubled Bobby almost from the moment of his first meeting with Beale, it was the subtle manner in which that gentleman had transferred himself from the category of possible suspects to that of probable victims which had succeeded so well in diverting suspicion. In the same way, this aspect of yet another dupe and victim he had succeeded in giving himself had prevented any risk of Lawrence growing suspicious. One does not readily suspect the fly hovering over the web, and apparently about to alight on it, of being in fact the spider that has actually spun the web.

  Bobby supposed, too, that it was the gossip started by the porter, who had recognized him as a police officer on the occasion of his first visit to the Berry, Quick office, that had reached Beale and brought him so promptly on the scene in his character of yet another prospective victim. All the scene that day with Lawrence must have been carefully arranged; Lawrence in his condition of apathy and indifference being ready to agree to anything asked of him, without troubling to require any explanation.

  The precautions he had taken to insure that his own death should end the series had satisfied him. These effected, he had been willing to drift on the current of events to an end clearly foreseen and willingly accepted.

  So vague and doubtful, in fact, had been Bobby’s own suspicions that there had been needed the casual remark of the uniformed constable he had been chatting with one day, to the effect that a man who could laugh at an old lady’s narrow escape from being run over had a murderer’s mind, to crystallize them into certainty, as sometimes in chemistry the addition of one element to others held in solution will make clear the nature of them all.

  Clear and certain as all this was now in Bobby’s mind, yet, go over and over again, as often as he liked, his arguments and inferences, he saw no line to follow leading to absolute proof.

  Beale was certainly an impostor, and that much no doubt could be proved, but imposture is not murder. Indeed, in two of the tragedies that had taken place there was no proof of murder at all. Bobby himself was convinced that murder had been carried out by some simple process of making the victim drunk or drugged, or depriving him of consciousness in some way, and then getting him into his bath, there to drown; but in each case the verdict of the coroner’s jury had been “Accidental Death” and would not be easy to upset. In the other case – that of Ronnie Owen – there was indeed this proof of murder, since it could be shown that poison had been administered, but nothing could be brought forward to implicate Beale.

  And in the case of the death of the unlucky Dick Norris, there was nothing again to show that Beale had been in any way concerned, or even anywhere near at the time. Possibly he had been concealed in the flat somewhere, but that was a pure guess, and Lawrence apparently had seen no sign of him. There was, in fact, nothing to prove that Norris’s death had been anything but a deplorable and unfortunate accident.

  Bobby was certain for his own part that Norris had begun to entertain suspicions pointing towards Beale; that this was the cause of his nocturnal wanderings on the Embankment which had roused suspicions of himself; that he had accumulated certain evidence; that Beale, therefore, had found it necessary to remove him, adopting for that purpose his well-established and successful technique of the bath; and finally that it was Beale’s collection and removal of such written testimony as Norris might have succeeded in getting together that accounted for the hurried search of which the flat showed traces. Efforts to induce Norris to insure his life had plainly been made by the evidence of the policy found in his rooms, and the careful limitation to accidents hardly likely to be caused purposely suggested, too, considerable suspicion and uneasiness on his part. But such policies so limited are not uncommon, and no jury would see anything there out of the way, or feel forced to accept the theory that Norris might have been testing Beale’s reaction to an insurance so carefully limited.

  “If Beale sits tight,” Bobby told himself gloomily, “he’s safe as houses – and so he is even if he doesn’t. There’s not a thing against him a smart K.C. wouldn’t make rings round as easy as winking.”

  There would even be the testimony, tending to establish an alibi, of the local police set to watch Beale – for his own protection and safety from that threat of murder Bobby was so certain was his own. They had already reported that to the best of their knowledge and belief he had not left his house on the evening of Norris’s death. Not that Bobby attached much importance to that evidence. Easy enough for Beale to direct his wife to take his place in the study, to work the typewriter so that its rattle could be heard, to switch on the light at the proper time, to let an unidentifiable but accepted shadow appear on the blinds. That Mrs. Beale was so much under her husband’s control as to obey implicitly any directions he gave her was certain enough, and he would have found little difficulty in leaving the house unseen, bicycling to some neighbouring station where he was not known, taking a train to town, and returning in time to show himself in person when the local sergeant of police came to make inquiry about the car accident Dr. Beale might have witnessed had he been on the spot at the time as, the sergeant explained, was understood might possibly have been the case.

  But once again all was conjecture – probable, even certain in a way, but yet far from the solid, unequivocal proof British law requires.

  To Bobby it looked very much as if the man guilty, as he was well convinced, of this long series of murders would escape all human punishment, escape with the rich profit of his crimes, escape perhaps to begin again elsewhere.

  In this depressed mood he returned to his rooms from Paddington, to write out there his report in surroundings more comfortable than the crowded conditions at Scotland Yard permitted. As soon as he got in, his landlady appeared to say that Miss Yates was in her room upstairs and wanted very urgently to speak to him, if he would spare her a few minutes. He sent up word accordingly that he would be glad to do so, and she came down at once, blinking, hesitating, nervous. He noticed that she was carrying a small attaché case. She said without preamble of any kind:

  “A woman called Magotty Meg stole this for me. I expect you know her. She said she had been seen and she has been keeping out of the way or I should have had it before. It was in a bus. There was a woman there. She was half asleep and she had an attaché case just like this. Meg changed it for this one. It was Dr. Beale’s. I mean this one. He kept his hand on it tight, but Meg is very clever. She jerked his hand away somehow, and before he put it back she changed his for the woman’s and put his on the woman’s seat. Neither of them knew, and then in a minute or two she picked it up from beside the woman and got out with it, so when it was missed the woman thought it was hers had gone. But Meg thought the bus conductor had seen her, so she had to keep out of the way till she could get it to me safely. It’s locked, and I haven’t tried to open it. I want you to do that.”

  CHAPTER 29

  CHRIS’S STATEMENT

  Bobby took the attaché case Alice was offering him, and held it on his knee.

  “I don’t think we will open it now,” he said. “I think we had better take it along with us to th
e Yard and let them open it there.” He added: “You mean Dr. Beale?”

  She nodded.

  “What made you suspect him?”

  “I always knew,” she answered slowly, “there was something queer going on. If a man is starving on the Embankment one night, like Mr. Lawrence was, and then he is put in charge of an office, you know there’s something behind, something secret. And if it’s secret, then it’s crooked.”

  “Yes. Yes,” agreed Bobby thoughtfully. “Yes, I expect that’s so.”

  “If it was crooked,” she went on, “then there was a crook to make it so, and there were only three of them – Dr. Beale, Mr. Norris, Mr. Lawrence – unless it was someone else nobody ever heard of. But I soon got to be sure there wasn’t anyone else – only those three. And it wasn’t Mr. Lawrence, because he didn’t care enough – a crook has to be wide awake, and he was living in a dream. Besides, he had only been brought in after the thing had been started; 1 felt sure he was meant just for cover. At least, I did till I found out they had him insured for a lot of money. They thought nobody would ever bother about what happened to an exconvict picked up on the Embankment. I knew very well that was why they had chosen him. For a long time I thought it was Mr. Norris, but then I found out he was worried, too, and was asking questions about things. He did that on the Embankment, and he tried to get out of me what I knew, but I didn’t tell him anything, because I didn’t trust him. Only, especially because he seemed to suspect Mr. Lawrence, that meant he wasn’t the one who was doing it all.”

  “If he was suspicious something was wrong, why didn’t he come to us?” Bobby asked. “He knew I was working on the case.”