by Peter Main
“Oh,” said Mr. Carr airily, “a lot of people have thought of doing her autobiography for her. She doesn’t write well. She’s spent her life doing other things. But the trouble is that she can’t make a start. One day she’s the illegitimate daughter of one of the Napoleons—Bonaparte, I think—and a dancer from the Imperial Ballet at St. Petersburg, and the next moment she’s changed her mind and is the only daughter of poor but honest parents who ruined themselves giving her a good upbringing. Once she got up to her fifteenth year I daresay the book would be easy—a kind of sandwich of bed and money—but it’s the start that worries her. She insists that the book should begin well. I suggested to her once that she should begin by saying that she was the daughter of poor but honest parents, one of whom was Napoleon and the other a ballet-dancer, but that idea didn’t go down any too well, I’m afraid. I think she cut me out of her will for a whole fortnight that time. You see, I don’t worry about her will, as even if I am in it, as likely as not she’s left me the family bible or a bottle of booze. On the other hand, at one time I know that I was due to come in for the whole shoot, not that I’d know what to do with it if I had it. I mean can you see me running a high-class brothel like that hotel? Can you now? I’d be sure to land in the clink within a couple of months.”
“Do you mean to say,” I asked, “that your aunt makes any money out of her hotel?”
“Good Lord, yes, cock,” said Mr. Carr with evident surprise, “of course she does. You see she was the mistress of a nobleman about the nineteen hundreds and he gave her the hotel freehold—they did things in style in those days—when he paid her off. Then, you see, if you stay there you never know what your bill will be—it may be a quid or it may be a fiver, all depending upon how she happens to feel that morning. You’ve got a sporting chance of getting away cheap, but when the old girl does sting you, a hornet’s got nothing on her. She’ll give you a bill for champagne that was drunk before you were pupped and still you’ll have to pay up, if you want to go there again. On the whole, though, you break pretty even if you count it up over a period of some years. She’s a weird old terror too—when you give her a cheque as likely as not she’ll lose it and it’ll never reach the bank—that’s so long as it’s a good cheque, but, by God, if you take the chance of passing off a stumer on her, it’s damned well certain to be in your bank the next morning. I think she’s got a kind of nose for elastic cheques, and she doesn’t much mind getting them, but once you’ve given her a dud cheque she’ll present it to your bank once a month until suddenly it gets paid. She’s still sending in a cheque given her in 1910 by a boy called Bertie Smart—it comes back to her with a covering note, but she never bothers to read that. I know that the note points out that Captain Smart was killed in 1916, but that has never filtered through to her mind.”
A miasma of murderous silence hung around Professor Stubbs as he lumbered across to the barrel of beer in the corner of the room. He filled two pint mugs and his own one, which holds a quart, and then came back to his vast seat beside the fire. He lowered himself gingerly down and pulled out a horrible black pipe, no bigger than a clay pipe, but about a million times as foul. He chopped some strong brown plug into his hand and, after rolling it up, tilted it into the bowl of his pipe, tamping it down with his blunt thumb. He stuck the little pipe rather jauntily between his teeth and lit it with an enormous cigarette lighter.
Once his head was surrounded with clouds of vile and noxious smoke he seemed to be more cheerful. He swigged about a pint of beer and wiped the froth from his mouth with a vast gay bandana.
“Uhhuh, Carr,” he grunted, “yer aunt seems to be a woman o’ some character to make up for her deficiencies in the way o’ memory. What d’ye really know about her, besides what ye enjoy yerself makin’ up?”
“Damn little,” said Mr. Carr frankly. “I know she ran a bawdy house in Brussells, because she’s always speaking about it. I gather it was not only exclusive but damned expensive. She seems to have had the time of her life there, but the thing I can’t discover really is whether she went there before she inherited the hotel or after. My own idea is that she went after, in order to make the money to run the hotel the way she wanted to run it. It’s as near to a bordello as you’ll get in London, I think, but somehow or other the old bird never seems to have any trouble with the police. I suppose she goes in for a bit of bribery now and again, but I’m sure she’s not much good at it. She’d never remember which policeman was due for his bribe and which had had it. I guess she just gets away with it by sheer strength of character. She never pays the least attention to the hours of opening for drinks, and anyone she knows can get a drink there at any time of the day or night. She never goes to bed, but just sits there propped in that old rocking-chair, thinking of the pleasures of wickedness in Edwardian times. Judging from the way she speaks of them, those days must have been as gay and a good deal more pleasing than the balmy ’twenties.”
When he heard that Mrs. Lottie Rattigan did not attempt to honour the legal opening hours for the consumption of intoxicating liquors, I could see that the old man was revising his opinion of her. In fact, he nodded approvingly. As a man who always claimed that he dehydrated faster than anything or person on earth, these regulations about the hours are one of the main torments of the old man’s existence. He will put up with anything that does not interfere with his right to have a drink as often as he wants one and exactly when he wants it. Anything that seems to upset his supply of liquid is a thorn in his flesh. I once managed to qualify as a thorn by jerking the barrel of beer in his room, while I was pouring out a mugful of bitter; the beer was undrinkable for a couple of hours, and since that time I have not been allowed to touch the barrel. I can drink as much as I like, but I can’t pour myself a drink.
Mr. Carr rose to go. It was getting late. But before he went he looked thoughtfully at the Professor.
“Er, cock,” he said nervously, “I was just kind of thinking that it might be a nice idea to put up an Orrery in your garden. I know where I can get a nice one cheap and I could easily enough knock it into shape, and then it would be most frightfully useful if you ever wanted to show anyone the positions of the planets.”
I could not, myself, envisage the spectacle of the Professor dying to display the wonders of the heavens to any chance passer-by—he is far more likely to instruct them on the subject of rust in wheat or the mutations he has produced in the evening primrose, but the thought of a brass and ivory contraption in the garden made an immediate appeal to him. He was enthusiastic. I had suffered already from Mr. Carr’s habit of bringing old scientific instruments into the house. He seemed to have got the idea that Professor Stubbs was a scientist and that therefore he was interested in all scientific instruments, no matter what they were meant for, from Dr. Burton’s obstetric forceps down to a set of Napier’s bones used in calculating problems. As a result, the house, which was full before, was beginning to look like a corner of the old Ashmolean at Oxford. I really do draw the line at finding a pair of seventeenth-century dividers point up in my chair, particularly when I do not find them until after I have sat down. One of these days, I tell myself, I will retire and go and live in the country where I’ll really have a quiet life and where everything will be in perfect order, with the books on my shelves arranged as they ought to be arranged and the plants where they ought to be, not crawling gradually through the rooms of the house like an invading force.
Anyhow, I thought, I should be grateful for we had managed for the first time in my experience with the Professor to get through the whole of an evening out without his contriving to get into some sort of trouble. Mr. Carr said goodnight and I heaved myself out of my armchair and went across to my table, where I started arranging my papers with a view to starting nice and early the next morning. I really had made up my mind that I was going to work like a trojan and that no power on earth or in heaven or hell was going to distract me, or prevent my finishing my paper.
The old man, I not
iced, was obtaining a little vicarious excitement by reading a thriller. I’d have thought that he had enough of murders from the ones he was mixed up in, but not at all, as soon as he was finished with a case he would sally forth to buy a couple of dozen detective stories to fill in the time until something new broke in the way of murder.
Professor Stubbs has a theory that the Chief Inspector calls him in as a consultant on murder cases. This is a theory that is derived from his reading and has applied to what he considers to be his dignity as a detective. The truth of the matter is that the Bishop would probably give an appreciable amount of his salary to keep the old man away from any case, but the old man insists on horning in, as disruptive as a butterfly-bomb.
Chapter 3
A Kill in the Morning
IT SEEMS to me that the one thing I learn by experience is that I learn nothing from experience. I should have had more sense than to plan anything more than about half an hour ahead. Living with the Professor, life further away than that is damned uncertain, and, I believe, unlikely to arrive. I had determined that I would clear up my paper and type it out and, with this in view, I arose right early. I did the necessary chores about the house, such as watering those plants which needed it, and so on, and I was just sitting down at my table to start work when the telephone rang sharply in the cold morning air.
I disentangled the receiver from a pile of books and learned periodicals and put it to my ear. It was Ben Carr. I sighed out loud as I realised who it was, for I wondered in what kind of mischief he was planning to involve the old man.
“Max, cock,” he said urgently, “I’m in a bit of a hole. Is the Prof. there?”
“Yes,” I said, “I’ll get him. What have you been up to—bagging a copper’s helmet or assault and battery, eh?”
“It’s worse than that,” his voice was really serious, “it’s murder.”
“Hell,” I said explosively, laying down the receiver and going to call the old man. Trust us, I thought, to know anyone who managed to keep away from murder. It seems to me that there’s something about Professor Stubbs which encourages otherwise peaceable men and women to indulge in an unaccustomed blood-lust. I groaned and knocked on the old man’s bedroom door.
He appeared in the doorway wrapped in a voluminous and violently tartan dressing-gown, so violent, in fact, that I suspect that it must have been responsible for the interdict on tartan after the 1745 rising. I know that it would have frightened the guts out of me if I had had anything in the way of a hangover.
“It’s Ben Carr,” I said briefly and bitterly, “he’s in trouble. He says it’s murder. For God’s sake let’s try to keep out of it.”
He swept past me with the dignity of a Roman emperor going to his doom and picked up the receiver, succeeding in tangling himself in the flex as he did so.
“Huh,” he grunted, “that you, Carr?” This was a bit obvious when I considered that I had just announced that it was indeed Carr on the phone. “Ho. Yes. Yes. Indeed. Well that seems to be a thunderin’ mess all right, you better wait here till we ha’ had a bite o’ breakfast.”
He laid down the receiver with the carefulness of a man who has just successfully dealt with a poisonous and extremely wriggly snake. The face he turned to me was wreathed in smiles of fiendish delight. I felt rather as though someone had just given me a hard punch in the middle of my wind. I might have known it; I had no prospect of keeping the old man away from murder.
“What is it this time?” I asked gloomily. “Has Ben Carr fallen out with his ‘wife’ and killed her?”
“No,” the old man shook his head, “it’s Lottie Rattigan. Someone has strangled her during the night.”
“What were you doing during the night,” I asked pointedly, “when she was making all those revelations about your father, you looked as though you would have strangled her yourself. Have you an alibi?”
The Professor brushed my remarks aside with the contempt which they doubtless deserved. He ran his blunt fingers through his mop of grey hair.
“Um,” he grumbled slowly, “the trouble, so far as I can gather from Ben Carr is that she was found sittin’ in that rockin’ chair in the hall this mornin’ an’ that, while any passer-by might ha’ come in an’ done her in, there was nothin’ missin’—all her rings, an’ there must be quite a deal o’ money tied up in those rings, were on her fingers. Ben Carr stayed the night there.”
He left this remark to sink in through my consciousness, which it did rather slowly. I was trying to reorientate my brain from dealing with plant breeding problems to trying to cope with the subject of murder. I must say that my brain seemed to be most unwilling to make the transition. I never did want to be mixed up in murder cases, and it seemed that my evil stars were working overtime.
“Are the police there?” I asked, changing the subject. The old man nodded heavily.
“Umhum,” he said, “an’ we’ll be there too, just as soon as I can get me clothes on an’ swallow a bite o’ breakfast. I think that Ben Carr’s not feelin’ too happy. If it turns out that his aunt has left him all her riches, an’ I gather she wasn’t what ye’d call poor, he’ll have to do some explainin’ about why, after not stayin’ at The Boudoir for donkey’s ages, he suddenly makes up his mind to stay there last night an’ it just kinda coincidental happens that his aunt gets murdered. It looks,” his face had the pleased look of an owl which has just found a plump field mouse, “as though it might be a very pretty case, a very pretty case indeed.”
While he was talking he had been dressing. He disappeared into the bathroom, leaving me to contemplate the work which I had arranged so neatly on my desk. The devil alone knew how long it would be before I could get back to deal with it. I could only pray that the case would be solved by the same evening, even although I knew that would make Professor Stubbs hopping mad. He liked, as he said, a case which he could get his teeth into, and I must say for him that he has very pugnacious teeth.
Of course, I might very well have said to the old man that he could go off and deal with the murder himself, but from very painful experience I knew perfectly well that if I was to do that he would just get into some sort of trouble and it would be worse for me sorting it out than it would be trying to prevent his getting into it in the first place.
I wandered sadly through into the breakfast room and took hold of The Times, but I had barely had time to glance at it before the old man, shaved and fully dressed, was in the room, howling for coffee. I poured him a pint mug of the stuff and gave myself a more reasonable ration. I find I do not need, nor could I contain, as much liquid as the old man does.
He destroyed a gargantuan mound of scrambled eggs and then started on immense wedges of toast with thick chunky Oxford marmalade. I made a pretty fair breakfast myself, for I knew that the time or place of my next meal was problematical. The Professor looked as pleased as if he had just heard that he had won the Irish Sweepstake.
I sighed heavily several times. I felt very low indeed. I wanted to do some work, some of my own work, and here I was about to be hauled off on a chase after murderers. My private opinion is that, while I would not deprive the old man of his pleasure entirely, I would allow him one murder a year and no more. Then he might get on with his tremendous History of Botany which has been hanging around him for the last fifteen years and looks like doing the same for the next thirty. I guess the old man will leave me his notes and drafts in his will and I’ll have to finish the job for him. He’ll never get round to parting with it himself. No doubt the editing of the History will bring me some professional kudos, but that’s a sort of thing I’m not anxious for. I’d like to see the Professor finish his own work and let me get on with mine.
The exterior of The Boudoir looked even more tawdry and rakish in the light of morning than it had looked the previous evening. A small crowd of idlers had gathered in the street before the entrance and a young and rather self-conscious uniformed constable stood in the doorway, resisting the blandishments of
people who wanted to have just one peep inside.
The old man brought the Bentley to rest successfully. I think he put the fear of death into some of the crowd but by some miracle he did not mow any of them down. He dismounted from the car with dignity and progressed towards the young constable. I thought the policeman was about to try to stop him, but the old man fixed him with the stern eye which he keeps for riotous students.
“Chief Inspector Bishop inside?” he asked, and the constable nodded. “Ah, well, he wants to see me.”
We swept past the constable and into the hall. The Chief Inspector had his back turned towards us, but some sixth sense must have warned him that there were people behind him. He turned slowly and his expression showed that the Professor had been mistaken in his description of the Bishop’s desires.
“My God,” said that worthy, with an emphasis that was heart-felt, “what have I done to deserve this?” He appealed to the serried photographs on the wall, and closed his eyes wearily. “What have I done? I ask you? I am doing my duty as a good plain ordinary policeman, and the tide washes this up at my feet. What brought you here, John? You can’t tell me that you can smell murder all the way from Bayswater to Hampstead?”
Professor Stubbs growled cheerfully. He looked at the Chief Inspector with real affection.
“Uhhuh,” he said, “I got a nose like a tapir an’ can smell out murder a long way off. No, Reggie, I’ll tell ye what happened. Me friend Mr. Ben Carr gave me a ring on the phone an’ asked me to trundle along, so I trundled.”
At the name of Mr. Carr I noticed the Chief Inspector’s eyelids droop over his eyes. He had had some contact with that amiable lunatic before, in connection with the murder of Dr. Cornelius Bellamy in the Museum of Modern Art, and I knew that Mr. Carr had left him feeling that something pretty radical had gone wrong with the world as he knew it and expected to see it.