by Peter Main
“Thank you, sir,” he said slowly, “she was a real lady was Mrs. Rattigan, and I’ll never forget her as long as I live. Would you mind, sir, if I went and laid down. I don’t feel too strong this morning. It’s been a sad shock to me.”
The lawyer looked at the Chief Inspector, who bowed his head to give permission.
“Certainly,” Mr. Smellman said softly, with more sympathy in his voice than had hitherto been apparent, “you go along now, Arthur, and remember that if you want any help you’ve only got to call on me.”
“Thank you, sir,” the old man’s voice shook as he rose to his feet and shambled slowly across to the door.
“Mr. and Mrs. Baker,” the rustling voice went on, “are to have the sum of two thousand pounds between them, and Miss Janet Morgan and Mrs. Roberts will each receive the sum of fifteen hundred pounds.”
Janet Morgan’s pretty face bore a look of complete satisfaction and it was obvious that she was already working out what she hoped to do with the windfall. The cook’s immense bulk shook with a sudden sob.
“Thank you, sir,” she said, “but I’d rather not have the money if only I could get Mrs. Rattigan back again. She was a real nice lady, as Mr. Niven said, and I could never have hoped to work for anyone nicer.”
“In addition to these bequests,” Mr. Smellman addressed Mr. Carr, “you will find that there are a considerable number of minor bequests to various friends of Mrs. Rattigan’s, but I do not consider that these need detain us now. If, sir,” he looked at the Chief Inspector, “it is all the same to you, I will now return to my office. I am, I may say, a busy man, and this tragic affair has considerably interfered with my morning’s work.”
He slipped the papers back into his dispatch case, and stood up. His rimless glasses fell to the end of a black silk ribbon and he caught them and placed them in his waistcoat pocket. He bowed to us all with punctilious politeness and left the room.
Roland Grimble sat at the table. He had chewed one of his fingernails down to the quick. He looked across at Mr. Carr insolently.
“Well,” he said, “now you’re a rich man, Ben, you’d better lend me a fiver. I’ll pay it back out of my inheritance.”
Mr. Carr did not seem to have heard. He was looking at the contents of his pockets which he had removed and placed upon the table. There were fragments of wire and odd bits of mechanical contraptions, and among the welter of papers I noticed that there were several pawn-tickets. Mr. Carr was engaged in sorting these out. Grimble repeated his request and Mr. Carr looked at him absently.
“I haven’t got a fiver,” he said at length. “If I had a fiver do you think I’d have all these pawn-tickets?” He held one of them up. “Gold watch—it didn’t go, but it was gold—three pounds ten. Fountain-pen—seven and six—there was something wrong with the rubber bag arrangement so it didn’t fount.”
He put the tickets back in his pocket and faced Roland Grimble.
“No,” he said finally, “I can’t lend you a fiver now, and I don’t mean to start lending you fivers. If you want any help when you find a job, well, I’ll do what I can for you. Apart from that I’d be very glad if you would leave my house just as soon as you can.”
Grimble got to his feet. His face was pale and his thin lips had almost disappeared.
“Why, you. . . .” Words failed him. “I’ve a good mind to throw you out. I’ll stay here just as long as I want to.” He turned to Janet Morgan for support. “Eh, Janet? I’m damned if I’m going to be ordered about by a pipsqueak like you, Ben. I’ll show you where you get off.”
“All right,” said Mr. Carr mildly, “you show me. I’m waiting.”
He certainly gave the impression that he was waiting for something, but his face and attitude said that that something was no larger nor more dangerous than the sudden assault of an irritated midge.
Grimble looked at him and hesitated. I could hear the old man beside me chuckling deeply to himself. There is nothing he likes so much as a good old-fashioned brawl; I sometimes think that he would have felt eminently at home in a Hogarthian election.
“It’s not worth it,” Grimble muttered, “but just you wait, Ben. I’ll make you wish you had never been born.”
He pulled himself into the semblance of a swagger and sauntered from the room, as nonchalantly as a man can whose knees are knocking together.
“Coo,” said Mr. Carr, “he’s a nasty piece of work, he is. Never could stand him. Even as a kid he was a horror. Maybe his mother liked him, but I doubt it.” A sudden idea seemed to strike him. “It seems,” his voice was not very certain, “that I’m now a rich man and that I own this joint. What does anyone say to a drink?”
Janet Morgan left the room. I looked after her with considerable pleasure. She might be as tough as old leather, but by god she had as nice a pair of legs as I’d seen in a long time, and she had the sense to show plenty of them.
There was a kind of short bar at the end of the room, and behind this there was a couple of beer barrels. Mr. Carr retired and, producing silver tankards, filled them up. The Chief Inspector refused to drink and looked as though he thoroughly disapproved of the proceeding.
“Hugg,” the Professor snorted, “stop lookin’ so dam’ sour grapes, Reggie me boy. Ye know I kinda dry up quicker than most an’ I do need to drink every now an’ then to keep me body from shrivellin’ wi’ the flamin’ fires inside me.”
The Bishop gave no reply to this excuse for drinking. The Professor, his expression said, could always think up a reason for everything.
Chapter 5
Interlude with Coffee
I MUST admit that I had never expected to eat lunch with the old man in a Lyons’ teashop, but there we were, Professor Stubbs, the Chief Inspector, and myself, sitting at a tiled table finishing off the remains of toad-in-the-hole.
While we had been eating, the Professor had washed his food down with continual cups of coffee, a habit which, I tell him, will one day land him in trouble with his digestion. There were, I think, about seven cups of coffee spread at his elbow. He ordered an eighth and ninth for himself and a first for me and the Bishop. The waitress cleared away the evidence of his gargantuan capacity for liquid of all sorts.
“Ho,” said the old man in a pleased voice, “so we’re in the thick o’ it again, eh, Reggie? An’ who do you think done it?”
The Chief Inspector looked sleepily pained.
“My dear John,” he said, “do you really think that I’m a magician? I get called into a case in the morning and you want the solution by lunch time. No, John, all I can do at the present is to go on collecting facts and trying to fit them together.”
“Ye realise, don’t ye,” the old man was as happy as a sandboy, “that this is another o’ these cases in which everyone might ha’ done the murder an’ no one seems to ha’ anythin’ in the way o’ an alibi? Must say I like me cases that way, it kinda gives me room for expansion.”
“I know,” the Chief Inspector was rather bitter, “it means that you can let your imagination range at will among all the people connected with the case and that you can put up arguments for the guilt of any single person without the slightest regard for the facts. Oh yes, John, it’s a fine case for a person like yourself, who looks on the thing as an intellectual puzzle and who is not concerned with earning his bread and butter by digging out the truth. A case like this supplies you with admirable opportunities for exercising academic arguments.”
The old man was indignant. He brought down his coffee-cup with a loud thump on the tiled table.
“Please, sir!” It was a waitress who had been roused by the noise of crashing china. She took the empty cup away from the Professor and I do not believe that he noticed her doing it.
“What the thunderin’ name o’ the unholy billygoat,” he began, “d’ye mean by that? Me, I got the scientific approach to me problems. I kinda can see all the possibilities at once. I got no need to go around worryin’ whether the public’ll like me solutions, I�
�ll grant ye that, but ye ha’ to admit that I kinda get at the truth in the long run.”
“Yes,” replied the Chief Inspector, “in the long run. But the trouble is that you do want the hell of a long run for your money. I have to satisfy my superiors not only that I am taking action, but that I am taking the correct action, and the trouble in this case lies in taking some action which will not appear to militate against the innocent.”
“Judgin’ from the appearance o’ most o’ the people there,” said the old man in a voice that boomed through the teashop and startled an old man playing draughts so that he made a move which allowed his opponent to polish him off without further trouble, “judgin’ from the faces o’ these people, I’d hardly say that ‘innocent’ was the right word. I’ve seldom seen a harder boiled lookin’ collection than the two Bakers, Miss Morgan an’ young Grimble. I don’t think you could say anythin’ which ’ud startle ’em. They know all the vices an’ they know all the blinkin’ answers too. Ye can take it from me that, if one o’ them was responsible for puttin’ that electric wire round Mrs. Rattigan’s neck and sort of tightenin’ it so’s she stopped breathin’, ye’ll find it a pretty difficult job to fix it on ’em. Yer suspicions won’t worry ’em, for I’ll bet me trouser-buttons that they’re as used to bein’ suspected as they are to eatin’ breakfast, an’ a little more suspicion won’t hurt ’em. No, son,” he looked at the Chief Inspector amiably, “ye needn’t worry about doin’ ’em any damage by suspectin’ ’em.”
“But,” said the Chief Inspector, “I’ve got to make a start somewhere, and the big question is, where do I start. In any ordinary case like this, you’d think, rightly enough, that the will was the place to start, but it seems, from what Carr says, and he is borne out by other witnesses, that Mrs. Rattigan’s will was as changeable as the barometer.”
“Unhuh,” the old man thoughtlessly tapped a little heap of damp vile tobacco from his pipe on to the tiles of the table, ‘“uhhuh, ye’re right there, an’ I’d like to say, in case ye’re gettin’ funny ideas into yer head, that I think me friend Ben Carr was as surprised as could be to discover that he’d suddenly inherited all his aunt’s hard cash an’ her tawdry hotel. I was watchin’ these people durin’ the readin’ of the will.”
“So was I,” put in the Bishop; “an’ I didn’t get anythin’ from the faces o’ any o’ the people who were gathered there. Not, as I’ve said, that ye could ha’ expected much from some of ’em They got real poker faces an’ wouldn’t jump if ye were to let off a fire-cracker on their heels.”
“I wonder,” the Chief Inspector was thoughtful, “whether the change in Mrs. Rattigan’s will, which she made yesterday, had anything to do with her murder? I forgot to ask that lawyer—dry old stick, wasn’t he?—and I’ll need to find out. Say, for instance, that Mrs. Rattitgan had put one of these people into her will only yesterday and, later in the same day, had discovered something about that person that might have made her decide that she would alter her will as quickly as she could—taking them out. Say, for example, that something like that had happened, well, that might give you a motive for murder.”
He took out a notebook and made a scrawled note to remind himself that he would have to enquire further into the matter of Lottie Rattigan’s wills. I had a momentary but vivid vision of the offices of Messrs. Smellman, Hewitt, Seldes, Renner, Smellman and Smellman, with millions of wills, all of them Mrs. Rattigan’s, neatly docketed, tied in red tape, and carefully filed, waiting for the last judgement.
The Professor had managed to get his pipe into action and was filling the tea-room with fumes that would have aroused horror even on a battle-front.
“Um,” he said deeply, “maybe you got somethin’ there, Reggie, but, all the same, I kinda wonder whether the will had anythin’ to do wi’ the case. It would kinda make it too dam’ simple an’ I don’t like too dam’ simple cases.”
“Hell, John,” even the phlegmatic Chief Inspector was explosive, “I don’t give a ruddy hoot what you like in the way of cases. I look upon them as a matter of business and I just have to try and straighten them out, as quickly and as simply as I can. I can’t act at the moment on the assumption that Mrs. Rattigan was murdered by a chance caller. I have to pretend to myself that it was one of the people in the house who murdered her. I have to go on this assumption, until I find a reason for discarding it, which God forbid.”
“God forbid,” echoed the old man piously, “it’s only the very worst kind o’ thriller which has the murderer as one o’ the uncounted hordes o’ London. Just think o’ it, Reggie, donkey’s millions o’ people walkin’ around the streets an’ any one o’ ’em could ha’ done the murder. It don’t give ye anythin’ to work on—nothin’ at all. Ye might as well write the case off as unsolvable at once.”
“Oh,” said the Chief Inspector, obviously on his mettle, “I don’t know about that. You see we have got a certain number of facts to go on, even if it does comes to that. We know, for instance, that the motive of the murder was not robbery, so that we can, at once, exclude the professional criminal from our lists of suspects, and we know, further, that the murderer must have been someone well known to Mrs. Rattigan, as it does not seem possible that a stranger, even if he had the motive, would have been able to get close enough to strangle her with the cord of her own electric light. I wonder, incidentally, why she did not ring that bell on her table? Even if she was being strangled you’d have thought that she would have been able to do that. I suppose,” he sighed, “that the trouble with being as mountainously fat as she was, is that it slows down the movements so that she couldn’t get to the bell in time.”
“I suppose so,” said the Professor gravely, “and talking of that, I’d suggest, that you were kinda careful about yer eatin’ in case ye finish up the same way. Yer pants are gettin’ a bit tight on ye already.”
By way of reply to this gratuitous rudeness, the Chief Inspector looked down complacently at his well-covered frame. It was certainly true that the material across his middle was stretched pretty tightly, and he did not look like a man who believed in starving his tummy.
“Yes, John,” he said, “I’m getting fat, and God knows why. I have more worries than anyone I know, enough, you’d think, to keep me as thin as a thread, and yet, eating carefully, I just can’t keep my weight down.”
“Eating carefully?” said the old man, “I thunderin’ well don’t think. You guzzle like a Gadarene swine and then complain that it must be that ye’re havin’ too much starch in yer diet. Too much starch, huh! Too much food, I’d say.”
He might have known that he would not get a rise out of Chief Inspector Bishop by being rude about his bulk. The Bishop nourishes and cherishes his well-fed size as if it was his ewe-lamb.
“That’s all right, John,” he beamed at the old man, “you won’t start a quarrel that way. Let’s get back to the murder of Mrs. Rattigan. Since you are so bright in expecting me to have the solution of the case cut and dried so quickly, let me hear what you can do in the way of working out a solution.”
“Ho,” said the old man, looking pleased with himself, “ho. I got no ideas at all. There’s just things that I think could do wi’ lookin’ into. Take the Bakers now. Well, I’m no magic worker an’ I ain’t got anythin’ in the way o’ second sight, but I’ll be kinda surprised if ye can’t find out somethin’ more about ’em from yer files at the Yard. There’s a sort o’ indefinable somethin’ about their attitude which suggests to me that they had some kinda dealin’ wi’ the coppers before. They kinda look as though they knew all about the police.”
“Yes,” said the Bishop, “yes. That’s a good point. I’d noticed it myself, and I remember thinking that if we didn’t know more about them than they let on, then I was by way of being less astute than I give myself credit for. Take young Grimble; too, and think of him. A young ne’er-do-well if there ever was one. The sort of young hanger-on to the fringes of Mayfair who, before the war, used to appear in the police cou
rts charged with stealing fur-coats or rings from middle-aged women with more money and sentimentality than sense. I’ve no doubt that I’ll be able to find something about them which hasn’t yet emerged. And,” his sleepy eyes opened a little, “there’s nothing like that sort of thing for making birds sing. Oh, I’ll make them sing all right. But I must say I’d like to know more about your friend Mr. Carr. He hasn’t been staying with his aunt, and yet, quite suddenly, he makes up his mind to spend the night there and that very night his aunt happens to be murdered and he comes into a fortune. I don’t like it. There’s too much coincidence about it. You know I don’t like coincidences.”
“I know,” the old man boomed like a bittern in a bog, “ye don’t like this an’ ye don’t like that. Ye can take me word for it that Ben Carr is just the kinda man who makes things happen around him. He can no more help gettin’ into trouble than I can help needin’ a drink. There are people like that.”
“I know,” said the Chief Inspector, looking pointedly at the old man, who scowled at him. Like the Bishop, I had thought that the Professor’s remarks about Mr. Carr could be applied with greater truth to himself. I have tried my hardest to keep the old man away from murders, but the damned things seem to have a habit of happening when he is around and then no power on earth could keep him away from them. If the murder does not actually happen in his presence, an unfortunate occurrence which has been known to take place, then someone or other of his many friends and acquaintances is sure to be mixed up in it and he gets pulled in. One of the Bishop’s favourite dreams is of Professor Stubbs in a strait-jacket in a padded cell. He is convinced that, if the old man were thus restrained, the course of justice and the duties of a policeman would both run more smoothly.
The old man gestured to the waitress and ordered more coffee. It was certainly being a sober outing, but not one without liquid.
Professor Stubbs felt through all his pockets until he succeeded in locating a fragment of pencil, about three-quarters of an inch in length. His habit of carrying these disgusting scraps always annoys me, and I make really great efforts to keep him supplied with reasonable pencils, but as sure as I hand him a nice new Royal Sovereign with a nice sharp point he will twiddle it between his fingers until he succeeds in breaking it up into four or five fragments. Then he will start to use the pieces quite happily. He tried out the point of the pencil on the tiled surface and discovered, to his evident delight, that the graphite would make marks upon it.