by Peter Main
“Professor Stubbs,” said Douglas irrelevantly,
“In life’s hubbubs,
Found only one thing dear,
The smell and taste of lots of beer
In lots and lots of pubs.”
The old man tried to look like Queen Victoria not being amused. As a matter of fact he looked like Stanley discovering Livingstone, a Stanley with a hangover.
“Well,” said Douglas, his tone low and repressed. “What’s been going on around here, Ben?”
“I wouldn’t know,” said Mr. Carr. “I came here last night for a bit of a doss in my aunt’s hotel, and in the morning I woke to find that somehow I was sleeping in my own hotel.” He appealed to the Professor. “That’s about the way it is, isn’t it?”
The old man nodded heavily. I thought he was beginning to look tired. He doesn’t often suffer from weariness, and, in fact, he can give me points any day of the week he wants to, but when he is tired there is something Homeric about his sleepiness. I wondered if it was coming on him now.
“Carr,” he said suddenly, “what d’ye know o’ yer cousin, Roland Grimble. Ye can keep the personal dislike o’ the feller out o’ it, but I’d like to know what ye can tell me about the feller.”
Mr. Carr leaned forward and pressed the bell on the table and the aged waiter brought drinks. When Arthur had disappeared, Mr. Carr lit another Woodbine from the butt of the one he held between mahogany-tinted fingers.
“If you want to know all about Roland,” he said rather sharply, “I can give it to you straight. He is a waster who does everything very badly, even nothing. He has not, I believe, ever done a day’s job in his life. He can’t understand that to do nothing, or crooked things, well, you’ve got to do a good deal of work. I,” Mr. Carr was rather proud, “spend a lot of time doing nothing, but then, I might say, I’m an expert on the subject. The trouble with Roland is that he’s so damn lazy that he won’t bother to shut his mouth to keep the flies out.”
Mr. Carr opened his mouth to put some beer down. He squinted at the diminishing quantity in his tankard and returned to his own troubles.
“If,” he said, “the cops put the finger on me, I can’t see how I can prove that I didn’t do the job. They can’t have much evidence that I did do it, but I can’t see how I’m to clear myself. I know I didn’t murder Aunt Lottie—for, after all, I did not know I was to come into all this,” he gestured round the place, “and, so far as I was concerned she was more valuable alive than dead. I was always sure of a bed and a meal here.”
He certainly looked gloomy. At least, gloomy for him. He sucked at the end of his cigarette and threw it into the fire. He then got up and emptied a bucket of coals on to the fire. He sat down again and looked hopefully at the old man. Professor Stubbs chortled noisily to himself.
“All right, son, all right,” his voice boomed away down the long corridor, “I’ll do me best to see ye through. I can’t say anythin’ yet as I ain’t got me ideas straight, but I got some an’ what they say to me is that ye weren’t the murderer. I’ll bet the most important o’ me pants’ buttons on that. The day they try hangin’ you for murder, Carr, I’ll walk down Piccadilly wi’ me trousers round me ankles. How’s that for a bet, son?”
Mr. Carr brightened. “Do you know the story about the chap who bet he would walk in the nude from Temple Bar to Trafalgar Square?” he asked, and we shook our heads. “Well, in those days a bet was a bet and was worth winning. I daresay that the sum he stood to win was somewhere in the region of a couple of thou. So this bright Johnny thinks to himself how to win the cash and yet not land himself in the hoosegaw. So he goes out and buys a broken down four wheeler for a fiver, and hires an old hack to draw it and gets inside the cab, takes out the floor-boards and walks naked all the way inside the cab. So he wins his bet.”
The Professor chortled and then became serious. “Ye know,” he said deeply, “there may be somethin’ in that story. Ye see what I mean? Eh? Well, all the public saw was the blinkin’ cab, an’ I’d be willing to bet that none of them, or dam’ few of ’em, noticed the feller’s legs stickin’ out below the floor. That was the way it was meant to be. Um. Um. There may be somethin’ like that about this case. We’re all of us lookin’ at the blinkin’ cab, an’ not realisin’ that there’s a feller in the nude inside it.”
I must admit that I did not know what he was talking about. It seemed to me that nearly all cases could be summed up in this manner, and that there was nothing especially applicable to the murder of Lottie Rattigan in it.
Leaving Douglas and Mr. Carr inspecting the bottoms of pint tankards, we went out into the night. As we left The Boudoir, Miss Janet Morgan came in. She certainly was a tidy piece of goods. Everything was just in the right place and, like the advertisement for shaving cream, there was neither too much nor too little of anything.
We climbed into the car and the old man switched on his headlights. In the bright glare I saw the figure of Mr. Roland Grimble wandering away.
Ho, ho, I thought, so you’ll see your girl friend to the door of the hotel, but you won’t risk going in, will you? I remembered how, in the morning, Grimble had threatened to knock Mr. Carr’s block off, but, on meeting with a stern front, had changed his mind. The old man crashed his gears and we were off—I was nearly off in both senses of the word, for, watching Grimble, I had not shut the door properly and I nearly fell out under the blow of the sudden start and shocking acceleration.
Chapter 8
Paper Chase
IF I HAD had any hopes that I might manage to do a spot of real work on the Saxifraga in the morning, I might just as well have put these hopes in the phosphur bronze cylinder which was buried at the World’s Fair in New York. It seemed to me that there was no chance of these hopes bearing fruit for at least a century or two.
I beat the old man in the morning and was downstairs first. I had done all the regulation chores and was seated at my table, trying to work out several series of figures when he came in. He was wrapped in his tartan dressing-gown and was smoking his horrible, vile, beastly, poisonous little pipe. The fumes came across the room and hit me a blow that, if I had been less strong physically, might well have been fatal. I said as much. Professor Stubbs took the little black object from the corner of his mouth and looked at it fondly.
“I’ve had this pipe,” he said, ruminating, “for more years than I like to try an’ remember. It’s a good little pipe an’ wi’ proper care ’ull last a whale o’ a time longer. What’re ye doin’ now.”
I showed him and he bent over the desk. One of the problems was beyond my powers as a mathematician without the expenditure of much time and effort. The Professor looked at it. He straightened up and, swinging backwards and forwards with his eyes closed, worked the damned answer out in his head. God alone knows how there is room inside his brain for all that he can hold there. It must be a sort of Revelation suitcase, holding enough for a week-end when he wants it that way, or enough for a voyage round the world.
We were about half way through breakfast when the phone went. I laid down the mug of coffee I was holding, bolted a large mouthful of toast and marmalade, and went through into the work-room to answer it.
I might have expected as much. It was Chief Inspector Reginald F. Bishop himself. If I could have shot him down the telephone I would gladly have done it.
“Hullo, Max,” he said, “is the old man there?”
“Yes,” I said grimly, “he’s here all right. What do you want with him? I’ve been trying to get some work done.”
“Oh,” said the Chief Inspector, “it is just that there has been a new development in the case of Mrs. Rattigan’s murder and I thought he would like to know it.”
“Hell, yes,” the voice was that of the old man. He had picked up the extension of the telephone in his room and was talking through that. I thought I might as well listen too, so I hung on.
“What is it, Reggie?” he asked and his voice sounded rather anxious.
&nbs
p; The Chief Inspector hummed and hawed a bit. I think he was trying to get his own back on the old man for all the hocus-pocus and mystification which he indulges in. Finally, however, he got down to the bones of the story.
It seemed that, unlike lazy people such as the Professor and myself, the police themselves arose right early and full of the virtues which the Psalmist promises to those who take this course of action, had gone to work on the case again. They had first of all visited Mr. Roland Grimble, more, I gathered from the Chief Inspector’s tone, to put the fear of death into him than for any other reason.
Mr. Grimble had been unaccountably shy in his description of what he wanted to say. He had mumbled about his duty as a citizen. At this the old man interrupted the Chief Inspector with a loud and vulgar raspberry. “I agree,” said the Bishop, “but in a murder case you have to put up with things like that, even things like Grimble.”
After he had beaten about the bush like an exasperated hunter, Grimble had finally come out with his story. This was that, early in the morning, he and Miss Morgan, who were awake for reasons into which the police did not inquire thoroughly, had heard footsteps in the corridor of the hotel.
Grimble had gone to the door of the room and had opened it quietly. Through the narrow crack he had seen his cousin, Ben Carr, going towards the stairs. After a long period they had heard him returning.
When asked why he had not told the police all this the day before, Grimble had replied that he had not wanted to get his cousin into trouble and had, as the Chief Inspector said, come the old blood is thicker than water game.
After this, the police had buzzed round to the hotel, to interview Miss Morgan. She had not been so shy as Mr. Grimble and when asked why they were not sleeping, had looked down at her trim figure and had asked them, “Sleeping? Would you have been sleeping?”
However, her story had borne out that of Grimble in every detail. Neither of them could be certain about the time, and as the Chief Inspector said, the time of Mrs. Rattigan’s death was a moot point with the doctors as she had been sitting in front of a large fire in a warm hall, which would upset any calculations that were made.
“So,” said the Chief Inspector, “I’m afraid, John, that it looks as though your friend Mr. Carr will have to do a bit of explaining.”
He rang off and I heard the Professor stumping through the hall. I laid down the receiver myself.
“Did ye hear that?” the old man demanded crossly, and I nodded. “Well, I must say I don’t believe a word o’ it. It’s a lyin’ story that that couple ha’ made up for some reasons o’ their own. Was there no point where ye became certain that it was a fabric o’ lies?”
“No,” I was forced to say, “I’m afraid that it seemed to me to be a pretty damning story.”
“Humph,” the old man snorted noisily, “you bin in The Boudoir, eh?”
I pointed out that he knew that I had been in the hotel, and that I had only been there with him.
“Well,” he went on heavily, “ye know what old Lottie Rattigan was like, eh? As bawdy as a figure from a restoration comedy, eh? So far as she was concerned people’s morals were their own affair an’ the less they had o’ ’em, the better pleased she was. In fact, her hotel was rather a high-class kinda bordello, eh?” I nodded at what seemed to be the right places. “Well,” the Professor was really explosive, “ye don’t tell me that, in a hotel o’ that character, people are going’ to start worryin’ about who goes along the corridors at night, do ye?”
Again I nodded. The Professor certainly was right there. I would not have expected any of the inhabitants of Lottie Rattigan’s hotel to pay the least attention to the behaviour of the other inhabitants. So far as each one, or more probably each couple, was concerned, the less they knew about other people and the less other people knew about them, the better.
“Bah!” the old man snorted violently. “Well, here ye ha’ young Grimble an’ the Morgan girl tellin’ you that in the middle o’ a night o’ love’s young dream, they kinda interrupt the raptures to go peerin’ into halls. Tell you flatly, Max, I don’t believe it. They’re playin’ some kinda game an’ we got to find out what it is. Gimme that phone.”
I passed him the instrument and, as was his habit, he dialled 0 and got the girl to put him through to Scotland Yard. One of the old man’s dearest fallacies is that he has a highly developed mechanical mind. The outstanding example of his ability in this line is, I think, his complete inability to manage the dial on a telephone. He justifies his lack here by saying that he likes the human feeling he gets by quarreling with the operators. I think all the girls in the Hampstead exchange know his voice. At any rate, his peculiar behaviour with the phone gets quite good results.
“Hoy, you, Reggie,” he bawled into the mouthpiece when he was finally connected with the Chief Inspector, “ye know that story you just gave me about Ben Carr bein’ seen walkin’ along the corridor by these two, eh? Well, I’d like ye to know it’s all bulls—I mean it’s a kinda cock and bull story.”
In a penetrating roar he told the Chief Inspector exactly what he had worked out about the behaviour of guests in Lottie Rattigan’s hotel. I could not hear what the Chief Inspector said by way of reply, but from the gathering clouds of fury on the old man’s face, I gathered myself that it was not satisfactory.
“Well,” he roared finally, “ye can go yer own way to the everlastin’ bonfire. I wash me hands o’ ye. Don’t ye come crawlin’ round to me again sayin’ that ye want yer cases solved for you.”
I am not able to swear to it, but it sounded to me very much as though an irritated Chief Inspector had followed the Professor’s own example.
The noise I heard coming from the telephone sounded most extraordinarily like a fierce raspberry.
“Bah!” roared the old man, slamming down the microphone, “bah!”
He turned to me. “Of all the flamin’ dunderheads it was ever me misfortune to be tied up wi’, that Bishop is the worst o’ ’em. The man’s got a dam’ brick wall around his thunderin’ mind an’ ye can’t get through it. I wash me hands o’ him, I consign him to the bottomless pit, let him stew in his own sour juice. Bah! Man says he got to look into every story that comes his way before he can make up his mind if it’s true or false. Man won’t take me word for it that it’s a tissue o’ lies, designed either to get Carr into trouble or to cover up somethin’ these two were doin’. Me own opinion is that they’re so busy givin’ themselves an alibi that they are actin’ kinda hasty.”
He scratched his head and ruffled up his grey hair. He applied his ferocious petrol lighter to his pipe and let the vile fumes and blue smoke waft round his head.
“Be God,” he said suddenly, “I’m a blinkin’ dunderhead meself. O’ course that’s the game. Get me all yesterday evenin’s papers, Max.”
I went out and invaded Mrs. Farley’s quarters to the extent of opening the door that divided her from us and chaos, and asking her whether she could manage to find me the News, Star and Standard of the day before. By some miracle or other she produced them, and I carried them into the old man who was sitting slumped in his chair, squinting villainously at the bowl of his pipe.
For the next hour there was comparative peace. I actually managed to get some work done while the Professor solemnly read his way through the papers from cover to cover, including, I think, even the advertisements and the leaders.
Finally there was a bellow of delight from the old man.
“Got it,” he shouted. “Pass me me scissors, Max.”
I passed him the scissors and he cut out a tiny strip of paper. I leaned over to see what it was, but found that I could not read the small type and, anyhow, the old man hid the fragment so that I realised that it would not be any use trying to persuade him to show it to me until he felt so inclined.
Giving up the effort I tried to get back to my work. It was no good. The old man went and dressed. He dresses and shaves quicker than anyone I know. When he came back into the room
he was putting the tiny cutting carefully into his already over-stuffed wallet. The look on his face told me that he was on the war-path.
He drove like hell, and I felt like it by the time we arrived at Scotland Yard. He more or less took Chief Inspector Bishop’s room by storm. I have rarely seen him so determined and so mad. He was like an enraged elephant going through a paddy-field.
The Chief Inspector looked up wearily as the Professor, supported in the rear by myself, burst into his room. He sighed as if to say that the world was certainly too much with him, both late and soon.
“Oh, it’s you, John,” he said obviously. “Well, what do you want this time? A nice set of burglar’s tools or the whole of the police force to be placed at your beck and call? Incidentally, I thought that you had wiped me off your list of friends this morning?”
“Bah!” said Professor Stubbs. “You’re a flamin’ fool as I told ye, but I got some kinda affection for ye an’ I’d loathe to see ye come a cropper in yer career.”
“I’ll bet you would,” said the Chief Inspector fervently. “Who would you find to worry who stood as much as I do? Well, what’s the bright idea.”
“I want to find out about a robbery,” the Professor was not explicate.
“A robbery?” echoed the Bishop. “A robbery? I thought you were mixed up in trying to solve a murder case, and here you are running around saying that you want to find out about a robbery. Any robbery in particular, may I ask, or will a robbery picked at random suit you?”
“Pooo,” the old man nearly bubbled at the Chief Inspector. I really began to be frightened that he would have an apoplectic fit unless he calmed down. “Bah! I get the ideas an’ I’m workin’ them out. I just want a bit, a little bit o’ help from the police o’ this godforsaken city, an’ they try an’ be funny. They’re so blinkin’ funny that I nearly split me sides laughin’ at them. Can’t ye hear me echoing laughter dyin’ away in the corridors, eh? Can’t you hear it, or d’ye think it’s the bells tollin’ yer own passing?”