Death for Madame

by Peter Main

  The sight of the foaming tankards did nothing to revive my flagging spirits. Mr. Carr took his seat once again and looked earnestly across at the old man.

  “Well,” he said encouragingly, “do you think that the Bakers murdered Aunt Lottie?”

  “Um,” the old man was ponderously thoughtful. “Um. Ye see, I wouldn’t know. I got a kinda simple mind an’ I can’t get them into the proper perspective. They’re sort of tortuous people whose behaviour don’t enter into me way o’ thinkin’. All the same, I don’t think they can be the guilty people as they ha’ bin behavin’ too much as if they were guilty. Wantin’ to run away, for instance, might be taken as a kinda significant act, if it didn’t come from them. But, ye see, I got a bit o’ information about ’em from the Chief Inspector, an’, it seems that, bein’ ex-jail birds, they naturally don’t feel too happy wi’ the police hoppin’ in an’ out o’ the house like robins. Their behaviour may be quite right for folk in their position. Somehow or other, I must admit, I can’t see them creepin’ downstairs to murder the old woman. Certainly, they do get a whack out o’ her will, but I wouldn’t think it was big enough to make ’em bump her off. I got a kinda idea that she was valuable to them alive. D’ye know if yer aunt was lucky at cards?”

  “Lucky at cards,” said Mr. Carr happily. “Good lord, no. I could always win the odd fiver off the old girl. You know, they say lucky in love and unlucky at cards. Well, that was her.”

  Chapter 12

  After-Dinner Amusements

  PROFESSOR STUBBS was broadly ensconced in his vast chair. His grey hair stood up like a devil’s halo round his head and his steel-rimmed glasses were perched precariously on the end of his nose. He beamed at the Chief Inspector with a beam that declared that he was full of brotherly love to mankind. He was also pretty full of good food and drink. So was I, and I can’t say that I was sorry for it. By the time we had got home my backbone was rubbing holes in my front. It is not a feeling that I can recommend.

  The Chief Inspector sat savouring a large glass of very expensive brandy. I remembered Mr. Carr’s story of what brandy had done to him and wondered whether it would have the same effect on the representative of law and order. It would have been nice to see the Bishop asleep on a barrow along with the spring greens and the brussels sprouts.

  “So there you are, John,” the Bishop said blandly, “all we’ve done so far is to remove two people from the list of possible suspects. I grant you that your brain-wave was responsible for this happening more quickly than it might otherwise have done. But I wouldn’t like you to run away with the idea that, had you not given us that information, Grimble and Morgan would have continued to get away with their crime. People grumble that the police are slow, but then they are so of sheer necessity. We may be absolutely certain that a certain man committed a crime, but, if we have not sufficient evidence to make the case stick in court, we cannot move against him. No doubt the proper branch would have succeeded in laying their hands on that bright couple, but it might have been some days before that happened, and in the meantime we might have been trying to connect them with the murder of Mrs. Rattigan. I would like to say that we are really grateful to you for your help there.”

  Professor Stubbs, basking in this unexpected meed of praise, seemed to expand like the frog in the fable. The Chief Inspector looked along the length of his cigar.

  “Of course, John,” he went on, “the fact that you have been proved to be right once does not mean that you can look upon yourself as infallible. Nor does it mean that you can come rushing along to me with one of your usual hair-brained ideas and hope that I can take action upon it. I am, as I have to insist so often in dealing with you, a public servant and I have to remember that there are other members of the public, too.”

  The Professor pushed his glasses back on to the bridge of his nose. He scowled fearsomely but without effect at the phlegmatic Chief Inspector.

  “See here, Reggie,” he complained, “I’m kinda gettin’ a feelin’ that I’m being persecuted. Ye take everythin’ ye dam’ well can from me, ye pick me brains o’ me ideas an’ me knowledge an’ then ye think ye’d better issue a warnin’ in case I think o’ takin’ advantage o’ ye. Let me tell ye that, so far as I’m concerned, the authorities are a lot o’ blunderin’ dunderheads—an’ that includes ye, Reggie—an’ that I can beat ’em any day o’ the week at their own game. What I’d like to know is what ye bin up to in me absence. Have ye bin workin’ or ha’ ye just bin sleepin’ at yer desk?”

  The Chief Inspector smiled at him. It would take more than that kind of banter from the old man to get under his skin.

  “Oh,” he waved his cigar largely, a gesture which was spoilt by the fact that the ash fell into his lap, “we’ve been working. However,” he did not sound too pleased, “I must confess that at the moment we don’t seem to be getting anywhere very fast. Let’s try taking all the people in the hotel and working out a possibilities and probabilities list.”

  The old man brightened immediately. There is nothing he likes so much as making lists. I’ve always suspected that, hidden somewhere in the house, he has a rough draft of the index to his interminable History of Botany.

  He moved over beside the Chief Inspector and produced a pad of large sheets of paper. The two of them set to work. I realised that, in one of my drawers, there was a mass of still unco-ordinated material concerned with the Botany book, so I took myself and my beer over to my table and spent some time arranging, and cross-referencing, notes and quotations dealing with John Goodyer and John Tradescant, the elder. The old man, as part of his theory of the continuity of the history of Botany, had been trying to work out the history of the libraries of famous botanists.

  For instance, he had been studying the influence of John Ray, who has been called the father of English botany, and had found, from Gunther’s Early British Botanists, that one of the latest books which Goodyer, one of Ray’s predecessors, had possessed, was the Catalogus Plantarum circa Cantabrigiam nascenlium, 1660; and this had led him to send me to the British Museum to copy out the catalogue of the sale of Ray’s own books, conducted by Mr. T. Ballard at Tom’s Coffee-House, on the 11th of March, 1708. I had somehow wandered into terrific bibliographical byways in pursuit of the answers to the questions which the old man had jotted down on pieces of paper. Where, he had wanted to know, were the copies of his own books which Ray had sent to various people during his life. This occupied much of my time, and, in a way, it annoyed me, for I knew that the results of several months’ extensive work would, probably, be epitomised in a small footnote. The labour seemed hardly justified by the results.

  I was interrupted by the Professor. He stumped across to the table and looked over my shoulder.

  “Good boy, Max,” he said pleasantly, “if the dam’ history don’t get finished it won’t be your fault, eh?”

  “I should hope not,” I said, nettled. “You’ve been at it for enough years and it seems as though it might occupy you for another quarter of a century. And it isn’t even as if it kept you out of trouble.”

  He smiled at me and gave me a friendly pat on the back, sliding his hand to pick up my beer mug, which he replenished for me. Then he returned to the Chief Inspector.

  “See here, Max,” he boomed in the room and the Calder mobile which he had begged from the Museum of Modern Art shivered under the impact of the sound waves. He waved a sheet of paper at me. “See what we bin doin’?”

  I sighed as I replaced the cap on my fountain pen, and put it in my pocket. “What is it this time?” I asked, almost as wearily as the Bishop himself could have. I got up and wandered over to see the notes.

  The paper was covered with the old man’s tiny regular handwriting, as legible as print.

  I leaned forward and started to read. The Professor had underlined comments by the Chief Inspector, so I have put them in italics here.

  BEN CARR. He inherits a fortune and was celebrated for being broke, but he did not mind being broke.
His cousin tried, unsuccessfully, to implicate him in the murder. He is obviously guiltless. This is a point of view which is entirely personal, and Carr cannot be excluded from the list of suspects, as yet.

  ROLAND GRIMBLE. Horrid man, but given to thieving and the safer sorts of crime. Don’t forget he held up a taxi-driver with a pistol. All right, I won’t, but would he have fired the pistol? No, probably not. He tried to implicate his cousin, see above. We have assumed that this was merely an effort to distract attention from himself, but it might possibly have been an effort to persuade us that he had not done the murder. But why should he have murdered the old lady? He did not know that she had changed her will, and might have assumed that he would come in for his three thousand without any strings on it. Murders have been done for less than three thousand before now. I grant you that. Thanks, you are generous. Bright idea: Could Grimble have murdered his aunt after committing the hold-up in the expectation that the police would fix their minds on the robbery and not tie him up with the murder? He might have argued that a short sentence for robbery under arms—where is his gun, incidentally. I don’t know, we haven’t found it—was worth suffering if he was to come into three thousand pounds on leaving gaol. Going to gaol will hold him up from earning his living and prevent his claiming his money. Naturally, but I’ve already said that he did not know that Lottie Rattigan had tied strings to the cash, so he might have argued that way. Pigs might fly. BAH.

  JANET MORGAN. Good-looking girl. Yes. Was she in it with Grimble if he murdered his aunt? I wouldn’t know—that’s your idea. Don’t be so damn unhelpful. All the same, I think she’s as hard as a coconut and might have known what Grimble was up to. He might have required the cash desperately to feed it to her. Yes, perhaps, but I don’t think so. All right. Let her ride.

  THE BAKERS. Do we take them separately or are they Siamese twins. The latter. Well, they come in for cash, too, and don’t seem to be any too scrupulous, do they? No, but not murder, I think. All right, I agree.

  ANNIE ASPINALL. We haven’t looked at her yet. She inherits money, but then so do the rest. She is reputed to have been devoted to Lottie Rattigan. Look into her. All right if you want to, you can, but you can’t expect me to set my men running around after your will o’ the wisps.

  ARTHUR NIVEN. Exactly the same, and ditto MRS. ROBERTS.

  “Well,” the old man looked at me, “what d’ye think o’ it. D’ye think it gets us anywhere.”

  “I doubt it,” I said honestly, shaking my head. All that was on the paper was already known to us all. I did not see what point there had been in writing it down, and I said so.

  “Huhh,” the old man snorted at me like a rather fierce horse. “there’s always some point in gettin’ things down on paper. It kinda clears them outa the brain an’ leaves room for more ideas to filter in. Ye see ye can only hold so much in yer head an’ if ye got all the obvious facts floatin’ around in the front o’ yer mind, ye cannot hope to be able to concentrate on the less obvious an’ probably more important ones. On this bit o’ paper,” he rattled it at me, “we got all we know or imagine we know jotted down tidy like, an’ so now we can go ahead an’ see what else we can think o’. Now what can ye make in the way o’ a constructive suggestion.”

  “Only,” I said slowly, “that you might have done the job yourself, to get away from the routine of your ordinary work.”

  “I said constructive idea,” the Professor howled at me, and the Chief Inspector nodded his head wisely.

  “I must say, John,” he said mildly, “that I’m inclined to agree with Max about that. There are far too many murders in this town which take place when you are around, or among your friends and acquaintances.”

  “Dam’ it,” the old man was irritated, “ye can’t go blamin’ me for that. Maybe a lot o’ me friends are just natural murderees—born, so’s to speak, to be killed violently. I can’t help it. But when me friends get mixed up in all this blinkin’ mess, ye can’t blame me if I do me best to get ’em out o’ it. Ye see, Reggie, the trouble wi’ ye is that ye come to a case kinda fresh. Ye got to find out all about the people who are concerned in it from the beginning. Only very rarely d’ye know anythin’ about the protagonists—good word that—I’ll repeat it—protagonists. Whereas, I’m talking like a flamin’ lawyer, when the case deals wi’ those whom I know I kinda got a start on ye. In this case I’ll admit ye’ve encountered Ben Carr before an’ he’s the only one I know at all well—though I had met Lottie Rattigan. But even there, ye know, I’m in a better position than ye are, for a man ’ull let his back hair down to his friends when he won’t do it to a policeman, an’ however little ye look like one, ye are a cop, Reggie, whether ye like it or not.”

  “Thank you,” said the Bishop, “I like it. I’ll grant you that you do know Carr better than I do, but I’m not sure that you’ve gained any advantage by that, as you are inclined to be biased on his behalf, because of your friendship, and you cannot, therefore, see him quite objectively, as I can.”

  This made the Professor really mad. “Hell blast it, Reggie,” he expostulated, “I got a scientific mind, which means I’m quite impartial. I look at things the way they are and not the way I think they ought to be. I’ll admit that Carr’s me friend, but I insist that, if I thought him guilty I would not hesitate for one moment. I got truth as me aim, an’ even if truth hurts I got to go ahead chasin’ it. Why, dammit, if I thought young Max, here, was guilty o’ a murder, d’ye think I’d try an’ cover it up for him, eh?”

  “Yes,” said the Chief Inspector gravely and simply. I was grateful for that small word, for I was already seeing myself thrown to the family of Pierrepont to make a hangman’s and a detective’s holiday.

  “Hum,” the old man grunted, “well, p’raps, that ain’t a fair analogy. Maybe I might help Max out if I thought I could do it wi’out bein’ found out, but on the whole I got the scientific mind, an’ I approach things wi’ this mind wide open an’ then I try an’ see what the truth is.”

  “All right, John,” the Chief Inspector’s eyelids had drooped wearily. “You can have your scientific mind if you like. But it doesn’t seem to have done anything that might help us solve the question of who murdered Lottie Rattigan.”

  “Oh,” the old man was up the airy mountain, “I got me ideas an’ I’ll show ’em to ye if they ripen.”

  “If they ripen,” the Bishop’s voice was rather bitter, “you’ll show them to me? That’s nice of you. I don’t suppose you’d consider showing them to me now, would you? No. I thought not. They are probably as cracked as an old eggshell. One thing about you, John, is that no one could ever complain that you’re not brim full of ideas. The only trouble is that most of them are of no value at all.”

  The old man lumbered noisily over to the beer barrel in the corner of the room. He was quite pointedly ignoring the aspersions cast upon his ideas by the Chief Inspector.

  He drained a quart mug standing beside the barrel and then helped himself to another. He sat down in his seat beside the fire and gloomily chopped up the brown plug tobacco he smokes. Once the fumes were wrapping him like the smoke around a bombed city, he seemed to be more comfortable. The log fire crackled encouragingly. The Chief Inspector helped himself to another cigar and another glass of brandy. I pulled out a packet of Players and lit one. It looked a perfect domestic scene with three men sitting round the fire engrossed in their own thoughts.

  My thoughts are hardly worth chronicling, but I might as well put them down. I was thinking that, if it really transpired that Mr. Ben Carr had murdered his aunt, there was some hope for me to get a little sanity into the house. It would at least mean that one was not so likely to trip over a piece of glass tubing in every corner of the garden, and that we would be spared the repetition of all the experiments of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Natural Philosophers. I must say that, while I get a great deal of pleasure out of reading Bishop John Wilkins’s Mathematicall Magick, I rarely feel impelled to try and co
nstruct a chariot to be driven by the wind, nor when I read his The Discovery of a New World, or a Discourse tending to prove, That (’tis probable) there may be another Habitable World in the Moon, do I feel inclined to join the Interplanetary Travel Association, but Mr. Carr, adventurous as a flea, has no such doubts. Anything he sees in print seems to be gospel and he wants to try it out on the spot. It would be all right if the old man was not inclined the same way, but unfortunately he is and he aids, abets and encourages Carr in his lunacy. My only hope is that Carr doesn’t get around to reading Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth and try to recreate the primæval paradise by ironing out the wrinkles in the face of the present one. I feel sure that the house is perched on top of one of the wrinkles and that it would have to come down.

  “John,” the Chief Inspector broke the silence suddenly, “if, as you insist, Carr is innocent, it seems to me that I will have to return to my original idea that the murder was committed by someone who knew Mrs. Rattigan, but who was not staying in the hotel. What makes you so certain that it was committed by one of the people on your list?”

  “Oh, I dunno,” the Professor was largely vague, “it just kinda seems to me that it would ha’ to ha’ bin done by one of the inhabitants. Kinda kink in me mind, maybe, comes from readin’ too many thrillers. Ye see, it’s only the worst kinda thriller which has a murderer come in from outside at the very end. In the best thrillers the murder is there all the time, an’ I kinda feel wi’, was it Oscar Wilde? that nature follows art an’ not the other way round. Ye see, if ye’re to start bringin’ in everyone who knew Lottie, ye’ll soon find that the case becomes unmanageable an’ messy an’ I don’t like messy cases. O’ course, I may be wrong in me idea, but I feel convinced meself that the murderer is one o’ these people.”

  He waved the sheet of paper with his notes upon it and scowled at them thoughtfully.

  “I like things neat,” he said, indicating the chaos in which we sat.