Death for Madame

by Peter Main

  Chapter 13

  The Mischief of Money

  “BEN,” THE PROFESSOR addressed Mr. Carr in a heavy voice, “I kinda feel I should still warn ye that the police are breathin’ hot on yer trail.”

  “Hell’s bells,” said Mr. Carr, “it’s that damn’ money. If I hadn’t been left a bean they wouldn’t have worried about me, but here I am as rich as the Bank of England—or nearly, and they start wondering if I killed my aunt to get her cash. I never did like money much. It’s fun to have it and more fun to get rid of it, but if having it means that I’m going to have all this trouble—well, thank you, I’d rather be broke again.”

  The Professor changed the subject. He looked around him with the air of a conspirator in an early film, one of these conspirators who would have been arrested on sight by any policeman in the country.

  “What,” he asked in an undertone of growl, “do you know of the past of Miss Aspinall?”

  “Annie? “said Mr. Carr, who couldn’t have looked more surprised if a pineapple had suddenly sprouted in the middle of the table. “Surely you’re not thinking that Annie could have had anything to do with the death of Aunt Lottie. Why they were really devoted to one another in spite of the fact that my aunt had never got used to the fact that as she had reached a very great age, Annie was also growing old. Not her, the old slavedriver, she used to treat Annie as if she was a girl of eighteen. Many’s the time I’ve heard her say, ‘Oh the girl can get it,’ and away would trot poor Annie on her tottering pins to do what Aunt Lottie required. If I had been in Annie’s position, I must say that I’d have gone ill occasionally, but the dear soul was never ill and was always awaiting Aunt Lottie’s beck and call. To tell the truth, I think she had become so used to being treated in that way that she had ceased to resent it, and then, of course, there were definite compensations in working for my aunt. Annie has an absolute passion for old-fashioned gold jewellery, mostly pretty ugly stuff I think it myself, but she likes it and, every now and again, whenever she remembered it or thought of her jewel box, Aunt Lottie used to take out something like a great hulking Victorian brooch and give it to the old girl. Mind you, in these days, gold ornaments of that sort are very valuable, and Annie could never have hoped to buy them herself. With the death of Aunt Lottie, it seems to me that her staff is breaking up. Annie spends most of the time in her room and old Arthur is really very ill. The doctor came to see him again this morning and says that he can’t make out what is wrong with the old fellow, except that he is absolutely worn out. I suppose he got that way working for Aunt Lottie. He must have been coiled up like a spring, inside, ready to do whatever had to be done at whatever time it was required, and once the necessity for being prepared for all eventualities ceased to exist, he just collapsed. Poor old soul. I was wondering what I could do for him and I thought of trying to get him a cottage in the country or something like that, but when I asked him, he just looked at me helplessly. It seems that he has never lived any life apart from this place and that he has no real friends. He never even thought of getting married—I don’t suppose he had time to. He looked at me as if he thought I was trying to get rid of him and begged to be allowed to stay on. This place has been his home for so many years that he can imagine no other. It was just the same with Annie. She has been with Aunt Lottie for so long that she has not yet been able to envisage the possibility of life without her.”

  He picked up his tankard from the table and sunk it.

  “It’s no use ringing,” he said, looking at the old man’s finger on the bell, “that rings both in Arthur’s room and in his pantry, and I disconnected it this morning, just in case anyone rang it by mistake and the old man thought he should come. The only member of the staff who hasn’t cracked is the cook, Mrs. Roberts. Now she’s come into money I thought she would give notice at once, but not her—the old bird wants to stay on for the time being and she and Maggie are getting along capitally. When she puts her mind to it, Maggie’s a really wonderful cook, and she and Mrs. Roberts have been turning out some great meals. You must stay and have one some time.” The thought pleased me. There was some prospect that we might eat on our outings. “The only trouble is that both of them have become so damned keen on the job of cooking that they are inclined to forget that the process has an end in view, the eating of what they have cooked. Why last night they made a marvellous soufflé and they were so damned pleased with it that they stood on each side of it full of admiration for their cleverness until it had deflated and was uneatable.”

  The Professor let this flood of verbiage flow over him like the waters of the sea. He seemed to be genuinely interested, but then he can look genuinely interested no matter what he is hearing. He has the most shocking store of general knowledge of any man I have ever met. I often wonder if the inside of his mind is not like the inside of a lumber-room in an old house, full of bits and pieces which have somehow wandered there and which are of no possible use to anyone. It is by this habit of listening intently that the old man has filled his mind like this.

  “Uhhuh, son,” he said when Mr. Carr finished, “but ye ain’t yet told me what ye know o’ Annie apart from her relationship wi’ yer aunt.”

  “Well,” said Mr. Carr in a puzzled way, scratching his head with the wet end of a fountain pen, “the trouble is that I don’t think that she has had any other life for more than twenty years. All I know of her past is that she is the daughter of a clergyman in Wiltshire and that she answered an advert that Aunt Lottie put in The Times asking for a companion. By god, she got a companion. When I tried to make out something about the affairs of this hotel, I found that old Annie had done her best all the time to keep the accounts in order and to see that bills were paid. I was under the impression that no one bothered about such things here, for certainly I was never bothered about them, but I found that old Annie had them all noted down. As a matter of fact,” he was slightly shamefaced, “I found that I’d had bedding and booze to a matter of nearly a couple of hundred. When I once paid about fifteen pounds to Aunt Lottie—I’d had a good day on the horses—Annie had entered it up in capitals, and in red ink.”

  He laughed rather wryly. I, never having managed to run a hotel bill up to more than a tenth of this sum, could feel for him. I wondered if he meant to pay himself back what he owed himself.

  A door on one side of the hall opened. The door of Miss Aspinall’s room. The small old lady came out. She smiled at us, but the smile could not disguise the red rims to her eyes.

  “Good mornin’, ma’am,” the professor rose heavily and bowed rather awkwardly, nearly upsetting the tankard of beer before him. “How are you to-day?”

  “Very well, thank you, Professor Stubbs,” she smiled primly, and turned to Carr. “Ben, I came to see if I could give you any help with the books. You know I’ve done my best to keep them in order, for dear Lottie was not very keen on anything that had to do with counting. She would tell me to leave them alone and that they could look after themselves, and that if the Income Tax people didn’t like it they knew what to do.”

  “Ha,” Ben Carr laughed, “I can just imagine Aunt Lottie having a row with an Income Tax inspector. She’d haze him all right. I don’t suppose that she knew to within a thousand or two how much money she had. She’d had her worries about cash when she was young, but by adroitly playing her cards she had managed to enlarge her capital and then she fell in with a stockbroker and he helped her a lot.”

  I looked at Miss Aspinall to see if she was shocked by these remarks about Lottie Rattigan’s past, for I remembered that Mr. Carr had said that her father was a clergyman. She did not seem to be shocked.

  “Yes,” she said in a way that seemed to be faintly pleased, “Lottie was pretty clever, but then, you see, she was really beautiful when she was young, really beautiful.” She paused as if trying to raise a picture of her own young self before her eyes. “Did you ever see a portrait of her at the age of twenty?”

  Mr. Carr shook his head and the little o
ld lady trotted back into her room, to emerge a moment later carrying an immense oval gold pendant. She pressed part of the elaborate workmanship on the side of this monstrosity and it flew open. Inside there was a small miniature painting on ivory. It was, I think, of about the very worst period of miniature painting, but even that could not disguise the really astonishing beauty of the subject. Beside that face Mrs. Baker became commonplace and even Janet Morgan, who could have given Mrs. Baker points any day of the week, became ordinary. I tried to associate this face with the broad old face I had seen once in life and afterwards in death. It was quite impossible. All that remained in my mind was a faint impression of having seen the face somewhere before. Beautiful though the face was, there was something about it which reminded me vaguely of those cruel paintings of whores and actresses by Toulous-Lautrec. I could not place it, but there was, I think, some pointer to depravity in the portrait which was largely responsible for the impression.

  Miss Aspinall took a look at the miniature and closed it very carefully, with the air of one who closes a railway carriage which carries them away from a life with which they have been familiar into the overpowering and horrible unknown.

  “She gave me that herself,” she said slowly, stifling a sob. “I’m afraid I asked her if I could have the miniature and she looked at it and laughed. ‘The glory that was Greece,’ she said, ‘why should you wish to perpetuate the horrid past?’ I told her that I did not consider the past to have been unpleasant and again she laughed. ‘No, my dear,’ she said, ‘for you the past was pleasant, while for me it is something which I am well quit of. I am content to live in the present, grown old and fat and gross, wheezing my way through each day and not much caring if there is another.’ Sometimes she said things that almost frightened me. She told me that no one in the whole world should be trusted and that life was cruel. I myself think that life is very beautiful. I go out sometimes into the Park and I hear the birds singing and they remind me of the birds at home, in the garden of my father’s rectory, and then I am happy. Once when I told Lottie this, she laughed. She told me that I was an incurable romantic and that if she had memories like mine to look back on they would make her sad. She was a very sweet person who had suffered from the world.”

  “Oh,” said Mr. Carr doubtfully, “I’d hardly say that suffered is the right word. She’d taken her fun where she’d found it and she’d found plenty of it and she’d come out on the other side full of years and riches.”

  “I suppose not,” Miss Aspinall was primly dubious, “she always used to say that she’d had a good time, the ‘hell of a good time,’ actually was what she said.” The word sounded odd in her mouth. “And she used to say that if she had her time over again, she’d do everything all over again. That is the one thing that makes me feel that this terrible tragedy is not as tragic as it might otherwise have been. Dear Lottie had had a full life, and I believe that she had enjoyed every minute of it.”

  Suddenly she took out her handkerchief and started to sob into it bitterly. Her sobs were deep-rending ones that seemed to shake her frailty.

  “Oy, ma’am, oy,” the Professor was alarmed, “don’t you take on so. As ye’ve just said, Lottie Rattigan had had a dam’—if ye’ll excuse the word—happy life, an’, ye know, we’ll catch whoever it was that murdered her.”

  Miss Aspinall wiped her eyes with her scrap of lace-fringed handkerchief. She looked up at the old man and I noticed that her lower lip was still quivering.

  “But, Professor,” she said anxiously, “that is a part, a very great part of the trouble. You see, Lottie didn’t believe in capital punishment, and the thought that someone was to be hanged for killing her would have been deeply repugnant to her. She’d have loathed to have thought that the police were chasing anyone for her death.”

  She again applied the tiny handkerchief to her eyes. The old man, I could see, was getting even more uncomfortable.

  “But, ma’am,” he said, “don’t ye see that the way things stand at the moment, everyone who had any dealin’s wi’ Mrs. Rattigan stands under the suspicion o’ having murdered her, an’ the only way to clear the innocent is for us to catch the guilty person. We can’t let about half a dozen innocent people suffer for the guilt o’ one. We got to clear the innocent an’ the only way o’ doing that is to find the person who is guilty.” He seemed to me to be repeating himself like a gramophone record with a needle stuck in the same groove. If there is one thing the old man is absolutely defeated by, it is the sight of a woman’s tears. He’d far rather be insulted or shouted at than wept at.

  Miss Aspinall again used the handkerchief on the corners of her eyes. She smiled shyly as she took it down.

  “I’m terribly sorry, Professor Stubbs,” she said, “you must think I’m frightfully weak and hysterical.”

  “Not at all, ma’am, not at all,” said the old man hastily, in case there was any reappearance of the tears. He was eyeing Miss Aspinall with a look that said that he felt rather like Dr. Johnson when Boswell asked him what he would do if he was shut up in a tower with a baby.

  “Thank you,” she said, “you are very kind to an old lady. But you see, I was very, very fond of Lottie Rattigan. She had her faults, but which of us has not his or her faults? In spite of her faults and her sins, neither of which may have been negligible, she was the truest friend I have ever had. She was generous to a fault and she would believe evil of no one. Why even young Roland was able to twist her round his finger.” Her tone showed that she had disapproved of Roland Grimble. “It was only when she discovered that he had been stealing her jewellery and selling it that she changed her will. She told him that she was going to do it, too, and she asked him why he had not come to her and asked for money if he needed it. As she said, she had never refused him anything within reason, but he just stood there mumbling and grumbling to himself. I don’t think he really took her threat about the will seriously, for she was always threatening to put people in and out of her will, but after a few days the will would more or less revert to its old form, and the main bequests would be the same.”

  “Hmm,” the old man growled to himself, “that’s interestin’, ma’am. I suppose ye never thought it possible that Roland Grimble would kill his aunt to prevent her changin’ her will, eh?”

  Miss Aspinall looked at him with patent astonishment. “Of course not, Professor,” she said, “I tell you that no one who knew Lottie was ever angry with her for long. I must confess that I myself have had sudden fits of irritation with her when her demands seemed more exacting and impossible than usual, but she always was so nice afterwards. It seemed as if she was able to divine one’s feelings. No matter how angry I was with her, it was only a momentary thing, no sooner there than gone. She was a gentle and a generous person who realised that she had shortcomings and never presumed on them. If she felt she had strained one, she was genuinely apologetic and kind. It seemed that she wanted to make up to one for one’s own anger. I used to feel so ashamed of myself.”

  “Well, then,” the old man returned to the attack, “d’ye think that Roland Grimble might ha’ had a sudden quarrel wi’ his aunt an’ killed her in a fit o’ temper.”

  “Oh, dear me, no,” Miss Aspinall was positive. “He had had his row with his aunt the day before and had had plenty of time to get over it. Besides, I was in my room there, and I am a very light sleeper. I would most certainly have heard had there been anything out of the ordinary going on in the hall. If there had been raised voices, for instance, I would have wakened up and looked out to see what was happening. There was no noise the least bit out of the ordinary. In fact, I think I might safely say that no one could have come into the hall and spoken to Lottie without me hearing them. I am a very light sleeper, I would say again.”

  She looked at the Professor, who was chewing his lip thoughtfully. He pulled out his little pipe and stuck it in the corner of his mouth. He looked at Miss Aspinall for permission and she nodded, so he pulled out the monster petrol lighter w
hich he effects and set fire to the tobacco.

  “Uhhuh,” he said slowly, through the blue-grey smoke, “all this kinda puts a different complexion on the matter. What then do you think happened, ma’am?”

  Her look said that she was surprised by the old man’s denseness. It was quite obvious to anyone who had the least intelligence and who knew dear Lottie Rattigan.

  “Why, Professor Stubbs,” she said, “it seems to me that there is only one thing that could have happened, and that is that Lottie must have dozed off and that some chance sneak-thief must have come in to try and rob her. He must have been alarmed. Perhaps she began to wake up, and he killed her. Then frightened by what he had done he ran away without stealing anything. That, I feel sure, is what happened and, curious though it may sound, I am glad, for no one can suffer for killing her. I don’t think the police will ever find the murderer.”

  She seemed very positive. The Professor looked rather worried. It was clear that he did not agree with her. Apart from anything else, he has the detective story fan’s approach to a problem and he refuses to allow it that a criminal should cheat in real life any more than he does in a thriller.

  Chapter 14

  A Damp Squib

  BY SOME MIRACLE, as yet unexplained, the Professor and I managed to get home for tea. This, during the course of a murder case, is such an unusual event that I almost feel it should be written in letters of gold.

  We were actually sitting beside the fire in the large workroom, drinking large cups of Earl Grey and licking the drips of butter that fell from the toasted muffins. I was doing a little desultory reading in the latest number of Nature and the old man was reading the latest detective story by John Dickson Carr. That is his idea of a busman’s holiday.

  The scene might almost have served as the subject for a Royal Academy painting to be called Contentment. There were plenty of books and objects lying around which would have provided the painter with exercise of his skill on still-life, as well as on ourselves who might almost have passed as nature-mort. I licked the last of the butter off my fingers, and wiped them on my handkerchief. I finished the pot before the old man had time to reach it.