Death for Madame

by Peter Main

  The old man still glowered at me, but I could see that the fierce fires of anger within him were gradually dying down.

  “Ye know, Max,” he spoke almost mildly, “ye may ha’ somethin’ there. O’ course I can’t say what worth it is till I look into the matter. But there may be somethin’ hidden in the story o’ that girl Morgan, for once ye’d mentioned it I realised at once why I was feeling uncomfortable about that hellish miniature. The reason was that I was lookin’ at a face which had ceased to be beautiful these forty-odd years, an’ all the time I was bein’ reminded o’ a beautiful face which I’d seen lately, an’ I’ll allow, Max, that ye were dam’ smart to spot it, for the difference in the way o’ doin’ the hair an’ the presence o’ the productions o’ Messrs. Max Factor an’ Arlen had made the likeness less recognisable than it would otherwise ha’ bin.”

  He took up a horrible-looking little black cigar. I waited to see what he would do. He looked at it with distaste and felt for his pipe. I sighed a sigh of real relief. When the old man smokes these little cigars in the morning it is a sign that the day is going to go from putrid to lousy. When he felt for his pipe I realised that there was some hope of the depression lifting. I almost felt cheerful myself, almost, but not quite, for I was still looking rather hopelessly at the arrears of work which were piled up around us.

  “Now then, Max,” the voice was almost brisk, “as it’s yer idea about the Morgan girl, perhaps ye can suggest somewhere where we can make a start, somewhere where ye didn’t try last night. What d’ye say?”

  This, I nearly said, was a stinker. I had only been fishing to try and find some method of cheering the old man, and now I seemed to have landed myself in for the job of playing leading detective. After I had drawn blank on my ideas with Scotland Yard and the slightly amused Miss Aspinall, I had more or less made up my mind that so far as detecting was concerned, it was off my menu. However, I had to make some sort of shot at it.

  “Why not ask the girl herself?” I said. She certainly had been a decorative piece of goods and so far as I’m concerned I never get tired of looking at people like her. At the same time, I felt it might be a little cruel to go and gloat over the girl in clink. After all, she’d got herself into trouble and was bound to pay for it. I said all this to the old man.

  “Depends on the jury she gets,” he announced. “If it’s a male jury she might even get off if she plays the act that she was misled by young Grimble, an’ that ’ud be the most sensible act for her to do, for he’s not there to contradict anythin’ she says an’ I don’t think she’s got any reason to respect the old saw about de mortuis nihil nisi bonum, d’ye?”

  I agreed with him there. So far as Grimble was concerned his last act of shooting a policeman would have blackened him sufficiently in the eyes of the public, to enable Miss Morgan, however black her crimes, to appear like Joan of Arc, in shining white armour. At the old man’s suggestion I rang through to Scotland Yard. The Bishop sounded pretty tired and pretty fed-up. I told him what we wanted.

  “Is John there?” he asked, and I admitted that the Professor was among those present and passed the phone over to him. He grumbled and spluttered into the mouthpiece but finally laid it down quietly.

  “He wants to know if we’re thought-readers, or what,” he complained. “He says he’s havin’ the girl brought to his office in about an hour’s time an’ we can trickle along there if we like. I think he wants to get the facts out o’ her as to whether it was possible for Grimble to ha’ murdered his aunt.”

  As he dressed and shaved I could hear the old man singing. He sounded more cheerful. I did not expect that we would get much out of Miss Janet Morgan and nor I think did he. But the mere fact that we were going to do something was enough to brighten his outlook. If there is one thing the old man cannot stand it is inactivity. He will put up with late hours and with people whom I consider to be as boring as the things that make holes in the planks of ships, but he won’t stand still. This, when I come to think of it, is strange for a botanist, who has to wait for the devil of a long time before he can see the results of his crosses and hybrids, but I don’t think the Professor expects the same behaviour from plants as he does from human beings. I remember that he once referred to someone as a sterile vegetable, and I think this was a pretty potent term of abuse.

  When the old man emerged, clad in his wrinkled grey suit with the bulging pockets, I examined him critically.

  “Look here,” I said, “what did you do with the revolver? Is it still in your pocket?”

  “I dunno,” he confessed, rather shamefacedly, as he felt for it and produced it. I felt happier once the chambers had been emptied and the barrel oiled and the whole thing laid away carefully.

  The old man drove with surprising care. I think he was not aware that he was driving and that made him more careful than usual. When he thinks about it he takes risks like overtaking on curves or cutting in between a tram and a horse-drawn L.M.S. van. He sat perched in his seat with a beautiful smile transfiguring his features. I didn’t know what he was thinking about, and it wasn’t worth trying to enquire for the old car makes a noise that puts any real conversation out of mind.

  The Chief Inspector did not look very pleased to see us. In fact, he looked at us both as if we were bits of rubbish which he had found shoved under the carpet by a slatternly housemaid. The old man gave no indication of the fact that he realised that our reception lacked anything in the way of cordiality.

  “Hullo, Reggie,” he said breezily, “still sleuthin’ away I see. How’s trade? Any nice new murders come in upon which ye’d like a little help. Always willin’ to help you out, that’s me.”

  “For God’s sake,” said the Bishop testily, “stop imitating Ben Carr. It doesn’t become you.”

  “All right, all right,” said the old man, lapsing into his own tone of grumbling roar, “but then ye’d better come out o’ the sulks.”

  The Chief Inspector looked rather sheepish as he carefully sharpened the point of his pencil. Finally, with the point sharp enough to suit him, he looked up and gave a Cheshire cat smile at us.

  “Where’s the gal?” demanded Professor Stubbs, “I kinda thought I came along here to listen to you askin’ her a few questions an’ to put a few meself.”

  “She should be here any minute,” replied the Chief Inspector, just as there was a tap on the door and Miss Janet Morgan was shown in.

  As she was only on remand she was still wearing her own clothes and she still was enough to make my heart flutter a bit quicker than it does when I am sitting at home making microscope sections. She really was a looker, and seeing her in the life I was hard put to it to decide whether she or the miniature of Lottie Rattigan had the best of it. Personally, I thought, I’d plump for flesh and blood. You get no kisses from a painting.

  “Good morning, all,” she was just a trifle too bright. The Chief Inspector was still looking down at his pad. As she spoke he raised his head and examined her.

  “Ah, yes,” he said, reaching for a pad of paper. “Miss Morgan, I have had you brought here in the hope that you will be willing to answer a few questions.”

  “It depends what they are,” said Janet Morgan, “you can’t expect a girl to implicate herself in anything.”

  “What I want to know,” the Bishop went on benovently, “is whether, after you had held up the taxi, there was any opportunity for Roland Grimble to have come downstairs again and murdered his aunt?”

  “After we had held up the taxi?” said Miss Morgan. “I’m afraid you’ve got it wrong. I was travelling home with Roland and he suddenly pulled out a gun and threatened the taxi-driver. There was nothing I could do about it. I was sure that Roland would shoot me if I tried to stop him. I was frightened.”

  The Chief Inspector looked at her sleepily. “I gather, Miss Morgan,” he said drily, “that you’ve been talking to a lawyer?”

  “What if I have?” She looked at him pertly. “A girl has to have some advice sometim
es, and it seemed to me that in the hole I was in the best person for me to see was a lawyer. I’m going to plead Not Guilty.”

  “I don’t mind what you plead, Miss Morgan,” the Chief Inspector was smooth; “all I want from you is an answer as to whether, after you and Grimble returned to the hotel together he had time to creep downstairs and kill his aunt.”

  She seemed to be thinking. I wondered myself if she was trying to remember the truth or whether she was wondering what there was for her in any answer that she gave. She apparently decided that she could not, at any rate, make anything by holding her tongue.

  “I suppose,” she said slowly, “that there just might have been enough time for him to do it. He went along to his room for his pyjamas and so on, and I suppose he could have sneaked downstairs and strangled the old girl if he’d wanted to, but, mind you, I don’t think he did it. She was worth far more to him alive than dead, and he hadn’t got the guts for the job.” Her voice held a wealth of contempt. “Oh, I know you’ll say that he had the guts to fire a gun at a copper, but that’s different. He was crazy mad when he did that, and the other night, after he had held up the taxi, he was frightened to death. It was a different kind of fright from that which made him try and shoot his way out of the hotel.”

  Even the ranks of Tuscany could scarce forbear to cheer. The look of gloating triumph which the old man turned on the Chief Inspector was a masterpiece of malevolence.

  “Thank you.” The Chief Inspector ignored the Professor. “So it seems that he could have managed to kill his aunt after all.”

  “Now,” said Janet Morgan, looking rather pleased with herself, “what are you going to do with me? I admit I was silly and that it was wrong of me not to have come to the police and reported what Roland had done, but I was terribly frightened of him, and he had a gun.”

  “I’ll need to see about that,” said the Bishop gently, “for if that is to be your story there is not much I can do about it, however much I may believe that the shoe was on the other foot and that Grimble was frightened by you into doing the job. I must congratulate you, Miss Morgan, on the speed with which you have decided on your story.”

  “Thank you,” she replied, looking at the Chief Inspector with eyes of langorous adoration. If I’d had that look turned on me I’d have melted like an ice-cream in a blast furnace, but for all the effect it had on the Bishop he might have been a matinee idol, rather bored by the senseless worship of the crowd.

  “Now, Miss Morgan,” he went on, “I believe that Professor Stubbs wants to ask you a question. Of course, I don’t need to point out to you, as a young lady of, I might say, considerable astuteness, that you don’t need to answer unless you want to.”

  “Ho, hum,” said the old man, gustily clearing his throat, “I was just kinda wonderin’, Miss Morgan, whether ye’d mind tellin’ me whether ye were in any way related to Mrs. Rattigan?”

  “Good lord, no,” the girl spoke brightly, “I only know that I looked like what she had been when she was my age, and so the old girl, who was as sentimental as an old nanny, took to me. I’ve seen a portrait of her at that time and it did look a bit like me, only with the hair and the clothes different. But as for my being related to her in any way, you can put that right out of your mind. I am no more related to her than you are to the man in the moon.”

  “Umph,” grunted the Professor, “so that’s that.”

  Miss Janet Morgan was taken away. I knew that she was as hard as nails, but I could not help regretting that it looked as though she was to spend a considerable time in prison. I turned to the Chief Inspector.

  “‘What’ll happen to her,” I asked, “and how long will she get?”

  The Bishop winked broadly. Then he recollected his official dignity and half-closed his eyes.

  “If you were in the jury, Max,” he said sleepily, “and that girl came along and told that story, in the way that she can, what would you do? Personally, I’m beginning to doubt whether she’ll get beyond the courts. She’ll be bound over, and, having just come into a certain amount of money, there’s no reason why she should get into trouble again—if she plays her cards well. Why, Max, were you thinking of trying to reform her?”

  “Hardly,” I said, thinking that, all the same, it was a pity that one so young and beautiful should be so bad. I know my shortcomings on the subject of women and one of them is that I am perpetually taken in by a pretty face and a nice pair of legs. Perhaps, I have a subconscious belief in the truth of the statement that beauty is truth and no experience can ever teach me otherwise.

  “Humph,” the Professor snorted. “When ye’ve finished wi’ love’s young dream, Max, maybe ye’ll try an’ think where we can go from here. It kinda seems to me that we’re stummered. An’ don’t ye start crowin’, Reggie. I may have ditched meself for the moment, but I’ll get meself out. Ye heard that that gal said she didn’t believe that Grimble could ha’ murdered his aunt, eh?”

  “Oh, yes, I heard,” the Bishop was pontifical. “I’ve heard lots of things in this case. But you must remember that, if one part of the girl’s story is true—namely, that she was frightened of Grimble, who had a gun, then he was a man who was quite capable of killing his aunt.”

  “Hell, dammit,” hooted the Professor, “ye got about as much sense as a boiled rabbit this mornin’, Reggie. The statement about her bein’ frightened was made wi’ an eye to the effect upon a magistrate or a jury, but the other was made because she felt it was true. Didn’t ye notice that she thought it over carefully before she made it, just in case there was anythin’ which might tangle her up, an’ seein’ nothin’ she told the truth.”

  “All right, John, all right,” the Chief Inspector nodded wearily, “let it pass. You can go your way and I’ll go mine, but so far as I am concerned Lottie Rattigan was killed by her nephew.”

  “Ye haven’t announced that official like, yet?” the old man asked in patent alarm.

  “No,” said the Chief Inspector, “why?” He did not look as though he would be very interested in the answer.

  “Well, Reggie,” the Professor was earnest, “I’m kinda interested in seein’ that yer reputation remains fairly untarnished, an’ I wouldn’t like to see ye making a fool o’ yerself, an’ becoming a laughin’ stock. Ye’d better wait a while before ye start makin’ official pronouncements. Lie low an’ say nuffin’, like Brer Rabbit.”

  “Naturally,” the Bishop was a trifle stiff, “I will not start making announcements until I have satisfied myself that I am correct. I still have a certain number of things to fill in, in my case, but once I have filled them in, I’m afraid that I will not be able to delay making an announcement just to please you, John.”

  “Come on, Reggie son,” the Professor was almost gentle, “don’t be a pig-headed fool. I was only speakin’ like that because I still think ye’re wrong, an’ I’d like ye to be right.”

  Chief Inspector Bishop smiled grimly. “You know, John,” he said pleasantly, “I take more in the way of rudeness from you than I do from anyone else. All right, I don’t expect my case will be ready for twenty-four hours, so you have till then.”

  Chapter 18

  Time Presses

  THE PROFESSOR was furious. He is not a man who is much troubled by the thought of time. Time, in his view, exists for his convenience and not the other way round. He always behaves as if he were immortal. But the twenty-four hours which he had been given by the Chief Inspector were weighing heavily on his mind.

  We were having lunch with Mr. Carr in his hotel. When he had said that Maggie and Mrs. Roberts were good cooks, he had been understating the facts. They were excellent. I was already feeling that I had been attending a banquet with a City Livery Company, and I resist the temptation to make the obvious pun about the effects of such a rich meal upon the unnamed portion of my interior anatomy.

  “But, Carr,” the old man’s voice boomed in the dining-room, “ye see the police ha’ now got it into their heads that Roland Grimble was t
he feller who murdered yer Aunt Lottie. He’s dead, ye see, an’ can’t defend himself. Not that I’d mind him bein saddled wi’ the murder, but for the fact that it don’t satisfy me idea o’ the facts o’ the case. I don’t think he did it. What d’ye think?”

  “Cor,” said Mr. Carr, crumbling up a roll. “Prof cock, to tell you the truth I don’t think. I don’t like thinking. My old mother used to warn me against it. ‘Don’t you think, Ben me boy,’ she’d say. ‘Look at me. A hundred and two and I’ve never let a thought enter my mind.’ And, you know, she was right. If you want to live comfortably, lay off thought. All the same, judging from feeling, I don’t feel that Roland killed the old girl. He hadn’t got it in him.”

  ‘‘That,” the Professor was ponderous, “is exactly what I bin sayin’. I say that he was frightened to death when he had that blinkin’ gun in his hand an’ that he’d no more control over himself than a puppet has. He had made up his mind that he was goin’ to behave one way, an’ he behaved that way. But to think that he would ha’ come in from holdin’ up a taxi an’, sweatin’ white, ha’ tried a different sort o’ crime is nonsense.”

  Mr. Ben Carr nodded his head judicially. He rose and went over to the barrels behind the little bar. When he returned he was looking unusually grave.

  “I didn’t tell you, did I, that I saw the doctor after he’d seen old Arthur this morning?” he said. “I’m afraid that the old boy is going. The sawbones said he was sinking fast and that there was nothing I could do. He was comfortable, he said, and that all that could be done was to keep him comfortable.”

  “Dammit all,” the old man slapped his thigh with a resounding crack. “I’m a flamin’ blunderin’ fool. D’ye think I could see the old fellow?”

  “I suppose so,” said Mr. Carr, “he’s quite lucid and clear, but just as weak as water. What do you want to see him about?”