“Married!” His voice seemed to underline the word.
“I swear that. It was honest and above-board, only he had her on his hands and she had wasted so much of his money.” For the first time her voice rang true. She added: “His wife cost a lot too, though she was not living with him. She died a month ago.”
They stood facing one another. In the silence of the room, the ticking of an ornate little clock on the mantelshelf was distinctly audible.
Doctor Hailey leaned forward.
“His name?” he asked.
“No. I shall not tell you.”
She had recaptured her feeble courage. It gleamed from her eyes for an instant, transforming even her weakness. The vague knowledge that she loved this man in her paltry, unmoral way, came to him. He was about to repeat his demand when the door of the room opened. Todcaster came in with a small, leather-bound volume in his hand.
The girl uttered a shrill cry and sprang towards him. But Doctor Hailey anticipated that move. He held her firmly.
“It is the collection of Browning’s Love Songs,” the detective said, “I found it lying open in the next room. There is an inscription signed Michael Cornwall.”
He held the book out for the doctor’s inspection. But Doctor Hailey’s face was as pale, almost, as that of the girl by his side.
He repeated the name “Michael Cornwall” almost like a man in a dream.
The place was hidden among its trees. Doctor Hailey walked up the avenue with slow steps. The thought of the mission which had brought him to this lovely Hampstead house lay, as it had lain through all the hours of the night—like death on his spirit. Michael Cornwall, the well-known Wimpole Street bacteriologist, and he had been boys together at Uppingham. They were still acquaintances. He came to the front door and was about to ring the bell when the man he was looking for appeared round the side of the house, accompanied by an old man and a girl.
“Hailey! Well I’m dashed!”
Doctor Cornwall advanced with outstretched hand. His deep, rather sinister eyes welcomed his colleague with an enthusiasm which was entirely unaffected. He introduced: “My uncle, Colonel Cornwall, and my cousin, Miss Patsy Cornwall, whom you must congratulate on having just become engaged,” in his quick staccato manner.
“We’re just going round the garden,” he explained, “and you must accompany us. And, after that, to luncheon. Whereupon, my dear Hailey, if you have—as I feel sure you have—great business to discuss with me, we shall discuss it.”
His bantering tones accorded well with his appearance, which had changed but little in the years. He was the same astute, moody, inordinately vain fellow who had earned for himself, once upon a time, the nickname of “The Lynx.” They strolled across the lawn and came to a brick wall of that rich, russet hue which only time and the seasons can provide. Doctor Cornwall opened a door in the wall and stood back for his companions to enter. A sight of entrancing beauty greeted them; lines of fruit trees in full blossom, as though the snows of some Alpine sunset had been spread, in all their glowing tints, on the English garden. Doctor Hailey, however, had no eye for this loveliness. His gaze was fixed on a row of white-painted bee-hives which gleamed in the sunlight under the distant wall. Patsy Cornwall exclaimed in sheer wonder. Then a new cry of delight escaped her as she detected in a large greenhouse which flanked the wall, a magnificent display of scarlet tulips. She took Doctor Hailey, in whose eyes the melancholy expression seemed to have deepened, to inspect them while her father and cousin strolled on up the garden path. She stood with him in the narrow gangway of the greenhouse and feasted ecstatic eyes on the wonderful blossoms.
“Don’t they make you wish to gather them all and take them away somewhere where there are no flowers?”
She turned to him. But he had sprung away from her side.
A cry, shrill and terrible, pierced the lazy silence of the morning. She saw her father and cousin fleeing back, pursued by an immense swarm of winged insects, towards the garden gate.
Blindly, frantically, they sought to ward off the dreadful onslaught. The old man stumbled and must have fallen had not his nephew caught him in his arms. She had a momentary glimpse of his face; it was as though she had looked on the face of death.
“The bees!”
The words broke from Doctor Hailey’s lips as a moan of despair. He had come to the closed door of the greenhouse and seemed to be about to open it. But at the same moment one of the infuriated insects, in delirious flight, struck the glass frame beside him. Then another… another… and another. He came back towards the girl.
“Lie down on the gangway,” he shouted at the pitch of his voice. “There may be a broken pane somewhere.”
She turned her horror-stricken eyes to him:
“My father, oh God!”
“Lie down for your life!”
He stood beside her, watching, ready to strike if one of the bees succeeded in entering the greenhouse. Only once did he remove his straining eyes from this task. The sight which then greeted them wrung a fresh cry from his lips.
The terrible swarm hung like a dust-cloud in the air above the garden gate, rising and falling in swift undulations, which caused the light to flash and scintillate on a myriad gilded bodies and shining wings. A faint, shrill piping came to his ears across the silence. The door in the wall was open; and the garden now quite empty.
Biles leaned forward.
“Mrs. Bardwell’s maid has confessed that she rung up Doctor Cornwall immediately before luncheon this morning,” he said. “She tried to communicate with him before, but he had gone to the country, to a case, overnight. He got her warning that the police suspected him of being responsible for her mistress’ death just after had carried his second victim, his uncle, in a dying condition, from the garden.”
The detective stuck a match and relit his cigar. Doctor Hailey sat watching him with sorrowful eyes.
“Ten minutes later, as you know,” he went on, “Cornwall blew his brains out. He had the wit to see that the game was up. He had been badly stung, of course, but his long experience of the bees made this a less serious matter than it would have been in the case of an ordinary outsider. In any case, moreover, he had to accept that risk if his plan was to succeed.”
Silence fell in the big consulting room; then the doctor remarked:
“Miss Cornwall has recently become engaged to be married?”
“Yes.” Biles drew a long whiff. “That was the circumstance which made speed essential to her cousin’s murderous plan. He was hopelessly in debt, as a result of Mrs. Bardwell’s extravagance, and only his uncle’s money, which is considerable, could have saved him. If Miss Cornwall had married he must have lost all hope of obtaining it, and so of marrying the girl on whom he had set his fickle heart. I have ascertained that he insisted on inoculating both father and daughter against spring catarrh a month ago and that the injections he gave them hurt them terribly. No doubt Mrs. Bardwell received a similar injection about the same time. Thus for each of these three individuals a single bee sting, on your showing, meant instant death.”
Doctor Hailey inclined his head.
“The moment I saw the swarm the truth flashed across my mind,” he declared. “These Cyprian bees, as I have been at pains to find out and as your bee-keeping friend told you, are exceedingly ill-natured. But no bees, unless they have been previously roused to fury, ever attack at sight people who have not even approached their hives. It was all too clear, even in that first terrible moment, that the swarm was part of a carefully prepared plan.”
The detective rose and held out his hand
“But for you, my dear friend,” he said, “Miss Cornwall must inevitably have shared her father’s fate; and the most devilish murder of which I have ever so much as heard would, almost certainly, have gone unsuspected and unpunished.”
The English Filter
C
. E. Bechhofer Roberts
Carl Erich Bechhofer Roberts (1894–1949) was of German descent but born and raised in London. As a young man, he travelled the world, and some of his early work was published in leading literary magazines such as The New Age in Britain and H. L. Mencken’s The Smart Set in the US. During the First World War he was a trooper of the 9th Lancers, and met Rasputin in St Petersburg. Prevailing anti-German sentiment caused him to publish some of his writings under the Anglicised pen-name Charles Brookfarmer, and also as “Ephesian,” a tribute to the distinguished lawyer and politician F. E. Smith. A man of many parts, Bechhofer Roberts was himself a barrister and a student of true crime. When he turned his attention to detective fiction in the 1920s, he created A. B. C. Hawkes, a brilliant scientist firmly in the tradition of the Great Detective, whose cases are narrated by his admiring friend, an archaeologist called Johnstone. Today the Hawkes books are sought-after collectors’ items, while the handful of crime novels Bechhofer Roberts co-wrote with the prolific George Goodchild are not much easier to find.
“The English Filter” first appeared in the Strand Magazine in 1926. It’s a locked room mystery—complete with a plan of the scene of the crime—written with so much gusto that one can forgive the dubious science. Optography, the concept at the heart of the plot, fascinated the Victorians, but had been widely questioned by the time the story was written. Belief in it persisted nevertheless, and in 1927, the shooting in Essex of P.C. George Gutteridge through each eye was thought to reflect a fear that a picture of the murderer would be implanted on the retina of the luckless constable.
* * *
I AM unlikely ever to forget the visit that my friend A. B. C. Hawkes, the scientist, and I paid to Rome. “A. B. C.,” as I always call him, had let only one man know we were coming—his old acquaintance, Professor Castagni, the bacteriologist. We were astonished, therefore, to find at least a hundred people awaiting us at the station.
Castagni introduced many of them, a lengthy business, and I was amused to discover that his instinctive Italian love of pageantry had apparently caused him to marshal representatives of every branch of learning in the city. I found myself, for example, walking to the hotel with an elderly historian on one side, who knew a little French and less English, and delivered himself of an uninterrupted flow of words in both languages, while at the other ear was a still older professor of philosophy who spoke only Italian—of which tongue I am ignorant, although this did not seem to prevent his addressing me in it.
Hawkes, in the inevitable grey frock-coat and sponge-bag trousers, with a rose in his buttonhole, was submerged in an excited crowd, from whom there arose a Babel of welcome and congratulation. Our arrival was a comic triumph.
The moment we reached our hotel, however, they all bowed, shook our hands, and withdrew.
“What a nerve-racking experience, A. B. C.,” I commented, as my friend and I reached our rooms.
“And, of course, the one man I do want to meet wasn’t there,” Hawkes replied.
I asked who this was.
“Ribotta, the physicist,” A. B. C. said. “He must be an old man now, and, I confess, I had never rated him very highly. But just lately he’s published some really very remarkable papers on atomic magnetism. How he’s managed to make up fifty years leeway in his work, I don’t pretend to know. But that is what I’ve come to Rome to find out.”
There was a tap at the door, and a young Italian entered.
“My name is Dorsi, Professor Castagni’s assistant,” he said in perfect English. “The professor wishes me to act as your guide here in Rome.”
“That is most kind of you both,” said Hawkes with assumed gratification. “But really, I mustn’t trouble you.”
“It is truly a pleasure. I appreciate the honour of coming into contact with so famous a man of science. Of course, if you wish to rest now after your journey, I will wait for you downstairs.”
A. B. C. smiled resignedly.
“What my friend Johnstone and I really want,” he said, “is an early lunch. I see it’s just twelve—perhaps we may indulge our appetites. You will lunch with us, Mr. Dorsi, I trust?”
Our guest proved a sympathetic and intelligent young man. Educated partly in England, he had a sound knowledge of our language and tastes. I could see that Hawkes liked him as well as I did.
“Now, Mr. Dorsi,” said A. B. C., as the waiter served the coffee and we lit our cigars. “You tell me that I may expect to be able to pay my formal call on Professor Castagni at three o’clock. Right! The only other visit I am anxious to make is to Professor Ribotta. His latest work interests me profoundly.”
“That will be very simple,” said Dorsi. “If you like, we can go there now—he is sure to be in his laboratory. And while you are there, gentlemen, I should advise you to talk to his assistant as well.”
“You are trying to tell me something,” remarked A. B. C., with a shrewd glance.
The Italian smiled.
“The facts are these, professor,” he commenced.
“Holy Darwin! Don’t call me ‘professor’!” cried A. B. C. “Anything but that! The word suggests all the academic foibles I most detest—vanity, pedantry, untidiness, petty jealousies, and tyranny!”
“You must excuse this outburst, Mr. Dorsi,” I laughed. “It is a form of address that always rouses his tempestuous nature.”
Dorsi stole a humorous glance at the scientist’s flaming red hair and smiled more broadly.
“Well, then, Mr. Hawkes,” he began again—“That’s better!” murmured A. B. C.—“I am perhaps being indiscreet, but your time is too valuable to be wasted. Professor Ribotta—I emphasise the title in this case—is not responsible for the theories you speak of. He takes the credit for them, but it is due to his assistant, Mr. Lavorello. You know the stupid system we have in our Continental universities—promotion goes by seniority, and a position may be held for life, or at least to a very advanced age, by any old man who does not wish to retire on a pension. That is the case of Professor Ribotta. He holds a chair for which, however well he may have filled it thirty years ago, he is today quite unqualified. You will see this for yourselves. But Lavorello—ah, there is a young man of the first quality, an experimenter without rival in all Italy, a scientific genius.”
“I have heard of such cases before,” said A. B. C. “I shall make a point of getting into touch with him. Thank you for your friendly advice. Shall we be going?”
The three of us set out for Ribotta’s laboratory, which we found in an old part of the city, near the Pantheon. The entrance was remote from the main portion of the institute, and Dorsi told us that it led to Ribotta’s and his assistant’s rooms only.
The porter inside took off his cap to us and led us into a small room which, Dorsi told me, was the preserve of the laboratory attendant. It was dark and confined; the remains of a meal lay on the table and a couple of dirty overalls hung on a hook on the wall.
We stopped before another door, on which the porter knocked.
It was opened to us by Ribotta himself, to whom Dorsi swiftly explained who we were. The professor, an old man with a flowing beard and piercing eyes, then invited us to enter. He greeted A. B. C. effusively, led us to his desk, and motioned to us to sit down. He leaned forward in his chair, holding a hand to his ear.
“You speak not Italian, I think, Professor Hawkes?” he said in a broken English that I shall not attempt to reproduce exactly. “You do? Well, no matter; I prefer to speak English. Oh, I am very fond of England. Forty years ago I was at Cambridge under your great professors.” He mentioned some famous names. “They taught me much—but I see you are too young to know them. I have not been in England since then, but I still have my great love for English things. I have many beautiful English things in my laboratory. I will call my assistant; he shall show them to you. Lavorello! Lavorello! Ah, he does not hear me. No matter, I will send the
attendant to him. Carlo!” he called.
“That wretched attendant,” the garrulous old man went on, “I cannot make him obey me. He attends only to Mr. Lavorello’s work; he leaves my laboratory dirty. When he comes, he will hear from me. And now I will call my assistant myself.”
He pounded on a door at the other side of the room. We heard a chair pushed back and the slamming of a door. Through an unglazed, barred window that gave on to a corridor—apparently the only ventilation of the room, for all the other windows were tightly closed—we saw a man pass.
Ribotta tittered. “You think it odd, perhaps,” he said. “My assistant is in the next room, but he cannot come in through the connecting door. Ah, this is done on purpose. I do not want anybody to come into the room. So I locked that door twenty years ago, and it has remained locked ever since. He must come in the way you came, the only entrance. And that has a Yale lock, so that nobody can come in except myself and the attendant, unless I let them in myself. Only he and I have keys. Even the porter I never allow to enter. I want quiet, and in this way I get it. Ah, there must be Lavorello!”
He motioned to Dorsi, and our guide slipped across to unfasten the door. A young man entered, keen and dark, but very fleshy for his age—a point, we afterwards discovered, on which he was rather sensitive. I looked at him with interest, for he was the brilliant youth whose work had brought Hawkes to Rome.
“Sit down, Lavorello, sit down,” cried Ribotta. “But no, I want you to show my English guests the great things that have come here from their country. First give them a glass of water from my filter.”
Without a word the young man went over to a large glass tank, uncovered at the top and with some kind of filter and tap attached. It was one of the most noticeable objects in the peculiarly bare room. He filled a glass from it and brought this to us. Ribotta held it under Hawkes’ nose.
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