by Leo Bruce
“How was that?”
“I cannot bear vulgarity. The witty, the lively, even, within reason, the risqué, I will accept, but vulgarity, no! One evening Mrs Rathbone suddenly rendered a song at the piano which I blush to remember. I felt bound to tell her that it was offensive to me and she laughed in a very coarse way and made a quite unforgivable remark. I asked them to leave the house.”
“That was towards the end of their stay here?”
“Within six months of it, I should say. I bore them no ill will. I realize that to some people I should seem intolerant. But life is too beautiful a thing to be cheapened by vulgarity. You may smoke if you wish.”
“Thank you. This was the first time that anything of the sort had occurred?”
“With me, yes. But I had heard Talk.”
“Talk?”
“Mrs Rathbone was not, I fear, quite what I should call a lady. Her manner of dress and her bearing left something to be desired. Although I myself saw no sign of it, for she would scarcely reveal such a thing to me, there was a rumor that she sometimes drank more than was good for her. I do not listen to gossip, but I could not avoid hearing that she went to a certain public house called the Star and Mitre. Certainly there was something rubicund about her which suggested intemperance.”
“I see.”
“I do not believe she was an ill-intentioned woman. Indeed she was considered affable and friendly. But she lacked refinement.”
“Her husband had no occupation while they were here?”
“None. They had private means, I understood. I sometimes thought Mr Rathbone was rather an indolent person.”
“Did they ever speak of any relatives?”
“Not when I first knew them. But about a year after they came here, Mrs Rathbone’s sister died in London. There was something a little curious about that, because I am almost sure they first had the news from a policeman.”
“Really?”
“Yes! About four o’clock one day I chanced to be seated near the window. I was catching the last of the light for some petit-point embroidery I was doing. I distinctly saw a policeman call at their house. When I met them later that evening, I did not venture to remark on what I had seen, but I detected something uneasy in their manner. Next day they left for London, and on the following day they were absent again. They told me afterwards that they had attended the cremation of Mrs Rathbone’s sister. I did then mention the policeman’s call and they dismissed this quite peremptorily. To do with their motor-car, they said; but I could not help wondering whether the sister’s death had not been . . . irregular, in some way.”
“A very natural supposition. And you were quite right. Mrs Rathbone was called to identify her sister’s body.”
“I feared something of the sort. It is consistent with . . . the Other.”
Carolus waited.
“You know, of course, that there was considerable speculation about their manner of leaving here? You don’t? Of course it may all be no more than hearsay. I should not wish to repeat mere gossip.”
“In a case like this, mere gossip may be of the greatest importance.”
“Then I will tell you! The house beyond theirs was then occupied by a very worthy person who let apartments during the summer—a Mrs Bishop. It was from her that I gathered the extraordinary story. How, you may be asking yourself, did I come to associate with her? She was of quite humble origin, but a very well-behaved, respectful woman and I saw no reason to treat her unkindly. She would occasionally come here and stay for a cup of tea. She it was who first told me that there was trouble between the Rathbones. It appeared—she explained this as delicately as possible—it appeared that Mrs Rathbone had formed a liaison with another man. A commercial traveller of some kind, I gathered.
“I did not require all the squalid details. I was thankful that I had put an end to my acquaintance with the Rathbones before this took place; but Mrs Bishop insisted that the two had been seen together on the promenade late at night and that Rathbone was extremely angry about it. This continued for some weeks. I myself saw nothing that could be thought in any way improper, though one evening when I happened to be near my bedroom window a car drew up which was certainly not the Rathbones’ car and Mrs Rathbone stepped out of it. I heard her call good night to the occupant of the car before it was driven away. Then she entered her house. In itself nothing, you will say. But wait!”
Carolus waited.
“Three days elapsed, then towards dusk I saw both the Rathbones leaving their house, bearing suitcases. By a coincidence I was just stitching a small tear in my lace curtain at the time. They placed these suitcases in their car and drove away. From that moment onwards I never saw Mrs Rathbone again!”
Giving Miss Ramble all his attention but not interrupting, Carolus nodded gravely.
“It was some days before I saw Mrs Bishop. She, too, it appeared, had chanced to be glancing from her window when the suitcases were brought out. She said that Rathbone had not returned till late that night and when he came he was alone. She met him in the street the following day and he seemed, in her words, ‘very upset’. ‘My wife has left me!’ he said. Mrs Bishop suggested that of course she would soon be back and he said: ‘Yes, yes,’ in an abstracted way and walked on. Strange, you will own.”
“Well, not necessarily. Wives do leave husbands for other men.”
“That was not the general interpretation of the circumstances. It was whispered . . . I hesitate to tell you this . . .”
“I dare say I can guess. They said that Rathbone had done away with his wife, I suppose.”
“They did! It was quite a scandal in the town. The circumstances were unusual. So sudden, you see.”
“How, I wonder, was he supposed to have disposed of the body?”
“That was the mystery; but it was pointed out that there is always the sea. Then someone claimed to know that Rathbone had once been employed by a firm of wholesale chemists. It was suggested that acid might have been used!”
“I wonder why. After all, so far as anyone knew, here was a wife leaving her husband with his full knowledge, if not consent. Why should they have made such sinister suggestions?”
“I think, perhaps, it was something about Rathbone himself. I am not saying that I was a party to these rumors, but I did think, looking back on my acquaintance with him, that Rathbone could have been that kind of man. One reads such dreadful cases in the papers.”
“I see what you mean.”
“However, since as you now tell me the two have been together again . . .”
“I did not quite say that. Rathbone has been living in a lonely part of the country with a woman whose description is quite unlike that you give me of his wife. She has disappeared in much the same circumstances.”
“How very horrible! The man must be a monster!”
“He left here soon after this happened?”
“Almost immediately. His furniture was removed by a London firm Mrs Bishop regretted afterwards that she had not made a note of the name. We have heard nothing of him or of her from that day to this.”
“I am most grateful to you, Miss Ramble. Your information will be very valuable. By the way, did Mrs Rathbone wear ear-rings?”
“Never!”
“What was her age, would you say?”
“Not more than forty, I should guess.”
“And you are certain that she was short and stout?”
“Quite certain.”
Carolus rose and took a last regretful look at the room in which they had been sitting. Those Japanese fans! That walnut whatnot! He might never see, in its natural state as it were, such a room again.
“Rubicund, you say?”
“Yes. Even a hint of purple sometimes. Full cheeks; indeed, as I have said, heavy altogether. I remember noticing—though it is not pleasant to discuss such things—that the calves of her legs were unbecomingly solid.”
“She never wore glasses?”
“Never. Not even to
read music.” Miss Ramble seemed to have something more to say but found difficulty in it. “I hesitate to suggest,” she began; “I was just wondering . . . if it would not be too much trouble . . . I should be most interested to hear what transpires. If you could kindly tell me any developments as they occur . . . Mrs Bishop has moved to Sebastopol Avenue, but we still see one another occasionally and she would be glad to receive any news, too, I know.”
Carolus gave some vague assurance and moved to the door. Miss Ramble let him out with a dramatic gesture of farewell. But he had forgotten Number 45, outside which his car still stood. As he passed, its door was opened, this time quite widely.
“You found her all right, then?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“I thought you would. She doesn’t often go out till the afternoon.”
“No.”
“Well, I’m glad you found her in.”
“Yes.”
“You don’t want to come and see someone and not find them, do you?”
“No.”
“I mean, it’s such a nuisance when you’ve come a long way.”
“Yes.”
Carolus started his car and with a cheerful wave of his hand left Balaclava Grove behind.
But he was not feeling cheerful. Even more than in the stuffy gloom of Glose Cottage he was filled with a rising sense of disgust. Remembering the shifty face of Rathbone gave him a feeling of physical nausea. He knew instinctively that there would be more to come. Tall and heavy, short and plump—but the original Mrs Rathbone had been described as a skinny little thing. He began to wonder where it would end.
9
CAROLUS had thought it would be necessary to stay in Hastings for some days, for he had not foreseen the dramatic and informative Miss Ramble. He was satisfied that he had the facts he needed but conscientiously determined not to depend on a single witness, and called that evening at the Star and Mitre where the landlord remembered the Rathbones well and confirmed most of Miss Ramble’s details. He reached his home after the Sticks had gone to bed, but faced his fiery little housekeeper over breakfast next morning.
“So it was you came in last night!” she said. “I was only saying to Stick we weren’t to know. It might have been anyone.”
Carolus attacked his kedgeree.
“Only we should like to know,” said Mrs Stick.
“What?”
“Whether you’ll be staying, now you’re back. I thought it was the sea air you were going to Hastings for.”
“Yes. I shall be staying some time, I think,” said Carolus. “But I shan’t be in to lunch or dinner today and I may stop tonight in town.”
“It’s no good my getting anything in, then, is it?” asked Mrs Stick as she left Carolus. She seemed perplexed more than put out, he thought absently, as he picked up The Times and turned straight to the crossword.
He knew that he must next go to Bolderton, the place in which the Rathbones had lived before they moved to Hastings. He felt something like dread at the prospect. He was fairly certain that he would hear yet another description of another Mrs Rathbone. But he went. He drove through London without more delay than usual, reflecting that a horse carriage sixty years ago would have covered the distance from Blackheath to Barnet in about a third of the time he took. He found Bolderton a region of new houses, thick with television aerials, busy with self-service shops, humming with motor-scooters. Deep in a maze of almost uniform streets an old high wall still rose, behind which Coleshill, once a lonely manor house, was maintained as a rehabilitation center for juvenile delinquents. It was now called Coleshill College. Much of the manor’s grounds had been built over, and what had once been the lodge was separated from the college playing-fields by another row of red-brick family cells named Aneurin Road; but the lodge had miraculously kept its character and square of garden. Between this garden and the road was a row of iron hurdles and shrubs. He felt that Mrs Chalk had exaggerated in calling it a “gloomy little house”, but after Glose Cottage he was apt to find any dwelling cheerful by comparison.
A pleasant, middle-aged woman came to the door and answered his questions in a businesslike way. She and her husband had taken the lodge soon after the Rathbones had vacated it. They had never seen the Rathbones, but had heard a good deal about them from Mrs Richards, the char whom they had inherited from the previous occupants. Mrs Richards had remained with them till quite recently, but no longer went out to work. Carolus could find her at 14 Jupp Street, near the station.
“My husband might be able to tell you more than I can,” said the lodge’s occupant. “He saw the estate agents at the time. I’m sure he would be quite willing to give you any information if it will help to trace someone missing. He gets home about five, but six-thirty would be the best time.”
Carolus expressed his thanks and went off to find Mrs Richards, whom he thought rather a pretty old thing, with very white hair and rosy cheeks. She lived with her daughter and son-in-law. Everyone seemed intelligent and helpful, he reflected. There was nothing in the least dim or macabre about Bolderton.
“Oh, yes,” said Mrs Richards when she had asked him into the living-room of her daughter’s home, “I remember the Rathbones well. I worked for them for some years just after the war. You say they’ve disappeared? That’s what they did from here in a way. They hadn’t long been married when they came to Bolderton. They seemed quite comfortably off, but I believe it was her money. Her father had died a year or so before and, though I never heard any details, I think he had left her everything.
“Mr Rathbone was older than his wife. He wasn’t what you’d call a healthy-looking man. Rather weedy, I’d say. It really got on my nerves to see him hanging about all day doing nothing. He didn’t seem to have any interests, even. He wasn’t a man who could turn his hand to anything in the house. Couldn’t even fit a new washer on a tap. He’d sit about in slippers all the morning, reading the paper and smoking. I used to have to get him out of his armchair. ‘I want to Do this room now, Mr Rathbone,’ I’d say, and he’d have to move. But I think he was fond of his wife in a way. There were never any words between them and when she became ill later on he looked after her very attentively. Mrs Rathbone . . .”
“Excuse me,” Carolus interrupted. “Would you mind describing her?”
“What she looked like, you mean? There was nothing of her, as you might say. A little peeked thing she was. Very nice to speak to, mind you. Always considerate and that. But very quiet. Rather sad-looking, I always thought. She didn’t seem to know how to enjoy herself.”
“They didn’t go out much?”
“Only to the cinema sometimes. It was before the telly had come in as it has.”
“Did either of them drink?”
“He liked a little sometimes. Oh, never too much, but he did pop into the Greyhound now and again. She never did. When the doctor ordered her to have a glass of milk-stout in the mornings it was as much as she could do to swallow it.”
“They had the doctor, then?”
“Oh, yes. Dr Whistley it was. He’s still in the town if you want to see him. He used to come about once a week to see Mrs Rathbone when she was ill. Pernicious anaemia, they called it. She became a proper invalid and stayed in her room all day. Sometimes she would sit up for an hour or two but you could see it was a strain. At one time it really looked as though she wasn’t going to live. They had to send for her sister.”
“What was the sister like?”
“I never saw her. She went there one day after I’d come home from work. But the nurse they had at that time told me next morning you’d never have believed she was Mrs Rathbone’s sister from the way she behaved. I shouldn’t like to repeat what the nurse said about her, but it wasn’t very nice. Then, after that, Mrs Rathbone must have been better, because they got rid of the nurse. I never saw much difference in her, ill or well, myself, but then we’re a healthy family and, although I’ve brought up three, I’ve never had much experience of illness. Mrs Rathbo
ne always looked the same to me, poor thing.”
“You said something which suggested that they left suddenly.”
“Yes. They did. It was a funny business altogether. I got there one morning at my usual time and found Mr Rathbone down in the kitchen as though he’d been waiting for me. I could see he was upset about something and it came to me he was trying to ask me to leave—after I’d been with them all that time. He said it was the house, it was damp and he was going to take Mrs Rathbone away, down to the sea. I said it might be a good thing. She looked as though that was what she needed. ‘She does,’ he said, ‘I’m going to take her at once. Today if possible; if not, tomorrow. So we shan’t need you any more, Mrs Richards.’ Of course I was surprised. ‘You’ll want someone to clear up,’ I said. ‘No, that doesn’t matter. I’ll do what’s necessary.’ Then he tried to be civil. ‘Thanks very much for all your help,’ he said and gave me three weeks’ money. What could I do? But they didn’t leave that day nor yet the next. I heard it was three days later when they drove away in the evening. There were no houses just by the Lodge in those days. All those have been built since then. So I don’t know who saw them go, but that’s what was said. There was a lot of talk about it at the time.”
I seem to have heard that before, thought Carolus wearily. But he asked: “What kind of talk?”
“In a place like this there are always those who think the worst. Their getting rid of the nurse and me and going off after dark like that. Some of them went so far as to say that he’d murdered her. But you know what people are when anything happens. They’re always ready to talk. I never liked Mr Rathbone very much because I’ve always been a worker, and it didn’t seem right to me that a man should be idle; but I don’t believe he would have done his wife any harm. As I say, he seemed very fond of her.”
“Afterwards you worked for the next occupants?”