Death Comes to Cambers (38 page)

Detective-Sergeant Bobby Owen, leaving the Park, crossed Carlton Lane. Through the dark shadows cast by a cliff-like block of flats opposite he passed on, round the mews, into stately Carlton Square itself, where on the north side, No. 1, the ancestral home of his race, sprawled its interminable and depressing length.

Bobby surveyed it with a sigh, thinking what a difference would be made in the family fortunes if only legal complication, jointures, mortgages, reversions, Lord knew what, permitted it to be pulled down, and a new block of spacious, super-luxury, one-room flats erected in its stead. But that could not be – at least, not without a special Act of Parliament whereof the expense would eat up all possible profit; and so Bobby sighed again, and then cast a glance of professional interest at the third window from the southeast corner on the top floor, that of the room where legend told that, a hundred and fifty years ago, a servant-maid had been murdered in mysterious circumstances never cleared up. Then, ascending the steps leading to the huge front doors, he knocked; and as from the very bowels of the earth a thin voice floated up to him.

“Beg pardon, sir,” it said, "I can't get them doors open; they haven't been used so long they've stuck someway, or else it's the lock. His lordship was proper vexed.”

Descending to the street-level again, and peering over iron railings, Bobby saw, far below, the ancient retainer of the house whose services had been rewarded – or punished – by the job of caretaker of this mansion, which none of the Lords of Hirlpool had been able to afford to inhabit for three-quarters of a century past.

“Do you mind coming this way, sir?” quavered again the voice from the depths. “His lordship had to, and proper vexed he was, too.”

“Righto,” said Bobby, and accordingly descended the long flight of steps that led down to the area door, where the old caretaker waited. “Bit of a climb,” he commented; “if uncle had to, I can believe he didn't like it. Do you have to climb those steps every time you want to go out?”

“Oh, no, sir,” answered the caretaker, “there's the back door, sir, opening on the mews, but it's nearly ten minutes' walk to get round there from here. This way, sir.”

Bobby followed the old man through a series of grim, dark, chill, dust-strewn chambers, compared with which the vaults of the Spanish Inquisition would surely have seemed cheery, homely abiding places. They came to a spot whence steep and narrow stone steps led both up and down, though whether to a gloom more intense above or below was hard to say. But it seemed to prove that even beneath these depths there stretched depths lower still.

“Good Lord,” Bobby said. “Are there cellars under these?”

"These aren't the cellars, sir,” answered the other rebukingly. “This is the basement floor. Over there's what used to be the kitchen, and that's the door of the old servants' hall. Very spacious apartment, sir, and very different everything looked when there was a staff of twenty or more busy here.”

“It's a wonder they didn't die of T.B. or rheumatism,” observed Bobby, peering into the dark cavern that once had been a kitchen. “Probably they did, though. What about the breakfast bacon? How long does it take to get from kitchen to dining-room?”

The caretaker considered the point carefully.

“I don't think it would take more than ten minutes,” he decided; “not much more, anyhow. His lordship will be waiting, sir,” he added; “her ladyship, too.”

“Oh, has granny got here already?” Bobby said. “All right, I'll cut along. What about Mrs. Ronnie? Has she turned up?”

“Yes, sir, she came the first. They're all there except Mr. Chris. Mr. Norris came immediate after Mrs. Ronnie. It's the small room to the right at the top of the big stair.”

“Right, I'll find my way; don't you bother,” Bobby said, and began to ascend the steps leading to the upper regions of the house.

As he went he wondered again what could be the meaning of this family conference to which his uncle, Lord Hirlpool, had summoned him; his grandmother, the dowager Lady Hirlpool; his cousin by marriage, Cora, who was Mrs. Ronald Owen; his other cousin, Chris Owen, the heir to the title and the family mortgages, debts, tithes, income-tax, and all the rest of the financial encumbrances that went with their old and historic name; and finally Dick Norris. He wondered, too, why Dick Norris had been included, since Norris was not one of the family, though he had been a very intimate friend of the vanished Ronnie Owen. It was a friendship that had been formed and consolidated on the links, for Norris was a famous amateur golfer, known to a wide circle through the articles he contributed to the golfing press under various pseudonyms, as “B. Unkert,”, “N.B. Luck,” and others, all in the breezy, healthy type of humour that made him so popular a writer.

“Hope,” Bobby thought uneasily, as he groped his way up the dark, twisting steps, “Ronnie hasn't been up to something they think I can hush up because I'm at the Yard.”

But he did not think this very likely, as, though Ronnie had been wild and reckless enough, and had been badly involved in that disastrous and scandalous divorce case after which he had vanished from the ken of all his former friends and acquaintances, including his justly offended wife, he was not likely to have mixed himself up in anything of a criminal nature – at least, not unless he had been more badly drunk even than usual.

“Must be something pretty serious, though,” Bobby told himself, as he emerged from the stairs and discovered he was by no means certain which was now the right direction to take.

However, after one or two attempts that brought him back to his starting-place, he arrived at last in the huge sepulchral entrance-hall, a bare, desolate void ringed round by possibly the worst collection of statuary in the whole wide world.

From the centre of this hall there rose the great double stair; so magnificent in marble and gilt, it would have done credit to almost any tea shop or cinema in the land. Indeed, one well-known provincial department store had recently made a tempting offer for it, though, unfortunately, trust deeds prevented its sale.

At the top of these stairs Bobby turned to the right, and, guided by the sound of voices, found his way to a small room at an angle of the building. Its door was open, and into it daylight streamed through one open and unshuttered window. At a second window a tall, thin, elderly man, with a long, thin, melancholy face, a very short body, and very long legs, was engaged in a free-for-all struggle with shutters that seemed as fixed as the decrees of fate. A woman's voice said:

“Chrissy, dear, if they won't open, get Mr. Norris to swot 'em with a chair or something.”

“My dear mother,” answered gloomily the man at the window, “maintenance and repair are ruining me as it is.”

He made a final effort, retired defeated before those immovable shutters, and turned round as Bobby entered the room.

“Morning, uncle,” Bobby said to him. “Hullo, granny,” he said to the lady who had advised the “swotting” of the difficult shutters, and he dropped a kiss upon her hair, that would very likely have been grey had either she or her maid ever dreamed of permitting such a thing. To a dark, tall, slim, sombre-looking, youngish, very handsome woman who was smoking cigarettes opposite, he said: “How do, Cora?” With a big, loose-limbed, brown-faced man in plus fours who was Dick Norris, and who was seated in the background, straddling a chair with his face to its back and his arms resting thereon, he exchanged silent nods, and again he wondered why Norris was there. Most likely there was nothing in it, but there had been stories that Norris, too, had been a competitor for Cora's hand, and that the disappointment had been bitter when she bestowed it upon Ronnie Owen.

Bobby's uncle, Lord Whirlpool, the tall, thin man, mumbled an indistinct reply to his greeting. The dowager patted his hand absently. Cora took not the slightest notice, but lighted another cigarette, though the one she was smoking was but half finished. Bobby asked himself whether it was quite an accident that her back was turned to Norris, while Norris, in his reverse position on the chair he straddled, was exactly behind her, his curiously expressionless, light blue eyes fixed full upon her. Of a feeling of tension, of expectation, in the room, Bobby was at once aware, and he began to think that perhaps Cora and Dick Norris were intending to get married – or, rather, to do without getting married, since Ronnie's disappearance only dated from about three years back. No denying that Ronnie had treated Cora disgracefully, and perhaps there had been some foundation for the stories representing Dick Norris as a disappointed rival, though there had never seemed to be any breach in his friendship with Ronnie. Even when the scandal broke upon a London most delightfully shocked, Dick had still stood by Ronnie when others of his friends deserted him. Emerging abruptly from deep thought, Lady Hirlpool said:

“If only we could let the place – even if there's no one left in England with money enough to live here, surely some American millionaire...?”

“American millionaires,” her son answered bitterly, “think of nothing but bathrooms. The last one wanted nine put in, five for the family and four for the servants. Imagine the miles of plumbing...”

“Why not,” suggested Bobby helpfully, “flood the basement and call it a swimming pool? Very likely you would catch a film star then.”

Lord Hirlpool did not seem to think much of the suggestion. He looked at his watch and mumbled:

“Chris ought to be here by now. He's always late.”

A slow and hesitating step sounded without, paused as if in doubt, and then came on, and there entered languidly a youngish man of middle height with the long, melancholy face and legs too long in proportion to the body that often characterized members of the family of Owen of Hirlpool, and that Bobby himself was thankful some trick of Mendelism had allowed him to escape. The newcomer was Christopher Owen, eldest nephew to Lord Hirlpool, who was a childless widower and to whom, therefore, Chris was heir- presumptive. It followed that he was also grandson to the dowager Lady Hirlpool, cousin by marriage to Cora Owen, cousin by blood to the missing Ronnie Owen and to Detective-Sergeant Bobby Owen, and anything but friend to Dick Norris, with whom he had had in the past certain complicated financial relations which had ended in a common loss and mutual ill-feeling. He was the proprietor of a small antique shop, of which the extremely fluctuating profits afforded him his means of livelihood, and he had the reputation of often picking up for a pound or two in the houses of his friends and acquaintances bits of china, drawings, old furniture, and so on, that afterwards he disposed of on trips to America at a fantastic profit. But it was also believed that most of what he gained in business he promptly lost again, gambling on the Stock Exchange. He had a considerable reputation as what is vulgarly called a “lady-killer,” since his long, melancholy face had its own attractiveness, his eyes could take on a look of infinite appeal, and many women seemed unable to resist the languid and melancholy indifference of his manner that seemed positively to challenge them to relieve it. Often they managed to convince themselves that that was a breaking heart which was in reality only wonder whether an offer of a couple of guineas for the bit of Sèvres – worth ten – on the mantelpiece would be accepted or resented. He spoke with a slight, indeed very slight, stutter, intermittent and at times scarcely perceptible, and yet, in a general way, oddly noticeable. Slight as it was, it had had a great effect on his life, it had made impossible for him a stage career to which he had been strongly drawn and for which he had real aptitude, and at Cambridge it had been the cause of his having been sent down without taking his degree. Absurdly sensitive always to what was a very trifling defect, he had resented so strongly a mocking imitation of it given by a fellow-undergraduate, at a party at which the cocktails had been frequent and strong, as to express that resentment in terms of a carving knife. A serious criminal charge had been narrowly averted; there had even been a few hours when a death and a charge of murder had seemed a possibility; in the end the injured man's lie that he had inflicted the injury himself had been accepted. But the incident had brought Chris's university career to a conclusion, and with it his hopes of entering the Civil Service with an eye upon the Foreign Office. Now, the moment he entered the room he announced gloomily, his little stutter more marked than usual:

“T-t-those Chippendale chairs I bought at the Lawes sale are all duds – made in Birmingham year before last. R-rather a bore – means I shall drop a couple of hundred on them.”

“Hard times all round,” agreed the brown-faced Norris. “It's hardly any good writing anything about golf – every editor you try has a drawerful of stuff already. All they want to know is if you've won the Open, and, if you haven't, then yours goes down the drain.”

“You shouldn't buy duds, Chris,” his grandmother told him tartly. “Antique dealers sell duds, they don't buy 'em.” Having delivered herself of this aphorism, Lady Hirlpool turned to Norris: “Why don't you turn pro, Mr. Norris?” she demanded. “They make plenty of money; they charge you a guinea for advising you to buy one of their own clubs at twice what they paid for it.”

“I know,” sighed Norris, “but if you're a pro you have to compete with pros – not good enough.”

“Got any tips to give away?” asked Chris, dangling eyeglasses of which he had no need, since his sight was excellent – the eyeglasses were in reality powerful magnifiers, enabling him to give a close examination to objects on which he seemed to be bestowing a merely casual glance.

Norris answered this inquiry for tips by a dismal shake of the head.

“The last three blokes I wasted a spot of coaching on stood me one dinner, one week-end invite, and one ‘Thanks awfully' between them,” he said dejectedly, “and one of them knew jolly well what was going to happen to ‘Emmies' and never said a word.”