The Bath Mysteries (12 page)

“What things?” Norris asked. “Oh, the sunray lamp and the heater, you mean? That's all right, they fit into slots; quite secure, you see; screwed down as well.”

He showed how they were held in place, and Bobby said: “Yes, I know, but accidents happen, and you can't be too careful of electricity in a bathroom. There've been one or two cases of people electrocuted, you know.” He added: “Didn't you say the other day you had insured yourself for – for £20,000?”

It was odd, but he had a certain difficulty, or hesitation rather, in pronouncing that figure, as if something warned him against uttering it, or at least wished him to understand there was menace there. But Norris only laughed lightly.

“You are thinking of Ronnie?” he asked. “If he was done in, he got no more than he deserved after the way he let Cora down, the swine.”

“Sounded as though she meant to take him back,” Bobby remarked.

“Good thing she didn't get the chance,” Norris said. “It would only have been the same thing over again.” He paused, and added slowly: “It saved her.”

Then, almost as if he thought he had said too much, he led the way quickly into the adjoining room, and, opening a drawer and bending over it, produced a box of cigars.

“Have one?” he said, pushing the box carelessly across the table; but the idea in Bobby's mind was that he had done all this to hide how he had looked.

“No, thanks,” Bobby answered the invitation. “You think Ronnie was murdered, then?”

“I don't think anything about it one way or the other,” Norris retorted sharply. “So long as Cora knows the chap's dead and done for, that's all that matters. Oh, yes,” he added, staring hard at Bobby, who had looked up at him suddenly, “I'm still keen on Cora. I'm trying to get her to come on this China trip with me. Do her good. A change, that's what she wants. What's the good of brooding things now the truth's out?” 

“It must have been a bad shock for her,” Bobby said. “She'll want a little time to get over it.”

“Why?” demanded Norris. “She ought to be jolly glad to know she's rid of the bounder after the way he treated her. I can tell you she felt it pretty badly. At the time she would have killed him herself if she had had the chance. She told me so, and she meant it, too.”

“Did she?” murmured Bobby, a little startled to hear this.

“You would have thought so if you had heard the way she said it,” declared Norris. “I was there with her when she first understood what it all meant.”

Bobby was inclined to suspect this meant it was Norris himself who had first told her what was happening; he even wondered whether it was through Norris's instrumentality that the scandal had finally become public. Norris continued in the same somewhat excited manner:

“Now she knows he's been dead a couple of years she won't go on brooding about the past. I could have told her at the time he was dead, but she wouldn't listen to me, though I knew all right.”

“How was it you knew?” Bobby asked.

If Norris's remark about Cora had startled Bobby, Bobby's question in return more than startled Norris. He looked thoroughly disturbed; even those generally unchanging light-blue eyes of his showed now something almost like alarm. His voice was shaken as he said:

“I didn't mean that. I mean I didn't mean I knew, only it stood to reason, didn't it? Cora puts in that silly fool advertisement; he answers it quick enough, trust him, and that's all. Plain enough something happened to stop him coming back to her, and what else could it be when he never gave another sign? Everyone knew his heart was rotten and he was liable to pass out any day.”

Bobby did not answer. Uncomfortable thoughts were crowding into his mind. Norris had spoken with deep feeling, and evidently still cherished his old passion for Cora. Any reconciliation between her and Ronnie would have put an end to all such hopes. When that reconciliation appeared likely to take place, the prospect of it had been put an end to forever by Ronnie's strange and sudden death. And now Norris declared he had had previous knowledge of Ronnie's death, this death timed so precisely to avoid the ruin of his hopes.

Bobby's silence – and silence can be as significant as speech – began to affect Norris. His eyes were still troubled, his skin a little pale beneath the sun-tan, his feet uneasy, and it is often in movements of the foot that inner nervousness betrays itself. In a harsh and angry voice he broke out suddenly:

“Look here, Owen, did you come just to pull this C.I.D. stuff on me?”

“No,” Bobby answered. “Or, rather, I suppose – yes. What I really wanted was to ask if you could suggest the name of anyone likely to have known anything of Ronnie between the time he disappeared and the time he answered Cora's advertisement. He was in London all the while, it seems, in business in the City; he knew plenty of people; there seems a good chance he may have been seen by someone. Any scrap of information might be a big help. What we want is to get some idea of who were his associates and what he was doing during that time.”

“Nothing I can tell you,” Norris answered. He seemed to have recovered his self-possession now, though his voice was still sullen. “I never heard a thing about Ronnie after he cleared out, and didn't want to either – or anyone else, I should think, after what the judge had to say about him in his summing-up that day in court. If you ask me, he showed his sense in getting out before he got kicked out. Anyhow, I never heard anything more of him, and I never heard of anyone who did.”

Bobby asked one or two more questions that Norris answered in the same sullen and resentful manner. He made no attempt to deny the fact that he still regarded Ronnie's death as a fortunate circumstance, leaving his own path free; or that at the time it had been a great shock to him to learn from Cora herself that she was once more in touch with her husband, and even expecting his return. But it was equally plain that he either actually knew nothing that could help the investigation, or that, if he did, he had no intention of telling it.

“The bounder's dead; why not leave it at that?” he demanded. “I told you just now, I was certain something had happened when Cora never heard any more. If he hadn't meant it, he wouldn't have answered her advertisement at all, let alone putting in that sloppy ‘Thank God' I expected he reckoned was just the way to fetch a softhearted, sentimental woman. And, of course, he was only too jolly glad of the chance. If Cora had taken him back again, everyone else would have had to accept him, and he would have been back at once in his old position. What I guessed was that he had gone an extra burst in the excitement, and it had been too much for him, with his heart in the state it was. Pretty near the truth of what did happen, too, don't you think?”

“I see what you mean,” Bobby answered cautiously, a noncommittal reply that set the other scowling afresh.

‘‘Plain enough,” Norris insisted. “He came home carrying a stiff load, thought he would have a bath to sober up on, filled it, thought another little drink wouldn't do him any harm, and that and the steam and the heat altogether were too much for him. That's all there is to it. The bath was full of boiling water when they found him, but that could happen easily enough. Most likely he put in cold water first to save steam in the room, and then turned on the geyser to warm it up. Take it from me, that's the way it happened.”

“I suppose it might be that,” agreed Bobby. “There's the insurance, though, collected by the woman who passed as his wife and wasn't.”

“Well, hang it,” Norris argued, “if he had taken out an insurance, someone was going to collect it. A woman got it, didn't she? Most likely he had been living with her, and she had talked him into making provision for her if anything happened to him. 1 don't see much in that.”

It was a theory Bobby, too, might have been willing to accept – even though it seemed to agree little with Ronnie's evident anxiety to return to Cora and win her forgiveness – but for those other deaths, here and on the Continent, so strangely resembling each other, forming such a series of coincidences as seemed beyond all natural explanation.

However, there was nothing more to learn from Norris, and Bobby took his departure, receiving no invitation to come again. It was late now, for time soon slips by in these journeys and inquiries, but Bobby made his way back to Scotland Yard knowing some of his colleagues would still be on duty there. Arrived, he first took his carefully preserved cigarette case to the fingerprint department and then went to report to the officer in charge, Inspector Ferris, who greeted him with a worried frown.

“Nice cheery nest of eggs you've tumbled on in this Berry, Quick Syndicate,” he said. “We told off Jones to take care of Lawrence, and he's rung up to say he's fairly sure he's recognized Lawrence, just as you said. Didn't you report something about having got his fingerprints?” Bobby was just beginning to explain that he had left them with the fingerprint department when there came a knock at the door, and there appeared a messenger with a report from it. For the system is so complete it takes no more than a minute or two either to identify those prints already registered or else be sure they are not there.

Ferris, too accustomed to this promptitude and accuracy even to notice it, took the report and glanced through it rapidly.

“That's right,” he said, “it's what Jones said. The prints on the cigarette case are identical with those of a man named Percy Lawrence, a bank clerk, sent up for five years for embezzlement, awarded twelve strokes of the cat for an aggravated assault on a warder shortly after reception, sentenced to an additional two years for attempted murder of another convict, served the full five years without remission of a day, but given a free pardon for the additional two years partly because he stopped a runaway horse that was heading straight for a group of wives and children of the warders and partly because fresh evidence showed that the other convict he nearly murdered had not only asked for it, but it was a pity he hadn't got it. Probably the affair with the runaway horse made some of the warders go into the other business more carefully. They couldn't let him off the cat, though, because he had already had it. Well, they say the worst of prison is its soul-destroying monotony, but Lawrence seems to have had a lively enough time.”

“He wasn't released till he had served his full time, then?” Bobby asked. “He wasn't on ticket of leave at all?”

“No; full term served,” agreed Ferris, “for the first sentence and a free pardon for the second. We had no more to do with him, and apparently he never came under notice again until now. Embezzlement, attempted murder, aggravated assault – lively sort of record. I don't wonder he's described as ‘reckless and sullen, desperate character, dangerous.'”

Bobby did not answer. He was trying to reconcile the picture thus presented in the official records with the quiet-voiced, slow-spoken, dull-eyed personality he had interviewed that afternoon, withdrawn from the world, as it were, and lost apparently in gloomy contemplation of the past. He found it difficult; he almost wondered if, in spite of the evidence of the fingerprints, two different men were not concerned. But that was not possible. Fingerprints are conclusive. Or was it that prison had so broken the spirit of this once “dangerous” and “reckless” man as to have reduced him to the automaton he seemed today? But, then, there was that background of dark horror against which his figure seemed to be outlined afresh.

“Jones,” continued Ferris, “followed him to a house in a street off the Edgware Road. Lawrence went in with a key as if he lived there, and Jones phoned us he would wait for further instructions. It's time he rang up now – that's him most likely,” he added, as the phone bell rang.

It was in fact a call Jones had put through from a Bayswater phone booth, and Ferris looked discontented as he listened.

“He's given Jones the slip,” he explained to Bobby. “Says Lawrence came out after about an hour and went off west towards Notting Hill, walking very fast. Jones thinks he knew he was being followed. He walked slap across a traffic-stream lights had just released, as if he were trying to get himself killed or daring Jones to follow. Jones says the motorists are still most likely using language about it. Anyhow, he got away with it, and Jones says he didn't want to commit suicide by attempting to follow. Instead he went back to the house Lawrence had left. It's a lodging house and Lawrence has had rooms there for two years. Jones got the landlady talking. She describes Lawrence as a very quiet gentleman, never complains, gives no trouble; the nicest lodger she ever had, in fact. She'd jump a bit if she knew his little record, though. It seems he is out every evening from eight to eleven, when he comes in and goes straight to bed. So what we've to do next is to find out what's his little game, and where he spends those three hours every night.”

“I can't understand,” Bobby said, ‘‘why he put his finger-prints on my cigarette case the way he did. I feel certain he understood and did it on purpose.”

“Thought you had recognized him, and wanted to show he didn't care,” suggested Ferris. “Just the sort of defiance his record suggests. ‘What are you going to do about it?' sort of thing. We shall have to be careful he's not armed if we have to pick him up, or there'll be a vacancy or two in the force most likely.”

“Is there anything in about the girl typist?” Bobby asked.

“Oh, yes,” Ferris answered. “We told Tommy Ryan to look after her. He knew her at once. Name of Alice, surname to taste; just at present, apparently, it's Yates; better known as Slimmy Alice to distinguish her from Fatty Alice, another of the same sort but dead now – they don't last long. Slimmy generally described herself as a film actress when run in. Probably her film acting amounts to her having tried to get Connie's to put her name down, and being refused because they spotted her at once for what she is.”