The Bath Mysteries (2 page)

“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.”

“Too bad,” murmured Chris, more sympathetically than believingly. To Cora, Chris added: “I don't know when I shall be able to pay back that couple of thou.”

Cora took not the least notice of this remark. She might not have heard, and yet they all felt in her a kind of hidden heat of attention, as though no word was spoken but was fuel to some secret fire in her. Chris's remark had reference to a sum of £2,000 Ronnie Owen had lent to him in a mood of unusual benevolence, affluence, and less unusual intoxication. That, of course, had been before the crash, and Bobby remembered the occasion well, for he had chanced that night to be in his cousins' company; had had made to himself, but had not accepted, similar generous offers; and had admired a fur coat in ocelot skin Ronnie had happened to see in a shop window, taken a fancy to, and bought then and there for Cora. She had been less grateful in that she had already two fur coats, and did not care for ocelot fur or consider that it suited her. The loan to Chris had been for the purpose of buying out an unsatisfactory partner in the antique business and for extending it, and the windfall which had permitted Ronnie to display such all-round generosity had been the result of a highly successful speculation in gold-mine shares, undertaken on the strength of information passed on by Dick Norris that it was commonly said he had failed to act on himself since he had not believed it reliable – otherwise he would not have passed it on but kept it to himself, was the unkind comment generally added when the story was told. By an added irony of fate, it was only this lucky hit, resulting in such unusual affluence – for the £2,000 lent to Chris had been a comparatively small part of the gain – that had put Ronnie in a position to propose to Cora. Chris said to her now:

“No news yet of Ronnie, I suppose?”

“Yes,” she answered. “I believe he's been murdered.”

The last word fell like a stone into a quiet pond. One could almost see the slow ripples of surprise, horror, incredulity, spreading in each listener's mind – but incredulity predominating. Lady Hirlpool was the first to speak. She said protestingly, a little with the air of thus finally disposing of the matter:

"My dear Cora!”

Cora picked up the half-smoked stump of one of the cigarettes she had discarded and put it between her lips without appearing to notice that it had long been extinguished.

“I expect I shall begin to scream soon,” she remarked dispassionately.

“Oh, I say... Cora,” exclaimed Norris, his first expression of blank disbelief changing to one of acute alarm.

“When people start to scream at the Yard,” observed Bobby as dispassionately as Cora, “we just let 'em. Then we go on when they're through.”

His grandmother turned on him with a flash of genuine indignation.

“I call that simply brutal,” she declared heatedly.

“So do they, granny,” agreed Bobby.

Lady Hirlpool snorted, and took refuge in her lipstick.

Lord Hirlpool said:

“It's because of this idea of Cora's that I asked you to come along here. Mother's flat is too small.”

“'Tisn't,” snapped Lady Hirlpool, still indignant. “I can get two bridge tables in quite easily, and three if someone sits in the lobby.”

“Besides, it's in West Kensington,” Lord Hirlpool added clinchingly. He still thought of West Kensington as others think of Central Africa, and, before his mother could frame another angry protest, he went on: “At my hotel one can't be private, so I thought it would be better to meet here to talk.”

“If I had known,” interposed Norris, “I would have suggested my place. I've a flat in Park Lane now, you know,” he added with a certain complacence, since this suggested an affluence altogether new and the more unexpected in view of his recent lament over the present difficulty of selling articles about golf in a world in which possibly not everyone played golf, but certainly everyone wrote about it.

“But... murdered?” protested Chris, as if the word had only just sunk into his mind. “Old Ronnie... murdered...? Oh, come...”

“If Cora has any facts to go on,” Bobby pointed out, himself incredulous, “she ought to give information to the C.I.D.”

“Well, you're the C.I.D., aren't you?” asked Chris. “Jolly good, too; people like it, when you're buying bits of things from them, if you tell them you've a cousin in the C.I.D. Makes them feel so safe,” he added, his voice the soft purr of a cat lazily absorbing a saucerful of cream.

Bobby, very indignant at this shameless use of a family connection, tried to think of some effective protest, but failed. All he could do was to grumble out: