The Bath Mysteries (11 page)

“Hard luck," agreed Bobby.

“Nearly did me in; it was as near as that,” said Chris reminiscently. “Only thing that saved me was that two thousand poor old Ronnie gave me after he had his lucky stroke with the gold mine. You remember?”

“Was that a gift? I thought it was a loan,” Bobby asked.

Chris looked at him sharply and suspiciously.

“Mrs. Ronnie been talking to you about it?” he demanded. “It was a loan in a sense. What Ronnie said was: ‘Pay it back if and when you can, but not till then.' Lord knows, Mrs. Ronnie should have it tomorrow if I had it to give her. But it's God's truth, I couldn't raise two thousand just now if I sold up. Mind you, the book value is a lot more – five or ten times as much – but book value and cash returns from a forced sale –”

With a sweeping gesture he indicated how enormous was the distance, as from equator to pole, that separated book value from cash returns, and Bobby nodded thoughtfully.

“I can understand that,” he agreed, still thoughtful, for an unpleasant idea was creeping into his mind.

“The truth is,” declared Chris, “I'm over-bought. So is nearly everyone else in the antique business. The slump caught us all; it came like a skid when the surface changes without your knowing it; one moment bowling along a straight, clear road and the next in the ditch and lucky if you're still alive.”

Again Bobby nodded. It was, he remembered, an odd repercussion of that same slump when men had left their offices on Saturday, well off and prosperous, to return bankrupt on Monday morning, that had brought about the disclosure of the scandal in which Ronnie had been so unhappily involved.

“What I came for,” he said presently, “was to ask you for Dick Norris's address. He was Ronnie's closest friend. Someone must surely have known where he was and what he was doing. If only I could find that out, I might be able to get a clue to who these people were who drew his life insurance money.”

“Ronnie kept out of everyone's way on purpose,” Chris answered. “It was all rather hard luck on him. He never meant it the way it turned out, and when it did he felt it a lot. He played the fool, but he was fooled as well, and afterwards the one thing he wanted was to cut himself off entirely from everyone who had known him before. I'm sure of that. You can ask Norris, but you'll find he'll tell you just the same.”

“Ronnie had hardly any money with him when he disappeared,” Bobby remarked. “Yet he must have got hold of some somehow. The evidence at the inquest showed he was in business for himself – unless that was faked, too. Anyhow, he had to have money to live on.”

“Well, I don't know anything about that,” Chris said.

“He never asked you for any of that two thousand, I suppose?”

“He did not,” Chris snapped. “What's more, I don't believe he would have if he had been starving. Ronnie always stuck to what he said; never budged an inch from it. That's Norris's address, but you can save yourself the trouble. He won't be able to help you, either. Ronnie deliberately cut himself off from everyone who knew him.”

This last sentence hung oddly in Bobby's mind as, leaving the little antique shop, he walked briskly on to the address Chris had mentioned. Had those others, too, he wondered, who had met their deaths in a manner so strangely similar, also deliberately cut themselves off, like Ronnie, from all their friends? If that were so, it was easier to understand why there had been comparatively little investigation into the circumstances of their deaths, if there had been no friend or relative to press for further inquiry. But, then, that seemed to suggest they had all been carefully sought out and chosen, and again Bobby was aware that his blood ran chill at this suggestion that continually seemed to force itself upon him – of a carefully prepared, widely spread organization of death, working in a strange and dreadful secrecy. But, then, how was it possible to find over and over again men who had deliberately made themselves alone in the world, and for whom, therefore, no inquiry – at any rate no immediate inquiry – was likely? One could hardly advertise openly for such unfortunates, and it would be difficult to pick them out from those likely to answer any ordinary advertisement – or even to make certain any of them would be among the applicants. There was, of course, the Thames Embankment, that goal of the lost, home of the homeless, refuge of the solitary. Possibly cautious search and inquiry along there for such lost creatures might have been successful.

Wider and wider still, darker and darker yet, the whole thing seemed to show itself to Bobby's eyes.

He turned out of the street he had been following into that behind Park Lane, where stood the block of flats to which he had been directed, and for a moment or two stood watching it with awestruck admiration, so vast it seemed, so high it reached to the heavens above, so far it stretched on either hand, so plainly had the architect derived his inspiration from the workhouse of the Victorian era.

Extremes meet, Bobby thought, as he reflected how entirely at home Oliver Twist would have felt in this grim and bleak abode of twentieth-century luxury and wealth, where a room twelve feet square, with a bath and a cupboard called a kitchen attached thereto, was labelled “Mansion Flat
de luxe
,” and rented at the kind of figure more familiar to astronomers than to ordinary mortals.

Dick Norris's flat was, however, of a more spacious kind, though, the supply of adjectives being finite, it was entered like the others in the books of the letting office as “Mansion Flat
de luxe
.” It possessed no less than three rooms, not counting a bathroom and a kitchen, both of reasonable size, or even the cupboard for hats and coats in the lobby, a cupboard almost as large itself as some of the rooms elsewhere in the building. The apartment was fitted up, too, with every contrivance – useful or not – ingenuity could imagine, from provision of a television set to an automatic victrola contrivance in the bedroom guaranteed to play the
Reveille
at any desired hour of the morning until turned off by pressure of a button that could not be reached from the bed.

Norris had furnished and decorated the flat in the most completely modern day-after-tomorrow style the youngest futuristic heart could have desired. In the decoration not a curve was to be seen – Hogarth being quite out of date. All the furniture was in chromium and red leather.

On his arrival, and on his giving the number of the flat he required, Bobby found himself treated with great deference by porters arrayed as never was Solomon at the height of his glory, for deference to the visitors to certain of the more expensive flats was strictly exacted by the management and duly considered in the rent. An equally deferential elevator attendant wafted Bobby heavenward, and as soon as he stepped out of the elevator he saw Norris himself standing in a doorway nearly opposite, apparently saying goodbye to a stocky little man in whom Bobby thought he recognized a prominent amateur golfer.

Norris nodded a greeting to Bobby, and, stepping aside from the doorway, told him to go in and sit down. The amateur golfer, shaking hands with Norris, said:

“Well, so long. Sorry you can't manage it.”

“Only wish I could,” said Norris, waiting to see him enter the elevator, and then turning back into the flat, where Bobby was standing looking round with wonder, admiration, and a general feeling that he had never seen anything in all his life so strongly reminiscent of a dentist's operating-room. There ought, he felt, to be a drill and a case of shining little instruments – picks and pincers and so on – but these were missing, and on the table, instead of illustrated papers months out of date, were scattered two or three financial papers, the prospectuses of some new companies, what seemed a typed draft, corrected in blue pencil, of a circular headed “London, Brighton & South Coast Syndicate,” and a letter with the printed heading of that Berry, Quick Syndicate from whose offices he had just come and beginning in capital letters: “WE RECOMMEND –”

No doubt the Berry, Quick Syndicate, like other businesses of its type, distributed its recommendations wholesale and at random – bait flung upon the waters in the hope some fat fish would bite, and no waters more likely to hold a better catch than these blocks of flats. Before Bobby had time to notice more, Norris came back into the room, and, as if he did not much want Bobby to see them, swept all these papers and documents from the table into a drawer. He said:

“That was Pips who was just going – you know, P I. Phipps, high up in the Open last year; means to pull it off some day. He wanted me to join in a freak foursome competition he's getting up, but I can't manage it. I may be off to China any day almost.”

“China?” repeated Bobby, surprised. “Why? Anything special?”

“Silver,” explained Norris mysteriously. “Not in your line, of course, but there's a big game on in silver. The U.S. trying to buy cheap, and the rest of us trying to buy cheaper to dump it on them at as fat an increase as they'll stand for. Big money in it.”

“I see,” said Bobby, who had, in fact, noticed various headlines in the papers about the silver situation. “I suppose that explains –”

He glanced round as he spoke at surroundings very different from those in which he had last seen Norris, when he had had occasion to call at the rooms Norris had formerly occupied in a square, half offices, half lodginghouses, where Bloomsbury tails off towards Islington.

“Not a bad little place, is it?” Norris asked, with a gleam of satisfaction showing for once in those generally expressionless light blue eyes of his. “You know, I was half expecting you. About that notion of Cora's that Ronnie was done in, I suppose? But how did you know where I was? I've only been here a week or two.”

“Chris told me,” Bobby explained, and Norris grumbled: “Oh, did he? I never told him I had moved even. Do you know how he knew?”

“No. How?”

“He's on the board of the company running the show here – gets twenty guineas for doing a doze at the directors' meeting once a month. If I had known in time I would have gone somewhere else. But I heard he had been recommending the place – not to me; didn't think I had the money. Chris knows a good thing all right though, I'll say that much for him, and of course I didn't know that he had a reason for plugging it. So I came round to have a look, and liked it and signed the lease before I tumbled to why Chris was talking the way he was.”

“You've got it fixed up all the very latest,” observed Bobby, his tone full of insincere admiration, for there still haunted him painful memories of the last dentist's apartment he had visited, so that he almost expected to hear Norris inviting him to be seated and uttering the usual perjury about not going to hurt.

“Well, anyhow,” agreed Norris, “I haven't got any of that junk off the dust-heap Chris palms off on suckers.”

“No,” agreed Bobby. “He'll be able to drop that sort of thing, though, if he's getting on boards of shows like this. Wonder how he managed to get the job.”

“Big stockholder,” Norris explained. “He's taken up sixty thousand in five percent debentures in three instalments of twenty thousand each in the last three years.”

“Oh, he has, has he, though?” Bobby muttered, and, because he feared that something of the discomposure he felt might show itself in his expression, he stooped as if to pick up something he made pretence of having dropped. Fortunately, Norris did not seem to have noticed anything, or, if he had, his brown, tanned face and those cold, light-blue eyes of his gave no sign, and in his voice sounded nothing but envy, as he added:

“Pretty good to have come out of a lot of mouldy old rubbish.”

“I never thought you could make such a pile out of antiques,” agreed Bobby, wondering in spite of himself if it had come out of antiques; telling himself, too, that it was absurd to let the mere mention of the sum of £20,000 affect him so unpleasantly, like a nervous shock; his nerves must be getting out of order, he thought. “Better than golf – better even than silver,” he added, trying to make his voice sound as natural as he could, “though it looks as if silver did you pretty well, too.”

“Oh, it's not only silver,” Norris explained. “I've brought off one or two other little things just lately. You can, if you get inside information. Now you're here, come and have a look round; the bathroom's a regular box of tricks.”

Bobby was taken round accordingly, shown the television screen – there was no television programme on at the moment, unfortunately – the working of the air-conditioning plant – it was out of order temporarily – the lighting scheme governed by so many switches you had to make the tour of the room to turn them all on and then generally found you had forgotten several; and finally the bathroom, a very pearl and nonpareil of bathrooms, the bathroom of a hundred dreams that were perhaps not very far removed from nightmares, at any rate for the simpler souls never likely, however, to have to use it. The bath itself was almost big enough to swim in, the walls were lined with glass decorated with mermaids and water nymphs not always behaving with a strict propriety, and with various fishes in whom, somehow, the artist had managed to express a certain shocked consciousness of that fact. In addition there was provided every conceivable fitting; a sunray apparatus at the head of the bath, a heating-lamp at its foot, and so on in an endless catalogue.

Even Norris's curiously unchanging, light-blue eyes glowed with enthusiasm as, like a child with a new toy, he showed off all the complicated wonders the twentieth century has added to the simple act of washing; but Bobby paid but scant attention, for somehow it was as though he had a vision of that wide and ample bath with a dead man lying in it. He said abruptly:

“Might be a bit awkward if either of those things fell into the water.”