The Bath Mysteries (28 page)

“Yes, sir,” agreed Bobby impassively.

“Great ladies' man, too, I remember,” mused Higher Authority; and then dropped the subject, but thought that if Bobby wanted to spend a day at Oxford, looking up old friends of his undergraduate days, there was no objection at all. Sergeant Owen had done a good deal of work – quite useful work – and deserved a day's rest and change. Higher Authority was, in fact, quite benevolent about it, and Bobby expressed his gratitude and retired, fully convinced it was thought just as well he should be out of the way for the time.

“Mean to haul in poor old Chris,” he thought, “and don't want me around. Nothing I can do.”

He returned to his rooms, and was glad to find waiting for him the report he had been promised of the address given by Dr. Ambrose Beale to the local literary and debating society. Bobby put it in his pocket to read in the train, and during the journey from Paddington to Oxford did his best to carry out that intention, but soon found himself in acute sympathy with the members of the literary society. He supposed the words made sense; they seemed to be put together in grammatical sequence, a good many of them he even recognized as being in ordinary everyday use, the meaning they conveyed to him was just none at all.

Sighing, he put the document in his pocket, and on arrival at Oxford, and after evading the various guides who assured him that unless he accepted their services he would see very little of the place, he found his way to the rooms of a Reader in Philosophy with whom his own acquaintance in his college days had been chiefly confined to the receipt of violent exhortations from the towing path, when he was being tried out for the college boat and the philosopher had been transformed into a coach.

The Reader, Mr. Allen by name, was out, and Bobby, awaiting his return, found a volume of Hegel in which he was somewhat doubtfully immersed when Mr. Allen appeared and noticed at once the book in Bobby's hand.

“I heard you had taken to tracking down the nightly burglar and the festive forger,” he said. “You don't expect to find one in Hegel, do you?”

“No,” Bobby answered, “it is a murderer I am looking for.”

“Dear me,” said Mr. Allen, from whom many years of experience of undergraduates had taken all capacity for surprise, “in the
Logic
. Had any luck?” he added with interest.

“I think so,” Bobby answered. “One of our uniform men gave me a tip when I saw an old lady nearly run over, and it looks as if Hegel confirms. Would you call Hegel a philosophic realist?”

“Would I call Zeno an Epicurean?” retorted Mr. Allen, growing sarcastic.

“The monad theory?” Bobby asked. “Do you find that in Spinoza?”

“You do not,” replied Mr. Allen, feeling sarcasm was useless here and falling back on patience. “You find it in Liebnitz.” He returned to sarcasm. “If you want to ask any more questions like that, go and find some ten-year-old schoolboy – backward, of course.”

“But I want to ask you,” Bobby protested. “Oh, do you mind looking at this?”

He handed Mr. Allen the report of Dr. Beale's paper and retired to the window, whence he was recalled by various sounds of indignation and contempt and finally by that of the typescript being flung violently on the table. From one of the shelves Mr. Allen took down Whitehead's
Process and Reality
and opened it.

“That stuff,” he said, with an indignant glance at the typescript on the table, “is a muddled-up copy of the beginning of this chapter. It hasn't even been copied right – whole paragraphs missed out. Is it a joke or what?”

“I shouldn't call it a joke,” Bobby answered gravely. “Did you know a Dr. Ambrose Beale? I've been looking him up. He got his doctorate of philosophy in 1903 for a thesis on ‘The Conditioning of the Unconscious.'”

“A very fine piece of work, too,” declared Mr. Allen. “I remember it well. It suggested ideas that were entirely novel then, though they are common enough now. In its way, a landmark of thought. He went to Australia to study the Unconscious in the Primitive Mind.”

“To Australia?” repeated Bobby, remembering that Australia had been mentioned in the Priestman case.

“Yes. There was an article in
Mind
giving some tentative conclusions, and I've always hoped he would follow them up some day. Very brilliant man, most original outlook, wonderful grasp of his subject. I should be glad to get in touch with him again. Do you know anything about him?”

“It was he who wrote that,” Bobby said, nodding towards the typescript.

“He did not,” said Mr. Allen, very positively.

“Why?”

“Because he was not a humbug, a charlatan, an impostor,” declared Mr. Allen heatedly. “That typescript is ignorant rubbish – unless it's a practical joke?” he added, relenting a little.

“I don't think it's a joke,” Bobby answered; “anything but a joke indeed.”

“What is it, then?” demanded Mr. Allen.

“The gallows, I hope,” Bobby answered grimly, and went away.

But in the train, on the journey back to Paddington, Bobby felt he had after all drawn only very little nearer to his goal. True, he was assured now that Dr. Ambrose Beale was an impostor, with no right to the name he had assumed, no right to call himself a doctor of philosophy, ignorant indeed of the very elements of that study. Yet between the proof of all that he now held in his hands, and proof to satisfy a jury that Beale was actively responsible for the long series of murders under investigation, the gap was wide; nor did Bobby at the moment see any means of bridging it.

He had no doubts himself. He felt he ought to have guessed the truth at the moment when Beale, thinking himself safe talking to a policeman – probably he was more cautious with people he supposed better educated – had babbled absurdly of Hegel's realism and had attributed the Liebnitz theory of monads to Spinoza.

He wondered if ever before in the history of crime a better knowledge of philosophy would have led to a quicker detection of a murderer's guilt. But he had also to admit to himself that there had been other indications that might have roused direct suspicion in him, instead of only that vague unease which it had needed the casual remark of Markham, the uniform man on street duty, to crystallize into conviction of the truth. For, though he was not instructed in higher mathematics, he did know enough to be aware that equations are seldom represented by such neat columns of figures as Beale had on his blotting pad, and that were in reality no doubt, the imaginary stock and share transactions sent to Lawrence to be copied into the books of the firm in readiness for the possible inspection by insurance company assessors that was being prepared for. In the same way the clean, unsoiled, in a way untouched, appearance of the books on the shelves in Beale's study might have let him guess they were there only for show and deceit.

Looking back, now he was assured of the truth, every detail seemed to fall into place.

But it was a good deal less certain that all of it put together amounted to anything like that direct, simple, and unquestionable proof the law requires.

The coat of ocelot fur, for instance, that had been mentioned as having been worn by the supposed Mrs. Oliver at the inquest on the unfortunate Ronnie Owen, and that it was now fairly certain had been passed on to Alice in order to confuse the issues, as well as, most likely, to get rid of a possibly dangerous identification – what was there to show it was actually and in fact the same coat? “Fairly certain” and “most likely” are not phrases that can be used in courts.

Obvious, too, that the supposed Mrs. Oliver had been in reality Mrs. Beale, the timid, nervous woman, at home only in her kitchen, of whom he had once had a glimpse. Probably she had been provided with a dark “transformation” to cover her own fair hair, and other steps would have been taken to give her a superficial likeness to the genuine Mrs. Ronnie Owen, but there again, what proof of all that could be produced? Most likely, too, she had had no guilty knowledge of the purpose she was being used to serve, but had simply done as her husband bade her, partly coerced, partly persuaded, accepting some such explanation as that it was all part of obscure business transactions, credits, loans, debts, financial arrangements, that site herself neither could nor was expected to understand. Any evidence she could give, even if it could be obtained, would probably be useless, and at such a distance of time there would be no hope of there being obtainable proof of her identity with the self-styled Mrs. Oliver.

Everything, Bobby told himself gloomily, had been prepared and carried out with the utmost care and foresight. No doubt it was when Beale was in his study, ostensibly writing his philosophical treatise, that he composed the imaginary transactions to be entered in the books of his syndicates with such care and detail that the accountants who had examined them had noticed nothing suspicious, and had accepted the entries as genuine. The precaution had even been taken of showing a moderate profit, on which income tax had been duly paid – and there is no document on earth more satisfactory and convincing in its stark, bare realism than a demand note or a receipt of the Income Tax Commissioners. In the safe seclusion of his study, too, Beale had probably prepared the necessary forged documents, marriage certificates, and so on, that had been necessary to satisfy the insurance companies and prevent their suspicions developing into a refusal to pay.

No doubt it would be easy to establish that the business of the Berry, Quick Syndicate and other concerns had been entirely imaginary, but there is no legal offence in inventing business transactions or in paying income tax on non-existent profits, and in them is no proof of murder, however suspicious they may seem. Bobby supposed that very likely evidence on such points would not be admitted at a trial, unless and until it could be linked up with more direct proof. Confirmatory testimony was all that could be considered.

Nor was there any hope that Lawrence could give evidence of identity. Plainly he had had no suspicion of Beale; he had regarded him simply as a prospective victim, though one safe for the time, both because Lawrence believed he was himself first on the list, and also because Beale had been wise enough to refuse to insure his life.

Bobby had learned, too, in further conversation with Mr. Allen, that the genuine Ambrose Beale had been a little over thirty when he received his doctorate in 1903, so that his age, if he were still alive, would be somewhere about sixty-five. And that was why the sham Beale had professed that age, though Bobby was now perfectly certain he was at least fifteen years younger.

“I ought to have followed that pointer up,” Bobby told himself with self-reproach.

Actually, though a vague unease had troubled Bobby almost from the moment of his first meeting with Beale, it was the subtle manner in which that gentleman had transferred himself from the category of possible suspects to that of probable victims which had succeeded so well in diverting suspicion. In the same way, this aspect of yet another dupe and victim he had succeeded in giving himself had prevented any risk of Lawrence growing suspicious. One does not readily suspect the fly hovering over the web, and apparently about to alight on it, of being in fact the spider that has actually spun the web.

Bobby supposed, too, that it was the gossip started by the porter, who had recognized him as a police officer on the occasion of his first visit to the Berry, Quick office, that had reached Beale and brought him so promptly on the scene in his character of yet another prospective victim. All the scene that day with Lawrence must have been carefully arranged; Lawrence in his condition of apathy and indifference being ready to agree to anything asked of him, without troubling to require any explanation.

The precautions he had taken to insure that his own death should end the series had satisfied him. These effected, he had been willing to drift on the current of events to an end clearly foreseen and willingly accepted.

So vague and doubtful, in fact, had been Bobby's own suspicions that there had been needed the casual remark of the uniformed constable he had been chatting with one day, to the effect that a man who could laugh at an old lady's narrow escape from being run over had a murderer's mind, to crystallize them into certainty, as sometimes in chemistry the addition of one element to others held in solution will make clear the nature of them all.

Clear and certain as all this was now in Bobby's mind, yet, go over and over again, as often as he liked, his arguments and inferences, he saw no line to follow leading to absolute proof.

Beale was certainly an impostor, and that much no doubt could be proved, but imposture is not murder. Indeed, in two of the tragedies that had taken place there was no proof of murder at all. Bobby himself was convinced that murder had been carried out by some simple process of making the victim drunk or drugged, or depriving him of consciousness in some way, and then getting him into his bath, there to drown; but in each case the verdict of the coroner's jury had been “Accidental Death” and would not be easy to upset. In the other case – that of Ronnie Owen – there was indeed this proof of murder, since it could be shown that poison had been administered, but nothing could be brought forward to implicate Beale.

And in the case of the death of the unlucky Dick Norris, there was nothing again to show that Beale had been in any way concerned, or even anywhere near at the time. Possibly he had been concealed in the flat somewhere, but that was a pure guess, and Lawrence apparently had seen no sign of him. There was, in fact, nothing to prove that Norris's death had been anything but a deplorable and unfortunate accident.

Bobby was certain for his own part that Norris had begun to entertain suspicions pointing towards Beale; that this was the cause of his nocturnal wanderings on the Embankment which had roused suspicions of himself; that he had accumulated certain evidence; that Beale, therefore, had found it necessary to remove him, adopting for that purpose his well-established and successful technique of the bath; and finally that it was Beale's collection and removal of such written testimony as Norris might have succeeded in getting together that accounted for the hurried search of which the flat showed traces. Efforts to induce Norris to insure his life had plainly been made by the evidence of the policy found in his rooms, and the careful limitation to accidents hardly likely to be caused purposely suggested, too, considerable suspicion and uneasiness on his part. But such policies so limited are not uncommon, and no jury would see anything there out of the way, or feel forced to accept the theory that Norris might have been testing Beale's reaction to an insurance so carefully limited.