Death for Madame: A Prof. John Stubbs Mystery

2018

Chapter 1

Visit to an Aunt

I ALWAYS knew that no good would come of the old man taking up Mr. Ben Carr as a kind of pet or hobby. It was all very well for me to tell myself that two such disruptive personalities might cancel one another out and result in that peace which passes all understanding. I might as well have hoped that Professor Stubbs would learn to mind his own business.

Mr. Carr seemed to be in and out of the house at all hours of the day and night. He is the genuine inquiring mind, taking nothing for granted until he has tried it out and then usually making some mistake in his experiment which meant that he did not believe even then.

I groaned aloud when I realised that he had discovered Stephen Hales’s Statistical Essays, published early in the eighteenth century, for I was afraid of what was coming. I tried to change the subject, but I might as well have tried to push back the water falling over Niagara.

Prof, cock, Mr. Carr said, looking up from the calf-bound volume on his knees, have you ever tried these things out?

The old man looked startled. I was sure that experiments on the force of sap in vegetables were among the things which he had never got around to trying out. I might have hoped, but for Mr. Carr, that he never would get around to them, but as Mr. Carr waved the book I realised with great bitterness the vanity of human wishes.

Before I knew where I was, I was out in the garden with Mr. Farley, the gardener and general factotum, and the old man and Mr. Carr. We were all busily engaged in cutting off branches and tying pieces of glass tubing to the ends of the branches, with which we hoped to work out the force of the sap. The only thing that prevented vegetable statistics becoming a major part of my life and hard times was that neither the Professor nor Mr. Carr had realised or remembered, in their enthusiasm, that it was the wrong time of the year, and, glory be to God, a hard frost put the snuffer on their ideas.

I might easily have rejoiced in my escape, but I knew that the failure of one experiment was only an incentive to the minds of the others to think up other things which might worry me and give me extra work. I was damned, literally as well as figuratively, when Mr. Carr turned up one day in a taxi, the greater part of which seemed to be occupied by a strange machine. It was nothing more or less than an air-pump, and judging from its appearance it might very well have been one of those which my illustrious namesake, Robert Boyle, had used for his experiments On the Spring and Weight of the Air in the sixteen-fifties. It certainly dated from the time of Mr. Hauksbee. The only thing that could be said in its favour was that it was in a bad state of repair, but I should have known that a little thing like that would not have deterred Mr. Carr once he was determined on some sort of game. He set to work, with the help of various seventeenth-and eighteenth-century copper-plates, to make the thing work, and I’m damned if he did not succeed.

This is the sort of thing which persisted in interfering with my serious work. What it did to the old man’s work was nobody’s business. So far as I could see life looked as though it would be one crack-brained scheme after another and that we would never get back to our old-fashioned sort of hard work. I had grumbled like hell at the old man’s working methods, notes all over the floor and books everywhere in the house, even including the bathroom, but I’d gladly have gone back to that to escape from the sheer lunacy which seemed to have descended upon the large house in Hampstead.

There was only one thing left for me to be grateful about. That was that by some miracle there did not seem to be any really interesting murders about. Mr. Carr’s amusements certainly interfered with work, but the interference was not on the same scale as that of a first-class murder.

So far as I was concerned, personally the whole of the population of the United Kingdom could murder one another, just so long as, to use the immortal words of Mr. Sam Goldwyn, they included me out of it. When I took the job as assistant to Professor Stubbs I looked forward to a really quiet life, with nothing moving any faster than a seed germinates, or a plant takes to grow to maturity and blossom and fruit. I’d had enough rough-and-tumble during the war and was fed up with it.

I should have guessed that I was born under a false star, and that no wish of mine would ever come true. My life with Professor Stubbs had been nothing more than one damned murder after another, and even in between murders I’d had no peace. I think that the Professor keeps a tame poltergeist as another man might keep a cat or a dog, and that his poltergeist has a private feud with me. At any rate that is the only way I can account for the manner in which things silt up from the large work-room and come to rest in my rooms at the top of the house. One day I’ll wake up and find that there is no room left for me to move about and then they’ll put me in a padded cell where, at least, there will be some sort of quiet.

It has become quite useless for me to protest to Professor Stubbs, with all the pathos of which I am capable, that we are botanists and not detectives or playboys. He insists that there is enough time in a day to try our hands at everything. That is all right for him, as my private belief is that he has come to a mutual agreement with the devil under which he has given up the luxury of sleeping. He can go on working for forty-eight hours without a break and come up as fresh as paint. I can’t.

Of course, I really have no one but myself to blame. If when I first joined the Professor I had insisted upon working some sort of regulation hours, then he’d have agreed and I’d have been able to have a little time to myself, but, alas, I made no such suggestion and now I find I’m as likely to finish work at five in the morning as at tea-time, more likely in fact.

We were sitting in the large work-room, a place lined with many thousands of books which have become the terror of my waking hours. I rearrange them at least once a week and still they become a mass of ill-sorted all-sorts, with thrillers in between the volumes of Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, and Gunther’s Early British Botanists in the place where the telephone directory should be. When I want the directory as likely as not I find it between the two volumes of Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth or hobnobbing with Parkinson or Gerard. Mr. Carr, waving a very sharp and dangerous-looking Norwegian knife, was busily engaged in whittling a piece of cedar wood. I did not know what he wanted it for, and I still don’t know. It was probably a part of some machine he was trying to invent, which would not have worked once he had put it together. On the other hand he may just have been whittling away for the sheer love of it. He adores making things which can be of no possible use to anyone. I remember him once spending two days on a set of dice, loaded dice, which when they were finished seemed to have been weighted so that no matter what happened he was certain to lose.

Max, cock, he had said to me with a far-away sigh, it’s no good. I thought I’d make a set of dice which would let me take the skin off Maggie, but it seems I’ll need to get a new wife.

He had scowled at the thought of the trouble getting a new wife would entail. I could never make up my mind about the truth of his stories, for he certainly enjoyed improving the truth, but one of his most continual complaints was that his wife, who wasn’t his wife, used to win all his money off him with loaded dice. He complained that she was worse than the income-tax, for at least they left a man something in his pockets, even if it was only a few coppers.

The Professor was reading the latest number of the Journal of Genetics and I was still trying to tidy up a paper which I had been writing. Mr. Carr grunted and threw his plug of wood into the fire, and slid the knife blade into the handle.

Prof, he said suddenly, do you know my aunt? The old man looked up from his reading and shook his head. I think he was wondering whether Mr. Carr was not asking him some obscure kind of riddle.

Well, Mr. Carr went on seriously, you should know my aunt. Most extraordinary old cuss she is. Used to keep a brothel in Brussels, she did, but she found the wear and tear too great. Now she’s got a hotel in Bayswater. As hotels go it’s pretty mad, too. Would you like to pay her a visit?

Professor Stubbs, it seems to me, is only too willing to go out visiting anyone at any time of the day or night, so I knew that he would go. If I had only been gifted by one of my Celtic forebears with just a little bit of second sight I think I would have hit him over the head with a poker to prevent his moving. Not, I must confess, that I really think that that would have been any good. Where there is trouble there you will find the Professor. Trouble to him is like the habitation of man to the nettle and the house-sparrow—they go together, and no power on earth can keep them apart.

I must admit, further, that I was feeling a bit bored myself and so I was quite glad to get out. My experience of Mr. Carr’s relatives had been confined to meeting his mother, who was a hundred and two years old and who boasted that she had not been sober to bed for ninety years. Mr. Carr’s relatives, it seemed to me, boasted of an eccentricity which would have frightened the pants off Ludwig of Bavaria, and all the rest of the historical eccentrics. Mr. Carr himself would not have supplied an alienist with a perfect norm from which others were supposed to deviate.

There was a distinct nip in the air, so I put on my heavy overcoat. The old man had announced his intention of driving us in his Bentley. Anything that the thought of Mr. Carr’s relatives might do to the historical characters was nothing to what the Professor’s driving does to me. I have seen strong men refuse to get into his car when he offered them a lift, and Chief Inspector Reginald F. Bishop, who loathes walking more than anything on earth, has been known to walk five miles rather than trust himself in the Bentley.

It may give some idea of the calibre of Mr. Carr when I say that he is the only recorded member of the human race who not only can put up with the Professor on the road but who positively enjoys it.

The journey was not enjoyable, and it was not made any happier for me by the fact that Mr. Carr seemed to take a positively ghoulish delight in cheering every time we missed death by the thickness of a rather fine hair. In addition he seemed to know exactly what fatal accidents had taken place at any given point on the route, and he enjoyed pointing out such places with considerable gory detail of description.

Mr. Carr’s aunt, it emerged, was the proud owner of a small hotel at the Notting Hill end of Bayswater. Even from the outside the hotel, The Boudoir, had a raffish and disreputable appearance. This was not helped by the fact that a nearby V2 rocket had blasted the lettering across the façade, leaving it drunken and awry.

We crossed the portal and entered the hotel, to find ourselves in a large hall. I had never been in a hall like it before. Every single inch of wall space seemed to have been covered; if it was not a signed photograph of some minor European royalty, or of the Eton first eleven in Edwardian days, it was the stuffed head of a stag or a fox’s mask, or a staggering trout in a glass case. The furniture itself seemed to date from the middle of the nineteenth century, and undoubtedly some of it must have won prizes at the Great Exhibition in 1851. I had never seen such perverted ingenuity outside the pages of the Art Journal describing the interior of the Crystal Palace on its original site.

In a large rocking chair, hung with faded green tassels, behind a heavily carved and twisted table, there sat Mr. Carr’s aunt. About eighteen stone of her. She seemed to be asleep, but as we advanced upon her she opened one eye, of a pale and intense blue, and took us in. Casting her mind into the recesses of her enormous body she seemed to place Mr. Carr.

Hullo, Ben, she wheezed, you up from the country? Eh? Have you brought me any chickens or a nice dozen of eggs, now?

Mr. Carr looked guilty. He seemed, for the first time since I had known him, to be slightly abashed."

Oh, he said uncomfortably, you know, Aunt Lottie, that I’m not living in the country at the moment and that I can’t get you a chicken in town?"

She paid no attention to this but opened her other eye, which, I realised with surprise, was a tawny orange.

You should be ashamed of yourself, Ben, she said severely. You know how difficult things are these days and you do nothing whatever to help me. I’ve a good mind to change my will.

You did that last week, said Mr. Carr. He seemed to recognise this gambit. I’ve given up worrying about your will. I never know if I’m on it or off it. If I was to start worrying about that I’d lead myself the hell of a life, wouldn’t I now, Auntie?

She wheezed wearily and seemed to catch sight of us.

Who’s that? she asked, indicating us both with a dagger which seemed to be a relic of the Afghan War.

This, said Mr. Carr with dignity, is Professor John Stubbs, and this is Mr. Max Boyle. They’re friends of mine, he added, by way of explanation and apology.

Stubbs, she said thoughtfully, Stubbs. Now I wonder if I didn’t know your father. Sir John Stubbs, eh? The old man nodded his head cautiously, as if afraid of what was to come, as well he might have been. She went on with an air of faint triumph: There you are, Ben. I told you I never forgot a name, or at least not for long. Your father now. He was a holy terror all right, she chuckled with a wicked and out-of-date mirth, always in and out of my house in Brussels he was. Oh, he was a lad, he was. I’d a little girl called Susie in those days, and your father had his eye on her all right. Oh, the bottles of bubbly in the private room and the parties that went on till morning.

The Professor, rather startled, interrupted this flow of indelicate reminiscence of his father, whom I had heard of as a very respectable nonconformist, with a loud and horrifying cough. Mr. Carr’s aunt closed both eyes.

Bubbly, she said fondly. A bottle of wine. Now that would be a charming gesture. She reached out one heavily-ringed hand and pressed a bell which seemed to be a part of the monstrous table before her.

A very aged and bent man appeared down a corridor. He recognised Ben and came to a halt. Yes, Mrs. Rattigan, he said, did you want anything?

A bottle of wine, Arthur, she said wheezily. Mr. Carr’s account.

You know, Mrs. Rattigan, Arthur was firmly apologetic, we haven’t had any wine since ’forty-three. The cellar ran dry during the autumn, and it’s not worth buying at the present price, particularly as nobody ever seems to pay their bills. This explanation was addressed to the Professor and myself.

Now, Arthur, now, Mrs. Rattigan raised an admonishing finger. You can wash your own dirty linen in public if you want to, but don’t wash mine. Three bottles of beer for the gentlemen and a large Bols for me.

The decrepit waiter disappeared. I could hear his stumbling feet as he made his way down the corridor to the unknown land behind.

Getting cheeky, said Mrs. Rattigan. Think they know everything, that’s their trouble. Now when I was a girl I wouldn’t have let a chit of a waiter speak to me that way. I’ve a good mind to sack him. I would if I thought I could get another one. Trouble with Arthur is he thinks he’s in my will.

Is he? asked Mr. Carr curiously.

I can’t remember, she said. He was in it but I can’t remember if I took him out or whether I left him in. No wine, indeed. There’d better be some wine or I’ll make certain that he comes out of my will. The war’s spoilt them. Things have never been the same since the old king died. She looked up affectionately at a large photograph of King Edward VII. Nothing is what it is. Look at the drink—half the strength—and look at the drinkers—half the quantity and they’re dead drunk. Now in my young days a man couldn’t be called a man who couldn’t take all the drink that was offered him and then top it off with a couple of bottles of port. Real port, too, it was in those days. None of your Port-style or light stuff. Real crusty port.

She sighed as she thought of the days and the drinks and the drinkers who had once populated the earth and who, with the death of Edward VII, had disappeared as completely as the inhabitants and the chattels of the cities of the plain. One of Lot’s wives she looked back regretfully and had been turned into a ball of flesh rather than a pillar of salt.

The aged waiter reappeared, slopping up the passage with tired and listless feet. He carried precariously a tray upon which were perched three silver pint mugs and a large glass of gin. I was offered, and accepted, one of the mugs. I realised that it had been won at some period during the eighties by a presumably long-dead athlete for running a mile. Beneath the inscription which recorded this feat, there was another, To Lottie with lots of love.

She took a sip of the gin which the waiter offered her and then scowled at him. I said Geneva gin, she grumbled, and you bring me this. Does no one pay any attention to my wishes in my own house?

Sorry, the old waiter seemed genuinely pained, but you finished the Bols a month ago, madam, and since then you’ve been on Gordon’s.

Don’t believe you, she said, you must think I’m getting soft in my old age. Think I don’t know what I’m drinking, eh? Bols I said, and Bols I’ll have or I’ll know the reason. I can’t stand this stuff. Take it away and bring me a proper drink.

She poured the contents of the glass into her capacious mouth and handed back the empty glass to Arthur, who looked at it doubtfully and then retired down the long