“I don’t think you have anything there, John,” the Chief Inspector was slowly critical. “We had just announced that Ambleside had been strangled, though as you say we had not made it clear that he was strangled by hand. I noticed that and wondered for a moment but then I realised that the first thing that the word ‘strangle’ does is to produce a mental picture of a pair of hands throttling their victim. It would not matter who you were speaking to, if you said that someone was strangled, they’d think of hands before they thought of a scarf or something like that.”
“Um,” the old man did not appear to be the least convinced, but I had to confess myself that I agreed with the Chief Inspector. It looked to me very much as though the Professor had been arguing from false premises.
“Ahum,” he grunted, “but that don’t matter. It just kinda made me think, same as it made ye think, Reggie, but it made me think to more purpose than you. Ye see,” he was fiercely honest, “the Doctor’s dam’ psychology kept on getting me down an’ I thought I’d try applyin’ his own treatment to himself an’ once I’d done that I was able to see how well he fitted the part o’ the murderer. In fact, I must say that once I’d seen him in the part, I could not see anyone else in it. I must say though,” he looked across at Mr. Carr who was helping himself to Emily’s sherry, “that the idea o’ this poor fish just standin’ there watchin’ the Doctor hangin’ up a body an’ not realisin’ that the whole performance was designed to cast suspicion on himself, kinda tickles me.”
“What,” said Mr. Carr, genuinely surprised, “me hang Mr. Ambleside up like that. Why?”
“I think,” said the old man gravely, “that it was supposed to have some reference to your idea of putting meat on the walls.”
“But, holy mother,” Mr. Carr was excited, “you don’t think I’d stick a whole man, all in one piece, on a wall. Good Lord no. Just think what it would do to the composition.”
This was too much for the Chief Inspector. He turned his head away and snorted violently.
“I might,” Mr. Carr went on, “have used a hand here or a foot there, to sort of help things out. Good rubbish is getting very hard to get. But a whole man, nonsense. It wouldn’t work.”
He seemed to be genuinely upset that anyone could have thought that he would have spoiled his decoration of a wall in this fashion. He retired into his glass of sherry, still mumbling at the lack of proper feeling in people who could suspect him of such errors.
“Don’t you worry, son,” Professor Stubbs was kindly, “I didn’t suspect you for a moment. I knew ye hadn’t done it. Ye wouldn’t bother to deal in forged pictures would ye, now? An’ so I knew it couldn’t be you.”
“Oh,” said Mr. Carr corning to the surface for air, “I don’t mind people suspecting me, but what I’m shocked at is the Doctor’s thinking that people might think I was guilty of hanging up a whole man as a kind of decoration. I thought he knew more about my work than that. It’s a bitter disappointment. I think I’ll give up the job of decorating interiors. There’s more freedom and more money in horses, and I’ve got a first-rate treble for to-morrow. I’ll let you all in on it, too.”
This startlingly generous offer stung a reply from the melancholy Douglas who seemed to be sunk in contemplation of the emptiness of his sherry glass. He looked up absently.
“Thanks, cock,” he said and Mr. Carr beamed at him approvingly, as one might beam at a savage who had learned to wish one good day.
“By the way,” the Professor coughed nervously, “Mr. Carr, do you think that your mother would consider parting from that toy rat? I’d like to have it as a kinda souvenir of the case. As ye probably know I got a mechanical mind an’ I like mechanical toys.”
Mr. Carr weighed this question heavily in his mind. Finally he spoke. “Well,” he said, “I think you might find that the old girl was willing to part from it for some sort of consideration. If, say, you offered her a bottle of gin when she was feeling thirsty.”
“But,” said the bewildered Professor Stubbs, “how will I know when she’s feelin’ thirsty?”
“That,” Mr. Carr replied with decision, “will be simple. She is always thirsty. Ninety years, girl and woman, no less she’s been thirsty, and it looks to me as though she’d go thirsty to her grave. You know, by the way, that she’s forgiven you. She heard you were a biologist and, like me, she doesn’t believe in biology. Maybe,” he was preternaturally solemn, “there was a biologist hidden in the wood pile at the bottom of her garden. I wouldn’t know. I was just brought up not to believe in biology. But, as I was saying, she’s forgiven you for she’s found out that you are a botanist. As she said to me, ‘Grasses and plants I’ll stand for, though, mark you, it’s the thin end of the wedge, but fiddling around with ordinary life—no’.”
The Chief Inspector was wearing a look on his face that shewed that he thought that he had wandered into a lunatic asylum. He stood up and teetered gently backwards and forwards on his feet. He coughed.
“Well,” he said blandly, “I think I have finished with this case. I feel however that I should warn you, Mr. Carr, that had the case come to trial and your suppression of vital evidence been discovered, you would have run the risk of very severe penalties indeed. I would like to warn you, further, that you should not repeat your behaviour.”
“All right, cock,” said Mr. Carr unabashed and turning an injured face towards me, “there you are, Maxie boy. That’s the police for you. If they can’t run you in they have to warn you. A man can’t call his mind his own these days.”
I was watching the Bishop’s face and I saw that, for a moment, he let himself toy with the idea of shewing Mr. Carr whether or not the police could run him in for the offence which he had just committed. Then his expression cleared and the usual blandness crept over his features like the mist over an Essex landscape. He went slowly towards the door like a giant Persian cat. I noticed that the similarity struck Francis Varley, and impelled him to get up and open the door.
The Chief Inspector went out. So far as he was concerned his underlings could clear up the remnants of the case. The Professor took out his pipe and looked enquiringly at Emily Wallenstein. She graciously gave him permission to smoke it. I’d be willing to bet that she did not know what she was in for.
“You know,” said Douglas suddenly, “I wondered sometimes about the two Flints. They had some connection with Julian Ambleside and I don’t know what it was.”
Francis Varley laughed gently. “My dear Douglas,” he said quietly, “you know what the Flints are? They are people who make a profession of building up other people into respectable social characters. Alison advises them about the people they should know, and Jeremy tells them who should be employed to decorate their houses and what pictures they should hang on their walls. Naturally, if he sent a man to Ambleside to buy a Picasso, he expected a small rake-off from Julian, and he made it his business to see that he got it. That is why they seemed to be connected with Ambleside. I, myself, have done business with them, in the way of putting them in touch with small libraries of art books, from which, naturally, I took the pick first, but in my case they give me a commission for my services.”
The Professor was standing up now. He was flicking the Calder mobile gently and watching it go round with the satisfied smile of a child watching a windmill. Emily sat at the desk watching him. He looked down and realised that she had her eyes on him.
“Nice thing this,” he said, “can you tell me where I can get one exactly like it?”
“My dear Professor,” Francis Varley was slightly shocked, “I’m afraid you won’t as you say be able to get one exactly like it. Alexander Calder is an artist and so no two mobiles of his are exactly alike.”
“Oh,” said the old man, putting on what I call his begging voice. “That’s a pity. I’d rather fallen for it, an’ I’d ha’ liked one just like it!”
After that there was nothing left for Emily Wallenstein to do but to give it to him. I must say she did it very gracefully and the ol
d man’s thanks were genuine and effusive. He climbed up on the steel chair, which I did my best to steady, and unhooked the mobile. It folded up nicely and he tucked it happily under his arm. He stumped heavily towards the door.
“Harumph,” he said noisily, “It’s bin nice meetin’ all you people, tho’ I can hardly say that the occasion was o’ the most auspicious. I hope that ye won’t mind if I come back again sometime an’ ha’ a look at the Museum o’ Modern Art when there ain’t so many thunderin’ nosey people around or blinkin’ corpses hangin’ on the pictures. What I always say, is that if people would only mind their own business the world ’ud be a much better place.”
With this outrageous statement we left the room. I might have thought of some crack that would have come back at the Professor but I was so flabbergasted by the barefaced effrontery of his remark that I failed to think of one of the same standard.
Half way down the stair, standing looking at her son’s wall decoration, we encountered Mrs. Carr. She was looking at the wall with real distaste. She recognised Professor Stubbs and immediately fell into conversation with him.
“Can’t say I like it,” she declared, “it wouldn’t have passed when I was a girl. It’s all this biology and books has done it. Rough-cast is rough-cast, I say, and it’s got its place on the outside of a house. Who wants gravel in a drawing-room? I had an aunt who had the gravel very bad but she carried it about with her. She still didn’t want gravel in her drawing-room. I wonder what young Ben will be up to next. Horrible child he was, to be sure. I say so, and I should know as I’m his mother. He’s got a bit better as he’s grown up but he’s got a long way to go yet. Breeding, that’s his trouble and always has been. First, it was mice and then it was rabbits and after that it was greyhounds. He’d have taken to breeding elephants if he hadn’t thought of breeding children. They take up too much space and too much time. You can’t put them in a hutch and forget them. If you do, along comes a nosey-parker and before you know where you are you’re doing six weeks in Holloway. Oh yes, things have changed for the worse since I was a girl.”
She paused for breath and Professor Stubbs, who had been trying to slip a word or two into her stream of verbiage got a start.
“Ma’am,” he said bowing politely, “it’s about that rat.”
“Oh yes,” she said, “I forgot. There was rats too, after the mice, I think. There’s one thing to be said for rats—they don’t smell. Mice do—something awful. Drown ’em all, I say.”
She paused again and the Professor made yet another effort to intrude himself upon her notice. She already held a world’s record as being the only person on earth who had ever been able to talk him down.
“That toy rat,” he said, “the one you got in the gallery. Will you sell it to me?”
“Toy rat,” she said looking puzzled, “Toy rat. I know nothing about toy rats. There are no such creatures. Ben’s father used to keep rats, too, but he kept them in his head and they only worried him once a month. He got paid monthly. Then when they worried him he had to wait till pay day before he could stand them a round of drinks. Most obliging they were, to be sure, one drink for each of them and away they went. It wasn’t so expensive in these days either. Ah, things have changed since I was a girl.”
“The mechanical rat that ran across the floor o’ the gallery,” boomed the Professor desperately.
“Oh, Bimbo, you mean?” she asked.
“Yes,” said the Professor firmly. She shook her head sadly and made a face which expressed her disappointment in the race of people which had grown up since she was a girl.
“Oh, Bimbo,” she said again, “no. You can’t have him. I’m going to put him out to stud and retire on his earnings.”
Even the Professor was defeated. He made on down the stairs, in deathly silence, and mounted the car, swathed in black gloom. It wasn’t till we got home, after one of the worst drives of my life, that he remembered the pleasure he would get from his Calder mobile. I spent most of the remainder of the day perched on the top of a ladder while he tried to decide exactly where it would look best in his work-room. I could have given him rats and ladders.
Finis
About the Author
RUTHVEN CAMPBELL TODD (1914–1978) was a Scottish-born poet, scholar, art critic, and fantasy novelist who wrote a series of detective novels under the name R. T. Campbell.
www.doverpublications.com
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