The Bath Mysteries Read online

  E.R. PUNSHON

  The Bath Mysteries

  Bobby Owen is on a mission of unusual delicacy, finding himself conducting an investigation which involves his own titled but impecunious family. This time the cards were stacked against Bobby. He knew full well the cause of his cousin’s mysterious disappearance, but he could not understand the baffling circumstances surrounding Ronnie Owen’s death. Ronnie was a drunkard, but even a drunkard has sufficient presence of mind to refrain from remaining in a tub of boiling water for thirty-six hours!

  Was Ronnie’s death caused accidentally, or was it a deliberate case of murder? Moreover, why had Ronnie taken out a heavy insurance policy shortly before his death?

  The Bath Mysteries is the seventh of E.R. Punshon’s acclaimed Bobby Owen mysteries, first published in 1936 and part of a series which eventually spanned thirty-five novels.

  INTRODUCTION

  On 23 March 1915, Scotland Yard formally charged George Joseph Smith with the murders of Bessie Williams, Alice Smith and Margaret Lloyd. After nine days’ trial Smith was found guilty on 1 July and hanged six weeks later, on 13 August. Justice (and sometimes, it must be admitted, injustice) was swift in those days, but although Smith’s legal ordeal was brief, his infamy is imperishable. Today, a full century after his trial, Smith remains one of England’s most notorious killers, the man who executed the infamous “Brides in the Bath” murders. Each of Smith’s victims was a woman he had bigamously wed, then drowned in a bathtub. The sensational case was referenced in works by Golden Age mystery writers, including the Crime Queens Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Margery Allingham; but in 1936, E.R. Punshon--who the same year published, in the Detection Club true crime anthology The Anatomy of Murder, an essay on the infamous French serial killer “Bluebeard” (Henri Desiré Landru)--devised an entire detective novel that pivoted on the plot device of a sinister succession of bathtub deaths. In this novel, The Bath Mysteries, Punshon mentions not only the Brides in the Bath Murders, but the Rouse burning-car killing and the Brighton trunk slayings, further evincing his interest in true crime. It is one of Punshon’s most interesting works of detective fiction, despite the fact--or perhaps, indeed, because of it--that it is a challenging book for the period, difficult to pigeonhole, as we are wont to do, into a convenient genre mystery category. The plot of the novel is interesting, to be sure, but it is the quality of Punshon’s empathy for his victimized characters that makes The Bath Mysteries exceptional for its time and still resonant today.

  The first couple of chapters in The Bath Mysteries raise the reader’s expectation that what she has in her hands is a witty manners mystery in the fashion of the detective novels of Sayers, Allingham and Ngaio Marsh, yet something rather different soon emerges. The tale opens with Punshon’s series sleuth, Detective-Sergeant Bobby Owen, visiting a London conclave of his aristocratic family held at the Lords of Hirlpool’s decayed white elephant of an ancestral abode, in which none of them could afford to live since the 1850s. As Bobby surveys the mansion’s grand hall, from which arises the majestic double stairway, Punshon writes amusingly, in a passage reflective of the waning of England’s traditional landed aristocracy and the waxing of crass commercial enterprise, that with all its 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.” Here in this magnificent ruin Bobby encounters his grandmother, the dowager Lady Hirlpool, whom loyal Punshon readers had already met in the previous Bobby Owen mystery, Death Comes to Cambers; his uncle, Lord Hirlpool; Christopher (“Chris”) Owen, Bobby’s cousin and an antique dealer who is “the heir to the title and the family mortgages”; Cora Owen, wife of Bobby’s other cousin, Ronald (“Ronnie”), vanished for the last three years after being named as a party in an especially scandalous divorce action; and Dick Norris, who though strictly speaking is not family, was a close friend of the missing Ronnie Owen.

  The family has recently learned that a man giving his name as Ronald Oliver, whom there is reason to believe may have been Ronnie Owen under alias, was found dead in his bath, apparently “from the effects of boiling water coming from a lighted geyser during approximately thirty-six hours.” (The inquest concluded he was “the worse for drink” when he ran the bath.) Oliver’s—or Owen’s—life was insured for 20,000 pounds, which was duly collected by a woman claiming to be his wife. Sometime afterward the same woman pawned a signet ring—Ronnie Owen’s signet ring, bearing the family crest of three dolphins. Lord Hirlpool and the family want Bobby to investigate the matter personally, and Lord Hirlpool complacently informs his nephew: “I had a chat with the Home Secretary yesterday. He rang up the Commissioner while I was there, and you’re to be seconded, or whatever you call it in the police, to look into the thing and find out what really did happen to poor Ronnie.”

  Bobby, who is acutely embarrassed within the police force by his aristocratic connections, desperately resents these elite behind-the-scenes machinations and prays fervently that the next general election will “hurl this Government and all connected with it into outer darkness.” Until that fine day arrives, however, he has yet another investigative job to do, in what proves a singularly bizarre case. It turns out that the gruesome demise of “Ronald Oliver” in his bath is only one of several such fatalities that have taken place over the last few years, all of them involving obscure men whose lives have been insured for 20,000 pounds. Have these men been ground up in a kind of remorselessly efficient “murder factory,” Bobby begins to wonder, some “carefully prepared, widely spread organization of death, working in a strange and fearful secrecy”? Bobby’s investigation takes him into the pits of London, exploring life among the down-and-outs in a decade overtaken by what the prominent socialist intellectual and detective fiction writer G.D.H. Cole in 1932 aptly termed “world chaos” (see The Intelligent Man’s Guide to World Chaos, published by Victor Gollancz, who also, not altogether incidentally, published the detective fiction of Cole’s Detection Club colleague E.R. Punshon).

  The characters of greatest interest in The Bath Mysteries are not found among the genteel sleuth’s aristocratic family members, as one might expect in a novel from this period by, say, Ngaio Marsh (see Surfeit of Lampreys, for example), but rather are drawn from the ranks of the downtrodden. For these people Punshon memorably conveys sympathy in the most striking passages of the novel, with words, no doubt partly inspired by his own past personal circumstances (see my introduction to Death Comes to Cambers), that are powerfully condemnatory of human exclusion and exploitation:

  Leaning against the parapet with his back to the river, Bobby watched how, in the darkness of the night that now had fallen, there drifted by a shadowy procession of the lost, of the outcast, of the disinherited, of those who had fallen or been thrown from their places in a society that knew them no more—men and women shuffling by like ghosts of their own past, like phantoms of the dead waiting only a signal to return to the graves they had deserted....Perhaps in the gloom of some other night another had leaned as he was doing upon the parapet, back to the river, and watched the shadowy line of the lost trailing aimlessly by, and watched them with the appraising eye of the butcher searching out the fattest sheep for the slaughterhouse.

  It is in this netherworld of vice and despair that we catch glimpses of such striking individuals as the elderly sneak thief Magotty Meg, a colorful personage of whom Punshon readers were soon to see more, and the coffee-stall keeper George Young, nicknamed “Cripples” on account of his missing left arm and right leg. The arm was lost in a Durham coal mine accident, we learn, the leg from the impact upon him and his stall of an inebriated young gent
leman’s space-hurtling sports car. “Lucky...it was a left arm and right leg,” reflects “Cripples” phlegmatically, “keeps you from being lopsided like.”

  It is between two denizens of this dark place that we find what Milward Kennedy, another of Punshon’s Detection Club colleagues, in his Sunday Times review of The Bath Mysteries called “a love-interest…as moving as any which I can recall in a detective story.” More about this element of The Bath Mysteries cannot in good conscience be divulged by me to the neophyte reader of the novel, so I will simply conclude by urging that you read it posthaste.

  Curtis Evans

  CHAPTER 1

  FAMILY CONFERENCE

  Detective-Sergeant Bobby Owen, leaving the Park, crossed Carlton Lane. Through the dark shadows cast by a cliff-like block of flats opposite he passed on, round the mews, into stately Carlton Square itself, where on the north side, No. 1, the ancestral home of his race, sprawled its interminable and depressing length.

  Bobby surveyed it with a sigh, thinking what a difference would be made in the family fortunes if only legal complication, jointures, mortgages, reversions, Lord knew what, permitted it to be pulled down, and a new block of spacious, super-luxury, one-room flats erected in its stead. But that could not be – at least, not without a special Act of Parliament whereof the expense would eat up all possible profit; and so Bobby sighed again, and then cast a glance of professional interest at the third window from the southeast corner on the top floor, that of the room where legend told that, a hundred and fifty years ago, a servant-maid had been murdered in mysterious circumstances never cleared up. Then, ascending the steps leading to the huge front doors, he knocked; and as from the very bowels of the earth a thin voice floated up to him.

  “Beg pardon, sir,” it said, "I can’t get them doors open; they haven’t been used so long they’ve stuck someway, or else it’s the lock. His lordship was proper vexed.”

  Descending to the street-level again, and peering over iron railings, Bobby saw, far below, the ancient retainer of the house whose services had been rewarded – or punished – by the job of caretaker of this mansion, which none of the Lords of Hirlpool had been able to afford to inhabit for three-quarters of a century past.

  “Do you mind coming this way, sir?” quavered again the voice from the depths. “His lordship had to, and proper vexed he was, too.”

  “Righto,” said Bobby, and accordingly descended the long flight of steps that led down to the area door, where the old caretaker waited. “Bit of a climb,” he commented; “if uncle had to, I can believe he didn’t like it. Do you have to climb those steps every time you want to go out?”

  “Oh, no, sir,” answered the caretaker, “there’s the back door, sir, opening on the mews, but it’s nearly ten minutes’ walk to get round there from here. This way, sir.”

  Bobby followed the old man through a series of grim, dark, chill, dust-strewn chambers, compared with which the vaults of the Spanish Inquisition would surely have seemed cheery, homely abiding places. They came to a spot whence steep and narrow stone steps led both up and down, though whether to a gloom more intense above or below was hard to say. But it seemed to prove that even beneath these depths there stretched depths lower still.

  “Good Lord,” Bobby said. “Are there cellars under these?”

  "These aren’t the cellars, sir,” answered the other rebukingly. “This is the basement floor. Over there’s what used to be the kitchen, and that’s the door of the old servants’ hall. Very spacious apartment, sir, and very different everything looked when there was a staff of twenty or more busy here.”

  “It’s a wonder they didn’t die of T.B. or rheumatism,” observed Bobby, peering into the dark cavern that once had been a kitchen. “Probably they did, though. What about the breakfast bacon? How long does it take to get from kitchen to dining-room?”

  The caretaker considered the point carefully.

  “I don’t think it would take more than ten minutes,” he decided; “not much more, anyhow. His lordship will be waiting, sir,” he added; “her ladyship, too.”

  “Oh, has granny got here already?” Bobby said. “All right, I’ll cut along. What about Mrs. Ronnie? Has she turned up?”

  “Yes, sir, she came the first. They’re all there except Mr. Chris. Mr. Norris came immediate after Mrs. Ronnie. It’s the small room to the right at the top of the big stair.”

  “Right, I’ll find my way; don’t you bother,” Bobby said, and began to ascend the steps leading to the upper regions of the house.

  As he went he wondered again what could be the meaning of this family conference to which his uncle, Lord Hirlpool, had summoned him; his grandmother, the dowager Lady Hirlpool; his cousin by marriage, Cora, who was Mrs. Ronald Owen; his other cousin, Chris Owen, the heir to the title and the family mortgages, debts, tithes, income-tax, and all the rest of the financial encumbrances that went with their old and historic name; and finally Dick Norris. He wondered, too, why Dick Norris had been included, since Norris was not one of the family, though he had been a very intimate friend of the vanished Ronnie Owen. It was a friendship that had been formed and consolidated on the links, for Norris was a famous amateur golfer, known to a wide circle through the articles he contributed to the golfing press under various pseudonyms, as “B. Unkert,”, “N.B. Luck,” and others, all in the breezy, healthy type of humour that made him so popular a writer.

  “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 ch
air 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.”