Five Roundabouts to Heaven (8 page)

It was the next day, 14 February, that, in accordance with his fortnightly habit, Bartels called upon his aunt Emily. Aunt Rose, pugnacious to the last, had died some years before, and uncle James, lost and at sea without that dominating character, had been buried beside her scarcely a year later.

But Cook was still in service, and greeted him in her usual sour manner, and told him that aunt Emily was at a séance but would be back in half an hour or so. He was hardly inside the door before he noticed a curious aromatic smell, half sweet, half acrid.

“What’s that smell?” he asked.

“You may well ask,” replied Cook ominously; she was a fat, pale woman, with dark hairs on her upper lip and a slight but disconcerting cast in one eye. She disappeared into the kitchen without further words.

She had been with Bartels’ aunt for twenty-seven years, and there appeared no reason to believe that she would ever leave until his aunt died. There was a general understanding that his aunt would leave her what she called “a little something” in her will. Bartels remembered how sometimes, in the gentle, arch way his aunt Emily had of speaking, she would say in Cook’s presence, while he was still a boy:

“There! What a lovely cake old Cookie has made for you to take back to school! What should we do without her? Never mind, Cookie knows she will not be forgotten when I pass over!”

She would glance at Cook, and give one of her coy little laughs, as if to indicate that she and Cook had a little secret which they shared between them. Possibly Cook saw visions of inheriting large sums of money, and retiring to live in modest comfort. Perhaps she thought she might even get the house. If she did, she was a stupid woman.

It was not that his aunt was mean, or even ungrateful for services rendered. It was simply that she had an entirely erroneous idea of the current value of money; when it came to tips, she continued to think in terms of Victorian days. Quite often she would describe the details of some journey she had made; how she had caught this or that train; how she had arrived at Paddington and commissioned a porter to carry her bag for her; how they had found a taxi.

“So I gave the porter tuppence for himself,” she would say in passing, and no doubt she thought she had remunerated him very handsomely indeed.

Bartels went into the drawing room and glanced at the evening paper for a while, and smoked a cigarette. There was nothing in the paper of particular interest. He tossed it aside and glanced round the room; then got to his feet and strolled over to the glass-fronted bookcase in which aunt Emily still kept the books of her late husband.

Bartels had only the dimmest recollections of his uncle Robert. He recalled a sombrely dressed figure who came and went with a mysterious black bag, who sometimes, when Bartels was a very small child, had come and gazed at him and made him put his tongue out, or had placed a glass thing in his mouth—“a cigarette,” uncle Robert had called it, with a wink at his mother.

Then the years passed and he never came again, and Bartels learnt that the physician had been unable to cure himself.

The bottom two shelves were filled with a collection of novels ranging from bestsellers of pre-1914 vintage to Edgar Wallace and P. G. Wodehouse. The other two shelves held a number of fat medical works of reference, one or two volumes on the history of medicine, and a French and a German dictionary.

Sandwiched between the dictionaries was a red book called
Forensic Medicine and Toxicology.

Bartels opened the bookcase and took it out.

The mentality of the poisoner was one which Bartels had never been able to fathom. He and I had frequently argued about capital punishment. Bartels was against it, except in very rare cases, declaring that in most cases the victim of a murder crime did not know that he was about to die, whereas capital punishment involved an almost sadistically long period of waiting and of fear.

“But poisoners,” Bartels said to me once, “they’re different. I just can’t get inside the mind of a man who poisons his wife, for example. Imagine the mentality of a person who sees his wife waking up in the morning, and hears her say, ‘I think I feel a little better today,’ who sees her looking brighter and more hopeful, and then slips out and puts more of the stuff in her drink.”

Doubtless it was only morbid fascination that made him take the book out of the case, and sit down with it, and glance through some of the pages.

He noted some of the more common poisons, and their reactions.

Idly, Bartels turned over the pages. It seemed heavy and dull. He replaced it on the shelf. Next to it, he noticed a smaller, blue book, called
Toxicology: A Handbook for GPs.
He sat down with it.

Perhaps the fact that he had seen altrapeine among the bottles in the photographic darkroom in my flat caused him to pause and read about it.

Altrapeine, he read, was a synthetic poison with a cyanide basis…“it is a white powder, odourless and tasteless, and easily soluble in water. It exercises a specially fast and usually fatal influence on the action of the heart. The circumstances of death are to all intents and purposes similar to those associated with coronary thrombosis. There is little or no pain. Death occurs within a matter of seconds, and in the case of a woman of forty it took place after a dose of a quarter of a teaspoonful. This poison is exceptionally difficult to detect.”

Bartels laid down the book and gazed across the room. He remembered Dr Anderson once saying that coronary thrombosis was the most merciful death of all. That was when Beatrice had had severe pains in the left breast, and had half seriously, half jokingly, suggested that she might have angina pectoris.

Dr Anderson had told him, in private, that the pain had been caused by Beatrice getting into an emotional condition. He had never discovered the cause of the emotional condition, and had soon forgotten all about it.

Dr Anderson had said something else, chatting to him in the way doctors do. He had said that coronary thrombosis could cause angina pectoris.

If, therefore, Beatrice—What? He stopped the train of thought. But it crept back, stealthily, and he followed it to its conclusion. If Beatrice died very suddenly, in circumstances suggesting coronary thrombosis, Dr Anderson would remember the earlier suggestions of angina pectoris…It would confirm a diagnosis of coronary thrombosis.

He read the paragraphs again, and frowned.

A few moments later he heard his aunt’s footsteps descending the linoleum-covered stairs leading to the basement. After the deaths of aunt Rose and uncle James, she had redecorated the ground-floor rooms and let them, and now confined herself entirely to the basement.

Bartels rose quickly out of his chair, crossed the room, and replaced the book between the dictionaries. Perhaps it was this action, this quick, furtive movement, which first brought him face to face with the reality behind his thoughts.

But as he hastily picked up the evening paper again, and pretended to be reading it, his mind was still protesting against the evidence of his actions.

Now aunt Emily came into the drawing room and gave one of her glad cries of welcome. She welcomed him in exactly the same way as on all such occasions. She raised her hands in pretended surprise, managed to infuse a delighted look into her eyes and, implanting a wet kiss on both his cheeks, said:

“My! My! My! If it isn’t Phil? Well! Well! Well!”

Her good-natured oval face was wreathed in smiles. She gazed at him with every semblance of rapt attention. He knew that in two or three minutes she would be indulging in confidential remarks about the movements up or down of the stock exchange, for she prided herself on being a keen businesswoman, and the shortcomings of whoever at that particular moment happened to be occupying the top parts of the house.

But this time there was another topic. It was Chan, the Chinaman.

When Bartels asked her what the strange smell in the house was, she gave one of her mysterious little smiles. He knew those little smiles. They indicated that she was about to impart a confidential titbit of information. She said nothing for the moment, however.

For a while she sat by the fire, smiling mysteriously, and washing her hands with invisible soap. At length she said:

“Now if I tell you, you mustn’t laugh. Chan wouldn’t like that. I know what you are, you naughty boy.”

“I won’t laugh,” Bartels said, and thought: Why did I get up so quickly and put the book back? Why?

“Promise?”

“I promise.”

She leant forward and gazed into his face.

“A wonderful thing has happened,” she said. “I am being helped!”

“Helped? Who by?”

“By Chan.”

“Who’s he?”

“Chan is a mandarin. He is a very, very important mandarin who was a high official at the Emperor’s Court in Peking. He tells me that the Emperor did nothing, nothing at all, without his advice. He had to sit all day long at the Emperor’s right hand and advise him on all the legal and financial matters which the Emperor had to decide.”

Bartels looked at her in surprise. He said:

“But how old is he? They haven’t had an emperor in China for ages.”

Aunt Emily smiled tolerantly at him, as though he were naturally too inexperienced to understand these things. She said:

“Chan has been
sent
, dear. There is no
age
where he is.”

“You mean he is a spook, or something?”

“He is my guardian spirit, dear. Oh! What a wonderful man he is! He is just the man I wanted, a legal and financial expert; just think of that, dear! I have had the most wonderful help from him. If I told you some of the things he has said, they would surprise you. You would really never believe it all!”

Bartels nodded. He knew it was no good arguing on this subject. He stared at her through his old-fashioned spectacles, and said:

“How did he get in touch with you?”

“It happened in the most wonderful way,” she said in a low voice. “It was little short of a miracle! I was at the greengrocer’s ordering some vegetables when I saw quite an ordinary little woman standing by me looking at me in rather a strange way.”

Bartels said: “Had you seen her before?”

“Never. Now where was I? Oh, yes. Well, you know, she was staring at me in such a strange way that at first I thought she was rather rude. Then, just as I was leaving the shop, I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned round and there she was again, and she said, ‘Excuse me, I’m afraid you must think me awfully rude, but I believe I can help you.’ I said, ‘Really, in what way?’ ”

“So she led me to one side and said she had noticed I was carrying the
Psychic Weekly.
And only the previous evening her Guide had come to her and told her to watch out for me! He had given her, she said, an exact description not only of me but of the very clothes I was wearing! Right down to these long black earrings! Isn’t that wonderful?

“She said her name was Mrs Brewer, and that if I would care to come that afternoon for a cup of tea she would get in touch with her Guide—a monk who was on earth in the fifteenth century, oh, such a wonderful man!—and she was sure I would be helped.”

“So you went along?”

“So I went along. And Chan came through, too, dear. He said that from now onwards it was his work to help and advise me.”

“And has he?” Bartels asked.

“Has he indeed!” She clasped her hands together in the way she had when she was enjoying, or had just related, a joke of such richness as to be almost unbearable.

Bartels gathered that the long-deceased Oriental, while not binding himself to give detailed stock exchange tips, would point out that the market was rising or falling, that it was time for courage or caution, and that although his protégée might have her times of bitter trial, she would always win through in the end; because he would be by her side, talking through his good friend Mrs Brewer.