At Bertram's Hotel Read online

  “Good morning, sir,” said Inspector Campbell, respectfully, when Father entered his domain. Naturally he called Chief-Inspector Davy “Father” behind his back as everyone else did; but he was not yet of sufficient seniority to do such a thing to his face.

  “Anything I can do for you, sir?” he inquired.

  “La, la, boom, boom,” hummed the Chief-Inspector, slightly off key. “Why must they call me Mary when my name’s Miss Gibbs?” After this rather unexpected resurrection of a bygone musical comedy, he drew up a chair and sat down.

  “Busy?” he asked.

  “Moderately so.”

  “Got some disappearance case or other on, haven’t you, to do with some hotel or other. What’s the name of it now? Bertram’s. Is that it?”

  “Yes, that’s right, sir. Bertram’s Hotel.”

  “Contravening the licensing hours? Call girls?”

  “Oh no, sir,” said Inspector Campbell, slightly shocked at hearing Bertram’s Hotel being referred to in such a connection. “Very nice, quiet, old-fashioned place.”

  “Is it now?” said Father. “Yes, is it now? Well, that’s interesting, really.”

  Inspector Campbell wondered why it was interesting. He did not like to ask, as tempers in the upper hierarchy were notoriously short since the mail train robbery, which had been a spectacular success for the criminals. He looked at Father’s large, heavy, bovine face and wondered, as he had once or twice wondered before, how Chief-Inspector Davy had reached his present rank and why he was so highly thought of in the department. “All right in his day, I suppose,” thought Inspector Campbell, “but there are plenty of go-ahead chaps about who could do with some promotion, once the dead wood is cleared away.” But the dead wood had begun another song, partly hummed, with an occasional word or two here and there.

  “Tell me, gentle stranger, are there anymore at home like you?” intoned Father and then in a sudden falsetto, “A few, kind sir, and nicer girls you never knew. No, let’s see, I’ve got the sexes mixed-up. Floradora. That was a good show, too.”

  “I believe I’ve heard of it, sir,” said Inspector Campbell.

  “Your mother sang you to sleep in the cradle with it, I expect,” said Chief-Inspector Davy. “Now then, what’s been going on at Bertram’s Hotel? Who has disappeared and how and why?”

  “A Canon Pennyfather, sir. Elderly clergyman.”

  “Dull case, eh?”

  Inspector Campbell smiled.

  “Yes, sir, it is rather dull in a way.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Canon Pennyfather?”

  “Yes—you’ve got a description, I suppose?”

  “Of course.” Campbell shuffled papers and read: “Height 5 ft 8. Large thatch of white hair—stoops….”

  “And he disappeared from Bertram’s Hotel—when?”

  “About a week ago—November 19th.”

  “And they’ve just reported it. Took their time about it, didn’t they?”

  “Well, I think there was a general idea that he’d turn up.”

  “Any idea what’s behind it?” asked Father. “Has a decent God-fearing man suddenly gone off with one of the churchwardens’ wives? Or does he do a bit of secret drinking, or has he embezzled church funds? Or is he the sort of absentminded old chap who goes in for this sort of thing?”

  “Well, from all I can hear, sir, I should say the latter. He’s done it before.”

  “What—disappeared from a respectable West End hotel?”

  “No, not exactly that, but he’s not always returned home when he was expected. Occasionally he’s turned up to stay with friends on a day when they haven’t asked him, or not turned up on the date when they had asked him. That sort of thing.”

  “Yes,” said Father. “Yes. Well that sounds very nice and natural and according to plan, doesn’t it? When exactly did you say he disappeared?”

  “Thursday. November 19th. He was supposed to be attending a congress at—” He bent down and studied some papers on his desk. “—oh yes, Lucerne. Society of Biblical Historical Studies. That’s the English translation of it. I think it’s actually a German society.”

  “And it was held at Lucerne? The old boy—I suppose he is an old boy?”

  “Sixty-three, sir, I understand.”

  “The old boy didn’t turn up, is that it?”

  Inspector Campbell drew his papers towards him and gave Father the ascertainable facts in so far as they had been ascertained.

  “Doesn’t sound as if he’d gone off with a choirboy,” observed Chief-Inspector Davy.

  “I expect he’ll turn up all right,” said Campbell, “but we’re looking into it, of course. Are you—er—particularly interested in the case, sir?” He could hardly restrain his curiosity on this point.

  “No,” said Davy thoughtfully. “No, I’m not interested in the case. I don’t see anything to be interested about in it.”

  There was a pause, a pause which clearly contained the words, “Well, then?” with a question mark after it from Inspector Campbell, which he was too well-trained to utter in audible tones.

  “What I’m really interested in,” said Father, “is the date. And Bertram’s Hotel, of course.”

  “It’s always been very well-conducted, sir. No trouble there.”

  “That’s very nice, I’m sure,” said Father. He added thoughtfully, “I’d rather like to have a look at the place.”

  “Of course, sir,” said Inspector Campbell. “Anytime you like. I was thinking of going round there myself.”

  “I might as well come along with you,” said Father. “Not to butt in, nothing like that. But I’d just rather like to have a look at the place, and this disappearing Archdeacon of yours, or whatever he is, makes rather a good excuse. No need to call me ‘sir’ when we’re there—you throw your weight about. I’ll just be your stooge.”

  Inspector Campbell became interested.

  “Do you think there’s something that might tie in there, sir, something that might tie in with something else?”

  “There’s no reason to believe so, so far,” said Father. “But you know how it is. One gets—I don’t know what to call them—whims, do you think? Bertram’s Hotel, somehow, sounds almost too good to be true.”

  He resumed his impersonation of a bumblebee with a rendering of “Let’s All Go Down the Strand.”

  The two detective officers went off together, Campbell looking smart in a lounge suit (he had an excellent figure), and Chief-Inspector Davy carrying with him a tweedy air of being up from the country. They fitted in quite well. Only the astute eye of Miss Gorringe, as she raised it from her ledgers, singled out and appreciated them for what they were. Since she had reported the disappearance of Canon Pennyfather herself and had already had a word with a lesser personage in the police force, she had been expecting something of this kind.

  A faint murmur to the earnest-looking girl assistant whom she kept handy in the background, enabled the latter to come forward and deal with any ordinary inquiries or services while Miss Gorringe gently shifted herself a little farther along the counter and looked up at the two men. Inspector Campbell laid down his card on the desk in front of her and she nodded. Looking past him to the large tweed-coated figure behind him, she noted that he had turned slightly sideways, and was observing the lounge and its occupants with an apparently naïve pleasure at beholding such a well-bred, upper-class world in action.

  “Would you like to come into the office?” said Miss Gorringe. “We can talk better there perhaps.”

  “Yes, I think that would be best.”

  “Nice place you’ve got here,” said the large, fat, bovine-looking man, turning his head back towards her. “Comfortable,” he added, looking approvingly at the large fire. “Good old-fashioned comfort.”

  Miss Gorringe smiled with an air of pleasure.

  “Yes, indeed. We pride ourselves on making our visitors comfortable,” she said. She turned to her assistant. “Will you carry on
, Alice? There is the ledger. Lady Jocelyn will be arriving quite soon. She is sure to want to change her room as soon as she sees it but you must explain to her we are really full up. If necessary, you can show her number 340 on the third floor and offer her that instead. It’s not a very pleasant room and I’m sure she will be content with her present one as soon as she sees that.”

  “Yes, Miss Gorringe. I’ll do just that, Miss Gorringe.”

  “And remind Colonel Mortimer that his field glasses are here. He asked me to keep them for him this morning. Don’t let him go off without them.”

  “No, Miss Gorringe.”

  These duties accomplished, Miss Gorringe looked at the two men, came out from behind the desk and walked along to a plain mahogany door with no legend on it. Miss Gorringe opened it and they went into a small, rather sad-looking office. All three sat down.

  “The missing man is Canon Pennyfather, I understand,” said Inspector Campbell. He looked at his notes. “I’ve got Sergeant Wadell’s report. Perhaps you’ll tell me in your own words just what occurred.”

  “I don’t think that Canon Pennyfather has really disappeared in the sense in which one would usually use that word,” said Miss Gorringe. “I think, you know, that he’s just met someone somewhere, some old friend or something like that, and has perhaps gone off with him to some scholarly meeting or reunion or something of that kind, on the Continent—he is so very vague.”

  “You’ve known him for a long time?”

  “Oh yes, he’s been coming here to stay for—let me see—oh five or six years at least, I should think.”

  “You’ve been here some time yourself, ma’am,” said Chief-Inspector Davy, suddenly putting in a word.

  “I have been here, let me think, fourteen years,” said Miss Gorringe.

  “It’s a nice place,” repeated Davy again. “And Canon Pennyfather usually stayed here when he was in London? Is that right?”

  “Yes. He always came to us. He wrote well beforehand to retain his room. He was much less vague on paper than he was in real life. He asked for a room from the 17th to the 21st. During that time he expected to be away for one or two nights, and he explained that he wished to keep his room on while he was away. He quite often did that.”

  “When did you begin to get worried about him?” asked Campbell.

  “Well, I didn’t really. Of course it was awkward. You see, his room was let on from the 23rd and when I realized—I didn’t at first—that he hadn’t come back from Lugano—”

  “I’ve got Lucerne here in my notes,” said Campbell.

  “Yes, yes, I think it was Lucerne. Some Archaeological Congress or other. Anyway, when I realized he hadn’t come back here and that his baggage was still here waiting in his room, it made things rather awkward. You see, we are very booked up at this time of year and I had someone else coming into his room. The Honourable Mrs. Saunders, who lives at Lyme Regis. She always has that room. And then his housekeeper rang up. She was worried.”

  “The housekeeper’s name is Mrs. McCrae, so I understand from Archdeacon Simmons. Do you know her?”

  “Not personally, no, but I have spoken to her on the telephone once or twice. She is, I think, a very reliable woman and has been with Canon Pennyfather for some years. She was worried naturally. I believe she and Archdeacon Simmons got in touch with near friends and relations but they knew nothing of Canon Pennyfather’s movements. And since he was expecting the Archdeacon to stay with him it certainly seemed very odd—in fact it still does—that the Canon should not have returned home.”

  “Is this Canon usually as absentminded as that?” asked Father.

  Miss Gorringe ignored him. This large man, presumably the accompanying sergeant, seemed to her to be pushing himself forward a little too much.

  “And now I understand,” continued Miss Gorringe, in an annoyed voice, “and now I understand from Archdeacon Simmons that the Canon never even went to this conference in Lucerne.”

  “Did he send any message to say he wouldn’t go?”

  “I don’t think so—not from here. No telegram or anything like that. I really know nothing about Lucerne—I am really only concerned with our side of the matter. It has got into the evening papers, I see—the fact that he is missing, I mean. They haven’t mentioned he was staying here. I hope they won’t. We don’t want the Press here, our visitors wouldn’t like that at all. If you can keep them off us, Inspector Campbell, we should be very grateful. I mean it’s not as if he had disappeared from here.”

  “His luggage is still here?”

  “Yes. In the baggage room. If he didn’t go to Lucerne, have you considered the possibility of his being run over? Something like that?”

  “Nothing like that has happened to him.”

  “It really does seem very, very curious,” said Miss Gorringe, a faint flicker of interest appearing in her manner, to replace the annoyance. “I mean, it does make one wonder where he could have gone and why?”

  Father looked at her comprehendingly.

  “Of course,” he said. “You’ve only been thinking of it from the hotel angle. Very natural.”

  “I understand,” said Inspector Campbell, referring once more to his notes, “that Canon Pennyfather left here about six thirty on the evening of Thursday the 19th. He had with him a small overnight bag and he left here in a taxi, directing the commissionaire to tell the driver to drive to the Athenaeum Club.”

  Miss Gorringe nodded her head.

  “Yes, he dined at the Athenaeum Club—Archdeacon Simmons told me that that was the place he was last seen.”

  There was a firmness in Miss Gorringe’s voice as she transferred the responsibility of seeing the Canon last from Bertram’s Hotel to the Athenaeum Club.

  “Well, it’s nice to get the facts straight,” said Father in a gentle rumbling voice. “We’ve got ’em straight now. He went off with his little blue BOAC bag or whatever he’d got with him—it was a blue BOAC bag, yes? He went off and he didn’t come back, and that’s that.”

  “So you see, really I cannot help you,” said Miss Gorringe, showing a disposition to rise to her feet and get back to work.

  “It doesn’t seem as if you could help us,” said Father, “but someone else might be able to,” he added.

  “Someone else?”

  “Why, yes,” said Father. “One of the staff perhaps.”

  “I don’t think anyone knows anything; or they would certainly have reported it to me.”

  “Well, perhaps they might. Perhaps they mightn’t. What I mean is, they’d have told you if they’d distinctly known anything. But I was thinking more of something he might have said.”

  “What sort of thing?” said Miss Gorringe, looking perplexed.

  “Oh, just some chance word that might give one a clue. Something like ‘I’m going to see an old friend tonight that I haven’t seen since we met in Arizona.’ Something like that. Or ‘I’m going to stay next week with a niece of mine for her daughter’s confirmation.’ With absentminded people, you know, clues like that are a great help. They show what was in the person’s mind. It may be that after his dinner at the Athenaeum, he gets into a taxi and thinks ‘Now where am I going?’ and having got—say—the confirmation in his mind—thinks he’s going off there.”

  “Well, I see what you mean,” said Miss Gorringe doubtfully. “It seems a little unlikely.”

  “Oh, one never knows one’s luck,” said Father cheerfully. “Then there are the various guests here. I suppose Canon Pennyfather knew some of them since he came here fairly often.”

  “Oh yes,” said Miss Gorringe. “Let me see now. I’ve seen him talking to—yes, Lady Selina Hazy. Then there was the Bishop of Norwich. They’re old friends, I believe. They were at Oxford together. And Mrs. Jameson and her daughters. They come from the same part of the world. Oh yes, quite a lot of people.”

  “You see,” said Father, “he might have talked to one of them. He might have just mentioned some little thing that would
give us a clue. Is there anyone staying here now that the Canon knew fairly well?”

  Miss Gorringe frowned in thought.

  “Well, I think General Radley is here still. And there’s an old lady who came up from the country—who used to stay here as a girl, so she told me. Let me see, I can’t remember her name at the moment, but I can find it for you. Oh yes, Miss Marple, that’s her name. I believe she knew him.”

  “Well, we could make a start with those two. And there’d be a chambermaid, I suppose.”

  “Oh yes,” said Miss Gorringe. “But she has been interviewed already by Sergeant Wadell.”

  “I know. But not perhaps from this angle. What about the waiter who attended on his table. Or the headwaiter?”

  “There’s Henry, of course,” said Miss Gorringe.

  “Who’s Henry?” asked Father.

  Miss Gorringe looked almost shocked. It was to her impossible that anyone should not know Henry.

  “Henry has been here for more years than I can say,” she said. “You must have noticed him serving teas as you came in.”

  “Kind of personality,” said Davy. “I remember noticing him.”

  “I don’t know what we should do without Henry,” said Miss Gorringe with feeling. “He really is wonderful. He sets the tone of the place, you know.”

  “Perhaps he might like to serve tea to me,” said Chief-Inspector Davy. “Muffins, I saw he’d got there. I’d like a good muffin again.”

  “Certainly if you like,” said Miss Gorringe, rather coldly. “Shall I order two teas to be served to you in the lounge?” she added, turning to Inspector Campbell.

  “That would—” the inspector began, when suddenly the door opened and Mr. Humfries appeared in his Olympian manner.

  He looked slightly taken aback, then looked inquiringly at Miss Gorringe. Miss Gorringe explained.

  “These are two gentlemen from Scotland Yard, Mr. Humfries,” she said.

  “Detective-Inspector Campbell,” said Campbell.