Alien Stars: A Harry Stubbs Adventure Read online

  Skinner scratched his head and looked at his watch. “She must still be in the house. See that? The key’s still in the door. She’s either in the bathroom or closeted with her landlady downstairs. Very well; it gives us a chance to search the place.”

  “What are we looking for?”

  “You’ll know it when you find it,” he said.

  The room was a comfortable size and made bigger because the furniture was so sparse—a single bed against one wall, a chest of drawers that was also the bedside table, a chair, a folding table, a shelf of books, and a washstand with a mirror. There was no wardrobe, but an alcove had been curtained off for the purpose. The small fireplace was decorated with a spray of dried flowers in place of a fire for the summer.

  The room retained an odour of smoke. There was no ashtray, and I doubted whether smoking would be permitted in a ladies’ guesthouse. Perhaps Mabel Brown was not a well-behaved young lady and liked the odd furtive cigarette.

  We searched in complete silence while the Midnight Waltz played again below us. The neighbours had to be tired of hearing the same tunes played on the gramophone over and over.

  It fell to me to search the alcove. There were coats and dresses hanging up and a pile of hatboxes and cases on the floor. One of those proved to contain a pair of roller skates, which brought to mind the young women who swished around the skating rink at the Crystal Palace of a Saturday. My ma called them flappers and did not approve one bit, but I could not help wondering whether Mabel Brown was pretty and if she skated well.

  Skinner, meanwhile, went through the chest of drawers and paused to pick through a jewellery box. “What a lot of rubbish,” he whispered disgustedly, poking at a brooch shaped like a teddy bear. “She never wears any of these, and now it’s so full she can’t find any of the good ones.”

  “They’re memories,” I said, wondering if Sherlock Holmes could reconstruct her history from the contents of her jewellery box and tell us who Mabel Brown really was.

  Skinner had already crammed the trinkets back and was rifling through a drawer of perfume bottles and jars and little boxes.

  A shelf by the bed held an alarm clock, a small lamp, and a book—a Western romance, The Prairie Bride. The bookmark was a folded sheet of printed paper with some handwriting in pencil. The printed text was a recipe for ragout of wild duck, but I was more interested in the jotted notes:

  Archivist, janitor (?), master (?)—held where??

  EG protection—Lock pick/chisel

  Poss. New England 1882?

  I folded the paper and slipped it in my pocket, hoping to decipher it later.

  Under the bed were two cases. I opened the smaller, a battered brown-leather affair. It was full of old magazines, cinema ones mainly, and programs from theatres and concerts but nothing personal. There were no bundles of letters tied with ribbon—nothing, really, to suggest that she had occupied the place for more than a few months.

  As I was sliding the suitcase back, I noticed a small, shiny object under the bed. I picked it up to examine it. It was black and no larger than a pea. I thought at first it was a black pearl or some other piece of jewellery that had got loose, but it was soft and not cold to the touch and had the feel of organic matter.

  “Bile bean,” said Skinner, looking over my shoulder.

  “What?”

  “Bile beans. Women love ‘em. Helps them to stay slim. Must have dropped it.”

  Not knowing what else to do, I put the thing back down where I had found it.

  “Well, that’s a bust,” said Skinner.

  “Loose floorboard?” I whispered, recalling the Shackleton case. The carpet stopped a good six inches from the wall. I checked the state of the boards all up and down and found nothing.

  I wanted to tell Skinner that he ought to be better at finding female hiding places. He had four sisters but no brothers. Growing up in such an environment left him very much at ease with the gentle sex in all of its manifestations. It should have given him a better understanding of the sorts of hiding places that would appeal to the feminine mind. But it was difficult to strike the right tone of remonstration in whispered conversation, so I applied myself to the problem.

  Under the loose floorboards—that was a man’s idea. Women would not grope down through dust and cobwebs and maybe mouse nests. Men hid things on inaccessible shelves and behind masonry; women relied on guile and subtly.

  That insight seemed of limited use given the absence of hiding places, so I looked at the books along the shelf. A few novels sat on one side, mainly romances but also Black Oxen, Babbitt, Mrs Dalloway, and then an interval occupied by two Japanese vases. On the other side was the inevitable Bible, an old copy of Mrs Beeton’s Household Management, two books of railway timetables, Flowers of England and Ireland, and a dozen souvenir theatre programs.

  My hand hovered over Mrs Beeton. The book was often given away as a school prize but not one that anyone living in a rooming house would have much use for. It was a big, heavy thing to cart around when it could be left at the parental home.

  “What about the other case?” Skinner asked.

  I could have slapped myself in the forehead, but I wondered if something had made me shy away from opening the larger of the two suitcases under the bed. It was dark leather with big straps and buckles that fastened around it but no lock.

  “I’ve a funny feeling about this,” said Skinner, echoing my own thoughts.

  Inside the suitcase was a bundle wrapped in a bed sheet. Skinner unrolled it on the floor. As the last fold opened to show its contents, we both froze.

  Midnight Waltz played on below.

  Skinner and I both had enough presence of mind not to say anything immediately. I heard him taking deep breaths: one, two, three, four. Both of us were staring fixedly at the thing he had just unwrapped.

  “There’s nothing we can do here,” he said quietly. “And there’s no point in us being found at the scene. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  Skinner wrapped the bundle up again with quick, jerky movements and shoved it back in the case, which I hastily closed and buckled. He opened the window stealthily and looked down, but there was no prospect of egress in that direction.

  “Back door,” Skinner said.

  I tried hard not to jostle as we hurried down the stairs, the boards creaking with each step, and every second I expected a door to open. Even if someone saw our backs, it would be enough to hang both of us. Our hats were pulled down, and we leaned forward to hide our faces as we came out of the alley and headed down the street.

  The image was imprinted on my brain, and I could see it as clearly as a photograph when I closed my eyes. At first the blackened, curled shape had made no sense. Working in a butcher’s, I had seen meat in all its shapes and forms, and human bodies were really no different than pigs when you got down to it. This was not meat, though. The crusted, blackened mess did not look like a body at all, not at first. It was curled up like a baby and half the size of a normal adult.

  The correct term for the body’s condition was “carbonised.” The old charcoal burners used to heat wood in fires banked under layers of turf. It did not burn but gradually scorched and charred. The heat slowly drove all the water out. The timber shrank down and became a blackened, desiccated husk in the shape of the original, brittle stuff that left black marks when you touched it.

  This shrivelled form had been a human being once. I only knew that when I saw the skull—a withered black citrus rind with two eyeholes looking right at me. Some incredible fire had burned her down to the bones, leaving charcoal sticks for limbs and ribs. But that was not what troubled us most. We had both seen old bones before. What troubled us was the finger—the last two joints of the little finger on the left hand—that was still perfectly intact. It stood out shockingly white against the blackened bones, the nail painted dark red. The skin was fresh, not decayed or even dried. She could not have been dead more than a few hours.

  Chapter Two: The Un
der Gardener

  For our office, we had the use of a room in a mail-order concern dealing in cheap chinaware. The business belonged to a friend of Skinner’s, and the operation consisted of nothing more than receiving boxes of wholesale crockery packed in newspaper and making them up into parcels for customers who responded to newspaper advertisements. The number of staff varied from day to day and week to week, but there were generally between four and six women employed there; Skinner’s friend showed up on rare occasions to oversee operations but seemed only to slow them down.

  The premises were more than the chinaware business needed, so Skinner had leased one of their empty rooms. Our office had only the basic amenities of chairs and a work table along with a battered filing cabinet and chests of china in varying numbers depending on our host’s needs. The large window looked out onto a brick wall ten feet away and was partly occluded by a leafy branch, which cast a green shade on the room that was most pleasant on a sunny day. Skinner had brightened the place up with a couple of classical nudes cut from gentleman’s magazines.

  I might mention that the company that officially occupied the office, and which we officially worked for, was a perfectly genuine operation by the name of Lantern Insurance. Another friend of Skinner’s, one who knew about these things, put all the paperwork through Somerset House. If anybody cares to check, Lantern Insurance is a legitimate business, and all our papers are more or less in order.

  “This is a turn-up for the books,” said Skinner. “We’ve gone from tiptoeing about, playing games, to full-blown murder enquiry in no time flat.”

  He stabbed absentmindedly at the desktop with his pocketknife, something he did often enough for the surface to look as though it was afflicted with woodworm.

  “A body in a suitcase does suggest murder,” I said. “But was it Mabel Brown’s body? Or somebody she herself killed?”

  “A very pertinent question. I would have said that the cadaver was of a young female, judging by the painted fingernail. So if Mabel Brown is missing, and nobody else from that house is gone, it’s got to be her.”

  We turned that one over, testing it for soundness.

  “Or she brought the body into the house in the suitcase,” I said, “and disappeared herself.”

  “The remains were too fresh for that. And I smelled smoke. No, someone killed her and put the remains in the suitcase to avoid detection. If they’d left the body on the floor, the landlady would have found it straight off when she cleaned the room. Packed away like that, it would stay undetected for days. People in the house would think Mabel Brown had just shot the moon and run off.”

  “But why did the killer leave the suitcase there?”

  Skinner shook his head.

  “Do you have any notion of how it was done?” I asked.

  “Some hocus-pocus,” he said darkly. “I didn’t see any signs of a conflagration in the room. There hadn’t been a fire in the grate for months. It’s like they took the body to a crematorium and put the remains in the suitcase.”

  “A death ray.” There was science far beyond our science; I knew that from personal experience. The Martian Heat Ray that H. G. Wells imagined so vividly, which could reduce a man to ashes in moments, was primitive compared to what I had witnessed on an earlier occasion. A memento of that encounter—a ring set with a green stone in the shape of a five-pointed star—hung around my neck. The ring was too small for my finger, but I wore it as a kind of protective talisman. I had reason to believe that its makers predated the human race.

  “Who knows?” said Skinner. “But speculation aside, we do have one piece of evidence.” He drew from his pocket the envelope he had stolen from the hall table. After examining the outside with a magnifying glass, he slit it open with his knife and flattened the single sheet of writing paper out on the table.

  “Female handwriting,” he announced then read aloud,

  M—

  I made enquiries for you last night, and there’s a couple of the lads willing to help. They’ll want a quid each up front, cash on the nail and no messing about. If it gets rough, they’ll want more afterwards, so take some extra with you, but the sight of them should do the trick. They are reliable and will keep their mouths shut after, but don’t tell them any more than you have to about your “beetle,” or you’ll be asking for trouble. Drop me a line, and I’ll tip them the wink.

  I still can’t believe it, but if he pays up like you say, then you can take me with you to Monte Carlo!

  E

  “Did you say ‘beetle’?”

  Skinner slid the paper over for me to read for myself.

  “The Egyptian scarab beetle has a sacred and magical significance,” I said. “Some scarabs made from precious stones are valuable. Apart from that, I can’t think of anything.”

  “Maybe, but beetle is in inverted commas, indicating maybe it’s not an actual beetle as such. I’m forced to conclude that it is the article we seek, which our lord and master has not seen fit to disclose to us.”

  “I’ll start writing the report,” I said.

  Writing reports always falls to me; Skinner has no aptitude for the written word, and his penmanship is atrocious. He is a useful source of suggestions, though, and frequently makes observations that I’ve missed. I have learned a lot from Skinner.

  We had completed the first draft, and I was writing it up when one of the girls came with a letter.

  “This has just come for Mr Skinner, by a taxi man.” She put it on the edge of Skinner’s desk with an outstretched arm, as though he might bite, before scuttling out.

  “Thank you, my darling,” Skinner called after her. He slit the envelope and read quickly. “Oh, dearie me.”

  “What is it?”

  “We are summoned to his Lordship’s manse with all haste. The taxicab is waiting outside. If I knew we’d be visiting the quality, I’d have had my valet to lay out a good collar this morning.”

  Skinner and I had never before been invited to the household of our employer. It had to be for something serious—I had no idea quite how serious.

  The Firs is a large property located towards Thornton Heath. If you have only a casual acquaintance with Norwood, you might be forgiven for thinking the area is inhabited entirely by working people who occupy street after street of terraced Victorian houses. Some of the streets are better than others—sometimes the houses grow an extra storey and spread themselves out more, and there are green spaces and brick-built churches—but the real money is largely invisible. There are a surprising number of grand houses tucked away behind rows of trees or down less-used thoroughfares towards Dulwich way. Apparently, back in the old days, long before the Crystal Palace was built, this was a popular area for successful London merchants to build their mansions.

  Our employer’s home was on one such street of substantial Georgian villas. A high wall enclosed an acre of so of gardens with a row of the eponymous fir trees further screening one side. The house itself could only be seen as you approached the iron gates. The house had a turret, which was not an uncommon embellishment for period residences, but this one was topped with a dome that must have been an astronomical observatory. Mr Stafford was a man of eclectic interests.

  A butler was posted outside the gates on the pavement. He briskly unlocked them as our cab approached, which struck me as an unusual procedure. Skinner took a swig from a silver hip flask and offered it to me; I declined. The butler—a gaunt, silver-haired man—directed us, with considerable agitation, to the far end of the garden. He hurried to fasten the gates and return to the house.

  We passed flower beds, a small lawn, and a rose garden with a pergola, all in immaculate order. Next, we passed to an area of raised beds then row upon row of seedlings, cold frames, and compost heaps. Seeing backstage made me realise the effort that went into the perfect image up front. Gardens were supposed to mean leisure, but I could see the labour here. As Kipling had it, “better men than we go out and start their working lives / At grubbing weeds fro
m gravel-paths with broken dinner-knives.”

  We arrived at an arrangement of low structures. There were greenhouses and what I took to be potting sheds, toolsheds, and the like. A group of three men waited outside one of the sheds. Two had armed themselves with gardening forks and stood ready to repel whatever was inside. Their attitude suggested it might be a bear, wolf, or other dangerous animal. The older man was evidently a gardener, a stocky fellow of middle years, face darkened by the wind and sun, his clothes all weathered and stained to an earthy brown. His fellow, looking rather less composed, was a boy of fourteen or so, probably one of the indoor servants—a footman rather than a kitchen helper, judging from his outfit.

  There was no mistaking the identity of the leader. I had never met our employer, but the man in a tweed jacket with a shotgun tucked under one arm could only be Mr Randolph Stafford. He was tall but stout, making his height less apparent. His build suggested a placid, cheerful individual. That day, he was profoundly troubled.

  I knew little about Mr Stafford, having felt it wise not to ask questions, but I gathered he came from a good family and had increased his fortune by trading in the city. A touch of grey about the temples suggested he might be in his early fifties, but he was ageing well.

  “Thank heaven you’re here,” he said with feeling. “I thought you’d never come.”

  “What’s the situation, sir?” asked Skinner.

  Stafford ran a hand through his hair before answering. “It’s the under-gardener, Pierce.” The tremor in his voice signified a man trapped in a nightmare. “He has lost his mind. We’ve cornered him in the shed here, but he won’t come out.”

  “And you require some assistance in restraining your under-gardener,” said Skinner as though we were dealing with no more than an escaped rabbit. “I take it he is displaying signs of violence?”

  “Some signs.” Stafford raised the shotgun almost apologetically. It was a fine weapon with filigree work around the barrel. “This is just birdshot to keep him back if he turns dangerous. Just to be safe.”