MRS. CRAGGS HAD very often nearly left the cleaning job she had with Mrs. Marchpane, of Fitzjames Avenue. But somehow, for some reason or no reason, she stayed on week after week. And so she was there, a witness, when in that luxury flat—as later the newspaper headline writers were to insist on calling it—there occured one of the great mysteries of our time. Or, anyhow, a mystery. And one that made the papers for nearly two weeks.
Certainly Mrs. Craggs had no regard at all for her employer, silly, gabbling Mrs. Marchpane, wife of Squadron Leader John (Jumping Jack) Marchpane, retired. Every other week at least, when it came to the Friday, the second of the two days on which she “did” for Mrs. Marchpane, she had been on the point of saying, “Sorry, madam, but I shan’t be able to oblige after next Friday,” and then she had said nothing. It might, to some extent, have been because of the Squadron Leader. There he was, a hero, called “Jumping Jack” in the war because he had had to bail out on twenty-three different occasions and had gone back to pilot another Spitfire next day every single time. But now he was retired with only a bit of a job to keep himself occupied and spending all the rest of his time being given orders by Mrs. Marchpane. And ridiculous orders, too, often as not.
So, although the Squadron Leader was always very nice to her, never failing to ask about her rheumatism—and listening to her reply—producing a little bunch of flowers when he discovered it was her birthday and sending her a card at Christmas, she could not help mingling her liking for him with a little half-contemptuous pity.
The trouble was that Mrs. Marchpane was such a fusspot. Everything had to be just right for her. If the frail figurines on the sitting-room mantelpiece were not each one at its exactly accustomed angle when Mrs. Craggs had finished dusting, it was as if the whole fabric of society had been made to totter. If each one of Mrs. Marchpane’s delicately scented toilet articles was not in its exact place on the shelf in front of the bathroom mirror, to a hair’s-breadth, it was as if the very foundations of the ever-spinning world had been lifted up and moved. If after Mrs. Craggs had taken the vacuum cleaner over the hall carpet the Squadron Leader was forgetful enough to walk across it and leave footmarks in the immaculate pile, it was as if someone had impiously challenged the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England and had to be rushed to the stake forthwith.
Yet Mrs. Craggs stayed on. Which did at least mean she was there on the day of the Great Locked Bathroom Mystery.
It happened just after she had finished the hall carpet, a task Mrs. Marchpane liked done first of all. Both the Squadron Leader and his wife were in the bathroom. They did not get up early, and it was very much a regular thing that the Squadron Leader should be taking his shower at this time. Mrs. Marchpane insisted—of course—that any husband of hers should shower each morning and she even timed her own twenty minutes spent at the bathroom basin to coincide with his. She insisted too that he should have a complete change of clothes each day, in summer even putting his lightweight trousers into the Ali Baba dirty-linen basket in the corner of the bathroom.
And hair. What a fuss she made about hair caught in the bath wastepipe.
You’d think, Mrs. Craggs used to murmur to herself whenever she heard from the other side of the locked bathroom door that unending sing-song voice, poor old Jumping Jack’s hairs were great poisonous tropical wrigglies, the palaver she’s making. “Really, John, if I’ve asked you once I’ve asked you a thousand times.” Mrs. Marchpane never called her hero husband by any other less dignified name than John. “Really, John, I can’t have the charwoman finding hair in the plug-hole.” Though Mrs. Craggs’s own feelings were that life made its share of muck, and muck had got to be cleared up.
But on this memorable day, just as she had switched off the vacuum cleaner, she heard from behind the bathroom door, not a comparatively restrained rebuke, but a sudden ear-shattering scream.
“Gone. Gone. He’s gone. He’s gone.”
Then there came the sound of the bolt on the door being banged back with desperate force and the next second Mrs. Marchpane came rushing out full pelt into the hall.
At first Mrs. Craggs thought the Squadron Leader must have had a heart attack as he stood there in the shower. But Mrs. Marchpane’s next shrill words dissipated the notion in an instant.
“He’s disappeared. John. My John. He’s gone. He’s vanished.”
“What you mean ‘gone’?” Mrs. Craggs was eventually forced to shout sharply into Mrs. Marchpane’s ear.
“Mrs. Craggs, my husband. He was there in the shower. I was looking at him in the mirror. I was massaging my face. Then—then I looked again and he wasn’t—he wasn’t there, Mrs. Craggs.”
And the good lady burst into such a howl of tears that Mrs. Craggs could do nothing else but guide her into the kitchen, ease her down onto a chair at the table, and hastily put a light under the kettle for that universal remedy, a good strong cup of tea.
“There, there,” she said. “You’ll be all right, dear. He can’t’ve gone. Not gone. You just didn’t see him, that’s all.”
But she knew at that moment that these were no more than mere words of comfort. Because the plain fact of the matter was that standing in front of the bathroom mirror, you could see plainly and fully right to the back of the sort of sentry box made by the shower curtain at the far end of the bath. She had often noticed this herself when she had cleaned the glass shelf over the wash basin and was making sure that each one of Mrs. Marchpane’s toilet articles was back in its exact place.
At last she saw with relief that the kettle had boiled. She tumbled hot water into the teapot, poured a quick cup—it wouldn’t be very strong, but at least it would be hot—and put it in front of Mrs. Marchpane.
But already that lady was beginning to recover.
“Tea?” she exclaimed. “In the kitchen? What can you be thinking of? I’ll be in the sitting room. In the sitting room, Mrs. Craggs.”
She rose to her feet, somewhat unsteadily.
“Oh, no, you won’t,” Mrs. Craggs said, her voice exactly mingling sternness and kindliness. “You’ll sit just there where you are and swaller that cup right down. A nasty shock you’ve ’ad, an’ tea you need.”
And she even planted her sturdy legs squarely in front of the kitchen door to stop her employer from getting up and opening it.
Mrs. Marchpane, to Mrs. Craggs’s relief, seemed to lack enough of her customary hammering willpower to resist. She fell back onto the kitchen chair and began to sip the hot liquid.
“Now,” said Mrs. Craggs, “I’ll just go along to that old bathroom an’ see what all this is about.”
She marched off, not without urgency, neglecting indeed in this emergency to take care to walk round and not across the hall carpet.
But, true enough, in the bathroom there was no sign of the Squadron Leader. And when, joined by Mrs. Marchpane, she looked through all the rest of the flat, there was still not the faintest trace of him to be found.
It had been some time before Mrs. Craggs allowed her employer to go to the length of telephoning the police. But in the end she had had to agree to that portentous step. And that had been the start of a process that had gone on for at least the two weeks during which the mysterious disappearance had made the national press. A series of ever more important police officers had one by one confessed themselves baffled. Fingerprint experts, photographers, Geiger counters, stethoscopes—all had been used, but none had helped.
At last the mystery entered the history books, and Mrs. Craggs brought herself to utter the words she had wanted to say ever since her first week of employment at the flat in Fitzjames Avenue, “Sorry, madam, but I shan’t be able to oblige after next Friday.”
Even her friend Mrs. Milhorne, who had pestered her night and morning for new details of the affair—and had had to be content with meagre pickings indeed—at last transferred her riotous imagination to the latest Hollywood scandal.
Until just a week before Christmas, nearly six months later.
That was when Mrs. Craggs received a particularly splendid Christmas card. Even if it was one not particularly in the spirit of Yuletide, consisting as it did of a reproduced painting of that hallowed air-war machine of old, the Spitfire.
Mrs. Milhorne, dropping in for a chat and a cup of tea, took it from the mantelpiece, without asking, and looked inside.
“From Jack Mayglass—and Jill,” she read aloud. “Who’s he then? I didn’t know you knew any Jack Mayglass.”
Mrs. Craggs pondered for a moment.
“Well,” she said at last, “I don’t suppose it matters if I tell you now, in confidence like. I don’t know no Jack May-glass. But I used ter know a John March-pane.”
“John March—the Great Locked Bathroom Mystery?”
“Locked bathroom. That bathroom weren’t locked fer very long,” Mrs. Craggs said. “It weren’t locked from the moment that silly cow unbolted it when she thought her poor long-suffering hubby had disappeared.”
“But he had disappeared. It said so in the papers.”
“Oh, yes. He disappeared all right. Then. Disappeared from a dog’s life, to start up somewhere new. Walked right out o’ that bathroom ’e did, soon as I ’appened to take his missus into the kitchen an’ shut the door behind me. Stuck on ’is shirt an’ trousers what ’e took out o’ that Ali Baba basket where he’d just put ’em, an’ walked right out o’ the house. An’ jolly good luck to ’im.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Milhorne slowly. “Yes, I can see that. I can see he might of been driven to that, driven by a force greater than what he was. But what I can’t see is, how he wasn’t there when she looked for him in that mirror.”
“Easy,” said Mrs. Craggs. “Hair.”
“Hair? What you mean ‘hair’?”
“He must of been cleaning ’is hair out o’ the plug-’ole,” Mrs. Craggs answered. “Like what she was always on an’ on at him to do. Crouched down ’e must of been ter hoick the stuff out. An’ just then the silly cow would’ve looked back in the mirror again an’ not seen ’im. ’Course she wouldn’t, not with ’im tucked away beneath ’er sight the way ’e was an’ with that curtain there an’ all. But what’s she do? Blows ’er top straight away, goes rushing to the door, yanks open that bolt, comes yelling up ter me an’ clasps me in ’er arms like what we was Rudy Valentino an’ Mary Pickford. An’ then it must of come to ’im. This was his chance. His sudden chance. An’ ’e took it.”
Mrs. Milhorne looked at the card with the picture of the sunlit Spitfire on it.
“But you knew,” she said suddenly. “You must of known all along.”
“Well, not quite all along. But I did ’ear some little noises in the ’all while we was in the kitchen, an’ I knew then I’d better keep that dratted woman in there. An’ it was a good thing I did. Footsteps all across the ’all carpet there was. ’Ad to tread on ’em meself to blot ’em out. Couldn’t ’ave the Great Locked Bathroom Mystery come to an end before it’d really begun, could I?”
