“‘Our list’?” I was puzzled by his most deliberate pause. “What list?”
“Oh, the little company I’m forming: myself, yourself, Koffard, Westmacott and young Brian, to exploit the pitch-blende deposits of our property in Skelter’s Pot, Derbyshire.” He laughed and stretched his long arms. “It ought to provide for us in our old age, if nothing else!”
… Judging by my latest returns from that adroitly-contrived concern, I am inclined, stoutly, to agree.
The 45 Steps by Peter Crowther
Here’s another brand new story. It was written for the last locked-room anthology I compiled but arrived too late for me to squeeze in. I was thus delighted to find that the story was still available as it includes one of the most audacious methods of murder I have yet encountered – and in the smallest locked room of them all. Peter Crowther (b. 1949) is a highly respected author, editor and publisher primarily of science fiction and fantasy, but of all things unusual. He runs PS Publishing which has won many awards, and which includes books by Brian Aldiss, Ray Bradbury, Michael Swanwick and Ramsey Campbell. Amongst Peter’s own books are Escardy Gap (1996) with James Lovegrove and Songs of Leaving (2004) with Edward Miller, as well as the fascinating anthology sequence that began with Narrow Houses (1992). Several of Peter’s stories have common settings and amongst those is the northern town of Luddersedge, which will one day coalesce into another book. In the meantime, we can peer into part of the town’s strange life in the following disquieting tale.
To say that hotels in Luddersedge were thin on the ground was an understatement of gargantuan proportions. Although there were countless guest houses, particularly along Honeydew Lane beside the notorious Bentley’s Tannery – whose ever-present noxious fumes seemed to be unnoticed by the guests – the Regal was the only full-blown hotel, and the only building other than the old town hall to stretch above the slate roofs of Luddersedge and scratch a sky oblivious to, and entirely disinterested in, its existence.
The corridors of the Regal were lined with threadbare carpets, hemmed in by walls bearing a testimonial trinity of mildew, graffiti and spilled alcohol, and topped by ceilings whose anaglypta was peeling at the corners and whose streaky paint-covering had been dimmed long ago by cigarette smoke. The rooms themselves boasted little in the way of the creature comforts offered by the Regal’s big-town contemporaries in Halifax and Burnley.
For most of the year, the Regal’s register – if such a thing were ever filled in, which it rarely was – boasted only couples by the name of Smith or Jones, and the catering staff had little to prepare other than the fabled Full English Breakfast – truly the most obscenely mountainous start-of-the-day plate of food outside of Dublin. Indeed, questions were frequently asked in bread-shop or bus-stop queues and around the beer-slopped pub tables at the Working Men’s Club, as to exactly how the Regal kept going.
But there were far too many other things to occupy the attention and interest of Luddersedge’s townsfolk and, anyway, most of them recognized the important social part played by the Regal in the lives of their not-so-distant cousins living in the towns a few miles down the road in either direction. Not that awkward questions were not asked about other situations in which the Regal played a key role, one of which came to pass on a Saturday night in early December on the occasion of the Conservative Club’s Christmas Party, and which involved the one hotel feature that was truly magnificent – the Gentlemen’s toilet situated in the basement beneath the ballroom.
To call such a sprawling display of elegance and creative indulgence a loo or a bog – or even a john or a head, to use the slang vernacular popular with the occasional Americans who visited the Calder Valley in the 1950s, the heyday of Luddersedge’s long-forgotten twinning with the mid-west town of Forest Plains – was tantamount to heresy.
A row of shoulder-height marble urinals – complete with side panels that effectively rendered invisible anyone of modest height who happened to be availing themselves of their facility – was completed by a series of carefully angled glass panel splashguards set in aluminium side grips and a standing area inlaid with a mosaic of tiny slate and Yorkshire stone squares and rectangles of a multitude of colours. It was an area worn smooth by generations of men temporarily intent on emptying bladders filled with an excess of John Smith’s, Old Peculiar and Black Sheep bitter ales served in the bars above.
Two wide steps down from the urinals was a row of generously sized washbasins, set back and mounted on ornate embellishments of curlicued brass fashioned to resemble a confusion of vines interlinked with snakes. They nested beneath individual facing panels split one-half mirror and the other reinforced glass, the glass halves looking through onto an identical set of basins on the other side of the partition, behind which stood the WCs.
It was these wood-panelled floor-to-ceiling enclosed retreats – with their individual light switches, oak toilet seats and covers, matching tissue dispensers, and stained glass backings behind the pipe leading from the overhead cistern – that were, perhaps, the room’s crowning glory. They were even more impressive than the worn leather sofas and wing-backed chairs situated on their own dais at the far end of the toilet, book-ended by towering aspidistras and serviced by standing silver ashtrays and glass-topped tables bearing the latest issues of popular men’s magazines.
But while these extravagant rooms – albeit small rooms, designed for but one purpose – had rightly gained some considerable fame (particularly as the town was not noted for anything even approaching artistic or historical significance) they had also achieved a certain notoriety that was not always welcome.
Such notoriety came not merely from the time, in the late 1940s, when an exceptionally inebriated Jack Walker pitched forward rather unexpectedly – after failing to register the aforementioned double step leading to the urinals – and smashed his head into one of the glass-panelled splashguards. Nor did it come from that legendary night when Pete Dickinson was ceremoniously divested of all of his clothes on his stag night and reduced to escaping the Regal, staggering drunkenly through Luddersedge’s cold spring streets, wearing only one of the toilet’s continuous hand towels (those being the days before automatic hand dryers, of course), a 50-foot ribbon of linen that gave the quickly sobering Dickinson the appearance of a cross between Julius Caesar and Boris Karloff’s mummy.
Rather, the toilet’s somewhat dubious reputation stemmed solely from the fact that, over the years, its lavish cubicles had seen a stream of Luddersedge’s finest and most virile young men venturing into their narrow enclosures with their latest female conquests for a little session of hi-jinks where, their minds (and, all too often, their prowess and sexual longevity) clouded by the effects of ale, a surfeit of testosterone and the threat of being discovered, they would perform loveless couplings to the muted strains of whatever music drifted down from the floor above.
The practice was known, in the less salubrious circles of Calder Valley drinking establishments, as “The Forty Five Steps Club”. The name referred, in a version of the similar “honorary” appellation afforded those who carried out the same act on an in-flight aeroplane (“The Mile High Club”), to the toilet’s distance below ground – three perilously steep banks of fifteen steps leading down from the ballroom’s west entrance.
And so it was that, at precisely 10 o’clock on the fateful night of the Conservative Club’s Christmas Party, it was to this bastion of opulence and renown that Arthur Clark retired midway through a plate of turkey, new potatoes, broccoli and carrots (having already seen off several pints of John Smith’s, an entire bowl of dry roasted peanuts and the Regal’s obligatory prawn cocktail first course) to evacuate both bladder and bowel. It was a clockwork thing with Arthur and, no matter where he was or whom he was with, he would leave whatever was going on to void himself – on this occasion, all the better to concentrate his full attention and gastric juices on the promised (though some might say “threatened”) Christmas Pudding and rum sauce plus a couple of coffees and a few glasses of Bells whisky. Arthur’s slightly weaving departure from the ballroom, its back end filled with a series of long dining tables leaving the area immediately in front of the stage free for the inevitable dancing that would follow coffee and liqueurs, was to be the last time that his fellow guests saw him alive.