The Perfect Murder

by Ruskin Bond

  ‘You needn’t feel so nervous about him; Mr Sleuth can look out for himself, all right.’ Mrs Bunting spoke in a dry, rather tart tone. She was less emotional, better balanced, than was her husband. On her the marks of past servitude were less apparent, but they were there all the same—especially in her neat black stuff dress and scrupulously clean, plain collar and cuffs. Mrs Bunting, as a single woman, had been for long years what is known as a useful maid.

  ‘I can’t think why he wants to go out in such weather. He did it in last week’s fog, too,’ Bunting went on complaining.

  ‘Well, it’s none of your business—now, is it?’

  ‘No; that’s true enough. Still, ’twould be a very bad thing for us if anything happened to him. This lodger’s the first bit of luck we’ve had for a very long time.’

  Mrs Bunting made no answer to this remark. It was too obviously true to be worth answering. Also she was listening—following in imagination her lodger’s quick, singularly quiet—stealthy, she called it to herself—progress through the dark, fog-filled hall and up the staircase.

  ‘It isn’t safe for decent folk to be out in such weather—not unless they have something to do that won’t wait till tomorrow.’ Bunting had at last turned round. He was now looking straight into his wife’s narrow, colourless face; he was an obstinate man, and liked to prove himself right. ‘I read you out the accidents in Lloyd’s yesterday—shocking, they were, and all brought about by the fog! And then, that ’orrid monster at his work again—’

  ‘Monster?’ repeated Mrs Bunting absently. She was trying to hear the lodger’s footsteps overhead; but her husband went on as if there had been no interruption:

  ‘It wouldn’t be very pleasant to run up against such a party as that in the fog, eh?’

  ‘What stuff you do talk!’ she said sharply; and then she got up suddenly. Her husband’s remark had disturbed her. She hated to think of such things as the terrible series of murders that were just then horrifying and exciting the nether world of London. Though she enjoyed pathos and sentiment—Mrs Bunting would listen with mild amusement to the details of a breach-of-promise action—she shrank from stories of either immorality or physical violence.

  Mrs Bunting got up from the straight-backed chair on which she had been sitting. It would soon be time for supper.

  She moved about the sitting-room, flecking off an imperceptible touch of dust here, straightening a piece of furniture there.

  Bunting looked around once or twice. He would have liked to ask Ellen to leave off fidgeting, but he was mild and fond of peace, so he refrained. However, she soon gave over what irritated him of her own accord.

  But even then Mrs Bunting did not at once go down to the cold kitchen, where everything was in readiness for her simple cooking. Instead, she opened the door leading into the bedroom behind, and there, closing the door quietly, stepped back into the darkness and stood motionless, listening.

  At first she heard nothing, but gradually there came the sound of someone moving about in the room just overhead; try as she might, however, it was impossible for her to guess what her lodger was doing. At last she heard him open the door leading out on the landing. That meant that he would spend the rest of the evening in the rather cheerless room above the drawing-room floor—oddly enough, he liked sitting there best, though the only warmth obtainable was from a gas-stove fed by a shilling-in-the slot arrangement.

  It was indeed true that Mr Sleuth had brought the Buntings luck, for at the time he had taken their rooms it had been touch-and-go with them.

  After having each separately led the sheltered, impersonal, and, above all, the financially easy existence that is the compensation life offers to those men and women who deliberately take upon themselves the yoke of domestic service, these two, butler and useful maid, had suddenly, in middle age, determined to join their fortunes and savings.

  Bunting was a widower; he had one pretty daughter, a girl of seventeen, who now lived, as had been the case ever since the death of her mother, with a prosperous aunt. His second wife had been reared in the Foundling Hospital, but she had gradually worked her way up into the higher ranks of the servant class and as useful maid she had saved quite a tidy sum of money.

  Unluckily, misfortune had dogged Mr and Mrs Bunting from the very first. The seaside place where they had begun by taking a lodging-house became the scene of an epidemic. Then had followed a business experiment which had proved disastrous. But before going back into service, either together or separately, they had made up their minds to make one last effort, and, with the little money that remained to them, they had taken over the lease of a small house in the Marylebone Road.

  Bunting, whose appearance was very good, had retained a connection with old employers and their friends, so he occasionally got a good job as waiter. During this last month his jobs had perceptibly increased in number and in profit; Mrs Bunting was not superstitious, but it seemed that in this matter, as in everything else, Mr Sleuth, their new lodger, had brought them luck.

  As she stood there, still listening intently in the darkness of the bedroom, she told herself, not for the first time, what Mr Sleuth’s departure would mean to her and Bunting. It would almost certainly mean ruin.

  Luckily, the lodger seemed entirely pleased both with the rooms and with his landlady. There was really no reason why he should ever leave such nice lodgings. Mrs Bunting shook off her vague sense of apprehension and unease. She turned round, took a step forward, and, feeling for the handle of the door giving into the passage, she opened it, and went down with light, firm steps into the kitchen.

  She lit the gas and put a frying-pan on the stove, and then once more her mind reverted, as if in spite of herself, to her lodger, and there came back to Mrs Bunting, very vividly, the memory of all that had happened the day Mr Sleuth had taken her rooms.

  The date of this excellent lodger’s coming had been the twenty-ninth of December, and the time late afternoon. She and Bunting had been sitting, gloomily enough over their small banked-up fire. They had dined in the middle of the day—he on a couple of sausages, she on a little cold ham. They were utterly out of heart, each trying to pluck up courage to tell the other that it was no use trying any more. The two had also had a little tiff on that dreary afternoon. A newspaper-seller had come yelling down the Marylebone Road, shouting out, ‘Orrible murder in Whitechapel!’ and just because Bunting had an old uncle living in the East End he had gone and bought a paper, and at a time, too, when every penny, nay, every half-penny, had its full value! Mrs Bunting remembered the circumstances because that murder in Whitechapel had been the first of these terrible cringes—there had been four since—which she would never allow Bunting to discuss in her presence, and yet which had of late begun to interest curiously, uncomfortably, ever her refined mind.

  But, to return to the lodger. It was then, on that dreary afternoon, that suddenly there had come to the front door a tremulous, uncertain double knock.

  Bunting ought to have got up, but he had gone on reading the paper and so Mrs Bunting, with the woman’s greater courage, had gone out into the passage, turned up the gas, and opened the door to see who it could be. She remembered, as if it were yesterday instead of nigh on a month ago, Mr Sleuth’s peculiar appearance. Tall, dark, lanky, an old-fashioned top hat concealing his high bald forehead, he had stood there, an odd figure of a man, blinking at her.

  ‘I believe—is it not a fact that you let lodgings?’ he had asked in a hesitating, whistling voice, a voice that she had known in a moment to be that of an educated man—of a gentleman. As he had stepped into the hall, she had noticed that in his right hand he held a narrow bag—a quite new bag of strong brown leather.

  Everything had been settled in less than a quarter of an hour. Mr Sleuth had at once ‘taken’ to the drawing-room floor, and then, as Mrs Bunting eagerly lit the gas in the front room above, he had looked around him and said, rubbing his hands with a nervous movement, ‘Capital—capital! This is just what
I’ve been looking for!’

  The sink had specially pleased him—the sink and the gas-stove. ‘This is quite first-rate!’ he had exclaimed, ‘for I make all sorts of experiments. I am, you must understand, Mrs—er—Bunting, a man of science.’ Then he had sat down—suddenly. ‘I’m very tired,’ he had said in a low tone, ‘very tired indeed! I have been walking about all day.’

  From the very first the lodger’s manner had been odd, sometimes distant and abrupt, and then, for no reason at all that she could see, confidential and plaintively confiding. But Mrs Bunting was aware that eccentricity has always been a perquisite, as it were the special luxury, of the well born and well educated. Scholars and such-like are never quite like other people.

  And then, this particular gentleman had proved himself so eminently satisfactory as to the one thing that really matters to those who let lodgings. ‘My name is Sleuth,’ he said, ‘S-l-e-ut-h. Think of a hound, Mrs Bunting, and you’ll never forget my name. I could give you references,’ he had added, giving her, as she now remembered, a funny sidewise look, ‘but I prefer to dispense with them. How much did you say? Twenty-three shillings a week, with attendance? Yes, that will suit me perfectly; and I’ll begin by paying my first month’s rent in advance. Now, four times twenty-three shillings is’ —he looked at Mrs Bunting, and for the first time he smiled, a queer, wry smile—‘ninety-two shillings.’

  He had taken a handful of sovereigns out of his pocket and put them down on the table. ‘Look here,’ he had said, ‘there’s five pounds; and you can keep the change, for I shall want you to do a little shopping for me tomorrow’

  After he had been in the house about an hour, the bell had rung, and the new lodger had asked Mrs Bunting if she could oblige him with the loan of a Bible. She brought up to him her best Bible, the one that had been given to her as a wedding present by a lady with whose mother she had lived for several years. This Bible and one other book, of which the odd name was Cruden’s Concordance, formed Mr Sleuth’s only reading: he spent hours each day poring over the Old Testament and over the volume which Mrs Bunting had at last decided to give to be a queer kind of index to the Book.

  However, to return to the lodger’s first arrival. He had had no luggage with him, barring the small brown bag, but very soon parcels had begun to arrive addressed to Mr Sleuth, and it was then that Mrs Bunting first became curious. These parcels were full of clothes; but it was quite clear to the landlady’s feminine eye that none of these clothes had been made for Mr Sleuth. They were, in fact, second-hand clothes, bought at good second-hand places, each marked, when marked at all, with a different name. And the really extraordinary thing was that occasionally a complete suit disappeared—became, as it were, obliterated from the lodger’s wardrobe.

  As for the bag he had brought with him, Mrs Bunting had never caught sight of it again. And this also was certainly very strange.

  Mrs Bunting thought a great deal about that bag. She often wondered what had been in it; not a nightshirt and comb and brush, as she had at first supposed, for Mr Sleuth had asked her to go out and buy him a brush and comb and toothbrush the morning after his arrival. That fact was specially impressed on her memory, for at the little shop, a barber’s, where she had purchased the brush and comb, the foreigner who had served her had insisted on telling her some of the horrible details of the murder that had taken place the day before in Whitechapel, and it had upset her very much.

  As to where the bag was now, it was probably locked up in the lower part of a chiffonnier in the front sitting-room. Mr Sleuth evidently always carried the key of the little cupboard on his person, for Mrs Bunting, though she looked well for it, had never been able to find it.

  And yet, never was there a more confiding or trusting gentleman. The first four days that he had been with them he had allowed his money—the considerable sum of one hundred and eighty-four pounds in gold—to lie about wrapped up in pieces of paper on his dressing-table. This was a very foolish, indeed a wrong thing to do, as she had allowed herself respectfully to point out to him; but as an only answer he had laughed, a loud, discordant shout of laughter.

  Mr Sleuth had many other odd ways; but Mrs Bunting, a true woman in spite of her prim manner and love of order, had an infinite patience with masculine vagaries.

  On the first morning of Mr Sleuth’s stay in the Buntings’s house, while Mrs Bunting was out buying things for him, the new lodger had turned most of the pictures and photographs hanging in his sitting-room with their faces to the wall! But this queer action on Mr Sleuth’s part had not surprised Mrs Bunting as much as it might have done; it recalled an incident of her long-past youth—something that had happened a matter of twenty years ago, at a time when Mrs Bunting, then the still youthful Ellen Cottrell, had been maid to an old lady. The old lady had a favourite nephew, a bright, jolly young gentleman who had been learning to paint animals in Paris; and it was he who had had the impudence, early one summer morning, to turn to the wall six beautiful engravings of paintings done by the famous Mr Landseer! The old lady thought the world of those pictures, but her nephew, as the only excuse for the extraordinary thing he had done, had observed that ‘they put his eye out’.

  Mr Sleuth’s excuse had been much the same; for, when Mrs Bunting had come into his sitting-room and found all her pictures, or at any rate all those of her pictures that happened to be portraits of ladies, with their faces to the wall, he had offered an only explanation, ‘Those women’s eyes follow me about.’ Mrs Bunting had gradually become aware that Mr Sleuth had a fear and dislike of women. When she was ‘doing’ the staircase and landing, she often heard him reading bits of the Bible aloud to himself, and in the majority of instances the texts he chose contained uncomplimentary reference to her own sex. Only today she had stopped and listened while he uttered threateningly the awful words, ‘A strange woman is a narrow pit. She also lieth in wait as for a prey, and increaseth the transgressors among men.’ There had been a pause, and then had come, in a high singsong, ‘Her house is the way to hell, going down to the chambers of death.’ It had made Mrs Bunting feel quite queer.

  The lodger’s daily habits were also peculiar. He stayed in bed all morning, and sometimes part of the afternoon, and he never went out before the street lamps were alight. Then, there was his dislike of an open fire; he generally sat in the top front room, and while there he always used the large gas-stove, not only for his experiments, which he carried on at night, but also in the daytime, for warmth.

  But there! Where was the use of worrying about the lodger’s funny ways? Of course, Mr Sleuth was eccentric; if he hadn’t been ‘just a leetle “touched” upstairs’—as Bunting had once described it—he wouldn’t be their lodger now; he would be living in a quite different sort of way with some of his relations, or with a friend of his own class.

  Mrs Bunting, while these thoughts galloped disconnectedly through her brain, went on with her cooking, doing everything with a certain delicate and clean precision.

  While in the middle of making the toast on which was to be poured some melted cheese, she suddenly heard a noise, or rather a series of noises. Shuffling, hesitating steps were creaking down the house above. She looked up and listened. Surely Mr Sleuth was not going out again into the cold, foggy night? But no; for the sounds did not continue down the passage leading to the front door.

  The heavy steps were coming slowly down the kitchen stairs. Nearer and nearer came the thudding sounds, and Mrs Bunting’s heart began to beat as if in response. She put out the gas-stove, unheedful of the fact that the cheese would stiffen and spoil in the cold air; and then she turned and faced the door. There was a fumbling at the handle, and a moment later the door opened and revealed, as she had known it would, her lodger.

  Mr Sleuth was clad in a plaid dressing-gown, and in his hand was a candle. When he saw the lit-up kitchen, and the woman standing in it, he looked inexplicably taken aback, almost aghast.

  ‘Yes, sir? What can I do for you, sir? I hope you didn�
�t ring, sir?’ Mrs Bunting did not come forward to meet her lodger; instead, she held her ground in front of the stove. Mr Sleuth had no business to come down like this into her kitchen.

  ‘No, I—I didn’t ring,’ he stammered; ‘I didn’t know you were down here, Mrs Bunting. Please excuse my costume. The truth is, my gas-stove has gone wrong, or, rather, that shilling in-the-slot arrangement has done so. I came down to see if you had a gas-stove. I am going to ask leave to use it tonight for an experiment I want to make.’

  Mrs Bunting felt troubled—oddly, unnaturally troubled. Why couldn’t the lodger’s experiment wait till tomorrow? ‘Oh, certainly, sir; but you will find it very cold down here.’ She looked round her dubiously.

  ‘It seems most pleasantly warm,’ he observed, ‘warm and cozy after my cold room upstairs.’

  ‘Won’t you let me make you a fire?’ Mrs Bunting’s housewifely instincts were roused. ‘Do let me make you a fire in your bedroom, sir; I’m sure you ought to have one there these cold nights.’

  ‘By no means—I mean, I would prefer not. I do not like an open fire, Mrs Bunting.’ He frowned, and still stood, a strange-looking figure, just inside the kitchen door.

  ‘Do you want to use this stove now, sir? Is there anything I can do to help you?’

  ‘No, not now—thank you all the same, Mrs Bunting. I shall come down later, altogether later—probably after you and your husband have gone to bed. But I should be much obliged if you would see that the gas people come tomorrow and put my stove in order.’

  ‘Perhaps Bunting could put it right for you, sir. I’ll ask him to go up.’

  ‘No, no—I don’t want anything of that sort done tonight. Besides, he couldn’t put it right. The cause of the trouble is quite simple. The machine is choked up with shillings: a foolish plan, so I have always felt it to be.’