The Best of Gerald Kersh

by Gerald Kersh

  Martha Tooth was taken in hand by a lady reporter, who carried her off to a beauty parlour, compelled her to have her hair waved, and showed her how to choose a hat. In three weeks she changed; paid attention to her finger-nails and expressed discontent with the Press. The press, she complained, wouldn’t leave her alone, and everyone wanted to marry her. Before the fourth instalment appeared she had received eleven offers of marriage. Martha Tooth had become whimsical, smiled one-sidedly, and took to lifting her shoulders in a sort of shrug. ‘Men,’ she said, ‘men! These men!’

  After the fourth week, however, she got no more letters. She was out of sight and out of mind.

  She went to the offices of the Sunday Special to see Jacket. Someone had told her that she ought to have got thousands of pounds for her story, and that there was a film in it. When she told Jacket this, he drew a deep breath and said:

  ‘Mrs Tooth. Your story is written, read, and wrapped around fried fish, and forgotten. You forget it too. Be sensible and forget it. You’ve lived your story and told your story. Go away and live another story.’ He added: ‘With a happy ending, eh?’

  She went away. Soon, a paragraph on the gossip page of an evening newspaper announced that she had married a man called Booth. Her name had been Tooth – there was the story. Mrs Tooth married Mr Booth. He was a market-gardener, and, strangely enough, a widower. Mr Booth had proposed to her by letter.

  John Jacket had forgotten the Tooth case when Mr Wainewright came to see him for the second time, twelve weeks later.

  *

  It struck Jacket as odd that Mr Wainewright was wearing a jaunty little green Tyrolean hat and a noticeable tweed suit.

  ‘Is it fair?’ asked Wainewright. ‘Where do I come in?’

  ‘Come in? How? How d’you mean, where do you come in?’

  ‘Well,’ said Mr Wainewright, shuffling his feet, ‘I mean to say … I hear that Tooth’s good lady got thousands and thousands of pounds.’

  ‘A few hundreds, George,’ said Jacket.

  ‘It isn’t that, Mr Jacket. It’s——’

  ‘The credit?’ asked Jacket, twitching an ironic lip.

  ‘Who is she to be made a heroine out of?’ asked Wainewright, looking at his finger-tips.

  ‘What exactly are you trying to get at, George?’ asked Jacket.

  ‘Get at? Who, me? Nothing, Mr Jacket.’

  ‘Then what do you want? What do you want me to do?’

  Mr Wainewright looked at the ball of his right thumb and shook his head. ‘There was nothing about me at all in the papers,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a story, too.’

  ‘Be a pal,’ said Jacket, ‘and go away. I’ve got work to do, George, old man, work. So be a pal.’

  ‘Right.’ Mr Wainewright got up.

  ‘Don’t be angry with me. Things come and things go,’ said Jacket, ‘and a story is a nine-days’ wonder. Wash this murder out of your head.’

  Mr Wainewright said: ‘Well, you know best. But I’ve also got a story——’

  A telephone bell rang. ‘See you some other time,’ said John Jacket, lifting the receiver. ‘So long for now, George.’

  Wainewright went out without saying good day. Shortly after he had gone, John Jacket, hanging up the telephone, found himself wondering about something. There had been something wrong with Wainewright. What?

  Jacket gnawed a fat black pencil.

  He had eaten his way to the last letter of the pencil-maker’s name before he knew what he was trying to remember. He laughed, and said to himself: That silly little man has gone and got himself up in a furry green hat and a tweed suit. What on earth for?

  Jacket felt that he was on the verge of a discovery – not a Sunday Special story, but something interesting all the same.

  Then his telephone rang. By the time he had stopped listening new things were in his head, and Mr Wainewright, being gone, was forgotten.

  *

  Three weeks later, as Jacket was leaving the office at lunch-time, he heard Mr Wainewright’s voice again. The little man came breathlessly out of the cover of a doorway and said: ‘Mr Jacket, sir. Please. One moment. Just one moment.’

  ‘Well, what is it?’ said Jacket, looking down at him with an expression of something like loathing. ‘What is it now, Wainewright?’

  ‘It’s something important, sir. Something very important. I give you my word, my word of honour, you’ll never forgive yourself if you don’t listen to me.’

  ‘I’m in a hurry.’

  ‘I’ve been waiting for you here in the street for an hour and a half,’ said Mr Wainewright.

  ‘You should have telephoned.’

  ‘If I had, you wouldn’t have spoken to me.’

  ‘True,’ said Jacket. Then he blinked, and said: ‘What the devil have you been doing to yourself?’

  Mr Wainewright was dressed in a tight-fitting, half-belted jacket of white stuff like tweed, an orange-coloured shirt and a black satin tie with a diamond horseshoe pin, blue flannel trousers, a panama hat, and brown-and-white buckskin shoes. He had trimmed his moustache to a fine straight line, above and below which Jacket could see a considerable area of tremulous white lip, beaded with perspiration. And he could smell lavender-water and whisky.

  ‘Doing to myself? Nothing, sir,’ said Mr Wainewright.

  ‘I like your hat.’

  ‘It’s real panama.’

  ‘Um-um!’ Jacket considered him for a second or two, and then said: ‘Come on, then. Tell me all about it. Come and have a drink.’

  ‘It’s very private,’ said Mr Wainewright. ‘It’s not something I could talk about if there was anybody around. Look, Mr Jacket, it’ll be worth your while. Come home with me, just for a few minutes.’

  ‘Home with you?’

  ‘To Bishop’s Square – ten minutes in a taxi, no more. I’ve got plenty of drinks at home. Have a drink there. Ten minutes. I’ll show you something…. I’ll tell you something. Please do! Please do, Mr Jacket.’

  ‘All right, then. But I haven’t long,’ said Jacket.

  They got into a taxi. Neither of them spoke until Mr Wainewright said: ‘After you,’ as he unlocked the street door of Number 77, Bishop’s Square. ‘Lead the way,’ said Jacket. The little man bobbed in a shopwalker’s obeisance. They passed through a clean, dim passage hung with framed caricatures out of Vanity Fair, and climbed sixteen darkly-carpeted stairs to the first floor. Mr Wainewright opened another door. ‘This used to be my auntie’s room,’ he said, rather breathlessly.

  ‘Charming,’ said Jacket, without enthusiasm.

  ‘It was Tooth’s room, too.’

  ‘Oh I see. The room in which Tooth was murdered, eh?’

  ‘Yes, sir. It’s my bedroom now.’

  ‘And is this what you brought me here to see?’ asked Jacket.

  ‘No, no,’ cried Mr Wainewright, splashing a quarter of a pint of whisky into a large tumbler, and pressing the nozzle instead of the lever of a soda-water syphon. ‘Please sit down.’

  ‘That’s a massive drink you’ve given me,’ said Jacket. He observed that his host’s drink was not much smaller.

  ‘No, not at all.’

  ‘Cheers.’ Jacket emptied his glass in two gulps. Mr Wainewright tried to do the same, but choked; recovered with a brave effort, and forced the rest of his drink into his mouth and down his throat. Jacket could hear his heavy breathing. ‘Now, tell us all about it,’ he said.

  ‘There was,’ said Mr Wainewright, swaying a little in his chair, ‘there was a … an astounding miscarriage of justice.’

  ‘In what way, Wainewright?’

  ‘In every way, Mr Jacket, sir. In every way. What I have to say will shock you.’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘Sid Tooth died just about on the spot where you are sitting, sir.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘The rug, of course, is a new one. They couldn’t clean the old one…. But your glass is empty.’

  ‘I’ll pour drinks. You go on,’ said Jacket, risi
ng.

  ‘Listen,’ said Mr Wainewright….

  *

  Mr Wainewright said, dreamily:

  ‘What I want to know is this: where’s your justice? Where’s your law? If justice is made a mockery of, and law is tricked – what do I pay rates and taxes for? The world’s going mad, sir. A woman is accused, sir, of killing her hubby with a pair of scissors. It’s proved that she did it, proved beyond doubt, Mr Jacket! And what happens? This woman, a nobody, mind you; this woman does not pay the penalty of her crime, sir. No. She is made a heroine of. She is cheered to the echo. She has her picture in all the papers. She has her life-story published. She marries again, lives happy ever after. Is that fair? Is that right?’

  ‘What’s on your mind, Wainewright? It was pretty well established as a clean-cut case of self-defence.’

  Mr Wainewright, with extraordinary passion, said: ‘She was lying! Tooth was still alive when she left this house! He was hale and hearty as you or me, after the street door closed behind Martha Tooth. Alive and laughing, I tell you. She’s a perjurer … a perjuress. She’s a liar. She got what she got under false pretences: all that money, all that sympathy. “Ill-Used Woman”, as you called her! She never killed Tooth. The world must be going mad.’

  ‘What about your evidence?’ asked Jacket, skilfully pouring half his drink into his host’s glass.

  Mr Wainewright snapped: ‘Evidence! Don’t talk to me about evidence!’

  ‘You drink up your nice drink,’ said Jacket, ‘and go over it all again.’

  ‘I hated that man,’ said Mr Wainewright. ‘Who did he think he was, that Sid Tooth? He was no good. And all the women were in love with him. He was a bully, a dirty bully. A drunkard, a bad ’un – bad to the backbone. He practically forced his way into this house. A laugh, a joke, a drink, a bang on the back – and before I knew where I was, there was Tooth, in auntie’s old room. I’m not used to that sort of thing, Mr Jacket, sir. I’m not used to it. He borrowed money in cash, and ran up bills. He told me he’d done a deal with a new department store, for weighing machines – over a thousand pounds in commission he had to collect. So he said. All lies, sir, all lies, but I swallowed ’em. I swallowed everything Tooth said. Bad, sir, bad! He was bad to the backbone.’

  Jacket asked: ‘Why didn’t you tell him to get out?’

  ‘I meant to,’ said Mr Wainewright, ‘but he always saw it coming. Then it was a laugh, and a joke, and a drink, and a bang on the back…. To-morrow: he’d pay me to-morrow. And to-morrow, he said, to-morrow. And then he had to go to Leeds, or Bristol. It was drinks and women with him, sir, all the time. He used to bring women into this very room, Mr Jacket, sir, into this very room. And I was next door. No woman ever looked twice at me, sir. What’s the matter with me? Have I got a hump on my back, or something? Eh? Have I?’

  Jacket said: ‘Far from it, old friend.’

  ‘And I sat in my room, next door, with nothing to do but get my scrap-book up to date.’

  ‘What scrap-book?’ asked Jacket, refilling the little man’s glass.

  Mr Wainewright giggled, pointing to a neatly-arranged pile of red-backed volumes on a shelf by the bed. Jacket opened one, and riffled the pages. Mr Wainewright had meticulously cut out of cinematic and physical-culture magazines the likenesses of young women in swimming suits. He had gummed them in and smoothed them down. Here, between the eight covers of four scrap-books, lay his seraglio. His favourite wife, it appeared, was Ann Sheridan.

  ‘You think I’m pretty terrible,’ he said, rising uncertainly and taking the book out of Jacket’s hands.

  ‘Go on,’ said Jacket.

  ‘No, but I don’t want you to think …’

  ‘I’m not thinking anything. Go on, pal, go on.’

  ‘I think there’s something artistic in the human form, sir. So for a hobby, you see, I collect it in my scrap-books.’

  ‘I understand, I understand,’ said Jacket. ‘You were sitting in your room next door to this, with nothing to do but get your scrap-books up to date, when – go on, go on, George.’

  ‘I asked you here to tell you this,’ said Mr Wainewright. ‘You don’t need to … to draw me out. I’m telling you something. A story – worth a fortune. No need to screw your face up. No need to pretend to treat me with respect. I know what you think. You think I’m nothing. You think I’m nobody. Let me tell you.’

  ‘You were sitting in your room——’

  ‘I was cutting out the picture of the young lady called Pumpkins Whitaker, sir – an artistic figure – when Mrs Tooth came to visit him.’

  He pointed to the floor under Jacket’s chair.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Jacket. I listened. What happened was as I said in court. They quarrelled. She cried. He laughed. There was a scuffle. In the end Mrs Tooth ran out. Just like I said, sir.’

  ‘Well?’

  Mr Wainewright leaned forward, and Jacket had to support him with an unobtrusive hand.

  ‘Then, sir, I went into Tooth’s room, this very room, sir. I knocked first, of course.’

  ‘And there was no answer?’

  ‘There was an answer. Tooth said “Come in.” And I came in, Mr Jacket.’

  ‘You mean to say Tooth was alive when you came in here, after his wife had left?’

  ‘Exactly, sir. I was curious to know what had been going on. I made up an excuse for coming to see him just then. I’d borrowed his scissors, you see, the ones she is supposed to have killed him with. I’d been using them – they were very sharp – for cutting things out. They were part of a set – scissors and paper-knife in a shagreen case. I came to give them back – it was an excuse. Actually, I wanted to know what had been going on.’

  ‘Go on, George,’ said Jacket, quietly.

  Mr Wainewright said: ‘He was sitting on the bed, just about where you are now, in his shirt-sleeves, laughing and playing with the paper-knife. He started telling me all about his wife, Mr Jacket, sir – how much she loved him, how much the barmaid at the “Duchess of Douro” loved him, how much every woman he met loved him. His collar was undone.’ Mr Wainewright paused and moistened his lips. ‘His collar was undone. He had one of those great big thick white necks. I had that pair of scissors in my hand. He threw his head back while he was laughing. I said: “Here’s your scissors.” He went on laughing, and coughing – he was a cigarette-smoker – at the same time. “Here’s your scissors,” I said. I think he’d been drinking. He roared with laughter. And then, all of a sudden, something got hold of me. I hit him with my right hand. I couldn’t pull my hand away. It was holding on to the scissors, and they were stuck in his neck, where his collar was open. He made a sort of noise like Gug – as if you’d pushed an empty glass into a basin. of water, sir, and simply went down. I hadn’t intended to do it. I hadn’t even shut the door of this room when I came in. But as soon as I saw what I’d done I wiped the scissors with my handkerchief, in case of fingerprints, and I slipped out, shutting the door from the outside, and went back to my room. Do you see?

  ‘Martha Tooth never killed anybody. It was me. I killed Sid Tooth, Mr Jacket, in this very room.

  ‘And so you see, sir. There was a miscarriage of justice. Martha Tooth hasn’t got any right to be made a heroine out of. She never killed that beast, sir. I killed Tooth. But she,’ said Mr Wainewright, with bitterness, ‘she gets acquitted. She is made a fuss of. Her life-story is all over your paper. Her picture and her name is all over the place. And the honest truth of it is, that I did it!’

  John Jacket said: ‘Prove it.’

  *

  Mr Wainewright drew a deep breath and said: ‘I beg pardon, sir?’

  ‘Prove it,’ said Jacket. ‘Prove you did it.’

  ‘Do you think I’m crazy?’ asked Mr Wainewright.

  ‘Of course you’re crazy,’ said Jacket.

  ‘I swear before the Almighty,’ said Mr Wainewright, with passionate sincerity, ‘I swear, so help me God, that I killed Tooth!’

  Jack
et, who had been watching his face, said: ‘I believe you, Wainewright. I believe you did kill Tooth.’

  ‘Then there’s your story,’ Mr Wainewright said. ‘Eh?’

  ‘No,’ said Jacket. ‘No story. It’s proved that Martha Tooth killed her husband and was justified in killing him. It’s all weighed and paid. It’s all over. You can’t prove a thing. I believe you when you say you killed Tooth. But if you weren’t a lunatic, why should you go out of your way to tell me so after everything has been resolved and poor Martha Tooth has been comfortably provided for?’

  Mr Wainewright sat still and white. He was silent.

  Jacket rose, stretched himself, and said: ‘You see, George old man, nobody in the world is ever going to believe you now.’ He reached for his hat.

  ‘Still, I did it,’ said Mr Wainewright.

  ‘I begin,’ said Jacket, ‘to understand the way you work. Tooth was a swine, a strong and active swine. I see how you envied Tooth’s beastly strength, and shamelessness. I think I get it. You wanted to ill-treat Tooth’s wife and betray his girl friends. You were jealous of his power to be wicked. You wanted what he had. You wanted to be Tooth. No? So you killed Tooth. But all the while, George, in your soul, you were Tooth! And so you’ve gone and killed yourself, you poor little man. You tick unheard, George; you move unseen – you are a clock without hands. You are in hell, George!’

  John Jacket put on his hat and left the house.

  He did no work that afternoon. At five o’clock he telephoned Chief Inspector Dark, at Scotland Yard, and said: ‘… Just in case. That little man Wainewright has just been telling me that he killed Tooth in Bishop’s Square.’

  Chief Inspector Dark replied: ‘I know. He’s been telling the same story around here. He was in yesterday. The man’s mad. Damned nuisances. Happens every time. Dozens of ’em always confess to what they haven’t done every time somebody kills somebody. Have to make a routine investigation, as you know. But this Tooth business is nothing but a lot of Sweet Fanny Adams. Pay no attention to it. Wainewright’s stone crackers, plain crazy. Forget it.’