by H. F. Heard
There he was talking about himself, but somehow today it was positively a relief. All too soon we should have to come to my case and, as long as he was here, I felt safe. I felt that I ought to make some slight comment.
“Didn’t that amusing writer Lytton Strachey live down there?”
“Yes; in fact, I passed his house, in taking my longest walk. But I wasn’t on a literary pilgrimage. His house lies in the vale just before you reach the finest walking in England, the North Downs escarpment. I was bound for that. Right opposite that house’s windows stands Inkpen Beacon. I walked there; really after I had done my little piece of hunting, just out of romantic interest.” Looking away from me, Mr. Mycroft added, “There used to be a gallows on that crest. The last man hanged on it was a remarkable murderer. Indeed, I should have thought, at that date, more than a century ago, he would have got off. But they brought the charge fully home to him. I was reading up the crime at Hungerford. He was a small Hungerford farmer, living not far from Lytton Strachey’s house.” Then, turning to me, Mr. Mycroft said, quietly, “He murdered his wife with a simple ingenuity which I have myself not met with elsewhere in the records of homicidal crime: by upsetting her into a hive of angry bees.”
I felt myself pale.
“But,” he went on, “even at that date, he was caught. And, though time adds to all skill, even in devilry, it also adds to our defenses.”
He paused. Then I summoned up my courage.
“Mr. Mycroft, it was extremely kind of you to come round so promptly. I don’t expect to be able to conceal from you the condition I am in, a condition to which—”
“Yes,” he said, with comforting confirmation. “I have seen plenty of men, who felt they were brave and tough, begin to go to pieces under the strain you have been enduring.”
That kindness—what I would call the right professional or medical attitude (I felt now pretty sure the old fellow had been a doctor)—that steady understanding, certainly hit me pretty hard. He took the hand—rather trembling, I fear it was—which I put out and held it in a remarkably reassuring grip.
“You have been doing a useful and dangerous piece of work,” he said—a curiously clever way of comforting someone who felt he had been only a bungling, impertinent fool, who had insisted, even when warned, on sticking his silly head all too literally into a hornets’ nest, and now was frightened almost out of his wits.
“You have drawn Heregrove,” he continued. “As we agreed” (that again was kind; it had, of course, been solely his diagnosis), “Heregrove is the typical murderer-with-a-bright-idea.”
I shuddered at the word, but it was true enough.
“That type generally reads a great many detective stories and, as you are no doubt aware, detective stories, like many other of our modes and manners—if you will forgive what may sound like an old man’s ‘grouse’—have degenerated. They began with common sense and trained observation and perhaps a patient devotion to and belief in tidying things up, these three allied together—not necessarily to exact the law’s penalty but to show the criminal he could not win; that the balance of intelligence and insight are, in the end, always on the side of order and right.”
The old man was started, but again I felt only relief. I thought of a long, plodding relief column, pertinaciously winding its way through narrow passes to raise the siege of a sorely beleaguered garrison.
“But now,” he went on, “it is the gentleman cracksman who is the public’s real fancy. Oh, I know the films have to show the G-man getting his gunman, but that is only a ‘command performance.’ The public has to see such pictures because it supposes they protect it from young, growing criminals. But the public really likes fancying itself in immaculate evening dress carelessly holding up the bank at Monte Carlo. Well, a few act on their daydreams. They get a new idea, as they think. I have shown you that this one is not as new as our friend believes. They suffer from an old irritation—as old as the world, the returning to ‘a dark house and a detested wife’—reverse the roles and the story is certainly as old as cyclopean Mykenae and the Trojan War, Klytemnestra killing her Agamemnon in his bath—older, if we only knew. They kill, and then, like most animals with the instinct to kill in their blood, having tasted blood, they must go on killing. Nothing else gives them such a sense of power—and this feeling they must have. All the members of the human race—proud, successful, hateful creatures—are in the murderer’s hand. To them he may seem a failure. They had better beware! At his slightest whim, there they are—so much carrion.”
It was all too obviously exemplified by my situation—the casual, nearest-to-hand neighbor following the hated wife into the oubliette.
“What are we to do?” I ventured to interpose.
“Mr. Silchester,” he said, looking straight at me, “I am going to repeat a request.”
“You needn’t have any fear,” I interrupted: “I shall never go near the place again.”
“The request I made,” he went on quietly, “had two clauses. The first, that you should not go alone, has proved to have been wise. The second—” He saw I had gone white. I now remembered it all too well. But he went on serenely, “Was that you would introduce me to your acquaintance, Mr. Heregrove.”
“But I can’t! It would be suicide for us both. The very sight of the man would make me tremble and he would be bound to make his brutes attack us, even if they did not do so of themselves. Can’t you put all you know before the police? Can’t you have him arrested?”
“British law is a noble pile,” he replied ruminatively, “but, like most stately causeways, erected block by block, year after year for centuries, it has plenty of crannies in it. The liberty of the subject requires that the law should not look too closely. For life and law are never very easy with each other and we must pay for our freedom to be eccentric by letting an occasional criminal get through and away.” Then, with a sudden sharpness, “There’s not a shred of evidence to go to a court upon. He’s proved innocent of his wife’s death. A court has said it was an accident. As for your situation: you were attacked in your house and no one even saw it happen. Your servant is hardly a mute. She does not ask to be questioned before she gives you both news and views. She sympathizes sincerely with you for having had some sort of shock. In her family, I gather, similar things have befallen. But she is certainly skeptical about the cause being other than, as she put it, ‘in the family.’ Indeed, Heregrove might turn the tables on you—he is certainly bold enough to do it—and say you were maligning him; trying to ruin him; either a blackmailer or a border-line neurotic. Remember, Mr. Silchester, an eccentric has few friends.”
That so chimed with my own gloomy thoughts at which his visit had found me that I collapsed into a wholly apprehensive silence.
“But remember also,” he went on, deliberately cheering, “Heregrove is also curiously helpless, curiously localized in his malignancy. He is like one of those slow-moving, stiff, poisonous lizards which, if you pounce and pick them up in a certain way, can’t get their venom-spine into you.”
He saw that I remained dolefully unconvinced. So he added, “Believe me, there is no safer place for you than in Heregrove’s house. He’s playing a game. He’s perfecting his lovely, power-giving murder tool. He’s not going to spoil all by striking at you when the corpse would fall on his hands.”
I didn’t like the phrase at all, but it did make the situation clear, if painfully so.
“No, no; in his house you will be under his guard. Some spiders don’t recognize a fly if it is not in their web. Heregrove simply can’t kill you unless you are outside his.”
Still, I quite naturally hesitated. Mr. Mycroft looked keenly at me again.
“And unless we do get into that house we shall never get him off your track. I beg you to make no mistake over that. I have more knowledge of this particular psychology than, if I may say so, you are likely to have. At the proper range, with his perfect shot, he is as determined yet to get you, as a golfer who won’t go
on to the third green until he has holed out on the second. You are No. 2 on his score.”
I knew all too well he was right.
“I must tell you,” I agreed, “Heregrove came here, called here, the very day he tried to murder me, only a couple of hours after the attempt!”
“Yes, your Alice told me of what she, though ignorant of the fullness of his nerve, called his ‘imperence.’ She evidently has something of an animal’s intuitive mistrust of malignancy, though she thinks your actual attack was a subjective experience: an interesting case, showing where intuition is sound but helpless, because reason is too rudimentary to argue accurately and attention too bird-witted rightly to observe.”
“But, Mr. Mycroft, she could not have told you the worst. When I went downstairs, after he had gone, I discovered that, while he had sent her upstairs on a fake message to me, he had taken the handkerchief out of my jacket pocket, which was lying in sight of the door! Do you see?”
“You needn’t explain,” he interrupted. “I know I seem to you long-winded, but I won’t waste your time on unnecessary details if I can help it, in this case. Time matters here. I’ll tell you: the purloining of your handkerchief does not, I think, matter immediately by adding any instant additional peril to that in which you already stand. We have time there. Nor need you explain to me about your coat. When in one of my thinkings aloud, which grated on you so much at our first meeting, I suddenly called myself senile, or at least questioned myself as to whether I might not be becoming so, it was because I had not foreseen that move of Heregrove’s. You remember?”
“Yes, we were talking about insects being able to hear sounds that we cannot and how a number of insects track great distances also by smell.”
“Well, that was why I begged you not to go to Heregrove’s place alone. I was sure he would want you to come, and I was equally sure, if he could get you by yourself, he would try to put some mark on you whereby his bees could track you down. You played into his hands perfectly. Now, will you tell me exactly what he did?”
I gave Mr. Mycroft precisely the account which I have put down before. I saw his face light up.
“Fascinating,” was his first and, I thought, rather heartless comment. He saw that my feelings were hurt and added at once, “I repeat, you did all of us an invaluable service by going there and taking the risk—making Heregrove show his hand before he was perfectly prepared. I believe you made the gun go off half-cock or half-charged. He wasn’t quite ready, or he would have found some way of asking you up. But he could not resist when, as he thought (all murderers of that sort are megalomaniacs), Destiny had put you deliberately in his hands. He will know more of Destiny before he has finished. Meanwhile, we must not let our counter-preparations suffer from the same fault. You see now, we must call on him. The coat trick failed. As a precaution, have that jacket burned. Tonight put it well into the center of your weed-and-grass bonfire which I saw smoking at your garden’s end. At night, mind you. Some virulent essential oils, like that of the pestilential poison oak of the southwestern United States, actually become more pungent and irritating when burning, and that would simply mean that you were signaling to your vampires, asking them to come over and attack you again. Now for your hand.”
I showed him the fingers which had been stained. No trace remained which even my nose could detect after all my scrubbings. But he insisted on getting some medical alcohol and rubbing the skin till it was sore.
“Now for something to throw off the scent, or rather to bury it under a load it couldn’t pierce through,” he remarked, drawing a small bottle from his pocket. “I brought this little mixture with me because I thought Heregrove would have tried some way of ‘putting the doom on you,’ as our ancestors would have phrased it, and quite accurately, too. I have noticed it throws out any animal’s olfactory sense more completely than any one scent. It is citronella, valerian, and aniseed oils in equal parts.”
Rubbing it on my fingers, which were almost inflamed by the alcohol, he added, “Now, please go up and wash. We don’t want Heregrove to smell us, or he is quite shrewd enough to ‘smell our rat.’ We only want to be sure to put his bees off. They will certainly smell the anointing I have given you and be of the opinion that you are not the man they wanted so furiously, so little time ago, to kill. The voice may be the voice of Jacob but the smell will be the smell of Esau.”
Quotations again; how the old man’s mind ran on! I didn’t want to attend to his sallies. My mind was in a most unpleasant whirl. It was all too obvious that he was pushing me, caparisoning me, I might almost say, as his mount, to go at once into action, to call straightway on Heregrove.
“I say,” I began lamely, hoping, perhaps only to gain time.
He saw my tendency and was quite clear and quick.
“Yes, we must go at once. He must not gain a moment’s more time, if we can help it. The fact that you come back again will be, to his cocksure vanity, final proof that you have not been able to put two and two together and so don’t suspect in the least his designs. Even should you mention being attacked, he will show you a wondering sympathy, talk of the mysteries of instinct, of how, unless he’s with someone they dislike, he’s always safe with the bees—they are his friends, like his dear little mare (which, incidentally, he poisoned), and how he can sympathize, having lost his dear wife in the same strange way. The fact that you bring round an amiable if boring old gentleman, also anxious to purchase honey, will put the final seal on your ignorance. You hardly introduce fresh customers to a salesman who you know has just tried to shanghai you.”
“All right,” I said resignedly.
Only the feeling that I had no choice but to decide to go back to that den or to be driven out of my house and perhaps out of my mind or out of my body—only such a grim, clear decision made me agree to act. But even then, when I assented, that was not enough for my strange champion.
“No,” he said, turning his head on one side and looking at me. “You must play your part a trifle more convincingly than that. As it is, you look as though you were the man with the noose closing round his throat. In spite of all Heregrove’s insane self-assurance, that look of yours would raise doubts in his mind, and if he doubts, we are done.”
I tried to smile, but it was a pale smirk of a thing.
“I’m sorry,” said Mr. Mycroft. “You must feel that smile, if it is to be any good to us. You see, we shall be watched while we are there, not merely by a couple of very shrewd if deluded human eyes. We shall be under the instinctive surveillance of hundreds of little detectives who will be judging us, not by our look but by our smell, and who will try to kill us the moment we seem sufficiently, or rather smell sufficiently, suspicious. You’ve heard about the ‘smell of fear’? It’s the adrenalin which fright puts into our sweat when we begin, as we say, to get into a cold sweat of fear, and, indeed, long before we know we are even feeling clammy. It is this smell which all animals, especially bees, find intensely provocative, and, if it gets strong, quite maddening. The bees we are about to visit are sufficiently crazy already not to be given the slightest further excuse for feeling provoked. It won’t be much comfort to us if we are killed by their attacking us a little prematurely, according to Heregrove’s plans.”
“Oh, let me out of this,” I broke in.
“No,” he replied. “This, as you know, is the only possible line of safety. We must grasp this nettle. And the more we delay, the worse it will be; quite apart from the fact that Heregrove may strike again, if we give him any more time.” Then the note of command changed to one of constructive assistance. “But I thought this necessary initiative against our enemy might require more of you than you could quite command at will. Whatever you might wish, and however necessary you might see it to be, I saw it might well be impossible for you to get yourself to feel that this is a fine, boyish adventure. And as you must believe this, as your part in our act, if you are to convince the greater part of our audience—and if they hiss us, we are lost—ju
st swallow this. It’s only benzedrine hydrate. Does no harm. Not a thing to live on, but it does pull one through little scenes like this and makes one’s acting convincing.”
I gazed with some misgiving at the small white tablet. I hate drugs. If I get into a mood I stay in it until it moves off. I don’t believe in making efforts with oneself; after all, does one ever know what one is doing and why things go on inside oneself? But I suppose every criminal going to the scaffold gulps down willingly enough his small regulation tot of brandy, even though he has always hated the taste up till then. I got it down, and Mr. Mycroft kept me walking up and down for some time while he ran over our final dispositions. As he talked, it seemed to me increasingly clear that he was a master mind, Heregrove simply a malicious fool and that we had him in our grasp.
The mood held even when we found ourselves at his door and, if anything, grew even stronger when I listened while Mr. Mycroft took the whole game out of my hands and played it, I had to own, incomparably. All vestige of the leisurely old bore had vanished. He was as sparklingly vivacious and at the same time as charmingly ingenuous as a schoolboy. No doubt he was an amazing actor, but it was equally clear to me that he was really in high spirits, an old hunter, finding itself once again following a breast-high scent, a veteran adventurer looking once more into the bright eyes of danger. Romantic similes and well-worn ones, too, I know, but I must set down things as they happened, and that was exactly how I saw him then. It explains a little the extraordinary ascendancy he was able to have over me.
Heregrove, on opening, had not looked hospitable, though he pulled his face together and was obviously both determined to appear at his ease and uninclined to think that we looked dangerous or even suspicious. Obviously we did not. Here was that young fool who had already once put his silly head into the trap and now again, as stupid as a pop-eyed trout, which takes the same hook five minutes after it has got off it safe back into deep water, was returning for another visit to the man who was determined to murder him in cold blood. And he brings with him an old, capering zany, also after honey, and who also might serve well as Demonstration Case No. 3 of the perfect, trackless killer.