'I know that, Sally,' said her husband. 'But what about them scratches on the bedroom door? Don't tell me he did that, too. Or, if he did, why didn't somebody hear him and come along to help him? It's all very well for Mr Timbs--that's the landlord--to say as tramps must have got into the house after the Proctors left, but put us in here to look after the place, but why should tramps go for to do a useless bit of damage like that?'
'A 'eartless lot, them Proctors, that's what I say,' said Mrs George. 'A-snoring away most likely, and leaving their uncle to die by himself. And wasn't the lawyer upset about it, neither! Coming along in the morning to make the old gentleman's will, and him passed away so sudden. And seeing they came in for all his money after all, you'd think they might have given him a better funeral. Mean, I call it--not a flower, hardly--only one half-guinea wreath--and no oak--only elm and a shabby lot of handles. Such trash! You'd think they'd be ashamed.'
Mr Egg was silent He was not a man of strong imagination, but he saw a very horrible picture in his mind. He saw an old, sick man asleep, and hands that quietly opened the bedroom door, and dragged in, one after the other, sacks that moved and squirmed and mewed. He saw the sacks left open on the floor, and the door being softly shut and locked on the outside. And then, in the dim glow of the night-light, he saw shadowy shapes that leapt and flitted about the room--black and tabby and ginger--up and down, prowling on noiseless feet, thudding on velvet paws from tables and chairs. And then, plump up on the bed--a great ginger cat with amber eyes--and the sleeper waking with a cry--and after that a nightmare of terror and disgust behind the locked and remorseless door. A very old, sick man, stumbling and gasping for breath, striking out at the shadowy horrors that pursued and fled him--and the last tearing pain at the heart when merciful death overtook him. Then, nothing but a mewing of cats and a scratching at the door, and outside, the listener, with his ear bent to the keyhole.
Mr Egg passed his handkerchief over his forehead; he did not like his thoughts. But he had to go on, and see the murderer sliding through the door in the morning--hurrying to collect his innocent accomplices before Mrs Crabbe should come--knowing that it must be done quickly and the corpse made decent--and that when people came to the house there must be no mysterious miaulings to surprise them. To set the cats free would not be enough--they might hang about the house. No; the water-butt and then the grave in the garden. But Maher-shalal-hashbaz--noble Maher-shalal-hashbaz had fought for his life. He was not going to be drowned in any water-butts. He had kicked himself loose ('and I hope,' thought Mr Egg, 'he scratched him all to blazes'), and he had toiled his way home across London. If only Maher-shalal-hashbaz could tell what he knew! But Monty Egg knew something, and he could tell.
'And I will tell, what's more,' said Monty Egg to himself, as he wrote down the name and address of Mr Proctor's solicitor. He supposed it must be murder to terrify an old man to death; he was not sure, but he meant to find out. He cast about in his mind for a consoling motto from the Salesman's Handbook, but, for the first time in his life, could find nothing that really fitted the case.
'I seem to have stepped regularly out of my line,' he thought sadly; 'but still, as a citizen--'
And then he smiled, recollecting the first and last aphorism in his favourite book:
To Serve the Public is the aim
Of every salesman worth the name.
THE MAN WHO KNEW HOW
For perhaps the twentieth time since the train had left Carlisle, Pender glanced up from Murder at the Manse and caught the eye of the man opposite.
He frowned a little. It was irritating to be watched so closely, and always with that faint, sardonic smile. It was still more irritating to allow oneself to be so much disturbed by the smile and the scrutiny. Pender wrenched himself back to his book with a determination to concentrate upon the problem of the minister murdered in the library. But the story was of the academic kind that crowds all its exciting incidents into the first chapter, and proceeds thereafter by a long series of deductions to a scientific solution in the last. The thin thread of interest, spun precariously upon the wheel of Pender's reasoning brain, had been snapped. Twice he had to turn back to verify points that he had missed in reading. Then he became aware that his eyes had followed three closely argued pages without conveying anything whatever to his intelligence. He was not thinking about the murdered minister at all--he was becoming more and more actively conscious of the other man's face. A queer face, Pender thought.
There was nothing especially remarkable about the features in themselves; it was their expression that daunted Pender. It was a secret face, the face of one who knew a great deal to other people's disadvantage. The mouth was a little crooked and tightly tucked in at the corners, as though savouring a hidden amusement. The eyes, behind a pair of rimless pince-nez, glittered curiously; but that was possibly due to the light reflected in the glasses. Pender wondered what the man's profession might be. He was dressed in a dark lounge suit, a raincoat and a shabby soft hat; his age was perhaps about forty.
Pender coughed unnecessarily and settled back into his corner, raising the detective story high before his face, barrier-fashion. This was worse than useless. He gained the impression that the man saw through the manoeuvre and was secretly entertained by it. He wanted to fidget, but felt obscurely that his doing so would in some way constitute a victory for the other man. In his self-consciousness he held himself so rigid that attention to his book became a sheer physical impossibility.
There was no stop now before Rugby, and it was unlikely that any passenger would enter from the corridor to break up this disagreeable solitude a deux. But something must be done. The silence had lasted so long that any remark, however trivial, would--so Pender felt--burst upon the tense atmosphere with the unnatural clatter of an alarm clock. One could, of course, go out into the corridor and not return, but that would be an acknowledgement of defeat. Pender lowered Murder at the Manse and caught the man's eye again.
'Getting tired of it?' asked the man.
'Night journeys are always a bit tedious,' replied Pender, half relieved and half reluctant. 'Would you like a book?'
He took The Paper-Clip Clue from his attaché-case and held it out hopefully. The other man glanced at the title and shook his head.
'Thanks very much,' he said, 'but I never read detective stories. They're so--inadequate, don't you think so?'
'They are rather lacking in characterisation and human interest, certainly,' said Pender, 'but on a railway journey--'
'I don't mean that,' said the other man. 'I am not concerned with humanity. But all these murderers are so incompetent--they bore me.'
'Oh, I don't know,' replied Pender. 'At any rate they are usually a good deal more imaginative and ingenious than murderers in real life.'
'Than the murderers who are found out in real life, yes,' admitted the other man.
'Even some of those did pretty well before they got pinched,' objected Pender. 'Crippen, for instance; he need never have been caught if he hadn't lost his head and run off to America. George Joseph Smith did away with at least two brides quite successfully before fate and the News of the World intervened.'
'Yes,' said the other man, 'but look at the clumsiness of it all; the elaboration, the lies, the paraphernalia. Absolutely unnecessary.'
'Oh, come!' said Pender. 'You can't expect committing a murder and getting away with it to be as simple as shelling peas.'
'Ah!' said the other man. 'You think that, do you?'
Pender waited for him to elaborate this remark, but nothing came of it. The man leaned back and smiled in his secret way at the roof of the carriage; he appeared to think the conversation not worth going on with. Pender, taking up his book again, found himself attracted by his companion's hands. They were white and surprisingly long in the fingers. He watched them gently tapping upon their owner's knee--then resolutely turned a page--then put the book down once more and said:
'Well, if it's so easy, how would you s
et about committing a murder?'
'I?' repeated the man. The light on his glasses made his eyes quite blank to Pender, but his voice sounded gently amused. 'That's different; I should not have to think twice about it.'
'Why not?'
'Because I happen to know how to do it.'
'Do you indeed?' muttered Pender, rebelliously.
'Oh, yes; there's nothing in it.'
'How can you be sure? You haven't tried, I suppose?'
'It isn't a case of trying,' said the man. 'There's nothing tentative about my method. That's just the beauty of it.'
'It's easy to say that,' retorted Pender, 'but what is this wonderful method?'
'You can't expect me to tell you that, can you?' said the other man, bringing his eyes back to rest on Pender's. 'It might not be safe. You look harmless enough, but who could look more harmless than Crippen? Nobody is fit to be trusted with absolute control over other people's lives.'
'Bosh!' exclaimed Pender. 'I shouldn't think of murdering anybody.'
'Oh, yes, you would,' said the other man, 'if you really believed it was safe. So would anybody. Why are all these tremendous artificial barriers built up around murder by the Church and the law? Just because it's everybody's crime, and just as natural as breathing.'
'But that's ridiculous!' cried Pender, warmly.
'You think so, do you? That's what most people would say. But I wouldn't trust 'em. Not with sulphate of thanatol to be bought for twopence at any chemist's.'
'Sulphate of what?' asked Pender sharply.
'Ah! you think I'm giving something away. Well, it's a mixture of that and one or two other things--all equally ordinary and cheap. For ninepence you could make up enough to poison the entire Cabinet--and even you would hardly call that a crime, would you? But of course one wouldn't polish the whole lot off at once; it might look funny if they all died simultaneously in their baths.'
'Why in their baths?'
'That's the way it would take them. It's the action of the hot water that brings on the effect of the stuff, you see. Any time from a few hours to a few days after administration. It's quite a simple chemical reaction and it couldn't possibly be detected by analysis. It would just look like heart failure.'
Pender eyed him uneasily. He did not like the smile; it was not only derisive, it was smug, it was almost--gloating--triumphant! He could not quite put a name to it.
'You know,' pursued the man, thoughtfully pulling a pipe from his pocket and beginning to fill it, 'it is very odd how often one seems to read of people being found dead in their baths. It must be a very common accident. Quite temptingly so. After all, there is a fascination about murder. The thing grows upon one--that is, I imagine it would, you know.'
'Very likely,' said Pender.
'Look at Palmer. Look at Gesina Gottfried. Look at Armstrong. No, I wouldn't trust anybody with that formula--not even a virtuous young man like yourself.'
The long white fingers tamped the tobacco firmly into the bowl and struck a match.
'But how about you?' said Pender, irritated. (Nobody cares to be called a virtuous young man.) 'If nobody is fit to be trusted--'
'I'm not, eh?' replied the man. 'Well, that's true, but it's past praying for now, isn't it? I know the thing and I can't unknow it again. It's unfortunate, but there it is. At any rate you have the comfort of knowing that nothing disagreeable is likely to happen to me. Dear me! Rugby already. I get out here. I have a little bit of business to do at Rugby.'
He rose and shook himself, buttoned his raincoat about him and pulled the shabby hat more firmly down above his enigmatic glasses. The train slowed down and stopped. With a brief goodnight and a crooked smile the man stepped on to the platform. Pender watched him stride quickly away into the drizzle beyond the radius of the gas-light.
'Dotty or something,' said Pender, oddly relieved. 'Thank goodness, I seem to be going to have the carriage to myself.'
He returned to Murder at the Manse, but his attention still kept wandering.
'What was the name of that stuff the fellow talked about?' For the life of him he could not remember.
It was on the following afternoon that Pender saw the news-item. He had bought the Standard to read at lunch, and the word 'Bath' caught his eye; otherwise he would probably have missed the paragraph altogether, for it was only a short one.
'WEALTHY MANUFACTURER DIES IN BATH 'WIFE'S TRAGIC DISCOVERY
'A distressing discovery was made early this morning by Mrs John Brittlesea, wife of the well-known head of Brittlesea's Engineering Works at Rugby. Finding that her husband, whom she had seen alive and well less than an hour previously, did not come down in time for his breakfast, she searched for him in the bathroom, where, on the door being broken down, the engineer was found lying dead in his bath, life having been extinct, according to the medical men, for half an hour. The cause of the death is pronounced to be heart-failure. The deceased manufacturer . . .'
'That's an odd coincidence,' said Pender. 'At Rugby. I should think my unknown friend would be interested--if he is still there, doing his bit of business. I wonder what his business is, by the way.'
It is a very curious thing how, when once your attention is attracted to any particular set of circumstances, that set of circumstances seems to haunt you. You get appendicitis: immediately the newspapers are filled with paragraphs about statesmen suffering from appendicitis and victims dying of it; you learn that all your acquaintances have had it, or know friends who have had it, and either died of it, or recovered from it with more surprising and spectacular rapidity than yourself; you cannot open a popular magazine without seeing its cure mentioned as one of the triumphs of modern surgery, or dip into a scientific treatise without coming across a comparison of the vermiform appendix in men and monkeys. Probably these references to appendicitis are equally frequent at all times, but you only notice them when your mind is attuned to the subject. At any rate, it was in this way that Pender accounted to himself for the extraordinary frequency with which people seemed to die in their baths at this period.
The thing pursued him at every turn. Always the same sequence of events: the hot bath, the discovery of the corpse, the inquest; always the same medical opinion: heart failure following immersion in too-hot water. It began to seem to Pender that it was scarcely safe to enter a hot bath at all. He took to making his own bath cooler and cooler every day, until it almost ceased to be enjoyable.
He skimmed his paper each morning for headlines about baths before settling down to read the news; and was at once relieved and vaguely disappointed if a week passed without a hot-bath tragedy.
One of the sudden deaths that occurred in this way was that of a young and beautiful woman whose husband, an analytical chemist, had tried without success to divorce her a few months previously. The coroner displayed a tendency to suspect foul play, and put the husband through a severe cross-examination. There seemed, however, to be no getting behind the doctor's evidence. Pender, brooding fancifully over the improbable possible, wished, as he did every day of the week, that he could remember the name of that drug the man in the train had mentioned.
Then came the excitement in Pender's own neighbourhood. An old Mr Skimmings, who lived alone with a housekeeper in a street just round the corner, was found dead in his bathroom. His heart had never been strong. The housekeeper told the milkman that she had always expected something of the sort to happen, for the old gentleman would always take his bath so hot. Pender went to the inquest.
The housekeeper gave her evidence. Mr Skimmings had been the kindest of employers, and she was heartbroken at losing him. No, she had not been aware that Mr Skimmings had left her a large sum of money, but it was just like his goodness of heart. The verdict was Death by Misadventure.
Pender, that evening, went out for his usual stroll with the dog. Some feeling of curiosity moved him to go round past the late Mr Skimmings's house. As he loitered by, glancing up at the blank windows, the garden-gate opened and a man came ou
t. In the light of a street lamp, Pender recognised him at once.
'Hullo!' he said.
'Oh, it's you, is it?' said the man. 'Viewing the site of the tragedy, eh? What do you think about it all?'
'Oh, nothing very much,' said Pender. 'I didn't know him. Odd, our meeting again like this.'
'Yes, isn't it? You live near here, I suppose.'
'Yes,' said Pender; and then wished he hadn't. 'Do you live in these parts too?'
'Me?' said the man. 'Oh, no. I was only here on a little matter of business.'
'Last time we met,' said Pender, 'you had business at Rugby.' They had fallen into step together, and were walking slowly down to the turning Pender had to take in order to reach his house.
'So I had,' agreed the other man. 'My business takes me all over the country. I never know when I may be wanted next.'
'It was while you were at Rugby that old Brittlesea was found dead in his bath, wasn't it?' remarked Pender carelessly.
'Yes. Funny thing, coincidence.' The man glanced up at him sideways through his glittering glasses. 'Left all his money to his wife, didn't he? She's a rich woman now. Good-looking girl--a lot younger than he was.'
They were passing Pender's gate. 'Come in and have a drink,' said Pender, and again immediately regretted the impulse.
The man accepted, and they went into Pender's bachelor study.
'Remarkable lot of these bath-deaths there have been lately, haven't there?' observed Pender carelessly, as he splashed soda into the tumblers.
'You think it's remarkable?' said the man, with his usual irritating trick of querying everything that was said to him. 'Well, I don't know. Perhaps it is. But it's always a fairly common accident.'
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