Thomas Aldrich: Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Vol. 14, No. 68, July 1949

And all the time, adding a touch of rhapsody, was the thought of the little girl, her hunger sated by jam tarts, curled happily asleep upstairs, dreaming, perhaps, of her Daddy Bloomers.

In his own happiness Mr. Loomis lost count of time and was only brought back to a sense of the hour when a voice on the wireless announced the familiar nightly message:

“Residents of the Pimlico district are warned again that, because of the present coal crisis, the gas will be shut off at the main in three minutes — that is at eleven o’clock. Service will be resumed at 5:30 tomorrow morning. If your gas is on now — whether for lighting, cooking, or heating — turn it off immediately.”

“Well,” exclaimed Mr. Loomis in a happy haze, “eleven o’clock already. I declare. I had no idea.”

Despite his hostess’ coaxing offer of a nightcap, Mr. Loomis took his leave and let himself into his own cold, dark hall. The familiar chilliness and the knowledge that instead of the slumbering Dinah, Mabel lay asleep upstairs, did not cool his exhilaration. Mabel, he knew, would become a reality in the morning. But now was now. He groped his way up the stairs and through the darkness of his den to the couch where he fell into a warm sleep.

Dreams of children lulled him all night, culminating with a dream in which he was walking on the sands of Burnham-on-Sea with Dinah clutching one hand and little Rosie Henderson clutching the other. Both little girls were sucking gay pink sticks of candy rock. They romped together on the sands; they paddled; they made castles; they rode donkeys.

Then something went wrong with the dream. A great purple cloud formed over the sea. It began to swoop toward them. The little girls, scuffing and dancing, seemed to notice nothing. Mr. Loomis knew that it was some new horrible form of gas invasion. He tried to shout out to warn them:

“The gas... the gas...”

But his voice would not sound. He heaved himself up in a mighty effort to throw off the dream tentacles that held him immobile. Then, conscious of a bump, he woke up to find himself on the floor, having rolled off his narrow couch in his struggles.

Vaguely he looked at his watch and saw in the thin early light that it was twenty-five minutes to six. He sat up on the floor and sniffed. Still half in the dream, he was certain he could smell gas. All nonsense, of course. But was it nonsense? Mr. Loomis held his breath and listened. Yes, there was no doubt about it. He could detect a faint hissing from the neighborhood of the gas-bracket above his desk. The smell was growing stronger too. In a flash he remembered the unfamiliar pleasures of last night. Before going over to the Miltons’, he had lit the gas in his den, but in his rapturous return he had forgotten, since the company had stopped the flow, that the tap was still on. He ran to the wall and turned it off at the bracket. The hissing ceased. Then he threw the window wide open, admitting cold gusts of morning air.

Feeling shaky but rather important from such a near brush with disaster, Mr. Loomis put on his carpet slippers and dressing gown, went out into the passage, and closed the den door. As was his regular custom, he proceeded to the kitchen and filled the kettle preparatory to making morning tea, a cup of which he habitually took to his wife in bed.

As he applied a lighted match to the gas ring, another chord was struck in his memory. Last night, before the quarrel, he had, at his wife’s request, lit the gas fire in the bedroom. Mabel was a sound sleeper who fell asleep almost as soon as her head touched the pillow. It was her invariable habit to leave the gas burning for him to turn off when he came to bed which, in normal circumstances, was far earlier than the gas company’s deadline of eleven o’clock. In addition, she had last night taken one of the sedatives prescribed by Dr. Heather. Even though she had locked the door against him, it was more than likely that she had fallen asleep without remembering to turn off the gas fire.

Acting on automatic reflex, Mr. Loomis was out of the kitchen in a twinkling and running anxiously up the stairs. He reached the bedroom door and standing breathless on the thick woolen mat at its threshold, tried the handle.

It did not yield.

“Mabel,” he called. “Mabel.”

There was no reply.

Mr. Loomis sniffed. His nostrils were still tainted by the odor of gas from the den, but there was unquestionably another leak here. It came from the crack beneath the bedroom door. Mabel always slept with the windows closed. She was lying in there suffocating to death.

“Mabel!”

Mr. Loomis rattled ineffectually at the door knob and then spun around for something with which to break down the heavy wood panels. Panic came and went. Its place was taken by a strange feeling almost of awe, as if Mr. Loomis were in the presence of Destiny herself.

Mabel had locked the door against him. Mamie and Al were aware of this fact. It was Mabel herself who had been responsible for all the trivial little actions which had led to this moment. His private dream of the santonin bottle — even at its most roseate — had always involved some impossibly aggressive act from Mr. Loomis himself. But here was the dream in reality. By the obscure workings of Destiny, Mabel and the santonin bottle — disguised now as a gas fire — had met, and in such a manner that no overt act was demanded from him. No act, no courage, no skill — no risk.

For a long moment Mr. Loomis stood quite still. Slowly he felt a terrible secret pleasure stir and scurry through him like a mouse.

Deliberately, he stooped. He picked up the pink and brown mat, decorated with roses, which Mabel had worked on before The War. He pushed it forward so that it tightly blocked the air passage between the bottom of the door and the floorboards.

He stood for another moment, sniffing the pungent but diminished odor, feeling a sensation far headier than the fisherman’s thrill when Dinah had tugged at the string. Then he returned to the kitchen and made a pot of tea. He carried it into the living-room and sat down with it in the least uncomfortable chair. The bleak morning light revealed the embroidered text hanging above the fireplace. THOU LORD SEEST ME. Mr. Loomis crossed to it and carefully turned its face to the wall. He sat down again and picked up his tea cup.

He felt larger, somehow, than he had ever felt in his life.

One will never know — one cannot even imagine — what were the thoughts that passed through Dr. Crippen’s mind immediately after he had killed his wife and disposed of her remains in the cellar. One shudders from speculating on the images which drifted through the warped brain of George Joseph Smith after he had drowned his various brides in cheap tin bathtubs. The murderer’s mind is a closed book, not to be opened by the impious fingers of average citizens like ourselves who have perhaps never been tempted to perpetrate this, the most spectacular and usually the most heinous, of all crimes. And so one cannot, one dare not, try to delineate with any accuracy the mental processes of Mr. Loomis as he sat there in his unfriendly but scrupulously tidy living-room, sipping his second and then his third cup of early morning tea.

Perhaps he thought merely of the absurdly convincing story he would tell the authorities when they came to investigate; perhaps he brooded on the humiliations, the soul privations he had suffered at his wife’s hands; perhaps he dreamed of Miss Henderson, of a vaguely happy future with a dynasty of little girls which they might found together; or perhaps he merely toyed with the new, immensely exotic realization that he was a murderer — that by moving a mat rather than breaking a door, he had joined irrevocably that twilight confederacy of wife-slayers along with Crippen, Smith, Greenwood, Armstrong, and Landru.