Gerald Kersh - The Best of Gerald Kersh

‘She’d cut herself, it appears.’

‘That’s right, ah … J-Jack.’

‘That’s it, George. Call me Jack and I’ll call you George,’ said Jacket. ‘What made you go into Tooth’s room later on?’

Mr Wainewright said: ‘He always borrowed my evening paper. I nearly always used to hand it over to him when I’d done with it.’ He held up a copy of the Evening Extra, neatly folded. ‘When I got back from here – I come here just for one quiet drink every evening, and read the paper here as a rule, you see –I went to his door and knocked.’

‘And, of course, he didn’t say “Come in,”’ said Jacket.

‘No. So I knocked again. No answer. I knocked again——’

‘– And at last you went in without knocking, eh?’

‘Exactly. And there he lay across the bed, Mr Jacket – a horrible sight to see, horrible!’

‘Bled a good deal?’

‘I never thought even Tooth could have bled so much!’

‘That shook you, eh, George?’

‘It made me feel faint, I assure you, sir. But I didn’t touch anything. I phoned the police. They were there in ten minutes.’

‘Detective Inspector Taylor, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes, that’s right. A nice man.’

‘He collects stamps for a pastime. Have you any hobbies, George?’

Mr Wainewright giggled. ‘It sounds silly,’ he said. ‘When I haven’t got anything else to do I cut pictures out of magazines.’

‘And what do you do with them when you’ve cut them out, George?’

‘I stick them in a scrap-book.’

‘An innocent pastime enough.’

‘In a way, sort of like collecting stamps – in a way,’ said Mr Wainewright.

‘Yet you never can tell how that sort of thing may end,’ said Jacket. ‘Look at Tooth. He got his by means of a pair of scissors – editorial scissors, paper-cutting scissors. Lord, how often have I wanted to stab the Sub with his own scissors!’

‘That’s right,’ said Mr Wainewright. ‘Long pointy scissors. They were part of a set – scissors and paper-knife in a leather case. I’d borrowed them myself a few days before. Very sharp scissors.’

‘Little did you think,’ said Jacket, ‘that that pair of scissors would end up in your lodger’s throat!’

‘Little did I, J-Jack,’ said Mr Wainewright. ‘It makes a person think. May I ask … are you going to put something in the paper about me?’

‘I think so,’ said Jacket.

Mr Wainewright giggled. ‘You wouldn’t like a photograph of me?’

‘We’ll see about that, George. We’ll see. What are you doing on Saturday?’

‘Next Saturday morning I get my hair cut,’ said Mr Wainewright.

‘Matter of routine, eh?’

‘Yes, sir. But——’

‘No, no, never mind. You get your hair cut on Saturday, George, and I’ll give you a tinkle some time. Right. And now if I were you I’d go and get some sleep, George, old man. You don’t look quite yourself,’ said Jacket.

‘I’m not a drinking man … I oughtn’t to drink,’ muttered Mr Wainewright, putting his hat on back-to-front and rising unsteadily. ‘I don’t feel very well …’

Poor little fellow, thought Jacket, having seen Mr Wainewright safely seated in a taxi. This Tooth affair has thrown him right out of gear. Bloodshed in Wainewright’s life! A revolution! It’s almost as if he found himself wearing a bright red tie.

Jacket, who was on the edge of the haze at the rim of the steady white light of sobriety, began to work out a story about Mr Wainewright. He thought that he might call it The Red Thread of Murder. Never mind the killer, never mind the victim – all that had been dealt with a hundred times before. What about the Ordinary Man, the Man In The Street, who has never seen blood except on his chin after a bad shave with a blunt blade, who opens a door and sees somebody like Tooth lying dead in a thick red puddle? Jacket laughed. In spite of everything Mr Wainewright had to get his hair cut on Saturday. There was, he decided, something ineffably pathetic about this desperate doggedness with which people like Wainewright clung to the finical tidiness of their fussy everyday lives.

He went to sleep thinking of Mr Wainewright. Mr Wainewright lay awake thinking of John Jacket, but went to sleep thinking: To-morrow is Friday: I put a new blade in my safety-razor.

So that Saturday, Mr Wainewright went to his barber. Friday was New Blade Day; Monday was Clean Shirt Day; Sunday morning was Bath morning; and he had his hair cut every third Saturday. This was law and order; a system to be maintained. System; routine – in the life of Wainewright inevitable laws governed collar-studs, rubber heels, sheets of toilet-paper, the knotting of neckties, the lighting of pipes, the cutting of string and the sticking-on of stamps. He ate, drank, walked and combed his hair in immutable rhythm. He was established to run smoothly for ever. Every habit of Wainewright’s was a Bastille; his every timed action was housed in a little Kremlin. Therefore, to-day, he had to get his hair cut. But Jowl’s display made him stop for a few minutes.

Jowl, who owned the antique shop on the corner, had stripped some bankrupt’s walls of a great, gleaming yataganerie of edged and pointed weapons. They hung on sale: double-handed swords, moon-faced battle-axes, mailed fists, stilettos, basket-hiked Italian daggers, Toledo rapiers, needle-pointed Khyber knives, adze-shaped obsidian club-axes, three-bladed knuckle-duster daggers, arquebuses, and a heap of oddments of sixteenth-century body-armour. Wainewright stood, smoking his pipe, looking hard. He stopped and examined some assassin’s weapon of the fourteen hundreds – a knife with a spring. You stabbed your man, and – Knutch! – it flew open like a pair of scissors.

At the back of the window stood a complete suit of jousting-armour, with a massive helmet shaped like a frog’s head. Wainewright looked up and, as it happened, he saw the reflection of his face exactly where his face would have been if he had been wearing the armour.

Then, in his breast, something uncoiled. He gazed, whistling. ‘Ye Gods!’ he said. ‘Ye Gods!’ But even as he looked he was inclined to laugh: his reflection was wearing a bowler hat.

Still, why not? thought Mr Wainewright. But then he remembered that he was an important person, that the glaring eyes of the world were focused on him. He walked across the court and pushed open the door of Flickenflocker’s Select Saloon.

Calm! thought Wainewright. Calm! Keep calm! The door of the barber’s shop was fitted with a compressed air brake: it hissed behind him and closed with a gentle tap.

As the door hissed, Wainewright stood still, tense. Then he also hissed: he had been holding his breath. When the door closed, he also made a tapping noise: he had been standing on his toes.

Flickenflocker said: ‘Harpust one! Quarder-nour late! For fifteen years so I never knew you to miss a second! Eh? Tsu, tsu, tsu!’

‘Am I late?’ asked Wainewright.

‘Fifteen minutes in fifteen years,’ said Flickenflocker. ‘One minute every year. In a hundred-twenty years, so you could save enough time to go to the pictures.’

‘The usual,’ said Wainewright, sitting in a chair.

‘Nice and clean back and sides,’ said Flickenflocker.

Wainewright nodded. But as he did so he noticed that a peculiar quietness had come over the people in the shop. They were exchanging hurried words in lowered voices, and looking at him out of the corners of their eyes. Deep in the breast of Mr Wainewright something broke into a glow which spread through him until he felt all his veins were burning brilliantly red like neon-tubes. He knew exactly what was being said: That is Wainewright, the witness for the prosecution in the Tooth murder case.