John Carr - The Reader Is Warned

Hilary was never still. She moved away from the bed. Now her cheeks were more deeply flushed; and she shivered. Back and forth she went, with little short steps.

'Anyway he was, and is, very intelligent. You can't deny that. They saw that when he was a boy; and an English priest and a German doctor took over his education. They took him away from the fetish-man, and sold the fetish-man's ivory so that he wasn't swindled, and got enough money to keep the boy-wonder for life. But I wish the fetish-man grandfather hadn't got into his skin so much. He did; and I have to stand it - for a little while, at least. The fetish-man taught him too much. I wish he hadn't seen the fetish-man mumbling spells in a hut, and striking down somebody a hundred miles away. He believes in it. He saw it work. All the rest of his life he's been trying to explain it scientifically. He's been at the science of the mind, the science of the mind, the science of the mind: thinking there was a great power somewhere; thinking he could put a scientific net round it and define its terms and mark it out and use it. He's got a power. I don't deny it, in its way. But it's not that.

'And then something snaps in his head sometimes, and he reverts to type. I don't mind that in the least, because it's given little Hilary what she wants; or it will, when I've watched you die. He reverted to type last Friday night, at the Constables', when we couldn't keep the conversation off a certain subject.

'You must hear about that. We were sitting in the conservatory, Sam Constable and Mina Constable and Dr Sanders and Larry Chase and myself, and not understanding what was under the surface. I wish I had understood it then. But I didn't. Nobody did. That smoothed-faced gentleman, perfect gentleman, Samuel Hobart Constable, had already been baiting Pennik until he couldn't stand much more of it. Then dear Dr Sanders set the real ball rolling by saying, "We will pass over the question of whether you could kill a man by thinking about him, like a Bantu witch-doctor."

'Pennik himself had already made a slip by using a "savage" as an illustration in an argument, and correcting himself quickly. But after that we couldn't keep off the subject. Chefs' caps came into the talk; and Mr Constable said, with that oh-so-nice-sneer of his, that Pennik would look well in a chef's cap. Mina Constable asked whether Dumas didn't once cook a dinner for the gourmets of France; and Dumas, as you probably don't know, was an octoroon. Samuel Hobart finished it by saying, "If I can dress for dinner among a lot of damned niggers, I can dress for dinner in my own house." And the light went out in my little mulatto's brain. He said Samuel Hobart would die. '

'And he would have died, if a Bantu spell could have killed him. That's what Pennik put on him over the salad-bowl. That's what scared that woman-servant and her son so much that they ran away from the house. That's why Pennik gets to a state of frothing at the mouth. That's why he came to me first, and attempted that highly inartistic seduction before dinner - really, Cynthia, dear, I hope most of your own clients are better - and told me hp would kill Samuel Hobart as a sacrifice to me, and said he would strew rubies at my feet; and, in short, my dear, for the moment at least, he really did frighten little Hilary out of her wits. I was terribly impressed. For Samuel Hobart did die, just as Pennik said he would. But the amusing part of the whole thing is that Pennik had nothing to do with it. The little Matabele boy is quite harmless, if you know how to manage him. All the same, he was a nice cover for me when I killed Mina Constable. I killed Mina so that she shouldn't blab the real truth about Sam's death, and then I could go on and do the real work - that is, attending to you - still under cover of Pennik's mysterious powers. Pennik's mysterious rubbish 1

'I know exactly what I'm doing, angel. I know that I'm in for some awkward suspicions and some awkward questions. But I'm used to that. I rather like dealing with men in that way. The point is that, no matter how much they suspect or think they suspect, they'll never be able to prove anything. Even if they do burst Pennik's bubble they'll still suspect him, and I shall be sitting most dainty and pretty (as usual) because I've got a really noble alibi for the death of Samuel Hobart Constable.'

Whereupon Hilary Keen made the mistake she could perhaps not help making. She lost her head. She had started talking, and she could not stop.

Her face was pink; she went so far as to do a small dance-step on the carpet, very gracefully and rather grotesquely; yet it revealed the inside of a mind as much as her words.

'I'm tired of playing things safe and sound, when people like you can get all they want just for the whistling. I made up my mind I was going to see you in your grave just as soon as I heard the real truth about how Samuel Hobart Constable died.

'I didn't kill him, Cynthia - did I tell you that? No, no. Up to the day after he died my thoughts were as innocent and pure as they ever have been. Otherwise I shouldn't have been so free about admitting to Dr Sanders that I wanted to see you dead. I heard the truth about Samuel Hobart's death because for two nights afterwards I slept in the same room with Mina; and Mina, as everybody knows, talks in her sleep. First I fitted together one bit of it; and then I fitted together another bit of it; and then I saw how I could use Pennik to cover me like a sheet in getting at you.

'In law, you could say that Samuel Hobart's death was an accident. It was, in mechanics; but it wasn't really an accident. Pennik was responsible for it. If Pennik hadn't said what he did, and done what he did, and prophesied death at Fourways before eight o'clock, Samuel Hobart would be alive and strutting at this time. It was bound to happen. If I had only listened to that conversation beforehand I could have seen it coming at us like an express-train. People 'all acted according to their natures, each as he had to; and Samuel Hobart's fat little carcase got the benefit of it. I got the benefit of the rest of it. Now you'll see how he died, because you're going to die like that too.'

Hilary made a little curtsey - as Sanders remembered, he had seen her do once before, on the stairway at Fourways. He also knew the expression of her face - he saw it under die mosaic dome in the dining-room, her colour up and her eyes glittering, when she took leave of him a few hours before the death of Mina Constable.

She ran over to the mantelpiece, taking a skip or two like a schoolgirl. She put her hand into the cardboard box.

'If the radio won't work,' she said practically, 'it won't work. And that's that. I've got oceans of time, anyway, before the announcement. I want you to pay close attention, ; Cynthia. It's the loveliest little way of killing people I've heard of. And needs no knowledge, or heaven knows I couldn't have managed it. Chief Inspector Masters said another thing that was as true as gospel. I sneaked up to listen to what they were saying at the door, before they put me on the train I didn't take; and he said, "Something as wild as wind and yet as domestic as cheese. Something you could do in your own home with two thimbles and a tablet of soap." And that was quite right. Soap! Soap! That reminds me. You'll have to wait a minute!'

She flew into the bathroom, and a moment later two taps were turned on with a roaring rush of water.

'I don't have to be careful about the noise here,' she explained, reappearing in the door, 'the way I had to be careful at Fourways when I got rid of Mina. Poor old thick-witted nice Dr Sanders heard the water running out; but he thought it was the fountain in the conservatory.

'I rather failed with that boy, Cynthia. I nagged and nagged at him to make violent love to me; I even sat down with him in the dark so he'd do it. But hewouldn't. He's still violently in love with some silly wench like you, on a cruise now; he thinks she's been deceiving him, as she probably has; but he simply can't get over it and the rebound wasn't enough. I nearly managed it, though. He said I was like "the heroine of a thriller"; and I thought that was much the best way to play my part. Don't you think so?