John Carr - The Reader Is Warned

'It was rather a good bit of business, because he's awfully easy to lie to and I knew if he caught me at Fourways on Sunday night I could make him swear to protect me. He could be lots of help. He has been. But I had rather to snub and slight poor Larry Chase, after giving Larry some encouragement to take me there.

' 'Do you know, Cynthia, I'm beginning positively to like you. You don't know the relief it is not to be Miss-Dignified-on - your - Poise - Little - Dog - Dingo - Fetch - and - Carry -for-Everybody, just for a little while anyway. I think I got all my best tricks and ideas from you. I've studied you ever since you married my father. Only, worse luck, the at least tolerable number of men who fall for me never seem to have any money. You always were lucky like that ... Naughty!

No, you don't!'

The woman on the bed, thrashing under the coverlet, screamed. Hilary was at her side, quiet and poised and cool again.

'Like Pennik, I'm talking too much,' said Hilary coldly and easily. 'Don't shout like that again. Do you know, I had thought of putting lighted matches to your feet before I did what I'm going to do. I don't suppose they would bother about a little burn or two like that afterwards, and it would so please me. Anyhow, get ready; I've got to carry you now.'

Cynthia Keen's voice, coughing but unexpectedly clear, spoke out.

'No, you don't,' she said.

'Why don't I, my dear ?’'

'Because of all those people out on the balcony,' said Cynthia. 'I've got some modesty left, in spite of what you say. I've got most of these damned knots loose, and I can reach this negligé now; but I think they might have told me what you were going to do.'

'All right, boys,' said H. M., in an ordinary tone.

He threw the window wide open, pushed draperies and curtains to one side, and stepped into the room.

CHAPTER XX

'Yes,' said H. M., holding up a tall glass to the light and stirring the sugar in it, 'I'll tell you all about it, son. Masters and I couldn't tell you before, because we were afraid you would blow the gaff to the gal, even if you didn't mean to. But you deserve to know., It's a very simple story, son.'

'Including,' asked Dr Sanders, 'the method of murder that's "something you could do at home with two thimbles and a tablet of soap"? '

H. M. nodded. And Chief Inspector Masters grinned.

They were sitting, towards dawn on that same morning, in H. M.'s office up all the flights of stairs at the back of Whitehall. For some hours the telephone had been ringing, and H. M. had been giving the same gleeful instructions over and over again. The same broad desk, the same flexible-necked lamp, the same iron safe that contained bottles and glasses: these were familiar as well.

'H'm!' said H. M., sniffing, sipping the tall glass, and blowing down the stem of a black pipe in rapid and successive movements. 'It requires very little sittin' and thinkin' once you've got the central fact. Which is this: That a man may be dead, and yet at the same time alive; and that there's only one medical or physiological cause which can put him in a state like that. Masters here carried on something awful when I first said it, but it's sober fact.'

He reflected.

"The best way of approach is by simply tellin' you the story just as it happened, from the start of the whole mess last Friday night. Hilary Keen - well,' he peered over his spectacles, 'we won't talk too much about her; but she said a true thing. She said it was practically inevitable, because all the people there acted accordin' to their characters. And they did.

'Now I want you to imagine you're back at Fourways, beside the fountain in that conservatory, at round about seven-thirty on Friday night. A clean sheet is before you; the dead are alive; and the whole thing is about to happen all over again. Pennik has just exploded a mine by announcin' that Sam Constable will probably die before eight o'clock.

'But what did Pennik actually say? Did he say (at the time) that he would do the killing? Not a bit of it! Did anybody understand him to mean that he would do the killing? No! You'd been playin' at mind-reading. So Hilary Keen immediately asked, "Do you mean that it's in someone's mind to kill Mr Constable within a very short time?" And Pennik, smilin' affirmatively, answers, "Perhaps."

'Now each of you took that proposition, and interpreted it each accordin' to his own nature. None of you thought of Pennik as the possible murderer: in fact, it startled the daylights out of you when later Pennik coolly announced what he had really meant. What you all thought he meant was that somebody else in that house had conceived a plan to Mil Constable; and that Pennik had read the guilty thought. - Is that a fair statement, son ?'

Sanders nodded.

'It is,' he admitted, and thought again of the overheated conservatory.

'Well, and what was the effect of it on your two hosts? What was the effect on Sam and Mina Constable? Just reflect on that. Constable, as pure a hypochondriac as I ever heard of, first thought of a seizure and then instantly thought of murder before murder had even been suggested. Back he came to the same old idea that he'd been talkin' about for so long: that his youngish, attractive wife might murder him. It was three-fourths a joke, of course. He didn't really and seriously believe she ever would. But he was the sort who likes to try out that kind of thing on a wife, three-fourths as a joke but one-fourth as a warning not to try any games. -Everything he said was sprinkled and peppered with references to that. He even indicated how she might kill him. "Mina will be the death of me yet, dropping things." Arid more directly, "Will she kill me and make it look like an accident, like that case in the papers?" Hah! That was a side-thrust they both understood, because the case was in Mina's scrap-book.

'So - while he looked accusingly at her - what do you imagine his wife was thinkin'? She'd heard this before. She was an imaginative woman, ill and unstrung from the backwash of malaria, jumping at every shadow. She really did worship that old blister. So it was, "Poor old Sam thinks I might kill him, and of course I never would; but suppose I should, without meaning to?" At that time she believed in Pennik with fervency. And up sprang this prophecy, which she could only take as applyin' to her. The hobgoblin was: "If I should kill him, they would hang me." It was a pretty bad thought.'

'And Pennik?'

'Pennik was responsible for it all.

'It's Pennik's case. He's the god from the machine. His personality was a whole heap more powerful than you thought. He took a group of ordinary, bickerin' human people; and before he got through with you he had each of you thinking exactly the thoughts you shouldn't. He had you, young feller, thinking you didn't actually care a rap for Marcia Blystone. He had Hilary Keen pondering very unpleasant thoughts about her stepmother. He had Sam Constable half afraid his wife would kill him, and Mina Constable terrorized for fear she might. The emotional pressure was stoked up too high. Somethin' was bound to blow up. And it did.

'At seven-thirty the Constables retire to their rooms to dress. That woman, with her shaky hands and her frightened imagination, has got to draw Samuel's bath and put the studs in his shirt. He's already hinted, downstairs, how she might kill him even while dressin' him. Suppose she did ? Suppose she had a subconscious (cor, how fond and afraid of that word we all are!), a subconscious wish to kill him? That's the worst thought of all.

'Now, did Samuel immediately step in and get his bath as soon as they went to their room? Later she said he did; she said he'd finished his bath, and was dressed to such an extent that she was tyin' up his shoes, just before he hopped down to investigate the smashing of the lamp in the other room at a. quarter to eight. But she was lyin', as we proved. At a quarter to eight he was wearin' a dressing-gown and slippers, and nothing else. That was because he hadn't yet had his bath. He'd spent so much time jawin' away to her - and making her more nervous - that he was only just ready to step into the tub when the lamp-smash happened. He went to see what it was; he returned, and he got into the tub between a quarter to eight and eight o'clock.