Gerald Kersh - Prelude To A Certain Midnight

He rose. There was a queer sensation, reminiscent of warm cotton-wool, under the soles of his feet, and his head felt like a gum into which a dentist, before a difficult drilling, has injected an anaesthetic. He pinched himself under the left eye. His thumb and forefinger might have come together a yard away; he felt nothing; only well-being.

This was going to be good. This was going to be sensational. Given the right moment — one of those little chasms of silence that inevitably crack open any uproar — he would tell the world in general, and Detective-Inspector Turpin in particular, the whole truth of the matter.

Muriel was saying: ‘Oh, Mr Turpin! Cigarette just told me you’re a detective. Are there any women detectives?’

Turpin said: ‘I suppose so,’ and looked at his watch.

‘How do you get that sort of job, Mr Turpin?’ asked Muriel. ‘I think I’d be good at that sort of job — don’t you, darling?’ she said to the Murderer, who had come, swaying, to join them.

‘I should make enquiries if I were you,’ said Turpin.

At this the Murderer, taken by a fit of laughter in the middle of a gulp of drink, was seized with a fit of coughing. It was merely a matter of a mouthful going the wrong way, yet it sounded so awful that two or three people came to bang him on the back, and for two or three seconds conversation stopped while everyone looked towards him.

He looked around and saw himself as the centre of a little crowd. Thea Olivia was offering him a tumblerful of soda water, and this, somehow, was irresistibly funny. In five seconds this dear little old lady, smelling of lavender and dressed in lavender, would recoil from him as from a decaying corpse in a cellar… in a cellar soiled with coal dust under the basement of a condemned house … a condemned house in a fog…

Now was the time to say it. Now was the time to say: ‘Look here, Detective-Inspector Turpin, has it never occurred to you that I — who don’t eat sweets — went to Geogharty’s sweet shop three days before the murder and bought three Pierrot Gourmand lollipops? Has it ever occurred to you, copper, to wonder exactly why I bought those? Did it ever occur to you, my good fool, to wonder why there was one of these in Sonia Sabbatani’s pocket? Do you realize that the other two of the three I bought are in my room? Are you aware, Turpin, that I am offering you a rope with which to hang me? Let us make this perfectly clear: I killed Sonia Sabbatani.’

He drew a deep breath, moistened his lips, and began: ‘Listen to me just for a moment! I want to tell you something.’

‘Well?’ said Turpin.

‘I want you all to listen,’ said the Murderer. ‘I have something important — most important —’

Then there was a disturbance.

Shocket the Bloodsucker and Mr Schiff came to blows. They had been discussing the relative merits of the Austrians and the English. Schiff had said:

‘The Austrians have, if you will allow me to say so, vivacity.’

‘Listen, I agree with you — or may L be struck down dead this minute,’ said Shocket.

‘Yet the English have a certain something, a confidence, a solidness.’

‘I should live so sure, you’ve hit the nail on the head.’

‘Yet, allow me to say so, your Viennese has more life in him than your Londoner.’

‘More life? You should live so sure! What’s the matter with England?’

‘I swear to you, most solemnly, that I was saying not a word against England. Your Englishman, indeed, is a better man than your Viennese.’

‘You should live so sure! What’s the matter with the Viennese? My father, God rest his soul, came from Vienna. What’s the matter with that?’

‘I beg you to be reasonable.’

‘He begs me to be reasonable,’ said Shocket, looking at the ceiling with one anguished eye and keeping the other on Schiff. ‘That’s as much as to say that I’m unreasonable.’

Then Shocket struck Schiff on the shoulder, and Schiff pushed Shocket away. Titch Whitbread bounded forward and separated them, saying: ‘Break it up, break it up, Bloodsucker. Ladies present! Break it up.’

Then Asta, throwing an arm about Titch’s shoulders, and calling him a good boy, told Shocket to behave himself. Everybody laughed. The silence was broken.

Looking again at his watch, Turpin said: ‘Well, it’s been a very pleasant evening, but —,

‘Please don’t go yet. There’s something very important I want to say to you,’ said the Murderer. Turpin looked at him. He saw a man of indeterminate age and colour, whose average body was wrapped in the kind of clothes to which no witness could satisfactorily swear in a court of law. The man was a little drunk, somewhat exalted. His face had gone loose.

‘Well. go ahead then,’ said Turpin.

37

There was a pause.

‘It’s only ten o’clock. You can’t possibly go yet,’ said Asta.

‘I’m a married man,’ said Turpin. ‘My good lady’ll be waiting with a rolling-pin.’

In the six or seven seconds that passed while they exchanged these few words, the Murderer had more visions. He had drawn a deep breath and looked down at his hands, gathering himself. Now the world was to know that these soft-looking, ill-shaped hands were weapons of atrocious murder. He winked back at an asterisk of reflected electric light on his right thumb-nail, and this fascinated him. It appeared to throb like a heart, spin like a catherine-wheel, and finally throw out a great cone of bluewhite light like a cinema-projector. On a shaky screen between his eyes and the back of his head, then, there flickered a spasmodically-moving picture in mauve, grey-green, and yellowishpink. A bell was tolling. He could hear it, and he knew that it was striking eight. There were grey-green tears upon the yellowishpink cheeks of the priest. But he was smiling. A mauve and yellowishpink jailer shook his head in grudging admiration…. There was the grey-green prison yard… . He felt wood under his feet. Something soft was slipped over his head. Everything became grey-mauve. A slippery roughness touched his neck. I won’t hurt you , said a business-like voice — and then the world fell away from beneath him, and there was a stab of light and an abominable jolt.

The Murderer hiccupped.

‘Go on, go ahead,’ said Detective-Inspector Turpin.

‘My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky,’ said the Murderer.

‘And how right you are,’ said Turpin. ‘Well, thank you very much, Miss Thundersley, for a very pleasant evening.’

‘Allow me, at least, to shake you by the hand,’ said the Murderer.

Turpin gripped his hand and let it fall.

‘You think I’m weak in the hands, perhaps?’ said the Murderer. ‘Then wait a minute!’

‘Strong as a lion. Give all I possess for a grip like yours,’ said Turpin. ‘Good night, Miss. Good night all.’

‘Ah-ah-ah! You silly man!’ cried Thea Olivia, stooping to pick a burning cigarette-end out of the Murderer’s trousercuff. ‘Do you want to burn your nice suit?’

‘Oh no, no! Dear lady! Not on your knees before me!’

She had thrown the cigarette-end into an ashtray, and was making a great to-do over the brushing away of the ashes. Thea Olivia used handkerchiefs of the finest cambric, so exquisite that only she could wash them. In her excitement she had whisked out one of these to dust the Murderer’s trousercuff.

‘You need a nurse, you silly man,’ she said.

‘I am a baby,’ he confessed: and added, with a lowering look: ‘if you prefer to think of me in that way.’

Catchy laid a hand on his arm. ‘Don’t you think —’ she began.

‘It might surprise you to know what I think,’ he replied.

Thea Olivia, looking from face to face in the crowd that surrounded her, was bewildered and a little frightened.