Kitabı oxu: «Bodies from the Library 2»

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

NO FACE

Christianna Brand

BEFORE AND AFTER

Peter Antony

HOTEL EVIDENCE

Helen Simpson

EXIT BEFORE MIDNIGHT

Q Patrick

ROOM TO LET

Margery Allingham

A JOKE’S A JOKE

Jonathan Latimer

THE MAN WHO KNEW

Agatha Christie

THE ALMOST PERFECT MURDER CASE

S. S. Van Dine

THE HOURS OF DARKNESS

Edmund Crispin

CHANCE IS A GREAT THING

E. C. R. Lorac

THE MENTAL BROADCAST

Clayton Rawson

WHITE CAP

Ethel Lina White

SIXPENNYWORTH

John Rhode

THE ADVENTURE OF THE DORSET SQUIRE

C. A. Alington

THE LOCKED ROOM

Dorothy L. Sayers

Acknowledgements

Also available

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

‘A great many crime short stories continue to be written with nothing but entertainment in mind.’

Julian Symons

As with the first volume of Bodies from the Library (HarperCollins, 2018), the aim of this volume is to bring into the light more lost or previously unknown short fiction by some of the best-known writers active during the Golden Age of crime and detective fiction, a period that can be loosely defined as starting in 1913 and ending in 1937. These dates mark the publication of two major titles: Trent’s Last Case, in which the journalist E. C. Bentley provided an antidote to Sherlock Holmes; and Busman’s Honeymoon, described as ‘a love story with detective interruptions’ by its author Dorothy L. Sayers.

For our purposes, there is also a loose definition of crime and detective fiction and in this volume, as well as stories that conform to S. S. Van Dine’s requirement that ‘there simply must be a corpse’, there is a story that sets out merely to deceive the reader by only appearing to be criminous, one that blurs the distinction between fact and fiction and another that was published after the end of the Golden Age but playfully tweaks its tail …

Enjoy!

Tony Medawar

February 2019

NO FACE
Christianna Brand

They sat in their silent ring in the darkened room and their touching fingers trembled and jerked apart and touched again … He was trying frantically to get through to them. ‘Listen to me! Listen! They were wrong, warn them, they’d got it all wrong!’ But they did not hear him; over his voice the sweet piping treble was burbling on of the peace and sunshine over here on the Other Side, and all the flowers. No ear for his soundless screaming: ‘It’s all going to begin again …’

Ringing up the police—Miss Delphine Grey. ‘Mr Joseph Hawke to speak to Superintendent Tomm.’

The weary voice. ‘Yes, Mr Hawke?’

He was half hysterical, gibbering with excitement. ‘You know, Superintendent, Joseph Hawke, famed clairvoyant. I sent you that article I published after the last time. The man is a lunatic—’

The murderer killed apparently at random, anyone, any time, any place. The swift incapacitating stab in the back, the body turned over and stabbed and stabbed and stabbed again. A plastic sheet would be throw down, which had protected the killer from the spurting blood; and for the rest, no sign left, ever, no clue for a police force stretched to its limit, on the edge of desperation. And every crank in the country ringing up, writing in, with their crack-pot theories. ‘Well, so, Mr Hawke—’

‘—helpless, a psychotic, I showed that in my articles. Some childhood experience? Witnessed a killing? A stabbing? No face!—he told you that he had no face …’ (The ghastly, gobbling, whispering ’phone calls to the police, taunting them, daring them, and yet perhaps with an inherent cry for help. ‘You’ll never catch me. How would you know me?’ And the terrible choking cry, ‘I have no face.’) ‘Now, a man who says he has no face, Superintendent, he’s a psychopath, he looks in the mirror and he dares not see himself. A man who has no face—’

‘—is a man who wears a stocking-mask. Now, Mr Hawke—’

‘Yes, but one moment! This time I have something positive to tell you. I’ve seen him. In the crystal—scrying, we call it. A small man, five foot six or less, clerk type, regulation suit, knee-length mackintosh—’

‘Strikingly different from half the male population of this town. Including for example, yourself. Now, I’m frantically busy—’

‘But there’s more—’

‘—so goodbye and thank you.’ He could not forbear from adding: ‘Don’t call us, we’ll call you.’

He fell into one of his terrible rages, hunched like a monkey in the big séance room armchair, and for a moment lost consciousness, blacked out as of late he so often did, sometimes for hours at a time, coming to spent and exhausted, deeply troubled by forgotten dreams. But Delphine was with him now, gently dabbing with a damp cloth at the haggard, narrow white face. ‘What does it matter, Mr Hawke? A dumb policeman!’

‘I could have told them—the man has red hair. But they’ll never believe in me, in my Gift—’

‘I believe in you,’ she said. ‘I know.’

Coming up to her in the crowded store, a total stranger. ‘Don’t be afraid, I only want to help you.’ But she had been afraid. Other shoppers had gathered protectively about her: was there not a mass murderer abroad? He introduced himself to them. ‘Joseph Hawke—famed clairvoyant, you’ll have heard of me. And I’ve had this vision, you see, in the crystal, I know that she’s in deep trouble.’ She had cried out—how could he possibly have known?—gone with him and confided, ashen-faced, ‘I’ve had a telephone call from him. From No Face, slopping and gobbling. It was terrifying. He said—he said, “You’re next!”’ But she was incredulous. ‘How could you know?’

He knew because he had watched her an hour ago, praying in the church before the statue of St Jude, Refuge of the Despairing. He learned a good deal from watching in churches—the widow in her mourning dress at the foot of the crucifix, the woman before the altar of St Antony of Padua who would help you to find lost things.

Horn-rimmed spectacles, mac turned inside out, a nylon wig, perhaps—he was adept at disguises, simple or elaborate: follow the victim to some busy spot where your revelations will attract potential clients for future séances. His current assistant would follow up the clues in old newspapers, parish registers, graveyards, even; and they would be duly astounded at how much he could tell them of themselves.

Delphine, frightened, without family or friends, had fallen a natural prey and in time replaced the latest helper to have departed, faith eroded by so much of fraudulence; grateful and trusting, Delphine had accepted sensibly the need of any practitioner to pad out for the credulous, trivialities unworthy of the true psychic gift. Pretty, sweet and blessedly naïve Delphine!—he might have come to love her if he could ever have felt love for anyone, poor squinny little orphanage boy, looking only inward, unto himself; but he felt only that she was caring and kind. He had never known that either.

Now she suggested: ‘Never mind the police. Tell the media.’

The media seized with joy, as ever, upon anything hinting of the occult. And here was Joseph Hawke, famed clairvoyant, describing a vision of a small man, white-collar type, and with red hair …

Two mornings later, the police issued a statement; the victim of last night’s murder had clutched, as though torn out in the struggle, a curl of black nylon: and mixed in with the nylon, two short red hairs.

Mr Joseph Hawke was a famed clairvoyant indeed.

The public were ripe for exploitation. Terror stalked in their midst. The authorities seemed helpless. But now—a Saviour! Queues formed to attend his scrying séances. He saw what they wanted him to see—the chances, he said to Delphine, were high against any of them falling victim to No Face. And of course very often, it was a genuine vision.

‘You never see me in the crystal?’ she asked, wistfully.

‘I’d have told you, wouldn’t I?’ He knew that she longed to stay with him in safety, but with this upsurge of fame he must be circumspect and she was nightly packed off to creep back to her lonely flat at the other end of town. ‘Use different exits from here, keep him guessing. You’ll be all right.’ He was impatient to get on with the affairs of Joseph Hawke. His correspondence was growing enormously. ‘If only we dared bring in some secretarial help!’

‘There’s so much stuff in the flat.’ The wired-up séance room, the rolls of fine plastic for the ectoplasm during mediumistic trance; the disguises for the follow-ups, the painted gas balloons looking down from the ceiling with dear Father’s fine features or mother’s sweet smile—it was incredible what people would believe when, in grief and anxiety, they wanted to believe. He agreed: ‘No, it’s too dangerous. We’ll have to make do with tricks, the slates and all that, and meanwhile I’ll train you in the scrying.’ He said sharply: ‘Did you hear what I said? You seem very distrait today.’

‘Yes, well … I’ve been trying to pluck up courage to tell you. The police have been questioning me. They asked how you could have known that the man has red hair. If I thought you had ever dyed your hair.’

‘Oh, my God!’ It had never occurred to him. ‘They think I know, because I’m No Face myself!’ His voice grew shrill, hysteria rose up in him like a scream. ‘They’d kill me—if such a rumour got around, the people would lynch me!’ And he began casting about, his head moving this way and that as though he might literally see a way out. ‘I’ll have to somehow prove … What proof can I show them …?’ And the darkness grew, and the swimminess, the build-up to unconsciousness; and sharply into the darkness and swimminess, a bell pealed. ‘Oh, Christ!’ he cried out. ‘They’ve come for me!’

‘It’s the people for the séance,’ she said.

By the time she had led them in, awed and silent, he was sprawled back in the chair, his hands lying flaccid on the table-top, the crystal abandoned. ‘He’s already in trance. Very quietly—sit down, join your hands in a ring. His two neighbours—just put your hands on his hands.’ In the ordinary way there would be noise, music, spirit movements all over the darkened room; if he wanted to be free, he simply jerked his hands, let his neighbours, groping in the dark, find each other’s hands, leaving him outside the ring. But this time was going to be different. She stood quietly aside, looking, herself, a little frightened. And he began to speak.

Or through him, someone began to speak. The police had published recordings, every soul in the room clearly recognised that voice—the horrible, gasping, half-whispering voice with its slurring of consonants, slobbering out the words. A woman shrieked, hands jumped apart, scrambled to re-form the circle; but the voice gabbled on. ‘Must have it! Must have it! Killed … The smell of their death … Must have it again …’ And the terrible cry: ‘They can’t stop me—they can’t find me: I have no face!’ An incomprehensible muttering and then: ‘But you know me! You described me! My name, tell them my name!’ The mumbling died away, glottic as the plops in a bubbling saucepan; died into silence …

Broken at last by a different voice, the voice of the medium. Strangely quiet after the hubble-bubble of that terrible voice. Spelling out—letters. An F. A pause and then an O; and then without interval, C-A-N-E. His name, he had said: and his name was F. O. Cane.

Into the stillness, Delphine said quietly: ‘Rearrange the letters and it spells—No Face.’

He got rid of them all, rushed to the telephone. The wooden voice tinged with exasperation. ‘Yes, Mr Hawke?’

‘His name,’ he said triumphantly. ‘I can tell you his name. And it is not my name.’

‘Oh, that. I never very seriously thought it was.’

His mind shook. To have offered this precious secret on a plate, which all the time might have been saved for some world-shattering revelation when the time was ripe!—and to find that after all, he needed no such proof of his innocence. But he had blurted it out already. ‘His name is F. O. Cane.’

A moment’s silence, and then: ‘You’ve been playing at anagrams, Mr Hawke, you and that pretty young lady of yours. F. O. Cane—No Face. But why not A. F. Cone? or C. O. Fane? Or F. Ocean, that would be rather a jolly name, F. Ocean. The Red Sea, perhaps, considering his fondness for blood?’

The narrow, hatchet face grew pinched with fury, he clung to the receiver with a juddering hand. ‘All right! You’ll be sorry! I’ll tell you nothing more, let him kill and kill and kill, you’ll get no more help from me!’ And to reclaim something at least from disaster, he broadcast widely that during a mediumistic trance, the murderer himself had come through and revealed his name. It would be safest not yet to make this public but he would deposit it in a sealed envelope, and one day the world would know that he had been right.

And indeed that night, the voice called the police—they had arranged code words with him to save themselves from hoaxers—and his name was F. O. Cane.

Delphine was uncertain about it, uneasy. ‘He’ll know that you know—and that probably I do too. Tonight; he may know tonight, if they get it on the nine o’clock news.’ She looked very pale and drawn. ‘I feel a bit scared going home. I suppose, just for once—?’

But he was tired, exhausted. ‘You’ll be all right, he doesn’t know yet, get back and lock yourself in, you’ll be perfectly safe.’ After all, what else was there to do about it? Give her shelter here? But he simply could not risk scandal now. ‘I’m sorry, but I’m totally worn out by the séance. And then that fool of a policeman—’ At the thought of it his voice began to rise, he felt sick with it, physically sick with the rage and the despair. ‘Real—this time it was real. But they’ll never believe …’ And the darkness descending, and the blackness …

But at four o’clock in the morning, he was wide awake and dialling her number. ‘Delphine—he’s rung me up!’

‘Oh, Mr Hawke—!’

‘About you! He says he’s going to … He says—tonight!’

She gave a sort of scream, broke into terrified sobbing. ‘His voice came through again, Delphine. It was real, it was genuine, believe me! I came to and found myself by the telephone. Now, look—lock yourself in, bar the door, put something against it.’

‘Oh, God,’ she sobbed, ‘I’m so frightened! He—he stabs them and stabs them. I can’t stay here, I can’t be alone—’

‘Don’t go, don’t leave your flat, I’ll call the police—’

‘Please come,’ she cried, imploring. ‘Please come, please come!’

‘Yes, but I can’t remember—Delphine! Your address?’ But her voice said, ‘I’m going to … Passing out …’ and there was the clatter of the dropped receiver. He called her name urgently, but there was no reply.

When he got through to the police station, it was from a call-box. A night-duty officer this time. Cagily. ‘He rang you? Any code word?’

‘Code? I don’t know. I was in trance—’

‘Oh, in trance, sir, were you?’

‘Some word did keep coming through. Silver?—could it be—?’ All caginess vanished. The voice snapped: ‘Name and address?’

Her name, yes. ‘But I can’t remember—’

‘Telephone?’

‘You can try but she seems to have fainted. And it’s a rented flat, the ’phone’s not in her name.’ And time passing, time passing. ‘Anyway, you find it, I can’t wait—I’ll have to try and remember the way. He could be there at this minute.’

He allowed himself only the smallest delay but it was almost an hour before he appeared at her flat. The police were there, the Superintendent himself. He gasped out: ‘Delphine?’

Superintendent Tomm in his level way. ‘The young lady’s not here.’

‘Oh, God, he hasn’t—?’

‘He’s been here. The window was forced, he’d got in over the roofs.’

‘But Delphine?’

‘She heard him at the window. Tore open the door and escaped. There’s a call-box just outside the flats, she rang us from there. We’ve got her safe. But meanwhile, of course, he’d been here and gone.’ He remarked coolly: ‘You took your time.’

‘There’s thick fog—’

‘We noticed. Still—an hour! You started out from home?’

‘Well, of course.’

‘I ask, because you rang the station from a call-box.’

‘She didn’t replace her receiver. That disconnected my ’phone. I got lost, I’ve been driving round and round, hardly knowing what I was doing.’

‘Yes, well … We’ll keep the girl for the night, she’s in a pretty bad way …’

She had pulled herself together by the time she came to him next morning, but she still looked terrible, pale as death and with dark arcs beneath her eyes. He was sitting collapsed in his chair and did not even look up at her. She knelt at his side. ‘Don’t be so upset! I’m all right now. I got away safe.’

He said dully: ‘Before I started, I rang round the media. I told them there’d be another killing. Last night, I said. A girl. In her own home. It’s been broadcast everywhere. And now I shall be proved wrong.’

She got to her feet, stood staring down at him. ‘Oh, my God—Mr Hawke! You’d rather I had been killed. Killed, murdered, slaughtered—if it would keep them believing in your powers!’

‘Oh, no!’ he cried out. ‘No, no!’ And he fell on his knees, caught at her hand, holding it against his worn face, clammy and cold. ‘Of course I wouldn’t sacrifice one hair of your head, Delphine!’ And yet … ‘It means so much to me. I have the gift, you know that: it’s so terrible to me that nobody will believe. Last night—the ’phone call: that was a genuine experience, I swear to you that it was. And now, if I’m proved wrong—’

She slid away her hand, stepped back, looking down at him. The horror seemed to fade away from her face, pity took its place. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘You’re safe. He did kill again last night.’

Now it was Superintendent Tomm’s turn to call on Joseph Hawke. ‘This time you weren’t quite so bang on. A girl was killed, yes. In her home, yes. But a man was killed too, the boy friend, visiting. You didn’t foresee that?’

‘Well, but …’ He said quickly: ‘That would be fortuitous. He meant to kill a girl—well, he meant to kill Delphine. But the man appeared, he had to kill him too.’

‘You’re still offering this as a psychic revelation?’ said the Superintendent, curiously.

‘I was in trance. I have these—well, what you would call dreams, very troubled, I wake up exhausted as though—’

‘As though you’d been walking in your sleep, perhaps?’

‘In this case as though I’d had the telephone call. A psychic revelation: yes, just the right phrase. How else could I have known the code word?’

‘You had a genuine ’phone call from No Face and he mentioned it?’

He fell back in despair. ‘You’ll never believe me, will you? No one will ever recognise my powers. Did he ring me, those earlier times, and describe himself to me? Did he ring and tell me that he has red hair? Did he ring and give me his name?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Superintendent Tomm. ‘You tell me.’

He fought against the old inevitable rise of hysteria. ‘Are you suggesting that I’m nothing but a fraud?’

‘Well, as to that—people do talk, you know.’

‘Oh, yes, I’m sure. Dismissed assistants. Who would listen to them?’

‘I would. Because you see, we have three choices. If, as you insist, you’ve had no actual ’phone calls—and if, as they insist, you have no true psychic powers—then there’s only one way that you would know as much as you do about this murderer.’

‘You mean—? Oh, my God!’ Fear rose up, choking him, darting questions scuttled about in his mind like rats. ‘You think I’m him? You believe I’m the killer? You suspected it once before …’

‘And you immediately came across with a ‘proof’ of your innocence. You gave us his name.’

‘Well, there you are then!’

‘But after all, that could have been yourself ringing up and confirming yourself.’

‘How could I, if I didn’t know the code word?’

‘Ah, but, Mr Hawke,’ said Superintendent Tomm, ‘what does that make you, if you did?’

He sat for a long time saying nothing, and slowly the hysteria ebbed away, leaving his mind cold and clear. He said at last, slowly: ‘If I tell you something, will you swear—?’

‘I’ll swear to nothing. But I won’t unnecessarily give away your secrets.’

‘Well, then. I see now that I have to convince you that I am not No Face; whatever conclusion you in the end might come to—if such a rumour got about—God help me! So I must tell you. I saw him. Not in the crystal—I saw him in a church. I noticed this man go into the confessional box. He was there a long time and when he came out he flung himself down on his knees and buried his face in his hands. And the priest came out of the box and went away quickly and he was as pale as death. I followed, I saw the priest kneeling out of sight of the rest, before a side-altar, with his hands clasped, looking up at the crucifix, tears pouring down his face. I knew then that he had heard something terrible, but he couldn’t break the seal of the confessional, he was powerless to do anything about it. And there was a mass murderer abroad.

‘I went back down the aisle. I touched the shoulder of the kneeling man and spoke some name. He shook me off, muttering, “No, no. Go away!” I gave him a sort of apologetic pat on the head and said, “Sorry, mate!—I thought you were someone I knew!” But in those two moments—we’re trained in these tricks, Superintendent, that’s how we get our information—I’d flicked the handkerchief out of his breast pocket and seen the name printed across the corner; and I’d gently shuffled back the nylon wig and got a glimpse of the red hair underneath. And that’s all there was to it.’ He gave a small, despairing shrug. ‘So now you know. But at least it proves that to know what I knew about him, I didn’t have to be the killer.’ He shrugged again. ‘I suppose if, after that, I swear to you that I do sometimes exercise the true psychic gift, you will simply think me a fool.’

‘A fool?’ said the Superintendent. ‘No, no, on the contrary. I think you are a very clever man.’ He fell to musing upon it. ‘A very, very, very clever man,’ he said.

Delphine appeared in the doorway. ‘Oh—I’m sorry—’

‘No, no, Miss Grey. It was really you I came to see. This may be just a little to your comfort. After you’d left this morning, we had one of his calls. Out of the usual horror emerged the fact that he was gloating over the two people murdered last night. In his childhood, he’d witnessed a double killing—a fight between his parents. With knives—so one up to you, Mr Hawke, you always suggested something of the kind!—and recently, I suppose, something triggered off the reaction. He has a craving, like a drug, for what he calls the smell of death.’

‘Yes—he said that to Mr Hawke, during last night’s séance.’

The Superintendent did not look at Mr Hawke. ‘He didn’t mention the word “surfeit”? No, the séance took place before the double killing. But he said it this morning, over and over. I’m hoping it just may mean that he’s satisfied. All the same …’ He suggested to Delphine: ‘You’ve had a bad time—this is twice he’s threatened you. You wouldn’t consider getting out of town for a bit?’

‘Oh, she can’t do that,’ said Joseph Hawke. ‘I need her here.’

She remained but now she was given police protection indeed, with safe-conduct to and from her home, a man posted all night on duty at her block of flats, even prowling the corridors outside of Joseph Hawke’s apartment. The work was ever-increasing, but they had been able to rent, from people fleeing from danger, a flat in the same building and there install a couple of secretaries. Three months passed by: No Face, appetite apparently appeased, struck no more. Gradually she seemed to forget her terrors, gave herself over to her study of the crystal ball. A success; she invented a little gimmick of her own, allowing the sitter to peer over her shoulder down into the wavery depths of the globe on its bed of black velvet then, once they were sufficiently mesmerised, slipping under the crystal a picture or photograph—by that time, almost anything more would do—and with a little guidance soon having them in amazed recognition of the dear old homestead complete with lost loved ones right down to dead doggie, Rover. But she herself proved somewhat too susceptible to the hypnotic effect—like gazing into deep, deep water, she would dreamily say, moving gently to a cloudy turbulence. An evening came when, after a particularly long, hard day’s work, he found her apparently unconscious, sitting nursing the glittering ball in her hands. ‘Delphine?’

No flicker of response. He was about to bring her round, gently, when she began to speak, to mutter in the high, bird-like voice she affected for her professional sessions. ‘Something moving. In the crystal—moving.’

To be clever at interpreting nonsense was one thing; a genuine rivalry in scrying was quite another. ‘What do you mean?’ he said sharply. ‘Moving?’

She seemed not to hear him. ‘Shadowy … All swirling … A picture of, a picture of …’ And she cried out suddenly: ‘It’s my flat! I can see the clock. The clock says midnight. It’s midnight. It’s tonight. There’s a girl—’ The high voice faltered. ‘There’s blood, there’s blood!’ and she gave a sharp scream and cried out ‘No! No! NO!’ and her hands dropped away from the crystal globe, she fell across the arm of the chair and lay there, still.

Oh, dear God—Delphine! His gentle and loyal Delphine, the only true friend that in all his life he had ever known—butchered to death by a maniac come alive again to his craving for blood! But it’s all right, he thought; there’s masses of time to warn the police, she can stay in the office flat, she needn’t go back home …

On the other hand …

He sat for a long, long time, watching her. Almost certainly what she had seen in the crystal would be obliterated from her mind. Let her go, then; and then inform the police, let them set a trap and—maniac caught red-handed in a murder attempt, and all through his own amazing predictions.

And yet, again …

She had seen in the crystal the spilled blood of a deed accomplished. She had seen into the future. What use, after all, to interfere, to protect, to warn?—only to have the prediction of the crystal come true; to be seen to have failed. Should not one simply ‘foresee’ what inevitably must be?

But foreseeing, why not have warned in advance? I must leave it to the last moment, he thought, pretend to have just come out of trance, rushed to the telephone. Then immediately call the media and … The maniac caught, not in the attempt but actually in commission of the deed: a small man, red-headed, whose name would prove to be F. O. Cane. Just dare the very universe, after that, to question the psychic powers of the great Joseph Hawke!

If in his heart he recognised that here was an infamy beyond the imagination of any decent man—his mind over-rode the thought. Within him the passion to be accepted for what he knew himself indeed to be had grown like a weed, to suffocate all other caring. At five minutes to midnight, call the police, call his contacts; and meanwhile let her, in happy ignorance, go home.

She stirred at last, opened her eyes, looked mildly astonished. ‘Oh, dear—did I pass out? This thing—I fall for it far too easily. Like staring down into a pool, into swirling water.’

He said: ‘Did you see anything in the water?’

‘Well—I seem vaguely to remember something—something rather horrid, like waking up from a nightmare one’s forgotten. I didn’t say anything?’

He dragged out the words. ‘No, you didn’t say anything.’

‘Goodness, how late it is! I must get home. Would you like me to get you something to eat before I go?’

‘No, no,’ he said, almost violently. Even he could not accept kindness from her, could not share with her such a meal as this. The last supper, he thought: she and Judas.

The last supper. He knew, then, didn’t he?—deep in his consciousness he had known all along—that he was sending her out to die.

The waiting was terrible—terrible. He began to be afraid that the tension would bring on one of those ever more frequent black-outs, of not coming to in time to make his ’phone calls. And indeed he did lapse into some sort of uneasy dream, returning fully to awareness only a few minutes before midnight—ill, exhausted, as though instead of lolling there a prey to nightmares, he had been through some tremendous effort …

Coming to full awareness—to a sudden full realisation of what he had done.

Save her, he thought—I must have been mad, I must save her, must save her!

Telephone her flat, then? To the police? But it was almost twelve, wouldn’t that make him too late to catch the television people? On the other hand … With his mind split three ways, he stumbled over to the telephone.

And the telephone was dead.

Panic hit him like a hurricane, whirled him into the familiar darkness, only one thought clear in his mind. Time’s running out. I must ring the press, ring the television people, I must tell them about it before it becomes known, before there is any normal way for me to have found out.

But the telephone was dead. The office, he thought: the office flat! I can use the ’phone there. Not waiting for the lift, he fled down the single flight of stairs. The church clock boomed the hour as with a trembling hand he thrust the key into the lock. He flung open the door and tumbled into the flat.

And she was waiting for him there.

The uplifted arm, the plunge of the keen blade that seemed to flash down and into his heart, as though through a sheet of shining water. He gave one shrill rabbit-scream of pain; and she was down on her knees, bending over him, sniffing at the blood that spurted through the slit nylon, snuffling like a pig after truffles. ‘The smell! The smell! More of it, I must have more!’ But she dropped the raised hand.

‘No, no, I mustn’t!’ She muttered and mumbled. ‘Only one stab. Self-defence …’ His head rolled helplessly as she forced on to it the dark nylon wig. Muttering … Echoes of the gruesome mutterings of the telephone voice. ‘Can’t call them till he dies. So die, can’t you?—die!’ She scrambled up, perched on the edge of a chair, leaning over him, her eyes fixed on his face. Her voice relaxed into something more nearly human. ‘But you’ll die—No Face, the maniac murderer with his nearly human thirst for the smell of death! Oh, you signed your death warrant, didn’t you?—the day you published that first article. Mad am I? Well, helpless lunatic I may be, but I got you into my power from that hour on. Watched you, got on to your tricks in the churches … Didn’t you ever think, poor deluded fool, that it was all a bit too slick and easy? Picking me up there—so naïve and trusting! And the confessional! I suppose that poor wretch still believes he heard the confession of a killer who would kill again. A trap for you—a trap! All laid on by the pitiful lunatic with his terrible childhood experiences. Terrible, it wasn’t terrible, it was wonderful, I hated them, I hated them for doing it all in front of me, their child—fighting each other with knives, fighting to the death. I wanted the smell of it again, the smell of their death in my nostrils. And again and again. But I needed a fall guy—the police were getting close, even if they didn’t yet know it. And who more suitable than you, who had spilt out your lies to the world. Mad, was I?—who was up to all your shifts and contrivances, playing you along, selling you to the police. Watching over me?—they were watching you with your precious scryings and seeings. The murderer’s voice ringing you up!—who knew that?—they knew only that you told them he rang you up. Do you think they believed you? I believed you: after all it was I who rang you. And all the disguises here, right down to the sheets of sheer plastic: this is one of your own wigs, they’ll find plenty of clues in that. They thought you might even not know it yourself, I described the blackouts, how you’d come to exhausted, strange dreams … I didn’t mention the little doses in all those warm drinks I used to bring you, kind, caring Delphine! But of course, all that was after the double killing …’

His ears were closed now, deaf for ever. His eyes were sightless for ever, staring blindly up at the animal face that could turn in a moment so charming and sweet—snout out-thrust at the savoured memory of that spilling of blood after which she had written SURFEIT. But, dead or alive, she needed an audience now. She gloated on. ‘Oh, the two of them—didn’t I have you all on a merry-go-round that time? Ringing you in my No Face voice—waiting till you called me; begging you to come. Not replacing the receiver so that your own telephone was disconnected, you had to ring the police from a call-box. And you played right into my hands; for what other reason had I chosen a foggy night?—driving around “not knowing what you were doing”, getting yourself lost. They thought you’d rung up from the call-box outside my flats, got in through the window and away again before they could arrive there. From then on—oh, you were for it, Mr Hawke! No clues, nothing to pin on you yet; but now they knew. They let me stay and spy on you in the flat, I was safe while mobs of people were coming in and out; but they watched you, night and day. It was wearisome, no more killings for those three hungry months, but I’d had a good deal from the double killing, I could last. Till the time came—I had to get more. Not that you’ve provided me with a lot, but once you’ve gone and the police relax, break up all this elaborate operation—then I can safely begin again. What a laugh!—took you in completely, didn’t I?—with the scrying act! You—drinking it all in, the final warning that I would be killed tonight. Murdered, slaughtered, by the maniac psychopath—and you let me go home to it! But I didn’t go home, you see: I just came here. I knew how your mind would work, I knew you’d never warn the police, you’d rather get your triumph with the media—and I’d quietly disconnected your telephone, you’d have to come down here to do it. And you came.’ Calm now, calmed by the assuaging of the long unsatisfied craving, she leaned over and sniffed long and ecstatically at the thickened seeping of the blood around the wound; rose and, re-settling her features into those of a sick and terrified girl, went across, already weeping, to the telephone. ‘Oh, Mr Tomm! Oh, it’s so dreadful! He came at me with the knife …’

And so now, here he was, trying to get through to them, to the circle sitting there in the darkness with their touching hands. Screaming, silently screaming. ‘Listen to me, listen! Tell them, warn them, implore them to believe in me! They’ve got it all wrong. Yes, I cheated sometimes, but I had the Gift, I had it, and here I am now to prove it to you, speaking to you … Tell them I wasn’t the killer, tell them it’s all going to begin again!’

But they would not hear him. Heard only the sweet, familiar piping. ‘Very happy. Yes, he’s happy now, he’s met them all on the Other Side, his sins are forgiven him. All peace and joy on the Other Side, sunshine and flowers everywhere, just sunshine and flowers …’

Sunshine and flowers; and no one to believe in his warning—this very night, it’s all going to begin again.

CHRISTIANNA BRAND

Mary Lewis, née Milne, was born in Malaya in 1907, the daughter of a tea planter. She wrote under the pen names Mary Brand, Mary Roland, Mary Ann Ashe, China Thompson, Annabel Jones and, the one as which she is best known, Christianna Brand, which joined her mother’s first name to her grandmother’s maiden name.

After several happy years at school at a convent in Berkshire, Brand was told she would have to leave by her father, who had been declared bankrupt. At the age of seventeen, she found herself ‘literally penniless’ and with no training whatsoever for earning her own livelihood. She moved to London where, known by her friends as ‘Quif’, she drifted from one job to another, eventually becoming a dance hostess (which, incidentally, was not a euphemism for something less respectable). This inspired her earliest published short story, a light romance entitled ‘Dance Hostess’ (1939) and it led to her meeting her husband, a surgeon called Roland Lewis. The couple married in 1936 and, when the Second World War broke out, Roland Lewis joined the Royal Army Medical Corps and was posted overseas.

On her own in London, Mary Lewis moved in and out of a variety of jobs, eventually taking on a role that was to change her life—she became a shop assistant. While she was not a great success in the job, the job led to a great success for her because she detested the manager of the shop so much that she decided to kill her … in a novel. The hate-fuelled result, Death in High Heels (1941), is set not in a shop but in a high-class Mayfair couturier, drawing on another of her many early jobs. There is a poisoning and the detective is the brash young Inspector Charlesworth.

With the return of her husband to England, Mary Lewis settled down with the intention of writing for the rest of her life. Her second novel, Heads You Lose (1941), won the $1,000 Red Badge prize offered by publishers Dodd, Mead for the best mystery of the year, but it was her third book, Green for Danger (1944), that made her a household name, not least because of the film version, which was released in 1946 and starred Alastair Sim as her best known detective, Inspector Cockrill. That same year, she was elected to the Detection Club, and she continued to write books of various kinds under various names.

By the late 1950s, Mary Lewis was recognised as a leading name in the crime and detective genre. Sadly, and for private reasons, she decided to give up writing mystery novels. However, she could not abandon writing altogether and, as well as a few newspaper serials and some short stories for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, she wrote a series of ‘true life’ novellas for Woman and several short books for children featuring Nurse Matilda, a character based on her own nanny.

And then, twenty years since his last case, Inspector Charlesworth returned, in The Rose in Darkness (1979), a strange, almost dreamlike book in which a reclusive actress and her small group of friends are caught up in what appears to be murder. The return was very warmly welcomed by critics and readers alike but Mary Lewis had been suffering from a painful illness for some years and she died in March 1988.

At the time of her death, Mary Lewis was working on a new detective story featuring Inspector Cockrill and, while that was not finished, a collection of largely unpublished material is due in 2020 from an American publisher, Crippen and Landru.

‘NO FACE’ has not been published previously.

BEFORE AND AFTER
Peter Antony

It was nine o’clock on a warm summer’s morning when Nurse Stephens discovered the body of her employer. Even in death Mrs Carmichael’s face still held the irritability of one forced to lean on others who were all too often engaged elsewhere. For fifteen years she had been paralysed from the waist down. Now a tiny hole, drilled neatly through her right temple, had made the top half of her body as immobile as the lower half.

It was all most unfortunate, particularly for Nurse Stephens, who had a most unprofessional attitude to the sight of the little blood there was. She managed, however, to ’phone the doctor and the police.

Inspector Swallow was nominally in charge of the party who arrived at Delver Park at ten o’clock—assorted ‘experts’, finger-print men, a photographer and the doctor. After a telephone conversation with Inspector Rambler of Scotland Yard, Swallow had been advised by that gentleman to bring with him on the case Mr Verity, who happened to be staying in the locality, and whenever Mr Verity ventured on a case, no one could possibly deny that he, not the police officer, was in charge of it.

‘You will certainly find him a little difficult to get on with,’ Rambler had said to Swallow over the ’phone, ‘but he is really a remarkable man. He always finds the truth. If he is in the area you can’t afford to neglect his services. In any case, I don’t suppose you will be able to. He has an infuriating habit of tendering them unasked.’

Inspector Swallow had not waited for that event, but had picked Mr Verity up in the police car on his way to Delver Park, and he now stood regarding the lifeless features of Mrs Carmichael with faint distaste.

Mr Verity was an immense man, tall and proportionately broad. His blue eyes shone brilliantly out of a pointed, bronzed face, which was completed by a well-tended, chestnut Vandyke. Despite the earliness of the hour, he was smoking a long, black Cuban cigar with the most curiously theatrical gestures.

‘She does make a particularly unlovely corpse,’ he said at length. ‘And I thought that death was meant to have a softening effect on the features.’

Inspector Swallow interposed: ‘If you’ve finished your inspection, could we have a few details, doctor?’

Doctor Hendrikson, neat, bird-like and laconic, straightened up.

‘She was killed with something like a very thin knitting-needle. It was driven with a considerable amount of force through her temple here. A quick-closing wound with very little blood. Time of death 10.30 to 11 o’clock last night. That’s about as accurate as I can get it.’

‘Clear enough. Munby, get finger-printing, and you, Brandt, do your stuff.’

Brandt, a young recruit to the Force, took his camera and leant over Mrs Carmichael’s tightening face. He giggled nervously.

‘Watch the dickie bird,’ he said with bravado.

Mr Verity scowled.

‘The contagion of Mr Raymond Chandler!’ he snorted.

‘Let’s go and see the family,’ said Swallow.

Together the two detectives went downstairs to the library where the dead woman’s husband and the nurse were waiting for them.

Robert Carmichael was a tall, austere man still in his late thirties, with a fine forehead, darting brown eyes, a rather sharp nose and an unexpectedly weak mouth and chin. Nurse Stephens was good-looking in a coarse, full-blown sort of way. Neither appeared distraught though they were essaying a reasonable facsimile.

Swallow was good at this game, being at once urbane, sympathetic and slightly menacing.

‘Now, let’s start from tea-time yesterday.’

Nurse Stephens was ready and willing.

‘Tea was at 4.30. Mrs Carmichael had her medicine at 4.45, and after that I wheeled her down to the garden. About five, Mr Carmichael took her photograph and went off to the village to develop it, whilst I sat with Mrs Carmichael for an hour or so before wheeling her off to bed. I remained on duty until seven o’clock, when relieved by the night nurse, Wimple.’

‘And everything was all right before you left?’

‘Certainly, Mrs Carmichael was asleep and everything in order.’

‘And later on that evening?’

‘At 7.30 we all went over to Colonel Longford’s house for dinner and bridge. We arrived back here at about one in the morning,’ Robert Carmichael put in.

‘All?’

‘Nurse Stephens, my brother-in-law Doctor Sanderson, Sandra my stepdaughter, and myself.’

Mr Verity grunted reflectively.

‘There seems to be a pretty comprehensive interest in that curiously anti-social pastime, eh, Mr Carmichael?’

‘I beg your pardon, sir?’

‘I refer to bridge.’

‘Yes, we all play.’

‘Tell me, Mr Carmichael, did your wife have any mortal enemies that you knew of?’

‘I’m afraid I can’t help you there, Mr Verity. I am as much in the dark as you are.’

‘Never mind, Mr Carmichael. I have a wonderful capacity for illumination.’

With a wave of the hand he dismissed them.

That evening after tea, Inspector Swallow and his elderly colleague saw Dr Sanderson, the dead woman’s brother.

The old man started the ball rolling with typical charm.

‘Well, sir. You’ve lost a sister and made £15,000. Some people would consider that you have made a profit on the day’s activities. What do you think?’

Doctor Sanderson, balding, eagle-nosed and tubby, was indignant.

‘Really, Mr Verity, I do resent that most earnestly. After all, I was very fond—’

‘I know all about it. Your sister left it to you. I saw Riggs the lawyer before tea. And don’t say you didn’t know … Looks of incredulity are lost on me. I have seen too many of them to be deceived into thinking that you only expected a little something … an extra pipe of tobacco a week maybe, or that odd pint.’

‘But it’s true—’

Inspector Swallow interposed tactfully.

‘Oh, come now, sir. It is our duty to check up on people, and we have discovered that you’ve been borrowing money on the strength of your expectations. Considerable sums, too.’

Doctor Sanderson paled.

‘Oh, so you know about that. You certainly work fast.’

His face set defiantly; assumed pain gave way to spleen.

‘All right, then, if you know so much about me, what about the others? Have you seen my sanctimonious brother-in-law? He’s not the sort of man to be chained to a hopeless invalid all his life and do nothing about it.’

Mr Verity was yawning hugely.

‘In the words of the vulgar, do you imply that we cherchez la femme?’

‘And not so far either.’

‘You refer, of course, to the angel of mercy. You could be right.’

‘No “could be” about it. And there’s Sandra. Money in trust. Love’s young dream, and the missing parental consent. Why not have a look at all that before picking on me?’

‘It’s not a question of picking on anybody,’ murmured Mr Verity sweetly. ‘I just always like to take suspects in order of repulsion.’

Doctor Sanderson stormed out of the library in a fury.

Both detectives stayed to dinner. It was a homely little meal, marred perhaps for the hypersensitive by the arrival of the mortuary van. Mr Verity was in great form and talked incessantly about a portrait of an old man in polychromed clay executed by Guido Mazzoni in the late fifteenth century which he had just purchased for his collection of statuary at his Sussex home ‘Persepolis’. The company, with the exception of Sandra, Carmichael’s stepdaughter, bore his recondite conversation with fortitude. She, however, was noticeably distressed, and it was with some diffidence that the two men set out after dinner to find out exactly why.

‘Believe it or not,’ she began, when at last they were alone together in the library, ‘I had a great affection for my mother.’

‘That is not the voice of vulgar rumour,’ said the old man.

‘You can love a person and not always get on with them, Mr Verity.’

‘So the Bible continually reminds us.’

Swallow scratched his head and said gently:

‘Your mother had £20,000 in trust for you. I understand you were to receive this sum, or the income thereof, on your marriage, provided your mother gave her consent. Is that correct?’

‘Perfectly. Have you ever heard anything so monstrous? It was my father’s idea.’

She said this as if her father’s death had been no great loss to her.

‘And the position was that, having hunted down one Harry Logan as your intended mate, you could not persuade your mother that the alliance of Harry and £20,000 was a holy one.’

Mr Verity smiled benevolently at her over his black cigar, and patted his inflated stomach affectionately.

Sandra Collins was almost crying. Her top lip trembled mutinously.

‘So—?’

‘So, if I might say it without offence, my dear Miss Collins, murder for money is still a highly favoured motive, not only amongst those who write on matters of crime, but amongst those who investigate it.’

Wishing to avoid an hysterical scene, Inspector Swallow left the world of conjecture conjured up by his colleague, and returned to the world of fact.

‘Tell me, Miss Collins,’ he began suavely, ‘what did you do last night?’

‘I went out to dinner with the others. You can soon find out whether that’s true or not.’

‘I have already done so.’

Sandra was openly weeping now.

‘I didn’t kill her, Inspector,’ she sobbed, ‘… my own mother … You can’t say I did.’

‘Which at the moment of speaking is perfectly true,’ grunted Mr Verity, blowing a smoke-ring.

‘Oh, you’re impossible,’ she cried, and with the tears pouring down her face hurried from the room.

‘Mr Verity, I don’t like this case,’ Swallow said when they were alone. ‘All of them had motives for killing her, yet none of them could have done it.’

Mr Verity beamed.

‘Don’t let it prey on you. 10.30 to 11 o’clock is the time to keep in mind. Surely we can punch a hole in one of their well-rehearsed narratives.’

‘It seems impossible. They were all over at Colonel Longford’s between 7.30 p.m. and 1 a.m. He lives twelve miles from here and there was absolutely no opportunity for one of them to take an unnoticed hour off, to drive back here, do the murder and drive back again. I checked up on it and no one left. Besides, the excellent Nurse Wimple was on duty in the passage outside Mrs Carmichael’s room the whole night, so no one could have got in.’

Mr Verity looked glum.

‘Oh lord! Not another locked room. My last locked-room case was a shattering business … all centring round some dreadful woman in a wardrobe. Besides, the excellent Wimple probably spent half the night dreaming she was in the arms of Tarzan.’

‘I’m afraid she claims all-night consciousness. And, further, she had no motive to kill the old lady.’

‘Of course she didn’t do it. If she had, she would have taken good care to provide herself with an alibi.’ The old detective yawned. ‘Come, Inspector, adjourn with me to the local hostelry. A pint or two of good ale, a cigar and a little light discussion on the terra-cotta work of Antonio Pollaiulo will do wonders for our tired brains.’

The next morning Inspector Swallow, calling on Mr Verity, found him in a state of high excitement.

‘Here, Inspector, look at this. Interesting, eh?’

He pointed with a well-manicured forefinger at the centre-page advertisement in the morning’s copy of the Daily Grind. It showed two photographs of Mrs Carmichael ‘Before and After Taking Toneup, the wonderful restorative for Invalids … “I felt absolutely washed out until I started taking Toneup,” says Mrs Carmichael, a chronic invalid of Delver Park …’

‘Yes, I know all about it.’ Inspector Swallow said. ‘It was Mrs Carmichael’s idea. I asked her husband. He sent it off the same night she got killed. Just another manifestation of the invalid’s craving to be noticed, I suppose.’

‘I suppose so,’ Verity replied, thoughtfully brushing his Vandyke with the back of a huge hand. ‘But I wonder why she is looking so sour in the “After” photograph. It’s most curious. In this kind of picture the patient is always equipped with a smirk of imbecilic glee. Here she looks like a professional mourner.’

Swallow studied the ‘After’ picture in perplexity.

‘Maybe it’s the cigarette smoke getting in her eyes.’

Mr Verity took out a small pocket magnifying-glass and scrutinized the picture again.

‘You must excuse the Sherlock Holmes touch … Yes, that is another curious point. There is certainly plenty of cigarette smoke there. But where is the cigarette?’

‘I think I can barely see it … there between her fingers.’

Inspector Swallow pointed to a dark smudge on the picture.

‘That is very odd indeed. One might almost say it is the first real rift in the leaden clouds of deceit which have surrounded us since the start of our investigations.’

‘Do you think she was dead then?’

‘Certainly not. The doctor said she died between 10.30 and 11 o’clock, approximately six hours later. I never believe doctors on questions of health, but on questions of death I have always found them infallible. Besides, the maid up at Delver Park confirms she was alive at six o’clock. She helped carry her upstairs in the wheel-chair.’

Inspector Swallow ran a harassed hand through his thinning hair.

‘I don’t understand it at all, Mr Verity. A woman is murdered in a room where no one could have reached her without being seen, and at a time when everyone was miles away. What do we do now? What is the significance of this photograph, if any?’

‘It certainly is significant. In fact, it tells us everything.’

Mr Verity lit a Cuban cigar and looked dreamily in front of him.

‘You really must have patience, Inspector. As to what we are to do now, there is only one thing to do.’

‘And that is?’

‘We must pay a visit to the morgue … No, don’t ask why. You will see when we get there.’

They had to stand five minutes in the antiseptic half-light of the mortuary before the attendants had sorted out Mrs Carmichael. Nervously Swallow pulled back the sheet and studied the body intently.

‘Observe her right hand,’ murmured Verity over his shoulder.

The Inspector whistled, and the noise had a horrible flat ring in that desolate room.

‘She must have been a heavy smoker. The whole finger is stained with nicotine, and the flesh is badly scorched on the side there.’

Mr Verity’s satanic face wore a smug look.

‘Just so. Mrs Carmichael must have suffered a considerable amount of pain in allowing that cigarette to burn down to that point.’

‘She must have been asleep when her husband took that “After” picture,’ said Swallow.

‘Fiddlesticks,’ roared Verity. ‘She was unconscious.’

‘And just what is the point of shunting an unconscious woman around in a bath-chair, posing her for a personality picture, dumping her in bed and going off to a bridge party?’ the Inspector enquired, suddenly startled by the old man’s explosion.

‘The point should be obvious to an intelligence considerably meaner than yours, my dear Inspector. Come, I want to make a telephone call.’

‘To whom?’

‘To the station, of course. I want them to arrest our two murderers, and take them into custody. Come, don’t stand there as if you had been struck by lightning. I’m sure they must have a ’phone here; if not for the convenience of the inmates, at least for casual visitors.’

Whilst the Inspector saw that the body of Mrs Carmichael was safely returned, Mr Verity found the ’phone and got through to the police-station. His instructions were brief but effective.

Ten minutes later, after Mr Verity had meticulously examined some Corinthian-style pillaring which had caught his fancy on the exterior of the little town hall, the two detectives were speeding back to the police-station in the Inspector’s car.

‘After all, we don’t want to keep our prisoners waiting,’ Mr Verity explained as he urged his colleague to exceed the speed limit. Inspector Swallow, his mind in a baffled whirl, drove steadily.

Once at the station, Mr Verity jumped out of the car with all the deftness of a rhinoceros in labour, and charged inside.

‘Well, where are they?’ he enquired of a constable behind the desk.

‘Waiting inside, sir.’

Next door sat Robert Carmichael and Nurse Stephens, white-faced and very angry.

‘You’ll pay for this, Verity,’ Carmichael roared. ‘False imprisonment. I’ll get £10,000 damages.’

‘The only damage you’ll get is to your neck,’ the old man replied benignly.

‘You can’t prove a thing. On your own evidence, the murder was done between 10.30 and 11 o’clock. Nurse Stephens and I were miles away at the time. I have half a dozen witnesses.’

‘Saving your presence, Nurse Stephens, I wouldn’t give a damn if you had the whole population of Central London as witnesses. You may have been miles away when your wife died, but that doesn’t mean you didn’t murder her. You ran the whole job up between you—a very natural alliance seeing that you planned to carry the partnership on to the legalised sex level when the obstacle was safely in her coffin.’

‘This is absurd,’ screamed Nurse Stephens. ‘Supposing you prove it.’

‘I can do that, too,’ Mr Verity replied, taking a deep puff at his cigar and exhaling slowly. ‘From the burn on Mrs Carmichael’s finger, I was convinced that at the time you took that photograph your wife was unconscious. Therefore some drug was suggested and at the same time a wonderful opportunity for administering the stuff—Mrs Carmichael’s medicine.

‘What happened was this. Nurse Stephens slipped an overdose of some suitable narcotic, probably chloral hydrate, into the medicine, and though the victim lost consciousness within half an hour she did not die until close on 11 o’clock. What simpler than for your nurse to come along in the morning and drive a thin implement through her head, the idea being to make it look as if Mrs Carmichael had been murdered at 11 o’clock, the time of death, when she and her accomplice were twelve miles away playing bridge. A very thin weapon, even if it had been used when the victim was alive, would cause so very little blood that Doctor Hendrikson was unable to tell that the wound was inflicted after death. Again, a drug like chloral hydrate would not be suspected if there were other evidence to account for death, like a wound in the temple. Ingenious and all well within a qualified nurse’s knowledge.

‘It really was very foolish of you, Mr Carmichael, to give way to your macabre egotism and put a picture of your dying wife in the newspaper with a caption plugging her superb health. It wasn’t really necessary to prove that she was alive at five o’clock. There was plenty of independent testimony on this point. On the other hand, it clearly showed me the way to your conviction … You can lock them up now, Sergeant.’