at least two brides quite successfully before fate and the News of the World intervened.'
'Yes,' said the other man, 'but look at the clumsiness of it all; the elaboration, the lies, the paraphernalia. Absolutely unnecessary.'
'Oh, come!' said Pender. 'You can't expect committing a murder and getting away with it to be as simple as shelling peas.'
'Ah!' said the other man. 'You think that, do you?'
Pender waited for him to elaborate this remark, but nothing came of it. The man leaned back and smiled in his secret way at the roof of the carriage; he appeared to think the conversation not worth going on with. Pender, taking up his book again, found himself attracted by his companion's hands. They were white and surprisingly long in the fingers. He watched them gently tapping upon their owner's knee--then resolutely turned a page--then put the book down once more and said:
'Well, if it's so easy, how would you set about committing a murder?'
'I?' repeated the man. The light on his glasses made his eyes quite blank to Pender, but his voice sounded gently amused. 'That's different; I should not have to think twice about it.'
'Why not?'
'Because I happen to know how to do it.'
'Do you indeed?' muttered Pender, rebelliously.
'Oh, yes; there's nothing in it.'
'How can you be sure? You haven't tried, I suppose?'
'It isn't a case of trying,' said the man. 'There's nothing tentative about my method. That's just the beauty of it.'
'It's easy to say that,' retorted Pender, 'but what is this wonderful method?'
'You can't expect me to tell you that, can you?' said the other man, bringing his eyes back to rest on Pender's. 'It might not be safe. You look harmless enough, but who could look more harmless than Crippen? Nobody is fit to be trusted with absolute control over other people's lives.'
'Bosh!' exclaimed Pender. 'I shouldn't think of murdering anybody.'
'Oh, yes, you would,' said the other man, 'if you really believed it was safe. So would anybody. Why are all these tremendous artificial barriers built up around murder by the Church and the law? Just because it's everybody's crime, and just as natural as breathing.'
'But that's ridiculous!' cried Pender, warmly.
'You think so, do you? That's what most people would say. But I wouldn't trust 'em. Not with sulphate of thanatol to be bought for twopence at any chemist's.'
'Sulphate of what?' asked Pender sharply.
'Ah! you think I'm giving something away. Well, it's a mixture of that and one or two other things--all equally ordinary and cheap. For ninepence you could make up enough to poison the entire Cabinet--and even you would hardly call that a crime, would you? But of course one wouldn't polish the whole lot off at once; it might look funny if they all died simultaneously in their baths.'
'Why in their baths?'
'That's the way it would take them. It's the action of the hot water that brings on the effect of the stuff, you see. Any time from a few hours to a few days after administration. It's quite a simple chemical reaction and it couldn't possibly be detected by analysis. It would just look like heart failure.'
Pender eyed him uneasily. He did not like the smile; it was not only derisive, it was smug, it was almost-- gloating--triumphant! He could not quite put a name to it.
'You know,' pursued the man, thoughtfully pulling a pipe from his pocket and beginning to fill it, 'it is very odd how often one seems to read of people being found dead in their baths. It must be a very common accident. Quite temptingly so. After all, there is a fascination about murder. The thing grows upon one--that is, I imagine it would, you know.'
'Very likely,' said Pender.
'Look at Palmer. Look at Gesina Gottfried. Look at Armstrong. No, I wouldn't trust anybody with that formula--not even a virtuous young man like yourself.'
The long white fingers tamped the tobacco firmly into the bowl and struck a match.
'But how about you?' said Pender, irritated. (Nobody cares to be called a virtuous young man.) 'If nobody is fit to be trusted--'
'I'm not, eh?' replied the man. 'Well, that's true, but it's past praying for now, isn't it? I know the thing and I can't unknow it again. It's unfortunate, but there it is. At any rate you have the comfort of knowing that nothing disagreeable is likely to happen to me. Dear me! Rugby already. I get out here. I have a little bit of business to do at Rugby.'
He rose and shook himself, buttoned his raincoat about him and pulled the shabby hat more firmly down above his enigmatic glasses. The train slowed down and stopped. With a brief goodnight and a crooked smile the man stepped on to the platform. Pender watched him stride quickly away into the drizzle beyond the radius of the gas-light.
'Dotty or something,' said Pender, oddly relieved. 'Thank goodness, I seem to be going to have the carriage to myself.'
He returned to Murder at the Manse, but his attention still kept wandering.
'What was the name of that stuff the fellow talked about?' For the life of him he could not remember.
It was on the following afternoon that Pender saw the news-item. He had bought the Standard to read at lunch, and the word 'Bath' caught his eye; otherwise he would probably have missed the paragraph altogether, for it was only a short one.
'WEALTHY MANUFACTURER DIES IN BATH 'WIFE'S TRAGIC DISCOVERY
'A distressing discovery was made early this morning by Mrs John Brittlesea, wife of the well-known head of Brittlesea's Engineering Works at Rugby. Finding that her husband, whom she had seen alive and well less than an hour previously, did not come down in time for his breakfast, she searched for him in the bathroom, where, on the door being broken down, the engineer was found lying dead in his bath, life having been extinct, according to the medical men, for half an hour. The cause of the death is pronounced to be heart-failure. The deceased manufacturer . . .'
'That's an odd coincidence,' said Pender. 'At Rugby. I should think my unknown friend would be interested--if he is still there, doing his bit of business. I wonder what his business is, by the way.'
It is a very curious thing how, when once your attention is attracted to any particular set of circumstances, that set of circumstances seems to haunt you. You get appendicitis: immediately the newspapers are filled with paragraphs about statesmen suffering from appendicitis and victims dying of it; you learn that all your acquaintances have had it, or know friends who have had it, and either died of it, or recovered from it with more surprising and spectacular rapidity than yourself; you cannot open a popular magazine without seeing its cure mentioned as one of the triumphs of modern surgery, or dip into a scientific treatise without coming across a comparison of the vermiform appendix in men and monkeys. Probably these references to appendicitis are equally frequent at all times, but you only notice them when your mind is attuned to the subject. At any rate, it was in this way that Pender accounted to himself for the extraordinary frequency with which people seemed to die in their baths at this period.
The thing pursued him at every turn. Always the same sequence of events: the hot bath, the discovery of the corpse, the inquest; always the same medical opinion: heart failure following immersion in too-hot water. It began to seem to Pender that it was scarcely safe to enter a hot bath at all. He took to making his own bath cooler and cooler every day, until it almost ceased to be enjoyable.
He skimmed his paper each morning for headlines about baths before settling down to read the news; and was at once relieved and vaguely disappointed if a week passed without a hot-bath tragedy.
One of the sudden deaths that occurred in this way was that of a young and beautiful woman whose husband, an analytical chemist, had tried without success to divorce her a few months previously. The coroner
