He hesitated for a moment and looked at Abbershaw defiantly, but as the other did not speak he went on again. “I found out that in the ordinary way she was what they call a ‘dancing instructress’ in one of the nightclubs at the back of Shaftesbury Avenue. I went there to find her. From the manager in charge I discovered that for half a crown a dance and anything else I might choose to pay I might talk as long as I liked with her.”
Again he hesitated, and Abbershaw was able to see in his face something of what the disillusionment had meant to him.
“As you know,” Wyatt continued, “I know very little of women. As a rule they don’t interest me at all. I think that is why Joy interested me so much. I want you to understand,” he burst out suddenly with something akin to savagery in his tone, “that the fact that she was not of my world, that her accent was horrible, and her fingernails hideously over-manicured would not have made the slightest difference. I was in love with her: I wanted to marry her. The fact that she was stupid did not greatly deter me either. She was incredibly stupid—the awful stupidity of crass ignorance and innocence. Yes,” he went on bitterly as he caught Abbershaw’s involuntary expression, “innocence. I think it was that that broke me up. The girl was innocent with the innocence of a savage. She knew nothing. The elementary civilized code of right and wrong was an abstruse doctrine to her. She was horrible.” He shuddered, and Abbershaw fancied that he began to understand. An incident that would have been ordinary enough to a boy in his teens had proved too much for a studious recluse of twenty-seven. It had unhinged his mind.
Wyatt’s next remark therefore surprised him.
“She interested me,” he said. “I wanted to study her. I thought her extraordinary mental state was due to chance at first—some unfortunate accident of birth and upbringing—but I found I was wrong. That was the thing that turned me into a particularly militant type of social reformer. Do you understand what I mean, Abbershaw?”
He leant forward as he spoke, his eyes fixed on the other man’s face. “Do you understand what I’m saying? The state of that girl’s mentality was not due to chance—it was deliberate.”
Abbershaw started.
“Impossible,” he said involuntarily, and Wyatt seized upon the word.
“Impossible?” he echoed passionately. “That’s what everybody would say, I suppose, but I tell you you’re wrong. I went right into it. I found out. That girl had been trained from a child. She was a perfect product of a diabolical scheme, and she wasn’t the only victim. It was a society, Abbershaw, a highly organized criminal concern. This girl, my girl, and several others of her kind, were little wheels in the machinery. They were the catspaws—specially prepared implements with which to attract certain men or acquire certain information. The thing is horrible when the girl is cognizant of what she is doing—when the choice is her own—but think of it, trained from childhood, minds deliberately warped, deliberately developed along certain lines. It’s driven me insane, Abbershaw.”
He was silent for a moment or so, his head in his hands. Abbershaw rose to his feet, but the other turned to him eagerly.
“Don’t go,” he said. “You must hear it all.”
The little red-haired doctor sat down immediately.
“I found it all out,” Wyatt repeated. “I shook out the whole terrible story and discovered that the brains of this organization were bought, like everything else. That is to say, they had a special brain to plan the crime that other men would commit. That appalled me. There’s something revolting about mass-production anyway, but when applied to crime it’s ghastly. I felt I’d wasted my life fooling around with books and theories, while all around me, on my very doorstep, these appalling things were happening. I worked it all out up here. It seemed to me that the thing to be done was to get at those brains—to destroy them. Lodging information with the police wouldn’t be enough. What’s the good of sending brains like that to prison for a year or two when at the end of the time they can come back and start afresh? It took me a year to trace those brains and I found them in my own family, though not, thank God, in my own kin … my aunt’s husband, Gordon Coombe. I saw that there was no point in simply going down there and blowing his brains out. He was only the beginning. There were others, men who could organize the thing, men who could conceive such an abominable idea as the one which turned Dolly Lord into Joy Love, a creature not quite human, not quite animal—a machine, in fact. So I had to go warily. My uncle was in the habit of asking me to take house-parties down to Black Dudley, as you probably know, to cover his interviews with his confederates. I planned what I thought was a perfect killing, and the next time I was asked I chose my house-party carefully and went down there with every intention of putting my scheme into action.”
“You chose your house-party?”
Abbershaw looked at him curiously as he spoke.
“Certainly,” said Wyatt calmly. “I chose each one of you deliberately. You were all people of blameless reputation. There was not one of you who could not clear himself with perfect certainty. The suspicion would therefore necessarily fall on one of my uncle’s own guests, each of whom had done, if not murder, something more than as bad. I thought Campion was of their party until we were all prisoners. Until Prenderby told me, I thought Anne Edgeware had brought him, even then.”
“You ran an extraordinary risk,” said Abbershaw.
Wyatt shook his head.
“Why?” he said. “I was my uncle’s benefactor, not he mine. I had nothing to gain by his death, and I should
