The Reader Is Warned

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.

'Ah, now we're sort of approaching!

'Samuel was always complainin' of the cold. He couldn't get the house warm enough. In fact, the last thing he groused about to high heaven, before your party broke up at seven-thirty, was the coldness of the house. Well, what's he done to take care of this mania of his in a room where people really do feel the cold: I mean the bathroom?'

H. M. looked malevolently at Sanders.

'You, son. On a couple of later occasions you saw in the bathroom a portable electric heater. A two-bar, or two-unit, heater. In fact, on one occasion you fell bang over the thing, didn't you? Yet it's very rummy - I repeat: very rummy - that, though you saw a heater there on Saturday and Sunday, you didn't see one there on Friday night when you looked into the bathroom only a little while after Sam Constable's death.'

It was true.

Sanders had in his mind only too clear a picture of that damp-smelling bathroom, when he had gone into it to search in the medicine-cabinet for an opiate to administer to Mina Constable. He had noted every object in the bathroom on Friday night; and there had been no heater there. But later it obtruded itself on the notice: a bronze- painted affair over which both he and Mina had at different times stumbled.

'And,' he said suddenly, 'the bathroom still smelt damp -' 'Sure,' growled H. M. 'Because Samuel Hobart didn't get his bath until it was past quarter to eight. Burn me, I can see him and I can hear him!

'He climbed in. He squawked to high heaven about draughts and the cold. There was his wife flutterin' around him as he made his valet flutter. And he was king and emperor. And automatically and without thinkin', just as he'd done a thousand times to his valet, he bawled to her to put the portable heater closer to the bath. And the subconscious fear or wish got hold of her, just as she was afraid it would. And she automatically picked it up in those hands of hers that can't; hold a glass. And all of a sudden, as she lifted it, they both thought of the same thing. She slipped; and the electric heater dropped into the bath.

'That's all, gents.

'Certain death, that's all.'