‘ALEC, you’re not to! Alec, you beast! Mother, tell him he’s not to. Alec, you’ll ruin this frock! Alec, I will not have it! You’ll have to buy me a new frock, you know. Oh, hell, there’s one of my suspenders gone. Mum, do for goodness’ sake tell him he’s not to! Are you going to sit there and see your daughter murdered? Alec! Alec, I swear I’ll—ALEC! I’ll kick your shins with my heels—I swear I will! Alec, I will not be treated like this. Alec, stop it! A joke’s a joke, but—Alec!—Oh, thank God, here’s father! Father, will you tell Alec—Alec, no! Not with Mr Sheringham here. No, this is too much of a good thing. I’ll get cross in a minute—I mean it! ALEC! Oh, father, do say something to the damned man, for Heaven’s sake.’
Dr Purefoy said something. He said: ‘Don’t mind me, Alec.’
‘Father, I loathe you!’ observed Miss Sheila Purefoy with intense feeling.
It must be admitted that Miss Purefoy had reason for her emotion. She was standing in a curious position, bent like a hair-pin over the end of the big couch, her face, very red and unpowdered, burrowed upside-down among the loose cushions in the corner of the seat. She could not regain an erect position because Alec’s large hand was planted firmly on the nape of her neck. Every now and then she heaved violently in an effort to follow her head on to the seat of the couch; on these occasions Alec’s other hand would grab her hastily by the scruff of the back and pull her back again. Frequently too she would lash out with a vicious jab of her high-heeled shoe, and then Alec would either jump nimbly out of the way, or else be caught off his guard and suffer intense discomfort. Nor had Alec himself escaped all signs of conflict. His hair was decidedly ruffled, his tie unfastened and a button missing from his dinner-jacket.
‘Well, will you keep still while I smack you?’ he demanded reasonably.
‘No, I’m damned if I will? Let me up this minute, you hulking great bully.’
‘You’re not coming up till you’ve been smacked.’
‘But why not?’ cried Miss Purefoy plaintively. ‘I’ve never done anything to you. Why are you going on like this, curse you?’
‘Because it’s good for you, Sheila. You’re getting too jolly big for your shoes. Now then, stand still!’ He removed his hand from her back, and Miss Purefoy instantly dived forward on to her head. He was only just in time to grab her frock at the back and drag her back again. A rending sound arose.
‘Now, you’ve done it!’ wailed Miss Purefoy. ‘Alec, you hound of hell, let me up. Didn’t you hear me split then? I don’t feel as if I’d got one whole garment left on me.’
‘Look here, Roger,’ Alec said, quite unperturbed, ‘I wish you’d come and whack her for me, will you? You see, whenever I take my hand off her back, she nearly gets away.’
‘Alec,’ Roger said with considerable emotion, ‘there are few things I wouldn’t do for you, but whacking my hostess’s daughter is most decidedly one of them.’
‘Thank you, Roger Sheringham,’ came a grateful if muffled voice from among the sofa cushions. ‘You’re a gent, you are. Alec, on the other hand, is a hound of hell.’
‘Sheila, will you stand still while I do it, then?’ demanded the hound of hell once more.
‘No, blast you, I won’t!’
‘Alec, dear,’ interposed Mrs Purefoy, ‘I think you might let her up now, don’t you?’
‘Oh, thank heaven for miracles!’ gasped Miss Purefoy in stifled tones. ‘Mother’s found her heart.’
‘But she hasn’t been whacked yet, Molly,’ Alec protested.
‘No, but I think you’ve dealt with her drastically enough even without that, haven’t you?’
‘All right,’ Alec conceded reluctantly. ‘I’ll take pot-luck and whack her on the run. Now then, Sheila!’
He whisked his hand away from Miss Purefoy’s back and applied it heavily three or four times to another portion of that young lady’s anatomy as she promptly hurled herself, with yet more rending sounds and a flourishing of green silk stockings, head over heels on to the couch.
‘And now,’ panted Miss Purefoy, picking herself up and smoothing down her dishevelled person, ‘somebody tell me a fairy-story. It’s more restful.’
‘I think you’ll find her a bit more like a human being for the next day or two now, Jim,’ observed Alec, dropping into a chair and applying a handkerchief to his brow.
‘Thank you, Alec,’ replied Dr Purefoy simply.
His wife felt that it was time to impart a somewhat more conventional note to the proceedings. ‘Alec tells me that you and he may be staying some days here, Mr Sheringham,’ she remarked.
‘Yes,’ Roger said. ‘It’s quite possible. I don’t know how long, but three or four days, I expect, at least.’
‘Well, wouldn’t you rather come and stay here than at the Man of Kent, both of you? We should be very pleased to have you if you cared to come.’
‘That’s most extraordinarily kind of you, Mrs Purefoy,’ Roger said warmly. ‘But surely we should be most terribly in the way?’
‘Not a bit. I should leave you to amuse yourselves; I always do leave my visitors alone, I’m sure they much prefer it. You wouldn’t be any trouble at all.’
‘This is really quite overwhelming,’ Roger murmured. ‘Of course we should like to come most awfully. If you’re absolutely certain it would be all right.’
‘Good. Then that’s settled,’ Dr Purefoy said briskly. ‘You’d better get your things round tomorrow morning.’
‘Need Alec come, mum?’ queried Sheila in some concern. ‘Couldn’t Mr Sheringham come alone?’
‘Do you want to be scragged again, Sheila?’ Alec asked with a grin.
‘Shut up, Alec!’ retorted his cousin. ‘I’m not on speaking terms with you at present.’
‘Because the next time I have to take action,’ continued Alec weightily, ‘the next time, Sheila—I’m going to drop you into a bath of cold water. So look out!’
‘The bathroom, Alec,’ remarked Dr Purefoy airily, his eyes fixed innocently upon the ceiling, ‘is the second door on the left at the top of the stairs.’
An excellent evening then ensued.
A few minutes before eleven Roger and Alec, reiterating for the fourteenth time their decision that they really must go now, really went.
‘Alexander,’ said Roger with his usual frankness as they turned down the High Street, ‘I like your cousins most tremendously. Two more charming people than Dr and Mrs Purefoy I’ve never met.’
‘Yes, they’re a topping couple. Awfully decent to me when I was a kid. Sheila used to be a jolly kid too, but she’s grown up pretty ghastly.’
‘Oh, she’s all right. Just the usual pose of nineteen or twenty or whatever she is. She’ll grow out of that sort of thing.’
‘I certainly did her a bit of good tonight,’ said Alec, with a reminiscent grin. ‘I didn’t notice any more of that dam’ silly languidness about her after I’d finished with her.’
Roger stopped dead on the pavement and solemnly lifted his hat. ‘Heads uncovered to Mr Alexander Grierson, Strong Silent Man and Tamer of Women,’ he said reverently.
‘Don’t be an ass,’ said the Woman-tamer tolerantly.
‘And also,’ Roger added, ‘as I was nearly forgetting, Hound, I understand, of Hell. I say, Alec, it really was most awfully good of them to invite us to stay there.’
‘Yes; they’re jolly hospitable.’
‘And mark my words, that young lady is going to be a great help to us. She can give us an introduction to the Saunderson, as she calls her, off her own bat, and she could certainly wangle any others we might want. I think we shall have seriously to consider taking her into our confidence.’
And then Alec said a very unexpected thing. ‘We might do a jolly sight worse,’ said Alec.
Roger looked at him with considerable surprise. It was the last advice he would have expected Alec to put forward.
‘Alexander,’ he remarked, ‘if ever I’ve called you a darned and blithering old fool, I herewith take it back. I really don’t think you are.’
‘Thanks,’ said Alec without exuberant gratitude.
They reached the Man of Kent and ordered the night-caps to which their position as residents entitled them, in defiance of the dictates of a maternal government, pussyfootism and all the other futilities which order our lives for us in these days.
‘Well, you didn’t get much forrarder tonight with the business in hand, I noticed,’ Alec observed, when a sleepy provincial waiter had set their glasses in front of them. ‘Cheerio!’
‘Good luck. Didn’t I, though! But most decidedly I did; after you’d gone to interview Sheila. Alec, my friend, this case looks as if it’s going to turn out to be uncommonly simple after all.’
‘How do you make that out?’
Roger told him what he had learned regarding the appearance of the symptoms in arsenical poisoning. ‘So you see,’ he pointed out, ‘this narrows everything down to a very fine point indeed. We’ve only got to find out who came into contact with Bentley during that penultimate half-hour before the symptoms appeared, and among those very few people is your murderer. At any rate we shall know after that whom not to waste time over.’
‘And Mrs Bentley?’ Alec asked. ‘How does this affect her?’
‘Well, that’s going to be rather interesting. If by any chance she didn’t come into contact with her husband during that time (how the deuce are we going to find all this out, by the way?), one can’t say that she’s cleared completely. The rule isn’t a hard-and-fast one, you see. But as far as all practical probabilities go, I think we might say that she would be.’
‘And if on the other hand,’ Alec said slowly, ‘she was the only one to do so, then the case against her appears to be clinched?’
Roger nodded. ‘Exactly. That’s what I meant. In either alternative the case may turn out comparatively simple.’
There was a short silence.
‘Lord, I wish I’d known the woman,’ Roger remarked restlessly. ‘We haven’t got anything to go on, you see, as to whether she’s capable of murder or not. No personal knowledge. Poisoning, as I said before, isn’t a thing you do in a hurry, like shooting someone in a temper or whacking somebody else over the head with a crowbar on the spur of the moment. It’s a deliberate, cold-blooded business, and you’ve got to be a “pure” murderer, as they call it, to carry it through. You’ve got to be capable of murder—which nine hundred and ninety-eight people out of a thousand aren’t!’
‘I can see that,’ Alec murmured, almost to himself. ‘Anybody might shoot a chap; but I’d sooner be shot myself than poison one.’
‘It’s all a question of the personal factor,’ Roger continued. ‘The dear old Law doesn’t recognise the personal factor in the slightest (that is, not consciously; though it was the personal factor which hanged Seddon for all that), but it’s a devilish important factor in any case where the murder is a deliberate one. Anybody’s capable of murder on the spur of the moment and with sufficient provocation; precious few people are capable of deliberately planning and carrying out the elimination of an unwanted fellow-creature. It does take a bit of nerve, you know. The French recognise the importance of the personal factor, of course; but then their legal procedure is based on the science of criminology, you might say, whereas ours is based on precedent.’
‘But I thought the French legal system was so harsh. Don’t they consider a person guilty till he’s proved innocent, while we do just the opposite?’
‘And isn’t that exactly what a detective unravelling a mystery does? Not that I’m defending the entire French legal system by any means. It is much harsher than ours and much more cruel, but there are plenty of points where it has the advantage of ours. All the French are concerned with is getting at the truth, and they don’t care a cuss how they get there; we’re mostly concerned with protecting the interests of every person or thing connected with the case, from the prisoner himself down through the barristers to the usher’s cat. The French confront an accused person with the corpse of his supposed victim and watch him with a magnifying-glass to see what his reactions are; we spend a couple of hours arguing whether a certain piece of evidence, about which the jury perfectly well know already, is to be admitted formally as evidence or not. The French go about it like a business; we go about it like a game—with the prisoner’s life as the prize for the cleverer side.’
‘But this is eloquence!’ murmured Alec. ‘Go on, though; it’s damned interesting all the same.’
‘Thanks; I will. You mentioned that the French treat a prisoner as guilty till he’s proved innocent, and we treat him as the reverse. That’s the old parrot-cry of the difference between the two systems, and there’s about as much sense in it as there is in most parrot-cries. If I wanted to be startling I might say that precisely the opposite is true—that the French treat a prisoner as innocent and we treat him as guilty; and there’d be just about as much sense in that as in the other. The real truth lies between the two, and you might say that the only way of expressing it is negatively. The French do not necessarily require a prisoner prove his innocence, and we certainly do not consider him innocent until he’s proved guilty. I could give you plenty of instances of that if you doubt what I’m saying, but I’ll confine myself to two. Seddon was certainly never proved guilty of poisoning Miss Barrow; Mrs Thompson was still more certainly never proved guilty of instigating the murder of her husband. Yet they were both hanged. Why? Because they couldn’t prove their innocence. Mind you, I’m not saying that either of these two convictions was necessarily unjust; that’s a very different thing. What I do say is that, if our law is administered as we suppose it to be administered, neither of these two persons should have been convicted; that they were, shows that the administration of the law does not, in fact, sing in tune with our parrot-cry about the benefit of the doubt. Of course I know that’s only one side of the question. If you knew of them, you could produce plenty of instances in which the accused person has been given that benefit and found not guilty because some vital link in the chain wouldn’t stand the test of proof. But that’s not the point. The point is that the other side of the case ought not to have examples in support of it at all.’
‘The point is conceded,’ Alec said with due solemnity. ‘So what about a spot of bed?’
Roger broke into a laugh. ‘Quite right, Alexander. I’m afraid all this is getting rather a hobby-horse of mine. Tip me gently off when I’ve ridden it long enough.’
‘I will,’ Alec promised, as they rose from their chairs.
‘So now to bed. Well, dormez bien, Alexandre. We’ve got a strenuous day before us tomorrow—I hope!’