“Capital?” asked Pons.
“I expect to come into some.”
“When?”
“Within the next few months.”
“Ample time! Now tell me, Mr. Lindall, since I am in need of some other little service, do you know any chemistry? Ever studied it?”
“No sir.”
“I asked because I saw a chemist’s shop next door. Perhaps you have a friend there who might make up a special prescription for me?”
“As a matter of fact, I do have. A young man named Ardley. Ask for him and say I gave you his name.”
“Thank you, thank you. I am grateful. In delicate little matters like these, one cannot be too careful.”
Lindall’s interest quickened. He ran the tip of his tongue over his lips and asked, “What is the nature of the prescription, sir?”
Pons dipped his hand into his coat pocket, thrust it out before Lindall, and unfolded his fingers. “I need a little pastille like this — with cyanide at the centre, to dispose of old men and middle-aged ladies.”
Lindall’s reaction was extraordinary. He threw up his hands as if to thrust Pons away, stumbled backward, and upset a stall of books. Books and Lindall together went crashing to the floor.
“Oh, I say! I say now!” called out the proprietor, getting off his stool.
“Inspector McGavick, arrest this man for the murder of Sir Randolph Curwen, and the planned murder of his aunt, Miss Emily Curwen,” said Pons.
McGavick had already moved in on Lindall, and was pulling him to his feet.
“You will need this poisoned pastille, Inspector. I found it in a box of rose pastilles in Miss Emily’s home. You should have no difficulty proving that this and the one that killed Sir Randolph were manufactured for Lindall at his direction.” To Lindall, Pons added, “A pity you didn’t ask after my Christian name, Mr. Lindall. Sherlock. A name I assume on those special occasions when I feel inordinately modest.”
In our compartment on the 10.15 express for London Pons answered the questions with which I pelted him.
“It was an elementary matter, Parker,” he said, confused by the coincidence of Sir Randolph’s possession of the Foreign Office papers. The death trap had been laid for him well before anyone at all knew that he would see the papers in question. This motive eliminated, it became necessary to disclose another. Nobody appeared to dislike Sir Randolph, and it did not seem that any adequate motivation lay in the provisions of his will.
“We were left, then, with Miss Emily’s curious visit, angrily terminated. She went to London to appeal to her uncle for an end to the trust. She came back and complained to her nephew — her ‘dear boy’ who is ‘all’ she has — her designated heir, as an examination of her will certainly show. In a fortnight, familiarized with Sir Randolph’s habits by Miss Emily, he paid him a visit on his own, managed to slip the poisoned pastille into his box, and was off to bide his time. He had had two made, one for his aunt, and felt safe in slipping the other into her box of pastilles. He might better have waited, but he had not counted on the death of Sir Randolph being taken for anything but a seizure of some kind. He underestimated the police, I fear, and greed pushed him too fast. ‘The love of money, Parker,’ is indeed ‘the root of all evil.’ ”
The Chinless Wonder
by Stanley Abbott
’Tis a reasonably accurate prognostication that one who parades in false adornment may anticipate apprehension.
Walter Mills was twenty-five and fed up, “browned off” as he put it, with life and with Himself. Since he was seventeen, he Had worked in a solicitor’s office near Piccadilly, slowly working himself up from the high stool of a junior clerk to the desk of a bookkeeper.
For eight years he had carried out his routine work without complaint. but under the surface he burned with a sense of injustice. Rich clients left behind a tantalizing whiff of a rich cigar or an elegant perfume, and in his imagination they lived romantic and adventurous lives. He envied them, for he had never had a girl. He was convinced the secret was money. So for a couple of years he had been quietly embezzling small sums in such a way that it was impossible to detect.
One day he left the office at lunch time to buy a suit. It was really the suit that started it all, a smart Glen Urquhart check. If the salesman hadn’t been so insistent Walter Mills wouldn’t even have thought of trying it on; he had never worn anything but hard-wearing greys and blacks. But when he saw himself in the three-way mirror he was amazed at the difference it made. He hesitated when the salesman produced a smooth, olive green hat with a smartly shaped brim to go with it — he never wore a hat. He turned to look at himself and caught sight of his face in the side mirror. He looked away quickly, but the sharp-eyed salesman had noticed.
“Why, that suit makes a new man of you, sir,” he exclaimed with calculated amazement. Walter Mills had taken the lot. Self-satisfied, he didn’t go back to the office.
But when he put the check suit on in his garret room, high among the roofs overlooking the River Thames, and looked at himself in the cracked wardrobe mirror, his doubts returned. Timidity stared back at him with pale blue eyes. It was his chin, or rather the lack of it, that was the trouble; it just faded into his neck. He looked, as a callous Army sergeant had once said, like “a chinless wonder that couldn’t pull the skin off a rice pudding.” The check suit couldn’t conceal that and he began to regret buying it. He couldn’t wear it to a job, and he didn’t go anywhere.
With only books for company, Walter spent each night in his room in the roof, lonely, bitter, and seething with dreams of the lovely women he saw in magazines or the pin-ups on his walls. He longed for something more than mere existence; but he had no friends. He knew his looks didn’t give him a chance.
At one time he had tried to grow a beard, but it had been a straggly failure. Thinking of it as he studdied himself in his smart new suit and hat, he wondered if he couldn’t get a beard such as actors wore.
He remembered there was a famous theatrical costumiers on Wardour Street. He said he was an actor, and whether they believed him or not, a beard was produced to match his colouring. He was shown how it attached with a self-adhesive; it could be put on or taken off at any time quite easily. When it had been trimmed short and given a smart naval cut, the effect when he looked in the mirror was almost unbelievable; the weak, timid-looking Walter Mills had disappeared.
As he walked down Piccadilly he imagined everybody was looking at him. But when he realized that no one was the slightest bit interested, he stared fascinated at his reflection in the shop windows. The set of his shoulders altered and he held his head higher. He decided to walk home along the Embankment beside the river. When he came to the Black Swan, a pub on the corner of Corson Street, where he lived, and which he’d never entered before, he went in without hesitation and ordered a drink.
It was pleasant sitting up at the bar with a bright fire in the grate. Through the window he could see the clock tower of Big Ben just lit up across the river. The barmaid came and leant her elbows on the counter in front of him. He’d heard people calling her Mabel. She was a country-looking girl with a high colour and fine brown eyes.
“Are you off a ship?” she asked softly.
“No, I live up the street here.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she smiled. “I hadn’t seen you here before; I took you for a naval man.”
He was delighted at this. “You’re not far wrong,” he lied. “I was in the merchant navy, but I’ve just moved here.”
“That’s the life for a man,” she said admiringly.