“Now, that’s a disagreeable sort of an inference,” protested Mr. Egg, “and I hope you won’t follow it up. I shouldn’t like anything of that sort to happen, and my employers wouldn’t fancy it either. Don’t you think that before we do anything we might have cause to regret, it would be a good idea to have a look in the furnace-room?”
“Why the furnace-room?”
“Because,” said Mr. Egg, “it’s the place that Craven particularly didn’t mention when we were asking him where anybody might have put a thing he wanted to get rid of.”
The inspector appeared to be struck by this line of reasoning. He enlisted the aid of a couple of constables, and very soon the ashes of the furnace that supplied the central heating were being assiduously raked over. The first find was a thick mass of semi-molten glass which looked as though it might once have been part of a wine bottle.
“Looks as though you might be right,” said the inspector, “but I don’t see how we’re to prove anything. We’re not likely to get any nicotine out of this.”
“I suppose not,” agreed Mr. Egg sadly. “But” — his face brightened — “how about this?”
From the sieve in which the constable was sifting the ashes he picked out a thin piece of warped and twisted metal to which a lump of charred bone still clung.
“What on earth’s that?”
“It doesn’t look like much, but I think it might once have been a corkscrew,” suggested Mr. Egg mildly. “There’s something homely and familiar about it. And, if you’ll look here, I think you’ll see that the metal part of it is hollow. And I shouldn’t be surprised if the thick bone handle was hollow, too. It’s very badly charred, of course, but if you were to split it open, and if you were to find a hollow inside it, and possibly a little melted rubber — well, that might explain a lot.”
The inspector smacked his thigh.
“By Jove, Mr. Egg!” he exclaimed, “I believe I see what you’re getting at. You mean that if this corkscrew had been made hollow, and contained a rubber reservoir, inside, like a fountain pen, filled with poison, the poison might be made to flow down the hollow shaft by pressure on some sort of plunger arrangement.”
“That’s it,” said Mr. Egg. “It would have to be screwed into the cork very carefully, of course, so as not to damage the tube, and it would have to be made long enough to project beyond the bottom of the cork, but still, it might be done. What’s more, it has been done, or why should there be this little hole in the metal, about a quarter of an inch from the tip? Ordinary corkscrews never have holes in them — not in my experience, and I’ve been, as you might say, brought up on corkscrews.”
“But who, in that case—?”
“Well, the man who drew the cork, don’t you think? The man whose fingerprints were on the bottle.”
“Craven? But where’s his motive?”
“I don’t know,” said Mr. Egg, “but Lord Borrodale was a judge, and a hard judge too. If you were to have Craven’s fingerprints sent up to Scotland Yard, they might recognize them. I don’t know. It’s possible, isn’t it? Or maybe Miss Waynfleet might know something about him. Or he might just possibly be mentioned in Lord Borrodale’s memoirs that he was writing.”
The inspector lost no time in following up this suggestion. Neither Scotland Yard nor Miss Waynfleet had anything to say against the butler, who had been two years in his situation and had always been quite satisfactory, but a reference to the records of Lord Borrodale’s judicial career showed that a good many years before he had inflicted a savage sentence of penal servitude on a young man called Craven, who was by trade a skilled metal-worker and had apparently been involved in a fraud upon his employer. A little further investigation showed that this young man had been released from prison six months previously.
“Craven’s son, of course,” said the inspector. “And he had the manual skill to make the corkscrew in exact imitation of the one ordinarily used in the household. Wonder where they got the nicotine from? Well, we shall soon be able to check that up. I believe it’s not difficult to obtain it for use in the garden. I’m very much obliged to you for your expert assistance, Mr. Egg. It would have taken us a long time to get to the rights and wrongs of those bottles. I suppose, when you found that Craven had given you the wrong one, you began to suspect him?”
“Oh, no,” said Mr. Egg, with modest pride, “I knew it was Craven the minute he came into the room.”
“No, did you? But why?”
“He called me ‘sir,’ ” explained Mr. Egg, coughing delicately. “Last time I called he addressed me as ‘young fellow’ and told me that tradesmen must go round to the back door. A bad error of policy. ‘Whether you’re wrong or whether you’re right, it’s always better to be polite,’ as it says in the Salesman’s Handbook.”
That’s your own funeral
by Cornell Woolrich[3]
The demure little lady stepped into the grocery store, rested her large parcel on the counter, and stood by to be waited on. Outside a man just passing glanced incuriously in through the glass front of the shop as he went by. Just a brief turn of his head, one quick glance, no more. The only unusual feature about it being that male passersby will glance at haberdasheries, cigar stores, even barber shops, but seldom at groceries as a rule.
She was a pretty little thing, and she gave her order in a low, pleasant, half-shy voice, keeping her eyes on the list in her hand. She looked absurdly like a child, gravely reciting a lesson. But there was a wedding ring on her ungloved hand. So she must have been at least eighteen.
“Want me to send it over for you?” he offered. “Kind of heavy—”
“No, thanks, I’ll carry it myself,” she murmured. “No trouble at all.”
She emerged, her arms pretty full, and continued on her way. She wore a short sealskin jacket that swung as she walked; her clothes were plain and inexpensive looking.
The man who had passed the grocery as she’d gone in hadn’t progressed very far. He had stopped at the newsstand at the next corner to buy a paper, then he retreated, his back to the Jine of buildings, to glance through it quickly before taking it home with him. The hands that held the paper wore stained pigskin gloves.
The little lady with the bundles passed him a moment later. Neither of them glanced at the other; there was no reason for them to. He was lost in the baseball scores boxed at the top of the page, she was eying a light diagonally opposite to make sure she could cross on red. Halfway down the next block she stopped in at another store, a bakery.
A moment after, by one of those coincidences that so often happen, Pigskin Gloves passed in front of the bakery. He was carrying the paper in his pocket now. Once more his eyes strayed indifferently to the inside of the store, then out again. But the average man on the street isn’t particularly interested in the interiors of bakeries either. This one may have been thinking of the supper he was going home to — so leisurely.
She accepted her change from the counterman, put it in her purse, and came out more bebundled than ever. Pigskin Gloves, who was obviously in no great hurry to get home, had stopped at last at the proper kind of showcase — that of a men’s furnishing store a few doors down — and was gazing in at a luscious display of trick shirts. The window had been recently washed, unlike most of its neighbors; except that it lacked a little quicksilver backing, it was every bit as good as a mirror.
The busy little housewife marched by with her packages, and her watery reflection followed across the glass store front. But just as she came abreast of Pigskin Gloves who was standing there with his back to her, the pupils of her eyes flicked briefly sideward toward him, then looked away again. It was as instantaneous, as hard to catch, as the click of a camera shutter.