"And your next explanation? You said there were a dozen."
"I always prefer the Straightforward," Mr Rennit said, running his fingers up and down the whisky bottle. "Perhaps there was a genuine mistake about the cake and he had come for it. Perhaps it contained some kind of a prize."
"And the drug was imagination again?"
"It's the straightforward explanation."
Mr Rennit's calm incredulity shook Rowe. He said with resentment, "In all your long career as a detective, have you never come across such a thing as murder -- or a murderer?"
Mr Rennit's nose twitched over the cup. "Frankly," he said, "no. I haven't. Life, you know, isn't like a detective story. Murderers are rare people to meet. They belong to a class of their own."
"That's interesting to me."
"They are very, very seldom," Mr Rennit said, "what we call gentlemen. Outside of story-books. You might say that they belong to the lower orders."
"Perhaps," Rowe said, "I ought to tell you that I am a murderer myself."
2
"Ha-ha," said Mr Rennit miserably.
"That's what makes me so furious," Rowe said. "That they should pick on me, me. They are such amateurs."
"You are -- a professional?" Mr Rennit asked with a watery and unhappy smile.
Rowe said, "Yes, I am, if thinking of the thing for two years before you do it, dreaming about it nearly every night until at last you take the drug out from the unlocked drawer, makes you one. . . and then sitting in the dock trying to make out what the judge is really thinking, watching each one of the jury, wondering what he thinks. . . there was a woman in pince-nez who wouldn't be separated from her umbrella, and then you go below and wait hour after hour till the jury come back and the warder tries to be encouraging, but you know if there's any justice left on earth there can be only one verdict. . ."
"Would you excuse me one moment?" Mr Rennit said. "I think I heard my man come back. . ." He emerged from behind his desk and then whisked through the door behind Rowe's chair with surprising agility. Rowe sat with his hands held between his knees, trying to get a grip again on his brain and his tongue. . . "Set a watch, O Lord, before my mouth and a door round about my lips. . ." He heard a bell tinkle in the other room and followed the sound. Mr Rennit was at the phone. He looked piteously at Rowe and then at the sausage-roll as if that were the only weapon within reach. "Are you ringing up the police? " Rowe asked, "or a doctor?"
"A theatre," Mr Rennit said despairingly, "I just remembered my wife. . ."
"You are married, are you, in spite of all your experience?"
"Yes." An awful disinclination to talk convulsed Mr Rennit's features as a thin faint voice came up the wires. He said, "Two seats -- in the front row," and clapped the receiver down again.
"The theatre?"
"The theatre."
"And they didn't even want your name? Why not be reasonable?" Rowe said. "After all, I had to tell you. You have to have all the facts. It wouldn't be fair otherwise. It might have to be taken into consideration, mightn't it, if you work for me."
"Into consideration?"
"I mean -- it might have a bearing, That's something I discovered when they tried me -- that everything may have a bearing. The fact that I had lunch on a certain day alone at the Holborn Restaurant. Why was I alone, they asked me. I said I liked being alone sometimes, and you should have seen the way they nodded at the jury. It had a bearing." His hands began to shake again. "As if I really wanted to be alone for life. . ."
Mr Rennit cleared a dry throat.
"Even the fact that my wife kept love-birds. . ."
"You are married?"
"It was my wife I murdered." He found it hard to put things in the right order; people oughtn't to ask unnecessary questions: he really hadn't meant to startle Mr Rennit again. He said, "You needn't worry. The police know all about it."
"You were acquitted?"
"I was detained during His Majesty's pleasure. It was quite a short pleasure: I wasn't mad, you see. They just had to find an excuse." He said with loathing, "They pitied me, so that's why I'm alive. The papers all called it a mercy killing." He moved his hand in front of his face as though he were troubled by a thread of cobweb. "Mercy to her or mercy to me. They didn't say. And I don't know myself."
"I really don't think," Mr Rennit said, swallowing for breath in the middle of a sentence and keeping a chair between them, "I can undertake. . . It's out of my line."
"I'll pay more," Rowe said. "It always comes down to that, doesn't it?" and as soon as he felt cupidity stirring in the little dusty room, over the half-eaten sausage-roll and the saucer and the tattered telephone-directory, he knew he had gained his point. Mr Rennit after all could not afford to be nice. Rowe said, "A murderer is rather like a peer: he pays more because of his title. One tries to travel incognito, but it usually comes out. . ."
Chapter 3
FRONTAL ASSAULT
"It were hard he should not have one
faithful comrade and friend with him."
The Little Duke
1
ROWE went straight from Orthotex to the Free Mothers. He had signed a contract with Mr Rennit to pay him fifty pounds a week for a period of four weeks to carry out investigations; Mr Rennit had explained that the expenses would be heavy -- Orthotex employed only the most experienced agents -- and the one agent he had been permitted to see before he left the office was certainly experienced. (Mr Rennit introduced him as A.2, but before long he was absent-mindedly addressing him as Jones.) Jones was small and at first sight insignificant, with his thin pointed nose, his soft brown hat with a stained ribbon, his grey suit which might have been quite a different colour years ago, and the pencil and pen on fasteners in the breast pocket. But when you looked a second time you saw experience; you saw it in the small, cunning, rather frightened eyes, the weak defensive mouth, the wrinkles of anxiety on the forehead -- experience of innumerable hotel corridors, of bribed chamber-maids and angry managers, experience of the insult which could not be resented, the threat which had to be ignored, the promise which was never kept. Murder had a kind of dignity compared with this muted second-hand experience of scared secretive passions.
An argument developed almost at once in which Jones played no part, standing close to the wall holding his old brown hat, looking and listening as though he were outside a hotel door. Mr Rennit, who obviously considered the whole investigation the fantastic fad of an unbalanced man, argued that Rowe himself should not take part. "Just leave it to me and A.2," he said. "If it's a confidence trick --"
He would not believe that Rowe's life had been threatened. "Of course," he said, "we'll look into the chemists' books -- not that there'll be anything to find."
"It made me angry," Rowe repeated. "He said he'd checked up -- and yet he had the nerve." An idea came to him and he went excitedly on, "It was the same drug. People would have said it was suicide, that I'd managed to keep some of it hidden. . ."