From the manuscripts on his desk he selected the one which had lately impressed him the most, and telephoned the author, who lived in London.
“I really think we might do something with your play, my boy,” he said. “I’d like to discuss just a few minor revisions with you. I don’t get to town very often, but I have to run up this afternoon. Could you manage to have dinner with me?… Fine! Let’s make it rather early — I don’t want to be away from home too long.”
Then he called his dentist, complained of a maddening toothache, and persuaded the man to squeeze him in for a few minutes at the end of the day.
Thus he consolidated his reason for leaving his wife alone on what had already been announced as Mrs Jafferty’s evening off. If the dentist could find nothing wrong with his teeth, the pain could always be attributed to neuralgia.
To his wife he said, “Since I have to make the trip, confound it, I really ought to see the fellow who wrote that play we read last week. I was just talking to him on the phone, and he told me that one of Rank’s men is very excited about it. I’d hate to let it get away, with the picture rights half sold already.”
“Of course, dear,” she said. “I’ll be perfectly all right, if you’ll fix my table for me like you’ve done before.”
“No one ever had such a wonderful wife and deserved it less,” he said, with considerable truth.
The table was a piece of hospital furniture, built like a traveling bridge and high enough to span the bed. A system of ropes and pulleys which he had rigged up enabled her to pull it up to her or push it away as she wished.
From the kitchen he brought up linen and silver, china and glass, bread and butter, sugar and cream, a bowl of strawberries, a decanter of wine, an electric coffee pot, and an electric chafing dish of Irish stew which she would only have to plug in and heat when she was ready.
Into the stew he had thoroughly stirred a certain tasteless drug which is much too easily obtainable to be freely mentioned in this connection, which in sufficient quantity induces profound sleep in about half an hour and death shortly afterwards. Taking no chances on a capricious appetite, Mr Clarron had used enough to put away four people.
“It smells heavenly,” he said, lifting the lid and sniffing. “But I kept some back for my lunch tomorrow, so you needn’t try to save any for me.”
He made sure that the television set was in the right position for her to watch from the bed — it had a remote control that she could operate from the night stand — made sure that all was in order with the devices that would make it unnecessary for her to be taken to the bathroom, saw that her books and magazines were within easy reach, checked the table again, fluffed up her pillows, and said, “Is there anything else you might possibly need, my love?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Just hurry back and spoil me some more.”
Mr Clarron kissed her tenderly on the forehead. He felt pretty good himself. He was giving her the most humane death he could think of, even more peaceful than the lightning extinction of her predecessor. He was glad that he was not callous enough to hurt women. Only his first wife could really have suffered at all in her passing, but he had been quite an amateur then.
He was in the best of spirits when the young playwright met him at his club.
“The Irish stew is very good tonight, sir,” said the dining-room steward.
It seemed almost like an omen.
“My favorite dinner, and I thought I was going to miss it. Not that it could be half as good as Mrs Jafferty’s — our housekeeper,” Mr Clarron explained to his guest. “She makes the best you ever tasted. Of course, she would. Irish as Paddy’s pig, but a marvelous old biddy. They don’t make ’em like that anymore these days.”
“How long have you had this treasure?” asked the young man perfunctorily.
“Only three weeks — and believe me, my boy, I sleep with my fingers crossed. We’ve had a bad time with servants. My wife being an invalid makes it especially difficult, it’s bound to make extra work. But Mrs Jafferty never complains. And to think that I came near not hiring her at all.”
“Really?” said his guest politely.
“I got her through an agency, you see, but she didn’t have any references. I mean, nothing that I could actually verify. She’d been in her last job for more than twenty years, but then the people had gone off to live in New Zealand and she didn’t want to leave England. She had a glowing letter of recommendation, but of course those can be faked. And even the place where she’d been staying since then, she’d only had a room there for a few days, and she’d been out all the time looking for jobs, so they knew nothing about her. I have to be extra careful, you know, because my wife insists on keeping all her jewels in the house.”
“A bit risky, isn’t it?” said the other, stifling a yawn.
“It wasn’t an easy decision to make. But we were getting quite desperate, and if she was as good as the letter said I was afraid of losing her to somebody else while I was waiting for a reply from her last employers in New Zealand. So I decided to take the gamble. And I must say, she seems to be honest to the last halfpenny. I let her do all the shopping, and our bills are the smallest they’ve ever been… By George, though,” Mr Clarron said with a sudden frown, “a suspicious character did turn up in Maidenhead today, asking where I lived. Wouldn’t it be frightful if they were…? Oh, but that’s too far-fetched. But I wish I hadn’t thought of it just now.”
“Talking of suspicious characters,” said the playwright, straw-clutching feverishly, “what did you think of the old man who comes to the door at the beginning of my second act? I’ve wondered if it would be more effective to keep him off the stage a bit longer, to build up the suspense.”
Mr Clarron nodded attentively, and thereafter confined himself admirably to the subject of their meeting. He had sounded most convincing, he thought, in his rehearsal.
He enjoyed his Irish stew. At any moment, he estimated, his wife would be eating hers.
6
“I don’t like it,” Adrienne Halberd said abruptly.
“Now that you’ve told me about those jewels of Mrs Clarron’s, I like it a bit less myself,” Simon admitted. “It just might occur to Lover Boy now to improvise a regular in which she gets bumped off, and try to make it look like my work.”
Her pixie face was almost sullen with concentration.
“I expect you could take care of yourself. I’m talking about that story you cooked up, about some gangster called Bingo Brown being married to his last wife’s black sheep sister, and you being a friend of theirs.”
“It was the best I could do in the few seconds we had.”
“But don’t you see, it might panic him into doing something drastic in a hurry, in the hope of getting away with his loot before you do something to him.”
“That was roughly what I had in mind.”
“But that would be helping to get another wife murdered.”
“When you hinted to him that you’d at least half killed a husband,” Simon said, “mightn’t that just as well have encouraged him to widow himself, knowing you wouldn’t hold it against him?”
“All I hoped was that it might make him talk about it. And then, with a tape recorder—”
“Oh, I know. Just like in a detective story. But maybe he’s read stories too. It might just as well have only encouraged him to get the job over without talking.”