Chapter Five

To Professor Gervase Fen, c/o Leiper Films, Inc., Long Fulton Studios, England

 

Mexico, April 1949

 

My dear Professor Fen:

 

You’ll be surprised, I dare say, that I should write to you rather than to the police; we were, after all, only very briefly and slightly acquainted. But I’ve always felt a great admiration for your talents in the criminological as well as the scholarly field, and I should like you to be the legal owner of my confession, which I don’t doubt will earn some little notoriety in the history of crime. You will of course pass it on to the police, so that the affair can be definitively wound up and any remaining uncertainties cleared away… As you can see, I’m not repentant: those three odious young people deserved to die. But it’s strange how spiritually empty I feel now that the job is done.

My one regret is that it wasn’t possible for me to follow the course of the investigation. I should like to have known whether you had any inkling of the truth before my flight gave the game away. In view of your ability, and of my own deliberate carelessness, I imagine you had much more than an inkling.

Please note that I say deliberate carelessness. I flatter myself that if I had chosen to do so, I could have covered my tracks so effectively that even you would never have suspected me. But of course, the one thing I could not hope to conceal for long was the identity of ‘Gloria Scott’, and since that in itself was bound to incriminate me, the precautions I took as regards the actual killings were never more than sketchy, never intended to do more than give me time to finish what I had set out to do.

One thing at least will be clear to you by this time: the girl you knew as ‘Gloria Scott’ was in fact my daughter Madeline.

And I adored her.

Note the tense of the verb. I don’t use that tense merely because Madeline is no longer alive. Something—a quite unexpected psychological volte-face—happened to me when I saw Maurice Crane die that Saturday…

But you shall hear all about that in its proper place.

‘Gloria Scott’ was my daughter. And to make you understand why I killed the Cranes I must take you back to the time of my marriage, nearly twenty years ago.

I suppose there never was a less sensible union. Dorothy and I were incompatible in almost every respect. I met her in Johannesburg, where I was born and where I spent the first thirty-seven years of my life. And looking back on it, it seems incredible to me that I could ever have thought her attractive in any way. None the less, I did. You must realise that I didn’t begin writing, didn’t acquire a reputation and a decent income, till quite late in life. At the time I first encountered Dorothy I was a very insignificant person, earning a wretched pittance as a clerk in the Johannesburg office of the De Windt Diamond Company, and Dorothy came from a higher economic level altogether. Her parents, like mine, were dead, and she had a private income—nothing enormous, but quite adequate to live on. Even at that time I was hankering after a literary life, and if I was to write, I needed unearned money to keep me going while I established myself.

So you see how it happened. It wasn’t Dorothy I married, but her Deposit Account at the bank.

She was a slim, tall girl, very fair, with washed-out blue eyes. As you know, I’m small and dark, and I’ve noticed that men of my physical type are often infatuated with women of hers. And in some obscure fashion she must—since she did marry me—have been attracted to me, outwardly unimportant though I was. I should like to think that she divined my talent, but that would be to flatter her. Actually, I believe she regarded the marriage from the first as a licence and an opportunity for unrestricted bullying. And I was stupid enough to fall into the trap.

After the first few weeks my married life was a hell. With my physical smallness and my absolute dependence on Dorothy for money, I was impotent, hamstrung. Little men who are maltreated by big wives are normally matter for farce, but I can assure you from personal experience that the situation is not funny… If she had had any respect for my writing I might have put up with the other things, but at first I was very unsuccessful, and she never missed an opportunity of jeering at my work. And sexual intercourse, when she allowed it at all, was a condescension, an unspeakable mockery.

But then Madeline was born.

Artistic creation apart, Madeline provoked in me the strongest emotions I’ve ever known. Love, as other people experience it, has never come my way, and I’ve had no deep, enduring friendships, and so emotionally I was frustrated, bottled up, and all the affection I was capable of was available for Madeline when she came. I doted on her—it was a love so strong that nothing, not even my work, had a chance against it. I can’t pretend to myself, now that I’m able to look at things more clearly, that it was a healthy state of mind; on the contrary, it was an obsession which intensified as the years went by to the point, almost, of dementia. But I’m not writing this letter in order to justify my feeling for Madeline—only to explain how it came about that I embarked on anything so melodramatic as a career of vengeance.

My wife hated and despised me. And because I worshipped Madeline, my wife came to hate and despise Madeline as well. She was not physically cruel to the child—though I think she would have been, and enjoyed it, if she’d dared—but she thwarted Madeline in every way she possibly could, so that even when Madeline was an infant I could see that she was becoming secretive and twisted and mistrustful. I understand that Madeline was not popular at the studios, or at the Menenford theatre where she worked. But can you wonder that she wasn’t frank and free and straightforward, after the upbringing she’d had? I believe that if she had not died she would have fought off, in time, the effects of that upbringing, because she had a naturally sweet and candid nature; but you can’t chain a girl for seventeen years to a mother who hates her without warping her character badly.

I can manage to look at Madeline objectively now. She grew up to be rather conceited and silly and wild. I wouldn’t say these things about her if they had been her fault. But Dorothy was responsible, Dorothy and—

I was going to add ‘no one else’, but that wouldn’t be true. Indirectly, I was responsible, too.

Because, you see, Dorothy divorced me and the court gave her custody of Madeline. And that meant that from then on Dorothy was able to indulge in her subtle beastliness to Madeline without any restraint at all.

I needn’t go into detail about the divorce. All I need say is that my home life was abominable, and I slept with a girl and Dorothy found out about it. Of course, she jumped at the chance to get rid of me, and but for Madeline I would have been delighted to get rid of her; by that time I’d sooner have starved, or given up writing, than lived on her detestable money any longer. But I adored little Madeline—she was six then—and the thought of parting with her was unbearable to me. Dorothy knew that, and obtaining custody of Madeline was her great triumph, the most succulent and satisfying part of her revenge on me. I did everything I could to get the decision reversed, but it was impossible. I went so far as to contemplate suicide, but I felt that would be a betrayal of Madeline, because there was always the chance that one day, however far distant, I might be able to be of service to her. What I did in the end was to get drunk and leave South Africa. I was drunk continuously for three weeks, and then when my money ran out I worked my passage on a boat bound for England. I had the right to see Madeline once a month, but I thought it would be better to make a complete break.

In England my talent was recognised, and I prospered; it was for Madeline’s sake that I worked and saved, and there wasn’t a day when I didn’t think of her. Sometimes I got news of her from friends in South Africa who knew how I felt, but I never mentioned her to anyone in England, and I doubt if anyone in England knew that I’d ever been married; somehow it wasn’t a thing I wanted to talk about. I brooded a lot, no doubt, and worried a lot, and it’s arguable that on this topic I got to be a bit unhinged. But in a fragmentary way I was kept informed about Madeline, and what I wasn’t told I could visualise or imagine. I was sent an occasional photograph, too…

And that was how I was able to recognise my daughter at Nicholas Crane’s party.

I’d heard that Dorothy and Madeline were leaving for England—that Dorothy had developed cancer of the lungs and wanted advice from Harley Street. And I’d tried to trace them after their arrival in England, and completely failed. That meant that for two nightmarish years I’d had no news of them whatever, and didn’t know whether they were alive or dead. I’d intended attempting to make it up with Dorothy, so that I could see Madeline again, but both of them seemed to have just stepped off the ship and vanished into thin air. I suspect now that the detective agency I employed was grossly incompetent.

I was sounding the ultimate depths of human misery when Leiper asked me to write the script for The Unfortunate Lady. My first instinct was to refuse—all work was an atrocious penance at that stage—but then I decided that a new kind of job might alleviate my depression slightly, and eventually I accepted. I’d not the faintest notion, of course, that Madeline was in the film business, and though I heard ‘Gloria Scott’ referred to once or twice, the name naturally conveyed nothing to me; and as her part in the film wasn’t important enough to justify her attending our script conferences, there was no opportunity for me to meet her.

But then came the night of Nicholas Crane’s party.

I was talking to someone when she came in, and didn’t immediately see her. But when I did, I recognised her instantly; and I think that if I hadn’t already had a good deal to drink I’d have made something of a scene. As it was, I could hardly believe I wasn’t dreaming.

And she recognised me, of course. Caroline Cecil told your Inspector Humbleby that as soon as Madeline entered something startled her; and that something was the unexpected sight of me. She knew who her father was, and my photograph has appeared on the dust jackets of various of my books; but apparently she’d had no idea, till that moment, that I had anything to do with films in general or The Unfortunate Lady in particular. So seeing me there was a shock.

We were introduced. We spoke to one another like strangers. She wasn’t sure that I’d identified her and I wasn’t sure that she’d identified me, and I think we both felt that a rowdy party wasn’t the place for a reunion like ours. I was dazed, too. It was like inventing an island or a continent and then discovering that in all its imagined detail it actually existed. The party dragged on and I drank a lot more. Madeline stayed behind to talk to Nicholas Crane and I went out to wait for her on the pavement. One or two others, as it happened, waited with me.

It’s odd how one’s mind works. I’d been assuming that because I wanted so passionately to be with Madeline, she’d want to be with me. But she didn’t, of course. I’d been out of her life for so long that I was nothing but a name to her—and God knows what lies Dorothy had told her about me. Anyway, she’d been on her own in England for two years and yet had never made any attempt to get into touch with me… She would have done, perhaps, if she’d ever been utterly wretched, but until Mr. Nicholas Crane came along she’d escaped that.

And in the end it was to me that she turned for comfort. As we walked to Piccadilly that night, the whole story poured out: how she’d grown up to detest Dorothy; how Dorothy had died in their Liverpool hotel the night after they landed and how, being still only seventeen and thinking that a particularly odious brother of Dorothy’s would now be appointed as her guardian, she had run away to Menenford that same night, without telling anyone of Dorothy’s death, and had there taken a job at the repertory theatre under an assumed name. She was afraid, it seems, that the police would find her, but there was no photograph of her in Dorothy’s luggage, and although the Missing Persons Bureau got one from South Africa, she was never located. The ration-book difficulty she solved by eating in cafes. That was how she began a completely new life…

She was distraught that night in Mayfair, almost hysterical. Small wonder. In addition to all the other things, she told me what Maurice and Madge and Nicholas Crane had done to her.

You can guess how I felt. As for her, her one thought was to run home and hide her head under the bedclothes. I consoled her as well as I could, and after arranging to call for her at her new lodgings in the morning to talk things over, I put her into her taxi. She wasn’t in the mood for company, even mine.

Naturally I lied about this episode to the police. By that time, Maurice Crane was dead, and I could hardly admit that I was Gloria Scott’s father.

I stood in Piccadilly for a few minutes after the taxi had gone, fretting. It had occurred to me, rather belatedly, that Madeline’s mood was such that she really ought not to be left alone. So after a while I hailed a second taxi and told the man to drive me to the Stamford Street address.

And by the time we reached Waterloo Bridge they were just pulling my daughter out of the river.

I noticed the little crowd that had gathered, and I told the driver to stop. Somehow I had a premonition of what had happened. I stayed there only long enough to make sure I was right. Then the taxi took me back to my hotel.

I didn’t sleep at all that night. I was a little mad, I expect. There were two lines of Pope’s Elegy which chased one another interminably round the inside of my skull. ‘On all the line a sudden vengeance waits, And frequent hearses shall besiege your gates…’

There was only one thing I wanted to do, and that was to kill.

And there were three people whom I thought the world would be well rid of.

As you know, colchicine was what I used, and it was a more or less arbitrary choice. I was limited to the vegetable poisons, of course—I’ve never been able to understand why murderers insist on buying packets of arsenic at the chemist’s when the fields and woods and gardens are smothered in things that are quite as deadly—but it might just as well have been aconitine or belladonna. Perhaps I was influenced by the fact that to me the autumn crocus is one of the most beautiful of flowers… I hadn’t the resources—chloroform and what not—for isolating the pure principle of the drug. But my amateurish distilling turned out quite well—didn’t it? And if it had failed to work, I could always have employed some other method.

The distilling was done immediately before lunch on the Friday. Earlier that morning I had been to Stamford Street to remove any evidence there might be there of Madeline’s real name. In case you should think me stupid—which most certainly I am not—I must emphasise that this was never intended to be anything more than a delaying tactic; I knew that my daughter’s true identity was bound to be established in the end. But as a delaying tactic it was useful, for I could not at that stage foresee what opportunities I should have for getting at my victims, and I needed a few days’ immunity in which to work.

A few days, I say; the point is that I intended quite honestly to give myself up as soon as the job was done. Does that surprise you? Probably not. You must have perceived that X’s recklessness—in the matter of leaving footprints, for instance—could only be explained, in a person who in other respects was so obviously intelligent (for example, I invariably wore gloves), by some such hypothesis as that. In the end, however, the habit of being alive proved too strong for me. It was not lack of courage which prevented me from surrendering myself; it was the intellectual conviction that such an act would be socially valueless, and hence merely irrational and superstitious.

When I was at Stamford Street I took the opportunity of removing, for sentimental reasons, one or two mementoes of Madeline. I have them with me here—but it’s strange how little they move me now.

I poisoned Maurice Crane’s medicine that Friday afternoon. The grounds of Lanthorn House provide perfect cover, and I was spying out the land when I happened to glimpse him at his bedroom window. So that enabled me to find the right room without too much difficulty. The house is large, rambling and completely vulnerable, and it was simple to get in. To roam about it uninvited, with a tincture of colchicine in my pocket, was of course tremendously risky, but I have never been averse from danger, and the gods protect those who act boldly. Certainly they protected me, then and throughout. At Stamford Street, at Lanthorn House, on Doon Island, at Nicholas Crane’s London flat—on each and every occasion I escaped undetected. A guardian angel—or devil, as some will be sure to say!—looked after me, and my confidence increased hugely as success followed success.

I went home and waited for what should happen. You know how things turned out. Maurice Crane did die, and in front of my very eyes. And that was when, quite suddenly and without warning, Madeline ceased to be important to me. I must not say too much on this subject, or stupid people will misconstrue me. But I can tell you this, that at the moment of Maurice Crane’s death my love for Madeline was blotted out, or thrust aside, by an even stronger emotion. Till then, I had not believed that any stronger emotion could possibly exist. But I was wrong. What I felt then was the strongest and deepest and most intoxicating of all the emotions—and I’ve wondered since how on earth I managed to conceal it! However, I’m an excellent actor, and manage I somehow did.

Nicholas Crane was the next on my list, and until early on the Monday no opportunity of dealing with him presented itself. But after that the Fates were kind. I visited his flat at half-past seven that morning on a fictitious pretext. Not a very plausible hour for visiting! But I was devouringly impatient and scarcely cared whether he found my irruption suspicious or not. My excuse for knocking him up was to have been that I was leaving London early for the North, and wanted before I went to consult him about certain technical details—camera-angles, panning and so forth—in my script. He might or might not have believed that; and an opportunity for leaving some poison behind might or might not have occurred. But in the event, such considerations turned out to be irrelevant. By a blessed coincidence he had gone out, inadvertently leaving his door unlatched. So I was able to do what I pleased.

That afternoon I drove down to Doon Island. There I was obliged to wait an hour or two before it was possible to enter Madge Crane’s cottage, and when between six and seven I did succeed in doing so, I was somewhat perplexed as to where my poison should be put. Let me make one thing very plain. Although Maurice Crane’s death changed me psychologically, so that from then on the driving force behind my actions was no longer my devotion to Madeline, but something rather different—in spite of all that, I never allowed myself, however strongly I may have been tempted, to kill indiscriminately, just for the sake of it. If I had succumbed to that temptation, the girl who chased me into the Maze would no longer be alive. Nor would you. Nor, probably, would several other people. But I have a good deal of self-control, and I kept myself in check. The mere pleasantness of an experience, however intense, does not justify one in over-indulgence, I consider. So you see, I’m not really the conscienceless monster some people will probably represent me to be!

All of which is by way of explaining the difficulty I was in after I’d climbed through a window into Madge Crane’s cottage. There seemed to be no medicine in this instance, and whatever else I poisoned the secretary might have eaten or drunk as well. In the upshot I had to fall back on the very unsatisfactory compromise of putting my colchicine in the gin. And again it worked exactly as I had intended—though not, of course, until thirty-six hours later.

That night I went again to Lanthorn House, and there operated on the steering-gear of Nicholas Crane’s car. I thought it very likely, you see, that as soon as the cause of Maurice Crane’s death was discovered Nicholas and Madge would be on their guard against poison; so additional plans had to be made. As you’ll remember, there was a script conference the following day, the Tuesday morning, and I was horrified when I saw David Crane drive up to the studios in Nicholas’ car. I had no grudge against David, no wish to see him die. After lunch, therefore, when the carpenters’ shop started work again, I disabled the engine as best I could with an iron bar I found in the garage. So tell that to anyone who’s stupid enough to think of me as a homicidal maniac!

On Tuesday evening I killed Nicholas. I’m sorry to say that he took me unawares—otherwise it would not have been such a head-on encounter. I have the right to be a little proud of myself, I think. He realised at once why I was there, he was bigger and stronger and younger than I, and he had a gun, while I had only a knife which I’d kept from my South African days. But I went for him baldheaded, and he was so flustered that his shot missed me by yards. The moment when the knife went into him was the best moment of all… You’ll be thinking, of course, that what I experienced was just a commonplace blood-lust. If you are thinking that, you’re wrong. I can safely say that my excitement was of an altogether more subtle and intellectual variety than that.

Unfortunately, I lost my head as soon as the deed was done. When I heard someone approaching, I fled, not realising that it was only a solitary girl. You’ll have heard about our game of hide-and-seek in the Maze. Needless to say, I didn’t blunder into it intentionally! And there were times when I wondered if I should ever get out! The girl and I must have got to the centre, unbeknown to each other, by different routes. At the moment when she lit that match and screamed and fainted I’d just fallen over the mound of that grave in the darkness, and I was crawling about trying to discover if I was on the edge of some pit or other… Doubtless it was a little unnerving for her. Further scruples, you see! I must apologise to you for felling you and removing your guide-string, but you’ll appreciate that I was somewhat anxious to delay pursuit…

Well, the story’s nearly told. The stop-press columns in the late editions of the Wednesday morning papers informed me that Madge Crane was dead and my job completed, so I decided it was time for me to be moving on. At Brixham, in Devon, I stole a motor-launch, and by night crossed in it to the French coast near Cherbourg—a neighbourhood I know well. At Cherbourg I boarded a boat bound for Mexico; and here I am. Ever since the end of the war I’ve been investing my money in diamonds—it’s a precaution I advise you to take in these days of shaky currencies—and I was able to bring a quantity of the stones with me. They’ll enable me to live in comfort, here or elsewhere, for a long, long time to come.

So now you know all about it. But there’s one additional thing I must say, and that is…

(Here the manuscript breaks off)

“In a mild way,” said Fen, “one wishes one knew what the ‘additional thing’ was. The usual claim to have been unique, I expect. I don’t suppose the murderer has ever lived who didn’t imagine his mental processes to be unprecedented in the world’s history.”

Judy Flecker nodded.

“But he wrote other confessions, didn’t he?” she said. “You could perhaps fill in the gap from those.”

“Dozens of them,” Humbleby agreed. “For all I know he’s writing them still. But most of them are almost completely fantastic. I understand that latterly they’ve been addressed to church dignitaries for the most part—the Moderator of the Methodist Assembly being a particular favourite.”

“And is it always Mexico he imagines he’s escaped to?”

“No, it’s Labrador sometimes, or the Sahara. Neither of those places bears much resemblance to the inside of Broadmoor, but that doesn’t seem to worry him at all. No, the point is that Fen’s letter, which was the first of them, is the only one that’s both coherent and—um—substantially true. Its statements have been checked, as a matter of routine, and apart from the penultimate paragraph they’re all correct.”

“Is he completely insane now?”

“I believe so, yes.”

“And do you think he was insane at the time he committed the murders?”

“Probably. Not on the surface, of course, but certifiably, none the less. To judge from what he says himself, it was seeing Maurice Crane die that finally pushed him over the edge.”

“I go cold down the spine,” said Judy, “whenever I think of him standing over me in that ghastly Maze… It’s funny: I never met him in the normal way, you know, or even set eyes on him. You actually arrested him in London, didn’t you?”

“Yes. In a Tottenham Court Road pub, at lunch-time on the Thursday. His picture was in all the morning papers, you remember, and the pub’s proprietor recognised him and telephoned us. God knows what he was doing there, or what he intended to do. Mentally, he was pretty far gone by that time, and I saw at once that he’d be much too mad to come up for trial… Just as well, I suppose.”

They were in the lounge of the Club at Long Fulton studios. It was a long, low, raftered room with chintz-covered armchairs, brass ash-trays, and at one end a well-stocked bar. Their drinks were on a low glass-topped table in front of the settee they were occupying. Bright May sunshine shone in through the windows, and since it was midday, and the studio people were almost all at work, they had the place to themselves. Fen and Humbleby were there at Judy’s invitation; it was only during the past week, at a date nearly two months after the denoument of the Crane case, that they had succeeded in arranging a meeting convenient to all three of them.

Judy turned to Fen.

“And now,” she said, “what about the logic of it all?”

“Simple enough,” he replied, “if once you were prepared to grant that the murderer hadn’t an accomplice who was on Doon Island while he was at Lanthorn House—or vice versa.” He became aggrieved. “But from the deductive point of view it wasn’t at all a satisfactory case, for the simple reason that there were so many alternative ways in which the mystery could have been solved: with the aid of the footprints report, for example—or by any one of numerous combinations of mere chance and mere routine… Still, one can’t, I suppose, expect life to conform with the pattern of detective stories, in which but for pure reasoning no criminal would ever be caught. I sometimes think—”

“Get on with it,” said Humbleby, “and don’t ramble so much.”

Fen regarded him rather coldly.

“The vital clue,” he said, “didn’t appear till right at the end. It consisted of the information that Madge’s gin could only have been poisoned between six and seven p.m. on the Monday. Now, Nicholas’ medicine could have been poisoned either between six and seven p.m. on the Monday or between seven and eight a.m. on the Monday. Even to an intelligence as tardy as Humbleby’s it was clear that between six and seven p.m. the murderer could not have been both on Doon Island (poisoning Madge’s gin) and at Lanthorn House (poisoning Nicholas’ medicine), for the excellent reason that the two places are a good three hours’ journey apart. And that meant that Nicholas’ medicine must have been poisoned between seven and eight on the Monday morning.

“Now, there was never any question but that the murders were purposive, that the victims were exclusively people who had harmed Gloria Scott. And therefore the interesting thing about the time Nicholas’ medicine was poisoned was the fact that that time was hours previous to the publication in the Mercury of Nicholas’ letter to Madge. In other words, X was gunning for Nicholas long before the world at large knew Nicholas had ever harmed Gloria Scott at all—at a time, indeed, when the girl was thought to be his particular protegee. I’d guessed at the contract business, but X wouldn’t have killed Nicholas, to judge from his scruples about David and the car, on the basis of guesswork.”

“Wasn’t there the possibility, though,” said Judy, “that the business of the car was a red herring contrived by David?”

“Yes, certainly. But that possibility was only acceptable on the hypothesis that David was the murderer; and Humbleby was witness to the fact that he couldn’t possibly have poisoned Madge’s gin.”

“Oh, yes, I see… Go on.”

“X, then, was scrupulous about not harming the innocent. And since he poisoned Nicholas’ medicine early on the Monday, that meant he must have had inside information about the contract trickery. From whom did he get it? Up to 8.20 a.m. on the Monday, when Snerd gave the letter to Rouncey, there were just four people who knew of it: Madge, Nicholas, Snerd—and Gloria Scott herself.

“Now it was demonstrable, of course, that none of those people was X. Snerd might have been; but when Nicholas was knifed Snerd was safely in gaol, so that eliminated him, even if there’d been no other grounds for doing so. So one of the four had clearly told some other person about the trick that had been played on Gloria. Snerd? No, inconceivable; he admitted so much when Humbleby caught up with him that he couldn’t possibly have done himself any further harm by admitting that; and he’s not the sort of man to lie in order to protect someone. Madge and Nicholas? Equally inconceivable. It was as much as their jobs were worth to let any whisper of their shabby little deception get abroad.

“That left Gloria Scott.

“And there was only one person Gloria Scott talked to between the moment when Nicholas told her what she’d let herself in for and the moment when she committed suicide.”

“Evan George,” Judy murmured. “Yes, I see… But look here, mightn’t he have passed the information on to someone else?”

“He might, yes. But in that case, why should he have lied about his talk with Gloria? Why should he have denied (his silence on the subject was an obvious denial) ever receiving the information?”

“Well, if he admitted to being Gloria Scott’s father, he’d be suspected of Maurice Crane’s murder. So even though he was innocent of that murder, he didn’t dare admit it.”

“No good, I’m afraid. At the time he lied, it wasn’t clear that Maurice Crane had been murdered at all. He might quite well—as far as, if he was innocent, George knew—have died a natural death.”

“Oh yes, of course… There’s still another loophole, though. Evan George might have been lying about his conversation with Gloria to protect someone—someone he’d told about the conversation.”

Fen raised his eyebrows. “But what way could his lying possibly have protected anyone? At that stage Nicholas’ medicine hadn’t yet been poisoned, and until that had happened, this whole business of who knew about the contract trickery was completely irrelevant: it just didn’t incriminate anyone. No, I’m afraid the conclusion was unarguable: Evan George lied; and his motive in lying can only have been to protect himself… I could only guess, of course, at how he was related to Gloria; but that he was her father seemed to be by far the likeliest thing.”

There was a long silence; all of them were looking back on the case, and on the part they had severally played in it. Then Judy said:

“Poor David… I’m afraid it’ll take him a long time to recover from it all.”

“Is he still working here?” Fen asked.

“No, he’s left. He was never any good, and anyway he’ll be thirty-five in August and come into the money his father left in trust for him… He asked me to marry him the other day.”

“And are you going to?”

“I’m afraid not. He’s a very nice soul, but he’d only make about a quarter of a proper husband. One would have to marry others as well to make up, and polygamy isn’t legal.”

“Polyandry,” Fen corrected her mildly.

“Polyandry, then… Though I’m not at all sure,” said Judy dreamily, “that having several husbands at a time mightn’t be rather piquant.”

“The plural of mouse is mice,” Fen observed, “but I doubt if it can be maintained that the plural of spouse is…” He broke off. “By the way, what’s going to happen about The Unfortunate Lady?”

“Shelved,” said Judy. “Shelved sine die. I gather that Leiper suddenly got tired of it. At the moment he’s contemplating a film about Sir Philip Sidney.”

“Which purports to prove, no doubt,” said Fen acidly, “that the entire corpus of Sidney’s poetry was fabricated in 1909 by Mr. T. S. Eliot.”

Humbleby looked at his watch. “Well, I must be off, I’m sorry to say. I have an appointment with some burglaries in Hammersmith.”

“Just one more thing before you go.” Judy leaned forward earnestly. “Do you think that what George says about Gloria’s miserable childhood, in his confession, is true?”

“As far as I’ve been able to check it, it is. Why do you ask?”

“Oh, I don’t know… I really did like her, you know. And when I look back on it all, it’s always her I think about most. And she had such rotten luck—a cruel mother and perhaps a hereditary taint from her father, too.”

“Yes,” said Humbleby seriously, “she did have rotten luck. For anything mean or vicious that she did one can hardly blame her.”

Fen nodded. “So our final toast is inevitable. With Gloria Scott the case began, and with her it should close…” He raised his glass, and they theirs.

“To the memory,” he said, “of an Unfortunate Lady.”