Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 10, No. 48, November 1947

The Nine Pound Murder by Roy Vickers

Some superstitions die hard, particularly the superstition that a man can possess “hypnotic eyes,” capable of compelling others to do his will — with special reference to women of property. This was said of Joseph Smith, who drowned various brides in their bath: more recently, of Heath, who savagely murdered two women within a month.

It was said in the mid-nineteen-thirties of James Gleddy, an ill-mannered little bounder who exploited his sex appeal. The hypnotic nonsense was dragged in to explain his success in marrying a girl of distinguished family, who apparently thought he was of her own class.

In their honeymoon there was a gap of six months while the bridegroom purged his offense in the matter of a worthless check. But his minor knaveries need not detain us. We can best contact the couple in the third year of their marriage — on a Saturday morning in May 1934, in the offices of the Domestic Animals Charitable Association, of which Margaret Gleddy was the president’s secretary: for by this time Gleddy had run through her money and she was supporting the home.

The Association rented a basement suite in one of the best blocks off Parliament Square. On Saturday the staff were not required to work, with the exception of the president and his secretary. The president would leave at eleven-thirty during the summer for his weekend cottage in Dorsetshire. Margaret would generally work on until one, when the porter would enter to sign on the cleaners.

On this particular Saturday, when the porter entered the suite, he smelled chloroform. He ran into the secretary’s office where he found Margaret lying on the floor near the big safe, which was shut. A duster hung over the door of the little wall safe, which was open and empty. Over the girl’s face was another duster, tied in a simple knot at the back. The porter untied the duster and whipped it away — with it, a wad of cotton wool on which chloroform had been poured. There was a cut on her chin from which a trickle of blood had stained her jumper.

The porter shouted to a constable on point duty at the corner. Margaret was carried on a stretcher the hundred odd yards to Westminster Hospital. In half an hour she recovered consciousness, to be dimly aware of a police sergeant at her bedside.

“Police! That’s a good thing!” she exclaimed. “It was my fault, really. I ought to have known it would happen. I ought to have taken special precautions on Saturdays.”

“Jest so, Miss! Can you remember anything of what happened?”

“Everything. Until he bumped my face on the back of the chair, and then I passed out. I feel awful. You might call a nurse, will you?”

Some ten minutes later the conversation was resumed.

“It must have been a little after half-past twelve when it happened. I made the mistake of threatening to scream, instead of screaming at once. He collared me from behind and put his hand over my mouth. He’s much stronger than you’d think. I’d have bitten his hand if I could, but he had my chin squashed up. I landed a good back-kick with my heel, and I think that toppled him on to the back of the chair — with my face underneath. Ugh! Speaking hurts all over.”

She began to laugh.

“If he had come six weeks ago,” she explained, “he would have found about a hundred and fifty in that little safe. This morning it was empty.”

“The little safe?” echoed the sergeant. “What about the big safe?”

“It’s only used as a cupboard. There’s nothing in it but photographs and gramophone records.”

“We shall want to open it, so as to make a complete check-up. Would the key of that big safe be in your possession, Miss?”

“You’ll find it in my desk — the one with the typewriter — top right-hand drawer. But you’ll only waste your time.”

“Matter o’ routine, Miss. You always have to open everything after a robbery, just to make sure.”

“On my desk,” said Margaret, “there were nine pounds in notes, clipped together, and a four shilling postal order. And he won’t even be able to keep that!” She frowned in sudden doubt. “You have caught him, haven’t you?”

“Not yet. Who is he, Miss? I can see you know.”

“Yes, I know who he is!” She sighed with vast weariness. “He is my husband — James Gleddy. He has been to prison before. I’ve done my best and I’ve failed. I’m giving evidence against him, turning on him, betraying him — what’s the word crooks use? — ratting on him.”

“What’s your home address, please?” She gave it, and added: “If you wait until about four, you’ll find him lying on his bed in a drunken sleep. Oh God, I’m all in! Don’t think me rude, Sergeant, but please go away.”

The Sergeant went back to the suite to report to the local superintendent who had taken charge.

“The key of the big safe isn’t in her drawer, where she said it was, sir.”

“No hurry about that!” grunted the superintendent. “It’s awkward dealing with a half-doped typist. Who runs this place?”

He rang for the porter, who gave the president’s London address.

“Did any stranger enter the block about twelve-thirty?”

“Nope. I started doin’ me brasses about twelve-fifteen: takes half an hour. No stranger, in or out. There’s very little going on here on a Saturday morning. Half a mo! There’s a door in the well, here.”

He drew the superintendent to the window. The latter slipped over the sill and examined the door in the well, which was used only to give access to the control chamber of the elevator.

“Locked on the inside!” exclaimed the superintendent. “He didn’t use this. You must have missed him when he came and when he left.”

“Not me!” said the porter confidently. “I was right across them steps from twelve-fifteen to a couple o’ minutes of it striking one. As I was finishing my brasses, a passing gent spotted my medal ribbons: turned out I’d served under his uncle.” He added: “No stranger came in or out o’ this building from twelve-fifteen to one.”

Half an hour after he had left Margaret’s bedside, the sergeant returned. The president of the Association, he said, was apparently out of town.

She gave the address of his weekend cottage and the telephone number.

“But it’s no use ringing up until about four, because he won’t have arrived.”

“To come back to the matter of that big safe,” said the sergeant, “the key isn’t in the drawer. Was the door of that safe open or shut when your... er... when the intruder entered the office?”

“Shut,” said Margaret. “I opened it and shut it again about twenty minutes before he came. I kept the key in my hand while I went to the safe, and I remember putting it back in the drawer. Have you arrested my husband yet?”

“We’ve got a couple o’ men at your house, but he hasn’t come back yet. By the way, how did he get in?”

Margaret appeared to be puzzled. “Like anybody else,” she answered. “That is, through the outer office.”

The sergeant reported back to the superintendent.

“Well, the porter missed him, that’s all! As to the key, the crook must have taken it out of the drawer after he had doped her and then walked off with it,” said the superintendent.

“Rather funny, isn’t it, sir — husband doping his wife when he knew she knew who he was?”

“Not so funny as you think. I’ve been talking to the Yard on the ’phone. He was a crook and she was a Society girl — daughter of a Judge — who fell for him. If he hadn’t doped her she wouldn’t have let him carry on. And he reckoned that when she came to, she wouldn’t give him away. But she did. Anyway, you wouldn’t get a put-up job for nine quid. If it is only nine quid, of course!”

At four o’clock, when they contacted the president by telephone, he agreed that there had been no more than some such sum in the office.

The superintendent talked about the key to the big safe.

“Well, if you really want to check up, ’phone Renson’s. They’ll open it without doing any damage. I’ll pay their charges, as I don’t want to come back for what appears to be a very small matter.”

The sergeant rang Renson’s, the makers, who said they would send a mechanic within an hour.

Margaret Whiddon was the daughter of a High Court judge who had made a comfortable fortune at the Bar. He had a town house in Kensington and a country house in Oxfordshire, where his daughter was hostess.

Lady Whiddon had left her money to her husband, but had bequeathed to her daughter a little present of four thousand pounds. In a lakeside hotel in Switzerland, James Gleddy had overheard a friend of the family referring to this modest legacy. It is a tragic circumstance that he misheard “four thousand” as “forty thousand,” to discover his mistake a few hours after the marriage ceremony. Thus Margaret was a very great disappointment to him, though he was for a time genuinely attracted.

She was, indeed, a rather exceptionally attractive young woman, though not photogenic. Her few photographs in the sporting and fashionable papers suggest a demure young miss, which she never was. A vital, springy brunette with quick, perceptive eyes and full red lips, she combined a radiant chastity with an intelligent worldliness — a shrewd scale of values with a spiritual generosity.

She had her own way in pretty nearly everything, but she chose to live hard. Two years before her disastrous marriage, her father became Master of Foxhounds. Margaret took over most of the work. She won the admiration of the veterinary surgeon by administering chloroform for him in an emergency operation on a valuable hunter.

At twenty-three she became engaged to Gerald Ramburn, a shipping broker. It was a romance based on companionship. Oddly, she never varied in her feeling for Gerald — held it to the end of her life, though it proved powerless to protect her from Gleddy.

Margaret was staying with her aunt at the hotel in Switzerland, while her father was deer-stalking in Scotland. No one introduced Gleddy. He accosted her with the technique which such men acquire.

It is not true that she thought he was of her own class, though she probably did think there was no reason why he should not be. One would reasonably suppose that a girl like Margaret Whiddon would be the last of all social types to fall for the palpable cheap-jackery of a man like Gleddy, who was not even good-looking. Discarding the hypnotic-eye theory, one is bound to assume that such men have a natural talent for appealing to the maternal instinct under the guise of romanticism.

Poor Margaret followed in the beaten track. To a point, she made a better job of it than most women. She married him in London within three weeks of their meeting. She wrote as honorable a letter as it was possible to write to Gerald Ramburn. Her father was still in Scotland when he received her telegram.

She made the first draft on her four thousand for the honeymoon. The two detectives, astonished at the sight of Margaret, whose type they recognized, allowed Gleddy to make the usual bluster that the charge against him was a ridiculous mistake. But they took him back to London. When the magistrate refused bail, Margaret rushed home to invoke the powerful aid of her father.

She arrived in the late afternoon. At the door of his study, where the judge was sitting alone, her assurance vanished. Her faith in James Gleddy seemed to glow only when she was in his presence.

“Come in, Margaret.” Her father’s voice was gentle. “I am very, very glad to see you.”

“Oh, Daddy!” She was a child again, climbing on his knee. “D’you think it rotten of me — doing it like that?”

“Not rotten, my dear — impulsive.” Presently he asked: “Is your husband here?”

She moved away.

“A perfectly preposterous thing has happened!” She gave the details. “I thought perhaps you could order that fool of a magistrate to grant him bail.”

The judge shook his head.

“You say he is charged with obtaining only seventeen pounds. You have made restitution, and you have offered bail in three thousand pounds. The police opposed bail. That means they have a record of at least one previous conviction, possibly more.”

“Then it must be mistaken identity! Why, it’s utterly absurd! James is a barrister himself, but he couldn’t practice because his father died suddenly, leaving no money.”

The judge rose heavily, went to his bookcase and consulted a reference book.

“If your husband told you he was a barrister, I am afraid he was not telling the truth.” Their eyes met in mutual commiseration. “Between ourselves, dearest girl, what sort of man is he?”

“I don’t know, Daddy.” The confession was a salute to his success as a father. “But I know what sort of man he is going to be — the sort you would not be ashamed to welcome to this house.”

Gallant words of a gallant woman. But gallantry was not enough to save James Gleddy — nor herself.

Margaret had never even seen a typewriter in action. The business college gave her many surprises and one or two shocks, which her wit and courage turned to profit.

When her husband was discharged she was able to welcome him to a small house, bought on mortgage, which she had furnished tastefully and, in the circumstances, a little extravagantly. With her own maintenance and one thing and another, her reserve was reduced to approximately three thousand pounds.

But they spent the first three days of his liberty at a West End hotel to cheer him up. Not that he was in the least depressed. He had the air of a man returning from a successful business trip. They danced in London, but not as they had danced in Switzerland. She was consciously entertaining him, as part of her program of reconstruction, and he was dimly aware that he had lost glamor in her eyes.

It was a long journey in the Underground to the outer suburb, and nearly ten minutes walk when they emerged. While he carried their suitcases she could feel his spirits sinking. But he was intelligent enough to make appreciative noises when she showed him over the “four room semi-detached, with garden.”

“It’s a fine little hide-out, darling,” he concluded. “But what a ghastly neighborhood! I mean, what do we do in the evening?”

“We shall probably be too tired to go out much, even when we can afford it,” she answered. “I have another two months’ grind before I get my certificate.”

“But, my sweet, why all this strenuousness? Don’t tell me you’ve blown the whole four thousand.”

“Of course not! There’s a bit over three thousand left, but it’s all we have in the world. We mustn’t spend a penny on luxuries. I thought I’d better be trained so that I could earn something in emergencies.”

“Surely your people would help in an emergency!”

“We shall never ask them!” He looked shocked. “We can pull it off together, James, you and I. We’ll make good and earn our own fun.”

Without knowing it, she gave him a pep talk, full of kindliness and confidence, which shocked him again, though he barely listened.

“On Monday you must order all the clothes you’ll need. That’ll help us to work out what it’ll cost to get you decently started.”

“Started on what?” he asked.

“Earning a living first, James — then a career.”

To James Gleddy it seemed sheer lunacy to talk like that when you had three thousand pounds in the bank. The problem, of course, was to detach as much as possible of the three thousand.

He smiled carefully. He had a good smile. A smallish man with a large head and a large face, he could use the smile to suggest that things had somehow gone wrong with him, through no fault of his own.

“That’s what I’ve wanted all my life, Margie! A chance to work. And someone to believe in me. By God, I’ll prove I’m worth it!”

Margaret swallowed it whole and was happy for the first time since his arrest. In the first six months he detached six hundred pounds, clear of living expenses.

Beginning as an almost unteachable student, Margaret passed out of the college with a first-class certificate, just short of the star class. She obtained immediate employment at a salary which covered bare living expenses and the wages of a charwoman.

A couple of months after her appointment, she met Gerald Ramburn in the street — by chance, as she thought.

Ramburn had enjoyed all the advantages which Gleddy had lacked. He had made good use of them. Physically, he was a large bony athlete; culturally, he had wide interests.

“Do you know of any reason,” he asked, “why you should not have lunch with me?” When she could produce none he carried her off. He settled their relationship by subtly pushing her backwards in time — to the period preceding their formal engagement. He asked no questions, but babbled welcome news of friends, things, and places.

On parting he gave no invitation; but a month later he was at the same spot and again took her to lunch. She told her husband but he evinced no interest. Thereafter their meetings became regular.

In the first phase of detaching the money, Gleddy used the “golden business opportunity” which in due course comes unexpectedly to grief. Margaret believed the first tale and bullied herself into believing the substance of the second, though she detected falsities of detail. Alarm for their rapidly shrinking reserve made her refuse to finance any further “operations.” There followed an intermediate phase in which he contented himself with small sponging and by obtaining local credit. Margaret had a dread of bills and always paid at once.

One day he turned up at the office to “borrow” a couple of pounds. She gave it him at once to get rid of him. He repeated the trick, raising the ransom to ten pounds; to avoid argument he had previously drunk himself into a state of noisiness.

“I am leaving the office,” she told him that night. “And as you don’t seem to be having any luck, I shall look for another job.”

She added no word of reproach. For her lack of progress in the reconstruction of her husband she blamed herself. Her job compelled her to leave him too much alone, so that he fell in with bad companions. She began to envisage the possibility of ultimate failure.

She was saved from complete exhaustion by the regular lunches with Gerald Ramburn. His rambling conversations acquired a certain continuity — through them she began to live imaginatively the kind of life that might have been hers. When she told him she had resigned from her job for a formal reason, he registered flat disbelief.

“That man turned up drunk at the office so that you should buy him off the premises. Let me buy him off altogether — and marry me after the divorce.”

If she had taken offense he would merely have told her not to be silly. So she answered from her heart.

“I don’t think it would work out as we’d want it to, Gerald. He is a sort of moral cripple. You and I would always remember that I had left him to stagger into the ditch in order to be happy myself.”

“You’re pulling your own leg,” he told her. “He is in the ditch — always has been — and you haven’t dragged him an inch out of it. Eventually, he will drag you in. Think it over. Meantime, if you want another job there’s one waiting for you with Domestic Animals Charitable Association.”

She had not intended to say anything to her husband, but suddenly she said it.

“You seem very unhappy, James. Would you like a divorce?”

“My dear, what a dreadful thing to say! Divorce is immoral — it’s against my principles. And I’m not unhappy with you, beloved. I’m unhappy because it looks as if I shall go to prison again. And I don’t think I shall survive it this time. I didn’t talk much about it before, but—”

“James!” She was terrified. “What have you been doing?”

“Nothing whatever. I backed a bill to help a friend out of a hole. The friend let me down. The bill turned out to be a forgery of some sort — I don’t even now understand what happened. We’ve got to pay up in three days or face the music. And he has bolted.”

“How much have you to pay?”

Gleddy had decided on a Napoleonic coup, for the story of the bill to help a friend would not work twice.

“Eight hundred pounds.” As she gasped, he hurried on: “What’s the use of talking? You’ve done enough for me. And you work yourself to the limit. You need a holiday from me — and it’ll be for five years or so, this time.”

The eight hundred brought the reserve below a thousand. His habits steadily pushed the cost of living above her salary. For the first time the protective instinct weakened and she began to think of herself.

The end was in sight, but as yet she had no idea of what form the end would take. For the immediate present she saw only the need to hold down her new job.

The Association held itself at the disposal of any who maintained any living thing for pleasure, and would perform almost any service from paying a pauper’s dog license to photographing a pet cobra. It would make gramophone records of a lion’s roar or a cage bird’s cheep. The president, though honest and capable in his administration, was a fatuous man with immature tastes and affectations.

He engaged Margaret on the spot!

“And now come and meet your new companions!” He patted her hand, drew her arm through his and held it there while he introduced her to the staff. In a month the hand-patting advanced to knee-patting.

One morning when she had stepped inside the big fireproof safe to file a record he shut the door and imprisoned her for a second or so.

“There now! I’ve saved your life, my dear! Isn’t that worth a kiss?”

Margaret took the kiss, imparting to it a degree of indifference that was definitely embarrassing.

“Ah! Now I think you realize, Mrs. Gleddy, that this was just my little joke to impress on you how dangerous it is to step into that safe without first stepping on this automatic stop. Anything might chance to shut the door on you — that very nice skirt might catch it — and within an hour you would be asphyxiated. Remember, that you need a key to unlock it, although it locks on its own spring.”

Her conscious mind forgot the incident — she did not even use the automatic stop. But the president’s warning was, in a sense, filed away in her subconsciousness.

In January 1934 the reserve had sunk to four hundred, though she had bluffed James that only a hundred remained. She bluffed and lied quite a lot these days. In accepting the patting and the silly, snatched kisses at the office, she had accepted a lowering of her own standards. There were moods in which she realized that the reconstruction problem had become a farce.

One evening, in February, James interrupted one of his own windy dissertations on bad luck.

“We can’t go on like this. We must have money!” he proclaimed. “That means I shall have to sell the shares I’ve been telling you about.” A slight hesitation and then: “I wonder if your friend Ramburn would like to buy them.”

“I wouldn’t care to ask a favor of him,” she protested.

“Favor! Sweet child, the favor is the other way round. This time next year those shares will be worth a thousand pounds — easily. Because he’s your friend I’ll let him have them for what I paid for ’em — that is, two-fifty. No profit to me — only to him.”

She was still a little doubtful. He went on:

“Listen, darling!” He made it all as clear as noon-day while he stroked her hair. “If he doesn’t jump at it when you have lunch with him tomorrow I know a round dozen of men who will — at that knockout price!”

He began to repeat it all with variations; and Margaret began to believe him.

The share certificates were in her bag when she met Gerald for lunch.

But before she had been with him five minutes she flushed with sudden understanding that she was about to perpetuate an insolent fraud, relying on his personal feeling for her to provide the money and avert the consequences.

After lunch she parted from him at the restaurant. She felt as if she had snatched herself from the brink of a precipice. Before going back to the office she turned into the Park. In dumb misery she faced the fact that she had stultified her womanhood by marrying James Gleddy.

She took out the share certificates, tore them, and dropped them into a waste bin. Then she went to the bank and drew two hundred and fifty pounds from the meagre reserve. It did not matter now. The end was so very near.

“That’s quick work!” approved Gleddy when she gave him the cash. “You clever, wonderful girl!”

“Yes, aren’t I? Spend some of that on me, please, James. I’d like a dinner and a show.”

“Darling, you’re waking up at last! We’ll have a gorgeous time.”

This was a short-lived, intermediate phase, which brought her a certain distraction — the dipsomaniac’s final fling. Almost nightly he took her out. He delighted in her company when she encouraged him in idiotic extravagance — was bored and querulous when she behaved as a conscientious housekeeper and breadwinner. It was her fault that, until now, he had spent none of her money on her.

By the end of March the cash was giving out. She had not the funds for any more imaginary transactions, and he apparently could not even lay hands on another parcel of phoney shares.

He began to talk about the subscriptions that flowed into Domestic Animals Charitable Association on Saturday mornings and remained in the office, as the banks closed so early.

“That animal slop is a wicked waste of money that ought to be stopped by law,” he asserted. “It’s maddening to think of it when human beings, like ourselves, are so terribly hard up.”

Soon he was unfolding a plan by which he should come to the office and remove the cash. She would then tidy up, and it would be assumed that the office had been burgled while it was deserted for the weekend.

She listened with cold fear — of herself. Very soon, she knew, she would let him talk her over. She would make herself believe his shoddy nonsense about their having a better claim to the money than had the animals. She might even help him in the burglary.

At the next office kiss she told the president she wanted to ask a favor.

“After you’ve gone on Saturdays, I get frightened — alone with all that money. If I come up an hour earlier I can get it all listed before you leave — and you can bank it on your way to the station.”

When he consented, after making her plead a little, she took another lonely walk in the Park. She was even more desperately miserable than on the previous occasion — and again she came to a pivotal conclusion.

In asking for the cash to be banked, she had taken an artificial precaution against her own weakness. She accepted this as the final degradation — the admission that she could not resist James Gleddy. For this, she did not blame him. The dipsomaniac does not blame the bottle — but he sometimes smashes it.

“I’ve worked it out, James,” she told him that night, “and I find I couldn’t cover the traces. I have a safer plan.” When she had secured his attention, she explained: “There’s an outside door in the basement giving on to an alley. I’ll unlock it and you can come in through the window, and we’ll pretend a hold-up man has overpowered me.”

“No good, darling! The police always rumble a job like that by the way the knots are tied and so on—”

“Listen! I’m going to be found genuinely unconscious. I learned a lot about chloroform from a vet. I know how to take just enough for unconsciousness without risk to life. And I know how to make out a chit so that the chemist will sell it to you. And I’ll tell you where to buy it.”

At twelve-twenty on the morning of Saturday, May 6th, 1934, Margaret slithered out of the window and unlocked the outer door that gave on to the alley. At twelve-forty, precisely, James Gleddy came through the door, wearing thin rubber gloves, and entered the office by the window.

“Splendid, James!” she applauded. “You’re bang on time!”

Acting on previous instructions he took from his pockets a stoppered bottle of chloroform and a handful of cotton wool, which he placed on her desk, and a screw-driver which he retained. He picked up a wad of nine one-pound notes pinned together and a four shilling postal order, and put them in his pocket.

She led him to the big safe, the door of which was ajar.

“Mind you don’t upset any of the records,” she warned. “The cash is in one of those two little drawers at the top — I don’t know which, but it’s generally the end one.”

When she heard him scrabbling with the screw-driver, she removed the stopper from the bottle, carefully poured a small quantity of chloroform on to the cotton wool, which she wrapped in a duster.

She glanced at the safe at floor level. The automatic stop was not in action. She crept towards the safe. With her gloved thumb she loosened the stopper and lobbed the bottle inside the safe.

Almost before it struck the floor she had slammed the door of the safe. She felt neither horror nor fear, nor any acute desire to escape the consequence of her act. Her main preoccupation was to prevent that door from being opened before James Gleddy was dead. The key was inside the safe, on the floor, where she had placed it before he arrived.

Back through the window to relock the door giving on to the alley. Next she picked up an upright chair, pressed the wooden back of it to her face then dropped herself forward. The wood cut her flesh round the jaw, and the blow dazed her.

In a few minutes she was able to continue her program. Holding her breath, she tied the duster round her head, after placing the chair sideways on the floor as if she had toppled over while sitting on it.

She removed her gloves, then lay down and inhaled the chloroform. Perhaps she had used too much and it would kill her before she was discovered. She did not care.

Thus the porter found her. In trying to render first-aid before rushing to the hospital, he destroyed any evidence which Margaret might have left for Scotland Yard.

At about five o’clock the house surgeon told Margaret that he need do no more for her, and suggested that she was now sufficiently recovered to go home.

A hundred yards away, in the office, the mechanic from Renson’s was opening the big safe.

“He’s dead — don’t touch anything!” shouted the superintendent. He hurried the mechanic from the office while the smell of chloroform mounted. To the sergeant he said:

“Society girl married to a crook! And then this little how-d’ye-do and the funny business with the key of the safe. I’m going to pass the buck straight to the Yard.”

Medical evidence but faintly illumined the obvious. Even if the chloroform had been released at once, the deceased could still have made himself heard by tapping on the wall of the safe with the screw-driver. In his struggles to attract notice the chloroform bottle might have fallen out of his pocket, its contents greatly accelerating his death.

The key was found on the floor of the safe, leaving the possibility that Gleddy, after drugging his wife, had taken the key from the drawer, opened the safe, removed the key, and dropped it when the door shut on him.

As to how the door had been shut, there was the possibility that the unconscious woman had fallen against it when she toppled from the chair. Or Gleddy, through carelessness or alarm, might have shut the door on himself.

The contribution of Scotland Yard was limited to the discovery of unidentified fingerprints on both sides of the door in the basement giving on to the alley, though not on the key which remained permanently in the lock. The Coroner was uninterested in the door, preferring to believe that Gleddy had slipped by the porter.

Margaret added nothing to the account she had originally given to the sergeant. Her last vague memory, she said, was of the smell of chloroform. As to the preceding circumstances, she admitted that she had described the routine of the office to her husband several months previously. The president’s evidence on the banking of the cash eliminated suspicion of collusion in the attempted robbery. Further, the house surgeon testified that she was unconscious when admitted to the hospital.

“You have told us that deceased came into your room from the outer office. Did he assault you the moment he came in?”

“No. He said he had come to ‘clean up’ — meaning to steal. He said I could leave everything tidy and I would never be suspected. I thought at first he was joking. When he picked up the nine pounds and the postal order, I threatened to scream and he seized me from behind. He said, ‘I’ll make everything quite safe for you — all you have to do is forget it was me. I know you’ll never give me away once it’s done.’ Then I kicked him.”

It sounded very straightforward. Anyone might guess that Margaret had slammed the door of the safe on a husband who had wrecked her life — whom she loved so little that she was ready to hand him over to the police. But it remained a guess. There was no means of proving that she had actually slammed that door. The police, after tracing Gleddy’s purchase of the chloroform and the cotton wool, completed their investigations — with negative result. The fingerprints on the door giving on to the alley remained unidentified.

After the inquest Margaret declined her father’s invitation to come straight back to his house. Leaving instructions for the sale of the furniture and her interest in the “semidetached with garden,” she spent several weeks in a cottage in Kent, the paying guest of a Miss Prinfold, who had been her mother’s governess.

This may be called the decontamination period, during which her former scale of values returned. When the Long Vacation came, her father took her to Norway, then to his home in Oxfordshire. The nightmare of her marriage was beginning to grow dim. The murder she put completely out of her mind, until Gerald Ramburn turned up in early September.

“How soon shall we get married?” he asked, without any hesitation.

As he spoke, she realized that in a mere four months she had come to believe that the version she had given police was the true one.

“I don’t think we can get married at all, Gerald. I’d like to, but I’ve changed, without your knowing it. You said something once about James being in the ditch. Well, I fell into the ditch myself. And I feel that, if we were married, it would show — if you understand what I mean.”

“Of course, I understand! You’re giving me a hint that you scuppered that fellow. You ought to have let me buy him off. No good going into that — it’s all over now. How soon shall we get married?”

She put her hand on his arm.

“Are we both quite sane, dear?” she asked. “Do you really want to marry me if you really think that?”

“You were never quite sane, dear. As to me, I turned up that Saturday hoping to collect you for lunch. While I was hanging about, I spotted Gleddy. Saw him turn up that alley and go through that door. Went to see what he was up to. Opened the door myself. It was unlocked. Found myself in that sort of hole-place. Heard you say: ‘Splendid, James, you’re bang on time.’ Went round to the front to see if one or other of you would come out. Chatted with the porter for a few minutes, then buzzed off.” He added: “I read the reports.”

“But Gerald! For the first time I feel guilty! I think I’d better confess.”

“Haven’t you made enough mess as it is? Why not tell me it’s my duty as a citizen to denounce you — for doing what I would have done myself if I could have seen my way clear. Alternatively, how soon shall we get married?”

Together they had not even the sense of sharing a guilty secret. The impact of James Gleddy on their joint lives had been a sordid irrelevance, something so contrary to the current of their thoughts that it had little place even in their memory.

They bought a house within a mile of the judge’s, where they lived a normal and happy life — until Margaret won the Ladies Point-to-Point challenge cup. When they moved back to their flat in Bloomsbury, they took the cup with them, and Margaret had her name added to those of the other winners.

One evening, returning to the flat after seeing Gerald off to Manchester for a business conference, she noticed that the cup had been moved — then that the flat had been burgled.

She called the police, who asked all the usual questions and took fingerprints, eliminating those of Margaret and a service maid. There was one unidentified set, identified the following afternoon as Gerald Ramburn’s. Thus there were no prints of the burglar.

The police held out little hope of success. Because it would be extremely embarrassing to Margaret to be unable to return the challenge cup, she offered a reward of one hundred pounds.

The reward merely scared the burglar. In two months, during which no clue had emerged, the case was passed to the Department of Dead Ends. A month later, a railway company’s official, opening a suitcase abandoned in a cloakroom, found what proved to be the articles burgled from the Ramburns’ flat.

Detective-Inspector Rason examined the items. He was reflecting that there was not much chance of obtaining a fingerprint after three months — when a perfect print leaped to his eye, as visible as if it had been made in plasticine. It was made, in fact, on a clot of shaving-soap on a razor case.

“Cor! Happened to put his thumb in the middle of that lovely bit o’ soap!” exclaimed Rason. “That’s what I call coincidence.”

Rason sent the razor case for examination and was duly informed that the print had been matched with an unidentified print found on a basement door adjoining the offices of the Domestic Animals Charitable Association eighteen months previously — which was not in itself helpful.

Following routine, he turned up the dossier of the Gleddy case. The main facts were familiar, but there was something new in a postscript.

Margaret Gleddy re-married October 75, 1934, to Gerald Ramburn.

“Looks as if that crook follows the girl around!” mused Rason. “He’s close at hand when Hubby One is getting his. Then he loots Hubby Two. That’s what I call coincidence — hullo! — two fat coincidences in one case!”

After writing to Gerald Ramburn asking him to call and identify his property, Rason looked up the report of the burglary — to see if he could find any more coincidences.

Unidentified print found on shaving mirror, he read: and in the next line: Later identified as print of Gerald Ramburn, owner. The photographs of the print were enclosed in the dossier — believed to be of no significance, they had not been passed to the register. There was a final, summarizing note.

Prints of owner, owner’s wife, and service maid only.

“I’d like to meet this bloke. He doesn’t wear gloves the first time — leaves a print on that basement door. When he robs the flat he does wear gloves and he leaves no print. But he suddenly goes haywire, takes off his glove, and puts his thumb on that clot of soap — so as to tell me he is the same bloke who went through that basement door.” Rason ran his hand though his hair. “That’s the worst of being logical — always leads to something damn silly. Meaning to say, the soap print is not the print of the burglar.”

He picked up the photograph of the print found on the shaving mirror, identified as that of Gerald Ramburn, and sent it in for identification. He was informed that the print was the same as the one on the razor case, which was the same as the one on the door giving on to the alley. So he hurried round to see the porter who had been discussing his medals with a stranger at the relevant time.

Margaret accompanied Gerald to Scotland Yard and was delighted to regain possession of the challenge cup. But on their way through the corridor the porter had identified Gerald.

“That settles the burglary,” chirped Rason. “And now we can discuss the murder. Sorry! I mean, I want you both to carry your minds back to the day when James Gleddy lost his life.”

Margaret gasped.

“At the time when Gleddy was making all the noise he could inside that safe, you, Mr. Ramburn, were talking to the porter — about his medals, I think. So the porter heard nothing. As to how Gleddy got inside that safe and as to how he got the door shut on him, with the chloroform and all—” Rason paused, for again Margaret had registered alarm.

“The door in the basement giving on to the alley,” resumed Rason, “was found by the district police to be locked — at about one-fifteen. At some time previous to one-fifteen it was unlocked. You, Mr. Ramburn, entered the well by that door. And you left the well by that door—”

“I neither admit nor deny anything,” cut in Gerald. “I’ll talk to you through a lawyer.”

It was one thing to forgive yourself for murdering James Gleddy — quite another thing to involve Gerald.

“My husband,” said Margaret, “need neither admit nor deny anything about that door. I unlocked it to admit Gleddy by arrangement. And I locked it again after I had shut him in the safe.”