Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 12, No. 60, November 1948

The Motive by Ronald Knox

Originally appeared in the Illustrated London News, December 1937

John Dickson Carr and his family have come over from England and settled permanently in the United States, and John is now a member-in-best-standing of the MWA (Mystery Writers of America, Inc.). The Carrs live in Westchester County, about three miles from where your Editor hangs his hat and homebrews his homicides. In the old days John and your Editor used to talk shop by long-distance correspondence; now we sit either in the Queen’s parlor or in John’s wonderful study, with its brick fireplace, its old swords and rapiers on the wall, and its deep, relaxing leather chairs of London tan. There is only one word to describe the Carr study: it is a clubroom, with all the peace and comfort the word implies. Well, one evening, in the midst of discussing locked rooms and miracle problems, your Editor got an idea. It was not a new idea, but it is one that has always been sure-fire. How about starting a department in EQMM called “Favorite Detective Stories of Famous Detective-Story Writers”? John mulled it over: it sounded good, but wouldn’t the nominations always be stories too well known for reprint? We admitted that danger, but why not test the idea on John himself? Suppose, John, that you fish into your memory and begin reeling off the detective short stories which have made the most lasting impression on you.

John agreed to this impromptu experiment in anthologizing. Having just finished a solid year’s work on an authorized biography of Conan Doyle, his first thoughts leaped to Sherlock Holmes. Yes, a Holmes story would undoubtedly be among his all-time favorites. Let’s see: “The Red-Headed League” — “Silver Blaze” — but no, John’s final, all-things-considered choice would be “The Man With the Twisted Lip.” Next, of course, Chesterton — who could omit Father Brown from any list of favorites? It would be a toss-up: “The Honour of Israel Gow” or “The Man in the Passage” — and after a moment’s deliberation John pitched decisively for the latter. Then there would be Thomas Burge’s “The Hands of Mr. Ottermole” — and Jacques Futrelle’s “The Problem of Cell 13,” about the Flunking Machine — both absolute “musts” to any aficionado worthy of the name. That makes four stories — shall I go on, asked John. By all means, we replied; perhaps one of the stories you’ll suggest will be a “sleeper” — an unexpected ’tec treasure.

You could see John’s mind grasshoppering from author to author. Melville Davisson Post? Of course! An Uncle Abner story — “The Doomdorf Mystery”? No, not an Uncle Abner story, superlative as they are. On John’s list it would have to be “The Great Cipher” from MONSIEUR JONQUELLE — the favorite Post story of S. S. Van Dine and Dr. Norbert Lederer, and so many other connoisseurs of the genre. Then — unqualifiedly — Anthony Berkley’s “The Avenging Chance.” An E. C. Bentley story about Philip Trent? “The Genuine Tabard”? No, a marvellous story but only Englishmen can appreciate it fully. Let’s hold off on Bentley for the moment. R. Austin Freeman? Naturally! Say, Dr. Thorndyke in “The Aluminium Dagger.” And that unforgettable story by Brett Holliday, “Human Interest Stuff” — you just can’t leave that one out!

How many does that make? Eight. Suppose we push on — make it an even ten. Let’s see, now: a Carnacki story — yes, indeed. “The Thing Invisible” — there’s your “sleeper”! Why, I’ll bet that story has never been anthologized! True, John, but our old friend August Derleth, under the publishing name of Mycroft and Moran, brought out the first American edition of William Hope Hodgson’s CARNACKI THE GHOST-FINDER last year, and the first story in the book is “The Thing Invisible.”

Well, that proves it can’t be done: any list of most memorable shorts is bound to be one classic after another, and all too well-known for reprint in EQMM. But your Editor was still not convinced. We reminded John that he had selected only nine stories. Finish out the golden ten, pick one more — perhaps that tenth story...

John’s eyes opened wide. There was another story that popped brilliant-clear into his mind. Perhaps it is not one of the ten best detective short stories ever written, but it has powerful recommendations. Witty, polished, full of bluff and double-bluff, with a final twist when you think no further twist is even possible, and with a murder method in the opening plot sequence that is so ingenious and yet so startlingly simple —

We knew instinctively that the experiment had succeeded. We were on the brink of—

John announced: Ronald Knox’s “The Motive.”

And now we were sure. The tenth story in John Dickson Carr’s list was a “sleeper”!

But suddenly a colossal doubt seized us. A list of John Dickson Carr’s ten favorite detective short stories — and no story by Poe? A list of ten definitive favorites and no mention of “The Purloined Letter” or “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”? Can such things be?

John crushed the doubt with a mere wave of his hand. Why, of course, no story by Poe. The Father of the Detective Story and his still unsurpassed standard (G. K. Chesterton’s phrase) are in a class by themselves. The Poe tales of ratiocination are above competitive listings. Any ’tec tyro knows that! [Q. exits, properly squelched]

“A certain amount of dust is good for a juryman’s eyes. It prevents him going to sleep.”

Sir Leonard Huntercombe is probably responsible for more scoundrels being at large than any other man in England. His references to the feelings of his client, to the long ordeal which a criminal prosecution involves, to the fallibility of witnesses, to those British liberties which we all enjoy only on the condition that everybody must be given the benefit of the doubt unless he is found with his hand in the till, are a subject of legitimate tedium and irreverent amusement to the reporters, who have heard it all before. But it still goes down with the jury, fresh to their job; and, after all, that is more important. It does not often happen to such a man that he is drawn into the old, old argument, whether a defending counsel is justified in pressing his defense when he privately knows his client to be guilty. And, of all places, you might have expected him to be free from such annoyances in the Senior Common Room of Simon Magus — the smoking-room, to be more accurate. Dons hate a scene, and prefer to talk trivialities after dinner. It is hardly even good form, nowadays, to talk a man’s own shop to him. In these days of specialization we are all bored with each other’s technicalities, and a tacit convention has grown up that we should stick to the weather and the Boat Race. Sir Leonard was justified, then, if his eye resembled that of a codfish rather more than usual.

For, as bad luck would have it, Penkridge was dining as somebody else’s guest — Penkridge, the dramatic critic, to whom all the world is a stage, and everything, consequently, a fit subject for dramatic criticism. It takes less than the Simon Magus port (though that is a powerful affair) to make such a man as Penkridge boorishly argumentative. He had trailed his coat deliberately, with a forthcoming article in view, and had contrived to put Sir Leonard on his own defense almost before he knew it. I need hardly say that he was adopting the most Puritan view.

McBride, the philosopher, was the host of the great man; and he felt bound to interfere, partly from a sense of hospitality, and partly because he always likes to be desperately just. (Nobody, it has been said, has seen more points of view than McBride, or adopted less.) “I was just thinking,” he said, “that perhaps you could put up an apology for Sir Leonard’s point of view if you claim that Law should be regarded as one of the sciences. You see, it’s notorious, isn’t it — I think even Cowan here will agree with me — that science owes some of its greatest developments to the influence of theories which have proved quite false, but were suggestive nevertheless, and put people on the track of the truth. Isn’t it arguable, I mean, in the same way, that my friend here is justified in putting forward a hypothesis, which will help forward the cause of truth if only by eliminating error?”

Penkridge, who hates dons, was evidently preparing to say something unpleasant; but Sir Leonard forestalled him by disowning the proffered help. “It’s not a scientific mind you need in the legal profession,” he insisted; “it’s a kind of artistic gift. You’ve got to be imaginative; to throw yourself into the business of picturing the story happening as you want it to have happened; with your client innocent, of course. Probably, if we knew, we should find that the truth in many cases is even stranger than all our imaginings. But imagination is what you must have — did I ever tell you the story of a client of mine, a man by the name of Westmacott?”

Several voices demanded that the story should be told; better to have Sir Leonard being prosy, than Penkridge being unmannerly. And Sir Leonard, when his cigar was going, went ahead with the story.

“I first came across Westmacott,” explained Sir Leonard, “over a business that never came into court, though it precious nearly did. I was only called in on a minor point to give counsel’s opinion. He was a man in late middle age, with an unhealthy look about him, as if you wouldn’t give him a very long life, and a depressed, restless sort of manner, as if his mind was preoccupied with something else than what he was talking about at the moment. He had done well on the Stock Exchange, and had retired just lately, with a considerable income he hardly knew what to do with. At least, it was a surprise to his friends when he went to stay over Christmas at one of those filthy great luxury hotels in Cornwall. It was the kind of place that tried to make you believe you were on the Riviera, with any amount of central heating and artificial sunlight, and a covered-in bathing-pool where the water was kept at a temperature of eighty or so, night and day. Of course, he might have gone to Cornwall for his health; but one didn’t see why he should have gone to a place like that, because he was well known to be old-fashioned in his views and conservative in his opinions, whereas the Hotel Resplendent was all full of modern people, a cosmopolitan and rather Bohemian crowd. Among the rest there was a well-known literary man; he’s still alive, and you’d all know his name, so I’ll call him just Smith.

“I’m speaking of some years ago, you’ll understand. Nowadays, of course, it doesn’t matter what anybody writes, or what sort of opinions he puts forward; it’s all art. But at the time of which I’m speaking, there were still people going about who were capable of being shocked, and they were shocked by Smith. It wasn’t so much his indecency, though every book he wrote looked as if it was meant to be seized by the police. He was really, if an old fogy like myself can be allowed to use such forgotten language, a bad influence on the young people; everybody admitted it, though already most people rather admired him for it. Westmacott had never met him before, and the other people in the hotel felt pretty certain that the two wouldn’t hit it off. The curious thing is, they were wrong. Westmacott hadn’t read any of Smith’s stuff, it appeared; indeed, he read very little except detective stories, which he devoured at the rate of one a day. And — well, strange acquaintances do ripen, and ripen fast, in a god-forsaken place like the Hotel Resplendent.

“It was a bad season; money wasn’t being thrown about that year as much as usual; and the management tried to make the best of the position by encouraging the guests to be a sort of family party, with any amount of ‘olde-worlde’ festivities. Naturally, they concentrated on Christmas Day; crackers and Christmas presents, and a synthetic boar’s head, and a Yule-log specially imported from Sweden; and a set of waits who’d been in training under an opera expert for months past. By half-past ten the company — between twenty and thirty of them, when you’d counted out the invalids who’d gone to bed early, and the idiots who’d gone out in cars for no reason whatever — found themselves set down by the master of the revels to play ‘blind man’s buff.’ This didn’t go too well, especially as the great hall in which they played it was heated like a crematorium. It was Westmacott, people remembered afterwards, who made the suggestion you would have expected to come from anybody but Westmacott — that they should all go and play ‘blind man’s buff’ in the swimming-bath.

“Well, they got some kick out of it after that. Westmacott didn’t go in himself, but he hung about on the edge; as a matter of fact, it was only pretty strong swimmers who did go in, because the bath was a matter of twelve feet deep at the shallowest part, and there was nothing but a hand-rail to lug yourself out by. Smith and Westmacott got into an argument, Westmacott saying he didn’t believe you could know what direction you were swimming in when you were blindfolded, and Smith (who was an exceptionally good swimmer himself) maintaining that it was perfectly easy, unless you’d got a bad sense of direction anyhow. It was nearly midnight when the party went away, and it seems that Smith and Westmacott stayed behind to settle their differences with a practical try-out and a bet; Smith was to swim ten lengths in the bath each way, touching the ends every time, but never touching the sides. They were quite alone when Westmacott adjusted the handkerchief on his new friend’s forehead, to make sure that everything was above-board.

“Well, Smith did his ten lengths each way, and by his own account made a good thing of it. As he swam he didn’t bother to touch the handrail, which was rather high out of the water; but when he’d finished he naturally felt for it — and it wasn’t there! He tore the handkerchief off his eyes, which wasn’t too easy, and found the whole place was in the dark. The rail wasn’t within his reach anywhere, and he tumbled to what must have happened. Somehow a goodish lot of water must have been let out of the bath while he wasn’t looking; and there was nothing to do but go on swimming about until somebody came to put things right for him; or, alternatively, until the level of the water fell so much that he was able to stand on the bottom.

“Other things began to occur to him before long. For one thing, he knew, more or less, where it was that the water escaped when the bath was changed, and he knew that there was a considerable undertow when it happened. He found there was no undertow now, which meant that the water wasn’t escaping any longer, and there was no chance of finding that he’d got into his depth. Also, he remembered that the swimming-bath was a long way from anywhere, and it wasn’t very likely that he would he heard if he shouted. Also, he couldn’t quite see how the water could have started emptying itself and then stopped, unless somebody was controlling it.

“Well, they say the devil looks after his own, and it so happened that the night watchman, whom they kept at the Hotel Resplendent (chiefly to keep out of the way when he wasn’t wanted), had spotted that the water was running away, and mentioned it to somebody; a search was made, and Smith was pulled out of the water with a rope, none too soon for his peace of mind. Smith was positive, of course, that he had been the victim of a particularly cunning murderous attack. I say particularly cunning, because, once he had drowned, it would have been easy for Westmacott (he assumed Westmacott was the villain) to have let the water into the bath again; and all the world would have been left supposing that Smith had committed suicide — how else could a strong swimmer have drowned with a handrail in his reach all the time? It looked as if it was going to be a very nasty business, and what didn’t make it any better was Westmacott’s own explanation, made privately to his lawyers, that the whole thing was a joke, and he had been meaning to rescue Smith later on. Nothing, it was explained to him, is more difficult to predict than a jury’s sense of humor. Enormous efforts were made to hush the thing up, chiefly by the hotel people, who thought it meant the end of their business if they were involved in a scandal; I’m not sure they were right there, but, as I say, this happened some years ago. The difficulty of Smith’s case was that there was no proving it was Westmacott who had tampered with the water apparatus (as a matter of fact, anybody could have done it), and it was that hitch that induced the police to let it go; and Smith to be content with a handsome compensation.

“Well, it was touch and go, and there was nothing I expected less than to find Westmacott, to all appearances a dull and unadventurous man, figuring in my line of business again. Though, as a matter of fact, the police had found out things about him which would have altered my opinion if I’d known about them. His man, fortunately for the police, had done time at an earlier stage in his career, and was all too ready to give them information. He assured them that a great change had come over his master within the last week or so before he went to the Resplendent; he had come home one morning looking like a man bowed down by some hideous secret anxiety, though up to then he had been in normally good spirits. He cursed the servants freely, he would start at shadows. He bought a revolver, which the police found in his rooms (he was a bachelor, I forgot to say); and although this only looked like self-defense, it was a more peculiar circumstance that, about the same time, he got hold of a drug (I forget the name of it now) which is deadly poison, and I’m not sure that he hadn’t forged a doctor’s certificate to get it.

“It was less than a week after the trouble had died down that a new character came on the scene: a character nobody liked, who had seen him. He was a seedy-looking fellow calling himself Robinson, who seemed very anxious to have an interview with Westmacott, for he made a great fuss with the servants when he called three times and found he was always out. It was the opinion of the servants that Robinson went about in disguise for no good end, but servants will always say that of anybody who wears dark spectacles. When the two did first meet, the servants weren’t prepared to say, because Westmacott lived on one floor, and often let in his visitors himself. Anyhow, for a fortnight or so he was a familiar figure in the house, being seen several times coming in and out.

“Westmacott had the habit of going to stay with friends near Aberdeen about the New Year. This time, he went a little later than usual; and it was a considerable surprise to his man when he was given the order to reserve two first-class sleepers on the night train from King’s Cross, one in the name of Westmacott, and another in the name of Robinson. It didn’t look too good; you couldn’t by any stretch of the imagination suppose that Robinson belonged to the same world as Westmacott and his friends. In fact, if he hadn’t been professionally shy of them, I think the man would have gone to the police about it; it looked so much as if Robinson had got a hold of some kind over Westmacott, and was following him about for fear of losing his tracks. Anyhow, nothing was done about it. Westmacott was a man who fussed about trains, and he was at the station, it seems, a full three-quarters of an hour before the train started; he was worried, apparently, about Robinson — asked the attendant once or twice whether he had shown up yet, and stood looking up and down the platform. As he did this, a telegram was brought to him which seemed to set his mind at rest; he shut himself up in his sleeper, and took no further notice, as far as could be ascertained. Robinson turned up with only two or three minutes to spare, and was bundled hurriedly into the sleeper next door. Whether the two held any conversation was not known; the two sleepers communicated with one another in the ordinary way, and it was only a matter of slipping a bolt for either to enter the other’s compartment.

“Robinson, it appeared, was not traveling all the way to Aberdeen; he was to get off at Dundee. The man was to come and call him about three-quarters of an hour before the train got in there. As a matter of fact, he cannot have slept too well, or possibly the lights and the shouting at Edinburgh woke him; at any rate, he went along the corridor just about when they were passing Dalmeny, and spoke to the attendant, who asked whether the order to call him still stood. He said yes, he expected to drop off again for a bit, and he was a heavy sleeper. Indeed, when the attendant knocked at his door, there seemed to be no waking him, and it was locked. With many apologies, the man knocked up Westmacott, and asked his leave to try the communicating door between the two compartments. This, it proved, was locked on Westmacott’s side, but not on Robinson’s. The attendant went in, and found the carriage quite empty. The bed had been slept in; that is, somebody had lain down on it, there was no mistaking the fact. Robinson’s luggage was still there; his watch was hanging by the bunk; a novel he had been reading lay on the floor close by; his boots were there, and his day clothes, not his pajamas.

“Well, there was all sorts of fuss and bother, as you can imagine. Westmacott, who seemed quite dazed by the news and unable to give any account of it, naturally got out at Dundee and put himself at the disposal of the police authorities. They did not like the look of the thing from the start. They had rung up Scotland Yard, and through some unwonted piece of efficiency had got on to the story of Smith and his experiences in the bath at the Resplendent. Exhaustive inquiries brought no news of Robinson being seen anywhere on the line; and there had been no stop, no slow-down, even, between the time when the attendant saw him in the corridor and the time when his bed was found empty. The train, naturally, had been searched, but without result.”

“But they must have found his body,” someone suggested.

“No remains were found; but you have to consider the lie of the journey. Between Dalmeny and Thornton Junction, near which the attendant tried to wake Robinson, the train has to pass over the Forth Bridge. The one interval of time, therefore, during which it was impossible to account for Robinson’s movements was an interval of time during which a body might, conceivably, have been got rid of without leaving any trace. To disappear, it would have to be weighted, no doubt. But the awkward fact emerged that Westmacott brought a very heavy bag with him into the train (the porter gave evidence of this), and it was completely empty when examined.

“As I say, I thought Westmacott had been lucky to get off so lightly in the Resplendent affair. I didn’t at all like the look of his case when I was asked to plead for him. When I went to see him I found him all broken up and in tears. He told me a long story in which he confessed to the murder of Robinson. Robinson — it was the old story — had been blackmailing him; he had evidence that it was Westmacott who attempted the murder of Smith in Cornwall. I gathered that there were other secrets behind it all which Westmacott was not anxious to go into, but it was the fear of exposure over the Smith case that made him reluctant to bring in the police against the blackmailer. Robinson had insisted on following him when he went north, afraid that he was trying to escape to the Continent by way of Leith or Aberdeen. The knowledge that he was being shadowed like this was too much for him, and he determined to get rid of his persecutor. Arranging for him to travel in the next carriage, he waited till the train was past Dalmeny, then found his man asleep, and laid him out with a piece of lead, tied that and other weights onto him as he lay there, and threw him out of the window just as the train was crossing the Forth Bridge.

“Ordinarily, when a man charged with murder tells you he is guilty you can form a pretty good guess between the two obvious alternatives — either he is telling the truth or he ought to be in an asylum. Occasionally there is a third possibility, for which the present circumstances did not seem to leave any room: he may be inculpating himself to save somebody else. I tell you, I didn’t know what to make of it. The whole story seemed wrong; Westmacott was not a strong man, and what would he have done if his man had not been asleep? The chances are enormously against most men sleeping soundly on a train.

“Now, what was I to do? I felt certain the man was not mad, and I have seen many lunatics in my time. I did not, could not, believe he was really guilty. I put it to you whether, with those convictions in my mind, I was not really offering to serve the cause of truth when I urged him (as of course I did) to plead ‘Not guilty.’

“He would have none of it — then. It was only a day or two later that I had an impassioned appeal to go and see him again. I found his mind entirely altered. He still stuck to his story that Robinson had been blackmailing him, but he professed to know nothing whatever about the disappearance: he thought Robinson must have either committed suicide or else staged a very clever disappearance with the sole intention of bringing him, Westmacott, to the dock. He implored me to save him from the gallows. This was too much for me; I couldn’t undertake to plead for a man who didn’t know from one day to the next whether he was guilty or not guilty, and gave such very lame explanations of his movements and his motives in either case. At last, when I had been at him some time, he told me a third story, which was quite different, and, as I believe, true. I shan’t tell you what it was just yet. As I say, I thought, and think, it was true. But it was obvious to me from the first that it was a story you could not possibly serve up to a jury.

“There was another odd thing, which was that now, for reasons you will understand later, I did not know whether I wanted my man hanged or not. I don’t know how some of you severe moralists would have formed your consciences in a situation like that. I thanked God I could fall hack on a legal tradition, and I resolved that I would defend Westmacott, devoting myself single-heartedly to pointing out the weaknesses in the story, whatever it was, the prosecution would bring against him. And, gentlemen, I succeeded. I don’t think I have ever had a tougher fight; there was any amount of prejudice against him among the public at large, and the jury, as usual, reflected it. But there was the solid fact that no body had been found; the open possibility that Robinson had made away with himself, or slipped off somehow when the train stopped. And, of course, the difficulty of throwing a body clear of the bridge. There was a mass of circumstantial evidence, but not a line of direct proof. Of course, you see what had happened.”

McBride, who had been sitting with his head buried in his hands, lifted it slowly. “I expect I’m being a fool,” he said, “but I don’t believe there was any such person as Robinson. He was just Westmacott, wasn’t he?”

“That’s a theory to go on, at all events,” admitted Sir Leonard, accepting the whisky-and-soda with which the suggestion was accompanied. “Let’s hear your reasons for thinking that, and I’ll put the difficulties.”

“Well, as you’ve told the story, nobody ever saw the two men together. When Robinson was seen going out of the house, it was supposed to be Westmacott who had let him in. At the station, there was nothing to prevent Westmacott getting out of his sleeper during that last quarter of an hour, going off somewhere, and putting on the Robinson disguise, picking up fresh luggage at the cloakroom, and so making his second appearance. He made sure that the attendant should see him at Dalmeny, because he wanted everybody to think that Robinson had been thrown overboard exactly at the Forth Bridge. There was no point in making the body disappear when all the circumstances would, in any case, point to murder — unless there was no body to disappear.”

“Good for you, McBride; I like to hear a man put a case well. And now let me point out the difficulties. You’ve got to suppose that a man who has already labored under an awkward imputation of intended murder deliberately projects an alter ego — a sort of Mr. Hyde — for no better purpose than to get rid of his imaginary carcass, thereby letting himself in for a second dose of suspicion. That, having done so, he first of all pretends to his counsel that he is really a murderer, and then he withdraws it all and decides to plead ‘Not guilty.’ Can you give a coherent explanation?”

“The man was balmy,” suggested Penkridge.

“Who isn’t, up to a point? But there was certainly method in poor Westmacott’s madness. Shall I tell you the story he told me?”

“We’ll buy it!” agreed Penkridge.

“I wonder if you could have guessed it? If so, your guesswork would have had to start from the moment at which, if you remember, Westmacott suddenly came home one day a changed man, with the shadow of something over his life. You see, he had been feeling ill for some time. He had made an appointment with a specialist, and that specialist told him the worst he had been afraid of hearing. Not only were his days numbered, but he must look forward to months of increasing pain, during which, very probably, his reason would be affected. That is the whole story; the rest just flows from it.

“Westmacott hated pain, perhaps more than most of us. He was not capable of facing great endurance, whether in action or in suffering. It didn’t take him long to realize that there was only one thing for him to do — to cut his life short by suicide. He went out and bought a revolver with the necessary ammunition. He shut himself up with it, and found that his hand was that of a physical coward; it would not pull the trigger. He tried long-distance methods, bought some poison, and tried to dose himself with it. Even here he had no better success. He realized, with self-loathing, that he was a man who could not take his own life.

“It is open to you to say, if you like, that something went wrong with his brain after that, but if he had the makings of a lunatic, his was the logic of lunacy. If he could not kill himself, he must make somebody else do it for him. He had not the physique to embark on some arduous adventure: fighting, for example, or a difficult mountain climb. Bravoes cannot be hired nowadays. There was only one way he could think of inducing somebody else to kill him — and that was to hill somebody else! He must get himself condemned to the gallows.

“Well, as you see, he went about that in a painstaking way. He deliberately went and stayed at that appalling hotel because he knew that he would meet there the sort of people he most disliked. He found himself in luck; Smith was there, and Smith was a man who, in his view, would be all the better for extermination. Circumstances favored him, too, in showing him a way to achieve his end. With all that reading of detective stories, you see, he had become fantastically ingenious in his conceptions of crime. He laid a trap for his victim which would make it possible for him to effect the murder by merely turning a tap, and then turning it a second time. There would be no blood, no struggle, no circumstances of violence.

“As it was, something worse happened. By mere accident, the crime of murder reduced itself to that of attempted murder, and penal servitude was no use to him. Rather sheepishly, he had to try and pass it off as a joke; all he had gained was the assurance that when he was next accused of murder, people would be apt to believe it against him. He did not attempt a second murder, which might go as wrong as the first one had gone wrong. He brought Mr. Robinson into existence, and then hurried him out of existence in the way you have all heard; he had got what he wanted.

“And then, of course, the coward came out in him again, and the close prospect of the gallows frightened him more than the remote prospect of a painful death later on. He broke down, and told me the story as I have been telling it to you. And I saved him; but for the life of me I did not know whether I was doing him a benefit in trying to save him. I simply had to proceed by rule of thumb, and behave as a good advocate should.”

“What became of him?” asked McBride.

“Fate stepped in, if you like to call it that. As he left the court, rather dazed with all he had gone through, he stumbled at the edge of the pavement in a crowded street, and a lorry was on the top of him before, I think, he knew what was happening. No, I saw it, and I am certain he didn’t throw himself off the pavement. I don’t believe he could have, either.”

“There’s just one comment your story suggests to me,” objected Penkridge, bitter to the last. “I always thought a lawyer was not allowed to repeat the story told him in confidence by his client?”

“That is why I said that the great gift in the legal profession is imaginativeness. You see, I have been making it all up as I went along.”