Reply Paid (19 page)

“Well,” I countered, sitting back in my chair and trying to feel judicial, “I always say when explaining my method that there is nothing high-flown or underhand about it. It is merely an expert's way of handling evidence. Anyone could learn it who gave the time. We specialists are simply time-savers. Time is money and we save it for you—on a percentage basis.” I smiled at my little joke. He didn't, but listened with continued care. “Now, of course,” and here I felt I was properly protecting myself, “there's no such thing as certainty in deduction. There's no such thing as certainty in all science. Because there isn't strict causality, strict necessity, anywhere that we can find—only probabilities either high or low.” Anyhow, that was true enough. Now to underline my moral. “So I can't say, ‘This is the one and only possible interpretation.' I can only say, ‘Here, you see, is certainly a reading which is self-consistent, which when read in this way gives sense, gives a direction.'” I stopped again. He was no longer looking at me but was staring at the floor.

“Maybe,” he said aloud to himself. “There is that trail, I've heard.” Then, rousing himself and quite clearly aware that he had spoken aloud inadvertently, he added, “Well, I don't quarrel with your method—don't grudge you your big fee. But just for your information I'd like you to know I don't think you've done the trick.”

Naturally he was resentful at having had to pay when he didn't want to, so I let that pass. As to his opinion of my reading, well, I knew the impression it had made on two other concerned inquirers. They'd dismissed it even more summarily. Anyhow, I was well quit of such a thorny subject. I'd had very good fortune and had survived, I suppose, very considerable risks. Two of the men on the same trail had paid me handsomely; one, I was told, had tried to put me out of the way; but now that he had failed I was safe. Mr. Mycroft was on his trail in town—and I suppose I must look upon my repayment to Mr. Mycroft of his original payment to me as a fee for his present services. If, after all, Intil was not in town, but had gone back into the desert, then this my latest client would track him there.

It looked as though all the lines were neatly canceling each other out. The way things had resulted was remarkably in my favor. I rose. “Then the matter must stand until you have proved out my deduction.” I felt quite safe and certain that this client would never darken my door again.

“All right,” he said absently, and, still absorbed in his own notions, he slouched out of the office. Yes, the interview satisfied me. I felt that I had won back to my natural position and in that position had carried off things in a way which was professionally creditable and which closed the whole question. I had been a good businessman dealing with difficult clients, sending them off when things might have become ugly and retaining very adequate fees.

I buzzed for Miss Delamere. Yes, she too agreed with my judgment. I could see it. She even removed the semaphore cigarette so she didn't have to speak out of the other corner of her mouth, as she handed me the letters for signing and asked whether I would approve some small immaterial changes she had made in a few of them. Usually I don't like to have my style modified. “The style is the man,” and if wave and curl are admired in hair, why not a few convolutions in composition? Of course style can be too “kinky,” like some hair, and then—as we were after the Euphuists—one may be glad of a “de-kinking” and everything brushed back, slick and smooth. But that's only one style. My style, like my hair, has a distinct and I believe, a becoming natural wave. Miss Delamere had adopted the patent-leather poll; her hair was a tight glossy mat. So I suppose she was all in favor of tight-cut sentences. What made me realize that she saw I had been behaving “adequately” (it was her highest word of praise because it was so meiosic; so, though long, it had always to be used and, of course, telescoped into “adqualy”) was the fact that she had actually approved of several parenthetic clauses which, on ordinary days, she certainly would have cut to pieces and left them, instead of a sinuous slope of style, a series of little jolting steps.

The day, then, ended well and the next flowed as easily. The rapids, I believed, were past and quiet stretches lay ahead. Even Mr. Mycroft's visit I looked forward to with a conviction that it would simply close, safely and fast, an incident which, incidentally, might never have been quite so melodramatic as he assumed. After all, I believed what I'd said to Kerson: Every mystery is capable of several interpretations. Indeed, I often think of writing myself a detective mystery wherein, starting with the conventional corpse, the stage-property well-stabbed body, it is “proved” that no less than three different people did it and also that it was a suicide or at least a
felo de se
. Yes, my spirits were good; my heart where it ought to be, not in my boots or my mouth but safely locked in my own breast doing its quiet business. My head was remarkably clear.

Chapter X

On the morning of the fourth day I, then, gave my orders briskly. “We'll go through the mail,” I said, “and get it settled. When Mr. Mycroft calls, send him in.” And we had everything practically in order when the doorbell of the outer office sounded. Miss Delamere swept out like a well-shaped wave—not a billow, still less a breaker, a neat swell—and swept back again with, in her ripple, like a large piece of flotsam, Mr. Mycroft. And he grounded down on the shingle of my foreshore in perfect character.

“It turned out exactly as I calculated,” was his opening, which I might have written out for him and handed to him to read as he entered. But I wasn't to be ruffled. One reaction only did I allow myself, and it was, I felt, a legitimate one. If he knew everything, or, poor, dear old man, enjoyed thinking that he did, why then, in the first case (as he would say, ticking off the points on his long fingers and keeping a stern eye on one for fear of inattention), there was no need to tell him of my visitor of two days ago, or, in the second, it would be unkind.

“I'm glad,” I said with attentive interest.

“You have reason to be,” was, of course, his counter. “Otherwise you'd have had to come into court to enforce what you rightly said we should see to, proper care for the public safety.” He was certainly going to start on my patience early. But I was resolved not to interrupt but to get through with it all and have it over in one sitting, as at the dentist's.

“Your supposition about the envelopes was, I suppose, correct?”

“You could hardly have any doubt about that. The proof I had to bring you was in two further parts. It is now complete. I will not detain you a moment more than can be helped. I am sure you will see the significance of the brief message I have come to bring you. I found the small hotel where Intil was living. He was so sure of his method (and he might well be) that he didn't trouble to disguise himself, though he was, in the hotel register, under another name—I was a little amused that he should have chosen the name Kerson—the trader, you recall—whether out of lack of inventiveness or for some other reason, I can't say.”

I felt a small inner start at that, but felt also that I showed no sign of it. And anyhow, Mr. Mycroft was so interested in uncoiling his own fine, highly-prized web that I was merely audience kept in waiting to applaud the end.

“I learned, when I had been able to make a few indirect inquiries, that he was already confined to his bed with a chill. Yes, a case of ‘acute influenza.' He had had a doctor called in. As he was unable to leave his room, there was no reason why I should not be in the hotel lobby. It was quite easy to be leaving the hotel as the doctor came out and to ask whether I might share his cab. I know enough of medicine, as you know, to be able to pass for a doctor, said I had business with Intil (and this, as you know, is strictly true), said, whether it was a coincidence or no, another person whom I had been seeing on business had also gone down with the same sort of acute attack. The doctor, a nice, kindly fellow, as most are, said he didn't like the look of the patient. ‘I expect,' he said, ‘it's one of those acute infections which seem to be the more deadly the less they are widely infectious. So I'm not raising an alarm and having him moved yet. That might spoil his chances. Keep a patient still, that is my experience. With sulphanilamide he may snap out of it in thirty-six hours.'”

Mr. Mycroft paused. “You will have surmised the rest. The patient did snap out, or perhaps one ought to say, was snapped out: the biter bit.”

“But—” I said.

“Yes, you see what happened. It has a sort of inevitability, what the Greeks called ‘irony' about it. I don't think, and they didn't, that it is chance. Indeed, as I've told you, I call it the basic element, Justice
per se
. The Greeks personified it as Ananke. It is in the nature of things, so deep that if you just splash about on the surface”—I thought his eye rested on me for a moment in a coldly appraising way—“you may never strike on it. But dive down deep enough and you will. If you have dived, as some of us have, just to detect as far as we can the basis of things, then you come up knowing that there is an adamant foundation below the tides, rising up, barring certain low paths and round which the sharpest of sharks cannot dive. If you dive simply as a shark to rip your fellow fish, well, you strike that unseen rock and split your skull. It is always taking place. I've seen it too often now to doubt. It looks as though all the cunning a murderer uses actually makes him blind to quite obvious things and, in the end, he seems actually to catch himself.

“All that Intil did was to repeat, at his last move, the final mistake of those classical poisoners, the Borgias, father and son. They made ready everything. Father (who, of course, is also father of Christendom, Pope Alexander VI, ‘Christ's vicar on earth,' and also king of that comfortable little country, the Papal States) still is not contented. Son Caesar has, naturally with that name, also his dreams of bettering the family fortunes. Poison has already served them handsomely. But until now it has been piecemeal work—a brother there, a fellow cardinal here. Now is the time for a grand slam—invite all one's obstacles (one is above having enemies) to a fine dinner. After which there would be an outbreak of colic and the field would have been cleared of all rivals. Everything went according to plan. The required guests accepted, and, what was more, arrived. The supply of wine for them and the supply of wine for their hosts were carefully distinguished. Yet, somehow, a mistake was made. The guests got the host's own wine and the hosts got, and unknowingly drank, the wine prepared for their invited victims.

“You see, Intil acted precisely like the Borgias. He prepares carefully a poisoned envelope for you and he has with it a normal, untreated one. Of course, only under the microscope would the poisoned one be distinguishable from the untreated one. He had to leave the gum which he had moistened when tincturing it with the anthrax culture, to dry. Perhaps then he made his mistake, when he was writing that careful little note which was to provoke you to reply. Anyhow, he took up one envelope and on it wrote his own name and address. Then he took the second and on this he wrote your name and address. He slipped his note and the envelope—no doubt very gingerly—into the envelope bearing now your name, and then, everything settled, he relaxes and licks the flap, seals it down, and mails it.”

Yes, that, undoubtedly, was what had happened and why I was alive. All my old upset returned on me. How ghastly! I could now—I who a moment before had been serene, yes, nearly hard-boiled—hardly feel safe. I wanted to ask if I was really secure. But I knew Mr. Mycroft would be contemptuous of such natural self-concern and he'd also take it as a reflection on his own omniscience—for hadn't he ruled pontifically that I was secure? Well, the best thing I could do would be to make an indirect inquiry.

“Intil?” I questioned. “Is he …?”

“Yes, he died last night—just like Miss Brown.”

Whether it was relief, I don't know; I think it may have been. “But,” I said, “you can't leave highly infectious corpses about like that?”

“I'm glad,” he remarked dryly, “that you are as actively concerned about the public health as you were over the public safety. Neither of these cases (and I don't recall your making a similar inquiry about the first when you learned the cause of that fatality)—neither of these bodies is dangerous if handled with the due precautions which are taken in all cases of death by a rapid and acute infection. Why? Well, to be precise, this was Intil's knowledge and intention—a very important part of his plan. If you will recall, I told you that he knew enough of anthrax to know that in cases where there is no natural resistance—and we have none, as do animals among whom the disease is common—the bubo, the anthrax, would not rise before the patient is dead. I believe that if it has not risen and there is no lesion, the dead body, if treated with the adequate disinfectants used in all mortuary service, can be handled with immunity.”

“But his things,” I went on. “His beastly little collection of poisoned gums and so on?”

“That, too, was easily dealt with. He evidently had no relatives, at least near about—a lone wolf. I told the doctor that I was probably the only person who knew much about him; I had wanted to see him about some prospecting he had been doing. As the doctor and I had got on well, he asked me, if I didn't mind, to come into the bedroom where the body was lying just after death. I had stayed about in the lobby all the time, having taken a room in the hotel. Before calling the authorities he and I arranged the body—queer, that, the wish to fold a coat hastily thrown off. As I helped him (no, we took sufficient precautions against infection), my knee struck against the jacket which the dead man had taken off when he undressed for the last time and which he had hung on the back of a chair which he had drawn close to his bedside. Something quite large and hard was in the pocket. As the doctor turned to pull down the window shades, I slipped the object, a black metal box, into my coat. My guess was right.