The Allingham Casebook

by Margery Allingham

  Young Perry was dismayed. He was late, and he wanted to go. In his panic he floundered on, making matters worse.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” he said. “I was only trying to help. I thought you might be – er – thinking of something else and got a bit muddled.”

  “Oh,” said Mr Brownrigg slowly, facing him with those hot, round eyes in a way which was oddly disturbing. “And of what should I be thinking when I am doing my work, boy?”

  “Of – of Mrs Brownrigg, sir,” stammered the wretched Perry helplessly.

  Henry Brownrigg froze. The blood congealed in his face and his eyes seemed to sink into his head.

  Young Perry, who realised he had said the wrong thing, and who had a natural delicacy which revolted at prying into another’s sorrow, mistook his employer’s symptoms for acute embarrassment.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I was really trying to help. I’m a bit – er – windy myself, sir. Mrs Brownrigg’s been very kind to me. I’m sorry she’s so ill.”

  A great sigh escaped Henry Brownrigg.

  “That’s all right, my boy,” he said, with a gentleness his assistant had never before heard in his tone. “I’m a bit rattled myself, too. You can go now. I’ll see to these few things.”

  Young Perry sped off, happy to be free on such a sunny evening, but also a little awe-stricken by revelation of this tragedy of married love.

  Phyllis hurried down Coe’s Lane, which was a short cut between her own road and Priory Avenue. It was a narrow, paper-baggy little thoroughfare, with a dusty hedge on one side and high tarred fence on the other.

  On this occasion Coe’s Lane appeared to be deserted, but when Phyllis reached the stunted may tree half-way down the hedge a figure stepped out and came to meet her.

  The girl stopped abruptly in the middle of the path. Her cheeks were patched with pink and white and she caught her breath sharply as though afraid of herself.

  Henry Brownrigg himself was unprepared for the savagery of the sudden pain in his breast when he saw her, and the writhing, vicious, mindless passion which checked his breathing and made his eyelids feel sticky and his mouth dry, frightened him a little also.

  They were alone in the lane and he kissed her, putting into his hunched shoulders and greedy lips all the insufferable, senseless longing of the past eighteen days.

  When he released her, she was crying. The big, bright tears which filled her eyes brimmed over on to her cheeks and made her mouth look hot and wet and feverish.

  “Go away,” she said, and her tone was husky and imploring. “Oh, go away – please, please!”

  After the kiss Henry Brownrigg was human again and no longer the fiend-possessed soul in torment he had been while waiting in the lane. Now he could behave normally, for a time at least.

  “All right,” he said, and added so lightly that she was deceived. “Going out with Peter Hill again this afternoon?”

  The girl’s lips trembled, and her eyes were pleading.

  “I’m trying to get free,” she said. “Don’t you see I’m trying to get free from you? It’s not easy.”

  Henry Brownrigg stared at her inquisitively for a full minute. Then he laughed shortly and explosively and strode away back down the lane at a great pace.

  Henry Brownrigg went home. He walked very fast, his round eyes introspective but his step light and purposeful. His thoughts were pleasant. So, Phyllis was there when he wanted her, there for the taking when the obstacle was once removed. That had been his only doubt. Now he was certain of it. The practical part of his project alone remained.

  Small, relatively unimportant things like the new story the mottled ledger would have to tell when the insurance money was in the bank and Millie’s small income was realised and reinvested crowded into his mind, but he brushed them aside impatiently. This afternoon he must be grimly practical. There was delicate work to do.

  When he reached home, Millie had gone over to her mother’s.

  It was also early-closing day and young Perry was far away, bowling wides for the St Anne’s parish cricket club.

  Mr Brownrigg went round the house carefully and made sure that all the doors were locked. The shop shutters were up too, and he knew from careful observation that they permitted no light from within to escape.

  He removed his jacket and donned his working overall, switched on the lights, locked the door between the shop and the living-room, and set to work.

  He knew exactly what he had to do. Millie had been taking five Fender’s pills regularly now for eight days. Each pill contained one sixteenth of a gram of Nativelle’s Digitalin, and the stuff was cumulative. No wonder she had been complaining of biliousness and headaches lately! Millie was a hopeless fool.

  He took out the bottle of Tincturae Digitalin, which had come when young Perry had given him such a scare and looked at it. He wished he had risked it and bought the Quevenne’s or the freshly powdered leaves. He wouldn’t have had all this trouble now.

  Still, he hadn’t taken the chance, and on second thoughts he was glad. As it was, the wholesalers couldn’t possibly notice anything unusual in his order. There could be no inquiry: it meant he need never worry – afterwards.

  He worked feverishly as his thoughts raced on. He knew the dose. All that had been worked out months before when the idea had first occurred to him, and he had gone over this part of the proceedings again and again in his mind so that there could be no mistake, no slip.

  Nine drachms of the tincture had killed a patient with no digitalin already in the system. But then the tincture was notoriously liable to deteriorate. Still, this stuff was fresh; barely six days old, if the wholesalers could be trusted. He had thought of that.

  He prepared his burner and the evaporator. It took a long time. Although he was so practised, his hands were unsteady and clumsy, and the irritant fumes got into his eyes.

  Suddenly he discovered that it was nearly four o’clock. He was panic-stricken. Only two hours and Millie would come back, and there was a lot to be done.

  As the burner did its work his mind moved rapidly. Digitalin was so difficult to trace afterwards; that was the beauty of it. Even the great Tardieu had been unable to state positively if it was digitalin that had been used in the Pommeraise case, and that was after the most exhaustive post mortem and tests on frogs and all that sort of thing.

  Henry Brownrigg’s face split into the semblance of a smile. Old Crupiner was no Tardieu. Crupiner would not advise a post mortem if he could possibly avoid it. He’d give the certificate all right; his mind was prepared for it. Probably he wouldn’t even come and look at the body.

  Millie’s stupid, placid body. Henry Brownrigg put the thought from him. No use getting nervy now.

  A shattering peal on the back door startled him so much that he nearly upset his paraphernalia. For a moment he stood breathing wildly, like a trapped animal, but he pulled himself together in the end, and, changing into his coat, went down to answer the summons.

  He locked the shop door behind him, smoothed his hair, and opened the back door, confident that he looked normal, even ordinary.

  But the small boy with the evening paper did not wait for his Saturday’s payment but rushed away after a single glance at Mr Brownrigg’s face. He was a timid twelve-year-old, however, who often imagined things, and his employer, an older boy, cuffed him for the story and made a mental note to call for the money himself on the Monday night.

  The effect of the incident on Henry Brownrigg was considerable. He went back to his work like a man in a nightmare, and for the rest of the proceedings he kept his mind resolutely on the physical task.

  At last it was done.

  He turned out the burner, scoured the evaporator, measured the toxic dose carefully, adding to it considerably to be on the safe side. After all, one could hardly overdo it; that was the charm of this stuff.

  Then he effectively disposed of the residue and felt much better.

  He had locked the door and changed his coat again
before he noticed the awful thing. A layer of fine dust on the top of one of the bottles first attracted his attention. He removed it with fastidious care. He hated a frowzy shop.

  He had replaced his handkerchief before he saw the showcase ledge and the first glimmering of the dreadful truth percolated his startled mind.

  From the ledge his eyes travelled to the counter-top, to the dummy cartons, to the bottles and jars, to the window shutters, to the very floor.

  Great drops appeared on Henry Brownrigg’s forehead. There was not an inch of surface in the whole shop that was innocent of the thinnest, faintest coat of yellowish dust.

  Digitalin! Digitalin over the whole shop. Digitalin over the whole world! The evidence of his guilt everywhere, damning, inescapable, clear to the first intelligent observer.

  Henry Brownrigg stood very still.

  Gradually his brain, cool at the bidding of the instinct of self-preservation, began to work again. Delay. That was the all-important note. Millie must not take the capsule tonight as he had planned. Not tonight, nor tomorrow. Millie must not die until every trace of that yellow dust had been driven from the shop.

  Swiftly he rearranged his plan. Tonight, he must behave as usual and tomorrow, when Millie went to church, he must clear off the worst of the stuff before young Perry noticed anything.

  Then on Monday he would make an excuse and have the vacuum-cleaning people in. They came with a large machine and he had often said he would have it done.

  They worked quickly; so, on Tuesday…

  Meanwhile, normality. That was the main thing. He must do nothing to alarm Millie or excite her curiosity.

  It did not occur to him that there would be a grim irony in getting Millie to help him dust the shop that evening. But he dismissed the idea. They’d never do it thoroughly in the time.

  He washed in the kitchen and went back into the hall. A step on the stairs above him brought a scream to his throat which he only just succeeded in stifling.

  It was Millie. She had come in the back way without him hearing her, heaven knew how long before.

  “I’ve borrowed a portière curtain from Mother for your bedroom door, Henry,” she said mildly. “You won’t be troubled by the draught up there anymore. It’s such a good thick one. I’ve just been fixing it up. It looks very nice.”

  Henry Brownrigg made a noise which might have meant anything. His nerves had gone to pieces.

  Her next remark was reassuring, however, so reassuring that he almost laughed aloud.

  “Oh, Henry,” she said, “you only gave me four of those pills today, dear. You won’t forget the other one, will you?”

  “Cold ham from the cooked meat shop, cold tinned peas, potato salad and Worcester sauce. What a cook! What a cook I’ve married my dear Millie.”

  Henry Brownrigg derived a vicious pleasure from the clumsy sarcasm, and when Millie’s pale face became wooden he was gratified.

  As he sat at the small table and looked at her he was aware of a curious phenomenon. The woman stood out from the rest of the room’s contents as though she alone was in relief. He saw every line of her features, every fold of her dark cotton dress, as though they were drawn with a thick black pencil.

  Millie was silent. Even her usual flow of banality had dried up, and he was glad of it.

  He found himself regarding her dispassionately, as though she had been a stranger. He did not hate her, he decided. On the contrary, he was prepared to believe that she was quite an estimable, practical person in her own limited fashion. But she was in the way.

  This plump, fatuous creature, not even different in her very obtuseness from many of the other matrons in the town, had committed the crowning impudence of getting in the way of Henry Brownrigg. She, this ridiculous lowly woman, actually stood between Henry Brownrigg and the innermost desires of his heart.

  It was an insight into the state of the chemist’s mind that at that moment nothing impressed him so forcibly as her remarkable audacity.

  Monday, he thought. Monday, and possibly Tuesday, and then…

  Millie cleared away.

  Mr Brownrigg drank his first glass of whisky and soda with a relish he did not often experience. For him the pleasure of his Saturday night libations lay in the odd sensation he experienced when really drunk.

  When Henry Brownrigg was a sack of limp, uninviting humanity to his wife and the rest of the world, to himself he was a quiet, all-powerful ghost, seated, comfortable and protected, in the shell of his body, able to see and comprehend everything, but too mighty and too important to direct any of the drivelling little matters which made up his immediate world.

  On these occasions Henry Brownrigg tasted godhead.

  The evening began like all the others, and by the time there was an inch of amber elixir in the square bottle, Millie and the dust in the shop and Dr Crupiner had become in his mind as ants and ant burdens, while he towered above them, a colossus in mind and power.

  When the final inch had dwindled to a yellow stain in the bottom of the white glass bottle Mr Brownrigg sat very still. In a few minutes now, he would attain the peak of that ascendancy over his fellow mortals when the body, so important to them, was for him literally nothing; not even a dull encumbrance, not even a nerveless covering but a nothingness, an unimportant, unnoticed element.

  When Millie came in at last a pin could have been thrust deep into Mr Brownrigg’s flesh and he would not have noticed it.

  It was when he was in bed, his useless body clad in clean pyjamas, that he noticed that Millie was not behaving quite as usual. She had folded his clothes neatly on the chair at the end of the bed when he saw her peering at something intently.

  He followed her eyes and saw for the first time the new portière curtain. It certainly was a fine affair, a great, thick, heavy plush thing that looked as though it would stop any draught there ever had been.

  He remembered clearly losing his temper with Millie in front of young Perry one day, and, searching in his mind for a suitable excuse, had invented this draught beneath his bedroom door. And there wasn’t one, his ghost remembered; that was the beauty of it. The door fitted tightly in the jamb. But it gave Millie something to worry about.

  Millie went out of the room without extinguishing the lights. He tried to call out to her and only then realised the disadvantages of being a disembodied spirit. He could not speak, of course.

  He was lying puzzled at this obvious flaw in his omnipotence when he heard her go downstairs instead of crossing into her room. He was suddenly furious and would have risen, had it been possible. But in the midst of his anger he remembered something amusing and lay still, inwardly convulsed with secret laughter.

  Soon Millie would be dead. Dead – dead – dead!

  Millie would be stupid no longer. Millie would appal him by her awful mindlessness no more. Millie would be dead.

  She came up again and stepped softly into the room.

  The alcohol was beginning to take its full effect now and he could not move his head. Soon oblivion would come, and he would leave his body and rush off into the exciting darkness, not to return until the dawn.

  He saw only Millie’s head and shoulders when she came into his line of vision. He was annoyed. She still had those thick black lines round her, and there was an absorbed expression upon her face which he remembered seeing before when she was engrossed in some particularly difficult household task.

  She switched out the light and then went over to the far window. He was interested now and saw her pull up the blinds.

  Then to his astonishment he heard the crackle of paper; not an ordinary crackle, but something familiar, something he had heard hundreds and hundreds of times before.

  He placed it suddenly. Sticky paper. His own reel of sticky paper from the shop.

  He was so cross with her for touching it that for some moments he did not wonder what she was doing with it, and it was not until he saw her silhouetted against the second row of panes that he guessed. She was sticki
ng up the window cracks.

  His ghost laughed again. The draught! Silly, stupid Millie trying to stop the draught.

  She pulled down the blinds and turned on the light again. Her face was mild and expressionless as ever, her blue eyes vacant and foolish.

  He saw her go to the dressing table, still moving briskly, as she always did when working about the house.

  Once again, the phenomenon he had noticed at the evening meal became startlingly apparent. He saw her hand and its contents, positively glowing because of its black outline, thrown up in high relief against the white table cover.

  Millie was putting two pieces of paper there: one white with a deckle edge, one blue and familiar.

  Henry Brownrigg’s ghost yammered in its prison. His body ceased to be negligible: it became a coffin, a sealed, leaden coffin suffocating him in its senseless shell. He fought to free himself, to stir that mighty weight, to move.

  Millie knew.

  The white paper with the deckle edge was a letter from Phyllis out of the drawer in the shop, and the blue paper – he remembered it now – the blue paper he had left in the dirty developing bath.

  He re-read his own pencilled words as clearly as if his eye had become possessed of telescopic sight:

  Millie dear, this does explain itself, doesn’t it?

  And then his name, signed with a flourish. He had been so pleased with himself when he had written it.

  He fought wildly. The coffin was made of glass now, thick, heavy glass which would not respond to his greatest effort.

  Millie was hesitating. She had picked up Phyllis’s letter. Now she was reading it again.

  He saw her frown and tear the paper into shreds, thrusting the pieces into the pocket of her cardigan.

  Henry Brownrigg understood. Millie was sorry for Phyllis. For all her obtuseness she had guessed at some of the girl’s piteous infatuation and had decided to keep her out of it.

  What then? Henry Brownrigg writhed inside his inanimate body.