“Oh,” said Nancy Telford in a faintly disappointed tone. “But that’s you as an official, isn’t it? Unofficially, don’t you think there are such things as irresistible impulses, sometimes? I can’t think of an example except kleptomania, but I do think that some people are driven to steal, although all the time they hate doing it and they know quite well it’s all wrong.”
“I never met a really convincing kleptomaniac,” said Sir Clinton with a sceptical smile. “Still, I admit it’s possible. I’ve had one homicidal maniac through my hands, and he simply couldn’t help doing what he did. But then I doubt if he had wits enough left to know he was doing wrong, so that’s not quite your case.”
Nancy Telford shrugged her shoulders almost imperceptibly as though she found Sir Clinton’s views unsatisfactory. Her eyes wandered to a group across the lawn and she seemed to seize the opportunity of leaving her two companions.
“I’m afraid I must run along,” she explained. “I want to catch Miss Dagenham before she moves away.”
And with a rather weary smile she left them and hurried across the turf to join the group she had indicated. Sir Clinton gazed after her with a slightly puzzled expression on his face.
“What’s wrong with that girl?” he demanded, turning to Wendover. “She’s all on edge. One would think her nerves had gone to pieces behind that mask.”
Wendover’s shrug expressed his ignorance.
“I don’t know. She’s changed completely since I saw her last. Pity, that, for she was a very attractive girl, then. Now she looks as brazen as . . .”
“Jezebel?” supplied the Chief Constable.
“I don’t like the way she looked at me, anyhow,” said Wendover. “It isn’t vamping. It’s worse.”
Sir Clinton evidently had no desire to pursue this subject.
“Let’s change over to something fresh, Squire. We’ve had Mrs. Hyson’s troubles and then Mrs. Telford’s, within the last ten minutes. Think of something brighter, will you? Something a bit more suitable to this occasion.”
He glanced past Wendover and saw an acquaintance walking towards them.
“You’re just in time, doctor,” he hailed the newcomer. “Wendover here needs a tonic to buck him up to a level suitable for a wedding-guest. Can you prescribe something that acts like magic in ten seconds or so?”
Dr. Malwood was a tall thin man with slanting eyebrows which gave him a faintly Mephistophelian expression. An old friend of both Sir Clinton and Wendover, he took them as he found them. He glanced at Wendover, up and down, with a twinkle in his eye.
“Something the matter with his adrenal glands, obviously,” he declared solemnly. “Adrenaline deficiency indicated by lack of power to rise to an emergency like a wedding.”
“No specialist ever gets beyond his own specialty,” complained Wendover. “If you’d been a surgeon, you’d have wanted to remove my liver, most likely, to cheer me up. A nose-and-throat sharp would have sworn I’d adenoids and tonsil trouble. And a chiropodist would have had my boot off by this time, looking for ingrowing toe-nails. With you, Malwood, of course it’s glands, glands, glands, all the time.”
“Of course,” the doctor confirmed, only half-ironically. “Glands are the most important factor of all, so far as humanity is concerned. The proof is: I make my living out of them. And think how much poorer the world would be if it lost me!”
“I’ve often thought the same about criminals,” said the Chief Constable with equal seriousness. “If it weren’t for them, my livelihood would be gone. We can shake hands, Malwood. We’re both too valuable to lose, and we’d be the first to admit it. Luckily our fields don’t overlap.”
“Don’t be so sure about that,” warned the doctor, with a cock of his eyebrows. “Suppose Wendover suffered from an excess production of adrenaline, it might key him up to the pitch of homicide, and then he’d be one of your patients, unless he managed to dispose of the body satisfactorily.”
“That sounds interesting,” admitted Sir Clinton. “Tell us some more about these things.”
“Well, take one you’re sure to have heard about: the thyroid gland. If a child’s born with a defective thyroid, it turns into a cretin. If the thyroid in a normal person happens to shrivel up during adult life, the patient gets dull, apathetic, slow-witted, and his appearance alters. He grows puffy about the eyes, his hair falls out, and premature senility comes on. It’s a case of myxœdema. On the other hand, if you get overgrowth of the thyroid, the patient is often tall, thin, with rather prominent eyes. The women in Rossetti’s pictures are something of the sort. They may be literary, or musical, and they’re generally intelligent above the average; but temperamentally they’re always emotional and unstable. Removal of some of the thyroid sometimes brings them back to a more normal type.”
“Genius cured by surgical operation, eh?” commented Sir Clinton.
“Something of the kind, if you put it so,” the doctor agreed. “Of course, it isn’t the gland itself that produces these changes. It’s some stuff which the gland secretes and passes into the blood stream.”
“Hormones, they call them, don’t they?” asked Sir Clinton. “But are they real stuffs, or just some of these hypothetical affairs that you medicals conjure up when you don’t really know what’s what?”
“Oh, they’re real enough,” Malwood declared. “Take adrenaline, for instance. It’s actually been synthesised and you can buy it if you want to. There’s more there than just mumbo-jumbo talk, you’ll admit? And the chemical people are pushing along with the structures of some others, so that very likely they’ll be on the market in due course.”
“Tell us some more,” Wendover demanded.
Dr. Malwood considered for a moment before complying.
“I don’t discuss my own patients,” he pointed out, “but there’s no harm telling you about a case that fell into the hands of a fellow specialist in my line. The patient was a girl, round about twenty, very attractive, quite feminine, and engaged to a decent young man. Then, in a very short time, she changed completely. She broke off her engagement — couldn’t stand male endearments. Instead, she took to frequenting young girls, putting her arm round them, kissing them eagerly and so on. Finally she showed signs of an incipient moustache.”
“That’s pretty ghastly,” Wendover interrupted.
“It’s all right. The story ends as happily as a fairy tale,” Malwood assured him with a grin. “My colleague diagnosed trouble in the suprarenals and suggested an operation to find out the truth. They operated, found a tumor pressing on the suprarenal glands, and removed it. The girl changed completely after that. All these awkward pseudo-masculine characteristics disappeared. She lost her taste for girls. The hair on her lip died away. And the last I heard, she was engaged again and as keen on her old fiancé as anyone could wish.”
“Sounds like a miracle,” commented Wendover, rather suspiciously. “You’re not making this up?”
“Not a bit of it. The suprarenal glands secrete a number of hormones which have influences on one’s sexual characteristics. If the normal balance of secretion is upset, all sorts of weird things may happen. If I found a man suddenly going off the rails with women, I’d be inclined to suspect overproduction of one hormone. If he turned into a pansy boy, I’d suspect that he wasn’t secreting enough of it. And conversely, if a girl begins to show masculine leanings, then one thinks immediately that there’s something disturbing the normal balance of secretion and that the wrong hormone’s getting the upper hand. And in the case I was telling you about, it was the pressure of the growing tumor on the glands that upset them and caused them to diverge from normal production.”
“That all sounds damned unpleasant, if one can’t guarantee that one’s own glands will attend strictly to business,” said Wendover thoughtfully. “But I suppose, if they get the length of synthesising these stuffs, you’ll be able to inject enough to make up for deficiencies and keep the balance right?”
“It’s a bit more compl
icated than that,” said Dr. Malwood, doubtfully. “If you trace the thing back, you come to the pituitary gland. Its secretions act on the suprarenals, and they in turn influence the Graafian follicles, probably. The whole affair’s more complex than it looks at first sight.”
“In the case of overproduction, can’t you remove some of the gland by operation and so cut down the output?” asked Sir Clinton.
“In some cases you might. But the pituitary’s awkwardly placed and most people wouldn’t thank you for the job of operating on it. There’s a new method coming in which may help.”
“What’s that?” asked Wendover.
“X ray.”
“But they’ve been using X rays for long enough, haven’t they?”
“Yes, but this new affair gives tremendous penetrating power. As a matter of fact, I think I’ve got the second outfit in this country. The first one was installed in a London hospital. That’s the advantage of a private income, one can afford toys even if they’re costly. And this one is very much so.”
“What’s it like?” asked Sir Clinton.
“Well, the X-ray tube itself is twenty feet long, and the drop in potential between the electrodes is about a million volts. You can imagine the acceleration one gets on the electrons as they pass from the cathode to the target under forces like that. Terrific. As a result, one gets an X ray of tremendous penetrating power. It seems to go clean through superficial tissue without damaging it, so that one can get right down with full effectiveness to deeper-seated tissues, and handle them with short exposures. In the old technique, the trouble was that one had to give much longer exposures and the superficial tissues got badly damaged in the process. Now we put the patient in a kind of lead coffin with an orifice just over the spot we want to attack. Then everyone clears out, the tube is switched on for the exposure, and we switch off before coming back. No one could stay in the place, unprotected, while the thing’s working. Even the walls have to be specially built of barium-containing bricks, sheeted with lead plate. I’ll let you see the thing if you come up to my place sometime. It’s well worth having a look at.”
“Thanks, I shall, when it suits you. And with this affair you reckon on practically blotting out a certain amount of a gland and so knocking it out of action while leaving the remainder intact to carry on? Is that the idea?”
“More or less. If it works out properly, you can see it would enable us to deal with excess production; and if the synthetic chemists can turn out these hormones in the laboratory we shall be able to make up deficiencies by injection. Between the two, it ought to be possible to produce something like the normal balance even in cases where the secretion has gone wrong. It’ll be a blessing to some people, I can tell you.”
“You have your apparatus working?”
“Oh, yes, it’s a going concern. In fact, I’ve got a couple of patients for it just now, and I expect to have another later on.”
“I know your professional secrecy,” Sir Clinton said at once, noticing a slight hesitation in the doctor’s tone as he gave this last information. “We’ll curb our curiosity, Malwood. By the way, Squire, you remember that we got landed with one of these glands in one of my affairs — that racket at your boathouse? It was a case of a persistent thymus gland — if I’ve got the name right — producing what you medicals call status lymphaticus. Have you any stop-press news about the thymus gland, Malwood?”
The doctor shook his head.
“You’ll have to call again the day after tomorrow, if you want to know about that,” he admitted. “We haven’t got its functions clear yet. It’s fairly large in childhood, then about the age of fourteen it shrivels up in normal cases, and by the time a person comes to maturity it almost disappears in the main run of people. That suggests that it has something to do with the development of people up to maturity. But that’s no more than a guess.”
“So there’s still more to come?” said Sir Clinton in mock horror. “If you medicals are allowed to monger about with these new things it’s evidently going to be the end of free-will and all the rest of it. I can see that the next thing in Air Raid Protection stunts will be to serve out adrenaline to the population, so as to brace up their nerves in the emergency. And I suppose the eugenists will seize on that stuff — eucortone you called it — to sterilise all undesirable females by making them masculine. It’ll be a funny world, if ever you medicine men get control.”
“Oh, we’ve hardly started yet,” said Malwood, with a laugh. “I haven’t mentioned Steinach’s operation. Tie up a duct and men are made years younger, apparently. They grow dark hair afresh, get back their hearing and eyesight if they’ve failed a bit, and generally renew their youth like the eagle. It’s all very rummy and amusing.”
“All this so-called progressiveness seems to be leading straight to damnation, if you ask me,” Wendover complained. “I’m not ashamed to be a Conservative, Malwood. Can’t you discover some gland that’ll bring us back to the old days when there was some sort of security in the world?”
“Out of my line,” the doctor declared. “I’m a specialist in the human body, not the body politic. Though I suspect there are a lot of analogies between the two, if you have the brains to look for them.”
“I’ll make you a present of one,” said Wendover. “Don’t bacteria excrete poisonous stuffs they call toxins, and when these toxins get into the blood stream they produce all sorts of ill-effects in the body as a whole? Well, that seems to me a pretty fair parallel to the trouble that’s going about this district — this poisonous creature who’s deluging the neighbourhood with anonymous letters. They’re toxins in the body politic. And from all I’ve heard, they’re doing a fair amount of damage. Somebody told me they’ve led to the break-off of at least one engagement; and no one knows how much other harm they may have done. Does my parallel fit?”
“I’ve heard about them,” Malwood admitted. “But they seem to me more in Driffield’s department than mine.”
“Hardly my department either,” the Chief Constable pointed out. “The Post Office organisation has a special branch to deal with that kind of thing, and we come in only if they ask for our help. If they can clear the thing up themselves, they pass their results to us and we handle the prosecution.”
“Well, then, since you’re not responsible, there’s no harm in asking what you think about it,” Malwood pointed out. “What kind of person is likely to take that line?”
“Someone with a general grievance, I’d say. Probably a miserable devil with an inferiority complex who finds compensation in making other people uncomfortable. It may start by his trying to pay off some specific score against an individual. Then, if he’s not spotted, he begins to feel he’s a bit of a power, through the trouble he can stir up. And so he launches out into a wider circle with his stuff.”
“But half the time he must misfire,” objected Malwood. “Unless people talk about the letters they get, he’ll never know if he’s stirred them up or not. Where’s his satisfaction then?”
“I’ll take a leaf out of Wendover’s book, and give you a parallel,” Sir Clinton said. “Ever hear of Neil Cream the poisoner? Wendover will see the point.”
“ I remember,” Wendover confirmed. “He was hanged in the early nineties after several murders. He used to scrape acquaintance with poor drabs and persuade them to take ‘long pills.’ He posed as a friendly doctor, anxious to cure the girl of spots on her face or something of the sort. If she swallowed the ‘long pill’ she died of a huge overdose of strychnine — a horrible death.”
“You’ve left out the point I wanted, Wendover,” Sir Clinton explained. “Cream never saw one of his victims die. He left them before the pangs came on; and while the poor creatures were writhing in their death-agonies, he was walking the streets, gloating over the anguish they were suffering. To my mind, he’s one of the most sinister figures in the murderers’ gallery. He had no grudge against his victims, he had nothing material to gain by doing them to death. But he got a
tremendous kick out of imagining every detail of the torments he brought on them. That was where he got his enjoyment. Pure imagination, building on what he knew would come of his ‘long pills.’ Well, Malwood, can’t you guess that a poison-pen expert gets the same kind of kick from the letters he sends out? He can sit quietly at home and gloat over the effect that his latest effort is having. ‘Aha! that fellow believed in his girl? And what’s he feeling like, now that I’ve sent him this stinger about her? I bet I’ve brought his little castle about his ears for him.’ The poison-pen pests are all of a piece with Neil Cream in intention. It’s merely a matter of degree.”
Malwood nodded seriously.
“I never heard it put exactly like that before,” he said, “but it sounds likely enough. Ugh! We get some queer enough cases in my line, but one’s sorry for them. I can’t imagine myself being sorry for a person of the Neil Cream type, or a poison-pen pest, either, although obviously they’re both gone in the brain department. Some things are over the score, even to a pathologist.”
“There’s another analogy between these physical and moral poisoners,” Sir Clinton went on. “They get a feeling of power out of what they do. There was a Bavarian woman, Zwanziger, who came almost to worship arsenic because by its agency she felt she could break through every restraint, gratify any inclination, and determine the very existence of her neighbours. She called it her truest friend. I can quite imagine that your anonymous letter writer has the same kindly feeling for his fountain pen. It’s his instrument of power, like Zwanziger’s arsenic.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Malwood agreed. “Only, our local pest doesn’t use a fountain pen, or any other kind, I’m told. He cuts words out of the morning newspaper and gums them on to sheets of paper to make his pleasant messages.”
Sir Clinton had caught sight of Nancy Telford, some distance away, talking eagerly to someone he had not noticed before.
Murder Will Speak Page 8
