The Perfect Murder

by Ruskin Bond

  Mr Sleuth spoke very pettishly, with far more heat than he was wont to speak; but Mrs Bunting sympathized with him. She had always suspected those slot-machines to be as dishonest as if they were human. It was dreadful, the way they swallowed up the shillings!

  As if he were divining her thoughts, Mr Sleuth, walking forward, stared up at the kitchen slot-machine. ‘Is it nearly full?’ he asked abruptly. ‘I expect my experiment will take some time, Mrs Bunting.’

  ‘Oh, no, sir; there’s plenty of room for shillings there still. We don’t use our stove as much as you do yours, sir. I’m never in the kitchen a minute longer than I can help in this cold weather.’

  And then, with him preceding her, Mrs Bunting and her lodger made a slow progress to the ground floor. There Mr Sleuth courteously bade his landlady goodnight, and proceeded upstairs to his own apartment.

  Mrs Bunting again went down into her kitchen, again she lit the stove, and again she cooked the toasted cheese. But she felt unnerved, afraid of she knew not what. The place seemed to her alive with alien presences, and once she caught herself listening, which was absurd, for of course she could not hope to hear what her lodger was doing two, if not three, flights upstairs. She had never been able to discover what Mr Sleuth’s experiments really were; all she knew was that they required a very high degree of heat.

  The Buntings went to bed early that night. But Mrs Bunting intended to stay awake. She wanted to know at what hour of the night her lodger would come down into the kitchen, and, above all, she was anxious as to how long he would stay there. But she had had a long day, and presently she fell asleep.

  The church clock hard by struck two in the morning, and suddenly Mrs Bunting awoke. She felt sharply annoyed with herself. How could she have dropped off like that? Mr Sleuth must have been down and up again hours ago.

  Then, gradually, she became aware of a faint acrid odour; elusive, almost intangible, it yet seemed to encompass her and the snoring man by her side almost as a vapour might have clone.

  Mrs Bunting sat up in bed and sniffed; and then, in spite of the cold, she quietly crept out of the nice, warm bedclothes and crawled along to the bottom of the bed. There Mr Sleuth’s landlady did a very curious thing; she leaned over the brass rail and put her face close to the hinge of the door. Yes, it was from there that this strange, horrible odour was coming; the smell must be very strong in the passage. Mrs Bunting thought she knew now what became of those suits of clothes of Mr Sleuth’s that disappeared.

  As she crept back, shivering, under the bedclothes, she longed to give her sleeping husband a good shake, and in fancy she heard herself saying: ‘Bunting, get up! There is something strange going on downstairs that we ought to know about.’

  But Mr Sleuth’s landlady, as she lay by her husband’s side, listening with painful intentness, knew very well that she would do nothing of the sort. The lodger had a right to destroy his clothes by burning if the fancy took him. What if he did make a certain amount of mess, a certain amount of smell, in her nice kitchen? Was he not—was he not such a good lodger! If they did anything to upset him, where could they ever hope to get another like him?

  Three o’clock struck before Mrs Bunting heard slow, heavy steps creaking up her kitchen stairs. But Mr Sleuth did not go straight up to his own quarters, as she expected him to do. Instead, he went to the front door, and, opening it, put it on the chain. At the end of ten minutes or so he closed the front door, and by that time Mrs Bunting had divined why the lodger had behaved in this strange fashion—it must have been to get the strong acrid smell of burning wool out of the passage. But Mrs Bunting felt as if she herself would never get rid of the horrible odour. She felt herself to be all smell.

  At last the unhappy woman fell into a deep, troubled sleep; and then she dreamed a most terrible and unnatural dream; hoarse voices seemed to be shouting in her ear, ‘Orrible murder off the Edgeware Road!’  Then three words, indistinctly uttered, followed by ‘—at his work again! Awful details!’

  Even in her dream Mrs Bunting felt angered and impatient; she knew so well why she was being disturbed by this horrid nightmare. It was because of Bunting—Bunting, who insisted on talking to her of those frightful murders, in which only morbid, vulgar-minded people took any interest. Why, even now, in her dream, she could hear her husband speaking to her about it.

  ‘Ellen’—so she heard Bunting say in her ear—‘Ellen, my dear, I am just going to get up to get a paper. It’s after seven o’clock.’

  Mrs Bunting sat up in bed. The shouting, nay, worse, the sound of tramping, hurrying feet smote on her ears. It had been no nightmare, then, but something infinitely worse—reality. Why couldn’t Bunting have lain quietly in bed awhile longer, and let his poor wife go on dreaming? The most awful dream would have been easier to bear than this awakening.

  She heard her husband go to the front door, and, as he bought the paper, exchange a few excited words with the newspaper boy. Then he came back and began silently moving about the room.

  ‘Well!’ she cried. ‘Why don’t you tell me about it?’

  ‘I thought you’d rather not hear.’

  ‘Of course I like to know what happens close to our own front door!’ she snapped out.

  And then he read out a piece of the newspaper—only a few lines, after all—telling in brief, unemotional language that the body of a woman, apparently done to death in a peculiarly atrocious fashion some hours before, had been found in a passage leading to a disused warehouse off the Marylebone Road.

  ‘It serves that sort of hussy right!’ was Mrs Bunting’s only comment.

  When Mrs Bunting went down into the kitchen, everything there looked just as she had left it, and there was no trace of the acrid smell she had expected to find there. Instead, the cavernous whitewashed room was full of fog, and she noticed that, though the shutters were bolted and barred as she had left them, the windows behind them had been widely opened to the air. She, of course, had left them shut.

  She stooped and flung open the oven door of her gas-stove. Yes, it was as she had expected; a fierce heat had been generated there since she had last used the oven, and a mass of black, gluey soot had fallen through to the stone floor below.

  Mrs Bunting took the ham and eggs that she had bought the previous day for her own and Bunting’s breakfast, and broiled them over the gas-ring in their sitting-room. Her husband watched her in surprised silence. She had never done such a thing before.

  ‘I couldn’t stay down there,’ she said, ‘it was so cold and foggy. I thought I’d make breakfast up here, just for today.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said kindly; ‘that’s quite right, Ellen. I think you’ve done quite right, my dear.’

  But, when it came to the point, his wife could not eat any of the nice breakfast she had got ready; she only had another cup of tea.

  ‘Are you ill?’ Bunting asked solicitously.

  ‘No,’ she said shortly; ‘of course I’m not ill. Don’t be silly! The thought of that horrible thing happening so close by has upset me. Just hark to them, now!’

  Through their closed windows penetrated the sound of scurrying feet and loud, ribald laughter. A crowd, nay, a mob, hastened to and from the scene of the murder.

  Mrs Bunting made her husband lock the front gate. ‘I don’t want any of those ghouls in here!’ she exclaimed angrily. And then, ‘What a lot of idle people there must be in the world,’ she said.

  The coming and going went on all day. Mrs Bunting stayed indoors; Bunting went out. After all, the ex-butler was human—it was natural that he should feel thrilled and excited. All their neighbours were the same. His wife wasn’t reasonable about such things. She quarrelled with him when he didn’t tell her anything, and yet he was sure she would have been angry with him if he had said very much about it.

  The lodger’s bell rang about two o’clock, and Mrs Bunting prepared the simple luncheon that was also his breakfast. As she rested the tray a minute on the drawing-room floor landing, she heard
Mr Sleuth’s high, quavering voice reading aloud the words:

  ‘She saith to him, Stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant. But he knoweth not that the dead are there; and that her guests are in the depths of hell.’

  The landlady turned the handle of the door and walked in with the tray. Mr Sleuth was sitting close by the window, and Mrs Bunting’s Bible lay open before him. As she came in he hastily closed the Bible and looked down at the crowd walking along the Marylebone Road.

  ‘There seem a great many people out today,’ he observed, without looking round.

  ‘Yes, sir, there do.’ Mrs Bunting said nothing more, and offered no other explanation; and the lodger, as he at last turned to his landlady, smiled pleasantly. He had acquired a great liking and respect for this well-behaved, taciturn woman; she was the first person for whom he had felt any such feeling for many years past.

  He took a half sovereign out of his waistcoat pocket; Mrs Bunting noticed that it was not the same waistcoat Mr Sleuth had been wearing the day before. ‘Will you please accept this half sovereign for the use of your kitchen last night?’ he said. ‘I made as little mess as I could, but I was carrying on a rather elaborate experiment.’

  She held out her hand, hesitated, and then took the coin. As she walked down the stairs, the winter sun, a yellow ball hanging in the smoky sky, glinted in on Mrs Bunting, and lent blood-red gleams, or so it seemed to her, to the piece of gold she was holding in her hand.

  It was a very cold night—so cold, so windy, so snow-laden the atmosphere, that every one who could do so stayed indoors. Bunting, however, was on his way home from what had proved a very pleasant job; he had been acting as waiter at a young lady’s birthday party, and a remarkable piece of luck had come his way. The young lady had come into a fortune that day, and she had had the gracious, the surprising thought of presenting each of the hired waiters with a sovereign.

  This birthday treat had put him in mind of another birthday. His daughter Daisy would be eighteen the following Saturday. Why shouldn’t he send her a postal order for half a sovereign, so that she might come up and spend her birthday in London?

  Having Daisy for three or four days would cheer up Ellen. Mr Bunting, slackening his footsteps, began to think with puzzled concern of how queer his wife had seemed lately. She had become so nervous, so ‘jumpy,’ that he didn’t know what to make of her sometimes. She had never been a really good-tempered woman, your capable, self-respecting woman seldom is—but she had never been like what she was now. Of late she sometimes got quite hysterical; he had let fall a sharp word to her the other day, and she had sat down on a chair, thrown her black apron over her face, and burst out sobbing violently.

  During the last ten days Ellen had taken to talking in her sleep. ‘No, no, no!’ she had cried out, only the night before. ‘It isn’t true! I won’t have it said! It’s a lie!’ And there had been a wail of horrible fear and revolt in her unusually quiet, mincing voice. Yes, it would certainly be a good thing for her to have Daisy’s company for a bit. Whew! It was cold; and Bunting had stupidly forgotten his gloves. He put his hands in his pockets to keep them warm.

  Suddenly he became aware that Mr Sleuth, the lodger who seemed to have ‘turned their luck’, as it were, was walking along on the opposite side of the solitary street.

  Mr Sleuth’s tall, thin figure was rather bowed, his head bent toward the ground. His right arm was thrust into his long Inverness cape; the other occasionally sawed the air, doubtless in order to help him keep warm. He was walking rather quickly. It was clear that he had not yet become aware of the proximity of his landlord.

  Bunting felt pleased to see his lodger; it increased his feeling of general satisfaction. Strange, was it not, that that odd, peculiar-looking figure should have made all the difference to his (Bunting’s) and Mrs Bunting’s happiness and comfort in life?

  Naturally, Bunting saw far less of the lodger than did Mrs Bunting. Their gentleman had made it very clear that he did not like either the husband or wife to come up to his rooms without being definitely asked to do so, and Bunting had been up there only once since Mr Sleuth’s arrival five weeks before. This seemed to be a good opportunity for a little genial conversation.

  Bunting, still an active man for his years, crossed the road, and, stepping briskly forward, tried to overtake Mr Sleuth; but the more he hurried, the more the other hastened, and that without even turning to see whose steps he heard echoing behind him on the now freezing pavement.

  Mr Sleuth’s own footsteps were quite inaudible—an odd circumstance, when you came to think of it, as Bunting did think of it later, lying awake by Ellen’s side in the pitch-darkness. What it meant was, of course, that the lodger had rubber soles on his shoes.

  The two men, the pursued and the pursuer, at last turned into the Marylebone Road. They were now within a hundred yards of home; and so, plucking up courage, Bunting called out, his voice echoing freshly on the still air:

  ‘Mr Sleuth, sir! Mr Sleuth!’

  The lodger stopped and turned round. He had been walking so quickly, and he was in so poor a physical condition, that the sweat was pouring down his face.

  ‘Ah! So it’s you, Mr Bunting? I heard footsteps behind me, and I hurried on. I wish I’d known that it was only you; there are so many queer characters about at night in London.’

  ‘Not on a night like this, sir. Only honest folk who have business out of doors would be out such a night as this. It is cold, sir!’ And then into Bunting’s slow and honest mind there suddenly crept the query as to what Mr Sleuth’s own business out could be on this cold, bitter night.

  ‘Cold?’ the lodger repeated. ‘I can’t say that I find it cold, Mr Bunting. When the snow falls the air always becomes milder.’

  ‘Yes, sir; but tonight there’s such a sharp east wind. Why, it freezes the very marrow in one’s bones!’

  Bunting noticed that Mr Sleuth kept his distance in a rather strange way: he walked at the edge of the pavement, leaving the rest of it, on the wall side, to his landlord.

  ‘I lost my way,’ he said abruptly. ‘I’ve been over Primrose Hill to see a friend of mine, and then, coming back, I lost my way.’

  Bunting could well believe that, for when he had first noticed Mr Sleuth he was coming from the east, and not, as he should have done if walking home from Primrose Hill, from the north.

  They had now reached the little gate that gave on to the shabby, paved court in front of the house. Mr Sleuth was walking up the flagged path, when, with a ‘By your leave, sir,’ the ex-butler, stepping aside, slipped in front of his lodger, in order to open the front door for him.

  As he passed by Mr Sleuth, the back of Bunting’s bare left hand brushed lightly against the long Inverness cape the other man was wearing, and, to his surprise, the stretch of cloth against which his hand lay for a moment was not only damp, damp from the flakes of snow that had settled upon it, but wet—wet and gluey. Bunting thrust his left hand into his pocket; it was with the other that he placed the key in the lock of the door.

  The two men passed into the hall together. The house seemed blackly dark in comparison with the lighted-up road outside; and then, quite suddenly, there came over Bunting a feeling of mortal terror, an instinctive knowledge that some terrible and immediate danger was near him. A voice—the voice of his first wife, the long-dead girl to whom his mind so seldom reverted nowaday suttered in his ear the words, ‘Take care!’

  ‘I’m afraid, Mr Bunting, that you must have felt something dirty, foul, on my coat? It’s too long a story to tell you now, but I brushed up against a dead animal—a dead rabbit lying across a bench on Primrose Hill.’

  Mr Sleuth spoke in a very quiet voice, almost in a whisper.

  ‘No, sir; no, I didn’t notice nothing. I scarcely touched you, sir,’ It seemed as if a power outside himself compelled Bunting to utter these lying words. ‘And now, sir, I’ll be saying goodnight to you,’ he added.

  He waited until the lodger had
gone upstairs, and then he turned into his own sitting-room. There he sat down, for he felt very queer. He did not draw his left hand out of his pocket till he heard the other man moving about in the room above. Then he lit the gas and held up his left hand; he put it close to his face. It was flecked, streaked with blood.

  He took off his boots, and then, very quietly, he went into the room where his wife lay asleep. Stealthily he walked across to the toilet-table, and dipped his hand into the water-jug.

  The next morning Mr Sleuth’s landlord awoke with a start; he felt curiously heavy about the limbs and tired about the eyes.

  Drawing his watch from under his pillow, he saw that it was nearly nine o’clock. He and Ellen had overslept. Without waking her, he got out of bed and pulled up the blind. It was snowing heavily, and, as is the way when it snows, even in London, it was strangely, curiously still.

  After he had dressed he went out into the passage. A newspaper and a letter were lying on the mat. Fancy having slept through the postman’s knock! He picked them both up and went into the sitting-room; then he carefully shut the door behind him, and, tossing the letter aside, spread the newspaper wide open on the table and bent over it.

  As Bunting at last looked up and straightened himself, a look of inexpressible relief shone upon his stolid face. The item of news he had felt certain would be there, printed in big type on the middle sheet, was not there.

  He folded the paper and laid it on a chair, and then eagerly took up his letter.

  Dear Father [it ran]: I hope this finds you as well as it leaves me. Mrs Puddle’s youngest child has got scarlet fever, and aunt thinks I had better come away at once, just to stay with you for a few days. Please tell Ellen I won’t give her no trouble.

  Your loving daughter,

  Daisy.

  Bunting felt amazingly light-hearted; and, as he walked into the next room, he smiled broadly.

  ‘Ellen,’ he cried out, ‘here’s news! Daisy’s coming today. There’s scarlet fever in their house, and Martha thinks she had better come away for a few days. She’ll be here for her birthday!’