Reply Paid

by H. F. Heard

  That was so uncheerful a thought for me that I did not venture again to hasten him back to my own acute predicament. “You’ve made the anthrax information quite clear to me. But I still am puzzled how Miss Brown was killed.”

  “It was beautifully simple.” Again that gruesome, detached interest! “These spores live indefinitely. In the desert Intil collects bits of the skins of the animals he shoots. You need only a scrap if the animal is thoroughly infected. That explains why he seemed a good shot. He was a far better naturalist than a gunman. He reserved his bullets for those ground-squirrels which ran badly, not because he could shoot them more easily but because they were so obviously ailing and therefore possibly dying of what he wanted, anthrax poisoning. Then, taking his spoils, as carefully, no doubt, as I have handled your correspondence, he brings back all his specimens. One or more are anthrax cases. That’s all he needs. It’s ample.

  “His next step? He makes a mucilage, a gum. Into this he introduces a number of the spores by just dipping a little of the skin and hair into the fluid. Next, he paints this ‘doctored’ gum onto the gum on the flap of a stamped envelope. All he has, then, to do, is to let it dry. That seals up the spores—till anyone should moisten the gum. Then, should they do so—a natural reaction—with their tongue or lip, they have poisoned themselves. He simply writes his name on two of these envelopes with his address and mails the first to Miss Brown. The success of that you know. He waits, watches, learns with quiet satisfaction, and then mails his second message of death.

  “The success of the second cast I, with my precipitancy, just averted. I had just concluded my deductions—that Miss Brown had been murdered, calculated that her murderer would be striking again, now in this direction—can you wonder that I infringed the rules of general courtesy and your office regulations?” He looked up smiling, and this time I did answer the rhetorical question.

  “No,” I said. “No. You were right, quite right, in fact, very kind. Indeed, I’m really sorry.…”

  He was as unresentful to my slights on his feelings as he was indifferent to the way he hurt mine. “Very well,” he said. “That’s settled. I was in time, and so now I may ask you to admire the beautiful simplicity of the beast of prey’s action—at your leisure. He kills—he makes you fall into his trap, put your head in the noose and, as it is a delayed-action noose, having fatally strangled yourself, you have still sufficient time to hand back to him the very tool with which he has killed you! The mere chance that the letter might be found and tested—a very slight chance—even that he avoids and guards against. The only thing which can be found is a letter partly friendly—in Miss Brown’s case, wholly so—partly concerned with another person. This is alibi raised to a further range of art, this is the true boomerang—indeed, it is the boomerang of boyhood’s dreams which strikes and kills the prey at which it is aimed and then returns itself to the hand of its sender.”

  He paused. “It is really, in its way, a perfect case. Everything is present. A simple but wonderfully sound idea carefully carried out; then man himself making a masterly cast. That is all as one would expect. But there is something more, that excites my admiration much further.”

  Was the old man, could he be going to make full amends and say that the way I had stood up under the strain was the really fine thing about it, the way I had taken Miss Brown’s actual death and my own terrible risk?

  “Mr. Silchester, you know I am deeply interested in human motive. Without that interest I could never, I have told you no detective could, be successful. But the trade itself would be too depressing to a man who was not callous—and a callous man becomes too clumsy and blunted to be a good detective—unless there was a deeper interest, an interest in the disclosure of a vaster design, a huge counterpoint whereby a basic harmony continually ‘resolves’ these surface discords.”

  It was a very long-winded compliment—if, indeed, it was ever going to turn into one.

  “This case, I am thankful to say, shows both features, and the really remarkable cunning is overscored, overruled, shall I say, by an intervention far more remarkable, indeed wonderful.”

  So he was falling into nothing but a delicious reverie at his own skill and the opportunity the cunning of a murderer had given him to display his overruling powers! I knew I ought to have nothing but gratitude for my deliverance and to my savior, and that my behavior had not been that of the rescued overcome by gratitude. Yet really this complacent enthusiasm for the masterly murderer and for himself, as though they were duet players, was a little unpleasant, with myself left as the mean instrument on which they had shown their wonderful techniques. It was hardly moral, I reflected, so to regard crime, and that made me bold again to interrupt, for I was evidently once more right out of the picture. After all, my safety was part of the safety of the state, of society.

  Mr. Mycroft remaining silent, lost, I suppose, in abstract admiration of still a new nicety in assassination, I plucked up my often-sat-upon courage: “Oughtn’t we do something about Intil?” I questioned.

  “Well,” he said coolly, “you’re out of danger now.” He rose and, taking the slide out of the microscope, put, with tweezers, the small disk of paper in the metal specimen box. Next he went to the fireplace and, picking up the forceps, which still held in its jaws the deadly envelope marked “Personal,” he made the instrument place it, with the piece cut from it, in the box, which he then snapped shut.

  “But,” I stammered, “he might try that beastly trick on other people, on you.”

  “Well, even if he should be so silly,” he dryly replied, “neither of us is likely to be quite so absentminded as again to oblige by licking a stamped and addressed envelope sent us by Mr. Intil. That reply has been paid—I believe once and for all.”

  “But won’t he try to kill me in some other way?”

  “Yes, undoubtedly, undoubtedly, if he had the chance.” He said this as reflectively as someone might say that there was a good chance of a heavy dew falling that night.

  “But he may,” I insisted. “Evidently he still would want to kill me—though why? I suppose it’s all because he somehow knows I let myself into trailing him with you. Oh, why.…”

  “Gently,” he said in a quiet but hardly gentle voice. “Your panic, which I have told you is groundless, is, like all fear, preventing you from seeing the actual situation.”

  “You mean,” I stammered, for fear and anger were making a sort of oil and vinegar emulsion inside me, little globules of sickly fear spinning round with clear drops of indignation (I had been far too long under the strain of uncertainty), “you mean that it is not clear that I am in danger from a man who wishes to kill me?”

  “First be just, if I may not ask you to be generous,” was his sententious reply. “I think I shall, I know I shall, be able to prove to you that Intil wanted to kill you not because you accompanied me on that trail, but for another reason. I have good reason to suppose that he never saw our tracks. He has reason to keep off that particular path where his dispute with Sanderson left after it a piece of evidence which, who knows, might be brought home to him. He went once again along that trail. Then he avoided it. Anyhow, he soon learned that his actual goal lay far from there. I have even better reason to suppose that he flattered you—fear nearly always overrates a foe—by thinking you had knowledge which—an awkward compliment, I allow—he was prepared to kill you if you were clever enough to have guessed.”

  I was going to interrupt, but he raised his hand and his next sentence made me listen, made me swallow the previous impertinences.

  “Are you in danger, in any danger now? I shall know that in four days’ time, and I am prepared to forestall Time’s verdict—I say no.” There was a refreshing certainty in his voice which so reassured me that, fear subsiding, indignation became my dominant mood.

  “And now I would like to ask,” and my tone was quiet and quite sarcastic, “I would be obliged if you would indicate to me in what respects I am failing to comprehend the s
ituation we are in?”

  “It is that your intense interest in the foreground, in the intended action, had blinded you to the overarching ‘surround,’ to what has actually taken place. You have missed what thrills me—the intervention of—well, what I have ventured to call the element which makes detection worth while.”

  “Oh, stop being obscure and superior!” I cried, my self-control nearly all gone.

  “I will,” he said. “But if I am to be quite brief and conclusive, we must wait for four days.” He rose quickly. “I will return then,” he said, “and by then your tension will, I hope, have abated—by the time my proof is clinched.”

  The door closed on him almost before his sentence ended. I was left to calm my feelings as best I could.

  Chapter IX

  “Four days” I said to myself, as I went to my office the next morning. I had to admit that I had been quite unable to banish “dead yesterday” from my mind. Indeed, I had slept very poorly. If only I could have been reasonably angry with Mr. Mycroft and reasonably sorry for Miss Brown. But I was, I had to own it, not merely sorry for myself but vexed. Why couldn’t I have let the domineering old fellow have his way, have it out, however he liked, and have it finished for good? After all, even if he had gone on praising himself and providence, drawing attention to his own skill and how it was approved by the nature of things, at the outside the whole business would have been closed in four hours. And now I had to wait four days, wait until I’d positively welcome another long lecture! My natural irritability had made me only postpone and extend punishment which, had I sat out the first dose, would have now all been over.

  As I entered the building I tried to pull myself out of my reverie and be ready to meet Miss Delamere’s drooped but darting eye. My “Good morning” as I passed into the inner office was nevertheless, I felt, very unconvincing. She would know I was upset—poor, soft-boiled Britisher. She might even say something, ultra sub-acutely sympathetic, out of the side of her mouth, while her cigarette, and its black holder bobbed a kind of semaphore accompaniment. The rest of her face would be as blank as a wax model—which indeed it was. Well, I had better call her in and get it over and into the day’s work. I pressed the buzzer, and then remembered that I hadn’t even looked at the mail which she had opened and stacked on my writing pad. Her shadow was, however, on the frosted glass panel of the door, so I snatched up the wad of letters, hoping to look as though I had run through them. Yes, she was going to be superiorly kind, I saw. She wasn’t going to let me not know that she knew I was—what do they call it—a “stuffed shirt,” I believe—anyhow, a horrid phrase.

  The cigarette and the cigarette holder began to bob and, from a small aperture between the two perfect curves of carmine which showed where she wished the world to believe her lips extended, her ironed-out voice said huskily, “That’s a new one on the top. Suppose you’d see him at three—spare hour then—gives his number—”

  “Yes,” I said, “yes,” hastily running my eye down the page which I was supposed to be reading but not a word of which penetrated my mind. “Three is a clear hour?” I asked, to gain time.

  “Don’t know what else you’d think of doing then.”

  Of course three was, almost as a rule, kept for visitors, and, as Miss Delamere said, it was vacant today. I should have remembered. But first I must find out what the client wanted, who he or she was. A man—yes, Miss Delamere was right, there could be no doubt about that, it was John. John what? John—what vile hands people wrote who always typed and were never taught to hold a pen!

  “Have you deciphered the signature?” I said. It was a better opening, for it looked as though I had read the letter and was simply graveled by the illegible name at the foot. “It’s a K,” I prompted.

  “Took it to be Katton—might be Karton,” the cigarette signaled. “Can I get him on the phone and tell him to come along if you wish to see him?”

  “Yes, do that,” I said, and she had gone, with one of those short-skirt, long-leg sweeps which I suppose they practice as part of polished poise, a sort of sharp slide.

  I heard her making the call before I began really to read the letter. None of it was typed—all was in penmanship, if one may so describe a hand which surely must have had no fingers, simply a fist. What Miss Delamere had picked out was fairly clear. He wanted an interview that day, if possible, and gave a telephone number at which he could be called. Next I began to make out of the squirms and skids which the tortured pen had made, that he wanted help with a clue. Well, most of my work, I had to own, did not lie with the highly intelligent and cultured. I had better see him and see what I could do. In a small business, a client is first and foremost a cash payment and all other interests must be secondary. Miss Delamere was back. Yes, she had made a contact. The client would be here at three.

  The day had settled down into its routine, I was grateful to my illegible visitor-to-be. We went straight on with a number of straightforward riddles, etc. Miss Delamere was fixed securely in her major part, the efficient secretary. Even I began to give nearly all my attention to the present. My mind ceased to be engrossed as to what would happen or wouldn’t happen in the next four days. I could wait; surely I should know that most things just peter out, don’t come to anything. Even my dramatic Mr. Mycroft had bet that I wouldn’t be troubled further. So I soothed the back of my mind, while in front I worked away with the safe little riddles people spin for themselves because they find most of their lives such plain, unrelieved sailing or sewing. And it worked. I felt myself becoming calm and content and the time slipped away. Miss Delamere lunched; then I lunched; no, not even going to the drugstore, for stopping work started unpleasant reveries. I read, as I munched my sandwiches and drank my milk, an ingenious work on double-code—the familiar book-code enriched and made far harder to detect by the actual meanings made to depend not on finding the actual word but by knowing how to calculate by an arithmetical progression where the real word would be “displaced.”

  It was then almost three when I got back to my work. I saw that someone was waiting—the outer door was ajar—so I slipped round to the second entrance to our small suite, which led directly into my own room. Miss Delamere heard me and I was not settled before she was in and saying, with her hand holding the door closed behind her—this half-turn was another of the “photogenic” poses, “The three o’clock client has been in since two forty-five. Shouldn’t be difficult—a simple type—small fee, though—will you see him now?—practically three.”

  “Very well,” I agreed, and splayed out a few papers on my desk. It is always better to be brooding—Archimedes and the Roman soldier—when an inquirer enters. So I heard the door close behind my new client, and Miss Delamere was gone before I looked up. I was glad she was—for I found myself looking at a face I knew, but certainly hadn’t expected to see here or perhaps ever again. My “reaction” was not very ready.

  “Oh, of course,” I said aloud but to myself, “I ought to have guessed—of course it was ‘Kerson’!”

  “Yes,” said my visitor, taking a seat without being invited. “You’re the guy was out back by the reservation. The old fellow said you were a detector of a sort—read codes and that sort of thing.…”

  I was just going to begin to feel pleased that Mr. Mycroft had named me as the detective, when I realized that naturally he had done so to draw attention to me and away from himself. My face must, then, have remained blank, and I can only hope that he took it for a poker-face of noncommittalness.

  Anyhow, after a pause, he did go on. “Living a bit of a lonely life as I do, I get to figuring out the fancy-stuff riddles and that sort of thing which people put in the papers and the competition stuff and what have you. Gotten pretty cute on it. But queer how it gets you! Can crack open most puzzles of an evening now. But when you get one that won’t split—” he paused, “Why, then, it sort of gets you! Just can’t get it out of your brain-pan. I say, not many of ’em can get you so fixed but when one does—well
, you don’t seem able to let the darned thing drop. Sometimes, after a week or more, you get it. If you don’t, why, then, you just have to have it out. Now, you’re an expert. The old fellow says you’ve just the hunch for this one sort of thing.” I bowed; I suppose he was also conveying that I was no use at anything else. “So when I got fixed a fortnight ago with a small puzzle I found in a little old book of puzzles—when I got myself quite mad with this one—had all the others cleared out and up—as anyhow I was coming up to the city, I thought I’d drop in on you.”

  “To what book do you refer, Mr. Kerson?” I asked. “Often students, if they know the volume, can give the answer straight out of their reference files.”

  “Funny,” he said. “Can’t remember the book’s name—Old Puzzles, or some such term. And I left it back at the store. But,” with rather abrupt cheerfulness, “I did copy out fully the one that had me stuck. Worked at it all the time in the train. Thought—” he gave a wry smile “—if I can get it before I get to his office I shan’t have to pay. I’ll have extracted the acher myself.”

  Well, he intended to pay. That is always an encouragement, I honestly believe one guesses, or hunches, or whatever it is, with far better aim if one’s subconscious knows it’s up to real business. It puts it on its mettle. I know that there are fine fanciful natures who feel that any thought of gain would tarnish with the foggy breath of avarice the fair mirror of their vision—or so they say. But I am certainly not one of those up-in-the-air seers.