by Gerald Kersh
‘Yes, he was on the road, sir.’
‘Make a lot of money?’
‘Never saved a penny, Mr Jacket,’ said Mr Wainewright, in a shocked voice. ‘But he could sell things, sir. He wouldn’t take no for an answer. Throw him out of the door, and back he comes at the window.’
‘That’s the way to please the ladies,’ said Jacket. ‘Appear ruthless; refuse to take no for an answer; make it quite clear that you know what you want and are going to get it. He did all that, eh?’
‘Yes, sir, he did …. Oh, you really shouldn’t’ve done that: I can’t——’
More drinks had been set down.
‘Cheers,’ said Jacket. Wainewright sipped another drink. ‘Are you a married man, Mr Wainewright?’
‘Married? Me? No, not me, Mr Jacket.’
‘Confirmed bachelor, hm?’
Mr Wainewright giggled; the whisky was bringing a pinkness to his cheeks. ‘That’s it, sir.’
‘Like your freedom, eh?’
‘Never given marriage a thought, sir.’
‘I shouldn’t be surprised if you were a bit of a devil on the sly, yourself, Mr Wainewright,’ said Jacket, with a knowing wink.
‘I … I don’t have time to bother with such things.’
‘Your boarding-house keeps you pretty busy.’
‘My apartment house? Yes, it does, off and on.’
‘Been in the business long?’
‘Only about eight months, sir, since my auntie died. She left me the house, you see, and I thought it was about time I had a bit of a change. So I kept it on. I was in gents’ footwear before that, sir, I was with Exton and Co., Limited, for more than twenty years.’
‘Making shoes?’
Mr Wainewright was offended. He said: ‘Pardon me, I was a salesman in one of their biggest branches, sir.’
‘So sorry,’ said Jacket. ‘Did Tooth yell out?’
‘Eh? Pardon? Yell out? N-no, no, I can’t say he did. He coughed, kind of. But he was always coughing, you see. He was a heavy smoker. A cigarette-smoker. It’s a bad habit, cigarettes: he smoked one on the end of another, day and night. Give me a pipe any day, Mr Jacket.’
‘Have a cigar?’
‘Oh … that’s very kind indeed of you I’m sure. I’ll smoke it later on if I may.’
‘By all means, do, Mr Wainewright. Tell me, how d’you find business just now? Slow, I dare say, eh?’
‘Steady, sir, steady. But I’m not altogether dependent on the house. I had some money saved of my own, and my auntie left me a nice lump sum, so …’
‘So you’re your own master. Lucky fellow!’
‘Ah,’ said Wainewright, ‘I’d like a job like yours, Mr Jacket. You must meet so many interesting people.’
‘I’ll show you round a bit, some evening,’ said Jacket.
‘No, really?’
‘Why not?’ Jacket smiled, and patted the little man’s arm. ‘What’s your address?’
‘77, Bishop’s Square, Belgravia.’
‘Pimlico … the taxi-drivers’ nightmare,’ said Jacket. writing it on the back of an old envelope. ‘Good. Well, and tell me – how does it feel to be powerful?’
‘Who, me? I’m not powerful, sir.’
‘Wainewright, you know you are.’
‘Oh, nonsense, Mr Jacket!’
‘Not nonsense. You’re the chief witness; it all depends on you. Don’t you realise that your word may send a woman to the gallows, or to jail? Just your word, your oath! Why, you’ve got the power over life and death. You’re something like a sultan, or a dictator – something like a god, as far as Martha Tooth is concerned. You have terrible power, indeed!’
Mr Wainewright blinked; and then something strange happened. His eyes became bright and he smiled. But he shook his head. ‘No, no,’ he said, with a kind of sickly vivacity. ‘No, you’re joking.’
Jacket, looking at him, said: ‘What an interesting man you are, Wainewright! What a fascinating man you really are!’
‘Ah, you only say that. You’re an author, and you can make ex-extraordinary things out of nothing.’
‘Don’t you believe it, Wainewright. You can’t make anything out of nothing. There’s more in men than meets the eye, though; and you are an extremely remarkable man. Why, I could make fifteen million people sit up and gape at you. What’s your first name?’
‘Eh? Er … George Micah.’
‘I think I’ll call you George. We ought to get together more.’
‘Well, I’m honoured, I’m sure, Mr Jacket.’
‘Call me Jack.’
‘Oh … it’s friendly of you, but I shouldn’t dare to presume. But, Mr Jacket, you must let me offer you a little something.’ Wainewright was leaning toward him, eagerly blinking. ‘I should be offended…. Whisky?’
‘Thanks,’ said Jacket.
The little man reached the bar. It was his destiny to wait unattended; to be elbowed aside by newcomers; to cough politely at counters.
At last he came back with two glasses of whisky. As soon as he was seated again he said:
‘Mr Jacket … you were joking about … You weren’t serious about making fifteen million people …’
‘Sit up and gape at you? Yes I was, George.’
‘But Mr Jacket, I … I’m nobody of interest; nobody.’
‘You are a man of destiny,’ said Jacket. ‘In the first place – not taking anything else into account – you are an Ordinary Man. What does that mean? All the genius of the world is hired to please you, and all the power of industry is harnessed in your service. Trains run to meet you; Cabinet Ministers crawl on their bellies to you; press barons woo you, George; archbishops go out of their way to make heaven and hell fit your waistcoat. Your word is Law. The King himself has got to be nice to you. Get it? You are the boss around here. All the prettiest women on earth have only one ambition, George Wainewright – to attract and amuse you, tickle you, excite you, in general take your mind off the harsh business of ruling the world. George, you don’t beg; you demand. You are the Public. Let anybody dare lift a finger without keeping an eye on your likes and dislikes: you’ll smash him, George! Rockefeller and Woolworth beg and pray you to give them your pennies. And so what do you mean by saying you’re nobody? Where do you get that kind of stuff, George? Nobody? You’re everybody!’
Mr Wainewright blinked. Jacket drank his health, and said: ‘So now tell me more about yourself.’
‘Well …’ said Mr Wainewright. ‘I don’t know what to say, I’m sure. You know everything already. You want my opinion, perhaps?’ In Mr Wainewright’s eyes there appeared a queer, marsh-light flicker of self-esteem.
‘Perhaps,’ said Jacket.
‘In my humble opinion,’ Mr Wainewright said, ‘the woman deserves to die. Of course, I admit that Tooth was a bad man. He was a drunkard, and a bully, and went in for too many women. He ill-treated them, sir; and he was a married man too. I couldn’t bear him.’
‘Then why did you let him stay in your house?’ asked Jacket.
‘Well … I don’t know. I had intended to give Tooth notice to quit more than once, but whenever I began to get around to it … somehow or other he managed to put me off. He’d tell me a funny story – never a nice story, but so funny that I couldn’t help laughing. You know what I mean? He had a way with him, Mr Jacket. He must have. He sold Poise Weighing Machines. He told me, once, how he had sold a sixty-guinea weighing-machine to an old lady who had a sweet-shop in a little village – it was wicked, but I couldn’t help laughing. And then again, his success with the women…. But all the same, you didn’t ought to be allowed to get away with murder. I mean to say – he was her husband, wasn’t he? And a human being, too. And I mean to say – the fact remains, doesn’t it? She stabbed her husband to death with a pair of sharp scissors.’
‘All right,’ said Jacket. ‘But can we prove that Martha Tooth meant to do it, eh? Can we prove premeditation?’
‘I don’t know anything about all that, I’m afraid,�
�� said Mr Wainewright.
Jacket said: ‘They don’t hang you for murder without malice aforethought in a case of this sort. And incidentally, there isn’t any actual proof that Martha Tooth really did stab her pig of a husband, is there?’
Mr Wainewright was shocked. ‘She must have!’ he said. ‘Who else could have, if she didn’t?’
‘Anyone might have done it, my dear George. I might have done it. You might have done it. The charwoman might have done it. Did anyone see her do it?’
‘Well, no, I suppose not,’ said Mr Wainewright. ‘But the evidence! The evidence, Mr Jacket!’
‘Call me Jack, George old man.’
‘Jack,’ said Wainewright, shyly and with some reluctance.
‘But go on, George,’ said Jacket. ‘What evidence?’
‘The evidence, J-Jack. (Jack, sir, since you insist.)’
John Jacket felt a strange, perverse desire to provoke, to irritate this respectable little man. ‘Evidence,’ he said, ‘evidence! I spit on the evidence. A woman comes into a house; a woman goes out of a house. The man she visited is found, stuck like a pig – which he was – with a pair of long, sharp, paper-cutting scissors in his throat near the collar-bone. So what? So what, George? He was in the habit of smuggling women into his room. Isn’t that so?’
‘Yes, that’s true.’
‘Say, for example, this man Tooth had a woman in his room before his wife – this wretched Martha Tooth – turned up unexpectedly. Say, for example, he hides this hypothetical woman in a cupboard…. Was there a big cupboard, closet, or wardrobe in Tooth’s room?’
‘There is a big wardrobe,’ said Mr Wainewright, meditating.
‘Say, then, that Tooth, hearing his wife’s voice downstairs, hid his concubine in the wardrobe. The wife comes in. She talks to Tooth. She goes away. As the door closes, the enraged woman in the wardrobe comes out fighting, with a pair of scissors, and – jab! An overhand stroke with something like a stiletto, striking the soft part of your throat just where the big artery runs down. A child could do it. What?’
‘Possible, I dare say,’ said Mr Wainewright, tapping his foot in irritation, ‘but I don’t see the point. Mr Jacket – I’m sorry, I mean Jack. Jack, since you say I may call you Jack. If there had been any other lady in Tooth’s room I should have known it.’
‘How could you know?’ asked Jacket.
Mr Wainewright meditated, marking off points with his fingers: he was somewhat drunk. He said, laboriously: ‘In the first place, I have a respectable house. When my auntie died I converted it into little furnished flatlets. People can do as they like in my place, within reason, Mr Jacket. I mean to say Jack, Jack. By “within reason” I mean to say that people can have visitors … within reason, visitors. As the person responsible for the house, I was always on the spot – or nearly always. A person can’t be sure of anybody, and you don’t want your house to get a bad reputation. So I … to be frank, I listened to how many footsteps were going up to this floor or that floor. And as it happened my little room was next door to Tooth’s. And I can assure you that Mrs Tooth was the only visitor Tooth had that night. Mrs Madge, the lady who does the cleaning, let Mrs Tooth in. I passed her on the stairs – or rather, I stood aside to let her pass on the first-floor landing. I had seen Tooth only about two minutes before. He’d just got home from Bristol.’
‘Did he say anything?’ asked Jacket.
‘He … he was the same as usual. Full of jokes. He was telling me about some girl he met in Bristol, some girl who worked in baker’s shop. The, ah, the usual thing. Mrs Madge let Mrs Tooth in while he was talking to me. He said: “I wonder what the – the Aitch – she wants.” And he said that she had better come on up. He’d been drinking. I went down because, to be quite frank, I’d never seen Tooth’s wife, and wondered what kind of a woman she could be.’
‘And what kind of a woman was she, George?’
‘Not what I should have expected, Mr Jacket – I mean J-Jack. One of the plain, humble-looking kind. You wouldn’t have thought she’d have appealed to Tooth at all: he went in for the barmaidish type, sir.’
‘You never can tell, George, old boy. After that you went up to your room, if I remember right.’
‘That’s right. My room was next door to Tooth’s. I mean, my sitting-room: I have a little suite,’ said Mr Wainewright, with pride.
‘Have a little drink,’ said Jacket, pushing a freshly-filled glass over to him.
‘I couldn’t, really.’
‘No arguments, George. By the by, remind me to let you have some theatre tickets. You and I’ll go to the first night of Greek Scandals next week. Drink up. Well, go on, George.’
‘Where was I? Oh yes. I had some accounts to do, you see, so I went to my sitting-room. And I could hear them talking.’
‘What were they saying, George?’
‘I couldn’t quite get what they were saying, Mr Jacket.’
‘But you tried?’
Mr Wainewright fidgeted and blushed. ‘I did try,’ he admitted. ‘But I only gathered that they were having a quarrel. Once Tooth shouted. He said “Go to the devil.” She started crying and he burst out laughing.’
‘A nice man, your friend Tooth, George.’
‘Yes, sir. I mean no, Mr Jacket – not at all nice.’
‘And then?’
‘About a quarter of an hour later, I should say, they stopped talking. They’d been raising their voices quite loud. I knocked on the wall, and they stopped. Then Tooth started coughing.’
‘Was that unusual?’
‘No, not at all unusual. He was a cigarette-smoker. In the morning, and at night, it was painful to listen to him, sir. And then his door opened and closed. I opened my door and looked out, and Mrs Tooth was going downstairs crying, and there was some blood on her hand. I asked her if she had hurt herself, and if she wanted some iodine or anything, and she said “No, no,” and ran downstairs and out of the house.’
‘She’d cut herself, it appears.’
‘That’s right, ah … J-Jack.’
‘That’s it, George. Call me Jack and I’ll call you George,’ said Jacket. ‘What made you go into Tooth’s room later on?’
Mr Wainewright said: ‘He always borrowed my evening paper. I nearly always used to hand it over to him when I’d done with it.’ He held up a copy of the Evening Extra, neatly folded. ‘When I got back from here – I come here just for one quiet drink every evening, and read the paper here as a rule, you see –I went to his door and knocked.’
‘And, of course, he didn’t say “Come in,”’ said Jacket.
‘No. So I knocked again. No answer. I knocked again——’
‘– And at last you went in without knocking, eh?’
‘Exactly. And there he lay across the bed, Mr Jacket – a horrible sight to see, horrible!’
‘Bled a good deal?’
‘I never thought even Tooth could have bled so much!’
‘That shook you, eh, George?’
‘It made me feel faint, I assure you, sir. But I didn’t touch anything. I phoned the police. They were there in ten minutes.’
‘Detective Inspector Taylor, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes, that’s right. A nice man.’
‘He collects stamps for a pastime. Have you any hobbies, George?’
Mr Wainewright giggled. ‘It sounds silly,’ he said. ‘When I haven’t got anything else to do I cut pictures out of magazines.’
‘And what do you do with them when you’ve cut them out, George?’
‘I stick them in a scrap-book.’
‘An innocent pastime enough.’
‘In a way, sort of like collecting stamps – in a way,’ said Mr Wainewright.
‘Yet you never can tell how that sort of thing may end,’ said Jacket. ‘Look at Tooth. He got his by means of a pair of scissors – editorial scissors, paper-cutting scissors. Lord, how often have I wanted to stab the Sub with his own scissors!’
‘That’s right,’ sa
id Mr Wainewright. ‘Long pointy scissors. They were part of a set – scissors and paper-knife in a leather case. I’d borrowed them myself a few days before. Very sharp scissors.’
‘Little did you think,’ said Jacket, ‘that that pair of scissors would end up in your lodger’s throat!’
‘Little did I, J-Jack,’ said Mr Wainewright. ‘It makes a person think. May I ask … are you going to put something in the paper about me?’
‘I think so,’ said Jacket.
Mr Wainewright giggled. ‘You wouldn’t like a photograph of me?’
‘We’ll see about that, George. We’ll see. What are you doing on Saturday?’
‘Next Saturday morning I get my hair cut,’ said Mr Wainewright.
‘Matter of routine, eh?’
‘Yes, sir. But——’
‘No, no, never mind. You get your hair cut on Saturday, George, and I’ll give you a tinkle some time. Right. And now if I were you I’d go and get some sleep, George, old man. You don’t look quite yourself,’ said Jacket.
‘I’m not a drinking man … I oughtn’t to drink,’ muttered Mr Wainewright, putting his hat on back-to-front and rising unsteadily. ‘I don’t feel very well …’
Poor little fellow, thought Jacket, having seen Mr Wainewright safely seated in a taxi. This Tooth affair has thrown him right out of gear. Bloodshed in Wainewright’s life! A revolution! It’s almost as if he found himself wearing a bright red tie.
Jacket, who was on the edge of the haze at the rim of the steady white light of sobriety, began to work out a story about Mr Wainewright. He thought that he might call it The Red Thread of Murder. Never mind the killer, never mind the victim – all that had been dealt with a hundred times before. What about the Ordinary Man, the Man In The Street, who has never seen blood except on his chin after a bad shave with a blunt blade, who opens a door and sees somebody like Tooth lying dead in a thick red puddle? Jacket laughed. In spite of everything Mr Wainewright had to get his hair cut on Saturday. There was, he decided, something ineffably pathetic about this desperate doggedness with which people like Wainewright clung to the finical tidiness of their fussy everyday lives.
He went to sleep thinking of Mr Wainewright. Mr Wainewright lay awake thinking of John Jacket, but went to sleep thinking: To-morrow is Friday: I put a new blade in my safety-razor.
