"Well?" said Warren.
"Wait a bit, old boy. This takes time… Mmmm. Oar — Gran — Gulden — Harris — mmm — Hooper, Isaacs mm, no — Jarvis, Jerome… I say, I hope I haven't missed it; Jeston, Ka-Kedler — Kennedy… Hullo!" She breathed a line of smoke past her cigarette, and glanced US with wide eyes. "What was it, skipper? C 46? Righto! Hire it is. "C 46 Kyle, Dr. Oliver Harrison." Fancy that! Sr. Kyle has one of those cabins…
Warren whistled.
"Kyle, eh? Not bad. Whoa! Wait a bit," said the diplomat, He struck the bulkhead. "My God! wasn't he one of the suspects? Yes, I remember now. This crook is probably masquerading…
With difficulty Morgan shut him up, for more and more Was Warren impressed by the general rightness and poetic reasonableness of a crook with a taste for using the blackjack adopting the guise of a distinguished Harley Street physician. His views were based on the forthright principle that, the more respectable they looked, the more likely they were to turn out dastardly murderers. He also sited examples from the collected works of Henry Morgan in which the authors of the dirty work had proved to be (respectively) an admiral, a rose-grower, an invalid, and an archdeacon. It was only when Peggy protested that this Was merely the case in detective stories that Morgan took his side.
"That's just where you're wrong, old girl," he said. "It's In real life that the crooks and killers always go in the most solidly respectable dress. Only, you see them at the wrong end — in the dock. You think of them as a murderer, not as the erstwhile churchgoing occupant of Number 13 Laburnum Grove. Whisper softly to yourself the names of the most distinguished croakers of a century, and observe that nearly all of them were highly esteemed by the vicar. Constance Kent? Dr. Pritchard? Christina Edmunds? Dr. Lamson? Dr. Crippen—"
"And nearly all of 'em doctors, eh?" inquired Warren, with an air of sinister enlightenment. He seemed to brood over this incorrigible tendency among members of the
medical profession to go about murdering people. "You < see, Peggy? Hank's right." "
"Don't be a lop-eared ass," said Morgan. "Wash out this idea of Dr. Kyle's being a crook, will you? He's a j very well-known figure… oh, and get rid of the notion, too, that somebody may be impersonating him while the real Dr. Kyle is dead. That may be all right for some person who never comes in contact with anybody; but a public figure like an eminent physician won't do… Go on, Peggy. Tell us who's in C 51, and then we can forget it and get down to real business."
She wrinkled her forehead.