“One moment,” said Henry. “Did Aunt V. know Giggle was the murderer?”
“We’ll take her next. As your family pointed out with tireless emphasis, Lady Wutherwood is mentally unhinged. May I say in passing that the emphasis was just a little too pointed? They would have been wiser to have left us to form our own opinion. However, she is undoubtedly insane and — a point that you may have missed — she is almost certainly taking some form of drug; morphia, I should think. She has also become deeply interested in witchcraft and black magic. The interest, I think, is pathological. In the police service we see a good deal of the effect of superstition on credulous and highly-strung people. We learn of middle-aged men and women losing their money and their sanity in the squalid little parlours of fortune-tellers, spirit-mongers, and self-styled psychiatrists. Lady Wutherwood, I think, is an extreme example of this sort of thing. She has wooed the supernatural in the grand macabre manner and has paid for her enthusiasm with her wits.”
“She’s always been a bit dotty,” said Henry.
“When Dr. Curtis and Fox and I interviewed her, we were puzzled by her reference to a couple of obscure mediaeval witches. A little later she certainly suggested that her husband had been killed by some supernatural agent who had taken the form of your brother Stephen.”
“Well!” said Henry. “I must say I call that a bit thick. Why pick on poor old Step?”
“Simply because she saw him in the lift. Her behaviour at this interview was in every way extraordinary. She had, we were assured, screamed violently and persistently when she discovered the injury to her husband, yet one couldn’t miss a kind of terrified exulting in her manner when she spoke of it. Lastly, and most importantly, she insisted that his body was to be sent to their London house. I’m no psychiatrist but it seemed to me that, however insane she was, if she had murdered her husband she wouldn’t desire, ardently, to spend a couple of nights in a half-deserted house with the dead body. Unless, and here’s an important point, she had some motive connected with the body. Very stupidly, I could think of no motive and was therefore still doubtful if she was guilty of her husband’s death, since Giggle’s guilt was not certainly known. This afternoon at Deepacres Park I believed I had discovered the motive. In a copy of a mediaeval work on witchcraft we found a chapter dealing with the various kinds of soporific spells.”
“My God!” Henry whispered, ‘“The Hand of Glory.”
“Yes. The hand cut from the wrist of a corpse, preferably a felon or a murdered man. It renders the possessor safe from discovery since — but you know your Ingoldsby Legends, I see.
Sleep all who sleep
Wake all who wake