The three taps

by Ronald Arbuthnott Knox

“Oh, God knows, I don’t see my way clear yet. But there’s the outlines of the thing. Now let’s hear the proxime accessit solution.”

“I feel inclined to apologize. I feel ashamed of being so right. But you’ve asked for it. Look here, the thing which has complicated this case so badly is the appearance of bluff. At one moment it looked like suicide pretending to be accident or murder; at another time it looked like murder pretending to be suicide. But the great mountainous fact that stands out is the turning off of the gas. In the event of suicide, that was impossible; in the event of murder, it was curiously needless. For it entirely removed the possibility of a suicide verdict. It was only as I was getting into bed last night that the truth flashed upon me. The gas was turned off by a murderer deliberately, and, mark this, in order to shew that the murder was not suicide. It was a deliberate protest, an advertisement. Make what you like of this case (it seemed to say); but do not call it suicide; that at least is outside the scheme of possibilities.”

“Well, my solution was rather by way of allowing for that.”

“To be sure. But, you see, you involve yourself in a hopeless psychological improbability. You make a man commit suicide, leaving behind him an accomplice who will turn off the gas. Now, it’s an extraordinary thing, our human love of interference; but I don’t believe it possible to have an accomplice in suicide. Except, of course, for those ‘death pacts’ which we are all familiar with. Tell any one that you mean to commit suicide and that person will not only try to dissuade you but will scheme to prevent your bringing the thing off. Suicide here would involve an accomplice; therefore it was not suicide. It was murder; and yet the murderer, so far from wanting to make it appear suicide, was particularly anxious to make it clear that it was not suicide. There is a strange situation for you.

“The strange situations, the mysterious situations, are not those which are most difficult to unravel. You can proceed in this case to look for the murderer in the certainty that he is some one who would stand to lose if a verdict of suicide were brought in. Puzzling it over last night I was unable to conceive such a person. Between you and me, I had been inclined to suspect Brinkman; but there did not seem to be any possible reason why he should want to murder Mottram; and, if he did, there was no conceivable reason why he should want to make it appear that Mottram did not commit suicide. Brinkman was not the heir; the Euthanasia policy did not affect him.

“My discoveries of this morning put me on an entirely different track. There was one man in the world, and only one, whose interest bade him murder Mottram, and murder him in such a way that no suspicion of suicide could rest over the event. I mean, of course, young Simmonds. It was in his interest, as he must have thought, to murder Mottram, because if Mottram lived to be sixty-five the Euthanasia policy would run out. This was Simmonds’s last chance but one, assuming that Mottram’s yearly visits to Chilthorpe were the best chance of doing away with him. In two years from now Mottram would have turned sixty-five and the half-million would have vanished into the air. Moreover, there was much to be said for haste: who could tell when Mottram might not take it into his head to draw up a new will? As it seemed to Simmonds, he had only to get rid of this lonely, crusty old bachelor by a painless death, and he, as the next of kin, would walk straight into five hundred thousand. Meanwhile, there must be no suspicion of suicide, for any such suspicion might mean that your company would refuse to pay up and the half-million would have disappeared once more.

“To young Simmonds, as he let himself in by the ground-floor casement into the Load of Mischief, only one fear presented itself—the fear of a false verdict. He was of the type that cannot commit cold-blooded murder. The more civilization advances the more ingenious does crime become; meanwhile, it becomes more and more difficult for one man to kill another with his hands. Simmonds might have been a poisoner; as it was, he had discovered a safer way: he would be a gasser. But there was this defect about the weapon he was using—it might create a false impression on the jury. Imperative, then, not merely to kill his man but to prove that he had killed him. That is why, after turning on the gas in the sleeping man’s room, he waited for two hours or so outside; then came back, flung open the window to get air, and turned the gas off again, only pausing to make sure that his victim was dead.

“How he worked the door trick I don’t know. We shall find out later. Meanwhile, let me tell you that one of the friends I made last night in the bar parlour told me he had seen Simmonds hanging round the hotel just after closing time, although (for the fellow is a teetotaller) he had not been drinking there. This was on the very night of the murder. That was a point in which I was in a position to score off you. There was another point, over which you had the same opportunities of information, but neglected them. You remember the letter which Mottram left lying about in his bedroom? It was in answer to a correspondent who signed himself ‘Brutus.’ I took the trouble to get from the offices of the Pullford Examiner a copy of the issue in which that letter appeared. It is a threatening letter, warning Mottram that retribution would come upon him for the bloodsucking methods by which his money had been made. And it was signed ‘Brutus.’ You’ve had a classical education; you ought to have spotted the point; personally I looked it up in an encyclopædia. Brutus wasn’t merely a demagogue; he led the revolt in Rome which resulted in the expulsion of his own maternal uncle, King Tarquin. The same relation, you see, that there was between Simmonds and Mottram.

“Well, I’ve applied for a warrant. I’m in no hurry to use it; for, as long as Simmonds is off his guard, he’s all the more likely to give himself away. Meanwhile, I’m having him watched. If you go and talk to him, just to form your own impressions, I know you’ll be careful not to say anything which would give away my suspicions. And I can wait for that twenty pounds too.”

Bredon sat spellbound. He could see the whole thing happening; he could trace every calculation in the mind of the criminal. And yet he was not convinced. He was just about to explain this, when a fresh thought struck him and interfered with their session. “Leyland,” he said, in a very quiet voice, “you aren’t smoking, and I’ve had my pipe out these last ten minutes. Can you tell me why there should be a smell of cigarette smoke?”