31st Of February by Julian Symons Page A

Anderson read the letters. The first suggested that he hated his wife and made her life miserable for years. It asked why Anderson’s statement at the inquest that his married life had been “normally happy” had been left uncorroborated. The second said that Anderson had been persistently unfaithful to his wife. “And then he insured her life for £5,000. And then she fell downstairs. Cui Bono?” Anderson read the letters and returned them without comment.
    “Typed on a Remington 12 machine, posted in Central London, no fingerprints,” the Inspector said. The clownishness had dropped from him, the heavy face was alert, the eyes’ vacancy might be interpreted as alertness. “The first of them came a week ago, the second three days after it. Nothing since. You’ve no idea who wrote them, I suppose?”
    “No.”
    “Stuff like this now – in one way it’s beneath contempt. And yet in another it’s interesting. It’s the sort of thing that sets us thinking.” With a return to clownishness, the Inspector ran a hand over his great bald head; the humorous action was somehow more menacing than a threat could have been. “A clever chap like you now, you’re thinking all the time. But a policeman only thinks when he needs to, and that’s not very often. A bit of low cunning’s enough for our purposes usually, when we’re dealing with the uneducated classes. But with a gentleman like yourself—”
    “I went to a grammar school,” Anderson said sharply, to check this ponderous humour.
    The Inspector was unperturbed. “That’s just what I mean. You’re a well-read man, an intellectual. A policeman’s got to be clever to keep up with you. When we got these letters we thought back over the case, and you know what we discovered? We hadn’t been clever enough. But that won’t be any surprise to somebody like yourself.” The Inspector slapped his knee with a meaty hand, and laughed.
    “Not clever enough?”
    “We had failed to read our Sherlock Holmes. The curious incident of the matches. Although, of course, in a way the reverse of Silver Blaze. You have read that, of course.”
    “I’m afraid not, no.”
    “Detective fiction,” the Inspector said with a sigh. “But the box of matches worries me, I must confess. You don’t understand me?” Anderson shook his head. In his thick voice the Inspector said: “Your wife left the sitting room—”
    “The kitchen. She was cooking the supper.”
    “Left the kitchen, passed through the sitting room, went out into the passage, to the head of the cellar stairs, turned on the switch and found that the light had fused. Unhappy that the light should have fused, is it not, just at that particular moment? Tragic, even. Then she struck a match, began to descend the stairs, slipped–” The Inspector paused delicately, and then looked up. “But did she strike a match? Where did the box of matches come from that was found by her body?” The question was asked in a gentle voice. Anderson goggled at him. “She would hardly have taken matches from the kitchen when she supposed that the cellar light would be on? Of course she wouldn’t. She would not find matches in the passage. She didn’t come back or call to you when she found that the cellar light was out of order. And yet – a box of matches was found by the side of her body.”
    “Her frock,” Anderson said. His voice was hoarse.
    “Woollen. No pockets.”
    “They must have been there for days.”
    “No, you’d had the cellar cleaned out the day before, don’t you remember? Your charwoman gave evidence. She’s quite certain there was no box of matches down there then. It’s a problem. I don’t see where the box of matches could have come from, do you?” The Inspector’s voice rumbled softly; it was ridiculous to think that his eyes could ever have been vacant. “What the anonymous letter said about the five thousand pounds insurance – that was right, wasn’t it?”
    Like a man emerging from