Eight Murders In the Suburbs by Roy Vickers Page B

seems to have been one of those fires that have no detectable cause,” said the Coroner. “It was a very windy day. A live cigarette end, or a spark from a distant chimney, might have been blown through a ventilator and carried to the space between the ground floor and the ceiling of the basement. It seems that we shall never know for certain. You are not, however, concerned with the fire, as such.”
    Peter Curwen had attended the court with something approaching confidence that the fire would be attributed to a half-finished cigarette falling outside the coal vase. The protracted doubt was attacking the flank of his defences.
    Direct inquiry of the experts would be impossible because he had sustained no financial loss in the fire. Using his connection with the insurance companies, he contrived a drink with the fire assessor concerned.
    â€œAn incendiary generally leaves something for us to work on,” said the assessor. “But a straight fire—I should say about a third of ’em have to be left to inspired guesswork. A man may do something slightly dangerous every day for twenty years, and suddenly it starts a fire!”
    â€œIn the hall—”
    â€œThe wind may be blowing at an angle it’s never blown at before. Freak combination of small factors. This is a case in point.”
    â€œIn the hall,” said Curwen, “there was a large coal vase. People would lob half-finished cigarettes into it as they passed. Now, suppose a cigarette missed the coal vase, rolled through a chink in the floorboards—”
    â€œCould be! It’s as likely as anything else. That’s what I meant by inspired guess. Let’s have another drink.”
    The doubt was now securely entrenched. When he had parted from the assessor, Curwen pinched a cigarette in half. He lobbed one half at a litter bin, and missed.
    That night they were booked for a dinner party. When he opened the drawer for a handkerchief, he remembered that under the pile lay the tortoiseshell comb. He felt unable to cope with the complicated vibrations set up by that comb. He lifted a handkerchief as if he feared to disturb the pile. It could lie buried until he had focused the death of that clerk.
    That it was a poor hiding place did not occur to him. Like many a man in his circumstances he put his soiled linen in a basket and was incurious as to the processes by which it eventually reappeared in a chest of drawers.
    He kept his end up at the dinner party. Afterwards, Marion was quieter than usual. She had perceived that the climate of their marriage had changed.
    The coroner’s jury had expressed sympathy with the widow and had felt the better for it. The widow—the half-finished cigarette—sympathy! The doubt was a haunting abstraction, but the widow was an inescapable actuality. He wrote to her, on office paper bearing his name. He asserted that he was under a moral obligation to her late husband—the nature of which he was not at liberty to divulge—that he proposed to call on her on the following day to inquire whether he could be of any service to her.
    He was glad they had another dinner engagement that night. It was as if he were afraid of being alone with Marion. The pile of handkerchiefs in his drawer was considerably higher. He did not know that Marion always placed incoming handkerchiefs at the bottom of the pile.
    At breakfast the next morning, he stopped with the coffee spoon halfway to his plate. He put it back in the saucer, then stole a glance at Marion.
    â€œI’m so glad you’re trying,” she said. “It’ll come easier after a while.”
    He felt fury so sudden and so intense that he left the room and did not return. Before leaving the flat, he went to his dressing-room, took the tortoiseshell comb from under the pile of handkerchiefs and later put it into storage in the office safe.
    By lunch time his calm had returned. Indeed, he was on the verge of good