Murder Is Easy (Superintendent Battle 4)

“Thanks,” said Luke. “Well, I’m relieved you think that electrical treatment will do the trick. I don’t want to turn a cripple at my age.”

Dr. Thomas smiled boyishly.

“Oh, I don’t think there’s any danger of that, Mr. Fitzwilliam.”

“Well, you’ve relieved my mind,” said Luke. “I was thinking of going to some specialist chap—but I’m sure there’s no need now.”

Dr. Thomas smiled again.

“Go if it makes your mind easier. After all, it’s always a good thing to have an expert’s opinion.”

“No, no, I’ve got full confidence in you.”

“Frankly, there is no complexity about the matter. If you take my advice, I am quite sure you will have no further trouble.”

“You’ve relieved my mind no end, doctor. Fancied I might be getting arthritis and would soon be all tied up in knots and unable to move.”

Dr. Thomas shook his head with a slightly indulgent smile.

Luke said quickly:

“Men get the wind up pretty badly in these ways. I expect you find that? I often think a doctor must feel himself a ‘medicine man’—a kind of magician to most of his patients.”

“The element of faith enters in very largely.”

“I know. ‘The doctor says so’ is a remark always uttered with something like reverence.”

Dr. Thomas raised his shoulders.

“If one’s patients only knew!” he murmured humorously.

Then he said:

“You’re writing a book on magic, aren’t you, Mr. Fitzwilliam?”

“Now how did you know that?” exclaimed Luke, perhaps with somewhat overdone surprise.

Dr. Thomas looked amused.

“Oh, my dear sir, news gets about very rapidly in a place like this. We have so little to talk about.”

“It probably gets exaggerated too. You’ll be hearing I’m raising the local spirits and emulating the Witch of Endor.”

“Rather odd you should say that.”

“Why?”

“Well, the rumour has been going round that you had raised the ghost of Tommy Pierce.”

“Pierce? Pierce? Is that the small boy who fell out of a window?”

“Yes.”

“Now I wonder how—of course—I made some remark to the solicitor—what’s his name, Abbot.”

“Yes, the story originated with Abbot.”

“Don’t say I’ve converted a hard-boiled solicitor to a belief in ghosts?”

“You believe in ghosts yourself, then?”

“Your tone suggests that you do not, doctor. No, I wouldn’t say I actually ‘believe in ghosts’—to put it crudely. But I have known curious phenomena in the case of sudden or violent death. But I’m more interested in the various superstitions pertaining to violent deaths—that a murdered man, for instance, can’t rest in his grave. And the interesting belief that the blood of a murdered man flows if his murderer touches him. I wonder how that arose.”

“Very curious,” said Thomas. “But I don’t suppose many people remember that nowadays.”

“More than you would think. Of course, I don’t suppose you have many murders down here—so it’s hard to judge.”

Luke had smiled as he spoke, his eyes resting with seeming carelessness on the other’s face. But Dr. Thomas seemed quite unperturbed and smiled in return.

“No, I don’t think we’ve had a murder for—oh, very many years—certainly not in my time.”

“No, this is a peaceful spot. Not conducive to foul play. Unless somebody pushed little Tommy What’s-his-name out of the window.”

Luke laughed. Again Dr. Thomas’s smile came in answer—a natural smile full of boyish amusement.

“A lot of people would have been willing to wring that child’s neck,” he said. “But I don’t think they actually got to the point of throwing him out of windows.”

“He seems to have been a thoroughly nasty child—the removal of him might have been conceived as a public duty.”

“It’s a pity one can’t apply that theory fairly often.”

“I’ve always thought a few wholesale murders would be beneficial to the community,” said Luke. “A club bore, for instance, should be finished off with a poisoned liqueur brandy. Then there are the women who gush at you and tear all their dearest friends to pieces with their tongues. Backbiting spinsters. Inveterate diehards who oppose progress. If they were painlessly removed, what a difference it would make to social life!”

Dr. Thomas’s smile lengthened to a grin.

“In fact, you advocate crime on a grand scale?”

“Judicious elimination,” said Luke. “Don’t you agree that it would be beneficial?”

“Oh, undoubtedly.”

“Ah, but you’re not being serious,” said Luke. “Now I am. I haven’t the respect for human life that the normal Englishman has. Any man who is a stumbling block on the way of progress ought to be eliminated—that’s how I see it!”

Running his hand through his short fair hair, Dr. Thomas said:

“Yes, but who is to be the judge of a man’s fitness or unfitness?”

“That’s the difficulty, of course,” Luke admitted.

“The Catholics would consider a Communist agitator unfit to live—the Communist agitator would sentence the priest to death as a purveyor of superstition, the doctor would eliminate the unhealthy man, the pacifist would condemn the soldier, and so on.”

“You’d have to have a scientific man as judge,” said Luke. “Someone with an unbiased but highly specialized mind—a doctor, for instance. Come to that, I think you’d be a pretty good judge yourself, doctor.”

“Of unfitness to live?”

“Yes.”

Dr. Thomas shook his head.

“My job is to make the unfit fit. Most of the time it’s an uphill job, I’ll admit.”

“Now just for the sake of argument,” said Luke. “Take a man like the late Harry Carter—”

Dr. Thomas said sharply:

“Carter? You mean the landlord of the Seven Stars?”

“Yes, that’s the man. I never knew him myself, but my cousin, Miss Conway, was talking about him. He seems to have been a really thoroughgoing scoundrel.”

“Well,” said the other, “he drank, of course. Ill-treated his wife, bullied his daughter. He was quarrelsome and abusive and had had a row with most people in the place.”

“In fact, the world is a better place without him?”

“One might be inclined to say so, I agree.”

“In fact, if somebody had given him a push and sent him into the river instead of his kindly electing to fall in of his own accord, that person would have been acting in the public interest?”

Dr. Thomas said drily:

“These methods that you advocate—did you put them into practice in the—Mayang Straits, I think you said?”

Luke laughed.

“Oh, no, with me it’s theory—not practice.”

“No, I do not think you are the stuff of which murderers are made.”

Luke asked:

“Why not? I’ve been frank enough in my views.”

“Exactly. Too frank.”

“You mean that if I were really the kind of man who takes the law into his own hands I shouldn’t go about airing my views?”

“That was my meaning.”

“But it might be a kind of gospel with me. I might be a fanatic on the subject!”

“Even so, your sense of self-protection would be active.”

“In fact, when looking for a murderer, look out for a nice gentle wouldn’t-hurt-a-fly type of man.”

“Slightly exaggerated perhaps,” said Dr. Thomas, “but not far from the truth.”

Luke said abruptly:

“Tell me—it interests me—have you ever come across a man whom you believed might be a murderer?”

Dr. Thomas said sharply:

“Really—what an extraordinary question!”

&nbs