Murder by the Clock quotes

there rarely was an and-the-drummer-said-to-Mabel or an-Irishman-and-a-Jew among them. Rarely? He shuddered. Never. As a result there were occasions when he rested under the cloud of being considered mildly lunatic. It was bad business. He had told himself so firmly again and again.

Success and humour formed bedfellows as agreeable as an absentminded dog would be en négligé in the boudoir of a surprised cat.

With a beautiful access of gravity he lifted the lid of an enamelled wicker hamper and peered in at the soiled linen it contained. There were many towels. Towels were, he reflected, one of the few genuine hallmarks of the rich.

I’m not making a speech, really. What I’m trying to express is that in that background, that pattern of Mr. Endicott’s life, one thread or series of interrelated threads would stand out pretty plainly as the reason why someone should wish to kill him.”

“I,” said Mrs. Endicott, “have several times wished to kill him.”

Lieutenant Valcour nodded. “There is nothing left for me but the trite things to say about marriage. And trite things, after all, are the true things, don’t you think?”

Mrs. Endicott’s slender hand and arm were models of quietness in motion as she reached for a cigarette.

“Everything wears off with usage,” she said. “Love quicker than anything else.”

“But it doesn’t wear off completely, love doesn’t, ever.”

“No? I just mentioned it, as nine times out of ten that’s what people do in attics.”

“And the tenth customary thing,” said Mrs. Endicott, reaching for a cigarette, “is suicide.”

A look of interest stirred sleepily in the coals.

“Because there’s a look of witch-burning in your eyes.”

Mrs. Siddons gestured a slow negation.

Mrs. Siddons gestured a slow negation.

“I would never abrogate the rights of God.”

“But you would approve, Mrs. Siddons.”

“Then why do you stay with Mrs. Endicott?” he said softly.

“Because there are some people, Lieutenant, who can only find their happiness in hell.”

“It’s a sharing, if you wish—sort of a sharing of torture.”

Lieutenant Valcour shrugged.

“There are no such things,” he said evenly, “as sex or chivalry in murder.”

“I am painting, incidentally, the darkest prospect of the picture. In all probability nothing will happen at all. You’ll spend a sleepless and tiresome night, get cricks in your necks, and damn the day you ever joined the force.

A complete stillness settled gently on the house.

The stillness of a grave.

Yes, she thought, just exactly that—the stillness of a grave. …

“Among men? Hell, no.” Hollander jerked his head fretfully.

“Gratitude gets damned tiresome, Lieutenant, not only to give it but to get it.”

“Especially,” Lieutenant Valcour said gently, “if a woman comes between.”

“Discounting your weekly adventures between paper covers, this is your first real murder case, isn’t it, Cassidy?”

“I thank God it is, sir.”

“Well, you’ll get used to them after a while. Before you’re called in on your fourth or fifth you’ll be finished with having presentiments.”

“

That’s the trouble with truth: it often sounds so silly.

”

Endicott must have been rather an ass, he decided, as well as a pretty low sort of an animal. It was all very well for Roberts to rave on about soldiers, and simple hearts, and war, and things. That’s just what it amounted to: raving.

What if Endicott and, presumably, her brother had had simple hearts. So had guinea pigs.

Lieutenant Valcour wondered whether everyone else connected with the case was quite sane and he just a little mad. Roberts—Mrs. Endicott—the housekeeper—Hollander—Madame Velasquez. They all seemed a little touched, and that was a sign of madness when one considered everyone else but one’s self insane.

With such a direct strain of insanity inherent in her blood no outside agency whatever might have been needed to awaken it into activity. And then, he reminded himself, the girl had been shopping.

He often wondered why more women didn’t go mad while shopping.

“Had Mr. Endicott any alibi for the period between the time he left her at Macy’s and came home?”

…

He was very near her now, himself a mist drifting softly through mist.⁠ ⁠…

Whispering—whispering—he could hear her whispering—a thin flow of meaning rather than of words, sent from the grayness to that light beyond—sent through a little measured casement out into the immeasurable brilliance of eternity. Her hands were resting easily by her side;

“It was beginning to. Things like that work slowly; they keep breeding in the mind until they become effective.”

She had missed, he decided, her century. When the Medicis were in flower she, too, would have bloomed her best.

“Mrs. Endicott, what was your real reason for sending for the police last night?”

“Then you can’t appreciate fully what I mean when I say that Roberts is a good maid. What earthly difference does it make whether she hates or loves me?

I’m hiring her services, not her emotions, and her services are excellent.

I’ve frequently wished that someone in my successive chain of cooks would develop a similar passion. There’s something so binding about it.”

He felt that she was escaping him again, that her armour was swiftly undergoing repair. In the brightening light her face shone clearer. She didn’t seem quite such an enigma, after all.

Nothing ever was, he reflected, truly enigmatic in daytime.

It was just a tired face, wearied by any number of things other than the lack of sleep.

She brushed with elementary strokes through fog in her effort to be explicit. “I love Tom Hollander, too, just as much as I loved Herbert. It isn’t nice, but it’s the truth.

Love isn’t a unit, a single emotion tightly wrapped up in one word. It’s a hundred feelings and desires and any number of little human hurts that are longing to be made well again.

” A certain bitterness crept into her manner: a bitterness of revolt. “The whole wretched business is too stylized. It’s quite all right to love your father and your mother equally;