The Three Taps

The principles of insurance, they tell us, were not hidden from our Anglo-Saxon forefathers. How anybody had the enterprise in those rough-and-tumble days to guarantee a client against “fire, water, robbery or other calamity” remains a problem for the historian; the more so as it appears that mathematical calculations were first applied to the business by the eminent John de Witt. In our own time, at any rate, the insurance companies have woven a golden net under the tightrope walk of existence; if life is a lottery, the prudent citizen faces it with the consciousness that he is backed both ways. Had the idea been thoroughly grasped in those remoter periods, no doubt but Alfred’s hostess would have been easily consoled for the damage done to her cakes and King John handsomely compensated for all that he lost in The Wash. Let us thank the soaring genius of the human mind which has thus found a means to canalize for us the waters of affliction; and let us always be scrupulous in paying up our premiums before the date indicated on the printed card, lest calamity should come upon us and find us unprepared.

In a sense, though, insurance was but an empirical science until the Indescribable Company made its appearance.

In one of the waiting-rooms on the ground floor, sitting under a large palm-tree and reading a closely reasoned article in the Actuaries’ and Bottomry Gazette, sat a client to whom the reader will do well to direct attention, for our story is concerned with him. His look, his dress, his manner betrayed the rich man only to those who have frequented the smaller provincial towns and know how little in those centres money has to do with education. He had a short black coat with very broad and long lapels, a starched collar that hesitated between the Shakespeare and the all-the-way-and-back-again patterns, a double-breasted waistcoat from which hung a variety of seals, lockets and charms⁠—in London, in fact, you would have put him down for an old-fashioned bank cashier with a moderate income. Actually, he could have bought you out of your present job at double the salary and hardly felt it. In Pullford, a large Midland town which you probably will never visit, men nudged one another and pointed to him as one of the wealthiest residents. In the anteroom of the Indescribable offices he looked, and perhaps felt, like a schoolboy waiting his turn for pocket-money. Yet even here he was a figure recognizable to the attendant who stood there smoothing out back numbers of the Actuaries’ and Bottomry Gazette. For this man, called Mottram by accident of birth and Jephthah through the bad taste of his parents, was the holder of a Euthanasia policy.

By next morning Bredon’s spirits had risen. He had received by the early post a confidential letter from the company describing Mr. Mottram’s curious offer, and suggesting (naturally) that the state of his health made suicide a plausible conjecture. The morning was fine, the car running well, the road they had selected in admirable condition. It was still before tea time when they turned off from its excellent surface onto indifferent byroads, through which they had to thread their way with difficulty. The signposts, as is the wont of English signposts, now blazoned “Chilthorpe,” “Chilthorpe,” “Chilthorpe,” as if it were the lodestone of the neighbourhood, now passed it over in severe silence, preferring to call attention to the fact that you were within five furlongs of Little Stubley. They had fallen, besides, upon hill country, with unexpected turns and precipitous gradients; they followed with enforced windings the bleak valley of the Busk, which swirled beneath them over smooth boulders between desolate banks. It was just after they had refused the fifth invitation to Little Stubley that the County Council’s arrangements played them false; there was a clear issue between two rival roads, with no trace of a signpost to direct their preference. It was here that they saw, and hailed, an old gentleman who was making casts into a promising pool about twenty yards away.

“Chilthorpe?” said the old gentleman. “All the world seems to be coming to Chilthorpe. The County Council does not appear to have allowed for the possibility of its becoming such a centre of fashion.

I’d like to have a look at this gas.”

There was a bracket on the wall, not far from the door, which originally had been the only light in the room. But for bed-sitting room purposes a special fitting had been added to this giving a second vent for the gas; and this new vent was connected by a long piece of rubber tubing with a standard lamp that stood on the writing-table near the window. There were thus three taps in all, and all of these close together on the bracket. One opened the jet on the bracket itself, one led to the rubber tubing and the standard lamp and the third was the oldest and closest to the wall, serving to cut off the supply of gas from both passages at once. This third main tap was turned off now; of the other two, the one on the bracket was closed, the one which led to the standard lamp stood open.

“Is this how the taps were when the body was first found?” asked Bredon.

“Exactly. Of course we’ve turned them on and off since to make certain that the jets were both in working order. They were, both of them. And we tried the taps for fingerprints⁠—with powder, you know.”

“Any results?”

“Only on the main tap. We could just trace where it had been turned on, with the thumb pressing on the right-hand side. But there were no marks of fingers turning it off.”

“That’s damned queer.”

“Gloves?”

“Oh, of course you think it was murder. Still, if it was murder it should have been the murderer who turned it on and off. Why did he conceal his traces in one case and not in the other?”

They seemed, indeed, to be in the very centre of a thunderstorm, though it was nowhere quite close at hand. Every few seconds, from some unexpected quarter, the whole sky seemed to wink twice in rapid succession, and with the wink the roofs of Chilthorpe would suddenly stand out silhouetted, and a pale glare fell on the white road outside. Rain lashed upon the roof above them, and for a few minutes every gutter spouted and every seam in the tiles let in a pattering flood; then, without a word of warning, the rain would die down once more. Occasionally the lightning would manifest itself closer, great jagged streaks across the sky that looked as if they were burying themselves in the hill summits above the town. When the elements were at rest for a moment, there was an uncanny stillness on every side; not a dog barked, not a footstep clattered down the deserted street.

Attuned as their nerves were to the thunder, they both started as if in panic when the telephone bell rang. Leyland was at the instrument in a moment, and heard Angela’s cool voice asking for him at the other end.

“Is that you, Mr. Leyland? Brinkman has just left the hotel by the front door.⁠ ⁠… Yes, the front door. I didn’t see him myself, of course, but my husband said he came out quite coolly, just looking up at our window as if to see whether he was watched. Then I came straight to the telephone.