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The waiting was terrible—terrible. He began to be afraid that the tension would bring on one of those ever more frequent black-outs, of not coming to in time to make his ’phone calls. And indeed he did lapse into some sort of uneasy dream, returning fully to awareness only a few minutes before midnight—ill, exhausted, as though instead of lolling there a prey to nightmares, he had been through some tremendous effort …

Coming to full awareness—to a sudden full realisation of what he had done.

Save her, he thought—I must have been mad, I must save her, must save her!

Telephone her flat, then? To the police? But it was almost twelve, wouldn’t that make him too late to catch the television people? On the other hand … With his mind split three ways, he stumbled over to the telephone.

And the telephone was dead.

Panic hit him like a hurricane, whirled him into the familiar darkness, only one thought clear in his mind. Time’s running out. I must ring the press, ring the television people, I must tell them about it before it becomes known, before there is any normal way for me to have found out.

But the telephone was dead. The office, he thought: the office flat! I can use the ’phone there. Not waiting for the lift, he fled down the single flight of stairs. The church clock boomed the hour as with a trembling hand he thrust the key into the lock. He flung open the door and tumbled into the flat.

And she was waiting for him there.

The uplifted arm, the plunge of the keen blade that seemed to flash down and into his heart, as though through a sheet of shining water. He gave one shrill rabbit-scream of pain; and she was down on her knees, bending over him, sniffing at the blood that spurted through the slit nylon, snuffling like a pig after truffles. ‘The smell! The smell! More of it, I must have more!’ But she dropped the raised hand.

‘No, no, I mustn’t!’ She muttered and mumbled. ‘Only one stab. Self-defence …’ His head rolled helplessly as she forced on to it the dark nylon wig. Muttering … Echoes of the gruesome mutterings of the telephone voice. ‘Can’t call them till he dies. So die, can’t you?—die!’ She scrambled up, perched on the edge of a chair, leaning over him, her eyes fixed on his face. Her voice relaxed into something more nearly human. ‘But you’ll die—No Face, the maniac murderer with his nearly human thirst for the smell of death! Oh, you signed your death warrant, didn’t you?—the day you published that first article. Mad am I? Well, helpless lunatic I may be, but I got you into my power from that hour on. Watched you, got on to your tricks in the churches … Didn’t you ever think, poor deluded fool, that it was all a bit too slick and easy? Picking me up there—so naïve and trusting! And the confessional! I suppose that poor wretch still believes he heard the confession of a killer who would kill again. A trap for you—a trap! All laid on by the pitiful lunatic with his terrible childhood experiences. Terrible, it wasn’t terrible, it was wonderful, I hated them, I hated them for doing it all in front of me, their child—fighting each other with knives, fighting to the death. I wanted the smell of it again, the smell of their death in my nostrils. And again and again. But I needed a fall guy—the police were getting close, even if they didn’t yet know it. And who more suitable than you, who had spilt out your lies to the world. Mad, was I?—who was up to all your shifts and contrivances, playing you along, selling you to the police. Watching over me?—they were watching you with your precious scryings and seeings. The murderer’s voice ringing you up!—who knew that?—they knew only that you told them he rang you up. Do you think they believed you? I believed you: after all it was I who rang you. And all the disguises here, right down to the sheets of sheer plastic: this is one of your own wigs, they’ll find plenty of clues in that. They thought you might even not know it yourself, I described the blackouts, how you’d come to exhausted, strange dreams … I didn’t mention the little doses in all those warm drinks I used to bring you, kind, caring Delphine! But of course, all that was after the double killing …’

His ears were closed now, deaf for ever. His eyes were sightless for ever, staring blindly up at the animal face that could turn in a moment so charming and sweet—snout out-thrust at the savoured memory of that spilling of blood after which she had written SURFEIT. But, dead or alive, she needed an audience now. She gloated on. ‘Oh, the two of them—didn’t I have you all on a merry-go-round that time? Ringing you in my No Face voice—waiting till you called me; begging you to come. Not replacing the receiver so that your own telephone was disconnected, you had to ring the police from a call-box. And you played right into my hands; for what other reason had I chosen a foggy night?—driving around “not knowing what you were doing”, getting yourself lost. They thought you’d rung up from the call-box outside my flats, got in through the window and away again before they could arrive there. From then on—oh, you were for it, Mr Hawke! No clues, nothing to pin on you yet; but now they knew. They let me stay and spy on you in the flat, I was safe while mobs of people were coming in and out; but they watched you, night and day. It was wearisome, no more killings for those three hungry months, but I’d had a good deal from the double killing, I could last. Till the time came—I had to get more. Not that you’ve provided me with a lot, but once you’ve gone and the police relax, break up all this elaborate operation—then I can safely begin again. What a laugh!—took you in completely, didn’t I?—with the scrying act! You—drinking it all in, the final warning that I would be killed tonight. Murdered, slaughtered, by the maniac psychopath—and you let me go home to it! But I didn’t go home, you see: I just came here. I knew how your mind would work, I knew you’d never warn the police, you’d rather get your triumph with the media—and I’d quietly disconnected your telephone, you’d have to come down here to do it. And you came.’ Calm now, calmed by the assuaging of the long unsatisfied craving, she leaned over and sniffed long and ecstatically at the thickened seeping of the blood around the wound; rose and, re-settling her features into those of a sick and terrified girl, went across, already weeping, to the telephone. ‘Oh, Mr Tomm! Oh, it’s so dreadful! He came at me with the knife …’

And so now, here he was, trying to get through to them, to the circle sitting there in the darkness with their touching hands. Screaming, silently screaming. ‘Listen to me, listen! Tell them, warn them, implore them to believe in me! They’ve got it all wrong. Yes, I cheated sometimes, but I had the Gift, I had it, and here I am now to prove it to you, speaking to you … Tell them I wasn’t the killer, tell them it’s all going to begin again!’

But they would not hear him. Heard only the sweet, familiar piping. ‘Very happy. Yes, he’s happy now, he’s met them all on the Other Side, his sins are forgiven him. All peace and joy on the Other Side, sunshine and flowers everywhere, just sunshine and flowers …’

Sunshine and flowers; and no one to believe in his warning—this very night, it’s all going to begin again.

CHRISTIANNA BRAND

Mary Lewis, née Milne, was born in Malaya in 1907, the daughter of a tea planter. She wrote under the pen names Mary Brand, Mary Roland, Mary Ann Ashe, China Thompson, Annabel Jones and, the one as which she is best known, Christianna Brand, which joined her mother’s first name to her grandmother’s maiden name.

After several happy years at school at a convent in Berkshire, Brand was told she would have to leave by her father, who had been declared bankrupt. At the age of seventeen, she found herself ‘literally penniless’ and with no training whatsoever for earning her own livelihood. She moved to London where, known by her friends as ‘Quif’, she drifted from one job to another, eventually becoming a dance hostess (which, incidentally, was not a euphemism for something less respectable). This inspired her earliest published short story, a light romance entitled ‘Dance Hostess’ (1939) and it led to her meeting her husband, a surgeon called Roland Lewis. The couple married in 1936 and, when the Second World War broke out, Roland Lewis joined the Royal Army Medical Corps and was posted overseas.

On her own in London, Mary Lewis moved in and out of a variety of jobs, eventually taking on a role that was to change her life—she became a shop assistant. While she was not a great success in the job, the job led to a great success for her because she detested the manager of the shop so much that she decided to kill her … in a novel. The hate-fuelled result, Death in High Heels (1941), is set not in a shop but in a high-class Mayfair couturier, drawing on another of her many early jobs. There is a poisoning and the detective is the brash young Inspector Charlesworth.

With the return of her husband to England, Mary Lewis settled down with the intention of writing for the rest of her life. Her second novel, Heads You Lose (1941), won the $1,000 Red Badge prize offered by publishers Dodd, Mead for the best mystery of the year, but it was her third book, Green for Danger (1944), that made her a household name, not least because of the film version, which was released in 1946 and starred Alastair Sim as her best known detective, Inspector Cockrill. That same year, she was elected to the Detection Club, and she continued to write books of various kinds under various names.

By the late 1950s, Mary Lewis was recognised as a leading name in the crime and detective genre. Sadly, and for private reasons, she decided to give up writing mystery novels. However, she could not abandon writing altogether and, as well as a few newspaper serials and some short stories for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, she wrote a series of ‘true life’ novellas for Woman and several short books for children featuring Nurse Matilda, a character based on her own nanny.

And then, twenty years since his last case, Inspector Charlesworth returned, in The Rose in Darkness (1979), a strange, almost dreamlike book in which a reclusive actress and her small group of friends are caught up in what appears to be murder. The return was very warmly welcomed by critics and readers alike but Mary Lewis had been suffering from a painful illness for some years and she died in March 1988.

At the time of her death, Mary Lewis was working on a new detective story featuring Inspector Cockrill and, while that was not finished, a collection of largely unpublished material is due in 2020 from an American publisher, Crippen and Landru.

‘NO FACE’ has not been published previously.

BEFORE AND AFTER
Peter Antony

It was nine o’clock on a warm summer’s morning when Nurse Stephens discovered the body of her employer. Even in death Mrs Carmichael’s face still held the irritability of one forced to lean on others who were all too often engaged elsewhere. For fifteen years she had been paralysed from the waist down. Now a tiny hole, drilled neatly through her right temple, had made the top half of her body as immobile as the lower half.

It was all most unfortunate, particularly for Nurse Stephens, who had a most unprofessional attitude to the sight of the little blood there was. She managed, however, to ’phone the doctor and the police.

Inspector Swallow was nominally in charge of the party who arrived at Delver Park at ten o’clock—assorted ‘experts’, finger-print men, a photographer and the doctor. After a telephone conversation with Inspector Rambler of Scotland Yard, Swallow had been advised by that gentleman to bring with him on the case Mr Verity, who happened to be staying in the locality, and whenever Mr Verity ventured on a case, no one could possibly deny that he, not the police officer, was in charge of it.

‘You will certainly find him a little difficult to get on with,’ Rambler had said to Swallow over the ’phone, ‘but he is really a remarkable man. He always finds the truth. If he is in the area you can’t afford to neglect his services. In any case, I don’t suppose you will be able to. He has an infuriating habit of tendering them unasked.’

Inspector Swallow had not waited for that event, but had picked Mr Verity up in the police car on his way to Delver Park, and he now stood regarding the lifeless features of Mrs Carmichael with faint distaste.

Mr Verity was an immense man, tall and proportionately broad. His blue eyes shone brilliantly out of a pointed, bronzed face, which was completed by a well-tended, chestnut Vandyke. Despite the earliness of the hour, he was smoking a long, black Cuban cigar with the most curiously theatrical gestures.

‘She does make a particularly unlovely corpse,’ he said at length. ‘And I thought that death was meant to have a softening effect on the features.’

Inspector Swallow interposed: ‘If you’ve finished your inspection, could we have a few details, doctor?’

Doctor Hendrikson, neat, bird-like and laconic, straightened up.

‘She was killed with something like a very thin knitting-needle. It was driven with a considerable amount of force through her temple here. A quick-closing wound with very little blood. Time of death 10.30 to 11 o’clock last night. That’s about as accurate as I can get it.’

‘Clear enough. Munby, get finger-printing, and you, Brandt, do your stuff.’

Brandt, a young recruit to the Force, took his camera and leant over Mrs Carmichael’s tightening face. He giggled nervously.

‘Watch the dickie bird,’ he said with bravado.

Mr Verity scowled.

‘The contagion of Mr Raymond Chandler!’ he snorted.

‘Let’s go and see the family,’ said Swallow.

Together the two detectives went downstairs to the library where the dead woman’s husband and the nurse were waiting for them.

Robert Carmichael was a tall, austere man still in his late thirties, with a fine forehead, darting brown eyes, a rather sharp nose and an unexpectedly weak mouth and chin. Nurse Stephens was good-looking in a coarse, full-blown sort of way. Neither appeared distraught though they were essaying a reasonable facsimile.

Swallow was good at this game, being at once urbane, sympathetic and slightly menacing.

‘Now, let’s start from tea-time yesterday.’

Nurse Stephens was ready and willing.

‘Tea was at 4.30. Mrs Carmichael had her medicine at 4.45, and after that I wheeled her down to the garden. About five, Mr Carmichael took her photograph and went off to the village to develop it, whilst I sat with Mrs Carmichael for an hour or so before wheeling her off to bed. I remained on duty until seven o’clock, when relieved by the night nurse, Wimple.’

‘And everything was all right before you left?’

‘Certainly, Mrs Carmichael was asleep and everything in order.’

‘And later on that evening?’

‘At 7.30 we all went over to Colonel Longford’s house for dinner and bridge. We arrived back here at about one in the morning,’ Robert Carmichael put in.

‘All?’

‘Nurse Stephens, my brother-in-law Doctor Sanderson, Sandra my stepdaughter, and myself.’

Mr Verity grunted reflectively.

‘There seems to be a pretty comprehensive interest in that curiously anti-social pastime, eh, Mr Carmichael?’

‘I beg your pardon, sir?’

‘I refer to bridge.’

‘Yes, we all play.’

‘Tell me, Mr Carmichael, did your wife have any mortal enemies that you knew of?’

‘I’m afraid I can’t help you there, Mr Verity. I am as much in the dark as you are.’

‘Never mind, Mr Carmichael. I have a wonderful capacity for illumination.’

With a wave of the hand he dismissed them.

That evening after tea, Inspector Swallow and his elderly colleague saw Dr Sanderson, the dead woman’s brother.

The old man started the ball rolling with typical charm.

‘Well, sir. You’ve lost a sister and made £15,000. Some people would consider that you have made a profit on the day’s activities. What do you think?’

Doctor Sanderson, balding, eagle-nosed and tubby, was indignant.

‘Really, Mr Verity, I do resent that most earnestly. After all, I was very fond—’

‘I know all about it. Your sister left it to you. I saw Riggs the lawyer before tea. And don’t say you didn’t know … Looks of incredulity are lost on me. I have seen too many of them to be deceived into thinking that you only expected a little something … an extra pipe of tobacco a week maybe, or that odd pint.’

‘But it’s true—’

Inspector Swallow interposed tactfully.

‘Oh, come now, sir. It is our duty to check up on people, and we have discovered that you’ve been borrowing money on the strength of your expectations. Considerable sums, too.’

Doctor Sanderson paled.

‘Oh, so you know about that. You certainly work fast.’

His face set defiantly; assumed pain gave way to spleen.

‘All right, then, if you know so much about me, what about the others? Have you seen my sanctimonious brother-in-law? He’s not the sort of man to be chained to a hopeless invalid all his life and do nothing about it.’

Mr Verity was yawning hugely.

‘In the words of the vulgar, do you imply that we cherchez la femme?’

‘And not so far either.’

‘You refer, of course, to the angel of mercy. You could be right.’

‘No “could be” about it. And there’s Sandra. Money in trust. Love’s young dream, and the missing parental consent. Why not have a look at all that before picking on me?’

‘It’s not a question of picking on anybody,’ murmured Mr Verity sweetly. ‘I just always like to take suspects in order of repulsion.’

Doctor Sanderson stormed out of the library in a fury.

Both detectives stayed to dinner. It was a homely little meal, marred perhaps for the hypersensitive by the arrival of the mortuary van. Mr Verity was in great form and talked incessantly about a portrait of an old man in polychromed clay executed by Guido Mazzoni in the late fifteenth century which he had just purchased for his collection of statuary at his Sussex home ‘Persepolis’. The company, with the exception of Sandra, Carmichael’s stepdaughter, bore his recondite conversation with fortitude. She, however, was noticeably distressed, and it was with some diffidence that the two men set out after dinner to find out exactly why.

‘Believe it or not,’ she began, when at last they were alone together in the library, ‘I had a great affection for my mother.’

‘That is not the voice of vulgar rumour,’ said the old man.

‘You can love a person and not always get on with them, Mr Verity.’

‘So the Bible continually reminds us.’

Swallow scratched his head and said gently:

‘Your mother had £20,000 in trust for you. I understand you were to receive this sum, or the income thereof, on your marriage, provided your mother gave her consent. Is that correct?’

‘Perfectly. Have you ever heard anything so monstrous? It was my father’s idea.’

She said this as if her father’s death had been no great loss to her.

‘And the position was that, having hunted down one Harry Logan as your intended mate, you could not persuade your mother that the alliance of Harry and £20,000 was a holy one.’

Mr Verity smiled benevolently at her over his black cigar, and patted his inflated stomach affectionately.

Sandra Collins was almost crying. Her top lip trembled mutinously.

‘So—?’

‘So, if I might say it without offence, my dear Miss Collins, murder for money is still a highly favoured motive, not only amongst those who write on matters of crime, but amongst those who investigate it.’

Wishing to avoid an hysterical scene, Inspector Swallow left the world of conjecture conjured up by his colleague, and returned to the world of fact.

‘Tell me, Miss Collins,’ he began suavely, ‘what did you do last night?’

‘I went out to dinner with the others. You can soon find out whether that’s true or not.’

‘I have already done so.’

Sandra was openly weeping now.

‘I didn’t kill her, Inspector,’ she sobbed, ‘… my own mother … You can’t say I did.’

‘Which at the moment of speaking is perfectly true,’ grunted Mr Verity, blowing a smoke-ring.

‘Oh, you’re impossible,’ she cried, and with the tears pouring down her face hurried from the room.

‘Mr Verity, I don’t like this case,’ Swallow said when they were alone. ‘All of them had motives for killing her, yet none of them could have done it.’

Mr Verity beamed.

‘Don’t let it prey on you. 10.30 to 11 o’clock is the time to keep in mind. Surely we can punch a hole in one of their well-rehearsed narratives.’

‘It seems impossible. They were all over at Colonel Longford’s between 7.30 p.m. and 1 a.m. He lives twelve miles from here and there was absolutely no opportunity for one of them to take an unnoticed hour off, to drive back here, do the murder and drive back again. I checked up on it and no one left. Besides, the excellent Nurse Wimple was on duty in the passage outside Mrs Carmichael’s room the whole night, so no one could have got in.’

Mr Verity looked glum.

‘Oh lord! Not another locked room. My last locked-room case was a shattering business … all centring round some dreadful woman in a wardrobe. Besides, the excellent Wimple probably spent half the night dreaming she was in the arms of Tarzan.’

‘I’m afraid she claims all-night consciousness. And, further, she had no motive to kill the old lady.’

‘Of course she didn’t do it. If she had, she would have taken good care to provide herself with an alibi.’ The old detective yawned. ‘Come, Inspector, adjourn with me to the local hostelry. A pint or two of good ale, a cigar and a little light discussion on the terra-cotta work of Antonio Pollaiulo will do wonders for our tired brains.’

The next morning Inspector Swallow, calling on Mr Verity, found him in a state of high excitement.

‘Here, Inspector, look at this. Interesting, eh?’

He pointed with a well-manicured forefinger at the centre-page advertisement in the morning’s copy of the Daily Grind. It showed two photographs of Mrs Carmichael ‘Before and After Taking Toneup, the wonderful restorative for Invalids … “I felt absolutely washed out until I started taking Toneup,” says Mrs Carmichael, a chronic invalid of Delver Park …’

‘Yes, I know all about it.’ Inspector Swallow said. ‘It was Mrs Carmichael’s idea. I asked her husband. He sent it off the same night she got killed. Just another manifestation of the invalid’s craving to be noticed, I suppose.’

‘I suppose so,’ Verity replied, thoughtfully brushing his Vandyke with the back of a huge hand. ‘But I wonder why she is looking so sour in the “After” photograph. It’s most curious. In this kind of picture the patient is always equipped with a smirk of imbecilic glee. Here she looks like a professional mourner.’

Swallow studied the ‘After’ picture in perplexity.

‘Maybe it’s the cigarette smoke getting in her eyes.’

Mr Verity took out a small pocket magnifying-glass and scrutinized the picture again.

‘You must excuse the Sherlock Holmes touch … Yes, that is another curious point. There is certainly plenty of cigarette smoke there. But where is the cigarette?’

‘I think I can barely see it … there between her fingers.’

Inspector Swallow pointed to a dark smudge on the picture.

‘That is very odd indeed. One might almost say it is the first real rift in the leaden clouds of deceit which have surrounded us since the start of our investigations.’

‘Do you think she was dead then?’

‘Certainly not. The doctor said she died between 10.30 and 11 o’clock, approximately six hours later. I never believe doctors on questions of health, but on questions of death I have always found them infallible. Besides, the maid up at Delver Park confirms she was alive at six o’clock. She helped carry her upstairs in the wheel-chair.’

Inspector Swallow ran a harassed hand through his thinning hair.

‘I don’t understand it at all, Mr Verity. A woman is murdered in a room where no one could have reached her without being seen, and at a time when everyone was miles away. What do we do now? What is the significance of this photograph, if any?’

‘It certainly is significant. In fact, it tells us everything.’

Mr Verity lit a Cuban cigar and looked dreamily in front of him.

‘You really must have patience, Inspector. As to what we are to do now, there is only one thing to do.’

‘And that is?’

‘We must pay a visit to the morgue … No, don’t ask why. You will see when we get there.’

They had to stand five minutes in the antiseptic half-light of the mortuary before the attendants had sorted out Mrs Carmichael. Nervously Swallow pulled back the sheet and studied the body intently.

‘Observe her right hand,’ murmured Verity over his shoulder.

The Inspector whistled, and the noise had a horrible flat ring in that desolate room.

‘She must have been a heavy smoker. The whole finger is stained with nicotine, and the flesh is badly scorched on the side there.’

Mr Verity’s satanic face wore a smug look.

‘Just so. Mrs Carmichael must have suffered a considerable amount of pain in allowing that cigarette to burn down to that point.’

‘She must have been asleep when her husband took that “After” picture,’ said Swallow.

‘Fiddlesticks,’ roared Verity. ‘She was unconscious.’

‘And just what is the point of shunting an unconscious woman around in a bath-chair, posing her for a personality picture, dumping her in bed and going off to a bridge party?’ the Inspector enquired, suddenly startled by the old man’s explosion.

‘The point should be obvious to an intelligence considerably meaner than yours, my dear Inspector. Come, I want to make a telephone call.’

‘To whom?’

‘To the station, of course. I want them to arrest our two murderers, and take them into custody. Come, don’t stand there as if you had been struck by lightning. I’m sure they must have a ’phone here; if not for the convenience of the inmates, at least for casual visitors.’

Whilst the Inspector saw that the body of Mrs Carmichael was safely returned, Mr Verity found the ’phone and got through to the police-station. His instructions were brief but effective.

Ten minutes later, after Mr Verity had meticulously examined some Corinthian-style pillaring which had caught his fancy on the exterior of the little town hall, the two detectives were speeding back to the police-station in the Inspector’s car.

‘After all, we don’t want to keep our prisoners waiting,’ Mr Verity explained as he urged his colleague to exceed the speed limit. Inspector Swallow, his mind in a baffled whirl, drove steadily.

Once at the station, Mr Verity jumped out of the car with all the deftness of a rhinoceros in labour, and charged inside.

‘Well, where are they?’ he enquired of a constable behind the desk.

‘Waiting inside, sir.’

Next door sat Robert Carmichael and Nurse Stephens, white-faced and very angry.

‘You’ll pay for this, Verity,’ Carmichael roared. ‘False imprisonment. I’ll get £10,000 damages.’

‘The only damage you’ll get is to your neck,’ the old man replied benignly.

‘You can’t prove a thing. On your own evidence, the murder was done between 10.30 and 11 o’clock. Nurse Stephens and I were miles away at the time. I have half a dozen witnesses.’

‘Saving your presence, Nurse Stephens, I wouldn’t give a damn if you had the whole population of Central London as witnesses. You may have been miles away when your wife died, but that doesn’t mean you didn’t murder her. You ran the whole job up between you—a very natural alliance seeing that you planned to carry the partnership on to the legalised sex level when the obstacle was safely in her coffin.’

‘This is absurd,’ screamed Nurse Stephens. ‘Supposing you prove it.’

‘I can do that, too,’ Mr Verity replied, taking a deep puff at his cigar and exhaling slowly. ‘From the burn on Mrs Carmichael’s finger, I was convinced that at the time you took that photograph your wife was unconscious. Therefore some drug was suggested and at the same time a wonderful opportunity for administering the stuff—Mrs Carmichael’s medicine.

‘What happened was this. Nurse Stephens slipped an overdose of some suitable narcotic, probably chloral hydrate, into the medicine, and though the victim lost consciousness within half an hour she did not die until close on 11 o’clock. What simpler than for your nurse to come along in the morning and drive a thin implement through her head, the idea being to make it look as if Mrs Carmichael had been murdered at 11 o’clock, the time of death, when she and her accomplice were twelve miles away playing bridge. A very thin weapon, even if it had been used when the victim was alive, would cause so very little blood that Doctor Hendrikson was unable to tell that the wound was inflicted after death. Again, a drug like chloral hydrate would not be suspected if there were other evidence to account for death, like a wound in the temple. Ingenious and all well within a qualified nurse’s knowledge.

‘It really was very foolish of you, Mr Carmichael, to give way to your macabre egotism and put a picture of your dying wife in the newspaper with a caption plugging her superb health. It wasn’t really necessary to prove that she was alive at five o’clock. There was plenty of independent testimony on this point. On the other hand, it clearly showed me the way to your conviction … You can lock them up now, Sergeant.’