The A B C Murders

When do you notice an individual murder least? When it is one of a series of related murders.

“You are quite right. Enjoy yourself. And—just a little word—what about a visit to an oculist? Those headaches, it is probably that you want new glasses.”

“You think that it may have been that all the time?”

“I do.”

I must mention a visit we had from Mr. Alexander Bonaparte Cust a few days later. After wringing Poirot’s hand and endeavouring very incoherently and unsuccessfully to thank him, Mr. Cust drew himself up and said:

“Do you know, a newspaper has actually offered me a hundred pounds—a hundred pounds—for a brief account of my life and history—I—I really don’t know what to do about it.”

“Mademoiselle Megan, all along, was haunted by a fear that it was you who had committed the second crime.”

Donald Fraser said quietly:

“I fancied so myself at one time.”

“Because of your dream?” He drew a little nearer to the young man and dropped his voice confidentially. “Your dream has a very natural explanation. It is that you find that already the image of one sister fades in your memory and that its place is taken by the other sister. Mademoiselle Megan replaces her sister in your heart, but since you cannot bear to think of yourself being unfaithful so soon to the dead, you strive to stifle the thought, to kill it! That is the explanation of the dream.”

“Those questions, Poirot? That you asked of everybody. Was there any point in them?”

“Some of them were simplement une blague. But I learnt one thing that I wanted to know—that Franklin Clarke was in London when the first letter was posted—and also I wanted to see his face when I asked my question of Mademoiselle Thora. He was off his guard. I saw all the malice and anger in his eyes.”

“You hardly spared my feelings,” said Thora Grey.

“I do not fancy you returned me a truthful answer, mademoiselle,” said Poirot dryly. “And now your second expectation is disappointed. Franklin Clarke will not inherit his brother’s money.”

I am sorry to relate that as the door closed behind Franklin Clarke I laughed hysterically.

Poirot looked at me in mild surprise.

“It’s because you told him his crime was not sporting,” I gasped.

“It was quite true. It was abominable—not so much the murder of his brother—but the cruelty that condemned an unfortunate man to a living death. To catch a fox and put him in a box and never let him go! That is not le sport!”

“No, Mr. Clarke,” said Poirot. “You may have noticed I had a new manservant today—a friend of mine—an expert sneak thief. He removed your pistol from your pocket, unloaded it, and returned it, all without you being aware of the fact.”

“You unutterable little jackanapes of a foreigner!” cried Clarke, purple with rage.

“Yes, yes, that is how you feel. No, Mr. Clarke, no easy death for you. You told Mr. Cust that you had had near escapes from drowning. You know what that means—that you were born for another fate.”

“You—”

Words failed him. His face was livid. His fists clenched menacingly.

Once you were suspected proofs were easy to obtain.”

“Proofs?”

“Yes. I found the stick that you used in the Andover and Churston murders in a cupboard at Combeside. An ordinary stick with a thick knob handle. A section of wood had been removed and melted lead poured in. Your photograph was picked out from half a dozen others by two people who saw you leaving the cinema when you were supposed to be on the race course at Doncaster. You were identified at Bexhill the other day by Milly Higley and a girl from the Scarlet Runner Roadhouse, where you took Betty Barnard to dine on the fatal evening. And finally—most damning of all—you overlooked a most elementary precaution. You left a fingerprint on Cust’s typewriter—the typewriter that, if you are innocent, you could never have handled.”

They think he has been in Cheltenham. He has the knife with him still—a thoroughly stupid thing to do, of course. He hides it behind the hall stand.

“Then, one day, he is warned that the police are coming. It is the end! They know!

“The hunted animal does his last run….

“I don’t know why he went to Andover—a morbid desire, I think, to go and look at the place where the crime was committed—the crime he committed though he can remember nothing about it….

“He has no money left—he is worn out…his feet lead him of his own accord to the police station.

“But even a cornered beast will fight. Mr. Cust fully believes that he did the murders but he sticks strongly to his plea of innocence. And he holds with desperation to that alibi for the second murder. At least that cannot be laid to his door.

“As I say, when I saw him, I knew at once that he was not the murderer and that my name meant nothing to him. I knew, too, that he thought himself the murderer!

“After he had confessed his guilt to me, I knew more strongly than ever that my own theory was right.”

“The Andover crime means nothing to him. He is shocked and surprised by the Bexhill crime—why, he himself was there about the time! Then comes the Churston crime and the headlines in the newspapers. An A B C crime at Andover when he was there, an A B C crime at Bexhill, and now another close by…Three crimes and he has been at the scene of each of them. Persons suffering from epilepsy often have blanks when they cannot remember what they have done…Remember that Cust was a nervous, highly neurotic subject and extremely suggestible.

“Then he receives the order to go to Doncaster.

“Doncaster! And the next A B C crime is to be in Doncaster. He must have felt as though it was fate. He loses his nerve, fancies his landlady is looking at him suspiciously, and tells her he is going to Cheltenham.

“He goes to Doncaster because it is his duty. In the afternoon he goes to a cinema. Possibly he dozes off for a minute or two.

“Imagine his feelings when on his return to his inn he discovers that there is blood on his coat sleeve and a blood-stained knife in his pocket.