Death Knocks Three Times Read Free Page A

suppose. The Bright Boy of Brakemouth, that’s John. Faugh! Tell me some more about yourself.”
    And, some time later, “Mean to say if I managed to shove this fellow out of the window you could make a judge believe he’d done it himself?”
    “Not precisely,” said Crook. “I’d be inclined to plump for self-defense. Your heir waiting to give you a helpin’ hand to the land of hope and glory. Naturally, you can’t allow him to go breaking the law and—well, that’s how I’d see it, and how the old bird on the bench would see it by the time I was through.”
    “Dear me!” said the Colonel, and his eyes gleamed. “And I gathered from some nonsensical paper Bligh imported into my house that private enterprise was dead.”
    “Not at 123 Bloomsbury Street, it ain’t. Next time you’re in town look me up, won’t you?”
    The Colonel carefully wrote down the name and address.
    “Better have the home one, too,” Crook invited him. “It’s only a couple of attics in S.W.5,, but at least I have ‘em to myself.”
    “No Mrs. Crook?”
    “Be your age,” said Crook, rudely. “Do I look like a family man?”
    “Quite so, quite so.” The Colonel appeared a little embarrassed, as if he thought one confirmed bachelor should recognize another. “In any case, yours is a sufficiently dangerous existence as it is. If my nephew—but John wouldn’t risk his precious life. What ‘ud happen to literature if he snuffed it out?”
    “Ah, well,” said Crook, dismissing the subject of John as unimportant. “It cuts both ways. If there’s a lot of chaps who’d like to
    see Arthur Crook under the daisies, there’s just as many who know it’s them or me, and they’ll make it tlieir job to keep me on my pins as long as I can stagger.”
    Bligh came in twice more and on the second occasion the old man exploded irritably: “What the devil’s the matter, man? Mr. Crook and I can look after the fire, if that’s all that’s troubling you. Lock up and get off to bed. We don’t either of us want hot milk.”
    “It’s long after your usual time,” muttered Bligh sulkily.
    “What do you think you are? A nurse? I’ll go to bed when I damn well please. Mr. Crook’s right. I’ve been vegetating here long enough. You’d have me in a wheelchair with an ear-trumpet if you had your way.”
    Bligh departed with a very sour glance in Crook’s direction and it was nearly one o’clock before the two men reluctantly left the ashes of the fire and made their way to the ice-cold regions above. The Colonel insisted on showing Crook to his room, and stood in the doorway, complacently admiring his own hospitality.
    “Got everything you want, I hope,” he said, looking from the bleak blue blind—he presumably included curtains on his list of womanish luxuries—to the stark furniture, the ragged carpet and the bed, an iron monstrosity with one brass knob missing. There was an enormous washstand supporting a double set of toilet ware, a gigantic wardrobe, an empty grate and a general smell of mice. Beside the bed, on an octagonal bamboo table, stood a china candlestick.
    “And you know your way to the bathroom?”
    Crook said he thought so, but the Colonel insisted on showing him. It was just as well he did, as Crook would never have found his way alone.
    “Handy,” said the Colonel approvingly, looking around the ice-cold barn of a room. “Everything ship-shape.” He drew Crook’s attention to a long thorny object which looked like a strip of shredded wheat eight or ten inches long and which he referred to as a loofah. Crook had seen these Spartan washcloths in many English bathrooms, but never by any furthest chance could he have been induced to use such an instrument of torture. It was secured to a string and fastened to a cup-hook on the lid of the bath; a sponge as big as a man’s head dwelt in a wire basket similarly secured. “All
    these flibbertigibbets,” the old man went on. “No method. Get into the bath,