The Complete Simon Iff Read Free Page A

at any time when there happens to be nobody looking—though this is not so important.”
    He returned to his fishing tackle. “It’s rather a big bet, though,” he added; “there’s more than a thousand pounds to it. I think I will be pretty careful over details. Practice may not be quite so simple as theory!”
    However, the first part of his programme turned out to be delightfully easy. It was his custom to train during the holiday by taking long walks, on his way to the lake or river where he fished. He detested motor-cars. As luck would have it, during the first week, as he tramped a lonely road, his eye was caught by an object lying on the ground. It was a heavy motor spanner, evidently left behind by some chauffeur who had had a breakdown. His mind instantly grasped the situation. There was no one in sigh. The spanner was already rusted, had lain there some days. Any of a hundred people might have picked it up. It could never be traced to him. He had never possessed such a tool in his life; besides, the pattern was common. He thrust it quickly into his pocket. When he got home, he packed it away carefully in his traveling cashbox, a solid steel affair of which there was but one key, which never left his chain. “Now,” said he, “the problem is to find the onoffensive stranger. I had better leave Scotland. Every one in Scotland is offensive. Also, in the matter of motive, our common humanity urges us all to kill Scotchmen. So goodbye, land o’ cakes!”
    Further meditations were in this key following: since he was to kill with the spanner, certain precautions must be taken. It must be a very clean kill, with no outcry or struggle. At the end of his cogitations, he decided that the victim had better be asleep. His legally trained mind had snapped its last link with the idea of adventure or sport; his motto was “safety first.” His attitude to his projected crime was simply that of preparing a brief; he wished to meet every contingency; the atrocity of his proceedings was invisible to his intellectuality. Reason is perfectly amoral.
    It was on his way from Edingburgh to London that the brilliant idea occured to him. He would kill old miss marsden! She was now Mrs. Robinson, by the way, for she had testified to the faith that was in her by marrying her protégé directly after his acquittal. Ffoulkes knew the house well; he had stayed there several days while working up the case. It was a lonely place, and the old lady was a fresh-air fiend, and slept on the veranda, winter and summer. She was perfectly, had paid most liberally for the defense. Everything was in his favor. Even if Ezra happened to see the murder committed, his tongue was tied; indeed, he stood the strongest chance of being arrested for it himself. The servants slept far away from the veranda, at the other end of the old rambling house; there were no neighbors, and no dogs. His presence in the vicinity would excite no remark, for there was good dry-fly fishing in the streams. He would rent a cottage in the district for the second half of his holiday, walk over the downs, five miles or so, nothing to him, one moonless night, do the job, and walk back. A thousand to one that no one would know that he had ever left his cottage.
    On this plan he acted. The only additional precautions suggested themselves to him on the spot; he cultivated the vicar assiduously, playing chess with him every evening; and he feigned a considerable devotion to that worthy gentleman’s only daughter. It will be well, he thought, to seem to have my mind well occupied with the pleasures of a simpler chase. Further, the villagers would see nothing in a lover taking long walks by nights, in case he were seen leaving the cottage or returning to it.
    A last refinement shot across his mental horizon when he began to calculate the time of the new moon. She would be just a week old on the anniversary of the Marsden murder. That would be the night for the job; the clever-clever