The Courtesy of Death Read Free

replied with sudden, disturbing return to everyday life. ‘He’ll
borrow a dog and be back with it this morning. The dog will track me here, but so long as this bungalow is locked up and I lay a trail, he will assume I hesitated at the door and went off again.
The dog cannot tell him that I entered under your charitable roof. That ensures that you will be unmolested. I fear that I have been instrumental in working my friends into a sad state of
excitement in which they are quite likely to commit acts of violence that afterwards they would regret.’
    I told him patiently that I was a simple, uncomplicated engineer, and that at least he owed it to me to put things clearly.
    ‘All I’ve got so far,’ I said, ‘is that you are frightened but that it wouldn’t be important if you hadn’t fallen in love with a girl one can see
through.’
    ‘Though crudely objective, that is about it,’ he admitted.
    ‘But forgive me if I say it seems inadequate.’
    ‘Love and death? Inadequate?’
    ‘I’ll see about getting you some breakfast,’ I said, giving up.
    ‘I don’t want to involve anybody else.’
    ‘You won’t. I’ll manage without giving your presence away.’
    ‘And how about this?’ he asked, turning back the sheets. ‘My word, what a mess!’
    In my far too hasty Good Samaritan act I had not foreseen the state of sheets and pillow-case. Or rather I had not thought it important. I never suspected that in the morning there would be any
reason for secrecy. The linen was nowhere soaked, but of course spotted by far more blood than could be explained by a shaving cut.
    He went into a huddle with himself, quite unembarrassed by silent thought, and at last emerged to ask me what I had done with his clothes. When I replied that they were in the cupboard, he
hopped inside to have a look.
    ‘Thank you,’ he said, peering round the open door like a tame crow, eyes bright with his own incomprehensible cleverness. ‘Would you care to give me your hand?’
    ‘Of course.’
    Quick and decisive as a surgeon he drew two scores from my wrist to my knuckles with a savage twig of hawthorn which he had extracted from his coat. I damned his eyes and very nearly called him
a sadistic lunatic.
    ‘It’s for your own protection. Really it is,’ he said with mild surprise.
    My exasperated opinion was that he had an obsession with blue veins. He had neatly nicked one of mine. I asked him how the devil he thought I could explain ripping myself twice in a tidy, modern
room without so much as a rusty nail in the wall.
    ‘You found a poor little pussy crawling around with a broken back, and when you tried to put it out of pain…’
    ‘I don’t put poor little pussies out of pain! I get someone else to do it.’
    ‘Then you are very muddled on the subject like many other people.’
    But the excuse was good, blast him! When I went over to the pub for breakfast, I used the cat on the Gorms—helping it, not putting it out of pain—and explained that the handkerchief
with which I had bound up my hand had slipped while I was asleep. Mrs Gorm said that I should have put my coat over the cat’s head, and did an efficient job on me with adhesive dressings.
    She believed in a good breakfast and found in me a guest after her own heart. I could hardly secrete fried eggs in my pocket, but bacon, sausages and a slice of ham were easy. Then, getting up
from the table, I remembered that Fosworthy was a vegetarian. That beat me. What did vegetarians have for breakfast? There seemed to be nothing but toast and marmalade which was safe. So I packed a
pile of that in a paper napkin and surreptitiously picked half a dozen carrots and a cabbage on my way back through the garden.
    When I went into the bedroom, I found that he had had a bath. He looked very different. He would have passed as, say, a devoted preparatory schoolmaster in his early forties if his clothes had
not been in ribbons. He actually ate the raw carrots and much of