donât want their cake, but they tried, Iâm sure they tried, to kill me. I know it sounds unlikely, now, in daylight, but if you had seen that wretched little cripple pouring in the milk, and then waiting, watching, crumbling the cake . . .â
âAnd you really believe,â Miss Hilfe said, âthat Canon Toplingâs friend . . .â
âDonât listen to her,â Hilfe said. âWhy not Canon Toplingâs friend? Thereâs no longer a thing called a criminal class. We can tell you that. There were lots of people in Austria youâd have said couldnât . . . well, do the things we saw them do. Cultured people, pleasant people, people you had sat next to at dinner.â
âMr Rennit,â Rowe said, âthe head of the Orthotex Detective Agency, told me today that heâd never met a murderer. He said they were rare and not the best people.â
âWhy, they are dirt cheap,â Hilfe said, ânowadays. I know myself at least six murderers. One was a cabinet minister, another was a heart specialist, the third a bank manager, an insurance agent . . .â
âStop,â Miss Hilfe said, âplease stop.â
âThe difference,â Hilfe said, âis that in these days it really pays to murder, and when a thing pays it becomes respectable. The rich abortionist becomes a gynaecologist and the rich thief a bank director. Your friend is out of date.â He went on explaining gently, his very pale blue eyes unshocked and unshockable. âYour old-fashioned murderer killed from fear, from hate â or even from love, Mr Rowe, very seldom for substantial profit. None of these reasons is quite â respectable. But to murder for position â thatâs different, because when youâve gained the position nobody âhas a right to criticize the means. Nobody will refuse to meet you if the positionâs high enough. Think of how many of your statesmen have shaken hands with Hitler. But, of course, to murder for fear or from love, Canon Topling wouldnât do that. If he killed his wife heâd lose his preferment,â and he smiled at Rowe with a blithe innocence of what he was saying.
When he came out of what wasnât called a prison, when His Majestyâs pleasure had formally and quickly run its course, it had seemed to Rowe that he had emerged into quite a different world â a secret world of assumed names, of knowing nobody, of avoiding faces, of men who leave a bar unobtrusively when other people enter. One lived where least questions were asked, in furnished rooms. It was the kind of world that people who attended garden fêtes, who went to Matins, who spent week-ends in the country and played bridge for low stakes and had an account at a good grocerâs, knew nothing about. It wasnât exactly a criminal world, though eddying along its dim and muted corridors you might possibly rub shoulders with genteel forgers who had never actually been charged or the corrupter of a child. One attended cinemas at ten in the morning with other men in macintoshes who had somehow to pass the time away. One sat at home and read The Old Curiosity Shop all the evening. When he had first believed that someone intended to murder him, he had felt a sort of shocked indignation; the act of murder belonged to him like a personal characteristic, and not the inhabitants of the old peaceful places from which he was an exile, and of which Mrs Bellairs, the lady in the floppy hat and the clergyman called Sinclair were so obviously inhabitants. The one thing a murderer should be able to count himself safe from was murder â by one of these.
But he was more shocked now at being told by a young man of great experience that there was no division between the worlds. The insect underneath the stone has a right to feel safe from the trampling superior boot.
Miss Hilfe told him, âYou mustnât
âAnd you really believe,â Miss Hilfe said, âthat Canon Toplingâs friend . . .â
âDonât listen to her,â Hilfe said. âWhy not Canon Toplingâs friend? Thereâs no longer a thing called a criminal class. We can tell you that. There were lots of people in Austria youâd have said couldnât . . . well, do the things we saw them do. Cultured people, pleasant people, people you had sat next to at dinner.â
âMr Rennit,â Rowe said, âthe head of the Orthotex Detective Agency, told me today that heâd never met a murderer. He said they were rare and not the best people.â
âWhy, they are dirt cheap,â Hilfe said, ânowadays. I know myself at least six murderers. One was a cabinet minister, another was a heart specialist, the third a bank manager, an insurance agent . . .â
âStop,â Miss Hilfe said, âplease stop.â
âThe difference,â Hilfe said, âis that in these days it really pays to murder, and when a thing pays it becomes respectable. The rich abortionist becomes a gynaecologist and the rich thief a bank director. Your friend is out of date.â He went on explaining gently, his very pale blue eyes unshocked and unshockable. âYour old-fashioned murderer killed from fear, from hate â or even from love, Mr Rowe, very seldom for substantial profit. None of these reasons is quite â respectable. But to murder for position â thatâs different, because when youâve gained the position nobody âhas a right to criticize the means. Nobody will refuse to meet you if the positionâs high enough. Think of how many of your statesmen have shaken hands with Hitler. But, of course, to murder for fear or from love, Canon Topling wouldnât do that. If he killed his wife heâd lose his preferment,â and he smiled at Rowe with a blithe innocence of what he was saying.
When he came out of what wasnât called a prison, when His Majestyâs pleasure had formally and quickly run its course, it had seemed to Rowe that he had emerged into quite a different world â a secret world of assumed names, of knowing nobody, of avoiding faces, of men who leave a bar unobtrusively when other people enter. One lived where least questions were asked, in furnished rooms. It was the kind of world that people who attended garden fêtes, who went to Matins, who spent week-ends in the country and played bridge for low stakes and had an account at a good grocerâs, knew nothing about. It wasnât exactly a criminal world, though eddying along its dim and muted corridors you might possibly rub shoulders with genteel forgers who had never actually been charged or the corrupter of a child. One attended cinemas at ten in the morning with other men in macintoshes who had somehow to pass the time away. One sat at home and read The Old Curiosity Shop all the evening. When he had first believed that someone intended to murder him, he had felt a sort of shocked indignation; the act of murder belonged to him like a personal characteristic, and not the inhabitants of the old peaceful places from which he was an exile, and of which Mrs Bellairs, the lady in the floppy hat and the clergyman called Sinclair were so obviously inhabitants. The one thing a murderer should be able to count himself safe from was murder â by one of these.
But he was more shocked now at being told by a young man of great experience that there was no division between the worlds. The insect underneath the stone has a right to feel safe from the trampling superior boot.
Miss Hilfe told him, âYou mustnât
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