'So - while he looked accusingly at her - what do you imagine his wife was thinkin'? She'd heard this before. She was an imaginative woman, ill and unstrung from the backwash of malaria, jumping at every shadow. She really did worship that old blister. So it was, "Poor old Sam thinks I might kill him, and of course I never would; but suppose I should, without meaning to?" At that time she believed in Pennik with fervency. And up sprang this prophecy, which she could only take as applyin' to her. The hobgoblin was: "If I should kill him, they would hang me." It was a pretty bad thought.'
'And Pennik?'
'Pennik was responsible for it all.
'It's Pennik's case. He's the god from the machine. His personality was a whole heap more powerful than you thought. He took a group of ordinary, bickerin' human people; and before he got through with you he had each of you thinking exactly the thoughts you shouldn't. He had you, young feller, thinking you didn't actually care a rap for Marcia Blystone. He had Hilary Keen pondering very unpleasant thoughts about her stepmother. He had Sam Constable half afraid his wife would kill him, and Mina Constable terrorized for fear she might. The emotional pressure was stoked up too high. Somethin' was bound to blow up. And it did.
'At seven-thirty the Constables retire to their rooms to dress. That woman, with her shaky hands and her frightened imagination, has got to draw Samuel's bath and put the studs in his shirt. He's already hinted, downstairs, how she might kill him even while dressin' him. Suppose she did ? Suppose she had a subconscious (cor, how fond and afraid of that word we all are!), a subconscious wish to kill him? That's the worst thought of all.
'Now, did Samuel immediately step in and get his bath as soon as they went to their room? Later she said he did; she said he'd finished his bath, and was dressed to such an extent that she was tyin' up his shoes, just before he hopped down to investigate the smashing of the lamp in the other room at a. quarter to eight. But she was lyin', as we proved. At a quarter to eight he was wearin' a dressing-gown and slippers, and nothing else. That was because he hadn't yet had his bath. He'd spent so much time jawin' away to her - and making her more nervous - that he was only just ready to step into the tub when the lamp-smash happened. He went to see what it was; he returned, and he got into the tub between a quarter to eight and eight o'clock.
'Ah, now we're sort of approaching!
'Samuel was always complainin' of the cold. He couldn't get the house warm enough. In fact, the last thing he groused about to high heaven, before your party broke up at seven-thirty, was the coldness of the house. Well, what's he done to take care of this mania of his in a room where people really do feel the cold: I mean the bathroom?'
H. M. looked malevolently at Sanders.
'You, son. On a couple of later occasions you saw in the bathroom a portable electric heater. A two-bar, or two-unit, heater. In fact, on one occasion you fell bang over the thing, didn't you? Yet it's very rummy - I repeat: very rummy - that, though you saw a heater there on Saturday and Sunday, you didn't see one there on Friday night when you looked into the bathroom only a little while after Sam Constable's death.'
It was true.
Sanders had in his mind only too clear a picture of that damp-smelling bathroom, when he had gone into it to search in the medicine-cabinet for an opiate to administer to Mina Constable. He had noted every object in the bathroom on Friday night; and there had been no heater there. But later it obtruded itself on the notice: a bronze-painted affair over which both he and Mina had at different times stumbled.
'And,' he said suddenly, 'the bathroom still smelt damp -' 'Sure,' growled H. M. 'Because Samuel Hobart didn't get his bath until it was past quarter to eight. Burn me, I can see him and I can hear him!
'He climbed in. He squawked to high heaven about draughts and the cold. There was his wife flutterin' around him as he made his valet flutter. And he was king and emperor. And automatically and without thinkin', just as he'd done a thousand times to his valet, he bawled to her to put the portable heater closer to the bath. And the subconscious fear or wish got hold of her, just as she was afraid it would. And she automatically picked it up in those hands of hers that can't; hold a glass. And all of a sudden, as she lifted it, they both thought of the same thing. She slipped; and the electric heater dropped into the bath.
'That's all, gents.
'Certain death, that's all.'
H. M. drew a deep breath.
'Y'see, son, here in town the London County Council have quite rightly got almost morbid rules about electric fittings in bathrooms. They won't even allow an electric-light switch inside the door. But to pick up a two-bar heater and move it about near bath-water b just plain suicidal lunacy.
'If it falls into the water, the thing short-circuits with a bang. The full weight of the house current goes through the best conductor of electricity known: water: and through the body of a victim sittin' in it up to his shoulders. It won't leave a mark or burn on the body, because the area's top distributed. It won't leave any sign at all, except dilated eye-pupils. There were two cases of it recently, at Bristol; and poor old Mina Constable knew it only too well, because she had the press-cutting in her scrap-book. And the voltage don't matter; 210 kills.
'She was the death of him, dropping things. And the very thing she was most awful cussed scared of was the thing that really happened.
'Well, what next? She stood there in the dark, with a wet-splashed bathroom and a dead husband. (No, don't interrupt me!) She had to find out if it was so. The lights had been put out when the fuse blew. But, as we found out, Fourways is on a system of what they call distributing fuses, two or three rooms to each fuse. The only lights that had gone out in the house were the lights in her room, in the bathroom, and in Samuel Hobart's room.
'There were a couple of candles standing on a chest-of-drawers in her husband's bedroom. She ran in, lit the candles, and brought 'em tearin' back to the bathroom to see what was what. But, in addition to droppin' wax on her sleeve, she also dropped two blobs of grease on the carpet. One was by the leg of the bed, and the other was by the door of the bathroom. - Remember, son? We were talkin' to her on Sunday afternoon, and she was standing in' the doorway of the bathroom ? I told you to look at the wax-stains, one by the bed and one beside where she was standing? Uh-huh. We gave her a bad time then, and I'm sorry as blazes; but that's how it happened.
'Well, her husband was dead.
'And they'd hang her now.
'You know what that woman's character was. She saw in her mind, in blazin' colours on vellum, the judge and the scaffold and herself on it. Pennik's hocus-pocus got hold of her imagination and swept it away. Nobody would believe it was an accident now. Samuel Hobart had practically said in front of witnesses that she'd kill him: "and make it look like an accident, like that case in the papers." She's even thought of it herself as a method of murder for a book; she was guilty. Oh, my eye!
'Standin' there in that bathroom with the candle held up, you know what she thought about. Little devil whistled to her and says, "Couldn't you pretend you didn't do it?" She says, "No, no, I loved him and I won't." "But you didn't mean to do it." "Never mind that." "You could,'' little devil says, "if you could get him out of that bath and not let on the bath had anything to do with it."