Death Knocks Three Times Read Online Free PDF

discuss the matter further.”
    Even the coroner didn’t like to press him on that point. He passed on to ask a question or two about the bath, but here, too, John proved unhelpful. He hadn’t taken a bath, he never had taken a bath at Chipping Magna, he hadn’t examined the fittings and certainly he hadn’t tampered with them. By this time half the jury thought he’d done the old fellow in (and you couldn’t blame him) and the other half thought what a nice chap he was, taking so much trouble for that old curmudgeon. On the whole, if murder had been done, they would all prefer to suspect Bligh, who had been rude to every one for twenty-five years and bullied the shopkeepers about the Colonel’s rations in a way that didn’t bear remembering. Any one, said the butcher, who was acting as foreman, would know he’d been a sergeant-major.
    Which was flattering but incorrect.
    Bligh’s manner was the antithesis of John’s blandness. He seemed resentful at being questioned at all, and said if he’d wanted to kill the old gentleman he’d had thirty years to do it in. No, he hadn’t known he was the Colonel’s heir, not till the lawyer told him, after the old gentleman was dead, and he didn’t want the money special anyhow. Yes, he’d heard Mr. Sherren say the Colonel might be visiting his lawyer, but where did that get them? The old man had been in a rare mood, but then it was always the same when Mr. Sherren came up. He (the Colonel) had said he wasn’t going to be talked down to by a lah-di-dah from London, speaking as if a fellow had one foot in the grave just because he didn’t write novels nobody wanted to read anyway. He said he’d be surprised if his nephew lasted as long as he did. Deflected from that line of talk by the indefatigable coroner, he said he hadn’t tampered with the bath, not likely. If he
    did let the lid down it ‘ud need two men to hook it up again (this; was not strictly speaking accurate, but Bligh, like John Sherren, sometimes allowed himself a little poetic license). He admitted thav the lid was unhooked, but added in pointed tones he wasn’t the only person in the house who might have monkeyed with the bath, and it seemed queer to him that a thing like this had to happen directly the Colonel started acting the Good Samaritan. The coroner pulled him up again there, and soon afterwards he left the witness stand.
    Then it was Crook’s turn. Even in this remote district his name was not entirely unknown, and a number of locals had turned up to see him in die flesh. One thing. Crook told Bill on his return, they saw plenty of that. For he was getting heavier as he got older, though he could still move like a flash, or so it seemed to younger, lighter men trying to keep up with him, and no advancing years dimmed his sensibilities. He repeated his story about the lid of the bath being securely hooked into place on Monday night. If he had any suspicions he didn’t mention them, not then.
    When his evidence was finished the jury had to come to a decision. It was obvious to all of them that one of the four men who had been in the house during the three days preceding the death of the oldest of them had tampered with the hooks, but when it came to fixing the responsibility on one particular pair of shoulders they found the problem beyond them. John Sherren certainly had had words with the old man. They debated how much weight you could attach to that. Every one, said the foreman, knew the old man was a tartar, a bit daft, come to that. There was a tale of a girl who had at one time been employed in the house who had lighted the dining-room fire so that it smoked. The Colonel had marched in, wrapped in a terrifying dressing-gown and waving a walking-stick, shouting: “In India a man has been hanged for less than that.” It wasn’t likely, therefore, that John would take his rage very seriously, and you are very serious indeed before you bash a man’s head in. On the other hand, hadn’t