Eight Murders In the Suburbs Read Online Free PDF

years—would presumably be hanged. Things, reflected Miss Paisley, had a way of coming right, in the end.
    After a single appearance before the magistrate, Jenkins was committed on the charge of murder and would come up for trial in the autumn at the Old Bailey. Miss Paisley removed her interest.
    One evening in early autumn, Miss Paisley was sitting in her armchair, reviving the controversy as to whether her father had made a mistake about the croquet lawn. She found new arguments in his favour, which had to be refuted. In her eagerness she thrust her hands between the folds of the upholstery. Her fingers encountered a hard object. She hooked it with her fingernail, then with her finger—and pulled up her dead cat’s collar.
    She held it in both hands while there came vivid memory of peering through Mr. Rinditch’s window, Jenkins beside her, and seeing the collar in the waste paper basket … The buckle was still unfastened. The leather had been cut, as if with a razor. She read the inscription: her own name and address (£1 Reward For Return) .
    â€œI took it out of that basket— afterwards !” She re-lived the ecstatic moment in which she had killed Rinditch. The cloud in her brain, having served its purpose, was blown away. Every detail was now clear cut. Strike UP, as the cat had struck—then leap to safety. She had pulled off a glove, to snatch the collar from the basket and thrust it under the neck of her jumper, had put the glove on again before leaving the room and making her way to the river. Back in her chair she had retrieved the collar.
    And here it was, between her thumb and finger! Miss Paisley was not legal minded, but she knew quite certainly that this was evidence. Evidence which she ought to report to the lawyers who were defending Jenkins.
    Gone was the exaltation which had sustained her in her first approach to the police. She stood up, rigid, as she had stood in the hall while listening to the scratching on the panel, refusing to accept an unbearable truth. Once again she had the illusion of being locked up, aware now that there could be no escape from herself. All the events in the orbit of the murder which, a moment ago, had been silhouetted with terrifying sharpness, were now induced to fade.
    There remained the collar—evidence irrefutable, but not wholly inescapable.
    â€œIf I keep this as a memento, I shall soon get muddled and accuse myself of murder all over again! What was it that nice inspector said—‘If the brain can play one trick on you it can play another.’”
    She smiled as she put the collar in her purse, slipped on a coat and walked—by the most direct route, this time—to the 17th century bridge. She dropped the collar into the river, knowing that it would sink under the weight of its metal, unlike the blood-stained lumber-jacket and the riding gloves which she had weighted with stones scratched from the soil of the old cemetery.

Chapter One
    In a letter written on the eve of execution, Arthur Penfold seems to share the judge’s astonishment that a man of his calibre should turn to murder to extricate himself from a domestic difficulty. A student of criminology could have told Penfold—if not the learned judge himself—that murder eventuates, not from immediate circumstance, but from an antecedent state of mind.
    The murder occurred in 1935. The antecedent state of mind was created five years earlier, on an October evening when Penfold, returning from the office, found a note in his wife’s handwriting on the hall table.
    Penfold, an only child of very doting parents, was born in 1900. At twenty-five he inherited the family business, a wholesale agency for technical inks—almost any ink except the kind one uses with a pen. His mother had died the previous year. For three years he lived alone in the twelve-roomed house, with an acre of garden, in the overgrown village of Crosswater, some twenty miles