The Silk Stocking Murders Read Online Free PDF

when she was at her most genuine, she was most artificial.
    On one of these occasions he took advantage of her absence in the kitchen to study with minute care the fatal door. What he saw there upset him considerably. For it was obvious that, however anxious she might have been beforehand, when it actually came to the point Janet had not at all wanted to die. At the bottom of the door, only a few inches off the ground, was a maze of deep scratches in the paintwork, such as might have been made by a pair of high heels trying desperately to find some sort of foothold, however minute, by which to stave off eternity.
    Roger’s imagination was a vivid one. He felt rather sick.
    “But why,” he asked himself, frowning, “didn’t she grip the stocking above her neck and pull on that, at any rate for a few minutes? She could have been saved if she had. But I suppose there wasn’t enough of it to grip on.”
    He turned his attention to the top of the door. There at the sides, and some little way down as well, were other scratches, fainter, but not to be mistaken. He walked out into the kitchen.
    “Moira,” he said abruptly, “what were Unity’s nails like? Do you happen to remember?”
    “Yes,” said Miss Carruthers, with a little shiver. “All broken and filled with paint and stuff.”
    “Ah!” said Roger.
    “And she used to keep them
so
nice,” said Miss Carruthers.
    London having thus proved blank, Roger determined to try the country. He felt a little diffident about intruding upon the grief-stricken family, and uncertain whether to acquaint the vicar with his suspicions or not. In the end he decided not to do so until he had more evidence to support them; what he possessed already would merely add to the old man’s distress without effecting anything helpful. He trusted to his usual luck to acquire the information he wanted (if it was to be acquired) by some other means.
    Having made up his mind, Roger acted with his usual impulsiveness. If he were to go at all, he would go the next day. But the next day was a Friday, and Tuesdays and Fridays were the days on which he spent the mornings at
The Courier
offices. Very well, then; he would write his article that evening, merely call in at
The Courier
building to leave it and collect his post, and so catch an early train down to Dorsetshire. Excellent.
    To turn out two articles a week for several months on the subject of sudden death is not, after the sixth month or so, an easy task. Having exhausted most of the topics on which he had wanted to spread himself, Roger was beginning to find the search for fresh ones getting rather too arduous. And now that he was anxious to polish one off in a hurry, of course no subject would present itself. After nibbling the end of his fountain-pen for half an hour, Roger ran down into the street to buy an evening paper. When inspiration fails, a newspaper will sometimes work wonders.
    This one certainly came up to expectations. On the front page, in gently leaded type to show that, while startling, it could hardly be considered important, were the following headlines:
    LONDON FLAT TRAGEDY
G IRL H ANGS H ERSELF W ITH O WN S TOCKING
P ATHETIC L ETTER
    Roger was able to write a very informative article indeed, all about mass-suggestion, neurotic types, predisposition to suicide and how it is stimulated by example, and the lack of originality in most of us. “Within a few weeks of the first genius discovering that he could end his life by lying with his head in a gas-oven,” wrote Roger, “more than a dozen had followed his lead.” And he went on to prove that a novel method of ending life, whether one’s own or another’s, acts in such a way upon a certain type of mind that it constitutes a veritable stimulus to death. He instanced Dr. Palmer and Dr. Dove, Patrick Mahon and Norman Thorne, and, of course, the twin stocking tragedies. Altogether the article was in Roger’s best vein, and he was not a little pleased with it.
    The