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Clinical Pharmacology During Pregnancy
Clinical Pharmacology
During Pregnancy
Second Edition

Edited by
Donald R. Mattison

AMSTERDAM • BOSTON • HEIDELBERG • LONDON

NEW YORK • OXFORD PARIS • SAN DIEGO
SAN FRANCISCO • SINGAPORE • SYDNEY • TOKYO
Academic Press in an imprint of Elsevier
Clinical Pharmacology
During Pregnancy
Second Edition

Edited by
Donald Mattison
University of South Carolina,
Arnold School of Public Health,
Columbia, SC, United States
Risk Sciences International, Ottawa, ON, Canada
School of Epidemiology and Public Health,
University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada

Lee-Ann Halbert
Associate Professor of Nursing
University of South Carolina
Beaufort, Bluffton
SC, United States
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 This book is dedicated to all the individuals who have added to
and benefit from the collective knowledge and wisdom presented
within this book. The chapter authors share their insights with the
express goal of helping health care practitioners and their clients
make the best clinical decisions when it comes to the use of
medications in pregnancy.
This page intentionally left blank
Random documents with unrelated
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The three taps
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
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you are located before using this eBook.

Title: The three taps

A detective story without a moral

Author: Ronald Arbuthnott Knox

Release date: March 18, 2024 [eBook #73198]

Language: English

Original publication: New York, NY: Jacobsen Publishing Company,

Inc, 1927

Credits: Brian Raiter

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE THREE

TAPS ***
 THE THREE TAPS

A Detective Story without a Moral

by

RONALD A. KNOX
 Contents
I The Euthanasia Policy
II The Detective Malgré Lui
III At the Load of Mischief
IV The Bedroom
V Supper, and Mr. Brinkman
VI An Ear at the Keyhole
VII From Leyland’s Note-Book
VIII The Bishop at Home
IX The Late Rector of Hipley
X The Bet Doubled
XI The Generalship of Angela
XII The Makings of a Trap
XIII A Morning with the Haberdasher
XIV Bredon Is Taken for a Walk
XV A Scrap of Paper
XVI A Visitor from Pullford
XVII Mysterious Behaviour of the Old Gentleman
XVIII The Barmaid Is Brought to Book
XIX How Leyland Spent the Evening
XX How Bredon Spent the Evening
XXI How Eames Spent the Evening
XXII At a Standstill
XXIII Leyland’s Account of It All
XXIV Mottram’s Account of It All
XXV Bredon’s Account of It All
 DEDICATED TO

SUSAN AND FRANCIS BAKER

(only he mustn’t sit up too late over it)
 Chapter I.
The Euthanasia Policy
The principles of insurance, they tell us, were not hidden from our
Anglo-Saxon forefathers. How anybody had the enterprise in those
rough-and-tumble days to guarantee a client against “fire, water,
robbery or other calamity” remains a problem for the historian; the
more so as it appears that mathematical calculations were first
applied to the business by the eminent John de Witt. In our own
time, at any rate, the insurance companies have woven a golden net
under the tight-rope walk of existence; if life is a lottery, the prudent
citizen faces it with the consciousness that he is backed both ways.
Had the idea been thoroughly grasped in those remoter periods, no
doubt but Alfred’s hostess would have been easily consoled for the
damage done to her cakes and King John handsomely compensated
for all that he lost in The Wash. Let us thank the soaring genius of
the human mind which has thus found a means to canalize for us the
waters of affliction; and let us always be scrupulous in paying up our
premiums before the date indicated on the printed card, lest calamity
should come upon us and find us unprepared.
In a sense, though, insurance was but an empirical science until
the Indescribable Company made its appearance. The man who is
insured with the Indescribable walks the world in armour of proof;
those contrary accidents and mortifications which are a source of
spiritual profit to the saint are a source of material advantage to him.
No east wind but flatters him with the prospect of a lucrative cold; no
dropped banana skin but may suddenly hurl him into affluence. The
chicken-farmer whose hen-houses are fitted with the company’s
patent automatic egg-register can never make a failure of his
business. The egg is no sooner laid than it falls gently through a slot
which marks its passage on a kind of taximeter; and if the total of
eggs at the end of the month is below the average the company
pays—I had almost said, the company lays—an exact monetary
equivalent for the shortage. The company which thus takes upon
itself the office of a hen is equally ready when occasion arises to
masquerade as a bee: if your hives are opened in the presence of its
representative you can distend every empty cell with sweet nectar at
the company’s expense. Doctors can guarantee themselves against
an excess of panel patients, barristers against an absence of briefs.
You can insure every step you take on this side of the grave, but no
one of them on such handsome terms as the step which takes you
into the grave; and it is confidently believed that if certain practical
difficulties could be got over the Indescribable would somehow
contrive to frank your passage into the world beyond. Wags have
made merry at the company’s expense, alleging that a burglar can
insure himself against a haul of sham jewels, and a clergyman
against insufficient attendance at even-song. They tell stories of a
client who murmured “Thank God!” as he fell down a lift-shaft, and a
shipwrecked passenger who manifested the liveliest annoyance at
the promptness of his rescuers when he was being paid for floating
on a life-belt at the rate of ten pounds a minute. So thoroughly has
the Indescribable reversed our scale of values here below.
But of all the company’s enterprises none can rival in importance
or in popularity the so-called Euthanasia policy. One of the giant
brains that organized the undertaking observed with compassion the
doubtful lot of human kind, the lot which makes the business man
sweat and labour and agonize, uncertain whether he himself will
reap the fruits of his industry or whether they will pass to an heir in
whom, on the whole, he is less interested. It follows, of course, from
the actuarial point of view, that he needs a policy which covers both
possibilities, immature death or unexpected longevity, but the former
on a more princely scale than the latter. If you take out a Euthanasia
policy you will pay very heavy premiums; that goes without saying.
But you pay them with a sense of absolute security. If you should die
before the age of sixty-five a fortune is immediately distributed to
your heirs and assigns. If you outlive that crucial age you become
thenceforward, until the decree of nature takes its tardy effect, the
pensioner of the company; every faltering breath you draw in the last
stages of senility is money to you; your heirs and assigns, instead of
looking forward heartlessly to the moment of your release, conspire
to keep your body and soul together with every known artifice of
modern medicine—it is in their interest to do so. There is but one
way in which you can forfeit the manifest advantages of the scheme,
and that is self-murder. So complex is our human fashioning that
men even may be tempted to enrich their surviving relatives by such
means; and you will find, accordingly, at the bottom of your
Euthanasia policy, an ominous black hand directing attention to the
fact that in the event of suicide no benefits are legally recoverable.
It goes without saying that the Indescribable Building is among
the finest in London. It appears to be an axiom with those who
conduct business in the modern, or American, manner that efficiency
is impossible unless all your transactions are conducted in an edifice
not much smaller and not much less elaborate than the Taj Mahal.
Why this should be so it is difficult to explain. In a less credulous age
we might have been tempted to wonder where all the money came
from; whether (to put it brutally) our premiums might not have
worked out a little lower if the company’s premises had not been
quite so high. After all, our solicitor lives in horrid, dingy little
chambers, with worn-out carpets and immemorial cobwebs on the
wall—does he never feel that this squalor will fail to inspire
confidence? Apparently not; yet the modern insurance company
must impress us all through the palatial splendour of its offices with
the idea that there is a vast reserve of capital behind it. The wildest
voluptuousness of an Eastern tyrant is less magnificent in its
architectural scheme than the hard-headed efficiency of the
American business man. Chatting in the waiting-room of some such
edifice, Sardanapalus might have protested that it stumped him how
they did it, and Kublai Khan might have registered the complaint that
it was all very well but the place didn’t feel homey.
Indescribable House is an enormously high building with long,
narrow windows that make it look like an Egyptian tomb. It is of white
stone, of course, so time-defying in its appearance that it seems
almost blasphemous to remember the days when it was simply a
gigantic shell composed of iron girders. Over the front door there is a
group of figures in relief, more than life-size; the subject is intended, I
believe, to be Munificence wiping away the tears of Widowhood,
though the profane have identified it before now as Uncle Sam
picking Britannia’s pocket. This is continued all round the four sides
by a frieze, ingeniously calculated to remind the spectator of the
numerous risks which mortality has to run: here a motor accident,
with an ambulance carrying off the injured parties; here an
unmistakable shipwreck; there a big-game hunter being gored by a
determined-looking buffalo, while a lion prowls thoughtfully in the
background. Of the interior I cannot speak so positively, for even
those who are favoured enough to be the company’s clients never
seem to go up beyond the first storey. But rumour insists that there is
a billiard-room for the convenience of the directors (who never go
there); and that from an aeroplane, in hot weather, you can see the
clerks playing tennis on the roof. What they do when they are not
playing tennis and what possible use there can be in all those
multitudinous rooms on the fifth, sixth and seventh floors are
thoughts that paralyze the imagination.
In one of the waiting-rooms on the ground floor, sitting under a
large palm-tree and reading a closely reasoned article in the
Actuaries’ and Bottomry Gazette, sat a client to whom the reader will
do well to direct attention, for our story is concerned with him. His
look, his dress, his manner betrayed the rich man only to those who
have frequented the smaller provincial towns and know how little in
those centres money has to do with education. He had a short black
coat with very broad and long lapels, a starched collar that hesitated
between the Shakespeare and the all-the-way-and-back-again
patterns, a double-breasted waistcoat from which hung a variety of
seals, lockets and charms—in London, in fact, you would have put
him down for an old-fashioned bank cashier with a moderate income.
Actually, he could have bought you out of your present job at double
the salary and hardly felt it. In Pullford, a large Midland town which
you probably will never visit, men nudged one another and pointed to
him as one of the wealthiest residents. In the anteroom of the
Indescribable offices he looked, and perhaps felt, like a schoolboy
waiting his turn for pocket-money. Yet even here he was a figure
recognizable to the attendant who stood there smoothing out back
numbers of the Actuaries’ and Bottomry Gazette. For this man,
called Mottram by accident of birth and Jephthah through the bad
taste of his parents, was the holder of a Euthanasia policy.
Another attendant approached him, summoning him to his
appointed interview. There was none of that “Mr. Mottram, please!”
which reverberates so grimly through the dentist’s waiting-room. At
the Indescribable the attendants come close to you and beckon you
away with confidential whispers; it is part of the tradition. Mr. Mottram
rose, and was gently sucked up by the lift to the first storey, where
fresh attendants ushered him on into one of the few rooms that really
mattered. Here he was met by a pleasant, rather languid young man,
delicately dressed, university-bred, whose position in the
complicated hierarchy of the Indescribable it is no business of ours
to determine.
“How do you do, Mr. Mottram? Keeping well, I hope?”
Mr. Mottram had the blunt manner of his fellow townsmen, and
did not appreciate the finesse of metropolitan conversational
openings. “Ah, that’s right,” he said; “best for you I should keep well,
eh? You and I won’t quarrel there. Well, it may surprise you, but it’s
my health I’ve come to talk about. I don’t look ill, do I?”
“You look fit for anything. I’d sooner be your insurance agent than
your family doctor, Mr. Mottram.” The young man was beginning to
pick up the Pullford idea of light small talk.
“Fit for anything, that’s right. And, mind you, I feel fit for anything.
Never felt better. Two years!”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Two years, that’s what he says. What’s the good of being able to
know about these things if they can’t do anything for ’em, that’s what
I want to know? And, mind you, he says there isn’t anything for it, not
in the long run. He tells me to take this and that, you know, and give
up this and that”——
“I’m sorry, Mr. Mottram, but I don’t quite understand. Is this your
doctor you’re talking about?”
“No doctor of mine. My doctor down in Pullford, he couldn’t tell
what was the matter. Sent me on to this big man in London I’ve been
seeing this morning. Two years, he says. Seems hard, doesn’t it?”
“Oh! . . . You’ve been to a specialist. I say, I’m most awfully sorry.”
The young man was quite serious in his condolences, though he was
even more embarrassed than actually grieved. It seemed horrible to
him that this red-faced man who looked so well and obviously
enjoyed his meals should be going where Numa and Ancus went
before him: he did not fit into the picture. No taint of professionalism
entered into this immediate reaction. But Mr. Mottram still took the
business line.
“Ah! ‘sorry’—you may say that. It may mean half a million to you,
mayn’t it?”
“Yes; but, look here, these specialists are often wrong. Famous
case of one who went potty and told all his patients they were in for
it. Look here, what about seeing our man? He’d vet you, gladly.”
It need hardly be said that the Indescribable keeps its own private
physician, whose verdict must be obtained before any important
insurance is effected. He is considered to be one of the three best
doctors in England, and fantastic stories are told about the retaining
fee which induced him to give up his practice in Harley Street. Once
more the young man was entirely disinterested; once more Mr.
Mottram saw ground for suspicion. It looked to him as if the company
were determined to get stable information about the exact state of
his health, and he did not like the idea.
“It’s of no consequence, thank you all the same. It isn’t as if my
case were a doubtful one; I can give you the doctor’s certificate if
needed. But I didn’t come here to talk about that; I came on
business. You know how I stand?”
The young man had just been looking up Mr. Mottram’s docket
and knew all about him well enough. But the Indescribable cultivates
the family touch; it likes to treat its clients as man to man, not as so
many lives. “Let’s see”—the young man appeared to be dragging the
depths of memory—“you should be sixty-three now, eh? And in two
years’ time—why, it looks as if it were just touch and go whether your
policy covered a case of—h’m!—premature decease or not, doesn’t
it?”
“That’s right. My birthday’s in a fortnight’s time, more or less. If
that doctor was dead accurate, it’ll stand you in five hundred
thousand; if he put the date a bit too soon, then I get nothing, and
you pay nothing; that’s how it is, isn’t it?”
 “Looks like it, I’m afraid. Of course, you’ll understand, Mr.
Mottram, the company has to work by rule of thumb in these cases.”
“I see that. But look at it this way. When I took out that policy I
wasn’t thinking much of the insurance part; I’ve no kith nor kin except
one nephew, and he’s seen fit to quarrel with me, so nothing goes to
him, anyhow. If that half-million falls in, it will just go to charity. But
what I’d set my heart on was the annuity; we’re a long-lived family,
mostly, and I’d looked forward to spending my last days in comfort,
d’you see? Well, there’s no chance of that after what the doctor’s
been telling me. So I don’t value that Youth-in-Asia policy as much
as I did, see? And I’ve come here to make you a fair offer.”
“The company”—— began the young man.
“Let me have my say, and you shall have yours afterward. They
call me rich, and I suppose I am rich; but my stuff is tied up more
than you’d think; with money as tight as it is, you can’t just sell out of
a thing when you feel inclined. What I want is ready money—doctors’
bills, you know, and foreign travel, and treatment, and that. So this is
my offer: you pay back half the premiums from the time I started
insuring with you, half the premiums, mind you; and if I die before I
reach sixty-five, then we call it off; you pay no insurance: if I live
beyond sixty-five we call it off, and you pay no annuity. Come now,
there’s a business offer. What do you people say to it?”
“I’m sorry; I’m frightfully sorry. But, you know, we’ve had this kind
of offer before, and the company has always taken the line that it
can’t go back on the original contract. If we lose, we lose; if the client
loses, he must shoulder the responsibility. If we once went in for
cancelling our insurances like that, our whole credit would suffer. I
know you mean well by us, Mr. Mottram, and we’re grateful to you for
the generosity of the offer; but it can’t be done; really it can’t.”
There was a heavy silence for nearly a minute. Then Mr.
Mottram, pathetic in his disappointment, tried his last card.
“You could put it to the directors, couldn’t you? Stands to reason
you couldn’t accept an offer of that kind without referring it to them.
But you could put it to them at their next meeting, eh?”
“I could put it to the directors; indeed, I will. But I’m sorry to say I
can’t hold out any hopes. The premium of the Euthanasia policy is so
stiff that we’re always having people wanting to back out of it half-
way, but the directors have never consented. If you take my advice,
Mr. Mottram, you’ll take a second opinion about your health, go
carefully this next year or two, and live to enjoy that annuity—for
many years, I hope.” The young man, after all, was a paid official; he
did not stand to lose.
Mr. Mottram rose; he declined all offers of refreshment. A little
wearily, yet holding his head high, he let the confidential attendants
usher him out. The young man made some notes, and the grim
business of the Indescribable Company went on. In distant places
ships were foundering, factories were being struck by lightning,
crops were being spoiled by blight, savages were raiding the
peaceful country-side; men were lying on air-cushions, fighting for
breath in the last struggle of all. And to the Indescribable Company
all these things meant business; most of them meant loss. But the
loss never threatened its solvency for a moment; the law of averages
saw to that.
 Chapter II.
The Detective Malgré Lui
I have already mentioned that the Indescribable kept its own
tame doctor, a man at the very head of his profession. He was not in
the least necessary to it; that is to say, a far cheaper man would
have done the work equally well. But it suited the style of the
Indescribable to have the very best man, and to advertise the fact
that he had given up his practice in order to work exclusively for the
company; it was all of a piece with the huge white building, and the
frieze, and the palms in the waiting-room. It looked well. For a quite
different reason the Indescribable retained its own private detective.
This fact was not advertised; nor was he ever referred to in the
official communications of the company except as “our
representative.” He carried neither a lens nor a forceps—not even a
revolver; he took no injections; he had no stupid confidential friend;
but a private detective he was for all that. An amateur detective I will
not call him, for the company paid him, and as you would expect,
quite handsomely; but he had nothing whatever to do with Scotland
Yard, where the umbrellas go to.
He was not an ornament to the company; he fulfilled a quite
practical purpose. There are, even outside the humorous stories,
business men in a small way who find it more lucrative to burn down
their premises than to sell their stock. There are ladies—ladies
whose names the Indescribable would never dream of giving away—
who pawn their jewels, buy sham ones, and then try to make the
original insurance policy cover them in the event of theft. There are
small companies (believe it or not) which declare an annual loss by
selling their stuff below cost price to themselves under another
name. Such people flocked to the Indescribable. It was so vast a
concern that you felt no human pity about robbing it—it was like
cheating the income tax, and we all know how some people feel
about that. The Indescribable never prosecuted for fraud; instead, it
allowed a substantial margin for these depredations, which it allowed
to continue. But where shady work was suspected “our
representative” would drop in in the most natural way in the world
and by dint of some searching inquiries made while the delinquent’s
back was turned would occasionally succeed in showing up a fraud
and saving the company a few hundreds of thousands by doing so.
The company’s “representative,” and our hero, was Miles Bredon,
a big, good-humoured, slightly lethargic creature still in the early
thirties. His father had been a lawyer of moderate eminence and
success. When Miles went to school it was quite clear that he would
have to make his own way in the world, and very obscure how he
was going to do it. He was not exactly lazy, but he was the victim of
hobbies which perpetually diverted his attention. He was a really
good mathematician, for example; but as he never left a sum
unfinished and “went on to the next” his marks never did him justice.
He was a good cross-country runner, but in the middle of a run he
would usually catch sight of some distraction which made him
wander three miles out of his course and come in last. It was his
nature to be in love with the next thing he had to do, to shrink in
loathing from the mere thought of the next but one. The war came in
time to solve the problem of his career; and more fortunate than
some he managed to hit on a métier in the course of it. He became
an intelligence officer; did well, then did brilliantly; was mentioned in
despatches, though not decorated. What was more to the point, his
Colonel happened to be a friend of some minor director of the
Indescribable, and, hearing that a discreet man was needed to
undertake the duties outlined, recommended Bredon. The offer fell at
his feet just when he was demobilized; he hated the idea of it, but
was sensible enough to realize, even then, that ex-officers cannot be
choosers. He was accepted on his own terms, namely, that he
should not have to sit in an office kicking his heels; he would always
be at home, and the company might call him in when he was
wanted.
In a few years he had made himself indispensable to his
employer; that is to say, they thought they could not get on without
him, though in fact his application to his duties was uncertain and
desultory. Four out of five inquiries meant nothing to him; he made
nothing of them; and Whitechapel thanked the God of its fathers for
his incompetence. The fifth case would appeal to his capricious
imagination; he would be prodigal of time and of pains; and he would
bring off some coup which was hymned for weeks behind closed
doors in the Indescribable Building. There was that young fellow at
Croydon, for example, who had his motor-bicycle insured, but not his
mother-in-law. Her body was found at the foot of an embankment
beside a lonely road in Kent, and there was no doubt that it had been
shot out of the side-car; only (as Bredon managed to prove) the
lady’s death had occurred on the previous day from natural causes.
There was the well-known bootlegger—well known, at least, to the
United States police—who insured all his cargoes with the
Indescribable and then laid secret information against himself
whereby vigilant officials sank hundreds of dummy cases in the sea,
all the bottles containing sea-water. And there was the lady of
fashion who burgled her own jewels in the most plausible manner
you could imagine and had them sold in Paris. These crooked ways
too the fitful intuitions of Miles Bredon made plain in the proper
quarters.
He was well thought of, in fact, by every one except himself. For
himself, he bitterly regretted the necessity that had made him
become a spy—he would use no other word for it—and constantly
alarmed his friends by announcing his intention of going into the
publishing trade, or doing something relatively honest. The influence
which saved him on these occasions was that of—how shall I say it?
—his wife. I know—I know it is quite wrong to have your detective
married until the last chapter, but it is not my fault. It is the fault of
two mocking eyes and two very capable hands that were employed
in driving brass-hats to and fro in London at the end of the war.
Bredon surrendered to these, and made a hasty but singularly
fortunate marriage. Angela Bredon was under no illusions about the
splendid figure in khaki that stood beside her at the altar. Wiser than
her generation, she realized that marriages were not “for the
duration”; that she would have to spend the rest of her life with a
large, untidy, absent-minded man who would frequently forget that
she was in the room. She saw that he needed above all things a
nurse and a chauffeur, and she knew that she could supply both
these deficiencies admirably. She took him as a husband, with all a
husband’s failings, and the Indescribable itself could not have
guaranteed her more surely against the future.
There is a story of some Bishop, or important person, who got his
way at Rome rather unexpectedly over an appeal, and, when asked
by his friends how he did it, replied, “Fallendo infallibilem.” It might
have been the motto of Angela’s mastery over her husband; the
detective, always awake to the possibilities of fraudulent dealing in
every other human creature, did not realize that his wife was a tiny
bit cleverer than he was and was always conspiring for his
happiness behind his back. For instance, it was his custom of an
evening to play a very long and complicated game of patience, which
he had invented for himself; you had to use four packs, and the
possible permutations of it were almost unlimited. It was an
understood thing in the household that Angela, although she had
grasped the rules of the game, did not really know how to play it. But
when, as often happened, the unfinished game had to be left
undisturbed all night, she was quite capable of stealing down early in
the morning and altering the positions of one or two cards, so that he
should get the game “out” in time to cope with his ordinary work.
These pious deceits of hers were never, I am glad to say, unmasked.
About a fortnight after Mr. Mottram’s interview with the young
man at Indescribable House these two fortunate people were alone
together after dinner, she alternately darning socks and scratching
the back of a sentimental-looking fox-terrier, he playing his
interminable patience. The bulk of the pack lay on a wide table in
front of him, but there were outlying sections of the design dotted
here and there on the floor within reach of his hand. The telephone
bell rang, and he looked up at her appealingly—obviously, he was
tied hand and foot by his occupation—which to her only meant
putting her darning away, lifting the fox-terrier off her feet, and going
out into the hall. She understood the signal, and obeyed it. There
was a fixed law of the household that if she answered a call which
was meant for him he must try to guess what it was about before she
told him. This was good for him, she said; it developed the sleuth
instinct.
“Hullo! Mrs. Bredon speaking—who is it, please? . . . Oh, it’s
you. . . . Yes, he’s in, but he’s not answering the telephone. . . . No,
only drunk. . . . Just rather drunk. . . . Business? Good; that’s just
what he wants. . . . A man called what? . . . M-o-t-t-r-a-m, Mottram,
yes. . . . Never heard of it. . . . St. William’s? Oh, the Midlands, that
are sodden and unkind, that sort of Midlands, yes? . . . Oh! . . . Is it—
what? . . . Is it supposed to have been an accident? . . . Oh, that
generally means suicide, doesn’t it? . . . Staying where? . . . Where’s
that? . . . All right, doesn’t matter; I’ll look it up. . . . At an inn? Oh,
then it was in somebody else’s bed really! What name? . . . What a
jolly name! Well, where’s Miles to go? To Chilthorpe? . . . Yes, rather,
we can start bright and early. Is it an important case? Is it an
important case? . . . Oo! I say! I wish I could get Miles to die and
leave me half a million! Righto, he’ll wire you to-morrow. . . . Yes,
quite; thanks. . . . Good-night.”
“Interpret, please,” said Angela, returning to the drawing-room.
“Why, you’ve been going on with your patience the whole time! I
suppose you didn’t listen to a word I was saying?”
“How often am I to tell you that the memory and the attention
function inversely? I remember all you said, precisely because I
wasn’t paying attention to it. First of all, it was Sholto, because he
was ringing you up on business, but it was somebody you know
quite well—at least I hope you don’t talk like that to the tradesmen.”
“Sholto, yes, ringing up from the office. He wanted to talk to you.”
“So I gathered. Was it quite necessary to tell him I was drunk?”
“Well, I couldn’t think of anything else to say at the moment. I
couldn’t tell him you were playing patience, or he might have thought
we were unhappily married. Go on, Sherlock.”
“Mottram, living at some place in the Midlands you’ve never
heard of, but staying at a place called ‘Chilthorpe’—he’s died, and
his death wants investigating; that’s obvious.”
“How did you know he was dead?”
“From the way you said ‘Oh’—besides, you said he’d died in his
bed, or implied it. And there’s some question of half a million