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.