Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 104, No. 4, August 22, 1936

Rich people could afford to soundproof their homes, in this fashion, far different from the sort of semi-tenement lodgings which Sergeant Campbell could afford to give to his wife and children. That hard-faced woman would be sitting up with her sewing, perhaps, even at this late hour. Silently, her lips pressed together a little. She had headaches all the time, but she never talked about them to her family. She had been married for ten years before Campbell even knew about them. Then she had said once to the doctor — Campbell had managed to overhear — “I think I’m going crazy. Hours every day I have it behind the eyes, as though somebody had driven a nail through my temples.”

There was something in the Bible about a woman driving a nail through the temples of somebody.

Well, you have to pay for class, and Campbell’s children would be the class. They looked scrawny, but they had to be the class. There was iron in them from both sides. Hammer iron enough and you make fine steel of it. Campbell’s children would be the class, all right. They’d take an edge that would cut a way for them through the world. A quick way. They wouldn’t have to climb a ladder a million steps long, the way Campbell had had to do. But the way it is in this world, hard work tells in the long run... Take the fancy detectives in the books, the ones that are the masterminds — they ain’t true. They’re only funny. You don’t meet real ones that match up with the book stuff. You wouldn’t have one of those funny guys on the force. But reading about them made you laugh, and it sort of gave you ideas. O’Rourke never stopped riding him because he read about the flossy detectives. O’Rourke never would let up.

You take a man that hasn’t got much to think about except beer and graft and things like that, he never lets up on any hold he’s got. The Irish are like that. Ignorant and fat-headed. Boors. Pigs. If you want a dean man, you take a Scotchman. Maybe kind of hard. But that’s what a man should be...

He would close his eyes, now.

Strange how the darkness, in soft, obscure waves, slipped over his body, from the feet towards the head. There seemed more darkness. The darkness was like sleep. Sleep was like an ocean, rolling ceaselessly over him.

Dying would be something like that, sinking into numb pain instead of out of pain into sleep. The man that invented sleep...

He had made a mistake, somewhere. He could not tell where. Somewhere a mistake. In the accounts. Something that had to do with money. He had lost some money.

The wife would say nothing. She would go on with her sewing, late, later than ever, to make up the money he had lost. She wouldn’t take the kids to the seashore this summer, because he had lost money.

But he never lost money. He wasn’t that sort of a fool. This time...

Half rousing out of sleep, Campbell put his hand up to the breast of his coat. It was true. It was his awn wallet out of his own pocket that he had lost, that had been stolen!

His eyes were wide open, staring, staring into darkness. And that wasn’t right because there had been an electric light shining when he went to sleep...

One hand got to the automatic in a jerking, swift movement. The other found his pocket torch. He raised on one elbow.

Over there towards the door a whisper was passing. The weight of footfalls seemed to be pressing not on the floor but on the nerves of Campbell.

So he swung suddenly from the bed to his feet. It seemed to him that in the darkness Kearton, still snoring, was reaching up a hand to drag him back. Except for the snoring of Kearton, certainly no one would have managed to put out the light without waking Sergeant Campbell, no one would have been able to put hand on the wallet inside his coat pocket.

The electric torch clicked in his hand. The light jerked foolishly high, towards the ceiling.

Then it flicked across a figure there near the door, slipping past a couple of chairs... Campbell fired. He let two bullets roar out of the throat of that big automatic.

The figure slipped out of sight behind the chairs.

Kearton was saying in a horrible whisper: “What’s happened? Ah, what’s happened?”

Campbell charged straight in behind the cone of light, his lips furling back from his teeth.

“You get up out of there. Damn you, get up out of there!” he was shouting.

Then he looked with light and gun over the backs of the chairs and saw, huddled back against the wall, which was thinly sprayed with blood, Charlotte Reid.

Chapter XXV Ready for the Payoff

She kept her eyes fixed on Campbell and began to push herself up from the floor, clumsily.

He said: “I didn’t know it was you. I didn’t know a woman — how was I to know...?”

She stood erect, touching the wall with her hand. Her blood was on the wall. It blurred under the tips of her fingers. The fingers were slender. Her hand was like the hand of a child. In the other, which hung at her side, dangled Campbell’s wallet. He snatched it away, threw it on the table.

“Where you hurt?” he asked.