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

He was a strange man to find in this Lancashire mill town to which he had come six years earlier, yet this Hindu doctor had thousands of patients on his books.

He was a Parsee, a member of that large and wealthy community of Persian origin, who live in Bombay. He had graduated in surgery and medicine at Bombay University. His name then had been Gabriel Hakim — Dr. Gabriel. He had married a Parsee bride, whose first name was Motibai. She had borne him a child.

But the wife which Lancashire knew was not this one.

The doctor had left his Parsee wife and child in Bombay, to come to the famous Edinburgh University in Scotland for a postgraduate course. He had not been long there when he met and was fascinated by a Scotswoman who was manageress of a restaurant. Belle had been married, but had got rid of her husband. She fell for this lithe, sallow-faced, dark-haired, magnetic, voluble and persuasive student, who always had money to spend.

The doctor, under the Scotswoman’s Northern charms, forgot the teachings of Zoroaster in whose cult he had been reared, right thought, right speech, right action. Resolutely he determined to cut himself apart from his former life, to forget India, his wife and child whom he had never mentioned to Belle, and to create a new life for himself. As a preliminary and in order to avoid his being traced, he instituted court proceedings and adopted the name of Buck Ruxton.

As he sat in his office this night he reviewed his life of the past seven years. He had prospered. He had paid four thousand pounds for his practice. He owned his house. He had many friends. He had three lovely children; two daughters, aged six, four, and two-year-old Billy, and yet his heart was black with hate and bitterness — such hate, suspicion, distrust as drove the Moor Othello to his destruction of Desdemona.

He remembered a phrase he once wrote in a letter to Belle just before he brought her to Lancaster.

“It’s women like you who make men hate women.”

She said she loved him, yet he felt she never was truly his, that he was not her lord and master as he would have had her admit.

“You’re not in India now, Bommie,” she kept saying to him, “and a wife has some freedom here, don’t forget that.”

Her cold mocking laugh, her neglect of him when he wanted her most, the uncertainty of life with her, one moment a consuming fire, the next a block of ice, the constant friction of East and West, of ancient ideas and modern, the clash of two strong wills, and ever present domestic turmoil, all had made his life a hell past endurance.

He could stand it no longer. The time had come to end this conflict. She loved the children. He would tear her away from them. He would rid himself of this torment and heal his burning wounds.

He had good cause for jealousy. Was she not running around with a young local solicitor? He believed they were writing to each other, telephoning. Had she not gone with him on an automobile trip to Edinburgh, a fortnight earlier. Oh, yes, she had said the young man’s family were with them, but could he believe her? She lied, as she had lied so often before, to taunt him, to mock him.

And now tonight she was off in the car, alone to Blackpool and its beach pleasures and excitements. To see her sister, Mrs. Nelson, who had come there from Edinburgh for a visit. That was what she said. How was he to know that she was speaking the truth?

If she were not? The pencil snapped in two in his strong, slender fingers.

He would kill her, rid himself of this torture once and for all. Only — there was the law. For those who murdered there was the gallows. For fools who murdered, that was. Not for subtle, cunning brains such as his. There were ways and means to circumvent the punishment of the law. Tricks that only a surgeon knew.

His mind went back to Bombay, to the Towers of Silence overlooking tropical foliage, roof terraces, the sparkling waters. Here the Parsees brought their dead. He saw the bearers passing through the low door, the dead body exposed to sun and air and to the multitude of screaming vultures. In twenty minutes the bones were picked bare. Twenty minutes to destroy the evidence of death.

But this was England, where men took a strange interest in the causes of sudden death. Where detectives, aided by doctors, sought at the root of murder. He must match his Asiatic wits against their Western — his medical skill against the science of experts.

The perfect crime, this will o’ the wisp which tempts so many to their doom, was taking shape in his imagination. They had caught Dr. Crippen, Dr. Cream with his capsules of poison, smiling Dr. Palmer, callous Dr. Lam-son, Dr. Cross, the careless, Dr. Bougrat, Dr. Pommerais, the American Dr. Webster, but they would not catch Dr. Ruxton. He would see to that.