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

He was back, however, by two when two of the usual charwomen Mrs. Smith and Mrs. Curwen arrived. Mrs. Smith noticed blood stains on the stair woodwork and made a comment, but the doctor had a ready answer. He had cut his hand and the blood dripped. And he said the same thing to Mrs. Curwen who pointed out blood on the stair casement window curtain. He ripped off the bloodied portion and took it away.

“People will be saying I murdered someone,” he said with a twisted smile, and the women laughed heartily at the idea.

That night he had a sudden quiver of apprehension. He had slipped up on a detail. If the two women had gone, of course they would have taken clothes with them, in addition to those they had worn. He had already disposed of his wife’s dress and things and of Mary Rogerson’s stained nightdress, but their traveling things, no.

He made a hasty search, gathered together some clothes, including one of Mary’s dresses with glass buttons, and with a can of gasoline made a fire in the yard.

Next morning he felt he had all but closed the door upon his crime. He went to the Andersons and took his children to the carnival at Morecambe.

On Thursday, September 19, Mrs. Oxley got to the house at seven-thirty. Dr. Ruxton told her to hurry breakfast as he had to see a specialist about his hand. She got him his breakfast in a hurry and he ate it in a hurry. She was in the kitchen washing up when she heard him bring his car round to the back door and come in. As he passed the kitchen door he shut it and went upstairs. He came down and up again several times, but she did not see what he was carrying. Which was just as well for both persons. He left the house at eight.

When Mrs. Oxley began to work, there did not appear to be anything wrong with them, though the two bedrooms had a faintly musty odor.

It was close on three o’clock when the doctor got back. Time enough to have gone a good many miles. He said, however, he had been to a nearby town and lost his way.

That night he brought back his children from Morecambe. There was no longer that beneath his roof which they must not see, must never know of.

On Friday Mrs. Curwen and Mrs. Oxley were again at the house. When they exclaimed about a bad smell, it did not take Dr. Ruxton long to set them right. The odor came from the walls they had been stripping of paper. He sent out for a sprayer and some eau-de-cologne.

He might have been uneasy, had he seen one of Mrs. Curwen’s operations. In a corner of the yard almost hidden from sight she came on a blanket in a basin of water. The water was reddish. She wrung the blanket and put fresh water on it, but did not mention the matter to the doctor.

And the doctor went about his usual business, seeing his patients, his ordinary efficient self. He handled all inquiries about his wife and Mary with the utmost composure. They had left his home on a trip Sunday morning. He was just a bit worried, he had not heard from them.

He was untouched by remorse. What was done was done. He had carried out the perfect crime. It would not, it could not be brought home to him. With his surgeon’s knife he had destroyed and removed from the two bodies every means of identification.

Yet even as he stalked in his pride through the streets of Lancaster, nemesis was stirring to life a hundred miles to the north where Dr. Ruxton believed he had concealed his secret.

II

Miss Susan Johnson, when she set out light-heartedly for a stroll on the morning of September 29, had no idea of the part she was to play in the most thrilling murder story to flash into the daily press of Great Britain since the discovery of the remains of Belle Crippen in the London cellar of her husband, Dr. Crippen.

With her brother Alfred she had come to spend a few days vacation in the town of Moffat, a well known health resort in the south of her native country, Scotland. Not that she needed to drink its famous mineral waters whose chemical taste attracted so many visitors. Nor was the scenery so different from that of the Glasgow suburb of Lenzie in which she lived, within a trifling journey of Loch Lomond and the mountains.

No, something else, she could not say what, had brought her to the Spa. It was a nice morning and she left the town behind her and began to climb. She could see the river Annan. And had her ears been alive to sounds long dead. She could have heard the tramp of Caesar’s legions on the old Roman road to her left. If she kept on she would come to that dismal forbidding hole known as the Devil’s Beef Tub.

But she did not get that far. When she came to the arched stone bridge spanning Gardenholm Linn, she stopped there for a rest and leaned over the parapet. She looked down into the eighty-foot deep ravine, dropping sheer from the roadway, at the bottom of which ran, a narrow swift current of the river, and she shuddered. It certainly was a fine place for terrible doings.