Murder Is Easy - Agatha Christie [25]
“Why?”
“Well, the rumour has been going round that you had raised the ghost of Tommy Pierce.”
“Pierce? Pierce? Is that the small boy who fell out of a window?”
“Yes.”
“Now I wonder how—of course—I made some remark to the solicitor—what’s his name, Abbot.”
“Yes, the story originated with Abbot.”
“Don’t say I’ve converted a hard-boiled solicitor to a belief in ghosts?”
“You believe in ghosts yourself, then?”
“Your tone suggests that you do not, doctor. No, I wouldn’t say I actually ‘believe in ghosts’—to put it crudely. But I have known curious phenomena in the case of sudden or violent death. But I’m more interested in the various superstitions pertaining to violent deaths—that a murdered man, for instance, can’t rest in his grave. And the interesting belief that the blood of a murdered man flows if his murderer touches him. I wonder how that arose.”
“Very curious,” said Thomas. “But I don’t suppose many people remember that nowadays.”
“More than you would think. Of course, I don’t suppose you have many murders down here—so it’s hard to judge.”
Luke had smiled as he spoke, his eyes resting with seeming carelessness on the other’s face. But Dr. Thomas seemed quite unperturbed and smiled in return.
“No, I don’t think we’ve had a murder for—oh, very many years—certainly not in my time.”
“No, this is a peaceful spot. Not conducive to foul play. Unless somebody pushed little Tommy What’s-his-name out of the window.”
Luke laughed. Again Dr. Thomas’s smile came in answer—a natural smile full of boyish amusement.
“A lot of people would have been willing to wring that child’s neck,” he said. “But I don’t think they actually got to the point of throwing him out of windows.”
“He seems to have been a thoroughly nasty child—the removal of him might have been conceived as a public duty.”
“It’s a pity one can’t apply that theory fairly often.”
“I’ve always thought a few wholesale murders would be beneficial to the community,” said Luke. “A club bore, for instance, should be finished off with a poisoned liqueur brandy. Then there are the women who gush at you and tear all their dearest friends to pieces with their tongues. Backbiting spinsters. Inveterate diehards who oppose progress. If they were painlessly removed, what a difference it would make to social life!”
Dr. Thomas’s smile lengthened to a grin.
“In fact, you advocate crime on a grand scale?”
“Judicious elimination,” said Luke. “Don’t you agree that it would be beneficial?”
“Oh, undoubtedly.”
“Ah, but you’re not being serious,” said Luke. “Now I am. I haven’t the respect for human life that the normal Englishman has. Any man who is a stumbling block on the way of progress ought to be eliminated—that’s how I see it!”
Running his hand through his short fair hair, Dr. Thomas said:
“Yes, but who is to be the judge of a man’s fitness or unfitness?”
“That’s the difficulty, of course,” Luke admitted.
“The Catholics would consider a Communist agitator unfit to live—the Communist agitator would sentence the priest to death as a purveyor of superstition, the doctor would eliminate the unhealthy man, the pacifist would condemn the soldier, and so on.”
“You’d have to have a scientific man as judge,” said Luke. “Someone with an unbiased but highly specialized mind—a doctor, for instance. Come to that, I think you’d be a pretty good judge yourself, doctor.”
“Of unfitness to live?”
“Yes.”
Dr. Thomas shook his head.
“My job is to make the unfit fit. Most of the time it’s an uphill job, I’ll admit.”
“Now just for the sake of argument,” said Luke. “Take a man like the late Harry Carter—”
Dr. Thomas said sharply:
“Carter? You mean the landlord of the Seven Stars?”
“Yes, that’s the man. I never knew him myself, but my cousin, Miss Conway, was talking about him. He seems to have been a really thoroughgoing scoundrel.”
“Well,” said the other, “he drank, of course. Ill-treated his wife, bullied his daughter. He was quarrelsome and abusive and had had a row with most people in the place.”
“In fact, the world is a better place without him?