Twelve
There was a short silence after Taverner had gone out.
Then I said:
“Dad, what are murderers like?”
The Old Man looked at me thoughtfully. We understand each other sowell that he knew exactly what was in my mind when I put that question.
And he answered it very seriously.
“Yes,” he said. “That’s important now — very important, for you …Murder’s come close to you. You can’t go on looking at it from the out-side.”
I had always been interested, in an amateurish¹ kind of way, in some ofthe more spectacular “cases” with which the CID had dealt, but, as myfather said, I had been interested from the outside—looking in, as it were,through the shop window. But now, as Sophia had seen much morequickly than I did, murder had become a dominant² factor in my life.
The Old Man went on:
“I don’t know if I’m the right person to ask. I could put you on to acouple of the tame psychiatrists³ who do jobs for us. They’ve got it all cutand dried. Or Taverner could give you all the inside dope. But you want, Itake it, to hear what I, personally, as the result of my experience of crimin-als, think about it?”
“That’s what I want,” I said gratefully.
My father traced a little circle with his finger on the desk top.
“What are murderers like? Some of them”—a faint rather melancholysmile showed on his face—“have been thoroughly⁴ nice chaps.”
I think I looked a little startled.
“Oh yes, they have,” he said. “Nice ordinary fellows like you and me—orlike that chap who went out just now—Roger Leonides. Murder, you see, isan amateur crime. I’m speaking of course of the kind of murder you havein mind—not gangster⁵ stuff. One feels, very often, as though these nice or-dinary chaps had been overtaken, as it were, by murder, almost accident-ally. They’ve been in a tight place, or they’ve wanted something verybadly, money or a woman—and they’ve killed to get it. The brake that op-erates with most of us doesn’t operate with them. A child, you know,translates desire into action without compunction. A child is angry with itskitten, says ‘I’ll kill you,’ and hits it on the head with a hammer—and thenbreaks its heart because the kitten doesn’t come alive again! Lots of kidstry to take a baby out of a

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