Twenty-three
I
In his hotel room, Arthur Calgary went over and over the notes he hadmade.
From time to time, he nodded his head.
Yes … he was on the right tack¹ now. To begin with, he had made the mis-take of concentrating on Mrs. Argyle. In nine cases out of ten that wouldhave been the right procedure. But this was the tenth case.
All along he had felt the presence of an unknown factor. If he couldonce isolate² and identify that factor, the case would be solved. In seekingit he had been obsessed³ by the dead woman. But the dead woman, he sawnow, was not really important. Any victim, in a sense, would have done.
He had shifted his viewpoint—shifted it back to the moment when allthis had begun. He had shifted it back to Jacko.
Not just Jacko as a young man unjustly sentenced for a crime he did notcommit—but Jacko, the intrinsic human being. Was Jacko, in the words ofthe old Calvinistic doctrine⁴, “a vessel⁵ appointed to destruction?” He’d beengiven every chance in life, hadn’t he? Dr. MacMaster’s opinion, at any rate,was that he was one of those who are born to go wrong. No environmentcould have helped him or saved him. Was that true? Leo Argyle hadspoken of him with indulgence, with pity. How had he put it? “One ofNature’s misfits.” He had accepted the modern psychological approach. Aninvalid, not a criminal. What had Hester said? Bluntly, that Jacko was al-ways awful!
A plain, childish statement. And what was it Kirsten Lindstrom hadsaid? That Jacko was wicked! Yes, she had put it as strongly as that.
Wicked! Tina had said: “I never liked him or trusted him.” So they allagreed, didn’t they, in general terms? It was only in the case of his widowthat they’d come down from the general to the particular. Maureen Clegghad thought of Jacko entirely⁶ from her own point of view. She had wastedherself on Jacko. She had been carried away by his charm and she was re-sentful of the fact. Now, securely remarried, she echoed her husband’sviews. She had given Calgary a

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