Chapter VII.

For those many brave souls who have become immersed in this highly complex tale of mystery, it will be sufficient to remember that Imp-skill Lloyd had returned to Matamata in an aeroplane and a pair of bathing V's, after adjudicating in the British Llama Festival at Dunedin. His encounter in that city with Archie Teaswell, the manufacturer of Teas-well's Tasty Toffees, provides the basis of this month's instalment. Do not forget the milkmaid's sad lapse, or the strange circumstances of Gillespie's disappearance. Forget all about the dizzy doings at the coroner's inquest and read on.

All night long Impskill wrote, and into the next day and the next, his fingers quivering and cramping as they drove the pencil across a vast white acreage of paper. The pencil circled and zig-zagged on a seismological track, pirouetted and stabbed, reeling under the impact of cerebral shocks that illumined and penetrated the clue-cluttered labyrinth of his mind. His nerves were trembling telegraphic wires, thought impelled, whipping his digital extremities into a frenzy of performance.

The disordered events of the last few days, the over-heated dream and phantasmagoric entrance of the coroner's witnesses, the milkmaid's confession, the llamas and Gillespie's strange disappearance, no longer tortured him. The solution he had arrived at was clear-cut and ridiculously simple. He cursed himself for his stupidity in failing to distinguish the really important aspects of the crime. It was only a chance remark of Teaswell's at the Llama Festival that gave him the idea. How could he have suspected the existence of a secret society? It gave the crime a different complexion, and pointed to the work of a great but warped intelligence directing, not an individual, but a group. The twelve Possible Causes were the work of a detestable organization, and history would have a new crime to, set down in its calendar—crime by community. And so he stumbled on the existence of the Matamata Vice Squad….

As he wrote he saw the bespatted Teaswell chiding the llamas into domestic submission. Archie, bland and debonair, in strange communion with llamas. It was all so funny, and yet somehow neither ridiculous nor obscene, but fundamental and absolute. Teaswell, distributing Teaswell's Tasty Toffee to avid but perplexed llamas. Why had he allowed himself to become involved? Six months before he had doubted the very existence of the absurd creatures, and was not sure whether they were some kind of Tibetian ecclesiastical dignitaries, or a species of Peruvian goat. Even now, when he was still uncertain, he could not rid his mind of the picture of Archie making nice little after-dinner speeches to rows and rows of llamas.

Day came. The wife of a bag snatcher slunk with her bucket under his casement, and the unshod mare excruciatingly pawed the gravel. A Hindu, bottle in hand, eluded the Schipperke and trod savagely on the alley cat. All this was real and urgent and immediate. Gillespie was gone, by what dark channel might never be known. He knew he must go out and take up the search, yet could not. The Possible Cause held him, and always he saw a sharp-edged lump of Teaswell's Tasty Toffee, the most coolly callous, and cloysomely dangerous sweetmeat, wedged in the gullet of Patrick Lauder. “Lauder still in coffin. Stop. Toffee in throat. Stop. Throat in advanced state of decomposition….”

As long as he lived, he could never forget that night of the Llama Festival, how he stayed with Teaswell when all Dunedin slept (or did that cautious city sleep, but only crouch watchfully in its tartan bed?). It was the queerest confession that his host had made, and he offered it not with contrition and tears, but blandly and archly with twinklings of suppressed triumph. He might have been Maske-lyne performing before an incredulous Houdini.

Three facts were clear to Impskill Lloyd, and from them he built up his theses with mathematical precision:

(a) Teaswell was the manufacturer of a toffee, a specimen of which had been found in the throat of Lauder.

(b) Teaswell had lived in Matamata until recently.

(c) The third fact, so clearly established, was the man's unbounded depravity. He had seen him with the llamas—and that was enough.

“You may remember this pamphlet of mine, Lloyd,” he said. He vanished behind the arras and dragged a saratoga into the middle of the floor. “These are the Society's minutes. Wouldn't Fanning and the Mayor love

“I called it “The Things that Matter in Matamata.'”

to have them!” He selected a typed folder and held it up to the light. “It contains the entire philosophy of the cult as propounded by myself. I called it. ‘The Things that Matter in Matamata.’ Wholly delightful. Something had to be done for those young people. They were dying of boredom, and didn't know what to do with their leisure. I suppose they have the five-day week now. God, how awful! The milkmaid was my first disciple, and so zealous….” He chuckled and tweeked his bow-tie. “She it was who set fire to the manse, and threw the District Nurse into the horse-pond. She brought her mother-in-law, and within a fortnight we were twelve.”

And then the disgusting recital began. The mysterious ills that had befallen Matamata during his years of occupation were jauntily explained. Impskill, sunk low in an ottoman, froze with horror. When he had seen Teaswell at the Llama Festival performing with his llamas he had suspected the man of complex and unfathomable depravities. The whole atmosphere of the Toffee Factory, which he had inspected in the morning, was overcharged. A man could not grow straight and hard there, and Teaswell had his roots in candy. As they walked, a column of peppermint rock crashed and splintered in their path. A young girl, struck with the flying fragments, uttered a wild scream of pain and collapsed on a tub of candy floss. The whole place was like that. Phantasmagoric and saccharine. And here was the prime cause of Possible Causes, expounding his infamies, boasting of his debased experiments, little suspecting the deadly trap he was setting himself. Had he not been so nauseated Lloyd would have rubbed his hands with glee at what was tantamount to an unequivocal confession…. They called themselves, under his fiendish tuition, the Disciples of Death. It was they who gave home-brew to the King Country, and birth-control to the Urewera. Grave-snatching, bag-snatching and cradle-snatching were not the least of their villainies, and petty larceny was a fait accompli amongst the merest novices in the group. It was a cult that set small-town boredom at defiance, that began with minor breaches of the law, and ended….?

Impskill lurched out of his chair and anchored on the saratoga. “Call me a taxi, Teaswell,” he managed to say.

Teaswell touched his cuff links and beamed implacably. “I regret,” he said, “that I cannot render you that service. The taxi-drivers are much too busy completing their questionnaires for the Taxi Commission. You will have to walk.” His hand went out and he pressed a small knob protruding from a handsome bas-relief panel which depicted the growth of agriculture in Thessaly. Teaswell was a cultured man…. The wall fell away, and Impskill found himself standing at the head of a narrow flight of stairs. “Down there,” said his host with an imperious gesture, “and turn to the right.” He dumbly obeyed and after much groping found himself once more on the open road….

The Twelve Possible Causes, abstractions mathematically conceived, had become gibbering phantoms. But now, standing in the open window, shorn of the V's that had so cunningly disguised him, he saw them as twelve men and women, real and wicked, evil-doers with blood on their hands. The blood of Patrick Lauder. His report was completed and he was tempted to file it with the proper authorities and leave the Police to prosecute. But the insatiable curiosity of the Lloyds would not be satisfied with this procedure. He burned to identify the personnel of the Disciples of Death. Who were the depraved souls sheltering behind its anonymity? Would the Public Livers of Matamata be incriminated by the exposure? Teaswell had named no names, and the identification was a task that appealed to the sleuth. “To Matamata,” he muttered, and hurriedly disguised himself as a dental nurse….

P.C. Fanning had little to report, save that the coroner had made an open verdict.

“They're buryin’ wot's left in the mornin'. Might be worth a walk to the cemetery.” The strange disguise of Lloyd left him unmoved and, indeed, had the Great Man effected an entrance in orthodox habiliments, his disappointment would have been profound.

“It is absolutely essential that I should remain anonymous,” he said to Fanning. “The Twelve Possible Causes may be twelve leading citizens.”

“You might take a look at the horse-doctor,” volunteered the constable. “That draught horse we examined the other night ‘ad been interfered with … and keep your eye on the County Chairman. Look's a thorough-goin’ garrotter that bloke.” The idea of plurality of murderers delighted his simple heart, even if he failed to grasp the complex psychology of the experiment motive. “Seems to me you oughter have a proper motive,” he argued. He produced a copy of the licensing poll for 1904, and the two of them combed the lists until early morning. At midnight, the suspects stood at twenty, but after a careful reexamination it was decided to place the entire population under observation. The next night and the next, he devoted to a careful study of the nocturnal habits of the Postmistress. She was a squat little woman with a black mole on her right eyelid, which gave her an alert and suspicious appearance. She was dressed from head to foot in unbleached linen and disappeared every evening at nine-thirty into a grove of lupins near the Post Office.

“Hurriedly disguised himself as a dental nurse.”

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Lying in a bed of water-cress he watched her, and could find no apparent reasons for her dubious behaviour. It was wet and odorous in the ditch, and his blue nurse's smock was ruined. He thought of the creature comforts of the police station, and stealthily moved in that direction…. Before a blazing fire he allowed his mind to travel over the incidents of the day. Out of a population of 1,200, seventeen had been wholly exonerated. The old inductive method never fails, he thought drowsily. Never fails. The flames licked and danced, and sap foamed at the ends of logs. He heard the clock strike three in uncanny silence, and rural noises far off. He heard a faint scuffling at the door, a noise of a lock being turned, and before he could move in his chair the door was flung open, and a heavy form lurched into the room.