The Man Who Killed Himself by Julian Symons

hold the stamp in his hand to impregnate it with body sweat, and thus leave impressions of the stamp in suitable places. Or he could have a print copied on to latex and glued to rubber gloves, using the gloves to leave prints. These methods had their dangers, however, since he would have to employ somebody to make the stamp or to have the prints copied, and he settled finally on a third method, involving the use of cellulose tape. He went out and bought a soapstone statuette of Buddha (‘soapstone,’ said one of the books he consulted, ‘is an excellent print-taking surface.’) He admired but did not touch it himself, and the dealer held the statuette firmly while extolling its beauty. Afterwards he was in agony while the man was wrapping it in tissue. Supposing the prints were destroyed! They survived, however, and on the following day he bought a pair of rubber gloves and completely cleaned the office. He paid particular attention to everything on the desk, the chair and the files, but he did not forget the door handle, the window sill, and other places likely to bear traces of prints.
    Then came the ticklish part of the operation, the ‘lifting’ of the prints on the statuette. He used for this purpose a roll of cellulose tape. By rolling this tape gently over the Buddha he obtained a number of reasonably good prints. The last part of the process involved pressing the tape on to the best print-taking surfaces he could find on his desk and the filing cabinet. These ‘roll-ons’ (a technical term which he had used in his own mind) became fainter with use, but he managed to take a few more which he dotted about the room. These were the presumptive fingerprints of Easonby Mellon. They were not likely to deceive any serious police examination with a hand-lens, but the beauty of the device was that in his particular case this was all to the good. ‘Ah ha,’ the fingerprint expert would say, ‘These prints are fakes. The man Mellon is obviously a criminal, trying to leave false prints.’ And the joy of the whole thing was that he wanted them to think just this. When he had done with the statuette he sold it in the Portobello Road for less than a quarter of what it had cost him.
    The problem of his prints at the Clapham flat was less easily solved. He considered and rejected one shocking idea, and decided that something was bound to occur to him in a day or two. In the meantime he had to provide Easonby Mellon with a background that was so far lamentably lacking. He took Joan to see a film called The Eye of the Past, of which he had read reviews. It was about a business executive who had risen to be the president of a corporation. Unknown to his friends he was the son of a convicted murderer, and had been prone to fits of uncontrollable rage in his youth. He was afraid that at some moment of crisis he would be moved to injure somebody because of the bad streak in his heredity, and his concern about this was shown in several dream sequences in which he was shown committing violent actions through a kind of fog which swirled about the screen. Sure enough his secret became known to a subordinate, a man who nursed a grudge about having been passed over for promotion. He now tried to obtain his ends by blackmail, and up to a point succeeded. The president paid him money, but when the man demanded promotion as well the president hit the man with a tyre lever, drove his car on to a rubbish dump, and set light to it. The body was identified, however, and the president was implicated because he had been seen leaving the dump. He fled to his home town, where he went to see an old nanny, who was the only person who had been kind to him when he was at home. In the end he was captured in her sitting-room, where she had given him the cookies he had loved in childhood. Under the influence of a long speech from her he gave himself up peacefully instead of fighting it out with the police.
    ‘It was good,’ Joan said afterwards. ‘But