Three Is A Lucky Number

Three Is a Lucky Number Margery Allingham
At five o’clock on a September afternoon Ronald Torbay was making preparations for his third murder. He was being very careful. He realized that murderingpeople becomes more dangerous if you do it often.
He was in the bathroom of the house that he had recently rented. For a moment he paused to look in the mirror. The face that looked back at him wasthin, middle-aged and pale. Dark hair, a high forehead and well-shaped blue eyes. Only the mouth was unusual – narrow and quite straight. Even Ronald Torbay did not like his own mouth.
A sound inthe kitchen below worried him. Was Edyth coming up to have her bath before he had prepared it for her? No, it was all right: she was going out of the back door. From the window he saw her disappearinground the side of the house into the small square garden. It was exactly like all the other gardens in the long street. He didn’t like her to be alone there. She was a shy person, but now new peoplehad moved into the house next door, and there was a danger of some silly woman making friends with her. He didn’t want that just now.
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Each of his three marriages had followed the same pattern.Using a false name, he had gone on holiday to a place where no one knew him. There he had found a middle-aged, unattractive woman, with some money of her own and no family. He had talked her intomarrying him, and she had then agreed to make a will which left him all her money. Both his other wives had been shy too. He was very careful to choose the right type of woman: someone who would not makefriends quickly in a new place.
Mary, the first of them, had had her deadly ‘accident’ almost unnoticed, in the bathroom of the house he had rented – a house very like this one, but in the north ofEngland instead of the south. The police had not found anything wrong. The only person who was interested was a young reporter on the local newspaper. He had written something about death in the...