The business of death has given insurance investigator Miles Bredon a unique outlook on life in this witty Golden Age mystery. Jephthah Mottram has been given some bad news from his doctor. The very rich man has only two years left to live. But he doesn’t even make it that far. While on a fishing holiday in the Midlands of England, he’s found dead of an apparent suicide by gas. Sadly, that would be the best-case scenario for Indescribable Insurance, which wouldn’t have to pay out the benefits. To that end, the company sends out its own private detective to investigate the matter. Arriving at the Load of Mischief Inn, Miles Bredon is met by a policeman with whom he served in the war, who has his own theory about the tragedy—and it is murderous. The two men make a friendly wager over who will prove their case, never expecting just how much greed and vanity can complicate a life—and a death . . .
The insurance firm investigator, Miles Bredon, must determine whether suicide or murder is the cause of the gas poisoning death in an inn of a man who has recently concluded a complex insurance policy and changed his will.
The principles of insurance, they tell us, were not hidden from our Anglo-Saxon forefathers. How anybody had the enterprise in those rough-and-tumble days to guarantee a client against “fire, water, robbery or other calamity” remains a problem for the historian; the more so as it appears that mathematical calculations were first applied to the business by the eminent John de Witt. In our own time, at any rate, the insurance companies have woven a golden net under the tight-rope walk of existence; if life is a lottery, the prudent citizen faces it with the consciousness that he is backed both ways. Had the idea been thoroughly grasped in those remoter periods, no doubt but Alfred’s hostess would have been easily consoled for the damage done to her cakes and King John handsomely compensated for all that he lost in The Wash. Let us thank the soaring genius of the human mind which has thus found a means to canalize for us the waters of affliction; and let us always be scrupulous in paying up our premiums before the date indicated on the printed card, lest calamity should come upon us and find us unprepared. In a sense, though, insurance was but an empirical science until the Indescribable Company made its appearance. The man who is insured with the Indescribable walks the world in armour of proof; those contrary accidents and mortifications which are a source of spiritual profit to the saint are a source of material advantage to him. No east wind but flatters him with the prospect of a lucrative cold; no dropped banana skin but may suddenly hurl him into affluence. The chicken-farmer whose hen-houses are fitted with the company’s patent automatic egg-register can never make a failure of his business. The egg is no sooner laid than it falls gently through a slot which marks its passage on a kind of taximeter; and if the total of eggs at the end of the month is below the average the company pays—I had almost said, the company lays—an exact monetary equivalent for the shortage. The company which thus takes upon itself the office of a hen is equally ready when occasion arises to masquerade as a bee: if your hives are opened in the presence of its representative you can distend every empty cell with sweet nectar at the company’s expense. Doctors can guarantee themselves against an excess of panel patients, barristers against an absence of briefs. You can insure every step you take on this side of the grave, but no one of them on such handsome terms as the step which takes you into the grave; and it is confidently believed that if certain practical difficulties could be got over the Indescribable would somehow contrive to frank your passage into the world beyond. Wags have made merry at the company’s expense, alleging that a burglar can insure himself against a haul of sham jewels, and a clergyman against insufficient attendance at even-song. They tell stories of a client who murmured “Thank God!” as he fell down a lift-shaft, and a shipwrecked passenger who manifested the liveliest annoyance at the promptness of his rescuers when he was being paid for floating on a life-belt at the rate of ten pounds a minute. So thoroughly has the Indescribable reversed our scale of values here below.
