Crime Never Pays

The story is about a man called Mr. Spiller who has just installed an ornamental fountain in his garden. He is so proud of it that invites some friends to have dinner at his house to admire it. During the dinner, the guests give their opinion about the fountain in the garden, about the place and the bushes around it. But it doesn’t like to everybody, above all, to Mr. Gooch, who is offending the host all the time criticizing his new fountain.

At the end of the dinner, some of them decide to play bridge but Mrs. Digby, one of his neighbours, decides to leave, and Mr. Spiller offers himself to accompanies her.

Once he is back home, realizes that everybody has gone to bed but Masters, the servant. He has turned off the fountain and everything is ready to go to sleep, so Mr. Spiller tells him to leave. But not everybody was in bed… Mr. Gooch, who had declined to play bridge with the other guests after the dinner, had decided to go to the garden. Some minutes later, they both meet in the living room and start to talk. Mr. Gooch knows a terrible secret about Mr. Spiller, and blackmails him in order to get more money than in fact he is receiving to keep the secret. He threatens to tell her daughter about it, they argue, and the crime takes place. Mr. Spiller was not intended to kill him but, actually, he did.

He hides the body next to the fountain and turns it on so that the water keeps the body temperature and confuses the police the next morning pretending to feign a natural death.

In the morning the body is found and the Police thinks it is a natural death as Mr. Spiller planned, but when everything seemed to be finished, Masters the servant tells Mr. Spiller that he knows everything about the crime he committed, and in order to keep the secret of the recent murder, Mr. Spiller has to increase his salary and to give him money when he ask to.

Mr. Gooch blackmailed him before, and Masters is doing it now. The same story is repeated again, like the fountain, which uses the same water over and over again.

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