Murder Impossible Read online

  'Hoy!' called the voice of Bill Sage.

  It did not come from the direction of the cottage.

  They were surrounded on three sides by Goblin Wood, now blurred with twilight. From the north side the voice bawled at them, followed by crackling in dry undergrowth. Bill, his hair and sports coat and flannels more than a little dirty, regarded then with a face of bitterness.

  'Here are her blasted wild strawberries,' he announced, extending his hand. 'Three of 'em. The fruitful (excuse me) result of three-quarters of an hour's hard labour. I absolutely refuse to chase 'em in the dark.'

  For a moment Eve Drayton's mouth moved without speech.

  'Then you weren't ... in the cottage all this time?'

  'In the cottage?' Bill glanced at it. 'I was in that cottage,' he said, 'about five minutes. Vicky had a woman's whim. She wanted some wild strawberries out of what she called the "forest." '

  'Wait a minute, son!' said H.M. very sharply. 'You didn't come out of that front door. Nobody did.'

  'No, I went out of the back door. It opens straight on to the wood.'

  'Yes. And what happened then?'

  'Well, I went to look for these damned . . .'

  'No, no! What did she do?'

  'Vicky? She locked and bolted the back door on the inside. I remember her grinning at me through the glass panel. She—'

  Bill stopped short. His eyes widened, and then narrowed, as though at the impact of an idea. All three of them turned to look at the rough-stone cottage.

  'By the way,' said Bill. He cleared his throat vigorously. 'By the way, have you seen Vicky since then?'

  'No.'

  'This couldn't be . . .?'

  'It could be, son,' said H.M. 'We'd all better go in there and have a look.'

  They hesitated for a moment on the porch. A warm moist fragrance breathed up from the ground after sunset. In half an hour it would be completely dark.

  Bill Sage threw open the front door and shouted Vicky's name. That sound seemed to penetrate, reverberating, through every room. The intense heat and stuffiness of the cottage, where no window had been raised for months, blew out at them. But nobody answered.

  'Get inside,' snapped H.M. 'And stop yowlin'.' The Old Maestro seemed nervous. 'I'm dead sure she didn't get out by the front door; but we'll just make certain there's no slippin out now.'

  Stumbling over the table and chairs on the porch, he fastened the front door. They were in a narrow passage, once handsome with parquet floor and pine-panelled walls, leading to a door with a glass panel at the rear. H.M. lumbered forward to inspect this door and found it locked and bolted, as Bill had said.

  Goblin Wood grew darker.

  Keeping well together, they searched the cottage. It was not large, having two good-sized rooms on one side of the passage, and two small rooms on the other side, so as to make space for bathroom and kitchenette. H.M., raising fogs of dust, ransacked every inch where a person could possibly hide.

  And all the windows were locked on the inside. And the chimney-flues were too narrow to admit anybody.

  And Vicky Adams wasn't there.

  'Oh, my eye!' breathed Sir Henry Merrivale.

  They had gathered, by what idiotic impulse not even H.M. could have said, just outside the open door of the bathroom. A bath-tap dripped monotonously. The last light through a frosted-glass window showed three faces hung there as though disembodied.

  'Bill,' said Eve in an unsteady voice, 'this is a trick. Oh, I longed for her to be exposed! This is a trick!'

  'Then where is she?'

  'Sir Henry can tell us! Can't you, Sir Henry?'

  'Well . . . now,' muttered the great man.

  Across H.M. 's Panama hat was a large black handprint, made there when he had pressed down the hat after investigating a chimney. He glowered under it.

  'Son,' he said to Bill, 'there's just one question I want you to answer in all this hokey-pokey. When you went out pickin' wild strawberries, will you swear Vicky Adams didn't go with you?'

  'As God is my judge, she didn't,' returned Bill, with fervency and obvious truth. 'Besides, how the devil could she? Look at the lock and bolt on the back door!'

  H.M. made two more violent black handprints on his hat.

  He lumbered forward, his head down, two or three paces in the narrow passage. His foot half-skidded on something that had been lying there unnoticed, and he picked it up. It was a large, square section of thin, waterproof oilskin, jagged at one corner.

  'Have you found anything!' demanded Bill in a strained voice.

  'No. Not to make any sense, that is. But just a minute!'

  At the rear of the passage, on the left-hand side, was the bedroom from which Vicky Adams had vanished as a child. Though H.M. had searched this room once before, he opened the door again.

  It was now almost dark in Goblin Wood.

  He saw dimly a room of twenty years before: a room of flounces, of lace curtains, of once-polished mahogany, its mirrors glimmering against white papered walls. H.M. seemed especially interested in the windows.

  He ran his hands carefully round the frame of each, even climbing laboriously up on a chair to examine the tops. He borrowed a box of matches from Bill; and the little spurts of light, following the rasp of the match, rasped against nerves as well. The hope died out of his face, and his companions saw it.

  'Sir Henry,' Bill said for the dozenth time, 'where is she?'

  'Son,' replied H.M. despondently, 'I don't know.'

  'Let's get out of here,' Eve said abruptly. Her voice was a small scream. 'I kn-know it's all a trick! I know Vicky's a faker! But let's get out of here. For heaven's sake, let's get out of here!'

  'As a matter of fact,' Bill cleared his throat, 'I agree. Anyway, we won't hear from Vicky until to-morrow morning.'

  'Oh yes, you will,' whispered Vicky's voice out of the darkness.

  Eve screamed.

  They lighted a lamp.

  But there was nobody there.

  Their retreat from the cottage, it must be admitted, was not very dignified.

  How they stumbled down that ragged lawn in the dark, how they piled rugs and picnic-hampers into the car, how they eventually found the main road again, is best left undescribed.

  Sir Henry Merrivale has since sneered at this—'a bit of a goosey feeling; nothin' much'—and it is true that he has no nerves to speak of. But he can be worried, badly worried; and that he was worried on this occasion may be deduced from what happened later.

  H.M., after dropping in at Claridge's for a modest late supper of lobster and Peach Melba, returned to his house in Brook Street and slept a hideous sleep. It was three o'clock in the morning, even before the summer dawn, when the ringing of the bedside telephone roused him.

  What he heard sent his blood pressure soaring.

  'Dear Sir Henry!' crooned a familiar and sprite-like voice.

  H.M. was himself again, full of gall and bile. He switched on the bedside lamp and put on his spectacles with care, so as adequately to address the 'phone.

  'Have I the honour,' he said with dangerous politeness, 'of addressin' Miss Vicky Adams?'

  'Oh yes!'

  'I sincerely trust,' said H.M., 'you've been havin' a good time? Are you materialized yet?'

  'Oh yes!'

  'Where are you now?'

  'I'm afraid,' there was a coy laughter in the voice, 'that must be a little secret for a day or two. I want to teach you a really good lesson. Blessings, dear.'

  And she hung up the receiver.

  H.M. did not say anything. He climbed out of bed. He stalked up and down the room. Then, since he himself had been waked up at three o'clock in the morning, the obvious course was to wake up somebody else; so he dialled the home number of Chief Inspector Masters.

  'No, sir,' retorted Masters grimly. 'I do not mind you ringing up. Not a bit of it!' He spoke with a certain pleasure. 'Because I've got a bit of news for you.'

  H.M. eyed the 'phone suspiciously.

 
'Masters, are you trying to do me in the eye again? What's the news?'

  'Do you remember mentioning the Vicky Adams case to me yesterday?'

  'Sort of. Yes.'

  'Oh, ah! Well, I had a word or two round among our people. I was tipped the wink to go and see a certain solicitor. He was old Mr. Fred Adams's solicitor before Mr. Adams died about six or seven years ago.' Here Masters's voice grew suave with triumph. 'I always said, Sir Henry, that Chuck Randall had planted some gadget in that cottage for a quick getaway. And I was right. The gadget was . . .'

  'You were quite right Masters. The gadget was a trick window.'

  The telephone, so to speak, gave a start. 'What's that?'

  'A trick window,' H.M. spoke patiently. 'You press a spring. And the whole frame of the window, two leaves locked together, slides down between the walls far enough to let you climb over. Then you push it back up again.'

  'How in lum's name do you know that?'

  'Oh, my son! They used to build windows like it in the country houses during the persecution of Catholic priests. It was a good enough second guess. Only ... it won't work.'

  Masters seemed annoyed. 'It won't work now,' Masters agreed. 'And do you know why?'

  'I can guess. Tell me.'

  'Because, just before Mr. Adams died, he discovered how his darling daughter had flummoxed him. He never told anybody except his lawyer. He took a handful of four-inch nails, and sealed up the top of the frame so tight an orangoutang couldn't move it, and painted 'em over so they wouldn't be noticed.'

  'Did he. You can notice 'em now.'

  'I doubt if the young lady herself ever knew. But, by George,' Masters said savagely, 'I'd like to see anybody try the same game now!'

  'You would, hey? Then will it interest you to know that the same gal has just disappeared out of the same house AGAIN?'

  H.M. began a long narrative of the facts, but he had to break off because the telephone was raving.

  'Honest, Masters,' H.M. said seriously, 'I'm not joking. She didn't get out through that window. But she did get out. You'd better meet me,' he gave directions, 'tomorrow morning. In the meantime, son, sleep well.'

  It was, therefore, a worn-faced Masters who went into the Visitors' Room at the Senior Conservatives' Club just before lunch on the following day.

  The Visitors' Room is a dark sepulchral place, opening on an airwell, where the visitor is surrounded by pictures of dyspeptic looking gentlemen with beards. It has a pervading mustiness of wood and leather. Though whisky and soda stood on the table, H.M. sat in a leather chair far away from it, ruffling his hands across his bald head.

  'Now, Masters, keep your shirt on!' he warned. 'This business may be rummy. But it's not a police matter yet.'

  'I know it's not,' Masters said grimly. 'All the same, I've had a word with the Superintendent at Aylesbury.'

  'Fowler?'

  'You know him?'

  'I know everybody. Is he goin' to keep an eye out?'

  'He's going to have a look at that ruddy cottage. I've asked for any telephone calls to be put through here. In the meantime, sir—'

  It was at this point, as though diabolically inspired, that the telephone was heard to ring. H.M. lumbered out and reached the telephone box before Masters.

  'It's the old man,' he said, unconsciously assuming a stance of grandeur. 'Yes, yes! Masters is here, but he's drunk. You tell me first. What?'

  The telephone talked thinly.

  'Certainly I looked in the kitchen cupboard,' bellowed H.M. 'Though I didn't honestly expect to find Vicky Adams hidin' there. What's that? Plates? Cups that had been . . .'

  An almost frightening change had come over H.M.'s expression. All the posturing went out of him. He was not even listening to the voice that still talked thinly, while his eyes and his brain moved to put together facts. At length (though the voice still talked) he hung up the receiver and blundered back to the Visitors' Room, where he drew out a chair and sat down.

  'Masters,' he said very quietly, 'I've come close to makin' the silliest mistake of my life.'

  Here he cleared his throat.

  'I shouldn't have made it, son. I really shouldn't. But don't yell at me for cuttin' off Fowler. I can tell you now how Vicky Adams disappeared. And she said one true thing when she said she was going into a strange country.'

  'How do you mean?'

  'She's dead,' answered H.M.

  The words fell with heavy weight into that dingy room, where the bearded faces looked down.

  'Y'see,' H.M. went on, 'a lot of us were right when we thought Vicky Adams was a faker. She was. To attract attention to herself, she played that trick on her family with the hocussed window. She's lived and traded on it ever since. That's what sent me straight in the wrong direction. I was on the alert for some trick Vicky Adams might play. So it never occurred to me that this elegant pair of beauties, Miss Eve Drayton and Mr. William Sage, were deliberately conspirin' to murder her.'

  Masters got slowly to his feet.

  'Did you say . . . murder?'

  'Oh yes. It was all arranged before-hand for me to witness. They knew Vicky Adams couldn't resist a challenge to disappear, especially as Vicky always believed she could get out by the trick window. They wanted Vicky to say she was goin' to disappear. They never knew anything about the trick window, Masters. But they knew their own plan very well.

  'Eve Drayton even told me the motive. She hated Vicky, of course. But that wasn't the main point. She was Vicky Adams's only relative; she'd inherit an awful big scoopful of money. Eve said she could be patient. (And, burn me, how her eyes meant it when she said that!) Rather than risk any slightest suspicion of murder, she was willing to wait seven years until a disappearing person can be presumed dead.

  'Our Eve, I think, was the fiery drivin' force of that conspiracy. She was only scared part of the time. Sage was scared all the time. But it was Sage who did the real dirty work. He lured Vicky Adams into that cottage, while Eve kept me in close conversation on the lawn . . .'

  H.M. paused.

  Intolerably vivid in the mind of Chief Inspector Masters, who had seen it years before, rose the picture of the rough-stone cottage against the darkling wood.

  'Masters,' said H.M., 'why should a bath-tap be dripping in a house that hadn't been occupied for months?'

  'Well?'

  'Sage, y'see, is a surgeon. I saw him take his black case of instruments out of the car. He took Vicky Adams into that house. In the bathroom he stabbed her, he stripped her, and he dismembered her body in the bath tub.—Easy, son!'

  'Go on,' said Masters.

  'The head, the torso, the folded arms and legs were wrapped up in three large square pieces of thin transparent oilskin. Each was sewed up with coarse thread so the blood wouldn't drip. Last night I found one of the oilskin pieces he'd ruined when his needle slipped at the corner. Then he walked out of the house, with the back door still standin' unlocked, to get his wild strawberry alibi.'

  'Sage went out of there,' shouted Masters, 'leaving the body in the house?'

  'Oh yes,' agreed H.M. 'But where did he leave it?' H.M. ignored this.

  'In the meantime, son, what about Eve Drayton? At the end of the arranged three-quarters of an hour, she indicated there was hanky-panky between her fiancé and Vicky Adams. She flew into the house. And what did she do?

  'She walked to the back of the passage. I heard her. There she simply locked and bolted the back door. And then she marched out to join me with tears in her eyes. And these two beauties were ready for investigation.'

  'Investigation?' said Masters. 'With that body still in the house?'

  'Oh yes.'

  Masters lifted both fists.

  'It must have given young Sage a shock,' said H.M., 'when I found that piece of waterproof oilskin he'd washed but dropped. Anyway, these two had only two more bits of hokey-pokey. The "vanished" gal had to speak—to show she was still alive. If you'd been there, son, you'd have noticed that Eve Drayton's got a voice just
like Vicky Adams's. If somebody speaks in a dark room, carefully imitating a coy tone she never uses herself, the illusion's goin' to be pretty good. The same goes for a telephone.

  'It was finished, Masters. All that had to be done was to remove the body from the house and get it far away from there . . .'

  'But that's just what I'm asking you, sir! Where was the body all this time? And who in blazes did remove the body from the house?'

  'All of us did,' answered H.M.

  'What's that?'

  'Masters,' said H.M., 'aren't you forgettin' the picnic hampers?'

  And now, the Chief Inspector saw, H.M. was as white as a ghost. His next words took Masters like a blow between the eyes.

  'Three good-sized wickerwork hampers, with lids. After our big meal on the porch, those hampers were shoved inside the house where Sage could get at 'em. He had to leave most of the used crockery behind, in the kitchen cupboard. But three wickerwork hampers from a picnic, and three butcher's parcels to go inside 'em. I carried one down to the car myself. It felt a bit funny . . .'

  H.M. stretched out his hand, not steadily, towards the whisky.

  'Y'know,' he said, 'I'll always wonder whether I was carrying the—head.'

  HAKE TALBOT

  The Other Side

  Astonishingly, Hake Talbot does not appear in any edition (thus far) of 20th Century Crime And Mystery Writers. To be sure, he published only two novels and one short story that qualify, all in the 1940s—but I can think of one or two (or more: come to think of it, many more) writers who are featured in that monumental reference tome who don't deserve to be included on four or even five limes that output.

  As my co-editor once remarked, Hake Talbot 'produced the only books that challenged Can on his own terms and earned a draw'. Those books were The Hangman's Handyman (1942) and Rim of the Pit (1944). Actually, if Talbot had only written Rim of the Pit he would still have merited inclusion in 20th Century, for Rim of the Pit is an out-and-out, no-holds-barred masterpiece. Not that The Hangman's Handyman, a masterly melange of hocus-pocus, intricate plotting, and brilliantly dabbed-in touches of the macabre, is that far behind—but Rim of the Pit, which features necromancy, flying creatures, ghostly voices and an Impossible murder, is truly in a class of its own. In 1981 a panel of experts (plus your two editors) judged it to be second only to Can's The Hollow Man (a.k.a. The Three Coffins,) in a poll of Best Impossible Crimes.