The doctor grimaced. “To tell you the truth,” he said, “I rather liked Betty myself. But after she met Venables, there just wasn’t a chance for anyone else. He was a good chap, too, I've got to hand it to him…

“Well, they got engaged, and the wedding was all set for a day last June. And then, on the actual morning of her wedding day, Betty disappeared.”

Fen’s eyebrows lifted; and if the doctor had been less engrossed in his story, he might have seen an odd look, almost like satisfaction, flicker across the stranger’s face. “Disappeared?” Fen echoed.

“Vanished. Went. Some time in the very early morning, they thought. She took some cash with her, but they never traced where she went during the fonnight that followed.”

“But what reason—”

“Well, she was frightened, it seems—frightened about the physical side of the marriage. Mrs. Danvers knew that, and there were one or two girl-friends who confirmed it. She wasn’t cold, mind you, not that sort at all; just scared.” The doctor’s brow darkened. “Why they don’t teach these girls something about it… However. Oh, and by the way, I’m sure it wasn’t Venables’s fault. He’s a nice gentle chap. No, it’s just that the girl was both ignorant and highly-strung, and the combination turned out fatal. In spite of being so much in love with him, she funked it at the last moment. Poor kid…”

He brooded while Fen ordered fresh drinks for himself and for the landlord. Then, resuming:

“Anyway, for a whole fortnight she vanished,” he said. “And then, one night, she came back. No one saw her, and she didn’t go to the house. Instead, she seems to have slept in an old barn just outside the town, Abingdon way. But you can imagine what she was feeling. She must have felt she could never face Venables again—though, Lord knows, he’d have forgiven her all right. With him gone, everything was gone. So she got hold of an old kitchen knife somewhere—they never found out where—and cut her throat with it, and that was how they found her.”

There was a brief silence, broken only by the landlord’s asthmatic wheezing. Then, dismissively, the doctor said:

“They’d searched for her, of course. It was quite a to-do, I can tell you. Everything ready—cake, reception, parson and all the trimmings—and then Mrs. Danvers had to ring up Venables and the police and meet them at the gate and tell them what had happened, and you can imagine how everyone felt. Though that was nothing to what they felt when the body was found…”

“Who,” Fen demanded abruptly, “was to have given her away?”

The doctor looked at him in surprise. “Why d’you ask? It was an old friend of her father’s, actually, because the only relative she had living was Mrs. Danvers.”

“And was he staying at the house?”

The doctor’s puzzlement visibly grew; but it was the landlord who answered.

“No, sir,” said the landlord. “’E was staying ’ere… Mrs. Danvers,” he added with some gratification, “said ’e’d be more comfortable ’ere than with them, so there was only Mrs. Danvers in the ’ouse when young Betty did ’er bunk.”

“That was what I was getting at, yes,” said Fen. “Interesting. Has the house ever been let?”

The landlord shook his head. “Not to my knowledge, sir, never. But why—”

“And just one other thing.” Fen’s smile robbed the interruption of all offence. “Mrs. Danvers can’t stand small children and dogs, I believe.”

“That’s so, sir. D’you remember the time you went there with your Alsatian, Doctor, and ’aving to leave ’im tied up outside? In’uman, I call it, but there’s no accounting for some people. O’ course, when old Ridgeon was alive, and before ’e sold ’is collection, it’d have been silly to ’ave dogs and kids rushing about knocking valuable pieces over and smashing ’em. I dessay if old Ridgeon ’ad put all ’is vases and so forth in that room ’e ’ad got ready for ‘em, it’d ’ave been all right then. But ’e never did—and anyway, ’e di’n’t like children nor animals, nor Mrs. Danvers don’t, neither.”

With this stately procession of negatives Fen seemed very content. “In that case,” he said, “if you could just tell me whether Mrs. Danvers has a car, and something about her shopping habits…” And presently he was able to finish his beer and depart, well primed.

There was a silence in the bar after he had left. Then the doctor said: “Impressive sort of bloke. in an odd way. Formidable, somehow. I wonder what he thought he was getting at?”

The landlord grunted. “For-mid-ab-le, yes,” he agreed, pronouncing the word with the precaution which its length required. “Not the sort o’ chap you‘d like to ’ave for an enemy, really. As to what ’e was after, I don’t know. ’E di’n’t look like police, not to me anyway. A bit cracked, per’aps.” Then, dismissing the topic: “Well, Doctor, ’ow about another of the same? Does you a bit of good, this weather, doe’n’t it—whatever anyone may say.”

But neither of them saw the object of these varied compliments when he returned next morning—for Fen’s second visit was not one which he wished to have generally known. For all his faults, he is not a particularly expert housebreaker; but on this occasion no great expertise was required, since Mrs. Danvers had gone to the shops leaving several ground-floor windows open; and so he was able to do his work, and get away after it. without leaving any traces behind him. He had with him only a thin-bladed knife, some sheets of paper, and some envelopes. But on arriving back safely in Oxford he supplemented these with various purchases at a chemist’s; and once home, he went straight to that room which, to the disgust and apprehension of his family, he uses as a makeshift laboratory, and locked himself in. For some little time he was happily occupied with filter paper, hydrogen peroxide, and a solution of benzidine sulphate in glacial acetic acid. Then he went to the telephone…

By a stroke of luck, it was Detective-Inspector Humbleby who was eventually sent down from Scotland Yard to handle the case.

“Oh yes, it’s blood all right,” said Humbleby. “And what’s more, it’s human blood. And what’s even better, it’s the same group and sub-groups as Betty Ridgeon’s (good thing she was a blood-donor, by the way: that’s saved us an exhumation). So the assumption is that she did in fact cut her throat in that little room, and not in the barn where she was found.”

“You got plenty of it, did you,” said Fen, “out of those crevices between the floor-boards?”

“More than enough, even after you’d been at it. The wretched girl must have bled pints… We managed to salvage some from the barn, too—cat’s blood, most of it, part of Mrs. Danvers’s ingenious scene-setting. Apparently it never occurred to anyone to test it, at the time. So far so good, then: Betty killed herself—”

“Or was killed.”

But Humbleby shook his head. “No proof of that. There were all the proper suicidal signs, apparently, the little tentative cuts before the final one and so forth… Oh yes, I grant you Mrs. Danvers had motive enough. Betty was intestate: if she died after her marriage, the estate she’d inherited from her father would go to Venables, and if she died before, it’d go to Mrs. Danvers—as in fact it did. But we can’t hope to prosecute for murder. In my view, the likeliest way for it to have happened is this: Mrs. Danvers, in mere panic at the thought of losing the chance of old Ridgeon’s money for good, shuts Betty up on the wedding morning, and invents this very plausible tale about the girl being scared and running away. Then—”

“But look here,” Fen interrupted fretfully, “what the devil can the Danvers woman have imagined she was going to do with the girl, after she’d locked her up? She’d either have to let her out eventually, and take the consequences, or else silence her for good. So that, surely, is reason enough in itself for supposing—“

“It isn’t, you know.” Humbleby was unexpectedly brusque. “In my view, Mrs. Danvers simply acted without thinking. What I will admit as likely is that she deliberately gave the girl a sharp kitchen knife to eat her food with; and that the girl, unhinged by her imprisonment and by whatever psychological warfare, on the subject of Venables and the marriage, Mrs. Danvers chose to subject her to, eventually used the knife on herself: it was only her fingerprints that were found on it, you know… Afterwards, Mrs. Danvers must have taken the body and the knife by night to that barn, in her car, and dumped it there with the cat’s blood.”

“Fingerprints,” Fen grumbled. “As if they proved anything. But if what you say is right, it was morally murder.”

“Oh, quite. Only unfortunately our law doesn’t punish people for moral murders.”

“Well then, at least there’s the imprisonment—assault, battery, unlawful restraint or whatever you call it.”

“My dear Gervase, we’ve no proof of that whatever. The only thing we can prove is that Betty Ridgeon died in that little room, and not in the barn. And you know what sort of a charge that leaves us with, to punish that abominable woman? Concealing a body in order to prevent an inquest. Seven days, if the magistrates are harsh. That’s a nice, fat, satisfying revenge for poor Betty, isn’t it?”

Fen contemplated him gloomily. “The father,” he ventured, “Ridgeon, I mean—”

“Died naturally. The post-mortem was done yesterday, immediately after the exhumation, and the Home Office isn’t a bit pleased at our having dug him up and not found anything, even though we warned them it was a gamble… Mrs. Danvers isn’t saying anything, by the way—anything at all, I mean. She refuses to make a statement or answer questions until she’s charged.”

For a long while after that both men were silent, angry at the law’s impotence. Then Humbleby said:

“The only thing I don’t see is what put you on to it in the first place, before you knew anything about Betty.” “Oh, that… I should like to think that it would help,” said Fen, “but I’m afraid it won’t. Here was this room, you see, with the windows blocked up, so that there was no question of burglars from outside getting through it into the rest of the house. And the house had never been let, and there had never been any small children or dogs in it, to be excluded from the room in case of damage they might do…

“So can you think of any reason—other than imprisonment, I mean—why there should have been a bolt on the outside, the hall side, of that door?”

Express Delivery

The lightning winked over Westminster, and office workers queueing for buses in Whitehall looked up apprehensively at the lowering grey of the late afternoon sky. The day had dawned hot, so that most were without their coats and many without umbrellas, and the odds were against their reaching their homes before the rain began to fall. Distantly, above the rumble of rush-hour traffic, the thunder spoke. And in a room high up in a corner of New Scotland Yard, Detective-Inspector Humbleby walked to a window, looking out and down.

“Here they come,” he said. “And whether they’re guilty or innocent the Lord alone knows.” His eye followed the two diminutive, foreshortened figures until they disappeared with their uniformed escort into the doorway below. “If they’re guilty, then their nerve must be colossal. But presumably nerve is one of the things experienced big-game hunters do acquire, so…” He completed the sentence with a shrug.

“They’re both that?” Gervase Fen, Professor of English Language and Literature in the University of Oxford, spoke out of a cloud of cigarette smoke. “The wife as well as the husband?”

“Oh yes, certainly—though I understand that the woman isn’t quite as good a shot as the man…” Rummaging, Humbleby had unearthed an old copy of the Tatler. “This.” he added as he handed it across, “will give you an idea of what they look like.”

They looked slightly like giraffes, Fen concluded as he studied the photograph in question; and you would have taken them for brother and sister rather than for husband and wife. The woman was older than he had expected—forty at least. Her lean and apparently sunburned countenance wore a hard unspontaneous smile showing large buck teeth, and her short hair had been permanently waved by no niggardly hand. Her long nose was almost duplicated by her husband’s, and the eyes of both of them were disagreeably small. It was he, however, who contrived to look the younger and the more human of the two; a large pipe projected manfully from his lips, and he was in the act of lighting it with a frown of preoccupation and a vesta match. The caption stated that also present (at a charity garden party) were Mr. and Mrs. Philip Bowyer, recently returned from a big-game expedition in Tanganyika; and “Mrs. Bowyer,” the Tatler hastened to explain, fearful of being thought to include mere polloi in its Society pages, “is the second daughter of Sir Egerton and the late Lady Joan Wilmot, of Wilmot Hall in Derbyshire.”

Fen was still digesting this information when a telephone rang on the desk, and Humbleby picked it up.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I saw them come in. Keep them downstairs for a few minutes, will you? I’ll let you know when I’m ready for them.” He replaced the instrument with a grimace. “Cowardice,” he observed. “Procrastination. But I thought that perhaps you wouldn’t mind hearing about it, and telling me what you think.”

Fen nodded. “By all means. Your story’s been rather scrappy so far, and I’m still not really clear about what happened.”

Lightning flickered again in the narrow room, and this time the thunder was close after it; the storm was coming in fast from the south-west, and at its coming the wind had risen. spattering a handful of rain-drops against the panes. Humbleby put his hand up to the sash, shut the window, returned to his desk. The heat had dishevelled his accustomed neatness, and he wiped sweat from his forehead as he slumped into the revolving chair.

“Here’s this girl, then,” he said. “Eve Crandall. Twenty-four, brunette, as pretty and graceful as you expect a mannequin to be, sharing a tiny flat in Nottingham Place with another girl. She has a rich old uncle, Maurice Crandall, who’s made her his heiress. She has a big-game-hunting cousin, Philip Bowyer, who’s at present downstairs with his wife Hilary. And she has a studious cousin, James Crandall, who teaches at an elementary school in Twelford.”

“James Crandall?” Fen was frowning. “In my undergraduate days, there was a James Crandall contemporary with me at Magdalen. A gawky, conscientious, desperately dull sort of man with thick-lensed glasses and a stammer. He was one of those unfortunate people who are obviously doomed to come to nothing however hard they try, so that an elementary school, twenty years later—”

“Yes, he could be the same one. I can vouch for the gawkiness and the glasses, though as to the rest,” said Humbleby a shade grimly, “I just wouldn’t know—not at first hand, anyway…

“Still, that’s by the way. The real point about all this set-up of uncle and cousins is this: that if Eve predeceases Maurice, the estate will be shared on Maurice’s death by Philip Bowyer and James Crandall; and that if both Eve and James Crandall predecease Maurice, the estate will go to Philip Bowyer intact. In other words, and not to be too delicate about it, schoolmaster James has a motive for killing Eve, and big-game hunter Bowyer (together with his wife) has a motive for killing both Eve and James. Clear so far?

“Now, Uncle Maurice has carcinoma of the lungs. He may live two months or two weeks or only two days, but in any event he’s dying, and like most of us he has no particular relish for dying among strangers in a nursing-home. So he asks Philip and Hilary Bowyer, the most well-to-do of his relatives, to take him in at their house near Henley.”

“A rather sanguine request.” Fen commented, “in view of the fact that he hadn’t willed them his money.”

“Oh, he’d left them something; the bulk of his fortune was to go to Eve, but he’d left the Bowyers something—and he was quite capable of canceling that arrangement if they refused to have him in their house. The Bowyers aren’t, it turns out, as well off as they look—not well enough off, in any case, to sniff at the chance of an odd thousand or two: no doubt big-game hunting is an expensive hobby. Anyway, they agreed to have him.

“They agreed to have him, and on the day he was due to arrive, rather more than a week ago, Eve traveled to Henley to see him settled in. That was to be expected; what was not to be expected was that James Crandall should forsake his little boys and turn up too. Turn up, however, he did—in the hope, maybe, of wheedling a rather larger bequest out of Maurice than the five hundred pounds he was destined for as things stood—and by the early afternoon they were all, excepting Maurice who was presumably still en route in an ambulance from the nursing-home, on the spot.

“The Bowyers’ house stands on high ground overlooking the town and the river, about a mile out. It’s biggish—ten-bedroom calibre—and like a lot of biggish houses these days it’s going to seed for lack of an adequate staff. But Philip and Hilary are the sort of people who prefer pretension to comfort, so there they stay—and it may be that they’re attracted by the fact that there’s quite a lot of land attached, with things to shoot on it: though rabbits, I take it, must be something of a come-down after lions. There’s just one servant, a wretched overworked little woman who makes one feel that there’s something to be said, after all, for the independent, take-it-on leave-it type that’s cropped up since the war. And it was this Mrs. Jordan who opened the door to Eve Crandall when at about three o’clock she arrived in a taxi from the station.

“By the time she got there, Hilary had left for the town to do some shopping, James had gone for a stroll, and Philip since the ambulance wasn’t expected until tea-time at the earliest was on the point of walking down to meet his wife and help her with her packages. So apart from the servant, Eve spent her first hour on the premises alone, and after she’d unpacked she wandered round the garden and eventually settled down in a deck-chair under a beech-tree, facing a coppice of beeches about three hundred yards away beyond the garden fence. She sat very still in the chair with her eyes closed, and anyone watching her must certainly have thought her asleep. But for some unexplained reason she was nervous, and her sideways jerk, when she heard the shot, was about as instantaneous as it’s possible for such a reflex to be. The bullet, from an express rifle, tore a track in her scalp and grazed her skull; another fraction of an inch and it would certainly have killed her. As it was, she was knocked unconscious, according to the doctors, the moment it touched her, and so failed to hear the second shot which immediately followed.

“Both shots, however, were heard by Mrs. Jordan and by the postman on his way up the drive, and these two witnesses converged in front of the house thirty seconds later to find Eve lying in a huddle beside the deck-chair and Hilary, white and shaken, emerging from the coppice opposite. Two minutes later Philip arrived. His wife had hurried home ahead of him, leaving him to collect and carry her parcels. And the situation was this, that James Crandall, shot through the head by Hilary, was lying in the coppice clutching the express rifle which had been fired at Eve.

“Well, the local police took over, and in due course I was called in to work with them, and we got statements from everyone concerned.” From a salmon-pink cardboard folder Humbleby extracted a sheaf of typescript. “Here, for instance, is Hilary’s, what’s relevant of it:

“‘I left my husband in the village because he had things to buy and I did not want to stay with him in case I should not be home in time to meet the ambulance. I came home across the fields, which is the shortest way, and entered the house by the back door. At this time I did not see Eve, since she was in the front garden. I was on my way up to my room to take off my hat when I saw through the open door of the gun-room that a Mannlicher express rifle was missing, and my suspicions were aroused because I knew that my husband did not have the gun, and no one else should have touched it. I thought of my cousin James Crandall, who had been asking questions about the guns. I put a small automatic pistol in my pocket and went out to look for him. I took the pistol because I was afraid James might intend some harm to Eve, whose death would benefit him. I had not liked his manner and was frightened of what he might do. I went round to the front garden where Eve was asleep in the deck-chair, and I thought I saw someone moving in the coppice. As quickly as possible I returned to the back garden and from there crossed into the field where the coppice is, entering the coppice from the side away from the garden. In the coppice I saw James with the Mannlicher pointed at Eve. I pointed my pistol at him and was about to speak when he fired and Eve fell. Immediately I fired at him. It was self-defence, I consider, because he would have killed me because I had seen him shoot Eve, but I did not intend to kill him. I am a fairly good shot with a rifle, but not with an automatic, which is a different kind of shooting.’”

Humbleby pushed the papers aside. “So much for that. Philip Bowyer heard the two shots, but by his own account he arrived too late to see anything. And that, really, is all there is to it. James Crandall’s prints were on the Mannlicher all right, and the position of his body was perfectly consistent with his having fired at Eve. On the other hand, the Bowyers undoubtedly had a very strong motive for wishing both James and Eve dead‘ and it’s easy to see how the thing could have been arranged. Thus: first they shoot off the rifle and hit Eve (I say ‘they’ because of course there’s no proof whatever that Philip didn’t catch up with his wife, in spite of their having left the village separately); next, James having previously been lured to the spot on any pretext you like to think of, they kill him with the automatic before he has time to as much as open his mouth; then Hilary rushes out of the coppice, leaving Philip behind to arrange the scene and put James’s fingerprints on the rifle; and finally, two minutes later, Philip appears with the astonished air of one who’s just arrived from the village with the weekly groceries… That, I repeat, is how it could have been done. But was it done like that? Or is Hilary’s story the simple truth?”

If these questions were other than rhetorical, Fen gave no sign of recognising the fact. “As a matter of interest,” he said, “how will Hilary’s story stand up in court?”

“Rather well, I should imagine. After all, James Crandall did have a very good motive for killing Eve, and as long as a jury can be induced to believe that he tried to do so, Hilary will never be censured for shooting him. Yes, she’ll get away with it all right. But I’m still not quite satisfied.”

“And Eve,” said Fen. “What became of her?”

“She was taken to hospital and is still there; but she’s pretty well recovered by now. I got her statement about what happened up to the moment the rifle bullet knocked her out, this morning…” Humbleby paused hopefully. “Well?” he said. “Any ideas?”

But for once Fen could only shake his head. The rain, falling heavily now, drummed against the window, and it had grown so dark that Humbleby leaned forward and switched on the desk-lamp. Lightning filled the room, and Humbleby had counted aloud up to four before the thunder came.

“The storm’s going away,” he said absently. “Well, well, I suppose there’s nothing for it except—” And then he checked himself, for Fen was staring at him with the eyes of a man half blinded by unaccustomed sunlight. “And what the devil,” said Humbleby, startled, “are you—”

He got no further. “The girl’s statement,” said Fen abruptly. “Is there a copy of it I could look at?”

“Eve’s statement, you mean.” Humbleby sought for it in the folder and passed it across the desk. “Yes, here it is. But why—”

“Here’s what I wanted.” Fen had turned at once to the final page. “Listen to this. ‘I remember moving to one side as I heard the shot; then straight away everything went black.’”

“Well? What about it?”

Fen tapped the papers with a long forefinger. “Do you consider this girl’s story trustworthy?”

“Yes, I most certainly do. Why shouldn’t it be? She didn’t kill James Crandall, if that’s what you’re getting at. Quite apart from the fact that she had no motive, it’d have been a physical impossibility.”

“All right, all right. But the point is, she’s not likely to have imagined any of this?”

“No. She’s not the sort.”

“Excellent. And now, two questions—no, sorry, three. First, is it certain that there weren’t more than two shots fired?”

“Absolutely. Philip and Hilary and the postman and Mrs. Jordan are all agreed about that.”

“Good. And, secondly, is it certain that the rifle bullet knocked Eve out the moment it touched her?”

“Good Lord. yes. It’d be like a superhuman blow with a tiny hammer. There are cases on record—”

“Bless you, Humbleby, how didactic you’re getting… And now here’s my final question: is it certain that Hilary’s shot killed James Crandall instantaneously?”

“My dear chap, his brain was pulped. Of course it’s certain.”

Fen relaxed with a little sigh. “Then providing Eve’s a good witness,” he murmured, “there’s a fair chance of getting Philip and Hilary Bowyer hanged. Their motive for wanting Eve and James dead is so overwhelming that they’ll be at a disadvantage from the start, and that one little scrap of evidence ought to tip the scales against them.”

Humbleby groaned. “God give me patience,” he said meekly. “What little scrap of evidence? You mean that in fact they did arrange it all the way I suggested?”

“Just that. I’ve no doubt they’d been contemplating something of the sort for some time past, but of course the scheme they eventually adopted, depending as it did on Eve’s settling in the deck-chair, must have been improvisation. One of them —I presume Hilary—must have fetched the guns from the house while the other got hold of James; and they could take James to the coppice on the pretext of showing him—well, perhaps rabbit-snares: that would account for their bringing a rifle, and James doesn’t sound to me the sort of person who’d know enough about guns to realise the incongruity of a Mannlicher express model in the context of rabbits. On the other hand—”

“These are happy speculations,” said Humbleby with restraint. “But I have the idea that a moment ago you mentioned evidence. If it wouldn’t put you to too much trouble—”

“Evidence!” said Fen affably. “Yes, I was almost forgetting that. The evidence of the storm—or to be more accurate, of the storm and yourself in combination. Like so many people, you counted out the interval between the lightning flash and the thunder. Why? Because light travels faster than sound, and by gauging the interval you can gauge how far away the storm is. But there are other things, as well as light, which travel faster than sound; and one of them, as you well know, is a. bullet fired from an express rifle.

“On a hot day, sound travels at about 1,150 feet per second; but on any sort of day, over a distance of three hundred yards, a bullet from a Mannlicher rifle travels nearly three times as fast, at an average speed of about 3,000 feet per second. Therefore the shot Eve heard was not the rifle-shot at all—she couldn’t have heard that, since the bullet grazed her, and knocked her out, before the report of the rifle could reach her ears. But she did hear a shot—and since there were admittedly only two shots fired, the report she heard must have been the report of the automatic which killed James. In other words, the report of the automatic preceded the report of the rifle; which means that James was dead before the rifle was fired; which means, in turn, that it certainly wasn’t he who fired it.”

“Well, I'm damned,” said Humbleby. “What it amounts to, then, is that the Bowyers fired their two shots in the wrong order. If Eve had been killed, as they intended, that wouldn’t have mattered. But as it is—” He reached for the telephone.

“Will you be able,” Fen asked, “to get a verdict of Guilty on that evidence?”

“I think so, yes. With any luck we shall hang them.” Humbleby put the receiver to his ear. “Charge Room, please… But it’s a pity they should have had all that trouble for nothing.”

“For nothing?”

“Yes. Mrs. Jordan took the telephone message. but there was no one about to pass it on to. It was from the nursing home. of course… You see, Maurice Crandall died—leaving all his money to Eve, whose will was decidedly not in the Bowyers’ favour—while they were actually carrying him out to the ambulance: that is, a comfortable two hours before the shooting started. Poor dears—(yes, Betts, you can send them up now)—they never had a chance.”

A Pot of Paint

The house itself was unremarkable—a small, trim brick villa built at a moderate cost some time between the wars. What was noticeable about it was its relative isolation: you expected a row of near-replicas on either side, but there were only fields, a coppice and a disused barn. “It couldn’t hardly have happened, else,” said Inspector Bledloe uninspiredly. “Not in broad daylight, anyhow.” He pushed the gate open, and with Fen at his heels entered the tidy front garden. “This,” he added laboriously, pointing, “is the scene of the occurrence.”

Fen examined the spot with the attentiveness which seemed to be required of him. There was a fence; there were bushes; there was a sundial in a circle of paving; there were the impedimenta with which the luckless housekeeper had been occupied when he was struck down—brushes, turpentine, and a messy tin, not large, of waterproof paint. But the assault and presumed robbery of two hours before had left no traces on the hard earth, not even blood. It was the flat of the spade that had knocked Church out, Fen supposed, and not the edge: lucky for him.

“You can see he didn’t have a chance to get much of his painting done.” Bledloe indicated the fence, on which the undried area was certainly diminutive, and the almost brim-full paint-tin; he nudged the tin illustratively with the toe of his boot, and a fragmentary green ellipse became visible on the paving-stone where it had rested. “So the way I work it out is this. We know it was twenty past three when he fetched the paint from the scullery—”

“That’s the evidence of the housekeeper, is it?”

“The evidence of the housekeeper and her lady-friend she was gossiping with. Which means—judging from the amount of painting he got done—that he must have been attacked round about half past. He wasn’t actually found, of course, till after four.”

Fen nodded. “Yes, I’d been meaning to ask you about that. Was it the housekeeper who found him?”

“No. It was a family party out for a walk.” Bledloe grimaced. “Five of them, including kids, so you needn’t waste your energy suspecting them. One of the kids saw his shoe sticking out from behind a bush, that’s the way it was. And then, as to the nephew—”

“Nephew?” said Fen rather testily. “This is the first time you’ve mentioned any nephew. Church’s nephew, you mean?”

“Yes. Didn’t I tell you about him? Merrick, his name is—George Merrick. He came here soon after lunch to visit Church, and—”

“And left when?”

“Ah. That’s one of the things I’m not sure of. You see, the housekeeper and her lady-friend, they were out in the back garden till a quarter past three, so they didn’t hear him go. The only thing was, they naturally assumed he’d left because of Church fetching that paint from the scullery at twenty past, just after they’d come back in to make a cup of tea.”

“Yes, I see. The two women didn’t hear Church talking to anyone, then?”

“No. They heard the front door open and shut when he came out here with his paint, and that was all.”

“Is there any reason for suspecting Merrick?”

Bledloe hesitated. “Not what you’d call a reason,” he said cautiously. “But just the same, I wouldn’t put it past him: he’s the sort of relative a man’s better without, if you ask me—a waster, and worse. But if it was him, Church is going to be badly upset about it. He’s the son of a sister of Church’s who died years ago, and I’ve heard that when she was dying she asked Church to look after him after she was gone. Which he’s done, and not got much thanks for it, either… Well. If there’s nothing more you want to look at here, we’ll go and find out if he’s fit to talk yet.”

Fen assented. “And it’ll be helpful,” he observed as they went on up the path towards the front door, “to know if he really has been robbed.”

“Not much doubt about that.” Bledloe spoke with a certain gloomy relish. “Most weekends he brings diamonds and so forth back here from his shop in London, so as to look them over… Risky, of course, but he’s pretty careful with them—carries them on him during the daytime, and the house is locked up nice and tight at nights. That front door, now—that’s got three bolts on it. and a chain, and two Yale locks, and he won’t even have those catches on the locks that hold them open, because he says they get fixed like that and forgotten… Well, you see what I mean: he does take precautions.”

This information Fen was able to confirm when the door in question was opened to them by the constable on duty. Behind the constable, in a state of considerable agitation, was a thin, worn-looking elderly woman—Mrs. Ryan, the housekeeper; and at the foot of the staircase lurked a stoutish lady, also elderly but with an air of settled misanthropy, who was presumably Mrs. Ryan’s so far unlabelled visitor. The hall in which they stood appeared at a first inspection to be commonplace enough, but Fen none the less prowled conscientiously about it while Bledloe conferred with the constable, and this thoroughness was presently rewarded by an interesting, though admittedly negative, discovery. Interrupting the constable, who had at last succeeded, with great prolixity, in conveying the news that Church was better and that the doctor had authorised a brief interview, Fen picked up a newspaper which was lying on the table beside the front door, handed it to Bledloe, and said:

“Tell me if you see anything unusual about that.”

The interruption took Bledloe sufficiently unawares to make him obey Fen’s request before enquiring its motive. “No, I don’t,” he answered, examining the paper somewhat bemusedly. “Except that it’s several days old, there’s nothing unusual about it that I can make out. Why?”

Fen turned to Mrs. Ryan. “Was Mr. Church keeping this paper for any particular reason?” he asked.

“Oh no, sir.” Mrs. Ryan shook her head vigorously. “It was me as left it there, when I was laying the fires this morning.”

“I see. And it was just this one paper you left? No others?”

“No, sir. Just the one. But—”

‘Thank you,” said Fen; and glanced round him. “The house is very beautifully looked after, Mrs. Ryan.”

“It ’as to be,” Mrs. Ryan replied with some candour. “Very ’ouse-proud, the master is. More like a woman, as far as that goes.”

“With a man fussy like that,” said the stoutish lady with sudden malevolence, making her sole recorded independent contribution to the matter, “I’m sorry for his wife, and I don’t care who hears me say it.” Upon which doubtfully relevant pronouncement, Bledloe, who by now was eyeing Fen with considerable mistrust, decided that the time had come to make a move upstairs.

They found the injured man propped up against pillows with his head in a bandage. He was perhaps fifty—small, slender, large-eyed and at the moment unnaturally pale. “He’s had a lucky escape,” said the doctor, in the slightly petulant tones of one to whom an interesting fatality has been denied. “Very lucky indeed. No concussion and no amnesia. But you’re not to tire him out, mind. Ten minutes—no more. I’ll wait downstairs.” He took himself off.

Though Church was obviously still suffering a good deal of pain, he was game enough, and quite lucid. His story did not, however, incriminate his nephew George Merrick, who had left, he said, at about ten or a quarter past three. Questioned to the reason for the visit, Church freely admitted that Merrick had been trying to borrow money. “Not for the first time, either,” he added wryly. “George suffered from the delusion that jewellers are necessarily rich, because of the value of their stock. As if that had anything to do with it! Anyway, this time I couldn’t afford to help him. For his mother’s sake I’d have liked to, but it was out of the question. I offered him a smaller amount than what he was asking for, but that didn’t suit his lordship, and so off he went. Then after he’d left I fetched my paint and trotted out to the garden to get on with painting the fence, and I hadn’t done more than a couple of inches before—”

“One moment, Mr. Church,” Fen interposed; at which Bledloe, balked of his climax, momentarily glowered at him. “You say you fetched your paint. But was the other stuff—brushes and so forth—already out there?”

Church was surprised. “Yes,” he said. “I took it out there immediately after lunch, and would have fetched the paint at the same time if George’s arrival hadn’t interrupted me. But I don’t quite see—”

“And you have in fact been robbed?”

“Certainly I have.” Church frowned. “Do you mean to say you didn’t—No, sorry: I’m being stupid. Of course you couldn’t possibly know. Anyway, I was robbed. At the time I was hit I had a bag of diamonds worth, oh, close on two thousand in my waistcoat pocket. And they aren’t there now.”

Bledloe cleared his throat. “But the point is, sir, did you see who hit you?”

“For a split second, yes. I heard him moving behind me, and swung round just in time to get a glimpse of him.”

“It wasn’t your nephew, then?”

“George?” Church snorted contemptuously. “Good God, no! I don’t hold much stock in George’s morals, but he hasn’t got the guts to go round knocking people out. No, this man—”

There followed an indeterminate description which patently conveyed as little to Bledloe as it did to Fen. “And that’s all you can tell us, sir?” said Bledloe, disappointed.

“I’m afraid so. It’s vague, I know, but you must remember that I didn’t have a chance to get a proper look.”

“Tell me, Mr. Church”—Fen had crossed the room and was gazing rather vacantly out of the window—“are you going to claim insurance on the stolen jewels?”

Church stared at him. “Look here,” he said after a moment’s pause, “who the devil are you? I don’t remember that I’ve ever—”

“A colleague, sir,” said Bledloe smoothly. “And if you wouldn’t mind answering his question…”

“Well, damn it, of course I’m going to claim. I can’t afford to drop a small fortune like that.” Church’s expression hardened. “If you’re implying that I hid the diamonds, and then knocked myself cut, so as to—”

“No.” said Fen with emphasis. “The one discrepancy in the evidence won’t fit that explanation, at all. But there’s another explanation it certainly will fit, so I think you’d better tell us the truth. Being attacked and robbed is (up to a point) your own business, and if only that had been involved, I’d have kept quiet. But claiming insurance money and at the same time lying in such a way as to hinder recovery of the jewels is another matter. We know it was Merrick who attacked you—attacked you in the virtual certainty that you’d do what you have done—namely, cover up for him for his mother’s sake and so give him time to leave the country. And these things being thus—”

“Oh, so I’m lying, am I?” Church regarded Fen with curiosity. but not with any special perturbation. “And just what makes you imagine that?”

“I’ll tell you,” said Fen. And did.

There was a silence when he had finished; then Church nodded abruptly. “Well, I’ve done what I could,” he said. “And you’re quite right, of course. George didn’t go at ten past three—in spite of the fact that I’d told him I couldn’t help him. He followed me into the garden, still arguing, and then when my back was turned—” Church shrugged. “Well, you know the rest.”

Later, over beer in the parlour of The Three Tuns, Bledloe sighed dismissively and said: “So that’s settled. But I still don’t understand how you could be sure.”

Fen grunted. “Someone must have opened the front door for Church when he went out to paint his fence,” he explained: “and since he didn’t mention that important fact, the someone was fairly obviously Merrick. The two women heard the door being opened, remember—so it wasn’t open already. Church couldn’t have opened it himself for the reason, you understand, that he was carrying that pot of paint. And he didn’t put the pot of paint down in order to open the door, because the old newspaper—the obvious and only place for a house—proud man to deposit the messy paint-tin—wasn’t marked at all.”

“But look here, he only needed one hand to carry the paint. So why couldn’t he have opened the door with the other?”

Fen chuckled and drank deep. “When there were two knobs to turn—and neither could be fixed? Well, I suppose he just might have used his teeth or his toes, but really, Bledloe…”

The Quick Brown Fox

The port had been round several times, and Wakefield’s temperamental dogmatism was by now somewhat inflamed by it.

“Just the same,” he said, irrupting on a discussion whose origin and purpose no one could clearly remember, “detective stories are anti-social, and no amount of sophistries can disguise the fact. It’s quite impossible to suppose that criminals don’t collect useful information from them, fantastic and far-fetched though they usually are. No one, I think”—here he glared belligerently at his fellow-guests—“will attempt to contest that. And furthermore—”

“I contest it,” said Gervase Fen; and Wakefield groaned dismally. “For all the use criminals make of them, the members of the Detection Club might as well be a chorus of voices crying in the wilderness. Look at the papers and observe what, in spite of detective fiction, criminals actually do. They buy arsenic at the chemists, signing their own names in the Poisons Book, and then put stupendous quantities of it in their victims’ tea. They leave their fingerprints on every possible object in the corpse’s vicinity. They invariably forget that burnt paper, if it isn’t reduced to dust, can be reconstituted and read. They spend, with reckless abandon, stolen bank-notes whose serial numbers they must know are in the possession of the police…

“No, on the whole I don’t think criminals get much help from detective stories. And if by any chance they are addicts, that fact by itself is almost certain to scupper them, since their training in imaginary crime—which as a rule is extremely complicated—tends to make them over-elaborate in the contriving of their own actual misdeeds; and that, of course, means that they’re easy game… For instance, there was the Munsey case.”

“It has always been my opinion,” said Wakefield to the ceiling, “that after-dinner conversation should be general rather than anecdotal. Moreover—”

“I’d known all the family slightly,” Fen went on, unperturbed, “over quite a long period of years; but I suppose that it was George Munsey, the head of the house, whom I knew best. Chance threw us together in Milan in 1928, when I was lecturing at the University there and he was engaged in some prolonged financial transaction to do with motor-cars. And although his household, which I met later, proved to be a pleasant one, I never got to know any of its members well enough to be able to regard them as individuals—as other, I mean, than the natural appendages of George. George himself was a little, round, chuckling man who’d made money on the Stock Exchange; but I’ve always felt that he must have made it more or less accidentally, because he had none of that appalling narrowness which you normally get in people who are engaged in breeding money from money. On the contrary, in fact: George was a man with hobbies—collecting ghost stories; running a toy theatre which he made and wrote the plays for, himself; bird-watching; illuminated manuscripts; and heaven knows what not else—and that fact made him livelier and more intelligent and more human even than the average non-business-man—a novelist, for instance—whose interests are necessarily fairly wide. He was thirty-seven when I first encountered him; so that in 1947, when the events I’m speaking of occurred, he was getting on for sixty—though his cherubic looks belied that, and his baldness was the only sign of aging in him that I could see.

“I’d traveled up from Oxford to London to deal with some odd scraps of business and to get myself a new portable typewriter (eventually it was a second-hand one I bought, in Holborn). On the following morning I had to attend a Ministry of Education conference, and I was proposing to stay overnight at the Athenaeum. At lunch-time, however, I happened on George Munsey in the Authors’ Club bar, and when he heard how I was placed he suggested I should stay with him instead; it was several years since we’d met, and he said the family would never forgive him if he allowed me to go back to Oxford without paying them a visit. I warned him I’d have to do some work while I was in the house—there was a long memorandum to be typed out for presentation at the M. of E. conference—but he was quite agreeable to that; and so at about half past two in the afternoon I duly appeared on his doorstep, typewriter and all.

“The Munseys’ house was in St. John’s Wood: a tall, narrow, grey-stone place with a long, narrow, rather sooty strip of garden behind it. They don’t live there now; with a single exception, I’ve no idea of the whereabouts of any of them these days, and there are good reasons why I shouldn’t enquire. But in 1947 they were old-established residents who’d survived two wars and were well-known and popular in the neighbourhood. And I rang their bell with the vaguely guilty, vaguely nostalgic feeling one has about people from whom, for no adequate reasons, one has allowed oneself to drift apart.

“I rang their bell; and the door was opened to me by Judith, the younger daughter.

“George Munsey’s two daughters were both good-looking; but if I’d had to choose between them, I think I should have chosen Judith rather than Eleanor. Eleanor had the more dizzying figure of the two, but that, of course, is only a relative judgment: Judith’s figure, though without the heroic mouth-drying splendour of her sister’s, was still capable of making the average girl look as if she’d been hammered out of a milk-churn, and in addition to that her features were more beautiful than Eleanor’s. I’m sorry to be talking about nothing but externals; the trouble is that I didn’t then, and don’t now, really know much about the two girls’ characters—other, I mean, than such obvious facts as that Judith was noisy while Eleanor was quiet, and that Judith was energetic while Eleanor was lazy. There were three years between them—Judith, at twenty-two, being the younger; Judith was fair while Eleanor was dark; and Eleanor dressed better than Judith. None of which is very vivid, I’m afraid—but then, healthy, attractive young women aren’t very vivid, except in the flesh.

“‘Aha!’ said Judith from the doorway. ‘The Great Man-hunter in person, how nice to see you again, I didn’t have so much embonpoint when you were here last do you think it’s improved me, oh look let me take your things, I’m sorry everyone’s making that God-awful row but they’re playing Racing Demon, how long are you going to stay, come on in.’

“So I went on in.

“I ought to explain, at this point, that the Munseys were a well-to-do family, since Mrs. Munsey and Judith and Eleanor had all inherited substantially from Mrs. Munsey’s father, who had owned flour-mills. They kept no servants, however, preferring on the whole, to lead a mildly Bohemian existence, looking after themselves. For some reason, they had never quite grasped the practical advantages, in a household, of the principle known to economists as Division of Labour, and when anything had to be done they tended all of them to try and do it simultaneously, frequently with disastrous results. But the atmosphere of their house was very friendly, and the shouts of irate laughter from the drawing-room were so characteristic of it that for a moment time was telescoped, and it seemed a matter of hours rather than of years since I’d been there last.

“‘Me,’ said Judith, ‘I’m Doing Something In The Kitchen and you’d better not ask what it is because you’ll probably have to eat it later on, and now just dump your bags, and that other thing oh it’s a typewriter isn’t it, here and come and meet everyone, we’re stuck with Aunt Ellen these days did you know, I really can’t bear the woman’—this with a sudden access of genuine feeling which rather startled me—‘but the others don‘t seem to mind her so it’s hopeless to try and turn her out, if she’d only accept money instead of battening on us here I shouldn’t mind so much, but look at her now, she’s upstairs slaving away at a lot of rubbishy embroidery which she can’t do for nuts in the hope that someone’ll pay her a few shillings for it, and God knows I’d be willing to finance her myself if only she’d go away, you remember her don’t you?’

“I did remember her. George Munsey’s sister Ellen was one of those desperately willing, desperately inefficient middle-aged women whom one associates with the Women’s Voluntary Services and an atmosphere of utter confusion: short-sighted eyes, wispy greying hair, and a walk like a cripple in a hurry. Her poverty, which was genuine enough, could, as Judith remarked, have been remedied easily out of the family resources if only she had not been obstinate about receiving direct help; as it was, she lodged with them free of charge, a situation which all of them except Judith endured very patiently; and Judith’s dislike of her hadn’t, I think, any rational basis, but was more in the nature of a violent temperamental aversion such as does sometimes crop up between dissimilar personalities. Aunt Ellen didn’t reciprocate it, by the way: if anything, she was rather fonder of Judith than of the others.

“I didn’t, of course, take all of this in straight away; most of it emerged during conversation over the cards—and it was to the cards that Judith conducted me as soon as I’d deposited my things. There were four of them playing: George Munsey, his wife Dorothy, his eldest daughter Eleanor, and a young man who was a stranger to me, but who I gathered was occupying the second spare-bedroom. He had the sort of looks which people describe as ‘over-handsome’; his thick, curly, jet-black hair was heavily oiled; he chewed gum; and he was manifestly vain—though the vanity was too naive to give serious offence, and it was relieved on occasion by a queer, earnest, dog-like, rather touching humility. Physically he was splendid. ‘This is Philip,’ said Judith, introducing him. ‘In full, Philip Odell. His specialty’—here a glint of malice appeared in Judith’s eye—‘his specialty is changing horses, or perhaps I should say mares, in mid-stream.’

“‘Judith,’ said Mrs. Munsey reproachfully. ‘The image is hardly—hardly—’ But reproof tailed away into benevolence. Dorothy Munsey, vague, stately and benign, who had acquired something of a reputation as a poetess in the earlier twenties and lost it again, conclusively, in the later, was temperamentally incapable of rebuking anyone, and it was a wonder her daughters had grown up as unspoiled as they were. ‘What Judith means, Professor Fen—’

“‘Is that I,’ said Odell, ‘have not been behaving like the perfect gentleman.’ His hearty tones didn’t quite conceal his uneasiness, I thought. ‘The fact is, sir,’ he went on, that for a time I was engaged to Judith. But of course, she couldn’t stand me’—he showed very white teeth in a not altogether convincing laugh—‘not for long, anyway. So that when Eleanor decided she could stand me, I got engaged to Eleanor. And there, as they say, the matter rests.’

“‘He felt,’ Eleanor put in, ‘that it ought to be kept in the family. And since apart from Aunt Ellen I was the only other unattached female to be had—’

“‘Now, darling, you know very well I adore—’ Odell checked himself abruptly. ‘Hell,’ he said. ‘Why wasn’t I brought up properly?’ He grimaced. ‘It’s the gigolo in me,’ he added ruefully, ‘that makes me want to gush in public. I’m sorry.’

“And somehow I liked him for that.

“I learned later that he was the owner of a chain of milk bars in the West End; and although clearly he was passionately interested in them, he took the Munseys’ gentle mockery on the subject in really very good part. I also gathered, indirectly, that in spite of what he’d said it was he rather than Judith who had been primarily responsible for the breaking-off of the first engagement. However, neither he nor Judith nor Eleanor seemed much discomfited by the exchange, and until the next day I wasn’t in the least aware of anything’s being amiss in the house at all.

“In the meantime, we played cards.

“l myself ought to have been working; but I nave a fondness for Racing Demon, so when Judith had gone back to the kitchen I joined the game, and the five of us played uninterruptedly for the next two hours—George Munsey with gusts of helpless laughter at his own inefficacy, Eleanor lazily, Odell with great seriousness, and Mrs. Munsey with her usual stately vagueness; so that it was always surprising when, as generally happened, Mrs. Munsey came out on top. At half past four, on the Munseys’ departing in a body to make tea, I retrieved my new typewriter and settled down in the library to work. And there I stayed—recruited by food and drink which the family brought in to me at irregular intervals—until nearly midnight. I hadn’t any occasion to leave the library, so I’ve no idea what the others did with themselves; and I don’t remember that anything more eventful happened to me, during the remainder of the day, than having to put a new ribbon into my machine. By the time I’d finished my job they’d all gone to bed, and I wasn’t at all sorry to follow them.

“But next morning. Odell being not yet up and the others unitedly engaged in cooking breakfast, Judith took me aside and confided to me certain matters which I must confess disturbed me a good deal.”

Fen leaned back, staring rather blankly at the roses in the centre of the dinner-table. “We went down the garden,” he said, “so as to keep out of people’s way. There was a ramshackle tool-shed, I remember. and a few spiky cabbages, and dust on all the grass; and we could hear the clatter of plates from the kitchen. Judith, in slacks and a sweater, was unusually subdued: her conversation had some full stops in it for once. And the reason soon appeared.

“‘I—I don’t know whether I ought to be telling you this,’ she said. ‘But it’s so like a Providence, you actually being here… Look, you’re not officially connected with the police, are you?’

“‘No.’

“‘I mean, anything I told you, you wouldn’t have to pass it on to them?’

“‘No, of course not,‘ I said uneasily. ‘But—’

“‘It’s about Philip, you see. Philip Odell. I’ve sometimes wondered if that’s his real—Well, but never mind that. The point is. you see, that last night something happened.’

“‘What sort of thing?’

“‘It—I say, you will keep this to yourself, won’t you? It’s something rather horrible, you see, and I— Oh, damn, I’m havering—Well, anyway, here goes.’

“And then it all came pouring out. Summarised—for conciseness’ and Wakefield’s sake—what it amounted to was this:

“Judith had heard me come up to bed at midnight, and having finished her book, and being still sleepless, had set of, as soon as the closing of the bedroom door signalled me out of the way (since in spite of her talk she was quite a modest child, and apparently had very little on), to fetch a magazine from the hall. Arriving at the head of the stairs, however, she had looked down and seen Odell slip quietly out of the drawing-room—where they’d left him chewing gum and playing dice with himself—and into the library; from which shortly afterwards she heard the rattle of my typewriter, which I’d left down there. In the normal way she wouldn’t have thought much about this, but Odell’s manner had struck her as distinctly furtive, and she was curious to know what he was up to. She hid in the hall cloaks closet, therefore, until after about ten minutes Odell emerged, still stealthily, and crept up to his room. Then she went into the library to see if she could find any indication of what he’d been doing there. Well, she did in fact find something, and in due course showed it to me, and—”

Fen broke off rather abruptly; and when after a moment he resumed, it was to say:

“You know that when you’re using thin typing-paper you generally put a backing-sheet behind the sheet you’re actually typing on?”

Haldane nodded. “Yes, I know.”

“That’s what Odell had done. And he’d left the backing-sheet in the waste-paper basket. And you could read what he’d typed by the indentations on it. And what he’d typed was not in the least pleasant.”

Fen paused to refill his glass. “As I recall it,” he continued after drinking, “the message ran like this: ‘You remember what happened at Manchester on December 4th, 1945? So do I. But a thousand pounds might persuade me, I think, to forget about it. I’ll write again and tell you where to leave the money. It will be the worse for you if you try to find out who I am.’”

Haldane nodded again. “Blackmail,” he murmured thoughtfully.

“Quite so. Odell was the sort of person who might well be unscrupulous enough to try that particular game; and the Munseys—Aunt Ellen apart—were a good rich mine for that kind of mining: I don’t mean in the sense of their having dubious pasts, of course, but rather in the sense that each one of them was well off independently of the others. It all seemed plain enough—and yet somehow it was a bit too plain; and I got the impression that even Judith, distressed as she was, had inexplicit doubts about it. Besides, there was an odd thing about the message on that tell-tale backing-sheet, and that was its heading.”

“Its heading?”

“Yes. At the top of it there were four additional words typed: ‘The—quick—brown—fox.’”

There was an instant’s bemused silence. Someone said: “What on earth… ?”

“Yes. A little mystifying, I agree. But anyway, there it was—and there too, more importantly, was the impress of the blackmail note. And if in fact, despite Judith’s and my misty doubts, Odell was blackmailing someone in the house, then the situation required very delicate handling indeed. Judith wanted my advice, naturally enough” (“Tcha,” said Wakefield) “as to what she ought to do. But I never had a chance to give it her, because it was at that point in our conversation that we heard Eleanor’s scream. Eleanor had gone to call her fiancé down to his breakfast, and had found him murdered in his bed.

“Well, the police came, and the Ministry awaited me vainly, and as soon as the routine of the investigation was over, Superintendent Yolland took me into consultation. I was glad to get away from the family, I can tell you. Odell’s death had plainly strengthened the hypothesis that he was blackmailing one of them—that he had slipped the blackmail note under a certain door on his way to bed, I mean, and that the occupant of that room had guessed the blackmailer’s identity and decided to kill rather than pay; and I was finding it difficult to look any of the Munseys in the eye. Eleanor was in a state of hysterics; George Munsey was as fathomlessly miserable as only a normally jovial man can be; his wife’s usual vagueness had grown monstrously, so that she scarcely seemed to be present in the spirit at all; and Aunt Ellen’s well-meant efforts to be helpful were really, in the circumstances, quite exceptionally trying. Judith stayed outwardly more or less normal; but although she said nothing further to me about the subject of our conversation in the garden, I could see that in spite of her apparent self-possession she was horribly afraid.

“Yolland proved to be a Devonshire man transplanted to London: slow, thorough and by no means unintelligent. But the facts he had to offer weren’t at all enlightening. Odell had been killed, while sound asleep, by a single blow on the forehead. The weapon was a heavy brass poker from the drawing-room, and no great strength would have been needed to wield it effectively. Death had occurred between five and six a.m. and had been instantaneous. There were no fingerprints, and no helpful traces of any kind.

“Naturally, I felt bound to tell the Superintendent what Judith had told me; and by way of response, he produced for my inspection two sheets of typing-paper which he’d found hidden away in one of Odell’s drawers. The first one I looked at bore, in faint and spidery typescript, the blackmail message I’ve already quoted—but not the odd superscription. The second sheet was identical with the first in every possible respect, except that it was addressed, like the backing-sheet Judith had found, to The Quick Brown Fox. And that being so—”

“That being so,” Wakefield interrupted, “you didn’t, I trust, have to do any very strenuous thinking in order to solve the mystery.”

Wakefield had been unnaturally silent during Fen’s narrative. And it now became immediately clear to everyone at the table that this silence had been due to some massive feat of cerebration on whose results he was proposing to lecture them. “You think the solution obvious?” said Fen mildly.

“I think it child’s play,” said Wakefield with much complacency. “With what, after all, does one associate the words ‘the quick brown fox’? One associates them, of course, with the sentence ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,’ which has the peculiarity of containing all the letters of the alphabet. To cut a long story short, Odell wasn’t writing a blackmail note: he was copying one, in order to find if it had been typed on that particular typewriter.

“In other words, Odell was not a blackmailer: he was a blackmailer’s victim.

“He started to type out the Quick Brown Fox sentence, as a means of comparison, and then decided it would be simpler just to copy the complete message. And the original, together with his copy, was naturally enough found in his drawer. I take it that he wasn’t the man to accede meekly to blackmail, and that he’d made up his mind to find out who was threatening him; at which the blackmailer took fright and brained him while he slept… Any objections so far?”

But there were no objections—not even from Fen.

“As to who the blackmailer was,” Wakefield went on, “That’s easy, too. And for this reason:

“As I understand it, both messages were in fact typed on Professor Fen’s machine.” Fen assented. “Just so. Well then, between the time Professor Fen entered the house and the time Odell made his copy, what opportunity was there for anyone to use his typewriter? One, and one only—the period during which Professor Fen was playing Racing Demon in the drawing-room.

“And—well, we know there were only two people who weren’t uninterruptedly engaged in that game: to wit, Judith, who was in the kitchen, and Aunt Ellen, who was upstairs. Judith we can eliminate on the simple grounds that if she’d been the blackmailer she’d scarcely have told Professor Fen what she did tell him. And that leaves Aunt Ellen… Did you ever find out anything about Odell and Manchester and that date?”

“Yes,” said Fen. “Odell—and that wasn’t his real name—had deserted from the Army on that date and in that place. And Aunt Ellen, who’d been in the A.T.S., had had to do, at one time, with the dossiers relating to deserters. In one of those dossiers she’d seen a photograph of Odell, and consequently she recognised him the first time he entered the house.”

“She didn’t attempt to deny having recognised him?”

“Oh no. She couldn’t very well deny it, because—having discreetly checked back to make sure she hadn’t made a mistake—she’d confided the facts to Judith after Odell became engaged to Eleanor; and Judith had advised her to do and say nothing, on the grounds that Odell had a first-rate fighting record, and that his desertion, at the end of the war, was therefore a technical rather than a moral offence.”

There was a hush while they assimilated this. Then: “Well, well… It really does seem,” said someone unkindly, “as if Wakefield has made the grade for once.”

“The problem was elementary,” said Wakefield smugly—forgetting, in the utterance of this rash echo, the awful dooms which the gods have decreed for those whose self-confidence is premature. “I’m not asserting that on the case I’ve outlined you could convict Aunt Ellen of the murder—even though it’s pretty certain she did it. But she was arrested, I take it, for the blackmail?”

“Oh dear, no. You see, Wakefield,” said Fen with aggravating tolerance, “your answer to the problem, though immensely cogent and logical, has one grave defect: it doesn’t happen to be the right answer.”

Wakefield was much offended. “If it isn’t the right answer,” he returned sourly, “that’s only because you’ve not given me all the relevant facts.”

“Oh, but I have. You remember my telling you about changing the ribbon in my typewriter?”

“Yes.”

“And you remember my saying that one of the blackmail messages was in ‘a faint and spidery typescript’?”

“So it would be, if it was typed in the afternoon, before you changed the ribbon.”

“But you remember also, no doubt, my saying that apart from the words ‘the quick brown fox’, the second sheet was identical with the first in every possible respect?”

For once Wakefield was bereft of speech; he subsided, breathing heavily through his nose.

“Therefore,” said Fen, “both messages were in faint, spidery typescript. Therefore they were both typed while I was playing Racing Demon. And therefore Judith’s story about Odell and the typewriter and the blackmail was a deliberate pack of lies from beginning to end.”

Haldane was groping for comprehension. “You mean the two messages were planted in Odell’s drawer?”

“Certainly. At the time of the murder.”

“So that in fact Odell never either sent or received a blackmail note at all?”

“Of course not. Neither he, nor anyone else.” “But the business about his being a deserter…”

“That was genuine enough,” said Fen. “But its only function in the affair was to provide Judith with raw material for her frame-up. The frame-up might well have come off, too, but for the chance of my changing the typewriter-ribbon. But for that, there’d have been no proof, other than Aunt Ellen’s word, that the blackmail attempt hadn’t in fact occurred. If Judith had had the sense to type the second copy of the message, the ‘quick brown fox’ one, after I’d gone to bed… However, she didn’t.”

Fen twisted his glass between his fingers; drained it, and reached for the cigarette-box. “And I liked her,” he murmured, as he struck a match. “That was the trouble. Until I knew the truth, I liked her very much. I liked all of them; But—“

“But you told the police about changing the ribbon.”

Fen nodded briefly.

“Yes, I told them; you see. I’d liked Odell, too…

“Under examination, Judith broke down and confessed to the murder. She was frightened—l mentioned that. didn’t I? She‘d bitten off very much more than she could chew. And since if she’d pleaded Not Guilty at her trial it would have come down to her word against mine, I was heartily relieved when she caved in. Her acting had certainly deceived me; and in a court-room tussle between us she might easily have got the best of it. A plea of Guilty to a murder charge is very rare, of course, but it had the great advantage, in Judith’s case, of obscuring the cold-blooded attempt to incriminate Aunt Ellen, and so making a recommendation to mercy possible. So that in the end she wasn’t in fact executed; the death sentence was commuted to imprisonment for life.”

“And her motive for the murder?” Haldane asked.

“Jealousy. She hated Odell for jilting her in favour of her sister; and if she hadn’t planted the messages in Odell’s room, and spun me her fairy-tales in a sophisticated, double-bluff attempt to incriminate Aunt Ellen, she might have got away with the killing.

“But the trouble was, she was a reader of detective stories; and what she dreamed up—in the hope that everyone would make the deductions Wakefield has just been making, and probe no further—was in consequence a detective-story device… I hope no one will imagine I’m mocking at detective-story devices. In point of fact, I dote on them. But so long as criminals take them for a model, the police are going to have a very easy time; because, like the wretched Judith, your genuinely murderous addict will dig his cunning and complicated pits for the investigators, only, in the upshot, to fall head first into one of them himself.”

Black For a Funeral

At ten o’clock on the evening of July 24th, 1951, Police-Constable Albert Tyler set out on his bicycle from the little police-station in the village of Low Norton. He would be back from his night-beat, and reporting to his Sergeant, at twelve-thirty prompt—for both of them took a pride in punctuality. In the meantime, he had much ground to cover. Cycling steadily past the cottage where his wife was already retiring to bed, past the Norton Arms—whose only guest at the moment, he had heard, was an Oxford Professor seeking peace and quiet in order to finish a book—and beyond that past the diminutive church and the old almshouses, P.C. Tyler struck out on the road eastwards and was presently swallowed up by the night.

Thus began the curious affair of the disappearing car, the black neck-tie, and the abortive burglary.

Incidents on P.C. Tyler’s extensive but not populous rural beat had hitherto belonged infallibly to one or other of three categories: (a) lost wayfarers; (b) poachers; and (c) burning ricks. Sergeant Beeton was consequently a good deal startled when at a minute to midnight Tyler rang him up to report murder. “Chap bashed on the head with a stone,” gabbled Tyler, whose misfortune it was to always sound much more agitated than he actually felt. “Middle-aged. Reddish hair. Raincoat and black tie. It’s at ‘The Moorings‘—you know. Might be that chap Derringer, who rented the place, but I’ve never seen him close to, so I can’t be sure. He’s lying in the road, just outside the gate… Dead? Lord, yes: he’s dead all right.”

Our police forces err, if anything, on the side of economy: despite the extent of the district under his charge, Beeton had never been granted the use of a car. As a result of this, it was more than half an hour before, winded from cycling at top speed up a succession of hills, he arrived at the scene of the crime; and it was an hour more before the doctor came.

“Yes, it is Derringer,” said Beeton, as he contemplated the huddled form in the shadow of the gate-post. “Poor devil…” He stooped lower. “But it’s queer about the clothes, Bert, isn’t it? He can’t have been to a funeral, can he?”

For the one really puzzling thing about the body was that along with the brown sports suit it wore a neat, plain black tie.

“Nor,” said Sergeant Beeton somewhat pedantically, in the police-station next afternoon, “is that the only strange feature of the affair… But look here, sir”—he recollected himself suddenly—“it’s not right I should be bothering you about it, and—”

“No bother at all.” Gervase Fen, Professor of English Language and Literature in the University of Oxford, regarded the Sergeant out of mild blue eyes. “All I’m afraid of is that I may be wasting your time. But Humbleby did tell me to look you up while I was here, so you must forgive me if I’m a nuisance… You worked with Humbleby for a time, didn’t you?”

“I did indeed, sir. But I found C.I.D. stuff wasn’t my line, so I got a transfer back into the Uniform Branch and they sent me here. Suits me a long sight better, really… As to you keeping me from my work, all I’m doing now is just marking time till the County C.I.D. man gets here. It’d be nice to be able to hand him the murderer all nicely tied up and ticketed, but the fact is, I’m downright dizzy with it all. Nothing makes sense.”

The police-station in which they sat resembled, in all outward essentials, a small private villa. As well as being a police-station, it was Beeton’s home. And its personnel consisted of Beeton and Tyler exclusively—for in spite of the overcrowding of our islands, there are still many country areas where the houses are few and far between, areas where the police-constable’s beat is a dozen times the length of a city beat, where ten or fifteen square miles support as few as a couple of hundred souls, and where the tiny branch railway-lines are for ever in peril of being pronounced redundant and closed down. Such areas—of which Low Norton was one—do not require anything very elaborate in the way of policing and their police headquarters can afford to be homely as well as diminutive. It is true that Beeton, being an earnest man, not to say conscientious, had striven to give his office an official look; but in this he had not been completely successful. Thus, there were a few portentous books on the mantelpiece—Police Regulations, Kenny’s Criminal Law, Stone’s Justices’ Manual; but their impressiveness was marred by a piece of knitting which had been put down on top of them. And there was a safe containing heaven knows what explosive secrets, which also contained, however, several bottles of stout and a broken toy aeroplane, belonging to Beeton’s small son, which Beeton had promised several weeks ago to repair and which had been swept hurriedly out of sight, and hence forgotten, on the occasion of an unexpected visit from the Chief Constable. All this was comfortable and pleasing. And Fen, settled in a wicker chair which creaked every time he shifted his weight, looked on it with an approving eye.

Outside the open window, the village drowsed under a hot sun. Beeton’s coat was unfastened; and from the room adjoining, where Constable Tyler (whose gruesome experience had left him in a state of very ill-suppressed emotion) was supposed to be writing a report, came the sound of liquid being poured from a bottle into a glass. This roused Beeton, and he resorted to the safe on behalf of his visitor and himself. And having seen to that small matter: “Yes,” he said, “it’s a funny business altogether. I don’t know if it’d be of any interest to you to…”

“It would,” Fen assured him. “Where crimes are concerned, I’m the one and only original Elephant’s Child.”

“Ele—Ah, I get you. ’Satiable curiosity.” Beeton grinned. “Well then, where do you want me to begin?”

“The first thing is, who was Derringer? I mean, what did he do?”

“He wrote adventure stories for boys.” Beeton leaned back with an air of luxury, his heavy bulk overflowing the swivel-chair; he was the archetypal countryman, slow but intuitive, blank of eye yet with a vein of simple cunning such as all those who trap or shoot animals tend in time to acquire. “Adventure stories,” he reiterated, “for boys—though they, I take it, wouldn’t be about the sort of adventures he was partial to himself.”

“Oh,” said Fen. “Oh.”

And Beeton nodded slyly. “Yes, he was a funny bloke: mad about the women, and not too scrupulous as to whether they were married or not. But in spite of that, you couldn’t help liking him—same way you can like a cat, provided you keep your pet goldfish out of its reach.”

And Fen remembered Beeton’s own wife, whom he had glimpsed on arrival: brunette and by no means unattractive. “Someone,” he pointed out, “doesn’t seem to have been quite so tolerant.”

“Ah. You’re right there, sir. It’s the husbands of women there’s been scandal about that we’ll have to be keeping an eye on… But now look; here’s what happened:

“Derringer hadn’t been renting ‘The Moorings’ long: not more than six months, anyway. And he was planning on starting for America some time today, with the idea of living there permanently. Well, now: last evening—according to Mrs. Jerrold, Bert Tyler’s ma-in-law that is, who was Derringer’s housekeeper—Derringer was due to go to a posh dinner in London. There was some sort of a quarrel about it, and at the last moment he decided not to go to the dinner. But he did go to London, by the late afternoon train. How he spent his time there, we haven’t found out yet. But he came back on the train that gets to Windover Halt at 11.10, and at that time he was wearing a green tie; the porter who took his ticket is ready to swear to that. So the conclusion you’re forced to, really, is that for some unknown reason the murderer took the green tie off, and put the black one on, after he’d done the murder… Perhaps,” said Beeton without much conviction, “as a sort of gruesome joke: black for a funeral, you know.”

Fen nodded. “Go on.”

“Derringer gets back from London at 11.10, then. And he stays at Windover Halt for twenty minutes or more, talking to the porter, who he’s pally with. All right. But now here’s the second queer thing. Bert Tyler found the body at five to twelve; and the trouble about that is that Windover Halt’s much too far from ‘The Moorings’ for Derringer to have walked the distance, or even cycled it, in twenty minutes or so. He was on foot when he left the Halt—the porter’s sure of that. So what it must mean is that somewhere on the way he was picked up by a car… Only trouble is, we can’t find the car.”

“Can’t find it?” Fen echoed rather blankly.

Beeton reached for a map. “See here, sir. Here’s ‘The Moorings’. Well now, there’s only two roads away from it a car could possibly take. One direction, all the road does is just peter out at the edge of an old quarry. And in the other direction—quite apart from the fact that any car’d have had to pass Bert, and no car did—there’s this.” Beeton’s stubby forefinger hovered again above the map. “Level-crossing,” he explained. “It’s the sort that’s only opened to road traffic on demand; and there are good locks on the gates, so you can’t get them open on your own… Anyway, the gate-keeper’s willing to take his oath that not a single car or motor-bike (apart from the doctor’s) went through all last night, after a quarter to midnight. Nor none’s been through today, either.”

“What about before a quarter to midnight?”

“Ah. That’s a bit different. Old Willis—that’s the gatekeeper—he left the crossing open between 11.15 and 11.45, while he was away from his cottage. Shouldn’t have done, strictly speaking, but there’s no trains go through between 11.5—that’s the one Derringer came home on—and 1.30 in the morning.”

“M’m. I see. To sum up, then: a car traveling from Windover Halt to ‘The Moorings’ would have had to go via that level-crossing. It could have got through all right, up to 11.45. But it wouldn’t have had time to get back.”

“That’s it, sir, exactly. And I know what you’re going to say now—that the car must still be somewhere in that area between the level-crossing and the old quarry beyond ‘The Moorings’. Only it isn’t. We’ve searched everywhere—woods, sandpits, barns, sheds, and of course the quarry itself. And there’s not a trace of it.”

Fen examined the map again; then: “I think,” he said slowly, “that I can probably tell you what became of the car. But before I do that, let’s hear the rest of it.”

“Well, sir, there’s only one other thing—which doesn’t make sense any more than the black tie or the disappearance of the car—and that’s the burglary at ‘The Moorings’. Window smashed, and someone had definitely climbed in through it. Bert Tyler discovered that when he entered the house-using the door-key from Derringer’s pocket, of course—to phone me after finding the body. But the thing is, that as far as we can make out, there was nothing at all taken.”

With that, they both fell silent. A hay-cart rumbled past outside, and a fly sang on the pane. Though the sun was now westering, it seemed hotter than ever—and with a muttered apology, Fen rose, while Beeton swallowed the last of his stout, and set the door ajar. “If there is any through-draught,” he said, “we’d better have it.” And Beeton nodded. “A few questions, then, if you can bear them.” Beeton nodded again. “First, if Derringer had walked home from Windover Halt, starting at 11.10 when his train got in, what time would he have arrived?”

“Well, he was quite a fast walker. Around midnight, I’d say. But—”

“Secondly, where was the doctor between 11.30 and 12.30? The doctor who examined the body, I mean.”

Beeton smiled. “I was wondering if you’d think of that. It’s no go, though. He was at a confinement—definitely.”

“Thirdly, then, just how reliable is the evidence of the porter at Windover Halt and the evidence of the gate-keeper at the level-crossing?”

“Well, sir, as far as the porter’s concerned, his evidence is confirmed—confirmed by two chaps who were going home late and actually saw Derringer leaving the Halt on foot, at 11.30. As to old Willis, I admit we’ve only got his word for it. But he’s not daft, not by any manner of means, and I’m willing to take my oath he’s telling the truth.”

“Then here’s my last question: what time was Tyler due to report back here at the end of his beat?”

“12.30, sir. And starting from ‘The Moorings’ at 12.0, he’d have had to pedal pretty hard to—” Beeton broke off. His eyes widened. “Good Lord, sir! You can’t be thinking that Bert—”

“Look,” said Fen. “If you haven’t found a car, then there just wasn’t a car. Which means that Derringer, on foot, must have reached home about 12.20. Which in turn means that Tyler’s telephone call to you was a simple lie.”

“But why, sir? Why?”

“Because Derringer was delayed, that’s why. The murder had to take place last night, because Derringer was to have left for America today. On the other hand, if Tyler hung about waiting for him, he’d have to explain to you why he was so late back from his beat—and although there were plenty of excuses he could have made, he didn’t want there to be anything out-of-the-way about his doings on a night when a murder had been committed. Well, he knew you’d need a good half-hour to get to ‘The Moorings’. So he took a risk, announcing the murder as a fait accompli before the victim had even arrived… ‘Black tie’, he told you; which at once suggests evening dress. Tyler thought that Derringer had gone to London for a posh dinner—he didn’t know that that plan had been altered. So when, having killed Derringer, he found that his victim wasn’t wearing a black tie, he was obliged to do something about it, in order that your suspicions shouldn’t be aroused by a discrepancy between his statement on the telephone and the clothing you saw when you reached the scene.”

“Then the burglary—”

“Wasn’t a burglary at all. In order to telephone you from ‘The Moorings’, Tyler was obliged to break into the house since Derringer hadn’t yet turned up with the keys… Is Tyler married?”

“Yes. To a pretty, flighty girl, a good bit younger than him; so—My God, what’s that?”

A pistol-shot had sounded in the next room; and now the smell of cordite was in their nostrils. Cursing, Beeton leaped to his feet.

“Blasted door half open,” he said incoherently. “If I’d had any idea where this was leading—” Then he turned savagely to Fen. “For God’s sake, man, why couldn’t you keep your voice down? Why—” He checked himself. As comprehension came, his anger faded as quickly as it had arisen. “Oh, I see. Yes. You—”

“I get on well with policemen,” said Fen. “That’s all. And if it can be avoided, I don’t like seeing their good name dragged through the mud; for the reason, you understand, that the good name is genuine and deserved. So what could be more natural than that a constable, who sometimes has to handle guns, should be involved in an accident?” He got up and moved towards the door. “Come on, Beeton,” he said. “Let’s make sure that it was an accident.”

The Name on the Window

Boxing Day; snow and ice; road-surface like glass under a cold fog. In the North Oxford home of the University Professor of English Language and Literature, at three minutes past seven in the evening, the front door bell rang.

The current festive season had taken heavy toll of Fen’s vitality and patience; it had culminated, that afternoon, in a quite exceptionally tiring children’s party, amid whose ruins he was now recouping his energies with whisky; and on hearing the bell he jumped inevitably to the conclusion that one of the infants he had bundled out of the door half an hour previously had left behind it some such prized inessential as a false nose or a bachelor’s button, and was returning to claim this. In the event, however, and despite his premonitory groans, this assumption proved to be incorrect: his doorstep was occupied, he found, not by a dyspeptic, over-heated child with an unintelligible query, but by a neatly-dressed greying man with a red tip to his nose and woebegone eyes.

“I can’t get back,” said this apparition. “I really can’t get back to London tonight. the roads are impassable and such trains as there are are running hours late. Could you possibly let me have a bed?”

The tones were familiar; and by peering more attentively at the face, Fen discovered that that was familiar too. “My dear Humbleby,” he said cordially, “do come in. Of course you can have a bed. What are you doing in this part of the world anyway?”

“Ghost-hunting.” Detective-Inspector Humbleby, of New Scotland Yard, divested himself of his coat and hat and hung them on a hook inside the door. “Seasonable but not convenient.” He stamped his feet violently, thereby producing, to judge from his expression, sensations of pain rather than of warmth; and stared about him. “Children,” he said with sudden gloom. “I dare say that one of the Oxford hotels—”

“The children have left,” Fen explained, “and will not be coming back.”

“Ah. Well, in that case—” And Humbleby followed Fen into the drawing-room, where a huge fire was burning and a slightly lop-sided Christmas tree, stripped of its treasures, wore tinsel and miniature witch-balls and a superincumbent fairy with a raffish air. “My word, this is better. Is there a drink, perhaps? I could do with some advice, too.”

Fen was already pouring whisky. “Sit down and be comfortable,” he said. “As a matter of interest, do you believe in ghosts?”

“The evidence for poltergeists,” Humbleby answered warily as he stretched out his hands to the blaze, “seems very convincing to me… The Wesleys, you know, and Harry Price and so forth. Other sorts of ghosts I’m not so sure about—though I must say I hope they exist if only for the purpose of taking that silly grin off the faces of the newspapers.” He picked up a battered tin locomotive from beside him on the sofa. “I say, Gervase, I was under the impression that your own children were all too old for—”

“Orphans,” said Fen, jabbing at the siphon. “I’ve been entertaining orphans from a nearby Home… But as regards this particular ghost you were speaking of—”

“Oh, I don’t believe in that.” Humbleby shook his head decisively. “There’s an obscure sort of nastiness about the place it’s supposed to haunt—like a very sickly cake gone stale—and a man was killed there once, by a girl he was trying to persuade to certain practices she didn’t relish at all; but the haunting part of it is just silly gossip for the benefit of visitors.” Humbleby accepted the glass which Fen held out to him and brooded over it for a moment before drinking. “…Damned Chief-Inspector,” he muttered aggrievedly, “dragging me away from my Christmas lunch because—”

“Really, Humbleby”—Fen was severe—”you’re very inconsequent this evening. Where is this place you’re speaking of?”

“Rydalls.”

“Rydalls?”

“Rydalls,” said Humbleby. “The residence,” he elucidated laboriously, “of Sir Charles Moberley, the architect. It’s about fifteen miles from here, Abingdon way.”

“Yes, I remember it now. Restoration.”

“I dare say. Old, in any case. And there are big grounds, with an eighteenth-century pavilion about a quarter of a mile away from the house, in a park. That’s where it happened—the murder, I mean.”

“The murder of the man who tried to induce the girl—’

“No, no. I mean, yes. That murder took place in the pavilion, certainly. But then, so did the other one—the one the day before yesterday, that’s to say.”

Fen stared. “Sir Charles Moberley has been murdered?”

“No, no, no. Not him. Another architect, another knight—Sir Lucas Welsh. There’s been quite a large house-party going on at Rydalls, with Sir Lucas Welsh and his daughter Jane among the guests, and it was on Christmas Eve, you see, that Sir Lucas decided he wanted to investigate the ghost.”

“This is all clear enough to you, no doubt, but—”

“Do listen… It seems that Sir Lucas is—was—credulous about ghosts, so on Christmas Eve he arranged to keep vigil alone in the Pavilion and—”

“And was murdered, and you don’t know who did it.”

“Oh yes, I do. Sir Lucas didn’t die at once, you see: he had time to write up his murderer’s name in the grime of the window-pane, and the gentleman concerned, a young German named Otto Mörike, is now safely under arrest. But what I can’t decide is how Mörike got in and out of the pavilion.”

“A locked-room mystery.”

“In the wider sense, just that. The pavilion wasn’t actually locked, but—”

Fen collected his glass from the mantelpiece where he had put it on rising to answer the doorbell. “Begin,” he suggested, “at the beginning.”

“Very well.” Settling back in the sofa, Humbleby sipped his whisky gratefully. “Here, then, is this Christmas house-party at Rydalls. Host, Sir Charles Moberley, the eminent architect… Have you ever come across him?”

Fen shook his head.

‘A big man, going grey: in some ways rather boisterous and silly, like a rugger-playing medical student in a state of arrested development. Unmarried; private means-quite a lot of them, to judge from the sort of hospitality he dispenses; did the Wandsworth power-station and Beckford Abbey, among other things; athlete; a simple mind, and generous, I should judge, in that jealous sort of way which resents generosity in anyone else. Probably tricky, in some respects—he’s not the kind of person I could ever feel completely at ease with.

“A celebrity, however: unquestionably that. And Sir Lucas Welsh, whom among others he invited to this house-party, was equally a celebrity, in the same line of business. Never having seen Sir Lucas alive, I can’t say much about his character, but—”

‘I think,’ Fen interrupted, “that I may have met him once, at the time when he was designing the fourth quadrangle for my college. A small dark person, wasn't he?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“And with a tendency to be nervy and obstinate.”

“The obstinacy there’s evidence for, certainly. And I gather he was also a good deal of a faddist—Yogi, I mean, and the Baconian hypothesis, and a lot of other intellectual—um—detritus of the same dull, obvious kind: that’s where the ghost-vigil comes in. Jane, his daughter and heiress (and Sir Lucas was if anything even better off than Sir Charles) is a pretty little thing of eighteen of whom all you can really say is that she’s a pretty little thing of eighteen. Then there’s Mörike, the man I’ve arrested: thin, thirtyish, a Luftwaffe pilot during the war, and at present an architecture-student working over here under one of these exchange schemes the Universities are always getting up—which accounts for Sir Charles’s knowing him and inviting him to the house-party. Last of the important guests—important from the point of view of the crime, that is—is a C.I.D. man (not Metropolitan, Sussex County) called James Wilburn. He’s important because the evidence he provides is quite certainly reliable—there has to be a point d’appui in these affairs, and Wilburn is it, so you mustn’t exhaust yourself doubting his word about anything.”

“I won’t,” Fen promised. “I’ll believe him.”

“Good. At dinner on Christmas Eve, then, the conversation turns to the subject of the Rydalls ghost—and I’ve ascertained that the person responsible for bringing this topic up was Otto Mörike. So far, so good: the Rydalls ghost was a bait Sir Lucas could be relied on to rise to, and rise to it he did, arranging eventually with his rather reluctant host to go down to the pavilion after dinner and keep watch there for an hour or two. The time arriving, he was accompanied to the place of trial by Sir Charles and by Wilburn—neither of whom actually entered the pavilion. Wilburn strolled back to the house alone, leaving Sir Charles and Sir Lucas talking shop. And presently Sir Charles, having seen Sir Lucas go into the pavilion, retraced his steps likewise, arriving at the house just in time to hear the alarm-bell ringing.”

“Alarm-bell?”

“People had watched for the ghost before, and there was a bell installed in the pavilion for them to ring if for any reason they wanted help… This bell sounded, then, at shortly after ten o’clock, and a whole party of people, including Sir Charles, Jane Welsh and Wilburn, hastened to the rescue.

“Now, you must know that this pavilion is quite small. There’s just one circular room to it, having two windows (both very firmly nailed up); and you get into this room by way of as longish, narrow hall projecting from the perimeter of the circle, the one and only door being at the outer end of this hall.”

“Like a key-hole,” Fen suggested. “If you saw it from the air it’d look like a key-hole, I mean; with the round part representing the room, and the part where the wards go in representing the entrance-hall, and the door right down at the bottom.”

“That’s it. It stands in a clearing among the trees of the park, on a very slight rise—inferior Palladian in style, with pilasters or whatever you call them: something like a decayed miniature classical temple. No one’s bothered about it for decades, not since that earlier murder put an end to its career as a love-nest for a succession of squires. What is it Eliot says?—something about lusts and dead limbs? Well, anyway, that’s the impression it gives. A house is all right, because a house has been used for other things as well—eating and reading and births and deaths and so on. But this place has been used for one purpose and one purpose only, and that’s exactly what it feels like…

“There’s no furniture in it, by the way. And until the wretched Sir Lucas unlocked its door, no one had been inside it for two or three years.

“To get back to the story, then.

“The weather was all right: you’ll remember that on Christmas Eve none of this snow and foulness had started. And the rescue-party, so to call them, seem to have regarded their expedition as more or less in the nature of a jaunt; I mean that they weren’t seriously alarmed at the ringing of the bell, with the exception of Jane, who knew her father well enough to suspect that he’d never have interrupted his vigil, almost as soon as it had begun, for the sake of a rather futile practical joke; and even she seems to have allowed herself to be half convinced by the reassurances of the others. On arrival at the pavilion, they found the door shut but not locked; and when they opened it, and shone their torches inside, they saw a single set of footprints in the dust on the hall floor, leading to the entrance to the circular room. Acting on instinct or training or both, Wilburn kept his crowd clear of these footprints; and so it was that they came—joined now by Otto Mörike, who according to his subsequent statement had been taking a solitary stroll in the grounds—to the scene of the crime.

“Fireplace, two windows, a crudely painted ceiling-crude in subject as well as in execution—a canvas chair, an unlit electric torch, festoons of cobwebs, and on everything except the chair and the torch dust, layers of it. Sir Lucas was lying on the floor beneath one of the windows, quite close to the bell-push; and an old stiletto, later discovered to have been stolen from the house, had been stuck into him under the left shoulder-blade (no damning fingerprints on it, by the way; or on anything else in the vicinity). Sir Lucas was still alive, and just conscious. Wilburn bent over him to ask who was responsible. And a queer smile crossed Sir Lucas’s face, and he was just able to whisper”—here Humbleby produced and consulted a notebook—“to whisper: ‘Wrote it—on the window. Very first thing I did when I came round. Did it before I rang the bell or anything else, in case you didn’t get here in time—in time for me to tell you who—’

“His voice faded out then. But with a final effort he moved his head, glanced up at the window, nodded and smiled again. That was how he died.

“They had all heard him, and they all looked. There was bright moonlight outside, and the letters traced on the grimy pane stood out clearly.

“Otto.

“Well, it seems that then Otto started edging away, and Sir Charles made a grab at him, and they fought, and presently a wallop from Sir Charles sent Otto clean through the tell-tale window, and Sir Charles scrambled after him, and they went on fighting outside, trampling the glass to smithereens, until Wilburn and company joined in and put a stop to it. Incidentally, Wilburn says that Otto’s going through the window looked contrived to him—a deliberate attempt to destroy evidence; though of course, so many people saw the name written there that it remains perfectly good evidence in spite of having been destroyed.”

“Motive?” Fen asked.

“Good enough. Jane Welsh was wanting to marry Otto—had fallen quite dementedly in love with him, in fact—and her father didn’t approve; partly on the grounds that Otto was a German, and partly because he thought the boy wanted Jane’s prospective inheritance rather than Jane herself. To clinch it, moreover, there was the fact that Otto had been in the Luftwaffe and that Jane’s mother had been killed in 1941 in an air-raid. Jane being only eighteen years of age—and the attitude of magistrates, if appealed to, being in the circumstances at best problematical—it looked as if that was one marriage that would definitely not take place. So the killing of Sir Lucas had, from Otto’s point of view, a double advantage: it made Jane rich, and it removed the obstacle to the marriage.”

“Jane’s prospective guardian not being against it.”

“Jane’s prospective guardian being an uncle she could twist round her little finger… But here’s the point.” Humbleby leaned forward earnestly. “Here is the point: windows nailed shut; no secret doors-emphatically none; chimney too narrow to admit a baby; and in the dust on the hall floor, only one set of footprints, made unquestionably by Sir Lucas himself… If you’re thinking that Otto might have walked in and out on top of those prints, as that page-boy we’ve been hearing so much about recently did with King Wenceslaus, then you’re wrong. Otto’s feet are much too large, for one thing, and the prints hadn’t been disturbed, for another: so that’s out. But then, how on earth did he manage it? There’s no furniture in that hall whatever—nothing he could have used to crawl across, nothing he could have swung himself from. It’s a long, bare box, that’s all; and the distance between the door and the circular room (in which room, by the way, the dust on the floor was all messed up by the rescue-party) is miles too far for anyone to have jumped it. Nor was the weapon the sort of thing that could possibly have been fired from a bow or an air-gun or a blowpipe, or any nonsense of that sort; nor was it sharp enough or heavy enough to have penetrated as deeply as it did if it had been thrown. So ghosts apart, what is the explanation? Can you see one?”

Fen made no immediate reply. Throughout this narrative he had remained standing, draped against the mantelpiece. Now he moved, collecting Humbleby’s empty glass and his own and carrying them across to the decanter; and it was only after they were refilled that he spoke.

“Supposing,” he said, “that Otto had crossed the entrance hall on a tricycle—”

“A tricycle!” Humbleby was dumbfounded. “A—?”

“A tricycle, yes,” Fen reiterated firmly. “Or supposing, again, that he had laid down a carpet, unrolling it in front of him as he entered and rolling it up again after him when he left…”

“But the dust!” wailed Humbleby. “Have I really not made it clear to you that apart from the footprints the dust on the floor was undisturbed? Tricycles, carpets…”

“A section of the floor at least,” Fen pointed out, “was trampled on by the rescue-party.”

“Oh, that… Yes, but that didn’t happen until after Wilburn had examined the floor.”

“Examined it in detail?”

“Yes. At that stage they still didn’t realise anything was wrong; and when Wilburn led them in they were giggling behind him while he did a sort of parody of detective work, throwing the beam of his torch over every inch of the floor in a pretended search for bloodstains.”

“It doesn’t,” said Fen puritanically, “sound the sort of performance which would amuse me very much.”

“I dare say not. Anyway, the point about it is that Wilburn’s ready to swear that the dust was completely unmarked and undisturbed except for the footprints… I wish he weren’t ready to swear that,” Humbleby added dolefully, “because that’s what’s holding me up. But I can’t budge him.”

“You oughtn’t to be trying to budge him, anyway,’ retorted Fen, whose mood of self-righteousness appeared to be growing on him. “It’s unethical. What about blood, now?”

“Blood? There was practically none of it. You don’t get any bleeding to speak of from that narrow type of wound.”

“Ah. Just one more question, then; and if the answer’s what I expect, I shall be able to tell you how Otto worked it.”

“If by any remote chance,” said Humbleby suspiciously, “it’s stilts that you have in mind—”

“My dear Humbleby, don’t be so puerile.”

Humbleby contained himself with an effort. “Well?” he said.

“The name on the window.” Fen spoke almost dreamily. “Was it written in capital letters?”

Whatever Humbleby had been expecting, it was clearly not this. “Yes,” he answered. “But—”

“Wait.” Fen drained his glass. “Wait while I make a telephone call.”

He went. All at once restless, Humbleby got to his feet, lit a cheroot, and began pacing the room. Presently he discovered an elastic-driven aeroplane abandoned behind an armchair, wound it up and launched it. It caught Fen a glancing blow on the temple as he reappeared in the doorway, and thence flew on into the hall, where it struck and smashed a vase. “Oh, I say, I’m sorry,” said Humbleby feebly. Fen said nothing.

But after about half a minute, when he had simmered down a bit: “Locked rooms,” he remarked sourly. “Locked rooms… I’ll tell you what it is, Humbleby: you’ve been reading too much fiction; you’ve got locked rooms on the brain.”

Humbleby thought it politic to be meek. “Yes,” he said.

“Gideon Fell once gave a very brilliant lecture on The Locked-Room Problem, in connection with that business of the Hollow Man; but there was one category he didn’t include.”

“Well?”

Fen massaged his forehead resentfully. “He didn’t include the locked-room mystery which isn’t a locked-room mystery: like this one. So that the explanation of how Otto got into and out of that circular room is simple: he didn’t get into or out of it at all.”