The Best of Roald Dahl

by Roald Dahl

She might just as well have hit him with a steel club.

  She stepped back a pace, waiting, and the funny thing was that he remained standing there for at least four or five seconds, gently swaying. Then he crashed to the carpet.

  The violence of the crash, the noise, the small table overturning, helped bring her out of the shock. She came out slowly, feeling cold and surprised, and she stood for a while blinking at the body, still holding the ridiculous piece of meat tight with both hands.

  All right, she told herself. So I've killed him.

  It was extraordinary, now, how clear her mind became all of a sudden. She began thinking very fast. As the wife of a detective, she knew quite well what the penalty would be. That was fine. It made no difference to her. In fact, it would be a relief. On the other hand, what about the child? What were the laws about murderers with unborn children? Did they kill them both - mother and child? Or did they wait until the tenth month? What did they do?

  Mary Maloney didn't know. And she certainly wasn't prepared to take a chance.

  She carried the meat into the kitchen, placed it in a pan, turned the oven on high, and shoved it inside. Then she washed her hands and ran upstairs to the bedroom. She sat down before the mirror, tidied her hair, touched up her lips and face. She tried a smile. It came out rather peculiar. She tried again.

  'Hullo Sam,' she said brightly, aloud.

  The voice sounded peculiar too.

  'I want some potatoes please, Sam. Yes, and I think a can of peas.'

  That was better. Both the smile and the voice were coming out better now. She rehearsed it several times more. Then she ran downstairs, took her coat, went out the back door, down the garden, into the street.

  It wasn't six o'clock yet and the lights were still on in the grocery shop.

  'Hullo Sam,' she said brightly, smiling at the man behind the counter.

  'Why, good evening, Mrs Maloney. How're you?'

  'I want some potatoes please, Sam. Yes, and I think a can of peas.'

  The man turned and reached up behind him on the shelf for the peas.

  'Patrick's decided he's tired and doesn't want to eat out tonight,' she told him. 'We usually go out Thursdays, you know, and now he's caught me without any vegetables in the house.'

  'Then how about meat, Mrs Maloney?'

  'No, I've got meat, thanks. I got a nice leg of lamb from the freezer.'

  'Oh.'

  'I don't much like cooking it frozen, Sam, but I'm taking a chance on it this time. You think it'll be all right?'

  'Personally,' the grocer said. 'I don't believe it makes any difference. You want these Idaho potatoes?'

  'Oh yes, that'll be fine. Two of those.'

  'Anything else?' The grocer cocked his head on one side, looking at her pleasantly. 'How about afterwards? What you going to give him for afterwards?'

  'Well - what would you suggest, Sam?'

  The man glanced around his shop. 'How about a nice big slice of cheesecake? I know he likes that.'

  'Perfect,' she said. 'He loves it.'

  And when it was all wrapped and she had paid, she put on her brightest smile and said, 'Thank you, Sam. Good night.'

  'Good night, Mrs Maloney. And thank you.'

  And now, she told herself as she hurried back, all she was doing now, she was returning home to her husband and he was waiting for his supper; and she must cook it good, and make it as tasty as possible because the poor man was tired; and if, when she entered the house, she happened to find anything unusual, or tragic, or terrible, then naturally it would be a shock and she'd become frantic with grief and horror. Mind you, she wasn't expecting to find anything. She was just going home with the vegetables. Mrs Patrick Maloney going home with the vegetables on Thursday evening to cook supper for her husband.

  That's the way, she told herself. Do everything right and natural. Keep things absolutely natural and there'll be no need for any acting at all.

  Therefore, when she entered the kitchen by the back door, she was humming a little tune to herself and smiling.

  'Patrick!' she called. 'How are you, darling?'

  She put the parcel down on the table and went through into the living room; and when she saw him lying there on the floor with his legs doubled up and one arm twisted back underneath his body, it really was rather a shock. All the old love and longing for him welled up inside her, and she ran over to him, knelt down beside him, and began to cry her heart out. It was easy. No acting was necessary.

  A few minutes later she got up and went to the phone. She knew the number of the police station, and when the man at the other end answered, she cried to him, 'Quick! Come quick! Patrick's dead!'

  'Who's speaking?'

  'Mrs Maloney. Mrs Patrick Maloney.'

  'You mean Patrick Maloney's dead?'

  'I think so,' she sobbed. 'He's lying on the floor and I think he's dead.'

  'Be right over,' the man said.

  The car came very quickly, and when she opened the front door, two policemen walked in. She knew them both - she knew nearly all the men at that precinct - and she fell right into Jack Noonan's arms, weeping hysterically. He put her gently in a chair, then went over to join the other one, who was called O'Malley, kneeling by the body.

  'Is he dead?' she cried.

  'I'm afraid he is. What happened?'

  Briefly, she told her story about going out to the grocer's and coming back to find him on the floor. While she was talking, crying and talking, Noonan discovered a small patch of congealed blood on the dead man's head. He showed it to O'Malley who got up at once and hurried to the phone.

  Soon, other men began to come into the house. First a doctor, then two detectives, one of whom she knew by name. Later, a police photographer arrived and took pictures, and a man who knew about fingerprints. There was a great deal of whispering and muttering beside the corpse, and the detectives kept asking her a lot of questions. But they always treated her kindly. She told her story again, this time right from the beginning, when Patrick had come in, and she was sewing, and he was tired, so tired he hadn't wanted to go out for supper. She told how she'd put the meat in the oven - 'it's there now, cooking' - and how she'd slipped out to the grocer's for vegetables, and come back to find him lying on the floor.

  'Which grocer?' one of the detectives asked.

  She told him, and he turned and whispered something to the other detective who immediately went outside into the street.

  In fifteen minutes he was back with a page of notes, and there was more whispering, and through her sobbing she heard a few of the whispered phrases - ' ... acted quite normal ... very cheerful ... wanted to give him a good supper ... peas ... cheesecake ... impossible that she ...'

  After a while, the photographer and the doctor departed and two other men came in and took the corpse away on a stretcher. Then the fingerprint man went away. The two detectives remained, and so did the two policemen. They were exceptionally nice to her and Jack Noonan asked if she wouldn't rather go somewhere else, to her sister's house perhaps, or to his own wife who would take care of her and put her up for the night.

  No, she said. She didn't feel she could move even a yard at the moment. Would they mind awfully if she stayed just where she was until she felt better. She didn't feel too good at the moment, she really didn't.

  Then hadn't she better lie down on the bed? Jack Noonan asked.

  No, she said. She'd like to stay right where she was, in this chair. A little later perhaps, when she felt better, she would move.

  So they left her there while they went about their business, searching the house. Occasionally one of the detectives asked her another question. Sometimes Jack Noonan spoke at her gently as he passed by. Her husband, he told her, had been killed by a blow on the back of the head administered with a heavy blunt instrument, almost certainly a large piece of metal. They were looking for the weapon. The murderer may have taken it with him, but on the other hand he may've thrown it away or hidden it somewhere on the p
remises.

  'It's the old story,' he said. 'Get the weapon, and you've got the man.'

  Later, one of the detectives came up and sat beside her. Did she know, he asked, of anything in the house that could've been used as the weapon? Would she mind having a look around to see if anything was missing - a very big spanner, for example, or a heavy metal vase.

  They didn't have any heavy metal vases, she said.

  'Or a big spanner?'

  She didn't think they had a big spanner. But there might be some things like that in the garage.

  The search went on. She knew that there were other policemen in the garden all around the house. She could hear their footsteps on the gravel outside, and sometimes she saw the flash of a torch through a chink in the curtains. It began to get late, nearly nine she noticed by the clock on the mantel. The four men searching the rooms seemed to be growing weary, a trifle exasperated.

  'Jack,' she said, the next time Sergeant Noonan went by. 'Would you mind giving me a drink?'

  'Sure I'll give you a drink. You mean this whisky?'

  'Yes please. But just a small one. It might make me feel better.'

  He handed her the glass.

  'Why don't you have one yourself,' she said. 'You must be awfully tired. Please do. You've been very good to me.'

  'Well,' he answered. 'It's not strictly allowed, but I might take just a drop to keep me going.'

  One by one the others came in and were persuaded to take a little nip of whisky. They stood around rather awkwardly with the drinks in their hands, uncomfortable in her presence, trying to say consoling things to her. Sergeant Noonan wandered into the kitchen, came out quickly and said, 'Look, Mrs Maloney. You know that oven of yours is still on, and the meat still inside.'

  'Oh dear me!' she cried. 'So it is!'

  'I better turn it off for you, hadn't I?'

  'Will you do that, Jack? Thank you so much.'

  When the sergeant returned the second time, she looked at him with her large, dark, tearful eyes. 'Jack Noonan,' she said.

  'Yes?'

  'Would you do me a small favour - you and these others?'

  'We can try, Mrs Maloney.'

  'Well,' she said. 'Here you all are, and good friends of dear Patrick's too, and helping to catch the man who killed him. You must be terribly hungry by now because it's long past your supper-time, and I know Patrick would never forgive me, God bless his soul, if I allowed you to remain in his house without offering you decent hospitality. Why don't you eat up that lamb that's in the oven. It'll be cooked just right by now.'

  'Wouldn't dream of it,' Sergeant Noonan said.

  'Please,' she begged. 'Please eat it. Personally I couldn't touch a thing, certainly not what's been in the house when he was here. But it's all right for you. It'd be a favour to me if you'd eat it up. Then you can go on with your work again afterwards.'

  There was a good deal of hesitating among the four policemen, but they were clearly hungry, and in the end they were persuaded to go into the kitchen and help themselves. The woman stayed where she was, listening to them through the open door, and she could hear them speaking among themselves, their voices thick and sloppy because their mouths were full of meat.

  'Have some more, Charlie?'

  'No. Better not finish it.'

  'She wants us to finish it. She said so. Be doing her a favour.'

  'O.K. then. Give me some more.'

  'That's a hell of a big club the guy must've used to hit poor Patrick,' one of them was saying. 'The doc says his skull was smashed all to pieces just like from a sledgehammer.'

  'That's why it ought to be easy to find.'

  'Exactly what I say."

  'Whoever done it, they're not going to be carrying a thing like that around with them longer than they need.'

  One of them belched.

  'Personally, I think it's right here on the premises.'

  'Probably right under our very noses. What you think. Jack?'

  And in the other room, Mary Maloney began to giggle.

  Galloping Foxley

  [1953]

  Five days a week, for thirty-six years, I have travelled the eight-twelve train to the City. It is never unduly crowded, and it takes me right in to Cannon Street Station, only an eleven and a half minute walk from the door of my office in Austin Friars.

  I have always liked the process of commuting; every phase of the little journey is a pleasure to me. There is a regularity about it that is agreeable and comforting to a person of habit, and in addition, it serves as a sort of slipway along which I am gently but firmly launched into the waters of daily business routine.

  Ours is a smallish country station and only nineteen or twenty people gather there to catch the eight-twelve. We are a group that rarely changes, and when occasionally a new face appears on the platform it causes a certain disclamatory, protestant ripple, like a new bird in a cage of canaries.

  But normally, when I arrive in the morning with my usual four minutes to spare, there they all are, these good, solid, steadfast people, standing in their right places with their right umbrellas and hats and ties and faces and their newspapers under their arms, as unchanged and unchangeable through the years as the furniture in my own living-room. I like that.

  I like also my corner seat by the window and reading The Times to the noise and motion of the train. This part of it lasts thirty-two minutes and it seems to soothe both my brain and my fretful old body like a good long massage. Believe me, there's nothing like routine and regularity for preserving one's peace of mind. I have now made this morning journey nearly ten thousand times in all, and I enjoy it more and more every day. Also (irrelevant, but interesting), I have become a sort of clock. I can tell at once if we are running two, three, or four minutes late, and I never have to look up to know which station we are stopped at.

  The walk at the other end from Cannon Street to my office is neither too long nor too short - a healthy little perambulation along streets crowded with fellow commuters all proceeding to their places of work on the same orderly schedule as myself. It gives me a sense of assurance to be moving among these dependable, dignified people who stick to their jobs and don't go gadding about all over the world. Their lives, like my own, are regulated nicely by the minute hand of an accurate watch, and very often our paths cross at the same times and places on the street each day.

  For example, as I turn the corner into St Swithin's Lane, I invariably come head on with a genteel middle-aged lady who wears silver pince-nez and carries a black briefcase in her hand - a first-rate accountant, I should say, or possibly an executive in the textile industry. When I cross over Thread-needle Street by the traffic lights, nine times out of ten I pass a gentleman who wears a different garden flower in his button-hole each day. He dresses in black trousers and grey spats and is clearly a punctual and meticulous person, probably a banker, or perhaps a solicitor like myself; and several times in the last twenty-five years, as we have hurried past one another across the street, our eyes have met in a fleeting glance of mutual approval and respect.

  At least half the faces I pass on this little walk are now familiar to me. And good faces they are too, my kind of faces, my kind of people - sound, sedulous, businesslike folk with none of that restlessness and glittering eye about them that you see in all these so-called clever types who want to tip the world upside down with their Labour Governments and socialized medicines and all the rest of it.

  So you can see that I am, in every sense of the words, a contented commuter. Or would it be more accurate to say that I was a contented commuter? At the time when I wrote the little autobiographical sketch you have just read - intending to circulate it among the staff of my office as an exhortation and an example - I was giving a perfectly true account of my feelings. But that was a whole week ago, and since then something rather peculiar has happened. As a matter of fact, it started to happen last Tuesday, the very morning that I was carrying the rough draft up to Town in my pocket; and this, to m
e, was so timely and coincidental that I can only believe it to have been the work of God. God had read my little essay and he had said to himself, 'This man Perkins is becoming over-complacent. It is high time I taught him a lesson.' I honestly believe that's what happened.

  As I say, it was last Tuesday, the Tuesday after Easter, a warm yellow spring morning, and I was striding on to the platform of our small country station with The Times tucked under my arm and the draft of 'The Contented Commuter' in my pocket, when I immediately became aware that something was wrong. I could actually feel that curious little ripple of protest running along the ranks of my fellow commuters. I stopped and glanced around.

  The stranger was standing plumb in the middle of the platform, feet apart and arms folded, looking for all the world as though he owned the place.

  He was a biggish, thickset man, and even from behind he somehow managed to convey a powerful impression of arrogance and oil. Very definitely, he was not one of us. He carried a cane instead of an umbrella, his shoes were brown instead of black, the grey hat was cocked at a ridiculous angle, and in one way and another there seemed to be an excess of silk and polish about his person. More than this I did not care to observe. I walked straight past him with my face to the sky, adding, I sincerely hope, a touch of real frost to an atmosphere that was already cool.

  The train came in. And now, try if you can to imagine my horror when the new man actually followed me into my own compartment! Nobody has done this to me for fifteen years. My colleagues always respect my seniority. One of my special little pleasures is to have the place to myself for at least one, sometimes two or even three stations. But here, if you please, was this fellow, this stranger, straddling the seat opposite and blowing his nose and rustling the Daily Mail and lighting a disgusting pipe.

  I lowered my Times and stole a glance at his face. I suppose he was about the same age as me - sixty-two or three - but he had one of those unpleasantly handsome, brown, leathery countenances that you see nowadays in advertisements for men's shirts - the lion shooter and the polo player and the Everest climber and the tropical explorer and the racing yachtsman all rolled into one; dark eyebrows, steely eyes, strong white teeth clamping the stem of a pipe. Personally, I mistrust all handsome men. The superficial pleasures of this life come too easily to them, and they seem to walk the world as though they themselves were personally responsible for their own good looks. I don't mind a woman being pretty. That's different. But in a man, I'm sorry, but somehow or other I find it downright offensive. Anyway, here was this one sitting right opposite me in the carriage, and I was looking at him over the top of my Times when suddenly he glanced up and our eyes met.