Ellery Queen's Eyewitnesses

by Ellery Queen

  “Miller might have come up against Bailey in a professional capacity, sir. Bailey might have nabbed him for something and this is a revenge killing.”

  “A revenge killing?” Dover’s uninhibited hoot of mirth sent the sea gulls winging up from a nearby field. “’Strewth, you’ve been at those detective-story books again! Revenge—on a clapped-out copper from Ealing who’s been retired for twenty years?” Dover, seeing that MacGregor was about to correct his figures, rushed raucously on. “That Miller pouf would still have been in his cradle when Who’s-your-father was pounding the beat.”

  MacGregor quietly resolved to check whether Miller had a police record and if there was any possible earlier connection between him and the deceased. “Ah, here we are, sir.”

  They had just turned into Viburnum Avenue and the car this time was a huge and very ancient Ford, liberally decorated with anarchistic slogans, Mickey Mouse stickers, pictures of nude ladies, and rust. Inside the appropriate house they found the owner of this vehicle—Lionel Hutchinson. He was a moronic-looking, slack-mouthed teenager, the epitome of a petty, unsuccessful crook. Lionel’s mother, having let Dover and MacGregor into the house while her ewe-lamb remained lolling full-length on the sofa, returned wearily to her ironing.

  Young Lionel was uncooperative. “You must be joking!” He removed neither his eyes from his comic book nor the cigarette from his mouth. “Drive that jalopy out there? Watcher trying to do—trap me?”

  “I was merely asking if you went out in it last night,” said MacGregor.

  “Not last night and not for months!” said Lionel. “Because why? Because it hasn’t passed its M.O.T. test, it isn’t licensed, and it’s not insured. Damn, I should have thought even you punks knew it was a criminal offense to take a car like that on the bleeding road. Besides”—he chucked his cigarette stub vaguely in the direction of the fireplace and reached for the packet on the floor at his side—“I can’t affort the petrol.”

  Mrs. Hutchinson spoke up. “He doesn’t get hardly anything from Social Security.”

  Dover looked hopefully at the packet of cigarettes, but it was not handed round. That was the trouble with these working-class crimes—no bloody perks! Dover vented his disappointment on Lionel. “You took that car out last night, didn’t you?”

  Lionel turned over the page. “Negative, Fatso.”

  “Just because it wasn’t taxed and insured?” sneered Dover. “Try pulling the other one!”

  Mrs. Hutchinson came galloping to the rescue again. “He’s got to watch his step,” she explained. “It’s prison next time they catch him.”

  Lionel raised himself up and glared at his mother with less than filial affection.

  Dover had another spot. “You took that car out last night and—”

  “Stuff yourself!”

  “—ran Bailey down because he was a copper and then—”

  “Aw, get knotted!”

  “—got out and finished him off as he lay there helpless.”

  Lionel Hutchinson struggled into a sitting position. “Without nicking his wallet?” Almost as exhausted by the effort as Dover would have been, he sank back. “I was home all evening. Ask my mum!”

  Once they were safely outside, Dover waxed bolder. “I’ll get that little bleeder!” he promised, looking fierce.

  MacGregor took a more moderate line. “I doubt if he’d have the guts to kill a grown man, sir. Mugging old ladies for their pension books is about his limit.”

  “There’s probably a gang of ’em,” grunted Dover. He was bored, hungry, thirsty, and suffering from nicotine starvation.

  “Perhaps forensic will turn up something on the murder weapon,” said MacGregor hopefully. “And I think we must examine these cars again, too. I can’t really believe that the car that knocked Bailey down would be completely unmarked.”

  They were walking slowly back up the hill and Dover was in no condition to contradict everything MacGregor said just for the hell of it.

  “Oh, look, sir!” MacGregor pointed. “There’s the caravan at last. Good! Now at least we’ll have somewhere we can settle down to work in.”

  Dover shied like a nervous horse at the mere mention of work. “I want my lunch! I’m starving.”

  “Oh, there’ll be coffee and sandwiches in the caravan for sure, sir.”

  By some miracle, Dover found the puff to tell MacGregor what he could do with his coffee and sandwiches, interrupting his tirade only to stick his tongue out at old Mrs. Golightly who was peeping out from behind her curtains.

  MacGregor hastened to make amends by giving her a cheery smile and raising his hat. “Poor old thing,” he said when he could get a word in. “You’d think they could do something better for them than this, wouldn’t you, sir? Sticking them out here miles away from anywhere and right on top of those noisy garages, to say nothing of having petrol fumes seeping in through your bathroom window. Good God!”

  Afterward, both MacGregor and Dover claimed to have spotted it first but, since Dover had fewer inhibitions about bawling his head off on the public highway, he tended to hog the glory at the time.

  He stopped dead in his tracks. “But there shouldn’t have been any petrol fumes!”

  By great good fortune there they were, standing right on the spot. Branching off on the left as they went up the hill was the row of houses for the old-age pensioners. And running up even higher behind them was Japonica Mount. Miller’s small red car was clearly visible, not more than a couple of hundred feet away, still outside Mrs. Jedryschowski’s house and still with its nose pointing down the hill.

  Dover’s brain nearly blew a gasket as he struggled to work it out. “How far,” he panted, “on a cold morning would you have to let that car roll down the hill before you could start it?”

  MacGregor was amazed at Dover’s grasp of the technical problem involved. “Oh, right to the bottom, I imagine, sir. Certainly well past Mrs. Golightly’s bathroom window.”

  “We’ve got him!” said Dover, and rested his case.

  MacGregor felt they needed a little more than that. “Miller could have started his car on the starter this morning for some reason or other, sir.”

  “Why the hell should he? And even if he did, the fumes still wouldn’t get into that old biddie’s bog, would they?”

  “Not if the car was parked outside Mrs. Jedryschowski’s house where it is now, sir,” agreed MacGregor. “On the other hand”—his eyes narrowed as he took in the topography of the area—“if he started the car on the starter outside his own house, old Mrs. Go-lightly would certainly have got the full benefit of both the noise and the smoke. He’d be hardly any distance away as the crow flies.”

  Dover had had his fill of the Willow Hill Farm Housing Estate. “Come on,” he said with unwonted enthusiasm, “let’s go get him!”

  MacGregor was appalled. “But there could be dozens of perfectly innocent explanations, sir,” he bleated anxiously. “I think it would be a big mistake for us to go off half cocked like this before we’ve—”

  “You speak for yourself, laddie!” snorted Dover, already charging up the hill like a two-year-old tortoise. “Me, I’ve never gone off half cocked at anything in my whole bloody life!”

  It was fortunate for the Cause of Justice that Henry Miller was one of Nature’s losers.

  “I knew I’d never get away with it,” he said dejectedly as Dover lay panting like a stranded whale in one of the armchairs and MacGregor, getting his notebook out, issued the formal caution. “Oh, I don’t mind making a statement. Why not?”

  “Keep it short,” advised Dover, cursing himself for not having had his lunch first. He accepted a cigarette from MacGregor, unaware that it was offered with the sole aim of stopping his mouth up.

  But Miller had never been much of a talker in any case. “My wife left me a couple of days ago,” he mumbled. “Just went. Late last night I got to wondering if she’d gone to stay with her sister. I thought I’d drive over and see.”

 
“What time did you leave?”

  Miller shrugged. “Latish.”

  “How did you start your car?”

  “Like I always do—I let it roll down the hill.”

  “And you headed for the main road?”

  “That’s right. I wasn’t going fast or anything. Then, just by the zebra crossing, he stepped out right in front of me and—bang!—I hit him. Not hard. I wasn’t doing more than twenty. I stopped and got out. Well, he just lay there in the road, cursing me up hill and down dale. A right mouthful. Said I knocked him down deliberate on a pedestrian crossing and he’d have the Law on me.

  “Said he’d charge me with dangerous driving and God knows what. I tried to calm him down a bit and ask if he was hurt, but he just kept on shouting. Said he was an ex-policeman and that he’d see me behind bars if it was the last thing he did. Well, he would have, wouldn’t he? My word against his? I wouldn’t have stood a chance. So I killed him.”

  “Just like that?” Dover didn’t like to hear of policemen being disposed of so casually.

  “I couldn’t afford to be found guilty, you see,” said Miller drearily. “Not on any charge. I’ve been in trouble before, you see.”

  “I’m not surprised,” sniffed Dover. “Was it Bailey who nabbed you?”

  “Oh, no, nothing like that. I didn’t know Mr. Bailey from Adam.”

  “Then why kill him, for God’s sake?”

  Miller sighed heavily. “It was when I was still up north. I”—he cleared his throat and avoided looking at either of his two inquisitors—“well, it was sort of to do with sex.”

  “Oh, yes?” said Dover, on whom the mouth-stopping cigarette was not working too well.

  Miller moistened his lips. “Children, actually,” he muttered. “I got six months. But”—he raised his head with a faint show of defiance—“that was four years ago and I haven’t been in trouble since. I pulled myself together, see? I moved down here and got myself a good job and got married and everything.”

  MacGregor understood. “You were afraid that if you were convicted on this motoring charge, your previous record would come out in open court?”

  “They say they don’t punish you twice for the same offense, but they do. I’d have lost my job straight off. I work at a school, you see. Kids everywhere. And then there’s the wife. She’d have never come back if she knew I’d been in the nick for molesting kids. And then there’s the neighbors.” He appealed to the more sympathetic face confronting him. “You can see how I was fixed, can’t you? I couldn’t just do nothing and let him ruin my life. I didn’t want to kill him, but he gave me no choice. I hit him with the wheel brace.”

  But Dover’s heart was not made of stone. He saw how distressed Miller was and was ready with solace. He addressed MacGregor. “Why don’t you go and make us all a nice cup of tea, laddie?”

  Miller raised his head. “There’s a bottle of whiskey in the sideboard,” he said shyly.

  Dover beamed. “Even better! Where do you keep your glasses?”

  Miller’s statement was completed in an increasingly convivial atmosphere and he had to be asked several times about the parking of his car after the murder.

  “Oh, that,” he said. “Well, I forgot all about going after the missus and I come rushing back here. All I wanted was to get out of sight as quick as possible. That’s why I left the car right outside instead of driving it to the top of the hill and turning it around ready for the morning like I usually do.”

  “So when you left for work today you had to start the car on the starter?” MacGregor, of course, didn’t drink on duty and was as sober as a judge.

  “That’s right. I had the devil of a job with it. It really needs a new battery but what with one thing and another. . .Anyhow, I won’t have to bother about that now, will I?”

  “What did you do with the murder weapon?”

  “It’s under the coal in the shed. I was going to chuck it in the canal when things quietened down. Here”—for the first time Miller showed a flicker of curiosity—“how did you get on to me?”

  “It was the break in the pattern, laddie!” said Dover, feeling he owed his host something for the whiskey. “If you’d turned your car and parked it like you always did outside the Jedryschowskis, you’d have got away with it.”

  MacGregor gawped. How on earth had the old fool managed to hang onto a name like Jedryschowski, for heaven’s sake?

  “You got cloth ears or something, laddie?”

  MacGregor abandoned his disloyal speculations. “Sir?”

  “I said, go and get somebody to take him away.”

  MacGregor hesitated. Leave Dover alone with a self-confessed murderer? “Will you be all right, sir?”

  Dover winked wickedly and reached for the whiskey bottle. “Oh, I’ll be fine, Sergeant!” he said. “Just fine now!”

  “Q”

  Nigel Morland

  The de Rougemont Case

  Jersey, the largest of Britain’s Channel Islands, is not the sort of place where anything spectacular ever happens; but when it does it is always remarkable—as, for example, the de Rougemont case.

  This occurred in the lonely northern parish of St. Jerome where the local inhabitants were mainly concerned with the growing of potatoes and tomatoes for the mainland markets.

  To understand something of the official background, it is as well to explain that Jersey’s only large town, St. Helier, possesses regular uniformed police. In all the outside parishes (each one a self-contained unit) the law is administered by a Constable through his Centeniers—civilians who work without pay but who hold full powers of office and, indeed, under the Law, supreme power; it is a system that goes back to Duke William of Normandy (William the Conqueror) from whose lands the Islanders originally came. And one of the obstinate Norman-French speaking peasants of Jersey was Jean Soustrelle.

  Centenier Soustrelle was a peaceful man, a farmer who could trace his ancestry back a thousand years to Normandy. He was a Norman countryman to the life—short, stout, and rubicund, a bumbling man of remarkable amiability and an almost bovine look. And one still August morning, when France just across the waters of the bay looked as if it were only a mile away, Soustrelle was told that Richard de Rougemont wished to see him.

  “De Rougemont—” Soustrelle ambled from the byre where he had been working when his housekeeper summoned him “—who has bought the new house on La Rochelle Point?”

  “Veritably, m’sieu.” The housekeeper spoke in the antiquated French common in the families of the old Jersaise. “He is deeply disturbed, that one.”

  “Hm.” Soustrelle wiped his hands on his grimy jeans and slipped his bare feet into a pair of espadrilles. “Inform him I will be there within moments.” He paused in the kitchen to take a quick swig from a jug of Calvados.

  Richard de Rougemont was waiting in the stuffy parlor in the front of the Soustrelle farmhouse. He rose from his chair as Soustrelle entered—a tall, neatly dressed man.

  “Good morning, Centenier.” His voice was harsh and obviously he was no local product, for he spoke in the clipped English of the mainland. “I am sorry to disturb you. I have bad news.”

  “Yes?” Soustrelle’s mild blue eyes were unsurprised. “It is of a truth that it is always bad news when I am called Centenier.”

  “I see.” De Rougemont touched his forehead with a shaking hand. “Mr. Soustrelle, I was born in Jersey but left as a boy for England where I have since lived. Now that I have retired I returned here with my wife to live out my years in a peaceful place.”

  “Excellent. And?”

  “Centenier, for a long time I have suspected she had a lover. I could not prove it. When we came here I rented a house in the west end of the island, in St. Michelet. To please her I have since bought a house on La Rochelle. We were to move in next week. Yesterday afternoon my wife did not return to tea, nor did she return during the night. I was alarmed but did not take any action because twice before she has spent the night at our new hou
se to enjoy its atmosphere—she is an artist, an amateur, you see.” Soustrelle nodded as if this explained such eccentricity. “I went to our house.”

  “And—she is there?”

  “Yes. The house is filled with our furniture, ready for us to move in, but we were waiting a few days until the smell of new paint has vanished—I find it sickens me. Yes, she is there.” De Rougemont paused. “She is on the bed in our room. A man is beside her—a man named Venning, who, my dear friends have hinted to me, was her lover.”

  “You mean, they are dead?”

  “I smelled gas when I opened the front door. I tried the bedroom door; it was locked. There is a balcony and I went there, peering into the bedroom.” De Rougemont shuddered, covering his eyes with one hand.

  “We will go there immediately. You have a motor car?”

  The de Rougemont car was as new and shining as was, Soustrelle observed, the de Rougemont house. It was a fine place on a promontory overlooking the sea and the distant beaches of France, shining whitely under the sun.

  Inside the wide hall Soustrelle sniffed gently, admiring what he could see of this elegant house so far superior to his peasant’s farmhouse. And with a peasant’s interest in money he wondered what all this splendor had cost.

  De Rougemont led the way upstairs, through a spare room to a balcony which ran the length of the house. He paused before an uncurtained French window.

  Soustrelle peered through the glass, then made a small sound of distress. On the bed, fully dressed, lay a gray-haired man and beside him a good-looking woman of early middle age.

  “You will go at once for the doctor, Mr. de Rougemont. It is the red house at the end of your road. Advise him and mention my name.”

  When the sound of a car moving away had reassured him, Soustrelle lifted one foot, ruthlessly kicking in the glass of the door and muttering when he bruised his big toe. The fresh breeze from the sea emptied the room of gas quickly, once the French windows had been opened. Soustrelle sniffed cautiously after some minutes, then entered.