by Tony Medawar
‘No,’ begged Skinner, ‘don’t leave me!’
‘Scaredy cat. I’ll only pretend to. We’ll go back to the parlour. Then I’ll tell you I’m returning to the stable. I’ll go out and run around to the side of the house, and come in the window. Then we’ll wait for the scarecrow. The scarecrow’s forced to act tonight—now—if anything’s to be accomplished.’
Banner helped Skinner, shaking and white-faced, back into the parlour, where Skinner flopped weakly in a chair. Banner prowled to the window and loosened the screen. Then he went to the sliding doors and said in a voice that must have carried all the way to the barn:
‘It’s no use your staying, Skinner. I’ll put your dobbin between the shafts and you can jog back to town.’
‘Yes,’ said Skinner in a choked voice.
‘Pull these doors closed after me,’ continued Banner loudly. ‘It’ll only take me ten minutes.’
Skinner got up and slid the doors closed. Banner went out on the porch and let his footsteps die away in the direction of the stable.
In an incredibly short space of time Banner, puffing and blowing, appeared at the side window. He came wriggling into the room like a walrus. ‘This’s what comes of eating too much strawberry shortcake,’ he whispered, smothering a chuckle.
Skinner was collapsed in the rocker by the table in the centre of the room. Banner pulled a chair close to the sliding doors, now closed, sat down, and began to wait.
One minute went by. Two minutes. Three minutes …
Skinner, rooted to his chair, looked horrified at the crack slowly appearing between the two doors beside Banner. There was not a sound. The crack got wider. White-gloved fingers pushed their squirming way in and then a hand rested between the doors.
Banner never moved.
The white-gloved hand was withdrawn and gradually the double barrels of a shotgun slid through, the invisible gunner drawing a bead on Skinner’s head.
Then like lightning Banner’s hand shot out and seized the barrels and forced them up. The shotgun roared and buckshot riddled the ceiling. Banner slammed one of the double doors back and followed the gun out into the front hall.
Skinner uprooted himself. He had to see. He was behind Banner.
Then his senses almost failed him.
Struggling in Banner’s iron grip, her face distorted with rage, was Beverly Jelke!
Daybreak was spreading over the sky like a pale stain. Banner faced Skinner in the jurisconsult’s office above Main Street.
Banner said, ‘Everything indicated that the body found in the creek was Bev’s. Her clothes were on the bank, her ring was on her hand. Generally, the physique and colouring were Bev’s. But exact identification of the features wasn’t possible, ’cuz, as you had told me, the buckshot had smeared most of the face.
‘Wayne saw a luminous figure in the fruit trees. Bare flesh gives off a glow in the moonlight. The person Wayne saw was naked … Then there was the peculiar stillness of the hounds, though the hideous scarecrow cavorted all over the place. There’s only one answer to that. The hounds knew who the scarecrow was. It was a person they were thoroughly used to.
‘But it was the attempt on Celeste while all the doors were locked that settled it for me. Nobody could have gotten out of those four rooms. That proved the murderer was still on the outside. The murderer, then, was someone who had complete run of the grounds and whom the dogs regarded as a master. Everyone at the Grange was eliminated except one person—Beverly Jelke. That’s why I told you the answer was unbelievable. But taking it as true, whose body was found in the creek?
‘Remember that Wayne caught sight of Bev running naked through the trees after the second murder. Why was she naked? ’Cuz she had left all her clothes on the bank. Why didn’t she put on her victim’s clothes? ’Cuz her victim had been wearing nothing but a bathing suit; she had come down to the creek in a bathing suit.
‘Who finds the creek that convenient? It wasn’t anybody from the Grange. They were all accounted for. The nearest other place is Foxchase Hall. It was one of the schoolgals! And we knew that Joan Vicars had come down to the creek occasionally. Could it be Joan Vicars they found in the creek? I checked later and found her missing.
‘We can see now that Bev needed clothes. She couldn’t get back into the house immediately. All that was available was the scarecrow rig. She put that on. Bev, as heartless as she’s painted, had killed Joan to pave the way to the more important murder of her brother.
‘To murder Hudson, she made some disturbance outside the farmhouse while all of us were asleep, and when he came to the porch to investigate she let him have it with the kitchen shotgun. Before she vamoosed she removed a bedroom key from Hudson’s pocket. It had been her key. Hudson had taken it from the body in the mortuary along with the rest of Bev’s effects earlier that day.
‘Then Bev began to play tricks. She left a broad trail from Hudson’s body. This trail petered out in some shale at the edge of the ploughed field. At least we couldn’t see any more footprints at that point, but the hounds were still able to follow the trail by the scent. Then Bev hit us between the eyes with the footprints in the newly ploughed field.
‘What she did was simple. She wanted us to see with our own eyes where the trail led, so that we’d call off the hounds. She was standing there dressed as the scarecrow. She had to get that scarecrow forty feet inside the field with only one set of shoe tracks leading up to it. First she made a cross-piece of a couple of dead branches to hang the ragged clothes on. Then she took off the scarecrow shoes she was wearing and continued barefoot out into the field for another forty feet.
‘She took off her clothes and set up the scarecrow the way we found it. All except the shoes. She put the heavy shoes on again and walked backwards to the edge of the field, where she started from. She stepped carefully on each bare footprint—the ones she’d made walking into the field. We didn’t think right off that large shoe tracks can completely blot out slighter bare footprints …
‘We have Bev standing nude on the rim of the ploughed field, the scarecrow forty feet from her and a pair of shoes in her hand. How’d she get the shoes out under the scarecrow? Horseshoe pitching is her favourite sport. You told me that. She could put them in pretty close at forty feet, couldn’t she, Skinner?’ Banner chuckled.
‘During the day she hid out in the stable or the barn and kept herself covered with straw and horse blankets. She ate raw carrots, kale and broccoli from her vegetable garden.’
Skinner interrupted, ‘But why—Why did she want to kill me?’
‘She wanted to get away from the farm with the five thousand you were willing to offer for it. Since Hudson was dead, he could no longer raise an objection to the sale. Celeste would wanna sell out and you’d bring the money to the farm. Bev had to have that money to start over again somewhere else; there was no use going away without it. She knew she had to kill you for it.
‘Bev had finally slipped into the house and into her room by the time you and Celeste had come to that sale agreement in the parlour. Bev had dressed herself in some of her own clothes. She was up on the stairs, listening to us. She knew you were gonna get the money that night. Then Celeste ran quickly up the stairs and Bev ducked back into the dark to hide herself. But Celeste caught a glimpse of Bev, though she didn’t know who it was. For all Bev knew, Celeste had spotted her and knew she was still alive. So Bev had to put your killing on her waiting list. She had to erase Celeste first.
‘As you can see, there really was no problem of getting out of the locked rooms. The scarecrow was outside all the time. The shoes on her feet sounded loose as she walked down the hall, for they were far too big for her. She removed the chair I had put up and entered Celeste’s room with the same key she’d taken off Hudson’s body. She intended to blast Celeste full of buckshot. But Celeste defended herself. Bev couldn’t stay for a second shot. She had to get out and leave things the way I’d set them before I could stomp up the stairs.
‘
Bev was hard pressed. To get the money she had to kill you before you left the Grange last night. Her hand was forced. So she fell into my trap. Come into my parlour, said the flies to the spider.’
JOSEPH COMMINGS
Born in New York in 1913, Joseph Commings is today almost forgotten outside a diminishing circle of aficionados of impossible crime fiction. After a brief spell as a journalist, he began his sporadic and very varied writing career during the Second World War on overseas postings with the US Air Force. Initially, he wrote to entertain his comrades and, on being demobbed, he must have been delighted to find a ready market in the so-called ‘pulps’ such as Western Trails, Hollywood Detective, Mystery Digest and Killers Mystery Story Magazine. His crime fiction is characterised by undeniably improbable situations, unfeasibly trusting witnesses and extraordinarily clever solutions. In one story the murderer might appear to be a vampire and in another a giant, but what truly lifts his work out of the run of the mill is Commings’ sense of humour.
Commings’ best-known character is Brooks Urban Banner, a Senator in the Democratic party who is also a criminal lawyer and a practising magician. Banner is modelled very much in the style of John Dickson Carr’s heroic sleuth Dr Gideon Fell (himself inspired by G. K. Chesterton) and is ‘extra large’ in every sense: he weighs nearly 300 pounds, has a mop of shaggy white hair and dresses loudly. Fond of tall tales, the Senator claims to have had all manner of careers—including hobo, locksmith and comic book enthusiast—which provide some of the arcane knowledge that allows him to unravel the baffling mysteries with which he is confronted. While he doesn’t appear in any novel-length investigations, there are over thirty Banner short stories. Fifteen of these were gathered together by the late Bob Adey, the authority on impossible crime stories, and form the collection Banner Deadlines (Crippen & Landru, 2004); a second volume is forthcoming. Commings’ non-Banner stories—of which there are at least forty, some written under pseudonyms—are mostly mysteries, sometimes with an unusual setting, but none captures the eccentric genius of the Banner canon.
As a writer, Joe Commings is sometimes criticised for an overly frivolous approach to the business of murder. That was of course quite deliberate. In a letter to the New York Times Book Review, published in 1941, Commings protested that the vast majority of publishing houses were uninterested in publishing anything humorous and therefore unwilling to accept his ‘whimsical wares’. As he was unwilling to write in any another way his work remained largely confined to the pulps while a few novel-length manuscripts also failed to find a publisher.
In his fifties, Commings supplemented his income from crime fiction by writing pornographic paperbacks with titles like Man Eater (1965), Operation Aphrodite (1966) and Swinging Wives (1971), as well as a study of sex crimes whose aim seems to have been titillation more than education.
In the early 1970s, Joe Commings suffered a stroke and his writing career came to an end. He moved to a care home in Maryland where he died in 1992.
‘The Scarecrow Murders’ was originally published in 10-Story Detective magazine in April 1948.
THE INCIDENT OF THE DOG’S BALL
Agatha Christie
(From the notes of Captain Arthur Hastings O.B.E.)
I always look back upon the case of Miss Matilda Wheeler with special interest simply because of the curious way it worked itself out—from nothing at all as it were!
I remember that it was a particularly hot airless day in August. I was sitting in my friend Poirot’s rooms wishing for the hundredth time that we could be in the country and not in London. The post had just been brought in. I remember the sound of each envelope in turn being opened neatly, as Poirot did everything, by means of a little paper-cutter. Then would come his murmured comment and the letter in question would be allotted to its proper pile. It was an orderly monotonous business.
And then suddenly there came a difference. A longer pause, a letter not read once but twice. A letter that was not docketed in the usual way but which remained in the recipient’s hand. I looked across at my friend. The letter now lay on his knee. He was staring thoughtfully across the room.
‘Anything of interest, Poirot?’ I asked.
‘Cela dépend. Possibly you would not think so. It is a letter from an old lady, Hastings, and it says nothing—but nothing at all.’
‘Very useful,’ I commented sarcastically.
‘N’est ce pas? It is the way of old ladies, that. Round and round the point they go! But see for yourself. I shall be interested to know what you make of it.’
He tossed me the letter. I unfolded it and made a slight grimace. It consisted of four closely written pages in a spiky and shaky handwriting with numerous alterations, erasures, and copious underlining.
‘Must I really read it?’ I asked plaintively. ‘What is it about?’
‘It is, as I told you just now, about nothing.’
Hardly encouraged by this remark I embarked unwillingly on my task. I will confess that I did not read it very carefully. The writing was difficult and I was content to take guesses on the context.
The writer seemed to be a Miss Matilda Wheeler of The Laburnums, Little Hemel. After much doubt and indecision, she wrote, she had felt herself emboldened to write to M. Poirot. At some length she went on to state exactly how and where she had heard M. Poirot’s name mentioned. The matter was such, she said, that she found it extremely difficult to consult anyone in Little Hemel—and of course there was the possibility that she might be completely mistaken—that she was attaching a most ridiculous significance to perfectly natural incidents. In fact she had chided herself unsparingly for fancifulness, but ever since the incident of the dog’s ball she had felt most uneasy. She could only hope to hear from M. Poirot if he did not think the whole thing was a mare’s nest. Also, perhaps, he would be so kind as to let her know what his fee would be? The matter, she knew was very trivial and unimportant, but her health was bad and her nerves not what they had been and worry of this kind was very bad for her, and the more she thought of it, the more she was convinced that she was right, though, of course, she would not dream of saying anything.
That was more or less the gist of the thing. I put it down with a sigh of exasperation.
‘Why can’t the woman say what she’s talking about? Of all the idiotic letters!’
‘N’est ce pas? A regrettable failure to employ order and method in the mental process.’
‘What do you think she does mean? Not that it matters much. Some upset to her pet dog, I suppose. Anyway, it’s not worth taking seriously.’
‘You think not, my friend?’
‘My dear Poirot, I cannot see why you are so intrigued by this letter.’
‘No, you have not seen. The most interesting point in that letter—you have passed it by unnoticed.’
‘What is the interesting point?’
‘The date, mon ami.’
I looked at the heading of the letter again.
‘April 12th,’ I said slowly.
‘C’est curieux, n’est ce pas?’ Nearly four months ago.’
‘I don’t suppose it has any significance. She probably meant to put August 12th.’
‘No, no, Hastings. Look at the colour of the ink. That letter was written a good time ago. No, April 12th is the date assuredly. But why was it not sent? And if the writer changed her mind about sending it, why did she keep it and send it now?’
He rose.
‘Mon ami—the day is hot. In London one stifles, is it not so? Then how say you to a little expedition into the country? To be exact, to Little Hemel which is, I see, in the County of Kent.’
I was only too willing and then and there we started off on our visit of exploration.
II
Little Hemel we found to be a charming village, untouched in the miraculous way that villages can be when they are two miles from a main road. There was a hostelry called The George, and there we had lunch—a bad lunch I regret to say, as is the way at country inns.
An elderly waiter attended to us, a heavy-breathing man, and as he brought us two cups of a doubtful fluid called coffee, Poirot started his campaign.
‘A house called The Laburnums,’ he said. ‘You know it? The house of a Miss Wheeler.’
‘That’s right, sir. Just past the church. You can’t miss it. Three Miss Wheelers there were, old-fashioned ladies, born and brought up here. Ah! well, they’re all gone now and the house is up for sale.’
He shook his head sadly.
‘So the Miss Wheelers are all dead?’ said Poirot.
‘Yes, sir. Miss Amelia and Miss Caroline twelve years ago and Miss Matilda just a month or two ago. You thinking of buying the house, sir—if I may ask?’
‘The idea had occurred to me,’ said Poirot mendaciously. ‘But I believe it is in a very bad state.’
‘It’s old-fashioned, sir. Never been modernised as the saying goes. But it’s in good condition—roof and drains and all that. Never grudged money on repairs, Miss Wheeler didn’t, and the garden was always a picture.’
‘She was well off?’
‘Oh! very comfortably off indeed, sir. A very well-to-do family.’
‘I suppose the house has been left to someone who has no use for it? A niece or nephew or some distant relative?’
‘No, sir, she left it to her companion, Miss Lawson. But Miss Lawson doesn’t fancy living in it, and so it’s up for sale. But it’s a bad time for selling houses, they say.’
‘Whenever one has to sell anything it is always a bad time,’ said Poirot smiling, as he paid the bill and added a handsome tip. ‘When exactly did you say Miss Matilda Wheeler died?’
‘Just the beginning of May, sir—thank you, sir—or was it the end of April? She’d not been in good health for a long time.’
‘You have a good doctor here?’
