by Otto Penzler
Charlie, that’s not so. I gave those contracts to Harry to take to Washington. You must know that.
You did not, said the Brown Recluse, and I knew when he was lying. (When a man lies to a woman in love she can forever spot a lie in that person’s mouth.) He was rigging this, the fiend. He was setting up Harry Hornbrook—just so he could claim the Persian Slipper.
You know Harry has those mineral right deeds, said Ory, red-faced and perplexed before this array of unreason. He had to have them to show to the government boys. To make his claim.
I remember sending Jim back to the bank for them, said the Brown Recluse. He was returning with them—through the foggy town—when Harry struck. Struck and took the deeds. And flew the coop.
Ory picked his nose and then flickered his fingers nervously.
By God, Charlie, he said, you’d do anything to win that damned old Arabian nights shoe. Even betray a friend.
Respect for law and order, said the Brown Recluse, goes deeper than friendship. The Master would agree, I think.
Nobody said anything. Nobody argued.
But I knew, I think we all knew that Charlie Gribble was not through.
Relentlessly, he went on, building his vicious and preposterous case against the poor real estate partner. I had earlier noticed the bulge in the tawdry, tight little trench coat. Now his spidery fingers dove into this pocket and took out something round and perhaps four inches in diameter wrapped in a white, though bloodstained, handkerchief.
This, he announced pretentiously, is the murder weapon. I found it a few moments ago under those leaves and moss by the tree.
What is it, Charlie? asked the sheriff drawing near and scratching the back of his neck.
It is a glass paperweight, said the Brown Recluse. Affixed to the bottom of it so that it can be read easily is a printed advertisement for a Glory firm. It is a promotional give-away.
Which one, Charlie? the sheriff asked. Which company?
A real estate firm, it so happens, drawled the dreadful little spiderman. One quite prominent locally.
He cleared his throat in the manner of a bad actor.
The firm of Hornbrook and Gallagher, he said then.
Again all was still save for the wind and the rustle of the dear old tree. I was fascinated, as though watching the filming of something prerecorded and all stacked up by whatever Fates there be. I felt a little giddy.
This paperweight was the weapon that killed Jim, said the Brown Recluse then. There is blood on it. And even a few hairs. And—
Oh, how dare you perpetrate this unbelievable folly! I blurted. You with your widely known shares in every chemical plant between Weirton and Nitro. You—a millionaire in chemical plants. Bow, I am sure, among them. You want that land for Bow, damn you, you—you Brown Recluse!
Ellen, control yourself, he stammered in a faint, scared voice. You shan’t snatch this moment of glory from me now.
I shall—damn you. And I shall snatch with the fingers of Truth!
But Harry Hornbrook’s fingerprints are on this paperweight, dear lady. Can that be controverted?
Ory Gallagher was standing tensed, half crouching.
Every one of those paperweights has Harry’s prints on them, for God’s sake, Charlie. He distributed them. Mailed them out personally.
But the blood. The blood, my dear fellow, snapped the Brown Recluse, and I swear his voice had assumed a kind of fake Englishness. As the Master would say in this case, Elementary, my dear Gallagher.
Oh, this was unspeakable. Absolutely detestable.
He had trumped the whole thing up, this greed-head, in the hopes of causing Harry to lose his deed claim with the powerful chemical combine. And to win, as a kind of lagniappe, the lovely Persian Slipper.
I think, I said, that it is time that the woman’s voice be heard, gentlemen.
I hobbled forward and stood swaying amid lovely beams of a sun which burned all the more fiercely as it declined behind a stripped-out hill. The wind blew and stirred my curls across my cheek.
My soul made choices in that instant.
In the manner of the Master, I announced with a modest lilt to my voice, I shall now demonstrate the true manner in which this crime was perpetrated.
I stared across the grass where the Brown Recluse stood, and I stared into the space six inches above his head, putting him forever beneath my regard.
In the first place, I said, we all know that he yonder wants those mineral rights for Bow Chemical. He is therefore prejudiced. He is also stupid—for the blood and hair on the paperweight will probably, under examination, prove to be the blood of one of his own Rhode Island red stewing hens. Establishing that, I shall continue.
Harry Hornbrook is a small man, I said. The deceased was a large man. I do not believe that Harry Hornbrook could have reached high enough to get a proper swing to deliver the fatal blow.
I hobbled around the dear old tree and stared at the empty case of a locust. Blessed creature, you have escaped and flown away into the moon. I plucked it loose and watched it fall to the moss at the base of the tree. I smiled.
How could you, Charlie Gribble—how could you, Sheriff Voitle—be so blind as to have missed this?
They all gathered round.
This footprint, I said. In the sweet, thick moss which grows here. It is so clear. It is unmistakable.
The sheriff stooped and stared. Presently he nodded.
It is like the print of a child, he whispered. A child—maybe ten, eleven. Such a tiny shoe.
Oh, yes, I breathed. Do observe how small. In fact—I smiled over their heads. The sun still clung—a bright, striving crumb of fire upon the mine tipple across the already fog-wisping river—I think if you measure the print, sheriff, you will find it was made by a size five and a half quadruple A.
That’s amazingly narrow, amazingly small, said Jake Bardall, who sold shoes on a commission mail-order business.
Oh, thank you—thank you, I said.
The thought seemed to strike everyone at once for at least three of them asked it.
Where is the other print? they chorused.
The wind blew so sweetly. O, I felt as if I could dance—dance—if only something soft and green, jade green, with sequins and paste gems were only clasping my dear little foot.
There was none, I said. The murder was committed by a one-legged person—quite strong in the shoulder and arm of the good side, as most such lame people are—and this one-legged person, to judge from the impression of the shoe in the moss, was probably a woman. Surely, no man would wear so small—so delicate—so petite a shoe.
Drawn by the sundown scents of frying steak in river-front pantries, a small brown dog came trotting past along the bricks and disappeared across Twelfth.
The murder weapon was metal, of considerable more weight than the piece of glass that the Brown—that Charlie Gribble has offered as exhibit A. No, this weapon—I leaned against the great, comforting tree and waved my crutch at them—this weapon, I said, was metal and tubular and of great weight. In fact, I went on, I believe this crutch of mine will, upon examination, prove to exactly fit the wound.
The dog barked at the screen door. Steaks and homefries and wilted-lettuce and gravy haunted the river wind.
No one spoke. I broke the silence.
Gentlemen, I said, I have given you your murderer. I have not confessed—I have irrefutably demonstrated. In the method of the canon—the technique of the Master.
I paused like a happy child about to leap a crying, country brook.
May I have the Persian Slipper? I whispered almost coquettishly. In perpetuity now.
The screen door slammed. But the supper sweetness dreamed sweetly on the wind and I could smell my azalea, too.
Yes, snapped the Brown Recluse. It’s up in the hotel. At what used to be 221B. On the mantel.
Will you get it for me?
No, damn you. Get it for yourself.
My progress from the big elm and up the town t
hat sundown evening is legend now. A dozen feet behind me purred Ory’s Plymouth cruiser. Lord, did they think I’d make a run for it? It took me one hour and fifteen minutes. Word spread fast. Kids and old people, too, came out on porches and stared over iced-tea glasses at a middle-aged cripple slowly hobbling up brick sidewalks toward her freedom. Oh, the poor fools. Didn’t they know I had won—won, at last?
The hardest part was making it up three flights of those hotel steps. And the long hallway with a door open and a poor young colored maid making up a room. I got there at last. I took the Persian Slipper down from its resting place on the mantel, under the patriotic VR. I sank into the Morris chair and, after a long spell, while all of them stood in the hall watching and craning their necks to see, I slipped my expensive hand-lasted shoe off my lovely foot. I wriggled my toes in the almost dark. I put on the Persian Slipper.
A strange thing has happened in the year since that night. I am sitting alone in my little room in a khaki, state uniform. The walls of the room are brown. Everything visible is some shade of brown. There is even a brownish cast to the beams of sunlight that manage to poke through my small window. Perhaps I am brown now, too—I have no mirror here. Only one spot of color blazes like a jewel in that dustbin of a place. Jade-green felt that curls into a cornucopia at the end, like a sweet, subtle pastry; bright sequins of lavender and mauve and cosmos blue, a glitter as of rubies and amethysts from the little gems of paste.
And I am free! No longer am I a flower pinned to earth on one leg—a stork incapable of delivering real babies. I am free. And that’s because the Persian Slipper is touched with enchantment and makes it be London out there when the fog comes up. When the fog comes up and makes it be Soho and Limehouse in all that fleecy Dickens world of night. Because you see with my marvelous Persian Slipper I can browse and wander through that strip of Thames just east of Mansion House. And every night—when the fog is up—you’ll find me there. If you look.
O, do come looking—do find me in that fog some night!
We can sit till morning and tell each other tales of Sherlock Holmes so wondrous that even he will not believe!
Or, if you prefer, we’ll go to haunt a spider.
Poor Charlie Gribble. No one believes him when he tells them he’s shrinking.
The Darkwater Hall Mystery
KINGSLEY AMIS
OF THE MANY elements of a full life for which Sir Kingsley William Amis (1922–1995) is famous, drinking may well head the list, though womanizing doesn’t trail by very much. The fact that he may be the leading British humorist of the second half of the twentieth century should not be forgotten, however, nor his rank (by the London Times) as the ninth greatest British writer since World War II.
He was a bestselling novelist with more than two dozen books to his credit, including the first, Lucky Jim (1954), which made a great impact both critically and with more than respectable international sales. While regarded as one of the Grand Old Men of British letters late in life, famous as one of the great satiric writers of the twentieth century, he also was a great aficionado of popular fiction, especially mystery fiction and even more especially James Bond. He wrote Colonel Sun (1968), a Bond novel, under the pseudonym Robert Markham, and two nonfiction books about 007: The James Bond Dossier (1965) and The Book of Bond, or Every Man His Own 007 (1965) under the pseudonym Lt.-Col. William (“Bill”) Tanner. Other mystery novels written under his own name are The Anti-Death League (1966), The Riverside Villas Murder (1973), Russian Hide-and-Seek (1980), and The Crime of the Century (1987).
“The Darkwater Hall Mystery” was first published in the May 1978 issue of Playboy; it was first published in book form in a chapbook, The Darkwater Hall Mystery (Edinburgh, Tragara Press, 1978). Its first commercial book publication was in Collected Short Stories (London, Hutchinson, 1980).
THE DARKWATER HALL MYSTERY
Kingsley Amis
ON CONSULTING MY notes, their paper grown yellow and their ink brown with the passage of almost forty years, I find it to have been in the closing days of July, 1885, that my friend Sherlock Holmes fell victim, more completely perhaps than at any other time, to the innate melancholy of his temperament. The circumstances were not propitious. London was stiflingly hot, without a drop of rain to lay the dust which, at intervals, a damp wind swept up Baker Street. The exertions caused Holmes by the affair of the Wallace-Bardwell portfolio, and the subsequent entrapment of the elusive Count Varga, had taken their toll of him. His grey eyes, always sharp and piercing, acquired a positively hectic brightness, and the thinness of his hawklike nose seemed accentuated. He smoked incessantly, getting through an ounce or more of heavy shag tobacco in a single day.
As his depression became blacker, he would sit in his purple dressing-gown with his fiddle across his knee and draw from it strange harmonies, sometimes sonorous, sometimes puzzling, more often harsh and disagreeable. Strange too, and quite as disagreeable, were the odours given off by his chemical experiments; I did not inquire their purpose. When he brought out his hair-trigger pistol and proceeded to add elaborate serifs to the patriotic V.R. done in bullet-pocks in the wall opposite his arm-chair, my impatience and my concern together dictated action. Nothing short of a complete rest, in conditions of comfort and ease such as I could not possibly provide, would restore my friend to health. I moved swiftly; telegrams were exchanged; within little more than twelve hours Sherlock Holmes was on his way to Hurlstone in Sussex, the seat of that Reginald Musgrave whose family treasures he had so brilliantly rediscovered some five years earlier. Thus it was that events conspired to embroil me in what I must describe as a truly singular adventure.
It came about in the following fashion. That same afternoon, I had just returned from visiting a patient when the housekeeper announced the arrival of a Lady Fairfax. The name at once stirred something in my memory, but I had had no time to apprehend it before my visitor had crossed the threshold of the sitting-room. There entered a blonde young woman of the most unusual beauty and distinction of feature. I was at once aware in her of a discomposure obviously not at all derived from the sweltering weather, to which indeed her bearing proclaimed utter indifference. I encouraged this lovely but troubled creature to be seated and to divulge her purpose.
“It was Mr. Sherlock Holmes whom I came to see, but I understand he has gone away and is not expected back for a fortnight,” she began.
“That is so.”
“Can he not be recalled?”
I shook my head. “Quite out of the question.”
“But I come on a matter of the utmost urgency. A life is in danger.”
“Lady Fairfax,” said I, “Holmes has been overworking and must have rest and a change of air. I speak not only as his friend but as his physician. I fear I cannot be influenced by any other consideration.”
The lady sighed and lowered her gaze into her lap. “May I at least acquaint you with the main facts of the matter?”
“Do so by all means, if you feel it will be of service to you.”
“Very well. My husband is Sir Harry Fairfax, the sixth baronet, of Darkwater Hall in Wiltshire. In his capacity as a magistrate, he had brought before him last year a man known locally as Black Ralph. The charge was poaching. There was no doubt of his guilt; he had erred before in this way and in others, and my husband’s sentence of twelve months in gaol was lenient to a degree. Now, Black Ralph is at liberty again, and word has reached our servants that he means to revenge himself on my husband—to kill him.”
“Kill him?” I ejaculated.
“Nothing less, Dr. Watson,” said Lady Fairfax, clasping and unclasping her white-gloved hands as she spoke. “My husband scouts these threats, calling Black Ralph a harmless rascal with a taste for rhetoric. But the fellow is no mere drunken reprobate such as one finds in every village; I have seen him and studied him, and I tell you he is malignant, and in all likelihood mentally deranged as well.”
I was at a loss. My visitor was by now extremely agitated, her vivi
d lips atremble and her fine blue eyes flashing fire. “He sounds most menacing,” said I, “and I understand your desire for assistance. I chance to know a certain Inspector Lestrade at Scotland Yard who would be happy to lend you all the aid he could.”
“Thank you, but my husband refuses to go to the police and has forbidden me to do so.”
“I see.”
“There must, however, be other consulting detectives in London whom I might approach. Perhaps you know of some of them?”
“Well,” said I after a short space, “it’s true that in the last year or so a number of—what shall I call them?—rivals of Sherlock Holmes have sprung up. But they’re very slight and unsatisfactory fellows. I could not in honesty recommend a single one.”
There was a silence. The lady sighed once more and at last turned to me. “Dr. Watson, will you help me?”
I had half expected this preposterous suggestion, but was none the better armed against it when it came. “I? I am quite unfit. I’m a simple medical man, Lady Fairfax, not a detective.”
“But you have worked with Mr. Holmes on his previous cases. You are his close friend and associate. You must have learned a great deal from him.”
“I think I can say I know his methods, but there are aspects of his activities of which I am altogether ignorant.”
“That would not prevent you from talking to my husband, from making him see the peril he faces. Nor from approaching Black Ralph, warning him, offering him money. Dr. Watson, I know you think me overwrought, fanciful, perhaps even deluded. Is it not the case, that you think so?”
This was uncommonly and uncomfortably shrewd, not only as an observation, but also as a turn of tactics. I made some motion intended to be evasive.
“Thank you for being so honest,” was the smiling response. “Now I may be all you suppose, but I lay no obligation upon you, and would two or three comfortable days out of London in this weather be so great a burden?”