‘Why no letters before that?’
‘I think,’ said Block slowly, ‘that all the way along, this was a crime arising out of opportunity. And here was the first opportunity. The months passed, the baby was born, Robbins fumed and was sick with anger; he couldn’t just go and beat up the seducer—he was in the police, and the police wouldn’t stand for that sort of thing; and more important, he wasn’t going to let the world know of his shame. But then—well, Mysterioso told us that these invitations to lay cornerstones and whatnot were arranged months in advance; and the first people to know about forthcoming events are the local police. Suddenly P.C. Robbins learned that his enemy was coming to Thrushford.
‘Threats at first, meaningless probably, just to give the seducer a bad time, with the vague hope that when he comes to Thrushford with his master, one may be able to add some small frightening shock just to shake him up. But the seducer turns it all to his own advantage, makes a sort of public joke of it, hands the letters to another man. The rankling anger grows and grows and begins to take on a more positive quality. And then the second opportunity presents itself.
‘I don’t know which came first—the rifle or the post of duty outside the unfinished wing. Either could have been fiddled, I daresay, having achieved the other. Not too difficult, for example, for a policeman to come by a weapon. Some old lady finds the gun after her husband’s death, hardly dares to touch the nasty dangerous thing, knows nothing certainly of numbers and identification marks, hands it over to the first copper, and thinks no more about it. He may have had it stashed away for years, or from the time his suspicions were first aroused; by the time it came to be used, the hander-over could be dead or senile or have moved elsewhere—certainly it was never traced. At any rate, with it in his possession and a perfect place at his disposal for using it, he began seriously to think about taking action. He thought out a plan, worked on it, and brought it off. And damn near perfect it turned out to be.’
‘No one guessed at the time how the thing was done?’
‘My higher-ups may have; but it was all so tenuous. Still, he’d lived in the flats where Mysterioso had visited; they must have had some suspicions—’
‘Only, I had lived there too.’
‘That’s right. And been on the scene of the crime also. So how to choose between the two of you when it seemed impossible for either of you to have done it? At any rate, they cooked up some excuse and got rid of him—I remember him as a difficult chap, brooding and touchy—well, no wonder! I daresay they weren’t sorry to let him go. It wasn’t till tonight…’ He laughed. ‘It hit you at the same moment?—how it had been done. I remember how you stopped and stared and said, “Dear God!”’
‘But you went on with the theory about possible collusion—’
‘I had to run through all the possibilities. I had to leave no doubts in anyone’s mind. I didn’t want people coming to the boy afterwards, saying, “He never covered this or that aspect.” But by then, I knew. When the boy accused you of making the hole in the roof before I saw you apparently making it—’
‘It accounted for the bag of apples and all,’ said Mr. Photoze. ‘So simple! Wasn’t it?’
So simple.
P.C. Robbins with hate in his heart and a long-perfected plan of revenge. After the major search of the previous day, concealing the rifle, the rope, the string, the apples, preparing the boards for dovetailing into a tripod. Slipping up when the final inspection had been concluded and they’d all gone off to prepare for the ceremony, erecting the tripod, fixing the rifle, winding a length of twine around the butt to suggest exactly what in fact had been deduced—that some trick with the string had been played. (A bag of apples dropped on to a taut string, jerking back a trigger—the nonsense of it! As if anyone for a moment could really depend on anything so absurdly susceptible to failure!) Down again, unseen because there was as yet nobody on the hospital balcony; or if observed, just another copper going about his business; the police had been up and down all day.
And then—
The sound of a shot—in the unfinished wing. A policeman tearing up, two steps at a time, pausing only to yell out, ‘Watch the stairs!’ and ‘They’ve got him!’ Pandemonium, predictably, on the hospital balcony, everyone talking at once, a lot of people ill and easily thrown into hysteria. Noise and confusion, at any rate, masking the sound of—
‘Of the real shot,’ said Mr. Photoze.
‘How do you hide a brown paper bag?—a paper bag that you’ve blown up and burst, to fake the sound of a shot. You fill it with too many apples and leave it prominently displayed, with two or three of them apparently rolled out from the tear in the side.’
‘So his father did commit the murder,’ said Mr. Photoze. ‘But in fact he didn’t. Because the man he calls his father, was not his father. So we could all look him in the eye and tell him that his father was innocent.’
‘These trick-psychs!’ said Inspector Block. ‘Oedipal complexes, delusions, paranoia—looking for a scapegoat for his own guilt feelings towards his dead father, because he had resented him in life, his dominance over himself; been jealous of the father’s possession of the mother—all the rest of it. “A long period of treatment!” Damn nonsense! One evening’s straight-forward discussion—merely convince the boy that his suspicions are unfounded, and that’s all there is to it. From now on, he’ll be as right as rain.’
The boy was as right as rain. He was bending over the Grand Mysterioso, lying back helpless in the big armchair. ‘If they didn’t do it—then you must have. Of course it wasn’t you that was meant to be killed—I can see that now; it was Tom. Because it was you that killed him—wasn’t it? It has to be. There’s nobody else. You were dependent on him—you hated him for that, to be humiliatingly dependent, like a child; I know about that, I know what that’s like, to be a child and—and hate someone, underneath: and to be helpless. And jealous of him—you were jealous because he was a man and you weren’t one any more; you told us about that just now, you and that woman: you gave away how ashamed you were. I know about that too. I was only a child but my—my father was a man.
‘I was angry with my father about that, but you—you were ashamed. And so you killed him; it must have been you, there’s nobody else. Oh, don’t ask me how—you’re the magician, you’re the one that knows the tricks; you said it yourself, things like melting ice and burning-down candles and a lot of others, I expect, that you carefully didn’t mention; but you’d know them all, all right. And there you were with your big cloak, even on such a hot day—all pockets and hiding places…
‘And you were on your own—they left you alone when they went down the corridor and hoisted Mr. Photoze up on to the roof and shot the bolt after him; quite a while they must have been there and by the time they came back you were waiting for them, standing in the doorway of the room—standing in the doorway, blocking off their view into that room with your big body and your big cloak. If you could get across the room from the window to the door, then you could do other things—oh, I don’t know how and I don’t care; you’re the magician, you do tricks that nobody ever sees through and this was just another of them. But you did it. If that fool with his bangles and his photos didn’t, well then, there’s no one else.’
No one else. For a moment there had been no one at all and that had been the worst, that had been the most terrible of all. So this one must not escape. Deep, deep down, perhaps, below conscious calculation, lay the cold knowledge of how tenuous a tether held this last scapegoat safe, the knowledge that this sacrificial goat must be placed beyond power of redemption or he too would be gone. ‘It was you. And for what you did, my father suffered for the rest of his life; it was dreadful, we were so poor, they were always fighting and my father—wasn’t always… Well, sometimes he was unkind, a bloody little bastard he used to call me, and my mother used to cry and cry…’
He went on and on, face chalk white, scarlet-streaked. But he was all right now, ‘as right as rain
’. He had found his scapegoat and now forever made his scapegoat safe; and so might love his mother and be loved by her without feeling guilty that his father was dead and could rival him no more. His father had suffered and died, and it had been—horrible—to go on resenting his memory; but now he had avenged his father and he was free.
The spittle ran down from his gibbering mouth and fell upon the upturned face of the Grand Mysterioso. But Mysterioso made no move to prevent it. The boy had his hands around his throat and he was dead.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The Niece from Scotland © 1972, 1974 by Christianna Brand; A Miracle in Montepulciano © 1961, 1974 by Christianna Brand; Such a Nice Man © 1972, 1974 by Christianna Brand; I Will Repay © 1974 by Christianna Brand; How the Unicorn Became Extinct © 1969, 1974 by Christianna Brand; The Kite (The King of the Air) © 1968, 1974; Charm Farm © 1970, 1974 by Christianna Brand; A Bit of Bovver © 1971, 1974 by Christianna Brand; The Blackthorn © 1974 by Christianna Brand; The Hilltop © 1974 by Christianna Brand; How Green Is My Valley! © 1969, 1974 by Christianna Brand; Bless This House © 1974 by Christianna Brand; Spring 1941 © 1974 by Christianna Brand; Murder Hath Charms © 1974 by Christianna Brand; An Apple for the Teacher © 1974 by Christianna Brand; Pigeon Pie © 1974 by Christianna Brand; Madame Thinks Quick © March and April 1974 by Christianna Brand; The Scapegoat © 1970, 1974 by Christianna Brand.
Copyright © 1974 by Christianna Brand
cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
ISBN 978-1-4532-9051-4
This 2013 edition distributed by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media
180 Varick Street
New York, NY 10014
www.mysteriouspress.com
www.openroadmedia.com
EBOOKS BY
CHRISTIANNA BRAND
FROM MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM
FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA
Available wherever ebooks are sold
Otto Penzler, owner of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan, founded the Mysterious Press in 1975. Penzler quickly became known for his outstanding selection of mystery, crime, and suspense books, both from his imprint and in his store. The imprint was devoted to printing the best books in these genres, using fine paper and top dust-jacket artists, as well as offering many limited, signed editions.
Now the Mysterious Press has gone digital, publishing ebooks through MysteriousPress.com.
MysteriousPress.com offers readers essential noir and suspense fiction, hard-boiled crime novels, and the latest thrillers from both debut authors and mystery masters. Discover classics and new voices, all from one legendary source.
FIND OUT MORE AT
WWW.MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM
FOLLOW US:
@emysteries and Facebook.com/MysteriousPressCom
MysteriousPress.com is one of a select group of publishing partners of Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
Open Road Integrated Media is a digital publisher and multimedia content company. Open Road creates connections between authors and their audiences by marketing its ebooks through a new proprietary online platform, which uses premium video content and social media.
Videos, Archival Documents, and New Releases
Sign up for the Open Road Media newsletter and get news delivered straight to your inbox.
Sign up now at
www.openroadmedia.com/newsletters
FIND OUT MORE AT
WWW.OPENROADMEDIA.COM
FOLLOW US:
@openroadmedia and
Facebook.com/OpenRoadMedia
Brand X Page 23
