Ellery Queen's Champions of Mystery vol. 33 (1977)

by Ellery Queen

  “You see, H.M.,” she hesitated, “there was another reason why I invited you here. I—I don’t quite know how to approach it.”

  “I’m the old man,” said H.M., tapping himself impressively on the chest. “You tell me.”

  “Eve, darling!” interposed Vicky’s voice, crying across the ragged lawn. “Coo-ee! Eve!”

  “Yes, dear?”

  “I’ve just remembered,” cried Vicky, “that I haven’t shown Bill over the cottage! You don’t mind if I steal him away from you for a little while?”

  “No, dear! Of course not!”

  It was H.M., sitting so as to face the bungalow, who saw Vicky and Bill go in. He saw Vicky’s wistful smile as she closed the door after them. Eve did not even look round. The sun was declining, making fiery chinks through the thickness of Goblin Wood behind the cottage.

  “I won’t let her have him,” Eve suddenly cried. “I won’t! I won’t! I won’t!”

  “Does she want him, my wench? Or, which is more to the point, does he want her?”

  “He never has,” Eve said with emphasis. “Not really. And he never will.”

  H.M., motionless, puffed out cigar smoke.

  “Vicky’s a faker,” said Eve. “Does that sound catty?”

  “Not necessarily. I was just thinkin’ the same thing myself.”

  “I’m patient,” said Eve. Her blue eyes were fixed. “I’m terribly, terribly patient. I can wait years for what I want. Bill’s not making much money now, and I haven’t got a bean. But Bill’s got great talent under that easy-going manner of his. He must have the right girl to help him. If only. . .”

  “If only the elfin sprite would let him alone. Hey?”

  “Vicky acts like that,” said Eve, “towards practically every man she ever meets. That’s why she never married. She says it leaves her soul free to commune with other souls. This occultism—”

  Then it all poured out, the family story of the Adamses. This repressed girl spoke at length, spoke as perhaps she had never spoken before. Vicky Adams, the child who wanted to attract attention, her father Uncle Fred and her mother Aunt Margaret seemed to walk in vividness as the shadows gathered.

  “I was too young to know her at the time of the ‘disappearance,’ of course. But, oh, I knew her afterwards! And I thought. . .”

  “Well?”

  “If I could get you here,” said Eve, “I thought she’d try to show off with some game. And then you’d expose her. And Bill would see what an awful faker she is. But it’s hopeless! It’s hopeless!”

  “Looky here,” observed H.M., who was smoking his third cigar. He sat up. “Doesn’t it strike you those two are being a rummy-awful long time just in lookin’ through a little bungalow?”

  Eve, roused out of a dream, stared back at him. She sprang to her feet. She was not now, you could guess, thinking of any disappearance.

  “Excuse me a moment,” she said curtly.

  Eve hurried across to the cottage, went up on the porch, and opened the front door. H.M. heard her heels rap down the length of the small passage inside. She marched straight back again, closed the front door, and rejoined H.M.

  “All the doors of the rooms are shut,” she announced in a high voice, “I really don’t think I ought to disturb them.”

  “Easy, my wench!”

  “I have absolutely no interest,” declared Eve, with the tears coming into her eyes, “in what happens to either of them now. Shall we take the car and go back to town without them?”

  H.M. threw away his cigar, got up, and seized her up by the shoulders.

  “I’m the old man,” he said, leering like an ogre. “Will you listen to me?”

  “No!”

  “If I’m any reader of the human dial,” persisted H.M., “that young feller’s no more gone on Vicky Adams than I am. He was scared, my wench. Scared.” Doubt, indecision crossed H.M.’s face. “I dunno what he’s scared of. Burn me, I don’t! But. . .”

  “Hoy!” called the voice of Bill Sage.

  It did not come from the direction of the cottage.

  They were surrounded on three sides by Goblin Wood, now blurred with twilight. From the north side the voice bawled at them, followed by crackling in dry undergrowth. Bill, his hair and sports coat and flannels more than a little dirty, regarded them with a face of bitterness.

  “Here are her blasted wild strawberries,” he announced, extending his hand. “Three of ’em. The fruitful (excuse me) result of three quarters of an hour’s hard labor. I absolutely refuse to chase ’em in the dark.”

  For a moment Eve Drayton’s mouth moved without speech.

  “Then you weren’t. . .in the cottage all this time?”

  “In the cottage?” Bill glanced at it. “I was in that cottage,” he said, “about five minutes. Vicky had a woman’s whim. She wanted some wild strawberries out of what she called the ‘forest.’”

  “Wait a minute, son!” said H.M. very sharply. “You didn’t come out that front door. Nobody did.”

  “No! I went out the back door! It opens straight on the wood.”

  “Yes. And what happened then?”

  “Well, I went to look for these damned. . .”

  “No, no! What did she do?”

  “Vicky? She locked and bolted the back door on the inside. I remember her grinning at me through the glass panel. She—”

  Bill stopped short. His eyes widened, and then narrowed, as though at the impact of an idea.

  All three of them turned to look at the rough-stone cottage.

  “By the way,” said Bill. He cleared his throat vigorously. “By the way, have you seen Vicky since then?”

  “No.”

  “This couldn’t be. . .?”

  “It could be, son,” said H.M. “We’d all better go in there and have a look.”

  They hesitated for a moment on the porch. A warm, moist fragrance breathed up from the ground after sunset. In half an hour it would be completely dark.

  Bill Sage threw open the front door and shouted Vicky’s name. That sound seemed to penetrate, reverberating, through every room. The intense heat and stuffiness of the cottage, where no window had been raised in months, blew out at them. But nobody answered.

  “Get inside,” snapped H.M. “And stop yowlin’.” The Old Maestro was nervous. “I’m dead sure she didn’t get out by the front door; but we’ll just make certain there’s no slippin’ out now.”

  Stumbling over the table and chairs they had used on the porch, he fastened the front door. They were in a narrow passage, once handsome with parquet floor and pine-paneled walls, leading to a door with a glass panel at the rear. H.M. lumbered forward to inspect this door and found it locked and bolted, as Bill had said.

  Goblin Wood grew darker.

  Keeping well together, they searched the cottage. It was not large, having two good-sized rooms on one side of the passage, and two small rooms on the other side, so as to make space for bathroom and kitchenette. H.M., raising fogs of dust, ransacked every inch where a person could possibly hide.

  And all the windows were locked on the inside. And the chimney-flues were too narrow to admit anybody.

  And Vicky Adams wasn’t there.

  “Oh, my eye!” breathed Sir Henry Merrivale.

  They had gathered, by what idiotic impulse not even H.M. could have said, just outside the open door of the bathroom. A bath-tap dripped monotonously. The last light through a frosted-glass window showed three faces hung there as though disembodied.

  “Bill,” said Eve in an unsteady voice, “this is a trick. Oh, I’ve longed for her to be exposed! This is a trick!”

  “Then where is she?”

  “H.M. can tell us! Can’t you, H.M.?”

  “Well. . .now,” muttered the great man.

  Across H.M.’s Panama hat was a large black handprint, made there when he had pressed down the hat after investigating a chimney. He glowered under it.

  “Son,” he said to Bill, “there’s just one question I
want you to answer in all this hokey-pokey. When you went out pickin’ wild strawberries, will you swear Vicky Adams didn’t go with you?”

  “As God is my judge, she didn’t,” returned Bill, with fervency and obvious truth. “Besides, how the devil could she? Look at the lock and bolt on the back door!”

  H.M. made two more violent black handprints on his hat.

  He lumbered forward, his head down, two or three paces in the narrow passage. His foot half-skidded on something that had been lying there unnoticed, and he picked it up. It was a large, square section of thin, waterproof oilskin, jagged at one corner.

  “Have you found anything?” demanded Bill in a strained voice.

  “No. Not to make any sense, that is. But just a minute!”

  At the rear of the passage, on the left-hand side, was the bedroom from which Vicky Adams had vanished as a child. Though H.M. had searched this room once before, he opened the door again.

  It was now almost dark in Goblin Wood.

  He saw dimly a room of twenty years before: a room of flounces, of lace curtains, of once-polished mahogany, its mirrors glimmering against white-papered walls. H.M. seemed especially interested in the windows.

  He ran his hands carefully round the frame of each, even climbing laboriously up on a chair to examine the tops. He borrowed a box of matches from Bill; and the little spurts of light, following the rasp of the match, rasped against the nerves as well. The hope died out of his face, and his companions saw it.

  “H.M.,” Bill said for the dozenth time, “where is she?”

  “Son,” replied H.M. despondently, “I don’t know.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” Eve said abruptly. Her voice was a small scream. “I kn-know it’s all a trick! I know Vicky’s a faker! But let’s get out of here. For God’s sake let’s get out of here!”

  “As a matter of fact,” Bill cleared his throat, “I agree. Anyway, we won’t hear from Vicky until tomorrow morning.”

  “Oh, yes, you will,” whispered Vicky’s voice out of the darkness.

  Eve screamed.

  They lighted a lamp.

  But there was nobody there.

  Their retreat from the cottage, it must be admitted, was not very dignified.

  How they stumbled down that ragged lawn in the dark, how they piled rugs and picnic-hampers into the car, how they eventually found the main road again, is best left undescribed.

  Sir Henry Merrivale has since sneered at this—“a bit of a goosy feeling; nothin’ much,”—and it is true that he has no nerves to speak of. But he can be worried, badly worried; and that he was worried on this occasion may be deducted from what happened later.

  H.M., after dropping in at Claridge’s for a modest late supper of lobster and Pêche Melba, returned to his house in Brook Street and slept a hideous sleep. It was three o’clock in the morning, even before the summer dawn, when the ringing of the bedside telephone roused him.

  What he heard sent his blood pressure soaring.

  “Dear Sir Henry!” crooned a familiar and spite-like voice.

  H.M. was himself again, full of gall and bile. He switched on the bedside lamp and put on his spectacles with care, so as adequately to address the ’phone.

  “Have I got the honor,” he said with dangerous politeness, “of addressin’ Miss Vicky Adams?”

  “Oh, yes!”

  “I sincerely trust,” said H.M., “you’ve been havin’ a good time? Are you materialized yet?”

  “Oh, yes!”

  “Where are you now?”

  “I’m afraid,” there was coy laughter in the voice, “that must be a little secret for a day or two. I want to teach you a really good lesson. Blessings, dear.”

  And she hung up the receiver.

  H.M. did not say anything. He climbed out of bed. He stalked up and down the room, his corporation majestic under an old-fashioned nightshirt stretching to his heels. Then, since he himself had been waked up at three o’clock in the morning, the obvious course was to wake up somebody else; so he dialed the home number of Chief Inspector Masters.

  “No, sir,” retorted Masters grimly, after coughing the frog out of his throat, “I do not mind you ringing up. Not a bit of it!” He spoke with a certain pleasure. “Because I’ve got a bit of news for you.”

  H.M. eyed the ’phone suspiciously.

  “Masters, are you trying to do me in the eye again?”

  “It’s what you always try to do to me, isn’t it?”

  “All right, all right!” growled H.M. “What’s the news?”

  “Do you remember mentioning the Vicky Adams case yesterday?”

  “Sort of. Yes.”

  “Oh, ah! Well, I had a word or two round among our people. I was tipped the wink to go and see a certain solicitor. He was old Mr. Fred Adams’s solicitor before Mr. Adams died about six or seven years ago.”

  Here Masters’ voice grew triumphant.

  “I always said, Sir Henry, that Chuck Randall had planted some gadget in that cottage for a quick getaway. And I was right. The gadget was. . .”

  “You were quite right, Masters. The gadget was a trick window.”

  The telephone, so to speak, gave a start.

  “What’s that?”

  “A trick window.” H.M. spoke patiently. “You press a spring. And the whole frame of the window, two leaves locked together, slides down between the walls far enough so you can climb over. Then you push it back up again.”

  “How in lum’s name do you know that?”

  “Oh, my son! They used to build windows like it in country houses during the persecution of Catholic priests. It was a good enough second guess. Only. . .it won’t work.”

  Masters seemed annoyed. “It won’t work now,” Masters agreed. “And do you know why?”

  “I can guess. Tell me.”

  “Because, just before Mr. Adams died, he discovered how his darling daughter had flummoxed him. He never told anybody except his lawyer. He took a handful of four-inch nails, and sealed up the top of that frame so tight an orangutang couldn’t move it, and painted ’em over so they wouldn’t be noticed.”

  “Uh-huh. You can notice ’em now.”

  “I doubt if the young lady herself ever knew. But, by George!” Masters said savagely. “I’d like to see anybody try the same game now!”

  “You would, hey? Then will it interest you to know that the same gal has just disappeared out of the same house AGAIN?”

  H.M. began a long narrative of the facts, but he had to break off because the telephone was raving.

  “Honest, Masters,” H.M. said seriously, “I’m not joking. She didn’t get out through that window. But she did get out. You’d better meet me,” he gave directions, “tomorrow morning. In the meantime, son, sleep well.”

  It was, therefore, a worn-faced Masters who went into the Visitors’ Room at the Senior Conservatives’ Club just before lunch on the following day.

  The Visitors’ Room is a dark sepulchral place, opening on an air-well, where the visitor is surrounded by pictures of dyspeptic-looking gentlemen with beards. It has a pervading mustiness of wood and leather. Though whiskey and soda stood on the table, H.M. sat in a leather chair far away from it, ruffling his hands across his bald head.

  “Now, Masters, keep your shirt on!” he warned. “This business may be rummy. But it’s not a police matter—yet.”

  “I know it’s not a police matter,” Masters said grimly. “All the same, I’ve had a word with the Superintendent at Aylesbury.”

  “Fowler?”

  “You know him?”

  “Sure. I know everybody. Is he goin’ to keep an eye out?”

  “He’s going to have a look at that ruddy cottage. I’ve asked for any telephone calls to be put through here. In the meantime, sir—”

  It was at this point, as though diabolically inspired, that the telephone rang. H.M. reached it before Masters.

  “It’s the old man,” he said, unconsciously assuming a stance of grandeu
r. “Yes, yes! Masters is here, but he’s drunk. You tell me first. What’s that?”

  The telephone talked thinly.

  “Sure I looked in the kitchen cupboard,” bellowed H.M. “Though I didn’t honestly expect to find Vicky Adams hidin’ there. What’s that? Say it again! Plates? Cups that had been. . .”

  An almost frightening change had come over H.M.’s expression. He stood motionless. All the posturing went out of him. He was not even listening to the voice that still talked thinly, while his eyes and his brain moved to put together facts. At length (though the voice still talked) he hung up the receiver.

  H.M. blundered back to the center table, where he drew out a chair and sat down.

  “Masters,” he said very quietly, “I’ve come close to makin’ the silliest mistake of my life.”

  Here he cleared his throat.

  “I shouldn’t have made it, son. I really shouldn’t. But don’t yell at me for cuttin’ off Fowler. I can tell you now how Vicky Adams disappeared. And she said one true thing when she said she was going into a strange country.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “She’s dead,” answered H.M.

  The word fell with heavy weight into that dingy room, where the bearded faces looked down.

  “Y’see,” H.M. went on blankly, “a lot of us were right when we thought Vicky Adams was a faker. She was. To attract attention to herself, she played that trick on her family with the hocused window. She’s lived and traded on it ever since. That’s what sent me straight in the wrong direction. I was on the alert for some trick Vicky Adams might play. So it never occurred to me that this elegant pair of beauties, Miss Eve Drayton and Mr. William Sage, were deliberately conspirin’ to murder her.”

  Masters got slowly to his feet.

  “Did you say. . .murder?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  Again H.M. cleared his throat.

  “It was all arranged beforehand for me to be a witness. They knew Vicky Adams couldn’t resist a challenge to disappear, especially as Vicky always believed she could get out by the trick window. They wanted Vicky to say she was goin’ to disappear. They never knew anything about the trick window, Masters. But they knew their own plan very well.