by Ellery Queen
“May I be of no help?”
“No, no, you just run along and comfort your young lady. Old Giddy’ll save the day.”
Reluctantly, Millard left the guest cottage and returned to the main house, making another set of tracks in the artificial snow. By now there were fifteen distinct sets of tracks going to the door of the guest cottage and returning, but at the time the crime was discovered there had been none—only those of the servant Answorth, who had discovered the body.
As he walked across the snow, Millard heard a curious sound emanating from the guest cottage. A hammering sound. Could Old Giddy be building something?
Entering the main house, Millard greeted Nancy. She noticed at once his pale face. “Have you seen the ghost?” she demanded.
“No,” he rejoined. “Have you?”
“No, but you look white as a sheet. Is Old Giddy investigating?”
“Yes,” Millard confirmed, a far-away look in his eye. “But I think I’ll do some investigating of my own and try to help Old Giddy out. Do you know the phone number of the Louisiana offices of the British Rail?”
The Pinkerton investigator rubbed his jaw ponderously. “No, Mr. Carstairs. No one entered or left the cottage but the servant. And every time he’d given the old man his food and mail, we’d smooth out the artificial snow so we’d be sure to notice if any more footprints appeared in it.”
“Did the old retainer ever have anything unusual with him?” Millard probed.
“Oh, frog’s legs, mock turtle soup, cucumber-and-onion ice cream, pickled octopus tentacles, rattlesnake pot-pie—”
“Besides the food, I mean,” Millard interrupted.
“No, not that I can—oh, there was his pet elephant.”
“Pet elephant!” Millard started.
“Yeah, the last time the old servant brought the food, he also had Sir Margrove Clifton’s pet elephant with him on a leash. He said the animal was lonesome and wanted to visit his master.”
“Was it a big elephant?”
“No, no. Just a baby. Maybe a five-hundred pounder.”
“And did the elephant come out when Answorth did?”
“Now that you mention it, no. I should have noticed that. The elephant stayed in there with Mr. Clifton.”
“Yet no elephant was found when you broke into the cottage?”
“No, that’s right. Gee whiz, now we got a vanished elephant on our hands on top of everything else.”
Millard did not seem disturbed. “Do you think I could have another look at the murder scene?”
“Sure I guess so. Old Giddy’s through in there.”
Within moments, Millard found what he was looking for. Under a rug in the cottage was a trap door that had been recently nailed down.
Working quickly, he managed to pry it open and dropped down into a tunnel below the cottage.
Turning on his flashlight, he followed the tunnel in the direction of the main house. Halfway there he found what he had expected: a discarded elephant suit. Leaving this important but unwieldy piece of evidence behind, he hurried on to whatever awaited him at the end of the tunnel. Speed was essential, for Millard knew he could easily be too late.
Not bothering to look for a secret panel or a concealed button, Millard crashed through the last barrier like a hero from a Dime Novel of his post-Victorian youth.
As he rather expected, he was in the servant’s quarters. He had overturned a bookcase in Answorth’s tiny room, and that elderly servant, gasping and shocked but fortunately still alive, was lying on the floor in a heap of volumes by such authors as Jacques Futrelle, Thomas W. Hanshew, Carolyn Wells, and Fergus Hume.
“Thank God he hasn’t gotten to you yet, Answorth!” Millard enthused triumphantly. “You’re bound to be the next victim. You know entirely too much!”
“I don’t understand. About what?”
“Old Giddy had been here before we arrived with him tonight, had he not?”
Answorth was silent.
“I know he made you promise not to tell, to pretend you hadn’t seen him before if he arrived a second time. But you must tell me to save your life. He was here, wasn’t he?”
“Yes,” the old retainer croaked.
“And he visited your master, Margrove Clifton, disguised as an elephant, didn’t he?”
“Yes, sir. He didn’t want Mr. Billy or Mr. Cavendish or Miss Jessica or Mr. Franklin to know he was here then, you see.”
“And he never came out?”
“No, sir. He was going to stay there to protect Mr. Clifton.”
“The heck he was!” Millard remonstrated.
“Believe it or not, son, that was the original plan,” said a new voice. A four-hundred-pound spectre had appeared in the doorway, an antique duelling pistol in his hand. “But I was kind of desperate, don’t you see? Desperate for the kind of locked-room problem that made me famous. When I found that he had a trap door in the guest cottage, a bloomin’ tunnel that led from there to the main house, I knew exactly what the critics—and I have my critics, son—would say: that gimmick is a cheat. Secret passages and tunnels go back to Ann Radcliffe and Horace Walpole and Monk Lewis, and in a modern detective story—and this is a modern detective story, son, whatever you may think—such outworn devices are against the rules.
“So I was infuriated at him for invitin’ me here to the House of the Shrill Whispers, on false pretences as it were. So I took out my pistol and shot him dead, planning to escape through the tunnel here and later go back and nail down the trap door, meanwhile tryin’ to come up with some other explanation for the murder in the triple-locked cottage.”
“And thus blame an innocent person for the crime!”
“No, son, not really. I just wanted to safeguard my reputation. I don’t even mind bein’ the murderer really, but havin’ the gimmick turn out to be a secret passage! That was positively out.”
The eyes behind the two monocles looked genuinely sad. “Of course, I knew Answorth would have to die, because he knew I was there in the first place, in the elephant suit, and he knew about the tunnel. But I didn’t count on havin’ to kill you, too, son. It goes down hard, but hang it, it does go down. Before I shoot you, though, son, I think it only fair that you explain how you got on to me, how you figured it all out.”
“Easy, Old Giddy. It was when you mentioned that the victim had been killed by a duelling pistol before Answorth even told us what the weapon was. Then, when I heard you hammering behind the locked door, I guessed that you were trying to cover up your tracks somehow. I called British Rail, and they told me all the times for the trains that stop at the Warwick-on-Stems station. There are only two a day, the one we arrived on and the earlier one that you arrived on in the first place.
“But a handcar was stolen from the Warwick-on-Stems station early to-day, and it was found off the track in the bushes near the place where you first appeared on our train. It must have been a very athletic performance on your part, Old Giddy, leaping onto a moving train, especially for a man who is so bulky as to get stuck between cars. But your reputation was at stake, Old Giddy, and so you were able to perform far beyond your normal strength.”
The murderer smiled benignly. “Say, old son, I did do a right fine job of it, didn’t I? In fact, what I did was more impossible than any impossible crime I ever investigated, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, Old Giddy, Nick Carter couldn’t have done better.”
Old Giddy twirled the duelling pistol and returned it to its holster. “Son, I ain’t gonna kill you after all. No, I’m givin’ myself up. There ain’t a jail in Louisiana that can hold Sir Gideon Merrimac. I hope you and Miss Nancy are happy with your money.”
“You’re a good sport, Old Giddy. But it’s her money, and I won’t live off my wife.”
“Did you say wife?” enquired a new voice. Nancy had appeared in the doorway. “It’s premature, isn’t it, Millard? The crime isn’t solved yet, and the suspects are waiting downstairs for you to question them, Old Giddy
.”
“The crime has been solved, Miss,” Old Giddy said dolefully.
“But the ghost of Admiral Cogsby hasn’t walked yet.”
“Ghost!” roared Old Giddy. “Ghost!” he bellowed with a laugh that reverberated through the House of the Shrill Whispers. “The way my luck’s runnin’, it’ll be a real ghost!”
Celia Fremlin
Golden Tuesday
William was “a wonderful husband” and he had “the patience of a saint.” He was the stuff of which martyrs are made. At least, that’s what the neighbors were beginning to say and think. . .
A distinguished story with the “luminous quality” that so many of Celia Fremlin’s stories have. . .
The tiny moment of suspense, the passing flicker of dread lest, this time. Coral would not be waiting for him at their usual table—this was all part of William’s Tuesday happiness, and he wouldn’t have missed it for anything. He paused in the doorway of the discotheque, savoring these moments of delicious terror (delicious because unfounded) while the pop music that Coral loved streamed out past him into the winter night, and his eyes searched the rosy dimness inside for a gleam of cool blonde hair, for a glimpse of pouting, impatient lips, fashionably metallic, and drawing, restless with waiting, on yet another cigarette.
As he stood there, bathed in the drumbeat rhythm, and with the pale glittering young people surging past him out of the night, William didn’t feel 48. He didn’t feel married; and least of all did he feel like the saintly, devoted paragon of a husband that his wife’s illness had forced him into becoming.
Yes, forced. All through the years when Eleanor had been well and strong and like anyone else’s wife, William had been like anyone else’s husband—cheerfully selfish, casually loving, and full of complaints, as are a man’s rights.
But Eleanor’s illness had finished all that. It had silenced his complaints, pole-axed his selfishness. All that was left was the loving—casual no longer, but nursed and coddled like an overfed cat, bloated with pity and good intentions.
“What a wonderful husband!” the neighbors were beginning to say of him. “Whatever would she do without him?” “The patience of an angel,” they were saying. “Never a cross word, even now that she’s grown so trying, poor thing!”
Actually he had been hustled into being wonderful, inch by inch, and fighting all the way. Slowly, inexorably, Eleanor’s aching back, her worsening stomach pains, had forced him back and back, blocking first one exit and then another, until at last here he was, like a man trapped by the advancing tide, finally and irrevocably at the mercy of her encroaching illness.
By attacks of nausea, by bouts of uncontrollable shivering, her sickness had got him into its power; bit by bit, day after day, it had molded him, twisting and transforming his commonplace flesh into an angel substance, the stuff of which martyrs are made. He had accepted his role of martyr because he could not fight it; he nursed Eleanor with tenderness and devotion because these seemed to be the only tools left to him; and his reward for all this was a monstrous, ever-increasing tedium, as Eleanor grew more and more boring, lapsed more and more into pain. . .
Someone had put on another record. It roared out from the russet darkness of the discotheque like a trumpet call to Youth, and William’s nostrils quivered at the summons like those of an old warhorse. Youth, youth! His 48 years seemed to slide away into the night, and so did all thought of his dreary middle-aged wife, hollowed out by her dreary middle-aged operations.
He was free, free of it all, for one golden evening! Free like these bearded striplings, like these dozy half-grown girls, delicious in their ignorance of pain! Free! Free! His magic Tuesday evening had begun!
William pushed open the swinging door and marched, head held high, into the very shrine of youth, marched tall and proud because he had a girl in there of his very own. A girl as gloriously young as the rest, and as delectable, and waiting for him.
“Willy! There you are! I was beginning to think something had happened! I was afraid you’d had to stay with her! Oh, Willy, darling!”
She always welcomed him with these exclamations, reaching out her silver-tipped little fingers to draw him down beside her, into the place she had been guarding for him on the red plastic cushions. He loved the feel of her soft hands not yet touched by work; and he loved too her never-failing surprise, Tuesday after Tuesday, at his successful arrival at the rendezvous. The predictability of her every word and gesture was infinitely soothing to him; it gave to these Tuesday evenings a luminous quality, the precious minutes sliding through his fingers like a necklace of well-loved jewels. He knew already what her next words were going to be, and how he was going to answer them; he waited, joyously expectant as a child awaiting his familiar bedtime story.
“Is she any better?”
Coral’s voice held just the note of anxious melancholy that is appropriate for asking about a hopeless invalid; but behind the sweet concern in her gray eyes William could see dancing an eagerness for morbid details that exactly matched his own aching need to confide them. Coral loved to hear of Eleanor’s petulance, her sickroom fads and fancies, her endless aches and pains—loved to hear of them every bit as much as William longed to tell of them. It made them both feel so healthy, he and Coral, so vital, so united in the singular glory of not being ill!
And so William shook his head sadly, as he always did in answer to Coral’s inquiry; he looked into her sparkling, expectant eyes, and to keep that enchanting eagerness dancing for him he raked his wearied memories for the things she most loved to hear.
She loved to hear that Eleanor had refused to take her medicine again, that she had scolded William for not responding quickly enough to her night bell, endlessly dragging him from sleep.
She loved to hear that Eleanor had asked him, perhaps, for dry toast, or a glass of orange juice, and then, when he brought it to her, all daintily set out on a pretty lace cloth, had turned her face away in disgust, refusing to eat.
“Oh, dear!” Coral would say, licking her little silver lips. “Oh, dear, I am sorry! But the pain’s better, is it—the pain in her back?”
Coral loved to hear about the pain in Eleanor’s back; it made her own spine feel so straight and strong and youthful. She gave a lissome little shrug with it now, while she breathed her condolences, and William watched the small movement with delight. He leaned forward and kissed the smooth unlined cheek under the fall of gleaming hair.
“How marvelous it is to touch a woman who is well!” he murmured; and Coral glowed, and flaunted her wellness before him for just the right length of time before gently prompting him—for after all, their time was short.
“She’s not worse, though, is she?” she suggested, laying her little hand on William’s with sweet concern. “The doctor doesn’t think she’s worse?”
The sweet secret zest in the young voice was to William like the forked flame of desire itself, and he responded to it like a lizard to the sun, his mind coming alive, darting this way and that among the sordid sickroom trivia for the kind of nourishment on which his and Coral’s relationship flourished and grew fat.
“Not worse—not really,” he said, with studied fairness, and whetting Coral’s appetite by the tiny delay. “But it’s the sickness, you see, she can’t seem to keep anything down. No matter how carefully I prepare it.”
Coral’s silvery, knowledgeable voice broke in, right on cue.
“You know why that is, Willy, don’t you? You do realize why she is doing it? Unconsciously, of course—I don’t meant she’d deliberately do such a thing to you—but unconsciously she’s equating food with love. By rejecting the food you offer her she’s rejecting your love. Rejecting it out of jealousy, because she can’t bear not to have all of it, every minute of the day. Her demands on your love have gone beyond all reason, my poor darling.”
Sweet Coral! She never failed him, never! Aloud he said, “Oh, Coral, how wonderful it is to be with someone who understands! I couldn’t talk about
this to anyone else in the whole wide world, because it seems such a dreadful thing to say of one’s own wife. But I have wondered myself, sometimes, if it isn’t psychosomatic, some of it.”
How the silver earrings bobbed and danced, in a sort of ecstasy of understanding!
“Yes,” Coral murmured. “Yes, that’s what I mean. Poor Eleanor. I’m sure she doesn’t realize it herself, but after all, an illness is a way of keeping a husband at home, isn’t it, when a woman hasn’t—well, hasn’t much else to hold him with, to make him want to stay with her.”
She sipped her coffee delicately, watching him over the rim of the cup with gray, thoughtful eyes. The most wonderful part of the whole evening was just beginning, the moment they got to Eleanor’s unconscious motivations. Like gods they soared together over the sick woman’s disintegrating personality, pouncing on a complex here, a neurosis there, handing them back and forth to each other like jewels, with little cries of admiration.
“Of course, looking back, I can see that she always had these incipient hypochondriac tendencies. . .”
“She can’t help it, of course, it’s no use blaming her. . .”
“Lying in bed all day—it’s no wonder her back hurts her.”
“And it’s not as if the doctor wasn’t giving her plenty of pain killers. . .”
“You know, I’ve sometimes wondered if that pain of hers is really as bad as she fancies it is? I once read an article which said that jealousy, especially sexual jealousy. . .”
“And all that throwing up in the night—unconscious demand for attention. . .”
“Because she can’t bear her husband to escape from her, even into sleep. . .”
The coffee in the two cups cooled in front of them as they talked. They needed no stimulant, for the thought of Eleanor, ugly and repellent on her bed of sickness, filled them with such a sense of their own health that it was like wine; it was like immortality itself.
But all too soon it was over. At eleven o’clock William must be home again, his weekly respite at an end. And only then did they look away from each other, a sort of shyness rising between them.
