Next door, Barry George appealed to him stammering: “But I didn’t know. I don’t know anything about it. I don’t know.”
“Just show Mr. Bannington, will you, Bailey?”
Bailey knelt down. The lead-in was disconnected from the tap on the heater. He turned on the tap in the pipe and blew down the tube.
“An air lock, you see. It works perfectly.”
H.J. was staring at Barry George. “But I don’t know about gas, H.J. H.J., tell them—”
“One moment.” Alleyn removed the towels that had been spread over the dressing-shelf, revealing a sheet of clean paper on which lay the rubber push-on connection.
“Will you take this lens, Bannington, and look at it. You’ll see that it’s stained a florid red. It’s a very slight stain but it’s unmistakably greasepaint. And just above the stain you’ll see a wiry hair. Rather like some sort of packing material, but it’s not that. It’s crêpe hair, isn’t it?”
The lens wavered above the paper.
“Let me hold it for you,” Alleyn said. He put his hand over H.J.’s shoulder and, with a swift movement, plucked a tuft from his false moustache and dropped it on the paper. “Identical, you see. Ginger.
It seems to be stuck to the connection with spirit gum.”
The lens fell. H.J. twisted round, faced Alleyn for a second, and then struck him full in the face. He was a small man but it took three of them to hold him.
“In a way, sir, it’s handy when they have a smack at you,” said Detective-Sergeant Thompson half an hour later. “You can pull them in nice and straightforward without any ‘will you come to the station and make a statement’ business.”
“Quite,” said Alleyn, nursing his jaw.
Mike said: “He must have gone to the room after Barry George and Miss Bourne were called.”
“That’s it. He had to be quick. The call-boy would be round in a minute and he had to be back in his own room.”
“But look here — what about motive?”
“That, my good Mike, is precisely why, at half-past one in the morning, we’re still in this miserable theatre. You’re getting a view of the duller aspect of homicide. Want to go home?”
“No. Give me another job.”
“Very well. About ten feet from the prompt-entrance, there’s a sort of garbage tin. Go through it.”
At seventeen minutes to two, when the dressing rooms and passage had been combed clean and Alleyn had called a spell, Mike came to him with filthy hands. “Eureka,” he said, “I hope.”
They all went into Bannington’s room. Alleyn spread out on the dressing-table the fragments of paper that Mike had given him.
“They’d been pushed down to the bottom of the tin,” Mike said.
Alleyn moved the fragments about. Thompson whistled through his teeth. Bailey and Gibson mumbled together.
“There you are,” Alleyn said at last.
They collected round him. The letter that H. J. Bannington had opened at this same table six hours and forty-five minutes earlier, was pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle.
“Dear H.J.
Having seen the monthly statement of my account, I called at my bank this morning and was shown a check that is undoubtedly a forgery. Your histrionic versatility, my dear H.J., is only equalled by your audacity as a calli-graphist. But fame has its disadvantages. The teller recognized you. I propose to take action.”
“Unsigned,” said Bailey.
“Look at the card on the red roses in Miss Bourne’s room, signed C.C. It’s a very distinctive hand.” Alleyn turned to Mike. “Do you still want to be a policeman?”
“Yes.”
“Lord help you. Come and talk to me at the office tomorrow.”
“Thank you, sir.”
They went out, leaving a constable on duty. It was a cold morning.
Mike looked up at the facade of the Jupiter. He could just make out the shape of the neon sign: I CAN FIND MY WAY OUT by Anthony Gill.
The Summer People
SHIRLEY JACKSON
Shirley Hardie Jackson (1916-65) was a prolific novelist and short-story writer, but her name is most readily associated with a single story, “The Lottery” (1948). Born in San Francisco, she grew up in Burlingame, California, and attended University of Rochester and Syracuse University. Her first major publication was the short story
“My Life with R. H. Macy,” published in The New Republic in 1941.
Her first novel, The Road Through the Wall, was published in 1948, the same year “The Lottery” appeared in The New Yorker to considerable controversy. According to Jackson’s essay “Biography of a Story” (1960), no one (including her agent and the editor who bought it) liked “The Lottery”; New Yorker editor in chief Harold Ross did not understand it; and it was the subject of torrents of disturbed reader mail. Jackson has been pegged as a specialist in horror and the supernatural because of her famous story but was actually far more versatile, her work including children’s books and lighthearted domestic humor in her autobiographies Life Among the Savages (1953) and Raising Demons (1957).
Jackson’s celebrated touch for understated horror developed quite early; see, for example, her very short story, “Janice” (1938), about a college student’s devastatingly casual description of her suicide attempt. According to her husband Stanley Edgar Hyman’s introduction to the posthumous collection Come Along with Me (1968), it was this story, written while she was a sophomore at Syracuse, that led to their first meeting.
“The Summer People” is a subtle tale, troublingly unresolved, with a sense of gathering menace assaulting the everyday. Is it an allegory, a horror story, a crime story? Are the Allisons dying or is some human agency terrorizing them? It makes a detective of the reader but doesn’t necessarily verify the reader’s conclusions.
The Allisons’ country cottage, seven miles from the nearest town, was set prettily on a hill; from three sides it looked down on soft trees and grass that seldom, even at midsummer, lay still and dry. On the fourth side was the lake, which touched against the wooden pier the Allisons had to keep repairing, and which looked equally well from the Allisons’ front porch, their side porch, or any spot on the wooden staircase leading from the porch down to the water. Although the Allisons loved their summer cottage, looked forward to arriving in the early summer and hated to leave in the fall, they had not troubled themselves to put in any improvements, regarding the cottage itself and the lake as improvement enough for the life left to them. The cottage had no heat, no running water except the precarious supply from the backyard pump, and no electricity.
For seventeen summers, Janet Allison had cooked on a kerosene stove, heating all their water; Robert Allison had brought buckets full of water daily from the pump and read his paper by kerosene light in the evenings and they had both, sanitary city people, become stolid and matter-of-fact about their backhouse. In the first two years they had gone through all the standard vaudeville and magazine jokes about backhouses and by now, when they no longer had frequent guests to impress, they had subsided to a comfortable security which made the backhouse, as well as the pump and the kerosene, an indefinable asset to their summer life.
In themselves, the Allisons were ordinary people. Mrs. Allison was fifty-eight years old and Mr. Allison sixty; they had seen their children outgrow the summer cottage and go on to families of their own and seashore resorts; their friends were either dead or settled in comfortable year-round houses, their nieces and nephews vague. In the winter they told one another they could stand their New York apartment while waiting for the summer; in the summer they told one another that the winter was well worthwhile, waiting to get to the country.