“He thought you were I. Why do you suppose he had the knife?”
Amy shuddered. “Not Allan. Not Peter. But Curtis. The one I trusted.”
“You first met Curtis when you were twelve years old and he was about thirty. How could a girl that age realize what a mature man is really like under the civilized shell?”
“And now?”
Payne shrugged. “There won’t be any trial. Allan is pleading guilty to an accessory charge. Curtis and Esther died in each other’s arms after Murchison reached the house.”
Amy’s voice quavered: “ ‘And none, I think, do there embrace...’ ”
Payne laid a hand on hers. “What about having dinner with me tonight?”
To her own amazement, she said, “Yes.”
Roy Vickers
The Yellow Jumper
One of the Department of Dead Ends stories, the most brilliant series of “inverted” detective stories of our time... Roy Vickers, by his authenticity of photographic detail, achieves almost complete suspension of disbelief, and with it the factual fascination of Great English Trials...
The execution of Ruth Watlington sent a shudder through respectable, middle-class Britain. If she had in some way repudiated her upbringing, by becoming a crook or a drug-addict, or a “bad woman,” it would have been more comfortable all around. As it was, her exposure created the suspicion that the impulse to murder is likely to seize almost anybody who has enough animal courage to see it through. It was not even a crime passionnel, although scented hair, moonlight playing on running water, and a wedding became subsidiary factors — particularly the moonlight on the running water.
This is in no sense a love chronicle; but we must for a moment concern ourselves with the romantic vaporings of poor Herbert Cudden, the mathematical master at Hemel Abbey, a girls’ boarding school in Devonshire. At eight-thirty on May 2, 1934, a week before the summer term opened, he was alone in the empty schoolhouse putting the finishing touches to his syllabus. His thoughts kept sliding to a young, modern-languages mistress, Rita Steevens, who had come, fresh from the University, two terms ago.
An under-vitalized man, he had been astonished at his own boldness in proposing marriage to her, still more astonished when she accepted. Incidentally, he had been very grateful to his friend and colleague, Ruth Watlington, for inviting Rita to share her cottage.
Daydreaming of this young woman, he visualized her in the dress in which he had last seen her. Now, if he had simply remembered that she had looked delightful in whatever she was wearing, it would have been better for his own peace of mind in later years. He was not the kind of man who understands women’s dress. Nevertheless, he happened to visualize Rita in what women call a pinafore dress, though he did not know the term. He visualized a pale green, sleeveless dress with a sleeved underbodice of yellow — the dress that was eventually produced at the trial after the police had, as it were, walked clean over it without seeing anything in it but the bloodstains.
So much for the dress. As for the moonlight — the full moon, which on that day rose at six thirty-seven in the afternoon, was already tinging the dusk when Cudden crossed the campus and dropped the syllabus in the letter box of the headmistress’s house.
Skirting a playing-field, he crossed a spuriously antique bridge over the Brynn, a sizeable trout stream of an average depth of a dozen inches, with many a deep pool which made it dangerous to children, though the swift current would generally carry them to safety. Feeling his thirty-six years as nothing, he very nearly vaulted the stile giving on to the wood — part of the school estate — that ran down the side of the hill to the village of Hemel, where most of the teaching staff were accommodated.
He was wearing a mackintosh. A man of many small anxieties, he nearly always carried a mackintosh. Presently he turned off the track, to Drunkard’s Leap — a pool in the Brynn some ten feet in breadth and some forty feet deep. When Rita was half-an-hour overdue he lit a cigarette. When the cigarette was finished he was not impatient. He sat down on an old bench like a park seat.
As he did so the centre plank fell out.
“Funny! The screws must have rotted out of the bracket.” He ran his hand along the bench, noticed, without interest, that the bracket itself was no longer in position. Rita was later than usual.
The stream, tumbling over rocks into the pool, threw up a spray, and for the first time he saw a rainbow of moonlight. He must remember to point it out to Rita. Below the rainbow, the moon shimmered on the turbulent surface of the pool, so that the pool itself seemed to be made of liquid moonlight.
So he described it to the Coroner — liquid moonlight. Then, he said, a light cloud crossed the moon so that the rainbow and the shimmer faded out. Instead, a diffused glow enabled him to see beneath the surface of the pool. And a few feet beneath the surface of the pool, below the current, he saw Rita Steevens.
For some seconds, he supposed, he gazed at the staring eyes, at the hair lightly swaying, as if stirred by a sluggish breeze. Then the cloud passed, and he could again see nothing but the shimmering surface of the pool.
He shaded his eyes, lurched to and fro, trying to escape from the angle of light. He grabbed the loose beam of the bench, intending to bridge the rocks of the waterfall to get a new angle, but he stumbled, cutting his hand on a splinter of the beam, which splashed into the pool and was carried away.
He related that he shouted at himself as if he were some one else. “Pull yourself together, man! You were dazzled by the moonlight, and you’ve had an hallucination. You were thinking of Rita, and beginning to fear she had met with an accident, and you visualized your fear. How could she be sort of standing up under the water like that?”
He half-believed it. The other half sent him scurrying from the pool down the track to the village. “Check up at the cottage anyway,” he muttered. “Better not mention the hallucination — make people laugh. It’s partly that damned syllabus. Anxiety complex!”
Fortunate that Ruth Watlington’s cottage was so near! At the end of the track through the wood, he did not vault the stile; he took it slowly, regaining his breath, coming to terms with his panic. A hundred yards of scrub, then the. cottage, built at right angles to the lane that wound its way to the village. Slowly across the scrub.
Already he could discern the wicket gate of the cottage garden. And there — a dozen feet away — were the yellow sleeves, the pale green dress, grey-white in the moonlight. He bounded forward. As he snatched her in his arms his nostrils were filled with the scent he had never perceived on any other woman — the scent of gardenia.
“Oh, my darling — thank God — had a ghastly hallucination! Thought I saw you standing up drowned — in Drunkard’s Leap.” Her head was resting on his shoulder. The scent of gardenia spurred him — he could have vaulted innumerable stiles. “Speak, Rita, darling!”
“But I’m not Rita!” cried Ruth Watlington. “What on earth is the matter with you, Herbert?”
He swung her round so that she faced the moon.
“It must be this dress,” she said. “Rita wore it once and didn’t like it, so I took it off her hands.”
He gaped at her, his senses in a vacuum in which his one clear impression was the scent of gardenia, almost as sharp as when, but a moment ago, her head had lain on his shoulder.
“I thought the hallucination, or whatever it is, was about me, and you seemed hysterical, or I wouldn’t have—”
“Then perhaps it wasn’t hallucination!” he gasped. “Where is Rita?”
“By now she’s at Lynmouth, where she is spending the night with her cousin, Fred Calder, and his wife. They’ve got a bungalow there. Mr. Calder rang up before Rita came in. She had just time to catch the eight-fifty bus. She asked me to phone you, which I did. Effie Cumber — one of the kitchen-maids, in case you don’t know — took the message. I told her you’d be in your classroom. But, I’m afraid I forgot till about nine.”