“Here you are, Tom,” he shouted. “If you can’t have it, no one else is bleedin’ going to.”
After sixty years there were no traces here now of that terrible night of the blitz in 1942. The tower, fully restored, was all that was left of St. George’s Church, its clock still projecting from it as though to remind the passerby that this church could not be defeated by time. Much of St. George’s had fallen in that night and what was left had been demolished save for this tower. A casualty had been found within it, so he had read: a soldier gone in there to pray. Apart from this tower there was nothing to recognise — or fear — in St. George’s Street or its church.
He had come to pay penance to Saint Thomas for the night that had changed his life forever, a penance for being alive, when morally there was little difference between the three of them. He was a murderer, no doubt of that, though he’d had good reason. Yet the knights that had murdered Becket had believed that, too, and they had ended their days reviled and hated by all men. Johnnie Wilson had given the ruby back to Saint Thomas just as he was pushed under that falling wall. He hadn’t meant to kill him, he was just crazed out of his mind. And after all, Johnnie Wilson was a murderer. He had knifed a man to get the stone away from him.
Nevertheless Johnnie had redeemed himself. He had given the jewel back to Saint Thomas — and through his action redeemed his killer, so he was twice blessed. That final shout of Johnnie’s had changed his life. He had devoted his life to the good of others. Just as the knights who murdered Becket went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, he had taken aid and food wherever it was needed in the world, and when too old for that had returned to run a well-known charity.
It wasn’t quite enough. He paid his entrance fee and walked into the cathedral to the place of Becket’s martyrdom.
There, to the great astonishment of the tourists around him, Robert Wayncroft fell to his knees in penitence.
Copyright (c); 2005 by Amy Myers.
The Problem of the Secret Passage
by Edward D. Hoch
The work of some authors travels well. Edward D. Hoch’s work has found homes abroad in both Europe and Asia: His Nick Velvet series was once adapted for French television, and his Dr. Sam Hawthorne stories have been translated for three Japanese collections, with a fourth currently in the works. A second U.S. collection of Dr. Sam stories, More Things Impossible, is forthcoming from Crippen & Landru.
It was Annabel’s idea from the beginning (Dr. Sam Hawthorne told his guest over a bit of sherry), and I don’t know how I ever let myself get talked into it. The time was early May of 1943, some months after our hard-won victory on Guadalcanal. Axis forces were surrendering in North Africa and there was a tentative air of optimism on the home front for the first time since Pearl Harbor.
Annabel had returned home late from her animal hospital and I’d made a start at preparing dinner. “Out!” she ordered, seizing the skillet from my unresisting hand. “Go read your paper or something!”
“I was only trying to help.”
“You’ll have plenty of chances for that. I had lunch today with Meg Woolitzer and she’s stopping by in an hour. We have to be finished with dinner by then.”
Meg Woolitzer was editor of the Northmont Advertiser, a weekly paper that appeared each Thursday free of charge. It was delivered to front porches in the town itself, and farmers could pick it up at several area stores. Since buying the paper a year earlier with money from a small family inheritance, she’d been trying to upgrade it into a real newspaper. That was something the town had lacked since the bankruptcy of the Northmont Blade. Annabel helped support them with regular ads for her Ark, and she’d become friendly with Meg.
“Let me guess,” I said, picking up a copy of the Boston news-paper that I read each evening. “She wants me to take an ad.”
“Nooo,” Annabel replied with a sly lilt to her voice. “It’s something else. Don’t worry, it’s nothing bad.”
“I’ll be the judge of that.”
Meg Woolitzer was a bright young woman in her early thirties, tall and brown-haired with a take-charge attitude. I sometimes saw her at town meetings, where she always had an opinion and wasn’t afraid to voice it. When she arrived at our house that evening she was carrying a briefcase full of newspapers and was accompanied by Penny Hamish, an attractive younger woman who was the paper’s assistant editor. “How are you, Sam?” she said, greeting me with a peck on the cheek. That should have warned me there was trouble brewing.
“Fine, Meg. Just the usual round of spring colds. You’re looking well, and you too, Penny.”
“We’ve been busy with new ideas for the paper. I was telling Annabel over lunch that it’s time Northmont became more involved with the war effort.”
“We’ve sent a great many boys overseas,” I pointed out.
“I mean something that everyone can take part in. Something to build community spirit.”
“We’ve had war-bond drives.”
“But we haven’t had a scrap-metal drive like most other places. Scrap metal is important to the war effort right now. Every family in this town probably has something they could contribute — old radiators, car and truck parts, outmoded farm equipment, lead pipes, and gutters.”
“Even metal washboards!” Penny chimed in.
“Meg is going to promote a scrap-metal drive in the Advertiser,” Annabel explained. “I think it’s a wonderful idea.”
Meg Woolitzer dove into her briefcase for some newspapers. “Look here, this is what gave me the idea. A paper in Rochester, New York, runs a weekly feature with a big picture of someone dressed like Sherlock Holmes, with the deerstalker hat, the cape, the pipe, and even a magnifying glass. He goes around the city searching for scrap metal to be donated to the war effort. He even has a name — Unlock Homes! Isn’t that clever?”
I studied the pictures and shrugged. “No harm in it if it does some good.”
Annabel took over the conversation. “All Meg needs is someone to dress up like this and play Unlock Homes.”
“Who—?”
“I told her you’d be glad to do it.”
“Me! Is this a joke?”
“Don’t you see how perfect you’d be, Sam? You’re the best detective in Northmont, and the most famous. Everyone will see the pictures and start searching for scrap metal so you’ll come to their house.”
“I’m a doctor,” I tried to remind them. “Sheriff Lens handles crime.”
“But this isn’t crime,” Meg pleaded. “It’s for the war effort. You’d make a perfect scrap-metal Sherlock! Your initials are even the same — S. H.”
It took a half-hour for them to wear me down, but finally they succeeded. Meg promised to come up with the costume and props, and I agreed to try it at least once. “After that you can get someone else and not show his face. Your readers will think it’s still me.”
“We’ll see,” she replied. “I’ll try to line everything up for this Saturday. That way we can run the first picture in next week’s edition.”
And that’s how I contributed to the war effort.
Saturday morning a dense, chilly mist hung over the fields. Until spring arrived in earnest the local farmers had little to do, churning the meager milk supply into butter and making sure the cows had enough to eat. Even the town’s single school bus sat idle on Saturday, and as we passed Seth Grey’s house I saw him working on something under its hood. Meg gave him a beep of her horn and he glanced up, grinning. Annabel and I occasionally saw them together at Max’s Steakhouse.