“Say, son,” Sir Marvin boomed, “you got possibilities.”
Starmes was listening with one ear while he received a report from one of his men with the other. Dismissing his man, he said, “Clever, all right. But Osch didn’t take pills — none were found on him, nor a container. My man just told me. And besides, the food doesn’t smell of cyanide, which it looks like he died of — but the drink does. We’ll have to wait for medical and laboratory reports to be certain, but unofficially I’d stake my shirt on it that he was poisoned in the champagne. And that,” he added, “seems to wash out all the possibilities.”
Starmes turned to Marvin Rhyerlee. “Unless, sir, you can think of something?”
The sweetly polite question was not without irony, born of long and frustrating experience. The Old Man was a master at providing explanations in situations where Starmes could have sworn that no explanations were possible.
“Why, sure, son.” Rhyerlee was doing it again. “Meantersay you haven’t tumbled to it? I don’t know how you’re going to pin it on him, but here’s your man.” And he pointed M. Druerre.
“This is an outrage!” The Frenchman was furious. “Why should I kill Miss St. Dinserd?”
“Won’t wash, son.” Rhyerlee sounded tired. “You don’t hocus me with that one. It ain’t Miss St. Dinserd who’s dead. It’s Peter Osch, and that’s just who you meant it to be. As to why — I daresay you’ve been monkeying with the young man’s estate while he was too far away in Africa to know about it. Maybe that’s how you raised the money to finance a movie for this particularly expensive star. Starmes can find out easy enough. I expect you felt threatened with exposure when Osch came back and became of age to manage his own affairs.”
“Yes, you will find out,” said Druerre, who seemed suddenly to have lost a lot of his bustle. “But I couldn’t have killed my ward. I was nowhere near his glass.”
“That was the diabolically clever part,” Sir Marvin admitted. “You got the boy to commit his own murder. Mlle. Glussot’g ‘friend,’ who sold him a lot of bunkum about a love drug, was you. And you also gave Osch something to take himself, didn’t you? — ‘to be equal to the flaming love of his sweetheart.’ And of course you suggested that he switch glasses, so he could dope ’em both — so that we would get on another wrong track, if we didn’t fall for Miss St. Dinserd as the murderess. Only it wasn’t a love drug, of course. What you gave him for Miss St. Dinserd was harmless, but for himself it was poison.”
Druerre sagged, but he made a final effort. “If you are right about the method, Melissa, or even Ramora or Girden, could have done it.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, son,” said Sir Marvin. “Aside from the fact that your motive sticks out a mile, the gal couldn’t have spun him that moonshine about a love potion to affect her. As for Herr Girden, he only met him this morning — so there’s no motive — and if it weren’t for Mademoiselle we’d never have known about the drug. She wouldn’t have told us if she’d killed him, and there’s no other way he could have been killed.
“And that ain’t quite all, son,” M.R. finished quietly. “That monicker of yours labels you the murderer anyhow.”
EDITORS’ NOTE: Yes, as M.R. said, M. Druerre’s monicker labels him the murderer... For once again the author, whose real name is Mrs. Norma Schier, is up to her anagrammatical tricks. Once again she has converted every proper name in the story (except London and England) into an anagram. To wit:
M. Druerre = murderer
Guy Moran Caine = young American
Melissa St. Dinserd = damsel in distress
Peter Osch = the corpse
Ramora Glussot = glamorous star
Herr Girden = red herring (a cute one!)
Drumis Tree = murder site
Starmes = (Chief Inspector) Masters (of the C.I.D.) Marvin Rhyerlee = Henry Merrivale
And the supposed author’s name — Handon C. Jorricks (a wonderful anagram!) — is of course (to quote from Mrs. Schier’s note) “the Old Man’s creator, master of the impossible situation, and a far wilier plotter than my anagrammatic ‘pastiche’ does justice to — none other than John Dickson Carr.”
John Dickson Carr
Right Before Your Eyes[3]
To Colonel March, head of the Department of Queer Complaints, comes another problem “of the impossible”: how did the £23,000 in cash disappear, vanish, evaporate in thin air?... the first in a special reprint series by one of the great masters of the “impossible crime,” the “miracle problem” — in this case, the Mystery of the Invisible Money.
Just before closing time on a Tuesday afternoon in December, a saloon car drew up before the St. James’s office of the City and Provincial Bank, and four men got out. Lights were burning inside the bank, but the day was raw and murky. Two of the newcomers went to the counter, where they accosted the cashiers with pistol muzzles cradled over their arms. The third, who wore no hat or coat, walked behind the counter, and before anybody knew what he was doing, began quietly drawing the blinds on the windows.
The fourth, who had taken a .45 caliber revolver out of his overcoat pocket, spoke with great clearness.
“You know why we’re here,” he said. “Just keep quiet and nothing will happen to you.”
One of the clerks, a youngster, laughed; and was instantly shot through the chest with a silencered gun.
The noise it made Was no louder than that of slapping two cupped palms together, a kind of thock. The clerk tumbled sideways, rattling against a desk scales, and they heard his body strike the floor. Then all noise seemed to die away under the bright, hard lights, except the sound of the newcomers’ footsteps on the marble floor.
“That’s right,” said the man who had first spoken. “Just keep quiet and nothing will happen to you.”
The thing was incredible; but it was happening. Possibly every man in the bank, now staring in various twisted positions with hands in the air, had seen it happen in a film, and had smiled at it as being confined to another continent. But with great precision the man who had drawn the blinds was now clearing out the safe, transferring what he wanted to a neat leather bag.
Outside bustled the traffic of St. James’s; passers-by saw a closed bank, and thought nothing of it. By the third minute it had become unbearable. The manager, risking it, ducked under the counter for a gun, and was shot down.
Then the leader of the gang leaned close to a young clerk named John Parrish, and said, “Thanks, kid. You’ll get your cut.”
Like four well-trained ghosts, the raiders came together and melted out into the street. Their car was away from the curb before the alarm sounded.
Now the robbery of the City and Provincial Bank failed because of one small but important fact. In England you can rob quite easily; you can even, if you do not mind risking the gallows, rob with violence; but you cannot make a getaway afterward.
“Skipper” Morgan, late of Cicero, Illinois, might be excused for not realizing this. But Pudge Henderson, Slugger Dean, and Bill Stein, all of whom knew Dartmoor as the rest of us know our own homes, should have realized it. Possibly they expected the very daring of the raid to bring it off for them, and they changed cars three times before, early that evening, two Flying Squad cars cut them off on the road to Southampton.