“Threats at first, meaningless probably, just to give the seducer a bad time, with the vague hope that when he comes to Thrushford with his master, one may be able to add some small frightening shock just to shake him up. But the seducer turns it all to his own advantage, makes a sort of public joke of it, hands the letters to another man. The rankling anger grows and grows and begins to take on a more positive quality. And then the second opportunity presents itself.
“I don’t know which came first — the rifle or the post of duty outside the unfinished wing. Either could have been fiddled, I daresay, having achieved the other. Not too difficult, for example, for a policeman to come by a weapon. Some old lady finds the rifle after her husband’s death, hardly dares to touch the nasty dangerous thing, knows nothing certainly of numbers and identification marks, hands it over to the first copper, and thinks no more about it. He may have had it stashed away for years, or from the time his suspicions were first aroused; by the time it came to be used, the hander-over could be dead or senile or have moved elsewhere — certainly it was never traced. At any rate, with it in his possession and a perfect place at his disposal for using it, he began really to think about taking action. He thought out a plan, worked on it, and brought it off. And damn near perfect it turned out to be.”
“No one guessed at the time how the thing was done?”
“My higher-ups may have; but it was all so tenuous. Still, he’d lived in the flats where Mysterioso had visited; they must have had some suspicions—”
“Only, I had lived there too.”
“That’s right. And been on the scene of the crime too. So how to choose between the two of you when it seemed impossible for either of you to have done it? At any rate, they cooked up some excuse and got rid of him — I remember him as a difficult chap, brooding and touchy — well, no wonder. I daresay they weren’t sorry to let him go. It wasn’t till tonight—” He laughed. “It hit you at the same moment.”
“But you went on with the theory about possible collusion—”
“I had to run through all the possibilities. I had to leave no doubts in anyone’s mind. I didn’t want people coming to the young man afterwards, saying, ‘He never covered this or that aspect.’ But by then I knew. When the young man accused you of making the hole in the roof before, I saw you apparently making it—”
“So simple,” said Mr. Photoze. “Wasn’t it?”
So simple.
P.C. Robbins with hate in his heart and a long perfected plan of revenge. After the major search of the previous day he concealed the rifle, the rope, the string, the apples, and prepared the boards for dovetailing into a tripod. Slipping up when the final inspection had been concluded and they’d all gone off to prepare for the ceremony, he erected the tripod, fixed the rifle, wound a length of twine around the butt to suggest exactly what in fact had been deduced — that some string trick had been played. (A bag of apples dropped onto a taut string, jerking back a trigger — the nonsense of it! As if anyone for a moment could really depend on anything so absurdly susceptible to failure!) Down again, unseen because there was as yet nobody on the hospital balcony, or if observed, just another copper going about his business; the police had been up and down all day.
And then—
The sound of a shot — in the unfinished wing. A policeman tearing up, two steps at a time, pausing only to yell out, “Watch the stairs!” and “They’ve got him!” Pandemonium, predictably, on the hospital balcony, everyone talking at once, a lot of people ill and easily thrown into hysteria. Noise and talking at any rate, masking the sound of—
“The real shot,” said Mr. Photoze.
“How do you hide a brown paper bag that you’ve burst to fake the sound of a shot? You fill it with too many apples and leave it prominently displayed with two or three of them rolled out from the hole in the side.”
“So his father did commit the murder,” said Mr. Photoze. “But in fact he didn’t. And we could all look the young man in the eye and swear to that.”
“These psychiatrists,” said Inspector Block. “Oedipal complexes, delusions, paranoia, looking for a scapegoat for his own guilt feelings towards his father — all the rest of it. And ‘a long period of treatment’! Hah! One evening’s discussion — merely convince the young man that his suspicions are unfounded, and that’s all there is to it. From now on he’ll be as right as rain.”
The young man was as right as rain. He was bending over the Grand Mysterioso, lying back helpless in the big armchair. “If they didn’t do it, then you must have. Of course it wasn’t you who was meant to be killed — it was Tom. Because it was you that killed him, wasn’t it? You hated him because you were dependent on him, humiliatingly dependent, like a child; I know about that, I know what that’s like, to be a child and — and hate someone underneath; and be helpless. And jealous of him — you were jealous of him because he was a man and you weren’t any more; you told us about that just now, how ashamed you were. I know about that too, I was only a child but my — my father was a man.
“I was angry with my father about that, but you — you were ashamed. And so you killed him. Oh, don’t ask me how — you’re the magician, you’re the one who knows the tricks; you said it yourself — things like melting ice and burning-down candles and a lot of others you carefully didn’t mention; but you’d know them all right. And there you were with your big cloak, even on such a hot day — all pockets and hiding places.
“And they left you alone when they went down the corridor and hoisted Mr. Photoze up onto the roof and shot the bolt after him; quite a while they must have been there and by the time they came back you were waiting for them out in the corridor — out in the corridor, blocking off their view into that room with your big body and your big cloak. If you could get across the room and out into the corridor, you could do other things — oh, I don’t know how and I don’t care; you’re the magician, you do tricks that nobody ever sees through and this was just another of them. But you did it; if that fool with his bangles and his photos didn’t, well then there’s no one else.
“And for what you did my father suffered the rest of his life; it was horrible, we were so poor, they were always fighting and my father wasn’t always — wasn’t always… Well, sometimes he was unkind, a bloody little bastard he’d call me and my mother would cry and cry.”
He went on and on, face chalk-white, scarlet-streaked. But he was all right now, as right as rain. He had found his scapegoat. He might love his mother and be loved by her without feeling guilty that his father was dead and could rival him no more. His father had suffered and died and it had been — horrible — to go on resenting his memory; but now he had avenged his father and he was free.
The spittle ran down from his gibbering mouth and fell on the upturned face of the Grand Mysterioso. But Mysterioso made no move to prevent it. The young man’s hands were around his throat and the Grand Mysterioso was dead.
In a Country Churchyard
by Robert L. Fish[9]
Robert L. Fish has many strings to his criminous bow. Readers of EQMM are apt to think of him almost exclusively as the creator of Schlock Homes, as a penning, panning, punning parodist, with a chuckle and sometimes a guffaw in every other paragraph. But Mr. Fish has his serious side — one might even say, his gloomy side. Here is the brightly glimmering Fish in late-Victorian England, but offering us a totally different kind of “period piece” — about murder and conscience, evil and dread…