An autopsy! Suddenly he sat upright. The bottle of acid, the box of pellets! A paralysing cold hand gripped his stomach. You fool! he cried to himself. You utter, complete, unmitigated fool! The dozens of places you might have hidden them, the hundreds of ways you might have destroyed them! To leave them where their mute testimony was bound to be fatal! All other thoughts were swept from his mind. He had to get the bottle and box from the coffin!
He arose from his chair, shaking, and called out to Mrs. Crimmins. She hurried in from the kitchen, drying her hands, eyeing him slyly. He forced himself to disregard the cynicism he saw in her eyes and to keep his voice down.
“Mrs. Crimmins,” he said steadying himself against the fireplace, “there is no need for you to remain any longer to-night. You may leave things as they are. I… I have some accounts to go over and I… I would rather not be disturbed.”
He seemed to hear his own voice as from a far distance. There was something dream-like in the housekeeper’s getting her wrap-around and kerchief something unreal in watching her move to the door. The sound of her footfalls hurrying down the path seemed to come to him through a misty curtain, like distant, imagined echoes. He placed his shaking hands over his eyes, forcing his tired brain to plan.
Several brandies seemed partially to dissipate the fog in his head, and then he set to work. Wrapping a scarf about his neck, he went quickly to the stables, saddled a horse, and led the animal to the shed where the tools were kept.
Somewhere from within his hot, pounding head a cold voice seemed to direct his movements; he acted on this inner compulsion. His own emotions flickered in and out of focus, now filling him with dread, and alternately disappearing into a warm, soft lassitude.
He found himself riding furiously along the hard road to the cemetery, one hand gripping the reins, the other holding a shovel tightly across the pommel. The damp night air seemed to clear his brain, and he saw again the terrible position he was in. Terror came with awareness as he spurred his horse even more fiercely over the rolling moor.
The churchyard cemetery appeared above a rise in the road, the ancient fence and drooping trees momentarily silhouetted against the white disk of the full moon. Blackburn threw himself from the saddle, dropping the reins to the ground, hurrying through the scattered monuments to the relatively fresh mound covering his wife’s grave. Without a pause he began to dig, his heart pounding, his breath harsh in the night silence.
A sudden sound brought him to a startled standstill and he stopped, panting, to search the gloom. It was only his horse, untethered, moving away in the darkness. For an instant he contemplated going after it, but the urgency of his mission forced him to abandon the idea. With a choked curse he threw himself back into his labors, tearing at the stubborn earth, flinging the dirt from the grave with frenzied, jerking motions. The bright moon threw wavering shadows over the scene, and the rising wind whispered through the overhanging branches bent in solemn contemplation of the weird view below.
Suddenly metal grated on wood. With a savage grunt of satisfaction he redoubled his efforts, scraping the clinging clods from the coffin-lid with the edge of the shovel. The moon peered over the rim of the black pit, throwing into relief the struggling, disheveled figure, the partially uncovered coffin.
Blackburn slipped the edge of the shovel under one corner of the lid, pressing the shovel down with a strength born of desperation; with a sharp tearing sound the screws ripped free and a board came away. Bits of dried earth fell into the opening, covering the half-exposed sunken face within.
With frantic haste Blackburn dropped to his knees, slipping his fingers beneath the cerements, searching for the containers. One came to hand readily; he slid it into his pocket and continued his search.
Where could the other have gotten to? He reached further, feeling the weight of the lifeless body pressing against his fingers, the rough wood of the coffin scraping the skin. And then he had it! And at the same moment he became aware of the commotion above him.
There was a flickering of a bull’s-eye lantern thrust over the edge of the grave. He heard his name being called.
“Hold on! Mr. Blackburn! None of that, now!”
No sound could make itself issue from his paralysed throat. He made one move towards the far wall of the shallow pit, stumbling over the coffin, spurning the huge arm extended in his direction. His eyes bulged in terror, searching for escape. There was none. With his mouth open in a vain attempt to scream his rage, his frustration, he tore the cover from the box in his hand and dropped a pellet down his throat…
The old crone had few opportunities to bask in public attention, and she didn’t mean to let this one pass by. Her hand gripped the polished rail of the witnessbox of the coroner’s inquest like a vulture’s talon.
“ ‘So bin to ’is elf, ’e was,” she said. “I seed ’im through the carriage winder arter the funeral. Ah, it were darkish an’ me eyes mayn’t be what they was, but I seed ’im clear enough. Her dyin’ ’it im ’arder not he let on. It allus does,” she added, picturing with dark satisfaction the future reaction of her own undemonstrative husband at her demise.
“There he was,” Mrs. Crimmins told the solemn court-room. “Poor man! Going over her old tintypes, one by one. And me, like the fool I be, disturbing the poor man in his sorrow. Oh, he felt it deep, never you mind!”
“I knowed it was still botherin’ the poor man,” the constable said with a sad shake of his head. “ ’im losin’ a game o’ draughts to the likes o’ me! Then when Mrs. Crimmins corned over t’house sayin’ she was sure ’e meant to ’arm ’isself, well, I ’ad to get young Griggs an’ the others, didn’t I? And o’ course we wasted time lookin’ about ’is ’ouse and the bams afore we even thought of ’e cemetery.” He shook his head in the ensuing silence.
“Anyway,” he resumed, “if ’e ’adn’t done it with one o’ them pills, ’ed of jumped off a bridge, or ’ung isself. When they’re grievin’ deep like that, there ain’t never no stoppin’ them.”
The Liquidation File
by Simon Troy[10]
Roger Railton was an organized man — methodical, precise, careful, with everything planned in advance to the smallest detail. So when he decided to murder his wife, he brought his talent for exact order into full operation…
We would like to pay Simon Troy a great compliment: while reading his new story, “The Liquidation File,” we were strongly reminded of the late Roy Vickers’ crime short stories. Mr. Vickers added detection to his marvelous tales of the Department of Dead Ends, and we now urge Mr. Troy to try his hand at a series of contemporary “inverted detective” stories. Create a new Department, Mr. Troy, especially for EQMM...
Roger Railton was a methodical man. When he decided to murder his wife he opened a file and put Ag. (L) at the top right-hand corner.
All the details of his private and business life were highly organized. His wife’s name was Agnes. The L stood for Liquidation, a euphemism which offended him less than the word beginning with M.
The first entry he made in that file was headed B.S. Somebody had to dance at the end of Railton’s second string, and it might as well be someone he disliked, someone dangerous to him. Bernard Saunders was such a man.