And then his name, signed with a flourish. He had been so pleased with himself when he had written it.
He fought wildly. The coffin was made of glass now, thick, heavy glass which would not respond to his greatest effort.
Millie was hesitating. She had picked up Phyllis’s letter. Now she was reading it again.
He saw her frown and tear the paper into shreds, thrusting the pieces into the pocket of her cardigan.
Henry Brownrigg, understood. Millie was sorry for Phyllis. For all her obtuseness she had guessed at some of the girl’s piteous infatuation and had decided to keep her out of it.
What then? Henry Brownrigg writhed inside his inanimate body.
Millie was back at the table now. She was putting something else there. What was it? Oh, what was it?
The ledger! He saw it plainly, the old mottled ledger, whose story was plain for any fool coroner to read and misunderstand.
Millie had turned away now. He hardly noticed her pause before the fireplace. She did not stoop. Her felt-shod slipper flipped the gas-tap over.
Then she passed out of the door, extinguishing the light as she went. He heard the rustle of the thick curtain as she drew the door close. There was an infinitesimal pause and then the key turned in the lock.
She had behaved throughout the whole proceeding as though she had been getting dinner or tidying the spare room.
In his prison Henry Brownrigg’s impotent ghost listened. There was a hissing from the far end of the room.
In the attic, although he could not possibly hear it, he knew the meter ticked every two or three seconds.
Henry Brownrigg saw in a vision the scene in the morning. Every room in the house had the same key, so Millie would have no difficulty in explaining that on awakening she had noticed the smell of gas and, on finding her husband’s door locked, had opened it with her own key.
The ghost stirred in its shell. Once again the earth and earthly incidents looked small and negligible. The oblivion was coming, the darkness was waiting; only now it was no longer exciting darkness.
The shell moved. He felt it writhe and choke. It was fighting — fighting — fighting.
The darkness drew him. He was no longer conscious of the shell now. It had been beaten. It had given up the fight.
The streak of light beneath the blind where the street lamp shone was fading. Fading. Now it was gone.
As Henry Brownrigg’s ghost crept out into the cold a whisper came to it, ghastly in its conviction:
“They never get caught, that kind. They’re too dull, too practical, too unimaginative. They never get caught.”
The Yellow Jumper
by Roy Vickers
“The Yellow Jumper” is the seventh case history of the Department of Dead Ends to appear in EQMM — the seventh in a brilliant series of modern “inverted” detective stories. Consistent always in tone, approach and technique, these tales achieve for the author, Roy Vickers, an almost complete suspension of disbelief: the reader, enthralled by the richness and authenticity of photographic detail, accepts them unreservedly as real-life cases. Whether they are or not, whether they are based on true crimes or cut out of the whole cloth of Mr. Vickers’s imagination, they possess the charm and realism of William Roughead and Edmund Pearson, and the factual fascination of Great English Trials. In a phrase, these chronicles of love, hatred, and murder are in the grand tradition; and they exemplify, in the storytelling art, what has been called “the genius of irregularity.”
We challenge you, once you have dipped into this crime passionnel, to stop reading. We challenge you, once you have glimpsed the moonlight on running water, to put aside this story of the eternal triangle. We challenge you, once you have made the acquaintance of Ruth Watlington, Rita Steevens, and poor Herbert Cudden, to stop pursuing the inexorable clue of yellow jumper. But we seriously doubt, once you have started, if any of you can break the magic spell...
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, a couple of 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.