Here he cleared his throat.
“I shouldn’t have made it, son. I really shouldn’t. But don’t yell at me for cuttin’ off Fowler. I can tell you now how Vicky Adams disappeared. And she said one true thing when she said she was going into a strange country.”
“How do you mean?”
“She’s dead,” answered H.M.
The word fell with heavy weight into that dingy room, where the bearded faces looked down.
“Y’see,” H.M. went on blankly, “a lot of us were right when we thought Vicky Adams was a faker. She was. To attract attention to herself, she played that trick on her family with the hocused window. She’s lived and traded on it ever since. That’s what sent me straight in the wrong direction. I was on the alert for some trick Vicky Adams might play. So it never occurred to me that this elegant pair of beauties, Miss Eve Drayton and Mr. William Sage, were deliberately conspirin’ to murder her.”
Masters got slowly to his feet.
“Did you say... murder?”
“Oh, yes.”
Again H.M. cleared his throat.
“It was all arranged beforehand for me to be a witness. They knew Vicky Adams couldn’t resist a challenge to disappear, especially as Vicky always believed she could get out by the trick window. They wanted Vicky to say she was goin’ to disappear. They never knew anything about the trick window, Masters. But they knew their own plan very well.
“Eve Drayton even told me the motive. She hated Vicky, of course. But that wasn’t the main point. She was Vicky Adams’s only relative; she’d inherit an awful big scoopful of money. Eve said she could be patient. (And, burn me, how her eyes meant it when she said that!) Rather than risk any slightest suspicion of murder, she was willing to wait seven years until a disappeared person can be presumed dead.
“Our Eve, I think, was the fiery drivin’ force of that conspiracy. She was only scared part of the time. Sage was scared all of the time. But it was Sage who did the real dirty work. He lured Vicky Adams into that cottage, while Eve kept me in close conversation on the lawn...”
H.M. paused.
Intolerably vivid in the mind of Chief Inspector Masters, who had seen it years before, rose the picture of the rough-stone bungalow against the darkling wood.
“Masters,” said H.M., “why should a bath-tap be dripping in a house that hadn’t been occupied for months?”
“Well?”
“Sage, y’see, is a surgeon. I saw him take his black case of instruments out of the car. He took Vicky Adams into that house. In the bathroom he stabbed her, he stripped her, and he dismembered her body in the bath tub. — Easy, son!”
“Go on,” said Masters without moving.
“The head, the torso, the folded arms and legs, were wrapped up in three large square pieces of thin transparent oilskin. Each was sewed up with coarse thread so the blood wouldn’t drip. Last night I found one of the oilskin pieces he’d ruined when his needle slipped at the corner. Then he walked out of the house, with the back door still standin’ unlocked, to get his wild-strawberry alibi.”
“Sage went out of there,” shouted Masters, “leaving the body in the house?”
“Oh, yes,” agreed H.M.
“But where did he leave it?”
H.M. ignored this.
“In the meantime, son, what about Eve Drayton? At the end of the arranged three quarters of an hour, she indicated there was hanky-panky between her fiancé and Vicky Adams. She flew into the house. But what did she do?
“She walked to the back of the passage. I heard her. There she simply locked and bolted the back door. And then she marched out to join me with tears in her eyes. And these two beauties were ready for investigation.”
“Investigation?” said Masters. “With that body still in the house?”
“Oh, yes.”
Masters lifted both fists.
“It must have given young Sage a shock,” said H.M., “when I found that piece of waterproof oilskin he’d washed but dropped. Anyway, these two had only two more bits of hokey-pokey. The ‘vanished’ gal had to speak — to show she was still alive. If you’d been there, son, you’d have noticed that Eve Drayton’s got a voice just like Vicky Adams’s. If somebody speaks in a dark room, carefully imitatin’ a coy tone she never uses herself, the illusion’s goin’ to be pretty good. The same goes for a telephone.
“It was finished, Masters. All that had to be done was remove the body from the house, and get it far away from there...
“But that’s just what I’m asking you, sir! Where was the body all this time? And who in blazes did remove the body from the house?”
“All of us did,” answered H.M.
“What’s that?”
“Masters,” said H.M., “aren’t you forgettin’ the picnic hampers?”
And now, the Chief Inspector saw, H.M. was as white as a ghost. His next words took Masters like a blow between the eyes.
“Three good-sized wickerwork hampers, with lids. After our big meal on the porch, those hampers were shoved inside the house where Sage could get at ’em. He had to leave most of the used crockery behind, in the kitchen cupboard. But three wickerwork hampers from a picnic, and three butcher’s parcels to go inside ’em. I carried one down to the car myself. It felt a bit funny...”
H.M. stretched out his hand, not steadily, towards the whiskey.
“Y’know,” he said, “I’ll always wonder if I was carrying the — head.”
About the story: Eighteen prizes were awarded in EQMM’s Second Annual Contest. The eighteen prize-winning stories represent nearly every type of detective-crime tale: the pure detective story, both deductive and active; the pure crime story, both psychological and physical; the realistic story and the fantastic story; the trick story; the mystical; the humorous; the orthodox and the unorthodox; the tried-and-true and the experimental; the down-to-earth and the supernatural; the story of characterization, of plot, of mood, and blendings of all three; the story of sheer suspense; the literary; the intuitional; the urban and surburban, the native and the exotic, the plain and the fancy.
From the very beginning we determined to select one story and treat it editorially as a study in technique, as a lesson in craftsmanship. The obvious choice among the eighteen prize-winners — indeed, the obvious choice among all detective-story writers — is Carter Dickson’s “The House in Goblin Wood.” Why obvious? Because Carter Dickson’s first short story about H.M. constitutes in itself as Dorothy L. Sayers once wrote about Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” almost a complete manual of detective-story theory and practice. It is the perfect story to re-read, re-examine, and re-appraise.
Before we go back and indicate the manner in which the clues were planted, before we reveal the author s superb mastery of form, one point should be made clear. “The House in Goblin Wood” is not only typical John Dickson Carr-Carter Dickson but it is Carr-Dickson at the peak of his prowess. It offers what John, in a dedication to your Editor, once described as the particular kind of “miracle” problem which is perhaps the most fascinating gambit in detective fiction. All that and a “locked room”; all that and John’s scrupulous fairplay; all that and John’s unexcelled, atmosphere of the eerie, of the supernatural that in the end becomes all too natural, of the “impossible” crime that in the end becomes all too possible. All that and heaven too...
Take, for example, the author’s introduction of his chief character, the large, stout, barrel-shaped gentleman with the majestic air, the lordly sneer, and the fire-and-brimstone tongue — the great man himself, H.M. How do we first meet him? Slipping on a banana peel and taking a fearful cropper. Why did the author choose this method of introduction? For sheer characterization? Yes. For comic relief? Yes. But there was more to it than that: there was a far deeper purpose than mere humanized characterization. This almost slapstick scene served an important plot purpose. For what did we actually learn as the result of H.M.’s prattfall? That Bill Sage was not merely a doctor — he was a surgeon. And that fact is probably the most vital clue in the entire story. Yet consider how unobtrusively, how irrelevantly, with what finesse the author slipped this pivotal clue into the story! This deliberate, yet totally fair, misdirection is perfect criminological camouflage.