Amy was standing up, her face splotched with anger. “I been talking to you for fifteen minutes and you Just sit staring into space.”
I looked at the record that had been played and was now revolving soundlessly.
Her eyes followed the direction of mine and then she moved. She grabbed the record off the machine and snapped it with her pudgy fingers.
She snatched one of the albums from the table and put it on the floor. The records cracked under her slippered heel.
She looked up as I rose and came to her. Her eyes showed fright before my hands went to her throat.
It wasn’t at all difficult. My hands pressed mechanically until there was no more struggle in her.
I let her drop and looked down. Her face was ugly purple and her eyes were flecked with blood.
I dragged her into the kitchen where she would be out of my sight, then I washed my hands carefully and returned to the living room.
There was now the question of running away and I considered it with a tired vagueness.
Then I heard the new music that shimmered faintly. It was beckoning and I had to get closer.
I put the album back on the table.
It made no difference now about what Amy had tried to do.
I turned out the lights and made my way to an easy chair.
I was going back now to the world I’d found in the darkness of solitary, and I was going back to the girl I had found there in the valley. It wasn’t a real world. It stayed quietly waiting in my mind and that was why I liked it.
They would find me sitting here staring the same way they had found me then. They would see that my body breathed, but my eyes would show that I was not one of them.
And this time they would not be able to bring me back. I knew that, as my eyes followed the moonlight and fixed on the night sky.
I came back to my valley in the music and the moonlight and she waited for me. She was pale and lovely and her eyes searched my face.
And then she smiled.
I had come to stay.
The Repeater
by Edward D. Radin
He knew just how to get away with murder. He confessed.
When a killer gets away with murder in real life, it’s usually because he has learned the wisdom of silence, a polite way of saying keeping his mouth shut. But there is one case on record where the killer deliberately confessed to a murder he had committed in order to beat the rap! What happened makes up not only the most unusual case in the modern history of Scotland Yard but one of the strangest in the annals of crime.
In some ways, Shaftesbury Avenue in London can be compared to Broadway in New York City. At one point the street is part of Piccadilly Circus, the Times Square of London, and is filled with bright lights, theatres and tinsel. But about a half-mile away it is just another street of small, unpretentious neighborhood shops.
This story opens on Shaftesbury Avenue, a half-mile from Piccadilly Circus, in London’s West End. One of the small stores on the street had gone out of business and a sign company was anxious to recover its property. On the morning of October 2, 1931, Douglas Barker, manager of the sign firm, arrived at the vacant store accompanied by Frederick Field, an electrician. Barker was to superintend the removal of the sign.
The men did not have the keys to the building, and, after checking the front and back doors and the rear windows, found all of them securely locked. They telephoned the real estate agent and received permission to force open a back window upon their promise to repair any damage.
The store consisted of a large front display area with a smaller stock-room in the back, the two sections connected by a narrow corridor. Using a heavy screwdriver, Field had no trouble prying open a rear window and the two men entered the dusty stockroom.
Barker opened the door leading to the narrow hall and paused on his way through to kick aside some newspaper spread on the floor. He stopped in surprise when his foot landed on something solid and he swept the paper away. His frightened outcry brought Field rushing to his side.
The body of a pert little blonde was stretched out in the corridor. A piece of cloth had been inserted into her mouth as a gag and a green belt that matched her coat was tied tightly around her neck.
To his credit, Barker did not pull rank. Although he longed to get away, he realized that he was in charge and so he sent Field out to notify police while he elected to remain with the body.
The electrician dashed along the street until he found a bobby and blurted out the story of the discovery. The cautious officer visited the store first and then notified headquarters.
Within a short time technical experts, and officials were at the scene with Superintendent George Cornish, one of Scotland Yard’s Big Five, heading the investigation.
Because his territory included many of the best-known sections of the city and crimes committed in these areas are worth more newspaper space than crimes elsewhere, Cornish had become an almost legendary figure. Reporters boasted in print that he never had lost a case and helped the legend along by referring to him simply as “Cornish of the Yard.” His appearance did not hinder the legend. A tall slender man, he moved quickly and gave orders swiftly. In profile, his fine features looked as if they had been chiselled by a master sculptor. His trademarks were a rolled umbrella and a derby hat, worn over closely cropped hair, and he was seldom without either, regardless of the weather.
From the dust in the vacant store, officials were able to reconstruct the crime. The murder had occurred in the rear stockroom, drag marks in the soot showing how the killer had pulled the body into the corridor where he covered it with newspaper. Time of death was set by the police surgeon as within the past twelve hours, probably during the night. The killer first had throttled the girl with his hands, later using the gag and belt.
Technical experts worked over the interior of the store without coming up with anything in the way of a clue. With the exception of the window opened by Field there was no sign of any forced entry. The killer must have had a key to get in and, with no indications of a struggle in the tell-tale dust, it was obvious that the murdered girl had entered the vacant store willingly with the man.
To Cornish, the crime appeared to be a planned murder rather than a spur-of-the-moment strangling. The girl’s pocketbook was missing and all identifying labels had been ripped from her clothes. The killer had not panicked, even spending time to spread newspapers over the body.
The victim’s flashy clothes indicated that she was more at home in the bright lights of Piccadilly Circus than in the quiet section where her body had been found and this was borne out when neighborhood storekeepers filed in to look at her and none of them recognized her. Slightly over five feet tall, she was a shapely and pretty girl in her early twenties.
The mystery of how the killer had entered the locked premises was solved when Cornish questioned the building agent and Field. The realtor said that he had just one set of keys for the front and back doors and had given them to Field four days earlier so he could remove the electrical wiring from the sign in preparation for its dismantling. Field had not returned the keys.
Questioned on this point, Field said that while completing his earlier work on the sign, a man entered the store and presented a note from the real estate office instructing him to turn over the keys. He did so. The visitor told Field that he had rented the store and was going to open a leather goods shop.
On the lookout for business, Field promptly suggested that the man hire him to make any electrical installations. The caller was agreeable but said he had to finish drafting his plans for the store layout. The electrician left him in the store but arranged to meet him later that night at the Piccadilly station of the underground where Field customarily boarded the tubes on his way home from work.