So it was back to the Bubbling Berties, who had motive and opportunity, if not means of transporting the poison. Nick stared gloomily at Les’s Baked Alaska, composed more like traditional concrete than traditional meringue and ice-cream. Les’s inadequacies had driven Nick to look up a cookery book last night to see how these dishes should be made. There were critical moments in cooking a Baked Alaska. Extreme heat applied to extreme cold. Alaska was as cold as Antarctica, and cooking the baked version was as risky as spider-catching…
“If this is a wild goose chase, friend Didier, you’ll find you’ve cooked your own,” Bishop had threatened genially. But it wasn’t, and geniality had vanished by the time Bishop called him in again three days later. Bishop glared at him. “Are you expecting me to say I was wrong and you were right?”
“No, sir, I’m not expecting that.”
Bishop eyed him sharply. “And I don’t take to being mocked.” A pause. “What gave you the idea, incidentally?”
“My spider-catcher, sir,” Nick confessed shamefacedly. “It’s a handy gadget with a wire running from the handle; when it’s pulled, the trap at the end opens up. I thought something similar might suit our murderer’s purpose. A walking stick with a wire cut into it, and a removable tip to release the poison, would work very well, if he kept it at shoulder height to avoid the full spotlight on his wife, and chose his moment. I didn’t imagine he would keep the stick afterwards, of course, but I reasoned a blackmailer might make it his business to get hold of it. I doubt if your evidence bagging would go so far as to deprive a disabled man of his stick.”
“We did find it, and it was where you’d said it would be. Tony Hobbs is still denying he killed his wife, but you’ve helped me prove it,” Bishop generously admitted.
“No, I didn’t, sir. I don’t believe Tony did murder his wife. I don’t know whether or not he loved her, but he didn’t like her carrying on with other men, which she enjoyed flaunting. She underestimated his resentment, particularly when he found it was still going on. I think he knew he’d get nowhere by an outright challenge, so he chose this method. Unfortunately his intended victim, prancing around at the back of the stage as the Berties whipped off their thongs, spotted Tony doctoring his glass which was placed as usual behind Greta’s. He probably couldn’t believe his luck, when he cottoned on to what might be happening. If it was innocent, no problem. If it wasn’t, he could choose between denouncing Tony or seizing his own opportunity for a double hit: ridding himself of Greta and milking Tony dry.
“He chose, all right. When he returned to the piano, he picked up Greta’s glass, not his own, to drink from, probably using his left hand, and masking the extra stretch with his right arm from the other two. Then he replaced Greta’s glass behind his own, making sure the others did see him do so, and stole the stick at the first opportunity so that he could blackmail Tony into giving back all the money he’d pinched from them. He needed the stick because he couldn’t come forward later and suddenly claim to remember seeing Tony doctoring the glass, but he could ‘find’ the stick and allow it to ‘jog his memory’. And so it was Paul Duncan deliberately murdered Greta, not the Colonel.”
Nick grinned, as he added: “There was no reason for me to mock you. Two murders at half-cock don’t add up to one full monty. The murder of Greta Hobbs by Paul Duncan was impossible – just as you thought, sir.”
OUT OF HIS HEAD by Thomas Bailey Aldrich
This story and the next three are a little group of early impossible crime stories to give a flavour of the past. In fact this story is one of the very earliest, the second only after Poe’s“The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, to feature an amateur detective seeking to solve a locked-room murder. The story is a self-contained episode in the rather rambling novel Out of His Head (1862). Thomas Bailey Aldrich(1836-1907)was an American poet, author and editor – he edited the Atlantic Monthly from 1881 to 1890. He wrote a number of stylish and idiosyncratic novels and stories of which the most popular in his day was“Marjorie Daw”(1873)about a man who falls in love with a girl he later discovers never existed. In The Stillwater Tragedy (1880),Aldrich introduced a private detective some years before Doyle created Sherlock Holmes. Although the following is the oldest story in this anthology, it remains remarkably fresh today, a testament to Aldrich’s skills and inventiveness.
I
I am about to lift the veil of mystery which, for nearly seven years, has shrouded the story of Mary Ware; and though I lay bare my own weakness, or folly, or what you will, I do not shrink from the unveiling.
No hand but mine can now perform the task. There was, indeed, a man who might have done this better than I. But he went his way in silence. I like a man who can hold his tongue.
On the corner of Clarke and Crandall Streets, in New York, stands a dingy brown frame-house. It is a very old house, as its obsolete style of structure would tell you. It has a morose, unhappy look, though once it must have been a blythe mansion. I think that houses, like human beings, ultimately become dejected or cheerful, according to their experience. The very air of some front-doors tells their history.
This house, I repeat, has a morose, unhappy look, at present, and is tenanted by an incalculable number of Irish families, while a picturesque junk-shop is in full blast in the basement; but at the time of which I write, it was a second-rate boarding-place, of the more respectable sort, and rather largely patronized by poor, but honest, literary men, tragic-actors, members of the chorus, and such like gilt people.
My apartments on Crandall Street were opposite this building, to which my attention was directed soon after taking possession of the rooms, by the discovery of the following facts:
First, that a charming lady lodged on the second-floor front, and sang like a canary every morning.
Second, that her name was Mary Ware
Third, that Mary Ware was a danseuse, and had two lovers – only two.
Mary Ware was the leading lady at The Olympic. Night after night found me in the parquette. I can think of nothing with which to compare the airiness and utter abandon of her dancing. She seemed a part of the music. She was one of beauty’s best thoughts, then. Her glossy gold hair reached down to her waist, shading one of those mobile faces which remind you of Guido’s picture of Beatrix Cenci – there was something so fresh and enchanting in the mouth. Her luminous, almond eyes, looking out winningly from under their drooping fringes, were at once the delight and misery of young men.
Ah! you were distracting in your nights of triumph, when the bouquets nestled about your elastic ankles, and the kissing of your castanets made the pulses leap; but I remember when you lay on your cheerless bed, in the blank day-light, with the glory faded from your brow, and “none so poor as to do you reverence.”
Then I stooped down and kissed you – but not till then.
Mary Ware was to me a finer study than her lovers. She had two, as I have said. One of them was commonplace enough – well-made, well-dressed, shallow, flaccid. Nature, when she gets out of patience with her best works, throws off such things by the gross, instead of swearing. He was a lieutenant, in the Navy I think. The gilt button has charms to soothe the savage breast.