Meredith’s tongue came out and licked her lip.
“Now, as to her motive, she hated Harry Corcoran bitterly…bitterly. She’s…well, she’s wicked. To know that is…is a matter of experience. You spot it. Some cold and selfish, yet hot and reckless thing. That’s the best I can do.”
“It’s not bad,” said Meredith humbly, “I mean, thank you, Uncle John. Where is she now?”
“In the hospital,” said Chief Barker, “with my men keeping their eye on her.”
“Was she hurt?”
The doctor cleared his throat. “She’s being hysterical. That is, you see, she was startled into making a terrible mistake when she pushed you, my dear. Now, all she can think to do is fake a physical or psychic collapse. But it’s strictly a phony. I can’t tell you exactly how I know that…”
“I suppose it’s experience,” said Meredith solemnly. She seemed to retreat deeper into the pillow. “I was all wrong about her. The town was right!” She looked as if she might cry, having been forced to this concession.
Russell said briskly. “That’s not enough. No good simply saying you were wrong. You need to understand what happened to you, just how you were led.”
“Led?” said Meredith distastefully.
“The widow was guilty,” Russell said. “Begin with that. Now look back at the time you first hung over her gate. You couldn’t know she was guilty or even suspect it, because you hadn’t so much as heard about the murder yet. How could you guess the fright she got, remembering that little girl in the tree? You thought it was retroactive worry—that you might have fallen. Because that is a kind of fear in your experience. Do you see, now, when you turned up, so full of vigor and intelligence, that she never felt less like smiling in her life. Of course she took you seriously. And you were charmed.”
“Naturally,” said Meredith bravely.
“I can see, and now you should be able to see, how she tried to use your impulsive sympathy. Maybe she hoped that when you tried—as you were bound to try—to remember the night, long ago, that your imagination would be biased in her favor.”
“I guess it was,” said Meredith bleakly.
“Probably, she tried to put suspicion of your Uncle John into your head, not from innocence, but to supply a missing suspect to the keen and much too brainy curiosity that had her terrified. Now, don’t be downcast,” the lawyer added, his warm smile breaking. “I’d have been fooled, too. After all, this is hindsight.”
“Probably you wouldn’t have been fooled,” said Meredith stolidly. “Experience, huh?”
“I’ve met a few murderers before,” said Russell gently.
“Well, I’ve met a murderess now,” said Meredith gravely. “Boy, was I ever dumb!” She sighed.
The Chief said, “All clear? Okay. Now, what do you say we find out where you were smart? What did it? Can’t we get to that?”
“Smart?” said Meredith.
“This is our question to you, young lady. What cracked Mrs. Corcoran’s nerve? Where were you in the story when she flew at you and pushed you down the stairs?”
The girl was motionless.
“You see, dear,” began the doctor.
“She sees,” said her Uncle John ferociously.
Meredith gave him a grateful lick of the eye. “Well, I was just past the key…” she said. She frowned. “And then she yelled and pushed me.” The brown eyes turned, bewildered.
“What were the exact words?” said Barker briskly, “Russell, read that part again.”
But Russell repeated, lingeringly, “Just past the key…?”
“I don’t get it,” Barker said. “Do you?”
“I just thought she’d be glad,” said Meredith in a small groan. “But she pushed me and hurt me. I got it wrong.” She seemed to cower. She was watching Russell.
“You got it right,” said he. “Listen. And follow me. Harry Corcoran was shot in the back.”
“That’s right,” the Chief said.
“The key was on the doorstep.” The lawyer was talking to the girl.
“I picked it up,” said Selby.
“All this time we’ve been assuming that he dropped the key because he was shot. But that isn’t what you said, Meredith. You said that he dropped the key because he was drunk. Now, all this time we have assumed that he was shot from behind, from somewhere near the hedge. But if you got it right, when he bent over to pick up the key…and was shot in the back…” Russell waited. He didn’t have to wait long.
“She shot him from above,” said Meredith, quick as a rabbit. “She was upstairs.”
“From above,” said Barker, sagging. “And the widow’s been waiting for seven years for some bright brain around here to think of that. Yep. Shot from a screenless window. Threw the gun out, closed the window, opened her door, faced her maid. Pretty cool. Pretty lucky. Pretty smart. And there is nothing you could call evidence, even yet.” But the Chief was not discouraged or dismayed. He patted the bed covers. “Don’t you worry, honey. You got her, all right. And I’ve made out with less. By golly, I got her method, now, and that’s going to be leverage. And, by golly, one thing she’s going to have to tell me, and that is why she pushed you down the stairs.”
“She needn’t have,” said Meredith, in the same thin, woeful voice. “I didn’t know…I didn’t understand.” Then her face changed and something was clicking in her little head. “But she still thinks I saw him drop the key. Couldn’t I go where she is? Couldn’t I…break her down? I could act.” The voice trailed off. They weren’t going to let her go, the four grown men.
“I’m going,” said Selby grimly. “I’ll break her down.”
“Stay in bed,” said the doctor, at the same time. “Nurse will be here. I may be needed with the widow.”
“And I,” said Russell. But still he didn’t move. “Miss Lee,” he said to the little girl, “may I make a prophecy? You’ll go on studying the whole world, you’ll get experience, and acquire insight, and you will not give up until you become a writer.” He saw the brown eyes clear; the misting threat dried away. He laid the notebook on the covers. “You won’t need to be there,” he said gently, “because you can imagine.” He held out a pencil. “Maybe you’d like to be working on an ending?” She was biting her left thumb but her right hand twitched as she took the pencil.
“Meredith,” said her Uncle John, “here’s one thing you can put in. You sure took the stuffing out of me. And I don’t care what your mother’s going to say…”
Meredith said, as if she were in a trance, “When is Mama coming?”
“In the morning. I wish I hadn’t wired—I wish I hadn’t alarmed her…We’re going to be in for it.”
“Oh, I don’t know, Uncle John,” said Meredith. The face was elfin now, for a mocking second of time. Then it was sober. She put the pencil into her mouth and stared at the wall. The nurse moved closer. The four men cleared their throats. Nothing happened. Meredith was gone, imagining. Soon the four grown men tiptoed away.
Meredith Lee. New notes and Jottings.
July 27th.
Early to bed. Supposed to be worn out. False, but convenient for all of us.
Everybody helped manage Mama. Doctor Coles put a small pink bandage on me. Chief Barker and Mr. Russell met her train and said gloating things about the widow confessing.
But, of course, Mama had to blast us some. She was just starting to rend Uncle John when I said, “Don’t be so cross with him, Mama. He is the Hero. Saved my life.” That took her aback. She was about to start on me, but Uncle John jumped in. “Meredith’s the Heroine, sis. She broke the case.”
Well, Mama got distracted. She forgot to be mad at us any more. “What’s going on with you two?” she wanted to know. Well, I guess she could see that the stuffing was out of both of us.
(N.B. Men are interesting. M.L.)
>
DETECTIVE: PALMYRA PYM
FLOWERS FOR AN ANGEL
Nigel Morland
THE INDEFATIGABLE NIGEL MORLAND, who was born Carl Van Biene (1905–1986), wrote approximately three hundred books under his own name and a gallimaufry of pseudonyms that included John Donavan, Norman Forrest, Roger Garnett, and Neal Shepherd.
Self-educated, Morland worked in printing, bookbinding, and advertising, as a mortuary assistant, and in journalism, covering crime stories in China and working for several Far Eastern newspapers while studying forensic medicine as a sideline. He edited numerous magazines, several fiction but mainly medical, notably The Criminologist, which he edited from its inception in 1966 until his death.
His most controversial novel was Death Takes an Editor (1949), which dealt with masochistic sex—a subject never before portrayed candidly in a mystery novel—shocking to readers as it came from the pen of an author whose work generally was on the cozy side.
Morland’s most successful mysteries featured Mrs. Palmyra Pym, deputy assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, who appeared in more than twenty books, beginning with The Phantom Gunman (1935). Mrs. Pym—yes, she was married, but be prepared for her wrath if you mention it, as she regards it as the biggest (perhaps only) mistake she’s ever made—is an indomitable detective who will go to any lengths to bring a criminal to justice and has no problem carrying an automatic pistol, though she doesn’t really know how to use it, so sometimes winds up brawling with bad guys, the same as any other cop.
Morland wrote the original story and some of the dialogue for Mrs. Pym of Scotland Yard (1940), which starred Mary Clare as the titular character and Edward Lexy as Detective Inspector Shott.
“Flowers for an Angel” was originally published in the September 1951 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine; it was first collected in Mrs. Pym and Other Stories (Henley-on-Thames, Aiden Ellis, 1976).
Flowers for an Angel
NIGEL MORLAND
SOME WOMEN HAVE SAID that Mrs. Pym was never young, that even in her initial stages she was probably an elderly baby. Obviously, such women should drink milk out of saucers; still, it is a fact that Mrs. Pym was somehow stolid, enormously capable, and frequently harsh, even in the early 1920’s when she must have been around thirty.
She affected the same ugly tweeds, the same enchantingly insane hats, and the same air of magnificent omnipotence as she does today. But her hair was brown then, with only the faintest touch of her current greyness. Her speech was as biting, and her contempt for authority and inefficiency as ready as on that notable day when she crashed the shocked portals of New Scotland Yard, the first woman ever to hold rank in Central C.I.D., where, in these present jittery times of nuclear fission and H-bombs, she is Mrs. Assistant-Commissioner Pym.
In those extraordinary 1920’s she had drifted away from the job of chief secretary to the Director of Remounts (War Office, Special Service) in China, where they were still talking about her merciless “I think we’re supposed to mount the British Army on Mongolian ponies; God knows why, but we Islanders are notable at confounding the enemy—particularly with the war over and done with!” She arrived, of all places in this world, as a woman detective-sergeant in the surprised ranks of the Shanghai Municipal Police Force.
I was still a cub reporter on the Shanghai Evening Star. “Still,” because I had publicly stated that Benjamin Cudworth, that aristocratic darling of the Shanghai Club, was selling guns to Wu Pei-fu (which later turned out to be the truth). It made me less than the dust beneath worthy British shoes—me, the Chinese, the Griffins, and the miserable itinerants who were not even Shanghailanders. But it was enough for Mrs. Pym; if she’d been in India she would have turned up at a Hindu dinner-party with an Untouchable. That seemingly granite exterior regarded all stiles as something to help lame dogs over—even if she usually kicked them on their way.
I used to go round to her flat in Bubbling Well Road, where I could watch the races, or the golfers in the middle of the central racecourse. She always had a liking for reporters—wasn’t she one herself for a year?—though what she told me about the local social set should not have been poured into my nineteen-year-old ears: I thought the Country Club people were next to holiness—she stripped off their outward façades with the zest of a kid tearing the wrapping off candy.
Her private life was a mystery to me. I knew Richard Pym had been a retired ironmaster, that he had died a few months after their marriage (the Country Club went to town on that!), and that because the Municipal Council was regretting her appointment she was given no more than routine assignments—mostly traffic violations and such things—which were not C.I.D. work at all.
But when Klara Dimmick came drifting down the Whangpoo one chill winter’s night, it became Mrs. Pym’s business. She and I were in a large sampan, illegally moored off the Customs’ Wharf. She was bartering for some rather nice jade which the boatman said was his father’s—he claimed to be a refugee from Nanking. I daresay the jade was loot, since Wu Pei-fu was on the rampage: when those old-time tuchuns broke out, it was every native for himself.
An uproar from the family end of the sampan brought Mrs. Pym from under the reed-matted mid-structure, and there was Klara, large, Nordic, and beautiful, sitting gracefully in the stern of a dinghy, drifting superbly on the muddy, littered current.
The dinghy was gaffed. Mrs. Pym craned over to have a look, with the help of my pocket torch.
“Klara Dimmick,” I said, “wife of——”
“All right, son, I know Dimmick of China Oil. H’m…that looks like a dagger wound in her front.”
“Murder?”
“Could be.” She snapped at the chattering sampan family in Shanghai dialect which, naturally, none of them understood; but her tone promoted something like silence. “Showy piece, isn’t she?” Mrs. Pym’s sniff was loud. A violent woman herself, she dislikes physically ostentatious human beings. “Lug her to the bank and we’ll have a look-see.”
You can’t keep anything quiet in China. Every idler on the Bund had gathered round when we checked over Klara on the edge of the Customs’ Wharf. The Chinese spectators were I-told-you-so-ing for all they were worth because, they maintained, her red hair was the unluckiest thing that could happen to her. I suggested the dagger wound was more immediately so. Mrs. Pym grimaced.
“Don’t be childish, boy.” She picked out an intelligent looking coolie and told him to nip along the Dzing-boo-vaung for help—the very mention of the police station scared him off. Finally, a stout Chinese who looked like, and admitted he was, a compradore agreed to do the job if she paid for a rickshaw on a generous basis—a Scot has nothing on a Chinese when it comes to money.
Mrs. Pym, wearing a camel’s hair overcoat which gave her an impressive heaviness, crouched on the edge of the Wharf, studying the corpse. I knelt beside her, focusing the torch.
“That’s a good coat she’s wearing, though it’s the wrong shade of mauve for a redhead, and she’s too big for the double-breasted style.” Her blue-grey eyes glanced at me with faint malice. “One of her earrings has fallen off—see it, caught in the coat folds? Not there, you blind young ass—on the left side, where it’s buttoned.” I saw the gewgaw and nodded my comprehension. “I doubt if it means anything much. Oh, we-tsen, we-tsen!” The encroaching crown moved back at the order. “Haul that painter up and let’s see.” Mrs. Pym paused. I had grabbed the rope, pulling its sodden, clammy length. At the end, attached with a bit of baling wire, was a bunch of ordinary red poppies, though the river had washed many of the heads away.
Mrs. Pym’s snort was terrific.
“Is that supposed to be significant? Our thoughtful murderer! A coffin would have been more useful—here; give me those flowers.” She wrapped them in the man’s handkerchief she always carried, for though she was not that major horror, a masculine woman, she loathed the frail, feminine fripperies women
are said to prefer.
“Won’t there be trouble if you take those flowers?”
“Son, I’ve had trouble all my life. This is my case and I’ll damn’ well handle it Pym fashion. I’m sick of chasing birds who sound their hooters after midnight—this time I’m having my own way.” She turned at the tramp of feet on the road. Inspector Gaylor, that big, amiable police officer from Wicklow, was there with his squad. “Oh, it’s you, Inspector, somebody stabbed a hole in Klara Dimmick, chucked her in this dinghy, and I’m handling the case—and no loopy S.M.C. councillor is going to stop me!”
Gaylor waved protestingly.
“Why, ma’am, would you have me comment?” His smile was infectious—at least, I smiled back. “I’m only a poor cop, doing his duty. Now why would I be wanting to take the case away from you?”
When the examination was over, Gaylor said: “Sort of thing a native would do.”
“Native my foot!” Mrs. Pym gestured irately. “You never came across one of them with that kind of imagination—betcha million dollars you never did! No,” she added, shaking the orthodox Gaylor to the roots, “we’ll find the beginnings of this somewhere in our own sacred upper crust, and when I’ve finished, I’ll teach that socially-elect jellyfish to swing something out of Nick Carter on me!”
* * *
—
Ernest Dimmick was roused from bed at two o’clock in the morning. He lived in a very respectable house opposite the French Club. It did not matter a row of native beans to Mrs. Pym that she was in the French Concession on her official occasions; she administered the law as it stood, and when it didn’t, she made personal adjustments.
The Number One boy brought him down, and Dimmick received us in the florid sitting-room. He was a gentle little man, with brown hair and brown eyes behind thick-glassed spectacles. You could almost see Mrs. Pym wondering why meek, small men always marry massive women, seemingly chosen from the front row of the Valkyrie chorus.
The Big Book of Female Detectives Page 138