Murder Impossible

by Jack Adrian (ed)

  'The old billygoat,' chuckled Banner.

  Linda kept her eyes on the salt cellar.

  Honeywell continued, 'They'd been in love for several years. Then Carewe quit her abruptly to marry you. Phyllis pretended to take it as a woman of the world should, but in her heart I knew she was jealous and embittered. She sunk her teeth in Carewe. She strafed him with extortion. She bled him for huge sums of money under the threat of telling you about them.'

  Argyll beamed. 'That's why Carewe killed Phyllis. That's the motive.'

  'Sounds possible,' agreed Banner. 'Going back to Carewe, let's grant that he got out of the room without harping too much on the how of it. Did he get out of the Galleries?'

  'No,' said Linda.

  'Yes,' said Honeywell.

  'Which is it?'

  'To tell the story in proper sequence,' said Argyll, 'Linda and I waited in the Seventeenth Century Gallery for Honeywell to join us after he'd phoned the police.'

  Linda interrupted, 'Then I heard something strange. Remember I told you, Borden?'

  Argyll frowned doubtfully. 'I'm not sure.'

  'I am,' she said. 'It was a rapid clicking sound—a whirring—like a window blind being pulled down.'

  'A window blind?' Banner juggled his furry black eyebrows.

  'There aren't any in the whole building,' said Honeywell.

  'No,' said Argyll, shaking his head. He looked at Linda as if to tell her to stop being so silly.

  Honeywell continued, 'I joined Mrs. Carewe and Argyll after I'd phoned for the police. "We must stick together," I said. And we did. We went first to the back door of the building. It was locked from the inside the way it generally is. The only other door is the front.

  We went there and found the door attendant, old McPherson, talking to a newsboy. Both of them swore that Carewe—nor anyone else, for that matter—had not gone out that way.'

  'The windows,' suggested Banner.

  'All of them burglar proof,' said Honeywell promptly. 'No one can use them to get in or out without setting off an alarm. Before the police came we made a hasty but thorough tour of the whole building. It's a fairly easy place to search. Nothing but paintings and small art objects. Carewe was not in the building!'

  'Ha!' chortled Banner. 'I know where he's hiding!'

  'Where?' cried all three at once.

  'In a suit of armour!'

  Honeywell sighed with disappointment and shook his head. 'There's no armour in the Galleries.'

  Banner's ruddy face was wry. 'I've always wanted to get on a case where somebody hid in a suit of armour. No such luck.' He started picking his teeth meditatively with a raccoon bone toothpick on the end of a tarnished silver chain.

  Honeywell said, 'There we were up against it. Carewe had not only escaped from the room when he turned out the light—he disappeared bodily from the entire Galleries!'

  'Did the police hunt for him when they came?'

  'They certainly did. They looked into everything that could conceal a live man.'

  'Yass, yass.' Banner leaned back and jabbed a cigar into his mouth. He didn't light it. He never did. He gnawed it. 'Carewe committed the murder, then dissolved. That's the picture.' He looked sweetly at Linda. 'Do you think you'd melt, sugar, if you went out in the rain again with me? Of course not.'

  Linda merely looked at him, puzzled.

  Honeywell said, 'Where are you going?'

  'To the Galleries. All of us.'

  'At this time of night?' said Argyll, shocked.

  'I'm gonna make one last stab at finding Carewe and doping out how he escaped.' He started to look around for his white campaign hat and finally discovered that he was sitting on it. He punched it back into shape.

  'I wonder,' he mused, 'if I oughta take some chalk with me to draw a pentagram. Mebbe it'd help us materialize Satan.'

  A policeman in a glistening poncho had replaced McPherson at the front door. He shined a heavy duty flashlight in their eyes, then Banner showed him his special salmon coloured police card.

  The policeman let them into the Galleries.

  Banner said to them, 'That's Coyne, the cop who sot it out last month with Four Finger Flannigan the vice czar.'

  They stood dripping in the dark main hall until Honeywell found a switch and threw it, lighting their way. Their heels rang eerily on the cold bare marble.

  First, Banner had a look into the Trustees' office, whence Carewe had vanished. He posed by the floor lamp and had Argyll and Linda go out to the corner of the corridor. Then he had Argyll stand by the lamp and went to the corner himself for a look.

  He trotted back. 'See anything wrong with it, Argyll?'

  'No, Senator,' said Argyll.

  'That's the trouble. That's what's giving me the screaming meemies.'

  He led the way to the Director's office. It was fifteen farther down the corridor, across from the Trustees office.

  The furnishings were similar to the first office, but arranged differently. The floor lamp in here was deep on the right.

  Banner said, 'This's where you were, Honeywell, when it all happened?'

  'Yes,' said Honeywell.

  'Here in the dark?'

  'Huh?'

  'Linda and Argyll say that when Carewe turned out the light in the other room the whole corridor went dark. This room has a plate glass door too. If your light was on, it would've shined out.'

  'Of course it wasn't on,' said Honeywell, a trifle pettishly. 'As I told them, I'd had a Judo lesson late in the morning. And I was lying on that studio couch'—he pointed—'resting. I wasn't asleep. Just relaxing here in the dark.'

  'Carewe never disturbed you?'

  'Not today.'

  Banner strayed to Honeywell's desk. There were a variety of objects on it. Banner began to toy with some coloured glass squares. 'What're these used for?'

  'They're stereopticon slides for our magic lantern,' said Honeywell. Those you're handling are pictures of Oaxaca pottery.'

  'Magic lantern?' said Banner. 'Then you have a movie theatre.'

  'You can call it that. Very small one.'

  'Is it located near the Seventeenth Century Gallery?'

  'Close to it,' said Honeywell, his brows knitted together over his beribboned eyeglasses.

  'We'll go there.'

  They filed slowly into the miniature theatre. Looking down over the slope of seat backs, they saw the screen. It was pulled.

  Banner ambled to it. It hung about eleven inches out from the wall. He grasped the lower edge and gave it a sharp jerk, then released it. It started to roll itself up rapidly on a spring.

  As it went up it made a rapid clicking sound—a whirring—like a window blind.

  And they saw a man with a face like Satan!

  He was hanging there. But he was dead. His neck was in a noose. The rope ran up over a hook, then down again to be fastened at the baseboard. All covered by the screen.

  'Sweet Marguerite!' grunted Banner. 'What d'you think of that?'

  'He hung himself,' gasped Argyll.

  Linda put her hands up to her face to shut out the sight.

  'We never thought of looking—there,' murmured Honeywell.

  'Neither did anyone else,' said Banner. 'You were looking for a live man. Not one hanging. And the screen looked innocently close to the wall. Only about eleven inches clearance. But you'd be surprised how little space you take up hanging that way. We've all been obtuse. Something else was obtuse today too. I'll tell you later. Honeywell, skip out and fetch Coyne, the cop on guard.'

  Honeywell didn't skip out. He plodded.

  'But how, Senator?' pleaded Linda. 'How has he been able to do all this?'

  'You wondered,' said Banner slowly, 'why you didn't kill him when you flavoured his milk with five grains of arsenic. You've heard of men taking more than that without harming them, haven't you?'

  'Addicts!' cried Argyll.

  Banner nodded. 'Yass. Was your husband on record as ever having a skin disease, Linda?'

 
; 'A skin disease? Oh yes. He once mentioned having had psoriasis. But he was cured long ago.'

  'Oh sure. The baker's itch. The cure is arsenic. That started him off. Another thing. Arsenic puts the youthful bloom in your cheeks. Does that answer another question?'

  Linda stared. 'That's why he looked so young!'

  'I'm still bothered,' muttered Argyll. 'How—?'

  Honeywell returned with Coyne. Seeing the hanging corpse, Coyne crossed himself religiously and exclaimed, '

  'Tis the divil hisself!'

  Banner scowled. 'No. Just a poor sap with buck teeth.' He lifted his voice. 'Lemme finish. Ready for the surprises? I told you something else was obtuse. It's an obtuse angle. Every schoolboy knows that the angle of reflection is equal to the angle of incidence.'

  'What are you talking about!' said Linda irritably. She studiously kept her eyes away from the wall.

  'Ever notice what you see when you look in a mirror?'

  Argyll answered. 'My reflection, of course.'

  'Is it accurate?'

  'Naturally.'

  'No, it ain't,' said Banner. 'When you move your right hand, the left hand in the mirror moves. It's completely the reverse.'

  'I see what you mean,' said Argyll. 'But how does that apply?'

  'When you stand at the corner of the corridor,' said Banner, 'and look toward the door through which you saw Carewe, an obtuse angle is formed. It's fifteen feet from you to the Trustees' door. And then the line rebounds off that door to go another oblique fifteen to the Director's door across the hall. Get it? The floor lamp in the Trustees' office, you said, is deep on the left. The floor lamp in the Director's office is deep on the right. But if you saw a reflection of the Director's office in a mirror, the lamp'd be to the left and rear—exactly the way it is in the Trustees' office!'

  'You can't mean that what we saw was—' Argyll started to blurt.

  'Carewe was never in the Trustees' office! He vanished, because he was never in there. It was the floor lamp in the Director's office that he turned out. What you saw was his reflection on the glass door, made to a perfect mirror with a black room behind it. The way you can often see passengers up ahead in the same car when you look out a train window at night.' He turned suddenly with an alarming gesture of accusation. 'Honeywell, you lied!'

  'My God!' said Honeywell piously. 'You're not accusing me of being in league with that devil.'

  Banner nodded. 'Worse than that, Honeywell. You killed Phyllis. You know too much about her blackmailing of Carewe not to have a whole hand in the pie. You drove her to it. When she got sick and tired of being your cat's paw, you killed her to stop her from blabbing to Carewe about you.'

  'You don't know what you're saying,' cried Honeywell.

  'Today she told you to go find another pigeon. You had to think fast. You told her to wait in the Trustees' office, that you had to have time to think it over. You had to have time, all right—to calculate her murder. You chawed your nails alone in the Director's office.

  Then Carewe burst in on your maledictions with the story of how his wife had tried to poison him so that she could fly off with her Skeeziks.

  'Carewe was full of sly tricks. He wanted to put the fear of the devil into these two with an idea he'd formed by his observation of the way the doors on that corridor were arranged. He told you all about it. You fell in with it. It was like the final piece in a jigsaw puzzle. While Carewe was off spooking Linda and Argyll in the gallery, you were murdering Phyllis with the silver alpaca. You turned off the Trustees' light. That's why Argyll found the bulb still warm when he touched it less than three minutes later. You'd left Phyllis's body lying there and you'd gone into the Director's office. That light you left burning. Carewe returned to you breathlessly, never suspecting that you'd committed a murder in the meantime. His spoof was working like a charm. Linda and Argyll had the wind up and they were tailing a ghost. Carewe stood near the lamp by the right wall, looking diagonally out toward the Trustees' office door.

  'When Linda and Argyll poked into sight, they saw his reflection in the office door for a moment before he plunged the whole place into darkness. Argyll crashed into the wrong room. And Carewe had every opportunity in the world to slip out of the other, unwatched office and into the little theatre.

  'Honeywell, you sent Linda and Argyll into the Seventeenth Century Gallery ahead of you. You took a moment to call the police, then dodged into the theatre to see Carewe. You knew that as soon as he heard about the murder he'd tell how he really disappeared, to save his own skin. You had to kill him too. You knocked him out with a plexus blow. You know all those pretty tricks. You practice Judo. Then you strung the unconscious Carewe up. Linda heard you pull down the movie screen to hide the body . . . Watch him, Coyne! I didn't bring my revolver! He's a bone breaker!'

  'So'm I,' grunted Coyne. As Honeywell made a lunge, Coyne broke a clawing arm with his alert nightstick.

  Honeywell dropped, groaning.

  As they went out into the rainy night, Linda said to Banner, 'Why did Honeywell go to such lengths to get money in the first place?'

  Banner snorted. 'Having these Galleries was enough to keep him broke. How a guy can expect to get a nickel back on a Siwash outfit like this beats me.'

  Art, to Banner, was just a man's name.

  EDGAR WALLACE

  The Missing Romney

  Four Square Jane was just one of many female characters, created by that phenomenon Edgar Wallace, who was a crook. Or at least seemed on the surface to be a crook. In fact it was usually (though not always) the case that the female in question was taking revenge on society for one reason or another, often on one particular member of society, usually highborn, who had ruined her family or her (though never with a fate worse than death) years before. And if it had been proved conclusively that a female was, say, a jewel robber, it would later turn out that she wasn't, or that the jewels were hers anyway.

  It's often said that Wallace's women characters were typical of the fictional heroines of his time (i.e. feeble and wishy-washy), but in truth they had a good deal of get-up-and-go about them, and if they did swoon in a book it was rarely more than once and then only after the most grueling experience. Indeed, a good many of them (remember Cora Ann Milton, witheringly sarcastic wife of the Ringer?) were wonderfully hardboiled and feisty.

  And how often was it the case that his female crooks had an American background or an appropriately American or semi-American nom de guerre: Denver May, for instance, in the series 'The Man Who Killed X', California May in 'Lord Exenham Creates A Sensation', Chicago Kate in 'Her Birthday'. And, of course, Four Square Jane. There was a reason for all this. Back in the mid-1900s Wallace had fallen under the spell of a genuine female villain, the notorious May Churchill or—as she was known in America, France and England—Chicago May.

  Chicago May was the Real Thing, an authentic, and entrancing, underworld character who'd been involved in all kinds of villainy from bank robbery down to the badger game (sexual blackmail). She was at that time attached to an equally fascinating crook, the infamous Eddie Guerin, the man who in 1902 had blown the American Express vaults in Paris (in the planning and staging of which May herself had been closely involved) getting away with over fifty thousand dollars. Guerin was subsequently pinched and sent to Devil's Island, from which he then proceeded to escape, causing something of a sensation.

  Wallace was immensely attracted to the kind of women then known as 'adventuresses'. Some years later he came into contact with Evelyn Thaw, the ex-chorus girl whose somewhat unhinged millionaire husband had shot her lover in Madison Square Garden Roof theatre restaurant in New York in 1906. While by no means a hardened criminal Evelyn Thaw was still a pretty tough nut.

  Even when he was at the height of his fame and five million copies of his books were being sold per year worldwide (a million and a quarter in the UK alone), Wallace was still fascinated by the breed, now nominally updated to 'gangsters' molls'. Four Square Jane was not a gangster'
s moll, but she was certainly clever, took risks, and when an opportunity presented itself to baffle the law she grabbed it with both hands—as the following story relates.

  jack adrian

  Chief Superintendent Peter Dawes, of Scotland Yard, was a comparatively young man, considering the important position he held. It was the boast of his department—Peter himself did very little talking about his achievements—that never once, after he had picked up a trail, was he ever baffled.

  A clean shaven, youngish looking man, with grey hair at his temples, Peter took a philosophical view of crime and criminals, holding neither horror towards the former, nor malice towards the latter.

  If he had a passion at all it was for the crime which contained within itself a problem. Anything out of the ordinary, or anything bizarre fascinated him, and it was one of the main regrets of his life that it had never once fallen to his lot to conduct an investigation into the many Four Square Jane mysteries which came to the Metropolitan police.

  It was after the affair at Lord Claythorpe's that Peter Dawes was turned loose to discover and apprehend this girl criminal, and he welcomed the opportunity to take charge of a case which had always interested him. To the almost hysterical telephone message Scotland Yard had received from Lord Claythorpe Peter did not pay too much attention. He realized that it was of the greatest importance that he should keep his mind unhampered and unprejudiced by the many and often contradictory 'clues' which everyone who had been affected by Four Square Jane's robberies insisted on discussing with him.

  He interviewed an agitated man at four o'clock in the morning, and Lord Claythorpe was frantic.

  'It's terrible, terrible,' he wailed, 'what are you people at Scotland Yard doing that you allow these villainies to continue? It is monstrous!'

  Peter Dawes, who was not unused to outbursts on the part of the victimized, listened to the squeal with equanimity.

  'As I understand it, this woman came here with two men who pretended to have her in custody?'