Murder Impossible

by Jack Adrian (ed)

  All at once some minor things started to fit into place, and he knew he had the answer.

  The grin on his face was more one of determination than elation. He swivelled around and said to Worth, 'Get the lab on the phone. We're going back to see Grimond.'

  'What now?' Worth asked. 'Why?'

  'I'll tell you on the way,' Devlin said, and then turned back to call his wife. Rose was going to be mad, but he wasn't going to be home tonight.

  The formal arrest of Peter Grimond didn't come until midmorning of the next day, after a messenger brought Devlin the lab report. Devlin had been up all night, but as he read the typed report, he suddenly felt fresh and full of energy.

  The report was, so to speak, his second wind. He handed it to Grimond, who had been sitting beside the desk for many hours, and asked, 'Do you want to tell us about it?'

  Grimond scanned the report and something seemed to escape from him. It was as if he deflated a little; his shoulders sagged, his head lowered, and he let out a tremendous sigh. His lawyer tried to caution him, but he waved him away and started to speak.

  'We fought over Joanie, this girl I've been seeing. Lenore said she had proof, that there were detectives watching the apartment from south tower. She was going to divorce me, and I couldn't stand that— my own business hasn't done too well, and hers was lucrative—she would have taken it and the apartment—everything.' Grimond licked dry lips and Worth brought him a cup of water from the cooler.

  Grimond drank greedily and continued. 'When she went into the bedroom and pulled the drapes, I saw a way of killing her. The detectives couldn't see me then, so I strangled her and stripped her and took her into the bathroom.'

  In spite of the detailed contents of the lab report, Grimond couldn't bring himself to mention his method of disposal. He coughed delicately and brushed over it by saying, 'Afterwards, I stayed in the apartment, knowing that the private detectives would be my alibi. They would have to testify that I never left the apartment, had never done anything suspicious, had never been out of their sight for more than a few minutes at a—'

  Devlin picked up the lab report and thumbed through it again, smiling. Grimond had been smart to turn his wife's trap around to serve his own purposes. But Devlin had thought it strange that Grimond hadn't gone out for three days, and he had wondered why, and then he recalled that at certain times the bathroom, bedrooms, and kitchen were out of sight to the detectives.

  The death had to have occurred in those rooms, as well as the disposal, and Grimond couldn't afford to move from the apartment, not while there were two men ready to testify to his behaviour.

  The lab crew had found microscopic blood samples on one of the large kitchen knives and around and in the bathtub drain, evidence that Mrs. Grimond had been dismembered after having been killed. There was still some ash stuck to the fibrous bag of the vacuum cleaner and some along the edges and around the heating coils of the oven.

  Devlin was a little chagrined at not having tumbled sooner to the significance of Ed Bagley's words’, . .on Monday, I think, he cleaned up the apartment, vacuuming and everything.' Especially after he had seen the condition the apartment was in.

  Grimond had used the vacuum cleaner on Monday, all right, but not to clean house. He'd sucked up the residue left in the oven, then reversed the machine and blown the contents out of the window, to be scattered forever.

  Devlin was going to have to thank his wife tonight. Maybe take her out to dinner. Her casserole was ruined, but she had inadvertently made him think of ovens, and then he had recalled Mrs. Ibsen's pie, and the fact that the ovens at The Acreage were all the selfcleaning kind. Selfcleaning ovens work by intense heat, burning the grease off the sides and bottom—quick, tremendous blasts of heat, getting up to 900 degrees.

  That's much hotter than a crematorium.

  BARRY PEROWNE

  The Blind Spot

  Barry Perowne (r.n. Philip Atkey, 1908-1985) is the classic example of a writer who rose up steadily through the authorial ranks to become a medium-echelon entertainer, and then had a single idea which thrust him far higher up the ladder of fame than he, or anyone else, might reasonably have expected.

  As a teenager Perowne worked as secretary to his uncle Bertram Atkey, the novelist, comedy-thriller writer and creator of the popular little Jorrocksian crook Smiler Bunn, later marrying Atkey's daughter Marjorie, his cousin. He joined the publishers Newnes to work as a lowly sub-editor on magazines such as the Happy (home of Richmal Crompton's boisterous William) and the Sunny, then cut his writing-teeth cranking out Dick Turpin yarns for around 12s (60p) per 1000 words. He then broke into the adult short-story market and at the same time began writing long-completes (25,000-word novelettes) for the Thriller: perfectly competent efforts but with nothing in them to distinguish him from the score or more second- or third-line pulpwriters who also contributed.

  Then Perowne had his brainwave. With the permission of the E. W. Hornung estate, he resurrected the gentleman-cracksman Raffles, but updated to the 1930s. This was a huge success which boosted both his confidence and his bankability, and he began selling fiction to the high-paying glossy monthlies in Britain, as well as the 'slicks' in America. Yet he never forgot his old friends in the Amalgamated Press (publishers of the Thriller), and in the late-1930s wrote three very long Sexton Blake thrillers for them (as well as an extended novella for the Sexton Blake Annual,) in which he pitted Raffles against the sleuth who, in almost every way, out-Holmesed Holmes.

  After the War he resurrected Raffles yet again, this time setting him against an Edwardian backdrop (Hornung's original was pre-Boer War) and transforming him from an amateur safecracker into something of a detective (though one who still indulged in the odd spot of grand larceny when funds grew low). Most of his later Raffles tales were written for Ellery Queen, a market Perowne had cracked back in 1944, although he hadn't known it at the time. Just before setting off for the Normandy beach-head on an Intelligence mission he'd visited his father-in-law and left a manuscript with him. Bertram Atkey found the story intriguing and sent it to EQ where it was pounced on with enthusiasm. And no wonder.The story was 'The Blind Spot' and in it Perowne doesn't put a foot wrong. It's a macabre classic in which he created an entirely original and chilling twist to the Impossible Crime.

  JACK ADRIAN

  Annixter loved the little man like a brother. He put an arm around the little man's shoulders, partly from affection and partly to prevent himself from falling. He had been drinking earnestly since seven o'clock the previous evening. It was now nudging midnight, and things were a bit hazy. The lobby was full of the thump of hot music; down two steps, there were a lot of tables, a lot of people, a lot of noise. Annixter had no idea what this place was called, or how he had got here, or when. He had been in so many places since seven o'clock the previous evening.

  'In a nutshell,' confided Annixter, leaning heavily on the little man, 'a woman fetches you a kick in the face, or fate fetches you a kick in the face. Same thing, really—a woman and fate. So what? So you think it's the finish, an' you go out and get plastered. You get good an' plastered,' said Annixter, 'an' you brood.

  'You sit there an' you drink an' you brood—an' in the end you find you've brooded up just about the best idea you ever had in your life! 'At's the way it goes,' said Annixter, 'an' 'at's my philosophy—the harder you kick a playwright, the better he works!'

  He gestured with such vehemence that he would have collapsed if the little man hadn't steadied him. The little man was poker-backed, his grip was firm. His mouth was firm, too—a straight line, almost colourless. He wore hexagonal rimless spectacles, a black hard-felt hat, a neat pepper-and-salt suit. He looked pale and prim beside the flushed, rumpled Annixter. From her counter, the hat-check girl watched them indifferently. 'Don't you think,' the little man said to Annixter, 'you ought to go home now? I've been honoured you should tell me the scenario of your play, but—'

  'I had to tell someone,' said Annixter, 'or blow my top!
Oh, boy, what a play, what a play! What a murder, eh? That climax—'

  The full, dazzling perfection of it struck him again. He stood frowning, considering, swaying a little—then nodded abruptly, groped for the little man's hand, warmly pumphandled it. 'Sorry I can't stick around,' said Annixter. 'I got work to do.' He crammed his hat on shapelessly, headed on a slightly elliptical course across the lobby, thrust the double doors open with both hands, lurched out into the night.

  It was, to his inflamed imagination, full of lights, winking and tilting across the dark. Sealed Room by James Annixter. No. Room Reserved by James—No, no. Blue Room. Room Blue by James Annixter—

  He stepped, oblivious, off the curb, and a taxi, swinging in toward the place he had just left, skidded with suddenly locked, squealing wheels on the wet road.

  Something hit Annixter violently in the chest, and all the lights he had been seeing exploded in his face.

  Then there weren't any lights.

  Mr James Annixter, the playwright, was knocked down by a taxi late last night when leaving the Casa Havana. After hospital treatment for shock and superficial injuries, he returned to his home.

  The lobby of the Casa Havana was full of the thump of music; down two steps there were a lot of tables, a lot of people, a lot of noise. The hat-check girl looked wonderingly at Annixter—at the plaster on his forehead, the black sling which supported his left arm.

  'My,' said the hat-check girl, 'I certainly didn't expect to see you again so soon!'

  'You remember me, then?' said Annixter, smiling.

  'I ought to,' said the hat-check girl. 'You cost me a night's sleep! I heard those brakes squeal after you went out the door that night— and there was a sort of a thud!' She shuddered. 'I kept hearing it all night long. I can still hear it now—a week after! Horrible!'

  'You're sensitive,' said Annixter.

  'I got too much imagination,' the hat-check girl admitted. 'F'rinstance, I just knew it was you even before I run to the door and see you lying there. That man you was with was standing just outside. 'My heavens', I say to him, "it's your friend"!'

  'What did he say?' Annixter asked.

  'He says, "He's not my friend. He's just someone I met." Funny, eh?'

  Annixter moistened his lips.

  'How d'you mean,' he said carefully, 'funny? I was just someone he'd met.'

  'Yes, but—man you been drinking with,' said the hat-check girl, 'killed before your eyes. Because he must have seen it; he went out right after you. You'd think he'd 'a' been interested, at least. But when the taxi driver starts shouting for witnesses, it wasn't his fault, I looks around for that man—an' he's gone!'

  Annixter exchanged a glance with Ransome, his producer, who was with him. It was a slightly puzzled, slightly anxious glance. But he smiled, then, at the hat-check girl.

  'Not quite "killed before his eyes",' said Annixter. 'Just shaken up a bit, that's all.'

  There was no need to explain to her how curious, how eccentric, had been the effect of that 'shaking up' upon his mind.

  'If you could 'a' seen yourself lying there with the taxi's lights shining on you—'

  'Ah, there's that imagination of yours!' said Annixter.

  He hesitated for just an instant, then asked the question he had come to ask—the question which had assumed so profound an importance for him.

  He asked, 'That man I was with—who was he?'

  The hat-check girl looked from one to the other. She shook her head.

  'I never saw him before,' she said, 'and I haven't seen him since.'

  Annixter felt as though she had struck him in the face. He had hoped, hoped desperately, for a different answer; he had counted on it.

  Ransome put a hand on his arm, restrainingly.

  'Anyway,' said Ransome, 'as we're here, let's have a drink.'

  They went down the two steps into the room where the band thumped. A waiter led them to a table, and Ransome gave him an order.

  'There was no point in pressing that girl,' Ransome said to Annixter. 'She doesn't know the man, and that's that. My advice to you, James, is: Don't worry. Get your mind on to something else. Give yourself a chance. After all, it's barely a week since—'

  'A week!' Annixter said. 'Hell, look what I've done in that week! The whole of the first two acts, and the third act right up to that crucial point—the climax of the whole thing: the solution: the scene that the play stands or falls on! It would have been done, Bill—the whole play, the best thing I ever did in my life—it would have been finished two days ago if it hadn't been for this—' he knuckled his forehead—'this extraordinary blind spot, this damnable little trick of memory!'

  'You had a very rough shaking up—'

  'That?' Annixter said contemptuously. He glanced down at the sling on his arm. 'I never even felt it; it didn't bother me. I woke up in the ambulance with my play as vivid in my mind as the moment the taxi hit me—more so, maybe, because I was stone cold sober then, and knew what I had. A winner—a thing that just couldn't miss!'

  'If you'd rested,' Ransome said, 'as the doc told you, instead of sitting up in bed there scribbling night and day—'

  'I had to get it on paper. Rest?' said Annixter, and laughed harshly. 'You don't get rest when you've got a thing like that. That's what you live for—if you're a playwright. That is living! I've lived eight whole lifetimes, in those eight characters, during the past five days. I've lived so utterly in them, Bill, that it wasn't till I actually came to write that last scene that I realized what I'd lost! Only my whole play, that's all! How was Cynthia stabbed in that windowless room into which she had locked and bolted herself? How did the killer get to her? How was it done?

  'Hell,' Annixter said, 'scores of writers, better men than I am, have tried to put that sealed room murder over—and never quite done it convincingly: never quite got away with it: been overelaborate, phoney! I had it—heaven help me, I had it! Simple, perfect, glaringly obvious when you've once seen it! And it's my whole play—the curtain rises on that sealed room and falls on it! That was my revelation— how it was done! That was what I got, by way of playwright's compensation, because a woman I thought I loved kicked me in the face—I brooded up the answer to the sealed room! And a taxi knocked it out of my head!'

  He drew a long breath.

  'I've spent two days and two nights, Bill, trying to get that idea back—how it was done! It won't come. I'm a competent playwright; I know my job; I could finish my play, but it'd be like all those others—not quite right, phoney! It wouldn't be my play! But there's a little man walking around this city somewhere—a little man with hexagonal glasses—who's got my idea in his head! He's got it because I told it to him. I'm going to find that little man, and get back what belongs to me! I've got to! Don't you see that, Bill? I've got to!'

  If the gentleman who, at the Casa Havana on the night of January 27 th so patiently listened to a playwright's outlining of an idea for a drama will communicate with the Box No. below, he will hear of something to his advantage.

  A little man who had said, 'He's not my friend. He's just someone I met—'

  A little man who'd seen an accident but hadn't waited to give evidence—

  The hat-check girl had been right. There was something a little queer about that.

  A little queer?

  During the next few days, when the advertisements he'd inserted failed to bring any reply, it began to seem to Annixter very queer indeed.

  His arm was out of its sling now, but he couldn't work. Time and again, he sat down before his almost completed manuscript, read it through with close, grim attention, thinking, 'It's bound to come back this time!'—only to find himself up against that blind spot again, that blank wall, that maddening hiatus in his memory.

  He left his work and prowled the streets; he haunted bars and saloons; he rode for miles on 'buses and subways, especially at the rush hours. He saw a million faces, but the face of the little man with hexagonal glasses he did not see.

 
The thought of him obsessed Annixter. It was infuriating, it was unjust, it was torture to think that a little, ordinary, chance-met citizen was walking blandly around somewhere with the last link of his, the celebrated James Annixter's, play—the best thing he'd ever done-locked away in his head. And with no idea of what he had: without the imagination, probably, to appreciate what he had! And certainly with no idea of what it meant to Annixter!

  Or had he some idea? Was he, perhaps, not quite so ordinary as he'd seemed? Had he seen those advertisements, drawn from them tortuous inferences of his own? Was he holding back with some scheme for shaking Annixter down for a packet?

  The more Annixter thought about it, the more he felt that the hat-check girl had been right, that there was something very queer indeed about the way the little man had behaved after the accident.

  Annixter's imagination played around the man he was seeking, tried to probe into his mind, conceived reasons for his fading away after the accident, for his failure to reply to the advertisements.

  Annixter's was an active and dramatic imagination. The little man who had seemed so ordinary began to take on a sinister shape in Annixter's mind-But the moment he actually saw the little man again, he realized how absurd that was. It was so absurd that it was laughable. The little man was so respectable; his shoulders were so straight; his pepper-and-salt suit was so neat; his black hard-felt hat was set so squarely on his head—

  The doors of the subway train were just closing when Annixter saw him, standing on the platform with a briefcase in one hand, a folded evening paper under his other arm. Light from the train shone on his prim, pale face; his hexagonal spectacles flashed. He turned toward the exit as Annixter lunged for the closing doors of the train, squeezed between them on to the platform.

  Craning his head to see above the crowd, Annixter elbowed his way through, ran up the stairs two at a time, put a hand on the little man's shoulder.