'Just a minute,' Annixter said. 'I've been looking for you.'
The little man checked instantly, at the touch of Annixter's hand. Then he turned his head and looked at Annixter. His eyes were pale behind the hexagonal, rimless glasses—a pale grey. His mouth was a straight line, almost colourless.
Annixter loved the little man like a brother. Merely finding the little man was a relief so great that it was like the lifting of a black cloud from his spirits. He patted the little man's shoulder affectionately.
'I've got to talk to you,' said Annixter. 'It won't take a minute. Let's go somewhere.'
The little man said, T can't imagine what you want to talk to me about.'
He moved slightly to one side, to let a woman pass. The crowd from the train had thinned, but there were still people going up and down the stairs. The little man looked, politely inquiring, at Annixter.
Annixter said, 'Of course you can't, it's so damned silly! But it's about that play—'
'Play?'
Annixter felt a faint anxiety.
'Look,' he said, 'I was drunk that night—I was very, very drunk! But looking back, my impression is that you were dead sober. You were, weren't you?'
'I've never been drunk in my life.'
'Thank heaven for that!' said Annixter. 'Then you won't have any difficulty in remembering the little point I want you to remember.' He grinned, shook his head. 'You had me going there, for a minute. I thought—'
'I don't know what you thought,' the little man said. 'But I'm quite sure you're mistaking me for somebody else. I haven't any idea what you're talking about. I never saw you before in my life. I'm sorry. Good night.'
He turned and started up the stairs. Annixter stared after him. He couldn't believe his ears. He stared blankly after the little man for an instant, then a rush of anger and suspicion swept away his bewilderment. He raced up the stairs, caught the little man by the arm.
'Just a minute,' said Annixter. 'I may have been drunk, but—'
'That,' the little man said, 'seems evident. Do you mind taking your hand off me?'
Annixter controlled himself. 'I'm sorry,' he said. 'Let me get this right, though. You say you've never seen me before. Then you weren't at the Casa Havana on the 27th—somewhere between ten o'clock and midnight? You didn't have a drink or two with me, and listen to an idea for a play that had just come into my mind?'
The little man looked steadily at Annixter.
'I've told you,' the little man said. 'I've never set eyes on you before.'
'You didn't see me get hit by a taxi?' Annixter pursued, tensely. 'You didn't say to the hat-check girl, "He's not my friend. He's just someone I met"?'
'I don't know what you're talking about,' the little man said sharply.
He made to turn away, but Annixter gripped his arm again.
'I don't know,' Annixter said, between his teeth, 'anything about your private affairs, and I don't want to. You may have had some good reason for wanting to duck giving evidence as a witness of that taxi accident. You may have some good reason for this act you're pulling on me, now. I don't know and I don't care. But it is an act. You are the man I told my play to!
'I want you to tell that story back to me as I told it to you; I have my reasons—personal reasons, of concern to me and me only. I want you to tell the story back to me—that's all I want! I don't want to know who you are, or anything about you, I just want you to tell me that story!'
'You ask,' the little man said, 'an impossibility, since I never heard it.'
Annixter kept an iron hold on himself.
He said, 'Is it money? Is this some sort of a hold-up? Tell me what you want; I'll give it to you. Lord help me, I'd go so far as to give you a share in the play! That'll mean real money. I know, because I know my business. And maybe—maybe,' said Annixter, struck by a sudden thought, 'you know it, too! Eh?'
'You're insane or drunk!' the little man said.
With a sudden movement, he jerked his arm free, raced up the stairs. A train was rumbling in, below. People were hurrying down. He weaved and dodged among them with extraordinary celerity.
He was a small man, light, and Annixter was heavy. By the time
he reached the street, there was no sign of the little man. He was gone.
* * *
Was the idea, Annixter wondered, to steal his play? By some wild chance did the little man nurture a fantastic ambition to be a dramatist? Had he, perhaps, peddled his precious manuscripts in vain, for years, around the managements? Had Annixter's play appeared to him as a blinding flash of hope in the gathering darkness of frustration and failure: something he had imagined he could safely steal because it had seemed to him the random inspiration of a drunkard who by morning would have forgotten he had ever given birth to anything but a hangover? That, Annixter thought, would be a laugh! That would be irony-He took another drink. It was his fifteenth since the little man with the hexagonal glasses had given him the slip, and Annixter was beginning to reach the stage where he lost count of how many places he had had drinks in tonight. It was also the stage, though, where he was beginning to feel better, where his mind was beginning to work.
He could imagine just how the little man must have felt as the quality of the play he was being told, with hiccups, gradually had dawned upon him.
'This is mine!' the little man would have thought. 'I've got to have this. He's drunk, he's soused, he's bottled—he'll have forgotten every word of it by the morning! Go on! Go on, mister! Keep talking!'
That was a laugh, too—the idea that Annixter would have forgotten his play by the morning. Other things Annixter forgot, unimportant things; but never in his life had he forgotten the minutest detail that was to his purpose as a playwright. Never! Except once, because a taxi had knocked him down.
Annixter took another drink. He needed it. He was on his own now. There wasn't any little man with hexagonal glasses to fill in that blind spot for him. The little man was gone. He was gone as though he'd never been. To hell with him! Annixter had to fill in that blind spot himself. He had to do it—somehow!
He had another drink. He had quite a lot more drinks. The bar was crowded and noisy, but he didn't notice the noise—till someone came up and slapped him on the shoulder. It was Ransome.
Annixter stood up, leaning with his knuckles on the table.
'Look, Bill,' Annixter said, 'how about this? Man forgets an idea, see? He wants to get it back—gotta get it back! Idea comes from inside, works outwards—right? So he starts on the outside, works back inward. How's that?'
He swayed, peering at Ransome.
'Better have a little drink,' said Ransome. 'I'd need to think that out.'
'I,' said Annixter, 'have thought it out!' He crammed his hat shapelessly on to his head. 'Be seeing you, Bill. I got work to do!'
He started, on a slightly tacking course, for the door—and his apartment.
It was Joseph, his 'man,' who opened the door of his apartment to him, some twenty minutes later. Joseph opened the door while Annixter's latchkey was still describing vexed circles around the lock.
'Good evening, sir,' said Joseph.
Annixter stared at him. 'I didn't tell you to stay in tonight.'
'I hadn't any reason for going out, sir,' Joseph explained. He helped Annixter off with his coat. 'I rather enjoy a quiet evening in, once in a while.'
'You got to get out of here,' said Annixter.
'Thank you, sir,' said Joseph. 'I'll go and throw a few things into a bag.'
Annixter went into his big living-room-study, poured himself a drink.
The manuscript of his play lay on the desk. Annixter, swaying a little, glass in hand, stood frowning down at the untidy stack of yellow paper, but he didn't begin to read. He waited until he heard the outer door click shut behind Joseph, then he gathered up his manuscript, the decanter and a glass, and the cigarette box. Thus laden, he went into the hall, walked across it to the door of Joseph's room.
There was a bolt
on the inside of this door, and the room was the only one in the apartment which had no window—both facts which made the room the only one suitable to Annixter's purpose.
With his free hand, he switched on the light.
It was a plain litde room, but Annixter noticed, with a faint grin, that the bedspread and the cushion in the worn basket-chair were both blue. Appropriate, he thought—a good omen. Room Blue by James Annixter—
Joseph had evidently been lying on the bed, reading the evening paper; the paper lay on the rumpled quilt, and the pillow was dented. Beside the head of the bed, opposite the door, was a small table Uttered with shoe-brushes and dusters.
Annixter swept this paraphernalia on to the floor. He put his stack of manuscript, the decanter and glass and cigarette box on the table, and went across and bolted the door. He pulled the basket-chair up to the table and sat down, lighted a cigarette.
He leaned back in the chair, smoking, letting his mind ease into the atmosphere he wanted—the mental atmosphere of Cynthia, the woman in his play, the woman who was afraid, so afraid that she had locked and bolted herself into a windowless room, a sealed room.
'This is how she sat,' Annixter told himself, 'just as I'm sitting now: in a room with no windows, the door locked and bolted. Yet he got at her. He got at her with a knife—in a room with no windows, the door remaining locked and bolted on the inside. How was it done?'
There was a way in which it could be done. He, Annixter, had thought of that way; he had conceived it, invented it—and forgotten it. His idea had produced the circumstances. Now, deliberately, he had reproduced the circumstances, that he might think back to the idea. He had put his person in the position of the victim, that his mind might grapple with the problem of the murderer.
It was very quiet: not a sound in the room, the whole apartment.
For a long time, Annixter sat unmoving. He sat unmoving until the intensity of his concentration began to waver. Then he relaxed. He pressed the palms of his hands to his forehead for a moment, then reached for the decanter. He splashed himself a strong drink. He had almost recovered what he sought; he had felt it close, had been on the very verge of it.
'Easy,' he warned himself, 'take it easy. Rest. Relax. Try again in a minute.'
He looked around for something to divert his mind, picked up the paper from Joseph's bed.
At the first words that caught his eye, his heart stopped.
The woman, in whose body were found three knife wounds, any of which might have been fatal, was in a windowless room, the only door to which was locked and bolted on the inside. These elaborate precautions appear to have been habitual with her, and no doubt she went in continual fear of her life, as the police know her to have been a persistent and pitiless blackmailer.
Apart from the unique problem set by the circumstance of the sealed room is the problem of how the crime could have gone undiscovered for so long a period, the doctor's estimate from the condition of the body as some twelve to fourteen days.
Twelve to fourteen days—
Annixter read back over the remainder of the story; then let the paper fall to the floor. The pulse was heavy in his head. His face was grey. Twelve to fourteen days? He could put it closer than that. It was exactly thirteen nights ago that he had sat in the Casa Havana and told a little man with hexagonal glasses how to kill a woman in a sealed room!
Annixter sat very still for a minute. Then he poured himself a drink.
It was a big one, and he needed it. He felt a strange sense of wonder, of awe.
They had been in the same boat, he and the little man—thirteen nights ago. They had both been kicked in the face by a woman. One, as a result, had conceived a murder play. The other had made the play reality!
'And I actually, tonight, offered him a share!' Annixter thought. 'I talked about "real" money!'
That was a laugh. All the money in the universe wouldn't have made that little man admit that he had seen Annixter before—that Annixter had told him the plot of a play about how to kill a woman in a sealed room! Why, he, Annixter, was the one person in the world who could denounce that little man! Even if he couldn't tell them, because he had forgotten, just how he had told the little man the murder was to be committed, he could still put the police on the little man's track. He could describe him, so that they could trace him. And once on his track, the police would ferret out links, almost inevitably, with the dead woman.
A queer thought—that he, Annixter, was probably the only menace, the only danger, to the little prim, pale man with the hexagonal spectacles. The only menace—as, of course, the little man must know very well.
He must have been very frightened when he had read that the playwright who had been knocked down outside the Casa Havana had only received 'superficial injuries.' He must have been still more frightened when Annixter's advertisements had begun to appear. What must he have felt tonight, when Annixter's hand had fallen on his shoulder?
A curious idea occurred, now, to Annixter. It was from tonight, precisely from tonight, that he was a danger to that little man. He was, because of the inferences the little man must infallibly draw, a deadly danger as from the moment the discovery of the murder in the sealed room was published. That discovery had been published tonight and the little man had a paper under his arm—
Annixter's was a lively and resourceful imagination.
It was, of course, just in the cards that, when he'd lost the little man's trail at the subway station, the little man might have turned back, picked up his, Annixter's trail.
And Annixter had sent Joseph out. He was, it dawned slowly upon Annixter, alone in the apartment—alone in a windowless room, with the door locked and bolted on the inside, at his back.
Annixter felt a sudden, icy and wild panic.
He half rose, but it was too late.
It was too late, because at that moment the knife slid, thin and keen and delicate, into his back, fatally, between the ribs.
Annixter's head bowed slowly forward until his cheek rested on the manuscript of his play. He made only one sound—a queer sound, indistinct, yet identifiable as a kind of laughter.
The fact was, Annixter had just remembered.
ALEX ATKINSON
Chapter the Last: Merriman Explains
Alex Atkinson's first novel All Next Week (1951) was a decidedly downbeat, even at times harrowing, social drama about provincial theatre (Atkinson was an actor for a time, with hard experience of the miseries of weekly rep), which featured a suicide in the very last paragraph. And this is odd because Atkinson (1916-1962) was already a leading light in Punch, a magazine not noted (at least then; hardly now) for its kitchen-sink approach to social realism, or indeed anything. A later book Exit Charlie (1955) was an excellent detective novel, but his fame rests on a number of hilariously acerbic guides to foreign climes produced in tandem with that fine artist Ronald Searle, and if he's remembered at all today (he died tragically young) it will surely be for those. He was also an excellent parodist.
The parody is not the easiest of literary jokes. Writers who are on the face of it the most obvious targets (those whose stylistic tics and habits almost poke you in the eye as you read) quite often bring forth the worst in their parodists. There is a fine line between clever and witty caricature and thumping exaggeration, too often stumbled across by the lampoonist.
In general parodies of mystery and detective fiction fail dismally because more often than not the parodist homes in on the content rather than the author. Those who poked fun at Edgar Wallace, for instance, dragged in hooded villains, old mansions, secret passages, but rarely came anywhere near capturing his essence, which was his style. On the other hand it is not enough to depend on style. . . not enough when parodying, say, Agatha Christie's Poirot merely to Frenchify the sentence construction and chuck in the odd Merde alors! (well, okay—Zut alors!).
In writing the way he did, and creating such vaster-than-life sleuths as Sir Henry Merrivale and Dr Fell, John Dickson C
an was bound to attract a certain amount of parody and pastiche. When it came it came from varied sources: the anagrammatic Handon C Jorricks (in reality Norma Schier) with the entrancingly-titled 'Hocus Pocus At Drumis Tree'; Jon Breen and his Sir Gideon Merrimac; Arthur Porges involving HM with Stately Homes the Great Detective (two parodies for the price of one!). All had things in common: they were funny, they were affectionate, and they were well-informed.
But the laurels for the very best parody—and incidentally the earliest (that we know of)—must go to Alex Atkinson, who clearly knew his Can very well indeed. Style, content, dialogue, even characterisation—all are superbly mimicked. It is not just funny, but wickedly funny—and supremely clever. It is also (and this is not entirely by the way) tangible evidence of how much value and enjoyment may be gained from sitting in a loft and idly picking through a monstrous accumulation of dusty magazines from a bygone era.
What follows is a little masterpiece—and, we trust, a fitting finale to The Art of the Impossible.
JACK ADRIAN/ROBERT ADEY
It must have been a full twelve and a half seconds before anybody broke the stunned silence that followed Merriman's calm announcement. As I look back, I can still see the half-humorous smile playing about his satyr's face in the flickering firelight. I can hear again the hearty cracks he made as he pulled his fingers one by one. I couldn't help feeling that the old fox was holding something back. What lay behind the quizzical look he fired at Eleanor? Did I detect a flutter of fear on her pasty (but somehow curiously attractive) face? What was the significance of the third onion? Was there a third onion at all? If so, who had it? These and eight other questions chased themselves around in my brain as I watched Merriman pick up his Chartreuse and look round at us with quiet amusement.
It was Humphrey who spoke first, his voice echoing strangely through the quiet room, with its crossed swords, Rembrandts, and jade. 'But—great Scott!—if Alastair Tripp wasn't there . . . !'
'Alastair Tripp,' said Merriman, breathing on his monocle (the only time I ever saw him do such a thing in all the years I knew him), 'wasn't, as you say, there. And yet, in a way, he was.'
Murder Impossible Page 38