by Otto Penzler
“Now, listen, sergeant,” I said. “If my wife is still harking—”
He interrupted me. “I thought you’d come along, doc. I think it might be interesting.”
I taxed Mona later. “But you were at Parriwatta yesterday,” I said. “With that Stewart fellow and his mother.”
She nodded. “We had a bush picnic on the way. The circus is there two nights. Darling, do please come. I promise I won’t open my mouth about the old murder the whole way.”
Which, just then, was exactly what I didn’t want.
As we parked at Parriwatta it was dark. We could hear the circus music and see the shadows of people sitting on the back bleachers. Mona led the way, stepping carefully over guy ropes and moving in and out among the caravans surrounding the big top. In a few minutes she stopped, pointing. “There’s her tent, Mr. Copestone.”
Copestone said: “You two wait.” I drew Mona into the shadows and watched him step up to Valda’s tent. A shadow appeared on the canvas, grew enormously, and the girl came into view. She was wearing tights as in the picture Daffy had shown us, and started as she saw the uniformed figure. We heard Copestone mumble something.
She appeared to hesitate, then her voice came clearly: “Not here—I share this tent. Let’s walk across the lot.” She disappeared, returning instantly, a cloak draped about her, and with the policeman, moved out of the line of light.
Mona leaned against me suddenly, breathing hard. “It’s hot,” she said.
“It isn’t hot at all,” I said, alarmed. “You’re fainting.”
Despite her protests I carried her across the intervening gloom into Valda’s tent, and sat her on a trunk, then looked about for water. Finding none, I stepped outside and moved toward the caravan alongside. The door was open and the interior lit. There was no one inside. I glanced back and saw Mona’s profile silhouetted on the side of the tent; and then, suddenly, there was a man standing alongside the shadow with only the canvas dividing him and her.
I heard him whisper, “Valda,” and saw the shadowed head lift slightly. The voice continued: “Listen, the policeman is here. You must be careful. Behave naturally. You must do the act. Understand?”
The silhouetted head nodded and in a moment the man had gone. Without moving from where I stood, I reached out and pushed the caravan door slightly so that a beam of light streamed directly across his path. I had no more than a glimpse, but it was sufficient to show me it was Cincotta. I had barely time to rush over and ask Mona if she were all right when Copestone and Valda returned.
Valda stared at my wife, then that enigmatic smile altered her whole expression. “I might have known,” she said.
Someone bawled in the darkness. “Valda, you’ve got five minutes!”
The smile never left her face. She turned to Copestone. “The show’s got to go on. You don’t mind?” She looked at Mona. “Excuse me,” she said. “There’s a letter I must send.” She walked inside the tent and sat at a make-shift table, her back to us. Nobody spoke.
After what seemed an age, the voice bawled again: “Valda, you’re on!”
She rose. “I must go,” she said and handed Mona an envelope. “Would you post it?”
“Of course,” Mona said.
The girl regarded Copestone quietly. “You ought to go in and watch,” she said. “You get in for nothing, don’t you?” Next moment the darkness had swallowed her and I heard the band start the music for her act.
Copestone was preoccupied as we walked to the entrance of the big top, and Mona said, “I’ll stand in the air. You go in.”
“You’re sure you’re all right?”
“Please. Go in,” she urged.
Standing in the entrance I could see Valda high in the tent posing on the rope, wrapping it about her tinselled waist, kissing her fingers to the crowd outside the orbit of the spotlight. Occasionally the beam picked up the gleaming white of Cincotta’s shirt in the ring below.
The music ceased as Valda returned to the trapeze and gracefully acknowledged the applause. Suddenly, she stood and reaching up, detached a rope from some gear above her head. It had a buckled end and this she clipped to the seat of the trapeze. Then, sitting with lower limbs extended, and with every gesture and movement reeking of circus, she began to manipulate the other end of the rope.
I heard Cincotta’s surprised ejaculation and heard him call “Valda!” There was consternation in his voice. Copestone sensed something unrehearsed was happening and made a step forward. The queer Mona Lisa smile played about the lips of the girl and as Cincotta cried again, “Valda!” I saw that she had contrived a loop in the free end of the rope. This she held up for the audience to see, smiling through it; then she looped the rope about her slender neck. She looked down and around her again, kissing her fingertips to each section of the audience in turn.
There was that deathly silence that showmanship insists must preface all death-defying acts and then the unbelievable happened. We heard Cincotta cry “No!” I am sure the crowd thought it was “Go!” Copestone cried, “Good God,” and then Valda dropped from the trapeze like a stone. Down, down, down, until she stopped suddenly in mid-air with a hideous jerk and the silver sequins on her pink tights threw out myriad flashes as the shapely body spun, then twitched convulsively and hung in an attitude of shameful death.
“You shouldn’t let it worry you,” Copestone said later at Nell’s house. “It saved a lot of trouble.”
“I only wanted to help her,” Mona said. “I thought Cincotta killed him, but when she said she didn’t recognize the body, I knew she was hiding something. I believed Cincotta was frightening her into silence.”
The policeman said: “I think they were both in it.”
“It was Valda who killed him,” Mona said, and handed Copestone a letter. “I didn’t realize it was addressed to me. It’s all there.” While Copestone read, she told me.
Cincotta, Varella, and Valda left the gipsy camp, Varella driving the truck. He’d had a big win at the races and Valda said: “Now you can marry me.” He laughed at her and produced a roll of notes waving them in her face. “Look!” he said. “There’s a thousand pounds there and I wouldn’t give you a single tenner for yourself or Cincotta’s brat.”
Mona said: “It was the first time Valda realized he knew who was the baby’s father. Cincotta couldn’t marry her even if he wanted to because he was married already. Varella kept boasting about the money he could make and the women he could have, and how he would eventually settle down and marry some nice girl.”
All the while, it seemed, Valda sitting between the two men could feel the bulge in Cincotta’s pocket that was his gun. In the end she couldn’t stand Varella’s taunts. She shot him while he was waving the notes in her face. Cincotta leaned over and took the money. He owed Varella five hundred on a gambling debt so he was fifteen hundred up if he could get away with it. But it was his gun, and his word against Valda’s.
He said: “We’ll split fifty-fifty. I know just what to do.”
I glanced quickly through Valda’s letter. “It doesn’t say what he did,” I said. “How did they get his body into the paddock?”
Copestone said: “Cincotta is a showman. He knows how easily the mind can be diverted. Conjurers always keep you watching something that really doesn’t matter. He and Valda cooked up a plausible excuse for Varella leaving the circus, and their method of disposing of the body clinched the whole thing. Afterwards he whipped back to the city somehow and arranged for a wire to be sent while Valda drove the lorry on here. Everybody but your good wife forgot the circus.”
“And my good wife discovered how Varella’s body got into the paddock?”
“Yes, I did, darling,” Mona admitted, “but you have to take the credit because you told me all the important things like about the boy complaining there weren’t any programs. I thought to myself, there’s something that W. S. is trying to hide. Then you told me he’d promised Valda would do another act. Somehow that made me remembe
r there was something I’d forgotten about the picture Daffy showed us. So I went and had tea with him … out of a pannikin.”
“But why, in heaven’s name?”
“I asked him to show me Valda’s picture—the one he thought was me without clothes.”
Copestone coughed and I gritted my teeth. “And he did?”
“He was awfully sweet, darling. He gave it to me.” She began fiddling in her bag. “We’ll have to find some theatrical costumers when we go home and hire the tights.”
“Tights?” Nell gasped. “Who for?”
“Why, for me,” Mona said. “I had to promise Daffy I’d give him a lovely framed picture for the one I took away.”
“Over my dead body,” I said.
“Now, darling,” she said, “don’t be difficult. After all, Daffy’s picture of Valda put us on the track.” She handed me the print the half-wit had shown us. “I remembered the wonderful clue you gave me the day we discovered the body.”
“What clue?” I asked and read the caption under the picture.
M’LLE. VALDA, THE HUMAN CANNON BALL
“What clue?” she repeated. “Why, surely you remember? You asked me how I’d like to be shot off the highway. I began thinking and asked Mr. Copestone had he seen many circuses and then he said, “Well, I’m b——”
Copestone coughed. He said: “It struck me all of a heap, Doc.”
“So,” Mona went on, “he had a good look through the circus and there it was.”
“There what was?” I asked.
“Why, the big, wooden cannon, darling. Don’t be so dense.”
“It was there all right, doc,” Copestone said. “After they’d done him in, they stripped him, shaved him, pushed him into the muzzle of the cannon which is really a camouflaged catapult and which they were carrying on the truck as part of the circus props, drove to the crest of the Hummocks, and shot him over.”
“Don’t you see, darling?” Mona said. “The Human Cannon Ball. It was a copy of the act Valda did in the circus. They used to shoot her out of the gun into a net … only there was no net for Mr. Varella.”
THE FLYING HAT
NEVER HAVING WRITTEN a novel, Vincent Cornier (1898–1976) is a name recognized only by devoted aficionados of detective fiction, especially those who are drawn to locked rooms and impossible crimes, a form in which he excelled. Born in Redcar, Yorkshire, he began writing at a very young age, earning the not inconsiderable sum of a hundred guineas a year at fourteen, selling articles to newspapers and magazines for a half guinea each. After serving in the Royal Air Force as a pilot in World War I, he became a journalist and soon began writing fiction, placing stories in both English and American magazines such as Pearson’s, The Storyteller, and Argosy. Cornier created a series character for some of his stories, Barnabas Hildreth, who is similar to R. Austin Freeman’s famous Dr. Thorndyke. A scientist, Hildreth brings careful analysis to the mysteries with which he is confronted, meticulously examining the most minute details and bringing scientific knowledge to interpreting them. A member of British Intelligence, he is known as “The Black Monk” by those who work with him, a moniker perhaps a bit more colorful than the character himself.
“The Flying Hat” was first published in the May 1929 issue of The Storyteller; it was then published in book form in the British anthology The Best Detective Stories of 1929, edited anonymously by Ronald Knox and H. Harrington (London, Faber & Faber, 1930).
VINCENT CORNIER
I
The wearer of the hat was tall and wan and spare in frame—that bleak and shabby young man who kissed Mary Sugden good night at the top of the area steps of Number 24, Bellington Square, W.i. He kissed her in a resounding fashion that brought a laugh from a nearing policeman, unheard of approach on his rubber-soled boots.
The young man looked up, and Mary Sugden gasped: “Oh, lor’!”
“A nasty raw night,” the constable remarked.
“Er—yes, it is that,” mumbled the swain.
“Doesn’t know whether to snow again or thaw.”
“No, it doesn’t,” agreed the young man. “Pretty rotten, underfoot.”
The constable glanced at the man’s cracked shoes, nodded benignantly, smiled, and sauntered on. The man tried to grip at Mary’s hand, but she giggled and scuttled three steps downward, to her kitchen.
“Then t’morrow night, same time,” she hoarsely ordered.
“Maybe,” grunted the young man.
“What d’y’ mean—mebbe?”
“I’m sick of messing about. I’m going in to see him.” The young man nodded at the golden windows of the dining-room above his head.
“I thought so—now I just thought so! Well, Harry Greenwood, y’ve precious little respec’ for me—as you’ve asked to be y’r wife—if y’ can’t be guided by me; you have! I’ve warned y’—he doesn’t bother his head about the likes of us. I’ve told you over an’ over again; but y’re that pig-headed, y’ are … Shut up an’ don’t be so soft!”
“Well, my argument is, you never know—”
“All right then, have y’r own silly way. Go on in an’ see him—an’ get chucked out! Do it … an’ it’s the last you ever see of me, Harry! He knows you by sight; seen you callin’ here … get me the blinkin’ sack you would! … An’ a fat lot you’d care—” And here, a gulping and a break to tears.
The constable had halted to pat his hands together in the cold night. Out of sidelong eyes he was watching. He had little else to do, for the relief was already five minutes late and he was at the defined end of his beat. Very soon now the sergeant from Harford Street Police Station would appear with a file of fifteen constables—cutting through Bellington Square, relieving duty-men all the way, eventually to post the last man out in Edgware Road. The sudden little quarrel he regarded whimsically, as men at their ease always regard the unease of others.
A second five-minutes’ period passed. The constable lost his complacency. Hang the relief! He took three or four slow steps toward the still quarrelsome twain. He saw, quite distinctly, for all that a swift whirry of snow sailed into the square, that Mary Sugden’s eyes were shining wide with tears. He heard her sobbing; but then he saw the tall man stoop quickly and kiss those tears away … fondle her with some fierce gentility of passion: heard him murmuring earnestly as he threw aside all his forces that had made for discord. And the constable, smiling again, retraced those three steps.
A second good-night call; a sweeter reply; a treading of feet and the closing of a heavy door. The constable turned to see the tall lover striding away across the narrow roadway to the high railings that bounded the private central gardens of the square. Mary Sugden had vanished. Save for the constable and the lover the great quadrangle was deserted … The time was twelve minutes past ten o’clock.
… The terrible scream and the crash as of a shot came within the ensuing twenty seconds.
P.C. Pentony was a man of decision and a good runner. He whistled double calls and sped to the fallen Harry Greenwood. He only had to traverse thirty-seven snowy yards … to reach the silent huddle beneath the lamp, beside the railings.
Doors were opening on all sides and windows glared as their hangings were drawn aside by alarmed residents. Bellington Square, W.i., wherein the only usual sounds were the far-away drone of traffic in Oxford Street and the solemn snoring of that in Edgware Road, became as the court-yard of Babel. The relief sergeant with his file of officers rushed up at the double, and a second constable, unrelieved, who had been on duty at the top end of the square—on the far side of the railed-in central gardens—ran around and joined the busy group.
Greenwood lay in the snow that covered the concrete pathway which was a bound outside the railings, with his knees bent under him as though he had slumped asleep at prayer. He was hatless and the shoulder of his jacket (he had no overcoat) was torn. His pitiful face was a livid mask, and frozen, so it seemed. One feeble and fluttering hand tried to claw the red slush in which he lay. B
ut then this twitched and was awfully still. Constable Pentony turned him over and looked.
“Shot through the head, poor bloke!” he muttered.
A second policeman smoothed him out and covered him with a cape. “Stand back there—keep back, will you!” snapped a third to the ever clustering crowd, and out of the plenitude of men he had, the sergeant drew a cordon.
“Pentony, where’s the fellow’s hat; seen it?”
“No, Sergeant, I haven’t.”
“Ugh!—How far away were you when the shot was heard?”
“Not forty yards … just across the road, as a matter of fact.”
“What?” The sergeant started and grew red in the face. “And—and you didn’t see anyone?”
“Not a soul!”
The sergeant glanced around and took survey of all the close vicinity. Then he cocked one eye and regarded P.C. Pentony as one regards a puling child: tolerantly, yet pitying.
“And you never noticed—”
“Sergeant Arnott, I saw this chap fall; saw him fall, I tell you”—Pentony’s voice was shrill—“but there wasn’t anyone about.”
“You—you poor fish!” Sergeant Arnott was icily violent. “Didn’t it dawn on your mind—hadn’t you the hoss-sense to realise—that the fellow was shot from inside these railings?” He snorted now. “Here, get a move on: you’ve got a key … half-a-dozen of you men … light up, and search these gardens. It’s an eight-feet-high barrier; take some getting over—might be just possible that the fellow who did the job is still inside!”
Seven electric hand-lamps flashed white arcs on the snow, and P.C. Pentony, trembling now, clumsily opened a resident’s gate in the tall railings. The searchers sidled through into the snowy waste, and very slowly began to scour the ground; methodically to scour. They were trained men. They missed little, as they moved about with those brilliant fans of light poured on the clear snow.