Ellery Queen's Champions of Mystery vol. 33 (1977)

by Ellery Queen

His corporation preceded him like the figurehead of a man-of-war. His shell-rimmed spectacles were pulled down on a broad nose, all being shaded by a Panama hat. At the top of the stone steps he surveyed the street with a lordly sneer.

  “Sir Henry!” called the girl.

  “Hey?” said Sir Henry Merrivale.

  “I’m Eve Drayton. Don’t you remember me? You knew my father!”

  “Oh, ah,” said the great man.

  “We’ve been waiting here a terribly long time,” Eve pleaded. “Couldn’t you see us for just five minutes?—The thing to do,” she whispered to her companion, “is to keep him in a good humor. Just keep him in a good humor!”

  As a matter of fact, H.M. was in a good humor, having just triumphed over the Home Secretary in an argument. But not even his own mother could have guessed it. Majestically, with the same lordly sneer, he began in grandeur to descend the steps of the Senior Conservatives’. He did this, in fact, until his foot encountered an unnoticed object lying some three feet from the bottom.

  It was a banana skin.

  “Oh, dear!” said the girl.

  Now it must be stated with regret that in the old days certain urchins, of what were then called the “lower orders,” had a habit of placing such objects on the steps in the hope that some eminent statesman would take a toss on his way to Whitehall. This was a venial but deplorable practice, probably accounting for what Mr. Gladstone said in 1882.

  In any case, it accounted for what Sir Henry Merrivale said now.

  From the pavement, where H.M. landed in a seated position, arose in H.M.’s bellowing voice such a torrent of profanity, such a flood of invective and vile obscenities, as has seldom before blasted the holy calm of Pall Mall. It brought the hall-porter hurrying down the steps, and Eve Drayton flying out of the car.

  Heads were now appearing at the windows of the Atheneum across the street.

  “Is it all right?” cried the girl, with concern in her blue eyes. “Are you hurt?”

  H.M. merely looked at her. His hat had fallen off, disclosing a large bald head; and he merely sat on the pavement and looked at her.

  “Anyway, H.M., get up! Please get up!”

  “Yes, sir,” begged the hall-porter, “for heaven’s sake get up!”

  “Get up?” bellowed H.M., in a voice audible as far as St. James’ Street. “Burn it all, how can I get up?”

  “But why not?”

  “My behind’s out of joint,” said H.M. simply. “I’m hurt awful bad. I’m probably goin’ to have spinal dislocation for the rest of my life.”

  “But, sir, people are looking!”

  H.M. explained what these people could do. He eyed Eve Drayton with a glare of indescribable malignancy over his spectacles.

  “I suppose, my wench, you’re responsible for this?”

  Eve regarded him in consternation.

  “You don’t mean the banana skin?” she cried.

  “Oh, yes, I do,” said H.M., folding his arms like a prosecuting counsel.

  “But we—we only wanted to invite you to a picnic!”

  H.M. closed his eyes.

  “That’s fine,” he said in a hollow voice. “All the same, don’t you think it’d have been a subtler kind of hint just to pour mayonnaise over my head or shove ants down the back of my neck? Oh, lord love a duck!”

  “I didn’t mean that! I meant. . .”

  “Let me help you up, sir,” interposed the calm, reassuring voice of the dark-haired and blue-chinned young man who had been with Eve in the car.

  “So you want to help too, hey? And who are you?”

  “I’m awfully sorry!” said Eve. “I should have introduced you! This is my fiancé. Dr. William Sage.”

  H.M.’s face turned purple.

  “I’m glad to see,” he observed, “you had the uncommon decency to bring along a doctor. I appreciate that, I do. And the car’s there, I suppose, to assist with the examination when I take off my pants?”

  The hall-porter uttered a cry of horror.

  Bill Sage, either from jumpiness and nerves or from sheer inability to keep a straight face, laughed loudly.

  “I keep telling Eve a dozen times a day,” he said, “that I’m not to be called ‘doctor.’ I happen to be a surgeon—”

  (Here H.M. really did look alarmed.)

  “—but I don’t think we need operate. Nor, in my opinion,” Bill gravely addressed the hall-porter, “will it be necessary to remove Sir Henry’s trousers in front of the Senior Conservatives’ Club.”

  “Thank you very much, sir.”

  “We had an infernal nerve to come here,” the young man confessed to H.M. “But I honestly think, Sir Henry, you’d be more comfortable in the car. What about it? Let me give you a hand up?”

  Yet even ten minutes later, when H.M. sat glowering in the back of the car and two heads were craned round towards him, peace was not restored.

  “All right!” said Eve. Her pretty, rather stolid face was flushed; her mouth looked miserable. “If you won’t come to the picnic, you won’t. But I did believe you might do it to oblige me.”

  “Well. . .now!” muttered the great man uncomfortably.

  “And I did think, too, you’d be interested in the other person who was coming with us. But Vicky’s—difficult. She won’t come either, if you don’t.”

  “Oh? And who’s this other guest?”

  “Vicky Adams.”

  H.M.’s hand, which had been lifted for an oratorical gesture, dropped to his side.

  “Vicky Adams? That’s not the gal who. . .?”

  “Yes!” Eve nodded. “They say it was one of the great mysteries, twenty years ago, that the police failed to solve.”

  “It was, my wench,” H.M. agreed sombrely. “It was.”

  “And now Vicky’s grown up. And we thought if you of all people went along, and spoke to her nicely, she’d tell us what really happened on that night.”

  H.M.’ small, sharp eyes fixed disconcertingly on Eve.

  “I say, my wench. What’s your interest in all this?”

  “Oh, reasons.” Eve glanced quickly at Bill Sage, who was again punching moodily at the steering wheel, and checked herself. “Anyway, what difference does it make now? If you won’t go with us. . .”

  H.M. assumed a martyred air.

  “I never said I wasn’t goin’ with you, did I?” he demanded. (This was inaccurate, but no matter.) “Even after you practically made a cripple of me, I never said I wasn’t goin’?” His manner grew flurried and hasty. “But I got to leave now,” he added apologetically. “I got to get back to my office.”

  “We’ll drive you there, H.M.”

  “No, no, no,” said the practical cripple, getting out of the car with surprising celerity. “Walkin’ is good for my stomach if it’s not so good for my behind. I’m a forgivin’ man. You pick me up at my house tomorrow morning. G’bye.”

  And he lumbered off in the direction of the Hay market.

  It needed no close observer to see that H.M. was deeply abstracted. He remained so abstracted, indeed, as to be nearly murdered by a taxi at the Admiralty Arch; and he was halfway down Whitehall before a familiar voice stopped him.

  “Afternoon, Sir Henry!”

  Burly, urbane, buttoned up in blue serge, with his bowler hat and his boiled blue eye, stood Chief Inspector Masters.

  “Bit odd,” the Chief Inspector remarked affably, “to see you taking a constitutional on a day like this. And how are you, sir?”

  “Awful,” said H.M. instantly. “But that’s not the point. Masters, you crawlin’ snake! You’re the very man I wanted to see.”

  Few things startled the Chief Inspector. This one did.

  “You,” he repeated, “wanted to see me?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And what about?”

  “Masters, do you remember the Victoria Adams case about twenty years ago?”

  The Chief Inspector’s manner suddenly changed and grew wary.

  “Victori
a Adams case?” he ruminated. “No, sir, I can’t say I do.”

  “Son, you’re lyin’! You were sergeant to old Chief Inspector Rutherford in those days, and well I remember it!”

  Masters stood on his dignity.

  “That’s as may be, sir. But twenty years ago. . .”

  “A little girl of twelve or thirteen, the child of very wealthy parents, disappeared one night out of a country cottage with all the doors and windows locked on the inside. A week later, while everybody was havin’ screaming hysterics, the child reappeared again: through the locks and bolts, tucked up in her bed as usual. And to this day nobody’s ever known what really happened.”

  There was a silence, while Masters shut his jaws hard.

  “This family, the Adamses,” persisted H.M., “owned the cottage, down Aylesbury way, on the edge of Goblin Wood, opposite the lake. Or was it?”

  “Oh, ah,” growled Masters. “It was.”

  H.M. looked at him curiously.

  “They used the cottage as a base for bathin’ in summer, and ice-skatin’ in winter. It was black winter when the child vanished, and the place was all locked up inside against drafts. They say her old man nearly went loopy when he found her there a week later, lying asleep under the lamp. But all she’d say, when they asked her where she’d been, was, ‘I don’t know.’”

  Again there was a silence, while red buses thundered through the traffic press of Whitehall.

  “You’ve got to admit, Masters, there was a flaming public rumpus. I say: did you ever read Barrie’s Mary Rose?”

  “No.”

  “Well, it was a situation straight out of Barrie. Some people, y’see, said that Vicky Adams was a child of faerie who’d been spirited away by the pixies. . .”

  Whereupon Masters exploded.

  He removed his bowler hat and made remarks about pixies, in detail, which could not have been bettered by H.M. himself.

  “I know, son, I know.” H.M. was soothing. Then his big voice sharpened. “Now tell me. Was all this talk strictly true?”

  “What talk?”

  “Locked windows? Bolted doors? No attic-trap? No cellar? Solid walls and floor?”

  “Yes, sir,” answered Masters, regaining his dignity with a powerful effort, “I’m bound to admit it was true.”

  “Then there wasn’t any jiggery-pokery about the cottage?”

  “In your eye there wasn’t,” said Masters.

  “How d’ye mean?”

  “Listen, sir.” Masters lowered his voice. “Before the Adamses took over that place, it was a hideout for Chuck Randall. At that time he was the swellest of the swell mob; we lagged him a couple of years later. Do you think Chuck wouldn’t have rigged up some gadget for a getaway? Just so! Only. . .”

  “Well? Hey?”

  “We couldn’t find it,” grunted Masters.

  “And I’ll bet that pleased old Chief Inspector Rutherford?”

  “I tell you straight: he was fair up the pole. Especially as the kid herself was a pretty kid, all big eyes and dark hair. You couldn’t help trusting her story.”

  “Yes,” said H.M. “That’s what worries me.”

  “Worries you?”

  “Oh, my son!” said H.M. dismally. “Here’s Vicky Adams, the spoiled daughter of dotin’ parents. She’s supposed to be ‘odd’ and ‘fey.’ She’s even encouraged to be. During her adolescence, the most impressionable time of her life, she gets wrapped round with the gauze of a mystery that people talk about even yet. What’s that woman like now. Masters? What’s that woman like now?”

  “Dear Sir Henry!” murmured Miss Vicky Adams in her softest voice.

  She said this just as William Sage’s car, with Bill and Eve Drayton in the front seat, and Vicky and H.M. in the back seat, turned off the main road. Behind them lay the smoke-red roofs of Aylesbury, against a brightness of late afternoon. The car turned down a side road, a damp tunnel of greenery, and into another road which was little more than a lane between hedgerows.

  H.M.—though cheered by three good-sized picnic hampers from Fortnum & Mason, their wickerwork lids bulging with a feast—did not seem happy. Nobody in that car was happy, with the possible exception of Miss Adams herself.

  Vicky, unlike Eve, was small and dark and vivacious. Her large light-brown eyes, with very black lashes, could be arch and coy; or they could be dreamily intense. The late Sir James Barrie might have called her a sprite. Those of more sober views would have recognized a different quality: she had an inordinate sex-appeal, which was as palpable as a physical touch to any male within yards. And despite her smallness, Vicky had a full voice like Eve’s. All these qualities she used even in so simple a matter as giving traffic directions.

  “First right,” she would say, leaning forward to put her hands on Bill Sage’s shoulders. “Then straight on until the next traffic light. Ah, clever boy!”

  “Not at all, not at all!” Bill would disclaim, with red ears and rather an erratic style of driving.

  “Oh, yes, you are!” And Vicky would twist the lobe of his ear, playfully, before sitting back again.

  (Eve Drayton did not say anything. She did not even turn round. Yet the atmosphere, even of that quiet English picnic-party, had already become a trifle hysterical.)

  “Dear Sir Henry!” murmured Vicky, as they turned down into the deep lane between the hedgerows. “I do wish you wouldn’t be so materialistic! I do, really. Haven’t you the tiniest bit of spirituality in your nature?”

  “Me?” said H.M. in astonishment. “I got a very lofty spiritual nature. But what I want just now, my wench, is grub.—Oi!”

  Bill Sage glanced round.

  “By that speedometer,” H.M. pointed, “we’ve now come forty-six miles and a bit. We didn’t even leave town until people of decency and sanity were having their tea. Where are we going?”

  “But didn’t you know?” asked Vicky, with wide-open eyes. “We’re going to the cottage where I had such a dreadful experience when I was a child.”

  “Was it such a dreadful experience, Vicky dear?” inquired Eve.

  Vicky’s eyes seemed far away.

  “I don’t remember, really. I was only a child, you see. I didn’t understand. I hadn’t developed the power for myself then.”

  “What power?” H.M. asked sharply.

  “To dematerialize,” said Vicky. “Of course.”

  In that warm sun-dusted lane, between the hawthorn hedges, the car jolted over a rut. Crockery rattled.

  “Uh-huh. I see,” observed H.M. without inflection. “And where do you go, my wench, when you dematerialize?”

  “Into a strange country. Through a little door. You wouldn’t understand. Oh, you are such Philistines!” moaned Vicky. Then, with a sudden change of mood, she leaned forward and her whole physical allurement flowed again towards Bill Sage. “You wouldn’t like me to disappear, would you, Bill?”

  (Easy! Easy!)

  “Only,” said Bill, with a sort of wild gallantry, “if you promised to reappear again straightaway.”

  “Oh, I should have to do that.” Vicky sat back. She was trembling. “The power wouldn’t be strong enough. But even a poor little thing like me might be able to teach you a lesson. Look there!”

  And she pointed ahead.

  On their left, as the lane widened, stretched the ten-acre gloom of what is fancifully known as Goblin Wood. On their right lay a small lake, on private property and therefore deserted.

  The cottage—set well back into a clearing of the wood so as to face the road, screened from it by a line of beeches—was in fact a bungalow of rough-hewn stone, with a slate roof. Across the front of it ran a wooden porch. It had a seedy air, like the long yellow-green grass of its front lawn. Bill parked the car at the side of the road, since there was no driveway.

  “It’s a bit lonely, ain’t it?” demanded H.M. His voice boomed out against that utter stillness, under the hot sun.

  “Oh, yes!” breathed Vicky. She jumped out of the car in a whirl of s
kirts. “That’s why they were able to come and take me. When I was a child.”

  “They?”

  “Dear Sir Henry! Do I need to explain?”

  Then Vicky looked at Bill.

  “I must apologize,” she said, “for the state the house is in. I haven’t been out here for months and months. There’s a modern bathroom, I’m glad to say. Only paraffin lamps, of course. But then,” a dreamy smile flashed across her face, “you won’t need lamps, will you? Unless. . .”

  “You mean,” said Bill, who was taking a black case out of the car, “unless you disappear again?”

  “Yes, Bill. And promise me you won’t be frightened when I do.”

  The young man uttered a ringing oath which was shushed by Sir Henry Merrivale, who austerely said he disapproved of profanity. Eve Drayton was very quiet.

  “But in the meantime,” Vicky said wistfully, “let’s forget it all, shall we? Let’s laugh and dance and sing and pretend we’re children! And surely our guest must be even more hungry by this time?”

  It was in this emotional state that they sat down to their picnic.

  H.M., if the truth must be told, did not fare too badly. Instead of sitting on some hummock of ground, they dragged a table and chairs to the shaded porch. All spoke in strained voices. But no word of controversy was said. It was only afterwards, when the cloth was cleared, the furniture and hampers pushed indoors, the empty bottles flung away, that danger tapped a warning.

  From under the porch Vicky fished out two half-rotted deckchairs, which she set up in the long grass of the lawn. These were to be occupied by Eve and H.M., while Vicky took Bill Sage to inspect a plum tree of some remarkable quality she did not specify.

  Eve sat down without comment. H.M., who was smoking a black cigar opposite her, waited some time before he spoke.

  “Y’ know,” he said, taking the cigar out of his mouth, “you’re behaving remarkably well.”

  “Yes.” Eve laughed. “Aren’t I?”

  “Are you pretty well acquainted with this Adams gal?”

  “I’m her first cousin,” Eve answered simply. “Now that her parents are dead, I’m her only relative. I know all about her.”

  From far across the lawn floated two voices saying something about wild strawberries. Eve, her fair hair and fair complexion vivid against the dark line of Goblin Wood, clenched her hands on her knees.