Thomas Godfrey (Ed) (55 page)

The third change now to
be added impressed me strongly as the most marked and striking of all. I do not
theorise upon it; I accurately state it, and there leave it. Although the
Appearance was not itself perceived by those whom it addressed, its coming
close to such persons was invariably attended by some trepidation or
disturbance on their part. It seemed to me as if it were prevented, by laws to
which I was not amenable, from fully revealing itself to others, and yet as if
it could invisibly, dumbly, and darkly overshadow their minds. When the leading
counsel for the defence suggested that hypothesis of suicide, and the figure
stood at the learned gentleman’s elbow, frightfully sawing at its severed
throat, it is undeniable that the counsel faltered in his speech, lost for a
few seconds the thread of his ingenious discourse, wiped his forehead with his
handkerchief, and turned extremely pale. When the witness to character was confronted
by the Appearance, her eyes most certainly did follow the direction of its
pointed finger, and rest in great hesitation and trouble upon the prisoner’s
face. Two additional illustrations will suffice. On the eighth day of the
trial, after the pause which was every day made early in the afternoon for a
few minutes’ rest and refreshment, I came back into court with the rest of the
Jury some little time before the return of the Judges. Standing up in the box
and looking about me, I thought the figure was not there, until, chancing to
raise my eyes to the gallery, I saw it bending forward, and leaning over a very
decent woman, as if to assure itself whether the Judges had resumed their seats
or not. Immediately afterwards that woman screamed, fainted, and was carried
out. So with the venerable, sagacious, and patient Judge who conducted the
trial. When the case was over, and he settled himself and his papers to sum up,
the murdered man, entering by the Judges’ door, advanced to his Lordship’s
desk, and looked eagerly over his shoulder at the pages of his notes which he
was turning. A change came over his Lordship’s face; his hand stopped; the
peculiar shiver, that I knew so well, passed over him; he faltered, “Excuse me,
gentlemen, for a few moments. I am somewhat oppressed by the vitiated air”; and
did not recover until he had drunk a glass of water.

Through all the monotony
of six of those interminable ten days, —the same Judges and others on the
bench, the same Murderer in the dock, the same lawyers at the table, the same
tones of question and answer rising to the roof of the Court, the same
scratching of the Judge’s pen, the same ushers going in and out, the same
lights kindled at the same hour when there had been any natural light of day,
the same foggy curtain outside the great windows when it was foggy, the same
rain pattering and dripping when it was rainy, the same footmarks of turnkeys
and prisoner day after day on the same sawdust, the same keys locking and
unlocking the same heavy doors, —through all the wearisome monotony which made
me feel as if I had been Foreman of the Jury for a vast period of time, and
Piccadilly had flourished coevally with Babylon, the murdered man never lost
one trace of his distinctness in my eyes, nor was he at any moment less
distinct than anybody else. I must not omit, as a matter of fact, that I never
once saw the Appearance which I call by the name of the murdered man look at
the Murderer. Again and again I wondered, “Why does he not?” But he never did.

Nor did he look at me,
after the production of the miniature, until the last closing minutes of the
trial arrived. We retired to consider, at seven minutes before ten at night.
The idiotic vestryman and his two parochial parasites gave us so much trouble
that we twice returned into Court to beg to have certain extracts from the
Judges notes re-read. Nine of us had not the smallest doubt about those
passages, neither, I believe, had any one in the Court; the dunderhead
triumvirate, however, having no idea but obstruction, disputed them for that
very reason. At length we prevailed, and finally the Jury returned into Court
at ten minutes past twelve.

The murdered man at that
time stood directly opposite the Jury-box, on the other side of the Court. As I
took my place, his eyes rested on me with great attention; he seemed satisfied,
and slowly shook a great grey veil, which he carried on his arm for the first
time, over his head and whole form. As I gave in our verdict, “Guilty,” the
veil collapsed, all was gone, and his place was empty.

The Murderer, being asked
by the Judge, according to usage, whether he had anything to say before
sentence of Death should be passed upon him, indistinctly muttered something
which was described in the leading newspapers of the following day as “a few
rambling, incoherent, and half-audible words, in which he was understood to
complain that he had not had a fair trial, because the Foreman of the Jury was
prepossessed against him.” The remarkable declaration that he really made was
this: “
My Lord, I knew I was a doomed man,
when the Foreman of my Jury came into the box. My Lord, I knew he would never
let me off, because, before I was taken, he somehow got to my bedside in the
night, woke me, and put a rope round my neck.”

Chief Inspector Doob of Scotland Yard arrived at Farnsworth
Hall moments after the call had come in. It had been a drizzly Christmas Eve,
and he had been nursing a head cold.

In the well-appointed sitting room of the home, he found
Lord Carstairs, the wealthy industrialist, sprawled out across the floor, quite
dead at the foot of an undecorated Christmas tree, blood still oozing from an
ugly gash across the back of his bald head.

On a
Victorian settee nearby, Vivian Carstairs, his attractive widow sat sobbing
into a lace handkerchief.

"I'm sorry to trouble you, Lady Carstairs," said
Doob in his most solicitous voice, "but I'm afraid I'm going to need some
kind of statement."

"Yes, Inspector," she said, composing herself.
"I understand.”

"As I told the constable, we were both upstairs in
bed, when Arthur woke me, and said he thought he heard a burglar downstairs.
The servants are all away, so he went downstairs to investigate.”

"After a bit, when he didn't return, I decided to go
downstairs myself. I took the poker from the bedroom fireplace just in case. It
was dark downstairs. None of the lights seemed to be working.”

"I thought I heard someone call to me from the sitting
room. I went in to investigate, and something suddenly came toward me. I
suppose I panicked and just swung at it. When I was able to get some light, I
found poor Arthur, like that."

"I see," said Doob, considerately. "I wonder
if it was possible that your husband had meant to do you some harm?"

"But, whatever for? I can think of no reason."

"My men say someone had tampered with the fuse box.
And, what of your husband's recent attachment to a Miss Trixie Latouche?"
continued Doob, removing a scented letter from the pocket of the dead man's
dressing gown.

"The Duchess of Claymore? Tabloid stuff, I can assure
you, Inspector. There was nothing to it," said the widow staunchly.

"Perhaps," conceded Doob, "but I think you
had better come with us to police headquarters. The charge is premeditated
murder."

WHAT MADE INSPECTOR DOOB SUSPICIOUS OF VIVIAN CARSTAIRS'S
STORY?

Solution:

Vivian Carstairs said she struck out with the poker as the
person was coming towards her. Yet Lord Carstairs had been killed by a blow to
the back of his head.

She was subsequently convicted. Doob later married the
Duchess of Claymore, after breaking her down during intensive interrogation.

The name Ellery Queen is
synonymous with the American mystery story. As editor, author, collector,
teacher, critic, lecturer, and anthologist, he has had a profound influence on
the course of mystery writing.

Actually Queen is two
people. Frederic Dannay and his cousin, the late Manfred B. Lee. (The fictional
hero of most of their stories was also named Ellery Queen.) Queen the detective
first appeared in
The Roman Hat Mystery
in 1929, and has since
turned up in just about every form of mass communication ever devised,
including television, radio and films.

The hallmark of an Ellery
Queen story is its ingenuity. A classic Queen mystery takes a murder, proposes
a number of different plausible solutions, then arrives at the correct one,
usually the shrewdest of all.

In 1941, Lee and Dannay
expanded their endeavors to a new monthly publication,
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
,
which became the keeper of the flame during the dark years when large
publishing houses were turning away from mystery fiction in general and short
stories in particular. It continues to dominate the field today.

With Lee’s death, the
Ellery Queen stories ceased, but Dannay continues his work as editor-in-chief
of the magazine, a latter-day Dr. Johnson in a field he has so tirelessly and
effectively championed.

There is a law among
story-tellers, originally passed by Editors at the cries (they say) of their
constituents, which states that stories about Christmas shall have children in
them. This Christmas story is no exception; indeed, misopedists will complain
that we have overdone it. And we confess in advance that this is also a story
about Dolls, and that Santa Claus comes into it, and even a Thief; though as to
this last, whoever he was—and that was one of the questions—he was certainly
not Barabbas, even parabolically.

Another section of the
statute governing Christmas stories provides that they shall incline towards
Sweetness and Light. The first arises, of course, from the orphans and the
never-souring savor of the annual Miracle; as for Light, it will be provided at
the end, as usual, by that luminous prodigy, Ellery Queen. The reader of
gloomier temper will also find a large measure of Darkness, in the person and
works of one who, at least in Inspector Queen’s harassed view, was surely the
winged Prince of that region. His name, by the way, was not Satan, it was
Comus; and this is paradox enow, since the original Comus, as everyone knows,
was the god of festive joy and mirth, emotions not commonly associated with the
Underworld. As Ellery struggled to embrace his phantom foe, he puzzled over
this
non sequitur
in
vain; in vain, that is, until Nikki Porter, no scorner of the obvious, suggested
that he
might
seek the answer where any ordinary mortal would go at once. And there, to the
great man’s mortification, it was indeed to be found: On page 262b of Volume 6,
Coleb to Damasci,
of the 175th Anniversary edition of
the
Encyclopaedia Britannica.
A
French conjuror of that name —Comus—performing in London in the year 1789
caused his wife to vanish from the top of a table—the very first time, it
appeared, that this feat, uxorial or otherwise, had been accomplished without the
aid of mirrors. To track his dark adversary’s
nom de nuit
to its historic lair gave Ellery
his only glint of satisfaction until that blessed moment when light burst all
around him and exorcised the darkness, Prince and all.