“Hanley, younger but still not young, had flat, dangerous eyes and no conscience. Dwyer, older, seasoned by years behind prison walls, had the look of a fox in its own forest.” Dwyer was the top con in the precisely structured social strata of the prison — the man to go to for such indispensables as a forged pass...

Max Hanley made his way slowly across the big prison yard, walking around groups of blue-clad men who were congregating to play dominoes or lift weights or dope out next Sunday’s football parlays or just rap about their latest never-ending gripes. He moved gradually over to the bleachers, lighting a cigarette as he went. The man he wanted to see was sitting alone on a low bleacher bench and reading a newspaper. He was an older con, in his late fifties, a lifer; he wore bifocals under a gray receding hairline.

“Frank Dwyer?” Hanley said, sitting down beside him.

“That’s me,” the old con replied, glancing at his visitor, then resuming his reading.

“I’m—”

“I know who you are,” Dwyer said before Hanley could tell him. “You’re Max Hanley. Former public enemy number one. Doing sixty-five years for bank robberies all over the midwest. You cell over in south block. Work in the dry-cleaning plant. What’s on your mind?”

Hanley smiled. “You sure you don’t already know that too?”

Dwyer looked at him, squinting. “I could probably guess. Been here about a year now, haven’t you?”

“A year too long,” Hanley said tightly.

“So you’re thinking of hanging ’em on a limb,’ is that it?”

“ ‘Hanging ’em on a limb?’ What’s that mean?”

“Means hanging your shackles on the limb of a tree and running away,” Dwyer explained. “Old chain-gang expression.”

Hanley studied the older man. “You were on a chain gang?”

“For over a year. Until I hung ’em on a limb and escaped. I did time on the Rock, too. Alcatraz. You didn’t think you were the only public enemy in here, did you?”

“I never thought about it one way or the other,” Max Hanley said with an edge. “But you’re right — I am looking to bust out of here. I asked around about some things I’ll be needing. Everybody said to see Frank Dwyer. They said Frank Dwyer was a lifer who knew this joint better than anybody. They said Frank Dwyer was the top con in here when it came to getting anything done. Were they right?”

“I’ve got a connection here and there,” Dwyer admitted. “But I don’t work for nothing.”

“Nobody asked you to. I’ve got friends and money on the outside. It just so happens that the things I need are on the inside.” Hanley leaned forward, elbows on knees, and dropped his cigarette butt on the ground. Dwyer eyed him distastefully.

“You’re not supposed to do that with your cigarette butt,” he said. “You’re supposed to tamp it out, peel the paper back, and roll it into a little ball, and spread the loose tobacco on the ground. Keeps the litter down. That’s the rule.”

Hanley grunted softly. “If I was interested in rules I wouldn’t be in here, old man. And I wouldn’t be sitting here planning a break.” “That’s the trouble with you young people,” Dwyer complained. “You got no respect for anything. This may be a prison, but it’s where you live. That’s good enough reason to keep it clean.”

“Climb down off your soapbox,” Hanley said flatly. “I didn’t come over here for no lecture. Are you open to making some money or aren’t you?”

“I’m open,” Dwyer said with a sigh. “A man’s got to get along somehow.” He folded his newspaper, carefully and neatly, and put it in the pocket of his denim jacket, which was also carefully and neatly folded on the bench next to him. “What’s your plan?” he asked.

Hanley shook his head. “You don’t have to know the plan. All you have to know is what I need from you. Then we’ll talk price.”

Dwyer shrugged. “Suit yourself. Shoot.”

“I want three yard passes from the dispensary to the kitchen. I want them signed by a doctor, so they won’t be questioned. Can you handle that?”

“Sure.”

“Okay. Next I want three white bake-shop uniforms. Just the pants and shirts — I don’t need the hats. One size medium and two larges.”

“Three bake-shop uniforms, okay,” Dwyer said, nodding.

“Last, I want a package moved from the shoe shop over to the waste bins behind the sheet-metal shop. It’ll have to be moved on the exact day I say, no earlier and no later.”

“How big a package?”

“Shoe-box size.”

Dwyer nodded again. “No problem. Okay. That it?”

Hanley studied the old con for a long moment. Then he said, “I’m going to have a pretty involved plan going here. I’d like to have some idea who your contacts are, how you’re going to arrange all this—”

Dwyer was already shaking his head. “Sorry. That’s my business. I’ll give you a guarantee that everything you want will be done. But that’s all. No details. My guarantee will have to be enough.”

“Personal guarantee?” Max Hanley asked.

“Personal guarantee. Absolutely.”

That satisfied Hanley. He and Dwyer both understood that Dwyer had just put his life on the line to guarantee his performance.

“Let’s get to the price now,” the old convict said. “We’re talking some pretty heavy money here.”

Hanley feigned a surprised look. “For what? For stealing a few passes and some bake-shop uniforms?”

Dwyer shook his head and smiled. He knew when someone was trying to handle him. “No,” he said easily, “for moving that package from the shoe shop to the sheet-metal waste bins. I mean, I have to assume that package ain’t somebody’s lunch. You want to tell me what’s in it?”

Hanley shook his head. “No.”

“Then I’ll tell you. Guns.”

A moment of silence fell between them. They sat there side by side, both leaning forward with forearms on knees, looking at but not really seeing the mass of blue-clad men milling about in the yard. Hanley, younger but still not young, had flat, dangerous eyes and no conscience. Dwyer, older, seasoned by years behind prison walls, had the look of a fox in its own forest. In the silence that pervaded the moment, each decided that he did not like the other. But that didn’t matter. It wasn’t necessary for them to be friends in order for them to strike a deal.

“Look it,” Dwyer finally said, “let’s stop playing games with each other. Here’s my position. Forget the signed passes and the bake-shop uniforms — those are nothing and we both know it. I just happen to be able to get them and you don’t. If you were bringing a break down on the joint, I’d get them for you and we’d be talking favors instead of cash money. But you’re not going to be around to pay back favors, so we’ve got to deal in terms of cash money.

“Now what you’re really buying is moving guns around inside the walls. You know as well as I do that’s about as heavy as it can get. We’re not talking dope or stolen canteen supplies or such. We’re talking guns. Get caught and it’s a formal felony charge that’ll bring another ten-year sentence — and it’ll be consecutive, not concurrent, tagged onto the end of the present sentence. Plus which you know how it’ll be served — in the hole. I’ve done hole time in D Block on Alcatraz, and in the SHU — the Security Housing Unit — at Folsom. Neither one was no picnic, and I was a lot younger then too. So you’re gonna have to decide if you’re willing to pay the freight or not. I’ll get your artillery moved for you, but I want a grand for doing it.”

“A grand!”

“You heard right. One grand. Cash. In hundred-dollar bills. New money, so it’s easy to roll.”

“A grand! That’s robbery!”

“Well, that’s why I’m here. Take it or leave it.”

Silence again. Dwyer pulled a pouch and paper out of his shirt pocket and rolled himself a cigarette. Hanley watched the wrinkled, yellowed fingers work with a deftness that belied their age. Not a shred of tobacco was dropped, not a millimeter of paper was left unfilled. Except for its twisted end, the cigarette looked tailor-made. Probably been rolling them for fifty years, Max Hanley thought. There wouldn’t be any bargaining with this old thief.

“Okay,” Hanley said at last. “It’s a deal. Ten hundred-dollar bills. New money.” He fixed Dwyer in a cold stare. “But you’d better come through, old man.”

Dwyer grunted. “I been coming through since before you was born, boy.”

When our friend, Detective Sergeant Henry H. Turnbuckle of the Milwaukee Police Department, investigates a case, especially a murder case, he examines minutely the implications of every iota of evidence, every jot and tittle of non-evidence, and theorizes exhaustively on the circumstances of the crime and the identity of the criminal. But this time has our Henry H. met his match in relentless reasoning?...

I rubbed my hands. “Ah, what have we here?”

“A body,” Ralph said.

We did indeed. It was that of Paula Washburn, age 36, weight possibly a bit over 130.

She lay prone on the carpeted floor of the walk-in vault-safe. Just beyond her right hand lay a pearl necklace and two diamond rings. Her body had been discovered at 4:30 p.m. by her stepdaughter, Marianne, when she had opened the vault to take another admiring look at her law diploma.

The vault was perhaps eight feet deep, seven wide, and seven high. I supposed that, if it became necessary, I could resort to mathematics and determine just how long a person would survive locked in a room of that size; in this case, however, I did not think that would be necessary. There were other things to consider.

On the far wall of the vault ranged a bank of various-sized safety-deposit boxes. To one side stood three four-door filing cabinets.

“Ralph,” I said, “we are here faced with three possibilities.”

“All I see are two. Either she got accidentally locked inside or somebody did the locking on purpose.”

I chuckled good-naturedly. “Have you considered suicide?”

“Not lately, Henry. Who’s going to commit suicide by locking herself in a vault? It isn’t a neat way to go.”

“Ralph, you, as others, are guilty of a common misconception on the question of asphyxiation in vaults. You seem to think that the ending would entail a desperate gasping for air. Au contraire. As the percentage of oxygen in the air decreased, one would simply become drowsy, lapse into unconsciousness, and then glide into death.”

“You think she might have committed suicide?”

“By no means, Ralph. I was merely touching all bases. If she came down here with the intention of committing suicide, would she just stand there clutching her jewelry — possibly for hours — until she keeled over? No, it would be the normal thing to at least put them down somewhere. On the filing cabinets, for example. Or in the pocket of her dressing gown.” I shook my head. “No, Ralph, she did not commit suicide.”

I went to the bank of safety-deposit boxes and tested them once again. They were all locked. So were the filing cabinets.

Ralph watched me. “All right, Henry, so maybe she came down here to put away her jewels for the night and the door swung shut behind her and trapped her inside?”

“No, Ralph. As we have seen and tested, the vault door is quite heavy and not at all free-swinging. It requires at least some continuous effort either to open or to shut it. In short, it cannot accidentally drift shut.”

Ralph agreed. “Which leaves us with murder. Let’s talk to the suspects.” There were three of those and they waited out of earshot at the farther end of the rather large drawing room.

James Washburn, husband of the deceased, age in the early fifties: tall, distinguished, open-countenanced, and deep in thought. Marianne, his daughter: small, raven-haired, wary eyes behind shell glasses. And Ronald Goodcart, a distant cousin of the deceased and a weekend guest at the house. Ronald was in his early forties, had black hair, a thin black mustache, and the general mien of a cad.

All three were quite solemn, none of them exhibiting undue grief at the death of Paula Washburn. They had, of course, undergone some preliminary questioning by the uniformed officers who arrived first at the scene. Ralph and I now moved in for in-depth interrogation.

I introduced Ralph and then myself. “Detective Sergeant Henry H. Turnbuckle, MPD.” I waited for signs of recognition, but they withheld them.

I regarded James Washburn. “How long were you and the deceased married?”

“Three years. About that.”

“When and where did you last see your wife alive?”

“In our bedroom last night at about eleven thirty. She suddenly remembered her jewelry and told me she was going back downstairs to put it into the vault for the night.”

I nodded judiciously. “It is now five thirty in the afternoon of the following day and the body was discovered less than one hour ago. How can you explain that?”

“Nobody opened the vault until then.”

“I mean you hadn’t seen your wife for approximately eighteen hours and yet you never thought to sound some kind of an alarm?”

“I didn’t know she was locked in the vault.”

I smiled thinly. “Your wife leaves your bedroom, telling you that she is going to put her jewelry into the vault, and she doesn’t return? Didn’t that make you wonder just a smidgen where she might be?”

“Not really. We sleep in twin beds. After she left the room, I closed my eyes and immediately fell asleep. I didn’t wake until nine this morning.”

“But surely when you glanced at her bed this morning and found it unoccupied, didn’t you begin to wonder where she was?”

“No. I thought she’d just gotten up early and gone downstairs. Paula usually has no more than a cup of coffee for breakfast and then is off. She led a rather independent life and usually didn’t bother to let people know where she was going or for how long. I’ve gone entire weekends without ever seeing her.”

“Who discovered the body?”

Marianne Washburn now spoke. “I did. At about four thirty this afternoon when I opened the vault to take another look at my sheepskin. Paula lay there on the floor inside, quite dead.”

“Your sheepskin?”

“My law degree. Magna cum laude, and stuff. I’m going to have it framed when I open my office, but for now I keep it in the vault and peek at it every now and then. The vault is our storage place for valuable things that are smaller than a bread box. Jewelry, cash, papers, records, mementoes, and new diplomas.”

“Isn’t there any way to open the vault from the inside? Or at least an alarm button which a person could press if he were imprisoned inside?”

“I’m afraid not. The vault was built into the house nearly fifty years ago. Today I suppose a vault must incorporate all kinds of safety features, but in those days they weren’t so particular.”

“The vault is opened by a combination lock?”

“Yes.”

“Who has the combination? Besides you?”

“Dad does. Paula did.” She looked at Ronald Goodcart.

He shook his head. “No. Why should I?”

I spoke to Marianne. “When you found Mrs. Washburn, did you touch her, move or take anything?”

“No.” Marianne sighed. “Poor Paula. It’s obvious that when she went downstairs to put away her jewelry the door of the vault accidentally shut behind her, trapping her inside.”

I smiled. “My dear young lady, I have inspected and tested the vault door thoroughly. No vagrant breath of air could set it in motion.”

She considered that, then sighed again. “I was just trying to protect Paula’s memory. She was so depressed lately. Her health, you know. She had this bad heart. Everybody knows it. Morose and downhearted. Brooding all the time. She must have decided to take her own life.”

“Nonsense,” Ronald Goodcart said. “Paula was quite cheerful. Vibrant. Besides, she would have left a note.”

Marianne regarded him with disdain. “Suicides do not necessarily leave notes. Besides, it could have been a sudden impulse and she discovered too late that she didn’t have a pencil and paper with her.”

“Ah, yes,” I said. “Actually the most interesting aspect of this entire case is the fact that the victim did not leave a note or any other communication behind. It is the very crux of this matter.”

Ralph was impressed. “You’ve gotten to the crux already, Henry?”

I nodded. “The body of Paula Washburn was examined by us, was it not, Ralph? And what did we find in the pocket of her dressing gown?”

“Just a small handkerchief.”

“Exactly.” I turned back to the suspects. “Let us suppose that Paula Washburn came downstairs to put away her jewelry. She opened the vault door by dialing the combination. And then what? Where, inside the vault, did she intend to put this jewelry?”

Washburn volunteered. “She stored her jewelry in one of the safety-deposit boxes.”

I nodded encouragement. “And how did she intend to get into that safety-deposit box?”

“With her key, of course.”

“Ah, but we found no key on her person, or on the floor, or anywhere else in the vault. And all the safety-deposit boxes and the filing cabinets are locked. So where did she intend to put this jewelry if she had no key with her?”

Marianne was still trying to sell suicide. “It’s obvious, isn’t it? She simply forgot the key. It was the last straw, so to speak. Everything had been going wrong all day and she had a headache too. So in one mad moment of frustration and despair, she pulled the vault door shut after her and said goodbye to the world.”

I did not buy. “No, Paula Washburn did not forget her key. Someone else did. And that was the person who closed the vault door behind her.”

I had been expecting a gasp or two, but they restrained themselves.

“Ralph,” I said, “were there any marks of violence on the victim’s body? Anything to suggest that she had been shot, stabbed, bludgeoned, strangled? Any discoloration or suspicious odor which might suggest poisoning?”

“Nothing. The coroner won’t get around to the autopsy until after he’s had supper, but he says that asphyxiation is a good bet.”

I agreed. “And now we come to the poser, the conundrum, the puzzle. Why did Paula Washburn leave no note, no message, no communication of any kind?”

I smiled about. “Suppose that you had just been locked in a vault and knew it had been no accident. Wouldn’t you at least have tried to tell the world who locked you in there?”

“Maybe she didn’t know,” Ralph said.

“A possibility, Ralph. However, even if she didn’t know who had locked her in, wouldn’t she at least have left some kind of information behind indicating that she had been locked in and that it hadn’t been accidental?”

“She lost her head and panicked,” Ralph said. “And it just didn’t come to her mind.”

“No, Ralph. While panic might be the first and natural reaction, I find it impossible to believe that she could have sustained that panic for three, four, five, or whatever hours it would have taken her to collapse. At some point during that time she would surely have recovered enough aplomb to at least leave a message about her suspicions or certainties. And yet she left none. Why not?”

Ralph speculated. “Maybe she did leave a message, Henry. A note. But the murderer waited a few hours until he was certain she was dead. And then he opened the vault, pocketed the note, and closed the vault again.”

“Possible, Ralph. However, that flimsy theory depends on the victim just happening to have a writing implement and paper in her pocket. Hardly likely, I should think.”

I allowed a pause. “However, in such an emergency couldn’t she have found some other instrument to write with or a surface to put it on?”

I smiled. “The diamond rings. Surely it would have occurred to her to use her diamond rings as writing implements and she could have used any plain surface — the sides or the tops of the filing cabinets, for instance — as her slate? She could very easily have scratched the name of her murderer, or simply indicated that someone unknown had locked her in there. And yet she didn’t do this. Why not?”

There was silence.

Ralph frowned. “She was unconscious? The murderer knocked her out before he put her in there?”

“But we found no cranial bruises or injury sufficient to produce such unconsciousness. Besides, even if she were unconscious before being put in there, what guarantee did the murderer have that she would remain unconscious until she died by asphyxiation.”

Ralph tried again. “She was drugged. That would have held her until she suffocated.”

“But surely the murderer must have known that, under the mysterious circumstances of her death, an autopsy would be performed and the presence of drugs discovered in her body.” I shook my head. “No, Ralph, the murderer was not the least bit worried about her leaving a message or drugs being found in her system because Paula Washburn was already dead when she was locked in the vault.”

There were moments of awed silence at my relentless reasoning and then Ralph said, “She didn’t die of asphyxiation?”

“Ah, Ralph, but she did die of asphyxiation. That was the whole point in putting her body into the vault.”

I assumed a grim expression. “She was asphyxiated, but not in the vault. And she was put into the vault to cover up the fact that she was asphyxiated, but somewhere else. And considering what she was wearing at the time of her death — that is, pajamas and a dressing gown — would not that lead us back to one particular room in the house?”

I turned to stare at James Washburn. “Perhaps a plastic bag slipped over her head? But more likely the old-fashioned pillow?”

James Washburn sighed heavily, looked utterly resigned, and opened his mouth to speak.

Marianne spoke first. “I see it all so clearly now. At eleven thirty last night Paula left father’s bedroom, telling him she was going downstairs to put away her jewelry. But instead she slipped down the hall to Ronald’s bedroom for a tryst, an assignation, a rendezvous.”

Goodcart blinked. “She did not.”

Marianne ignored him. “The two of them had a lover’s quarrel. Harsh, bitter words were exchanged. She told him their affair was finished.”

Ronald protested. “It never began.”

Marianne swept on. “In his moment of rage he seized a pillow and smothered Paula. Then, realizing he had to cover up the crime, he carried her body down to the vault, hoping to make it appear that she had died there accidentally.”

Ronald had begun to perspire. “But I don’t even know the combination of the vault.”

She smiled insincerely in his direction. “We have only your untrustworthy word for that. Everybody knows that Paula was a complete witch — if I pronounced that word correctly. She continually flittered from hither to yon and last night you were the nearest hither.”

I shook my head. “A noble effort, Miss Washburn, but sheer logic indicates that a woman would not blatantly tell her husband she was going to put her jewelry into the vault and then instead sashay down the hall to an assignation. Her husband might not innocently fall asleep at her departure. After a time he might even come looking for her. No, it is much more logical to assume that if she intended any such action, she would first wait until she was certain her husband had fallen asleep before she ventured out of the bedroom.”

I took my celluloid card out of my breast coat pocket.

Ralph stopped me. “What are you doing, Henry?”

“I’m about to read Mr. Washburn his rights.”

“Why?”

“The Supreme Court insists on it.”

Ralph took me aside. “Henry, you know and I know that Washburn killed his wife. Everybody in this room does. But what solid proof do we have? I’m talking about things that people can see and touch. People like district attorneys who have to get the indictments or the judges who have to issue them.”

“Ralph, the man seems almost eager to confess.”

“Henry, I doubt that his daughter, the brand-new lawyer, will allow him to confess to anything.”

Marianne had edged close enough to hear us. She nodded and smiled sweetly.

I experienced moral indignation. “Ralph, we have here a coldblooded murder. This man held a pillow over the face of his wife until she was asphyxiated. Seven or eight minutes, assuming that there was no leakage of air. But probably longer.”

James Washburn had joined us. “Seven or eight minutes? But it wasn’t anywhere near—”

Marianne quickly put her hand over his mouth. “Suppose,” she said, “suppose this somebody who wielded the pillow merely wanted to stop the victim’s vituperation and hysteria. He had no intention at all of murdering her. He just wanted to shut her up for a while. He held the pillow over her head for perhaps one minute.”

Washburn freed his mouth. “Maybe not even that long.”

“Maybe less,” Marianne said swiftly. “And when Paula ceased to struggle, he removed the pillow from her face and was utterly astounded to discover she was dead.”

Washburn nodded eagerly.

Marianne glared at him for a moment, then continued, “And suppose that since he had no conception at all as to the amount of time it takes to asphyxiate anyone with a pillow, he merely assumed he had killed her? Actually she had died of a heart attack, not of asphyxiation. And so, succumbing to perfectly understandable panic, he carried her body down to the vault and tried to make it appear as though she had accidentally locked herself inside.”

I folded my arms. “Even assuming that is what occurred, in this state if a person dies as the result of stress during a hostile act, it would be considered at least manslaughter.”

Marianne smiled. “But can you prove even manslaughter? And there will be no confession. And if this person were somehow convicted — which is highly unlikely since thirty-seven character witnesses will testify in his behalf — he will probably — considering his unblemished past and his standing in the community — be put on probation for six months. Would you cause all that trouble just to stick some poor unfortunate soul with a six-months’ probation?”

There was respectful silence while I stared out of a window.

Finally I put my celluloid card back into my pocket. “Ralph, my mother cried for three days when she discovered that I had joined the Milwaukee Police Department. She was right.”

“Now, now, Henry,” Ralph said. “We win some and we lose some.” He turned to the others. “Does anyone have a glass of sherry?”

“Not here, Ralph,” I said firmly.

Ralph embarrassed me further by explaining. “Whenever one of Henry’s cases doesn’t go just right, he finds that a glass or two of sherry helps to buck him up.”

Ronald Goodcart folded his arms. “I’ll bet he drinks a lot.”

That remark was entirely uncalled for. I consume perhaps one bottle of sherry a year. Well, maybe two.

I declined their sherry and we left.

At eight that evening the coroner phoned me at my apartment to let me know that the autopsy had shown that Paula Washburn had died of a heart attack, not of asphyxiation.

At nine my door buzzer sounded.

It was Marianne. “Do you realize that you are the only Turnbuckle in the telephone directory?”

I sighed. “I am the only Turnbuckle who ever left Sheboygan for more than a weekend.”

She held up what looked like a bottle in a paper bag. “I thought I’d drop in and see if it’s possible to cheer you up.”

It was.

The highly successful plastic surgeon from California, dissatisfied with life, was seeking a new career. In Brighton, England, he met two women, two entirely different women — “a young girl with astonishing silver hair” and a mature woman, “not really his type,” with taffy hair and dressed in tweed. Both women were to change the face of Mark Whitman’s life, each in her own fashion...

The pub was almost deserted. Not many people inhabited the Brighton seafront on a cloudy day in early April. Mark Whitman left his bench by the window, walked to the bar, and asked for another bourbon and water.

The feeling that he had made a fool of himself was strong today. If he could not achieve something in England soon, he would probably end up back in California with more egg on his face than a chicken farmer in a hurricane. But not necessarily. He could easily afford to drink himself to death. Or he could walk a hundred yards down the shingle, shed his clothes, and trudge into the breakers like Fredric March in “A Star Is Born.” If he did, his wife back home would not announce bravely to the world, “This is Mrs. Mark Whitman.” She would say something like, “The idiot finally got what he was after.”

Somebody was having trouble with the doors. Back on his bench, Whitman saw why when a woman struggled in leading on a chain the biggest Great Dane he had ever seen. It was charcoal-gray and as tall as a Shetland pony. She caught his eye and they exchanged sympathetic smiles. “He’s taking me for my walk,” she said.

“I’m glad he brought you in here.”

“Thank you.”

Whitman was more surprised than she was by his flirtatious remark. He had managed a few interesting pickups since arriving, all in London, but this mature woman was not really his type. Her taffy hair was permed in an old-fashioned style he thought of as “dancing teacher.” She had a large plain face that he assessed professionally: no lift needed, a little work around the eyelids would help, some padding in the chin. The dog, however, was hopeless, its face draped in enough skin to make another Dane or a couple of terriers.

“I’m off to the bar,” Whitman said, tossing back the bourbon. “Can I bring you something?”

“Yes, please. I’d like a gin and tonic.”

When he came back carrying the drinks, she was settled in with her tweed jacket unbuttoned revealing a full but not flamboyant chest. Her sturdy build, her clear-eyed look, and her confident accent suggested to Whitman that this was a girl who had done well at field hockey for her private school during the war.

“What’s the dog’s name?” Whitman said. “Cheers.”

“Cheers. His name is Giant.”

The animal was stretched out proudly like one of Landseer’s lions in Trafalgar Square. “Nice boy, Giant. I hope you never run into a dog named Jack.”

They exchanged introductions. Then they began chatting and he learned that her name, Brenda Belziel, was French. She was the widow of an officer in the Free French Army, a Colonel who had walked not far behind le Grand Charles himself when de Gaulle returned to Paris. No, he had not been killed in the war, nothing as heroic as that. Brenda had only met Belziel in 1960 when he was serving with a trade commission in London. They married, she for the first time, he for the third. His death had occurred accidentally a year and a half ago, as the result of a fall in the bathtub.

“I’m still living it down, I can assure you,” she said, insisting on going to the bar for the next round of drinks. Giant plodded after her like an animated exhibit from the Museum of Natural History. When she came back and put Whitman’s bourbon in front of him, she went on to say, “Brighton is a gossipy town. I’m known as the Black Widow by some of the nastier types. They can’t believe I didn’t kill him. I have ended up with a house and a lot of money, but still—”

Whitman was beginning to feel secure inside his protective skin of whiskey. Her legs, which he had inspected as she went to the bar, were as healthy as the rest of her. Definitely a hockey player this one, a woman of charm and humor, but not the type to be given more than the story of his life. A game of gin rummy might be the limit of their intimacy.

“You’re an interesting man, Mr. Whitman,” she said. “When I reveal I’m a wealthy widow, most of them become nervous, or extra polite, or sexy. But you didn’t turn a hair.”

“Maybe it’s because I earn more than I could spend in two lifetimes.”

“My guess is you’re Dr. Mark Whitman.”

“Take the prize.”

“Do you specialize?”

“Plastic surgery.” His occupation never failed to raise a woman’s interest.

“How fascinating. That’s quite a fad in your country, I believe.” “More than a fad in California. It’s becoming a way of life. If we ever lower the price, automate it somehow, it’ll become like color television — everybody will have one.”

“Meanwhile, you like things the way they are.”

“I’m doing very nicely, thank you. No complaints.”

Was he fooling Mrs. Belziel? He could not kid himself about his dissatisfaction with life. Whitman remembered the key question put to him by a television interviewer. The man was making a film on California life. Whitman cooperated because there was no such thing as bad publicity. They began by tracing his background. Born in Munich, he had been brought to America by his parents who were far-sighted enough to realize that Hitler’s joke was going to be on them. Growing up comfortably in New York, he had a happy childhood except for the embarrassment of living with parents whose accent was not American.

Medicine as a career seemed to be a foregone conclusion. Whitman went along because his way was being paid and he could see the logic of becoming rich. But at college his most satisfying time was spent on stage with the dramatic group. He was good — better than most of the others who said they were going on to a career in the theater.

A drama coach told him once, after he had come off following a very good rehearsal, “You’ve got something, Mark. When you’re on stage, nobody looks at anybody else.”

He was not surprised to hear it. “I love it up there,” he said. “I feel in control.”

By this time he was no longer Morris Weissman, he was Mark Whitman. He chose the surname of a poet whose work he admired. Looking at Brenda Belziel’s dog, Whitman recalled a fragment from one of the poems.

Brenda had been watching him closely. “Forgive me for saying so,” she said, “but I think you hate your work.”

He found himself telling her the truth. I didn’t hate it till about a year ago. Not consciously. A man making a film about plastic surgeons asked me a question. He said, “With your obvious intelligence, do you feel you’re doing enough with your life, devoting your time to giving rich women smaller noses and bigger breasts?”

“What was your answer?”

“Something glib at the time. But subsequently I watched the film on television. The camera was on my face as he asked the question and I saw my eyes shift before I replied. It was a queer feeling. What I saw in my own eyes is what I have been experiencing ever since.” Whitman drank again. “Eight weeks later I left home.”

As he talked on, the woman seemed to accept with equanimity what to Whitman was a shattering story of a man falling apart in his early fifties. A wife who didn’t care whether he stayed or ran away. A daughter 22 years old, absent for almost a year in India — irony of ironies, she was untraceable because she had changed her name. And here he was, attempting at this late date to take up an acting career in England.

“Sounds to me like a smashing idea,” she said.

“Coals to Newcastle,” Whitman said sheepishly. “I’ve learned there are seven thousand unemployed actors in London alone.”

“But you have an American voice. That should be useful.”

“No shortage of Yanks in the London theater. I was told to try the provinces. Look for work in some rep company. That’s why I’m in Brighton.”

“Any job so far?”

“I’ve been to see various groups perform but I haven’t applied for an audition. They’re all so good, I’ve lost my nerve.”

She looked at her watch. “I don’t think our conversation is finished, do you?”

“It’s been fun, Brenda.”

“Two things. Will you come up to my house for a drink this evening? Say around eight o’clock? I’d bring you with me now but there are some dreary people I must get rid of.”

“Yes, okay. I’d like to.” He scribbled the address she gave him on a scrap of paper.

“The other thing is The Lion.” She was on her feet now, organizing the dog for the door.

“You said his name is Giant.”

“I mean the theater pub around the corner. They do a lunchtime performance most days. Have you been in?”

“Been meaning to.”

“Do go in. No disrespect, but they aren’t as professional as some of the others who have London connections. It might be the best place for you to break in.”

“I hear you,” Whitman said. “I’ll finish my drink and give it a go.”

There was a hinged wooden sign on the pavement outside The Lion advertising a performance of some comedy he had never heard of. Whitman went in and could tell by the appearance of the young people drinking that he was too late to see the play. They had to be the cast: girls with large eyes and mouths; young bearded men with their hair combed forward. Every phrase of their small talk carried in the sparsely populated saloon bar.

Whitman sought out the dusty bottle of Jim Beam lost behind two magnums of sherry. Waiting for his drink, he decided not to request an audition today. No harm waiting until he could speak without slurring his words.

He caught sight of himself in a mirror behind the bar and raised his glass to give that lonely image something to do. Two months of restaurant eating had given him some extra pounds. His face was firm, the skin retaining some of its California tan. “This is all there is for you,” Whitman said to himself. “You’ve had a fling and it’s over. No tragic scenes. You’re going back to the soft life of changing faces and putting money in the bank.”

One of the bearded youths came to the bar. He ordered a pint and a dry sherry. Whitman surprised himself by saying, “I meant to see your performance but I missed it. Maybe tomorrow.”

“We could have used you,” the boy said. “We aren’t exactly playing to standing room.”

“Let me pay for these,” Whitman insisted. When he had pocketed his change and looked around, he saw the lad at a table near the door, sitting down beside a young girl with astonishing silver hair. Sunlight through a window created a dazzling aura around her head. There was an empty chair at the table. The boy pointed to it and Whitman responded by moving across the floor, stepping carefully. He was as nervous as if this was the audition.

“Amanda Royston, and I’m Jeremy Lake.”

“Mark Whitman. Hello. I was telling Jeremy I’m sorry I missed the play. I’ll try to come back and see it tomorrow.”

“That would be nice. Thanks for the drink.”

“Are you connected with the theater yourself, Mr. Whitman?”

“Call me Mark. I’m old enough to be your father but I’d rather not be reminded.” They laughed on cue and he felt encouraged. “Yes, I’ve done some acting. Not as much as I would have liked.”

Jeremy turned round in his chair. “Hey, Norrie,” he called to a bald-headed man with a baby face. “Listen to this.” He turned back to Whitman and gave him an encouraging nod.

Whitman had lost all his earlier reticence. “Am I on?” he asked. Again the group laughed; he saw appreciative faces all around him. These were his kind of people. Good old Brenda — he was easing in because of her advice. “Had I but known,” he said, “I would have rehearsed my soliloquy.”

“What do you think?” Jeremy asked.

“You may be right,” said the man called Norrie. “Let’s talk.”

There was a note of conspiracy in the air and Whitman found it exciting. Jeremy excused himself and went to an empty table in a corner where Norrie joined him. They began talking, enjoying their roles as men behind the scenes. Whitman looked at Amanda. She had spent a lot of money making the silver hair look roughly cut and unkempt. Her lipstick was pale. Most of the emphasis was on the eyes — hazel eyes outlined heavily in black, shaded with a sort of greenish-gold paste. Her face, and the sensuous way she held her mouth, belonged on the glossy cover of a pop record album.

Whitman found her easy to talk to. She laughed at the right places, and when their eyes met he experienced a feeling from over 30 years ago when all his sensations were sharp and new.

The landlord rang a bell. According to the English rule, they were closing the pub for the hiatus between three o’clock and five thirty. Jeremy and Norrie still had their heads together. “What’s happening with them?” Whitman asked.

She sized him up. “I think they want you for a part. I overheard Norrie a minute ago. He said something about ‘Death of a Salesman’.”

The character of Willie Loman in the great Arthur Miller drama had always appealed to Whitman. He had never attempted it — in his acting days he was too young. Now he had the years and the experience. “Is Norrie your director?” he asked, hardly able to believe his luck.

“Yes. Norrie Mikeljohn.” She set her glass aside half full. “I’d like it if you and I could go some place now.”

“You’d be crazy to become involved with me.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m fifty-two years old. You can’t be more than twenty. And you’ve got young Jeremy standing by. Never mind that I obviously like you. Don’t be confused by that.”

“What if I like you?”

She went to get her coat. Whitman waited at the door where Mikeljohn came to him and said, “Hold on, please. We don’t want to lose you.”

His voice had a scolding, spinsterish sound and his eyes, in that baby face, were narrow and reflected pain and anger.

“I plan to be around.”

“Good. I may have a part for you. It’s something I think you’ll be just right for.”

Whitman had the faintest feeling of being played with. “I’ll try anything once,” he said. “Nasty things I do repeatedly.”

“Our man to the life,” Mikeljohn said, smiling in a sophisticated way as he shook Whitman’s hand. His grip was bone-dry and astonishingly strong.

Over the director’s shoulder Whitman could see Amanda listening to Jeremy as he helped her into her coat. The garment was imitation leopard, hip-length.

Outside and walking, he found himself reluctant to bring Amanda to his room. It was upstairs over a restaurant, a seedy converted place called Margaret’s. On a wet day in March, after he got off the London train, he had lunched there, tucking in at an oilcloth-covered table by an open fire. He was the only customer. A toothless old woman came out of the kitchen and bent his ear with stories as forgettable and soothing as the Musak in his L.A. surgery. Instead of snubbing her, he found himself encouraging her to go on.

He paid his bill at a table near a flight of stairs in the front hall. A sign in a frame on the faded wallpaper advertised bed and breakfast. Next thing Whitman knew, he was registered. Almost a month later he was still living there.

The pebbles that covered Brighton beach, worn smooth by the tides, made walking a tiring effort. Amanda soldiered on in her high heels, holding Whitman’s arm formally so that he began to feel they were guests at some comic wedding. He was not sorry when she released him and went to sit on a wooden upright at the end of a breakwater. Whitman was always nervous this close to the ocean; he was never sure whether the tide was advancing or retreating. He took a deep breath. “No smog in that air,” he said.

She laughed, took him by the lapels of his conservative topcoat, and drew him close, shaking him gently. “Health freak,” she said, and kissed him. In the cold sea air her face was like a heater.

“I guess I’d better get you inside before we freeze.”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

Whitman’s room, small, untidy, with its ancient bed and gloomy oak furniture, seemed cosy with two people in it. He snapped on the electric fire while she hung their coats on the back of the door.

“I’ve only got bourbon,” he said.

“I don’t want a drink.” She arranged herself on the bed with a pillow behind her back. She had taken off her shoes to reveal large feet in nylon.

Whitman tried to understand why he was so ill at ease with this girl. The action in London had been positive, and from his point of view, a great success. But of course — those girls were strangers brought back to a hotel room for one reason only. This was Amanda Royston, a member of the group he hoped to join.

“My child,” he said, feeling relief now that he knew how to play the scene, “I am not the last of the red-hot lovers. I hope I haven’t misled you.” He drew over a chair, sat beside the bed, and took her hand.

“I know that. What do you think I am? I’m here because I like your company.” She pinged a fingernail against the glass he was holding. “Drink your medicine and tell me things about yourself.”

Pale light through the window identified a different time of day. Whitman was lying on the bed now, Amanda seated in the chair, turning the pages of a paperback too quickly to be reading it. He must have fallen asleep. He remembered her shifting over and allowing him half of the pillow. They had kissed a few times, retaining a mood of humor that absolved him from going further. Then the whisky must have taken over.

“What time is it?” he said, rising onto an elbow.

“Just after eight.”

“We have to get going. Due up the hill.” The idea that he would bring Amanda with him to Brenda Belziel’s was spontaneous. The invitation had been for him alone, but why not take this pretty girl?

Amanda was happy to tag along. She deciphered the address from Whitman’s scrawl and said they could walk there. He washed, changed into a white shirt, and put on a dark jacket and striped tie. “Mister bank manager,” Amanda said.

“Don’t shoot the bank manager. He is doing his best.”

“To rip off the public. Have you checked interest rates lately?”

He could have explained that high interest was keeping his investments ahead of soaring inflation but he sensed it would be the wrong thing to say to Amanda. He thought she resembled his daughter, who despised the system so much she had gone to live among the poorest people on earth. Or was it her father she despised? Whenever this suspicion arose in Whitman’s mind he tried not to give it thinking room.

Up the hill they strode, arm in arm again; it could have been their honeymoon. The house was a brick-and-frame mansion overlooking the promenade and the sea. The heating bill alone would be astronomical, let alone the selling price.

Brenda seemed to inhabit the place without servants. She opened the door herself — a mahogany door with a hemispherical fanlight of stained glass. When they were seated in front of an open fire, Whitman saw that bringing Amanda had been a mistake. The women represented that English phenomenon, different classes. They could never be more than polite to each other.

Furthermore, as he watched Brenda pour the wine, he noticed she had to get out another glass. The occasion had been intended, obviously, as a tête-à-tête. Her nose was probably so far out of joint that it would take all Dr. Mark Whitman’s professional skill to reset it. Never mind, they would have a drink and push off. Big Brenda, the Black Widow of Brighton, was only a chance acquaintance anyway. She had put him in touch with the drama group and thanks very much, but he owed her no eternal gratitude.

Accepting a glass of wine, Whitman became aware of music playing faintly in the background. It was the infectious, frenetic rhythm of The Quintet of The Hot Club of France playing ‘Sweet Georgia Brown.’ “Great stuff,” he said. “I haven’t heard Django in a long time.”

“I particularly like Grapelly’s violin,” Brenda said. “My late husband knew him. Whenever the group was in this country, he stayed with us.”

Whitman was beginning to see Brenda in a different light. “I owe you something for sending me to The Lion.” He went on to explain how he had met Amanda and the others, ending with the possibility that he might be given a part. “So you may be responsible for keeping me here in England, Mrs. Belziel.”

“If that’s the case, I’m pleased,” she said.

Amanda became silent while the older people talked. Every now and then she shook her silver hair as if this was the only way she could clear her vision. When Whitman looked at her, she smiled and pretended to drink. Eventually she asked where the loo was and excused herself.

A brief silence followed the girl’s departure from the room. Then Brenda said with what Whitman could now identify as characteristic bluntness, “That one is a bad apple, Mark. Be careful.”

“She’s a kid. Anyway, I’m not involved.”

“Don’t be. I know her. Well, I know of her — she’s notorious around here. She’s been picked up more than once for shoplifting. Her driving license was suspended not long ago — that was for leaving the scene of an accident. Her family managed to get her off, but now they’ve washed their hands. She lives with one of the boys in the drama group.”

“Jeremy Lake. How do you know all this?”

“I move around the center of town quite a lot. Especially since I’m alone. I decided after my husband died not to become the ghost of this castle. I talk to people. I’m a gossip.”

“Thanks for the advice. I’m only with her because she latched onto me this afternoon when I was talking to the director. Norrie Mikeljohn. From now on I’ll only see her at rehearsals.”

She touched his arm. “I think we’ve started a new life for you here, ex-Doctor Whitman.”

When Amanda did not return, Brenda went to look for her. “You never know with these kids. She may have overdosed and be lying on the floor.”

It was sad but true, Whitman thought as he sat by himself. There was something clinical and sinister about the dope-takers beyond their furtive behavior forced on them by the law. Needles and smoke were not nice. Drinking was as natural as breathing, part of the life process. To ingest a moderate amount of alcohol this way, in company, that was how we were meant to get high. Not by snorting a pinch of powder up your nose. He thought that was a sad, perverse way to behave.

Brenda came back in a hurry. She spoke quickly, keeping her voice low. “Amanda was on the phone and I heard what she was saying. Something is going on. I don’t know what it is but she told somebody you’ll do perfectly.”

“Did she say that?”

“She said, ‘We can send him to see her tomorrow.’ ”

“To see who?”

“I didn’t hear any more.”

Amanda came into the room in a cloud of fresh scent. She did not sit down. “I’m tired now, Mark. If you want to stay, I can get back by myself.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“That’s a good idea, if you’re auditioning in the morning.”

“Am I?”

“That was my impression. Jeremy was saying they’d like to see you at the pub at nine o’clock.”

Whitman arrived at The Lion at nine feeling hung over and suspicious. His grim mood did not seem to bother anybody. Mikeljohn gave him a copy of the play and asked him to read a few key speeches. When he had done so, the director said, “Not bad, Mark. When we start rehearsing I’d like more disenchantment. Amanda, where’s that coffee?”

Before he handed back the playbook, Whitman noticed it was out of the public library and nobody else in the place had a copy. What kind of fool did they take him for?

They sat at the back of the room around a couple of tables, drinking coffee from plastic cups. There were donuts but not enough to go around. “What’s your opinion then, Mr. Whitman?” Mikeljohn asked. “Do you think you’d like to join us?”

“That’s whut ah’m here fur,” Whitman drawled like a television hillbilly.

Through the laughter Mikeljohn intoned, “Mr. Treasurer, collect one new membership.”

“Two pounds, please,” Jeremy said apologetically.

Whitman paid with a fiver and there was a lot of commotion over putting together the change. Then Amanda got up from the table. “I’m off,” she said. “Well done, Mark.”

“You can’t leave,” Mikeljohn protested. “What about Auntie Jane?”

“I’m sorry, somebody else will have to go. I’m busy for the rest of the day.” She thudded out of the room on white training shoes.

The director addressed Jeremy. “Can you go up and see her?”

“You know better than that. I’m too young — she thinks I’m her long-lost Robbie.”

“I’d go myself except I have to see the arts council about the grant. Without that, we fold.”

“What’s the problem?” Whitman asked. “Can I help?”

“You might at that. We have a difficult and darling patron, dear old Jane Reedie — Auntie Jane she’s known as, when we aren’t calling her rude names.” Mikeljohn glanced at Jeremy. “What say you? Should we risk sending Whitman into the pit on his first day?”

“Why not? He’s a member now, let him have his baptism.”

“Right. You’re on, then, Marko.”

Whitman felt pleased to be called Marko. Mikeljohn was clearly a manipulator, but there was magnetism in those deadly eyes.

It seemed that Jane Reedie had been a member of the group for decades. Now she was senile and lived alone in an apartment above a shop in The Lanes, surrounded by her treasures. She seldom took part in theatrical activities now, sometimes not even making it to the annual general meeting. But still she paid her dues and was good for the odd touch when the group was hard up.

Now she had agreed to lend them some of her costume jewelry for use as props in a Victorian melodrama they would be staging soon. But, being Auntie Jane, she could not be counted on to bring this stuff around. Somebody would have to collect it. Whitman would have to go.

“I don’t see the problem,” he said.

“You will when you get there,” the director said. “Auntie Jane has an idée fixe. She believes her nephew Robbie is still alive. Robbie was attached as liaison officer to a U.S. Army unit that went ashore on D-Day at Omaha Beach. He was killed — his grave is in some corner of a Normandy field that is forever Brighton. But the curious brain of Auntie Jane rejects this. She believes her Robbie is walking the earth and about to appear at any moment.”

Whitman began to feel a mixture of revulsion and anger, as if he had just stepped in something nasty.

“Jeremy can’t approach her,” Mikeljohn went on. “She gives him tea and asks him questions about the family. But you, Marko my dear, with your American face and voice, will be immune.”

“She may think he’s the C.O. of Robbie’s unit,” Jeremy suggested.

“It’s possible. If she does, tell her the story of Robbie’s heroic demise. Then perhaps we can get on with producing plays. No, seriously, just hand her this note if you will.” Mikeljohn passed over a sealed envelope. “It restates our request for the costume jewelry. Then accept the stuff with our thanks and come away.”

Following verbal directions, Whitman walked the short distance to the address in The Lane, a complex of narrow streets near the seafront converted now to a district of shops selling mostly antiques and souvenirs. He rang a bell, heard a buzzer, opened the door, and climbed a flight of stairs. The door at the top was already ajar, part of a worried face visible behind the aperture.

For a few moments they were silent. Whitman had the envelope in his hand and the eyes behind the door watched it as if the envelope would speak when it was ready. Finally he said, “Miss Reedie?”

“Are you from them?”

“Yes. I’m to give you this and I believe you have something for me.”

“You’d better come inside.”

He went in and she closed the door. All Whitman could tell about the apartment was that it was dark brown and smelled of bacon. As he stood there, a cat performed tight figure eights between and around his ankles.

Jane Reedie was short and made shorter by her stooping posture. Whitman could imagine her bowing to perpetual applause. She led him into a sitting room, her eyes close to the head of the knobby cane that supported her. Here she did a three-point turn and peered up at him through auburn bangs. Her hair was neat and attractive — surely a wig.

“Is he all right?” she asked.

“Ma’am?” Whitman handed her the envelope.

“Robbie. I’m worried about him. You don’t understand how I feel...”

There was never the faintest possibility that Whitman would do as Jeremy suggested and inflict on this woman the truth of her nephew’s death 35 years ago. “I understand exactly how you feel. I can promise you Robbie is just fine.”

“Can I believe that?”

“Of course.”

Her eyes softened as she looked closely at Whitman. “You’re very kind,” she said. “I can see you are a gentleman.”

“Thank you.” He was afraid he was about to be offered hospitality. “I think you’d better read that,” he said.

As she opened the envelope and began reading the typewritten page inside, Whitman had time to study her face. The parchment skin, heavily wrinkled, showed years of neglect. But it was never too late. He could do a great deal to get rid of many of the signs of age. She could change to a fuller wig and hide the scars at the ears. If something could be done about her posture, she might go around as someone in her sixties instead of as the perambulating mummy she had chosen to become.

“All right,” Auntie Jane said. Her hand was trembling, the page crumpled in her grasp. “All right!” She slammed the letter down on a table with surprising force. “Wait here.”

She left the room. Whitman stood beside the table with the letter in reach. As he picked it up and read it, he could hear drawers opening and closing in another room. “Miss Reedie,” the upper-case typescript read, “We have Robbie. He is safe now. But he will be killed unless you obey instructions. Do not call the police. If you do, Robbie will be shot. Give your emerald necklace, your diamond brooch, your diamond pendant, and all the rings to the bearer of this message. Do nothing else. When we have the jewels, we will release Robbie and all will be as before.”

There was no signature. Whitman put down the letter as the old woman came back into the room. She was carrying a plastic bag with the name of a greengrocer printed on it. Whitman took the bag from her; inside it he could see a number of velvet-covered boxes.

“It’s all there,” she said. She sounded alert, completely in touch with the situation. The only indication of her madness was the fact that she was ransoming a dead man. “You haven’t lied to me have you?” she pleaded. “Will Robbie be all right now? I don’t mind losing my things as long as I can keep him.”

“I promise you,” Whitman said, “you and Robbie have a lot of happy years ahead of you.” As he prepared to leave, he picked up the letter. “I’m taking this with me,” he said.

Instead of going back to The Lion, he walked to Brenda Belziel’s house overlooking the sea. Approaching, he heard his name called. “Mark! Hi!” He looked up and saw Brenda on an upstairs porch. She was at a table in the shade of an awning. He could see the gleam of a coffee maker. Giant’s head loomed above the railing.

As he climbed the steps to the house, Whitman experienced a feeling unique in his entire life. Munich, New York, Los Angeles — this was the first time he had felt that he was coming home. It was so simple, there was nothing to it, and yet this must be what everybody else worked for and what all the songs and poetry were about. A relaxing of the muscles, a lifting of the heart, walking into a place where somebody was waiting and you had things you were anxious to tell her...

Brenda opened the door to him, started to speak, then hesitated, troubled by the tears in his eyes. “Are you all right?”

“Better than you know,” he said. As he came in, he gave her a one-arm squeeze around the waist, partially lifting her off the floor.

She laughed. “I don’t exactly mind that,” she said.

“I smell coffee.”

“There’s lots. I was hoping you’d show up.” They held hands going up the stairs. “What happened at the audition?”

“Audition for idiot of the year. But thanks to you I was on the alert. Wait till I tell you what’s been going on.”

Drinking strong black coffee and eating a croissant with butter and jam, Whitman told Brenda about Mikeljohn’s phony assignment involving his visit to Miss Reedie’s place, his discovery of the ransom note. “I have the stuff here in this bag,” he concluded. “It must be worth a bundle.” They spent a few minutes examining the diamonds and emeralds, obviously genuine, clearly worth many thousands.

“One thing I’m not sure of,” Whitman said. “Did Robbie really die in the war or is that part of Mikeljohn’s lie?”

“That part is true,” Brenda said. “Everybody around here knows of Jane Reedie and her obsession.”

“Then our friends are not kidnapers. There is no Robbie to be kidnaped.”

“No, but they’re guilty of extortion.”

“So what’s our next move?”

“The police. You did well to keep the note. I’ll call them, they’ll be here in five minutes. We give them the note and the jewels, you tell the story exactly as it happened, then that crew will get what they deserve.”

Whitman considered this. “All right,” he said at last. “But give me one hour before you call.”

“Why?”

“I want to talk to somebody first.”

“It’s the blonde. You want to give Amanda Royston a chance to get off the hook.”

“I want to hear her side of it. I can’t believe she would intentionally—”

“She’s hoodwinked you the way she does every other man, including two magistrates.” Brenda pushed her cup and saucer away with the flat of her hand. “She’s probably the ringleader, Mark. I assure you, she’s a nasty piece of work.”

“Can you allow me one hour? Where’s the harm?”

“There’s none, I suppose,” Brenda said quietly, “if it shows you how wrong you can be about some people.”

At The Lion the pub was open for business. The barman told Whitman the performance had been canceled for that day. The players were upstairs in Mikeljohn’s flat. Whitman had a drink to settle him and give him time to think. His decision to bring along the jewelry was correct, he was sure of that. The police would have to find the stuff in Mikeljohn’s possession or he would simply deny everything. Leaving the ransom note with Brenda was right, too. She would have something to show the police after she called them in an hour.

As for Amanda, he would have to get her alone and hear what she had to say. Brenda could be right, the girl might be as wicked as sin. But that walk on the beach — granted, he was drunk — had contained something sweet and decent. If she had any good in her, he might be able to appeal to that instinct, to turn the girl around.

Whitman finished his drink, accepted directions from the barman, went through a devious succession of doors, and finally climbed two flights of steps through a grotty stairwell that smelled of beer and gas fires. In response to his knock Jeremy Lake opened the door. His eyes first met and searched Whitman’s, then fell to the plastic bag. “You got the stuff? Good man!”

Whitman let himself be conducted inside. The flat was more of a loft, one large room with a low ceiling, windows on two sides, a mattress on the floor, ill-assorted furniture, a couple of closed doors. They were all there, Norrie, Amanda — and a stranger, a heavy-set man in a tight suit who occupied a chair against a wall, away from the others. “Home is the hero,” Jeremy announced. “He has met Auntie Jane and she is ours!”

Whitman allowed the bag to be taken away and given to Mikeljohn who took out one of the velvet boxes, opened it, and withdrew a diamond pendant. “Here’s a pretty thing,” said the director in the whistling voice of a Punch-and-Judy man.

The stranger got up and came across the room to stand at Mikeljohn’s shoulder. His blond hair grew low on his forehead and had been combed with a lot of water. The brutish face was of the type seen by Whitman in textbooks posing the theory that by the use of cosmetic surgery such men could be diverted from a life of crime. This one had never had the benefit. He kept his right hand in his jacket pocket.

Amanda snatched the pendant and dropped it round her neck. “Let me wear it, Norrie. Just for one day.”

Mikeljohn made no attempt to retrieve the jewel but he said, “You know what this stuff is for, my dear. And it is not for embellishing your grotesque chest.”

Whitman was wondering how to get Amanda aside for the necessary conversation. He was beginning to wonder if it mattered. The stranger was asking who would be responsible for selling the stuff. Mikeljohn suggested they divide the articles now. “Our account with your organization is how much — four thousand? Surely we can agree on what will cover that. You want to continue selling to us and we need your services.”

“Best cocaine on the south coast,” Jeremy said, laying a comradely hand on the stranger’s shoulder, removing it when the man looked at him.

It was then that somebody knocked on the door and a voice said, “Police officers.” Brenda had made it a very short hour.

Mikeljohn glanced at Whitman, saw something in his eyes. “You crafty swine,” he said softly. “You’re a plant.” He snatched the pendant from Amanda, dropped it in the bag, and hid the bag under his seat cushion. As he went to the door he said, “Leave the talking to me.”

There were two uniformed men in the hall, neither of them very large, neither armed. Good old British cops, Whitman thought. They’re going to walk in here and sort everything out with a few minutes of polite conversation. As they entered the loft, he caught a glimpse of Brenda Belziel hanging back at the top of the stairs. Their eyes met for a moment; she was frightened.

“What’s the problem, gentlemen?” Mikeljohn asked. “Are we rehearsing too loud?”

“We’ve had a report that you may have some property here that belongs to—”

“It’s under the seat cushion,” Whitman put in, anxious to be finished. “I took it from Miss Reedie and brought it here. I believe Mrs. Belziel has shown you the ransom note.”

“You are a plant,” Mikeljohn said. “Thanks very much, Amanda. Well done, Jeremy.”

“Check the man in the suit,” Whitman said. “The stuff was going to him.”

One of the officers approached the stranger. Before he could reach him the man had a gun in his hand. Nobody spoke. The officer stopped in his tracks. The occupants of the room were frozen in a tableau.

Then Brenda Belziel moved forward into the doorway.

The stranger turned his head, the officer lunged forward and caught his gun hand. Whitman shouted her name and moved to push Brenda away. He heard an explosion and felt as if someone had punched him in the back. He knelt for a moment, then fell over on his side...

Whitman opened his eyes and decided he had only been unconscious for a minute or so. There was another policeman in the room now, a helmeted Bobby up from the street. The gunman was no longer in sight, Mikeljohn and friends were grouped at one side of the room. Brenda was kneeling beside him and so was the officer who had gone for the gun.

“You’ll be all right,” she said. “There’s an ambulance on the way.”

“Sorry about this, sir,” the officer said. “I had to try for the gun. I recognized our friend — he’s a very dangerous man. We’ve done well to get him in the bag.”

Whitman thought of various things to say but speech seemed like too much trouble. Where was the bullet? Unless they got him to surgery very quickly, he realized he would be in bad shape.

Amanda was bending over him. “Why all this?” she asked. “We had a chance for something really good. Auntie Jane will never do anything with these things but keep them in a drawer.”

Whitman looked into her eyes, past the paint, into depths as unfathomable as the sea. He forced himself to speak to her. It was important. “You’re too good to be a thief,” he whispered. “I see the good.”

Her expression reminded him of his daughter’s face when an emergency phone call brought him to the high school one day years ago. She had been taken to a room beside the principal’s office after being caught in the basement with several boys. He had been shocked but able to recognize in those pretty eyes values quite different from his own. And why not? His daughter, this girl, they were individuals. Why should he expect them to see the world the way he saw it?

“I’m sorry,” Amanda said patiently, “but you’re dead-wrong about me.”

Brenda came to visit Whitman in the hospital. Never mind the National Health Service, he was in a private room with a glorious view of the ocean. He could sit up now in bed, but he was due to stay for another week. After that he would need special care.

“Nice of you to open your doors to me,” he said.

“In that big empty house? You must be joking. I only hope I can persuade you to stay on when you’re all better.”

He reached out to touch her cheek. “If they were all like you,” he told her, “doctors like me would have to earn an honest living.”

She watched him, her mind extending across broad areas of possibility. “This country needs surgeons,” she said. “Quite a few have departed for where they can make a lot of money.”

“But if I come and practice in England, what happens to Mark Whitman, frustrated actor?”

“You might be able to do both, on different levels.”

His mind shifted, as it often did these days, to Mikeljohn, Jeremy, and Amanda. Brenda had reported they were out on bail and facing probably no more than suspended sentences. Their freely given testimony had opened up a wide avenue for the police into south-coast drug operations. The gunman was, of course, inside for the foreseeable future.

“Have you visited Jane Reedie?” he asked.

“I went up there yesterday. She wants to see you when you’re out and about.”

“I wouldn’t mind seeing her again.”

“I said we’d come round in a week or two.”

Whitman decided to say something important. “For your information, my name is not Mark Whitman. It’s Morris Weissman.”

“Some of my best friends,” she replied, “are plastic surgeons. I’m more concerned about wives in residence.”

“This particular wife has wanted out for a long time.”

“Then welcome to England.”

Later, when she was preparing to leave, he said, “I took the name of Whitman from the American poet, of course.”

“Leaves of Grass?”

“That’s the man. I used to read him all the time. I’ve been remembering a line of his that might interest you.”

“I’m interested.”

“ ‘A woman waits for me,’ he quoted, ‘she contains all, nothing is lacking.’ ”

Brenda smiled at him before she went away and Whitman was left wondering how he could ever have judged her face plain.

John Vennah had murdered at least three young girls and two small boys. It was an open-and-shut case — but would his politically powerful family be able to get him off?...

When the police finally tracked John Vennah down and arrested him, half the city where his family was so well known reacted with shocked disbelief. The other half either felt a load of fear lift from them, especially if they were parents, or else grunted grimly and said they’d always thought the guy was weird. Dear little old ladies shook their heads, murmuring, “I simply can’t believe it — he always seemed like such a nice young man. How terrible it must be for his poor mother!”

Men of his own age who’d been to school with him, and one or two of his old teachers, and certain former neighbors of the Vennahs recalled the things they’d caught — or almost caught — him doing years ago. But that had been before the Vennahs started sending him to boarding schools, getting him out of town in one way or another.

There was no doubt about one thing. John Vennah had murdered at least three young girls, after torturing and abusing them in a variety of ways; similarly, he had abused and murdered at least two small boys. The police had found their violated bodies buried near a mountain cabin of his father’s, and he had, surprisingly, not even denied the crimes.

It was an open-and-shut case — or would have been if his father had not been the city’s most important lawyer and his grandfather its most prestigious judge, with enormous political clout locally and on a state and national level.

Even that, of course, could not engineer his release on bail. But his maximum-security cell in the county jail was made more comfortable than it would otherwise have been, and there he granted interviews to avid media men eager to make him a celebrity, sitting in an easy chair completely self-possessed, his light-brown hair combed neatly back from his narrow forehead, his strange blue eyes peering through rather old-fashioned silver spectacles. He smiled at the newsmen with perfect, expensively straightened teeth; he answered their questions in a soft, almost coaxing voice; he kept turning the conversation from the crimes of which he was accused, discussing psychiatric theory, and why some people were superior and destined to survive and dominate, while other, lesser, weaker beings were born only to be victims.

The media men decided that he was either crazy or crazy like a fox, and they said as much. It made him angry, and in subsequent interviews he stated baldly that he was not insane, that it was society that was off the beam. The media ate it up.

In the meantime his grandfather and his father had hired the state’s leading criminal lawyer to defend him, and the three of them had reviewed his situation very carefully. There was his history to consider — the history his family had done its best to cover up, sometimes buying the silence of the injured or of witnesses, sometimes using the sort of pressure only great political clout makes possible. It went back to his early boyhood, when they had discovered that he could not be given pets. What he had done to a cocker spaniel puppy had sent his mother running out wildly, pale and sick.

The episode was still vivid in their minds; and so were those that followed it, involving neighbors’ animals at first, then finally an occasion when a truckdriver had found him in a normally deserted shed, starting to use a razor blade on a much smaller boy.

They had sent him to military schools, to three of them. Twice he had been badly beaten up and had run away; the third time he had been expelled, with the recommendation that he have psychotherapy. They had sent him to a long succession of psychiatrists and psychiatric hospitals, and all had given up, urging his parents to have him permanently institutionalized. Mrs. Vennah, weeping, would have none of that, arguing that there had never been insanity in her family or her husband’s, and that certainly John would grow out of it as he matured.

Strangely, in his last year in high school, and for the three years before he dropped out of college, he seemed to stabilize. He was quiet, withdrawn, very much a loner; his smile was too cold, too much like a sneer, to make others warm to him. He watched the tube a lot; he read oddly and sporadically; he went off on long solitary wanderings. But nothing happened — or at least nothing surfaced. “He isn’t getting any place,” his father said, “but he’s straightened out, thank God!”

And then—

There had been disappearances. Rewards were being offered, mounting up. The city seethed with fear and anger. The press demanded action.

He had been careful, oh, so very careful. But the wrong person had seen the girl get in his car, had wondered, had copied down his license number. The police had come. They had gone out to the cabin with their dogs...

John Vennah’s father and grandfather met with the out-of-town attorney. They went over the whole business point by point, his grandfather still towering, huge and bushy-browed, over his desk; his father lean, tight-lipped, taciturn; his counsel beautifully barbered and tailored for the courtroom.

“He’s guilty as all hell!” his grandfather declared. He looked at them. “We’re agreed on that?”

They nodded.

“And I suppose we also all agree that, the way the MacNaughton Rule is being interpreted these days here in this state and in the Federal courts, he won’t have even a prayer pleading insanity?”

Again they nodded.

His grandfather’s brows drew down. “Finally, because here we have no death penalty, he’s certain to draw life without hope of parole.” He glared at his son. “That, Willard, means he’ll be a ready weapon for any enemy to use against us — the press will always help. That’s something we can not afford.”

“Then what the hell can we do?”

The old man sat back in his chair. “We can put him in cold storage,” he said.

“What do you mean by that, Judge Vennah?”

“You’ve heard about cryonics, haven’t you? People getting themselves into deep-freeze the moment they’re dead, hoping they can be brought to life again when the world’s found cures for what they died of? Well, it got a big boost in ’88 when they proved that higher mammals can be frozen and revived, and even more when the Russians actually woke up that baby mammoth in Siberia.”

“I think... I see,” said Willard Vennah slowly. “That means we’d not be killing him.”

“A good point,” put in the counsel. “A very good point. Of course, it would have to be entirely voluntary.”

A few hours later the three of them visited John Vennah in his cell. They laid it out for him, coldly and legalistically, examining each of his hopeless options, saying nothing of their own motives in the matter.

He was intelligent. He stared at them for a long time with his strange eyes. He told himself that, when those people in the future woke him up, they’d find a problem more difficult than they expected; he had defeated every headshrinker he had encountered. He smiled. Then he agreed.

Three weeks later his counsel presented the Vennah family’s offer at a pre-trial hearing, arguing eloquently that they would defray all expenses — that the taxpayers would be spared the enormous costs of keeping this mentally ill, dangerous man in high-security confinement for forty or fifty or more years. And justice would ally with mercy; perhaps years from now a more advanced society with psychiatric wonder cures could bring him back to life, a useful citizen.

The judge agreed. Though there had been no enabling legislation, he declared, there quite clearly had been none prohibiting. The prosecution, who had good reason to keep Judge Vennah happy, agreed not to pursue the case. The media had a field day.

Ten days later, in the prison hospital, John Vennah was prepared for cryonic storage. He was given the necessary shots to slow down his life processes. He was wrapped in the winding sheet the treatment called for. He was taken away to the cold crypt where he was to lie for generations.

An unusual story about an unusual detective... Meet David Clay of the Public Defender’s Office (Juvenile Division) in the case of a tragic, brutal triple murder. Dave Clay had his orders: Go through the motions; go by the book, but don’t make waves. The question was: could a conscientious public defender like Dave Clay follow such orders?...

Children do have some rights in this country, but most of the legal ones protect only the child’s physical well-being. One cannot, for example, mug one’s child too often, too severely, too conspicuously. One cannot deprive one’s child of adequate nourishment either. A parent accused of such crimes can be and is occasionally prosecuted in a court of law.

Unfortunately, tragically, parents who subject their child to more subtle forms of deprivation will seldom be held accountable. A child unloved has no legal redress. The sheriff will not intervene, nor will a social worker.

Only when this emotional barrenness erupts into violence does the System step in, as it did last Thursday night when Peter Callison, Junior was arrested for the murder of his mother, father, and sister.

“Mary faced her facts, made her decisions, and felt better because she had given herself goals and deadlines”...

It was — until it ended — an ordinary domestic triangle: a husband, a wife, and another, younger woman. For the three participants, of course, it was not, by any stretch of their imaginations, ordinary, and for the wife it was shattering.

A kind, meddlesome friend told her that George had a mistress in La Mesa, and she wondered why she hadn’t guessed without being told. He’d been careless enough, heaven knows, counting on her to be credulous and blind — or not giving a damn? She led a very full, happy life — even without children — and had never been one to anticipate trouble. Her love for him was unchanged, and she never questioned his for her, never looked for grief. But the danger signs were there — if she’d ever looked.

His love-making had become perfunctory and infrequent; she’d thought this was because he was adjusting to a new job, a substantial advance which involved a much more demanding schedule. He’d taken to coming home late several evenings a week. That, too, was accounted for by his new responsibilities. In fact, all the alterations in his behavior — his inattention, his growing irritation with her unprepossessing looks, haphazard housekeeping and sloppy work habits, his withdrawal when she made amorous advances — everything had been attributed to the new job and the absurd air of importance that apparently came with it. His “position” called for a grander background, he’d told her.

“I owe it to myself — and to the prestige of the firm. My home should look like $250,000 — God knows it cost enough! And my wife should, too. You’re not a grubby student any more. You’re an established artist.” He hadn’t liked it when she laughed at him.

“A man is judged as much by appearances as by his superior qualifications,” he said.

Imagine George talking like that even a year ago! Mary had been sure he was going through a temporary phase, that his common sense and humor would surface, and he’d settle down and be himself again. Not for a moment had she suspected that the changes she saw in him could be permanent — or that his love for her was changing too.

It was this that made the sick pain so much harder to bear, her naive stupidity. She knew that nothing stays the same; she wasn’t really stupid, but she had exempted her marriage and his love as glowing exceptions. Until death us do part. God, how could she have been so blind — and so complacent?

It took Mary Hitchman agonizing hours to absorb the shock — and the pain which, surprisingly, was so physical. It took interminable, lost days before she gained an upper hand over her self, and was ready to face the facts and decide what she would do about them. It was the hardest thing she had ever done, and the first hard thing she’d done alone. Even facing the fact that she had “a nice talent” but no genius had been shared.

Fact number one: George loved someone else — was probably making love to someone else right now, someone younger — someone who evidently did look like $250,000!

Fact number two: He would never divorce her because her family had money, and he liked being wealthy. This other woman, she was hardly more than a girl, Liz said, and didn’t have a cent.

Fact number three: She would leave him if she had to. She wouldn’t divorce him if California laws made her give him so much as half a dollar; but to live with him in a marriage of polite pretense was unthinkable. There would be no dragged-out, miserable status quo for her! Mr. George Hitchman, Esquire, wasn’t going to have his cake in the suburbs and a wife with a grand background in San Diego if she had anything to say about it! She’d have to talk to him soon, make all this clear, but first she had to meet the woman.

She was a schoolteacher and her name was Carol James. George must have met her last winter when he gave a series of lectures at San Diego State. Mary thought she remembered his mentioning a young woman with admiration — a serious, promising midwesterner, he’d said, who was working evenings toward her Master’s degree, and who had none of the far-out notions he deplored in other younger people. He certainly hadn’t mentioned her lately! Mutual friends on the faculty at San Diego State knew about the affair, had seen George and his Carol James on the campus, in the park, and once at a motel in East San Diego. They liked the girl, Liz Ferguson told Mary, and they did not like what George was doing to her. He hadn’t told her he was married — had, in fact, asked Liz and Dave Ferguson not to tell her.

“Let me handle this in my own way and in my own time,” he’d said, but he had not thought to ask them not to tell his wife.

Mary faced her facts, made her decisions, and felt better because she had given herself goals and deadlines, and something to do. Inaction is the worst liniment for disaster. She’d meet Carol James, perhaps even talk to her; that would have to wait for the atmosphere and the reality of the moment. They might never get beyond trivialities — how could she know before she saw her? She only knew she must meet the woman George was loving. She must assess the magnitude of her loss, the strength of the competition, before she talked to George — or a lawyer.

She’d manage her confrontation casually, somehow, but before that she would spend some time and money in a beauty parlor and a boutique. Like so many other complacent wives, she had let herself go disgracefully. Now that the horse was loose, she’d do something about the barn door. A facial and a manicure. Surely there was someone who could scrub off the paint and charcoal! She’d have her hair cut short. She’d have a permanent. Better yet, she’d have it dyed! She should have done this years ago. Her long unwieldy hair only aggravated the headache she’d suffered almost without letup since Liz had told her.

Bouts of ugly, stormy weeping still caught her unawares, but at least she could cut all that hair off. George wouldn’t even notice! It was a long time since he’d praised her hair, or anything else — or anything else! And no wonder, she thought, staring wildly into a mirror: she looked positively plain. She looked old, and she wasn’t forty yet. She could still compete for a man’s attention, and by God, she would! She’d give George the glamor-wife he wanted, and maybe — just maybe — it wouldn’t be too late. She could do no more, she thought with sick fury, remembering how much he’d loved her once.

George would be away — in Sacramento not La Mesa — until Saturday afternoon. She had five days to patch herself up, meet the “other woman,” and decide if her marriage, too, could be patched up. She’d know that as soon as she met Carol James. Liz Ferguson was delighted to act as middle woman — that was her favorite role. She was an ebullient extrovert who made friends easily and enjoyed being helpful. She liked being “in” on things, maneuvering, rearranging — always, of course, with the best of intentions. She and Carol taught summer classes during the week, Liz said. They would come to meet her at the cove on Saturday.

As long as the weather permitted, Mary swam at the La Jolla cove, sometimes during the week and always on Saturdays. Every summer-Saturday had found her there — and sitting in the same spot — since high school. Her friends knew this and would come, often on purpose, to join her over at the far left, where the high rocky cliff curves down around the edge of the beach to form a smaller cove within the larger one.

If this Saturday habit had started as an affectation, it had gradually become an essential part of her life. That small secluded niche in the Pacific was the only place where she felt completely at home and free within herself. (Sometimes she thought she should have been born with gills.) She had chosen her retreat well. It was a unique and beautiful place — a beach so sheltered by the cliffs on either side that you could swim there, not just fight the surf or ride the waves. She loved it because, while it was never the same, it never changed. It could be both frightening and reassuring — wild and dangerous when the tide was high and the winds blew, still and peaceful when the day was calm. Oddly enough, she had never wanted to paint the ocean, although it meant so much in her life. She only liked working with people — and animals.

Long before she was Mary Hitchman, Mary Burns had learned to swim in the cove — from one of the lifeguards — to ride the waves, and to dive far down into the clear water around the reef, where goldfish darted in the seaweed, and the world was silent. She would float for hours out beyond the rocks, letting the waves rock her gently or tumble her over into the salty spray. She had played there as a child — and daydreamed as a young girl; she’d learned to be afraid there, when the tides ran strong and she’d overestimated her own strength, and she’d learned to love George there, lying close to him on the sand, wrestling in the water — now, of course, “his work” took even his weekends. They had made love there one August night when the sand was still warm, and the beach completely deserted except for a scattering of stars in the sky and the sensuous rhythm of the waves... On Saturday, Liz would bring Carol James to this place of hers for a swim.

Waiting for Saturday, Mary fought against memory and fear at the beauty parlor and the small expensive shops in Del Mar and La Jolla. She’d never spent much money on herself; now she did so lavishly, enjoying the new experience in spite of her unhappiness. Thank heavens she still had a good figure! She became an instant blonde. She’d always envied blondes, and it made her look years younger. Her mirror, and the neighbors and friends she ran into, told her this. She had been pretty, but suddenly she was much more than that. The new hairdo and the clothes gave her a sparkle. She’d been too “sweet” before, but pain and a staunch determination to resolve her problems privately and decently gave her something happiness couldn’t give — it gave her style. The boys in front of Safeway’s whistled at her, and she walked past them with a new spring in her walk, and a new poise.

She reached the cove Saturday morning, ready, she believed, for whatever might happen. She wore an emerald-green bikini and a dark green, sinfully expensive jacket — she who had worn the same serviceable blue for years, and she noticed, with delight, unmistakable signs of interest as she picked her way among the heavily bronzed males lounging on the hot sand. Perhaps she’d make the same gratifying impression on George, flying home that afternoon from Sacramento!

Shortly after noon Liz, burdened down with bathing paraphernalia and an air of importance, and Carol James, looking like all the other girls Mary knew, came across the sand to the end of the beach where she sat, waiting. Their meeting was casual, and Liz Ferguson’s introduction used first names only. The three of them lounged in the sun, digging their toes into the sand, watching unusually heavy waves batter the rocks out near the reef, and talking idly while Mary studied this stranger who had torn her life into jagged pieces, appropriating George without knowing he was secondhand goods. She had not known how much the thought of George making love to this — this child would hurt, but she managed to look relaxed and pleasant.

The girl looked like a teenager. Mary hadn’t realized she’d look this young — like all the girls on all the campuses across the land. She was boyishly slim, light and graceful in a modest blue suit which she’d obviously chosen for swimming, not for show. Her hair was a well-brushed light brown — again like all the girls on the beach, long and straight and shining, framing an intelligent, happy face.

Mary could find nothing there that wasn’t lovely and honest — and she had an artist’s eye. If there was anything ugly or cheap there, she’d have seen it. She understood, helplessly, how George could love this radiant girl; how he could want, want desperately, her soft, untouched youth; but she didn’t understand how he could lie to her, or seduce her with empty promises, as he must have done. His love for Carol James was imperfect, too, and Mary found an unexpected, new pain in this knowledge.

It was a hot day. After almost an hour of desultory conversation — mostly about the charms of southern California — Carol wanted to swim. It was high tide and the waves were strong, but she assured the other two that she was a good swimmer. Mary didn’t want to get her new permanent wet yet, and Liz wanted to talk to Mary. The younger woman piled her hair on top of her head, secured it firmly with a large barrette, and ran into the water, swimming quickly toward the open ocean with strong strokes. Mary had no desire to talk to Liz — or to anyone else, but Liz was doing her a kindness, and Mary Burns Hitchman had always been a proper, polite woman. She lay back on her beach towel, closed her eyes against the hot midday sun, and mumbled answers to her friend’s persistent questioning.

Of course it helped to look younger and handsomer; the new hairdo had done worlds for her morale. Not that her morale couldn’t do with a few more boosts!

No, she didn’t want Liz to leave them alone — the last thing she wanted was a private talk with the girl. She knew all she needed to know already, and no, she didn’t plan on telling her who she was. She couldn’t.

Carol James wasn’t at all what she’d expected — so young and serious. Mary had imagined somebody more seductive, a little grasping, somebody she could hate and blame and fight. Not somebody she could hurt.

She’d have it out with George when she got home. Beyond that, she couldn’t guess what would happen. Almost, she didn’t care! This young lovely child deserved something better than a middle-aged man turning pompous with success. That’s what she would tell George!... And she was able to laugh when Liz did.

Gradually the two women, absorbed by the sun and their immediate thoughts to the exclusion of the rest of the world, realized that something untoward was happening out by the reef — one of the periodic swimming accidents which occur even on the best-guarded beaches. Swimmers insist on swimming too near the rocks where the waves pound relentlessly. Poor swimmers put unwarranted faith in themselves and their fancy goggles and fins and frog suits, and go out much too far. There can be a strong, pulling tide — as there was on that Saturday — and an undertow. Sometimes there are riptides beyond the cove’s shelter. The guards are alert and quick, and usually the sudden excitement ends happily, but on this afternoon it didn’t.

Mary and Liz, standing at the edge of the water, bemused by the sudden turn of events and frightened, watched while the guards rowed back to shore with the body of a young woman, a woman Mary knew, with a stunned, superstitious certainty, would be Carol James. They listened, shocked and silent, to a chorus of voices around them repeating, in conflicting dissonance, what the various bystanders thought had happened.

“She drowned. I saw her. A wave hit her smack in the face. She must have swallowed a lot of water. She just went under and drowned. Just like that.”

“No, she hit her head on a rock. That’s why she went under. I noticed her earlier. She was a good swimmer.”

“Maybe she was caught under the reef, and couldn’t breathe.”

“She must have had a cramp. She just doubled up and sank. I saw her go under, but I was too far away. There was no way I could get to her in time.”

“Nobody was near enough.”

“Yes, there was! I saw a frogman swimming near her just before the guard shouted.”

“That was a shark. I saw it too, swimming under the surface, very near the place where she went under.”

Several people had seen the shark, or the frogman — had seen something; but they were drowned out by the ones who had seen nothing.

“She was alone when the guards reached her. She’d been alone all along, swimming out farther than anybody else. She had seemed to know what she was doing.”

“That couldn’t have been another swimmer out there — he couldn’t just vanish, could he? It must have been a seagull riding on a kelp bed.”

“There was a similar drowning last summer, in almost exactly the same spot, remember?”

“I wouldn’t swim near there for anything!”

Nobody knew who she was until Liz Ferguson walked, reluctantly, over to the beached boat and spoke Carol’s name softly, her voice uncertain because she was crying. Mary didn’t belong there, knew herself to be an ironic intrusion. She spoke soft commiserations, then went quietly away, allowing Liz to look after her friend alone.

But she was loath to go home. It was as though she no longer had a home. She was dazed by the sudden tragedy coming so swiftly on the wake of other violent and conflicting emotions, coming as inevitably, it seemed to her, as the waves which battered the shore cliffs. She wondered with an unreasonable, hopeless dread what the next wave would be like.

She circled La Jolla, driving her car up and down the curving hills blindly, out of tune with the summer’s brilliance. Varicolored tropical plants under tall palms, sharp greens and the rival blues of sky and ocean taunted her bleak, solitary mood. She didn’t belong in this sunlit world any more. She didn’t belong anywhere. With a frisson of horror, she found herself driving, once again, past the stairs which went down to the cove. Numb, unthinking, she turned her car and took the long way back to San Diego, dawdling in the slow lanes, delaying the inevitable.

What would she tell George? How could she explain how she knew? What could she possibly say to him?

George Hitchman was home when she arrived — frantic with worry, he told her.

“Why frantic?” she said, surprised. “I’m not late. I always go to the cove on Saturday.”

“What have you done to your hair?” he asked, staring at her wildly. “What’s that green thing you’re wearing? You’ve never had a bikini. You don’t like bikinis! Where’s your blue suit? What have you done to your hair?... My God! Oh, my God! I told him you had long brown hair on top of your head. And a blue suit. I showed him where you always sit.”

This is the 575th “first story” to be published by Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine... a bold debut in the world of fictional detection; even before the author knew his first story would be published, he planned to make his detective, Feng Da-wei, a series character...

The author, Ta Huang Chi, was born in 1927. He has been a ship’s officer and a guided-missile engineer. At present he is writing and illustrating a book on Chinese chess. He has no hobbies, but admits he “dabbles in Chinese poetry, computer programming, and a bit of clay sculpting when the mood is upon me”...

Feng Da-wei was born in July of 1900. The exact date is unknown, but his baptismal certificate and the records of the Evangelical Gospel Order in St. Louis, Missouri indicate July 20th. This date is surely accurate within a day either way, since the Feng baby was only two or three days old at the time he came into the keeping of Reverend and Mrs. Myles Stainford.

In May of that year the Stainfords received a letter at their mission in Lingtan ordering them to report at Shanghai in August to act as resident instructors to newly arrived groups of missionaries — missionaries whose knowledge of China and the Chinese consisted of little more than colorful fictions current in the American midwest. The letter had taken a month to reach them.

In early June the Reverend and Mrs. Parkinson arrived in Lingtan to replace the Stainfords. They arrived with several cases of Bibles and some ugly, but unconfirmed, rumors.

In July, satisfied that his replacement was now familiar with the mission and local conditions, Reverend Stainford and his wife started their long journey to the coast. It would take them twelve days, traveling by mule cart, to reach the first of several rivers that would eventually carry them to Shanghai.

On the evening of the tenth day they reached what once had been a small farming village, but was now gray ashes on dark brown earth. Black, wide-winged birds circled above, while others strutted, grotesquely fed, across the corpses in the street. Here, the ugly rumors had become an uglier reality. They searched for survivors and found two — a young woman, unconscious, one out-flung arm charred to the bone, with a newborn baby clutched in the other. The baby slept fitfully on the mother’s bloodstained blouse.

They made night camp near a small stream several li beyond the village where they took turns sleeping and watching over the woman. Myles Stainford was beside her when, during the fifth hour of starlight, she opened her eyes, called softly for her husband, and died. Two days later three weary people reached the river.

After selling the cart and both mules, they took a mud-floored room at an inn and set about arranging for supplies and a sampan to take them downriver at first light.

Later, on that powder-dry Chinese night, the Reverend and Mrs. Stainford hurried across the walled courtyard of the district magistrate’s yamen, bid a polite tsai chen to the frightened watchmen at the gate, and walked back down the dusty street leading to the inn. The elderly magistrate had confirmed the wild tales they had heard along the waterfront.

After the first minutes of prescribed polite questions of health and family had been mutually asked and replied to, one terrible phrase had dominated the conversation — I Ho Chuan — The Society of Righteous Fists. The English-language press had dubbed them “Boxers” and had not taken them too seriously in the beginning. Now the whole world would hear of them.

The Boxers had risen in their thousands, cut all lines of communication between the capital and the sea to the east, and even as they spoke, were besieging the foreign legations in Peking. Missionaries, the hated Je-so teachers, were being hunted down and killed. Missions burned. Chinese converts butchered.

“You must think of your wife. Flee to a treaty port, honored friend,” the magistrate had said. “You are not safe even in my own poor house. Your mission at Lingtan is now ashes and the Je-so, Parkinson, is dead with all his family and servants. Liao pu te! Fearful, fearful!”

It is written that God moves in mysterious ways. Reverend Stain-ford never questioned these ways and never, like some, cried out, “Why me, Lord?” It wasn’t lack of faith that stayed his words but fear of the booming reply, “Why not, Stainford?” This explains, in part, why a certain Chinese baby did not end up in a specific church orphanage when the Stainfords finally arrived in Shanghai that August.

Martha Stainford loved babies. Myles Stainford liked children but disliked babies, and this particular baby reminded him of a boiled Chinese owl. Whenever he mentioned the church orphanage as the proper place for the baby — after all, the church would certainly be sending them back to the interior when their present work was complete — a look would come in her eyes. A look of such pained longing that he reluctantly agreed to keep the baby until they were assigned to a new mission. He also agreed that David would be a fine name for the baby. From the mother’s dying words he knew that the family name was Feng. David, in Chinese, became Da-wei, and it was as Feng Da-wei that he was baptized on the following Sunday.

In the months that followed, Myles Stainford went about his work content in the knowledge that his role of temporary father would soon end.

It ended later at night that Christmas Eve when they were told to leave for Kwangsi province before the Chinese New Year began on February 19th. Sometime around midnight Martha had quietly got out of bed. Half an hour went by. He found her sitting crosslegged among the small presents around their candle-lit Christmas tree. She was staring at a floppy-eared, gingham-vested bunny propped at the base of the tree as she rocked the sleeping David in her arms. Her face was that of a mother holding her child for the last time, waiting for that nameless, uninvited thing that never knocks and, without speaking, takes away all light forever. Moving quietly, Myles sat down beside his wife and gingerly took the child into his own arms.

On February 14th in 1901, the Stainford family arrived in Kwangsi. The unpacking of a floppy-eared, gingham-vested rabbit was duly noted by an intelligent pair of small dark eyes peering from a teakwood cradle...

A rain squall born of the great Tai Hu Lake left its watery womb at noon, swept east in a broad gray pattern across farmlands, blotted from sight the towering pagodas, and wove itself into the latticework of canals that made Soochow the Venice of China. The advance winds of the storm played onto a checkerboard of courtyarded homes, sending a foam of flower petals after the specks of birds fleeing to quieter horizons.

At one of these comfortable, walled homes the wind flicked off a heavy roofing tile and planed it clattering along the eaves of the study.

Two men sat in the paneled room below the storm. Each man knew only the sound of his pen nib scraping across paper.

One of these men was a balding, stockily built American in his early thirties with a short-stemmed bulldog pipe burning perilously close beneath a luxuriant walrus mustache the size of a shoe brush. The pipe smoke, drifting upward through this formidable red growth, created the image of a smoldering sunset over Vesuvius or a Pittsburgh slag heap glowing fitfully in the dusk.

Between puffs Gordon Pymm took another sheet of paper and let his pen — re-phrasing his thoughts as politely as possible — state that the rumored existence of an easily worked deposit of manganese ore in the Kang-tsu district could only have been the product of a mind in the last stages of decay.

He concluded his part of the report to the Western Seas Mining Syndicate and reread the results with satisfaction. Professional objectivity had triumphed over his personal feelings.

The survey had been made difficult enough by mountainous terrain and record bad weather, alternating between sudden snows and chilling rains.

Gordon accepted these things, as would any civil engineer working across a hostile landscape. But when a landscape becomes so hostile that it emits nine-millimeter bullets, the profession loses some of its appeal.

Gordon sealed the report in a manila envelope and began sorting through the mail that had accumulated in his absence. Two engineering magazines and a package with the return address of a New York bookstore were placed to one side unopened. Flood Control in Large River Basins and The Design of Silting Dams In High Erosion Areas could wait.

Behind Gordon, on the canal side of the study, a tall broad-shouldered man with the lithe build of a long-distance swimmer sat at a massive rolltop dresk. A collection of framed photographs, mostly black and whites but with a few duotones and hand-tinted ones among them, covered the wall behind his desk and overflowed toward the courtyard door.

Feng Da-wei put aside his pen, picked up his writing brush, and began a letter to his mother in St. Louis. The large strong hand holding the brush floated effortlessly above the paper as the fine tip laid down flowing columns of Chinese characters in the Tsao Tzu style of calligraphy his mother had taught him. David spoke to her of the report he had just completed, and of other things.

The brush took more ink and made word-pictures of her son; first, as a threadbare Taoist priest along the mountain backroads, then as an itinerant herb doctor with a wooden chest of leaves, roots, seeds, and oils slung across his shoulder by a leather strap as he plied his profession in small villages.

As the priest who sold wen yi kwei charms and as the doctor who dispensed small powders with quotes from the Pen Ts’ao healings, he observed all things closely, asked many questions, and listened well.

From these weeks of gathering he had distilled his intelligence report to the Syndicate.

David passed lightly over the bandit attack on the survey camp and gave full credit for the camp’s survival to the unholy fear inspired in the superstitious bandits by Gordon’s dragon-smoke mustache.

A few pages later he washed and laid aside the writing brush. Pressing the face of his stone chuan stick against a pad of vermilion ink, he stamped his personal “chop” below his signature.

He stood up from the desk to flex his arms and shoulders. His soft brown robe, worked with a narrow pattern of yellow thread along the edges and cuffs, yielded to the movements as water yields to the swimmer.

From the courtyard doorway he watched the trailing skirts of the squall move eastward to the sea.

Then he turned toward Gordon at his desk, and in his pronounced midwestern accent said, “The sky is clearing up over Tai Hu Lake. I wonder what riled it up so?”

“There is a perfectly logical explanation for it, David.” Gordon folded the letter he had been reading and replaced it in its envelope. “I saw a shooting star last night. Judging from its direction I would say it fell smack in the lake.”

David shook his head in mock sadness. “You are beginning to sound like a superstitious backcountry Chinese. Either a bandit bullet hit you in the head or you’ve been in China too long.”

“And I expect to be here a lot longer if this letter from Charles Ketty is any indication. He wants me to be resident engineer for a dredging project on the Grand Canal.” The corners of his red mustache lifted above an impish smile. “No more bandits. No more bullets.”

“Congratulations, Gordon, and who is Mr. Ketty?”

“He was a guest lecturer at my college. I worked in his drafting section at Chicago Dredge and Marine during my last summer at school. He’s a good man. Taught me a lot in those three months.”

“When will you see him?”

“When we go to Shanghai with our reports. I’d like you to meet him.”

David motioned toward the Tai Hu Lake. “Fine. Our boat will get us in there sometime early in the afternoon — if there are no more shooting stars.”

“The Affair of the Reluctant Witness” is a relatively unknown story by Erle Stanley Gardner. It raises the curtain on the stage of our Department of Discoveries in which we will bring you not only relatively unknown stories by well-known authors but also relatively unknown stories by relatively unknown writers — when the stories are little gems that somehow have been lost in forgotten or neglected archives.

(If you have a favorite story you haven’t reread in years, or if there is a story that has persisted in your memory, please give us whatever details you can — authors name, title of story, where and when it originally appeared. We are happy to pay a modest finder’s fee for all stories on which we are able to obtain reprint rights. Let us hear from you!)

Now, meet Jerry Bane, ex-prisoner of war, at present a ne’er-do-well man-about-town. But more important, Jerry Bane is a blood-brother — at least, a first cousin — of Erle Stanley Gardner’s Lester Leith, and a member of the royal family that includes Edward D. Hoch’s Nick Velvet and Leslie Charteris’ Simon Templar (the Saint) and traces its larcenous lineage back to Robin Hood...

This Jerry Bane novelet, “The Affair of the Reluctant Witness,” is not to be confused with Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason short story titled “The Case of the Irate Witness,” which appeared in our issue of July 1954.

Jerry Bane knuckled his eyes into wakefulness, kicked back the covers and said, “What time is it, Mugs?”

“Ten thirty,” Mugs Magoo told him.

Bane jumped from the bed, stood in front of the open window, and went through a series of quick calisthenics.

Magoo surveyed the swift, lithe motions with eyes that had been trained to soak in details as a fresh blotting paper absorbs ink.

Jerry Bane straightened, extended his arms from the shoulder, and bending his knees, rapidly raised and lowered his body.

“How am I doing, Mugs?”

“Okay,” Magoo said without enthusiasm. “I guess you just ain’t the type that puts on weight. What’s your waist?”

“Twenty-eight.”

Mugs’s comment was based on fifty years of cynical observation. “It’s all right while you’re young,” he said, “and the girls are crazy about a good dancer, to be slim-waisted, but when you get up to what I call the competitive years, it takes beef to flatten out the opposition. When I was on the police force, the boys used to figure you needed weight to have impact. Not fat, you understand, but beef and bone.”

“I understand,” Bane said, smiling.

Mugs surveyed the empty sleeve of his right arm. “Of course,” he added, “I’ve only got one punch now, but that one punch will do the work if I can get it in the right place and at the right time. What do you want for breakfast?”

“Poached eggs and coffee. What’s the right time for the punch, Mugs?”

“First,” Mugs said laconically.

Jerry chuckled.

“Better take your orange juice before you have your shower,” Mugs advised, “and remember your friend, Arthur Arman Anson, is coming this morning.”

Bane laughed. “Don’t call that old fossil a friend. He’s an attorney and the executor of my uncle’s estate, that’s all. He disapproves thoroughly of everything I do... What’s in the mail?”

“Did you order a package of photos from the Shooting Star News Photo Service?”

Bane nodded.

Mugs cocked a quizzical eyebrow.

“It’s an idea I had,” Jerry said. “It’s the answer to Anson, Mugs. The Shooting Star outfit has photographers who cover all the news events. Now, with your photographic memory, your knowledge of the underworld, the confidence men, the slickers and the hypocrites, it occurred to me it might be a good plan for us to study the news photographs. In other words, Mugs, we might build up a business, an unorthodox business to be sure, but a profitable business.”

“And a dangerous business?” Mugs asked.

Jerry merely grinned.

“It’s an expensive service?” Mugs asked dryly.

“A hundred bucks a month,” Jerry said cheerfully. “Do you know, Mugs, Arthur Arman Anson had the colossal effrontery to tell me that since he’s the trustee of a so-called spendthrift trust under my uncle’s will he can withhold every penny of the trust fund if he sees fit.

“The ten thousand we got in a lump sum from my uncle’s estate must be about gone. Anson is going to be difficult, so I thought we’d better do a little sharpshooting. He lives by his brains. We’ll live by our wits.”

“I see,” Mugs said without expression.

“That ten grand is about gone, isn’t it?” Jerry asked.

Mugs headed for the kitchenette. “I think I’d better look at the coffee.”

“Okay,” Bane said cheerfully.

He seated himself in front of the mirror, opened the package of photographs Mugs brought him, drank his orange juice, then connected the electric shaver.

Magoo said, “Anson is going to be here any minute now. Hope you don’t mind my saying so, but he won’t like it if he finds you still in pajamas. It irritates him.”

“I know,” Jerry said. “The old fossil thinks he has a right to order my life just because he’s the executor of a spendthrift trust. How much money is left in the account, Mugs?”

Magoo cleared his throat. “I can’t remember exactly,” he said.

Bane disconnected the razor so that he could hear better. “Mugs, what the devil’s the matter?”

“Nothing.”

“Phooey! Let’s have it.”

“I’m sorry,” Magoo blurted, “but you’re overdrawn three hundred and eighty-seven dollars. The bank sent a notice.”

“I suppose the bank also advised Arthur Anson,” Jerry said, “and he’s coming up to pour reproaches over me and rub them in the open wounds.”

“He’ll relent and tide you over,” Mugs said without conviction. “That’s why your uncle made him trustee.”

“Not Anson. That old petrified pretzel wants to run my life. If I’d do what he wants I’d become another Arthur Arman Anson, puttering around with a briefcase, a cavernous, bony face, lips as thin as a safety-razor blade, and about as sharp... Well, Mugs, I don’t know what I’m going to do about salary, and today, I believe, is payday.”

“You don’t need to bother about salary,” Magoo said feelingly. “When you picked me up I was selling pencils on the street.”

“It isn’t a question of what you were doing, but what you are doing,” Jerry said. “Well, we’ll finish with the whiskers, then the shower, then breakfast, then finances.”

He resumed his shaving and as he did so started studying the pictures which had been sent out by the Shooting Star News Photo Service, photographs on eight-by-ten, with a hard, glossy finish, each photograph bearing a mimeographed warning to watch the credit line and a brief description of the picture so that news editors could make and run their own captions.

Jerry Bane tossed aside a picture of an automobile accident. “I guess the idea of this picture stuff wasn’t so good, Mugs. It seems they’re running around like mad, shooting auto accidents with all of the gruesome details.”

“Part of a publicity campaign to educate the people,” Mugs explained.

“Well, those photographs certainly don’t interest me,” Bane said. “Here, Mugs, you’re the camera-eye man of the outfit. Run your eye through these pictures while I shower. I can’t look at gruesome, mangled bodies and smashed-up automobiles on an empty stomach. See if you can’t find the picture of some crook who’s crashed into the news, someone you can tell me about. Then we may be able to figure out an angle.”

Mugs said deprecatingly, “Of course, I’m an old-timer, Mr. Bane. There’s a whole crop of newcomers in the crime field since I—”

“I know,” Bane interrupted, laughing. “You’re always apologizing, but the fact remains you have the old camera eye. That’s where you got your nickname, Mugs, from being able to remember faces. They tell me you’ve never forgotten a face, a name, or a connection.”

“That was in the old days. I had both arms then and I was on the force and—”

“Yes, yes, I know,” Jerry interrupted hastily, “and then you got mixed up in politics. Then you lost an arm, took to drink, and wound up selling pencils.”

“There was an interval with a gentleman by the name of Mr. Pry,” Mugs Magoo said somewhat wistfully. “He was a fast worker, that lad — reminds me of you. But I got to drinking too much and—”

“Well, you’re on the wagon now,” Bane said reassuringly. “You look over these pictures and see if you find anyone you know.”

Constable Bill Evans saw the whole thing clearly — saw Jellinks run down and kill Evans’ own daughter and grandchild. He could have put the blame on Jellinks, an unpopular ex-con. But Evans was an honest witness. He had “to do what’s right.” He had to tell the truth. It was not Jellinks’ fault...

They could scarcely believe their ears. “He was driving quite slow?”

“Well, not fast, Sergeant. I can’t say that. And a country road, very little traffic—”

“Constable Evans — Jellinks here, he says himself that he was driving fast.”

“Not all that fast,” said Jellinks quickly.

“He’s confused,” said Constable Bill Evans. “Shocked, I daresay, doesn’t know what he’s saying.” Natural enough, he added, his big, strong, middle-aged face gone so white and pudgy now in the evening light. Jellinks having just run down — just killed — a girl and her little kid.

“For God’s sake, Bill — your girl and her little kid. Your daughter.”

“That’s right,” Evans said woodenly and moved apart, suddenly, and stood with clenched hands, his back turned to them.

Jellinks seized the opportunity. “You heard what he said. Driving quite slow, he said, and him a copper. And he ought to know!”

“Perhaps it’s him that’s shocked and confused,” said the sergeant.

“Well, I thought you were driving fast,” said a woman, coming forward. A couple of cars had drawn up, and a small group of on-lookers stood wretchedly around. “He passed me ten miles back, going at the rate of knots.”

“I could’ve slowed down later,” said Jellinks, growing from wary to a little cocky.

“Yes, well... Just come out of the Pig and Whistle, Jellinks, had you?” said the sergeant. “At closing time.”

“Yes, I had. I come out of the Pig and Whistle most nights of my life at closing time,” said Jellinks. “But I wasn’t drunk, I never get drunk, they’ll tell you so — and you’ve done all your breathalysing.”

“And for once it was not a stolen car?”

“I’ve shown you all the humph, haven’t I? It’s me own car. All right, so it was stolen originally, getting away from that job on the shoe shop. But I bought it after I’d done my time. Made a pretty good mess of it, but I could patch it up myself. So I went, honest, to the owner and he was glad enough to get rid of it.”

“And you had the proceeds of the till to pay for it?”

“I’d done me stint for that,” said Jellinks, shrugging.

The sergeant stood, waiting. Two constables were nosing about the road — looking at the car, the tracks, making notes, taking names and addresses. He watched them but he knew his men — they were efficient and thorough; he could safely leave it all to them. And Bill Evans was under control again and had turned back to him. “We went into that, Sergeant, when Constable Jones turned up — it’s Jellinks’ own car. And he’s right about the breathalyser too. Just under the margin.”

“I know the score,” said Jellinks.

“You’d have to,” said the sergeant, “wouldn’t you? — driving the way you do and for the reasons you do.” And to Evans, “So he took the bend okay?” Passing cars had obscured the tiremarks in the road, swinging out to avoid the group gathering around the scene of the accident.

“That’s right, yes.” The attendants had closed the ambulance door with a slam, and more to distract him than anything else, the sergeant suggested, “Just run through it once again for me, before we get to the station. If you can manage it,” he added compassionately, looking at the sick white face watching the ambulance with its pathetic burden driving away.

“That’s all right, Skip. Well, like I told you, I was on my bike, just at the end of my beat. I knew I’d meet them, our Jenny and the baby, coming back from the Other Granny’s. The Other Granny, that’s what we call her. Lives just down the road — on her own she is now, since her Tom married our Jenny and moved in with me and the missis.”

“Yes — so?” said the sergeant, gently interrupting; he knew all about Bill and Bill’s missis and Tom and Jenny and the baby; and the Other Granny too. The officers were all local men.

“Yes, well he — the car — was coming up behind them. Came round the bend — not fast, I can’t say he was going too fast. But...” He made a huge effort. “They saw me coming. The little one — she ran forward to meet me, ran into the road, and her mother went after her to catch her.” He looked at Jellinks steadily. “I got to say it,” he said.

It was beginning to get to Jellinks. He looked ill now in the evening light. But he clutched greedily at salvation. “Okay, well, you’ve heard him. I was going slow enough, the kid ran into the road and the girl after her — it wasn’t my fault.”

“And you stopped at once. You weren’t driving on?”

“The... well, the jolt like, that stopped me—”

“Two jolts,” said Evans with murder in his voice.

“—and anyway, there he was, biking towards me. I had to stop. Well, I mean I’d’ve stopped anyway, of course I would.”

“Something like this happened to you once before — and you didn’t.”

“Nobody was hurt that time. What would I stop for?” said Jellinks.

“But this time you had to?”

“I didn’t have to. I could have... well, there you are, you see!” he said, improvising triumphantly. “I could’ve driven straight on, couldn’t I? Run him down on his bike and driven straight on and no one the wiser. But I didn’t, did I? I had nothing to be afraid of. He says himself, I was driving quite slow, the kid run across in front of me.” But the triumph died and he looked at Bill Evans uneasily. “You’re not going to go back on that in court and say anything different? Don’t you try anything of that, mate! I’ve got friends—”

The sergeant looked from the white face, set and stern, to the narrow white weasel-face, vicious in self-defense. He said slowly, “Well, that’s a good thing, Jellinks — you hang on to them. I think you’re going to need them from now on — need all the friends you’ve got.”

Mr. Hoch reminds us that “the Rand stories started out being about codes and ciphers,” and he is always pleased when he “can return to that original concept of a secret message.” We are also pleased. As for Rand, the Double-C man, he must be pleased too. When Hastings, his former superior, calls, Rand can’t help wondering if he’ll ever be free of his past, when he was director of Concealed Communications for British Intelligence. But thank St. Edgar, Rand does go back to work — grumbling a bit perhaps, but deep down, pleased...

“We have a defector,” Hastings said over the telephone. “A really top-level fellow, straight from Moscow.”

“Good for you!” Rand congratulated him. “I’m retired, remember?”

“And I know I promised not to bother you with our troubles, Rand, but we’re in a bit of a bind. We have this fellow at the estate up in Scotland along with a crack team of debriefers, and the trouble is he won’t talk.”

“Won’t talk? Then what did he defect for?”

“He says he’ll talk to you, Rand. Nobody else.”

“Who is it?”

Hastings hesitated. “Your home telephone isn’t secure. I don’t want to mention any names.”

Rand held the receiver away from him, tempted to hang up and be done with it. Still, if the defector was asking for him—

“All right,” he decided. “I suppose I can come see him. Where do you want me?”

“I can’t go up myself. We’re busy with this Middle East thing. But if you’ll be at Heathrow at ten in the morning I’ll have someone meet you with instructions and plane tickets. We’ll want you to fly up there, of course. It’s too dangerous bringing him down to London.”

“Very well,” Rand agreed. He hung up the phone wondering if he would ever be free of his past, free of Hastings and those others who’d been part of his life when he was director of Concealed Communications for British Intelligence.

He went into the kitchen and told his wife, “Leila, I have to go away for a few days. Up to Scotland.”

She didn’t look up from the mixing bowl. It was her semester break from the course she taught at Reading University, and Rand knew she’d been hoping they could go off somewhere for a few days. “For Hastings?” she asked simply.

“Yes.”

“It’s always for Hastings, isn’t it? How much of our lives does that man want?”

“They have a defector. He won’t speak to anyone but me.”

“It must be nice to feel so wanted.”

“Leila—”

“Never mind. I’m sorry.”

“I’ll try to be back by Wednesday. We’ll still have the weekend.”

“Yes. The weekend.”