Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 35, No. 10, October 1990

Gladys Manley Gray, age 23, prostitute. Had jumped bail at the beginning of the month after being sent for trial, accused of robbing a client. Mary knew her well and had traced her on a previous, similar occasion. She’d been expected to do so again, given time.

George Philip Trench, age 56, suspected of Value-Added Tax evasion on a large scale. Mary Taylor was working, gently and as a long-term project, on persuading his bookkeeper to turn Queen’s Evidence and escape punishment as a result.

Detective-Sergeant Mary Taylor had been involved in many other matters, of course. Police work, as the instructors din into recruits and probationers, is teamwork. It had taken Sergeant Rollason more than ten minutes just to dictate the relevant names and add thumbnail dossiers.

But those three, said Rollason — and Flinders agreed — were “the live ones.” Endaby, the fence, had a violent record and an understandable aversion, after much experience, to prison. Gladys Gray was on speed and might have reacted strongly to attempted arrest. Trench was the least likely, on the face of it, but with so much money and ruin involved could not be counted out.

“Hang on,” Rollason sighed, his roster completed. “Helen wants a word. Words, more like.”

Helen Rollason said in a rush, “I don’t care if you do hang up on me, Dickie Flinders! Mary was an exceptional person. Her death didn’t have to be, though. You’d better be very sure you do have a hunch, not just the instinct to make this thing dramatic because you’re emotionally involved.

“I’m not an insensitive fool, I know what I’m saying. Bereavement has messed up the heads of far more stoical and brainy guys than you, luv.”

An anxious silence at Helen’s end of the line. Then Flinders said: “I wouldn’t hang up on you. You’re in order, dear, but I know what I’m talking about, too. Not to worry, we’ll all meet up and have one of our curry festivals when this thing’s sorted.”

Walking to the library, Flinders had wondered at himself. He didn’t hold with ghosts, ESP, premonitions, and the like. Sentimentality irked him like silver foil on an exposed dental nerve.

Yet the night Mary Taylor died, he had been swept by a sense of desolation and worry that shook him. Depression can be a clinical condition as well as a passing fit of the blues, and Flinders had feared he was experiencing its onset.

The news about Mary had explained that feeling. Somehow, he could discount any idea of the supernatural and still be sure, without the least factual foundation, that she had been killed and he had to do something about it.

Miss Angel’s tart speech hauled him back to the present. “Escaping from the rain, or looking for an ethnic minority member to oppress?” She had suspiciously emphatic black hair, snapping blue eyes, and an abiding disapproval of the police, who, she had often explained to Detective-Sergeant Flinders, were minions of the boss class and mercenaries of anti-life, neocolonial interests. Despite this, they were firm friends.

Flinders said humbly, “I need help. There’s a poem about a broken mirror, and that’s all I know.”

Miss Angel scratched her head, like a very poor actress signaling puzzlement to an audience seated perhaps a hundred yards away. “Goodness! Oxford Dictionary of Quotations is your best bet, fat blue joker, bottom shelf, third stack along, in Reference.”

“I don’t know the title.”

She curled her upper lip. “What a moron. That’s the idea of the book, dear boy. The index has key words. Listed alphabetically, that means M-for-mirror will be a long way past A-for-apple.”

He was turning away when she made his scalp tingle. “The mirror crack’d from side to side,” Miss Angel announced. Startled by his blazing glance, she added lamely, “Well, it’s only an Agatha Christie whodunit. I never read them; too class-conscious, and I detest violence.”

“That wasn’t it. This was a poem.”

He found what he wanted in the seventh item on page 354 of the dictionary, one of a score or more devoted to extracts from Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892).

Reading “The Lady of Shalott,” Flinders found his eyes blurring and he had to stop, blowing his nose and clearing his throat sternly. Mary Taylor’s chanting with its warm Wessex drawl resurfacing as she slipped back towards childhood days in something remembered from them was so clear in his head that the ache of her passing was all the harder to take.

Soon the grief was backed by disappointment. The dictionary gave large sections, but he hunted up a battered, stale-smelling Complete Works to read the whole poem and make sure. The lady in her tower, the water meadows, the handsome knight, the shattering of mirror and spell, Sir Lancelot’s epitaph while gazing on the stricken maiden...

None of it made any sense. Flinders slammed the book shut, making several readers jump at the pistol shot.