Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 116, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 709 & 710, September/October 2000

King had waited in the school car park. He noticed a Landrover amid the other cars. He watched as men and women carrying briefcases or piles of books got into their respective cars. When a male teacher approached the Landrover, King walked up to him and said, “Mr. Durham?”

“I’ve ruined my life,” Durham said.

King nodded.

“Yet I feel a sense of relief.”

“People often say that.”

“Do they?”

“Oh yes...” King nodded.

“I want a favour of you.”

“I doubt...”

“Hear me out.”

“All right.”

“I want to go home. I want to tell my wife. I want to hold my son.”

“I can understand that.”

“You’re a family man?”

“Yes.”

“I was stupid to get involved with her. She was a bad woman. I was young. I thrilled to it. It was fun to have an affair with an older, married woman who lived in a lavish home. I suppose you’ve seen her home?”

“Yes. Doubt that you’d recognise it now.”

“I know what you mean. I happened to drive past it the other week.”

“So, what happened twelve years ago?”

“She killed him. Evil little woman. She told me she’d murdered him. Crept up behind him and whacked him over the head with a pickaxe handle, right there in her living room. The woman who cleaned for her had walked out and she took the opportunity to kill her husband. Nobody else in the house, you see, except me. The guy who tended the garden never entered the house. He was lying there when I called round, still in his dressing gown... She was pushy... insistent... Just assumed that I’d go along with her. Before I knew what I was doing, I was loading the body into the Landrover... I just love these vehicles... This is not the one, I had an earlier model at the time.”

“That’s how you got the body up to the tops?”

“Yes. It’s the only way. A Landrover could handle that slope... A Landrover can go up a one in two... The route we took up the tops was about one in six. We did it at night. We took it to a part of the moor she knew to be in private hands. She said no one would find it. She was right for ten...”

“Twelve years. She was right for twelve years.”

“So what’s that, conspiracy to murder?”

“Probably not as serious as that. Conspiracy to defeat the ends of justice. The unwritten rule is that the more you help us, the lesser the charge will be... But I think you’re right, you won’t enter a school again.”

“Just put these exercise books back on my shelves. I doubt I’ll be marking the third-years’ homework tonight. I mean, if you’ll let me?”

King nodded. “And it’s ‘yes’ to your other request. You know where P Division Police Station is? Bottom of Sauchiehall Street? Be there by seven P.M. Otherwise we’ll be obliged to arrest you in front of your wife and neighbours.”

“I’ll be there.”

Hank’s Tale by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

Although Dorothy Salisbury Davis is the creator o£ series detective Juke Hayes, a New York City amateur sleuth, she has mainly produced, in her fifty-year career as a crime writer, nonseries hooks that have less to do with detection than with the understanding of character. Ms. Davis is a grandmaster of the MWA, and as this new story shows, she can write as convincingly of rural life as she does, in the Hayes hooks, of New York City.

* * *

It was a grey raw day when we buried Billy Baldwin. The wind turned the women around on the church steps, tugged at their skirts, and tossed their hair. The Reverend Barnes, who’d begun to show his years, didn’t seem sure of who he was talking about or when he’d died, and he was usually at his best at funerals, knowing everybody in Webbtown. But he hadn’t been called to the Baldwin house till Billy was cold and some time dead. Of a heart attack, according to the coroner, who had a Doctor of Medicine degree, which I guess entitles you to work on dead people if that’s your preference. He’d come from Ragapoo City, the county seat, routed out of his bed at four in the morning. Even at that he’d got there ahead of Reverend Barnes.