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

It was Sarah who had warned Frank of what was happening between Carradine and Mrs. Rampling, and the gossip it was causing. A certain coolness was always evinced by the female section of the community towards this lady, if not by their husbands, but it was impossible for someone of Sarah’s warmhearted and generous nature to follow suit, and she had been at special pains to be agreeable to her.

Kitty Rampling was pretty, lively, engaging, and thirty-five if she was a day. She had made an unfortunate and apparently disappointing marriage. Her husband, George, was considerably older than she was, a brute of a man, a sullen individual with a great propensity for quarrelling, one with whom Carradine, for one, had recently had a violent argument. He was said to owe money all around the town — as he certainly did to the mayor. Too busy, it was rumoured in the racecourse bar, drinking and losing on the horses what money remained to him to be any more suspicious of his wife’s affair with the handsome railway engineer than he had been of countless others. She held him in the hollow of her cool little hand — or under her thumb, depending on which way you regarded Kitty Rampling. She was small and feminine, wore pretty frocks rather than the fashionable, mannish coats and skirts, the shirtwaists and the ties which the other ladies favoured at the moment, and had huge, innocent brown eyes.

Foolish and infatuated as Edward Carradine might be, however, Frank could not believe that he was the sort of man to shoot another, and in the back, too.

There was no getting away from the circumstances, unfortunately. He had been discovered one evening outside the Rampling bungalow, kneeling over the man’s body, blood on his hands. It was popularly supposed that Rampling had come home unexpectedly and discovered Carradine and his wife in flagrante delicto, and a furtherance of their quarrel had ensued, though why the shooting had occurred in the street remained a mystery. Nor had the gun ever been found.

Carradine denied he had been with Mrs. Rampling. His story, not necessarily believed, was that he had been walking homewards along the street when a shot had rung out and the man walking in front of him had collapsed. He had run forward, discovered the injured man to be Rampling, and supported him in his arms, only to find him already dead. It was thus that the next man on the scene, the mayor, who had been working late and was bumping homewards on his bicycle, awkwardly carrying a Gladstone bag full of papers, came round the corner and found him.

His arrival was followed in but a few moments by others, including the ever-present police. Everyone was shocked; no one had liked Rampling and no one wanted to believe in young Carradine’s guilt, and it was at once suggested that Rampling had been killed by some sniper’s bullet, regardless of the fact that the scene of the shooting was almost in the centre of the town. Other equally baseless suggestions followed — that one of Rampling’s creditors had come after him, or, with more support, that due to the inadvisability of arming the natives, one of them had run amok. Or maybe drunken soldiers had been involved: The troops were not all disciplined regulars, and unruly incidents were not uncommon. However, Carradine’s presence outside the Rampling bungalow, the gossip about his association with Kitty Rampling, together with that recent angry clash in the racecourse bar between himself and her husband, witnessed by many, made him a prime suspect.

The mayor, sitting in his empty house, could find no answer to his own pressing problem of what was to be done about the matter.

The siege continued, Mafeking still miraculously holding out after more than six months. But the fortified trenches encircling the town were not proof against Cronjé’s onslaughts, and casualties grew, despite the warning horn blown from the lookout whenever the Boers’ twelve-pounders were being loaded. Small acts of heroism and courage were reported daily among the loyalist civilians, the women and children, the native servants. The townspeople buried their dead and at last began to eat the horses.

However, with the letters and despatches which still got through came news to stiffen the sinews — that Ladysmith, another beleaguered town, an important railway junction in Natal, had been relieved after a hundred and twenty days. It was reported that the Boers were losing heart. It was also reported, once again, that relief troops were within five miles of Mafeking, and B.P. promptly earmarked several more horses for a celebration dinner for the whole town, cheerfully urging everyone to bolster their courage, reminding them that their sacrifices for Queen and country would not be in vain. The relief forces, unfortunately, were driven back with heavy losses.