Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 122, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 745 & 746, September/October 2003

It had been a long, weary, and sickening day, but finally a weight seemed to have lifted from Edward Hartest. He poured me a glass of sherry, having, on one pretext or another, prevented my leaving for the last two hours. “Nonsense! Not in the way at all! I can never apologise enough for dragging you into such a grisly family scene but we’ve both been glad you were here. Kept us in touch with sanity in an increasingly mad scenario, you might say. And you were right, you see, Ellie, about the motive. Purity of the line. It meant a lot to my father.” He fell silent, plunging into painful thought. Recovering himself he said, more brightly, “Ellie... now that’s short for Eleanor, isn’t it? And funnily enough, that’s the modern spelling of Alienore. Did you know that? Your surname’s Hardwick? One of the Norfolk Hardwicks, are you? Then your family are apple growers? You must know a good deal about apples.”

Suspicious and disturbed by his change of tone, I admitted that I did.

“Look, before you go you must have a stroll in the orchard with me. The blossom’s wonderful at the moment. We’ve got some very special old strains that might interest an expert.”

The thought of wandering under the trees in the twilight with the handsome dark lord was making my knees quiver. I tried to fix an interested smile and appear relaxed but all my senses were screaming a warning.

For two men who’d just suffered a double bereavement, Rupert and Edward were charming hosts. But it was more than noblesse obliging them to put on a good show — they were hanging on to me because my presence was a necessary buffer between them. When I had gone they would be left alone with each other, with recriminations, perhaps, and with much sorrow. For the moment I presented them with the need to behave normally. I got to my feet, packing up my bag. I had to take my leave carefully, raising no suspicion that I knew a huge injustice had been done and that one of these charming men was a killer, a killer with the deaths of a young girl, her unborn child, and an innocent old man on his conscience.

Neither man had an alibi for the time of the murder. Rupert was thought to have been in bed and had made a rather stagey (in my opinion) appearance in his bathrobe at ten-thirty. Edward had told the police in his straightforward way that, as usual, he’d been working by himself in the fields since six o’clock. If the inspector cared to ask, any one of what he called “his chaps” might be able to state that they’d spotted him out in the croft, mending the tractor. Somehow I thought his chaps might be queuing up, tugging their forelocks, to do just that.

The killer was probably trying to calculate how much I had worked out for myself, assessing from my behaviour how urgently I was trying to get away to raise the alarm, perhaps even working on a scheme to ensure my discretion — or my silence.

Rupert scrambled to his feet and firmly took my bag. “No, it’s all right, Dad. Ellie won’t want to be wandering round a damp orchard at this time of night. We’re not all apple freaks, you know! I’ll walk you to your car, Ellie... No, I insist! It’s a bit dark down the lane now,” he said. “You left it in front of the church, didn’t you?”

And we set off together to walk down the tree-lined driveway to the church.

Distantly, the reassuring sound of the blue and white plastic ribbons outlining the crime scene flapping in the evening breeze was reaching my ears. We crunched on in silence down the gravel. Not much further to go. My hand curled round my car keys in the right-hand pocket of my jeans. Fifty yards.

At the bottom of the drive, Rupert pulled me into the deep shadow of a lime tree, turned to face me, and put two hands on my shoulders. “You know, don’t you?” he said abruptly.

I shivered under his hands. “Yes, I do,” I said defiantly.

“And I want to know what you’re proposing to do about it.”

Keeping my voice level and unconcerned I said, “Nothing. That’s what I’m proposing to do. Who would listen to me in the face of so much evidence pointing so convincingly in a different direction? You’ve said it, Rupert, or was it your father? — ‘It’s a family thing.’ You can sort it out between you.”

“How did you guess?”

“It was no guess. Sharp observation and intelligent deduction!” I couldn’t let him intimidate me. I looked anxiously down the drive, trying to make out the outline of my old Golf. Could I outrun him if he got angry? Probably not.

“It was the pills that gave it away.” (Better give him something to think about.)

“Pills, Ellie? What do you mean?”