Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 124, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 757 & 758, September/October 2004

“What the hell do you suppose they’re doing over there?” said Doug. He’s dead now, poor old Doug, crushed under his beloved Facel Vega one afternoon when he was working on it and the jack failed. Suzanne came back from a bridge game with the other wives and found him in the garage lying under those two tons of car. But on this afternoon I’m talking about, which is exactly a year ago, he was still very alive, pouring himself yet another brandy and looking rather sourly across the avenue towards Bill’s house.

It was a quiet summer Sunday afternoon in Greenacres. I don’t know if you know Greenacres, probably not. It’s the sort of place which was made for quiet summer Sunday afternoons. It’s not a suburb, Greenacres; it’s more of an enclave. Far enough from London to keep it quiet, near enough to make it easy to get up there. If you have to. We don’t often have to, Harry, Doug, Bill, and me. We’ve got things sufficiently under control not to have to.

Greenacres is a sort of staging post for those, like Harry, Doug, Bill, and me, who are not seriously rich enough to warrant the giant domains you find further down the Thames Valley. We’re taking a breather, you might say, before moving up to the next rung. All the same, in Greenacres, you won’t find a house going for much under half a million quid.

Here’s the sort of place it is: On a Sunday afternoon in Greenacres, you don’t hear lawn mowers or the hiss of hoses. Why not? Because all that’s been taken care of during the working week by working people who take care of all that annoying business of lawn mowing and car washing for us. So that our Sundays are left mower-free and car-washingless for us to concentrate on living. Living, which in most cases means lunching.

Were there ever two words that fit together so beautifully as Sunday and Lunch? Sunday and Lunch, in our case, means, in the summer, a barbeque at one of our houses. And on this occasion, the one I’m concerned with, and to be honest, still very concerned with, was at Doug’s house.

Doug and Harry and Bill and I take it in turns most weeks, when the weather is clement, to host a lunch al fresco. And I must say that Doug had done us proud. He has a double-size barbeque on which he had cooked first lobster en papillote, delightfully prepared by Mrs. Evans, his cook-housekeeper, and then tournedos Rossini, each steak delivered on its slice of fried bread, topped with a layer of foie gras, and accompanied by baked potatoes whose consistency was to dream about, and a selection of fresh vegetables.

During the meal, served on the lawn, Caroline, my wife, had eyed me in a very particular way which said, quite clearly, that we weren’t yet up to scratch in this area.

“Isn’t this wonderful, Tom?” she had trilled at me and I sighed. I knew that I would be searching in the next week for double-size barbeques and importers of Pacific prawns. Keep up, she was saying to me.

But that was earlier. Now, in the middle of the afternoon, wifeless and listless, we were at the stage where if you’re going to go on drinking, and we certainly were, Doug, Harry, Bill, and I, well, you’ve got a problem about what. Do you go on with the wine, which can get pretty heavy at four in the afternoon, or do you switch to alcohol and the hell with it. So we’d switched to brandy under the pretence that it was a digestif. Except for me. I had started unashamedly on the scotch. I like a drop of scotch and everyone knows it. And the hell with Caroline.

“What the hell do you suppose they’re doing across there?” Doug asked again. He was looking across the avenue towards Bill’s house, where our four wives had gone after lunch. We all looked across Doug’s lawn, which is expansive, followed by the avenue, which is wide, then across Bill’s lawn, which is the same size as Doug’s, so we were looking a fair distance, say a hundred yards, but we had a pretty good view. They were sitting in Bill’s sitting room, in front of the enormous picture window, huddled in a group, talking seriously, but every so often there would be the occasional burst of laughter which we couldn’t hear, but it was pretty obvious that they were laughing from the way they threw themselves about. I could even make out Caroline putting her hand over her mouth, which she inevitably does whenever she’s screeching with laughter.

“And what the hell can they be talking about that’s so funny?” Doug said.

Harry said, “In my experience, Doug, even if they told you, which they certainly won’t, you wouldn’t understand it. So don’t sweat it.”

Bill said, “Come on, Doug, siddown. Who cares anyway?”

And I said, just to get my four penn’orth in, “It’s probably dirty anyway.”

“That’s right,” Bill backed me up, “women are much worse than men when it comes to dirty talk.”

“Ever been in a women’s toilet?” asked Harry. “The things they write on the walls would curl your hair. Much worse than the men’s toilet.”

“When were you in a women’s toilet?” Bill asked, interested.