Calendar of Crime

The Adventure of The Needle’s Eye

This being a tale of pirates and stolen treasure, it is a gratification to record that it all happened in that season of the year to which the moonstone and the poppy are traditionally dedicated. For the moonstone is a suprisingly moral object. To its lawful owner it brings nothing but good: Held in the mouth at the full of the moon, it reveals the future; it heats the lover and it cools the heated; it cures epilepsy; it fructifies trees; and so on. But rue and blight upon him who lays thievish hands on it, for then it invokes the black side of its nature and brings down upon the thief nothing but evil. Such exact justice is unarguably desirable in a story of piracy which, while boasting no moonstones—although there were buckets of other gems—did reach its apogee in Augustus Caesar’s month, which is the moonstone’s month. And the poppy springs from the blood of the slain, its scarlet blooms growing thickest on battlefields and in places of carnage. So it is a poetic duty to report that there is murder in this August tale, too.

The sea-robber involved was master of the galley Adventure, a Scotsman who was thoroughly hanged in London’s Execution Dock two centuries and a half ago—alas, on a day in May—and whose name ever since has stood for piracy in general. Ellery had tangled with historical characters before, but never with one so exciting as this; and it must be confessed that he embarked on the case of Captain Kidd’s treasure with a relish more suitable to a small boy in his first hot pursuit of Mr. Legrand’s golden scarabaeus than to a weary workman in words and the case-hardened son of a modern New York policeman.

And then there was Eric Ericsson.

Ericsson was that most tragic of men, an explorer in an age when nothing of original note remained on earth to be explored. He had had to content himself with being, not the first in anything, but the farthest, or the highest, or the deepest. Where five channels in the Northwest Passage were known, Ericsson opened a sixth. He found a peak in Sikang Province of western China, in the Amne Machin Range, which was almost a thousand feet higher than Everest, but he lost his instruments and his companions and Mount Everest remained on the books the highest mountain on the planet. Ericsson went farther and wider in the great Juf depression of the Sahara than the Citroën expedition, but this did not salve the nettling fact that other men had blazed the trail. And so it had gone all his life. Now in middle age, broken in health, Ericsson rested on his bitter fame—honorary fellowships and medals from all the proper learned societies, membership and officership in clubs like the Explorers’, Cosmos, Athenaeum—and brooded over his memories in his New York apartment or, occasionally, at the fireside of the old stone house on the island he owned off Montauk Point, Long Island.

Ellery had heard the story of William Kidd and Ericsson’s Island as a result of his first meeting with Ericsson at the Explorers’ Club. Not from Ericsson—their introduction had been by the way and their conversation brief; if any discoveries had been made it was by Ericsson, who explored Ellery with far swifter economy than that explorer in other spheres would have believed possible of anyone but himself. Then the large, burned, bowed man had shuffled off, leaving Ellery to quiz his host of the evening, a cartographer of eminence. When this amiable personage mentioned Ericsson’s Island and the buccaneer of the Adventure in adjoining breaths, Ellery’s bow plunged into the wind.

“You mean you’ve never heard that yarn?” asked the cartographer with the incredulity of the knowledgeable man. “I thought everyone had!” And he gripped his glass and set sail.

An Ericsson had taken possession of the little island in the fourth quarter of the seventeenth century, and he had managed to hold on to it through all the proprietary conflicts of that brawling era. Along the way the Northman acquired a royal patent which somehow weathered the long voyage of colonial and American history.

“Now did Kidd know Ericsson’s Island?” asked the cartographer, settling himself as if for argument. “The circumstantial evidence is good. We know that in 1691, for instance, he was awarded £150 by the council of New York for his services during the disturbances in the colony ‘after the rebellion of 1688.’ And then, of course, there was the treasure found on Gardiner’s Island off the tip of Long Island after Kidd’s arrest in 1699 on a charge of murder and piracy. On a clear day you can see Ericsson’s Island from Gardiner’s Island with a glass. How could he have missed it?”

“It’s your story,” said Ellery judicially. “Go on.”

William Kidd served respectably against the French in the West Indies, the cartographer continued, and in 1695 he was in London. Recommended as fit to command a vessel for the king, Captain Kidd received the royal commission to arrest all freebooters and boucaniers, and he sailed the galley Adventure from Plymouth in 1696 into a life, not of arresting pirates, but of outpirating them.

“The rest is history,” said the cartographer, “although some of it is dubious history. We do know that in 1698 or thereabout he was in these parts in a small sloop. Well, the story has persisted for two hundred and fifty years that during this period—when Kidd deserted the Adventure in Madagascar and took to the sloop, eventually working his way to these waters—he paid a visit to Ericsson’s Island.”

“To Gardiner’s Island,” corrected Ellery.

“And Ericsson’s,” said his host stubbornly. “Why not? About £14,000 was recovered from Kidd’s vessel and from Gardiner’s Island afterward; there must have been a great deal more than that. Why, John Avery — ‘Long Ben’ — once grabbed off 100,000 pieces of eight in a single haul; and a Mogul’s daughter to boot!

“What happened to the rest of Kidd’s booty? Is it likely he’d have cached it all in one place? He knew he was in for serious trouble—he tried to bribe Governor Bellomont, you’ll recall. And with Ericsson’s Island so handy...”

“What’s the story?” murmured Ellery.

“Oh, that he put into the cove there with a small boat one night, by a ruse got into the Ericsson house—the original’s still standing, by the way, beautifully preserved—gave Ericsson and his family fifteen minutes to get off the island, and used the place as his headquarters for a few days. When Kidd cleared out, to be seized and shipped to England shortly after, the Ericssons went back to their island—”

“And perforated it fore and aft and amidships for the treasure Kidd presumably buried there,” said Ellery, trying to sound amused.

“Well, certainly,” said the cartographer peevishly. “Wouldn’t you have?”

“But they never found it.”

“Neither they nor their heirs or assigns. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t there, Queen.”

“Doesn’t mean it is, either.”

Nevertheless, Ellery went home that night feeling as if he had spent the evening in a hurricane off the Spanish Main, clinging to the wild rigging.

It was not quite two weeks later, in a mid-August spell of Dry Tortugan weather, that Eric Ericsson telephoned. The explorer sounded remote, as if deep—at least six fathoms deep—affairs were on his mind.

“Could you see me confidentially, Mr. Queen? I know you’re a busy man, but if it’s possible—”

“Are you calling from town, Mr. Ericsson?”

“Yes.”

“You come right on over!”

Nikki could not understand Ellery’s excitement. “Buried treasure,” she sniffed. “A grown man.”

“Women,” pontificated Mr. Queen, “have no imagination.”

“I suppose that’s true,” said his secretary coolly, “if you mean the kind that heats up at a bucket of nasty gore and a couple of rum-soaked yo-ho-hos. Who ever heard of a lady pirate?”

“Two of the bloodiest pirates in the business were Anne Bonny and Mary Read.”

“Then they were no ladies!”

Twenty minutes later the doorbell rang and Nikki, still sniffishly, admitted the owner of the island whose clamshells had once been crunched by the tread of Captain Kidd and his cutthroat crew.

“Glad you didn’t waste any time getting here, Mr. Ericsson,” said Ellery enthusiastically. “The sooner we get going on it—”

“You know why I’m here?” The explorer frowned.

“It doesn’t take a math shark to put a couple of twos together.”

“What on earth are you talking about?”

“Oh, come, Mr. Ericsson,” chortled Ellery. “If it’s Nikki you’re worried about, I assure you that not only is she the custodian of all my secrets, she also has no interest whatsoever in buried treasure.”

“Buried treasure?” Ericsson waved a charred hand impatiently. “That’s not what I wanted to see you about.”

“It’s... not?”

“I’ve never put any stock in that yarn, Mr. Queen. In fact, the whole picture of Kidd as a pirate in my opinion is a myth and a historical libel. Kidd was the goat of a political intrigue, I’m convinced, not a pirate at all. Dalton’s book presented some pretty conclusive evidence. If it’s real pirates you’re after, look up Bartholomew Roberts. Roberts took over four hundred ships during his career.”

“Then the story of Kidd’s seizure of Ericsson’s Island—?”

“He may have visited the island around 1698, but if it was to bury anything I’ve never seen the slightest evidence of it. Mr. Queen, I’d like to tell you why I came.”

“Yes,” sighed Ellery, and Nikki felt almost sorry for him.

Ericsson’s problem involved romance, it appeared, but not the kind that glittered under pirate moons. His only sister, a widow, had died shortly after Ericsson’s retirement, leaving a daughter. The explorer’s relationship with his sister had been distant, and he had last seen her child, Inga, as a leggy creature of twelve with a purple pimple on her nose. But at the sister’s funeral he found himself embraced as “Uncle Eric” by a golden Norse goddess of nineteen. His niece was alone in the world and she had clung to him. Ericsson, a bachelor, found the girl filling a need he had never dreamed existed. Inga left college and came to live with him as his ward, the consolation of his empty retirement, and the sole heir of his modest fortune.

At first they were inseparable—in Ericsson’s New York household, at the stone house on the island during long weekends. But Inga began to glow, and the moths came. They were young moths and they rather interfered. So Ericsson—selfishly, he admitted—had his yacht refurbished and sailed Inga away on a cruise of the Caribbean.

“Biggest mistake of my life,” the explorer shrugged. “We stopped over in the Bahamas, and there Inga met a young Britisher, Anthony Hobbes-Watkins, who was living a gentlemanly beachcomber sort of existence out on Lyford Cay, at the other end of New Providence Island. It was Inga’s first serious love affair. I should have taken her away immediately. When I woke up, it was too late.”

“Elopement?” asked Nikki hopefully.

“No, no, Miss Porter, it was a cathedral wedding. I couldn’t stand in Inga’s way. And I really had nothing definite to go on.”

Ellery said: “There’s something fishy about Hobbes-Watkins?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Queen.” Ericsson’s heavy, burned-out face remained expressionless, but not his eyes. “That’s what I want you to find out.”

“What do you know about him?”

“Only what he’s told me and a few things I’ve picked up. Captaincy in the RAF during the war, and not much of anything since—I don’t hold that against him, it’s a rocky world. All the British upper class attainments—shoots well, plays an earnest game of polo, grouses about the fading star of empire; that sort of thing. Knew all the right people in Nassau; but he hadn’t been there long.

“His father, a Colonel Hobbes-Watkins, came on from somewhere—England, he said—for the wedding,” continued the explorer, and he shrugged again. “A stout, red, loud, horsy specimen, nearly a caricature of his type. They seem to have plenty of money, so it can’t be that. But there is... something, a mystery, a vagueness about them that keeps disturbing me. They’re like figures on a movie screen—you see them move, you hear them talk, but they never seem flesh and blood. Two-dimensional... I’m not saying this well,” said Ericsson, flushing. “When a man’s tramped mountains and deserts and jungles all his life, as I have, he develops an extra sense.” He looked up. “I don’t trust them.”

“I suppose,” said Nikki, “your niece does.”

“Well, Inga’s young and unsophisticated, and she’s very much in love. That’s what makes it so awkward. But she’s become important to me, and for her sake I can’t let this go on unless I’m satisfied she hasn’t made some awful mistake.”

“Have you noticed anything different since the wedding, Mr. Ericsson?” asked Ellery. “A change in their attitude?”

The explorer scraped the bark of his neck with a limp handkerchief. But he said defiantly, “They whisper together.”

Ellery raised his brows.

But Ericsson went on doggedly. “Right after the wedding Colonel Hobbes-Watkins left for the States. On business, he said. I gave the yacht to Inga and Tony for a three-week honeymoon. On their way back they picked me up in Nassau and we sailed up to New York, meeting Tony’s father here... On three different occasions I’ve come on the Hobbes-Watkinses having whispered conversations which break off like a shot. I don’t like it, Mr. Queen. I don’t like it to such an extent,” said Ericsson quietly, “that I’ve deliberately kept us all in the city instead of doing the sensible thing in this heat and living down at the island. My island is pretty isolated, and it would make the ideal setting for a... Instead of which, Tony and Inga have my apartment, I’m stopping at one of my clubs, and the Colonel is sweating it out politely in a midtown hotel—business, unspecified, still keeping him in the States. But I can’t stall any longer. Inga’s been after me now for weeks to shove off for the Point, and she’s beginning to look at me queerly. I’ve had to promise we’d all go down this weekend for the rest of the summer.”

“It would make the ideal setting,” said Ellery, “for a what?”

“You’ll think I’m cracked.”

“For a what, Mr. Ericsson?”

“All right!” The explorer gripped the arms of his chair. “For a murder,” he muttered.

Nikki stared. “Oh, I’m sure—” she began.

But Ellery’s foot shifted and somehow crushed Nikki’s little toe. “Murder of whom, Mr. Ericsson?”

“Inga! Me! Both of us—I don’t know!” He controlled himself with an effort. “Maybe I’m hallucinated. But I tell you those two are scoundrels and my island would be a perfect place for whatever they’re up to. What I’d like you to do, Mr. Queen, is come down this weekend for an indefinite stay. Will you?”

Ellery glanced at his secretary; Nikki was often his umpire when he was playing the game of working. But she was regarding him with the grim smile of a spectator.

“Come down, too, Miss Porter,” said the explorer, misinterpreting the glance. “Inga will love having you. Besides, your coming will make it appear purely social. I don’t want Inga having the least suspicion that... Don’t bother about a wardrobe; we lead the most primitive life on the island. And there’s plenty of room; the house has tripled its original size. About the fee, Mr. Queen—”

“We’ll discuss fees,” murmured Ellery, “when there’s something to charge a fee for. We’ll be there, Mr. Ericsson. I can’t leave, however, before Saturday morning. When are you planning to go down?”

“Friday.” The explorer looked worried.

“I don’t imagine they’d try anything the very first night,” said Ellery soothingly. “And you’re not exactly a helpless old gaffer.”

“Good lord! You don’t think it’s myself I’m concerned about! It’s Inga... married and...” Ericsson stopped abruptly. Then he smiled and rose. “Of course you’re right. I’ll have the launch waiting for you at Montauk Point. You don’t know how this relieves me.”

“But won’t your niece suspect something by the mere fact of Ellery’s being invited down?” asked Nikki. “Unless, Ellery, you cook up one of your stories.”

“How’s this?” beamed Ellery. “I met Mr. Ericsson at the Explorers’ Club recently, heard the family tale about Captain Kidd’s treasure, I couldn’t resist it, and I’m coming down to try to solve a two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old mystery. Simple?”

“Simply perfect,” exclaimed Ericsson. “Inga’s had them half-believing this yarn ever since the Bahamas, and if I talk it up for the rest of the week you’ll have them under your feet—they’ll follow you around like tourists. See you both Saturday.”

“It’s simple, all right,” said Nikki when the explorer had gone. “The simple truth! Shall I pack your extra cutlass, my bucko—and a couple of all-day suckers?”

Eric Ericsson and his niece met them at Montauk Point Saturday morning and hurtled them over blue water in a noisy launch. It was hard to think of wickedness. Inga was a big solid blonde girl with the uncomplicated loveliness of the North, friendly and charming and—Nikki thought—happy as a newlywed could be. The day was stainless, the sun brilliant, the horizon picketed with racing sails; a salt breeze blew the girls’ hair about, and the world looked a jolly place. Even Ericsson was composed, as if he had slept unexpectedly well or the presence of serene, golden-legged Inga gave him the strength to dissemble his fears.

“I think it’s so thrilling,” Inga cried over the roar of the launch. “And Tony and the Colonel have talked of nothing else since Uncle Eric told us why you were coming down, Mr. Queen. Do you really feel there’s hope?”

“I try to,” Ellery shouted. “By the way, I’m disappointed. I thought your husband and father-in-law might be with you in the launch.”

“Oh, that’s Uncle Eric’s fault,” the girl said, and the explorer smiled. “He kidnaped me before I could scream for help.”

“Guilty.” Ericsson’s grip on the wheel gave the lie to his smile. “I don’t see much of you now that you’re Mrs. Hobbes-Watkins.”

“Darling, I’m glad you kidnaped me. I really am.”

“Even though Mr. Hobbes-Watkins is probably fit to be tied?”

Inga looked happy.

But Nikki, the sun notwithstanding, felt a chill. Ericsson had been afraid to leave Inga alone on the island with her husband and father-in-law.

Ellery kept chattering to Inga about the paragon she had married, while Ericsson stood quietly over the wheel. Nikki could have told the great man that he was wasting his celebrated bream: the girl was in the first heaven of wedded bliss, where the beloved hangs in space clothed in perfect light and there is no past.

From the horizon rose a seaweed-hung otter with a fish in its mouth, which changed rapidly into a long low-lying island thinly wooded and running down to a white beach and a pretty cove. As the launch drew near, they made out a shed, a boathouse, and a jetty. A lank, disjointed something stuck up from the jetty like a piece of driftwood. It turned surprisingly into a one-legged old man. His left leg was gone at the knee; the trouser of his bleached, fishy jeans was pinned back over the stump; and to the stump there was strapped a crude, massive pegleg. With a skin resembling the shed’s corrugated roof, a nose that was a twist of bone, crafty and secretive eyes, and a greasy bandana tied behind his ears against the sun, the peglegged old man looked remarkably like a pirate; and Nikki said so.

“That’s why we call him Long John,” Inga said as her uncle maneuvered the launch toward the jetty. “At least Tony and I do. Uncle Eric calls him Fleugelheimer, or something as ridiculous, though I suppose it’s his name. He’s not very bright, and he has no manners at all. Hi, Long John!” she called. “Catch the line.”

The old man hopped sidewise with great agility and caught the line, poorly tossed, in his powerful right hand. Immediately he wheeled on Ericsson, his bony jaws grinding.

“Bloodsucker!” he yelled.

“Now, John,” said the explorer with a sigh.

“When ye givin’ me more money?”

“John, we have guests...”

“Or d’ye want me to quit? Ye want me to quit!”

“Make the line fast,” said Ericsson with a faint smile.

“I’m a poor man,” whined the old pirate, obeying. Suddenly he squinted sidewise at Ellery. “This the great detecative?”

“Yes, John.”

“Henh!” said Long John, and he spat into the water, grinning evilly. He seemed to have forgotten all about his grievance.

“He’s been on the island for years,” Ericsson explained as they went up a rough path in the woods. “My caretaker. Surly old devil—not all there. He’s a miser—hoards every penny I give him, and keeps dunning me for more with the regularity of a parrot. I ignore him and we get along fine.”

And there was the stone house at the hump of the island’s back. Clean wings stretched from a central building whose stones were grimy with weathered age. The old part of the house rose in a clapboard tower. The tower was square, with several small windows from which, Ellery thought, the whole island and a great spread of the sea must be visible. Undoubtedly the lookout tower of the original structure.

To one side of the house someone—Ericsson, or one of his more recent forebears—had built a rough but comfortable terrace. It was paved with oyster shells and there was a huge barbecue pit.

Two men—one portly and middleaged, the other slim and young—rose from deckchairs waving frosty glasses.

And the instant Ellery laid eyes on the Hobbes-Watkinses he knew Eric Ericsson had been right.

It was hard to say why. They were almost professionally British, especially Colonel Hobbes-Watkins, but that did not account for it; and for the rest of the day Ellery devoted himself to this riddle. He did not solve it.

On the surface the men were plausible. Inga’s husband was handsome in a thin, underdone way; he slouched and lolled as if he were hopelessly tired; speech seemed forced out of him; and he drank a good deal. This was the very picture of the young postwar European, spoiled, sick, and disenchanted. Still... The elder Hobbes-Watkins was Colonel Blimp to the life, fussing and blustery and full of oldfashioned prejudices. A warmed-over mutton roast, as Nikki promptly dubbed him in a mumble. But there was something in the Colonel’s bloated eye and occasionally in his blasting tone that had a lean and cynical energy in it, not at all in character.

During the afternoon Ellery, playing his role of historical detective, set off on a survey of the island. Inga, Tony, and the Colonel insisted on accompanying him.

Long John was fishing from a dory off the cove. When he spied them, he deliberately turned his back.

Ellery began to saunter along the beach, the others trotting eagerly behind.

“Needn’t be bashful,” he called, mindful of Inga between the two ogres at his back. “I’m merely casing the joint. Come up here, Inga.”

“Casing the joint,” wheezed Colonel Hobbes-Watkins. “Very good, haha! But I say, won’t we trample the clues?”

“Not much danger of that, Colonel,” said Ellery cheerfully, “after two and a half centuries. Inga, do join me.”

“Glad I ambled along,” said Tony Hobbes-Watkins in a languid voice. It sounded queerly dutiful for a groom. Ellery was conscious of the man’s eyes; they kept a staring watch.

They went around the island in an hour. It was long and narrow and swelled to a ridge in the middle. The vegetation was scrubby and poor. There was no close anchorage except off the cove. None of the trees, which might have been landmarks, looked old; the island was exposed to the sea, and centuries of winter gales had kept it pruned.

“I don’t suppose,” Ellery asked Inga as they climbed the path back to the house in the dusk, “the story has ever had any documentation? Chart, map—anything like that?”

“Nothing that still exists. But it’s said that there was once a letter or diary page or something left by the 1698 Ericsson—it’s been lost, if it ever existed at all—telling about the clue in Captain Kidd’s room, and of course that’s been the big mystery ever since.”

“Clue? Kidd’s room?” exclaimed Ellery. “No one’s mentioned that!”

“Didn’t Eric tell you?” murmured the younger Englishman. “Fantastic fellow, Eric. No imagination.”

“I wondered why you hadn’t steamed up there immejiately,” panted the Colonel. “Fancy your uncle’s not telling Mr. Queen the most exciting part of it, Inga! It’s the chamber the pirate watched the sea from when he took the island over—didn’t you say, my dear?”

“The tower room,” said Inga, pointing through the dusk. “That was in the lost letter, and the reference to the clue Kidd left there.”

“Clue left in the tower room?” Ellery squinted through the twilight hungrily. “And that’s the original room up there, Inga?”

“Yes.”

“What was the clue?”

But the terrace and Long John at the barbecue pit intervened; and since the one-legged caretaker was brandishing a veritable trident as he glowered at the latecomers, Ellery was not answered.

They had dinner. A great moon rose, and the air turned chilly. Ellery wandered to the edge of the terrace with his plate, and a moment later Eric Ericsson joined him.

“Well?” the explorer asked.

“Nothing tangible, Mr. Ericsson. But I agree—there’s something in the wind.”

“What about tonight? I’ve put you next to the Colonel’s room, and I have an automatic, but Inga... alone with...”

“I’ve already fixed that. By a happy coincidence Nikki is going to be so nervous tonight in this primeval setting that she’ll just have to sleep with somebody. Since she’s had a strict upbringing, that means with Inga, the only other female here. A dirty trick to play on a new husband,” said Ellery dryly, “but Tony can console himself with the prospect of a good night’s sleep in the room next to mine.” Ericsson pressed Ellery’s arm rather pathetically. “For the rest of the evening, Mr. Ericsson,” murmured Ellery, “please follow my lead. I’m going to be treasure-hunting like mad.”

“Ha. Caught you whispering,” said a voice at Ellery’s elbow; it was young Hobbes-Watkins with a glass in his hand. “Pumping Eric about that clue, eh, Queen?”

“We were just getting round to it,” said Ellery. “Girls couldn’t take it, I see.” Inga and Nikki were gone.

“Driven to cover by the mosquitoes and gnats,” boomed the Colonel, slapping himself. “Lovely children, but females, what? Ah, there, you dog, don’t shake your head at your old bachelor father! The moon’s bloody, and it’s the hour for high adventure, didn’t some chap say? About that clue, Mr. Queen...”

“Yes, you never said a word to me about Captain Kidd’s room, Mr. Ericsson,” said Ellery reproachfully. “What’s all this about a clue he’s supposed to have left up there?”

“It’s characteristically cryptic,” said the explorer, pouring coffee. “The legend says that just before Kidd was to be hanged in London he sent a letter to my ancestor admitting that he’d buried a treasure on Ericsson’s Island in ’98, and saying that ‘to find it you must look through the eye of the needle.’”

“Eye of the needle,” said Ellery. “Eye of which needle?”

“Ah!” said Colonel Hobbes-Watkins ominously. “There’s the rub, as the Bard says. No one knows—eh, Ericsson?”

“I’m afraid not, Colonel. And no one ever will, because it’s all moonshine.”

“Don’t see why you say that, Eric, at all,” said Tony, almost energetically. “Could have been a needle!”

“Even if there had been,” Ericsson smiled in his moonshine, “two hundred and fifty years make a large haystack.”

“One moment!” said Ellery. “Look through the eye of the needle in the tower room, Mr. Ericsson?”

“That’s how it goes.”

“What’s in that room?”

“Nothing at all. Just four walls, a floor, and a ceiling. I assure you, Mr. Queen, everything’s been tried—unsuccessfully—from hunting for a peculiar rock formation to conjuring up a tree fork viewed from a certain angle from the windows.”

Ellery stared up at the tower. Suddenly he sprang to his feet. “How do I get up there?”

“There’s the sleuth for you!” cried Colonel Hobbes-Watkins, hurling himself from his chair. “Been itching to have a go at that ruddy room myself!”

“But Eric’s been so discouraging,” murmured his son.

Nikki and Inga had their heads together before the fireplace, where Long John was laying a fire. Inga fell behind to say something to her young husband, who glanced quickly at Nikki and then shrugged.

The explorer led the way up a tiny narrow coiling staircase, holding a kerosene lamp high. “The tower’s never been electrified,” he called down, his deep voice reverberating. “Better use those flashlights or you’ll break your necks on these stairs.”

“Eeee,” said Nikki convincingly; but it was only a dried-up wasps’ nest. The stairs sagged perilously at every step.

The climb ended in a little landing and a heavy door of blackened oak and handforged iron. Ericsson set his big shoulder to the door. It gave angrily. The lamp bobbed off.

“A couple of you had better stay on the landing. This floor may not hold up under so much weight. Come in, Mr. Queen.”

It was scarcely more than a large closet with miniature square windows. A floor of dirt-glazed random boards, undulant like the sea; a raftered ceiling only a few inches above the men’s heads; and four papered walls. And that was all, except for dust and cobwebs. The windows, of imperfectly blown glass, were closed.

“Open them, Ellery,” choked Nikki from the doorway. “You can’t breathe up here.”

“You can’t open them,” said Inga. “They’ve been stuck fast for six generations.”

Ellery stood in the middle of the room looking about.

“Aren’t you going to get down on all fours, Mr. Queen?” bellowed the Colonel from the landing. “Like the fellow from Baker Street?”

“I find these walls much more interesting.”

But the only thing Nikki could see on the walls was the wallpaper. The paper showed an imitation colored marble design on a grainy background—ugly as sin, Nikki thought, and even uglier for being faded and mildewed in great patches.

Ellery was at one of the walls now, actually caressing it, holding the lamp close to the marbled paper. Finally he began at a corner and went over the paper inch by inch, from ceiling to floor. At one point he examined something for a long time. Then he resumed his deliberate inspection, and he neither spoke nor looked around until he had completed his tour of the room.

“This wallpaper,” he said. “Do you know, Mr. Ericsson, what you have here?”

“Dash it all, sir,” interrupted the Colonel explosively, “are you treasure-hunting, or what?”

“The wallpaper?” Ericsson frowned. “All I know about it is that it’s very old.”

“To be exact, late seventeenth century,” said Ellery. “This is genuine flock paper, made by the famous Dunbar of Aldermanbury. It’s probably quite valuable.”

“There’s a treasure for you,” wailed Inga.

“If so,” shrugged her uncle, “it’s the first I’ve run across on the island.”

“There may be a second,” said Ellery. “If we look through the eye of the needle.”

“Don’t tell me, Queen,” said Inga’s husband with what might have been animation, “you’ve spotted something’.”

“Yes.”

The Hobbes-Watkinses made admiring sounds and Inga embraced her spouse. The explorer seemed stunned.

“Do you mean to say,” demanded Nikki in a loud voice, “that you walk into a strange room and in ten minutes solve a mystery that’s baffled everybody for two hundred and fifty years? Come, come, Mr. Q!”

“It’s still only theory,” said Ellery apologetically. “Inga, may I borrow a broom?”

“A broom!”

Inga, Tony, and the Colonel shouted chaotically down the tower stairs for Long John to fetch the best broom on the premises. Then they ran into the little room and danced around Ellery, reckless of the aged floor.

“If the yarn is true at all,” Ellery said, “Kidd couldn’t have meant it literally when he instructed your ancestor, Mr. Ericsson, to ‘look through the eye of the needle.’ The early treasure-hunters saw that at once, or they wouldn’t have looked for peculiar rock and tree formations. They just didn’t look close enough to home. It was under their noses all the time.”

“What was under their noses all the time?” asked Nikki.

“The marble design on this wallpaper. Marble’s unique characteristic is its veining. Look at these veins in the pattern. Some are long and thin, tapering to a point—”

“Like needles,” said the explorer slowly.

Everyone began scuttling along a wall.

“But where’s one with an opening?” shrieked Inga. “Oh, I can’t find a—a bloody eye!”

“An eye, an eye,” mumbled the Colonel feverishly. “There must be one with an eye!”

“There is,” said Ellery. “Just one, and here it is near this window.”

And while they stared in awe at the place on the wall beyond the tip of Ellery’s forefinger, Long John’s boot and pegleg stumped into the tower room.

“Broom.” He flung it.

Ellery seized it, placed the end of the broom handle on the open space in the needle-shaped vein, said with piety, “Let us pray,” and pushed.

There was a ripping sound and the broom handle burst through the wallpaper and sank into the wall. Ellery kept pushing gently. The handle slid out of sight up to the sweep.

Ellery withdrew the broom and stepped back.

“Mr. Ericsson,” he said, not without emotion, “the honor of the first look is yours.”

“Well, don’t just crouch there, Uncle Eric!” moaned Inga. “What do you see?”

“Can you see anything?”

“But he must—there’s a bright moon!”

“Now, my dears, give the old chap a chance—”

“I see,” said Eric Ericsson slowly, “a bit of the northeast shoreline. You know the place, Inga. It’s that postage-stamp patch of beach with the slight overhang of flat rock. Where you’ve sunbathed.”

“Let me see!”

“Let me!”

“It is!”

“It can’t be. By George, not really—”

“What luck!”

There was a great deal of confusion.

Ellery said rapidly, “Mr. Ericsson, since you know just where the place is, take a hurricane lamp and a stake and get down there. We’ll keep watch through the peephole. When we’ve got your lamp in the center of our sight, we’ll signal with a flashlight three times from this window. Drive your stake into the sand at that point, and we’ll join you there with shovels.”

“I’ll get ’em!” shrieked a voice; and they turned to see Long John’s peg vanishing. Fifteen minutes later, with Inga sprinting ahead, they thrashed through the scrub toward the explorer’s light.

They found Ericsson standing on an outcrop of silvery rock, smiling. “No hurry,” he said. “And no treasure—not till low tide tomorrow morning, anyway.”

Ericsson’s stake was protruding from four and a half feet of ocean.

Nikki found herself able to play the part of a nervous city female with no difficulty at all. How could Inga sleep? she thought as she thrashed about in the twin bed. When in a few hours she was going to be the heiress of a pirate’s treasure?… The... piracy of that pirate... to bury it so that for half the elapsed time the Atlantic rolled over it... He ought to be hanged...

Then Nikki remembered that he had been hanged; and that was her last thought until a hand clamped over her mouth and a light flashed briefly into her eyes and Ellery’s voice said affectionately in her ear, “You certainly sleep soundly. Get into some clothes and join me outside. And don’t wake anyone or I’ll give you a taste of the cat.”

Nikki slipped out of the house into a dead and lightless world. She could not even make out the terrace. But Ellery rose out of the void and led her down the path and into the woods, his grip forbidding noise. Not until they had gone several hundred yards did he turn on his flashlight, and even then he cupped its beam.

“Is it all right to talk now?” Nikki asked coldly. “What time is it? Where are we going? And why are you practically naked? And do you think this is cricket? After all, Ellery, it’s not your treasure.”

“It’s not quite four, we’re getting the jump on our friends, I expect it will be wet and mucky work, and pirate loot calls for pirate methods. Would you rather go back to your hot little bed?”

“No,” said Nikki. “Though it all sounds pretty juvenile to me. How can you dig through sea water?”

“Low tide at 4:29 A.M. — I checked with a tide table at the house.”

Nikki began to feel excited all over again.

And she almost burst into a yo-ho-ho when they came out on the flat rock and saw Ericsson’s stake below them lapped by a mere inch or two of water.

The sun made its appearance with felicity. The first sliver of fried-egg radiance slipped over the edge of the sea’s blue plate just as Ellery’s spade rang a sort of breakfast bell. Nikki, who was flat on the wet sand with her head in the hole, and Ellery, whose salted hair bobbed a foot below Nikki’s chin, responded to the sound with hungry cries.

“It’s a metal box, Nikki!”

“Whee!”

“Don’t come down here! Get that windlass ready.”

“Where? What? What’s a windlass?”

“That drum up there for hoisting!” Before turning in the previous night the men had lugged all the portable paraphernalia they could find in the shed down to the site of the treasure. “And unwind the line and pay it down to me—”

“Yaaaaa-hoo!” Nikki ran around in her little bare feet madly.

Twenty minutes later they knelt panting on the sand at the edge of the hole, staring at a brassbound iron chest with a fat convex lid. It was a black and green mass of corruption. Shreds of crumbled stuff told where leather had once been strapped. And the chest was heavy—

“Can you open it?” whispered Nikki.

Ellery set the heels of his hands on the edge of the lid and got his shoulders ready. The lid cracked off like a rotten nutshell.

Nikki gulped. The celestial egg was sunnyside up now, and beneath it a million little frying lights danced.

The chest was heaped with jewels.

“Diamonds,” said Nikki dreamily. “Rubies. Emeralds. Pearls. Sapphires. So pretty. Look, Ellery. The booty of a real pirate. Wrenched from the throats and arms of dead Spanish women—”

“And the jewels in turn wrenched from their settings,” muttered Ellery, “most of which were probably melted down. But here are some they overlooked. An empty gold setting. A silver one—”

“Here are more silver ones, Ellery...”

“Those aren’t silver.” Ellery picked one up. “This is platinum, Nikki...”

“And look at those old coins! What’s this one?”

“What?”

“This coin!”

“Oh? El peso duro. A piece of eight.”

“Gosh...” Nikki suddenly thrust both hands into the chest.

And at this precise moment, through the young air of the island’s morning, there came a dull crack, like the faraway slam of a door, and quickly after—so quickly it sounded like an echo of the first—another.

Ellery vaulted across the hole and leaped onto the flat rock. “Nikki, those were gunshots—”

“Huh?” Nikki was still on a quarterdeck with her jewels. “But Ellery—the treasure! You can’t leave—” But Ellery was gone.

They found Eric Ericsson in a robe and slippers lying in the doorway of Captain Kidd’s roost, across the sill. He had tumbled head first into the empty room. In his right hand there was a .38 automatic pistol.

When they turned him over they saw a red hole in his forehead and red thickening fluid on the floor where the forehead had rested.

His body was still warm.

Ellery got up, and he said to the Hobbes-Watkinses and the marble-faced girl and the one-legged caretaker and Nikki, “We will go downstairs now and we will bar the tower door.” So they went downstairs quietly, and Ellery excused himself for a moment and disappeared in his room, and when he appeared again he had a police revolver in his hand. “Nikki, you and Inga will take the launch and go over to the mainland and notify the Coast Guard and the Suffolk County police; there’s no phone here. You won’t come back until someone in authority can come with you. You gentlemen will wait here with me—with me, that is, and my shooting iron.”

Late that day Ellery came downstairs from the tower room and conferred with the Coast Guard officer and the police captain from the mainland. Finally he said, “I appreciate that. It’s something I owe poor Ericsson,” and he waited until the people were brought in and seated before him.

The hearty bloat had gone out of Colonel Hobbes-Watkins; it was supplanted wholly by the muscular alertness Ellery had glimpsed the day before. Tony Hobbes-Watkins was very still, but he was no longer remotely languid. Inga was the palest projection of herself. Even Long John jiggled his peg nervously.

“Fifteen minutes or so after sunrise this morning,” Ellery began, “just about the time I was down at the beach opening the treasure chest, Eric Ericsson was climbing the stairs in this house to the tower room. He was in his robe and slippers, and he carried his .38 automatic, with a full clip. His bedroom is below the tower shaft, which acts as an amplifier; evidently he was awakened by some noise from the tower room and decided to investigate. He took a gun with him because, even in his own house, he was afraid to be without it.”

“I say—” began the Colonel furiously; but he did not say after all, he wiped the rolls on his neck.

“Someone was in the tower room. What was this person doing there—at dawn, in an empty room? There is only one thing of utility in that room—the peephole I punctured through the wall last night. The person Ericsson heard was watching me through the peephole. Watching me dig up the treasure.”

They stared at him.

“Ericsson came to the landing and flung open the door. The man at the peephole whirled. Maybe they talked for a little while; maybe Ericsson was put off his guard. His gun came down, and the man across the room whipped out a revolver and fired a .22 caliber bullet into Ericsson’s head, killing him instantly. But Ericsson’s automatic had come up again instinctively as his murderer drew, and it went off, too—a split second after the murderer’s. We know two shots were fired almost simultaneously because Miss Porter and I heard them, and because we found a .22 caliber bullet in Ericsson’s head and a .38 shell on the floor near Ericsson’s .38 automatic.”

And Ellery said clearly, “The murderer ran down the tower stairs after the shots, heard the others coming—you’d all been awakened by the shots and dashed out of your rooms at once, you’ve said—realized he was trapped, and thereupon did the only thing he could: he pretended that he, too, had been awakened by the shots and he ran back up the stairs with the rest of you. The gun he managed to dispose of before I got back to the house from the beach.

“One of you,” said Ellery, “was that murderer.

“Which one was it?”

There was no sound in the room at all.

“We found the empty shell of Ericsson’s discharged cartridge, as I say, near his body. He had fired once at his murderer, his automatic had ejected the shell, and the bullet had sped on its way.

“But here is the interesting fact: We haven’t found Ericsson’s bullet.”

Ellery leaned their way. “The tower room has been gone over all day by these officers and me. The bullet isn’t there. There is no sign of it or its passage anywhere in the room—floor, walls, ceiling. The windows remain intact. They weren’t open at the time of Ericsson’s shot; as you remarked yesterday, Inga, they’ve been stuck fast for generations; and when we tried to open them today without breaking something, we failed.

“Nor did Ericsson’s shot go wild. He was killed instantly, falling into the room head first; this means that when he fired, he was facing into the room. But just to be thorough, we went over the landing and the tower shaft, too. No bullet, no bullet mark, and no slightest opening through which the bullet might have passed.”

“The peephole!” Nikki said involuntarily.

“No. There is considerable thickness to the walls. Ericsson in the doorway was at an extremely acute angle to the peephole. So while the bullet conceivably might have passed through the opening of the hole inside the tower room, it would have to have lodged inside the wall, or at least left some sign of its passage if it went clear through. We’ve torn down part of the wall to get a look inside. There is no bullet and no mark of a bullet.

“So the extraordinary fact is that while Ericsson’s bullet must have struck something in that room, there is no sign of its having done so.

“Impossible? No.

“There is one logical explanation.”

And Ellery said, “The bullet must have struck the only thing in that room which left it—the murderer. One of you is concealing a bullet wound.”

Ellery turned to the silent officers. “Let’s have these three men stripped to the skin. And Nikki,” he added, “go you somewhere with Inga—yes, I said Inga! — and do likewise.”

And when the Colonel, raging, had been reduced to his fundamental pinkness, and his intent son stood similarly unclothed, and when what there was of Long John was grimly revealed also—and no wound was found on any of them, not so much as a scratch—Ellery merely blinked and faced the door through which Nikki had taken the murdered man’s niece, the heir to his fortune and the treasure.

And the men redressed quickly, as if time were at their heels.

And when Nikki came back with Inga the police captain asked, “Where is Mrs. Hobbes-Watkins’s wound, Miss Porter?”

“Mrs. Hobbes-Watkins,” replied Nikki, “has no wound.”

“No...?”

“Maybe,” said the Coast Guard officer awkwardly, “maybe you didn’t look—uh—”

“And maybe I did,” said Nikki with a sweet smile. “I work for the great Ellery Queen... you know?”

So now the two officers turned to look at the great Ellery Queen, but with no appreciation of his greatness at all.

And the Coast Guard officer said, “Well,” and the police captain from the mainland did not say even that but turned on his heel.

He turned immediately back. For Ellery was growling, “If that’s the case, it’s obvious who killed Ericsson.”

And Ellery produced a cigaret and a lighter and went to work on them, and then he said, “It all goes back to what I dug up this morning. And what did I dig up? An old chest, some old coins, a great number of unmounted gems, and some empty gem settings. Nikki, you saw the empty settings. Of which materials were they made?”

“Gold, silver, platinum—”

“Platinum,” said Ellery, and he waved his cigaret gently. “The metal platinum wasn’t introduced into Europe until about 1750 — over fifty years after Kidd supposedly buried the chestful of jewels on this island. It’s even worse than that: Platinum wasn’t used for jewel settings until the year 1900, at which time Kidd had been dead a hundred and ninety-nine years.

“A phony, gentleman. A plant. The whole thing.

“The ‘treasure’ I unearthed this morning was buried in that sand very recently, I’m afraid. It has no more connection with William Kidd or any other seventeenth century pirate than the loose change in my pocket. Oh, it was meant to be taken for a treasure Kidd buried—the chest is authentically old, and some old coins were strewn among the jewels. But the jewels, as proved by those platinum settings, are modern.

“Why should modern jewels be buried on an island in the guise of old pirate treasure? Well, suppose they were stolen property. As stolen property, they’d have to be disposed of through fences for a small proportion of their value. But as buried treasure they could be disposed of openly at market prices. Very clever.

“Eric Ericsson, gentlemen, suspected that Anthony Hobbes-Watkins and his ‘father,’ Colonel Hobbes-Watkins—who’s probably not his father at all—were not what they seemed. He was tragically right—they’re a pair of European jewel thieves and, from the size of their accumulations, they must hold some sort of record for prowess in their exacting profession.

“They were cooling off in the Bahamas, wondering how best to turn their loot into cash, when Eric Ericsson and his niece stopped over at New Providence Island for a visit. Hearing the purely mythical yarn about how Kidd had buried treasure on Ericsson’s Island two hundred and fifty years ago—treasure that had never been found—these worthies got a remarkably ingenious idea. They would plant the jewels in a real old chest—the Bahamas were the headquarters of the buccaneers and are full of pirate relics; they would salt the stolen jewels with a few authentic old coins; and they would bury the chest on Ericsson’s Island, to be ‘discovered’ by them at a later date. The plan revolved about Inga’s infatuation for this fellow here; he pretended to reciprocate her love and he married her. As Ericsson’s sole heir, Inga would inherit his entire estate, which included this island, when Ericsson died. And as Inga’s husband, Tony Hobbes-Watkins would control it all, and when Inga died—an early and untimely death, eh, gentlemen? — our friends would be in the rosy clear... I’m sorry, Inga, but it seems to be a day for crushing blows.”

Inga sat pallid and blank, her hand clutching Nikki’s.

“If you’re trying to pin Ericsson’s murder on me—” began the younger man in a swift and nasal voice.

But the Colonel said harshly, “Be quiet.”

“Oh, that?” said Ellery. “Let’s see. We know that Ericsson’s bullet struck his murderer. Yet none of his four possible murderers exhibits a wound. Obviously, the bullet buried itself in a part of the murderer which couldn’t be wounded—” Ellery smiled — “which couldn’t be wounded because it’s not flesh and blood. Only one of you four fits that curious specification. The one who uses a wooden leg to compensate for his — Stop him!”

And when they had subdued the struggling caretaker and dug Eric Ericsson’s bullet out of the pegleg, the police captain—who was glassy-eyed—said, “Then these two men here, Mr. Queen... they weren’t in on Ericsson’s murder...?”

“The whole plot, Captain, was geared to Ericsson’s murder,” said Ellery with a shrug, “though I’m afraid Long John rather jumped the gun.

“Don’t you see that they were all in the plot together? How could our friend the Colonel, when he left the Bahamas after the wedding to smuggle the jewels into the States and get it to Ericsson’s Island before the others sailed up to join him—how, I say, could the Colonel have planted the chest on the island unless the caretaker was taken into the gang? Also, the stage had to be set for the ‘discovery’ of the treasure: a hole bored through the tower room wall to sight on the chosen spot, the wallpaper doctored to implement the mythical clue of ‘the needle’s eye,’ and so on—none of it possible unless Long John were declared in. He was, I suppose, to be paid off when Ericsson was disposed of and they got control, through Inga, of the estate and the island.

“What these gentry didn’t figure on was the stupidity and avarice of Long John. They’re far too clever operators to have planned to kill Ericsson the very night the treasure was located. Even if that had been their plan, they’d hardly have devised such a crude and obvious murder—especially with a trained investigator on the island. An ‘accident’ would have been more their style. At their leisure, under selected conditions... like a storm, say, and an overturned boat... perhaps even with Inga a victim of the same accident, in that way gaining their objective in one stroke and with no danger to themselves.

“But Long John is simple-minded and, as Ericsson told me, a miser. He just couldn’t wait. He heard me leave in the dark, realized my purpose, saw the dawn coming up, and hurried to the tower room to spy on me. He watched me dig the jewels up, probably saw them sparkling in the sun. When Ericsson surprised him in the tower at that very moment, all he could see were those jewels and his share of them when Ericsson should be killed. So Long John killed him—then and there. Speeding up the great day...

“Haste makes waste, eh, Colonel? And Tony, I regret to inform you that I’m going to take your wife to the best lawyer in New York and see what can be done about an immediate annulment.

“And now, gentlemen, if you’ll remove these pirates,” said Ellery to the officers, but looking soberly at Inga, “Nikki and I have some holes to refill.”