Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 10, No. 48, November 1947

The House in Goblin Wood by Carter Dickson

About the author: As everyone knows (or should know), Carter Dickson and John Dickson Carr are one and the same. Creator of two of the most famous sleuths in contemporary fiction — Dr. Gideon Fell and Sir Henry Merrivale (H.M.) — John Dickson Carr grows in stature with each passing year. Long ago the English critic who calls himself Torquemada rated Mr. Carr as “one of the Big Five.” Torquemada probably meant “one of the Big Five” among English writers; actually it is true among all writers of the detective story, past and present. And still John Dickson Carr keeps growing... Born in 1905 at Uniontown, Pa., John is the son of Wooda Nicholas Carr, formerly a United States Congressman. “At the age of eight,” writes John, “I was hauled off to Washington. While my father thundered in Congress, I stood on a table in the members’ anteroom, pinwheeled by a God-awful collar, and recited Hamlet’s Soliloquy to certain gentlemen named Thomas Heflin and Pat Harrison and Claude Kitchin.” At the same tender age John sat on “Uncle Joe” Cannon’s knee listening to ghost stories, learned the great American game of crap-shooting from the legislative page boys, and met Woodrow Wilson. John’s earliest fictional heroes were Sherlock Holmes, d’Artagnan, and the Wizard of Oz, and all three exerted subtle influences on his later creative development. J. B. Priestley has said that John possesses “a sense of the macabre that lifts him high above the average run of detective story writers.” Your Editor once wrote that “despite his preoccupation with Anglo-materia, Mr. Carr is in no sense an expatriate. Rather, he occupies the enviable and eminent position of being our first literary lend-lease: he is the perfect example in the field of the modern detective story of Anglo-American unity.” In April 1947 we published John’s first book of short stories about Dr. Fell. Now we bring you John’s first short story about H.M. ever to appear in print — one of the most distinguished “firsts” it has been your Editor’s privilege to introduce to American readers. “The House in Goblin Wood” won the Special Award of Merit in EQMM’s Second Annual Contest — an honor it literally created for itself because of its outstanding excellence. It is safe to predict that “The House in Goblin Wood” will become one of the anthological favorites of all time.

In Pall Mall, that hot July afternoon three years before the war, an open saloon car was drawn up to the curb just opposite the Senior Conservatives’ Club.

And in the car sat two conspirators.

It was the drowsy post-lunch hour among the clubs, where only the sun remained brilliant. The Rag lay somnolent; the Athaneum slept outright. But these two conspirators, a dark-haired young man in his early thirties and a fair-haired girl perhaps half a dozen years younger, never moved. They stared intently at the Gothiclike front of the Senior Conservatives’.

“Look here, Eve,” muttered the young man, and punched at the steering wheel. “Do you think this is going to work?”

“I don’t know,” the fair-haired girl confessed. “He absolutely loathes picnics.”

“Anyway, we’ve probably missed him.”

“Why so?”

“He can’t have taken as long over lunch as that!” her companion protested, looking at a wrist-watch. The young man was rather shocked. “It’s a quarter to four! Even if...”

“Bill! There! Look there!”

Their patience was rewarded by an inspiring sight.

Out of the portals of the Senior Conservatives’ Club, in awful majesty, marched a large, stout, barrel-shaped gentleman in a white linen suit.

His corporation preceded him like the figurehead of a man-of-war. His shell-rimmed spectacles were pulled down on a broad nose, all being shaded by a Panama hat. At the top of the stone steps he surveyed the street with a lordly sneer.

“Sir Henry!” called the girl.

“Hey?” said Sir Henry Merrivale.

“I’m Eve Drayton. Don’t you remember me? You knew my father!”

“Oh, ah,” said the great man.

“We’ve been waiting here a terribly long time,” Eve pleaded. “Couldn’t you see us for just five minutes? — The thing to do,” she whispered to her companion, “is to keep him in a good humor. Just keep him in a good humor!”

As a matter of fact, H.M. was in a good humor, having just triumphed over the Home Secretary in an argument. But not even his own mother could have guessed it. Majestically, with the same lordly sneer, he began in grandeur to descend the steps of the Senior Conservatives’. He did this, in fact, until his foot encountered an unnoticed object lying some three feet from the bottom.

It was a banana skin.

“Oh, dear!” said the girl.

Now it must be stated with regret that in the old days certain urchins, of what were then called the “lower orders,” had a habit of placing such objects on the steps in the hope that some eminent statesman would take a toss on his way to Whitehall. This was a venial but deplorable practice, probably accounting for what Mr. Gladstone said in 1882.

In any case, it accounted for what Sir Henry Merrivale said now.

From the pavement, where H.M. landed in a seated position, arose in H.M.’s bellowing voice such a torrent of profanity, such a flood of invective and vile obscenities, as has seldom before blasted the holy calm of Pall Mall. It brought the hall-porter hurrying down the steps, and Eve Drayton flying out of the car.

Heads were now appearing at the windows of the Atheneum across the street.

“Is it all right?” cried the girl, with concern in her blue eyes. “Are you hurt?”

H.M. merely looked at her. His hat had fallen off, disclosing a large bald head; and he merely sat on the pavement and looked at her.

“Anyway, H.M., get up! Please get up!”

“Yes, sir,” begged the hall-porter, “for heaven’s sake get up!”

“Get up?” bellowed H.M., in a voice audible as far as St. James’ Street. “Burn it all, how can I get up?”

“But why not?”

“My behind’s out of joint,” said H.M. simply. “I’m hurt awful bad. I’m probably goin’ to have spinal dislocation for the rest of my life.”

“But, sir, people are looking!”

H.M. explained what these people could do. He eyed Eve Drayton with a glare of indescribable malignancy over his spectacles.

“I suppose, my wench, you’re responsible for this?”

Eve regarded him in consternation.

“You don’t mean the banana skin?” she cried.

“Oh, yes, I do,” said H.M., folding his arms like a prosecuting counsel.

“But we... we only wanted to invite you to a picnic!”

H.M. closed his eyes.

“That’s fine,” he said in a hollow voice. “All the same, don’t you think it’d have been a subtler kind of hint just to pour mayonnaise over my head or shove ants down the back of my neck? Oh, lord love a duck!”

“I didn’t mean that! I meant...”

“Let me help you up, sir,” interposed the calm, reassuring voice of the dark-haired and blue-chinned young man who had been with Eve in the car.

“So you want to help too, hey? And who are you?”

“I’m awfully sorry!” said Eve. “I should have introduced you! This is my fiancé. Dr. William Sage.”

H.M.’s face turned purple.

“I’m glad to see,” he observed, “you had the uncommon decency to bring along a doctor. I appreciate that, I do. And the car’s there, I suppose, to assist with the examination when I take off my pants?”

The hall-porter uttered a cry of horror.

Bill Sage, either from jumpiness and nerves or from sheer inability to keep a straight face, laughed loudly.

“I keep telling Eve a dozen times a day,” he said, “that I’m not to be called ‘doctor.’ I happen to be a surgeon—”

(Here H.M. really did look alarmed.)

“—but I don’t think we need operate. Nor, in my opinion,” Bill gravely addressed the hall-porter, “will it be necessary to remove Sir Henry’s trousers in front of the Senior Conservatives’ Club.”

“Thank you very much, sir.”

“We had an infernal nerve to come here,” the young man confessed to H.M. “But I honestly think, Sir Henry, you’d be more comfortable in the car. What about it? Let me give you a hand up?”

Yet even ten minutes later, when H.M. sat glowering in the back of the car and two heads were craned round towards him, peace was not restored.

“All right!” said Eve. Her pretty, rather stolid face was flushed; her mouth looked miserable. “If you won’t come to the picnic, you won’t. But I did believe you might do it to oblige me.”

“Well... now!” muttered the great man uncomfortably.

“And I did think, too, you’d be interested in the other person who was coming with us. But Vicky’s — difficult. She won’t come either, if you don’t.”

“Oh? And who’s this other guest?”

“Vicky Adams.”

H.M.’s hand, which had been lifted for an oratorical gesture, dropped to his side.

“Vicky Adams? That’s not the gal who...?”

“Yes!” Eve nodded. “They say it was one of the great mysteries, twenty years ago, that the police failed to solve.”

“It was, my wench,” H.M. agreed sombrely. “It was.”

“And now Vicky’s grown up. And we thought if you of all people went along, and spoke to her nicely, she’d tell us what really happened on that night.”

H.M.’s small, sharp eyes fixed disconcertingly on Eve.

“I say, my wench. What’s your interest in all this?”

“Oh, reasons.” Eve glanced quickly at Bill Sage, who was again punching moodily at the steering wheel, and checked herself. “Anyway, what difference does it make now? If you won’t go with us...”

H.M. assumed a martyred air.

“I never said I wasn’t goin’ with you, did I?” he demanded. (This was inaccurate, but no matter.) “Even after you practically made a cripple of me, I never said I wasn’t goin’?” His manner grew flurried and hasty. “But I got to leave now,” he added apologetically. “I got to get back to my office.”

“We’ll drive you there, H.M.”

“No, no, no,” said the practical cripple, getting out of the car with surprising celerity. “Walkin’ is good for my stomach if it’s not so good for my behind. I’m a forgivin’ man. You pick me up at my house tomorrow morning. G’bye.”

And he lumbered off in the direction of the Haymarket.

It needed no close observer to see that H.M. was deeply abstracted. He remained so abstracted, indeed, as to be nearly murdered by a taxi at the Admiralty Arch; and he was halfway down Whitehall before a familiar voice stopped him.

“Afternoon, Sir Henry!”

Burly, urbane, buttoned up in blue serge, with his bowler hat and his boiled blue eye, stood Chief Inspector Masters.

“Bit odd,” the Chief Inspector remarked affably, “to see you taking a constitutional on a day like this. And how are you, sir?”

“Awful,” said H.M. instantly. “But that’s not the point. Masters, you crawlin’ snake! You’re the very man I wanted to see.”

Few things startled the Chief Inspector. This one did.

“You,” he repeated, “wanted to see me?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And what about?”

“Masters, do you remember the Victoria Adams case about twenty years ago?”

The Chief Inspector’s manner suddenly changed and grew wary.

“Victoria Adams case?” he ruminated. “No, sir, I can’t say I do.”

“Son, you’re lyin’! You were sergeant to old Chief Inspector Rutherford in those days, and well 1 remember it!”

Masters stood on his dignity.

“That’s as may be, sir. But twenty years ago...”

“A little girl of twelve or thirteen, the child of very wealthy parents, disappeared one night out of a country cottage with all the doors and windows locked on the inside. A week later, while everybody was havin’ screaming hysterics, the child reappeared again: through the locks and bolts, tucked up in her bed as usual. And to this day nobody’s ever known what really happened.”

There was a silence, while Masters shut his jaws hard.

“This family, the Adamses,” persisted H.M., “owned the cottage, down Aylesbury way, on the edge of Goblin Wood, opposite the lake. Or was it?”

“Oh, ah,” growled Masters. “It was.”

H.M. looked at him curiously.

“They used the cottage as a base for bathin’ in summer, and ice-skatin’ in winter. It was black winter when the child vanished, and the place was all locked up inside against drafts. They say her old man nearly went loopy when he found her there a week later, lying asleep under the lamp. But all she’d say, when they asked her where she’d been, was, ‘I don’t know.’ ”

Again there was a silence, while red buses thundered through the traffic press of Whitehall.

“You’ve got to admit, Masters, there was a flaming public rumpus. I say: did you ever read Barrie’s Mary Rose?”

“No.”

“Well, it was a situation straight out of Barrie. Some people, y’see, said that Vicky Adams was a child of faerie who’d been spirited away by the pixies...”

Whereupon Masters exploded.

He removed his bowler hat and made remarks about pixies, in detail, which could not have been bettered by H.M. himself.

“I know, son, I know.” H.M. was soothing. Then his big voice sharpened. “Now tell me. Was all this talk strictly true?”

“What talk?”

“Locked windows? Bolted doors? No attic-trap? No cellar? Solid walls and floor?”

“Yes, sir,” answered Masters, regaining his dignity with a powerful effort, “I’m bound to admit it was true.”

“Then there wasn’t any jiggery-pokery about the cottage?”

“In your eye there wasn’t,” said Masters.

“How d’ye mean?”

“Listen, sir.” Masters lowered his voice. “Before the Adamses took over that place, it was a hideout for Chuck Randall. At that time he was the swellest of the swell mob; we lagged him a couple of years later. Do you think Chuck wouldn’t have rigged up some gadget for a getaway? Just so! Only...”

“Well? Hey?”

“We couldn’t find it,” grunted Masters.

“And I’ll bet that pleased old Chief Inspector Rutherford?”

“I tell you straight: he was fair up the pole. Especially as the kid herself was a pretty kid, all big eyes and dark hair. You couldn’t help trusting her story.”

“Yes,” said H.M. “That’s what worries me.”

“Worries you?”

“Oh, my son!” said H.M. dismally. “Here’s Vicky Adams, the spoiled daughter of dotin’ parents. She’s supposed to be ‘odd’ and ‘fey.’ She’s even encouraged to be. During her adolescence, the most impressionable time of her life, she gets wrapped round with the gauze of a mystery that people talk about even yet. What’s that woman like now, Masters? What’s that woman like now?”

“Dear Sir Henry!” murmured Miss Vicky Adams in her softest voice.

She said this just as William Sage’s car, with Bill and Eve Drayton in the front seat, and Vicky and H.M. in the back seat, turned off the main road. Behind them lay the smoky-red roofs of Aylesbury, against a brightness of late afternoon. The car turned down a side road, a damp tunnel of greenery, and into another road which was little more than a lane between hedgerows.

H.M. — though cheered by three good-sized picnic hampers from Fortnum & Mason, their wickerwork lids bulging with a feast — did not seem happy. Nobody in that car was happy, with the possible exception of Miss Adams herself.

Vicky, unlike Eve, was small and dark and vivacious. Her large light-brown eyes, with very black lashes, could be arch and coy; or they could be dreamily intense. The late Sir James Barrie might have called her a sprite. Those of more sober views would have recognized a different quality: she had an inordinate sex-appeal, which was as palpable as a physical touch to any male within yards. And despite her smallness, Vicky had a full voice like Eve’s. All these qualities she used even in so simple a matter as giving traffic directions.

“First right,” she would say, leaning forward to put her hands on Bill Sage’s shoulders. “Then straight on until the next traffic light. Ah, clever boy!”

“Not at all, not at all!” Bill would disclaim, with red ears and rather an erratic style of driving.

“Oh, yes, you are!” And Vicky would twist the lobe of his ear, playfully, before sitting back again.

(Eve Drayton did not say anything. She did not even turn round. Yet the atmosphere, even of that quiet English picnic-party, had already become a trifle hysterical.)

“Dear Sir Henry!” murmured Vicky, as they turned down into the deep lane between the hedgerows. “I do wish you wouldn’t be so materialistic! I do, really. Haven’t you the tiniest bit of spirituality in your nature?”

“Me?” said H.M. in astonishment. “I got a very lofty spiritual nature. But what I want just now, my wench, is grub. — Oi!”

Bill Sage glanced round.

“By that speedometer,” H.M. pointed, “we’ve now come forty-six miles and a bit. We didn’t even leave town until people of decency and sanity were having their tea. Where are we going?”

“But didn’t you know?” asked Vicky, with wide-open eyes. “We’re going to the cottage where I had such a dreadful experience when I was a child.”

“Was it such a dreadful experience, Vicky dear?” inquired Eve.

Vicky’s eyes seemed far away.

“I don’t remember, really. I was only a child, you see. I didn’t understand. I hadn’t developed the power for myself then.”

“What power?” H.M. asked sharply.

“To dematerialize,” said Vicky. “Of course.”

In that warm sun-dusted lane, between the hawthorn hedges, the car jolted over a rut. Crockery rattled.

“Uh-huh. I see,” observed H.M. without inflection. “And where do you go, my wench, when you dematerialize?”

“Into a strange country. Through a little door. You wouldn’t understand. Oh, you are such Philistines!” moaned Vicky. Then, with a sudden change of mood, she leaned forward and her whole physical allurement flowed again towards Bill Sage. “You wouldn’t like me to disappear, would you, Bill?”

(Easy! Easy!)

“Only,” said Bill, with a sort of wild gallantry, “if you promised to reappear again straightaway.”

“Oh, I should have to do that.” Vicky sat back. She was trembling. “The power wouldn’t be strong enough. But even a poor little thing like me might be able to teach you a lesson. Look there!”

And she pointed ahead.

On their left, as the lane widened, stretched the ten-acre gloom of what is fancifully known as Goblin Wood. On their right lay a small lake, on private property and therefore deserted.

The cottage — set well back into a clearing of the wood so as to face the road, screened from it by a line of beeches — was in fact a bungalow of rough-hewn stone, with a slate roof. Across the front of it ran a wooden porch. It had a seedy air, like the long yellow-green grass of its front lawn. Bill parked the car at the side of the road, since there was no driveway.

“It’s a bit lonely, ain’t it?” demanded H.M. His voice boomed out against that utter stillness, under the hot sun.

“Oh, yes!” breathed Vicky. She jumped out of the car in a whirl of skirts. “That’s why they were able to come and take me. When I was a child.”

“They?”

“Dear Sir Henry! Do I need to explain?”

Then Vicky looked at Bill.

“I must apologize,” she said, “for the state the house is in. I haven’t been out here for months and months. There’s a modern bathroom, I’m glad to say. Only paraffin lamps, of course. But then,” a dreamy smile flashed across her face, “you won’t need lamps, will you? Unless...”

“You mean,” said Bill, who was taking a black case out of the car, “unless you disappear again?”

“Yes, Bill. And promise me you won’t be frightened when I do.”

The young man uttered a ringing oath which was shushed by Sir Henry Merrivale, who austerely said he disapproved of profanity. Eve Drayton was very quiet.

“But in the meantime,” Vicky said wistfully, “let’s forget it all, shall we? Let’s laugh and dance and sing and pretend we’re children! And surely our guest must be even more hungry by this time?”

It was in this emotional state that they sat down to their picnic.

H.M., if the truth must be told, did not fare too badly. Instead of sitting on some hummock of ground, they dragged a table and chairs to the shaded porch. All spoke in strained voices. But no word of controversy was said. It was only afterwards, when the cloth was cleared, the furniture and hampers pushed indoors, the empty bottles flung away, that danger tapped a warning.

From under the porch Vicky fished out two half-rotted deck-chairs, which she set up in the long grass of the lawn. These were to be occupied by Eve and H.M., while Vicky took Bill Sage to inspect a plum tree of some remarkable quality she did not specify.

Eve sat down without comment. H.M., who was smoking a black cigar opposite her, waited some time before he spoke.

“Y’ know,” he said, taking the cigar out of his mouth, “you’re behaving remarkably well.”

“Yes.” Eve laughed. “Aren’t I?”

“Are you pretty well acquainted with this Adams gal?”

“I’m her first cousin,” Eve answered simply. “Now that her parents are dead, I’m the only relative she’s got. I know all about her.”

From far across the lawn floated two voices saying something about wild strawberries. Eve, her fair hair and fair complexion vivid against the dark line of Goblin Wood, clenched her hands on her knees.

“You see,” she hesitated, “there was another reason why I invited you here. I... I don’t quite know how to approach it.”

“I’m the old man,” said H.M., tapping himself impressively on the chest. “You tell me.”

“Eve, darling!” interposed Vicky’s voice, crying across the ragged lawn. “Coo-ee! Eve!”

“Yes, dear?”

“I’ve just remembered,” cried Vicky, “that I haven’t shown Bill over the cottage! You don’t mind if I steal him away from you for a little while?”

“No, dear! Of course not!”

It was H.M., sitting so as to face the bungalow, who saw Vicky and Bill go in. He saw Vicky’s wistful smile as she closed the door after them. Eve did not even look round. The sun was declining, making fiery chinks through the thickness of Goblin Wood behind the cottage.

“I won’t let her have him,” Eve suddenly cried. “I won’t! I won’t! I won’t!”

“Does she want him, my wench? Or, which is more to the point, does he want her?”

“He never has,” Eve said with emphasis. “Not really. And he never will.”

H.M., motionless, puffed out cigar smoke.

“Vicky’s a faker,” said Eve. “Does that sound catty?”

“Not necessarily. I was just thinkin’ the same thing myself.”

“I’m patient,” said Eve. Her blue eyes were fixed. “I’m terribly, terribly patient. I can wait years for what I want. Bill’s not making much money now, and I haven’t got a bean. But Bill’s got great talent under that easygoing manner of his. He must have the right girl to help him. If only...”

“If only the elfin sprite would let him alone. Hey?”

“Vicky acts like that,” said Eve, “towards practically every man she ever meets. That’s why she never married. She says it leaves her soul free to commune with other souls. This occultism—”

Then it all poured out, the family story of the Adamses. This repressed girl spoke at length, spoke as perhaps she had never spoken before. Vicky Adams, the child who wanted to attract attention, her father Uncle Fred and her mother Aunt Margaret seemed to walk in vividness as the shadows gathered.

“I was too young to know her at the time of the ‘disappearance,’ of course. But, oh, I knew her afterwards! And I thought...”

“Well?”

“If I could get you here,” said Eve, “I thought she’d try to show off with some game. And then you’d expose her. And Bill would see what an awful faker she is. But it’s hopeless! It’s hopeless!”

“Looky here,” observed H.M., who was smoking his third cigar. He sat up. “Doesn’t it strike you those two are being a rummy-awful long time just in lookin’ through a little bungalow?”

Eve, roused out of a dream, stared back at him. She sprang to her feet. She was not now, you could guess, thinking of any disappearance.

“Excuse me a moment,” she said curtly.

Eve hurried across to the cottage, went up on the porch, and opened the front door. H.M. heard her heels rap down the length of the small passage inside. She marched straight back again, closed the front door, and rejoined H.M.

“All the doors of the rooms are shut,” she announced in a high voice. “I really don’t think I ought to disturb them.”

“Easy, my wench!”

“I have absolutely no interest,” declared Eve, with the tears coming into her eyes, “in what happens to either of them now. Shall we take the car and go back to town without them?”

H.M. threw away his cigar, got up, and seized her by the shoulders.

“I’m the old man,” he said, leering like an ogre. “Will you listen to me?”

“No!”

“If I’m any reader of the human dial,” persisted H.M., “that young feller’s no more gone on Vicky Adams than I am. He was scared, my wench. Scared.” Doubt, indecision crossed H.M.’s face. “I dunno what he’s scared of. Burn me, I don’t! But...”

“Hoy!” called the voice of Bill Sage.

It did not come from the direction of the cottage.

They were surrounded on three sides by Goblin Wood, now blurred with twilight. From the north side the voice bawled at them, followed by crackling in dry undergrowth. Bill, his hair and sports coat and flannels more than a little dirty, regarded them with a face of bitterness.

“Here are her blasted wild strawberries,” he announced, extending his hand. “Three of ’em. The fruitful (excuse me) result of three quarters of an hour’s hard labor. I absolutely refuse to chase ’em in the dark.”

For a moment Eve Drayton’s mouth moved without speech.

“Then you weren’t... in the cottage all this time?”

“In the cottage?” Bill glanced at it. “I was in that cottage,” he said, “about five minutes. Vicky had a woman’s whim. She wanted some wild strawberries out of what she called the ‘forest.’ ”

“Wait a minute, son!” said H.M. very sharply. “You didn’t come out that front door. Nobody did.”

“No! I went out the back door! It opens straight on the wood.”

“Yes. And what happened then?”

“Well, I went to look for these damned...”

“No, no! What did she do?”

“Vicky? She locked and bolted the back door on the inside. I remember her grinning at me through the glass panel. She—”

Bill stopped short. His eyes widened, and then narrowed, as though at the impact of an idea. All three of them turned to look at the rough-stone cottage.

“By the way,” said Bill. He cleared his throat vigorously. “By the way, have you seen Vicky since then?”

“No.”

“This couldn’t be...?”

“It could be, son,” said H.M. “We’d all better go in there and have a look.”

They hesitated for a moment on the porch. A warm, moist fragrance breathed up from the ground after sunset. In half an hour it would be completely dark.

Bill Sage threw open the front door and shouted Vicky’s name. That sound seemed to penetrate, reverberating, through every room. The intense heat and stuffiness of the cottage, where no window had been raised in months, blew out at them. But nobody answered.

“Get inside,” snapped H.M. “And stop yowlin’.” The Old Maestro was nervous. “I’m dead sure she didn’t get out by the front door; but we’ll just make certain there’s no slippin’ out now.”

Stumbling over the table and chairs they had used on the porch, he fastened the front door. They were in a narrow passage, once handsome with parquet floor and pine-paneled walls, leading to a door with a glass panel at the rear. H.M. lumbered forward to inspect this door and found it locked and bolted, as Bill had said.

Goblin Wood grew darker.

Keeping well together, they searched the cottage. It was not large, having two good-sized rooms on one side of the passage, and two small rooms on the other side, so as to make space for bathroom and kitchenette. H.M., raising fogs of dust, ransacked every inch where a person could possibly hide.

And all the windows were locked on the inside. And the chimney-flues were too narrow to admit anybody.

And Vicky Adams wasn’t there.

“Oh, my eye!” breathed Sir Henry Merrivale.

They had gathered, by what idiotic impulse not even H.M. could have said, just outside the open door of the bathroom. A bath-tap dripped monotonously. The last light through a frosted-glass window showed three faces hung there as though disembodied.

“Bill,” said Eve in an unsteady voice, “this is a trick. Oh, I’ve longed for her to be exposed! This is a trick!”

“Then where is she?”

“H.M. can tell us! Can’t you, H.M.?”

“Well... now,” muttered the great man.

Across H.M.’s Panama hat was a large black handprint, made there when he had pressed down the hat after investigating a chimney. He glowered under it.

“Son,” he said to Bill, “there’s just one question I want you to answer in all this hokey-pokey. When you went out pickin’ wild strawberries, will you swear Vicky Adams didn’t go with you?”

“As God is my judge, she didn’t,” returned Bill, with fervency and obvious truth. “Besides, how the devil could she? Look at the lock and bolt on the back door!”

H.M. made two more violent black handprints on his hat.

He lumbered forward, his head down, two or three paces in the narrow passage. His foot half-skidded on something that had been lying there unnoticed, and he picked it up. It was a large, square section of thin, waterproof oilskin, jagged at one corner.

“Have you found anything?” demanded Bill in a strained voice.

“No. Not to make any sense, that is. But just a minute!”

At the rear of the passage, on the left-hand side, was the bedroom from which Vicky Adams had vanished as a child. Though H.M. had searched this room once before, he opened the door again.

It was now almost dark in Goblin wood.

He saw dimly a room of twenty years before: a room of flounces, of lace curtains, of once-polished mahogany, its mirrors glimmering against white-papered walls. H.M. seemed especially interested in the windows.

He ran his hands carefully round the frame of each, even climbing laboriously up on a chair to examine the tops. He borrowed a box of matches from Bill; and the little spurts of light, following the rasp of the match, rasped against nerves as well. The hope died out of his face, and his companions saw it.

“H.M.,” Bill said for the dozenth time, “where is she?”

“Son,” replied H.M. despondently, “I don’t know.”

“Let’s get out of here,” Eve said abruptly. Her voice was a small scream. “I kn-know it’s all a trick! I know Vicky’s a faker! But let’s get out of here. For God’s sake let’s get out of here!”

“As a matter of fact,” Bill cleared his throat, “I agree. Anyway, we won’t hear from Vicky until tomorrow morning.”

“Oh, yes, you will,” whispered Vicky’s voice out of the darkness.

Eve screamed.

They lighted a lamp.

But there was nobody there.

Their retreat from the cottage, it must be admitted, was not very dignified.

How they stumbled down that ragged lawn in the dark, how they piled rugs and picnic-hampers into the car, how they eventually found the main road again, is best left undescribed.

Sir Henry Merrivale has since sneered at this — “a bit of a goosy feeling; nothin’ much,” — and it is true that he has no nerves to speak of. But he can be worried, badly worried; and that he was worried on this occasion may be deduced from what happened later.

H.M., after dropping in at Claridge’s for a modest late supper of lobster and Pêche Melba, returned to his house in Brook Street and slept a hideous sleep. It was three o’clock in the morning, even before the summer dawn, when the ringing of the bedside telephone roused him.

What he heard sent his blood pressure soaring.

“Dear Sir Henry!” crooned a familiar and sprite-like voice.

H.M. was himself again, full of gall and bile. He switched on the bedside lamp and put on his spectacles with care, so as adequately to address the ’phone.

“Have I got the honor,” he said with dangerous politeness, “of addressin’ Miss Vicky Adams?”

“Oh, yes!”

“I sincerely trust,” said H.M., “you’ve been havin’ a good time? Are you materialized yet?”

“Oh, yes!”

“Where are you now?”

“I’m afraid,” there was coy laughter in the voice, “that must be a little secret for a day or two. I want to teach you a really good lesson. Blessings, dear.”

And she hung up the receiver.

H.M. did not say anything. He climbed out of bed. He stalked up and down the room, his corporation majestic under an old-fashioned nightshirt stretching to his heels. Then, since he himself had been waked up at three o’clock in the morning, the obvious course was to wake up somebody else; so he dialed the home number of Chief Inspector Masters.

“No, sir,” retorted Masters grimly, after coughing the frog out of his throat, “I do not mind you ringing up. Not a bit of it!” He spoke with a certain pleasure. “Because I’ve got a bit of news for you.”

H.M. eyed the ’phone suspiciously.

“Masters, are you trying to do me in the eye again?”

“It’s what you always try to do to me, isn’t it?”

“All right, all right!” growled H.M. “What’s the news?”

“Do you remember mentioning the Vicky Adams case yesterday?”

“Sort of. Yes.”

“Oh, ah! Well, I had a word or two round among our people. I was tipped the wink to go and see a certain solicitor. He was old Mr. Fred Adams’s solicitor before Mr. Adams died about six or seven years ago.”

Here Masters’s voice grew triumphant.

“I always said, Sir Henry, that Chuck Randall had planted some gadget in that cottage for a quick getaway. And I was right. The gadget was...”

“You were quite right, Masters. The gadget was a trick window.”

The telephone, so to speak, gave a start.

“What’s that?”

“A trick window.” H.M. spoke patiently. “You press a spring. And the whole frame of the window, two leaves locked together, slides down between the walls far enough so you can climb over. Then you push it back up again.”

“How in lum’s name do you know that?”

“Oh, my son! They used to build windows like it in country houses during the persecution of Catholic priests. It was a good enough second guess. Only... it won’t work.”

Masters seemed annoyed. “It won’t work now,” Masters agreed. “And do you know why?”

“I can guess. Tell me.”

“Because, just before Mr. Adams died, he discovered how his darling daughter had flummoxed him. He never told anybody except his lawyer. He took a handful of four-inch nails, and sealed up the top of that frame so tight an orangoutang couldn’t move it, and painted ’em over so they wouldn’t be noticed.”

“Uh-huh. You can notice ’em now.”

“I doubt if the young lady herself ever knew. But, by George!” Masters said savagely. “I’d like to see anybody try the same game now!”

“You would, hey? Then will it interest you to know that the same gal has just disappeared out of the same house AGAIN?”

H.M. began a long narrative of the facts, but he had to break off because the telephone was raving.

“Honest, Masters,” H.M. said seriously, “I’m not joking. She didn’t get out through that window. But she did get out. You’d better meet me,” he gave directions, “tomorrow morning. In the meantime, son, sleep well.”

It was, therefore, a worn-faced Masters who went into the Visitors’ Room at the Senior Conservatives’ Club just before lunch on the following day.

The Visitors’ Room is a dark sepulchral place, opening on an air-well, where the visitor is surrounded by pictures of dyspeptic-looking gentlemen with beards. It has a pervading mustiness of wood and leather. Though whiskey and soda stood on the table, H.M. sat in a leather chair far away from it, ruffling his hands across his bald head.

“Now, Masters, keep your shirt on!” he warned. “This business may be rummy. But it’s not a police matter — yet.”

“I know it’s not a police matter,” Masters said grimly. “All the same, I’ve had a word with the Superintendent at Aylesbury.”

“Fowler?”

“You know him?”

“Sure. I know everybody. Is he goin’ to keep an eye out?”

“He’s going to have a look at that ruddy cottage. I’ve asked for any telephone calls to be put through here. In the meantime, sir—”

It was at this point, as though diabolically inspired, that the telephone rang. H.M. reached it before Masters.

“It’s the old man,” he said, unconsciously assuming a stance of grandeur. “Yes, yes! Masters is here, but he’s drunk. You tell me first. What’s that?”

The telephone talked thinly.

“Sure I looked in the kitchen cupboard,” bellowed H.M. “Though I didn’t honestly expect to find Vicky Adams hidin’ there. What’s that? Say it again! Plates? Cups that had been...”

An almost frightening change had come over H.M.’s expression. He stood motionless. All the posturing went out of him. He was not even listening to the voice that still talked thinly, while his eyes and his brain moved to put together facts. At length (though the voice still talked) he hung up the receiver.

H.M. blundered back to the centre table, where he drew out a chair and sat down.

“Masters,” he said very quietly, “I’ve come close to makin’ the silliest mistake of my life.”

Here he cleared his throat.

“I shouldn’t have made it, son. I really shouldn’t. But don’t yell at me for cuttin’ off Fowler. I can tell you now how Vicky Adams disappeared. And she said one true thing when she said she was going into a strange country.”

“How do you mean?”

“She’s dead,” answered H.M.

The word fell with heavy weight into that dingy room, where the bearded faces looked down.

“Y’see,” H.M. went on blankly, “a lot of us were right when we thought Vicky Adams was a faker. She was. To attract attention to herself, she played that trick on her family with the hocused window. She’s lived and traded on it ever since. That’s what sent me straight in the wrong direction. I was on the alert for some trick Vicky Adams might play. So it never occurred to me that this elegant pair of beauties, Miss Eve Drayton and Mr. William Sage, were deliberately conspirin’ to murder her.”

Masters got slowly to his feet.

“Did you say... murder?”

“Oh, yes.”

Again H.M. cleared his throat.

“It was all arranged beforehand for me to be a witness. They knew Vicky Adams couldn’t resist a challenge to disappear, especially as Vicky always believed she could get out by the trick window. They wanted Vicky to say she was goin’ to disappear. They never knew anything about the trick window, Masters. But they knew their own plan very well.

“Eve Drayton even told me the motive. She hated Vicky, of course. But that wasn’t the main point. She was Vicky Adams’s only relative; she’d inherit an awful big scoopful of money. Eve said she could be patient. (And, burn me, how her eyes meant it when she said that!) Rather than risk any slightest suspicion of murder, she was willing to wait seven years until a disappeared person can be presumed dead.

“Our Eve, I think, was the fiery drivin’ force of that conspiracy. She was only scared part of the time. Sage was scared all of the time. But it was Sage who did the real dirty work. He lured Vicky Adams into that cottage, while Eve kept me in close conversation on the lawn...”

H.M. paused.

Intolerably vivid in the mind of Chief Inspector Masters, who had seen it years before, rose the picture of the rough-stone bungalow against the darkling wood.

“Masters,” said H.M., “why should a bath-tap be dripping in a house that hadn’t been occupied for months?”

“Well?”

“Sage, y’see, is a surgeon. I saw him take his black case of instruments out of the car. He took Vicky Adams into that house. In the bathroom he stabbed her, he stripped her, and he dismembered her body in the bath tub. — Easy, son!”

“Go on,” said Masters without moving.

“The head, the torso, the folded arms and legs, were wrapped up in three large square pieces of thin transparent oilskin. Each was sewed up with coarse thread so the blood wouldn’t drip. Last night I found one of the oilskin pieces he’d ruined when his needle slipped at the corner. Then he walked out of the house, with the back door still standin’ unlocked, to get his wild-strawberry alibi.”

“Sage went out of there,” shouted Masters, “leaving the body in the house?”

“Oh, yes,” agreed H.M.

“But where did he leave it?”

H.M. ignored this.

“In the meantime, son, what about Eve Drayton? At the end of the arranged three quarters of an hour, she indicated there was hanky-panky between her fiancé and Vicky Adams. She flew into the house. But what did she do?

“She walked to the back of the passage. I heard her. There she simply locked and bolted the back door. And then she marched out to join me with tears in her eyes. And these two beauties were ready for investigation.”

“Investigation?” said Masters. “With that body still in the house?”

“Oh, yes.”

Masters lifted both fists.

“It must have given young Sage a shock,” said H.M., “when I found that piece of waterproof oilskin he’d washed but dropped. Anyway, these two had only two more bits of hokey-pokey. The ‘vanished’ gal had to speak — to show she was still alive. If you’d been there, son, you’d have noticed that Eve Drayton’s got a voice just like Vicky Adams’s. If somebody speaks in a dark room, carefully imitatin’ a coy tone she never uses herself, the illusion’s goin’ to be pretty good. The same goes for a telephone.

“It was finished, Masters. All that had to be done was remove the body from the house, and get it far away from there...

“But that’s just what I’m asking you, sir! Where was the body all this time? And who in blazes did remove the body from the house?”

“All of us did,” answered H.M.

“What’s that?”

“Masters,” said H.M., “aren’t you forgettin’ the picnic hampers?”

And now, the Chief Inspector saw, H.M. was as white as a ghost. His next words took Masters like a blow between the eyes.

“Three good-sized wickerwork hampers, with lids. After our big meal on the porch, those hampers were shoved inside the house where Sage could get at ’em. He had to leave most of the used crockery behind, in the kitchen cupboard. But three wickerwork hampers from a picnic, and three butcher’s parcels to go inside ’em. I carried one down to the car myself. It felt a bit funny...”

H.M. stretched out his hand, not steadily, towards the whiskey.

“Y’know,” he said, “I’ll always wonder if I was carrying the — head.”

About the story: Eighteen prizes were awarded in EQMM’s Second Annual Contest. The eighteen prize-winning stories represent nearly every type of detective-crime tale: the pure detective story, both deductive and active; the pure crime story, both psychological and physical; the realistic story and the fantastic story; the trick story; the mystical; the humorous; the orthodox and the unorthodox; the tried-and-true and the experimental; the down-to-earth and the supernatural; the story of characterization, of plot, of mood, and blendings of all three; the story of sheer suspense; the literary; the intuitional; the urban and surburban, the native and the exotic, the plain and the fancy.

From the very beginning we determined to select one story and treat it editorially as a study in technique, as a lesson in craftsmanship. The obvious choice among the eighteen prize-winners — indeed, the obvious choice among all detective-story writers — is Carter Dickson’s “The House in Goblin Wood.” Why obvious? Because Carter Dickson’s first short story about H.M. constitutes in itself as Dorothy L. Sayers once wrote about Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” almost a complete manual of detective-story theory and practice. It is the perfect story to re-read, re-examine, and re-appraise.

Before we go back and indicate the manner in which the clues were planted, before we reveal the author s superb mastery of form, one point should be made clear. “The House in Goblin Wood” is not only typical John Dickson Carr-Carter Dickson but it is Carr-Dickson at the peak of his prowess. It offers what John, in a dedication to your Editor, once described as the particular kind of “miracle” problem which is perhaps the most fascinating gambit in detective fiction. All that and a “locked room”; all that and John’s scrupulous fairplay; all that and John’s unexcelled, atmosphere of the eerie, of the supernatural that in the end becomes all too natural, of the “impossible” crime that in the end becomes all too possible. All that and heaven too...

Take, for example, the author’s introduction of his chief character, the large, stout, barrel-shaped gentleman with the majestic air, the lordly sneer, and the fire-and-brimstone tongue — the great man himself, H.M. How do we first meet him? Slipping on a banana peel and taking a fearful cropper. Why did the author choose this method of introduction? For sheer characterization? Yes. For comic relief? Yes. But there was more to it than that: there was a far deeper purpose than mere humanized characterization. This almost slapstick scene served an important plot purpose. For what did we actually learn as the result of H.M.’s prattfall? That Bill Sage was not merely a doctor — he was a surgeon. And that fact is probably the most vital clue in the entire story. Yet consider how unobtrusively, how irrelevantly, with what finesse the author slipped this pivotal clue into the story! This deliberate, yet totally fair, misdirection is perfect criminological camouflage.

A little later the author tells us openly that there were three large picnic hampers — both the number and size are material clues. Still later we are informed, with almost disarming frankness, that Bill Sage took a black case out of the car. Did you connect this fact with the surgeon-fact and ask yourself why Bill Sage needed his “black case” on an ordinary picnic in the country? You should have — the fabric of deduction is now assuming a discernible pattern.

Next we are told that after eating the goodies provided by Fortnum & Mason, “the cloth was cleared, the furniture and hampers pushed indoors.” This places the three crucial, indispensable hampers (as H.M. himself says in the third from the last paragraph of the story) “inside the house where Sage could get at ’em.” The deductive clot thickens — all by the inconspicuous insertion of a simple, unsuspicious word like “indoors”!

The clues keep emerging, one by one, some brazenly, some stealthily — bits and pieces, all necessary to complete the final mosaic of irrefutable truth. Eve states that she is Vicky’s “only relative” — handing the reader the whole motive on a silver platter. Eve admits she is “terribly, terribly patient” — an essential facet of characterization, making credible the fact that “she was willing to wait seven years until a disappeared person can be presumed dead.” H.M. (and the reader) hears Eve’s “heels rap down the length of the small passage inside” — telling us skillfully and deceptively that it was Eve who could have locked and bolted the back door on the inside. “The bath-tap dripped monotonously” — the adverb artfully draws attention away from the revealing clue. “The large, square section of thin, waterproof oilskin, jagged at one corner” — what a daring giveaway, and yet how much did it give away?

The author s sense of timing is flawless. When H.M.’s mystification reaches its most profound state, along comes Chief Inspector Masters with a simple, all-inclusive solution — the revelation that one of the rooms in the cottage was equipped with a “trick window.” So that’s the answer to the impossible disappearance! — just another “gadget”! But the author is merely playing cat-and-mouse with his reader: instead of evoking the supernatural and then dispelling it (the usual procedure, and good enough for most practitioners), the author evokes the natural, only to dispel that and sink story even deeper in the supernatural. The “trick window” is a straw-man, set up to be promptly demolished. The reader is now convinced beyond all doubt that no obvious solution — therefore, no unsatisfying solution — will be palmed off on him, as a disappointing anticlimax after so meticulous and cumulative a build-up. That, dear reader, is dramatic timing.

And finally, the report that the cupboard contained “Plates? Cups that had been...” Here, admittedly, the author skated on thin ice. The words were picked with infinite care — they do not say too much, nor do they say too little. If you think it over, they tell exactly enough — the last little push, added to all the other evidence, to upset the apple-cart and place the reader in possession of all the facts necessary to the one and only correct solution...

How does it feel to look behind the scenes of creative detective-story writing? Do you realize now the enormous intricacies of dovetailing a tightly-knit plot, with no loose ends, and with the intellectual hallmark of the modern detective story, complete fairness-to-the-reader? Do you realize now the talent and integrity that go into the cutting of a truly fine detective-diamond? We hope so — detective-story writers are still held too lightly, especially by critics who have never tried to write one. But master craftsmen like John Dickson Carr, with the help of so many other unwept, unhonored, and unsung heroes of the genre, will ultimately raise the detective story to its just and proper position in literature, win for it the respect and honest admiration so long denied to one of the most difficult literary forms ever invented by the mind of man...