Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 112, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 684 & 685, September/October 1998

The Coincidence by Celia Fremlin

©1998 by Celia Fremlin

EQMM first published Celia Fremlin’s short fiction in July of 1967. The story with which she made her debut for us was a second-place winner in a joint EQMM/Crime Writers Association short story contest. The more than three dozen stories Ms. Fremlin has written for us since then have all been characterized by sharp observation and psychological insight, qualities on which she’s made her reputation.

Sometimes, when I have finished my homework, and get down to writing up my Journal, I find myself wondering, who am I writing it for? Who is ever going to read the maundering thoughts of Penelope Dean, aged seventeen, and currently spending most of her time revising for A-levels?

Dull reading indeed. So perhaps, until the exams are over, I’d better record only those days when something actually happens.

May 23rd

A Happening of a sort, certainly, albeit a pretty familiar one by now. “Memorial Day” is here again, the day on which all of us at St. Olaf’s School have to wear very clean white blouses and very well polished shoes to commemorate the anniversary of that dreadful day, seven years ago now, when a homicidal maniac burst into the school playground and shot dead a dozen of the girls before turning his gun upon himself.

The commemoration is very solemn, of course, and morning lessons are largely abandoned in favour of uplifting talks, first from our headmistress and then from the local vicar, for whose sermon and a few hymns we file silently through the main street of this little town and into the churchyard, where in the sparkling spring sunshine our shadows go flip, flip, flip across the grassy mounds of long-dead denizens.

Yes, the sun always seems to be shining on May twenty-third, just as it was on the awful day when it all happened.

I was only ten at the time, and because I was in the top stream for science, I not only didn’t see anything, I didn’t even hear the shots. The science labs are in a separate building, you see, and our break-time was scheduled for eleven o’clock, half an hour later than that of the doomed children who at half-past ten had flooded out into the sunshine, laughing, skipping, and improvising games.

And now, seven years later, we are being urged to learn the right lessons from this tragedy. Compassion; courage; the need to look forward to the future, not backward to the past. That sort of thing. These were the attitudes which would help overcome the shock and horror of that dreadful day.

Shock and horror? Yes, I’m sure I did feel shock and horror, I must have done. But the fact remains that the only emotion I can clearly remember is one of envy. Pure, unmitigated envy. All these reporters, all these photographers, all these television crews — and not one of them paying the slightest attention to me because I hadn’t seen anything, didn’t know anything. It was the girls that had happened to be in the playground at the time who were getting all the attention: They were interviewed, listened to, and photographed as if they were royalty. Some of them were even shown on television, evening after evening, in their best clothes and with their hair beautifully done, the whole world listening to their every stumbling word.

And that wasn’t all. On top of all this, it turned out that my enemy, Pauline, was one of the dead. Pauline, who throughout the last two terms had bullied me mercilessly, setting herself to make my life a misery. Walking home from school in the afternoons, she would position herself a couple of yards behind me, with her two acolytes, and in a very loud voice, for the whole street to hear, would make cruel remarks about my personal appearance: “Fancy wearing white ankle socks with those huge fat legs!” she would shout; and her two acolytes would giggle admiringly, and passersby would stare. And sometimes it was even worse walking to school in the mornings. Sometimes the three of them would set upon me, drag my homework from my briefcase, and scribble obscene pictures all down the margins — naked breasts, erect penises, that sort of thing. Of course, I couldn’t give it in like that, so I had to pretend I’d forgotten to do it, and got into endless trouble.

And now she was dead, and everyone was saying: what a tragedy, what a wonderful child she was, so kind, so full of promise, so deeply loved by her classmates; while I, who knew what she was really like, had to keep silent, not daring to say a word.

Of course, I was glad she was dead, it was a huge relief, but I kept thinking, if only the whole thing had happened two terms ago instead of this term, how wonderful it would have been, I’d have escaped all of that bullying.

What a self-centred little monster I must have been, to have had thoughts like those at such a time! But I was only ten, remember; I’m not like that now. It occurs to me, sometimes, that Pauline, too, if she had lived, might have changed, just as I have. She would be seventeen by now, just as I am, and we would be doing A-levels together. We might even have become good friends. It is a known thing that this can happen to people whose relationship started in savage enmity. There are plenty of examples, in real life as well as in legends.

May 25th

The strangest day of my whole life! I must record it, even at the expense of my chemistry revision.

It all started in the early afternoon. I was on the way upstairs to my maths class when I happened to glance through a window that looks out on the Junior playground. The playground was empty at the moment — the children’s lunch hour was over — but I noticed, with a small shock of concern, that there was a shabbily dressed man hanging about outside the main gate, peering in. As I watched, he seemed to be fiddling with the padlock (these gates have been kept locked during school hours ever since the tragedy of seven years ago). Of course, it could be just a father, wanting to talk to one of the teachers; but I felt uneasy, and decided I ought to report it to someone.

Two teachers were in the staff room when I knocked, Miss Lucas and Mrs. Pain, and they both volunteered at once to come out with me to the Junior playground and see what was going on.

“Oh. Whoever it was seems to have gone,” said Miss Lucas as we descended the steps to the playground; and I was quite taken aback by her words. For there the man still was, still peering in through the ironwork. And now, for the first time, I noticed a resemblance between him and those gruesome photographs in the newspapers of seven years ago. The same little pointed beard, the same receding hairline and unhealthy complexion. Of course, it couldn’t be him — he had died instantly at almost the same time as his victims; but all the same, the chance resemblance added to my unease, and also to my puzzlement.

“But, Miss Lucas,” I protested, “look, he is still there. And see, he’s still fiddling with the padlock!”

There was a pause. I could feel the two teachers looking at each other behind my back.

“Penelope, dear, I wonder if you should have your eyes tested?” one of them suggested gently. “Come along, let’s go right up to the gate, just to set your mind at rest.”

So right up to the gate we went; but it didn’t set my mind at rest, for the man was still there. For a moment, I was looking right into his eyes; those very same eyes — or almost — as the ones that had stared at us night after night from the television screen, all those years ago.

“Miss Lucas! Mrs. Pain!” I almost shrieked. “He is there. You can see him. He’s staring right at us...”

By this time, the two teachers were one on each side of me, nervously clutching my arms as they propelled me back into the school building.

“Penny, dear, you really must try to calm yourself,” urged Mrs. Pain. “You’ve been working too hard, that’s what it is. You must give yourself a little holiday... No more revising and sitting up late...”

She was trembling from head to foot as we walked along, I could feel it as she clutched my arm so tightly.

By now, we had reached the sick bay, Nurse Williams had been summoned, and the two bewildered teachers thankfully handed me over to her care. I could still hear their voices, through the closed door, as they retreated along the corridor. “Nervous breakdown... exam hysteria... brain exhaustion” floated into my ears with the sound of their retreating footsteps.

Nurse Williams was altogether more reassuring. “All this nonsense!” was her comforting assessment of the situation. She gave me a hot drink and two white pills which I’m sure were just aspirin, and assured me they’d help me to get a good sleep, and I’d wake up right as rain.

I didn’t get the good sleep — I had no intention of doing so — and as soon as Nurse Williams had bustled off, presumably on her next errand of mercy, I slipped off the couch, slipped my shoes back on, and hurried as fast as I could back to the Junior playground.

It was full of children now — they were rushing around having their afternoon break. They were rushing about, giggling, pushing, shouting, just as they’d been on that tragic day seven years ago; and to my horror — but somehow not to my surprise — the man was still there. No longer just staring, nor fiddling with the padlock, but actually climbing the gate with amazing skill and agility; seeking, with his scuffed shoes, first one foothold and then another in the ornamental ironwork.

I tried to warn the children. I shouted, I tried to hustle them indoors; but it was no good. They reacted first with surprise and then with puzzlement. “But there isn’t a man!” they kept saying; and it wasn’t many minutes before they came to the same conclusion as Miss Lucas and Mrs. Pain had come to, only they expressed it differently.

“Penny’s gone bananas!” they chanted gleefully, dancing around me. “Penelope Dean is bonkers!”

I didn’t tell them off. I had no attention to spare for them at all, for by now the intruder had successfully scaled the gate and was rapidly descending on the inner side. And now he was rushing headlong across the playground, somehow avoiding any collisions with any of the children, who were continuing with their play exactly as if he didn’t exist.

Up the short flight of steps he raced, through the doorway into the main building, with me hot on his heels. Well, what else could I do? I had to stop him somehow, from whatever it was that he planned to do.

But he moved so fast, so fast. Along the corridors, up the flights of stairs, which he seemed to take four or five steps at a time, almost as if he was flying. There was no way I could keep up such a pace, and very soon I lost him. I did not know if he had turned left or right... up or down. I was totally at a loss, I couldn’t think what to do, and so I just stood still, in the middle of a corridor, waiting. Waiting for what? I didn’t know, but I knew that something was going to happen. I knew it in my bones, and in the thudding of my heart.

And then it did happen. The bell rang for Fire Practice and I can’t tell you what a relief it was, rescuing me instantly from my state of paralysis. Fire Practice at St. Olaf’s is taken seriously, and run with military precision. Wherever we happen to be in the building, we all know exactly what we have to do (“Walk briskly, don’t run.”) and exactly which exit to make for. So on this occasion, as on all previous ones, we were out of the school and on the far side of the playing field within the allotted seven minutes. The standard roll call was beginning.

But it never finished. For suddenly someone shouted, “Look! Look!” and at once the cry was taken up: “Look! Look!”

We had all heard the plane approaching, and now, two or three miles away across the fields, it could be seen lurching strangely, and — yes — even while we watched, tiny figures could be seen floating with their parachutes beneath it.

The crash, when it came, was so loud it was almost not like a sound at all: more like an earthquake, like the sky falling apart all round us.

We scarcely realised, in those first moments of shock, that it was our school building that had been hit, and that the whole top floor was virtually in ruins.

May 27th

It’s been filling all the front pages of all the newspapers, of course; and all the radio and television programmes as well. “Disaster School... Fate Strikes Again,” screamed some of the headlines; “Miraculous Escape — 800 Girls Safe and Sound,” proclaimed others, expatiating on the extraordinary stroke of luck by which the crash came just minutes after the school fire bell had been accidentally set off, without the knowledge of any of the staff. “An Astonishing Coincidence,” as the headline declared.

Astonishing coincidence; they can say that again, but they don’t know the half of it. They do not know that on that very same afternoon an A-level student named Penelope Dean suffered repeated hallucinations of seeing the mass murderer of seven years ago once more breaking into the school premises.

An “Amazing Coincidence” indeed. A triple coincidence, almost beyond belief.

Almost. Billions and billions of chances against it anyway.

Of course, once the psychic people get hold of it they will claim that none of it was a coincidence at all. For the spiritualists, in particular, it will be a field day. The murderer, they will claim, having been rendered virtuous and remorseful by his seven-year sojourn in the Other World, has sought to compensate as far as he could for his evil deed by coming back as a ghost and ringing the fire bell just in time to evacuate the school buildings before the crash. Thus he saved the lives of all those girls who would otherwise have been killed, Penelope Dean among them.

A comforting sort of explanation, I suppose, and tempting to some.

But not to me. Hang it all, I’m a science student; I plan one day to be a scientist, perhaps even an important one. How can I possibly believe in this sort of superstitious rubbish?

The alternative, of course, is to believe that there has been a triple coincidence so extraordinary that many would say it is even harder to believe in than the above mystical one; but they would be wrong. There is no coincidence so extraordinary that it can’t happen, even though the chances against it may be billions of billions to one. This one chance could come up; the possibility of this outcome is never absolutely nil. For it may well be that each one of the other billions of possibilities was equally unlikely; but one of them has got to come up. Let’s suppose that you’ve got a supermarket of which it is known that about two thousand people shop there on Saturday afternoons. It would be possible (though wearisome) to go there with a notebook one Saturday and get the name and address of every single person who entered. The actual chance of these being the very ones they are is remote in the extreme, as you would soon discover if you had tried to predict the outcome by taking two thousand names at random off the voting register. All the same, they were there, this particular lot, unlikely though it was that they would be. Equally unlikely would be any other particular lot; but one or other of these unpredictable lots will be there, Saturday after Saturday, despite the billions and billions of chances against it being exactly them.

Gosh, I do hope we get a question about Probability Theory in our Philosophy exam. (Yes, we are to do our A-level exams, in spite of everything; they’ve organised a room for us at the Town Hall.)

On Probability Theory I can write a really brilliant essay, I know I can, so I’ll pray we’ll get a question on it.

Oops! Did I say “pray”? Just a slip of the tongue, I promise you.