Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 126, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 769 & 770, September/October 2005

Waiting for Nemesis by Robert Barnard

Rave reviews for Mr. Barnard’s novel The Graveyard Position (Scribner). PW says: “Fans of classic murder puzzles will be delighted by the careful hiding of clues in plain sight. Few writers of contemporary mysteries can equal Barnard’s ability to meld a clever fair-play plot with satire.” Booklist adds: “exhibiting all the author’s greatly appreciated traits, including charm, wit, and excellent pacing.”

The Walthamstow locals were unanimous when Harriet Blackstone died. Standing in the doorways of Gladstone Road (the renamed o’connor Street), watching the police horse and cart clip-clopping away to the morgue, they looked at each other, and either said it or left it unsaid but understood: “She asked for it.”

It was, in truth, only what they had been saying about Mrs. Blackstone for years. When they saw her cleaning her attic-floor windows on long ladders borrowed from Mr. Dean the builder (what had she got on him? they asked themselves), when they saw her sharpening her kitchen knives at the front door, saw her buying arsenic (for the rats) and cyanide (for the wasps) at the chemist’s or the general stores, they always looked on these habits as hubristic, without ever using the word. “She’s asking for it,” they had said, shaking their heads. Now there was the satisfaction of seeing their prophecies come true, as well as a more general satisfaction. That night they had a street party, with Eccles cakes and muffins, and bottles left over from the Diamond Jubilee. Everyone came except Harriet’s daughter Sylvia, and she seemed regretful at missing the fun.

“Don’t get many chances for a good knees-up,” said Mr. Rowlands at number twenty. “Won’t be decent when the old Queen goes.”

“Not decent at all,” said Mrs. Whitchurch, his neighbour. “Mind you, after that there’ll be the Coronation...”

And the thought of the first coronation for sixty-odd years gave an added zest to the evening.

Harriet Blackstone had married beneath her, after some years of trying for someone above or on a level with her. Her father had run a failing ironmonger’s in Deptford, and her husband had peddled insurance in the poorer areas of cockney London. “Poor blighter,” everyone said about him when she made him the happiest of men. Nine years later he had gone to his well-deserved rest, having fathered a sickly but determined little girl. The neighbours suggested “For this relief much thanks” as an appropriate inscription for his gravestone, but the one Harriet had erected merely said “Sacred to the memory of” and left room for two more names. Harriet did not intend Sylvia to marry. She was needed for the heavy work.

“All men are good for nothing,” she told her daughter, but Sylvia had heard about one or two things that they were good for, and began marking out potential husbands from an early age. They represented not only satisfactions of an earthly kind, but escape as well. So when the jollifications were going on down in the street below, Sylvia watched them from behind the curtains of her cramped little two-up-two-down, wishing she could go down and have a dance and a glass of something nice. She sighed, but she felt it would not do, and soon she went back to bed with her plasterer husband, and had a giggle and a good time with him.

Relations with her mother had, in fact, been resumed two months before. The marriage had been marked by Mrs. Blackstone only by curtains drawn as for a funeral, but some weeks later she had sprained her ankle while unblocking a drain, and had sent one of the neighbouring boys with a note to her daughter, rewarding him with a ha’penny (half the going rate). The note had simply said, “Sprained ankle. Come.” When Sylvia came round she had finished unblocking the drain, peeled a few potatoes, cut a few slices of cold meat, and then left. All this had been done to a continual ground bass of complaint and criticism not one whit lessened by the fact that her daughter was doing her a favour.

“I could forgive the treachery,” Mrs. Blackstone said at one point, “I could forgive the disobedience and the loose morals — because what had been going on before the wedding I shudder to think — but what I cannot forgive is my daughter taking her sheets to the Communal Wash House to be boiled. The shame of that will be with me to my dying day.”

Sylvia had said nothing and left. But she went back at least once a day during the next week, and now and then thereafter when the ankle had recovered. “Blood is thicker than water,” she said when the neighbours commented. Behind her back they nodded sagely.

“Who else is there to leave the house to?” they asked each other. When such remarks were repeated to Charlie Paxman, Sylvia’s husband, he licked the foam off his lips and said:

“Silly old buzzard will probably leave it to the Primitive Methodists.” So far, at any rate, she had not. All the neighbourhood would have known if she had taken the momentous step of going to a solicitor’s.

Harriet was indeed a regular worshiper at the Ebenezer Chapel in Trafalgar Street, where the rigorous and belligerent tone of the services matched her own martial spirit. She was no Sunday Christian, but brought her values into every corner of everyday life. She had a withering glance that could have felled a bay tree, and she used it against young people holding hands, sometimes followed by “Shame on you” or some variant of it. Children playing ball in the street were sent scurrying for cover by her shrill objections, and any woman whose clothes were visibly dirty would be assailed by words such as “slattern” or “slut.” Cleanliness and teetotalism were up there beside godliness in her scale of values: Boys emerging from the Gentleman’s conveniences in Trafalgar Street would be asked to show her that they’d washed their hands, and the smell of beer on the breath of a passing labourer would elicit the outraged cry of “Drunken beast!”

“Give it a rest, old woman,” said one of her victims. “Just because your tipple is vinegar doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t enjoy a pint or two of summat nicer.”

But the object of her particular wrath in the months before her death was the house on the corner of Trafalgar Street and Gladstone Road, one whose entrance she could see from all the front windows of her own house. After the death of Mr. Wisbeach, the house had been sold (his son lived in Wimbledon, and had no conscience about what happened to the neighbourhood he grew up in). It soon became clear to Harriet Blackstone that the new owners were unusual. There were several women apparently living there, but no man. To be precise, the house contained no man, but from time to time it did contain men. Several members of the frail sex came and went, often regularly, but none of them lived there. Harriet soon began to suspect that some of the women were also only there on an occasional basis. The explanation for this irregularity eventually occurred to her.

“The place is no less than a brothel!” she said to the Ebenezer’s minister.

“I should prefer the phrase ‘House of Pleasure,’ ” he said. There was no inconsistency in his rebuke. “Pleasure” was always, for him, a dirty word.

Steady and prolonged observation of the house only strengthened Harriet’s conviction. One fine afternoon she marched around to the Walthamstow police station and demanded to see the inspector in charge, refusing to say what she wanted to talk to him about. Such was her force of personality that she got her way, though normally the constable on the duty desk would have shielded his boss from the force of any public indignation.

Inspector Cochrane took his feet off the desk (he wore size thirteen boots, which had for a long time hindered his promotion, as being more suitable for a walker of the beat rather than one undertaking a more thoughtful role, but eventually merit had won out). He welcomed Mrs. Blackstone and heard through her detailed account of the occupants of number three, Gladstone Road, and the male visitors that had been seen going there. He took no action to cut her short, merely lighting a cigarette and enduring the vicious glances she cast at it. When at last she drew to a close, he tipped the ash off the end of it and got a word in himself.

“Right,” he began. “Now, it may surprise you to know that you’re not the first to come to us over this little matter. I feel people might have done better to talk to the inhabitants of number three, so they got their facts right first, but new residents always take time to be accepted, don’t they? Anyway, we’ve made enquiries, and the family who bought the house from Mr. Wisbeach are called O’Hare. Their grandfather came over from Ireland to work on the Manchester to Leeds railway, and their father came south to work on building the station at Liverpool Street and on the lines going out from it. He died last year. It’s a big family, and the men in it are either married or working here and there around the country.”

“One of the regular visitors bears a distinct resemblance to the constable who directs the traffic at one end of Walthamstow High Street,” said Harriet waspishly.

“PC O’Hare. Quite,” said Inspector Cochrane. “Some of the men of the family visit regularly, some less often if they live further away — just as you’d expect. The mother, widow of the man who worked on Liverpool Street station, is not too badly off, and one of the daughters works for a dressmaker in Clerkenwell. I’m not sure I should be telling you their business, but I feel I should save time. So there you are. Problem solved.”

Harriet Blackstone, after a few moments’ meditation, cast him one of her bay-tree-withering looks.

“You’re telling me I’ve been wasting your time,” she said.

“I’ve said nothing of the sort.”

“Well, let’s wait and see: It’s Time as will tell,” she said, and she marched out of his office and the police station without so much as a goodbye.

As ill luck would have it, it was later that afternoon, when Harriet was still in a foul mood, that Charlie Paxman made his first visit to his new mother-in-law’s home. He had seen Sylvia going in when he was arriving back early from a job, and he had knocked at the front door to tell her he was off to the Wolf and Whistle for a pint.

“Bring him in. Let’s have a look at him!” shouted Harriet in the kitchen to her daughter at the front door. Charlie went through sheepishly and she surveyed his white-spattered and overalled form from top to toe.

“Well, you’re never going to set the Thames on fire,” she said.

“Such was never my hambition,” said Charlie genially. “And I doubt if Mr. Gladstone ’imself could ’ave achieved it.”

Mrs. Blackstone continued sharpening her carving knife on her whetstone, her way of relieving her frustration, and continued the attack. “Don’t you take the name of that godly man in vain,” she said (never having heard of the great man’s determined work among the fallen women of the Westminster area). “He was worth a hundred of you. I suppose you’re off to the pub?”

“Just called in to tell Sylv I’m off to do a little job in Trafalgar Street,” said Charlie, winking at his wife. “You’re doing a fine job on that knife, Ma. I could use that in my job, a fine sharp one like that. Just take care you don’t whetstone the ’ole thing away, though.”

“When I want advice from a sot like you, I’ll ask for it,” said Harriet. “Get off to your beer palace and your drunken mates.”

“Yes, I could use a good sharp knife like that,” said Charlie meditatively as he left the house.

“Don’t know what you’ve got against drink,” said Sylvia, greatly daring. “I like the odd Guinness myself these days. Or a port and lemon.” And she put down what she was doing and followed her husband.

Three days later, when she was putting out cyanide against the insects and hoping it would also tempt any stray dog in the neighbourhood that penetrated her backyard to have a lick, Harriet had a set-to with Jim Parsons in the next house. Jim had worked on the roads, and was now invalided out with a pittance of a pension.

“That stuff smells like a charnel house,” he shouted. “I wonder you don’t drop dead on the spot, just putting it out.”

“You wouldn’t understand the first thing about hygiene,” she shouted.

“No, I wouldn’t. But I tell you, if one of my pigeons dies, there’ll be another death follows on.”

Jim Parsons loved his birds more than he had ever loved mortal, and his love of them made Mrs. Blackstone wish she could wipe out the entire loft of them, and make a feathered carpet of Parsons’ backyard.

The end, when it came, was sudden. It was an early morning death, so most of the activity in Gladstone Road was centred on the back kitchens. Paul Dean, the builder, had left his long ladder outside the Blackstone residence at half-past six (he was not being blackmailed by Harriet, and merely did it for a quiet life). Since it was the second Thursday in the month, everyone in the street knew it was Mrs. Blackstone’s day for cleaning her windows. Being convinced that everyone had a duty to do the difficult things first — as they should eat their vegetables before their meat, if any — Harriet always began with the attic windows. She climbed the stepladder, as always, soon after seven o’clock. Her long skirts did not make things easy, but she was used to that problem, and she coped with that and with the bucket she was carrying. The police ascertained later that the glass in the right-hand side of the double window had been cleaned, and she had just begun on the left-hand side, abutting Jim Parsons’ house, when she fell. She dropped her bucket immediately, and managed to grasp the guttering along the top of Jim Parsons’ house. The iron was much eroded by the pigeon droppings, of which the gutter itself was nearly full, and a whole section broke off with her weight. She fell to her death on the pavement below, hitting her head on Parsons’ front step. She lay faceup, the face half-covered with pigeon dirt. The doctor at the other end of Trafalgar Street was called out from his breakfast, and he pronounced her dead.

“Any fool could have seen that,” said Charlie Paxman, who nevertheless stood guard in the street and moved people on when they were inclined to gossip or crow.

The police investigation was brief, not to say cursory. The foolishness of a woman in long and bulky skirts cleaning regularly the windows of a room that was never used, at a level too high for the dirt to be seen from the road, was evident to all the (male) members of the force who looked into the matter. The details of the accident hardly seemed of any moment, and in any case were irretrievable. A man on his way to an early start at a factory in Ilford had walked along Gladstone Road on his way to the omnibus in Trafalgar Street. He had seen Hettie Blackstone up her ladder but had seen nothing untoward about her activity, which he’d seen her at regularly over the years. He had seen a boy running down a side lane in the direction of Gladstone Road at a great tilt, and said he had the look of Dick Gregory, who had lived in the area up until six months before. After he turned the corner into Trafalgar Street he had heard a crash, but his omnibus was approaching his stop, so he had no time to investigate even if he’d thought it important. In fact he hadn’t thought twice about it. No one had heard anything of Dick Gregory since his family had moved away, and were not to hear anything of him again for six or seven years, at which time he joined the police force and was frequently to be seen trying doors and reprimanding children and vagrants along a regular beat, splendid in his hard helmet, with his truncheon swinging from his belt. At the time the police paid very little attention to the workman who brought up his name. All boys look pretty alike, they said.

On the night of her death, when the jollifications had died down in the street and her daughter was sleeping in the arms of her lawful wedded husband, there was quite a lot of activity in number three, the house that had engaged so much of Hettie’s attention in the last week of her life. In one of the front bedrooms a man and a woman were preparing for bed, he undressing with enthusiasm, she with a practised routine. They were laughing over the events of the day. The woman, in bed first, lay back against the pillow, looked at his boots beside the bed, and giggled. “Funny, all the times you’ve been, and I don’t even know your name. I always think of you as size thirteens.”

“Come to that, I don’t know yours,” said the man.

“Call me Collette. Collette O’Hare.”

“O’Hare, of course. And you can call me Prince Albert.”

And then, with the sort of thoroughness and dedication for which that prince was famous, he got down to the job.

Copyright (c); 2005 by Robert Barnard.