Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 128, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 781 & 782, September/October 2006

Charlady’s Choice by Neil Schofield

In the five years since we first published Mr. Schofield’s work — when he was a newcomer to the field, with only a few published stories — he’s gone on to become one of the best and most prolific writers of the short mystery. In his latest tale he has some fun at the expense of “big-name” writers and the publishing business.

Thus Mrs. Ethel Hoskins and her great friend Mrs. Vera Bumstead, friends of forty years, widows both, cleaning ladies both, in the snug bar of the Ring O’ Bells in Camden Town: Ethel was a small port and lemon, Vera was a Gin and It, because the vermouth helped her digestion, she said. Both had the thin, tired faces of women who had been through it a bit, but who believed firmly that you mustn’t grumble, worse things happen at sea, look on the bright side, it could be worse. Both wore clothes suited to their calling of charlady: worn dresses that had seen better days, pinafores with multiple pockets for holding dusters and other ephemera and impedimenta, and flat, comfortable shoes. It was a treat for both of them to slip off their shoes under the table and sip their drinks while waiting for their buses. Vera took the 13 up to Chalk Farm, while Ethel caught the 29 to Holloway. The Ring O’ Bells was their way station and their Wailing Wall.

“Writers,” said Ethel, taking a vicious sip from her port and lemon, “I wouldn’t give them house room.” Ethel was a stocky, aggressive woman with a pronounced chin and blazing blue eyes. Vera was smaller and fainter, like a bad photocopy of herself.

“Playing you up, then, is he, your bloke?” said Vera with sympathy. She knew as well as anyone just how a customer could play you up.

“Missis Hoskins, I wender,” said Ethel, her voice modulating into an excruciating parody, “I wender if it wed be too much to ask you to hoover more thoroughly under the tables in mai steddy?”

“Steddy, is it?” said Vera.

“Steddy, my arse,” said Ethel, “pardon my French, Vera, but I speak as I find. More like a rubbish dump. Paper everywhere. Piles of it. Never saw so much paper in your life. Mr. bloody Jolyon Carstairs. You believe that? Jolyon. What sort of a name is that? Mind you, I had a Jasper once. What’s happened to the good old names? Wilf. Arnold. Walter.”

“Bert,” said Vera, invoking the name of Ethel’s defunct husband, who had been as stocky and aggressive as Ethel.

“Ah yes. Bert,” said Ethel, a nostalgic look in her eyes. “But Jolyon. Writers,” she said again, plunging her nose into her glass, “I can’t be doing with them. If I’d known it was going to be a writer, I’d ’ave told the bloody agency to stick their job up their jacksy.”

She was talking about the Golden Mop Agency in Camden Town who supplied cleaning services to that gilded little neighbourhood adjoining Regent’s Park and Primrose Hill, peopled in large part by writers, artists, actors, and other bohemians. If you lived in NW1 and you needed a duster wafted round your bibelots of a morning or an afternoon, Golden Mop was your man. Or your woman, as was more popularly the case.

Vera nodded.

“I wouldn’t mind,” said Ethel, “but it’s that click, click, click all the time on their computers. Drives you round the bend.”

Vera said, “Well, you won’t have that with Mr. bloody Mervyn Fincham while I’m in Margate. He won’t have a computer. Uses a real old-fashioned typewriter. Clack, clack, clack, he goes.”

“Won’t have a computer?”

“Won’t even have a phone.”

Ethel considered this outlandish concept for a moment. She said, “What is he, then? Barmy?”

“No, ’e’s not barmy. Not dangerously barmy anyway. He’s just a bit wossername — eccentric. That’s it, eccentric.”

“Well, he’d better not come near me with his eccentric,” said Ethel.

“Oh, he won’t come near you. He doesn’t like people. He doesn’t talk to anyone, no one comes to the flat.”

“Hermit sort of affair, is he then?”

“A bit like that. But don’t worry. You won’t have any trouble with him. I’ve told him you’re taking over for me for two weeks and it’s all right with him. You won’t even know he’s around the place. He goes out for a walk in the morning. He’s like clockwork. Two hours he’s out. The rest of the time, he’s clacking away like the clappers. He doesn’t like to talk. He leaves notes all the time. ‘Please polish the floor in the front hall.’ ‘Do not answer the door on any account.’ Stuff like that. In this really rotten spiky writing. Terrible. I’ve never seen handwriting like it. Worse than a doctor’s, it is.”

But Ethel was only half listening, brooding into her drink.

“I always wanted to try that writing lark,” she said musingly. “I mean, can’t be that hard, can it? I mean, I’ve read loads of stuff, Agatha Christie, that Mary Higgins Clark and that P. D. James. Jack Frost is good, too. Doesn’t seem to me it’d be too difficult.”

Vera had the look that said Ethel was reaching above her station.

“You got to know stuff,” she said warningly.

“I know stuff, Vera,” said Ethel scornfully. “I seen things you wouldn’t believe, I have. Be nice having people reading your books, have a nice house, going on Woman’s Hour, being interviewed and that. Have three names. I like writers with three names. There’s lots. Mary Higgins Clark. That Barbara Taylor Bradford. That Joyce Carol Wossername. Three names adds something.”

“Authority,” suggested Vera.

“Maybe,” conceded Ethel. “What I’m saying is it can’t be hard. I’ve read some of my bloke’s stuff, he leaves it lying about all the time. Mr. Jolyon Carstairs. Tripe, it is. Complete and utter tripe. I could do better than that with me eyes closed, wearing boxing gloves. And here’s me with my legs under the doctor, doing the charring for ’im. Does that seem right to you? It doesn’t to me.”

“But you have to have the typing,” said Vera.

“Oh, I got the typing. Piece of piss that is, excuse my French, Vera. My Norma taught me all that. Gave me lessons. Type away like a good’un, I can. Computers and everything. Only on a computer it’s not called typing. Word Pro-cessing, it’s called,” she added kindly and carefully.

“Word pro-cessing. Well, there’s a thing,” said Vera, impressed.

“All I’m saying is, it can’t be hard, if your bloke can do it and my bloke can do it. I’ve a good mind to have a go at it, you just see if I don’t. I can’t go on like this with my legs. I deserve a bit of luxury, I do, after all these years.” Her chin jutted out aggressively. Vera was slightly taken aback. She had never heard her friend speak so bitterly and assertively about anything save the price of port. She tried to shift the subject onto more neutral ground.

She said, “You’re sure you can manage both of them?”

“Don’t you worry your head,” said Ethel. “I’ll do your Mervyn Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Then I’ll go have a nice bit of lunch in the café in Camden High Street. And I’ll do Mr. bloody Jolyon Carstairs in the afternoons Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, Saturdays is when I do his windows, see. No problem. You go off and have a lovely time with your Sandra. Get yourself a drop o’ sunshine. You can do the same for me when I go see my Norma in Clacton.”

“I’ll send you a postcard, Ethel,” said Vera, “nice postcard from Margate. That’ll cheer you up.”

And they finished their drinks, Ethel and Vera, very pleased with themselves and their arrangement.

Very nearly the first thing Ethel did, on her first day chez Mr. Mervyn Fincham in his ground-floor garden flat, was to go through his desk. She had every opportunity to do so, since Mr. Mervyn Fincham, after letting her in, went off to take his constitutional stroll in Regent’s Park, only a step away.

So Ethel had all the time in the world to put his study to the sack. Well, “study.” It was really just an alcove in the large living room. His desk was a large old roll-top affair, with many drawers and a venerable Remington typewriter in the place of honour. There were lots of papers, cuttings and sheaves of pages clipped together. A quick shufti through this lot and a heap of correspondence told Ethel that Mr. Mervyn Fincham earned a precarious living writing short stories, occasional articles, and book reviews. She found copies of a couple of American mystery magazines, brightly coloured things with brutal men with guns on their covers. Flicking through them, she found stories under Mervyn Fincham’s name. She didn’t bother to read them. “Gentleman’s Relish,” one was called; “And Little Lambs Eat Ivy” was the other. Stuffed in the desk’s pigeonholes were letters and contracts from editors, and other assorted correspondence. Vera had been right about the typewriter and she was right about the telephone, too, Ethel discovered. How could someone live without a telephone? Then she tried the desk drawers and found them to be locked. That was not a problem. The late Bert, who in addition to his many other qualities was an accomplished thief, had, very early on in their marriage, initiated her into the Mysteries of the Lock. Because, as he told her, another skill is always useful in life, and besides, You Never Know.

She took two of the hair grips with which she was always well endowed, and following the delicate instruction she had received, tackled the top right-hand drawer, which opened to her with a grateful little sigh. There were folders inside.

Ha. First, a thick, packed brown folder, with a title in thick black felt pen. “Double Space,” it said. Underneath there were other folders, which seemed to be notes, untyped, written in Mr. Mervyn Fincham’s spiky handwriting, and appeared to be the outlines of other novels that he had in his head but were as yet unwritten. There must have been ten or twelve of these folders, each with ten pages of tightly written notes, swatches of dialogue, character descriptions. There was enough in these folders to keep Mr. Mervyn Fincham busy for years, Ethel thought. To keep anyone busy for years. Mr. Mervyn Fincham was a book writer on the quiet.

She looked at the clock and settled down to read Double Space. It was a crime novel whose principal characters were, curiously enough, two writers of crime fiction who clearly, even in the first chapter, didn’t get on. Things were obviously shaping up for a scrap.

She read contentedly for an hour and a half, and then had to stop and hoover and give the place a flick of a duster. When Mr. Mervyn Fincham came back, the place was clean and smelling slightly of Pledge. Ethel had noticed that if you sprayed a little furniture polish into the air around the front door, people didn’t bother checking too much.

Fincham said, “Very good, Mrs. Hoskins.” He was a tall, lanky man with a beaky nose and an untidy shock of black hair. He had a furtive look, Ethel noticed, a hunched-shouldered, guilty sort of stance, and a horrible way of talking out of the corner of his mouth, while avoiding her eyes. He looked like a man who was simply waiting to be found out. He looked like a man who had been found out and was talking to you in the prison exercise yard, where, Bert had told her, everyone talked like that. It wasn’t surprising that he had no friends, looking like that. Ethel couldn’t imagine anyone wanting Mervyn Fincham as a friend or even an acquaintance.

“I do my best to oblige, I’m sure, sir,” she said. Hermit or no hermit, eccentric or not, his money was as good as anyone else’s.

She left at twelve and walked down the road to the café, where she had a nice piece of liver and bacon, and thought about Double Space. There was a sizzle of excitement running through her body. He might be a long streak of piss, she thought, but he knew how to write. It had gripped her from the start and she wasn’t easy to grip. Agatha didn’t grip her like that. She had only finished about a third of what Mr. Mervyn Fincham had written and she was looking forward to reading the rest on Wednesday.

And then she’d see.

But in the meantime, she had Mr. Jolyon Carstairs to sort out. Who was a very different kettle of fish. Mr. Jolyon Carstairs lived in a vast apartment, on the second floor overlooking Regent’s Park. Mr. Jolyon Carstairs was not eking out an existence as a short-story writer like Mervyn Fincham. He had written books, lots of them. One whole shelf of his bookcase was filled with copies of his works. Ethel had sneaked one of them home and had read it. It was not much cop, she told herself. She couldn’t make head nor tail of it. People wandered around, nothing happened, other people wandered in and more nothing happened. But in the blurb, Mr. Jolyon Carstairs was hailed as “a master of the psychological mystery story.” Whatever that meant. If this was crime fiction, then Ethel was a monkey’s uncle.

In crime stories, people did things, terrible things, and were either caught or they weren’t. This empty stuff of Carstairs’s was not up to snuff. But Double Space, now there was a crime story for you.

To have a good crime novel, what you needed apparently was a good plot. The rest, well, that came along on its own. Mr. Mervyn Fincham appeared to have good plots coming out of his ears.

Well, he wasn’t the only one, she decided as she began Mr. Jolyon Carstairs’s housework the next afternoon. The trouble with Carstairs, she had decided long ago, was Carstairs. He was a pompous man who affected a small goatee and usually wore velvet jackets and bow ties. He had very little hair and eyes that looked as though they had been painted on. As Ethel watched him tittupping around the flat after her, his feet clicking on the parquet, she always had the urge to put out a foot and squash him.

It was a relief as always to leave his flat. Her last long-established duty was to prepare a large pot of Mr. Carstairs’s nightly infusion of hawthorn and verbena, which was apparently good for warding off all manner of ills, and which, according to him, Mr. Carstairs liked to sip, lukewarm, in the evenings. Ethel had taken a little trial sip once and once was enough. It tasted like something you would spray on tomatoes. He was welcome to it. Perhaps it was to help him sleep. She had noticed, in his bathroom cabinet, lots and lots of different sleeping pills. Mr. Carstairs evidently had an overactive mind which wouldn’t leave him alone at night. Interesting.

The next day was Wednesday, so she went bright and early to Mervyn Fincham’s to spray furniture polish into the air and read the rest of Double Space. She had been right. It was good. Mervyn had almost finished it; she could see where he was going with the plot, or at least she thought she could, and she could think of a twist or two that she would put in if she were him.

“If I was ’im,” she said to herself as she vacuumed cursorily round the steddy, “I’d make the first bloke the second bloke’s brother. That’s funnier. And, into the bargain, I’d give the copper a stammer. That’s different and that’s funny, too. And ’e doesn’t know nothing about how to pick a lock, neither.”

Well now. All you need is a good plot. But for a good plot you have to set it up. If you want to get on Woman’s Hour, that is.

The next day, Thursday — and she was keeping count because Vera was due back now in ten days or thereabouts — was her day for Jolyon Carstairs.

On this day, Jolyon Carstairs went into his study and was surprised to find in the middle of his desk an African carving of heavy brownstone which he had brought back from one of his researching trips to Benin, or Dahomey as it had been when he was there. And which normally lived with other similar artifacts in the lounge on a special low table. He picked up the sculpture, which was an idealised representation of a lanky mother and child. It was an ugly old thing, he had privately always thought, but you had to bring something back from Africa, didn’t you, and he had always told people that it had been presented to him by a shaman and that it had curative powers. He had actually bought it with others in a street market in Porto Novo for three shillings.

“Mrs. Hoskins,” he called.

Ethel appeared at the door in pinafore and turban. She was carrying a mop and was wearing pink Marigold gloves.

“Yes, sir?” she said.

Jolyon Carstairs held out the carving.

“What on earth was this doing on my desk?”

“I’ve no idea, I’m sure,” she said. “Perhaps I was dusting it and carried it to your study in an absent-minded moment. I’ll put it back in the lounge, shall I?” She took it from him, handling it very carefully.

“A place for everything, Mrs. Hoskins, and everything in its place,” he said.

“To be sure, Mr. Carstairs. My mother always said as much. It was her motto.”

“Was it,” he said with total disinterest, and sat down at his desk and fired up his computer, not wondering why Mrs. Hoskins had gone straight back into the kitchen with the carving.

“Everything in its place,” she said as she wrapped the carving carefully in newspaper and put it in her bag. “I’ll give him everything in its place.” Then she attacked the floor with her mop and with ferocious concentration.

Later that morning, Jolyon Carstairs looked round the living room door where Ethel was dusting the mantelpiece.

“Mrs. Hoskins,” he said, rather hesitantly, though not knowing why; for heaven’s sake, she was the cleaning lady.

“Yes, sir,” said Ethel, turning.

“You wouldn’t have any idea — that is, can you explain what has happened to a pair of shoes of mine? Brown brogues they are, in fact. And I can’t seem to lay my hands on them.”

“I’m sure I wouldn’t know, sir. I never touch your private things, as you know. Perhaps you’ve mislaid them. Left them at a friend’s house or something.”

Jolyon Carstairs frowned.

“Left them at a friend’s house? Why on earth would I do that?”

“I don’t know, I’m sure, sir,” said Ethel in a tone that indicated that she was very clear that some people had peculiar habits that were none of her business. “They’ll turn up, I’m sure they will, Mr. Carstairs, don’t you worry your head about them.”

He stared at her for a moment. “No,” he said, “very well. But it’s very mysterious.”

“Mysterious as may be,” said Ethel, “but my mother always said that there were more things in heaven and earth. And she was right.”

Mr. Carstairs considered the dictum offered by Ethel’s mother and traipsed despondently off.

The following day, Ethel was pleased to see that Mervyn Fincham had written another ten pages of Double Space since her last reading.

“Good boy,” she said, reading busily, “that’s it. You hammer on.”

The she went through the contents of the other folders in Fincham’s desk.

“He’s got the touch, has the boy,” she told herself, “this is good stuff. Bert would have liked this one.”

One of the pages in one of the folders interested her particularly. It was apparently a piece of dialogue which Fincham was trying out. It read:

Interesting.

On Saturday, Mr. Jolyon Carstairs began to feel he was losing his wits. He went into the lounge, where Ethel was up on a stepladder, cleaning the high windows, a task she always left for Saturdays, because Mr. Carstairs was often out on a Saturday afternoon watching cricket, or involved in other gentlemanly pursuits, and she could spread herself.

“Mrs. Hoskins,” he said, cursing himself for the diffident tone Mrs. Hoskins always produced in him, “I’m sorry to trouble you, but I wonder if you have seen my light overcoat. It’s beige, perhaps you know the one I mean, and I can’t seem to find it anywhere.”

“An overcoat, is it now?” she said, looking down at him from the stepladder. “Well, dearie me, I can’t say, I’m sure. It was shoes the other day, wasn’t it? And today, it’s an overcoat. Well, I can’t help you, sir, I’m afraid.”

“Yes, and the shoes never reappeared, either,” Mr. Carstairs said petulantly. “I don’t know what’s happening.”

“Well, if you don’t, then neither do I, Mr. Carstairs,” Ethel said in a voice that conveyed pity and wariness, as though she was wondering whether some people were quite right in the head, which was precisely what Mr. Carstairs was beginning to wonder. He wondered what life was coming to. He wondered if he was starting premature Alzheimer’s.

At five o’clock Ethel went home and prepared to rest on the seventh day, as prescribed. God had rested on the seventh day, and Ethel followed his example meticulously, if not religiously. What was good enough for God was good enough for her, she was fond of saying. We do not know if God played bingo on His seventh day, but that was what Ethel did anyway, winning four pounds and a blue washing-up bowl, very useful. She spent the four pounds on port and lemon, which she drank alone because Vera was still in Margate.

On Monday, she spent a pleasant morning at Mervyn Fincham’s, getting up-to-date with Double Space. He’d done a lot of work over the weekend, she was pleased to see, adding at least twenty pages. And he was setting himself up for the ending, she could tell.

And so was she. But there were still a few wrinkles to iron out.

One of them ironed itself out with no help from her. On Tuesday afternoon, on arriving at Carstairs’s, she was pleased to learn that Mr. Jolyon Carstairs had a meeting with his publishers, which couldn’t have suited her better. As soon as he had gone, she went to her capacious bag in the kitchen and took out a sheet of paper, and took it to the study where she crumpled it and placed it in the wastepaper basket. Then, donning her pink Marigolds, she set to work on Mr. Carstairs’s computer. Happily, Carstairs himself had put paper in the printer only that morning. Mr. Carstairs’s absence gave her a clear two hours in his study, which is all she had been hoping for.

She left at six, after preparing his herbal infusion this time with extra special care.

Vera was not called to give evidence, which offended her not a little. After all, she had been the permanent cleaning lady for Mervyn Fincham, even if her friend Ethel had been her replacement during the crucial period. On her precipitous return from Margate, after reading the horrid news in the Daily Mirror, she offered herself up at the police station, was perfunctorily interviewed by a police inspector, and was then shown the door with no ceremony, with the promise that the authorities would be in touch if it proved necessary. It had evidently not proved necessary. It was Ethel who was the star, and Vera was merely the understudy waiting vainly in the wings for the call to come.

Still, she had a little reflected glory — after all, she was on the sidelines, even if she wasn’t playing in the match — and even this tiny touch of fame earned her the right to several Gin and Its in the Ring O’ Bells.

She had to admit, reluctantly, that Ethel stood up well in the witness box. Under examination and cross-examination, her jaw stood out like a rock and her eyes never flickered, and she spoke in a clear voice.

Yes, she had undertaken cleaning duties for the deceased. Yes, she had arrived as usual on the morning of Wednesday the eleventh. At about eight forty-five, sir. On entering the hall, she had heard raised angry voices coming from the apartment belonging to the deceased. What did she do then? She opened the front door of the flat. And what did she find? Nothing, sir. What did she hear? She heard the sound of hurried footsteps from the lounge. When she went to investigate, she found the French windows open, and at the end of the garden, she saw a running figure open the garden gate and disappear into the road. Then what did she do? She went to the study, where she expected to find Mr. Mervyn Fincham. And did she find him? Yes, sir, but he was sitting slumped in his chair, with blood streaming from a horrid wound. He was clearly without life? Yes, sir. Yes, the witness would like a glass of water, thank you, I’m sure, Your Lordship. And what had she done then? She had called the police, who arrived in ten minutes. Was she able to identify the person she had seen at the end of the garden? No, sir. She had only seen him for a second. Did she know of any bad feeling between the deceased and the person in the dock, Mr. Jolyon Carstairs? No, she didn’t meddle in the affairs of her employers, sir, it wasn’t her place to. Very commendable. And after she had been interviewed by the officer in charge of the investigation, what had she done then? She had taken her bag and gone round to Mr. Carstairs’s apartment. But this was a Wednesday. Was not her day for Mr. Carstairs a Thursday? Yes, but she had been feeling a bit wobbly recently, so she had previously asked if she might change the day to give herself a full day free on Thursday to relax. And when she arrived at Mr. Carstairs’s apartment, what was his comportment? Comportment? Behaviour. How did he behave? Objection: Calling for an opinion on the part of the witness. The witness might answer. He behaved peculiarly, he appeared a bit doolally. Doolally? You mean not in command of himself. That’s right, sir. Did he appear to you as a man might if he had recently committed a serious crime? The jury were to disregard that scandalously disgraceful question.

A snarling cross-examination full of inference and nuance if not outright accusation failed to shake any of the witness’s evidence, or to produce anything new. The witness left the box with the warm commendations of the judge on her courage and forthright testimony.

Vera and Ethel went for a restorative drink in a pub opposite the court.

“Well,” said Vera, “that was a performance and no mistake. You didn’t half give ’em what for.”

Ethel wiped her forehead. “I will not hide from you, Vera,” she said, “that it was a real ordeal.”

“Well, you did really well. Do you have to go back again?”

“I don’t think so. Don’t know as I shall. Makes me go all peculiar, all that. Brings back some awful memories.”

However, Ethel did consent to go back, at the invitation of the prosecution three days later to hear the judge’s summing up, which was a masterpiece of impartiality.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” he said, “this has been a difficult and painful case for you to listen to. You have heard the evidence; it now falls to you to deliberate and pronounce on the guilt or otherwise of the accused man. You will disregard the behaviour of the prisoner, whose violent outpourings early in this hearing did little to advance his cause, indeed served only to reinforce the prosecution’s case that here is a violent and calculating individual eminently capable of committing a heinous and calculated crime.

“You may of course choose to believe the accused when he avers that he is the victim of diabolical machinations and that he is entirely innocent. That is entirely a matter for you. But you will, in coming to your decision, recall the facts as presented in the admirably marshalled testimony of Chief Inspector Wickersley. The search of the effects of the deceased man — who was a writer of short fiction, and who was apparently in the throes of what I believe is called ‘writer’s block,’ an affliction that I am told is common in the writing fraternity — revealed, in the correspondence on the deceased’s desk, a letter from the accused, on his letterhead, couched in threatening and abusive language, and, recklessly, you will think, signed by him. The most telling passage in this vicious missive, you will remember, ran:

“‘You think you’re a writer, Fincham, but you’re nothing but a miserable failed scribbler. You deserve everything that’s coming to you. So watch out, because I am going to get you, you long streak of piss.’

“This note led to the police interviewing the accused and conducting a search of his apartment, where they found a pair of shoes bearing traces of soil that matched exactly the soil in the deceased’s garden. And which fit exactly the footprints found in the deceased man’s garden. You will recall the evidence of the forensic expert to this effect. You will also recall that the police also found in the course of their search an overcoat, which, when subjected to scientific examination, revealed minute spatter traces of the victim’s blood. You will remember the expert testimony in this regard as well. You will also, I am sure, have noted the fact that among the effects of the accused, in his wastepaper basket, in point of fact, was found a crumpled letter from the deceased, in his distinctive handwriting, which addressed the accused in uncomplimentary tones. A significant passage reads, you will recall, ‘You are a pretentious, untalented, unprincipled little swine.’

“The police also found, and you may have found this significant, a group of statuettes of African origin. And you will remember that Chief Inspector Wickersley explained to you that the deceased was beaten savagely with a statuette of the same material and origin, and which, in his opinion, belonged to that very group. Evidence to support this assertion came from Dr. Eriq Ebouaney, an acknowledged expert on indigenous African art. The statuette, and I am sure the significance of this did not escape you, bore the fingerprints of the accused man.

“We shall never know with any certainty the cause of the ill-feeling between these two men. The deceased cannot tell us, and as for the accused, he amply demonstrated his contempt for this court and these proceedings by retreating, as you have seen, into a mulish and obstinate silence. From this stubborn mutism I fancy you will draw your own conclusions, if conclusions to be drawn there be.

“But perhaps we may imagine that the two men, both being writers and inhabiting the same neighbourhood, may have frequented the same public tavern. And perhaps, having drink taken, which I am told is common among persons of their calling and kidney, a quarrel broke out, founded on some imagined slight. We shall never know. And whatever be the cause, it has no bearing whatsoever on your deliberations. If quarrel there were, it soon mutated, as learned counsel for the prosecution told you not altogether fancifully, into a fully fledged blood feud, conducted at first through the mails, and finally and fatally translating into physical assault.

“You may believe it significant that the accused can give no account of his actions or whereabouts on the fateful morning, can produce no witnesses to support his assertion that he was elsewhere. All he could find to say was that he slept until midday. You may choose to believe him, you may not. You are at liberty to believe his assertion that he had been drugged, although a medical examination, admittedly thirty-six hours after the event, revealed no trace of drugs.

“As for the accused man’s railings and phantasmagoric accusations against another person, it is for you to decide whether these are the last desperate stratagems of a guilty man who seeks to direct the blame elsewhere, or the pleas of an innocent man caught in the snares of a devious and Machiavellian master criminal in the person of an honest widow, a hardworking cleaning lady from North London. (laughter in court) That, too, is entirely a matter for you.

“You may choose to accept the view expressed by learned counsel for the defence that all the evidence in this case is circumstantial, and that there is not a shred of witness testimony to prove that the accused committed this dreadful crime, nor that he had indeed ever met the victim, let alone set foot inside the victim’s home. You will, I have no doubt, give this all the consideration that it merits, and you will, I am sure, recall the words of Thoreau, who said, ‘Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.’ The circumstantial evidence in this case is indeed strong, but it is for you to decide whether it was Jolyon Carstairs who indeed watered the milk.

“You will now retire to another place to consider your verdict.”

There was scattered applause from the jury which was quickly suppressed by ushers.

The jury returned after seven minutes with a verdict of Guilty and a recommendation for No Clemency.

Thus Mrs. Ethel McGonagall Hoskins and her cleaning lady Vera Bumstead, in the kitchen of Mrs. Hoskins’s house in the Vale of Health close to Hampstead Heath: for Mrs. Hoskins a cup of decaffeinated coffee with just a drop of milk, and for Mrs. Bumstead, a mug of Darjeeling with three sugars.

“Be sure if you would, Vera,” said Ethel McGonagall Hoskins, “to sweep carefully under the furniture in my study. I find I am beginning to have a bit of the old allergicals recently, and it may be due to house dust, my doctors think.”

“I will,” said Vera, who was starting to have enough of all this. Doctors yet. It had been very kind of Ethel to think of her old friend and to engage her as cleaning lady following the purchase of her house funded by the publication of Two Write! her first crime novel (Robert Hale £14.95; Berkley $24.95: “A stunning debut” — Kirkus Reviews; “Packed with comic criminal insights” — PW; “Ms. Hoskins springs fully fledged onto the crime scene with a laugh-a-minute murder mystery that combines, curiously but successfully, a crystalline literary style with some hilariously robust reportage from the lower depths. Her stammering detective is a joy” — Sunday Times), but enough was enough. Ethel had got well above her station.

Vera watched Ethel as she marched out of the gate and off in the direction of the Heath, where it was her habit to take a long walk in the mornings, to get the old creative juices flowing, as she had told Vera. Vera had her own thoughts about this but kept her thoughts to herself. You don’t ask questions you don’t want to know the answers to, she had told herself more than once, but there were still things about Ethel that nagged away at her.

All right, admit that she wrote a book. After the trial both of them had been out of a job, naturally, since one of their blokes was in the nick, the other was in the hereafter. Vera had quickly found more work through the Golden Mop, but Ethel had quite simply vanished off the face of the earth for six months and had then resurfaced with a book written, an agent, a publisher, interviews on Woman’s Hour and everything.

Nothing against Ethel, of course, more power to her, but where did she get her ideas? She’d always said she wanted to be a writer, but you don’t get to be something just by wanting to. What was more, Vera knew she was working on a new book. She’d gone into the study when Ethel was working, and Ethel had, as quick as a flash, shoved away a big blue folder, which stirred some sort of muddy memory for Vera, into the top drawer almost as though she had something to hide.

Ethel normally took two hours to get her juices flowing, so Vera had plenty of time. She went into the study and looked at the desk. Quite handy, really, that one of the things she’d remembered from Two Write! was a minute description of how to pick a lock.

She took two hairpins from her hair and knelt down at the desk, repeating to herself the instructions that Ethel had given in Two Write!

She was taking great care not to scratch the lock so as not to leave traces of her incursion.

“But,” she muttered to herself, manipulating the hair grips, “what’s the harm in looking? I mean, even if she does find out, what’s she going to do? Kill me?”

She had opened the drawer, pulled out the thick blue folder, and opened it, and was staring open-mouthed at the pages of all-too-familiar handwriting, her mind, if not racing, then at least moving along at a smart clip, when a draught riffled the pages and the shadow fell slowly across her.

Copyright © 2006 Neil Schofield