Ellery Queen. The Best of Suspense

Celia Fremlin A Case of Maximum Need

“No, no telephone, thank you. It’s too dangerous,” said Miss Emmeline Fosdyke decisively; and the young welfare worker, only recently qualified, and working for the first time in this Sheltered Housing Unit for the Elderly, blinked up from the form she was filling in.

“No telephone? But, Miss Fosdyke, in your — I mean, with your — well, your arthritis, and not being able to get about and everything... You’re on our House-Bound list, you know that, don’t you? As a House-Bound Pensioner, you’re entitled — well, I mean, it’s a necessity, isn’t it, a telephone? It’s your link with the outside world!”

This last sentence, a verbatim quote from her just-completed Geriatric Course, made Valerie Coombe feel a little more confident. She went on, “You must have a telephone, Miss Fosdyke! It’s your right! And if it’s the cost you’re worrying about, then do please set your mind at rest. Our Department — anyone over sixty-five and in need—”

“I’m not in need,” asserted Miss Fosdyke woodenly. “Not of a telephone, anyway.”

There had been nothing in the Geriatric Course to prepare Valerie for this. She glanced round the pin-new Sheltered Housing flatlet for inspiration, but she saw none. It’s bland, purpose-built contours were as empty of ideas as was the incomplete form in front of her. “Telephone Allowance. In Cases of Maximum Need...”

It was a case of maximum need, all right. Valerie took another quick look at the papers in her file.

Fosdyke, Emmeline J. Retired dressmaker, unmarried. No relatives. One hundred percent disability: arthritis, diabetes, cardiovascular degeneration, motor-neurone dysfunction.

The case notes made it all so clear. Valerie glanced up from the precise, streamlined data and was once again confronted with a person — an actual, quirky, incomprehensible person, a creature whose eyes, sunk in helpless folds of withered skin, yet glittered with some impenetrable secret defiance.

Why couldn’t old sick people just be old and sick, the poor girl wondered despairingly. Why did they have to be so many other things as well, things for which there was no space allotted on the form, and which just didn’t fit in anywhere?

“But suppose you were ill, Miss Fosdyke?” Valerie hazarded, her eyes fixed on all that list of incapacitating disabilities. “Suppose—?”

“Well, of course I’m ill!” snapped back Miss Fosdyke. “I’ve been ill for years, and I’ll get iller. Old people do. Why do I have to have a telephone as well?”

Valerie’s brain raked desperately through the course notes of only a few months ago. Dangers to Watch Out For in Geriatric Practice. Isolation. Mental Confusion. Hypothermia. Lying dead for days until the milkman happens to notice the half-dozen unclaimed bottles...

An easy job, they’d told her back in the office — an easy job for Valerie’s first solo assignment. Simply going from door to door in the Sheltered Housing block, and arranging for a free telephone for those who qualified, either by age or disability or both. She’d pictured to herself the gratitude in the watery old eyes as she broke the good news, imagined the mumbling but effusive expressions of gratitude.

Why couldn’t Miss Fosdyke be like that? Eighty-seven and helpless — why the hell couldn’t she?

“Miss Fosdyke, you must have a telephone!” Valerie repeated, a note of desperation creeping into her voice as she launched into these unknown waters beyond the cosy boundaries of the Geriatric Course. “Surely you can see that you must? I mean, in your situation — suppose you needed a doctor?”

“Nobody of my age needs a doctor,” Miss Fosdyke retorted crisply. “Look at my case notes there, you can see for yourself the things I’ve got. Incurable, all of them. There’s not a doctor in the world who can cure a single one of them, so why should I have to be bothered with a doctor who can’t?”

Obstinate. Difficult. Blind to their own interests. Naturally, the course had dealt with these attributes of the aging process, but in such bland, nonjudgmental terms that when you finally came upon the real thing, it was only just recognizable.

But recognizable, nevertheless. Be friendly but firm, and don’t become involved in argument. Smilingly, Valerie put Miss Fosdyke down for a free telephone, and left the flat, all optimism and bright words.

“Hope you’ll soon be feeling better, Miss Fosdyke,” she called cheerfully as she made her way out, and then on her long lithe young legs she almost ran down the corridor in order not to hear the old thing’s riposte: “Better? Don’t be silly, dear, I’ll be feeling worse. I’ll go on feeling worse until I’m dead. Everyone does at my age. Don’t they teach you anything but lies at that training place of yours?”

“What a morning!” Valerie confided, half laughing and half sighing with relief, to her lunch companions in the staff canteen. “There was this poor old thing, you see, getting on for ninety, who was supposed to be applying for a free telephone, and do you know what she said...?”

And while the others leaned forward, all agog for a funny story to brighten the day’s work, Valerie set herself to making the anecdote as amusing as she knew how, recalling Miss Fosdyke’s exact words, in all their incongruous absurdity: “No, no telephone, thank you. It’s too dangerous.”

Too dangerous! What could the old thing mean? Ribald suggestions about breathy male voices late at night ricocheted round the table; anecdotes of personal experiences almost took the conversation away from Miss Fosdyke and her bizarre attitude, and it was only with difficulty that Valerie brought it back.

At eighty-seven! — she should be so lucky! — this was the general reaction of the others. Of course, the girls admitted, one did read occasionally of old women being assaulted as well as robbed — look at that great-grandmother found stripped and murdered behind her own sweet-shop counter only a few months ago. And then a few years back there had been that old girl in an Islington basement defending her honor with a carving knife. Still, you couldn’t say it was common.

“At eighty-seven!” they kept repeating, wonderingly, giggling a little at the absurdity of it. Consciously and gloriously exposed to all the dangers of being young and beautiful, they could well afford to smile pityingly, to shrug, and to forget.

It was nearly three months after the telephone had been installed that Miss Fosdyke first heard the heavy masculine breathing. It was late on a Sunday night — around midnight, as is usual with this type of anonymous caller — and it so happened that Miss Fosdyke was not in bed yet; she was dozing uneasily in her big chair, too tired after her hard day to face the slow and exhausting business of undressing and preparing for bed.

For it had been a hard day, as Sundays so often were for the inhabitants of the Sheltered Housing block. Sunday was the day when relatives of all ages, bearing flowers and potted plants in proportion to their guilt, came billowing in through the swing doors to spend an afternoon of stunned boredom with their dear ones; or alternatively, to escort the said dear ones, on their crutches and in their wheel chairs, to spend a few hours in the tiny, miserable outside world.

Just how tiny and miserable it was, Emmeline Fosdyke knew very well, because once every six weeks her old friend Gladys would come with her husband (arthritic himself, these days) to take Emmeline to tea in their tall, dark, bickering home — hoisting her over their awkward front doorstep, sitting her down in front of a plate of stale scones and a cup of stewed tea, and expecting her to be envious. Envious not of their happiness, for they had none, but simply of their marriage. Surely any marriage, however horrible, merits the envy of a spinster of eighty-seven.

Especially when, as in this case, the marriage is based on the long-ago capture by one dear old friend of the other dear old friend’s fiancé — a soldier boy of the First World War he’d been then, very dashing and handsome in his khaki battle dress, though you’d never have guessed it now. Emmeline remembered as if it was yesterday that blue-and-gold October afternoon, the last afternoon of his leave, when she had lost him.

“He says you’re frigid!” Gladys had whispered gleefully, brushing the golden leaves from her skirt, all lit up with having performed a forbidden act and destroyed a friend’s happiness all in one crowded afternoon. “He says...”

Details had followed — surprisingly intimate for that day and age, but unforgettable. Only later, emboldened partly by old age and partly by a changing climate of opinion, had Emmeline found herself wondering how responsive Gladys herself had proved to be over the subsequent fifty-five years. Naturally Emmeline had never asked, nor would Gladys ever have answered. But maybe Gladys’ tight bitter mouth and the gray defeated features of the once carefree soldier boy were answer enough.

The visit on this particular Sunday had been more than usually exhausting. To start with, there had been seedcake for tea instead of the usual scones, and the seeds had got in behind Emmeline’s dentures, causing her excruciating embarrassment and discomfort; and on top of this, Gladys’ budgerigar, who had been saying “Percy wants a grape!” at intervals of a minute and a half for the last eleven years, had died the previous Wednesday, and this left a gap in the conversation which was hard to fill.

And so, what with the seed cake and the car journey and the boredom and the actual physical effort of putting up with it all, Emmeline Fosdyke arrived back at the Sheltered Housing unit in a state of complete exhaustion. She couldn’t be bothered even to make herself a cup of tea, or turn on the television; she didn’t feel up to anything more than sitting in her armchair and waiting for bedtime.

She hadn’t meant to fall asleep. She’d learned long ago that when you are old, sleep has to be budgeted just as carefully as money; if you use up too much of it during the day, there’ll be none left for the night. So she’d intended just to sit there, awake but thinking of nothing in particular, until the hands of her watch pointed to a quarter to ten and it would be time to start preparing for bed.

But it is hard to think of nothing in particular after eighty-seven years. Out of all those jumbled decades heaped up behind, something will worm itself to the surface; and thus it was that as Emmeline’s head sank farther and farther toward her chest, and her eyelids began to close, a formless, half-forgotten anxiety began nibbling and needling at the fringes of her brain — something from long, long ago, over and done with really, and yet still with the power to goad.

Must hurry, must hurry, must get out of here — this was the burden that nagged at her last wisps of consciousness. Urgency pounded behind her closed eyes — a sense of trains to catch, of doors to bolt, of decisions to make. And now there seemed to be voices approaching — shouts — cars drawing up — luggage only half packed.

Slumped in her deep chair, Emmeline Fosdyke’s sleeping limbs twitched ever so slightly to the ancient crisis; the slow blood pumped into her flaccid muscles a tiny extra supply of oxygen to carry the muscles through the dream chase along streets long since bulldozed; her breath came infinitesimally quicker, her old lungs expanded to some miniscule degree at the need for running, running, running, through a long-dead winter dawn...

It was the telephone that woke her. Stunned by the suddenness of it, and by its stupefying clamor erupting into her dreams, Emmeline sat for a few moments in a state of total bewilderment. Who? Where? And then, gradually, it all came back to her.

It was all right. It was here. It was now. She, Emmeline Fosdyke, eighty-seven years old, sitting comfortably in her own chair in her own room on a peaceful Sunday evening. She was home. She was safe — safe back from that awful outing to Gladys’ house, and with a full six weeks before she need think about going there again. There was nothing to worry about. Nothing at all. Nothing, certainly, to get her heart beating in this uncomfortable way, thundering in her eardrums, pulsing behind her eyes.

Except, of course, the telephone, which was still ringing. Ringing, ringing as if it would never stop. Who could possibly be telephoning her on a Sunday evening as late as — oh, dear, what was the time? With eyes still blurred by sleep, Emmeline peered at her watch and saw, with a little sense of shock, that it was past midnight.

Midnight! She must have been dozing here for hours! That meant that even with a sleeping pill, she’d never—

And still the telephone kept on ringing; and now, her mind slowly coming into focus, it dawned on Miss Fosdyke that she would have to answer it.

“Hello?” she half whispered, her old voice husky and tremulous with sleep. Then from force of habit she said, “This is Emmeline Fosdyke, 497-6402. Who...?”

There was no answer. Only the slow measured sound of someone breathing breathing loudly, and with deliberate intention; the sounds pounded against her car like the slow reverberation of the sea. In, out. In, out.

For several seconds Miss Fosdyke simply sat there, speechless, the hand that clutched the instrument growing slowly damp with sweat, and her mind reeling with indecision. During her long decades of solitary bed-sitter life, she’d had calls of this nature quite a number of times, and she knew very well there was no infallible method for dealing with them. If you simply hung up without a word, then they were liable to ring again later in the night; if, on the other hand, you did speak, then they were as likely as not to launch forth immediately into a long rambling monologue of obscene suggestions. It was a nerve-wracking situation for an old woman all on her own in an empty flat and late at night.

Miss Fosdyke decided to take the bull by the horns.

“Listen,” she said, trying to speak quietly and control the quivering of her voice. “Listen, I don’t know who you are or why you’re calling me, but I think I ought to tell you that I’m—”

That I’m what? Eighty-seven years old? All on my own? Crippled with arthritis? About to call the police?

That would be a laugh! Anyone who has been an elderly spinster for as long as Emmeline Fosdyke knows well enough what to expect from officialdom if she complains of molestation. No, no policemen, thank you. Not anymore. Not ever again.

But no matter. Her decisive little speech seemed to have done the trick this time. With a tiny click the receiver at the other end was replaced softly, and Emmeline leaned back with a sigh of relief, even with a certain sense of pride in what she had accomplished. Funny how these sort of calls always came when you were least prepared for them — late at night, like this one, or even in the small hours, rousing you from your deepest sleep.

Like that awful time five years ago — or was it six? — when she’d been living all alone in that dark dismal fiat off the Holloway Road. Even now she still trembled when she thought about that night, and how it might have ended. And then there was that other time, only a few years earlier, when she’d just moved into that bedsitter in Wandsworth. There, too, the telephone had only recently been installed, just as it had been here...

Well, I told her, didn’t I? That prissy, know-it-all little chit of a welfare worker — no one can say that I didn’t warn her! I told her that a telephone was dangerous, but of course she had to know better, she with her potty little three-year Training Course which she thinks qualifies her to be right about everything for evermore!

Training Course indeed! — as if life itself wasn’t a training course much tougher and more exacting than anything the Welfare could think up, if it sat on its bloody committees yakketty-yakking for a thousand years!

Nearly one o’clock now. Emmeline still had not dared to undress, or to make any of her usual preparations for the night. Even though it was more than half an hour since she’d hung up on her mysterious caller, she still could not relax. Of course, it was more than possible that nothing further would happen, that the wretched fellow had given up, turned his attentions elsewhere. Still, you couldn’t be sure. It was best to be prepared.

And so, her light switched off as an extra protection, and a blanket wrapped round her against the encroaching chill of the deepening night, Emmeline sat wide awake in the velvet darkness, waiting.

It was very quiet here in this great block of fiats at this unaccustomed hour. Not a footstep, not a cough, not so much as the creaking of a door. Even the caretaker must be asleep by now, down in his boiler room in the depths of the building.

Emmeline had never been awake and listening at such an hour before. Her mind went back to earlier night calls when the sounds outside had grown sharper, louder. Did she hear them again?

Emmeline was trembling now, from head to foot. She’d never get out of it this time, never! Ten years ago — even five — she’d at least have been mobile, able to slip through a doorway, to get away from the house, and if necessary stay away for days, or even for weeks.

Not now, though. This time she would be helpless, a sitting duck. And as this thought went through her mind, she became aware, through the humming of her hearing aid, of a new sound, a sound quite distinct and unmistakable, the sharp click of the latch as her door handle was being quietly turned.

Softly, expertly, making no noise at all, Emmeline Fosdyke reached into the darkness for the long sharp carving knife that always lay in readiness.

It was a shame, really, having had to do this to them, after having been so nice to them on the phone, after having given them her name and everything, and encouraging them to think that her tense husky whisper was the voice of a young girl. It was a real shame; but then, what else could she have done?

In the deep darkness, the unknown male lips coarse and urgent against her own, she would have her brief moment of glory, a strange miraculous moment when it really seemed that the anonymous, ill-smelling mackintosh of some stranger was indeed a khaki battle dress of long ago, that the blind clutchings in the darkness were the tender caresses of her first love. For those few wild incredible seconds, in the meaningless grip of some greasy, grunting stranger, she would be young again, and loved again, under the poignant blueness of a wartime summer sky.

During those mad brief moments she could allow hard masculine fingers to fumble with her cardigan in the darkness, and with the buttons of her blouse, scrabbling their way nearer and nearer... a shame it was, a crying shame, that at exactly that moment, just before the eager questing fingers had discovered the sagging, empty loops of skin and had recoiled in horror — that was the moment when she’d had to stab the poor nameless fellow, if possible in the heart.

Had to. It was self-defense. Even the law had agreed about that, on the rare occasions when the law had caught up with her.

She’d had to do it — had to stab them all, swiftly and surely, before they’d had a chance to discover how old she was.

“No, no telephone, thank you. It’s too dangerous” — for them.