Ellery Queen. The Best of Suspense

Edmund Crispin The Pencil

It was not until (he third day that they came for Eliot. He had expected them sooner, and in his cold withdrawn fashion had resented and grown impatient at the delay — for although his tastes had never been luxurious, the squalid bedroom which he had rented in the Clerkenwell boardinghouse irked him. Now, listening impassively to the creak of their furtive steps on the staircase, he glanced at his gun-metal wristwatch and made certain necessary adjustments in the hidden thing that he carried on him. Then quite deliberately he turned his chair so that his back was toward the door.

His belated dive for his revolver, after they had crept up behind him, was convincing enough to draw a gasp from one of them before they pinioned his arms, thrusting a gun muzzle inexpertly at the back of his neck. Petty crooks, thought Eliot contemptuously as he feigned a struggle. And “petty crooks” again, as they searched him and hustled him down to the waiting car. Yet his scorn was not vainglorious. The hard knot into which his career of professional killing had twisted his emotions left no room even for that. Only once had Eliot killed on his own account and that was when they had nearly caught him. He was not proposing to repeat the mistake.

It was a little after midnight and the narrow street was deserted. The big car moved off smoothly and quietly. Presently it stopped by an overgrown bomb site, blanched under the moon, and the blinds were drawn down. There they gagged Eliot, and blindfolded him, and tied his hands behind his back. When they found him submissive, their confidence perceptibly grew. Between them and Addison’s lot, Eliot reflected as the car moved off again, there was little or nothing to choose: petty crooks all of them, petty warehouse thieves whose spheres of operation had happened to collide. That was why he was here.

He made no attempt to chart mentally the car’s progress. He had not been asked to do that — and it was Eliot’s great merit as a hired murderer that he was incurious, never going beyond the letter of his commission. Leaning back against the cushions, he reconsidered his instructions as the car purred on through London, through the night.

“Holden’s people are getting to be a nuisance,” Addison had said — Addison the young boss with his swank and his oiled hair and his Hollywood mannerisms. “But if Holden dies they’ll fall to pieces. That’s your job — to kill Holden.”

Eliot had only nodded. Explanations bored him.

“But the trouble is,” Addison had continued, “that we can’t find Holden. We don’t know where his hideout is. That means we’ve got to fix things so that they lead us to it themselves. My idea is to make you the bait.” He had grinned. “Poisoned bait.”

With that he had gone on to explain how Eliot was to be represented as a new and shaky recruit to the Addison mob; how it was to be made to seem that Eliot possessed information which Holden would do much to get. Eliot had listened to what concerned him directly and ignored the rest, it was thorough, certainly. They ought to fall for it.

And to judge from his present situation, they had...

It seemed a long drive. The only thing above all others that Holden’s men wanted to avoid was the possibility of being followed, the possibility that he, Eliot, might pick up some clue to the hideout’s whereabouts. So whatever route they were taking, it certainly wasn’t the most direct.

At last they arrived. Eliot was pushed upstairs and through a door, was thrust roughly onto a bed. A bed, he thought: good. That meant Holden had only this one musty-smelling room. All the more chance, therefore, that the job would come off.

He let them hit him a few times before he talked: his boyhood had inured him to physical pain, and he was being well paid. Then he told them what they wanted to know — the story Addison had given him, the story with just enough truth in it to be convincing. Eliot enjoyed the acting: he was good at it. And they were at a disadvantage, of course, in that having left the blindfold on they were unable to watch his eyes.

In any case, Holden — who to judge from his voice was a nervous elderly Cockney — seemed satisfied. And Holden was the only one of them who mattered... Before long, Eliot knew, the police would get Holden, and Addison too, and their smalltime wrangling for the best cribs would be done with for good and all. That, however, was of no consequence to Eliot. All he had to do was to say his lesson nicely and leave his visiting card and collect his fee.

And here it was at last: the expected, the inevitable offer. Yes, all right, Eliot said smoothly after a few moments of apparent hesitation; he didn’t mind being their stool pigeon so long as they paid him enough. And they were swallowing that, too, telling him what they wanted him to find out about Addison’s plans, sticking a cigarette between his bruised lips and lighting it for him. He almost laughed. They weren’t taking off the blindfold, though: they didn’t trust him enough for that. They were going to let him go, but in case he decided not to play ball with them, after all, they weren’t risking his carrying away any important information...

Yes, they were going to let him go. This is it, Eliot thought. And delicately, as he lay sprawled on the bed, his fingers moved under the hem of his jacket, so that, hidden from his interrogators, something slim and smooth rolled out onto the bedclothes.

Fractionally he shifted his position, thrusting the object — to the limit that the rope round his wrists would allow — underneath the pillow. It was a nice little thing, and Eliot was sorry to lose it: in appearance, nothing more than an ordinary mechanical pencil, but with a time fuse inside it and a powerful explosive charge. Addison had told him that it was one of the many innocent-looking objects supplied to French saboteurs during the Occupation, to be deposited on the desks of German military commanders or in other such strategic places. And Eliot, who cared nothing for war but who was interested in any destructive weapon, had appreciated its potentialities. As a means of murder it was chancy, of course: this one might kill Holden, or on the other hand it might kill a cleaning woman making up the bed.

But that was none of Eliot’s business He was doing what he had been told to do, and whether it succeeded or not he was going to collect.

The return drive was like the first. At the bomb site the gag and bonds and blindfold were taken off and presently Eliot was back at his lodginghouse door, in the gray light of early dawn, watching Holden’s car drive rapidly away.

He mounted to his room, examined his damaged face without resentment in the mirror, and on impulse started to pack. Then, tiring suddenly, he lay down on the bed and slept.

The pencil had been set to explode at eight...

It was a quarter to eight when Eliot woke, and the full light had come. Finish packing first, he thought: then see Addison, report, and get paid off. The early editions of the evening papers would tell him, before he caught the boat train, whether Holden was dead or not...

So he was shifting the pillows, to make more room on the bed for his shabby suitcase, just as the clock of St. John’s struck the hour.

And that was when he saw the pencil.

For a second he stared at it in simple incomprehension. Then understanding came. Of course, thought Eliot dully, of course! They weren’t risking the secret of their precious hideout. This is where they brought me to, after driving me round and round the streets. This is where they questioned me — here in my own room!

Panic flooded him. He ran. From the bedside to the door was a distance of no more than three paces.

But the explosion had caught and killed him before his fingers even touched the doorknob.