Ellery Queen. The Best of Suspense

Celia Fremlin Waiting for the Police

The topsail had been easy. He remembered how lightly the spade had tossed the loose earth this way and that in the moonlight. For those first minutes it had all been as effortless as in a dream — the strange euphoria of the previous evening was still flowing strongly in his veins, giving his thin young arms the strength, almost, of a grown man.

But two feet down he came to the clay — the sullen, sodden, implacable London clay; and it was only then that the dreamlike omnipotence began to drain out of him. Now the sweat of terror began to glisten on his forehead and his skinny adolescent arms began to quiver with exhaustion.

The length was all right. The uprooted dahlias and the shaggy, seeding willow-herb lay blanched in the moonlight along half the length of the devastated autumn flowerbed. But only two feet deep! It would have to be deeper than that, much deeper. Four feet? Six? Years of wide but desultory reading of lurid paperbacked stories had not provided him with this sort of solid, factual information; but any fool could see that a depth of two feet would not be enough.

He was crying now, in a sort of weak fury at the obstinate, devilish clay. He would have stamped and stormed at it, throwing a tantrum like a toddler, if it had not been for all those silent, curtained windows overlooking, like lightly closed eyes, the whole row of little back gardens. Any moment now one of those sleeping eyes might open, with a streak of yellow light between the curtains, and a sly sleepy voice would call out, “What’s going on there?” or maybe, more raucously, “Shut that bleedin’ row!”

This soft squelch of spade on clay — was it a bleedin’ row? Of course it was — it seemed to him that it must be heard for miles! And then there would be more voices, more cracks of light, eyes everywhere, queries called across the cloying darkness. Would it be best, when all this began happening, to make a clean breast of it? To tell them straightaway, in a ringing shout, before they came flitting out of the doors and alleyways, over the fences, like ghosts attracted by the smell of blood, to find out what was going on?

“I have killed my love,” he would yell to them across the gardens, across the closed, listening night swept silent by the moon. “I have killed my love, my only love. She was with Cyril — Cyril from the Gas Board offices, with his posh voice and natty suit. She was standing by the front door, I could see her face in the moonlight, and when she saw me coming she laughed. She pointed, and she whispered to Cyril, and then he laughed, too.

“That was their last laugh, though, the last laugh they’ll ever have. He ran away like I’ve never seen a man run, nor even a rat; and her, she’s lying there in the passage where I dragged her. I hope — yes, the thing I hope most of all — is that she was still alive just long enough to see him run like that, see him run away like a rat, and never lifted a finger to protect her! That’s what I hope — she was alive just long enough to see — to see it, and to know it, before she died.”

The clay, the damnable accursed clay! Tears of fury and terror streaked the boy’s thin moon-blanched face; his breath came in feeble sobs, like the sobs of the wet clay under the onslaughts of his jabbing spade.

But he did not give up. He couldn’t give up, for soon it would be dawn, and then bright morning, and the cover of darkness would be gone. So he struggled on, and gradually, inch by inch, as if dragging at the very intestines of the earth, he got the clay to move; and presently, into his trance of exhaustion, there came, dully, the knowledge that the hole was deep enough at last. As deep as it would ever be. Deep enough anyway, for his love, his sweet treacherous love.

Oh, but the dangers still ahead! With morning, the neighbors would come. “Getting busy in the garden, eh? Them dahlias — you didn’t oughter ’a’ pulled up them dahlias, not while they’re still flowering. What a shame! Just look at them, all them colors!”

“To plant a new lilac, you say? But you didn’t need to’ve cleared the whole bloomin’ bed, a whole six foot of it, just to plant a lilac bush! Besides, what does a young lad like you want with a lilac? It’s only a rented room you got in there, innit? You’ll be gone off, lad, somewheres else, that’s for sure, long before that lilac can bloom!”

But as the days went by, the questioning died down. Gradually the horticultural experts of the little street lost interest in the boy’s folly, and turned their attention back to their own gardens; and at last the boy himself began to sleep again at night, instead of lying tense as whipcord through the black hours, waiting for the police to come for him.

And so the autumn passed, and a long sodden December, and while it was still winter, before even the crocuses had begun to show their first leaves, tiny green things had already begun to sprout in the flat untidy soil above his own true love. Weeds, presumably, but he never found out for certain; nor did he ever know whether the lilac bloomed, for, just as the neighbors had predicted, before this could possibly have happened, he was gone.

“Now, come along, Mr. Parsons! Drink up! Just look at Mrs. Carruthers, she’s on her second cup already, you’re getting left all behind. Come on, Mr. Parsons, wakey, wakey! What’s the good of bringing you out into the garden for your tea when you just — oh, dear! Shall I hold the saucer for you? There, is that better? Can you manage now?”

The young woman’s voice went on and on, bright and bracing, but he had been at the Old People’s Home a long time now, and he no longer listened. Nor was he bothered any longer by the sweet tepid tea which his throat was obediently gulping from the expertly tipped cup.

He was aware only of the lilac in full bloom, above and all around him, and the sweet May breeze stirring the mauve blossoms, heavy with bees. Now that he was more than ninety years old, he was finding it hard to distinguish the sweet summer days, one from another, over the long years.

He was a little confused, too, about the lilacs — so many of them there had been, in gardens here and gardens there, blooming and fading, through ninety springtimes. By now they were all the same lilac, and beneath it lay his love, his first and only love, with her bright hair and her green enchanting eyes.

Over the long years he had waited for the police; but they had never caught him, never even suspected anything. He recalled how, over the years, the guilt and terror had gradually faded, to be buried at last, forever, under the turmoil of the rushing adult years. Marriage — children — work; success and failure; and more work; they had come and gone, and now at last he was close to her again, close to his first love, as lovely still as on the day he had killed her.

Killed her. How thankful he was now that he had done it! That he had killed her then, on that moonlit autumn night, in the full flower of her loveliness, more than seventy years ago! A murderer in shining armor, he had saved her from this Old People’s Home as surely as St. George had saved his princess from the dragon.

They would never get her now! Not for her the shameful, slobbering gulps of tea from a cup that her trembling hands could no longer manage; not for her the wheel chair, or the bright, professional voices impatiently jollying her through the dim dead days.

Not for her the crutches, the pointless tottering round and round the smooth, terrible lawns. Not for her the ill-fitting teeth, the mislaid spectacles, the endless, feeble bickering of the old, as thin as the mewing of seagulls left stranded by a tide that has gone out too far ever to turn again.

“Thank God I murdered you, my darling,” he murmured into the lilac-scented air; and the nurse, noticing that old Mr. Parsons was mumbling to himself again, and slobbering over his cup, decided it was time to wheel him indoors.