Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 40, No. 6, June, 1995

“You don’t have to tell me,” she replied edgily when McKell said it was bad business and looking worse for her lover with every passing hour. Pampered, groomed, Ivy had a disciplined cloud of auburn hair, green eyes, spectacular legs, all set off by a redhead’s pale skin, creamed, lotioned, and toned to perfection. It was hard to believe that she was pushing forty.

“Search all over again if you like,” she offered. “I’d be delighted for Ivor to be here.” She twisted the diamond ring on a long finger, as if trying to saw through. “To be honest, if it hadn’t been for that fight... Usual run of things, you come asking, I would keep my trap shut. But he must be hurt. On my mother’s eyes, Mr. McKell, if he comes back or calls me, you’ll be the first to know. I don’t want him arrested, he’ll give me a bad time after — but at least you lot would get Ivor into hospital. He might even finish with me for giving him away. I don’t care, as long as he’s all right in the end.”

McKell had believed her. The clincher coming when, eyes wet, Ivy Challis faltered, “He is

just... you know, only hurt, isn’t he?”

“I hope so, Ivy. From what I hear, he was in a bad way when last seen.”

“And that damned pub is by the river...”

“We’ve dragged it, dear. Your feller didn’t fall in.” He did not share the theory that Tosh Fisher’s heavies had taken Grange with them, aiming to dispose of the body. Having gone too far in trying to beat the stash’s location out of him, they might have treated human wreckage with a spark of life as evidence to be destroyed.

Ivy wasn’t listening. “He knew Tosh was after him, some row or other, I didn’t want to know. Safer for me, right? I begged him to stay home. But no, Ivor goes out on the booze. Reckoned he would be all right at The Waterman’s, Tosh wouldn’t look for him there.” Her face twisted. “All this is down to Fisher! Not just the fight, you’re after Ivor for that factory business, but he never had anything to do with it. Tosh gets up to strokes and always drags my Ivor in.”

“That’s as may be. All Fisher admits is fighting at the pub. Grange wasn’t involved, he says. Tosh had a drink on his ownsome and was getting into his car when an assailant, whom he’d never seen in his life, set on him. Two passing strangers just happened to join in on Tosh’s side, protecting him.”

Ivy laughed bitterly. But when McKell urged, “You know more than you’re letting on... be frank with me, and I can really ruin Fisher’s day,” she shook her head.

“All I know is you lot keep persecuting Ivor. Just find him and get him to a doctor — please.”

“She played me like an old violin,” Inspector McKell admits cheerfully. “I bought the whole act. Until my new friend Tania Wark marked my card about Ivy, that is. Then I caught on to how, um, parochial I had been. Ivor Grange wasn’t at his mistress’s house; therefore she was not sheltering him. But that was tunnel vision, blinkered to anything outside Longdown.

“Thanks to naughty Mrs. Wark, I cast my mental net a little wider. Ivy lived on my patch, but along with a third or more of the population, she commuted to work in London. Soon as I took that aboard, it was obvious where Grange had to be hiding. It was a pain, since another force was involved: you can’t just go barging around the Met’ Police’s back yard, it bends them out of shape, makes ’em shrill and spiteful. Cap-in-hand, humble pie time, otherwise known as liaison and professional courtesy... Our assistant chief constable spoke to his opposite number in The Smoke, and then we were off to the races...”

Ivy Challis’s reputation was spotless in Longdown. She explained, but only if asked, that she was housekeeper for a West End hotel group. Good salary, but it involved shift work, unsocial hours.

In reality, Ivy was a prostitute. She worked out of a ground floor studio apartment in an impersonal, incurious block two or three streets behind Hyde Park. The previous year, a Met’ Police colleague had asked Inspector McKell for background on a hooker calling herself Desire, whose car license number turned out to be identical with that of a Mrs. Ivy Challis. If a redheaded Mrs. Challis did live in Longdown and owned a car with that number, she could be eliminated from an investigation. There had been no need for him to question her, so she was unaware of his background knowledge.

In the West End next day, McKell and one of his sergeants met up with Inspector Pete Peters of the Met’, flanked by a brace of burly young men in leather jackets. Thin-faced, crewcut, crafty and slangy, Peters looked more of a villain than most villains. He and Tom McKell were by way of being friends after a couple of shared Home Office courses.