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

“But she got the wrong end of the stick, thought I was being sexist, surprised that all women aren’t squeamish. The, um, moral dimension was invisible to Ivy. ‘Oh,’ she said, quite proud of herself, ‘Dad was a butcher, I knew how to go about it. And I work out a lot, I’m stronger than I look.’ ”

“God, how awful.”

“I don’t believe God was anywhere near Apartment 3A, Rougemont Court, that particular day.” But his smile, sardonic, hardly perceptible, soon vanished. “You can drive yourself dotty over maybes and might-have-beens, so I try not to wonder exactly what part I played in Grange’s death.

“Until Tania Wark’s tipoff, I accepted that Ivy Challis had no idea where Grange might be. After my second visit, she could tell she was in the clear as far as I was concerned. I’ve a nasty feeling that was the green light. The law was ready to believe that Grange had been knocked off in a dispute with another crook; if his corpse was found, Tosh Fisher had to be the prime suspect. Granted, we picked Fisher up immediately after the fracas at The Waterman’s Arms, but he was granted bail the following day. For all we knew, he could have caught up with Grange and finished what had begun outside the pub.

“During the brawl, Ivor Grange escaped. If he’d gone to Ivy’s house, Fisher might trace him. Lord knows how, but Grange managed to get himself to her London flat. Likeliest explanation is that anonymous wheelman I mentioned, the getaway driver we never caught up with.

“In hindsight, I believe Grange went to that secluded pub to pay off the driver. No doubt the guy bottled out when Fisher turned up with his lynch mob but hung around at a safe distance, rescued Grange when he had the chance, and drove him to London. Grange had a key to Ivy’s crib there — which interested me because he wasn’t her pimp and it was a lousy potential hideout, considering Ivy’s trade. We’ll come back to that in a minute.

“He was in a bad way, front teeth splinters and pulp, broken jaw, but he was a tough nut, confident he’d recover providing he kept away from Tosh Fisher. Grange knew a dodgy doctor who would fix him up on the quiet, but the quack was out of town for a while. Grange phoned Ivy, told her the score, demanded her help, and settled down to wait for the doc.

“Fair play, Ivy Challis did her best at first. But she wasn’t much of a nurse, and he was a rotten patient, half crazy from pain. He whacked her a couple of times for clumsiness, and fairly soon — her version, this — he stopped talking and sulked on the bed, day and night.

“Ivy didn’t like being knocked about. After all, she was turning business away to give Grange a safe house, losing a fortune for his sake. Then rumors started about Tosh Fisher’s being mixed up in Grange’s disappearance, and the poison began working. The idea hit her that there’s no risk in murdering a man who is assumed to be dead already. Grange was weak but bound to get stronger as time passed, she’d never have a better chance.”

Digesting that, I could deduce no sane motive. “If she wanted revenge,” I objected, “she could have had it simply by telling you where to find him.”

Tom McKell was pitying. “Ivy wasn’t after revenge, no money in that. You haven’t listened, old son. Grange was canny, didn’t sling his gelt around. He stashed it away.

“We went over that flat — which is to say the Met’ did, they’re great at searching. Sure enough, a steel box was hidden under the lounge floor. It held most of the hundred thousand from the payroll job, still in the delivery bags, and other cash besides. He had the best part of a quarter-million quid on deposit at his mistress’s London address.

“She denied it, but Ivy must have known his stash was there. Whatever pretext Ivor Grange used to get time alone in her flat, keeping a spare key for further access, she’d spotted something, maybe sawdust on a rug or a certain section of floor not quite the same as before. Women in her trade don’t need many clues; what blood in the water is to sharks, the smell of money is to them.

“Right up to the trial, Ivy denied all knowledge of the money because it was such a damning motive. She tried to sell us and her QC the tale that Grange was killed in self-defense. He’d lost his temper and tried to throttle her, she grabbed up a knife and stabbed him. Then she panicked, fearing that nobody would believe her version, and started covering up...

“Didn’t work. The pathologist agreed there was a lot of damage to the body — how could he not? But Grange was smothered, not stabbed. Fibers from a pillowslip were caught on a broken tooth, and it was an exact match with the pillow on the bed. Forget lashing out, she crept up on him and put that pillow over his face and kept pressing.

“As if that wasn’t enough, the knives and a cleaver she was using on the corpse had been brought from the kitchen of her house at Longdown, that day, which exploded her spur-of-the-moment story.”