Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 50, No. 1 & 2, January/February 2005

Among them was Nigel Crane — a name generating cruel mirth, but that was much later. Crane’s detention was striking proof of police unfairness and the truth of the Cockney adage, “All coppers are bastards.” He was arrested in a departure lounge at Heathrow Airport, exactly forty minutes after Mrs. Skeets and many, many others heard the fatal shot.

“You are joking. What is this? Can’t I even go on holiday anymore?”

“Sorry, Nige.” The detective constable was an old acquaintance and courtesy costs nothing. Crane was dodgy but always good for a drink. “Can’t be helped, orders from God Almighty. We both know it’s stupid but try telling them that, eh?” The killing had gone down at the far side of London hardly half an hour ago. Unless Crane owned one of those James Bond jet packs, he couldn’t have reached the airport so quickly. Well, slight exaggeration... if Crane had a motorbike waiting behind the new mall he might just have managed it.

Leafing through a girlie magazine in the departure lounge, Nigel Crane had looked serene and a trifle bored, not like a windswept, nearly-bought-it-twice-and-that-was-just-the-first-mile rider or pillion passenger. If he had covered over twenty traffic-heavy miles from the crime scene in just about as many minutes, then he deserved a vacation for nerve.

But he hadn’t done anything like that, the detective was positive. It was Give a Dog a Bad Name syndrome. There were persistent rumors that Crane was a hit man. Informers alleged it, although they couldn’t provide a scrap of proof. “My own silly fault,” he had conceded on one occasion, while admitting petty fraud. “I used to tell birds fairy tales to impress ’em. There’s a certain type that is right morbid, blood on your hands really turns them on. Some day, I’ll grow up and learn sense.”

That had the ring of truth, the detective constable considered. “Somebody will look at the times and do their sums, and you will be on your way, no danger.”

“I’m having a pants year all round, mate. Beyond

pants, I can’t win for losing. Been saving for ages to go to Rio — see Carnival and die, isn’t that the saying?”

“Naples is see it and die. Rio, I been there and it’s overrated. Hot and cold running pickpockets and the Sugarloaf, what is that about? It’s a hill, be still my heart.”

“You’re just saying that to make me feel better about missing the trip.” Nigel Crane smiled wanly. “Appreciate it.”

“Melanie Skeets,” says the detective inspector whom she had cornered that day, “was a very good witness and a bloody awful one.

“She couldn’t describe the man she guessed had been the shooter. She kept on about El Greco, whoever he was — the shooter didn’t look like him, he just put her in mind of some bygone oil painter. ‘I will recognize him if I see him,’ she went. Which she did, no hesitation. Dead fair ID parade too — all were the same general type, and several could have doubled for Nigel Crane if you only knew him by sight.”

Our Inspector, a helpful label given the number of officers involved, admits that Melanie Skeets’s outlandish theory attracted him because it accounted for the unaccountable. He was all for that.

“Three guys were watching Balch on his way from the gym to the car, right? Him, and everybody around him. All three minders insisted the shot came out of thin air. The killer had to have used a long gun, a rifle, from the gym roof or one of the tower blocks on the street behind.

“They were wrong. Balch was killed by a .38 round fired at just about point-blank range. Impossible, the muscle reckoned. Nobody close to their boss had a gun out, or pulled a gun. They’d have seen that, it was exactly what they were alert for, right? They weren’t lying or covering up, either. They loved the guy — no accounting for taste — they’d wanted to keep him alive and they had been heads-up all the while.

“These weren’t standard witnesses, the kind of civilians who walk round in a daze and will tell you rubbish. Like I said, they’d had their eyes peeled, and they were adamant that nobody at ground level could have shot Big Eddie.

“Then up pops our Mel and what she proposes is this: The shooter had the piece out ready, all along. Little .38 snubnosed held vertically by the side of his head. A guy has a small, dark object up to his lughole, deeply suspicious, what can he be up to? Calling a bookie, telling lies to his wife, asking for train times is what. Nothing suspicious, is the short answer; he’s on the phone, what else?

“Nigel Crane walks past Tasty Eddie, shoots him just above the ear, whips the revolver back into phone mode and walks on, talking to the piece. ‘That has to be it,’ Melanie Skeets said. ‘It didn’t sink in till he’d gone through that archway. He never looked round when there was that bang. He was the only one expecting it. The only one who knew what it was.’ ”