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

Nigel Crane couldn’t resist venting his feelings. “That many cameras, you reckon? I said it in the car coming here and I say it again, this year has been pants for me.” Then he folded his arms and fell glumly silent again.

“Melanie Skeets worked it out perfectly,” Our Inspector gloats. “Crane walked past Eddie Balch, slotted him and kept going, ‘on the phone’ again. What he didn’t reckon on was this: The passage of a bullet heats up a revolver barrel something cruel. Even a short barrel. Nigel has skin a girl would envy — ultra sensitive. When I saw the nasty new burn near his earlobe, from putting the gun up against it again and talking away, it was Game Over.

“None of the traffic or security camera coverage had caught him en route to Heathrow, by the way. We had enough, though. He wore transparent gloves for the hit but a dark suit and white shirt were recovered from a washroom bin at the airport, and there was gunshot residue on the shirt and jacket sleeves. Nothing to connect Crane to the clothing bar his DNA traces, pardon my sarcasm...

“His defending brief could tell they were on a hiding to nothing, didn’t contest the evidence, and went all-out on the mitigation speech: ‘A tragedy for the defendant as much as the victim, both casualties of society.’ It sounded good but the jury didn’t quite agree. They conferred for, oh, all of forty minutes. Not quite as fast as his trip to the airport, but close. Guilty as charged.”

At which point — in hindsight one understands that he had been working up to it, chortling inwardly for minutes — Our Inspector produces his treasured and excruciating pun, polished by frequent use.

“It was enough to make a man religious, clocking that redness on his skin. You could say our Nigel bore the mark of Crane.”

Dark Eyes

by R. T. Lawton

“Armenian, come with me. The Russian requests your presence.”

I left off sorting the bright silk scarves the southern traders had brought in the day before and glanced up. The schoolteacher for the Tereski Cossack Regiment stood in the doorway of my hut, a hut that I had rented on a previous trip for my business here. During the few other times I’d seen the teacher, he had carried himself with the air of authority, but on this early morning he seemed perturbed over some weighty matter that occupied his mind. Ah, those sorts of things were for the local officials to handle. I had no wish to meddle in the affairs of the tsar’s representatives, nor to be drawn into them. I was merely a seller of goods in this foreign land.

“If His Honor wishes a silver dagger from Turkey or some trinkets for the village girls, then pray let him come here. I cannot carry my entire shop around on my back.”

The regimental schoolteacher cast a hard gaze on me.

“He doesn’t wish to buy.”

“Then what does he want with me?” I asked.

In answer, the schoolteacher grabbed my elbow and hurried me out into the yard.

“I can’t tell you much for now, he only said to bring you.”

I yelled over my shoulder for the Nogay boy whose sun-browned face displayed the stolid features of his Mongol forebears. The youth had somehow attached himself to me in the last year and found ways to assist in my trading concern. In return, I fed him and taught him the business. But for right now, I wanted him out on the front steps with an eye on the goods. If anyone came to buy, he should tell them to come back in the late afternoon after the Cossack girls drove the cattle through the main gate and into the yards of their owners. I should return by then and have everything ready for sale.

The schoolteacher led me up the wide dirt street, past the wattle fences that enclosed every Cossack yard, with its hut set up on posts a few feet above the ground. A dirt embankment then surrounded each hut. Few people were about the village at this time of day. Most of the Cossack men were out on expeditions against the Chechens or stood guard at one of the cordons along the brown waters of the Terek River sweeping down from the snowy Caucasus. As for the women, they worked in the vineyards with the ripening black grapes or else kept an eye on the cattle in the fields.

Along our way, the schoolteacher spoke very little other than to say that something of importance had happened during the night, something upon which the Russian staff captain wished to consult with me. Further than that he wouldn’t explain, even though I tried to draw him out with small talk.

“Where are we going?”

“To my second house.”

“The one that you rented to the staff captain after he and his orderly were quartered on you by the army?”

The schoolteacher glanced at me, then seemed to ignore my presence as much as possible under the circumstances. We passed two more huts before coming to his yard and entering through the arched gate.