Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 100, Nos. 4 & 5. Whole Nos. 603 & 604, October 1992

I found Olivia in tears. “He killed her! Before my very eyes! He brained Perdita with my rolling pin. Said it might as well be used for something. Oh, it was dreadful, dreadful. And that’s not all. You should have seen what he did to my Monty. Literally knocked the stuffings out of him. And he’s talking to doctors and lawyers about me. Oh, it’s more than I can bear. I wish I could just die.”

Suddenly she seized my arm and her voice brightened. “I know. We can run away! Yes! Why didn’t I think of that before? You’ll be leaving anyway. We can go together. To the south of France! You can write there and I can have a garden.”

As gently and tactfully as possible I tried to explain the impossibility of such a scheme. She gazed at me with childlike stubbornness. “Well, mercy me, something’s got to be done. We can’t let him get away with it. He’s a monster! A murderer!”

That she might have possessed the will or strength of purpose to resort to as drastic a solution as she did never entered my mind, and even when she came rushing over to me later that evening and told me what had happened, it did not dawn upon me at the time to disbelieve her story.

“Come quick! Come quick! Monty’s had an accident.”

A fatal accident, as I soon discovered. Monty lay dead at the foot of the cellar steps. When I tried to question Olivia all she could do was to keep repeating that she’d heard a Godawful crash and found Monty lying down there.

I had to phone the police, of course, and their questions seemed only to confuse Olivia. At least, I thought it was confusion brought on by shock that inspired her to lie, for when they asked her how Monty had happened to fall, she said with a rapid fluttering of her little hands that he’d tripped over something.

“You didn’t actually see him fall, Mrs. Crackenthorpe?”

“Well, no, but I heard him.”

“Then what do you think he tripped on?”

It was then, as she cast a hooded, sly glance in my direction, the glance of a child who has done something inexcusable and suddenly thinks of a way to escape punishment, that I knew Monty’s death had been no accident.

“The cat!” she cried out, almost gaily. “He tripped over the cat. The cat ran between his legs at the top of the stairs.” She pointed at me. “Ask him. He saw it.”

For one ghastly moment I felt sure the officer would demand to see this cat, which Olivia knew perfectly well was dead and buried. It was such a stupid, careless, childish lie.

Before he could speak, I intervened. “That’s how it happened, officer. I was here when he fell.”

I didn’t dare look at Olivia. I prayed she would keep quiet.

“You were here, sir?”

“Olivia had invited me to dinner. Mr. Crackenthorpe was going down to the cellar to fetch a bottle of wine when it happened.”

That’s all there was to it. My perjured testimony was all they seemed to require to render a verdict of accidental death.

I accompanied Olivia to the funeral. She held tight to my hand but didn’t once shed a tear. I caught one or two of the mourners looking at her with droll amusement. She wore her ancient black dress but at the last minute, while I’d waited in the car, she’d dashed back into the house and added a Spanish mantilla to her outfit. There was no rose in her hair, but with a bunch of sweetpeas pinned to her lapel she looked like an aging, gold-haired Carmen.

That last week before I left we saw a good deal of each other. As if by common agreement, we avoided any reference to the night Monty had died.

“Are you quite sure you’ll be all right, Olivia?” I asked her on the day I was to leave.

“Oh, right as rain, my dear. Of course I’ll be lonely without Perdita. Lonely but unscarred. And without Monty. My Monty. But I can’t very well do anything about that when everyone knows he’s in his grave. They really would think I was dotty.”

I asked her if there was anything at all I could do for her before I took off. She started to shake her head and then, with a droll twinkle in her eye and uttering her jingle-bell laugh, she regarded me with a long, measuring look, studying my shoes, my faded jeans, my shirt, and my old tweed jacket with the leather elbow patches.

“If you could spare them, my dear, you might leave me one or two souvenirs. Yes, it would be lovely. I could use the same stuffing and it would be like you’d never left at all. You’d be right here where I could chat with you every day.”

I was rather attached to those shoes and to the jacket as well, but I could hardly refuse. And so as a parting gift I presented Olivia with the jeans, the shirt, the jacket and shoes.

“You needn’t worry I’ll do anything socially indiscreet,” she assured me. “One can imagine what the neighbors would say if I were to take in a male lodger so soon after Monty’s demise. I think one should observe a decent period of mourning, don’t you agree?”