Mike Ashley - The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries

Clobber reached to lift a pair of binoculars, but Johnson gripped his arm. “Wait. Did you pick them up at this stage the first time?”

“No. I only used them after the emergency brake was applied,”

“Then leave them alone now.”

They watched the two cars crawling slowly across space towards each other.

In the ascending car Dimble peered approvingly at the one which was descending. “That’s right,” he said to Botha. “He’s leaning over the door exactly as Heston… Good God!”

He pulled the emergency brake. Mrs Orvin sobbed and then screamed.

The telephone rang. Botha clapped the instrument to his ear.

“Everything OK?” asked Johnson.

“No!” said Botha, “no! Something’s happened to Rolf. There’s a knife sticking out of his back. It looks like the same knife…”

From the lower station Joubert cut in excitedly. “What are you saying, Botha? It’s impossible…”

“It’s true, Inspector. I can see it quite clearly from here. And he’s not moving…”

“Get him down here,” said Joubert. “Quick!”

The cars moved again.

In the driver’s cabin Johnson, through powerful binoculars, watched the car with the sagging figure go down, down, losing sight of it only as it entered the lower station.

Joubert, with Brander, stood on the landing-stage watching the approaching car. He felt suddenly lost and bewildered and angry.

“Oom Rolf,” he muttered.

Brander’s eyes were sombre with awe. “The Lord has given,” he said, “and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

He and Joubert stepped forward as the car bumped to a stop.

The head of the corpse with the knife in its back suddenly twisted, grinned, said gloatingly: “April fool!”

Brander shivered into shocked action. His arms waved in an ecstacy of panic. His bandaged left hand gripped the hilt of the knife held between Rolf’s left arm and his body, and raised it high in a convulsive gesture. Rolf twisted away, but his movement was unnecessary. Joubert had acted, too.

Brander struggled, but only for a second. Then he stood meekly peering in myopic surprise at the handcuffs clicking round his wrists.

“And that is how Heston was killed,” said Rolf. “He died because he remembered today was April the first – All Fools Day – and because he had that type of mind, he thought of a joke, and he played it to the bitter end. A joke on Clobber, on the people in the ascending car, on Brander.

“But to Brander it was not a joke – it was horror incarnate. A dead man come to life. This was infinitely more terrible than the dream he feared of a knock from a coffin. This was like the very lid being suddenly flung open in his face. And his reaction was the typical response to panic when there is no escape – a wild uncontrollable aggression, striking out in every direction – as he struck out at me when the unthinkable happened again.

“The first time he plunged the knife into Heston. The joke became reality. The dead stopped walking.

“And now you see why there were no fingerprints on the knife. Brander is left-handed – he reached for the hot iron with that hand, remember. So it was burnt and bandaged. Bandages – no fingerprints. The way Heston was crouched, too, explains the angle of the wound.”

Joubert said: “So it was not premeditated after all.” Then, to Brander: “Why did you not tell the truth?”

Brander said, meekly: “Who would believe the truth?” Then, louder, with undertones of a new hysteria: “The dead are dead. They must rest in peace. Always rest. They are from hell if they walk…”

Then he mumbled, and his voice tailed off as he raised his eyes, and his gaze saw far beyond the mountain and the blue of the sky.

Forrest Rosaire (1902-77), who also wrote under the name J.J. des Ormeaux, is little remembered today. Originally in the oil industry, he settled in California from Chicago in the 1930s and turned to writing. He appeared regularly in both the pulps and slick magazines producing a number of high quality crime or suspense stories. He continued writing until the 1950s but did not make the transition fully to the book market. He published only three books , East of Midnight (1945) , Uneasy Years (1950) and White Night (1956), the last his only straight suspense novel in book form. He is another of those writers whose talents have been forgotten. The following, which betrays some of the pulp stereotypes of the day, is nevertheless ingeniously plotted and keeps you guessing to the end.

All kinds of people came into the welfare office, and Sandra Grey was so well versed in the diverse aspects of human misery that nothing much surprised her. But this visitor did. Both physically and by contrast. She had closed up her desk and was putting on her hat after a long day when his voice from the doorway made her jump.

“I say, is this where I’m to leave this?”

Sandra turned and saw a big-shouldered, floridly handsome man in an expensive raglan topcoat. He was holding in his arms a tiny ragged child – awkwardly, in the way men do who do not know how to handle babies.

Sandra stared at him. For a second she was completely at a loss – his appearance, the child, the request. In his turn the man stared at her. Sandra was enough to take any man aback. He looked jerkily around, as if he could not connect the drab office, with its heaps of cast-off clothing, boxes of canned goods, bushel baskets of shoes, with this radiant, slim, smart girl, whose wide brown eyes were like deep velvet.

He said uncertainly: “This is the welfare office, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Sandra. “What’s the trouble?”

He nodded his big florid face at the child. “I found this boy down in the building entry with a note on him. I stopped in at the clinic downstairs and they said to bring him up here, or to call the police.”

“Oh!” said Sandra.

She stepped quickly across, took the boy from him. He was a little, laughing, curly-headed fellow, no more than three at the most. He reached up a chubby hand, experimentally took hold of the end of Sandra’s nose.

“What a darling!” Sandra sat him down on her desk. He had wide gentian-colored eyes, bright with a baby’s mischief. He began chuckling to himself, exploring in a tall basket of shoes beside the desk. Sandra’s eyes flashed up to the stranger. “A note! You mean-”

“He’s abandoned.”

“Oh, how terrible!” Sandra had found the note by now, sewed into the ragged collar of his thin blouse. It read simply, in crude printing: “Be good to him.”

Sandra felt compassion well up, an ache in her heart. “How could anyone abandon such a darling?”

The man shook his head. He had an abrupt, awkward manner, entirely out of keeping with his air of breeding, his expensively tailored clothes, his big, impressive handsomeness. He said gruffly:

“What will you do with him?”

Sandra shook her head. “Take him to the orphanage, I suppose.” She took her slip-over sweater from a chair, began to roll it up. “I’ll drop him off on my way home. Thank you for bringing him up, Mr-”

“Gawdy.”

“Mr Gawdy.” Sandra decided the name aptly described his type of handsomeness. His ruddy face was too high-colored, his eyes too brightly blue, his topcoat too brilliantly golden.

She slipped the sweater over the boy’s head. A sudden, curiously sharp feeling of fear caught her. She realized afterward it was an intuition: if she had only caught up the child, sweater and all, rushed away with him, out of the office, away, away, anywhere-she might have avoided the horrible event looming so close at hand. Instead she went on pulling the chubby little hands through the knitted sleeves. The big man cleared his throat.