David Dean - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 125, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 763 & 764, March/April 2005

That accounted for the impression of arrested movement, once the figure came into focus and revealed itself. She’d heard footsteps or the creak of a door and she was about to peer over her shoulder... The longer he stared, the more he saw.

Gloved fingers gripped the chair, and if the shadows dispersed one would find her thin arm braced and straining to swivel the meager body. Okay, done that, a bored strand of his thinking ran. Let’s be on our way.

Urgency wasn’t involved, as it had been with the earlier, near-subconscious pleading to be anywhere but near the old woman. Mission Control sent the message that he was emerging from a medium-bad hangover, not before time, and some food would be appreciated.

Robin Ratcliffe’s tale ended there, first time around, with a hangdog grimace. In newspaper jargon I’d wasted attention on a “delayed drop,” meaning introductory matter unfolded at length — only there was nothing to follow. Politely put, an anticlimax; less politely, he had suckered me into a shaggy-dog story and I’d missed the punch line.

Except that Robin wasn’t like that. The trivial incident — as it seemed at first telling — had impressed him enough to share it. Shortly afterwards, our flight was called or the lift doors opened and the man we awaited stepped out — for the life of me I cannot recall the setting or how we came to be talking about a picture in the first place.

My memory is no worse than the next fellow’s, whoever he is. I have good recall of what Robin Ratcliffe told me over a five-year period. It’s just that I was pinballing around the world at the time, one eye on my watch, waiting for the Tilt light to start flashing — missed deadline or faulty telex machines, on which one relied in the primitive era a quarter-century or so ago. Actually, now that it’s going on paper I do remember where he told me, and belatedly, a connection is made.

Robin started explaining about the art gallery because...

Regrettably, British journalists, Her Majesty’s Press, are a bit of a handful overseas. Some of them, anyway. Repressed individuals may become roaring boys and roaring boys morph into — you get the idea. As my first Foreign Editor told me, “You can claim ridiculous expenses, get thrown out of the country — always good for the image — abduct the women and slaughter the men. The only thing you can’t do is... fail.”

Golly, that pumped me up. Under such pressure, with sketchy knowledge of foreign languages thrown in, no wonder many of the boys (and girls, in their own ways) cut loose after the story’s filed.

All fairly harmless, if rotten diplomacy, and we always pay for breakages.

This is not a digression, honestly. Hacks need a hotel with reliable communications and your average hotel fitting that bill needs guests who won’t frighten the horses. Lottie Totty — Eastern European with a virtually all-consonants name, so that’s what she was to us — perceived a niche market allowing her to charge four-star prices for a decent boardinghouse.

It’s right behind the train station in a European capital. Lottie Totty installed half a dozen telex machines in the basement, beefed up the switchboard, dedicated ten percent of overheads to the Ministry of Posts and Communications, and did terrific business. The city was a hub or crossroads and several times a year the hacks would hurtle in, pack the Pension Whatever, and do wonders for her offshore bank account.

We’d been resident for ten days — an uprising, we were waiting for famous dissidents to flee across the border and they were fleeing in slow motion if at all. Robin Ratcliffe was ousted early on, though he slunk back frequently for fear of missing anything the rest of the pack had scavenged. Lottie shook her head until her cleavage blurred, in the course of refusing to reveal his offense.

The consensus was that it must have been incredibly violent or perverted. Lottie Totty ran — I suppose you could term it a frat house for allegedly mature adults. Our sort of guests helped themselves at the little bar and scribbled the price in an exercise book hanging on a string. You paid well over the odds for your room so what went on there was none of Lottie’s never-mind.

Then Henry Potter lost patience with our rumors. Henry’s older than God, doyen of foreign correspondents. Lottie Totty kept two adjoining rooms free on the top floor and they were Herr Potter’s Suite. The only other guest near him had been Robin Ratcliffe.

“You’re a pack of gossiping applewomen,” Henry Potter declared, three days after Robin’s expulsion. “I complained because the idiot was making such a racket that I couldn’t sleep. Snoring’s forgivable but strangled bloody screams are unacceptable when indulged in at length, nightly. Satisfied, you... children? This correspondence must now cease. The Editor.”

Some of us believed that he and Lottie were more than good friends. Possibly Robin had caught her sneaking into HP’s bower, that would do it. On the other hand, the old boy’s irritation at having his sleep ruined was convincing. Either way, the solution was disappointing. Lurid had been far more fun.

We were at the airport when Robin started edging into his account. The dissidents having refused to oblige, everyone was returning to London. Now that I think about it, his shaggy-dog story was an oblique apology for making a fool of himself at the Pension Whatever. I expect he assumed that Potter had gone into cruel detail, and Robin wanted me to put his nightmares into context. Only his nerve failed, so he just trailed away and thought his thoughts...

Six months after the Lottie Totty affair, there was a small war — little more than crockery rattled and plumage ruffled all round — but my paper is into shot and shell, so off I went. Robin Ratcliffe’s lot were eccentric enough to consider sensationalism A Bad Thing, but a deputy editor had made his bones in the region and considered it important enough to warrant coverage.

There we were, Robin, me, and a couple of thugs from the Daily Dire, out for glory and desperate to beat us and each other, the idiots. He and I took to slipping away first thing every morning and working the story together. (We’d bribed the hotel people twice over to inform us what the thugs were telling the Dire and not inform the thugs of what we’d filed. Their bribe had been inadequate, or our shared resources made it so.)

Slipping away was all very well, but misery likes company and we could have done with the thugs aboard the armoured personnel carrier when it ran into an ambush. Not even an ambush for us, that was the pig of it. Bad enough for homicidal lunatics to try killing a harmless stranger, i.e oneself. To be caught between opposing sets of organised loonies who don’t even know you’re there, stalled in a fold of desert with mortar rounds going one way and a hull-down tank’s shells replying from a quarter-mile away...

Terror turns me glumly thoughtful. At least I don’t wet myself or bite people, which I have seen happen. Robin’s reaction was strange enough to break my trance. One would swear he looked... relief wasn’t quite it, but a weight was off his shoulders. “Funny,” he mumbled, “I never thought it would be this way...”

Then he told me more about the art gallery. We all repeat ourselves at times, and he had every excuse to gabble the first thing in his head. Though he wasn’t gabbling, just thinking aloud. I didn’t stop him because the partly familiar recital provided a distraction and I willed myself to listen carefully, concentrate.

Much later — the tank went away, the mortar team ran out of ammunition or motivation, I was on the plane back to London — I realised that Robin Ratcliffe’s story had changed. Wrong word: Developed was what it had done.