Doug Allyn - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 125, No. 6. Whole No. 766, June 2005

“It’s a possibility, isn’t it?”

Mrs. Williams shrugged, and her husband leaned forward and shouted, “Yes!”

“Nobody suspected at the time that she might have come to grief?” I asked, looking now from one of them to the other. “Did the police suspect foul play?”

“I wouldn’t know that,” Mr. Williams responded reluctantly. “But I do remember my da saying that young Dai Jones had to be feeling uncomfortable. Son of Jones the newspapers, he’d been going steady with Miss Evans but she’d broke it off just before she disappeared.”

“I think I remember that, too.” He had brought me to where I wanted to be. “And I remember he married... ” I pretended to fumble for the name, and Mr. Williams supplied it.

“Gladys Lewis,” he said. “I remember my mother saying she’d got what she wanted, but that she wouldn’t have had a look-in if Megan hadn’t taken herself off. Dai worshipped the ground Megan walked on; my mother reckoned he only married Gladys because nothing really mattered to him after Megan disappeared.”

“Gladys Jones is still alive,” Mrs. Williams supplied as she poured me a second cup of tea. My hand was trembling as I took it from her. “In the Craig Bueno nursing home in Upper Bangor. Not that I’ve seen her, but I’ve a friend who visits old people’s homes with a dog for them to pat, and the Megan-Dai-and-Gladys drama’s still a local legend. No mind, I’m told, but a good appetite.”

“Gladys was terrible ugly,” Mr. Williams said. “And never a word to say for herself. Dai Jones must have been out of his mind to take so much as a second look at her. But I suppose that’s what he was, seeing he’d been so crazy for Megan. I didn’t go to his wedding, o’ course, but I remember it because of all the drama that had gone on, see?”

Mrs. Williams asked me then how I thought the Bangor of today compared with the Bangor of sixty years back, and I was happy to sit back and exchange nostalgias, having got far more than I’d hoped for.

Gladys Jones having no mind made it easy for me to present myself at the nursing home the next morning as being on a trip down memory lane and having known her as a child.

But I decided I might learn more if I didn’t help the head of the establishment out when she tried to break Gladys’s condition to me gently.

“So I’m afraid there’s no possibility of her knowing you,” she concluded. “She doesn’t know anyone.”

“Not even her own children?”

“Mrs. Jones has no children.”

I don’t know why, but something inside me rejoiced for Megan, that no other woman had carried on Dai’s line. And I was rejoicing for him, anyway, that he hadn’t lived a long life with his second choice.

“Here we are! She doesn’t walk now, but she can still give a good kick if she suddenly doesn’t like someone, or thinks they’re too close to her... So sit down here beside her, pull the chair round a bit... HERe’s SOMEONE TO SEE YOU, GLADYS! It’s a long time since she’s had a visitor. I’ll be in my office if you’d like to look in before you go.”

I wouldn’t have known Gladys. For a start she was so much smaller, her bristly dark hair was thin and white, and the aggressive teeth had gone. Her eyes, though, were still large and mournful, larger even than I remembered them in what was now her thin little face. The hands, though, hadn’t changed much, lying together in her lap. On a reflex I started to move one of mine towards them, then to my surprise drew it back.

“Hello, Gladys,” I said.

The head took a few moments to turn towards me, and there was no new expression in the eyes. “Kill her, God!” Gladys said.

“It’s Mary, Gladys. Mary Rowe. d’you remember? I used to see you in the milk bar in the High Street.”

I knew it was a total waste of time, but one can’t help trying. And now Gladys’s eyes softened, and she said, “I love you.”

I was about to make myself say, “And I love you, too, Gladys,” when she shifted in her seat and something she had round her neck swung forward. A small gold circle framed in gold scrolls, with something green gleaming in the heart of it. For a moment I was lightheaded, feeling my heart pumping in my throat. The next I had to hold my hands together, to prevent them ripping it from between her shrivelled breasts.

“She’s fallen asleep,” I lied, in the director’s office. “At least I’ve seen her. That’s a very interesting locket she’s wearing, by the way. Did she come in with it?”

“She came in with a small locked strongbox,” the director said reluctantly, looking embarrassed. “When she got bronchitis last year we thought we were going to lose her, and as she’s no family, we decided to open it. There was no key, so I’m afraid we had to force it. There were one or two other bits of jewellery, a few papers, and this locket. She seemed to have a bit of an excited reaction when she saw it, so we put it on her. Then when we tried to take it off, she got so distressed we just left it. We like to keep them as individual as possible, even if they’re unaware of it.”

“Very commendable,” I heard myself say. “Any photographs in it?”

“No. It was empty.”

No doubt emptied with a pin, it was so fiddly. I felt my eyes fill with tears.

“It is upsetting,” the director said. “It was very good of you to come.”

I thanked her and left, and left the car in the nursing home car park and went walking without deciding where I was going, the picture suddenly in my mind playing over and over: the picture of Megan pleading for her life before a pair of implacable hands. One moment they were fastening round her neck, the next they were lifting a stone for the lethal blow, the next they were pushing her down a slope. Each time they buried her.

At least I knew they couldn’t be Dai’s. Dai would never have taken her locket from her. But now there’s no BBC Light Entertainment to distract me, and I’m terribly afraid that the picture will run and run.

Even though I’ve done what I realized as I walked that I would have to do. Megan had pleaded in vain for her life, and sixty years on she was pleading with me for justice. Well, I could give her that.

So I went back to my car and drove down to the police station.

Copyright © 2005 by Eileen Dewhurst.

The African continent is featured this month in a story by Malawian Daliso Chaponda. The tale also qualifies for our Department of First Stories, as his first paid fiction (though he is an L. Ron Hubbard contest finalist). Mr. Chaponda is currently living in Canada, where he works as a comic with his own show, Black History YEAR: A Month Isn’t Enough. “My native tongue is Chichewa,” he says, “which I spoke for my first six years of life. But I write in English because years of British education gradually made that the language I am most fluent in.”

“DICTATOR DIES WHILE SITTING ON TOILET.” That was the headline. Beneath it, a full-page photo showed General Ebeso, self-proclaimed “Lion of the Savannah” and “Leader for Life,” sitting on a ceramic throne with trousers pooled around his ankles. As always, he was in full military regalia. The bullet wound in his chest was a crater in his bloated mass.

Detective Kachani leant his head back in an uninhibited laugh.

Govinda Patel’s eyes flickered dangerously behind oversized, pink-rimmed glasses. “This is funny to you? The police not take me serious?”

He pointed at the Malawi News on her counter. “I wasn’t laughing at you.” He reached for the newspaper. The photo was a grainy black-and-white. If ever there was a time when a color photograph would have been appreciated, this was it. Still, the image was sufficiently comical. Kachani mentally picked out a spot on his fridge on which to tape it. Better yet, he’d buy a frame.