Doug Allyn - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 131, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 799 & 800, March/April 2008

It turned out to be easy to lure my selected victim to the house. He was a trusting soul. He didn’t even mind when we trimmed his hair, gave him some of my clothes to wear. He kept babbling on about “kindly people” and asking for a fag. Aileen left me to it. I knew the way the cops think in a killing. They always finger the collar of the nearest person — usually the spouse. So she had a date with Caron.

Even the killing bit was easier than I had imagined. He must have had a weak skull or something. I heard it crack with the first blow of the golf club and gave him a few more just to be on the safe side. In fact, I quite enjoyed it. I had it all worked out, wearing gloves and pressing his fingers round the stem of the murder weapon.

Careful now. I smiled. Don’t want to turn into a loony monster type of serial killer. But honestly it was fairly easy. I stepped back and peeled off my boiler suit to reveal my ordinary clothes.

Now it was important to establish my alibi.

This is how clever my wife is. She’d borrowed Mrs. Nosey Barnes’s garden shears a week before, so how easy was it for me to return them, dropping casually into the conversation that I couldn’t stop for the proffered beer because I wanted to watch Crime Watch . “Aileen’s out,” I said. I didn’t add, With a friend, having a curry to establish her alibi . “So I can watch a bit of telly in peace.”

She returned my smile nicely, without the slightest clue that she had just been used, and I wandered back to the house to fake my own murder.

We’d put my clothes on him. Now I put his in my rucksack. I would take them far away and dump them in a wheelie bin somewhere.

I’d taken the precaution of buying an awful, cheap car for cash, through the papers, and keeping the remainder of my stash of money with me. The car I’d parked round the corner, ready for my getaway.

I switched the telly on and watched the gorgeous Fiona Bruce introduce my programme. I blew her a kiss. Time for action and a bit of scene-setting. It was so easy. I simply pretended I was an actor acting out the scene. Breaking in through the back door. Plenty of noise but not too much. I didn’t want Nosey Barnes coming round to see if I was all right. Not now. It would have ruined the whole thing. I bashed the already-dead schizo a bit more, and to my ultimate grief took a swing at my most treasured possession with a number-nine iron. The thing is, there had to be the signs of a struggle. I would have struggled, so there had to be damage, so my tiger was smashed.

I know that pathologists will argue forever about the time of death. Basically, the only thing they really agree on is that time of death is sometime between the last sighting of the victim and the time of finding his or her body. I was safe on that one. Mrs. Nosey Barnes would be quick to put her oar in the stream and tell the cops that I had popped round a little before nine.

Aileen was set to stay out until a little after ten, by which time I would be seventy or so miles down the M6, so the time of death would be fixed at between nine and ten, when I had actually finished the psycho off at twenty minutes before nine. I challenge the very best pathologist in the whole wide world to pinpoint a time of death down to twenty minutes, but just to be on the safe side I’d made sure the room was warm — to slow down the rate of body cooling. Now I switched the central heating off and opened the windows.

The one thing I had absolutely no worries about was Aileen’s ability to act the part of first-on-the-scene after her husband’s terrible murder .

I had also got a pay-as-you-go mobile phone, because it would be nice to know how things were going for my “widow.” After I’d roughed the room up a bit I splashed a bit of petrol around just for good measure, set a match to it, and walked out of my house forever. Aileen and I would meet up when she’d sorted out the sale of the house, widow’s pension, insurances. See how important it is to marry a competent woman? I’d planned to move to Bolivia.

But I was forgetting a few things. Smoke rises. Fires go out. Smoke alarms go off.

I got the story from Aileen.

Mrs. Nosey Barnes from next-door heard the smoke alarm, got her husband to peer over the wall, and he saw the smoke and the broken glass well before time. He rang the emergency services, the police, the fire engine, and the ambulance.

An ambulance?

They dragged the body out. Only it wasn’t a body. Interfering paramedics felt for a bloody carotid pulse. And know what? They found one. My murder wasn’t. So they put an oxygen mask over his “my” face and with the blue light flashing screamed their way to the hospital while the fire engine dealt with the fire.

Get it so far?

And the police were tracking down my wife to tell her someone’s tried to kill her husband and burn the house down.

Same story but different backdrop.

She was supposed to be the one to find the terrible carnage. Not them. And she wasn’t meant to learn about it in the Jaipur over poppadoms and chicken jalfrezi. It was, admittedly, a help that she was with Caron, who couldn’t have reacted better, putting her hand over her mouth and saying, “They’ve got him, too.” Which was right on cue.

The kindly police took Aileen to the hospital to see her “husband.” And the psycho opened his eyes, smiled, and said, “Hello, Mrs. Arnold. I’ve got a bit of a headache.”

At which point even my wife broke down and started screaming.

Sometimes my colleagues can be smarter than you’d ever give them credit for. Porky bloody Flambard was the sausage-eating sergeant who’d been elected to drive my almost-widow to the hospital. He put his fat little arm around my beloved, sat her down in the chair, and said, “It isn’t him, is it?”

I think by then Aileen was fast approaching a gibbering wreck.

But Porky’s got a soft, greasy little voice and he persisted.

“So if it isn’t ’im, then who is it? And where is your Steve?”

When she didn’t answer, he put his podgy face right by hers. “Now then, darlin’,” he said. “You don’t want to spend the rest of your days in a nasty, cold, dirty old prison, do you? Charged with being a) an accessory to attempted murder and b) withholding information pertaining to the theft of drugs and cash from a crime scene by a serving police officer? So let’s start with the first question, shall we? Who is the geezer in the bed and how did he come to have such nasty head injuries?”

By now she was shaking all over and couldn’t have spoken if she’d wanted to.

“Mind if I take a look?” he’d said and reached inside her handbag, pulled out her mobile phone, scrolled through to “Steve,” and pressed the green button.

“Hello, Steve,” he said when I answered. “Just thought I’d let you know. Your bloke isn’t dead but currently sitting up in a hospital bed, a dirty great big bandage wrapped around his head, eating a marmalade sandwich. You couldn’t even manage a murder, could you? Now then. Why don’t you tell us where exactly you are and we’ll bring you home.”

All in all I only have one real regret. It’s my tiger. My lovely pottery tiger. Broken forever. But I reckon I’m probably safer here, in an English jail, than out there, patrolling the streets, waiting for Juan or Pedro or Sanchez to try a bit of knife practice on my back.

Agree?

© 2008 by Priscilla Masters

Memphis private eye Charlie Raines, a recurring character in a number of Tim L. Williams’s short stories, including a previous tale published by EQMM , is back this month in another morally ambiguous outing. His creator is a college professor whose work has appeared in numerous literary quarterlies, as well as in crime magazines such as Plots With Guns, Murdaland , and Red Scream .