Charles Ardai - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 102, No. 4 & 5. Whole No. 618 & 619, October 1993

She spoke almost flatteringly. She was also speaking unnecessarily freely considering all those TV cameras.

He said warningly, “Mebbe we should...” What? There was nowhere private to go! But she took his meaning and laughed, making a flapping gesture with her hands.

“It is all right. No witnesses. These electrical storms are sometimes convenient, hey?”

“You mean you’ve fixed it?” A light dawned. “Of course, it was you who fixed it last time, not Marco. It was your idea.”

“Of course. I guessed Marco might boast, but he’s too macho to tell it was not his initiative!”

“Why’d you need the blackout?”

“If Control had spotted a fault in Emile’s TEC circuits during the module descent, they might have aborted the landing and spoilt my plan.”

She was bloody cool, thought Dalziel. Another thought occurred to him and he said, “But weren’t the suits tested earlier in the voyage out?”

“Of those involved in the landing, yes.”

She regarded him expectantly. It was as if she wanted him to justify her decision to black out the cameras and confront him directly. Though what she hoped to gain by that..

As often happens with sight, taking his eye off a sought-after object brought it into view.

He said, “I saw the files. You and Lemarque are the same height, so your suits would be much the same. You fixed your suit at your leisure, didn’t you? You had time to do a real job on it, not this botched-up job the Yanks claimed. Then all you had to do was swap the suits. And the name strips. That’s why his was out of line. You had to do that in a hurry down in the hold. I should have remembered the smell.”

“Smell?”

“In Lemarque’s suit. That spicy smell. I thought it were a funny kind of aftershave...”

And now the memory of her spiced breath and the contents of the leather pouch in her locker came together and he said, “What was it you put in his coffee to make him pee? Dandelion juice? Used to call them piss-the-beds when I were a lad.”

“Dandelion, pansy, burdock, black briony — just a very little of the briony, it is very poisonous, very dangerous to those who do not know how to use it. When I hear he is dead, at first I thought: My God, I have used too much and killed him!”

Her face paled with the memory of shock. Dalziel scratched his nose reflectively and said, “Aye, but you did kill him, lass.”

“No!” she protested indignantly. “He dies by accident! All I do is give him a shock, make him ridiculous in front of the whole world! You must believe me, Dalziel. You must!”

She looked at him beseechingly and he said, “Must I? I’ll need to know a lot more before I can go along with that. First thing I need to know is why you wanted to electrify his goolies anyway.”

She scowled and said, “He was a rat! He turned from me to that Danish icicle. Well, that was his right. I grow tired of men too. But this rat wanted us both, he is insatiable. Even that I don’t mind. But he hid it from me and he did not hide it from her, and that I mind very much! She knew I was being tricked and found it amusing. They screw with their minds, these Scands. But it was his fault, so I decided he must be punished and this idea came. It seemed to me — what is your phrase? Poetical justice! That’s it. To pain him in the places he valued most. His vanity and his sex! But pain only, not death. You cannot laugh at a dead man, can you?”

This sounded like a clinching argument to Dalziel.

“So you’re saying it was a fault in the TEC design that killed him? But if you hadn’t interfered with it, that fault would never have shown up.”

“My interference was a possible fault, therefore it could occur, so this other fault was the real fault,” she flashed.

“Mebbe that makes sense in Spanish,” he said. “So you definitely left it looking like an accidental fault?”

“Of course! You think I am stupid?” she cried. “So what has happened? How is it you are looking for a killer? And why is Kevin accused? How can that idiot who comes with you believe such a stupidity? Kevin will prove his innocence, won’t he?”

He missed the implication of this for the moment as his mind tried to rearrange everything he knew into something he could understand. And as the picture emerged like a negative in developing fluid, his slablike face grew cold and hard as a rock on a wintry fell.

“I’d not put money on it, luv,” he said. “In fact, I’d bet that yon idiot who comes with me has probably got O’Meara’s full and frank confession in his pocket already.”

“Confession? Why should he confess?”

“I don’t know yet. But one thing’s for sure. Somehow it’ll seem a better option for him than not confessing.”

She digested this.

“You think so? Then in fact, I will be helping Kevin by keeping quiet, is that not so?”

He grinned at her ingenuity, and also at her naiveté.

“Bit late to be thinking of keeping quiet when you’ve just coughed your guts out to me, luv,” he said cheerfully.

“Coughed? Oh yes. I understand.” She smiled at him with wide-eyed innocence. “But I do not understand why you say I have coughed? There is no one here. Just you and me and the electrical storm. No witnesses.”

She gestured at the useless TV eyes.

Dalziel shook his head and showed his gums in a chimpanzee’s smile.

“Good try, luv,” he said. “But they don’t like us using a notebook and a stubby pencil anymore.”

From his breast pocket he took a flat black-plastic case with a silver grille along one edge, held it up to his ear, pressed a button, and listened to the resulting faint hiss with every appearance of satisfaction.

“That’s grand,” he said, switching off. “I was a bit worried in case the electrical storm had affected the recording quality.”

She stared at him, baffled, unsure, as he replaced the instrument in his pocket. He met her stare full on, raised his eyebrows as if to invite her comment. She moistened her lips nervously. At least it started as nervousness, but the tiny pink tongue flickering round the full red lips carried a sensual jolt like an electric shock, and when she saw his reaction, she smiled and let the tongue slowly repeat the soft moist orbit.

And then it was he heard that question for the first time.

“So, tell me, Dalziel,” she said. “What are you going to do about it?”

They were facing each other across the deck, resting against the bulkheads. If there was an up and a down on the Europa , this configuration came closest to what Dalziel thought of as “standing up.” Perhaps that’s what made him take the step.

One small step.

Indeed, hardly that. On Earth it would have been a mere shuffling of the feet, a rather nervous adjustment of a man’s weight as he wondered what the hell to do next.

Only here there was no weight to adjust, and the small forward movement of the left foot provoked a counterbalancing backward movement of the right; and as this was against the bulkhead, it caused an equal and opposite reaction, thus doubling his forward movement; and now his arms swung back to grab for support, but, finding nothing to get hold of, merely struck hard against the surface, and this energy too was translated into forward momentum.

And so it was that one small step for Dalziel became in a split second a mighty leap.

She came to meet him. In her eyes a deal had been offered and enthusiastically accepted, and she was no niggard in a bargain. There was perhaps a moment when she became aware that the thin black-plastic device spinning in the asteroid belt of clothing that soon surrounded them was not a recorder but an electric razor, but by then it was far too late to abort the blastoff. Far too late... far, far too late...