Isaac Asimov - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Vol. 73, No. 3. Whole No. 424, March 1979

“He was lying. He must be the grass, stands to reason.” That was Samuel Whiskers.

“Do you wish to pass a verdict on Peter Rabbit?”

“I certainly do. Guilty.” Mrs. Tiggy-winkle’s face was grim. The scar on it pulsed red.

“How many of you agree with her? Put up your hands.” They all went up except Simpkin’s. “Simpkin?”

“I just think he made a mistake. No need to suppose anything else.”

“Then who do you think grassed on us?” Samuel Whiskers shouted. Simpkin gave one of his characteristic shrugs.

“Peter Rabbit, you have been found guilty without a single dissenting vote. Have you anything to say?”

The blond young man passed a hand through his hair in a gesture intolerably reminiscent of Charlie Ramsden, and cried out in bewilderment. “I don’t know what’s happening — this is all crazy, Hilary. You know me, you know it is.”

“No names, Peter. You know the rules,” Hilary said gently. He got up from his chair, walked over to the young man, and held out his pack of Russian cigarettes. “Let’s talk about it.”

“I’ll smoke my own.” Peter Rabbit shook one from a pack and put it in his mouth.

“Here’s a light.” Flame shot up from the long narrow lighter, and smoke came from the cigarette. Peter Rabbit looked at Hilary in total astonishment. He put a hand to his neck. The cigarette fell out of his mouth. He dropped to the floor.

Simpkin stood up. Somebody gave a cry, sharply cut off. Hilary giggled and held up the lighter.

“I got it from one of the NLG boys. An ordinary lighter, you’ve seen me using it. But if you press a button at the bottom a dart comes out.” He pressed it and a tiny thing, hardly thicker than a needle, buried itself in Peter Rabbit’s body. “Very effective.”

“Nobody said kill him,” Samuel Whiskers said.

“The verdict was yours. There was only one possible sentence.”

“But he’d been in the group as long as me, as long as any of us.”

“There are no medals for long service.” Hilary gave his acid smile. “This door leads to a chute that will deposit Peter Rabbit in the Thames. If one of you will give me a hand, we can dispose of our grass. Then I suggest that we sit down and consider some new plans for raising the necessary cash to bring Mr. McGregor over here.”

Simpkin helped him out with the body. They stood together while it slid down the chute and vanished. When they returned, an obituary on Peter Rabbit was pronounced by Mrs. Tiggy-winkle.

“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” she said.

Just after three o’clock on the following afternoon Simpkin, whose name was Bill Gray, entered an office block in Shaftesbury Avenue, took the lift up to the third floor, and went through a frosted-glass door lettered Inter-European Holidays, Travel Consultants. He nodded to the girl in reception and walked down a corridor to a room at the end. There, in a small office with three telephones in it, including one with a direct line to Giles Ravelin, he found Jean Conybeare and Derek Johnson — alias Pigwig and Pigling Bland — waiting for him.

“My God, what a shambles,” Derek said.

“Macabre.” Jean shivered. “He enjoyed it, that Hilary Mannering. He’s a real creep.”

“It was a bad scene,” Derek went on. “If it hadn’t been for Jean here, I don’t know what might have happened. ‘He was in bed with me, had been all evening,’ ” he said, falsetto. “Wonderful.”

“You provided the clincher, Derek, with that story about meeting him in the street.”

Derek Johnson shook his head. “Poor bloody Peter Rabbit, it was a clincher for him all right. It was just his bad luck, Bill, that he saw you coming out of that room with Ravelin and Scott.”

Bill Gray was at his desk looking through papers about Operation Wolfhunt. Now he looked up. “No need for tears. He was just an upper-class twit who got himself mixed up with a gang of thugs.”

“Mannering isn’t a thug, he’s a psychopath,” Jean said. “The pleasure he took in using that lighter — I hate to be in the same room with him.” She asked curiously, “Did you know he’d seen you at Morton’s?”

“I was afraid he might have.”

“So what would you have done if I’d not come up with that story?”

“Shot it out. But that would have wrecked the operation.”

“Mannering should be in a padded cell.”

“No argument. But let me remind you that if we take in his crackpot Beatrix Potter Brigade we lose a chance of catching the Wolf. That’s the object of the operation, remember? Now, we couldn’t let them get away with kidnaping a Duke’s son, though I was able to make sure everybody got clear. They still have to raise funds to get the Wolf over here, and we’ve got to help.”

They waited. Bill Gray’s catlike features were intent, he might have been about to pounce. “I think this is going to come best from you, Derek. You’ve got a friend who’s a watchman in a bank in Cheapside. He’ll provide duplicate keys. There’s wads of money in the vaults. We knock out the watchman and pay him off, collect the cash. The money will be slush, but they won’t need to use much of it until they pay out the Wolf, and I’ll put the word around so that in the meantime anything they use will be honored.

“We’ll talk about the details, Derek, after I’ve set it up. Then you can go to Mannering and talk about it. The Wolf’s said to be in the Argentine at the moment, but he’s in touch with an NLG man there and we have some contacts with him. When he knows that his fee’s going to be paid he’ll come over.”

“And until then?”

A smile touched Bill Gray’s face and was gone like winter sunshine. “Until then we’re waiting for Mr. McGregor.”

Nick Velvet, the unique thief — and in a sense, the unique detective. As a thief, Nick steals only the valueless, the worthless — “never money or jewels or art treasures” — and for a minimum fee of $20,000 (inflation has not yet reared its ugly head). But to be a successful thief it is usually necessary for Nick to solve a mystery, thus becoming a detective with a unique purpose — a detective whose aim is not to mend the law but to break it.

In his newest caper-case Nick is hired to steal a copy of yesterday’s newspaper — and usually there is nothing so dead (worthless) as yesterday’s newspaper. But then there was the mystery to solve: why should a copy of yesterday’s newspaper be worth $20,000?...

Nick Velvet slid a stack of chips across the green felt of the roulette table on the top floor of London’s Playboy Club and waited for the wheel to be spun by a pert blonde girl with long legs and perfect teeth.

“So much, Nicky?” Gloria asked cautiously at his side.

“I’ve a hunch black is due to come up.”

But as the girl spun the wheel, Nick’s attention was distracted by a stout man on his right. The man thrust something into his hand and when Nick looked down he saw it was a check drawn on a London bank in an amount approximately equal to twenty thousand American dollars. It was payable to Nick Velvet and signed by someone named Felix Poland. “That’s better than a calling card,” Nick commented.

“I thought so,” the man said with a smile. His eyes were deep and alert, though the wrinkles around them hinted at an age past 50. “You see my name there. May we talk business?”

“It would be a pleasure, Mr. Poland.”

Gloria was tugging at his sleeve. “Nicky, we won!”