Эрик Эмблер - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 9, No. 42, May 1947

But her attitude had always bewildered him, her quick changes of mood. He had been surprised this morning when she prepared to work in the studio and came impatiently to ask if he was ready to pose. He had gazed at her, thinking that he would rather not sit another day staring at the high light on the faun, that he would rather not sit for his bust at all, and he had said, “Let’s skip it, Elaine.”

“Skip it? Why? I have a very good start, Edward.”

“I don’t feel so well, Elaine. I have a headache.”

She had come a step nearer him. “It will be restful just to sit there and relax. We’ll rest every five minutes, if you like.”

“But I simply don’t feel up to it, Elaine.”

She had examined him with hard, impersonal eyes, and there had been a strange authority in her bearing. All she had said was, “Please, Edward,” and he had shrugged his shoulders and followed her into the studio.

But now he thought uneasily that at some point in recent weeks their relationship had been reversed: he had taken the defensive and she had become increasingly dominant.

He stared morosely at the bronze faun, thinking that he must escape, he must free his brain of this absorbing doubt. If he was to be charged with prying, why not pry in earnest? Why not find out for himself? Go out to the cemetery and find out. Through the hours of posing he had become excited about it, and there was an anxious urgency in his mind that made him restless, unable to sit still.

“Time for rest,” Elaine said. “I’ll finish it by dark.”

“Finish it? Finish what?”

“The bust, of course.”

“Finish it this afternoon?”

“Edward, what’s the matter with you? Of course.”

“Nothing,” Edward said. “Nothing at all.” But he had a sense of dread. He could not wait; he must go at once. He could not wait for the bust to be finished. He said, “Elaine, I feel terrible. I’m going for a walk. Got to have some fresh air. I’ll be back in no time.”

He fled from the studio, caught up his hat in the hall. He found a taxicab at the corner and almost shouted, “Grand Central Terminal.”

On the train he was nervous and could not relax. As the afternoon sun sank lower he thought of Elaine in the studio, waiting beside the head of clay, the bust that would never be finished. Never, never be finished. Let her wait in the fading light of the studio with the shadows lengthening the planes of her face, he thought, until eternity. Maybe he was crazy, maybe he should have seen a psychiatrist, but he was determined that the bust would never be completed.

It was a quiet town and a golden glow lay over it as the sun’s rays slanted from just above the hills of the horizon. The caretaker was a strong old man with faded, incurious eyes and an irritating manner of deliberating over each word.

“The Peters plot? Don’t know it. Oh, Mrs. Edward Peters. Yes, Mrs. Rice that used to be. Just follow that path until you come to a big marble cross with the name Cowan on it. Turn right and the plot is along by the hedge, with dogwood around it.”

The Cowan cross loomed against the sunset sky. Edward turned right on the paved walk, his heels ringing loud in the graveyard. There ahead was the tall green hedge, to the left the grove of dogwood. He turned aside on a gravel path and came to a gladelike plot where the grass was very green and saw what he had come to see.

There were four niches and four urns, and looking down on the dark green grass in the shadowy gloom of dusk were the four heads of the four men, modeled in massive, brooding planes and cast in bronze.

They were here as Edward had known they would be, and he shivered, thinking that here bloomed asphodel, the pale flower of the dead, where souls unbodied dwelt, and was this an act of innocent sentiment or a monument to death? Why had they died and how?

He glanced fearfully around and knew that he would never learn the truth. He would never go back and there would be no fifth bust here amid the dogwood.

Then he walked gently forward over the turf toward the ashes of the previous four, to read the name of the man in between.