Марджери Аллингем - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 14, No. 71, October 1949

“Why?”

“I read an interview with Dr. Tamara Radanine about the Singing Diamonds.”

“Oh, that!” She laughed. “Isn’t ‘consistent structuration of the external stimulus world’ a beautiful phrase?”

“I like ‘pseudologica phantastica’ better.”

“Some boy in Navy Public Relations asked me for a statement. I gave him the sort of dope they expect from a professor. Clare was furious. She’s a Fortian.”

“Did you meet her through the Verworns?”

“I forget where I first met her. She enrolled in the summer school when she first came to New York, and soon she knew everyone on the faculty. That is, everyone she considered worth cultivating. Everyone she takes trouble with is selected for some particular reason.”

“What’s the reason here?”

“It could be Mathilde. She’s so respectable and in some subtle way Clare wouldn’t be quite respectable unless she had someone like Mathilde along. Or it could be Kurt. He’s the kind of man Clare would like to marry. His book — What Inflation Means To You — was a bestseller.”

“Perhaps he will be the lucky man.”

“I think not.”

“Any particular reason?”

“Only one. Kurt is engaged to marry me.”

Basil took another look at the young man, tall, angular, loose-jointed with a shock of sandy hair. His speech was almost aggressively American and Middlewestern. Basil recalled Mathilde’s complaint. His ideas are American, even his manners or lack of manners ...

Double doors were sliding back. A maid appeared in the doorway to announce dinner. Beyond her a long table laid with glass and silver glittered like ice in the candlelight. Basil was placed on his hostess’ right, with Tamara on the other side, Clare and Kurt opposite. His start was almost guilty when Clare’s light, rapid voice lanced across the table: “What were you two talking about so quietly on your window seat?”

He responded swiftly: “The Singing Diamonds.”

There was a sudden hush — the hush that follows a blunder. Basil went on: “All the explanations offered at the time were ingenious, yet none were true for there was one fact that none of them took into account. The fact that everyone of the six coherent witnesses who saw and heard Singing Diamonds died a few days afterward.”

This time the hush was more pronounced. Anders Verworn spoke ponderously. “You do not make that statement without factual basis?”

“I can prove it.” Basil took Mathilde’s clippings from his breast pocket. Briefly he gave them the facts. “All but Sanders were subject to asthma,” he concluded. “And, rather curiously, Sanders had an asthmatic fiancée. Three of the six had a box of candied ginger in the house, at the time. Incidentally, three of you were among those who gave the press conflicting explanations of the Singing Diamonds. I’d like to know what you think now.”

Again Anders took the floor as if he were spokesman for the whole company. “Dr. Willing, you cannot realize how shocking your revelation is to the rest of us at this table. Everyone present has promised my wife not to discuss the matter but... My dear, you will release us now, will you not?”

“Yes, of course, Anders.” Mathilde’s voice was quaking a little as she spoke.

“Briefly, Dr. Willing, my wife was one of those who saw or thought she saw the Singing Diamonds, though her story was not published. You will observe...” His voice sharpened. “... that she is very much alive.”

“But...” Clare’s voice was a little shrill. “Mathilde has asthma and she likes candied ginger.”

“Absurd!” put in Kurt. “Just coincidence, all of it.”

Tamara lifted one slanting brow, eloquently quizzical. “Kurt, my darling, and you a political economist with some knowledge of statistics and mathematical probability! Mathilde, if I were you, I should ask for police protection.”

“I am not afraid.” Mathilde spoke with dignity. “Dr. Willing is a criminologist as well as a distinguished psychiatrist.”

“Are you serious?” Kurt was studying the clippings. He took out a small notebook and a tiny gold pencil, scribbled a moment, then tore a page loose and tossed it across the table to Basil.

Deaths

Ching Fu — China — July 10

MacDonald — Montana — July 12

Mrs. Kuzak — New Jersey — July 13

Flaherty — Jackson Heights — July 14

Sanders — South Carolina — July 20

Amherst — Boston — July 21

“I cannot believe in a murderer who travels so far and so fast!” protested Kurt.

Tamara was looking over Basil’s shoulder at the timetable. “If he had a plane it would be almost possible physically — all but the hop from China to Montana. Of course it wouldn’t be psychologically possible to combine such fast travel with so many successful killings. No one could stand the strain.”

“If there were more than one killer...” Kurt was thinking aloud. “In other words, a world-wide criminal organization...”

“That also is psychologically absurd,” retorted Tamara. “Oh, I know there are criminal organizations of political fanatics but they kill politicians like Jean Jaures and Carlo Tresca. They don’t bother with Loch Ness monsters or Singing Diamonds.”

“I’m sure some people would do anything!” Clare fingered the cluster of rubies and diamonds on her left hand as if she expected “some people” to snatch it at any moment.

“That would be a job for Military Intelligence or the FBI,” said Anders. “No individual could solve such a case. You’d have to travel all over the country, question dozens of witnesses.”

“I wonder if it couldn’t be done more... academically?” suggested Basil. “By us, here, tonight. We have the main details of the six deaths from these clippings. We have also the one surviving eye-witness of Singing Diamonds, Mrs. Verworn, her family, and her closest friends. We are all used to solving problems intellectually. Perhaps we might arrive at the truth if we pooled our wits and our specialized knowledge. Suppose we try.”

Tamara laughed. “Once you identify your criminal or criminals will you catch them by such purely cerebral methods?”

“Why not? You should know, Dr. Radanine, how the guilty mind cracks under psychological pressure. Physical violence excites resistance, but once you get hold of a man by his mind, you really have him.”

“I should know? Why?”

“As a psychologist. Suppose we each volunteer a new solution of the Singing Diamonds based on these new facts. Dr. Verworn, will you begin?”

“This is fantastic!” Verworn frowned. “However... let us go into the garden for our coffee and then...”

In the starlit garden, as they sat waiting for the maid to bring coffee, Anders began. “The Singing Diamonds were not radiosondes, used to test air currents, for they must drift with the wind and these other things flew in formation. They were not planes because the one competent judge of velocity, Sanders, the pilot, said they flew at 1,500 miles per hour and even the thousand-mile-an-hour plane is still an engineer’s dream. What could fly in formation at such an impossible speed? I can think of only one thing — a radio-guided missile, fueled by atomic energy, sent here by a hostile foreign power to intimidate us. Radio-activity might kill the eye-witnesses a few days later.”

Basil’s gaze shifted. “Mrs. Albany?”

“Isn’t it just barely conceivable that it was not a foreign power that sent these things but somebody on another planet, Mars or Saturn? Anders, you told me that since radar was invented they’ve been able to pick up noises that come from outside the earth’s atmosphere. Poor old Pythagoras was right. There is a music of the spheres, only it’s modern music — just noise. Didn’t they use to believe there was something between the stars that would carry light, but not sound? Something they decided to call ether? I don’t know whether you need air for sound to travel through or not, but if you do — why, then there’s air between us and the other stars and anything that can go through air might come here from another planet — even radio-guided missiles!”