Питер Ловси - Do Not Exceed the Stated Dose [Stories]

Copyright © 1998 by Peter Lovesey

“Because It Was There” was first published in Whydunit (Severn House) 1997;

“Bertie and the Boat Race” in Crime Through Time (Berkley) 1996;

“Bertie and the Fire Brigade” in Royal Crimes (Signet) 1994;

“Disposing of Mrs Cronk” in Perfectly Criminal (Severn House) 1996;

“The Case of the Easter Bonnet” in the Bath Chronicle , 1995;

“The Mighty Hunter” in Midwinter Mysteries 5 (Little, Brown) 1995;

“Murder in Store” in Woman’s Own , 1985;

“Never a Cross Word” in You ( Mail on Sunday ) 1995;

“The Odstock Curse” in Murder for Halloween (Mysterious Press) 1994;

“A Parrot Is Forever” in Malice Domestic 5 (Pocket Books) 1996;

“Passion Killers” in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine , 1994;

“The Proof of the Pudding” in A Classic Christmas Crime (Pavilion) 1995;

“The Pushover” in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine , 1995;

“Quiet Please — We’re Rolling” in No Alibi (Ringpull) 1995;

“Wayzgoose” in A Dead Giveaway (Warner Futura) 1995.

Are you sitting comfortably?

The appeal of a short story is that it may be read at a sitting, comfortably. In bed, bath, aircraft, cruise ship or train; waiting for one’s case to come up in court; under cover of a prayer book in church; propped up against the cornflakes packet over breakfast.

For the writer, also, compactness has attractions. Over the years I have plotted, if not written, short stories in many of the locations mentioned above. Occasionally an idea emerges from a few minutes in one memorable place. In this collection, “The Pushover” was inspired by the sunset celebration at Key West; “Bertie and the Boat Race” by a strange incident at the Henley Regatta; and “The Odstock Curse” by the sight of a gravestone on a dark day in a churchyard in Wiltshire.

To tell it to you straight, your comfort is not high in my priorities. If these stories are comfortable reading I am failing in my job. My hope is that you will find in them crimes that make your heart beat faster and twists that take your breath away. One or two at a sitting ought to be enough — which explains the title I chose.

Peter Lovesey

They are dead now, all three. Professor Patrick Storm, the last of them, went in August, aged eighty-two, of pneumonia. The obituary writers gave him the send-off he deserved, crediting him with the inspiration and the dynamism that got the new theatre built at Cambridge. The tributes were blessedly free of the snide remarks that are almost obligatory two-thirds of the way into most of the obits you read — “not over-concerned about the state of his dress” or “borrowing from friends was an art he brought to perfection.” No such smears for Patrick Storm. He was a decent man, through and through. A murderer, yes, but decent.

The press knew nothing about the murder. I don’t think anyone knew of it except me. Patrick amazed me with it over supper in his rooms a couple of years ago. He wanted the facts made public at the proper time, and asked me to take on the task. I promised to wait until six months after he was gone.

This is the story. About January, 1975, when he had turned sixty, he received a phone call. A voice he had not heard in almost forty years, so it was not surprising he was slow to cotton on. The words made a lasting impression; he gave me the conversation verbatim. I have it on tape, and I’ll reproduce it here.

“Professor Storm?”

“Yes.”

“Patrick Storm?”

“Yes.”

“Pat, late of Caius College?”

“ ‘Late’ is the operative word,” said Patrick. “I was there as an undergraduate in the nineteen-thirties.”

“You don’t have to tell me, old boy. Remember Simon Brown?”

“To be perfectly frank, no.” He didn’t care much for that over-familiar “old boy.”

“Well, you wouldn’t,” the voice at the end of the line said in the same confident manner. “I had a nickname in those days. You would have known me as ‘Cape’ — short for ‘Capability’. Does it ring a bell now?”

Patrick Storm had not cast his thoughts so far back in many years. So much had happened since, to the world, and to himself. The thirties were another age. Faintly a bell did chime in his brain. “Cape, you say. Are you a Caius man yourself?”

“The Alpine Club.”

“Oh, that.” Patrick had done some climbing in his second year at Cambridge. Not much. He hadn’t got to the Alps. The Welsh Mountains on various weekends. He didn’t remember much else. So “Cape” Brown had been one of the Alpine Club people. “It’s coming back to me. Didn’t you and I walk the Snowdon Horseshoe together, with another fellow, one Easter?”

“Climbed, old boy. Climbed. We weren’t a walking club. The other chap was Ben Tattersall, who is now the Bishop of Westbury, would you believe?”

“Is he, by Jove?”

“You remember Ben, then?”

“Certainly, I remember Ben,” said Patrick in a tone suggesting that some people had more right to be remembered than others.

Cape Brown said, “You wouldn’t have thought he’d make it to Bishop, not the Ben Tattersall I remember, telling his dirty joke about the parrot.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“The parrot who worked for the bus conductor.”

“Oh, yes,” said Patrick, pretending he remembered, not wanting to prolong this. “What prompted you to call me?”

“Old time’s sake. It’s coming up to forty years since we asked some stranger to take that black and white snapshot with Ben’s box Brownie on the summit of Snowdon. April 1st, 1936.”

“As long ago as that?”

“You, me and Ben, bless him.”

“If what you say is right, he can bless us,” Patrick heard himself quip.

Cape Brown chuckled. “You haven’t lost your sense of humour, Prof. Might have lost all your other faculties—”

“Hold on,” said Patrick. “I’m not that decrepit.”

“That’s good, because I was taking a risk, calling you up after so long. You could have had a heart condition, or chronic asthma.”

“I’ve been fortunate.”

“Looked after yourself, I’m sure?”

“Tried to stay fit, yes.”

“Excellent. And you’re not planning a trip to the Antipodes this April? You’re game for the climb?”

“The what?”

“The commemorative climb. ‘Walk’, if you insist. Don’t you remember? Standing on the top of Snowdon, we pledged to come back and do it again in another forty years. The first suggestion was fifty, but we modified it. Three old blokes of seventy might find it difficult slogging up four mountain peaks.”

Patrick had no memory of such a pledge, and said so. He had only the faintest recollection of standing on Snowdon in a thick mist.

“Ben didn’t remember either when I phoned him just now, but he doesn’t disbelieve me.”

“I’m not saying I disbelieve you...”

“That’s all right, then. Ben has all kinds of duties for the Church, but Easter is late this year, and April 1st happens to fall on a Thursday, so he thinks he can clear his diary that day. He’s reasonably fit, he tells me. Does a fair bit of fell walking in the summer. You’ll join us on the big day, won’t you?”

It would have been churlish to refuse when the bishop was going to so much trouble. Patrick said he would consult his diary, knowing already that the first week in April was clear. “Where are you suggesting we meet — if I can get there?”