Keep The Giraffe Burning (13 page)

The young lady, a beautiful blonde with a black eye, seemed too frightened to speak. Next came Claude Elliott, the millionaire playboy, attired in his customary black evening wear, a monocle twinkling in his eye. ‘I say, old sport,’ he drawled, ‘d’you think you could do anything about it? Someone seems to have kidnapped Pater. His entire private car has vanished from its train. Deucedly awkward, what?’ Young Elliott expected no answer to this question.

‘’Scuse me, mistah Wort’,’ said a jockey, ducking into view from behind Elliott’s scarlet-lined cape. ‘Honeymarch has been heisted!’

‘Honeymarch stolen!’ echoed the astonished shamus. This famous filly had won many times her weight in gold, as had her sire, My White Dream, which Fenton had earlier saved from doping in –

‘The Case of the Mona Lisa Moth,’ breathed Bozo.

‘Exactly,’ Fenton said. ‘Get rid of some of these people – all of them, Bozo. I want to do some hard thinking.’

Bozo gently but firmly pushed them all from the library: the debutante and the B-girl, the Brovnian ambassador and the gum-chewing taxi driver, the business tycoon and the spirit medium, the jockey, the playboy, the cop and the black-eyed blonde.

‘In “The Case of the Oddest Occurrence”,’ Fenton mused, ‘the trick was to make it seem as if the victim were dead before he really was. The killer got him into a room and drugged him, and managed to get the room locked. Then he feigned alarm, convinced us there was something afoot, and broke the door down to get in. He rushed in ahead of us, I recall, exclaiming at the (fictitious) sight of the victim’s throat, cut from ear to ear. And even while he was exclaiming, he was cutting that throat – an instant before the rest of us saw it!’

‘It was another kettle of fish sir,’ said Bozo, ‘in the case you called “Murder Galore”.’

‘True enough, Bozo. In that, as in many cases, the ruse was to get the rest of us believing the victim to be still alive, when he had already been done to death. In the case you mention, this was accomplished by means of a phonographic recording of the victim’s voice. Other cases involved the use of mirrors, disguises, death-masks and even ventriloquism. Yet
The Locked Room
is not one of this type.

‘Nor does it resemble the more bizarre cases, such as “The Wrong Hotel Room Mystery”, or the simpler ones, such as “The Case of the Gunsel’s Gardenia”. In the former the whole plot hinged upon an elaborate switch of door number plates; in the latter, the killer only
pretended
the door was locked, and held it shut as he feigned battering it
open.’

Bozo withdrew, and the celebrated crime-solver locked and bolted the door. There remained only the pages of the final chapter to be cut, but he could not yet bring himself to break their seal. Surely he could guess the ending in advance of reading it! Surely, in all his experience, there must be one case relevant to solving this tangle.

Yet he had covered all categories: the secret passage or panel; the string-locked door; the ice bullet; and so on. There remained for consideration only one case, the strange ‘Case of the Parched Adjutant’.

The Case of the Parched Adjutant

Another Fenton Worth Mystery

The victim was a retired military gentleman of sober and regular habits, an ardent anti-vivisectionist. He spent several hours each day in his study, writing his memoirs and anti-vivisection pamphlets, or perhaps just gazing out over the vast heath of which his window commanded an excellent prospect. When he was not writing, he could generally be found upon that heath, strolling and meditating. He had no relatives living, very little money, and a devoted housekeeper who was a chimpanzee.

On the day in question a circus had pitched on the heath, and the adjutant had, according to the housekeeper, gone to see it – for the second time. Worried at his absence, she finally called the police and Fenton Worth. No one at the circus had seen him. In the search of the house, they broke in the door of his study.

The study had only one door, to which the adjutant had the only key, and its only window was inaccessible. The furniture consisted of a desk, a chair and a sofa. The adjutant was found lying on the sofa, strangled to death – with finger marks clear on his throat – and oddly parched. The door key was in his pocket.

The study window was open, but Fenton soon proved that it was inaccessible, for it lay forty feet above a mire of wet sand. This mire would neither support a ladder nor any climbing device, and its unbroken surface indicated that nothing had come within a hundred feet of the house on that side. It was further impossible to lower oneself from the roof by a rope, for the roof was made of treacherous rotten thatching – which likewise had not been disturbed.

A great deal of suspicion fell upon the housekeeper, as the adjutant’s only heir. But an examination of the corpse, together with evidence from the adjutant’s pamphlets and memoirs, established the true circumstances, as Fenton explained:

The adjutant had been strangled at the circus, bundled into a cannon, and fired through the window to land upon the sofa. This was confirmed by the parching, and powder burns on the corpse’s feet. Certain details in the adjutant’s memoirs and pamphlets showed that he had uncovered a vicious vivisection racket running behind the scenes at the circus, and was about to subject this sordid business to the light of public scrutiny. On his first visit to the circus, he had recognized an old enemy, an ex-Nazi
artillery officer notorious during the war for his torture of animals, chiefly puppies and kittens. The adjutant’s discovery of what the lions were fed completed his inquiry; the rest was duck soup, as he’d have said.

Confronted with this evidence, the Human Cannonball broke down and confessed, sobbing in half-coherent German.

‘Hmmm,’ said Fenton. ‘Even that case doesn’t help me here. Maybe I should re-read the novel, to see what clues I’ve missed.’ The well-known peeper leafed back through the book.

‘Say, here’s an anomaly!’ he exclaimed. ‘The author tells us on page one the door is locked, and here on page three it so manifestly isn’t! What can be the explanation of that?’

Suddenly the world-famed private eye sat bolt upright. ‘Aha! The author says the door is locked,
but we have only his word for it.
The pieces of the jigsaw are beginning to fall into place, now. The author may in fact have
staged
the entire murder to make money from his own fictionalization of it! So the name of the killer must be –’

But the publicly-acclaimed private investigator will never name me. He’ll be found tomorrow morning, stabbed to death, in a room locked from the inside. The
kriis
will have vanished.

Thus begins my novel of detection, another Fenton Worth Mystery.

He took another look. This time he could see, on a shelf just inside the cabinet door, a tiny Zodiac arrangement: A circle divided into twelve sectors, each marked with symbols. He named them: bas, go, fen, dup, dor, pag, ut, lar, cav, mun-bas, bas-bas and go-bas. Odd, their having a naming system that used repetitions. The almanac didn’t explain. They must have begun by naming something with fewer members – their eyes? – and then lazily, they’d transferred this system to everything. What the almanac was clear about was how it worked: The planet was supposed to make one half-turn each time this small brass arrow made one complete turn. No sense again. And the longer arrow ran through the Zodiac for every sector-movement of the small arrow – what a system! How did they ever manage to keep the planet revolving smoothly, as if running on the same think brass gears … not to mention a complete new moon, to be constructed every lar-go Zodiacs. No need to look further for an explanation of why they were extinct. Probably just ran out of money, as did so many human races. He noticed the arrows moving on into the sector ‘cocktail hour’. That meant resetting his own Zodiac and

He took another look. In the middle distance stood a man looking at something reflected in a mirror. A dotted line ran from his triangular eye to the minor and bounced to the far corner, where a breathing woman stood feeding the second dog. The first dog was gigantic. Perspective lines connected her nose, ear, collar with those of a tiny personoid near the horizon line. The man with the mirror was forming symbols overhead, words, he was counting backwards. He counted the breaths of the woman: dup, fen, go, bas … and at mun, she sank into the nearer part of the landscape. The dotted line swept and swept over the trees, hills, rayed sun, the half-eaten dog, but it failed to find her new location. Folding his mirror, the man shrank, flying back to the other far corner, where a cat waited to be fed.

He took another look. The experiment required him to stand perfectly still while a No. 13 bus rumbled downhill towards him. He drove the bus down the worn ruts, straight at the rigid figure (now it was not surprising that, as he moved forward in time, he moved forward, and the figure grew larger), while behind him passengers began to complain. ‘I could have walked faster than this,’ he said, peering over the driver’s shoulder. ‘Look at that crazy bastard looking at us.’ ‘I know what you mean,’ he replied. The passenger ahead of him had picked his parachute to pieces – nerves, it hit a lot of them that way – and any moment, someone would mention the meals. ‘And the meals they serve,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t feed those to an animal.’ ‘Who wouldn’t feed an animal?’ He couldn’t hear what those ahead of him were talking about, but he could see them nodding. ‘What
was that? Did we hit something?’ ‘A dog?’ They were all talking at once. ‘Is this my stop?’ he asked, peering out the rear window. The whorls were unfamiliar, but the fort must be around here somewhere. He climbed down and watched the bus dust its way on down the hill, towards him. As it came closer he could see the grim driver, the excited passengers … he recalled the old trick: Look at the tyre treads, fix on them, look well into the herringbone pattern. As each pair of rubber rectangles hit the road, they squeeze up a tiny pinch of dirt between them. As the wheel turns on, they’re released, they spring apart and puff the dirt into the air. ‘What’s he standing there looking at?’

He took another look. The encyclopedia (yes, another book – dusty books were all that remained of their strange race. There were times when he might have preferred a collection of stuffed reptiles, or an album of rare envelopes. It pleased him to think that they who made these books were now a part of the dust upon their pages) had prepared him for his encounter in the park. The girl would be waiting for him at A, the ice-cream vendor at B, the murderer with the bicycle at C. If he visited the girl or the ice-cream vendor first, the murderer would, as the encyclopedia put it, ‘eliminate the other option’. But he could visit the murderer first, steal his bicycle, and pedal to loci A and B both, before the murderer could reach either locus on foot. As usual in such decisions, the greatest risk is attached to the greatest benefit. The problem seemed to involve every aspect of their primitive science: ‘entropy’ (the ice-cream was melting, the girl dying); criminology (the murderer very likely had a knife or a garrotte); geometry (the three points formed a triangle on a surface of unknown shape); even gyroscopic principles (he did not know how to ride a bicycle). On the shelf below the encyclopedia was a small mound of clay; looking closer, he saw that a tiny lay figure had climbed up on it and was about to speak. The lay figure opened his mouth and taught, saying: ‘The kingdom of the next shelf is not like the kingdom of this shelf. The kingdom of the next shelf is like a ball-point pen that traces its own shadow. And when all the shadow is traced, the point is retracted, and the pen is clipped into a shirt pocket and forgotten. But the tracing is not forgotten.’

He looked again, taking a closer look at the book of fables, open on the polished oak table for anyone to see. Fables! Wasn’t that like the human race, to waste their time on fables, when death rose like flying dust all about them. He knew now his own function, a useless robot, destined to keep opening the cabinet of himself and taking another look. But what use were fables, when silence, all through the fort, told him that this planet held no life. How did they all die? He wasn’t sure about death, it wasn’t as clear as life. Some may have died skewered by the black lines of bullets across the page, or some torn and tumbled by the jagged edges of explosions, red and orange with radial lines around the large red
BLAM!
Could any number of fat books of fables now bring them back for his inspection? He doubted it, even as he stepped forward to inspect the Table of Contents. It was almost completely blank by now, with the two
remaining fables huddled at the bottom of the page, barely breathing. Turning quickly to the bayonet bookmark, he read T
HE
E
MU
, T
HE
A
UK AND THE
P
ASSENGER
P
IGEON:
‘One day the emu, the auk and the passenger pigeon were arguing about the meaning of life. The passenger pigeon was easily the most clever, and the other two were finally struck speechless by the brilliance of his argument. Then, just as he spread his wings to make a final dramatic point, the pigeon slipped, fell over, struck his head on the fender, and died. “Pity,” said the Great Auk. “Last of his kind, wasn’t he?” “I think he had a wife somewhere,” replied the emu. “But they haven’t been living together for years. Still, we’ll never see his like again. What an argument!” The Great Auk preened. “Oh, I don’t know. There’s such a thing as being too smart for your own good.”’ The next story, T
HE
F
OX AND THE
E
RASER
, was fading fast. ‘One day a fox, finding a vain and idle eraser, decided to play a trick on the slow-witted object. “Can you erase
anything
?” he asked. “Of course I can.” “Then how about erasing this fable?” “Nothing easier. If I can’t erase this fable, I’ll give you anything you like – my daughter’s hand in marriage.” “Agreed,” said the wily ox, and the era immediately busied himself with the able. In nc tim at al, th e hd cmpltly obltrtd evrythng but –’ The blank page was thinner, and the whole book seemed to be wearing away to dust. Erasers have a terrible way, he recalled, of working at pictures as well as words. The shine vanished from the oak, and the oak from the fort, and the fort from the terrible silence, as he took another look.