A Moment on the Edge:100 Years of Crime Stories by women by Elizabeth George
So I had to be sick enough to provide myself with an alibi but not sick enough to keep Laura at home. On the Wednesday morning I was feeling a good deal better. Dr. Lawson looked in on his way back from his rounds in the afternoon and pronounced, after a thorough examination, that I still had
phlegm on my chest. While he was in the bathroom washing his hands and doing something with his stethoscope, I held the thermometer he had stuck in my mouth against the radiator at the back of the bed. This worked better than I had hoped, worked, in fact, almost too well. The mercury went up to a hundred and three, and I played up to it by saying in a feeble voice that I felt dizzy and kept alternating between the sweats and the shivers.
“Keep him in bed,” Dr. Lawson said, “and give him plenty of warm drinks. I doubt if he could get up if he tried.”
I said rather shamefacedly that I had tried and I couldn’t and that my legs felt like jelly. Immediately Laura said she wouldn’t go out that night, and I blessed Lawson when he told her not to be silly. All I needed was rest and to be allowed to sleep. After a good deal of fussing and self-reproach and promises not to be gone more than two hours at the most, she finally went off at seven.
As soon as the car had departed, I got up. Brenda’s house could be seen from my bedroom window, and I saw that she had lights on but no porch light. The night was dark, moonless and starless. I put trousers and a sweater on over my pajamas and made my way downstairs.
By the time I was halfway down I knew that I needn’t have pretended to be ill or bothered with the thermometer ploy. I was ill. I was shivering and swaying, great waves of dizziness kept coming over me, and I had to hang on to the banisters for support. That wasn’t the only thing that had gone wrong. I had intended, when the deed was done and I was back home again, to cut up my coat and gloves with Laura’s electric scissors and burn the pieces on our living room fire. But I couldn’t find the scissors and I realized Laura must have taken them with her to her dressmaking session. Worse than that, there was no fire alight. Our central heating was very efficient and we only had an open fire for the pleasure and coziness of it, but Laura hadn’t troubled to light one while I was upstairs ill. At that moment I nearly gave up. But it was then or never. I would never again have such
circumstances and such an alibi. Either kill her now, I thought, or live in an odious ménage à trois for the rest of my life.
We kept the raincoats and gloves we used for gardening in a cupboard in the kitchen by the back door. Laura had left only the hall light on, and I didn’t think it would be wise to switch on any more. In the semi-darkness I fumbled about in the cupboard for my raincoat, found it and put it on. It seemed tight on me, my body was so stiff and sweaty, but I managed to button it up, and then I put on the gloves. I took with me one of our kitchen knives and let myself out by the back door. It wasn’t a frosty night, but raw and cold and damp.
I went down the garden, up the lane and into the garden of Brenda’s cottage. I had to feel my way round the side of the house, for there was no light there at all. But the kitchen light was on and the back door unlocked. I tapped and let myself in without waiting to be asked. Brenda, in full evening rig, glittery sweater, gilt necklace, long skirt, was cooking her solitary supper. And then, for the first time ever, when it didn’t matter any more, when it was too late, I felt pity for her. There she was, a handsome, rich, gifted woman with the reputation of a seductress, but in reality as destitute of people who really cared for her as poor old Peggy Daley had been; there she was, dressed for a party, heating up tinned spaghetti in a cottage kitchen at the back of beyond.
She turned round, looking apprehensive, but only, I think, because she was always afraid when we were alone that I would try to make love to her.
“What are you doing out of bed?” she said, and then, “Why are you wearing those clothes?”
I didn’t answer her. I stabbed her in the chest again and again. She made no sound but a little choking moan and she crumpled up on the floor. Although I had known how it would be, had hoped for it, the shock was so great and I had already been feeling so swimmy and strange, that all I wanted was to throw myself down too and close my eyes and sleep. That was impos
sible. I turned off the cooker. I checked that there was no blood on my trousers and my shoes, though of course there was plenty on the raincoat, and then I staggered out, switching off the light behind me.
I don’t know how I found my way back, it was so dark and by then I was lightheaded and my heart was drumming. I just had the presence of mind to strip off the raincoat and the gloves and push them into our garden incinerator. In the morning I would have to get up enough strength to burn them before Brenda’s body was found. The knife I washed and put back in the drawer.
Laura came back about five minutes after I had got myself to bed. She had been gone less than half an hour. I turned over and managed to raise myself up to ask her why she was back so soon. It seemed to me that she had a strange distraught look about her.
“What’s the matter?” I mumbled. “Were you worried about me?”
“No,” she said, “no,” but she didn’t come up close to me or put her hand on my forehead. “It was—Isabel Goldsmith told me something—I was upset—I…It’s no use talking about it now, you’re too ill.” She said in a sharper tone than I had ever heard her use, “Can I get you anything?”
“I just want to sleep,” I said.
“I shall sleep in the spare room. Good night.”
That was reasonable enough, but we had never slept apart before during the whole of our marriage, and she could hardly have been afraid of catching the flu, having only just got over it herself. But I was in no state to worry about that, and I fell into the troubled nightmare-ridden sleep of fever. I remember one of those dreams. It was of Laura finding Brenda’s body herself, a not unlikely eventuality.
However, she didn’t find it. Brenda’s cleaner did. I knew what must have happened because I saw the police car arrive from my window. An hour or so later Laura came in to tell me the news which she had got from Jack Williamson.
“It must have been the same man who killed Peggy,” she said.
I felt better already. Things were going well. “My poor darling,” I said, “you must feel terrible, you were such close friends.”
She said nothing. She straightened my bedclothes and left the room. I knew I should have to get up and burn the contents of the incinerator, but I couldn’t get up. I put my feet out and reached for the floor, but it was as if the floor came up to meet me and threw me back again. I wasn’t over-worried. The police would think what Laura thought, what everyone must think.
That afternoon they came, a chief inspector and a sergeant. Laura brought them up to our bedroom and they talked to us together. The chief inspector said he understood we were close friends of the dead woman, wanted to know when we had last seen her and what we had been doing on the previous evening. Then he asked if we had any idea at all as to who had killed her.
“That maniac who murdered the other woman, of course,” said Laura.
“I can see you don’t read the papers,” he said.
Usually we did. It was my habit to read a morning paper in the office and to bring an evening paper home with me. But I had been at home ill. It turned out that a man had been arrested on the previous morning for the murder of Peggy Daley. The shock made me flinch and I’m sure I turned pale. But the policemen didn’t seem to notice. They thanked us for our co-operation, apologized for disturbing a sick man, and left. When they had gone I asked Laura what Isabel had said to upset her the night before. She came up to me and put her arms round me.
“It doesn’t matter now,” she said. “Poor Brenda’s dead and it was a horrible way to die, but—well, I must be very wicked—but I’m not sorry. Don’t look at me like that, darling. I love you and I know you love me, and we must forget her and be as we used to be. You know what I mean.”
I didn’t, but I was glad whatever it was had blown over.
wife. Even though Laura was beside me that night, I hardly slept for worrying about the stuff in that incinerator. In the morning I put up the best show I could of being much better. I dressed and announced, in spite of Laura’s expostulations, that I was going into the garden. The police were there already, searching all our gardens, actually digging up Brenda’s.
They left me alone that day and the next, but they came in once and interviewed Laura on her own. I asked her what they had said, but she passed it off quite lightly. I supposed she didn’t think I was well enough to be told they had been enquiring about my movements and my attitude towards Brenda.
“Just a lot of routine questions, darling,” she said, but I was sure she was afraid for me, and a barrier of her fear for me and mine for myself came up between us. It seems incredible but that Sunday we hardly spoke to each other and when we did Brenda’s name wasn’t mentioned. In the evening we sat in silence my arm round Laura, her head on my shoulder, waiting, waiting…
The morning brought the police with a search warrant. They asked Laura to go into the living room and me to wait in the study. I knew then that it was only a matter of time. They would find the knife, and of course they would find Brenda’s blood on it. I had been feeling so ill when I cleaned it that now I could no longer remember whether I had scrubbed it or simply rinsed it under the tap.
After a long while the chief inspector came in alone.
“You told us you were a close friend of Miss Goring’s.”
“I was friendly with her,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. “She was my wife’s friend.”
He took no notice of this. “You didn’t tell us you were on intimate terms with her, that you were, in point of fact, having a sexual relationship with her.”
Nothing he could have said would have astounded me more.
“That’s absolute rubbish!”
“Is it? We have it on sound authority.”
“What authority?” I said. “Or is that the sort of thing you’re not allowed to say?”
“I see no harm in telling you,” he said easily. “Miss Goring herself informed two women friends of hers in London of the fact. She told one of your neighbors she met at a party in your house. You were seen to spend evenings alone with Miss Goring while your wife was ill, and we have a witness who saw you kissing her good night.”
Now I knew what it was that Isabel Goldsmith had told Laura which had so distressed her. The irony of it, the irony…Why hadn’t I, knowing Brenda’s reputation and knowing Brenda’s fantasies, suspected what construction would be put on my assumed friendship with her? Here was motive, the lack of which I had relied on as my last resort. Men do kill their mistresses, from jealousy, from frustration, from fear of discovery.
But surely I could turn Brenda’s fantasies to my own use?
“She had dozens of men friends, lovers, whatever you like to call them. Any of them could have killed her.”
“On the contrary,” said the chief inspector, “apart from her ex-husband who is in Australia, we have been able to discover no man in her life but yourself.”
I cried out desperately, “I didn’t kill her! I swear I didn’t.”
He looked surprised. “Oh, we know that.” For the first time he called me sir. “We know that, sir. No one is accusing you of anything. We have Dr. Lawson’s word for it that you were physically incapable of leaving your bed that night, and the raincoat and gloves we found in your incinerator are not your property.”
Fumbling in the dark, swaying, the sleeves of the raincoat too short, the shoulders too tight…“Why are you wearing those clothes?” she had asked before I stabbed her.
“I want you to try and keep calm, sir,” he said very gently. But I have never been calm since. I have confessed again and again, I have written statements, I have expostulated, raved, gone over with them every detail of what I did that night, I have wept.
Then I said nothing. I could only stare at him. “I came in here to you, sir,” he said, “simply to confirm a fact of which we were already certain, and to ask you if you would care to accompany your wife to the police station where she will be charged with the murder of Miss Brenda Goring.”
Sweet Baby Jenny
JOYCE HARRINGTON
Joyce Harrington, a former actress who follows theatrical tradition in keeping her exact age a secret, started strong as a writer of crime fiction. Her very first short story, “The Purple Shroud” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, September 1972), won the Edgar award. Edward
D. Hoch, writing in St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (fourth edition, 1996) called the story “a quiet tale of a summer art instructor and the wife he has betrayed, building into a murder story of understated terror. Harrington’s second story, “The Plastic Jungle,” is even better—a macabre tale of a girl and her mother living in today’s plastic society.”
Born in Jersey City, New Jersey, Harrington was trained for theater at the Pasadena Playhouse. She told EQMM she had held many jobs for many employers “from a doorknob factory to the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps’; she later had a successful career in advertising and public relations.
Harrington has written three remarkably varied and well-received novels—No One Knows My Name (1980), a theatrical whodunnit; Family Reunion (1982), a variant on the modern gothic; and Dreemz of the Night (1987), with a rarely-exploited background of graffiti as art—but she remains best known as a short-story writer. Though her stories have not been collected to date, she is a master of the crime short who bears comparison with Roald Dahl and Stanley Ellin. One of her attributes is the ability to write in a variety of styles, including the rural dialect narrative of “Sweet Baby Jenny.”
Inever had a mother, leastways not one that I can remember. I must have had one sometime, ’cause as far as I can tell I didn’t hatch out from no egg. And even chicks get to snuggle up under the hen for a little space before she kicks them out of the nest. But I didn’t have no hen to snuggle up to, or to peck me upside the head if I did something wrong. Not that I would ever do anything wrong. Leastways not if I knowed it was wrong. There are lots of things that go on that are pure puzzlement to me, and I can’t tell the right from the wrong of it. For instance, I recollect when Ace—that’s my biggest big brother and the one who taken care of us all after Pop went away—I recollect when he used to work driving a beer truck round to all the stores in town and the root cellar used to be full of six-packs all the time. I said to him one day, “Ace, how come if you got the cellar full of beer, I can’t have the cellar full of Coke-Cola? I don’t like beer.” Guess I was about nine or ten years old at the time and never could get my fill of Coke-Cola. Well, Ace, he just laughed and said, “Sweet Baby Jenny”—that’s what they all called me even after I was well growed up—“Sweet Baby Jenny, if I drove a Coke-Cola truck you could float away to heaven on an ocean of it. Now, just drink your beer and learn to like it.” I wasn’t ever dumb, even though I didn’t do so good in school, so it didn’t take much figuring to catch onto the fact that Ace was delivering almost as much beer to the root cellar as he was to Big Jumbo’s Superette down on Main Street. So it didn’t seem fair when I got caught in the five-and-dime with a lipstick in my pocket for him to come barreling down and given me hellfire and damnation in front of that suet-faced manager. I just stood there looking at him with pig-stickers in my eyes until we got out to the truck and I said to him, “What’s the difference between one teensyweensy lipstick and a cellar full of beer?”
He says to me, grinning, “Is that a riddle?”
And I says, “No, I would surely like to know.”
And he says, “The difference, Sweet Baby Jenny, is that you got caught.”
Now I ask you.
It was different, though, when he got caught. Then he cussed and swore and kicked the porch till it like to fallen off the house all the while the boys from the beer company was hauling that beer up from the root
And he says, “Dammit, Jenny, they taken away my beer. I don’t give a hoot about the job, it was a jackass job anyway, but I worked hard for that beer and they didn’t ought to taken it away.”
“But, Ace,” I says, hanging onto his hand and swinging it like a jumping rope, “ain’t it true you stolen that beer and you got caught and you had to give it back just like I did with that lipstick?”
Well, he flung me away from him till I fetched up against the old washing machine that was resting in the yard waiting for somebody to fix it, and he yelled, “I ain’t stolen anything and don’t you ever say I did! That beer was what they call a fringe benefit, only they didn’t know they was givin’ it. They don’t even pay me enough to keep you in pigtail ribbons and have beer money besides. I only taken what I deserve.”
Well, he was right on one score. I didn’t have anything you could rightfully call a hair ribbon, and I kept my braids tied up with the strings off of Deucy’s old Bull Durham pouches.
Deucy, you maybe guessed, is my second-biggest big brother and a shiftless lazy skunk even though some people think he’s handsome and should be a movie star. Ace’s name in the family Bible is Arthur, and Deucy is written down as Dennis. Then
there’s Earl, Wesley, and Pembrook. And then there’s me, Jennet Maybelle. That’s the last name on the birth page. Over on the death side the last name written in is Flora Janine Taggert. It’s written in black spiky letters like the pen was stabbing at the page, and the date is just about a month or so after my name was written on the birth page. I know that’s my mother, although no one ever told me. And no one ever told me how she died. As for Pop, there ain’t no page in the Bible for people who just up and go away.