“It made me feel I was back,” she smiled, “in a small village I knew in Cambridgeshire. How was it you knew the people so well?” Her hazel-green eyes smiled directly into his as she handed him the cup and saucer. “The cakes,” she explained, “are something I make myself. Not those. Let us save those for later.” She had an odd, girlish quality, he decided, that belied the deep sophistication of her glance—but bafflingly cool, tantalizingly reserved, and self-contained. Buxtree consoled himself with a piece of substantial, plain cake with carraway seeds in it. “But your book was cruel,” she said.
“Cruel,” Buxtree mouthed the word fondly. Like all authors, he was delighted to be considered cruel.
“You see,” she said, “I think you’re a very clever person, and I think you know a great deal more than even your lovely book betrayed; but the deadly logic with which you hounded poor Eva Tredgold down and had them hang her in the last chapter struck me as gorgeously ruthless.”
“Life,” the enchanted Buxtree reminded her, “is ruthless.”
“I’m afraid I’ve never given that much thought,” she said. “But you see, I
was
in Cambridgeshire at the time of that hideous Armitage case, so I know where you got your plot.” She sparkled upon him like a mischievous schoolgirl. “Only poor Mr. Armitage,” she pointed out, “went all alone to the gallows for poisoning wife, while the lady of his heart was acquitted of complicity in the crime without even her name being brought into it. That makes you just twice as ruthless as life, does it not?”
Buxtree smiled indulgently. “A novelist,” he explained, “must be true to himself. I admit
THE STRANGEFLEET CASE
was based upon a very close study of the Armitage poisoning case, but I may say in confidence,”—he assumed an authoritative air which in the past had done much to win him an enviable unpopularity—“that I had access to private information which was not introduced at the trial; and according to the evidence it provided, I had to find Eva Tredgold guilty, and to condemn her. I had no choice.”
“But what of the poor woman in the original case—do try another bit of seedcake! —of course, it’s perfectly obvious that she loved poor Mr. Armitage entirely too much; but after all, it was proved, wasn’t it, that she had sailed— for America, wasn’t it?—before the poison was actually administered to poor Mrs. Armitage?”
“But supposing she
hadn’t?”
Buxtree leaned forward, cake in one hand, tea cup in the other. “Supposing it happened as I worked it out in the book? Supposing this Madame X, as they called her throughout the trial, had booked her passage for America and actually sailed
from Cherbourg
on a boat that stopped at Southampton? She leaves the boat, runs up to Cambridgeshire for that night-time visit with Mrs. Armitage, of which poor Armitage knew nothing, and then is back at Southampton to rejoin the ship. Armitage returns in the morning, as my book describes it, to find his wife dying; and because Madame X is never suspected, the authorities accept her elaborate plans for sailing, the passenger list from Cherbourg, and her appearance in America, as evidence of her having sailed
before
the poison was administered.”
Mrs. Enderby appeared unimpressed.
“Ingenious, yes,” she smiled. “But after all, she had been honorably dismissed from the case; they had even refused to bring her name into it. It seems so cruel to drag her out of retirement and pin the crime on her.”
Buxtree permitted himself a superior smile. “You don’t seriously believe,” he said, “that she had nothing to do with the murder?”
“The courts believed it.”
“The courts!” He spoke scornfully. “Supposing I were to tell you that I possess evidence which conclusively proves Madame X an accomplice.”
“No!” Her eyes widened in charming incredulity. “Not all that business of the boats! You did it beautifully, Mr. Buxtree. It was a triumph of imagination, but—”
“It wasn’t!” he cried recklessly. “It was true! It actually happened!” Like all good novelists, Buxtree was prepared to lie to the last ditch in defense of his novel’s verisimilitude. “I have traced that woman’s movements, Mrs. Enderby, from the boat to the Armitages, and from Cambridgeshire to America. If ever the real Eva Tredgold is found, I have evidence that can bring her to justice, just as surely—”
“As your tea is cold as ice!” she cried gaily. “Let me take it!” Her hand snatched his cup with the graceful flight of a swallow. “Oh, it’s all very delightful and mysterious,” she exulted, rising with teacup in one hand and teapot in the other, “and I feel as if I’d been let in behind the scenes at a play! But how you can unearth secrets that the Scotland Yard men missed is beyond my poor little comprehension.”
He laughed modestly. “We have our own methods,” he said.
“But
how?”
she insisted. “Where could it all come from?”
Buxtree was wondering about that himself, but then, as she stood gazing at him with starry eyes, he had it.
“Mrs. Armitage,” he said enigmatically.
“But she was dead.”
“Not when Armitage found her,” he reminded her. “And she told him of the woman’s visit.”
“She told him! But he’d never have—”
“He did!” Buxtree was inventing recklessly now. “The poor devil was as infatuated as that. He knew she had poisoned his wife—and he kept silent. He died for her.”
She was gazing at him with thoughtful unbelief. “How could you
know
it?” she asked him reproachfully.
“He wrote it down,” Buxtree maintained stoutly. “Scrawled it on the flyleaf of a book about English beetles. It came into my possession with others of his books and—er—papers. You see I bought up all his belongings I could. And I found a pearl.”
“How lovely!” she cried. “You own it? You have it now?”
“Of course.” He assumed an admirable vagueness. “It’s just one of a lot of old books knocking about my study. I’d find it hard to lay hands on it, now.” He laughed carelessly.
“Of course,” she admitted. “But I
must
make you a fresh cup of tea!”
Again she retreated to the kitchen. Again there was talk of tea as a beverage, of tea as an institution. Again her pretty hands fluttered over the sugar bowl and he was persuaded to eat the very special cake which she had made for him. But the room was dim before she returned again to the subject of his novel and then, to his chagrin, she used it to dismiss him.
“You know,” she exclaimed, “it has been such a treat having this look behind the scenes. We must meet again and talk ever so much longer. You can tell me so much about all these tangles that we make out of our wretched little lives. You will, won’t you?”
It seemed that she had to dress, now, for a dinner party, and he must go. He went reluctantly, feeling a strange heaviness, and increasing uneasiness as he walked home.
It was not until he had removed his coat and flung himself upon the bed that the pain seized him; and it was not until he curled up despairingly in an excruciating foreknowledge of his doom that he realized his irremediable mistake.
He had met the Madame X of the Armitage poisoning case and had made the fatal error of having tea with her.
THE LADY AND THE DRAGON
P
ETER
G
ODFREY
Described as “the Simenon of South Africa,” Peter Godfrey (1917–1992) wrote hundreds of short stories, mainly in the 1940s and ’50s, which were translated into eight languages. However, until Crippen & Landru recently published
The Newtonian Egg
(2002), he had had only one book published,
Death Under the Table
(1954), a very rare collection of detective stories published by the obscure South African publishing house S.A. Scientific Publishing Co., the address of which was a post office box in Cape Town.
Godfrey’s series character, the lawyer and psychologist Rolf le Roux, with his assistants, Inspector Joubert, Sergeant Johnson, and Doc McGregor, works in Cape Town and provides a look into every corner of that great international city. The homicide squad and le Roux confront the most elusive type of mystery, the seemingly impossible crime, and display extraordinary intelligence in their solutions. One case challenges them to understand how a quantity of cyanide got inside an unbroken hard-boiled egg; another raises the question of how a man alone in a cable car high above the ground could have been murdered.
“The Lady and the Dragon” is not even remotely a standard detective story but offers the same dreamlike atmosphere that elevates his other tales. It was first published in the September 1950 issue of
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
.
THE LADY AND THE DRAGON
BY
P
ETER
G
ODFREY
S
HE WAS IN A HURRY
to get to Knysna, and yet she stopped the car. Nor did she know why she stopped it. It’s not the scenery, she told herself. My art is to photograph people, enjoying themselves, working in sewers, dying of disease. How could my attention be attracted by a bit of pretty-pretty landscape?
But even while she rationalized, she knew her analysis was wrong. The scenery wasn’t pretty-pretty—it was awe-inspiring; there was something about it that seemed to thrust its way through her eyes into her mind. Besides, there were no birds.
The valley fell away from the road in a great sweep, dwarfing the giant trees into the semblance of a lush carpet. Then, on the other side, the massive green leaped up to the sky, concave seeming, like a wave about to engulf.
No birds and no insects, and the air was still, and yet from out the heart of the wave she could sense a rolling beat, like a soundless drum.
She unslung her camera, fitted a telescopic lens with practiced fingers, and did not know why she did so. There’s no photograph there, she told herself, no composition in the small field of vision of a camera, no contrast in the masses of green.
All the same, she brought the viewfinder to her eye and swept the camera slowly round. Only trees, shapeless trees, and more trees; yet she knew she would take a picture. Then suddenly she found a spot, a deep gash in the opposite mountain. Some contrast at least, she thought. Not good, but it may help me recapture the mood.
Even though the mood was one of unease …
She pressed the shutter release, but the second before she did so her muscles jerked, altering the angle of the camera, focusing it on a patch of forest to the left of the gap.
She felt irritated and vaguely shaken. Now she
had
to take a picture. She held the camera firmly, sighted the gap again, and pressed the shutter release. But again her muscles jerked involuntarily.
In a swift movement she re-entered the car, slammed the door, started driving. There was something at the back of her mind which she first took for panic, and then suddenly knew for excitement—deep pulsating excitement.
Fool, she thought, acting like a fool—like a kid overpowered by atmosphere, not a woman of sense and experience. There’s nothing there, not even a good photograph; all I’ve done is waste time, and two exposures.
She was very annoyed with herself.
T
HE MANAGER OF
the hotel, a dapper Swiss, showed her to her table and introduced her to the two men who would keep her company at meals. “Professor Munnik, Dr. Penner,” he said, “Miss Carlton.”
She liked the professor immediately; his eyes were warm beneath the shock of white hair. About fifty, she thought, perhaps a little more, but he carries his years well.
Dr. Penner was fair and younger; she did not try to analyze her opinions about him.
“Carlton?” said the professor. “I saw an exhibition of photographs by Mary Carlton in Cape Town last month. You aren’t—?” There was genuine pleasure in his face when she nodded.
Dr. Penner said: “I suppose, as a photographer you must have stopped for pictures at least a dozen times between George and here?”
“Why, no,” she said. “I’m not really a landscape photographer, you see.”
That was all she meant to say, but the nagging insistence in her mind made her go on. “I did stop once, though, and took a couple of pictures. I’m afraid they’re not going to be very good. I had rather a queer experience.”
She told them about it. “Somehow, I can’t get the incident out my mind. I don’t know why—I came here to have a holiday, to forget about photography. I only brought my camera because—well, there are things I must have with me, like clothes or a handbag. And now I feel I won’t rest until those exposures are developed. I know they’ll look like nothing on earth. There was something about the place.… This may sound silly, but it’s true. It was as though it had been waiting for me for a long time, and I knew I was expected.”
“Déjà vu,”
said Dr. Penner, and she looked at him inquiringly. The professor laughed. “Don’t let him mystify you,” he said. “His doctorate isn’t in medicine or even anything remotely scientific. He’s a psychologist, and he’s probably just applied some completely outlandish classification to you from the depths of his jargon. What was it you said, Penner?”
“Déjà vu
. That’s the name psychologists—who are incidentally very scientific fellows, despite what the professor says—apply to the feeling that you have seen a place before, even when you know you’ve never really been there.”
She was still curious.
“That’s it, yes,” she said, “but how does it come about? What causes the feeling?”
Dr. Penner grinned. “I see I will have to give you a lecture. In your unconscious mind there are many desires and urges—complexes—which you cannot perceive consciously because they have been repressed in your childhood. In your dreams and in your waking fantasies, though, these urges do slip past the censorship, but in a disguised form. They adopt a symbolism—if you dream of a tree, for instance, it might stand for an infantile desire to go screaming through the drawing-room with jam on your face, or hatred for one of your parents, or one of the other things you have been forced to repress. Each person has his own particular symbols for his own complexes. Then suddenly, by coincidence, you come on physical objects arranged in a pattern, and those objects and that pattern are symbolic of your repressions in a vivid form. That is why you get the feeling you have seen a place before, although you don’t know where or when.”