EQMM 1994-10 by Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

Author:Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine [Magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Eye of the Beholder

by Robert Barnard

© 1994 by Robert Barnard

A new short story by Robert Barnard

Though he is best known for his comic mysteries, Robert Barnard is equally adept with darker stories of a psychological turn, and his new novel from Scribners, Masters of the House (September, 1994) is of this sort. For those who enjoy Mr. Barnard’s lighter side, a new book in the Bernard Bastable series is due out early in 1995, also from Scribners…

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Simon Carraway’s trowel had been expertly flicking cement between bricks with a vigour and purpose which was the result of a newly acquired expertise. Now it slowed down, as the door to number eighteen opened. Simon knew what was going to happen, but he watched nevertheless: the situation at number eighteen interested him, as the doings at none of the other houses in Gordon Road did. The man came out, had his cheek pecked by the still-pretty woman who was the inhabitant of the house that Simon felt he knew best, then the door was shut from inside, and the man, bowler-hatted and carrying a briefcase and an umbrella, set off in the direction of the Underground.

Simon bent his back down again and his trowel resumed its deft slapping-on of cement and its neat placing of bricks. Nothing more to be seen yet awhile.

Simon was nineteen. When he met his former schoolteachers in the street they shook their heads that he had not changed his mind about going up to university. Oxbridge could have been yours for the asking, they said. Simon replied that university, and especially Oxbridge, wouldn’t be any use to him. He didn’t say, because it sounded pretentious if you said it too often, that the reason university would be no use to him was because he was going to be a writer. The only writer he had ever met had told him that any side job a writer took on should be something that did not take it out of him intellectually or emotionally. “Something mindless,” the man had said. So Simon had joined his father’s building firm as a labourer, putting up rabbit hutches for the newly married, on the site of a former factory in the road named after General Gordon.

His father told people he was working his way up from the bottom. It sounded so much better than that he wanted to be a writer.

Meanwhile Simon stored in his head the personal lives of his work-mates, listened in the pub at lunchtimes to the stories of teenagers and pensioners, watched the people in the old Victorian redbrick houses on the other side of Gordon Road, and made stories out of their lives.

Such as the woman who had just seen her husband off to work. A dull soul, he looked. And Simon knew all about dutiful pecks on the cheek. That was how his father was seen off every morning. But the thing that made the house interesting to him was the question of who the other

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