Quick Curtain (British Library Crime Classics) by Alan Melville

Author:Alan Melville [Melville, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: British Library Publishing Division
Published: 2015-06-30T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

MR. (DEREK) WILSON was solving a crossword with a fair amount of success. Not an ordinary crossword; not one of those affairs where five thousand pounds is given to the person who puts “rat”, “crash” and “exclaim” in the squares where several million poor mutts have put “cat”, “clash” and “declaim”; not even a puzzle with any attendant prize at all. On the contrary, a highbrow affair altogether. An affair with no black squares, but a number of provoking lines. An affair in which most of the clues were quite unintelligible, many of them reversed, not a few written in Latin, and all of them in verse. The younger Wilson was doing pretty well against odds as heavy as these; already he had pencilled in “cablegram” as a result of pondering since ten past nine over the clue “A healthy weight here proves to be, A message sent when on the C.” And in a moment of inspiration the word “legend” had gone boldly in for “A tale passed down throughout the years, As (mispronounced) a foot appears.” Derek lit his second cigarette of the morning and looked at the completed squares with a good deal of satisfaction. Twenty-three across: “A musical composer this, Without, one fears, his good-night kiss.” A blighter, that. Decidedly nasty. Mr. Wilson, junr., laid the newspaper on his knees, placed both feet on the tiles of the fireplace, stuck his pencil in his hair, and closed his eyes. A pleasant air of peace and calm settled over the Wilson family seat. Disturbed only by the behaviour of Wilson père.

“Craile ...” said Mr. Wilson, senr., to himself, rising suddenly and setting out on a series of little walks from the fireplace to the door and back via the sideboard. “Craile ... Craile? ... Craile! ...”

Mr. Wilson, junr., opened his eyes slowly and listened carefully for a moment. He decided that this was something not at all unlike the Writing on the Wall. When a man—hitherto perfectly sane and normal in every way—suddenly begins to pace the sitting-room carpet in a diagonal and agitated manner, muttering to himself a word that isn’t even in the Oxford Dictionary—when that kind of thing happens, it is only a question of time before the person concerned runs amok with the breadknife or refuses to sit down on anything but a half-slice of toast in the firm conviction that he is a poached egg. Mr. Wilson, junr., allowed his eyes to return for a minute to his crossword. The clue that caught the said eyes remarked mysteriously: “This preacher’s behaviour was rather eccentric, So for a physician his relatives sent quick.” It was neither good verse nor good sense—even for this particular brand of crossword puzzle—but it seemed to Mr. Wilson, junr., to be a fairly neat summing-up of the present situation.

“Hi!” he said.

“Craile ...” said Mr. Wilson, senr., stepping out of the groove he had made for himself and stopping to gaze sadly out of the sitting-room window at a passing plain van.

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