Heavens Above

Scene: England. Time: The 1950s.

* * *

Rupert Thursby stood on the concourse of Kings Cross railway station watching the bookstall of W H Smith & Son. His was not an idle interest. He had come up to London to see his literary agent and find out why his royalties were diminishing. He had received the unwelcome answer that his published books were no longer selling well, and it was increasingly difficult to persuade publishers to accept his current offerings. "You see, old chap," his agent had explained, "acclaim in the literary journals is all very well, but it doesn't pay. If it's money you want, you must aim for popularity." These words were echoing in his ears as he watched the bookstall in the hope that its traffic might provide some indication of the fare that public taste currently demanded.

To his surprise, there was no difficulty in coming to a swift conclusion. Of all the book sales from the stall, more than half were Penguin paperbacks with green covers, which he knew to be crime mystery novels. Other books were purchased only after a perusal of the blurb on the cover and comparison with alternative volumes. Crime fiction, however, was plucked, it seemed, indiscriminately and hastily, as if the only criterion for purchase was the colour of the cover.

In the train on the way home he brooded upon the situation with increasing resentment. Murder mysteries were not his forte, and he acknowledged that he stood little chance of breaking into an already crowded market. Well, he thought, if you can't join them, beat them, and he resolved that his next composition would be an excoriating essay lambasting Crime Club authors for pandering to low taste. Before he reached Nutcombe he had already decided upon a title: 'The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstruous Regiment of Whodunnits'.

For the next few days, researching and writing tirelessly, Rupert devoted all his working hours to the essay. In it he accused crime authors of knowingly peddling phoney solutions to their mysteries. He drew attention to the frequency with which their supposedly 'detected' criminals confessed or committed suicide. Seldom did the writers tell of their cases going to court, for the very good reason that in real life almost all of them would result in 'not guilty' verdicts. Any defence counsel worth his salt would tear to shreds prosecutions based on hearsay, faulty logic, and evidence obtained illegally or improperly handled by the detective, as was often the case in these stories.

Rupert was particularly scathing that these faults were known to the authors of the offending books. As early as 1913 E C Bentley had exposed their precarious inductive logic in his novel 'Trent's Last Case,' but instead of retiring from the field in disgrace, detective story writers had seized upon it with glee and exploited it. In 1936 Michael Innes had written 'Death at the President's Lodging' in which there were no fewer than seven different persons whose guilt could be considered to be 'proved' by whodunnit standards.

He wrote of the obvious gimmicks in the genre. Regular readers soon learned that the first suspect was not likely to be the guilty party; more often than not he was the second victim. Obvious perpetrators could be ruled out immediately. The murderer had to be somebody you were unlikely to have thought of: the postman, the detective himself, the first supposed murder victim, or even all the suspects conspiring together. The early trick, 'the butler did it,' became the cliché for all subsequent versions.

The essay accused mystery writers of being impervious to satire. 'The Macbeth Murder Mystery' by James Thurber, in which whodunnit reasoning was applied to the Shakespeare play, should have had them cringing in shame, but so impudent were they that Michael Innes even wrote a similar parody himself: 'The Mysterious Affair at Elsinore.' That Innes was in reality a professor of English at Oxford University compounded his offence in Rupert's estimation.

Equally obvious, Rupert wrote, were the desperate attempts to give the author's featured detective some memorable distinguishing characteristic. Funny little foreigners, noblemen, priests, blind men, little old ladies, all were suitable candidates for the role of sleuth in the improbable world of mystery writing. It was the last of these which incensed Rupert the most. In trying to envisage such a character in real life, he thought of Miss Abigail Knightley, retired headmistress of the Nutcombe Infants School, the perfect archetype for Agatha Christie's Miss Jane Marple. As Miss Knightley could not, he opined, solve a crime mystery to save her life, it followed that neither should Miss Marple be represented as being capable of so doing. So taken was he with this comparison that he had made it the triumphant climax of his essay.

By Friday afternoon the work was finished, and Rupert congratulated himself on having done a good job. He decided to reward his efforts with a drink in the Red Lion, then on the morrow he would give his work one last proof read before submitting it to 'The Times Literary Supplement'.

* * *

Unknown to Rupert, during his absence in London and subsequent seclusion in his study, a real mystery had been unfolding in Nutcombe. Farmer Stubbs' old cow Bluebell had been found dead one morning in the middle of Five Acre Field with her head and neck smashed by some mighty blow. The field was otherwise empty; no weapon or missile, nor any debris of any kind was to be found there. There had been a torrential rain storm during the night; the field was muddy, but free of tracks, save for Bluebell's own. Her front feet were actually embedded in her final prints, as if her forelegs had been driven into the earth by the force of the blow.

Farmer Stubbs was baffled, the veterinary surgeon was baffled, and PC Banks was baffled. None of them had ever seen anything like it, or could think of any explanation. "To produce injuries like that," the vet said, "would require a powerful blow from a very blunt instrument. A strong blacksmith with his biggest hammer might produce enough force, but a hammer would make a more localised injury. Poor Bluebell has been struck by something flatter, like a huge rock, a large meteorite perhaps, but if so, where is it? Whatever it was has been taken away, and a rock that size would be too big to carry."

"Perhaps it was a meteorite which broke up into smaller pieces after striking Bluebell," Farmer Stubbs suggested.

"Then where are the pieces?" PC Banks asked. "Why would anyone want to remove every last one of them?"

"There are people who collect stuff like that," the vet observed.

Banks wasn't having that. "Yes, but if I understand you correctly, the meteorite would have been so large that all the pieces gathered together would still be too much for a man to carry, so you'd need a van or truck."

"There's no way a vehicle could have got there," Farmer Stubbs insisted. "The nearest road to where Bluebell was found is about half a mile away, and that's by the shortest route which goes through my farmyard. I'm quite sure I would have heard any vehicles passing that way. From any other direction there's more like a mile of open fields to cross to get into Five Acre."

"A vehicle would have left tracks. I've thoroughly examined all possible approaches," PC Banks averred, "and I'm willing to swear that no vehicle has crossed the fields surrounding Five Acre."

For a few days the mysterious demise of Bluebell was the subject of lively conjecture in the village. Many explanations were advanced, the quality of which may be judged from the fact that the most credible was that favoured by the youth of the village, namely that it was the work of Martians.

Then a surprising development took place. Farmer Stubbs let it be known that the mystery had been solved, and that the perpetrators had compensated him for his loss. When asked for further details, he stated that the terms of his compensation forbade his disclosing the circumstances. He was unwilling to breach this confidentiality agreement, the compensation having been so generous; he had been paid the value of a first class Jersey cow at the peak of its economic life, whereas Bluebell had been of dubious heritage and had been retained out of sentiment after her milking days had passed. When pressed, however, he did say that the person who had solved the mystery would be his guest in the Saloon Bar of the Red Lion on Friday evening, and might be induced to reveal more particulars.

* * *

PC Banks, off-duty and out of uniform, was an early customer in the Saloon Bar that Friday, but he was not the first; the Vicar and the doctor were already there, accompanied by their wives. It was not long before Farmer Stubbs arrived, ushering in his guest, who, to their surprise, was Miss Knightley. She was enjoying herself immensely. It had been a long time since a gentleman had asked her out, and she relished the grave courtesy with which Stubbs settled her in a corner seat commanding a view of the whole room before fetching her a glass of port from the bar.

She knew why she was there, of course. She was an avid reader of crime mysteries, particularly those involving Miss Marple, a character she much admired for confounding prejudices against females, spinsters, and the elderly in one fell swoop. She quite fancied herself in the role. 'Abigail Knightley Investigates' would have a nice ring to it as the title of a mystery novel. And now it was time for the dénouement, in which the detective reveals all. She intended to spin it out as far as she could. After all, in the best books it occupied the whole last chapter.

After the exchange of social pleasantries and inconsequential remarks about the weather and so forth, a silence fell on the company. They waited for Miss Knightley to say something, but she merely smiled upon them and sipped her port demurely. The silence was broken by the entrance of Rupert Thursby. He had hoped to find solitude in the Saloon Bar, and was disgruntled to see it so unusually full. He nodded briefly all round and took his drink to the corner furthest from Miss Knightley, distancing himself with the air of a man who wants to be alone.

PC Banks had waited long enough. "I believe, Miss Knightley, that you were instrumental in solving the mystery of Bluebell's death," he prompted. All eyes were on Miss Knightley as she set her glass down and seemed to be about to speak, so no-one noticed Rupert's startled reaction to Banks' words.

"Well, Mr Banks," Miss Knightley began, "it was something you said that first put me on the track. You said that you had searched all around the site in every direction, and there was no trace of anyone or anything approaching Five Acre Field. So of course I immediately remembered how Mrs Onions had said much the same thing last Autumn when her hat disappeared off her head. She looked everywhere, she swore, and it was nowhere to be seen. Her opinion was that the pixies had taken it.

"Then there was the fact," she continued, "that everyone was saying how unusual poor Bluebell's death was, but I wondered if perhaps it wasn't unusual at all. Perhaps it was one of those things that are happening all the time, only we don't notice until some particular circumstance makes it remarkable.

"It put me in mind of the whist drive at which Mrs Wagstaff was dealt a hand with ten spades, and that started a discussion about the odds against being dealt a complete suit of spades. Mr Middleton the magistrate was there, and it so happened that he had looked into this question. He told us that, in round numbers, there were three chances in two billion of such a thing happening, which is very improbable but far from impossible when you consider how many whist hands are being dealt every day all over the world. But the relevant point is, you see, that the odds are exactly the same for any set of thirteen cards you care to specify. So every time you are dealt a whist hand, you are looking at a hand which had only three chances in two billion of turning up. But we don't exclaim, 'Look at this improbable hand,' do we, even though it is just as improbable as a complete suit of spades."

"I'm sorry to interrupt you, Miss Knightley," the doctor said, "but before you go on, just to be clear, when you say 'three chances in two billion,' is it the proper English billion you mean, or the American billion which is a thousand times smaller?"

"Oh, the English billion, of course," Miss Knightley replied, "the one with twelve noughts. But that is by the way. The point I am making is that improbable events are happening all the time, but we don't remark on them unless one of the factors is of some consequence. Take the time that Mr Simpson's chip pan exploded, for example."

"Oh ar, I remember that," Farmer Stubbs said. "Right funny it were."

"Well, not for Mr Simpson it wasn't," Miss Knightley quietly admonished him. "He had to clean the mess up." Seeing that the others were puzzled, she explained. "Mr Simpson runs the fish and chip shop. A few years ago I was in the shop, the only customer. It was a very cold winter's day, so the front door was kept closed, except to let customers in and out. Mr Simpson had finished serving me, and he turned to go out of the door behind the counter to get more chips for the pan. At the same time I turned to go out of the shop. The moment our two backs were turned, with me in the front doorway and Mr Simpson in the back doorway, the contents of the chip pan exploded, and hot fat spurted everywhere. Two seconds before there had been nothing wrong with the pan, but as soon as we had taken our eyes off it, it erupted. We neither of us had any idea what might have caused it.

"It was quite a mystery until Mr Simpson's grandson Tommy owned up. He had been outside in the street playing snowballs. As I left the shop I had looked down to be sure my feet were not going to slip on the ice in the doorway. Tommy had let fly a snowball at random. Unnoticed by me it had sailed over my head and through the door during the brief time that it was open, and had landed in the chip pan, with inevitable results. You see what a concatenation of coincidences combined to produce that unhappy result. If Tommy's aim had been one degree different in any direction, if the force of his throw had been a fraction more or less, if I had opened the door a second earlier or later, if the chip pan had been located further along the counter in either direction, if any one of a thousand factors had been other than what it was, the outcome would have been of no consequence."

The Vicar was beginning to suspect that the speaker had lost the thread of the subject under discussion, and he sought to get it back on track. "But Miss Knightley," he protested, "surely you are not suggesting that Bluebell was killed by a snowball? Apart from anything else, it is August. Whoever heard of snowballs in August?"

"But we do sometimes get hailstones in summer, don't we, Vicar?" Miss Knightley replied gently. "And hailstones are nothing but little balls of ice, are they not?"

"That's true," said Sophie, the doctor's wife, "and sometimes they're not so little. Why, I remember one year in July we had our greenhouse roof smashed by hailstones the size of golf balls, though why hailstones should be bigger in summer than in winter I can't imagine."

"That's because you didn't pay attention in school, darling," her husband suggested. "You have to remember that the upper atmosphere is very cold, well below freezing in fact, so rain from those altitudes starts out as ice, hailstones in fact. Usually it melts before it gets down to us, so we get rain. But in summer it sometimes falls into a cumulonimbus cloud, one of those towering hammer-headed thunder clouds. There are violent updrafts in those clouds; no aeroplane would dare to fly through one. So the little hailstones get swept up, and fall again, and get swept up again, time after time, circulating inside the cloud. And all the time they are accumulating another coat of ice, getting bigger and bigger, until at last gravity triumphs over the updraft, and they finally fall to Earth, many times bigger than when they started out."

"Thank you for the school lesson, darling, but they still do not grow to the size of the object that struck poor Bluebell, do they?"

"Well, that depends, does it not?" Miss Knightley suggested. "Don't forget the time that Billy Enright accused Peggy Parkin of cheating in the snowball rolling contest." Seeing from their blank faces that none of those present recognised the relevance of the event, Miss Knightley explained. "The children were competing to see who could create the biggest snowball by rolling one along in the snow. All the others started with a hand-made snowball, but Peggy started with the head she had taken off a snowman." There being no glimmer of comprehension from her audience, she added, "How big it ends up as depends on how big it started out as."

PC Banks had been looking increasingly bewildered, and he now interjected, "But what has Mrs Onions' hat got to do with any of this?"

"She said she had looked everywhere," Miss Knightley explained, "but she had only looked around her. If she had looked up, she would have seen her hat only eighteen inches immediately above her head, stuck in a tree where the wind had blown it. You looked all around Five Acre Field, but you didn't look up, did you?"

"By Jove, I believe I can see where you are heading, Miss Knightley," the doctor said. "Something above the field, high above, higher than the cumulonimbus clouds, so it must have been an aeroplane, dropped a large lump of ice that grew on its way down into the monster block that crushed the cow's skull."

"And then, of course, it would all melt and leave no trace," his wife added excitedly.

"But I don't believe that there are any aeroplane routes that pass directly over Nutcombe," the Vicar objected.

"Not directly over, Vicar, but then they don't have to, do they?" Miss Knightley had a rogueish smile as she spoke. "Remember the GI who gave you a pair of nylons to wear for him."

"Hello! What's this then? You've never admitted this secret life to me, Claude," his wife said jokingly.

"Miss Knightley is having a bit of naughty fun at my expense," the Vicar explained.

"Yes, I suppose it was a bit naughty of me," Miss Knightley admitted. "What happened was that a convoy of GIs was passing through the village one day during the war. We guessed that they were on their way to embark for the front, so a number of villagers were lining the route cheering them as they passed. One of the soldiers spotted a pretty girl, and he threw her a packet of nylon stockings with a note which said something like, 'These will look better on you than on me. Wear them for me when I get back,' and he had added his Army Post Office address so that she could write to him. Unfortunately he made the mistake of throwing the packet directly towards the girl. He forgot that it would still retain some of the momentum of the moving vehicle it came from, so its flight was not straight but curved, ending up with the Vicar, standing a couple of people along from the girl."

"I never got to see those stockings," said Joyce, pretending to be aggrieved, "so what happened to them?"

"Naturally I guessed what had happened, and gave them to the nearest young lady who looked like the sort of girl a soldier would throw nylons at," the Vicar replied.

Miss Knightley continued, "So you see, to anyone who knew about Mrs Onions' hat, Mrs Wagstaff's whist hand, Mr Simpson's chip pan, Peggy Parkin's snowman's head, and the Vicar's nylon stockings, it was perfectly obvious what had killed Bluebell. I suggested to Mr Stubbs that he telephone London Airport, tell them about Bluebell's death, and ask them if any aeroplane flying towards Nutcombe had jettisoned water that night. Within forty-eight hours BEA rang back and apologised. It seems that one of their aeroplanes had diverted from its usual route because of the bad weather, and had jettisoned its water supply in order to lose weight before landing. They accepted full responsibility, and volunteered to compensate Mr Stubbs."