Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 31, No. 4. Whole No. 173, April 1958

He could never understand afterward why he felt uneasiness, even to the point of fear, before he saw the beach at all.

Night and fancies? But how far can fancies go?

It was a steep track down to the beach. The road, however, was good, and he could rely on his car. And yet, halfway down, before he could even taste the sea-wind or hear the rustle of the sea, Dan Fraser felt sweat on his forehead. A nerve jerked in the calf of his leg over the foot brake.

“Look, this is damn silly!” he thought to himself. He thought it with a kind of surprise, as when he had first known fear in wartime long ago. But the fear had been real enough, no matter how well he concealed it, and they believed he never felt it.

A dazzle of lightning lifted ahead of him. The night was too hot. This enclosed road, bumping the springs of his car, seemed pressed down in an airless hollow.

After all, Dan Fraser decided, he had everything to be thankful for. He was going to see Brenda; he was the luckiest man in London. If she chose to spend weekends as far away as North Cornwall, he was glad to drag himself there — even a day late.

Brenda’s image rose before him, as clearly as the flash of lightning. He always seemed to see her half laughing, half pouting, with light on her yellow hair. She was beautiful; she was desirable. It would only be disloyalty to think any trickiness underlay her intense, naive ways.

Brenda Lestrange always got what she wanted. And she had wanted him, though God alone knew why: he was no prize package at all. Again, in imagination, he saw her against the beat and shuffle of music in a night club. Brenda’s shoulders rose from a low-cut silver gown, her eyes as blue and wide-spaced as the eternal Eve’s.

You’d have thought she would have preferred a dasher, a roaring bloke like Toby Curtis, who had all the women after him. But that, as Joyce had intimated, might be the trouble. Toby Curtis couldn’t see Brenda for all the rest of the crowd. And so Brenda preferred—

Well, then, what was the matter with him?

He would see Brenda in a few minutes. There ought to have been joy bells in the tower, not bats in the—

Easy!

He was out in the open now, at sea level. Dan Fraser drove bumpingly along scrub grass, at the head of a few shallow terraces leading down to the private beach. Ahead of him, facing seaward, stood the overlarge, overdecorated bungalow which Brenda had rather grandly named “The King’s House.”

And there wasn’t a light in it — not a light showing at only a quarter past ten.

Dan cut the engine, switched off the lights, and got out of the car. In the darkness he could hear the sea charge the beach as an army might have charged it.

Twisting open the handle of the car’s trunk, he dragged out his suitcase. He closed the compartment with a slam which echoed out above the swirl of water. This part of the Cornish coast was too lonely, too desolate, but it was the first time such a thought had ever occurred to him.

He went to the house, round the side and toward the front. His footsteps clacked loudly on the crazy-paved path on the side. And even in a kind of luminous darkness from the white of the breakers ahead, he saw why the bungalow showed no lights.

All the curtains were drawn on the windows — on this side, at least.

When Dan hurried round to the front door, he was almost running. He banged the iron knocker on the door, then hammered it again. As he glanced over his shoulder, another flash of lightning paled the sky to the west.

It showed him the sweep of gray sand. It showed black water snakily edged with foam. In the middle of the beach, unearthly, stood the small natural rock formation — shaped like a low-backed armchair, eternally facing out to sea — which for centuries had been known as King Arthur’s Chair.

The white eye of the lightning closed. Distantly there was a shock of thunder.

This whole bungalow couldn’t be deserted! Even if Edmund Ireton and Toby Curtis were at the former’s house some distance along the coast, Brenda herself must be here. And Joyce Ray. And the two maids.

Dan stopped hammering the knocker. He groped for and found the knob of the door.

The door was unlocked.

He opened it on brightness. In the hall, rather overdecorated like so many of Brenda’s possessions, several lamps shone on gaudy furniture and a polished floor. But the hall was empty too.

With the wind whisking and whistling at his back Dan went in and kicked the door shut behind him. He had no time to give a hail. At the back of the hall a door opened. Joyce Ray, Brenda’s cousin, walked toward him, her arms hanging limply at her sides and her enormous eyes like a sleepwalker’s.

“Then you did get here,” said Joyce, moistening dry lips. “You did get here, after all.”

“I—”

Dan stopped. The sight of her brought a new realization. It didn’t explain his uneasiness or his fear — but it did explain much.

Joyce was the quiet one, the dark one, the unobtrusive one, with her glossy black hair and her subdued elegance. But she was the poor relation, and Brenda never let her forget it. Dan merely stood and stared at her. Suddenly Joyce’s eyes lost their sleepwalker’s look. They were gray eyes, with very black lashes; they grew alive and vivid, as if she could read his mind.

“Joyce,” he blurted, “I’ve just understood something. And I never understood it before. But I’ve got to tell—”

“Stop!” Joyce cried.

Her mouth twisted. She put up a hand as if to shade her eyes.

“I know what you want to say,” she went on. “But you’re not to say it! Do you hear me?”

“Joyce, I don’t know why we’re standing here yelling at each other. Anyway, I... I didn’t mean to tell you. Not yet, anyway. I mean, I must tell Brenda—”

“You can’t tell Brenda!” Joyce cried.

“What’s that?”

“You can’t tell her anything, ever again,” said Joyce. “Brenda’s dead.”