Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 140, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 853 & 854, September/October 2012

She was brought up suddenly by a shout — not a scream, but the sort of shout a schoolmaster inevitably had to use at times. She threw open the living-room door, then dashed up the stairs and onto the landing where the hatch was. Ernest was lying still on the floor, his left ankle still trapped in one of the lower steps of the ladder. Miriam rushed over and released it, then knelt and felt her father’s pulse. She had been a schoolteacher before her own children came along, and she knew all the basics of first aid.

“Oh, Dad. You silly old fool. Why wouldn’t you let me fetch your precious box? I’m ringing for an ambulance now. Love you, Dad... Always.”

The ambulance took only ten minutes, but it was the longest ten minutes of her life. She wanted to ring Les and tell him, but she thought he would be taking Kieran home, so she waited until she and her father were in the ambulance, she on a little tip-up seat, her father lying flat out, attached to various dials and indicators.

“Les, darling. Dad has had some kind of stroke or heart attack. I’ll be at the hospital when you’re free. Could you get your mum to take the children for a bit? And ring my mother and tell her. She’ll want to be at the hospital with him. Ring for a taxi for her, or bring her yourself... of course I trust you. Love you too.”

The next two hours were almost unbearable, especially after they were told by the specialist that things didn’t look good. Her mother arrived with Les, though the latter stayed only twenty minutes then decided he ought to be with the children. Les’s one weakness was a fit person’s horror of illness. Win said all the things people do say at such times, and did all the useless things people do except worrying about the state of her husband’s underclothes. When the inevitable had happened and the nurse had tenderly shut his eyes, Win demanded to go home to her new home, and asked to be left alone.

“I’ve got things I want to say to him,” she said. “I’ll be all right in the morning.”

Miriam went to her new home after she had seen her mother safely into her old one. The space in the new house now seemed less of an attraction, more of a disorientating threat. She went up to the landing and looked around. The specialist had said it seemed unlikely there would need to be an inquest. Ernest had had a couple of minor heart scares soon after retirement. Apart from the rickety old ladder, the landing was tidy. The box, the container of all that youthful attempt at fiction, had skidded over to the doorway of the main bedroom, but it had remained intact, the box being secured by a liberal application of freezer tape. The neat package looked faintly pathetic.