Guilty as Charged: Fantastic Crime Stories. Philip E. High

Guilty as Charged: Fantastic Crime Stories

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Published by Wildside Press LLC

www.wildsidebooks.com

DEDICATION

For Beverley and Jacqui

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

These stories were previously published as follows, and are reprinted by permission of the author’s estate and his agent, Cosmos Literary Agency:

GUILTY AS CHARGED

There were those, no doubt, who declared I had got away with it, that I was damn lucky. It’s a question of degree, isn’t it? Yes, it is true I could have got life and, in some parts of the world, been executed, but getting away with it, no, most certainly not.

I got five years, narrowly missing a life in an institution. Three of those years I spent in the penal section of a psychiatric hospital. It was a curious place and I am convinced I learned more about the psychs in it than they ever learned about me. My sentence in court had classified me, you see, it was fixed, none of them had the initiative or the imagination to move away from that. I found the medical profession far more open-minded. This case of influenza, could it not be yellow fever, malaria, and many other like complaints? But the psychs never showed a similar fluidity of mind. The court hearing and the subsequent sentence had put me in a fixed frame for perfect psychiatric probing.

A great deal of it, was, of course, my own fault. I had been forced to walk a tightrope in court to save my own skin. I told the truth when I thought they would believe and played the idiot when I knew they wouldn’t.

“You are telling this court, Mr. Graham, that you had never met Mr. Kemly before?”

“No I had never seen him before in my life.”

“Do you deny brutally murdering him within five hours of your first meeting?”

“No, I do not deny it.” (There must have been fifty witnesses standing around, what choice had I?)

“You can offer no reason for this unprovoked and savage attack on the life of the deceased?”

“No, I can offer no explanation whatever.” (Better a negative line than the truth—the truth would have put me in an asylum for life.)

Yes, well, in a way I suppose I did get away with it. You, too, may say, that you, Leonard Graham, got away with murder.

* * * *

It all began on a bright hot day in August, and I have often thought since, how wrong the setting was. A happy seaside town, the bay dancing with sails and windsurfers, swimmers and children splashing around near the shore. Somehow it was all wrong, even the house was wrong. Number 80 Marine Drive, a holiday home facing the sea. The sort of places we usually visited were somber places, often half in ruin and crouched behind tall trees.

“This is a bad one,” said Trench, fumbling in his pocket for the keys. “The owner was not at all keen in letting us visit the place, took a lot of persuading.”

“How much?” asked Hammond who was a realist.

“Almost as much as I was prepared to pay actually.” Trench opened the door and we filed inside.

Trench sort of ran things, he had actually founded the society although the rest of us contributed quite a bit here and there.

Trench was a big man who wore a flat cap and never seemed to discard his grubby raincoat. He wore steel-rimmed spectacles and always seemed burdened with equipment. He was, despite his appearance, a clever and meticulous man who never seemed to lose his cool.

Yes, we were The Trench Society of Psychic Research and, needless to say, Trench ran it although we were a small team. There was Poole, a lugubrious sort of man, untidy sideburns, and a limp black moustache. Jumpy, always went outside for a cigarette if things got a little unnerving.

Then there was Hammond: I liked Hammond. He seldom spoke but he had a dry sort of wit when he did. A strong solid man, been around quite a lot although he never talked about it. Had a wonderful tattoo of a cobra on his left arm. It started just above the bicep and terminated at his wrist. When he was in the mood he would roll up his sleeve and flex his muscles about. It made it look as the cobra was crawling down his arm. There was only one thing wrong with it: the cobra lacked a head. Hammond claimed a motor accident was responsible, just scraped off the skin, but personally, I strongly suspected that a bullet was responsible. It looked very like a shot-burn to me and I had seen more than one.

Lastly there was Judie, painfully thin and in her early thirties. She was all long dark hair, huge dark eyes, and full brightly painted lips.

Poole said she was a bit of a nymph. I didn’t believe him, I liked Judie and I doubt very much if Poole would know what to do if he had actually met a nymph.

Judie wrote down all the details, the hard way: no recorders, a notebook, and shorthand. Incidentally, Judie was the only one who stood by me when the trouble broke.

Lastly myself, and in this I just try and say what I am, nothing more. No self-pity and no bloody claims to virtue. To make the outline brief I had been pretty lucky up to the trouble. I was in the Army, Special Services, when an old Aunt of mine died and left me quite a lot of money.

In peace time, of course, one can buy one’s way out of the services, and I saw to that damn fast because things were closing in. The Colonel’s lady was twenty years his junior and I knew, sooner or later, we’d be caught. I took the money and ran, far away, to Hobart in Australia to be precise. I stayed there until I settled down, until I had stopped yearning—two years to be precise. Then I came home and set up a business on the other side of the country, on the coastline. I had always been interested in the sea. I bought up a few dinghies, two or three sailing boats, and twenty surfboards, and started a rent-a-boat business and did quite well.

One night in a bar I met Hammond and we got talking. Needless to say I often had time to spare, particularly in the winter, and somehow I became a member of the team.

Was there anything in it? Well, yes, there was, but only one in every fifteen vigils or so ever produced anything. As a sort of side observation, you’d be amazed at the number of headless horseman that are supposed to haunt places around Europe. It does quite well on gray ladies in sixteenth-century costumes as well. Phantom monks are fairly prolific too, closely followed by heavy footsteps on the stairs.

Were there any genuine manifestations? A difficult question: things happened, crockery and kitchen utensils thrown around, the feeling of a ‘presence.’

This bring me to a point

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