Six Against the Yard. Margery Allingham

      I looked about for a broom, though it was the last thing I wanted.

      ‘You’ll break my window,’ I said.

      He grinned at me. ‘I’ll buy you fifty windows when I come back from Manchester.’

      I leant out of the window. The parapet sticks up about a foot over the glass and the windows are built out of the roof, dormer fashion.

      ‘I’ll get a broom,’ I said. My courage was going. I thought I’d have to try some other way. It wasn’t working out as I thought it was going to.

      I suppose I must have been silent for nearly three minutes, for then he said quite suddenly:

      ‘I suppose one of your Pollini pals would just trot along there and pick it up?’

      ‘I believe even old Ma Pollini could,’ I said.

      That did it. He swept me out of the way.

      ‘I’ll do it,’ he said. ‘I’ll get your damned tablecloth. I can do anything a Pollini can.’

      He scrambled up on the sill and I saw that he was waiting for me to pull him back. I did. That was the extraordinary thing: I did.

      ‘Don’t you dare,’ I said. ‘You’ll break your neck. You haven’t got the courage.’

      He thrust his little red face into mine. ‘I’ll show you,’ he said.

      I watched him out upon the sill and saw him climb shakily on to the parapet, which was nearly a foot wide, holding his arms out like a tight-rope walker.

      ‘Don’t you dare,’ I said. ‘Don’t you dare.’ Now I’d got him there I panicked. I lost my head I screamed. I ran to the top of the stairs.

      ‘Bring a broom! ‘I shouted to nobody in particular and rushed back again.

      There was no sign of him, only the big bare room with the stove and the window open at the bottom, and far away the tops of the trees.

      I ran over to the window and looked out. He was coming towards me, holding the cloth in his arms. I screamed. I screamed and screamed.

      ‘Be careful!’ I said. ‘Be careful!’

      He came to the window and stood there swaying, holding the cloth, his little bulk blotting out most of the light. I saw his short trousers and his shoeless feet in their grey army socks standing on the slippery stucco. He put down his hand to catch the top of the window and at that moment I leant out and caught him round the ankles.

      I can hear my own voice now shouting hoarsely:

      ‘Be careful! Be careful!’

      I heard him shout and I realised that I could make up my mind there and then.

      I pushed.

      He threw his weight against the top of the window and a shower of glass fell in over me. I was still pushing, pushing with my head, my arms round his ankles.

      I felt him go. I heard his scream. Just for a moment I saw his body swing past me and then there was silence until far below in the little stone yard that we call a garden there was another sound, a sound I can’t get out of my mind.

      I stepped back from the window and from that moment my mind was clear. There was a noise on the stairs and I ran towards it, screaming, but intentionally this time, knowing what I was doing.

      It was Ma Pollini. I tried to tell her but she’d only talk in Italian and finally I pushed her out of the way and hurried on down the stairs.

      Everybody in the house was running out into the street and I remember coming out under the porch and standing there in the bright sunlight.

      I didn’t see him. There was a crowd round him and one of the Denver boys, who had the ground floor rooms, came and put his arm round me.

      ‘Don’t look, Ma,’ he said, ‘don’t look.’

      I told the young policeman exactly what happened right up to the moment when I caught Frank by the feet. Then I said I was so frightened that I just hung there until he overbalanced and went out, jerking his ankles out of my arms.

      He was very kind to me, I remember.

      Then the other men came and I told them the same thing and they said there’d have to be an inquest. And all the time he was lying out there in the yard, with a sheet off the Denver boys’ bed over him.

      They’d just finished with me when Louie came back. The other Denver boy had told her over the ’phone what had happened.

      I shall never forget her as she sat in my kitchen with the police there and listened while I told my story yet another time. She didn’t break down and when I saw the calm in her face, the extraordinary repose and dignity, I felt it was worth it.

      She never reproached me. Instead she came over and kissed me and said:

      ‘Don’t worry, Polly. I know you did what you could.’

      Then the first floor people took her in and wouldn’t let her go upstairs.

      The police were very careful but they were never unkind, they never bullied. I thought how young they were, even the oldest of them. I remember the Inspector particularly. Such a boy he looked when he took his cap off.

      They couldn’t understand how he got out on the parapet, but when I told my story there were lots of people to back me up: Ma Pollini and the Denver boys who had been in bed when he fell downstairs the day before. They all knew him for what he was, and told stories about how he’d show off and how he’d lie and the idiotic things he’d do, and gradually the police got him straight in their minds.

      They chose two or three of the boarders for witnesses at the inquest and I had to go too. There was only one awkward moment and that came from the Inspector.

      ‘You know, you killed him, Ma,’ he said just as he was going.

      I suppose I gaped at him because he dropped a hand on my shoulder.

      ‘Let that be a warning to you not to try to drag a man in through a top-floor window by his feet,’ he said.

      I expect you read a report of the inquest. It took up quite a bit in the paper. The Coroner put me through it, but I stuck to my story: I was frightened and I held him round the feet. It was a silly thing to do, but they were all I could get hold of.

      Finally they were satisfied. The jury brought in Death by Misadventure and I went home.

      A lot of my boarders had come to the inquest with me. Louie was there too, of course, and she gave her evidence very quietly and calmly and I thought she looked years younger, poor old girl.

      She went to bed early that night. She didn’t want to talk to me and I didn’t want to talk to her. I knew it had been a shock and I wanted her to get over it and wake up and find out what it was like to be cured, what it was like to have her chance all over again without the dead weight that had been dragging her down half her life.

      I got so used to telling my story that I believed it. It was such a simple story, so easy to remember, so like what really happened.

      It became so real to me in the next two or three days that now I have to strain my memory, as it were, to get at the truth.

      People were very kind. We had to borrow for the funeral, but it was worth it and as I stood beside his grave I hoped he’d lie quiet and have more rest himself than ever he gave Louie or me.

      That would have been the end of the story. I should never have tried to remember the truth and I should never have set it down if it had not been for the one thing that beat me, the one thing that had always beaten me, the one vital fact that I never recognised until now.

      This is the day that Louie ought to have gone to Manchester. There are a lot of bills up there now advertising her