Bent, Bent and Duckworth

EXCERPT

 “Leave the upstairs thinking to me.”

 “But I’m telling you—” 

“And I’m telling you. And I know best.” She glared at me in the way only a mother can glare at a son, and I understood the conversation was over; I wouldn’t be able to tell her what I knew, which was what she needed to know, both to solve the mystery and to save herself from making a massive mistake in her personal life. And, of course, her mistake would be a disaster for me too, because that’s how life works in a family.

“But Mom—” This time she took the knife she was using to slice the cold beef on the cutting board in front of her and slapped the flat blade against the wood, to punctuate the intensity of her mood. The words died in my throat, and I clamped my mouth shut, unable to fight through the strength of Mother’s will.

But I should begin at the beginning, which is really the end of the biggest success I’ve had thus far in my career as a detective. After I found the missing Sun of Sumatra and solved the murder of Gary Favours I was for a brief period the talk of the town. I was fêted and toasted from my hospital bed; flashbulbs flashed; the newspapers called me a boy genius, even though I wasn’t a boy anymore and maybe Mom was more the genius than me. But, for all the fame I’d gained, I had to bask in it, from the starched sheets of a trundle bed with a bandage around my head and my leg hoisted up in traction, hanging like a construction crane. Not my best look. But, I wasn’t vain—Mom had enough of that for the both of us.

And that’s really where things went wrong. While I was in the hospital, Mom was home on her own—except she wasn’t so much on her own anymore, because Arthur Bent, the dockyard security bull who’d been my minder when I was solving the Favours murder and finding the missing diamond, was busy making sweet on her, whispering God knows what in her ear, sweeping her up and off her feet and into his arms, and by the time I returned home it was to one I barely recognized.

Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine 2025

Credit: Original Photo – Yunming Wang