Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 67, No. 3. Whole No. 388, March 1976

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“This is a very nice neighborhood,” Mrs. Swanson, the landlady, said, “but the crime rate in London is rising all the time and I always say you can’t be too careful...”

A new prize-caliber story from Ruth Rendell, winner of the Edgar award from the Mystery Writers of America for the best mystery short story published in America during 1974 (“The Fallen Curtain,” EQMM, August 1974).

Della Galway went out with a man for the first (and almost the last) time on her nineteenth birthday. He parked his car, and as they were going into the restaurant she asked him if he had locked all the doors and the boot. When he turned back and said yes, he’d better do that, she asked him why he didn’t have a burglarproof locking device on the steering wheel.

Her parents had brought her up to be cautious. When she left that happy home in that safe little provincial town, she took her parents’ notions with her to London. At first she could only afford the rent of a single room. It upset her that the other tenants often came in late at night and left the front door on the latch. Although her room was at the top of the house and she had nothing worth stealing, she lay in bed sweating with fear. At work it was the same. Nobody bothered about security measures. Della was always the last to leave, and sometimes she went back two or three times to check that all the office doors and the outer door were shut.

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