It’s circuited into the machine itself. If the safety bar goes on the blink, the machine shuts down.’
‘Then how did it happen, for Christ’s sake?’
‘We don’t know. My colleagues and I are of the opinion that the only way the speed ironer could have
killed Mrs Frawley was for her to have fallen into it from above. And she had both feet on the floor
when it happened. A dozen witnesses can testify to that.’
‘You’re describing an impossible accident,’ Hunton said.
‘No. Only one we don’t understand.’ He paused, hesitated, and then said: ‘I will tell you one thing,
Hunton, since you seem to have taken this case to heart. If you mention it to anyone else, I’ll deny I
said it. But I didn’t like that machine. It seemed. . . almost to be mocking us. I’ve inspected over a
dozen speed ironers in the last five years on a regular basis. Some of them are in such bad shape that I
wouldn’t have a dog unleashed around them – the state law is lamentably lax. But they were only
machines for all that. But this one. . . it’s a spook. I don’t know why, but it is. I think if I’d found one thing, even a technicality, that was off whack, I would have ordered it shut down. Crazy, huh?’
‘I felt the same way,’ Hunton said.
‘Let me tell you about something that happened two years ago in Milton,’ the inspector said. He took
off his glasses and began to polish them slowly on his vest. ‘Fella had parked an old ice-box out in his
backyard. The woman who called us said her dog had been caught in it and suffocated. We got the state
policeman in the area to inform him it had to go to the town dump. Nice enough fella, sorry about the
dog. He loaded it into his pickup and took it to the dump the next morning. That afternoon a woman in the neighbourhood reported her son missing.’
‘God,’ Hunton said.
The icebox was at the dump and the kid was in it, dead. As mart kind, according to the mother. She
said he’d no more play in an empty icebox than he would take a ride with a strange man. Well, he did.
We wrote it off. Case closed?’
‘I guess,’ Hunton said.
‘No. The dump caretaker went out next day to take the door off the thing. City Ordinance No.58 on the
maintenance of public dumping places.’ Martin looked at him expressionlessly. ‘He found six dead
birds inside. Gulls, sparrows, a robin: And he said the door closed on his arm while he was brushing
them out. Gave him a hell of a jump. The mangler at the Blue Ribbon strikes me like that, Hunton. I
don’t like it.’
They looked at each other wordlessly in the empty inquest chamber, some six city blocks from where
the Hadley-Watson Model-6 Speed Ironer and Folder sat in the busy laundry, steaming and fuming
over its sheets.
The case was driven out of his mind in the space of a week by the press of more prosaic police work. It
was only brought back when he and his wife dropped over to Mark Jackson’s house for an evening of
bid whist and beer.
Jackson greeted him with: ‘Have you ever wondered if that laundry machine you told me about is
haunted, Johnny?’
Hunton blinked, at a loss. ‘What?’
‘The speed ironer at the Blue Ribbon Laundry, I guess you didn’t catch the squeal this time.’
‘What squeal?’ Hunton asked, interested.
Jackson passed him the evening paper and pointed to an item at the bottom of page two. The story said
that a steam line had let go on the large speed ironer at the Blue Ribbon Laundry, burning three of the
six women working at the feeder end. The accident had occurred at 3.45 p.m. and was attributed to a
rise in steam pressure from the laundry’s boiler. One of the women, Mrs Annette Gillian, had been held
at City Receiving Hospital with second-degree burns.
‘Funny coincidence,’ he said, but the memory of Inspector Martin’s words in the empty inquest chamber