Before she went out, Alice Phelps  told her husband Ralf to clean the ice off the front stairs before he left for work. But Ralf never did what his wife told him to do.
When Ralf came back home, there was a body lying on his front stairs. It was the postman. He had obviously slipped on the ice that Ralf hadn't cleaned off and broken his neck.
Ralf carried the body into the house. He decided he would put the body into the boot of his car and throw it into the river before anyone noticed that the postman had disappeared. But there was a problem. If the police investigated the disappearance of the postman, there was an obvious clue. All the houses up to his house would have their mail. The houses after his house would not.
He remembered that a postman had once broken his leg on a friend's property and that had cost his friend a lot of money. A broken neck would probably cost as much as ten broken legs.
Ralf poured himself a drink, undressed the postman  put on his uniform and went out to deliver the mail. No one noticed that it was Ralf delivering the mail instead of the regular postman.
When he got home he found that his key was still in his own pants, not in the postman's pants. He tried to get in a window. He was seen by some police who were passing by the house. They accused him of trying to break into the house. Ralf said that it was his own house. The police didn’t believe that a postman could afford such a large house. Ralf remembered that there was a body in his living room and decided to stop arguing.
When Alice came home, she found that the window had been opened from the outside . She found the postman, the clothes and the bottle. She'd had an affair with the postman some months before. She'd broken up with him, but it looked like he’d come back. He had broken into the house to see her and, not finding her, had drunk half a bottle of whisky, taken off all his clothes and fallen asleep .
Afraid that Ralf would come back soon and find him there, she dressed the postman, put him in the car, drove to his apartment, carried him up the stairs and put him to bed. She gave him a last kiss before leaving. For the first time she noticed he wasn't breathing. What had happened?
Perhaps, while the postman was drinking and getting undressed, Ralf had come home and killed him. Perhaps Ralf was out buying a gun, right at that moment, to kill her too. Alice drove away to another city, changed her name and started a new life .
Meanwhile, Ralf was being released from the police station. Thinking he was the real postman, the Postmen’s Union had paid his bail. When he got home he noticed that the body had disappeared. He burned the postman's uniform and decided to forget the whole thing.
When the trial day for the postman arrived, they waited for him, but he didn’t come. The police  went to the postman's apartment and found that he had died in his bed. One of the policeman noticed that he looked different from the guy they had arrested, but the other policeman said that was just because he was dead.
The coroner was surprised to find that the postman had died of a broken neck... in bed. He thought that the postman, feeling guilty about his crime, had dreamed that he was being hanged. The reflex of his neck muscles had broken his neck.
After a while Ralf stopped worrying about the fact the body had disappeared and that his wife had never come back. And in all the long and happy years that followed, Ralf never cleaned the front stairs.