The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories Read online

  P. D. JAMES

  The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories

  Contents

  Title Page

  Foreword

  Preface

  The Mistletoe Murder

  A Very Commonplace Murder

  The Boxdale Inheritance

  The Twelve Clues of Christmas

  About the Author

  Also by the Author

  Copyright

  Foreword

  Like so many crime writers, P. D. James was drawn to her vocation out of love. Before she took up her pen, she was a keen reader of detective novels, and over her long career she remained fascinated by the so-called Golden Age that followed the end of the First World War. But she was more than a fan. She applied her keen intelligence to what she read and developed a genuine expertise on the subject. I once heard her lecture on the four Queens of Crime – Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh – and she even wrote a fascinating monograph on the subject, Talking about Detective Fiction. That love for the work of her predecessors is evident in this collection of her short stories: she picks the pockets of the mechanics of Golden Age plotting; Agatha Christie is referenced several times; and there are knowing nods to the conventions of traditional ‘cosy’ mystery stories.

  This appropriation of the conventions of the past sometimes misleads people into thinking of P. D. James as a cosy writer. The reality is that she was anything but cosy, and she takes on those conventions only to subvert them in an often witty way. But one thing in particular sets P. D. James apart from the mainstream tradition of Golden Age English crime fiction, with its stately homes and bourgeois villages where reality never rears its ill-mannered head. She understands that murder is nasty and brutal, that it is fuelled by the most malevolent of motives, and she’s not afraid to face that darkness head on. Her understanding of what she often called ‘wickedness’ is creepily accurate. There’s nothing cosy about the murders in these stories, however much the settings mimic their forerunners.

  And those settings are another hallmark of P. D. James’s work. Her stories are always very specifically located in terms both of time and place. She is meticulous in her descriptions, summoning up backdrops against which we can readily picture the events as they unfold. She makes those settings work for a living – they create atmosphere and often foreshadow what is to come. Here is our first sight of Stutleigh Manor: ‘It loomed up out of the darkness, a stark shape against a grey sky pierced with a few high stars. And then the moon moved from behind a cloud and the house was revealed; beauty, symmetry and mystery bathed in white light.’ We know right now that something sinister and mysterious lies ahead.

  As well as wickedness, P. D. James understood the importance of respectability. She wrote about people who would kill to preserve reputation and status, but who would never do it in a vulgar way. Her elegant prose always plays fair with the reader, and lulls us into a sense of false security, as her killers try to do. Behind those untroubled facades, the malice and suspense build, taking us to places that are dark, vicious and shocking. But always beautifully written. These stories are a delicious gift to us at a time when we thought we would read no more of P. D. James’s work.

  Val McDermid

  Preface

  In her introduction to an anthology of short crime stories published in 1934, Dorothy L. Sayers wrote: ‘Death seems to provide the minds of the Anglo-Saxon race with a greater fund of innocent amusement than any other single subject.’ She was, of course, writing not of the horrifying, messy and occasionally pathetic murders of real life, but of the mysterious, elegantly contrived and popular concoctions of crime writers. Perhaps amusement is hardly the word; entertainment, relaxation or excitement would all be more appropriate. And, to judge from the universal popularity of crime writing, it isn’t only the Anglo-Saxons who evince enthusiasm for murder most foul. Millions of readers throughout the world are at home in Sherlock Holmes’s claustrophobic sanctum at 221B Baker Street, Miss Marples’s charming cottage in St Mary Mead, and Lord Peter Wimsey’s elegant Piccadilly flat.

  In the period leading up to the Second World War, much of crime writing was done in the form of a short story. The two writers who can be regarded as the founding fathers of the detective story, Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, were both masters of the form, and the former adumbrated most of the distinguishing features not only of the short story, but of the crime novel: the least likely suspect as murderer, the closed-room mystery, the case solved by an armchair detective, and the epistolary narrative. Eric Ambler has written: ‘The Detective story may have been born in the mind of Edgar Allan Poe, but it was London that fed it, clothed it and brought it to maturity.’ He was, of course, thinking of the genius of Conan Doyle, creator of the most famous detective in literature. He bequeathed to the genre a respect for reason, a non-abstract intellectualism, a reliance on ratiocination rather than on physical force, an abhorrence of sentimentality and the power to create an atmosphere of mystery and gothic horror which is yet firmly rooted in physical reality. Above all, more than any other writer he established the tradition of the great detective, that omniscient amateur whose personal, sometimes bizarre eccentricity is contrasted with the rationality of his methods and who provides for the reader the comforting reassurance that, despite our apparent powerlessness, we yet inhabit an intelligible universe.

  Although the Sherlock Holmes stories are the most famous of this period, they are not the only ones worth re-reading. Julian Symons, a respected critic of crime fiction, pointed out that most of the notable practitioners in the art of the short story turned to detection as a relief from their other work and enjoyed using a form still in its infancy which offered them infinite opportunities for originality and variation. G. K. Chesterton is an example of a writer whose main interest lay elsewhere but whose Father Brown stories are still read with pleasure. And it is surprising how many other distinguished writers tried their hand at the short crime story. In the second series of Great Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror, published in 1931, the contributors included H. G. Wells, Wilkie Collins, Walter de la Mare, Charles Dickens and Arthur Quiller-Couch, in addition to the names we would expect to find.

  Few detective novelists writing today are uninfluenced by the founding fathers, but most crime writers produce novels rather than short stories. Part of the reason for this is the greatly reduced market for short stories generally, but the main reason is perhaps that the detective story has moved closer to mainstream fiction and a writer needs space if he or she is fully to explore the psychological subtleties of character, the complications of relationships, and the impact of murder and of a police investigation on the lives of those characters.

  The scope of the short story is inevitably restricted and this means it is most effective when it deals with a single incident or one dominant idea. It is the originality and strength of this idea which largely determine the success of the story. Although it is far less complex in structure than a novel, more linear in concept, driving single-mindedly to its denouement, the short story can still provide within its smaller compass a credible world into which the reader can enter for those satisfactions which we expect from good crime writing: a plausible mystery, tension and excitement, characters with whom we can identify if not always sympathise, and an ending which does not disappoint. There is a satisfying art in containing within a few thousand words all those elements of plot, setting, characterisation and surprise which go to provide a good crime story.

  Although most of my own work has been as a novelist, I have greatly enjoyed the challenge of the short story. Much has to be achieved with limited means. There is not space
for long and detailed descriptions of place, but the setting must still come alive for the reader. Characterisation is as important as in the novel, but the essentials of a personality must be established with an economy of words. The plot must be strong but not too complex, and the denouement, to which every sentence of the narrative should inexorably lead, must surprise the reader but not leave him feeling cheated. All should command the most ingenious element of the short story: the shock of surprise. The good short story is accordingly difficult to write well, but in this busy age it can provide one of the most satisfactory reading experiences.

  P. D. James

  The Mistletoe Murder

  One of the minor hazards of being a bestselling crime novelist is the ubiquitous question, ‘And have you ever been personally involved with a real-life murder investigation?’; a question occasionally asked with a look and tone which suggest that the Murder Squad of the Metropolitan Police might with advantage dig up my back garden.

  I invariably reply no, partly from reticence, partly because the truth would take too long to tell and my part in it, even after fifty-two years, is difficult to justify. But now, at seventy, the last survivor of that extraordinary Christmas of 1940, the story can surely safely be told, if only for my own satisfaction. I’ll call it ‘The Mistletoe Murder’. Mistletoe plays only a small part in the mystery but I’ve always liked alliteration in my titles. I have changed the names. There is now no one living to be hurt in feelings or reputation, but I don’t see why the dead should be denied a similar indulgence.

  I was eighteen when it happened, a young war-widow; my husband was killed two weeks after our marriage, one of the first RAF pilots to be shot down in single combat. I had joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, partly because I had convinced myself it would have pleased him, but primarily out of the need to assuage grief by a new life, new responsibilities.

  It didn’t work. Bereavement is like a serious illness. One dies or one survives, and the medicine is time, not a change of scene. I went through my preliminary training in a mood of grim determination to see it through, but when my grandmother’s invitation came, just six weeks before Christmas, I accepted with relief. It solved a problem for me. I was an only child and my father, a doctor, had volunteered as a middle-aged recruit to the Royal Army Medical Corps; my mother had taken herself off to America. A number of school friends, some also in the Forces, wrote inviting me for Christmas, but I couldn’t face even the subdued festivities of wartime and feared that I should be a skeleton at their family feast.

  I was curious, too, about my mother’s childhood home. She had never got on with her mother and after her marriage the rift was complete. I had met my grandmother only once in childhood and remembered her as formidable, sharp-tongued, and not particularly sympathetic to the young. But I was no longer young, except in years, and what her letter tactfully hinted at – a warm house with plenty of wood fires, home cooking and good wine, peace and quiet – was just what I craved.

  There would be no other guests, but my cousin Paul hoped to be on leave for Christmas. I was curious to meet him. He was my only surviving cousin, the younger son of my mother’s brother and about six years older than I. We had never met, partly because of the family feud, partly because his mother was French and much of his youth spent in that country. His elder brother had died when I was at school. I had a vague childhood memory of some disreputable secret, whispered about but never explained.

  My grandmother in her letter assured me that, apart from the three of us, there would only be the butler, Seddon, and his wife. She had taken the trouble to find out the time of a country bus which would leave Victoria at 5 p.m. on Christmas Eve and take me as far as the nearest town, where Paul would meet me.

  The horror of the murder, the concentration on every hour of that traumatic Boxing Day, has diminished my memory of the journey and arrival. I recall Christmas Eve in a series of images, like a gritty black-and-white film, disjointed, a little surreal.

  The bus, blacked out, crawling, lights dimmed, through the unlit waste of the countryside under a reeling moon; the tall figure of my cousin coming forward out of the darkness to greet me at the terminus; sitting beside him, rug-wrapped, in his sports car as we drove through darkened villages through a sudden swirl of snow. But one image is clear and magical, my first sight of Stutleigh Manor. It loomed up out of the darkness, a stark shape against a grey sky pierced with a few high stars. And then the moon moved from behind a cloud and the house was revealed; beauty, symmetry and mystery bathed in white light.

  Five minutes later I followed the small circle of light from Paul’s torch through the porch with its country paraphernalia of walking-sticks, brogues, rubber boots and umbrellas, under the blackout curtain and into the warmth and brightness of the square hall. I remember the huge log fire in the hearth, the family portraits, the air of shabby comfort, and the mixed bunches of holly and mistletoe above the pictures and doors, which were the only Christmas decoration. My grandmama came slowly down the wide wooden stairs to greet me, smaller than I had remembered, delicately boned and slightly shorter even than my five feet three inches. But her handshake was surprisingly firm and, looking into the sharp, intelligent eyes, at the set of the obstinate mouth, so like my mother’s, I knew that she was still formidable.

  I was glad I had come, glad to meet for the first time my only cousin, but my grandmother had in one respect misled me. There was to be a second guest, a distant relation of the family, who had driven from London earlier and arrived before me.

  I met Rowland Maybrick for the first time when we gathered for drinks before dinner in a sitting room to the left of the main hall. I disliked him on sight and was grateful to my grandmother for not having suggested that he should drive me from London. The crass insensitivity of his greeting – ‘You didn’t tell me, Paul, that I was to meet a pretty young widow’ – reinforced my initial prejudice against what, with the intolerance of youth, I thought of as a type.

  He was in the uniform of a Flight Lieutenant but without wings – Wingless Wonders, we used to call them – darkly handsome, full-mouthed under the thin moustache, his eyes amused and speculative, a man who fancied his chances. I had met his type before and hadn’t expected to encounter it at the manor.

  I learned that in civilian life he was an antiques dealer. Paul, perhaps sensing my disappointment at finding that I wasn’t the only guest, explained that the family needed to sell some valuable coins. Rowland, who specialised in coinage, was to sort and price them with a view to finding a purchaser. And he wasn’t only interested in coins. His gaze ranged over furniture, pictures, porcelain and bronze; his long fingers touched and caressed as if he were mentally pricing them for sale. I suspected that, given half a chance, he would have pawed me and assessed my second-hand value.

  My grandmother’s butler and cook, indispensable small-part characters in any country-house murder, were respectful and competent but deficient in seasonal goodwill. My grandmother, if she gave the matter any thought, would probably have described them as faithful and devoted retainers, but I had my doubts. Even in 1940 things were changing. Mrs Seddon seemed to be both overworked and bored, a depressing combination, while her husband barely contained the lugubrious resentment of a man calculating how much more he could have earned as a war-worker at the nearest RAF base.

  I liked my room; the four-poster with its faded curtains, the comfortable low chair beside the fire, the elegant little writing-desk, the prints and watercolours, fly-blown in their original frames. Before getting into bed I put out the bedside light and drew aside the blackout curtain. High stars and moonlight, a dangerous sky. But this was Christmas Eve. Surely they wouldn’t fly tonight. And I thought of women all over Europe drawing aside their curtains and looking up in hope and fear at the menacing moon.

  I woke early next morning, missing the jangle of Christmas bells, bells which in 1940 would have heralded invasion. Next day the police were to take me through every minute of that Ch
ristmas, and every detail remains clearly in my memory more than fifty years later. After breakfast we exchanged presents. My grandmother had obviously raided her jewel chest for her gift to me of a charming enamel and gold brooch, and I suspect that Paul’s offering, a Victorian ring, a garnet surrounded with seed pearls, came from the same source. I had come prepared. I parted with two of my personal treasures in the cause of family reconciliation, a first edition of A Shropshire Lad for Paul and an early edition of Diary of a Nobody for my grandmother. They were well received. Rowland’s contribution to the Christmas rations was three bottles of gin, packets of tea, coffee and sugar, and a pound of butter, probably filched from RAF stores. Just before midday the depleted local church choir arrived, sang half a dozen unaccompanied carols embarrassingly out of tune, were grudgingly rewarded by Mrs Seddon with mulled wine and mince pies and, with evident relief, slipped out again through the blackout curtains to their Christmas dinners.

  After a traditional meal served at one o’clock, Paul asked me to go for a walk. I wasn’t sure why he wanted my company. He was almost silent as we tramped doggedly over the frozen furrows of desolate fields and through birdless copses as joylessly as if on a route march. The snow had stopped falling but a thin crust lay crisp and white under a gun-metal sky. As the light faded, we returned home and saw the back of the blacked-out manor, a grey L-shape against the whiteness. Suddenly, with an unexpected change of mood, Paul began scooping up the snow. No one receiving the icy slap of a snowball in the face can resist retaliation, and we spent twenty minutes or so like schoolchildren, laughing and hurling snow at each other and at the house, until the snow on the lawn and gravel path had been churned into slush.