The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories Page 3

  There was nothing else of interest. I closed the drawer and began pacing and measuring the distance from the desk to the French windows. It was then that the door opened almost soundlessly and I saw my cousin.

  Coming up quietly beside me, he said lightly: ‘What are you doing? Trying to exorcise the horror?’

  I replied: ‘Something like that.’

  For a moment we stood in silence. Then he took my hand in his, drawing it through his arm. He said:

  ‘I’m sorry, cousin, it’s been a beastly day for you. And all we wanted was to give you a peaceful Christmas.’ I didn’t reply. I was aware of his nearness, the warmth of his body, his strength. As we moved together to the door I thought, but did not say: ‘Was that really what you wanted, to give me a peaceful Christmas? Was that all?’

  *

  I had found it difficult to sleep since my husband had been killed, and now I lay rigid under the canopy of the four-poster reliving the extraordinary day, piecing together the anomalies, the small incidents, the clues, to form a satisfying pattern, trying to impose order on disorder. I think that is what I’ve been wanting to do all my life. It was that night at Stutleigh which decided my whole career.

  Rowland had been killed at half-past ten by a single blow delivered across the width of a three foot six desk. But at half-past ten my cousin had been with me, had indeed been hardly out of my sight all day. I had provided an indisputable alibi. But wasn’t that precisely why I had been invited, cajoled to the house by the promise of peace, quiet, good food and wine, exactly what a young widow, recently recruited into the Forces, would yearn for?

  The victim, too, had been enticed to Stutleigh. His bait was the prospect of getting his hands on valuable coins and negotiating their sale. But the coins, which I had been told must of necessity be valued and sold, had in fact been purchased only five weeks earlier, almost immediately after my acceptance of my grandmother’s invitation. For a moment I wondered why the receipt hadn’t been destroyed, but the answer came quickly. The receipt was necessary so that the coins, their purpose now served, could be sold and the £3,200 recouped. And if I had been used, so had other people.

  Christmas was the one day when the two servants could be certain to be absent all night. The police, too, could be relied upon to play their appointed part.

  The Inspector, honest and conscientious but not particularly intelligent, inhibited by respect for an old-established family and by the presence of his Chief Constable. The Chief Constable, past retirement age but kept on because of the war, inexperienced in dealing with murder, a friend of the family and the last person to suspect the local squire of a brutal murder.

  A pattern was taking shape, was forming into a picture, a picture with a face. In imagination I walked in the footsteps of a murderer. As is proper in a Christie-type crime, I called him X.

  Sometime during Christmas Eve the right-hand drawer of the study desk was cleared, the papers stuffed into the left-hand drawer, the wellington boots placed ready. The weapon was hidden, perhaps in the drawer with the boots. No, I reasoned, that wasn’t possible; it would need to have been longer than that to reach across the desk. I decided to leave the question of the weapon until later.

  And so to the fatal Christmas Day. At a quarter to ten my grandmother goes up to bed, telling Rowland that she will get the coins out of the library safe so that he can examine them before he leaves next day. X can be certain that he will be there at half-past ten, sitting at the desk. He enters silently, taking the key with him and locking the door quietly behind him. The weapon is in his hands, or hidden somewhere within reach in the room.

  X kills his victim, smashes the watch to establish the time, exchanges his shoes for the wellington boots, unlocks the door to the patio and opens it wide. Then he takes the longest possible run across the library and leaps into the darkness. He would have to be young, healthy and athletic in order to clear the six feet of snow and land on the gravel path; but then he is young, healthy and athletic.

  He need have no fear of footprints on the gravel. The snow has been scuffled by our afternoon snowballing. He makes the first set of footsteps to the library door, closes it, then makes the second set, being careful partly to cover the first. No need to worry about fingerprints on the doorknob; his have every right to be there. And then he re-enters the house by a side-door left unbolted, puts on his own shoes and returns the wellington boots to their place in the front porch. It is while he is crossing the hall that a piece of snow falls from the boots and melts into a puddle on the wooden floor.

  How else could that small pool of water have got there? Certainly my cousin had lied in suggesting that it came from the water-carafe. The water-carafe, half-full, had been by my grandmother’s bed with the glass over the rim. Water could not have been spilled from it unless the carrier had stumbled and fallen.

  And now, at last, I gave the murderer a name. But if my cousin had killed Rowland, how had it been done in the time? He had left me for no more than three minutes to say goodnight to our grandmother. Could there have been time to fetch the weapon, go to the library, kill Rowland, make the footprints, dispose of the weapon, cleaning from it any blood, and return to me so calmly to tell me that I was needed upstairs?

  But suppose Dr Bywaters was wrong, seduced into an over-hasty diagnosis by the watch. Suppose Paul had altered the watch before smashing it and the murder had taken place later than 10.30. But the medical evidence was surely conclusive; it couldn’t have been as late as half-past one. And even if it were, Paul had been too drunk to deliver that calculated blow.

  But had he in fact been drunk? Had that, too, been a ploy? He had enquired whether I liked whisky before bringing in the bottle, and I remembered how faint was the smell of the spirit on his breath. But no; the timing was incontrovertible. It was impossible that Paul could have killed Rowland.

  But suppose he’d merely been an accomplice; that someone else had done the actual deed, perhaps a fellow-officer whom he had secretly let into the house and concealed in one of its many rooms, someone who had stolen down at 10.30 and killed Maybrick while I gave Paul his alibi and the surging music of Wagner drowned the sound of the blows. Then, the deed done, he left the room with the weapon, hiding the key among the holly and mistletoe above the door, dislodging the bunch as he did so, so that the berries fell. Paul had then come, taking the key from the ledge, being careful to tread over the fallen berries, locked the library door behind him leaving the key in place, then fabricated the footprints just as I’d earlier imagined.

  Paul as the accomplice, not the actual murderer, raised a number of unanswered questions, but it was by no means impossible. An Army accomplice would have had the necessary skill and the nerve. Perhaps, I thought bitterly, they’d seen it as a training exercise. By the time I tried to compose myself to sleep I had come to a decision. Tomorrow I would do more thoroughly what the police had done perfunctorily. I would search for the weapon.

  Looking back it seems to me that I felt no particular revulsion at the deed and certainly no compulsion to confide in the police. It wasn’t just that I liked my cousin and had disliked Maybrick. I think the war had something to do with it. Good people were dying all over the world and the fact that one unlikeable one had been killed seemed somehow less important.

  I know now that I was wrong. Murder should never be excused or condoned. But I don’t regret what I later did; no human being should die at the end of a rope.

  I woke very early before it was light. I possessed myself in patience; there was no use in searching by artificial light and I didn’t want to draw attention to myself. So I waited until Mrs Seddon had brought up my early morning tea, bathed and dressed, and went down to breakfast just before nine. My cousin wasn’t there. Mrs Seddon said that he had driven to the village to get the car serviced. This was the opportunity I needed.

  My investigation ended in a small lumber room at the top of the house. It was so full that I had to climb over trunks, tin boxes and old ch
ests in order to search. There was a wooden chest containing rather battered cricket bats and balls, dusty, obviously unused since the grandsons last played in village matches. I touched a magnificent but shabby-looking horse, and set it in vigorous creaking motion, got tangled in the piled tin track of a Hornby train set, and cracked my ankle against a large Noah’s Ark.

  Under the single window was a long wooden box, which I opened. Dust rose from a sheet of brown paper covering six croquet mallets with balls and hoops. It struck me that a mallet, with its long handle, would have been an appropriate weapon, but these had clearly lain undisturbed for years. I replaced the lid and searched further.

  In a corner were two golf-bags, and it was here I found what I was looking for – one of the clubs, the kind with a large wooden head, was different from its fellows. The head was shining-clean.

  It was then I heard a footstep and, looking round, saw my cousin. I know that guilt must have been plain on my face but he seemed completely unworried.

  He asked: ‘Can I help you?’

  No,’ I said. ‘No. I was just looking for something.’

  ‘And have you found it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think I have.’ He came into the room and shut the door, leaned across it and said casually: ‘Did you like Rowland Maybrick?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I didn’t like him. But not liking him isn’t a reason for killing him.’

  He said easily: ‘No, it isn’t, is it? But there’s something I think you should know about him. He was responsible for the death of my elder brother.’

  ‘You mean he murdered him?’

  ‘Nothing as straightforward as that. He blackmailed him. Charles was a homosexual. Maybrick got to know and made him pay. Charles killed himself because he couldn’t face a life of deceit, of being in Maybrick’s power, of losing this place. He preferred the dignity of death.’

  Looking back on it I have to remind myself how different public attitudes were in the Forties. Now it would seem extraordinary that anyone would kill himself for such a motive. Then I knew with desolate certainty that what he said was true.

  I asked: ‘Does my grandmother know about the homosexuality?’

  ‘Oh yes. There isn’t much that her generation don’t know, or guess. Grandmama adored Charles.’

  ‘I see. Thank you for telling me.’ After a moment I said: ‘I suppose if you’d gone on your first mission knowing Rowland Maybrick was alive and well, you’d have felt there was unfinished business.’

  He said: ‘How clever you are, Cousin. And how well you put things. That’s exactly what I should have felt, that I’d left unfinished business.’ Then he added: ‘So what were you doing here?’

  I took out my handkerchief and looked him in the face, the face so disconcertingly like my own.

  I said: ‘I was just dusting the tops of the golf-clubs.’

  I left the house two days later. We never spoke of it again. The investigation continued its fruitless course. I could have asked my cousin how he had done it, but I didn’t. For years I thought I should never really know.

  My cousin died in France, not, thank God, under Gestapo interrogation, but shot in an ambush. I wondered whether his Army accomplice had survived the war or had died with him. My grandmother lived on alone in the house, not dying until she was ninety-one, when she left the property to a charity for indigent gentlewomen, either to maintain as a home or to sell. It was the last charity I would have expected her to choose. The charity sold.

  My grandmother’s one bequest to me was the books in the library. Most of these I, too, sold, but I went down to the house to look them over and decide which volumes I wished to keep. Among them I found a photograph album wedged between two rather dull tomes of nineteenth-century sermons. I sat at the same desk where Rowland had been murdered and turned the pages, smiling at the sepia photographs of high-bosomed ladies with their clinched waists and immense flowered hats.

  And then, suddenly, turning its stiff pages, I saw my grandmother as a young woman. She was wearing what seemed a ridiculous little cap like a jockey’s and holding a golf-club as confidently as if it were a parasol. Beside the photograph was her name in careful script and underneath was written: ‘Ladies County Golf Champion 1898’.

  A Very Commonplace Murder

  ‘We close at twelve on Saturday,’ said the blonde in the estate office. ‘So if you keep the key after then, please drop it back through the letterbox. It’s the only key we have, and there may be other people wanting to view on Monday. Sign here, please, Sir.’

  The ‘Sir’ was grudging, an afterthought. Her tone was reproving. She didn’t really think he would buy the flat, this seedy old man with his air of spurious gentility, with his harsh voice. In her job you soon got a nose for the genuine inquirer. Ernest Gabriel. An odd name, half-common, half-fancy.

  But he took the key politely enough and thanked her for her trouble. No trouble, she thought. God knew there were few enough people interested in that sordid little dump, not at the price they were asking. He could keep the key a week, for all she cared.

  She was right. Gabriel hadn’t come to buy, only to view. It was the first time he had been back since it all happened sixteen years ago. He came neither as a pilgrim nor a penitent. He had returned under some compulsion which he hadn’t even bothered to analyse. He had been on his way to visit his only living relative, an elderly aunt who had recently been admitted to a geriatric ward. He hadn’t even realised the bus would pass the flat.

  But suddenly they were lurching through Camden Town, and the road became familiar, like a photograph springing into focus; and with a frisson of surprise he recognised the double-fronted shop and the flat above. There was an estate agent’s notice in the window. Almost without thinking, he had got off at the next stop, gone back to verify the name, and walked the half-mile to the office. It had seemed as natural and inevitable as his daily bus journey to work.

  Twenty minutes later he fitted the key into the lock of the front door and passed into the stuffy emptiness of the flat. The grimy walls still held the smell of cooking. There was a spatter of envelopes on the worn linoleum, dirtied and trampled by the feet of previous viewers. The light bulb swung naked in the hall, and the door into the sitting room stood open. To his right was the staircase, to his left the kitchen.

  Gabriel paused for a moment, then went into the kitchen. From the windows, half-curtained with grubby gingham, he looked upward to the great black building facing the flat, eyeless except for the one small square of window high on the fifth floor. It was from this window, sixteen years ago, that he had watched Denis Speller and Eileen Morrisey play out their commonplace little tragedy to its end.

  He had no right to be watching them, no right to be in the building at all after six o’clock. That had been the nub of his awful dilemma. It had happened by chance. Mr Maurice Bootman had instructed him, as the firm’s filing clerk, to go through the papers in the late Mr Bootman’s upstairs den in case there were any which should be in the files. They weren’t confidential or important papers – those had been dealt with by the family and the firm’s solicitors months before. They were just a miscellaneous, yellowing collection of out-of-date memoranda, old accounts, receipts and fading press clippings which had been bundled together into old Mr Bootman’s desk. He had been a great hoarder of trivia.

  But at the back of the left-hand bottom drawer Gabriel had found a key. It was by chance that he tried it in the lock of the corner cupboard. It fitted. And in the cupboard Gabriel found the late Mr Bootman’s small but choice collection of pornography.

  He knew that he had to read the books; not just to snatch surreptitious minutes with one ear listening for a footstep on the stairs or the whine of the approaching lift, and fearful always that his absence from his filing room would be noticed. No, he had to read them in privacy and in peace. So he devised his plan.

  It wasn’t difficult. As a trusted member of the staff, he had one of the Yale keys to the side-door
at which goods were delivered. It was locked on the inside at night by the porter before he went off duty. It wasn’t hard for Gabriel, always among the last to go home, to find the opportunity of shooting back the bolts before leaving with the porter by the main door. He dared risk it only once a week, and the day he chose was Friday.

  He would hurry home, eat his solitary meal beside the gas fire in his bedsitting room, then make his way back to the building and let himself in by the side-door. All that was necessary was to make sure he was waiting for the office to open on Monday morning so that, among the first in, he could lock the side-door before the porter made his ritual visit to unlock it for the day’s deliveries.

  These Friday nights became a desperate but shameful joy to Gabriel. Their pattern was always the same. He would sit crouched in old Mr Bootman’s low leather chair in front of the fireplace, his shoulders hunched over the book in his lap, his eyes following the pool of light from his torch as it moved over each page. He never dared to switch on the room light, and even on the coldest night he never lit the gas fire. He was fearful that its hiss might mask the sound of approaching feet, that its glow might shine through the thick curtains at the window, or that, somehow, the smell of gas would linger in the room next Monday morning to betray him. He was morbidly afraid of discovery, yet even this fear added to the excitement of his secret pleasure.

  It was on the third Friday in January that he first saw them. It was a mild evening, but heavy and starless. An early rain had slimed the pavements and bled the scribbled headlines from the newspaper placards. Gabriel wiped his feet carefully before climbing to the fifth floor. The claustrophobic room smelled sour and dusty, the air struck colder than the night outside. He wondered whether he dared open the window and let in some of the sweetness of the rain-cleansed sky.