Murder Most Merry

WHO KILLED FATHER CHRISTMAS? – Patricia Moyes

“Good morning, Mr. Borrowdale. Nippy out, isn’t it? You’re in early, I see.” Little Miss MacArthur spoke with her usual brisk brightness, which failed to conceal both envy and dislike. She was unpacking a consignment of stout Teddy bears in the stockroom behind the toy department at Barnum and Thrums, the London store. “Smart as ever, Mr. Borrowdale.” she added, jealously.

I laid down my curly-brimmed bowler hat and cane and took off my British warm overcoat. I don’t mind admitting that I do take pains to dress as well as I can, and for some reason it seems to infuriate the Miss MacArthurs of the world.

She prattled on. “Nice looking, these Teddies, don’t you think? Very reasonable, too. Made in Hong Kong, that’ll be why. I think I’ll take one for my sister’s youngest.”

The toy department at Barnum’s has little to recommend it to anyone over the age of twelve, and normally it is tranquil and little populated. However, at Christmastime it briefly becomes the bustling heart of the great shop, and also provides useful vacation jobs for chaps like me who wish to earn some money during the weeks before the university term begins in January. Gone, I fear, are the days when undergraduates were the gilded youth of England. We all have to work our passages these days, and sometimes it means selling toys.

One advantage of the job is that employees—even temporaries like me— are allowed to buy goods at a considerable discount, which helps with the Christmas gift problem. As a matter of fact, I had already decided to buy a Teddy bear for one of my nephews, and I mentioned as much.

“Well, you’d better take it right away,” remarked Miss MacArthur, “because I heard Mr. Harrington say he was taking two, and I think Disaster has her eye on one.” Disaster was the unfortunate but inevitable nickname of Miss Aster, who had been with the store for thirty-one years but still made mistakes with her stockbook. I felt sorry for the old girl. I had overheard a conversation between Mr. Harrington, the department manager, and Mr. Andrews, the deputy store manager, and so I knew—but Disaster didn’t—that she would be getting the sack as soon as the Christmas rush was over.

Meanwhile, Miss MacArthur was arranging the bears on a shelf. They sat there in grinning rows, brown and woolly, with boot-button eyes and red ribbons round their necks.

It was then that Father Christmas came in. He’d been in the cloakroom changing into his costume—white beard, red nose, and all. His name was Bert Denman. He was a cheery soul who got on well with the kids, and he’d had the Father Christmas job at Barnum’s each of the three years I’d been selling there. Now he was carrying his sack, which he filled every morning from the cheap items in the stockroom. A visit to Father Christmas cost 50 pence, so naturally the gift that was fished out of the sack couldn’t be worth more than 20 pence. However, to my surprise, he went straight over to the row of Teddy bears and picked one off the shelf. For some reason, he chose the only one with a blue instead of a red ribbon.

Miss MacArthur was on to him in an instant. “What d’you think you’re doing, Mr. Denman? Those Teddies aren’t in your line at all—much too dear. One pound ninety, they are.”

Father Christmas did not answer, and suddenly I realized that it was not Bert Denman under the red robe. “Wait a minute,” I said. “Who are you? You’re not our Father Christmas.”

He turned to face me, the Teddy bear in his hand. “That’s all right,” he said. “Charlie Burrows is my name. I live in the same lodging house with Bert Denman. He was taken poorly last night, and I’m standing in for him.”

“Well.” said Miss MacArthur. “How very odd. Does Mr. Harrington know?”

“Of course he does,” said Father Christmas.

As if on cue, Mr. Harrington himself came hurrying into the stockroom. He always hurried everywhere, preceded by his small black mustache. He said, “Ah, there you are. Burrows. Fill up your sack, and I’ll explain the job to you. Denman told you about the Teddy bear, did he?”

“Yes, Mr. Harrington.”

“Father Christmas can’t give away an expensive bear like that, Mr. Harrington,” Miss MacArthur objected.

“Now, now, Miss MacArthur. it’s all arranged,” said Harrington fussily. “A customer came in yesterday and made a special request that Father Christmas should give his small daughter a Teddy bear this morning. I knew this consignment was due on the shelves, so I promised him one. It’s been paid for. The important thing, Burrows, is to remember the child’s name. It’s... er... I have it written down somewhere.”

“Annabel Whitworth,” said Father Christmas. “Four years old, fair hair, will be brought in by her mother.”

“I see that Denman briefed you well.” said Mr. Harrington, with an icy smile. “Well, now, I’ll collect two bears for myself—one for my son and one for my neighbor’s boy—and then I’ll show you the booth.”

Miss Aster arrived just then. She and Miss MacArthur finished uncrating the bears and took one out to put on display next to a female doll that, among other endearing traits, actually wet its diaper. Mr. Harrington led our surrogate Father Christmas to his small canvas booth, and the rest of us busied and braced ourselves for the moment when the great glass doors opened and the floodtide was let in. The toy department of a big store on December 23 is no place for weaklings.

It is curious that even such an apparently random stream of humanity as Christmas shoppers displays a pattern of behavior. The earliest arrivals in the toy department are office workers on their way to their jobs. The actual toddlers, bent on an interview with Father Christmas, do not appear until their mothers have had time to wash up breakfast, have a bit of a go around the house, and catch the bus from Kensington or the tube from Uxbridge.

On that particular morning it was just twenty-eight minutes past ten when I saw Disaster, who was sitting in a decorated cash desk labeled “The Elfin Grove,” take 50 pence from the first parent to usher her child into Santa’s booth. For about two minutes the mother waited, chatting quietly with Disaster. Then a loudly wailing infant emerged from the booth.

The mother snatched her up, and—with that sixth sense that mothers everywhere seem to develop—interpreted the incoherent screams. “She says that Father Christmas won’t talk to her. She says he’s asleep.”

It was clearly an emergency, even if a minor one, and Disaster was already showing signs of panic. I excused myself from my customer—a middle-aged gentleman who was playing with an electric train set—and went over to see what I could do. By then, the mother was indignant.

“Fifty pence and the old man sound asleep and drunk as like as not, and at half-past ten in the morning. Disgraceful, I call it. And here’s poor little Poppy what had been looking forward to—”

I rushed into Father Christmas’s booth. The man who called himself Charlie Burrows was slumped forward in his chair, looking for all the world as if he were asleep; but when I shook him, his head lolled horribly, and it was obvious that he was more than sleeping. The red robe concealed the blood until it made my hand sticky. Father Christmas had been stabbed in the back, and he was certainly dead.

I acted as fast as I could. First of all, I told Disaster to put up the CLOSED sign outside Santa’s booth. Then I smoothed down Poppy’s mother by leading her to a counter where I told her she could select any toy up to one pound and have it free. Under pretext of keeping records, I got her name and address. Finally I cornered Mr. Harrington in his office and told him the news.

I thought he was going to faint. “Dead? Murdered? Are you sure, Mr. Borrowdale?”

“Quite sure, I’m afraid. You’d better telephone the police, Mr. Harrington.”

“The police! In Barnum’s! What a terrible thing! I’ll telephone the deputy store manager first and then the police.”

As a matter of fact, the police were surprisingly quick and discreet. A plainclothes detective superintendent and his sergeant, a photographer, and the police doctor arrived, not in a posse, but as individuals, unnoticed among the crowd. They assembled in the booth, where the deputy manager—Mr. Andrews—and Mr. Harrington and I were waiting for them.

The superintendent introduced himself—his name was Armitage—and inspected the body with an expression of cold fury on his face that I couldn’t quite understand, although the reason became clear later. He said very little. After some tedious formalities Armitage indicated that the body might be removed.

“What’s the least conspicuous way to do it?” he asked.

“You can take him out through the back of the booth,” I said. “The canvas overlaps right behind Santa’s chair. The door to the staff quarters and the stockroom is just opposite, and from there you can take the service lift to the goods entrance in the mews.”

The doctor and the photographer between them carried off their grim burden on a collapsible stretcher, and Superintendent Armitage began asking questions about the arrangements in the Father Christmas booth. I did the explaining, since Mr. Harrington seemed to be verging on hysteria.

Customers paid their 50 pence to Disaster in the Elfin Grove, and then the child—usually alone—was propelled through the door of the booth and into the presence of Father Christmas, who sat in his canvas-backed director’s chair on a small dais facing the entrance, with his sack of toys beside him. The child climbed onto his knee, whispered its Christmas wishes, and was rewarded with a few friendly words and a small gift from Santa’s sack.

What was not obvious to the clientele was the back entrance to the booth, which enabled Father Christmas to slip in and out unobserved. He usually had his coffee break at about 11:15, unless there was a very heavy rush of business. Disaster would pick a moment when custom seemed slow, put up the CLOSED notice, and inform Bert that he could take a few minutes off. When he returned, he pressed a button by his chair that rang a buzzer in the cashier’s booth. Down would come the notice, and Santa was in business again.

Before Superintendent Armitage could comment on my remarks, Mr. Harrington broke into a sort of despairing wait. “It must have been one of the customers!” he cried.

“I don’t think so. sir.” said Armitage. “This is an inside job. He was stabbed in the back with a long thin blade of some sort. The murderer must have opened the back flap and stabbed him clean through the canvas back of his chair. That must have been someone who knew the exact arrangements. The murderer then used the back way to enter the booth—”

“I don’t see how you can say that!” Harrington’s voice was rising dangerously. “If the man was stabbed from outside, what makes you think anybody came into the booth?”

“I’ll explain that in a minute, sir.”

Ignoring Armitage, Harrington went on. “In any case, he wasn’t our regular Father Christmas! None of us had ever seen him before. Why on earth would anybody kill a man that nobody knew?”

Armitage and the deputy manager exchanged glances. Then Armitage said. “I knew him, sir. Very well. Charlie Burrows was one of our finest plainclothes narcotics officers.”

Mr. Harrington had gone green. “You mean—he was a policeman?”

“Exactly, sir. I’d better explain. A little time ago we got a tipoff from an informer that an important consignment of high-grade heroin was to be smuggled in from Hong Kong in a consignment of Christmas toys. Teddy bears, in fact. The drug was to be in the Barnum and Thrums carton, hidden inside a particular Teddy bear, which would be distinguished by having a blue ribbon around its neck instead of a red one.”

“Surely,” I said, “you couldn’t get what you call an important consignment inside one Teddy bear, even a big one.”

Armitage sighed. “Shows you aren’t familiar with the drug scene, sir,” he said. “Why, half a pound of pure high-grade heroin is worth a fortune on the streets.”

With a show of bluster Harrington said. “If you knew this, Superintendent, why didn’t you simply intercept the consignment and confiscate the drug? Look at the trouble that’s been—”

Armitage interrupted him. “If you’d just hear me out, sir. What I’ve told you was the sum total of our information. We didn’t know who in Barnum’s was going to pick up the heroin, or how or where it was to be disposed of. We’re more interested in getting the people—the pushers—than confiscating the cargo. So I had a word with Mr. Andrews here, and he kindly agreed to let Charlie take on the Father Christmas job. And Charlie set a little trap. Unfortunately, he paid for it with his life.” There was an awkward silence.

He went on. “Mr. Andrews told us that the consignment had arrived and was to be unpacked today. We know that staff get first pick, as it were, at new stock, and we were naturally interested to see who would select the bear with the blue ribbon. It was Charlie’s own idea to concoct a story about a special present for a little girl—”

“You mean, that wasn’t true?” Harrington was outraged. “But I spoke to the customer myself!”

“Yes, sir. That’s to say, you spoke to another of our people, who was posing as the little girl’s father.”

“You’re very thorough,” Harrington said.

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. Well, as I was saying, Charlie made a point of selecting the bear with the blue ribbon and taking it off in his sack. He knew that whoever was picking up the drop would have to come and get it—or try to. You see, if we’d just allowed one of the staff to select it, that person could simply have said that it was pure coincidence—blue was such a pretty color. Difficult to prove criminal knowledge. You understand?”

Nobody said anything. With quite a sense of dramatic effect Armitage reached down into Santa’s sack and pulled out a Teddy bear. It had a blue ribbon round its neck.

In a voice tense with strain Mr. Andrews said, “So the murderer didn’t get away with the heroin. I thought you said—”

Superintendent Armitage produced a knife from his pocket. “We’ll see,” he said. “With your permission, I’m going to open this bear.”

“Of course.”

The knife ripped through the nobbly brown fabric, and a lot of stuffing fell out. Nothing else. Armitage made a good job of it. By the time he had finished, the bear was in shreds: and nothing had emerged from its interior except kapok.

Armitage surveyed the wreckage with a sort of bleak satisfaction. Suddenly brisk, he said, “Now. Which staff members took bears from the stockroom this morning?”

“I did,” I said at once.

“Anybody else?”

There was a silence. I said, “I believe you took two, didn’t you, Mr. Harrington?”

“I... em... yes, now that you mention it.”

“Miss MacArthur took one,” I said. “It was she who unpacked the carton. She said that Dis—Miss Aster—was going to take one.”

“I see.” Armitage was making notes. “I presume you each signed for your purchases, and that the bears are now with your things in the staff cloakroom.” Without waiting for an answer he turned to me. “How many of these people saw Burrows select the bear with the blue ribbon?”

“All of us,” I said. “Isn’t that so, Mr. Harrington?”

Harrington just nodded. He looked sick.

“Well, then,” said Armitage, “I shall have to inspect all the bears that you people removed from the stockroom.”

There was an element of black humor in the parade of the Teddies, with their inane grins and knowing, beady eyes: but as one after the other was dismembered. nothing more sensational was revealed than a growing pile of kapok. The next step was to check the stockbook numbers—and sure enough, one bear was missing.

It was actually Armitage’s Sergeant who found it. It had been ripped open and shoved behind a pile of boxes in the stockroom in a hasty attempt at concealment. There was no ribbon round its neck, and it was constructed very differently from the others. The kapok merely served as a thin layer of stuffing between the fabric skin and a spherical womb of pink plastic in the toy’s center. This plastic had been cut open and was empty. It was abundantly clear what it must have contained.

“Well,” said the Superintendent, “it’s obvious what happened. The murderer stabbed Burrows, slipped into the booth, and substituted an innocent Teddy bear for the loaded one, at the same time changing the neck ribbon. But he—or she—didn’t dare try walking out of the store with the bear, not after a murder. So, before Charlie’s body was found, the murderer dismembered the bear, took out the heroin, and hid it.” He sighed again. “I’m afraid this means a body search. I’ll call the Yard for a police matron for the ladies.”

It was all highly undignified and tedious, and poor old Disaster nearly had a seizure, despite the fact that the police matron seemed a thoroughly nice and kind woman. When it was all over, however, and our persons and clothing had been practically turned inside out, still nothing had been found. The four of us were required to wait in the staff restroom while exhaustive searches were made for both the heroin and the weapon.

Disaster was in tears, Miss MacArthur was loudly indignant and threatened to sue the police for false arrest, and Mr. Harrington developed what he called a nervous stomach, on account, he said, of the way the toy department was being left understaffed and unsupervised on one of the busiest days of the year.

At long last Superintendent Armitage came in. He said, “Nothing. Abso-bloody-lutely nothing. Well, I can’t keep you people here indefinitely. I suggest you all go out and get yourselves some lunch.” He sounded very tired and cross and almost human.

With considerable relief we prepared to leave the staffroom. Only Mr. Harrington announced that he felt too ill to eat anything, and that he would remain in the department. The Misses MacArthur and Aster left together. I put on my coat and took the escalator down to the ground floor, among the burdened, chattering crowd.

I was out in the brisk air of the street when I heard Armitage’s voice behind me.

“Just one moment, if you please, Mr. Borrowdale.”

I turned. “Yes, Superintendent. Can I help you?”

“You’re up at the university, aren’t you, sir? Just taken a temporary job at Barnum’s for the vacation?”

“That’s right.”

“Do quite a bit of fencing, don’t you?”

He had my cane out of my hand before I knew what was happening. The sergeant, an extraordinarily tough and unattractive character, showed surprising dexterity and speed in getting an arm grip on me. Armitage had unscrewed the top of the cane, and was whistling in a quiet, appreciative manner. “Very nice. Very nice little sword stick. Something like a stilletto. I don’t suppose Charlie felt a thing.”

“Now, look here,” I said. “You can’t make insinuations like that. Just because I’m known as a bit of dandy, and carry a sword stick, that’s no reason—”

“A dandy, eh?” said Armitage thoughtfully. He looked me up and down in a curious manner, as if he thought something was missing.

It was at that moment that Miss MacArthur suddenly appeared round the corner of the building.

“Oh, Mr. Borrowdale, look what I found! Lying down in the mews by the goods entrance! It must have fallen out of the staffroom window! Lucky I’ve got sharp eyes—it was behind a rubbish bin, I might easily have missed it!” And she handed me my bowler hat.

That is to say, she would have done if Armitage hadn’t intercepted it. It didn’t take him more than five seconds to find the packages of white powder hidden between the hard shell of the hat and the oiled-silk lining.

Armitage said, “So you were going to peddle this stuff to young men and women at the university, were you? Charming, I must say. Now you can come back to the Yard and tell us all about your employers—if you want a chance at saving your own neck, that is.”

Miss MacArthur was goggling at me. “Oh, Mr. Borrowdale!” she squeaked. “Have I gone and done something wrong?”

I never did like Miss MacArthur.

[i] Ed. note: A joyful note to anachronism—shortly after this story was written.