Murder Most Merry

THE SPY AND THE CHRISTMAS CIPHER – Edward D. Hoch

It was just a few days before the Christmas recess at the University of Reading when Rand’s wife Leila said to him over dinner, “Come and speak to my class on Wednesday, Jeffrey.”

“What? Are you serious?” He put down his fork and stared at her. “I know nothing about archaeology.”

“You don’t have to. I just want you to tell them a Christmas story of some sort. Remember last year? The Canadian writer Robertson Davies was over here on a visit and he told one of his ghost stories.”

“I don’t know any good ghost stories.”

“Then tell them a cipher story from before you retired. Tell them about the time you worked through Christmas Eve trying to crack the St. Ives cipher.”

Ivan St. Ives. Rand hadn’t thought of him in years.

Yes, he supposed it was a Christmas story of sorts.

It was Christmas Eve morning in 1974, when Rand was still head of Concealed Communications, operating out of the big old building overlooking the Thames. He remembered his superior, Hastings, making the rounds of the offices with an open bottle of sherry and a stack of paper cups, a tradition that no one but Hastings ever looked forward to. A cup of government sherry before noon was not something to warm the heart or put one in the Christmas spirit.

“It promises to be a quiet day,” Hastings said, pouring the ritual drink. “You should be able to leave early and finish up your Christmas shopping.”

“It’s finished. I have no one but Leila to buy for.” Rand accepted the cup and took a small sip.

“Sometimes I wish I was as well organized as you, Rand.” Hastings seemed almost disappointed as he sat down in the worn leather chair opposite Rand’s desk. “I was going to ask you to pick up something for me.”

“On the day before Christmas? The stores will be crowded.”

Hastings decided to abandon the pretense. “They say Ivan St. Ives is back in town.”

“Oh? Surely you weren’t planning to send him a Christmas gift?”

St. Ives was a double agent who’d worked for the British, the Russians, and anyone else willing to pay his price. There were too many like him in the modern world of espionage, where national loyalties counted for nothing against the lure of easy money.

“He’s back in town and he’s not working for us.”

“Who, then?” Rand asked. “The Russians?”

“Perkins and Simplex, actually.”

“Perkins and Simplex is a department store.”

“Exactly. Ivan St. Ives has been employed over the Christmas season as their Father Christmas—red suit, white beard, and all. He holds little children on his knee and asks them what they want for Christmas.”

Rand laughed. “Is the spying business in some sort of depression we don’t know about? St. Ives could always pick up money from the Irish if nobody else would pay him.”

“I just found out about it last evening, almost by accident. I ran into St. Ives’s old girlfriend. Daphne Sollis, at the Crown and Piper. There’s no love lost between the two of them and she was quite eager to tell me of his hard times.”

“It’s one of his ruses, Hastings. If Ivan St. Ives is sitting in Perkins and Simplex wearing a red suit and a beard it’s part of some much more complex scheme.”

“Maybe, maybe not. Anyway, this is his last day on the job. Why don’t you drop by and take a look for yourself?”

“Is that what this business about last-minute shopping has been leading up to? What about young Parkinson—isn’t this more his sort of errand?”

“Parkinson doesn’t know St. Ives. You do.”

There was no disputing the logic of that. Rand drank the rest of his sherry and stood up. “Do I have to sit on his lap?”

Hastings sighed. “Just find out what he’s up to, Jeff.”

The day was unseasonably warm, and as Rand crossed Oxford Street toward the main entrance of Perkins and Simplex he was aware that many in the lunchtime crowd had shed their coats or left them back at the office. The department store itself was a big old building that covered an entire block facing Oxford Street. It dated from Edwardian times, prior to World War I, and was a true relic of its age. Great care had been taken to maintain the exterior just as it had been, though the demands of modern merchandising had taken their toll with the interior. During the previous decade the first two floors had been gutted and transformed into a pseudo-atrium, surrounded by a balcony on which some of the store’s regular departments had become little shops. The ceiling was frosted glass, lit from above by fluorescent tubes to give the appearance of daylight.

It was in this main atrium, near the escalators, that Father Christmas had been installed on his throne amidst sparkly white mountains of ersatz snow that was hardly in keeping with the outdoor temperature. The man himself was stout, but not as fat as American Santa Clauses. His white beard and the white-trimmed cowl of his red robe effectively hid his identity. It might have been Ivan St. Ives, but Rand wasn’t prepared to swear to it. He had to get much closer if he wanted to be sure.

He watched for a time from the terrace level as a line of parents and tots wound its way up the carpeted ramp to Father Christmas’s chair. There he listened carefully to each child’s request, sometimes boosting the smallest of them to his knee and patting their heads, handing each one a small brightly wrapped gift box from a pile at his elbow.

After observing this for ten or fifteen minutes, Rand descended to the main floor and found a young mother approaching the end of the line with her little boy. “Pardon me. ma’am,” Rand said. “I wonder if I might borrow your son and take him up to see Father Christmas.”

She stared at him as if she hadn’t heard him correctly. ‘No. I can take him myself.”

Rand showed his identity card. “It’s official business.”

The woman hesitated, then stood firm. “I’m sorry. Roger would be terrified if I left him.”

“Could I come along, then, as your husband?”

She stared at the card again, as if memorizing the name. “I suppose so, if it’s official business. No violence or anything, though?”

“I promise.”

They stood in line together and Rand took the little boy’s hand. Roger stared up at him with his big brown eyes, but his mother was there to give him confidence. “I hate shopping on Christmas Eve,” she told Rand. “I always spend too much when I wait until the last minute.”

“I think most of us do that.” He smiled at the boy. “Are you ready, Roger? We’re getting closer to Father Christmas.”

In a moment the boy was on the bearded man’s knee, having his head patted as he told him what he wanted to find under the tree next day. Then he received his brightly wrapped gift box and they were on their way back down the ramp.

“Thank you,” Rand told the woman. “You’ve been a big help.” He went back up to the terrace level and spent the next hour watching Ivan St. Ives. double agent, passing out gifts to a long line of little children.

“It’s St. Ives,” Rand told Hastings when he returned to the office. “No doubt of it.”

“Did he recognize you?”

“I doubt it.” He explained how he’d accompanied himself with the woman and child. “If he did, he might have assumed I was with my family.”

“So he’s just making a little extra Christmas money?”

“I’m afraid it’s more than that.”

“You spotted something.”

“A great deal, but I don’t know what it means. I watched him for more than an hour in all. After he listened to each child, he handed them a small gift. I watched one little girl opening hers. It was a clear plastic ball to hang on a Christmas tree, with figures of cartoon characters inside.”

“Seems harmless enough.”

“I’m sure the store wouldn’t be giving out anything that wasn’t. The trouble is, while I watched him I noticed a slight deviation from his routine on three different occasions. In these cases, he chose the gift box from a separate pile, and handed it to the parent rather than the child.”

“Well, some of the children are quite small, I imagine.”

“In those three cases, none of the boxes were opened in the store. They were stowed away in shopping bags by the mother or father. One little boy started crying for his gift, but he didn’t get it.”

Hastings thought about it.

“Do you think an agent would take a position as a department store Father Christmas to distribute some sort of message to his network?”

“I think we should see one of those boxes, Hastings.”

“If there is a message, it probably says ‘Merry Christmas. ‘ “

“St. Ives has worked for some odd people in the past, including terrorists. When I left the store, there were still seven or eight boxes left on his special pile. If I went back there now with a couple of men—”

“Very well,” Hastings said. “But please be discreet, Rand. It’s the day before Christmas.”

It’s not easy to be discreet when seizing a suspected spy in the midst of a crowd of Christmas shoppers. Rand finally decided he wanted one of the free gifts more than he wanted the agents at this point, so he took only Parkinson with him. As they passed through the Oxford Street entrance of Perkins and Simplex, the younger man asked, “Is this case likely to run through the holidays? I was hoping to spend Christmas and Boxing Day with the family.”

“I hope there won’t even be a case,” Rand told him. “Hastings heard Ivan St. Ives was back in the city, working as Father Christmas for the holidays. I confirmed the fact and that’s why we’re here.”

“To steal a child’s gift?”

“Not exactly steal, Parkinson. I have another idea.”

They encountered a woman and child about to leave the store with the familiar square box. “Pardon me. but is that a gift from Father Christmas?” Rand asked her.

“Yes, it is.”

“Then this is your lucky day. As a special holiday treat. Perkins and Simplex is paying every tenth person ten pounds for their gift.” He held up a crisp new bill. “Would you like to exchange yours for a tenner?”

“I sure would!” The woman handed over the opened box and accepted the ten-pound note.

“That was easy,” Parkinson commented when the woman and child were gone. “What next?”

“This might be a bit more difficult,” Rand admitted. They retreated to a men’s room where Rand fastened the festive paper around the gift box once more, resticking the piece of tape that held it together. ‘There, looks as good as new.”

Parkinson got the point. “You’re going to substitute this for one of the special ones.”

“Exactly. And you’re going to help.”

They resumed Rand’s earlier position on the terrace level, where he observed that the previous stack of boxes had dwindled to three. If he was right, they would be gone shortly, too. “How about that man?” Parkinson pointed out. “The one with the little boy.”

“Why him?”

“He doesn’t look that fatherly to me. And the boy seems a bit old to believe in Father Christmas.”

“You’re right.” Rand said a moment later. “He’s getting one of the special boxes. Come on!”

As the man and the boy came down off the ramp and mingled with the crowd. Rand moved in. The man was clutching the box just as the others had when Rand managed to jostle him. The box didn’t come loose, so Rand jostled again with his elbow, this time using his other hand to yank it free. The man, in his twenties with black hair and a vaguely foreign look, muttered something in a language Rand didn’t understand. There was a trace of panic in his face as he bent to retrieve the box. Rand pretended to lose his footing then, and came down on top of the man. The crowd of shoppers parted as they tumbled to the floor.

“Terribly sorry,” Rand muttered, helping the man to his feet.

At the same moment, Parkinson held out the brightly wrapped package. “I believe you dropped this, sir.”

Anyone else might have cursed Rand and made a scene, but this strange man merely grasped the box and hurried away without a word, the small boy trailing along behind. “Good work.” Rand said, brushing off his jacket. “Let’s get this back to the office.”

“Aren’t we going to open it?”

“Not here.”

Thirty minutes later, Rand was carefully unwrapping the gift on Hastings’ desk. Both Parkinson and Hastings were watching apprehensively, as if expecting a snake to spring out like a jack-in-the-box. “My money’s on drugs,” Parkinson said. “What else could it be?”

“Is the box exactly the same as the others?” Hastings asked.

“Just a bit heavier,” Rand decided. “A few ounces.”

But inside there seemed to be nothing but the same plastic tree ornament. Rand removed the tissue paper and stared at the bottom of the box.

“Nothing,” Parkinson said.

“Wait a minute. Something had to make it heavier.” Rand reached in and pried up the bottom piece of cardboard with his fingernails. It was a snugly fitted false bottom. Beneath it was a thin layer of a grey puttylike substance. “Better not touch it,” Hastings cautioned.

“That’s plastique—plastic explosive.”

The man from the bomb squad explained that it was harmless without a detonator of some sort, but they were still relieved when he removed it from the office. “How much damage would that much plastic explosive do?” Rand wanted to know.

“It would make a mess of this room. That’s about all.”

“What about twelve or fifteen times that much?”

“Molded together into one bomb? It could take out a house or a small building.”

They looked at each other glumly. “It’s a pretty bizarre method for distributing explosives,” Parkinson said.

“It has its advantages,” Hastings said. “The bomb is of little use until enough of the explosive is gathered together. If one small box falls into government hands, as this one did, the rest is still safe. No doubt it was delivered to St. Ives only recently, and this served as the perfect method for getting it to his network—certainly better than the mails during the Christmas rush.”

“Then you think it’s to be reassembled into one bomb?” Rand asked.

“Of course. And it’s to be used sometime soon.”

“The IRA? Russians? Arabs?”

Hastings shrugged. “Take your pick. St. Ives has worked for all of them.”

Rand held the box up to the light, studying the bottom. “This may be some writing, some sort of invisible ink that’s beginning to become visible. Get one of the technicians up here to see if we can bring it out.”

Heating the bottom of the box to bring out the message proved an easy task, but the letters that appeared were anything but easy to read: MPPMP MBSHG OEXAS-EWHMR AWPGG GBEBH PMBWE ALGHQ.

“A substitution cipher,” Parkinson decided at once. “We’ll get to work on

it.”

“Forty letters,” Rand observed, “in the usual five-letter groups. There are five Ms, five Ps, and five Gs. Using letter frequencies, one of them could be E. but in such a short message you can’t be sure.”

“GHQ at the end could stand for General Headquarters.” Hastings suggested.

Rand shook his head. “The entire message would be enciphered. Chances are that’s just a coincidence.”

Parkinson took the message off to the deciphering room and Rand confidently predicted he’d have the answer within an hour.

He didn’t.

“It’s tougher than it looks,” Parkinson told them. “There may not be any Es at all.”

“Run it through the computer,” Rand suggested. “Use a program that substitutes various frequently used letters for the most frequently used letters in the message. See if you hit on anything.”

Hastings glanced at the clock. “It’s after six and my niece has invited me for Christmas Eve. Can you manage without me?”

“Of course. Merry Christmas.”

After he’d gone, Rand picked up the phone and told Leila he’d be late. She was living in England now. and he’d planned to spend the holiday with her.

“How late?” she asked.

“These things have been known to last all night.”

“Oh. Jeffrey. On Christmas Eve?”

“I’ll call you later if I can,” Rand promised. “It might not take that long.”

He went down the hall and stood for a time watching the computer experts work on the message. They seemed to be having no better luck than Parkinson’s people. “How long?” he asked one.

“In the worst possible case it could take us until morning to run all the combinations.”

Rand nodded. “I’ll be back.”

They had to know what the message said, but they also had to find Ivan St. Ives. The employment office at Perkins and Simplex would be closed now. His only chance was that pub where Hastings had spoken with Daphne Sollis. The Crown and Piper.

It was on a corner, as London pubs often are, and the night before Christmas didn’t seem to have made much of a dent in the early-evening business. The bar was crowded and all the tables and booths were occupied. Rand let his eyes wander over the faces, seeking out either St. Ives or Daphne, but neither one seemed to be there. He didn’t know either of them well, though he thought he would recognize St. Ives out of his Father Christmas garb. He was less certain about recognizing Daphne Sollis.

“Seen Daphne around?” he asked the bartender as he ordered a pint.

“Daphne Jenkins?”

“Daphne Sollis.”

“Do I know her?”

“She was in here last night, talking to a grey-haired man wearing rimless glasses. He was probably dressed in a plaid topcoat.”

“I don’t— Wait a minute, you must mean Rusty. Does she have red hair?”

“Not the last time I knew her, but these things change.”

“Well, if it’s Rusty she comes in a couple of nights a week, usually alone. Once recently she was with a creepy-looking gent who kept laughing like Father Christmas. I sure wouldn’t want him bringing gifts to my kids. He’d scare ‘em half to death.”

“Does she live around here?”

“No idea, mate.” He went off to wait on another customer.

So whatever Daphne had told Hastings about her relationship with Ivan St. Ives, they were hardly enemies. He’d been with her recently in the Crown and Piper, apparently since he took on the job as Father Christmas.

Rand thought it unlikely that Daphne would visit the pub two nights in a row, but on the other hand she might stop by if she was lonely on Christmas Eve. He decided to linger over his pint and see if she appeared. Thirty minutes later he was about to give it up and head for Leila’s flat when he heard the bartender say, “Hey, Rusty! Fellow here’s been askin’ after you.”

Rand turned and saw Daphne Sollis standing not five feet behind him, unwrapping a scarf to reveal a tousled head of red hair. “Daphne!” She looked puzzled for a moment and he identified himself. “Ivan St. Ives introduced us a year or so back. He did some work for me.”

She nodded slowly as it came back to her. “Oh, yes—Mr. Rand. I remember you now. Is this some sort of setup? The other one, Hastings, was here just last night.”

“No setup, but I would like to talk with you, away from this noise. How about the lobby of the hotel next door?”

“Well—all right.”

The hotel lobby was much quieter. They sat beneath a large potted palm and no one disturbed them. “What do you want?” she asked. “What did your friend Hastings want last night?”

“It was only happenstance that he met you. though I’ll admit I came to the Crown and Piper looking for you. I need to locate Ivan St. Ives.”

“I told Hastings we’re on the outs.”

“I saw him at Perkins and Simplex earlier today.”

“Then you’ve already located him.”

“No.” Rand explained. “His Christmas job would have ended today. I need to know where he’s living.”

“I said we’re on the outs.”

“You were drinking with him at the Crown and Piper just a week or two

ago.”

She bit her lip and stared off into space. “I don’t know where he’s living. He rang me up and we had a drink for old times’ sake. That’s when he told me about the Christmas job. He talked about getting back together again, but I don’t know. He works for a lot of shady people.”

“Who’s he working for now?”

“Just the store, so far as I know. He said he’d fallen on hard times.”

Rand leaned forward. “It could be worth some money if you located him for us, told us who he’s palling around with.”

She seemed to consider the idea. “I could tell you plenty about who he’s palled around with in the past. It wasn’t just our side, you know.”

“I know.”

But it would have to be after New Year’s. I’m going to visit a girlfriend in Hastings, on the coast. Is your friend Hastings from there?”

“From Leeds, actually.” Rand was frowning. “I need St. Ives now.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t help you. Perhaps the store has his address.”

“I’ll have to ask them.” Rand stood up. “Can I buy you a pint back at the

pub?”

“I’d better skip it now,” she said, glancing at her watch. “I want to get home and change. I’m going to Midnight Mass with some friends.”

“If you’ll jot down your phone number I’d like to ring you up after New Year’s.”

“Fine,” she agreed.

He’d intended to phone Leila after he left Daphne, but back at the Double-C office, Parkinson was in a state of dejection. “We’ve run every possible substitution of the letter E and there’s still nothing. We’re going down the letter-frequency list now, working on T, A, O, and N.”

“Forty characters without a single E. Unusual, certainly.”

“Any luck locating St. Ives?”

“Not yet.”

Rand worked with them for a time and then dozed on his office couch. It was long after midnight when Parkinson shook him awake. “I think we’ve got part of it.”

“Let me see.”

The younger man produced long folds of computer printout. “On this one we concentrated on the first six characters—the repetitive MPPMPM. We got nowhere substituting E, T, or A, but when we tried the next letters on the frequency list, O and N, look what came up.”

Rand focused his sleepy eyes and read NOONON. “Noon on?”

“Exactly. And there’s another ON combination later in the message.”

“Just a simple substitution cipher after all,” Rand marveled. “School children make them up all the time.”

“And it took us all these hours to get this far.”

“St. Ives didn’t worry about making the cipher too complex because he was writing it in invisible ink. It was our good luck that the box warmed enough so that some of the message began to appear.”

“A terrorist network armed with plastic explosives, and St. Ives is telling them when and where to set off the bomb. Do you think we should phone Hastings?”

Rand glanced at the clock. It was almost dawn on Christmas morning. “Let’s wait till we get the rest of it.

He followed Parkinson down the hall to the computer room where the others were at work. Not bothering with the machines, he went straight to the old blackboard at the far end of the room. “Look here, all of you. The group of letters following noon on is probably a day of the week, or a date if it’s spelled out. If it’s a day of the week, three of these letters have to stand for day.”

As he worked, he became aware that someone had chalked the most common letter-frequency list down the left side of the board, starting with E, T, A, O, N, and continuing down to Q, X, Z. It was the list from David Kahn’s massive 1967 book, The Codebreakers, which everyone in the department had on their shelves. He stared at it and noticed that M and P came together about halfway down the list. Together, just like N and O in the regular alphabet. Quickly he chalked the letters A to Z next to the frequency list. “Look here! The key is the standard letter-frequency list. ABCDE is enciphered as ETAON. There are no Ns in the message we found, so there are no Es in the plaintext.”

The message became clear at once: NOONO NTHIS DAYCH ARING CROSS STATI ONTRA CKSIX. “Noon on this day, Charing Cross Station, Track six,” Rand read.

“Noon on which day?” Parkinson questioned. “It was after noon yesterday before he distributed most of the boxes.”

“He must mean today. Christmas Day. A Christmas Day explosion at Charing Cross Station.”

I’ll phone Hastings,” Parkinson decided. “We can catch them in the act.”

Police and Scotland Yard detectives converged on the station shortly after dawn. Staying as unobtrusive as possible, they searched the entire area around track six. No bomb was found.

Noon came and went, and no bomb exploded.

Rand turned up at Leila’s flat late that afternoon. “Only twenty-four hours late,” she commented drily, holding the door open for him.

“And not in a good mood.”

“You mean you didn’t crack it after all this time?”

“We cracked it, but that didn’t do us much good. We don’t have the man who sent it, and we may be unable to prevent a terrorist bombing.”

“Here in London?”

“Yes. right here in London.” He knew a few police were still at Charing Cross Station, but he also knew it was quite easy to smuggle plastic explosives past the tightest security. They could be molded into any shape, and metal detectors were of no use against them.

He tried to put his mind at ease during dinner with Leila, and later when she asked if he’d be spending the night he readily agreed. But he awakened before dawn and walked restlessly to the window, looking out at the glistening streets where rain had started to fall. It would be colder today, more like winter.

The bomb hadn’t gone off at Charing Cross Station yesterday. Either the time or the place was wrong.

But it hadn’t gone off anywhere else in London, so he could assume the place was correct. It was the time that was off.

The time, or the day.

This day.

Noon on this day.

He went to Leila’s telephone and called Parkinson at home. When he heard his sleepy voice answer, he said, “This is Rand. Meet me at the office in an hour.”

“It’s only six o’clock,” Parkinson muttered. “And a holiday.”

“I know. I’m sorry. But I’m calling Hastings, too. It’s important.”

He leaned over the bed to kiss Leila but left without awakening her.

An hour later, with Hastings and Parkinson seated before him in the office, Rand picked up a piece of chalk. “You see, we assumed the wrong meaning for the word ‘this.‘ If someone wants to indicate ‘today,‘ they say it— they don’t say ‘this day.‘ On the other hand, if I write the word ‘this’ on the desk in front of me—” he did so with the piece of chalk “—what am I referring to?”

“The desk,” Parkinson replied.

“Right. If I wrote the word on a box, what would I be referring to?”

“The box.”

“When St. Ives’s message said, ‘this day,‘ he wasn’t referring to Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. He was telling them Boxing Day. Even if they were foreign, they’d know it was the day after Christmas here and a national holiday.”

“That’s today,” Hastings said.

“Exactly. We need to get the men back to Charing Cross Station.”

The station was almost deserted. The holiday travelers were at their destinations, and it was too soon for anyone to have started home yet. Rand stood near one of the newsstands looking through a paper while the detectives again searched unobtrusively around track six. It was nearly noon and time was running out.

“No luck,” Hastings told him. “They can’t find a thing.”

“Plastique.” Rand shook his head. “It could be molded around a girder and painted most any color. We’d better keep everyone clear from now until after noon.” It was six minutes to twelve.

“Are you sure about this, Rand? St. Ives is using a dozen or more people. Perhaps they all didn’t understand his message.”

“They had to come together to assemble the small portions of explosive into a deadly whole. Most of them would understand the message even if a few didn’t. I’m sure St. Ives trained them well.”

“It’s not a busy day. He’s not trying to kill a great many people or he’d have waited until a daily rush hour.”

“No,” Rand agreed. “I think he’s content to—” He froze, staring toward the street entrance to the station. A man and a woman had entered and were walking toward track six. The man was Ivan St. Ives and the woman was Daphne Sollis.

Rand had forgotten that the train to Hastings left from Charing Cross Station.

He ran across the station floor, through the beams of sunlight that had suddenly brightened it from the glass-enclosed roof. “St. Ives!” he shouted.

Ivan St. Ives had just bent to give Daphne a good-bye kiss. He turned suddenly at the sound of his name and saw Rand approaching. “What is this?” he asked.

“Get away from him. Daphne!” Rand warned.

“He just came to see me off. I told you I was visiting—”

“Get away from him!” Rand repeated more urgently.

St. Ives met his eyes, and glanced quickly away, as if seeking a safe exit. But already the others were moving in. His eyes came back to Rand, recognizing him. “You were at the store, in line for Father Christmas! I knew I’d seen you before!”

“We broke the cipher, St. Ives. We know everything.”

St. Ives turned and ran, not toward the street from where the men were coming but through the gate to track six. A police constable blew his whistle, and the sound merged with the chiming of the station clock. St. Ives had gone about fifty feet when the railway car to his left seemed to come apart with a blinding flash and roar of sound that sent waves of dust and debris billowing back toward Rand and the others. Daphne screamed and covered her face.

When the smoke cleared. Ivan St. Ives was gone. It was some time later before they found his remains among the wreckage that had been blown onto the adjoining track. By then. Rand had explained it to Hastings and Parkinson. “Ivan St. Ives was a truly evil man. When he was hired to plan and carry out a terrorist bombing in London over the Christmas holidays, he decided quite literally to kill two birds with one stone. He planned the bombing for the exact time and place where his old girlfriend Daphne Sollis would be. To make certain she didn’t arrive too early or too late, he even escorted her to the station himself. She knew too much about his past associations, and he wanted her out of his life for good. I imagine one of his men must have ridden the train into Charing Cross Station and hidden the bomb on board before he left.”

But he didn’t tell any of this to Daphne. She only knew that they’d come to arrest St. Ives and he’d been killed by a bomb while trying to flee. A tragic coincidence, nothing more. She never knew St. Ives had tried to kill her.

In a way Rand felt it was a Christmas gift to her.