The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries

The Carol Singers Josephine Bell

One of the founders of the (British) Crime writers’ Association and its chairwoman from 1959 to 1960, Doris Bell Collier Ball took the pseudonym Josephine Bell largely because of Sherlock Holmes. It has been widely reported that Arthur Conan Doyle based many of the characteristics of his great detective on his teacher at the University of Edinburgh, Dr. Joseph Bell. Since the author was also a physician, she particularly liked the symmetry of using Dr. Bell’s name as the inspiration for the one that would appear on forty-five of her own works. “The Carol Singers” was first published in Murder Under the Mistletoe, edited by Cynthia Manson (New York, Signet, 1992).

Old Mrs. Fairlands stepped carefully off the low chair she had pulled close to the fireplace. She was very conscious of her eighty-one years every time she performed these mild acrobatics. Conscious of them and determined to have no humiliating, potentially dangerous mishap. But obstinate, in her persistent routine of dusting her own mantelpiece, where a great many, too many photographs and small ornaments daily gathered a film of greasy London dust.

Mrs. Fairlands lived in the ground floor flat of a converted house in a once fashionable row of early Victorian family homes. The house had been in her family for three generations before her, and she herself had been born and brought up there. In those faroff days of her childhood, the whole house was filled with a busy throng of people, from the top floor where the nurseries housed the noisiest and liveliest group, through the dignified, low-voiced activities of her parents and resident aunt on the first and ground floors, to the basement haunts of the domestic staff, the kitchens and the cellars.

Too many young men of the family had died in two world wars and too many young women had married and left the house to make its original use in the late 1940’s any longer possible. Mrs. Fairlands, long a widow, had inherited the property when the last of her brothers died. She had let it for a while, but even that failed. A conversion was the obvious answer. She was a vigorous seventy at the time, fully determined, since her only child, a married daughter, lived in the to her barbarous wastes of the Devon moors, to continue to live alone with her much-loved familiar possessions about her.

The conversion was a great success and was made without very much structural alteration to the house. The basement, which had an entrance by the former back door, was shut off and was let to a businessman who spent only three days a week in London and preferred not to use an hotel. The original hall remained as a common entrance to the other three flats. The ground floor provided Mrs. Fairlands with three large rooms, one of which was divided into a kitchen and bathroom. Her own front door was the original dining room door from the hall. It led now into a narrow passage, also chopped off from the room that made the bathroom and kitchen. At the end of the passage two new doors led into the former morning room, her drawing room as she liked to call it, and her bedroom, which had been the study.

This drawing room of hers was at the front of the house, overlooking the road. It had a square bay window that gave her a good view of the main front door and the steps leading up to it, the narrow front garden, now a paved forecourt, and from the opposite window of the bay, the front door and steps of the house next door, divided from her by a low wall.

Mrs. Fairlands, with characteristic obstinacy, strength of character, integrity, or whatever other description her forceful personality drew from those about her, had lived in her flat for eleven years, telling everyone that it suited her perfectly and feeling, as the years went by, progressively more lonely, more deeply bored, and more consciously apprehensive. Her daily came for four hours three times a week. It was enough to keep the place in good order. On those days the admirable woman cooked Mrs. Fairlands a good solid English dinner, which she shared, and also constructed several more main meals that could be eaten cold or warmed up. But three half days of cleaning and cooking left four whole days in each week when Mrs. Fairlands must provide for herself or go out to the High Street to a restaurant. After her eightieth birthday she became more and more reluctant to make the effort. But every week she wrote to her daughter Dorothy to say how well she felt and how much she would detest leaving London, where she had lived all her life except when she was evacuated to Wiltshire in the second war.

She was sincere in writing thus. The letters were true as far as they went, but they did not go the whole distance. They did not say that it took Mrs. Fairlands nearly an hour to wash and dress in the morning. They did not say she was sometimes too tired to bother with supper and then had to get up in the night, feeling faint and thirsty, to heat herself some milk. They did not say that although she stuck to her routine of dusting the whole flat every morning, she never mounted her low chair without a secret terror that she might fall and break her hip and perhaps be unable to reach the heavy stick she kept beside her armchair to use as a signal to the flat above.

On this particular occasion, soon after her eighty-first birthday, she had deferred the dusting until late in the day, because it was Christmas Eve and in addition to cleaning the mantelpiece she had arranged on it a pile of Christmas cards from her few remaining friends and her many younger relations.

This year, she thought sadly, there was not really much point in making the display. Dorothy and Hugh and the children could not come to her as usual, nor could she go to them. The tiresome creatures had chicken pox, in their late teens, too, except for Bobbie, the afterthought, who was only ten. They should all have had it years ago, when they first went to school. So the visit was canceled, and though she offered to go to Devon instead, they told her she might get shingles from the same infection and refused to expose her to the risk. Apart altogether from the danger to her of traveling at that particular time of the year, the weather and the holiday crowds combined, Dorothy had written.

Mrs. Fairlands turned sadly from the fireplace and walked slowly to the window. A black Christmas this year, the wireless report had promised. As black as the prospect of two whole days of isolation at a time when the whole western world was celebrating its midwinter festival and Christians were remembering the birth of their faith.

She turned from the bleak prospect outside her window, a little chilled by the downdraft seeping through its closed edges. Near the fire she had felt almost too hot, but then she needed to keep it well stocked up for such a large room. In the old days there had been logs, but she could no longer lift or carry logs. Everyone told her she ought to have a cosy stove or even do away with solid fuel altogether, install central heating and perhaps an electric fire to make a pleasant glow. But Mrs. Fairlands considered these suggestions defeatist, an almost insulting reference to her age. Secretly she now thought of her life as a gamble with time. She was prepared to take risks for the sake of defeating them. There were few pleasures left to her. Defiance was one of them.

When she left the window, she moved to the far corner of the room, near the fireplace. Here a small table, usually covered, like the mantelpiece, with a multitude of objects, had been cleared to make room for a Christmas tree. It was mounted in a large bowl reserved for this annual purpose. The daily had set it up for her and wrapped the bowl round with crinkly red paper, fastened with safety pins. But the tree was not yet decorated.

Mrs. Fairlands got to work upon it. She knew that it would be more difficult by artificial light to tie the knots in the black cotton she used for the dangling glass balls. Dorothy had provided her with some newfangled strips of pliable metal that needed only to be threaded through the rings on the glass balls and wrapped round the branches of the tree. But she had tried these strips only once. The metal had slipped from her hands and the ball had fallen and shattered. She went back to her long practiced method with black cotton, leaving the strips in the box for her grandchildren to use, which they always did with ferocious speed and efficiency.

She sighed as she worked. It was not much fun decorating the tree by herself. No one would see it until the day after Boxing Day when the daily would be back. If only her tenants had not gone away she could have invited them in for some small celebration. But the basement man was in his own home in Essex, and the first floor couple always went to an hotel for Christmas, allowing her to use their flat for Dorothy and Hugh and the children. And this year the top floor, three girl students, had joined a college group to go skiing. So the house was quite empty. There was no one left to invite, except perhaps her next-door neighbors. But that would be impossible. They had detestable children, rude, destructive, uncontrolled brats. She had already complained about broken glass and dirty sweet papers thrown into her forecourt. She could not possibly ask them to enjoy her Christmas tree with her. They might damage it. Perhaps she ought to have agreed to go to May, or let her come to her. She was one of the last of her friends, but never an intimate one. And such a chatterer. Nonstop, as Hugh would say.

By the time Mrs. Fairlands had fastened the last golden ball and draped the last glittering piece of tinsel and tied the crowning piece, the six-pronged shining silver star, to the topmost twig and fixed the candles upright in their socket clips, dusk had fallen. She had been obliged to turn on all her lights some time before she had done. Now she moved again to her windows, drew the curtains, turned off all the wall lights, and with one reading lamp beside her chair sat down near the glowing fire.

It was nearly an hour after her usual teatime, she noticed. But she was tired. Pleasantly tired, satisfied with her work, shining quietly in its dark corner, bringing back so many memories of her childhood in this house, of her brief marriage, cut off by the battle of the Marne, of Dorothy, her only child, brought up here, too, since there was nowhere for them to live except with the parents she had so recently left. Mrs. Fairlands decided to skip tea and have an early supper with a boiled egg and cake.

She dozed, snoring gently, her ancient, wrinkled hand twitching from time to time as her head lolled on and off the cushion behind it.

She woke with a start, confused, trembling. There was a ringing in her head that resolved, as full consciousness returned to her, into a ringing of bells, not only her own, just inside her front door, but those of the other two flats, shrilling and buzzing in the background.

Still trembling, her mouth dry with fright and open-mouthed sleep, she sat up, trying to think. What time was it? The clock on the mantelpiece told her it was nearly seven. Could she really have slept for two whole hours? There was silence now. Could it really have been the bell, all the bells, that had woken her? If so, it was a very good thing. She had no business to be asleep in the afternoon, in a chair of all places.

Mrs. Fairlands got to her feet, shakily. Whoever it was at the door must have given up and gone away. Standing still, she began to tremble again. For she remembered things Dorothy and Hugh and her very few remaining friends said to her from time to time. “Aren’t you afraid of burglars?” “I wouldn’t have the nerve to live alone!” “They ring you up, and if there is no answer, they know you’re out, so they come and break in.”

Well, there had been no answer to this bell ringing, so whoever it was, if ill-intentioned, might even now be forcing the door or prowling round the house, looking for an open window.

While she stood there in the middle of her drawing room, trying to build up enough courage to go round her flat pulling the rest of the curtains, fastening the other windows, Mrs. Fairlands heard sounds that instantly explained the situation. She heard, raggedly begun, out of tune, but reassuringly familiar, the strains of “Once in Royal David’s City.”

Carol singers! Of course. Why had she not thought of them instead of frightening herself to death with gruesome suspicions?

Mrs. Fairlands, always remembering her age, her gamble, went to the side window of the bay and, pulling back the edge of the curtain, looked out. A darkclad group stood there, six young people, four girls with scarves on their heads, two boys with woolly caps. They had a single electric torch directed onto a sheet of paper held by the central figure of the group.

Mrs. Fairlands watched them for a few seconds. Of course they had seen the light in her room, so they knew someone was in. How stupid of her to think of burglars. The light would have driven a burglar away if he was out looking for an empty house to break into. All her fears about the unanswered bell were nonsense.

In her immense relief, and seeing the group straighten up as they finished the hymn, she tapped at the glass. They turned quickly, shining the torch in her face. Though she was a little startled by this, she smiled and nodded, trying to convey the fact that she enjoyed their performance.

“Want another, missis?” one boy shouted.

She nodded again, let the curtain slip into place, and made her way to her bureau, where she kept her handbag. Her purse in the handbag held very little silver, but she found the half crown she was looking for and took it in her hand. “The Holly and the Ivy” was in full swing outside. Mrs. Fairlands decided that these children must have been well taught in school. It was not usual for small parties to sing real carols. Two lines of “Come, All Ye Faithful,” followed by loud knocking, was much more likely.

As she moved to the door with the half crown in one hand, Mrs. Fairlands put the other to her throat to pull together the folds of her cardigan before leaving her warm room for the cold passage and the outer hall door. She felt her brooch, and instantly misgiving struck her. It was a diamond brooch, a very valuable article, left to her by her mother. It would perhaps be a mistake to appear at the door offering half a crown and flaunting several hundred pounds. They might have seen it already, in the light of the torch they had shone on her.

Mrs. Fairlands slipped the half crown into her cardigan pocket, unfastened the brooch, and, moving quickly to the little Christmas tree on its table, reached up to the top and pinned the brooch to the very center of the silver tinsel star. Then, chuckling at her own cleverness, her quick wit, she went out to the front door just as the bell rang again in her flat. She opened it on a group of fresh young faces and sturdy young bodies standing on her steps.

“I’m sorry I was so slow,” she said. “You must forgive me, but I am not very young.”

“I’ll say,” remarked the younger boy, staring. He thought he had never seen anything as old as this old geyser.

“You shut up,” said the girl next to him, and the tallest one said, “Don’t be rude.”

“You sing very nicely,” said Mrs. Fairlands. “Very well indeed. Did you learn at school?”

“Mostly at the club,” said the older boy, whose voice went up and down, on the verge of breaking, Mrs. Fairlands thought, remembering her brothers.

She held out the half crown. The tallest of the four girls, the one who had the piece of paper with the words of the carols on it, took the coin and smiled.

“I hope I haven’t kept you too long,” Mrs. Fairlands said. “You can’t stay long at each house, can you, or you would never get any money worth having.”

“They mostly don’t give anything,” one of the other girls said.

“Tell us to get the ’ell out,” said the irrepressible younger boy.

“We don’t do it mostly for the money,” said the tallest girl. “Not for ourselves, I mean.”

“Give it to the club. Oxfam collection and that,” said the tall boy.

“Don’t you want it for yourselves?” Mrs. Fairlands was astonished. “Do you have enough pocket money without?”

They nodded gravely.

“I got a paper round,” said the older boy.

“I do babysitting now and then,” the tallest girl added.

“Well, thank you for coming,” Mrs. Fairlands said. She was beginning to feel cold, standing there at the open door. “I must go back into my warm room. And you must keep moving, too, or you might catch colds.”

“Thank you,” they said in chorus. “Thanks a lot. Bye!”

She shut and locked the door as they turned, clattered down the steps, slammed the gate of the forecourt behind them. She went back to her drawing room. She watched from the window as they piled up the steps of the next house. And again she heard, more faintly because they were farther away, “Once in Royal David’s City.” There were tears in her old eyes as she left the window and stood for a few minutes staring down at the dull coals of her diminishing fire.

But very soon she rallied, took up the poker, mended her fire, went to her kitchen, and put on the kettle. Coming back to wait for it to boil, she looked again at her Christmas tree. The diamond brooch certainly gave an added distinction to the star, she thought. Amused once more by her originality, she went into her bedroom and from her jewel box on the dressing table took her two other valuable pieces, a pearl necklace and a diamond bracelet. The latter she had not worn for years. She wound each with a tinsel string and hung them among the branches of the tree.

She had just finished preparing her combined tea and supper when the front doorbell rang again. Leaving the tray in the kitchen, she went to her own front door and opened it. Once again a carol floated to her, “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing” this time. There seemed to be only one voice singing. A lone child, she wondered, making the rounds by himself.

She hurried to the window of her drawing room, drew back the curtain, peeped out. No, not alone, but singing a solo. The pure, high boy’s voice was louder here. The child, muffled up to the ears, had his head turned away from her towards three companions, whose small figures and pale faces were intent upon the door. They did not seem to notice her at the window as the other group had done, for they did not turn in her direction. They were smaller, evidently younger, very serious. Mrs. Fairlands, touched, willing again to defeat her loneliness in a few minutes’ talk, took another half crown from her purse and went out to the main hall and the big door.

“Thank you, children,” she said as she opened it. “That was very—”

Her intended praise died in her throat. She gasped, tried to back away. The children now wore black stockings over their faces. Their eyes glittered through slits; there were holes for their noses and mouths.

“That’s a very silly joke,” said Mrs. Fairlands in a high voice. “I shall not give you the money I brought for you. Go home. Go away.”

She backed inside the door, catching at the knob to close it. But the small figures advanced upon her. One of them held the door while two others pushed her away from it. She saw the fourth, the singer, hesitate, then turn and run out into the street.

“Stop this!” Mrs. Fairlands said in a voice that had once been commanding but now broke as she repeated the order. Silently, remorselessly, the three figures forced her back; they shut and locked the main door, they pushed her, stumbling now, terrified, bewildered, through her own front door and into her drawing room.

It was an outrage, an appalling, unheard-of challenge. Mrs. Fairlands had always met a challenge with vigor. She did so now. She tore herself from the grasp of one pair of small hands to box the ears of another short figure. She swept round at the third, pulling the stocking halfway up his face, pushing him violently against the wall so his face met it with a satisfactory smack.

“Stop it!” she panted. “Stop it or I’ll call the police!”

At that they all leaped at her, pushing, punching, dragging her to an upright chair. She struggled for a few seconds, but her breath was going. When they had her sitting down, she was incapable of movement. They tied her hands and ankles to the chair and stood back. They began to talk, all at once to start with, but at a gesture from one, the other two became silent.

When Mrs. Fairlands heard the voices, she became rigid with shock and horror. Such words, such phrases, such tones, such evil loose in the world, in her house, in her quiet room. Her face grew cold, she thought she would faint. And still the persistent demand went on.

“We want the money. Where d’you keep it? Come on. Give. Where d’you keep it?”

“At my bank,” she gasped.

“That’s no answer. Where?”

She directed them to the bureau, where they found and rifled her handbag, taking the three pound notes and five shillings’ worth of small change that was all the currency she had in the flat.

Clearly they were astonished at the small amount. They threatened, standing round her, muttering threats and curses.

“I’m not rich,” she kept repeating. “I live chiefly on the rents of the flats and a very small private income. It’s all paid into my bank. I cash a check each week, a small check to cover my food and the wages of my daily help.”

“Jewelry,” one of them said. “You got jewelry. Rich old cows dolled up — we seen ’em. That’s why we come. You got it. Give.”

She rallied a little, told them where to find her poor trinkets. Across the room her diamond brooch winked discreetly in the firelight. They were too stupid, too savage, too — horrible to think of searching the room carefully. Let them take the beads, the dress jewelry, the amber pendant. She leaned her aching head against the hard back of the chair and closed her eyes.

After what seemed a long time they came back. Their tempers were not improved. They grumbled among themselves — almost quarreling — in loud harsh tones.

“Radio’s worth nil. Prehistoric. No transistor. No record player. Might lift that old clock.”

“Money stashed away. Mean old bitch.”

“Best get going.”

Mrs. Fairlands, eyes still closed, heard a faint sound outside the window. Her doorbell rang once. More carol singers? If they knew, they could save her. If they knew—

She began to scream. She meant to scream loudly, but the noise that came from her was a feeble croak. In her own head it was a scream. To her tormentors it was derisory, but still a challenge. They refused to be challenged.

They gagged her with a strip of sticking plaster, they pulled out the flex of her telephone. They bundled the few valuables they had collected into the large pockets of their overcoats and left the flat, pulling shut the two front doors as they went. Mrs. Fairlands was alone again, but gagged and bound and quite unable to free herself.

At first she felt a profound relief in the silence, the emptiness of the room. The horror had gone, and though she was uncomfortable, she was not yet in pain. They had left the light on — all the lights, she decided. She could see through the open door of the room the lighted passage and, beyond, a streak of light from her bedroom. Had they been in the kitchen? Taken her Christmas dinner, perhaps, the chicken her daily had cooked for her? She remembered her supper and realized fully, for the first time, that she could not open her mouth and that she could not free her hands.

Even now she refused to give way to panic. She decided to rest until her strength came back and she could, by exercising it, loosen her bonds. But her strength did not come back. It ebbed as the night advanced and the fire died and the room grew cold and colder. For the first time she regretted not accepting May’s suggestion that she should spend Christmas with her, occupying the flat above in place of Dorothy. Between them they could have defeated those little monsters. Or she could herself have gone to Leatherhead. She was insured for burglary.

She regretted those things that might have saved her, but she did not regret the gamble of refusing them. She recognized now that the gamble was lost. It had to be lost in the end, but she would have chosen a more dignified finish than this would be.

She cried a little in her weakness and the pain she now suffered in her wrists and ankles and back. But the tears ran down her nose and blocked it, which stopped her breathing and made her choke. She stopped crying, resigned herself, prayed a little, considered one or two sins she had never forgotten but on whose account she had never felt remorse until now. Later on she lapsed into semiconsciousness, a half-dream world of past scenes and present cares, of her mother, resplendent in low-cut green chiffon and diamonds, the diamond brooch and bracelet now decorating the tree across the room. Of Bobbie, in a fever, plagued by itching spots, of Dorothy as a little girl, blotched with measles.

Towards morning, unable any longer to breathe properly, exhausted by pain, hunger, and cold, Mrs. Fairlands died.

The milkman came along the road early on Christmas morning, anxious to finish his round and get back to his family. At Mrs. Fairlands’s door he stopped. There were no milk bottles standing outside and no notice. He had seen her in person the day before when she had explained that her daughter and family were not coming this year so she would only need her usual pint that day.

“But I’ll put out the bottles and the ticket for tomorrow as usual,” she had said.

“You wouldn’t like to order now, madam?” he had asked, thinking it would save her trouble.

“No, thank you,” she had answered. “I prefer to decide in the evening, when I see what milk I have left.”

But there were no bottles and no ticket and she was a very, very old lady and had had this disappointment over her family not coming.

The milkman looked at the door and then at the windows. It was still dark, and the light shone clearly behind the closed curtains. He had seen it when he went in through the gate but had thought nothing of it, being intent on his job. Besides, there were lights on in a good many houses and the squeals of delighted children finding Christmas stockings bulging on the posts of their beds. But here, he reminded himself, there were no children.

He tapped on the window and listened. There was no movement in the house. Perhaps she’d forgotten, being practically senile. He left a pint bottle on the doorstep. But passing a constable on a scooter at the end of the road, he stopped to signal to him and told him about Mrs. Fairlands. “Know ’oo I mean?” he asked.

The constable nodded and thanked the milkman. No harm in making sure. He was pretty well browned off — nothing doing — empty streets — not a hooligan in sight — layabouts mostly drunk in the cells after last night’s parties — villains all at the holiday resorts, casing jobs.

He left the scooter at the curb and tried to rouse Mrs. Fairlands. He did not succeed, so his anxiety grew. All the lights were on in the flat, front and back as far as he could make out. All her lights. The other flats were in total darkness. People away. She must have had a stroke or actually croaked, he thought. He rode on to the nearest telephone box.

The local police station sent a sergeant and another constable to join the man on the beat. Together they managed to open the kitchen window at the back, and when they saw the tray with a meal prepared but untouched, one of them climbed in. He found Mrs. Fairlands as the thieves had left her. There was no doubt at all what had happened.

“Ambulance,” said the sergeant briefly. “Get the super first, though. We’ll be wanting the whole works.”

“The phone’s gone,” the constable said. “Pulled out.”

“Bastard! Leave her like this when she couldn’t phone anyway and wouldn’t be up to leaving the house till he’d had plenty time to make six getaways. Bloody bastard!”

“Wonder how much he got?”

“Damn all, I should think. They don’t keep their savings in the mattress up this way.”

The constable on the scooter rode off to report, and before long, routine investigations were well under way. The doctor discovered no outward injuries and decided that death was probably due to shock, cold, and exhaustion, taking into account the victim’s obviously advanced age. Detective-Inspector Brooks of the divisional CID found plenty of papers in the bureau to give him all the information he needed about Mrs. Fairlands’s financial position, her recent activities, and her nearest relations. Leaving the sergeant in charge at the flat while the experts in the various branches were at work, he went back to the local station to get in touch with Mrs. Fairlands’s daughter, Dorothy Evans.

In Devonshire the news was received with horror, indignation, and remorse. In trying to do the best for her mother by not exposing her to possible infection, Mrs. Evans felt she had brought about her death.

“You can’t think of it like that,” her husband Hugh protested, trying to stem the bitter tears. “If she’d come down, she might have had an accident on the way or got pneumonia or something. Quite apart from shingles.”

“But she was all alone! That’s what’s so frightful!”

“And it wasn’t your fault. She could have had what’s-her-name — Miss Bolton, the old girl who lives at Leatherhead.”

“I thought May Bolton was going to have her. But you couldn’t make Mother do a thing she hadn’t thought of herself.”

“Again, that wasn’t your fault, was it?”

It occurred to him that his wife had inherited to some extent this characteristic of his mother-in-law, but this was no time to remind her of it.

“You’ll go up at once, I suppose?” he said when she was a little calmer.

“How can I?” The tears began to fall again. “Christmas Day and Bobbie’s temperature still up and his spots itching like mad. Could you cope with all that?”

“I’d try,” he said. “You know I’d do anything.”

“Of course you would, darling.” She was genuinely grateful for the happiness of her married life and at this moment of self-reproach prepared to give him most of the credit for it. “Honestly, I don’t think I could face it. There’d be identification, wouldn’t there? And hearing detail—” She shuddered, covering her face.

“Okay. I’ll go up,” Hugh told her. He really preferred this arrangement. “I’ll take the car in to Exeter and get the first through train there is. It’s very early. Apparently her milkman made the discovery.”

So Hugh Evans reached the flat in the early afternoon to find a constable on duty at the door and the house locked up. He was directed to the police station, where Inspector Brooks was waiting for him.

“My wife was too upset to come alone,” he explained, “and we couldn’t leave the family on their own. They’ve all got chicken pox; the youngest’s quite bad with it today.”

He went on to explain all the reasons why Mrs. Fairlands had been alone in the flat.

“Quite,” said Brooks, who had a difficult mother-in-law himself and was inclined to be sympathetic. “Quite. Nothing to stop her going to an hotel here in London over the holiday, was there?”

“Nothing at all. She could easily afford it. She isn’t — wasn’t — what you call rich, but she’d reached the age when she really couldn’t spend much.”

This led to a full description of Mrs. Fairlands’s circumstances, which finished with Hugh pulling out a list, hastily written by Dorothy before he left home, of all the valuables she could remember that were still in Mrs. Fairlands’s possession.

“Jewelry,” said the inspector thoughtfully. “Now where would she keep that?”

“Doesn’t it say? In her bedroom, I believe.”

“Oh, yes. A jewel box, containing — yes. Well, Mr. Evans, there was no jewel box in the flat when we searched it.”

“Obviously the thief took it, then. About the only thing worth taking. She wouldn’t have much cash there. She took it from the bank in weekly amounts. I know that.”

There was very little more help he could give, so Inspector Brooks took him to the mortuary where Mrs. Fairlands now lay. And after the identification, which Hugh found pitiable but not otherwise distressing, they went together to the flat.

“In case you can help us to note any more objects of value you find are missing,” Brooks explained.

The rooms were in the same state in which they had been found. Hugh found this more shocking, more disturbing, than the colorless, peaceful face of the very old woman who had never been close to him, who had never shown a warm affection for any of them, though with her unusual vitality she must in her youth have been capable of passion.

He went from room to room and back again. He stopped beside the bureau. “I was thinking, on the way up,” he said diffidently. “Her solicitor — that sort of thing. Insurances. I ought — can I have a look through this lot?”

“Of course, sir,” Inspector Brooks answered politely. “I’ve had a look myself. You see, we aren’t quite clear about motive.”

“Not — But wasn’t it a burglar? A brutal, thieving thug?”

“There is no sign whatever of breaking and entering. It appears that Mrs. Fairlands let the murderer in herself.”

“But that’s impossible.”

“Is it? An old lady, feeling lonely perhaps. The doorbell rings. She thinks a friend has called to visit her. She goes and opens it. It’s always happening.”

“Yes. Yes, of course. It could have happened that way. Or a tramp asking for money — Christmas—”

“Tramps don’t usually leave it as late as Christmas Eve. Generally smash a window and get put inside a day or two earlier.”

“What worries you, then?”

“Just in case she had someone after her. Poor relation. Anyone who had it in for her, if she knew something damaging about him. Faked the burglary.”

“But he seems to have taken her jewel box, and according to my wife, it was worth taking.”

“Quite. We shall want a full description of the pieces, sir.”

“She’ll make it out for you. Or it may have been insured separately.”

“I’m afraid not. Go ahead, though, Mr. Evans. I’ll send my sergeant in, and he’ll bring you back to the station with any essential papers you need for Mrs. Fairlands’s solicitor.”

Hugh worked at the papers for half an hour and then decided he had all the information he wanted. No steps of any kind need, or indeed could, be taken until the day after tomorrow, he knew. The solicitor could not begin to wind up Mrs. Fairlands’s affairs for some time. Even the date of the inquest had not been fixed and would probably have to be adjourned.

Before leaving the flat, Hugh looked round the rooms once more, taking the sergeant with him. They paused before the mantelpiece, untouched by the thieves, a poignant reminder of the life so abruptly ended. Hugh looked at the cards and then glanced at the Christmas tree.

“Poor old thing!” he said. “We never thought she’d go like this. We ought all to have been here today. She always decorated a tree for us—” He broke off, genuinely moved for the first time.

“So I understand,” the sergeant said gruffly, sharing the wave of sentiment.

“My wife — I wonder— D’you think it’d be in order to get rid of it?”

“The tree, sir?”

“Yes. Put it out at the back somewhere. Less upsetting — Mrs. Evans will be coming up the day after tomorrow. By that time the dustmen may have called.”

“I understand. I don’t see any harm—”

“Right.”

Hurrying, in case the sergeant should change his mind, Hugh took up the bowl, and turning his face away to spare it from being pricked by the pine needles, he carried it out to the back of the house where he stood it beside the row of three dustbins. At any rate, he thought, going back to join the sergeant, Dorothy would be spared the feelings that overcame him so unexpectedly.

He was not altogether right in this. Mrs. Evans traveled to London on the day after Boxing Day. The inquest opened on this day, with a jury. Evidence was given of the finding of the body. Medical evidence gave the cause of death as cold and exhaustion and bronchial edema from partial suffocation by a plaster gag. The verdict was murder by a person or persons unknown.

After the inquest, Mrs. Fairlands’s solicitor, who had supported Mrs. Evans during the ordeal in court, went with her to the flat. They arrived just as the municipal dust cart was beginning to move away. One of the older dustmen came up to them.

“You for the old lady they did Christmas Eve?” he asked, with some hesitation.

“I’m her daughter,” Dorothy said, her eyes filling again, as they still did all too readily.

“What d’you want?” asked the solicitor, who was anxious to get back to his office.

“No offense,” said the man, ignoring him and keeping his eyes on Dorothy’s face. “It’s like this ’ere, see. They put a Christmas tree outside, by the bins, see. Decorated. We didn’t like to take it, seeing it’s not exactly rubbish and her gone and that. Nobody about we could ask—”

Dorothy understood. The Christmas tree. Hugh’s doing, obviously. Sweet of him.

“Of course you must have it, if it’s any use to you now, so late. Have you got children?”

“Three, ma’am. Two younguns. I arsked the other chaps. They don’t want it. They said to leave it.”

“No, you take it,” Dorothy told him. “I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to be reminded—”

“Thanks a lot, dear,” the dustman said, gravely sympathetic, walking back round the house.

The solicitor took the door key from Dorothy and let her in, so she did not see the tree as the dustman emerged with it held carefully before him.

In his home that evening the tree was greeted with a mixture of joy and derision.

“As if I ’adn’t enough to clear up yesterday and the day before,” his wife complained, half angry, half laughing. “Where’d you get it, anyway?”

When he had finished telling her, the two children, who had listened, crept away to play with the new glittering toy. And before long Mavis, the youngest, found the brooch pinned to the star. She unfastened it carefully and held it in her hand, turning it this way and that to catch the light.

But not for long. Her brother Ernie, two years older, soon snatched it. Mavis went for him, and he ran, making for the front door to escape into the street where Mavis was forbidden to play. Though she seldom obeyed the rule, on this occasion she used it to make loud protest, setting up a howl that brought her mother to the door of the kitchen.

But Ernie had not escaped with his prize. His elder brother Ron was on the point of entering, and when Ernie flung wide the door, Ron pushed in, shoving his little brother back.

“ ’E’s nicked my star,” Mavis wailed. “Make ’im give me back, Ron. It’s mine. Off the tree.”

Ron took Ernie by the back of his collar and swung him round.

“Give!” he said firmly. Ernie clenched his right fist, betraying himself. Ron took his arm, bent his hand over forwards, and, as the brooch fell to the floor, stooped to pick it up. Ernie was now in tears.

“Where’d ’e get it?” Ron asked over the child’s doubled-up, weeping form.

“The tree,” Mavis repeated. “I found it. On the star — on the tree.”

“Wot the ’ell d’she mean?” Ron asked, exasperated.

“Shut up, the lot of you!” their mother cried fiercely from the kitchen where she had retreated. “Ron, come on in to your tea. Late as usual. Why you never—”

“Okay, Mum,” the boy said, unrepentant. “I never—”

He sat down, looking at the sparkling object in his hand.

“What’d Mavis mean about a tree?”

“Christmas tree. Dad brought it in. I’ve a good mind to put it on the fire. Nothing but argument since ’e fetched it.”

“It’s pretty,” Ron said, meaning the brooch in his hand. “Dress jewelry, they calls it.” He slipped it into his pocket.

“That’s mine,” Mavis insisted. “I found it pinned on that star on the tree. You give it back, Ron.”

“Leave ’im alone,” their mother said, smacking away the reaching hands. “Go and play with your blasted tree. Dad didn’t ought t’ave brought it. Ought t’ave ’ad more sense—”

Ron sat quietly, eating his kipper and drinking his tea. When he had finished, he stacked his crockery in the sink, went upstairs, changed his shirt, put a pair of shiny dancing shoes in the pockets of his mackintosh, and went off to the club where his current girlfriend, Sally, fifteen like himself, attending the same comprehensive school, was waiting for him.

“You’re late,” she said over her shoulder, not leaving the group of her girlfriends.

“I’ve ’eard that before tonight. Mum was creating. Not my fault if Mr. Pope wants to see me about exam papers.”

“You’re never taking G.C.E.?”

“Why not?”

“Coo! ’Oo started that lark?”

“Mr. Pope. I just told you. D’you want to dance or don’t you?”

She did and she knew Ron was not one to wait indefinitely. So she joined him, and together they went to the main hall where dancing was in progress, with a band formed by club members.

“ ’Alf a mo!” Ron said as they reached the door. “I got something you’ll like.”

He produced the brooch.

Sally was delighted. This was no cheap store piece. It was slap-up dress jewelry, like the things you saw in the West End, in Bond Street, in the Burlington Arcade, even. She told him she’d wear it just below her left shoulder near the neck edge of her dress. When they moved on to the dance floor she was holding her head higher and swinging her hips more than ever before. She and Ron danced well together. That night many couples stood still to watch them.

About an hour later the dancing came to a sudden end with a sound of breaking glass and shouting that grew in volume and ferocity.

“Raid!” yelled the boys on the dance floor, deserting their partners and crowding to the door. “Those bloody Wingers again.”

The sounds of battle led them, running swiftly, to the table tennis and billiards room, where a shambles confronted them. Overturned tables, ripped cloth, broken glass were everywhere. Tall youths and younger lads were fighting indiscriminately. Above the din the club warden and the three voluntary workers, two of them women, raised their voices in appeal and admonishment, equally ignored. The young barrister who attended once a week to give legal advice free, as a form of social service, to those who asked for it plunged into the battle, only to be flung out again nursing a twisted arm. It was the club caretaker, old and experienced in gang warfare, who summoned the police. They arrived silently, snatched ringleaders with expert knowledge or recognition, hemmed in their captives while the battle melted, and waited while their colleagues, posted at the doors of the club, turned back all would-be escapers.

Before long complete order was restored. In the dance hall the line of prisoners stood below the platform where the band had played. They included club members as well as strangers. The rest, cowed, bunched together near the door, also included a few strangers. Murmurings against these soon added them to the row of captives.

“Now,” said the sergeant, who had arrived in answer to the call, “Mr. Smith will tell me who belongs here and who doesn’t.”

The goats were quickly separated from the rather black sheep.

“Next, who was playing table tennis when the raid commenced?”

Six hands shot up from the line. Some disheveled girls near the door also held up their hands.

“The rest were in here dancing,” the warden said. “The boys left the girls when they heard the row, I think.”

“That’s right,” Ron said boldly. “We ’eard glass going, and we guessed it was them buggers. They been ’ere before.”

“They don’t learn,” said the sergeant with a baleful glance at the goats, who shuffled their feet and looked sulky.

“You’ll be charged at the station,” the sergeant went on, “and I’ll want statements from some of your lads,” he told the warden. “Also from you and your assistants. These other kids can all go home. Quietly, mind,” he said, raising his voice. “Show us there’s some of you can behave like reasonable adults and not childish savages.”

Sally ran forward to Ron as he left the row under the platform. He took her hand as they walked towards the door. But the sergeant had seen something that surprised him. He made a signal over their heads. At the door they were stopped.

“I think you’re wanted. Stand aside for a minute,” the constable told them.

The sergeant was the one who had been at the flat in the first part of the Fairlands case. He had been there when a second detailed examination of the flat was made in case the missing jewelry had been hidden away and had therefore escaped the thief. He had formed a very clear picture in his mind of what he was looking for from Mrs. Evans’s description. As Sally passed him on her way to the door with Ron, part of the picture presented itself to his astonished eyes.

He turned to the warden.

“That pair. Can I have a word with them somewhere private?”

“Who? Ron Sharp and Sally Biggs? Two of our very nicest—”

The two were within earshot. They exchanged a look of amusement instantly damped by the sergeant, who ordered them briefly to follow him. In the warden’s office, with the door shut, he said to Sally, “Where did you get that brooch you’re wearing?”

The girl flushed. Ron said angrily, “I give it ’er. So what?”

“So where did you come by it?”

Ron hesitated. He didn’t want to let himself down in Sally’s eyes. He wanted her to think he’d bought it specially for her. He said, aggressively, “That’s my business.”

“I don’t think so.” Turning to Sally, the sergeant said, “Would you mind letting me have a look at it, miss?”

The girl was becoming frightened. Surely Ron hadn’t done anything silly? He was looking upset. Perhaps—

“All right,” she said, undoing the brooch and handing it over. “Poor eyesight, I suppose.”

It was feeble defiance, and the sergeant ignored it. He said, “I’ll have to ask you two to come down to the station. I’m not an expert, but we shall have to know a great deal more about this article, and Inspector Brooks will be particularly interested to know where it came from.”

Ron remaining obstinately silent in spite of Sally’s entreaty, the two found themselves presently sitting opposite Inspector Brooks, with the brooch lying on a piece of white paper before them.

“This brooch,” said the inspector sternly, “is one piece of jewelry listed as missing from the flat of a Mrs. Fairlands, who was robbed and murdered on Christmas Eve or early Christmas Day.”

“Never!” whispered Sally, aghast.

Ron said nothing. He was not a stupid boy, and he realized at once that he must now speak, whatever Sally thought of him. Also that he had a good case if he didn’t say too much. So, after careful thought, he told Brooks exactly how and when he had come by the brooch and advised him to check this with his father and mother. The old lady’s son had stuck the tree out by the dustbins, his mother had said, and her daughter had told his father he could have it to take home.

Inspector Brooks found the tale too fantastic to be untrue. Taking the brooch and the two subdued youngsters with him, he went to Ron’s home, where more surprises awaited him. After listening to Mr. Sharp’s account of the Christmas tree, which exactly tallied with Ron’s, he went into the next room where the younger children were playing and Mrs. Sharp was placidly watching television.

“Which of you two found the brooch?” Brooks asked. The little girl was persuaded to agree that she had done so.

“But I got these,” the boy said. He dived into his pocket and dragged out the pearl necklace and the diamond bracelet.

“ ’Struth!” said the inspector, overcome. “She must’ve been balmy.”

“No, she wasn’t,” Sally broke in. “She was nice. She give us two and a tanner.”

“She what?”

Sally explained the carol singing expedition. They had been up four roads in that part, she said, and only two nicker the lot.

“Mostly it was nil,” she said. “Then there was some give a bob and this old gentleman and the woman with ’im ten bob each. We packed it in after that.”

“This means you actually went to Mrs. Fairlands’s house?” Brooks said sternly to Ron.

“With the others — yes.”

“Did you go inside?”

“No.”

“No.” Sally supported him. “She come out.”

“Was she wearing the brooch?”

“No,” said Ron.

“Not when she come out, she wasn’t,” Sally corrected him.

Ron kicked her ankle gently. The inspector noticed this.

“When did you see it?” he asked Sally.

“When she looked through the window at us. We shone the torch on ’er. It didn’t ’Alf shine.”

“But you didn’t recognize it when Ron gave it to you?”

“Why should I? I never saw it close. It was pinned on ’er dress at the neck. I didn’t think of it till you said.”

Brooks nodded. This seemed fair enough. He turned to face Ron.

“So you went back alone later to get it?

Right?”

“I never! It’s a damned lie!” the boy cried fiercely.

Mr. Sharp took a step forward. His wife bundled the younger children out of the room. Sally began to cry.

“ ’Oo are you accusing?” Mr. Sharp said heavily. “You ’eard ’ow I come by the tree. My mates was there. The things was on it. I got witnesses. If Ron did that job, would ’e leave the only things worth ’aving? It says in the paper nothing of value, don’t it?”

Brooks realized the force of this argument, however badly put. He’d been carried away a little. Unusual for him; he was surprised at himself. But the murder had been a particularly revolting one, and until these jewels turned up, he’d had no idea where to look. Carol singers. It might be a line and then again it mightn’t.

He took careful statements from Ron, Sally, Ron’s father, and the two younger children. He took the other pieces of jewelry and the Christmas tree. Carol singers. Mrs. Fairlands had opened the door to Ron’s lot, having taken off her brooch if the story was true. Having hidden it very cleverly. He and his men had missed it completely. A Christmas tree decorated with flashy bits and pieces as usual. Standing back against a wall. They’d ignored it. Seen nothing but tinsel and glitter for weeks past. Of course they hadn’t noticed it. The real thief or thieves hadn’t noticed it, either.

Back at the station he locked away the jewels, labeled, in the safe and rang up Hugh Evans. He did not tell him where the pieces had been found.

Afterwards he had to deal with some of the hooligans who had now been charged with breaking, entering, willful damage, and making an affray. He wished he could pin Mrs. Fairlands’s murder on their ringleader, a most degenerate and evil youth. Unfortunately, the whole gang had been in trouble in the West End that night; most of them had spent what remained of it in Bow Street police station. So they were out. But routine investigations now had a definite aim. To collect a list of all those who had sung carols at the houses on Mrs. Fairlands’s road on Christmas Eve, to question the singers about the times they had appeared there and about the houses they had visited.

It was not easy. Carol singers came from many social groups and often traveled far from their own homes. The youth clubs in the district were helpful; so were the various student bodies and hostels in the neighborhood. Brooks’s manor was wide and very variously populated. In four days he had made no headway at all.

A radio message went out, appealing to carol singers to report at the police station if they were near Mrs. Fairlands’s house at any time on Christmas Eve. The press took up the quest, dwelling on the pathetic aspects of the old woman’s tragic death at a time of traditional peace on earth and goodwill towards men. All right-minded citizens must want to help the law over this revolting crime.

But the citizens maintained their attitude of apathy or caution.

Except for one, a freelance journalist, Tom Meadows, who had an easy manner with young people because he liked them. He became interested because the case seemed to involve young people. It was just up his street. So he went first to the Sharp family, gained their complete confidence, and had a long talk with Ron.

The boy was willing to help. After he had got over his indignation with the law for daring to suspect him, he had had sense enough to see how this had been inevitable. His anger was directed more truly at the unknown thugs responsible. He remembered Mrs. Fairlands with respect and pity. He was ready to do anything Tom Meadows suggested.

The journalist was convinced that the criminal or criminals must be local, with local knowledge. It was unlikely they would wander from house to house, taking a chance on finding one that might be profitable. It was far more likely that they knew already that Mrs. Fairlands lived alone, would be quite alone over Christmas and therefore defenseless. But their information had been incomplete. They had not known how little money she kept at the flat. No one had known this except her family. Or had they?

Meadows, patient and amiable, worked his way from the Sharps to the postman, the milkman, and through the latter to the daily.

“Well, of course I mentioned ’er being alone for the ’oliday. I told that detective so. In the way of conversation, I told ’im. Why shouldn’t I?”

“Why indeed? But who did you tell, exactly?”

“I disremember. Anyone, I suppose. If we was comparing. I’m on me own now meself, but I go up to me brother’s at the ’olidays.”

“Where would that be?”

“Notting ’Ill way. ’E’s on the railway. Paddington.”

Bit by bit Meadows extracted a list of her friends and relations, those with whom she had talked most often during the week before Christmas. Among her various nephews and nieces was a girl who went to the same comprehensive school as Ron and his girlfriend Sally.

Ron listened to the assignment Meadows gave him.

“Sally won’t like it,” he said candidly.

“Bring her into it, then. Pretend it’s all your own idea.”

Ron grinned.

“Shirl won’t like that,” he said.

Tom Meadows laughed.

“Fix it any way you like,” he said. “But I think this girl Shirley was with a group and did go to sing carols for Mrs. Fairlands. I know she isn’t on the official list, so she hasn’t reported it. I want to know why.”

“I’m not shopping anymore,” Ron said warily.

“I’m not asking you to. I don’t imagine Shirley or her friends did Mrs. Fairlands. But it’s just possible she knows or saw something and is afraid to speak up for fear of reprisals.”

“Cor!” said Ron. It was like a page of his favorite magazine working out in real life. He confided in Sally, and they went to work.

The upshot was interesting. Shirley did have something to say, and she said it to Tom Meadows in her own home with her disapproving mother sitting beside her.

“I never did like the idea of Shirl going out after dark, begging at house doors. That’s all it really is, isn’t it? My children have very good pocket money. They’ve nothing to complain of.”

“I’m sure they haven’t,” Meadows said mildly. “But there’s a lot more to carol singing than asking for money. Isn’t there, Shirley?”

“I’ll say,” the girl answered. “Mum don’t understand.”

“You can’t stop her,” the mother complained. “Self-willed. Stubborn. I don’t know, I’m sure. Out after dark. My dad’d’ve taken his belt to me for less.”

“There were four of us,” Shirley protested. “It wasn’t late. Not above seven or eight.”

The time was right, Meadows noted, if she was speaking of her visit to Mrs. Fairlands’s road. She was. Encouraged to describe everything, she agreed that her group was working towards the house especially to entertain the old lady who was going to be alone for Christmas. She’d got that from her aunt, who worked for Mrs. Fairlands. They began at the far end of the road on the same side as the old lady. When they were about six houses away, they saw another group go up to it or to one near it. Then they were singing themselves. The next time she looked round, she saw one child running away up the road. She did not know where he had come from. She did not see the others.

“You did not see them go on?”

“No. They weren’t in the road then, but they might have gone right on while we were singing. There’s a turning off, isn’t there?”

“Yes. Go on.”

“Well, we went up to Mrs. Fairlands’s and rang the bell. I thought I’d tell her she knew my aunt and we’d come special.”

“Yes. What happened?”

“Nothing. At least—”

“Go on. Don’t be frightened.”

Shirley’s face had gone very pale.

“There were men’s voices inside. Arguing like. Nasty. We scarpered.”

Tom Meadows nodded gravely.

“That would be upsetting. Men’s voices? Or big boys?”

“Could be either, couldn’t it? Well, perhaps more like sixth form boys, at that.”

“You thought it was boys, didn’t you? Boys from your school.”

Shirley was silent.

“You thought they’d know and have it in for you if you told. Didn’t you? I won’t let you down, Shirley. Didn’t you?”

She whispered, “Yes,” and added, “Some of our boys got knives. I seen them.”

Meadows went to Inspector Brooks. He explained how Ron had helped him to get in touch with Shirley and the result of that interview. The inspector, who had worked as a routine matter on all Mrs. Fairlands’s contacts with the outer world, was too interested to feel annoyed at the other’s success.

“Men’s voices?” Brooks said incredulously.

“Most probably older lads,” Meadows answered. “She agreed that was what frightened her group. They might have looked out and recognized them as they ran away.”

“There’d been no attempt at intimidations?”

“They’re not all that stupid.”

“No.”

Brooks considered.

“This mustn’t break in the papers yet, you understand?”

“Perfectly. But I shall stay around.”

Inspector Brooks nodded, and Tom went away. Brooks took his sergeant and drove to Mrs. Fairlands’s house. They still had the key of the flat, and they still had the house under observation.

The new information was disturbing, Brooks felt. Men’s voices, raised in anger. Against poor Mrs. Fairlands, of course. But there were no adult fingerprints in the flat except those of the old lady herself and of her daily. Gloves had been worn, then. A professional job. But no signs whatever of breaking and entering. Therefore, Mrs. Fairlands had let them in. Why? She had peeped out at Ron’s lot, to check who they were, obviously. She had not done so for Shirley’s. Because she was in the power of the “men” whose voices had driven this other group away in terror.

But there had been two distinct small footprints in the dust of the outer hall and a palm-print on the outer door had been small, childsize.

Perhaps the child that Shirley had seen running down the road had been a decoy. The whole group she had noticed at Mrs. Fairlands’s door might have been employed for that purpose and the men or older boys were lurking at the corner of the house, to pounce when the door opened. Possible, but not very likely. Far too risky, even on a dark evening. Shirley could not have seen distinctly. The streetlamps were at longish intervals in that road. But there were always a few passersby. Even on Christmas Eve no professional group of villains would take such a risk.

Standing in the cold drawing room, now covered with a grey film of dust, Inspector Brooks decided to make another careful search for clues. He had missed the jewels. Though he felt justified in making it, his mistake was a distinct blot on his copybook. It was up to him now to retrieve his reputation. He sent the sergeant to take another look at the bedroom, with particular attention to the dressing table. He himself began to go over the drawing room with the greatest possible care.

Shirley’s evidence suggested there had been more than one thief. The girl had said “voices.” That meant at least two, which probably accounted for the fact, apart from her age, that neither Mrs. Fairlands nor her clothes gave any indication of a struggle. She had been overpowered immediately, it seemed. She had not been strong enough or agile enough to tear, scratch, pull off any fragment from her attackers’ clothes or persons. There had been no trace of any useful material under her fingernails or elsewhere.

Brooks began methodically with the chair to which Mrs. Fairlands had been bound and worked his way outwards from that center. After the furniture, the carpet and curtains. After that the walls.

Near the door, opposite the fireplace, he found on the wall — two feet, three inches up from the floor — a small, round, brownish, greasy smear. He had not seen it before. In artificial light, he checked, it was nearly invisible. On this morning, with the first sunshine of the New Year coming into the room, the little patch was entirely obvious, slightly shiny where the light from the window caught it.

Inspector Brooks took a wooden spatula from his case of aids and carefully scraped off the substance into a small plastic box, sniffing at it as he did so.

“May I, too?” asked Tom Meadows behind him.

The inspector wheeled round with an angry exclamation.

“How did you get in?” he asked.

“Told the copper in your car I wanted to speak to you.”

“What about?”

“Well, about how you were getting on, really,” Tom said disarmingly. “I see you are. Please let me have one sniff.”

Inspector Brooks was annoyed, both by the intrusion and the fact that he had not heard it, being so concentrated on his work. So he closed his box, shut it into his black bag, and called to the sergeant in the next room.

Meadows got down on his knees, leaned towards the wall, and sniffed. It was faint, since most of it had been scraped off, but he knew the smell. His freelancing had not been confined to journalism.

He was getting to his feet as the sergeant joined Inspector Brooks. The sergeant raised his eyebrows at the interloper.

“You can’t keep the press’s noses out of anything,” said Brooks morosely.

The other two grinned. It was very apt.

“I’m just off,” Tom said. “Good luck with your specimen, Inspector. I know where to go now. So will you.”

“Come back!” called Brooks. The young man was a menace. He would have to be controlled.

But Meadows was away, striding down the road until he was out of sight of the police car, then running to the nearest tube station, where he knew he would find the latest newspaper editions. He bought one, opened it at the entertainments column, and read down the list.

He was a certain six hours ahead of Brooks, he felt sure, possibly more. Probably he had until tomorrow morning. He skipped his lunch and set to work.

Inspector Brooks got the report from the lab that evening, and the answer to his problem came to him as completely as it had done to Tom Meadows in Mrs. Fairlands’s drawing room. His first action was to ring up Olympia. This proving fruitless, he sighed. Too late now to contact the big stores; they would all be closed and the employees of every kind gone home.

But in the morning some very extensive telephone calls to managers told him where he must go. He organized his forces to cover all the exits of a big store not very far from Mrs. Fairlands’s house. With his sergeant he entered modestly by way of the men’s department.

They took a lift from there to the third floor, emerging among the toys. It was the tenth day of Christmas, with the school holidays in full swing and eager children, flush with Christmas money, choosing long-coveted treasures. A Father Christmas, white-bearded, in the usual red, hooded gown, rather too short for him, was moving about trying to promote a visit to the first of that day’s performances of “Snowdrop and the Seven Dwarfs.” As his insistence seeped into the minds of the abstracted young, they turned their heads to look at the attractive cardboard entrance of the little “theater” at the far end of the department. A gentle flow towards it began and gathered momentum. Inspector Brooks and the sergeant joined the stream.

Inside the theater there were small chairs in rows for the children. The grownups stood at the back. A gramophone played the Disney film music.

The early scenes were brief, mere tableaux with a line thrown in here and there for Snowdrop. The queen spoke the famous doggerel to her mirror.

The curtain fell and rose again on Snowdrop, surrounded by the Seven Dwarfs. Two of them had beards, real beards. Dopey rose to his feet and began to sing.

“Okay,” whispered Brooks to the sergeant. “The child who sang and ran away.”

The sergeant nodded. Brooks whispered again. “I’m going round the back. Get the audience here out quietly if the balloon goes up before they finish.”

He tiptoed quietly away. He intended to catch the dwarfs in their dressing room immediately after the show, arrest the lot, and sort them out at the police station.

But the guilty ones had seen him move. Or rather Dopey, more guilt-laden and fearful than the rest, had noticed the two men who seemed to have no children with them, had seen their heads close together, had seen one move silently away. As Brooks disappeared, the midget’s nerve broke. His song ended in a scream; he fled from the stage.

In the uproar that followed, the dwarf’s scream was echoed by the frightened children. The lights went up in the theater, the shop assistants and the sergeant went into action to subdue their panic and get them out.

Inspector Brooks found himself in a maze of lathe and plaster backstage arrangements. He found three bewildered small figures, with anxious, wizened faces, trying to restrain Dopey, who was still in the grip of his hysteria. A few sharp questions proved that the three had no idea what was happening.

The queen and Snowdrop appeared, highly indignant. Brooks, now holding Dopey firmly by the collar, demanded the other three dwarfs. The two girls, subdued and totally bewildered, pointed to their dressing room. It was empty, but a tumbled heap of costumes on the floor showed what they had done. The sergeant appeared, breathless.

“Take this chap,” Brooks said, thrusting the now fainting Dopey at him. “Take him down. I’m shopping him. Get on to the management to warn all departments for the others.”

He was gone, darting into the crowded toy department, where children and parents stood amazed or hurried towards the lifts, where a dense crowd stood huddled, anxious to leave the frightening trouble spot.

Brooks bawled an order.

The crowd at the lift melted away from it, leaving three small figures in overcoats and felt hats, trying in vain to push once more under cover.

They bolted, bunched together, but they did not get far. Round the corner of a piled table of soft toys Father Christmas was waiting. He leaped forward, tripped up one, snatched another, hit the third as he passed and grabbed him, too, as he fell.

The tripped one struggled up and on as Brooks appeared.

“I’ll hold these two,” panted Tom Meadows through his white beard, which had fallen sideways.

The chase was brief. Brooks gained on the dwarf. The latter knew it was hopeless. He snatched up a mallet lying beside a display of camping equipment and, rushing to the side of the store, leaped on a counter, from there clambered up a tier of shelves, beat a hole in the window behind them, and dived through. Horrified people and police on the pavement below saw the small body turning over and over like a leaf as it fell.

“All yours,” said Tom Meadows, handing his captives, too limp now to struggle, to Inspector Brooks and tearing off his Father Christmas costume. “See you later.”

He was gone, to shut himself in a telephone booth on the ground floor of the store and hand his favorite editor the scoop. It had paid off, taking over from the old boy, an ex-actor like himself, who was quite willing for a fiver to write a note pleading illness and sending a substitute. “Your reporter, Tom Meadows, dressed as Father Christmas, today captured and handed over to the police two of the three murderers of Mrs. Fairlands—”

Inspector Brooks, with three frantic midgets demanding legal aid, scrabbling at the doors of their cells, took a lengthy statement from the fourth, the one with the treble voice whose nerve had broken on the fatal night, as it had again that day. Greasepaint had betrayed the little fiends, Brooks told him, privately regretting that Meadows had been a jump ahead of him there. Greasepaint left on in the rush to get at their prey. One of the brutes must have fallen against the wall, pushed by the old woman herself perhaps. He hoped so. He hoped it was her own action that had brought these squalid killers to justice.

Waxworks Ethel Lina White

It is an unfortunate fact that Ethel Lina White’s seventeen books are seldom read today, though two motion pictures inspired by her extremely suspenseful novels are in constant rerun on classic movie channels. The Spiral Staircase, directed by Robert Siodmak and starring Dorothy McGuire and Ethel Barrymore, was released in 1945; it was based on White’s 1934 novel Some Must Watch. Even more successful was The Lady Vanishes, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Margaret Lockwood, Michael Redgrave, and Dame May Whitty. Released in 1938, it was inspired by White’s 1936 novel The Wheel Spins. “Waxworks” was first published in the December 1930 issue of Pearson’s Magazine.

Sonia made her first entry in her notebook:

She stopped writing to glance at her company. Seen in the light from the streetlamp, which streamed in through the high window, the room seemed to be full of people. Their faces were those of men and women of character and intelligence. They stood in groups, as though in conversation, or sat apart, in solitary reverie.

But they neither moved nor spoke.

When Sonia had last seen them in the glare of the electric globes, they had been a collection of ordinary waxworks, some of which were the worse for wear. The black velvet which lined the walls of the Gallery was alike tawdry and filmed with dust.

The side opposite to the window was built into alcoves, which held highly moral tableaux, depicting contrasting scenes in the career of Vice and Virtue. Sonia had slipped into one of these recesses, just before closing-time, in order to hide for her vigil.

It had been a simple affair. The porter had merely rung his bell, and the few courting-couples who represented the Public had taken his hint and hurried towards the exit.

No one was likely to risk being locked in, for the Waxwork Collection of Oldhampton had lately acquired a sinister reputation. The foundation for this lay in the fate of a stranger to the town — a commercial traveller — who had cut his throat in the Hall of Horrors.

Since then, two persons had, separately, spent the night in the Gallery and, in the morning, each had been found dead.

In both cases the verdict had been “Natural death, due to heart failure.” The first victim — a local alderman — had been addicted to alcohol, and was in very bad shape. The second — his great friend — was a delicate little man, a martyr to asthma, and slightly unhinged through unwise absorption in spiritualism.

While the coincidence of the tragedies stirred up a considerable amount of local superstition, the general belief was that both deaths were due to the power of suggestion, in conjunction with macabre surroundings. The victims had let themselves be frightened to death by the Waxworks.

Sonia was there, in the Gallery, to test its truth.

She was the latest addition to the staff of the Oldhampton Gazette. Bubbling with enthusiasm, she made no secret of her literary ambitions, and it was difficult to feed her with enough work. Her colleagues listened to her with mingled amusement and boredom, but they liked her as a refreshing novelty. As for her fine future, they looked to young Wells — the Sporting Editor — to effect her speedy and painless removal from the sphere of journalism.

On Christmas Eve, Sonia took them all into her confidence over her intention to spend a night in the Waxworks, on the last night of the old year.

“Copy there,” she declared. “I’m not timid and I have fairly sensitive perceptions, so I ought to be able to write up the effect of imagination on the nervous system. I mean to record my impressions, every hour, while they’re piping-hot.”

Looking up suddenly, she had surprised a green glare in the eyes of Hubert Poke.

When Sonia came to work on the Gazette, she had a secret fear of unwelcome amorous attentions, since she was the only woman on the staff. But the first passion she awoke was hatred.

Poke hated her impersonally, as the representative of a Force, numerically superior to his own sex, which was on the opposing side in the battle for existence. He feared her, too, because she was the unknown element, and possessed the unfair weapon of charm.

Before she came, he had been the star turn on the Gazette. His own position on the staff gratified his vanity and entirely satisfied his narrow ambition. But Sonia had stolen some of his thunder. On more than one occasion she had written up a story he had failed to cover, and he had to admit that her success was due to a quicker wit.

For some time past he had been playing with the idea of spending a night in the Waxworks, but was deterred by the knowledge that his brain was not sufficiently temperate for the experiment. Lately he had been subject to sudden red rages, when he had felt a thick hot taste in his throat, as though of blood. He knew that his jealousy of Sonia was accountable. It had almost reached the stage of mania, and trembled on the brink of homicidal urge.

While his brain was still creaking with the idea of first-hand experience in the ill-omened Gallery, Sonia had nipped in with her readymade plan.

Controlling himself with an effort, he listened while the sub-editor issued a warning to Sonia.

“Bon idea, young woman, but you will find the experience a bit raw. You’ve no notion how uncanny these big deserted buildings can be.”

“That’s so,” nodded young Wells. “I once spent a night in a haunted house.”

Sonia looked at him with her habitual interest. He was short and thick-set, with a three-cornered smile which appealed to her.

“Did you see anything?” she asked.

“No, I cleared out before the show came on. Windy. After a bit, one can imagine anything.”

It was then that Poke introduced a new note into the discussion by his own theory of the mystery deaths.

Sitting alone in the deserted Gallery, Sonia preferred to forget his words. She resolutely drove them from her mind while she began to settle down for the night.

Her first action was to cross to the figure of Cardinal Wolsey and unceremoniously raise his heavy scarlet robe. From under its voluminous folds, she drew out her cushion and attaché-case, which she had hidden earlier in the evening.

Mindful of the fact that it would grow chilly at dawn, she carried on her arm her thick white tennis-coat. Slipping it on, she placed her cushion in the angle of the wall, and sat down to await developments.

The Gallery was far more mysterious now that the lights were out. At either end, it seemed to stretch away into impenetrable black tunnels. But there was nothing uncanny about it, or about the figures, which were a tame and conventional collection of historical personages. Even the adjoining Hall of Horrors contained no horrors, only a selection of respectable-looking poisoners.

Sonia grinned cheerfully at the row of waxworks which were visible in the lamplight from the street.

“So you are the villains of the piece,” she murmured. “Later on, if the office is right, you will assume unpleasant mannerisms to try to cheat me into believing you are alive. I warn you, old sports, you’ll have your work cut out for you... And now I think I’ll get better acquainted with you. Familiarity breeds contempt.”

She went the round of the figures, greeting each with flippancy or criticism. Presently she returned to her corner and opened her notebook ready to record her impressions.

Sonia had left her corner, to write her entry in the light which streamed through the window. Smoking was prohibited in the building, and, lest she should yield to temptation, she had left both her cigarettes and matches behind her, on the office table.

At this stage she regretted the matches. A little extra light would be a boon. It was true she carried an electric torch, but she was saving it, in case of emergency.

It was a loan from young Wells. As they were leaving the office together, he spoke to her confidentially.

“Did you notice how Poke glared at you? Don’t get up against him. He’s a nasty piece of work. He’s so mean he’d sell his mother’s shroud for old rags. And he’s a cruel little devil, too. He turned out his miserable pup, to starve in the streets, rather than cough up for the license.”

Sonia grew hot with indignation.

“What he needs to cure his complaint is a strong dose of rat-poison,” she declared. “What became of the poor little dog?”

“Oh, he’s all right. He was a matey chap, and he soon chummed up with a mongrel of his own class.”

“You?” asked Sonia, her eyes suddenly soft.

“A mongrel, am I?” grinned Wells. “Well, anyway, the pup will get a better Christmas than his first, when Poke went away and left him on the chain... We’re both of us going to over-eat and over-drink. You’re on your own, too. Won’t you join us?”

“I’d love to.”

Although the evening was warm and muggy the invitation suffused Sonia with the spirit of Christmas. The shade of Dickens seemed to be hovering over the parade of the streets. A red-nosed Santa Claus presided over a spangled Christmas-tree outside a toy-shop. Windows were hung with tinselled balls and coloured paper festoons. Pedestrians, laden with parcels, called out seasonable greetings.

“Merry Christmas.”

Young Wells’s three-cornered smile was his tribute to the joyous feeling of festival. His eyes were eager as he turned to Sonia.

“I’ve an idea. Don’t wait until after the holidays to write up the Waxworks. Make it a Christmas stunt, and go there tonight.”

“I will,” declared Sonia.

It was then that he slipped the torch into her hand.

“I know you belong to the stronger sex,” he said. “But even your nerve might crash. If it does, just flash this torch under the window. Stretch out your arm above your head, and the light will be seen from the street.”

“And what will happen then?” asked Sonia.

“I shall knock up the miserable porter and let you out.”

“But how will you see the light?”

“I shall be in the street.”

“All night?”

“Yes; I sleep there.” Young Wells grinned. “Understand,” he added loftily, “that this is a matter of principle. I could not let any woman — even one so aged and unattractive as yourself — feel beyond the reach of help.”

He cut into her thanks as he turned away with a parting warning.

“Don’t use the torch for light, or the juice may give out. It’s about due for a new battery.”

As Sonia looked at the torch, lying by her side, it seemed a link with young Wells. At this moment he was patrolling the street, a sturdy figure in an old tweed overcoat, with his cap pulled down over his eyes.

As she tried to pick out his footsteps from among those of the other passers-by, it struck her that there was plenty of traffic, considering that it was past twelve o’clock.

“The witching hour of midnight is another lost illusion,” she reflected. “Killed by nightclubs, I suppose.”

It was cheerful to know that so many citizens were abroad, to keep her company. Some optimists were still singing carols. She faintly heard the strains of “Good King Wenceslas.” It was in a tranquil frame of mind that she unpacked her sandwiches and thermos.

“It’s Christmas Day,” she thought, as she drank hot coffee. “And I’m spending it with Don and the pup.”

At that moment her career grew misty, and the flame of her literary ambition dipped as the future glowed with the warm firelight of home. In sudden elation, she held up her flask and toasted the waxworks.

“Merry Christmas to you all! And many of them.”

The faces of the illuminated figures remained stolid, but she could almost swear that a low murmur of acknowledgment seemed to swell from the rest of her company — invisible in the darkness.

She spun out her meal to its limit, stifling her craving for a cigarette. Then, growing bored, she counted the visible waxworks, and tried to memorise them.

“Twenty-one, twenty-two... Wolsey. Queen Elizabeth, Guy Fawkes, Napoléon ought to go on a diet. Ever heard of eighteen days, Nap? Poor old Julius Caesar looks as though he’d been sun-bathing on the Lido. He’s about due for the melting-pot.”

In her eyes they were a second-rate set of dummies. The local theory that they could terrorise a human being to death or madness seemed a fantastic notion.

“No,” concluded Sonia. “There’s really more in Poke’s bright idea.”

Again she saw the sun-smitten office — for the big unshielded window faced south — with its blistered paint, faded wall-paper, ink-stained desks, typewriters, telephones, and a huge fire in the untidy grate. Young Wells smoked his big pipe, while the sub-editor — a ginger, pig-headed young man — laid down the law about the mystery deaths.

And then she heard Poke’s toneless deadman’s voice.

“You may be right about the spiritualist. He died of fright — but not of the waxworks. My belief is that he established contact with the spirit of his dead friend, the alderman, and so learned his real fate.”

“What fate?” snapped the sub-editor.

“I believe that the alderman was murdered,” replied Poke.

He clung to his point like a limpet in the face of all counter-arguments.

“The alderman had enemies,” he said. “Nothing would be easier than for one of them to lie in wait for him. In the present circumstances, I could commit a murder in the Waxworks, and get away with it.”

“How?” demanded young Wells.

“How? To begin with, the Gallery is a one-man show and the porter’s a bonehead. Anyone could enter, and leave, the Gallery without his being wise to it.”

“And the murder?” plugged young Wells.

With a shudder Sonia remembered how Poke had glanced at his long, knotted fingers.

“If I could not achieve my object by fright, which is the foolproof way,” he replied, “I should try a little artistic strangulation.”

“And leave your marks?”

“Not necessarily. Every expert knows that there are methods which show no trace.”

Sonia fumbled in her bag for the cigarettes which were not there.

“Why did I let myself think of that, just now?” she thought. “Really too stupid.”

As she reproached herself for her morbidity, she broke off to stare at the door which led to the Hall of Horrors.

When she had last looked at it, she could have sworn that it was tightly closed... But now it gaped open by an inch.

She looked at the black cavity, recognizing the first test of her nerves. Later on, there would be others. She realized the fact that, within her cool, practical self, she carried a hysterical, neurotic passenger, who would doubtless give her a lot of trouble through officious suggestions and uncomfortable reminders.

She resolved to give her second self a taste of her quality, and so quell her at the start.

“That door was merely closed,” she remarked as, with a firm step, she crossed to the Hall of Horrors and shut the door.

Sonia dropped her pencil at the sound of a low chuckle. It seemed to come from the end of the Gallery which was blacked out by shadows.

As her imagination galloped away with her, she reproached herself sharply.

“Steady, don’t be a fool. There must be a cloak-room here. That chuckle is the air escaping in a pipe — or something. I’m betrayed by my own ignorance of hydraulics.”

In spite of her brave words, she returned rather quickly to her corner.

With her back against the wall she felt less apprehensive. But she recognized her cowardice as an ominous sign.

She was desperately afraid of someone — or something — creeping up behind her and touching her.

“I’ve struck the bad patch,” she told herself. “It will be worse at three o’clock and work up to a climax. But when I make my entry, at three, I shall have reached the peak. After that every minute will be bringing the dawn nearer.”

But of one fact she was ignorant. There would be no recorded impression at three o’clock.

Happily unconscious, she began to think of her copy. When she returned to the office — sunken-eyed, and looking like nothing on earth — she would then rejoice over every symptom of groundless fear.

“It’s a story all right,” she gloated, looking at Hamlet. His gnarled, pallid features and dark, smouldering eyes were strangely familiar to her.

Suddenly she realized that he reminded her of Hubert Poke.

Against her will, her thoughts again turned to him. She told herself that he was exactly like a waxwork. His yellow face — symptomatic of heart-trouble — had the same cheesy hue, and his eyes were like dull black glass. He wore a denture which was too large for him, and which forced his lips apart in a mirthless grin.

He always seemed to smile — even over the episode of the lift — which had been no joke.

It happened two days before. Sonia had rushed into the office in a state of molten excitement because she had extracted an interview from a Personage who had just received the Freedom of the City. This distinguished freeman had the reputation of shunning newspaper publicity, and Poke had tried his luck, only to be sent away with a flea in his ear.

At the back of her mind, Sonia knew that she had not fought level, for she was conscious of the effect of violet-blue eyes and a dimple upon a reserved but very human gentleman. But in her elation she had been rather blatant about her score.

She transcribed her notes, rattling away at her typewriter in a tremendous hurry, because she had a dinner-engagement. In the same breathless speed she had rushed towards the automatic lift.

She was just about to step into it when young Wells had leaped the length of the passage and dragged her back.

“Look, where you’re going!” he shouted.

Sonia looked — and saw only the well of the shaft. The lift was not waiting in its accustomed place.

“Out of order,” explained Wells before he turned to blast Hubert Poke, who stood by.

“You almighty chump, why didn’t you grab Miss Fraser, instead of standing by like a stuck pig?”

At the time Sonia had vaguely remarked how Poke had stammered and sweated, and she accepted the fact that he had been petrified by shock and had lost his head.

For the first time, she realized that his inaction had been deliberate. She remembered the flame of terrible excitement in his eyes and his stretched ghastly grin.

“He hates me,” she thought. “It’s my fault. I’ve been tactless and cocksure.”

Then a flood of horror swept over her.

“But he wanted to see me crash. It’s almost murder.”

As she began to tremble, the jumpy passenger she carried reminded her of Poke’s remark about the alderman.

“He had enemies.”

Sonia shook away the suggestion angrily.

“My memory’s uncanny,” she thought. “I’m stimulated and all strung up. It must be the atmosphere... Perhaps there’s some gas in the air that accounts for these brainstorms. It’s hopeless to be so utterly unscientific. Poke would have made a better job of this.”

She was back again to Hubert Poke. He had become an obsession.

Her head began to throb and a tiny gong started to beat in her temples. This time, she recognized the signs without any mental ferment.

“Atmospherics. A storm’s coming up. It might make things rather thrilling. I must concentrate on my story. Really, my luck’s in.”

She sat for some time, forcing herself to think of pleasant subjects — of arguments with young Wells and the Tennis Tournament. But there was always a point when her thoughts gave a twist and led her back to Poke.

Presently she grew cramped and got up to pace the illuminated aisle in front of the window. She tried again to talk to the waxworks, but, this time, it was not a success.

They seemed to have grown remote and secretive, as though they were removed to another plane, where they possessed a hidden life.

Suddenly she gave a faint scream. Someone — or something — had crept up behind her, for she felt the touch of cold fingers upon her arm.

Sonia stopped writing, to glance uneasily at the image of the Stuart monarch. His black velveteen suit appeared to have a richer pile. The swart curls which fell over his lace collar looked less like horse-hair. There really seemed a gleam of amorous interest lurking at the back of his glass optics.

Absurdly, Sonia spoke to him, in order to reassure herself.

“Did you touch me? At the first hint of a liberty, Charles Stuart, I’ll smack your face. You’ll learn a modern journalist has not the manners of an orange-girl.”

Instantly the satyr reverted to a dummy in a moth-eaten historical costume.

Sonia stood, listening for young Wells’s footsteps. But she could not hear them, although the street now was perfectly still. She tried to picture him, propping up the opposite building, solid and immovable as the Rock of Gibraltar.

But it was no good. Doubts began to obtrude.

“I don’t believe he’s there. After all, why should he stay? He only pretended, just to give me confidence. He’s gone.”

She shrank back to her corner, drawing her tennis-coat closer, for warmth. It was growing colder, causing her to think of tempting things — of a hot-water bottle and a steaming tea-pot.

Presently she realized that she was growing drowsy. Her lids felt as though weighted with lead, so that it required an effort to keep them open.

This was a complication which she had not foreseen. Although she longed to drop off to sleep, she sternly resisted the temptation.

“No. It’s not fair. I’ve set myself the job of recording a night spent in the Waxworks. It must be the genuine thing.”

She blinked more vigorously, staring across to where Byron drooped like a sooty flamingo.

“Mercy, how he yearns! He reminds me of— No, I won’t think of him... I must keep awake... Bed... blankets, pillows... No.”

Her head fell forward, and for a minute she dozed. In that space of time, she had a vivid dream.

She thought that she was still in her corner in the Gallery, watching the dead alderman as he paced to and fro, before the window. She had never seen him, so he conformed to her own idea of an alderman — stout, pompous, and wearing the dark-blue, fur-trimmed robe of his office.

“He’s got a face like a sleepy pear,” she decided. “Nice old thing, but brainless.”

And then, suddenly, her tolerant derision turned to acute apprehension on his account, as she saw that he was being followed. A shape was stalking him as a cat stalks a bird.

Sonia tried to warn him of his peril, but, after the fashion of nightmares, she found herself voiceless. Even as she struggled to scream, a grotesquely long arm shot out and monstrous fingers gripped the alderman’s throat.

In the same moment, she saw the face of the killer. It was Hubert Poke.

She awoke with a start, glad to find that it was but a dream. As she looked around her with dazed eyes, she saw a faint flicker of light. The mutter of very faint thunder, together with a patter of rain, told her that the storm had broken.

It was still a long way off, for Oldhampton seemed to be having merely a reflection and an echo.

“It’ll clear the air,” thought Sonia.

Then her heart gave a violent leap. One of the waxworks had come to life. She distinctly saw it move, before it disappeared into the darkness at the end of the Gallery.

She kept her head, realizing that it was time to give up.

“My nerve’s crashed,” she thought. “That figure was only my fancy. I’m just like the others. Defeated by wax.”

Instinctively, she paid the figures her homage. It was the cumulative effect of their grim company, with their simulated life and sinister associations, that had rushed her defences.

Although it was bitter to fail, she comforted herself with the reminder that she had enough copy for her article. She could even make capital out of her own capitulation to the force of suggestion.

With a slight grimace, she picked up her notebook. There would be no more on-the-spot impressions. But young Wells, if he was still there, would be grateful for the end of his vigil, whatever the state of mind of the porter.

She groped in the darkness for her signal-lamp. But her fingers only scraped bare polished boards.

The torch had disappeared.

In a panic, she dropped down on her knees, and searched for yards around the spot where she was positive it had lain.

It was the instinct of self-preservation which caused her to give up her vain search.

“I’m in danger,” she thought. “And I’ve no one to help me now. I must see this through myself.”

She pushed back her hair from a brow which had grown damp.

“There’s a brain working against mine. When I was asleep, someone — or something — stole my torch.”

Something? The waxworks became instinct with terrible possibility as she stared at them. Some were merely blurred shapes — their faces opaque oblongs or ovals. But others — illuminated from the street — were beginning to reveal themselves in a new guise.

Queen Elizabeth, with peaked chin and fiery hair, seemed to regard her with intelligent malice. The countenance of Napoléon was heavy with brooding power, as though he were willing her to submit. Cardinal Wolsey held her with a glittering eye.

Sonia realized that she was letting herself be hypnotised by creatures of wax — so many pounds of candles moulded to human form.

“This is what happened to those others,” she thought. “Nothing happened. But I’m afraid of them. I’m terribly afraid... There’s only one thing to do. I must count them again.”

She knew that she must find out whether her torch had been stolen through human agency; but she shrank from the experiment, not knowing which she feared more — a tangible enemy or the unknown.

As she began to count, the chilly air inside the building seemed to throb with each thud of her heart.

“Seventeen, eighteen.” She was scarcely conscious of the numerals she murmured. “Twenty-two, twenty-three.”

She stopped. Twenty-three? If her tally were correct, there was an extra waxwork in the Gallery.

On the shock of the discovery came a blinding flash of light, which veined the sky with fire. It seemed to run down the figure of Joan of Arc like a flaming torch. By a freak of atmospherics, the storm, which had been a starved, whimpering affair of flicker and murmur, culminated, and ended, in what was apparently a thunderbolt.

The explosion which followed was stunning; but Sonia scarcely noticed it, in her terror.

The unearthly violet glare had revealed to her a figure which she had previously overlooked.

It was seated in a chair, its hand supporting its peaked chin, and its pallid, clean-shaven features nearly hidden by a familiar broad-brimmed felt hat, which — together with the black cape — gave her the clue to its identity.

It was Hubert Poke.

Three o’clock.

Sonia heard it strike, as her memory began to reproduce, with horrible fidelity, every word of Poke’s conversation on murder.

“Artistic strangulation.” She pictured the cruel agony of life leaking — bubble by bubble, gasp by gasp. It would be slow — for he had boasted of a method which left no tell-tale marks.

“Another death,” she thought dully. “If it happens everyone will say that the Waxworks have killed me. What a story... Only, I shall not write it up.”

The tramp of feet rang out on the pavement below. It might have been the policeman on his beat; but Sonia wanted to feel that young Wells was still faithful to his post.

She looked up at the window, set high in the wall, and, for a moment, was tempted to shout. But the idea was too desperate. If she failed to attract outside attention, she would seal her own fate, for Poke would be prompted to hasten her extinction.

“Awful to feel he’s so near, and yet I cannot reach him,” she thought. “It makes it so much worse.”

She crouched there, starting and sweating at every faint sound in the darkness. The rain, which still pattered on the sky-light, mimicked footsteps and whispers. She remembered her dream and the nightmare spring and clutch.

It was an omen. At any moment it would come...

Her fear jolted her brain. For the first time she had a glimmer of hope.

“I didn’t see him before the flash, because he looked exactly like one of the waxworks. Could I hide among them, too?” she wondered.

She knew that her white coat alone revealed her position to him. Holding her breath, she wriggled out of it, and hung it on the effigy of Charles II. In her black coat, with her handkerchief-scarf tied over her face, burglar fashion, she hoped that she was invisible against the sable-draped walls.

Her knees shook as she crept from her shelter. When she had stolen a few yards, she stopped to listen... In the darkness, someone was astir. She heard a soft padding of feet, moving with the certainty of one who sees his goal.

Her coat glimmered in her deserted corner.

In a sudden panic, she increased her pace, straining her ears for other sounds. She had reached the far end of the Gallery where no gleam from the window penetrated the gloom. Blindfolded and muffled, she groped her way towards the alcoves which held the tableaux.

Suddenly she stopped, every nerve in her body quivering. She had heard a thud, like rubbered soles alighting after a spring.

“He knows now.” Swift on the trail of her thought flashed another. “He will look for me. Oh, quick!”

She tried to move, but her muscles were bound, and she stood as though rooted to the spot, listening. It was impossible to locate the footsteps. They seemed to come from every quarter of the Gallery. Sometimes they sounded remote, but, whenever she drew a freer breath, a sudden creak of the boards close to where she stood made her heart leap.

At last she reached the limit of endurance. Unable to bear the suspense of waiting, she moved on.

Her pursuer followed her at a distance. He gained on her, but still withheld his spring. She had the feeling that he held her at the end of an invisible string.

“He’s playing with me, like a cat with a mouse,” she thought.

If he had seen her, he let her creep forward until the darkness was no longer absolute. There were gradations in its density, so that she was able to recognize the first alcove. Straining her eyes, she could distinguish the outlines of the bed where the Virtuous Man made his triumphant exit from life, surrounded by a flock of his sorrowing family and their progeny.

Slipping inside the circle, she added one more mourner to the tableau.

The minutes passed, but nothing happened. There seemed no sound save the tiny gong beating inside her temples. Even the raindrops had ceased to patter on the sky-light.

Sonia began to find the silence more deadly than noise. It was like the lull before the storm. Question after question came rolling into her mind.

“Where is he? What will he do next? Why doesn’t he strike a light?”

As though someone were listening-in to her thoughts, she suddenly heard a faint splutter as of an ignited match. Or it might have been the click of an exhausted electric torch.

With her back turned to the room, she could see no light. She heard the half-hour strike, with a faint wonder that she was still alive.

“What will have happened before the next quarter?” she asked.

Presently she began to feel the strain of her pose, which she held as rigidly as any artist’s model. For the time — if her presence were not already detected — her life depended on her immobility.

As an overpowering weariness began to steal over her a whisper stirred in her brain:

“The alderman was found dead on a bed.”

The newspaper account had not specified which especial tableau had been the scene of the tragedy, but she could not remember another alcove which held a bed. As she stared at the white dimness of the quilt she seemed to see it blotched with a dark, sprawling form, writhing under the grip of long fingers.

To shut out the suggestion of her fancy, she closed her eyes. The cold, dead air in the alcove was sapping her exhausted vitality, so that once again she began to nod. She dozed as she stood, rocking to and fro on her feet.

Her surroundings grew shadowy. Sometimes she knew that she was in the alcove, but at others she strayed momentarily over strange borders... She was back in the summer, walking in a garden with young Wells. Roses and sunshine...

She awoke with a start at the sound of heavy breathing. It sounded close to her — almost by her side. The figure of a mourner kneeling by the bed seemed to change its posture slightly.

Instantly maddened thoughts began to flock and flutter wildly inside her brain.

“Who was it? Was it Hubert Poke? Would history be repeated? Was she doomed also to be strangled inside the alcove? Had Fate led her there?”

She waited, but nothing happened. Again she had the sensation of being played with by a master mind — dangled at the end of his invisible string.

Presently she was emboldened to steal from the alcove, to seek another shelter. But though she held on to the last flicker of her will, she had reached the limit of endurance. Worn out with the violence of her emotions and physically spent from the strain of long periods of standing, she staggered as she walked.

She blundered round the Gallery, without any sense of direction, colliding blindly with the groups of waxwork figures. When she reached the window her knees shook under her and she sank to the ground — dropping immediately into a sleep of utter exhaustion.

She awoke with a start as the first grey gleam of dawn was stealing into the Gallery. It fell on the row of waxworks, imparting a sickly hue to their features, as though they were creatures stricken with plague.

It seemed to Sonia that they were waiting for her to wake. Their peaked faces were intelligent and their eyes held interest, as though they were keeping some secret.

She pushed back her hair, her brain still thick with clouded memories. Disconnected thoughts began to stir, to slide about... Then suddenly her mind cleared, and she sprang up — staring at a figure wearing a familiar black cape.

Hubert Poke was also waiting for her to wake.

He sat in the same chair, and in the same posture, as when she had first seen him, in the flash of lightning. He looked as though he had never moved from his place — as though he could not move. His face had not the appearance of flesh.

As Sonia stared at him, with the feeling of a bird hypnotised by a snake, a doubt began to gather in her mind. Growing bolder, she crept closer to the figure.

It was a waxwork — a libellous representation of the actor — Kean.

Her laugh rang joyously through the Gallery as she realized that she had passed a night of baseless terrors, cheated by the power of imagination. In her relief she turned impulsively to the waxworks.

“My congratulations,” she said. “You are my masters.”

They did not seem entirely satisfied by her homage, for they continued to watch her with an expression half-benevolent and half-sinister.

“Wait!” they seemed to say.

Sonia turned from them and opened her bag to get out her mirror and comb. There, among a jumble of notes, letters, lipsticks, and powder-compresses, she saw the electric torch.

“Of course!” she cried. “I remember now, I put it there. I was too windy to think properly... Well, I have my story. I’d better get my coat.”

The Gallery seemed smaller in the returning light. As she approached Charles Stuart, who looked like an umpire in her white coat, she glanced down the far end of the room, where she had groped in its shadows before the pursuit of imaginary footsteps.

A waxwork was lying prone on the floor. For the second time she stood and gazed down upon a familiar black cape — a broad-brimmed conspirator’s hat. Then she nerved herself to turn the figure so that its face was visible.

She gave a scream. There was no mistaking the glazed eyes and ghastly grin. She was looking down on the face of a dead man.

It was Hubert Poke.

The shock was too much for Sonia. She heard a singing in her ears, while a black mist gathered before her eyes. For the first time in her life she fainted.

When she recovered consciousness she forced herself to kneel beside the body and cover it with its black cape. The pallid face resembled a death-mask, which revealed only too plainly the lines of egotism and cruelty in which it had been moulded by a gross spirit.

Yet Sonia felt no repulsion — only pity. It was Christmas morning, and he was dead, while her own portion was life triumphant. Closing her eyes, she whispered a prayer of supplication for his warped soul.

Presently, as she grew calmer, her mind began to work on the problem of his presence. His motive seemed obvious. Not knowing that she had changed her plan, he had concealed himself in the Gallery, in order to poach her story.

“He was in the Hall of Horrors at first,” she thought, remembering the opened door. “When he came out he hid at this end. We never saw each other, because of the waxworks between us; but we heard each other.”

She realized that the sounds which had terrified her had not all been due to imagination, while it was her agency which had converted the room into a whispering gallery of strange murmurs and voices. The clue to the cause of death was revealed by his wrist-watch, which had smashed when he fell. Its hands had stopped at three minutes to three, proving that the flash and explosion of the thunderbolt had been too much for his diseased heart — already overstrained by superstitious fears.

Sonia shuddered at a mental vision of his face, distraught with terror and pulped by raw primal impulses, after a night spent in a madman’s world of phantasy.

She turned to look at the waxworks. At last she understood what they seemed to say.

“But for Us, you should have met — at dawn.”

“Your share shall be acknowledged, I promise you,” she said, as she opened her notebook.

Cambric Tea Marjorie Bowen

Gabrielle Margaret Vere long used at least six pseudonyms for her prodigious output of more than one hundred fifty novels and countless short stories, the most famous bylines being Marjorie Bowen and Joseph Shearing. To help support her sister and profligate, unstable mother after her father left the family, she began to write and had her first novel published when she was only sixteen, immediately becoming the prime supporter of her small family. Her dark and unhappy early years led her to produce a plethora of fictional works with Gothic overtones. While many were hastily written potboilers, she often wrote finely crafted tales that remain highly readable and popular today. “Cambric Tea” was first collected in The World’s 100 Best Detective Stories, edited by Eugene Thwing (New York & London, Funk & Wagnalls, 1929).

The situation was bizarre; the accurately trained mind of Bevis Holroyd was impressed foremost by this; that the opening of a door would turn it into tragedy.

“I am afraid I can’t stay,” he had said pleasantly, humouring a sick man; he was too young and had not been long enough completely successful to have a professional manner but a certain balanced tolerance just showed in his attitude to this prostrate creature.

“I’ve got a good many claims on my time,” he added, “and I’m afraid it would be impossible. And it isn’t the least necessary, you know. You’re quite all right. I’ll come back after Christmas if you really think it worth while.”

The patient opened one eye; he was lying flat on his back in a deep, wide-fashioned bed hung with a thick, dark, silk-lined tapestry; the room was dark for there were thick curtains of the same material drawn half across the windows, rigidly excluding all save a moiety of the pallid winter light; to make his examination Dr. Holroyd had had to snap on the electric light that stood on the bedside table; he thought it a dreary unhealthy room, but had hardly found it worthwhile to say as much.

The patient opened one eye; the other lid remained fluttering feebly over an immobile orb.

He said in a voice both hoarse and feeble:

“But, doctor, I’m being poisoned.”

Professional curiosity and interest masked by genial incredulity instantly quickened the doctor’s attention.

“My dear sir,” he smiled, “poisoned by this nasty bout of ’flu you mean, I suppose—”

“No,” said the patient, faintly and wearily dropping both lids over his blank eyes, “by my wife.”

“That’s an ugly sort of fancy for you to get hold of,” replied the doctor instantly. “Acute depression — we must see what we can do for you—”

The sick man opened both eyes now; he even slightly raised his head as he replied, not without dignity:

“I fetched you from London, Dr. Holroyd, that you might deal with my case impartially — from the local man there is no hope of that, he is entirely impressed by my wife.”

Dr. Holroyd made a movement as if to protest but a trembling sign from the patient made him quickly subsist.

“Please let me speak. She will come in soon and I shall have no chance. I sent for you secretly, she knows nothing about that. I had heard you very well spoken of — as an authority on this sort of thing. You made a name over the Pluntre murder case as witness for the Crown.”

“I don’t specialize in murder,” said Dr. Holroyd, but his keen handsome face was alight with interest. “And I don’t care much for this kind of case — Sir Harry.”

“But you’ve taken it on,” murmured the sick man. “You couldn’t abandon me now.”

“I’ll get you into a nursing home,” said the doctor cheerfully, “and there you’ll dispel all these ideas.”

“And when the nursing home has cured me I’m to come back to my wife for her to begin again?”

Dr. Holroyd bent suddenly and sharply over the sombre bed. With his right hand he deftly turned on the electric lamp and tipped back the coral silk shade so that the bleached acid light fell full over the patient lying on his back on the big fat pillows.

“Look here,” said the doctor, “what you say is pretty serious.”

And the two men stared at each other, the patient examining his physician as acutely as his physician examined him.

Bevis Holroyd was still a young man with a look of peculiar energy and austere intelligence that heightened by contrast purely physical dark good looks that many men would have found sufficient passport to success; resolution, dignity, and a certain masculine sweetness, serene and strong, different from feminine sweetness, marked his demeanour which was further softened by a quick humour and a sensitive judgment.

The patient, on the other hand, was a man of well past middle age, light, flabby and obese with a flaccid, fallen look about his large face which was blurred and dimmed by the colours of ill health, being one pasty livid hue that threw into unpleasant relief the grey speckled red of his scant hair.

Altogether an unpleasing man, but of a certain fame and importance that had induced the rising young doctor to come at once when hastily summoned to Strangeways Manor House; a man of a fine, renowned family, a man of repute as a scholar, an essayist who had once been a politician who was rather above politics; a man whom Dr. Holroyd only knew vaguely by reputation, but who seemed to him symbolical of all that was staid, respectable, and stolid.

And this man blinked up at him and whimpered:

“My wife is poisoning me.”

Dr. Holroyd sat back and snapped off the electric light.

“What makes you think so?” he asked sharply.

“To tell you that,” came the laboured voice of the sick man, “I should have to tell you my story.”

“Well, if you want me to take this up—”

“I sent for you to do that, doctor.”

“Well, how do you think you are being poisoned?”

“Arsenic, of course.”

“Oh? And how administered?”

Again the patient looked up with one eye, seeming too fatigued to open the other.

“Cambric tea,” he replied.

And Dr. Holroyd echoed:

“Cambric tea!” with a soft amazement and interest.

Cambric tea had been used as the medium for arsenic in the Pluntre case and the expression had become famous; it was Bevis Holroyd who had discovered the doses in the cambric tea and who had put his finger on this pale beverage as the means of murder.

“Very possibly,” continued Sir Harry, “the Pluntre case made her think of it.”

“For God’s sake, don’t,” said Dr. Holroyd; for in that hideous affair the murderer had been a woman; and to see a woman on trial for her life, to see a woman sentenced to death, was not an experience he wished to repeat.

“Lady Strangeways,” continued the sick man, “is much younger than I... I over persuaded her to marry me, she was at that time very much attracted by a man of her own age, but he was in a poor position and she was ambitious.”

He paused, wiped his quivering lips on a silk handkerchief, and added faintly:

“Lately our marriage has been extremely unhappy. The man she preferred is now prosperous, successful, and unmarried — she wishes to dispose of me that she may marry her first choice.”

“Have you proof of any of this?”

“Yes. I know she buys arsenic. I know she reads books on poisons. I know she is eating her heart out for this other man.”

“Forgive me, Sir Harry,” replied the doctor, “but have you no near friend nor relation to whom you can confide your — suspicions?”

“No one,” said the sick man impatiently. “I have lately come from the East and am out of touch with people. Besides I want a doctor, a doctor with skill in this sort of thing. I thought from the first of the Pluntre case and of you.”

Bevis Holroyd sat back quietly; it was then that he thought of the situation as bizarre; the queerness of the whole thing was vividly before him, like a twisted figure on a gem — a carving at once writhing and immobile.

“Perhaps,” continued Sir Harry wearily, “you are married, doctor?”

“No.” Dr. Holroyd slightly smiled; his story was something like the sick man’s story but taken from another angle; when he was very poor and unknown he had loved a girl who had preferred a wealthy man; she had gone out to India, ten years ago, and he had never seen her since; he remembered this, with sharp distinctness, and in the same breath he remembered that he still loved this girl; it was, after all, a commonplace story.

Then his mind swung to the severe professional aspect of the case; he had thought that his patient, an unhealthy type of man, was struggling with a bad attack of influenza and the resultant depression and weakness, but then he had never thought, of course, of poison, nor looked nor tested for poison.

The man might be lunatic, he might be deceived, he might be speaking the truth; the fact that he was a mean, unpleasant beast ought not to weigh in the matter; Dr. Holroyd had some enjoyable Christmas holidays in prospect and now he was beginning to feel that he ought to give these up to stay and investigate this case; for he could readily see that it was one in which the local doctor would be quite useless.

“You must have a nurse,” he said, rising.

But the sick man shook his head.

“I don’t wish to expose my wife more than need be,” he grumbled. “Can’t you manage the affair yourself?”

As this was the first hint of decent feeling he had shown, Bevis Holroyd forgave him his brusque rudeness.

“Well, I’ll stay the night anyhow,” he conceded.

And then the situation changed, with the opening of a door, from the bizarre to the tragic.

This door opened in the far end of the room and admitted a bloom of bluish winter light from some uncurtained, high-windowed corridor; the chill impression was as if invisible snow had entered the shaded, dun, close apartment.

And against this background appeared a woman in a smoke-coloured dress with some long lace about the shoulders and a high comb; she held a little tray carrying jugs and a glass of crystal in which the cold light splintered.

Dr. Holroyd stood in his usual attitude of attentive courtesy, and then, as the patient, feebly twisting his gross head from the fat pillow, said:

“My wife — doctor—” he recognized in Lady Strangeways the girl to whom he had once been engaged in marriage, the woman he still loved.

“This is Doctor Holroyd,” added Sir Harry. “Is that cambric tea you have there?”

She inclined her head to the stranger by her husband’s bed as if she had never seen him before, and he, taking his cue, and for many other reasons, was silent.

“Yes, this is your cambric tea,” she said to her husband. “You like it just now, don’t you? How do you find Sir Harry, Dr. Holroyd?”

There were two jugs on the tray; one of crystal half full of cold milk, and one of white porcelain full of hot water; Lady Strangeways proceeded to mix these fluids in equal proportions and gave the resultant drink to her husband, helping him first to sit up in bed.

“I think that Sir Harry has a nasty turn of influenza,” answered the doctor mechanically. “He wants me to stay. I’ve promised till the morning, anyhow.”

“That will be a pleasure and a relief,” said Lady Strangeways gravely. “My husband has been ill some time and seems so much worse than he need — for influenza.”

The patient, feebly sipping his cambric tea, grinned queerly at the doctor.

“So much worse — you see, doctor!” he muttered.

“It is good of you to stay,” continued Lady Strangeways equally. “I will see about your room, you must be as comfortable as possible.”

She left as she had come, a shadow-coloured figure retreating to a chill light.

The sick man held up his glass as if he gave a toast.

“You see! Cambric tea!”

And Bevis Holroyd was thinking: does she not want to know me? Does he know what we once were to each other? How comes she to be married to this man — her husband’s name was Custiss — and the horror of the situation shook the calm that was his both from character and training; he went to the window and looked out on the bleached park; light, slow snow was falling, a dreary dance over the frozen grass and before the grey corpses that paled, one behind the other, to the distance shrouded in colourless mist.

The thin voice of Harry Strangeways recalled him to the bed.

“Would you like to take a look at this, doctor?” He held out the half drunk glass of milk and water.

“I’ve no means of making a test here,” said Dr. Holroyd, troubled. “I brought a few things, nothing like that.”

“You are not so far from Harley Street,” said Sir Harry. “My car can fetch everything you want by this afternoon — or perhaps you would like to go yourself?”

“Yes,” replied Bevis Holroyd sternly. “I would rather go myself.”

His trained mind had been rapidly covering the main aspects of his problem and he had instantly seen that it was better for Lady Strangeways to have this case in his hands. He was sure there was some hideous, fantastic hallucination on the part of Sir Harry, but it was better for Lady Strangeways to leave the matter in the hands of one who was friendly towards her. He rapidly found and washed a medicine bottle from among the sick room paraphernalia and poured it full of the cambric tea, casting away the remainder.

“Why did you drink any?” he asked sharply.

“I don’t want her to think that I guess,” whispered Sir Harry. “Do you know, doctor, I have a lot of her love letters — written by—”

Dr. Holroyd cut him short.

“I couldn’t listen to this sort of thing behind Lady Strangeways’s back,” he said quickly. “That is between you and her. My job is to get you well. I’ll try and do that.”

And he considered, with a faint disgust, how repulsive this man looked sitting up with pendant jowl and drooping cheeks and discoloured, pouchy eyes sunk in pads of unhealthy flesh and above the spiky crown of Judas-coloured hair.

Perhaps a woman, chained to this man, living with him, blocked and thwarted by him, might be wrought upon to—

Dr. Holroyd shuddered inwardly and refused to continue his reflection.

As he was leaving the gaunt sombre house about which there was something definitely blank and unfriendly, a shrine in which the sacred flames had flickered out so long ago that the lamps were blank and cold, he met Lady Strangeways.

She was in the wide entrance hall standing by the wood fire that but faintly dispersed the gloom of the winter morning and left untouched the shadows in the rafters of the open roof.

Now he would not, whether she wished or no, deny her; he stopped before her, blocking out her poor remnant of light.

“Mollie,” he said gently, “I don’t quite understand — you married a man named Custiss in India.”

“Yes. Harry had to take this name when he inherited this place. We’ve been home three years from the East, but lived so quietly here that I don’t suppose anyone has heard of us.”

She stood between him and the firelight, a shadow among the shadows; she was much changed; in her thinness and pallor, in her restless eyes and nervous mouth he could read signs of discontent, even of unhappiness.

“I never heard of you,” said Dr. Holroyd truthfully. “I didn’t want to. I liked to keep my dreams.”

Her hair was yet the lovely cedar wood hue, silver, soft, and gracious; her figure had those fluid lines of grace that he believed he had never seen equalled.

“Tell me,” she added abruptly, “what is the matter with my husband? He has been ailing like this for a year or so.”

With a horrid lurch of his heart that was usually so steady, Dr. Holroyd remembered the bottle of milk and water in his pocket.

“Why do you give him that cambric tea?” he counter questioned.

“He will have it — he insists that I make it for him—”

“Mollie,” said Dr. Holroyd quickly, “you decided against me, ten years ago, but that is no reason why we should not be friends now — tell me, frankly, are you happy with this man?”

“You have seen him,” she replied slowly. “He seemed different ten years ago. I honestly was attracted by his scholarship and his learning as well as — other things.”

Bevis Holroyd needed to ask no more; she was wretched, imprisoned in a mistake as a fly in amber; and those love letters? Was there another man?

As he stood silent, with a dark reflective look on her weary brooding face, she spoke again: “You are staying?”

“Oh yes,” he said, he was staying, there was nothing else for him to do.

“It is Christmas week,” she reminded him wistfully. “It will be very dull, perhaps painful, for you.”

“I think I ought to stay.”

Sir Harry’s car was announced; Bevis Holroyd, gliding over frozen roads to London, was absorbed with this sudden problem that, like a mountain out of a plain, had suddenly risen to confront him out of his level life.

The sight of Mollie (he could not think of her by that sick man’s name) had roused in him tender memories and poignant emotions and the position in which he found her and his own juxtaposition to her and her husband had the same devastating effect on him as a mine sprung beneath the feet of an unwary traveller.

London was deep in the whirl of a snow storm and the light that penetrated over the grey roof tops to the ugly slip of a laboratory at the back of his consulting rooms was chill and forbidding.

Bevis Holroyd put the bottle of milk on a marble slab and sat back in the easy chair watching that dreary chase of snow flakes across the dingy London pane.

He was thinking of past springs, of violets long dead, of roses long since dust, of hours that had slipped away like lengths of golden silk rolled up, of the long ago when he had loved Mollie and Mollie had seemed to love him; then he thought of that man in the big bed who had said:

“My wife is poisoning me.”

Late that afternoon Dr. Holroyd, with his suit case and a professional bag, returned to Strangeways Manor House in Sir Harry’s car; the bottle of cambric tea had gone to a friend, a noted analyst; somehow Doctor Holroyd had not felt able to do this task himself; he was very fortunate, he felt, in securing this old solitary and his promise to do the work before Christmas.

As he arrived at Strangeways Manor House which stood isolated and well away from a public high road where a lonely spur of the weald of Kent drove into the Sussex marshes, it was in a blizzard of snow that effaced the landscape and gave the murky outlines of the house an air of unreality, and Bevis Holroyd experienced that sensation he had so often heard of and read about, but which so far his cool mind had dismissed as a fiction.

He did really feel as if he was in an evil dream; as the snow changed the values of the scene, altering distances and shapes, so this meeting with Mollie, under these circumstances, had suddenly changed the life of Bevis Holroyd.

He had so resolutely and so definitely put this woman out of his life and mind, deliberately refusing to make enquiries about her, letting all knowledge of her cease with the letter in which she had written from India and announced her marriage.

And now, after ten years, she had crossed his path in this ghastly manner, as a woman her husband accused of attempted murder.

The sick man’s words of a former lover disturbed him profoundly; was it himself who was referred to? Yet the love letters must be from another man for he had not corresponded with Mollie since her marriage, not for ten years.

He had never felt any bitterness towards Mollie for her desertion of a poor, struggling doctor, and he had always believed in the integral nobility of her character under the timidity of conventionality; but the fact remained that she had played him false — what if that had been “the little rift within the lute” that had now indeed silenced the music!

With a sense of bitter depression he entered the gloomy old house; how different was this from the pleasant ordinary Christmas he had been rather looking forward to, the jolly homely atmosphere of good fare, dancing, and friends!

When he had telephoned to these friends excusing himself his regret had been genuine and the cordial “bad luck!” had had a poignant echo in his own heart; bad luck indeed, bad luck—

She was waiting for him in the hall that a pale young man was decorating with boughs of prickly stiff holly that stuck stiffly behind the dark heavy pictures.

He was introduced as the secretary and said gloomily:

“Sir Harry wished everything to go on as usual, though I am afraid he is very ill indeed.”

Yes, the patient had been seized by another violent attack of illness during Dr. Holroyd’s absence; the young man went at once upstairs and found Sir Harry in a deep sleep and a rather nervous local doctor in attendance.

An exhaustive discussion of the case with this doctor threw no light on anything, and Dr. Holroyd, leaving in charge an extremely sensible-looking housekeeper who was Sir Harry’s preferred nurse, returned, worried and irritated, to the hall where Lady Strangeways now sat alone before the big fire.

She offered him a belated but fresh cup of tea.

“Why did you come?” she asked as if she roused herself from deep reverie.

“Why? Because your husband sent for me.”

“He says you offered to come; he has told everyone in the house that.”

“But I never heard of the man before today.”

“You had heard of me. He seems to think that you came here to help me.”

“He cannot be saying that,” returned Dr. Holroyd sternly, and he wondered desperately if Mollie was lying, if she had invented this to drive him out of the house.

“Do you want me here?” he demanded.

“I don’t know,” she replied dully and confirmed his suspicions; probably there was another man and she wished him out of the way; but he could not go, out of pity towards her he could not go.

“Does he know we once knew each other?” he asked.

“No,” she replied faintly, “therefore it seems such a curious chance that he should have sent for you, of all men!”

“It would have been more curious,” he responded grimly, “if I had heard that you were here with a sick husband and had thrust myself in to doctor him! Strangeways must be crazy to spread such a tale and if he doesn’t know we are old friends it becomes nonsense!”

“I often think that Harry is crazy,” said Lady Strangeways wearily; she took a rose silk-lined work basket, full of pretty trifles, on her knee, and began winding a skein of rose-coloured silk; she looked so frail, so sad, so lifeless that the heart of Bevis Holroyd was torn with bitter pity.

“Now I am here I want to help you,” he said earnestly. “I am staying for that, to help you—”

She looked up at him with a wistful appeal in her fair face.

“I’m worried,” she said simply. “I’ve lost some letters I valued very much — I think they have been stolen.”

Dr. Holroyd drew back; the love letters; the letters the husband had found, that were causing all his ugly suspicions.

“My poor Mollie!” he exclaimed impulsively. “What sort of a coil have you got yourself into!”

As if this note of pity was unendurable, she rose impulsively, scattering the contents of her work basket, dropping the skein of silk, and hastened away down the dark hall.

Bevis Holroyd stooped mechanically to pick up the hurled objects and saw among them a small white packet, folded, but opened at one end; this packet seemed to have fallen out of a needle case of gold silk.

Bevis Holroyd had pounced on it and thrust it in his pocket just as the pale secretary returned with his thin arms most incongruously full of mistletoe.

“This will be a dreary Christmas for you, Dr. Holroyd,” he said with the air of one who forces himself to make conversation. “No doubt you had some pleasant plans in view — we are all so pleased that Lady Strangeways had a friend to come and look after Sir Harry during the holidays.”

“Who told you I was a friend?” asked Dr. Holroyd brusquely. “I certainly knew Lady Strangeways before she was married—”

The pale young man cut in crisply:

“Oh, Lady Strangeways told me so herself.”

Bevis Holroyd was bewildered; why did she tell the secretary what she did not tell her husband? — both the indiscretion and the reserve seemed equally foolish.

Languidly hanging up his sprays and bunches of mistletoe the pallid young man, whose name was Garth Deane, continued his aimless remarks.

“This is really not a very cheerful house, Dr. Holroyd — I’m interested in Sir Harry’s oriental work or I should not remain. Such a very unhappy marriage! I often think,” he added regardless of Bevis Holroyd’s darkling glance, “that it would be very unpleasant indeed for Lady Strangeways if anything happened to Sir Harry.”

“Whatever do you mean, sir?” asked the doctor angrily.

The secretary was not at all discomposed.

“Well, one lives in the house, one has nothing much to do — and one notices.”

Perhaps, thought the young man in anguish, the sick husband had been talking to this creature, perhaps the creature had really noticed something.

“I’ll go up to my patient,” said Bevis Holroyd briefly, not daring to anger one who might be an important witness in this mystery that was at present so unfathomable.

Mr. Deane gave a sickly grin over the lovely pale leaves and berries he was holding.

“I’m afraid he is very bad, doctor.”

As Bevis Holroyd left the room he passed Lady Strangeways; she looked blurred, like a pastel drawing that has been shaken; the fingers she kept locked on her bosom; she had flung a silver fur over her shoulders that accentuated her ethereal look of blonde, pearl, and amber hues.

“I’ve come back for my work basket,” she said. “Will you go up to my husband? He is ill again—”

“Have you been giving him anything?” asked Dr. Holroyd as quietly as he could.

“Only some cambric tea, he insisted on that.”

“Don’t give him anything — leave him alone. He is in my charge now, do you understand?”

She gazed up at him with frightened eyes that had been newly washed by tears.

“Why are you so unkind to me?” she quivered.

She looked so ready to fall that he could not resist the temptation to put his hand protectingly on her arm, so that, as she stood in the low doorway leading to the stairs, he appeared to be supporting her drooping weight.

“Have I not said that I am here to help you, Mollie?”

The secretary slipped out from the shadows behind them, his arms still full of winter evergreens.

“There is too much foliage,” he smiled, and the smile told that he had seen and heard.

Bevis Holroyd went angrily upstairs; he felt as if an invisible net was being dragged closely round him, something which, from being a cobweb, would become a cable; this air of mystery, of horror in the big house, this sly secretary, these watchful-looking servants, the nervous village doctor ready to credit anything, the lovely agitated woman who was the woman he had long so romantically loved, and the sinister sick man with his diabolic accusations, a man Bevis Holroyd had, from the first moment, hated — all these people in these dark surroundings affected the young man with a miasma of apprehension, gloom, and dread.

After a few hours of it he was nearer to losing his nerve than he had ever been; that must be because of Mollie, poor darling Mollie caught into all this nightmare.

And outside the bells were ringing across the snow, practising for Christmas Day; the sound of them was to Bevis Holroyd what the sounds of the real world are when breaking into a sleeper’s thick dreams.

The patient sat up in bed, fondling the glass of odious cambric tea.

“Why do you take the stuff?” demanded the doctor angrily.

“She won’t let me off, she thrusts it on me,” whispered Sir Harry.

Bevis Holroyd noticed, not for the first time since he had come into the fell atmosphere of this dark house that enclosed the piteous figure of the woman he loved, that husband and wife were telling different tales; on one side lay a burden of careful lying.

“Did she—” continued the sick man, “speak to you of her lost letters?”

The young doctor looked at him sternly.

“Why should Lady Strangeways make a confidante of me?” he asked. “Do you know that she was a friend of mine ten years ago before she married you?”

“Was she? How curious! But you met like strangers.”

“The light in this room is very dim—”

“Well, never mind about that, whether you knew her or not—” Sir Harry gasped out in a sudden snarl. “The woman is a murderess, and you’ll have to bear witness to it — I’ve got her letters, here under my pillow, and Garth Deane is watching her—”

“Ah, a spy! I’ll have no part in this, Sir Harry. You’ll call another doctor—”

“No, it’s your case, you’ll make the best of it — My God, I’m dying, I think—”

He fell back in such a convulsion of pain that Bevis Holroyd forgot everything in administering to him. The rest of that day and all that night the young doctor was shut up with his patient, assisted by the secretary and the housekeeper.

And when, in the pallid light of Christmas Eve morning, he went downstairs to find Lady Strangeways, he knew that the sick man was suffering from arsenic poison, that the packet taken from Mollie’s work box was arsenic, and it was only an added horror when he was called to the telephone to learn that a stiff dose of the poison had been found in the specimen of cambric tea.

He believed that he could save the husband and thereby the wife also, but he did not think he could close the sick man’s mouth; the deadly hatred of Sir Harry was leading up to an accusation of attempted murder; of that he was sure, and there was the man Deane to back him up.

He sent for Mollie, who had not been near her husband all night, and when she came, pale, distracted, huddled in her white fur, he said grimly:

“Look here, Mollie, I promised that I’d help you and I mean to, though it isn’t going to be as easy as I thought, but you have got to be frank with me.”

“But I have nothing to conceal—”

“The name of the other man—”

“The other man?”

“The man who wrote those letters your husband has under his pillow.”

“Oh, Harry has them!” she cried in pain. “That man Deane stole them then! Bevis, they are your letters of the olden days that I have always cherished.”

“My letters!”

“Yes, do you think that there has ever been anyone else?”

“But he says — Mollie, there is a trap or trick here, someone is lying furiously. Your husband is being poisoned.”

“Poisoned?”

“By arsenic given in that cambric tea. And he knows it. And he accuses you.”

She stared at him in blank incredulity, then she slipped forward in her chair and clutched the big arm.

“Oh, God,” she muttered in panic terror. “He always swore that he’d be revenged on me — because he knew that I never cared for him—”

But Bevis Holroyd recoiled; he did not dare listen, he did not dare believe.

“I’ve warned you,” he said, “for the sake of the old days, Mollie—”

A light step behind them and they were aware of the secretary creeping out of the embrowning shadows.

“A cold Christmas,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “A really cold, seasonable Christmas. We are almost snowed in — and Sir Harry would like to see you, Dr. Holroyd.”

“I have only just left him—”

Bevis Holroyd looked at the despairing figure of the woman, crouching in her chair; he was distracted, overwrought, near to losing his nerve.

“He wants particularly to see you,” cringed the secretary.

Mollie looked back at Bevis Holroyd, her lips moved twice in vain before she could say: “Go to him.”

The doctor went slowly upstairs and the secretary followed.

Sir Harry was now flat on his back, staring at the dark tapestry curtains of his bed.

“I’m dying,” he announced as the doctor bent over him.

“Nonsense. I am not going to allow you to die.”

“You won’t be able to help yourself. I’ve brought you here to see me die.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve a surprise for you too, a Christmas present. These letters now, these love letters of my wife’s — what name do you think is on them?”

“Your mind is giving way, Sir Harry.”

“Not at all — come nearer, Deane — the name is Bevis Holroyd.”

“Then they are letters ten years old. Letters written before your wife met you.”

The sick man grinned with infinite malice.

“Maybe. But there are no dates on them and the envelopes are all destroyed. And I, as a dying man, shall swear to their recent date — I, as a foully murdered man.”

“You are wandering in your mind,” said Bevis Holroyd quietly. “I refuse to listen to you any further.”

“You shall listen to me. I brought you here to listen to me. I’ve got you. Here’s my will, Deane’s got that, in which I denounced you both, there are your letters, every one thinks that she put you in charge of the case, every one knows that you know all about arsenic in cambric tea through the Pluntre case, and every one will know that I died of arsenic poisoning.”

The doctor allowed him to talk himself out; indeed it would have been difficult to check the ferocity of his malicious energy.

The plot was ingenious, the invention of a slightly insane, jealous recluse who hated his wife and hated the man she had never ceased to love; Bevis Holroyd could see the nets very skillfully drawn round him; but the main issue of the mystery remained untouched; who was administering the arsenic?

The young man glanced across the sombre bed to the dark figure of the secretary.

“What is your place in all this farrago, Mr. Deane?” he asked sternly.

“I’m Sir Harry’s friend,” answered the other stubbornly, “and I’ll bring witness any time against Lady Strangeways. I’ve tried to circumvent her—”

“Stop,” cried the doctor. “You think that Lady Strangeways is poisoning her husband and that I am her accomplice?”

The sick man, who had been looking with bitter malice from one to another, whispered hoarsely:

“That is what you think, isn’t it, Deane?”

“I’ll say what I think at the proper time,” said the secretary obstinately.

“No doubt you are being well paid for your share in this.”

“I’ve remembered his services in my will,” smiled Sir Harry grimly. “You can adjust your differences then, Dr. Holroyd, when I’m dead, poisoned, murdered. It will be a pretty story, a nice scandal, you and she in the house together, the letters, the cambric tea!”

An expression of ferocity dominated him, then he made an effort to dominate this and to speak in his usual suave stilted manner.

“You must admit that we shall all have a very Happy Christmas, doctor.”

Bevis Holroyd was looking at the secretary, who stood at the other side of the bed, cringing, yet somehow in the attitude of a man ready to pounce; Dr. Holroyd wondered if this was the murderer.

“Why,” he asked quietly to gain time, “did you hatch this plan to ruin a man you had never seen before?”

“I always hated you,” replied the sick man faintly. “Mollie never forgot you, you see, and she never allowed me to forget that she never forgot you. And then I found those letters she had cherished.”

“You are a very wicked man,” said the doctor dryly, “but it will all come to nothing, for I am not going to allow you to die.”

“You won’t be able to help yourself,” replied the patient. “I’m dying, I tell you. I shall die on Christmas Day.”

He turned his head towards the secretary and added:

“Send my wife up to me.”

“No,” interrupted Dr. Holroyd strongly. “She shall not come near you again.”

Sir Harry Strangeways ignored this.

“Send her up,” he repeated.

“I will bring her, sir.”

The secretary left, with a movement suggestive of flight, and Bevis Holroyd stood rigid, waiting, thinking, looking at the ugly man who now had closed his eyes and lay as if insensible. He was certainly very ill, dying perhaps, and he certainly had been poisoned by arsenic given in cambric tea, and, as certainly, a terrible scandal and a terrible danger would threaten with his death; the letters were not dated, the marriage was notoriously unhappy, and he, Bevis Holroyd, was associated in every one’s mind with a murder case in which this form of poison, given in this manner, had been used.

Drops of moisture stood out on the doctor’s forehead; sure that if he could clear himself it would be very difficult for Mollie to do so; how could even he himself in his soul swear to her innocence!

Of course he must get the woman out of the house at once, he must have another doctor from town, nurses — but could this be done in time; if the patient died on his hands would he not be only bringing witnesses to his own discomfiture? And the right people, his own friends, were difficult to get hold of now, at Christmas time.

He longed to go in search of Mollie — she must at least be got away, but how, without a scandal, without a suspicion?

He longed to have the matter out with this odious secretary, but he dared not leave his patient.

Lady Strangeways returned with Garth Deane and seated herself, mute, shadowy, with eyes full of panic, on the other side of the sombre bed.

“Is he going to live?” she presently whispered as she watched Bevis Holroyd ministering to her unconscious husband.

“We must see that he does,” he answered grimly.

All through that Christmas Eve and the bitter night to the stark dawn when the church bells broke ghastly on their wan senses did they tend the sick man who only came to his senses to grin at them in malice.

Once Bevis Holroyd asked the pallid woman:

“What was that white packet you had in your work box?”

And she replied:

“I never had such a packet.”

And he:

“I must believe you.”

But he did not send for the other doctors and nurses, he did not dare.

The Christmas bells seemed to rouse the sick man from his deadly swoon.

“You can’t save me,” he said with indescribable malice. “I shall die and put you both in the dock—”

Mollie Strangeways sank down beside the bed and began to cry, and Garth Deane, who by his master’s express desire had been in and out of the room all night, stopped and looked at her with a peculiar expression. Sir Harry looked at her also.

“Don’t cry,” he gasped, “this is Christmas Day. We ought all to be happy — bring me my cambric tea — do you hear?”

She rose mechanically and left the room to take in the tray with the fresh milk and water that the housekeeper had placed softly on the table outside the door; for all through the nightmare vigil, the sick man’s cry had been for “cambric tea.”

As he sat up in bed feebly sipping the vapid and odious drink the tortured woman’s nerves slipped her control.

“I can’t endure those bells, I wish they would stop those bells!” she cried and ran out of the room.

Bevis Holroyd instantly followed her; and now as suddenly as it had sprung on him, the fell little drama disappeared, fled like a poison cloud out of the compass of his life.

Mollie was leaning against the closed window, her sick head resting against the mullions; through the casement showed, surprisingly, sunlight on the pure snow and blue sky behind the withered trees.

“Listen, Mollie,” said the young man resolutely. “I’m sure he’ll live if you are careful — you mustn’t lose heart—”

The sick room door opened and the secretary slipped out.

He nervously approached the two in the window place.

“I can’t stand this any longer,” he said through dry lips. “I didn’t know he meant to go so far, he is doing it himself, you know; he’s got the stuff hidden in his bed, he puts it into the cambric tea, he’s willing to die to spite you two, but I can’t stand it any longer.”

“You’ve been abetting this!” cried the doctor.

“Not abetting,” smiled the secretary wanly. “Just standing by. I found out by chance — and then he forced me to be silent — I had his will, you know, and I’ve destroyed it.”

With this the strange creature glided downstairs.

The doctor sprang at once to Sir Harry’s room; the sick man was sitting up in the sombre bed and with a last effort was scattering a grain of powder into the glass of cambric tea.

With a look of baffled horror he saw Bevis Holroyd but the drink had already slipped down his throat; he fell back and hid his face, baulked at the last of his diabolic revenge.

When Bevis Holroyd left the dead man’s chamber he found Mollie still leaning in the window; she was free, the sun was shining, it was Christmas Day.

The 74th Tale Jonathan Santlofer

The author of five detective novels, Jonathan Santlofer is even better known as an artist who has works in the permanent collections of such prestigious institutions as the Art Institute of Chicago and the Norton Simon Museum, among many others, and has been reviewed by every major publication devoted to contemporary art, including Art in America, ArtForum, and the New York Times. His crime novels feature Kate McKinnon, a Queens cop and art historian, and Nate Rodriguez, a New York City forensic sketch artist; the author includes his own original sketches in this series. “The 74th Tale” was first published as a chapbook, given to customers of the Mysterious Bookshop as a Christmas gift in 2008.

I swear it wouldn’t have happened if it were not for the book. Really, I didn’t plan it. It’s just that I’m impressionable you know, sensitive to others and to suggestion. It’s the way I’m made, the way my brain works and I’ve come to accept that.

The book was a gift to myself. For Christmas. I knew I wasn’t going to get any and was feeling a little bad, like I deserved something, you know, at least one, and it was just a paperback, no big deal, though you could say it changed my life; two lives, really.

I got it at this place called the Mysterious Bookshop. Woo, woo, right? Like it should have been Halloween, not Christmas. What lured me in were the books in the window, all those titles with death and murder and blood, which is not something I think about all the time, just on occasion like most people. Someone had tied black and red ribbons around some of the books which is what got me thinking about a present, plus the little lights, black and orange ones, again more Halloween than Christmas, and funny.

Inside, the store was old and new at the same time, lots of wood and stuff but airy and nice, with books everywhere, floor-to-ceiling, on tables, stacked on the floor; I’d never seen so many in one space. There was even one of those ladders you have to climb to get at the books on the top rows which I couldn’t do for “insurance reasons” I was told by this woman, from England I think, with a fancy accent, who smiled when she told me I couldn’t use the ladder, that she’d get the higher-up books for me. I said I’d make do with the ones I could reach which was more than enough.

They were in alphabetical order, which appealed to my mind. I may not have leadership qualities but I’m organized and methodical, just as important, if you ask me, and why I was so good in my job at the post office.

I spent a long time going from A to Z but of course there were big gaps, like I missed half of D and more of H and other letters as they were in the top rows, but it didn’t matter because I was just choosing books with titles that appealed to me. I wasn’t looking for anything special. That’s always the way, isn’t it, the important things just sort of coming to you when you least expect it?

After a while my eyes were starting to blur from all the books and the English lady came over and asked if she could help me. I told her I was okay and then this white-haired guy came out of a back room and the English lady went and talked to him and I could see they were eying me and then he came over and asked exactly what the English lady had asked: if he could help me, which was annoying because I could tell they thought I was going to shoplift, which I’d never do, I’m not that kind of guy.

I told him I was making up my mind and he said that was fine but they were closing in a few minutes so I had to hurry, which sort of annoyed me, I mean the pressure of making a decision like that when I could buy only one book and I had pulled out about twenty. Like I said I was feeling bad because I knew I wasn’t going to get any Christmas presents, not from my mother who I hadn’t spoken to in like five years and my father was long dead and my brother, hell, he hated me because I’d mouthed off to his wife last time I saw him which was at Thanksgiving two years ago, a holiday I haven’t celebrated since, but she deserved it and to be honest I don’t miss my brother or his wife or his two bratty kids or their stupid split-level house out in Levittown or wherever. He, my brother, is six years older than me and never really gave a crap about me and told me I was crazy, like I’m crazy and he isn’t? and I’m not going to patch it up unless he calls me and makes like a huge apology and I don’t see that happening because I read in the newspaper that some reporter called him and he said I have nothing to say, which proves he never really cared about me, right? I mean, wouldn’t you say something nice about your brother at a time like this?

The white-haired guy was going around the store adjusting books but keeping an eye on me which made me want to leave but I wasn’t ready to go back to my one room above the Korean deli because the thought of seeing the owner with his creepy bent finger and the way he was always looking at me, squinting, was just too much, too much, so I went through the twenty books and decided to buy the one that had seventy-three stories, which seemed like the best deal, all those stories for the price of one book. It was a paperback, like I said, but really fat with poems in it too, which I didn’t think I’d read but it was still a good deal.

The white-haired guy came over while I was looking through it and said it was a classic and how I’d made the right choice and that made me feel good and he smiled and patted me on the arm and called me son, which was nice even though I’m not crazy about being touched and he said, You’ll learn a lot from that book.

I asked him what he meant and he said I’d have to read the book to find out, which was pretty cagey, like he was pressing me to buy it and that’s when I saw it was fifteen dollars so I said no way I could afford it being out of work and all and he asked how much I could spend and I told him I had seven bucks on me, a lie, I had twenty-two but wasn’t going to admit that. He sort of rocked back on his heels and tilted his head with his face screwed up like he was making a decision and finally said, Okay, it’s yours for seven dollars, Merry Christmas, which kind of blew me away.

If I’d known then that the book was going to change everything I wouldn’t have felt so good, but when someone does something nice like that you just want to believe in the goodness of people, don’t you?

Funny thing is I hadn’t planned to buy a book. I’m not much of reader; I haven’t read much my whole life except for comic books, lately Bloody Skull and Blade and Hack/Slash, before that X-Men and Fantastic Four which are more for kids but when I turned twenty-one my brother — this was before we had our fight — said I needed to improve my mind which sort of irritated me but my friend Larry who worked with me at the Post Office before I got laid off said the same thing when he saw me reading Fantastic Four and he meant it as a good thing because he knows how smart I am and he’s the one who turned me on to horror comics, so I figured I could learn a lot from a book with seventy-three stories and that was true, though some people don’t agree it was such a good thing.

By the time I left the store it was dark and drizzling with little icy puddles that looked like frozen lemonade because of the yellow light cast from streetlamps, no one around and I was glad. I liked the feeling that I was alone in the world, which I guess I am but don’t start feeling sorry for me because I could have lots of friends and a girlfriend if I wanted one. I’ve had plenty, and most girls say I’m good-looking which doesn’t mean anything to me though I wouldn’t say it’s a bad thing. My last girlfriend who I met in a bar and went home to her apartment in Murray Hill decorated all modern with girly touches like a ruffled bedspread and such said my mouth was pouty. I wasn’t totally sure what she meant but didn’t want to ask and appear uneducated so I looked it up in her dictionary. It said: To protrude the lips in an expression of displeasure or sulkiness. That didn’t sound so good to me though I was pretty sure Loretta, that was her name, meant it as a good thing since she liked running her finger over my lips, but we didn’t last too long so it didn’t matter if my lips were pouty or not.

I live only five blocks from the bookstore so it was weird that I’d never seen it. I guess you could say it was fate or evil forces, as they say in X-Men, that drew me to it.

When I got to my apartment building I stopped into the deli downstairs and bought a six-pack of beer and a family-size bag of potato chips and a Snickers bar. I tried not to look at the owner’s bent finger. I carefully laid my money on the counter so I wouldn’t have to touch him, but when he gave me the change he made a point of rubbing his finger against my hand and I know it was on purpose because he’s done it before, and I swear a chill went through my entire body.

As soon as I got inside my apartment I gulped down a beer then started another, tore open the chips and sunk onto my couch, which I got from the street, leather and really nice except for a few stains and a tear on one of the back pillows and on one arm which I fixed with Scotch Magic Tape and you can hardly see it now, I’m handy that way. Then I skimmed through my new book and read all the titles making sure I was not moving my lips even though no one was around because one of my girlfriends, Susie, I think her name was, made fun of me for doing that.

I was sorry I hadn’t asked the white-haired guy or the English lady which were the best tales, as they were called, because there were so many, so I just went by the titles like I do the names of the horses when I put a few dollars down at OTB, though I usually don’t win.

The first tale I chose was about a gold bug that bites a guy, I think, I wasn’t sure because it was really hard to read with too many words and sentences that went on so long that I had to reread them and I finally stopped and might have given up and been really annoyed that I’d wasted seven dollars if I hadn’t started another tale which grabbed me right away about a nervous guy who gets pretty crazy as the story goes on because this old guy’s eye is driving him nuts. It was pretty funny and got me thinking about the guy in the deli downstairs and his pinky, which is arched up away from his hand as if it’s been yanked out of the socket and put back in all wrong with no nail at the end, just a stump. I always end up staring at it, you know how that is, and then it stays in my mind. Sometimes I avoid going into the store for weeks so I won’t have to see it but when I need something quick it just makes sense to go there and then I see it again and it’s all I can think about for days.

I didn’t want to think about the finger so I read another tale about some guy named Roderick and his friend who bury Roderick’s twin sister, only she isn’t dead, which reminded me of the time I found an injured bird on the sidewalk outside my apartment building when I was a kid. I think it flew into the side of the building; it was alive but couldn’t fly. I put it in a shoe box and fed it birdseed and gave it water with an eyedropper but it just got weaker and I knew it was going to die — which is exactly what Roderick and his friend thought about Roderick’s sister — but I couldn’t kill it outright so I buried the box in an empty lot on the corner and marked the spot with a brick. A week later I dug it up but it was gone and I was never sure if someone else dug it up or if the brick got moved or what happened so I tried again with a mouse that I caught in one of those glue traps.

I didn’t wait so long this time, just a day, but when I dug the mouse up he was dead. Mice are easy to catch, so I used more, burying one for like a half day or so — dead when I dug him up — another for like a third of a day, also dead, so I decided I had to make it more methodical. Like I said my mind works best when I’m methodical which is why I was good in the post office and would still have that job if I hadn’t gotten into that fight, which wasn’t my fault.

I buried the next mouse for exactly eight hours, dead, then one for seven, also dead, and so on subtracting an hour until one finally lived. Two mice lived for five hours after being buried alive. It was awesome, you know, to open the box and see this little creature panting for breath but alive. But then I had to see if they could live for six hours and they both died.

I did that, buried animals and such, on and off for the next few years till we moved away from the corner lot and I sort of stopped thinking about it; well not really but I hadn’t thought about actually doing it again until I read the story because Roderick’s sister who doesn’t die but comes back at the end, like a zombie, and falls onto her brother and they both die and the friend races out — I couldn’t blame him for that — and when he looks back the house is cracking apart and crashing down and my heart was beating like the heart under the floorboard in the first tale but I kept reading and the next tale was about the same thing — like the writer was speaking just to me — all about being buried alive, and worse because the guy who told this tale had this like sick fear of being buried alive and in the end he wakes up and he is buried alive, at least he thinks so, really he’s in a boat or something, which was a cheat, but it got me all caught up again in the idea of being buried alive, well not me, but something, someone.

I couldn’t get the idea out of my mind. It was all I thought about for days while everyone else was thinking about Christmas.

Now they’re saying it was premeditated, and it’s true I thought about it, a lot, I even dreamed about it, but I still say, and I told this to my court-appointed lawyer — a woman who looks at me with a blank stare and wears the same suit every time I see her — gray stripes with a different blouse so she thinks it looks different but it doesn’t — that it was the book, the tales that were the premeditation part, not me. You see what I’m saying? But she says that’s no defense, which makes me think she’s a lousy lawyer.

I’ve been here for seven months now and have read all seventy-three tales, some more than once, and a lot of the poems, which were okay, and they inspired me to write my own tale especially since there have been lots of stories written about me, one by a reporter who came to interview me but still got it wrong, so I decided to write my story, my own tale of what really happened and why. It was the hardest thing I ever did.

I let my lawyer read it and she says I should destroy it because it will seal my fate, but like I said I don’t think she’s a very good lawyer because I think I did a really good job of explaining my feelings and my motive, if you want to call it that, but you be the judge.

First of all I am not nervous. I am sensitive. Very, very, dredfully sensitive, but not so dredful that it is a bad thing. I eschew that people are saying I am crazy — mad as they use to say in the olden days but I am not. How could I be mad and get away with what I did and I would have gotten away with it I could have if I wanted to. That is the unequivocal point!

I was careful and filled with dissimulation for days before I did it and I was methodical which is how my mind works and a little melancholy mainley because I live alone and there is a veil of gloom draping over my apartment and I was all-absorbed with this fancy of being buried alive which is like the shadow between life and death and I had to know where one ended and the other begins.

It vexed me for days but methought I could not do it I mean you cannot exactly bury yourself and even if I could get someone to help me like Larry who laboured beside me at the post office how could I keep track of the time and unearth the grave and see if I lived right? Impossible!

So I needed a volunteer! I wasn’t sure who but once I had the idea I was inflamed with intense excitement and bought the trunk which was not made well just a mockery of cardbord painted to look like lether which I could scrap off with my fingernail but I thought it would work singularly well for my endeavor!

There was a construction site right next to my apartment and I went thereupon at night feeling torrents of blood beating in my heart and dug the grave way in the back where they were not building yet. It took me 3 nights but fineally I was ready and with slight quivering I went down to the deli and there he was! Giving me the evil eye like always and I looked upon that hideous bent finger of his and my blood ran cold and I had a bottel of chloroform and a rag with me but there was a customer a woman buying laundery detergent so I went into the back near the frozen food and my nerves were very unstrung and I waited and he could not see me but I could see him and his finger!

I waited a customary duration for the woman to leave then I seezed upon a package of Oreos and delivered them to the counter and I could see the guy was vexed to see me because he made a little grunt which I heard because my hearing is acute and like I told you I am sensitive. For a moment I did not think I would be able to do it but then his hideous finger brushed against my hand and I shivered all the way to my soul and I got the rag over his nose and he fought me but he was not very strong and even when he made a low mowning cry I had an impetuous fury that kept me going and I did not stop until he grew tremulous and slumped down and fell on the floor.

I felt intense paroxysms and went back upstairs in haste to bring the trunk down and closed the deli door behind me and put the closed sign in the window and endeavored to get the guy into the trunk. Not easy! I had to be careful not to touch that gruesome hideous finger! It took like an eternal period but I fineally got him in and then the top would not close! I was vexed and inflamed but found some duck tape which worked to keep it shut tight in case he tried to get out.

It was all blackness and absolute night when I dragged the trunk outside and my heart was vacillating and no doubt I grew very pale but I had made solem promises to do what I was doing so I dragged the trunk around the corner and into the construction sight and back to the grave I had dug and pushed the trunk in vehemently and piled dirt over it so it was very entombed. Then I found formidable rocks and put them on top the whole time sweating and my heart pounding but it was thrilling!

After that I went back to the deli and my limbs were trembeling but I fetched two bags of potato chips and a six-pack of beer and another Snickers and went upstairs to my apartment where I was consumed by a burning thirst and drank the beer and devoured the chips and Snickers and my heart stopped pounding and I was feeling less vexed and I counted off the hours because I needed to know how long the guy was entombed. My plan was to keep him buried over night. I did not wish him any ill harm! I wanted him to live! I had good intentions! It was not a crime! It was an experament!

But then I realized with trepidation that I could not unentomb him in the morning because there would be a throng of construction workers and all my cunning and resolve would be ruined!

The next thing I knew it had dawned morning. I had fallen into a deep slumber from the beer and hard work and I was feeling unwell because all I had eaten was the 2 bags of chips and the Snickers bar but when I pictured the guy encoffined in the trunk and how by now the chloroform must be worn off and he could be awake and filled with a terrible dread I felt better and I read my favourite story again the one that inspired me to such fancy and I made a methodical decizion to wait another day and night because one night was not much of a test for a premature burial and so I resolved that he should stay buried for 2 nights!

I was again filed with a hunger so I went down to the deli which still had the closed sign in the window to keep people out and got some Kraft American cheese and Wonder bread and mayo and a giant-size bag of chips and 2 bottels of Yoo-Hoo and went back upstairs and made cheese sanwiches and watched TV til I fell asleep and the next day dawned. Then I watched DVDs of old movies to pass the duration even though I could hardly sit still thinking about the man and what must be going thru his mind in that underground box and that kept me stirring until I started thinking that if my experament worked and the guy lived it would be no good if I was the only one who knew about it and I got tumultuous and started pacing and I did not know how many hours passed but it was starting to darken again and then it came to me who I could tell and it made perfect sense so I raced downstairs in haste and ran 5 blocks feeling like I was in a gossamer dream and went right in and saw all the books and decorations that reminded me it was Xmas and the English lady was there and she looked surprized and discordant to see me and I asked if the white-haired guy was around and she said you must mean Otto and I said yes if that is his name and she went to fetch him and he came out of the back room and I told them both how they must hasten to come with me that I had something awesome to show them and I guess they could see how aroused I was because Otto told the young guy with all the tatoos who was at the desk near the door to watch the store and then they followed me into the gloomy night.

Otto kept telling me to calm down but I could not and when we got to the construction site Otto said to the English lady Sally to wait on the street but I said no she had to come to see what I had done and she said ok and Otto held her hand because the ground had much irregularity and depression from all the construction.

Then we were there and my heart was thumping in my chest and I took the rocks off and started scrapping the dirt away with my shaking hands and Otto asked what are you doing? but I just kept going and then you could see the trunk and I got really aroused and had to rip the tape asunder to get it off but once I did I stopped because it was a rapturous moment and I remembered the line I had memorized and bespoke it—

Arise! Did I not bid they arise?

Otto and Sally stared at me with discordant looks and then I did it! I took the top off! and there was the wretched guy! Groaning and filed with agony! and whiter than the sheet of paper upon which I write these words but alive!

Otto and Sally looked truly vexed and impetuous but Otto helped the Korean man out of the box. He was trembeling and pitiful looking and Otto tried to calm him down and I saw Sally was getting her cel phone out but it was ok because I had made a discovery! A man could be entombed for 2 nights and live so the world should know and praize my endeavor and when the police came I did not put up a fight I just went into the car with them.

The End

I sent my story to the one person I was sure would like it, the white-haired guy Otto and he wrote back asking if he could publish it in this book he did every year about true crime. He said he was going to use the magazine article written by the guy who interviewed me and would publish my story along with it, which was awesome because that way people would get to hear my side. Otto said there would be about twenty stories in the book and I’d have my name on mine but he couldn’t pay me because it was illegal to make money from a crime, though I still say it wasn’t like a real crime but that was okay because the idea of having my tale in a book with twenty others was awesome and Otto promised I could have ten copies to give my friends though the only person I could think of was Larry and maybe the man from the deli so that he would understand what I was trying to do. It gets pretty boring in here so I’m looking forward to the book and reading my tale and the others too. I hope there will be some good ones that will appeal to my sensitive nature and maybe even inspire me.

The Uninnocent Bradford Morrow

As a major figure in the world of literary fiction, Bradford Morrow has received an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and many other honors. He is the founding editor of the prestigious literary journal Conjunctions and the author of many acclaimed works of fiction, including The Diviner’s Tale (2011), Giovanni’s Gift (1997), and Trinity Fields (1995). “The Uninnocent” was first published in The Village Voice Literary Supplement and was collected in The Uninnocent (New York, Pegasus, 2011).

In our innocence, we burned candles. We got them from a nearby church, and because my sister believed what we were doing was holy, she said it was fair to take them. Churches, Sister said, were not in the business of making money off children. “Alms for the poor,” said she. “Suffer the little ones to come before me and unto them I shall make many gifts.” My sister enjoyed creating scripture. She had an impressive collection of hymnals, though neither of us could sing. And, as I say, many candles. I worried about her logic and thefts sometimes, but made it a point never to contradict her. She was older than I, and anyway, what was a hymnal but paper and ink? What was a candle but so much wax and string?

The yellow tongues at the ends of their tapers would flutter when the wind flowed off the lake, and we’d look at each other, down there in the old boathouse, our eyes wide, our mouths agape. And yes, when the flames made shadows all over the rustic wooden walls, where the canoes lay on their shelves and oars were lined up like rifles in a gun case, we would know that he was there. We weren’t, to say the least, objective in these exercises, these private séances. It didn’t occur to either my sister or me that the flickering of the candle flames might have been caused by our own expectant breath. The wind, we knew, could have nothing to do with it. No, it was him. He had come back. He never failed us. After all, he was our Christmas brother.

He never spoke. Our task was to decide what his signs meant. Everything had deep meaning. If the smoke of the candles drifted in a certain direction, it was up to us to deduce what such a thing portended. If a bat flew out of the boathouse, if a flock of chorusing birds lit in a tree overhead, if a mouse danced along the length of the wall, by our reckoning there were valuable ramifications. We took it upon ourselves to determine what the signs were, and interpret. This must, I know, sound indiscriminate and childish.

An instance. Down by the lake. Blind old dear Bob Coconut, the dog, stiffened in the legs, lying in the long grass. The air blue. Autumn. The water was cold, and red and brown leaves clotted the surface of the lake near the shore, like an oil slick. Angela and I had a sign that day. We’d found a dead ovenbird that’d flown into the kitchen window, and we knew what that meant. Out in the boat, we got our friend Butter calmed down enough so that he would let us tie him up like we always liked to do, and tickled him, and warned him if he laughed we would throw him overboard. The blue air was turning toward purple as the sun moved down into the trees and evening was on us. We’d been so hard at our game we hadn’t noticed how quickly the hours passed.

Butter wasn’t having a very good time. Nice boy with his round face and wide-open pale-gray eyes. He couldn’t complain, of course, because those were the rules, and because my sister had wrapped her muffler around his mouth. “Don’t worry, little guy,” Angela told him. “We’re taking you home now.” And he squirmed a bit before falling back into the bottom of the boat to breathe. “Don’t you cry,” she finished, “or Angie will have to hurt.”

I was slowly rowing us in. Butter’s parents would soon be worried. The evening star was up, a tiny eye of foil, winking. And then I saw him, our brother. He was standing on the lake. He was a milky swirl. His feet were in the mist that had come up out of the water into the warm and cool atmosphere. My sister put her palms over Butter’s eyes so that he couldn’t see. She thought he had been through enough, and she didn’t want him to be so scared that he’d never come out to play with us again. Moreover, she felt that nobody deserved to see our brother but us. Butter sobbed in the bottom of the boat. Angela and I cried too, while the evening star got brighter and brighter.

Butter was drawn into all this because one of the candles went out at just the moment he walked into the boathouse when we were praying for the ovenbird’s soul. Too bad for Butter, my sister told me later. And true, it was too bad, because from that moment on, all Butter’s problems became a matter of fate. Nothing we did, said Angela, was because we decided to do it. Our Christmas brother — who was one with fate — told us what to do and we did as we were told.

Looking back, I must admit to some surprise at how unparented we were. My father’s persistent absences were difficult to fathom, and what I’ve since been able to fathom is difficult to articulate, for the shame of what I think I understand. He worked hard to support us. He had a long daily commute from our rural home into the city. He was a tall, meek, square-headed, decent sort of man. And I’ve become unshakable in my conviction that he was a dedicated philanderer. I have no proof, and I never confronted him. My deduction is the nasty product of all those days and nights of fatherlessness coupled with my sure memory of his wandering, unprincipled eyes.

As for Mother, she was transformed into a cipher, a drifting and listless creature, by the Christmas brother’s death. We never knew her any other way, though Father told us she used to be a happy girl. She took it all to be her fault. She was the one who slipped on the ice. No one pushed her. The miscarriage that followed her accident was quite probably the end of her life, too, along with that of the blackened holiday fetus. Angela and I — who came along later — were unexpected, were not even afterthoughts. Mother carried us, birthed us, but gave us to understand we would never be our brother. Nothing would ever replace him. Much as I loved him, sometimes he made me want to do bad things.

In our innocence, sometimes we were compelled to go to extremes to get our brother to come to us. We felt forced to do things we weren’t proud of, yet never lost our faith in him even when, in our mad desire to tempt him home, we hurt things that didn’t deserve hurt.

We always feared Christmas. We couldn’t understand that other world, that parallel world where he resided, we couldn’t see why Christmas made him so reluctant a guest. Here, we thought, was the one time of year when families should celebrate together, reunite and rejoice.

Angela was the one who decided to hurt Bob Coconut. I didn’t make the connection between the dog and our brother, but Angela told me to trust her and I did. This was during Christmas, of course. My father and I had brought in the tree we’d sawed down at the tree farm. A prickly, nasty blue spruce. Ornaments, twinkling lights, cookies, the train set, cards hung over pendant string from end to end on the mantel. Bob Coconut lay on a rug before the fire, and twitched pleasantly under the influence of his dreams.

“You think Coco remembers when he could see?” Angela asked me.

I didn’t know, but I thought so.

“Coco?” she whispered in his old ear. “Oh, Co-co.”

“Let him sleep,” I said.

“I bet Coco could see him if he wanted to. Dogs have those abilities, you know. They can hear things we can’t hear. And they can smell better than we can. I bet he can see right into that other world, can’t you, Coco dear?”

“Doubt it,” I said.

“Hey, I’ve got an idea,” she said.

I don’t want to write down what my sister did to him. I wasn’t surprised, though, that it failed to work. Our brother was farther away from us than ever, after that. From then on, I decided to trust nothing my sister said or did. Instead, I began to observe her.

Two Angela stories.

First Angela story. There was a period when she thought she was our brother, after he stopped appearing to us. “He’s in me now,” she announced one night. She liked possessing him, liked being possessed. On occasion, she allowed me to pose questions. “What is it like being dead?” I asked. “You’ll know soon enough,” he answered through his medium. “Do you love me?” I asked. “I love you fine, but I love Angela better,” she said, her eyelids closing to narrow slits, the corners of her mouth lifted into a satisfied smile.

Then she found out one day that she wasn’t our brother. Something mysterious happened to her, and Mother told her she was a woman. And so it was time for her to start wearing dresses. I got to shave her legs. My sister even photographed me while I shaved them, telling me it was good for both of us, a sacrifice. She wouldn’t let me shave the hair under her arms, though. She said this was because she couldn’t take a picture of me doing it. I would be too close to her. That is what she said. The real reason she wouldn’t let me do it, I think, was that part of her still believed she was our brother. She could walk around with her glistening and smooth white legs in the sun beneath the pleat of her billowy skirt, a young woman with strong calves and hard thighs, and we could admire her lush femininity, but we could never release her from her masculine possessiveness.

Second Angela story. Once there was a parade in the little upstate town where we lived. I don’t remember what holiday it was. There were a couple of makeshift floats. There were marching bands from county schools. I remember because it was the day my sister ran away from home. She was eighteen. She managed to vanish — “like a ghost,” said our mother — and was not heard from for many years. She was a missing person. Some people thought she was dead. I knew better; I knew she was truly missing.

In our innocence, we grew up. Tonight is his birthday, or would have been. He’ll always seem older than me, no matter how many years I keep on going. Angela is married and lives in New Hampshire now, her personal cold complementing its heavy winters. She has been married twice. She’s been around, as she likes to phrase it. She has three children — she may be cold, but she’s not frigid — and mentioned in a recent letter that she wants another.

I never understood this marrying business, and I can’t imagine what it must be like to raise children. The dog I own here in the city reminds me of old Bob Coconut. He’s far too lively and large for this apartment, but he is an amiable companion. When he curls up by the fireplace — the landlord won’t let me burn a fire in the hearth, so I make do with a gouache painting of flames I made on cardboard — I think of those times, of the complexities and strangeness of a child’s world. We were isolated. We didn’t know what we were doing; we didn’t realize how splendidly we were able to do what we wanted. All that is gone now. Is it schizophrenic of me to say that I regret the loss and couldn’t care less?

Here is Christmas night again. Christmas Eve I spent with my friends. We ate dinner down in Chinatown. It was a noisy evening there, the streets teeming with revelers. Tonight, it is silent. I’ve thought about phoning Mother, even considered giving Angela a call. Not fond of Mother’s new husband, and knowing Angela to be a chore, I have decided against communication. Were Bob Coconut here, I might light a candle for old times’ sake. There is a cathedral around the corner, where I could snag one. I miss my ghost; he’d have made a decent brother, despite how our mother would have raised him, smothering him with a flood of feeling, drinking his love like a vampire. Yes, I miss my Christmas brother. He would have been a felicity in my olding life. He’d have been able to tell me why I’m all alone.

Outside the window, snow is making a feeble attempt to fall. The streetlights that form halos of its transient passage are cheery. A whole world tries its best to rise to the dignity and joy of the occasion. I wish the world happiness, and everyone in it peace. I do. I’ll always regret what happened to Butter. We were uninnocent, but the very isolation that in some ways damned us has also acted as our benefactor and protector. I suppose I’m grateful no one has ever found out how it happened, or will.

Blue Christmas Peter Robinson

Detective Chief Inspector Banks works in a fictional town in Yorkshire, where Peter Robinson was born and lived until he moved to Canada in 1974. The cop who appears in virtually all of the author’s books is tough enough to do his job but, as in the present story, has a giant heart, helping to make his adventures among the most popular crime fiction being written today, with regular appearances on the bestseller lists in Canada, the United States, and Great Britain, numerous awards on both sides of the Atlantic, and frequent recognition among the notable books of the year by various publications. “Blue Christmas” was first published as a chapbook limited to three hundred fifty-five copies (Norfolk, VA, Crippen & Landru, 2005).

A three-day holiday. Banks sat down at the breakfast table and made some notes on a lined pad. If he was doomed to spend Christmas alone this year, he was going to do it in style. For Christmas Eve, Alastair Sim’s Scrooge, the black and white version, of course. For Christmas Day, Love, Actually. Mostly it was a load of crap, no doubt about that, but it was worth the silliness for Bill Nighy’s Billy Mack, and Keira Knightley was always worth watching. For Boxing Day, David Copperfield, the one with the Harry Potter actor in it, because it had helped him through a nasty hangover one Boxing Day a few years ago, and thus are traditions born.

Music was more problematic. Bach’s Christmas Oratorio and Handel’s Messiah, naturally. Both were on his iPod and could be played through his main sound system. But some years ago, he had made a Christmas compilation tape of all his favourite songs, from Bing’s “White Christmas” to Elvis’s “Santa Claus Is Back in Town” and “Blue Christmas,” The Pretenders’ “2000 Miles” and Roland Kirk’s “We Free Kings.” Unfortunately, that had gone up in flames along with the rest of his music collection. Which meant a quick trip to HMV in Eastvale that afternoon to pick up a few seasonal CDs so he could make a playlist. He had to go to Marks and Spencer, anyway, for his turkey dinner, so he might as well drop in at HMV while he was in the Swainsdale Centre. As for wine, he still had a more than decent selection from his brother’s cellar — including some fine Amarone, Chianti Classico, Clarets, and Burgundies — which would certainly get him through the next three days without any pain. Luckily, he had bought and given out all his Christmas presents earlier — what few there were: money for Tracy, a Fairport Convention box-set for Brian, chocolates and magazine subscriptions for his parents, and a silver and jet bracelet for Annie Cabbot.

Banks put his writing pad aside and reached for his coffee mug. Beside it sat a pristine copy of Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum, which he fully intended to read over the holidays. There should be plenty of peace and quiet. Brian was with his band in Europe and wouldn’t be able to get up to Gratly until late on Boxing Day. Tracy was spending Christmas with her mother Sandra, stepdad Sean, and baby Sinead, and Annie was heading home to the artists’ colony in St. Ives, where they would all no doubt be having a good weep over The Junky’s Christmas, which, Annie had told him, was a Christmas staple among her father’s crowd. He had seen it once, himself, and he had to admit that it wasn’t bad, but it hadn’t become a tradition with him.

All in all, then, this Christmas was beginning to feel like something to be got through with liberal doses of wine and music. Even the weather was refusing to cooperate. The white Christmas that everyone had been hoping for since a tentative sprinkle of snow in late November had not materialized, though the optimists at the meteorological centre were keeping their options open. At the moment, though, it was uniformly grey and wet in Yorkshire. The only good thing that could be said for it was that it wasn’t cold. Far from it. Down south people were sitting outside at Soho cafes and playing golf in the suburbs. Banks wondered if he should have gone away, taken a holiday. Paris. Rome. Madrid. A stranger in a strange city. Even London would have been better than this. Maybe he could still catch a last-minute flight.

But he knew he wasn’t going anywhere. He sipped some strong coffee and told himself not to be so maudlin. Christmas was a notoriously dangerous time of year. It was when people got depressed and gave in to their deepest fears, when all their failures, regrets, and disappointments came back to haunt them. Was he going to let himself give in to that, become a statistic?

He decided to go into town now and get his last-minute shopping over with before it got really busy. Just before he left, though, his phone rang. Banks picked up the receiver.

“Sir? It’s DC Jackman.”

“Yes, Winsome. What’s the problem?”

“I’m really sorry to disturb you at home, sir, but we’ve got a bit of a problem.”

“What is it?” Banks asked. Despite having to spend Christmas alone, he had been looking forward to a few days away from the Western Area Headquarters, if only to relax and unwind after a particularly difficult year. But perhaps that wasn’t to be.

“Missing person, sir.”

“Can’t someone else handle it?”

“It needs someone senior, sir, and DI Cabbot’s already on her way to Cornwall.”

“Who’s missing?”

“A woman by the name of Brenda Mercer. Forty-two years old.”

“How long?”

“Overnight.”

“Any reason to think there’s been foul play?”

“Not really.”

“Who reported her missing?”

“The husband.”

“Why did he leave it until this morning?”

“He didn’t. He reported it at 6 p.m. yesterday evening. We’ve been looking into it. But you know how it is with missing persons, sir, unless it’s a kid. It was very early days. Usually they turn up, or you find a simple explanation quickly enough.”

“But not in this case?”

“No, sir. Not a sign. The husband’s getting frantic. Difficult. Demanding to see someone higher up. And he’s got the daughter and her husband in tow now. They’re not making life any easier. I’ve only just managed to get rid of them by promising I’d get someone in authority to come and talk to them.”

“All right,” Banks said, with a sigh. “Hang on. I’ll be right in.”

Major Crimes and CID personnel were thin on the ground at Western Area Headquarters that Christmas Eve, and DC Winsome Jackman was one who had drawn the short straw. She didn’t mind, though. She couldn’t afford to visit her parents in Jamaica, and she had politely passed up a Christmas dinner invitation from a fellow member of the potholing club, who had been pursuing her for some time now, so she had no real plans for the holidays. She hadn’t expected it to be particularly busy in Major Crimes. Most Christmas incidents were domestic and, as such, they were dealt with by the officers on patrol. Even criminals, it seemed, took a bit of time off for turkey and Christmas pud. But a missing person case could turn nasty very quickly, especially if it was a woman.

While she was waiting for Banks, Winsome went through the paperwork again. There wasn’t much other than the husband’s report and statement, but that gave her the basics.

When David Mercer got home from work on 23rd December at around 6 p.m., he was surprised to find his wife not home. Surprised because she was always home and always had his dinner waiting for him. He worked in the administration offices of the Swainsdale Shopping Centre, and his hours were regular. A neighbour had seen Mrs. Mercer walking down the street where she lived on the Leaview Estate at about a quarter past four that afternoon. She was alone and was wearing a beige overcoat and carrying a scuffed brown leather bag, the kind with a shoulder-strap. She was heading in the direction of the main road, and the neighbour assumed she was going to catch a bus. She knew that Mrs. Mercer didn’t drive. She said hello, but said that Mrs. Mercer hadn’t seemed to hear her, had seemed a bit “lost in her own world.”

Police had questioned the bus-drivers on the route, but none of them recalled seeing anyone matching the description. Uniformed officers also questioned taxi drivers and got the same response. All Mrs. Mercer’s relatives had been contacted, and none had any idea where she was. Winsome was beginning to think it was possible, then, that someone had picked Mrs. Mercer up on the main road, possibly by arrangement, and that she didn’t want to be found. The alternative, that she had been somehow abducted, didn’t bear thinking about, at least not until all other possible avenues had been exhausted.

Winsome had not been especially impressed by David Mercer — he was the sort of pushy, aggressive alpha white male she had seen far too much of over the past few years, puffed up with self-importance, acting as if everyone else were a mere lackey to meet his demands, especially if she happened to be black and female. But she tried not to let personal impressions interfere with her reasoning. Even so, there was something about Mercer’s tone, something that didn’t quite ring true. She made a note to mention it to Banks.

The house was a modern Georgian-style semi with a bay window, stone cladding, and neatly kept garden, and when Banks rang the doorbell, Winsome beside him, David Mercer opened it so quickly he might have been standing right behind it. He led Banks and Winsome into a cluttered but clean front room, where a young woman sat on the sofa wringing her hands, and a whippet-thin man in an expensive, out-of-date suit paced the floor. A tall Christmas tree stood in one corner, covered with ornaments and lights. On the floor were a number of brightly wrapped presents and one ornament, a tiny pair of ice skates, which seemed to have fallen off the tree. The radio was playing Christmas music faintly in the background. Fa-la-la-la-lah.

“Have you heard anything?” David Mercer asked.

“Nothing yet,” Banks answered. “But, if I may, I’d like to ask you a few more questions.”

“We’ve already told everything to her,” he said, gesturing in Winsome’s direction.

“I know,” said Banks. “And DC Jackman has discussed it with me. But I still have a few questions.”

“Don’t you think you should be out there on the streets searching for her,” said the whippet-thin man, who was also turning prematurely bald.

Banks turned to face him slowly. “And you are?”

He puffed out what little chest he had. “Claude Mainwaring, Solicitor.” He pronounced it “Mannering,” like the Arthur Lowe character on Dad’s Army. “I’m David’s son-in-law.”

“Well, Mr. Mainwaring,” said Banks, “it’s not normally my job, as a detective chief inspector, to get out on the streets looking for people. In fact, it’s not even my job to pay house calls asking questions, but as it’s nearly Christmas, and as Mr. Mercer here is worried about his wife, I thought I might bend the rules just a little. And believe me, there are already more than enough people out there trying to find Mrs. Mercer.”

Mainwaring grunted as if he were unsatisfied with the answer, then he sat down next to his wife. Banks turned to David Mercer, who finally bade him and Winsome to sit, too. “Mr. Mercer,” Banks asked, thinking of the doubts that Winsome had voiced on their way over, “can you think of anywhere your wife might have gone?”

“Nowhere,” said Mercer. “That’s why I called you lot.”

“Was there any reason why your wife might have gone away?”

“None at all,” said Mercer, just a beat too quickly for Banks’s liking.

“She wasn’t unhappy about anything?”

“Not that I know of, no.”

“Everything was fine between the two of you?”

“Now, look here!” Mainwaring got to his feet.

“Sit down and be quiet, Mr. Mainwaring,” Banks said as gently as he could. “You’re not in court now, and you’re not helping. I’ll get to you later.” He turned back to Mercer and ignored the slighted solicitor. “Had you noticed any difference in her behaviour before she left, any changes of mood or anything?”

“No,” said Mercer. “Like I said, everything was quite normal. May I ask what you’re getting at?”

“I’m not getting at anything,” Banks said. “These are all questions that have to be asked in cases such as these.”

“Cases such as these?”

“Missing persons.”

“Oh God,” cried the daughter. “I can’t believe it. Mother a missing person.”

She used the same tone as she might have used to say “homeless person,” Banks thought, as if she were somehow embarrassed by her mother’s going missing. He quickly chided himself for being so uncharitable. It was Christmas, after all, and no matter how self-important and self-obsessed these people seemed to be, they were worried about Brenda Mercer. He could only do his best to help them. He just wished they would stop getting in his way.

“Has she ever done anything like this before?” Banks asked.

“Never,” said David Mercer. “Brenda is one of the most stable and reliable people you could ever wish to meet.”

“Does she have any close friends?”

“The family means everything to her.”

“Might she have met someone? Someone she could confide in?”

Mercer seemed puzzled. “I don’t know what you mean. Met? Confide? What would Brenda have to confide? And if she did, why would she confide in someone else rather than in me? No, it doesn’t make sense.”

“People do, you know, sometimes. A girlfriend, perhaps?”

“Not Brenda.”

This was going nowhere fast, Banks thought, seeing what Winsome had meant. “Do you have any theories about where she might have gone?”

“Something’s happened to her. Someone’s abducted her, obviously. I can’t see any other explanation.”

“Why do you say that?”

“It stands to reason, doesn’t it? She’d never do anything so irresponsible and selfish as to mess up all our Christmas plans and cause us so much fuss and worry.”

“But these things, abductions and the like, are much rarer than you imagine,” said Banks. “In most cases, missing persons are found healthy and safe.”

Mainwaring snorted in the background. “And the longer you take to find her, the less likely she is to be healthy and safe,” he said.

Banks ignored him and carried on talking to David Mercer. “Did you and your wife have any arguments recently?” he asked.

“Arguments? No, not really.”

“Not really?”

“I mean nothing significant, nothing that would cause her to do something like this. We had our minor disagreements from time to time, of course, just like any married couple.”

“But nothing that might upset her, make her want to disappear.”

“No, of course not.”

“Do you know if she has any male friends?” Banks knew he was treading on dangerous ground now, but he had to ask.

“If you’re insinuating that she’s run off with someone,” Mercer said, “then you’re barking up the wrong tree. Brenda would never do that to me. Or to Janet,” he added, glancing over at the daughter. “Besides, she’s...”

“She’s what?”

“I was simply going to say that Brenda’s not exactly a Playboy centrefold, if you catch my drift. Not the sort of woman men would chase after or fantasize about.”

Nice one, Banks thought. He had never expected his wife Sandra to run off with another man, either — and not because he didn’t think she was attractive to men — but she had done. No sense in labouring the point, though. If anything like that had happened, the Mercers would be the last people to admit it, assuming that they even knew themselves. But if Brenda had no close friends or relatives, then there was no-one else he could question who might be able to tell him more about her. All in all, it was beginning to seem like a tougher job than he had imagined.

“We’ll keep you posted,” he said, then he and Winsome headed back to the station.

Unfortunately, most people were far too absorbed in their Christmas plans — meals, family visits, last-minute shopping, church events, and what have you — to pay as much attention to local news stories as they did the rest of the year, and even that wasn’t much. As Banks and Winsome whiled away the afternoon at Western Area Headquarters, uniformed police officers went from house to house asking questions and searched the wintry Dales landscape in an ever-widening circle, but nothing came to light.

Banks remembered, just before the shops closed, that he had things to buy, so he dashed over to the Swainsdale Centre. Of course, by closing time on Christmas Eve it was bedlam, and everyone was impatient and bad-tempered. He queued fifteen minutes to pay for his turkey dinner because he would have had nothing else to eat otherwise, but just one glance at the crowds in HMV made him decide to forgo the Christmas music for this year, relying on what he had already, and what he could catch on the radio.

By six o’clock he was back at home, and the men and women on duty at the police station had strict instructions to ring him if anything concerning Brenda Mercer came up.

But nothing did.

Banks warmed his leftover lamb curry and washed it down with a bottle of Black Sheep. After he’d finished the dishes, he made a start on Behind the Scenes at the Museum, then he opened a bottle of decent claret and took it with him into the TV room. There, he slid the shiny DVD of Scrooge into the player, poured himself a healthy glass and settled back. He always enjoyed spotting the bit where you could see the cameraman reflected in the mirror when Scrooge examines himself on Christmas morning, and he found Alastair Sims’s over-the-top excitement at seeing the world anew as infectious and uplifting as ever. Even so, as he took himself up to bed around midnight, he still had a thought to spare for Brenda Mercer, and it kept him awake far longer than he would have liked.

The first possible lead came early on Christmas morning, when Banks was eating a soft-boiled egg for breakfast and listening to a King’s College Choir concert on the radio. Winsome rang to tell him that someone had seen a woman resembling Mrs. Mercer in a rather dazed state wandering through the village of Swainshead shortly after dawn. The description matched, down to the coat and shoulder-bag, so Banks finished his breakfast and headed out.

The sky was still like iron, but the temperature had dropped overnight, and Banks thought he sniffed a hint of snow in the air. As he drove down the dale, he glanced at the hillsides, all in shades of grey, their peaks obscured by low-lying cloud. Here and there a silver stream meandered down the slope, glittering in the weak light. Whatever was wrong with Brenda Mercer, Banks thought, she must be freezing if she had been sleeping rough for two nights now.

Before he got to Swainshead, he received another call on his mobile, again from Winsome. This time she told him that a local train driver had seen a woman walking aimlessly along the tracks over the Swainshead Viaduct. When Banks arrived there, Winsome was already waiting on the western side along with a couple of uniformed officers in their patrol cars, engines running so they could stay warm. The huge viaduct stretched for about a quarter of a mile across the broad valley, carrying the main line up to Carlisle and beyond, into Scotland, and its twenty or more great arches framed picture-postcard views of the hills beyond.

“She’s up there, sir,” said Winsome, pointing as Banks got out of the car. Way above him, more than a hundred feet up, a tiny figure in brown perched on the edge of the viaduct wall.

“Jesus Christ,” said Banks. “Has anyone called to stop the trains? Anything roaring by her right now could give her the fright of her life, and it’s a long way down.”

“It’s been done,” said Winsome.

“Right,” said Banks. “At the risk of stating the obvious, I think we’d better get someone who knows about these things to go up there and talk to her.”

“It’ll be difficult to get a professional, sir, on Christmas Day.”

“Well, what do you...? No. I can read your expression, Winsome. Don’t look at me like that. The answer’s no. I’m not a trained psychologist or a counsellor. We need someone like Jenny Fuller.”

“But she’s away, and you know you’re the best person for the job, sir. You’re good with people. You listen to them. They trust you.”

“But I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

“I don’t think there are any set rules.”

“I’m hardly the sort to convince someone that life is full of the joys of spring.”

“I don’t really think that’s what’s called for.”

“But what if she jumps?”

Winsome shrugged. “She’ll either jump or fall if someone doesn’t go up there soon and find out what’s going on.”

Banks glanced up again and swallowed. He thought he felt the soft, chill touch of a snowflake melt on his eyeball. Winsome was right. He couldn’t send up one of the uniformed lads — they were far too inexperienced for this sort of thing — and time was of the essence.

“Look,” he said, turning to Winsome, “see if you can raise some sort of counsellor or negotiator, will you? In the meantime, I’ll go up and see what I can do. Just temporary, you understand?”

“Right you are, sir.” Winsome smiled. Banks got back in his car. The quickest way to reach the woman was drive up to Swainshead station, just before the viaduct, and walk along the tracks. At least that way he wouldn’t have to climb any hills. The thought didn’t comfort him much, though, when he looked up again and saw the woman’s legs dangling over the side of the wall.

“Stop right there,” she said. “Who are you?”

Banks stopped. He was about four or five yards away from her. The wind was howling more than he had expected, whistling around his ears, making it difficult to hear properly, and it seemed much colder up there, too. He wished he were wearing something warmer than his leather jacket. The hills stretched away to the west, some still streaked with November’s snow. In the distance, Banks thought he could make out the huge rounded mountains of the Lake District.

“My name’s Banks,” he said. “I’m a policeman.”

“I thought you’d find me eventually,” she said. “It’s too late, though.”

From where Banks was standing, he could only see her in profile. The ground was a long way below. Banks had no particular fear of heights, but even so, her precarious position on the wall unnerved him. “Are you sure you don’t want to come back from the edge and talk?” he said.

“I’m sure. Do you think it was easy getting here in the first place?”

“It’s a long walk from Eastvale.”

She cast him a sidelong glance. “I didn’t mean that.”

“Sorry. It just looks a bit dangerous there. You could slip and fall off.”

“What makes you think that wouldn’t be a blessing?”

“Whatever it is,” said Banks, “it can’t be worth this. Come on, Brenda, you’ve got a husband who loves you, a daughter who needs—”

“My husband doesn’t love me, and my daughter doesn’t need me. Do you think I don’t know? David’s been shagging his secretary for two years. Can you imagine such a cliché? He thinks I don’t know. And as for my daughter, I’m just an embarrassment to her and that awful husband of hers. I’m the shop-girl who married up, and now I’m just a skivvy for the lot of them. That’s all I’ve been for years.”

“But things can change.”

She stared at him with pity and shook her head. “No they can’t,” she said, and gazed off into the distance. “Do you know why I’m here? I mean, do you know what set me off? I’ve put up with it all for years, the coldness, the infidelity, just for the sake of order, not rocking the boat, not causing a scene. But do you know what it was, the straw that finally broke the camel’s back?”

“No,” said Banks, anxious to keep her talking. “I don’t know. Tell me.” He edged a little closer so he could hear her voice above the wind. She didn’t tell him to stop. Snowflakes started to swirl around them.

“People say it’s smell that sparks memory the most, but it wasn’t, not this time. It was a Christmas ornament. I was putting a few last-minute decorations on the tree before Janet and Claude arrived, and I found myself holding these tiny, perfect ice skates I hadn’t seen for years. They sent me right back to a particular day, when I was a child. It’s funny because it didn’t seem like just a memory. I felt as if I was really there. My father took me skating on a pond somewhere in the country. I don’t remember where. But it was just getting dark and there were red and green and white Christmas lights and music playing — carols like “Silent Night” and “Away in a Manger” — and someone was roasting chestnuts on a brazier. The air was full of the smell. I’ll never forget that smell. I was... My father died last year.” She paused and brushed tears and melted snowflakes from her eyes with the back of her hand. “I kept falling down. It must have been my first time on ice. But my father would just pick me up, tell me I was doing fine, and set me going again. I don’t know what it was about that day, but I was so happy, the happiest I can ever remember. Everything seemed perfect and I felt I could do anything. I wished it would never end. I didn’t even feel the cold. I was just all warm inside and full of love. Did you ever feel like that?”

Banks couldn’t remember, but he was sure he must have. Best to agree, anyway. Stay on her wavelength. “Yes,” he said. “I know just what you mean.” It wasn’t exactly a lie.

“And it made me feel worthless,” she said. “The memory made me feel that my whole life was a sham, a complete waste of time, of any potential I once might have had. And it just seemed that there was no point in carrying on.” She shifted on the wall.

“Don’t!” Banks cried, moving forward.

She looked at him. He thought he could make out a faint smile. She appeared tired and drawn, but her face was a pretty one, he noticed. A slightly pointed chin and small mouth, but beautiful hazel eyes. Obviously this was something her husband didn’t notice. “It’s all right,” she said. “I was just changing position. My bum’s gone numb. The wall’s hard and cold. I just wanted to get more comfortable.”

She was concerned about comfort. Banks took that as a good sign. He was within two yards of her now, but he still wasn’t close enough to make a grab. At least she didn’t tell him to move back. “Just be careful,” he said. “It’s dangerous. You might slip.”

“You seem to be forgetting that’s what I’m here for.”

“The memory,” said Banks. “That day at the pond. It’s something to cherish, surely, to live for?”

“No. It just suddenly made me feel that my life’s all wrong. Worthless. Has been for years. I don’t feel like me any more. I don’t feel anything. Do you know what I mean?”

“I know,” said Banks. “But this isn’t the answer.”

“I don’t know,” Brenda said, shaking her head, then looking down into the swirling white of the chasm below. “I just feel so sad and so lost.”

“So do I sometimes,” said Banks, edging a little closer. “Every Christmas since my wife left me for someone else and the kids grew up and moved away from home. But it doesn’t mean that you don’t feel anything. You said before that you felt nothing, but you do, even if it is only sadness.”

“So how do you cope?”

“Me? With what?”

“Being alone. Being abandoned and betrayed.”

“I don’t know,” said Banks. He was desperate for a cigarette, but remembered that he had stopped smoking ages ago. He put his hands in his pockets. The snow was really falling now, obscuring the view. He couldn’t even see the ground.

“Did you love her?” Brenda asked.

The question surprised Banks. He had been quizzing her, but all of a sudden she was asking about him. He took that as another good sign. “Yes.”

“What happened?”

“I suppose I neglected her,” said Banks. “My job... the hours... I don’t know. She’s a pretty independent person. I thought things were OK, but they weren’t. It took me by surprise.”

“I’m sure David thinks everything is fine as long as no-one ruffles the surface of his comfortable little world. And I know he doesn’t think I’m attractive. Were you unfaithful?”

“No. But my wife was. I don’t suppose I blame her now. I did at the time. When she had a baby with him, that really hurt. It seemed... I don’t know... the ultimate betrayal, the final gesture.”

“She had a baby with another man?”

“Yes. I mean, we were divorced and they got married and everything. My daughter’s spending Christmas with them.”

“And you?”

Was she starting to feel sorry for him? If she did, then perhaps it would help to make her see that she wasn’t the only one suffering, that suffering was a part of life and you just had to put up with it and get on with things. “By myself,” he said. “My son’s abroad. He’s in a rock group. The Blue Lamps. They’re doing really well. You might even have heard of them.”

“David doesn’t like pop music.”

“Well... they’re really good.”

“The proud father. My daughter’s a stuck-up, social-climbing bitch who’s ashamed of her mother.”

Banks remembered Janet Mainwaring’s reaction to the description of her mother as missing: an embarrassment. “People can be cruel,” he said. “They don’t always mean what they say.”

“But how do you cope?”

Banks found that he had edged closer to her now, within a yard or so. It was almost grabbing range. That was a last resort, though. If he wasn’t quick enough, she might flinch and fall off as he reached for her. Or she might simply slip out of his hands. “I don’t know,” he said. “Christmas is a difficult time for all sorts of people. On the surface, it’s all peace and happiness and giving and family and love, but underneath... You see it a lot in my job. People reach a breaking point. There’s so much stress.”

“But how do you cope with it alone? Surely it must all come back and make you feel terrible?”

“It does, sometimes. I suppose I seek distractions. Music. Scrooge. Love, Actually — for Bill Nighy and Keira Knightley — and David Copperfield, the one with the Harry Potter actor. I probably drink too much as well.”

“Daniel Radcliffe. That’s his name. The Harry Potter actor.”

“Yes.”

“And I’d watch Love, Actually for Colin Firth.” She shook her head. “But I don’t know if it would work for me.”

“I suppose it’s all just a pointless sort of ritual,” said Banks, “but I’d still recommend it. The perfect antidote to spending Christmas alone and miserable.”

“But I wouldn’t be alone and miserable, would I? That’s the problem. I’d be with my family and I’d still be bloody miserable.”

“You don’t have to be.”

“What are you suggesting?”

“I told you. Things can change. You can change things.” Banks leaned his hip against the wall. He was so close to her now that he could have put his arms around her and pulled her back, but he didn’t think he was going to need to. “Do it for yourself,” he said. “Not for them. If you think your husband doesn’t love you, leave him and live for yourself.”

“Leave David? But where would I go? How would I manage? David has been my life. David and Janet.”

“There’s always a choice,” Banks went on. “There are people who can help you. People who know about these things. Counsellors, social services. Other people have been where you are now. You can get a job, a flat. A new life. I did.”

“But where would I go?”

“You’d find somewhere. There are plenty of flats available in Eastvale, for a start.”

“I don’t know if I can do that. I’m not as strong as you.” Banks noticed that she managed a tight smile. “And I think if I did, I would have to go far away.”

“That’s possible, too.” Banks reached out his hand. “For crying out loud, you can come and have Christmas dinner with me if you want. Just let me help you.” The snow was coming down heavily now, and the area had become very slippery. She looked at his hand, shaking her head and biting her lip.

“Scrooge?” she said.

“Yes. Alastair Sim.”

“I always preferred James Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life.”

Banks laughed. “That’ll do nicely, too. I’ve got the DVD.”

“I couldn’t... you know... If I... well, I’d have to go home and face the music.”

“I know that. But after, there’s help. There are choices.”

She hesitated for a moment, then she took hold of his hand, and he felt her grip tightening as she climbed off the wall and stood up. “Be careful now,” he said. “The ground’s quite treacherous.”

“Isn’t it just,” she said, and moved towards him.