The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries

Noel, Noel Barry Perowne

The greatest criminal character in literature is A. J. Raffles, the gentleman jewel thief created by E. W. Hornung at the end of the Victorian era. A few years after the author’s death in 1921, the popularity of the character remained so high that the British magazine The Thriller asked Philip Atkey (using the pseudonym Barry Perowne) to continue the rogue’s adventures, and he produced more stories about Raffles than the creator had. Over a fifty-year career, Atkey wrote hundreds of stories and more than twenty novels, many featuring the suave safecracker and his sidekick, Bunny Manders. “Noel, Noel” was first collected in Murder Under the Mistletoe, edited by Cynthia Manson (New York, Signet, 1992).

It was on a gray December morning, under a sky threatening snow, that I called by request at the Colonial Office (Pacific Section) in the matter of my brother, recently deceased. As his only relative surviving in England, I was handed a letter written by the Resident Commissioner of the remote archipelago where my brother’s life had come to an end. The letter was accompanied by a photograph of his grave, and I was given also a small box or chest, carved with strange island designs, which had been found in his palm-thatched house and contained, I was told, a manuscript he had left, of an autobiographical nature.

The official who interview me was a young-old individual, impeccably dressed in a black jacket and striped trousers, and of great urbanity. When I took my leave, he helped me into my tweed overcoat, handed me my gray bowler hat and my cane. No doubt in deference to my frailty and my silver hair, he insisted on carrying the chest out to the waiting taxi.

The snow had set in by now, in earnest.

“Christmas in a few days,” said my official, as we shook hands through the taxi window. “It’ll be a white one.”

He gave me a rather odd look, and I had no doubt, as the taxi set off for Victoria Station, that he was thinking about my brother, who had been born on a Christmas Day and named, accordingly, Noel.

I lived in the country, and returning home in the train, I had a first-class compartment to myself. Prior to opening the chest on the seat beside me, I studied again the photograph of my brother’s far-off memorial. A small obelisk of what look like white coral, it bore the curious epitaph “1°.58′ N., 157°.27′ W.,” together with two sets of initials, my brother’s and, I had been told, those of the woman to whom he had been for a great many years (though today was the first I had heard of it) most happily married.

Touching those years, the terms used by the Resident Commissioner to describe them, filled me with astonishment as I glanced over his letter again: “Beloved by this small community of forty-two souls — a source of comfort — sage in council — kind, courageous, selfless—”

With the best will in the world, I could not recognize in this picture my brother as I had known him. I turned for enlightenment to the chest on the seat beside me. I studied the carving for a moment — designs of outrigged canoes, paddles, coconut palms, turtles, and land crabs, and when, with an uncomfortable sense of intrusion, I lifted the lid, there came from the chest a subtle aroma that suggested to my imagination palm fibre and sea shells, sunshine and coral grottoes, baked breadfruit and petals of frangipani. I breathed again, it seemed to me — in that train rocking through the December snowfall — the trade winds which had blown from the pages of my boyhood reading, which was as near as I had ever got to the Pacific.

I took from the chest my brother’s manuscript book, ran my fingers over its frayed binding, turned the yellowed leaves at random. They were covered with faded writing in a hand which, even after all the long years, I recognized as my brother’s. And at the opening sentence, simple and conventional — My earliest memory is Christmas in the year 1880 — I nodded to myself, remembering that and many another Christmas at home.

I was five years older than Noel. We were a large family, living in a rambling country house, and our father, an awesome man normally, was always rollicking and jovial at Christmastime. For us, his eight children, it was always, outstandingly, the happiest time of the year. Especially was it so, in boyhood and adolescence, for Noel, the youngest of us, being his birthday as well as the season for which he was named. For Noel it was a time of pure magic. His eyes shone with excitement. He was a handsome boy, sensitive and imaginative, not a bit like the rest of us, who were rather homely-looking and stodgy. Yes, at Yuletide my Noel, as a boy, was always at his best — though later, in young manhood, by a kind of reaction to a most unfortunate circumstance, he was to be always at his disastrous worst.

My sister Emily once remarked, “I suppose it’s natural that Christmas should mean even more to Noel than to the rest of us, but, you know, I wonder at times if his excitement is quite healthy. His anxiety that we should all be here together, his intense preoccupation with whether it will snow at just the right time, the utter extravagance with which he’d reward the waits if we didn’t restrain him — it all makes me wonder if there’s not perhaps a slight instability in him somewhere. Really, I tremble at times to think of his future.”

She had good reason. At sixteen he began to get into scrapes. At eighteen his behavior gave rise to a deeper disquiet. At twenty, while articled to an estate agent in Shropshire, he kicked over the traces so seriously that my father told him never to show his face at home again.

Poor Noel. Christmas was not the same for him without us — or for us without him. Some of us were married by then, but we always foregathered in the old home in deference to our father. Our natural stodginess, lacking the inspiration of Noel’s presence, was quite stupefying.

As for Noel, the very next Christmas season after he had been cast out, he was brought before a London magistrate and charged with drunkenness and insulting behavior. We heard about it later. Asked if he had anything to say, he blamed his misdemeanor on the need he had felt to drown the memory of past joyous Christmases in the home from which his own folly had barred him forever.

“Young man,” said the magistrate, “your trouble is less unique than you fancy. We are all prone to self-pity at this season. We all have memories and regrets. We are all sensitive at Christmastime, but it is a sign of immaturity in you that you have allowed such a universal feeling to become, in your case, morbidly developed. Case dismissed, but don’t leave the court. I haven’t finished with you.”

What followed was surprising. The magistrate, moved perhaps by Noel’s good looks and charm of manner, and by a certain pathos in his aberration, invited him into his own home as a guest over Christmas. The visit grew extended. Long after the holly had been taken down, my brother continued to loll in the magistrate’s house. Instead of resenting this, the magistrate and his good lady felt a growing affection for him. In a sense, they adopted him; but, not liking to see him idle, they found him a sound position in a South Coast town.

The following Christmas found Noel in trouble again. It was so serious that, instead of returning “home” to the magistrate’s house, where he was expected on Christmas Eve, he sent the unfortunate man a telegram announcing his intention of throwing himself from Beachy Head at midnight.

The harassed magistrate caused police to be rushed to the spot. Noel, however, having sent his telegram, had succumbed to drink and was later found insensible in a snow-covered beach shelter. The magistrate, though furious, yielded to his wife’s insistence that he smooth over the trouble Noel was in; but he told my brother from thenceforth he could go to the devil in his own way.

The magistrate and his wife, on the other hand, went to Aix-les-Bains to recuperate from their undeserved anxieties. One morning, as they were walking from their hotel to the curative baths, in the pleasant winter sunshine, a man darted out from behind a date palm and planted himself squarely in their path.

It was my brother Noel, handsome as ever, but much disheveled and in that state of excitement, peculiar to himself, which my sister Emily had once described as “unhealthy.”

“Go to the devil, may I?” he shouted at the magistrate. “In my own way? All right, watch me! This is my way!”

His hand flashed to his mouth. A cloaked gendarme came running towards the scene, blowing his whistle. My brother Noel lurched heavily to the left. He lurched heavily to the right. His knees buckled. The magistrate’s good lady screamed. My brother Noel fell contorted at her feet with a white froth on his lips.

It was proved afterward that he had eaten soap.

His object had been to frighten the couple into taking him back into their good graces. The extraordinary thing was that the magistrate did not have him jailed. He was eager to do so, but his good lady took the view that it was no good sending Noel to prison, since he would be out in a month or two, and free to plague them again. She would be terrified to put a foot outside her house, she said, for fear he might spring at her from the shrubbery and open his veins with a razor before her very eyes. He must be sent, she insisted, somewhere very far away.

The magistrate provided funds for Noel’s emigration to Australia.

At home, we of his family heard of all this later. Our father passed away in the interim — our sister Emily too — and those of us who were still living in the family home had resolved to let bygones be bygones and to make Noel welcome among us, should he ever show up.

But we heard nothing from him, and it was only now as I sat in the train reading his manuscript that I came to that part of it which dealt with adventures of which I had had no previous inkling.

I laid down the book on my knees for a moment. The lights had come on in the compartment. Outside, the snow was falling thickly, and the woods and fields glimmered under their mantle of white as the December evening drew in.

Poor Noel, I thought again; he had been worthless through and through when he had left England. I marveled again at the letter, so full of praise of my brother, which I had been handed at the Colonial Office. What experience had befallen him, I wondered, to have changed him so greatly?

I picked up the book again, to read of a continuing succession of disasters and infamies. Within a year, he had made Australia too hot to hold him. He was compelled to leave clandestinely aboard a trading schooner, the Ellis P. Harkness, skippered by a toothless Cockney named Larkin, as incorrigible a scoundrel as my brother.

The third member of the schooner’s company was a slim, brown, silent, smiling boy, a native of Tokelau called Rahpi. He was far too good for the precious party he sailed with, but through months of their huckstering and rogueries among the archipelagos he served them loyally, and for my brother the boy conceived an inexplicable devotion.

One day, as the two men were drinking morosely in the cabin, an excited hail from Rahpi, at the wheel, sent them staggering up the companionway. The boy pointed off to starboard. Far across the shining water, under the blue Pacific sky, was an open boat. The prevailing easterly blew light and fitful; the boat’s sail trembled. It was clear there was no hand at the helm.

By mid-afternoon the schooner came up with the boat. There lay in it the sun-blackened body of a man. My brother Noel dropped down into the boat to examine the corpse. Clutched in its brittle fingers was a wash-leather bag. Noel loosed it from the dead man’s grip and shook the contents onto his palm. His heart gave a great thud.

Pearls!

He felt the boat rock as Larkin leaped down into it.

“Halves, mate!” Larkin said. “How about it, mate?”

Noel looked at him. Larkin’s eyes narrowed, his tongue moved round over his toothless gums, his right hand rested tensely on the bulge of the revolver in the pocket of his tattered ducks.

My brother smiled. “Halves it is,” he said.

Larkin looked with sly gloating at the pearls on my brother Noel’s palm. “What a Christmas present, mate!” Larkin said. “Eh, mate?”

The bright day seemed to my brother Noel suddenly, strangely to darken. He said slowly, “Christmas present?”

Larkin flared up. It was as though, all at once, he were anxious to find cause for offense, an excuse for a fight.

“Why, you lowdown, busted boozer,” he shouted, “ain’t you got a spark of decency left in you? Ain’t you got a family back home to bow your head in shame to think of at a time like this? Don’t you know tomorrow’s Christmas Eve?”

The pearls spilled unheeded from my brother’s hand to the bottom of the boat. Larkin plunged to his knees, pouring curses on the corpse as he shoved it aside to get at the boat’s bilges. Noel swung himself back to the schooner’s deck. He thrust past the staring Rahpi and went below. He flung his broken-peaked cap across the cabin and reached for a bottle.

That night, swaying on his feet as he stood his trick at the wheel, he brooded alcoholically, heedless of the star-bright sky. More acutely than ever before, the memory of long-lost happy Yuletides returned to plague him. He could neither relive them nor forget them. That nostalgia known to all men — but developed in my brother Noel to a destructive morbidity — made him as desperate as a trapped animal. He had a blind urge to flight, which in his befuddled mind shaped itself into a plan to seize the schooner and the pearls and be rid of Larkin—

Suddenly, leaving the wheel spokes spinning aimlessly, he lurched down the companion into the cabin. The lamp there, swaying in gimbals, cast an oily yellow gleam that made the shadows move. Larkin lay on his back in his bunk, snoring, his toothless mouth agape, his gums glistening pink in a tangle of beard.

My brother, holding his breath, slid a hand under the man’s pillow. He felt the wash-leather bag, the butt of the revolver. He drew them out cautiously. He raised the revolver to Larkin’s head, but then the thought of the boy Rahpi flashed into his mind. The Tokelau boy was asleep in the forepeak. He would hear a shot. My brother stood biting his lips. His rage flamed up again. Kill one, kill both! Rahpi must go, too. He must be hounded out and ruthlessly shot down.

Again my brother raised the revolver to Larkin’s head. But now the schooner, to a sudden freshening of the wind, and with the wheel spinning free, broached-to with a jerk that sent Noel staggering. Before he could recover himself, the squall struck — one of those Pacific squalls which an alert wheelsman could see coming from afar in good time to reef down and make all snug. But there was no wheelsman, and with a rush and hiss of rain and screaming wind, the squall was on them. Larkin woke with a shout as the schooner was lifted high on the top of the rollers, then dropped dizzily into its trough. Glass crashed as the lamp blacked out.

The two men were flung together, struggling, fighting with each other to be first up the companion. Finally both gained the deck and clung where they could as a wave swept over them. Through the tumult about them sounded a deeper, more distant note, a rumbling note like thunder.

“Breakers!” Larkin yelled.

After that, according to the account in the manuscript, my brother Noel had no clear idea of what happened, no recollection of clawing a handhold on the reef as the schooner struck. He did not know how many hours passed before he regained consciousness. His whole body stung from the cruel abrasions of the coral. His head seemed to weigh a ton as he raised it.

He struggled to his knees. The vast sky of morning was sheened over with radiant tints of pearl. The passing of the squall had left the sea shining and level to the horizon, though here and there along the curve of the reef spray leaped with a white flash against the blue. At some distance from him, two figures were picking their way along the reef, slowly and painfully, sometimes stumbling.

Noel watched them, conscious of the heavy, measured thumping in his chest. Larkin and Rahpi! Alive! With a creeping horror he remembered how a few hours before, in his madness, he had stood at the very brink of murder. Mere change had plucked him back from that awful precipice. They were alive, and he drew in his breath, deeply, in relief and gratitude.

A shout reached him, not from the men on the reef, but from the lagoon within its shelter. Noel got to his feet with difficulty, his salt-soaked body smarting, and turned. The lagoon lay tranquil, edged in the distanced by a white beach and leaning palms. A canoe, driven swiftly by paddles that flashed as they rose and fell, was coming towards him. There were two people in it, a young man and a girl. The pareus they wore were gaily colored, and the girl’s shining dark hair streamed over her brown shoulders.

“Hello?” the young man called to Noel. “All right, there? Hello?”

My brother lifted a hand slowly in reply. He wondered where he was. The young man had spoken in English. Nearing the reef, the couple, obviously brother and sister, and Tahitian in appearance, backed with their paddles, and beached the canoe.

The girl looked up at my brother with dark, gentle eyes that seemed to hold a puzzled look. She was very beautiful. My brother had a strange feeling that this meeting between them had been inevitable — that he had come to the one place in the world where he could find peace — that before him, here, lay the beginning of his real life.

There had been nobody here to greet Captain Cook when he had discovered the island on December 24, 1777, at precisely 1°.58′ N., 157°.27′ W. But for my brother Noel there was this girl, and she smiled at him gravely, yet with a kind of wonder in her eyes, as though she had been waiting for him for a long time and could not quite believe that he had come, at last.

“Welcome,” she said, “to Christmas Island.”

Death on Christmas Eve Stanley Ellin

The three-time Edgar Award winner and the Mystery Writers of America’s Grand Master honoree in 1981, Stanley Ellin was one of America’s greatest short story writers of the twentieth century. His first story, “The Specialty of the House” (1948), went on to become a relentlessly anthologized classic of crime fiction and was adapted for an episode of the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Many more of his stories were adapted for TV by Hitchcock and other series, and six of his stories were nominated for Edgars, two of which won; his superb novel, The Eighth Circle (1958), also won an Edgar. Each of his stories is a perfectly polished gem, as you will see when you read this masterpiece. “Death on Christmas Eve” was first published in the January 1950 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine; it was first collected in Mystery Stories (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1956).

As a child I had been vastly impressed by the Boerum house. It was fairly new then, and glossy; a gigantic pile of Victorian rickrack, fretwork, and stained glass, flung together in such chaotic profusion that it was hard to encompass in one glance. Standing before it this early Christmas Eve, however, I could find no echo of that youthful impression. The gloss was long since gone; woodwork, glass, metal, all were merged to a dreary gray, and the shades behind the windows were drawn completely so that the house seemed to present a dozen blindly staring eyes to the passerby.

When I rapped my stick sharply on the door, Celia opened it.

“There is a doorbell right at hand,” she said. She was still wearing the long outmoded and badly wrinkled black dress she must have dragged from her mother’s trunk, and she looked, more than ever, the image of old Katrin in her later years: the scrawny body, the tightly compressed lips, the colorless hair drawn back hard enough to pull every wrinkle out of her forehead. She reminded me of a steel trap ready to snap down on anyone who touched her incautiously.

I said, “I am aware that the doorbell has been disconnected, Celia,” and walked past her into the hallway. Without turning my head, I knew that she was glaring at me; then she sniffed once, hard and dry, and flung the door shut. Instantly we were in a murky dimness that made the smell of dry rot about me stick in my throat. I fumbled for the wall switch, but Celia said sharply, “No! This is not the time for lights.”

I turned to the white blur of her face, which was all I could see of her. “Celia,” I said, “spare me the dramatics.”

“There has been a death in this house. You know that.”

“I have good reason to,” I said, “but your performance now does not impress me.”

“She was my own brother’s wife. She was very dear to me.”

I took a step toward her in the murk and rested my stick on her shoulder. “Celia,” I said, “as your family’s lawyer, let me give you a word of advice. The inquest is over and done with, and you’ve been cleared. But nobody believed a word of your precious sentiments then, and nobody ever will. Keep that in mind, Celia.”

She jerked away so sharply that the stick almost fell from my hand. “Is that what you have come to tell me?” she said.

I said, “I came because I knew your brother would want to see me today. And if you don’t mind my saying so, I suggest that you keep to yourself while I talk to him. I don’t want any scenes.”

“Then keep away from him yourself!” she cried. “He was at the inquest. He saw them clear my name. In a little while he will forget the evil he thinks of me. Keep away from him so that he can forget.”

She was at her infuriating worst, and to break the spell I started up the dark stairway, one hand warily on the balustrade. But I heard her follow eagerly behind, and in some eerie way it seemed as if she were not addressing me, but answering the groaning of the stairs under our feet.

“When he comes to me,” she said, “I will forgive him. At first I was not sure, but now I know. I prayed for guidance, and I was told that life is too short for hatred. So when he comes to me I will forgive him.”

I reached the head of the stairway and almost went sprawling. I swore in annoyance as I righted myself. “If you’re not going to use lights, Celia, you should, at least, keep the way clear. Why don’t you get that stuff out of here?”

“Ah,” she said, “those are all poor Jessie’s belongings. It hurts Charlie to see anything of hers, I knew this would be the best thing to do — to throw all her things out.”

Then a note of alarm entered her voice. “But you won’t tell Charlie, will you? You won’t tell him?” she said, and kept repeating it on a higher and higher note as I moved away from her, so that when I entered Charlie’s room and closed the door behind me it almost sounded as if I had left a bat chittering behind me.

As in the rest of the house, the shades in Charlie’s room were drawn to their full length. But a single bulb in the chandelier overhead dazzled me momentarily, and I had to look twice before I saw Charlie sprawled out on his bed with an arm flung over his eyes. Then he slowly came to his feet and peered at me.

“Well,” he said at last, nodding toward the door, “she didn’t give you any light to come up, did she?”

“No,” I said, “but I know the way.”

“She’s like a mole,” he said. “Gets around better in the dark than I do in the light. She’d rather have it that way too. Otherwise she might look into a mirror and be scared of what she sees there.”

“Yes,” I said, “she seems to be taking it very hard.”

He laughed short and sharp as a sea-lion barking. “That’s because she’s still got the fear in her. All you get out of her now is how she loved Jessie, and how sorry she is. Maybe she figures if she says it enough, people might get to believe it. But give her a little time and she’ll be the same old Celia again.”

I dropped my hat and stick on the bed and laid my overcoat beside them. Then I drew out a cigar and waited until he fumbled for a match and helped me to a light. His hand shook so violently that he had hard going for a moment and muttered angrily at himself. Then I slowly exhaled a cloud of smoke toward the ceiling, and waited.

Charlie was Celia’s junior by five years, but seeing him then it struck me that he looked a dozen years older. His hair was the same pale blond, almost colorless so that it was hard to tell if it was graying or not. But his cheeks wore a fine, silvery stubble, and there were huge blue-black pouches under his eyes. And where Celia was braced against a rigid and uncompromising backbone, Charlie sagged, standing or sitting, as if he were on the verge of falling forward. He stared at me and tugged uncertainly at the limp mustache that dropped past the corners of his mouth.

“You know what I wanted to see you about, don’t you?” he said.

“I can imagine,” I said, “but I’d rather have you tell me.”

“I’ll put it to you straight,” he said. “It’s Celia. I want to see her get what’s coming to her. Not jail. I want the law to take her and kill her, and I want to be there to watch it.”

A large ash dropped to the floor, and I ground it carefully into the rug with my foot. I said, “You were at the inquest, Charlie; you saw what happened. Celia’s cleared, and unless additional evidence can be produced, she stays cleared.”

“Evidence! My God, what more evidence does anyone need! They were arguing hammer and tongs at the top of the stairs. Celia just grabbed Jessie and threw her down to the bottom and killed her. That’s murder, isn’t it? Just the same as if she used a gun or poison or whatever she would have used if the stairs weren’t handy?”

I sat down wearily in the old leather-bound armchair there and studied the new ash that was forming on my cigar. “Let me show it to you from the legal angle,” I said, and the monotone of my voice must have made it sound like a well-memorized formula. “First, there were no witnesses.”

“I heard Jessie scream and I heard her fall,” he said doggedly, “and when I ran out and found her there, I heard Celia slam her door shut right then. She pushed Jessie and then scuttered like a rat to be out of the way.”

“But you didn’t see anything. And since Celia claims that she wasn’t on the scene, there were no witnesses. In other words, Celia’s story cancels out your story, and since you weren’t an eyewitness you can’t very well make a murder out of what might have been an accident.”

He slowly shook his head.

“You don’t believe that,” he said. “You don’t really believe that. Because if you do, you can get out now and never come near me again.”

“It doesn’t matter what I believe; I’m showing you the legal aspects of the case. What about motivation? What did Celia have to gain from Jessie’s death? Certainly there’s no money or property involved; she’s as financially independent as you are.”

Charlie sat down on the edge of his bed and leaned toward me with his hands resting on his knees. “No,” he whispered, “there’s no money or property in it.”

I spread my arms helplessly. “You see?”

“But you know what it is,” he said. “It’s me. First, it was the old lady with her heart trouble any time I tried to call my soul my own. Then when she died and I thought I was free, it was Celia. From the time I got up in the morning until I went to bed at night, it was Celia every step of the way. She never had a husband or a baby — but she had me!”

I said quietly, “She’s your sister, Charlie. She loves you,” and he laughed that same unpleasant, short laugh.

“She loves me like ivy loves a tree. When I think back now, I still can’t see how she did it, but she would just look at me a certain way and all the strength would go out of me. And it was like that until I met Jessie... I remember the day I brought Jessie home, and told Celia we were married. She swallowed it, but that look was in her eyes the same as it must have been when she pushed Jessie down those stairs.”

I said, “But you admitted at the inquest that you never saw her threaten Jessie or do anything to hurt her.”

“Of course I never saw! But when Jessie would go around sick to her heart every day and not say a word, or cry in bed every night and not tell me why, I knew damn well what was going on. You know what Jessie was like. She wasn’t so smart or pretty, but she was good-hearted as the day was long, and she was crazy about me. And when she started losing all that sparkle in her after only a month, I knew why. I talked to her and I talked to Celia, and both of them just shook their heads. All I could do was go around in circles, but when it happened, when I saw Jessie lying there, it didn’t surprise me. Maybe that sounds queer, but it didn’t surprise me at all.”

“I don’t think it surprised anyone who knows Celia,” I said, “but you can’t make a case out of that.”

He beat his fist against his knee and rocked from side to side. “What can I do?” he said. “That’s what I need you for — to tell me what to do. All my life I never got around to doing anything because of her. That’s what she’s banking on now — that I won’t do anything, and that she’ll get away with it. Then after a while, things’ll settle down, and we’ll be right back where we started from.”

I said, “Charlie, you’re getting yourself all worked up to no end.”

He stood up and stared at the door, and then at me. “But I can do something,” he whispered. “Do you know what?”

He waited with bright expectancy of one who has asked a clever riddle that he knows will stump the listener. I stood up facing him, and shook my head slowly. “No,” I said. “Whatever you’re thinking, put it out of your mind.”

“Don’t mix me up,” he said. “You know you can get away with murder if you’re as smart as Celia. Don’t you think I’m as smart as Celia?”

I caught his shoulders tightly. “For God’s sake, Charlie,” I said, “don’t start talking like that.”

He pulled out of my hands and went staggering back against the wall. His eyes were bright, and his teeth showed behind his drawn lips. “What should I do?” he cried. “Forget everything now that Jessie is dead and buried? Sit here until Celia gets tired of being afraid of me and kills me too?”

My years and girth had betrayed me in that little tussle with him, and I found myself short of dignity and breath. “I’ll tell you one thing,” I said. “You haven’t been out of this house since the inquest. It’s about time you got out, if only to walk the streets and look around you.”

“And have everybody laugh at me as I go!”

“Try it,” I said, “and see. Al Sharp said that some of your friends would be at his bar and grill tonight, and he’d like to see you there. That’s my advice — for whatever it’s worth.”

“It’s not worth anything,” said Celia. The door had been opened, and she stood there rigid, her eyes narrowed against the light in the room. Charlie turned toward her, the muscles of his jaw knotting and unknotting.

“Celia,” he said, “I told you never to come into this room!”

Her face remained impassive. “I’m not in it. I came to tell you that your dinner is ready.”

He took a menacing step toward her. “Did you have your ear at that door long enough to hear everything I said? Or should I repeat it for you?”

“I heard an ungodly and filthy thing,” she said quietly, “an invitation to drink and roister while this house is in mourning. I think I have every right to object to that.”

He looked at her incredulously and had to struggle for words. “Celia,” he said, “tell me you don’t mean that! Only the blackest hypocrite alive or someone insane could say what you’ve just said, and mean it.”

That struck a spark in her. “Insane!” she cried. “You dare use that word? Locked in your room, talking to yourself, thinking heaven knows what!” She turned to me suddenly. “You’ve talked to him. You ought to know. Is it possible that—”

“He is as sane as you, Celia,” I said heavily.

“Then he should know that one doesn’t drink in saloons at a time like this. How could you ask him to do it?”

She flung the question at me with such an air of malicious triumph that I completely forgot myself. “If you weren’t preparing to throw out Jessie’s belongings, Celia, I would take that question seriously!”

It was a reckless thing to say, and I had instant cause to regret it. Before I could move, Charlie was past me and had Celia’s arms pinned in a paralyzing grip.

“Did you dare go into her room?” he raged, shaking her savagely. “Tell me!” And then, getting an immediate answer from the panic in her face, he dropped her arms as if they were red hot, and stood there sagging with his head bowed.

Celia reached out a placating hand toward him. “Charlie,” she whimpered, “don’t you see? Having her things around bothers you. I only wanted to help you.”

“Where are her things?”

“By the stairs, Charlie. Everything is there.”

He started down the hallway, and with the sound of his uncertain footsteps moving away I could feel my heartbeat slowing down to its normal tempo. Celia turned to look at me, and there was such a raging hatred in her face that I knew only a desperate need to get out of that house at once. I took my things from the bed and started past her, but she barred the door.

“Do you see what you’ve done?” she whispered hoarsely. “Now I will have to pack them all over again. It tires me, but I will have to pack them all over again — just because of you.”

“That is entirely up to you, Celia,” I said coldly.

“You,” she said. “You old fool. It should have been you along with her when I—”

I dropped my stick sharply on her shoulder and could feel her wince under it. “As your lawyer, Celia,” I said, “I advise you to exercise your tongue only during your sleep, when you can’t be held accountable for what you say.”

She said no more, but I made sure she stayed safely in front of me until I was out in the street again.

From the Boerum house to Al Sharp’s Bar and Grill was only a few minutes’ walk, and I made it in good time, grateful for the sting of the clear winter air in my face. Al was alone behind the bar, busily polishing glasses, and when he saw me enter he greeted me cheerfully. “Merry Christmas, counsellor,” he said.

“Same to you,” I said, and watched him place a comfortable-looking bottle and a pair of glasses on the bar.

“You’re regular as the seasons, counsellor,” said Al, pouring out two stiff ones. “I was expecting you along right about now.”

We drank to each other and Al leaned confidingly on the bar. “Just come from there?”

“Yes,” I said.

“See Charlie?”

“And Celia,” I said.

“Well,” said Al, “that’s nothing exceptional. I’ve seen her too when she comes by to do some shopping. Runs along with her head down and that black shawl over it like she was being chased by something. I guess she is at that.”

“I guess she is,” I said.

“But Charlie, he’s the one. Never see him around at all. Did you tell him I’d like to see him some time?”

“Yes,” I said. “I told him.”

“What did he say?”

“Nothing. Celia said it was wrong for him to come here while he was in mourning.”

Al whistled softly and expressively, and twirled a forefinger at his forehead. “Tell me,” he said, “do you think it’s safe for them to be alone together like they are? I mean, the way things stand, and the way Charlie feels, there could be another case of trouble there.”

“It looked like it for a while tonight,” I said. “But it blew over.”

“Until next time,” said Al.

“I’ll be there,” I said.

Al looked at me and shook his head. “Nothing changes in that house,” he said. “Nothing at all. That’s why you can figure out all the answers in advance. That’s how I knew you’d be standing here right about now talking to me about it.”

I could still smell the dry rot of the house in my nostrils, and I knew it would take days before I could get it out of my clothes.

“This is one day I’d like to cut out of the calendar permanently,” I said.

“And leave them alone to their troubles. It would serve them right.”

“They’re not alone,” I said. “Jessie is with them. Jessie will always be with them until that house and everything in it is gone.”

Al frowned. “It’s the queerest thing that ever happened in this town, all right. The house all black, her running through the streets like something hunted, him lying there in that room with only the walls to look at, for — when was it Jessie took that fall, counsellor?”

By shifting my eyes a little I could see in the mirror behind Al the reflection of my own face: ruddy, deep jowled, a little incredulous.

“Twenty years ago,” I heard myself saying. “Just twenty years ago tonight.”

The Chinese Apple Joseph Shearing

Most of the books written under Gabrielle Margaret Vere Long’s Joseph Shearing pseudonym are historical novels, usually based on real-life criminal cases. While the other nom de plumes of the prolific author have faded into obscurity, the Marjorie Bowen and Shearing names endure. Among Shearing’s best known crime novels are Moss Rose (1934), the basis for the 1947 film of the same name; Blanche Fury (1939), a film released in 1948; and the psychological thriller So Evil My Love (1947), the basis for the film starring Ann Todd, Ray Milland, and Geraldine Fitzgerald, set in England in 1876. (In England the film was also titled So Evil My Love; it was released in the United States as The Obsessed.) “The Chinese Apple” was first published in the April 1949 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

Isabelle Crosland felt very depressed when the boat train drew into the vast London station. The gas lamps set at intervals down the platform did little more than reveal filth, fog, and figures huddled in wraps and shawls. It was a mistake to arrive on Christmas Eve, a matter of missed trains, of indecision and reluctance about the entire journey. The truth was she had not wanted to come to London at all. She had lived in Italy too long to be comfortable in England. In Florence she had friends, admirers; she had what is termed “private means” and she was an expert in music. She performed a little on the harpsichord and she wrote a great deal about ancient musical instruments and ancient music. She had been married and widowed some years before and was a childless woman who had come to good terms with life. But with life in Florence, not London. Mrs. Crosland really rather resented the fact that she was performing a duty. She liked things to be taken lightly, even with a touch of malice, of heartlessness, and here she was in this gloomy, cold station, having left the pleasant south behind, just because she ought to be there.

“How,” she thought, as she watched the porter sorting out her baggage, “I dislike doing the right thing; it is never becoming, at least to me.”

A widowed sister she scarcely remembered had died: there was a child, quite alone. She, this Lucy Bayward, had written; so had her solicitors. Mrs. Crosland was her only relation. Money was not needed, companionship was. At last it had been arranged, the child was coming up from Wiltshire, Mrs. Crosland was to meet her in London and take her back to Florence.

It would really be, Isabelle Crosland reflected, a flat sort of Christmas. She wished that she could shift her responsibility, and, as the four-wheeled cab took her along the dingy streets, she wondered if it might not be possible for her to evade taking Lucy back to Italy.

London was oppressive. The gutters were full of dirty snow, overhead was a yellow fog.

“I was a fool,” thought Mrs. Crosland, “ever to have left Florence. The whole matter could have been settled by letter.”

She did not care for the meeting-place. It was the old house in Islington where she and her sister had been born and had passed their childhood. It was her own property and her tenant had lately left, so it was empty. Convenient, too, and suitable. Only Isabelle Crosland did not very much want to return to those sombre rooms. She had not liked her own childhood, nor her own youth. Martha had married, though a poor sort of man, and got away early. Isabelle had stayed on, too long, then married desperately, only saving herself by Italy and music. The south had saved her in another way, too. Her husband, who was a dull, retired half-pay officer, had died of malaria.

Now she was going back. On Christmas Eve, nothing would be much altered; she had always let the house furnished. Why had she not sold, long ago, those heavy pieces of Jamaica mahogany? Probably out of cowardice, because she did not wish to face up to writing, or hearing anything about them. There it was, just as she remembered it, Roscoe Square, with the church and graveyard in the centre, and the houses, each like one another as peas in a pod, with the decorous areas and railings and the semicircular fanlights over the doors with heavy knockers.

The streetlamps were lit. It was really quite late at night. “No wonder,” Mrs. Crosland thought, “that I am feeling exhausted.” The sight of the Square chilled her: it was as if she had been lured back there by some malign power. A group of people were gathered round the house in the corner, directly facing her own that was number twelve. “Carols,” she thought, “or a large party.” But there seemed to be no children and the crowd was very silent.

There were lights in her own house. She noticed that bright façade with relief. Alike in the parlour and in the bedrooms above, the gas flared. Lucy had arrived then. That part of the arrangements had gone off well. The lawyers must have sent the keys, as Isabelle Crosland had instructed them to do, and the girl had had the good sense to get up to London before the arrival of the boat train.

Yet Mrs. Crosland felt unreasonably depressed. She would, after all, have liked a few hours by herself in the hateful house.

Her own keys were ready in her purse. She opened the front door and shuddered. It was as if she had become a child again and dreaded the strong voice of a parent.

There should have been a maid. Careful in everything that concerned her comfort, Mrs. Crosland had written to a woman long since in her employment to be in attendance. The woman had replied, promising compliance. But now she cried: “Mrs. Jocelyn! Mrs. Jocelyn!” in vain, through the gas-lit house.

The cabby would not leave his horse and his rugs, but her moment of hesitancy was soon filled. One of the mongrel idlers who, more frequently than formerly, lounged about the streets, came forward. Mrs. Crosland’s trunks and bags were placed in the hall, and she had paid her dues with the English money carefully acquired at Dover.

The cab drove away, soon lost in the fog. But the scrawny youth lingered. He pointed to the crowd on the other side of the Square, a deeper patch amid the surrounding gloom.

“Something has happened there, Mum,” he whispered.

“Something horrible, you mean?” Mrs. Crossland was annoyed she had said this, and added: “No, of course not; it is a gathering for Christmas.” With this she closed her front door on the darkness and stood in the lamp-lit passage.

She went into the parlour, so well remembered, so justly hated.

The last tenant, selected prudently, had left everything in even too good a state of preservation. Save for some pale patches on the walls where pictures had been altered, everything was as it had been.

Glowering round, Mrs. Crosland thought what a fool she had been to stay there so long.

A fire was burning and a dish of cakes and wine stood on the deep red mahogany table.

With a gesture of bravado, Mrs. Crosland returned to the passage, trying to throw friendliness into her voice as she called out: “Lucy, Lucy, my dear, it is I, your aunt Isabelle Crosland.”

She was vexed with herself that the words did not have a more genial sound. “I am ruined,” she thought, “for all family relationship.”

A tall girl appeared on the first landing.

“I have been waiting,” she said, “quite a long time.”

In the same second Mrs. Crosland was relieved that this was no insipid bore, and resentful of the other’s self-contained demeanour.

“Well,” she said, turning it off with a smile. “It doesn’t look as if I need have hurried to your assistance.”

Lucy Bayward descended the stairs.

“Indeed, I assure you, I am extremely glad to see you,” she said gravely.

The two women seated themselves in the parlour. Mrs. Crosland found Lucy looked older than her eighteen years and was also, in her dark, rather flashing way, beautiful. Was she what one might have expected Martha’s girl to be? Well, why not?

“I was expecting Mrs. Jocelyn, Lucy.”

“Oh, she was here; she got everything ready, as you see — then I sent her home because it is Christmas Eve.”

Mrs. Crosland regretted this; she was used to ample service. “We shall not be able to travel until after Christmas,” she complained.

“But we can be very comfortable here,” said Lucy, smiling.

“No,” replied Mrs. Crosland, the words almost forced out of her. “I don’t think I can — be comfortable here — I think we had better go to an hotel.”

“But you arranged this meeting.”

“I was careless. You can have no idea — you have not travelled?”

“No.”

“Well, then, you can have no idea how different things seem in Florence, with the sun and one’s friends about—”

“I hope we shall be friends.”

“Oh, I hope so. I did not mean that, only the Square and the house. You see, I spent my childhood here.”

Lucy slightly shrugged her shoulders. She poured herself out a glass of wine. What a false impression those school-girlish letters had given! Mrs. Crosland was vexed, mostly at herself.

“You — since we have used the word — have friends of your own?” she asked.

Lucy bowed her dark head.

“Really,” added Mrs. Crosland, “I fussed too much. I need not have undertaken all that tiresome travelling at Christmas, too.”

“I am sorry that you did — on my account; but please believe that you are being of the greatest help to me.”

Mrs. Crosland apologised at once.

“I am over-tired. I should not be talking like this. I, too, will have a glass of wine. We ought to get to know each other.”

They drank, considering one another carefully.

Lucy was a continuing surprise to Mrs. Crosland. She was not even in mourning, but wore a rather ill-fitting stone-coloured satin, her sleek hair had recently been twisted into ringlets, and there was no doubt that she was slightly rouged.

“Do you want to come to Italy? Have you any plans for yourself?”

“Yes — and they include a trip abroad. Don’t be afraid that I shall be a burden on you.”

“This independence could have been expressed by letter,” smiled Mrs. Crosland. “I have my own interests — that Martha’s death interrupted—”

“Death always interrupts — some one or some thing, does it not?”

“Yes, and my way of putting it was harsh. I mean you do not seem a rustic miss, eager for sympathy.”

“It must be agreeable in Florence,” said Lucy. “I dislike London very much.”

“But you have not been here more than a few hours—”

“Long enough to dislike it—”

“And your own home, also?”

“You did not like your own youth, either, did you?” asked Lucy, staring.

“No, no, I understand. Poor Martha would be dull, and it is long since your father died. I see, a narrow existence.”

“You might call it that. I was denied everything. I had not the liberty, the pocket-money given to the kitchenmaid.”

“It was true of me also,” said Mrs. Crosland, shocked at her own admission.

“One is left alone, to struggle with dark things,” smiled Lucy. “It is not a place that I dislike, but a condition — that of being young, vulnerable, defenceless.”

“As I was,” agreed Mrs. Crosland. “I got away and now I have music.”

“I shall have other things.” Lucy sipped her wine.

“Well, one must talk of it: you are not what I expected to find. You are younger than I was when I got away,” remarked Mrs. Crosland.

“Still too old to endure what I endured.”

Mrs. Crosland shivered. “I never expected to hear this,” she declared. “I thought you would be a rather flimsy little creature.”

“And I am not?”

“No, indeed, you seem to me quite determined.”

“Well, I shall take your small cases upstairs. Mrs. Jocelyn will be here in the morning.”

“There’s a good child.” Mrs. Crosland tried to sound friendly. She felt that she ought to manage the situation better. It was one that she had ordained herself, and now it was getting out of hand.

“Be careful with the smallest case in red leather: it has some English gold in it, and a necklace of Roman pearls that I bought as a Christmas present for you—”

Mrs. Crosland felt that the last part of this sentence fell flat. “... pearl beads, they are really very pretty.”

“So are these.” Lucy put her hand to her ill-fitting tucker and pulled out a string of pearls.

“The real thing,” said Mrs. Crosland soberly. “I did not know that Martha—”

Lucy unclasped the necklace and laid it on the table; the sight of this treasure loosened Mrs. Crosland’s constant habit of control. She thought of beauty, of sea-water, of tears, and of her own youth, spilled and wasted away, like water running into sand.

“I wish I had never come back to this house,” she said passionately.

Lucy went upstairs. Mrs. Crosland heard her moving about overhead. How well she knew that room. The best bedroom, where her parents had slept, the huge wardrobe, the huge dressing-table, the line engravings, the solemn air of tedium, the hours that seemed to have no end. What had gone wrong with life anyway? Mrs. Crosland asked herself this question fiercely, daunted, almost frightened by the house.

The fire was sinking down and with cold hands she piled on the logs.

How stupid to return. Even though it was such a reasonable thing to do. One must be careful of these reasonable things. She ought to have done the unreasonable, the reckless thing, forgotten this old house in Islington, and taken Lucy to some cheerful hotel.

The steps were advancing, retreating, overhead. Mrs. Crosland recalled old stories of haunted houses. How footsteps would sound in an upper storey and then, on investigation, the room be found empty.

Supposing she were to go upstairs now and find the great bedroom forlorn and Lucy vanished! Instead, Lucy entered the parlour.

“I have had the warming-pan in the bed for over two hours, the fire burns briskly and your things are set out—”

Mrs. Crosland was grateful in rather, she felt, an apathetic manner.

This journey had upset a painfully acquired serenity. She was really fatigued, the motion of the ship, the clatter of the train still made her senses swim.

“Thank you, Lucy, dear,” she said, in quite a humble way, then leaning her head in her hand and her elbow on the table, she began to weep.

Lucy regarded her quietly and drank another glass of wine.

“It is the house,” whimpered Mrs. Crosland, “coming back to it — and those pearls — I never had a necklace like that—”

She thought of her friends, of her so-called successful life, and of how little she had really had.

She envied this young woman who had escaped in time.

“Perhaps you had an accomplice?” she asked cunningly.

“Oh, yes, I could have done nothing without that.”

Mrs. Crosland was interested, slightly confused by the wine and the fatigue. Probably, she thought, Lucy meant that she was engaged to some young man who had not been approved by Martha. But what did either of them mean by the word “accomplice”?

“I suppose Charles Crosland helped me,” admitted his widow. “He married me and we went to Italy. I should never have had the courage to do that alone. And by the time he died, I had found out about music, and how I understood it and could make money out of it—”

“Perhaps,” she thought to herself, “Lucy will not want, after all, to come with me to Italy — what a relief if she marries someone. I don’t really care if she has found a ruffian, for I don’t like her — no, nor the duty, the strain and drag of it.”

She was sure that it was the house making her feel like that. Because in this house she had done what she ought to have done so often. Such wretched meals, such miserable silences, such violences of speech. Such suppression of all one liked or wanted. Lucy said:

“I see that you must have suffered, Mrs. Crosland. I don’t feel I can be less formal than that — we are strangers. I will tell you in the morning what my plans are—”

“I hardly came from Italy in the Christmas season to hear your plans,” replied Mrs. Crosland with a petulance of which she was ashamed. “I imagined you as quite dependent and needing my care.”

“I have told you that you are the greatest possible service to me,” Lucy assured her, at the same time taking up the pearls and hiding them in her bosom. “I wear mourning when I go abroad, but in the house I feel it to be a farce,” she added.

“I never wore black for my parents,” explained Mrs. Crosland. “They died quite soon, one after the other; with nothing to torment, their existence became insupportable.”

Lucy sat with her profile towards the fire. She was thin, with slanting eyebrows and a hollow at the base of her throat.

“I wish you would have that dress altered to fit you,” remarked Mrs. Crosland. “You could never travel in it, either, a grey satin—”

“Oh, no, I have some furs and a warm pelisse of a dark rose colour.”

“Then certainly you were never kept down as I was—”

“Perhaps I helped myself, afterwards — is not that the sensible thing to do?”

“You mean you bought these clothes since Martha’s death? I don’t see how you had the time or the money.” And Mrs. Crosland made a mental note to consult the lawyers as to just how Lucy’s affairs stood.

“Perhaps you have greater means than I thought,” she remarked. “I always thought Martha had very little.”

“I have not very much,” said Lucy. “But I shall know how to spend it. And how to make more.”

Mrs. Crosland rose. The massive pieces of furniture seemed closing in on her, as if they challenged her very right to exist.

Indeed, in this house she had no existence, she was merely the wraith of the child, of the girl who had suffered so much in this place, in this house, in this Square with the church and the graveyard in the centre, and from which she had escaped only just in time. Lucy also got to her feet.

“It is surprising,” she sighed, “the amount of tedium there is in life. When I think of all the dull Christmases—”

“I also,” said Mrs. Crosland, almost in terror. “It was always so much worse when other people seemed to be rejoicing.” She glanced round her with apprehension. “When I think of all the affectations of good will, of pleasure—”

“Don’t think of it,” urged the younger woman. “Go upstairs, where I have put everything in readiness for you.”

“I dread the bedroom.”

The iron bell clanged in the empty kitchen below.

“The waits,” added Mrs. Crosland. “I remember when we used to give them sixpence, nothing more. But I heard no singing.”

“There was no singing. I am afraid those people at the corner house have returned.”

Mrs. Crosland remembered vaguely the crowd she had seen from the cab window, a blot of dark in the darkness. “You mean someone has been here before?” she asked. “What about?”

“There has been an accident, I think. Someone was hurt—”

“But what could that have to do with us?”

“Nothing, of course. But they said they might return—”

“Who is ‘they’?”

Mrs. Crosland spoke confusedly and the bell rang again.

“Oh, do go, like a good child,” she added. She was rather glad of the distraction. She tried to think of the name of the people who had lived in the house on the opposite corner. Inglis — was not that it? And one of the family had been a nun, a very cheerful, smiling nun, or had she recalled it all wrongly?

She sat shivering over the fire, thinking of those past musty Christmas Days, when the beauty and magic of the season had seemed far away, as if behind a dense wall of small bricks. That had always been the worst of it, that somewhere, probably close at hand, people had really been enjoying themselves.

She heard Lucy talking with a man in the passage. The accomplice, perhaps? She was inclined to be jealous, hostile.

But the middle-aged and sober-looking person who followed Lucy into the parlour could not have any romantic complications.

He wore a pepper-and-salt-pattern suit and carried a bowler hat. He seemed quite sure of himself, yet not to expect any friendliness.

“I am sorry to disturb you again,” he said.

“I am sorry that you should,” agreed Mrs. Crosland. “But on the other hand, my memories of this house are by no means pleasant.”

“Name of Teale, Henry Teale,” said the stranger.

“Pray be seated,” said Mrs. Crosland.

The stranger, this Mr. Teale, took the edge of the seat, as if very diffident. Mrs. Crosland was soon fascinated by what he had to say.

He was a policeman in private clothes. Mrs.

Crosland meditated on the word “private” — “private life,” “private means.” He had come about the Inglis affair, at the corner house.

“Oh, yes, I recall that was the name, but we never knew anyone — who are they now — the Inglis family?”

“I’ve already told Miss Bayward here — it was an old lady, for several years just an old lady living with a companion—”

“And found dead, you told me, Mr. Teale,” remarked Lucy.

“Murdered, is what the surgeon says and what was suspected from the first.”

“I forgot that you said that, Mr. Teale. At her age it does not seem to matter very much — you said she was over eighty years of age, did you not?” asked Lucy, pouring the detective a glass of wine.

“Very old, nearly ninety years of age, I understand, Miss Bayward. But murder is murder.”

Mrs. Crosland felt this affair to be an added weariness. Murder in Roscoe Square on Christmas Eve. She felt that she ought to apologise to Lucy. “I suppose that was what the crowd had gathered for,” she remarked.

“Yes, such news soon gets about, Ma’am. A nephew called to tea and found her — gone.”

Mr. Teale went over, as if it were a duty, the circumstances of the crime. The house had been ransacked and suspicion had fallen on the companion, who had disappeared. Old Mrs. Inglis had lived so much like a recluse that no one knew what she possessed. There had been a good deal of loose money in the house, the nephew, Mr. Clinton, thought. A good deal of cash had been drawn every month from the Inglis bank account, and very little of it spent. The companion was a stranger to Islington. Veiled and modest, she had flitted about doing the meagre shopping for the old eccentric, only for the last few weeks.

The woman she had replaced had left in tears and temper some months ago. No one knew where this creature had come from — probably an orphanage; she must have been quite friendless and forlorn to have taken such a post.

“You told me all this,” protested Lucy.

“Yes, Miss, but I did say that I would have to see Mrs. Crosland when she arrived—”

“Well, you are seeing her,” remarked that lady. “And I cannot help you at all. One is even disinterested. I lived, Mr. Teale, so cloistered a life when I was here, that I knew nothing of what was going on — even in the Square.”

“So I heard from Miss Bayward here, but I thought you might have seen someone; I’m not speaking of the past, but of the present—”

“Seen someone here — on Christmas Eve—?”

Mr. Teale sighed, as if, indeed, he had been expecting too much. “We’ve combed the neighbourhood, but can’t find any trace of her—”

“Why should you? Of course, she has fled a long way off—”

“Difficult, with the railway stations and then the ports all watched.”

“You may search again through the cellars if you wish,” said Lucy. “I am sure that my aunt won’t object—”

Mrs. Crosland put no difficulties in the way of the detective, but she felt the whole situation was grotesque.

“I hope she escapes,” Mrs. Crosland, increasingly tired and confused by the wine she had drunk without eating, spoke without her own volition. “Poor thing — shut up — caged—”

“It was a very brutal murder,” said Mr. Teale indifferently.

“Was it? An over-draught of some sleeping potion, I suppose?”

“No, Ma’am, David and Goliath, the surgeon said. A rare kind of murder. A great round stone in a sling, as it might be a lady’s scarf, and pretty easy to get in the dusk round the river ways.”

Mrs. Crosland laughed. The picture of this miserable companion, at the end of a dismal day lurking round the dubious dockland streets to find a target for her skill with sling and stone, seemed absurd.

“I know what you are laughing at,” said Mr. Teale without feeling. “But she found her target — it was the shining skull of Mrs. Inglis, nodding in her chair—”

“One might understand the temptation,” agreed Mrs. Crosland. “But I doubt the skill.”

“There is a lovely walled garden,” suggested the detective. “And, as I said, these little by-way streets. Anyway, there was her head smashed in, neatly; no suffering, you understand.”

“Oh, very great suffering, for such a thing to be possible,” broke out Mrs. Crosland. “On the part of the murderess, I mean—”

“I think so, too,” said Lucy soberly.

“That is not for me to say,” remarked the detective. “I am to find her if I can. There is a fog and all the confusion of Christmas Eve parties, and waits, and late services at all the churches.”

Mrs. Crosland impulsively drew back the curtains. Yes, there was the church, lit up, exactly as she recalled it, light streaming from the windows over the graveyard, altar tombs, and headstones, sliding into oblivion.

“Where would a woman like that go?” asked Lucy, glancing over Mrs. Crosland’s shoulder at the churchyard.

“That is what we have to find out,” said Mr. Teale cautiously. “I’ll be on my way again, ladies, just cautioning you against any stranger who might come here, on some pretext. One never knows.”

“What was David’s stone? A polished pebble? I have forgotten.” Mrs. Crosland dropped the curtains over the view of the church and the dull fog twilight of evening in the gas-lit Square.

“The surgeon says it must have been a heavy stone, well aimed, and such is missing. Mr. Clinton, the nephew, her only visitor and not in her confidence, remarked on such a weapon, always on each of his visits on the old lady’s table.”

“How is that possible?” asked Mrs. Crosland.

Mr. Teale said that the object was known as the Chinese apple. It was of white jade, dented like the fruit, with a leaf attached, all carved in one and beautifully polished. The old lady was very fond of it, and it was a most suitable weapon.

“But this dreadful companion,” said Mrs. Crosland, now perversely revolted by the crime, “could not have had time to practise with this — suitable weapon — she had not been with Mrs. Inglis long enough.”

“Ah,” smiled Mr. Teale. “We don’t know where she was before, Ma’am. She might have had a deal of practice in some lonely place — birds, Ma’am, and rabbits. Watching in the woods, like boys do.”

Mrs. Crosland did not like this picture of a woman lurking in coverts with a sling. She bade the detective “Good-evening” and Lucy showed him to the door.

In the moment that she was alone, Mrs. Crosland poured herself another glass of wine. When Lucy returned, she spoke impulsively.

“Oh, Lucy, that is what results when people are driven too far — they kill and escape with the spoils, greedily. I do wish this had not happened. What sort of woman do you suppose this may have been? Harsh, of course, and elderly—”

“Mr. Teale, when he came before, said she might be in almost any disguise.”

“Almost any disguise,” repeated Mrs. Crosland, thinking of the many disguises she had herself worn until she had found herself in the lovely blue of Italy, still disguised, but pleasantly enough. She hoped that this mask was not now about to be torn from her; the old house was very oppressive, it had been foolish to return. A relief, of course, that Lucy seemed to have her own plans. But the house was what really mattered: the returning here and finding everything the same, and the memories of that dreadful childhood.

Lucy had suffered also, it seemed. Odd that she did not like Lucy, did not feel any sympathy with her or her schemes.

At last she found her way upstairs and faced the too-familiar bedroom. Her own was at the back of the house; that is, it had been. She must not think like this: her own room was in the charming house of the villa in Fiesole, this place had nothing to do with her at all.

But it had, and the knowledge was like a lead cloak over her. Of course it had. She had returned to meet not Lucy, but her own childhood.

Old Mrs. Inglis — how did she fit in?

Probably she had always been there, even when the woman who was now Isabelle Crosland had been a child. Always there, obscure, eccentric, wearing out a succession of companions until one of them brained her with the Chinese apple, the jade fruit, slung from a lady’s scarf.

“Oh, dear,” murmured Mrs. Crosland, “what has that old, that very old woman got to do with me?”

Her cases were by her bedside. She was too tired to examine them. Lucy had been scrupulous in putting out her toilet articles. She began to undress. There was nothing to do but to rest; what was it to her that a murderess was being hunted round Islington — what had Mr. Teale said? The stations, the docks... She was half-undressed and had pulled out her wrapper when the front-door bell rang.

Hastily covering herself up, she was out on the landing. At least this was an excuse not to get into the big, formal bed where her parents had died, even if this was only Mr. Teale returned. Lucy was already in the hall, speaking to someone. The gas-light in the passage illuminated the girl in the stone-coloured satin and the man on the threshold to whom she spoke.

It was not Mr. Teale.

Isabelle Crosland, half-way down the stairs, had a glance of a sharp face, vividly lit. A young man, with his collar turned up and a look of expectation in his brilliant eyes. He said something that Isabelle Crosland could not hear, and then Lucy closed the heavy front door.

Glancing up at her aunt, she said:

“Now we are shut in for the night.”

“Who was that?” asked Mrs. Crosland, vexed that Lucy had discerned her presence.

“Only a neighbour; only a curiosity-monger.”

Lucy’s tone was reassuring. She advised her aunt to go to bed.

“Really, it is getting very late. The church is dark again. All the people have gone home.”

“Which room have you, Lucy, dear?”

“That which you had, I suppose; the large room at the back of the house.”

“Oh, yes — that—”

“Well, do not concern yourself — it has been rather a disagreeable evening, but it is over now.”

Lucy, dark and pale, stood in the doorway, hesitant for a second. Mrs. Crosland decided, unreasonably, not to kiss her and bade her a quick good-night of a forced cheerfulness.

Alone, she pulled the chain of the gas-ring and was at once in darkness. Only wheels of light across the ceiling showed the passing of a lonely hansom cab.

Perhaps Mr. Teale going home.

Mrs. Inglis, too, would have gone home by now; the corner house opposite would be empty.

Isabelle Crosland could not bring herself to sleep on the bed after all. Wrapped in travelling rugs, snatched up in the dark, she huddled on the couch. Presently she slept, but with no agreeable dreams. Oppressive fancies lay heavily on her and several times she woke, crying out.

It was with a dismal sense of disappointment that she realised each time that she was not in Florence.

With the dawn she was downstairs. Christmas morning; how ridiculous!

No sign of Lucy, and the cold, dismal house was like a trap, a prison.

Almost crying with vexation, Mrs. Crosland was forced to look into the room that once had been her own. The bed had not been slept in. On the white honeycomb coverlet was a package and a note.

This, a single sheet of paper, covered an opened letter. Mrs. Crosland stared at this that was signed “Lucy Bayward.” It was a childish sort of scrawl, the writer excused herself from reaching London until after the holidays.

The note was in a different hand:

I promised to let you know my plans. I am away down the river with my accomplice. Taking refuge in your empty house I found this note. The whole arrangement was entirely useful to me. I left the Roman pearls for Lucy, as I had those of my late employer, but I took the gold. No one will ever find us. I leave you a Christmas present.

Mrs. Crosland’s cold fingers undid the package. In the ghastly half-light she saw the Chinese apple.