The Christmas Egg

by Mary Kelly

  “Laundry at Hampstead and TV repairs at Golders Green. Always something where bags and bundles wouldn’t look out of place. Perhaps the men were coming to mend that.” Nightingale pointed to the gas fire in the hearth. Three of its six jets were stuffed with corks.

  “Domestic economy,” said Beddoes.

  “But at Hampstead and Golders Green there was obviously collusion with servants who flitted. Who let them in here? Or could they just walk in? But who told . . .”

  “Wait a bit. You know her name?”

  “Carrikin. Rather odd.”

  Beddoes frowned and shook his head in an aggrieved way. “Karukhin,” he pronounced elegantly.

  “It’s only what I was told,” retorted Nightingale nettled. “Since you took that Russian course you’ve been unbearable. Why don’t you transfer to Special Branch?”

  “Run around seeing some nob doesn’t bruise his backside? Boil me first!”

  “All right, all right. Karukhin. A real Russian? I mean, by birth?”

  “Yes. Came over after the Revolution according to Mrs. Minelli. By the way, she’s all right, Mrs. M. Even the Division gives her the clear. Ex-waitress, naturalized in ’39, in the nick. Had to work in a hospital in the war, and stayed there. Deserted by her husband in ’41. Simple, devout, and all the rest. I’ve been talking to her.”

  “So I gather.”

  “Go in her room and the first thing to hit you in the eye is the ikon over the mantelpiece. Reproduction of the Virgin of Vladimir.” Beddoes turned a transparent gaze on Nightingale for a moment. “She calls it a holy picture. Apparently one day in an air raid Mrs. Karukhina came on Mrs. M. saying the rosary on her knees in the passsage. No words passed, and Mrs. M. thought no more of it, till Mrs. K. appeared holding the ikon, handed it over, and pointed imperiously at the mantelpiece. Up it went, pronto, and up it stayed. Mrs. M.’s convinced it diverted the bomb to the other side of the street. This ikon, by the way, has a chased gold frame stuck with emeralds and rubies the size of eggs,” Beddoes concluded with attempted nonchalance.

  “Oh?” Nightingale surpassed him. “Sure?”

  “If it’s brass and glass then the Division’s wrong too. He saw it first. That’s when he decided to let you know. Remember they took all that horrible shiny china from Hampstead.”

  “Nymphenburg porcelain, yes. So there seems to be a line in objets d’art as well as jewels—assuming that there was anything more up here and that these are the same people. Certainly it’s unusual to keep a trunk entirely empty, especially if there’s not much closet space in your one room.”

  Beddoes brought something out of his pocket and unwrapped a small object. “One day after Mrs. M. had taken some shopping upstairs, Mrs. K. gave her a brooch, similarly deeming explanation superfluous. Mrs. M. thought it flashy, so she never put it on except before taking other baskets up so’s not to let Mrs. K. think she disparaged her present.”

  He dropped the object he had unwrapped into Nightingale’s outstretched hand. It was a very dark amethyst, about an inch square, elaborately cut, within a border of small diamonds, the whole being mounted on a gold frame and pin.

  “Not a bad little nut, is it?” said Beddoes.

  “You must have winning ways.”

  “But she doesn’t know the value. When she said it was flashy, she meant Woolworth’s.”

  “And doesn’t know the ikon frame is gold?” Nightingale was sceptical.

  “Well, you know what it is. These people see gold plate on the altar from the year one. They get acclimatized. They know, and they don’t know.”

  Nightingale looked from the brooch to the figure on the dingy bed.

  “Slightly unbalanced,” said Beddoes, following his glance. “Never set foot outside the house in case the Reds got her.”

  “Hence Mrs. Minelli’s shopping? I assumed she was bedridden anyway. Is this fear of the Kremlin of recent growth or was there a predecessor to Mrs. Minelli?”

  Beddoes paused. “Ivan. Her grandson. He who sleeps behind that screen and wedges his closet door with the Greyhound Express.”

  “Beddoes! You casually mention this now, at this stage, after minutes of piffling—well, not quite. Go on, since you’ve managed to get it out.”

  “He’s a clerk at St. Pancras station,” said Beddoes in injured tones. “Been there twenty-five years.”

  “How old then?”

  “Forties. Well, you can see his grandmother must have been about ninety. Anyway, there’s nothing against him at work, the Division checked that quickly. May root something out later. On a superficial estimate he’s slow and slightly stupid but honest. On duty today from nine to five-thirty as usual, and he had lunch in the canteen. No one who was sounded mentioned abnormal behavior today, which they probably would have if there’d been any to notice. Doesn’t seem to have any cronies. However, he drinks. Mrs. M. told us that. I gather she often had to provide for both of them when Ivan had swigged his wages at a couple of sessions. He was afraid of Grandma—so was Mrs. M. incidentally—but not enough afraid to stop them having terrific rows. Mrs. M. could hear, but not understand. They carried on in Russian. That was another reason why Mrs. M. didn’t flaunt the brooch. She felt Ivan would have been a bit annoyed at Gran doling out largesse while he gasped for a pint.”

  “What about the ikon? If it’s such an eye-catcher . . .”

  “He never went in her room—strictest propriety. And you can’t see it from the door.”

  “Oh well. Ivan hasn’t shown up yet? Or will he be at the pub?”

  “Not finished yet,” said Beddoes with relish. “Mrs. M. came home from work and shopping about six-thirty. Ten minutes later she heard someone come in and go upstairs. She knew it must be Ivan because no one else has a key to the front door, apart from herself. Anyway, Mrs. M. heard Ivan call—the point being that Gran was so scared of Reds that she bolted herself in the room all day, except for trips to the communal cold water tap in the kitchen downstairs and the communal lavatory, and she wouldn’t unbolt till you’d knocked and declared yourself. Mrs. M. was lighting her fire. She heard Ivan moving overhead and thought of taking up the shopping. She hadn’t gone up with it as soon as she’d come in for two reasons. First, there’d been no light in the upper window. Nothing to alarm her in that, only meant Gran was asleep. Second, she wanted to wait for Ivan because he’d have money to pay her, she hoped. Just then she heard Ivan charge downstairs and out. She supposed he’d gone out to get something he’d forgotten. In about five minutes she went to her kitchen and noticed that the Karukhins’ door was open and the light was on. That was odd, because of Ivan being out and Gran’s Bolshevik neurosis. Mrs. M. slipped up to see if she was all right—and there you are. She ran out and dialed 999. Call came in at six fifty-two, patrol arrived six fifty-five, and the Division followed at seven. Called us at seven-twenty. Mrs. M. was in a terrible state at first, because she’d asked for the police. Said she never thought that Ivan had probably run out to do the same thing, or else to fetch a doctor. When he didn’t come back she was more upset than ever, frightened at the implications maybe.”

  “Anything between her and Ivan?”

  “You haven’t seen Mrs. M. I know tastes vary . . .”

  “Taste counts for nothing. You have to forget your own standards in the exercise of our charming duties. It couldn’t have taken Ivan an hour to come home from St. Pancras, so I suppose he dropped in for a quick one on the way. All right then. What have you done, besides chat with Mrs. Minelli?”

  “First, sent out an All Stations for Ivan—fortyish, about five foot eight, thin, fair, gray eyes, reddish face, blue chalk stripe suit, a cough, inclined to asthma, bad teeth . . .”

  “And you expect him to cavil at Mrs. Minelli? Never mind. All stations? Rather drastic. No, I suppose not, if he’s on the run. But it did sound as though he were taken by surprise.”

  “Why hasn’t he called us or a doctor in that case?”

  “True.”

  “And I�
��ve said not to take him in but just to tag him, in case he leads . . .”

  “Good. Anything else?”

  “Telfer looked at the front door lock. Nothing. No wax, no scratches.”

  “Anyone can get a copy of their own key cut and pass it on. Even Mrs. Minelli. Well?”

  “I thought you’d probably want that taken for analysis.” Beddoes pointed to a table set near the wall.

  On an ancient green cloth stood part of a wrapped loaf; the top edge of its rind was sticky where it had been cut with the same knife as had delved into the can of syrup and had scraped the last of the margarine from its crumpled wrapping, which also lay there, together with a saucer of sugar cubes and two cups stained with dribbles of cocoa.

  “Looking for dregs of a sleepy nature in the cups, I take it,” said Nightingale, “or in one cup, at least. What meal would this be?”

  “Ivan’s breakfast, Mrs. M. says. Gran never took anything but the cocoa.”

  “Come on, Beddoes, what’s the big surprise? I can see you swelling with it.”

  “Just a trifle I happened on. Don’t raise your hopes. On the table beside the bed, a book of devotions. On the flyleaf, here, you see, there’s some writing in pencil, done a good while ago I should imagine.”

  “Russian?”

  “Yes. This top lot’s a hymn, as far as I can make out. Religious verses, anyway. Quite in order. But the line at the bottom—know what it says?”

  “No, Beddoes, I don’t, but I should like to draw on the fund of talent at my disposal.”

  “It says A. K. Majendie, Twenty-eight Fitch Street, London.”

  Nightingale was silent. The words dropped like stones into the tank of memory; reflections of his past rose, jostled, and sank, undisciplined by chronology. A girl with a yellow coat and a yellow switch of hair, sitting on a bombed space beside a shop during a sunny lunch hour; a velvet tray of glitter in a shop window and a woman looking at it, her back turned to him, her black hair twisted in a coil, Christina, his wife, before she was his wife; the girl, with the yellow hair braided around her head, seen from across the street, leaning into that same window, inside, to remove some delicate object.

  “Majendie’s,” Nightingale said. “Let me look at that line. Thanks. Why write an English address in Russian script?”

  “Habit perhaps.”

  “I thought she might want to keep it from anyone not knowing Russian. We’ll get the experts to find out whether the two lots were written at about the same time. The pencil’s pressed off on the inside cover from the hymn, the single line isn’t. But that may be due to a variation in the paper or something.”

  “Ivan could speak Russian.”

  “But had she taught him to read it? If he came to England with her after the Revolution, he’ll have been here since he was a small boy, even a baby. And if she was a recluse, she won’t have exerted herself to launch him in the Russian colony. I don’t see any books. Where would he have learned to read it?”

  “He did come with her, according to Mrs. Minelli—not that she knew from experience but so he told her, and there’s no reason to doubt that. Also, Mrs. M. says this was their first and only home. Certainly this was Ivan’s address when he started at St. Pancras. No relations, to Mrs. M.’s knowledge. No friends, for that matter.”

  “I see,” said Nightingale. “Would you go and ask Mrs. Minelli whether she ever posted letters for Mrs. Karukhina.” Nightingale took considerable pains with his pronunciation of the name. “If so, to whom, if she can remember.”

  Beddoes went off in silence. Nightingale put the book on the table, removed his gloves, and leaned his arms on the mantelpiece, withdrawing them hastily as they encountered a mess of matches, shoelaces, sugar cubes, pennies and other small dusty objects. He examined the shelf. Under the dust he could see innumerable sticky rings and recent ones less thickly coated. Beside an alarm clock stood a half-used can of condensed milk and a pack of cocoa, ingredients of the morning drink, which plainly was always made in the cups as they stood on the mantelpiece handy to the kettle resting on the double gas ring at the side of the hearth. He supposed that the ring represented the Karukhins’ sole cooking facilities, unless they chose to trudge up and down stairs with dishes from Mrs. Minelli’s kitchen. And that dilapidated washstand, with its chipped enamel basin and jug, was where they washed. A cake of soap lying on the marble slab was dry and flaky, suggesting infrequent use.

  As he looked around the room Nightingale saw confirmation of his guess about the cooking, in that Cobb was carefully turning out of a corner cupboard an assortment of foodstuffs, mostly in paper bags. It was an advantage of his present rank, Nightingale reflected, that the investigation of crumby, mousy cupboards and dingy beds by him, personally, was a matter not of necessity but of choice. By being selfish enough to seize that advantage he was denied the satisfaction of discovering some factual clue. He had merely to supervise the people who might find the hair, the pin, the print which could make or break. But he was the one who, later, was supposed to make sense of the collected facts. He wondered why he had ever wanted the responsibility of drawing conclusions that could so easily be wrong.

  Beddoes returned, looking rather dejected. “As far as Mrs. M. knows, she never sent out a single letter and never received one.”

  “It doesn’t matter. What I’m going to do now is to ring Runciman. You never met him, did you?”

  Beddoes shook his head. “Left before I came. Strong on Slavonic Studies?”

  “That’s right. I want to ask him if the name Karukhin ever appeared in the course of his studies or duty.”

  “I’ve asked Records, as far as the duty part’s concerned. And if they weren’t naturalized they’ll have had to report in the war, so the Division’s checking that. There may not be anyone still there who remembers or knows them, and it’ll take some time to unearth records.”

  “Why not go straight to the Home Office? Ask whether these Karukhins are aliens or naturalized. They can look up both registers simultaneously and whoever gets the right file wins. I’ll see to it. Now, in case some form of press life puts in an appearance, you’ll have to let them know the old woman’s dead. Give them to understand it’s just an ordinary sudden death, and if they want to know why, in that case, we have a hand in it, let them think it’s the death that’s being queried, without any gloss of robbery. Do you think Mrs. Minelli’s told the neighbors much of the home life of the Karukhins? Or about the ikon and brooch?”

  “I’ll ask her.”

  “Do. And ask her if she hasn’t some friends or relations she could stay with for a while. If she hasn’t, tell her to say absolutely nothing to anyone but you or me, and to lock that ikon out of sight. Exert your charm, Beddoes. She might even let you take charge of the ikon till everything’s blown over.”

  “If it’s the Hampstead people, they’ll be watching the papers for even a tiny paragraph. They haven’t caused anything like this before. Think they might be in shock and clear out double quick?”

  “It probably won’t be news to them.”

  “But if they came in the gas truck at about ten-thirty, and she’s only been dead seven or eight hours . . .”

  “She was in a death sleep when they came, perhaps. And Ivan may have run out to tell them. Anyway, we can’t keep it out of the papers if they do get hold of it, and I don’t think it will make any difference to the Hampstead people. Success is going to their heads, I dare say. ‘Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold.’ Carry on as you are doing. You can have the car that brought me here for sending things back to headquarters—the cups, the book, anything you find. The car’s in the High Street, I’ll send it along. Oh, and the mort car will be coming, of course. When you’ve finished with the room for the time being, close it off. Then make a beginning with the neighbors. Anything at all about the Karukhins. There’s no pressing need for me to see Mrs. Minelli, since you have. It would be a mere formality.”

  “Thank you!” Beddoes answered irony with a w
ell-gauged bow.

  “For myself, I shall ring Runciman.” Nightingale kicked aside a sprouting potato which, dislodged by Cobb’s poking, had rolled across the floor. “And then I’m going to see Majendie.”

  He went out into the street with no more than a glance of curiosity at Mrs. Minelli’s door. Later, he would visit her, chiefly to see the ikon, the gold-framed, gem-studded ikon, which thieves would never have failed to collect had they known of its existence. He was sure that there had been thieves, the same thieves as at Hampstead or at least under the same direction. They were a new set, but they planned well. After the second episode, at Golders Green, he’d organized raids on the premises of every known large-scale receiver with a speed and strength that had enormously elated his pride, until each party had reported a dismal blank. The very importance of the thefts made their disposal through small dealers almost impossible. Therefore a new hand was at work, presumably a whole new ring. What really astounded him was that none of the others had split. Since he knew that neither fear nor chivalry would deter them from slitting an upstart’s throat, directly or by means of a hint in the right place, he was forced to conclude that they were as much in the dark as he was. He kicked a cigarette end into the gutter. A blight seemed to have fallen on the faculties of the informed and the informing. One very good source, having been beaten and left more dead than alive on an empty lot near the Bricklayer’s Arms, was now immured in St. Thomas’s, a fact which no doubt had its relevance. But he hadn’t much hope of doing anything without information.

  Nightingale sent the police car into Bright’s Row and walked through the nearest gap into Upper Street. He felt as if he had emerged from a tunnel into daylight. The broad road was bright with neon, electricity, and sodium, full of noise and movement from busy pavements and a double stream of traffic. The old High Street, bypassed by the century, atrophied in gloom; yet it ran like an undertone beneath the throbbing prosperity of its supplanter, a sort of memento mori.