by P. D. James
We saw the cracker almost at once. It had been placed on a small table near the door. It was fashioned of red and yellow crêpe paper, overlarge, obviously an amateur effort but made with some skill. Miss Belsize seized it and read:
“Victor Mickledore! It’s got your name on it, darling. Someone’s left you a present. What fun! Do let’s pull it!”
He didn’t respond but drew on his cigarette and gazed at her contemptuously through the smoke. She flushed, then held the cracker out to me and we pulled together. The paper tore apart without a bang and a small object fell out and rolled over the carpet. I bent and picked it up. Wrapped neatly in an oblong of paper was a small metal charm in the shape of a skull attached to a keyring; I had seen similar ones in gift shops. I opened the paper folded round it and saw a verse hand-printed in capitals. Gloria cried:
“Read it out, darling!”
I glanced at my uncle’s impassive face and heard my nervous, overloud voice:
“Merry Christmas, Mickledore!
Go to bed and sleep no more.
Take this charm and hold it fast;
This night’s sleep shall be your last.
Christmas bells ring merrily;
Bells of hell shall ring for thee.
Happy Christmas, Mickledore.
Go to bed and sleep no more.”
There was a moment’s silence, then Henry said calmly, “One of your neighbours doesn’t like you, Victor. He’s wrong about the bells, though. No Christmas bells in wartime. The bells of hell are another matter. No doubt they aren’t subject to Defence Regulations.”
Gloria’s voice was piercing: “It’s a death threat! Someone wants to kill you. That woman was among the singers, wasn’t she? The one whose child you ran over and killed last Christmas Eve. The village schoolmistress. Saunders. That’s her name. Mrs. Saunders was here!”
There was a dreadful silence. My uncle spoke in a voice like a whiplash: “A witness saw a dark Daimler but it wasn’t mine. My Daimler never left the garage last Christmas Eve. Poole confirmed it.”
“I know, darling. I didn’t mean anything…”
“You seldom do.” He turned to Poole:
“The best place for this is the kitchen grate.”
Then Henry spoke: “I shouldn’t destroy it, not for a time anyway. It’s harmless enough, but if you get another and the thing becomes a nuisance it might be as well to let the police see it.”
Miss Makepiece said in her cool voice, “I’ll put it in the study desk.”
She took it away and the rest of us followed her with our eyes. Gloria said, “But you’ll lock your door, darling. I think you ought to lock your bedroom door.”
Victor said, “I lock my door against no one in my house. If I have an enemy I meet him face to face. And now perhaps we could go in to dinner.”
It was an uncomfortable meal. Gloria’s loud, half-tipsy volubility served only to emphasise the general cheerlessness. And it was at dinner that she told me about another of my uncle’s traditions. Promptly at one o’clock, “to give us time to get to sleep or at least be in our proper beds, darling,” he would put on a Santa Claus costume and distribute gifts to each of his guests. We would find a stocking ready at the foot of each bed.
“See what I got last year,” she exulted, stretching out her arm to me across the table. The diamond bracelet sparkled in the candlelight. My uncle cracked a walnut in his palm like a pistol shot.
“You may do better this year if you’re a good girl.”
The words and the tone were an insult.
I remember the rest of the evening in a series of brightly lit cameos. Dancing after dinner; the Turvilles staidly circling, Gloria clinging amorously to Henry, Miss Makepiece watching with contemptuous eyes from her seat by the fire. Then the game of hunt the hare; according to Henry this was another of Victor’s Christmas traditions, one in which the whole household was required to take part. I was chosen as hare. A balloon was tied to my arm and I was given five minutes to hide anywhere in the house. The aim was to regain the front door before I was caught and the balloon punctured. For me it was the only jolly part of the evening. I remember giggling housemaids, Gloria chasing me round the kitchen table, making ineffectual lunges with a rolled magazine, my last mad rush to the door as Henry burst from the study and exploded the balloon with one swipe of a branch of holly. Later, I remember the dying firelight gleaming on crystal decanters as Poole brought in the drinks tray. The Turvilles went to bed first—she wanted to listen to the ten forty-five Epilogue in her own room—and were shortly followed by Gloria and Miss Makepiece. I said my goodnights at eleven forty-five, leaving my uncle alone with Henry, the drinks tray between them.
At my bedroom door I found Miss Makepiece waiting for me. She asked me to change rooms with Henry. He was in the red room with its curtained four-poster and, after his accident in June when he had been forced down in his flight to South America and had escaped in seconds from the blazing cockpit, she thought he might find the bed claustrophobic. She helped me move my few belongings into the new room on the back corridor and bade me goodnight. I can’t say I was sorry to be further from my uncle.
Christmas Eve was nearly over. I thought about my day as I undressed and made my way to the bathroom at the turn of the corridor. It hadn’t been too bad, after all. Henry had been remote but amiable. Miss Makepiece was intimidating, but she had left me alone. I was still terrified of Victor but Mrs. Turville had been a motherly and protective presence. Deaf and shabby, she yet had her own gentle authority. There was a small carved statue of the Virgin in a niche to the right of the fireplace. Before the game of hunt the hare, someone had tied a balloon to its neck. Quietly she had asked Poole to remove it and he had at once obeyed. Afterwards she had explained to me that the statue was called the Turville Grace and for three hundred years had protected the heir from harm. She told me that her only son was in a Guards regiment and asked about my own family. How glad I must be that they were in Singapore where the war could not touch them. Could not touch them! The irony stings even now.
The lined bed curtains and the canopy were of heavy crimson material, damask I suppose. Because of some defect in the rails they couldn’t be fully drawn back except at the foot and there was barely space for my bedside table. Lying on the high and surprisingly hard mattress I had the impression of being enveloped in flames of blood, and I could understand Miss Makepiece’s concern that Henry should sleep elsewhere. I don’t think I realised then, child that I was, that she was in love with him any more than I accepted what I surely must have known, that Gloria had been my uncle’s mistress.
I slept almost immediately, but that internal clock which regulates our waking made me stir after little more than two hours. I switched on my bedside lamp and looked at my watch. It was a minute to one o’clock. Santa Claus would be on his way. I put out the light and waited, feeling again some of the excitement I had felt as a young child on this most magical night of the year. He came promptly, gliding in soundlessly over the carpet. Curtained as I was I could hear nothing, not even the sound of his breathing. I half-covered my head with the sheet, feigned sleep, and watched with one narrowed eye. He was holding a torch and the pool of light shone momentarily on his fur-trimmed robe, the peaked hood drawn forward over his face. A white-gloved hand slipped a package into the stocking. And then he was gone as silently as he had come.
At sixteen, one has no patience. I waited until I was sure he had gone, then I crept down the bed. The present, wrapped in red striped paper, was slim. I untied the ribbon. Inside was a box containing a gold cigarette case carved with the initials H.R.C. How odd that I hadn’t remembered! This present was, of course, meant for Henry. I should have to wait for mine until morning. On impulse I opened the case. Inside was a typed message.
“Happy Christmas! No need to get it tested. It’s gold all right. And in case you’re beginning to hope, this is the only gold you’ll get from me.”
I wished I hadn’t opened it, h
adn’t seen that offensive gibe.
I took some time replacing the wrapping and ribbon as neatly as I could, put the package back in the stocking, and settled myself to sleep.
I woke once again in the night. I needed to go to the lavatory. The corridor, like the whole house, was blacked out but a small oil lamp was kept burning on a table and I groped my sleepy way by its light. I had regained my room when I heard footsteps. I slipped back into the recess of the door and watched. Major and Mrs. Turville, dressing-gowned, came silently down the corridor and slipped into the bathroom, furtively as if gaining a refuge. He was carrying what looked like a rolled-up towel. I waited, curious. In a few seconds she put her head round the door, glanced down the passage, then withdrew. Three seconds later they came out together, he still carrying the rolled towel as if it were a baby. Afraid of being detected in my spying, I closed the door. It was a curious incident. But I soon forgot it in oblivion.
I had drawn back my curtain before sleeping and was woken by the first light of dawn. A tall figure was standing at the foot of the bed. It was Henry. He came up to me and handed me a gift-wrapped package saying:
“Sorry if I disturbed you. I was trying to exchange presents before you woke.”
He took his own but didn’t open it, and watched while I tore the paper off mine. My uncle had given me a gold watch wrapped in a ten-pound note. The richness of it left me speechless but I knew that I was pink with pleasure. He watched my face then said:
“I wonder what price he’ll exact for that. Don’t let him corrupt you. That’s what he uses his money for, playing with people. Your parents are overseas, aren’t they?”
I nodded.
“It might be sensible to write to them that you’d rather not holiday here. It’s your affair. I don’t want to interfere. But your uncle isn’t good for the young. He isn’t good for anyone.”
I don’t know what, if anything, I should have found to say. I recall my momentary resentment that he should have spoilt some of my pleasure in my present. But it was then that we heard the first scream.
It was horrible, a wild female screeching. Henry ran out and I scrambled out of bed and followed, down the corridor and round to the front of the house. The screams were coming from the open door of my uncle’s bedroom. As we reached it, Gloria appeared in the doorway, dishevelled in her mauve silk dressing gown, her hair loose. Clutching at Henry, she stopped screaming, caught her breath and gasped:
“He’s dead! Murdered! Victor’s murdered!”
We slackened our pace and walked almost slowly up to the bed. I was aware of Miss Makepiece behind us, of Poole coming down the corridor bearing a tray with early morning tea. My uncle lay stretched on his back, still in his Santa Claus costume, the hood framing his face. His mouth was half open in a parody of a grin; his nose was sharply beaked like a bird’s; his hands, neatly disposed at his side, seemed unnaturally white and thin, too frail for the heavy signet ring. Everything about him was diminished, made harmless, almost pathetic. But my eyes came back and fixed themselves finally on the knife. It had been plunged into his chest, pinning to it the menacing rhyme from the Christmas cracker.
I felt a dreadful nausea which, to my shame, gave way to a heady mixture of fear and excitement. I was aware of Major Turville coming up beside me. He said, “I’ll tell my wife. She mustn’t come in here. Henry you’d better ring the police.”
Miss Makepiece said, “Is he dead?”
She might have been asking if breakfast was ready.
Henry answered, “Oh yes, he’s dead all right.”
“But there’s so little blood. Round the knife. Why didn’t he bleed?”
“That means he was dead before the knife was put in.”
I wondered that they could be so calm. Then Henry turned to Poole: “Is there a key to this room?”
“Yes, Sir. On the keyboard in the business room.”
“Fetch it please. We’d better lock up here and keep out until the police arrive.”
They ignored Gloria, who crouched snivelling at the foot of the bed. And they seemed to have forgotten me. I stood there, shivering, my eyes fixed on that grotesque red-robed corpse which had been Victor Mickledore.
Then Poole coughed, ridiculously deferential: “I’m wondering, Sir, why he didn’t defend himself. Mr. Mickledore always kept a gun in the drawer of the bedside table.”
Henry went over and pulled it open.
It was then that Gloria stopped crying, gave a hysterical laugh, and sang out in a quavering voice:
“Happy Christmas, Mickledore,
Go to bed and wake no more.
Merry Christmas, sound the knell,
Murdered, dead and gone to hell.”
But all our eyes were on the drawer.
It was empty. The gun was missing.
—
A retired seventy-six-year-old police officer, even from a small County Force, isn’t short of memories to solace his fireside evenings and, until Charles Mickledore’s letter arrived, I hadn’t thought about the Marston Turville killing for years. Mickledore asked me to give my version of the case as part of a private account he was writing, and I was surprised how vividly the memories returned. I don’t know how he managed to run me to earth. He mentioned that he wrote detective fiction and that may have helped. Not that I read it. In my experience police officers rarely do. Once you’ve had to cope with the real thing, you lose the taste for fantasy.
I was interested to learn what had happened to that shy, unattractive, secretive boy. At least he was still alive. Too many of that little group which had spent Christmas Eve 1939 with him at Marston Turville had come to violent ends. One murdered; one shot down in flames; one killed in a car smash; two caught in a London air raid; and one, largely due to my activities, ignominiously dead at the end of a rope. Not that I lose any sleep over that. You get on with your job and let the consequences look after themselves. That’s the only way I know to do police work. But I’d better get on with my story.
My name is John Pottinger and in December 1939 I was a newly promoted Detective Inspector. The Mickledore killing was my first murder. I arrived at the manor with my Sergeant at nine thirty and old Doc McKay, the police surgeon, was hard on my heels. Henry Caldwell had taken charge and had done all the correct things. The death room was locked, no one had been allowed to leave the house and they had all kept together. Only Mrs. Turville was missing; locked in her bedroom and, according to her husband, too distressed to see me. But the Major was willing to let me in as soon as Doc McKay had taken a look at her. He was their family doctor; but then, he was doctor to all the village. Most of us involved in the case knew each other. That was my strength; it was also my weakness.
Once we had parted the heavy Santa Claus robe, its inner fold stiffened and darkened with blood, it didn’t need the missing gun to tell us that Mickledore had been shot. The bullet had been aimed at short range to the heart. And I couldn’t see Mickledore lying there meekly waiting for it. There was an empty glass on his bedside table. Taking it up, I could just detect the faint smell of whisky. But I had an open mind on what else it might have contained.
Doc McKay pulled out the knife—an ordinary sharp-bladed kitchen knife—with one quick jerk of his gloved hand. He sniffed round the larger gunshot wound for signs of scorching, then checked the body temperature and the progress of rigor mortis. The timing of death is always chancy, but he finally estimated that Mickledore had been killed sometime between eleven thirty and two o’clock. It was an opinion that the post-mortem examination subsequently confirmed.
We were short of manpower in that first winter of the phoney war and I had to manage with one Sergeant and a couple of Detective Constables new to the job. I interviewed the suspects myself. It wouldn’t have been convincing if they’d pretended any grief and, to give them their due, they didn’t try. They spoke the conventional platitudes and so did I; but we didn’t fool each other.
Caldwell said that he had last seen Mickledore carr
ying a glass of whisky to his room when they parted in the corridor shortly before midnight. The Turvilles and Miss Belsize, who had retired earlier, claimed that they were asleep by midnight and hadn’t stirred until morning. Charles Mickledore admitted that he had gone to the bathroom sometime after one—he hadn’t looked at his watch—but insisted that he had seen no one and heard nothing. I had a strong impression he was lying but I didn’t press him at that first interview. The young seldom lie convincingly. They haven’t had time to practise like the rest of us.
Poole and the cook, Mrs. Banting, lived in separate flats in the stable block; Mickledore had a dislike of servants sleeping in the house. The other three maids were local girls who came in part-time from the village and had gone home after dinner. Mrs. Banting had put the turkey and Christmas pudding in the pantry before leaving for her bed at eleven and Poole had left with her. She had returned at six to begin her Christmas preparations and Poole had arrived at seven to take up the early morning tea trays. Both claimed to have spent a night of innocent oblivion and swore that their keys hadn’t left their possession. No one heard the gunshot. The Turvilles were deaf, Miss Belsize probably half-drunk and doped, the young sleep soundly, and Mickledore’s door was of heavy oak. All the same, it was odd.
I may as well admit that my first suspect was Caldwell. This was a murder requiring nerve and that he had in plenty. I reckoned that his country had a better use for him than stringing him up in a hangman’s noose. But if the law found him guilty, he’d be for the drop, war or no war. But one thing, in particular, puzzled me. His mother had died in 1934. Why wait five years to take his revenge? Why this Christmas? It didn’t make sense.
