by P. D. James
“Had what on him?”
“He’s been in prison for assaulting small girls. He wouldn’t last long in the village if that came out. And it’s very convenient for him that Victor died when he did. He was thinking of changing his will. That’s why you’re here. If he liked you, he was thinking of making you his heir and cutting the rest of us out.”
It had been convenient for her, too, I thought, that my uncle had died when he had. I whispered:
“How do you know about the will?”
“Victor told me. He liked tormenting me. He could be terribly cruel. People say that he drove his wife to suicide.”
Gloria had swallowed her sleeping pill by now and her voice was becoming blurred. I had to strain to hear her.
“And then there’s the Turvilles.”
“What about the Turvilles?”
I realised that my voice had betrayed me. She laughed sleepily.
“You like her, don’t you? Everyone does. The perfect lady. Not like little Gloria. Must protect the dear Turvilles. But they’re up to something. Their door was ajar. The deaf don’t realise how loudly they whisper. He was saying, ‘We have to go through with it, darling. We’ve spent the money and we’ve planned it so carefully…So carefully.’ ” Gloria’s voice faded into silence.
Spent what money and for what? I wondered as I lay there listening to Gloria’s low guttural breathing. Wakeful, I relived all the events of that extraordinary Christmas. My arrival at Marston station, the silent drive through the darkening village, the school with the Christmas chains of coloured paper gleaming against the windows. The first sight of my uncle’s dark judgemental face. The carol singers creeping out under the blackout curtain. The game of hunt the hare. The silent figure of Santa Claus at the foot of my bed. Myself, standing by Victor’s bed and noting every detail of that grotesquely clad, unreal corpse. Dr. McKay leaving Mrs. Turville’s room with his old-fashioned Gladstone bag. The strand of tinsel thrown by Gloria over the Turville Grace. The gun thudding at Pottinger’s feet.
The varied images flashed upon my inner eye like camera shots. And suddenly, the confused medley of sights and sounds fused into a coherent picture. Before I fell asleep I knew what I must do. Tomorrow I would first speak to Inspector Pottinger. And then I would confront the murderer.
—
I saw Inspector Pottinger first and told him what I had to tell. Then I sought out Henry. He was in the great hall with the Turvilles and I asked if I might speak to him alone. Tactful as ever they got up and silently left. I said:
“I know it was you.”
That sixteen-year-old boy is a stranger to me now and memory is self-deluding. I couldn’t, surely, have been so confident, so self-assured as I seem to recall. But there is no doubt about what I had to say. And I remember perfectly—how could I ever forget?—how he looked and the words he spoke to me.
He looked down at me calmly, unfrightened, a little sadly.
“Suppose you tell me how.”
“When Santa Claus slipped your present into my stocking he was wearing a white glove. The murderer would have needed to wear gloves to avoid fingerprints. But the hands of the corpse were bare and I could see no gloves by the bed.”
“And you kept this vital piece of evidence from the police?”
“I wanted to protect the Turvilles. I saw them creeping about suspiciously in the night. He was carrying a rolled towel. I thought it concealed the gun.”
“And how did you imagine they got rid of it? Pottinger searched our rooms.”
“Mrs. Turville feigned illness. I thought she gave the gun to Dr. McKay after he’d seen her. He could have taken it away in his Gladstone bag.”
“But when the gun was found, you realised that your theory was wrong. The Turvilles were innocent.”
“And last night I guessed the truth. Dr. McKay did take something away in his bag: the Turville Grace. That’s what they were doing; substituting a fake statue for the one they believe will protect their son. They were desperate to regain it now that he’s gone to war.”
“So now you pick on me as suspect number one. Am I also supposed to have fabricated and planted the cracker?”
“No. You and I stood together during the carol singing. You were never near the door. I think you used it to complicate the crime—that’s why you suggested keeping it—but it was Mrs. Saunders who made it. She could have taken some of the crêpe paper her schoolchildren were provided with to make their Christmas decorations. I noticed, too, that the verse was written by someone who punctuated correctly as if by instinct. And it didn’t threaten death. All they wanted was to harass Victor, to spoil his Christmas. It was a small, pathetic revenge for the death of their daughter.”
“Well, go on. So far it’s remarkably convincing.”
“You took the cracker and the kitchen knife and stole some of Gloria’s sleeping pills while we were playing hunt the hare. The game is traditional at the manor. You could rely on its being played. And it was you who asked for a change of room. You wanted to be close to my uncle and to have me further away in case I heard the shot. The Turvilles are deaf and Gloria takes sleeping pills. My young ears were the danger. But even I couldn’t hear a shot in that heavily curtained bed. You can’t really be claustrophobic, can you? The RAF wouldn’t have accepted you if you were.”
He looked down on me, his pale handsome face still calm, still unfrightened. And I realised again that he must have been Santa Claus. No one else in the house could match my uncle’s height.
When he spoke, his voice was ironic, almost amused.
“Don’t stop now. Aren’t you getting to the exciting part?”
“You slipped the sleeping pills in Victor’s whisky while you were drinking together or, perhaps, later while he was in the bathroom. Then you took his gun and shot him while he lay drugged and undressed on his bed, probably between twelve fifteen and twelve thirty. Promptly at one o’clock you took the part of Santa Claus, being careful to leave your present in my stocking. Then you dressed the corpse in the robes and drove in the knife through the menacing cracker rhyme. It was you who pulled aside that curtain in the bathroom knowing that it would bring an immediate call. If Miss Makepiece hadn’t woken you—but you were the natural choice—you would have pretended to hear her prowling about outside. There was no difficulty in persuading her to play chess with you and thus innocently provide you with that vital alibi for the hours after one o’clock.”
He said calmly, “Congratulations. You should write detective stories. Is there anything you don’t know?”
“Yes. What you did with the white gloves and the death’s head charm from the cracker.”
He looked at me with a half-smile, then bent and rummaged among the cotton-wool snowballs round the foot of the Christmas tree. He brought one out, a rolled white ball with strands of cotton wool and tinsel still adhering to it. Deliberately he threw it into the fire. The flames licked at it, then blazed high.
“I’ve been waiting for the chance to do that. The fire had died by midnight and ever since it was relit this room has been occupied.”
“And the charm?”
“Someone will break a tooth on it next Christmas. I took the cloth and greaseproof paper off the Christmas pudding and pressed it in among the sixpenny pieces. Even if it’s found next year it will be too late to help Pottinger.”
“And, immediately after the shooting, you wrapped the gun in the crêpe paper and hid it in the Christmas tree present bearing your name. You would have taken it away with you when you left the manor if Gloria hadn’t found it so dramatically. No wonder you tried to restrain her.”
He said, “There’s no witness to this conversation. I’m trusting you; but not perhaps as much as you suppose.”
I looked at him full in the face.
“I’m trusting you, too. Five minutes ago I asked to see Inspector Pottinger and told him that I’d remembered something vital. I said that, when Santa Claus slipped your present into my stocking, I
distinctly saw the gold of his signet ring. Your fingers are much thicker than Victor’s. You couldn’t have forced on that ring. If I stick to my lie—and I shall—they won’t dare arrest you.”
He didn’t thank me. I didn’t say anything. I cried out:
“But why? And why now, this Christmas?”
“Because he murdered my mother. Oh, not in any way I can prove. But she killed herself after only two years of marriage to him. I always meant to destroy him, but the years pass and the will atrophies. And then came the war. This phoney war won’t last much longer and there will be nothing phoney about the killing once it begins in earnest. I’ll be shooting down young pilots, decent ordinary Germans with whom I’ve no quarrel. It has to be done. They’ll do it to me if they can. But it will be more tolerable now that I’ve killed the one man who did deserve it. I’ve kept faith with her. If I have to go, I’ll go more easily.”
I picture that blazing Spitfire spiralling into the Channel and I wonder if he did.
—
I’ve posted my account of the Marston Turville murder to Charles Mickledore, but God knows why he wanted it. It was hardly my most successful case; I never made an arrest and the mystery remains to this day. Once the boy recalled seeing that ring on his uncle’s finger, my case against Caldwell collapsed. The medical evidence showed that Mickledore was dead before three o’clock when Caldwell and Miss Makepiece finished their game of chess. Caldwell couldn’t have shot him and done all that was necessary in those few minutes between the delivery of the presents and the warden’s telephone call.
His alibi held.
The Turvilles were killed by a V2 rocket while on a day trip to London. Well, that’s how they would have wanted to go, quickly and together. But there are Turvilles still at the manor. Their son survived the war and bought back his ancestral home. I wonder if his grandchildren frighten themselves on Christmas Eve with tales of the murder of Santa Claus.
Neither Poole nor Miss Belsize benefited long from their legacies. She bought herself a Bentley and killed herself in it, driving while drunk. He purchased a house in the village and played the gentleman. But within a year he was up to his old tricks with small girls. I was actually on my way to arrest him when he hanged himself in his garage, choked to death on the end of a washing line. The public hangman would have made a neater job of it.
I sometimes wonder if young Charles Mickledore lied about seeing that ring. Now that we’re in touch, I’m tempted to ask him. But it was over forty years ago; an old crime, an old story. And if Henry Caldwell did owe a debt to society, he paid it at last and in full.
The Girl Who Loved Graveyards
She couldn’t remember anything about that day in the hot August of 1956 when they took her to live with her Aunt Gladys and Uncle Gordon in the small house in East London, at 49 Alma Terrace. She knew that it was three days after her tenth birthday and that she was to be cared for by her only living relations now that her father and grandmother were dead, killed by influenza within a week of each other. But those were just facts someone, at some time, had told her briefly. She could remember nothing of her previous life. Those first ten years were a void, unsubstantial as a dream that had faded but that had left on her mind a scar of unarticulated childish anxiety and fear. For her, memory and childhood both began with that moment when, waking in the small, unfamiliar bedroom with the kitten, Blackie, still curled up asleep on a towel at the foot of her bed, she had walked barefoot to the window and drawn back the curtain. And there, stretched beneath her, lay the cemetery, luminous and mysterious in the early morning light, bounded by iron railings and separated from the rear of Alma Terrace only by a narrow path. It was to be another warm day, and over the serried rows of headstones lay a thin haze pierced by the occasional obelisk and by the wing tips of marble angels whose disembodied heads seemed to be floating on particles of shimmering light. And as she watched, motionless in an absorbed enchantment, the mist began to rise and the whole cemetery was revealed to her, a miracle of stone and marble, bright grass and summer-laden trees, flower-bedecked graves and intersecting paths stretching as far as the eye could see. In the distance she could just make out the spire of a Victorian chapel, gleaming like the spire of some magical castle in a long-forgotten fairy tale. In those moments of growing wonder she found herself shivering with delight, an emotion so rare that it stole through her thin body like a pain. And it was then, on the first morning of her new life, with the past a void and the future unknown and frightening, that she made the cemetery her own. Throughout her childhood and youth it was to remain a place of delight and mystery, her refuge and her solace.
It was a childhood without love, almost without affection. Her uncle Gordon was her father’s elder half-brother; that too she had been told. He and her aunt weren’t really her relations. Their small capacity for love was expended on each other, and even here it was less a positive emotion than a pact of mutual support and comfort against the threatening world that lay outside the trim curtains of their small, claustrophobic sitting room.
But they cared for her as dutifully as she cared for the cat Blackie. It was a fiction in the household that she adored Blackie, her own cat, brought with her when she arrived, her one link with the past, almost her only possession. Only she knew that she disliked and feared him. But she brushed and fed him with conscientious care as she did everything, and in return he gave her a slavish allegiance, hardly ever leaving her side, slinking through the cemetery at her heels and turning back only when they reached the main gate. But he wasn’t her friend. He didn’t love her and he knew she didn’t love him. He was a fellow conspirator, gazing at her through slits of azure light, relishing some secret knowledge that was her knowledge too. He ate voraciously, yet he never grew fat. Instead his sleek black body lengthened until—stretched in the sunlight along her windowsill, his sharp nose turned always to the cemetery—he looked as sinister and unnatural as a furred reptile.
It was lucky for her that there was a side gate to the cemetery from Alma Terrace and that she could take a shortcut to and from school across the graveyard, avoiding the dangers of the main road. On her first morning her uncle had said doubtfully, “I suppose it’s all right. But it seems wrong, somehow, a child walking every day through rows of the dead.”
Her aunt had replied: “The dead can’t rise from their graves. They lie quiet. She’s safe enough from the dead.”
Her voice had been unnaturally gruff and loud. The words had sounded like an assertion, almost a defiance. But the child knew her aunt was right. She did feel safe with the dead—safe and at home. The years in Alma Terrace slipped by, as bland and dull as her aunt’s blancmange, a sensation rather than a taste. Was she happy? That was a question it had never occurred to her to ask. She wasn’t unpopular at school, being neither pretty nor intelligent enough to provoke much interest either from the children or the staff; an ordinary child, unusual only in that she was an orphan, but unable to capitalise even on that sentimental advantage. Perhaps she might have found friends, quiet, unenterprising children like her, who would respond to her unthreatening mediocrity, but something about her repelled their timid advances: her self-sufficiency, the bland, uncaring gaze, the refusal to give anything of herself even in casual friendship. She didn’t need friends. She had the graveyard and its occupants.
She had her favourites. She knew them all—when they had died, how old they had been, sometimes how they had died. She knew their names and learned their memorials by heart. They were more real to her than the living, those rows of dearly loved wives and mothers, respected tradesmen, lamented fathers, deeply mourned children.
The new graves hardly ever interested her, although she would watch the funerals from a distance and creep up later to read the mourning cards. What she liked best were the old, neglected oblongs of mounded earth or chipped stones, the tilted crosses, the carved words almost erased by time. It was around the names of the long dead that she wove her childish fantasies.
&n
bsp; Even the seasons of the year she experienced in and through the cemetery. The gold and purple spears of the first crocuses thrusting through the hard earth. April with its tossing daffodils. The whole graveyard en fête in yellow and white, as mourners dressed the graves for Easter. The smell of mown grass and the earthy tang of high summer, as if the dead were breathing the flower-scented air and exuding their own mysterious perfume. The glare of sunlight on stone and marble as the old women in their stained cotton dresses shuffled with their vases to fill them at the tap behind the chapel. Seeing the cemetery transformed by the first snow of winter, the marble angels grotesque in their high bonnets of glistening white. Watching at her window for the thaw, hoping to catch that moment when the edifice would slip and the shrouded shapes become themselves again.
Only once had she asked about her father, and then she had known, as children do, that this was a subject which, for some mysterious adult reason, it was better not to talk about. She had been sitting at the kitchen table with her homework while her aunt was busy cooking supper. Looking up from her history book, she asked: “Where is Daddy buried?”
The frying pan clattered against the stove. The cooking fork dropped from her aunt’s hand. It took her a long time to pick it up, wash it, clean the grease from the floor. The child asked once again: “Where is Daddy buried?”
“Up north. At Creedon, outside Nottingham, with your mum and gran. Where else?”
“Can I go there? Can I visit him?”
“When you’re older, maybe. No sense, is there, hanging about graves? The dead aren’t there.”
“Who looks after them?”
“The graves? The cemetery people. Now get on with your homework.” She hadn’t asked about her mother, the mother who died when she was born. That desertion had always seemed to her wilful, a source of secret guilt. “You killed your mother.” Someone sometime had spoken those words to her, had laid on her that burden. She wouldn’t let herself think about her mother. But she knew that her father had stayed with her, had loved her, hadn’t wanted to die and leave her. Someday, secretly, she would find his grave. She would visit it, not once, but every week. She would tend it and plant flowers on it and clip the grass as the old ladies did in the cemetery. And if there wasn’t a stone, she would pay for one, bearing his name and an epitaph she would choose. She would have to wait until she was older, until she could leave school and go to work and save enough money. But one day she would find her father. She would have a grave of her own to visit and tend. There was a debt of love to be paid.
