by P. D. James
ALSO BY P. D. JAMES
Fiction
The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories
Death Comes to Pemberley
The Private Patient
The Lighthouse
The Murder Room
Death in Holy Orders
A Certain Justice
Original Sin
The Children of Men
Devices and Desires
The Skull Beneath the Skin
Innocent Blood
Death of an Expert Witness
The Black Tower
An Unsuitable Job for a Woman
Shroud for a Nightingale
Unnatural Causes
A Mind to Murder
Cover Her Face
Nonfiction
Talking About Detective Fiction
Time to Be in Earnest: A Fragment of Autobiography
The Maul and the Pear Tree: The Ratcliffe Highway Murders, 1811 (with T. A. Critchley)
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2017 by The Estate of P. D. James
Foreword copyright © 2017 by Peter Kemp
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Faber & Faber Ltd., London, in 2017.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
These stories first appeared in the following publications:
“A Very Desirable Residence” first published in Winter’s Crimes 8, edited by Hilary Watson. Copyright © 1976 by P. D. James.
“The Girl Who Loved Graveyards” first published in Winter’s Crimes 15, edited by George Harding. Copyright © 1983 by P. D. James.
“Mr. Millcroft’s Birthday” first published as “The Man Who Was Eighty” in The Man Who…, edited by H. R. F. Keating. Copyright © 1992 by P. D. James.
“The Murder of Santa Claus” first published in Great Detectives, edited by D. W. McCullough. Copyright © 1984 by P. D. James.
“The Victim” first published in Winter’s Crimes 5, edited by Virginia Whitaker. Copyright © 1973 by P. D. James.
“The Yo-Yo” first published as “Hearing Ghote” in The Verdict of Us All, edited by Peter Lovesey. Copyright © 2006 by P. D. James.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017950613
HARDCOVER ISBN 9780525520733
EBOOK ISBN 9780525520740
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover photograph by WebCat / Shutterstock
Cover design by Carol Devine Carson
v4.1
ep
Contents
Cover
Also by P. D. James
Title Page
Copyright
Foreword
The Yo-Yo
The Victim
The Murder of Santa Claus
The Girl Who Loved Graveyards
A Very Desirable Residence
Mr. Millcroft’s Birthday
A Note About the Author
Foreword
“Sleep no more”—the words that terrified Macbeth—strike horror into a house party in one of the stories collected in this book. They apply to characters in each of the others, as well. Anxiety-racked colluders in crime, unsettled witnesses of bygone killings, a murderer with bad dreams, and a troubled suppressor of homicidal memories populate these pages.
P. D. James’s great accomplishment as a writer of crime fiction was to take the murder-mystery novel that had its heyday in the “Golden Age” of the 1920s and 1930s and, by deepening it emotionally and complicating it morally and psychologically, give it a second golden age. In her short stories, she plays—half in tribute, half ironically—with the features that made the genre so addictively popular.
The narrator of the longest story, “The Murder of Santa Claus,” is a second-league writer of detective fiction who does “a workmanlike job on the old conventions, for those who like their murders cosy.” Recalling a murder he had personal experience of when he was sixteen, he harks back to Christmas Eve 1939. In a Cotswold manor house owned by an unpleasant patriarch, an ill-assorted group assembles: a genteel couple on their uppers, a vamp in a tight evening gown, a severely efficient secretary, a famous aviator soon to join the RAF. Scarcely have the mince pies and punch been circulated before menace fatally mounts.
It’s a classic scenario and, as with the title story of a previous P. D. James collection, The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories, is placed within a wonderfully evocative resurrection of a wartime Christmas. An unsecured blackout curtain brings a reproving telephone call from an Air Raid Warden. On the wireless is P. G. Wodehouse’s “The Crime Wave at Blandings” (starring Gladys Young and Carleton Hobbs). The next day, the King’s Christmas message quotes lines about a man standing at the gate of the year and asking for a light to guide him into the unknown.
The bombing raids and other carnage that unknown future brought are mentioned as the story closes, putting its teasing murder-riddle in perspective. Concluding twists in these tales don’t only ingeniously confound readers’ guesswork but sometimes redirect their sympathies. One ending contrives to be simultaneously poignant and sinister.
The prevailing tone is sardonically bracing. “Mr. Millcroft’s Birthday,” a very funny story about greed and snobbery getting their comeuppance, opens with a vigorously epitomising cameo: “Mildred Millcroft, seated in the front left-hand seat of the Jaguar, thumped her copy of The Times into a manageable shape for reading the social pages.”
Sharp insights as well as corpses strew these stories. So do a hangman’s noose, a blue poison bottle, a lino-knife, a revolver, a poker, sleeping pills and that fashionable toy of the 1930s, a yo-yo. Reading the use made of them, you share the pleasure of a writer gleefully and shrewdly revelling in the components of her craft.
—PETER KEMP
The Yo-Yo
I found the yo-yo the day before Christmas Eve, in the way one does come across these long-forgotten relics of the past, while I was tidying up some of the unexamined papers which clutter my elderly life. It was my seventy-third birthday and I suppose I was overtaken by a fit of memento mori. Most of my affairs were tidied up years ago, but there is always a muddle somewhere. Mine was in six old box files on a top shelf of the wardrobe in my little-used spare bedroom, normally out of sight and out of mind. But now, for no particular reason, they intruded into my thoughts with an irritating persistence. Their contents ought to be sorted through and the papers either filed or destroyed. Henry and Margaret, my son and daughter-in-law, would expect to find that I, the most meticulous of fathers, had spared them even this minor inconvenience on my death. There was nothing else I needed to do. I was waiting, suitcase packed, for Margaret to come in the car to collect me for a family Christmas I would infinitely have preferred to spend alone in my Temple flat. To collect me. That is what we can so easily be made to feel at seventy-three; an object, not exactly precious but likely to be brittle, to be carefully collected, conscientiously cared for and as conscientiously returned. I was ready too early, as I always am. There were nearly two hours to be got through before the car arrived. Time to sort out the boxes.
The box files, bulging and one with the lid wrenched loose, were tied with thin cord. Undoing this and opening the first box, I was met by a half-forgotten, nostalgic smell of old papers. I carried the box to the bed, settled down and began leafing
through a miscellany of papers from my prep-school days, old school reports—some of the inked comments yellowing, others as clear as if written yesterday—letters from my parents still in their fragile envelopes, with the foreign stamps torn away to give to school-friend collectors, one or two school exercise books with highly marked essays which I had probably kept to show my parents on their next furlough. Lifting one of these, I discovered the yo-yo. It was just as I remembered it, bright red, glossy, tactile and desirable. The string was neatly wound with only the looped end for the finger showing. My hand closed round the smooth wood. The yo-yo precisely fitted my palm. It felt cold to the touch, even to my hand which is now seldom warm. And with that touch the memories came flooding back. The verb is trite but accurate; they came like a full tide, sweeping me back to the same day sixty years ago, December 23rd 1936, the day of the murder.
I was at prep school in Surrey and was, as usual, to spend Christmas with my widowed grandmother in her small manor house in west Dorset. The rail journey was tedious, requiring two changes, and there was no local station, so she usually sent her own car and driver to collect me. But this year was different. The headmaster called me into his study to explain.
“I’ve had this morning a telephone call from your grandmother, Charlcourt. It appears that her chauffeur is unwell and will be unable to fetch you. I’ve arranged for Carter to drive you down to Dorset in my personal car. I need him until after lunch so it will be a later arrival than usual. Lady Charlcourt has kindly offered him a bed for the night. And Mr. Michaelmass will be travelling with you. Lady Charlcourt has invited him to spend Christmas at the manor, but no doubt she has already written to you about that.”
She hadn’t, but I didn’t say so. My grandmother wasn’t fond of children and tolerated me more from family feeling—I was, after all, like her only son, the necessary heir—than from any affection. She did her dutiful best each Christmas to see that I was kept reasonably happy and out of mischief. There was a sufficiency of toys appropriate to my sex and age, purchased by her chauffeur on written suggestions from my mother, but there was no laughter, no young companionship, no Christmas decorations and no emotional warmth. I suspected that she would much have preferred to spend Christmas alone than with a bored, restless and discontented child. I don’t blame her. I have reached her age and I feel exactly the same.
But as I closed the door of the headmaster’s study my heart was heavy with resentment and disgust. Didn’t she know anything about me or the school? Didn’t she realise that the holiday would be boring enough without the sharp eyes and sarcastic tongue of Mike the Menace? He was easily the most unpopular master in the school, pedantic, over-strict and given to that biting sarcasm which boys find more difficult to bear than shouted insults. I know now that he was a brilliant teacher. It was to Mike the Menace that I largely owe my public-school scholarship. Perhaps it was this knowledge and the fact that he had been at Balliol with my father which had prompted my grandmother’s invitation. My father might even have written to suggest it. I was less surprised that Mr. Michaelmass had accepted. The comfort and excellent food at the manor would be a welcome change from the spartan living and institutional cooking at school.
The journey was as boring as I had expected. When the elderly Hastings was at the wheel, he would let me sit in the front seat beside him and keep me happy with chat about my father’s childhood; instead, I was closeted in the back with a silent Mr. Michaelmass. The glass partition between us and the driver was closed and all I could see was the back of the rigid uniform hat, which the headmaster always insisted that Carter should wear when acting as chauffeur, and his gloved hands on the wheel.
Carter wasn’t really a chauffeur but was required to drive the headmaster when his prestige demanded this addition to his status. For the rest of the time Carter was part groundsman, part odd-job man. His wife, frail and gentle-faced and looking as young as a girl, was matron at one of the three boarding houses. His son, Timmy, was a pupil at the school. Only later did I fully understand this curious arrangement. Carter was what I had overheard one of the parents describe as “a most superior type of man.” I never knew what personal misfortune had brought him to his job at the school. The headmaster got Carter’s and his wife’s services cheaply by offering them accommodation and free education for their son. He probably paid them a pittance. If Carter resented this, we, the boys, never knew. We got used to seeing him about the grounds, tall, white-faced, dark-haired, and, when not busy, playing always with the red yo-yo. It was a fashionable toy in the 1930s and Carter was adept at the spectacular throws which the rest of us practised with our own yo-yos but never achieved.
Timmy was an undersized, delicate, nervous child. He sat always at the back of the class, neglected and ignored. One of the boys, a more egregious snob than the rest of us, said, “I don’t see why we have to have that creep Timmy in class with us. That’s not why my father pays the fees.” But the rest of us didn’t mind one way or the other, and in Mike the Menace’s class Timmy was a positive asset, diverting from the rest of us the terror of that sharp, sarcastic tongue. I don’t think in Mr. Michaelmass’s case the cruelty had anything to do with snobbery, or even that he recognised his behaviour as cruel. He was simply unable to tolerate wasting his teaching skills on an unresponsive and unintelligent boy.
But none of this occupied my mind on the journey. Sitting well apart from Mr. Michaelmass in the corner of the car, I was sunk in a reverie of resentment and despair. My companion preferred to be driven in darkness as well as silence, and we had no light. But I had brought with me a paperback and a slender torch and asked him if it would disturb him if I read. He replied, “Read, by all means, boy,” and sank back into the collar of his heavy tweed coat.
I took out my copy of Treasure Island and tried to concentrate on the small moving pool of light. Hours passed. We were driven through small towns and villages, and it was a relief from boredom to look out at brightly lit streets, the decorated gaudy windows of the shops and the busy stream of late shoppers. In one village a little group of carol singers accompanied by a brass band were jangling their collecting boxes. The sound seemed to follow us as we left the brightness behind. We seemed to be travelling through a dark eternity. I was, of course, familiar with the route, but Hastings normally called for me in the morning of December 23rd so that we did most of the drive in daylight. Now, sitting beside that silent figure in the gloom of the car and with blackness pressing against the windows like a heavy blanket, the journey seemed interminable. Then I sensed that we were climbing, and soon I could hear the distant rhythmic thudding of the sea. We must be on the coast road. It would not be long now. I shone my torch on the face of my wristwatch. Half past five. We should be at the manor in less than an hour.
And then Carter slowed the car and bumped gently onto the grass verge. The car stopped. He pulled back the glass partition and said, “I’m sorry, Sir. I need to get out. A call of nature.”
The euphemism made me want to giggle. Mr. Michaelmass hesitated for a moment, then said, “In that case we’d better all get out.”
Carter came round and punctiliously opened the door. We stepped out onto lumpy grass, and into black darkness and the swirl of snow. The sea was no longer a background murmur but a crashing tumult of sound. I was at first aware of nothing but the snowflakes on my cheeks, the two dark figures close to me, the utter blackness of the night and the keen salty tang of the sea. Then, as my eyes became accustomed to the darkness, I could see the shape of a huge rock to my left.
Mr. Michaelmass said, “Go behind that boulder, boy. Don’t take long. And don’t go wandering off.”
I stepped closer to the boulder, but not behind it, and the two figures moved out of sight, Mr. Michaelmass walking straight ahead and Carter to the right. A minute later, turning from the rock face, I could see nothing, not the car or either of my companions. It would be wise to wait until one of them reappeared. I plunged my hand into my pocket and, almost without think
ing, took out the torch and shone it over the headland. The beam of light was narrow but bright. And in that moment, instantaneously, I saw the act of murder.
Mr. Michaelmass was standing very still about thirty yards away, a dark shape outlined against the lighter sky. Carter must have moved up silently behind him on the thin carpet of snow. Now, in that second when the dark figures were caught in the beam, I saw Carter violently lunge forward, arms outstretched, and seemed to feel in the small of my back the strength of that fatal push. Without a sound Mr. Michaelmass disappeared from view. There had been two shadowy figures; now there was one.
Carter knew that I had seen; how could he help it? The beam of light had been too late to stop the action, but now he turned and it shone full on his face. We were alone together on the headland. Curiously I felt absolutely no fear. I suppose that what I did feel was surprise. We moved towards each other almost like automata. I said, hearing the note of simple wonder in my voice, “You pushed him over. You murdered him.”
He said, “I did it for the boy. God help me, I did it for Timmy. It was him or the boy.”
I stood for a moment silently regarding him, aware again of the soft liquid touch of the snow melting on my cheeks. I shone the torch down and saw that the two sets of footprints were already no more than faint smudges on the snow. Soon they would be obliterated under that white blanket. Then, still without speaking, I turned and we walked back to the car together, almost companionably, as if nothing had happened, as if that third person was walking by our side. I have a memory, but perhaps I may be wrong, that at one place Carter seemed to stumble and I held his arm to steady him. When we reached the car he said, his voice dull and without hope, “What are you going to do?”
“Nothing. What is there to do? He slipped and fell over the cliff. We weren’t there. We didn’t see, either of us. You were with me at the time. We were both together by that rock. You never left my side.”
