The Christmas Card Crime and Other Stories

by Martin Edwards

  The colour fled from the little cockney’s face, leaving it a dirty white.

  “I don’t know,” he began. “I—”

  “You knew!” snapped Lowe sternly, “because it was you who took this card out of Miss Lake’s handbag in the first place. You who tied her up and locked her in your cupboard. You who came downstairs and later killed William Makepiece. You who, when the girl was found, lied and said that you had felt thirsty and came down to this bar and drawn yourself beer.”

  “You’re talking nonsense!” cried the man. “You’re trying to frame this on me! I did come down to get a drink! All I’ve told you is true!” In his excitement all trace of his cockney accent had vanished, and Lowe was quick to remark on it.

  “You’ve forgotten your accent, Mr Willings,” he said softly. “The same as you forgot to verify your facts concerning your story of the beer.”

  “What do you mean?” muttered the other.

  “I mean,” retorted Trevor Lowe curtly, “that that beer engine has not been connected for a year! That’s what Cornford was going to tell us when you shot him. It was absolutely impossible for you to have drawn any beer that way. That, coupled with the fact that you fell into the trap I had prepared for you has given you away. No one but the man who searched Miss Lake’s room could have known what the object was I referred to, and yet you went and fetched it without my telling you—fetched it from among half a dozen other objects, all of which might equally have been the right one.”

  The trapped man’s lips drew back from his teeth in a snarl. Without warning he picked up a wooden stool that stood in front of the bar and hurled it at Trevor Lowe’s head.

  “I suppose you think you’ve got me?” he cried harshly. “But you haven’t, yet!”

  Lowe dodged the stool and it went crashing through the window, ripping out glass and woodwork—and then Shadgold took a hand. As Willings made a dash for the door he barred his path and gripped him by the arm.

  “No you don’t!” he growled; and the revolver with which the other had shot the landlord appeared in his other hand. “You just keep quiet. If you can find any rope, Lowe, we’ll tie him up until the police arrive.”

  * * *

  The police patrol was stopped as he passed the inn and given the news and instructions. Later came a sleepy-eyed inspector and a constable. They came in a car, and when they went away were accompanied by the man who called himself Arty Willings.

  Later on that morning, when the snow had stopped falling and a pale sun shone coldly on the expanse of white, a car, which Lowe had asked the police to send from Bugle, arrived and drove the dramatist, Shadgold, Arnold White, and the girl to Tregoney, where they left her to meet the father she had never seen.

  It was on the morning of Christmas Day that Trevor Lowe heard the last echo of that sinister business at the gloomy inn. Shadgold had just returned from Bugle and an interview with the police. Arty Willings had been identified as Montague Buxton, a cousin of Sir Joshua Lanning, and when he found that the game was up he made a full confession. It tallied almost exactly with Lowe’s theory.

  The old man had told Buxton the story of his efforts to find his missing daughter, and gradually the idea had taken shape in Buxton’s brain to put forward a substitute. He had led a fairly wild life and was associated with a woman who had few scruples that money could not overrule. He had confided his plans to her, and she had agreed to present herself to Sir Joshua as his missing relative. Buxton, who had been staying with the old man, was aware that he was prepared to accept anyone who could produce the torn half of the Christmas card which matched his own.

  In order to keep an eye on the girl he had disguised himself as the rather insignificant looking cockney, and had met the Western Express from Paddington at Bodmin. He had tried to kidnap the girl when the train came to a halt after snow blocked the line but he’d been surprised by Trevor Lowe and Arnold White. When they had all been forced to spend the night at the Chained Man, he was forced to come up with a new plan.

  “There’s plenty of evidence against him,” the Scotland Yard man concluded. “I should think the jury would bring in a verdict without leaving the box.”

  “Well, he deserves what he gets,” said Trevor Lowe, “if ever a man did.”

  The Motive

  Ronald Knox

  Ronald Knox (1888–1957) was a brilliant member of an outrageously gifted family of overachievers. One of his brothers, “Evoe,” became editor of Punch; another, “Dilly,” was a legendary codebreaker whose war-time exploits are now honoured at Bletchley Park. His sister Winifred enjoyed success under her married name, Winifred Peck, with a string of popular novels; her output included a couple of detective stories which have recently been republished. Educated at Eton and Balliol, Ronnie Knox was an intellectual, a classicist and Oxford University tutor whose pupils included the future Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan. After leaving the Anglican church, he became well known as a Catholic priest and as a broadcaster on BBC radio.

  Knox’s passion for the Sherlock Holmes stories led him to become a pioneer of Sherlockian criticism. This fondness for detective fiction led him to try his hand at writing it himself, and his first mystery novel, The Viaduct Murder, appeared in 1925. This stand-alone story was followed at regular intervals by five more detective novels, each featuring the amiable insurance investigator Miles Bredon, and he became a prominent Golden Age detective author, focused mainly on puzzles rather than in-depth characterization. Knox devised the famous “Ten Commandments” of detective fiction, facetious “rules” which some people took far too seriously. Elements from this “Decalogue” were embodied in the initiation ritual to be undergone by new recruits to the Detection Club, of which Knox was a founder member; the ritual continues, in much-changed form, to this day. From the outset, however, Club members delighted in flouting the so-called “rules”. Knox wrote only a handful of short crime stories, but their quality makes this a matter for regret. This elaborate story with a cheeky if not shameless final twist first appeared in The Illustrated London News on 17 November 1937. For one of the characters, Westmacott, Knox borrowed a pen name used by his Detection Club colleague Agatha Christie; it was a custom of Club members at the time, and something of an in-joke, to give each other such hat-tips in their fiction.

  “A certain amount of dust is good for a juryman’s eyes. It prevents him going to sleep.”

  Sir Leonard Huntercombe is probably responsible for more scoundrels being at large than any other man in England. His references to the feelings of his client, to the long ordeal which a criminal prosecution involves, to the fallibility of witnesses, to those British liberties which we all enjoy only on the condition that everybody must be given the benefit of the doubt unless he is found with his hand in the till, are a subject of legitimate tedium and irreverent amusement to the reporters, who have heard it all before. But it still goes down with the jury, fresh to their job; and, after all, that is more important. It does not often happen to such a man that he is drawn into the old, old argument, whether a defending counsel is justified in pressing his defence when he privately knows his client to be guilty. And, of all places, you might have expected him to be free from such annoyances in the Senior Common Room of Simon Magus—the smoking-room, to be more accurate. Dons hate a scene, and prefer to talk trivialities after dinner. It is hardly even good form, nowadays, to talk a man’s own shop to him. In these days of specialization we are all bored with each other’s technicalities, and a tacit convention has grown up that we should stick to the weather and the Boat Race. Sir Leonard was justified, then, if his eye resembled that of a codfish rather more than usual.

  For, as bad luck would have it, Penkridge was dining as somebody else’s guest—Penkridge, the dramatic critic, to whom all the world is a stage, and everything, consequently, a fit subject for dramatic criticism. It takes less than the Simon Magus port (though that is a powerful affair) to make
such a man as Penkridge boorishly argumentative. He had trailed his coat deliberately, with a forthcoming article in view, and had contrived to put Sir Leonard on his own defence almost before he knew it. I need hardly say that he was adopting the most Puritan view.

  McBride, the philosopher, was the host of the great man; and he felt bound to interfere, partly from a sense of hospitality, and partly because he always likes to be desperately just. (Nobody, it has been said, has seen more points of view than McBride, or adopted less.) “I was just thinking,” he said, “that perhaps you could put up an apology for Sir Leonard’s point of view if you claim that Law should be regarded as one of the sciences. You see, it’s notorious, isn’t it—I think even Cowan here will agree with me—that science owes some of its greatest developments to the influence of theories which have proved quite false, but were suggestive nevertheless, and put people on the track of the truth. Isn’t it arguable, I mean, in the same way, that my friend here is justified in putting forward a hypothesis, which will help forward the cause of truth if only by eliminating error?”

  Penkridge, who hates dons, was evidently preparing to say something unpleasant; but Sir Leonard forestalled him by disowning the proffered help. “It’s not a scientific mind you need in the legal profession,” he insisted; “it’s a kind of artistic gift. You’ve got to be imaginative; to throw yourself into the business of picturing the story happening as you want it to have happened; with your client innocent, of course. Probably, if we knew, we should find that the truth in many cases is even stranger than all our imaginings. But imagination is what you must have—did I ever tell you the story of a client of mine, a man by the name of Westmacott?”

  Several voices demanded that the story should be told; better to have Sir Leonard being prosy, than Penkridge being unmannerly. And Sir Leonard, when his cigar was going, went ahead with the story.

  “I first came across Westmacott,” explained Sir Leonard, “over a business that never came into court, though it precious nearly did. I was only called in on a minor point to give counsel’s opinion. He was a man in late middle age, with an unhealthy look about him, as if you wouldn’t give him a very long life, and a depressed, restless sort of manner, as if his mind was preoccupied with something else than what he was talking about at the moment. He had done well on the Stock Exchange, and had retired just lately, with a considerable income he hardly knew what to do with. At least, it was a surprise to his friends when he went to stay over Christmas at one of those filthy great luxury hotels in Cornwall. It was the kind of place that tried to make you believe you were on the Riviera, with any amount of central heating and artificial sunlight, and a covered-in bathing-pool where the water was kept at a temperature of eighty or so, night and day. Of course, he might have gone to Cornwall for his health; but one didn’t see why he should have gone to a place like that, because he was well known to be old-fashioned in his views and conservative in his opinions, whereas the Hotel Resplendent was all full of modern people, a cosmopolitan and rather Bohemian crowd. Among the rest there was a well-known literary man; he’s still alive, and you’d all know his name, so I’ll call him just Smith.

  “I’m speaking of some years ago, you’ll understand. Nowadays, of course, it doesn’t matter what anybody writes, or what sort of opinions he puts forward; it’s all art. But at the time of which I’m speaking, there were still people going about who were capable of being shocked, and they were shocked by Smith. It wasn’t so much his indecency, though every book he wrote looked as if it was meant to be seized by the police. He was really, if an old fogy like myself can be allowed to use such forgotten language, a bad influence on the young people; everybody admitted it, though already most people rather admired him for it. Westmacott had never met him before, and the other people in the hotel felt pretty certain that the two wouldn’t hit it off. The curious thing is, they were wrong. Westmacott hadn’t read any of Smith’s stuff, it appeared; indeed, he read very little except detective stories, which he devoured at the rate of one a day. And—well, strange acquaintances do ripen, and ripen fast, in a god-forsaken place like the Hotel Resplendent.

  “It was a bad season; money wasn’t being thrown about that year as much as usual; and the management tried to make the best of the position by encouraging the guests to be a sort of family party, with any amount of ‘olde-worlde’ festivities. Naturally, they concentrated on Christmas Day; crackers and Christmas presents, and a synthetic boar’s head, and a Yule-log specially imported from Sweden; and a set of waits who’d been in training under an opera expert for months past. By half past ten the company—between twenty and thirty of them, when you’d counted out the invalids who’d gone to bed early, and the idiots who’d gone out in cars for no reason whatever—found themselves set down by the master of the revels to play ‘blind man’s buff.’ This didn’t go too well, especially as the great hall in which they played it was heated like a crematorium. It was Westmacott, people remembered afterwards, who made the suggestion you would have expected to come from anybody but Westmacott—that they should all go and play ‘blind man’s buff’ in the swimming-bath.

  “Well, they got some kick out of it after that. Westmacott didn’t go in himself, but he hung about on the edge; as a matter of fact, it was only pretty strong swimmers who did go in, because the bath was a matter of twelve feet deep at the shallowest part, and there was nothing but a hand-rail to lug yourself out by. Smith and Westmacott got into an argument, Westmacott saying he didn’t believe you could know what direction you were swimming in when you were blindfolded, and Smith (who was an exceptionally good swimmer himself) maintaining that it was perfectly easy, unless you’d got a bad sense of direction anyhow. It was nearly midnight when the party went away, and it seems that Smith and Westmacott stayed behind to settle their differences with a practical try-out and a bet; Smith was to swim ten lengths in the bath each way, touching the ends every time, but never touching the sides. They were quite alone when Westmacott adjusted the handkerchief on his new friend’s forehead, to make sure that everything was above-board.

  “Well, Smith did his ten lengths each way, and by his own account made a good thing of it. As he swam he didn’t bother to touch the hand-rail, which was rather high out of the water; but when he’d finished he naturally felt for it—and it wasn’t there! He tore the handkerchief off his eyes, which wasn’t too easy, and found the whole place was in the dark. The rail wasn’t within his reach anywhere, and he tumbled to what must have happened. Somehow a goodish lot of water must have been let out of the bath while he wasn’t looking; and there was nothing to do but go on swimming about until somebody came to put things right for him; or, alternatively, until the level of the water fell so much that he was able to stand on the bottom.

  “Other things began to occur to him before long. For one thing, he knew, more or less, where it was that the water escaped when the bath was changed, and he knew that there was a considerable undertow when it happened. He found there was no undertow now, which meant that the water wasn’t escaping any longer, and there was no chance of finding that he’d got into his depth. Also, he remembered that the swimming-bath was a long way from anywhere, and it wasn’t very likely that he would be heard if he shouted. Also, he couldn’t quite see how the water could have started emptying itself and then stopped, unless somebody was controlling it.

  “Well, they say the devil looks after his own, and it so happened that the night watchman, whom they kept at the Hotel Resplendent (chiefly to keep out of the way when he wasn’t wanted), had spotted that the water was running away, and mentioned it to somebody; a search was made, and Smith was pulled out of the water with a rope, none too soon for his peace of mind. Smith was positive, of course, that he had been the victim of a particularly cunning murderous attack. I say particularly cunning, because, once he had drowned, it would have been easy for Westmacott (he assumed Westmacott was the villain) to have let the water into the bath again; and all the wor
ld would have been left supposing that Smith had committed suicide—how else could a strong swimmer have drowned with a hand-rail in his reach all the time? It looked as if it was going to be a very nasty business, and what didn’t make it any better was Westmacott’s own explanation, made privately to his lawyers, that the whole thing was a joke, and he had been meaning to rescue Smith later on. Nothing, it was explained to him, is more difficult to predict than a jury’s sense of humour. Enormous efforts were made to hush the thing up, chiefly by the hotel people, who thought it meant the end of their business if they were involved in a scandal; I’m not sure they were right there, but, as I say, this happened some years ago. The difficulty of Smith’s case was that there was no proving it was Westmacott who had tampered with the water apparatus (as a matter of fact, anybody could have done it), and it was that hitch that induced the police to let it go; and Smith to be content with a handsome compensation.

  “Well, it was touch and go, and there was nothing I expected less than to find Westmacott, to all appearances a dull and unadventurous man, figuring in my line of business again. Though, as a matter of fact, the police had found out things about him which would have altered my opinion if I’d known about them. His man, fortunately for the police, had done time at an earlier stage in his career, and was all too ready to give them information. He assured them that a great change had come over his master within the last week or so before he went to the Resplendent; he had come home one morning looking like a man bowed down by some hideous secret anxiety, though up to then he had been in normally good spirits. He cursed the servants freely, he would start at shadows. He bought a revolver, which the police found in his rooms (he was a bachelor, I forgot to say); and although this only looked like self-defence, it was a more peculiar circumstance that, about the same time, he got hold of a drug (I forget the name of it now) which is deadly poison, and I’m not sure that he hadn’t forged a doctor’s certificate to get it.