Mike moved forward. His face was pale and his eyes were dangerous. George laid a hand upon his arm.
‘Wait,’ he commanded. ‘Pouter, you may go. Now,’ he continued as the door closed behind the man, ‘you, Mr Welkin, you’ll have to explain, you know.’
Mr Welkin kept his temper. He seemed almost amused. ‘Well, it’s perfectly simple, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘This fellow has been wandering about in this disguise all the evening. He couldn’t come in here because her ladyship wanted him to be a surprise to the children, but he had the rest of the house to himself. He went round lifting anything he fancied, including my diamonds. Suppose he had been met? No one would think anything of it. Father Christmas always carries a sack. Then he went off down the drive, where he met a confederate in a car, handed over the stuff and came back to the party’
Mike began to speak, but Sheila interrupted him. ‘What makes you think Mike would do such a thing, Mr Welkin?’ she demanded, her voice shaking with fury.
Edward Welkin’s heavy mouth widened in a grin. ‘Dishonesty’s in the family, isn’t it?’ he said.
Mike sprang, but George clung to him. ‘Hold on, my boy, hold on,’ he said breathlessly. ‘Don’t strike a man old enough to be your—’
He boggled at the unfortunate simile and substituted the word ‘mother’ with ludicrous effect.
Mr Campion decided it was time to interfere.
‘I say, George,’ he said, ‘if you and Mr Welkin would come along to the library I’ve got a suggestion I’d like to make.’
Welkin wavered. ‘Keep an eye on him then, Ken,’ he said over his shoulder to his son. I’ll listen to you, Campion, but I want my diamonds back and I want the police. I’ll give you five minutes, no longer.’
The library was in darkness when the three men entered, and Campion waited until they were well in the room before he switched on the main light. There was a moment of bewildered silence. One corner of the room looked like a stall in the Caledonian Market. There the entire contents of the sack, which had come so unexpectedly into Mr Campion’s possession, was neatly spread out. George’s cherubic face darkened.
‘What’s this?’ he demanded. ‘A damned silly joke?’
Mr Campion shook his head. ‘I’m afraid not. I’ve just collected this from a gentleman in fancy dress whom I met in the corridor upstairs,’ he said. ‘What would you say, Mr Welkin?’
The man stared at him doggedly. ‘Where are my diamonds? That’s my only interest. I don’t care about this junk.’
Campion smiled faintly. ‘He’s right, you know, George,’ he said. ‘Junk’s the word. It came back to me as soon as I saw it. Poor Charlie Spring – I recognised him, Mr Welkin – never had a successful coup in his life because he can’t help stealing gaudy junk.’
Edward Welkin stood stiffly by the desk.
‘I don’t understand you,’ he said. ‘My diamonds have been stolen and I want to call the police.’
Mr Campion took off his spectacles. ‘I shouldn’t if I were you,’ he said. ‘No you don’t—!’
On the last words Mr Campion leapt forward and there was a brief struggle. When it was over Mr Welkin was lying on the floor beside the marble and ormolu clock and Mr Campion was grasping the gold pen and pencil in the leather holder which until a moment before had rested in the man’s waistcoat pocket.
Welkin scrambled to his feet. His face was purple and his eyes a little frightened. He attempted to bluster.
‘You’ll find yourself in court for assault,’ he said. ‘Give me my property.’
‘Certainly. All of it,’ agreed Mr Campion obligingly. ‘Your dummy pen, your dummy pencil, and in the little receptacle which they conceal, your wife’s diamonds.’
On the last word he drew the case apart and a glittering string fell out in his hand.
There was a long, long pause.
Welkin stood sullenly in the middle of the room.
‘Well?’ he said at last. ‘What are you two going to do about it?’
Mr Campion glanced at George, who was sitting by the desk, an expression of incredulity amounting almost to stupefaction upon his mild face.
‘If I might suggest,’ he murmured, ‘I think he might take his family and spend a jolly Christmas somewhere else, don’t you? It would save a lot of trouble.’
Welkin held out his hand.
‘Very well. I’ll take my diamonds.’
Mr Campion shook his head. ‘As you go out of the house,’ he said with a faint smile. ‘I shouldn’t like them to be – lost again.’
Welkin shrugged his shoulders. ‘You win,’ he said briefly. I’ll go and tell Ada to pack.’
He went out of the room, and as the door closed behind him George bounced to his feet.
‘Hanged if I understand it …’ he began. ‘D’you mean to say the feller put up this amazing cock-and-bull story simply so that he could get Mike accused of theft?’
Mr Campion remained serious. ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘That was an artistic afterthought, I imagine. The cock-and-bull story, as you call it, was a very neat little swindle devised by our unpleasant friend before he came down here at all. It was very simple to stage a burglary here on Christmas Eve, especially when he had heard from his wife that Mae had ordered a Santa Claus costume from Harridge’s. All he had to do was to go and get one there too. Then, armed with the perfect disguise, he enlisted the services of a genuine burglar, to whom he gave the costume. The man simply had to walk into the house, pick up a few things at random, and go off with them. I think you’ll find if you go into it that he hired a car at Ipswich and drove out here, changing somewhere along the road.’
George was still puzzled. ‘But his own son Kenneth was going to play Santa Claus,’ he said. ‘Or at least he seemed to expect to.’
Campion nodded. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Welkin had foreseen that difficulty and prepared for it. If Kenneth had been playing Father Christmas and the same thing had happened I think you would have found that the young man had a pretty convincing alibi established for him. You must remember the burglar was not meant to be seen. He was only furnished with the costume in case he was. As it happened, of course, when Welkin père saw that Mike was not too unlike his burglar friend in build, he encouraged the change-over and killed two birds with one stone – or tried to.’
His host took the diamonds and turned them over. He was slow of comprehension.
‘Why steal his own property?’ he demanded.
Mr Campion sighed. ‘You have such a blameless mind, George, that the wickedness of some of your fellow men must be a constant source of astonishment to you,’ he murmured. ‘Did you hear our friend Welkin say that he had insured this necklace?’
George’s eyebrows rose.
‘God bless my soul!’ he said. ‘The bounder! In our house too,’ he added as an afterthought. ‘Miracle you spotted it, Campion. God bless my soul! Draw the insurance and keep the diamonds … Damnable trick.’
He was still wrathful when the door burst open and Mae Turrett came in, followed by Mike and Sheila.
‘The Welkins are going. They’ve ordered their cars. What on earth’s happened, George?’
Her ladyship was startled but obviously relieved.
Mr Campion explained. ‘It had been worrying me all day’ he said after the main part of the story had been told. ‘I knew Charlie Spring had a peculiarity, but I couldn’t think what it was until I pulled that clock out of the bag. Then I remembered his penchant for the baroque and his sad habit of mistaking it for the valuable. That ruled out the diamonds instantly. They wouldn’t be big enough for Charlie. When that came back to me I recollected his other failing. He never works alone. When Mr Spring appears on a job it always means he has a confederate in the house, usually an employee, and with these facts in my hand the rest was fairly obvious.’
Mike moved forward. ‘You’ve done me a pretty good turn, anyway’ he said.
George looked up. ‘Not really, my boy’ he said. ‘We’re not utter fool
s, you know, are we Mae?’
Lady Turrett blushed. ‘Of course not, Mike my dear,’ she said, and her smile could be very charming. ‘Take Sheila away and cheer her up. I really don’t think you need wait about to say goodbye to the Welkins. Dear me, I seem to have been very silly!’
Before she went out Sheila put her hand into Mr Campion’s.
‘I told you I was glad to see you,’ she said.
As the two cars containing the Welkins, their diamonds and all that was theirs disappeared down the white drive, George linked his arm through Mr Campion’s and led him back to the library.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said. ‘You spotted that pen was a dummy when Miss Hare came in this afternoon.’
Mr Campion grinned. ‘Well, it was odd the man didn’t use his own pen, wasn’t it?’ he said, settling himself before the fire. ‘When he ignored it I guessed. That kind of cache is fairly common, especially in the States. They’re made for carrying valuables and are usually shabby Bakelite things which no one would steal in the ordinary way. However, there was nothing shabby about Mr Welkin – except his behaviour.’
George leant back in his chair and puffed contentedly.
‘Difficult feller,’ he observed. ‘Didn’t like him from the first. No conversation. I started him on shootin’, but he wasn’t interested, mentioned huntin’ and he gaped at me, went on to fishin’ and he yawned. Couldn’t think of anything to talk to him about. Feller hadn’t any conversation at all.’
He smiled and there was a faintly shamefaced expression in his eyes.
‘Campion,’ he said softly.
‘Yes?’
‘Made a wonderful discovery last week.’ George had lowered his voice to a conspiratorial rumble. ‘Went down to the cellar and found a single bottle of Cockburn’s ’sixty-eight. ’Sixty-eight, my boy! My father must have missed it. I was saving it for tomorrow, don’t you know, but whenever I looked at that feller Welkin, I couldn’t feel hospitable. Such a devilish waste. However, now he’s gone—’ His voice trailed away.
‘A very merry Christmas indeed,’ supplemented Mr Campion.
The Adventure of the Red Widow
Adrian Conan Doyle & John Dickson Carr
‘Your conclusions are perfectly correct, my dear Watson,’ remarked my friend Sherlock Holmes. ‘Squalor and poverty are the natural matrix to crimes of violence.’
‘Precisely so,’ I agreed. ‘Indeed, I was just thinking—’ I broke off to stare at him in amazement. ‘Good heavens, Holmes,’ I cried, ‘this is too much. How could you possibly know my innermost thoughts!’
My friend leaned back in his chair and, placing his finger-tips together, surveyed me from under his heavy, drooping eyelids.
‘I would do better justice, perhaps, to my limited powers by refusing to answer your question,’ he said, with a dry chuckle. ‘You have a certain flair, Watson, for concealing your failure to perceive the obvious by the cavalier manner in which you invariably accept the explanation of a sequence of simple but logical reasoning.’
‘I do not see how logical reasoning can enable you to follow the course of my mental processes,’ I retorted, a trifle nettled by his superior manner.
‘There was no great difficulty. I have been watching you for the last few minutes. The expression on your face was quite vacant until, as your eyes roved about the room, they fell on the bookcase and came to rest on Hugo’s Les Miserables which made so deep an impression upon you when you read it last year. You became thoughtful, your eyes narrowed, it was obvious that your mind was drifting again into that tremendous dreadful saga of human suffering; at length your gaze lifted to the window with its aspect of snowflakes and grey sky and bleak, frozen roofs, and then, moving slowly on to the mantelpiece, settled on the jack-knife with which I skewer my unanswered correspondence. The frown darkened on your face and unconsciously you shook your head despondently. It was an association of ideas. Hugo’s terrible sub-third stage, the winter cold of poverty in the slums and, above the warm glow of our own modest fire, the bare knife-blade. Your expression deepened into one of sadness, the melancholy that comes with an understanding of cause and effect in the unchanging human tragedy. It was then that I ventured to agree with you.’
‘Well, I must confess that you followed my thoughts with extraordinary accuracy,’ I admitted. ‘A remarkable piece of reasoning, Holmes.’
‘Elementary, my dear Watson.’
The year of 1887 was moving to its end. The iron grip of the great blizzards that commenced in the last week of December had closed on the land and beyond the windows of Holmes’s lodgings in Baker Street lay a gloomy vista of grey, lowering sky and white-capped tiles dimly discernible through a curtain of snowflakes.
Though it had been a memorable year for my friend, it had been of yet greater importance to me, for it was but two months since that Miss Mary Morston had paid me the signal honour of joining her destiny to mine. The change from my bachelor existence as a half-pay, ex-Army surgeon into the state of wedded bliss had not been accomplished without some uncalled-for and ironic comments from Sherlock Holmes but, as my wife and I could thank him for the fact that we had found each other, we could afford to accept his cynical attitude with tolerance and even understanding.
I had dropped in to our old lodgings on this afternoon, to be precise December 30th, to pass a few hours with my friend and enquire whether any new case of interest had come his way since my previous visit. I had found him pale and listless, his dressing-gown drawn round his shoulders and the room reeking with the smoke of his favourite black shag, through which the fire in the grate gleamed like a brazier in a fog.
‘Nothing, save a few routine enquiries, Watson,’ he had replied in a voice shrill with complaint. ‘Creative art in crime seems to have become atrophied since I disposed of the late-lamented Bert Stevens.’ Then, lapsing into silence, he curled himself up morosely in his armchair, and not another word passed between us until my thoughts were suddenly interrupted by the observation that commenced this narrative.
As I rose to go, he looked at me critically.
‘I perceive, Watson,’ said he, ‘that you are already paying the price. The slovenly state of your left jaw-bone bears regrettable testimony that somebody has changed the position of your shaving-mirror. Furthermore, you are indulging in extravagances.’
‘You do me a gross injustice.’
‘What, at the winter price of fivepence a blossom! Your buttonhole tells me that you were sporting a flower not later than yesterday.’
‘This is the first time I have known you penurious, Holmes,’ I retorted with some bitterness.
He broke into a hearty laugh. ‘My dear fellow, you must forgive me!’ he cried. ‘It is most unfair that I should penalise you because a surfeit of unexpended mental energy tends to play upon my nerves. But hullo, what’s this!’
A heavy step was mounting the stairs. My friend waved me back into my chair.
‘Stay a moment, Watson,’ said he. ‘It is Gregson, and the old game may be afoot once more.’
‘Gregson?’
‘There is no mistaking that regulation tread. Too heavy for Lestrade’s and yet known to Mrs Hudson or she would accompany him. It is Gregson.’
As he finished speaking, there came a knock on the door and a figure muffled to the ears in a heavy cape entered the room. Our visitor tossed his bowler on the nearest chair and unwinding the scarf wrapped around the lower part of his face, disclosed the flaxen hair and long, pale features of the Scotland Yard detective.
‘Ah, Gregson,’ greeted Holmes, with a sly glance in my direction. ‘It must be urgent business that brings you out in this inclement weather. But throw off your cape, man, and come over to the fire.’
The police-agent shook his head. ‘There is not a moment to lose,’ he replied, consulting a large silver turnip watch. ‘The train to Derbyshire leaves in half an hour and I have a hansom waiting below. Though the case should present no difficulties for an officer of my experience,
nevertheless I shall be glad of your company.’
‘Something of interest?’
‘Murder, Mr Holmes,’ snapped Gregson curtly, ‘and a singular one at that, to judge from the telegram from the local police. It appears that Lord Jocelyn Cope, the Deputy-Lieutenant of the County, has been found butchered at Arnsworth Castle. The Yard is quite capable of solving crimes of this nature, but in view of the curious terms contained in the police telegram, it occurred to me that you might wish to accompany me. Will you come?’
Holmes leaned forward, emptied the Persian slipper into his tobacco pouch and sprang to his feet.
‘Give me a moment to pack a clean collar and toothbrush,’ he cried. ‘I have a spare one for you, Watson. No, my dear fellow, not a word. Where would I be without your assistance? Scribble a note to your wife, and Mrs Hudson will have it delivered. We should be back tomorrow. Now, Gregson, I’m your man and you can fill in the details during our journey.’
The guard’s flag was already waving as we rushed up the platform at St Pancras and tore open the door of the first empty smoker. Holmes had brought three travelling-rugs with him and as the train roared its way through the fading winter daylight we made ourselves comfortable enough in our respective corners.
‘Well, Gregson, I shall be interested to hear the details,’ remarked Holmes, his thin, eager face framed in the ear-flaps of his deer-stalker and a spiral of blue smoke rising from his pipe.
‘I know nothing beyond what I have already told you.’
‘And yet you used the word “singular” and referred to the telegram from the county police as “curious”. Kindly explain.’
‘I used both terms for the same reason. The wire from the local inspector advised that the officer from Scotland Yard should read the Derbyshire County Guide and the Gazetteer. A most extraordinary suggestion!’
‘I should say a wise one. What have you done about it?’
‘The Gazetteer states merely that Lord Jocelyn Cope is a Deputy-Lieutenant and county magnate, married, childless and noted for his bequests to local archaeological societies. As for the Guide, I have it here.’ He drew a pamphlet from his pocket and thumbed over the pages. ‘Here we are,’ he continued. ‘Arnsworth Castle. Built reign of Edward III. Fifteenth-century stained-glass window to celebrate Battle of Agincourt. Cope family penalised for suspected Catholic leaning by Royal Visitation, 1574. Museum open to public once a year. Contains large collection of martial and other relics including small guillotine built originally in Nîmes during French Revolution for execution of a maternal ancestor of the present owner. Never used owing to escape of intended victim and later purchased as relic by family after Napoleonic Wars and brought to Arnsworth. Pshaw! That local inspector must be out of his senses, Mr Holmes. There is nothing to help us here.’
A Very Murderous Christmas Page 3
