A Very Murderous Christmas

by Cecily Gayford

  As the flames spread through the straw and reached the mackintoshes, thick black wreaths of smoke poured from the cloak-room door into the hall of Arnsworth Castle, accompanied by a hissing and crackling from the burning rubber.

  ‘Good heavens, Holmes,’ I gasped, the tears rolling down my face. ‘We shall be suffocated!’

  His fingers closed on my arm.

  ‘Wait,’ he muttered, and even as he spoke, there came a sudden rush of feet and a yell of horror.

  ‘Fire!’

  In that despairing wail, I recognised Stephen’s voice. ‘Fire!’ he shrieked again, and we caught the clatter of his footsteps as he fled across the hall.

  ‘Now!’ whispered Holmes and, in an instant, he was out of the cloak-room and running headlong for the library. The door was half open but, as we burst in, the man drumming with hysterical hands on the great fireplace did not even turn his head.

  ‘Fire! The house is on fire!’ he shrieked. ‘Oh, my poor master! My lord! My lord!’

  Holmes’s hand fell upon his shoulder. ‘A bucket of water in the cloak-room will meet the case,’ he said quietly. ‘It would be as well, however, if you would ask his lordship to join us.’

  The old man sprang at him, his eyes blazing and his fingers crooked like the talons of a vulture.

  ‘A trick!’ he screamed. ‘I’ve betrayed him through your cursed tricks!’

  ‘Take him, Watson,’ said Holmes, holding him at arm’s length. ‘There, there. You’re a faithful fellow.’

  ‘Faithful unto death,’ whispered a feeble voice.

  I started back involuntarily. The edge of the ancient fireplace had swung open and in the dark aperture thus disclosed there stood a tall, thin man, so powdered with dust that for the moment I seemed to be staring not at a human being but at a spectre. He was about fifty years of age, gaunt and high-nosed, with a pair of sombre eyes that waxed and waned feverishly in a face that was the colour of grey paper.

  ‘I fear that the dust is bothering you, Lord Cope,’ said Holmes very gently. ‘Would you not be better seated?’

  The man tottered forward to drop heavily into an armchair. ‘You are the police, of course,’ he gasped.

  ‘No. I am a private investigator, but acting in the interests of justice.’

  A bitter smile parted Lord Cope’s lips.

  ‘Too late,’ said he.

  ‘You are ill?’

  ‘I am dying.’ Opening his fingers, he disclosed a small empty phial. ‘There is only a short time left to me.’

  ‘Is there nothing to be done, Watson?’

  I laid my fingers upon the sick man’s wrist. His face was already livid and the pulse slow and feeble.

  ‘Nothing, Holmes.’

  Lord Cope straightened himself painfully. ‘Perhaps you will indulge a last curiosity by telling me how you discovered the truth,’ said he. ‘You must be a man of some perception.’

  ‘I confess that at first there were difficulties,’ admitted Holmes, ‘though these dissolved themselves later in the light of events. Obviously the whole key to the problem lay in a conjunction of two remarkable circumstances – the use of a guillotine and the disappearance of the murdered man’s head.

  ‘Who, I asked myself, would use so clumsy and rare an instrument, except one to whom it possessed some strong symbolic significance and, if this were the case, then it was logical to suppose that the clue to that significance must lie in its past history.’

  The nobleman nodded.

  ‘His own people built it for Rennes,’ he muttered, ‘in return for the infamy that their womenfolk had suffered at his hands. But pray proceed, and quickly.’

  ‘So much for the first circumstance,’ continued Holmes, ticking off the points on his fingers. ‘The second threw a flood of light over the whole problem. This is not New Guinea. Why, then, should a murderer take his victim’s head? The obvious answer was that he wished to conceal the dead man’s true identity. By the way,’ he demanded sternly, ‘what have you done with Captain Lothian’s head?’

  ‘Stephen and I buried it at midnight in the family vault,’ came the feeble reply. ‘And that with all reverence.’

  ‘The rest was simple,’ went on Holmes. ‘As the body was easily identifiable as yours by the clothes and other personal belongings which were listed by the local inspector, it followed naturally that there could have been no point in concealing the head unless the murderer had also changed clothes with the dead man. That the change had been effected before death was shown by the blood-stains. The victim had been incapacitated in advance, probably drugged, for it was plain from certain facts already explained to my friend Watson that there had been no struggle and that he had been carried to the museum from another part of the castle. Assuming my reasoning to be correct, then the murdered man could not be Lord Jocelyn. But was there not another missing, his lordship’s cousin and alleged murderer, Captain Jasper Lothian?’

  ‘How could you give Dawlish a description of the wanted man?’ I interposed.

  ‘By looking at the body of the victim, Watson. The two men must have borne a general resemblance to each other or the deception would not have been feasible from the start. An ash tray in the museum contained a cigarette stub, Turkish, comparatively fresh and smoked from a holder. None but an addict would have smoked under the terrible circumstances that must have accompanied that insignificant stump. The footmarks in the snow showed that someone had come from the main building carrying a burden and had returned without that burden. I think I have covered the principal points.’

  For a while, we sat in silence broken only by the moan of a rising wind at the windows and the short, sharp panting of the dying man’s breath.

  ‘I owe you no explanation,’ he said at last, ‘for it is to my Maker, who alone knows the innermost recesses of the human heart, that I must answer for my deed. Nevertheless, though my story is one of shame and guilt, I shall tell you enough to enlist perhaps your forbearance in granting me my final request.

  ‘You must know, then, that following the scandal which brought his Army career to its close, my cousin Jasper Lothian has lived at Arnsworth. Though penniless and already notorious for his evil living, I welcomed him as a kinsman, affording him not only financial support but, what was perhaps more valuable, the social aegis of my position in the county.

  ‘As I look back now on the years that passed, I blame myself for my own lack of principle in my failure to put an end to his extravagance, his drinking and gaming, and certain less honourable pursuits with which rumour already linked his name. I had thought him wild and injudicious. I was yet to learn that he was a creature so vile and utterly bereft of honour that he would tarnish the name of his own house.

  ‘I had married a woman considerably younger than myself, a woman as remarkable for her beauty as for her romantic yet singular temperament which she had inherited from her Spanish forebears. It was the old story, and when at long last I awoke to the dreadful truth it was also to the knowledge that only one thing remained for me in life – vengeance. Vengeance against this man who had disgraced my name and abused the honour of my house.

  ‘On the night in question, Lothian and I sat late over our wine in this very room. I had contrived to drug his port and before the effects of the narcotic could deaden his senses I told him of my discovery and that death alone could wipe out the score. He sneered back at me that in killing him I would merely put myself on the scaffold and expose my wife’s shame to the world. When I explained my plan, the sneer was gone from his face and the terror of death was freezing in his black heart. The rest you know. As the drug deprived him of his senses, I changed clothes with him, bound his hands with a sash torn from the door-curtain and carried him across the courtyard to the museum, to the virgin guillotine which had been built for another’s infamy.

  ‘When it was over, I summoned Stephen and told him the truth. The old man never hesitated in his loyalty to his wretched master. Together we buried the head in the family vault and th
en, seizing a mare from the stable, he rode it across the moor to convey an impression of flight and finally left it concealed in a lonely farm owned by his sister. All that remained was for me to disappear.

  ‘Arnsworth, like many mansions belonging to families that had been Catholic in the olden times, possessed a priest’s hole. There I have lain concealed, emerging only at night into the library to lay my final instructions upon my faithful servant.’

  ‘Thereby confirming my suspicion as to your proximity,’ interposed Holmes, ‘by leaving no fewer than five smears of Turkish tobacco ash upon the rugs. But what was your ultimate intention?’

  ‘In taking vengeance for the greatest wrong which one man can do to another, I had successfully protected our name from the shame of the scaffold. I could rely on Stephen’s loyalty. As for my wife, though she knew the truth she could not betray me without announcing to the world her own infidelity. Life held nothing more for me. I determined therefore to allow myself a day or two in which to get my affairs in order and then to die by my own hand. I assure you that your discovery of my hiding-place has advanced the event by only an hour or so. I had left a letter for Stephen, begging him as his final devoir that he would bury my body secretly in the vaults of my ancestors.

  ‘There, gentlemen, is my story. I am the last of the old line and it lies with you whether or not it shall go out in dishonour.’

  Sherlock Holmes laid a hand upon his.

  ‘It is perhaps as well that it has been pointed out to us already that my friend Watson and I are here in an entirely private capacity,’ said he quietly. ‘I am about to summon Stephen, for I cannot help feeling that you would be more comfortable if he carried this chair into the priest’s hole and closed the sliding panel after you.’

  We had to bend our heads to catch Lord Jocelyn’s response.

  ‘Then a higher tribunal will judge my crime,’ he whispered faintly, ‘and the tomb shall devour my secret. Farewell, and may a dying man’s blessing rest upon you.’

  Our journey back to London was both chilly and depressing. With nightfall, the snow had recommenced and Holmes was in his least communicative mood, staring out of the window at the scattered lights of villages and farm-houses that periodically flitted past in the darkness.

  ‘The old year is nodding to its fall,’ he remarked suddenly, ‘and in the hearts of all these kindly, simple folk awaiting the midnight chimes dwells the perennial anticipation that what is to come will be better than what has been. Hope, however ingenuous and disproven by past experience, remains the one supreme panacea for all the knocks and bruises which life metes out to us.’ He leaned back and began to stuff his pipe with shag.

  ‘Should you eventually write an account of this curious affair in Derbyshire,’ he went on, ‘I would suggest that a suitable title would be “The Red Widow”.’

  ‘Knowing your unreasonable aversion to women, Holmes, I am surprised that you noticed the colour of her hair.’

  ‘I refer, Watson, to the popular sobriquet for a guillotine in the days of the French Revolution,’ he said severely.

  The hour was late when, at last, we reached our old lodgings in Baker Street where Holmes, after poking up the fire, lost not a moment in donning his mouse-coloured dressing-gown.

  ‘It is approaching midnight,’ I observed, ‘and as I would wish to be with my wife when this year of 1887 draws to its close, I must be on my way. Let me wish you a happy New Year, my dear fellow.’

  ‘I heartily reciprocate your good wishes, Watson,’ he replied. ‘Pray bear my greetings to your wife and my apologies for your temporary absence.’

  I had reached the deserted street and, pausing for a moment to raise my collar against the swirl of the snowflakes, I was about to set out on my walk when my attention was arrested by the strains of a violin. Involuntarily, I raised my eyes to the window of our old sitting-room and there, sharply outlined against the lamplit blind, was the shadow of Sherlock Holmes. I could see that keen, hawk-like profile which I knew so well, the slight stoop of his shoulders as he bent over his fiddle, the rise and fall of the bow-tip. But surely this was no dreamy Italian air, no complicated improvisation of his own creation, that drifted down to me through the stillness of that bleak winter’s night.

  Should auld acquaintance be forgot

  And never brought to mind’?

  Should auld acquaintance be forgot

  And days o’ auld lang syne.

  A snowflake must have drifted into my eyes for, as I turned away, the gas-lamps glimmering down the desolate expanse of Baker Street seemed strangely blurred.

  * * *

  My task is done. My notebooks have been replaced in the black tin deed-box where they have been kept in recent years and, for the last time, I have dipped my pen in the ink-well.

  Through the window that overlooks the modest lawn of our farm-house, I can see Sherlock Holmes strolling among his beehives. His hair is quite white, but his long, thin form is as wiry and energetic as ever, and there is a touch of healthy colour in his cheeks, placed there by Mother Nature and her clover-laden breezes that carry the scent of the sea amid these gentle Sussex Downs.

  Our lives are drawing towards eventide and old faces and old scenes are gone for ever. And yet, as I lean back in my chair and close my eyes, for a while the past rises up to obscure the present and I see before me the yellow fogs of Baker Street and I hear once more the voice of the best and wisest man whom I have ever known. ‘Come, Watson, the game’s afoot!’

  In the case of the Darlington Substitution Scandal it was of use to me, and also in the Arnsworth Castle business.

  FROM ‘A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA’

  Camberwell Crackers

  Anthony Horowitz

  ‘I’ll try not to take up too much of your time, Mr Fulbright,’ the detective said. ‘But I’d be interested to know what you can tell me about the dead man.’

  ‘Well, not very much, Detective Inspector. I only ever met him once.’

  ‘He came here.’

  ‘That’s right. He paid us a visit … I suppose it must have been four or five weeks ago. He didn’t stay very long. I showed him round the factory and then he had a cup of tea, here in this office.’

  ‘What did you make of him?’

  ‘I don’t quite know how to answer that. He was quite brusque but then of course he was a businessman and it was business that had brought him here. He struck me as someone who didn’t like to waste time.’

  ‘Were you surprised to hear that he had been killed?’

  ‘I was shocked. We all were. Did you notice the wreath in the reception area? One of the lads brought it in. A very nice gesture, I thought.’

  Reception area … wreath. Andrew Fletcher jotted the words down in his notebook and underlined them – not because they were important but because he felt a need to look as if he was in control.

  He wasn’t.

  This was the first murder he had investigated since he had become a Detective Inspector at the unusually young age of twenty-seven. There had been a lot of bad-mouthing back at the station but the moment he had heard about the death of multi-millionaire, Harvey Osborne, he had known that this was his chance to prove himself. Yes, he had been privately educated. And yes, he was lucky enough to have been fast-tracked for promotion. But he was going to show them! He wasn’t the chinless wonder they all believed – and having an uncle who happened to be Assistant Commissioner was also completely irrelevant.

  The trouble was, as far as he could see nothing made sense. The murder itself was completely crazy and he had already decided that coming here was a complete waste of time.

  It was frankly hard to believe that somewhere like Fulbright’s Christmas Cracker Factory – or Camberwell Crackers as it was fondly known to all the locals – could exist in London in the twenty-first century. It was housed in a neat, Victorian building just off Denmark Hill, complete with red bricks, sash windows and a chimney which had given up smoking, surrounded by lawns and ornate metalwork
, a world of its own. The reception area boasted wood panelling, a swirly carpet and a demure receptionist straight out of World War Two. Sure enough, there had been a funeral wreath of white roses and lilies, resting on an easel. There had even been a book of condolences although Fletcher had noticed the pages were all blank.

  ‘Mr Fulbright? Yes, certainly. I’ll just call him.’ The receptionist somehow managed to smile and look severe at the same time. She had been knitting when the detective came in. Did anyone still knit? Perhaps she had a sister or a friend who was expecting a child.

  The factory supervisor – and indeed its owner – had appeared a few minutes later: a small, neat, bald-headed man in a dark suit and brightly polished shoes. He had a moustache which, though not quite so extreme, reminded Fletcher of that annoying man, the opera singer who had once appeared in insurance commercials. He was about sixty years old, twitching and apologising before he had even shaken hands.

  ‘So sorry to keep you … a busy time for us … Christmas only just round the corner … of course you understand.’

  The words came tumbling out. He was obviously nervous about something but Fletcher’s first impression was that he would make an unlikely murder suspect. Arthur Fulbright was the sort of man who would only meet a police officer if he was stopped for speeding and even then it would only be five or six miles per hour over the limit. He had a sort of twitchy nervousness which came from not wanting to get into trouble. He was probably married to a wife who nagged him. Fletcher could imagine him walking three paces behind her, carrying the shopping.

  They did not go straight to the office. Fulbright insisted on showing the detective around the factory, introducing him to everyone who worked there. In all, there were about twenty of them spread across the different departments: novelties (purchasing and assembly), tube construction, wrapping design, packaging, marketing, distribution and sales. The manufacturing floor was semi-automated in a Heath Robinson sort of way with tubes of cardboard and brightly coloured foil at one end, the finished boxes stacking up at the other. The workers were old and young, male and female, from every ethnic background and seemed absurdly cheerful, as if the spirit of Christmas infused the place the whole year round.