A Very Murderous Christmas

by Cecily Gayford

  And then? This is what Dr Vernon-Peak will particularly wish to know but what I cannot clearly remember. I remember that as the door opened I was holding the bread knife in my paws. I think I remember letting out a low growl and poising myself to spring. But what came after?

  The last things I can recall before they brought me here are the blood on my fur and the two wild predatory creatures crouched on the floor over the body of the lamb.

  Morse’s Greatest Mystery

  Colin Dexter

  ‘Hallo!’ growled Scrooge, in his accustomed voice as near as he could feign it. ‘What do you mean by coming here at this time of day?’

  Dickens, A Christmas Carol

  He had knocked diffidently at Morse’s North Oxford flat. Few had been invited into those book-lined, Wagner-haunted rooms: and even he – Sergeant Lewis – had never felt himself an over-welcome guest. Even at Christmas time. Not that it sounded much like the season of goodwill as Morse waved Lewis inside and concluded his ill-tempered conversation with the bank manager.

  ‘Look! If I keep a couple of hundred in my current account, that’s my look-out. I’m not even asking for any interest on it. All I am asking is that you don’t stick these bloody bank charges on when I go – what? once, twice a year? – into the red. It’s not that I’m mean with money’

  – Lewis’s eyebrows ascended a centimetre – ‘but if you charge me again I want you to ring and tell me why!’

  Morse banged down the receiver and sat silent.

  ‘You don’t sound as if you’ve caught much of the Christmas spirit,’ ventured Lewis.

  ‘I don’t like Christmas – never have.’

  ‘You staying in Oxford, sir?’

  ‘I’m going to decorate.’

  ‘What – decorate the Christmas cake?’

  ‘Decorate the kitchen. I don’t like Christmas cake – never did.’

  ‘You sound more like Scrooge every minute, sir.’

  ‘And I shall read a Dickens novel. I always do over Christmas. Re-read, rather.’

  ‘If I were just starting on Dickens, which one—?’

  ‘I’d put Bleak House first, Little Dorrit second—’

  The phone rang and Morse’s secretary at HQ informed him that he’d won a £50 gift-token in the Police Charity Raffle, and this time Morse cradled the receiver with considerably better grace.

  ‘“Scrooge”, did you say, Lewis? I’ll have you know I bought five tickets – a quid apiece! – in that Charity Raffle.’

  ‘I bought five tickets myself, sir.’

  Morse smiled complacently. ‘Let’s be more charitable, Lewis! It’s supporting these causes that’s important, not winning.’

  ‘I’ll be in the car, sir,’ said Lewis quietly. In truth, he was beginning to feel irritated. Morse’s irascibility he could stomach; but he couldn’t stick hearing much more about Morse’s selfless generosity!

  Morse’s old Jaguar was in dock again (‘Too mean to buy a new one!’ his colleagues claimed) and it was Lewis’s job that day to ferry the chief inspector around; doubtless, too (if things went to form), to treat him to the odd pint or two. Which indeed appeared a fair probability, since Morse had so managed things on that Tuesday morning that their arrival at the George would coincide with opening time. As they drove out past the railway station, Lewis told Morse what he’d managed to discover about the previous day’s events …

  The patrons of the George had amassed £400 in aid of the Littlemore Charity for Mentally Handicapped Children, and this splendid total was to be presented to the Charity’s Secretary at the end of the week, with a photographer promised from The Oxford Times to record the grand occasion. Mrs Michaels, the landlady, had been dropped off at the bank in Carfax by her husband at about 10.30 a.m., and had there exchanged a motley assemblage of coins and notes for forty brand-new tenners. After this she had bought several items (including grapes for a daughter just admitted to hospital) before catching a minibus back home, where she had arrived just after midday. The money, in a long white envelope, was in her shopping bag, together with her morning’s purchases. Her husband had not yet returned from the Cash and Carry Stores, and on re-entering the George via the saloon bar, Mrs Michaels had heard the telephone ringing. Thinking that it was probably the hospital (it was) she had dumped her bag on the bar counter and rushed to answer it. On her return, the envelope was gone.

  At the time of the theft, there had been about thirty people in the saloon bar, including the regular OAPs, the usual cohort of pool-playing unemployables, and a pre-Christmas party from a local firm. And – yes! – from the very beginning Lewis had known that the chances of recovering the money were virtually nil. Even so, the three perfunctory interviews that Morse conducted appeared to Lewis to be sadly unsatisfactory.

  After listening a while to the landlord’s unilluminating testimony, Morse asked him why it had taken him so long to conduct his business at the Cash and Carry; and although the explanation given seemed perfectly adequate, Morse’s dismissal of this first witness had seemed almost offensively abrupt. And no man could have been more quickly or more effectively antagonised than the temporary barman (on duty the previous morning) who refused to answer Morse’s brusque enquiry about the present state of his overdraft. What then of the attractive, auburn-haired Mrs Michaels? After a rather lop-sided smile had introduced Morse to her regular if slightly nicotine-stained teeth, that distressed lady had been unable to fight back her tears as she sought to explain to Morse why she’d insisted on some genuine notes for the publicity photographer instead of a phonily magnified cheque.

  But wait! Something dramatic had just happened to Morse, Lewis could see that: as if the light had suddenly shined upon a man that hitherto had sat in darkness. He (Morse) now asked – amazingly! – whether by any chance the good lady possessed a pair of bright green, high-heeled leather shoes; and when she replied that, yes, she did, Morse smiled serenely, as though he had solved the secret of the universe, and promptly summoned into the lounge bar not only the three he’d just interviewed but all those now in the George who had been drinking there the previous morning.

  As they waited, Morse asked for the serial numbers of the stolen notes, and Lewis passed over a scrap of paper on which some figures had been hastily scribbled in blotchy Biro. ‘For Christ’s sake, man!’ hissed Morse. ‘Didn’t they teach you to write at school?’

  Lewis breathed heavily, counted to five, and then painstakingly rewrote the numbers on a virginal piece of paper: 773741–773780. At which numbers Morse glanced cursorily before sticking the paper in his pocket, and proceeding to address the George’s regulars.

  He was virtually certain (he said) of who had stolen the money. What he was absolutely sure about was exactly where that money was at that very moment. He had the serial numbers of the notes – but that was of no importance whatsoever now. The thief might well have been tempted to spend the money earlier – but not any more! And why not? Because at this Christmas time that person no longer had the power to resist his better self.

  In that bar, stilled now and silent as the grave itself, the faces of Morse’s audience seemed mesmerised – and remained so as Morse gave his instructions that the notes should be replaced in their original envelope and returned (he cared not by what means) to Sergeant Lewis’s office at Thames Valley Police HQ within the next twenty-four hours.

  As they drove back, Lewis could restrain his curiosity no longer. ‘You really are confident that—?’

  ‘Of course!’

  ‘I never seem to be able to put the clues together myself, sir.’

  ‘Clues? What clues, Lewis? I didn’t know we had any.’

  ‘Well, those shoes, for example. How do they fit in?’

  ‘Who said they fitted in anywhere? It’s just that I used to know an auburn-haired beauty who had six – six, Lewis! – pairs of bright green shoes. They suited her, she said.’

  ‘So … they’ve got nothing to do with the case at all?’

 
‘Not so far as I know,’ muttered Morse.

  The next morning a white envelope was delivered to Lewis’s office, though no one at reception could recall when or whence it had arrived. Lewis immediately rang Morse to congratulate him on the happy outcome of the case.

  ‘There’s just one thing, sir. I’d kept that scrappy bit of paper with the serial numbers on it, and these are brand-new notes all right – but they’re not the same ones!’

  ‘Really?’ Morse sounded supremely unconcerned.

  ‘You’re not worried about it?’

  ‘Good Lord, no! You just get that money back to ginger-knob at the George, and tell her to settle for a jumbo-cheque next time! Oh, and one other thing, Lewis. I’m on leave. So no interruptions from anybody – understand?’

  ‘Yes, sir. And, er … Happy Christmas, sir!’

  ‘And to you, old friend!’ replied Morse quietly.

  The bank manager rang just before lunch that same day. ‘It’s about the four hundred pounds you withdrew yesterday, Inspector. I did promise to ring about any further bank charges—’

  ‘I explained to the girl,’ protested Morse. ‘I needed the money quickly.’

  ‘Oh, it’s perfectly all right. But you did say you’d call in this morning to transfer—’

  ‘Tomorrow! I’m up a ladder with a paint brush at the moment.’

  Morse put down the receiver and again sank back in the armchair with the crossword. But his mind was far away, and some of the words he himself had spoken kept echoing around his brain: something about one’s better self … And he smiled, for he knew that this would be a Christmas he might enjoy almost as much as the children up at Littlemore, perhaps. He had solved so many mysteries in his life. Was he now, he wondered, beginning to glimpse the solution to the greatest mystery of them all?

  The Jar of Ginger

  Gladys Mitchell

  ‘But you would have to be certain,’ said Jaffrick, ‘that the person you wanted to murder would eat the whole lot. I mean, look at the risk otherwise. Why, you might even eat the wrong piece yourself.’

  We were young then. We called ourselves The Society of Thugs and the only rule for admission to membership was that you should describe to the club a method for murdering your nearest and dearest. We interpreted this heading widely. It could be held that nearest and dearest need not be synonymous terms. For instance, Withers had given a perfectly good and very interesting account of how he could murder his landlady, and P. J. Smith had described a method for murdering himself. In the one case the operative word was nearest and in the other case dearest, P. J. Smith holding (against no particular opposition) that he was the dearest person known to himself. For one thing he contended that he was of more expense to himself than anybody else was (he was a bachelor, of course), and he confessed also that he preferred himself and his own company even to us and ours.

  It was a man called Chart who had drawn the remark from Jaffrick. Chart was not known personally to any of us. He had rolled up in company with Bellew, but Bellew had only run into him that evening in a bar, and as Chart (admittedly slightly stewed when they arrived) had stood him a drink because he said he liked his face, Bellew had brought him along after telling him the terms of membership.

  He was a good deal older than the rest of us. Forty-five, I should say, and his story of how he could murder his wife was interesting enough in a sense, but, as Jaffrick argued, the method he described could not be guaranteed to work. The risk to the murderer was as great as to the intended victim.

  ‘Ah, but after a time you wouldn’t put the whole jar of ginger on the table,’ said Chart. ‘Perhaps I ought to make that bit a little clearer. By the way, my wife is dead, so my choice of her as my victim no longer has any real significance. I shouldn’t like you gentlemen to think that my selection of somebody I could murder was in questionable taste. Yes, well, you see, you’d buy the pot of ginger … one of those handsome, decorated, Chinese things, you know – as a present for the house around Christmas time. You’d buy the biggest and most beautiful pot you could afford, because the more ginger you had to play about with, the easier your task would be and the greater its chance of success.

  ‘Well, at first you would dig for your ginger, and the wife would dig for hers. This would go on for quite some time, the ginger, of course, innocent stuff, gradually getting lower and the action of digging for it stickier.

  ‘One point that I must emphasise is that for the successful carrying out of your plan you would need to keep the pot of ginger firmly under your own control. This could be done by insisting, with humorous gallantry, that you always place it upon the table yourself.

  ‘“No, it’s my present to the house,” you would laughingly say, looking at it affectionately as it stood in its celestial glory on the sideboard. “Nobody else need even dust it! I’ll see to all that!” Of course, if you had any sense, you wouldn’t make it the first present to the house that you had ever bought. If one proposes to murder one’s nearest and dearest, one leads up to it by degrees. Even three years is not too long to wait. There is no point in bungling the job, let alone spoiling the ship for a ha’porth of tar.

  ‘Well, when the ginger in the jar was low enough to make spearing it out a messy, sticky business, you would introduce your next little move. You would bring home a very small, expensive, cut-glass dish … something about the size of a domestic ash-tray. In fact, a really lovely ashtray about three to four inches across would do as well as anything else.

  ‘“Look, darling,” you would say. “For our lovely ginger! And when we’ve finished the ginger we’ve got a perfectly good ash-tray. My next present to the house had better be some super-Turkish or Egyptian.”’

  ‘But I can’t see a woman swallowing all this, you know,’ said Jaffrick. ‘I mean, by the time you’d got to this stage you’d have had disagreements and a good many quarrels. I mean, she would tend to suspect your bona fides and so forth, wouldn’t she?’

  ‘That would depend upon how much you hated her,’ replied Chart. ‘If it was only the ordinary give and take of the average married couple, she would naturally suspect your good intentions. She would take it for granted that you were covering up some peccadillo of your own by bringing back presents for the house. But a real, honest, devilish, implacable hatred, that’s quite a different matter. You would disguise that as long as ever you could, because you would know that sooner or later it would mean either murder or divorce, and divorce is so confoundedly expensive.’

  We all gloomily agreed. We were young, as I said, and all bachelors. It takes a bachelor to be ideally (as it were) gloomy and profound about marriage.

  ‘Go on about the ginger,’ said Bellew, for our guest showed signs of dropping off to sleep. ‘The trouble, as I see it, would not be to disguise your hatred – any competent hater could do that! – but to make perfectly certain, ash-tray or no ash-tray, that you didn’t pick the wrong piece of ginger yourself.’

  ‘Simplicity itself,’ said P. J. Smith. ‘You’d stick a pin in the poisoned lump and then chew carefully.’

  We all disputed this, an ordinarily silent bloke called Carruthers and myself holding that the danger of swallowing or being pricked by the pin would be almost equal to the danger of swallowing the lethal dose in the piece of ginger, and, further, that if the victim struck on the pin she would throw the rest of the ginger away.

  ‘Pins!’ said P. J. Smith. ‘Oh no! Who on earth worries about pins? Stuck them deeply into chaps at school, and chaps at school stuck them deeply into me. Nothing to it. Nobody cares about pins!’

  Carruthers and I said that we did, and the pin and anti-pin argument lasted the club for half an hour and tended to embrace such subjects as canteen meals and the recent bus strike. It then passed lightly over films, the scenery around the Matterhorn and yachting on the Norfolk Broads. In fact, Rowbotham, our president, had to call the meeting to order.

  ‘Will somebody move,’ he said plaintively, ‘that the prospective candidate be al
lowed to continue his exposition?’

  Half a dozen of us who were losing the argument immediately accommodated him, and Chart resumed his remarks.

  ‘You see,’ he said, when we had woken him up, ‘one would only put out four pieces of ginger each time on the small glass dish.’

  ‘Three-to-one chance,’ said Bellew.

  ‘Granted,’ said Chart, ‘and your remarks about pins have interested me deeply. Nevertheless, there would be one infallible rule. You yourself would always choose your piece of ginger first. This would reduce the odds, of course, but, in my view, unnecessarily. There would always be a slight element of chance or risk, but the wise man would slice off the end of the noxious piece of ginger so that he could recognise it. The technique is really very simple. One would spear an innocuous piece of ginger, leaving three other pieces on the dish. It might be that the party of the second part would pick the piece with the strychnine in it straight away. If not, there would be only two pieces left, and a wise murderer would give his victim the choice of these, and not attempt to encourage her to eat both.’

  ‘I can’t see that,’ said Bellew. P. J. Smith said that of course he could. If the victim picked the non-poisonous piece it would be simplicity itself to say that one did not want anymore and leave it at that. Other members disputed this. It would look very fishy, they said, to leave a piece on the dish if one was not in the habit of doing this. And what of the ill-manners of helping oneself first? they enquired.

  Chart, looking crestfallen, agreed.

  ‘Besides, what would you do with the fatal piece?’ asked Bellew, pressing home his advantage. ‘You could hardly put it back into the jar, and you’d not want to throw it away and doctor up another piece, would you?’