A Very Murderous Christmas

by Cecily Gayford

  ‘Not till the Old Bailey, sir. I may have thought of a few more by then.’ With great satisfaction, Skimpy committed Denis Timson, a minor villain who would have had difficulty changing a fuse, let alone blowing a safe, for trial at the Central Criminal Court.

  ‘Funny you mentioned Harry Sparksman. Do you know, the same thought occurred to me. An expert like him could’ve done that job in the time.’

  ‘Great minds think alike,’ I assured DI Grimble. We were washing away the memory of an hour or two before Skimpy with two pints of nourishing stout in the pub opposite the beak’s court. ‘You know Harry took up a new career?’ I needn’t have asked the question. DI Grimble had a groupie’s encyclopaedic knowledge of the criminal stars.

  ‘Oh, yes. Now a comic called Jim Diamond. Got up a concert party in the nick. Apparently gave him a taste for show business.’

  ‘I did hear,’ I took Grimble into my confidence, ‘that he made a comeback for the Croydon job.’ It had been a throwaway line from Uncle Fred Timson – ‘I heard talk they got Harry back out of retirement’ – but it was a thought worth examining.

  ‘I heard the same. So we did a bit of checking. But Sparksman, known as Diamond, has got a cast-iron alibi.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘At the time when the Croydon job was done, he was performing in a pantomime. On stage nearly all the evening, it seems, playing the dame.’

  ‘Aladdin,’ I said, ‘at the Tufnell Park Empire. It might just be worth your while to go into that alibi a little more thoroughly. I’d suggest you have a private word with Mrs Molly Diamond. It’s just possible she may have noticed his attraction to Aladdin’s lamp.’

  ‘Now then, Mr Rumpole.’ Grimble was wiping the froth from his lips with a neatly folded handkerchief. ‘You mustn’t tell me how to do my job.’

  ‘I’m only trying to serve,’ I managed to look pained, ‘the interests of justice!’

  ‘You mean, the interests of your client?’

  ‘Sometimes they’re the same thing,’ I told him, but I had to admit it wasn’t often.

  As it happened, the truth emerged without Detective Inspector Grimble having to do much of a job. Harry had, in fact, fallen victim to a tip-tilted nose and memorable thighs; he’d left home and moved into Aladdin’s Kensal Rise flat. Molly, taking a terrible revenge, blew his alibi wide open.

  She had watched many rehearsals and knew every word, every gag, every nudge, wink and shrill complaint of the dame’s part. She had played it to perfection to give her husband an alibi while he went back to his old job in Croydon. It all went perfectly, even though Uncle Abanazer, dancing with her, had felt an unexpected softness.

  I had known, instinctively, that something was very wrong. It had, however, taken some time for me to realise what I had really seen that night at the Tufnell Park Empire. It was nothing less than an outrage to a Great British Tradition. The Widow Twankey was a woman.

  DI Grimble made his arrest and the case against Denis Timson was dropped by the Crown Prosecution Service. As spring came to the Temple gardens, Hilda opened a letter in the other case which had turned on the recognition of old, familiar faces and read it out to me.

  ‘The repointing’s going well on the tower and we hope to have it finished by Easter,’ Poppy Longstaff had written. ‘And I have to tell you, Hilda, the oil-fired heating has changed our lives. Eric says it’s like living in the tropics. Cooking supper last night I had to peel off one of my cardigans.’ She Who Must Be Obeyed put down the letter from her old school friend and said, thoughtfully, ‘Noblesse oblige.’

  ‘What was that, Hilda?’

  ‘I could tell at once that Donald Compton was a true gentleman. The sort that does good by stealth. Of course, poor old Eric thought he’d never get the tower mended, but I somehow felt that Donald wouldn’t fail him. It was noblesse.’

  ‘Perhaps it was,’ I conceded, ‘but in this case the noblesse was Rumpole’s.’

  ‘Rumpole! What on earth do you mean? You hardly paid to have the church tower repointed, did you?’

  ‘In one sense, yes.’

  ‘I can’t believe that. After all the years it took you to have the bathroom decorated. What on earth do you mean about your noblesse?’

  ‘It’d take too long to explain, old darling. Besides, I’ve got a conference in chambers. Tricky case of receiving stolen surgical appliances. I suppose,’ I added doubtfully, ‘it may lead, at some time in the distant future, to an act of charity.’

  Easter came, the work on the tower was successfully completed, and I was walking back to chambers after a gruelling day down at the Bailey when I saw, wafting through the Temple cloisters, the unlikely apparition of the Revd Eric Longstaff. He chirruped a greeting and said he’d come up to consult some legal brains on the proper investment of what remained of the Church Restoration Fund.

  ‘I’m so profoundly grateful,’ he told me, ‘that I decided to invite you down to the rectory last Christmas.’

  ‘You decided?’

  ‘Of course I did.’

  ‘I thought your wife Poppy extended the invitation to She …’

  ‘Oh, yes. But I thought of the idea. It was the result of a good deal of hard knee-work and guidance from above. I knew you were the right man for the job.’

  ‘What job?’

  ‘The Compton job.’

  What was this? The rector was speaking like an old con. The Coldsands caper? ‘What can you mean?’

  ‘I just mean that I knew you’d defended Donald Compton. In a previous existence.’

  ‘How on earth did you know that?’

  Eric drew himself up to his full, willowy height. ‘I’m not a prison visitor for nothing,’ he said proudly. ‘I thought you were just the chap to put the fear of God into him. You were the very person to put the squeeze on the Lord of the Manor.’

  ‘Put the squeeze on him?’ Words were beginning to fail me.

  ‘That was the idea. It came to me as a result of knee-work.’

  ‘So you brought us down to that freezing rectory just so I could blackmail the local benefactor?’

  ‘Didn’t it turn out well!’

  ‘May the Lord forgive you.’

  ‘He’s very forgiving.’

  ‘Next time,’ I spoke to the Man of God severely, ‘the Church can do its blackmailing for itself.’

  ‘Oh, we’re quite used to that.’ The rector smiled at me in what I thought was a lofty manner. ‘Particularly around Christmas.’

  The Problem of Santa’s Lighthouse

  Edward Hoch

  ‘You say you’d like a Christmas story this time?’ old Dr Sam Hawthorne said as he poured the drinks into fine crystal wineglasses. ‘Well, the holidays are approaching, and as it happens I’ve got an adventure from December of 1931 that fills the bill nicely. It didn’t happen in Northmont, but along the coast, over toward Cape Cod …’

  I’d decided to take a few days off (Dr Sam continued), and took a drive by myself along the coast. It was something of a treat for me, since vacations are rare for a country doctor. But now that the Pilgrim Memorial Hospital had opened in Northmont, some of the pressure was off. If people couldn’t reach me in an emergency, the hospital was there to minister to their ills.

  So off I went in my Stutz Torpedo, promising my nurse April I’d telephone her in a few days to make certain everything was under control. It was the first week in December, but winter hadn’t yet set in along the New England coast. There was no snow, and temperatures were in the forties. Along with every other part of the country, the area had been hard hit by the Depression, but once I’d passed through the old mill towns and headed north along the coast I saw less poverty.

  Not far from Plymouth, a sign nailed to a tree caught my attention. Visit Santa’s Lighthouse! it read, and although such commercial ventures to attract children are commonplace today, they were still a bit unusual in 1931. I couldn’t imagine a lighthouse whose sole function was to entertain tots in the weeks before Christmas.
But then I noticed that the word Santa’s had been tacked on over the original name. It was enough to make me curious, so I turned down the road to the shore.

  And there it was, sure enough: a gleaming white structure that rose from the rocky shoreline and proclaimed across its base, in foot-high wooden letters, that it was indeed Santa’s Lighthouse. I parked my car next to two others and walked up the path to where a bright-faced girl of college age was selling admissions for twenty-five cents. She was wearing bright Christmassy red.

  ‘How many?’ she asked, peering down the path as if expecting me to be followed by a wife and children.

  ‘Just one.’ I took a quarter from my pocket.

  ‘We have a special family rate of fifty cents.’

  ‘No, I’m alone.’ I pointed up at the sign. ‘What’s the name of this place the rest of the year?’

  ‘You noticed we changed the sign,’ she said with a grin. ‘It’s really Satan’s Lighthouse, but there’s nothing very Christmas-sounding about that. So we took the “n” off the end of Satan and moved it to the middle.’

  I had to chuckle at the idea. ‘Has it helped business?’ ‘A little. But with this Depression and gasoline twenty-five cents a gallon, we don’t get many families willing to drive here from Boston or Providence.’

  A bulging, padded Santa Claus appeared at the door just then, mumbling through his beard, ‘Lisa, you have to do something about those kids. They’re pulling the beard and kicking me!’

  She sighed and turned her attention to the Santa. ‘Harry, you’ve got to show a little patience – you can’t expect me to go running in to rescue you every time they give you any trouble.’

  I said, ‘He’s not so good at this Santa Claus business.’

  ‘He’s much better as the pirate ghost,’ she agreed.

  ‘The pirate ghost is a feature of Satan’s Lighthouse?’

  She gave a quick nod and offered her hand. ‘I’m Lisa Quay. That’s my brother, Harry. There’s a legend that goes with this place – I guess it’s why our father bought it.’

  ‘Buried treasure.’

  ‘How’d you guess? Pirates are supposed to have put up a false light here to lure ships onto the rocks and loot them, just as they once did off the coast of Cornwall. That’s why it was called Satan’s Lighthouse. When a real lighthouse was built years later, the local people called it by the same name. But of course there aren’t pirates any more – except when my brother puts on his costume.’

  I introduced myself and she told me more about the region. She was an open, unassuming young woman who seemed more than capable of taking care of herself – and her brother, from what I’d seen. ‘Is your father here, too?’ I asked.

  She shook her head. ‘Daddy’s in prison.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘He was convicted of some sort of fraud last year. I never fully understood it, and I don’t believe he was guilty, but he refused to defend himself. He has another year to serve before he’s eligible for parole.’

  ‘So you and your brother are keeping this place going in his absence.’

  ‘That’s about it. Now you know my life story, Dr Hawthorne.’

  ‘Call me Sam. I’m not that much older than you.’

  Four unruly children came out of the lighthouse, shepherded by a frustrated Santa Claus. I watched while they piled into a waiting car and drove off with their parents. ‘Anyone else inside now?’ Lisa asked her brother.

  ‘No, it’s empty.’

  ‘You’re not making any money by my standing here,’ I decided, plunking down the quarter I was still holding. ‘I’ll have a ticket.’

  ‘Come on,’ Harry Quay said. ‘I’ll show you through.’ The lighthouse was a slender whitewashed structure with rectangular sides that tapered toward the top, where a railing and walkway surrounded the light itself. I followed Quay up the iron staircase that spiralled through the centre of the structure. The padded Santa suit didn’t slow him down and he made the first landing well ahead of me. I was short of breath and welcomed the pause when he led me to a room that had been converted into a Santa’s workshop.

  ‘We bring the kids up here and give them inexpensive little toys,’ he explained. ‘Then we go the rest of the way up to the light.’

  ‘What’s the room used for the rest of the year?’

  ‘Originally it was the sleeping quarters for the lighthouse crew – generally a keeper and his wife. Of course, Lisa and I don’t live here ourselves. We use the room for the pirate’s den when it’s not Christmas.’

  I glanced at the spiral staircase, anxious to get the rest of the climbing behind me. ‘Let’s see the top.’

  We went up another dozen feet to the next level, where a rolltop desk and wooden filing cabinet had been outfitted with signs indicating it was Santa’s office. The nautical charts of Cape Cod Bay on the walls were festooned with streamers proclaiming a landing area for Santa’s reindeer-powered sleigh. There were powerful binoculars and a telescope for observing passing ships, and a two-way radio for receiving weather reports or S.O.S. messages.

  ‘I have to watch the kids every minute up here,’ Harry Quay said. ‘Some of this equipment is valuable.’

  ‘I’m surprised it’s still here if the lighthouse is no longer in use.’

  ‘My father kept them for some reason. He used to sit up here at night sometimes. It was a hobby of his, I suppose. That’s why he bought the place.’

  I gestured toward the ceiling of the little office. ‘Does the light up above still operate?’

  ‘I doubt it. I haven’t tried it myself.’

  We climbed the rest of the way to the circular outside walkway that went around the light itself. A metal railing allowed me a handhold, but one could easily slip beneath it and fall to the ground. ‘You don’t bring the kids up here, do you?’

  ‘One at a time, with me holding their hand. I’m very careful.’

  I had to admit it was a magnificent view. On the bay side the land fell away rapidly to the water’s edge, and as far as I could see the chill waters were casting up rippling whitecaps before the stiff ocean breeze. The curve of Cape Cod itself was clearly visible from this high up, and I could even make out the opposite shoreline some twenty miles across the bay.

  But at this time of the year night came early and the sun was already low in the western sky. ‘I’d better get going if I want to reach Boston tonight,’ I said.

  ‘Why go that far? There are plenty of places to stay around Plymouth.’

  We went back downstairs and met Lisa at the workshop level. ‘Did you enjoy the view? Isn’t it spectacular?’

  ‘It certainly is,’ I agreed. ‘You should double your prices.’

  ‘No one comes as it is,’ she replied with a touch of sadness.

  ‘If the light still works, turn it on! Bring in some customers in the early evening.’

  ‘Oh, the coast guard would never allow that.’ She bustled about the workroom, picking up a few candy wrappers dropped by the children, retrieving a reel of fishing line and a set of jacks from one corner. ‘You find the darnedest things at the end of the day.’

  ‘Your brother says there are some places I could stay in the Plymouth area.’

  ‘Sure. The Plymouth Rock is a nice old place, and the rooms are clean.’ She turned to her brother. ‘Let’s close up for the night.’

  ‘I’d better make sure everything’s shut upstairs,’ Harry said.

  ‘I’ll go with you.’

  I started down the spiral staircase to the ground floor. I waited a few minutes, thinking they’d be following soon, but I became restless. The lighthouse had been a pleasant diversion, but I was anxious to move on.

  ‘Wait a minute!’ Lisa Quay called out as I started down the path to my car. She was at one of the middle windows, and I paused while she came down to meet me.

  ‘I didn’t mean to leave without saying goodbye,’ I told her, ‘but it’s getting dark and I should be on my way.’

  ‘At least wait for
Harry. He’s taking off his Santa Claus suit. He’ll be down in a minute.’

  I strolled back with her while she closed up the fold-away ticket booth and stowed it inside the lighthouse doorway. ‘If this weather holds out, you should get some crowds before Christmas.’

  ‘I hope so,’ she said. ‘Those four kids you saw were the only customers we had all afternoon.’

  ‘Maybe you could offer a special group-rate for—’

  ‘What’s that?’ she asked suddenly, hurrying back outside. ‘Harry?’ she called out, looking up. ‘Is that you?’

  There was some sort of noise from above us and then Lisa Quay screamed. I looked up in time to see a figure falling from the circular walkway at the top of the lighthouse. I sprang aside, pulling her with me, as Harry Quay’s body hit the ground where we’d been standing.

  Lisa turned away screaming, her hands covering her face. I hurried over to her brother, my mind racing through the possibilities of getting fast help if he was still alive.

  Then I saw the handle of the dagger protruding from between his ribs and I knew that help was useless.

  ‘I don’t believe in ghosts,’ she said quite rationally as we waited for the police to arrive. I’d used the lighthouse radio to call the coast guard, who promised to contact the state police for us. While I was inside, I’d looked in both rooms and even inside a little storeroom, but the lighthouse was empty. There was nothing on the walkway to indicate anyone else had been there, nothing on the spiral staircase to point to an unseen visitor.

  ‘We don’t have to believe in ghosts,’ I told her. ‘There’s a logical explanation. There has to be. Have you ever seen that dagger before?’

  ‘Yes. It’s part of his pirate costume. The storeroom—’

  ‘I checked the storeroom. I saw the costume hanging there. No one was hiding.’

  ‘Well, I don’t believe in ghosts,’ she said again.

  ‘The police will be here soon.’

  She fastened her hand on my arm. ‘You won’t leave, will you? You won’t leave before they come?’

  ‘Of course not.’ I’d moved her away from her brother’s body, so she’d be spared the sight while we waited for the police. I could see she was close to hysteria and might need my professional services at any moment.