Murder under the Christmas Tree

by Cecily Gayford

  MURDER

  UNDER THE

  CHRISTMAS TREE

  Featuring Arthur Conan Doyle, Ngiao Marsh, Ellis Peters, Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, Edmund Crispin, Dorothy L Sayers, Carter Dickson and GK Chesterton.

  Ten Classic Crime Stories for the Festive Season

  MURDER

  UNDER THE

  CHRISTMAS TREE

  Ian Rankin • Dorothy L. Sayers • Margery Allingham • Arthur Conan Doyle • Val McDermid • Ellis Peters • Edmund Crispin • G. K. Chesterton • Ngaio Marsh • Carter Dickson

  First published in Great Britain in 2016 by

  PROFILE BOOKS LTD

  3 Holford Yard

  Bevin Way

  London WC1X 9HD

  www.profilebooks.com

  Chosen and edited by Cecily Gayford

  Selection copyright © Profile Books Ltd, 2016

  ‘The Necklace of Pearls’ by Dorothy L. Sayers, from Hangman’s Holiday, reprinted by permission of David Higham Ltd, Hodder & Stoughton and HarperCollins Publishers Ltd, USA; ‘The Name on the Window’ by Edmund Crispin reprinted by permission of Peters Fraser & Dunlop (www.petersfraserdunlop.com) on behalf of Rights Limited; ‘A Traditional Christmas’ by Val McDermid, reprinted by Jane Gregory & Company on behalf of the Author; ‘Cinders’ by Ian Rankin, from The Beat Goes On, reprinted by permission of The Orion Publishing Group and Back Bay Books. ‘Cinders’ © 2014 John Rebus Ltd; ‘Death on the Air’ by Ngaio Marsh, reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd and Felony & Mayhem Press © Ngaio Marsh, 1948; ‘Persons or Things Unknown’ by Carter Dickson, from The Department of Queer Complaints, reprinted by permission of David Higham Ltd and William Heinemann; ‘The Case is Altered’ from The Return of Mr. Campion by Margery Allingham reprinted by permission of Peters Fraser & Dunlop (www.petersfraserdunlop.com) on behalf of Rights Limited; ‘The Price of Light’ by Ellis Peters, reprinted by permission of United Agents.

  The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  eISBN 978 1 78283 332 1

  Contents

  The Necklace of Pearls

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  The Name on the Window

  Edmund Crispin

  A Traditional Christmas

  Val McDermid

  The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  The Invisible Man

  G. K. Chesterton

  Cinders

  Ian Rankin

  Death on the Air

  Ngaio Marsh

  Persons or Things Unknown

  Carter Dickson

  The Case is Altered

  Margery Allingham

  The Price of Light

  Ellis Peters

  The Necklace of Pearls

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  Sir Septimus Shale was accustomed to assert his authority once in the year and once only. He allowed his young and fashionable wife to fill his house with diagrammatic furniture made of steel; to collect advanced artists and anti-grammatical poets; to believe in cocktails and relativity and to dress as extravagantly as she pleased; but he did insist on an old-fashioned Christmas. He was a simple-hearted man, who really liked plum-pudding and cracker mottoes, and he could not get it out of his head that other people, ‘at bottom,’ enjoyed these things also. At Christmas, therefore, he firmly retired to his country house in Essex, called in the servants to hang holly and mistletoe upon the cubist electric fittings; loaded the steel sideboard with delicacies from Fortnum & Mason; hung up stockings at the heads of the polished walnut bedsteads; and even, on this occasion only, had the electric radiators removed from the modernist grates and installed wood fires and a Yule log. He then gathered his family and friends about him, filled them with as much Dickensian good fare as he could persuade them to swallow, and, after their Christmas dinner, set them down to play ‘Charades’ and ‘Clumps’ and ‘Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral’ in the drawing-room, concluding these diversions by ‘Hide-and-Seek’ in the dark all over the house. Because Sir Septimus was a very rich man, his guests fell in with this invariable programme, and if they were bored, they did not tell him so.

  Another charming and traditional custom which he followed was that of presenting to his daughter Margharita a pearl on each successive birthday – this anniversary happening to coincide with Christmas Eve. The pearls now numbered twenty, and the collection was beginning to enjoy a certain celebrity, and had been photographed in the Society papers. Though not sensationally large – each one being about the size of a marrow-fat pea – the pearls were of very great value. They were of exquisite colour and perfect shape and matched to a hair’s-weight. On this particular Christmas Eve, the presentation of the twenty-first pearl had been the occasion of a very special ceremony. There was a dance and there were speeches. On the Christmas night following, the more restricted family party took place, with the turkey and the Victorian games. There were eleven guests, in addition to Sir Septimus and Lady Shale and their daughter, nearly all related or connected to them in some way: John Shale, a brother with his wife and their son and daughter Henry and Betty; Betty’s fiancé, Oswald Truegood, a young man with parliamentary ambitions; George Comphrey, a cousin of Lady Shale’s, aged about thirty and known as a man about town; Lavinia Prescott, asked on George’s account; Joyce Trivett, asked on Henry Shale’s account; Richard and Beryl Dennison, distant relations of Lady Shale, who lived a gay and expensive life in town on nobody precisely knew what resources; and Lord Peter Wimsey, asked, in a touching spirit of unreasonable hope, on Margharita’s account. There were also, of course, William Norgate, secretary to Sir Septimus, and Miss Tomkins, secretary to Lady Shale, who had to be there because, without their calm efficiency, the Christmas arrangements could not have been carried through.

  Dinner was over – a seemingly endless succession of soup, fish, turkey, roast beef, plum-pudding, mince-pies, crystallized fruit, nuts, and five kinds of wine, presided over by Sir Septimus, all smiles, by Lady Shale, all mocking deprecation, and by Margharita, pretty and bored, with the necklace of twenty-one pearls gleaming softly on her slender throat. Gorged and dyspeptic and longing only for the horizontal position, the company had been shepherded into the drawing-room and set to play ‘Musical Chairs’ (Miss Tomkins at the piano), ‘Hunt the Slipper’ (slipper provided by Miss Tomkins), and ‘Dumb Crambo’ (costumes by Miss Tomkins and Mr William Norgate). The back drawing-room (for Sir Septimus clung to these old-fashioned names) provided an admirable dressing-room, being screened by folding doors from the large drawing-room in which the audience sat on aluminum chairs, scrabbling uneasy toes on a floor of black glass under the tremendous illumination of electricity reflected from a brass ceiling.

  It was William Norgate who, after taking the temperature of the meeting, suggested to Lady Shale that they should play at something less athletic. Lady Shale agreed and, as usual, suggested bridge. Sir Septimus, as usual, blew the suggestion aside.

  ‘Bridge? Nonsense! Nonsense! Play bridge every day of your lives. This is Christmas time. Something we can all play together. How about “Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral”?’

  This intellectual pastime was a favourite with Sir Septimus; he was rather good at putting pregnant questions. After a brief discussion,
it became evident that this game was an inevitable part of the programme. The party settled down to it, Sir Septimus undertaking to ‘go out’ first and set the thing going.

  Presently they had guessed among other things Miss Tomkins’s mother’s photograph, a gramophone record of ‘I want to be happy’ (much scientific research into the exact composition of records, settled by William Norgate out of the Encyclopaedia Britannica), the smallest stickleback in the stream at the bottom of the garden, the new planet Pluto, the scarf worn by Mrs Dennison (very confusing, because it was not silk, which would be animal, or artificial silk, which would be vegetable, but made of spun glass – mineral, a very clever choice of subject), and had failed to guess the Prime Minister’s wireless speech – which was voted not fair, since nobody could decide whether it was animal by nature or a kind of gas. It was decided that they should do one more word and then go on to ‘Hide-and-Seek’. Oswald Truegood had retired into the back room and shut the door behind him while the party discussed the next subject of examination, when suddenly Sir Septimus broke in on the argument by calling to his daughter:

  ‘Hullo, Margy! What have you done with your necklace?’

  ‘I took it off, Dad, because I thought it might get broken in “Dumb Crambo”. It’s over here on this table. No, it isn’t. Did you take it, mother?’

  ‘No, I didn’t. If I’d seen it, I should have. You are a careless child.’

  ‘I believe you’ve got it yourself, Dad. You’re teasing.’

  Sir Septimus denied the accusation with some energy. Everybody got up and began to hunt about. There were not many places in that bare and polished room where a necklace could be hidden. After ten minutes’ fruitless investigation, Richard Dennison, who had been seated next to the table where the pearls had been placed, began to look rather uncomfortable.

  ‘Awkward, you know,’ he remarked to Wimsey.

  At this moment, Oswald Truegood put his head through the folding-doors and asked whether they hadn’t settled on something by now, because he was getting the fidgets.

  This directed the attention of the searchers to the inner room. Margharita must have been mistaken. She had taken it in there, and it had got mixed up with the dressing-up clothes somehow. The room was ransacked. Everything was lifted up and shaken. The thing began to look serious. After half an hour of desperate energy it became apparent that the pearls were nowhere to be found.

  ‘They must be somewhere in these two rooms, you know,’ said Wimsey. ‘The back drawing-room has no door and nobody could have gone out of the front drawing-room without being seen. Unless the windows—’

  No. The windows were all guarded on the outside by heavy shutters which it needed two footmen to take down and replace. The pearls had not gone out that way. In fact, the mere suggestion that they had left the drawing-room at all was disagreeable. Because – because –

  It was William Norgate, efficient as ever, who coldly and boldly faced the issue.

  ‘I think, Sir Septimus, it would be a relief to the minds of everybody present if we could all be searched.’

  Sir Septimus was horrified, but the guests, having found a leader, backed up Norgate. The door was locked, and the search was conducted – the ladies in the inner room and the men in the outer.

  Nothing resulted from it except some very interesting information about the belongings habitually carried about by the average man and woman. It was natural that Lord Peter Wimsey should possess a pair of forceps, a pocket lens, and a small folding foot-rule – was he not a Sherlock Holmes in high life? But that Oswald Truegood should have two liver-pills in a screw of paper and Henry Shale a pocket edition of The Odes of Horace was unexpected. Why did John Shale distend the pockets of his dress-suit with a stump of red sealing-wax, an ugly little mascot, and a five-shilling piece? George Comphrey had a pair of folding scissors, and three wrapped lumps of sugar, of the sort served in restaurants and dining-cars – evidence of a not uncommon form of kleptomania; but that the tidy and exact Norgate should burden himself with a reel of white cotton, three separate lengths of string, and twelve safety-pins on a card seemed really remarkable till one remembered that he had superintended all the Christmas decorations. Richard Dennison, amid some confusion and laughter, was found to cherish a lady’s garter, a powder-compact, and half a potato; the last-named, he said, was a prophylactic against rheumatism (to which he was subject), while the other objects belonged to his wife. On the ladies’ side, the more striking exhibits were a little book on palmistry, three invisible hair-pins, and a baby’s photograph (Miss Tomkins); a Chinese trick cigarette-case with a secret compartment (Beryl Dennison); a very private letter and an outfit for mending stocking-ladders (Lavinia Prescott); and a pair of eyebrow tweezers and a small packet of white powder, said to be for headaches (Betty Shale). An agitating moment followed the production from Joyce Trivett’s handbag of a small string of pearls – but it was promptly remembered that these had come out of one of the crackers at dinnertime, and they were, in fact, synthetic. In short, the search was unproductive of anything beyond a general shamefacedness and the discomfort always produced by undressing and re-dressing in a hurry at the wrong time of the day.

  It was then that somebody, very grudgingly and haltingly, mentioned the horrid word ‘Police.’ Sir Septimus, naturally, was appalled by the idea. It was disgusting. He would not allow it. The pearls must be somewhere. They must search the rooms again. Could not Lord Peter Wimsey, with his experience of – er – mysterious happenings, do something to assist them?

  ‘Eh?’ said his lordship. ‘Oh, by Jove, yes – by all means, certainly. That is to say, provided nobody supposes – eh, what? I mean to say, you don’t know that I’m not a suspicious character, do you, what?’

  Lady Shale interposed with authority.

  ‘We don’t think anybody ought to be suspected,’ she said, ‘but, if we did, we’d know it couldn’t be you. You know far too much about crimes to want to commit one.’

  ‘All right,’ said Wimsey. ‘But after the way the place has been gone over –’ He shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid you won’t be able to find any footprints,’ said Margharita. ‘But we may have overlooked something.’

  Wimsey nodded.

  ‘I’ll try. Do you all mind sitting down on your chairs in the outer room and staying there. All except one of you – I’d better have a witness to anything I do or find. Sir Septimus – you’d be the best person, I think.’

  He shepherded them to their places and began a slow circuit of the two rooms, exploring every surface, gazing up to the polished brazen ceiling, and crawling on hands and knees in the approved fashion across the black and shining desert of the floors. Sir Septimus followed, staring when Wimsey stared, bending with his hands upon his knees when Wimsey crawled, and puffing at intervals with astonishment and chagrin. Their progress rather resembled that of a man taking out a very inquisitive puppy for a very leisurely constitutional. Fortunately, Lady Shale’s taste in furnishing made investigation easier; there were scarcely any nooks or corners where anything could be concealed.

  They reached the inner drawing-room, and here the dressing-up clothes were again minutely examined, but without result. Finally, Wimsey lay down flat on his stomach to squint under a steel cabinet which was one of the very few pieces of furniture which possessed short legs. Something about it seemed to catch his attention. He rolled up his sleeve and plunged his arm into the cavity, kicked convulsively in the effort to reach farther than was humanly possible, pulled out from his pocket and extended his folding foot-rule, fished with it under the cabinet, and eventually succeeded in extracting what he sought.

  It was a very minute object – in fact, a pin. Not an ordinary pin, but one resembling those used by entomologists to impale extremely small moths on the setting-board. It was about three-quarters of an inch in length, as fine as a very fine needle, with a sharp point and a particularly small head.

  ‘Bless my soul!’ said Sir Septimus
. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Does anybody here happen to collect moths or beetles or anything?’ asked Wimsey, squatting on his haunches and examining the pin.

  ‘I’m pretty sure they don’t,’ replied Sir Septimus. ‘I’ll ask them.’

  ‘Don’t do that.’ Wimsey bent his head and stared at the floor, from which his own face stared meditatively back at him.

  ‘I see,’ said Wimsey presently. ‘That’s how it was done. All right, Sir Septimus. I know where the pearls are, but I don’t know who took them. Perhaps it would be as well – for everybody’s satisfaction – just to find out. In the meantime they are perfectly safe. Don’t tell anyone that we’ve found this pin or that we’ve discovered anything. Send all these people to bed. Lock the drawing-room door and keep the key, and we’ll get our man – or woman – by breakfast-time.’

  ‘God bless my soul,’ said Sir Septimus, very much puzzled.

  Lord Peter Wimsey kept careful watch that night upon the drawing-room door. Nobody, however, came near it. Either the thief suspected a trap or he felt confident that any time would do to recover the pearls. Wimsey, however, did not feel that he was wasting his time. He was making a list of people who had been left alone in the back drawing-room during the playing of ‘Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral.’ The list ran as follows:

  Sir Septimus Shale

  Lavinia Prescott

  William Norgate

  Joyce Trivett and Henry Shale (together, because they had claimed to be incapable of guessing anything unaided)

  Mrs Dennison

  Betty Shale

  George Comphrey

  Richard Dennison

  Miss Tomkins

  Oswald Truegood

  He also made out a list of the persons to whom pearls might be useful or desirable. Unfortunately, this list agreed in almost all respects with the first (always excepting Sir Septimus) and so was not very helpful. The two secretaries had both come well recommended, but that was exactly what they would have done had they come with ulterior designs; the Dennisons were notorious livers from hand to mouth; Betty Shale carried mysterious white powders in her handbag, and was known to be in with a rather rapid set in town; Henry was a harmless dilettante, but Joyce Trivett could twist him round her little finger and was what Jane Austen liked to call ‘expensive and dissipated’; Comphrey speculated; Oswald Truegood was rather frequently present at Epsom and Newmarket – the search for motives was only too fatally easy.