Murder under the Christmas Tree

by Cecily Gayford

  When the second housemaid and the under-footman appeared in the passage with household implements, Wimsey abandoned his vigil, but he was down early to breakfast Sir Septimus with his wife and daughter were down before him, and a certain air of tension made itself felt. Wimsey, standing on the hearth before the fire, made conversation about the weather and politics.

  The party assembled gradually, but, as though by common consent, nothing was said about pearls until after breakfast, when Oswald Truegood took the bull by the horns.

  ‘Well now!’ said he. ‘How’s the detective getting along? Got your man, Wimsey?’

  ‘Not yet,’ said Wimsey easily.

  Sir Septimus, looking at Wimsey as though for his cue, cleared his throat and dashed into speech.

  ‘All very tiresome,’ he said, ‘all very unpleasant. Hr’rm. Nothing for it but the police, I’m afraid. Just at Christmas, too. Hr’rm. Spoilt the party. Can’t stand seeing all this stuff about the place.’ He waved his hand towards the festoons of evergreens and coloured paper that adorned the walls. ‘Take it all down, eh, what? No heart in it. Hr’rm. Burn the lot.’

  ‘What a pity, when we worked so hard over it,’ said Joyce.

  ‘Oh, leave it, Uncle,’ said Henry Shale. ‘You’re bothering too much about the pearls. They’re sure to turn up.’

  ‘Shall I ring for James?’ suggested William Norgate.

  ‘No,’ interrupted Comphrey, ‘let’s do it ourselves. It’ll give us something to do and take our minds off our troubles.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Sir Septimus. ‘Start right away. Hate the sight of it.’

  He savagely hauled a great branch of holly down from the mantelpiece and flung it, crackling, into the fire.

  ‘That’s the stuff,’ said Richard Dennison. ‘Make a good old blaze!’ He leapt up from the table and snatched the mistletoe from the chandelier. ‘Here goes! One more kiss for somebody before it’s too late.’

  ‘Isn’t it unlucky to take it down before the New Year?’ suggested Miss Tomkins.

  ‘Unlucky be hanged. We’ll have it all down. Off the stairs and out of the drawing-room too. Somebody go and collect it.’

  ‘Isn’t the drawing-room locked?’ asked Oswald.

  ‘No. Lord Peter says the pearls aren’t there, wherever else they are, so it’s unlocked. That’s right, isn’t it, Wimsey?’

  ‘Quite right. The pearls were taken out of these rooms. I can’t tell yet how, but I’m positive of it. In fact, I’ll pledge my reputation that wherever they are, they’re not up there.’

  ‘Oh, well,’ said Comphrey, ‘in that case, have at it! Come along, Lavinia – you and Dennison do the drawing-room and I’ll do the back room. We’ll have a race.’

  ‘But if the police are coming in,’ said Dennison, ‘oughtn’t everything to be left just as it is?’

  ‘Damn the police!’ shouted Sir Septimus. ‘They don’t want evergreens.’

  Oswald and Margharita were already pulling the holly and ivy from the staircase, amid peals of laughter. The party dispersed. Wimsey went quietly upstairs and into the drawing-room, where the work of demolition was taking place at a great rate, George having bet the other two ten shillings to a tanner that they would not finish their part of the job before he finished his.

  ‘You mustn’t help,’ said Lavinia, laughing to Wimsey. ‘It wouldn’t be fair.’

  Wimsey said nothing, but waited till the room was clear. Then he followed them down again to the hall, where the fire was sending up a great roaring and spluttering, suggestive of Guy Fawkes’ night. He whispered to Sir Septimus, who went forward and touched George Comphrey on the shoulder.

  ‘Lord Peter wants to say something to you, my boy,’ he said.

  Comphrey started and went with him a little reluctantly, as it seemed. He was not looking very well.

  ‘Mr Comphrey,’ said Wimsey, ‘I fancy these are some of your property.’ He held out the palm of his hand, in which rested twenty-two fine, small-headed pins.

  ‘Ingenious,’ said Wimsey, ‘but something less ingenious would have served his turn better. It was very unlucky, Sir Septimus, that you should have mentioned the pearls when you did. Of course, he hoped that the loss wouldn’t be discovered till we’d chucked guessing games and taken to “Hide-and-Seek”. Then the pearls might have been anywhere in the house, we shouldn’t have locked the drawing-room door, and he could have recovered them at his leisure. He had had this possibility in his mind when he came here, obviously, and that was why he brought the pins, and Miss Shale’s taking off the necklace to play “Dumb Crambo” gave him his opportunity.

  ‘He had spent Christmas here before, and knew perfectly well that “Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral” would form part of the entertainment. He had only to gather up the necklace from the table when it came to his turn to retire, and he knew he could count on at least five minutes by himself while we were all arguing about the choice of a word. He had only to snip the pearls from the string with his pocket-scissors, burn the string in the grate, and fasten the pearls to the mistletoe with the fine pins. The mistletoe was hung on the chandelier, pretty high – it’s a lofty room – but he could easily reach it by standing on the glass table, which wouldn’t show footmarks, and it was almost certain that nobody would think of examining the mistletoe for extra berries. I shouldn’t have thought of it myself if I hadn’t found that pin which he had dropped. That gave me the idea that the pearls had been separated and the rest was easy. I took the pearls off the mistletoe last night – the clasp was there, too, pinned among the holly-leaves. Here they are. Comphrey must have got a nasty shock this morning. I knew he was our man when he suggested that the guests should tackle the decorations themselves and that he should do the back drawing-room – but I wish I had seen his face when he came to the mistletoe and found the pearls gone.’

  ‘And you worked it all out when you found the pin?’ said Sir Septimus.

  ‘Yes; I knew then where the pearls had gone to.’ ‘But you never even looked at the mistletoe.’ ‘I saw it reflected in the black glass floor, and it struck me then how much the mistletoe berries looked like pearls.’

  The Name on the Window

  Edmund Crispin

  Boxing Day; snow and ice; road-surfaces like glass under a cold fog. In the North Oxford home of the University Professor of English Language and Literature, at three minutes past seven in the evening, the front door bell rang.

  The current festive season had taken heavy toll of Fen’s vitality and patience; it had culminated, that afternoon, in a quite exceptionally tiring children’s party, amid whose ruins he was now recouping his energies with whisky; and on hearing the bell he jumped inevitably to the conclusion that one of the infants he had bundled out of the door half an hour previously had left behind it some such prized inessential as a false nose or a bachelors button, and was returning to claim this. In the event, however, and despite his premonitory groans, this assumption proved to be incorrect: his doorstep was occupied, he found, not by a dyspeptic, over-heated child with an unintelligible query, but by a neatly dressed greying man with a red tip to his nose and woebegone eyes.

  ‘I can’t get back,’ said this apparition. ‘I really can’t get back to London tonight. The roads are impassable and such trains as there are are running hours late. Could you possibly let me have a bed?’

  The tones were familiar; and by peering more attentively at the face, Fen discovered that that was familiar too. ‘My dear Humbleby,’ he said cordially, ‘do come in. Of course you can have a bed. What are you doing in this part of the world, anyway?’

  ‘Ghost-hunting.’ Detective Inspector Humbleby, of New Scotland Yard, divested himself of his coat and hat and hung them on a hook inside the door. ‘Seasonable but not convenient.’ He stamped his feet violently, thereby producing, to judge from his expression, sensations of pain rather than of warmth; and stared about him. ‘Children,’ he said with sudden gloom. ‘I dare say that one of the Oxford hotels –’
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  ‘The children have left,’ Fen explained, ‘and will not be coming back.’

  ‘Ah. Well, in that case –’ And Humbleby followed Fen into the drawing-room, where a huge fire was burning and a slightly lop-sided Christmas tree, stripped of its treasures, wore tinsel and miniature witch-balls and a superincumbent fairy with a raffish air. ‘My word, this is better. Is there a drink, perhaps? I could do with some advice, too.’

  Fen was already pouring whisky. ‘Sit down and be comfortable,’ he said. ‘As a matter of interest, do you believe in ghosts?’

  ‘The evidence for poltergeists,’ Humbleby answered warily as he stretched out his hands to the blaze, ‘seems very convincing to me…. The Wesleys, you know, and Harry Price and so forth. Other sorts of ghosts I’m not so sure about – though I must say I hope they exist, if only for the purpose of taking that silly grin off the faces of the newspapers.’ He picked up a battered tin locomotive from beside him on the sofa. ‘I say, Gervase, I was under the impression that your own children were all too old for –’

  ‘Orphans,’ said Fen, jabbing at the siphon. ‘I’ve been entertaining orphans from a nearby Home…. But as regards this particular ghost you were speaking of –’

  ‘Oh, I don’t believe in that.’ Humbleby shook his head decisively. ‘There’s an obscure sort of nastiness about the place it’s supposed to haunt – like a very sickly cake gone stale – and a man was killed there once, by a girl he was trying to persuade to certain practices she didn’t relish at all; but the haunting part of it is just silly gossip for the benefit of visitors.’ Humbleby accepted the glass which Fen held out to him and brooded over it for a moment before drinking. ‘… Damned Chief Inspector,’ he muttered aggrievedly, ‘dragging me away from my Christmas lunch because –’

  ‘Really, Humbleby’ – Fen was severe – ‘you’re very inconsequent this evening. Where is this place you’re speaking of?’

  ‘Rydalls.’

  ‘Rydalls?’

  ‘Rydalls,’ said Humbleby. ‘The residence,’ he elucidated laboriously, ‘of Sir Charles Moberley, the architect. It’s about fifteen miles from here, Abingdon way.’

  ‘Yes, I remember it now. Restoration.’

  ‘I dare say. Old, in any case. And there are big grounds, with an eighteenth-century pavilion about a quarter of a mile away from the house, in a park. That’s where it happened – the murder, I mean.’

  ‘The murder of the man who tried to induce the girl –’

  ‘No, no. I mean, yes. That murder took place in the pavilion, certainly. But then, so did the other one – the one the day before yesterday, that’s to say.’

  Fen stared. ‘Sir Charles Moberley has been murdered?’

  ‘No, no, no. Not him. Another architect, another knight – Sir Lucas Welsh. There’s been quite a large house party going on at Rydalls, with Sir Lucas Welsh and his daughter Jane among the guests, and it was on Christmas Eve, you see, that Sir Lucas decided he wanted to investigate the ghost.’

  ‘This is all clear enough to you, no doubt, but –’

  ‘Do listen… It seems that Sir Lucas is – was – credulous about ghosts, so on Christmas Eve he arranged to keep vigil alone in the pavilion and –’

  ‘And was murdered, and you don’t know who did it.’

  ‘Oh yes, I do. Sir Lucas didn’t die at once, you see: he had time to write up his murderer’s name in the grime of the window-pane, and the gentleman concerned, a young German named Otto Mörike, is now safely under arrest. But what I can’t decide is how Mörike got in and out of the pavilion.’

  ‘A locked-room mystery.’

  ‘In the wider sense, just that. The pavilion wasn’t actually locked, but –’

  Fen collected his glass from the mantelpiece, where he had put it on rising to answer the door-bell. ‘Begin,’ he suggested, ‘at the beginning.’

  ‘Very well.’ Settling back in the sofa, Humbleby sipped his whisky gratefully. ‘Here, then, is this Christmas house party at Rydalls. Host, Sir Charles Moberley, the eminent architect…. Have you ever come across him?’

  Fen shook his head.

  ‘A big man, going grey: in some ways rather boisterous and silly, like a rugger-playing medical student in a state of arrested development. Unmarried; private means – quite a lot of them, to judge from the sort of hospitality he dispenses; did the Wandsworth power-station and Beckford Abbey, among other things; athlete; a simple mind, and generous, I should judge, in that jealous sort of way which resents generosity in anyone else. Probably tricky, in some respects – he’s not the kind of person I could ever feel completely at ease with.

  ‘A celebrity, however: unquestionably that. And Sir Lucas Welsh, whom among others he invited to this house party, was equally a celebrity, in the same line of business. Never having seen Sir Lucas alive, I can’t say much about his character, but –’

  ‘I think,’ Fen interrupted, ‘that I may have met him once, at the time when he was designing the fourth quadrangle for my college. A small dark person, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘And with a tendency to be nervy and obstinate.’

  ‘The obstinacy there’s evidence for, certainly. And I gather he was also a good deal of a faddist – Yogi, I mean, and the Baconian hypothesis, and a lot of other intellectual – um – detritus of the same dull, obvious kind: that’s where the ghost-vigil comes in. Jane, his daughter and heiress (and Sir Lucas was if anything even better off than Sir Charles) is a pretty little thing of eighteen of whom all you can really say is that she’s a pretty little thing of eighteen. Then there’s Mörike, the man I’ve arrested: thin, thirtyish, a Luftwaffe pilot during the war, and at present an architecture student working over here under one of these exchange schemes the Universities are always getting up – which accounts for Sir Charles’ knowing him and inviting him to the house party. Last of the important guests – important from the point of view of the crime, that is – is a C.I.D. man (not Metropolitan, Sussex County) called James Wilburn. He’s important because the evidence he provides is quite certainly reliable – there has to be a point d’appui in these affairs, and Wilburn is it, so you mustn’t exhaust yourself doubting his word about anything.’

  ‘I won’t,’ Fen promised. ‘I’ll believe him.’

  ‘Good. At dinner on Christmas Eve, then, the conversation turns to the subject of the Rydalls ghost – and I’ve ascertained that the person responsible for bringing this topic up was Otto Mörike. So far, so good: the Rydalls ghost was a bait Sir Lucas could be relied on to rise to, and rise to it he did, arranging eventually with his rather reluctant host to go down to the pavilion after dinner and keep watch there for an hour or two. The time arriving, he was accompanied to the place of trial by Sir Charles and by Wilburn – neither of whom actually entered the pavilion. Wilburn strolled back to the house alone, leaving Sir Charles and Sir Lucas talking shop. And presently Sir Charles, having seen Sir Lucas go into the pavilion, retraced his steps likewise, arriving at the house just in time to hear the alarm-bell ringing.’

  ‘Alarm-bell?’

  ‘People had watched for the ghost before, and there was a bell installed in the pavilion for them to ring if for any reason they wanted help. … This bell sounded, then, at shortly after ten o’clock, and a whole party of people, including Sir Charles, Jane Welsh and Wilburn, hastened to the rescue.

  ‘Now, you must know that this pavilion is quite small. There’s just one circular room to it, having two windows (both very firmly nailed up); and you get into this room by way of a longish, narrow hall projecting from the perimeter of the circle, the one and only door being at the outer end of this hall.’

  ‘Like a key-hole,’ Fen suggested. ‘If you saw it from the air it’d look like a key-hole, I mean; with the round part representing the room, and the part where the wards go in representing the entrance-hall, and the door right down at the bottom.’

  ‘That’s it. It stands in a clearing among the trees of the par
k, on a very slight rise – inferior Palladian in style, with pilasters or whatever you call them: something like a decayed miniature classical temple. No one’s bothered about it for decades, not since that earlier murder put an end to its career as a love-nest for a succession of squires. What is it Eliot says? – something about lusts and dead limbs? Well, anyway, that’s the impression it gives. A house is all right, because a house has been used for other things as well – eating and reading and births and deaths and so on. But this place has been used for one purpose and one purpose only, and that’s exactly what it feels like. …

  ‘There’s no furniture in it, by the way. And until the wretched Sir Lucas unlocked its door, no one had been inside it for two or three years.

  ‘To get back to the story, then.

  ‘The weather was all right: you’ll remember that on Christmas Eve none of this snow and foulness had started. And the rescue-party, so to call them, seem to have regarded their expedition as more or less in the nature of a jaunt; I mean that they weren’t seriously alarmed at the ringing of the bell, with the exception of Jane, who knew her father well enough to suspect that he’d never have interrupted his vigil, almost as soon as it had begun, for the sake of a rather futile practical joke; and even she seems to have allowed herself to be half convinced by the reassurances of the others. On arrival at the pavilion, they found the door shut but not locked; and when they opened it, and shone their torches inside, they saw a single set of footprints in the dust on the hall floor, leading to the entrance to the circular room. Acting on instinct or training or both, Wilburn kept his crowd clear of these footprints; and so it was that they came – joined now by Otto Mörike, who according to his subsequent statement had been taking a solitary stroll in the grounds – to the scene of the crime.