Ten Classic Crime Stories for the Festive Season

by Cecily Gayford

  ‘Look here, Wrigglesworth. That evidence about my client having a sword: it’s quite irrelevant. I’m sure you’d agree.’

  ‘Why is it irrelevant?’ Wrigglesworth frowned.

  ‘Because the murder clearly wasn’t done with an antique cavalry sabre. It was done with a small, thin blade.’

  ‘If he’s a man who carries weapons, why isn’t that relevant?’

  ‘A man? Why do you call him a man? He’s a child. A boy of seventeen!’

  ‘Man enough to commit a serious crime.’

  ‘If he did.’

  ‘If he didn’t, he’d hardly be in the dock.’

  ‘That’s the difference between us, Wrigglesworth,’ I told him. ‘I believe in the presumption of innocence. You believe in original sin. Look here, old darling.’ I tried to give the Mad Monk a smile of friendship and became conscious of the fact that it looked, no doubt, like an ingratiating sneer. ‘Give us a chance. You won’t introduce the evidence of the sword, will you?’

  ‘Why ever not?’

  ‘Well,’ I told him, ‘the Timsons are an industrious family of criminals. They work hard, they never go on strike. If it weren’t for people like the Timsons, you and I would be out of a job.’

  ‘They sound in great need of prosecution and punishment. Why shouldn’t I tell the jury about your client’s sword? Can you give me one good reason?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, as convincingly as possible.

  ‘What is it?’ He peered at me, I thought, unfairly.

  ‘Well, after all,’ I said, doing my best, ‘it is Christmas.’

  It would be idle to pretend that the first day in Court went well, although Wrigglesworth restrained himself from mentioning the sword in his opening speech, and told me that he was considering whether or not to call evidence about it the next day. I cross-examined a few members of the clan O’Dowd on the presence of lethal articles in the hands of the attacking force. The evidence about this varied, and weapons came and went in the hands of the inhabitants of number twelve as the witnesses were blown hither and thither in the winds of Rumpole’s cross-examination. An interested observer from one of the other flats spoke of having seen a machete.

  ‘Could that terrible weapon have been in the hands of Mr Kevin O’Dowd, the deceased in this case?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘But can you rule out the possibility?’

  ‘No, I can’t rule it out,’ the witness admitted, to my temporary delight.

  ‘You can never rule out the possibility of anything in this world, Mr Rumpole. But he doesn’t think so. You have your answer.’

  Mr Justice Vosper, in a voice like a splintering iceberg, gave me this unwelcome Christmas present. The case wasn’t going well but at least, by the end of the first day, the Mad Monk had kept out all mention of the sword. The next day he was to call young Bridget O’Dowd, fresh from her triumph in the Nativity play.

  ‘I say, Rumpole. I’d be so grateful for a little help.’

  I was in Pommeroy’s Wine Bar, drowning the sorrows of the day in my usual bottle of the cheapest Château Fleet Street (made from grapes which, judging from the bouquet, might have been not so much trodden as kicked to death by sturdy peasants in gumboots) when I looked up to see Wrigglesworth, dressed in an old mackintosh, doing business with Jack Pommeroy at the sales counter. When I crossed to him, he was not buying the jumbo-sized bottle of ginger beer which I imagined might be his celebratory Christmas tipple, but a tempting and respectably aged bottle of Château Pichon-Longueville.

  ‘What can I do for you, Wrigglesworth?’

  ‘Well, as you know, Rumpole, I live in Croydon.’

  ‘Happiness is given to few of us on this earth,’ I said piously.

  ‘And the Anglican Sisters of St Agnes, Croydon, are anxious to buy a present for their Bishop,’ Wrigglesworth explained. ‘A dozen bottles for Christmas. They’ve asked my advice, Rumpole. I know so little of wine. You wouldn’t care to try this for me? I mean, if you’re not especially busy.’

  ‘I should be hurrying home to dinner.’ My wife, Hilda (She Who Must Be Obeyed), was laying on rissoles and frozen peas, washed down by my last bottle of Pommeroy’s extremely ordinary. ‘However, as it’s Christmas, I don’t mind helping you out, Wrigglesworth.’

  The Mad Monk was clearly quite unused to wine. As we sampled the claret together, I saw the chance of getting him to commit himself on the vital question of the evidence of the sword, as well as absorbing an unusually decent bottle. After the Pichon-Longueville I was kind enough to help him by sampling a Boyd-Cantenac and then I said, ‘Excellent, this. But of course the Bishop might be a Burgundy man. The nuns might care to invest in a decent Mâcon.’

  ‘Shall we try a bottle?’ Wrigglesworth suggested. ‘I’d be grateful for your advice.’

  ‘I’ll do my best to help you, my old darling. And while we’re on the subject, that ridiculous bit of evidence about young Timson and the sword …’

  ‘I remember you saying I shouldn’t bring that out because it’s Christmas.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Jack Pommeroy had uncorked the Mâcon and it was mingling with the claret to produce a feeling of peace and goodwill towards men. Wrigglesworth frowned, as though trying to absorb an obscure point of theology.

  ‘I don’t quite see the relevance of Christmas to the question of your man Timson threatening his neighbours with a sword …’

  ‘Surely, Wrigglesworth,’ I knew my prosecutor well, ‘you’re of a religious disposition?’ The Mad Monk was the product of some bleak Northern Catholic boarding school. He lived alone, and no doubt wore a hair shirt under his black waistcoat, and was vowed to celibacy. The fact that he had his nose deep into a glass of Burgundy at the moment was due to the benign influence of Rumpole.

  ‘I’m a Christian, yes.’

  ‘Then practise a little Christian tolerance.’

  ‘Tolerance towards evil?’

  ‘Evil?’ I asked. ‘What do you mean, evil?’

  ‘Couldn’t that be your trouble, Rumpole? That you really don’t recognise evil when you see it.’

  ‘I suppose,’ I said, ‘evil might be locking up a seventeen-year-old during Her Majesty’s pleasure, when Her Majesty may very probably forget all about him, banging him up with a couple of hard and violent cases and their own chamber pots for twenty-two hours a day, so he won’t come out till he’s a real, genuine, middle-aged murderer …’

  ‘I did hear the Reverend Mother say,’ Wrigglesworth was gazing vacantly at the empty Mâcon bottle, ‘that the Bishop likes his glass of port.’

  ‘Then in the spirit of Christmas tolerance I’ll help you to sample some of Pommeroy’s Light and Tawny.’

  A little later, Wrigglesworth held up his port glass in a reverent sort of fashion.

  ‘You’re suggesting, are you, that I should make some special concession in this case because it’s Christmas time?’

  ‘Look here, old darling.’ I absorbed half my glass, relishing the gentle fruitiness and the slight tang of wood. ‘If you spent your whole life in that high-rise hellhole called Keir Hardie Court, if you had no fat prosecutions to occupy your attention and no prospect of any job at all, if you had no sort of occupation except war with the O’Dowds …’

  ‘My own flat isn’t particularly comfortable. I don’t know a great deal about your home life, Rumpole, but you don’t seem to be in a tearing hurry to experience it.’

  ‘Touché, Wrigglesworth, my old darling.’ I ordered us a couple of refills of Pommeroy’s port to further postpone the encounter with She Who Must Be Obeyed and her rissoles.

  ‘But we don’t have to fight to the death on the staircase,’ Wrigglesworth pointed out.

  ‘We don’t have to fight at all, Wrigglesworth.’

  ‘As your client did.’

  ‘As my client may have done. Remember the presumption of innocence.’

  ‘This is rather funny, this is.’ The prosecutor pulled back his lips to reveal strong, yellowish teeth
and laughed appreciatively. ‘You know why your man Timson is called “Turpin”?’

  ‘No.’ I drank port uneasily, fearing an unwelcome revelation.

  ‘Because he’s always fighting with that sword of his. He’s called after Dick Turpin, you see, who’s always duelling on the television. Do you watch the television, Rumpole?’

  ‘Hardly at all.’

  ‘I watch a great deal of the television, as I’m alone rather a lot.’ Wrigglesworth referred to the box as though it were a sort of penance, like fasting or flagellation. ‘Detective Inspector Wainwright told me about your client. Rather amusing, I thought it was. He’s retiring this Christmas.’

  ‘My client?’

  ‘No. DI Wainwright. Do you think we should settle on this port for the Bishop? Or would you like to try a glass of something else?’

  ‘Christmas,’ I told Wrigglesworth severely as we sampled the Cockburn, ‘is not just a material, pagan celebration. It’s not just an occasion for absorbing superior vintages, old darling. It must be a time when you try to do good, spiritual good, to our enemies.’

  ‘To your client, you mean?’

  ‘And to me.’

  ‘To you, Rumpole?’

  ‘For God’s sake, Wrigglesworth!’ I was conscious of the fact that my appeal was growing desperate. ‘I’ve had six losers in a row down the Old Bailey. Can’t I be included in any Christmas spirit that’s going around?’

  ‘You mean, at Christmas especially it is more blessed to give than to receive?’

  ‘I mean exactly that.’ I was glad that he seemed, at last, to be following my drift.

  ‘And you think I might give this case to someone, like a Christmas present?’

  ‘If you care to put it that way, yes.’

  ‘I do not care to put it in exactly that way.’ He turned his pale blue eyes on me with what I thought was genuine sympathy. ‘But I shall try and do the case of R. v. Timson in the way most appropriate to the greatest feast of the Christian year. It is a time, I quite agree, for the giving of presents.’

  When they finally threw us out of Pommeroy’s, and after we had considered the possibility of buying the Bishop brandy in the Cock Tavern, and even beer in the Devereux, I let my instinct, like an aged horse, carry me on to the Underground and home to Gloucester Road, and there discovered the rissoles, like some traces of a vanished civilisation, fossilised in the oven. She Who Must Be Obeyed was already in bed feigning sleep. When I climbed in beside her she opened a hostile eye.

  ‘You’re drunk, Rumpole!’ she said. ‘What on earth have you been doing?’

  I’ve been having a legal discussion,’ I told her, ‘on the subject of the admissibility of certain evidence. Vital, from my client’s point of view. And, just for a change, Hilda, I think I’ve won.’

  ‘Well, you’d better try and get some sleep.’ And she added with a sort of satisfaction, ‘I’m sure you’ll be feeling quite terrible in the morning.’

  As with all the grimmer predictions of She Who Must Be Obeyed, this one turned out to be true. I sat in Court the next day with the wig feeling like a lead weight on the brain, and the stiff collar sawing the neck like a blunt execution. My mouth tasted of matured birdcage and from a long way off I heard Wrigglesworth say to Bridget O’Dowd, who stood looking particularly saintly and virginal in the witness box, ‘About a week before this did you see the defendant, Edward Timson, on your staircase flourishing any sort of weapon?’

  It is no exaggeration to say that I felt deeply shocked and considerably betrayed. After his promise to me, Wrigglesworth had turned his back on the spirit of the great Christmas festival. He came not to bring peace but a sword.

  I clambered with some difficulty to my feet. After my forensic efforts of the evening before, I was scarcely in the mood for a legal argument. Mr Justice Vosper looked up in surprise and greeted me in his usual chilly fashion.

  ‘Yes, Mr Rumpole. Do you object to this evidence?’

  Of course I object, I wanted to say. It’s inhuman, unnecessary, unmerciful and likely to lead to my losing another case. Also, it’s clearly contrary to a solemn and binding contract entered into after a number of glasses of the Bishop’s putative port. All I seemed to manage was a strangled ‘Yes’.

  ‘I suppose Mr Wrigglesworth would say,’ Vosper, J, was, as ever, anxious to supply any argument that might not yet have occurred to the prosecution, ‘that it is evidence of “system”.’

  ‘System?’ I heard my voice faintly and from a long way off. ‘It may be, I suppose. But the Court has a discretion to omit evidence which may be irrelevant and purely prejudicial.’

  ‘I feel sure Mr Wrigglesworth has considered the matter most carefully and that he would not lead this evidence unless he considered it entirely relevant.’

  I looked at the Mad Monk on the seat beside me. He was smiling at me with a mixture of hearty cheerfulness and supreme pity, as though I were sinking rapidly and he had come to administer supreme unction. I made a few ill-chosen remarks to the Court, but I was in no condition, that morning, to enter into a complicated legal argument on the admissibility of evidence.

  It wasn’t long before Bridget O’Dowd had told a deeply disapproving jury all about Eddie ‘Turpin’ Timson’s sword. ‘A man,’ the Judge said later in his summing up about young Edward, ‘clearly prepared to attack with cold steel whenever it suited him.’

  When the trial was over, I called in for refreshment at my favourite watering hole, and there, to my surprise, was my opponent Wrigglesworth, sharing an expensive-looking bottle with Detective Inspector Wainwright, the Officer-in-Charge of the case. I stood at the bar, absorbing a consoling glass of Pommeroy’s ordinary, when the DI came up to the bar for cigarettes. He gave me a friendly and maddeningly sympathetic smile.

  ‘Sorry about that, sir. Still, win a few, lose a few. Isn’t that it?’

  ‘In my case lately, it’s been win a few, lose a lot!’

  ‘You couldn’t have this one, sir. You see, Mr Wrigglesworth had promised it to me.’

  ‘He had what?’

  ‘Well, I’m retiring, as you know. And Mr Wrigglesworth promised me faithfully that my last case would be a win. He promised me that, in a manner of speaking, as a Christmas present. Great man is our Mr Wrigglesworth, sir, for the spirit of Christmas.’

  I looked across at the Mad Monk and a terrible suspicion entered my head. What was all that about a present for the Bishop? I searched my memory and I could find no trace of our having, in fact, bought wine for any sort of cleric. And was Wrigglesworth as inexperienced as he would have had me believe in the art of selecting claret?

  As I watched him pour and sniff a glass from his superior bottle, and hold it critically to the light, a horrible suspicion crossed my mind. Had the whole evening’s events been nothing but a deception, a sinister attempt to nobble Rumpole, to present him with such a stupendous hangover that he would stumble in his legal argument? Was it all in aid of DI Wainwright’s Christmas present?

  I looked at Wrigglesworth, and it would be no exaggeration to say the mind boggled. He was, of course, perfectly right about me. I just didn’t recognise evil when I saw it.

  The Assassins’ Club

  Nicholas Blake

  ‘No,’ thought Nigel Strangeways, looking round the table, ‘no one would ever guess.’

  Ever since, quarter of an hour ago, they had assembled in the ante-room for sherry, Nigel had been feeling more and more nervous – a nervousness greater than the prospect of having to make an after-dinner speech seemed to warrant. It was true that, as the guest of honour, something more than the usual post-prandial convivialities would be expected of him. And of course the company present would, from its nature, be especially critical. But still, he had done this sort of thing often enough before; he knew he was pretty good at it. Why the acute state of jitters, then? After it was all over, Nigel was tempted to substitute ‘foreboding’ for ‘jitters’, to wonder whether he oughtn’t to have proclaimed these very curiou
s feelings, like Cassandra, from the housetop – even at the risk of spoiling what looked like being a real peach of a dinner party. After all, the dinner party did get spoiled, anyway, and soon enough, too. But, taking all things into consideration, it probably wouldn’t have made any difference.

  It was in an attempt to dispel this cloud of uneasiness that Nigel began to play with himself the old game of identity-guessing. There was a curious uniformity amongst the faces of the majority of the twenty-odd diners. The women – there were only three of them – looked homely, humorous, dowdy-and-be-damned-to-it. The men, Nigel finally decided, resembled in the mass sanitary inspectors or very minor Civil Servants. They were most of them rather undersized, and ran to drooping moustaches, gold-rimmed spectacles and a general air of mild ineffectualness. There were exceptions, of course. That elderly man in the middle of the table, with the face of a dyspeptic and superannuated bloodhound – it was not difficult to place him; even without the top hat or the wig with which the public normally associated him, Lord Justice Pottinger could easily be recognised – the most celebrated criminal judge of his generation. Then that leonine, mobile face on his left; it had been as much photographed as any society beauty’s; and well it might, for Sir Eldred Travers’s golden tongue had – it was whispered – saved as many murderers as Justice Pottinger had hanged. There were one or two other exceptions, such as the dark-haired, poetic-looking young man sitting on Nigel’s right and rolling bread-pellets.

  ‘No,’ said Nigel, aloud this time, ‘no one would possibly guess.’

  ‘Guess what?’ inquired the young man.

  ‘The bloodthirsty character of this assembly.’ He took up the menu-card, at the top of which was printed in red letters

  THE ASSASSINS

  Dinner, December 20th

  ‘No,’ laughed the young man, ‘we don’t look like murderers, I must admit – not even murderers by proxy.’

  ‘Good lord! are you in the trade, too?’

  ‘Yes. Ought to have introduced myself. Name of Herbert Dale.’