He answered all the questions which the Press reporters put to him on the de Raun Case, except one. When they pressed him, he smiled.
‘That’s my secret,’ he said.
When they asked him why, he lit a Passing Cloud. Staring at them over his half-glasses, with his lined face wreathed in the blue smoke, he considered his answer.
‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘there are certain cases of fraud, and this is one of them, when it would not be in the interest of the great insurance companies—and may I remind you that, for all the world, that means the insurance companies of the City of London—to reveal the whole truth. There are always dishonest people who might make improper use of the knowledge. Thank you, gentlemen, that’s all. If you’ll excuse me, I have a Board Meeting to attend.’
***
Over many a drink in the ‘Cheshire Cheese,’ in Fleet Street, Chris Sparrow has told the story of Alouette’s Worms. But neither he nor his friends have been able to guess Mr. Cork’s secret. Can you?
***
The solutions to ‘Mr. Cork’s Secret,’
as published by Lilliput magazine,
appear on at the end of this document.
The Santa Claus Club
Julian Symons
Today, Julian Symons (1912–94) is best remembered as a crime fiction critic who was responsible for an outstanding history of the genre, Bloody Murder. Symons argued that the detective story had evolved into the crime novel, and in later life, he became rather dismissive of some of the traditional puzzle-mysteries which he had enjoyed in his younger days—although his admiration for the most talented exponents of the classic whodunit, such as Agatha Christie and Anthony Berkeley, never faltered.
Bloody Murder has proved so influential that it is easy to forget that, in addition to his achievements as a critic and historian, Symons was also a poet and a gifted writer of mystery stories. His finest novels, such as The Man Who Killed Himself, The Plot against Roger Rider, and Death’s Darkest Face, show his skill at depicting character, but are also conspicuously well plotted, and his flair for the tricks and techniques of the conventional detective puzzle was evident early in his career, in books such as Bland Beginning, and in his twisty tales about private investigator Francis Quarles. The Quarles stories have been neglected for many years, but this tale is a reminder that Symons was more adept at the traditional mystery than he might, in later life, have cared to admit.
***
1
It is not often, in real life, that letters are written recording implacable hatred nursed over the years, or that private detectives are invited by peers to select dining clubs, or that murders occur at such dining clubs, or that they are solved on the spot by a process of deduction. The case of the Santa Claus Club provided an example of all these rarities.
The case began one day a week before Christmas, when Francis Quarles went to see Lord Acrise. He was a rich man, Lord Acrise, and an important one, the chairman of this big building concern and director of that and the other insurance company, and consultant to the Government on half a dozen matters. He had been a harsh, intolerant man in his prime, and was still hard enough in his early seventies, Quarles guessed, as he looked at the beaky nose, jutting chin and stony blue eyes under thick brows. They sat in the study of Acrise’s house just off the Brompton Road.
‘Just tell me what you think of these.’
These were three letters, badly typed on a machine with a worn ribbon. They were all signed with the name James Gliddon. The first two contained vague references to some wrong done to Gliddon by Acrise in the past. They were written in language that was wild, but unmistakably threatening. ‘You have been a whited sepulchre for too long, but now your time has come… You don’t know what I’m going to do, now I’ve come back, but you won’t be able to help wondering and worrying… The mills of God grind slowly, but they’re going to grind you into little bits for what you’ve done to me.’
The third letter was more specific. ‘So the thief is going to play Santa Claus. That will be your last evening alive. I shall be there, Joe Acrise, and I shall watch with pleasure as you squirm in agony.’
Quarles looked at the envelopes. They were plain and cheap. The address was typed, and the word ‘Personal’ was on top of the envelope. ‘Who is James Gliddon?’
The stony eyes glared at him. ‘I’m told you’re to be trusted. Gliddon was a school friend of mine. We grew up together in the slums of Nottingham. We started a building company together. It did well for a time, then went bust. There was a lot of money missing. Gliddon kept the books. He got five years for fraud.’
‘Have you heard from him since then? I see all these letters are recent.’
‘He’s written half a dozen letters, I suppose, over the years. The last one came—oh, seven years ago, I should think. From the Argentine.’ Acrise stopped, then said abruptly, ‘Snewin tried to find him for me, but he’d disappeared.’
‘Snewin?’
‘My secretary. Been with me twelve years.’
He pressed a bell. An obsequious, fattish man, whose appearance somehow put Quarles in mind of an enormous mouse, scurried in.
‘Snewin? Did we keep any of those old letters from Gliddon?’
‘No, sir. You told me to destroy them.’
‘The last ones came from the Argentine, right?’
‘From Buenos Aires to be exact, sir.’
Acrise nodded, and Snewin scurried out. Quarles said, ‘Who else knows this story about Gliddon?’
‘Just my wife.’ Acrise bared yellow teeth in a grin. ‘Unless somebody’s been digging into my past.’
‘And what does this mean, about you playing Santa Claus?’
‘I’m this year’s chairman of the Santa Claus Club. We hold our raffle and dinner next Monday.’
Then Quarles remembered. The Santa Claus Club had been formed by ten rich men. Each year they met, every one of them dressed up as Santa Claus, and held a raffle. The members took it in turn to provide the prize that was raffled—it might be a case of Napoleon brandy, a modest cottage with some exclusive salmon fishing rights attached to it, a Constable painting. Each Santa Claus bought one ticket for the raffle, at a cost of one thousand guineas. The total of ten thousand guineas was given to a Christmas charity. After the raffle the assembled Santa Clauses, each accompanied by one guest, ate a traditional Christmas dinner. The whole thing was a combination of various English characteristics: enjoyment of dressing up, a wish to help charities, and the desire also that the help given should not go unrecorded. The dinners of the Santa Claus Club got a good deal of publicity, and there were those who said that it would have been perfectly easy for the members to give their money to charities in a less conspicuous manner.
‘I want you to find Gliddon,’ Lord Acrise said. ‘Don’t mistake me, Mr. Quarles. I don’t want to take action against him, I want to help him. I wasn’t to blame—don’t think I admit that—but it was hard that Jimmy Gliddon should go to jail. I’m a hard man, have been all my life, but I don’t think my worst enemies would call me mean. Those who’ve helped me know that when I die they’ll find they’re not forgotten. Jimmy Gliddon must be an old man now. I’d like to set him up for the rest of his life.’
‘To find him by next Monday is a tall order,’ Quarles said. ‘But I’ll try.’
He was at the door when Acrise said casually, ‘By the way, I’d like you to be my guest at the Club dinner on Monday night.’
Did that mean, Quarles wondered, that he was to act as official poison-taster if he did not find James Gliddon?
2
There were two ways of trying to find Gliddon—by investigation of his career after leaving prison, and through the typewritten letters. Quarles took the job of tracing the past, leaving the letters to his secretary, Molly Player.
From Scotland Yard Quarles found out that Gliddon had spent ne
arly four years in prison, from 1913 to late 1916. He had joined a Nottinghamshire Regiment when he came out, and the records of this Regiment showed that he had been demobilized in August, 1919, with the rank of Sergeant. In 1923 he had been given a sentence of three years for an attempt to smuggle diamonds. Thereafter, all trace of him in Britain vanished.
Quarles made some expensive telephone calls to Buenos Aires, where letters had come from seven years earlier. He learned that Gliddon had lived in the city from a time just after the war until 1955. He ran an import-export business, and was thought to have been living in other South American Republics during the war. His business was said to have been a cloak for smuggling, both of drugs and of suspected Nazis, whom he got out of Europe into the Argentine. In 1955 a newspaper had accused Gliddon of arranging the entry into the Argentine of a Nazi war criminal named Hermann Breit. Gliddon threatened to sue the paper, and then disappeared. A couple of weeks later a battered body was washed up just outside the city.
‘It was identified as Gliddon,’ the liquid voice said over the telephone. ‘But you know, Senor Quarles, in such matters the police are sometimes happy to close their files.’
‘There was still some doubt?’
‘Yes. Not very much, perhaps, but—in these cases there is often a doubt.’
Molly Player found out nothing useful about the paper and envelopes. They were of the sort that could be bought in a thousand stores and shops in London and elsewhere. She had more luck with the typewriter. Its key characteristics identified the machine as a Malward portable of a type which the company had ceased producing ten years ago. The type face had proved unsatisfactory, and only some three hundred machines of this sort had been made. The Malward Company was able to provide her with a list of the purchasers of these machines, and Molly started to check and trace them, but had to give it up as a bad job.
‘If we had three weeks I might get somewhere. In three days it’s impossible,’ she said to Quarles.
Lord Acrise made no comment on Quarles’s recital of failure. ‘See you on Monday evening, seven thirty, black tie,’ he said, and barked with laughter. ‘Your host will be Santa Claus.’
‘I’d like to be there earlier.’
‘Good idea. Any time you like. You know where it is—Robert the Devil Restaurant.’
3
The Robert the Devil Restaurant is situated inconspicuously in Mayfair. It is not a restaurant in the ordinary sense of the word, for there is no public dining-room, but simply several private rooms, which can accommodate any number of guests from two to thirty. Perhaps the food is not quite the best in London, but it is certainly the most expensive.
It was here that Quarles arrived at half past six, a big suave man, rather too conspicuously elegant perhaps in a midnight blue dinner jacket. He talked to Albert, the maître d’hôtel, whom he had known for some years, took unobtrusive looks at the waiters, went into and admired the kitchens. Albert observed his activities with tolerant amusement. ‘You are here on some sort of business, Mr. Quarles?’
‘I am a guest, Albert. I am also a kind of bodyguard. Tell me, how many of your waiters have joined you in the past twelve months?’
‘Perhaps half a dozen. They come, they go.’
‘Is there anybody at all on your staff—waiters, kitchen staff, anybody—who has joined you in the past year, and who is over sixty years old?’
Albert thought, then shook his head decisively. ‘No. There is not such a one.’
The first of the guests came just after a quarter past seven. This was the brain surgeon Sir James Erdington, with a guest whom Quarles recognized as the Arctic explorer, Norman Endell. After that they came at intervals of a minute or two—a junior minister in the Government, one of the three most important men in the motor industry, a General promoted to the peerage to celebrate his retirement, a theatrical producer named Roddy Davis, who had successfully combined commerce and culture. As they arrived, the hosts went into a special robing room to put on their Santa Claus clothes, while the guests drank sherry. At seven-twenty-five Snewin scurried in, gasped, ‘Excuse me, place names, got to put them out,’ and went into the dining-room. Through the open door Quarles glimpsed a large oval table, gleaming with silver, bright with roses.
After Snewin came Lord Acrise, jutting-nosed and fearsome-eyed. ‘Sorry to have kept you waiting,’ he barked, and asked conspiratorially, ‘Well?’
‘No sign.’
‘False alarm. Lot of nonsense. Got to dress up now.’
He went into the robing room with his box—each of the hosts had a similar box, labelled ‘Santa Claus’—and came out again bewigged, bearded and robed. ‘Better get the business over, and then we can enjoy ourselves. You can tell ’em to come in,’ he said to Albert.
This referred to the photographers, who had been clustering outside, and now came into the room specially provided for holding the raffle. In the centre of the room was a table and on this table stood this year’s prize, two exquisite T’ang horses. On the other side of the table were ten chairs arranged in a semi-circle, and on these sat the Santa Clauses. The guests stood inconspicuously at the side.
The raffle was conducted with the utmost seriousness. Each Santa Claus had a numbered slip. These slips were put into a tombola, and Acrise put in his hand and drew out one of them. Flash bulbs exploded.
‘The number drawn is eight,’ Acrise announced, and Roddy Davis waved the counterfoil in his hand. ‘Isn’t that wonderful? It’s my ticket.’ He went over to the horses, picked up one. More flashes. ‘I’m bound to say that they couldn’t have gone to anybody who’d have appreciated them more.’
Quarles, standing near to the General, whose face was as red as his robe, heard him mutter something uncomplimentary. Charity, he reflected, was not universal, even in a gathering of Santas. More flashes, the photographers disappeared, and Quarles’s views about the nature of charity were reinforced when, as they were about to go into the dining-room, Erdington said: ‘Forgotten something, haven’t you, Acrise?’
With what seemed dangerous quietness Acrise answered, ‘Have I? I don’t think so.’
‘It’s customary for the Club and guests to sing “Noel” before we go in to dinner.’
‘You didn’t come to last year’s dinner. It was agreed then that we should give it up. Carols after dinner, much better.’
‘I must say I thought that was just for last year, because we were late,’ Roddy Davis fluted. ‘I’m sure that’s what was agreed. I think myself it’s rather pleasant to sing “Noel” before we go in and start eating too much.’
‘Suggest we put it to the vote,’ Erdington said sharply. Half a dozen of the Santas now stood looking at each other with subdued hostility. It was a situation that would have been totally ludicrous, if it had not been also embarrassing for the guests. Then suddenly the Arctic explorer, Endell, began to sing ‘Noel, Noel’ in a rich bass. There was the faintest flicker of hesitation, and then guests and Santas joined in. The situation was saved.
At dinner Quarles found himself with Acrise on one side of him and Roddy Davis on the other. Endell sat at Acrise’s other side, and beyond him was Erdington. Turtle soup was followed by grilled sole, and then three great turkeys were brought in. The helpings of turkey were enormous. With the soup they drank a light, dry sherry, with the sole Chassagne Montrachet, with the turkey an Alexe Corton, heavy and powerful.
‘And who are you?’ Roddy Davis peered at Quarles’s card and said, with what seemed manifest untruth, ‘Of course I know your name.’
‘I am a criminologist.’ This sounded better, he thought, than private detective.
‘I remember your monograph on criminal calligraphy. Quite fascinating.’
So Davis did know who he was—it would be easy, Quarles thought, to underrate the intelligence of the round-faced man who beamed innocently to him.
‘These beards really do get
in the way rather,’ Davis said. ‘But there, one must suffer for tradition. Have you known Acrise long?’
‘Not very. I’m greatly privileged to be here.’ Quarles had been watching, as closely as he could, the pouring of the wine, the serving of the food. He had seen nothing suspicious. Now, to get away from Davis’s questions, he turned to his host.
‘Damned awkward business before dinner,’ Acrise said. ‘Might have been, at least. Can’t let well alone, Erdington.’ He picked up his turkey leg, attacked it with Elizabethan gusto, wiped mouth and fingers with his napkin. ‘Like this wine?’
‘It’s excellent.’
‘Chose it myself. They’ve got some good Burgundies here.’ Acrise’s speech was slightly slurred, and it seemed to Quarles that he was rapidly getting drunk.
‘Do you have any speeches?’
‘What’s that?’
‘Are any speeches made after dinner?’
‘No speeches. Just sing carols. But I’ve got a little surprise for ’em.’
‘What sort of surprise?’
‘Very much in the spirit of Christmas, and a good joke too. But if I told you it wouldn’t be a surprise now, would it?’
Acrise had almost said ‘shurprise.’ Quarles looked at him and then returned to the turkey.
There was a general cry of pleasure as Albert himself brought in the great plum pudding, topped with holly and blazing with brandy.
‘That’s the most wonderful pudding I’ve ever seen in my life,’ Endell said. ‘Are we really going to eat it?’
‘Of course we’re going to eat it,’ Acrise said irritably. He stood up, swaying a little, and picked up the knife beside the pudding.
‘I don’t like to be critical, but our Chairman is really not cutting the pudding very well,’ Roddy Davis whispered to Quarles. And indeed, it was more of a stab than a cut that Acrise made at the pudding. Albert took over, and cut it quickly and efficiently. Bowls of brandy butter were circulated.
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