Crimson Snow

by Martin Edwards

  But there had been two distinct small footprints in the dust of the outer hall and a palmprint on the outer door had been small, childsize.

  Perhaps the child that Shirley had seen running down the road had been a decoy. The whole group she had noticed at Mrs. Fairlands’s door might have been employed for that purpose and the men or older boys were lurking at the corner of the house, to pounce when the door opened. Possible, but not very likely. Far too risky, even on a dark evening. Shirley could not have seen distinctly. The streetlamps were at longish intervals in that road. But there were always a few passersby. Even on Christmas Eve no professional group of villains would take such a risk.

  Standing in the cold drawing room, now covered with a grey film of dust, Inspector Brooks decided to make another careful search for clues. He had missed the jewels. Though he felt justified in making it, his mistake was a distinct blot on his copybook. It was up to him now to retrieve his reputation. He sent the sergeant to take another look at the bedroom, with particular attention to the dressing table. He himself began to go over the drawing room with the greatest possible care.

  Shirley’s evidence suggested there had been more than one thief. The girl had said ‘voices.’ That meant at least two, which probably accounted for the fact, apart from her age, that neither Mrs. Fairlands nor her clothes gave any indication of a struggle. She had been overpowered immediately, it seemed. She had not been strong enough or agile enough to tear, scratch, pull off any fragment from her attackers’ clothes or persons. There had been no trace of any useful material under her fingernails or elsewhere.

  Brooks began methodically with the chair to which Mrs. Fairlands had been bound and worked his way outwards from that centre. After the furniture, the carpet and curtains. After that the walls.

  Near the door, opposite the fireplace, he found on the wall—two feet, three inches up from the floor—a small, round, brownish, greasy smear. He had not seen it before. In artificial light, he checked, it was nearly invisible. On this morning, with the first sunshine of the New Year coming into the room, the little patch was entirely obvious, slightly shiny where the light from the window caught it.

  Inspector Brooks took a wooden spatula from his case of aids and carefully scraped off the substance into a small plastic box, sniffing at it as he did so.

  ‘May I, too?’ asked Tom Meadows behind him.

  The inspector wheeled round with an angry exclamation.

  ‘How did you get in?’ he asked.

  ‘Told the copper in your car I wanted to speak to you.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Well, about how you were getting on, really,’ Tom said disarmingly. ‘I see you are. Please let me have one sniff.’

  Inspector Brooks was annoyed, both by the intrusion and the fact that he had not heard it, being so concentrated on his work. So he closed his box, shut it into his black bag, and called to the sergeant in the next room.

  Meadows got down on his knees, leaned towards the wall, and sniffed. It was faint, since most of it had been scraped off, but he knew the smell. His freelancing had not been confined to journalism.

  He was getting to his feet as the sergeant joined Inspector Brooks. The sergeant raised his eyebrows at the interloper.

  ‘You can’t keep the press’s noses out of anything,’ said Brooks morosely.

  The other two grinned. It was very apt.

  ‘I’m just off,’ Tom said. ‘Good luck with your specimen, Inspector. I know where to go now. So will you.’

  ‘Come back!’ called Brooks. The young man was a menace. He would have to be controlled.

  But Meadows was away, striding down the road until he was out of sight of the police car, then running to the nearest tube station, where he knew he would find the latest newspaper editions. He bought one, opened it at the entertainments column, and read down the list.

  He was a certain six hours ahead of Brooks, he felt sure, possibly more. Probably he had until tomorrow morning. He skipped his lunch and set to work.

  Inspector Brooks got the report from the lab that evening, and the answer to his problem came to him as completely as it had done to Tom Meadows in Mrs. Fairlands’s drawing room. His first action was to ring up Olympia. This proving fruitless, he sighed. Too late now to contact the big stores; they would all be closed and the employees of every kind gone home.

  But in the morning some very extensive telephone calls to managers told him where he must go. He organized his forces to cover all the exits of a big store not very far from Mrs. Fairlands’s house. With his sergeant he entered modestly by way of the men’s department.

  They took a lift from there to the third floor, emerging among the toys. It was the tenth day of Christmas, with the school holidays in full swing and eager children, flush with Christmas money, choosing long-coveted treasures. A Father Christmas, white-bearded, in the usual red, hooded gown, rather too short for him, was moving about trying to promote a visit to the first of that day’s performances of ‘Snowdrop and the Seven Dwarfs.’ As his insistence seeped into the minds of the abstracted young, they turned their heads to look at the attractive cardboard entrance of the little ‘theatre’ at the far end of the department. A gentle flow towards it began and gathered momentum. Inspector Brooks and the sergeant joined the stream.

  Inside the theatre there were small chairs in rows for the children. The grownups stood at the back. A gramophone played the Disney film music.

  The early scenes were brief, mere tableaux with a line thrown in here and there for Snowdrop. The queen spoke the famous doggerel to her mirror.

  The curtain fell and rose again on Snowdrop, surrounded by the Seven Dwarfs. Two of them had beards, real beards. Dopey rose to his feet and began to sing.

  ‘Okay,’ whispered Brooks to the sergeant. ‘The child who sang and ran away.’

  The sergeant nodded. Brooks whispered again. ‘I’m going round the back. Get the audience here out quietly if the balloon goes up before they finish.’

  He tiptoed quietly away. He intended to catch the dwarfs in their dressing room immediately after the show, arrest the lot, and sort them out at the police station.

  But the guilty ones had seen him move. Or rather Dopey, more guilt-laden and fearful than the rest, had noticed the two men who seemed to have no children with them, had seen their heads close together, had seen one move silently away. As Brooks disappeared, the midget’s nerve broke. His song ended in a scream; he fled from the stage.

  In the uproar that followed, the dwarf’s scream was echoed by the frightened children. The lights went up in the theatre, the shop assistants and the sergeant went into action to subdue their panic and get them out.

  Inspector Brooks found himself in a maze of lathe and plaster backstage arrangements. He found three bewildered small figures, with anxious, wizened faces, trying to restrain Dopey, who was still in the grip of his hysteria. A few sharp questions proved that the three had no idea what was happening.

  The queen and Snowdrop appeared, highly indignant. Brooks, now holding Dopey firmly by the collar, demanded the other three dwarfs. The two girls, subdued and totally bewildered, pointed to their dressing room. It was empty, but a tumbled heap of costumes on the floor showed what they had done. The sergeant appeared, breathless.

  ‘Take this chap,’ Brooks said, thrusting the now fainting Dopey at him. ‘Take him down. I’m shopping him. Get on to the management to warn all departments for the others.’

  He was gone, darting into the crowded toy department, where children and parents stood amazed or hurried towards the lifts, where a dense crowd stood huddled, anxious to leave the frightening trouble spot.

  Brooks bawled an order.

  The crowd at the lift melted away from it, leaving three small figures in overcoats and felt hats, trying in vain to push once more under cover.

  They bolted, bunched together, but
they did not get far. Round the corner of a piled table of soft toys Father Christmas was waiting. He leaped forward, tripped up one, snatched another, hit the third as he passed and grabbed him, too, as he fell.

  The tripped one struggled up and on as Brooks appeared.

  ‘I’ll hold these two,’ panted Tom Meadows through his white beard, which had fallen sideways.

  The chase was brief. Brooks gained on the dwarf. The latter knew it was hopeless. He snatched up a mallet lying beside a display of camping equipment and, rushing to the side of the store, leaped on a counter, from there clambered up a tier of shelves, beat a hole in the window behind them, and dived through. Horrified people and police on the pavement below saw the small body turning over and over like a leaf as it fell.

  ‘All yours,’ said Tom Meadows, handing his captives, too limp now to struggle, to Inspector Brooks and tearing off his Father Christmas costume. ‘See you later.’

  He was gone, to shut himself in a telephone booth on the ground floor of the store and hand his favourite editor the scoop. It had paid off, taking over from the old boy, an ex-actor like himself, who was quite willing for a fiver to write a note pleading illness and sending a substitute. ‘Your reporter, Tom Meadows, dressed as Father Christmas, today captured and handed over to the police two of the three murderers of Mrs. Fairlands—’

  Inspector Brooks, with three frantic midgets demanding legal aid, scrabbling at the doors of their cells, took a lengthy statement from the fourth, the one with the treble voice whose nerve had broken on the fatal night, as it had again that day. Greasepaint had betrayed the little fiends, Brooks told him, privately regretting that Meadows had been a jump ahead of him there. Greasepaint left on in the rush to get at their prey. One of the brutes must have fallen against the wall, pushed by the old woman herself perhaps. He hoped so. He hoped it was her own action that had brought these squalid killers to justice.

  Solution to Mr. Cork’s Secret

  The following was printed in Lilliput magazine, as the solution to the conundrum posed in ‘Mr. Cork’s Secret’. The author’s solution was printed first, followed by the two winning entries (from the ‘home’ prizewinner and the ‘overseas’ prizewinner).

  ***

  Alouette’s Worms Never Existed. Mr. Cork was rightly suspicious as soon as he was consulted about the risk. The valuation, £75,000, was unusually high. Further, the Anchor were invited to give temporary cover on a mere description provided by a Paris jeweller and the doubtful evidence of the portrait of a singer named Alouette painted wearing the jewels over fifty years ago. His suspicions were confirmed when he discovered that Anton de Raun, the man who was supposed to have purchased Alouette’s Worms, had put up a burglar to raid the private safe in the bridal suite at the Paradise. De Raun would never have risked losing jewellery as precious as Alouette’s Worms to get the insurance money unless he knew that there was nothing to steal. But he had to have proof of burglary. Harry was to be the victim. The whole plot was only possible because, through his marriage to Fanny Fairfield, Anton de Raun’s doings made news. The consequence was that the press played up the story until everybody, except Mr. Cork, believed in Alouette’s Worms.

  Guydamour, the jeweller, was the instigator of the plan. He somehow discovered, probably from Alouette herself in her old age, that her famous ‘Worms’ were made of paste. He put up the scheme to de Raun of insuring jewels which, because they never existed, could never be recovered if they were ‘stolen.’ Mr. Cork’s pertinent inquiries when he telephoned Paris before the de Raun wedding put Guydamour on his guard. Guydamour warned off de Raun. But de Raun himself seized the chance of staging an even better fake robbery by murdering his own accomplice. If Harry hadn’t arrived to burgle the safe as arranged, and Mr. Cork hadn’t caught him by accident, de Raun might well have got away with it and the police would still be searching for the jewels. Mr. Cork kept the secret because he was alarmed lest it become widely known that the big London insurance companies constantly accept the risk on valuables for the existence of which they have no first-hand knowledge.

  Home

  J. Carroll, ‘Whiteholme,’

  Grantham Road, Bracebridge Heath, Lincoln.

  Sparrow. Care Cheshire Cheese. Fleet Street, London. Regret unable to join you and Harry Christmas Eve as detained New York stop Due however general tightening insurance regulations am now able reveal missing link De Raun case stop My anxiety this cover first aroused by absence expert examination Alouettes Worms coupled knowledge De Raun’s unsavoury financial record stop My cardinal rule these investigations is examine whether conditions favourable any of following three principal methods defrauding insurance companies stop Firstly phoney theft with view later underground sale insured articles stop Discarded this theory because convinced De Raun lacked wherewithal purchase jewels first place stop Secondly theft of imitations substituted for real jewels which usually sold beforehand stop Intriguing possibility here was manufacture by Guydamour of imitation Alouettes Worms for pre-arranged theft stop Nevertheless concluded this unlikely because Harry’s subsequent attempts dispose of sham jewels would provide underworld concrete evidence fraud carrying distinct possibilities blackmail stop Came finally to third alternative of complete non-existence jewels real or false which proved to be solution in De Raun case stop Legend of missing Alouettes Worms provided De Raun Guydamour with ideal starting point their conspiracy stop They spread story that jewels reappeared lending authenticity by report of forthcoming public sale stop Alleged private sale to De Raun followed thus setting stage for fraudulent insurance of non-existent jewels and finally genuine burglary of precisely nothing stop This was the fact necessarily concealed from press.

  Montague Cork

  Overseas

  A. G. Yates, 2 Seaview Parade,

  Collaroy, Sydney, N.S.W. Australia.

  The Anchor Insurance Company

  Confidential memo to all Departmental Heads

  from General Manager.

  This Memo is written as a solemn warning to all senior staff.

  You have all read accounts in the Press of the de Raun case and, therefore, are familiar with the details. Perhaps some of the more observant among you have wondered why the obvious question was not answered, namely, ‘Where were the jewels found?’

  The answer is that the jewels were never found—because they never existed.

  Ask yourselves—what proof was there that Alouette’s Worms actually existed? Nothing more than newspaper reports, based on statements from de Raun and Guydamour themselves.

  Guydamour described them as an exquisite collection of Siamese gems, he concocted a story of Alouette having been given them by a South African millionaire in her heyday. Alouette being dead, could not of course, deny this. De Raun, with a flourish of trumpets, announced to the Press that he had bought the jewels by private treaty as a wedding present.

  De Raun, the brains of the partnership, contacted a professional burglar in the South of France and gave him exact details of a safe in a room of the Paradise Hotel and a date to commit the burglary, so that he would have a perfect setpiece.

  De Raun planned the cold-blooded murder of his partner, Guydamour, for two reasons. Firstly, to substantiate the robbery as being genuine and secondly to save sharing the insurance money.

  Let me not labour the point. I am sure, gentlemen, that you are satisfied with the generous salaries paid by this Company and wish to continue to enjoy them.

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