by Merry Murder
She bit her lip and stared off into space. “I don’t know where he’s living. He rang me up and we had a drink for old times’ sake. That’s when he told me about the Christmas job. He talked about getting back together again, but I don’t know. He works for a lot of shady people.”
“Who’s he working for now?”
“Just the store, so far as I know. He said he’d fallen on hard times.”
Rand leaned forward. “It could be worth some money if you located him for us, told us who he’s palling around with.”
She seemed to consider the idea. “I could tell you plenty about who he’s palled around with in the past. It wasn’t just our side, you know.”
“I know.”
But it would have to be after New Year’s. I’m going to visit a girlfriend in Hastings, on the coast. Is your friend Hastings from there?”
“From Leeds, actually.” Rand was frowning. “I need St. Ives now.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t help you. Perhaps the store has his address.”
“I’ll have to ask them.” Rand stood up. “Can I buy you a pint back at the
pub?”
“I’d better skip it now,” she said, glancing at her watch. “I want to get home and change. I’m going to Midnight Mass with some friends.”
“If you’ll jot down your phone number I’d like to ring you up after New Year’s.”
“Fine,” she agreed.
He’d intended to phone Leila after he left Daphne, but back at the Double-C office, Parkinson was in a state of dejection. “We’ve run every possible substitution of the letter E and there’s still nothing. We’re going down the letter-frequency list now, working on T, A, O, and N.”
“Forty characters without a single E. Unusual, certainly.”
“Any luck locating St. Ives?”
“Not yet.”
Rand worked with them for a time and then dozed on his office couch. It was long after midnight when Parkinson shook him awake. “I think we’ve got part of it.”
“Let me see.”
The younger man produced long folds of computer printout. “On this one we concentrated on the first six characters—the repetitive MPPMPM. We got nowhere substituting E, T, or A, but when we tried the next letters on the frequency list, O and N, look what came up.”
Rand focused his sleepy eyes and read NOONON. “Noon on?”
“Exactly. And there’s another ON combination later in the message.”
“Just a simple substitution cipher after all,” Rand marveled. “School children make them up all the time.”
“And it took us all these hours to get this far.”
“St. Ives didn’t worry about making the cipher too complex because he was writing it in invisible ink. It was our good luck that the box warmed enough so that some of the message began to appear.”
“A terrorist network armed with plastic explosives, and St. Ives is telling them when and where to set off the bomb. Do you think we should phone Hastings?”
Rand glanced at the clock. It was almost dawn on Christmas morning. “Let’s wait till we get the rest of it.
He followed Parkinson down the hall to the computer room where the others were at work. Not bothering with the machines, he went straight to the old blackboard at the far end of the room. “Look here, all of you. The group of letters following noon on is probably a day of the week, or a date if it’s spelled out. If it’s a day of the week, three of these letters have to stand for day.”
As he worked, he became aware that someone had chalked the most common letter-frequency list down the left side of the board, starting with E, T, A, O, N, and continuing down to Q, X, Z. It was the list from David Kahn’s massive 1967 book, The Codebreakers, which everyone in the department had on their shelves. He stared at it and noticed that M and P came together about halfway down the list. Together, just like N and O in the regular alphabet. Quickly he chalked the letters A to Z next to the frequency list. “Look here! The key is the standard letter-frequency list. ABCDE is enciphered as ETAON. There are no Ns in the message we found, so there are no Es in the plaintext.”
The message became clear at once: NOONO NTHIS DAYCH ARING CROSS STATI ONTRA CKSIX. “Noon on this day, Charing Cross Station, Track six,” Rand read.
“Noon on which day?” Parkinson questioned. “It was after noon yesterday before he distributed most of the boxes.”
“He must mean today. Christmas Day. A Christmas Day explosion at Charing Cross Station.”
I’ll phone Hastings,” Parkinson decided. “We can catch them in the act.”
Police and Scotland Yard detectives converged on the station shortly after dawn. Staying as unobtrusive as possible, they searched the entire area around track six. No bomb was found.
Noon came and went, and no bomb exploded.
Rand turned up at Leila’s flat late that afternoon. “Only twenty-four hours late,” she commented drily, holding the door open for him.
“And not in a good mood.”
“You mean you didn’t crack it after all this time?”
“We cracked it, but that didn’t do us much good. We don’t have the man who sent it, and we may be unable to prevent a terrorist bombing.”
“Here in London?”
“Yes. right here in London.” He knew a few police were still at Charing Cross Station, but he also knew it was quite easy to smuggle plastic explosives past the tightest security. They could be molded into any shape, and metal detectors were of no use against them.
He tried to put his mind at ease during dinner with Leila, and later when she asked if he’d be spending the night he readily agreed. But he awakened before dawn and walked restlessly to the window, looking out at the glistening streets where rain had started to fall. It would be colder today, more like winter.
The bomb hadn’t gone off at Charing Cross Station yesterday. Either the time or the place was wrong.
But it hadn’t gone off anywhere else in London, so he could assume the place was correct. It was the time that was off.
The time, or the day.
This day.
Noon on this day.
He went to Leila’s telephone and called Parkinson at home. When he heard his sleepy voice answer, he said, “This is Rand. Meet me at the office in an hour.”
“It’s only six o’clock,” Parkinson muttered. “And a holiday.”
“I know. I’m sorry. But I’m calling Hastings, too. It’s important.”
He leaned over the bed to kiss Leila but left without awakening her.
An hour later, with Hastings and Parkinson seated before him in the office, Rand picked up a piece of chalk. “You see, we assumed the wrong meaning for the word ‘this.‘ If someone wants to indicate ‘today,‘ they say it— they don’t say ‘this day.‘ On the other hand, if I write the word ‘this’ on the desk in front of me—” he did so with the piece of chalk “—what am I referring to?”
“The desk,” Parkinson replied.
“Right. If I wrote the word on a box, what would I be referring to?”
“The box.”
“When St. Ives’s message said, ‘this day,‘ he wasn’t referring to Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. He was telling them Boxing Day. Even if they were foreign, they’d know it was the day after Christmas here and a national holiday.”
“That’s today,” Hastings said.
“Exactly. We need to get the men back to Charing Cross Station.”
The station was almost deserted. The holiday travelers were at their destinations, and it was too soon for anyone to have started home yet. Rand stood near one of the newsstands looking through a paper while the detectives again searched unobtrusively around track six. It was nearly noon and time was running out.
“No luck,” Hastings told him. “They can’t find a thing.”
“Plastique.” Rand shook his head. “It could be molded around a girder and painted most any color. We’d better keep everyone clear from now until after noon.” It was six minutes to twelve
.
“Are you sure about this, Rand? St. Ives is using a dozen or more people. Perhaps they all didn’t understand his message.”
“They had to come together to assemble the small portions of explosive into a deadly whole. Most of them would understand the message even if a few didn’t. I’m sure St. Ives trained them well.”
“It’s not a busy day. He’s not trying to kill a great many people or he’d have waited until a daily rush hour.”
“No,” Rand agreed. “I think he’s content to—” He froze, staring toward the street entrance to the station. A man and a woman had entered and were walking toward track six. The man was Ivan St. Ives and the woman was Daphne Sollis.
Rand had forgotten that the train to Hastings left from Charing Cross Station.
He ran across the station floor, through the beams of sunlight that had suddenly brightened it from the glass-enclosed roof. “St. Ives!” he shouted.
Ivan St. Ives had just bent to give Daphne a good-bye kiss. He turned suddenly at the sound of his name and saw Rand approaching. “What is this?” he asked.
“Get away from him. Daphne!” Rand warned.
“He just came to see me off. I told you I was visiting—”
“Get away from him!” Rand repeated more urgently.
St. Ives met his eyes, and glanced quickly away, as if seeking a safe exit. But already the others were moving in. His eyes came back to Rand, recognizing him. “You were at the store, in line for Father Christmas! I knew I’d seen you before!”
“We broke the cipher, St. Ives. We know everything.”
St. Ives turned and ran, not toward the street from where the men were coming but through the gate to track six. A police constable blew his whistle, and the sound merged with the chiming of the station clock. St. Ives had gone about fifty feet when the railway car to his left seemed to come apart with a blinding flash and roar of sound that sent waves of dust and debris billowing back toward Rand and the others. Daphne screamed and covered her face.
When the smoke cleared. Ivan St. Ives was gone. It was some time later before they found his remains among the wreckage that had been blown onto the adjoining track. By then. Rand had explained it to Hastings and Parkinson. “Ivan St. Ives was a truly evil man. When he was hired to plan and carry out a terrorist bombing in London over the Christmas holidays, he decided quite literally to kill two birds with one stone. He planned the bombing for the exact time and place where his old girlfriend Daphne Sollis would be. To make certain she didn’t arrive too early or too late, he even escorted her to the station himself. She knew too much about his past associations, and he wanted her out of his life for good. I imagine one of his men must have ridden the train into Charing Cross Station and hidden the bomb on board before he left.”
But he didn’t tell any of this to Daphne. She only knew that they’d come to arrest St. Ives and he’d been killed by a bomb while trying to flee. A tragic coincidence, nothing more. She never knew St. Ives had tried to kill her.
In a way Rand felt it was a Christmas gift to her.
THE CAROL SINGERS – Josephine Bell
Old Mrs. Fairlands stepped carefully off the low chair she had pulled close to the fireplace. She was very conscious of her eighty-one years every time she performed these mild acrobatics. Conscious of it and determined to have no humiliating, potentially dangerous mishap. But obstinate, in her persistent routine of dusting her own mantelpiece, where a great many too many photographs and small ornaments daily gathered a film of greasy London dust.
Mrs. Fairlands lived in the ground floor flat of a converted house in a once fashionable row of early Victorian family homes. The house had been in her family for three generations before her, and she herself had been born and brought up there. In those faroff days of her childhood, the whole house was filled with a busy throng of people, from the top floor where the nurseries housed the noisiest and liveliest group, through the dignified, low-voiced activities of her parents and resident aunt on the first and ground floors, to the basement haunts of the domestic staff, the kitchens and the cellars.
Too many young men of the family had died in two world wars and too many young women had married and left the house to make its original use in the late 1940’s any longer possible. Mrs. Fairlands, long a widow, had inherited the property when the last of her brothers died.
She had let it for a while, but even that failed. A conversion was the obvious answer. She was a vigorous seventy at the time, fully determined, since her only child, a married daughter, lived in the to her barbarous wastes of the Devon moors, to continue to live alone with her much-loved familiar possessions about her.
The conversion was a great success and was made without very much structural alteration to the house. The basement, which had an entrance by the former back door, was shut off and was let to a businessman who spent only three days a week in London and preferred not to use an hotel. The original hall remained as a common entrance to the other three flats. The ground floor provided Mrs. Fairlands with three large rooms, one of which was divided into a kitchen and bathroom. Her own front door was the original dining room door from the hall. It led now into a narrow passage, also chopped off from the room that made the bathroom and kitchen. At the end of the passage two new doors led into the former morning room, her drawing room as she liked to call it, and her bedroom, which had been the study.
This drawing room of hers was at the front of the house, overlooking the road. It had a square bay window that gave her a good view of the main front door and the steps leading up to it, the narrow front garden, now a paved forecourt, and from the opposite window of the bay, the front door and steps of the house next door, divided from her by a low wall.
Mrs. Fairlands, with characteristic obstinacy, strength of character, integrity, or whatever other description her forceful personality drew from those about her, had lived in her flat for eleven years, telling everyone that it suited her perfectly and feeling, as the years went by, progressively more lonely, more deeply bored, and more consciously apprehensive. Her daily came for four hours three times a week. It was enough to keep the place in good order. On those days the admirable woman cooked Mrs. Fairlands a good solid English dinner, which she shared, and also constructed several more main meals that could be eaten cold or warmed up. But three half days of cleaning and cooking left four whole days in each week when Mrs. Fairlands must provide for herself or go out to the High Street to a restaurant. After her eightieth birthday she became more and more reluctant to make the effort. But every week she wrote to her daughter Dorothy to say how well she felt and how much she would detest leaving London, where she had lived all her life except when she was evacuated to Wiltshire in the second war.
She was sincere in writing thus. The letters were true as far as they went, but they did not go the whole distance. They did not say that it took Mrs. Fairlands nearly an hour to wash and dress in the morning. They did not say she was sometimes too tired to bother with supper and then had to get up in the night, feeling faint and thirsty, to heat herself some milk. They did not say that although she stuck to her routine of dusting the whole flat every morning, she never mounted her low chair without a secret terror that she might fall and break her hip and perhaps be unable to reach the heavy stick she kept beside her armchair to use as a signal to the flat above.
On this particular occasion, soon after her eighty-first birthday, she had deferred the dusting until late in the day, because it was Christmas Eve and in addition to cleaning the mantelpiece she had arranged on it a pile of Christmas cards from her few remaining friends and her many younger relations.
This year, she thought sadly, there was not really much point in making the display. Dorothy and Hugh and the children could not come to her as usual, nor could she go to them. The tiresome creatures had chicken pox, in their late teens, too, except for Bobbie, the afterthought, who was only ten. They should all have had it years ago, when they first went to school. So the visit was cancele
d, and though she offered to go to Devon instead, they told her she might get shingles from the same infection and refused to expose her to the risk. Apart altogether from the danger to her of traveling at that particular time of the year, the weather and the holiday crowds combined, Dorothy had written.
Mrs. Fairlands turned sadly from the fireplace and walked slowly to the window. A black Christmas this year, the wireless report had promised. As black as the prospect of two whole days of isolation at a time when the whole western world was celebrating its midwinter festival and Christians were remembering the birth of their faith.
She turned from the bleak prospect outside her window, a little chilled by the downdraft seeping through its closed edges. Near the fire she had felt almost too hot, but then she needed to keep it well stocked up for such a large room. In the old days there had been logs, but she could no longer lift or carry logs. Everyone told her she ought to have a cosy stove or even do away with solid fuel altogether, install central heating and perhaps an electric fire to make a pleasant glow. But Mrs. Fairlands considered these suggestions defeatist, an almost insulting reference to her age. Secretly she now thought of her life as a gamble with time. She was prepared to take risks for the sake of defeating them. There were few pleasures left to her. Defiance was one of them.
When she left the window, she moved to the far corner of the room, near the fireplace. Here a small table, usually covered, like the mantelpiece, with a multitude of objects, had been cleared to make room for a Christmas tree. It was mounted in a large bowl reserved for this annual purpose. The daily had set it up for her and wrapped the bowl round with crinkly red paper, fastened with safety pins. But the tree was not yet decorated.
Mrs. Fairlands got to work upon it. She knew that it would be more difficult by artificial light to tie the knots in the black cotton she used for the dangling glass balls. Dorothy had provided her with some newfangled strips of pliable metal that needed only to be threaded through the rings on the glass balls and wrapped round the branches of the tree. But she had tried these strips only once. The metal had slipped from her hands and the ball had fallen and shattered. She went back to her long practiced method with black cotton, leaving the strips in the box for her grandchildren to use, which they always did with ferocious speed and efficiency.
