Murder Most Merry

by ed. Abigail Browining

  “This might be a bit more difficult,” Rand admitted. They retreated to a men’s room where Rand fastened the festive paper around the gift box once more, resticking the piece of tape that held it together. ‘There, looks as good as new.”

  Parkinson got the point. “You’re going to substitute this for one of the special ones.”

  “Exactly. And you’re going to help.”

  They resumed Rand’s earlier position on the terrace level, where he observed that the previous stack of boxes had dwindled to three. If he was right, they would be gone shortly, too. “How about that man?” Parkinson pointed out. “The one with the little boy.”

  “Why him?”

  “He doesn’t look that fatherly to me. And the boy seems a bit old to believe in Father Christmas.”

  “You’re right.” Rand said a moment later. “He’s getting one of the special boxes. Come on!”

  As the man and the boy came down off the ramp and mingled with the crowd. Rand moved in. The man was clutching the box just as the others had when Rand managed to jostle him. The box didn’t come loose, so Rand jostled again with his elbow, this time using his other hand to yank it free. The man, in his twenties with black hair and a vaguely foreign look, muttered something in a language Rand didn’t understand. There was a trace of panic in his face as he bent to retrieve the box. Rand pretended to lose his footing then, and came down on top of the man. The crowd of shoppers parted as they tumbled to the floor.

  “Terribly sorry,” Rand muttered, helping the man to his feet.

  At the same moment, Parkinson held out the brightly wrapped package. “I believe you dropped this, sir.”

  Anyone else might have cursed Rand and made a scene, but this strange man merely grasped the box and hurried away without a word, the small boy trailing along behind. “Good work.” Rand said, brushing off his jacket. “Let’s get this back to the office.”

  “Aren’t we going to open it?”

  “Not here.”

  Thirty minutes later, Rand was carefully unwrapping the gift on Hastings’ desk. Both Parkinson and Hastings were watching apprehensively, as if expecting a snake to spring out like a jack-in-the-box. “My money’s on drugs,” Parkinson said. “What else could it be?”

  “Is the box exactly the same as the others?” Hastings asked.

  “Just a bit heavier,” Rand decided. “A few ounces.”

  But inside there seemed to be nothing but the same plastic tree ornament. Rand removed the tissue paper and stared at the bottom of the box.

  “Nothing,” Parkinson said.

  “Wait a minute. Something had to make it heavier.” Rand reached in and pried up the bottom piece of cardboard with his fingernails. It was a snugly fitted false bottom. Beneath it was a thin layer of a grey puttylike substance. “Better not touch it,” Hastings cautioned.

  “That’s plastique—plastic explosive.”

  The man from the bomb squad explained that it was harmless without a detonator of some sort, but they were still relieved when he removed it from the office. “How much damage would that much plastic explosive do?” Rand wanted to know.

  “It would make a mess of this room. That’s about all.”

  “What about twelve or fifteen times that much?”

  “Molded together into one bomb? It could take out a house or a small building.”

  They looked at each other glumly. “It’s a pretty bizarre method for distributing explosives,” Parkinson said.

  “It has its advantages,” Hastings said. “The bomb is of little use until enough of the explosive is gathered together. If one small box falls into government hands, as this one did, the rest is still safe. No doubt it was delivered to St. Ives only recently, and this served as the perfect method for getting it to his network—certainly better than the mails during the Christmas rush.”

  “Then you think it’s to be reassembled into one bomb?” Rand asked.

  “Of course. And it’s to be used sometime soon.”

  “The IRA? Russians? Arabs?”

  Hastings shrugged. “Take your pick. St. Ives has worked for all of them.”

  Rand held the box up to the light, studying the bottom. “This may be some writing, some sort of invisible ink that’s beginning to become visible. Get one of the technicians up here to see if we can bring it out.”

  Heating the bottom of the box to bring out the message proved an easy task, but the letters that appeared were anything but easy to read: MPPMP MBSHG OEXAS-EWHMR AWPGG GBEBH PMBWE ALGHQ.

  “A substitution cipher,” Parkinson decided at once. “We’ll get to work on

  it.”

  “Forty letters,” Rand observed, “in the usual five-letter groups. There are five Ms, five Ps, and five Gs. Using letter frequencies, one of them could be E. but in such a short message you can’t be sure.”

  “GHQ at the end could stand for General Headquarters.” Hastings suggested.

  Rand shook his head. “The entire message would be enciphered. Chances are that’s just a coincidence.”

  Parkinson took the message off to the deciphering room and Rand confidently predicted he’d have the answer within an hour.

  He didn’t.

  “It’s tougher than it looks,” Parkinson told them. “There may not be any Es at all.”

  “Run it through the computer,” Rand suggested. “Use a program that substitutes various frequently used letters for the most frequently used letters in the message. See if you hit on anything.”

  Hastings glanced at the clock. “It’s after six and my niece has invited me for Christmas Eve. Can you manage without me?”

  “Of course. Merry Christmas.”

  After he’d gone, Rand picked up the phone and told Leila he’d be late. She was living in England now. and he’d planned to spend the holiday with her.

  “How late?” she asked.

  “These things have been known to last all night.”

  “Oh. Jeffrey. On Christmas Eve?”

  “I’ll call you later if I can,” Rand promised. “It might not take that long.”

  He went down the hall and stood for a time watching the computer experts work on the message. They seemed to be having no better luck than Parkinson’s people. “How long?” he asked one.

  “In the worst possible case it could take us until morning to run all the combinations.”

  Rand nodded. “I’ll be back.”

  They had to know what the message said, but they also had to find Ivan St. Ives. The employment office at Perkins and Simplex would be closed now. His only chance was that pub where Hastings had spoken with Daphne Sollis. The Crown and Piper.

  It was on a corner, as London pubs often are, and the night before Christmas didn’t seem to have made much of a dent in the early-evening business. The bar was crowded and all the tables and booths were occupied. Rand let his eyes wander over the faces, seeking out either St. Ives or Daphne, but neither one seemed to be there. He didn’t know either of them well, though he thought he would recognize St. Ives out of his Father Christmas garb. He was less certain about recognizing Daphne Sollis.

  “Seen Daphne around?” he asked the bartender as he ordered a pint.

  “Daphne Jenkins?”

  “Daphne Sollis.”

  “Do I know her?”

  “She was in here last night, talking to a grey-haired man wearing rimless glasses. He was probably dressed in a plaid topcoat.”

  “I don’t— Wait a minute, you must mean Rusty. Does she have red hair?”

  “Not the last time I knew her, but these things change.”

  “Well, if it’s Rusty she comes in a couple of nights a week, usually alone. Once recently she was with a creepy-looking gent who kept laughing like Father Christmas. I sure wouldn’t want him bringing gifts to my kids. He’d scare ‘em half to death.”

  “Does she live around here?”

  “No idea, mate.” He went off to wait on another customer.

  So whatever Daphne had told Ha
stings about her relationship with Ivan St. Ives, they were hardly enemies. He’d been with her recently in the Crown and Piper, apparently since he took on the job as Father Christmas.

  Rand thought it unlikely that Daphne would visit the pub two nights in a row, but on the other hand she might stop by if she was lonely on Christmas Eve. He decided to linger over his pint and see if she appeared. Thirty minutes later he was about to give it up and head for Leila’s flat when he heard the bartender say, “Hey, Rusty! Fellow here’s been askin’ after you.”

  Rand turned and saw Daphne Sollis standing not five feet behind him, unwrapping a scarf to reveal a tousled head of red hair. “Daphne!” She looked puzzled for a moment and he identified himself. “Ivan St. Ives introduced us a year or so back. He did some work for me.”

  She nodded slowly as it came back to her. “Oh, yes—Mr. Rand. I remember you now. Is this some sort of setup? The other one, Hastings, was here just last night.”

  “No setup, but I would like to talk with you, away from this noise. How about the lobby of the hotel next door?”

  “Well—all right.”

  The hotel lobby was much quieter. They sat beneath a large potted palm and no one disturbed them. “What do you want?” she asked. “What did your friend Hastings want last night?”

  “It was only happenstance that he met you. though I’ll admit I came to the Crown and Piper looking for you. I need to locate Ivan St. Ives.”

  “I told Hastings we’re on the outs.”

  “I saw him at Perkins and Simplex earlier today.”

  “Then you’ve already located him.”

  “No.” Rand explained. “His Christmas job would have ended today. I need to know where he’s living.”

  “I said we’re on the outs.”

  “You were drinking with him at the Crown and Piper just a week or two

  ago.”

  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.”