‘Well, it hadn’t been burgled, but Father Christmas was still in there. Nailed to a cross, and as dead as a doornail.’
‘What?’ shouted Falconer. ‘Would you mind repeating what you just said? I think I must be hearing things.’
‘In the church. Father Christmas. Nailed to a cross. And dead as a doornail.’
‘That’s what I thought you said! But what cross, which Father Christmas; and when did all this happen?
‘The cross from the Strict and Particular Chapel in Steynham St Michael that I told you about ages ago. It was moved to the church in Castle Farthing for safe-keeping, and kept in the vestry,’ Carmichael explained fairly calmly. ‘And the dead man is Digby Jeffries, still dressed in his Father Christmas costume.’
‘Nailed?’ queried Falconer, hoping that he really had misheard this piece of information both times.
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, my God!’ It was lucky that Falconer had had no breakfast yet, or he might have had an unexpected rebate. It was usually Carmichael’s stomach that suffered from queasiness, but that one word, ‘nailed’, had caused his own insides to turn over. It was just so savage.
‘Shall I inform the station, sir?’ asked Carmichael, this being standard operating procedure.
‘I suppose you’d better,’ replied Falconer, as the lights suddenly cut out and they were plunged into darkness.
There was the sound of someone scrabbling in a kitchen cupboard, and the hiss of a stream of swearwords, almost drowned out by the cries of surprise from the boys, who could no longer see what they were playing with, and Falconer was surprised to identify the voice of the swearer as Kerry’s. She must be under even more strain than Carmichael thought, and this was just the last straw for her. Falconer took a moment to wonder idly if his sergeant knew how freely and comprehensively his wife could cuss.
A match was struck, and the wick lit of, first one candle, then another three. ‘I always keep some handy, because we get so many power cuts out here in the villages,’ she explained, her voice now sounding back in control.
Carmichael’s voice confirmed what Falconer’s mind knew it must. ‘Phone’s out, too. I’ll have to try my mobile.’ (A pause.) ‘Dammit! No reception on that either. Have you got your personal radio with you, sir?’
‘I’m afraid I left it in the office. What about yours, Carmichael?’
‘I handed it in yesterday because it was broken. I’ve just used my mobile: you try yours in case that can still get a signal.’
‘Dead. The transmitter must be having trouble. That’s that, then.’
‘What are we going to do, sir?’
‘Light a fire to keep warm, sort out some more candles or oil lamps, and then review the situation. And just thank God that you’ve got an open fire and a gas cooker, so we shan’t freeze and we shan’t starve either.’ Although there was no piped gas in the villages, Falconer knew that Carmichael had insisted they have a cooker that would run happily on bottled gas, and the cylinder for this was cunningly concealed behind one of the cupboard doors in the kitchen.
‘Shouldn’t we go over to the church? George is probably waiting for us.’
‘Then he’ll just have to work out that we’re not going to get there in a hurry, won’t he? After making this place warm and light, it’s going to take us ages to dig a pathway through all that snow. It must be thigh-high or more, and it’s definitely a shovel job.’
‘But how can we start an investigation without any equipment?’ Carmichael was beginning to panic.
‘By improvising, Sergeant. When everything we can do here is done, we start to gather the equipment we can use that is available in a normal household.’ Falconer crossed his fingers behind his back, when he said the word ‘normal’. There was nothing normal about this household.
Mulligan chose that moment to come lolloping down the stairs, reminding them that they’d have to put up with his company for the foreseeable future, and Falconer, ever forward-thinking, called out, ‘Make sure that any candles and lamps are put up high, so that that monster doesn’t knock them over with his tail, or accidentally eat them in mistake for a ‘light’ snack.’
‘Very funny, sir!’ Carmichael, like Queen Victoria, was not amused. This wasn’t how he’d planned his first married Christmas with Kerry and the boys.
His mood lightened, however, when he discovered a spark of life in last night’s fire, and remembered that he’d filled the log basket before going to bed the previous night. With a smug smile of satisfaction, he dropped a few twigs on the embers and received a cheer when within seconds these caught and produced flames. ‘And for my next trick,’ he said, adding some fairly thin logs, ‘I shall produce heat.’
The boys cheered, but Falconer had his mind on more serious things. ‘We’ll just have to improvise a murder kit from what we can find about the house. Have you got a camera, Carmichael?’
‘Yes, and a video camera as well.’
‘Excellent! Now, we’ll need a tape measure, some sort of pipette, and some fine powder. Any offers?’
‘I’ve got my retractable DIY rule,’ offered Carmichael. ‘And I’ve got a pipette for giving the dogs medicine, and some baby powder. Are they any use?’
‘Perfect! Now, what about lighting?’
‘George Covington’s got some of those spotlight things that builders use, that he puts up in the pub garden if there’s something going on late into the evening,’ Carmichael remembered.
‘And just where do we get the power to run them?’ asked the inspector. ‘In case you’ve forgotten, we’ve got no electricity.’
‘Bottom!’ said Carmichael, with feeling.
‘We’ll just have to rely on good old-fashioned candle power for now, and maybe see if we can get a few oil-lamps down there, if there’s not enough light. And I can record things on my mobile. At least that functions OK, even if I can’t use it to summon help, although I’ll have to go easy on the battery,’ finished Falconer. ‘There’s nothing we can do about the absence of a doctor, so we’ll just have to use our own judgement and record things as precisely as we can. Boys! Have you got any sticks of chalk?’
‘Yes, Uncle Harry,’ they chorused, and scrambled off in search of them, hunting through their bedroom by feel. The adults downstairs knew that was what they were doing, because they distinctly heard Dean say, ‘Ugh! That’s a wax crayon!’ and Kyle call out,
‘I’ve got some. At least, it tastes like chalk!’ Those boys were really using their initiative in difficult circumstances.
As Kerry laughed at this, she remembered she had a vanity case that they could use to keep all the stuff together and, offering this into the mix, went off to fetch it with one of the candles for light, then made her ponderous way back downstairs, depositing the case in Falconer’s arms before lumbering off to the kitchen with a cry of, ‘I must get the turkey on, or it’ll never be cooked before bedtime.’
Fortunately, Carmichael had had the foresight to bring in a couple of shovels the evening before, when it looked like the snow was setting in, and these sat waiting for them in the kitchen. As the two men wrapped themselves up against the cold to shovel a pathway through the snow to the church, Carmichael had to reassure his stepsons that they would definitely open the presents under the tree when they got back from recording the scene of the crime. They carried on jumping up and down, however, their hands pressed against their mouths to suppress what they might let slip, and pointing at Falconer, until their stepfather finally got the message.
‘Of course!’ he said, giving them a fond look. ‘Sir, the boys have got a special present for you, and I think you’ll need it for your time outside.’ So saying, he leaned down and picked up a soft parcel from the front of the tree and handed it to Falconer with the words, ‘They bought this for you with their own pocket-money.’
The boys, both too young to be bothered with the protocol of job titles, shouted as one, ‘Open it, Uncle Harry. Open it! We bought it ’specially for you.’
‘Daddy thinks his is ever so warm,’ crowed Dean.
‘And he thinks it’s very pretty too, so we thought you’d like one as well.’
Falconer knew when he was beaten and pulled the hat over his head, taking care that he tied a smart bow under his chin. Stylish and elegant it wasn’t, but it seemed eminently practical in these freezing conditions, and he said thank you very politely for his lovely Christmas gift. Carmichael beamed with pride at his stepsons’ timely suggestion, as he donned the identical hat that the boys had bought for him some time ago.
Their first hurdle occurred earlier than either of them had anticipated, as Carmichael threw open the front door with his usual enthusiasm and the snow that had been piled up against it began to slither slowly into the house. Even Falconer had been distracted enough by the call from George Covington to have overlooked this obvious eventuality, and cursed mildly under his breath as they both set to with their shovels to remove the obstacle that now prevented the door from being closed and let the heat that had started to build up in the house to escape.
Outside the cottage the weather was Siberian, the temperature lowered considerably by the wind-chill from the flying snow, which in places had drifted to almost waist height, even on Carmichael. Each armed with a shovel, they began the gargantuan task of digging a path to the church, both secretly grateful that Jasmine Cottage wasn’t at the other end of the village, or even of the terrace.
George Covington had remained at the church and heard the scrape of their shovels, and they could just make out his figure, silhouetted in the soft yellow light that shone out of the church doorway. He had lit every candle he could find when the electricity had cut off, to provide as much light as possible. ‘Ahoy there!’ he called, using his hands as an improvised megaphone. ‘I’ll dig from this end, and we can meet in the middle to save time.’
Apart from the slight moaning of the wind, his voice carried clearly to them in the frozen air, and they appreciated his offer, which would save them a considerable amount of effort. George Covington was built like a navvy and was as fit as a flea, to coin but two clichés, and would make short work of his end of the digging.
By the time the three men met in the middle, the sun, such as it was, was up, but still shrouded by a fair thickness of cloud which drooped down and threatening to unburden its fecund load anytime now. Without preamble, George explained, ‘I sent the old vicar back to the pub. I reckoned a skinny old fellow like ’im would freeze to death in less than an hour. Let’s get ourselves into the church and out of that lazy wind, and I’ll explain everything to you.’
They entered the church with gratitude at the shelter it provided, and subsided into pews, while the pub landlord joked, ‘If anyone hollers to us, I’ll tell them there ain’t no one in here ’cept us chickens,’ his beady eye on their unusual headgear.
‘Very funny, George,’ commented Falconer, removing his hat due to the change in temperature. The church may be cold inside, but when measured against the biting freeze outside, it seemed warm in comparison. ‘Come on, where’s this body?’
‘Right in front of your eyes. Just look down the front, and then into the left hand corner. That ain’t no fancy Christmas decoration over there. That’s your corpse. Anyone’d think it was Easter instead of Christmas.’ George was evidently employing graveyard humour to quell his horror.
Four eyes turned in the direction he had indicated. And there it was: or rather, there Digby Jeffries was, still in full seasonal fig, raised above floor level with his arms outstretched, his wire-framed specs awry on his face as if they had been replaced there after he had been crucified, and bathed in the softness of candle-light.
‘That’s absolutely grotesque!’ exclaimed Falconer, feeling his stomach lurch, an alien experience after all the years he had spent in the army. Carmichael normally was the one with the dicky tummy. Tearing his eyes away from what lay before him he risked a glance at Carmichael, to see how he was coping with this grisly scenario.
Carmichael merely looked enraged, and said, ‘What if we hadn’t had all this snow? The little kiddies would’ve come in here this morning and found this. It’s an absolute outrage, leaving this for little ones to see. Can you imagine their horror, when they saw Father Christmas murdered, and in their own village church, too?’
‘It’s not really him, Carmichael!’ Falconer informed him. ‘It’s that bloke Jeffries who was always upsetting Kerry, and caused such a fuss in here at the crib service.’
‘I know that, sir, but the kiddies wouldn’t have done, would they?’
Carmichael had got him there with his childlike view on some aspects of life, and all he could say was, ‘I suppose you’re right. By the way, George, what have you done with the vicar? You said on the phone that he wanted to say morning prayers. Where is he now?’
‘After he’d got over the shock of ‘the obscene act that someone had committed in the house of God’, as he put it, he just sat down and mumbled away until he got to the end of whatever he was doing, then I took him back to the pub. He was quite all right. Said he’d prayed for the soul of the dear departed – dear, my arse – and that he was in God’s hands now, and there was nothing left that anyone could do for him on God’s earth, except find his killer.
‘The old chap had found another wrapped gift on one of the pews, and took it back with him to go with all the others he was given last night. People are really very kind, and he had quite a lot of presents to open. I was glad to get him back there, too, out in this temperature at his age. At least it’s warm in the pub, and the wife’s got all the oil lamps out; and opening his presents will keep him out of your way so that you can do whatever it is that has to be done at a crime scene.
‘If I give you the key, you can get on with your job, and I can get back to my fireside. You know where I am if you need a hand with anything.’
George Covington shook hands with them both as a seasonal greeting, and made his way off down the passageway he had dug from the Fisherman’s Flies, glad that he didn’t have to spend any more time in the church’s chilly interior.
Carmichael fetched the bag that he had dragged behind them every step of the way when they were shovelling a path to the church, and they began to record the scene of murder. As Falconer began to take photographs, and Carmichael began to film the position of the body and the wounds at its wrists and feet, Falconer commented, ‘At least we know this wasn’t a suicide.’
‘How’s that, sir?’ asked Carmichael, focussing on the victim’s head.
‘Because there’s no way he could have nailed up that second hand, you twit.’
Ignoring this minor slur cast on his intellectual capabilities, Carmichael pointed out that, using the zoom lens, he could detect blood which seemed to have come from under the red hat. ‘I think he was whacked first, sir, then put on the cross. And there seems to be a nail through his throat. How the heck didn’t we hear all that hammering last night? It must’ve made one hell of a racket, putting in all those nails, and this cross is old. The wood would’ve been as hard as – well, nails.’
‘I very much suspect that a nail gun was used, so that would’ve been – what? – five nails, five thunks, and the job would’ve been done. But it must’ve taken some muscle to lift both cross and Jeffries up and prop them up in that corner. Someone must’ve really hated him to do that to him.’
‘Well, that leaves us with just about the entire population of Castle Farthing, sir.’
‘So, we weed out those that would’ve been too weak to do all the humping around,’ suggested Falconer, having finished his photography and putting away the camera. ‘Now, w
hat about the infamous blunt instrument, if he was whacked? I’ll just take a look at the candlesticks. It’s just a pity that Covington has collected them altogether and put them near the body. I’ve no idea where any of them came from. Aha!’
The church had become just a little bit darker, as Falconer had extinguished a candle, removed it from its holder, and now stood with the candlestick turned upside-down by a candle that was still glowing, examining its base. ‘I think I’ve found the incriminating article. There are traces of blood, and a few hairs too, stuck to the base of this one. I think we can assume that this is what did the initial damage. I’ll just get this into an evidence bag so I can get these latex gloves off and put my warm ones on. I can’t feel my fingers any more.’
‘Me neither,’ agreed the sergeant, who had taken off his woollen ones to operate the video camera.
‘If you’ll just give me a hand to get this fellow and his cross into the vestry, I think we’d better be getting back to the cottage before we develop either frostbite or hypothermia. We can’t just leave him there for anyone to see, even if it’s fairly unlikely that anyone will come in here with the weather like this, but at least he won’t go off in this temperature.’
As they exited the church they became aware of the sound of a vehicle and Carmichael explained that it was a local farmer with his snowplough. ‘Kerry says he always comes out when there’s a significant fall of snow. He only clears the village roads, but that’s a huge help to the residents. We may not be able to get anywhere else, but at least we can get to each other, the shop and the pub.’
‘Well, that’s damned lucky for us then,’ replied Falconer, ‘otherwise we’d never be able to interview any of the possible suspects until the thaw. Let’s get back to your place and make a list of anyone who had a bone to pick with that poor chap.’
‘You’ll need a very long piece of paper, then,’ commented Carmichael, ‘as I reckoned he’d ticked off just about everyone in the village.’
Christmas Mourning (The Falconer Files Book 8) Page 8
