The Christmas Card Crime and Other Stories Page 16

  “Sir Charles had but the one surviving child, Annabell,” went on the inspector. “She was married to John Bland. He was a financier—clever chap, always able to foretell the markets—so it was said. A lovely house that was, and the young couple—John and Annabell Bland—welcomed us very prettily. Of course, they made a great fuss of Sir Charles, and they accepted me as one of his friends and treated me accordingly. There were six of us altogether—John and Annabell Bland, Sir Charles, a young R.A.F. officer, a pretty lass named Avril Walsh, and yours truly. It was decided that Bland should sit out the first rubber and he made himself very civil to me, while the other four settled down at the bridge table. I sat by the fire, and the bridge table was in the middle of the room. Bland was an attentive son-in-law, and he and his young missis made quite a to-do over seeing Sir Charles was comfortable. He was a big heavy chap, and they gave him a very fine chair—a Jacobean piece it was—strong and heavy enough to take any man’s weight. They got settled at last and Sir Charles was in great fettle—he’d bid a slam and was dead keen to make it. John Bland and I chatted quietly so as not to interrupt the game. I said I thought the snow had stopped falling and Bland said: ‘I think you’re wrong. It’s heavier than ever,’ and he went to the french window and pulled the curtain back to peer out. The room faced east and the window was pretty well snowed up—just like this one is now—and as Bland peered out he gave a sudden yell: ‘Good God! There’s a man out there on the verandah! What the hell! Look out, everybody; he’s got a gun…’ I jumped up, but the shot came hard on Bland’s words. The glass tinkled down as the bullet came through and Leighton dropped dead over the table, shot through the head.”

  “A pretty kettle of fish for you, Inspector,” grunted Dr Walton, “with you there on duty to protect Leighton—but did you get the assailant?”

  “Aye,” said Lang. “I got him—eventually. There was a moment of wild confusion after the shot. Bland tried to get the french window open and to rush outside to grapple with the gunman, but I wouldn’t have that—I wasn’t risking any amateur interference in this job. I’d got young Sergeant Dixon posted outside and I knew he was a good lad. I tackled Bland and pulled him away from the window, though he was all het up with rage—real mad at me. I told ’em I was a C.I.D. officer and I ordered them all to stay where they were. They were all raging at me: The shot came through the window and Bland had seen the gunman jump for cover in the shrubbery: why the hell had I stopped Bland going after him?”

  “Well, I reckon I’d have felt the same in similar circumstances,” put in Harland, but the old inspector shook his head.

  “I may be a bit old and slow, lad, but I wasn’t going to have the pack of them tramping outside there in the snow and mucking everything up. Young Dixon reported in a brace of shakes. He’d been on duty at the angle of the house and his attention had been distracted just before the gunshot, but he’d swung round pretty fast when he heard the report. Bland just swore at Dixon. ‘Fast, damn you, you weren’t fast enough. I tell you I saw the chap jump for the shrubbery. You police blokes make me tired. If the inspector here hadn’t interfered I’d have got the devil.’ Dixon had found the gun though—an old-type army pistol, not an automatic. It had been dropped in the snow on the path at the edge of the verandah, and there were some big footprints out there in the snow, where someone had stood, and a shuffle of prints leading to the shrubbery. By this time a local constable turned up, and I left him on duty with the party. I wasn’t letting one of them move until I’d had time to think.”

  “I can believe the bridge party didn’t think very highly of you at that moment,” put in Dr Walton, as the old inspector paused in his narrative.

  “Maybe not, maybe not,” agreed Lang, “but a little thinking’s worth a deal of rushing about, sometimes. And I was puzzled. I went outside to have a look. The footprints in the snow were plain enough—a man had stood on the verandah and had jumped for the shrubbery, though I could see the thaw had set in and the prints were losing shape. Then I found a rather odd item—a short length of spiral curtain wire, the expanding sort. It was hanging on a branch in the shrubbery, opposite the french window. Might have been irrelevant—or might not. I then studied the window and curtain fitments. When I tackled Bland we’d half torn the blind away and the cord had come adrift, but I saw that the telephone wire entered the house through a hole bored in the window framing.” Lang paused and then added: “That was about the lot, but I’ll just repeat the essential points. Sir Charles was sitting at the bridge table in the centre of the room when he was shot, in line with the window. The shot came through the glass. There were footprints outside the window and on the verandah. The gun had been dropped just clear of the verandah, and I’d found a length of expanding curtain wire, hanging on a branch across the path. An hour or so earlier it had been freezing hard, but now the thaw had set in, and I reckoned I’d got to think this thing out before the thaw altered the conditions. Any of you chaps like to have a smack at sorting it out?”

  Harland spoke first. “Obviously Bland, the financier, planned a quick way of getting Leighton’s fortune, Bland’s wife being Leighton’s only child. Bland bribed a gunman to shoot Leighton when the curtain was drawn back. And the gunman got into cover in the shrubbery so fast that Dixon didn’t see him jump.”

  “That won’t do,” said Dr Walton. “You haven’t listened to the evidence. Lang said the window was snowed over—as that window is, over there. In addition, the window would have been misted over inside as the room was very warm. How could the gunman see through that window clearly enough to aim? You go outside here and try it. The thing’s impossible.”

  Old Lang chuckled. “Ay, you’re right, Doc. In addition to that, how did Bland see the chap on the verandah when the window was snowed up and blurred like that?”

  “But you said there were footprints in the driven snow on the verandah,” persisted Harland.

  “I can explain that one,” said Dr Walton. “It had been freezing hard. Those footsteps could have been made much earlier in the evening, just as the snow was giving over—evidence all prepared. And a gun could have been dropped there, too. No, maybe that won’t do. It was an old-fashioned pistol—could you identify it as the gun that was used to shoot Leighton?” he asked Lang.

  “I was pretty sure of it, and later we proved it,” said Lang. “It was that gun, none other. Well, Doc, I thought I’d have a quick reconstruction of everything before the thaw altered conditions. I made the party take the positions they were in before the shot was fired, and I had Dixon on the verandah and told him to aim at Leighton’s chair when the police constable drew the curtains apart. It was as I thought. The window was still too opaque with mist and snow for Dixon to aim, and the constable said it was impossible to see anything on the verandah. So there we were, but the shot had come through the window and Leighton was killed by it.”

  “Then it was a booby-trap murder,” said Harland. “I remember now. You said Bland had fussed around settling Leighton in a heavy chair. Bland must have got the gun fixed outside on the window frame somehow, trained on to the chair at the right height and angle for Leighton’s head, and Bland chose the split second to fire the gun when Leighton was sitting erect. He could have fired the gun by a fine line—salmon line say—running through the hole bored for the telephone wire, and cleared the line away during the schemozzle afterwards. How’s that?”

  “You haven’t explained the essential point,” objected Dr Walton. “The gun was found lying in the snow at the edge of the verandah—it was not ‘fixed outside’, as you put it.”

  Harland looked rueful: “Yes—rather kippers it,” he said, and old Lang laughed.

  “You’ve forgotten my bit of curtain wire, laddy. It’s very strong, that wire, and when fully extended it’s got a powerful pull—grips like a vice. I worked it out you could lash the gun to the upright of the verandah with the expanding wire and take the last turn of the wire across the m
outh of the gun barrel. When the gun was fired—by a line, as the lad suggested—the bullet cut the wire and the gun fell free. And the spiral wire sprang back hard as the tension was suddenly released. Which explained why I found the gun on the path and the wire in the shrubbery.”

  “Cripes, that was a cunning one!” exclaimed Harland, and Lang went on:

  “When I did the reconstruction with the bit of wire, Bland’s nerve went. He just gave up arguing. He was properly sold, because he’d thought I was just an old dodderer, some friend of Leighton—never occurred to him I was a C.I.D. man.”

  Lang paused to relight his pipe. “D’you know what it was made me certain it was phoney?” he asked. “Not the snowy window, not even the wire. It was Dixon. I knew Dixon was a good lad and on his toes all the time, and I couldn’t believe that when Dixon heard the shot he was so slow in turning round that he neither saw nor heard the man jump from the verandah, across the path and into the shrubbery, when the light from the window was shining out across the path. You see, I believe in the lads I’ve trained. If Dixon didn’t see a man on the verandah, it was because there wasn’t a man to see. So I looked for some hankey-pankey, and, by gum, I found it. Just a bit of wire.”

  Dr Walton chuckled. “Good for you, Inspector. Wire-pulling, eh? They say these financial jugglers are always pulling bits of wire, but their puppets don’t always work and the market goes against ’em.”

  “A bit of wire-pulling,” said Harland. “Not a bad title for the yarn, eh?”

  Pattern of Revenge

  John Bude

  John Bude was the pen name adopted by Ernest Carpenter Elmore (1900–1957), who worked as a school teacher and theatrical producer prior to establishing himself as a full-time author. After writing, under his own name, novels of the fantastic rejoicing in titles such as The Steel Grubs (1928), he turned to crime fiction in 1935, with The Cornish Coast Murder. He swiftly followed this regional mystery with three others set in equally attractive locations: the Lake District, the Sussex Downs, and Cheltenham. Having found a literary niche, he became an increasingly accomplished practitioner of the traditional detective story; after the Second World War, he located several of his novels in continental Europe, a lively example being Death on the Riviera (1952).

  Bude played a modest but by no means insignificant part in the history of the genre in Britain, being among the handful of writers who joined with John Creasey to found the Crime Writers’ Association at a meeting at the National Liberal Club on Guy Fawkes Night, 1953. The CWA now boasts over eight hundred members based not only in the UK but across the globe, and its Dagger Awards are renowned, but much is owed to the pioneering efforts of men like Creasey and Bude. At the time of his sudden death, he had published thirty crime novels, many of them featuring his series detective, Inspector Meredith. Bude seldom attempted short stories; this rare exception first appeared in The London Mystery Magazine, No. 21 in 1954.

  Thord Jensen was the finest man on skis in Levendal. Englishmen of the pre-war era, holidaying in our Norwegian mountains, may remember Thord—for after the tragedy he set up as a skiing instructor and did exceeding well for himself. So well, in fact, that when he died in 1945 as the result of an accident, Thord was in a position to leave over three thousand pounds to his hated rival, Olaf Kinck. That, of course, was by way of compensation for what he’d done to Olaf—for when the poor fellow was released from an Oslo jail, three months after Thord’s confession, it was not only his heart that was broken but his faith in his fellow-men.

  But I anticipate.

  Karen Garborg was the cause of the tragedy. She was tall, blonde, blue-eyed, with a cold luminous beauty like that of our Northern Lights. She dazzled most of the young men in Levendal, but favoured only two—Thord Jensen and Olaf Kinck.

  For two years she kept them dancing attendance on her—the fair-haired, athletic, good-looking Thord; the saturnine, intelligent, lion-hearted Olaf. I, for one, never questioned which of the two she’d finally accept. For all his fire and wit, as I watched Olaf floundering and dipping through the snow, I knew he hadn’t a chance. A girl like Karen Garborg would never marry a man with a wooden leg.

  Karen lived alone in an isolated timber cottage on the outskirts of the village. Sometimes it was Thord who came striding through the spruce woods after a visit to the girl… shoulders back, head up, singing like a lark. At others it was Olaf who came jerking out of the forest, his dark eyes glittering with exaltation and a small, secret smile on his lips. If the two men met in the street, they passed without recognition. I sometimes think their hatred of each other was fiercer than their love for Karen Garborg.

  There was a heavy fall of snow on the night Karen was murdered…

  In the morning Knut Larsen, the postman, found her slumped in the open doorway of the cottage, stabbed through the heart. As the only doctor in Levendal, I was called in by the police to make a medical examination. Rigor mortis and temperature tests showed that the girl had been dead for at least twelve hours. There was only one set of tracks in the fresh-fallen snow that the police couldn’t account for—single footprints alternating with deep pock-marks, characteristic of the imprint left by a wooden leg.

  The footprint matched up with the sole of the left boot that Olaf Kinck was wearing when the police came to question him. The knife they found—half-buried in the snow beneath the churchyard wall—was unquestionably his. There were fingerprints on its smooth bone handle. Olaf’s fingerprints and only his.

  Six weeks later, still protesting his innocence, Olaf was convicted of the murder, and, as in our country there’s no death penalty, he was sentenced to life imprisonment.

  He’d served about three years of that sentence when Thord Jensen met with his skiing accident. Thord was carried back to the house a dying man. I did what I could to ease his agony and, aware that I could do nothing more, turned to steal from his room. As I gained the door I heard his voice, faint but urgent, calling me back to his bedside. I sat down.

  “Doctor,” he whispered. “Stay with me a moment. There’s something I want to tell you.”

  “Well. Thord?” I said gently.

  “It’s to do with Olaf Kinck and…and the woman who’d promised to marry him. I mean, of course, poor Karen Garborg.”

  “Karen!” I cried. “But you told the police the day after her death that it was you she’d accepted, Thord. They were seeking a motive for the crime. Are you claiming that we were wrong…that it wasn’t jealousy that drove Olaf to murder her?”

  “Olaf didn’t murder her,” said Thord in a low voice. “He’s serving a sentence for a crime he didn’t commit. I killed Karen Garborg!”

  “You?”

  “Yes, it was I who visited her that night and thrust the knife into her heart.”

  “But…but it’s impossible!” I contested. “All the evidence pointed to the fact that Olaf was the guilty man. It was his knife. His fingerprints on the handle. His footprints in the snow. Above all, there were the tell-tale pock-marks left by his wooden leg. And since Olaf was the only one-legged man in Levendal—”

  Thord broke in huskily:

  “Olaf Kinck is innocent. You must see to it that they set him free. I haven’t long to live…so I beg of you, Doctor, listen carefully to what I have to say…

  “For these last three years my conscience has been darkened by the thought of Olaf’s suffering. Before I die I must set right the terrible wrong I did him. It was he that Karen really loved. The morning before she died, Olaf went out to her cottage and came away with her promise of marriage. That evening when I dropped in at the inn, everybody knew that Karen, after two years of indecision, had finally chosen Olaf Kinck…

  “I was stunned by the news…barely conscious of what I was saying or doing. Olaf was there, celebrating with his friends. He was already drunk, slumped back in his chair, incapable of speech…yet his glances seemed to mock me with silent and trium
phant laughter. Then something seemed to crack in my brain…

  “One thought was drawn through my head like a thread of fire. If I wasn’t to marry Karen, then no man should—least of all Olaf Kinck. I waited, saying nothing, until he left the inn. Then I slipped quietly away and followed him. As I’d anticipated, he didn’t get very far down the street before he collapsed in the black shadow of the churchyard wall. I went up to him and shook him. But he just sprawled there, unmoving, in a drunken sleep. The moon was bright on the fresh-fallen snow. It would be easy, I realized, to take the path through the forest to Karen’s house. Earlier that evening I’d noticed the hunting-knife at Olaf’s belt. I drew it from its sheath with my gloved hand and slipped it into my pocket. Then I knelt down and unlaced his one and only boot.

  “It was all so simple and inevitable. I moved faultlessly through the pattern of my revenge. In a little over half an hour Karen Garborg was dead and the boot was back on Olaf’s left foot. I thrust the bloodstained knife into the snow a few feet from where he lay unnoticed in the shadows, taking care that the hilt should easily be seen. Then, without meeting a soul, I returned home and waited for the law to take its course.