The Christmas Card Crime and Other Stories Page 18

  “Tell her I dropped a vase! Go on, tell her that!”

  When the woman had done so, they went into the living-room and saw the stone with the piece of paper wrapped round it, lying among the shattered fragments of window-pane. Bradley picked it up and smoothed out the paper, and saw, in capital letters, the word, ADULTERESS. He handed it to Lucy Shaw and said:

  “He doesn’t seem to think an awful lot of you, does he?”

  The curtains were stirring in front of the jagged hole in the window. Bradley flung the logs down by the side of the fire and said abruptly:

  “I’ve had enough of this! I’m going. You can sort it out yourself with your husband. It’s no affair of mine.”

  She flung herself at the door, ashen-faced, and stood in front of it, barring his way.

  “You can’t leave me here—alone!”

  “Who can’t?” asked Bradley tonelessly, and watched the curtains billowing into the room as a sudden gust of wind struck them.

  “Where are the police?” gasped Lucy Shaw. “Surely the first thing they do is to send men to watch an escaped convict’s home?”

  Bradley pointed to the telephone.

  “Ring ’em up and tell ’em so. Ask them where they are,” he said. “Go on—ring them up.”

  She ran to the telephone and lifted the receiver, and listened. When a few seconds had gone by, Bradley said:

  “Perhaps the wire is down with the snow. Perhaps he’s cut it—you never know. They do it in books.”

  After a minute, the operator answered. Lucy Shaw held her breath for a few seconds to control her voice, to try to restrain the tremor. Then she said:

  “I want the police! Tell the police to come! This is Mrs Shaw, Lark Cottage, Oak Lane, off the Skandale-Tollbrook road. Tell them it’s—it’s very urgent! My life is in danger! My—there’s an escaped convict—a murderer—trying to get in!”

  She replaced the receiver and stared at Bradley. He glanced at his watch and said:

  “They’ll probably be here in half an hour. Three-quarters, at the most. You’ll be all right till then, I expect.”

  He moved towards the door.

  She did not move, unable to believe that he was really going.

  “It’s no business of mine,” he pointed out for the second time. And when she clung to him and began to whimper, he said:

  “Don’t be daft. He won’t kill you for not perjuring yourself at his trial. He won’t even kill you for carrying on with this podgy-faced, blond brute.” He waved towards the picture on the chimney-piece.

  “Maybe he’ll black your eye. Maybe he won’t even do that, once he’s in the house and you can appeal to him. Men are queer that way.”

  But she clung to the door-handle, gaunt and unlovely, her black hair now in disarray, and when he tried to move her hands she suddenly flung herself against him, temporarily forcing him away from the door, and said:

  “It’s worse than that. He knew Leslie and I were in love, long before his uncle was killed.”

  “So what?” said Bradley, and moved again towards the door.

  “You fool!” gasped Lucy Shaw. “Don’t you understand what I’m trying to tell you? Leslie—Leslie Bond—traveller for Fred’s firm, killed the old man, and stole the money, and planted the evidence against my husband, Fred Shaw—and I knew he had done it!”

  “Did you now?” said Bradley mildly. “What’s that to me?”

  “And I let Fred go on trial for it, and I’d have let him die for it, too—and he knows it, and that’s why he’ll kill me if you go before the police arrive!”

  “Fancy!” said Bradley, staring at her. “And your friend, where is he?”

  “He left the country, saying he would come back when the case had blown over.”

  “And will he?”

  “No!” said Lucy Shaw bitterly.

  “Not voluntarily!”

  As she spoke, her voice rose almost to a scream, and Bradley, watching the hatred flush her sallow face and stretch her mouth into a thin, straight line, knew that the end was at hand.

  “Where is he?” he asked abruptly.

  “In Melbourne, Australia, and I’ll damn well tell the police when they arrive!”

  “You may be charged as an accomplice after the fact.”

  “What the hell do I care!” shouted Lucy Shaw. “I’m not going to be done-in to-night, nor twenty years hence, to save Leslie Bond, and I don’t care who knows it!”

  Bradley said, woodenly: “If that’s the way you feel, and since you wish to make a statement, I don’t mind telling you now that the police are here already.”

  Lucy Shaw looked round. “Where?”

  “Here,” said Bradley, and put his hand in his raincoat pocket and produced his warrant-card. Almost automatically his voice reverted to a routine drone as he continued: “I am Superintendent Bradley, of Scotland Yard. Sergeant Wood, I believe, has been listening outside that broken window. If you wish to make a written statement, I have some foolscap sheets of paper and a pen.

  “I must, however, warn you that you are not obliged to do so, and that anything you say, or any written statement you make from now onwards, may be used in evidence against you. I should perhaps add that your husband was recaptured some three hours ago within a few miles of the prison.”

  “What with you skylarking around, trespassing, making footprints, and breaking windows,” said Superintendent Bradley later to Sergeant Wood, “and me extorting confessions through fear and subterfuge, there’s been enough crime committed at Lark Cottage to-night to fill a sheaf of charge-sheets.

  “Funny, how I always had an uneasy feeling about that case, even though I did collect the evidence which put Frederick Shaw in the dock. Lucky she didn’t attend the trial and know my face.”

  He filled his pipe and added: “The kid’ll be glad to be back with her father for Christmas. I reckon she hated her mother. So did I, if it comes to that,” he said, striking a match.

  “And so did I,” said Sergeant Wood. “I was frozen stiff.”

  ’Twixt the Cup and the Lip

  Julian Symons

  Julian Gustave Symons (1912–1994) was a major figure in the British crime fiction world in the second half of the twentieth century. In addition to being a respected poet, historian, and biographer, he was an incisive critic of the genre, and his account of the evolution of crime fiction, Bloody Murder, which ran to four editions, was characteristically lucid and enjoyable. Symons was Chair of the Crime Writers’ Association, and later President of the Detection Club; in addition, he received the genre’s two principal lifetime achievement awards, winning the CWA Diamond Dagger and becoming a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master.

  As a novelist, Symons received the CWA Gold Dagger for The Colour of Murder (1957), yet for all his many garlands, his fiction is nowadays apt to be regrettably under-valued. This may in part be because he had an antipathy towards series detectives, although a few characters, such as the barrister Magnus Newton and the actor Sheridan Haynes, appear in more than one of his books. His criticism of some classic detective fiction (he dismissed the likes of John Rhode as “Humdrums”) masks the reality that his own mystery fiction was often markedly ingenious; examples include The Players and the Game (1972) and The Plot Against Roger Rider (1973). His early short stories, which featured an inquiry agent called Francis Quarles, often boast neat twists, although in later years, his short fiction focused increasingly on psychological suspense. This story was included in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in January 1965.

  “A beautiful morning, Miss Oliphant. I shall take a short constitutional.”

  “Very well, Mr Payne.”

  Mr Rossiter Payne put on his good thick Melton overcoat, took his bowler hat off its peg, carefully brushed it, and put it on. He looked at himself in a small glass and nodded approvingly at what he saw.


  He was a man in his early fifties, but he might have passed for ten years less, so square were his shoulders, so ruler-straight his back. Two fine wings of grey hair showed under the bowler. He looked like a retired Guards officer, although he had, in fact, no closer relationship with the Army than an uncle who had been cashiered.

  At the door he paused, his eyes twinkling. “Don’t let anybody steal the stock while I’m out, Miss Oliphant.”

  Miss Oliphant, a thin spinster of indeterminate middle age, blushed. She adored Mr Payne.

  He had removed his hat to speak to her. Now he clapped it on his head again, cast an appreciative look at the bow window of his shop, which displayed several sets of standard authors with the discreet legend above—Rossiter Payne, Bookseller. Specialist in First Editions and Manuscripts—and made his way up New Bond Street toward Oxford Street.

  At the top of New Bond Street he stopped, as he did five days a week, at the stall on the corner. The old woman put the carnation into his buttonhole.

  “Fourteen shopping days to Christmas now, Mrs Shankly. We’ve all got to think about it, haven’t we?”

  A ten shilling note changed hands instead of the usual half crown. He left her blessing him confusedly.

  This was perfect December weather—crisply cold, the sun shining. Oxford Street was wearing its holiday decorations—enormous gold and silver coins from which depended ropes of pearls, diamonds, rubies, emeralds. When lighted up in the afternoon they looked pretty, although a little garish for Mr Payne’s refined taste. But still, they had a certain symbolic feeling about them, and he smiled at them.

  Nothing, indeed, could disturb Mr Payne’s good temper this morning—not the jostling crowds on the pavements or the customary traffic jams which seemed, indeed, to please him. He walked along until he came to a large store that said above it, in enormous letters, ORBIN’S. These letters were picked out in coloured lights, and the lights themselves were festooned with Christmas trees and holly wreaths and the figures of the Seven Dwarfs, all of which lighted up.

  Orbin’s department store went right round the corner into the comparatively quiet Jessiter Street. Once again Mr Payne went through a customary ceremony. He crossed the road and went down several steps into an establishment unique of its kind—Danny’s Shoe Parlour. Here, sitting on a kind of throne in this semi-basement, one saw through a small window the lower halves of passers-by. Here Danny, with two assistants almost as old as himself, had been shining shoes for almost thirty years.

  Leather-faced, immensely lined, but still remarkably sharp-eyed, Danny knelt down now in front of Mr Payne, turned up the cuffs of his trousers, and began to put an altogether superior shine on already well-polished shoes.

  “Lovely morning, Mr Payne.”

  “You can’t see much of it from here.”

  “More than you think. You see the pavements, and if they’re not spotted, right off you know it isn’t raining. Then there’s something in the way people walk, you know what I mean, like it’s Christmas in the air.” Mr Payne laughed indulgently. Now Danny was mildly reproachful. “You still haven’t brought me in that pair of black shoes, sir.”

  Mr Payne frowned slightly. A week ago he had been almost knocked down by a bicyclist, and the mudguard of the bicycle had scraped badly one of the shoes he was wearing, cutting the leather at one point. Danny was confident that he could repair the cut so that it wouldn’t show. Mr Payne was not so sure.

  “I’ll bring them along,” he said vaguely.

  “Sooner the better, Mr Payne, sooner the better.”

  Mr Payne did not like being reminded of the bicycle incident. He gave Danny half a crown instead of the ten shillings he had intended, crossed the road again, and walked into the side entrance of Orbin’s, which called itself unequivocally “London’s Greatest Department Store.”

  This end of the store was quiet. He walked up the stairs, past the grocery department on the ground floor, and wine and cigars on the second, to jewellery on the third. There were rarely many people in this department, but today a small crowd had gathered around a man who was making a speech. A placard at the department entrance said: “The Russian Royal Family Jewels. On display for two weeks by kind permission of the Grand Duke and Grand Duchess of Moldo-Lithuania.”

  These were not the Russian Crown Jewels, seized by the Bolsheviks during the Revolution, but an inferior collection brought out of Russia by the Grand Duke and Grand Duchess, who had long since become plain Mr and Mrs Skandorski, who lived in New Jersey, and were now on a visit to England.

  Mr Payne was not interested in Mr and Mrs Skandorski, nor in Sir Henry Orbin who was stumbling through a short speech. He was interested only in the jewels. When the speech was over he mingled with the crowd round the showcase that stood almost in the middle of the room.

  The royal jewels lay on beds of velvet—a tiara that looked too heavy to be worn, diamond necklaces and bracelets, a cluster of diamonds and emeralds, and a dozen other pieces, each with an elegant calligraphic description of its origin and history. Mr Payne did not see the jewels as a romantic relic of the past, nor did he permit himself to think of them as things of beauty. He saw them as his personal Christmas present.

  He walked out of the department, looking neither to left nor right, and certainly paying no attention to the spotty young clerk who rushed forward to open the door for him. He walked back to his bookshop, sniffing that sharp December air, made another little joke to Miss Oliphant, and told her she could go out to lunch. During her lunch hour he sold an American a set of a Victorian magazine called The Jewel Box.

  It seemed a good augury.

  In the past ten years Mr Payne had engineered successfully—with the help of other, and inferior, intellects—six jewel robberies. He had remained undetected, he believed, partly because of his skill in planning, partly because he ran a perfectly legitimate book business, and partly because he broke the law only when he needed money. He had little interest in women, and his habits were generally ascetic, but he did have one vice.

  Mr Payne developed a system at roulette, an improvement on the almost infallible Frank-Konig system, and every year he went to Monte Carlo and played his system. Almost every year it failed—or rather, it revealed certain imperfections which he then tried to remedy.

  It was to support his foolproof system that Mr Payne had turned from bookselling to crime. He believed himself to be, in a quiet way, a mastermind in the modern criminal world.

  Those associated with him were far from that, as he immediately would have acknowledged. He met them two evenings after he had looked at the royal jewels, in his pleasant little flat above the shop, which could be approached from a side entrance opening into an alley.

  There was Stacey, who looked what he was, a thick-nosed thug; there was a thin young man in a tight suit whose name was Jack Line, and who was always called Straight or Straight Line; and there was Lester Jones, the spotty clerk in the Jewellery Department.

  Stacey and Straight Line sat drinking whisky, Mr Payne sipped some excellent sherry, and Lester Jones drank nothing at all, while Mr Payne in his pedantic, almost schoolmasterly manner, told them how the robbery was to be accomplished.

  “You all know what the job is, but let me tell you how much it is worth. In its present form the collection is worth whatever sum you’d care to mention—a quarter of a million pounds perhaps. There is no real market value. But alas, it will have to be broken up. My friend thinks the value will be in the neighbourhood of fifty thousand pounds. Not less, and not much more.”

  “Your friend?” the jewellery clerk said timidly.

  “The fence. Lambie, isn’t it?” It was Stacey who spoke. Mr Payne nodded. “Okay, how do we split?”

  “I will come to that later. Now, here are the difficulties. First of all, there are two store detectives on each floor. We must see to it that those on the third floor are not i
n the Jewellery Department. Next, there is a man named Davidson, an American, whose job it is to keep an eye on the jewels. He has been brought over here by a protection agency, and it is likely that he will carry a gun. Third, the jewels are in a showcase, and any attempt to open this showcase other than with the proper key will set off an alarm. The key is kept in the Manager’s Office, inside the Jewellery Department.”

  Stacey got up, shambled over to the whiskey decanter, and poured himself another drink. “Where do you get all this from?”

  Mr Payne permitted himself a small smile. “Lester works in the department. Lester is a friend of mine.”

  Stacey looked at Lester with contempt. He did not like amateurs.

  “Let me continue, and tell you how the obstacles can be overcome. First, the two store detectives. Supposing that a small fire bomb were planted in the Fur Department, at the other end of the third floor from Jewellery—that would certainly occupy one detective for a few minutes. Supposing that in the department that deals with ladies’ hats, which is next to Furs, a woman shopper complained that she had been robbed—this would certainly involve the other store detective. Could you arrange this, Stace? These—assistants, shall I call them?—would be paid a straight fee. They would have to carry out their diversions at a precise time, which I have fixed as ten thirty in the morning.”

  “Okay,” said Stacey. “Consider it arranged.”

  “Next, Davidson. He is an American, as I said, and Lester tells me that a happy event is expected in his family any day now. He has left Mrs Davidson behind in America, of course. Now, supposing that a call came through, apparently from an American hospital, for Mr Davidson. Supposing that the telephone in the Jewellery Department was out of order because the cord had been cut. Davidson would be called out of the department for the few minutes, no more, that we should need.”

  “Who cuts the cord?” Stacey asked.

  “That will be part of Lester’s job.”