The Christmas Card Crime and Other Stories Read online

  “At least a couple of thousand pounds.”

  “Yes?”

  “Of course I shall be able to pay it back out of profits in a year—two years.”

  Herbert nodded, closed the dictionary and inspected his cigar.

  “I’m afraid I shan’t be able to help you very much,” he said.

  Alfred’s eyes moved uneasily. Well, perhaps two thousand was rather a lot all at once.

  “I might manage it with fifteen hundred—” he leaned forward. “It’s a great opportunity from the investment point of view. At a most conservative estimate, the man who puts up the capital would see twenty or twenty-five per cent return per annum. I’ve worked it out, you see.”

  Herbert was silent.

  “You said yourself that the idea was a good one,” Alfred pointed out. “Frankly, Herbert, I was counting on you to see the—”

  Herbert had taken a small notebook out of a drawer in his desk and Alfred paused uncertainly. What was the fool doing now?

  “In the last eight years, Alfred,” he heard him saying, in a quiet, unemotional tone. “I have lent you six thousand pounds. I say ‘lent,’ because on each occasion that you have appealed to me you have spoken of repayment. I do not for a moment suggest that you have deliberately borrowed from me without intention of paying me back, but neither do I pretend to you that I regard these sums as anything but gifts. Indeed, they appear in this record under the heading of Monies Given to A.C. I have been very glad to help you and I am making no criticism. But, if I am not mistaken, I made a point of telling you when we discussed the matter on the fifteenth of July last that I would be unable to continue these—ah—loans.”

  “Yes, but, Herbert, this is—”

  “Different, I think you wish to say? I am sorry, but I am unable to detect in this any intrinsic variation from your previous applications. I regret it exceedingly, Alfred, but, quite definitely and finally, no! I feel, and have felt for some while, that if you are ever to be successful it must be based on your own, unaided efforts. To continue to give you money—I put it bluntly, I am afraid—can only serve to postpone your chance of doing something worth while.”

  “All right,” Alfred interrupted. “I quite understand. We’ll say no more about it. As to the six thousand I’ve already had, I said I would repay it and I will.”

  His voice was quiet. It surprised and had an effect on his cousin, who seemed a little less sure of himself, almost as though he doubted momentarily the wisdom of his course. But his mouth tightened and Alfred, watching him narrowly, knew all hope had gone.

  He rose and put half an inch of cigar ash carefully in the ash-tray on the edge of the desk.

  “You’re a stubborn old thing, Herbert, but don’t worry your head about me. I’ll manage, I dare say.”

  He went out, and closed the door gently.

  He did not immediately proceed on his way, however, but stood tensely in the corridor fighting the weakness which attacked his limbs. He told himself that he was calm, unperturbed by the catastrophe of that blank refusal. He should have foreseen its suddenness and now remain untroubled by its significance. Laugh! Show that you don’t care a damn!

  But he whispered a little thickly: “Turned down! The swine turned me down!”

  He walked unsteadily along the corridor with his mind confused by a swirl of thoughts. Barbara…the money… Herbert’s stern face, with its eyes full of comprehension hovering in front of him.

  His fingers closed tightly. Herbert had everything, hadn’t he? All the money. The fate of men in his hands. The fate of Alfred Caithness, also. Even of Barbara. And by what right? By what right of God or man? The pale limping devil!

  Then, before he reached the end of the corridor, an idea came which banished the shadows of uncertainty as with a bright light.

  He stopped and became quite still, holding his breath as though he feared some eavesdropper of his mind.

  He would kill Herbert. The money would come to Barbara.

  Kill him, but not in this passion of hatred which possessed him now. Kill him quietly, unseen. Kill him in the night, secretly, so that no one could tell by whose hand he had died. The life of the Honourable Mr Justice Caithness had been threatened by many men who believed that he might have punished their sins less savagely. There had been comments in the Press about it and, a little while ago, after the Glastonbury blackmail case, a police guard had been put to watch over him until the fuss quietened down.

  The money would come to Barbara.

  As the thought took shape and became decision, he realized that only through the death of this man would his own life, so long buried in a morass of inhibition and failure, grow and blossom to fruitfulness.

  Barbara, free at last, could come openly to his arms after a little while.

  Thank Heaven he had not quarrelled with Herbert just now! Some blessed instinct must have warned him. An omen of success.

  He began to think, to plan, and found himself curiously clear-headed and tranquil. The impatience was there and the need to give expression to this dominant desire which had been born in him. But these, far from hampering him, stimulated and enlivened his imagination.

  He lay down on the divan in the library and closed his eyes.

  First and foremost, he must school himself to appear normal when the others appeared. He must keep from his eyes and voice the excitement of his heart. There must be nothing they could remember afterwards and hold against him when the inquiry came.

  Next, it must be a simple crime. The act of a man who is seeking vengeance without much thought for the consequences. An unsubtle, rather brutal murder…

  His glance fell on the long Elizabethan dagger hanging with other antique arms on the wall between the windows. He did not get up and inspect it more closely, but he remembered handling it idly years ago. A weighty, dangerous weapon.

  It would come readily to the hand of anyone who climbed in by one of the windows. These were very low to the ground. He saw the carpet of snow stretching across the tennis lawn to the drive and the London road. The road itself had been cleared and threaded like a black ribbon between the white hills.

  He drew a sudden deep breath, like a swimmer who comes out of the buffeting of heavy waves into smooth water.

  At tea he was quiet. This suited both his mood and his tactics. Barbara would expect him to be on tenterhooks because of his declaration this morning. Herbert, knowing him to be disappointed about the money, would not look to him for any great display of cheerfulness. He noticed that Donaldson was rather silent but that was no more than reasonable in a man who had walked nearly ten miles since lunch.

  Barbara talked of little things, but with an effort. Alfred thought he knew why and was wrong. Only Donaldson knew.

  She, like himself, was seeking the courage to face a grievous parting. They were both dreading and yet welcoming the morrow. Being near each other was heaven, but the agony of the situation was difficult to bear.

  Herbert was the only one of them who seemed to be in an entirely normal frame of mind. He was amiable and discursive. He was glad Alfred had decided to be philosophical. There was no reason why he should not pull himself together and make good.

  Dusk had fallen before five. By half past it was almost dark, with the snow outside a vague blur of lightness.

  At a quarter-to-seven the dressing-gong sounded and Alfred, once again in the library, heard the others go to their rooms. He had several minutes in which to work. With a little hurrying he could do what he had to do and be changed and in the drawing-room before the rest.

  He went swiftly to the window he had chosen and, opening it, stepped carefully out into the snow. The closed curtains would hide him from the eyes of an unlikely invader of the room. He stood for a moment in the darkness and then ran silently in the yielding snow, covering the fifty yards across the lawn and down the drive to the roa
d in less than half-a-minute. He then turned and walked back to the window, taking a slightly indirect route.

  His reasoning was sound. The traces of a murderer who had come from outside would appear clearly in the snow between the road and the house but not on the road, which was clear. Furthermore they would indicate that he had cautiously approached the scene of his intended crime and, having committed it, had fled quickly away.

  In preparing this evidence he was at pains to make sure that the two sets of tracks did not intersect. Were they to do so, it might betray the fact that the running ones had been made before the walking ones. He was taking no chances. That the road was free from snow was a godsend. A car could have stood there, its wheel-marks lost in those of previous and later traffic, while the man was about his job. And, since the footprints passed in and out of the snow at nearly the same spot on the edge of the road, obviously, the detectives would say, a car had been used.

  He regained the window, parted the curtains stealthily and stepped across the sill into the room. He closed the window and wiped what little frozen snow there was from the edges and soles of his boots, using a handkerchief which he dropped into the red heart of the fire as he passed it on his way to the door.

  They were not his boots, but an old pair at least two sizes larger than his own which he had come upon some nights ago, when he was looking for an extra blanket, at the bottom of a cupboard on the landing outside his bedroom.

  He reached his room unseen and, while the boots were drying on the radiator, changed quickly into his dinner jacket. On the way down to the drawing-room he returned them unobserved to their place, confident that they would never be connected with the tracks in the snow and that, even if by some incredible chance they were, there would be no evidence to show that he had ever worn them.

  He was reading in the drawing-room when the others came down. Donaldson was more himself and Herbert mellower than his wont. If Barbara was pale, the two younger men had their own and different explanations for it. Herbert, who seldom if ever betrayed his observation, seemed, however, not to have noticed it. He went to his study after dinner, but reappeared within a few minutes in the drawing-room and suggested Bridge.

  It was a welcome suggestion and enabled those who heard it to get through what threatened for each of them to be a difficult evening.

  The game came to an end after the fifth rubber at about half past ten, with Alfred the only winner, twenty-seven shillings to the good.

  “Luck seems to be in,” he said. A few minutes later he asked Barbara to excuse him and bade them good night.

  Herbert nodded very amiably to him as he went and Alfred interpreted a relief that he had made so little fuss. Selfish hypocrite!

  He closed the door of his bedroom, got quickly into pyjamas and dressing-gown, lay down under the eiderdown and, switching off the light, composed himself to wait as patiently as he might.

  The moment for action was approaching. Herbert, one of those people who seemed to need very little sleep, would follow his invariable custom of reading a book by the library fire for some while after the rest of the household had gone to bed.

  Alfred listened to the sounds in the old house and analysed them as they occurred.

  Once during this period he experienced a moment of uncertainty, which was when he heard Barbara pass his door on her way to her room. She stopped and went back to the landing. He thought he heard Donaldson’s voice in a subdued key.

  He smiled grimly. Was that brilliant young fellow already falling under her spell?

  He heard her return after several minutes and noticed that she walked slowly. He resisted the strong impulse to open his door and speak to her, to see her alone for a moment or two and to hold her closely in his arms. The thought of her embrace made him tremble. Time enough in the swiftly-approaching future. Time enough.

  She went into her room and the door closed. Donaldson’s was too far away in the east wing to be heard, but Alfred detected his heavy tread on the polished oak as he crossed the landing into the passage which led to it.

  What had they said to one another? It was an idle, vaguely jealous question. But he comforted himself with the knowledge that, if Donaldson was beginning to get tiresome, he could soon be dealt with when matters had been straightened out. Barbara was too attractive to be allowed any great degree of freedom. When Herbert was out of it, and she—

  He forced his attention to the necessities of the present and, after lying there for twenty minutes or so, swung his feet off the bed into a pair of felt-soled slippers.

  He made no sound on the stairs and his movements across the darkened lounge towards the library door were no less silent. The thin line of light beneath it reassured him.

  He opened it quietly, but without stealth, and closed it without undue noise.

  Herbert, stretched out in an armchair with his shoes off looked up from his reading and peered out of the restricted radiance of the reading-lamp on the small table by his side, the only light in the big room.

  “It’s I—Alfred. I forgot to look out a book before I went up.”

  He came within the radiance of light, his hands comfortably in his dressing-gown pockets, as casual a figure of a man as could be imagined.

  Herbert eyed him keenly for a moment, seemed about to say something, changed his mind, and remarked:

  “You read An Experiment in Time, didn’t you? Try the third shelf over there, behind the chesterfield. Most of the newer books are there.”

  “Thanks.”

  Herbert returned to his book after a moment and Alfred moved to the shelf suggested. He was aware of an immense and stifling excitement. He glanced at the rows of books, but without seeing them. He strolled along the shelves, with his back to the man in the chair. He came close to the corner and the windows between which the Elizabethan poinard hung.

  He concentrated on a title in front of him. Read it aloud.

  “Life of Machiavelli, by Villari,” he said. “Any good?”

  “A little solid. The Victorian biographical fashion.” Herbert did not look round.

  “H’m.”

  Alfred thought, “Machiavelli, the man of cunning and ingenuity.”

  Machiavelli—Machiavelli—The name ran in and out of his brain like a rat scampering in a bundle of hay. Keep still! Keep quiet!

  He edged silently to the wall between the windows and lifted down the dagger. His mind slowed and became rational. Only his breathing was a little faster than normal as his grip closed round the hilt.

  Murder in theory was now to be murder in fact. For a moment he had to nerve himself for the physical necessity of action. No holding back now!

  The back of Herbert’s head was visible above the chair. He was deeply engrossed. Alfred’s four paces across the strip of carpet which lay between the windows and the fireplace were quite noiseless and Herbert gave no sign of even a subconscious perception of the movement behind him.

  But suddenly he spoke.

  Alfred, with a tremor of anxiety, came to an abrupt stop within three feet of him, the dagger held out of sight. Then he realized, by the pitch of Herbert’s voice, that he thought he was still at the other side of the room. In relief he stepped swiftly backwards to the shelves again.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “I said: ‘Did you get my note?’”

  Alfred brought his wits together with an effort.

  “Note?”

  “I put it on your dressing-table after dinner, before we started Bridge. Never mind. You must have overlooked it.” He glanced round and added: “Read it when you go up again. And before we close the subject finally, let me impress upon you that I mean every word of it.”

  Alfred was glad that he turned back to his book at that moment. He could not believe that his own quivering emotion, a mingling of rage and nervousness which he controlled with every particle o
f will he possessed, did not show in his face.

  “I see,” he said, and felt sure that the thickness of his tone was perceptible. “I’ll remember. Yes. I must have overlooked it. I’ll read it when I go up.”

  Written evidence that there had been trouble about money between them! Lying about on a dressing-table! That letter must be destroyed the moment he got back to his room. Destroyed beyond all tracing. He knew perfectly well what was in it. Typical of Mr Justice Caithness! A categorical restatement in writing of his refusal to give his unsatisfactory cousin another penny! “And let me impress upon you that I mean every word of it!”

  All right! Savour your power! Savour it well while you have it, cousin Herbert! For you won’t have it long!

  Alfred moved again across the space of carpet, his mouth like a scar which is nearly healed, thin and mauve with the tenseness of his muscles. He was no longer conscious of hesitation, of physical reluctance. Savage determination burned in him like a fire.

  Herbert did not speak this time, attentive to his book. However, a fraction of a second before the knife swept sideways over the armchair, he straightened himself a little, as though some sixth sense had begun to stir, to warn him of the peril which was upon him.

  But the small movement availed him nothing. Indeed, it exposed his side and made the blow more certain.

  Alfred used all his strength. Far more, actually, than was necessary to reach the heart, driving the slim blade under the ribs at a slightly upward angle.

  He whipped back his hand and left the weapon there.

  A slight gasp, it could scarcely be called an exclamation, was the only sound with which Death came. The body twisted once and was still. The head lolled down on to the white shirt front.

  Alfred stood motionless behind the chair for perhaps three age-long seconds and then held out his hand in the white rays from the reading-lamp and stared at it. It was quite steady.

  He looked up and saw the Caithness crest carved in the stone. It glowed redly in the firelight.

  Funny. Even Herbert, lame and sedentary all his days, had come to his end by the sword. The aptness of it pleased strangely.