The Christmas Card Crime and Other Stories Page 6

  He took the white handkerchief from the dead man’s breast pocket and, bending down, rubbed the hilt of the dagger clean of possible finger-prints. He arranged the handkerchief neatly in its pocket again and went to the window.

  Kneeling on the wide sill, the curtains closed behind him, he took out a penknife, opened the window with his hand wrapped in the skirt of his dressing-gown and scratched the paint-work of the frame where the latch came, so that it would look as though it had been forced from outside. The garden was dark and silent, and the cold of the snow smote his cheeks.

  He shut the penknife and slipped it back into his dressing-gown pocket.

  As he did so he heard a short sound in the room. An inexplicable clatter. It brought his breath to a standstill, cutting him to the depths of his being with sharp, agonizing fear.

  He slid off the sill on to the floor behind the curtains, his one instinct being to keep low and out of sight. He landed on hands and knees, rather heavily, crouching and in great fright lest he was bulging the bottom of the curtains.

  He stayed there, utterly still, with every sense alert to define the slightest noise or movement in the room he could not see.

  As the persistent quietness, unbroken after that one sound, reassured him somewhat, he crawled backwards a foot or so, and put his eye to the join of the curtains.

  The library was peaceful, and held nothing living. The dead man’s legs and his dangling right arm broke the silhouette of the armchair before the fire. They had not moved.

  He stole across the room and saw that the book Herbert had been reading had dropped from his knees to the floor and, striking the shaft of a steel poker as it fell, had disturbed it on the stone hearth.

  He brushed his lips with a nervous hand and had the presence of mind to leave the light switched on. A man who fled in haste would not wait to turn it off.

  He went unhurriedly out of the library.

  All had gone according to plan. No one had heard him, no one had seen him.

  As he passed through the lounge he was conscious of a smarting sensation in the top of his thumb and sucked it mechanically. He felt a piece of broken skin with his tongue and wondered vaguely how he had done it.

  But he was thinking of the letter on the dressing table and the necessity for obliterating it. Burn it? Yes, in the wash-basin. Swill the ashes down the waste pipe. That would do it.

  He reached his room and found the letter, lying under his evening-dress collar. Showed how intent he must have been when he was undressing, not to have noticed it.

  He tore it open and read it. His hand shook.

  Dear Alfred,

  Here it is, but positively I will not be able to do this again. I believe that you honestly want to succeed in this new project and I detect in you a different attitude. I think it is a genuine one.

  Good luck,

  Herbert.

  A slip of pink paper, a blue stamp in the corner…a cheque for two thousand pounds.

  He stared at it like a man in a trance. The unexpectedness of the thing found him without the capacity for adjustment. His mind flickered helplessly like a candle in a wind and it was several moments before it gathered strength and direction.

  Herbert had relented. Affection, generosity—heaven knew what—had moved him to alter his decision.

  Herbert…whom he had killed.

  He covered his eyes and swayed a little on his feet. What had he done?

  He caught at his uncertain thoughts and strove to order them.

  Then, with sudden uprising, resentment came to his aid.

  The magnanimous prig! He had given the money, yes! But with a cramped spirit, reflecting that cramped soul!

  He was glad he had killed him! Glad! He exulted in it.

  And he had not killed him uselessly.

  Had he been allowed to live there would still have remained the problem of Barbara. His death had set her free—free. Nothing stood between them now.

  It had had to be. Fate had ordained that he should not see the letter until afterwards.

  He would not dream of destroying it. Together with the cheque it removed beforehand any motive the authorities could find should they, by some impossible effort of imagination, suspect him.

  He was safer than ever.

  He regarded himself carefully in the mirror, and saw nothing in his eyes to suggest knowledge of what he had done, of what had happened downstairs.

  He glanced at his wrist-watch. It congratulated him that he had been out of his bedroom exactly nine-and-a-half minutes.

  He took off his dressing-gown and slid between the cold sheets.

  But he did not sleep.

  His deportment the next morning, during the hour of horror which followed the discovery of the murder by a housemaid, was precisely what it should have been. His pallor and shakiness were no more than to be expected. It was he who rang up the police station and, as a relative of the dead man, took upon his shoulders the burden of the affair in those respects which would have caused pain to Barbara.

  He welcomed the Superintendent and the Detective-Inspector, and was exceedingly helpful to those individuals in their preliminary investigation. The tracks in the snow, the open window and the fact that Mr Justice Caithness had not infrequently received threatening letters of one kind or another, seemed to indicate the character and motive of the crime as clearly as any overworked policeman could desire.

  “We’ll get the fellow all right,” said the Detective-Inspector and set about taking measurements and subjecting the library, the window and the snow to an inch by inch examination. The Superintendent departed to make inquiries in the neighbourhood for evidence of suspicious strangers.

  Jim Donaldson seemed to be in a queer state, a profound silence. Only Barbara, in those moments when she could drag her mind from the numbness of shock, realized what he was feeling. Life had played him a trick. He had gained his heart’s desire in the eleventh hour but he had paid for it dearly.

  He saw her alone for a moment during that terrible morning, and said:

  “I shall get over it, my dear, but I have an awful sensation, deep in me, that I have cheated somewhere, somehow.”

  She shook her head.

  “He would not think so.”

  He took courage at that and saw the sun shining on the snow-burdened trees. Presently it would disappear, magically.

  * * *

  Alfred, grim but professedly interested in the Detective-Inspector’s procedure, watched the man at work. He was satisfied that all was going well but he was not blind to the sudden abstraction which came upon the police officer shortly before mid-day.

  He saw him find a finger-print, a single one, on the white paint of the window-sill and also (neither of them paid much attention to it at the moment) a toy soldier on the carpet just below it.

  “One of young Robert’s,” Alfred explained. “He was playing with them here yesterday. He must have—”

  He stopped.

  The Detective-Inspector, who was puzzled by the fact that the print, which was so particularly clear except for an unevenness in the middle and looked like that of a left thumb should be alone in its glory, noticed the sudden pause.

  He did not realize that his companion was struggling with a rising, an overwhelming panic, because he had seen that the tiny sword of the Lifeguardsman was bent and that something had dulled the brightness of its point.

  “The sword—” he muttered and, with his forefinger, felt the small place on the pad of his left thumb where the skin was broken. “Oh my God! By the sword!”

  The Detective-Inspector regarded him curiously and said nothing.

  He was not unaccustomed to the sight of a guilty man’s face.

  It was in that moment that he neglected the trend of his inquiry for a less obvious one. And after a little things began to fit in…
a very curious affair. And then the widow’s story.

  Counsel for the Defence did his best. He asked, was it sensible to suggest that a man should murder the person who had given him so many reasons for gratitude? Two thousand reasons, for example, that very evening?

  But the jury thought it might be. Apart from all that, however, they were much impressed by the evidence of the finger-print expert and the doctor, who together were unshakably convincing on the subject of the prisoner’s left thumb. The blood-chemist proved very successfully that the print on the window-sill had not been there more than ten hours when the Inspector found it. The time it had been made corresponded with the time of the murder.

  The prisoner displayed no great effort in denying the charge the Crown had brought against him. He listened to the proceedings without emotion, his eyes now and again fixing themselves in an unwavering stare on the smallest of the exhibits ranged on the table in the well of the court. A toy Lifeguard with a broken sword.

  It seemed to fascinate him.

  He was hanged in May.

  The Christmas Card Crime

  Donald Stuart

  Donald Stuart was one of the pen names adopted by John Robert Stuart Pringle (1897–1980), a prolific writer whose work, especially under his principal pseudonym Gerald Verner, bore the influence of that great entertainer Edgar Wallace. Like Wallace, he had a flair for publicity, as an interview he gave to the Surrey Comet describing his rise from rags to riches makes clear. The journalist breathlessly recorded how “he once sat up all night and guarded the dead body of a man lest he should rise and frighten his timid wife—the wife was Mr Verner’s landlady, and for his services he was absolved from the cost of board and living which he could not pay. He has ‘bumped’ ice at Billingsgate, designed posters and magazine covers, been a pavement artist, a journalist, produced cabarets for £200 a week, acted, associated with thieves and cut-throats, and done a hundred and one other exciting things… Now, at the age of forty, he is one of the most successful crime writers in the country… He has a huge public, one and a half million copies of his books having been sold, and he also has the distinction of having constituted what is probably a record output—twenty-three novels in five years, as well as nearly one hundred short stories, serials, and two film scenarios.” Nor was that all: “A man of amazing memory and powers of concentration, he can write several books at once without losing the thread of any of them…and spends the little spare time he has motor boating on the Thames.”

  It is the customary fate of most such mass producers for their work to fall into neglect once they cease to market and publish their wares so energetically, and Stuart is, alas, no exception. However, the reason for the success he achieved was that he knew how to engage his readers, and this story is a good example of his talent to entertain. It first appeared in Detective Weekly No. 96, in December 1934.

  With a long hiss of escaping steam that sounded like light relief the Western Express came to a halt beside the platform at Bodmin Station. From a first class compartment a tall, thin man alighted, and turned to assist a middle-aged lady, whose ample proportions were enveloped in a voluminous coat of some mysterious black, furry material.

  “I hope there’s a waiting room,” she remarked, shivering violently as a blast of icy wind came whistling along the platform. “This weather is bad for them what’s got rheumatics.”

  “I’ve no doubt there’s a waiting room,” said Trevor Lowe, the well-known dramatist, smiling at the woman’s distortion of the King’s English, “but we haven’t very long to wait, anyhow. Our own train goes in twenty minutes.”

  He turned as his secretary Arnold White and Detective Inspector Shadgold joined them. “Will you see about the luggage?”

  Arnold White nodded.

  “We’ll meet you at the train,” added the dramatist. And as his secretary hurried away down the platform towards the guard’s van: “Come along, Shadgold!”

  The Scotland Yard man, his red face glowing, set his bowler hat more firmly on his bullet head, thrust his hands into the pockets of his overcoat, and fell into step at Lowe’s side as they headed towards the bridge that crossed the line to the other platform.

  The three of them were on their way to spend Christmas with a friend of Lowe’s who lived at St Merryan, a little Cornish village nestling in the moors. The invitation was a long-standing one, and, if the truth must be told, the dramatist had forgotten all about it until his friend had written three days previously reminding him of his promise.

  It had been Lowe’s intention to spend Christmas at home, and he had invited Shadgold to join him. Reluctant to disappoint the burly inspector at the last moment, he had wired his friend, who was an old school chum, asking if he might bring the Scotland Yard man with him. The reply had been characteristic:

  “Bring the entire police force, only come. I shall expect you on the 9.5, 23rd.”

  The journey from Paddington had been a long and tedious one, but the worst of it was over, and another couple of hours would see them at their destination.

  They crossed the footbridge, found a waiting room, in which they installed the ample lady before a microscopic fire, as she waited for a different train, and went off to stretch their legs until the local train which would take them to St Merryan pulled in.

  It was snowing heavily, and the platform beyond the shelter was covered with a thick layer of white which was gradually growing deeper.

  “By Jove—it’s cold!” grunted Shadgold, his ruddy face a deeper red and his breath steaming. “It’s a treat to get a breath of fresh air, though, after the stuffiness of that carriage.”

  Lowe agreed. It was a tonic to breathe that ice-cold wind that had come across the snow-swept moor. They walked as far as the end of the shelter, and then turned to retrace their steps; and as they did so Lowe saw that the platform was no longer deserted. Several men were pacing up and down, and at the other end stood the solitary figure of a girl. They had obviously transferred from the Western Express, and were waiting to catch the 7.20 local.

  Lowe was rather surprised that there should be so many passengers for this train, for it only ran to Tregoney, which was one station beyond St Merryan, and itself little more than a village. Almost mechanically he counted them. There were six men; the girl made the seventh passenger.

  Arnold White, accompanied by a porter with a loaded truck, joined them as they reached the foot of the steps leading up to the bridge, and Lowe dismissed the other people who were waiting for the train from his mind. Had he known what lay in store, and how important those seven passengers were to become, he would have taken more interest in them. But he had no knowledge then of the strange business in which he was to be involved, and the terrible experience which awaited him and his fellow travellers in the snow-flecked darkness of the night.

  The train backed in to time. It was not a very long one, and there was only one first-class carriage. Lowe was hoping that they would have the compartment to themselves when the girl who had been waiting on the platform, and whom he had originally seen get into one of the other coaches, almost fell into the carriage.

  She was breathing quickly, and as Lowe took her suitcase and put it on the rack he saw that she was trembling violently. Something had apparently frightened her, and he wondered what it was. With a murmured word of thanks she sat down in the corner seat which Arnold White gave up to her, and almost immediately became absorbed in a newspaper.

  She was a slim girl, with a face that might have been lovely but for its extreme pallor. Lowe, who was watching her covertly, noticed that her stockings were of artificial silk. In the left one was a ladder that had been neatly darned, and her shoes were slightly down-at-heel. The gloves she wore were cheap, and two of the fingers had been carefully mended. Her coat was shabby, the fur at the neck worn, and the little black hat which was tilted on one side of the shapely head was obviously of the cheapest.

&n
bsp; She looked up from the paper she was reading, and, catching Lowe’s eye, looked down again quickly, but not before he had seen the startled expression which flashed for a moment in her grey eyes—an expression that held more than a percentage of fear.

  With the preliminary blast of its whistle, the train began to move. It jolted forward, stopped, as though loath to leave the shelter of the station and face the coldness of the night, thought better of it, and with a resigned grunting started in earnest on its cross-country journey.

  The girl did not look up again, but kept her eyes fixed on her paper, though Lowe was convinced that she was not reading. He began to feel curious about the girl, and amused himself by wondering who she was and where she was going. She had come from London, for he remembered having seen her on the platform at Paddington, and he concluded that most probably she was going home to her parents for Christmas. But why, and of what, was she afraid? He mused on this as the train thundered on, stopping every now and again at some small station to unload and take in parcels and mail. Most of these were only halts, and the last had been left some miles behind when the train, which had been gathering speed, suddenly slowed and, with a grinding of brakes, shuddered to a standstill.

  “What are we stopping again for?” grunted Shadgold.

  Trevor Lowe rubbed the misty glass of the carriage window with his coat-sleeve and peered out into the darkness.

  “There’s no sign of a station,” he remarked. “There’s no sign of anything that I can see except snow.”

  At that moment a flicker of light caught his eyes and he saw someone with a lantern hurry past the carriage. Presently there was a shout and a muffled sound of voices outside on the line. Lowering the window Lowe thrust out his head. The snow was falling thicker than ever, and he could see very little at first, but looking along the train he was able to make out in the lights from the carriage windows a group of men standing by the engine. Somebody shouted, and then Lowe saw the guard hurrying towards him carrying a lantern.