The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories

by P. D. James

  ‘A memorable defence, I believe.’

  ‘Magnificent. There’s no doubt Allegra Boxdale owed her life to Gort Lloyd. I know that concluding speech by heart:

  ‘“Gentlemen of the jury, I beseech you in the sacred name of Justice to consider what you are asked to do. It is your responsibility, and yours alone, to decide the fate of this young woman. She stands before you now, young, vibrant, glowing with health, the years stretching before her with their promise and their hopes. It is in your power to cut off all this as you might top a nettle with one swish of your cane. To condemn her to the slow torture of those last waiting weeks; to that last dreadful walk; to heap calumny on her name; to desecrate those few happy weeks of marriage with the man who loved her so greatly; and to cast her into the final darkness of an ignominious grave.”

  ‘Pause for dramatic effect. Then the crescendo in that magnificent voice. “And on what evidence, gentlemen? I ask you.” Another pause. Then the thunder. “On what evidence?”’

  ‘A powerful defence,’ said Dalgliesh. ‘But I wonder how it would go down with a modern judge and jury.’

  ‘Well, it went down very effectively with that 1902 jury. Of course, the abolition of capital punishment has rather cramped the more histrionic style. I’m not sure that the reference to topping nettles was in the best of taste. But the jury got the message. They decided that, on the whole, they preferred not to have the responsibility of sending the accused to the gallows. They were out six hours reaching their verdict and it was greeted with some applause. If any of those worthy citizens had been asked to wager five pounds of their own good money on her innocence, I suspect that it would have been a different matter. Allegra Boxdale had helped him, of course. The Criminal Evidence Act, passed three years earlier, enabled him to put her in the witness box. She wasn’t an actress of a kind for nothing. Somehow, she managed to persuade the jury that she had genuinely loved the old man.’

  ‘Perhaps she had,’ suggested Dalgliesh. ‘I don’t suppose there had been much kindness in her life. And he was kind.’

  ‘No doubt, no doubt. But love!’ Glatt was impatient. ‘My dear Dalgliesh! He was a singularly ugly old man of sixty-nine. She was an attractive girl of twenty-one!’

  Dalgliesh doubted whether love, that iconoclastic passion, was susceptible to this kind of simple arithmetic but he didn’t argue. Glatt went on: ‘The prosecution couldn’t suggest any other romantic attachment. The police got in touch with her previous partner, of course. He was discovered to be a bald, undersized little man, sharp as a weasel, with a buxom wife and five children. He had moved down the coast after the partnership broke up and was now working with a new girl. He said regretfully that she was coming along nicely, thank you gentlemen, but would never be a patch on Allie and that, if Allie got her neck out of the noose and ever wanted a job, she knew where to come. It was obvious, even to the most suspicious policeman, that his interest was professional. As he said: “What was a grain or two of arsenic between friends?”

  ‘The Boxdales had no luck after the trial. Captain Maurice Boxdale was killed in 1916 leaving no children, and the Reverend Edward lost his wife and their twin daughters in the 1918 influenza epidemic. He survived until 1932. The boy, Hubert, may still be alive, but I doubt it. That family always were a sickly lot.

  ‘My greatest achievement, incidentally, was in tracing Marguerite Goddard. I hadn’t realised that she was still alive. She never married Brize-Lacey or, indeed, anyone else. He distinguished himself in the 1914–18 war, came successfully through, and eventually married an eminently suitable young woman, the sister of a brother officer. He inherited the title in 1925 and died in 1953. But Marguerite Goddard may be alive now for all I know. She may even be living in the same modest Bournemouth hotel where I found her. Not that my efforts in tracing her were rewarded. She absolutely refused to see me. That’s the note that she sent out to me, by the way. Just there.’

  It was meticulously pasted into the notebook in its chronological order and carefully annotated. Aubrey Glatt was a natural researcher; Dalgliesh couldn’t help wondering whether this passion for accuracy might not have been more rewarding spent other than in the careful documentation of murder.

  The note was written in an elegant upright hand, the strokes black and very thin but clear and unwavering.

  Miss Goddard presents her compliments to Mr Aubrey Glatt. She did not murder her grandfather and has neither the time nor the inclination to gratify his curiosity by discussing the person who did.

  Aubrey Glatt said: ‘After that extremely disobliging note, I felt there was really no point in going on with the book.’

  Glatt’s passion for Edwardian England evidently extended to a wider field than its murders, and they drove to Colebrook Croft high above the green Hampshire lanes in an elegant 1910 Daimler. Aubrey wore a thin tweed coat and deer-stalker hat and looked, Dalgliesh thought, rather like Sherlock Holmes, with himself as attendant Watson.

  ‘We are only just in time, my dear Dalgliesh,’ he said when they arrived. ‘The engines of destruction are assembled. That ball on a chain looks like the eyeball of God, ready to strike. Let us make our number with the attendant artisans. You will have no wish to trespass, will you?’

  The work of demolition had not yet begun but the inside of the house had been stripped and plundered, the great rooms echoed to their footsteps like gaunt and deserted barracks after the final retreat. They moved from room to room, Glatt mourning the forgotten glories of an age he had been born too late to enjoy; Dalgliesh with his mind on the somewhat more immediate and practical concerns.

  The design of the house was simple and formalised. The first floor, on which were most of the main bedrooms, had a long corridor running the whole length of the facade. The master bedroom was at the southern end with two large windows giving a distant view of Winchester Cathedral tower. A communicating door led to a small dressing room.

  The main corridor had a row of four identical large windows. The brass curtain rods and wooden rings had been removed (they were collector’s items now) but the ornate carved pelmets were still in place. Here must have hung pairs of heavy curtains giving cover to anyone who wished to slip out of view. And Dalgliesh noted with interest that one of the windows was exactly opposite the door of the main bedroom. By the time they had left Colebrook Croft and Glatt had dropped him at Winchester Station, Dalgliesh was beginning to formulate a theory.

  His next move was to trace Marguerite Goddard if she were still alive. It took him nearly a week of weary searching, a frustrating trail along the South Coast from hotel to hotel. Almost everywhere his enquiries were met with defensive hostility. It was the usual story of a very old lady who had become more demanding, arrogant and eccentric as her health and fortune waned; an unwelcome embarrassment to manager and fellow guests alike. The hotels were all modest, a few almost sordid. What, he wondered, had become of the legendary Goddard fortune?

  From the last landlady he learned that Miss Goddard had become ill, really very sick indeed, and had been removed six months previously to the local district general hospital. And it was there that he found her.

  The ward sister was surprisingly young, a petite, dark-haired girl with a tired face and challenging eyes.

  ‘Miss Goddard is very ill. We’ve put her in one of the side wards. Are you a relative? If so, you’re the first one who has bothered to call and you’re lucky to be in time. When she is delirious she seems to expect a Captain Brize-Lacey to call. You’re not he, are you?’

  ‘Captain Brize-Lacey will not be calling. No, I’m not a relative. She doesn’t even know me. But I would like to visit her if she’s well enough and is willing to see me. Could you please give her this note.’

  He couldn’t force himself on a defenceless and dying woman. She still had the right to say no. He was afraid she would refuse him. And if she did, he might never learn the truth. He wrote four words on the back page of his diary, signed them, tore out the page, folded it and handed
it to the sister.

  She was back very shortly.

  ‘She’ll see you. She’s weak, of course, and very old but she’s perfectly lucid now. Only please don’t tire her.’

  ‘I’ll try not to stay too long.’

  The girl laughed:

  ‘Don’t worry. She’ll throw you out soon enough if she gets bored. The chaplain and the Red Cross librarian have a terrible time with her. Third floor on the left. There’s a stool to sit on under the bed. We will ring the bell at the end of visiting time.’

  She bustled off, leaving him to find his own way. The corridor was very quiet. At the far end, he could glimpse through the open door of the main ward the regimented rows of beds, each with its pale blue coverlet, the bright glow of flowers on some of the tables, and the laden visitors making their way in pairs to each bedside. There was a faint buzz of welcome, a hum of conversation. But no one was visiting the side wards. Here, in the silence of the sterile corridor, Dalgliesh could smell death.

  The woman, propped high against the pillows in the third room on the left, no longer looked human. She lay rigidly, her long arms disposed like sticks on the coverlet. This was a skeleton clothed with a thin membrane of flesh beneath whose yellow transparency the tendons and veins were as plainly visible as an anatomist’s model. She was nearly bald and the high-domed skull under its spare down of hair was as brittle and vulnerable as a child’s. Only the eyes still held life, burning in their deep sockets with an animal vitality. But when she spoke her voice was distinctive and unwavering, evoking as her appearance never could the memory of imperious youth.

  She took up his note and read aloud four words:

  ‘“It was the child.” You are right, of course. The four-year-old Hubert Boxdale killed his grandfather. You signed this note Adam Dalgliesh. There was no Dalgliesh connected with the case.’

  ‘I am a detective of the Metropolitan Police. But I’m not here in any official capacity. I have known about this case for a number of years from a dear friend. I have a natural curiosity to learn the truth. And I have formed a theory.’

  ‘And now, like that poseur Aubrey Glatt, you want to write a book?’

  ‘No. I shall tell no one. You have my promise.’

  Her voice was ironic.

  ‘Thank you. I am a dying woman, Mr Dalgliesh. I tell you that, not to invite your sympathy which it would be an impertinence for you to offer and which I neither want nor require, but to explain why it no longer matters to me what you say or do. But I, too, have a natural curiosity. Your note, cleverly, was intended to provoke it. I should like to know how you discovered the truth.’

  Dalgliesh drew the visitor’s stool from under the bed and sat down beside her. She did not look at him. The skeleton hands still holding his note did not move.

  ‘Everyone in Colebrook Croft who could have killed Augustus Boxdale was accounted for, except the one person whom nobody considered, the small boy. He was an intelligent, articulate child. He was almost certainly left to his own devices. His nurse did not accompany the family to Colebrook Croft and the servants who were there over Christmas had extra work and also the care of the delicate twin girls. The boy probably spent much time with his grandfather and the new bride. She, too, was lonely and disregarded. He could have trotted around with her as she went about her various activities. He could have watched her making her arsenical face wash and, when he asked, as a child will, what it was for, could have been told “to make me young and beautiful”. He loved his grandfather but he must have known that the old man was neither young nor beautiful. Suppose he woke up on that Boxing Day night overfed and excited after the Christmas festivities? Suppose he went to Allegra Boxdale’s room in search of comfort and companionship and saw there the basin of gruel and the arsenical mixture together on the washstand? Suppose he decided that here was something he could do for his grandfather?’

  The voice from the bed said quietly:

  ‘And suppose someone stood unnoticed in the doorway and watched him.’

  ‘So you were behind the window curtains on the landing looking through the open door?’

  ‘Of course. He knelt on the chair, two chubby hands clasping the bowl of poison, pouring it with infinite care into his grandfather’s gruel. I watched while he replaced the linen cloth over the basin, got down from the chair, replaced it with careful art against the wall and trotted out into the corridor and back to the nursery. About three seconds later, Allegra came out of the bathroom and I watched while she carried the gruel in to my grandfather. A second later I went into the main bedroom. The bowl of poison had been a little heavy for Hubert’s small hands to manage and I saw that a small pool had been spilt on the polished top of the washstand. I mopped it up with my handkerchief. Then I poured some of the water from the jug into the poison bowl to bring up the level. It only took a couple of seconds and I was ready to join Allegra and my grandfather in the bedroom and sit with him while he ate his gruel.

  ‘I watched him die without pity and without remorse. I think I hated them both equally. The grandfather who had adored, petted and indulged me all through my childhood and deteriorated into this disgusting old lecher, unable to keep his hands off this woman even when I was in the room. He had rejected me and his family, jeopardised my engagement, made our name a laughing stock in the county, and all for a woman that my grandmother wouldn’t have employed as a kitchen maid. I wanted them both dead. And they were both going to die. But it would be by other hands than mine. I could deceive myself that it wasn’t my doing.’

  Dalgliesh asked: ‘When did she find out?’

  ‘She knew that evening. When my grandfather’s agony began she went outside for the jug of water. She wanted a cool cloth for his head. It was then that she noticed that the level of water in the jug had fallen and that a small pool of liquid on the washstand had been mopped up. I should have realised that she would have seen that pool. She had been trained to register every detail. She thought at the time that Mary Huddy had spilt some of the water when she set down the tray and the gruel. But who but I could have mopped it up? And why?’

  ‘And when did she face you with the truth?’

  ‘Not until after the trial. Allegra had magnificent courage. She knew what was at stake. But she also knew what she stood to gain. She gambled with her life for a fortune.’

  And then Dalgliesh understood what had happened to the Goddard inheritance.

  ‘So she made you pay?’

  ‘Of course. Every penny. The Goddard fortune, the Goddard emeralds. She lived in luxury for sixty-seven years on my money. She ate and dressed on my money. When she moved with her lovers from hotel to hotel it was on my money. She paid them with my money. And if she has left anything, which I doubt, it is my money. My grandfather left very little. He had been senile and had let money run through his fingers like sand.’

  ‘And your engagement?’

  ‘It was broken, you could say by mutual consent. A marriage, Mr Dalgliesh, is like any other legal contract. It is most successful when both parties are convinced they have a bargain. Captain Brize-Lacey was sufficiently discouraged by the scandal of a murder in the family. He was a proud and highly conventional man. But that alone might have been accepted with the Goddard fortune and the Goddard emeralds to deodorise the bad smell. But the marriage couldn’t have succeeded if he had discovered that he had married socially beneath him, into a family with a major scandal and no compensating fortune.’

  Dalgliesh said: ‘Once you had begun to pay you had no choice but to go on. I see that. But why did you pay? She could hardly have told her story. It would have meant involving the child.’

  ‘Oh no! That wasn’t her plan at all. She never meant to involve the child. She was a sentimental woman and she was fond of Hubert. No, she intended to accuse me of murder outright. Then, if I decided to tell the truth, how would it help me? After all, I wiped up the spilled liquid, I topped up the bowl. She had nothing to lose remember, neither life nor reputation. They could
n’t try her twice. That’s why she waited until after the trial. It made her secure for ever.

  ‘But what of me? In the circles in which I moved at that time reputation was everything. She needed only to breathe the story in the ears of a few servants and I was finished. The truth can be remarkably tenacious. But it wasn’t only reputation. I paid in the shadow of the gallows.’

  Dalgliesh asked, ‘But could she ever prove it?’

  Suddenly she looked at him and gave an eerie screech of laughter. It tore at her throat until he thought the taut tendons would snap violently.

  ‘Of course she could! You fool! Don’t you understand? She took my handkerchief, the one I used to mop up the arsenic mixture. That was her profession, remember. Some time during that evening, perhaps when we were all crowding around the bed, two soft plump fingers insinuated themselves between the satin of my evening dress and my flesh and extracted that stained and damning piece of linen.’

  She stretched out feebly towards the bedside locker. Dalgliesh saw what she wanted and pulled open the drawer. There on the top was a small square of very fine linen with a border of hand-stitched lace. He took it up. In the corner was her monogram delicately embroidered. And half of the handkerchief was still stiff and stained with brown.