A Very Murderous Christmas

by Cecily Gayford

  The athletic harlequin swung him about like a sack or twisted or tossed him like an Indian club; all the time to the most maddeningly ludicrous tunes from the piano. When the harlequin heaved the comic constable heavily off the floor the clown played ‘I arise from dreams of thee’. When he shuffled him across his back, ‘With my bundle on my shoulder’, and when the harlequin finally let fall the policeman with a most convincing thud, the lunatic at the instrument struck into a jingling measure with some words which are still believed to have been, ‘I sent a letter to my love and on the way I dropped it’.

  At about this limit of mental anarchy Father Brown’s view was obscured altogether; for the City magnate in front of him rose to his full height and thrust his hands savagely into all his pockets. Then he sat down nervously, still fumbling, and then stood up again. For an instant it seemed seriously likely that he would stride across the footlights; then he turned a glare at the clown playing the piano; and then he burst in silence out of the room.

  The priest had only watched for a few more minutes the absurd but not inelegant dance of the amateur harlequin over his splendidly unconscious foe. With real though rude art, the harlequin danced slowly backwards out of the door into the garden, which was full of moonlight and stillness. The vamped dress of silver paper and paste, which had been too glaring in the footlights, looked more and more magical and silvery as it danced away under a brilliant moon. The audience was closing in with a cataract of applause, when Brown felt his arm abruptly touched, and he was asked in a whisper to come into the colonel’s study.

  He followed his summoner with increasing doubt, which was not dispelled by a solemn comicality in the scene of the study. There sat Colonel Adams, still unaffectedly dressed as a pantaloon, with the knobbed whalebone nodding above his brow, but with his poor old eyes sad enough to have sobered a Saturnalia. Sir Leopold Fischer was leaning against the mantelpiece and heaving with all the importance of panic.

  ‘This is a very painful matter, Father Brown,’ said Adams. ‘The truth is, those diamonds we all saw this afternoon seem to have vanished from my friend’s tail-coat pocket. And as you—’

  ‘As I,’ supplemented Father Brown, with a broad grin, ‘was sitting just behind him—’

  ‘Nothing of the sort shall be suggested,’ said Colonel Adams, with a firm look at Fischer, which rather implied that some such thing had been suggested. ‘I only ask you to give me the assistance that any gentleman might give.’

  ‘Which is turning out his pockets,’ said Father Brown, and proceeded to do so, displaying seven and sixpence, a return ticket, a small silver crucifix, a small breviary and a stick of chocolate.

  The colonel looked at him long, and then said, ‘Do you know, I should like to see the inside of your head more than the inside of your pockets. My daughter is one of your people, I know; well, she has lately—’ and he stopped.

  ‘She has lately,’ cried out old Fischer, ‘opened her father’s house to a cut-throat Socialist, who says openly he would steal anything from a richer man. This is the end of it. Here is the richer man – and none the richer.’

  ‘If you want the inside of my head you can have it,’ said Brown rather wearily. ‘What it’s worth you can say afterwards. But the first thing I find in that disused pocket is this: that men who mean to steal diamonds don’t talk Socialism. They are more likely,’ he added demurely, ‘to denounce it.’

  Both the others shifted sharply and the priest went on:

  ‘You see, we know these people, more or less. That Socialist would no more steal a diamond than a pyramid. We ought to look at once to the one man we don’t know. The fellow acting the policeman – Florian. Where is he exactly at this minute, I wonder.’

  The pantaloon sprang erect and strode out of the room. An interlude ensued, during which the millionaire stared at the priest, and the priest at his breviary; then the pantaloon returned and said, with staccato gravity, ‘The policeman is still lying on the stage. The curtain has gone up and down six times; he is still lying there.’

  Father Brown dropped his book and stood staring with a look of blank mental ruin. Very slowly a light began to creep in his grey eyes, and then he made the scarcely obvious answer.

  ‘Please forgive me, colonel, but when did your wife die?’

  ‘Wife!’ replied the staring soldier, ‘she died this year two months. Her brother James arrived just a week too late to see her.’

  The little priest bounded like a rabbit shot. ‘Come on!’ he cried in quite unusual excitement. ‘Come on! We’ve got to go and look at that policeman!’

  They rushed on to the now curtained stage, breaking rudely past the columbine and clown (who seemed whispering quite contentedly), and Father Brown bent over the prostrate comic policeman.

  ‘Chloroform,’ he said as he rose; ‘I only guessed it just now.’

  There was a startled stillness, and then the colonel said slowly, ‘Please say seriously what all this means.’

  Father Brown suddenly shouted with laughter, then stopped, and only struggled with it for instants during the rest of his speech. ‘Gentlemen,’ he gasped, ‘there’s not much time to talk. I must run after the criminal. But this great French actor who played the policeman – this clever corpse the harlequin waltzed with and dandled and threw about – he was—’ His voice again failed him, and he turned his back to run.

  ‘He was?’ called Fischer inquiringly.

  ‘A real policeman,’ said Father Brown, and ran away into the dark.

  There were hollows and bowers at the extreme end of that leafy garden, in which the laurels and other immortal shrubs showed against sapphire sky and silver moon, even in that midwinter, warm colours as of the south. The green gaiety of the waving laurels, the rich purple indigo of the night, the moon like a monstrous crystal, make an almost irresponsible romantic picture; and among the top branches of the garden trees a strange figure is climbing, who looks not so much romantic as impossible. He sparkles from head to heel, as if clad in ten million moons; the real moon catches him at every movement and sets a new inch of him on fire. But he swings, flashing and successful, from the short tree in this garden to the tall, rambling tree in the other, and only stops there because a shade has slid under the smaller tree and has unmistakably called up to him.

  ‘Well, Flambeau,’ says the voice, ‘you really look like a Flying Star; but that always means a Falling Star at last.’

  The silver, sparkling figure above seems to lean forward in the laurels and, confident of escape, listens to the little figure below.

  ‘You never did anything better, Flambeau. It was clever to come from Canada (with a Paris ticket, I suppose) just a week after Mrs Adams died, when no one was in a mood to ask questions. It was cleverer to have marked down the Flying Stars and the very day of Fischer’s coming. But there’s no cleverness, but mere genius, in what followed. Stealing the stones, I suppose, was nothing to you. You could have done it by sleight of hand in a hundred other ways besides that pretence of putting a paper donkey’s tail to Fischer’s coat. But in the rest you eclipsed yourself.’

  The silvery figure among the green leaves seems to linger as if hypnotised, though his escape is easy behind him; he is staring at the man below.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ says the man below, ‘I know all about it. I know you not only forced the pantomime, but put it to a double use. You were going to steal the stones quietly; news came by an accomplice that you were already suspected, and a capable police officer was coming to rout you up that very night. A common thief would have been thankful for the warning and fled; but you are a poet. You already had the clever notion of hiding the jewels in a blaze of false stage jewellery. Now, you saw that if the dress were a harlequin’s the appearance of a policeman would be quite in keeping. The worthy officer started from Putney police station to find you, and walked into the queerest trap ever set in this world. When the front door opened he walked straight on to the stage of a Christmas pantomime, where he could be kicked, clubb
ed, stunned and drugged by the dancing harlequin, amid roars of laughter from all the most respectable people in Putney. Oh, you will never do anything better. And now, by the way, you might give me back those diamonds.’

  The green branch on which the glittering figure swung, rustled as if in astonishment; but the voice went on:

  ‘I want you to give them back, Flambeau, and I want you to give up this life. There is still youth and honour and humour in you; don’t fancy they will last in that trade. Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil. That road goes down and down. The kind man drinks and turns cruel; the frank man kills and lies about it. Many a man I’ve known started like you to be an honest outlaw, a merry robber of the rich, and ended stamped into slime. Maurice Blum started out as an anarchist of principle, a father of the poor; he ended a greasy spy and tale-bearer that both sides used and despised. Harry Burke started his free money movement sincerely enough; now he’s sponging on a half-starved sister for endless brandies and sodas. Lord Amber went into wild society in a sort of chivalry; now he’s paying blackmail to the lowest vultures in London. Captain Barillon was the great gentleman-apache before your time; he died in a madhouse, screaming with fear of the “narks” and receivers that had betrayed him and hunted him down. I know the woods look very free behind you, Flambeau; I know that in a flash you could melt into them like a monkey. But some day you will be an old grey monkey, Flambeau. You will sit up in your free forest cold at heart and close to death, and the tree-tops will be very bare.’

  Everything continued still, as if the small man below held the other in the tree in some long invisible leash; and he went on:

  ‘Your downward steps have begun. You used to boast of doing nothing mean, but you are doing something mean tonight. You are leaving suspicion on an honest boy with a good deal against him already; you are separating him from the woman he loves and who loves him. But you will do meaner things than that before you die.’

  Three flashing diamonds fell from the tree to the turf. The small man stooped to pick them up, and when he looked up again the green cage of the tree was emptied of its silver bird.

  The restoration of the gems (accidentally picked up by Father Brown, of all people) ended the evening in uproarious triumph; and Sir Leopold, in his height of good humour, even told the priest that though he himself had broader views, he could respect those whose creed required them to be cloistered and ignorant of this world.

  A Problem In White

  Nicholas Blake

  ‘Seasonable weather for the time of year,’ remarked the Expansive Man in a voice succulent as the breast of a roast goose.

  The Deep Chap, sitting next to him in the railway compartment, glanced out at the snow swarming and swirling past the window-pane. He replied:

  ‘You really like it? Oh well, it’s an ill blizzard that blows nobody no good. Depends what you mean by seasonable, though. Statistics for the last fifty years would show—’

  ‘Name of Joad, sir?’ asked the Expansive Man, treating the compartment to a wholesale wink.

  ‘No, Stansfield, Henry Stansfield.’ The Deep Chap, a ruddy-faced man who sat with hands firmly planted on the knees of his brown tweed suit, might have been a prosperous farmer but for the long, steady meditative scrutiny which he now bent upon each of his fellow travellers in turn.

  What he saw was not particularly rewarding. On the opposite seat, from left to right, were a Forward Piece, who had taken the Expansive Man’s wink wholly to herself and contrived to wriggle her tight skirt farther up from her knee; a desiccated, sandy, lawyerish little man who fumed and fussed like an angry kettle, consulting every five minutes his gold watch, then shaking out his Times with the crackle of a legal parchment, and a Flash Card, dressed up to the nines of spivdom, with the bold yet uneasy stare of the young delinquent.

  ‘Mine’s Percy Dukes,’ said the Expansive Man. ‘P.D. to my friends, General Dealer. At your service. Well, we’ll be across the border in an hour and a half, and then hey for the bluebells of bonny Scotland!’

  ‘Bluebells in January? You’re hopeful,’ remarked the Forward Piece.

  ‘Are you Scots, master?’ asked the Comfortable Body sitting on Stansfield’s left.

  ‘English outside’ – Percy Dukes patted the front of his grey suit, slid a flask from its hip pocket, and took a swig – ‘and Scotch within.’ His loud laugh, or the blizzard, shook the railway carriage. The Forward Piece giggled. The Flash Card covertly sneered.

  ‘You’ll need that if we run into a drift and get stuck for the night,’ said Henry Stansfield.

  ‘Name of Jonah, sir?’ The compartment reverberated again.

  ‘I do not apprehend such an eventuality,’ said the Fusspot. ‘The station-master at Lancaster assured me that the train would get through. We are scandalously late already, though.’ Once again the gold watch was consulted.

  ‘It’s a curious thing,’ remarked the Deep Chap meditatively, ‘the way we imagine we can make Time amble withal or gallop withal, just by keeping an eye on the hands of a watch. You travel frequently by this train, Mr—?’

  ‘Kilmington. Arthur J. Kilmington. No, I’ve only used it once before.’ The Fusspot spoke in a dry Edinburgh accent.

  ‘Ah yes, that would have been on the 17th of last month. I remember seeing you on it.’

  ‘No, sir, you are mistaken. It was the 20th.’ Mr Kilmington’s thin mouth snapped tight again, like a rubber band round a sheaf of legal documents.

  ‘The 20th? Indeed? That was the day of the train robbery. A big haul they got, it seems. Off this very train. It was carrying some of the extra Christmas mail. Bags just disappeared, somewhere between Lancaster and Carlisle.’

  ‘Och, deary me,’ sighed the Comfortable Body. ‘I don’t know what we’re coming to, really, nowadays.’

  ‘We’re coming to the scene of the crime, ma’am,’ said the expansive Mr Dukes. The train, almost dead-beat, was panting up the last pitch towards Shap Summit.

  ‘I didn’t see anything in the papers about where the robbery took place,’ Henry Stansfield murmured. Dukes fastened a somewhat bleary eye upon him.

  ‘You read all the newspapers?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The atmosphere in the compartment had grown suddenly tense. Only the Flash Card, idly examining his fingernails, seemed unaffected by it.

  ‘Which paper did you see it in?’ pursued Stansfield.

  ‘I didn’t.’ Dukes tapped Stansfield on the knee. ‘But I can use my loaf. Stands to reason. You want to tip a mail-bag out of a train – get me? Train must be moving slowly, or the bag’ll burst when it hits the ground. Only one place between Lancaster and Carlisle where you’d know the train would be crawling. Shap Bank. And it goes slowest on the last bit of the bank, just about where we are now. Follow?’

  Henry Stansfield nodded.

  ‘OK. But you’d be barmy to tip it off just anywhere on this God-forsaken moorland,’ went on Mr Dukes. ‘Now, if you’d travelled this line as much as I have, you’d have noticed it goes over a bridge about a mile short of the summit. Under the bridge runs a road: a nice, lonely road, see? The only road hereabouts that touches the railway. You tip out the bag there. Your chums collect it, run down the embankment, dump it in the car they’ve got waiting by the bridge, and Bob’s your uncle!’

  ‘You oughta been a detective, mister,’ exclaimed the Forward Piece languishingly.

  Mr Dukes inserted his thumbs in his armpits, looking gratified. ‘Maybe I am,’ he said with a wheezy laugh. ‘And maybe I’m just little old P.D., who knows how to use his loaf.’

  ‘Och, well now, the things people will do!’ said the Comfortable Body. ‘There’s a terrible lot of dishonesty today.’

  The Flash Card glanced up contemptuously from his fingernails. Mr Kilmington was heard to mutter that the system of surveillance on railways was disgraceful, and the Guard of the train should have been severely censured.

  ‘The Guard can�
��t be everywhere,’ said Stansfield. ‘Presumably he has to patrol the train from time to time, and—’

  ‘Let him do so, then, and not lock himself up in his van and go to sleep,’ interrupted Mr Kilmington, somewhat unreasonably.

  ‘Are you speaking from personal experience, sir?’ asked Stansfield.

  The Flash Card lifted up his voice and said, in a Charing-Cross-Road American accent, ‘Hey, fellas! If the gang was gonna tip out the mail-bags by the bridge, like this guy says – what I mean is, how could they rely on the Guard being out of his van just at that point?’ He hitched up the trousers of his loud check suit.

  ‘You’ve got something there,’ said Percy Dukes. ‘What I reckon is, there must have been two accomplices on the train – one to get the Guard out of his van on some pretext, and the other to chuck off the bags.’ He turned to Mr Kilmington. ‘You were saying something about the Guard locking himself up in his van. Now if I was of a suspicious turn of mind, if I was little old Sherlock H. in person’ – he bestowed another prodigious wink upon Kilmington’s fellow travellers – ‘I’d begin to wonder about you, sir. You were travelling on this train when the robbery took place. You went to the Guard’s van. You say you found him asleep. You didn’t by any chance call the Guard out, so as to—?’

  ‘Your suggestion is outrageous! I advise you to be very careful, sir, very careful indeed,’ enunciated Mr Kilmington, his precise voice crackling with indignation, ‘or you may find you have said something actionable. I would have you know that, when I—’

  But what he would have them know was to remain un-divulged. The train, which for some little time had been running cautiously down from Shap Summit, suddenly began to chatter and shudder, like a fever patient in high delirium, as the vacuum brakes were applied; then, with the dull impact of a fist driving into a feather pillow, the engine buried itself in a drift which had gathered just beyond the bend of a deep cutting. The time was five minutes past seven.