Ten Classic Crime Stories for the Festive Season

by Cecily Gayford

  The Lion’s Tooth

  Edmund Crispin

  It lay embedded in crudely wrought silver, with a surround of big lustreless semiprecious stones; graven on the reverse of the silver was an outline which Fen recognised as the ichthys, pass-sign of primitive Christianity.

  ‘Naturally, one thinks of Androcles,’ said the reverend mother. ‘Or if not of him specially, then of the many other early Christians who faced the lions in the arena.’ She paused, then added: ‘This, you know, is the convent’s only relic. Apparently it is also our only clue.’

  She stooped to replace it in the sacristy cupboard; and Fen, while he waited, thought of frail old Sister St Jude, whose only intelligible words since they had found her had been ‘The tooth of a lion!,’ and again – urgently, repeatedly – ‘The tooth of a lion!’

  He thought, too, of the eleven-year-old girl who had been kidnapped and of her father, who had obstinately refused to divulge to the police the medium through which the ransom was to be paid, for fear that in trying to catch the kidnapper they would blunder and bring about the death of his only child. He would rather pay, he had said; and from this decision he was in no way to be moved …

  It had been the reverend mother who had insisted on consulting Fen; but following her now, as she led the way back to her office, he doubted if there was much he could do. The available facts were altogether too arid and too few. Thus: Francis Merrill was middle-aged, a widower and a wealthy businessman. Two weeks ago, immediately after Christmas, he had gone off to the Continent, leaving his daughter Mary, at her own special request, to the care of the sisters. During the mornings Mary had helped the sisters with their chores. But in the afternoons, with the reverend mother’s encouragement, she would usually go out and ramble round the countryside.

  On most of these outings Mary Merrill was accompanied, for a short distance, by Sister St Jude. Sister St Jude was ailing; the doctors, however, had decreed that she must get plenty of fresh air, so even through the recent long weeks of frost and ice she had continued to issue forth, well wrapped up, and spend an hour or two each afternoon on a sheltered seat near the summit of the small hill at the convent’s back. It had been Mary Merrill’s habit to see her settled there and then to wander off on her own.

  Until, this last Tuesday, a search-party of the sisters had come upon Sister St Jude sprawled near her accustomed seat with concussion of the brain.

  Mary Merrill had not come home that night. The reverend mother had, of course, immediately notified the police; and Francis Merrill, hastening back from Italy, had found a ransom note awaiting him.

  To all intents and purposes, that was all; the police, it seemed, had so far achieved precisely nothing. If only – Fen reflected – if only one knew more about the girl herself: for instance, where she was likely to have gone, and what she was likely to have done, on these rambles of hers. But Francis Merrill had refused even to meet Fen; and the reverend mother had been unable to produce any information about Mary more specific and instructive than the statement that she had been a friendly, trusting, ordinary sort of child …

  ‘I suppose,’ said Fen, collapsing into a chair, ‘that it’s quite certain Sister St Jude has never said anything comprehensible other than this phrase about the lion’s tooth?’

  ‘Absolutely certain, I am afraid,’ the reverend mother replied. ‘Apart from a few – a few sounds which may conceivably have been French words, she has not yet been able – ’

  ‘French words?’

  ‘Yes. I should have mentioned, perhaps, that Sister St Jude is a Frenchwoman.’

  ‘I see,’ said Fen slowly. ‘I see… Tell me, did she – does she, I mean – speak English at all fluently?’

  ‘Not very fluently, no. She has only been over here a matter of nine months or so. Her vocabulary, for instance, is still rather limited …’ The reverend mother hesitated. ‘Perhaps you are thinking that the phrase about the lion’s tooth may have been, misheard. But she has used it many times, in the presence of many of us – including Sister Bartholomew, who is another Frenchwoman – and we have none of us ever had the least doubt about what the words were.’

  ‘Not misheard,’ said Fen pensively. ‘But misinterpreted, perhaps …’ Looking up, the reverend mother saw that he was on his feet again. ‘Reverend Mother, I have an idea,’ he went on. ‘Or an inkling, rather. At present I don’t at all see how it applies. But nonetheless, I think that if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go now and take a look at the place where Sister St Jude was attacked. There’s a certain object to be looked for there, which the police may well have found, but decided to ignore.’

  ‘What kind of object?’ the reverend mother asked.

  And Fen smiled at her. ‘Yellow,’ he said. ‘Something yellow.’

  No prolonged search was needed; there the thing lay, in full view of everyone, as plain as the nose on a policeman’s face. In a mood of complacency which the reverend mother could hardly have approved, Fen pocketed it, climbed the remaining distance to the top of the little hill and looked around him. The complacency waned somewhat; from this vantage-point he could see buildings galore. Still, with any luck at all …

  The gods were with him that day; within three hours – three hours of peering over hedges, and of surreptitious trespassing in other people’s gardens – he located the particular house he sought. A glance at the local directory, a rapid but rewarding contact with the child population of a neighbouring village and by six o’clock he was ready for action.

  The man who answered the knock on the front door was grey-haired, weedy, nervous-seeming; while not unprepossessing, he yet had something of a hungry look. ‘Mr Jones?’ said Fen, pushing him back into his own hall before he had time to realise what was happening, and without waiting for a reply, added: ‘I’ve come for the child.’

  ‘The child?’ Mr Jones looked blank. ‘There’s no child here. I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong house.’

  ‘Indeed I haven’t,’ said Fen confidently. And even as he spoke, the thin, high scream of a young girl welled up from somewhere on the premises, followed by incoherent, sobbing appeals for help. Fen noted the particular door to which pallid Mr Jones’s eyes immediately turned: an interesting door, in that it lay well away from the direction whence the scream had come …

  ‘Yes, we’ll go through there, I think,’ said Fen pleasantly; and now there was an automatic pistol in his hand. ‘It leads to the cellar, I expect. And since I’m not at all fond of men who try to smash in the skulls of helpless old nuns, you may rely on my shooting you without the slightest hesitation or compunction if you make a single false move.’

  Later, when Mr Jones had been taken away by the police, and Mary Merrill, hysterical but otherwise not much harmed, restored to her father, Fen went round to the back garden, where he found an engaging female urchin wandering about eating a large bar of chocolate cream.

  ‘That was jolly good,’ he told her, handing over the promised ten-shilling note. ‘When you grow up, you ought to go on the stage.’

  She grinned at him. ‘Some scream, mister, eh?’ she said.

  ‘Some scream,’ Fen agreed.

  And: ‘It’s obvious,’ he said to the reverend mother over lunch next day, ‘that Mary Merrill made friends with Jones soon after she came here, and got into the way of visiting him pretty well every afternoon. No harm in that. But then he found out who her father was and began envisaging the possibility of making some easy money.

  ‘What actually happened, I understand, is that Mary, on that last visit, took fright at something odd and constrained in his attitude to her, and succeeded in slipping away while his back was turned. Whereupon he very stupidly followed her (in his car, except for the last bit) and tried to grab her when she was already quite close to home.

  ‘She eluded him again, and ran to Sister St Jude for protection. But by that time Jones had gone too far for retreat to be practicable or safe; so he ran after her, struck Sister St Jude down with his stick and this time
really did succeed in capturing Mary, knocking her out and so getting her back to his house.

  ‘Whether the dandelion part of it belongs to that particular afternoon, or to some previous one, one doesn’t know, but whichever it was, Sister St Jude clearly noticed the flower and equally clearly realised, even in her illness and delirium, that it provided a clue to –’

  ‘Wait, please,’ the reverend mother implored him faintly. ‘Did I hear you say “dandelion”?’

  And Fen nodded. ‘Yes, dandelion. English corruption of the French dent-de-lion – which of course means a lion’s tooth. But Sister St Jude’s vocabulary was limited: she didn’t know the English name for it. Therefore, she translated it literally, forgetting altogether the existence of that confusing, but irrelevant, relic of yours –

  ‘Well, I ask you: a dandelion, in January, after weeks of hard frost! But Mary Merrill had managed to find one; had picked it and then perhaps pushed it into a buttonhole of her frock. As every gardener knows, dandelions are prolific and hardy brutes; but in view of the recent weather, this particular dandelion could really only have come from a weed in a hot-house within an hour’s walk from here. As soon as I saw Jones’s, I was certain it was the right one.’

  The reverend mother looked at him. ‘You were, were you?’ she said.

  ‘Well, no, actually I wasn’t certain at all,’ Fen admitted. ‘But I thought that the luck I’d had up to then would probably hold, and I was tired of tramping about, and anyway I haven’t the slightest objection to terrorising innocent householders so long as it’s in a good cause … may I smoke?’

  Rumpole and the Spirit of Christmas

  John Mortimer

  I realised that Christmas was upon us when I saw a sprig of holly over the list of prisoners hung on the wall of the cells under the Old Bailey.

  I pulled out a new box of small cigars and found its opening obstructed by a tinselled band on which a scarlet-faced Santa was seen hurrying a sleigh full of carcinoma-packed goodies to the Rejoicing World. I lit one as the lethargic screw, with a complexion the colour of faded Bronco, regretfully left his doorstep sandwich and mug of sweet tea to unlock the gate.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Rumpole. Come to visit a customer?’

  ‘Happy Christmas, officer,’ I said as cheerfully as possible. ‘Is Mr Timson at home?’

  ‘Well, I don’t believe he’s slipped down to his little place in the country.’

  Such were the pleasantries that were exchanged between us legal hacks and discontented screws: jokes that no doubt have changed little since the turnkeys locked the door at Newgate to let in a pessimistic advocate, or the cells under the Colosseum were opened to admit the unwelcome news of the Imperial thumbs-down.

  ‘My Mum wants me home for Christmas.’

  ‘Which Christmas?’ It would have been an unreasonable remark and I refrained from it. Instead, I said, ‘All things are possible.’

  As I sat in the interviewing room, an Old Bailey Hack of some considerable experience, looking through my brief and inadvertently using my waistcoat as an ashtray, I hoped I wasn’t on another loser. I had had a run of bad luck during that autumn season, and young Edward Timson was part of that huge South London family whose criminal activities provided such welcome grist to the Rumpole mill. The charge in the seventeen-year-old Eddie’s case was nothing less than wilful murder.

  ‘We’re in with a chance though, Mr Rumpole, ain’t we?’

  Like all his family, young Timson was a confirmed optimist. And yet, of course, the merest outsider in the Grand National, the hundred-to-one shot, is in with a chance, and nothing is more like going round the course at Aintree than living through a murder trial. In this particular case, a fanatical prosecutor named Wrigglesworth, known to me as the Mad Monk, was to represent Beechers and Mr Justice Vosper, a bright but wintry-hearted Judge who always felt it his duty to lead for the prosecution, was to play the part of a particularly menacing fence at the Canal Turn.

  ‘A chance. Well, yes, of course you’ve got a chance, if they can’t establish common purpose, and no one knows which of you bright lads had the weapon.’

  No doubt the time had come for a brief glance at the prosecution case, not an entirely cheering prospect. Eddie, also known as ‘Turpin’ Timson, lived in a kind of decaying barracks, a sort of high-rise Lubianka, known as Keir Hardie Court, somewhere in South London, together with his parents, his various brothers and his thirteen-year-old sister, Noreen. This particular branch of the Timson family lived on the thirteenth floor. Below them, on the twelfth, lived the large clan of the O’Dowds. The war between the Timsons and the O’Dowds began, it seems, with the casting of the Nativity play at the local comprehensive school.

  Christmas comes earlier each year, and the school show was planned about September. When Bridget O’Dowd was chosen to play the lead in the face of strong competition from Noreen Timson, an incident occurred comparable in historical importance to the assassination of an obscure Austrian archduke at Sarajevo. Noreen Timson announced, in the playground, that Bridget O’Dowd was a spotty little tart quite unsuited to play any role of which the most notable characteristic was virginity.

  Hearing this, Bridget O’Dowd kicked Noreen Timson behind the anthracite bunkers. Within a few days war was declared between the Timson and O’Dowd children, and a present of lit fireworks was posted through the O’Dowd front door. On what is known as the ‘night in question’, reinforcements of O’Dowds and Timsons arrived in old bangers from a number of South London addresses and battle was joined on the stone staircase, a bleak terrain of peeling walls scrawled with graffiti, blowing empty Coca-Cola tins and torn newspapers. The weapons seemed to have been articles in general domestic use such as bread knives, carving knives, broom handles and a heavy screwdriver.

  At the end of the day it appeared that the upstairs flat had repelled the invaders, and Kevin O’Dowd lay on the stairs. Having been stabbed with a slender and pointed blade, he was in a condition to become known as the ‘deceased’ in the case of the Queen against Edward Timson. I made an application for bail for my client, which was refused, but a speedy trial was ordered.

  So even as Bridget O’Dowd was giving her Virgin Mary at the comprehensive, the rest of the family was waiting to give evidence against Eddie Timson in that home of British drama, Number 1 Court at the Old Bailey.

  ‘I never had no cutter, Mr Rumpole. Straight up, I never had one,’ the defendant told me in the cells. He was an appealing-looking lad with soft brown eyes, who had already won the heart of the highly susceptible lady who wrote his social inquiry report. (‘Although the charge is a serious one, this is a young man who might respond well to a period of probation.’ I could imagine the steely contempt in Mr Justice Vosper’s eye when he read that.)

  ‘Well, tell me, Edward. Who had?’

  ‘I never seen no cutters on no one, honest I didn’t. We wasn’t none of us tooled up, Mr Rumpole.’

  ‘Come on, Eddie. Someone must have been. They say even young Noreen was brandishing a potato peeler.’

  ‘Not me, honest.’

  ‘What about your sword?’

  There was one part of the prosecution evidence that I found particularly distasteful. It was agreed that on the previous Sunday morning, Eddie ‘Turpin’ Timson had appeared on the stairs of Keir Hardie Court and flourished what appeared to be an antique cavalry sabre at the assembled O’Dowds, who were just popping out to Mass.

  ‘Me sword I bought up the Portobello? I didn’t have that there, honest.’

  ‘The prosecution can’t introduce evidence about the sword. It was an entirely different occasion.’ Mr Bernard, my instructing solicitor, who fancied himself as an infallible lawyer, spoke with a confidence which I couldn’t feel. He, after all, wouldn’t have to stand up on his hind legs and argue the legal toss with Mr Justice Vosper.

  ‘It rather depends on who’s prosecuting us. I mean, if it’s some fairly reasonable fellow …’

  ‘I think,’ Mr Bernard rem
inded me, shattering my faint optimism and ensuring that we were all in for a very rough Christmas indeed, ‘I think it’s Mr Wrigglesworth. Will he try to introduce the sword?’

  I looked at ‘Turpin’ Timson with a kind of pity. ‘If it is the Mad Monk, he undoubtedly will.’

  When I went into Court, Basil Wrigglesworth was standing with his shoulders hunched up round his large, red ears, his gown dropped to his elbows, his bony wrists protruding from the sleeves of his frayed jacket, his wig pushed back and his huge hands joined on his lectern in what seemed to be an attitude of devoted prayer. A lump of cottonwool clung to his chin where he had cut himself shaving. Although well into his sixties, he preserved a look of boyish clumsiness. He appeared, as he always did when about to prosecute on a charge carrying a major punishment, radiantly happy.

  ‘Ah, Rumpole,’ he said, lilting his eyes from the police verbals as though they were his breviary. ‘Are you defending as usual?’

  ‘Yes, Wrigglesworth. And you’re prosecuting as usual?’ It wasn’t much of a riposte, but it was all I could think of at the time.

  ‘Of course, I don’t defend. One doesn’t like to call witnesses who may not be telling the truth.’

  ‘You must have a few unhappy moments then, calling certain members of the Constabulary.’

  ‘I can honestly tell you, Rumpole,’ his curiously innocent blue eyes looked at me with a sort of pain, as though I had questioned the doctrine of the immaculate conception, ‘I have never called a dishonest policeman.’

  ‘Yours must be a singularly simple faith, Wrigglesworth.’

  ‘As for the Detective Inspector in this case,’ Counsel for the prosecution went on, ‘I’ve known Wainwright for years. In fact, this is his last trial before he retires. He could no more invent a verbal against a defendant than fly.’

  Any more on that tack, I thought, and we should soon be debating how many angels could dance on the point of a pin.