‘Well, you’re going to see Santa now, aren’t you?’ May reminded him.
‘Yes, but it’s not the same when you feel like you’re a hundred years old. Plus, there’s a death involved this time, which sort of takes the sparkle off one’s Yuletide glow.’
‘Fair point,’ May conceded as Bryant tamped Old Holborn into his Lorenzo Spitfire and lit it.
They passed a Salvation Army band playing carols. ‘“Silent Night”,’ Bryant noted. ‘I wish it bloody was. Look at these crowds. It’ll take us an age to reach Selfridges. We should have got off at Bond Street.’
‘Can you stop moaning?’ asked May. ‘I thought that as we were coming here we could pop into John Lewis and get my sister a kettle.’
‘Dear God, is that what she wants for Christmas?’ Bryant peeped over his tattered green scarf, shocked. ‘There’s not much seasonal spirit in that.’
‘It’s better than before. She used to email me Argos catalogue numbers,’ said May. ‘When I first opened her note I thought she’d written it in code.’
A passing bus delivered them to the immense department store founded by Harry Selfridge, the shopkeeper who coined the phrase ‘The customer is always right’. The snow was falling in plump white flakes, only to be transmuted into liquid coal underfoot. Bryant stamped and shook in the doorway like a wet dog. With his umbrella and stick he looked like a cross between an alpine climber and a troll.
By the escalators, a store guide stood with a faraway look in his eye, as if he was imagining himself to be anywhere but where he was. ‘I say, you there.’ Bryant tapped an epaulette with his stick. ‘Where’s Father Christmas?’
‘Under-twelves only,’ said the guide.
‘We’re here about Sebastian Carroll-Williams,’ said May, holding up his PCU card.
The guide apologized and sent them down to the basement, where ‘O Come, All Ye Faithful’ was playing on a loop along with ‘I Saw Three Ships’ and ‘Ding Dong Merrily on High’. The Christmas department was a riot of fake trees, plastic snow, glitter, sledges, wassail cups, cards, robotic Santas, dancing reindeer, singing penguins, North Poles, Christmas logs, candles, cake-holders, cushions, jumpers and chinaware printed with pictures of puddings, holly, mistletoe and fairies. ‘It’s been this jolly since October,’ said the gloomy sales girl, directing them. In her right hand she held some china goblins on a toboggan. ‘It makes you dead morbid after a while.’
Beyond this accretion of Yuletidiana, a large area had been turned into something called ‘The Santa’s Wonderland Sleigh-ride Experience’. ‘Why do they have to call everything an “experience”?’ asked Bryant irritably. ‘It’s tautological and clumsy. It’s like Strictly Come Dancing. The BBC obviously couldn’t decide whether to name it after the old show Come Dancing or the film Strictly Ballroom so they ended up with gibberish. Two verbs and an adverb? How is that supposed to work? Does nobody study grammar any more?’
‘It’s hard to learn that stuff,’ said May. ‘English is the only language I can think of where two negatives can mean a positive, and yet conversely there are no two positives that can mean a negative.’
‘Yeah, right.’ Bryant turned around. ‘Look out, floor manager.’
Mr Carraway was a man so neatly arranged as to appear polished and stencilled, from the moisturized glow of his forehead and his carefully threaded eyebrows to his shining thumbnails and toecaps. ‘Thank you so much for coming,’ he said, pumping each of their hands in turn. ‘We didn’t know if this was a matter for the proper police or for someone like you, and then one of our ladies said you dealt with the sort of things they couldn’t be bothered with.’
‘Oh yes, we were just sitting around knitting and doing jigsaws, waiting for your call,’ said Bryant. ‘You’d better tell us what happened before I’m tempted to bite you.’
The floor manager eyed him uncertainly. ‘Er, yes, well, perhaps we should go into Santa’s Wonderland,’ he said, leading the way.
‘I thought it was Alice who had a Wonderland,’ said Bryant as they walked.
‘No, this is Santa’s Wonderland,’ said Mr Carraway.
‘Yes, but, you know – Alice in Wonderland.’
‘We narrowed it down to Wonderland or Christmasville. It could have gone either way.’
A tunnel of black light illuminated Bryant’s dentures, turning him into a Mexican Day of the Dead doll. They emerged from the other end to find an immense cyclorama of the North Pole as imagined by a very gay man who had seen too many Disney films, complete with geographically misplaced polar bears and a variety of non-reality-based fauna including elves, goblins and little people in pointed hats and dirndls, some of whom were real and presumably taking time out from their busy performance schedules as gold-mining dwarves or Oompa-Loompas.
‘Mickey,’ called Mr Carraway, ‘where’s Father Christmas?’
‘He’s gone to the toilet,’ said Mickey, one of the dwarves. He looked up at the two detectives, studying each of them in turn. ‘Are you here about the lad who died?’
‘Yes,’ said May. ‘Were you here when it happened?’
‘Yeah, we’re here for the full season,’ said Mickey. ‘We were supposed to be in panto at the Fairfields Hall, Croydon, but we got laid off after Snow White put in a sexual harassment claim against us. She said we touched her bum but we were just trying to get her into the glass coffin. She’s a hefty lass.’
Just then Father Christmas came back on to the Arctic set doing up his flies. ‘Ah, the rozzers,’ he said, rolling his Rs in a plummily theatrical brogue. ‘I suppose you want to know how the magic happens. Of course, I’m just filling in doing this. Normally I’m treading the boards. I had to come out of a major role, but who can resist helping out at Christmas?’
‘What were you doing?’ asked May.
‘The Duke of Ephesus, Comedy of Errors, “Five summers have I spent in farthest Greece, Roaming clean through the bounds of Asia …”’
‘Whereabouts?’
‘Crawley Rep. It’s a nice short play and I was in a toga so I could be in the pub by ten.’
‘Can you talk us through what happened?’ asked May.
Father Christmas pulled down his white beard and scratched his chin with the end of a biro. ‘Sorry, these things get damnably hot. It was the day before yesterday, just before six o’clock, wasn’t it, Mickey?’
The dwarf nodded.
‘This lad, Sebastian Carroll-Williams, about eleven, small for his age. I saw him come in with his mum. She was fussing around him something chronic. Normally that’s my cue to take over and have a chat with them about what they want for Christmas. I always tell the same joke.’
‘What sort of a joke?’ asked Bryant.
‘What did the elf get while he was working in Santa’s toyshop? Tinsellitis. We don’t sit them on our knees any more, not since Jimmy Savile. We’re all very carefully vetted. And we’re on camera.’
‘Last year we had a Father Christmas with creeping hands,’ said Mr Carraway. ‘Dreadful.’
‘Then we get them ready for their selfies,’ said Santa.
‘What selfies?’ Bryant asked.
‘They get a choice of outfit: polar bear, Santa’s helper or toy soldier,’ said Mickey. ‘Princess gown for a girl. The girls only get one choice. Me and the other dwarves put the costumes over their heads. It just takes a few moments. Velcro. We’re on turnover.’
‘Then what?’
‘The photographer takes his shot,’ said Santa, ‘I give them their gift and they’re slung back on the sleigh. It’s like processing hamburgers.’
‘What did the boy pick for his outfit?’ asked May.
‘He didn’t have a preference. He didn’t want to be here at all. I think his mother pushed him into it, so he finally went for a polar bear. A real sense of entitlement about him. Dead stroppy. Mickey had to help him get into his outfit because he was angry and got all tangled up in it.’
‘They’re hyperactive at that age,’ said Mickey. ‘An
d they fart a lot. Nerves.’
‘What did he ask Father Christmas to bring him?’
‘A machine gun.’ Santa rolled his eyes. ‘Kids. So he got a gift from the sack and was sent on his way. He took the sleigh-ride back to the tunnel exit.’
‘What was the gift?’ asked May.
‘I’ve no idea,’ Santa admitted. ‘We just work from the colour-coded boxes. The girls get tiaras and cuddly toys and games, the boys get more gadgety stuff. It all comes from China. Mind you, some of the gifts are pretty good. I never got things like that when I was a kid. We encourage them to open their presents after they’ve left Wonderland, just so they don’t get bits of cardboard all over the place.’
‘Do you know anything about what happened after the boy left?’ Bryant asked.
Santa shrugged. ‘You’ll have to ask Mr Carraway about that.’
‘I saw him just as he came out of the tunnel, back into the main store,’ said the floor manager. ‘He was holding the torn-open box in his hand and appeared to be in a state of distress. His mother was nowhere in sight. You get an instinct about trouble.’ He touched a plucked eyebrow as if securing it in place. ‘I started walking towards him and suddenly he threw the box across the china hall. Luckily, nothing broke. I went after him but by this time he had reached the escalator. I got there as quickly as I could, but it was hard to see him, being so small. He ran between the make-up counters and out into the road.’
‘Where he was hit by a number 53 bus,’ said May, checking his notes.
‘He went straight under the wheels,’ said Mr Carraway. ‘He never regained consciousness. The doctor reckoned he didn’t feel anything.’
‘We interviewed Carroll-Williams’s mother,’ said May. ‘She went running after him but the store was very crowded and she lost sight of him.’
‘So the boy was fine when he left you and got back into the sleigh,’ said Bryant.
‘Yeah, it only goes halfway round a bit of track. He could barely wait for it to stop.’
‘But when he emerged from the tunnel he was distraught. Was there anyone else in the tunnel with him?’ May asked.
‘No, we were finishing for the evening. There were just the six of us: Mickey, me, the photographer, the kid, the kid’s mother and the other Father Christmas. We were all still here in Wonderland when the boy left.’
‘Wait, I’m confused,’ said Bryant. ‘You’re Father Christmas.’
‘No, I’m a Father Christmas,’ said Father Christmas. ‘There’s two of us, working in rotation. It would be too knackering otherwise.’
‘Wait, so you saw everything from where you were backstage but it was the other Santa who asked Sebastian what he wanted for Christmas?’
‘You’ve grasped it,’ said Santa. ‘I’m Edwin, he’s – What was his name, Mickey?’
‘God knows,’ said Mickey. ‘We get through them at a rate of knots.’
‘I’m embarrassed to say I’m not sure either,’ said Mr Carraway. ‘He was only here a few days. The incident probably upset him. It must have done because he didn’t come in yesterday.’
‘But you have a contact number for him?’ May asked with a sinking feeling.
‘Certainly,’ said Mr Carraway. ‘Our Santas are vetted very carefully.’
‘You need to find it for us as soon as you can,’ said May.
Bryant was thinking. The loss of one Father Christmas didn’t seem to bother him. ‘So the boy must have opened his gift as he walked out through the tunnel.’
‘It looks that way.’
‘What on earth did he find inside the box to upset him so much that he would run out into the street without watching for traffic?’
‘That’s the oddest part about it,’ said Mr Carraway. ‘He threw it away just after opening it. It was completely empty.’
‘He wasn’t carrying the gift? It wasn’t on his person?’
‘No, there was nothing inside the box or on him at the accident site,’ said Santa.
‘If it was empty, it must have felt lighter than the usual gift packages,’ said Bryant.
‘No, because some of them just have vouchers inside that you can take to the electronics department.’
‘You didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary about this particular box?’
‘It was just like all the others. You can see the CCTV footage if you want,’ said Mr Carraway. ‘There’s nothing on it that’s remotely unusual or different from any other Santa experience.’
‘Do you still have the box?’ asked Bryant.
‘Yes, I had one of my girls put it in a plastic bag for you,’ said Mr Carraway. ‘It’s in my office.’
The detectives examined the box and found nothing unusual about it. Then they watched the CCTV footage of the other Father Christmas with Sebastian Carroll-Williams. In terms of identification, it didn’t help that Santa wore a wig, a hat and a beard. The footage had no sound, but the actions of both made everything pretty clear. Santa told his joke, helped the boy into his polar-bear outfit, posed with him for the selfie, gave him a gift and sent him on his way. At no point was there any physical contact between them.
‘It’s obvious that whatever happened to the child occurred in the tunnel,’ said Bryant. ‘But I’ll need you to find the contact for your other Santa, just to corroborate the sequence of events.’
‘Has it occurred to you that the kid might just have had anger-management issues?’ May asked as they trudged back through the sludge to the tube station. ‘He could have been upset about the box being empty or just annoyed with his mother. He might have discovered that he was claustrophobic and freaked out in the tunnel or the crowds. Any number of things could have happened.’
‘No,’ said Bryant. ‘He’d walked in through the crowded store and was fine. You heard what his mother said. It was only after he saw Father Christmas that he panicked. We have to track down the missing Santa. And get Dan Banbury to go over every inch of the tunnel. If that’s where he opened the box, he might have discarded evidence.’
That night, as the detectives sat working late in their offices and the crusted snow on their window ledges started to roast black from car exhaust fumes, Dan Banbury turned up, ridiculously underdressed. ‘I’m glad you’re still here,’ he told them, pulling off his scarf to reveal a short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt. ‘I was supposed to be at a party tonight. The trains are up the spout. Why does London have to grind to a stop when it snows? They manage all right everywhere else. Look at Russia. They can’t even produce an edible salad but their trains run on time. We’ve just finished at Selfridges. I think we’ve got something.’
‘I hope you have,’ retorted Bryant. ‘We’ve got nothing. It’s starting to look like our Santa’s done a bunk.’
‘Well, don’t get too excited. There was nothing on or in the box, but we lifted this from the tunnel.’ Banbury unclipped his forensics box and took out a small clear bag, emptying its contents on to the desk.
Bryant donned his trifocals and squinted at the object. It appeared to be a tiny, ragged scrap of dark-blue cloth. ‘What’s that?’ he asked. ‘It looks like there’s something written on it.’
‘It’s hard to read but definitely a signature. “Branways”,’ said Banbury. ‘Picked out in gold and silver thread. I thought you might have an idea what it means.’
‘Not a clue. Did you run a search?’
‘I just got back,’ said Banbury. ‘I thought you’d like to do that.’
‘Found it,’ said May, checking online. ‘It’s an old-fashioned school-uniform shop, supplies exclusively to St Crispin’s School for Boys. It says here the school was founded in 1623 by the Right Honourable Sir Thomas Lindsay. “For almost four hundred years the institution has prospered, with many of its Old Boys going on to great achievements in the world of politics, sport and the liberal arts.” Did Sebastian go there? The mother said something …’
‘I made a note somewhere,’ said Bryant, scrubbing about among the rubbishy scraps of paper on his desk.
‘Ah, it would seem he did. We’ve missed the shop tonight. You might as well go to your party, Dan.’
‘I’m supposed to take a pineapple,’ said Banbury.
‘The Asian place over the road will be open,’ said May. ‘Take a tin.’
The next morning, the detectives headed for the Covent Garden shop. It had snowed again overnight and then frozen hard, which made the pavements as treacherous as mountain paths. ‘I’m not breaking a hip over this,’ Bryant complained, picking his way through stalagmites of ice and frozen bags of restaurant garbage.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll catch you if you go over,’ said May. The idea of requiring a helping hand did not, of course, appeal to Bryant, who would rather have plunged to his death than shown the need to accept assistance. The young man who had once cycled to work every morning and knew every pothole in the Strand had given way to the old man who sometimes struggled to get off the sofa, but his mind was as sharp as ever.
The outfitters’ shop proved to be one of those odd anomalies London has a habit of producing from nowhere. Its windows were decorated with gilt shields and its interior was dark wood, but it was wedged between a mobile-phone store and a Pret A Manger. Its manager, Miss Prentice, was a formidable presence, as stately as a galleon in full sail. Bryant imagined that she might have once been a headmistress, reluctantly released by the board of governors for being too free with the cane.
‘Branways has been supplying school uniforms to St Crispin’s for nearly four hundred years,’ she said with fierce pride. ‘My staff can get the measure of a child in a single glance. Of course, they’re getting chubbier these days, but boarding school soon knocks that out of them.’
‘I bet they hide the doughnuts and save the dosh,’ said Bryant. ‘Schools like St Crispin’s are a closed book to me. What’s to stop the parents from shopping elsewhere?’
‘We hold the licence for the uniforms,’ Miss Prentice explained. ‘No other stylings are allowed. Lapels, ties and belts must all be a certain width, collars must be a specific distance from the hair, sleeves and cuffs have rigidly dictated lengths and cuts. And of course no one else has the right to hand-sew pocket badges, heraldic devices or crests. They’re unique and impossible to duplicate. St Crispin’s sportswear is renowned for its quality. Our pants have a double-lined gusset for those chilly mornings on the rugger pitch.’
Bryant & May - London's Glory: (Short Stories) (Bryant & May Collection) Page 3