Murder for Christmas

by Francis Duncan

  He opened the window and leaned out, and as he did so he gave a sudden low gasp of surprise. Almost immediately below him, moving along the terrace, was a figure. That in itself was possessed of no great significance, but it was the clothes in which it was dressed that caused him to stare wide-eyed, for it was the figure of Father Christmas! He could see the long red cloak and the red cap with little patches of snow upon it that showed plainly in the clear light.

  For a few unreal moments he wondered whether his brain was betraying him. Undoubtedly it was Christmas Eve, when Santa Claus rode abroad to delight the hearts of children. But this was fantasy!

  And then his thoughts were able to focus on the screen of his mind and the explanation was clear. The red-robed figure was no hallucination. It was, of course, Benedict Grame. Now that his guests had gone to their rooms he had dressed himself in the traditional manner and was setting out to decorate the Christmas tree.

  Tremaine leaned out of the window. From where he knew the village to lie the sound of a bell was coming. The moon was still free of the drifting clouds and the Christmas card effect of his surroundings was emphasized by its cold radiance. The bare arms of the trees formed a boundary to the big house; the snow lay unbroken between the main steps and the road they bordered.

  The red figure was in perfect keeping with its setting. Now it was no longer moving. It was as though he was not looking out upon a real scene but was gazing at a Christmas picture in a shop window, a picture that possessed a stereoscopic quality that gave it the illusion of life but which must remain eternally unchanged.

  But it was only for a moment that the illusion lasted. A faint wind sighed eerily up from behind the hills. A great mass of dark and ominous cloud passed its grim finger over the clear face of the moon and stole its brightness from it.

  And with the darkness came menace.

  The blackness of the earth seemed to be giving shelter to the forces of evil. Malignity and terror were abroad. The whole world lay under a deep, inky shadow in which the figure of Father Christmas had been swallowed up. Above the house the clouds had gathered. They were pressing down upon it, threatening and implacable, as though it had been singled out for some essential act of evil and that now the hour was come.

  Wrapped in his dressing-gown Mordecai Tremaine did not feel the chill wintry air. But he shivered.

  8

  THE SCREAM awakened him.

  Mordecai Tremaine sat up in bed with the sound of it ringing in his ears, and at first he could not tell whether it was real. Imagination and reality, fantasy and fact had become so entwined within him that, aroused suddenly from a troubled sleep, he was left groping after truth.

  And then the scream came again and this time its shrill desperation impacted upon his mind with an effect that shocked him into full consciousness.

  He groped for the bedside lamp, found it and blinked at his pocket-watch. It was ten minutes past two. He could not have been sleeping for long; the heavy, drugging legacy of first sleep still lay upon him.

  As he huddled himself into his dressing-gown the screams went on. They formed an hysterical background to the slow working of his thoughts. He was listening to them and trying at the same time to assimilate their meaning. There was something he had to learn. There was some message for him. It was not merely that the screams were underwritten by terror; there was another, less obvious meaning.

  But although he was conscious of it he could not define it. His awakening had been too sudden. He had had no time to sort out his impressions clearly. This was it, his mind was saying. This was the ‘something’ he had been expecting.

  As he opened the door of his bedroom and stepped into the corridor he could hear movements from other parts of the house. A voice called out in enquiry. There was a note of irascibility in it and he thought it was Lorring’s. He heard the sound of running feet.

  The screams were less frequent now. They had a sobbing note, as though exhaustion was reducing whoever was responsible to semi-impotence.

  It was a woman who had screamed. The mists had cleared from Mordecai Tremaine’s mind now and that much at least had resolved itself. He wondered as he padded along the corridor what he would find. He had located the source of the screams as the ground floor, and as he made his way towards the stairs Gerald Beechley came out of a room just ahead of him.

  The other heard him and turned. His normally red face had lost its high colour and was drawn and tense.

  ‘What is it?’ he said. ‘What’s happened?’ He added: ‘I was asleep—wondered what was going on. Is it Benedict?’

  Mordecai Tremaine regarded him curiously.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘What makes you think it might be Mr. Grame?’

  Fear flickered in Gerald Beechley’s eyes. His glance wavered. He gave a convincing impression of a man who had made a mistake and was trying to avoid being caught in a trap. He said haltingly:

  ‘It seemed the—the most obvious thing. I—I thought it must be Benedict. All the others are in bed.’

  They were going down the stairs now. Mordecai Tremaine did not look at his companion. It was a method that encouraged people to talk more freely, either defensively in an attempt to throw up excuses against what they construed as cold suspicion, or confidently in the belief that they had nothing to fear.

  ‘You mean you thought it was Mr. Grame because you knew that he would be downstairs attending to the Christmas tree after everybody else had gone to their rooms?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Beechley eagerly. ‘You know Benedict’s habit, of course. He always stays up on Christmas Eve to get the tree ready for the morning. He likes to have the presents all waiting for us when we come down.’

  ‘I see,’ said Mordecai Tremaine. ‘The only thing is,’ he added gently, ‘it was a woman who screamed.’

  This time he glanced sideways at his companion. Beechley’s new-found assurance had collapsed as rapidly as it had been inflated. The hesitant, fearful look was back in his face and one hand had gone to his collar to caress his neck nervously.

  As if, thought Tremaine suddenly, he was anxious on account of it …

  Downstairs lights were blazing through an open doorway. They heard the sound of voices and, crossing the hall, went into the room in which the activity appeared to be centred.

  The first thing Mordecai Tremaine saw was the Christmas tree. He saw it as though it was a symbol; as though it was the dominant factor in a dark tragedy. And as though, in some strange way and as though it possessed a thinking brain, it knew.

  It was, of course, only a fleeting and fantastic impression born of its momentarily seizing his attention as he went into the room. In the next instant the full scene of which it was a part was photographed upon his mind.

  It was Charlotte Grame who had screamed. She was seated in one of the easy chairs from which the house-party had listened to the village carollers. Grief and horror had distorted her face, and in addition her expression held the indefinable misery of someone who felt herself to be lying under the hand of doom.

  She was dressed in a dark tweed costume that exaggerated her paleness into a pallor that shocked and that accentuated the dark rings marking her tortured eyes. Her emotion had stormed itself out, but it had left her weak and pitiable, huddled into the chair.

  Austin Delamere was with her. The plump man had lost his official pose. He was no longer the potential elder statesman carrying the cares of office and relaxing with conscious dignity in between signing documents of historic importance. He was only an over-fat, harassed little man, whose thin hairs were straggling wildly down into his eyes and who was faced with a situation with which he was unable to cope.

  He was patting one of Charlotte Grame’s hands, making an ineffectual attempt to revive her. For all the interest she was showing in him he might not have been there. She was staring past him. She was staring at something that lay beyond him on the floor.

  It was a heap of red cloth. It lay almost under the Christ
mas tree. It lay motionless, and it was the fact that it was so still that made it so terrible.

  Mordecai Tremaine’s hand gripped Gerald Beechley’s arm. He said sharply:

  ‘Don’t go any closer! Don’t touch anything!’

  It was an unnecessary warning. Beechley had stopped almost as soon as he had entered the room. He stood there trying to say something, but with only inarticulate sounds coming from him.

  Tremaine walked forward. He looked down. His eyes moved over the crumpled red cloak, the plain red cap with edges trimmed with white, the long white beard that had slipped out of position and rested grotesquely against the dead man’s cheek.

  It was a dead man. There was a darker red on the cloak. It was a red that had stained. It was a red that had seeped through when a bullet had drained the life-blood from the heart. He stooped. He could see the hole, discoloured around the edges, slightly irregular but quite small, through which the bullet had passed. It was in a vertical line with the heart, but was well below it.

  This was Father Christmas his brain was saying crazily over and over again. It was Christmas Eve and Father Christmas had arrived. Only he was lying dead under the Christmas tree. Father Christmas had been murdered.

  Murdered? That was something it remained to prove. He peered about him. There was no sign of a weapon.

  On the floor by the dead man’s hand something glittered. Cautiously he picked up one of the bright particles lying there and examined it. It looked as though it might have come from one of the decorations on the tree. He turned and saw that one of the little bells hanging from the branches had been broken. The remnants were hanging precariously from the lower part of the tree, a pathetic morsel of wreckage.

  Despite the fact that the carol singers had left ample evidence of their presence, the floor immediately around the tree was reasonably clear. Tremaine was able to pick out the four marks that disfigured the woodwork between its base and the body. They looked as though they had been made by something that had been dragged an inch or two under pressure and they formed an almost perfect square. Between the dead man and the french windows was an uneven trail of moisture.

  The other occupants of the room had watched him without speaking. He had felt their eyes upon him, questioning, frightened, but they had said nothing, as though there was nothing they could find to say.

  Austin Delamere was the first to break the silence. He cleared his throat. He said:

  ‘Should we—do you think we ought to send for a doctor?’

  ‘A doctor,’ said Mordecai Tremaine, ‘cannot bring a dead man back to life.’

  ‘He—he is dead?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Tremaine, ‘he is dead.’

  There were voices in the hall. People eddied into the room. The bald head of Professor Lorring showed in the lead. He thrust his way forward, gaunt features soured with the anger of a man robbed of sleep.

  ‘What the devil’s going on down here?’ he demanded. ‘People screaming their heads off in the middle of the night! I’ll——’

  Mordecai Tremaine cut him off. He stood up quickly.

  ‘Stay where you are!’ he ordered sharply. ‘All of you!’

  The note of command in his voice, so much at variance with his mild appearance, would in any case have surprised them into obeying. But they had seen the crumpled form under the tree and they were suddenly at a loss.

  Lorring’s face went white. His eyes swept to the tree, fiercely searching, stayed for an instant and then swung back to the body.

  ‘It isn’t—murder?’

  All his antagonism had gone. He was a frightened man. He was looking at Mordecai Tremaine as though he wanted to be given comfort.

  ‘That,’ said Tremaine, ‘is a matter the police will have to decide.’

  ‘The police!’

  It was a woman’s voice. The voice of Rosalind Marsh. It came in a taut, involuntary sigh.

  ‘Of course,’ said Tremaine. ‘The police. They will have to be told. Don’t you—like the thought?’

  She recoiled at that. The desperate expression of a hunted wild thing came into her eyes. But it was only for a moment or two. She came back at him with a kind of challenging fury.

  ‘Why shouldn’t I like it? Are you trying to accuse me of something?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Mordecai Tremaine apologetically. ‘I’m sorry if I expressed myself clumsily.’

  He looked so inoffensive as he stood there in front of the tree, pince-nez askew, his slight form seeming to flinch beneath her attack, that she was partly reassured. She regarded him suspiciously but without the same open hostility.

  Tremaine’s eyes were passing over each member of the little group at the doorway. They thought that he was bewildered by what had happened, and not quite certain what to do next, despite the surprising manner in which he had at first assumed command of the situation. They could not tell that his brain was working coolly and steadily, taking them one by one and trying to memorize their manner and their appearance, trying to analyse what they were thinking—and trying to extract the significance from those things.

  For this was the vital time. This was the period when the murderer—if he or she were present—might make the mistake that would be a betrayal of guilt.

  Gerald Beechley had not moved from the time he had entered the room. He was displaying no interest in any of the others. His attention was fixed alternately upon the Christmas tree and upon the sprawled figure beneath it. His gaze swung from one to the other in an unending rhythm. His face was still but a bloodless shadow of its usual high-coloured self and the expression it bore was a curious mixture of fear and bewilderment.

  Professor Lorring was just behind him. In contrast to Beechley’s complete disregard for anyone else, the scientist was now displaying an intense interest in his companions. His head was thrust forward in that challenging manner with which he had rebuffed all attempts at drawing him into conversation. It was as though he was striving by his aggressiveness to eradicate those first moments of betrayal. His eyes were peering this way and that; he had the look of a predatory if uncertain eagle searching for its quarry.

  It was Austin Delamere with whom he was most concerned. His fierce glance returned continually to the politician, who was still leaning over Charlotte Grame, one plump hand yet holding her wrist as though he had forgotten it was there.

  Delamere became suddenly conscious of the scrutiny. He looked up to meet Lorring’s stare and his face flushed. At first Tremaine thought that he was going to make an angry comment. He did make an abrupt movement and his lips opened. But no words came. Whatever it was he had been about to say he changed his mind, and his only response was a deepening scowl.

  Rosalind Marsh had recovered her self-possession. She was once more the cold beauty who knew how to wrest a living from an unfriendly world. She gave no indication of being unnerved by the presence of murder. She was the unemotional woman of experience, whom life had schooled to remain indifferent to tragedy.

  It was the one person who might have been expected to show a calm acceptance of the situation who betrayed the most reaction. Lucia Tristam came in behind the Napiers. She was panting, as though she had been running hard from her bedroom. As she saw the crumpled Father Christmas on the floor she stopped abruptly. She gave a gasp and her hand went to her throat.

  She swayed. Tremaine thought she was going to fall, but she managed to retain her hold on her senses with a visible effort. She stood by the door, unsteadily, her hand grasping the jamb of it for support, her face very white.

  The Napiers were as they might have been expected to be. Dressing-gowned, the husband’s straggly hair tousled, the wife’s enclosed in a net that drew it tight around her head, they were any nondescript, middle-aged couple pitchforked into the midst of strange events that left them at a loss, and pathetically ready to accept guidance from anyone with a stronger mind than theirs.

  And yet—Mordecai Tremaine was not altogether sure that his first quick judgement was corr
ect. There was something about Harold Napier and his wife that he could not place. They looked ordinary. They looked just what one would imagine them to be. But he was not satisfied. There was about them a queer, elusive quality that hinted at the existence of something more complex behind their façade of ordinariness.

  His survey was too hurried to give him any opportunity of indulging in a detailed analysis. It was over in a matter of seconds, for it had to be accomplished in the brief space of time in which shock and alarm might reasonably be expected to keep the hurriedly aroused house-party inactive around the doorway, waiting for a lead to be given them.

  It was a photographic series of impressions that he received, images that were thrown upon his mind in quick succession, and that he was given no time to develop and study at leisure.

  As it was there were already stirrings. Lorring said:

  ‘Well, what’s going to happen now? If Grame’s been murdered hadn’t we better notify the police at once?’

  There was a truculent, almost a defiant note in his voice. But before Tremaine could reply there was a movement by the doorway as Nicholas Blaise appeared. He was in his dressing-gown, dark hair brushed back, alarm in his face. He saw Mordecai Tremaine and came straight towards him.

  ‘What is it?’ he said. ‘I heard screams …’

  Tremaine had been standing in front of the body. He drew back. Blaise looked down suddenly. He saw the red cloak and the beard.

  ‘No …’

  He took a pace backward, horror rising in his eyes. He swung slowly round upon his heel so that he faced the others. He surveyed them accusingly, searchingly, and with a cold purpose. And then he turned back to Tremaine.

  ‘It’s happened, Mordecai,’ he said shakily. ‘It’s happened. I wanted to prevent it and I was too late …’

  Bitterness and grief choked his voice. For a moment he could not go on. But they saw him struggling to hold himself in check, and when he spoke again his tones were firm.