Cynthia Manson (ed)

by Merry Murder

  Over by the door, Miss Jones put away her smelling salts. Plan B had not involved her, of course. She was required to stick resolutely to her post at all times, but even watching the struggle to save civilisation as we know it had been alarming enough. Now that the community singing was in full swing, more children than ever were hearkening to the calls of Nature and Miss Jones had her hands full regulating the flow. Some of the tougher kids predictably began trying to buck the system but fortunately tea was announced before that appalling blond-haired boy—son of the town’s leading Baptist minister— got a chance to demonstrate whether or not he was man enough to carry out the threats he’d been uttering in respect of Miss Jones’s virtue.

  For tea the children were herded into the adjoining Sir Winston Churchill Salon where a veritable feast had been laid out for them. Almost before the last child had been seated the walls were thick with jelly and trifle, and the sausage rolls were zooming through the air like missiles in an interplanetary war. Even the gorgeous cream cakes were deemed too good to eat and were squashed flat instead upon the heads of unsuspecting neighbours.

  For the twenty minutes allotted to the pleasures of the table, Mrs. Johnson and her cohorts battled to maintain some semblance of order, but their task was made even more difficult by the animal masks that some of the children were still wearing. The masks hindered one of the most effective ploys for riot control—that of actually recognising a youngster, addressing it by name and threatening to report its unspeakable behaviour to its parents. Not that these brats gave a damn for their parents, but the experience of being publicly identified did seem to unnerve them for a moment or two.

  When the tea party was over, it was time for the Hon. Con to hog the limelight. The children were driven back into the Margaret Thatcher Hall and grouped around the platform which, by means of some old army blankets and a few strips of silver paper, had now been transformed into a magic cave. In the middle, surrounded by heaps of exciting-looking parcels, sat the Hon. Con, beaming benevolently and not relaxing her guard for one second.

  At the side of the platform, Mrs. Johnson read the names out from her list in alphabetical order. Each child then, theoretically, came forward in turn, shook hands with Father Christmas, received its present, and said thank you for it. In practice, any child that could break through the protective barrier of lady helpers made a dive and grabbed what it could.

  Personation was rife.

  “Here,” demanded the Hon. Con of a rather rotund frog in striped trousers and bower boots whom, she could swear, she’d seen twice already before, “you sure you’re little Gwendoline Roberts, aged six?”

  “You sure you’re Father Christmas, missus?” retorted the frog, tearing the parcel wrapped in pink paper out of the Hon. Con’s hands. “And not some nosy old judy called Burke?”

  A sweet little girl in pigtails ducked back through the phalanx of lady helpers and thrust the battered remnants of her present into the Hon. Con’s hands. “I don’t want no lousy farmyard animals!” she shrilled, her blue eyes flashing.” ’Sides, they’re all broke. Haven’t you got a knuckle duster or a horse whip or something?”

  The Hon. Con tried, but failed, to give back as good as she got. All around her the Margaret Thatcher Hall was knee-deep in discarded wrapping paper, crushed cardboard boxes and broken toys—all watered by infantile tears of rage and disappointment.

  Still, all good things come to an end and four o’clock struck. Mrs. Johnson and her gallant band girded up their loins for one final effort and at five past four Lady Fowler proclaimed the glad tidings in stentorian tones.

  “All right, girls!” she roared. “You can relax! I counted seventy-three of the little buggers in and seventy-three of them out! They’ve gone. It’s over for another bloody year!”

  The news ran round like wildfire and most of the ladies dropped where they stood. Oh, the blessed peace and quiet! Shoes were slipped off, clothing loosened, and foreheads dabbed with eau-de-cologne. But the human frame is amazingly resilient and before too long everybody was gathering in the kitchens for a cup of tea which, it was hoped, would give them enough strength to go home. Those ladies who had given up smoking cadged cigarettes off their less strong-willed sisters and before long the air was thick with tobacco smoke and recriminations.

  Everybody had her complaints, but none was more vociferous than Mrs. Hinchliffe. “Somebody,” she announced, trying to ease her aching back, “is going to have to do something about that cloakroom duty. It’s too much.”

  “We did give you those fresh air sprays, dear,” Mrs. Johnson reminded her.

  “It’s not the pong, Rose, it’s the sheer hard work. Two people aren’t enough. We need at least three.”

  “Hear, hear!” agreed the other ladies who had been relentlessly dressing and undressing children all afternoon.

  Mrs. Johnson sighed. “There isn’t room for three, dear. You yourself said that.”

  “Two on and one off!” declared Mrs. Hinchliffe. “So we can at least take a bit of a breather. Do you realise neither Clarice nor I so much as got our noses out of that damned boys’ loo all afternoon?”

  “Irene and I were just the same with the girls,” chimed in one of her equally aggrieved colleagues. “I’d thought one of us would be able to take a break while the other held the fort, but no such luck. We were both of us slogging away the whole time.”

  “We’ll look into it next time,” promised Mrs. Johnson blandly. “Now,” she looked round brightly, “is everybody here?” It was getting time for her little speech of thanks and appreciation.

  The Hon. Con was reaching for the sugar bowl. “All present and correct, old fruit! I say,” she addressed the company at large, “anybody see a pork pie lying around that hasn’t actually been violated? I’m feeling dashed peckish.”

  Miss Jones, one of whose duties was to keep the Hon. Con’s waist-line within bounds, endeavoured to divert the conversation from the topic of food. “Actually, Mrs. Johnson,” she twittered helpfully, “I don’t think we are quite all gathered together yet, are we? There’s Mrs. Lawn, for example.”

  “Oh, she’ll have sneaked off hours ago,” said Lady Fowler with her usual snort. “Bloody idle cow!”

  Mrs. Johnson, who’d had enough of Lady Fowler for one afternoon, pretended not to have heard and, since she had Miss Jones there, she decided she might as well make use of her. “I wonder, Miss—er... would you mind just popping along and seeing what’s happened to her? Remind her that we’re all waiting, would you? Perhaps her watch has stopped.”

  “Why not just leave her there to bloody rot?” enquired Lady Fowler charitably. “Serve her damned well right if she gets locked in.”

  But Miss Jones was already scurrying away. After long association with the Hon. Con, it was not in her nature to question orders, however dog-tired she might be.

  In a remarkably short space of time she came scurrying back, ashen-faced and trembling like a leaf.

  Even the Hon. Con noticed that she wasn’t quite herself. “Something up, Bones?” she asked, pausing with her second vol-au-vent of the afternoon halfway to her lips.

  Miss Jones had worked out how she was going to break the news. “Mrs. Lawn is sitting on her chair by the fire exit, dear,” she said with chilling composure, “quite dead and with a large knife sticking out of her chest.”

  “Holy cats!” breathed the Hon. Con. She tossed the unconsumed portion of the vol-au-vent heedlessly aside and leaped to her feet. “Nobody move!” she bawled. “This sounds like murder, and I don’t want you lot trampling all over the clues. Everybody stay here while I go and have a look!”

  “Hadn’t we better phone the police, Constance?”

  There’s always some clever devil, isn’t there? Luckily, the Hon. Con’s thought processes were now rattling along at the speed of light. “Better let me check first, old bean,” she advised solemnly. “It may be a false alarm.”

  “It’s no false alarm dear,” moaned Miss Jones, her handk
erchief pressed to her lips. “She is quite, quite dead, I do—”

  The Hon. Con regarded her chum with exasperation. “Do button it, Bones!” she growled.

  Still in her Father Christmas outfit, the Hon. Con strode off masterfully towards the scene of the crime. Chin up, stomach in, white whiskers fluttering importantly in the breeze of her passage, she thudded across the Margaret Thatcher Hall, through the door by which Miss Jones had stood on duty all afternoon, down the corridor past the two cloakrooms (one on either side), round the corner at the end and—”Golly!” said the Hon. Con.

  Lyonelle Lawn was certainly as dead as a doornail.

  The Hon. Con leaned forward for a close look. The knife sticking out of Lyonelle Lawn’s chest seemed ordinary enough. Sort of kitchen knife you could get anywhere. Fingerprints? Grudgingly the Hon. Con acknowledged that that was one she’d have to leave to the boys in blue. Not much blood and it didn’t seem as though she’d put up much of a fight. Taken unawares, perhaps? And robbery wasn’t the motive because there was her handbag, still standing on the floor under her chair.

  The Hon. Con straightened up. Bit creepy down there, actually, right at the end of the corridor and with nobody about. She turned her attention to the emergency door which Lyonelle Lawn had been guarding against anyone trying to break in or break out. They had experienced both gate-crashers and escapees in previous years. No, the door was still securely fastened. And there were no windows or—

  Somebody was tiptoeing down the corridor!

  The Hon. Con’s hand closed round the rubber truncheon as she prepared to sell her life dearly.

  “Blimey-O’Riley, Bones, I do wish you’d stop pussyfooting about!” Sheer relief that it wasn’t a maniac killer with slavering jaws made the Hon. Con’s tones unnecessarily sharp.

  “I’m sorry, dear, but I thought you’d like to know that Lady Fowler went to phone the police.”

  “She-Judas!” spat the Hon. Con. “She might have given me a few minutes. I haven’t had a decent murder for months.”

  “Well, you’re all right for the moment, dear, because somebody’s disconnected the telephone and jammed up all the doors so that we can’t get out. Miss Kingston thinks it’s super-glue in the locks.”

  The Hon. Con frowned. This was getting serious. “The murderer, eh?” she mused aloud.

  “More likely the children, dear,” said Miss Jones with a sigh. She’d always been so fond of kiddies—before she’d been enrolled as a helper at the Totterbridge & District Conservative & Unionist Club’s annual Christmas party, of course. “I left them trying to push little Mrs. Bellamy through the skylight over the front door. If she doesn’t break a leg or anything, she’s going to ring the police from the call box on the corner.” Miss Jones glanced involuntarily at the corpse and regretted, not for the first time, that dear Constance hadn’t managed to find a nicer hobby. Still, Miss Jones always felt it was up to her to take an intelligent interest. “Have you worked out any theories yet, dear?”

  The Hon. Con emitted a rich chuckle. “Dozens, old girl! How does Felicity Fowler grab you, for a start?”

  “Oh, Constance!”

  “She was being deuced catty about Lyonelle Lawn earlier on,” grunted the Hon. Con, ever ready to take any hasty word for the foulest deed. “Vicious, really. Or there’s Rose Johnson.”

  “Mrs. Johnson is Chairperson of the Organising Committee, dear!”

  “So who was in a better position to set the whole thing up? Who was it who stuck La Lawn down here all on her lonesome where she could be knocked off without anybody noticing? La Lawn’s job this afternoon was precisely what Felicity Fowler was griping about, wasn’t it? Well, come on, Bones, you heard her.”

  “Yes, I did hear her, dear,” said Miss Jones with dignity, “and I think it highly improbable that Mrs. Johnson deliberately murdered Mrs. Lawn just because the extension to Mrs. Lawn’s house was going to ruin Mrs. Johnson’s view of the river.”

  The Hon. Con scowled. “People can get jolly steamed up about that sort of thing. And then there’s the depreciation in the value of the Johnsons’ house. Don’t forget that.”

  But Miss Jones was determined to take a more socially acceptable line. “Surely it’s the work of an outsider, isn’t it, dear? A burglar or a tramp or some sort of gibbering maniac who just happened to be passing?”

  “ ’Fraid that rabbit won’t run, old girl,” said the Hon. Con with evident relish. “No outsider could infiltrate this blooming building—you know that. We’ve had every door manned all afternoon to keep gate-crashers out and our dratted brats in. Nor,” the Hon. Con raised a lordly hand before Miss Jones could voice the theory that the killer might have concealed himself in the Club earlier on, “is it any good you thinking of that door where Lyonelle Lawn was sitting. That’s a proper emergency exit, you see. You can only open or close it from the inside with that bar thing. Well, the late lamented might possibly have opened it up and let her murderer in, but she jolly well didn’t close it behind him after he’d gone out. No, we’ve just got to face facts, Bones. It was one of us. And my money’s on Rose Johnson—with Felicity Fowler a good each-way bet.”

  Miss Jones was reluctant to be the hand that threw the spanner, but she had no choice. “I’m afraid it can’t be one of us, dear.”

  “Why not?”

  “There are only two ways of reaching the spot where Mrs. Lawn was killed, dear. You have demonstrated that we can forget about the emergency door. Well, that only leaves the route from the Margaret Thatcher Hall, along the corridor past the cloakrooms.”

  “So?”

  “I was on duty on the door from the Margaret Thatcher Hall, dear, all afternoon, without a second’s break. After Mrs. Lawn and the four ladies on duty in the cloakrooms went through, nobody else did—apart from the kiddies, of course.”

  The Hon. Con didn’t look best pleased. “You prepared to swear that on a stack of Bibles, Bones?”

  Miss Jones shuddered. “I should hope that wouldn’t be necessary, Constance dear,” she said reproachfully.

  “All right,” said the Hon. Con, whose thought processes under pressure frequently achieved the velocity of light, “somebody sneaked through after the party was over and you’d gone to the kitchen for a cup of tea.”

  Miss Jones was no slouch when it came to spiking the Hon. Con’s guns. “I was the last person to arrive in the kitchen, dear. Or almost the last. Certainly both Mrs. Johnson and Lady Fowler were already there. Besides, if poor Mrs. Lawn was killed after I left my post by the door, that would mean she had only died a matter of moments before I found her.” Miss Jones swallowed hard as she recalled the scene. “I don’t think that was the case, dear. The blood seemed to be quite—”

  The Hon. Con was growing impatient. “Then it was one of the four lassies on duty in the cloakrooms. One of them could have sloped off any old time, nipped round the corner, stuck the knife in La Lawn, and Bob’s your uncle!”

  Miss Jones’s head was already shaking. “But you heard them yourself, dear, complaining that they’d never had a moment’s relaxation and that they never left their cloakrooms all afternoon. They’ll be able to give each other alibis, won’t they? I mean, each couple will be able to—”

  If there was anything that got right up the Hon. Con’s nose it was hearing blessed amateurs using technical terms like “alibi.” “There’s such a thing as collusion!” she snapped. “Or conspiracy! Two of ‘em could be in it together.”

  “Now don’t be silly, dear!”

  Miss Jones’s reproof was feather-light and her smile indulgent, but the Hon. Con was never one to take criticism lying down. “Hope you’re in the clear, Bones,” she said nastily. “Because, if anybody could have slipped away during the afternoon and done Lyonelle Lawn in, it was you!”

  The idea was so absurd that Miss Jones even managed a little laugh, though with a fresh corpse only a few feet away laughter was neither very easy nor appropriate.

  “Then it’s one of the kids,�
� said the Hon. Con indifferently, as though Miss Jones was in some way to blame for this conclusion. “It’s the only answer—and it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility, is it? I wouldn’t put anything past those evil-minded little horrors. Do you know, I didn’t get a thank you out of more than a couple of ‘em all afternoon? Talk about manners! Yes, one of ’em could have come out to the cloakroom and popped round here to kill Lyonelle as easy as pie, having first nicked a knife at teatime, I shouldn’t wonder. That explains why she didn’t put up a struggle or anything. I mean, who expects getting knocked off by a nine-year-old, eh?”

  Miss Jones had had a pretty gruelling day so far, what with the children’s party and finding a dead body and everything, but it was all as nothing compared with the crisis she now faced. She would like to have fainted, but she daren’t. Oh, why, oh, why hadn’t she just let dear Constance pin the murder on whomever it was she wanted to pin it on in the first place? There would have been a little unpleasantness, no doubt, but it would be as nothing to the storm of fury and outrage that was going to erupt when the Hon. Con started pointing the finger of suspicion at a group of innocent children and innocent Conservative children, at that. Even Labor-voting parents would have been horrified, but the parents of this lot—well, running amuck and foaming at the mouth would just be for starters. Miss Jones’s mind shied at the possibilities: tarring and feathering? Being ridden out of Totterbridge on a rail? Lynching?

  Miss Jones moistened arid lips. “Constance, dear—” “You know my methods, Bones,” said the Hon. Con grandly. “When you’ve eliminated the impossible, what you’ve got left is it—however improbable. And you’re the one,” she added, turning the knife, “who did most of the eliminating for me.”

  “Constance, dear, you can’t go around making wild accusations against some poor child who—”