Twelve Deaths of Christmas

by Jackson Sharp

  ‘You broke it!’ He’s trying to cup his hand under the leak.

  ‘I never. It was already like that.’

  ‘It was fine when I was playing with it.’

  ‘Give over, I bet it was already busted when they gave it you. Place like this, they’re not going to give you something dead good, are they? Bet they bought it from Oxfam or something.’

  Stan’s holding his kaleidoscope like it’s his favourite pet that’s just died.

  ‘Anyway,’ I say, because I don’t like seeing him look like that, ‘you’re too old for a toy like that. It’s a kid’s toy, that. You’re nearly nine.’

  He drops his face into his pillow. Mutters something – something about how Santa gave it to him, and Santa wouldn’t give him something rubbish from Oxfam.

  ‘You what? Speak up, mumbles.’

  ‘I said’ – he lifts his face up, and even in this gloom I can see he’s got tears on his cheeks – ‘it’s off Santa, so it’s not rubbish, Robbie, so shut up.’

  I don’t say anything. It was a second-hand toy, ’course it was, maybe third-hand, fourth-hand. Other kids’ cast-offs, that’s what bloody Santa brings at Hampton Hall. Same as the clothes, the comics. Stuff normal folk’d chuck away.

  I look at Stan. He’s got his blanket pulled over his chin and he’s not crying any more, but his eyes are still open.

  ‘Ro-ob,’ he says, quietly.

  ‘Wha-at.’

  ‘There’s a grate over the chimney.’

  He’s looking across the dorm, at the old fireplace in the far wall that hasn’t ever had a fire in it as long as we’ve been here. It’s just an alcove in the wall is all it is, but he’s right, there is a metal grill-type thing over the hole that used to be a chimney.

  ‘Yeah, so?’

  ‘So how does Santa get down?’ The worry in his voice, bloody hell, it’s painful to hear.

  I don’t know when I realized Santa didn’t exist, or why. Now I don’t know how I ever believed in him. I must’ve been bloody daft.

  I start to answer: ‘Well, he’s probably got a key, hasn’t he, to the side-door, so he parks his reindeer in the car park and –’

  A laugh from across the room cuts me off.

  My fists clench.

  Mark Duffy is sitting up in bed – I can see his outline. Recognize his snotty bloody laugh anyway.

  ‘What’s your problem, Duffy?’

  ‘Your kid’s a bit old to be believing in Santa, isn’t he? He’s such a little spaz.’

  I know Stan’s looking at me. I don’t look at him.

  ‘You shut your bloody stupid mouth.’

  ‘Here, Stanley, how was Father Christmas when you saw him yesterday?’

  Stan’s voice is on the edge of breaking, right on the edge. ‘I did see him, I did, he give me a present, a kaleidoscope, and –’

  ‘I bet that’s not all he gave you,’ Duffy sniggers.

  Stan doesn’t say anything – doesn’t understand. But I understand well enough. I don’t know what Duffy’s on about exactly but I know his tone, what it means. Something dirty.

  Can’t fight in here, not after lights-out, I’d get a proper bollocking. Only been in here a week, don’t want to mark my card already. And they might take me away, to solitary or whatever – and Stan’d be left on his own.

  ‘Why don’t you fuck off, Duffy,’ I say.

  ‘Make me.’

  ‘I’ll see you in workshop tomorrow, then I’ll bloody make you.’

  He shuts up. Knows I could have him. That’s a good feeling.

  Then he says: ‘I was only telling the truth. It’s not Santa, it’s only bloody Merton. Real Santa’s not got bad breath and wandering hands. Real Santa might make you sit on his knee but that’s all he does – not like Merton.’ Duffy lies down, pulls his blanket over himself. ‘Don’t much mind whether you been naughty or nice, neither.’

  What the bloody hell have we let ourselves in for here, Stan?, I think.

  He’s really sleeping now. Can tell by his breathing.

  Wish he was awake. Wish we weren’t here. Wish we were still in our old room.

  What’s it been now, nearly a year? Can’t be a year yet ’cause we was at home last Christmas. Bloody Malky was already around then, though. Smackhead crackhead Malky. I’ll never forgive him, that skinny, slimy, creepy bastard. For what he done to our mum. For what he done to me and Stan.

  Not a fit parent, they reckoned. Not responsible. I told ’em, come on, she’s never been a fit parent, our mum, it’s me what’s been cooking tea and looking after Stan, for years, like – she’s lazy, our mum, and I don’t think she ever wanted us – but she’s our mum. We’ll just carry on like we have been, I told ’em, whether Mum’s on smack or whatever, it doesn’t matter – we’ll just carry on like always.

  Didn’t make no difference. Nothing we say ever makes any difference.

  ‘Into Care.’ It was like the bloody bogeyman when I was little, that. Mum used to threaten us with it when we was bad but I know she never meant it. If she’d meant it she wouldn’t’ve been all crying and screaming when they took us away, would she?

  I knew it was going to be bad. Stan didn’t know, but I knew. That place, though – that place was worse than I’d ever thought.

  We were lucky our dad’s a bloody headcase. I mean, it wasn’t lucky out in the real world because, well, he was a proper bloody headcase, but in there – he got us out of there. Found out where we was and properly kicked off. Started trying to get in, threatening, having a go at the staff, wound up in court –

  I remember something Stan said: ‘It’s nice, isn’t it, that Dad cares about us.’

  Made me laugh, that. Anyway, they moved us on. And here we are.

  Footsteps. Footsteps, out on the landing.

  Stan wakes up sharply, frightened.

  ‘Who’s there? Robbie? What’s that?’

  From across the dorm, Mark Duffy tells him in a hiss to bloody well keep quiet. I lean over, touch his arm – tell him it’s okay, I’m here, nothing’s going to happen.

  The footsteps come up to the door. I hold my breath. I think we all do. I can see the shadows of two feet through the crack between the door and the tiles.

  Then the footsteps move on.

  Bloody hell.

  I reach under my mattress – if you can call it a bloody mattress, it’s like an old sack full of coathangers – and pull out my picture. Can hardly see it in the dark but I just want to hold it. Mum, Stan, me, in the lounge of our house in Oldbury. Stan’s only small. I’m about nine. All smiles, all saying ‘cheese’. Happy bloody family.

  ‘When will they let us go home?’ Stan says suddenly, his voice wobbly, in the darkness.

  Soon, I tell him. Dead soon.

  I hear Mark Duffy make a noise under his blanket. Can’t tell if he’s laughing or crying.

  2

  The PC on the door knew who Cox was before she told him. Well, of course he did.

  As she signed in, he gave her the details of the case. William Radley, sixty-eight. Ex-copper. Found dead that morning. The name rang a bell, but she wasn’t sure why.

  It was a big place, a Victorian townhouse in a leafy bit of Ealing. High ceilings, she noted as she made her way through the hall. Wood floors and a staircase you could drive a Routemaster up.

  ‘This his place?’ she called back.

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘On a police pension? Must’ve made some sound investments.’ A businesslike nod. ‘Thanks, Constable.’

  A white tent was being put up in the long back garden. Cox stood for a moment in the roomy kitchen (Belfast sink, marble worktops, a set of expensive and well-used cast-iron pans) and sized up the situation. Through a rose-trellis to the left she could see the neighbours – a constipated-looking middle-aged man and a woman with steel-grey hair wrapped in a fierce bun – gawping at the scene. A few uniform were standing around, looking bored. A female sergeant was talking to a man in a well-tailored dark suit w
ho, with a cursory assessment of their body language (her talking more, nodding a lot; him brusque, authoritative, inquiring), she judged to be a superior officer. Didn’t recognize him, though. Wasn’t CID. That rang alarm bells. MI5? GCHQ? Trouble, anyway.

  He turned and saw her as she stepped out through the French windows on to the lawn. Smiled fleetingly and extended a hand. His handshake was firm and brief.

  ‘Sam Harrington,’ he said. ‘Ministry of Justice.’

  ‘DI Cox.’ She looked at him meaningfully. ‘So, to what do we owe this honour?’

  Harrington laughed lightly. Not buying it, Cox thought.

  ‘Just a formality,’ the MoJ man said, absently smoothing a lapel. ‘Bill Radley was quite high up at the Yard. We have to make sure everything’s done by the book.’

  Thanks for the vote of confidence, she thought. ‘Sure. So what’s the story?’

  ‘Hard to be sure at this stage, of course – but it looks a lot like suicide.’

  ‘Suicide?’ Then what the hell am I doing here on my bloody day off? she thought bitterly. Then the self-awareness kicked in. Come on, DI Cox, be honest – would you really rather be watching feeding time at the penguin pond right now?

  She half-turned, looked up, taking in the layout of the house and garden. The back wall, thick with drab winter ivy, rose up three storeys to a shingled mansard roof. A balcony jutted from a second-floor room – a bedroom, she guessed. Must be a hell of a view from up there.

  Turned back to Harrington. Something here didn’t feel quite right; something about this set-up – something she couldn’t put her finger on – was making her uneasy.

  ‘What’s the family situation? Next of kin?’

  ‘No family that we know of. Radley never married.’

  Confirmed bachelor, as the newspaper obituaries used to say, with a nod and a wink.

  ‘Okay.’ She nodded, gestured towards Radley’s body – they’d put up the tent, and it lay under a sheet, parallel to the house, one arm flung out. There were dull burgundy blood-spots on the paving stone near the dead man’s head. ‘Shall we take a look at him?’

  Harrington, thin-lipped, nodded grimly. Left it to Cox to bend down and draw back the concealing sheet.

  William Radley – AC Radley, or DC Radley, or whatever he’d been at the Yard – was a slightly balding, grey-haired, middle-aged white man. No surprises there, Cox thought drily. His face, baggy and pale, was composed, perhaps slightly puzzled. Someone had closed his eyes, but hadn’t bothered to cover his modesty where the navy-blue dressing-gown had flapped open. The dead didn’t need dignity, thought Cox. Patches of purple lividity were already pooling in his buttocks and thighs. The back of his head was a pulpy, red mess, gummed to the spotted paving stone with viscous, part-congealed blood.

  Looked about right for a head-first fall from three floors up, Cox thought grimly.

  ‘Who found him?’

  ‘Chap in the house opposite.’ Harrington nodded towards the bottom of the garden. ‘Heard a bang just after nine this morning, saw him lying here. Called the police.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Cox replaced the sheet, straightened up. Harrington, she noticed, was looking pretty green about the gills. ‘I’m going to take a look inside.’

  The MoJ man nodded mutely. As she turned away, she saw him press a handkerchief to his mouth.

  It was warm in the house, but you couldn’t call it cosy. She moved slowly through the kitchen and the hall, turning through the first door she came to into a dark-panelled dining room. The table and six chairs – oak, she thought – shone in the subdued lighting; the smell of furniture polish made her eyes sting.

  For an older man living alone, Radley had kept the place immaculate. Every picture dust-free and straight on its hook; every book square on its shelf. The sitting room was the same. The TV and DVD remote controls might have been positioned on the coffee table with a set square. Well, he was a copper, Cox thought. Meticulous.

  Back into the hall, up the wide staircase.

  The first floor seemed a little more lived-in. Toothbrush and shaving things left by the bathroom basin (sink dry, she noted, shower screen too); shirts drying on a rack in the guest bedroom. A small study – computer, two filing cabinets, bookcase – was decorated with framed photographs of Radley dinner-jacketed or in full uniform, grinning beside various public figures. Home secretaries, lord chancellors, local MPs, anti-crime campaigners. In the pictures he looked engaged, genuine, his wide smile easy and unforced.

  An old snap from a long-ago ACPO conference rang a bell in Cox’s mind. She’d been there – Brighton, had it been? Bournemouth? – and, now that she came to think about it, she’d met William Radley there. The memory flared brightly from somewhere in her subconscious. Only briefly, long enough to exchange a few words of small talk, but she remembered the man’s easy-going charm: ‘Call me Bill,’ he’d said, and never mind the badge of rank on his shoulder. That had been in the good years, what the papers later termed, with more than a hint of schadenfreude, her ‘meteoric rise’.

  The second floor of the house was divided into two big rooms, one either side of the steep staircase. On the right, facing south, was a bare-planked artist’s studio, flooded with pale light from three tall windows. There were two large canvases set on wooden easels, one bare, the other a half-finished watercolour, a landscape – to Cox’s eye, it looked pretty good.

  Radley, she thought, had had nothing to fear from retirement. His books, his paintings, his love of food and friends – he’d built himself a life, a good life, on leaving the force. Not like Dad, Cox thought bleakly. DS Colin Cox had clung on to his going-nowhere career as long as he could, and been pensioned off at sixty-five. He’d found nothing to replace policing in his life – found, in fact, that policing was his life. Nothing she or Mum could say seemed to help. It wasn’t that he wasn’t kind, that he’d stopped loving them, caring about them, both of them, and Matthew, too – it was just that he seemed to have lost his way and could never seem to get back on the right track. He’d shrunk from the world outside; settled into his chair in front of the telly and waited for it all to be done with.

  Was it really a year ago? Cox thought, moving from the studio out on to the landing. A year ago that the end finally came for DS Cox (retd). Mum’d been off visiting her sister in Kent. Cox had been roused from sleep by a phone-call at 3 a.m.: her parents’ neighbours complaining about the TV blaring all through the night. Turned out he’d had a stroke; with no phone to hand – he couldn’t be doing with new-fangled nonsense like mobiles – he’d grabbed for the TV remote and squeezed the volume button until his strength gave out.

  Too little, too late. His body was cold when Cox found him.

  She shook her head, tried to shake away the memory, to focus, as she pushed open Radley’s bedroom door. The coldness in the room made her blink. The balcony door, of course: it was still open. The well-made maroon curtains stirred in the breeze. The duvet was thrown back, and Radley’s size 13 slippers were on the floor by the bed. Nothing out of the ordinary.

  So Bill Radley just woke up this morning, got out of bed, opened the curtains and jumped out of the window?

  Cox circled the unmade bed and stepped gingerly out on to the little balcony. Took a breath and looked down. Only three storeys but Christ it looked like more, down to the garden, the trembling white square of the tent – and, beneath it, the bloodied body of Bill Radley. Her head spun; she’d never been good with heights.

  As she stepped back into the room, the door from the landing opened, and Harrington stepped inside. He greeted her breezily: ‘Find anything interesting?’

  She replied with a non-committal shrug.

  Harrington, one hand in his trouser-pocket, began poking desultorily around the room. Pulled open the drawer of the bedside table; peered into the empty tea-mug by the bed; picked up one of Radley’s slippers and ran his thumb absently over the nap.

  ‘You’re disturbing a crime-scene, Mr Harrington,’ Cox said sharply.<
br />
  He looked up guiltily. Dropped the slipper as if it had suddenly turned white-hot.

  ‘Sorry. Didn’t realize it was a crime-scene.’

  Cox eyed him sourly for a second.

  Then she moved back to the double-glazed door that opened on to the balcony.

  ‘Have you been out here?’

  ‘Lord, no.’ Harrington laughed urbanely. ‘No head for heights, I’m afraid.’

  Cox gritted her teeth.

  ‘Have you ever attended at a suicide? A suicide by jumping?’

  ‘Nope. Not really my field. I assume you have?’

  ‘A few, yeah. And you know what they had in common?’

  ‘A dead body?’

  She let his facetiousness slide.

  ‘Exactly. That’s exactly the point. Jumpers, more than most other suicides, want to make sure. No second thoughts, no turning back. This’ – she gestured to the little balcony – ‘is what – maybe twenty feet? Hornsey Lane Bridge it isn’t. It’s not a sure thing, Mr Harrington. You’re as likely to break both your legs as be killed. Or end up in a wheelchair being fed through a tube.’

  ‘Could it be that, at the time of his suicide, poor Mr Radley was in no fit state mentally to carry out such calculations?’

  Again Cox forced herself to ignore the faint note of mockery in Harrington’s voice.

  ‘It’s possible,’ she nodded. ‘But look at this place. Nothing here suggests a man who’s lost his grip on reality. Everything neat as a pin downstairs. The garden’s been well cared for. And look at his painting.’

  ‘Come on. Weren’t all the great painters raving madmen?’

  ‘This isn’t the home of a man who’s got nothing to live for,’ Cox insisted.

  Harrington followed her as she made her way back downstairs.

  ‘I’m not jumping to any conclusions,’ she said, over her shoulder. ‘But I want to at least wait until we get the forensics report before I rule out anything suspicious.’ She collared a passing constable. ‘Are forensics here yet?’

  The young PC looked at her in surprise.

  ‘Ma’am?’

  ‘Forensics. You know, the guys in facemasks and white jumpsuits. Have they arrived yet? They should be here by now.’