Murder Most Merry

by ed. Abigail Browining

  “Supposing,” said Jill, “she wasn’t taken to Grand Drive and killed? Supposing she was leaving there, heading back to her beat, when it happened?”

  “I’m not quite with you.”

  “She didn’t walk all the way, wasn’t dressed for it, therefore she went in a car, that’s the conventional wisdom. Doesn’t follow. A bus runs from dockland to a stop round the corner from Grand Drive every half hour. She could have taken herself there, right? Visited somebody, left again, and either her attacker was waiting, or he was the one she’d called on, and he chased her out of doors.”

  “Try reading the file,” Inspector Poole urged. “No known sex offenders among the residents, remember. We grilled all Les Girls, whether or not they’d associated with Ms. Field, and none of them had a client in Grand Drive; far as they were aware, that is. Down-market hookers don’t keep names and addresses. Her mates were sure Mitzi had never been up there before.”

  “Yes, but it was Christmas, Len. When we all get sudden urges to see Mum and Dad, look up Auntie Flo, send a card to that nice former neighbor who nursed us through whooping cough. Mitzi Field had a family of sorts, once upon a time.”

  Digesting the implications, Inspector Poole said, “Crumbs.” He did not go in for bad language. “You do get ‘em. the wild hunches. All right, she was Mitzi Field, but her mother remarried, to a man called, don’t tell me... Edwardes. The stepfather who supposedly seduced the little girl. The mother died in 1984. Edwardes was never charged, lack of evidence, they just took the child away. He’d dropped off the radar screen by 1990, dead or gone abroad, certainly hasn’t paid tax or claimed unemployment benefits for a long time. All in the file. dear. I may be slow but I ain’t stupid.”

  “Perish the thought. But that still leaves Auntie Flo and the kindly neighbor.”

  “Crumbs,” he repeated, even more feelingly, “you don’t want much. We’re talking ten, fifteen years back, and in London.” Inspector Poole took possession of the file. “It’s a thought, I can’t deny it. More’s the pity.”

  On Christmas Eve afternoon, Len Poole rapped jauntily at Jill’s office door. “London doesn’t get any better. I’ve had two days up there, and how those lads in the Met stand the life is beyond me. Noise, pollution, bad manners, homeless beggars everywhere. But I did find a helpful social worker, they do exist even if it’s an endangered species, and this chap had a good memory-

  “Great idea of yours—but I’m afraid James Edwardes. Mitzi’s allegedly wicked stepfather, doesn’t live at Grand Drive. He works the fairs in the Republic of Ireland, hasn’t been in England for years.”

  Hitching half his skinny rump onto the corner of the desk, Inspector Poole added innocently, “No trace of Auntie Flo. But I’ll tell you who did have a Grand Drive address until recently—Anthony Challis.”

  Since he had to have worked hard and fast and was full of himself over it, Jill Tierce played along. “Challis?”

  “He lodged with Mitzi’s family in the eighties. Freelance electrician, good earner, about to get married. But then Mitzi Field, only she was little Dorothy then, accused nice Mr. Challis of doing things to her. Her mother called the police, and then Dorothy admitted it wasn’t Challis after all, it was her stepfather who kept raping her.” Len Poole grimaced distastefully. “Ugly... my tame social worker said he’d never believed Challis had touched her. What it was, they discovered, Edwardes not only abused her, he practically brainwashed the poor kid, said she’d be struck down if she told on him. When it got too much for her, she accused Tony Challis—ironically enough, because he was kind, would never hurt her. She’d just wanted it out in the open, so the grownups would make it stop. Ruining Challis wasn’t on her agenda, if she had such a thing, but that was the effect.”

  “After Dorothy-Mitzi was taken into council care, her mother threw Edwardes out, and Tony Challis went to other digs. No charges were brought in the end—the child was considered unreliable on account of changing her story. Rumors spread, mud stuck, Challis’s fiancée told him to get lost, his regular customers followed suit...”

  “Ugly,” Jill agreed.

  “Gets worse. Challis is a Wessex man, he talked a lot about this part of the world when he was lodging with Mitzi’s folks. Maybe that’s why she stuck around, having drifted here. Anyway, Challis took to drink, hit the gutter before he straightened up. Returned to his native heath, as posh books put it, found work as a janitor for Coastal Properties. They own several apartment houses on Grand Drive and gave him a basement flat in the end one on the left. Too dark and cramped for letting, and it gave them a good excuse to pay him peanuts.”

  “Mitzi Field wasn’t looking for Challis—if she’d had a grain of sense she would have kept well clear—but she found him. Once a month he picked up supplies from a discount hardware store on her beat in dockland. He didn’t notice her, which is natural; the last time he’d seen Dorothy, she was a child. But she must have seen him going in and out of the hardware place and pumped somebody there, discovered where he worked.”

  Len Poole sighed and shook his head. “Just as you said, it was Christmas. Tony Challis is watching TV in his basement one night, and suddenly this shabby little tart is at the side door, saying, I’m Dorothy, Mr. Challis, don’t you remember me? Wanted to say sorry, hoped he was doing all right now, she hadn’t wanted to make trouble for him. And so on.”

  “Challis says, and I believe him, he was in a daze while she talked to him. ‘Noises, she was making noises,’ he told me. She was dead when the actual words came back to him. Mitzi left, and for a minute—the chap’s a drinker, mark you—he wondered whether he’d been hallucinating. Then he wished he had been. Challis hadn’t hated Dorothy, he understood she was a victim who dragged him down with her, no malice involved. But she’d become Mitzi... ruining him and still ending up like that, that was past bearing.”

  “Next moment, it seemed to him. he was standing over her in the street, holding one of those little stone lions: half the big houses along the drive had them on either side of the porch. He had the lion by its head, the square base was allover blood.”

  “He accepted that he must have killed her, but he didn’t feel like a murderer. All he felt was scared witless. He slipped back to his basement, washed the lion, and put it back in place. Then he prayed. Been praying ever since.”

  “From Met Police records and that social worker. I got the names of five people linked to Field when she was a child. Only one was among the residents of Grand Drive at the time she was killed. No problem finding him, he didn’t move far, one of those new council flats near the marina. Soon as I said who I was. Challis goes. ‘Thank God, now I can tell somebody.’ ”

  Jill Tierce addressed her folded hands, almost inaudibly. “She wanted to make amends for what happened all those years ago, and he killed her for trying?”

  Inspector Poole slid off the desk, his expression mixing wonder and compassion over her naivete. “If you can make sense of the why and wherefore, be sure to tell Challis. He can’t sort it out. It’s people, Jill... she was one of them that gets sentimental at Christmas, never considered she’d be opening a wound. As for him, he wasn’t the kind man who’d lodged with her mum. Not anymore. She stirred up an embittered semialcoholic, temper overdue to snap.”

  Len Poole hesitated, cleared his throat. “Nobody’s fault, luv. not even his. Though he’ll go away for it.”

  “We got a result, which is all that matters.”

  “Not what I meant—though there is always that, at the end of the day.”

  Inspector Tierce’s day, apparently over, had a postscript.

  She’d wanted to watch the black and white movie of Scrooge for the fifth Christmas Eve in a row but went to bed instead. Her father would be calling “fairly early” to collect her for Christmas lunch, meaning crack of dawn.

  The phone woke her. The caller sounded drunk, though on nothing more than girlish high spirits, it emerged.

  “We’ve just got back from midnight Mass,
now we can be the first to wish you Merry Christmas.”

  “Wha? Who is it?” Jill pulled the alarm clock radio round on the bedside table, sending paperbacks, a bottle of cough mixture, and her pain tablets cascading to the floor. “It’s twenty to two!” The voice’s identity registered belatedly. “Connie, I’ll kill you.”

  “Don’t be like that. I rang him after all, you see. And I’m so happy.”

  “Bully for you. What in the world are you on about?”

  “Noel, of course. You let his name slip the other night—”

  “Did I, by gum.” Fully awake and up on one elbow, Inspector Tierce rolled gummy eyes. “That was very unprofessional.”

  “Sarum’s an unusual surname, only one in the local phonebook, and we talked for hours—” Following squeaks and a rattle, Noel Sarum came on the phone.

  “And here I am! Well, I’ll be leaving in a minute,” he added sheepishly.

  Another interlude of cryptic noises and then Connie French trilled, “He’s so stuffy, of course he’s not leaving at this time of the morning.”

  She said something aside, answering Noel in the background. “He wants you to know we’re engaged and says I’m indiscreet, the idiot. I say. you must come to our wedding, it’ll be February or March. You have to, you’re the matchmaker.”

  “Let’s talk about it next year. I’m pleased you are pleased. Connie. Tell Noel to go easy on the law in future: he owes me. ‘Bye.”

  Lying back in the darkness, a phrase from the Bible popped into her head, a Sunday school fragment clear as if spoken for her benefit: “Out of the strong came forth sweetness. “Something about bees using the remains of a savage lion as their hive. Why think of that? Mitzi Field was battered with a stone lion. Nothing sweet there, that was not the connection.

  Connie was gorgeously happy, and Noel worshipped her. It couldn’t last, euphoria didn’t, yet it was a promising prelude to something better. They might fight eventually, but they would not be lonely.

  That was what had triggered the parable of bees and a beast of prey. Out of evil, good can come. “Merry Christmas,” Jill Tierce whispered to the pillow.

  CHRISTMAS PARTY – Martin Werner

  People in the advertising business said the Christmas party at French & Saunders was the social event of the year. For it wasn’t your ordinary holiday office party. Not the kind where the staff gets together for a few mild drinks out of paper cups, some sandwiches sent in from the local deli, and a long boring speech by the company president. At F&S it was all very different: just what you’d expect from New York’s hottest advertising agency.

  The salaries there were the highest in town, the accounts were strictly blue chip, and the awards the agency won over the years filled an entire boardroom. And the people, of course, were the best, brightest, and most creative that money could buy.

  With that reputation to uphold, the French & Saunders Christmas party naturally had to be the biggest and splashiest in the entire industry.

  Year after year, that’s the way it was. Back in the late Seventies, when discos were all the rage, the company took over Numero Uno. the club people actually fought over to get in. Another year, F&S hired half the New York Philharmonic to provide entertainment. And in 1989, the guest bartenders were Mel Gibson. Madonna, and the cast of LA. Law.

  There was one serious side to the party. That’s when the president reviewed the year’s business, announced how much the annual bonus would be, and then named the Board’s choices for People of the Year, the five lucky employees who made the most significant contributions to the agency’s success during the past twelve months.

  The unwritten part to this latter (although everyone knew it, anyway) was that each one of the five would receive a very special individual bonus— some said as high as $50, 000 apiece.

  Then French & Saunders bought fifteen floors in the tallest, shiniest new office tower on Broadway, the one that had actually been praised by the N. Y. Times architecture critic.

  The original plan was to hold the party in the brand-new offices that were to be ready just before Christmas. A foolish idea, as it turned out, because nothing in New York is ever finished when it’s promised. The delay meant the agency had to scramble and find a new party site—either that, or make do in the half finished building itself.

  Amazingly—cleverly? —enough, that was the game plan the party committee decided to follow. Give the biggest, glitziest party in agency history amid half finished offices in which paneless windows looked out to the open skies, where debris and building supplies stood piled up in every corner, and where doors opened on nothing but a web of steel girders and the sidewalk seventy floors below.

  Charlie Evanston, one of the company’s senior vice-presidents (he had just reached the ripe old of age of fifty), was chosen to be party chairman. He couldn’t have been happier. For Charlie had a deepdown feeling that this was finally going to be his year. After being passed over time and again for one of those five special Christmas bonuses, he just knew he was going to go home a winner.

  Poor Charlie.

  In mid-November—the plans for the party proceeding on schedule— the agency suddenly lost their multi-million-dollar Daisy Fresh Soap account, no reason given. Charlie had been the supervisor on the account for years, and although he couldn’t be held personally responsible for the loss a few people (enemies!) shook their heads and wondered if maybe someone else, someone a little stronger—and younger—couldn’t have held on to the business.

  Two weeks later, another showpiece account—the prestigious Maximus Computer Systems—left the agency. Unheard of.

  The trade papers gave away the reason in the one dreaded word “kickbacks.” Two French & Saunders television producers who had worked on the account had been skimming it for years.

  Again, Charlie’s name came up. Not that he had anything remotely to do with the scandal. The trouble was that he personally had hired both offenders. And people remembered.

  There’s a superstition that events like these happen in threes, so it was only a question of time before the next blow. And, sure enough, two weeks before Christmas, it happened. A murder, no less. A F&S writer shot his wife, her lover, and himself.

  With that, French & Saunders moved from front-page sidelines in the trade papers straight to screaming headlines in every tabloid in town. In less than a month, it had been seriously downgraded from one of New York’s proudest enterprises to that most dreaded of advertising fates—an agency “in trouble.”

  It was now a week before Christmas and every F&S employee was carrying around his or her own personal lump of cold, clammy fear. The telltale signs were everywhere. People making secret telephone calls to headhunters and getting their resumes in order. Bitter jokes about the cold winter and selling apples on street corners told in the elevators and washrooms. Rumors that a buyout was in the making and nobody was safe.

  And yet, strange as it sounds, there were those who still thought there would be a happy ending. At the Christmas party, perhaps. A last-minute announcement that everything was as before—the agency was in good shape and, just like always, everyone would get that Christmas bonus.

  Charlie was one of the most optimistic. He didn’t know why. Just a gut feeling that the world was still full of Christmas miracles and, bad times or not, he was going to be one of F&S’s five magical People of the Year.

  Poor Charlie.

  A few days before the party, his phone rang. It was the voice of J. Stewart French, president and chairman of the board.

  “Hi, Charlie. Got a minute?”

  “Sure.”

  “I wonder if you’d mind coming up to my office. I’ve got a couple of things I’d like to talk to you about.”

  Nothing menacing about that, thought Charlie. J probably wants to discuss the party. The food. The caterers. The security measures that would be needed so that no one would be in any danger in those half finished offices.

  Very neatly, very efficiently, Charlie got
out his files and headed upstairs. When he arrived in the president’s office—it was the only one that had been completely finished (vulgar but expensive, thought Charlie)—J was on the phone, his face pale and drawn, nothing like the way he usually looked, with that twelve-months-a-year suntan he was so proud of. He nodded over the phone. “Sit down, Charlie, sit down.”

  Charlie sank into one of the comfortable $12,000 chairs beside the desk and waited. After a minute the conversation ended and J turned to give him his full attention. Charlie had known J for fifteen years and had never seen him so nervous and ill at ease.

  Then he spoke.

  “Charlie, they tell me you’ve really got the Christmas party all together. Looks like it’ll be a smash.”

  “We’re hoping so, J.”

  “Well, we can certainly use some good times around here. I don’t have to tell you that. It’s been a bad, bad year.”

  “Things’ll be better. I know it.”

  “Do you really think so, Charlie? Do you? I’d like to believe that, too. That’s why this party means so much to me. To all of us. Morale—”

  “I know.”

  “Well, you’ve certainly done your part. More than your part. That’s why I called you in.”

  Here it comes, thought Charlie, here comes my special Christmas bonus! Ahead of time, before anyone else hears about it!

  “I wanted you to be one of the first to know. The Board and I have agreed that, even with all our troubles, there’ll be something extra in everybody’s paycheck again this year. Nothing like before, of course, but it will be something.”

  “That’s wonderful.”

  “Yeah. Wonderful. We monkeyed around with the budget and found we could come up with a few bucks. The problem is, we’ll have to make some cuts here and there.”

  “Cuts?”

  “Well, for one thing, I’m afraid there won’t be any of those special bonuses this year, Charlie. And I’ll level with you—you were down for one. After all these years, you had really earned it. I can’t tell you how sorry—”