Crime at Christmas

by Jack Adrian (ed)

  One day just after I had successfully solved the mystery of the Poisoned Doughnut, in Tooting Bee, I found the Great Man in our consulting-room at Shaker Street, begging Jotson to narrate the tale for the benefit of his readers. Jotson refused.

  Therefore, I insisted on recording this amazing case myself. . . [And on pocketing the fee usually awarded to poor Jotson.—Ed.]

  For long Dr Jotson had been run-down and depressed. Ever since that day when he left his best pair of silver-plated scissors inside the patient upon whom he had operated for liver trouble, he had not been himself.

  For some time I must admit it did not occur to me that there was anything else wrong with poor Jotson save worry for the loss of his patient and the scissors. But shortly before Christmas it was borne on me that something else was amiss.

  One night as I sat in my armchair playing Schnoffenstein's Five-Finger Exercise in B Flat on my violin, curious rumbling noises assailed my ear. At first I thought the G string wanted tightening; then it occurred to me that the strange, deep sounds were proceeding from the next room.

  I ceased playing. Creeping stealthily towards the bed-room door, my fiddle grasped in my right hand ready for any emergency, I stooped down with the skilled grace of long practice, and applied my ear to the keyhole.

  Now I could hear the rumbling clearly. Dr Jotson was talking to himself. Throwing open the door, I stood a tall and, I hope, dignified figure in my purple dressing-gown with the little green birds on the holly branches round the hem.

  'Jotson' I cried. 'You are distraught.'

  My old friend Jotson, who had been pacing the bed-room, stopped, his hands behind him. There was a startled look on his face, his sandy, walrus moustache drooping guiltily.

  'Sholmes,' he said, 'you have been listening. What have you heard?'

  'Aah.' I said. 'What! Well might I ask you a question. What are you concealing from me, Jotson? What have you behind your back?'

  'He, he, he! Only a couple of patches,' replied Jotson, faintly laughing at his own feeble joke. 'Now pray go and resume your amateur vivisection on my guinea pigs!'

  Candidly, I felt offended, and I left the room. But I resolved to keep my eye on my old and faithful friend for any further symptoms before formally notifying Colney Hatch.

  Gradually, as the days sped by, I became more convinced that Jotson was ailing mentally. Several times I heard him mumbling behind closed doors. Occasionally, too, he left the house in the evenings on some pretext or another. But I felt that when Jotson needed my help he would tell me. So I snuffed my cocaine, played my violin, and solved a couple of dozen poison mysteries which had baffled Scotland Yard and the Continental police, and temporarily left Jotson to look after himself.

  On Christmas Eve Dr Jotson made one more of his mysterious disappearances. For long I sat before the fire in the consulting-room, casually perusing the evening paper as I smoked my pipe. Outside the snow snowed and the waits waited—I was hard up that Christmas.

  Suddenly a paragraph on an inner news page riveted my attention. It was headed: 'Proposed River Trip for Crown Prince', and read: 'The Crown Prince of Schlacca-Splittzen, who arrived this afternoon in London from Paris, has expressed a desire to see the London County Council Hall from the river. He remarked to reporters that his view of this magnificent structure from the railway reminded him of the municipal Torture House in Tchmnomzyte, the capital of his own state of Schlacca-Splittzen, which lies to the south of Russia. The Crown Prince is being carefully guarded by Inspector Pinkeye and three other well-known detectives from Scotland Yard. These precautions are being taken because it is rumoured that the Schlacca-Splittzen Co-operative Society of Anarchists have threatened to drop a bomb into his porridge if he visited Britain's shores.'

  As I read this little paragraph a dark suspicion entered my mind, and there I determined that Jotson must be watched.

  It was at eleven o'clock on Christmas Eve. Mrs Spudson, her hair in curl-papers, had retired to rest. I damped down the fire, covered the canary's cage, turned the consulting-room lights out, chained up the dog, put out the cat, and left the key under the front doormat for Jotson. Then I went to my room.

  I was about to doff my dressing-gown when I heard Jotson enter the house. Slowly he came upstairs, and I heard him switch on the consulting-room light. Leaving my room, I crept along the passage and quickly opened the door of the consulting-room.

  As I did so Jotson leaped from the hearth as though stung.

  'Great porous plasters!' he gasped. 'What a fright you gave me! For a moment I thought you were the ghost of Old Man Scrooge. You see, I've been attending the recital of the "Christmas Carol.'" He, he, he!'

  The halting words of my old friend and his musical cackle told me he was not speaking the truth.

  'Jotson,' I said sternly, 'you've no more been to any recital to-night than I've been to the tax-collector to pay next year's income-tax in advance. Now, tell me. Where have you been?'

  As I spoke, my trained eye swept the fire grate. From the flames and ashes which I saw there I deduced that Jotson had been burning something. Quickly I averted my gaze so that he should not know I knew.

  My old friend tugged nervously at his moustache.

  'It's nothing, really, my dear Sholmes,' he said nervously. 'If I told you, you would only laugh at me. And I hate being laughed at!'

  'Nonsense, Jotson!' I said heartily. 'Everyone laughs at you—er—except your patients, of course. And they usually don't last long enough to laugh long.'

  This I said in a gentle, bantering tone to cheer Jotson up. To my surprise, it seemed to have the opposite effect, and he stumped out of the room in a huff.

  That was the opportunity I wanted. In a moment my nose was in the fender. Quickly I peered about. Before you could say 'forcemeat stuffing' I had found a narrow strip of torn paper bearing some typewritten words. Hearing Jotson's footsteps returning I hastily crammed it in my pocket, and was innocently cracking Brazil nuts with my teeth when he entered the consulting-room to apologise for his former rudeness.

  I said nothing about my discovery, but in my bedroom I examined the find carefully. To my stupefaction the typewritten words, which were in English, read as follows:

  ' . . .this honour. You have been chosen, comrade. See you fail not.'

  Ding, dong! Clatter Bang! Ding dong!

  The merry Christmas bells were chiming as Jotson and I met at breakfast on the following morning and exchanged greetings.

  My eagle eye was quick to notice that Dr Jotson was not himself at breakfast. Quite absent-mindedly he helped me to the larger half of the breakfast kipper, and then gave me the first cup from the coffee-pot, instead of the usual dregs. All my old fears for my poor friend's condition returned with renewed force.

  Sitting in my chair, daintily flicking the kipper-bones from the lapel of my mauve dressing-gown, I watched Jotson as he went to the window and tried to entice the friendship of a robin redbreast by means of a fish-head.

  'What do you say to a walk round Marylebone Station or the Waxworks, to get an appetite for our Christmas dinner, Jotson!' I remarked casually.

  Jotson's walrus moustache gave a perceptible quiver.

  'Er—I'm afraid you will have to excuse me, my dear Sholmes!' he stammered. 'A new patient of mine, a dear old lady who is suffering from a temporary attack of suspended vibration of the right bozookum, and wishes me to test her high tension battery to enable her to get 2LO for the Christmas glee singers. I'm afraid—'

  'Tut, tut! I said. 'I'll come with you, Jotson.'

  'No, my dear Sholmes,' said Jotson very firmly. 'I shouldn't think of taking you to a case like this on Christmas Day. Why don't you take the bus up to the Zoological Gardens, or, if you prefer it, remain in front of the fire cracking a few monkey-nuts yourself?'

  I said no more, but I thought a lot. For a time I sat myself in the armchair.

  Speedily it became apparent that Jotson was up to some game. It seemed almost impossible to keep track of his
movements. He was a slippery as an eel in an old pail. But at last I heard him stealthily take his hat and coat from the peg in the hall and leave the house.

  Within a minute I was tracking my old friend down Shaker Street. Dr Jotson had a large brown paper parcel under his right arm. The parcel looked innocent enough. What did that parcel contain? That I was determined to find out.

  Poor Jotson was worried. I deduced that from the absent-minded way that he pushed the face of a little boy who asked him for a cigarette-card. Stopping at the corner outside the Goat and Gooseberry Bush, he hesitated a moment, and then leaped on a passing bus. I waited until he had gone inside with his parcel; then I swung myself on the step and darted aloft.

  Peering from the bus top, I saw Jotson alight at Charing Cross. I waited a few moments until the bus had started to move again, and then I ran nimbly down the steps. As I did so, with consummate cunning I knocked off the conductor's hat and leaped into the road. As he prepared to stop the bus I swiftly tossed him my own cap, and retrieved his fallen property. Then replacing the peaked, blue cap on my head and gumming a false black moustache to my upper lip, I followed in the track of my old friend.

  Once Jotson stopped and looked back. All he saw, apparently, was an attenuated bus-conductor about to turn into a nearby chop-house.

  Waiting in the shelter of the doorway a minute, I emerged and followed him again. As I watched his stocky form stumping down Whitehall towards the Houses of Parliament, a gust of wind blew the paper from under his arm. A white, earthenware pudding basin was revealed, with a cloth over the top of it.

  After a vain attempt to retrieve the paper Jotson went on his way, looking uncommonly foolish walking down Whitehall holding that pudding-cloth, with the basin swinging at his side.

  At first the sight of that pudding-basin brought a sense of relief to me. Then a horrible thought occurred to me. This was no pudding-basin. It was a bomb! Rapidly I reviewed in my mind the events leading up to this Christmas morning walk. I remembered Jotson's curious mumblings. I remembered the paragraph about the Crown Prince of Schlacca-Splittzen. I called to mind the mysterious message on the scrap of paper I had taken from the fire grate. With a bomb in that innocent-looking bag, Jotson was on his way to the river to fulfil his dread mission.

  My friend strode firmly to the Thames Embankment.

  Quite a crowd was lining the parapet.

  'What's the excitement?' I heard him ask a low-looking ruffian.

  'It's that there Crown Prince of Slaccy-Splittem,' replied the fellow. 'He's just about to land at the jetty.'

  Jotson pushed his way through the crowd to the parapet. I kept close at his heels, my heart hammering against my ribs.

  With a gasp of dismay I saw Jotson hoist the pudding-basin on to the parapet and give it a gentle shove.

  'Stop!' I cried, and thrust my hand forward.

  I must have diverted Jotson's aim, for the basin struck against a jutting ledge of the Embankment. There was no time to duck, for I feared the next moment there would be an explosion that would bring about the end of all things as far as we were concerned. To my surprise, however, the basin broke, and out shot a great plum-pudding. It struck a boatman standing on the jetty waiting for the prince's launch right on the back of the neck and burst into fragments, while the onlookers gasped with astonishment. Then when they realised what had happened, a great shout of laughter burst forth. The boatman was annoyed—very! He looked aloft, with a great piece of pudding crowning his head, and passed a few remarks totally unconnected with that 'peace on earth and good will to men' which one associates with the Yuletide season. Then, as the fellow turned to help with the mooring of the prince's launch, I grasped Jotson by the hand and dragged him away.

  'You thundering idiot!' I said. 'What do you mean by it all?'

  'Sholmes!' cried Jotson. There was both surprise and disappointment in his tone.

  And then bit by bit I dragged the story out of Jotson. He knew that Mrs Spudson had made a Christmas pudding and that she would insist on him and me partaking of it at the Christmas dinner.

  'Knowing your good nature, Sholmes,' he said, 'I knew that you would have eaten some of it to avoid offending our landlady. You did last year, and what was the consequence? For two days you groaned on the couch with the collywobbles. This year I determined at all costs I would get rid of the Christmas pudding. As a medical man I knew it was positively dangerous, but I didn't want to drag you into the matter, nor did I wish to offend Mrs Spudson. And so I quietly lifted the basin containing the pudding, intending to dispose of it in the first possible way that presented itself. As you know, in desperation I finally toppled it over into the river.'

  Then I told him how his rumblings had roused my suspicions, and the finding of the torn piece of typewritten paper had corroborated them.

  Now it was Jotson's turn to laugh.

  ‘’Pon my word, Sholmes!' he chuckled. 'I didn't know you were so worried about me! You see, a fortnight ago I joined the Marylebone Dramatic Society, and was offered the role of Koffituppe in the play, 'Crown Jewels in Pawn,' by Msmooji, the famous Russian dramatist. Afraid you would laugh at me, I would retire to my bed-room to study my role. Finally, in disgust at my inability to learn the part, I tore it up and threw it on the fire. The typewritten piece of paper you found was a portion of the play.'

  'But why on earth didn't you tell me all this before, my dear fellow?' I cried.

  'Because,' answered Jotson, 'I should have had to acknowledge failure, and, as you know, no man likes to do that.'

  'Ah, well,' I laughed, 'the mystery is solved! And we can safely return to Shaker Street to pull the wish-bone of a turkey without the fear of having to partake of any of the amazing stodgy concoction which Mrs Spudson calls Christmas pudding!'

  Back to Table of Contents

  17 – The Great Christmas Train Mystery by ANTHONY BURGESS

  THE GREAT CHAM of twentieth-century letters? In a mystery anthology? Well, why not? Although a late starter (nearly 40 when his first book was published), Anthony Burgess (real name Anthony Burgess Wilson, b. 1917) has tackled most literary forms over the past thirty years—essays, reviews, editing chores, librettos (not to mention the music to go with them), biographies, histories, critical analyses, books about music, books about books, books about books about books, books about James Joyce.

  And fiction. Quantities of fiction. Satirical fiction, science fiction, semi-autobiographical fiction, experimental fiction, pseudonymous fiction (for which he wrote a rave review under his own name, then got thrown off the paper by an irate and humourless editor when twigged), blockbuster-length fiction, novella-length fiction, short fiction. It should come as no great surprise to discover the odd mystery hidden away somewhere amongst his huge, and hugely readable, output—although I'll admit that stumbling across this one was a matter of the purest serendipity.

  Having tracked down a copy of the British digest magazine Suspense with Julian Symons's 'The Santa Claus Club' in it, I spotted Burgess's name on the contents page.

  Was it the same Anthony Burgess? If so, was it a real mystery? If so, and much more to the point (given certain mainstream authors' lamentable conviction that genre fiction's an easy number), was it any good? Yes to the first; yes to the second (a clever, and unusual, con-trick); and absolutely yes to the third. Here is a neat little tale, tellingly told (watch how Burgess perfectly captures his narrator's fed-uppedness through his use of downbeat dialogue), with a decided nip to it. . .

  THIS story's as true as I'm standing here with this pint in my right hand and my left foot on this bar-rail. It's rails that put me in mind of it. It happened to me when I was a dining-car steward on British Railways a few years back. It happened on Christmas Day.

  I suppose you'd regard it as funny when you come to think of it—that people should travel by railway, quite long distances too, on Christmas Day, the same as if it was any other day. But people do it, quite a lot of them. They have their reasons—quite well-dressed
people a lot of them are, too—which I suppose they might be willing to tell if you asked them nicely. But really it's none of your business and it's none of mine. Right. Ours not to reason why. Right. You do your job and I'll do mine and no questions asked. Right.

  When you come to think of it, there could be a lot of reasons. They could be working, some of them, late on Christmas Eve, and promised to be with their mothers and dads for Christmas Day and no late trains to precisely where they're going on Christmas Eve. Some of them could just have been let out. Nick, hospital, what have you. . .

  There are all sorts of reasons.

  But this was the first time I'd ever worked on Christmas Day on the railways, and it all looked a bit weird to me. They looked almost a bit like ghosts, getting on the train at all the different stops, dressed up, hearty, but still like ghosts because, as I saw it, they shouldn't have been there. They should have been at home by the fire, pulling crackers or cracking nuts or putting the turkey in the oven or getting the port out of the sideboard cupboard. As I say, there was something, to my mind at the time, a bit weird about it.

  Anyway, there was a nice special Christmas Day lunch laid on that day, though only one sitting as was only proper, because the train was not exactly jam-packed as it would have been on an ordinary day, and one sitting could take care of all who wanted lunch easy enough. Right. The menu was all decorated with holly and mistletoe, and there was gravy soup, turkey with stuffing, spuds done three ways, brussels, Christmas pud with brandy sauce. It was all right, nicely done and plenty of it. We started to serve lunch at Reading, and there was quite a number sitting down to it, both in the first class and what is now second, though it used to be third.

  The customers were really jolly about it all. It wasn't a bit like what it is on ordinary days—you know, when nobody talks to anybody and they drink their bottled beer like as if it was medicine. Somebody had a box of crackers, which British Railways didn't provide in those days, and soon there were fancy hats and false noses, and streamers floating all over the place, with loud laughter and what not. There was even a bit of mistletoe that somebody had, and festive screams rose high as we rattled over the points. People ordered cocktails and sherry and bottles of claret and sauterne. People with winy voices kept saying, 'Your very good health, steward, and a very merry Christmas to you and yours.'