Red Christmas

by Reginald Hill

  ‘Of course. By the way, for the record, I don’t suppose you’ve got the faintest idea what that young man was doing in your bed in your bedroom?’

  ‘Not the faintest! But that reminds me—the excitement put it quite out of my mind.’

  Swiftly she told him about her encounter with Suzie Leclerc.

  ‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘Any other snippets you’ve overlooked?’

  For a moment he thought she was going to say something else, but she hesitated briefly and the moment was gone.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said.

  ‘OK. See you later.’

  Gloomily he made his way along the corridor towards the conference room, stopping only to confirm that Dave, the coach-guard, was in position to keep an eye on Arabella when she left the bedroom. It would be nice to trust her absolutely, but it was a luxury he couldn’t afford. This was his first big operation and already it was a disaster. Even without the attack on young Stephen things had been bad. Old Swinburne had been desperately keen to put up a good show under the scrutiny of some of Europe’s most highly critical security men. The two deaths would cause him acute professional discomfort, but this was nothing compared with the personal anger the attack on his son had produced.

  He wasn’t looking forward to the interview with him. Meanwhile there were other things to worry about. Sawyer was on the loose somewhere, almost certainly in the house. No one unequipped could survive outside for long on a night like this, and the nearest shelter was the village nearly ten miles away. He seriously doubted whether even Colley could make it. Sawyer certainly couldn’t.

  The thought brought him some small satisfaction. If the killer was in the house there was no way of evading capture. Boswell had already started his men searching, a task aided by the fact that the party below showed no sign of breaking up. They were back on the country dancing again, fiddles and harp going like billy-oh! Only Arabella of those not actively involved in the conference suspected anything untoward was going on. Except poor Stephen. And the Hislop woman. Damn! One was too many. But at least if Sawyer could be found it might reassure the delegates that they could proceed in safety.

  If he could be found in the next fifteen minutes it might even take the edge off Swinburne’s wrath. He increased his pace, his jaw set with determination.

  Sawyer watched him go through the crack of a barely opened door. He grinned widely. In his left hand was a half-eaten turkey leg, in his right a dull black automatic. He now slipped this into the scarlet cummerbund he wore round his waist and took both hands to the turkey.

  ‘He’s tougher than he looks, that cookie,’ he grunted as he chewed.

  ‘You’re a fool, Tarantyev,’ said the man behind him calmly. Sawyer laughed at the affront.

  ‘This is the life, huh? Food, drink, and all the excitement you can manage!’

  ‘You were supposed to be on the outside, observing,’ said the other, ignoring him. ‘That’s all. Not drawing attention to yourself, then killing those sent to investigate. Not foolhardily pushing yourself into the house.’

  ‘It was all set up,’ protested Sawyer without heat.

  ‘As a second line of attack if for any reason I did not make it,’ answered the other. ‘Then to kill Wardle! And the boy. We could have used the boy.’

  ‘That’s what them Frenchies thought too,’ laughed Sawyer. ‘You think there’s anything to drink in here?’

  ‘For Godsake! This was supposed to be a quiet operation.We were here to observe, note and report. Unobtrusively. Undetected. I feared the worst when they told me Tarantyev was in charge of the operation. But this is worse even than I feared! I see now why you had to get out of America so quickly.’

  ‘Where I had been for seven years,’ said Sawyer, serious now. ‘And where I had done more damage in seven than Lonsdale or Philby did here in twenty! Let me tell you something, sonny; the way I work, no one likes to give the goahead. They’re all like you, a bunch of frigging filing clerks. But they like my results, oh yes. So they put me in charge. Remember that. You know my authority. You don’t know the full picture of this operation. So just take orders. And do it my way.’

  ‘Pah! Look at you! Like Douglas Fairbanks!’

  ‘Yes, sir. And I always get the girl. Now you get back down below and make with the merriment. I’ve got things to do. You’ll know when I need you. These fools think they’re chasing me. What they don’t know is, I’m chasing them!’

  He laughed freely and uninhibitedly. The other man, his face wreathed with grave doubts, carefully opened the door and peered out.

  ‘Good luck,’ he said reluctantly. ‘Be careful. They will search all the rooms. Or the owner might come back.’

  ‘Not to this one,’ said Sawyer with a smile. ‘This pad belonged to Wardle.’

  The other man shuddered as he made his way down the stairs towards the lights and the music. This affair had long since passed the boundaries of what he thought of as espionage. He had heard distantly of Tarantyev’s prima donna approach; had dismissed much of what he heard as the hyperbole of nostalgia. But now quite clearly any share of control here had passed from him. The kudos, if any, would be Tarantyev’s. The most he could hope for was survival.

  His politics did not pay much heed to non-earthly affairs, but he said a little prayer almost unconsciously as he reentered the ballroom.

  10

  The instant you discover him write to me immediately … If he attempts to run away from you, knock him down or lock him up. You have my full authority.

  MR. SAMUEL PICKWICK

  Christmas Day dawned, or rather the backcloth of the driving snow shaded gradually from black to grey and stuck there, like a pantomime transformation scene gone wrong. The party started to break up shortly after 2 a.m., though it was a good two hours before all the guests had retired to their rooms. Three times Boswell’s seven men had gone through Dingley Dell, working in pairs for safety, with Boswell himself making up the fourth pair. By the time the guests started going to bed he had to admit failure. Continuing the search seemed a waste of time and energy. In addition there was the risk of alerting the genuine holidaymakers to the fact that something odd was going on. Even the professionals seemed to have enjoyed themselves sufficiently to miss most of the comings and goings, though Boswell knew that in any case they would be too professional to reveal that they had noticed. Only Leclerc, who had either not been drinking or had a built-in imperviousness to alcohol, had sought Boswell out on the pretext of some procedural query on the next day’s business.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Boswell, with as much unconcern as he could muster. ‘There’s a session from ten-thirty until twelve. Then a break for the roast goose and Christmas pud. Followed by another meeting between three-thirty and six, before the evening festivities start.’

  ‘These interruptions for gluttony!’ said Leclerc, pursing his lips in disapproval. Then, casually, ‘Mr. Wardle, our very jolly host. He seems to have left us early tonight. Swinburne too.’

  ‘Saving their strength for tomorrow. I mean today,’ laughed Boswell.

  ‘Very wise. Pah! that German pig! See how he sweats!’

  The wassail perhaps had loosened Leclerc’s tongue sufficiently for his prejudices to slide out, thought Boswell, watching the ungainly assent of the stairs by a very red and merry Herr Bear. His wife, impassive as ever, came behind and caught him whenever he fell.

  ‘Good night,’ said Leclerc, and walked away before the German could reach them. Suzie had disappeared from the scene completely some time earlier. Clearly the implication of what Arabella had seen (if he could believe her account) was that the Frenchwoman knew of the injury to Stephen Swinburne. But it would have to wait till morning now.

  Mrs. Hislop had listened in disbelieving silence to Boswell’s suggestion that Stephen’s injury was the result of an accidental fall. But she seemed ready to comply with his request for silence on the matter for the sake of the other guests.

  ‘He should be all right,
I think,’ she said. ‘Call me if you need me. Otherwise I’m just an ordinary guest.’

  She had then gone off to look into her uncle’s room to check that he was all right. Boswell had walked with her along the corridor and as she entered Bloodworth’s room after a perfunctory knock, he glanced over her shoulder into the interior.

  What he saw took him by surprise. Sitting on the edge of the bed in deep conversation with the man was Arabella.

  Ridiculously, as he walked away, his main feeling was one of jealousy. There had been something very intimate about the scene. His mind began to piece together fragmentary hypotheses in which Arabella and Bloodworth were fellow-agents, old friends, lovers even—though he kept well away from that one. How old was the fellow? and how sick? It made useful cover, illness. You were upstairs while everyone else was downstairs. Very handy.

  The matter was still very much on his mind when he appeared for his interview with Swinburne. It was short and fairly nasty, in a civilised kind of way. Swinburne listened to Boswell’s account of matters in silence, then announced it was his rule never to interfere with the work of operatives in the field. On the other hand, it was also his rule that incompetence received short shrift. He would expect, in the short term, solutions; in the longer term, flawless security arrangements.

  ‘I never liked this Dingley Dell idea much,’ he said finally. ‘I was persuaded against my judgment.’

  ‘We all pay for our moments of weakness,’ said Boswell stolidly.

  It was a sour note on which to end a sour interview. This and fatigue in part accounted for the acrimony with which he greeted Arabella whom he met a few minutes later walking down the corridor to her new room.

  She smiled rather wanly at him, but all he could manage in reply was, ‘Is the old man tired out then?’

  ‘So you still spy on me,’ she said levelly.

  ‘You flatter yourself. We watch everything suspicious.’

  ‘And I am suspicious?’

  ‘Certainly. At least, your actions are.’

  ‘Is visiting a sick man suspicious?’

  ‘Sick!’ said Boswell contemptuously. ‘How sick is sick, I wonder. I suppose it was you who put him on to the peephole?’

  ‘I suppose it was. He spends a lot of time in his bedroom. He deserves to have his privacy respected. We all do.’

  ‘Privacy! If we had respected privacy a bit less, Wardle might still be alive,’ he said accusingly.

  ‘That’s not fair,’ she answered, flushed with anger.

  ‘No. Being dead’s never fair.’

  He walked away. Another sour note to end on. And it had brought him no nearer to solving the problem of Bloodworth. If there were a problem. Perhaps he was going out of his way to look for problems? He didn’t know. All he knew was that Wardle was dead. The following winter would have seen him safely retired. Now he was at the bottom of a pond. It was too dangerous to attempt to recover his body in the dark. So there he must lie. And why? God knows what Sawyer (it must have been Sawyer) hoped to achieve, no matter who he was working for. Information obtained via espionage was only useful as long as the enemy did not know of the leak. Advance knowledge of a new European security set-up would be invaluable, but at this stage in negotiations discreet observation was the only sensible mode of work.

  Either the man was very incompetent or, and this was far worse, he preferred to work like this. It could be that he was the same fellow who had blasted Custer, the groom, on the hillside. Another unnecessary death, like Wardle’s? The fellow seemed almost to invite discovery.

  At this point Boswell had yawned suddenly and hugely. He was very tired. The strain and tensions were beginning to tell. Presumably wherever Sawyer was now he was resting at his ease. It was time he did the same. And so to bed. And so Christmas Day dawned.

  People greet Christmas Day in a variety of moods and situations. The religious, and quite a number of the non-religious, see it arrive from the vantage point of large vaulted, domed, galleried, towered, spired buildings which either decorum or economy has preserved from central heating. Major Herbert Halloway was one of these. He knelt by his small, comfortable wife who accepted without complaint all the alarums and excursions which his trade involved, and for whose sake, whenever possible, he accompanied her to their unlovely Victorian parish church. But this was as far as he could accompany her. Internally, his sights were fixed not on the promise of heaven but the comfort of bed. The only Christian thought which entered his mind was the hope that the nineteenth century was being kinder to Wardle and Boswell than the church architects had been to the present congregation. And the only prayer that he uttered, but this most fervently, was that the two aforementioned gentleman should so organise their Christmas Day that no calls would be made upon Major Herbert Halloway.

  Others, more or less fortunate than the major, fall into bed full of good cheer and expensive drink and are awoken at a time in the morning commensurate with the degree of diplomacy they have instilled. into their children. Everyone gets what he deserves at Christmas.

  Though some, of course, feel they are getting less than their share. If, for instance, you are a fifty-year-old ginger-bearded tramp, waking up in a draughty, scarcely furnished and completely unheated, room, you may feel that your portion of life’s goodies have somehow been misdirected. But philosophy helps. Who knows what joys the day might bring?

  Others, apparently much better placed in the grand scheme of things, may have found sleep has evaded them as they lie in their warm comfortable beds. Some sudden shock—a boy halfdead for instance—might have called into doubt a whole course of action. And the steady breathing of the man at your side brings little comfort.

  Or some sudden, astounding discovery might have climaxed a day of startling activity and be warring in a young woman’s head with the desire to analyse and assess the beginnings of what she feels could be an important relationship.

  Sleep is by no means the reward of the just. It is very possible for a man who has committed murder on Christmas Eve and who, if the occasion arises, intends to commit murder on Christmas Day, to sleep as soundly as a well-nurtured child.

  And a great deal more soundly than one who, though age and health and all things in him crave for sleep, feels it necessary for the duty he owes his employers to rise in the grey light of dawn and, Grendel-like, tread a stealthy path to rooms where other sleepers lie.

  And finally there is another strange band of people who rise on this most holy of days and, laying no claim even to symbolic justification, make their way to a variety of river banks and sea-shores, where they hurl themselves, shrieking with pain and amazement at their own foolhardiness, into the icy water. Such a band met on the stony foreshore near Southendon-Sea. Some minutes later one woman emerged from the water clutching something in her hands. For some time, in the general outcry from the bathers, her own shrieks went unnoticed.

  Boswell came out of the grey depths swiftly and completely within a single second of the hand’s touching his shoulder. But he kept his eyes closed and his breathing steady until the voice whispered urgently once more, ‘Mr. Boswell!’

  It was Johnson. He sat up.

  ‘What’s on?’ he asked.

  ‘There’s someone moving around downstairs.’

  He was out of bed, pulling on clothes, in an instant.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In the hall. Trying the front door.’

  Boswell grunted happily. No one was getting out of the front door tonight—not without a combination of three keys or a charge of gelignite.

  ‘Who’s watching?’

  ‘Joe and Dave. Like you said, we haven’t made contact.’

  ‘Good.’

  He wanted to know what this man Sawyer was trying to do. And he wanted to be sure he was taken with no further injury to anyone else.

  At the bottom of the stairs they met the Fat Boy.

  ‘He’s in there,’ he whispered, nodding towards the parlour door. ‘We think he’s trying the
windows. He seems keen to get out.’

  What for, Boswell couldn’t imagine. A glance out of his bedroom window before he came down had shown him that the wind and snow were still dancing together with as much abandon as ever. He very much doubted now if Colley could have got through. Or, even if he had, there was little anyone could do in these conditions.

  Still, once they got hold of the man in there, the situation would be perfectly in control. He put aside his concern for Colley’s well-being and concentrated on the job in hand.

  ‘Where’s Dave?’

  ‘He’s gone out of the back and round the side of the house just in case our man does get out.’

  ‘Fine. Have you had a good look at the fellow yet? Is it Sawyer?’

  Joe shook his head.

  ‘Can’t say. He’s well muffled up. He’ll need to be if he’s going out in this weather!’

  ‘Which he isn’t. He’ll have a hell of a job opening those windows. They’re all individually locked. Right, let’s go and get him. Johnson, you stay by the door. Joe, you go left. I’ll switch on the lights and go right. Keep low and find cover. There’s a big settee in the corner, make for that. He might start shooting.’

  Carefully, they advanced to the door. It was slightly ajar, which made things easier. The light switches were in the wall to the right, concealed behind an anti-draught curtain in keeping with the Dingley Dell policy of having all mod cons present, but unobtrusive.

  It was a policy which had its disadvantages in the present circumstances.

  ‘Go,’ said Boswell, and plunged through the door. His right hand, outstretched to flick down the light-switches, became entangled in the curtain and long, precious seconds were lost as he disentangled himself and located the switch panel. If Sawyer started blasting off at the door now, it could be nasty.

  But when the light finally spilled down from the pseudocandelabra, and Boswell hurled himself full length behind a chair, it seemed as if Sawyer had used the time for other purposes.