The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries Part 58

"Sally won't like it," he said candidly.

"Bring her into it, then. Pretend it's all your own idea."

Ron grinned.

"Shirl won't like that," he said.

Tom Meadows laughed.

"Fix it any way you like," he said. "But I think this girl Shirley was with a group and did go to sing carols for Mrs. Fairlands. I know she isn't on the official list, so she hasn't reported it. I want to know why."

"I'm not shopping anymore," Ron said warily.

"I'm not asking you to. I don't imagine Shirley or her friends did Mrs. Fairlands. But it's just possible she knows or saw something and is afraid to speak up for fear of reprisals."

"Cor!" said Ron. It was like a page of his favorite magazine working out in real life. He confided in Sally, and they went to work.

The upshot was interesting. Shirley did have something to say, and she said it to Tom Meadows in her own home with her disapproving mother sitting beside her.

"I never did like the idea of Shirl going out after dark, begging at house doors. That's all it really is, isn't it? My children have very good pocket money. They've nothing to complain of."

"I'm sure they haven't," Meadows said mildly. "But there's a lot more to carol singing than asking for money. Isn't there, Shirley?"

"I'll say," the girl answered. "Mum don't understand."

"You can't stop her," the mother complained. "Self-willed. Stubborn. I don't know, I'm sure. Out after dark. My dad'd've taken his belt to me for less."

"There were four of us," Shirley protested. "It wasn't late. Not above seven or eight."

The time was right, Meadows noted, if she was speaking of her visit to Mrs. Fairlands's road. She was. Encouraged to describe everything, she agreed that her group was working towards the house especially to entertain the old lady who was going to be alone for Christmas. She'd got that from her aunt, who worked for Mrs. Fairlands. They began at the far end of the road on the same side as the old lady. When they were about six houses away, they saw another group go up to it or to one near it. Then they were singing themselves. The next time she looked round, she saw one child running away up the road. She did not know where he had come from. She did not see the others.

"You did not see them go on?"

"No. They weren't in the road then, but they might have gone right on while we were singing. There's a turning off, isn't there?"

"Yes. Go on."

"Well, we went up to Mrs. Fairlands's and rang the bell. I thought I'd tell her she knew my aunt and we'd come special."

"Yes. What happened?"

"Nothing. At least-"

"Go on. Don't be frightened."

Shirley's face had gone very pale.

"There were men's voices inside. Arguing like. Nasty. We scarpered."

Tom Meadows nodded gravely.

"That would be upsetting. Men's voices? Or big boys?"

"Could be either, couldn't it? Well, perhaps more like sixth form boys, at that."

"You thought it was boys, didn't you? Boys from your school."

Shirley was silent.

"You thought they'd know and have it in for you if you told. Didn't you? I won't let you down, Shirley. Didn't you?"

She whispered, "Yes," and added, "Some of our boys got knives. I seen them."

Meadows went to Inspector Brooks. He explained how Ron had helped him to get in touch with Shirley and the result of that interview. The inspector, who had worked as a routine matter on all Mrs. Fairlands's contacts with the outer world, was too interested to feel annoyed at the other's success.

"Men's voices?" Brooks said incredulously.

"Most probably older lads," Meadows answered. "She agreed that was what frightened her group. They might have looked out and recognized them as they ran away."

"There'd been no attempt at intimidations?"

"They're not all that stupid."

"No."

Brooks considered.

"This mustn't break in the papers yet, you understand?"

"Perfectly. But I shall stay around."

Inspector Brooks nodded, and Tom went away. Brooks took his sergeant and drove to Mrs. Fairlands's house. They still had the key of the flat, and they still had the house under observation.

The new information was disturbing, Brooks felt. Men's voices, raised in anger. Against poor Mrs. Fairlands, of course. But there were no adult fingerprints in the flat except those of the old lady herself and of her daily. Gloves had been worn, then. A professional job. But no signs whatever of breaking and entering. Therefore, Mrs. Fairlands had let them in. Why? She had peeped out at Ron's lot, to check who they were, obviously. She had not done so for Shirley's. Because she was in the power of the "men" whose voices had driven this other group away in terror.

But there had been two distinct small footprints in the dust of the outer hall and a palm-print on the outer door had been small, childsize.

Perhaps the child that Shirley had seen running down the road had been a decoy. The whole group she had noticed at Mrs. Fairlands's door might have been employed for that purpose and the men or older boys were lurking at the corner of the house, to pounce when the door opened. Possible, but not very likely. Far too risky, even on a dark evening. Shirley could not have seen distinctly. The streetlamps were at longish intervals in that road. But there were always a few pa.s.sersby. Even on Christmas Eve no professional group of villains would take such a risk.

Standing in the cold drawing room, now covered with a grey film of dust, Inspector Brooks decided to make another careful search for clues. He had missed the jewels. Though he felt justified in making it, his mistake was a distinct blot on his copybook. It was up to him now to retrieve his reputation. He sent the sergeant to take another look at the bedroom, with particular attention to the dressing table. He himself began to go over the drawing room with the greatest possible care.

Shirley's evidence suggested there had been more than one thief. The girl had said "voices." That meant at least two, which probably accounted for the fact, apart from her age, that neither Mrs. Fairlands nor her clothes gave any indication of a struggle. She had been overpowered immediately, it seemed. She had not been strong enough or agile enough to tear, scratch, pull off any fragment from her attackers' clothes or persons. There had been no trace of any useful material under her fingernails or elsewhere.

Brooks began methodically with the chair to which Mrs. Fairlands had been bound and worked his way outwards from that center. After the furniture, the carpet and curtains. After that the walls.

Near the door, opposite the fireplace, he found on the wall-two feet, three inches up from the floor-a small, round, brownish, greasy smear. He had not seen it before. In artificial light, he checked, it was nearly invisible. On this morning, with the first sunshine of the New Year coming into the room, the little patch was entirely obvious, slightly shiny where the light from the window caught it.

Inspector Brooks took a wooden spatula from his case of aids and carefully sc.r.a.ped off the substance into a small plastic box, sniffing at it as he did so.

"May I, too?" asked Tom Meadows behind him.

The inspector wheeled round with an angry exclamation.

"How did you get in?" he asked.

"Told the copper in your car I wanted to speak to you."

"What about?"

"Well, about how you were getting on, really," Tom said disarmingly. "I see you are. Please let me have one sniff."

Inspector Brooks was annoyed, both by the intrusion and the fact that he had not heard it, being so concentrated on his work. So he closed his box, shut it into his black bag, and called to the sergeant in the next room.

Meadows got down on his knees, leaned towards the wall, and sniffed. It was faint, since most of it had been sc.r.a.ped off, but he knew the smell. His freelancing had not been confined to journalism.

He was getting to his feet as the sergeant joined Inspector Brooks. The sergeant raised his eyebrows at the interloper.

"You can't keep the press's noses out of anything," said Brooks morosely.

The other two grinned. It was very apt.

"I'm just off," Tom said. "Good luck with your specimen, Inspector. I know where to go now. So will you."

"Come back!" called Brooks. The young man was a menace. He would have to be controlled.

But Meadows was away, striding down the road until he was out of sight of the police car, then running to the nearest tube station, where he knew he would find the latest newspaper editions. He bought one, opened it at the entertainments column, and read down the list.

He was a certain six hours ahead of Brooks, he felt sure, possibly more. Probably he had until tomorrow morning. He skipped his lunch and set to work.

Inspector Brooks got the report from the lab that evening, and the answer to his problem came to him as completely as it had done to Tom Meadows in Mrs. Fairlands's drawing room. His first action was to ring up Olympia. This proving fruitless, he sighed. Too late now to contact the big stores; they would all be closed and the employees of every kind gone home.

But in the morning some very extensive telephone calls to managers told him where he must go. He organized his forces to cover all the exits of a big store not very far from Mrs. Fairlands's house. With his sergeant he entered modestly by way of the men's department.

They took a lift from there to the third floor, emerging among the toys. It was the tenth day of Christmas, with the school holidays in full swing and eager children, flush with Christmas money, choosing long-coveted treasures. A Father Christmas, white-bearded, in the usual red, hooded gown, rather too short for him, was moving about trying to promote a visit to the first of that day's performances of "Snowdrop and the Seven Dwarfs." As his insistence seeped into the minds of the abstracted young, they turned their heads to look at the attractive cardboard entrance of the little "theater" at the far end of the department. A gentle flow towards it began and gathered momentum. Inspector Brooks and the sergeant joined the stream.

Inside the theater there were small chairs in rows for the children. The grownups stood at the back. A gramophone played the Disney film music.

The early scenes were brief, mere tableaux with a line thrown in here and there for Snowdrop. The queen spoke the famous doggerel to her mirror.

The curtain fell and rose again on Snowdrop, surrounded by the Seven Dwarfs. Two of them had beards, real beards. Dopey rose to his feet and began to sing.

"Okay," whispered Brooks to the sergeant. "The child who sang and ran away."

The sergeant nodded. Brooks whispered again. "I'm going round the back. Get the audience here out quietly if the balloon goes up before they finish."

He tiptoed quietly away. He intended to catch the dwarfs in their dressing room immediately after the show, arrest the lot, and sort them out at the police station.

But the guilty ones had seen him move. Or rather Dopey, more guilt-laden and fearful than the rest, had noticed the two men who seemed to have no children with them, had seen their heads close together, had seen one move silently away. As Brooks disappeared, the midget's nerve broke. His song ended in a scream; he fled from the stage.

In the uproar that followed, the dwarf's scream was echoed by the frightened children. The lights went up in the theater, the shop a.s.sistants and the sergeant went into action to subdue their panic and get them out.

Inspector Brooks found himself in a maze of lathe and plaster backstage arrangements. He found three bewildered small figures, with anxious, wizened faces, trying to restrain Dopey, who was still in the grip of his hysteria. A few sharp questions proved that the three had no idea what was happening.

The queen and Snowdrop appeared, highly indignant. Brooks, now holding Dopey firmly by the collar, demanded the other three dwarfs. The two girls, subdued and totally bewildered, pointed to their dressing room. It was empty, but a tumbled heap of costumes on the floor showed what they had done. The sergeant appeared, breathless.

"Take this chap," Brooks said, thrusting the now fainting Dopey at him. "Take him down. I'm shopping him. Get on to the management to warn all departments for the others."

He was gone, darting into the crowded toy department, where children and parents stood amazed or hurried towards the lifts, where a dense crowd stood huddled, anxious to leave the frightening trouble spot.

Brooks bawled an order.

The crowd at the lift melted away from it, leaving three small figures in overcoats and felt hats, trying in vain to push once more under cover.

They bolted, bunched together, but they did not get far. Round the corner of a piled table of soft toys Father Christmas was waiting. He leaped forward, tripped up one, s.n.a.t.c.hed another, hit the third as he pa.s.sed and grabbed him, too, as he fell.

The tripped one struggled up and on as Brooks appeared.

"I'll hold these two," panted Tom Meadows through his white beard, which had fallen sideways.

The chase was brief. Brooks gained on the dwarf. The latter knew it was hopeless. He s.n.a.t.c.hed up a mallet lying beside a display of camping equipment and, rushing to the side of the store, leaped on a counter, from there clambered up a tier of shelves, beat a hole in the window behind them, and dived through. Horrified people and police on the pavement below saw the small body turning over and over like a leaf as it fell.

"All yours," said Tom Meadows, handing his captives, too limp now to struggle, to Inspector Brooks and tearing off his Father Christmas costume. "See you later."

He was gone, to shut himself in a telephone booth on the ground floor of the store and hand his favorite editor the scoop. It had paid off, taking over from the old boy, an ex-actor like himself, who was quite willing for a fiver to write a note pleading illness and sending a subst.i.tute. "Your reporter, Tom Meadows, dressed as Father Christmas, today captured and handed over to the police two of the three murderers of Mrs. Fairlands-"

Inspector Brooks, with three frantic midgets demanding legal aid, scrabbling at the doors of their cells, took a lengthy statement from the fourth, the one with the treble voice whose nerve had broken on the fatal night, as it had again that day. Greasepaint had betrayed the little fiends, Brooks told him, privately regretting that Meadows had been a jump ahead of him there. Greasepaint left on in the rush to get at their prey. One of the brutes must have fallen against the wall, pushed by the old woman herself perhaps. He hoped so. He hoped it was her own action that had brought these squalid killers to justice.

WAXWORKS.

Ethel Lina White.

IT IS AN UNFORTUNATE FACT THAT ETHEL LINA WHITE'S seventeen books are seldom read today, though two motion pictures inspired by her extremely suspenseful novels are in constant rerun on cla.s.sic movie channels. The Spiral Staircase, directed by Robert Siodmak and starring Dorothy McGuire and Ethel Barrymore, was released in 1945; it was based on White's 1934 novel Some Must Watch. Even more successful was The Lady Vanishes, directed by Alfred Hitchc.o.c.k and starring Margaret Lockwood, Michael Redgrave, and Dame May Whitty. Released in 1938, it was inspired by White's 1936 novel The Wheel Spins. "Waxworks" was first published in the December 1930 issue of Pearson's Magazine.

Waxworks.

ETHEL LINA WHITE.

SONIA MADE HER FIRST ENTRY IN her notebook:.

Eleven o'clock. The lights are out. The porter has just locked the door. I can hear his footsteps echoing down the corridor. They grow fainter. Now there is silence. I am alone.

She stopped writing to glance at her company. Seen in the light from the streetlamp, which streamed in through the high window, the room seemed to be full of people. Their faces were those of men and women of character and intelligence. They stood in groups, as though in conversation, or sat apart, in solitary reverie.