Cynthia Manson (ed) (27 page)

Sir Leo excused them, but not with
any undue haste. He appeared to be enjoying himself. Meanwhile, Mr. Campion,
who had risen to inspect the display on the mantle shelf more closely, helped
her to move the kettle so that it should not boil too soon.

The Christmas cards were splendid.
There were nearly 30 of them in all, and the envelopes which had contained them
were packed in a neat bundle and tucked behind the clock, to add even more
color to the whole.

In design, they were mostly
conventional. There were wreaths and firesides, saints and angels, with a
secondary line of gardens in unseasonable bloom and Scotch terriers in
tam-o’shanter caps. One magnificent card was entirely in ivorine, with a cutout
disclosing a coach and horses surrounded by roses and forget-me-nots. The
written messages were all warm and personal, all breathing affection and
friendliness and the out-spoken joy of the season:

The very best to you. Darling, from
all at The Limes.

To dear Auntie from Little Phil.

Love and Memories. Edith and Ted.

There is no wish like the old wish.
Warm regards, George.

For dearest Mother.

Cheerio. Lots of love. Just off.
Writing. Take care of yourself. Sonny.

For dear little Agnes with love from
us all.

Mr. Campion stood before them for a
long time but at length he turned away. He had to stoop to avoid the beam and
yet he towered over the old woman who stood looking up at him.

Something had happened. It had
suddenly become very still in the house. The gentle hissing of the kettle
sounded unnaturally loud. The recollection of its lonely remoteness returned to
chill the cosy room.

The old lady had lost her smile and
there was wariness in her eyes.

“Tell me.” Campion spoke very
gently. “What do you do? Do you put them all down there on the mat in their
envelopes before you go to bed on Christmas Eve?”

While the point of his question and
the enormity of it was dawning upon Sir Leo, there was silence. It was
breathless and unbearable until old Mrs. Fyson pierced it with a laugh of
genuine naughtiness.

“Well,” she said, “it does make it
more fun!” She glanced back at Sir Leo whose handsome face was growing steadily
more and more scarlet.

“Then... ?” He was having difficulty
with his voice. “Then the postman did not call this morning, ma’am?”

She stood looking at him placidly,
the flicker of the smile still playing round her mouth.

“The postman never calls here except
when he brings something from the Government,” she said pleasantly. “Everybody
gets letters from the Government nowadays, don’t they? But he doesn’t call here
with
personal
letters because, you see, I’m the last of us.” She paused
and frowned very faintly. It rippled like a shadow over the smoothness of her
quiet, careless brow. “There’s been so many wars,” she said sadly.

“But, dear lady...” Sir Leo was
completely overcome. There were tears in his eyes and his voice failed him.

She patted his arm to comfort him.

“My dear man,” she said kindly.
“Don’t be distressed. It’s not sad. It’s Christmas. We all loved Christmas.
They sent me their love at Christmas and you see
I’ve still got it
. At
Christmas I remember them and they remember me...wherever they are.” Her eyes
strayed to the ivorine card with the coach on it. “I do sometimes wonder about
poor George,” she remarked seriously. “He was my husband’s elder brother and he
really did have quite a shocking life. But he once sent me that remarkable card
and I kept it with the others. After all, we ought to be charitable, oughtn’t
we? At Christmas time...”

As the four men plodded back through
the fields, Bussy was jubilant.

“That’s done the trick,” he said.
“Cleared up the mystery and made it all plain sailing. We’ll get those two
crooks for doing in poor old Noakes. A real bit of luck that Mr. Campion was
here,” he added generously, as he squelched on through the mud. “The old girl
was just cheering herself up and you fell for it, eh, Constable? Oh, don’t
worry, my boy. There’s no harm done, and it’s a thing that might have deceived
anybody. Just let it be a lesson to you. I know how it happened. You didn’t
want to worry the old thing with the tale of a death on Christmas morning, so
you took the sight of the Christmas cards as evidence and didn’t go into it. As
it turned out, you were wrong. That’s life.”

He thrust the young man on ahead of
him and came over to Mr. Campion.

“What beats me is how you cottoned
to it,” he confided. “What gave you the idea?”

“I merely read it, I’m afraid.” Mr.
Campion sounded apologetic. “All the envelopes were there, sticking out from
behind the clock. The top one had a ha’penny stamp on it, so I looked at the
postmark. It was 1914.”

Bussy laughed “Given to you.” he
chuckled. “Still, I bet you had a job to believe your eyes.”

“Ah.” Mr. Campion’s voice was
thoughtful in the dusk. “That, Super, that was the really difficult bit.”

Sir Leo, who had been striding in
silence, was the last to climb up onto the road. He glanced anxiously towards
the village for a moment or so. and presently touched Campion on the shoulder.

“Look there.” A woman was hurrying
towards them and at her side, earnest and expectant, trotted a small, plump
child. They scurried past and as they paused by the stile, and the woman lifted
the boy onto the footpath, Sir Leo expelled a long sighing breath.

“So there was a party,” he said
simply. “Thank God for that. Do you know, Campion, all the way back here I’ve
been wonderin’.”

Christmas Eve,” Art Hippie was
thinking to himself, “would be a good time for the murder.”

The thought was both timely and characteristic.
It was 3 o’clock in the afternoon of December 24, and though the murder would
have got an eager welcome from Art Hippie any day at all. his disdainful
attitude toward the prolonged hurly-burly of Christmas sentiment and shopping
made that the best possible date for it. He did not actually turn up his nose
at Christmas, for that would have been un-American: but as a New York cop not
yet out of his twenties who had recently been made a precinct dick and had hung
his uniform in the back of the closet of his furnished room, it had to be made
clear, especially to himself, that he was good and tough. A cynical slant on
Christmas was therefore imperative.

His hope of running across a murder
had begun back in the days when his assignment had been tagging illegally
parked cars, and was merely practical and professional. His biggest ambition
was promotion to Homicide, and the shortest cut would have been discovery of a
corpse, followed by swift, brilliant, solo detection and capture of the
culprit. It had not gone so far as becoming an obsession; as he strode down the
sidewalk this December afternoon he was not sniffing for the scent of blood at
each dingy entrance he passed; but when he reached the number he had been given
and turned to enter, his hand darted inside his jacket to touch his gun.

None of the three people he found in
the cluttered and smelly little room one flight up seemed to need shooting. Art
identified himself and wrote down their names. The man at the battered old
desk, who was twice Art’s age and badly needed a shave, was Emil Duross,
proprietor of the business conducted in that room—Duross Specialties, a
mail-order concern dealing in gimcrack jewelry. The younger man. small, dark
and neat, seated on a chair squeezed in between the desk and shelves stacked
with cardboard boxes, was II. E. Koenig, adjuster, according to a card he had
proffered, for the Apex Insurance Company. The girl, who had pale watery eyes
and a stringy neck, stood backed up to a pile of cartons the height of her shoulder.
She had on a dark brown felt hat and a lighter brown woolen coat that had lost
a button. Her name was Helen Lauro, and it could have been not rheum in her
eyes but the remains of tears.

Because Art Hipple was thorough it
took him twenty minutes to get the story to his own satisfaction. Then he
returned his notebook to his pocket, looked at Duross, at Koenig, and last at
the girl. He wanted to tell her to wipe her eyes, but what if she didn’t have a
handkerchief?

He spoke to Duross. “Stop me if I’m
wrong,” he said. “You bought the ring a week ago to give to your wife for
Christmas and paid sixty-two dollars for it. You put it there in a desk drawer
after showing it to Miss Lauro. Why did you show it to Miss Lauro?”

Duross turned his palms up. “Just a
natural thing. She works for me, she’s a woman, and it’s a beautiful ring.”

“Okay. Today you work with
her—filling orders, addressing packages, and putting postage on. You send her
to the post office with a bag of the packages. Why didn’t she take all of them?”

“She did.”

“Then what are those?” Art pointed
to a pile of little boxes, addressed and stamped, on the end of a table.

“Orders that came in the afternoon
mail. I did them while she was gone to the post office.”

Art nodded. “And also while she was
gone you looked in the drawer to get the ring to take home for Christmas, and
it wasn’t there. You know it was there this morning because Miss Lauro asked if
she could look at it again, and you showed it to her and let her put it on her
finger, and then you put it back in the drawer. But this afternoon it was gone,
and you couldn’t have taken it yourself because you haven’t left this room.
Miss Lauro went out and got sandwiches for your lunch. So you decided she took
the ring, and you phoned the insurance company, and Mr. Koenig came and advised
you to call the police, and—”

“Only his stock is insured,” Koenig
put in. “The ring was not a stock item and is not covered.”

“Just a legality,” Duross declared
scornfully. “Insurance companies can’t hide behind legalities. It hurts their
reputation.”

Koenig smiled politely but
noncommittally.

Art turned to the girl. “Why don’t
you sit down?” he asked her. “There’s a chair we men are not using.”

“I will never sit down in this room
again,” she declared in a thin tight

voice.

“Okay.” Art scowled at her. She was
certainly not comely. “If you did take the ring you might—”

“I didn’t!”

“Very well. But if you did you might
as well tell me where it is because you won’t ever dare to wear it or sell it.”

“Of course I wouldn’t. I knew I
wouldn’t. That’s why I didn’t take it.”

“Oh? You thought of taking it?”

“Of course I did. It was a beautiful
ring.” She stopped to swallow. “Maybe my life isn’t much, but what it is, I’d
give it for a ring like that, and a girl like me, I could live a hundred years
and never have one. Of course I thought of taking it—but I knew I couldn’t ever
wear it.”

“You see?” Duross appealed to the
law. “She’s foxy, that girl. She’s slick.”

Art downed an impulse to cut it
short, get out. return to the station house, and write a report. Nobody here
deserved anything, not even justice— especially not justice. Writing a brief
report was all it rated, and all, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it would
have got. But instead of breaking it off, Art sat and thought it over through a
long silence, with the three pairs of eyes on him. Finally he spoke to Duross:

“Get me the orders that came in the
afternoon mail.”

Duross was startled. “Why?”

“I want to check them with that pile
of boxes you addressed and stamped.”

Duross shook his head. “I don’t need
a cop to check my orders and shipments. Is this a gag?”

“No. Get me the orders.”

“I will not!”

“Then I’ll have to open all the
boxes.” Art arose and headed for the table. Duross bounced up and got in front
of him and they were chest to chest.

“You don’t touch those boxes,”
Duross told him. “You got no search warrant. You don’t touch anything!”

“That’s just another legality.” Art
backed off a foot to avoid contact. “And since I guessed right, what’s a little
legality? I’m going to open the boxes here and now, but I’ll count ten first to
give you a chance to pick it out and hand it to me and save both of us a lot of
bother. One, two, three—”

“I’ll phone the station house!”

“Go ahead. Four, five, six, seven,
eight, nine...”

Art stopped at nine because Duross
had moved to the table and was fingering the boxes. As he drew away with one in
his hand Art demanded, “Gimme.” Duross hesitated but passed the box over, and
after a glance at the address Art ripped the tape off, opened the flap of the
box, took out a wad of tissue paper, and then a ring box. From that he removed
a ring, yellow gold, with a large greenish stone. Helen Lauro made a noise in
her throat. Koenig let out a grunt, evidently meant for applause. Duross made a
grab, not for the ring but for the box on which he had put an address, and
missed.