Cynthia Manson (ed) (52 page)

Over by the door, Miss
Jones put away her smelling salts. Plan B had not involved her, of course. She
was required to stick resolutely to her post at all times, but even watching
the struggle to save civilisation as we know it had been alarming enough. Now
that the community singing was in full swing, more children than ever were
hearkening to the calls of Nature and Miss Jones had her hands full regulating
the flow. Some of the tougher kids predictably began trying to buck the system
but fortunately tea was announced before that appalling blond-haired boy—son of
the town’s leading Baptist minister— got a chance to demonstrate whether or not
he was man enough to carry out the threats he’d been uttering in respect of
Miss Jones’s virtue.

For tea the children were
herded into the adjoining Sir Winston Churchill Salon where a veritable feast
had been laid out for them. Almost before the last child had been seated the
walls were thick with jelly and trifle, and the sausage rolls were zooming
through the air like missiles in an interplanetary war. Even the gorgeous cream
cakes were deemed too good to eat and were squashed flat instead upon the heads
of unsuspecting neighbours.

For the twenty minutes
allotted to the pleasures of the table, Mrs. Johnson and her cohorts battled to
maintain some semblance of order, but their task was made even more difficult
by the animal masks that some of the children were still wearing. The masks
hindered one of the most effective ploys for riot control—that of actually
recognising a youngster, addressing it by name and threatening to report its
unspeakable behaviour to its parents. Not that these brats gave a damn for
their parents, but the experience of being publicly identified did seem to
unnerve them for a moment or two.

When the tea party was
over, it was time for the Hon. Con to hog the limelight. The children were
driven back into the Margaret Thatcher Hall and grouped around the platform
which, by means of some old army blankets and a few strips of silver paper, had
now been transformed into a magic cave. In the middle, surrounded by heaps of
exciting-looking parcels, sat the Hon. Con, beaming benevolently and not
relaxing her guard for one second.

At the side of the
platform, Mrs. Johnson read the names out from her list in alphabetical order.
Each child then, theoretically, came forward in turn, shook hands with Father
Christmas, received its present, and said thank you for it. In practice, any
child that could break through the protective barrier of lady helpers made a
dive and grabbed what it could.

Personation was rife.

“Here,” demanded the Hon.
Con of a rather rotund frog in striped trousers and bower boots whom, she could
swear, she’d seen twice already before, “you sure you’re little Gwendoline
Roberts, aged six?”

“You sure you’re Father
Christmas, missus?” retorted the frog, tearing the parcel wrapped in pink paper
out of the Hon. Con’s hands. “And not some nosy old judy called Burke?”

A sweet little girl in
pigtails ducked back through the phalanx of lady helpers and thrust the
battered remnants of her present into the Hon. Con’s hands. “I don’t want no
lousy farmyard animals!” she shrilled, her blue eyes flashing.” ’Sides, they’re
all broke. Haven’t you got a knuckle duster or a horse whip or something?”

The Hon. Con tried, but
failed, to give back as good as she got. All around her the Margaret Thatcher
Hall was knee-deep in discarded wrapping paper, crushed cardboard boxes and
broken toys—all watered by infantile tears of rage and disappointment.

Still, all good things
come to an end and four o’clock struck. Mrs. Johnson and her gallant band
girded up their loins for one final effort and at five past four Lady Fowler
proclaimed the glad tidings in stentorian tones.

“All right, girls!” she
roared. “You can relax! I counted seventy-three of the little buggers in and
seventy-three of them out! They’ve gone. It’s over for another bloody year!”

The news ran round like
wildfire and most of the ladies dropped where they stood. Oh, the blessed peace
and quiet! Shoes were slipped off, clothing loosened, and foreheads dabbed with
eau-de-cologne. But the human frame is amazingly resilient and before too long
everybody was gathering in the kitchens for a cup of tea which, it was hoped, would
give them enough strength to go home. Those ladies who had given up smoking
cadged cigarettes off their less strong-willed sisters and before long the air
was thick with tobacco smoke and recriminations.

Everybody had her
complaints, but none was more vociferous than Mrs. Hinchliffe. “Somebody,” she
announced, trying to ease her aching back, “is going to have to do something
about that cloakroom duty. It’s too much.”

“We did give you those
fresh air sprays, dear,” Mrs. Johnson reminded her.

“It’s not the pong, Rose,
it’s the sheer hard work. Two people aren’t enough. We need at least three.”

“Hear, hear!” agreed the
other ladies who had been relentlessly dressing and undressing children all
afternoon.

Mrs. Johnson sighed. “There
isn’t room for three, dear. You yourself said that.”

“Two on and one off!”
declared Mrs. Hinchliffe. “So we can at least take a bit of a breather. Do you
realise neither Clarice nor I so much as got our noses out of that damned boys’
loo all afternoon?”

“Irene and I were just the
same with the girls,” chimed in one of her equally aggrieved colleagues. “I’d
thought one of us would be able to take a break while the other held the fort,
but no such luck. We were both of us slogging away the whole time.”

“We’ll look into it next
time,” promised Mrs. Johnson blandly. “Now,” she looked round brightly, “is
everybody here?” It was getting time for her little speech of thanks and
appreciation.

The Hon. Con was reaching
for the sugar bowl. “All present and correct, old fruit! I say,” she addressed
the company at large, “anybody see a pork pie lying around that hasn’t actually
been violated? I’m feeling dashed peckish.”

Miss Jones, one of whose
duties was to keep the Hon. Con’s waist-line within bounds, endeavoured to
divert the conversation from the topic of food. “Actually, Mrs. Johnson,” she
twittered helpfully, “I don’t think we are quite all gathered together yet, are
we? There’s Mrs. Lawn, for example.”

“Oh, she’ll have sneaked
off hours ago,” said Lady Fowler with her usual snort. “Bloody idle cow!”

Mrs. Johnson, who’d had
enough of Lady Fowler for one afternoon, pretended not to have heard and, since
she had Miss Jones there, she decided she might as well make use of her. “I
wonder, Miss—er... would you mind just popping along and seeing what’s happened
to her? Remind her that we’re all waiting, would you? Perhaps her watch has
stopped.”

“Why not just leave her
there to bloody rot?” enquired Lady Fowler charitably. “Serve her damned well
right if she gets locked in.”

But Miss Jones was
already scurrying away. After long association with the Hon. Con, it was not in
her nature to question orders, however dog-tired she might be.

In a remarkably short
space of time she came scurrying back, ashen-faced and trembling like a leaf.

Even the Hon. Con noticed
that she wasn’t quite herself. “Something up, Bones?” she asked, pausing with
her second vol-au-vent of the afternoon halfway to her lips.

Miss Jones had worked out
how she was going to break the news. “Mrs. Lawn is sitting on her chair by the
fire exit, dear,” she said with chilling composure, “quite dead and with a
large knife sticking out of her chest.”

“Holy cats!” breathed the
Hon. Con. She tossed the unconsumed portion of the vol-au-vent heedlessly aside
and leaped to her feet. “Nobody move!” she bawled. “This sounds like murder,
and I don’t want you lot trampling all over the clues. Everybody stay here
while I go and have a look!”

“Hadn’t we better phone
the police, Constance?”

There’s always some
clever devil, isn’t there? Luckily, the Hon. Con’s thought processes were now
rattling along at the speed of light. “Better let me check first, old bean,” she
advised solemnly. “It may be a false alarm.”

“It’s no false alarm dear,”
moaned Miss Jones, her handkerchief pressed to her lips. “She is quite, quite
dead, I do—”

The Hon. Con regarded her
chum with exasperation. “Do button it, Bones!” she growled.

Still in her Father
Christmas outfit, the Hon. Con strode off masterfully towards the scene of the
crime. Chin up, stomach in, white whiskers fluttering importantly in the breeze
of her passage, she thudded across the Margaret Thatcher Hall, through the door
by which Miss Jones had stood on duty all afternoon, down the corridor past the
two cloakrooms (one on either side), round the corner at the end and—”Golly!”
said the Hon. Con.

Lyonelle Lawn was
certainly as dead as a doornail.

The Hon. Con leaned
forward for a close look. The knife sticking out of Lyonelle Lawn’s chest
seemed ordinary enough. Sort of kitchen knife you could get anywhere.
Fingerprints? Grudgingly the Hon. Con acknowledged that that was one she’d have
to leave to the boys in blue. Not much blood and it didn’t seem as though she’d
put up much of a fight. Taken unawares, perhaps? And robbery wasn’t the motive
because there was her handbag, still standing on the floor under her chair.

The Hon. Con straightened
up. Bit creepy down there, actually, right at the end of the corridor and with
nobody about. She turned her attention to the emergency door which Lyonelle
Lawn had been guarding against anyone trying to break in or break out. They had
experienced both gate-crashers and escapees in previous years. No, the door was
still securely fastened. And there were no windows or—

Somebody was tiptoeing
down the corridor!

The Hon. Con’s hand
closed round the rubber truncheon as she prepared to sell her life dearly.

“Blimey-O’Riley, Bones, I
do wish you’d stop pussyfooting about!” Sheer relief that it wasn’t a maniac
killer with slavering jaws made the Hon. Con’s tones unnecessarily sharp.

“I’m sorry, dear, but I
thought you’d like to know that Lady Fowler went to phone the police.”

“She-Judas!” spat the
Hon. Con. “She might have given me a few minutes. I haven’t had a decent murder
for months.”

“Well, you’re all right
for the moment, dear, because somebody’s disconnected the telephone and jammed
up all the doors so that we can’t get out. Miss Kingston thinks it’s super-glue
in the locks.”

The Hon. Con frowned.
This was getting serious. “The murderer, eh?” she mused aloud.

“More likely the
children, dear,” said Miss Jones with a sigh. She’d always been so fond of
kiddies—before she’d been enrolled as a helper at the Totterbridge &
District Conservative & Unionist Club’s annual Christmas party, of course. “I
left them trying to push little Mrs. Bellamy through the skylight over the
front door. If she doesn’t break a leg or anything, she’s going to ring the
police from the call box on the corner.” Miss Jones glanced involuntarily at
the corpse and regretted, not for the first time, that dear Constance hadn’t
managed to find a nicer hobby. Still, Miss Jones always felt it was up to her
to take an intelligent interest. “Have you worked out any theories yet, dear?”

The Hon. Con emitted a
rich chuckle. “Dozens, old girl! How does Felicity Fowler grab you, for a
start?”

“Oh, Constance!”

“She was being deuced
catty about Lyonelle Lawn earlier on,” grunted the Hon. Con, ever ready to take
any hasty word for the foulest deed. “Vicious, really. Or there’s Rose Johnson.”

“Mrs. Johnson is
Chairperson of the Organising Committee, dear!”

“So who was in a better
position to set the whole thing up? Who was it who stuck La Lawn down here all
on her lonesome where she could be knocked off without anybody noticing? La
Lawn’s job this afternoon was precisely what Felicity Fowler was griping about,
wasn’t it? Well, come on, Bones, you heard her.”

“Yes, I did hear her,
dear,” said Miss Jones with dignity, “and I think it highly improbable that
Mrs. Johnson deliberately murdered Mrs. Lawn just because the extension to Mrs.
Lawn’s house was going to ruin Mrs. Johnson’s view of the river.”

The Hon. Con scowled. “People
can get jolly steamed up about that sort of thing. And then there’s the
depreciation in the value of the Johnsons’ house. Don’t forget that.”

But Miss Jones was
determined to take a more socially acceptable line. “Surely it’s the work of an
outsider, isn’t it, dear? A burglar or a tramp or some sort of gibbering maniac
who just happened to be passing?”