The Twelve Crimes of Christmas (40 page)

Their hostess had been sitting back against the
sofa, quietly folding the little white bag with one hand, and speaking in a
prim voice. Now she did something which turned her hearers cold.

You have probably seen the same thing done many
times. She had been touching her cheek lightly with the fingers of the other
hand. In doing so, she touched the flesh at the corner under her lower eyelid,
and accidently drew down the corner of that eyelid—which should have exposed
the red part of the inner lid at the corner of the eye. It was not red. It was
of a sickly pale color.

“In the course of his business dealings,” she
went on, “Mr. Waycross had often to go to London, and usually he was obliged to
remain overnight. But Jane Waycross was not afraid to remain alone in the
house. She had a good servant, a staunch old woman, and a good dog. Even so,
Mr. Waycross commended her for her courage.”

The girl smiled. “On the night I wish to tell
you of, in February, Mr. Waycross was absent. Unfortunately, too, the old
servant was absent; she had been called away as a midwife to attend her cousin,
and Jane Waycross had allowed her to go. This was known in the village, since
all such affairs are well known, and some uneasiness was felt—this house being
isolated, as you know. But she was not afraid.

“It was a very cold night, with a heavy fall of
snow which had stopped about nine o’clock. You must know, beyond doubt, that
poor Jane Waycross was alive after it had stopped snowing. It must have been
nearly half-past nine when a Mr. Moody—a very good and sober man who lived in
Hawkhurst—was driving home along the road past this house. As you know, it
stands in the middle of a great bare stretch of lawn; and you can see the house
clearly from the road. Mr. Moody saw poor Jane at the window of one of the
upstairs bedrooms, with a candle in her hand, closing the shutters. But he was
not the only witness who saw her alive.

“On that same evening, Mr. Wilkes (the handsome
gentleman I spoke to you of a moment ago) had been at a tavern in the village
of Five Ashes with Dr. Sutton, the local doctor, and a racing gentleman named
Pawley. At about half-past eleven they started to drive home in Mr. Wilkes’s
gig to Cross-in-Hand. I am afraid they had been drinking, but they were all in
their sober senses. The landlord of the tavern remembered the time because he
had stood in the doorway to watch the gig, which had fine yellow wheels, go
spanking away as though there were no snow; and Mr. Wilkes in one of the new
round hats with a curly brim.

“There was a bright moon. ‘And no danger,’ Dr.
Sutton always said afterwards; ‘shadows of trees and fences as clear as though
a silhouette-cutter had made
’em
for sixpence.’ But when they were passing this house Mr. Wilkes pulled up
sharp. There was a bright light in the window of one of the downstairs
rooms—this room, in fact. They sat out there looking round the hood of the gig
and wondering.

“Mr. Wilkes spoke: ‘I don’t like this,’ he
said. ‘You know, gentlemen, that Waycross is still in London; and the lady in
question is in the habit of retiring early. I am going up there to find out if
anything is wrong.’

“With that he jumped out of the gig, his black
beard jutting out and his breath smoking. He said: ‘And if it is a burglar,
then, by Something, gentlemen’—I will not repeat the word he used—‘by
Something, gentlemen, I’ll settle him.’ He walked through the gate and up to
the house—they could follow every step he made—and looked into the windows of this
room here. Presently he returned, looking relieved (they could see him by the
light of the gig lamps), but wiping the moisture off his forehead.

“ ‘It is all right,’ he said to them; ‘Waycross
has come home. But by Something, gentlemen, he is growing thinner these days,
or it is shadows.’

“Then he told them what he had seen. If you
look through the front windows—there—you can look sideways and see out through
the doorway into the main hall. He said he had seen Mrs. Waycross standing in
the hall with her back to the staircase, wearing a blue dressing gown over her
nightgown, and her hair down round her shoulders. Standing in front of her,
with his back to Mr. Wilkes, was a tallish, thin man like Mr. Waycross, with a
long greatcoat and a tall hat like Mr. Waycross’s.
She
was
carrying either a candle or a lamp; and he remembered how the tall hat seemed
to wag back and forth, as though the man were talking to her or putting out his
hands towards her. For he said he could not see the woman’s face.

“Of course, it was not Mr. Waycross; but how
were they to know that?

“At about seven o’clock next morning, Mrs.
Randall, the old servant, returned. (A fine boy had been born to her cousin the
night before.) Mrs. Randall came home through the white dawn and the white snow,
and found the house all locked up. She could get no answer to her knocking.
Being a woman of great resolution, she eventually broke a window and got in.
But when she saw what was in the front hall, she went out screaming for help.

“Poor Jane was past help. I know I should not
speak of these things; but I must. She was lying on her face in the hall. From
the waist down her body was much charred and—unclothed, you know, because fire
had burnt away most of the nightgown and the dressing gown. The tiles of the
hall were soaked with blood and paraffin oil, the oil having come from a broken
lamp with a thick blue-silk shade which was lying a little distance away. Near
it was a china candlestick with a candle. This fire had also charred a part of
the paneling of the wall, and a part of the staircase. Fortunately, the floor
is of brick tiles, and there had not been much paraffin left in the lamp, or
the house would have been set afire.

“But she had not died from burns alone. Her
throat had been cut with a deep slash from some very sharp blade. But she had
been alive for a while to feel both things, for she had crawled forward on her
hands while she was burning. It was a cruel death, a horrible death for a soft
person like that.”

There was a pause. The expression on the face
of the narrator, the plump girl in the brown dress, altered slightly. So did
the expression of her eyes. She was sitting beside Muriel, and moved a little
closer.

“Of course, the police came. I do not
understand such things, I am afraid, but they found that the house had not been
robbed. They also noticed the odd thing I have mentioned, that there was both a
lamp
and
a candle in a candlestick; there were no other
lamps or candles downstairs except the lamps waiting to be filled next morning
in the back kitchen. But the police thought she would not have come downstairs
carrying both the lamp
and
the candle as well.

“She must have brought the lamp, because that
was broken. When the murderer took hold of her, they thought, she had dropped
the lamp, and it went out; the paraffin spilled, but did not catch fire. Then this
man in the tall hat, to finish his work after he had cut her throat, went
upstairs, and got a candle, and set fire to the spilled oil. I am stupid at
these things, but even I should have guessed that this must mean someone
familiar with the house. Also, if she came downstairs, it must have been to let
someone in at the front door; and that could not have been a burglar.

“You may be sure all the gossips were like
police from the start, even when the police hemm’d and haw’d, because they knew
Mrs. Waycross must have opened the door to a man who was not her husband. And
immediately they found an indication of this, in the mess that the fire and
blood had made in the hall. Some distance away from poor Jane’s body there was
a medicine bottle such as druggists use. I think it had been broken in two
pieces; and on one intact piece they found sticking some fragments of a letter
that had not been quite burned. It was in a man’s handwriting, not her husband’s,
and they made out enough of it to understand. It was full of—expressions of
love, you know, and it made an appointment to meet her there on that night.”

Rodney Hunter, as the girl paused, felt
impelled to ask a question.

“Did they know whose handwriting it was?”

“It was Jeremy Wilkes’s,” replied the other
simply. “Though they never proved that, never more than slightly suspected it,
and the circumstances did not bear it out. In fact, a knife stained with blood
was actually found in Mr. Wilkes’s possession. But the police never brought it
to anything, poor souls. For, you see, not Mr. Wilkes—or anyone else in the
world—could possibly have done the murder.”

“I don’t understand that,” said Hunter, rather
sharply.

“Forgive me if I am stupid about telling
things,” urged their hostess in a tone of apology. She seemed to be listening
to the chimney growl under a cold sky, and listening with hard, placid eyes. “But
even the village gossips could tell that. When Mrs. Randall came here to the
house on that morning, both the front and the back doors were locked and
securely bolted on the inside. All the windows were locked on the inside. If
you will look at the fastenings in this dear place, you will know what that
means.

“But, bless you, that was the least of it! I
told you about the snow. The snowfall had stopped at nine o’clock in the
evening, hours and hours before Mrs. Waycross was murdered. When the police
came, there were only two separate sets of footprints in the great unmarked
half acre of snow round the house. One set belonged to Mr. Wilkes, who had come
up and looked in through the window the night before. The other belonged to
Mrs. Randall. The police could follow and explain both sets of tracks; but
there were no other tracks at all, and no one was hiding in the house.

“Of course, it was absurd to suspect Mr.
Wilkes. It was not only that he told a perfectly straight story about the man
in the tall hat; but both Dr. Sutton and Mr. Pawley, who drove back with him
from Five Ashes, were there to swear he could not have done it. You understand,
he came no closer to the house than the windows of this room. They could watch
every step he made in the moonlight, and they did. Afterwards he drove home
with Dr. Sutton and slept there; or, I should say, they continued their
terrible drinking until daylight. It is true that they found in his possession
a knife with blood on it, but he explained that he had used the knife to gut a
rabbit.

“It was the same with poor Mrs. Randall, who
had been up all night about her midwife’s duties, though naturally it was even
more absurd to think of
her.
But there were no
other footprints at all, either coming to or going from the house, in all that
stretch of snow; and all the ways in or out were locked on the inside.”

It was Muriel who spoke then, in a voice that
tried to be crisp, but wavered in spite of her. “Are you telling us that all
this is true?” she demanded.

“I am teasing you a little, my dear,” said the
other. “But really and truly, it all did happen. Perhaps I will show you in a
moment.”

“I suppose it was really the husband who did
it?” asked Muriel in a bored tone.

“Poor Mr. Waycross!” said their hostess
tenderly. “He spent the night in a temperance hotel near Charing Cross Station,
as he always did, and, of course, he never left it. When he learned about his
wife’s duplicity”—again Hunter thought she was going to pull down a corner of
her eyelid—“it nearly drove him out of his mind, poor fellow. I think he gave
up agricultural machinery and took to preaching, but I am not sure. I know he
left the district soon afterwards, and before he left he insisted on burning
the mattress of their bed. It was a dreadful scandal.”

“But in that case,” insisted Hunter, “who did
kill her? And, if there were no footprints and all the doors were locked, how
did the murderer come or go? Finally, if all this happened in February, what
does it have to do with people being out of the house on Christmas Eve?”

“Ah, that is the real story. That is what I
meant to tell you.”

She grew very subdued.

“It must have been very interesting to watch
the people alter and grow older, or find queer paths, in the years afterwards.
For, of course, nothing did happen as yet. The police presently gave it all up;
for decency’s sake it was allowed to rest. There was a new pump built in the
market square; and the news of the Prince of Wales’s going to India in ’seventy-five
to talk about; and presently a new family came to live at ‘Clearlawns’ and
began to raise their children. The trees and the rains in summer were just the
same, you know. It must have been seven or eight years before anything
happened, for Jane Waycross was very patient.

“Several of the people had died in the
meantime. Mrs. Randall had, in a fit of quinsy; and so had Dr. Sutton, but that
was a great mercy, because he fell by the way when he was going out to perform
an amputation with too much of the drink in him. But Mr. Pawley had
prospered—and, above all, so had Mr. Wilkes. He had become an even finer figure
of a man, they tell me, as he drew near middle age. When he married he gave up
all his loose habits. Yes, he married; it was the Tinsley heiress, Miss
Linshaw, whom he had been courting at the time of the murder; and I have heard
that poor Jane Waycross, even after
she
was married to Mr. Waycross,
used to bite her pillow at night because she was so horribly jealous of Miss
Linshaw.