Christmas Stalkings (11 page)

The ending of “O Little Town of Bethlehem” brought on Mary and Joseph; with “Angels from the Realms of Glory,” Annabel shoved the three angels toward the wooden dais on which they would spend ten agonizing minutes with their hands raised aloft. Three heads of golden-red hair and three sets of wings moved with great care until they reached their posts. As they raised their arms on Annabel
Cousins’s
vigorous cue, Mary sank—a little too gracefully—into her chair and discovered, with much too much astonishment, the infant Jesus in the crib.

“That’s the last time I let someone who thinks she’s Sarah Bernhardt play Mary,” muttered Annabel to Helen Armstrong, who had just finished creeping back from the other side of the altar. “Deborah makes a good Joseph, though.”

Helen nodded. “Are the kings in position yet?”

“
Omigod
,” said Annabel, “I haven’t checked their makeup.” And she tore downstairs.

“Shepherds in the Fields Abiding” brought two light-footed shepherd boy-girls frolicking joyously up the side aisles, carrying an improbable number of toy lambs. Erica appeared last, careening up the center aisle as if she had been entered in the Bethlehem Olympics. Helen Armstrong sighed; she knew it had been a mistake to tell Erica Henry to run, no matter how gladsomely. The side-aisle shepherds caught sight of their speedy companion and broke into a panicked race for the front. All three came skidding to a halt at the chancel steps, giving the unfortunate impression that they were escaping prisoners who had just been nabbed by a posse of their schoolmates. Erica finally remembered to point at the angels before she dashed through the narrow pathway between the second sopranos and the altos.

The organ ran through a graceful modulation in key and mode, and the senior school altos started “We Three Kings.” From her strategic spot behind the latticework, Helen Armstrong saw with great relief that Annabel Cousins was standing at the back with three completely attired Orient kings. They looked impressive, she reflected complacently. Of course, the three tallest girls in the senior class swathed in black velvet and scarlet-and-gold brocade were bound to look impressive.

Melchior paced solemnly up the aisle, apparently unaware of the three thousand or so people watching her, and took her place slightly to the left of the narrow passage up the chancel steps. The junior-school treble voices took up Caspar’s verse, sounding perilously frail and alone in a cruel and hostile world. The second king seemed to panic and hastened to take her place in the center, as if she could hear Herod’s soldiers at the door. The richer voices of the senior sopranos picked up Balthazar’s mournful wail and the third king paced ahead steadily, like one who had traveled at this same speed for years through the desert. They stood at last shoulder to shoulder, facing the altar. In a huge outpouring of sound, the organ screamed and every voice cried out the triumphant last verse; the three kings raised their offerings high above their heads.

It was at this rather noisy point that the
Kingsmede
School Annual Festival of Carols suffered its first alteration in procedure in seventy-five years. The center angel staggered slightly, dropped her arms, and collapsed on top of Joseph, before tumbling onto Mary’s lap.

“
Omigod
,” said Helen Armstrong, and hurried behind a line of senior second sopranos to rescue Mary from her angelic burden.

“She fainted,” whispered Mary accusingly. “You said no one ever fainted.” The school sang lustily, now onto “See Amid the Winter’s Snow,” covering the noise of two gym teachers and the school nurse swooping in on the trouble spot as rapidly as possible.

Helen ignored her, and bent to help Deborah turn the middle angel over to get the mask off her face and let her breathe.

It was then that the second departure from routine occurred. Mary was the first to notice the blood pouring out of the white-and-gold mask, soaking into her blue robe. Her screams brought down the house, drowning out all six hundred joyful voices.

“She was shot?”

“Looks that way.”

“And nobody saw anybody firing at her. No one saw a weapon.”

The larger man in the grey suit shook his head, with a what-did-you-expect shrug of his shoulders.

“What have they done with the body?” asked Inspector John Sanders. He was standing in the chancel looking down at the blood-soaked carpet.

“Apparently there were twenty doctors in the first two rows of the audience, all tripping over each other to make medical history by saving her life,” said his partner, Sergeant Ed Dubinsky. “She got whisked away to the hospital. But she’s dead all right He got her right between the eyes. Couldn’t have done it better myself.”

“Who was she?”

“That’s interesting,” said Dubinsky, dragging out his notebook. “She was supposed to be a girl called Ashley Wallace. But Ashley didn’t show up, and at the last minute they grabbed a teacher. They needed someone who could stand still, and had hair to match the other two.”

“What in hell are you talking about?” Sanders stared at his partner in bafflement. “The other two what? Hair to match?”

“The other two angels. She was an angel, in the pageant—you know. The Christmas pageant. Like Sunday school and all that.” Ed Dubinsky was moving into his mode of long-suffering patience. “And the angels all wear masks, so you can’t tell who they are. Like this.” He moved over to where the plastic-shrouded, bloodstained mask with its neat bullet hole in the center of the forehead lay waiting to be carried off to the lab. “But every year they have angels that match—”

“Angels that match?”

“Yes, Inspector,” said a clear voice from behind Dubinsky. “The angels always have long hair, by tradition, and we have cycles—black, brown, red, blond. When I first got here, they were always blond, and that seemed to me to be discriminatory. The girls consider it a great honor to be an angel-. My name is Helen Armstrong, by the way. I look after the angels, among other things. Not that I did a very good job today.”

Sanders looked at her and then shook his head. “Beautiful. We have a maniac going around shooting angels in Christmas pageants. That was all I needed. It’ll be Santa’s next. Let me get this straight. The angel was supposed to be a girl named Ashley Wallace but she didn’t show—and?”

“It was at the very last minute, literally, before we realized she wasn’t here. We had wasted a lot of time searching for her. She’s like that, though. Totally unreliable.”

“Then why did you put her in it?”

Helen Armstrong smiled grimly. “You haven’t heard of Wilfred Wallace, the Minister of Justice? The
Wallaces
felt that little Ashley hadn’t received the recognition she deserved from the school over the years.” Mrs. Armstrong’s voice was thick with sarcasm. “He spoke to his good friend the chairman of the board, who begged us on bended knee to let Ashley be an angel and get Wallace off his back. It’s no big thing—not like asking us to raise her marks or make her Head Girl—so we cast Ashley. Wallace was certainly rewarded for that piece of arm-twisting—he thought that was his darling going face-forward into the crèche. He almost had a heart attack.” She grinned wickedly and then shook her head. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to sound quite so callous. Anyway, we were going to go on with just two angels, when—” Helen Armstrong’s eyes suddenly filled with tears. She shook her head angrily and continued in a low voice. “—when Cynthia Toomey finally turned up. She was supposed to be a floater, helping us do the pageant, going from one potential trouble spot to the next, but she was hiding in the choir loft talking to Jeff. Anyway, we took one look at that gorgeous red hair and bundled her into Ashley’s costume. With the mask, you couldn’t tell the difference.”

“Who knew about the switch?”

“Just the two of us. Annabel Cousins—she’s the drama teacher—and I. As far as anyone else was concerned, it was Ashley in that costume.”

“Did you see it happen?” -

“My God,” interrupted Dubinsky, “everybody saw it. There were about six hundred girls up here and down there,” he said, pointing to the pews in front beyond the side aisles. “There were twenty-five hundred more spectators, and about forty teachers roaming around. Carstairs said he felt like he was in court—he recognized at least three judges, and about thirty lawyers. They all have kids here. Not only that, but the dead woman’s husband was up there taking pictures of it.” He pointed to the choir loft at the west end of the church.

“Where are they all?”

“We let the spectators go, except for the parents of kids still here. They’re at the back. We kept the kids in the pageant, Ashley’s friends, the teachers who were roaming around and the choir director. They’re sitting up here. We haven’t been able to get rid of the chairman of the board, two of his lawyer friends, the principal and the vice-principal. They’re down in the first two pews.” He peered down as he spoke. “With Miss Jeffries,” he added, his voice heavy with disapproval.

“Don’t be so damned righteous,” muttered Sanders. “We were having lunch across the street when they tracked me down. She’s brought a book and I’ll take her home as soon as we’ve cleared up here.”

Dubinsky paid no attention. “And the husband is in the vestry.”

“The husband?”

“Yes, the husband. Jeff Toomey. The one who was photographing it all.”

“I’ll see him first.”

“By the way, the rector wants us out before evensong, the Minister of Justice wants a province-wide search instituted for his daughter, and half the powers in the country are down there screaming for blood. So we’re supposed to do something and be quick about it.”

Jeff Toomey was a startlingly good-looking man, in the square-jawed, blue-eyed style, with the face of a twenty-year-old, except for a sprinkling of lines around his eyes and a slight thinning of his blond hair. He stumbled to his feet, looking blankly exhausted, when they walked in. “I’m Jeff Toomey,” he said, holding out his hand. His voice was hoarse.

“You were up in the balcony all the time?”

“Yes, from about two-thirty until—until after Cynthia collapsed and someone came to tell me it was Cynthia, not one of the girls.”

“Alone?”

He shook his head. “Not really. Some girl came looking for someone and Cynthia was . . .” He swallowed hard and stopped. “Every year I photograph the whole thing. You know, for fund-raising. They sell prints to the kids’ parents. I’ve been doing it for ten years, ever since we got married. And I shot it,” he cried suddenly, causing Sanders’s wandering attention to snap back, “I shot someone killing Cynthia.” He dropped his head in his hands. “Just as she fell. What in hell was she doing up there? No one seems to know.”

“The student who was supposed to play the center angel didn’t show.”

“Why would someone want to shoot one of the students?” said Toomey, his face crumpled in bewilderment.

Sanders thought of the Minister of Justice, sitting grim-faced in the back of the church, and of the number of enemies he had acquired in the last four years. He shook his head. “Did you notice anything out of the ordinary, Mr. Toomey? While you were taking pictures?”

Toomey stared at him as if he hadn’t understood. “Notice anything? I didn’t have much chance. I had two cameras going—a wide-angle and a long lens— and a video camera. The video I left running, checking it now and again. Otherwise, I was setting up shots, going back and forth.”

“And except for those two visitors, you were alone.”

“Once the choir left. That was at the end of the first song.” He paused, as if for thought. “There was a man standing just below me in the center aisle. He was carrying something—I assumed at the time it was a camera. Now—I’m not so sure. And I may have heard a bang when I was taking that last picture. The music was so damned loud, I couldn’t tell.” A knock on the vestry door interrupted his reflections.

A constable walked in, dragging behind him a tall, thin, redheaded girl dressed in wet jeans, running shoes, a sweatshirt and a jacket. She was shivering visibly and her cheeks were wet with tears. “The missing girl, Inspector. She just arrived. Her father would like to speak to her also.”

Sanders could imagine the minister invoking the wrath of everyone from the Chief of Police to the Prime Minister on the constable’s stubborn head, without result “So you’re Ashley Wallace,” said Sanders, looking closely at her. “And where have you been?”

Ashley looked Sanders woefully in the eye, and then her glance skewered sideways toward Jeff Toomey. “I’m sorry,” she began in a voice choked with tears. “It’s been the most awful day. I don’t think I can . . .”

“Sit down, Miss Wallace,” said Sanders. “Start from the beginning.”

“Okay,” she said, and he caught a glimpse of a wad of blue gum between her teeth. Jeff Toomey frowned. “I left home early because I had to get into my angel costume and everything and I didn’t want to wait for my dad, because sometimes he can’t get away, and he didn’t want me to take the car because of the snow and everything. So I went to catch the bus and I realized that I’d forgotten my wallet. I didn’t have any money and this guy was driving by and he offered me a lift right to the church.”