Christmas Stalkings (28 page)

“He and I discussed this question, actually. He did remember one occasion when trash had been strewn around out front. He was afraid we’d get a citation from the Environmental Control Board, so he was working madly to get it picked up. The weather was unseasonably warm, so he took his jacket off and hung it inside, on the newel post at the foot of the stairs. But nobody came in or out except the neighbors.”

Nick leans closer.
“Which
neighbors?”

“He said he saw all three of them.”

Nick walks to the corner deli and gets himself a cup of coffee to go. Next to Gaston’s French roast, it’s swill. Back at the brownstone, he leans on the fence while he drinks it. He has just tossed his paper cup in the garbage can, still has the lid off, when Barnaby Gough emerges from the front door in a camel’s-hair coat and earmuffs. He is carrying a bulging plastic garbage bag. He waves cheerily at Nick and drops the bag into the garbage can. “Disposing of the Christmas junk mail,” he says and walks briskly away, leaving Nick still holding the garbage-can lid, staring down at the bag. Nick has just realized something.

When Barnaby Gough returns, now laden with bags from the Integral Yoga Institute’s health-food grocery store on Thirteenth Street, Nick is sitting inside on the stairs. He is holding a red-and-white-striped cardboard fruitcake box imprinted, “To Our Valued Customer.” He holds the box out to Barnaby. “I rescued your fruitcake,” he says.

Barnaby’s eyes narrow. “So you did.”

“I noticed it upstairs, and wondered who would send a fruitcake to a health-food nut. So I looked at the small print.” Nick reads, “‘To Our Valued Customer.’ And down here below, ‘From Your Friends at the Admiral Savings Bank.’ If you never do business with banks, why is the Admiral Savings Bank sending you a fruitcake?”

“Who’s asking?” says Barnaby contemptuously.

He starts to push by Nick, but Nick stands up. Somehow, in the half-light of the hall, Nick looks enormous. His face is craggy and grave. He says, “I think you’d better answer.”

“I don’t—it’s a mistake—”

Nick shakes his head. “It’s no mistake. I called the bank. They confirm that you have a safe-deposit box there. They also said all communication with you was supposed to be through a box number. There must have been a glitch, and the fruitcake got sent here instead.”

“They can’t give you information like that! It’s privileged—”

“My guess is, the jewels are in your safe-deposit box, where you put them when you thought up your scheme to defraud the insurance company. Collect the money, right? Then go abroad and sell the stones sometime?”

Barnaby shrinks. He says, “Who the hell are you, Nick? Undercover cop? Listen, Nick—”

“You sent the super and his family tickets to Radio City to get them out of the way. You didn’t imagine Matt McGuire would get into the spirit of the season, give away his ticket, and come back to hear you setting the scene upstairs.”

“I’ve had difficulties, you know. Times aren’t good. I didn’t expect anybody to be arrested—”

“But when he was, you went ahead and let an innocent man be your fall guy.” Nick shakes his head. “Not only that. You made his son hate Santa Claus.”

Barnaby’s lips move. He might be trying to say, “I’m sorry.”

Once Barnaby is in custody, Nick doesn’t stick around for Matt McGuire’s homecoming. Time is short, and there’s too much to do. He does have a brief talk with Jason McGuire. Nick can be persuasive, and by the time he leaves, he’s pretty sure everything is okay on the Jason front. Oh!—he’d better arrange for somebody actually to repair the fireplaces in the brownstone before Christmas. Nick hopes, he really hopes, that Gaston
Duvivier
believes in Santa Claus.

I’d be interested to know whether any scholar has ever done a Ph.D. thesis on why so many college professors take to a life of literary crime. Few have done so with more zest, skill
_,
and sometimes malicious wit than Robert Barnard.

Bob could possibly do it in Norwegian, even. After having studied English at Balliol College in Oxford University, he went on to teach English in Australia, then in Norway, finishing his teaching career at the University of Troms0. Troms0 is at the highest latitude you can reach in northern European universities, and Robert Barnard is about as high as he can get on my personal list of favorites .
. .
even if some of his characters do choose strange methods of solving their domestic problems.

It must be rare for the first thought of a newly appointed government minister to be: Now is the time to kill my wife. Don’t get me wrong—I’m sure many of my colleagues would like to, with that dull, insistent sort of wishing which will never actually impel them to action, and which is characteristic of second-rate minds. My thought was not If only I could but Now I can. It had my typical decisiveness and lack of sentiment, as well as that ability to get to the heart of a question and come up with a solution which I am sure was the reason the Prime Minister decided to promote me.

I was brought into the government in the autumn reshuffle, and my second thought was: Christmas is coming. Ideal.

I should explain that the post I was given was one of the junior positions in the Home Office. I doubt whether the thought would have occurred to me if it
had
been in Trade and Industry, or Environment The Home Office, you see, has a great deal to do with Northern Ireland, and everything to do with the imprisonment of IRA terrorists. Its ministers, therefore, are natural targets. Indeed, two days after I took up my post, I had a visit by arrangement from a high-ranking Scotland Yard terrorist officer who lectured me on personal security; elementary precautions I and my family could take, and little indications that might give me the idea that something was wrong.

Including, naturally, suspect packages.

He actually brought along a mock-up suspect package, showed me all the signs that should arouse my suspicions, and then proceeded to take it apart and show me the sort of explosive device that would be concealed inside. It was a real education.

I tried not to show too much interest. Indeed, I hope I gave the impression of a man who is trying to give due attention to an important matter, but who has actually a mountain of things he ought to be doing. In fact my mind was ticking away as inexorably as a real explosive device. A suspect package among her Christmas parcels—a sort of
bombe surprise.
How wonderful if it could have gone off while she was singing “Happy Birthday, dear Jesus” with the children. But of course that was out of the question. I had no particular desire to harm my children. Merely to render them motherless.

There are many reasons why the old custom of wife murder has not fallen into disuse in this age of easy—indeed practically obligatory—divorce. One is to get custody of the children. Another is money. Another is personal satisfaction that no divorce can give. My situation is peculiar. Normally even an MP can move out of the family home, make mutterings about “irretrievable breakdown,” and in two shakes of a duck’s tail be shacking up with his secretary, or Miss Bournemouth 1989, or whomever he has had his eye on. Not the MP for the constituency of Dundee
Kirkside
. My constituents, though Conservative almost to a man and woman, are tight-lipped, censorious, pleasure-hating accountants and small shopkeepers, people for whom John Knox did not go nearly far enough. Liquor never passes their lips, dance never animates their lower limbs—their very sperm is deep-frozen.

Divorce, for the MP for Dundee
Kirkside
, was a non-starter.

Equally, living for the rest of my life with Annabelle was simply not to be contemplated. If I had not known this before, I certainly knew it at a Downing Street dinner shortly after my appointment. As ill luck would have it, Annabelle was seated near to the Prime Minister, while I was
someway
down on the other side of the table. But of course I am all too attuned to her voice, and I heard her say, “Whenever I see my two little ones tucked up in their little bed, I always seem to see the baby Jesus there making a third I”

The Prime Minister’s face was a picture. So, I imagine, was mine.

Not that Annabelle’s style of conversation, apparently derived from Victorian commonplace books designed to be given as Sunday school prizes, hadn’t been useful to me in the past I’d be the first to admit that in private. For instance, being only half-Scottish (and on my mother’s side at that) and having been educated at Lancing, I was not an obvious candidate for a Scottish constituency. Thank God we Tories still interview the wives as part of the selection procedure! I don’t say anyone was melted by Annabelle’s liquid caramel smile, but they were enraptured by her expressed conviction that we (we in the Conservative party) are on this earth to do the Lord’s bidding, that she prayed every night that her husband would do the Lord Jesus’ work, that we were the party of the family, and the Christian family at that—and a lot more balls along these lines. I got the nomination, and we celebrated by going down on our knees beside the twin beds in our hideous Dundee hotel room. It was the least I could do. Luckily the curriculum vitae which I submitted to the selection committee had merely stated that we had been married in 1985 and our first child born in 1986—months not given. Being the party of the family didn’t mean they approved of women who were in the family way when they went to the altar.

That happened, of course, before Annabelle got religion from a poisonous American woman evangelist at a dreadful rally in Earls Court that she had gone along to under the impression that it was
Aida
with elephants.

“I’m so longing for Christmas to come this year,” burbled Annabelle, her eyes all fizzing sparklers. “Just us and our two babies celebrating the coming of Jesus.”

I looked at her with love in my eyes and
Semtex
in my heart.

“It will be lovely. But, do you know, I sometimes regret the Christmases of my childhood. Over in Belgium the real celebration was Christmas Eve.”

My family retreated to Ostend, in the manner pioneered by bankrupt Victorians, when I was five. This was as a consequence of a disagreement my father had with the Inland Revenue which was not sorted out for many years. I have no idea whether the Belgians do in fact celebrate Christmas Eve. It was bad enough living with the clog-hoppers, without mixing with them. But I do know that many Continental countries do, and Annabelle has no knowledge of habits and customs outside
Pinner
.

“How odd,” she said in reply. “Before the baby Jesus was actually born. I’m not sure I’d like that.”

“Don’t be so parochial,” I said. “God isn’t just English. He’s got the whole world in his hands, remember.”

That set Annabelle off singing for the rest of the evening in her clear, bright Julie Andrews voice that can shatter glass ornaments if she goes too high.

I meanwhile was not neglecting the practical side. I never do, it’s part of my strength. I’ve always been pretty smart at do-it-yourself, and to explain my evening hours in the garage I told Annabelle that I was preparing a little surprise for Gavin and Janet at Christmas. Which wasn’t so far from the truth. I had already made an incognito visit (luckily for me I am still so junior that my face is not known, which will not be the case for long) to
Tottenham
Court Road, where I picked up one of the devices the inspector had so kindly demonstrated to me. Fortunately I had a very dodgy contact in the underworld (I had used him when I worked for Conservative Central Office, for a small job of ballot-rigging), and from him I got the modest quantity of explosive necessary to send Annabelle into the arms of the Lord Jesus.

All was going beautifully to plan.

While all this was coming to fruition, I was naturally fulfilling—very energetically fulfilling—my obligations and duties at the Home Office. I was also making routine preparations for Christmas, or getting other people to do them for me. I paid particular attention to getting the right presents for Annabelle. I meant her to die happy—or, if she insisted on leaving my presents till later, I intended to make much, in a thoroughly maudlin way, of what pleasures I had had in store for her to the Special Branch officers who would investigate her death. I bought a diamond pendant from Carrier’s; I had one of the bookish secretaries from the Home Office scouring the secondhand bookshops of
Highgate
and Hampstead for a copy of
The Bible Designed to Be Read as Literature,
which she had expressed a desire for—everything, right down to the Thornton’s chocolates that she loved. Thoughtful presents, though I say so myself. The presents of a model husband.

The children’s presents I could safely leave to her. She loved shopping for them, and she was usually out when I rang home in the weeks leading up to Christmas, on some spree or other of that kind. I got one of the secretaries to ring Harrods, and by the eighteenth a large Christmas tree was in place in the living room. Annabelle, the children, and the Norwegian au pair decorated it the same day. They were just finishing it when I arrived back from Whitehall.