Christmas Stalkings (5 page)

“But they won’t understand!”

“They’ll understand. Merry Christmas, Miss Sissler.”

After one last sniffle, the freshman managed a watery smile. “Merry Christmas, Professor Shandy.”

Arm in arm, the great-aunt and the great-niece went down the walkway toward the village. As Peter watched them thread their way among the merrymakers, a repentant tiger lady came to rub against his pant leg. He picked her up and tickled her behind her ears. “Merry Christmas, Jane. If you mend your rowdy ways, maybe we’ll ask Mrs. Santa Claus to bake you a nice fresh catnip cowpat”

We almost didn’t get this story. Fortunately it was just
after
Reginald Hill completed “The Running of the Deer” that he learned he’d won the British Crime Writers Association’s Gold Dagger award for his novel
Bones and Silence.
Had the news arrived sooner, he says, he’d have been too excited to write.

So far, the gentleman from Yorkshire has produced only one other short story starring the serendipitous West Indian detective, Joe Sixsmith. That one was selected for the
Oxford Book of English Detective Stories . . .
not surprisingly, considering
Reg
Hill’s international reputation for taut writing, wry humor, and wildly original plots.

Nettleton was a tall, tweedy man in late middle age with a face like one of those snooty dogs that rich folk crap up poor folk’s parks with.

Joe Sixsmith was glad to see him, even though he didn’t like the look of him. Being glad to see people you didn’t like the look of was better than being guilty about taking money from people you did like the look of. How a good private eye
should
feel he didn’t know, mainly because he suspected he wasn’t a good private eye. Not that he didn’t find things out, only they often weren’t the things he was being paid to find out. There was a word for this.

Serendipity.

He thought it meant something like bad breath the first time he heard it and might have been seriously offended if the old girl who told him he’d got it hadn’t been writing a check at the time.

“What’s that then?” he’d asked.

“The knack of making useful discoveries by chance,” said Miss Negus, handing him the check which was the first installment of the money he got to feel guilty about taking. “That’s why I have come to you. I have applied all my ratiocinative powers to my problem and come up empty-handed. So now I am willing to pay for a more oblique approach.”

After a lifetime in education, Miss Negus was devoting her retirement to good works. Her name appeared on the committee list of most major charities in the area, but the apple of her charitable eye was a group she’d founded herself, SPADA, the Small Pet Animals’ Defense Association. SPADA had been functioning for five years, and the “problem” was that its income had gone into a slight decline over the last two. Miss Negus had a “feeling” that something was wrong. As most of SPADA’s income came from collecting boxes, Sixsmith had his own feeling there was
sod
all he could do about it, even if there were anything to be done about. But Miss Negus was not to be denied and he spent many chilly hours, catching cold and guilt together, lurking around drafty shopping centers in hope of spotting one of SPADA’s elderly collectors attacking her box with a table knife.

So when he found a message on his answering machine saying that a Mr. Nettleton would call at five, both his health and his higher feelings rejoiced at the prospect of a new client

There was a phone number with the message in case he couldn’t keep the appointment. He used the directory to turn it into a very posh address, then, feeling like a real PI instead of a balding, middling-aged, West Indian lathe operator who’d spent his redundancy money most unwisely, he made for the library to check the man out

He came back well-pleased. Nettleton was, among other things, an accountant He could smell real money.

And now the man was sitting before him and about to speak.

“Tell me, Mr. Sixsmith,” he drawled, “when you hear the phrase ‘an English country Christmas,’ what images spring to your mind?”

“Now that’s an interesting question,” said Sixsmith, followed by a pause. It was his experience that twits who asked interesting questions were usually bent on answering them as well.

“I hope not an unfair one, though of course different cultures have their different traditions ...”

He dunks I’m just off a banana boat! Time for a bit of role-play.

Sixsmith fixed Nettleton with his steely Pi’s gaze and hit the desk with his fist The dramatic effect was rather spoiled by a protesting howl from the bottom drawer where his cat Whitey slept, but ignoring this, he leaned forward and said, “Okay, let’s cut the cackle and get down to cases. I guess you know who I am, else you wouldn’t be here. Let me return the compliment You’re Antony Nettleton, age forty-three, married, four children, two at university, two at boarding school. You are senior partner in Nettleton and Jones, Chartered Accountants, you are an Independent member of South East
Herts
County Council, Chairman of Rotary, Captain-elect of the Coif Club, Coordinator of the United Appeal Fund, and Great Unicorn of the Worshipful Order of Stags. Right?”

He sat back with some complacency.

Nettleton was reduced to silence by his surprise.

Then he said, “No, I’m not.”

“Eh?”

“You’re confusing me with my more famous and much more active young brother, Antony, with whom I happen to be staying. I’m
Ambrose
Nettleton.”

“Oh, shit,” said Sixsmith.

“Not at all,” smiled Nettleton. “A natural mistake. We were talking about a country Christmas ...”

Such generosity of spirit deserved a reward. The least he could do was play the man’s game.

He said, “Dickens, stagecoaches and such?”

“That’s right,” said Nettleton, taking over as Six-smith had guessed he would. “Log fires, skating on the pond, mulled wine, blind man’s bluff, hunt the slipper, all the old games. Well, let me tell you, Mr. Sixsmith, Dickens got it wrong. I live and work in France, but earlier this year I acquired a small estate in
Cumbria
and my wife and I have been looking forward to spending Christmas there. But the closer it comes, the more we realize it’s not like
Dingley
Dell. Oh, there are traditional games being played, but nothing like hunt the slipper and blind man’s bluff. These are much rougher games, like poaching the pheasant, and chopping the fir, and running the deer.”

“Poaching the peasant, eh?” said Sixsmith. “Man, that sounds really heavy. And chopping the fur? That’d be rabbits maybe?”

“
Eff
eye
are
”
said Nettleton. “The tree. We have a plantation. Had. Someone chopped most of the young trees down the other night. They’ll be on some market stall now, no doubt. Christmas trees, you see. You have Christmas trees back home, do you?”

“In Luton? Yeah, it’s like a forest down Luton High Street this time of year.” Careful! Don’t trade ironies with the punters, not till you’ve cashed their check. “Deer you mentioned too.
Rubbing
the deer, was it?”

“Running. Like in the carol . . . ‘The rising of the sun and the running of the deer . . .’ it means hunting. Crisp winter mornings, red-coated huntsmen, hounds running free, traditional Christmas-card stuff. Only this isn’t like that This is nasty, furtive, dead-of-night stuff. They call it ‘lamping.’ What they do is go out in the woods or up the fells where the deer are sleeping, then switch on a powerful light suddenly. The deer are dazzled and transfixed in the beam. Then the bastards send in their lurchers to pull them down. Or they finish off the job themselves with an ax or pick handle. Disgusting.”

“What’s a lurcher when it’s at home?”

“Crossbreed, something between a sheepdog, say, and a greyhound.”

He spoke with such contempt that Sixsmith, despite his resolution, couldn’t help saying, “Purebred staghounds use humane killers, I suppose.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” snapped Nettle-ton. “No one can object to properly organized field sports. They’re part of our old country tradition. But I do object to mindless thugs coming onto my land to perform their monstrous slaughter. The other day in the woods just a few hundred yards above the Hall, I found a great pile of blood and guts, plus a deer’s head and hooves. They’d actually drawn and dismembered the beast right there! Mary and I are by ourselves just now, but come Christmas we’ll have a houseful of guests, and I don’t care to think of them or their children experiencing that kind of shock, I tell you.”

“You’ve told the police?”

“Of course. But it’s the usual story, too little, too late. We’re pretty remote, you see. Got to look after yourself up there, only the locals warn us not to investigate if we see a light. These bastards have as little respect for human life as for animals, and are quite capable of attacking you with a pick handle or even a shotgun.”

Sixsmith was not liking the sound of this. He said, “Mr. Nettleton, what do you want from me? Take a good look before you answer. I’m not one of those martial-arts freaks you see in the movies. I don’t suddenly uncoil and start parting the bad guys’ hair with my feet. What you see is what you get.”

“I’m not looking for a hard man,” said Nettleton. “You’ve been recommended to me as a man who comes in at things subtly, from the side. You see, I believe these lampers live in our area. The evening of the day I found the guts, we went down to our local, the
Hunnisage
Arms. Naturally we got talking with friends about the lampers. My wife expressed her opinion of them in very forceful terms. Anyone could have heard, and the pub was crowded. When we left pretty late—they have very flexible hours up there—I found that some bastard had scratched the outline of a deer’s antlers on my car bonnet”

“One of the lampers, you think? Any ideas?”

“There’s a nasty piece of work called Eddie Stamp. I caught him in my woods once. He said there was a path, but I told him I’d kick him so hard he wouldn’t need a path if I found him there again. Could be him, it’d be his style. But I’ve no proof. That’s why I’d like to hire you, Mr. Sixsmith, to go up there and investigate. There’s a converted barn on the estate, which is let out during the holiday season. You can stay there.”

“A black man by himself in the middle of winter? I’d stick out like a live sheep in a Sainsbury’s freezer.”

“No you wouldn’t Lots of people holiday in the Lake District at Christmas. As for being by yourself take your wife. Or a friend.”

“I don’t have a wife. And this is the only friend I’d take.”

A black-and-white cat had stepped out of a drawer onto the desk and was yawning impolitely in Nettle-ton’s face. “What do you think, Whitey? You fancy a trip to the country?”

“I’m sorry, no pets,” said Nettleton. “It’s a rule.”

“No? Well, I’m sorry too. No Whitey, no darkie, that’s the rule here, Mr. Nettleton.”

The man frowned, then said grudgingly, “All right Bring the cat So it’s settled?”

It still seemed crazy to Sixsmith, but he needed the job, not least because it gave him a good reason to stop spending Miss Negus’s money.

When he rang her to tell her he was going away, she said, “No matter. At this time of year, SPADA comes under the aegis of the United Appeal Fund. So our collectors are well supervised anyway, but do keep on thinking about it, Mr. Sixsmith. I know what a trivial matter it must seem but during my teaching days I always had this nose for something not quite right the moment I entered a classroom.”

Poor old cow, thought Sixsmith. Even noses had to grow old. He went home to pack all his thickest jumpers in preparation for the first journey he’d ever made north of Birmingham.

It was even worse than he expected. He passed through three sub-Arctic storms, lost his way at least five times, and saw the temperature gauge of his ancient Morris Oxford dip into the red as he scaled hills like the
Eiger
before he crawled up the winding driveway to
Skellbreak
Hall. He couldn’t see much of the house in the gloom but it looked to be a long rambling Hammer Films sort of place.

A woman answered the door, thirtyish, slightly overblown though not yet ready for dead-heading, with a cigarette dropping from an ill-natured mouth.

“Oh it’s you,” she said with the peremptory clarity of the tennis-playing classes. “Wait there.”

He waited there till she came back with a key.