Murder Most Merry (44 page)

“Not yet.”

Rand worked with them for a time and then dozed on his office couch. It was long after midnight when Parkinson shook him awake. “I think we’ve got part of it.”

“Let me see.”

The younger man produced long folds of computer printout. “On this one we concentrated on the first six characters—the repetitive MPPMPM. We got nowhere substituting E, T, or A, but when we tried the next letters on the frequency list, O and N, look what came up.”

Rand focused his sleepy eyes and read NOONON. “Noon on?”

“Exactly. And there’s another ON combination later in the message.”

“Just a simple substitution cipher after all,” Rand marveled. “School children make them up all the time.”

“And it took us all these hours to get this far.”

“St. Ives didn’t worry about making the cipher too complex because he was writing it in invisible ink. It was our good luck that the box warmed enough so that some of the message began to appear.”

“A terrorist network armed with plastic explosives, and St. Ives is telling them when and where to set off the bomb. Do you think we should phone Hastings?”

Rand glanced at the clock. It was almost dawn on Christmas morning. “Let’s wait till we get the rest of it.

He followed Parkinson down the hall to the computer room where the others were at work. Not bothering with the machines, he went straight to the old blackboard at the far end of the room. “Look here, all of you. The group of letters following
noon on
is probably a day of the week, or a date if it’s spelled out. If it’s a day of the week, three of these letters have to stand for
day
.”

As he worked, he became aware that someone had chalked the most common letter-frequency list down the left side of the board, starting with E, T, A, O, N, and continuing down to Q, X, Z. It was the list from David Kahn’s massive 1967 book,
The Codebreakers
, which everyone in the department had on their shelves. He stared at it and noticed that M and P came together about halfway down the list. Together, just like N and O in the regular alphabet. Quickly he chalked the letters A to Z next to the frequency list. “Look here! The key is the standard letter-frequency list. ABCDE is enciphered as ETAON. There are no Ns in the message we found, so there are no Es in the plaintext.”

The message became clear at once: NOONO NTHIS DAYCH ARING CROSS STATI ONTRA CKSIX. “Noon on this day, Charing Cross Station, Track six,” Rand read.

“Noon on which day?” Parkinson questioned. “It was after noon yesterday before he distributed most of the boxes.”

“He must mean today. Christmas Day. A Christmas Day explosion at Charing Cross Station.”

I’ll phone Hastings,” Parkinson decided. “We can catch them in the act.”

Police and Scotland Yard detectives converged on the station shortly after dawn. Staying as unobtrusive as possible, they searched the entire area around track six. No bomb was found.

Noon came and went, and no bomb exploded.

Rand turned up at Leila’s flat late that afternoon. “Only twenty-four hours late,” she commented drily, holding the door open for him.

“And not in a good mood.”

“You mean you didn’t crack it after all this time?”

“We cracked it, but that didn’t do us much good. We don’t have the man who sent it, and we may be unable to prevent a terrorist bombing.”

“Here in London?”

“Yes. right here in London.” He knew a few police were still at Charing Cross Station, but he also knew it was quite easy to smuggle plastic explosives past the tightest security. They could be molded into any shape, and metal detectors were of no use against them.

He tried to put his mind at ease during dinner with Leila, and later when she asked if he’d be spending the night he readily agreed. But he awakened before dawn and walked restlessly to the window, looking out at the glistening streets where rain had started to fall. It would be colder today, more like winter.

The bomb hadn’t gone off at Charing Cross Station yesterday. Either the time or the place was wrong.

But it hadn’t gone off anywhere else in London, so he could assume the place was correct. It was the time that was off.

The time, or the day.

This day.

Noon on this day.

He went to Leila’s telephone and called Parkinson at home. When he heard his sleepy voice answer, he said, “This is Rand. Meet me at the office in an hour.”

“It’s only six o’clock,” Parkinson muttered. “And a holiday.”

“I know. I’m sorry. But I’m calling Hastings, too. It’s important.”

He leaned over the bed to kiss Leila but left without awakening her.

An hour later, with Hastings and Parkinson seated before him in the office, Rand picked up a piece of chalk. “You see, we assumed the wrong meaning for the word ‘this.‘ If someone wants to indicate ‘today,‘ they say it— they don’t say ‘this day.‘ On the other hand, if I write the word ‘this’ on the desk in front of me—” he did so with the piece of chalk “—what am I referring to?”

“The desk,” Parkinson replied.

“Right. If I wrote the word on a box, what would I be referring to?”

“The box.”

“When St. Ives’s message said, ‘this day,‘ he wasn’t referring to Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. He was telling them Boxing Day. Even if they were foreign, they’d know it was the day after Christmas here and a national holiday.”

“That’s today,” Hastings said.

“Exactly. We need to get the men back to Charing Cross Station.”

The station was almost deserted. The holiday travelers were at their destinations, and it was too soon for anyone to have started home yet. Rand stood near one of the newsstands looking through a paper while the detectives again searched unobtrusively around track six. It was nearly noon and time was running out.

“No luck,” Hastings told him. “They can’t find a thing.”

“Plastique.” Rand shook his head. “It could be molded around a girder and painted most any color. We’d better keep everyone clear from now until after noon.” It was six minutes to twelve.

“Are you sure about this, Rand? St. Ives is using a dozen or more people. Perhaps they all didn’t understand his message.”

“They had to come together to assemble the small portions of explosive into a deadly whole. Most of them would understand the message even if a few didn’t. I’m sure St. Ives trained them well.”

“It’s not a busy day. He’s not trying to kill a great many people or he’d have waited until a daily rush hour.”

“No,” Rand agreed. “I think he’s content to—” He froze, staring toward the street entrance to the station. A man and a woman had entered and were walking toward track six. The man was Ivan St. Ives and the woman was Daphne Sollis.

Rand had forgotten that the train to Hastings left from Charing Cross Station.

He ran across the station floor, through the beams of sunlight that had suddenly brightened it from the glass-enclosed roof. “St. Ives!” he shouted.

Ivan St. Ives had just bent to give Daphne a good-bye kiss. He turned suddenly at the sound of his name and saw Rand approaching. “What is this?” he asked.

“Get away from him. Daphne!” Rand warned.

“He just came to see me off. I told you I was visiting—”

“Get away from him!” Rand repeated more urgently.

St. Ives met his eyes, and glanced quickly away, as if seeking a safe exit. But already the others were moving in. His eyes came back to Rand, recognizing him. “You were at the store, in line for Father Christmas! I knew I’d seen you before!”

“We broke the cipher, St. Ives. We know everything.”

St. Ives turned and ran, not toward the street from where the men were coming but through the gate to track six. A police constable blew his whistle, and the sound merged with the chiming of the station clock. St. Ives had gone about fifty feet when the railway car to his left seemed to come apart with a blinding flash and roar of sound that sent waves of dust and debris billowing back toward Rand and the others. Daphne screamed and covered her face.

When the smoke cleared. Ivan St. Ives was gone. It was some time later before they found his remains among the wreckage that had been blown onto the adjoining track. By then. Rand had explained it to Hastings and Parkinson. “Ivan St. Ives was a truly evil man. When he was hired to plan and carry out a terrorist bombing in London over the Christmas holidays, he decided quite literally to kill two birds with one stone. He planned the bombing for the exact time and place where his old girlfriend Daphne Sollis would be. To make certain she didn’t arrive too early or too late, he even escorted her to the station himself. She knew too much about his past associations, and he wanted her out of his life for good. I imagine one of his men must have ridden the train into Charing Cross Station and hidden the bomb on board before he left.”

But he didn’t tell any of this to Daphne. She only knew that they’d come to arrest St. Ives and he’d been killed by a bomb while trying to flee. A tragic coincidence, nothing more. She never knew St. Ives had tried to kill her.

In a way Rand felt it was a Christmas gift to her.

INSPECTOR TIERCE AND THE CHRISTMAS VISITS – Jeffry Scott

Choppers are only human, Jill Tierce told herself, without much conviction, after Superintendent Haggard’s invitation to a quiet drink after work. Actually he’d passed outside the open door of her broom-closet office, making Jill start by booming, “Heads up. girlie! Pub call, I’m buying. Back in five...” before bustling away, rubbing his hands.

Taking acceptance for granted was very Lance Haggard, and so was the empty, outward show of bonhomie, but there you were.

Unless forced to behave otherwise, Superintendent Haggard generally did no more than nod to Inspector Tierce in passing. This hadn’t broken her heart. He had a reputation: it was whispered that he pulled strokes. Nothing criminal, he wasn’t bent, but he had a knack of pilfering credit for ideas or successes, coupled with deft evasive action if his own projects went wrong.

Refusing to waste time on Jill Tierce owed less to sexism than to the fact that she was of no present use to him. Leg mangled on duty, she was recovering slowly. Fighting against being invalided out of the Wessex-Coastal Force, lying like a politician about miracles of surgery and physiotherapy, and disguising her limp by willpower, she had won a partial victory. Restricted to light duties on a part-time basis, she was assigned to review dormant cases —and Lance Haggard, skimming along the fast track, wasn’t one to waste time on history.

It wasn’t professional, then, and she doubted a pass. Superintendent Haggard was a notoriously faithful husband. Moreover, Inspector Tierce was clearsighted about her looks: too sharp-featured for prettiness, and the sort of pale hair that may deserve the label but escapes being called blonde.

What was he up to? Then she’d glanced out of the smeary window at her elbow and seen strings of colored lights doubly blurred by the glass and another flurry of snow. There was the explanation, Christmas spirit. She smiled wryly. The superintendent probably kept a checklist of seasonal tasks, so many off-duty hours per December week devoted to stroking inferiors who might mature into rivals or allies. She supposed she ought to feel flattered.

A police cadet messenger tapped at the door and placed a file on Jill’s desk without leaving the corridor, by leaning in and reaching. He had a lipstick smudge in the lee of one earlobe. Mistletoe had been hung in the canteen at lunchtime, only five days to the twenty-fifth now.

Big deal, she thought sourly.

The new file was depressingly fat. She transferred it from the in tray to the bottom of the pending basket, noting that the covers were quite crisp though the buff cardboard jacket had begun to fade. More than a year old. Inspector Tierce estimated. Then Superintendent Haggard was back, jingling his car keys impatiently.

He drove a mile or so out of town, to a Dickensian pub by the river. The saloon bar evoked a sporting squire’s den. Victorian-vintage trophy fish in glass cases on the walls, no jukebox, and just token sprigs of non-plastic holly here and there. “Quiet and a bit classy,” Lance Haggard commented. “I stumbled on this place last summer, thought it would suit you.”