The Santa Klaus Murder (16 page)

George was grumbling, “None of us is ever going to entertain that lot at once, so why bother?”

When I had detached Gordon and was taking him off, Eleanor remarked sweetly, “I'm so grateful to you for removing my husband, Colonel Halstock. He's really too frightful when he comes over all highbrow, like this.”

“I have information,” I told Gordon, when we were alone in the library, “that you were in the study on Tuesday afternoon. Did you happen to go there to type a letter?”

He laughed genially. “No, no, Colonel! I
can
pick out a tune on the machine, mind you, with one finger, but I don't do it for fun. If I wanted something typed I should ask the admirable amanuensis.”

I asked him if he had noticed the typewriter at all, but could get nothing out of him on this point. No one else had been in the study, except for Eleanor, who had followed him in. He had expected to find Sir Osmond, had gone in to see him, but the room was empty.

“You want to know what I was trying to get hold of Sir Osmond alone for? In fact someone, who overheard a bit of what we said before the door was shut, has reported some incriminating conversation? I don't know what they have told you, and I can't remember exactly what words we used, but we certainly didn't refer to the typewriter, neither to the machine nor to its seductive operator! It's a bit awkward. I'm not keen for the others to know this, as you'll understand. The late Lady Melbury had some fine jewels, in particular some emeralds. I'm a bit of a connoisseur and Sir Osmond once showed me those stones. I believe she left them all for him to dispose of at his discretion, and although he gave some to the girls, he still had a good many. I was particularly anxious for Eleanor to have those emeralds. Both she and I would appreciate them and you'll not find anyone who could wear them to better advantage. You'll admit that, I think?”

I agreed that Eleanor would look lovely in emeralds and emeralds lovely on Eleanor, and wondered if I was going to be told that Sir Osmond had them in his breast-pocket on Christmas Day.

“I had told Eleanor,” Gordon continued, “that I meant to ask Sir Osmond, on this visit, if he would now give those emeralds to her. Fact of the matter is, I was a bit afraid he might do something foolish about them; might get an idea, you know, that emeralds would look well with auburn hair. Sheer waste! That girl would be better pleased with something from the synthetic diamond store.

“Eleanor didn't want me to speak to her father. She was afraid we'd lose the treasure for good if we seemed too eager for it. Eleanor and I aren't often at loggerheads, but she couldn't see eye to eye with me over this. I felt sure that if I caught the old man in the right mood, he'd be delighted to hand them over to his favourite daughter. That's what I was seeking him out in the study for on Christmas Eve. I thought I'd given Eleanor the slip, but she had chosen to make a great cause of this affair and was keeping an eye on me and followed me. So that's how it all came about.”

There wasn't much more. The emeralds were kept in the safe, he believed. He hadn't seen them on his visit and he never got another opportunity to speak to Sir Osmond about them. He only hoped that when the will was read it would turn out that the testator had done the right thing about them.

We did later on check the valuables in the safe and the emeralds were snug in their case.

When I was alone in the library again, I turned my attention to Miss Portisham's neat typescript. The girl had obviously made a great effort to remember every detail correctly and it seemed to me that she had remembered far too many.

The first point I noted as important was that apparently two Santa Klaus costumes had been ordered, of which the first never turned up. Miss Portisham's description of the family's behaviour when the alarm was given, I found interesting, but I noted no special facts until I got to the end of her story. The order in which people arrived in the study or library might tell us something, I thought. It was: Dittie, Hilda, Witcombe, Miss Portisham, George, Jennifer—who all entered the study. Then into the library came Eleanor and Gordon, Witcombe (again; he having gone out into the hall, apparently, to tell the others) and Miss Melbury, and Patricia. Then there was a pause and, last of all, Carol “sort of burst in,” followed by Philip Cheriton.

So Parkins had not delivered Ashmore's message to Carol until everyone else had heard the news and flocked into the library. That bore out what the butler himself had said. Also he was clearly not mistaken in thinking he had seen Philip Cheriton in Jenny's room with Carol. In any case, there was little possibility of a mistake, for Cheriton has thick, black, unruly hair, unlike that of anyone else in the house. Witcombe's hair is fair and neatly waved, Sir David's is thin and dusty-looking, Gordon has a bald patch and George has a very closely-clipped head.

While I was wondering what sort of a plot could possibly have been hatched between Carol, Philip and Witcombe, Witcombe himself put an inquiring head round the door. I knew he had returned to Flaxmere early that morning, but he seemed to have lain very low since then and I had not seen him. He grinned his silly grin at me.

“May I come in, Colonel? I've thought of something I'd like to tell you. It's a bit hard, you know, to think out the reasons for things when they're sprung upon you, the way your Inspector fellow sprung that one on me yesterday about the hairs on Sir Osmond's coat. Of course, I'd never thought of it before; didn't know there
were
any hairs on his coat; so how could I explain them? But lying on my little prison bed last night, I thought the whole thing over. Great place for thinking, a solitary cell! Of course, when they took the coat off the poor fellow's body, they folded it up! I left a little nest of bunny hairs on one side, and they spread all over the place. They stick to anything they touch! So that's all right, isn't it?”

I said guardedly that it might be.

“And there's another thing! Of course we all know what you're looking for and I saw it!”

This staggered me, but I asked him to explain exactly what he saw.

“Why, a whole Santa Klaus outfit, the exact image of the one I wore!”

I nearly went off the deep end at that. The house seemed to be full of lunatics who never gave away anything they knew until it was just too late. But I did manage to tell the fool to explain himself.

“I saw it in the mirror,” he told me. “I didn't grasp the idea at the time; thought I was seeing myself, though it did seem a bit odd. Thought it must be some scientific trick to do with refracted light and it occurred to me that we might make a good game of it later on. Angles and rays and that sort of business.”

With great difficulty I brought him back to the point and drew out of him that as he left the hall to take the presents to the servants and crossed the passage he approached a big mirror which is fastened to the wall opposite to the door of the cupboard under the stairs. In this mirror he saw for a moment the reflection of a Santa Klaus, who immediately slipped away “out of the side of the mirror, y'know!”

“I thought it was a bit rum and I walked backwards and tried again, but I couldn't catch the reflection a second time,” he explained. “But I've been experimenting since I came back, and if someone stands just in the dining-room doorway, and you come out of the hall and cross the passage to the opposite door, you catch a glimpse of him when you're almost up to the mirror.”

I took Witcombe to the passage and he showed me what he meant. The passage is lighted by windows high up in the wall which separates it from the hall, and if its own electric light is not switched on, it is gloomy. A man lurking silently in the doorway of the dining-room, at the end of the passage, would probably be unseen by anyone crossing the passage to go to the servants' quarters. If the murderer, rigged up as a duplicate Santa Klaus, had waited there to make sure that Witcombe had left the hall before he entered it, he forgot the tell-tale mirror which revealed him just for an instant, before he slipped away.

“You didn't go to the dining-room, I suppose,” I asked Witcombe, “to see if there really was anyone else about?”

“It never entered my head that there could be another one! I was sure that I'd seen myself, only I didn't quite make out how it happened. You see, Carol came out of the other corner while I was experimenting, and then I forgot all about it.”

“What do you mean by
out of the other corner
?”

“From somewhere behind me, to my left. From Jenny's room, I suppose. She called out to me and I turned to talk to her and forgot all about my ghost.”

I remarked that he seemed to have forgotten a great deal.

“You're right there, Colonel,” he agreed amiably. “I had such a shock when I found the corpse in the study that my mind went blank. It's all coming back now.”

Nothing else of any importance seemed to have “come back,” however, so I returned alone to the library.

Again the clues were leading unpleasantly to Carol. At the moment when Witcombe might have discovered the second Santa Klaus, Carol—after perhaps having helped that second one to dress up—distracts Witcombe's attention and saves the situation. Having kept him talking for a few minutes, she sees him safely on his way to the servants' hall and then waits in Jenny's room—for the return of the murderer? And who did join her in that room? Philip Cheriton who, whatever he knew or did not know of the will, had strong motives for murdering Sir Osmond. Perhaps, after all, Witcombe had begun to drop a few hints about Sir Osmond's proposed new will; not quite the hints Sir Osmond intended, but a suggestion to Carol that she was going to gain substantially. If she misunderstood him and thought that her grandfather had already executed a will leaving £25,000 to her and £50,000 to Jenny, providing she were still single, she might plan to draw in Philip as accomplice. By one shot he could win Jenny and a fortune and, incidentally, help Carol to another one. They would not bring Jenny into the plot. Even if she could be capable of such villainy, her naïve, emotional character was not the stuff of which murderers are made. But she might well suspect that something was wrong and if she had guessed enough to jump to the conclusion that Philip had fired the pistol, that would account for her handling of it to blot out his finger-prints.

Jennifer's room seemed to offer a possible means of getting the Santa Klaus outfit away from the house. Opening, as it did, into the passage, it was freer from observation than other parts of the house. If Philip had put on the costume in the cupboard where it had been kept ready, he may have forgotten the eyebrows and left them there; he could have returned to Jennifer's room to change. Or possibly he changed again in the cupboard, picked up the things and took them to Jennifer's room and never noticed that he had left the eyebrows in a dark corner. We must survey the garden outside Jennifer's windows for a possible hiding-place.

I had reached this point in my speculations when Kenneth Stour appeared, with an untidy mass of manuscript, which he dumped on the table in three heaps labelled on top sheets in his own handwriting:
Cheriton, Mrs. Wynford
, and
Jennifer Melbury
.

“I sat with Jennifer in her room most of the time while she wrote hers,” he informed me, “to make sure there was no collaboration between her and young Cheriton. But they are in no mood to collaborate. I suppose you've noticed the coldness between them? They are hardly on speaking terms. I'm sorry for little Jenny. Philip sat up most of the night over his little effort, I gather, and delivered it as soon as I arrived this morning. It doesn't tell us very much, I'm afraid, except how unfair the family always is and always has been to Dittie. Dittie's so confoundedly honest and that's not a quality which most Melburys can understand.”

“I have noticed that they have little use for the truth,” I agreed.

“I'm almost sorry I asked them to write the beastly things,” Kenneth continued. “But here they are. I haven't had time to read Jennifer's and Mrs. Wynford's thoroughly, but I have extracted one bit of information. The Santa Klaus affair was planned in the week before Christmas and an outfit was sent for, which was expected by post on Saturday but didn't arrive. That is to say, no one admits to knowing it arrived. It may have come, though not necessarily on Saturday. I don't know whether any members of the household, besides Jennifer, knew of the plan, but evidently most of the visitors didn't know of it until Monday morning, when Jennifer told them.”

Casually I asked him if he had worked out exactly who was at Flaxmere then.

“Yes; I've got a note of the order in which they came; Aunt Mildred on Friday; Hilda and Carol by train on Saturday morning, met at the station by Ashmore; George and family by car on Saturday evening; Dittie and David by car on Sunday; Eleanor and family on Monday morning by train, also met by Ashmore; Cheriton on Monday afternoon and Witcombe on Tuesday morning.”

I flicked over the leaves of Jennifer's story as he talked, and Carol's name jumped up at me from the third or fourth page. Jennifer “knew Carol had some shopping of her own to do in Bristol” on Monday morning. I felt an intense distaste for all Kenneth's ridiculous homework idea and I picked up the whole mass, including Miss Melbury's and Miss Portisham's compositions, and handed it to him, telling him to take the lot and go away and work through it.

“It's about time I left Flaxmere,” he agreed cheerfully. “Old George is beginning to wonder what on earth I am and if they forget their own troubles sufficiently to get really inquisitive, they'll give Dittie hell. I'll go home to the Tollards and work though this stuff systematically. I'm getting the germ of an idea but there are blank spots in my knowledge and I may want a good deal from you.”

I reflected that I might cope with him better when he had been chastened by reading Miss Melbury's sketch of his character, so I told him to drive to Twaybrooks and invite himself to dinner and I would talk to him afterwards. He went to borrow from Jenny a dispatch case in which to cart the manuscript about and then he took himself off.