The Twelve Crimes of Christmas (39 page)

“I doubt we’ll ever see its like again,” I
agreed.

“Do not deny us hope, Parker,” replied Pons. He
cocked his head in my direction and looked at me quizzically. “Did I not see
you eyeing the clock with some apprehension in the course of the past half
hour?”

“You did, indeed,” I admitted. “I feared—I had
the conviction, indeed I did—that the three of them would vanish at the stroke
of midnight!”

BLIND MAN’S HOOD

by John Dickson Carr

Well known for his “locked-room”
mysteries, John Dickson Carr was a master practitioner of the true detective
story, and played fair with the reader. Under his own name and a pseudonym,
Carter Dickson, he produced a long list of short stories, mysteries and
historical novels, several of which were made into movies and radio plays.
Although most of his works were set in England, Carr was born in Uniontown,
Pennsylvania, the son of a criminal lawyer. The best of his works weave a
marvelous sense of time and place into their fabric.

Although one snowflake had already sifted past
the lights, the great doors of the house stood open. It seemed less a snowflake
than a shadow; for a bitter wind whipped after it, and the doors creaked.
Inside, Rodney and Muriel Hunter could see a dingy, narrow hall paved in dull
red tiles, with a Jacobean staircase at the rear. (At that time, of course,
there was no dead woman lying inside.)

To find such a place in the loneliest part of
the Weald of Kent—a seventeenth-century country house whose floors had grown humped
and its beams scrubbed by the years—was what they had expected. Even to find
electricity was not surprising. But Rodney Hunter thought he had seldom seen so
many lights in one house, and Muriel had been equally startled by the display. “Clearlawns”
lived up to its name. It stood in the midst of a slope of flat grass, now wiry
white with frost, and there was no tree or shrub within twenty yards of it.
Those lights contrasted with a certain inhospitable and damp air about the
house as though the owner were compelled to keep them burning all the time.

“But why is the front door
open?”
insisted Muriel.

In the driveway, the engine of their car
coughed and died. The house was now a secret blackness of gables, emitting
light at every chink, and silhouetting the stalks of the wisteria vines which
climbed it. On either side of the front door were little-paned windows, whose
curtains had not been drawn. Towards their left they could see into a low
dining room, with table and sideboard set for a cold supper; towards their
right was a darkish library moving with the reflections of a bright fire.

The sight of the fire warmed Rodney Hunter, but
it made him feel guilty. They were very late. At five o’clock, without fail, he
had promised Jack Bannister, they would be at “Clearlawns” to inaugurate the
Christmas party.

Engine trouble in leaving London was one thing;
idling at a country pub along the way, drinking hot ale and listening to the
wireless sing carols until a sort of Dickensian jollity stole into you, was
something else. But both he and Muriel were young; they were very fond of each
other and of things in general; and they had worked themselves into a glow of
Christmas, which—as they stood before the creaking doors of “Clearlawns”—grew
oddly cool.

There was no real reason, Rodney thought, to
feel disquiet. He hoisted their luggage, including a big box of presents for
Jack and Molly’s children, out of the rear of the car. That his footsteps
should sound loud on the gravel was only natural. He put his head into the
doorway and whistled. Then he began to bang the knocker. Its sound seemed to
seek out every corner of the house and then come back like a questing dog; but
there was no response.

“I’ll tell you something else,” he said. “There’s
nobody in the house.”

Muriel ran up the three steps to stand beside
him. She had drawn her fur coat close around her, and her face was bright with
cold.

“But that’s impossible!” she said. “I mean,
even if they’re out, the servants—! Molly told me she keeps a cook and two
maids. Are you sure we’ve got the right place?”

“Yes. The name’s on the gate, and there’s no
other house within a mile.”

With the same impulse they craned their necks
to look through the windows of the dining room, on the left. Cold fowl on the
sideboard, a great bowl of chestnuts; and, now they could see it, another good
fire, before which stood a chair with a piece of knitting put aside on it.
Rodney tried the knocker again, vigorously, but the sound was all wrong. It was
as though they were even more lonely in that core of light, with the east wind
rushing across the Weald, and the door creaking again.

“I suppose we’d better go in,” said Rodney. He
added, with a lack of Christmas spirit: “Here, this is a devil of a trick! What
do you think has happened? I’ll swear that fire has been made up in the last
fifteen minutes.”

He stepped into the hall and set down the bags.
As he was turning to close the door, Muriel put her hand on his arm.

“I say, Rod. Do you think you’d better close
it?”

“Why not?”

“I—I don’t know.”

“The place is getting chilly enough as it is,”
he pointed out, unwilling to admit that the same thought had occurred to him.
He closed both doors and shot their bar into place; and, at the same moment, a
girl came out of the door to the library, on the right.

She was such a pleasant-faced girl that they
both felt a sense of relief. Why she had not answered the knocking had ceased
to be a question; she filled a void. She was pretty, not more than twenty-one
or -two, and had an air of primness which made Rodney Hunter vaguely associate
her with a governess or a secretary, though Jack Bannister had never mentioned
any such person. She was plump, but with a curiously narrow waist; and she wore
brown. Her brown hair was neatly parted, and her brown eyes—long eyes, which
might have given a hint of secrecy or curious smiles if they had not been so
placid—looked concerned. In one hand she carried what looked like a small white
bag of linen or cotton. And she spoke with a dignity which did not match her
years.

“I am most terribly sorry,” she told them. “I
thought
I heard someone, but I was so busy that I
could not be sure. Will you forgive me?”

She smiled. Hunter’s private view was that his
knocking had been loud enough to wake the dead; but he murmured conventional
things. As though conscious of some faint incongruity about the white bag in
her hand, she held it up.

“For Blind Man’s Bluff,” she explained. “They
do cheat so, I’m afraid, and not only the children. If one uses an ordinary
handkerchief tied round the eyes, they always manage to get a corner loose. But
if you take this, and you put it fully over a person’s head, and you tie it
round the neck”—a sudden gruesome image occurred to Rodney Hunter—“then it
works so much better, don’t you think?” Her eyes seemed to turn inward, and to
grow absent. “But I must not keep you talking here. You are—?”

“My name is Hunter. This is my wife. I’m afraid
we’ve arrived late, but I understood Mr. Bannister was expecting—”

“He did not tell you?” asked the girl in brown.

“Tell me what?”

“Everyone here, including the servants, is
always out of the house at this hour on this particular date. It is the custom;
I believe it has been the custom for more than sixty years. There is some sort
of special church service.”

Rodney Hunter’s imagination had been devising
all sorts of fantastic explanations, the first of them being that this demure
lady had murdered the members of the household and was engaged in disposing of
the bodies. What put this nonsensical notion into his head he could not tell,
unless it was his own profession of detective-story writing. But he felt
relieved to hear a commonplace explanation. Then the woman spoke again.

“Of course, it is a pretext, really. The
rector, that dear man, invented it all those years ago to save embarrassment.
What happened here had nothing to do with the murder, since the dates were so
different; and I suppose most people have forgotten now why the tenants
do
prefer to stay away during seven and eight o’clock on Christmas Eve. I doubt if
Mrs. Bannister even knows the real reason, though I should imagine Mr.
Bannister must know it. But what happens here cannot be very pleasant, and it
wouldn’t do to have the children see it—would it?”

Muriel spoke with such sudden directness that
her husband knew she was afraid. “Who are you?” Muriel said. “And what on earth
are you talking about?”

“I am quite sane, really,” their hostess
assured them, with a smile that was half-cheery and half-coy, “I dare say it
must be all very confusing to you, poor dear. But I am forgetting my duties.
Please come in and sit down before the fire, and let me offer you something to
drink.”

She took them into the library on the right,
going ahead with a walk that was like a bounce, and looking over her shoulder
out of those long eyes. The library was a long, low room with beams. The windows
towards the road were uncurtained; but those in the side wall, where a faded
red-brick fireplace stood, were bay windows with draperies closed across them.
As their hostess put them before the fire, Hunter could have sworn he saw one
of the draperies move.

“You need not worry about it,” she assured him,
following his glance towards the bay. “Even if you looked in there, you might
not see anything now. I believe some gentleman did try it once, a long time
ago. He stayed in the house for a wager. But when he pulled the curtain back,
he did not see anything in the bay—at least, anything quite. He felt some hair,
and it moved. That is why they have so many lights nowadays.”

Muriel had sat down on a sofa and was lighting
a cigarette, to the rather prim disapproval of their hostess, Hunter thought.

“May we have a hot drink?” Muriel asked crisply.
“And then, if you don’t mind, we might walk over and meet the Bannisters coming
from church.”

“Oh, please don’t do that!” cried the other.
She had been standing by the fireplace, her hands folded and turned outwards.
Now she ran across to sit down beside Muriel; and the swiftness of her
movement, no less than the touch of her hand on Muriel’s arm, made the latter
draw back.

Hunter was now completely convinced that their
hostess was out of her head. Why she held such fascination for him, though, he
could not understand. In her eagerness to keep them there, the girl had come
upon a new idea. On a table behind the sofa, bookends held a row of modern
novels. Conspicuously displayed—probably due to Molly Bannister’s tact—were two
of Rodney Hunter’s detective stories. The girl put a finger on them.

“May I ask if you wrote these?”

He admitted it.

“Then,” she said with sudden composure, “it
would probably interest you to hear about the murder. It was a most perplexing
business, you know; the police could make nothing of it, and no one ever has
been able to solve it.” An arresting eye fixed on his. “It happened out in the
hall there. A poor woman was killed where there was no one to kill her, and no
one could have done it. But she was murdered.”

Hunter started to get up from his chair; then
he changed his mind and sat down again. “Go on,” he said.

“You must forgive me if I am a little uncertain
about dates,” she urged. “I think it was in the early eighteen-seventies, and I
am sure it was in early February—because of the snow. It was a bad winter then;
the farmers’ livestock all died. My people have been bred up in the district
for years, and I know that. The house here was much as it is now, except that
there was none of this lighting (only paraffin lamps, poor girl!); and you were
obliged to pump up what water you wanted; and people read the newspaper quite
through, and discussed it for days.

“The people were a little different to look at,
too. I am sure I do not understand why we think beards are so strange nowadays;
they seem to think that men who had beards never had any emotions. But even
young men wore them then, and looked handsome enough. There was a newly married
couple living in this house at the time: at least, they had been married only the
summer before. They were named Edward and Jane Waycross, and it was considered
a good match everywhere.

“Edward Waycross did not have a beard, but he
had bushy side-whiskers which he kept curled. He was not a handsome man,
either, being somewhat dry and hard-favored; but he was a religious man, and a
good man, and an excellent man of business, they say: a manufacturer of
agricultural implements at Hawkhurst. He had determined that Jane Anders (as
she was) would make him a good wife, and I dare say she did. The girl had
several suitors. Although Mr. Waycross was the best match, I know it surprised
people a little when she accepted him, because she was thought to have been
fond of another man—a more striking man, whom many of the young girls were
after. This was Jeremy Wilkes, who came of a very good family but was
considered wicked. He was no younger than Mr. Waycross, but he had a great
black beard, and wore white waistcoats with gold chains, and drove a gig. Of
course, there had been gossip, but that was because Jane Anders was considered
pretty.”