The Twelve Crimes of Christmas (41 page)

“Mr. Wilkes had always been tall, and now he
was finely stout. He always wore frock coats. Though he had lost most of his
hair, his beard was full and curly; he had twinkling black eyes, and twinkling
ruddy cheeks, and a bluff voice. All the children ran to him. They say he broke
as many feminine hearts as before. At any wholesome entertainment he was always
the first to lead the cotillion or applaud the fiddler, and I do not know what
hostesses would have done without him.

“On Christmas Eve, then—remember, I am not sure
of the date—the Fentons gave a Christmas party. The Fentons were the very nice
family who had taken this house afterwards, you know. There was to be no
dancing, but all the old games. Naturally, Mr. Wilkes was the first of all to
be invited, and the first to accept; for everything was all smoothed away by
time, like the wrinkles in last year’s counterpane; and what’s past
is
past, or so they say. They had decorated the house with holly and mistletoe,
and guests began to arrive as early as two in the afternoon.

“I had all this from Mr. Fenton’s aunt (one of
the Warwickshire Abbotts) who was actually staying here at the time. In spite
of such a festal season, the preparations had not been going at all well that
day, though such preparations usually did. Miss Abbott complained that there
was a nasty earthy smell in the house. It was a dark and raw day, and the
chimneys did not seem to draw as well as they should. What is more, Mrs. Fenton
cut her finger when she was carving the cold fowl, because she said one of the
children had been hiding behind the window curtains in here, and peeping out at
her; she was very angry. But Mr. Fenton, who was going about the house in his
carpet slippers before the arrival of the guests, called her ‘Mother’ and said
that it was Christmas.

“It is certainly true that they forgot all
about this when the fun of the games began. Such squealings you never heard!—or
so I am told. Foremost of all at Bobbing for Apples or Nuts in May was Mr.
Jeremy Wilkes. He stood, gravely paternal, in the midst of everything, with his
ugly wife beside him, and stroked his beard. He saluted each of the ladies on
the cheek under the mistletoe; there was also some scampering to salute him;
and, though he
did
remain for longer than was necessary behind
the window curtains with the younger Miss Twigelow, his wife only smiled. There
was only one unpleasant incident, soon forgotten. Towards dusk a great gusty
wind began to come up, with the chimneys smoking worse than usual. It being
nearly dark, Mr. Fenton said it was time to fetch in the Snapdragon Bowl and
watch it flame. You know the game? It is a great bowl of lighted spirit, and
you must thrust in your hand and pluck out a raisin from the bottom without scorching
your fingers. Mr. Fenton carried it in on a tray in the half darkness; it was
flickering with that bluish flame you have seen on Christmas puddings. Miss
Abbott said that once, in carrying it, he started and turned round. She said
that for a second she thought there was a face looking over his shoulder, and
it wasn’t a nice face.

“Later in the evening, when the children were
sleepy and there was tissue paper scattered all over the house, the grown-ups
began their games in earnest. Someone suggested Blind Man’s Bluff. They were
mostly using the hall and this room here, as having more space than the dining
room. Various members of the party were blindfolded with the men’s
handkerchiefs, but there was a dreadful amount of cheating. Mr. Fenton grew
quite annoyed about it, because the ladies almost always caught Mr. Wilkes when
they could; Mr. Wilkes was laughing and perspiring heartily, and his great
cravat with the silver pin had almost come loose.

“To make it certain nobody could cheat, Mr.
Fenton, got a little white linen bag—like this one. It was the pillowcase off
the baby’s cot, really; and he said nobody could look through that if it were
tied over the head.

“I should explain that they had been having
some trouble with the lamp in this room. Mr. Fenton said: ‘Confound it, Mother,
what is wrong with that lamp? Turn up the wick, will you?’ It was really quite
a good lamp, from Spence and Minstead’s, and should not have burned so dull as
it did. In the confusion, while Mrs. Fenton was trying to make the light
better, and he was looking over his shoulder at her, Mr. Fenton had been rather
absently fastening the bag on the head of the last person caught. He has said
since that he did not notice who it was. No one else noticed, either, the light
being so dim and there being such a large number of people. It seemed to be a
girl in a broad bluish kind of dress, standing over near the door.

“Perhaps you know how people act when they have
just been blindfolded in this game. First they usually stand very still, as though
they were smelling or sensing in which direction to go. Sometimes they make a
sudden jump, or sometimes they begin to shuffle gently forward. Everyone
noticed what an air of
purpose
there seemed to be
about this person whose face was covered; she went forward very slowly, and
seemed to crouch down a bit.

“It began to move towards Mr. Wilkes in very
short but quick little jerks, the white bag bobbing on its face. At this time
Mr. Wilkes was sitting at the end of the table, laughing, with his face pink
above the beard, and a glass of our Kentish cider in his hand. I want you to
imagine this room as being very dim, and much more cluttered, what with all the
tassels they had on the furniture then; and the high-piled hair of the ladies,
too. The hooded person got to the edge of the table. It began to edge along
towards Mr. Wilkes’s chair; and then it jumped.

“Mr. Wilkes got up and skipped (yes, skipped)
out of its way, laughing. It waited quietly, after which it went, in the same
slow way, towards him again. It nearly got him again, by the edge of the potted
plant. All this time it did not say anything, you understand, although everyone
was applauding it and crying encouraging advice. It kept its head down. Miss
Abbott says she began to notice an unpleasant faint smell of burnt cloth or
something worse, which turned her half ill. By the time the hooded person came
stooping clear across the room, as certainly as though it could see him, Mr.
Wilkes was not laughing any longer.

“In the corner by one bookcase, he said out
loud: ‘I’m tired of this silly, rotten game; go away, do you hear?’ Nobody
there had ever heard him speak like that, in such a loud, wild way, but they
laughed and thought it must be the Kentish cider. ‘Go away!” cried Mr. Wilkes
again, and began to strike at it with his fist. All this time, Miss Abbott
says, she had observed his face gradually changing. He dodged again, very
pleasant and nimble for such a big man, but with the perspiration running down
his face. Back across the room he went again, with it following him; and he
cried out something that most naturally shocked them all inexpressibly.

“He screamed out: ‘For God’s sake, Fenton, take
it off me!’

“And for the last time the thing jumped.

“They were over near the curtains of that bay window,
which were drawn, as they are now. Miss Twigelow, who was nearest, says that
Mr. Wilkes could not have seen anything, because the white bag was still drawn
over the woman’s head. The only thing she noticed was that at the lower part of
the bag, where the face must have been there was a curious kind of
discoloration, a stain of some sort, which had not been there before: something
seemed to be seeping through. Mr. Wilkes fell back between the curtains, with
the hooded person after him, and screamed again. There was a kind of thrashing
noise in or behind the curtains; then they fell straight again, and everything
grew quiet.

“Now, our Kentish cider is very strong, and for
a moment Mr. Fenton did not know what to think. He tried to laugh at it, but
the laugh did not sound well. Then he went over to the curtains, calling out
gruffly to them to come out of there and not play the fool. But after he had
looked inside the curtains, he turned round very sharply and asked the rector
to get the ladies out of the room. This was done, but Miss Abbott often said
that she had one quick peep inside. Though the bay windows were locked on the inside,
Mr. Wilkes was now alone on the window seat. She could see his beard sticking
up, and the blood. He was dead, of course. But, since he had murdered Jane
Waycross, I sincerely think that he deserved to die.”

For several seconds the two listeners did not
move. She had all too successfully conjured up this room in the late ’seventies,
whose stuffiness still seemed to pervade it now.

“But look here!” protested Hunter, when he
could fight down an inclination to get out of the room quickly. “You say he
killed her after all? And yet you told us he had an absolute alibi. You said he
never went closer to the house than the windows….”

“No more he did, my dear,” said the other.

“He was courting the Linshaw heiress at the
time,” she resumed; “and Miss Linshaw was a very proper young lady, who would
have been horrified if she had heard about him and Jane Waycross. She would
have broken off the match, naturally. But poor Jane Waycross meant her to hear.
She was much in love with Mr. Wilkes, and she was going to tell the whole
matter publicly: Mr. Wilkes had been trying to persuade her not to do so.”

“But—”

“Oh, don’t you see what happened?” cried the
other in a pettish tone. “It is so dreadfully simple. I am not clever at these
things, but I should have seen it in a moment, even if I did not already know.
I told you everything so that you should be able to guess.

“When Mr. Wilkes and Dr. Sutton and Mr. Pawley
drove past here in the gig that night, they saw a bright light burning in the
windows of this room. I told you that. But the police never wondered, as anyone
should, what caused that light. Jane Waycross never came into this room, as you
know; she was out in the hall, carrying either a lamp or a candle. But that
lamp in the thick blue-silk shade, held out there in the hall, would not have
caused a bright light to shine through this room and illuminate it. Neither
would a tiny candle; it is absurd. And I told you there were no other lamps in
the house except some empty ones waiting to be filled in the back kitchen.
There is only one thing they could have seen. They saw the great blaze of the
paraffin oil round Jane Waycross’s body.

“Didn’t I tell you it was dreadfully simple?
Poor Jane was upstairs waiting for her lover. From the upstairs window she saw
Mr. Wilkes’s gig, with the fine yellow wheels, drive along the road in the
moonlight, and she did not know there were other men in it; she thought he was
alone. She came downstairs—

“It is an awful thing that the police did not
think more about that broken medicine bottle lying in the hall, the large
bottle that was broken in just two long pieces. She must have had a use for it;
and, of course, she had. You knew that the oil in the lamp was almost
exhausted, although there was a great blaze round the body. When poor Jane came
downstairs, she was carrying the unlighted lamp in one hand; in the other hand
she was carrying a lighted candle and an old medicine bottle containing
paraffin oil. When she got downstairs, she meant to fill the lamp from the
medicine bottle, and then light it with the candle.

“But she was too eager to get downstairs, I am
afraid. When she was more than halfway down, hurrying, that long nightgown
tripped her. She pitched forward down the stairs on her face. The medicine
bottle broke on the tiles under her, and poured a lake of paraffin round her
body. Of course, the lighted candle set the paraffin blazing when it fell; but
that was not all. One intact side of that broken bottle, long and sharp and
cleaner than any blade, cut her throat when she fell on the smashed bottle. She
was not quite stunned by the fall. When she felt herself burning, and the blood
almost as hot, she tried to save herself. She tried to crawl forward on her
hands, forward into the hall, away from the blood and oil and fire.

“That was what Mr. Wilkes really saw when he
looked in the window.

“You see, he had been unable to get rid of the
two fuddled friends, who insisted on clinging to him and drinking with him. He
had been obliged to drive them home. If he could not go to ‘Clearlawns’ now, he
wondered how at least he could leave a message; and the light in the window
gave him an excuse.

“He saw pretty Jane propped up on her hands in
the hall, looking out at him beseechingly while the blue flame ran up and
turned yellow. You might have thought he would have pitied, for she loved him
very much. Her wound was not really a deep wound. If he had broken into the
house at that moment, he might have saved her life. But he preferred to let her
die, because now she would make no public scandal and spoil his chances with
the rich Miss Linshaw. That was why he returned to his friends and told a lie
about a murderer in a tall hat. It is why, in heaven’s truth, he murdered her
himself. But when he returned to his friends, I do not wonder that they saw him
mopping his forehead. You know now how Jane Waycross came back for him,
presently.”