Abigail Browining - Murder Most Merry

“I said, ‘Oo-er’,” murmured Mr. Campion. “One of the Eumenides, no doubt?”

“No.” Oates spoke innocently. “She’s not a Greek. Don’t worry about her. Just keep your mind on the facts. She knows, as we do, that the only person who wanted to kill Sampson is a nasty little snake called Kroll. He has been out of circulation for the best of reasons. Sampson turned Queen’s evidence against him in a matter concerning a conspiracy to rob Her Majesty’s mails and when he was released last Tuesday Kroll came out breathing retribution.”

“Not the Christmas spirit,” said Mr. Campion inanely.

“That is exactly what we thought,” Oates agreed. “So about five o’clock yesterday afternoon two of our chaps, hearing that Kroll was at The Humdinger, where he might have been expected to make trouble, dropped along there and brought him in for questioning and he’s been in custody ever since.

“Well, now. We have at least a dozen reasonably sober witnesses to prove that Kroll did not meet Sampson at the Club. Sampson had been there earlier in the afternoon but he left about a quarter to four saying he’d got to do some Christmas shopping but promising to return. Fifteen minutes or so later Kroll came in and stayed there in full view of Girlski and the customers until our men turned up and collected him. Now what do you say?”

“Too easy!” Mr. Campion was suspicious. “Kroll killed Sampson just before he came in himself. The two met in the dusk outside the club. Kroll forced Sampson into the garage and possibly into the car and shot him. With the way the traffic has been lately, he’d hardly have attracted attention had he used a mortar, let alone a gun with a silencer. He wiped the weapon, chucked it in the car, threw the mistletoe over the corpse, and went up to Girlski to renew old acquaintance and establish an alibi. Your chaps, arriving when they did, must have appeared welcome.”

Oates nodded. “We thought that. That is what happened . That is why this morning’s development has set me gibbering. We now have two unimpeachable witnesses who swear that the dead man was in Chipperwood West at six last evening delivering some Christmas purchases he had made on behalf of a neighbor. That is a whole hour after Kroll was pulled in.

“The assumption is that Sampson returned to Alcatraz Mews sometime later in the evening and was killed by someone else—which we know is not true. Unfortunately, the Chipperwood West witnesses are not the kind of people we are going to shake. One of them is a friend of yours. She asked our Inspector if he knew you because you were “so good at crime and all that nonsense.”

“Good Heavens!” Mr. Campion spoke piously as the explanation of the Superintendent’s unlikely visitation was made plain to him. “I don’t think I know Chipperwood West.”

“It’s a suburb which is becoming fashionable. Have you ever heard of Lady Larradine?”

“Old Lady ‘ell?” Mr. Campion let the joke of his salad days escape without its being noticed by either of them. “I don’t believe it. She must be dead by this time!”

“There’s a type of woman who never dies before you do,” said Oates with apparent sincerity. “She’s quite a dragon, I understand from our Inspector. However, she isn’t the actual witness. There are two of them. Brigadier Brose is one. Ever heard of him ?”

“I don’t think I have.”

“My information is that you’d remember him if you’d met him. Well, we’ll find out. I’m taking you with me, Campion. I hope you don’t mind?”

“My sister will hate it. I’m due to be Santa Claus in about an hour.”

“I can’t help that.” Oates was adamant. “If a bunch of silly crooks want to get spiteful at the festive season, someone must do the homework. Come and play Santa Claus with me. It’s your last chance. I’m retiring this summer.”

Oates continued in the same vein as he and Mr. Campion sat in the back of a police car threading their way through the deserted Christmas streets where the lamps were growing bright in the dusk.

“I’ve had bad luck lately,” the Superintendent said seriously. “Too much. It won’t help my memoirs if I go out in a blaze of no-enthusiasm.”

“You’re thinking of the Phaeton Robbery,” Mr. Campion suggested. “What are you calling your memoirs? Man-Eaters of the Yard ?”

Oates’s mild old eyes brightened, but not greatly.

“Something of the kind,” he admitted. “But no one could be blamed for not solving that blessed Phaeton business. Everyone concerned was bonkers. A silly old musical star, for thirty years the widow of an eccentric Duke, steps out into her London garden one autumn morning leaving the street door wide open and all her most valuable jewelry collected from strong-rooms all over the country lying in a brown paper parcel on her bureau in the first room off the hall. Her excuse was that she was just going to take it to the Bond Street auctioneers and was carrying it herself for safety! The thief was equally mental to lift it.”

“It wasn’t saleable?”

“Saleable? It couldn’t even be broken up. The stuff is just about as well-known as the Crown Jewels. Great big enamels which the old Duke had collected at great expense. No fence would stay in the same room with them, yet, of course, they are worth the Earth as every newspaper has told us at length ever since they were pinched!”

“He didn’t get anything else either, did he?”

“He was a madman.” Oates dismissed him with contempt. “All he gained was the old lady’s housekeeping money for a couple of months which was in her handbag—about a hundred and fifty quid—and the other two items which were on the same shelf, a soapstone monkey and a plated paperknife. He simply wandered in, took the first things he happened to see and wandered out again. Any sneak thief, tramp, or casual snapper-upper could have done it and who gets blamed? Me! ”

He looked so woebegone that Mr. Campion hastily changed the subject. “Where are we going?” he inquired. “To call on her ladyship? Do I understand that at the age of one hundred and forty-six or whatever it is she is cohabiting with a Brig? Which war?”

“I can’t tell you.” Oates was literal as usual. “It could be the South African. They’re all in a nice residential hotel—the sort of place that is very popular with the older members of the landed gentry just now.”

“When you say landed, you mean as in Fish?”

“Roughly, yes. Elderly people living on capital. About forty of them. This place used to be called The Haven and has now been taken over by two ex-society widows and renamed The Ccraven —with two Cs. It’s a select hotel-cum-Old Ducks’ Home for Mother’s Friends. You know the sort of place?”

“I can envisage it. Don’t say your murdered chum from The Humdinger lived there too?”

“No, he lived in a more modest place whose garden backs on the CCraven’s grounds. The Brigadier and one of the other residents, a Mr. Charlie Taunton, who has become a bosom friend of his, were in the habit of talking to Sampson over the wall. Taunton is a lazy man who seldom goes out and has little money but he very much wanted to get some gifts for his fellow guests— something in the nature of little jokes from the chain stores, I understand; but he dreaded the exertion of shopping for them and Sampson appears to have offered to get him some little items wholesale and to deliver them by six o’clock on Christmas Eve—in time for him to package them up and hand them to Lady Larradine who was dressing the tree at seven.”

“And did you say Sampson actually did this?” Mr. Campion sounded bewildered.

“Both old gentlemen—the Brigadier and Taunton—swear to it. They insist they went down to the wall at six and Sampson handed the parcel over as arranged. My Inspector is an experienced man and he doesn’t think we’ll be able to shake either of them.”