Abigail Browining - Murder Most Merry

For dearest Mother.

Cheerio. Lots of love. Just off. Writing. Take care of yourself. Sonny.

For dear little Agnes with love from us all.

Mr. Campion stood before them for a long time but at length he turned away. He had to stoop to avoid the beam and yet he towered over the old woman who stood looking up at him.

Something had happened. It had suddenly become very still in the house. The gentle hissing of the kettle sounded unnaturally loud. The recollection of its lonely remoteness returned to chill the cosy room.

The old lady had lost her smile and there was wariness in her eyes.

“Tell me.” Campion spoke very gently. “What do you do? Do you put them all down there on the mat in their envelopes before you go to bed on Christmas Eve?”

While the point of his question and the enormity of it was dawning upon Sir Leo, there was silence. It was breathless and unbearable until old Mrs. Fyson pierced it with a laugh of genuine naughtiness.

“Well,” she said, “it does make it more fun!” She glanced back at Sir Leo whose handsome face was growing steadily more and more scarlet.

“Then... ?” He was having difficulty with his voice. “Then the postman did not call this morning, ma’am?”

She stood looking at him placidly, the flicker of the smile still playing round her mouth.

“The postman never calls here except when he brings something from the Government,” she said pleasantly. “Everybody gets letters from the Government nowadays, don’t they? But he doesn’t call here with personal letters because, you see, I’m the last of us.” She paused and frowned very faintly. It rippled like a shadow over the smoothness of her quiet, careless brow. “There’s been so many wars,” she said sadly.

“But, dear lady...” Sir Leo was completely overcome. There were tears in his eyes and his voice failed him.

She patted his arm to comfort him.

“My dear man,” she said kindly. “Don’t be distressed. It’s not sad. It’s Christmas. We all loved Christmas. They sent me their love at Christmas and you see I’ve still got it . At Christmas I remember them and they remember me...wherever they are.” Her eyes strayed to the ivorine card with the coach on it. “I do sometimes wonder about poor George,” she remarked seriously. “He was my husband’s elder brother and he really did have quite a shocking life. But he once sent me that remarkable card and I kept it with the others. After all, we ought to be charitable, oughtn’t we? At Christmas time...”

As the four men plodded back through the fields, Bussy was jubilant.

“That’s done the trick,” he said. “Cleared up the mystery and made it all plain sailing. We’ll get those two crooks for doing in poor old Noakes. A real bit of luck that Mr. Campion was here,” he added generously, as he squelched on through the mud. “The old girl was just cheering herself up and you fell for it, eh, Constable? Oh, don’t worry, my boy. There’s no harm done, and it’s a thing that might have deceived anybody. Just let it be a lesson to you. I know how it happened. You didn’t want to worry the old thing with the tale of a death on Christmas morning, so you took the sight of the Christmas cards as evidence and didn’t go into it. As it turned out, you were wrong. That’s life.”

He thrust the young man on ahead of him and came over to Mr. Campion.

“What beats me is how you cottoned to it,” he confided. “What gave you the idea?”

“I merely read it, I’m afraid.” Mr. Campion sounded apologetic. “All the envelopes were there, sticking out from behind the clock. The top one had a ha’penny stamp on it, so I looked at the postmark. It was 1914.”

Bussy laughed “Given to you.” he chuckled. “Still, I bet you had a job to believe your eyes.”

“Ah.” Mr. Campion’s voice was thoughtful in the dusk. “That, Super, that was the really difficult bit.”

Sir Leo, who had been striding in silence, was the last to climb up onto the road. He glanced anxiously towards the village for a moment or so. and presently touched Campion on the shoulder.

“Look there.” A woman was hurrying towards them and at her side, earnest and expectant, trotted a small, plump child. They scurried past and as they paused by the stile, and the woman lifted the boy onto the footpath, Sir Leo expelled a long sighing breath.

“So there was a party,” he said simply. “Thank God for that. Do you know, Campion, all the way back here I’ve been wonderin’.”

SANTA CLAUS BEAT – Rex Stout

Christmas Eve,” Art Hippie was thinking to himself, “would be a good time for the murder.”

The thought was both timely and characteristic. It was 3 o’clock in the afternoon of December 24, and though the murder would have got an eager welcome from Art Hippie any day at all. his disdainful attitude toward the prolonged hurly-burly of Christmas sentiment and shopping made that the best possible date for it. He did not actually turn up his nose at Christmas, for that would have been un-American: but as a New York cop not yet out of his twenties who had recently been made a precinct dick and had hung his uniform in the back of the closet of his furnished room, it had to be made clear, especially to himself, that he was good and tough. A cynical slant on Christmas was therefore imperative.

His hope of running across a murder had begun back in the days when his assignment had been tagging illegally parked cars, and was merely practical and professional. His biggest ambition was promotion to Homicide, and the shortest cut would have been discovery of a corpse, followed by swift, brilliant, solo detection and capture of the culprit. It had not gone so far as becoming an obsession; as he strode down the sidewalk this December afternoon he was not sniffing for the scent of blood at each dingy entrance he passed; but when he reached the number he had been given and turned to enter, his hand darted inside his jacket to touch his gun.

None of the three people he found in the cluttered and smelly little room one flight up seemed to need shooting. Art identified himself and wrote down their names. The man at the battered old desk, who was twice Art’s age and badly needed a shave, was Emil Duross, proprietor of the business conducted in that room—Duross Specialties, a mail-order concern dealing in gimcrack jewelry. The younger man. small, dark and neat, seated on a chair squeezed in between the desk and shelves stacked with cardboard boxes, was II. E. Koenig, adjuster, according to a card he had proffered, for the Apex Insurance Company. The girl, who had pale watery eyes and a stringy neck, stood backed up to a pile of cartons the height of her shoulder. She had on a dark brown felt hat and a lighter brown woolen coat that had lost a button. Her name was Helen Lauro, and it could have been not rheum in her eyes but the remains of tears.

Because Art Hipple was thorough it took him twenty minutes to get the story to his own satisfaction. Then he returned his notebook to his pocket, looked at Duross, at Koenig, and last at the girl. He wanted to tell her to wipe her eyes, but what if she didn’t have a handkerchief?

He spoke to Duross. “Stop me if I’m wrong,” he said. “You bought the ring a week ago to give to your wife for Christmas and paid sixty-two dollars for it. You put it there in a desk drawer after showing it to Miss Lauro. Why did you show it to Miss Lauro?”

Duross turned his palms up. “Just a natural thing. She works for me, she’s a woman, and it’s a beautiful ring.”

“Okay. Today you work with her—filling orders, addressing packages, and putting postage on. You send her to the post office with a bag of the packages. Why didn’t she take all of them?”