Abigail Browining - Murder Most Merry

“You’d stunned him,” Jill said.

“Bull,” Ms. French countered. But she was thoughtful. “Honest injun?”

“That’s the impression I got. The twit’s been keeping a vigil out there in the run-up to Christmas, ever since, hoping to pull the fancy-seeing-you-here bit.”

Connie went to the bay window. “Typical of my luck, I never saw him.”

“He stayed in his car, from up here he’d be an anonymous roof.” Joining her, Inspector Tierce asked, “Were you questioned in the house-to-house sweep after Mitzi Field’s body was found?”

“I was playing bridge that night, didn’t get home till it was all over.” Connie hugged herself. “Just as well. I couldn’t bear it if I’d been up here watching some silly TV show while... ugh!”

“Looks pretty now.” Snow crusted high walls and hedges, whiteness and moonlight giving Grand Drive a luminous quality.

“Christmas card,” Connie French suggested, making the comment bleak. “I spend hours at this window sometimes, it’s like a box seat for the seasonal stuff—carol singers from St. Stephen’s in full Dickens costume, crinolines and caped coats and candle-lanterns. Then there are the children returning to the nest, back from boarding school, or a bit older, very proud of The Car and their university scarves.”

“My daughter lives in California, she might ring on Christmas Day, probably will before New Year’s.... Mummy’s an afterthought.”

To Jill’s dismay, Connie French was crying silently, a single, fat tear sliding down the side of her elegant nose.

Inspector Tierce woke the next morning with the mildest of hangovers, little more than a nasty taste in the mouth, and a flinching sensation at the memory of her hostess.

The provoking thing was that she didn’t pity Connie French. The sorrow had been alcohol-based and transitory; minutes afterwards they’d played an old Dory Previn album, whooping approval of the bitchy lyrics. Connie might have been briefly maudlin, but she was too sparky for extensive self-pity.

No, this was not about Connie, but something she had said or done kept niggling and scratching in the subconscious. Every time Jill recollected the profile etched against the window, decorated by a crystal tear—and the image was persistent, like that pop tune you cannot stop humming—an alarm went off.

‘Think of something else,” Inspector Tierce advised out loud, competing against the hair dryer’s breathy roar. Nearly too late to post greetings cards, not that she’d bought them yet. She had bought some in good time one year. They were in A Safe Place to this day, waiting to be found.

Oh dear, she was better off thinking about the Mitzi Field case. Very well, Noel Sarum was in the clear. He could have printed that school magazine himself, or altered the date, but only in a Golden Age detective story. He’d been far away, and Connie French had confirmed his reason for haunting Grand Drive at a particular time of year. Further, while everyone was a potential life-taker, Noel Sarum belonged at the safest, last-resort end of the spectrum.

And that revived Superintendent Haggard’s imperfect crime. She could picture a man on perhaps his first and last sojourn in the city, stopping at a street woman’s signal and unrecognized, very likely unseen, driving away with her. To drive on, soon afterwards, taking care to stay away.

“Hopeless,” Jill mumbled and, skipping breakfast, went off to her broom closet, cardboard-flavored coffee, and the case file.

It assured her that everything needful had been done. A fruitless check for witnesses to the crime, an unrewarding search for tire tracks, footprints, any physical evidence apart from Mitzi Field’s body. Local and then regional sexual offenders interrogated. Other prostitutes questioned, fellow tenants of her last known address, the demolished squat, traced and interviewed.

Nothing to go on; conscientious Detective-Inspector Poole, exactly the breed of plodder who catches most criminals, had demonstrated that if nothing else. Or had he?

Inspector Tierce stood up awkwardly, massaging scar tissue through her skirt. She hadn’t thought the location significant, merely incongruous, when Superintendent Haggard told her of it. Previous reading of the file had left her cold. But now it was different because... because of Connie French. Something— what? —that she’d said last night.

She’d said so much, that was the snag. Squinting, lips moving silently, Jill talked herself through a lengthy and meandering conversation. Until reaching the point where Connie had lamented an uncaring daughter... bingo.

Children coming home for the holidays, of course. That’s what families did at Christmas, families and friends of the family. Driven by nostalgia, tradition, the chance to purge year-long offenses during the annual truce, or (if mercenary souls) simply to collect presents, they headed for hearth and home.

She leafed through to a terse section of the dossier, the London end. A few discreet sentences covered Mitzi’s life from just before her ninth birthday until she absconded from the council home six years later.

Lots of digging needed. Inspector Tierce felt sorry for Len Poole, and profoundly grateful that she did not have to follow up her idea.

Inspector Poole, a careworn, resigned character, took one look at the name on the file and groaned, “Haggard’s got you at it as well, has he? Wish he’d mind his own business.”

“Amen to that, but I’m stuck with it. Len, what was that girl doing on Grand Drive? Haggard thinks she took a client to a road full of snobs and busy-bodies because she didn’t know any better. Or the punter was ignorant and Mitzi Field didn’t care. Did you buy that?”

“No opinion—I’d need facts to form one, and the only certainty was that she was killed there.” He wasn’t being awkward, that was how his mind worked. “Long way to go for a quickie in a motor, right enough. Then again, Vice was chasing street prozzies at the time, she might have wanted to get well away from the redlight area.”

“Supposing,” said Jill, “she wasn’t taken to Grand Drive and killed? Supposing she was leaving there, heading back to her beat, when it happened?”

“I’m not quite with you.”

“She didn’t walk all the way, wasn’t dressed for it, therefore she went in a car, that’s the conventional wisdom. Doesn’t follow. A bus runs from dockland to a stop round the corner from Grand Drive every half hour. She could have taken herself there, right? Visited somebody, left again, and either her attacker was waiting, or he was the one she’d called on, and he chased her out of doors.”

“Try reading the file,” Inspector Poole urged. “No known sex offenders among the residents, remember. We grilled all Les Girls, whether or not they’d associated with Ms. Field, and none of them had a client in Grand Drive; far as they were aware, that is. Down-market hookers don’t keep names and addresses. Her mates were sure Mitzi had never been up there before.”

“Yes, but it was Christmas, Len. When we all get sudden urges to see Mum and Dad, look up Auntie Flo, send a card to that nice former neighbor who nursed us through whooping cough. Mitzi Field had a family of sorts, once upon a time.”

Digesting the implications, Inspector Poole said, “Crumbs.” He did not go in for bad language. “You do get ‘em. the wild hunches. All right, she was Mitzi Field, but her mother remarried, to a man called, don’t tell me... Edwardes. The stepfather who supposedly seduced the little girl. The mother died in 1984. Edwardes was never charged, lack of evidence, they just took the child away. He’d dropped off the radar screen by 1990, dead or gone abroad, certainly hasn’t paid tax or claimed unemployment benefits for a long time. All in the file. dear. I may be slow but I ain’t stupid.”