The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries Read online

  “Sister my foot!” she said, with a short unpleasant laugh. “That swine’s no brother of mine! So he’s beaten it, has he, and left me to carry the can? The whole thing was his idea! He put me up to it! Said it was money for jam. They’d never prosecute because of the scandal. I could always threaten to say that Ali had given me his historic jewel. Des and I were to have shared the swag in Paris—and now the swine runs out on me! I’d like to murder him!” She switched abruptly. “The sooner I get out of here—— Can someone telephone for a taxi?”

  “A car is waiting at the front door to take you to the station, mademoiselle,” said Poirot.

  “Think of everything, don’t you?”

  “Most things,” said Poirot complacently.

  But Poirot was not to get off so easily. When he returned to the dining-room after assisting the spurious Miss Lee-Wortley into the waiting car, Colin was waiting for him.

  There was a frown on his boyish face.

  “But look here, M. Poirot. What about the ruby? Do you mean to say you’ve let him get away with it?”

  Poirot’s face fell. He twirled his moustache. He seemed ill at ease.

  “I shall recover it yet,” he said weakly. “There are other ways. I shall still——”

  “Well, I do think!” said Michael. “To let that swine get away with the ruby!”

  Bridget was sharper.

  “He’s having us on again,” she cried. “You are, aren’t you, M. Poirot?”

  “Shall we do a final conjuring trick, mademoiselle? Feel in my left-hand pocket.”

  Bridget thrust her hand in. She drew it out again with a scream of triumph and held aloft a large ruby blinking in crimson splendour.

  “You comprehend,” explained Poirot, “the one that was clasped in your hand was a paste replica. I brought it from London in case it was possible to make a substitution. You understand? We do not want the scandal. Monsieur Desmond will try and dispose of that ruby in Paris or in Belgium or wherever it is that he has his contacts, and then it will be discovered that the stone is not real! What could be more excellent? All finishes happily. The scandal is avoided, my princeling receives his ruby back again, he returns to his country, and makes a sober and we hope a happy marriage. All ends well.”

  “Except for me,” murmured Sarah under her breath.

  She spoke so low that no one heard her but Poirot. He shook his head gently.

  “You are in error, Mademoiselle Sarah, in what you say there. You have gained experience. All experience is valuable. Ahead of you I prophesy there lies happiness.”

  “That’s what you say,” said Sarah.

  “But look here, M. Poirot,” Colin was frowning. “How did you know about the show we were going to put on for you?”

  “It is my business to know things,” said Hercule Poirot. He twirled his moustache.

  “Yes, but I don’t see how you could have managed it. Did someone split—did someone come and tell you?”

  “No, no, not that.”

  “Then how? Tell us how?”

  They all chorused, “Yes, tell us how.”

  “But no,” Poirot protested. “But no. If I tell you how I deduced that, you will think nothing of it. It is like the conjuror who shows how his tricks are done!”

  “Tell us, M. Poirot! Go on. Tell us, tell us!”

  “You really wish that I should solve for you this last mystery?”

  “Yes, go on. Tell us.”

  “Ah, I do not think I can. You will be so disappointed.”

  “Now, come on, M. Poirot, tell us. How did you know?”

  “Well, you see, I was sitting in the library by the window in a chair after tea the other day and I was reposing myself. I had been asleep and when I awoke you were discussing your plans just outside the window close to me, and the window was open at the top.”

  “Is that all?” cried Colin, disgusted. “How simple!”

  “Is it not?” said Hercule Poirot, smiling. “You see? You are disappointed!”

  “Oh well,” said Michael, “at any rate we know everything now.”

  “Do we?” murmured Hercule Poirot to himself. “I do not. I, whose business it is to know things.”

  He walked out into the hall, shaking his head a little. For perhaps the twentieth time he drew from his pocket a rather dirty piece of paper. “DON’T EAT NONE OF THE PLUM PUDDING. ONE AS WISHES YOU WELL.”

  Hercule Poirot shook his head reflectively. He who could explain everything could not explain this! Humiliating. Who had written it? Why had it been written? Until he found that out he would never know a moment’s peace. Suddenly he came out of his reverie to be aware of a peculiar gasping noise. He looked sharply down. On the floor, busy with a dustpan and brush, was a tow-headed creature in a flowered overall. She was staring at the paper in his hand with large round eyes.

  “Oh sir,” said this apparition. “Oh, sir. Please, sir.”

  “And who may you be, mon enfant?” inquired M. Poirot genially.

  “Annie Bates, sir, please, sir. I come here to help Mrs. Ross. I didn’t mean, sir, I didn’t mean to—to do anything what I shouldn’t do. I did mean it well, sir. For your good, I mean.”

  Enlightenment came to Poirot. He held out the dirty piece of paper.

  “Did you write that, Annie?”

  “I didn’t mean any harm, sir. Really I didn’t.”

  “Of course you didn’t, Annie.” He smiled at her. “But tell me about it. Why did you write this?”

  “Well, it was them two, sir. Mr. Lee-Wortley and his sister. Not that she was his sister, I’m sure. None of us thought so! And she wasn’t ill a bit. We could all tell that. We thought—we all thought—something queer was going on. I’ll tell you straight, sir. I was in her bathroom taking in the clean towels, and I listened at the door. He was in her room and they were talking together. I heard what they said plain as plain. ‘This detective,’ he was saying. ‘This fellow Poirot who’s coming here. We’ve got to do something about it. We’ve got to get him out of the way as soon as possible.’ And then he says to her in a nasty, sinister sort of way, lowering his voice, ‘Where did you put it?’ And she answered him, ‘In the pudding.’ Oh, sir, my heart gave such a leap I thought it would stop beating. I thought they meant to poison you in the Christmas pudding. I didn’t know what to do! Mrs. Ross, she wouldn’t listen to the likes of me. Then the idea came to me as I’d write you a warning. And I did and I put it on your pillow where you’d find it when you went to bed.” Annie paused breathlessly.

  Poirot surveyed her gravely for some minutes.

  “You see too many sensational films, I think, Annie,” he said at last, “or perhaps it is the television that affects you? But the important thing is that you have the good heart and a certain amount of ingenuity. When I return to London I will send you a present.”

  “Oh thank you, sir. Thank you very much, sir.”

  “What would you like, Annie, as a present?”

  “Anything I like, sir? Could I have anything I like?”

  “Within reason,” said Hercule Poirot prudently, “yes.”

  “Oh, sir, could I have a vanity box? A real posh slap-up vanity box like the one Mr. Lee-Wortley’s sister, wot wasn’t his sister, had?”

  “Yes,” said Poirot, “yes, I think that could be managed.

  “It is interesting,” he mused. “I was in a museum the other day observing some antiquities from Babylon or one of those places, thousands of years old—and among them were cosmetics boxes. The heart of woman does not change.”

  “Beg your pardon, sir?” said Annie.

  “It is nothing,” said Poirot, “I reflect. You shall have your vanity box, child.”

  “Oh thank you, sir. Oh thank you very much indeed, sir.”

  Annie departed ecstatically. Poirot looked after her, nodding his head in satisfaction.

  “Ah,” he said to himself. “And now—I go. There is nothing more to be done here.”

  A pair of arms slipped round
his shoulders unexpectedly. “If you will stand just under the mistletoe——” said Bridget.

  Hercule Poirot enjoyed it. He enjoyed it very much. He said to himself that he had had a very good Christmas.

  GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MURDER

  Catherine Aird

  THE DETECTIVE STORIES OF CATHERINE AIRD are notable for their sense of fair play—that nice, old-fashioned notion that the author should have her detective actually solve mysteries by observation and deduction—not by sheer luck, coincidence, or via confession—and this is proven in the excellent and long-running series featuring her series protagonist, Inspector C. D. Sloan. “Gold, Frankincense and Murder” was first published in Tim Heald’s anthology, A Classic Christmas Crime (London, Pavilion, 1995).

  Gold, Frankincense and Murder

  CATHERINE AIRD

  “CHRISTMAS!” SAID HENRY TYLER. “Bah!”

  “And we’re expecting you on Christmas Eve as usual,” went on his sister Wendy placidly.

  “But …” He was speaking down the telephone from London, “but, Wen …”

  “Now it’s no use your pretending to be Ebenezer Scrooge in disguise, Henry.”

  “Humbug,” exclaimed Henry more firmly.

  “Nonsense,” declared his sister, quite unmoved. “You enjoy Christmas just as much as the children. You know you do.”

  “Ah, but this year I may just have to stay on in London over the holiday …” Henry Tyler spent his working days—and, in these troubled times, quite a lot of his working nights as well—at the Foreign Office in Whitehall.

  What he was doing now to his sister would have been immediately recognized in ambassadorial circles as “testing the reaction.” In the lower echelons of his department it was known more simply as “flying a kite.” Whatever you called it, Henry Tyler was an expert.

  “And it’s no use your saying there’s trouble in the Baltic either,” countered Wendy Witherington warmly.

  “Actually,” said Henry, “it’s the Balkans which are giving us a bit of a headache just now.”

  “The children would never forgive you if you weren’t there,” said Wendy, playing a trump card; although it wasn’t really necessary. She knew that nothing short of an international crisis would keep Henry away from her home in the little market town of Berebury in the heart of rural Calleshire at Christmastime. The trouble was that these days international crises were not nearly so rare as they used to be.

  “Ah, the children,” said their doting uncle. “And what is it that they want Father Christmas to bring this year?”

  “Edward wants a model railway engine for his set.”

  “Does he indeed?”

  “A Hornby LMS red engine called ‘Princess Elizabeth,’ ” said Wendy Witherington readily. “It’s a 4—6—2.”

  Henry made a note, marvelling that his sister, who seemed totally unable to differentiate between the Baltic and the Balkans—and quite probably the Balearics as well—had the details of a child’s model train absolutely at her fingertips.

  “And Jennifer?” he asked.

  Wendy sighed. “The Good Ship Lollipop. Oh, and when you come, Henry, you’d better be able to explain to her how it is that while she could see Shirley Temple at the pictures—we took her last week—Shirley Temple couldn’t see her.”

  Henry, who had devoted a great deal of time in the last ten days trying to explain to a Minister in His Majesty’s Government exactly what Monsieur Pierre Laval might have in mind for the best future of France, said he would do his best.

  “Who else will be staying, Wen?”

  “Our old friends Peter and Dora Watkins—you remember them, don’t you?”

  “He’s something in the bank, isn’t he?” said Henry.

  “Nearly a manager,” replied Wendy. “Then there’ll be Tom’s old Uncle George.”

  “I hope,” groaned Henry, “that your barometer’s up to it. It had a hard time last year.” Tom’s Uncle George had been a renowned maker of scientific instruments in his day. “He’s nearly tapped it to death.”

  Wendy’s mind was still on her house guests. “Oh, and there’ll be two refugees.”

  “Two refugees?” Henry frowned, even though he was alone in his room at the Foreign Office. They were beginning to be very careful about some refugees.

  “Yes, the rector has asked us each to invite two refugees from the camp on the Calleford Road to stay for Christmas this year. You remember our Mr. Wallis, don’t you, Henry?”

  “Long sermons?” hazarded Henry.

  “Then you do remember him,” said Wendy without irony. “Well, he’s arranged it all through some church organization. We’ve got to be very kind to them because they’ve lost everything.”

  “Give them useful presents, you mean,” said Henry, decoding this last without difficulty.

  “Warm socks and scarves and things,” agreed Wendy Witherington vaguely. “And then we’ve got some people coming to dinner here on Christmas Eve.”

  “Oh, yes?”

  “Our doctor and his wife. Friar’s their name. She’s a bit heavy in the hand but he’s quite good company. And,” said Wendy drawing breath, “our new next-door neighbours—they’re called Steele—are coming too. He bought the pharmacy in the square last summer. We don’t know them very well—I think he married one of his assistants—but it seemed the right thing to invite them at Christmas.”

  “Quite so,” said Henry. “That all?”

  “Oh, and little Miss Hooper.”

  “Sent her measurements, did she?”

  “You know what I mean,” said his sister, unperturbed. “She always comes then. Besides, I expect she’ll know the refugees. She does a lot of church work.”

  “What sort of refugees are they?” asked Henry cautiously.

  But that Wendy did not know.

  Henry himself wasn’t sure even after he’d first met them, and his brother-in-law was no help.

  “Sorry, old man,” said that worthy as they foregathered in the drawing-room, awaiting the arrival of the rest of the dinner guests on Christmas Eve. “All I know is that this pair arrived from somewhere in Mitteleuropa last month with only what they stood up in.”

  “Better out than in,” contributed Gordon Friar, the doctor, adding an old medical aphorism, “like laudable pus.”

  “I understand,” said Tom Witherington, “that they only just got out, too. Skin of their teeth and all that.”

  “As the poet so wisely said,” murmured Henry, “ ‘The only certain freedom’s in departure.’ ”

  “If you ask me,” said old Uncle George, a veteran of the Boer War, “they did well to go while the going was good.”

  “It’s the sort of thing you can leave too late,” pronounced Dr. Friar weightily. Leaving things too late was every doctor’s nightmare.

  “I don’t envy ’em being where they are now,” said Tom. “That camp they’re in is pretty bleak, especially in the winter.”

  This was immediately confirmed by Mrs. Godiesky the moment she entered the room. She regarded the Witheringtons’ glowing fire with deep appreciation. “We ’ave been so cooald, so cooaald,” she said as she stared hungrily at the logs stacked by the open fireside. “So very cooald …”

  Her husband’s English was slightly better, although also heavily accented. “If we had not left when we did, then,” he opened his hands expressively, “then who knows what would have become of us?”

  “Who, indeed?” echoed Henry, who actually had a very much better idea than anyone else present of what might have become of the Godieskys had they not left their native heath when they did. Reports reaching the Foreign Office were very, very discouraging.

  “They closed my university department down overnight,” explained Professor Hans Godiesky. “Without any warning at all.”

  “It was terrrrrible,” said Mrs. Godiesky, holding her hands out to the fire as if she could never be warm again.

  “What sort of a department was it, sir?” enquired Henry casuall
y of the Professor.

  “Chemistry,” said the refugee, just as the two Watkins came in and the hanging mistletoe was put to good use. They were followed fairly quickly by Robert and Lorraine Steele from next door. The introductions in their case were more formal. Robert Steele was a good bit older than his wife, who was dressed in a very becoming mixture of red and dark green, though with a skirt that was rather shorter than either Wendy’s or Dora’s and even more noticeably so than that of Marjorie Friar, who was clearly no dresser.

  “We’re so glad you could get away in time,” exclaimed Wendy, while Tom busied himself with furnishing everyone with sherry. “It must be difficult if there’s late dispensing to be done.”

  “No trouble these days,” boomed Robert Steele. “I’ve got a young assistant now. He’s a great help.”

  Then Miss Hooper, whose skirt was longest of all, was shown in. She was out of breath and full of apology for being so late. “Wendy, dear, I am so very sorry,” she fluttered. “I’m afraid the Waits will be here in no time at all …”

  “And they won’t wait,” said Henry guilelessly, “will they?”

  “If you ask me,” opined Tom Witherington, “they won’t get past the ‘Royal Oak’ in a hurry.”

  “The children are coming down in their dressing-gowns to listen to the carols,” said Wendy, rightly ignoring both remarks. “And I don’t mind how tired they get tonight.”

  “Who’s playing Father Christmas?” asked Robert Steele jovially. He was a plump fellow, whose gaze rested fondly on his young wife most of the time.

  “Not me,” said Tom Witherington.

  “I am,” declared Henry. “For my sins.”

  “Then, when I am tackled on the matter,” said the children’s father piously, “I can put my hand on my heart and swear total innocence.”

  “And how will you get out of giving an honest answer, Henry?” enquired Dora Watkins playfully.

  “I shall hope,” replied Henry, “to remain true to the traditions of the Foreign Service and give an answer that is at one and the same time absolutely correct and totally meaningless …”

  At which moment the sound of the dinner gong being struck came from the hall and presently the whole party moved through to the dining-room, Uncle George giving the barometer a surreptitious tap on the way.