Crime at Christmas (29 page)

The
somersaulting figure rocketed against the guard rail of the fire escape and
went over, plummeting downward.

From the
street below came a solid crunching sound. Then, with eerie macabreness, a
startled jingling of sleigh bells as the little strip of bells fell beside the
dark spot in the snow in the alley far beneath.

Then—nothing.

Lippy took
the gun apart swiftly, put it in a gayly wrapped package that looked like a
Christmas present and moved toward the door.

'Come on,
Red,' he said. 'That does it. There's our Christmas present to Ed. Just what he
asked for—that damned McElroy's life.'

Red
followed him. 'We had to do it,' she half-laughed and half-cried hysterically.
'We had to. Ed himself told me how easy it would be to do tonight, and we had
to do it. Because we'd never get another chance. And because if we didn't kill
him, Ed would, when he gets out.

'But now he
won't have to. Now he won't have to kill McElroy. And so they won't take him
away from me. Because we did it, and now Ed will be with me always and they
won't take him away. We'll just be happy together, like I've always wanted to
be, and I'll have him forever—'

Then her
sobbing voice was gone too. Only the children's voices were left, singing in
the stillness of the night.

Peace on the earth, goodwill to men,

From heaven's all gracious King;

The world in golden stillness lay

To hear the angels sing.

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I
T IS
not often, in real life, that letters are written recording implacable hatred
nursed over the years, or that private detectives are invited by peers to
select dining clubs, or that murders occur at such dining clubs, or that they
are solved on the spot by a process of deduction. The case of the Santa Claus
Club provided an example of all these rarities.

The case
began one day a week before Christmas, when Francis Quarles went to see Lord
Acrise. He was a rich man, Lord Acrise, and an important one, the chairman of
this big building concern and director of that and the other insurance company,
and consultant to the Government on half a dozen matters. He had been a harsh,
intolerant man in his prime, and was still hard enough in his early seventies,
Quarles guessed, as he looked at the beaky nose, jutting chin and stony blue
eyes.

They sat in
the study of Acrise's house just off the Brompton Road.

'Just tell
me what you think of these,' Lord Acrise said.

These
were three letters, badly typed on
a machine with a worn ribbon. They were all signed with the name James Gliddon.
The first two contained vague references to some wrong done to Gliddon by
Acrise in the past. They were written in language that was wild but
unmistakably threatening.
You have been a whited sepulchre for too long, but now your time
has come. . . You don't know what I'm going to do, now I've come back, but you
won't be able to help wondering and worrying. . . The mills of God grind
slowly, but they're going to grind you into little bits for what you've done to
me.

The third letter was more specific.
So the thief is
going to play Santa Claus. That will be your last evening alive. I shall be
there, Joe Acrise, and I shall watch with pleasure as you squirm in agony.

Quarles
looked at the envelopes. They were plain and cheap. The address was typed, and
the word
Personal
was on top of each envelope.

'Who is
James Gliddon?' he asked.

The stony
eyes glared at him. 'I'm told you're to be trusted. Gliddon was a school friend
of mine. We grew up together in the slums of Nottingham. We started a building
company together. It did well for a time, then went bust. There was a lot of
money missing. Gliddon kept the books. He got five years for fraud.'

'Have you
heard from him since then? I see all these letters are recent.'

'He's
written half a dozen letters, I suppose, over the years. The last one came—oh,
seven years ago, I should think. From the Argentine.' Acrise stopped, then
added abruptly, 'Snewin tried to find him for me, but he'd disappeared.'

'Snewin?'

'My
secretary. Been with me twelve years.'

He pressed
a bell. An obsequious, fattish man, whose appearance somehow put Quarles in
mind of an enormous mouse, scurried in.

'Snewin—did
we keep any of those old letters from Gliddon?'

'No sir.
You told me to destroy them.'

'The last
ones came from the Argentine, right?'

'From
Buenos Aires, to be exact, sir.'

Acrise
nodded, and Snewin scurried out.

Quarles
said, 'Who else knows this story about Gliddon?'

'Just my
wife.'

'And what
does this mean about you playing Santa Claus?'

'I'm this
year's chairman of the Santa Claus Club. We hold our raffle and dinner next
Monday.'

Then
Quarles remembered. The Santa Claus Club had been formed by ten rich men. Each
year they met, every one of them dressed up as Santa Claus, and held a raffle.
The members took it in turn to provide the prize that was raffled—it might be a
case of Napoleon brandy, a modest cottage with some exclusive salmon fishing
rights attached to it, or a Constable painting. Each Santa Claus bought one
ticket for the raffle, at a cost of one thousand guineas. The total often
thousand guineas was given to a Christmas charity. After the raffle the
assembled Santa Clauses, each accompanied by one guest, ate a traditional
English Christmas dinner.

The whole
thing was a combination of various English characteristics: enjoyment of
dressing up; a wish to help charities; and the desire also that the help given
should not go unrecorded.

'I want you
to find Gliddon,' Lord Acrise said. 'Don't mistake me, Mr Quarles. I don't want
to take action against him, I want to help him. I wasn't to blame, don't think
I admit that, but it was hard that Jimmy Gliddon should go to jail. I'm a hard
man, have been all my life, but I don't think my worst enemies would call me
mean. Those who've helped me know that when I die they'll find they're not
forgotten. Jimmy Gliddon must be an old man now. I'd like to set him up for the
rest of his life.'

'To find
him by next Monday is a tall order,' Quarles said. 'But I'll try.'

He was at
the door when Acrise said, 'By the way, I'd like you to be my guest at the Club
dinner on Monday night. . .'

There were
two ways of trying to find Gliddon; by investigation of his career after
leaving prison, and through the typewritten letters. Quarles took the job of
tracing the past, leaving the letters to his secretary, Molly Player.

From
Scotland Yard he found out that Gliddon had spent nearly four years in prison,
from 1913 to late 1916. He had joined a Nottinghamshire regiment when he came
out, and the records of this regiment showed that he had been demobilised in
August, 1919, with the rank of Sergeant. In 1923 he had been given a sentence
of three years for an attempt to smuggle diamonds. Thereafter all trace of him
in Britain vanished.

Quarles
made some expensive telephone calls to Buenos Aires, where the letters had come
from seven years earlier. He learned that Gliddon had lived in that city from a
time just after the Second World War until 1955. He ran an import-export
business, and was thought to have been living in other South American Republics
during the war. His business was said to have been a cloak for smuggling, both
of drugs and of suspected Nazis, whom he got out of Europe into the Argentine.
In 1955 a newspaper had accused Gliddon of arranging the entry into the
Argentine of a Nazi war criminal named Hermann Breit. Gliddon disappeared. A
couple of weeks later a battered body was washed up just outside the city.

'It was
identified as Senor Gliddon,' the liquid voice said over the telephone. 'But
you know, Senor Quarles, in such matters the police are sometimes unhappy to
close their files.'

'There was
still some doubt?"

'Yes. Not
very much, perhaps. But in these cases there is often a measure of doubt.'

Molly
Player found out nothing useful about the paper and envelopes. They were of the
sort that could be bought in a thousand stores and shops in London and
elsewhere. She had no more luck with the typewriter.

Lord Acrise
made no comment on Quarles' recital of failure. 'See you on Monday evening,
seven-thirty, black tie,' he said, and barked with laughter. 'Your host will be
Santa Claus. '

'I'd like
to be there earlier.'

'Good idea.
Any time you like. You know where it is? Robert the Devil Restaurant. . .'

The Robert
the Devil Restaurant is situated inconspicuously in Mayfair. It is not a
restaurant in the ordinary sense of the word, for there is no public
dining-room, but simply several private rooms accommodating any number of
guests from two to thirty. Perhaps the food is not quite the best in London,
but it is certainly the most expensive.

It was here
that Quarles arrived at half-past six, a big, suave man, rather too conspicuously
elegant perhaps in a midnight-blue dinner jacket. He talked to Albert, the
maitre d’hôtel,
whom he had known for some years,
took an unobtrusive look at the waiters, went into and admired the sparkling
kitchens.

Albert
observed his activities with tolerant amusement.

'You are
here on some sort of business, Mr Quarles?'

'I am a
guest, Albert. I am also a kind of bodyguard. Tell me, how many of your waiters
have joined you in the past twelve months?'

'Perhaps
half a dozen. They come, they go—'

'Is there
anybody at all on your staff—waiters, kitchen staff, anybody—who has joined you
in the past year, and who is over sixty years old?'

'No. There
is not such a one.'

The first
of the guests came just after a quarter-past seven. This was the brain surgeon
Sir James Erdington, with a guest whom Quarles recognized as the Arctic
explorer, Norman Endell. After that they came at intervals of a minute or two:
a junior minister in the Government; one of the three most important men in the
motor industry; a general elevated to the peerage to celebrate his retirement;
a theatrical producer named Roddy Davis, who had successfully combined commerce
and culture.

As they
arrived, the hosts went into a special robing room to put on their Santa Claus
clothes, while the guests drank sherry.

At
seven-twenty-five Snewin scurried in, gasped, 'Excuse me, place names, got to
put them out,' and went into the dining-room. Through the open door Quarles
glimpsed a large oval table, gleaming with silver, bright with roses.

After
Snewin came Lord Acrise, jutting-nosed and fearsome-eyed. 'Sorry to have kept
you waiting,' he barked, and asked conspiratorially, 'Well?'

'No sign.'

'False
alarm. Lot of nonsense. Got to dress up now.'

He went into
the robing room with his box—each of the hosts had a similar box, labelled
'Santa Claus'—and came out again bewigged, bearded and robed. 'Better get the
business over, and then we can enjoy ourselves. You can tell 'em to come in,'
he said to Albert.

This
referred to the photographers, who had been clustered outside, and now came
into the room specially provided for holding the raffle. In the centre of the
room was a table, and on the table stood this year's prize, two exquisite T'ang
horses. On the other side of the table were ten chairs arranged in a
semi-circle, and on these sat the Santa Clauses. Their guests stood inconspicuously
at the side.

The raffle
was conducted with the utmost seriousness. Each Santa Claus had a numbered
slip. These slips were put into a tombola, and Acrise put in his hand and drew
out one of them. Flash bulbs exploded.

'The number
drawn is eight,' Acrise announced, and Roddy Davis waved the counterfoil in his
hand.

'Isn't that
wonderful?
It's my ticket.' He went over to
the horses, picked up one. 'I'm bound to say that they couldn't have gone to
anybody
who'd have appreciated them more.'

Quarles,
standing near the general, whose face was as red as his robe, heard him mutter
something uncomplimentary. Charity, he reflected, was not universal, even in a
gathering of Santa Clauses. Then there were more flashes, the photographers
disappeared, and Quarles' views about the nature of charity were reinforced
when, as they were about to go into the dining-room, Sir James Erdington said, 'Forgotten
something, haven't you, Acrise?'

With what
seemed dangerous quietness Acrise answered, 'Have I? I don't think so.'

'It's
customary for the Club and guests to sing "Noel" before we go in to
dinner.'

'You didn't
come to last year's dinner. It was agreed then that we should give it up.
Carols after dinner, much better.'

'I must say
I thought that was just for last year, because we were late,' Roddy Davis
fluted.

'Suggest we
put it to the vote,' Erdington said sharply.

Half a
dozen of the Santas now stood looking at each other with subdued hostility.
Then suddenly the Arctic explorer, Endell. began to sing 'Noel, Noel' in a rich
bass. There was the faintest flicker of hesitation, and then the guests and
their hosts joined in. The situation was saved.

At dinner
Quarles found himself with Acrise on one side of him and Roddy Davis on the
other. Endell sat at Acrise's other side, and beyond him was Erdington. Turtle
soup was followed by grilled sole, and then three great turkeys were brought
in. The helpings of turkey were enormous. With the soup they drank a light, dry
sherry, with the sole Chassagne Montrachet, with the turkey an Aloxe Corton.