Stranded (8 page)

About an hour later, the storm broke. We were reading in bed when a clap of thunder as loud as a bomb blast crashed over the house. Then a rattle of machine-gun fire against the window. We clutched each other in surprise, though heaven knows we've never needed an excuse. Diana slipped out of bed and pulled back one of the heavy damask curtains so we could watch the hail pelt the window and the bolts of lightning flash jagged across the sky. It raged for nearly half an hour. Diana and I played the game of counting the gap between thunderclaps and lightning flashes, which told us the storm seemed to be circling Amberley itself, moving off only to come back and blast us again with lightning and hail.

Eventually it moved off to the west, occasional flashes lighting up the distant hills. Somehow, it seemed the right time to make love. As we lay together afterwards, revelling in the luxury of satiated sensuality, the lights suddenly went out. ‘Damn,' Diana drawled. ‘Bloody storm's got the electrics on the blink.' She stirred. ‘I'd better go down and check the fuse box.'

I grabbed her. ‘Leave it,' I urged. ‘Edmund can do it when he comes in. We're all warm and sleepy. Besides, I might get lonely.'

Diana chuckled and snuggled back into my arms. Moments later, the lights came back on again. ‘See?' I said. ‘No need. Probably a problem at the local sub-station because of the weather.'

I woke up just after seven the following morning, full of the joys of spring. We were due to go back to London after lunch, so I decided to sneak out for an early morning walk in the copse. I dressed without waking Diana and slipped out of the silent house.

The path from the house to the copse was well-trodden. There had been no fresh snow since Christmas Eve, and the path was well used, since it was a short cut both to the Dower House and the village. There were even mountainbike tracks among the scattered boot prints. The trees, an elderly mixture of beech, birch, alder, oak and ash, still held their tracery of snow on the tops of some branches, though following the storm a mild thaw had set in. As I moved into the wood, I felt drips of melting snow on my head.

In the middle of the copse, there's a clearing fringed with silver birch trees. When she was little, Diana was convinced this was the place where the fairies came to recharge their magic. There was no magic in the clearing that morning. As soon as I emerged from the trees, I saw Edmund's body, sprawled under a single silver birch tree by the path on the far side.

For a moment, I was frozen with shock. Then I rushed forward and crouched down beside him. I didn't need to feel for a pulse. He was clearly long dead, his right hand blackened and burned.

I can't remember the next hours. Apparently, I went to the Dower House and roused Evie. I blurted out what I'd seen and she called the police. I have a vague recollection of her staggering slightly as I broke the news, but I was in shock and I have no recollection of what she said. Diana arrived soon afterwards. When her mother told her what had happened, she stared numbly at me for a moment, then tears poured down her face. None of us seemed eager to be the one to break the news to Jane. Eventually, as if by mutual consent, we waited until the police arrived. We merited two uniformed constables, plus two plain-clothes detectives. In the words of Noël Coward, Detective Inspector Maggie Staniforth would not have fooled a drunken child of two and a half. As soon as Evie introduced me as her daughter's partner, DI Staniforth thawed visibly. I didn't much care at that point. I was too numbed even to take in what they were saying. It sounded like the distant mutter of bees in a herb garden.

DI Staniforth set off with her team to examine the body while Diana and I, after a muttered discussion in the corner, informed Evie that we would go and tell Jane. We found her in the kitchen drinking a mug of coffee. ‘I don't suppose you've seen my husband,' she said in tones of utter contempt when we walked in. ‘He didn't have the courage to come home last night.'

Diana sat down next to Jane and flashed me a look of panic. I stepped forward. ‘I'm sorry, Jane, but there's been an accident.' In moments of crisis, why is it we always reach for the nearest cliché?

Jane looked at me as if I were speaking Swahili. ‘An accident?' she asked in a macabre echo of Dame Edith Evans's ‘A handbag?'

‘Edmund's dead,' Diana blurted out. ‘He was struck by lightning in the wood. Coming home from the village.'

As she spoke, a wave of nausea surged through me. I thought I was going to faint. I grabbed the edge of the table. Diana's words robbed the muscles in my legs of their strength and I lurched into the nearest chair. Up until that point, I'd been too dazed with shock to realise the conclusion everyone but me had come to.

Jane looked blankly at Diana. ‘I'm so sorry,' Diana said, the tears starting again, flowing down her cheeks.

‘I'm not,' Jane said. ‘He can't stop my child growing up in Amberley now.'

Diana turned white. ‘You bitch,' she said wonderingly.

At least I knew then what I had to do.

Maggie Staniforth arrived shortly after to interview me. ‘It's just a formality,' she said. ‘It's obvious what happened. He was walking home in the storm and was struck by lightning as he passed under the birch tree.'

I took a deep breath. ‘I'm afraid not,' I said. ‘Edmund was murdered.'

Her eyebrows rose. ‘You're still in shock. I'm afraid there are no suspicious circumstances.'

‘Maybe not to you. But I know different.'

Credit where it's due, she heard me out. But the sceptical look never left her eyes. ‘That's all very well,' she said eventually. ‘But if what you're saying is true, there's no way of proving it.'

I shrugged. ‘Why don't you look for fingerprints? Either in the plug of the Christmas tree lights, or on the main fuse box. When he was electrocuted, the lights fused. At the time, Diana and I thought it was a glitch in the mains supply, but we know better now. Jane would have had to rewire the plug and the socket to cover her tracks. And she must have gone down to the cellar to repair the fuse or turn the circuit breaker back on. She wouldn't have had occasion to touch those in the usual run of things. I doubt she'd even have good reason to know where the fuse box is. Try it,' I urged.

And that's how Evie came to be charged with the murder of her son. If I'd thought things through, if I'd waited till my brain was out of shock, I'd have realised that Jane would never have risked her baby by hauling Edmund's body over the crossbar of his mountain bike and wheeling him out to the copse. Besides, she probably believed she could use his love for her to persuade him to change his mind. Evie didn't have that hope to cling to.

If I'd realised it was Diana's mother who killed Edmund, I doubt very much if I'd have shared my esoteric knowledge with DI Staniforth. It's a funny business, New Age medicine. When I attended a seminar on the healing powers of plants given by a Native American medicine man, I never thought his wisdom would help me prove a murder.

Maybe Evie will get lucky. Maybe she'll get a jury reluctant to convict in a case that rests on the inexplicable fact that lightning never strikes birch trees.

The Girl Who Killed Santa Claus

I
t was the night before Christmas, and not surprisingly, Kelly Jane Davidson was wide awake. It wasn't that she wanted to be. It wasn't as if she believed in Santa and expected to catch him coming down the chimney onto the coal-effect gas fire in the livingroom. After all, she was nearly eight now.

She felt scornful as she thought back to last Christmas when she'd still been a baby, a mere six year old who still believed that there really was an elf factory in Lapland where they made the toys; that there really was a team of reindeer who magically pulled a sleigh across the skies and somehow got round all the world's children with sackloads of gifts; that she could really write a letter to Santa and he'd personally choose and deliver her presents.

Of course, she'd known for ages before then that the fat men in red suits and false beards who sat her on their knees in an assortment of gaudy grottoes weren't the real Santa. They were just men who dressed up and acted as messengers for the real Father Christmas, passing on her desires and giving her a token of what would be waiting for her on Christmas morning.

She'd had her suspicions about the rest of the story, so when Simon Sharp had told her in the playground that there wasn't really a Santa Claus, she hadn't even felt shocked or shaken. She hadn't tried to argue, not like her best friend Sarah, who had gone red in the face and looked like she was going to burst into tears. But it was obvious when you thought about it. Her mum was always complaining when she ordered things from catalogues and they sent the wrong thing. If the catalogue people couldn't get a simple order right, how could one fat man and a bunch of elves get the right toys to all the children in the world on one night?

So Kelly Jane had said goodbye to Santa without a moment's regret. She might have been more worried if she hadn't discovered the secret of the airing cupboard. Her mum had been downstairs making the tea, and Kelly Jane had wanted a pillowcase to make a sleeping bag for her favourite doll. She'd opened the airing cupboard and there, on the top shelf, she'd seen a stack of strangely shaped plastic bags. They were too high for her to reach, but she'd craned her neck and managed to see the corner of some packaging inside one of the bags. Her heart had started to pound with excitement, for she'd immediately recognised the familiar box that she'd been staring at in longing in the toyshop window for weeks.

She'd closed the door silently and crept back to her room. Her mum had said, ‘Wait and see what Santa brings you,' as if she was still a silly baby when she'd asked for the new Barbie doll. But here it was in the house.

Later, when her mum and dad were safely shut in the living-room watching the telly, she'd crept out of bed and used the chair from her bedroom to climb up and explore further. It had left her feeling very satisfied. Santa or no Santa, she was going to have a great Christmas.

Which was why she couldn't sleep. The prospect of playing with her new toys, not to mention showing them off to Sarah, was too exciting to let her drift off into dreams. Restless, she got out of bed and pulled the curtains open. It was a cold, clear night, and in spite of the city lights, she could still see the stars twinkling, the thin crescent of the moon like a knife cut in the dark blue of the sky. No sleigh, or reindeers, though.

She had no idea how much time had passed when she heard the footsteps. Heavy, uneven thuds on the stairs. Not the light-footed tread of her mum, nor the measured footfalls of her dad. These were stumbling steps, irregular and clumsy, as if someone was negotiating unfamiliar territory.

Kelly Jane was suddenly aware how cold it had become. Her arms and legs turned to gooseflesh, the short hair on the back of her neck prickling with unease. Who – or what – was out there, in her house, in the middle of the night?

She heard a bump and a muffled voice grunting, as if in pain. It didn't sound like anyone she knew. It didn't even sound human. More like an animal. Or some sort of monster, like in the stories they'd read at school at Hallowe'en. Trolls that ate little children. She'd remembered the trolls, and for weeks she'd taken the long way home to avoid going over the ringroad flyover. She knew it wasn't a proper bridge like trolls lived under, but she didn't want to take any chances. Sarah had agreed with her, though Simon Sharp had laughed at the pair of them. It would have served him right to have a troll in his house on Christmas Eve. It wasn't fair that it had come to her house, Kelly Jane thought, trying to make herself angry to drive the fear away.

It didn't work. Her stomach hurt. She'd never been this scared, not even when she had to have a filling at the dentist. She wanted to hide in her wardrobe, but she knew it was silly to go somewhere she could be trapped so easily. Besides, she had to know the worst.

On tiptoe, she crossed the room, blinking back tears. Cautiously, she turned the door handle and inched the door open. The landing light was off, but she could just make out a bulky shape standing by the airing cupboard. As her eyes adjusted to the deeper darkness, she could see an arm stretching up to the top shelf. It clutched the packages and put them in a sack. Her packages! Her Christmas presents!

With terrible clarity, Kelly Jane realised that this was no monster. It was a burglar, pure and simple. A bad man had broken into her house and was stealing her Christmas presents! Outrage flooded through her, banishing fear in that instant. As the bulky figure put the last parcel in his sack and turned back to the stairs, she launched herself through the door and raced down the landing, crashing into the burglar's legs just as he took the first step. ‘Go away, you bad burglar,' she screamed.

Caught off balance, he crashed head over heels down the stairs, a yell of surprise splitting the silence of the night like an axe slicing through a log.

Kelly Jane cannoned into the bannisters and rebounded onto the top step, breathless and exhilarated. She'd stopped the burglar! She was a hero!

But where were her mum and dad? Surely they couldn't have slept through all of this?

She opened their bedroom door and saw to her dismay that their bed was empty, the curtains still wide open. Where were they? What was going on? And why hadn't anyone sounded the alarm?

Back on the landing, she peered down the stairs and saw a crumpled heap in the hallway. He wasn't moving. Nervously, she decided she'd better call the police herself.

She inched down the stairs, never taking her eyes off the burglar in case he suddenly jumped up and came after her.

Step by careful step, she edged closer.

Three stairs from the bottom, enough light spilled in through the glass panels in the front door for Kelly Jane to see what she'd really done.

There, in the middle of the hallway, lay the prone body of Santa Claus. Not moving. Not even breathing.

She'd killed Santa Claus.

Simon Sharp was wrong. Sarah was right. And now Kelly Jane had killed him.

With a stifled scream, she turned tail and raced back to her bedroom, slamming the door shut behind her. Now she was shivering in earnest, her whole body trembling from head to foot. She dived into bed, pulling the duvet over her head. But it made no difference. She felt as if her body had turned to stone, her blood to ice. She couldn't stop shaking, her teeth chattering like popcorn in a pan.

She'd killed Santa Claus.

All over the world, children would wake up to no Christmas presents because Kelly Jane Davidson had murdered Santa. And everyone would know whom to blame, because his dead body was lying in her hallway. Until the day she died, people would point at her in the street and go, ‘There's Kelly Jane Davidson, the girl who murdered Christmas.'

Whimpering, she lay curled under her duvet, terrible remorse flooding her heart. She'd never sleep again.

But somehow, she did. When her mum threw open the door and shouted ‘Merry Christmas!' Kelly Jane was sound asleep. For one wonderful moment, she forgot what had happened. Then it came pouring back in and she peered timidly over the edge of the duvet at her mum. She didn't seem upset or worried. How could she have missed the dead body in the hall?

‘Don't you want your presents?' her mum asked. ‘I can't believe you're still in bed. It's nine o'clock. You've never slept this late on Christmas morning before. Come on, Santa's been!'

Nobody knew that better than Kelly Jane. What had happened? Had the reindeer summoned the elves to take Santa's body away, leaving her presents behind? Was she going to be the only child who had Christmas presents this year? Reluctantly, she climbed out of bed and dawdled downstairs behind her mum, gazing in worried amazement at the empty expanse of the hall carpet.

She trailed into the living-room, feet dragging with every step. There, under the tree, was the usual pile of brightly wrapped gifts. Kelly Jane looked up at her mum, an anxious frown on her face. ‘Are these all for me?' she asked. Somehow, it felt wrong to be rewarded for killing Santa Claus.

Her mum grinned. ‘All for you. Oh, and there was a note with them as well.' She handed Kelly Jane a Christmas card with a picture of a reindeer on the front.

Kelly Jane took it gingerly and opened it. Inside, in shaky capital letters, it read, ‘Don't worry. You can never kill me. I'm magic. Happy Christmas from Santa Claus.'

A slow smile spread across her face. It was all right! She hadn't murdered Santa after all!

Before she could say another word, the door to the kitchen opened and her dad walked in. He had the biggest black eye Kelly Jane had ever seen, even on the telly. The whole of one side of his face was all bruised, and his left arm was encased in plaster. ‘What happened, Dad?' she asked, running to hug him in her dismay.

He winced. ‘Careful, Kelly, I'm all bruised.'

‘But what happened to you?' she demanded, stepping back.

‘Your dad had a bit too much to drink at the office party last night,' her mum said hastily. ‘He had a fall.'

‘But I'm going to be just fine. Why don't you open your presents?' he said, gently pushing Kelly Jane towards the tree.

As she stripped the paper from the first of her presents, her mum and dad stood watching. ‘That'll teach me to leave you alone in the house on Christmas Eve,' her mum said softly.

Her dad tried to smile, but gave up when the pain kicked in. ‘Bloody Santa suit,' he said. ‘How was I to know she'd take me for a burglar?'