The Santa Klaus Murder (9 page)

I made my little speech, asking for their cooperation. They were surprised, annoyed, suspicious. Dittie clutched suddenly at Kenneth's sleeve. Aunt Mildred stopped knitting and glowered at me. A buzz of talk rose, which stopped when George raised his voice.

“I'm ready, to begin with, to give my finger-prints, and I propose that everyone else does the same. It's up to us to help the Chief Constable all we can to track the skunk who shot my father!”

“O.K. by me!” Witcombe declared. Several turned to look at him.

Miss Melbury raised her voice. “Really, it's monstrous! I never entered the study after luncheon yesterday! Treating us like common criminals!”

I was passing near her to speak to the man who was stationed with his apparatus at a table on the study side of the hall. There was a good deal I should have liked to say to her, but I refrained. Patricia—the new Lady Melbury—sympathized loudly enough for me to hear.

“It's definitely frightful, Aunt Mildred!
I
didn't go into the study either. Just officiousness! So like the police! No discrimination! I wonder they don't ask for the children's finger-prints!”

George came up and I heard him blustering gently at her.

“You don't know what you're talking about! Just like a woman! I'm submitting to this business; isn't that good enough for you?” And then to Miss Melbury: “Be a sport, Aunt Mildred! Seems a bit queer, what? But we're in a queer fix. Don't make things more difficult!”

Jennifer followed me up to the table. “You're welcome to
my
finger-prints, Colonel Halstock!” she seemed pleased at the idea.

The ceremony began and as George left the table he signed to me and I followed him across the hall.

“Sorry, Colonel, but Sir David has gone off in a huff. I know it looks bad, but if you knew him as well as we do, you'd not be surprised. Nerves, y'know; shell-shocked in the war. Thrown right off his balance by this business.
I
d'know what to do—”

I told him not to bother; that it probably wouldn't matter, and relief spread over George's broad face. As I left the hall, Miss Melbury was proclaiming shrilly: “Really, I fail to understand why you all submit to this outrage! Perfectly useless. Now if someone would take my advice—” At that point she saw that I was making my escape and arrested me with an imperious, “Colonel Halstock!” I turned to her with all the civility I could assume.

“I understand, Colonel Halstock,” Miss Melbury said icily, “that you even refuse to allow us to obtain decent mourning for my poor brother. That is really too much! Poor Osmond may go unavenged but he shall not go unmourned!”

“I think you have misunderstood the orders I was compelled by the situation to give,” I pointed out. “You can telephone to the shops and have clothes sent up for you to choose from. I should imagine that, while you are still suffering from grief and shock, you might prefer to try on frocks in the privacy of your own room, rather than have to face the crowds and noise of the city.” I thought that was rather neat. Eleanor passed near us and I called her to my aid, but she didn't back me up quite as I had hoped.

“It doesn't concern me at all,” she announced; “because I have telephoned to my maid to pack my mourning clothes and send them at once. I always have them at hand because one never knows what may happen and one seems to have to go to funerals so often. It is so much more satisfactory to wear things which one has been able to choose and have made at leisure!”

“Really, Eleanor!” Aunt Mildred protested. “I don't approve of the
spirit
of that at all! To be prepared, for what none of us, none of
us
, I repeat, could possibly have expected! Of course we all know that one person in the house was able to make a fine parade of mourning
immediately
, and some of us can read between the lines and see that there is more in that than meets the eye.” She shot a venomous glance at poor Miss Portisham's neat black-gowned figure.

“Well, poor father would have been pleased to see his dutiful secretary still doing the right thing,” Eleanor remarked.

“I won't hear a word against my poor brother!” Miss Melbury protested unreasonably.

“I'm saying nothing against him,” Eleanor retorted.

They had apparently forgotten me and I made a move towards the library door, reflecting that the situation was playing havoc with their nerves, for it was unusual for Eleanor to be snappy or for Miss Melbury to reprove her favourite niece. I turned at the door to see if Patricia was still withholding her fingers, but she was standing meekly behind a group of others near the table. My hesitation gave Kenneth Stour a chance to catch me before I could escape into the library.

“Of course I was miles away last night, Colonel, but as some of the others seem to wonder what I'm doing here, perhaps I'd better go in with the rest in this?” he suggested.

I told him he could if he liked, though it seemed rather off the point. In the library I found Rousdon talking to the police surgeon, Caundle, who had just arrived. I told Rousdon that Sir David and Miss Melbury shrank from the ordeal and he had better take the opportunity, while there was no one about upstairs, to go to their rooms and try to secure prints from some objects there.

Caundle, a desiccated little man with stubbly, sand-coloured hair, stood warming his back at the fire. I asked him whether he had any startling news for us.

“Not a thing, Colonel!” he told me. “No revelation! No sensation! Sir Osmond was killed by the bullet from the .22; he hadn't been drugged or poisoned, he was in pretty good health and had no gnawing pains in his vitals that might drive him to suicide. It positively couldn't be suicide, anyway. Here's the report in all the correct language. But what I do want to know is, who left the house just after the murder was discovered yesterday?”

That was a sensational revelation all right. I had been assured by George and the servants and everyone else that no one had left Flaxmere.

“When you sent for me yesterday afternoon,” Caundle explained; “I came up here through the village and by the back drive—much quicker for me than going round by the main gate—and just before I turned into the drive a car came out of it, turned into the road and passed me. Now that's a bit odd?”

I inquired why the dickens he didn't tell me yesterday.

“It didn't strike me at the moment as odd, and when I got up here I had other things to think of. It jumped into my mind again later. It
is
odd.”

Something jumped into
my
mind. I asked him whether it was by chance a big sports car, of shiny metal, which he saw.

He thought not. “It was getting dark, you know, and my headlights were on, which means I saw very little of anything that wasn't in their beams. But as far as I remember, it would be a darkcoloured fair-sized saloon, and not a very modern one, either. Not one of those stream-lined affairs, but a dignified, comfortable car. It came slowly out of the gate.”

There didn't seem any sense in it. I couldn't picture our murderer driving slowly out of the back drive in a big old-fashioned saloon car, but who
would
have been doing so on Christmas afternoon? Caundle had told Rousdon, he said, and the detective was very peeved because he hadn't got the number of the car.

Sir Osmond's Sunbeam was four or five years old and George had an Austin which was definitely old-fashioned in outline now, but if either of them was in use, who drove it? It was incredible that anyone should come to Flaxmere with criminal intentions and keep a big car conspicuously waiting in the drive. Perhaps after all some neighbour had sent a belated Christmas gift and in the scurry and alarm after the murder everyone had forgotten the event. I went off to interview the domestic staff and prepare them for the finger-print ordeal.

Chapter Nine

Peregrinations of Santa Klaus

by Col. Halstock

By the time we had secured the finger-prints of everyone in the house, either by open approach or by strategy, it was getting on for midday. The spectacle of Parkins majestically submitting his fingers, with the remark, “It's not what I am accustomed to, of course, but I am ready to suffer in the cause of justice, as the saying is,” produced meek submission in the rest of the staff. The experts were now busy sorting and identifying the prints.

Rousdon had meanwhile questioned Miss Portisham about the telephone bells. She had shown him the switch in the study, by which the bell could be made to ring there or in the hall. It was then switched on to ring in the hall, and so she had set it on the morning of Christmas Day, she said, because they were not likely to be occupying the study continually. She did not know whether Sir Osmond had altered it himself when he went into the study on Christmas afternoon, but it seemed that he hadn't, for Rousdon couldn't discover that anyone had switched it back again later.

In any case Miss Portisham thought that she would have heard the bell if a call had come through, because she was in the hall all the time and was sitting on a divan quite near the study door, talking to Hilda, most of the time. From the hall you could plainly hear the bell ringing in the study.

“Even above the noise of crackers?” Rousdon asked.

Miss Portisham thought so. Crackers, she explained, did not make a continuous noise; one would hear the telephone bell between the bangs.

Rousdon also questioned Mrs. Wynford, who had been sitting near the study door all the time and had heard no telephone bell and felt sure she would have heard it if it had rung, even in the study.

“I've been in touch with the local exchange, too,” Rousdon told me. “They've no record of any call to Flaxmere on Christmas afternoon. That fixes this telephone appointment as a put-up job. It was an excuse to get Sir Osmond in the study. There never was a call and there never would have been a call. But I don't quite see why he didn't switch the bell to ring in his study. It seems, however, that you could also hear it in the study from the hall, and perhaps he forgot about it. It was Miss Portisham's business to attend to it as a rule.”

Rousdon could by now hardly be restrained from bringing his victim down. I was anxious to postpone an arrest, because I didn't think we really had enough to go on and I felt that some of the information which the family must be holding might leak out if we kept them in uncertainty. But in any case Witcombe must be questioned and I was glad enough to leave the job to Rousdon.

Oliver Witcombe was always so conventionally correct in his appearance that he reminded me of an advertisement of one of the best tailors. From the little I knew of him he struck me as having about that much individuality. He was good-looking in an uninteresting kind of way, without any liveliness of expression. I watched him now from my seat in the background (at a table in the library bow window) as he sat down rather carefully in a chair opposite to Rousdon and leaned forward a little. It would have seemed appropriate if he had inquired, “And what can I do for you, sir?”

“I want to ask you, Mr. Witcombe,” Rousdon began portentously, “to make a statement about your movements yesterday afternoon, from the moment when you followed Sir Osmond out of this room here into his study. And I must warn you that anything you say may be used in evidence.”

Witcombe blinked at that, obviously a bit surprised. He threw a sideways look at Constable Mere who was sitting at the big library table, prepared to write.

“Yes, of course, I see that it's important; I was the last person to see Sir Osmond alive—”

“Do you really mean that?” snapped Rousdon.

Witcombe blinked again. “Oh, I see what you mean! Always excepting the murderer, of course.”

There was a pause. Then Witcombe began his statement, speaking slowly and carefully. Except for a few unimportant additional details, he gave exactly the same account as he had given to me on Christmas evening. He did not mention his return to the hall with crackers after he had gone out towards the servants' quarters.

“When you returned to the study to report to Sir Osmond, and found him dead, as you say, did you notice anything unusual about the room?” Rousdon asked. This was my question which he had rather unwillingly agreed to put.

“There was the pistol on the table; I think I mentioned that.” Witcombe closed his eyes and considered. “Of course!” he exclaimed suddenly. “The window!”

“What about the window?” Rousdon inquired coldly.

“It was open—the window behind Sir Osmond—wide open at the bottom!”

“How could you tell?”

“How could I tell? I could see it—it was straight in front of me when I faced Sir Osmond's table.”

“But the shutters?” Rousdon asked.

“Oh, of course; I'd forgotten there are shutters. They must have been open.”

“You're sure about that?” asked Rousdon sternly.

“Well, if I clearly saw an open window, there can't have been any shutters in front of it. You can see that for yourself, surely?”

“Did you close the shutters yourself?”

“No, certainly not. Having made sure that Sir Osmond was dead, my one thought was to let George and the others know.”

“Having made sure that Sir Osmond was dead,” Rousdon repeated slowly and heavily. Witcombe gazed at him in mild surprise. “How did you make sure?” Rousdon suddenly snapped out.

“I think I mentioned that before; I felt his heart; there was no movement at all. As a matter of fact, I felt pretty sure as soon as I saw that hole in his head.”

“I suppose you were quite sure where the heart would be found?” inquired Rousdon sarcastically.

“Absolutely! I have taken a course of Red Cross classes. Are you implying that Sir Osmond wasn't dead when I found him?”

“Oh, no,” said Rousdon with a nasty grin. “You made sure that he was dead all right. But you seem to have done a good deal of feeling about; if you weren't feeling for his heart, what were you looking for?”

“I haven't the least idea what you mean,” Witcombe replied. He seemed quite unshaken by Rousdon's questions and had given away nothing of value. I didn't like Rousdon's method and I couldn't help feeling a certain satisfaction that it wasn't proving very successful.

“Then how,” Rousdon asked, “do you account for the fact that Sir Osmond's coat was strewn about with white hairs from the trimming on your Santa Klaus dress?”

“Do I have to account for that?” Witcombe asked with mild surprise.

“You do!” Rousdon growled. “The hairs are all over Sir Osmond's coat and they came off the costume that you were wearing.”

“Well, they did come out very easily. My own clothes were in a bit of a mess, I noticed this morning. And there are wide, floppy sleeves, you know, on the garment.” Witcombe had all the appearance of a man trying his best to be helpful. “Tell you what! D'you mind being the body? Just slump in your chair the way Sir Osmond was when I found him, and I'll give a demonstration of how I felt his heart!”

Rousdon, looking mistrustful, as if he thought Witcombe might suddenly produce a pistol and press the trigger and say, “That's how I did it,” leant awkwardly across one arm of his chair.

Witcombe stood up and surveyed him thoughtfully; then closed his eyes. “You're a bit stiff!” he observed critically. “Can't you slump more? And—yes; I think the arms hung outside the arms of the chair.”

Rousdon slumped a bit more and moved his arms.

“Yes; I think that's about how he was. I came up between his table and the wall and bent down like this—” Witcombe bent over Rousdon, who followed his movements watchfully.

“Wait!” Rousdon shouted suddenly. “Didn't you put something down?”

Witcombe started back and considered again. “Oh, the sack? It was empty, of course. I can't remember; I was pretty well shaken, you know. I may have dropped it—”

“Never mind!” Rousdon growled. “Go on.”

Witcombe undid the top button of Rousdon's coat and slid his right hand inside. “My first is a bull, I think!” he remarked complacently. “Here is the heart, beating quite nicely! Now, imagine that wide Santa Klaus sleeve; it would brush across the right side of the coat, as you see, leaving its little trail.”

Witcombe stood back, well pleased with himself. His “model” sat up. “Yes; the lower part of the right side, but not just below the collar. And what about the left side?”

“What about it?” inquired Witcombe amiably.

“How do you account for it being covered with white hairs?”

“I really don't see how I can account for it,” Witcombe admitted, as if slightly pained. “Except that I was upset, as I have pointed out, and therefore probably not so neat in my movements as I was just now, and I suppose I must have flicked the sleeve across the other side of the coat. Of course, I didn't notice that I'd left the hairs sticking there.”

“I guessed that,” said Rousdon with some satisfaction. “Now, another point. To return to that window. Was it open when you came back into the study?”

“Was it open—oh, of course; it was open before. Well now, that's funny, but I can't remember. I wasn't specially noticing. But probably one of the others can tell you; Mrs. Wynford went in at the same time, you know, and someone else—George, I think.” He sat still, looking puzzled.

Rousdon leant forward towards him. “Mr. Witcombe, can you explain this: you went into Sir Osmond's study; you found him, as you say, lying there dead; you noticed a window open behind him. But you said nothing to us about that window. Didn't you think it of any importance?”

“I was too fussed to think about it. Look here, is there some catch in this?” Witcombe asked quickly. For the first time during the cross-questioning he was showing signs of uneasiness. “I certainly think I remember seeing a window open when I went into the study, but all I thought of then was to fetch George or someone. Tell you the truth, my first idea was that Sir Osmond had shot himself, so I didn't think of anyone having come in by the window. It never came into my mind again. After all,
I'm
not doing the detective work. It wasn't my job to remember every detail I'd seen and point it out to you, was it? If there was an open window, anyone could see it. I didn't shut it; I can swear to that.”

“In fact,” suggested Rousdon; “you thought it might be better if someone else did notice it and point it out?”

“You've no right to imagine what I thought; and you're wrong; I didn't think anything of the kind,” he retorted angrily.

“All right,” said Rousdon soothingly. “Now there's one more little detail. Just why did you go to Sir Osmond's study?”

“That's simple,” Witcombe replied with some relief. “When I left him in the study before I went to do the Santa Klaus business in the servants' hall, he asked me to go back there and let him know when I had finished.”

“Did Sir Osmond say why he was staying in the study?”

“I don't think so. But he wasn't a man to explain himself much. I thought he was a bit tired with the children's racket. It wasn't unusual for him to go and sit there by himself.”

“Did he give you any instruction about the crackers?”

“He never mentioned crackers. Everyone's been talking about crackers, but I don't know where they come in and I certainly didn't have anything to do with them.”

Rousdon hardly concealed his surprise, but he merely asked firmly, “So the cracker distribution in the hall was quite your own idea?”

“I've told you, I don't know anything about it. It certainly wasn't my idea. I don't even know who did it; I can't get anyone to tell me. You know, there's some mystery about those crackers; you might think that one of them was a bomb, from the way people talk about them—or rather,
don't
talk about them.”

Rousdon stared at him incredulously. “You're not telling me that you yourself didn't hand out crackers to the children before you went out to give the servants their presents?”

“That's what I'm telling you.
I
give out crackers? It's absurd. I never saw a cracker.”

“Do you know that two or three people saw you handing out those crackers in the hall?”

“They couldn't have seen me,” Witcombe persisted. “If they say they did, it's a lie! It's a conspiracy! I don't know what the point of those crackers is, but I had nothing to do with them.”

Rousdon was nonplussed. He looked at Witcombe as if unable to make up his mind whether the man were sane or not. He hadn't been flustered into this denial, so far as I could see. He had been disturbed by the questions about the window, but had calmed down again afterwards. I had before me a plan of the ground floor at Flaxmere and I called to Witcombe to come and show me, on this, his movements from the time he left Sir Osmond's study. He came over to my table in the window, took out a pencil and traced on the plan a path from the study door across the hall and out by the door at the back; then across the passage and through the door into the servants' quarters.

Rousdon stood over him and, when he got to that point, snatched the pencil, exclaiming, “You've left something out!”

Witcombe jumped and looked rather concerned. He watched very attentively whilst Rousdon traced a line along the passage into the dining-room and out of the other dining-room door into the hall again. Then he looked up at Witcombe, who shook his head. “No; that's not the way I came back. And anyway, what's that door?” He pointed to the one between the dining-room and library. “There's no door there, surely? The map's wrong.” He looked up from the plan towards the corner of the library.