A Christmas Case Read online

  Inspector Lovelace was with him, and brandy was being drawn. The Doctor was refusing a glass.

  The other house guests seemed to have retreated, appalled, to the far corners of the room, blending seamlessly with the red walls and terracotta curtains, the fear they felt at witnessing such an intimate, terrible moment transforming their faces into little other than strange and grotesque carnival masks.

  But Posie really couldn’t accept it.

  She stayed squatting down, the bottle of Sal Volatile held automatically, hopefully, beneath Dolly’s nose. She watched the grey drawn face of her friend beneath the make-up and willed her to live. To breathe. She stroked the stone-cold cheek, patted the frizzled-blonde hair.

  ‘Come on, Dolls. You’re going to be fine,’ she said loudly, firmly, cheerily, as she had six years previously to plenty of men whose lives had been draining away as she had carted them off the slaughter fields towards her rickety little grey ambulance.

  ‘Come on…’

  She turned to the Doctor, who looked so sick and grey now as to be almost transparent. ‘I don’t understand, sir. I saw the Countess walk out of the room not half an hour ago; she must have been going to the bathroom. I thought she looked better; refreshed, somehow. Did no-one else see her go or come in again?’

  She appealed to the other guests, who all shook their heads.

  The Doctor shrugged sorrowfully. ‘I think you must have been mistaken, Miss. The Countess has been suffering from acute pneumonia, and she was much weakened by that last birth…you know, her age. And I’d hazard a guess that she’s been dead at least an hour. You probably thought she was sleeping very peacefully, and didn’t like to wake her…’

  Rufus emitted something between a bellow and a roar, and Posie heard the Inspector asking the Doctor discreetly if he had anything which might help the Earl? Something to dull the pain, perhaps?

  ‘No,’ said Posie. ‘No.’

  She stared at Dolly. How could Dolly have been dead for an hour, her life draining away, as they all told stupid little mystery stories to each other, distracted by the past? A past which couldn’t help anyone now.

  Posie swallowed and carried on stroking her friend’s cheek. During her lifetime she had lost almost everyone she loved. Dolly was one of only a handful who remained, and somehow Posie had sat by as Dolly had departed this life.

  Absent friends indeed…

  Had that been the last thing Dolly had said? Had her thoughts been already with those somewhere else? On the other side?

  Posie had given up on praying a long time ago, feeling deserted by a God who took so much and seemed to give so very little. But the belief in him had been sustained. And she took Dolly’s freezing hands in hers now and rubbed them together, sinking her face down into the bundle of tartan blankets which was Dolly’s lap. She whispered through tears which were not far away, through the smell of blood which was still awfully close:

  ‘Please God, please spare Dolly. We need her. Her children need her. Especially her girls, whose father won’t value them as he should. And I need her. Please show up tonight. Please. Just in time. I can’t believe she’s dead. I can’t believe it…’

  She stayed like that for a few seconds. It felt like an eternity. And then Posie sat back on her haunches, staring with unseeing eyes. And then…

  There was a slight stirring from the armchair. A flickering of an eyelid.

  ‘Dolly?’

  ‘Posie? Posie? Is that you?’

  Dolly was moving, and Inspector Lovelace was shouting, and more brandy was being fetched, and the house guests were moving forwards into the room again. And Posie sat, like back in the war days, administering brandy in tiny tiny sips, her manner cool and cheery, but her heart beating frantically. Rufus was howling in the corner, alone. There was no sign of the Doctor, and Posie imagined he must have run off and called an ambulance.

  ‘What happened, Posie?’ asked Dolly. ‘I fell asleep, but I was dreaming. I dreamed I walked out of here, feeling good, just like in the old days, and I went upstairs and checked on my wee fella, and little Ray was as right as rain. And the girls were fine, too. The funny thing was that I could hear the old Earl calling me, as if he were still here! And then everything went black, and I could hear Dr Marlin talking to me, but from very far away. He was saying “Hang on, hang on, I’ll get to you in a minute. I’m still on the road. It will all be fine.”’

  Posie soothed her friend’s brow, and didn’t know how to interpret the dream, but smiled as if everything in the world was just fine.

  ‘Everything will be fine, Dolls. You were just having a little sleep, that’s all. You missed nothing.’

  ****

  Eight

  In later years, when Posie looked back on that night, what followed Dolly’s waking-up seemed like some sort of pandemonium.

  Within seconds it seemed that the room was thronged with people, none of whom Posie knew. Manders, the Butler, seemed to be keeping some sort of order, with Inspector Lovelace exchanging remarks with a burly-looking man who was bundled up in an old army greatcoat. A doctor, but this one much older, hearty and red of face, with a neat-clipped beard, was efficiently having Dolly carried out of the room on a stretcher, which was being wielded by two young men in police uniform.

  ‘Where are you taking her, Doctor? To the hospital?’

  The older Doctor had laughed in sheer disbelief. ‘No, Missie. Not all the way to York! How would we get there through this snow? Have you seen the blizzard raging outside? I had to get the police to escort me here, can you believe it? It’s taken us the best part of forty-five minutes to reach you from nearby Tockwith. No: she won’t be moving, not if we want our Countess to survive. Which she will, by the way. So don’t you worry.’

  The Doctor nodded firmly at Posie. ‘I gather your quick thinking with that Sal Volatile did the trick, Miss? An ex-nurse, are you? You weren’t a minute too soon. What led you to go over to her just then? Another couple of minutes and she’d have sunk done well and good into a coma. She’d been in a semi-coma for about an hour already. That’s what happens with bad pneumonia, you know. If you hadn’t got to her with those smelling salts it really would have been too late. And now I’m going up to the Countess’ bedroom, where I’ll stay all night if need be. We can think about hospitals in the morning, but for now, we’ll manage this as best we can from here at the Abbey. Would you like to come up, your Grace?’

  Rufus was sitting on a small footstool at the very back of the room, and Posie saw how his face was blotchy and red and his hands were balled into fists. He was drinking, but only water, from what Posie could see. He shook his head.

  ‘No, you go on. I’ll stay down here. I’ll come up and see my wife when you’ve got her settled. Not much use I can be at present.’

  ‘Right you are, your Grace.’

  It seemed at this moment, from where Posie was still sitting on the floor, that Rufus seemed to diminish, grow smaller, and that Lovelace stepped in properly, taking over now as host. He commandeered the drinks trolley. He poured out brandies all round, and asked the Major if he could help by stoking the fire and adding more firewood, a task which the elder man fell upon gladly, happy for something to do.

  The burly man in the overcoat was still at the back of the room, but he stayed in the shadows, and Manders stayed next to him, his eyes flashing anxiously again and again at his employer, the Earl. The Inspector raised his glass.

  ‘I’ll raise a toast – hopefully the last of the night – to the Countess. To her health.’

  ‘Health! To the Countess!’

  The fire, replenished, crackled merrily. The snow pelted against the windows outside and there was obviously no more talk of attending Midnight Mass.

  ‘It’s been an odd night,’ said the Inspector, nodding sagely. ‘And I dare say those of us who can should try and make an early night of it. Who knows what tomorrow might bring?’

  There were muted acknowledgements of agreement all around. But Posie,
who knew the Inspector of old, fancied that beneath the air of resigned sadness, there was something still up his sleeve. He seemed curiously excited. He tugged at his silver hair as if waiting for a cue which didn’t come. Posie bit her lip, most of her thoughts still with Dolly and that strange near-death experience, but she felt something more was being asked of her.

  She needed to provide the cue. She blundered wildly:

  ‘It seems almost pointless now, sir, doesn’t it? Finishing off old stories… The past seems hardly relevant when we’ve just witnessed what happened to poor Dolly. And yet…’

  The Inspector nodded.

  ‘You’re right, Posie. There is unfinished business here.’

  So she had been right: she had known it! The rising excitement of solving a mystery almost stuck in her throat and she found herself sitting up in Dolly’s vacated chair, right on the edge of the seat.

  ‘Tell us,’ said Levin Smythe, also on the edge of his seat, his voice showing more interest than it had all night. ‘This is certainly turning out to be one of the most memorable soirees I have ever attended.’

  ‘Very well, Mr Smythe, although you won’t be quite so happy when you hear what I have to say, and the position you will find yourself in at the end of this evening.’

  Smythe cleared his throat and frowned. ‘You don’t scare me, Inspector.’

  ‘Good, because I never meant to. You all heard my little unsolved mystery earlier, although I admit it feels a lifetime ago. You remember I told you it had haunted me, mainly because it was a truly despicable crime, and the man responsible for it had slipped away through our very fingertips, like sand…’

  ‘You mean he checked himself out of his private hospital and went to collect the cash and then ran?’ said Posie succinctly. She remembered the Inspector’s description of his visits to the hospital. ‘You said there was a nurse you spoke to there? She hadn’t seen anyone visit Clampton. I’ll bet sure as bread is bread you found out when you investigated a bit more that this helpful nurse of yours didn’t really exist.’

  ‘Eh?’ said Rufus, from his corner of the room, obviously now able to follow what was going on in his own parlour. ‘What do you mean, old thing?’

  Andromeda Keene cut in with some excitement: ‘Miss Parker means that this nurse creature must have been hand-in-glove with Robert Clampton all the time. That the nurse was really the house-maid, Meggie McColl. That she had stationed herself there in the clinic, all dressed up to look like a nurse, and frittered away the time with him over that couple of weeks, and then helped Clampton to check out. It had suited both of their purposes that she disappear, and disappear she did. And then she must have arranged to meet him somewhere later, to share the ill-gotten gains.’

  ‘You’re right, Miss Keene. Of course.’ Lovelace nodded.

  Posie nodded in excitement: ‘And that’s what you meant, sir, when you said you had seen Meggie later?’

  ‘In a way, Posie. Yes. But in what has proved to be a very bad year, I’ve had – for once – an enormous stroke of luck in coming here tonight. So thank you, your Grace, for this invitation. You’ve enabled me to put this mystery to bed, at last.’

  ‘Glad you have resolved it within yourself, old man,’ said Rufus sadly. ‘Sounds a dreadful memory to beat yourself up about endlessly.’

  But Posie saw what the Inspector meant, and she gripped the armrest hard.

  ‘It was this doll’s house here that triggered your memory in the first place, wasn’t it, sir?’ She nodded towards the splendid toy, sitting forgotten in all the chaos.

  ‘That’s right.’ The Inspector smiled calmly. ‘You might have noticed I disappeared off a few times tonight. That was to make urgent calls, mainly to London. I got my Sergeant to get the wind up several fairly important people in order to make them come to the telephone – it is Christmas Eve, after all – but I got the answers I wanted.’

  ‘What did you want to find out, Inspector?’ asked the Major, obviously not liking the negative attention his expensive gift was still receiving.

  ‘What was all that about the land registry?’ butted in Posie, curious. ‘Was that one of your calls?’

  Lovelace rubbed his hands together and stood framed by the fire again. ‘Yes. I wanted to find out if this place, Rebburn Abbey, had been put on the market recently, and sold.’

  Posie gasped at the same time as Rufus spluttered and coughed. ‘I say, Lovelace, that’s a bit rich, what? How the devil do you come to be prying into such things?’

  Posie caught a look of alarm which rested for just a second on the usually inscrutable face of Manders. She turned and shook her head, anxious for the Inspector not to make a fool of himself in front of an audience.

  ‘No, sir,’ she hissed in an undertone. ‘You’ve got this one wrong, trust me. Dolly told me that Rufus had sold off a parcel of the Rebburn Abbey estate a month back, to the Fairbanks here. Not the Abbey itself! It’s been in the Cardigeon family for more than a thousand years. That would be ludicrous!’

  Smiling, Lovelace turned a frank gaze upon Rufus. ‘Is it ludicrous, your Grace? Tell this room of people that I’m wrong when I say that you put Rebburn Abbey up for sale at the same time as you sold off the Gamekeeper’s Lodge. The final sale went through last week, didn’t it? I expect the funds – I won’t say how much, that would be tawdry, but you sold at a definite undervalue – are in your bank account just now. And I expect you reached some deal whereby you would move out in the New Year, so this would be your last Christmas here. Isn’t that right?’

  Posie stood, shocked. ‘Rufus? Does Dolly know about this?’

  The Inspector continued: ‘The Countess knows part of it, Posie. As you say, she knew about the sale of the Lodge, and the sale of the Abbey itself is part of the same deal. To the Fairbanks here, who are, effectively, already the owners of this house, of all of this. Isn’t that the case, your Grace?’

  Rufus stood, angry. ‘What of it? Isn’t a man free to sell his own home without answering to a bally policeman?’

  ‘Of course you are, your Grace, but that bit about ownership is important for my piecing together what I needed to.’

  Posie looked in disbelief at her old friend, and then sat down again, numb. ‘I don’t like how this is panning out, sir. There’s some sort of horrible symmetry here.’

  ‘That’s right, and when something reminds you of something else which was nasty in the first place, you should jolly well watch out.’

  Lovelace turned again to the room at large. ‘You see, murderers don’t often change their methods. They find something that works, and then they stick to it like glue. A lack of imagination, perhaps? Or more likely, an arrogance regarding their own achievements. When I saw the Major here tonight, whipping out that showpiece with its electric lights, I was transported back in time to that incident at 98 Hanover Terrace, but I was also already on my guard. Something about you, Major Fairbanks, unsettled me. So I put some calls in to the Yard. My boy Rainbird there raked about and found this…’

  He pulled out a notebook, and then opened it on a blank page.

  He shook it in disgust.

  ‘See? Absolutely nothing! There is no Major Fairbanks. No army record of any note, ever, and no proper tax records except for the last month.’

  The Major stood up, his face puce. ‘How dare you! I’ve been out in India! I only got back here recently. I’m straight as a die.’

  ‘That’s what you might have told your new lovely young wife here maybe, sir. But I can reveal now that you, Major Fairbanks, and the Robert Clampton of the Hanover Terrace fire are one and the same. I was foxed at first: you’ve changed, of course. You look much, much older than you should – it must be the Indian sun – and you’ve put on weight, and those baby-faced looks which so enchanted Mrs Wheeler are long gone. But two things remained: your military bearing, which helped with your current disguise, and your interest in electrics.’

  From the back of the room the burly man in the overcoat was directing
a stream of men forwards. Two men in shiny blue uniforms marched over to the Major and grabbed him by the arms, and he struggled violently. Posie saw Mrs Fairbanks, completely white, eyes like saucers, staring up at her husband, looking as if she was about to be violently sick.

  ‘This is insane!’

  ‘No,’ said the Inspector, reading out the terms of an arrest warrant. ‘What was insane was the fact that you returned at all from India, where I expect you’d been living a high old sort of life on Mrs Wheeler’s money, hadn’t you? It should have lasted you the rest of your life, as a rich man. What led you back here? Boredom? The need to get more money? The need to murder again like you did before?’

  ‘Murder?’ said Andromeda Keene, rising. ‘Murder again? What do you mean?’

  ‘A clever plot,’ said Lovelace, staring at the Major. ‘Only you hadn’t counted on me being here tonight, had you? That was a dashed coincidence! And unlucky for you. But you were pretty confident I hadn’t recognised you. Even when I told the whole sorry story… I think you held your nerve.’

  ‘By gad, I swear you’ve got this wrong.’ The Major shook his head, his teeth gritted together. Handcuffs were produced, glittering silver in the light of the fire.

  ‘Put them on him, boys.’

  Lovelace went over to the doll’s house and tapped its beautiful red roof. ‘I called the owner of Gamages tonight, too. I got through to him at last, and he confirmed his centrepiece from the main store on High Holborn had been sold, just this last week, to a Major. When I asked if it had contained any lights, the Manager just laughed, and said such things still weren’t safe for children. So this electric lighting lark was a home-made effort. Again.’

  Posie gasped. ‘The same trick, sir? The lights would short-circuit and a fire would start?’

  ‘Not quite the same trick, but along the same lines. There could be no guarantee of any little girls opening up this doll’s house – Rebburn Abbey is too big, and the girls in question too young to understand – so I expect when it’s taken away in a minute there will be some sort of short-circuit device found, attached to a timer. It will explode, effectively, at a given time. Like a massive bomb. With no heed for life. Like twenty years ago.’