Crime at Christmas (11 page)
Read Crime at Christmas Online
Authors: Jack Adrian (ed)
She decided
to have it out with them. The grotto closed between 1:00 and 2:00, so she found
them in the staff canteen. They'd finished lunch and Ben had his arm around
Zena. They looked like two innocent choirboys on a Christmas card.
She warned
them that she'd been checking downstairs.
'I want a
straight answer. Why weren't you ready to open the grotto at ten this morning?'
'There's no
mystery, darling,' answered Zena. 'We had to wait ages for the lift.'
A
reasonable explanation. The lift was their only means of access to the grotto.
Pauline had to accept it for the moment. She said, 'I'm going to search the
grotto.'
Ben said
affably, 'Fine. Let's all make a search.'
They had
twenty minutes. Pauline had hoped to find bloodstains on Santa's throne, but it
was painted red. She went behind the scenery, where it was supported on wood
and chicken wire. 'There's something under here.'
It was a
wooden packing case. Ben dragged it out and pulled off the lid. There was a
layer of the small, white chips of polystyrene used in packing. Ben dug into
them with his large hands.
Zena
screamed as a tuft of dark hair was revealed. It didn't take long to confirm
that Mark's body had been crammed into the packing case.
'We'd
better report it,' said Ben in a shocked voice. Reassuringly, he and Zena
seemed genuinely surprised at the discovery.
'Before we
do,' said Pauline, 'look in his pockets.'
In an
inside pocket Ben discovered the note Pauline hoped to find.
Something
must have lured Mark to his death
in the grotto.
It was a
short, typed message: 'See what Santa has for you, darling. Tuesday morning,
8:45.'
'I've seen
that typestyle recently,' said Ben.
'On our
letter of appointment,' said Zena.
'Sylvia?'
said Ben, frowning, 'Mr Beckington's secretary?'
Pauline and
Zena exchanged a long, uncomprehending look.
They
covered the body and took the lift to the management floor above. On the way
up, Pauline said, 'I've thought of something terribly important. Did you find
out why you had to wait so long for the lift this morning?'
'It's
usually because a storeman's delivering goods,' Ben answered.
Pauline
said, 'I believe it was the murderer jamming the lift door open at our floor so
that no one would interrupt the killing. When it finally arrived, did you see a
storeman?'
'No,' said
Zena, 'it was empty.' She hesitated. 'But we smelled cigar smoke.'
There
wasn't time to reflect on that, because the lift doors opened at the top floor
and Mr Beckington was waiting there, a cigar jutting from his mouth. At the
sight of the three of them together, his features twisted in alarm. He turned
and made a dash for the stairs.
'Ben!'
shouted Zena.
The
commotion brought people from their offices, among them Sylvia. Pauline grabbed
her arm and drew her into the lift. Zena pressed the ground floor button and
the three women started downward.
'Mr
Beckington,' Zena blurted out. 'He murdered Mark.'
Sylvia's
hand went to her mouth.
'But why?'
said Pauline.
Sylvia said
in a small, shocked voice, 'He was jealous. Silly man. He was forever trying to
start something with me, but I wasn't interested. I mean, he's married, with a
daughter my age. Then last week Mark started taking an interest in me. I always
thought him dishy, and. . .well, on Friday evening we spent a little time in
the grotto.'
'By
arrangement?'
Sylvia
nodded. 'When everyone else was gone.' Pauline showed her the note they'd found
in Mark's pocket. 'I didn't type this?' said Sylvia.
'Mr
Beckington did,' Pauline explained, 'on your typewriter, to make sure Mark
turned up this morning. He killed Mark in the grotto and he must have still
been in there when the child sneaked in. He must have been hiding behind the
scenery when I came in. I raised the alarm, and while I was standing outside
like a lemon, he hid the body in a packing case. I just hope Ben catches him.'
The lift
gave a shudder as they reached the ground floor. When the doors opened, a police
sergeant was waiting. Two constables were nearby, standing at the foot of the
stairs.
'All right,
girls,' said the sergeant. 'Just stand over there, well out of the way.'
In a
moment, there was the clatter of footsteps on the stairs, then Mr Beckington
ran straight into the arms of the waiting policemen. He offered no resistance.
Pauline
felt a tug on her skirt and looked down at the small girl. 'You?' she said.
'You called the police?'
The child
smiled smugly and nodded.
'And you
believed her?' Pauline asked the sergeant.
'She's my
daughter, miss. The way I see it, if my little girl tells me Santa's snuffed
it, I've got to be very, very concerned.'
Waxworks
by
ETHEL LINA WHITE
N
OT MUCH
seems to be known about Ethel Lina
White (1887-1944). I know; I've looked. The odd mention here and there, one or
two references in the older standard works, a brief essay in the first edition
of Reilly's mammoth
20th Century Crime And Mystery Writers,
which was ruthlessly chopped out of
the second. And that's about it.
Astonishing,
really, when you think that two of her books were transformed into classic
movies:
Some Must
Watch
(1933) as
Spiral Staircase; The Wheel Spins
(1936) as Hitchcock's British
masterpiece
The Lady
Vanishes
(that
moment when Margaret Lockwood discovers that the bandaged figure in the
compartment
isn't
Dame May Whitty. . .the running
cricket cross-talk act between Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford. . .the
gun-battle in the forest when Cecil Parker, at his most stutteringly craven,
gets his. . .the moment when Michael Redgrave and Margaret Lockwood are
desperately trying to recall that crucial tune, and
then
—but enough, enough).
In Reilly,
White's life is summed up thus: 'British. Born in Abergavenny, Monmouthshire,
in 1887. Worked in the Ministry of Pensions. Died in 1944.' Only the
excellent—and, come to think of it, even more mysterious—Thurman Warriner gets
shorter shrift, but there's nothing in his
c.v.
to compare with 'Worked in the
Ministry of Pensions. Died . . .'
Chilling
stuff. As chilling as some of Miss (Mrs?) White's own books. She wrote
seventeen in all, in between 1927 and 1944, but you may have to stump round
secondhand bookshops for years before you catch sight of even one, apart from
The Lady Vanishes
in tattered paperback. But it'll be
worth the effort. Ethel Lina White wrote some of the most atmospheric thrillers
of the 1930s.
None of her
early books was a mystery. Her first,
The Wishbone,
judging by a review which talks of her 'keen sense of humour',
appears to have been a comedy; her second, judging by the title,
'Twill Soon Be Dark
(a pretty cheerless line from
Emerson on the transcience of human life), a tragedy; her third,
The Eternal Journey
, was very strong on reincarnation.
But after
that, more often than not she wrote of imperilled and friendless females
bending under intolerable emotional (even unearthly) pressures. Her heroines
are invariably young, alone in the world, not quite pretty (the Jane Eyre
touch), struggling at a dead-end job; and whatever sinister entanglements they
fall into . . .
no
one believes a word they say.
Still, they may bend but they never crack, although at the end of
the story, when all has been sorted out, the menace defied and vanquished, they
usually feel as though they've been shoved backwards through a wringer.
Even when
she was not telling of some put-upon heroine struggling in the toils—the
excellent
She Faded
Into Air
(1941),
for instance, is relatively un-doom-laden, although it's a cracking tale of an
Impossible Vanishment—Ethel Lina White could certainly pile on the
atmospherics. One of my own favourites is
Wax
(1935), a story of murder and
sudden, shocking
appearances
(as
opposed to disappearances) in that most eerie of settings, an old, rundown
waxworks.
Which, of
course, brings us to 'Waxworks', the story on which the novel is only very
loosely based. Not quite a murder story, not quite a ghost story—but certainly
a tale of nerve-jangling tension. . .
