Crime at Christmas (18 page)

T
HERE
are several people concerned in this story whom it is impossible within a
limited space to describe. If you are on friendly terms with the great men of
Scotland Yard you may inspect the photographs and finger-prints of two—Harry
the Valet and Joe the Runner.

Lord
Carfane's picture you can see at intervals in the best of the illustrated weeklies.
He was once plain Ferdie Gooberry, before he became a contractor and supplied
the army with odds and ends and himself with a fortune and a barony.

In no
newspaper, illustrated or otherwise, do the names of John and Angela Willett
appear. Their marriage at a small registrar's office had excited no public
comment, although he was a BA of Cambridge and she was the grand-niece of Peter
Elmer, the shipping magnate, who had acknowledged his relationship by dictating
to her a very polite letter wishing her every happiness.

They lived
in one furnished room in Pimlico, this good-looking couple, and they had the
use of the kitchen. He was confident that he would one day be a great engineer.
She also believed in miracles.

Three days
before Christmas they sat down calmly to consider the problem of the great
annual festival and how it might best be spent. Jack Willett scratched his
cheek and did a lightning calculation.

'Really, we
ought not to spend an unnecessary penny,' he said dolefully. 'We may be a week
in Montreal before I start work, and we shall need a little money for the voyage.'

They were
leaving on Boxing Day for Canada; their berths had been taken. In Montreal a
job was awaiting Jack in the office of an old college friend: and although
twenty-five dollars per did not exactly represent luxury, it was a start.

Angela
looked at him thoughtfully.

'I am quite
sure Uncle Peter is going to do something awfully nice for us,' she said
stoutly.

Jack's
hollow laugh was not encouraging.

There was a
tap at the door, and the unpleasant but smiling face of Joe the Runner appeared.
He occupied an attic bedroom, and was a source of worry to his landlady. Once
he had been in the newspaper business, running evening editions, and the name
stuck to him. He had long ceased to be associated with the Press, save as a
subject for its crime reporters, but this the Willetts did not know.

'Just
thought I'd pop in and see you before I went, miss,' he said. 'I'm going off
into the country to do a bit of work for a gentleman. About that dollar, miss,
that you lent me last week.'

Angela looked
uncomfortable.

'Oh, please
don't mention it,' she said hastily.

'I haven't
forgotten it,' said Joe, nodding solemnly. 'The minute I come back, I'll bring
it to you.' And with a large and sinister grin he vanished.

'I lent him
the money because he couldn't pay his rent,' said Angela penitently, but her
husband waved her extravagance away.

'Let's talk
about Christmas dinner. What about sausages. . .!'

'If Uncle
Peter—' she began.

'Let's talk
about sausages,' said Jack gently.

Foodstuffs
were also the topic of conversation between Lord Carfane and Prince Riminoff
as they sat at lunch at the Ritz-Carlton. Lord Carfane emphasized his remarks
with a very long cigar.

'I always
keep up the old English custom of distributing food to the poor,' he said.
'Every family on my estate on Christmas Eve has a turkey from my farm. All my
workers,' he corrected himself carefully, 'except old Timmins. Old Timmins
has been very rude to me, and I have had to sack him. All the tenants assemble
in the great hall. . . But you'll see that for yourself, Prince.'

Prince
Riminoff nodded gravely and tugged at his short beard. That beard had taken
Harry the Valet five months to grow, and it was so creditable a production that
he had passed Chief Inspector Mailing in the vestibule of the Ritz-Carlton and
had not been recognised.

Very
skilfully he switched the conversation into more profitable channels.

'I do hope,
my dear Lord Carfane, that you have not betrayed my identity to your guests?'

Ferdie
smiled.

'I am not
quite a fool,' he said, and meant it.

'A great
deal of the jewellery that I am disposing of, and of which you have seen specimens,
is not mine. I think I have made that clear. I am acting for several of my
unfortunate compatriots, and frankly it would be embarrassing for me if it
leaked out that I was the vendor.'

Ferdie
nodded. He suspected that a great deal of the property which he was to acquire
had been secured by underhand means. He more than suspected that, for all his
princely origin, his companion was not too honest.

'That is
why I have asked that the money you pay should be in American currency. By the
way, have you made that provision?' Lord Carfane nodded. 'And, of course, I
shall not ask you to pay a single dollar until you are satisfied that the
property is worth what I ask. It is in fact worth three times as much.'

Lord
Carfane was nothing if not frank.

'Now, I'm
going to tell you, my dear chap,' he said, 'there will only be one person at
Carfane Hall who will know anything whatever about this little transaction of
ours. He's an expert jeweller. He is an authority, and he will examine every
piece and price it before I part with a single bob!'

His
Highness heartily, but gravely, approved of this act of precaution.

Lord
Carfane had met his companion a few weeks before in a highly respectable night
club, the introduction having been effected through the medium of a very beautiful
lady who had accidentally spilt a glass of champagne over his lordship's dress
trousers. She was so lovely a personage that Lord Carfane did no more than
smile graciously, and a few minutes later was introduced to her sedate and
imposing presence.

Harry the
Valet invariably secured his introductions by this method. Usually he worked
with Molly Kien, and paid her a hundred pounds for every introduction.

He spoke no
more of jewels smuggled from Russia and offered at ridiculous prices, but
talked sorrowfully of the misfortunes of his country; spoke easily of his
estates in the Crimea and his mines in the Urals, now, alas! in Bolshevik
hands. Lord Carfane was immensely entertained.

On the
following evening, Harry drove down in Lord Carfane's limousine to Berkshire,
and was introduced to the glories of Carfane Hall; to the great banqueting
chamber with its high raftered roof; to the white-tiled larder where petrified
turkeys hung in rows, each grisly corpse decorated with a gay rosette. . .

'My tenants
come in on Christmas Eve,' explained Lord Carfane,' and my butler presents each
one with a turkey and a small bag of groceries—'

'An old
feudal custom?' suggested the Prince gravely.

Lord
Carfane agreed with equal gravity.

The Prince
had brought with him a large, heavily locked and strapped handbag, which had
been deposited in the safe, which was the most conspicuous feature of Ferdie's
library. The expert jeweller was arriving on the morrow, and his lordship
looked forward, with a sense of pleasurable anticipation, to a day which would
yield him 400 per cent profit on a considerable outlay.

'Yes,' said
Ferdie at dinner that night, 'I prefer a combination safe. One can lose keys,
but not if they're here'—he tapped his narrow forehead and smiled.

Harry the
Valet agreed. One of his greatest charms was his complete agreement with
anything anybody said or did or thought.

Whilst he
dwelt in luxury in the halls of the great, his unhappy confederate had a more
painful task. Joe the Runner had collected from a garage a small, light
trolley. It was not beautiful to look upon, but it was fast, and under its
covered tilt, beneath sacks and amidst baskets, a man making a swift getaway
might lie concealed and be carried to London without exciting attention.

Joe made a
leisurely way into Berkshire and came to the rendezvous at the precise minute
he had been ordered. It was a narrow lane at the termination of a footpath
leading across the Carfane estate to the house. It was a cold, blue-fingered,
red-nosed job, and for three hours he sat and shivered. And then, coming
across the field in the blue dusk, he saw an old man staggering, carrying a
rush basket in one hand and an indescribable something in the other. He was
evidently in a hurry, this ancient. From time to time he looked back over his
shoulder as though he expected pursuit. Breathlessly, he mounted the stile
and fell over rather than surmounted it.

Stumbling
to his feet, he saw Joe sitting at the wheel of the van, and gaped at him
toothlessly, his eyes wide with horror. Joe the Runner recognised the signs.

'What have
you been doin'?' he demanded sternly.

For a few
minutes the breathless old man could not speak; blinked fearfully at his interrogator;
and then:

'He's fired
me,' he croaked. 'Wouldn't give me no turkey or nothin', so I went up to the
'All and pinched one.'

'Oh!' said
Joe judiciously.

It was not
an unpleasant sensation, sitting in judgment on a fellow creature.

'There was
such a bother and a fuss and shouting going on. . .what with the safe bein'
found broke open, and that foreign man being caught, that nobody seed me,'
whimpered the elderly Mr Timmins.

'Eh?' said
Joe. 'What's that—safe broken open?'

The old man
nodded.

'I heered
'em when I was hiding in the pantry. His lordship found that the safe had been
opened an' money took. He sent for the constable, and they've got the prince
locked up in a room, with the under-gardener and the butler on guard outside
the door—’

He looked
down at the frozen turkey in his red, numbed hand; and his lips twitched
pathetically.

'His
lordship promised me a turkey and his lordship said I shouldn't have—'

Joe Runner
was a quick thinker. 'Jump up in the truck,' he commanded roughly. 'Where do
you live?'

'About
three miles from here,' began Mr Timmins.

Joe leaned
over, and pulled him up, parcel, bag and turkey.

'Get
through into the back, and keep quiet.'

He leapt
down, cranked up the engine with some difficulty, and sent the little trolley
lumbering on to the main road. When he passed three officers in a police car
speeding towards Carfane Hall his heart was in his mouth, but he was not
challenged. Presently, at the urgent desire of the old man, he stopped at the
end of a row of cottages.

'Gawd bless
you, mister!' whimpered Mr Timmins. 'I'll never do a thing like this again.’

'Hi!' said
Joe sternly. 'What do I get out of this?'

And then,
as the recollection of a debt came to him:

'Leave the
turkey—and hop!'

Mr Timmins
hopped.