Crime at Christmas (32 page)

Once Jotson
stopped and looked back. All he saw, apparently, was an attenuated
bus-conductor about to turn into a nearby chop-house.

Waiting in
the shelter of the doorway a minute, I emerged and followed him again. As I
watched his stocky form stumping down Whitehall towards the Houses of
Parliament, a gust of wind blew the paper from under his arm. A white,
earthenware pudding basin was revealed, with a cloth over the top of it.

After a
vain attempt to retrieve the paper Jotson went on his way, looking uncommonly
foolish walking down Whitehall holding that pudding-cloth, with the basin
swinging at his side.

At first
the sight of that pudding-basin brought a sense of relief to me. Then a
horrible thought occurred to me. This was no pudding-basin. It was a bomb!
Rapidly I reviewed in my mind the events leading up to this Christmas morning
walk. I remembered Jotson's curious mumblings. I remembered the paragraph about
the Crown Prince of Schlacca-Splittzen. I called to mind the mysterious message
on the scrap of paper I had taken from the fire grate. With a bomb in that
innocent-looking bag, Jotson was on his way to the river to fulfil his dread
mission.

My friend
strode firmly to the Thames Embankment.

Quite a
crowd was lining the parapet.

'What's the
excitement?' I heard him ask a low-looking ruffian.

'It's that
there Crown Prince of Slaccy-Splittem,' replied the fellow. 'He's just about to
land at the jetty.'

Jotson
pushed his way through the crowd to the parapet. I kept close at his heels, my
heart hammering against my ribs.

With a gasp
of dismay I saw Jotson hoist the pudding-basin on to the parapet and give it a
gentle shove.

'Stop!' I
cried, and thrust my hand forward.

I must have
diverted Jotson's aim, for the basin struck against a jutting ledge of the
Embankment. There was no time to duck, for I feared the next moment there would
be an explosion that would bring about the end of all things as far as we were
concerned. To my surprise, however, the basin broke, and out shot a great
plum-pudding. It struck a boatman standing on the jetty waiting for the
prince's launch right on the back of the neck and burst into fragments, while
the onlookers gasped with astonishment. Then when they realised what had
happened, a great shout of laughter burst forth. The boatman was annoyed—very!
He looked aloft, with a great piece of pudding crowning his head, and passed a
few remarks totally unconnected with that 'peace on earth and good will to men'
which one associates with the Yuletide season. Then, as the fellow turned to
help with the mooring of the prince's launch, I grasped Jotson by the hand and
dragged him away.

'You
thundering idiot!' I said. 'What do you mean by it all?'

'Sholmes!'
cried Jotson. There was both surprise and disappointment in his tone.

And then
bit by bit I dragged the story out of Jotson. He knew that Mrs Spudson had made
a Christmas pudding and that she would insist on him and me partaking of it at
the Christmas dinner.

'Knowing
your good nature, Sholmes,' he said, 'I knew that you would have eaten some of
it to avoid offending our landlady. You did last year, and what was the
consequence? For two days you groaned on the couch with the collywobbles. This
year I determined at all costs I would get rid of the Christmas pudding. As a
medical man I knew it was positively dangerous, but I didn't want to drag you
into the matter, nor did I wish to offend Mrs Spudson. And so I quietly lifted
the basin containing the pudding, intending to dispose of it in the first
possible way that presented itself. As you know, in desperation I finally
toppled it over into the river.'

Then I told
him how his rumblings had roused my suspicions, and the finding of the torn
piece of typewritten paper had corroborated them.

Now it was
Jotson's turn to laugh.

‘’Pon my
word, Sholmes!' he chuckled. 'I didn't know you were so worried about me! You
see, a fortnight ago I joined the Marylebone Dramatic Society, and was offered
the role of Koffituppe in the play, 'Crown Jewels in Pawn,' by Msmooji, the
famous Russian dramatist. Afraid you would laugh at me, I would retire to my
bed-room to study my role. Finally, in disgust at my inability to learn the
part, I tore it up and threw it on the fire. The typewritten piece of paper you
found was a portion of the play.'

'But why on
earth didn't you tell me all this before, my dear fellow?' I cried.

'Because,'
answered Jotson, 'I should have had to acknowledge failure, and, as you know,
no man likes to do that.'

'Ah, well,'
I laughed, 'the mystery is solved! And we can safely return to Shaker Street to
pull the wish-bone of a turkey without the fear of having to partake of any of
the amazing stodgy concoction which Mrs Spudson calls Christmas pudding!'

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T
HIS
story's as true as
I'm standing here with this pint in my right hand and my left foot on this
bar-rail. It's rails that put me in mind of it. It happened to me when I was a
dining-car steward on British Railways a few years back. It happened on
Christmas Day.

I suppose you'd regard it as funny when you come to think of it—that
people should travel by railway, quite long distances too, on Christmas Day,
the same as if it was any other day. But people do it, quite a lot of them.
They have their reasons—quite well-dressed people a lot of them are, too—which
I suppose they might be willing to tell if you asked them nicely. But really
it's none of your business and it's none of mine. Right. Ours not to reason
why. Right. You do your job and I'll do mine and no questions asked. Right.

When you come to think of it, there could be a lot of reasons. They could
be working, some of them, late on Christmas Eve, and promised to be with their
mothers and dads for Christmas Day and no late trains to precisely where
they're going on Christmas Eve. Some of them could just have been let out.
Nick, hospital, what have you. . .

There are
all sorts of reasons.

But this
was the first time I'd ever worked on Christmas Day on the railways, and it all
looked a bit weird to me. They looked almost a bit like ghosts, getting on the
train at all the different stops, dressed up, hearty, but still like ghosts
because, as I saw it, they shouldn't have been there. They should have been at
home by the fire, pulling crackers or cracking nuts or putting the turkey in
the oven or getting the port out of the sideboard cupboard. As I say, there was
something, to my mind at the time, a bit weird about it.

Anyway,
there was a nice special Christmas Day lunch laid on that day, though only one
sitting as was only proper, because the train was not exactly jam-packed as it
would have been on an ordinary day, and one sitting could take care of all who
wanted lunch easy enough. Right. The menu was all decorated with holly and
mistletoe, and there was gravy soup, turkey with stuffing, spuds done three
ways, brussels, Christmas pud with brandy sauce. It was all right, nicely done
and plenty of it. We started to serve lunch at Reading, and there was quite a
number sitting down to it, both in the first class and what is now second,
though it used to be third.

The
customers were really jolly about it all. It wasn't a bit like what it is on
ordinary days—you know, when nobody talks to anybody and they drink their
bottled beer like as if it was medicine. Somebody had a box of crackers, which
British Railways didn't provide in those days, and soon there were fancy hats
and false noses, and streamers floating all over the place, with loud laughter
and what not. There was even a bit of mistletoe that somebody had, and festive
screams rose high as we rattled over the points. People ordered cocktails and
sherry and bottles of claret and sauterne. People with winy voices kept saying,
'Your very good health, steward, and a very merry Christmas to you and yours.'

Then there
was port and brandy and cigars for some, and everybody got redder in the face.
One old one with a fair pot on him said, in a colonel-sort-of-voice, 'An
excellent lunch, steward, really excellent.'

'And
excellently served,' said somebody else.

'Hear,
hear,' said one young smasher.

'Our
compliments to the chef,' said another.

'And a very
merry Christmas,' said another.

So I
thought, and Bert and young Jack thought, that this was going to be all right.
This was going to be real sort of compensation for working on Christmas Day.
In my mind's eye I could see five bob tips, ten bob tips, all sorts of tips
just flowing in, some of the kinder-hearted ones saying, 'And here's an extra
ten bob to buy something for the kids.'

So, all ready
for this, we began to take the bills round, saying, just to remind them, 'I
hope your lunch was satisfactory, sir,' and 'I trust you enjoyed your lunch,
madam.' They all said they did, and this colonel-type kept on saying
'Excellent, excellent,' with a big Corona Corona stuck in his gob.

And here's
where the mystery came in. At least it was a mystery at the time, such a big
sort of mystery that I really began to think we were all haunted, and very
nearly decided to get off for good at the next stop.

Not one tip
did we get. Not a sausage. Not a threepenny joey, not a solitary claud. As true
as I'm standing here now, not one of those well-fed and, as they themselves put
it, highly satisfied passengers, whether first-class or third as it was then,
gave as much as a worn-out meg. They'd gorged themselves silly, saying
'Excellent, excellent' and 'Really delightful, steward,' but every ounce of
change we put on their plates they scooped right back in their pockets or
purses or what have you.

I couldn't
believe it, nor could Bert and young Jack. I mean, we were too flabbergasted
even to get a bit nasty, which, all things considered, we would have been quite
right to get. I just gasped like a fish at them. I even said to the colonel
bloke. 'Are you
sure
you enjoyed your lunch, sir?' and
he said, 'Excellent, excellent. Really first-class, steward, really first-rate
lunch.' And some idiot next to him—idiot I thought then, anyway—said, 'Hear,
hear.'

As they
made their way back to their compartments, some of them even gave me the old
pat on the back with 'Merry Christmas, steward,' and all the rest of it. They
must have seen us all looking a bit gloomy, but I suppose they'd put it down to
us being far from home and our loved ones and all that load of tripe on Christmas
Day, working like blacks instead of watching others guzzle. Anyway, that
ungrateful-seeming lot went back to their compartments to snore it off. And
when we'd packed everything away and had our own bit to eat, the lot of us just
sat about, gloomy as you-know-what, wondering about it all.

'I just
can't understand it,' said young Jack. He was near to crying, that poor young
lad was, and I couldn't really blame him.

'Mystery,
that's what it is,' said Bert. 'I never known anything like it.'

'Like as
though everybody's haunted,' I

said. That
had been in my mind all day.