Christmas Stalkings Read online

  “Adulterer!” Recovering, he advanced round the huge rectangular stone casket, knife gleaming, a flash of teeth matching the falling flakes of snow in that sepulchral gloom. “Traitor!”

  “Wait! Quentin! For God’s sake, man! Can’t we discuss this sensibly?”

  “You bastard! Wait till I get you! ‘He who lives more lives than one, more deaths than one must die’!”

  Wilde 1 Oscar Wilde! The man was completely demented! Biographical research of his type must, obviously, corrode the brain.

  “Wilde?” I shouted, dodging behind what looked like an enormous stone mushroom. “Really! We are in Brompton, not Pere Lachaise! Please! Listen to me! Surely we can talk?”

  “Talk? To a swine like you? I’ll slit your guts first! I’ve worked like a dog! Only to be betrayed!” His bulk rushed at me, weaving around a marble bust of a bald worthy strongly resembling Gladstone. Was there no one left in the place? I glanced around feverishly. We were working away from the central avenue, he was herding me like a sheepdog, forestalling me, blocking any move toward the now far-distant entrance. Indeed, we were much farther away.

  “You can’t get away with this!”

  His answering cackle, as I dodged a fearful swipe with the huge carving knife, struck an all-too-confident note. “Oh, yes, I can! I can! I’ve planned this for a fortnight!” He pulled up, panting, his face close, much too close, behind a simple but heavy urn, inscribed across the base with, I fancy, an item from the Book of Common Prayer.

  In the midst of life we are in death.

  He grinned savagely. “Jones! So appropriate. I’ve found the place for you. There’s an area behind you where vandals have been at work. A sarcophagus at ground level, moved aside. Aaron Jones, 1843. In you’ll go I Eh? Remember G. K. Chesterton? The safest place to hide a body? In a grave!”

  At this, great prickles of fear paralyzed me. To know that such deliberate preparations had been made drained my legs of strength. For a moment I was unable to speak. His eyes, suddenly visible clearly in that petrifying air, fastened hypnotically on to mine. Hesmiled a horrible smile. I said the first thing that came into my head, to break the spell. My voice, strange to my own ears, was shrill.

  “But what on earth will you tell Jill?”

  He leered at me. “That under the pressure of my accusations and remorse you confessed to me, begged my forgiveness, and promised to leave immediately. And never to contact her again. I shall then exact a pleasurable atonement from her for her infidelity. In at least six ways that I can think of.”

  “My God! That’s disgusting! You couldn’t!”

  “Oh, yes, I could! Just as I shall—” He jumped, but I had anticipated him, springing backward. It was a dreadful error. My thin leather shoes slipped on the snowy stony surface behind me, my whirling hands found no support, and in a moment I was dazed upon my back in the wet vegetation, staring, horrified, upward at him and the outstretched arms of yet another stone angel and its inscription.

  Peace to him that is far off, and to him that is near. Isaiah 57:19.

  Never would I enjoy cemetery inscriptions again! My voice pitched to a scream; he was above me, knife raised.

  “Oh, God! Were you right?”

  “Eh?” He paused, arm uplifted.

  “Was it where they met? Fanny and Sullivan? At Eastwell Park?” It would be too horrible an irony if, after all that, he was wrong.

  He blinked. The knife lowered a little. “No, actually, it wasn’t. I found that Sullivan had met her first in Paris, perhaps as far back as 1867.”

  “1867? But the Franco-Prussian War wasn’t until 1870.”

  A look of intense irritation replaced the savage anger of his countenance. “I know that! Don’t patronize me! He told his nephew that everyone from the Emperor downward was at her feet. It was almost certainly Juliette Conneau, a patroness of Sullivan’s and a lady-in-waiting to the Empress, who introduced him to Fanny in Paris.”

  “So how did Edinburgh get to her?”

  He waved the knife impatiently, “I haven’t had time to establish that yet. For God’s sake! I’ve only been working on the bloody biography for six months. Give me a chance! Through music, it must have been. Obviously.”

  Mad, as I’ve said. Obsessed. I had wondered, at Eastwell, why he and Jill had never had children. Was that the reason for her enthusiasm with me? Or was it the prospect of traveling, eventually, abroad, with a man whose occupation was not to be contained within libraries, archives, places of dusty study?

  “Fond of women, was he? Edinburgh, I mean.”

  Cranbrook seemed uncertain of himself for a moment. Perhaps no one, apart from his publisher, had expressed any interest in his subject to date. Then his face twisted again; I had made a mistake.

  “Like his brother Bertie? Or like you? Fond of other men’s wives, you mean? Yes, I think he was.” The knife raised, the arm tensed. “It’s right by you, Jones 1 Your final resting place!” His left finger stabbed sideways. “Look!”

  A desperate glance to my right revealed the full horror of his grisly plan. A jumble of stone surrounded a geometric granite lid swiveled to one side. Most of a vile black space beneath was exposed. Across the lid, quite clearly, I could see the name, “Aaron Jones, RIP 1843,” and an inscription:

  Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life. Revelation 2:10.

  Cranbrook cackled loudly. Useless to protest that my Christian name is not Aaron; he was quite clearly deranged. Just then, however, the inscription inspired my memory.

  “It was electrified,” I shouted, flat on my back. “The gas jets were electrified!”

  “Eh?” Cranbrook halted again, puzzled.

  “The harp-shaped crown! Fanny Ronalds’s crown! The one she wore in New York! Years later! She wore it to the Duchess of Devonshire’s famous fancy-dress ball in London. She’d had it electrified! 1897? Your man must have been in Germany by then.”

  How strange the human memory can be! It was a quirk of those amazing grey cells that had invoked an article I’d read, a year earlier,-in a fashion magazine, about the great balls of history.

  Cranbrook stopped again and blinked. The poor fellow’s mind was clogged, of course, internally encrusted by barnacle-facts from the history and biography he studied and imbibed so much. Every detail is important to the biographer; he leaned a little forward, the better to absorb what I’d just said. It was enough. I swept my legs around in a last, desperate kicking arc to catch his ankles. He staggered, with a roar of fury, reaching out to steady himself in that dark, monumental setting.

  Cranbrook grasped the angel. It held for a moment, taking his bulk, and then, my eyes starting in concentration and hope, I saw its square base lift, separating moss, weeds, and detritus from its pediment He gave out a hoarse cry as the extra movement took him farther off balance. He threw out his arm, the right arm clutching the great carving knife, to reach the angel’s waist. He was now totally dependent on the upright stone figure for support. There was a moment of breathless poise, of silence, as the two engrappled figures held together. Then the angel tilted over and toppled, its great stone wings sweeping through the air as it fell and crushed him, drawing a hideous grunt from him as it broke on his head and smashed to pieces. The murmuring silence of the vast cemetery returned, except for the blessed wail, far off, of a siren in the city.

  I drew myself to my feet, gasping with shock, wet, cold, and dirtied. My frozen legs were trembling. Cranbrook lay quite still as I approached him. A feel of his pulse confirmed that indeed the angel had brought him peace; the inscription was still intact across its base. My mind raced; I reflected that Cranbrook was given to travel when researching his biographies but usually only in England and never with Jill. This time his research on Edinburgh of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha should quite legitimately have taken him to Saxony, a place easily reached by ferry across the Channel, that splendid, unrecorded way of leaving the country. Why should he not leave indefinitely? Who would know what had befallen h
im? How long before inquiries were made?

  I dragged him carefully to Aaron Jones’s dark sarcophagus-space and tumbled him in. To close the lid required enormous effort but, my legs shaking, I managed to brace myself against it and got the necessary leverage. Slowly I edged the lid closed. Snow began to patter onto the neatened tomb.

  “Aaron Jones. RIP 1843.” Who would disturb so quiet a grave?

  As I moved away, a gleam in the grass caught my eye. It was the turkey knife, lying where he’d dropped it. I picked it up and put it carefully under my coat. It was a happy thought that, in addition to her enthusiasm for reproduction, another of Jill’s attractions was her ability as a cook. We’d need the knife to carve our celebration turkey tomorrow, when the unusual snow would have covered London with a white Christmas blanket. Then we could raise our glasses to the memory of Mrs. Fanny Ronalds of New York, and her harp-shaped crown.

  The only true unraveller of Quentin Cranbrook.

  The final entangler of Jill and me.

  DOROTHY CANNELL - THE JANUARY SALE STOWAWAY

  Dorothy Cannell didn’t mean to be a writer. What drove her to it, she maintains, was her young son’s complaint that she didn’t do anything. Unlike his friends’ mothers, she didn’t go out to a job, she just stayed home and kept house. To help him save face around the neighborhood, she protested that she did, too, have a job, she was writing a book. Then, to save her own face, she had to write one. The Thin Woman was an immediate success, so she kept on writing. Aren’t you glad?

  British-born Dorothy now lives in the quaint little village of Peoria, Illinois, with her husband, her children, a dog named Charlie who claims to be half pony, and three cats named respectively Lovey, Mocha, and Witches.

  Who would have guessed that Cousin Hilda had a dark secret? She was tall and thin, with legs like celery stalks in their ribbed stockings. Her braided hair had faded to match the beige cardigans she wore. And once when I asked if she had been pretty when young, Cousin Hilda said she had forgotten.

  “Girly dear, I was fifty before I was thirty. You’d think being an only daughter with five brothers, I’d have had my chances. But I never had a young man hold my hand. There wasn’t time. I was too busy being a second mother; and by the time my parents were gone, I was married to this house.”

  Cousin Hilda lived in the small town of Oxham, some thirty miles northeast of London. As a child I spent quite a lot of weekends with her. She made the best shortbread in the world and kept an inexhaustible tin of lovely twisty sticks of barley sugar. One October afternoon I sat with her in the back parlor, watching the wind flatten the faces of the chrysanthemums against the window. Was this a good moment to put in my request for a Christmas present?

  “Cousin Hilda, I really don’t want to live if I can’t have that roller-top pencil box we saw in the antique shop this afternoon—the one with its own little inkwell and dip pen inside.”

  “Giselle dear, thou shalt not covet.”

  Pooh! Her use of my hated Christian name was a rebuff in itself.

  “Once upon a time I put great stock in worldly treasures and may be said to have paid a high price for my sin.” Cousin Hilda stirred in her fireside chair and ferried the conversation into duller waters. “Where is that curmudgeon Albert with the tea tray?”

  A reference, as I understood it, to her lodger’s army rank—a curmudgeon being several stripes above a sergeant, and necessitating a snappy mustache as part of the uniform.

  “Cousin Hilda,” I said, “while we’re waiting, why not tell me about your Dark Secret?”

  “Is nothing sacred, Miss Elephant Ears?”

  “Mother was talking to Aunt Lulu and I distinctly heard the words ‘teapot’ and ‘Bossam’s Departmental Store.’“

  “Any day now I’ll be reading about myself in the peephole press; but I suppose it is best you hear the whole story from the horse’s mouth.”

  While we talked the room had darkened, throwing into ghostly relief the lace chair backs and Cousin Hilda’s face. A chill tippy-toed down my back. Was I ready to rub shoulders with the truth? Did I want to know that my relation was the Jesse James of the China Department?

  Hands clasped in her tweed lap, Cousin Hilda said—in the same voice she would have used to offer me a stick of barley sugar, “No two ways about it, what I did was criminal. A real turnup for the book, because beforehand I’d never done anything worse than cough in church. But there I was, Miss Hilda Finnely, hiding out in the storeroom at Bossam’s, on the eve of the January Sale.”

  To understand, girly dear, you must know about the teapot. On Sunday afternoons, right back to the days when my brothers and I were youngsters in this house, Mother would bring out the best china. I can still see her, sitting where you are, that teapot with its pink-and-yellow roses in her hands. Then one day—as though someone had spun the stage around, the boys had left home and my parents were gone. Father had died in March and Mother early in December. That year, all of my own choosing, I spent Christmas alone—feeling sorry for myself, you understand. For the first time in years I didn’t take my nephews and nieces to see Father Christmas at Bossam’s. But by Boxing Day the dyed-in-the-wool spinster suspected she had cut off her nose to spite her face. Ah, if wishes were reindeer! After a good cry and ending up with a nose like Rudolph’s, I decided to jolly myself up having tea by the fire. Just like the old days. I was getting the teapot out of the cupboard when a mouse ran over my foot Usually they don’t bother me, but I was still a bit shaky—thinking that the last time I used the best china was at Mother’s funeral. My hands slipped and . . . the teapot went smashing to the floor.

  I was distraught But always a silver lining. My life had purpose once more. Didn’t I owe it to Mother’s memory and future generations to make good the breakage? The next day I telephoned Bossam’s and was told the Meadow Rose pattern had been discontinued. A blow. But not the moment to collapse. One teapot remained among the back stock. I asked that it be held for me and promised to be in on the first bus.

  “I’m ever so sorry, madam, really I am. But that particular piece of china is in a batch reserved for the January Sale. And rules is rules.”

  “Surely they can be bent.”

  “What if word leaked out? We’d have a riot on our hands. You know how it is with The Sale. The mob can turn very nasty.”

  Regrettably true. On the one occasion when I had attended the first day of the sale, with Mrs. McClusky, my best bargain was escaping with my life. Those scenes shown on television—of customers camping outside the West End shops and fighting for their places in the queue with pitchforks—we have the same thing at Bossam’s. The merchandise may not be as ritzy. But then, the Bossam’s customer is not looking for an original Leonardo to hang over the radiator in the bathroom, or a sari to wear at one’s next garden party. When the bargain hunter’s blood is up— whether for mink coats or tea towels, the results are the same. Oh, that dreadful morning with Mrs. McClusky! Four hours of shuddering in the wind and rain, before the doors were opened by brave Bossam personnel taking their lives in their hands. Trapped in the human avalanche, half suffocated and completely blind, I was cast up in one of the aisles. Fighting my way out, I saw once respectable women coshing each other with handbags, or throttling people as they tried to hitchhike piggyback rides. Before I could draw breath, my coat was snatched off my back, by Mrs. McClusky, of all people.

  “Doesn’t suit you, ducky!”

  The next moment she was waving it overhead like a matador’s cape, shouting, “How much?”

  The dear woman is still wearing my coat to church, but back to the matter at hand. For Mother’s teapot I would have braved worse terrors than the January stampede but, hanging up the telephone, I took a good look at myself in the hall mirror. To be first at the china counter on the fateful morning I needed to do better than be Hilda Jane. I’d have to be Tarzan. Impossible. But, strange to say, the face that looked back at me wasn’t downcast. An idea had begun to grow and was soon as sec
urely in place as the bun on my head.

  The afternoon before The Sale I packed my handbag with the essentials of an overnight stay. In went my sponge bag, my well-worn copy of Murder at the Vicarage, a package of tomato sandwiches, a slice of Christmas cake, a small bottle of milk, a piece of cardboard, and a roll of adhesive tape. And mustn’t forget my torch. All during the bus ride into town, I wondered whether the other passengers suspected— from the way I held my handbag—that I was up to something. Was that big woman across the aisle, in the duck-feather hat, staring? No . . . yes, there she went elbowing her companion . . . now they were both whispering. So were the people in front. And now the ones behind. I heard the words “Father Christmas” and was put in my place to realize I wasn’t the subject of all the buzzing on the bus. That distinction belonged to the stocky gentleman with the mustache, now rising to get off at my stop.

  He was vaguely familiar.

  “Dreadfully sorry,” I said as we collided in the aisle. His Bossam’s carrier bag dropped with a thump as we rocked away from each other to clutch at the seat rails. My word, if looks could kill! His whole face turned into a growl.

  Behind us someone muttered. “No wonder he got the sack! Imagine him and a bunch of kiddies? Enough to put the little dears off Christmas for life.”

  Silence came down like a butterfly net, trapping me inside along with the ex-Father Christmas. For a moment I didn’t realize the bus had stopped; I was thinking that I was now in no position to throw stones and that I liked the feeling. We “Black Hats” must stick together. Stepping onto the pavement, it came to me why his face was familiar. That day last year, when I left my wallet on the counter at the fishmonger’s, he had come hurrying after me . . .

  His footsteps followed me now as I went in through Bossam’s Market Street entrance.

  Now was the moment for an attack of remorse, but I am ashamed to say I didn’t feel a twinge. Familiarity cushioned me from the reality of my undertaking. The entire floor looked like a tableau from one of the display windows. The customers could have been life-size doll folk already jerkily winding down.