The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories by P. D. James
Then there was the letter. It was passed to the snivelling woman in the box, and she confirmed that it had been written to her by Mrs Morrisey. Slowly it was collected by the clerk and borne majestically across to counsel, who proceeded to read it aloud:
Dear Brenda,
We shall be at the flat on Friday after all. I thought I’d better let you know in case you and Ted changed your plans. But it will definitely be for the last time. George is getting suspicious, and I must think of the children. I always knew it would have to end. Thank you for being such a pal.
Eileen
The measured, upper-class voice ceased. Looking across at the jury, counsel laid the letter slowly down. The judge bent his head and made another notation. There was a moment of silence in the court. Then the witness was dismissed.
And so it went on. There was the paper-seller at the end of Moulton Street who remembered Speller buying an Evening Standard just before eight o’clock. The accused was carrying a bottle under his arm and seemed very cheerful. He had no doubt his customer was the accused.
There was the publican’s wife from the Rising Sun at the junction of Moulton Mews and High Street who testified that she served the prisoner with a whisky shortly before half-past eight. He hadn’t stayed long. Just long enough to drink it down. He had seemed very upset. Yes, she was quite sure it was the accused. There was a motley collection of customers to confirm her evidence. Gabriel wondered why the prosecution had bothered to call them, until he realised that Speller had denied visiting the Rising Sun, had denied that he had needed a drink.
There was George Edward Morrisey, described as an estate agent’s clerk, thin-faced, tight-lipped, standing rigidly in his best blue serge suit. He testified that his marriage had been happy, that he had known nothing, suspected nothing. His wife had told him that she spent Friday evenings learning to make pottery at evening classes. The court tittered. The judge frowned.
In reply to counsel’s questions, Morrisey said that he had stayed at home to look after the children. They were still a little young to be left alone at night. Yes, he had been at home the night his wife was killed. Her death was a great grief to him. Her liaison with the accused had come as a terrible shock. He spoke the word ‘liaison’ with an angry contempt, as if it were bitter on his tongue. Never once did he look at the prisoner.
There was the medical evidence – sordid, specific but mercifully clinical and brief. The deceased had been raped, then stabbed three times through the jugular vein. There was the evidence of the accused’s employer, who contributed a vague and imperfectly substantiated story about a missing meat-screwer. There was the prisoner’s landlady, who testified that he had arrived home on the night of the murder in a distressed state and that he had not got up to go to work next morning. Some of the threads were thin. Some, like the evidence of the butcher, obviously bore little weight even in the eyes of the prosecution. But together they were weaving a rope strong enough to hang a man.
The defending counsel did his best, but he had the desperate air of a man who knows that he is foredoomed to lose. He called witnesses to testify that Speller was a gentle, kindly boy, a generous friend, a good son and brother. The jury believed them. They also believed that he had killed his mistress. He called the accused. Speller was a poor witness, unconvincing, inarticulate. It would have helped, thought Gabriel, if the boy had shown some sign of pity for the dead woman. But he was too absorbed in his own danger to spare a thought for anyone else. Perfect fear casteth out love, thought Gabriel. The aphorism pleased him.
The judge summed up with scrupulous impartiality, treating the jury to an exposition on the nature and value of circumstantial evidence and an interpretation of the expression ‘reasonable doubt’. The jury listened with respectful attention. It was impossible to guess what went on behind those twelve pairs of watchful, anonymous eyes. But they weren’t out long.
Within forty minutes of the court rising, they were back; the prisoner reappeared in the dock, the judge asked the formal question. The foreman gave the expected answer, loud and clear. ‘Guilty, my Lord.’ No one seemed surprised.
The judge explained to the prisoner that he had been found guilty of the horrible and merciless killing of the woman who had loved him. The prisoner, his face taut and ashen, stared wild-eyed at the judge, as if only half-hearing. The sentence was pronounced, sounding doubly horrible spoken in those soft judicial tones.
Gabriel looked with interest for the black cap and saw with surprise and some disappointment that it was merely a square of some black material perched incongruously atop the judge’s wig. The jury was thanked. The judge collected his notes like a businessman clearing his desk at the end of a busy day. The court rose. The prisoner was taken below. It was over.
The trial caused little comment at the office. No one knew that Gabriel had attended. His day’s leave ‘for personal reasons’ was accepted with as little interest as any previous absence. He was too solitary, too unpopular to be included in office gossip. In his dusty and ill-lit room, insulated by tiers of filing cabinets, he was the object of vague dislike or, at best, of a pitying tolerance. The filing room had never been a centre for cosy office chat. But he did hear the opinion of one member of the firm.
On the day after the trial, Mr Bootman, newspaper in hand, came into the general office while Gabriel was distributing the morning mail. ‘I see they’ve disposed of our little local trouble,’ Mr Bootman said. ‘Apparently the fellow is to hang. A good thing, too. It seems to have been the usual sordid story of illicit passion and general stupidity. A very commonplace murder.’
No one replied. The office staff stood silent, then stirred into life. Perhaps they felt that there was nothing more to be said.
It was shortly after the trial that Gabriel began to dream. The dream, which occurred about three times a week, was always the same. He was struggling across a desert under a blood-red sun, trying to reach a distant fort. He could sometimes see the fort clearly, although it never got any closer. There was an inner courtyard crowded with people, a silent black-clad multitude whose faces were all turned towards a central platform. On the platform was a gallows. It was a curiously elegant structure, with two sturdy posts at either side and a delicately curved crosspiece from which the noose dangled.
The people, like the gallows, were not of this age. It was a Victorian crowd, the women in shawls and bonnets, the men in top hats or narrow-brimmed bowlers. He could see his mother there, her thin face peaked under the widow’s veil. Suddenly she began to cry, and as she cried, her face changed and became the face of the weeping woman at the trial. Gabriel longed desperately to reach her, to comfort her. But with every step he sank deeper into the sand.
There were people on the platform now. One, he knew, must be the prison governor, top-hatted, frock-coated, bewhiskered and grave. His clothes were those of a Victorian gentleman, but his face, under that luxuriant beard, was the face of Mr Bootman. Beside him stood the chaplain, in gown and bands, and, on either side, were two warders, their dark jackets buttoned high to their necks.
Under the noose stood the prisoner. He was wearing breeches and an open-necked shirt, and his neck was as white and delicate as a woman’s. It might have been that other neck, so slender it looked. The prisoner was gazing across the desert towards Gabriel, not with desperate appeal but with great sadness in his eyes. And, this time, Gabriel knew that he had to save him, had to get there in time.
But the sand dragged at his aching ankles, and although he called that he was coming, coming, the wind, like a furnace blast, tore the words from his parched throat. His back, bent almost double, was blistered by the sun. He wasn’t wearing a coat. Somehow, irrationally, he was worried that his coat was missing, that something had happened to it that he ought to remember.
As he lurched forward, floundering through the gritty morass, he could see the fort shimmering in the heat haze. Then it began to recede, getting fainter and further, until at last it was only a blur among t
In the comparative sanity of the morning, he analysed the dream and realised that the scene was one pictured in a Victorian news-sheet which he had once seen in the window of an antiquarian bookshop. As he remembered, it showed the execution of William Corder for the murder of Maria Marten in the Red Barn. The remembrance comforted him. At least he was still in touch with the tangible and sane world.
But the strain was obviously getting him down. It was time to put his mind to his problem. He had always had a good mind, too good for his job. That, of course, was why the other staff resented him. Now was the time to use it. What, exactly, was he worrying about? A woman had been murdered. Whose fault had it been? Weren’t there a number of people who shared the responsibility?
That blonde tart, for one, who had lent them the flat. The husband, who had been so easily fooled. The boy, who had enticed her away from her duty to husband and children. The victim herself – particularly the victim. The wages of sin are death. Well, she had taken her wages now. One man hadn’t been enough for her.
Gabriel pictured again that dim shadow against the bedroom curtains, the raised arms as she drew Speller’s head down to her breast. Filthy. Disgusting. Dirty. The adjectives smeared his mind. Well, she and her lover had taken their fun. It was right that both of them should pay for it. He, Ernest Gabriel, wasn’t concerned. It had only been by the merest chance that he had seen them from that upper window, only by chance that he had seen Speller knock and go away again.
Justice was being served. He had sensed its majesty, the beauty of its essential rightness, at Speller’s trial. And he, Gabriel, was a part of it. If he spoke now, an adulterer might even go free. His duty was clear. The temptation to speak had gone for ever.
It was in this mood that he stood with the small silent crowd outside the prison on the morning of Speller’s execution. At the first stroke of eight, he, like the other men present, took off his hat. Staring up at the sky high above the prison walls, he felt again the warm exultation of his authority and power. It was on his behalf, it was at his, Gabriel’s, bidding that the nameless hangman inside was exercising his dreadful craft …
*
But that was sixteen years ago. Four months after the trial the firm, expanding and conscious of the need for a better address, had moved from Camden Town to the north of London. Gabriel had moved with it. He was one of the few people on the staff who remembered the old building. Clerks came and went so quickly nowadays; there was no sense of loyalty to the job.
When Gabriel retired at the end of the year, only Mr Bootman and the porter would remain from the old Camden Town days. Sixteen years. Sixteen years of the same job, the same bedsitting room, the same half-tolerant dislike on the part of the staff. But he had had his moment of power. He recalled it now, looking round the small sordid sitting room with its peeling wallpaper, its stained boards. It had looked different sixteen years ago.
He remembered where the sofa had stood, the very spot where she had died. He remembered other things – the pounding of his heart as he made his way across the asphalt; the quick knock; the sidling through the half-opened door before she could realise it wasn’t her lover; the naked body cowering back into the sitting room; the taut white throat; the thrust with his filing bodkin that was as smooth as puncturing soft rubber. The steel had gone in so easily, so sweetly.
And there was something else which he had done to her. But that was something it was better not to remember. And afterwards he had taken the bodkin back to the office, holding it under the tap in the bathroom until no spot of blood could have remained. Then he had replaced it in his desk drawer with half a dozen identical others. There had been nothing to distinguish it anymore, even to his eyes.
It had all been so easy. The only blood had been a gush on his right cuff as he withdrew the bodkin. And he had burned the coat in the office furnace. He still recalled the blast on his face as he thrust it in, and the spilled cinders like sand under his feet.
There had been nothing left to him but the key of the flat. He had seen it on the sitting-room table and had taken it away with him. He drew it now from his pocket and compared it with the key from the estate agent, laying them side by side on his outstretched palm. Yes, they were identical. They had had another one cut, but no one had bothered to change the lock.
He stared at the key, trying to recall the excitement of those weeks when he had been both judge and executioner. But he could feel nothing. It was all so long ago. He had been fifty then; now he was sixty-six. It was too old for feeling. And then he recalled the words of Mr Bootman. It was, after all, a very commonplace murder.
*
On Monday morning the girl in the estate office, clearing the mail from the letter box, called to the manager.
‘That’s funny! The old chap who took the key to the Camden Town flat has returned the wrong one. This hasn’t got our label on it. Unless he pulled it off. Cheek! But why would he do that?’
She took the key over to the manager’s desk, dumping his pile of letters in front of him. He glanced at it casually.
‘That’s the right key, anyway – it’s the only one of that type we still have. Probably the label worked loose and fell off. You should put them on more carefully.’
‘But I did!’ Outraged, the girl wailed her protest. The manager winced.
‘Then label it again, put it back on the board, and for God’s sake don’t fuss, that’s a good girl.’
She glanced at him again, ready to argue. Then she shrugged. Come to think of it, he had always been a bit odd about that Camden Town flat.
‘OK, Mr Morrisey,’ she said.
The Boxdale Inheritance
‘You see, my dear Adam,’ explained the Canon gently, as he walked with Chief Superintendent Dalgliesh under the vicarage elms, ‘useful as the legacy would be to us, I wouldn’t feel happy in accepting it if Great Aunt Allie came by her money in the first place by wrongful means.’
What the Canon meant was that he and his wife wouldn’t be happy to inherit Great Aunt Allie’s fifty thousand pounds if, sixty-seven years earlier, she had poisoned her elderly husband with arsenic in order to get it. As Great Aunt Allie had been accused and acquitted of just that charge in a 1902 trial which, for her Hampshire neighbours, had rivalled the Coronation as a public spectacle, the Canon’s scruples were not altogether irrelevant. Admittedly, thought Dalgliesh, most people faced with the prospect of fifty thousand pounds would be happy to subscribe to the commonly held convention that, once an English Court has pronounced its verdict, the final truth of the matter had been established once and for all. There may possibly be a higher judicature in the next world but hardly in this. And so Hubert Boxdale would normally be happy to believe. But, faced with the prospect of an unexpected fortune, his scrupulous conscience was troubled. The gentle but obstinate voice went on:
‘Apart from the moral principle of accepting tainted money, it wouldn’t bring us happiness. I often think of that poor woman, driven restlessly round Europe in her search for peace, of that lonely life and unhappy death.’
Dalgliesh recalled that Great Aunt Allie had moved in a predictable pattern with her retinue of servants, current lover and general hangers-on from one luxury Riviera hotel to the next, with stays in Paris or Rome as the mood suited her. He was not sure that this orderly programme of comfort and entertainment could be described as being restlessly driven round Europe or that the old lady had been primarily in search of peace. She had died, he recalled, by falling overboard from a millionaire’s yacht during a rather wild party given by him to celebrate her eighty-eighth birthday. It was perhaps not an edifying death by the Canon’s standards but Dalgliesh doubted whether she had, in fact, been unhappy at the time. Great Aunt Allie (it was impossible to think of her by any other name), if she had been capable of coherent thought, would pr
But this was hardly a point of view he could put forward comfortably to his present companion.
Canon Hubert Boxdale was Chief Superintendent Adam Dalgliesh’s godfather. Dalgliesh’s father had been his Oxford contemporary and lifelong friend. He had been an admirable godfather: affectionate, uncensorious, genuinely concerned. In Dalgliesh’s childhood, he had always been mindful of birthdays and imaginative about a small boy’s preoccupations and desires.
Dalgliesh was very fond of him and privately thought him one of the few really good men he had known. It was only surprising that the Canon had managed to live to seventy-one in a carnivorous world in which gentleness, humility and unworldliness are hardly conducive to survival, let alone success. But his goodness had in some sense protected him. Faced with such manifest innocence, even those who exploited him, and they were not a few, extended some of the protection and compassion they might show to the slightly subnormal.
‘Poor old darling,’ his daily woman would say, pocketing pay for six hours when she had worked five and helping herself to a couple of eggs from his refrigerator. ‘He’s really not fit to be let out alone.’ It had surprised the then young and slightly priggish Detective Constable Dalgliesh to realise that the Canon knew perfectly well about the hours and the eggs, but thought that Mrs Copthorne, with five children and an indolent husband, needed both more than he did. He also knew that if he started paying for five hours she would promptly work only four and extract another two eggs, and that this small and only dishonesty was somehow necessary to her self-esteem. He was good. But he was not a fool.
He and his wife were, of course, poor. But they were not unhappy; indeed it was a word impossible to associate with the Canon. The death of his two sons in the 1939 war had saddened but not destroyed him. But he had anxieties. His wife was suffering from disseminated sclerosis and was finding it increasingly hard to manage. There were comforts and appliances which she would need. He was now, belatedly, about to retire and his pension would be small. A legacy of fifty thousand pounds would enable them both to live in comfort for the rest of their lives and would also, Dalgliesh had no doubt, give them the pleasure of doing more for their various lame dogs. Really, he thought, the Canon was an almost embarrassingly deserving candidate for a modest fortune. Why couldn’t the dear, silly old noodle take the cash and stop worrying? He said cunningly: ‘Great Aunt Allie was found Not Guilty, you know, by an English jury. And it all happened nearly seventy years ago. Couldn’t you bring yourself to accept their verdict?’