Cynthia Manson (ed) (29 page)

Armitage and the deputy manager
exchanged glances. Then Armitage said. “I knew him, sir. Very well. Charlie Burrows
was one of our finest plainclothes narcotics officers.”

Mr. Harrington had gone green. “You
mean—he was a policeman?”

“Exactly, sir. I’d better explain. A
little time ago we got a tipoff from an informer that an important consignment
of high-grade heroin was to be smuggled in from Hong Kong in a consignment of
Christmas toys. Teddy bears, in fact. The drug was to be in the Barnum and
Thrums carton, hidden inside a particular Teddy bear, which would be
distinguished by having a blue ribbon around its neck instead of a red one.”

“Surely,” I said, “you couldn’t get
what you call an important consignment inside one Teddy bear, even a big one.”

Armitage sighed. “Shows you aren’t
familiar with the drug scene, sir,” he said. “Why, half a pound of pure high-grade
heroin is worth a fortune on the streets.”

With a show of bluster Harrington
said. “If you knew this, Superintendent, why didn’t you simply intercept the
consignment and confiscate the drug? Look at the trouble that’s been—”

Armitage interrupted him. “If you’d
just hear me out, sir. What I’ve told you was the sum total of our information.
We didn’t know who in Barnum’s was going to pick up the heroin, or how or where
it was to be disposed of. We’re more interested in getting the people—the
pushers—than confiscating the cargo. So I had a word with Mr. Andrews here, and
he kindly agreed to let Charlie take on the Father Christmas job. And Charlie
set a little trap. Unfortunately, he paid for it with his life.” There was an
awkward silence.

He went on. “Mr. Andrews told us
that the consignment had arrived and was to be unpacked today. We know that
staff get first pick, as it were, at new stock, and we were naturally
interested to see who would select the bear with the blue ribbon. It was
Charlie’s own idea to concoct a story about a special present for a little
girl—”

“You mean, that wasn’t true?”
Harrington was outraged. “But I spoke to the customer myself!”

“Yes, sir. That’s to say, you spoke
to another of our people, who was posing as the little girl’s father.”

“You’re very thorough,” Harrington
said.

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. Well, as
I was saying, Charlie made a point of selecting the bear with the blue ribbon
and taking it off in his sack. He knew that whoever was picking up the drop
would have to come and get it—or try to. You see, if we’d just allowed one of
the staff to select it, that person could simply have said that it was pure
coincidence—blue was such a pretty color. Difficult to prove criminal
knowledge. You understand?”

Nobody said anything. With quite a
sense of dramatic effect Armitage reached down into Santa’s sack and pulled out
a Teddy bear. It had a blue ribbon round its neck.

In a voice tense with strain Mr.
Andrews said, “So the murderer didn’t get away with the heroin. I thought you said—”

Superintendent Armitage produced a
knife from his pocket. “We’ll see,” he said. “With your permission, I’m going
to open this bear.”

“Of course.”

The knife ripped through the nobbly
brown fabric, and a lot of stuffing fell out. Nothing else. Armitage made a
good job of it. By the time he had finished, the bear was in shreds: and
nothing had emerged from its interior except kapok.

Armitage surveyed the wreckage with
a sort of bleak satisfaction. Suddenly brisk, he said, “Now. Which staff
members took bears from the stockroom this morning?”

“I did,” I said at once.

“Anybody else?”

There was a silence. I said, “I
believe you took two, didn’t you, Mr. Harrington?”

“I... em... yes, now that you
mention it.”

“Miss MacArthur took one,” I said.
“It was she who unpacked the carton. She said that Dis—Miss Aster—was going to
take one.”

“I see.” Armitage was making notes.
“I presume you each signed for your purchases, and that the bears are now with
your things in the staff cloakroom.” Without waiting for an answer he turned to
me. “How many of these people saw Burrows select the bear with the blue
ribbon?”

“All of us,” I said. “Isn’t that so,
Mr. Harrington?”

Harrington just nodded. He looked
sick.

“Well, then,” said Armitage, “I
shall have to inspect all the bears that you people removed from the
stockroom.”

There was an element of black humor
in the parade of the Teddies, with their inane grins and knowing, beady eyes:
but as one after the other was dismembered. nothing more sensational was
revealed than a growing pile of kapok. The next step was to check the stockbook
numbers—and sure enough, one bear was missing.

It was actually Armitage’s Sergeant
who found it. It had been ripped open and shoved behind a pile of boxes in the
stockroom in a hasty attempt at concealment. There was no ribbon round its
neck, and it was constructed very differently from the others. The kapok merely
served as a thin layer of stuffing between the fabric skin and a spherical womb
of pink plastic in the toy’s center. This plastic had been cut open and was
empty. It was abundantly clear what it must have contained.

“Well,” said the Superintendent,
“it’s obvious what happened. The murderer stabbed Burrows, slipped into the
booth, and substituted an innocent Teddy bear for the loaded one, at the same
time changing the neck ribbon. But he—or she—didn’t dare try walking out of the
store with the bear, not after a murder. So, before Charlie’s body was found,
the murderer dismembered the bear, took out the heroin, and hid it.” He sighed
again. “I’m afraid this means a body search. I’ll call the Yard for a police
matron for the ladies.”

It was all highly undignified and
tedious, and poor old Disaster nearly had a seizure, despite the fact that the
police matron seemed a thoroughly nice and kind woman. When it was all over,
however, and our persons and clothing had been practically turned inside out,
still nothing had been found. The four of us were required to wait in the staff
restroom while exhaustive searches were made for both the heroin and the weapon.

Disaster was in tears, Miss
MacArthur was loudly indignant and threatened to sue the police for false
arrest, and Mr. Harrington developed what he called a nervous stomach, on
account, he said, of the way the toy department was being left understaffed and
unsupervised on one of the busiest days of the year.

At long last Superintendent Armitage
came in. He said, “Nothing. Abso-bloody-lutely nothing. Well, I can’t keep you
people here indefinitely. I suggest you all go out and get yourselves some lunch.”
He sounded very tired and cross and almost human.

With considerable relief we prepared
to leave the staffroom. Only Mr. Harrington announced that he felt too ill to
eat anything, and that he would remain in the department. The Misses MacArthur
and Aster left together. I put on my coat and took the escalator down to the
ground floor, among the burdened, chattering crowd.

I was out in the brisk air of the
street when I heard Armitage’s voice behind me.

“Just one moment, if you please, Mr.
Borrowdale.”

I turned. “Yes, Superintendent. Can
I help you?”

“You’re up at the university, aren’t
you, sir? Just taken a temporary job at Barnum’s for the vacation?”

“That’s right.”

“Do quite a bit of fencing, don’t
you?”

He had my cane out of my hand before
I knew what was happening. The sergeant, an extraordinarily tough and
unattractive character, showed surprising dexterity and speed in getting an arm
grip on me. Armitage had unscrewed the top of the cane, and was whistling in a
quiet, appreciative manner. “Very nice. Very nice little sword stick. Something
like a stilletto. I don’t suppose Charlie felt a thing.”

“Now, look here,” I said. “You can’t
make insinuations like that. Just because I’m known as a bit of dandy, and
carry a sword stick, that’s no reason—”

“A dandy, eh?” said Armitage
thoughtfully. He looked me up and down in a curious manner, as if he thought
something was missing.

It was at that moment that Miss
MacArthur suddenly appeared round the corner of the building.

“Oh, Mr. Borrowdale, look what I
found! Lying down in the mews by the goods entrance! It must have fallen out of
the staffroom window! Lucky I’ve got sharp eyes—it was behind a rubbish bin, I
might easily have missed it!” And she handed me my bowler hat.

That is to say, she would have done
if Armitage hadn’t intercepted it. It didn’t take him more than five seconds to
find the packages of white powder hidden between the hard shell of the hat and
the oiled-silk lining.

Armitage said, “So you were going to
peddle this stuff to young men and women at the university, were you? Charming,
I must say. Now you can come back to the Yard and tell us all about your
employers—if you want a chance at saving your own neck, that is.”

Miss MacArthur was goggling at me.
“Oh, Mr. Borrowdale!” she squeaked. “Have I gone and done something wrong?”

I never did like Miss MacArthur.

“A beautiful morning, Miss Oliphant.
I shall take a short constitutional.”

“Very well, Mr. Payne.”

Mr. Rossiter Payne put on his good
thick Melton overcoat, took his bowler hat off its peg, carefully brushed it,
and put it on. He looked at himself in a small glass and nodded approvingly at
what he saw.

He was a man in his early fifties,
but he might have passed for ten years less, so square were his shoulders, so
ruler-straight his back. Two fine wings of gray hair showed under the bowler.
He looked like a retired Guards officer, although he had, in fact, no closer
relationship with the Army than an uncle who had been cashiered.

At the door he paused, his eyes
twinkling. “Don’t let anybody steal the stock while I’m out. Miss Oliphant.”

Miss Oliphant, a thin spinster of
indeterminate middle-age, blushed. She adored Mr. Payne.

He had removed his hat to speak to
her. Now he clapped it on his head again, cast an appreciative look at the bow
window of his shop, which displayed several sets of standard authors with the
discreet legend above—
Rossiter Payne, Bookseller. Specialist in First
Editions and Manuscripts
—and made his way up New Bond Street
toward Oxford Street.

At the top of New Bond Street he
stopped, as he did five days a week, at the stall on the corner. The old woman
put the carnation into his buttonhole.

“Fourteen shopping days to Christmas
now, Mrs. Shankly. We’ve all got to think about it, haven’t we?”

A ten shilling note changed hands
instead of the usual half crown. He left her blessing him confusedly.

This was perfect December
weather—crisply cold, the sun shining. Oxford Street was wearing its holiday
decorations—enormous gold and silver coins from which depended ropes of pearls,
diamonds, rubies, emeralds. When lighted up in the afternoon they looked
pretty, although a little garish for Mr. Payne’s refined taste. But still, they
had a certain symbolic feeling about them, and he smiled at them.

Nothing, indeed, could disturb Mr.
Payne’s good temper this morning—not the jostling crowds on the pavements or
the customary traffic jams which seemed, indeed, to please him. He walked along
until he came to a large store that said above it, in enormous letters, ORBIN’S.
These letters were picked out in colored lights, and the lights themselves were
festooned with Christmas trees and holly wreaths and the figures of the Seven
Dwarfs, all of which lighted up.

Orbin’s department store went right round
the corner into the comparatively quiet Jessiter Street. Once again Mr. Payne
went through a customary ceremony. He crossed the road and went down several
steps into an establishment unique of its kind—Danny’s Shoe Parlor. Here,
sitting on a kind of throne in this semi-basement, one saw through a small
window the lower halves of passers-by. Here Danny, with two assistants almost
as old as himself, had been shining shoes for almost 30 years.

Leather-faced, immensely lined, but
still remarkably sharp-eyed, Danny knelt down now in front of Mr. Payne, turned
up the cuffs of his trousers, and began to put an altogether superior shine on
already well-polished shoes.

“Lovely morning, Mr. Payne.”

“You can’t see much of it from here.”

“More than you think. You see the
pavements, and if they’re not spotted, right off you know it isn’t raining.
Then there’s something in the way people walk, you know what I mean, like it’s
Christmas in the air.” Mr. Payne laughed indulgently. Now Danny was mildly
reproachful. “You still haven’t brought me in that pair of black shoes, sir.”

Mr. Payne frowned slightly. A week
ago he had been almost knocked down by a bicyclist, and the mudguard of the
bicycle had scraped badly one of the shoes he was wearing, cutting the leather
at one point. Danny was confident that he could repair the cut so that it
wouldn’t show. Mr. Payne was not so sure.