Cynthia Manson (ed) (64 page)

“Well, of course I mentioned ’er
being alone for the ’oliday. I told that detective so. In the way of
conversation, I told ’im. Why shouldn’t I?”

“Why indeed? But who did you tell,
exactly?”

“I disremember. Anyone, I suppose.
If we was comparing. I’m on me own now meself, but I go up to me brother’s at
the ’olidays.”

“Where would that be?”

“Notting ’ill way.’E’s on the
railway. Paddington.”

Bit by bit Meadows extracted a list
of her friends and relations, those with whom she had talked most often during
the week before Christmas. Among her various nephews and nieces was a girl who
went to the same comprehensive school as Ron and his girlfriend Sally.

Ron listened to the assignment
Meadows gave him.

“Sally won’t like it,” he said
candidly.

“Bring her into it, then. Pretend it’s
all your own idea.”

Ron grinned.

“Shirl won’t like that,” he said.

Tom Meadows laughed.

“Fix it any way you like,” he said. “But
I think this girl Shirley was with a group and did go to sing carols for Mrs.
Fairlands. I know she isn’t on the official list, so she hasn’t reported it. I
want to know why.”

“I’m not shopping anymore,” Ron said
warily.

“I’m not asking you to. I don’t
imagine Shirley or her friends did Mrs. Fairlands. But it’s just possible she
knows or saw something and is afraid to speak up for fear of reprisals.”

“Cor!” said Ron. It was like a page
of his favorite magazine working out in real life. He confided in Sally, and
they went to work.

The upshot was interesting. Shirley
did have something to say, and she said it to Tom Meadows in her own home with
her disapproving mother sitting beside her.

“I never did like the idea of Shirl
going out after dark, begging at house doors. That’s all it really is, isn’t
it? My children have very good pocket money. They’ve nothing to complain of.”

“I’m sure they haven’t,” Meadows
said mildly. “But there’s a lot more to carol singing than asking for money.
Isn’t there, Shirley?”

“I’ll say,” the girl answered. “Mum
don’t understand.”

“You can’t stop her,” the mother
complained. “Self-willed. Stubborn. I don’t know, I’m sure. Out after dark. My
dad’d ’ve taken his belt to me for less.”

“There were four of us,” Shirley
protested. “It wasn’t late. Not above seven or eight.”

The time was right, Meadows noted,
if she was speaking of her visit to Mrs. Fairlands’ road. She was. Encouraged
to describe everything, she agreed that her group was working towards the house
especially to entertain the old lady who was going to be alone for Christmas.
She’d got that from her aunt, who worked for Mrs. Fairlands. They began at the
far end of the road on the same side as the old lady. When they were about six
houses away, they saw another group go up to it or to one near it. Then they
were singing themselves. The next time she looked round, she saw one child
running away up the road. She did not know where he had come from. She did not
see the others.

“You did not see them go on?”

“No. They weren’t in the road then,
but they might have gone right on while we were singing. There’s a turning off,
isn’t there?”

“Yes. Go on.”

“Well, we went up to Mrs. Fairlands’
and rang the bell. I thought I’d tell her she knew my aunt and we’d come
special.”

“Yes. What happened?”

“Nothing. At least—”

“Go on. Don’t be frightened.”

Shirley’s face had gone very pale.

“There were men’s voices inside.
Arguing like. Nasty. We scarpered.”

Tom Meadows nodded gravely.

“That would be upsetting.
Men’s
voices? Or big boys?”

“Could be either, couldn’t it? Well,
perhaps more like sixth form boys, at that.”

“You thought it was boys, didn’t you?
Boys from your school.”

Shirley was silent.

“You thought they’d know and have it
in for you if you told. Didn’t you? I won’t let you down, Shirley. Didn’t you?”

She whispered, “Yes,” and added, “Some
of our boys got knives. I seen them.”

Meadows went to Inspector Brooks. He
explained how Ron had helped him to get in touch with Shirley and the result of
that interview. The inspector, who had worked as a routine matter on all Mrs.
Fairlands’ contacts with the outer world, was too interested to feel annoyed at
the other’s success.

“Men’s voices?” Brooks said
incredulously.

“Most probably older lads,” Meadows
answered. “She agreed that was what frightened her group. They might have
looked out and recognized them as they ran away.”

“There’d been no attempt at
intimidations?”

“They’re not all
that
stupid.”

“No.”

Brooks considered.

“This mustn’t break in the papers
yet, you understand?”

“Perfectly. But I shall stay around.”

Inspector Brooks nodded, and Tom
went away. Brooks took his sergeant and drove to Mrs. Fairlands’ house. They
still had the key of the flat, and they still had the house under observation.

The new information was disturbing,
Brooks felt. Men’s voices, raised in anger. Against poor Mrs. Fairlands, of
course. But there were no adult fingerprints in the flat except those of the
old lady herself and of her daily. Gloves had been worn, then. A professional
job. But no signs whatever of breaking and entering. Therefore, Mrs. Fairlands
had let them in. Why? She had peeped out at Ron’s lot, to check who they were,
obviously. She had not done so for Shirley’s. Because she was in the power of
the “men” whose voices had driven this other group away in terror.

But there had been two distinct
small footprints in the dust of the outer hall and a palmprint on the outer
door had been small, childsize.

Perhaps the child that Shirley had
seen running down the road had been a decoy. The whole group she had noticed at
Mrs. Fairlands’ door might have been employed for that purpose and the men or
older boys were lurking at the corner of the house, to pounce when the door
opened. Possible, but not very likely. Far too risky, even on a dark evening.
Shirley could not have seen distinctly. The street lamps were at longish
intervals in that road. But there were always a few passersby. Even on
Christmas Eve no professional group of villains would take such a risk.

Standing in the cold drawing room,
now covered with a grey film of dust, Inspector Brooks decided to make another
careful search for clues. He had missed the jewels. Though he felt justified in
making it, his mistake was a distinct blot on his copybook. It was up to him
now to retrieve his reputation. He sent the sergeant to take another look at
the bedroom, with particular attention to the dressing table. He himself began
to go over the drawing room with the greatest possible care.

Shirley’s evidence suggested there
had been more than one thief. The girl had said “voices.” That meant at least
two, which probably accounted for the fact, apart from her age, that neither
Mrs. Fairlands nor her clothes gave any indication of a struggle. She had been
overpowered immediately, it seemed. She had not been strong enough or agile
enough to tear, scratch, pull off any fragment from her attackers’ clothes or
persons. There had been no trace of any useful material under her fingernails
or elsewhere.

Brooks began methodically with the
chair to which Mrs. Fairlands had been bound and worked his way outwards from
that center. After the furniture, the carpet and curtains. After that the
walls.

Near the door, opposite the
fireplace, he found on the wall—two feet, three inches up from the floor—a
small, round, brownish, greasy smear. He had not seen it before. In artificial
light, he checked, it was nearly invisible. On this morning, with the first
sunshine of the New Year coming into the room, the little patch was entirely
obvious, slightly shiny where the light from the window caught it.

Inspector Brooks took a wooden
spatula from his case of aids and carefully scraped off the substance into a
small plastic box, sniffing at it as he did so.

“May I, too?” asked Tom Meadows
behind him.

The inspector wheeled round with an
angry exclamation.

“How did you get in?” he asked.

“Told the copper in your car I
wanted to speak to you.”

“What about?”

“Well, about how you were getting
on, really,” Tom said disarmingly. “I see you are. Please let me have one sniff.”

Inspector Brooks was annoyed, both
by the intrusion and the fact that he had not heard it, being so concentrated
on his work. So he closed his box, shut it into his black bag, and called to
the sergeant in the next room.

Meadows got down on his knees,
leaned towards the wall, and sniffed. It was faint, since most of it had been
scraped off, but he knew the smell. His freelancing had not been confined to
journalism.

He was getting to his feet as the
sergeant joined Inspector Brooks. The sergeant raised his eyebrows at the
interloper.

“You can’t keep the press’s noses
out of anything,” said Brooks morosely.

The other two grinned. It was very
apt.

“I’m just off,” Tom said. “Good luck
with your specimen, inspector. I know where to go now. So will you.”

“Come back!” called Brooks. The
young man was a menace. He would have to be controlled.

But Meadows was away, striding down
the road until he was out of sight of the police car, then running to the
nearest tube station where he knew he would find the latest newspaper editions.
He bought one, opened it at the entertainments column, and read down the list.

He was a certain six hours ahead of
Brooks, he felt sure, possibly more. Probably he had until tomorrow morning. He
skipped his lunch and set to work.

Inspector Brooks got the report from
the lab that evening, and the answer to his problem came to him as completely
as it had done to Tom Meadows in Mrs. Fairlands’ drawing room. His first action
was to ring up Olympia. This proving fruitless, he sighed. Too late now to
contact the big stores; they would all be closed and the employees of every
kind gone home.

But in the morning some very
extensive telephone calls to managers told him where he must go. He organized
his forces to cover all the exits of a big store not very far from Mrs.
Fairlands’ house. With his sergeant he entered modestly by way of the men’s
department.

They took a lift from there to the
third floor, emerging among the toys. It was the tenth day of Christmas, with
the school holidays in full swing and eager children, flush with Christmas
money, choosing long-coveted treasures. A Father Christmas, white-bearded, in
the usual red, hooded gown, rather too short for him, was moving about trying
to promote a visit to the first of that day’s performances of “Snowdrop and the
Seven Dwarfs.” As his insistence seeped into the minds of the abstracted young,
they turned their heads to look at the attractive cardboard entrance of the
little “theater” at the far end of the department. A gentle flow towards it
began and gathered momentum. Inspector Brooks and the sergeant joined the
stream.

Inside the theater there were small
chairs in rows for the children. The grownups stood at the back. A gramophone
played the Disney film music.

The early scenes were brief, mere
tableaux with a line thrown in here and there for Snowdrop. The queen spoke the
famous doggerel to her mirror.

The curtain fell and rose again on
Snowdrop, surrounded by the Seven Dwarfs. Two of them had beards, real beards.
Dopey rose to his feet and began to sing.

“Okay,” whispered Brooks to the
sergeant. “The child who sang and ran away.”

The sergeant nodded. Brooks
whispered again. “I’m going round the back. Get the audience here out quietly
if the balloon goes up before they finish.”

He tiptoed quietly away. He intended
to catch the dwarfs in their dressing room immediately after the show, arrest
the lot, and sort them out at the police station.

But the guilty ones had seen him
move. Or rather Dopey, more guilt-laden and fearful than the rest, had noticed
the two men who seemed to have no children with them, had seen their heads
close together, had seen one move silently away. As Brooks disappeared, the
midget’s nerve broke. His song ended in a scream; he fled from the stage.

In the uproar that followed, the
dwarf’s scream was echoed by the frightened children. The lights went up in the
theater, the shop assistants and the sergeant went into action to subdue their
panic and get them out.

Inspector Brooks found himself in a
maze of lathe and plaster backstage arrangements. He found three bewildered
small figures, with anxious, wizened faces, trying to restrain Dopey, who was
still in the grip of his hysteria. A few sharp questions proved that the three
had no idea what was happening.