“After Dorothy-Mitzi was taken into council care, her mother threw Edwardes out, and Tony Challis went to other digs. No charges were brought in the end—the child was considered unreliable on account of changing her story. Rumors spread, mud stuck, Challis’s fiancée told him to get lost, his regular customers followed suit...”
“Ugly,” Jill agreed.
“Gets worse. Challis is a Wessex man, he talked a lot about this part of the world when he was lodging with Mitzi’s folks. Maybe that’s why she stuck around, having drifted here. Anyway, Challis took to drink, hit the gutter before he straightened up. Returned to his native heath, as posh books put it, found work as a janitor for Coastal Properties. They own several apartment houses on Grand Drive and gave him a basement flat in the end one on the left. Too dark and cramped for letting, and it gave them a good excuse to pay him peanuts.”
“Mitzi Field wasn’t looking for Challis—if she’d had a grain of sense she would have kept well clear—but she found him. Once a month he picked up supplies from a discount hardware store on her beat in dockland. He didn’t notice her, which is natural; the last time he’d seen Dorothy, she was a child. But she must have seen him going in and out of the hardware place and pumped somebody there, discovered where he worked.”
Len Poole sighed and shook his head. “Just as you said, it was Christmas. Tony Challis is watching TV in his basement one night, and suddenly this shabby little tart is at the side door, saying, I’m Dorothy, Mr. Challis, don’t you remember me? Wanted to say sorry, hoped he was doing all right now, she hadn’t wanted to make trouble for him. And so on.”
“Challis says, and I believe him, he was in a daze while she talked to him. ‘Noises, she was making noises,’ he told me. She was dead when the actual words came back to him. Mitzi left, and for a minute—the chap’s a drinker, mark you—he wondered whether he’d been hallucinating. Then he wished he had been. Challis hadn’t hated Dorothy, he understood she was a victim who dragged him down with her, no malice involved. But she’d become Mitzi... ruining him and still ending up like that, that was past bearing.”
“Next moment, it seemed to him. he was standing over her in the street, holding one of those little stone lions: half the big houses along the drive had them on either side of the porch. He had the lion by its head, the square base was allover blood.”
“He accepted that he must have killed her, but he didn’t feel like a murderer. All he felt was scared witless. He slipped back to his basement, washed the lion, and put it back in place. Then he prayed. Been praying ever since.”
“From Met Police records and that social worker. I got the names of five people linked to Field when she was a child. Only one was among the residents of Grand Drive at the time she was killed. No problem finding him, he didn’t move far, one of those new council flats near the marina. Soon as I said who I was. Challis goes. ‘Thank God, now I can tell somebody.’ ”
Jill Tierce addressed her folded hands, almost inaudibly. “She wanted to make amends for what happened all those years ago, and he killed her for trying?”
Inspector Poole slid off the desk, his expression mixing wonder and compassion over her naivete. “If you can make sense of the why and wherefore, be sure to tell Challis. He can’t sort it out. It’s people, Jill... she was one of them that gets sentimental at Christmas, never considered she’d be opening a wound. As for him, he wasn’t the kind man who’d lodged with her mum. Not anymore. She stirred up an embittered semialcoholic, temper overdue to snap.”
Len Poole hesitated, cleared his throat. “Nobody’s fault, luv. not even his. Though he’ll go away for it.”
“We got a result, which is all that matters.”
“Not what I meant—though there is always that, at the end of the day.”
Inspector Tierce’s day, apparently over, had a postscript.
She’d wanted to watch the black and white movie of Scrooge for the fifth Christmas Eve in a row but went to bed instead. Her father would be calling “fairly early” to collect her for Christmas lunch, meaning crack of dawn.
The phone woke her. The caller sounded drunk, though on nothing more than girlish high spirits, it emerged.
“We’ve just got back from midnight Mass, now we can be the first to wish you Merry Christmas.”
“Wha? Who is it?” Jill pulled the alarm clock radio round on the bedside table, sending paperbacks, a bottle of cough mixture, and her pain tablets cascading to the floor. “It’s twenty to two!” The voice’s identity registered belatedly. “Connie, I’ll kill you.”
“Don’t be like that. I rang him after all, you see. And I’m so happy.”
“Bully for you. What in the world are you on about?”
“Noel, of course. You let his name slip the other night—”
“Did I, by gum.” Fully awake and up on one elbow, Inspector Tierce rolled gummy eyes. “That was very unprofessional.”
“Sarum’s an unusual surname, only one in the local phonebook, and we talked for hours—” Following squeaks and a rattle, Noel Sarum came on the phone.
“And here I am! Well, I’ll be leaving in a minute,” he added sheepishly.
Another interlude of cryptic noises and then Connie French trilled, “He’s so stuffy, of course he’s not leaving at this time of the morning.”
She said something aside, answering Noel in the background. “He wants you to know we’re engaged and says I’m indiscreet, the idiot. I say. you must come to our wedding, it’ll be February or March. You have to, you’re the matchmaker.”
“Let’s talk about it next year. I’m pleased you are pleased. Connie. Tell Noel to go easy on the law in future: he owes me. ‘Bye.”
Lying back in the darkness, a phrase from the Bible popped into her head, a Sunday school fragment clear as if spoken for her benefit: “Out of the strong came forth sweetness. “Something about bees using the remains of a savage lion as their hive. Why think of that? Mitzi Field was battered with a stone lion. Nothing sweet there, that was not the connection.
Connie was gorgeously happy, and Noel worshipped her. It couldn’t last, euphoria didn’t, yet it was a promising prelude to something better. They might fight eventually, but they would not be lonely.
That was what had triggered the parable of bees and a beast of prey. Out of evil, good can come. “Merry Christmas,” Jill Tierce whispered to the pillow.
CHRISTMAS PARTY – Martin Werner
People in the advertising business said the Christmas party at French & Saunders was the social event of the year. For it wasn’t your ordinary holiday office party. Not the kind where the staff gets together for a few mild drinks out of paper cups, some sandwiches sent in from the local deli, and a long boring speech by the company president. At F&S it was all very different: just what you’d expect from New York’s hottest advertising agency.
The salaries there were the highest in town, the accounts were strictly blue chip, and the awards the agency won over the years filled an entire boardroom. And the people, of course, were the best, brightest, and most creative that money could buy.
With that reputation to uphold, the French & Saunders Christmas party naturally had to be the biggest and splashiest in the entire industry.
Year after year, that’s the way it was. Back in the late Seventies, when discos were all the rage, the company took over Numero Uno. the club people actually fought over to get in. Another year, F&S hired half the New York Philharmonic to provide entertainment. And in 1989, the guest bartenders were Mel Gibson. Madonna, and the cast of LA. Law.