The Twelve Clues of Christmas

“A match?” Darcy smiled. “I don’t think I’d be described as much of a catch at the moment. A title sometime in the distant future and no prospects for the present. Hopeless, if you ask me.” He gave me another one of those smiles.

Other people began to drift into the breakfast room muttering “Morning” in a way that indicated they too were suffering from hangovers. I got up. “I should go and see what Lady Hawse-Gorzley wants me to do,” I said. But before I could leave the room she came in.

“Georgiana dear. The weather’s not promising this morning. It may snow again. May rain. Dashed nuisance. So I suggest you round up the young people and get to work on the pantomime.”

“Pantomime?”

“Oh, yes. We always put on a pantomime on Boxing Day. The funnier the better. Ask Bunty for the local jokes. I’ll have the servants bring the dressing-up box down from the attic. Always such fun. And we’ll keep it down for when we play charades. You can have the small sitting room next to the ballroom.”

She looked around the table. “Everyone all right? Splendid. Splendid. I’ll have the butler put the morning papers in the library for you.”

And she was off again. I looked down at Darcy.

“How are you at pantomimes?” I asked.

“Expert,” he said. “My Widow Twankey brought the house down.”

“What pantomime is she in?”

He looked shocked. “Aladdin. You know—Wishy Washy and the magic lamp and all that.”

I shrugged. “Sorry, I’ve never seen it.”

“Never seen Aladdin? My dear girl, you haven’t lived.”

“There aren’t too many pantomimes around Castle Rannoch, you know. And I’ve hardly ever been in London for Christmas. I think I may have seen Puss in Boots once, but I can’t remember anything about it.”

“And then there is Dick Whittington, isn’t there? And Cinderella, of course. And Babes in the Wood.”

“We’ll need one with seven or eight roles,” I said. “Everyone should have a part.”

“Well, that rules out Dick Whittington,” Darcy said. “I can only think of Dick and his cat.”

“I expect he had a sweetheart,” I said. “It seems to be one of the requirements.”

“It had better be Cinderella,” Darcy said. “At least we know the story to that one.”

I counted on my fingers. “Let’s see—Cinderella, wicked stepmother—”

“I claim that role for myself,” he said.

“Two ugly sisters.”

“Monty and Badger.”

“The prince, the fairy godmother.”

“The king and the person who carries around the glass slipper. That makes eight.”

“Perfect,” I said.

I rounded up the younger members and presented the idea to them. Naturally Cherie thought it would be boring, Junior thought it would be stupid and Ethel didn’t look too enthusiastic. But Cherie brightened up a lot when I made her Cinderella. Ethel agreed to be the fairy godmother and I assigned Bunty to be the prince. As you know, the principal boy in a pantomime is always played by a female in tights, and there is always a comic older woman played by a man. It’s tradition. And a lot of pies in the face and that kind of thing.

By the end of the morning we had a rough sketch of our lines and everyone had entered into the spirit of the thing, Ethel proving to be rather sharp and witty and even Junior happy to be made the king. But the more they laughed and joked and tried on impossible costumes the more I tried to fight off a lingering uneasiness. Why had I sensed danger so close to my mother’s cottage the night before? A ridiculous notion entered my head. What if one of those convicts knew that my grandfather had been a policeman? Might they want to get him out of the way as their fifth victim?

I could stand it no longer. “I’ll leave you to run through it once more,” I said. “I have to pop down to the village for a minute.”

I put on my coat, grabbed my gifts and ran all the way down the drive, sliding a little in snow that had started to melt. I hammered on my mother’s door. When Granddad opened it I let out a huge sigh of relief.

“Oh, you’re all right. Thank goodness.”

“And why shouldn’t I be all right?” he asked, helping me off with my coat. “Fit as a fiddle, me.” And he thumped his chest. “Come on in, ducks. We’ve got company.”

I went through into the sitting room and found Detective Inspector Newcombe seated by the fire, a cup of tea in his hand.

“The inspector just dropped in for a chat,” Granddad said.

“There hasn’t been another death, has there?” I asked.

“Not that we’ve heard of,” the inspector said, “but I’m not at all happy. Those first deaths I could explain, but that poor woman at the telephone exchange—that had to be malicious and intentional. We can’t tell any more, because the place burned, but I’d say the wires were deliberately hooked up to kill someone. That’s why I came to see your grandfather, miss.”

Obviously it had slipped his mind that I wasn’t a miss, I was a milady. “My chief inspector is off skiing in France so it’s all up to me. I know I should probably call in Scotland Yard, but I don’t want to do that and look a fool, so I thought that a retired member of the Metropolitan Police Service could maybe give me some pointers.”

He looked hopefully at my grandfather. Granddad tried to look like someone who had been a Scotland Yard expert detective, instead of an ordinary copper.

“Do you have anyone around here who might have a grudge against the people who have died? Anyone who has been a bit off his rocker?”

The inspector shook his head. “Nobody. It’s normally quieter than the grave in these parts—oh, dear, that was a tactless expression, wasn’t it? But the occasional robbery, a bit of cattle or sheep stealing, someone beating up his old lady on a Saturday night—that’s what crime means to us. This has to be an outsider, and the only outsiders I know are those convicts.”

“There are all the people staying with Lady Hawse-Gorzley,” I pointed out. “They are all outsiders.”

“Yes, but with no connections to the people who have died, surely?” The inspector sounded shocked.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Since they’ve just come from America and Yorkshire and India.”

“I wish they’d hurry up and catch those blasted convicts,” the inspector said. “Until they are caught I have to believe that they are hiding out on my patch and it’s up to me to find them.”

“You’ve asked everybody in the area to report break-ins or stolen food immediately, have you?” I said. “They have to eat and shelter somewhere.”

“Exactly. With the kind of weather we’ve just had, someone must be hiding them, but we’ve pretty much searched door to door. Most of the local people have lived here all their lives. They’re not the kind of people to be harboring criminals.”

“I’m not sure it is your convicts we’re looking at,” Granddad said slowly. “In my time on the force I came up against a lot of criminals. Most of them were not too bright and if they were going to kill someone they did it with the first thing that came to hand—coshing someone over the head with a brick, stabbing them, or shooting, if they had a gun. And they usually chose the same way too. They’d leave behind a blueprint we could identify. If these are murders, they are clever methods of killing—someone with a good brain is killing in very different ways—heaven knows for what reason. Either that or more than one person is involved. So we have to ask ourselves why. Why would a man bother to electrocute someone at a switchboard when he could presumably follow her home in the dark and cosh or stab her? Until we can get inside his head, we’re not going to be able to stop him.”

“I suppose you’re right,” the inspector said. “But as it happens these convicts were not your usual thugs. One was a bank teller, reckoned to be the brains behind a big train robbery. Another was an escape artist in the theater. You know, Britain’s answer to Houdini. We reckon he was the one who got them out of their shackles. He went bad