Murder Most Merry

for all but deli stuff, it’s loads cheaper.”

“I mustn’t lead you, put ideas in your head, but that Christmas Eve did you have help with your shopping, like your bags carried to the car?”

“I don’t take the c— Oh. him, the knight errant!” She opened the door wider and stood aside. “Come in, you look chilled.”

Constance—”Connie, please, the other’s so prissy”—French remembered Noel Sarum, all right.

“He picked me up in the checkout line that Christmas Eve. Well, I picked him up, had he but known.” Brown, almond eyes sparkled wickedly. “It was such a scrum, the line was endless, all the trolleys were taken so I was lugging three or four of those wretched baskets, and he did the polite, offered to share the load while we waited.”

“Single men who aren’t teenagers are so pathetic, aren’t they? And he was kind and clean and cuddly, I really took to him.” She’d insisted on making them mugs of hot chocolate (“with the teeniest spike of brandy to cheer it up”) after Jill Tierce refused a cocktail.

And I could take to a pad like this, Inspector Tierce reflected a shade drowsily. Connie French had two floors of one of Grand Drive’s former mansions. Her living room was spacious yet cosy, elegant antique pieces to dress it, costly modern furniture for wallowing.

Ms. French sat a little straighten “What’s this about, dear?”

“I’m glad you asked that.” Jill pulled a face. “Officially I’m eliminating a loose end, confirming somebody’s reason for... never mind, confirming a story. Don’t quote me, but I was curious. A witness was terribly impressed by you and...”

Connie waited, and Jill said, “It’s just that you knocked him for six, he hasn’t got over it—and call it the Christmas syndrome, or downright nosiness, but I wondered if you’d felt the same.”

“I have thought about him since.” Connie smiled weakly, blushing. “A lot, on and off. Look, there is always enough for two when it’s a casserole, and a glass of wine can’t put you over the limit for driving. Terrible thing to tell a woman, but you look exhausted. Stay for a meal.”

They got on famously. A long while later, table cleared, dishwasher loaded, they’d put the world to rights and compared Most Terrible Male Traits (nasal fur, aggressive driving, and pointless untruths topping the painstakingly compiled list).

Inspector Tierce was deciding that she’d better go home by cab and pick her car up tomorrow—should have known she was unable to drink one glass of wine—when Connie French became fretful.

“What is it with that chap, Jill? I could tell he fancied me. Oh, not the flared nostrils and ripping the thin silk from my creamy shoulders, he wasn’t that sort, but we really hit it off. Greek gods and toy boys are all very well, but what you need is a man who’s comfy as old shoes. I’ve only met two or three, one was my brother and the others were friends’ husbands....

“Tell me his name, I’ll ring him.” Connie reached for the phonebook on the end table at her side.

“I can’t do that, I shouldn’t be here anyway, certainly not gossiping. Christmas has a lot to answer for.” It struck Jill that they were talking animatedly but with a certain precision over trickier words; perhaps the Beaujolais Villages in easy reach on the coffee table between them was not the first bottle.

“Wouldn’t ring him anyway. My late husband, as in divorced, not RIP, said I had no pride but... is he gay? My supermarket chap, not the ex.”

“Sarum? Certainly not.” Frowning at the alliteration as much as the slip, Jill muttered, “I must make tracks.”

“Night’s young,” Connie said on a pleading note. “He drove me home, I nearly asked him up for a drink—but something stopped me. I wanted him to at least introduce himself first, and after all that, he just took himself off.”

“You’d stunned him,” Jill said.

“Bull,” Ms. French countered. But she was thoughtful. “Honest injun?”

“That’s the impression I got. The twit’s been keeping a vigil out there in the run-up to Christmas, ever since, hoping to pull the fancy-seeing-you-here bit.”

Connie went to the bay window. “Typical of my luck, I never saw him.”

“He stayed in his car, from up here he’d be an anonymous roof.” Joining her, Inspector Tierce asked, “Were you questioned in the house-to-house sweep after Mitzi Field’s body was found?”

“I was playing bridge that night, didn’t get home till it was all over.” Connie hugged herself. “Just as well. I couldn’t bear it if I’d been up here watching some silly TV show while... ugh!”

“Looks pretty now.” Snow crusted high walls and hedges, whiteness and moonlight giving Grand Drive a luminous quality.

“Christmas card,” Connie French suggested, making the comment bleak. “I spend hours at this window sometimes, it’s like a box seat for the seasonal stuff—carol singers from St. Stephen’s in full Dickens costume, crinolines and caped coats and candle-lanterns. Then there are the children returning to the nest, back from boarding school, or a bit older, very proud of The Car and their university scarves.”

“My daughter lives in California, she might ring on Christmas Day, probably will before New Year’s.... Mummy’s an afterthought.”

To Jill’s dismay, Connie French was crying silently, a single, fat tear sliding down the side of her elegant nose.

Inspector Tierce woke the next morning with the mildest of hangovers, little more than a nasty taste in the mouth, and a flinching sensation at the memory of her hostess.

The provoking thing was that she didn’t pity Connie French. The sorrow had been alcohol-based and transitory; minutes afterwards they’d played an old Dory Previn album, whooping approval of the bitchy lyrics. Connie might have been briefly maudlin, but she was too sparky for extensive self-pity.

No, this was not about Connie, but something she had said or done kept niggling and scratching in the subconscious. Every time Jill recollected the profile etched against the window, decorated by a crystal tear—and the image was persistent, like that pop tune you cannot stop humming—an alarm went off.

‘Think of something else,” Inspector Tierce advised out loud, competing against the hair dryer’s breathy roar. Nearly too late to post greetings cards, not that she’d bought them yet. She had bought some in good time one year. They were in A Safe Place to this day, waiting to be found.

Oh dear, she was better off thinking about the Mitzi Field case. Very well, Noel Sarum was in the clear. He could have printed that school magazine himself, or altered the date, but only in a Golden Age detective story. He’d been far away, and Connie French had confirmed his reason for haunting Grand Drive at a particular time of year. Further, while everyone was a potential life-taker, Noel Sarum belonged at the safest, last-resort end of the spectrum.

And that revived Superintendent Haggard’s imperfect crime. She could picture a man on perhaps his first and last sojourn in the city, stopping at a street woman’s signal and unrecognized, very likely unseen, driving away with her. To drive on, soon afterwards, taking care to stay away.

“Hopeless,” Jill mumbled and, skipping breakfast, went off to her broom closet, cardboard-flavored coffee, and the case file.

It assured her that everything needful had been done. A fruitless check for witnesses to the crime, an unrewarding search for tire tracks, footprints, any physical evidence apart from Mitzi Field’s body. Local and then regional sexual offenders interrogated. Other prostitutes questioned, fellow tenants of her last known address, the demolished squat, traced and interviewed.

Nothing to go on; conscientious Detective-Inspector Poole, exactly the breed of plodder who catches most criminals, had demonstrated that if nothing else. Or had he?

Inspector Tierce stood up awkwardly, massaging scar tissue through her skirt. She hadn’t thought the location significant, merely incongruous, when Superintendent Haggard told her of it. Previous reading of the file had left her cold. But now it was different because... because of Connie French. Something—what? —that she’d said last night.

She’d said so much, that was the snag. Squinting, lips moving silently, Jill talked herself through a lengthy and meandering conversation. Until reaching the point where Connie had lamented an uncaring daughter... bingo.

Children coming home for the holidays, of course. That’s what families did at Christmas, families and friends