Murder Most Merry

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.

There was one serious side to the party. That’s when the president reviewed the year’s business, announced how much the annual bonus would be, and then named the Board’s choices for People of the Year, the five lucky employees who made the most significant contributions to the agency’s success during the past twelve months.

The unwritten part to this latter (although everyone knew it, anyway) was that each one of the five would receive a very special individual bonus— some said as high as $50, 000 apiece.

Then French & Saunders bought fifteen floors in the tallest, shiniest new office tower on Broadway, the one that had actually been praised by the N. Y. Times architecture critic.

The original plan was to hold the party in the brand-new offices that were to be ready just before Christmas. A foolish idea, as it turned out, because nothing in New York is ever finished when it’s promised. The delay meant the agency had to scramble and find a new party site—either that, or make do in the half finished building itself.

Amazingly—cleverly? —enough, that was the game plan the party committee decided to follow. Give the biggest, glitziest party in agency history amid half finished offices in which paneless windows looked out to the open skies, where debris and building supplies stood piled up in every corner, and where doors opened on nothing but a web of steel girders and the sidewalk seventy floors below.

Charlie Evanston, one of the company’s senior vice-presidents (he had just reached the ripe old of age of fifty), was chosen to be party chairman. He couldn’t have been happier. For Charlie had a deepdown feeling that this was finally going to be his year. After being passed over time and again for one of those five special Christmas bonuses, he just knew he was going to go home a winner.

Poor Charlie.

In mid-November—the plans for the party proceeding on schedule— the agency suddenly lost their multi- million-dollar Daisy Fresh Soap account, no reason given. Charlie had been the supervisor on the account for years, and although he couldn’t be held personally responsible for the loss a few people (enemies!) shook their heads and wondered if maybe someone else, someone a little stronger—and younger—couldn’t have held on to the business.

Two weeks later, another showpiece account—the prestigious Maximus Computer Systems—left the agency. Unheard of.

The trade papers gave away the reason in the one dreaded word “kickbacks.” Two French & Saunders television producers who had worked on the account had been skimming it for years.

Again, Charlie’s name came up. Not that he had anything remotely to do with the scandal. The trouble was that he personally had hired both offenders. And people remembered.

There’s a superstition that events like these happen in threes, so it was only a question of time before the next blow. And, sure enough, two weeks before Christmas, it happened. A murder, no less. A F&S writer shot his wife, her lover, and himself.

With that, French & Saunders moved from front-page sidelines in the trade papers straight to screaming headlines in every tabloid in town. In less than a month, it had been seriously downgraded from one of New York’s proudest enterprises to that most dreaded of advertising fates—an agency “in trouble.”

It was now a week before Christmas and every F&S employee was carrying around his or her own personal lump of cold, clammy fear. The telltale signs were everywhere. People making secret telephone calls to headhunters and getting their resumes in order. Bitter jokes about the cold winter and selling apples on street corners told in the elevators and washrooms. Rumors that a buyout was in the making and nobody was safe.

And yet, strange as it sounds, there were those who still thought there would be a happy ending. At the Christmas party, perhaps. A last-minute announcement that everything was as before—the agency was in good shape and, just like always, everyone would get that Christmas bonus.

Charlie was one of the most optimistic. He didn’t know why. Just a gut feeling that the world was still full of Christmas miracles and, bad times or not, he was going to be one of F&S’s five magical People of the Year.

Poor Charlie.