WHO KILLED FATHER CHRISTMAS? by Patricia Moyes— The toy department is the scene of this diabolically clever crime, where telling Santa what you want for Christmas becomes something to scream about.

I SAW MOMMY KILLING SANTA CLAUSE by George Baxt— A little boy sees Mommy committing murder... but it takes him forty years to find out how she got away with it and where the missing weapon really went.

MYSTERY FOR CHRISTMAS by Anthony Boucher— Hollywood throws the best holiday bashes... and this California Christmas party includes a crime, a frame-up, and a director with an Academy Award-winning talent for detection.

AND EIGHT MORE TALES TO SAY, “MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL MYSTERY FANS... AND TO ALL A GOOD NIGHT!”

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for their permission to reprint their copyrighted material:

“Christmas Cop” by Thomas Adcock, copyright © 1986 by Davis Publications, Inc., reprinted by permission of the author

“On Christmas Day in the Morning” by Margery Allingham, copyright 1952 by P. and M. Youngman Carter Ltd., reprinted by permission of the Estate

“I Saw Mommy Killing Santa Claus” by George Baxt, copyright © 1990 by Davis Publications, Inc., reprinted by permission of the author

“Mystery for Christmas” by Anthony Boucher, copyright © 1942 by Anthony Boucher, reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown Ltd.

“The Marley Case” by Linda Haldeman, copyright © 1982 by Davis Publications, Inc., reprinted by permission of Cherry Weiner Literary Agency

“Dead on Christmas Street” by John D. MacDonald, copyright © Dorothy P. MacDonald Trust reprinted by permission of Diskant Associates

“Kelso’s Christmas” by Malcolm McClintick, copyright © 1984 by Davis Publications, Inc., reprinted by permission of the author

“Who Killed Father Christmas?” by Patricia Moyes, copyright © 1980 by Laura W. Haywood & Isaac Asimov, first appeared in WHO DONE IT?, reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown Ltd.

“The Plot Against Santa Claus” by James Powell, copyright © 1970 by James Powell, reprinted by permission of Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc.

“The Christmas Bear” by Herbert Resnicow, copyright © 1989 by Davis Publications, Inc., reprinted by permission of the author

“Santa Claus Beat” by Rex Stout, copyright © 1953 by Rex Stout, reprinted by permission of the Estate

“Whatever Became of Ebenezer Scrooge?” by Tom Tolnay, copyright © 1988 by Davis Publications, Inc., reprinted by permission of the author.

All stories previously appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine or Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, published by Davis Publications, Inc.

The stories in this collection are from the pages of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. They were chosen primarily because, as the title suggests, each story takes place at Christmas time, but also because they are gift wrapped in entertainment and suspense. What distinguishes this particular anthology from others of this kind is that all the stories are mysteries with a “conscience” — a moral underlies each story, which each author conveys with masterful subtlety. It is this “conscience” which gives these stories their true Christmas spirit.

Our cast of characters is quite a lively bunch ranging from Christmas bears and bright-eyed children to a jaded Manhattan cop and a murderous Mommy to criminals with big hearts. There are new twists to our classic Christmas tales which feature our old-time favorites: Marley’s Ghost, Ebenezer Scrooge, Bob Cratchit. And what would Christmas be without Santa Claus?

The time is past, present and future and the settings move from small town U.S.A. to big city streets. More importantly, the message is clear — nothing is as it appears to be because no matter what the nature of the crime, each story contains that special sparkle that we all recognize as the magic of Christmas.

Cynthia Manson

March 1990

“Up there, Grandma,” Debbie pointed, all excited, tugging at my skirt, “in the top row. Against the wall. See?” I’m not really her grandma, but at six and a half the idea of a great-grandmother is hard to understand. All her little friends have grandmothers, so she has a grandmother. When she’s a little older, I’ll tell her the whole story.

The firehouse was crowded this Friday night, not like the usual weekend where the volunteer firemen explain to their wives that they have to polish the old pumper and the second-hand ladder truck. They give the equipment a quick lick-and-a-promise and then sit down to an uninterrupted evening of pinochle. Not that there’s all that much to do in Pitman anyway — we’re over fifty miles from Pittsburgh, even if anyone could afford to pay city prices for what the big city offers — but still, a man’s first thought has to be of his wife and family. Lord knows I’ve seen too much of the opposite in my own generation and all the pain and trouble it caused, and mine could’ve given lessons in devotion to this new generation that seems to be interested only in fun. What they call fun.

Still, they weren’t all bad. Even Homer Curtis, who was the worst boy of his day, always full of mischief and very disrespectful, didn’t turn out all that bad. That was after he got married, of course; not before. He was just voted fire chief and, to give him credit, this whole Rozovski affair was his idea, may God bless him.

Little Petrina Rozovski — she’s only four years old and she’s always been small for her age — her grandfather was shift foreman over my Jake in the mine while we were courting. We married young in those days because there was no future and you grabbed what happiness you could and that’s how I came to be the youngest great-grandmother in the county, only sixty-seven, though that big horsefaced Mildred Ungaric keeps telling everybody I’m over seventy. Poor Petrina has to have a liver transplant, and soon. Real soon. You wouldn’t believe what that costs, even if you could find the right liver in the first place. Seventy-five thousand dollars, and it could go to a lot more than that, depending. There isn’t that much money in the whole county.

There was talk about going to the government — as if the government’s got any way to just give money for things like this or to make somebody give her baby’s liver to a poor little girl — or holding a raffle, or something, but none of the ideas was worth a tinker’s dam. Then Homer, God bless him, had this inspiration. The volunteer firemen — they do it every year — collect toys for the poor children, which, these days, is half the town, to make sure every child gets some present for Christmas. And we all, even if we can’t afford it, we all give something. Then one of them dresses up as Santa Claus and they all get on the ladder truck and, on Christmas Eve, they ride through the town giving out the presents. There’s a box for everyone, so nobody knows who’s getting a present, but the boxes for the families where the father is still working just have a candy bar in them or something like that. And for the littlest kids, they put Santa on top of the ladder and two guys turn the winch and lift him up to the roof as though he’s going to go down the chimney and the kids’ eyes get all round and everybody feels the way a kid should on Christmas Eve.

We had a town meeting to discuss the matter. “Raffles are no good,” Homer declared, “because one person wins and everybody else loses. This year we’re going to have an auction where everybody wins. Everybody who can will give a good toy — it can be used, but it’s got to be good — in addition to what they give for the poor kids. Then the firemen will auction off those extra toys and the idea of that auction is to pay as much as possible instead of as little.” That was sort of like the Indian potlatches they used to have around here that my grandfather told me about. Well, you can imagine the opposition to that one. But Homer overrode them all. Skinny as he is, when he stands up and raises his voice — he’s the tallest man in town by far — he usually gets his way. Except with his wife, and that’s as it should be. “Anyway,” he pointed out, “it’s a painless way of getting the donations Rozovski needs to get a liver transplant for Petrina.”

Shorty Porter, who never backed water for anyone, told Homer, “Your brain ain’t getting enough oxygen up there. Even if every family in town bought something for ten dollars on the average, with only twelve hundred families in town, we’d be short at least sixty-three thousand dollars, not to mention what it would cost for Irma Rozovski to stay in a motel near the hospital. And not everybody in town can pay more than what the present he bids on is worth. So you better figure on getting a lot less than twelve thousand, Homer, and what good that’ll do, I fail to see.” Levi Porter always had a good head for figures. One of these days we ought to make him mayor, if he could take the time off from busting his butt in his little back yard farm which, with his brood, he really can’t.

“I never said,” Homer replied, “that we were going to raise enough money this way to take care of the operation and everything. The beauty of my plan is... I figure we’ll raise about four thousand. Right, Shorty?”

“That’s about what I figured,” Shorty admitted.

“We give the money to Hank and Irma and they take Petrina to New York. They take her to a TV station, to one of those news reporters who are always looking for ways to help people. We have a real problem here, a real emergency, and Petrina, with that sweet little face and her big brown eyes, once she appears on TV, her problems are over. If only ten percent of the people in the U.S. send in one cent each, that’s all, just one cent, we’d get two hundred fifty thousand dollars. That would cover everything and leave plenty over to set up an office, right here in Pitman, for a clearing house for livers for all the poor little kids in that fix. And the publicity would remind some poor unfortunate mother that her child — children are dying in accidents every day and nobody knows who or where, healthy children — her child’s liver could help save the life of a poor little girl.”

Even Shorty had to admit it made sense. “And to top it all,” Homer added, “if we do get enough money to set up a liver clearing house, we’ve brought a job to Pitman, for which I’d like to nominate Irma Rozovski, to make up for what she’s gone through. And if it works out that way, maybe even two jobs, so Hank can have some work too.” Well, that was the clincher. We all agreed and that’s how it came about that I was standing in front of the display of the auction presents in the firehouse on the Friday night before Christmas week while Deborah was tugging and pointing at that funny-looking teddy bear, all excited, like I’d never seen her before.

Deborah’s a sad little girl. Not that she doesn’t have reason, what with her father running off just before the wedding and leaving Caroline in trouble; I never did like that Wesley Sladen in the first place. The Social Security doesn’t give enough to support three on, and nobody around here’s about to marry a girl going on twenty-nine with another mouth to feed, and I’m too old to earn much money, so Carrie’s working as a waitress at the Highway Rest. But thanks to my Jake, we have a roof over our heads and we always will. My father was against my marrying him. I was born a Horvath, and my father wanted me to marry a nice Hungarian boy, not a damn foreigner, but I was of age and my mother was on my side and Jake and I got married in St. Anselms’s and I wore a white gown, and I had a right to, not like it is today.

That was in ’41 and before the year was out we were in the war. Jake volunteered and, not knowing I was pregnant, I didn’t stop him. He was a good man, made sergeant, always sent every penny home. With me working in the factory, I even put a little away. After Marian was born, the foreman was nice enough to give me work to do at home on my sewing machine, so it was all right. Jake had taken out the full G.I. insurance and, when it happened, we got ten thousand dollars, which was a lot of money in those days. I bought the house, which cost almost two thousand dollars, and put the rest away for the bad times.

My daughter grew up to be a beautiful girl and she married a nice boy, John Brodzowski, but when Caroline was born, complications set in and Marian never made it out of the hospital. I took care of John and the baby for six months until John, who had been drinking, hit a tree going seventy. The police said it was an accident. I knew better but I kept my mouth shut because we needed the insurance.

So here we were, quiet little Deborah pulling at me and pointing at that teddy bear, all excited, and smiling for the first time I can remember. “That’s what I want, Grandma,” she begged. “He’s my bear.”

“You have a teddy bear,” I told her. “We can’t afford another one. I just brought you to the firehouse to look at all the nice things.”

“He’s not a teddy bear, Grandma, and I love him.”

“But he’s so funny looking,” I objected. And he was, too. Black, sort of, but shining blueish when the light hit the right way, with very long hair. Ears bigger than a teddy bear’s, and a longer snout. Not cute at all. Some white hairs at the chin and a big crescent-shaped white patch on his chest. And the eyes, not round little buttons, but slanted oval pieces of purple glass. I couldn’t imagine what she saw in him. There was a tag, with #273 on it, around his neck. “Besides,” I said, “I’ve only got eighteen dollars for all the presents, for everything. I’m sure they’ll want at least ten dollars for him on account of it’s for charity.”

She began crying, quietly, not making a fuss; Deborah never did. Even at her age she understood, children do understand, that there were certain things that were not for us, but I could see her heart was broken and I didn’t know what to do.

Just then the opening ceremonies started. Young Father Casimir, of St. Anselm’s, gave the opening benediction, closing with “It is more blessed to give than to receive.” I don’t know how well that set with Irma Rozovski and the other poor people there, but he’ll learn better when he gets older. Then Homer brought up Irma, with Petrina in her arms looking weaker and yellower than ever, to speak. “I just want to thank you all, all my friends and neighbors, for being so kind and...” Then she broke down and couldn’t talk at all. Petrina didn’t cry, she never cried, just looked sad and hung onto her mother. Then Homer came and led Irma away and said a few words I didn’t even listen to. I knew what I had to do and I’d do it. Christmas is for the children, to make the children happy, that’s the most important part. The children. I’d just explain to Carrie, when she got home, that I didn’t get her anything this year and I didn’t want her to get me anything. She’d understand.

I got hold of Homer in a corner and told him, “Look, Homer, for some reason Deborah’s set on that teddy bear in the top row. Now all I’ve got is eighteen dollars, and I don’t think you’d get anywhere near that much for it at the auction, but I don’t want to take a chance on losing it and break Deborah’s heart. I’m willing to to give it all to you right now, if you’ll sell it to me.”

“Gee, I’d like to, Miz Sophie,” he said, “but I can’t. I have to go according to the rules. And if I did that for you, I’d have to do it for everybody, then with everybody picking their favorites, nobody would bid on anything and we couldn’t raise the money for Petrina to go to New York.”

“Come on, Homer, this ain’t the first time you’ve broken some rules. Besides, I wouldn’t tell anyone; I’d just take it off the shelf after everybody’s left and no one would know the difference. It’s an ugly looking teddy bear anyway.”

“I’m real sorry, Mrs. Slowinski,” he said, going all formal on me, “but I can’t. Besides, there’s no way to get it now. Those shelves, they’re just boxes piled up with boards across them. You look at them crooked, and the whole thing’ll fall down. There’s no way to get to the top row until you’ve taken off the other rows. That’s why the numbers start at the bottom.”

“You’re a damned fool, Homer, and I’m going to get that bear for Deborah anyway. I’m going to get him for a lot less than eighteen dollars too, so your stubbornness has cost the fund a lot of money and you ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

We didn’t go back to the firehouse until two days before Christmas Eve, Monday, when Carrie was off. Deborah had insisted on showing the bear to her mother to make sure we knew exactly which bear it was she wanted, but when we got there the bear was gone. Poor Deborah started crying, real loud this time, and even Carrie couldn’t quiet her down. I picked her up and told her, swore to her, that I would get that bear back for her, but she just kept on sobbing.

I went right up to Homer to tell him off for selling the bear to somebody else instead of to me but before I could open my mouth, he said, “That wasn’t right, Mrs. Slowinski, but as long as it’s done, I won’t make a fuss. Just give me the eighteen dollars and we’ll forget about it.”

That was like accusing me of stealing, and Milly Ungaric was standing near and she had that nasty smile on her face, so I knew who had stolen the bear. I ignored what Homer said and asked, “Who was on duty last night?” We don’t have a fancy alarm system in Pitman; one of the firemen sleeps in the firehouse near the phone.

“Shorty Porter,” Homer said, and I went right off.

I got hold of him on the side. “Levi, did you see anyone come in last night?” I asked. “I mean late.”

“Only Miz Mildred,” he said. “Just before I went to sleep.”

Well, I knew it was her, but that wasn’t what I meant. “I mean after you went to sleep. Did any noise wake you up?”

“When I sleep, Miz Sophie, only the phone bell wakes me up.”

She must have come back later, the doors are never locked, and taken the bear. She’s big enough, but how could she reach it? She couldn’t climb over the shelves, everything would be knocked over. And she couldn’t reach it from the floor. So how did she do it? Maybe it wasn’t her, though I would have liked it to be. I went back to Homer. He was tall enough and had arms like a chimpanzee. “Homer,” I said, “I’m going to forget what you said if you’ll just do one thing. Stand in front of the toys and reach for the top shelf.”

He got red, but he didn’t blow. After a minute he said, sort of strangled, “I already thought of that. If I can’t reach it by four feet, nobody can. Tell you what; give me seventeen dollars and explain how you did it, and I’ll pay the other dollar out of my own pocket.”

“You always were a stupid, nasty boy, Homer, and you always will be. Well, if you won’t help me, I’ll have to find out by myself, start at the beginning and trace who’d want to steal a funny-looking bear like that. Who donated the bear?”

“People just put toys in the boxes near the door. We pick out the ones for the auction and the ones for the Santa Claus boxes. No way of knowing who gave what.”

I knew he wouldn’t be any help, so I got Carrie and Debbie and went to the one man in town who might help me trace the bear, Mr. Wong. He doesn’t have just a grocery, a credit grocery, thank God; he carries things you wouldn’t even find in Pittsburgh. His kids were all grown, all famous scientists and doctors and professors, but he still stayed here, even after Mrs. Wong died. Mrs. Wong never spoke a word of English, but she understood everything. Used to be, her kids all came here for Chinese New Year — that’s about a month after ours — and they’d have a big feast and bring the grandchildren. Funny how Mrs. Wong was able to raise six kids in real hard times, but none of her children has more than two. Now, on Chinese New Year, Mr. Wong closes the store for a week and goes to one of his kids. But he always comes back here.

“Look I have for you,” he said, and gave Debbie a little snake on a stick, the kind where you turn it and the snake moves like it’s real. She was still sniffling, but she smiled a little. The store was chock full of all kinds of Chinese things; little dragons and fat Buddhas with bobbing heads and candied ginger. I knew I was in the right place.

“Did you ever sell anyone a teddy bear?” I asked. “Not a regular teddy bear, but a black one with big purple eyes.”

“No sell,” he said. “Give.”

“Okay.” I had struck gold on the first try. “Who’d you give it to?”

“Nobody. Put in box in firehouse.”

“You mean for the auction?”

“Petrina nice girl. Like Debbie. Very sick. Must help.”

“But...” Dead end. I’d have to find another way to trace the bear so I could find out who’d want to steal it. “All right, where’d you get the teddy bear?”

“Grandmother give me. Before I go U.S. Make good luck. Not teddy bear. Blue bear. From Kansu.”

“You mean there’s a bear that looks like this?”

“Oh yes. Chinese bear. Moon bear. Very danger. Strong. In Kansu.”

“Your grandmother made it? For you?”

“Not make, make. Grandfather big hunter, kill bear. Moon bear very big good luck. Eat bear, get strong, very good. Have good luck in U.S.”

“That bear is real bearskin?”

“Oh yes. Grandmother cut little piece for here,” he put his hand under his chin, “and for here,” he put his hand on his chest. “Make moon.” He moved his hand in the crescent shape the bear had on its chest. “Why call moon bear.”

“You had that since you were a little boy?” I was touched. “And you gave it for Petrina? Instead of your own grandchildren?”

“Own grandchildren want sportcar, computer, skateboard, not old Chinese bear.”

Well, that was typical of all modern kids, not just Chinese, but it didn’t get me any closer to finding out who had stolen the teddy bear, the moon bear. Deborah, though, was listening with wide eyes, no longer crying. But what was worse, that romantic story would make it all the harder on her if I didn’t get that bear back. She went up to the counter and asked, “Did it come in?”

“Oh yes.” He reached down and put a wooden lazy tongs on top of the counter.

“I got it for you. Grandma,” Debbie said, “for your arthritis, so you don’t have to bend down. I was going to save it for under the tree, but you looked so sad...”

God bless you, Deborah, I said in my heart, that’s the answer. I put my fingers in the scissor grip and extended the tongs. They were only about three feet long, not long enough, and they were already beginning to bend under their own weight. No way anyone, not even Mildred Ungaric, could use them to steal the moon bear. Then I knew. For sure. I turned around and there it was, hanging on the top shelf. I turned back to Mr. Wong and said, casually, “What do you call that thing grocers use to get cans from the top shelf? The long stickhandle with the grippers at the end?”

“Don’t know. In Chinese I say, ‘Get can high shelf.’”

“Doesn’t matter. Why did you steal the bear back? Decided to sell it to a museum or something?”

“‘No. Why I steal? If I want sell, I no give.” He was puzzled, not insulted. “Somebody steal moon bear?”

He was right. But so was I. At least I knew how it was stolen. You didn’t need a “get can high shelf.” All the thief needed was a long thing with a hook on the end. Or a noose. Like a broomstick. Or a fishing rod. Anything that would reach from where you were standing to the top of the back row so you could get the bear without knocking over the shelves or the other toys. It had to be Mildred Ungaric; she might be mean, but she wasn’t stupid. Any woman had enough long sticks in her kitchen, and enough string and hooks to make a bear-stealer, though she’d look awful funny walking down the street carrying one of those. But it didn’t have to be that way. There was something in the firehouse that anyone could use, one of those long poles with the hooks on the end they break your windows with when you have a fire. All you’d have to do is get that hook under the string that held the number tag around the moon bear’s neck and do it quietly enough not to wake Levi Porter. Which meant that anyone in town could have stolen the moon bear.

But who would? It would be like stealing from poor little Petrina herself. Mildred was mean, but even she wouldn’t do that. Homer was nasty; maybe he accused me to cover up for himself. Mr. Wong might have changed his mind, in spite of what he said; you don’t give away a sixty-year-old childhood memory like that without regrets. Levi Porter was in the best position to do it; there was only his word that he slept all through the night and he has eight kids he can hardly feed. Heck, anyone in town could have done it. All I knew was that I didn’t.

So who stole the moon bear?

That night I made a special supper for Carrie, and Deborah served. There’s nothing a waitress enjoys so much on her time off as being served. I know; there was a time I waitressed myself. After supper, Carrie put Deborah to bed and read to her, watched TV for a while, then got ready to turn in herself. There’s really nothing for a young woman to do in Pitman unless she’s the kind that runs around with the truckers that stop by, and Carrie wasn’t that type. She had made one mistake, trusted one boy, but that could have happened to anybody. And she did what was right and was raising Deborah to be a pride to us all.

I stayed up and sat in my rocker, trying to think of who would steal that bear, but there was no way to find that out. At least it wasn’t a kid, a little kid, who had done it; those firemen’s poles are heavy. Of course it could have been a teenager, but what would a teenager want with a funny-looking little bear like that? There were plenty of better toys in the lower rows to tempt a teenager, toys that anyone could take in a second with no trouble at all. But none of them had been stolen. No, it wasn’t a teenager; I was pretty sure of that.

Finally, I went to sleep. Or to bed, at least. I must have been awake for half the night and didn’t come up with anything. But I did know one thing I had to do.

That night being the last night before Christmas Eve, they were going to hold the auction for Petrina in the fire house. I didn’t want to get there too early; no point in making Deborah feel bad seeing all the other presents bought up and knowing she wasn’t going to get her moon bear. But I did want her to know it wasn’t just idle talk when I promised I’d get her bear back.

Debbie and I waited until the last toy was auctioned off and Porter announced the total. Four thousand, three hundred seventy-two dollars and fifty cents. More than we had expected and more than enough to send the Rozovskis to New York. Then I stood up and said, “I bid eighteen dollars, cash, for the little black bear, Number 273.”

Homer looked embarrassed. “Please, Mrs. Slowinski, you know we don’t have that bear any more.”

“I just want to make sure, Mr. Curtis, that when I find that bear, it’s mine. Mine and Deborah’s. So you can just add eighteen dollars to your total, Mr. Porter, and when that bear turns up, it’s mine.” Now if anyone was seen with the bear, everybody’d know whose it was. And what’s more, if the thief had a guilty conscience, he’d know where to return the bear.

That night I stayed in my rocking chair again, rocking and thinking, thinking and rocking. I was sure I was on the right track. Why would anyone want to take the moon bear? That had to be the way to find the thief; to figure out why anyone would take the bear. But as much as I rocked, much as I thought, I was stuck right there. Finally, after midnight, I gave up. There was no way to figure it out. Maybe if I slept on it... Only trouble was, tomorrow was Christmas Eve, and even if I figured out who took the bear, there was no way I could get it back in time to put it under the tree so Debbie would find it when she woke up Christmas morning. For all I knew, the bear was in Pittsburgh by now, or even back in China. Maybe I shouldn’t have warned the thief by making such a fuss when I bought the missing bear.

Going to bed didn’t help. I lay awake, thinking of everything that had happened, from the time we first stood behind the firetrucks and saw the bear, to the time in Mr. Wong’s store when I figured out how the bear had been stolen. Then all of a sudden it was clear. I knew who had stolen the bear. That is I knew how it had been stolen and that told me who had stolen it which told me how, which... What really happened was I knew it all, all at once. Of course, I didn’t know where the bear was, not exactly, but I’d get to that eventually. One thing I had to remember was not to tell Deborah what I had figured out. Not that I was wrong — I wasn’t wrong; everything fit too perfectly — but I might not be able to get the bear back. After all, how hard would it be to destroy the bear, to burn it or throw it in the dump, rather than go to jail?

The next morning Deborah woke me. “It’s all right, Grandma,” she said. “I didn’t really want that old moon bear. I really wanted a wetting doll. Or a plain doll. So don’t cry.” I wasn’t aware I was crying, but I guess I was. Whatever else I had done in my life, whatever else Carrie had done, to bring to life, to bring up such a sweet wonderful human being, a girl like this, one to be so proud of, that made up for everything. I only wished Jake could have been here with me to see her. And Wesley Sladen, the fool, to see what he’d missed.

I didn’t say anything during breakfast — we always let Carrie sleep late because of her hours but right after we washed up, I dressed Deborah warmly. “We’re going for a long walk,” I told her. She took my hand and we started out.

I went to the garage where he worked and motioned Levi Porter to come out. He came, wiping his hands on a rag. Without hesitating, I told him what I had to tell him. “You stole the teddy bear. You swiveled the ladder on the ladder truck around, pointing in the right direction, and turned the winch until the ladder extended over the bear. Then you crawled out on the flat ladder and stole the bear. After you put everything back where it was before, you went to sleep.”

Well, he didn’t bat an eye, just nodded his head. “Yep, that’s the way it was,” he said, not even saying he was sorry. “I figured you knew something when you bought the missing bear. Nobody throws away eighteen dollars for nothing.” Deborah just stared up at him, not understanding how a human being could do such a thing to her. She took my hand for comfort, keeping me between her and Shorty Porter.

“Well, that’s my bear,” I said. “I bought it for Deborah; she had her heart set on it.” He wasn’t a bit moved. “She loved that bear, Porter. You broke her heart.”

“I’m sorry about that, Miz Sophie,” he said, “I really didn’t want to hurt anybody. I didn’t know about Debbie when I stole the bear.”

“Well, the least you could do is give it back. If you do, I might consider, just consider, not setting the law on you.” I didn’t really want to put a man with eight children in jail and, up till now, he’d been a pretty good citizen, but I wasn’t about to show him that. “So you just go get it, Mr. Porter. Right now, and hop to it.”

“Okay, Miz Sophie, but it ain’t here. We’ll have to drive over.” He stuck his head in the shop and told Ed Mahaffey that he had to go someplace, be back soon, and we got in his pickup truck.

I wasn’t paying attention to where we were going and when he stopped, my heart stopped too. Petrina was lying on the couch in the living room, clutching the moon bear to her skinny little chest. Irma was just standing there wondering what had brought us. “It’s about the teddy bear,” Levi Porter apologized. “It belongs to Debbie. I have to take it back.”

We went over to the couch. “You see,” he explained to me, “on opening night, Petrina fell in love with the bear. I wanted to get it for her, but I didn’t have any money left. So I took it, figuring it wasn’t really stealing; everything there was for Petrina anyway. If I’d knowed about Debbie, I would’ve worked out something else, maybe.”

He leaned over the couch and gently, very gently, took the moon bear out of Petrina’s hands. “I’m sorry, honey,” he told the thin little girl, “it’s really Debbie’s. I’ll get you a different bear soon.” The sad little girl let the bear slip slowly out of her hands, not resisting, but not really letting go either. She said nothing, so used to hurt, so used to disappointment, so used to having everything slip away from her, but her soft dark eyes filled with tears as Shorty took the bear. I could have sworn that the moon bear’s purple glass eyes looked full of pain, too.

Shorty put the bear gently into Debbie’s arms and she cradled the bear closely to her. She put her face next to the bear’s and kissed him and whispered something to him that I didn’t catch, my hearing not being what it used to be. Then she went over to the couch and put the bear back into Petrina’s hands. “He likes you better,” she said. “He wants to stay with you. He loves you.”

We stood there for a moment, all of us, silent. Petrina clutched the bear to her, tightly, lovingly, and almost smiled. Irma started crying and I might’ve too, a little. Shorty picked Deborah up and kissed her like she was his own. “You’re blessed,” he said to me. “From heaven.”

He drove us home, and on the way back I asked Debbie what she said to the bear. “I was just telling him his name,” she said innocently, “and he said it was exactly right.”

“What is his name?” I asked.

“Oh, that was my name for him, Grandma. Petrina told him her name; he has a different name now,” and that’s all she would say about it.

I invited Shorty in but he couldn’t stay; had to get back to the garage. If he took too long — well, there were plenty of good mechanics out of work. He promised he’d get Deborah another gift for Christmas, but he couldn’t do it in time for tonight. I told him not to worry; I’d work out something.

When we got home, I got started making cookies with chocolate sprinkles, the kind Deborah likes. She helped me. After a while, when the first batch of cookies was baking, her cheeks powdered with flour and her pretty face turned away, she said, quietly, “It’s all right not to get a present for Christmas. As long as you know somebody wanted to give it to you and spent all her money to get it.”

My heart was so full I couldn’t say anything for a while. Then I lifted her onto my lap and hugged her to my heart. “Oh, Debbie my love, you’ll understand when you’re older, but you’ve just gotten the best Christmas present of all: the chance to make a little child happy.”

I held her away and looked into her wise, innocent eyes and wondered if, maybe, she already understood that.

By the second week of December, when they light up the giant fir tree behind the statue of a golden Prometheus overlooking the ice-skating rink at Rockefeller Center, Christmas in New York has got you by the throat.

Close to five hundred street-corner Santas (temporarily sober and none too happy about it) have been ringing bells since the day after Thanksgiving; the support pillars on Macy’s main selling floor have been dolled up like candy canes since Hallowe’en; the tipping season arrives in the person of your apartment-house super, all smiles and open-palmed and suddenly available to fix the leaky pipes you’ve complained about since July; total strangers insist not only that you have a nice day but that you be of good cheer on top of it; and your Con Ed bill says HAPPY HOLIDAYS at the top of the page in a festive red-and-green dot-matrix.

In addition, New York in December is crawling with boosters, dippers, yokers, smash-and-grabbers, bindlestiffs on the mope, aggressive pross offering special holiday rates to guys cruising around at dusk in station wagons with Jersey plates, pigeon droppers and assorted other bunco artists, purveyors of all manner of dubious gift items, and entrepreneurs of the informal branch of the pharmaceutical trade. My job is to try and prevent at least some of these fine upstanding perpetrators from scoring against at least some of their natural Yuletide prey — the seasonal hordes of out-of-towners, big-ticket shoppers along Fifth Avenue, blue-haired Wednesday matinee ladies, and wide-eyed suburban matrons lined up outside Radio City Music Hall with big, snatchable shoulder bags full of credit cards.

I’m your friendly neighborhood plainclothes-man. Very plain clothes. The guy in the grungy overcoat and watch cap and jeans and beat-up shoes and a week’s growth of black beard shambling along the street carrying something in a brown paper bag — that ubiquitous New York bum you hurry past every day while holding your breath — might be me.

The name is Neil Hockaday, but everybody calls me Hock, my fellow cops and my snitches alike. And that’s no pint of muscatel in my paper bag, it’s my point-to-point shortwave radio. I work out of a boroughwide outfit called Street Crimes Unit-Manhattan, which is better known as the befitting S.C.U.M. patrol.

For twelve years, I’ve been a cop, the last three on S.C.U.M. patrol, which is a prestige assignment despite the way we dress on the job. In three years, I’ve made exactly twice the collars I did in my first nine riding around in precinct squad cars taking calls from sector dispatch. It’s all going to add up nicely when I go for my gold shield someday. Meanwhile, I appreciate being able to work pretty much unsupervised, which tells you I’m at least a half honest cop in a city I figure to be about three-quarters crooked.

Sometimes I do a little bellyaching about the department — and who doesn’t complain along about halfway through the second cold one after shift? — but mainly I enjoy the work I do. What I like about it most is how I’m always up against the elements of chance and surprise, one way or another.

That’s something you can’t say about most careers these days. Not even a cop’s, really. Believe it or not, you have plenty of tedium if you’re a uniform sealed up in a blue-and-white all day, even in New York. But the way my job plays, I’m out there on the street mostly alone and it’s an hour-by-hour proposition: fifty-eight minutes of walking around with my pores open so I don’t miss anything and two minutes of surprise.

No matter what, I’ve got to be ready because surprise comes in several degrees of seriousness. And when it does, it comes out of absolutely nowhere.

On the twenty-fourth of December, I wasn’t ready.

The police in the first prowl car on the scene got out a tarpaulin. A traffic policeman threw it over the body and herded the crowd back. They moved uneasily in the gray slush. Some of them looked up from time to time.

In the newspaper picture the window would be marked with a bold X. A dotted line would descend from the X to the spot where the covered body now lay. Some of the spectators, laden with tinsel- and evergreen-decorated packages, turned away, suppressing a nameless guilt.

But the curious stayed on. Across the street, in the window of a department store, a vast mechanical Santa rocked back and forth, slapping a mechanical hand against a padded thigh, roaring forever, “Whaw haw ho ho ho. Whaw haw ho ho ho,” The slapping hand had worn the red plush from the padded thigh.

The ambulance arrived, with a brisk intern to make out the DOA. Sawdust was shoveled onto the sidewalk, then pushed off into the sewer drain. Wet snow fell into the city. And there was nothing else to see. The corner Santa, a leathery man with a pinched, blue nose, began to ring his hand bell again.

We buried my mother yesterday, so I feel free to tell the truth. She lived to be ninety-three because, like the sainted, loyal son I chose to be, I didn’t blab to the cops. I’m Oscar Leigh and my mother was Desiree Leigh. That’s right — Desiree Leigh, inventor of the Desiree face cream that promised eternal youth to the young and rejuvenation to the aged. It was one of the great con games in the cosmetics industry. I suppose once this is published, it’ll be the end of the Desiree cosmetics empire, but frankly, my dears, I don’t give a damn. Desiree Cosmetics was bought by a Japanese combine four years ago, and my share (more than two billion) is safely salted away. I suppose I inherit Mom’s billions, too, but what in heaven’s name will I do with it all? Count it, I guess.

Desiree Leigh wasn’t her real name. She was born Daisy Ray Letch, and who could go through life with a surname like Letch? For the past fourteen years she’s been entertaining Alzheimer’s and that was when I began to take an interest in her past. She was always very mysterious about her origins and equally arcane about the identity of my father. She said he was killed in North Africa back in 1943 and that his name was Clarence Kolb. I spent a lot of money tracing Clarence, until one night, in bed watching an old movie, the closing credits rolled and one of the character actors was named Clarence Kolb. I mentioned this to Mother the next morning at breakfast, but she said it was a coincidence and she and my father used to laugh about it.

She had no photos of my father, which I thought was strange. When they married a few months before the war, they settled in Brooklyn, in Coney Island. Surely they must have had their picture taken in one of the Coney Island fun galleries? But no, insisted Mother, they avoided the boardwalk and the amusement parks — they were too poor for such frivolities. How did Father make his living? He was a milkman, she said — his route was in Sheepshead Bay. She said he worked for the Borden Company. Well, let me tell you this; there is no record of a Clarence Kolb ever having been employed by the Borden Milk Company. It cost an ugly penny tracking that down.

Did Mom work, too, perhaps? “Oh, yes,” she told me one night in Cannes where our yacht was berthed for a few days, “I worked right up until the day before you were born.”

“What did you do?” We were on deck playing honeymoon bridge in the blazing sunlight so Mom could keep an eye on the first mate, with whom she was either having an affair or planning to have one.

“I worked in a laboratory.” She said it so matter of factly while collecting a trick she shouldn’t have collected that I didn’t believe her. “You don’t believe me.” (She not only conned, stole, and lied, she was a mind-reader.)

“Sure I believe you.” I sounded as convincing as an East Berlin commissar assuring would-be emigrés they’d have their visas to freedom before sundown.{Ed. note: A joyful note to anachronism — shortly after this story was written.}

“It was a privately owned laboratory,” she said, sneaking a look at the first mate, who was sneaking a look at the second mate. “It was a couple of blocks from our apartment.”

“What kind of a laboratory was it?” I asked, mindful that the second mate was sneaking a look at me.

“It was owned by a man named Desmond Tester. He fooled around with all kinds of formulas,”

“Some sort of mad scientist?”

She chuckled as she cheated another trick in her favor. “I guess he was kind of mad in a way. He had a very brilliant mind. I learned a great deal from him.”

“Is that where you originated the Desiree creams and lotions?”

“The seed was planted there.”

“How long were you with this—”

“Desmond Tester. Let me see now. Your daddy went into the Army in February of ’42. I didn’t know I was pregnant then or he’d never have gone. On the other hand, I suppose if I had known, I would have kept it to myself so your dad could go and prove he was a hero and not just a common everyday milkman.”

“I don’t see anything wrong in delivering milk.”

“There’s nothing heroic about it, either. Where was I?”

“Taking my king of hearts, which you shouldn’t be.”

She ignored me and favored the first mate with a seductive smile, and I blushed when the second mate winked at me. “Anyway, I took time off to give birth to you and then I went right back to work for Professor Tester. A nice lady in the neighborhood looked after you. Let me think, what was her name? Oh, yes — Blanche Yurka.”

“Isn’t that the name of the actress who played Ma Barker in a gangster movie we saw on the late show?”

“I don’t know, isn’t it? That’s my ten of clubs you’re taking,” she said sharply.

“I’ve captured it fair and square with the queen of clubs,” I told her. “How come you never married again?”

“I guess I was too busy being a career woman. I was assisting Professor Tester in marketing some of his creams and lotions by then. I had such a hard time cracking the department stores.”

“When did you come up with your own formulas?”

“That was after the professor met with his unfortunate death.”

Unfortunate, indeed. I saw her kill him.

Someone had murdered a Santa Claus.

The body, rotund and clad in the traditional red suit, lay in a corner behind the gift wrap section, in the basement, hidden from the view of passing customers by a counter and stacks of cardboard boxes. He still wore his long white beard and mustache, but the hat had come off and lay a foot from his head, revealing black hair with a bald spot on top.

George Kelso looked down at the body, then at Detective Sergeant Meyer. It was ten A.M., three days before Christmas, in one of the larger downtown department stores.

“Okay,” Meyer said, “let’s get this area cleared so the lab boys can get to work.” He sounded tired. Kelso understood that it wasn’t fatigue, but depression. Every year at Christmas Meyer, a small dark Jewish man, became depressed and usually withdrawn. It was no good talking to him about it, it was something Meyer had to live with and work out for himself, at least until he became willing to confide in his associates at the police department.

“I was supposed to go shopping this afternoon with Susan,” Kelso said to nobody in particular. “I suppose that’s out of the question now.”

“I suppose it is,” Meyer replied. “All right, Kelso, why don’t you take the offices upstairs and I’ll check with the clerks. The other guys are talking to customers to see if anybody noticed anything unusual.”

“I’ll go talk to the business staff,” Kelso agreed. When Meyer was in his Christmas funk, it was best to agree with whatever he said. The store’s music system was playing “Winter Wonderland” over the noise and confusion of shoppers, and a few feet away, a little boy was screaming and trying to kick his mother, who looked flustered.

Kelso headed for the elevators.

We do Christmas right at our house — the holly and the ivy and the manger and the tree. Stockings all hung and an ever full wassail bowl for thirsty carollers. I use the pronoun “we” editorially, for all this holiday jollity comes your way with the compliments of Joyce and the kids. I’m not much of a celebrator myself, and even in my youth avoided when possible all those cherished tribal rituals.

Some people don’t. Joyce, for instance. For years I didn’t understand. I thought it was just for the children, all the decking of halls and jingling of bells and harking of herald angels. But as the children grew up, the merry mayhem diminished not at all, and I still find myself in my middle years surrounded by a trio of oversized moppets bandaging boxes in miles of red satin ribbon and spreading tinsel all over everything.

A week before this Christmas just past, I was force fed a certain minimal dose of spirit when I was carted to the church youth club’s annual dramatization of A Christmas Carol. This, I must admit, is one of the less objectionable parts of the customary Saturnalia. It’s not the Royal Shakespeare Company, to be sure, but it certainly is an improvement on the pageants of my childhood, where at least one angel fainted every year and the wise men always forgot their lines. As in everything else seasonal, the family had a considerable stake in this production. Stephanie, in a billowy gauze gown that reminded me painfully of a Sunday School angel’s robe, was the Ghost of Christmas Past.

“Long past?” the boy who played Scrooge asked warily.

“No, your past,” Steffy replied in a thin, æthereal voice that actually made me, her father, shiver. I have at times envisioned Steffy as a basketball coach or a carnival barker, but certainly not as an actress, and not with that voice. Remarkable.

Mark played, of course, Tiny Tim. He’s small for his age and is able to project a deceptive air of cherubic innocence.

“God bless us every one,” he intoned with the falsetto intensity of a child evangelist. It was a performance that melted poor sentimental old Scrooge’s heart. It hardened mine, not just because I could not fully separate Mark smiling sweetly onstage from Mark raising hell at the dinner table, but because I always suspect virtuous children.

We stopped at Mister Donut on the way home. Steffy, no longer ghostly, had a double chocolate doughnut and a cup of hot chocolate. I could almost see the acne pop out. Mark, choosing, it seems, to remain for a while in character, selected something gooey called “angel filled.”

“It’s remarkable,” said Joyce, “how a great piece like that doesn’t date. But then the Christmas spirit doesn’t date, either.”

“Bah!” I said. “Humbug!”

“Oh, Daddy,” Steffy sighed as only an adolescent daughter can.

“You know,” I went on, “I’ve often wondered about one thing. Just as it says: ‘Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.’” (I was proud to quote with such perfect accuracy, for the kids were obviously impressed. And how often can a man of my age and shortcomings impress his kids?) “Okay. Marley was dead. But what did he die of?”

“I don’t know, probably a stroke or a heart attack,” said Joyce. “After all, he was a classic type A personality.”

“Have you considered the possibility of foul play?”

There. I had caught their attention, dropped a curdling dollop of vinegar into their emotional eggnog of peace and goodwill. What fun.

“Oh, I get it,” Mark exclaimed in an astounding show of insight, for him. “He could have been murdered.”

“Now who would do that?” Joyce laughed.

“Look for a motive.”

“Scrooge himself would be a prime suspect,” said Steffy. She’s quick-witted for a ghost and a sophomore, and she shares my love of detective fiction. “He had a motive. Money, He inherited Marley’s half of the business, right?”

“Too obvious,” I said. “The obvious suspect is never the real culprit.”

“Anyhow,” Mark chimed in, “if Scrooge had done him in, why would Marley have come back from the dead to save him? I bet it was good old Tiny Tim, bashed the old skinflint’s brains out with his crutch for not paying his father a decent wage.”

“Impossible,” Steffy snickered. “How old do you think Tiny Tim was, midget? He probably wasn’t even born when Marley died. ‘Mr. Marley has been dead these seven years,’ Scrooge says. Bob Cratchit might not even have worked for Scrooge and Marley then. Faced you, hosehead!”

Occasionally, not often, mind you, but every now and then, your children make you proud.

We celebrate Christmas early now that the children are older, one tradition that I like, for it gets the worst of it out of the way and permits the household to settle back more quickly into the blessed monotony of the midwinter doldrums. It all starts on Christmas Eve, with an extensive carolling tour of the neighborhood, ending up at St. Nicholas (no less) Parish Church in time for Midnight Mass. I don’t attend, especially at Christmas, for of all tinsel, liturgical tinsel is the most incongruous.

I was feeling particularly Scroogish about the whole business this year, so I took my dinner, a slapdash hoagie on an undersized bun (fast before feast, I suppose), sought refuge in the den, and did not show my face until the merry revellers were ready to leave. Then I sent them off with a resounding, “Bah! Humbug!” which was greeted with much untoward merriment.

“Oh, Daddy,” said Stephanie.

“Don’t get into the brandy,” Joyce warned.

I waved to them from the doorway, then went back inside the house and watched them from the living room window until they had turned a corner and could no longer see the house. Then I turned off the string of colored lights that outlined our front porch, pulled the plug on the Christmas tree, and got into the brandy. Not terribly, for brandy gives a vicious hangover, just enough to make me mellow. Once I was sufficiently mellow, I turned out all the other lights and went to bed.

That was a mistake. Sometimes brandy works, and sometimes it backfires. I don’t know that it really was the brandy’s fault. The house was so empty, so silent. For the last month I had longed and prayed for silence and solitude, but now that I had it in abundance I found it a hollow and empty state.

And then there was the moon, which had the bad taste to be full on a cloudless cold night. It was a silver-white moon, shining down unshaded on a silver-white earth. Too much, much too much, as if the entire universe had been hung with tinsel. And the light wouldn’t stay outside where it belonged; the damned washed-out white light slithered in around gaps in the lined drapes and crawled across the bed to sit glaring on my eyelids and murder sleep. I lay under that light brooding, I don’t know why, on the fate of one Jacob Marley, dead nearly a century and a half.

Finally giving up the struggle, I crept out from under the electric blanket, shrugged on my slippers and went downstairs. The moonlight followed me, illuminating the stairs and the wide entrance hall. The living room curtains were sheer and generously invited all the moonlight in the vicinity inside, as to a silver-white open house. The Christmas tree stood before the large bay window looking tacky as only an unlighted Christmas tree can. The trees outside, undecorated even by their own natural foliage, silhouetted by the overpowering moonlight, appeared like black spectres, skeletal, ominous. I turned quickly about, went into my study across the hall, closed the door, drew the drapes, and turned on the comfortably warm yellow reading lamp.

The third shelf of the bookcase that lined one wall held a handsome leather bound set of the complete works of Dickens, an inheritance from my grandfather that I had not bothered for years. I took out the volume titled Christmas Stories and settled back in my recliner, opened it, and read aloud softly into the moonlight.

“‘Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.’”

“Amen say I to that,” declared a voice deep as the Pit, yet thin as a breath. I jumped up with a cry, dropping the book. In front of me stood the ghost of Jacob Marley, exactly as Dickens had described it, a tall stocky man in waistcoat and boots dragging along with him a large wrought iron chain to which ledgers, keys, padlocks, purses, and the like were attached every few links, like charms on a bracelet. He was so transparent that I could read through him the titles of my grandfather’s set of Dickens on the bookshelf behind him.

“What the hell?” I cried, realizing as the words left my mouth how absurdly unDickensian they sounded. The apparition did not crack a smile, prevented perhaps by a strip of white cloth bound around its head from jaw to balding crown.

“Marley, sir,” he said. “Jacob Marley.”

He offered his transparent hand, and I automatically held my own out to shake, then drew back.

“With all due respect, Mr. Marley,” I said, my voice admittedly a little tremulous, “this is very absurd. What do you want with me, anyway? God knows, I keep Christmas. Look at that damned tree out there. It must have a pound of tinsel on it. Do you know that I actually sing along at the elementary Christmas program sing-along? That’s keeping Christmas with a vengeance.”

“Keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine,” the Ghost said illogically.

“By scaring the living daylights out of innocent people in the middle of the night?”

The Ghost sighed. “I am doomed to wander through the world trying to do the good I failed to do in life.”

“What possible good could you do me?”

“I would lay you,” replied the Ghost.

I said, “Good God,” and sat down quickly. My chair of its own will flew back into the reclining position, pitching me back with a jarring thump. I closed my eyes and tried to bring order to my gyrating thoughts. It was possible, of course, that all this time I was safe and asleep under the warmth of the electric blanket and the influence of a slight overdose of brandy, dreaming. Or my subconscious had finally won the battle for my mind, and I was hallucinating in the den, enthroned like some mad king on my recliner, where I couldn’t do anyone much harm. But, being a rational person, even in the worst extremity, I expect my hallucinations to be consistent and make sense.

“I think you have that wrong, Jacob,” I said very quietly, wondering if it might be wiser to attempt to wake myself rather than waste intellectual energy reasoning with a trick of the right brain. On the other hand, I was a little afraid I would find that I was not asleep at all. “As you are the ghost, I ought to be laying you.”

“If you could, I should be most grateful,” Marley’s Ghost said courteously. “For you see, though you are in the flesh and I in the spirit, we share a common affliction. We do not find rest in the night.”

“Well, if someone would turn the moon down, I might be able to get some sleep.”

“You walk the night only when the moon is full?” the Ghost asked. “I do not think so.”

“Well, a little darkness might help. I don’t know why the hell I can’t sleep. If the story runs true, you can’t rest because you were a miserable, stingy bastard in life, and now you have to go around scaring other miserable, stingy bastards into playing Santa Claus. If that’s what you’re after here, you certainly picked the wrong house.”

“I came here because you thought of me,” said Marley’s Ghost. “It is the thought of me that keeps you awake. You have asked a question that has never been asked before, not even by he who created me. To lay you is an easy matter; we must simply find the answer to your question.”

I looked at the shade in astonishment. “Surely you know what you died of?”

He shook his head. “I exist only to the degree in which I have been thought about. He who created me did not think about the manner of my death; therefore the manner of my death did not exist, at least not until you inquired into it.”

“I wasn’t all that interested,” I grumbled. “I was just making conversation.”

“If you were just making conversation, how is it that you do not sleep?”

“Damned if I know.”

The Ghost shuddered, causing his chain to roll thuddingly along the carpeting. “My dear sir, I beseech you. Avoid that expression. As it stands you have aroused my curiosity, and since for whatever reason we have both been deprived of our repose this Christmas Eve, we might amusingly and perhaps profitably pass the time exploring the mystery, eh?”

I shrugged. “Why don’t you go on without me? I think I’m going to mosey on back to bed.”

I got up and started to move past him, but his transparent hand caught my forearm in a remarkably strong grip.

“Come now, my dear fellow, don’t be hasty. I cannot travel alone, incorporeal as I am, and a very minor ghost at that. I must justify any journey that I make like some otherworldly civil servant, and you could be my justification. Besides I was a man of business and had not the imagination to solve mysteries. You could be much assistance.”

“And what do I get out of it?”

“Unless I am much mistaken, my dear sir,” said Marley’s Ghost, “you are not the sort of fellow who sleeps well on an empty belly or an unanswered question. What I offer you is a rare opportunity to travel through time, to observe the world as it was and will never be again. You have in your secret heart longed to be a detective and solve some great mystery; here is your chance, perhaps your only chance, to fulfill that wish. Corporeal life, believe me, is woefully short. There is much time on this side to regret lost opportunities.”

I walked slowly back to the recliner and sat down.

“You probably died of a heart attack or a stroke or... or food poisoning.”

“You do not see it that way,” said Marley’s Ghost, “so that is not the way it will be.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean, my dear sir, that you are the author.”

He picked up the tooled leather volume from the floor where I had dropped it and handed it to me. I pushed the chair into the reclining position and began to read aloud. The Ghost, leaning on the back of the chair, looked over my shoulder at his own likeness in a reproduction of the original engraving.

“‘Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it, and Scrooge’s name was good...’”

A reclining chair is not the best place for reading; it is too comfortable. I have often dropped into a doze even while reading some remarkable thriller, so it is not so awfully strange that I did so now. I was startled into wakefulness by the resonant striking of the hour, twelve. That did not seem so awfully strange either, until it occurred to me that we do not have a clock that strikes the hour.

I sat up quickly, jerking the chair upright. The moonlight, it appeared, had taken over my den, touching everything in it with a silver glow of tinsel. And directly in front of me, in the place where old Marley had first appeared, stood my daughter Stephanie, in the billowy Christmas angel gown, her light brown hair caught in a circlet of holly, a mysterious half smile on her lips. The tinsel moonlight reflected off her in such a way that she appeared to glow.

I struggled to regain my equilibrium.

“Back from Mass already, hon?”

“I am the Ghost of Christmas Past,” she said in that voice of wind-rattled icicles that made me shudder.

“My past?” I decided to play along.

“No. Long past. Come, my time is short.”

“As is your stature.”

I fully expected the usual, “Oh, Daddy,” but got instead an outstretched hand and a calm but firm order.

“Rise! and walk with me!”

“No thanks, hon...” I started to say, but then saw that the beckoning hand was transparent and slightly iridescent. I shrank back against the Naugahyde upholstery of the chair, my cold, but quite opaque, hands firmly gripping the armrests. “M-must I?”

The apparition, so like yet so unlike my daughter, shook its shining head solemnly, and little sparkles of tinsel floated in the air around it.

“You are under no compulsion and may decline, without retribution, to accompany me. Though it is strange that you would do so, as you are one of the fortunate ones who is spared the painful journey into your own past. What you are being offered is an opportunity offered to few, to visit a past that is not your own, simply for the satisfaction of your curiosity.”

“Really? No strings attached? No moral?”

The Spirit’s slight smile broadened just a trifle. “Few journeys are made in what you call the ‘real world’ without something being learned. You will be shown things; what you do with them is your business. The opportunity will not arise again. Come with me now, or close the book forever.”

I am a man incapable of passing an open door without peering into the room, so this challenge left me no choice but to accept it. I grasped the Spirit’s hand, surprised to find that it felt like solid flesh. Its grip was, indeed, very strong, pulling me up abruptly from my chair and leading me through the den and across the hall to the silver-bathed living room. I can well remember Steffy in the flesh dragging me from the comfort of the den with this same eagerness to see the decorated tree. I saw it now, shining in the moonlight, and it seemed larger, fuller, more brilliant and, goodness knows, gaudier, than it had before.

“Where are you taking me?” I asked as we hastened toward the bay window.

“London, December 24, 1836.” It spoke in the tone and manner of the narrative voice that so often opens cheaply made historical or science fiction films. The date, seven years prior to the publication of A Christmas Carol, reminded me all of a sudden of the purpose of my journey.

“Wait, where’s old Marley?”

“Right with you, my dear sir.”

And there he was indeed, peering over my left shoulder, bandage and all; apparently he had been there, unnoticed, the whole time. Now he grasped my left hand, and together the three of us passed through the bay window’s leaded panes. I felt the solid glass brush past me like the strips of a beaded curtain.

I had closed my eyes as I approached the window and did not open them at first when I felt the cold outside air. For one thing the air itself felt different, damp and chilly rather than sharp and crisp. And all about me was a confusion of noise and smells. So many smells: coal fires smoking, gas fumes, old fish, beer, sewage, sweat, and then rising above all this the sweet, pungent odor of mince pie. I stood for a moment in wonder, my head raised like that of a hound downwind of a herd of deer, just sniffing. Then I had the strange, vaguely unpleasant, sensation of someone passing through me, as if I were a beaded curtain, and I opened my eyes.

I knew at once where I was, for I had been there before, in the City of London late on a winter afternoon, at a busy intersection just east of those three brooding stone edifices that form the hub around which the ancient city spins: the Bank of England, the Mansion House, and the Royal Exchange. I marvelled at how similar the scene was to the one I had enjoyed in my student days, watching schools of office workers crowding down the old streets through the early twilight into underground and railway stations. And yet, as I recovered from the shock of finding myself in that well remembered spot, I saw it all as very familiar yet marvelously strange.

Leadenhall, that was the name of the street, between two churches, St. Michael Cornhill to the west, its stolid, rectangular, pinnacled tower standing out above everything, and to the east St. Andrew Undershaft, the site, it is said, in older times of a gigantic maypole. It is the churches, the ubiquitous churches, that give the City of London its illusion of timelessness. The London I now stood in was older, dirtier, noisier, and even more charming than the one I had known.

I am a city person, revelling in the urban rush and clutter and racket. But this was almost too much city for even me, noisy beyond belief, with the clatter of donkey carts and hackneys and great lumbering omnibuses over the stone paving, the shouts of peddlers urging their wares on the passerby, and the intermittent clanging of bells. I counted the chimes of the hour coming from St. Michael’s tower with some surprise. It was only three o’clock, yet it was dark enough for the gas lamps to be lighted. The air was thick with an oppressive dark green smog that penetrated everywhere but softened the roughness of the street life as if wrapping it in gray-green chiffon.

I was finding it difficult to see, a problem the natural inhabitants of the place seemed to have overcome, and blundered into a young woman who materialized suddenly out of the fog, hurrying along the street, a dark knit shawl wrapped around her striped silk gown, a wide-brimmed bonnet shielding her face. I got a look at it, though, a pretty, childlike, bright-eyed face set with a grimness that seemed contrary to its nature. I attempted to excuse myself, but realized, when the stack of petticoats rustled right through my astonished leg, that apologies were not just unnecessary, they were downright useless.

I fell in step beside her, curious about where she might be going and why she was so nervous. Invisibility, by the way, is a very useful attribute to have in a crowded city street, especially when trying to keep up with someone who is in a great hurry and doesn’t even know you’re there. I was enjoying myself thoroughly, drinking in the wonderful grimy aliveness of the city, feeling the rush and the gaiety, observing with delight the sideshow of strange and colorful characters free in their anonymity. I took pleasure now and then as I hurried through (literally) the crowds in playing childish “invisible man” games, swinging unseen from a lamppost and passing right through the polished brass “can” of a baked potato vendor stationed on the pavement in the shelter of Whittington Avenue as it leads into the old Leadenhall Market. I must have caused a bit of a breeze, for the coals in the iron firepot suspended beneath the large, showy receptacle shot up in a sudden surge of orange flame and died down. Then I remembered Marley and the superstition that flames rise in the presence of ghosts.

“Sorry about that,” I said over my shoulder but saw only the Ghost of Christmas Past helping the hot potato man get the conflagration under control before his primitive steam table blew up. Marley had hurried on ahead through the confusion of the great poultry market.

“Where are you going?” I shouted over the racket of hundreds of chickens, turkeys, geese, ducks, and, for all I know, dodos and emus, bewailing their fate in the overcrowded condemned cells of the market, a Dickensian slum for poultry if ever there was one. A group of three or four very dirty, ragged boys hoarsely chanting some tuneless carol passed through me, surrounding the potato vendor in an effort to take advantage of the generosity of his clients and the warmth of his fire.

“My chambers,” Marley panted, pointing vaguely toward the street ahead of us. “I lived there, and still do, in a way of speaking, in the wine cellars.”

“Nice work if you can get it,” I murmured.

I followed the Ghost down a narrow byway along the back wall of a great stone house, relieved to be free of the feathered bedlam of the poultry market. We came out on a street of large, impressive buildings only slightly less congested than the thoroughfare, and Marley’s Ghost, apparently oblivious to the chill drizzle of sleet that was beginning to fall from the gunmetal gray sky, and the black city mud splashed up from the street by passing hooves and bare metal wheels, jaywalked joyously across toward a narrow courtyard almost hidden between two buildings. I hesitated a moment before following him into that nineteenth century rush hour, for I still did not quite trust my bodiless condition.

A light touch on my arm caused me to turn. The Ghost of Christmas Past, disguised as my daughter Stephanie, pointed northward along the side of the great stone house.

“East India House. Torn down in 1862. You ought to have a look at the front portico facing Leadenhall Street. You will have seen something no person living has seen.”

That sort of exclusiveness holds little appeal for me. I was much more interested in exploring Marley’s wine cellars, but something else facing Leadenhall Street did catch my interest. A nervous young woman in a striped silk dress and a dark shawl and bonnet had just crossed the thoroughfare and was turning north by the soot-stained gothic church of St. Andrew Undershaft.

“Hey, Marley! Up this way!” I shouted. “I want to see where that girl’s going.”

He followed me with an obedience I have yet to inspire in the living.

“May I presume to ask why we are stalking this particular person?” he asked when he had caught up.

“I don’t know, really. It’s just a hunch. Good detectives always follow hunches.”

Crossing Leadenhall at that hour was dangerous and indeed all but impossible for ordinary mortals, but we floated easily through hansom cabs and hackney coaches, piemen and holly decorated donkey carts. We followed the girl northward past aging mansions and half timbered Elizabethan relics into an area of small shops with living quarters above them.

“Where are we?” I asked Marley.

“Simmery Axe.”

St. Mary Axe, I translated. English place names are marvelous and their pronunciation even more marvelous. I couldn’t say at first how I happened to know this particular pronunciation, but a song began to run through my head as I trotted up the pavement in pursuit of my hunch.

Gilbert and Sullivan, wasn’t it? I used to know all the words to most of the patter songs when I was younger and could sing after a fashion. The clatter of the horses and the rhythmic clanging of a muffin man’s bell formed an accompaniment, and I sang aloud, safe in the realization that no mortal ear could hear me. Marley, however, regarded me with some pain.

Good Lord. I stopped abruptly in front of one of the small shabby shops, for the girl in the bonnet had stopped and was looking uncertainly at it. The stone front was black, as was the door. The bowed windows — meant, I suppose, to display wares — were so soot begrimed as to appear black as well. The uncertain flicker of candles inside the shop only helped to obscure the view. I looked up. Over door and window in polished brass letters was the name of the shop, with the number 70 set like quotation marks at each end.

I started to laugh. The whole thing was so preposterous. I was not used to having such literary dreams. But this was stuff I knew about, and I couldn’t let a gaffe like that pass.

“I’m sorry,” I said to Christmas Past, who still floated on my right. “You just can’t do that.”

“I beg your pardon?” said the courteous Spirit.

“Anachronism. Blatant, baldfaced anachronism. Gilbert wrote The Sorcerer in 1877. This is supposed to be the London of 1836. Gilbert was born in 1836! Now, how do you explain that away?”

“Elementary,” said the Ghost. “It’s an old established family firm. The present proprietor is Gilbert’s sorcerer’s grandfather.”

“That’s ridiculous. How could the company exist before its author invented it? You can’t do that, even in fiction.”

“You can do anything in fiction as long as you’re consistent,” the Ghost explained with a great show of patience. “And once something, a place, a character, is conceived, it acquires an existence of its own — a past, a present, and a future.”

I laughed. “What a cop-out. Are you trying to tell me there’s no difference between flesh-and-blood historical reality and — and the figment of somebody’s imagination?”

“My dear sir,” the Spirit replied, “we are all figments of Somebody’s imagination.”

That’s what you get for arguing with a ghost.

I returned to my hunch.

The girl, after taking another quick, frightened look about her, entered the shop, activating a tinkly little bell. I followed, passing through the door after she had closed it, just for the thrill of doing it that way while I could. After all, I’m going to have to open doors for the rest of my life.

The inside of the shop was as dark as the outside, and the soot-saturated fog seemed to have passed through the closed door and filled every crevice. What little I could see through this miasma looked like a combination of old fashioned hardware store and the sort of cheap magic tricks emporium found on seaside boardwalks between the penny arcade and the bingo parlor. A small, round, bald man wearing a blue herringbone checked waistcoat over a pink shirt looked up from behind a low wooden counter where he sat playing solitaire with a set of ancient tarot cards by the light of a close-trimmed oil lamp. A meagre coal fire provided the only other light.

“And what may I do for you, madam?” he asked the girl in a carefully smoothed down cockney accent. His face was pink, his smile somewhat cherubic; his voice was oily and self-deprecating, a pudgy Uriah Heep.

The girl’s hand, when she removed it from her fur muff, was trembling, and her voice was thin and strained with tension.

“I... I’ve come for the — uh — the effigy.”

The proprietor raised his spectacles to the top of his head and looked carefully into her face for perhaps half a minute.

“Ah, yes,” he said slowly. “Mr. Scrooge.”

He spun around to face a cluttered shelf on the wall behind his desk, although I have no idea how he did it, since the chair did not swivel.

“Ah, here we are. Mr. Scrooge.”

He took down a cylindrical package wrapped in newspaper like an order of chips and handed it to her. She took it gingerly and stared at it a moment.

“Oh, dear. How dreadful. I don’t know how I could do this.”

J. W. Wells smiled slightly. “The first time is always the hardest.”

“Oh, dear,” the girl cried in agitation. “I certainly shan’t be doing this again. It’s not for me, you know. I never could do such a thing for my own gain. It’s for Fred, poor dear Fred. He hasn’t a farthing, and it’s so dreadfully unfair.”

“And if dear Fred ’asn’t a farthing, he can’t marry you, eh?”

The girl lowered her head. “He hasn’t asked me yet.”

“He ’asn’t? Bless my soul.” The little shopkeeper chuckled, catching the girl’s hand in a quick, gentle, but firm movement. “Come now, let’s see what we ’ave here.” He took the package from her hand and spread the palm out under the lamp, raising the wick just a trifle. “Now this is very nice, don’t you see? Such a lovely long life line. I see marriage, but not so soon. No matter, it’s a very fine hand: happiness, many children, prosperity in due time. Be patient, say the Stars, your time will come.”

He released her hand and placed the package back into it.

“A Christmas gift for poor, dear Fred. That’ll come to five quid, madam, and a bob for the reading. For you. Regular clients I charge ’arf a crown.”

“Oh.” She fumbled in her muff and pulled out a small purse from which she carefully counted out coins.

“You’re sure this is Mr. Scrooge?” she asked, staring at the little package. “Do you know Mr. Scrooge?”

The chuckle was less cherubic, more malevolent. “Know Mr. Scrooge? My dear lady, there’s not a chap within the sound of Bow bells that don’t know Mr. Scrooge, more’s the pity. His chambers being just over the way, I’m privileged betimes to share the street with ’im. ‘Mr. Scrooge?’ says I and tips me hat. ‘Umph,’ says he, if he says anything at all. Not a kindly man, our Mr. Scrooge.” He leaned over the counter familiarly. “It’s a favor we’re doing this old town, you and me.”

The girl shuddered and drew back. “For Fred,” she whispered. “Just for Fred. What do I do with it?”

“Set it in the fire, madam, saying these words...” He drew her face close to his and whispered a series of phrases in her ear which I, though I leaned close, could not make out. “You’ve got that now? Good. Wouldn’t you care to have a look at it? It’s a marvelous likeness, I must say.”

“Oh no. I couldn’t bear it. I’d rather not know what he looked — looks like.”

She secreted the package in her muff and ran from the shop, the bell on the door tinkling in her wake.

“Thank you very much, and a Merry Christmas to you,” the shopkeeper called. “And a Merry Christmas to Fred, the lucky fellow.”

I passed through the closed door just as the great bell of St. Andrew Undershaft boomed the hour of four. The sky was dark, what sky could be seen, but the street was bright with torches and gaslights. Marley materialized beside me.

“Who is this Fred?” he asked.

“Scrooge’s nephew.”

“Oh yes, that dreadfully jolly young fellow who came around to the counting house every Christmas Eve, spreading cheer, like marzipan, all over everything. Scrooge assumed he was after his money. But I don’t recognize her. Who is she, and what’s she up to?”

“She’s Scrooge’s niece-in-law to be, I think. And, if I’m not mistaken, she’s attempting to melt a rich uncle in wax, so to speak. Come on.”

I pushed through the crowd, for I was losing my hunch. Suddenly there was a diversion on the southwest corner of Leadenhall Street, in front of the brashly neoclassic facade of East India House. Two slightly drunken porters had collided and were now settling the question of right-of-way with bare fists. The nearby market emptied into the street to join the melee. I passed through the center of the mob, having caught sight of a dark bonnet disappearing down Whittington Avenue. Then I saw her standing in front of the brass baked potato can temporarily left untended. She looked around, white-faced, then quickly threw her package onto the glowing coals of the firepot and fled westward.

By the time I reached the vessel the paper had burst into yellow flame and shrivelled to a blackened crust, and the wax effigy itself was starting to melt. It was a rather horrid sight, as recognizable human features began to run together. Recognizable indeed, for it was a good likeness, a perfect likeness of Jacob Marley.

“Hey!” I called to the girl’s rapidly retreating back, forgetting my ghostly state. “You hexed the wrong man!”

The effigy was beginning to melt rapidly, and I put my hand into the pot, attempting to retrieve it. A firm, transparent grip on my wrist prevented me.

“You are free to observe only,” said the Ghost of Christmas Past, “not to intervene. The past cannot be altered, even in fiction.”

So we stood, three ill-matched spectres in the sooty darkness as snow began to fall lightly over the scene, watching the effigy slowly dissolve and run in rivulets of molten wax around and between the hot coals.

“I don’t understand,” said Marley’s Ghost.

“It’s a form of black magic,” I explained. “A wax image of the victim is slowly melted with appropriate curses or whatever.”

“That bright-eyed, dimpled, fresh-faced child involved in such dark deeds? I find that difficult to comprehend.”

“She was driven to it by necessity, I think.”

“Oh?” Marley’s Ghost was puzzled. “Not by me, surely.”

“No. By your partner. She wants to marry Fred, you see, as in time she will and make him very happy. And I suppose in time she will also secretly be glad that her attempt at witchcraft failed. It wasn’t her fault, of course, that it did, or the sorcerer’s either. Apparently he mistook you for Scrooge. I gather you sometimes answered to the name of Scrooge, as it is written of him: ‘Sometimes people... called Scrooge Scrooge and sometimes Marley, but he answered to both names: it was all the same to him.’”

Marley’s Ghost nodded solemnly, his jaws clacking together under the white bandage.

“We were like that, as it were one person in two bodies. It was also a device for keeping clients guessing. If an unwanted solicitor asked for Mr. Marley, he would be out for the day. I would be Mr. Scrooge. It was something of a game, I venture.”

“A game that cost you your life.”

Just at that moment Marley’s Ghost gave a gasp and backed into the baked potato can, pointing at something with a trembling finger. Following his gesture I saw Marley himself, in the flesh, a solid identical twin of my companion of the evening in all aspects except the bandage, stumbling eastward, somewhat unsteady on his feet, as though the curse had already begun to take effect. He tripped on a loose paving stone and fell through me, catching himself on the large round handle of the can. He leaned on it an instant to get his balance and inadvertently looked down into the glowing coals of the fire pot. The effigy had melted from the back of the head forward and the face now spread over the coals like a projected relief map. I tried to shield Marley from the sight, but of course he saw through me, as many do. With a cry the poor fellow staggered back, holding his chest, took three steps forward, and fell. We three stood there, helpless in our insubstantiality, and watched a crowd gather around the stricken man, make a corridor for a doctor to come through, and then close up again around him, and after a while six strong men, like premature pallbearers, carried the dying man down the street to his chambers. For though some of the bystanders weren’t certain whether this was Mr. Scrooge or Mr. Marley, all knew that he was one of those gentlemen and that his home was above the wine cellars and offices in the old dark house in the courtyard off Lime Street.

Chimes sounded again from the tower of St. Andrew’s Church. It must be six, I reasoned. The great bell tolled once and fell silent. I waited, straining in the sudden oppressive silence for the bell to go on. But it did not. All was darkness and stillness around me, and I was alone. Where was I now? In Scrooge’s dark chambers above the wine cellars and holiday vacant offices? He could not have been more alone than I was. I sat back, for wherever I was, I was sitting, and wished fervently for companionship, longed to hear the ominous clank of chains, to see some otherworldly luminosity break through the terrible blackness. Then I knew what was Scrooge’s curse, and Marley’s, to be alone and lonely on Christmas.

In the distance I heard voices, faint but growing stronger. The voices surely of an angel choir sent to redeem my hardened soul. I welcomed it as it drew near.

With a rush of comfort and joy I realized that I was in my recliner in the den and the angelic choir was Joyce and the kids coming home from Midnight Mass, strewing vocal tinsel through the dark world as they came.

I stumbled to my feet, groping for a light switch. I must turn the decorations on again before they got back. I had suddenly lost all desire to be mistaken for Scrooge. I felt along the wall, falling into bookcases and knocking over bric-a-brac. The singing was coming closer.

My hand was on the knob, and I pulled the door open. Light, brilliant, festive, many-colored, twinkling, clashing, gaudy Christmas light filled the living room and glowed from the porch. The lights had come on, how or why I did not know, but I thanked the Ghost of Christmas Present, who surely must have been.

The front door burst open, and there were my wife and children, bright and glowing in the light of the outdoor decorations. And I was glad to see them.

Standing like a young orator on the hall carpet, shaking off snow like tinsel, Mark spread out his arms and crowed.

“God bless us every one!”

“Amen say I to that,” I answered, turning back to the den just long enough to pick up and carefully close the book that lay on the floor still open to the picture of Marley’s Ghost, before I joined the family around the misplaced, overburdened tree in the living room.

“Shall I light the candles?” Joyce asked.

“No, no,” I said. “Don’t do that.”

“There’s light enough already, light enough.”

And I kissed her quickly, under the mistletoe.

That was why the Benson jewel robbery was solved — because Aram Melekian was too much for Mr. Quilter’s temper.

His almost invisible eyebrows soared, and the scalp of his close-cropped head twitched angrily. “Damme!” said Mr. Quilter, and in that mild and archaic oath there was more compressed fury than in paragraphs of uncensored profanity. “So you, sir, are the untrammeled creative artist, and I am a drudging, hampering hack!”

Aram Melekian tilted his hat a trifle more jauntily. “That’s the size of it, brother. And if you hamper this untrammeled opus any more, Metropolis Pictures is going to be sueing its youngest genius for breach of contract.”

Mr. Quilter rose to his full lean height. “I’ve seen them come and go,” he announced; “and there hasn’t been a one of them, sir, who failed to learn something from me. What is so creative about pouring out the full vigor of your young life? The creative task is mine, molding that vigor, shaping it to some end.”

“Go play with your blue pencil,” Melekian suggested. “I’ve got a dream coming on.”

“Because I have never produced anything myself, you young men jeer at me. You never see that your successful screen plays are more my effort than your inspiration.” Mr. Quilter’s thin frame was aquiver.

“Then what do you need us for?”

“What— Damme, sir, what indeed? Ha!” said Mr. Quilter loudly. “HI show you. I’ll pick the first man off the street that has life and a story in him. What more do you contribute? And through me hell turn out a job that will sell. If I do this, sir, then will you consent to the revisions I’ve asked of you?”

“Go lay an egg,” said Aram Melekian. “And I’ve no doubt you will.”

Mr. Quilter stalked out of the studio with high dreams. He saw the horny-handed son of toil out of whom he had coaxed a masterpiece signing a contract with F.X. He saw a discomfited Armenian genius in the background busily devouring his own words. He saw himself freed of his own sense of frustration, proving at last that his was the significant part of writing.

He felt a bumping shock and the squealing of brakes. The next thing he saw was the asphalt paving.

Mr. Quilter rose to his feet undecided whether to curse the driver for knocking him down or bless him for stopping so miraculously short of danger. The young man in the brown suit was so disarmingly concerned that the latter choice was inevitable.

“I’m awfully sorry,” the young man blurted. “Are you hurt? It’s this bad wing of mine, I guess.” His left arm was in a sling.

“Nothing at all, sir. My fault. I was preoccupied...”

They stood awkwardly for a moment, each striving for a phrase that was not mere politeness. Then they both spoke at once.

“You came out of that studio,” the young man said. “Do you” (his tone was awed) “do you work there?”

And Mr. Quilter had spotted a sheaf of eight and a half by eleven paper protruding from the young man’s pocket. “Are you a writer, sir? Is that a manuscript?”

The young man shuffled and came near blushing. “Naw. I’m not a writer. I’m a policeman. But I’m going to be a writer. This is a story I was trying to tell about what happened to me — But are you a writer? In there?”

Mr. Quilter’s eyes were aglow under their invisible brows. “I, sir,” he announced proudly, “am what makes writers tick. Are you interested?”

He was also, he might have added, what makes detectives tick. But he did not know that yet.

Sir Leo Persuivant, the Chief Constable, had been sitting in his comfortable study after a magnificent lunch and talking shyly of the sadness of Christmas while his guest, Mr. Albert Campion, most favored of his large house party, had been laughing at him gently.

It was true, the younger man had admitted, his pale eyes sleepy behind his horn-rimmed spectacles, that, however good the organization, the festival was never quite the same after one was middle-aged, but then only dear old Leo would expect it to be, and meanwhile, what a truly remarkable bird that had been!

But at that point the Superintendent had arrived with his grim little story and everything had seemed quite spoiled.

At the moment their visitor sat in a highbacked chair, against a paneled wall festooned with holly and tinsel, his round black eyes hard and preoccupied under his short gray hair. Superintendent Bussy was one of those lean and urgent countrymen who never quite lose their fondness for a genuine wonder. Despite years of experience and disillusion, the thing that simply can’t have happened and yet indubitably has happened, retains a place in their cosmos. He was holding forth about one now. It had already ruined his Christmas and had kept a great many other people out in the sleet all day; but nothing would induce him to leave it alone even for five minutes. The turkey sandwiches, which Sir Leo had insisted on ordering for him, were disappearing without him noticing them and the glass of scotch and soda stood untasted.

“You can see I had to come at once,” he was saying for the third time. “I had to. I don’t see what happened and that’s a fact. It’s a sort of miracle. Besides,” he eyed them angrily, “fancy killing a poor old postman on Christmas morning! That’s inhuman, isn’t it? Unnatural.”

Sir Leo nodded his white head. “Horrible,” he agreed. “Now, let me get this clear. The man appears to have been run down at the Benham-Ashby crossroads...”

Bussy took a handful of cigarettes from the box at his side and arranged them in a cross on the table.

“Look,” he said. “Here is the Ashby road with a slight bend in it, and here, running at right angles slap through the curve, is the Benham road. As you know as well as I do, Sir Leo, they’re both good wide main thoroughfares, as roads go in these parts. This morning the Benham postman, old Fred Noakes, a bachelor thank God and a good chap, came along the Benham Road loaded down with Christmas mail.”

“On a bicycle?” asked Champion.

“Naturally. On a bicycle. He called at the last farm before the crossroads and left just about 10 o’clock. We know that because he had a cup of tea there. Then his way led him over the crossing and on towards Benham proper.”

He paused and looked up from his cigarettes.

“There was very little traffic early today, terrible weather all the time, and quite a bit of activity later; so we’ve got no skid marks to help us. Well, to resume: no one seems to have seen old Noakes, poor chap, until close on half an hour later. Then the Benham constable, who lives some 300 yards from the crossing and on the Benham road, came out of his house and walked down to his gate to see if the mail had come. He saw the postman at once, lying in the middle of the road across his machine. He was dead then.”

“You suggest he’d been trying to carry on, do you?” put in Sir Leo.

“Yes. He was walking, pushing the bike, and had dropped in his tracks. There was a depressed fracture in the side of his skull where something — say, a car mirror — had struck him. I’ve got the doctor’s report. I’ll show you that later. Meanwhile there’s something else.”

Bussy’s finger turned to his other line of cigarettes.

“Also, just about 10, there were a couple of fellows walking here on the Ashby road, just before the bend. They report that they were almost run down by a wildly driven car which came up behind them. It missed them and careered off out of their sight round the bend towards the crossing. But a few minutes later, half a mile farther on, on the other side of the crossroads, a police car met and succeeded in stopping the same car. There was a row and the driver, getting the wind up suddenly, started up again, skidded and smashed the car into the nearest telephone pole. The car turned out to be stolen and there were four half-full bottles of gin in the back. The two occupants were both fighting drunk and are now detained.”

Mr. Campion took off his spectacles and blinked at the speaker.

“You suggest that there was a connection, do you? — that the postman and the gin drinkers met at the crossroads? Any signs on the car?”

Bussy shrugged his shoulders. “Our chaps are at work on that now,” he said. “The second smash has complicated things a bit, but last time I ’phoned they were hopeful.”

“But my dear fellow!” Sir Leo was puzzled. “If you can get expert evidence of a collision between the car and the postman, your worries are over. That is, of course, if the medical evidence permits the theory that the unfortunate fellow picked himself up and struggled the 300 yards towards the constable’s house.”

Bussy hesitated.

“There’s the trouble,” he admitted. “If that were all we’d be sitting pretty, but it’s not and I’ll tell you why. In that 300 yards of Benham Road, between the crossing and the spot where old Fred died, there is a stile which leads to a footpath. Down the footpath, the best part of a quarter of a mile over very rough going, there is one small cottage, and at that cottage letters were delivered this morning. The doctor says Noakes might have staggered the 300 yards up the road leaning on his bike, but he puts his foot down and says the other journey, over the stile and so on, would have been absolutely impossible. I’ve talked to the doctor. He’s the best man in the world on the job and we won’t shake him on that.”

“All of which would argue,” observed Mr. Campion brightly, “that the postman was hit by a car after he came back from the cottage — between the stile and the constable’s house.”

“That’s what the constable thought.” Bussy’s black eyes were snapping. “As soon as he’d telephoned for help he slipped down to the cottage to see if Noakes had actually called there. When he found he had, he searched the road. He was mystified though because both he and his missus had been at their window for an hour watching for the mail and they hadn’t seen a vehicle of any sort go by either way. If a car did hit the postman where he fell, it must have turned and gone back afterwards.”

Leo frowned at him. “What about the other witnesses? Did they see any second car?”

“No.” Bussy was getting to the heart of the matter and his face shone with honest wonder. “I made sure of that. Everybody sticks to it that there was no other car or cart about and a good job too, they say, considering the way the smashed-up car was being driven. As I see it, it’s a proper mystery, a kind of not very nice miracle, and those two beauties are going to get away with murder on the strength of it. Whatever our fellows find on the car they’ll never get past the doctor’s testimony.”

Mr. Campion got up sadly. The sleet was beating on the windows, and from inside the house came the more cheerful sound of tea cups. He nodded to Sir Leo.

“I fear we shall have to see that footpath before it gets too dark. In this weather, conditions may have changed by tomorrow.”

Sir Leo sighed. “‘On Christmas day in the morning!’” he quoted bitterly. “Perhaps you’re right.”

Rory Bigtoes, Santa’s Security Chief, was tall for an elf, measuring almost seven inches from the curly tips of his shoes to the top of his fedora. But he had to stride to keep abreast of Garth Hardnoggin, the quick little Director General of the Toyworks, as they hurried, beards streaming back over their shoulders, through the racket and bustle of Shop Number 5, one of the many vaulted caverns honeycombing the undiscovered island beneath the Polar icecap.

Director General Hardnoggin wasn’t pleased. He slapped his megaphone, the symbol of his office (for as a member of the Board he spoke directly to Santa Claus), against his thigh. “A bomb in the Board Room on Christmas Eve!” he muttered with angry disbelief.

“I’ll admit that Security doesn’t look good,” said Bigtoes.

Hardnoggin gave a snort and stopped at a construction site for Dick and Jane Doll dollhouses. Elf carpenters and painters were hard at work, pipes in their jaws and beards tucked into their belts. A foreman darted over to show Hardnoggin the wallpaper samples for the dining room.

“See this unit, Bigtoes?” said Hardnoggin. “Split-level ranch type. Wall-to-wall carpeting. Breakfast nook. Your choice of Early American or French Provincial furnishings. They said I couldn’t build it for the price. But I did. And how did I do it?”

“Cardboard,” said a passing elf, an old carpenter with a plank over his shoulder.

“And what’s wrong with cardboard? Good substantial cardboard for the interior walls!” shouted the Director General striding off again. “Let them bellyache, Bigtoes. I’m not out to win any popularity contests. But I do my job. Let’s see you do yours. Find Dirk Crouchback and find him fast.”

At the automotive section the new Lazaretto sports cars (1/32 scale) were coming off the assembly line. Hardnoggin stopped to slam one of the car doors. “You left out the kachunk,” he told an elf engineer in white coveralls.

“Nobody gets a tin door to go kachunk,” said the engineer.

“Detroit does. So can we,” said Hardnoggin, moving on. “You think I don’t miss the good old days, Bigtoes?” he said. “I was a spinner. And a damn good one. Nobody made a top that could spin as long and smooth as Garth Hardnoggin’s.”

“I was a jacksmith myself,” said Bigtoes. Satisfying work, building each jack-in-the-box from the ground up, carpentering the box, rigging the spring mechanism, making the funny head, spreading each careful coat of paint.

“How many could you make in a week?” asked Director General Hardnoggin.

“Three, with overtime,” said Security Chief Bigtoes.

Hardnoggin nodded. “And how many children had empty stockings on Christmas morning because we couldn’t handcraft enough stuff to go around? That’s where your Ghengis Khans, your Hitlers, and your Stalins come from, Bigtoes — children who through no fault of their own didn’t get any toys for Christmas. So Santa had to make a policy decision: quality or quantity? He opted for quantity.”

Crouchback, at that time one of Santa’s right-hand elves, had blamed the decision on Hardnoggin’s sinister influence. By way of protest he had placed a bomb in the new plastic machine. The explosion had coated three elves with a thick layer of plastic which had to be chipped off with hammers and chisels. Of course they lost their beards. Santa, who was particularly sensitive about beards, sentenced Crouchback to two years in the cooler, as the elves called it. This meant he was assigned to a refrigerator (one in Ottawa, Canada, as it happened) with the responsibility of turning the light on and off as the door was opened or closed.

But after a month Crouchback had failed to answer the daily roll call which Security made by means of a two-way intercom system. He had fled the refrigerator and become a renegade elf. Then suddenly, three years later, Crouchback had reappeared at the North Pole, a shadowy fugitive figure, editor of a clandestine newspaper, The Midnight Elf, which made violent attacks on Director General Hardnoggin and his policies. More recently, Crouchback had become the leader of SHAFT — Santa’s Helpers Against Flimsy Toys — an organization of dissident groups including the Anti-Plastic League, the Sons and Daughters of the Good Old Days, the Ban the Toy-Bomb people and the Hippie Elves for Peace...

“Santa opted for quantity,” repeated Hard-noggin. “And I carried out his decision. Just between the two of us it hasn’t always been easy.” Hardnoggin waved his megaphone at the Pacification and Rehabilitation section where thousands of toy bacteriological warfare kits (JiffyPox) were being converted to civilian use (The Freckle Machine). After years of pondering Santa had finally ordered a halt to war-toy production. His decision was considered a victory for SHAFT and a defeat for Hardnoggin.

“Unilateral disarmament is a mistake, Big-toes,” said Hardnoggin grimly as they passed through a door marked Santa’s Executive Helpers Only and into the carpeted world of the front office. “Mark my words, right now the tanks and planes are rolling off the assembly lines at Acme Toy and into the department stores.” (Acme Toy, the international consortium of toymakers, was the elves’ greatest bugbear.) “So the rich kids will have war toys, while the poor kids won’t even have a popgun. That’s not democratic.”

Bigtoes stopped at a door marked Security. Hardnoggin strode on without slackening his pace. “Sticks-and-stones session at five o’clock,” he said over his shoulder. “Don’t be late. And do your job. Find Crouchback!”

“Christmas Eve,” Art Hippie was thinking to himself, “would be a good time for the murder.”

The thought was both timely and characteristic. It was 3 o’clock in the afternoon of December 24, and though the murder would have got an eager welcome from Art Hippie any day at all, his disdainful attitude toward the prolonged hurly-burly of Christmas sentiment and shopping made that the best possible date for it. He did not actually turn up his nose at Christmas, for that would have been un-American; but as a New York cop not yet out of his twenties who had recently been made a precinct dick and had hung his uniform in the back of the closet of his furnished room, it had to be made clear, especially to himself, that he was good and tough. A cynical slant on Christmas was therefore imperative.

His hope of running across a murder had begun back in the days when his assignment had been tagging illegally parked cars, and was merely practical and professional. His biggest ambition was promotion to Homicide, and the shortest cut would have been discovery of a corpse, followed by swift, brilliant, solo detection and capture of the culprit. It had not gone so far as becoming an obsession; as he strode down the sidewalk this December afternoon he was not sniffing for the scent of blood at each dingy entrance he passed; but when he reached the number he had been given and turned to enter, his hand darted inside his jacket to touch his gun.

None of the three people he found in the cluttered and smelly little room one flight up seemed to need shooting. Art identified himself and wrote down their names. The man at the battered old desk, who was twice Art’s age and badly needed a shave, was Emil Duross, proprietor of the business conducted in that room — Duross Specialties, a mail-order concern dealing in gimcrack jewelry. The younger man, small, dark and neat, seated on a chair squeezed in between the desk and shelves stacked with cardboard boxes, was II. E. Koenig, adjuster, according to a card he had proffered, for the Apex Insurance Company. The girl, who had pale watery eyes and a stringy neck, stood backed up to a pile of cartons the height of her shoulder. She had on a dark brown felt hat and a lighter brown woolen coat that had lost a button. Her name was Helen Lauro, and it could have been not rheum in her eyes but the remains of tears.

Because Art Hippie was thorough it took him twenty minutes to get the story to his own satisfaction. Then he returned his notebook to his pocket, looked at Duross, at Koenig, and last at the girl. He wanted to tell her to wipe her eyes, but what if she didn’t have a handkerchief?

He spoke to Duross, “Stop me if I’m wrong,” he said. “You bought the ring a week ago to give to your wife for Christmas and paid sixty-two dollars for it. You put it there in a desk drawer after showing it to Miss Lauro. Why did you show it to Miss Lauro?”

Duross turned his palms up. “Just a natural thing. She works for me, she’s a woman, and it’s a beautiful ring.”

“Okay. Today you work with her — filling orders, addressing packages, and putting postage on. You send her to the post office with a bag of the packages. Why didn’t she take all of them?”

“She did.”

“Then what are those?” Art pointed to a pile of little boxes, addressed and stamped, on the end of a table.

“Orders that came in the afternoon mail. I did them while she was gone to the post office.”

Art nodded. “And also while she she was gone you looked in the drawer to get the ring to take home for Christmas, and it wasn’t there. You know it was there this morning because Miss Lauro asked if she could look at it again, and you showed it to her and let her put it on her finger, and then you put it back in the drawer. But this afternoon it was gone, and you couldn’t have taken it yourself because you haven’t left this room. Miss Lauro went out and got sandwiches for your lunch. So you decided she took the ring, and you phoned the insurance company, and Mr. Koenig came and advised you to call the police, and—”

“Only his stock is insured,” Koenig put in. “The ring was not a stock item and is not covered.”

“Just a legality,” Duross declared scornfully. “Insurance companies can’t hide behind legalities. It hurts their reputation.”

Koenig smiled politely but noncommittally.

Art turned to the girl. “Why don’t you sit down?” he asked her. “There’s a chair we men are not using.”

“I will never sit down in this room again,” she declared in a thin tight voice.

“Okay.” Art scowled at her. She was certainly not comely. “If you did take the ring you might—”

“I didn’t!”

“Very well. But if you did you might as well tell me where it is because you won’t ever dare to wear it or sell it.”

“Of course I wouldn’t. I knew I wouldn’t. That’s why I didn’t take it.”

“Oh? You thought of taking it?”

“Of course I did. It was a beautiful ring.” She stopped to swallow. “Maybe my life isn’t much, but what it is, I’d give it for a ring like that, and a girl like me, I could live a hundred years and never have one. Of course I thought of taking it — but I knew I couldn’t ever wear it.”

“You see?” Duross appealed to the law. “She’s foxy, that girl. She’s slick.”

Art downed an impulse to cut it short, get out, return to the station house, and write a report. Nobody here deserved anything, not even justice — especially not justice. Writing a brief report was all it rated, and all, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it would have got. But instead of breaking it off, Art sat and thought it over through a long silence, with the three pairs of eyes on him. Finally he spoke to Duross:

“Get me the orders that came in the afternoon mail.”

Duross was startled. “Why?”

“I want to check them with that pile of boxes you addressed and stamped.”

Duross shook his head. “I don’t need a cop to check my orders and shipments. Is this a gag?”

“No. Get me the orders.”

“I will not!”

“Then I’ll have to open all the boxes.” Art arose and headed for the table. Duross bounced up and got in front of him and they were chest to chest.

“You don’t touch those boxes,” Duross told him. “You got no search warrant. You don’t touch anything!”

“That’s just another legality.” Art backed off a foot to avoid contact. “And since I guessed right, what’s a little legality? I’m going to open the boxes here and now, but I’ll count ten first to give you a chance to pick it out and hand it to me and save both of us a lot of bother. One, two, three—”

“I’ll phone the station house!”

“Go ahead. Four, five, six, seven, eight, nine...”

Art stopped at nine because Duross had moved to the table and was fingering the boxes. As he drew away with one in his hand Art demanded, “Gimme.” Duross hesitated but passed the box over, and after a glance at the address Art ripped the tape off, opened the flap of the box, took out a wad of tissue paper, and then a ring box. From that he removed a ring, yellow gold, with a large greenish stone. Helen Lauro made a noise in her throat. Koenig let out a grunt, evidently meant for applause. Duross made a grab, not for the ring but for the box on which he had put an address, and missed.

“It stuck out as plain as your nose,” Art told him, “but of course my going for the boxes was just a good guess. Did you pay sixty-two bucks for this?”

Duross’s lips parted, but no words came. Apparently he had none. He nodded, not vigorously.

Art turned to the girl. “Look, Miss Lauro. You say you’re through here. You ought to have something to remember it by. You could make some trouble for Mr. Duross for the dirty trick he tried to play on you, and if you lay off I expect he’d like to show his appreciation by giving you this ring. Wouldn’t you, Mr. Duross?”

Duross managed to get it out. “Sure I would.”

“Shall I give it to her for you?”

“Sure.” Duross’s jaw worked. “Go ahead.”

Art held out the ring and the girl took it, but not looking at it because she was gazing incredulously at him. It was a gaze so intense as to disconcert him, and he covered up by turning to Duross and proffering the box with an address on it.

“Here,” he said, “you can have this. Next time you cook up a plan for getting credit with your wife for buying her a ring, and collecting from the insurance company for its cost, and sending the ring to a girl friend — ail in one neat little operation — don’t do it. And don’t forget you gave Miss Lauro that ring before witnesses.”

Duross gulped and nodded.

Koenig spoke. “Your name is not Hippie, officer, it’s Santa Claus. You have given her the ring she would have given her life for, you have given him an out on a charge of attempted fraud, and you have given me a crossoff on a claim. That’s the ticket! That’s the old yuletide spirit! Merry Christmas!”

“Nuts,” Art said contemptuously, and turned and marched from the room, down the stairs, and out to the sidewalk. As he headed in the direction of the station house he decided that he would tone it down a little in his report. Getting a name for being tough was okay, but not too damn tough. That insurance guy sure was dumb, calling him Santa Claus — him, Art Hippie, feeling as he did about Christmas.

Which reminded him, Christmas Eve would be a swell time for the murder.

So Ebenezer Scrooge, that squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner was led into the past, the present, and the future by three apparitions on Christmas Eve, and the horrors that he witnessed, which were his own life and death, convinced him that he’d better repent or else. Not merely in word, but in deed, for his fears of moral retribution were profound. Next morning, while still in his nightcap, he rewarded a boy handsomely to run to the poulterer’s and have a turkey the size of Tiny Tim sent to the humble home of the Cratchit family. After consuming a bowl of gruel and a cup of tea with more relish than such feeble fare justified, he brushed the coal dust from his cuffs and went off on a cold, clear, Christmas Day to join his nephew Fred and family at their holiday feast. Scrooge delighted the children with gifts in his hard-as-flint fists and astonished the grownups with a steady smile on his bloodless face. He tasted of the spiced wassail and joined in the carols in bold voice and bounced their son and daughter upon his knee. It was like old times, with the kind of merriment he had enjoyed so unashamedly at Fezziwig’s establishment. (Those were the days when he was a mere apprentice with Dick Wilkins, good old Dick Wilkins, who had been very attached to him — long before Ebenezer’s soul had been twisted into an ugly thing by the connivances of commerce.) Later that night, when the cheer had simmered down, and the fire had withdrawn its flames, and a slab of clouds had blocked out the stars, and a cold mist was pressing against the windows, Ebenezer Scrooge, with a wave of his hand, alighted from the glowing doorway of his nephew’s home and headed into the gloom of nineteenth century London. It was that sort of penetrating gloom which of times follows hard on the heels of a frolicsome occasion, the way the brightest and most pleasant of rooms becomes dank and dreary when plunged into the bitter darkness of a winter’s night. It was the gloom of death itself.

Ebenezer stepped cautiously through the slippery skin of snow that had settled upon the cobblestones, for he was mortal and, as he had reminded the Ghost of Christmas Past, liable to fall. It was feet-stamping cold, and his breath crystallized with each exhalation. The bleakness was so concentrated it seemed to muffle the sputtering gas lamps along his route, but it did not extinguish the gladness in Scrooge’s heart, which radiated on the fuel of his recent salvation. So altered was his attitude that as he walked in the direction of his chambers, he kept an expectant eye out for a carriage to carry him forth. Not since he’d been young and wasteful had he hired a carriage; on this particular evening, however, he felt a strong desire to be accompanied by the happy clacking of hoofs and to impress the cabman with a generosity befitting the season. Scrooge spotted a few such conveyances, shiny through the frozen mists, one of them with holly wound in the spokes of its great wheels. But each was loaded with people and packages and the sounds of mirth, hurrying on toward yet another festivity in celebration of the birth of Christ. By the time he came upon a carriage that was free — a young couple was laughing as they stepped down from the sturdy black vehicle, its springs jouncing from the quick loss of weight — Scrooge had already covered three-quarters of the distance to his rooms. And though the air was as harsh as a rasp, he decided to complete his journey by foot. It seemed more trouble to get in and out of the carriage than the short trip warranted. Besides, a long walk on Christmas night was good for the heart and satisfying to the soul, and a man of business in his time of life had to be attentive to both.

The windows of the low brick houses were gleaming with candles and oil lamps, and the scent of baked breads and sweetmeats wafted over the streets. A few men and women wrapped in green and red scarves bobbed past him on the narrow walk. “Merry Christmas!” said they, raising their hats or saluting, though he did not recognize any of them. Scrooge fingered the brim of his tall hat and smiled as best he could, his cracked face aching from having crowded thirty years of smiling into a single day. What the ghosts had demonstrated to him the previous evening appeared to be decidedly true: There was joy, perhaps even a certain profit, to be collected from being pleasant, from being charitable to others.

“Good morning, Mr. Borrowdale. Nippy out, isn’t it? You’re in early, I see.” Little Miss Mac-Arthur spoke with her usual brisk brightness, which failed to conceal both envy and dislike. She was unpacking a consignment of stout Teddy bears in the stockroom behind the toy department at Barnum and Thrums, the London store. “Smart as ever, Mr. Borrowdale,” she added, jealously.

I laid down my curly-brimmed bowler hat and cane and took off my British warm overcoat. I don’t mind admitting that I do take pains to dress as well as I can, and for some reason it seems to infuriate the Miss MacArthurs of the world.

She prattled on. “Nice looking, these Teddies, don’t you think? Very reasonable, too. Made in Hong Kong, that’ll be why. I think I’ll take one for my sister’s youngest.”

The toy department at Barnum’s has little to recommend it to anyone over the age of twelve, and normally it is tranquil and little populated. However, at Christmastime it briefly becomes the bustling heart of the great shop, and also provides useful vacation jobs for chaps like me who wish to earn some money during the weeks before the university term begins in January. Gone, I fear, are the days when undergraduates were the gilded youth of England. We all have to work our passages these days, and sometimes it means selling toys.

One advantage of the job is that employees — even temporaries like me — are allowed to buy goods at a considerable discount, which helps with the Christmas gift problem. As a matter of fact, I had already decided to buy a Teddy bear for one of my nephews, and I mentioned as much.

“Well, you’d better take it right away,” remarked Miss MacArthur, “because I heard Mr. Harrington say he was taking two, and I think Disaster has her eye on one.” Disaster was the unfortunate but inevitable nickname of Miss Aster, who had been with the store for thirty-one years but still made mistakes with her stock-book. I felt sorry for the old girl. I had overheard a conversation between Mr. Harrington, the department manager, and Mr. Andrews, the deputy store manager, and so I knew — but Disaster didn’t — that she would be getting the sack as soon as the Christmas rush was over.

Meanwhile, Miss MacArthur was arranging the bears on a shelf. They sat there in grinning rows, brown and woolly, with boot-button eyes and red ribbons round their necks.

It was then that Father Christmas came in. He’d been in the cloakroom changing into his costume — white beard, red nose, and all. His name was Bert Denman. He was a cheery soul who got on well with the kids, and he’d had the Father Christmas job at Barnum’s each of the three years I’d been selling there. Now he was carrying his sack, which he filled every morning from the cheap items in the stockroom. A visit to Father Christmas cost 50 pence, so naturally the gift that was fished out of the sack couldn’t be worth more than 20 pence. However, to my surprise, he went straight over to the row of Teddy bears and picked one off the shelf. For some reason, he chose the only one with a blue instead of a red ribbon.

Miss MacArthur was on to him in an instant. “What d’you think you’re doing, Mr. Denman? Those Teddies aren’t in your line at all — much too dear. One pound ninety, they are.”

Father Christmas did not answer, and suddenly I realized that it was not Bert Denman under the red robe. “Wait a minute,” I said. “Who are you? You’re not our Father Christmas.”

He turned to face me, the Teddy bear in his hand. “That’s all right,” he said. “Charlie Burrows is my name. I live in the same lodging house with Bert Denman. He was taken poorly last night, and I’m standing in for him.”

“Well,” said Miss MacArthur. “How very odd. Does Mr. Harrington know?”

“Or course he does,” said Father Christmas.

As if on cue, Mr. Harrington himself came hurrying into the stockroom. He always hurried everywhere, preceded by his small black mustache. He said, “Ah, there you are, Burrows. Fill up your sack, and I’ll explain the job to you. Denman told you about the Teddy bear, did he?”

“Yes, Mr. Harrington.”

“Father Christmas can’t give away an expensive bear like that, Mr. Harrington,” Miss MacArthur objected.

“Now, now, Miss MacArthur, it’s all arranged,” said Harrington fussily. “A customer came in yesterday and made a special request that Father Christmas should give his small daughter a Teddy bear this morning. I knew this consignment was due on the shelves, so I promised him one. It’s been paid for. The important thing, Burrows, is to remember the child’s name. It’s... er... I have it written down somewhere.”

“Annabel Whitworth,” said Father Christmas. “Four years old, fair hair, will be brought in by her mother.”

“I see that Denman briefed you well,” said Mr. Harrington, with an icy smile. “Well, now, I’ll collect two bears for myself — one for my son and one for my neighbor’s boy — and then I’ll show you the booth.”

Miss Aster arrived just then. She and Miss MacArthur finished uncrating the bears and took one out to put on display next to a female doll that, among other endearing traits, actually wet its diaper. Mr. Harrington led our surrogate Father Christmas to his small canvas booth, and the rest of us busied and braced ourselves for the moment when the great glass doors opened and the floodtide was let in. The toy department of a big store on December 23 is no place for weaklings.

It is curious that even such an apparently random stream of humanity as Christmas shoppers displays a pattern of behavior. The earliest arrivals in the toy department are office workers on their way to their jobs. The actual toddlers, bent on an interview with Father Christmas, do not appear until their mothers have had time to wash up breakfast, have a bit of a go around the house, and catch the bus from Kensington or the tube from Uxbridge.

On that particular morning it was just twenty-eight minutes past ten when I saw Disaster, who was sitting in a decorated cash desk labeled “The Elfin Grove,” take 50 pence from the first parent to usher her child into Santa’s booth. For about two minutes the mother waited, chatting quietly with Disaster. Then a loudly wailing infant emerged from the booth.

The mother snatched her up, and — with that sixth sense that mothers everywhere seem to develop — interpreted the incoherent screams. “She says that Father Christmas won’t talk to her. She says he’s asleep.”

It was clearly an emergency, even if a minor one, and Disaster was already showing signs of panic. I excused myself from my customer — a middle-aged gentleman who was playing with an electric train set — and went over to see what I could do. By then, the mother was indignant.

“Fifty pence and the old man sound asleep and drunk as like as not, and at half-past ten in the morning. Disgraceful, I call it. And here’s poor little Poppy what had been looking forward to—”

I rushed into Father Christmas’s booth. The man who called himself Charlie Burrows was slumped forward in his chair, looking for all the world as if he were asleep; but when I shook him, his head lolled horribly, and it was obvious that he was more than sleeping. The red robe concealed the blood until it made my hand sticky. Father Christmas had been stabbed in the back, and he was certainly dead.

I acted as fast as I could. First of all, I told Disaster to put up the CLOSED sign outside Santa’s booth. Then I smoothed down Poppy’s mother by leading her to a counter where I told her she could select any toy up to one pound and have it free. Under pretext of keeping records, I got her name and address. Finally I cornered Mr. Harrington in his office and told him the news.

I thought he was going to faint. “Dead? Murdered? Are you sure, Mr. Borrowdale?”

“Quite sure, I’m afraid. You’d better telephone the police, Mr. Harrington.”

“The police! In Barnum’s! What a terrible thing! I’ll telephone the deputy store manager first and then the police.”

As a matter of fact, the police were surprisingly quick and discreet. A plainclothes detective superintendent and his sergeant, a photographer, and the police doctor arrived, not in a posse, but as individuals, unnoticed among the crowd. They assembled in the booth, where the deputy manager — Mr. Andrews — and Mr. Harrington and I were waiting for them.

The superintendent introduced himself — his name was Armitage — and inspected the body with an expression of cold fury on his face that I couldn’t quite understand, although the reason became clear later. He said very little. After some tedious formalities Armitage indicated that the body might be removed.

“What’s the least conspicuous way to do it?” he asked.

“You can take him out through the back of the booth,” I said. “The canvas overlaps right behind Santa’s chair. The door to the staff quarters and the stockroom is just opposite, and from there you can take the service lift to the goods entrance in the mews.”

The doctor and the photographer between them carried off their grim burden on a collapsible stretcher, and Superintendent Armitage began asking questions about the arrangements in the Father Christmas booth. I did the explaining, since Mr. Harrington seemed to be verging on hysteria.

Customers paid their 50 pence to Disaster in the Elfin Grove, and then the child — usually alone — was propelled through the door of the booth and into the presence of Father Christmas, who sat in his canvas-backed director’s chair on a small dais facing the entrance, with his sack of toys beside him. The child climbed onto his knee, whispered its Christmas wishes, and was rewarded with a few friendly words and a small gift from Santa’s sack.

What was not obvious to the clientele was the back entrance to the booth, which enabled Father Christmas to slip in and out unobserved, He usually had his coffee break at about 11:15, unless there was a very heavy rush of business. Disaster would pick a moment when custom seemed slow, put up the CLOSED NOTICE, and inform Bert that he could take a few minutes off. When he returned, he pressed a button by his chair that rang a buzzer in the cashier’s booth. Down would come the notice, and Santa was in business again.

Before Superintendent Armitage could comment on my remarks, Mr. Harrington broke into a sort of despairing wait, “It must have been one of the customers!” he cried.

“I don’t think so, sir,” said Armitage. “This is an inside job. He was stabbed in the back with a long thin blade of some sort. The murderer must have opened the back flap and stabbed him clean through the canvas back of his chair. That must have been someone who knew the exact arrangements. The murderer then used the back way to enter the booth—”

“I don’t see how you can say that!” Harrington’s voice was rising dangerously. “If the man was stabbed from outside, what makes you think anybody came into the booth?”

“I’ll explain that in a minute, sir.”

Ignoring Armitage, Harrington went on. “In any case, he wasn’t our regular Father Christmas! None of us had ever seen him before. Why on earth would anybody kill a man that nobody knew?”

Armitage and the deputy manager exchanged glances. Then Armitage said, “I knew him, sir. Very well. Charlie Burrows was one of our finest plainclothes narcotics officers.”

Mr. Harrington had gone green. “You mean — he was a policeman?”

“Exactly, sir. I’d better explain. A little time ago we got a tipoff from an informer that an important consignment of high-grade heroin was to be smuggled in from Hong Kong in a consignment of Christmas toys. Teddy bears, in fact. The drug was to be in the Barnum and Thrums carton, hidden inside a particular Teddy bear, which would be distinguished by having a blue ribbon around its neck instead of a red one.”

“Surely,” I said, “you couldn’t get what you call an important consignment inside one Teddy bear, even a big one.”

Armitage sighed. “Shows you aren’t familiar with the drug scene, sir,” he said. “Why, half a pound of pure high-grade heroin is worth a fortune on the streets.”

With a show of bluster Harrington said, “If you knew this, Superintendent, why didn’t you simply intercept the consignment and confiscate the drug? Look at the trouble that’s been—”

Armitage interrupted him. “If you’d just hear me out, sir. What I’ve told you was the sum total of our information. We didn’t know who in Barnum’s was going to pick up the heroin, or how or where it was to be disposed of. We’re more interested in getting the people — the pushers — than confiscating the cargo. So I had a word with Mr. Andrews here, and he kindly agreed to let Charlie take on the Father Christmas job. And Charlie set a little trap. Unfortunately, he paid for it with his life.” There was an awkward silence.

He went on. “Mr. Andrews told us that the consignment had arrived and was to be unpacked today. We know that staff get first pick, as it were, at new stock, and we were naturally interested to see who would select the bear with the blue ribbon. It was Charlie’s own idea to concoct a story about a special present for a little girl—”

“You mean, that wasn’t true?” Harrington was outraged. “But I spoke to the customer myself!”

“Yes, sir. That’s to say, you spoke to another of our people, who was posing as the little girl’s father.”

“You’re very thorough,” Harrington said.

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. Well, as I was saying, Charlie made a point of selecting the bear with the blue ribbon and taking it off in his sack. He knew that whoever was picking up the drop would have to come and get it — or try to. You see, if we’d just allowed one of the staff to select it, that person could simply have said that it was pure coincidence — blue was such a pretty color. Difficult to prove criminal knowledge. You understand?”

Nobody said anything. With quite a sense of dramatic effect Armitage reached down into Santa’s sack and pulled out a Teddy bear. It had a blue ribbon round its neck.

In a voice tense with strain Mr. Andrews said, “So the murderer didn’t get away with the heroin. I thought you said—”

Superintendent Armitage produced a knife from his pocket. “We’ll see,” he said. “With your permission, I’m going to open this bear.”

“Of course.”

The knife ripped through the nobbly brown fabric, and a lot of stuffing fell out. Nothing else. Armitage made a good job of it. By the time he had finished, the bear was in shreds: and nothing had emerged from its interior except kapok.

Armitage surveyed the wreckage with a sort of bleak satisfaction. Suddenly brisk, he said, “Now. Which staff members took bears from the stockroom this morning?”

“I did,” I said at once.

“Anybody else?”

There was a silence. I said, “I believe you took two, didn’t you, Mr. Harrington?”

“I... em... yes, now that you mention it.”

“Miss MacArthur took one,” I said. “It was she who unpacked the carton. She said that Dis — Miss Aster — was going to take one.”

“I see.” Armitage was making notes. “I presume you each signed for your purchases, and that the bears are now with your things in the staff cloakroom.” Without waiting for an answer he turned to me. “How many of these people saw Burrows select the bear with the blue ribbon?”

“All of us,” I said. “Isn’t that so, Mr. Harrington?”

Harrington just nodded. He looked sick.

“Well, then,” said Armitage, “I shall have to inspect all the bears that you people removed from the stockroom.”

There was an element of black humor in the parade of the Teddies, with their inane grins and knowing, beady eyes: but as one after the other was dismembered, nothing more sensational was revealed than a growing pile of kapok. The next step was to check the stockbook numbers — and sure enough, one bear was missing.

It was actually Armitage’s Sergeant who found it. It had been ripped open and shoved behind a pile of boxes in the stockroom in a hasty attempt at concealment. There was no ribbon round its neck, and it was constructed very differently from the others. The kapok merely served as a thin layer of stuffing between the fabric skin and a spherical womb of pink plastic in the toy’s center. This plastic had been cut open and was empty. It was abundantly clear what it must have contained.

“Well,” said the Superintendent, “it’s obvious what happened. The murderer stabbed Burrows, slipped into the booth, and substituted an innocent Teddy bear for the loaded one, at the same time changing the neck ribbon, But he — or she — didn’t dare try walking out of the store with the bear, not after a murder. So, before Charlie’s body was found, the murderer dismembered the bear, took out the heroin, and hid it.” He sighed again. “I’m afraid this means a body search. I’ll call the Yard for a police matron for the ladies.”

It was all highly undignified and tedious, and poor old Disaster nearly had a seizure, despite the fact that the police matron seemed a thoroughly nice and kind woman. When it was all over, however, and our persons and clothing had been practically turned inside out, still nothing had been found. The four of us were required to wait in the staff restroom while exhaustive searches were made for both the heroin and the weapon.

Disaster was in tears, Miss MacArthur was loudly indignant and threatened to sue the police for false arrest, and Mr. Harrington developed what he called a nervous stomach, on account, he said, of the way the toy department was being left understaffed and unsupervised on one of the busiest days of the year.

At long last Superintendent Armitage came in. He said, “Nothing. Abso-bloody-lutely nothing. Well, I can’t keep you people here indefinitely. I suggest you all go out and get yourselves some lunch.” He sounded very tired and cross and almost human.

With considerable relief we prepared to leave the staffroom. Only Mr. Harrington announced that he felt too ill to eat anything, and that he would remain in the department. The Misses MacArthur and Aster left together. I put on my coat and took the escalator down to the ground floor, among the burdened, chattering crowd.

I was out in the brisk air of the street when I heard Armitage’s voice behind me.

“Just one moment, if you please, Mr. Borrow-dale.”

I turned. “Yes, Superintendent. Can I help you?”

“You’re up at the university, aren’t you, sir? Just taken a temporary job at Barnum’s for the vacation?”

“That’s right.”

“Do quite a bit of fencing, don’t you?”

He had my cane out of my hand before I knew what was happening. The sergeant, an extraordinarily tough and unattractive character, showed surprising dexterity and speed in getting an arm grip on me. Armitage had unscrewed the top of the cane, and was whistling in a quiet, appreciative manner. “Very nice. Very nice little sword stick. Something like a stilletto. I don’t suppose Charlie felt a thing.”

“Now, look here,” I said. “You can’t make insinuations like that. Just because I’m known as a bit of dandy, and carry a sword stick, that’s no reason—”

“A dandy, eh?” said Armitage thoughtfully. He looked me up and down in a curious manner, as if he thought something was missing.

It was at that moment that Miss MacArthur suddenly appeared round the corner of the building.

“Oh, Mr. Borrowdale, look what I found! Lying down in the mews by the goods entrance! It must have fallen out of the staffroom window! Lucky I’ve got sharp eyes — it was behind a rubbish bin, I might easily have missed it!” And she handed me my bowler hat.

That is to say, she would have done if Armitage hadn’t intercepted it. It didn’t take him more than five seconds to find the packages of white powder hidden between the hard shell of the hat and the oiled-silk lining.

Armitage said, “So you were going to peddle this stuff to young men and women at the university, were you? Charming, I must say. Now you can come back to the Yard and tell us all about your employers — if you want a chance at saving your own neck, that is.”

Miss MacArthur was goggling at me. “Oh, Mr. Borrowdale!” she squeaked. “Have I gone and done something wrong?”

I never did like Miss MacArthur.