“No, I’ll deal with it. Though God knows why I should have to. You just get these people out of my store before I return. I’ll talk to you later.”
An uneasy silence followed the slamming of the door behind Mr. Stanton Wakeforth. Parsons looked apologetically at Chantek and the now abruptly sobered Santa.
“You had better come to my office straight away. I’ll make your money up to the end of the week. I’m sorry, but that’s the best I can do.”
Simon attempted a final appeal.
“Couldn’t you get him to reconsider?” he asked hopefully. “Perhaps when he’s cooled down a bit.”
Parsons sighed, and his regret seemed genuine.
“There is no chance of that, I’m afraid. Mr. Wakeforth doesn’t cool down. He’s always like that, and this has been one of those days when nothing has been right for him. I have to do what he tells me. Would you come this way, please?”
He led the dispirited trio out of the rest room, and they filed without speaking up to his office on the top floor and waited while he contacted the accounts department and arranged for the cards and wages to be sent up.
“Tida apa,” the Saint said to Chantek consolingly. “There must be plenty of other jobs going at this time of year. And if I can’t find ’em for you, I’ll have you both myself, as my personal Santas. I always wanted to feel like the Man Who Has Everything.”
Her eyes had sparkled with happy surprise at the first phrase he used.
“First, you will have to tell me how you learned to speak Malay.”
“It’s a long story,” said the Saint wickedly, “and may involve several evenings.”
Parsons sat behind his desk gazing awkwardly into space. The man called Ted sat, head down, staring at the carpet. Chantek stood looking out of the window over the snow-brushed rooftops. The Saint eyed the safe in the corner and considered whether the almighty Mr. Stanton Wakeforth should be taught a lesson where it would hurt him most — in his pocket.
All four stopped their meditations as a commotion erupted in the outer office, and turned as the door was thrown back and a man in brown overalls staggered in.
“Murder!” he panted. “He’s dead. I saw it!”
“What on earth are you blabbering about?” the manager demanded.
“I tell you, I saw it,” the porter repeated.
“Who’s been murdered?” Parsons asked sharply. “You’re not making sense, man.”
The porter shook himself as he fought to control his shock and regain his breath.
“Mr. Wakeforth, sir. He’s been shot. Murdered! I saw it.”
“Where?” The Saint’s voice sliced through the stillness that followed.
The porter swung around and noticed him for the first time.
“In the stock room. Just now. I saw it!”
“Good, then you can show me. Come along.”
Simon grasped the man by the arm and hustled him back to the door. He turned to the manager as he reached it. “Don’t sit there gawping, phone the police.”
In the corridor the porter suddenly stopped and began to struggle against the Saint’s grip.
“I’m not going back down there!”
“Yes, you are,” Simon told him firmly. “Don’t worry, I’ll hold your hand. Pull yourself together. Where is the stock room?”
The authority in his voice was not to be denied, and the porter stopped resisting and managed to get a hold on himself.
“Ground floor at the rear. I ran up the stairs, but there’s a service lift.”
The elevator was at the end of the passage, and Simon hustled the porter to it and bundled him inside.
The iron cage descended with infuriating slowness. The lower they went, the more the porter’s agitation increased, and when they finally stopped he pressed himself into a corner and refused to budge. The Saint let him stay where he was.
There was no need to search for the body. Stanton Wakeforth lay spread-eagled on the floor a few feet from the lift. There was a neat round hole in the breast pocket of his jacket where the bullet had entered, and a crimson stain that oozed and spread from beneath him.
The Saint knelt beside the body, and his experienced eye told him all he needed to know. The scorch marks around the wound showed that the gun had been fired at point-blank range, and death had come so quickly that the magnate’s features still seemed to be contorted in anger rather than fear.
Clutched in the left hand was a scrap of paper, and Simon had to open the fingers to extract it. At first he thought it was gift-wrapping paper, and then its real purpose dawned. It was part of a Christmas cracker.
The stock room covered a large area, and nearly all of it was stacked to the ceiling with crates and boxes. On one side was an open loading bay leading to a service road which ran behind the store. The Saint knew it was no use now to hunt for the murderer. It must have been simple for him to get in and hide among the crates until Wakeforth arrived, and just as easy to get away again afterwards without being seen.
He walked back to the lift and pressed the top-floor button.
“Tell me what happened,” he said to the porter as the lift slowly rose.
“I was checking the inventory of the last delivery when I see Mr. Wakeforth come out of the lift. Then this figure steps out in front of him and holds out a cracker. Mr. Wakeforth tries to pull it away from him, and then there’s a bang and he’s dead. Shot!”
“What did this man look like?”
The porter could not stop trembling. His fingers dug into the Saint’s shoulder, and his voice was little above a croak.
“I told you, I saw it. It wasn’t a man. It was Father Christmas!”
4
What the Chronicle’s front-page headline lacked in syntax it made up for in dramatic effect.
Simon Templar propped the paper against the coffeepot and read the story during breakfast.
The killing of Sir Basil Lazentree had happened too late for the following morning’s papers, but the murder of Stanton Wakeforth could not have been better timed if the editor had committed it himself.
Two murders within twenty-four hours and half a mile of each other, both of important people, both killed by a man disguised as Father Christmas, and both with Simon Templar in the vicinity: the story had everything any news-hungry editor ever dreamt of.
There was an account of each murder plus potted biographies of both victims. Everyone but the cat appeared to have been interviewed, and there was a spread of pictures of every person and place in any way involved.
The Saint reviewed his own notices critically. For once the quotes were accurate, but he thought it was time the press took a new portrait for their files. The picture of Nutkin, however, was an accurate likeness, the photographer having managed to catch him looking both arrogant and angry as he shouldered his way through the throng of reporters outside the department store.
There are certain moments which transcend description, when words become not only superfluous but positively obstructive to a clear understanding of the emotions they seek to describe. The look on Superintendent Nutkin’s face when he marched importantly into the manager’s office and found himself confronted by the Saint had been one such moment. It was like the expression of a monarch who, after walking grandly up the aisle to be crowned, finds someone already sitting on his throne.
“What are you doing here?” he almost shouted.
“Waiting for you, like everybody else, Mr. Nuthatch—”
“Nutkin!”
“—and before you go out on a limb and I have to saw it off,” Simon continued kindly, “we were all here together while Brother Wakeforth was being promoted to the Great Board Room in the sky. So let me warn you that anything you say may be taken down and used in evidence of probable paranoia.”