Naughty: Nine Tales of Christmas Crime Page 8

  Bucket had just noticed the sign over a nearby warehouse door—"SCROOGE & MARLEY," it read—when the old man came scurrying up to him.

  "My dear sir!" he bellowed, spewing frothy spittle that fell as softly as snow on the detective's greatcoat. "How do you do? I hope you succeeded yesterday. It was very kind of you. A merry Christmas to you, sir!"

  "M-M-Mr. Scrooge?" Bucket stammered, unnerved that the old bedlamite thought him an acquaintance.

  Bucket had never met the man, but he knew him by (foul) reputation. Scrooge was a usurer, a lender of money at such fantastic rates that the interest compounded not so much annually, monthly or even weekly but by the second. The almshouses were packed wall-to-fetid-wall with his former clients ("prey," some called them), and many a London child would spend Christmas shivering on the street instead of nestled before the family fireplace because a penniless father had defaulted to the pitiless Scrooge.

  "Yes!" Scrooge crowed. "That is my name, and I fear it may not be pleasant to you. Allow me to ask your pardon. And will you have the goodness—" The old man pulled the detective closer and whispered in his ear. "—to accept a donation of two hundred pounds toward your most excellent charity."

  Bucket realized then that Scrooge's strange behavior wasn't born of natural dementia, but arose instead from the vapors of a Chinaman's pipe: The bitter smell of opium clung to the old man's clothes.

  "My dear sir, I don't know what to say to such munificence," Bucket said, peeling Scrooge's gnarled hand from his arm and giving it a hearty shake. Best to just placate the man and let him go his mad, merry way, the detective had decided. There was, after all, no law against putting poppy seed to whatever use one wished. And what's more, Bucket wanted to go home.

  "Don't say anything, please," Scrooge replied, delighted. "Come and see me. Will you come and see me?"

  "I will."

  "Thank you." Scrooge reached up to tip his top hat to Bucket. There was no such hat upon his head, but he tipped it all the same. "I am much obliged to you. I thank you fifty times. Bless you!"

  And with that Scrooge turned, took a few zigzagging steps away, and stopped before a stray cat that stared at him from the front steps of a poulterer's shop.

  "Is your master at home, my dear?" Scrooge asked the cat.

  "Meow."

  "Where is he, my love?"

  "Meow meow."

  "Thank you."

  And so on. There followed a brief conversation with a heap of dirty snow Scrooge addressed as "Fred" and a cart of roasted chestnuts he called "Bob," after which he christened a discarded sack of rotten potatoes "Tim" and proceeded to give it a piggy-back ride.

  When the old man dropped the potatoes and darted into the street to wish a very merry Christmas to a steaming pile of horse dung, Bucket finally decided to restrain the old man for his own good. But before the detective could take a step, the tree-wagon came rolling along—and Scrooge was rolled out as flat as a Christmas cookie.

  Scrooge's passing produced nary a tear from those who witnessed it. What it did yield—from Inspector Bucket, anyway—was a mixture of curiosity and guilt. The detective regretted not moving more quickly to restrain the old man, and he resolved to make amends for it by gathering up both Scrooge's body and the information needed for the inquest with as much alacrity and discretion as possible.

  A half-penny secured the services of a gawking street urchin as his runner, and Bucket dispatched the lad on two errands, both of vital importance: firstly, to take news of Scrooge's death to the nearest station house; secondly, to take Bucket's wife the news that he would be late for supper. He then recruited as navvies a group of laborers repairing gas pipes nearby, directing them to move Scrooge's freshly pulped body to the curb. The driver of the tree wagon hopped down and followed them, pleading his case to Bucket.

  "He ran right in front of me, he did! How was I to see him coming in this fog? It ain't my fault what happened!"

  "Now, now, my friend—calm down. It's plain you're not to blame," Bucket said soothingly. A pear-shaped man of five-and-forty years, he had a softness about him that usually put others at ease—when he wanted it to. "Nevertheless, I'll need to know your name."

  "My name? What for?"

  "For the inquest, of course."

  "Inquest? It was an accident, I tell you!"

  "That is for the inquest to determine," Bucket snapped, narrowing his eyes. Suddenly, he wasn't portly. He was imposing. "Your name."

  "Percy Thimblewitt, sir," the wagon driver mumbled, cringing.

  Bucket smiled, and once again he seemed about as threatening as a well-stuffed pillow. "Thank you, Mr. Thimblewitt. Now . . . did you know the deceased?"

  Thimblewitt said he did not, and once Bucket finished questioning the man (who had little to add beyond further proclamations of his freedom from fault), the detective moved on to the witnesses lingering nearby.

  "Came skipping out a few minutes before you happened along, Scrooge did," said a chestnut vendor who parked his cart near Scrooge's office each evening. "Had a 'merry Christmas' for everyone in sight. Every thing, too."

  "The gentleman was eccentric then?" Bucket said with a waggle of his bushy eyebrows that was meant to whisper, "An opium-eater, eh?"

  "Eccentric? No, sir. Sour as spoilt milk, he was, but he weren't balmy. Not until tonight."

  The other witnesses who knew Scrooge said the same: While the moneylender was notoriously understocked on scruples, there had been no indication that he was similarly short on marbles. No one picked up on Bucket's hints about a penchant for the pipe, either.

  Eventually, the clatter of hooves and the steadily growing growl of wagon wheels on stone announced the approach of a police ambulance. When the driver pulled the small, boxy vehicle to a stop before Bucket, the back doors swung open and two men clambered out.

  "Police Constable Thicke! Dr. Charhart!" Bucket said. "So good of you to join me tonight!"

  "Sir," Thicke said, putting on his regulation stovepipe hat and straightening his blue uniform jacket as best he could over a belly twice as prodigious as Bucket's (which was hardly insubstantial in its own right). He jerked his head at the doctor and waggled his eyebrows—a warning to Bucket to brace himself.

  "Good of me?" Charhart sneered. "For it to be 'good of me,' coming here would have to be voluntary!"

  Dr. Crispus Charhart was a tall, lanky man with a face so overgrown with gray whiskers it would be impossible to say whether he was smiling or frowning were it not a commonly known fact that he never smiled. Despite his wild beard and fiery eyes, however, the doctor had the regal, rigid bearing of a gentleman of property and position—though perhaps one for whom both were now but a memory.

  "As it so happens," he snarled, "I was dragged from my dinner simply so a man of medicine can affirm that the miserable old sod who was run over by a wagon before a dozen witnesses was killed by—gasp, shock, alarum!—being run over by a wagon. As long as I'm out here in the freezing cold, shall I write out certificates for everyone else present testifying to the fact that they are indeed still alive? It would be a task just as worthy of my time and talents, I tell you."

  "It would be a fine thing, I agree, if more people would schedule their dying with our convenience in mind," Bucket replied cheerfully. "Alas, we must accommodate those rude souls who allow themselves to be shepherded from this earth at the time of Another's choosing. Such is one's lot when one signs on with Scotland Yard—or accepts a coroner's warrant, Dr. Charhart."

  The doctor's eyes blazed as bright as the fire he no doubt longed to be warming himself by.

  "Fine—step aside and let me at the old villain!" he snapped, pushing past Bucket before the inspector had time to move. The old man's body was lying in the gutter nearby, and Charhart stomped over and knelt down beside it.

  "Do I take it that you knew the gentleman?" Bucket asked.

  "Scrooge was no gentleman," the doctor muttered, seeming to take bitter pleasure from turning the corpse over so it was fac
e-down in grimy, soupy slush. "He was a vulture, a scavenger, a carrion-eater. And if you're wondering why a true gentleman like myself would need the piddling extra pounds per annum a coroner's warrant offers, then look no further. Scrooge was nearly the ruin of me, and it is a fine Christmas gift indeed to find his ruin before me now. If I could take him home and hang him upon my tree, I tell you I would."

  Charhart roughly rolled the body in the icy sludge again, as if it were a cut of meat he was breading with flour. He stared down at Scrooge's dead face for a moment, not so much examining the body, it seemed, as pausing to appreciate it. Then he stood and began wiping his hands with a hankie he produced from his pocket.

  "I've seen enough," he announced. "I'm going home."

  "Surely you're not done already?" Bucket protested.

  "Most assuredly I am. Ebenezer Scrooge was trampled to death, and I intend to file a certificate to that effect the day after tomorrow. There remains nothing further to occupy me here."

  "Oh, but questions remain, Dr. Charhart, questions remain," Bucket clucked. "Mr. Scrooge was acting in a most peculiar manner before he was killed. He was euphoric—hysterically so. I spoke with him myself, and were there mistletoe about, I do believe he would have kissed me. I wonder if you detected anything that might account for such uncharacteristic jollity?"

  Charhart straightened to his full height, straining for the maximum altitude from which to peer down disdainfully upon the detective. "Exactly what sort of something are you suggesting?"

  "Well," Bucket said, and he cleared his throat and leaned in closer, continuing in a conspiratorial whisper. "When I talked to Mr. Scrooge, I noticed upon him the scent of opium smoke."

  Charhart responded with a mocking guffaw that he cast down upon Bucket like Zeus hurling a lightning bolt from Olympus.

  "You did not!" the doctor cried.

  "I did," Bucket responded calmly.

  "Stuff and nonsense!"

  "No, Dr. Charhart."

  "Rubbish!"

  "I don't believe so, Dr. Charhart."

  "Poppycock! Tommyrot! Fiddle-faddle! Flapdoodle!"

  Bucket waited patiently for Charhart to finish.

  "If you hadn't been so eager to dunk the body in gutter-wash like a scone in tea, you might have smelled it yourself," the detective said mildly.

  "Ebenezer Scrooge took but one pleasure from life, Bucket—the continual accumulation of wealth. To suggest anything to the contrary is purest humbug! Now if you are through insulting me, I will be on my way."

  Bucket held up a fat forefinger and pushed it out before him like a candle to light his way. "One final question, Dr. Charhart: As you knew Mr. Scrooge, perhaps you could tell me where I might find his family. After all, we can't leave his body here in the street."

  "You can throw it in the Thames for all I care!" Charhart thundered. "As for Scrooge's family, he never spoke of any save a single nephew—Fred Merriweather. A merchant of some sort. Resides in Pimlico, I believe. And that's the last thing I have to say upon the subject of Ebenezer Scrooge. I would wish you a good night, Bucket, except I don't see why I should wish for you what you've denied me."

  Charhart spun on his heel and began striding quickly into the fog.

  "Thank you, Dr. Charhart!" Bucket called after him. "A very happy Christmas to you and yours!"

  Charhart didn't look back.

  "Police Constable Dimm," Bucket said, turning to peer up at the ambulance driver. "Why don't you come down and help Police Constable Thicke get Mr. Scrooge stowed away? It seems you'll be paying a call in Pimlico!"

  Dimm, a congenitally lethargic man who could barely muster the necessary vigor needed to continue breathing, began climbing down with such painstaking sluggishness an observer would have been forced to watch him for quite some time to be certain he was moving at all. This suited Bucket just fine, actually, for he had other business to attend to while Dimm and Thicke tidied up the gutter.

  The detective walked towards the sign reading "SCROOGE & MARLEY" and made use of the doorway beneath it. The door was open wide, and gray tendrils of icy fog had swept into the office to curl themselves around desks and chairs like the clutching fingers of some colossal shade.

  Bucket sniffed at the air, hoping to reassure himself that the scent he'd caught on the old man's clothes had been no pipe-dream of his own. But it wouldn't have mattered now had Scrooge been smoking two opium pipes while burning incense and boiling cabbage. The odors would have been long dissipated by the flow of air from outside. Indeed, Scrooge's office now smelled like the nearby London streets—which is to say, like factory smoke, horses and the unwholesome effluvia of a million souls living in close quarter.

  His nose finding little to investigate, Bucket turned the job over to his eyes. After giving the rooms before them a thorough examination, they reported back thusly:

  —Scrooge employed a solitary clerk, and the old man made no exception from his stinginess to accommodate this underling's comfort. (An empty coal scuttle, overflowing work desk and high, rickety stool were shoved into one, cell-like corner.)

  —Scrooge was as parsimonious with his trust as he was with his coal. (The ledger books arrayed upon a shelf at the back of the office were shut tight with leather clasps and padlocks.)

  —Scrooge's tight fist squeezed its owner nearly as hard as it squeezed the rest of humanity. (Scrooge's own work area was only slightly less dismal than the clerk's, and the old man had conducted his affairs by candle light rather than part with the extra coins necessary for the purchase of lamp oil.)

  —Scrooge had been "burning the candle at both ends" at the very moment his sanity flickered out. (His aforementioned desk candles had melted completely, leaving tracks of yellow and brown wax slithering across the wood to pool around the edges of an open ledger.)

  —And finally, Scrooge had most definitely not been smoking opium on the premises. (There was no pipe in sight.)

  Aside from the streams of wax flowing across the desktop, Scrooge's office was a perfectly orderly (if exceptionally dark and dingy) place of business, and there was nothing to suggest it doubled as an opium den. Yet, while Bucket could be labeled agnostic on many another matter, his faith in his own senses never wavered. He was one of a new breed: a "detective." One who detects. And he had smelled opium on the old man.

  So when Dimm stepped inside to glumly announce that the body was ready for "home delivery," Bucket had an announcement of his own to make: He would be accompanying Dimm to the residence of Scrooge's nephew, Fred Merriweather.

  "A happy Christmas to you, Police Constable Thicke!" Bucket called out as the ambulance rolled away.

  "And to you and the missus, Inspector Bucket!" Thicke replied with a hearty wave. "And to you, too, Dimm!"

  "Oh, yes," Dimm grumbled. "What could be merrier than spending Christmas Eve playing hansom cab for a corpse?"

  "Cheer up, Police Constable Dimm! At least you won't spend the night walking a beat like poor Police Constable Thicke back there."

  Dimm would have rolled his eyes had he the energy to do so.

  "Sure you wouldn't rather ride inside, sir?" he muttered instead. "Warmer."

  Bucket shook his head. "From what I understand, the old gentleman would make more congenial company now than ever he did in life. Nevertheless, I prefer to surround myself with more, shall we say, animated companions." The detective paused to glance at Dimm, who sat beside him as hunched and still as a gargoyle, his only movement an occasional flick of the reins he held loosely in his limply hanging hands. "Not that I'm entirely certain you qualify as such, Police Constable Dimm. You seem so uncommonly torpid, even by your own languorous standards, I almost wonder if this ambulance carries two cadavers this evening."

  Astronomers training their telescopes upon the blue wool of Dimm's uniform tailcoat might have detected, had they been squinting fiercely enough, a slight tremor about the shoulders that would have entirely evaded the detection of the unaided human eye. This was a shrug.


  "Just . . . thinking," Dimm mumbled.

  "Ah-ha! There's your problem! Constables aren't paid to think—that's what inspectors are for. Just let your mind go blank and you'll feel better in no time, there's a good fellow."

  He gave Dimm a jovial swat on the back, certain he'd solved the younger man's problems—whatever they were. Yet something about Dimm's lugubrious manner made Bucket's forefinger twitch, as it did whenever there was an itch the detective felt compelled to scratch.

  After a moment of silence, Bucket scratched it.

  "Besides, what have you to think about, Police Constable Dimm?"

  Dimm finally showed signs of life, actually cringing when he heard Bucket's question. "No use hiding it, I suppose. It's common enough knowledge amongst the other P.C.s. The old man had me on the hook for a dozen guineas."

  "You owed money to Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge?"

  Dimm's chin moved an infinitesimal fraction of an inch closer to his chest—for Dimm, a vigorous nod. "It started out as just a trifle. I got into . . . well, a tight spot with a woman, and I needed a few extra bob to put things right."

  Bucket turned to stare at the ambulance driver, unable to disguise his astonishment. Not that Dimm had become entangled in a usurer's web, mind you. Bucket simply couldn't believe the man was capable of the exertion usually required to put oneself in "a tight spot with a woman."

  "I couldn't pay it all back on time—and once you fall behind with Scrooge, there's no hope of catching up again," Dimm continued miserably. "Now that the old blighter's dead, I'm at the mercy of whichever creditor takes over his business. Might be someone even worse than Scrooge himself."

  "Ho ho! That hardly seems possible," Bucket said, his voice more blithesome than his thoughts.

  Whoever took on the accounts of Scrooge & Marley would be within his rights to call in the firm's chits forthwith. Anyone unable to meet their obligations would land in the workhouse.

  "Take heart, Police Constable Dimm."

  Bucket clapped his companion on the back again, intending to cheer up his brother officer by pointing out the shining silver lining in the dark cloud above. After a moment's searching, however, Bucket realized there was no such lining to point to: The P.C. was buggered.