Crime at Christmas by Jack Adrian (ed) Page A

thermos.
    'It's
Christmas Day,' she thought, as she drank hot coffee. 'And I'm spending it with
Don and the pup.'
    At that
moment her career grew misty, and the flame of her literary ambition dipped as
the future glowed with the warm firelight of home. In sudden elation, she held
up her flask and toasted the waxworks.
    'Merry
Christmas to you all! And many of them.'
    The faces
of the illuminated figures remained stolid, but she could almost swear that a
low murmur of acknowledgment seemed to swell from the rest of her company—invisible
in the darkness.
    She spun
out her meal to its limit, stifling her craving for a cigarette. Then, growing
bored, she counted the visible waxworks, and tried to memorise them.
    'Twenty-one,
twenty-two. . .Wolsey. Queen Elizabeth, Guy Fawkes, Napoleon ought to go on a
diet. Ever heard of eighteen days, Nap? Poor old Julius Caesar looks as though
he'd been sun-bathing on the Lido. He's about due for the melting-pot.'
    In her eyes
they were a second-rate set of dummies. The local theory that they could
terrorise a human being to death or madness seemed a fantastic notion.
    'No,'
concluded Sonia. 'There's really more in Poke's bright idea.'
    Again she
saw the sun-smitten office—for the big unshielded window faced south—with its
blistered paint, faded wall-paper, ink-stained desks, typewriters, telephones,
and a huge fire in the untidy grate. Young Wells smoked his big pipe, while the
subeditor—a ginger, pig-headed young man—laid down the law about the mystery
deaths.
    And then
she heard Poke's toneless dead-man's voice.
    'You may be
right about the spiritualist. He died of fright—but not of the waxworks. My
belief is that he established contact with the spirit of his dead friend, the
alderman, and so learned his real fate.'
    'What
fate?' snapped the sub-editor.
    'I believe
that the alderman was murdered,' replied Poke.
    He clung to
his point like a limpet in the face of all counter-arguments.
    'The
alderman had enemies,' he said. 'Nothing would be easier than for one of them
to lie in wait for him. In the present circumstances, I could commit a murder in the
Waxworks, and get away with it.'
    'How?'
demanded young Wells.
    'How? To
begin with, the Gallery is a one-man show and the porter's a bonehead. Anyone
could enter, and leave, the Gallery without his being wise to it.'
    'And the
murder?' plugged young Wells.
    With a
shudder Sonia remembered how Poke had glanced at his long knotted fingers.
    'If I could
not achieve my object by fright, which is the foolproof way,' he replied, 'I
should try a little artistic strangulation.'
    'And leave
your marks?'
    'Not
necessarily. Every expert knows that there are methods which show no trace.'
    Sonia
fumbled in her bag for the cigarettes which were not there.
    'Why did I
let myself think of that, just now?' she thought. 'Really too stupid.'
     



 
     
    As she
reproached herself for her morbidity, she broke off to stare at the door which
led to the Hall of Horrors.
    When she
had last looked at it, she could have sworn that it was tightly closed. . . But
now it gaped open by an inch.
    She looked
at the black cavity, recognizing the first test of her nerves. Later on, there
would be others. She realized the fact that, within her cool, practical self,
she carried a hysterical, neurotic passenger, who would doubtless give her a
lot of trouble through officious suggestions and uncomfortable reminders.
    She
resolved to give her second self a taste of her quality, and so quell her at
the start.
    'That door
was merely closed,' she remarked as, with a firm step, she crossed to the Hall
of Horrors and shut the door.
    One
o'clock. I begin to realize that there is more in this than I thought. Perhaps
I'm missing my sleep. But I'm keyed up and horribly expectant. Of what? I don't
know. But I seem to be waiting for—something. I find myself listening—listening.
The place is full of mysterious noises. I know they're my fancy. . .And things
appear to move. I can