The Christmas Egg Read online

  THE

  CHRISTMAS

  EGG

  A Seasonal Mystery

  MARY KELLY

  with an introduction by

  MARTIN EDWARDS

  This edition published 2019 by

  The British Library

  96 Euston Road

  London NW1 2DB

  The Christmas Egg was originally published in 1958 by Seeker and Warburg, London.

  Introduction © 2019 Martin Edwards

  The Christmas Egg © 1958 Mary Kelly

  Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 0 7123 5310 6

  eISBN 978 0 7123 6740 0

  Front cover image © Mary Evans Picture Library

  Typesetting and eBook by Tetragon, London

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Part One: December the Twenty-Second

  Part Two: December the Twenty-Third

  Part Three: Christmas Eve

  Introduction

  The Christmas Egg, first published in 1958, is an unconventional Christmas crime novel by an unconventional writer. Mary Kelly was one of the most talented British novelists to write crime fiction in the post-war era, coming to the fore just before P.D. James and Ruth Rendell appeared on the scene. Having risen rapidly to the heights, she abandoned the genre after publishing a mere ten books over a span of eighteen years. Her disappearance from the scene was as mysterious as it was complete; she did not publish a novel after 1974, even though she lived until 2017.

  This was her third book. Like its predecessors, A Cold Coming and Dead Man’s Riddle, it featured Detective Chief Inspector Brett Nightingale. In the run-up to Christmas, he is confronted by the puzzle of the death of the elderly Princess Olga Karukhina, who had fled her native Russia in the wake of the Revolution. But this is not an elaborate whodunit in the tradition of Agatha Christie or Dorothy L. Sayers. Nor is it a police procedural novel of the kind that John Creasey had popularised in the 1950s. Kelly’s principal focus is on the study of character and on the idiosyncrasies of British society.

  The idea for the story came to her after she was sent, in error, a set of books about Russia to review. The books were meant to be sent to Marie-Noelle Kelly, and this prompted Mary Kelly to read the work of her not-quite-namesake. This in turn led her to attend an auction of Faberge eggs. Her knowledge of Islington, an important setting in the story, came from evening walks in the neighbourhood after she and her husband had visited the opera at Sadlers Wells.

  When, eight years after its original appearance, the novel was finally published in the US, the eminent American critic Anthony Boucher lauded it in his column in the New York Times. Noting that Nightingale was an amateur tenor, he described him as an “unusually attractive” character. For Boucher, the book was “fascinating as a stage in the development of an important writer, and a pleasing entertainment in its own right.” Kirkus Reviews also approved the novel, pointing out that the story involved “more pursuit than procedure”, and saying it was “easy to read, fast to follow, with no remission of interest”.

  Mary Kelly’s love of music is evident in much of her fiction, including The Christmas Egg. She was an enthusiastic singer, a mezzo-soprano with an extensive knowledge of lieder, capable of singing Schubert’s song cycle from memory. Brett Nightingale’s wife Christina was an opera singer, and Mary gained insights into the life and work of professional singers from Monica Sinclair, a member of the Covent Garden Opera Company who was Sir Thomas Beecham’s preferred choice as contralto. Critics who shared Kelly’s devotion to opera, and derived particular pleasure from her work, included two notable commentators usually associated with the classic whodunit rather than the psychological crime novel, namely Boucher and the composer Bruce Montgomery, better known as the detective novelist and Sunday Times reviewer Edmund Crispin.

  The Christmas Egg consolidated Kelly’s developing reputation as a quirky, intelligent crime novelist, but she was never interested in following fashion or working to a template. Later, in an excess of modesty that seems typical of her, she would describe the three Nightingale books as “sins of my youth”. She wrote a novel without Nightingale, Take Her up Tenderly, which was rejected and never published. Her next book, which appeared in 1961, was very different, and it heralded a breakthrough in her literary career.

  The Spoilt Kill was set in the Staffordshire Potteries, and had a workplace setting as memorable as it was unusual. The protagonist was an enquiry agent called Hedley Nicholson, but he was as unlike (say) Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe as Nightingale was unlike Freeman Wills Crofts’ Inspector French or Ngaio Marsh’s Inspector Roderick Alleyn. The book was critically acclaimed and won the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger for the best crime novel of the year, which was presented to her by Sir Compton Mackenzie. Given that in winning the prize, Kelly’s book edged out John Le Carre’s Call for the Dead, which introduced the now legendary George Smiley, the scale of her achievement is clear. She was promptly elected to membership of the prestigious Detection Club at the age of thirty-four; later, she became the Club’s Secretary.

  In reviewing The Christmas Egg, Boucher expressed the hope that Nightingale would return. What he (like almost everyone else) failed to realise is that, in a very oblique passage in The Spoilt Kill, Kelly had effectively killed off her first series detective in a car crash. Nicholson reappeared in her next novel, but he too was quickly abandoned. After that, she concentrated on writing stand-alone novels, and although her style was too under-stated for her ever to achieve bestseller status, she retained a devoted coterie of admirers. Edmund Crispin was among them, enthusing over Write on Both Sides of the Paper (1969): “her insights into human behaviour are tethered, wonderfully effectively, to the availability of spending money and the frequency of buses. . . Such conscientiousness may sound dull. In fact, however, it is all in a flight with the gentle, witty, profound acuity with which her characters are treated.”

  Yet there was something wilful, as well as something admirable, about the way that, throughout her career as a novelist, Mary Kelly defied the conventions and commercial imperatives that guide the fortunes of almost all writers. Her publishers, not surprisingly, began to despair of her. So did some critics. Even her admirers admitted to some frustration.

  An example was H.R.F. Keating, who opened an essay about her books Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers as follows: “One of the best contemporary British crime writers, but: such must be the verdict on Mary Kelly.” Keating regretted the fact that she published so infrequently, and felt that she skimped sometimes on plotting, but emphasised that “there is enormous pleasure to be got from her books. . . what propels the reader through the pages is. . . the sheer excellence of the writing. . . from her very first sentence Mary Kelly observes so meticulously, describes so exactly and economically. Hers is a never-blinking eye.”

  Mary Theresa Coolican was born in London on 28 December 1927. She was educated at a convent and at Edinburgh University, where she met her future husband, Denis Kelly (to whom I am indebted for sharing his loving and fascinating memories of her). After marriage and graduation, she worked as an auxiliary nurse and, like Denis, as a teacher; her first permanent post was as a teacher of Latin and English at the Convent of the Handmaids of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Beckenham.

  She enjoyed detective fiction, including the novels of Michael Innes and Dorothy L. Sayers, and the clear structure of the classic genre appealed to her; she often likened the “Golden Age of Murder” between the wars to the era of sonnets and sonneteers. At one point, her publisher promoted her as “the new Dorothy L. Sayers”, but this was wide of the mark. Mary Kelly’s writing was nothi
ng like Sayers’, far less Christie’s. Satisfaction with the plots of her books always eluded her.

  For a novelist with such gifts and potential, That Girl in the Alley (1974) marked a low-key and anti-climactic end to her career as a published novelist; thereafter just one short story appeared, in an anthology in 1976. She decided to set her next book in Prague, and researched the manufacturing of cellos for the background. Unfortunately, she felt dissatisfied with the new novel, and although she kept working at it, off and on, over several years, she never finished it.

  Mary Kelly enjoyed socialising with fellow crime writers; her friends included such disparate characters as Patricia Highsmith, Anthony Berkeley, William Haggard, Josephine Bell, John Trench, Joan Aiken, and Michael Gilbert. At one point, when Michael Innes had lost interest in the Detection Club, she persuaded him to re-engage. But she became deaf relatively early in life, and as time passed she lost touch with her colleagues and the genre.

  Instead, she pursued other interests. She and Denis were keen botanists, and she enjoyed decorating and gardening. They started renovating houses, selling up and starting all over again, before eventually settling in Bath. In her seventies, she decided to write another book. The inspiration was the nursery rhyme “Ding dong bell”. The story was to concern a drowning in a well in Surrey, and was meant to be slyly comic. Regrettably, she did not finish it before illness intervened.

  As a writer, Mary Kelly was one of a kind. It’s clear from reading her work, including The Christmas Egg, that she admired courage and honesty, and these are qualities that she manifested in her personal life. There are no locked room mysteries in her novels, no elaborate puzzles or plot twists, and no eccentric crime-solving genius. But in their quiet, polished way, her best books deserve to be ranked as crime classics.

  Martin Edwards

  www.martinedwardsbooks.com

  Part One

  December the Twenty-Second

  PRINCESS OLGA KARUKHINA was lying on her back in her bed, a narrow iron contraption with a hard mattress. The khaki greatcoat and blankets which served for covers were scarcely raised by her bony old body. Her gray head rested on a grayer pillow, across which a sluggish winter fly crawled by stops and starts, attracted by the greasiness of the shawl wrapped around her shoulders. Half a century ago Princess Karukhina had slept in a carved bed inlaid with mother-of-pearl, between silk sheets changed daily, covered with down quilts and white furs. The walls of her lofty bedroom, sprayed with rosewater, had been set with Wedgwood jasper plaques. Whole pelts of Polar bears had lain like ice floes on the glassy floor. The dark cramped room where she now lay was both sleeping and living room. The walls were shoulder-rubbed; the single rug curled at the corners; there was a pervasive smell of crackers gone soft. The door of a closet hung askew above the wedge of newspaper that had held it shut; in its mirror a tilted reflection of window and sky was dimming to a London dusk.

  In the midst of squalor the Princess lay still, absolutely still. Even when the inquisitive fly crept into her ear she did not stir. She did not feel it, for she was dead.

  “I think we’ll stop here in the High Street,” said Detective Chief Inspector Brett Nightingale. “There wouldn’t be room to turn in Bright’s Row. Back to that van.”

  The police car reversed and came to a standstill. Nightingale stepped from the back into the northern end of Islington High Street. By night it appeared even more clearly a survival from the past. Its narrow curving course and pavements sloping to a central runnel recalled the village engulfed by the city. High flat-faced buildings crowded in on either side, their ground floors of tiny shops bedizened with dusty Christmas decorations; they belonged unmistakably to London, but to the last century. Nightingale looked at the tawny window, full of umbrellas, by which he stood. CANE REPAIRER was embossed in white letters across the glass. Two hundred yards away at the green, the village green, what remained of it, he remembered an undertaker’s, with coffins and brass urns illuminated in the window; and in suggestive proximity, a shop sheathed with blue-and-white enamel advertising that a long-dead proprietor had been “Agent for Female Pills, by the King’s Letters Patent, 1743.”

  Nightingale shrugged and shivered. His breath curled away from his nose in a vapor. If the cold weather tightened its grip, he reflected, they could have skating on the Thames.

  He put his hands in his overcoat pockets and walked away from the car and the cane repairer’s shop, turning off the patchily lit High Street into the cul-de-sac of Bright’s Row. The left side of the street was a fenced bombed space; the right side a short terrace of small, crouched houses, reminiscent social histories of the nineteenth century. Nightingale looked along the empty street, at the red and green and flowered squares of thinly curtained windows. At least the neighbors seemed to be minding their own business. Possibly, at the advent of the police, some of them were even removing evidence of their occupation. The quiet was almost blatantly discreet.

  Number thirteen was the last house but one. Lights shone behind drab curtains on both floors. The front door was open, and Nightingale stepped from the pavement over its threshold, bending his head to avoid the lintel. Nodding to the detective who rose from his seat on the bottom stair, Nightingale paused. From behind a slightly open door on his left issued the reasonable twang of Sergeant Beddoes’ voice. It flashed through Nightingale’s mind that Beddoes must have made an exceptionally sarcastic and immovable school prefect. Nightingale tapped on the door in a rhythm that was a sign between them; and after a couple of seconds Beddoes came out.

  “Didn’t ask you in,” he said quickly in a low voice, closing the door. “She’s rather upset just now. Mrs. Minelli, downstairs tenant. She made the call.”

  “Don’t apologize,” said Nightingale. “When did you arrive?”

  “Half-past seven.”

  “Where’s the Division?”

  “Three youths breaking into tobacconist’s, assault behind the Green Man, and a bad crash in the City Road. He’s undermanned, and he’d love to see you any time at the office.”

  Nightingale smiled. “All right. Shall we go up?”

  The stairs were covered with cracked linoleum and creaked as they climbed. Nightingale trod warily.

  “Do you know,” he said, without looking around, “I left as soon as I had the call and came straight here. Eighty percent of the lights were against us; I worked it out.”

  “Busy just now for slipping them,” Beddoes observed. “Good lecture?”

  “Sordid but intriguing. He’d just finished when they rang. I’m glad you were available to come in advance. If their guess proves right . . .” Nightingale paused for a moment.

  He had said, without thinking what he was saying, that he was pleased. It was true, but he hadn’t meant to give voice to the feeling, since the real reason for it was that working with anyone less coolly irreverent than Beddoes made him feel he was going to break out in a rash.

  “Who’s in this room?” he asked. “Photographer?”

  “And Cobb and Telfer.”

  Nightingale pushed open the door and went in. “Lord!” he exclaimed stopping.

  “East, West, home’s best,” said Beddoes. “Well, you can see . . .”

  “I can’t see a thing by this soupy light. Undrape the lamp.”

  Beddoes unpinned a piece of brown cloth which had been shading the glass bowl of gaslight.

  “That’s better,” said Nightingale. “Functionally. Esthetically, a good deal worse.” As he spoke, he moved across to the bed and looked down at it. “Has the doctor been here?”

  “The Division’s.”

  “How long dead?”

  “Seven or eight hours perhaps. No violence. Bed wasn’t disturbed.”

  “He didn’t alter the face? No, I see. Went out quite peacefully then. Still, the thing seems rather a stretched coincidence.”

  “Coincidence with what?”

  Nightingale raised his eyes to meet those of Beddoes—clear, pale blue, ambiguously innoc
ent and knowledgeable, with innocence predominant at the moment in the form of an inquiring stare.

  “I’ve been told,” said Nightingale, trying not to smile, “that the Division diagnosed theft, Hampstead class. That’s all. You’ve spoken to them; perhaps you’d let me have a few crumbs of information.”

  “Well first,” Beddoes said meekly, “it was just the Division’s sixth sense. Walked in the room, so I heard, stopped in his tracks, sniffed—figuratively—and spoke the oracular word. There was only the closet door hanging open, as it is now, otherwise all serene—apart from the body. He had a scout around and found that.” Beddoes pointed to a large wooden trunk which stood in the middle of the floor. “It was under the bed, the position’s chalked. You’ll see the dust is brushed off the top in two patches. Drooping blankets, perhaps. Lifted the trunk to avoid marking the floor, and rubbed the top clean.”

  Nightingale bent to examine the trunk more closely. “Very fine, isn’t it? Out of keeping with the room. All right to open it?”

  “Yes, but it’s empty; was when the Division unlocked it.”

  “Good Lord! Locked it after them, does he think?”

  Nightingale went to the table at the head of the bed. A sheet of paper, clinically white in the surrounding murk, had caught his eye when he first came in. On the paper lay a key and a length of dirty string.

  “Division found it around her neck,” Beddoes explained. “Mrs. Minelli says she was never without it. The loop was large enough to be slipped off.”

  “But it’s been untied recently, and only that once, I think. The kinks and clean patches of the old knot are quite distinct. Still, go on.”

  “While underlings soothed Mrs. M. with tea, Division nipped down and asked the people next door if they’d seen anyone or anything odd hanging around today. The old granddad at the end—he’s always at home—he saw a green van outside about ten-thirty this morning. Took it for a gas truck, swears he saw a North Thames Gas Board poster stuck on the side; but they could pinch that from a showroom. He didn’t notice anyone enter or leave, inattentive old bat. According to Mrs. M., there was no call for gas men to come here. She didn’t ask them, and if they’d been expected upstairs she’d have heard about it.”