Did he imagine that a hush fell over the room when he entered? Was it just paranoia that told him everyone was watching him as he walked to the snack table and loaded a plate with cookies and Hershey"s Kisses? Bigelow wasn"t sure. But when he took a bite of a star-shaped cookie, the crunch seemed to echo through the room like thunder. The silence that followed was so profound he was almost afraid to chew.
He"d spotted Crowley and Jarry huddled together in a corner, and he was heading for that oasis of management-level camaraderie when Marcy walked to the center of the room with two large shopping bags.
"Well," she said, "now that everyone"s here, we may as well let the fun and games begin. So . . . we"re all just dying to find out who our Secret Santas are, right?"
There was a smattering of applause and one half-hearted "woo-woo," but Bigelow could barely hear it over the high-revving thump-thump of his heart.
"Great," Marcy said. "Because today"s the day all is revealed. I took the liberty of collecting the last Secret Santa gifts this morning." She raised up the bags in her hand, then set them on the floor. "I"ll just pick one out at random, and we"ll see who it"s for."
Bigelow"s blood pressure shot so high he felt like his head would explode like those screaming b.a.s.t.a.r.ds he"d just seen in the Scanners Anniversary Edition DVD.
Marcy pulled out the box he"d left on Sandberg"s desk the night before.
This can"t be happening, Bigelow thought. This can"t be happening!
By the time he"d accepted that it was happening, right in front of him, Marcy was reading the note attached to the box out loud-"For Alex, from your Secret Santa"-and walking the present to the other side of the room, where Sandberg had been chatting with McCoy and Starr.
"Wait," Bigelow tried to say, but his mouth was still full of cookie, and all that came out was a spray of moist crumbs.
He started to move toward Sandberg, but it was too late. By the time he got there, Marcy, McCoy and Starr were all staring in horror at the open box in Sandberg"s hands.
""This is what people get when they mess with me,"" Sandberg said, reading out the note taped to the inside lid of the box. ""Erik Bigelow.""
Other staff members crowded around, all of them quickly backing off with a loud "Ewwwww!" when they saw what Bigelow had stuffed into the package. The "Ewwww!"-ing grew even louder when the stench began to waft into the room.
Bantha was a very large dog, and the contents of the box were still reasonably fresh.
"That is sick, Bigelow," Starr said.
"What is it?" Crowley asked.
Starr told him in a single, blunt word. It hit Crowley like a slap, and his muscular neck tensed up tight.
"What is wrong with you, man?" he snapped at Bigelow.
"Wait," Bigelow said. "You don"t understand. Look at this."
He ran to the shopping bags in the middle of the room and began pulling out presents, tossing the ones he didn"t want over his shoulder. Some of the boxes made hard, ugly, shattering sounds when they landed, and voices were calling for Bigelow to stop, but he knew he had to act fast. He found what he was looking for at the very bottom of one of the bags.
"You think that was bad?" Bigelow grabbed the package with the HO! HO! HO! wrapping paper and held it aloft. "Well, look at this!"
He tore off the wrapping and clawed open the box underneath.
A Snickers bar fell out.
And a bag of Peanut M&Ms.
And a ten dollar Red Lobster gift card.
"What?" Bigelow screamed. "What is this c.r.a.p?"
"Well, Erik . . . ," replied a quiet, trembly female voice.
Bigelow turned to find a teary-eyed, frightened-looking Marcy huddling behind Sandberg.
"You"re always forgetting your lunch," she said.
And at last Bigelow knew who his Secret Santa really was. It was the person who could monitor his comings and goings better than anyone because her cubicle was right outside his office. The person who"d watched as his insecurities had pushed him to destroy anyone he thought could be a rival. The person who sat near his door and heard him tell Crowley what a waste Sandberg was. The person who"d heard him say the same things about everyone else he"d managed to get fired. The person who knew he stole people"s mail, because she was the one who brought it to his desk. The person who already had her own key to Sandberg"s office. The person who knew his neuroses well enough to find a way to exploit them. The person who had walked into his office with a hatful of paper slips that all had the same name written on them.
The person who had set him up.
He saw the hint of a smile behind the mask of fear she was wearing now, and he knew everything. But it was all too much to explain, so he didn"t try. Instead, he just howled like an angry monkey and lunged at Marcy.
He knew he wouldn"t make it, and he didn"t. Sandberg and Starr and McCoy stopped him. He flailed at them, spitting obscenities, until Crowley stepped up and ended the fight with one powerful punch from his little child-like fist.
Words and phrases floated in and out of Bigelow"s consciousness as he lay there amidst the gifts he"d scattered across the floor. "911." "Police." "Weird." "Klepto." "Grudge." "Obsession." "Sandberg." "Granola bars."
There were other things he didn"t hear, things no one was saying, though they bounced around inside his skull nonetheless. "Freak." "Fired." "Wal-Mart." And the sound of Marcy"s voice as she looked up into Sandberg"s eyes later that day, after Bigelow had been carted away.
"Merry Christmas, boss," she would say.
HUMBUG.
Scrooge was dead. There was no doubt whatever about that. Compared to his battered, shattered body, a doornail would have seemed positively rambunctious.
A doornail, after all, might be run over by a team of horses pulling a wagonload of fresh-cut Christmas trees and come away none the worse for wear. Put a frail old man to the same test, however, and he not only finds himself the worse for it, he finds himself extremely, irrefutably, irreversibly dead.
Or, to be more precise, he is found thus, as the only thing such an individual would be capable of finding himself is his eternal reward-and perhaps, as in the case of Ebenezer Scrooge, his lack of same.
Scrooge had not been a very good man. But he was, as has been so firmly established, a very dead man. And that made Inspector Bucket of the Detective Police a very curious man.
A few minutes before Scrooge was juiced beneath the wagon wheels like a shriveled grape, the detective had been heading home for his Christmas Eve supper, having just dropped off a matching pair of handcuffed jewelry thieves at E Division headquarters. He was debating whether or not to surprise the wife with a pre-Christmas present-the new collection of stories by the American master of the macabre Edgar Allan Poe-when he"d encountered Scrooge capering up and down the sidewalk talking to himself.
It was immediately apparent that this was no ordinary lunatic. Though out-of-doors in the chilly damp, the old man wore no topcoat, hat, gloves or scarf, appearing perfectly happy to cavort in the slush in a simple black business suit. His clothes were well-tailored and neat but years out of date, suggesting an owner with full pockets he was nevertheless reluctant to reach into to accommodate such a fickle thing as fashion. He also appeared to be a man of some renown, for people were stopping to stare in wide-eyed amazement and say, "Look at the old pinchpenny! Do you think his conscience has driven him mad at last?"
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 pa.s.sing 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 face-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 a.s.suredly 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 alt.i.tude 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.