The First Lockdown Christmas Mystery (#2)
Last year, Simon Lee encouraged students and practitioners of the law to try writing a Christmas mystery short story We asked him to have a go himself. His story, set in lockdown last Christmas, is running in five daily parts this week. You can find part one here.
#2
Sure enough, Boxing Day began with an email from the Headteacher, Mrs Horde, with ‘Sad news’ as the subject title: ‘I am sorry to report that our deputy head, Mr Day, died suddenly at home yesterday. Many of you will know that Christmas Day was his birthday. He will be remembered fondly by those who enjoyed his productions of the annual nativity play. Please call the police on the number below if you have any information about his death or have had any interaction with Mr Day since the end of term. May he rest in peace.’ Each teacher called the hotline. Several called each other.
Was the theft or kidnapping of the Black Baby Jesus a crime? Was Mr Day’s death a murder? If yes to both, were the two crimes connected? It was, said the music teacher Carol Jones, a mystery. More than that, to Mrs Jones’s way of thinking, the mis-use of another clip, which should have been an out-take, was a disgrace. For, notwithstanding the death of the producer, the Boxing Day edition of this nativity play duly popped up on her school lap-top, beginning with another extract from the rehearsals, this time a discordant Zoom session.
Carol saw herself on screen, signalling to cut the cacophony: ‘Stop being a martyr, Stephanie! It’s not ‘Good King Wences last looked out’, it’s ‘Good King Wenceslas looked out’.
Her pupils looked sceptical. ‘That’s not how we sing it at home, Miss,’ sulked Stephanie.
‘And it’s not how we sing it in church, Miss,’ claimed her twin brother, Stephen.
‘That’s as may be but, in school, we sing it properly, just how it was written. We’re not some sort of Bohemian anything-goes kind of a school.’
‘Please, Miss, Good King Wenceslas was Bohemian. He was King of Bohemia.’
‘I’ll murder him,’ was Carol’s immediate reaction on this second day of Christmas, referring not to her pupil, Stephen, and not to Good King Wenceslas, but to the director, Noel Day. She pulled herself up: ‘I mean I would have killed him if he weren’t already dead. Wait a minute: if he is dead, how is this streaming working?’
She might have asked who I am and how my voice is being heard. I’m just the voiceover to the edited highlights of the box set, widely available on YouTube this Epiphany. My script has come mostly from the victim and sleuth, Mr Day, predicting what would happen after his death. But I’ve also drawn on the observational skills of one of his pupils, Marley, a protégé who lives next door to Mr Day, and then there are some parts Mr Day and I recorded ages ago. For example, we were always going to stream on the Feast of the Holy Family, Sunday 27th, a scene from the nativity play where Mary and Joseph improvise. When Miss Gillingham was hunting for the Black Baby Jesus, the producer screamed at the little actors, ‘Improvise!’ Mary and Joseph were still on their way to Bethlehem. That’s why Baby Jesus had not yet been called on stage. As the school was in Kent and this was December 2020, there were border police as well as shepherds. As the Brexit transition period was almost up, there were traffic police marshalling the lorries queuing for the Continent. You can imagine how the children improvised, especially if you have a map of Kent to hand.
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Professor Simon Lee
Simon Lee is Professor of Law at The Open University. In the run-up to his 60th birthday, he re-read and wrote about 60 of his favourite books in 60 days:
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