The First Lockdown Christmas Mystery (#4)

The mystery continues today in Simon Lee's Christmas series. It is running in five daily parts this week. You can find part one here , part two here and part three here.

Straight after Mary and Joseph got to Betteshanger and the Magi visited Herod, our Nativity Play fast forwards 1100 years, as the Church confusingly breaks away from the Nativity to celebrate the Feast of St Thomas à Becket on 29^th December. He was an Archbishop of Canterbury in the twelfth century. In 2020, this school named after him had been planning to celebrate two Becket anniversaries, the 850^th anniversary of his death on this very day in 1170 and, earlier in the year, on 7^th July, the 800^th anniversary of the moving of his body to a shrine. Lockdown had scuppered those plans but Mr Day wanted the school community to remember their patronal saint. It sounds now as if our nativity play is cutting away to King Henry II himself asking, ‘Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?’, but on screen you can see it’s actually the current headteacher speaking, whereupon her helpers appear to stab someone in the back. This was acting, thankfully, cut into the video from the school’s charity ransom day pranks.

The apparent victim on that occasion was the school chaplain. Fr Winston Tobago had come to oppose all the headteacher’s liberalising reforms. He had been a supporter of hers when he was a curate on secondment from his home diocese. But, rather like Thomas à Becket, once he was appointed to high office, he became accustomed to his new role and played his new part with relish, becoming estranged from his sponsor. Was Fr Win the Becket figure in this drama, or was it the deputy head, Mr Day himself? After all, Mrs Horde had closed down the school’s official channel and ordered her deputy to take down the version running on his own channel. He didn’t answer, being dead. What kind of an excuse was that for ignoring an instruction from the headteacher? King Henry II is the forerunner of people on social media who say they wish someone were dead. Others are emboldened to attack the person who has been singled out as irritating the king. The teachers, Miss Gillingham and Mrs Jones, and the headteacher Mrs Horde, all use the expression that they would murder someone when you would like to think that they don’t mean it. But that kind of rhetoric is like a virus which infects society, which was, after all, the dominant story of 2020 and which brings us to the chair of governors.

Mrs Violet Grieve-Rush was a parent governor, constantly seeking election to even grander public office in Thanet, the cradle of Brexit politics. She was abrasive and yet quick to find offence when others responded in kind, that is to say, in unkind retaliation. She was known to the staff as Violent-Rush-to-Grievance, or Vi-Rus for short. Her worst trait, in their eyes, was her sycophantic attachment to Herod the Head, instead of holding her to account. In the wider community of Kent, Violet was known for being hostile to immigration. Violet didn’t do irony. She had not understood, for example, why others raised their eyes to heaven when she complained about the school casting so many Middle Eastern characters in the Nativity. Noel Day used to annoy her by taking every opportunity to remind the school community that Violet, a blow-in from West Kent, was a Kentish immigrant herself, not a native of East Kent.

On screen, Mr Day is now speaking to us directly as we fast-forward through the comings and goings of his visitors, recorded from the security cameras scanning his and Marley’s neighbouring houses.

‘So who has murdered me? Day after day, you’ve seen figures come to collect their 2020 Christmas turkey. Given that Kent is in Tier 4, anyone who wanted to defrost a frozen turkey had to come in the days before Christmas, one at a time, to my gazebo. Fresh turkeys were mostly to be collected on Christmas Eve but some members of the school community had ordered a fresh one for Christmas and a frozen one to see them through the twelve days of Christmas. You will have worked out by now that the murder weapon must have been one of those frozen turkeys. I just knew that one of my visitors would bash me over the head. I knew it would be captured by the security camera. I knew who it would be, I knew my little next-door neighbour, Marley, who goes to our school, would easily identify them and I gave them that opportunity, because I’d rather die swiftly and memorably in the great tradition of short stories than as one more anonymous statistic through a painful, drawn-out death due to Long Covid.

‘Whether or not the murderer knows this, the idea of a frozen turkey as the weapon is a variation on one of the most famous short story murder mysteries of all time. Or, rather, a short murder mystery story written by a famous author. He was better known as an author of stories for children. The idea is said to have been gifted to him by another author of renown, who wrote a much-loved children’s story but who is better known for spy thrillers. Both these authors are from Kent, although not our part of it.’

As for who killed Mr Day, are you nearly there yet? If ‘whodunnit’ is obvious to you, as it so often is in short stories, is there something less obvious that is really the point of all this, as to how some of us could tell who murdered Mr Day?

Caroline Derry Professor Simon Lee

Simon Lee is Professor of Law at The Open University. In the run-up to his 60^th birthday, he re-read and wrote about 60 of his favourite books in 60 days:

https://sixtybookworkout.wordpress.com/