The First Lockdown Christmas Mystery (#5)

The mystery reaches its climax today in Simon Lee's Christmas series. It ran in five daily parts and you can find part one here , part two here , part three here and part four here.

#5

The word ‘epiphany’ means a ‘showing’ or ‘revealing’. The Twelve Days of Christmas lead us to the Epiphany. In this winter, as 2020 gave way to 2021, this is the last instalment of Noel Day’s video, now available as a box set. His final words explain what gave him the idea of death by turkey and introduce us to his murderer:

‘The short story is Lamb to the Slaughter, where the frozen leg of lamb is the murder weapon. Admittedly, it’s easier to wield a leg of lamb than a whole turkey but I wanted my death to be seasonal, on the birthday I have shared with Jesus. The author of that short story is Roald Dahl. The idea was given to him by Ian Fleming, author of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang as well as the James Bond novels. Dahl, Fleming and my murderer all come from the opposite end of Kent, bordering on London. On the west side of the River Medway, people were called Kentish Men or Kentish Maids, nowadays Kentish Women. On our eastern side of the Medway, we use the terms Men and Maids (now Women) of Kent. So when someone says Kentish this or that, I point out it’s really this or that of Kent. It becomes a habit, one of those tiny things which gives us a sense of belonging, a mark between insiders and outsiders. Any child in this school will tell you that wherever they come from, Canterbury, Folkestone, the Caribbean, India, Bulgaria, Syria, I teach them this little peculiarity as Pupils of Kent, not Kentish Pupils. There’s only one member of our school community who comes from West Kent, who says Kentish this or that. You’ll hear her any minute now speaking in a Kentish manner about her Kentish self.’

Sure enough, you can now see on this video, from the security cameras overseeing the back gardens of Noel Day and Marley next door, the killer asking,

‘Mr Day, have you got a Kentish frozen turkey for me?’

Mr Day knew why she was coming to kill him. This particular year was when Violet Grieve-Rush’s daughter was in the top class and thus eligible for the role of Mary, which he hadn’t, in his casting director mode, given to her. Although that was on merit, that’s not how her mother would have seen it.

Next on screen, we have a flash-back to the opening scene of our Nativity video, after which you can see Mr Day asking Miss Gillingham, following the distressing saga of the mislaid doll, ‘Who put away the baby Jesus dolls last year?’

‘It was one of the mothers. She was very careful about it, now I come to think of it, looking at them all and putting them in some sort of order.’

‘Who was it?’

‘You know, that one who’s a governor.’

‘Vi-Rus?’

‘That’s her. She was hoping her daughter might play Mary next year, well, this year now. So she was putting the right doll for her on top of the other ones in the box.’

In casting another pupil over Violet’s daughter as Mary, Noel Day had known he was a turkey voting for Christmas but he was dying anyway and preferred to die theatrically. You did not need to be an expert in Kent dialect, however, to identify the murderer, not if you lived next door. This box set ends with Marley’s eye-witness report, when asked by the police who killed Noel Day:

‘It was the white one.’

Yes, in this part of Kent, Marley, Mr Day, Mrs Horde, all the teachers and all bar one of the governors are Black or Asian or ethnic minority or dual race. Only the chair of governors, the relative newcomer to our area, Violet Grieve-Rush, is white. If that had not occurred to you, then this has been a shared mystery tour through our collective unconscious bias. Thanks be to God for discovering the true significance of the Black Baby Jesus. 

 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/

Nativity image: CloudyStock / Shutterstock