Santa Claus, Lies, and Murder (Amber Fox Mysteries book #4.5 - Novella) (The Amber Fox Murder Mystery Series) Read online

  Tia looked at her watch. “Can we synchronize watches?”

  “No. We’re not synchronizing anything.”

  Her mouth turned down. “What? Why? Don’t you want any help?” She did the wounded-puppy-dog look.

  “Not at the moment. I think I can handle this one without any assistance. Thanks.”

  “Well…oooh, I know! How about we at least do a spell to find some clues and solve the case?” She perked up again, giving me a look that had morphed into a slobbery, I’m-about-to-go-for-a-walk puppy.

  “I told you. No more spells. Never. They always go wrong.”

  She snorted. “No, they don’t!”

  “Hah! You’re in denial, Tia.”

  “Penelope.”

  “Tia.”

  She ignored me. “They do not go wrong.”

  “Oh, yeah? Well what about when the ashtray exploded during a spell, and afterwards, we got in the middle of a huge explosion? Or that other time when I was reciting some spell words, the mirror cracked, and then I was nearly sliced up with a huge knife? And the last one with that chocolate cake killed someone! There are some seriously bad vibes going on with your spells.”

  She gasped. “It did not kill anyone. A spell can’t do that.”

  I folded my arms and tilted my head. “Really? Well, I’m not taking any chances, so no more spells.”

  “But it’s Christmas,” she whined, eyes bright and shiny. She even pouted a little.

  “I don’t care.”

  “But St Nicholas was the original Santa. He went out of his way to give to the poor and needy. Don’t you want to find the exhibits to honour his memory of what Christmas is really all about?”

  “Yes, but I don’t need a spell to do it. I can find the exhibits using perfectly normal, proven, investigatorish methods, like asking questions and examining evidence.”

  She slumped onto her chair. “Oh.” She sniffed. “OK, then. I’ll just get on with some paperwork.” She opened a file, did another humongous sniff, wiped the corner of her eye, and clicked the top of a pen. Under her breath, she started singing Do they Know it’s Christmas by Band Aid, with a special emphasis on the word “Christmas”.

  Oh, crap. Guilt trip or what? Now I feel like a meanie.

  I threw my hands in the air. “For God’s sake! Come on, then, let’s do the stupid spell. As long as you’re quick about it.”

  “Yay!” She clapped, replacing the pout with a beaming smile. “OK, so I’m going to have to improvise a bit here.” She tapped her finger on her mouth and looked around the reception desk, which was cluttered with tinsel, plastic holly, a little wooden nativity scene, a mini fibre-optic Christmas tree, an old-fashioned Santa Claus ornament, and a snowglobe with Santa, his reindeer, and a sleigh inside. She nodded to herself, picked up the snowglobe and Santa ornament, and bounced out of her chair. “Come on!”

  I followed her as she hurried along the corridor to my office.

  “Yo, babe.” Hacker grinned at her.

  She blushed and giggled. “Yo, Roddy Woddy.”

  Hacker’s real name was Roderick, although I don’t think many people would get away with actually calling him by it. I’m sure even fewer would get away with Roddy Woddy. I swore I saw a little blush going on him, too. Sweet.

  “I need your hoodie,” Tia said.

  He looked down at it. “Why? I love this one.”

  “I need it for a spell.”

  “Oh.” He shrugged. “OK.” He pulled it off and handed it to her.

  I dreaded to think what the two of them got up to at home. Hacker was from Haiti and could do voodoo. Voodoo and spells together? It didn’t bear thinking about.

  “Great!” She grabbed my arm and pulled me back along the corridor to the conference room. “Sit!” She pointed at a chair in front of the large table, and I had a really horrible feeling.

  “Look. I don’t think this is a—”

  “Shh!” She held up her hand to silence me and glared. “It’s Christmas. We have to spread love and peace to all, and that means protecting the St Nicholas exhibits.”

  I groaned and ran my hands through my curly hair. “All right, all right. Just get on with it. I need to see a flea.”

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind! Just do it.”

  She handed me the hoodie. “Put it on.”

  “Wha—”

  More glaring. I had to hand it to her—in a glaring competition, she would definitely win. I would win the eye-rolling competition, though. I raised an eyebrow and pulled the hoodie over my head.

  “Right. Hold the snowglobe in one hand and Santa in the other.” She handed them over, and I followed her instructions. “Now close your eyes.”

  I sighed.

  “Do it!” More glaring.

  “You’re so bossy sometimes.”

  Humongous glare.

  I closed my eyes.

  “Now you have to visualize finding the St Nicholas exhibit and returning it to the museum.”

  “OK.” I did what she said. She would only bully me if I didn’t.

  “Now repeat after me…Simple wish I now shall cast. Let the true spirit of Christmas be rediscovered fast. As I send my spell to the ever-seeing giver, this wish for me, you will deliver. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

  I repeated the words, which were going great at first, but as I got to “this wish for me you will” I felt something crawling on my hand, and my eyelids flew open.

  It was a spider! An ugly, yucky, huge spider! OK, maybe if I were tortured to reveal its actual size, I would probably be forced to say it was a smallish spider, maybe even money spider-sized. But I would admit to that only during torture. Otherwise, it was huge!

  I never got to the actual “deliver” part of the spell because I let out a scream high-pitched and loud enough to put any professional opera singer to shame, and I dropped both the Santa and the snowglobe.

  Santa bounced across the floor a few times before his head fell off and he stared at me from an odd angle. The snowglobe smashed, squirting snowflakey water all over the floor, and the cute, and fragile, reindeer sleigh broke into little pieces. The Santa inside was still holding on tight to the reigns with his hands, but his arms and legs were no longer attached to his body.

  “Um…I don’t think that’s a good sign.” Tia chewed her lip.

  Feeling sick, I stared at the Santa annihilation on the floor.

  Uh-oh. I’m so jinxed.

  Chapter 2

  The manor house that contained the museum had a long gravel driveway. The red-bricked and wooden facade of the building loomed in the distance, all pointy angles and chimneys. I drove past a sign in the middle of the road that said the museum was closed until further notice. I parked at the car park in front then got out of the car and faced the museum, eyes scanning the oak front door—or lack of it. The concrete frame was still intact, but the door itself lay inside the entrance. I noticed several CCTV cameras along the front of the building pointing out into the grounds. The two on either side of the door were angled towards the entrance and should’ve got a good shot of the offenders. There were no police or Scenes of Crime officers around anymore, so it looked as though they'd all finished gathering evidence.

  Now it was my turn.

  Stepping through the gaping entrance, I crunched my way inside over gravel and wood splinters. A well-built man in his early thirties wearing a security guard uniform approached me.

  “I’m afraid you can’t come in at the moment. We’re closed.” His white shirt, black trousers, and jacket were all tidy and perfectly ironed. His closely cropped blonde hair was functional for his job. He was the neatest-looking security guard I’d ever come across. “Didn’t you see the sign?”

  “I did, but I’m Amber Fox, from Hi-Tec Insurance. I need to speak with Alistair Cooper about the insurance coverage and what happened here.”

  “Yes, but we’re closed.”

  “I know. As I said, I need to speak to—”

  �
�It’s OK, Colin. Just keep an eye on the entrance until the carpenters come and make the repairs,” a voice said from behind me.

  I swung around and saw a short guy walking towards us. He was shorter than I was, about five foot four and a half. I was guessing the extra half inch was very important to him, like most men. He made up for his lack of height with his hair, which was thick, curly, bushy, and…well, just huge. Bigger than him, in fact. A couple of squirrels could be nesting in that lot, and he would never know. He was dressed in brown corduroy trousers and a brown-checked shirt.

  “Hello. I’m Alistair Cooper, the curator here.” He extended one small, slim hand.

  I shook it as Colin moved closer to the door behind me, out of earshot. It was cold and limp. “I’m Amber Fox.”

  “Sorry about Colin. He’s a little overzealous when it comes to security.”

  “Does he usually work here? I didn’t see any mention of a security guard in our files.” I glanced at Colin, and although he had a polite smile on his face, he was doing a narrow-eyed staring kind of thing at me. Then again, it could have just been his usual look.

  “Oh, no. I’ve borrowed him as extra security until we can get the door repaired.”

  “Where does he usually work?”

  “At the Natural History Museum in London. He’s a very valued member of the security staff there.”

  “Right.” I turned back to Alistair and felt Colin’s eyes burning a hole in my back. Maybe he was really just super-duper conscientious. Maybe. “What's his surname?”

  Alistair’s eyebrows lifted in surprise. “Prescott.”

  “Thanks.” I tucked that into my brain for later. “Can we go somewhere private and talk?”

  He removed a handkerchief from his shirt pocket and wiped beads of sweat from his forehead before replacing it. “Of course,” he said wearily. “Let’s go to my office.” He walked towards an ornately carved wooden staircase at the back of the entrance hall where steps led up and down. We went down. At the bottom of the stairs, a thick burgundy rope with a sign on it marked “Private” secured the area. Alistair unclipped the rope and allowed me to pass through before re-securing it. We went along a corridor, past closed wooden doors and walls of wood panelling that led to his office right at the end.

  “Here we are.” He took a seat behind a desk piled high with paperwork and artefacts in glass containers.

  I spied a rat in one and a frog in another. If he had a spider there, I was going to freak. I avoided looking at them and glued my gaze to his face as we sat down.

  “The robbery is a terrible shame. Terrible. The pieces that were stolen are irreplaceable.” He shook his head. “Simply irreplaceable.”

  “St Nicholas’s bones, you mean?”

  He nodded gravely and wiped his forehead again. “You know the story of St Nicholas, do you?”

  “Some of it.”

  “After St Nicholas died, his tomb in Myra, which is now part of Turkey, attracted a great number of pilgrims from distant lands, and because of this significant religious site, Myra became a wealthy and commercial city. Then when the Seljuks, who were not sympathetic to the Christian faith, took control of the area, the Italians from Venice and Bari concocted a plan to remove his bones back to Italy. One reason was to protect the relics, but they also saw an opportunity to increase the prosperity of their own cities.

  “So in 1087, sailors from Bari travelled to Myra and duped the monks guarding St Nicholas’s tomb into showing them where the bones were laid to rest. Then they stole them and laid them to rest in the Basilica di San Nicola, Italy. But that wasn’t the end of the story!” He shook his head, his eyes lighting up as he became engrossed in his storytelling. “Some time later, the Venetians, who were Adriatic rivals of the Bari people, arrived in Myra and discovered the Church of St Nicholas deserted, because the priests and local Christians were afraid of the Suljuks. They also discovered a well-hidden copper urn containing some bones. Engraved on the front was 'Here lies the Great Bishop Nicholas.' Naturally assuming Bari had recovered someone else's bones, they took the urn to Venice, where the relics were secured in the Lido.

  “However, a final box of bones was also found at the original site later on, and it transpired that the original monks had kept these safe from looters, duping them into believing the other two boxes contained St Nicholas’s bones, when, in fact, they really contained the bones of two monks. The real relics of St Nicholas were recovered and eventually exhibited in the Antalya Museum in Turkey. Of course, there were big disputes between the Lido in Venice, the Basilica in Bari, and Antalya, as to whose were the real bones. In all locations, the relics had been stored securely without being opened or examined for centuries. But in the early fifties, a renowned anatomy professor looked at all of the bones and determined the real St Nicholas to be in the Antalya museum.”

  “So how did St Nicholas become what we now think of as Santa Claus?” I asked.

  “As Bishop of Myra, Nicholas was a man whose concern for the welfare and well-being of his flock was legendary. Even before his death, he was known as a saint. He was, in fact, the most revered saint of the early church, working tirelessly to reduce taxes for his people, help overcome their hardships, and perform deeds of great kindness. People believed that through God, he worked many miracles, and he was known as a 'wonderworker.' There are many stories that reveal his character to be a genuine lover of his people, with particular emphasis on helping the poor, and as a patron saint of children.

  “It was the Europeans who arrived in the New Americas that brought stories of cherished traditions of the Christian saint. And after the American Revolution, New Yorkers looked to their Dutch roots, making St Nicholas the patron saint of their city. Since he was still an icon of gift-giving and a protector of children, when New York wanted to domesticate the celebration of Christmas, St Nicholas naturally became the 'front man' of the season, if you like. Over the years, through poetry and stories, St Nicholas became a pipe-smoking, rotund man who travelled through the night on his reindeer to bring gifts to children, eventually becoming Santa Claus, the icon of jolliness in a red suit who we all know and love today. Some of the traditions we observe today are borne from the stories of St Nicholas.

  “I could go on all day.” He blushed. “He was such an amazing saint. And to think we actually had his relics here in this very museum is simply amazing. But…” He waved his hand. “I can’t chat forever. I’m sure we both have hundreds of things to do as a result of this terrible incident.” His animation deflated, and sweat broke out on his brow.

  Was he just distraught at the loss of the exhibit or feeling guilty about something? Was he the inside person who'd made the thieves' job easier? As curator of the museum, he had been responsible for updating Hi-Tec about the exhibit to make sure it was covered with insurance, but was his failure to do that incompetence, an administrative oversight, or something more sinister? Was he nervous because he knew where the relics really were?

  He patted his brow again. “I know the insurance policy is null and void.” His cheeks grew redder. “It’s an unforgivable error on my part. The clause that says we have to inform you of any additional valuable exhibits was added to the policy before I arrived as curator, but I know that’s no excuse. I should’ve made myself familiar with it and acted accordingly.” He glanced down at his desk and sighed. “So I know you’ve come here to advise me that you won’t be paying any monetary claim made for the collection, but, to be honest, how could I even put a price on something which is priceless? St Nicholas’s bones can never be replaced.”

  “I’m still going to investigate this and see where it leads me. I’ll do everything I can to bring St Nicholas and the collection back where it belongs.”

  He glanced up sharply. “Really? Even though you’re within your rights not to even bother? You know I take full responsibility for the oversight on my part. No doubt I’ll lose my job here now as a result of it, but nevertheless, it’s all my fault.”

&nb
sp; “Yes. But it’s Christmas. We can’t have a missing Santa, can we?” I gave him my most reassuring smile.

  He started to speak but closed his mouth, frowning as if struggling to think of the words to use. “Well, I…I don’t know what to say. Thank you for your generosity in this matter. It would be an immense catastrophe if St Nicholas wasn’t recovered.”

  “Apart from his relics, what else was in the collection?”

  “There were five icons—pictures of St Nicholas painted in oil on wooden panels, three gold statues depicting St Nicholas, a wooden box containing a silver cross belonging to St Nicholas, some gold coins depicting him, and translated scripts about him through the ages.”

  “I understand they drove a Land Rover into the door to gain entry. What else can you tell me about the actual robbery?”

  “Not much that will help, I’m afraid. I locked up last night at seven p.m., as usual, and set the alarm. The next thing I knew, the police were phoning me at four in the morning to tell me the alarm had been activated, and when they arrived, thieves had driven a vehicle into the doors and broken them off their hinges to gain entry. Of course, I came down at once to see what had been stolen. The other staff are still checking their respective exhibits to see if things are in order, and so far it looks like only the St Nicholas collection was targeted. Awful. Just an awful mess.”

  “Have you checked the CCTV yet?”

  “No, I haven’t had time. I’ve been arranging things. Repairs. People to be told.” He flapped a hand in the air. “I know I’m going to be fired.” He looked about to burst into tears. “The police are checking with the company that hosts our CCTV servers to see if they recorded the break-in.”

  “Why don’t you have a security guard here when the museum is closed? Isn't that standard these days?”

  “It’s not standard for our usual collection, no. Although we have many rare species of animal, birds, and insects here, they’re not considered sought after by thieves.”