Santa Goes Bananas: A Cozy Christmas Mystery Read online

  This youthful greeting put Santa in mind of his only daughter and his need to give her a call without further delay. Computing the time difference between Alaska and Cambridge, Massachusetts – and deciding to ignore it for the most part – he switched on his mobile and stopped dead in his tracks, fifteen meters shy of the workshop. There he watched the icy plumage of his breath as he waited for Amka to pick up.

  The fact that he was having to call her long distance was another source of concern for Santa Claus. Term-time was over, and with it any reasonable excuse for Amka delaying her return for the holidays. And yet delay it she had, twice. Each time stressing a heavy workload left over from the semester’s studies and the need to draw a firm line under it before she headed back.

  Santa wasn’t buying this argument, however, and his fatherly instincts told him that her scholarly devotion was little more than a smokescreen. Instead,

  he was of the opinion that love was in the air.

  Overly protective at the best of times, this keen suspicion had made Santa go on the defensive. His first impulse, as always, to act as a human shield and try to shelter Amka from all those life lessons which couldn’t be avoided, and which were hers by right. And so it was, like many a loving parent, he found it difficult not to lead with his fears, convincing himself that this mystery boyfriend was a villain who would take great pleasure in stomping all over his daughter’s heart.

  After a half dozen rings – during which time Santa tried and failed to dispel the fuzzy image of her lover loitering in the background – Amka finally picked up, after what felt like a short lifetime.

  “Pop!” The way she said it – so bright eyed and bushy-tailed – put him in mind of the young reindeer again.

  “Hey, sweetheart.”

  “I’m really glad you called, I was just about to ring you.”

  “Funny how that’s always the case . . .”

  “You’re telling me you of all people don’t believe in telepathy?” she joked.

  But rather than answer the question, Santa cut to the chase and gave fresh voice to his anxiety: “So when can we expect you home – have you’ve booked your flight yet?” he asked her. Trying to restrict himself to a casual reminder, although there was little disguising the panic bubbling away underneath.

  “Just one or two more loose ends to tie up, but I am working on it and I guarantee I’ll be there with you by Friday at the latest.”

  “Friday! But that’s the 22nd! You’re really telling me you need to leave it as late as that?”

  Don’t worry, there’s no way I’m not going to miss the big day.”

  “You say that now, but wait any longer and I’m going to have to drag the reindeer out of retirement and come get you myself.”

  “Don’t you dare,” Amka warned him, rightly or wrongly hearing it as a thinly veiled threat.

  “Then please, Amka, get that flight booked. Don’t put it off any longer.”

  Santa knew how needy he sounded, almost nakedly desperate, but by this stage he was not above emotional blackmail. And by the pained nature of his daughter’s reply, he knew that something of his guilt trip had stuck.

  “All right, all right, I promise,” she answered. “I’ll be sure to do it today.”

  Chapter Five

  Santa’s instincts were entirely correct when it came to his daughter. Amka daughter was very much in love, and it was this same love that had kept her in Cambridge longer than was strictly necessary. Knowing her father as she did, it had made sense to keep him in the dark and say nothing of the wild romance. He had enough on his plate at this time of the year without fretting about his little girl and her growing maturity.

  When it came to her mother – who wasn’t buying the work excuse either – Amka had come partially clean on condition of secrecy. Yes, she had met someone. Yes, they were pretty serious. But there she’d tailed off, promising to fill in the huge gaps when she returned for the holidays. Keeping the young man’s identity as vague as possible for the moment. Just some guy she’d had the good fortune to meet.

  This same guy, as Santa had feared, was in bed with Amka as she finished the call and put her iphone on the night stand. Worse still, he shifted over on the mattress now, put an arm around his girlfriend of six months and pulled Amka closer until her back was up against his chest. Having drowsily followed one half of the conversation, Kyle offered a comment on it.

  “No need to ask who that was,” he said.

  Rolling over on her side, Amka turned around underneath the duvet to face her beloved.

  “He’s right, though – I need to get back. It’s already cost me a small fortune to change my travel plans twice and Lord knows how much a flight at the weekend is going to be.”

  Blinking himself awake, Kyle blew a wisp of curly black hair away from his eye line and repeated an offer he’d made before.

  “I’ve already told you, I’ve got that covered. If the worst comes to the worst, you can always charter one of the company jets.”

  Yeh, and as I’ve already explained, that’s totally a non-starter. My father’s going to be there at the airport to greet me and that is so not a good way of breaking the news to him – by stepping off a Lear jet with Bzaah painted down one side.”

  Nodding soberly, Kyle conceded the point. “OK. I get that. But he’s still going to have to get used to the idea. That is unless you’re planning on deserting me any time soon?”

  Smiling at the remark, Amka shook her head determinedly with a huge smile on her face. “I’d kind of planned on sticking around,” she answered.

  Drinking that smile in, Kyle matched it with a wide grin of his own. Then he leaned forwards to plant a kiss on her left shoulder. “Good. I’m glad to hear it. I’d sort of hoped that’s what you’d say.”

  In the way of young lovers, Amka and Kyle had already mapped out a brilliant future together that the two of them had every faith in. A future they’d plotted in detail and committed to whole-heartedly. But, as with many young lovers – something they’re given much less credit for – there was also something steely and grounded about these big dreams, for all of their giddy optimism. Which was just as well, because there could be no doubting this love of theirs had massive hurdles it needed to overcome. Not least the fact that their two fathers were mortal enemies when you got right down to it, with no love lost between the two.

  But if this fine romance was going to be awful hard for Santa Claus to stomach then Jon Moran was perhaps at an even greater disadvantage. For he believed himself to be at war with a figment of the popular imagination, not a man of flesh and blood. Convincing the entrepreneur otherwise was going to be no mean feat. And even then there was the small problem of getting him to warm to the idea and accept that the destinies of their two families were now interlinked.

  It was with all this in mind that Amka lost her carefree expression and a frown creased her brow.

  “I still don’t know if me attending this party on Friday is such a great idea,” she said.

  “It’s a start. A first step. My dad gets to see you. You become real for him.

  We take it from there.”

  “I guess. But please don’t go dropping any major bombshells,” Amka urged him. “We can save the shock therapy for another day.”

  Raising one hand, Kyle pulled a solemn face and gave the oath of a boy scout. “Don’t worry, your deep, dark secrets are safe with me.”

  Chapter Six

  It was not yet five-thirty when Santa entered the workshop and checked in with his colleagues. Early risers like himself, the three of them had been up for an hour and hard at it. Now they were gathered around the quantum vehicle that had provided Santa with his festive transportation ever since the reindeer had gone into retirement a half dozen years ago.

  Seen together, the resemblance between the trio was unmistakable, and you would not have had much trouble identifying them as father, son, and daughter. Their features were striking, and hinted vaguely at their lineage, alth
ough their non-human origins were nowhere near as striking as had been the case with earlier generations. Their names were Vettir, Lambi, and Taniwha for the record, and Santa’s reliance on the Moonchild family was pretty much absolute.

  Viewed from a distance, the vehicle itself looked a lot like a VW camper van fancied up for the holidays, painted red and white in bright, bold colors, with the word Xmas spray-painted down one side. Although the closer you got to it – as Santa did now – the more its weirdly shimmering structure became apparent. Far more fantastic and insubstantial than it had any right to be. In fact, the van looked more like a vivid mirage, or a vibrant energy field, than an assembly of material parts. And, as such, it possessed something of that weird unreal quality we sometimes encounter in our everyday lives, out towards the margins of reality, and are generally keen to blink away.

  But here, in Santa’s workshop, no amount of blinking could alter the true nature of it. It was blatantly magical. And if the vehicle’s strange shimmering quality wasn’t convincing enough, there was also the fact that it was currently hovering a metre and a half off the ground.

  Lambi and Taniwha were stood directly beneath the unsupported vehicle, laying hands on the van’s undercarriage, manipulating it with oddly precise gestures that looked as much like the blessings of a faith healer as the work of any mechanic you might know. At the same time, their father was stood off to one side, watching their labors impassively, wearing a gentle smile that rarely left his face. He was a thin, wiry individual of indeterminate age, as befitted a mystical being, although the wisdom he’d accrued over a long lifetime was plain to see.

  “How’s she looking?” Santa asked as he came alongside his small workforce and stopped by Vettir’s shoulder.

  “Not bad.” It was Vettir himself who offered the assessment. An elf of few words, he opted for understatement whenever possible, whatever the situation, and tended to treat triumph and disaster in a not dissimilar way.

  “The signal-to-noise ratio of the temporal qubits is hovering around the 77% mark, but with a few more teaks we should be good to go.”

  It was Taniwha who offered the advance on her father’s curt comment. She was, by far, the most technically minded of the trio. Not surprising given that she boasted a PhD in Particle Physics acquired at MIT. As such, Taniwha tended to come at magic from a different direction to the rest of her kinfolk, offering technical breakdowns of how the impossible came to be. These were things that Santa didn’t need to know – and could hardly understand, anyway – but he didn’t begrudge the young elf her breathless fascination, for it was this, as much as anything, that had helped them transition to the modern day.

  Stood a couple of feet apart from Taniwha, Lambi kept on working the whole time as his sister held forth on the nuts and bolts of quantum mechanics. Even quieter than his father, he had something of the same effortless grace, although physically the two elves were poles apart to look at (Lambi ate like a horse and was built like an ox).

  “Have you been up to The Gift Box this morning?” Vettir put the question to Santa out of the blue, totally wrong-footing him in the process.

  “Not as yet. I thought I’d drop by here first and check in with you guys.”

  At this, Vettir simply nodded, which was all he had to do, because this one nod spoke volumes. He was telling Santa what Santa knew already, but was still struggling to act upon. That with a handful of days until Christmas he needed to be spending several hours a day in deep meditation, getting in the zone.

  Spurred on by the subtle criticism, Santa pushed off and started making for the door.

  “Right, well I better get over there now, soak up the heat, and get with the program.”

  “Good,” said Vettir, away behind him. And although Santa couldn’t see the smile on the elf’s face with his back turned, he still felt its radiance go up a notch.

  Chapter Seven

  Leaving the workshop behind, Santa took a right and walked towards the treeline fifty yards away. There he followed the trail that led between two tall pines and headed deeper into the boreal forest. The only sounds to be heard: the crunch of his own footfall and an occasional creak from trees that were sagging under the weight of frozen snow.

  Twenty minutes later, a mile and a half in, he reached a small clearing and the low lodge that dominated it. Built from ancient lumber, it was a strange-looking construction dating back many centuries. Known as The Gift Box for as long as his family had made use of it, the building would have had other names and earlier functions stretching far back in time (the preserve of long dead shaman and medicine men who’d drawn against the powerful forces stored therein). As for himself, it was where Santa retreated to with increasing frequency at this time of year, much in need of rest, reflection, guidance. But more than anything, he came here to get in touch with the spirit of Christmas, and his own need to honour it and embody it and extend its reach near and far.

  Climbing the three stone steps, it took real effort to get The Gift Box’s heavy door open. Then, having done so, Santa entered smartly, closed it behind him, and shut himself firmly away. By this act alone, the air became increasingly charged with an invisible energy and broke him out in goosebumps. Knowing every square inch of the space by heart, he stepped forward sure-footedly in the darkness, knelt down, took a matchbox from his pocket and struck up a flame.

  In the floor, already prepared, was a recessed fire pit packed tight with logs, branches, kindling. Now he held the match to the top layer until the flame caught, and started to build, and the surrounding space became ever more illuminated. Then, with the heat still rising, Santa got undressed and retired to the low bench directly behind it. There, with the wood crackling away, and the scent of it carrying, he sat bolt upright, hands in his lap, and closed his eyes.

  As the dry heat kept escalating, washing over him in waves, Santa gave himself over to the sweltering temperature until he’d sunk into a deep trance. In this faraway state, there was no knowing what kind of visions his mind would throw up. Some of them proved delightful, others startling, yet others highly disturbing, but they all had their uses once he’d reflected on them at length.

  This morning, Santa was hoping for something uplifting to give his morale a much needed boost. An inspiring flashback to counteract thoughts of that damned advert from last night, and his persistent worries about Amka’s delayed homecoming. But if he was honest with himself, there was an even deeper source of concern that was looming over everything, despite his best efforts to ignore it.

  The troubling memory of what had happened last year.

  It was while flying over Brazil, roughly halfway along his delivery route, when near disaster had struck. Travelling at impossible speeds – making time all screwy in the process – the magic had started to give out without any warning. And even as Santa processed this alarming development, and felt a mighty shudder go through the delivery van, its very essence had started to flicker, fade away, and then disappear altogether. Suddenly he was on his own, stranded in mid-air, many miles above Rio de Janeiro. And no sooner had the shocking truth dawned on him than he’d started to plummet through the sky, dropping hundreds and then thousands of feet in a matter of seconds. A scream bursting from Santa’s lungs as he hurtled earthwards, staring death in the face.

  It was only then, with his life flashing before him, that the magic had somehow materialised and kicked into gear. The driver’s seat reappearing beneath his backside at the very last minute – a blessed reprieve. Santa’s heart in his mouth, and his mind in a daze, and his hands gripping the steering wheel for all that they were worth.

  At the time, there’d been nothing for it except to continue on his merry way and fulfil the wishes of a great many children. His professionalism, and personal commitment to the holiday, overriding the deep sense of shock. Even afterwards, landing back at the North Pole, Santa had done his level-headed best to write the incident off as a minor hiccup. Seeking to downplay the major upset, just as the elves had d
ownplayed it also, all of them understanding that his fragile self-belief needed shoring up. Santa’s self-belief, and their own magical ingenuity, being the only things that could sustain the family business for another year.

  This was why, as the sweat beads started forming on his forehead, Santa was hoping for a dream encounter with his father’s spirit, or his grandfather’s, or someone else from the family line. But as the vision crystallised and came into view, it couldn’t have been any less welcome and he was greeted by just about the last person he wanted to see.

  It was the obese Santa Claus from the Bzaah advert. What’s more this pudgy oaf was up in his face, stood mere inches away, close enough that his foul breath was all too apparent. Gnawing at a chicken leg, he was wearing an expression of mockery, looking Santa up and down in a less than favourable light.

  “How’s it hanging, bro?” Speaking with his mouth full, shreds of white meat shot out and hit Santa in the face.

  With his anger rising, Santa wiped the meat away from the corner of his eye. “Whoever the hell you are, you’re no brother of mine,” he answered sharply

  With a carefree dip of his shoulders, Santa’s alter-ego shrugged off the insult and gave his huge belly a contented pat. “A brother from a different mother, maybe, but we’re definitely peas in a pod – our best days a good ways behind us.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Santa shot back, firmly on the defensive.

  But this only made his critic laugh out loud. “Really? So you’re still in your prime? Then what about last year?” As he said it, the man lifted up the hand with the chicken bone in it before lowering it in a dramatic spiral, making a noise like a plane about to crash. Then, tossing the bone away behind him, the chubby imposter floated an idea.

  “What say we join forces? How about I ride shotgun for you this year? Maybe between the two of us we can keep this sinking ship afloat one more time.”