“I know how it looks, Inspector, but we’ve found ourselves in this position before.”
“Once, yes,” admitted Ivor. “When you had the advantage of local knowledge and peculiar circumstances. But this... this is an old-fashioned motive and it’s old-fashioned police work that’s solved it. It’s a crime of passion, that’s for certain, and I don’t doubt the judge will show leniency. That doesn’t mean I’m looking forward to putting your aunt behind bars, but I am looking forward to putting you in your place.”
CHAPTER NINE
Zero Zone at the Zeppelin’s Zenith
The Feast of Stephen rang out across Graze Hill in the form of church bells, a bright, blue and white morning, and piping hot tea.
“This is uncharacteristically correct, Vickers,” I said, casting a suspicious eye over a tray of cream, sugar, cup and saucer, teapot, and a crisp cloth under which I discovered a toasted crumpet dripping with local produce.
I took my tea by the window of the Heath Room next to the glowing brazier. Calm night had given onto tranquil day and had left behind wavy pastures of downy snow, but something else had been deposited onto the scene, something utterly and completely normal, and yet which had been conspicuously absent the day before. I studied the pastoral winter tableau, drinking my tea and focussing all my faculties, but it wasn’t until a chorus of hollow clangs echoed across to me that I was able to put my finger on it.
“I say, Vickers, the cows have returned.”
“I’m very gratified to hear it, sir,” said Vickers, assembling a combination of winter tweeds on the bed.
“Don’t you think that’s rather peculiar?”
“If I may speak freely, sir, no, I do not. Is it?”
“I confess I’m not sure myself. There were none at all there yesterday afternoon,” I said thoughtfully. “Perhaps they had duties elsewhere. Not really my area of expertise, although I am rapidly developing a certain conversant familiarity — resist, by the way, the temptation to buy a cow a drink. She’ll thank you for it, have no apprehension about that, but it will end badly.”
“I’ll take careful note of it, sir.”
I flowed with the tidal scent of sausages, bacon, eggs and coffee to the dining room where I encountered Puckeridge, bending over the sideboard, engaged in dabbing a drop of grease away from a silver platter.
“Morning Puckers. Aunty Azalea not yet disinterred?”
“I suspect that Miss Boisjoly has composed a tray for herself,” deduced Puckeridge, a bit sniffily, “and retired to her room.”
And indeed the orderly arrangements of a latticework of bacon, a pyramid of sausages, an oval of eggs, and a rack of half-a-dozen slices of toast had been spoiled by the absence of one rasher, one banger, a runny sunny-side, and a single slice of toast.
“Quite understandable. Such is the prerogative of the persecuted innocent. Doubtless Jean Valjean would have taken all his meals alone in his room, had he meals. And a room.”
“She made it known that she will be home to visitors at midday.”
“Then so will I,” I said. “I have much business in bustling downtown Graze Hill this morning.” I prepared a plate of protein and took my place alone at the table. “Tell me, Puckeridge, do cows like snow?”
“In what sense, sir?”
“All of them. Aesthetically, gastronomically. Whatever comes to you. I note that dozens of them can be seen from my window this morning, where yesterday there were none.”
“Cows are very attuned to their daily routine — they are the timepieces of dairy country. I expect that you arrived yesterday at milking time for that particular herd.”
“And that mysterious task accomplished, they raced back out to frolic in the snow?”
“I think not,” said Puckeridge, diplomatically expressing ‘of course not, you citified noddy’. “They would have presented themselves for milking according to schedule, after which they would know that feed troughs would be available in the fields. This is done to allow time to clean the stables, store the milk, and perform general maintenance tasks.”
“I see. So, to get a cow to leave a warm stable outside of regular office hours, you’d have to offer it some sort of incentive. Rum-soaked raisins and orange rinds, to pick an example at random.”
“I wouldn’t advise it, sir.”
“Never a wiser word,” I said. “Though we may have our differences with regard to the Equal Franchise Act and the current fashion for the faux bob, on this point we are of one mind.”
“I’m not sure that I follow, sir.”
“I assumed that you were a reformer,” I explained. “I didn’t see you at church last night.”
“The staff find it more convenient to attend morning services,” said Puckeridge.
“I didn’t realise there were morning services,” I said. “I understood there was little point in dairy country.”
“It’s true that Sunday mornings at Saint Stephen’s are somewhat undersubscribed at the best of times, and in the winter even more so.”
“Otherwise the same docket, is it?” I asked. “High Anglican readings, homily, communion, etc?”
“ I believe that Mister Padget employs the morning services to expand his range, somewhat,” said Puckeridge . “He’s an admirer of John Mason Neale.”
“The reverend songwriter? Chap who gave us Good King Wenceslas , about the mad king who bids his page follow his footsteps in the snow so they can spring a load of charity on an unsuspecting serf.”
“Yes, sir. Mister Padget has similar ambition and an abiding interest in the story of Saint Stephen. He likes to trial his own poetry with the less discriminating morning congregations.”
“You have my sympathies.”
“Thank you, sir.”
It was one of those clear, crisp Boxing Days that smell the way they look — woodfire smoke drifted lightly on still winds, coming from everywhere and nowhere. The clang of cowbells carried in much the same way, and apart from rare clumps of snow weakening their grip under a morning sun and dropping with a plop from the branches, the landscape might have been a still photograph.
I slipped along the main street, passing the Sulky Cow, which had yet to open, Hildy’s manger, at which I glanced longingly, and the church. Little cottages — the pieds à terre of the farming community — lay empty and cold and, consequently, almost completely buried in snow. So it was a simple matter to identify the vicarage house, which was near the edge of the village perpendicular to the road, directly facing the townside profile of the church. A path had been worn in the snow from the front door, across the churchyard to the apse entrance.
The house was a pleasant jumble of additions and renovations to what had probably been a modest stone house in the style of the church it served, and had since acquired a porch, which had then been covered and enclosed and given stained-glass doors, and some lumpy growths out the sides and back, styled in the Georgian and Victorian tastes of the eras in which they were built.
Mister Padget himself answered the door, and explained that it would otherwise not have been answered.
“The housekeeper leaves us at Christmas. She has grown children in Ipswich.”
“An excellent place for grown children, in my experience. Plenty of high ceilings and open spaces. I’ve come calling upon Flight-Lieutenant Hern-Fowler — he left me with many questions last night.”
“Oh dear,” said Padget, taking my coat. “I’m afraid that Monty has gone for a morning constitutional in the woods. I don’t know when to expect him back.”
“Then I wish to claim my consolation prize — is Mister Millicent on the premises?”
“Ah, yes, he’s in the parlour,” said Padget with visible relief. “Can I bring you tea?”
“Lashings, if you can spare it.” I gestured down the hall toward a source of natural light. “Just down here, is it, the parlour?”
“Yes. Oh, Mister Boisjoly…” Padget said with stagey second-thoughtedness. “Have you had a moment to read ove
r my little effort?”
“Your little what now?”
“The modest oeuvre that I entrusted to you last night,” he said sheepishly. “Forgive me. I should have known you would be too busy.”
“What I mean to say, Mister Padget, is that you’ve no business calling it a modest oeuvre or little effort,” I said, backfilling quickly. “It’s a most erudite composition. It flows and flies and, dare I say it, it inspires. It’s a most worthy accomplishment.”
“I say, Mister Boisjoly, I’m extremely gratified to hear you say it.” Padget flushed and fiddled as though I’d just asked him to be my bride, and he took up his invisible knitting with vigour. “You don’t think it a trifle… pretentious?”
“Pretentious?” I affected to weigh the word. “I don’t think so, no. I see where you’re coming from, there are many bold flourishes, but that’s what they are, bold. No, no, I would have to reject all suggestions that the work is pretentious. Now, if you’d suggested that it was sententious, I might entertain the idea, but no, not pretentious.”
“I feared that I had taken some liberties with the rhyming scheme.”
“In all frankness, Mister Padget, you did. I noticed it. But you didn’t defy the scheme so much as extend it. What masterpiece isn’t the result of some rule being broken?”
“Saint Paul’s Cathedral?”
“My point exactly,” I said. “Did you know that Sir Christopher Wren pioneered a completely new form of geometry to justify the physics of the dome of Saint Paul’s?”
“Did he?”
“Might have. The parlour is just down this way, you say.”
“Hm? Oh, yes. I’ll bring the tea.”
The parlour was a long, narrow extension from the back of the house, thick of brick on the outside and made cosy on the inside by deep stained oak, cushioned benches and a crackling fire. An entire wall was composed of three windows and one Cosmo Millicent, pared back to a simple green and red checked dressing gown and purple ascot. His monocle hung from a delicate chain pinned to the pocket of his robe. He sat chewing on a pencil and squinting out onto snowy Main Street, Graze Hill. On the deep sill before him was a stack of papers with nothing on them, and a thesaurus.
I tapped lightly on the door frame as a precaution against giving the absorbed artist a start and costing the literary world some irretrievable jewel.
“Morning, Cosmo.”
“Oh, what ho, Anty,” he said, dropping his pencil like a bomb onto the papers. “I say, this writing lark’s not so easy as it looks from a distance.”
“Why don’t you tell me what you’ve got so far?”
Cosmo and I looked at the blank pages.
“What you want is an outline,” I said. “Where are these copious notes you took? That’s where you should be starting, if I recall my days of writing school papers.”
“To be entirely candid, Anty, when I say I ‘took’ notes, I meant more in the notional sense.”
“You mean you didn’t write anything down.”
“In a nutshell.”
I sat on the bench by the fire.
“Perhaps you should,” I suggested, “while it’s still relatively fresh.”
“That’s what I’ve been doing. It’s just not coming. I have what I believe is called ‘writer’s blot’.”
“Block,” I corrected. “Your problem is you’re trying to write your book and recall what your uncle told you at the same time. I submit to you that these are two entirely distinct skills. Just get it down in point form, and decorate it later.”
“You think so?”
“I’m sure of it,” I said. “In any case it’s bound to be more constructive than sitting by the window, gazing at the snow. Tell me the last thing he told you.”
“It was just yesterday morning, in fact, at the Sulky Cow,” said Cosmo. “He was recounting the night he went down. It was December, as it happens, 1917. Uncle Flaps was a captain, at the time, and commander of a fighter squadron operating out of Dunkirk. It was late at night and they received word that London had been attacked by Zeppelin.”
“Monstrous machines.”
“Rather. All manner of hell had been unleashed on the capital, it seems, and some half-dozen of the things had simply floated off, scot-free.”
“Doubtless laughing maniacally all the way.”
“Just so,” agreed Cosmo. “So, up they went, into a foggy night over the channel.”
“Brave boys.”
“Quite. They’re up there for hours, though, and just when they think they missed the blighters, the clouds part and there are two of the monstrosities, floating in the air like dark leviathans of the storms.”
“Oh, I say, you should write that down,” I suggested.
“You think so? It’s not mine, if I’m honest, it’s one of the major’s.”
“It’s his story.”
“Quite so.” Cosmo scribbled down the phrase. “Anyhow, in they go, guns blazing. But, turns out, those dashed balloons were fixed with machine guns.”
“I think that’s widely known.”
“Is it?” said Cosmo. “I didn’t know it. Nevertheless, my uncle did, and it turned into quite a dance of destiny.”
“Another one of the major’s?”
“Yes. Worth keeping?”
“Absolutely.”
Cosmo added it to his list.
“This goes on for some time, you see, and then one or, probably several of them, hit a sore spot and, ka-boom, like some celestial Christmas cracker.”
“Ah, excellent. Doubtless a shell caused a spark.”
“Exactly. They were full of helium, you know, Zeppelins.”
“Hydrogen, I think you’ll find,” I gently corrected.
“What do you think of that last one, ‘celestial Christmas cracker’?”
“Luke-warm, I think. One of the major’s?”
“No, actually, my own.”
“Perhaps keep it in reserve,” I suggested, “on the rare chance nothing better comes up. Then what happened?”
“Well, that still left one of the devils up there, making a run for home. Our boys give chase, but they’re running out of fuel and ammunition at this point. And then a most extraordinary thing happened — one of the chaps, bloke they called Cardiac on account of his breathtaking daring — he actually does run out of ammunition. And, near as my uncle can tell, he seems to think that everyone has, and he decides that he’s not letting that Zeppelin live to fight another day — he positions himself above the thing…”
“Dear Lord. He dive-bombed it.”
“He did,” said Cosmo, now as absorbed by the story as, I realised then, I was. “The major saw what Cardiac was planning and so did the others — there were five planes in total — but they weren’t all out of ammunition. So everyone scrambled to put the silver bullet into the heart of the beast before Cardiac could sacrifice his own life. But then...”
“Shall I be mother?” Padget called out as he wheeled in the tea trolley.
“As it comes from the pot, please Vicar.”
“The usual, thanks.”
Padget distributed cups and saucers and drew our attention to a plate of pre-war, armoured biscuits.
“What are we discussing?” asked the Vicar, taking a pew by the window.
“Cosmo is endeavouring to remind himself of some of the stories the major had shared with him. Today’s feature is the Adventure of the Zeppelins.”
“Ah, yes,” the vicar nodded. “The day he was shot down.”
“Blown out of the sky, it turns out,” said Cosmo. “So, there they are, everyone racing toward the Zeppelin simultaneously, giving it everything they’ve got from machine guns to sidearm fire, and somebody apparently hits the sweet spot. Up it goes, just like that. One second the major’s flying in almost total darkness, the next he’s surrounded by flame, like he’s flying through Hell itself.”
Cosmo and I shared an unspoken consensus and he took a moment to write down ‘flying through Hell itself’ be
fore continuing...
“It’s too late to pull up or bank out or whatever, so they fly straight into the wreckage. The major, amazingly, comes out the other side, but he’s on fire. I don’t mean his plane is burning, I mean everything, including the major, is in flames.”
“It’s a miracle anyone survived,” claimed Padget.
“Very few did,” said Cosmo. “But the major was in a dive and so he had momentum and a single thought — water. If he could ditch his plane in the sea in the next few seconds he could live to tell the tale.”
“What extraordinary presence of mind,” I opined.
“He said that being on fire heightens the powers of concentration considerably.”
“I rather imagine that it would.”
“Anyway, it worked. He hit the water at something like survival speed and his plane broke up, mostly, but he was able to cling to a bit of wing for he couldn’t say how long. Some time later, the sun is rising and he’s being pulled onto a boat that smells of fish and then and only then does he allow himself to pass out. Next thing he knows he’s in an evacuation hospital somewhere in Yser, wrapped from head-to-foot in bandages and being generously medicated with good French brandy. Took him a week to realise he’d lost an eye, and another week to care.”
“I say,” I commented. “You add a bit of background colour and you’ve got an entire chapter there.”
“Yes, riveting stuff,” added Padget.
“Let’s have another,” I proposed.
“Ah, well, I could do, I suppose,” said Cosmo, noncommittally. “There’s that time they were escorting a bombing mission. The major got separated from his squadron and when the clouds parted he found himself flying in perfect formation with six German fighters.”
“Solid stuff. What happened?”
“Uhm…” Cosmo glanced imploringly at his stack of blank sheets of paper. “Shot his way out of a sticky situation, I think. Dodged, weaved, dove, thrusted. Maybe parried a bit.”
“Perhaps what you need, Cosmo, is a ghostwriter. Someone to help you draw all the threads together.”
The Case of the Ghost of Christmas Morning (Anty Boisjoly Mysteries Book 2) Page 9