“And yesterday?”
“Well, different. Like I told you, he paid off his cuff, made his goodbyes.”
“A peculiarity which I have since confirmed, you’ll be happy to know,” I said. “What do you suppose happened?”
“No idea. He was fine when he first come in.”
“He was, was he? Did you happen to notice the turning point?”
“I suppose it was sometime after that Montmorency bloke showed up.” Sally gestured with her chin toward Monty, who appeared to be shouting and miming something about night vision to Mister Padget and Aunty Azalea.
“Monty wasn’t in the pub when the major arrived?”
“He come in a few minutes later.”
“And this was the first any of you had seen of him?”
“No, he was in on Christmas eve. Said that he just got to town. Asked about the major.”
“I see,” I said. “Most intriguing.”
“Why?”
“Hm? Oh, it’s a deducting thing. Difficult to explain to the layman,” I said. “Who else was there that night?”
“Everyone, pretty much. Me and Soaky, Mister Barking, Mister Trimble, and that Millicent bloke, who says he’s the major’s nephew.”
“And they all met Monty.”
“Did they ever,” said Sally. “Thought I was going to have to replaster the ceiling.”
“Yes, Monty’s is the sort of rich, resonant tenor best suited to the larger venues. East Anglia, say. No one else popped in? Constable Kimble didn’t have to come by and put you under caution?”
“No, I closed up a bit early, in fact,” said Sally. “When I come back from milking Hildy, Soaky had finished off the mulled wine by himself. He was trying to make another batch out of straight whisky and a half a stick of liquorice.”
“Noted for future reference,” I said.
“Right, that’ll do, everyone.” Barking accompanied this subtle proposal with gentle ‘shove off’ motions. The parties broke up and Padget established a checkpoint at the door. I joined the queue with the intention of exchanging a polite farewell but he once again grasped my hand. The vicar, as has been previously noted, was not a big man, but was surprisingly strong and bony, and the effect was not unlike catching my hand in a mousetrap.
“Thank you again, Mister Boisjoly, for raising my little oeuvre to such heights.”
“Oh, well, you know, Vicar. One raises where one can. So long…”
“I wonder, Mister Boisjoly, if the slight modifications you affected were intended as permanent changes.”
“If you like,” I said, absently. “Consider them a gift.”
“I’m particularly fascinated by the verse in which the archdeacon is brought before the Sanhedrin,” Padget said, with a serious squint and a tone suggestive of the Gershwin brothers thrashing out the sequence of the overture medley. “It seemed a curious choice.”
“What was?”
“You finished the verse with something about a mandolin.”
“Was that not correct?”
“No, I mean, who’s to say?” said Padget, philosophically. “But the original line was,
Who proceeded to make fun of him.”
“Surely not.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I mean, are you quite sure that’s not what I sang? Quite similar in rhythm, ‘fun of him’ and ‘mandolin’. Easy to confuse the two, in the heat of battle.”
An uneasy peace ensued while Padget furrowed his brow in dangerous reflection. I grasped for a distraction and, glancing back into the church, saw Monty escorting Aunty Azalea to the transept, presumably with the intention of revealing to her the wonders of the Graze Hill Museum.
“I say, Vicar,” I said. “Do you recall when it was that you received Monty’s letter, reserving a room?”
“Oh, yes, very clearly. We get so few letters. It was the third of the month.”
“Plenty of time to hide the silver then,” I said. “And when did he arrive?”
“Christmas eve,” said Padget. “Just after tea. The station taxi brought him , so I assume that he arrived on the four-thirty from London.”
“And he went directly to the Sulky Cow?”
“He did, as it happens. I offered to make another tea and show him the church, but he seemed eager to meet the locals.”
“Drawn by the novelty of a strange metropolis,” I explained. “I was like that the first time I went to Monte Carlo. And Cosmo? When did he first make landfall?”
“The beginning of November. We have a monthly arrangement.” Padget said this distractedly, gazing off into the middle field, and I could see him silently mouthing something that rhymes with ‘mandolin’.
“Must be awfully jolly, the three of you in the vicarage — the writer, the soldier, the man of the cloth. Sounds like solid grounds for a parable,” I said. “Why do you suppose Monty didn’t go visit his old war buddy immediately upon arrival?”
“I asked him that very question when we were walking back from the cow last night.”
“I say, Vicar, you were at the pub last night? I understood you to be a beacon of temperance and an example to us all. To me, anyway.”
“When I say the cow, I mean Hildy, the Graze Hill Golden.”
“Ah, I don’t blame you. We’ve met,” I said. “Captivating conversationalist.”
“I wished to consult with Sally Barnstable on a private matter, and I popped in when she was milking Hildy. I met Monty on the way home.”
We were interrupted briefly by Barking, who stood in the middle of the nave, rattling the chain of his thurible and saying “Time, ladies and gentlemen, if you please.”
“And what did he say?” I asked Padget.
“Say?”
“Monty. What did he say when you asked him why he hadn’t yet been to visit the major?”
“Ah, yes. The major. Monty said that he wished to surprise him.”
“Curiouser and curiouser. Did Flaps not know that Monty was coming?”
“I regret that I may have ruined the surprise. I mentioned it in passing to the major the Sunday prior.” With this the vicar looked thoughtfully skyward. “I say, Mister Boisjoly, you don’t suppose…”
“What is it, Mister Padget?”
“You don’t suppose,” resumed the vicar, newly inspired, “that there’s room for a verse which elucidates the conversion of Paul. His name rhymes with so very many things.”
Happily, in that moment, Monty shook foundations and traumatised infants for miles around with a mighty roar of “The ruddy cow is gone!”
I immediately formulated an internal plan to institute a search of all snowbanks in the region. Monty, however, was standing at the transept, holding back the curtain. Padget and I joined him there, along with Cosmo, Everett, Barking, and Ivor.
True enough, the purple velvet plinth was empty.
“Is something missing, Vicar?” asked Ivor through a much-travelled handkerchief.
“Nothing worth the attention of the police,” said Padget. “Doubtless Mister Barking is in the midst of rearranging the museum. Isn’t that right, Mister Barking?”
Barking replied with wide eyes and a stuttering denial.
“Me? No, of course not. Haven’t I enough to do without playing museum curator, too?”
“Ah, well, doubtless it will turn up, Inspector,” said Padget. “Good night, everyone. Don’t forget, next Sunday is the Veneration of the Holy Family . By popular request, I will be repeating my free-verse defence of the authorship of the Johannine Epistles.”
Ivor turned a weary eye on me.
“A tin cow, Inspector,” I explained. “In the form of a weather vane. Not a tremendously useful device in a church transept, but an artefact close to the hearts of the honest villagers of Graze Hill.”
“Is it valuable?”
“Can you put a price on heritage, Inspector? Can you measure birthright in pounds and pennies?” I asked. “Not really, no. It’s a tin cow.”
“
Then why would anyone take it?”
“Jealousy? I doubt very much if Steeple Herding has any bovine weather vanes.”
“If anyone was going to steal the weather vane, they’d have taken the bronze one off the clocktower,” pointed out Everett. “Have you seen it Inspector? Glorious. Like a beacon of faith, shining out a message of prosperity for all of Hertfordshire and parts of Essex.”
“I noticed it, yes,” said Ivor with all the patience a man with a head cold shouldering the problem of a missing tin cow should have to muster. “I suggest we leave this mystery until morning.”
This proposition inspired the always stirring scene of unanimous agreement, and finally we broke away from the relative comfort of an unheated church and into the Arctic wasteland that was Graze Hill Town Square, future site of the Flaps Fleming memorial bronze facsimile.
“Ah,” boomed Monty, with hands on his hips and his gaze raised to the now brightly moonlit sky. “There it is.”
We followed his line of sight to his line of reasoning. There, indeed, it was. The golden idol of the blasphemous cow was gone, and its place was the tin original.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Vanishing Visitor of the Solicitous Solicitor
“The intriguing question, of course, after how someone managed to steal a bronze weather vane from the clocktower, is why.”
I made this bold contention from the forward-facing bench of the landau, as it jingled through the snow in the winding direction of Steeple Herding. The sun had dragged itself reluctantly from the gloom of a misty horizon, like a Wellington drawn slowly from a muddy furrow, and established a blurry presence in a murky midday sky. A chill fog lingered about us, and clung to bits to which it had no business clinging.
“The intriguing question, Mister Boisjoly, is why there was a golden calf on top of a church in the first place.”
Ivor made this counterpoint from the other bench, his back to the wind and his shoulders enrobed in a horse blanket provided by Mister Barking, who was skillfully ho-ho-hoing us away from the constabulary.
“I concede the point,” I said, munificently, for Ivor was not at his fighting best. “But you’ll agree that it’s of lesser pertinence to the mystery at hand.”
“The mystery at hand is the murder of Major Aaron Fleming,” Ivor enunciated nasally. “I’m having considerable difficulty bringing myself to give a hang and a half about the theft of a bronze weather vane.”
“No, I confess, that when you weigh them against one another, murder does on the face of it appear to be the graver of the two offences. But surely you’re as captivated as I am by the uncanny similarity of the crimes.”
Ivor rocked with the gentle motion of the sleigh and regarded me beneath hooded eyes, as one awaiting elucidation or on the cusp of falling asleep.
“Well?”
“I refer, of course, to the fact that both the murder of Major Fleming and the theft of the bronze cow are, at first glance, impossible,” I explained. “Major Fleming was seen alive hours after my aunt discovered his body. There is no question of anyone mistaking the time, because she visited Tannery Lodge before sunrise. And yet, hours later, in the fullness of morning, he walked into the Sulky Cow, and stood everyone a round of drinks.”
“Easily explained — your aunt is lying.”
“There you go,” I declared. “Impossible. And then we have the theft of the weather vane and the reinstallation of the original tin version. Possibly someone could have climbed the clocktower, but every suspect was in the church when it happened.”
“Also easily explained — that’s not when it happened. It was done at some point during the day, or the night before.”
“I think I would have noticed.”
“Would you have?” asked Ivor. “Can you swear that you saw the bronze weather vane during the day yesterday?”
On reflection, I realised that Ivor was correct. I certainly took note of the monstrosity when I first encountered it — it was impossible not to — but it’s extraordinary what extremes the human mind can come to regard as commonplace. I couldn’t say that I would have noticed had the cow been exchanged within the last twenty-four hours, and I said as much to Ivor.
“And I asked Mister Barking,” continued Ivor, “he couldn’t say for certain when he last saw the tin cow in the museum. He closed the curtain the night before.”
“Ah, but what about the footsteps in the snow?” I asked.
“What footsteps in the snow?”
“Exactly,” I said. “There were none. The snow on the roof of the church was entirely undisturbed. Returning us once again to the same, single, inescapable explanation for both mysteries.”
“Which is?”
“Ghosts,” I said, rather unnecessarily, in my view, but Ivor’s intellect was oppressed by a head cold, which reminded me… “That reminds me. I brought you a present.” I withdrew from my overcoat a smoked-glass flagon. “The French call it sirop contre la toux, or cognac, in the vernacular. Two generous helpings of this with hot water and, before you know it, you’ll be breathing freely and debating the limitations of a free press in a democratic society.”
Ivor received the bottle with a touching desperation, and folded it into his coat.
“Ho ho ho. Ho,” declared Barking, and his giant Clydesdale replied with an assenting “P-p-p-p-puh.”
“Steeple Herding, gentlemen.”
“Thank you, Mister Barking,” I said. “Where are we going, Ivor?”
“Solicitor by the name of Josilyn Boodle.”
“Solicitor by the name of Josilyn Boodle, Mister Barking,” I said. “If you could kindly direct us.”
“Steeple Herding has a solicitor?”
“Not only that, Mister Barking, but he goes by the singular name of Josilyn Boodle, if the inspector’s sources are to be believed. I’m as astonished as you are.”
“You could ask at the post office.”
“We’ll do just that, Mister Barking. I expect you have an empire to build or a market to conquer, so if you could get all that out of the way in time to pick us up around two, you’ll find us in…” I scanned the doughy, snowy, main street of Steeple Herding. “...that pub.”
“I’m not going into any public house in Steeple Herding.”
“No, and I wouldn’t ask you to, any more than I’d ask a Capulet to pop down to a Montague off-licence. I’ll keep an eye out for you.”
A crinkle-eyed postal elf with a bow tie and spring link sleeve garters gave us very precise directions to the home office of Mister Boodle, and Ivor and I were soon at the door of a handsome maison de maître of the sort that Harley Street doctors are forever hiding behind brass plaques. This house had opted for a more modest iron sign with raised letters spelling “Josilyn Boodle, Solicitor”.
“I’m sure I don’t need to remind you, Mister Boisjoly, that you’re here as a courtesy.” Ivor reminded me, apparently feeling the need to do so nevertheless, and then tapped the door knocker. “You’re not to say a word, unless I explicitly ask your opinion, is that understood?”
“Couldn’t be clearer, Inspector, even if your cold didn’t give you the elocution of a man being smothered by a pillow. Feel free to call upon me to translate, if the need arises.”
The door opened exactly as far as needed to reveal the aquiline features of a patrician woman with an extremely judgemental eyebrow.
“Yes?” she asked, pointedly and, I daresay for the season, a bit piquishly.
“Inspector Wittersham, Scotland Yard, to see Mister Josilyn Boodle.” Ivor managed to combine imperious and weary into the same tone, which caused whatever he said to carry an implied ‘or am I going to have to nick someone?’
The door swung open on a smart hallway that divided home and office in exactly the same way that Constable Kimble had failed to do. The right-side wall was wainscotting to roughly the height of wainscotting, and frighteningly domestic wallpaper with cornflowers or lavender or some such the rest of the way up. On the left was a
plain, white wall with a black lacquered door. The letter-opener-shaped woman marched us through the office door, which led to a pleasant waiting room with two deep, worn-leather divans on either side of a bay window looking out onto the snowy street from whence we had just come.
“My husband doesn’t often see visitors in this office,” announced the woman who in that instant came to be known to us as Mrs Boodle. “He normally receives clients in his London office.” She said ‘London’ the way people in London say ‘Kensington’ and people in ‘Kensington’ say ‘Buckingham Palace’. “I’ll tell him you’re here.” She slipped through the crack in the door and was gone.
Ivor slumped sideways on a divan like a prima donna in a death scene, and I sunk into the other and flipped through a small stack of tracts on various themes of law, such as A Passion for Probate, by Seward Braith-Wairing, FBA, and A Practitioner’s Guide to Trespass and Poaching, by Federick-Anne Damby-Squires, KC and KCSI. Spoilt for choice, I nevertheless selected Copyright Infringement and Remedy, partially because there were a dozen copies, and partially because it was authored by none other than Josilyn M Boodle, Solicitor, London and Environs. It was a simple, folded, stunningly dull treatise with a picture of a serious-minded Boodle on the front, taking a dim view of something that was occurring to the left of the photographer.
In the photograph, he was a handsome, clean-shaven, professorial type, an image which was entirely undermined a moment later when the door burst open and the real Josilyn Boodle clattered in. Since the photograph was taken he’d acquired a thin moustache and lost a monocle, and he’d developed a sense of joie de vivre that appeared largely absent among the legal essayists of Great Britain, if these brochures were anything to go by.
“Allo, allo,” sang Boodle. “Which of you is the rozzers?”
“Inspector Wittersham,” said Ivor, rising like a flag of mourning. “This is Mister Boisjoly.”
“Boisjoly, eh?” Boodle shook our hands enthusiastically. “Any relation to Azalea Boisjoly?”
“My aunt,” I explained, and stopped there, to avoid destabilising the delicate balance of the police interrogation.
The Case of the Ghost of Christmas Morning (Anty Boisjoly Mysteries Book 2) Page 14