by Ewan Lawrie
Mrs Gonderthwaite left forthwith to find the accoutrements to repair the mess in the late reporter’s chamber. The policeman cut a comical figure, holding the stained white material of his uniform trousers away from his private parts, far too much the gentleman to remove them in the presence of a lady. In the meantime, he gasped, ‘Maccabi, I hold you as guarantor for Miss Pardoner’s pledge to remain on the premises.’
As Maccabi began to bluster, I interrupted, ‘Should that task not fall to me, Constable?’
‘As you like! Someone must.’
He spat it out, either excited out of his phlegmatism by the warming properties of the broth or simply by the prospect of arresting someone, at last, for something. At this point, Maccabi finally expelled something intelligible from his mouth. ‘You can’t think... surely not... ’
It was evident that constable did indeed ‘think’, and that Maccabi knew he did.
‘I shall require, in that case, that Maccabi summon from Alnwick Mrs Catchpole, wife to the turnkey of the House of Correction, so that we may transport the miscreant to a place of confinement.’
Maccabi showed himself for a lovesick fool by seizing the fellow by the arm and hissing into his face, ‘It was I, I saw off the hack!’.
The policeman shook off the offending hand and, raising an eyebrow, said to the handsome Jew, ‘I did not take you for any kind of herbalist, sir.’
The dwarf stepped nimbly over to the policeman and beckoned him to lean his ear downward, the better to whisper a confidence. I thought this uncommon rude, although the detective’s face offered as many clues as the most inept of criminal might. The professor exclaimed, ‘Gentlemen, lady, follow me if you please.’
We followed the scampering gnome, some less reluctantly than others. Down the stairs, through the phantasmagoria of furnishings in the atrium, then through the dining room and the various bizarre collections until we reached the vivarium, just before the library. In addition to the vitrines behind which slithered creatures invisible in the darkness of the room, there were rows and rows of exemplars of every kind of plant imaginable, and some that were not. I doubt that I would have been able to identify even the tenth part of their varieties, had I been wont to try.
In addition to being dark, the room was uncomfortably warm, as alien as the tropic forests of Martinique and, perhaps, as sinister. The horticultural specimens stood atop long benches, the edge of whose surfaces were of a height with the professor’s eyebrows. The benches were more than a clothyard deep, and at the very back I could see a space dedicated to the most exotic of the orchidae, their colours fighting valiantly against the general gloom. The dwarf reached under the bench and withdrew a rough stool, the like of which, in a more conventional household, might conceivably have been used for milking a cow. The professor skipped nimbly atop it and made a deep and mocking bow. ‘Gentlemen, lady, before your squinting eyes our very own Jedediah will pluck the fruit of the Strychnos nux vomica and save the fair maiden from durance vile.’
The little man grinned and snickered and for the first time I felt some semblance of fellow feeling for him, both of us knowing that for all Maccabi’s prodigious knowledge of the local avian riches, his botanical expertise was such that he could provide no answer that would incriminate himself.
Maccabi turned listlessly to the bench and grasped a plant without looking at it. He gave quite a start when the Dionaea muscipula trapped him as surely as Venus herself had inveigled his confession. The dwarf looked at Constable Turner and gave a vigorous shake of the head.
‘Well, miss, your gallant has failed you,’ the policeman said.
‘It does not follow that Miss Pardoner is responsible, Turner,’ I said.
‘I know that none of these plants is Strychnos nux vomica, for it is, in fact, a tree. Do you now propose my arrest? Certainly the professor would know the tree itself and perhaps where, in this lunatic house, one might find it.’ I awaited answer from the policeman.
He said nothing. I added, ‘Perhaps we might consider more than means and opportunity. You said it yourself, there are few motiveless crimes.’
It was some surprise to me that I had unwittingly absorbed so much of the policeman’s earlier lecture on the science of detection. It occurred to me also that the man might have wished that he had not proselytised quite so much on behalf of his new religion. Miss Pardoner, who had hitherto been most surprisingly mute, enquired, ‘Motive? Means? Opportunity? What have these to do with such hideous crimes?’
I feared a further tiresome exposition from Constable Turner, but we were saved by the intervention of a no less tiresome, if more diminutive, didact: the professor.
‘I shall explain. A fascinating subject, detection.’
He looked around, as if for applause. Maccabi appeared quite distracted, staring fixedly at a point on Miss Pardoner’s bosom. Turner had a bemused look: I supposed him amazed at finding a conversationalist more boring than himself.
Miss Pardoner seemed about to interrupt the great man, but he finally deigned to answer her question, after a fashion.
‘Imagine, dear Ellen, that you have robbed me of a valuable repeater watch. Later you are found dead, strangled – it might be with a scarf, perhaps yellow – in a side-street in Newcastle.’
With this the mountebank produced, with a theatrical flourish, one such scarf from an inner pocket. He winked at me.
‘So, let us say I have motive: viz the watch. I have means: exemplum – a supply of scarves, of an unusual colour I admit. But opportunity? Why, I was here all the time. Alibi is the best defence against such accusations. Suppose I had been in Newcastle? Suppose I owned such a scarf as was found – begging your pardon, Ellen – around your graceful neck? What motive would I have to snuff out the life of such a beautiful creature as yourself? Besides, I have a new and different watch.’
The dwarf gave a leer worthy of an escaped convict in a molly house. Miss Pardoner looked to be biting the inside of her cheek, whether in an effort to prevent a blush or a laugh, I was not sure. I, however, was neither embarrassed nor amused, being preoccupied with the professor’s glaring hints to me about my activities in Newcastle.
Professor Jedermann’s lecture was not yet finished. ‘So, in dealing with a civilised and logical mind, one would presuppose opportunity, means and motive, before one might suppose the guilt of persons accused.’
I could not resist. ‘And the mind of a lunatic? What would that presuppose? Especially if the lunatic were a murderer?’
Maccabi, and most surprisingly Miss Pardoner began to speak at once, before manners prevailed and Ellen spoke at an unaccustomed pitch, ‘But that means it could be anyone. Maccabi, the professor, the servants. Anyone!’
She did not point at me, but the omission of my name did not prevent Maccabi from doing so.
The policeman held up a large and calloused hand, palm out. He shouted, with some distemper, ‘Enough.’
The effect was rather spoiled by the after effects of his sudden encounter with the soup, and the manner in which these caused him to bend at the waist to evade the touch of the wet cloth of his trousers. Still, it was enough to ensure the professor did not proceed to regale us with a history of the study of the mind from Aristotle’s De Anima to the work of some modern academic whom he had no doubt met in Leipzig twenty years before.
‘The reporter’s room will be sealed until the arrival of the coroner from Alnwick. You, Moffat!’
I made an obsequy, but the fellow was far too self-absorbed to note the irony.
‘At your service, Constable.’
‘Is there no one here to be trusted to fetch the coroner?’ he asked.
‘I think we might send Cullis and even expect a return before sunrise,’ I replied.
‘A letter. Might I have the necessary, Mr Moffat?’
‘Certainly, let us all repair to the relative comfort of the library.’
Chapter Thirty-two
The company of five clustered around an escritoire of
white wood. The professor had had to move aside some impressively heavy, if unspeakably filthy, damask drapery to reveal the beautiful piece standing between two of the high-arched windows in the right-hand wall. I fancied I had seen something similar at the Great Exhibition some years ago. It was most definitely a lady’s escritoire, intricately carved with rustic figures, harts, hinds, hares and bucolics idling in leafy bowers; a less indolent cowherd led four cows and a calf along the carved wooden back plate. The white wood had yellowed with age; a shepherd and shepherdess reclined at each side of the writing surface, mooning at each other whilst serving as truss and bracket between the desk and the back plate. Neither nib nor knife had made so much as a scratch on the pristine writing surface, nor had any stray gobbet of ink stained the wood.
The professor pressed the centre of an exquisite rose that formed the centrepiece of a panel above the cattle and their keeper. The cattle and cowherd shot forward, revealing a drawer constrained by spring and lever. The professor stood on the tips of the toes on his tiny feet and withdrew a single sheet of vellum, a ball of wax, a pen and inkwell. He laid the items on the writing surface.
‘We are not so modern here as the late Mr Allan, and can offer no miracles of contemporary calligraphy. Please, Constable, wait here while I fetch you a chair.’
The diminutive professor was as good as his word, although it cost him much barking of shins on the ornate legs of a chair that, quite literally, dwarfed him. He was not helped in his endeavours by the heavy ormolu-mounted candlestick that teetered on the rich, if tattered, fabric of the chair’s seat. The candlestick was after the style of Caffieri and was as emetically rococo in style as to have come from the hand of the master himself. The midget, still huffing, placed the candlestick on the bureau and motioned the detective toward the chair.
Constable Turner did not demur before the interested gaze of the rest of our company, perhaps he was proud of the careful and elegant handwriting I observed from behind his left shoulder. The note was succinct.
Hepplewhite,
A matter for the Coroner is here at hand at Gibbous House. Accompany the bearer of this missive, Cullis.
Constable Turner
He signed it with a flourish and finally removed his tongue to the confines of his mouth once more. He sealed the sheet using only the sealing wax, after warming it over one of the candles in the over-decorative stick. I reached for the letter, but Maccabi seized it before me and dashed away in search of Cullis.
‘Miss Pardoner, Mr Moffat, Constable. Let us be seated in comfort. I shall pour us some refreshment.’
Those two followed the little man. I lingered a moment by the beautiful white-wood writing desk. I pressed the exquisite rose centrepiece, just for the pleasure of seeing the secret compartment spring open once more. A small packet of oilskin, about the size of a snuff box, lay in one corner. I turned my back to the room the better to hide it from the others.
The oilskin was not secured, merely wrapped around a small resinous block of a familiar brown substance. Perhaps the writing desk had spent some time in the notary’s office in Seahouses. I pocketed the opium and pushed the compartment shut. Turning to the room, I bellowed at the professor, ‘For pity’s sake, Enoch, just a good oporto, and none of that damnable green filth!’
He almost dropped the absinthe but could not save the sugar; the cube skittered across the floor to disappear under Miss Pardoner’s chair. Placing the bottle on the long board, he scuttled to the chair and burrowed under Miss Pardoner’s skirts to recover it. That young woman remained in a state of remarkable equanimity throughout the performance. Her own raised eyebrow answered mine in reciprocal fashion.
The professor, the sugar cube now in his mouth, retired to the lowest of the chairs in the room, an expression somewhere between a leer and the beatific smile of a saint. He let out a contented sigh. ‘Miss Pardoner, if you please, some music.’
She arose without reply and strode to the far corner of the room. Seated before a piano, she looked over her shoulder and said, ‘Mr Moffat, would you be so kind?’ She pointed at the music on the stand before her. Naturally, I was delighted to be so.
It was an old-fashioned instrument, with none of the innovations of Erard or Babcock. A vile green in colour in the main, it featured gilt-scalloping on the edges. The keys were an inversion of the modern custom, the natural being black and the accidental white.
Ellen Pardoner gave a laugh. ‘A Viennese school piano, Mr Moffat. A Stein Klavier. Who knows, perhaps Mozart himself played on this very one?’
‘Perhaps,’ I said.
I looked at the proliferation of black markings on the pages before her: they were as meaningless to me as the strange alphabets the professor was so proud of knowing.
‘What will you play?’ I asked her.
‘Why Mozart, of course.’
She began to play. It was both beautiful and sad.
I turned the pages and noted the occasional crabbed note in the margin, often monogrammed with a floridly cursive M. The music finished. The professor’s and the policeman’s applause was augmented by that of Maccabi, who must have entered during the entertainment. I asked my ward in a whisper, ‘What was it?’
Her answer was abruptly drowned by the professor’s excited yelp: ‘Fräulein Pardoner, sollen wir nicht singen?’
‘Oh fie, Professor, not again!’
Fie indeed, I thought. Miss Pardoner was uncommon fond of romances, it seemed.
Maccabi and the dwarf were now positioned on the French-window side of the hideous piano, as excited as boys at keyholes. The professor’s chest was as puffed out as that of any pouter pigeon. I believed I saw the slightest upward turn of Jedediah’s mouth, as if he were the elder indulging an excitable youth.
‘Ach ja! Play it! Play it! Mozart’s finest!’
Miss Pardoner began to play, accompanying her own pleasant contralto, the professor’s reedy tenor and Maccabi’s manly baritone. The policeman looked on as stoically as might have been expected. It was a round – or a canon, if you will. My grasp of the German language was sufficient to discern the title as being ‘Leck mich im Arsch’. It was not hard to imagine Mozart issuing such an invitation: there were rumours that he told Archbishop Colloredo to ‘kiss my arse’ more than once.
We repaired once more to chairs near the vast fireplace. The professor poured us each a glass of jerez and rang the cracked bell.
‘Do you carry that with you everywhere, man?’ I asked.
‘As you saw, some of the bell pulls have been,’ he pon-dered his next words for a moment or two, ‘adapted to better purpose.’
‘I find it nothing short of miraculous that anyone answers the summons of so unsound a chime, much less so distracted a soul as Mrs Gonderthwaite. The woman cannot possibly hear the summons, wherever she might be,’ I posited, looking the mannikin squarely in the eye.
‘Well, you are aware of the nature of sound, surely, Mr Moffat? As Galileo said, “Waves are produced by the vibrations of a sonorous body, which spread through the air, bringing to the tympanum of the ear a stimulus which the mind interprets as sound.”’
My heart sank at the prospect of another lecture from the academic homunculus.
‘The frequencies of such vibrations may be measured, you will allow, Mr Moffat?’
I nodded wearily.
‘There are those who believe that animals hear more frequencies than do we, did you know that, Mr Moffat?’
‘Any fool knows that, Professor,’ enjoined Maccabi. ‘We do not hear the half of birdsong, and how beautiful it would be to hear the entire canon.’
The fellow wore a simpering look worthy of a heroine of a sensationalist novel.
The professor sounded displeased at the interruption: ‘Quite so. Although we do not hear them, it is said that sounds of low frequency may cause feelings of awe and fear in humankind. In my examinations of Mrs Gonderthwaite, I have noticed a peculiar sensitivity to audible low frequency sounds. I persist with this bell a
s part of my ongoing research.’
He appeared on the point of clacking the cracked bell once more when Mrs Gonderthwaite entered the library. Perhaps she had heard some sound inaudible to the rest of us. I felt the woman appeared according to her own whim, rather in the manner of the faery folk. She addressed the professor but looked at me. ‘If there is nothing further, I should like to retire, sir.’
The policeman answered by means of a question. ‘I trust the room is sealed?’
The woman replied that it was indeed.
‘In that case,’ Turner went on, ‘I see no reason to keep any of you from your beds. I shall wait here for the coroner.’
I looked at the watch: it was past eleven. I stood to allow Miss Pardoner to take her leave and resolved to follow after a polite interval. Maccabi followed her, whilst the professor lingered as if wishing to share some confidence, but finally he left after a few moments of uncomfortable silence. I made to leave. Turner held me back with his arm, fixing a cold gaze on me.
‘Be careful, Moffat. There is more at work here than you can know. You would do well to leave Gibbous House this very evening.’
I scoffed at his presumption, and brushed his arm away.
‘You would do well to remember that I am master of this house, Constable.’
‘Allan was not a man to keep his own counsel, Moffat. I have heard much of your... abilities. They will not be enough. You play into their hands, sir.’
‘Whose hands?’ I laughed. ‘Do you not think I am a match for an ageing dwarf, a slip of a girl and that dolt Maccabi?’
The man’s spittle dampened my cheek. ‘Curse your arrogance, you fool. There is more at work here than you can know. Mark my words, Moffat, leave – while you still can.’
I left him in his chair.
Chapter Thirty-three
I was awakened by Mrs Gonderthwaite in the darkest hours. She wore a nightshirt – thank the lord – but the light of the moon through the window offered an unwanted glimpse of her figure’s silhouette. She bore a seven-branched candelabrum aloft and informed me that the coroner had arrived. She led me below, floating before me like a phantasm from some tale of the imagination.