I explained the whole thing as lucidly as I could, from the discovery of the extra-deep cupboard and the Slavic-sounding conversation I’d overheard and recorded, to finding Carfax Yard House and getting a tour from M. Alcide. I related every single detail I’d noticed about the empty offices, as well as an exact description of the body and its position. It took a good deal of telling, with Twister stopping me and making me explain things, but it got him over being angry with me; by the time I’d finished my statement, he was laughing at me under his breath and looking at me with a strange mix of admiration and exasperation. It made me feel very warm and cozy.
“Well, it’s the most bizarre train of coincidences I’ve ever heard,” Twister finally said, closing his notebook and giving me a friendly smile, “And I’m very interested in this transcription of a conversation you couldn’t possibly under-stand. I’ll call around later on and get the pages from you, if you don’t mind.”
“I never mind you calling around,” I murmured, flapping my eyelashes at him.
“You really have to stop talking like that in public,” Twister warned me, glancing around to make sure we hadn’t been overheard, “You’re going to get yourself into trouble. And I’d really rather you didn’t get me into trouble while you were at it.”
“I can’t help it,” I shrugged and winked, “You’re so irresistible.”
“Oh, for crying out loud,” he grabbed my shoulders and turned me around, pushing me away down the hall, “Go do whatever it is you idlers do in the afternoon, and I’ll talk to you later.”
*****
I didn’t know what the other idlers were doing, but I had a little more shopping to do with M. Alcide, after which a spot of lunch would not go amiss. I stopped at home to copy the sheets of phonetic writing twice, once for Twister and once for myself, making a few corrections as I went; the first copy was folded neatly into an envelope in case Twister called while I was out, and the other I took with me to the Oxford & Cambridge Club in Pall Mall, where I hoped to not only feed myself but to collar a linguist who could make sense of my scribbles.
To continue the bizarre chain of coincidences that had so far characterized the day, whom should I run into on the stairs but the handsome linguistics lecturer himself, Professor ffinchWinship. I latched onto him like a limpet and wouldn’t let go, insisting almost rudely that he join me for lunch and discuss my phonetics with me. After a brief resistance, no doubt remembering the pash I so clearly harbored for him at Oxford, he gave in when I proffered up my scribblings for his review. Like any scholar, he was easily led by his own subject, and could be counted on to sacrifice his comforts in order to take apart an interesting puzzle.
“You say you wrote this while lying in a cupboard and listening against a wall?” he looked over the neat rows with surprise after we were seated in the coffee-room.
“Well, no,” I admitted, “This is a fair-copy I made afterward. The original looked like a gang of mice got into some ink and performed a Morris dance over the pages.”
“Still, very impressive,” ffinch-Winship snapped the edges of the pages together and started reading without interrupting the flow of lamb-chop into his mouth, “Very good work for a novice.”
“I had a good teacher,” I smiled at him, but tried to make it sound like a compliment rather than a flirtation. I was still a bit besotted by him, truth be told, and was having some difficulty concentrating on the topic at hand.
“This looks like Czech or Slovak to me,” he proclaimed after several minutes’ silent reading, “Though I can’t really be certain. And I don’t know what it means, only that it’s definitely a Slavic language. You’ll want to get old Beran to translate it for you, he’s an expert of Slavic languages.”
“Oh!” I exclaimed in disappointment, “I don’t know Professor Beran.”
“I’ll introduce you,” he grinned at my impatience, “He was in the north library just a bit ago, probably still there.”
“Would you? I’d be forever grateful.”
“What’s the great hurry?” he wondered, studying me closely.
“I’m just madly curious,” I admitted, though I decided to omit any mention of the corpse, “I overheard these blokes talking at the back of my cupboard, and I went around to the building that backs onto mine, to find out who they were. But it was just an empty office.”
“It’s too bad you didn’t apply your curiosity in academia,” he sighed, “That kind of inquisitiveness, the search for knowledge for its own sake, is the prerequisite of the best scholarship.”
“I’m afraid none of the subjects really caught my fancy,” I leaned back in my chair as the waiter came around with the port, “I’m more interested in people than in history or languages.”
“History and languages are the study of people,” he corrected me, “But I take your meaning. You’re a man of action rather than of study.”
“Exactly! I am much too impatient for research in books. I need to go and find out right away.”
“Well, let’s not test your patience any further, we’ll go chivvy Beran and find out what your mysterious Slavs were talking about.”
Professor Beran, like Professor ffinchWinship, was considerably younger and better-looking than your average run of Oxford dons, tall and dark and handsome (though not quite as handsome as ffinch-Winship); but unlike Professor ffinchWinship, Professor Beran looked at me with a very interested glitter in his eye while I explained my problem.
“Well, yes, I suppose it is Czech. I’m not as fluent in this alphabet as you both seem to be,” he frowned at the papers in his hands, “Why don’t we try this: you two speak the transcript aloud, and I’ll transcribe it into the Czech, and see if we can make sense of it all.”
Retiring to a quieter corner of the library together, ffinchWinship and I read the transcript aloud, and Beran wrote down what we were saying, stopping us every now and then to ask for a clarification from me, whether or not I meant to record a sound that would make better sense than the sound I had written down. Then he set to work translating the Czech into English while we watched, fascinated. After about twenty minutes, he laughed in triumph and slammed his hand down on the finished transcript.
“Well, I think I owe you gentlemen a drink,” I flagged down a waiter and ordered a bottle and a syphon, “I bet we managed this faster than Scotland Yard could have done. Twister will be green with envy!”
“Scotland Yard?” ffinch-Winship was startled, “You didn’t mention Scotland Yard was involved.”
“And who is Twister?” Beran asked, just as startled and suspicious as ffinch-Winship.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I apologized, realizing rather belatedly that both of them might have some ideological objection to doing police-work; and then there were a great many University intellectuals who subscribed to the communist cause, which might be what the Czech gentlemen were discussing, “I didn’t mention the Yard before because they asked me not to. Twister is my friend who’s a sergeant at Scotland Yard. Sir Oliver Paget? A Cambridge man, but otherwise sound.”
“Why is the Yard involved?” ffinch-Winship pursued, “Is it a criminal matter? Or a political matter? Is this transcription a betrayal of some kind?”
“I don’t know about betrayal,” I lowered my voice and leaned in so that they’d stop yelling, “But I wasn’t quite truthful when I told you the office was empty. There was a dead man there. It’s a murder investigation. The victim was probably one of the men I’d overheard, and this might give us some clue as to the murderer’s identity.”
“I don’t see how,” Professor Beran frowned at his handiwork, wondering if he should give it to me after all, “It’s just an argument about a family matter, something about an inheritance.”
“Really?” I leaned over his shoulder to read the transcript, “I was hoping for something more exotic.”
“Just because they’re foreign doesn’t mean they’re involved in international espionage,” Beran grinned up at me, those inky eyes dancing w
ith amusement, “Even we Czechs have mothers, and brothers to fight with.”
“You’re from Czechoslovakia?” I looked at him in surprise, “But your accent is flawless!”
“That’s because I was born and raised in Chipping Norton, you silly boy,” he reached over and pinched my leg, “My father is from Czechoslovakia. Though it was Bohemia when he left.”
“If you two are just going to flirt with each other, I have better things to do than watch you,” ffinch-Winship said, not unkindly, standing up and slapping Beran on the back, “We’ll have a game of backgammon after dinner tonight, Miles? Nice to see you again, Foxbridge, and thanks for lunch.”
“Thank you so much for your help, Professor,” I shook his hand warmly.
“We’re not in college anymore, Foxbridge,” he corrected me gently, “We’re fellow clubmen, here. ffinch-Winship will do. Cheerio!”
“Are you really flirting, or was he joking?” I asked, feigning innocence.
“Of course I was, weren’t you?” he asked a little warily.
“Not yet; and you won’t have to ask when I do, I’m not very subtle,” I promised, “I’ll show you when we’re done with this transcript. Now, what’s it all about?”
Professor Beran — Miles, I mean — had been correct in his estimation of the conversation: it was deadly dull, full of references to unknown persons, rehashes of childhood slights, and which one of them Mother liked best. The deeper-voiced chap, who was called Georg, was disgruntled about the sum of his inheritance, implying that the higher-voiced chap, Johan, had taken more than his fair share; but the sums mentioned were quite small, no more than a couple hundred pounds. It just wasn’t the sort of thing that someone would break someone else’s neck over.
“It is possible that the argument and the murder are unrelated,” Miles suggested, “Well over an hour had passed between your hearing the argument and finding the body.”
“But what were they doing there in the first place?” I was deeply dissatisfied with how things were unfolding. It was all so dreadfully unromantic.”Who in the world breaks into an empty office to have an argument about an inheritance?”
“I imagine they were there for some other reason,” Miles laughed, “Family rows break out in their own time.”
“That makes some sense,” that stopped me, “I don’t even know if they broke in, they may have had some legitimate reason for being there. I’ll have to ask Twister.”
“You like this Twister chap, don’t you?” he looked at me closely.
“Why do you say that?”
“The look on your face when you said his name.”
“Really?” I was stunned, “I had no idea I looked any certain way when I say his name.”
“Does he like you?” Miles tilted his head at me, the flirtation gone from his eyes, replaced by concern.
“He will,” I grinned, “Sooner or later. And in the meantime, I am not planning to play Penelope to his Ulysses and spend the next ten years weaving in my room.”
“You’ll be entertaining suitors?” he arched his eyebrow at me.
“A boy has to make his hay while the sun shines, what?” I poured us another round of drinks, and lifted my glass in a toast, “And speaking of hay, would you care to roll in some with me?”
“You really aren’t very subtle, are you?” he actually blushed.
“Are you staying here at the club?” I inquired, wondering whose bed was closest, mine or his.
“I am, but it’s a shared room,” he looked a little startled, so much so that I wondered if I should slow down a bit.
“Hmm,” I thought a moment, realizing we couldn’t go back to my rooms, not with Twister expected to drop in at any minute — unless he already had dropped by, I could phone Pond and find out...
“I hope you won’t think me a prude,” Miles interrupted my scheming, “But it’s a bit early in the day for that sort of thing, surely?”
“You are a bit of a prude,” I reached out and grasped his knee briefly, “But I think it’s sweet. Why don’t we have dinner tonight? The dining-room at my hotel is excellent. Come around a little after eight and I’ll show you around the place. It used to be a club, you know. Quite like this place.”
“All right,” he said after a short pause to think about whether my hotel was too suggestive a setting, “Is it formal?”
“Oh, we wear anything from smoking jackets to white tie at Hyacinth House. But I bet you look absolutely spiffing in white tie. We might go to a show after?”
“Sounds lovely,” he smiled shyly at me.
I took my leave of him and of the O&C, and walked slowly back to Hyacinth House. It struck me as funny that he’d come all over coy at the last minute, when it was he who started flirting in the first place. But I suppose he’d expected to flirt a little while longer before leading to a more laden form of communication; that’s me all over: impatient and pushy, grabbing after what I want instead of waiting for it to come to me.
Except in the case of Twister, it seemed. I was quite content to wait him out, drawing out the flirtation over weeks, or months if that’s how long it took. In fact, I didn’t want him to succumb to my wiles all at once, I wanted to work for it a bit. That was so unlike my usual modus operandi that it presented me with a bit of a puzzle; I worried at it like a cat with a ball of yarn all the way up St. James’s Street, into my rooms, into a bath, and into the underpinnings of my evening clothes.
I was enjoying my afternoon tea in my shirtsleeves, my stockinged feet on the pouf in front of the empty fireplace, when Twister finally condescended to pay his call. Pond seemed to have been expecting him, since there were already two cups and a pot of sliced lemon on the tray, with a walnut cake too big for me to manage on my own.
“Take a pew,” I waved negligently at him as he came in, not getting up from my chair. But behind the louche facade, I was feeling a couple of butterflies doing a warmup foxtrot in my tummy. Miles was on to something: my feelings for Twister were rather more serious than I had hitherto thought, “And tell me, before you stuff your maw with cake, was there any sign of a break-in on the office door, or did they have a key?”
“No sign of a break-in,” Twister threw his hat on the table by the door and fell comfortably into the chair across from me, snatching up a piece of cake and taking a polite-sized bite, “Oh, good cake, this.”
“So who would have keys to that office?” I considered the problem, “Previous tenants? Prospective tenants? What about the estate agents, are any of them missing a brother?”
“How do you mean ‘brother’? Figuratively or literally?”
“Quite literally,” I grinned like a Cheshire cat, “While you were off doing whatever it is policemen do in the afternoons, I was at the Oxford & Cambridge Club getting my scribblings translated. What do you think of that?”
“I think you shouldn’t be sharing this information with all and sundry, and leave it to the police whose proper work it is.”
“P’shaw,” I picked up the sheets of O&C writing-paper from the table by my elbow and handed them over to him, “I saved your people hours of labour on the taxpayers’ shilling.”
“But my people would keep the information they translated confidential,” Twister said very seriously, “Who'd you give your scribbles to? How do you know you can trust them to keep it quiet?”
“Professors ffinch-Winship and Beran, both of Merton College, Oxford. The former is a professor of linguistics and the latter a professor of modern languages, specializing in the Slavics. It was ffinch-Winship who taught me phonetic writing in the first place.”
“And you just happened to run into him?”
“I’m lucky, I guess,” I shrugged, “I mean, I went to the O&C to dig up someone to translate my phonetics for me, it was pure luck that it was the man who taught it to me in the first place. Even purer luck that his good friend Professor Beran is not only fluent in Czech — the language my through-the-wall men were speaking, by the way — but is himself Czech.
Or at least his father is. How about that?”
“I’ll be sure to ask your pick for Ascot,” he said in a mocking tone, “And the Grand National. We should put your dumb luck to work.”
“You already have,” I smirked at him, “Right there in your hand. Seven pages of translated transcription, at no cost to the Yard.”
“But they’re just squabbling about money,” he said after a few moments’ silent reading, “That’s not at all what I was expecting.”
“Nor what I was expecting,” I agreed, “I was sure it would be espionage, or anarchist plots, or something dastardly.”
“You read too many pulps, Foxy,” Twister looked at me sternly.
“Yes, well,” I couldn’t stay recumbent while I was puzzling things out, so I got up and started to pace in front of the sofa, or rather circling it, “You say the office door wasn’t broken into, and so that means either the door was sitting around unlocked — which not only seems unlikely but begs the question of how the killer locked the door behind him when he left — or else the men had a key. We know now that the men were Czechs, they were brothers, and their names are Georg and Johan. Compare that to a list of people who have keys to that office, and you have our mysterious gentlemen.”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Twister put down my pages and opened his own notebook, “The men who leased that office before its current vacancy were not Czechs, nor were they named Georg or Johan — nor even George or John. Richard Little and Francis Bickersteth. They aren’t brothers, either, unless there’s something their mothers aren’t telling them.”
“What about their staff? What about the tenants before them? What about the estate agents?” I fired at him.
“Slow down, boy,” he laughed at me, flipping through his notebook, “I haven’t looked into previous tenants yet, and Little-Bickersteth Investments didn’t have a staff except for a typist who came in to do their correspondence once a week, name of Lavender Briggs.”
“Leaving the estate agents as our main avenue of investigation,” I dipped my oar in to show I was paying attention.
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