Polly was saved from stuffing the muffins down his throat by the fresh tinkling of the bell over the tearoom door.
• • •
The next person to enter the Magic Muffin was Emily Louise Perk, ten years old with no sign she had grown since she was eight. Her small-boned frame and triangular face, mournful brown eyes, strings of yellow hair hanging about her pointed chin, shabby little hacking jacket and jeans, all proclaimed her to be quite a pitiful child.
Emily Louise Perk was anything but pitiful.
Her unkempt appearance had nothing to do with a neglectful parent or a poor one. If her hair never looked combed and her costume never changed it was because Emily Louise was up long before her mother, up before the rest of the village, up before God, seeing to her interests, chief among them being her pony, Shandy. Shandy was stabled, oddly enough, at Rookswood, the Bodenheim manor. Emily was permitted to keep her own pony there in return for taking care of the Bodenheim horses. Since Emily Louise knew more about horses than anyone from Hertfield to Horndean, they let her alone. That she was not even plagued by Sylvia Bodenheim was in itself a remarkable feat, testimony to Emily’s remarkable facility for either getting what she wanted out of grown-ups or ignoring them completely. She was permitted to slop about freely in the stableyard and even to enter the kitchen for tea and tidbits served up by the Bodenheim cook, who was fond of Emily Louise. Thus, unlike the other village children whom the Bodenheims gladly squashed like stray cats and dogs, Emily was permitted, metaphorically speaking, to live.
And live she did rather high on the hog because she knew everything that went on in Littlebourne. She was not a gossip, but she certainly knew the going rate of exchange. News flowed back and forth through her four-foot frame as if she were an electrical wire.
Polly happily called out to her and pulled a chair round for her to sit in. If anyone would know, she would.
As Emily sat down, Miles said, “Thought you were supposed to be up at the house currying Julia’s horse.” His iron-gray brows furrowed.
No frown, however, was any match for Emily Louise’s. She always appeared to be in a brown study. “Today’s Saturday. I don’t do spit on Saturday.” She looked at the muffin plate and sighed. “It’s carrot again. I wish I had a hot cross bun.” She clamped her hands atop her head and looked at Polly.
Polly called to Miss Pettigrew, who, seeing Emily, immediately procured a plate of buns and a fresh pot of tea. Miss Pettigrew was not immune to the charms of Miss Perk, either. They spent rather a lot of time over tea and talk.
“Thank you,” said Emily, who did not place herself above manners. “There’s a policeman in the village, a new one.”
“I know,” snapped Sir Miles. “Met the chap already.” He dusted his trouser knees and drank his tea. “He’s from Scotland Yard.”
Scotland Yard. Polly’s mouth dropped open. She cleared her throat. “What’s he doing here? I mean, is he staying?”
Apparently unable to supply any more information, Sir Miles passed it off with a general comment about the inefficiency of police in general. “All running about cock-a-hoop, none of them seem to know what they’re doing.”
Emily ate her bun. “He’s going to find that body, I expect. He’s staying at the Bold Blue Boy. They dropped off their stuff there. He’s a police superintendent.”
“Did you, ah, happen to hear his name?” asked Polly.
Emily did not provide this essential bit of information. Instead, she drained her cup and shoved it toward Polly. “Tell my fortune, please.”
Polly was loath to drop the subject, but perhaps the tea-leaf reading could be turned to that account. Sir Miles sighed hugely, as if they had chained him to his chair, forcing him to listen to this nonsense.
Polly tipped the cup and looked down at the meaningless pattern the small bits of black leaf left on its surface. All she saw was something that looked like a ragged bird. “I see a man, a stranger.”
“What’s he look like?” Emily’s chin rested in her clenched fists. The eternal pucker between her brows deepened.
“Tall, good-looking, about forty—”
“That old?”
“ . . . chestnut hair, uh, brown eyes—”
“Gray.”
“Gray?”
“Rubbish,” contributed Miles.
“Go on!” said Emily.
Looking at the wingless bird, Polly said, “Some kind of danger, some sort of mystery.” Polly shrugged her shoulders. Ordinarily her imagination was sprightlier, but today she couldn’t seem to make it click.
“He’s got a nice smile and a nice voice,” said Emily, supplying the missing details. Then she stood up, her legs slightly bowed, her feet turned in. She had found a bit of string which she was winding thoughtfully about her finger. “Do policemen make much money?”
“Ho! Poor as churchmice,” said Sir Miles, hoping it was bad news.
Apparently it was. “I can’t marry anyone who hasn’t got a lot of money. I’d need it for the horses. One day, I’m going to have a lot of horses.” Then she turned and walked out the door.
• • •
Detective Superintendent Richard Jury had been in Littlebourne under an hour and had already turned two of its women to jellies.
Though Emily Louise Perk seemed made of starchier stuff than Polly Praed.
THREE
I
IT was not the police who found the body to which the finger had lately belonged; it was Miss Ernestine Craigie, sister to Augusta. Ernestine had gone to the Horndean wood, as was her usual habit, in her Wellingtons and anorak, and with binoculars swinging round her neck. Ernestine was not only president, but was heart, soul and muscle of the Hertfield Royal Birdwatchers’ Society.
The Horndean wood was a somber tract of oak, ash, and bracken which stretched its seemingly endless wetness (bog and marsh), an invitation to all sorts of birdlife, between Littlebourne and the much larger town of Horndean. The wood was unpleasant and unpretty; even in high summer it appeared to be sulking around the edge of winter, its shrubberies a dull brown, its leaves untouched by the usual autumnal glow. Except for the sort of mucking about Miss Craigie had been doing, it was a good-for-nothing, boggy place. Good for nothing, apparently, but bird-watching and murder.
• • •
Police hounds had snuffled through the last place the little dog had been seen rooting—the Craigie sisters’ rosebushes. Fortunately for the sisters, the corpse had not been deposited beneath them. Otherwise the Craigies would have had a lot of explaining to do. They were having a bad enough time as it was. This particular corpse seemed fated to attach itself to them in one way or another. The body had been found not under Augusta’s rosebushes, but by Ernestine: it was lying half-in, half-out of the muddy waters of a narrow stream which cut straight across the Horndean wood.
When Superintendent Jury and Constable Gere arrived on the scene they found a hard knot of police and dogs all seeming to jockey for position. One of the men peeled off from the group and walked toward them.
“ ’Lo, Peter.” He put out his hand to Jury. “You’re from Scotland Yard C.I.D.?” Jury nodded. “I’m Carstairs.” Detective Inspector Carstairs had a beaked nose and somewhat predatory air. “Come on. We found her not half an hour ago. Or, to be more precise, one of the local ladies found her. I had one of our people take her back to her cottage; she held up awfully well, I must say. Still, it’s a shock. She’s there whenever you want to speak to her. Unless—”
“No. That’s fine. Is that the M.E. over there?”
“Yes. Come along, then.”
• • •
The medical examiner was a woman, and she was in the process of finishing up her preliminary examination, tossing her comments over her shoulder to an assistant who stood marking items on a chart of a human form.
“ . . . Hairs adherent to this hand; bag it. Nothing on this hand, but I’d bag it, too.”
The reason, Jury thought, there might have been nothing on that hand was becaus
e it had no fingers.
The medical examiner dropped it, quite casually, back on the tree stump, with the direction, “Bag each finger separately.”
Jury took a step forward but was stopped by her assistant’s saying, “Don’t step on that finger, please, sir.”
He looked down and drew his foot back quickly. It was then he noticed the two separate, severed fingers. One had rolled off the stump. The victim, a youngish woman, in her late twenties or early thirties, lay in the shallow and muddy water of the stream. One side of her face was turned down in the water. The water itself was rusty with blood. Except for the one hand, the rest of the body appeared to have escaped mutilation; the cyanosed complexion told Jury she had been strangled.
The doctor rose and dusted her knees free of twigs and leaves. She intoned her findings to Jury. “Dead, I’d say on a prelim, about thirty-six hours. I’d put it at roughly between eight and midnight, Thursday.”
The police ambulance had made its way off the Horndean—Hertfield Road and was trying to maneuver inward along the public footpath. It had to stop some distance from the body. Two men carried over the stretcher and rubber sheet from that point.
“What about the hand, Doctor?”
She pursed her lips, looked at the plastic bag given over to her assistant. “Ax, apparently. It was done in a single blow. That one, there.” She pointed to a small, double-bladed ax lying in the grass.
“Any ideas why the killer’d go to the trouble of cutting off the fingers?” asked Jury.
She shook her head, snapped her bag shut. A woman of few words. She wore a black suit relieved only by a pale shirtwaist, but even that was tied around the throat with a narrow black tie.
“Well, it couldn’t be fingerprints,” said Carstairs, “or he’d have done both hands. And taken away, ah, the fingers. The ax, Gere tells me, belongs to Miss Craigie. The one who found the body. She uses it to clear out underbrush and branches and so forth . . . to see the birds. Miss Craigie’s big on birds.” Inspector Carstairs pulled on his earlobe, as if embarrassed to drag this frivolity into it.
“Could it have been a woman?” asked Jury of the medical examiner.
Her every word was dipped in acid: “ ‘Could it have been a woman?’ Yes, Superintendent. You’ll find that we can do all sorts of things—dress ourselves, ride two-wheelers, do murders.”
Chalk one up for women’s lib, he guessed. “Sorry.” She left, and Jury and Carstairs looked down at the body. The black coat was scummy with algae and the hair was a net to trap twigs and leaves.
Sergeant Wiggins and Peter Gere tramped toward them, away from the clutch of Hertfield policemen looking the ground over.
Wiggins looked down at the mutilated hand as the woman was being wrapped in the rubber sheet. “Why d’ya suppose he cut off the fingers?”
Jury shook his head. “He wasn’t just saying good-bye.”
II
They were back in Peter Gere’s one-room office on the High warming their hands around mugs of tea and coffee.
“No identification,” said Carstairs. “Labels in her clothes were Swan and Edgar and Marks and Sparks. Anyway, you could tell from the quality she didn’t do her shopping at Liberty’s. Looks pretty much the shop girl type to me. Bit heavy on the jewelry, too. Only thing to tell us where she comes from was this.” Carstairs drew a small envelope from his pocket and shook the contents out on the desk. “My sergeant handed me this just before we left the wood. A day return to London. Found it down in the coat lining, apparently slipped through a hole in the pocket.”
Jury looked at the date, September fourth, two days before. “She wasn’t a local, then.”
“Guess not.” Then Carstairs added, as if he didn’t want to let the girl go entirely, “But we shouldn’t completely discount that.”
“Say she was,” said Wiggins, holding his cup close to his nose and breathing in steam, “still, it’s not likely she’d be having a walk along that footpath in the dark, would she? In that wood? And dressed the way she was?”
Carstairs looked at Wiggins as if he were a pile of unwashed socks, but had to agree, nonetheless. “This Miss Craigie, the one who found her. The Craigie woman said she must have passed by that spot when she was out that night having a tramp in the woods—”
“What time?” asked Peter Gere.
“She’s uncertain about that. Nine or nine-thirty, possibly even ten. At any rate, after dark.”
“What would she have been walking in the wood for at that hour?” asked Wiggins, handing his cup back to Gere for seconds.
Peter Gere answered: “Owls. Miss Craigie’s the head of the local birdwatching society. Spends a good deal of time in Horndean wood. It’s wonderful for birds, she claims—all nice and wet and boggy.”
“Sounds a dim pastime,” said Wiggins, pulling his jacket more tightly about him. The little police office’s single night storage heater was no match for Wiggins. “So that puts her out there at the time of the murder, sir,” he said to Jury.
Gere laughed. “Well, I must admit she’s certainly got enough brute force for it—only, wait a moment: you surely don’t think this was done by a local, do you?” With a worried frown, he was tamping tobacco down in his pipe.
“Maybe not, but you’ve had your share of troubles here, Peter. What about these?” Carstairs reached in his inside pocket and dropped a brown packet on the table. “Have a look, Superintendent.” His smile was enigmatic, as if he could hardly wait for Scotland Yard to cast its eye on this little lot.
It was a plain, brown mailing envelope, postmarked in Hertfield and addressed to the Littlebourne sub-post office. Jury opened it and took out a packet of letters held together with a rubber band. He flipped through the envelopes and said, “Crayon?”
“Interesting, isn’t it? Much more difficult for forensics than ink or typewriter impressions. They haven’t come up with anything yet.”
Jury opened and read the first, written in green crayon, to a Miss Polly Praed, Sunnybank Cottage. “It would appear Miss Praed has been getting up to all sorts of mischief without ever leaving her home. Gin. Dope.” He set it aside and picked up the second, this one in orange, to a Ramona Wey. “Not very long, are they?”
“And not very naughty, either, except for the ones to Augusta Craigie and Dr. Riddley. Hard to write for very long in crayon.”
Augusta Craigie’s letter was done in purple. “Miss Craigie gets around, doesn’t she? So far three different men have been cited here, in various states of dress and undress.”
Peter Gere smiled. “If you knew Augusta—that’s Ernestine’s sister—you’d see it’s very unlikely. She was rather proud of her letter, I’d say. We were wondering if perhaps she was the writer just so’s she could send one to herself.”
“It’s not usual to do that,” said Jury. “Seems a thin motive for writing all the others. Poison pen letter-writers usually get a sense of power from controlling other people’s lives, like a voyeur or an obscene telephone caller.” Jury opened the next one. “You got one, Peter, I see.”
Blushing, Gere scratched his neck with the stem of his pipe. “Pretty dull. Done in gray, which is all my personal life deserves, I guess. ‘Skulduggery’—there’s an old-fashioned word for you—when I was working for LT.”
Carstairs clucked his tongue at Peter in mock reproof. “The one to Riddley is a dandy. He’s the local medic, young chap and attractive. Blue.” Carstairs picked it out of the pile.
Jury read the detailed description of what Dr. Riddley was doing with Ramona Wey. “Is she that sexy?”
“Good-looking,” said Peter, “but a bit of an iceberg. She runs an antiques business in Hertfield.”
There were no addresses on the envelopes, only names. All of the letters had been stuffed in the one brown envelope and sent along to the local post office.
“So who got this lot?”
“Mrs. Pennystevens. Well, of course she thought it damned odd, but she just handed them over to the various locals wh
en they came in for bread or stamps. She said she thought they must be party invitations, or something.”
“Some party,” said Wiggins, who was reddening up a bit as he scanned them.
“Ordinary Crayolas you could find in any W. H. Smith’s or any home with kiddies in it.”
“Or without kiddies.” Peter Gere opened the side drawer of the desk and took out some stubs of crayons and a couple of coloring books which he tossed on the table. “Not mine, actually. They belong to a little girl here. Has a passion for coloring, Emily does. She leaves the damned things everywhere. I found these on the window ledge.”
Jury shook his head as he reread the letter to Augusta Craigie. “These letters don’t ring true.”
Carstairs looked at him. “Meaning?”
“Meaning I don’t believe them.” He tossed the letter on the table. “They’re like a game or something. They don’t even sound serious.”
“People round here are taking them seriously, believe me,” said Peter.
Carstairs looked at his watch, set down his cold coffee cup. “Look, I’ve got to get back to Hertfield station. Anything I can do to help, let me know, Superintendent. We can have a mobile unit over here immediately, if you like. I only thought, that since Hertfield’s so close—”
“That’s fine. Just keep your men searching that wood.”
Carstairs nodded, raised two fingers to his cap in a mock military salute and said, “Thanks for the coffee, Peter. You still make it out of steel shavings, I see.” He smiled and was gone.
• • •
The packet of letters lay on the desk. Jury spread them out. “A veritable rainbow of poison-pennery. This girl that got murdered. Do you think there’s any relationship between these and her?”
“I don’t see how,” said Peter Gere. “I hadn’t thought of it, I expect. Are you talking about blackmail?”
“No. That wouldn’t be a very lucrative way of operating, would it? To publish the sins and then try and collect.”
Wiggins came out of the collar of his overcoat, where he must have been turning things over in his chilly way. “You know, it doesn’t seem to me that ticket stub in her coat proves she was a Londoner. It could have been put there by someone else to make us think she was from London.”
The Anodyne Necklace Page 3