“To meet Princess Victoria,” the large woman carrying a Union Jack on the step behind me said. “She’s travelling up from Reading.”
Verity had reached the bottom of the escalator. “Coventry!” I called to her, pointing over the heads of the crowd toward the Warwickshire Line.
“I know,” Verity shouted back, already headed down the corridor.
The corridor was jammed, and so was the platform. Verity pushed her way over to me. “You’re not the only one who’s good at solving mysteries, Sherlock,” she said. “I’ve even figured out what Finch is up to.”
“What?” I said, but a train was pulling in. The crowd surged forward, pushing us apart.
I fought my way over to her again. “Where are all these people going? Princess Victoria’s not in Coventry.”
“They’re going to the protest,” a boy in braids said. “Coventry’s holding a rally to protest the disgraceful theft of their cathedral by Oxford.”
“Really?” Verity said sweetly. “Where’s it being held? In the shopping center?” and I could have kissed her.
“You realize,” she said, pushing a hand-painted sign that read, “Architects Against Coventry Cathedral” out of her face, “that there’s probably a time traveller from a hundred years in the future in this crowd who thinks this is all unbelievably quaint and charming.”
“That’s impossible,” I said. “What is Finch up to?”
“He’s been—” she started, but the doors were opening and people were jamming onto the train.
We got separated again in the process, and I found myself half a car away from her, shoved into a seat between an old man and his middle-aged son.
“But why rebuild Coventry Cathedral, of all things?” the son was complaining. “If they had to rebuild something that had been destroyed, why not the Bank of England? That would have been of some use at least. What good’s a cathedral?”
“‘God works in a mysterious way,’” I quoted, “‘His wonders to perform.’”
Both of them glared at me.
“James Thomson,” I said. “The Seasons.”
They glared some more.
“Victorian poet,” I said, and subsided between them, thinking about the continuum and its mysterious ways. It had needed to correct an incongruity, and it had done so, putting into action its entire array of secondary defenses, and shutting down the net, shifting destinations, manipulating the slippage so that I would keep Terence from meeting Maud, and Verity would arrive at the exact moment Baine threw the cat in. To save the cat that killed the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built.
“Coventry,” the station sign read, and I fought my way out from between the bankers and off the train, motioning to Verity to get off, too. She did, and we fought our way up the escalators and out into Broadgate in front of the statue of Lady Godiva. It looked even more like rain. The protesters were putting their umbrellas up as they started for the shopping center.
“Should we ring her up first?” Verity said.
“No.”
“You’re sure she’ll be at home?”
“I’m sure,” I said, not at all certain.
But she was, though it took her a little time to open the door.
“Sorry, I’m having a bout of bronchitis,” Mrs. Bittner said hoarsely, and then saw who we were. “Oh,” she said.
She stood back so we could enter. “Come in. I’ve been expecting you.” She held out her veined hand to Verity. “You must be Miss Kindle. I understand you are a fan of mystery novels, too.”
“Only those of the Thirties,” Verity said apologetically.
Mrs. Bittner nodded. “They are quite the best.” She turned to me. “I read a great many mystery novels. I am particularly fond of those in which the criminal nearly gets away with the crime”
“Mrs. Bittner,” I said, and didn’t know how to go on. I looked helplessly at Verity.
“You’ve puzzled it out, haven’t you?” Mrs. Bittner said. “I was afraid you would. James told me you were his two best pupils.” She smiled. “Shall we go into the drawing room?”
“I . . . I’m afraid we haven’t much time . . .” I stammered.
“Nonsense,” she said, starting down the corridor. “The criminal is always given a chapter in which to confess his sins.”
She led us into the room where I’d interviewed her. “Won’t you sit down?” she said, indicating a chintz-covered sofa. “The famed detective always gathers the suspects together in the drawing room,” she said, moving slowly toward a sideboard considerably smaller than the Merings’, steadying herself on the furniture, “and the criminal always offers them a drink. Would you care for some sherry, Miss Kindle? Would you care for some sherry, Mr. Henry? Or strop de cassis? That’s what Hercule Poirot always drank. Dreadful stuff. I tried it once when I’d been reading Agatha Christie’s Murder in Three Acts. Tastes like cough medicine.”
“Sherry, thank you,” I said.
Mrs. Bittner poured two glasses of sherry and turned to hand them to us. “It caused an incongruity, didn’t it?”
I took the glasses from her, handed one to Verity, and sat down beside her. “Yes,” I said.
“I was so afraid it had. And when James told me last week about the theory regarding nonsignificant objects being removed from their space-time location, I knew it must have been the bishop’s bird stump” She shook her head, smiling. “Everything else that was in the cathedral that night would have burned to ashes, but I could see by looking at it that it was indestructible.”
She poured herself a glass of sherry. “I tried to undo what I’d done, you know, but I couldn’t get the net to open, and then Lassiter—that was the head of faculty—put on new locks, and I couldn’t get into the lab. I should have told James, of course. Or my husband. But I couldn’t bear to.” She picked up the glass of sherry. “I told myself the net’s refusing to open meant that there hadn’t been an incongruity after all, that no harm had been done, but I knew it wasn’t true.”
She started for one of the chintz-covered chairs, moving slowly and carefully. I jumped up and took the glass of sherry for her till she had sat down.
“Thank you,” she said, taking it from me. “James told me what a nice young man you were.” She looked at Verity. “I don’t suppose either of you have ever done something you were sorry for afterward? Something you’d done without thinking?”
She looked down at her sherry. “The Church of England was shutting down the cathedrals that couldn’t support themselves. My husband loved Coventry Cathedral. He was descended from the Botoner family who built the original church.”
And so are you, I thought, realizing now who it was Mary Botoner had reminded me of, standing there in the tower arguing with the workman. You’re a descendant of the Botoners, too.
“The cathedral was his life,” she went on. “He always said that it wasn’t the church building that mattered, but what it symbolized, yet the new cathedral, ugly as it was, was everything to him. I thought if I could bring back some of the treasures from the old cathedral,” she said, “it would be good publicity. The tourists would flock to see them, and the cathedral wouldn’t have to be sold. I thought it would kill my husband if it had to be sold.”
“But hadn’t Darby and Gentilla proved it was impossible to bring things forward through the net?”
“Yes,” she said, “but I thought since the things had ceased to exist in their own space-time, they might come through. Darby and Gentilla had never tried to bring through anything that didn’t still exist in its own time.” She twisted the stem of the glass in her hands. “And I was fairly desperate.”
She looked up. “So I broke into the lab late one night, went back to 1940, and did it. And the next day, James telephoned to tell me that if I wanted a job, that Lassiter had authorized a series of drops to Waterloo, and then he told me—” She stopped, staring into the past. “—he told me that Shoji had had a breakthrough in temporal theory, that he’d discovered why it was im
possible to bring things forward through the net, that such an action would cause an incongruity that could change the course of history, or worse.”
“So you tried to take it back?” Verity said.
“Yes. And I went and saw Shoji and made him tell me as much as I could about incongruities without making him suspicious. It was all bad, but the worst was that he told me they’d been able to adapt the net to safeguard against them, and weren’t we lucky one hadn’t happened before we did, we could have caused the collapse of the entire space-time continuum.”
I looked over at Verity. She was watching Mrs. Bittner, her beautiful face sad.
“So I hid the swag, as they say in the mystery novels, and waited for the world to end. Which it did. The cathedral was deconsecrated and sold to the Church of the Hereafter and then turned into a shopping center.”
She stared into her sherry. “The irony is that it was all for nothing. My husband loved Salisbury. I had been so convinced that losing Coventry Cathedral would kill him, but it didn’t. He truly meant that about churches being only a symbol. He didn’t seem to mind even when they built a Marks and Spencer’s on the ruins.” She smiled warmly. “Do you know what he said when he heard Lady Schrapnell was rebuilding the old cathedral? He said, ‘I hope this time they get the spire on straight.’”
She set her glass down. “After Harold died, I came back here. And two weeks ago James telephoned and asked me if I could remember anything about the drops we’d done together, that there was an area of increased slippage in 2018, and he was afraid it was due to an incongruity. I knew then it was just a matter of time before I was found out, even though he had the wrong incongruity.” She looked up at us. “James told me about the cat and Tossie Mering. Did you manage to get Lady Schrapnell’s great-great-grandmother married to the mysterious Mr. C?”
“Not exactly,” I said. “She did marry him, but it was no thanks to us.”
“It was the butler,” Verity said, “under an assumed name.”
“Of course,” Mrs. Bittner said, clapping her veined hands together. “The old solutions are always the best. The butler, the case of mistaken identity, the least likely suspect—” She looked at us both meaningfully, “—the purloined letter.” She stood up. “I hid it in the attic.”
We started up the stairs. “I was afraid moving it might make things worse,” she said, taking the steps slowly, “so I left the loot here when we went to Salisbury. I made certain it was well-hidden, and I took care to rent the house to people without children—children are so curious, you know—but I was always afraid someone would come up here and find it and do something that would change the course of history.” She turned back, holding onto the banister, and looked at me. “But it already had, hadn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said.
She didn’t say anything more. She seemed to be concentrating all her effort on climbing the stairs. When we reached the first floor, she led us down a corridor past a bedroom and opened a narrow door onto another, steeper flight of stairs. “This leads up to the attic,” she said, panting a little. “I’m sorry. I need to rest a bit before going on. There’s a chair in the bedroom.”
I ran to fetch it, and she sat down on it. “Would you like a glass of water?” Verity asked.
“No, thank you, dear,” she said. “Tell me about the incongruity I caused ”
“You weren’t the only person who considered the bishop’s bird stump indestructible,” I said. “So did the chairman of the Flower Committee named—”
“Delphinium Sharpe,” Verity said.
I nodded. “She had been there the night of the raid, standing guard by the west door, and she knew the bishop’s bird stump couldn’t have been carried out. When it wasn’t found in the rubble or among the things the fire watch had saved, she concluded it had been stolen some time before the raid and that the thief must have known about the raid in advance, knowing he could get away with it. She was quite vocal with her theory—”
“She even wrote a letter to the editor of one of the Coventry papers,” Verity put in.
I nodded. “This next part is only a theory, like Miss Sharpe’s,” I said. “The only evidence we have is Carruthers’s testimony, the list of Ladies’ church committees for 1940, and a letter to the editor that wasn’t in either of the Coventry papers.”
Mrs. Bittner nodded sagely. “The incident of the dog in the nighttime.”
“Exactly,” I said. “The Nazis made it a practice to obtain and read Allied newspapers, looking for any intelligence information that might be inadvertently revealed. I think Miss Sharpe’s letter and the words ‘advance warning of the raid’ must have caught the eye of someone in Nazi intelligence who was worried about the Nazi code system being compromised, and that inquiries were subsequently made, inquiries that revealed the High Command had dispatched RAF fighters to Coventry that night and had attempted to jam the pathfinder beams.”
“And the Nazis realized we had Ultra,” Verity said, “and changed the Enigma machine.”
“And we lost the campaign in North Africa,” I said, “and possibly the D-Day invasion—”
“And the Nazis won the war,” Mrs. Bittner said bleakly. “Only they didn’t. You stopped them.”
“The continuum stopped them with its system of secondary defenses, which is almost as good as Ultra’s,” I said. “The one thing that didn’t fit in this whole mess was the slippage on Verity’s drop. If there hadn’t been any slippage, that might have meant the continuum’s defenses had somehow broken down, but there had been. But not enough to fit Fujisaki’s theory that incongruities occur when the slippage required is more than the net can supply. The net could easily have supplied fourteen minutes of slippage, or four, which would have been all that would have been necessary to keep the incongruity from ever happening. So the only logical conclusion was that it had intended for Verity to go through at that exact moment—”
“Are you saying the continuum arranged for me to save Princess Arjumand?” Verity said.
“Yes,” I said. “Which made us think you’d caused an incongruity and we had to fix it, which is why we arranged a seance to get Tossie to Coventry to see the bishop’s bird stump and write in her diary that the experience had changed her life—”
“And Lady Schrapnell would read it,” Verity said, “and decide to rebuild Coventry Cathedral and send me back to Muchings End to find out what happened to the bishop’s bird stump, so I could save the cat—”
“So I could be sent back to return it and overhear a conversation about mystery novels in Blackwell’s and spend a night in a tower—”
“And solve the mystery of the bishop’s bird stump,” Mrs. Bittner said. She stood up and started up the stairs. “I’m glad you did, you know,” she said, leading the way up the narrow stairs. “There is nothing heavier than the weight of a secret crime.”
She opened the door to the attic. “I should have been found out soon at any rate. My nephew’s been lobbying me to move into a single-floor flat.”
Attics in books and vids are always picturesque places, with a bicycle, several large plumed hats, an antique rocking horse, and, of course, a steamer trunk for storing the missing will or the dead body in.
Mrs. Bittner’s attic didn’t have a trunk, or a rocking horse, at least that I could see. Though they might easily have been there, along with the lost Ark of the Covenant and the Great Pyramid of Giza.
“Oh, dear,” Mrs. Bittner said, looking round in dismay. “I’m afraid it’s more The Sittaford Mystery than ‘The Purloined Letter.’”
“Agatha Christie,” Verity explained. “Nobody noticed the evidence because it’d been stuck in a cupboard with a bag of golf clubs and tennis rackets and a lot of other things.”
“A lot of other things” was putting it mildly. The low-raftered room was crammed from end to end with cardboard cartons, stacked lawn chairs, old clothes hanging from an exposed pipe, jigsaw puzzles of the Grand Canyon and the Mars colony, a croquet set, squash
rackets, dusty Christmas decorations, books, and an assortment of bedspread-draped furniture, all stacked on top of each other in sedimentary layers.
“Could you reach me down that chair?” Mrs. Bittner said, pointing at a Twentieth Century plastiform atrocity perched on top of a washing machine. “I have difficulty standing for very long.”
I got it down, disentangling a trowel and several coat hangers from its aluminum legs, and dusted it off for her.
She sat down, easing herself into it gingerly. “Thank you,” she said. “Hand that tin box to me.”
I handed it to her reverently.
She set it down beside her on the floor. “And those large pasteboard boxes. Just push them aside. And those suitcases.”
I did, and she stood up and walked down the little aisle my shifting the boxes had made and into darkness.
“Plug in a lamp,” she said. “There’s an outlet over there.” She pointed at the wall behind an enormous plastic aspidistra.
I reached for the nearest lamp, a massive affair with a huge pleated shade and a squat, heavily decorated metal base.
“Not that one,” she said sharply. “The pink one.”
She pointed at a tall, early Twenty-First Century fringed affair.
I plugged it in and switched on the hard-to-find knob, but it didn’t do much good. It lit the fringe and Verity’s Waterhouse face, but not much else.
Apparently Mrs. Bittner thought so, too. She went over to the ornate metal lamp. “The Masqued Murder” she said.
Verity leaned forward. “Evidence disguised as something else,” she murmured.
“Exactly,” Mrs. Bittner said, and lifted the pleated shade off bishop’s bird stump.
It was too bad Lady Schrapnell wasn’t here. And Carruthers. All that time we had spent searching for it in the rubble, and it was here all along. Removed for safekeeping, as Carruthers had suggested, and not a mark on it. The Red Sea still parted; Springtime, Summer, Autumn, and Winter still held their respective garlands of apple blossoms, roses, wheat, and holly; John the Baptist, his head still on the platter, still stared reproachfully at King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. Gryphons, poppies, pineapples, puffins, the Battle of Prestonpans, all of it intact and not even dusty.
To Say Nothing of the Dog Page 55