by Alan Beechey
“Oh, you’ve heard it.”
Ben was shaking his head. “No good. It’s too long and I’ve already used it for foreplay. Come with me!”
“What about me?” wailed Geoffrey, rocking on his back as he tried to get a grip on the boot. “My toes are going to sleep. There must be a whole nest of them in there!”
But Ben grabbed Oliver’s sleeve and hauled him out of the kitchen, sending a curry-laden fork spinning across the room. Oliver followed his friend up the stairs, aware this was not the time to ask Ben formally if he was a rival for Effie Strongitharm’s affections.
“I have a rather important client,” Ben whispered as he and Oliver reached the second floor landing. “But she has a peculiar quirk, and that’s not a reference to her anatomy. She can only have an orgasm if she’s laughing. So I want you to stand outside the door and shout all the jokes you know. We’re up to the plateau phase, so I need some raucous belly-laughs to finish the assignment. Get to work!”
“But I told you, I can never remember jokes!” Oliver protested, clutching Ben’s arm. “The only stuff that comes to mind is that old music hall cross-talk act we learned for a laugh.”
Ben paused. A faint chuckling came from the studio. “Then that’ll have to do,” he conceded. “But don’t expect my timing to be perfect. I have f-stops to think of.”
“So who is she?” Oliver asked slyly.
“I can’t tell you that,” whispered Ben as he opened the door. “But let’s just say her great-great-great-grandmother-in-law would not have been amused.”
Five minutes later, when Effie Strongitharm tentatively pushed open the kitchen door, it was to witness a small public relations officer apparently break dancing on the floor, while from upstairs came the noise of a shouted comedy routine being very enthusiastically received by an audience of one female.
“I say, I say, I say!” (Oliver’s voice.)
“Yes?” (Ben’s voice, a little fainter, after a pause to adjust his focus.)
(Deep exhalation by the woman.)
“Why does the Lord Mayor of London wear red, white, and blue braces?” (Oliver’s voice.)
“I don’t know, why does the Lord Mayor of London wear red, white, and blue braces?” (Ben’s voice)
(Anticipatory squeals of delight from the woman.)
“To keep his trousers up!” (Oliver’s voice in triumph, followed by more raucous female laughter.)
Effie had found four possible reasons for Oliver’s apparent immunity to her disapproving gaze: (a) he was too pure at heart to be bothered by it; (b) he was too depraved to care; (c) he was too stupid to notice; or (d) he was short-sighted. For some reason, which she couldn’t fully explain to herself, she felt she needed to know the answer, and the only way was to find out more about the young man. So when Mallard muttered that he wanted to give Oliver some information, but he was too busy hunting scorpions to pick up the telephone, Effie had volunteered to stop by Edwardes Square on her way home to Richmond to pick up a change of clothes. Her immediate impression was that (b) was rapidly supplanting (c).
“I rang the bell but nobody heard me,” she said to Geoffrey, who was looking up at her helplessly from the floor. “It’s all right, I’m a police officer.”
“Then do you know how to get a pair of riding boots off?” Geoffrey pleaded in desperation. “My feet are being eaten by scorpions.”
Effie knew how to take control of a situation. She effortlessly picked Geoffrey up by his armpits and threw him into a chair.
“Put your leg out!” she commanded. Geoffrey cautiously extended a limb. Effie grabbed his foot and straddled his leg, keeping her back to him, as if mounting a small, thin Shetland pony.
“I say, I say, I say,” wafted down the stairs, with an ostinato of more moans.
“Push against my bottom,” Effie instructed, looking back over her shoulder. Geoffrey blushed.
“Why does the Lord Mayor of London wear red, white, and blue braces?”
“Not with your hands, you nitwit. With your other foot.”
“To keep his trousers up?”
“Harder. Don’t be a wimp.”
“No, to stop them falling down!”
Effie shot forward, clutching the empty boot, accompanied by a high-pitched screech from upstairs that subsided into happy chortles. Geoffrey ripped off his sock and inspected his toes.
“Thank God, they’re all there,” he sighed.
“Of course they are,” Effie replied briskly. “There aren’t any scorpions. My name’s Effie Strongitharm, by the way.”
“Geoffrey Angelwine,” replied the other, feeling that to shake the policewoman’s hand now would only be a step backward in their acquaintanceship. “Oliver’s told me about you. No scorpions?”
“Absolutely none. It’s all a dodge made up by Tim Mallard. Didn’t Oliver tell you?”
“No, he didn’t,” Geoffrey replied thoughtfully, eyeing the riding crop. They heard voices on the stairs and shortly afterward, the kitchen door swung open.
“So was it good for you?” sniggered Ben, as he and Oliver came in gleefully. They caught sight of Effie and froze.
“Effie!”
“Sergeant Strongitharm!”
She acknowledged their startled greetings with a slow nod of the head. “Good evening, Mr. Motley. How good of you and Oliver to provide some entertainment for poor Mr. Angelwine in his distress.” She rested her hand on Geoffrey’s shoulder.
“Oh that, we were just…” Oliver attempted, trying to ignore Geoffrey’s nauseating smirk. “You see it took two of us…I was helping Ben.…”
“You clearly have hidden talents, Oliver,” Effie remarked frostily. “I expect you took your wife to the West Indies for her holiday and your dog has no nose, am I correct?”
“You’re looking every bit as charming as last night, Sergeant,” cooed Ben, who had recovered more quickly than his friend. “Will you join us for some tea?”
Effie allowed a polite smile to dawn on her face. “It’s very tempting, Mr. Motley, but I’m still on duty. I’ve called to give Oliver a message from Superintendent Mallard,” she said, switching her attention to Oliver and her smile off. “Your uncle wanted me to let you know that Gordon Paper was born in July.”
“I’m not sure I understand,” said Oliver meekly.
“He wasn’t a Sagittarius.”
Oliver’s blue eyes opened wide behind his cheap spectacles. “You mean it could have been a coincidence that the first three victims had the correct zodiac signs?” he asked incredulously. “What are the chances of that happening?”
“One in one thousand, seven hundred and twenty-eight,” Effie said instantly. “No, Tim doesn’t think that was a coincidence. But he’s worried that the murderer’s stopped being faithful to his pattern, which gave us our only chance of stopping him. After all, if the Sagittarius victim wasn’t a Sagittarius, tomorrow’s Scorpio victim may not be a Scorpio. And worse, the murder may have nothing to scorpions.”
“That reminds me, Ollie,” Geoffrey piped up. “Will you do something for me?”
“Of course.”
“Can you help me get this other boot off?” Geoffrey asked, with a sly glint in his eye. “Effie’s just shown me how to do it.”
***
It was ten o’clock in the morning on the day of Scorpio—the Friday of a week that had begun with Sir Harry Random’s death on Monday—and Oliver Swithin was looking quizzically at a scorpion. Maybe. He needed a closer look at the gnarled arabesque, picked out in stark relief by the sunlight strafing the Battenberg-cake brickwork. Oliver cursed his weak eyesight, not for the first time in his life, and leaned further over the stone balustrade.
“Found something?” asked Mallard, strolling down the curving ramp from the Natural History Museum’s main entrance. He took a pair of powerful binoculars from the case arou
nd his neck.
“There, the stonework on that corbel,” said Oliver, pointing to the stone tracery around a second-story window. Mallard trained the binoculars.
“It’s not a corbel, it’s a capital.”
“Never mind the architectural lecture, is it a scorpion’s telson?”
“No. Decidedly vegetable, not animal.”
“Blast.”
Mallard pushed the binoculars back into their case. “Ollie, the Museum is crawling—almost literally, in the petrified sense—with carvings of flora and fauna, both inside and outside. I’m sure that somewhere, there’s a scorpion. And, incidentally, full of scorpions is my mind, even though I’m an absentee Banquo, not Macbeth. But it doesn’t matter—there’s not an inch of this building that isn’t under the eye of one of my men. Now come inside, it’s cooler in there.”
Oliver moodily followed his uncle through the basilica-like entrance to the Museum and into the expansive, Byzantine space of its main hall. Light flooded in through windows high above them in the hall’s barrel vault, giving a soft glow to the biscuit-colored stonework—more restrained than the polychrome exterior but still inclined to outbreaks of blue-gray bruising wherever it contorted into an archway or a groin. The massive space seemed like a cross between a cathedral and a railway station, husbanded by a crazed Victorian zoologist.
Mallard nodded to a group of men, who couldn’t have looked more like policemen in plain clothes if they’d studied it at RADA. They were standing uncomfortably beside a Tyrannosaurus skeleton, which made them feel below the statutory height. Effie was not among them, Oliver noted, remembering with disappointment that she was coordinating the stakeout of the Zoo’s Insect House, probably still muttering that a scorpion wasn’t an insect. He’d rather be there, he decided, although he was feeling less than charitable toward the policewoman since she had found Geoffrey Angelwine’s revenge so amusing. He was still unable to sit, but at least Geoffrey had already removed the first boot. Oliver guessed that Effie had been planning to add a few sardonic insults to his injury, but as he saw her to the front door, she had caught sight of the woman who wafted regally down the stairs, through the hallway, and into the waiting Rolls Royce with no license plates. It seemed to subdue her.
“Thanks for dropping by, Oliver,” Mallard was saying.
“Well, the office is just around the corner, so I told Mr. Woodcock I was taking a long coffee break,” Oliver replied. “He won’t mind if I don’t hurry back. Do you remember when you brought me here as a treat?”
“I remember,” Mallard confirmed. “You were seven. I tried to leave you here as an exhibit, but they wouldn’t take you. A small matter of your still being alive. I said I could fix that. I’d even pay for the taxidermist.”
They headed for the Arachnid Gallery, which Mallard had already located. Oliver paused once to point out a likely bas-relief on an extrados above their heads, but Mallard scrutinized it carefully and pronounced it a stag beetle. Display cases were mounted on opposite walls of the low, whitewashed gallery. Brief visual essays on the personal habits of the scorpion defiantly faced those of its cousin, the spider, like a particularly academic gross-out contest. Several small boys were studying the section on reproduction with great interest, watched gloomily by the burly Detective Sergeant Welkin, who had been scene-of-crime officer at Sloane Square three days earlier, and who was now assigned to Mallard’s special zodiac task force. Other detectives were stationed by the Museum’s displays of scorpion flies and scorpion fish. Welkin saluted Mallard cautiously from the far end of the gallery.
“Gosh, and that’s what’s loose in London?” one schoolboy was saying.
“Yeah. Only they’re bigger than that,” replied his friend. My mum said she didn’t want me to come up ’cause I might get bitten.”
“They don’t bite, they sting. It says so here.”
“That’s just normal scorpions. The ones they can’t find are a special breed. They’re as big as sheepdogs.”
“I heard they escaped from a mad scientist’s laboratory and they’re as big as horses.”
“Well, I heard they were as big as elephants.”
“If they’re as big as elephants, the police would have found them by now.”
“Not our police. My dad says the coppers today couldn’t find a haystack in a haystack. Come on, let’s find the ferrets. Maybe they’ll have something on Finsbury.”
The boys ran noisily out of the gallery, past the glowering Welkin, who for some reason found himself thinking fondly of King Herod. Mallard and Swithin passed at a more leisurely pace and returned to the main hall, which was beginning to fill up with visitors, thankfully escaping the heat outside. Mallard perched on a bench and watched the crowds around the dinosaurs. Many of the humans were wearing thick shoes, and one large woman rustled by in plastic bags secured around her calves with rubber bands.
“Everyone’s heard about the scorpions,” Oliver noted. He preferred to stand. “Won’t the murderer figure out that we’re on to him when he hears the radio announcements?”
“That’s what I want,” claimed Mallard. He took off his glasses and laid them carefully on his knees, lifting his face toward the sunlight. “A serial killer wants to tell the story of his pathetic life, and he does so in the language of death. Murder defines him—it’s his art form, his game. Well, I want him to know we’re in the game and we’re closing on him. Maybe that’ll provoke him into a dialogue. It’s not unusual for serial killers to write directly to the police or to the media, taunting his chosen adversaries, crowing about his successes, his ingenuity. That would give us more to go on.”
“What about those zodiac symbols? Aren’t they his messages?”
“Yes. But they’re not enough.”
A group of lissome female students from Sweden thudded passed, wearing loose T-shirts, tight shorts, and oversized green Wellington boots. They walked with their eyes anxiously scanning the smooth mosaic floor. Oliver found the effect strangely endearing. Mallard replaced his glasses.
“I read somewhere that a serial killer’s prime goal is celebrity,” Oliver said. He scented some post hoc self-justification in Mallard’s explanation for the radio broadcast, and it irked him. “Isn’t the scorpion scare giving him the publicity he wants?”
“No, because the newspapers don’t know about the zodiac theme,” Mallard replied, unsure if an appreciative comment about the Scandinavian ladies would get back to his wife via her favorite nephew. “The press know something’s going on, but they’ve agreed to hold off on public speculation in return for the full story when we catch the killer.”
“So what does the public think? That the deaths were unrelated?”
“Exactly. They think Sir Harry Random’s death was an accident. That Nettie Clapper’s at Sloane Square was a vicious mugging. That Mark Sandys-Penza’s death in Kew was the result of drunken high spirits. And that Gordon Paper was a organized crime hit.”
“Organized crime? With a crossbow?”
“Too many people witnessed that murder. We had to say Paper was the intended victim, or rumors will spread about mad arbalesters picking off people at random. And I have enough to worry about with scorpions. You said yesterday you thought you’d seen a scorpion statue somewhere. Have you remembered where yet?”
“No. Actually, it’s more a bas-relief, and I vaguely recall that the main subject was another animal. But does it matter? Effie said that after yesterday’s non-Sagittarian Sagittarius, you weren’t necessarily counting on a scorpion-related murder today.”
“I’m less certain, but it’s all we have to go on. And I’d rather be sitting here watching for scorpions than sitting at the Yard scratching my arse.” Mallard stretched self-indulgently, rounding it off with a yawn. “What about tomorrow, though, assuming my lads haven’t copped the bastard? Where would a Libra death take place?”
“That’s easy,”
said Oliver. “Libra is the sign of the Balance or the Scales. And the most famous set of scales in London is in the left hand of the statue of Justice on top of the Central Criminal Court.”
“The Old Bailey,” said Mallard thoughtfully, giving the court its more popular name. “Okay, I’ll go with that for now. Can you join me there tomorrow, if necessary? It’s a Saturday.”
“Not until the afternoon. I have a book signing in the morning at a children’s bookstore, organized by Geoffrey Angelwine. We’re trying to extract the price of a Finsbury book from the kiddiewinks of Richmond. I think Geoffrey’s role is to hold them up by the ankles and shake until the half-crowns drop out.”
“Geoffrey’s going with you?” Mallard asked with apprehension.
“Yes, his agency have finally entrusted him to help with, as they put it, ‘flogging the Ferret.’ Susie Beamish said it sounded like something Geoffrey should know a lot about.”
“You’re getting to be quite a celebrity, dear nephew. All right, back to business. What comes after Libra?”
“Virgo is the Virgin or Maiden. Perhaps that murder will take place in a church dedicated to the Virgin Mary.”
“That’s location. But how on earth do you kill someone with a virgin?”
“Next is Leo, the Lion.”
“There’s no shortage of lions in London, which is more than can be said for virgins. There are statues in Trafalgar Square, on the South Bank, on the York Water Gate, over the Royal Mews. There’s Red Lion Square and Black Lion Gate. Then there are reliefs, pub signs, door knockers, symbols of livery company or guilds—and any place that flies the royal standard or displays the royal coat of arms.”
“And the Zoo,” said Oliver, thinking momentarily of Effie at the Regent’s Park insect house. “After Leo comes Cancer, the Crab—I hope he doesn’t get tasteless with that one. Gemini is the sign of the Twins. Taurus is the Bull. And finally, Aries…”
“The sign of the Ram,” Mallard concluded. “Then what? Does he go round again?” But Oliver had trailed off for some other reason.
“The Bull,” he repeated pensively. Then he stood up, staring ahead of him. “It was a bull!” he cried. Several museum-goers turned from the dinosaurs and stared at him.