by Alan Beechey
“Says here it was a stegosaurus,” whispered one puzzled lad to his mother, who hurried him away from the two men.
“What are you bleating about?” asked Mallard crossly. He hated to wait for explanations. Oliver spun around.
“The sculpture, Uncle. Of the scorpion. I’ve just remembered what the other animal was. It was a bull. It was a Roman relief featuring a bull being sacrificed. And I think I know where I saw it. I must go.” He picked up his battered satchel and headed for the door.
“Wait,” called Mallard, “I can get someone to drive you.”
“No need,” Oliver shouted back. “I’ll call you when I find it.” His silhouette shimmered in front of the main door, and then was swallowed by the blazing sunlight.
***
It was only Constable Urchin’s second week on the beat, but being an ambitious policeman, he was already baffled.
Last week, I arrested a murder suspect in Trafalgar Square, he would say woefully to himself, and where did it get me? Well, actually, it had got him out of Grunwick’s company and off night duty, so it couldn’t be all bad. But the fact that the suspect had turned out to be the nephew of a Murder Squad superintendent had been as welcome to his Station Sergeant as a flasher in a nunnery. When he tried to evaluate the incident, Urchin found the phrase “curate’s egg” sprang to mind, and he took mild comfort in knowing the origin and meaning of the expression. Many of his colleagues, he speculated, would have trouble just defining a curate, and Grunwick couldn’t even recognize an egg unless it was fried in bacon fat and doused in tomato ketchup.
So was his abrupt posting to Grosvenor Square a step up or another blot on the splattered Urchin escutcheon? (There actually was an Urchin family escutcheon, which had been pristine until he had been sent down from Christ Church after brawling with a militant atheist in Tom Quad on All Saints’ Day. Urchin may have been pardoned this display of muscular Christianity, but when he dutifully told the Dean he had been “fighting a liar in the quad,” the sensitive academic took it for the famous Spoonerism and dismissed the student for cheek.) Urchin found the new beat refined, but still uneventful. Only the stretch that passed the American Embassy offered any relief. Here, in front of Saarinen’s uncompromising building, with its golden statue of a bald eagle on the roof, he would occasionally stop for a brief conversation with one of the American guards. And he had spoken twice to a long-legged secretary from Omaha, Nebraska, who claimed she loved his accent. It hadn’t yet occurred to him that, because she was in England rather than he in America, his accent was not exactly a competitive advantage.
Urchin was walking past the embassy now, noticing the sun glinting on the eagle’s thirty-five-foot-wide wings. He muttered a polite “good morning” to a young woman who was also hovering on this side of the Square, by the embassy entrance, as if waiting for someone. She wasn’t bad-looking either, Urchin thought as he drifted away. Mid-twenties, blonde, good figure, sun tan, thin white cotton sundress to show it off, Fendi handbag, sandals that suggested she had no fear of scorpions. Perhaps he could find some excuse to start a conversation?
He decided to retrace his steps instead of continuing his clockwise circuit of the square. Circling the statue of Eisenhower, he headed back toward the young woman, who was looking anxiously at the embassy’s glass doors, although she made no move in their direction.
That’s when it happened. A motorcycle that had been idling along the north side of the square abruptly accelerated and hurtled around the corner, heading straight for the woman. Urchin shouted a warning, but she looked the wrong way, staring at him rather than at the approaching vehicle. He pointed frantically behind her. She turned. At last, she started to react, darting toward the embassy for safety.
Urchin saw the motorcycle veer away, the rider’s left arm held straight out to the side, holding an oddly shaped gun. As it drew level with the woman, the gloved hand pulled the trigger. But there was no report, even though she started to fall instantly. Urchin hesitated, not knowing whether to try to dive forward and catch her or throw himself into the path of the motorcycle. A second later, he was too late to do either. The rider sped past, out of his reach. A white card fell, fluttering in the sunlight. Then, the motorcycle was gone.
Urchin ran to the woman, who had dropped face down onto the Embassy steps. An American guard rushed over.
“Why the hell didn’t you shoot him?” he was shouting. “Ah jeez, you guys don’t got guns, do you?”
“Did you see where that motorbike went?” Urchin asked calmly, turning the woman gently onto her side and feeling for her carotid artery.
“Nah. Maybe our cameras picked up something.” The guard pointed to two security cameras, mounted on either side of the embassy’s main entrance. “Hey, what’s this?” he continued, as he reached out to a bulky feathered dart that protruded from the young woman’s buttock. It had easily penetrated the thin barriers of her dress and underwear, spreading a small, round stain, starkly scarlet on the white fabric, like a poppy on a snowdrift.
“Don’t touch it!” yelled Urchin, nursing the woman’s head.
“Take it easy, man.” The guard looked puzzled at the policeman’s sudden vehemence. “I ain’t gonna hurt her.”
“You could hurt yourself. She’s dead. And whatever may be leaking from that dart could kill you, too.” Urchin laid the body down gently and rolled upright. He called in his report on his lapel radio, including the best description he could manage of the escaping motorcyclist, and then waited, still seated awkwardly and forlornly on the steps. People started to gather, forming a silent ring around the dead woman and the sitting policeman. As the sound of approaching sirens reached the group, Urchin heaved himself to his feet.
“All right, anybody who saw what happened, I want you to stay here,” he said wearily. “The rest of you, move along.”
The secretary from Omaha came out of the Embassy, pushed through the crowd, and draped a blanket over the woman’s body. “I was watching you through the window,” she said softly to Urchin. “I saw what happened.”
“So did I,” said the guard. “And I saw the rider drop this. Think it means anything?”
He handed over the white index card that he had retrieved. It had a symbol drawn on it in blue ink—a cursive capital letter M, with an extra twist and an arrow at the bottom of the right-hand vertical. Like a scorpion’s sting.
“Oh yes,” said Urchin. “It means something.”
Chapter Six
The rider drifted into view, silently canting around the traffic island, a threatening, monochrome ghost. Slowly, the arm came out, straight and purposeful. The young woman in the white dress began to run, but as the motorcycle drew level with her, she fell, floating down onto the embassy steps. The point of view changed, snatching back two seconds of her life. She still fell, this time from right to left across the screen. Behind her now, the policeman jolted, as if the rider’s gun had been a starter’s pistol. The motorcycle slid into the frame again. Then they all slowed—policeman, rider, victim, moving only in brief, coordinated spurts, like mechanical figures on an ancient town clock. The gray shadows froze behind the glass.
“Run it again,” Mallard ordered. A young detective constable pushed a button on the video player and the images retreated, Urchin backing out of the picture, the motorcyclist finding a mythical reverse gear, the young woman in white springing back into life twice. If only it were that simple, Mallard lamented privately.
They watched as the embassy’s security cameras gave them their first glance of the killer, unidentifiable in a crash helmet, goggles, and loose track suit, coldly repeating the fifth zodiac murder in slow motion.
“Can’t even tell if it’s a man or a woman,” said the detective constable, unhelpfully. “Again?”
Mallard shook his head. “Let’s see if there’s some way we can enhance it. Anything from forensic yet?” he asked, addressing hi
s question generally to the dozen detectives gathered in the conference room in New Scotland Yard.
“The dart came from a tranquilizer gun, the kind used for sedating animals in zoos,” said Effie. “The killer took the gun with him. We haven’t identified the substance in the dart, but it must have been extremely toxic—perhaps acotine or some related compound. Respiratory arrest was virtually instant. The police constable said she was dead almost as soon as he got to her.”
“Poor bugger,” muttered Mallard. “Wasn’t he the one who arrested my nephew?”
“Police Constable Urchin,” confirmed Detective Sergeant Welkin. “He’s new. Rather cut up about the murder happening under his nose.”
“He couldn’t have stopped it. Make sure his station knows that we know that. And where the hell is Oliver, anyway? I want him here. There’s something wrong with this picture, and it’s the absence of scorpions. Any lead on the motorbike?”
A glum-looking detective sergeant called Moldwarp checked his notes. “Stolen yesterday lunchtime on Frick Street,” he reported. His voice was as morose as his face. “We don’t know where the miscreant kept it in the meanwhile. After the killing, he nipped up past Oxford Street and dumped the motorcycle in Selfridges car park. Left the crash helmet and track suit in the lift, so he could’ve been wearing anything underneath. Nobody saw him. No prints on anything. Nothing in the bike’s storage compartment apart from a small drinks cooler. Empty.”
“An acotine solution would need to be kept cool, or it would lose its effectiveness,” Effie murmured.
Mallard stood up and walked to window, one hand toying with the longer hairs of his white moustache.
“I suppose there’s no doubt this was the Scorpio death we were expecting?” he asked, staring across the rooftops to the towers of Parliament and the Abbey.
“The symbol on the index card was the Scorpio sign, sir,” Effie admitted, almost apologetically. “And the victim had a letter in her handbag inviting her to a meeting. Same style as the others.”
“But why the American Embassy? There’s no connection with scorpions. Unless it’s a xenophobic slur on our transatlantic cousins?”
“I got a theory, Chief,” said Welkin, failing to subdue his thick Cockney accent.
Mallard turned around. “Let’s hear it.”
“If I understand about scorpions—and I spent all morning in that exhibit in the Natural History Museum—they got a stinger on their tails what makes them dangerous.”
“That’s correct. Factually, if not grammatically.”
Welkin started to look uncomfortable. “Well, our victim was killed with a sharp dart up the arse…sorry, in the gluteus maximus.” He corrected himself, catching Effie’s frown out of the corner of his eye and fearing a full blast of the Look. The last time Welkin had failed to mind his language, she’d caused him to remember a particularly humiliating event at a birthday party when he was eight years old, which had been the cause of his lifelong bachelorhood.
“Anyway,” he continued hastily, “a scorpion has a sting in the tail. And that’s how the lady died—with a sting in her tail.”
To Welkin’s irritation, Mallard let the unkind laughter continue for about twenty seconds, and then he help up his hand.
“I think you’re absolutely right, Sergeant,” he said to the team’s surprise, Welkin’s included. “Unfortunately, that’s only how she was killed. It doesn’t explain where she was killed, and that’s always been part of the pattern up to now. The only part, in fact, that gave us a sporting chance of being in the right place ahead of the right time. All right, anything else?”
“The lab reports came back on the Capricorn, Chief,” offered another detective cautiously. Mallard waved him to continue.
“The pathologist found traces of an unusual chemical compound in his stomach, a synthetic narcotic related to mescalin, called tetra…tetraphen…tetraphenylflu…. Okay, it’s known by its initials, TPFC, or by its street name ‘Squidgy.’ Apparently, a few grams can induce an alcohol-like intoxication very quickly, without a hangover the next day. But it has an odd side effect, in that it can raise the user’s suggestibility.”
“So if this drug was slipped somehow to Mark Sandys-Penza, and he was told there was treasure at the top of the Tropical House, then he would probably lurch up there in a drunken stupor to find out.”
“Yes, sir. Sandys-Penza’s stomach also contained traces of sugar and peppermint. This suggests to the lab boys that the TPFC was given to him hidden in a breath mint.”
“How easy is it to get this stuff?” Mallard asked.
“The squidgy or the breath mint?” asked the detective with a grin. Then he caught sight of Mallard’s expression and hurried on. “It’s new, but it’s fairly easy to score on the street. A couple of our lads are checking with known suppliers.”
“All the zodiac symbols were written in the same indelible blue marker on the same white index cards, available at any branch of Ryman’s,” said another detective. “We don’t know about the writing on Sir Harry Random’s shirt, but the ink must have been waterproof, because it survived a dunking in the fountain.”
“Why can’t we find out?” Mallard asked.
“Random’s clothes were sent back to his home on Tuesday, before we were treating his death as a murder. His daughter threw the shirt away.”
“Tidy girl,” commented Effie. “She’d make someone a wonderful wife.”
“Did we pull any prints off the letters?” Mallard asked her gruffly, ignoring the comment. Effie hastily consulted her files.
“The letter sent to the Capricorn, the Richmond estate agent, has his prints and those of his office receptionist, who opened the envelope.”
“Attractive woman, incidentally,” said Moldwarp sadly, who had interviewed the family and business associates of Mark Sandys-Penza.
“The letter sent to the Aquarius, Nettie Clapper, had only her prints and her husband’s,” Effie continued. “And the letter sent to Sir Harry Random has his prints and Oliver’s.”
“Obviously, because Oliver found the letter at his club. But how did you know they were his prints?”
“Bow Street took his fingerprints when he was arrested on Monday morning. I had them sent over.”
“Good. You never know when you’ll need them. Did we find any letter sent to Gordon Paper?”
“Not yet,” said a detective who hadn’t spoken, “although the Yorkshire police are still going through his windmill. He hadn’t been there for a week, though.”
“Did he have a hotel room in London?”
“We haven’t found it yet.”
“What about the lead piping that killed Nettie Clapper?” asked Mallard.
“Untraceable,” lamented Moldwarp. “And no fingerprints.”
“The crossbow that killed Gordon Paper?”
“German model,” Welkin reported. “Not a top-of-the-line weapon, used more for entertainment or hunting than high-accuracy target shooting. The stock had been wiped clean of prints and the serial number was partly removed, but the manufacturer thinks it was part of a shipment that went to an Austrian retail outlet, about five years ago. Interpol are making a few inquiries for us, but we don’t have high hopes. The killer needn’t have been the purchaser, after all—it could have been stolen. The bolt had some fingerprints, but they all belonged to bystanders in Piccadilly Circus who tried to help Paper. We’re also checking the membership lists of archery clubs, seeing the murderer was such a good shot. But we need some other clue before we can cross-reference the names.”
“Well, we know he can ride a motorbike and he can score ‘squidgy’ on the street,” said Effie.
There was a knock on the door, and a policeman let a breathless Oliver into the room. He recoiled momentarily on seeing the size of his potential audience, but his excitement overcame his stage fright.
“Here you are! Good afternoon, gentlemen…and lady. Effie, I mean. Not that you’re not a lady, of course, but I thought…”
Mallard rescued him, addressing the room. “In case you haven’t met him before, this is my nephew, Oliver, who’s been giving us some technical assistance on this case.”
The men grumbled a curt greeting at the mere civilian. “You may want to take a seat, Oliver,” Mallard suggested firmly.
“Oh, but this can’t wait!” Oliver cried with enthusiasm, sadly oblivious to the differences between Mallard the indulgent uncle and Mallard the senior policeman. “You see, I’ve found the London scorpion. I was convinced I’d seen a carving of a scorpion somewhere, but I couldn’t remember where. And then this morning, it clicked! When the Roman Temple of Mithras was excavated on Cannon Street, the archaeologists found a relief depicting a Mithraic legend, Mithras slaying a bull. On the edge of the image—in fact, snipping at his balls, sorry Effie, the bull’s, I mean, not Mithras’, testicles I should say, sorry Effie—is a small scorpion. Of course, I hot-footed it to Cannon Street, but the sculptures weren’t there, they’re in the Museum of London, on London Wall, so I ran over and checked, and there indeed was my scorpion. But get this—there are two scorpions in the carving. There’s also a kind of frieze around the edge that shows all the zodiac signs, including Scorpio.”
He stopped, aware they were watching him quizzically, each detective taking mean-spirited delight in trying to guess Mallard’s first comment (apart from Effie, who felt strangely sorry for the young man). But Mallard didn’t speak. He simply picked up the white index card and pitched it across the table toward his nephew. Oliver looked at the blue-ink symbol without touching the card.
“Ah,” he said humbly. “May I ask where?”
“The American Embassy,” replied Mallard. “Show him.” He sat down while the detective ran the videotape again. Oliver watched in silence.