by Alan Bradley
No, I wouldn’t, I thought, but I didn’t say so.
I was thinking of the bruise on the back of Orlando’s neck.
·TWENTY-TWO·
OUR RING AT THE rusting bellpull was answered by a surprisingly crisp young man in a blue cardigan and a yellow tie.
“Miss Mandrill is expecting you,” he said, stepping aside to let us in.
“Thank you, Coatesworth,” Claire replied, with a barely perceptible wink. “I hope we’re not too early.”
“Not at all, Miss Tetlock,” he answered. “Miss Mandrill has made her preparations.”
Preparations? What did he mean by that? Was the woman compounding poisons in her kitchen?
We’d better keep a sharp eye on the tea and biscuits.
Although her name had not appeared in Mr. Wanless’s poison register, Poppy Mandrill did, after all, have indirect access to cyanide through Orlando, who worked occasionally at the chemist’s shop. And Canon Whitbread’s wasp killer would have been kept somewhere in the vicarage—probably the greenhouse—and any of the vicar’s wardens, including Mrs. Palmer, would have had no trouble pinching enough of the stuff to do whatever nefarious deeds they had in mind.
“She’ll see you in the second parlor,” Coatesworth said as he led us past an open double door, through which I had a glimpse of a dusty parquet floor, high moldings, and a number of grim green hangings.
“Just in here,” he said, showing us into an altogether smaller room.
I could see at a glance that sunlight was not welcome here. The windows were covered with blackout paper, sections of which were visible behind a set of heavy, dark curtains.
Three chairs had been arranged in a dead straight line at the edge of a threadbare Turkey carpet, upon which had been centered a small table, set with a vase of old-fashioned pinks and a large brass carriage clock. In the silence, I could hear its self-important ticking.
The spicy clove scent of the flowers overpowered even the moldy atmosphere of the parlor. I was reminded of a sickroom—or perhaps an undertaker’s shop.
“Please be seated,” Coatesworth said, fussing with a fully set tea trolley which stood parked on one corner of the carpet, as if on a stage set. “Miss Mandrill will be with you momentarily.”
I raised an eyebrow at Dogger, who had once told me that the word meant “briefly,” rather than “soon,” and was best avoided if one didn’t want to be mistaken for an American. But Dogger was wearing his unreadable poker face, and I was left to feel superior all by myself.
“Thank you, Coatesworth,” Claire said as we took our seats.
There was a feeling of expectancy in the room, as if even the wallpaper were listening to our every word. We sat in silence, hands folded, and we waited.
And waited.
Claire shot me a half smile before she returned to contemplating the carpet.
It seemed as if the lighting in the room was changing. Surely the shadows of the vase and clock were shifting slightly across the silk tablecloth?
How many shoe soles had that shabby old carpet seen in its day? I wondered. What famous feet had worn away its pile? Had murderers stood chatting upon its once-red nap?
There was a slight scurrying sound in the corner: the sound that a couple of mice might make when caught with the cheese, followed by a hollow groaning.
Poppy Mandrill’s ornate wicker bath chair came sailing smoothly into the room like some ancient wooden ship under full sail, coming to anchor on the Turkey carpet between the table and the tea trolley.
Surely the lights were brighter at that spot than they had been when we came into the room; surely we were now sitting in a slightly greater darkness.
But it was the woman herself who commanded attention. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.
This was not the elderly invalid who had accosted me in the churchyard! Nor the same harpy who had hissed into my ear in the pews of St. Mildred’s.
This was an Edwardian beauty in the full flush of high-colored womanhood. Her skin was like peaches and her eyes sparkled like happy diamonds.
Belladonna, I thought, but I pushed it out of my mind at once. It would be a sin to penetrate such artistry: an affront to decency. We were entranced, and I knew it.
Poppy Mandrill looked slowly and deliberately at each of us in turn: from Claire to Dogger, and then to me, her piercing eye relishing—no, not relishing, but positively feasting upon—our reactions.
She was coolly judging her effect upon our widening eyes, making us her mirror.
Her transformation was remarkable. From a frail and elderly invalid, this woman had summoned up a goddess.
I’m afraid I gasped.
“Welcome,” Poppy Mandrill said in a voice like ancient honey, extending her arms, her palms upturned in a gesture of hospitality. “I bid you welcome to Alhambra House.”
Now I wanted to applaud. I was in her grip already and I knew it; under her spell.
But I didn’t care. It was as if the very nature of time itself had shifted and taken us with it: a slice of time in which we sat frozen in a pretty little tableau; living insects in amber.
Poppy was dressed in a classic white drapery, which I guessed was modeled on the Greek, overlaid with a large, dangling Art Deco necklace of shiny Bakelite lozenges, each of a different vivid color: a necklace for which the Duchess of Windsor would happily have sold herself—several times over—into slavery.
We sat suspended for several very long moments in this charmed state until Dogger broke the spell.
“Thank you for inviting us to visit, Miss Mandrill,” he said. “It is most gracious of you to share your memories.”
Already her eyes were glittering like a snake’s. This woman’s metabolism burned recognition in the same way that an automobile burns petrol.
She tittered slightly.
“You mustn’t press me too much, Mr. Dogger, for I am of frail and tender years.”
It was a joke, I suppose, and Dogger smiled dutifully.
“Hypatia of Alexandria,” he said. “Act One, Scene One.”
“You surprise me, Mr. Dogger,” Poppy said.
I turned to stare at him but caught myself just in time. Dogger had surprised me, too. Just when I thought that I had got the measure of the man, he would reveal an entirely new and unsuspected side.
“As a student, I was fortunate enough to take up residence in a theatrical boardinghouse,” Dogger said. “Complimentary tickets often served as the common currency.”
Poppy Mandrill laughed a throaty laugh.
“In exchange for what, Mr. Dogger?”
“Favors,” Dogger answered. “Friendship. Do you remember Frederick Linden-Smith?”
Poppy’s face became a sunbeam. “Of course! He was Adagio in Return of the Homing Angel. Wonderful reviews. Wonderful. And Carlyle Quinn in When the Sleeper Awakes. Were you acquainted with him, Mr. Dogger?”
“I was,” Dogger said quietly. “He died a prisoner of war in Burma.”
Dogger did not mention his own captivity.
He was risking a great deal by opening this line of conversation, I realized, when even the slightest trigger—the most casual reference—could set him off on a nightmare journey of flashbacks to his own torture.
“Yes, I believe I heard something to that effect,” Poppy remarked. “Poor chap, Freddie. He had a great future.”
I bit my tongue, and from where I sat, it looked to me as if Dogger was doing the same.
“I believe he was once your protégé,” Dogger said. “As was Orlando Whitbread.”
Something glistened at the corner of one of Poppy Mandrill’s eyes.
“You mustn’t be too hard on me, Mr. Dogger,” she said. “The flame must never be blamed for the death of the moth.
“Help yourselves to tea,” she added, covering her own cup with an open hand when Claire offered to pour.
Dogger inclined his head, accepting the rebuke graciously. Was he trying to encourage her to
talk?
“All the world envies a woman like me,” she said, when we were settled. “They think it heaven to have been the quarry of every male, young or old, who ever laid eyes upon her. Let me tell you it is not. The bull’s-eye on a target range has fewer holes than the heart of a woman on the stage. ‘Oh!’ you will say, ‘but what about the gifts: the flowers, the food, the jewels…the attention…the applause?’ Well enough when you are young, I suppose, and still blinded by your own beauty. But to someone of my present age, it is quite frankly sickening. One comes to fear the corpulent clergyman as the apple fears the worm.”
Aha! I thought. The present vicar, Mr. Clemm, and his loss of faith.
How my heart was suddenly breaking for him—and for her!
Claire, who had not spoken to this point, got up from her chair and moved toward the woman in the wheelchair.
“No!” Poppy said, holding up a forbidding hand. “Sit down. The priestess must never be approached upon the altar.
“We must honor our traditions,” she added.
Although she said this in rather a wry tone, almost half joking, her meaning was unmistakable.
Claire returned to her seat. “Tell me about Orlando,” she said softly. “I haven’t yet been able to grasp—”
And in that instant I suddenly saw through her. She and Dogger had planned this interview as precisely as a pair of generals craft a battle plan. They had rehearsed this conversation even before we set out for Alhambra House! They had rehearsed this little scene as carefully as any opening night in the West End.
I kept my mouth shut in admiration.
“Ah, Orlando.” Poppy shook her head. “Dear Orlando. He was too good to live. The world did not deserve him.”
What was this? Was the woman confessing to murder?
“He was paying you a tribute, was he not?” Dogger asked. “I recognized the red ballet slippers and the blue silk costume at once as one of yours. Pierrot in the Underworld. One of your greatest roles. A record run at the Aldwych. I remember it with great pleasure.”
Poppy’s only response was to touch her upper lip with a startlingly long forefinger, and for a fleeting moment, her face was that of Pierrot—as if the character had been flashed upon her face by some cleverly concealed magic lantern.
“He was going to re-create my role…we were going to re-create my role. To astonish the world. There would be no denying his talent.”
“You understood him,” Dogger said. “Where others failed him.”
Poppy nodded. It was easy to see how touched she was at even the mention of Orlando’s name.
Which didn’t mean that she hadn’t killed him.
“Orlando’s life was not an easy one,” she said quietly. “His mother died before she could begin to love him. His father resented him in the beginning—hated him in the end.”
“But why?” I couldn’t resist.
“There are children,” Poppy said, “whose lives are shaped by the minds of their elders. It matters not a jot what they are in actuality, but what they are thought to be. Orlando was such a child—and such a man.”
“Sad,” I said, because I knew exactly what she meant.
“Infinitely sad,” Poppy said, “because Orlando had in him, as I have said, the power to be the greatest actor of his generation. A gift from the gods.”
“He must have been the envy of Volesthorpe,” I said, putting it as gently as I knew how.
“Haw! Haw!” Poppy cried, her voice like that of an enraged hawk. “There were those who resented—”
“The Three Graces!” I blurted, as if I had just thought of it. I needed to flush this conversation out into the open to keep it from creeping back into the bushes.
In spite of that, I did not say what was actually on my mind.
“—his ease with women,” Poppy went on.
Meaning what? I wondered. Was it possible for one woman to hate a man because of his ease with another? This was a question that was far beyond me. I tried to think of an equivalent problem in the world of organic chemistry, but I could not.
I would ask Daffy, who had read Lady Chatterley’s Lover and accordingly knew everything there was to know about such things.
I turned my mind back to the Three Graces and their swift departure from the earth.
If not Canon Whitbread, who then had poisoned the chalice? Who, indeed, had dumped it in the river after the killings of the Three Graces?
“Look for the Invisible Ones,” Dogger had told me.
And who could be more invisible in a parish than the minister’s son? My heart fluttered at the thought. Was it possible that Orlando had poisoned the cup of the village gossips? He may well have had good reason to.
“Where was Orlando on the Sunday morning—the day of the three murders?” I asked.
Poppy was suddenly a hawk again, her wild eyes staring directly—perhaps too directly—into my mind.
“He was with me,” she said.
I shot a glance at Claire. Hadn’t she told me Orlando claimed to have taken the 7:02 up to London the previous evening? She gave me an eye shrug.
“Rehearsing,” Poppy added unnecessarily. “And I testified to that fact at the time.”
“What actually happened that morning, Miss Mandrill?” Dogger asked, with a little shake of his head. “One reads the papers, of course, but I have never quite been able to get it straight in my mind.”
“You are a clever man, Mr. Dogger. And a very pretty trap you have laid. But obviously, since I was with Orlando, I could not possibly know what took place in the church.”
“Quite right,” Dogger agreed, not fazed in the least. “I thought it might have been spoken about in Volesthorpe.”
“And so it was,” Poppy answered. “It was also widely reported in all the newspapers, which you admit to having read—as did I—as did we all.”
“May I help myself to more tea?” Claire asked brightly, getting to her feet and reaching for the silver pot.
How much of this conversation had she and Dogger anticipated? I wondered. How much of it was spontaneous?
“You’ve come to me under false pretenses, Mr. Dogger,” Poppy said in a scolding tone, as if he were a naughty boy. I saw that the spark had returned to her eye. “I fear your interest in my theatrical experiences was merely a ruse. Your motives are not those of the theatrical historian, nor are they of the merely curious.”
Dogger did not protest, as I might have done if I were him.
“I offer my apologies if I haven’t made myself clear,” he said. “But as a once-avid student of the stage, I couldn’t help being struck by the remarkable similarities of the murders to your role in Mildritha Kinbote. The three poisonings from the common cup were particularly suggestive. There is also the coincidence of the name: St. Mildred’s.”
The silence that fell clotted the air of the drawing room. I hardly dared breathe.
And then there came an insistent “SSS-SSS-SSS.” Poppy Mandrill was hissing like a kettle through her teeth.
“You must forgive me, Mr. Dogger,” she rasped, pulling a handkerchief from her sleeve and wiping at her mouth. “Perhaps you won’t believe me, but that similarity had never occurred to me. Not until this very moment. You are quite right, of course. Do you suspect some connection?”
“No,” Dogger said. “I was merely pointing out the remarkable coincidence. In my experience, murderers in real life have neither the wit nor the ingenuity to plot and plan such literary crimes, let alone carry them out. Killers do not read books, nor do they frequent the theater. They are more often to be found in cinemas, or wrapped in the Daily Mail.”
Poppy Mandrill let out a dry chuckle.
“Touché, Mr. Dogger,” she said. “I am properly chastised. I should have known better than to bait you. Your point, of course, being that such fiendish killings occur only in the books of Mrs. Christie and her ilk?”
Dogger gave her a slowly beatific look. His face was suddenly that of a weary but understanding ar
changel.
“And, of course, in Volesthorpe,” he said.
Although I could see that they were both taking a certain pleasure in the duel, it was time to remove Dogger from the line of fire. I knew the signs all too well.
I reached for my teacup and as I raised it to my lips, I let out the most appalling, gut-grinding belch.
It was an art that Daffy had taught me as a child, and one which I had perfected over the years in the privacy of my bedroom and my laboratory. My belches were not for the faint of heart.
“I’m sorry,” I gasped, covering my mouth and holding my breath just enough to make my face go a convincing shade of red. “I suddenly don’t feel well. The piggies-in-a-blanket at breakfast, perhaps.”
I let out another train of injured air.
Dogger and Claire were on their feet at once, bustling me toward the door and making their apologies.
It was a performance worthy of Poppy Mandrill herself. Had she spotted it as such? I wondered.
I kept my shoulders hunched like a vulture and my hands over my mouth until we were in the Rolls and safely away from Alhambra House.
Only then did Claire and I burst into hysterical laughter.
Dogger smiled a tired smile and I realized that it really was time to get him home.
After dropping Claire off at Scull House (“Just leave me at the edge of the field,” she had insisted), we drove back to the Oak and Pheasant in near-silence.
“Phew!” I said as we got out of the car. “It’s been a long day already. I think I need a rest. You might as well have one, too, Dogger.”
“Thank you, Miss Flavia,” he said. “I believe I shall.”
In my room, I stood on my head on the bed as I sometimes do when I need to concentrate my thoughts.
Why hadn’t I asked Poppy Mandrill about Orlando’s paraldehyde habit? I’d certainly had the opportunity. It was almost as if some powerful hand had held back my questioning—and perhaps for good reason.