by Alan Bradley
What were they doing in there? Why wasn’t I allowed to watch?
Daffy had once told me how a baby was born, but her story was so ridiculous as to be beyond belief. I’d made a mental note to ask Dogger, but had somehow never got round to it. This could be my golden opportunity.
Time dragged on and I was drawing concentric circles with the toes of my shoes when the door opened and Dogger crooked a finger at me.
“Just a peek,” he said. “Miss Nialla is quite tired.”
I stepped cautiously into the room, looking this way and that, as if something was going to leap out and bite me, and there was Nialla propped up with pillows in the bed holding something in her arms that seemed at first to be a large water rat.
I edged closer and as I watched, its mouth opened and it gave out a squeak like a rubber toy.
It’s hard to describe how I felt at that moment. A mixture, I suppose, of profound happiness and quite crushing sadness. The happiness, I understood; the sadness, I did not.
It had something to do with the fact that suddenly, I was no longer the last baby who had cried at Buckshaw, and I felt as if one of my most secret possessions had been stolen from me.
“How was it?” I asked, not knowing what else to say.
“Oh, kid,” she said, “you have no idea.”
How odd. Weren’t those the words Bun Keats had used when I’d extended my sympathy on Phyllis Wyvern’s death?
“It’s a beautiful baby,” I said untruthfully. “It looks just like you.”
Nialla looked down at the bundle in her arms and began to sob.
“Ohhh,” she said.
Then Dogger’s hand was on my shoulder and I was being steered gently but firmly towards the door.
I walked slowly back to the chair in the corridor and sat down. My mind was overflowing.
Over there, behind a closed door, was Nialla, with her newborn baby. And there, just along the corridor, behind her own closed door, was the newly dead—relatively speaking—Phyllis Wyvern.
Was there any meaning in this or was it just another stupid fact? Did living bodies come into being from dead bodies or was that just another old wives’ tale?
Daffy had told me about the girl in India who claimed to be the reincarnation of an old woman who had died in the next village, but was it true? Dr. Gandhi had certainly thought so.
Was there even the remotest possibility, then, that the soggy creature in Nialla’s arms contained the soul of Phyllis Wyvern?
I shuddered at the thought.
Still, I’d have to admit that, of the two, to my mind, the dead Phyllis Wyvern was more interesting.
To be perfectly honest, far more interesting.
There had been a time, not long after Nialla’s last visit to Buckshaw, that I had begun to worry about my fascination with the dead.
After a number of sleepless nights and a patchwork of dreams involving crypts and walking corpses, I had decided to talk it over with Dogger, who had listened in silence as he always does, nodding only occasionally as he polished Father’s boots.
“Is it wrong,” I finished up, “to find enjoyment in the dead?”
Dogger had dredged with the corner of his cloth into the tin of blacking.
“I believe a man named Aristotle once said that we delight to contemplate things such as dead bodies, which in themselves would give us pain, because in them, we experience a pleasure of learning which outweighs the pain.”
“Did he really?” I asked, hugging myself. This Aristotle, whoever he may be, was a man after my own heart, and I made a mental note to look him up sometime.
“As best I recall,” Dogger said, and a shadow had passed across his face.
I was thinking about this when, along the corridor, the door of the Blue Bedroom opened and the mountainous Detective Sergeant Woolmer began lifting his bulky photo kit out of Phyllis Wyvern’s late bedroom.
He seemed as surprised to see me as I was to see him.
“Got the dabs, and so forth?” I asked pleasantly. “Scene-of-the-crime photos?”
The sergeant stared at me for a few moments, and then a smile spread across his usually stony face.
“Well, well,” he said. “If it isn’t Miss de Luce. Hot on the trail, are you?”
“You know me, Sergeant,” I said, with what I hoped was a mysterious grin. I began sauntering towards him, hoping for at least a glance over his shoulder at the deceased Miss Wyvern.
He quickly closed the door, gave the key a twist, and dropped it into his pocket.
“Uh-uh-uh,” he said, cutting me off in mid-thought. “And don’t you even go thinking about Mrs. Mullet’s key chain, miss. I know as well as you do that old houses like this have spare keys by the bagful. If you lay so much as a fingerprint on this door, I’ll have you up on charges.”
Coming from a fingerprint expert, this was a serious threat.
“What did you use for your camera settings?” I asked, trying to distract him. “A hundred-and-twenty-fifth of a second at f eleven?”
The sergeant scratched his head—almost in pleasure, I thought.
“It’s no good, miss,” he said. “We’ve already been warned about you.”
And with that, he walked away.
Warned about me? What the deuce did he mean by that?
I could think of only one thing: Inspector Hewitt, the traitor, had lectured his men against me on their way to Buckshaw. He had specifically cautioned them against my ingenuity, which must have grated upon them in the past like a fingernail on slate.
Did he think he could outwit me?
We shall see, my dear Inspector Hewitt, I thought. We shall see.
I had become aware, as I chatted with Sergeant Woolmer, of quiet conversation in the adjacent room—two women talking, by the sound of it.
I knocked firmly at the door and waited.
The voices fell silent, and a moment later the door opened no more than a crack.
“Sorry to bother you,” I said to the single slightly bloodshot eye that appeared, “but Mr. Lampman wants to see you.”
The door swung inwards and I saw the rest of the woman’s face. She was one of the bit players in the film.
“Wants to see me?” she asked in a surprisingly brassy voice. “Wants to see me, or wants to see both of us?
“Mr. Lampman wants to see us, Flo,” she called over her shoulder, without waiting for an answer.
Flo wiped her mouth and put down a bowl from which she had been eating.
“Both of you,” I said, trying to put a touch of grimness into my voice. “I think he’s outside in one of the lorries,” I added, “so you’d better bundle up.”
I waited patiently, leaning on the door frame until they hustled off towards the staircase, still shrugging themselves into their heavy winter coats.
I felt more than a little sorry for them. Goodness knows what fantasies were running through their heads. Each of them, most likely, was praying that she had been chosen to replace Phyllis Wyvern in the leading role.
I’d better get to work. They’d be back soon enough—and angry at my deception.
I stepped into their room and turned the key, which, like most keys at Buckshaw, was left in the room side of the lock.
Across the room, on the inside wall between the window and the dresser, was a hanging curtain—a leftover from the days when guest bedrooms were decorated like Turkish harems. It pictured a hunting party with elephants, and a tiger, unseen among the jungle trees, preparing to spring.
I jerked the tapestry aside, sneezing at the cloud of gray dust that flew up into the room, revealing a small, wood-paneled door. I inserted the key and, to my immense satisfaction, felt the bolt slide back with a welcome click.
I took hold of the knob and gave it a good twist. Again there were promising sounds but the door was stuck fast.
I muttered something that was half a prayer and half a curse. Even a fraction of a second’s inspection would have shown me that it was painted shut.
>
Given five minutes in my laboratory, I could have produced a solvent that would strip a battleship while you were saying “Rumpelstiltskin,” but there wasn’t the time.
A quick look round the room revealed a lady’s handbag tossed carelessly on the bed, and I fell upon it like the tiger upon the Maharajahs.
Handkerchief … scent bottle … aspirins … cigarettes (bad girl!), and a small purse which, guessing by its weight and feel, contained no more than six shillings, sixpence.
Ah! Here it was—just what I was looking for. A nail file. Sheffield steel. Perfect!
My prayer had evidently been heard and my curse forgotten.
Inserting the blade of the file between the frame and the door, and working my way round it like a Girl Guide opening rather a large tin of campfire beans, I soon had a satisfactory pile of paint chips on the floor at my feet.
Now for it. One more twist of the knob and a kick at the bottom panel, and the door jerked open with a groan.
Taking a deep breath, I stepped into the Chamber of Death.
• SIXTEEN •
THIS BEDROOM, TOO, HAD a dusty drapery covering the unused door, and I was forced to fight my way out from behind it before proceeding.
Phyllis Wyvern’s body was still slumped in the chair as I had first found it, but was now covered with a sheet, as if it were a statue whose sculptor had wandered off to lunch.
The police would have finished their inspection by now, and were probably awaiting the arrival of a suitable vehicle in which to carry off the body.
No great harm, then, in having a dekko of my own.
I lifted the sheet slowly, taking care not to disturb her hair, still laced with Juliet’s posies, which seemed to me the only vanity she had left.
Even in death, though, there was something exotic about Phyllis Wyvern, although after twenty-four hours, the body had begun its inevitable chemical dissolution, and had now taken on a gray and waxy appearance.
The awful pallor of her flesh—aside from her made-up face—gave her the appearance of a star from the days of the silent cinema, and for a moment I had the same awful feeling I’d had before: that she was playing the game of Statues, as I used to do with Feely and Daffy before they began to hate me—that in a moment she’d sneeze, or suck in a giant, gasping breath.
But no such thing happened, of course. Phyllis Wyvern was as dead as a door knocker.
I began my examination from the ground up. I lifted the hem of her heavy woolen skirt and saw at once that her ankles were swollen, ballooning out, as it were, above a pair of heavy black work boots.
Work boots? They couldn’t possibly be hers!
Using my handkerchief to guard against fingerprints, I slipped one of the boots off her foot … slowly and carefully, taking special note of the way the thick white stocking was bunched in a knot beneath her instep.
As I had suspected, the boot had been shoved onto her foot after she was dead.
With great care I rolled down the knee-length stocking and removed it. Her foot was puffy, dark, and bruised with the settling blood. Her painted toenails were ghastly.
I replaced the stocking, which slid on easily over her cold flesh.
Getting the boot back on, though, was not as easy as taking it off; the stiffened toes simply refused to slide all the way back into the boot. Could this be rigor mortis?
I pulled it off again and stuck my fingers into the opening. There was something pushed down into the toe—paper, by the feel of it.
Would someone as wealthy and famous as Phyllis Wyvern buy footwear so oversized that she had to stuff paper into the toes to make it fit?
It seemed unlikely. I fished out the wad with my finger and uncrumpled it.
It was a piece of stationery printed at the top with the name: Cora Hotel, Upper Woburn Place, London, WC1.
Scrawled across the page in red ink were the words:
Blast her handwriting (if it was hers). Was it “Must I tell T?”?
The paper was torn from the edge diagonally across the initial—the final letter could have been anything.
D for Desmond? D for Duncan? V for Val? Or was it a B for Bun?
No time to speculate, or even to crow over finding something the police had missed. I shoved the paper into the pocket of my cardigan for later analysis.
I struggled again to replace the boot, but because of the swelling in the legs, it was like trying to squeeze an elephant’s foot into a ballet slipper.
Remembering Flo, or Maeve, or whatever her name was, I dashed back into the adjacent room.
Yes! Just as I thought—the actress had left half a bowl of fruit pieces uneaten on the night table. I helped myself to the dessert spoon and returned to Miss Wyvern.
Using the bowl of the spoon as a shoehorn, I managed to lever the boot back onto her dead foot.
Better check the other one, something told me, and I quickly pried it off. Could there possibly be more of the message in the other toe?
No such luck. To my disappointment the second boot was empty, and I quickly levered it back onto her foot.
So much for the lower extremities.
Next step was to give her a jolly good sniffing. I had learned by experience that poison could underlie all seeming causes of death, and I was taking no chances.
I sniffed her lips (the upper one, I noticed, painted larger than it actually was with scarlet lipstick, perhaps to mask the faint mustache that was visible only at extremely close range), followed by her ears, her nose, her cleavage, her hands, and as much as I could manage of her armpits without actually shifting the body.
Nothing. Except for being dead, Phyllis Wyvern smelled exactly like someone who had, just hours ago, stepped out of a bath of scented salts.
She must have come straight from her performance to her room, removed her Juliet costume (it was still laid out flat on the bed), taken a bath, and then … what?
I used my handkerchief again to collect from the nape of her neck a small sample of the stage makeup I had noted earlier. Smeared onto the white linen, the greasepaint had the appearance of finely ground red brick.
I gave special attention to her fingernails, which had been coated with a shiny scarlet polish to match the lipstick. The cuticles formed stark half-moons of grayish white where the color had not been applied. Feely did her nails in that way, too, and I had a sudden but momentary attack of gooseflesh.
Steady on, old girl, I thought. It’s only death.
Phyllis Wyvern certainly hadn’t been wearing these gaudily lacquered nails on stage. Quite the contrary—except for the slap, her interpretation of Juliet had been notable for its village-pump simplicity. The real-life Juliet, after all, had been no more than twelve or thirteen years old, or so Daffy liked to claim.
“If it weren’t for you lot,” she had once said mysteriously, “I could have Dirk Bogarde scaling my balcony even as we speak.”
Phyllis Wyvern, by contrast, was fifty-nine. She had told me so herself. How she managed to shed forty-five years under the lights was nothing short of a miracle.
Perhaps it was her size. She was really not that much bigger than me.
I’d better get on with it, I thought. The actresses could return at any moment from their wild-goose chase, and be hammering at the locked door.
But something was niggling away at the back of my brain—something that was not quite right. What could it be?
I stepped back from the body for a more general look.
In her peasant blouse and skirt, Phyllis Wyvern looked as if she had just dropped into the chair to catch her breath before setting out to a masquerade.
Was it possible she had simply had a heart attack, perhaps, or suffered a sudden fatal stroke?
Of course not! There was no blotting out the sight of that dark decorative bow of ciné film twisted fancily around her throat. And besides, Dogger had pointed out the petechiae. The woman had been strangled. That much was clear. Part of my mind must still be milling away trying to reduc
e the horror of what must have been a violent scene.
From her hair to her—
Her hair! That was it!
Like little colored stars twinkling in the winter sky, Juliet’s crown of flowers was still woven into her long, golden hair. They could hardly be real, I thought. If they had been, they’d have wilted by now, and yet they looked as fresh as if they had been picked just moments before I came into the room.
I reached out and pinched a particularly dewy-looking primrose.
Hard to tell by touch. I gave the thing a jerk and—good lord!—Phyllis Wyvern’s hair, posies and all, went tumbling off her head and onto the floor with the sickening whump of a shot bird falling dead from the sky.
It was a wig, of course, and without it, she was as bald as a boiled egg.
A boiled egg mottled with even more of the petechiae, or Tardieu’s spots, as Dogger had called them.
I stared, aghast. What kind of nightmare had I stumbled into?
I retrieved the wig from the carpet and replaced it on her head, but no matter how much I twisted it this way and that, it still looked ludicrous.
Perhaps it was the knowledge of what lay beneath.
Well, I couldn’t spend all day fiddling with her coiffure. I finally had to give it up and turn my attention to the dresser, which I found to be littered with a various assortment of bottles and tins: theatrical cold creams, glycerine and rose water, rank upon rank of skin cleansers and assorted toiletries by Harriet Hubbard Ayer. Although the dresser top was a veritable apothecary’s shop, a few things were obviously missing: one was red theatrical makeup; the others included scarlet lipstick and nail polish.
I had a quick rummage through her purse, but aside from a handful of paper tissues, a wallet containing six hundred and twenty-five pounds, and a handful of loose change, there was little of real interest: a tortoiseshell comb, a pocket mirror, and a tin of breath mints (of which I helped myself to one and pocketed a couple of extras for quick energy, should I need it later).