‘Nobody can accidentally entangle themselves in several neat knots,’ I said.
‘He knows that as well as you or I.’ My guardian polished his fingernails on his trousers. ‘I shall be glad when the promotions are decided next week. The man has never been much of a help, but now he is a positive obstruction.’
‘How does he sleep at night?’ I asked and Mr G regarded his fingertips.
‘People talk about the sleep of the just.’ He tugged his earlobe. ‘But it is the wicked who have the best nights. Who have they to fear but themselves?’ He crooked a finger. ‘By the way, you left something at the factory.’ He pointed to a tea chest on the floor by his desk.
I went over and something moved. ‘Spirit! How could I have forgotten you?’ I bent down and lifted her out, and she opened her eyes and mewed silently.
‘I hope your friend takes better care of it,’ he said.
‘Which friend?’
‘The one you are giving it to.’
‘Oh yes.’
‘The only survivor,’ he told me.
I stroked under her chin and Spirit nuzzled her nose into my palm.
You got a letter from your mother and you wept. There was no bad news, just family gossip and wishing you a happy Christmas. You made me swear not to tell anyone but there was no need. I would never have embarrassed you in front of your comrades. After all I never told how the brigadier cried when his pet canary died. He had just taught it to say ‘God save the queen’ when Dinah, my cat, got it. It was all my father could do to stop him executing her on the spot.
Three days later Dinah went missing and everyone, except the brigadier, made a search for her, but she seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth.
Six weeks later you brought me a cat, a lovely tortoiseshell with one black paw. You had purchased her from your cha walla, who told you he had heard of my loss and shipped it from England at great expense, and charged you accordingly.
‘I know she can never replace Dinah,’ you said, ‘but I thought she looked quite similar.’
I picked her out of the basket and held her to me.
‘You see. She likes you already,’ you said.
‘Oh, Edward, you pickle,’ I said. ‘This is Dinah.’
‘Well, I’m fried.’
‘You certainly have been,’ I said and kissed you on the tip of your nose.
50
Three-toed Sloths and Captain Dubois
‘Let us imagine,’ Sidney Grice said, settling into his armchair, ‘what happened at that vile cat factory. And by imagine, I mean attempt to logically reconstruct what happened. It is not an invitation to unleash your lurid imagination. First of all, who sent the telegram?’
‘Either Mr Piggety or the murderer.’
‘And how will you find out which?’
‘Me?’
‘Yes. You are always whining in your diaries about me not giving you any responsibility.’
‘Have you been reading my journal again?’
‘Of course.’
‘But I keep it hidden and the key is always on my person.’
‘It is impossible to hide anything from me,’ my guardian said. ‘And as for locks…’ He piffed. ‘A three-toed sloth could open the average diary clasp with a parsnip. Proceed.’
‘My journals are personal.’
‘Much too personal at times,’ Sidney Grice said. ‘Proceed.’
I let the matter drop. ‘I have already asked the woman at the telegram office, as you know.’
‘And how much did you give her?’
‘Well, nothing.’
‘Nothing?’ He could not have been more astonished had I told him I was Cardinal Newman. ‘Nobody with an income of below five hundred a year remembers anything for free. A telegrapher requires a shilling to recall facts as accurately as his or her primitive cranium permits. Railway porters’ underdeveloped memories can be stimulated for one and sixpence and guards’ for a florin. It is all in Beckham’s Financial Inducements of the Lower Orders, though some of his figures are out of date. He lists three classes of our inferiors who will talk for a farthing, whereas I have never heard anything worth listening to for under a penny.’ Molly came in with the tea tray. She was cleanly turned out and had not spilled a drop on the cloth. ‘Bring a fresh pot in twenty-four minutes.’
‘Certainly, sir.’
‘She must be an identical twin,’ I joked as she left, and my guardian considered the remark.
‘I hope not,’ he said. ‘Mercy – and never was a child so cruelly misnamed – awaits Her Majesty’s pleasure in Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, and will still be awaiting it on the day she expires.’
I put a strainer on his cup. ‘What did she do?’
‘Not a fraction of what she planned to do.’
I could see that he was not going to tell me any more, so I said, ‘Are you suggesting that I return to the office and offer the desk clerk a bribe?’
‘There is no point in striking when the iron is cold and has been taken away.’ He levelled the surface of the sugar with the back of a spoon. ‘I mention it only for future reference. So…’ He eased the spoon in, taking great care not to disturb the smooth surface. ‘We have two possibilities. First, Mr Piggety really did have information.’
‘But why instruct us to wait until three o’clock when he described it as vital?’
‘A moot point which leads us to suspect that the second possibility is more likely to be correct’ – he plunged the spoon up to its hilt – ‘that the murderer lured us there just in time to witness the crime, but too late to be able to prevent it.’
‘How could somebody know this morning exactly what time he would die?’ I asked and my guardian pursed his lips.
‘How long do you think it would have taken those cats to die?’
‘I am not sure.’ I poured our teas. ‘In that heat and with no water, perhaps two days.’
Sidney Grice straightened the tray. ‘Captain François Dubois of the French Foreign Legion did some research on this topic during his country’s typically inept intrusion into Mexico. He was concerned about the effects of heat and dehydration on his men, and experimented with dogs in cages in the full sun. He was astonished at how soon they succumbed, some as quickly as two hours. Now cats are hardier than their creepily sycophantic canine counterparts, plus it would take a long time for a room of that size to heat up, even with its insulation and instant hot water supply. According to my mercury thermometer, the water was two hundred and nine degrees Fahrenheit, the pipes were ten inches diameter and, since they go up and down all the rows, two hundred and forty-two feet long – the room must be…’ he looked about him as if we were still in it, covering our noses from the stench of nearly five thousand dead cats, ‘seven thousand, nine hundred cubic feet. The room temperature was previously set at sixty-two degrees and rose to one hundred and four. So that would take…?’ He snapped his fingers at me.
‘Four or five hours,’ I hazarded.
‘Not bad.’ Sidney Grice looked mildly impressed. ‘So, if we assume that the cats survived for another four or five hours in those conditions…?’ He pointed at me.
‘We can estimate that the murderer went there some time between six and eight o’clock this morning,’ I said. ‘But why would he turn the heating up when—’
‘Stop,’ my guardian protested as if in pain. ‘Three logical solecisms in twenty-three words and you have not even finished your sentence. It is more than the human frame can endure.’
‘I was only making assumptions, as you have been doing,’ I said and he winced.
‘I have made twelve assumptions in four minutes, some of them unspoken. The difference being that I know these false friends for what they are, whereas you think of conjecture as fact. First, we cannot know that the murderer turned the heating up, second, we cannot know that it was turned up the moment the murderer arrived and, third, we do not know that the murderer is a man. However, for the sake of linguistic brevity,
we will agree to refer to the murderer as he for the time being.’
I spooned two sugars into my tea. ‘The more I think about it, the more I am convinced we should be saying she.’ I poured some milk and stirred. ‘The cruelty of his death and the senseless killing of all those cats – it all reeks of Primrose McKay to me.’
‘I hope so.’ Mr G sneezed. ‘It would be pleasant indeed to put that young lady into a condemned cell, but I shall stick with he for the time being.’ He blew his nose. ‘To continue – getting into the building was not necessarily a problem. He may have just knocked and been admitted. Perhaps Piggety knew or was expecting him. And, when he left, the killer locked up and posted me the key.’
‘Mr Piggety only had one key,’ I remembered.
‘And, unless you are acquainted with Messrs Frankie Zammit or George Henderson, you cannot get a Williams-Hazard deadlock key made except by the manufacturers, and that is easily checked.’
‘The key arrived here just after two and it takes a good half-hour to get here, so—’ A thought struck me. ‘The murderer was probably at his work when I arrived. But why did he not lock the door?’
Sidney Grice tasted his tea. ‘There are two likely reasons. Either he was about to leave or he was waiting for you.’
‘But why would he expect me to turn up?’
Mr G rotated his saucer. ‘You have heard of Pandora?’
‘Of course.’ I reached for the milk jug. ‘She was told not to look in a box, but she opened it and released chaos into the world.’
He turned the saucer back a fraction. ‘Tell a woman not to do something and what will she do?’
‘Very often the opposite,’ I admitted.
He blew his nose. ‘So tell a woman that she must on no account arrive before three?’
‘And curiosity might get the better of her.’ I splashed myself with the milk. ‘But he would have had to hide behind that door for hours on the chance that I would turn up.’
He passed me a napkin to dab my sleeve. ‘He may be a very patient man or more likely he had somebody alert him – an accomplice possibly.’
‘The children,’ I said. ‘There were girls throwing stones against the wall. They could have been signalling that I was approaching… But why would he…’ I put my hand to my mouth.
‘There are two vats.’ My guardian’s face was sombre.
51
Flash Mobsmen and Royal Garden Parties
It took a while for that thought to sink in and even then I could not imagine it – being stripped and trussed and suspended on that slow ride alongside Prometheus Piggety, watching each other’s terror, feeling the first scalding splashes, hearing each other’s desperate thrashings, knowing that all I could hope for was what I feared most – death.
I wondered if my guardian was as shocked as I by the thought of what I had escaped but he was humming lightly now, and tapping an irregular rhythm on his leg, and each of his eyes looked as dead as the other.
I stood up unsteadily and he rose from his chair, ready to catch me, but I would not swoon into his arms like the helpless schoolgirl he imagined me to be. He stepped forward but I held out my hand and sat back again with as much dignity as I could salvage.
‘You look ill, March. Have you been eating enough vegetables?’ He scrutinized me with concern. ‘What is so amusing?’
‘Enough?’ I laughed louder than I intended. ‘I have eaten nothing but wretched vegetables since I came here.’
My guardian said, ‘Kindly moderate your language.’
‘But they are wretched,’ I insisted. ‘They are miserable and soggy and cold. Besides, there is nothing wrong with the word.’
He puffed through his lips. ‘You said it as if it were an expletive, and a lady should never say anything that sounds even remotely like an expletive. I had a cousin who once said affable in such a way that she was never invited to another royal garden party again.’
‘Why are we discussing royal garden parties?’
Sidney Grice brushed an invisible speck from his right shoulder. ‘Because it has stopped you shaking. Deliberate verbal distraction is an art usually only practised by flash mobsmen, Whig politicians and the better class of pickpockets, but it can be a useful technique. When Maximilian Hurst was preparing to assassinate me I initiated a conversation about the merits of electrical lighting, which I had to keep going for over an hour before the police arrived.’
‘That would never have worked with a woman,’ I said.
‘Maximilian Hurst was a woman,’ he told me, ‘which was only apparent after she was executed by firing squad in Belarus.’
‘Do you really think I would have been boiled alive?’ For all his ramblings, I could not get the idea out of my head.
Mr G yawned. ‘It is not unlikely that the murderer would have tried, but I would probably have saved you.’
‘Only probably?’
‘Most probably.’
I lifted the teapot lid and there was only a mound of soggy leaves. ‘But why would anybody want to kill me?’
‘To wound me.’
I was not in the mood to pursue that train of thought. ‘So before eight o’clock this morning when the telegram was sent, the murderer had estimated the time of death,’ I said. ‘He must have been very confident that the chain belt would work, to go off and leave Mr Piggety unattended – and he knew exactly how long it would take. If he had called us too early we could have rescued Mr Piggety and he might have been able to identify his would-be killer.’
My guardian considered the matter, then sprang up and went to his desk. It was littered with the day’s envelopes. He took the bands off one and emptied the contents on to his blotter. I went over to look. It was a little heap of the glass fragments. Sidney Grice spread it out with the edge of a rule and set aside one of the larger pieces.
‘Look at this.’ He handed me his magnifying glass. ‘There is a very slight but definite curve in it.’
He went back and emptied a second envelope of more finely powdered glass next to the first. ‘You are a girl and therefore addicted to jigsaws—’
‘I quite liked them when I was a girl,’ I said, ‘but I am a woman now.’
My guardian leaned back to look at me. He raised his pince-nez to his nose and let it fall on its string. ‘A caterpillar may call itself a butterfly,’ he said, ‘but it has not the beauty and neither can it fly.’ He placed the rule on his blotter. ‘So, if you were to indulge in your juvenile passions and assemble these pieces as a disc, what diameter would you expect it to be?’
‘It is difficult to say.’
‘If it were an easy question, I should have asked Molly.’
‘Two inches,’ I guessed and he waved the rule in my face.
‘What do I have on me that is glass and two inches in diameter?’
‘Your eye,’ I said, and he rolled his good one.
‘My eye is not a flat disc and it is not that wide. I am not a horse. Think, girl. Clear out all that coagulated poetical flotsam with which you clog your brain and concentrate.’
‘Your watch face.’
‘At last.’ He raked his hair back. ‘So, armed with our conjectures, I think we can envision the series of events with a reasonable degree of confidence, but first, we have another urgent matter to attend to. That wastrel girl has not brought any more tea.’
He re-crossed the room and grasped the bell rope.
52
The Eternal Scream
Sidney Grice still had his hand on the rope when the door flew open and Molly with it, her hat flapping and the tea spilling out of the spout as she rushed to put the tray down on the central table.
‘Ever so sorry, Mr G,’ she said. ‘But—’
He jumped to his feet, tight with indignation. ‘If you ever call me that again you will leave this house immediately.’
Molly drew back nervously. ‘Sorry, sir, but I heard Miss Middleton call you that and I thought you liked it.’
‘When you are my wa
rd you may call me that, but not one particle of a second beforehand.’
Molly’s eyes lit up. ‘Oh, when shall that be, sir? Someday soon, I trust. Oh, I shall be fienderishly happy to stop this diresome work. The hours are so long and the pay so tiddlerish. Why, Miss Middleton and I will be like sisters. We shall comb each other’s hair and I shall call her March.’
‘Oh, good grief.’ Sidney Grice sat down.
‘Mr Grice is not going to make you his ward, Molly,’ I told her, and she jerked her head sideways as if she had been stung. ‘He was just telling you not to call him that.’
‘So he’s—’
‘I am afraid not,’ I said and Molly ran her tongue around the inside of her cheek.
‘Just as well.’ She scratched her arm vigorously. ‘I should have to stop cursing and stealing from the kitchen, and I enjoy both those things.’ She cleared our tray and replaced it with the new one.
‘Why were you so long?’ her employer asked and Molly grimaced.
‘Oh, sir, it was gruelsome. Cook got her ear caught in that automaticated potato masherer what you invented.’
‘But how?’ I asked.
‘For once in my life I do not want to know.’ Sidney Grice put his fingertips to his temples and whisked his hands apart.
‘She was trying to hear if there was anything in there.’
‘And was there?’ I asked.
‘Just her ear, miss,’ she told me.
‘Go away,’ her employer said.
‘What?’ Molly screwed up her face and her apron. ‘For ever?’
He half-stood. ‘Y—’
‘Just until you are called again,’ I put in hurriedly. ‘Is Cook all right?’
Molly wrinkled her nose. ‘As right as a body can be with an ear and half a finger scrungulated.’
‘What happened to her finger?’
‘She was trying to get her ear back.’
‘Does she need a doctor?’
‘Yes,’ Sidney Grice snapped. ‘They both need an alienist.’
‘A what, sir?’
The Curse Of The House Of Foskett (The Gower Street Detective Series) Page 24