At first the cell appeared to be empty, the bed and chair unoccupied, but then I saw a pair of boots immediately to my right. The patient sat on the floor, her knees pulled up, her hands clasped round them and her head bowed so that we could only see her long, greying taupe hair. She did not react to our entry.
‘Good afternoon, Angelina,’ I said, but there was no response.
Sidney Grice marched four paces to the far wall, gazed up at the barred window and swivelled smartly round. He dropped to his haunches and peered under the bed.
‘Interesting,’ he said, jumping up and striding back towards the patient.
‘She has been like this since the fight,’ Dr Whelkhorn told us.
‘Even at night?’ I asked, for I knew from experience how cold a cell floor could get.
Dr Whelkhorn shook his head but said, ‘Yes.’
There was still no reaction from the figure on the floor.
My guardian bent over her like a proud father inspecting his newborn heir and asked, ‘To whom does that highly polished pair of brown boots under the bed belong?’
‘Boots?’ Dr Whelkhorn echoed.
‘Highly polished,’ Mr G reiterated.
‘Why, they belong to Miss Angelina,’ Dr Whelkhorn replied, as if he expected to be admitting Sidney Grice imminently.
‘Then why,’ my guardian demanded, ‘is she wearing this pair?’
He rested the tip of his cane on the toe of one boot.
‘Well, she can hardly wear both pairs at once.’ Dr Whelkhorn guffawed. ‘Many of our patients have changes of clothing. They—’
‘The fact that you are a halfwit does not entitle you to babble like one.’ Sidney Grice raised his hand. ‘Listen and learn.’
‘Well, I…’ Dr Whelkhorn blustered but nonetheless complied.
Sidney Grice pressed on his cane, his knuckles blanching as he ground it into the leather.
The patient jumped but stayed hunched over.
‘You are hurting her,’ Dr Whelkhorn protested.
‘Am I indeed?’ Mr G pursed his lips. ‘Do you concur with the doctor’s diagnosis, Miss Middleton?’
‘Ouch,’ the patient cried out.
‘Yes.’ I grasped his sleeve. ‘Stop it.’
Sidney Grice gave the cane one final twist and pulled away. For a moment I thought he had used his spike stick with which he had pierced a man’s foot for insulting me one afternoon in Kew. I was relieved, therefore, to see that the leather was dented by the outline of the ferule, but not pierced.
‘That was pointlessly cruel even by your standards,’ I scolded and Mr G shrugged.
‘I am not a kind man,’ he conceded, ‘but my brutality is never gratuitous.’ His voice rose. ‘Is it, Miss Grebe?’
Dr Whelkhorn wagged his outraged fingers in my guardian’s face. ‘It is bad enough that you assault my patients, Mr Grice – and you need not imagine that you have heard the last of this – you might at least have the courtesy to get her name right.’
Sidney Grice’s eye flickered as he withstood the flapping.
‘When you have a spare fourteen seconds, take a look at that highly polished brown footwear, Dr Whelkhorn,’ he said, ‘and you may notice that they are a great deal smaller than the pair which this patient is wearing.’
‘But her feet fill the larger pair or she would not have felt you squashing the toe of her boot,’ I realized.
‘Precisely.’ My guardian smiled thinly. ‘She would have had to have her feet bound at birth to fit into that pair beneath the bed.’
Dr Whelkhorn’s left eyebrow drooped to almost obliterate his pupil. ‘But I have seen her wearing them.’
I clicked my fingers – another habit my guardian abhorred in women.
‘Perhaps you saw Angelina Innocenti wearing them,’ I suggested, and the doctor rounded on me.
‘Do you not understand either?’ His shaggy right eyebrow jiggled about. ‘This is Angelina Innocenti. I should know my own patient.’
‘Indeed you should,’ Mr G agreed heartily. ‘Which makes your failure to do so all the more culpable. She said ouch.’
‘Of course she did,’ Whelkhorn shouted, beside himself with frustration. ‘What of it?’
‘Many foreigners, including the attenuated and knock-kneed French, the Italians, Germans, Japanese and Bulgarians do not say ouch. Neither do the unfeasibly tall Swedes.’ Mr G tugged at his earlobe. ‘They ejaculate aie, ahia, autsch, 痛いで, ox and aj in that sequence, whereas –’ he turned his attention to the other lobe – ‘the Spanish are content to cry out ¡ay! when expressing their appreciation of pain. Need I go on? I can.’
Sidney Grice prodded the figure with his toe and she balled up tighter, but a low, deep and quite musical sound emerged from within.
‘Descuse meo, senior, but me do not know-ay key you mean-o.’
‘That is Miss Angelina’s voice,’ the doctor declared triumphantly. ‘I have heard it many times.’
‘I can only suggest,’ Sidney Grice told him, ‘that you invest in an especially enormous and extraordinarily sensitive ear trumpet and use it at all times, though it will not compensate for the feeble and haphazard functionings of your primitive neural tube.’
‘How dare you?’ Dr Whelkhorn tore the air between them apart.
Mr G ignored his outburst. ‘That was the worst attempt at an accent I have heard since Miss Middleton’s derisive effort to counterfeit a dialect of the East End.’
‘It fooled the mob,’ I retorted indignantly, for I had saved his life by pretending to be a cockney when he was being attacked.
‘There is scant skill in fooling fools.’ My guardian grabbed a fistful of the patient’s hair, wrenching her head up and back, and a face leaped out, distorted with rage, purple-rimmed indigo eyes straining to spring out at him, a tangled mess of green teeth jutting through fissured lips.
‘Scut-nosed scrab,’ she hissed and her clawed hand lashed out, her black and broken nails lashing at my guardian, but his cane whipped up and knocked her arm away. ‘Frebbing grut,’ she cursed, nursing her injured wrist.
‘Good afternoon, Miss Grebe.’ Sidney Grice greeted her more cordially than he did most clients.
The patient kicked out but Mr G stepped elegantly aside.
‘But it is not possible,’ Dr Whelkhorn whispered and Sidney Grice wiped his hand, a digit at a time.
‘My dear doctor,’ he said patiently, ‘it is not possible that it is not possible because it has happened. This unhygienic representative of the female sex is none other than Hezzuba Punsella Chevita Grebe, the notorious pigeon poisoner of Primrose Hill.’
‘But…’ Dr Whelkhorn sagged inside his suit. His lips kept moving but nothing emerged except a tiny squeak eliding with a hiccup.
‘So the woman who escaped was Angelina Innocenti,’ I concluded for the doctor’s benefit.
Hezzuba Grebe jumped into a crouching position, snapping the air rabidly. She reminded me of the faux mad women I had seen in India, eating grass to make themselves foam and get alms from people who were terrified of touching them, mainly British visitors.
‘Precisely.’ Sidney Grice prodded the prisoner in the stomach with his ferrule and she fell back into the corner. ‘I feel obliged to commend you, so-called Dr Whelkhorn. Whilst detaining a dispenser of avian toxins, you have allowed the putative slaughterer of the Garstang household to decamp from what is supposed to be the most secure madhouse in the country, free to rampage unfettered through this wretched land, and you have not even noticed.’
‘But…’ Dr Whelkhorn rubbed his eyes yet, when he opened them, it was still the wrong patient. ‘How?’
‘That is a fourteen-guinea question.’ Sidney Grice let his handkerchief fall and limped from the cell. ‘Though I anticipate you will want it answering for free.’
39
✥
The Last Straw and Wicked Wicked Women
‘THE EXPLANATION IS certain to be simple,’ Sidney Grice prophesied when we were in the doctor�
��s office, a large room, freshly distempered and with two high windows overlooking the treetops.
Dr Whelkhorn steadied his left hand with his right as he poured himself a sherry. He gulped half of it down and topped up his drink before remembering to offer my guardian some.
‘I never ingest alcohol,’ Mr G told him. ‘If I wanted to be befuddled I could beat myself unconscious with a plaster bust of Napoleon.’
‘Steadies the nerves,’ the doctor mumbled.
‘Addles them,’ my guardian corrected him.
‘I will have one,’ I put in.
‘Are you old enough?’ he asked over me to my guardian.
‘I was old enough to be incarcerated here,’ I reminded him.
The doctor looked embarrassed. ‘Quite so.’ And he dispensed a glassful. ‘An amontillado,’ he told me. ‘There is a very good merchant in Duke’s Ride.’
My guardian clucked. ‘Shall I proceed or am I interrupting your festivities?’
Dr Whelkhorn drained his glass in a series of quick sips and joined us standing by a weakly gleaming coal fire. ‘Are you quite cured now?’
‘Mad as a parsnip.’ Sidney Grice picked up a stack of unopened letters from the mantelpiece. ‘Describe precisely and concisely the circumstances in which your Hispanic inmate absconded.’ He leafed through the pile.
‘Both women did voluntary work in the kitchens.’ Dr Whelkhorn watched my guardian uneasily. ‘Miss Grebe, being crippled from a failed escape bid nine years ago, would sit at a table and prepare vegetables. Senorita Innocenti often sat with her to help. On that occasion they were sorting through old sacks of vegetables for the slop wagon. We sell our waste to a local pig farmer.’
‘By the name of?’ Sidney Grice tossed two letters unopened into the bin.
Whelkhorn pulled his nose thoughtfully with his unusual hands. ‘Jones Fred Jones.’
‘Fred Jones,’ I repeated.
‘Jones Fred Jones,’ Whelkhorn corrected me, and I realized that his thumbs were as long and slender as his fingers and had three joints each.
‘And what was wrong with the pickled herrings?’ Sidney Grice held a letter up to the light.
‘But how on earth…?’ The doctor stopped, baffled, but my guardian did not trouble to enlighten him and I was too proud to express my own surprise.
Whelkhorn pushed on his nose as if reattaching it. ‘We had a rotten batch.’
‘Supplied by whom?’ Mr G rubbed his wounded shoulder.
‘I do not remember details like that,’ Whelkhorn protested. ‘Tullbride’s, I think.’
‘If only you could.’ Mr G slipped one letter into his pocket and quelled Whelkhorn’s unspoken objection with a halt sign.
‘So is it possible that Angelina Innocenti escaped with the rubbish?’ I proposed.
‘This foolish man will insist that it is not, but it is exceedingly likely.’ My guardian leaned back against the wall.
‘But the wagon is always carefully searched,’ Whelkhorn protested.
‘Is the rubbish put into any containers?’ I asked and Mr G raised his left eyebrow in commendation.
‘Barrels.’ The doctor helped himself – but not me – to another sherry. ‘But they are checked and filled in the presence of a warder. We are not as stupid as you suppose, Mr Grice.’
‘You cannot begin to imagine how stupid I suppose you to be,’ my godfather said amiably. ‘If your men are doing their jobs properly, it would be almost impossible to quit this establishment in a slop barrel.’
‘And they are packed so that nobody can hide behind one,’ the doctor stated confidently.
‘What about the herrings?’ I asked.
‘There was no point in repacking those.’ Whelkhorn sucked his sherry out of the glass. ‘The barrel was full of vinegar so, even if you managed to climb into it, apart from the mess you would create, you would drown in a fraction longer than the length of time you could avoid respiring.’
‘You would be well advised – assuming you are literate and I have no evidence that you are – to read that educational tome, The Art of the Cooper, by a retired cooper conveniently named Mr Cooper. Though you may have as much trouble finding it as you do your escapees, for only twenty-five copies were ever printed and thirteen were destroyed in the great flood of Abingdon, and I shall not lend you mine.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Whelkhorn ran his strange thumbs over his temples.
‘Barrels,’ I told him, though that was as far as I understood the gist of my guardian’s ramblings.
‘The pickled-herring barrel, as supplied by Tullbride Brothers and eight other merchants of whom I am aware, has an unusual design and for good reason. Fantasize that you are trying to get the last few fish from the barrel. You would have to drain it and climb inside, a superlatively unpleasant prospect.’ He rubbed his back up and down on the wall. ‘To rescue you from this fate, the barrel is made tapered towards the base rather than with the conventional bulge in the middle. Bamboo hoops are affixed inside the receptacle on which trays some seven or eight inches deep can be rested, the smaller trays at the bottom, of course.’
‘So, as you work your way down, you just have to lift out the next layer.’ I tried the doctor’s chair behind his desk.
‘Even a woman can grasp the concept with greater rapidity than you,’ Mr G told the doctor, to both our indignations.
‘So Angelina climbs in, somebody puts the top tray or two back in so that if the lid is lifted to all appearances there is a barrel full of rotting fish, and nobody wants to root about too much in that,’ I concluded.
‘Oh.’ Dr Whelkhorn poured another sherry.
‘Did nobody see her?’ I swivelled from side to side.
‘Angelina attacked Warden Wilde as the wagon was being loaded – at least we thought it was her, but it must have been Miss Grebe, I suppose. She bit his hand as he passed her table and would not let go.’ Dr Whelkhorn watched in disbelief as Mr G selected another letter. ‘That envelope is marked highly confidential.’
‘Fear not.’ Sidney Grice opened it. ‘I shall not divulge its contents to another living soul –’ he perused the contents – ‘unless I choose to do so.’
‘I must insist.’ Dr Whelkhorn snatched the missive from my guardian’s hand and I glimpsed a coat of arms on the heading.
‘So Angelina Innocenti and Hezzuba Grebe swapped places,’ I calculated, ‘and, behind all that hair, nobody noticed.’
‘Oh my goodness.’ The doctor put a fist to his mouth. ‘Somebody must have helped Senorita Innocenti into the barrel and put the tray back over her. We are dealing with a mass conspiracy of bestial criminal lunatics.’
‘I thought you said they were patients.’ I spun on the chair but it jammed halfway, so I had to shuffle it back to face him.
‘That was before all this.’ Whelkhorn gnawed his fingerplates in what looked like a parody of anxiety. ‘We had to carry the woman we thought was Angelina back to her cell face down because she kept twisting over.’
‘And the reason she sat on the floor all that time was because she could not get up.’ I was having trouble doing so myself with my bustle snagging on the back bars of the chair.
‘This is all a dream.’ Whelkhorn confided to himself, picking up a sealed envelope.
Mr G tossed a circular on the fire, scattering cinders on to the hearth.
I struggled free.
‘If Hezzuba Grebe was a poisoner,’ I remembered in surprise, ‘why was she allowed to work in the kitchen?’
‘It was a question of trust.’ Whelkhorn laughed emptily, the envelope escaping from his hand as unnoticed as had the senorita.
‘But why did she do it?’ I asked, raising my glass in the hope that our host would notice it was empty.
‘She claimed that she resented all birds for making her name ridiculous, and all people for making jokes about it.’ Sidney Grice rooted through the open drawer, bringing out a discoloured ivory page-turner.
‘I am surprised the court
was so lenient after all those deaths.’ I placed my glass upside down on the desk, just in case he thought I had not drained it dry.
Mr G inserted the blade of the turner into a thick blue book. ‘She was fortunate to go before a sympathetic judge, Lord Swan.’ He flicked open the volume and clipped on his pince-nez. ‘Poldark’s Diseases, Disorders and Dysfunctions of the Human Cerebrum,’ he remarked. ‘His chapters on cranial measurements are highly original.’
‘Quite so.’ Whelkhorn forced himself to calm down. ‘There is a lot to be said for the science of judging people’s intelligence and personality by the shapes of their skulls.’
He pivoted awkwardly to pick up the letter.
‘A great deal,’ my guardian concurred, flipping through the pages, ‘of tish-tosh.’
This, it appeared, was the last straw for Dr Whelkhorn. He stamped his right foot and then his left, and then his right again, in an ungainly sort of war dance.
‘Damn you, Angelina Innocenti; damn you, Hezzuba Grebe; damn you, unknown inmate or inmates who abetted her; damn you, Mr Sidney Grice.’ He scrunched the letter into a ball and threw it at my guardian. ‘Damn your eyes,’ he yelled.
‘Ladies,’ my guardian reproved.
‘Damn their eyes too,’ Dr Whelkhorn raved, spraying white flecks around the corners of his mouth. ‘Those wicked, wicked women, luring and taunting me with their pretty promises and fascinating bosoms, betraying me with their sweet deceptions.’ He was vigorously spraying now.
Mr G extracted the page-turner. ‘If it is of any interest,’ he conducted something between a gavot and a waltz, ‘I can tell you exactly where she was at twenty-six minutes past three yesterday post-meridiem.’
I wiped my sleeve. ‘So that woman with the bouquet—’
‘Surely, Miss Middleton,’ my guardian closed the book, ‘even your tobacco-damped senses must have appreciated the delicate perfumes of sour herring.’
‘Quite so,’ the doctor said because, of course, that had been his deduction all along.
Sidney Grice held the page-turner at an angle convenient for running our host through.
The Secrets of Gaslight Lane Page 18