I recalled a woman trying to push me into her brother’s grave once but I could not recollect why.
The lady surveyed me with revulsion as I leaned against a yew tree.
‘Stimulated,’ she shuddered, ‘at this hour.’
I wondered what would have been a better hour to be intoxicated and realized that she was not addressing me but somebody behind.
A man’s face appeared indecently close to mine. ‘She don’t smell of drink.’
‘Does not,’ I corrected him absent-mindedly as the circle of light contracted around his weather-torn features. ‘And stop sniffing me.’
The lady’s face reappeared, hovering over me with a tortoiseshell-handled lorgnette.
‘My goodness.’ She recoiled. ‘Regard the presentation of her. She has had a calamity.’
‘She needs a doctor,’ the man decided. One of his eyebrows was singed.
I was always told it was rude to talk about people as if they are not there but I let it pass.
‘I just need a cab,’ I assured them as I scrambled to my knees. ‘If I can get home I live near a hospital.’
And they must have helped me to the road for I was clambering into a hansom and croaking, ‘125 Gower Street,’ to the driver.
‘Blimey, that’s where old Rice Puddin’ lives,’ he called down as I fell on to the seat, and the next thing I knew Molly was answering the door.
‘Oh goodness, miss, you look horrenderous. I thought you were a mongerel’s dinner when you set off in that dress what you’ve still got on, but you look much worserer now. Your face looks all bashed in.’
‘I think it is,’ I told her wearily.
‘Oh.’ She took my cloak. ‘Was it the lady from number 115 ’cause you said her bonnet looked like a compost heap?’
‘I do not think she had heard me.’ In the mirror I saw the mud on my cheeks, a graze on my nose and a large contusion on my forehead. My nose was bleeding.
‘Oh, don’t worry, miss. She didn’t not.’ Molly hung my cloak on the rack. ‘But I accidently told her.’
I made my way to the study, slumped into the chair behind the desk and took a sheet of paper. ‘I want you to take this to the telegraph office immediately.’
‘A pen?’
‘I haven’t written it yet.’ I found the address in Sidney Grice’s card index box. ‘What is Inspector Pound’s surname?’ I heard myself muttering before I worked out the answer for myself.
‘Not immediantely then,’ Molly mumbled as she watched me print it out.
DO YOU KNOW PTOLEMY TRAVERS SMYTH QUERY I MAY HAVE KILLED HIM STOP MARCH.
I thrust the note into her hand with a few coins from Sidney Grice’s change bowl.
‘Go,’ I said. ‘And on the way back fetch a doctor.’
‘A docker, miss?’ Molly queried. ‘I think you are more in need of a doctor.’ Her lips moved as she perused what I had written. ‘And a solossiter.’
21
The Quirry
‘THERE IS A creature at the bottom of the quarry called the Quirry. It lives in the hollows, beneath the stagnant pools and in the cracks that go down to the centre of the earth. At night it creeps out and feeds off any living creature it can find, like a spider sucking the insides out of a fly.’
Barney laughed, but Maudy Glass paled and looked about her in alarm. She was the same age as me but always seemed younger, and so I stopped my story and we finished the dregs of our lemonade, chewing the shreds of rind thoughtfully. Maudy had to go and help her mother and the sun was sinking, and so we set back.
The edge of the sandstone cliff had crumbled and a dead tree trunk tilted almost horizontally over the side.
‘Bet I could walk on that,’ Barney speculated.
Maudy begged him not to, but I bet him tuppence he couldn’t. I lost my bet for he clambered over the tangle of roots and strolled easily along the trunk, arms outstretched – as we had seen a tightrope walker do when Silcock’s Circus came to the village – twenty feet to the last broken branches. Maudy could not watch but I applauded. I would have tried it myself were it not for the ridiculous layers of clothing that society decreed I must wear.
‘Come back now, Barney,’ Maudy begged, but he was enjoying her terror.
‘Watch this,’ he called and stood on one leg, but the bark was wet and his foot slipped. Barney wobbled and slid sideways. He managed to snatch at a bough but it was rotten and snapped. Barney seemed to hang for an age. His mouth opened but no sound came as he fell.
I rushed to the side, grabbed on to a root and looked down in time to see Barney bounce off a rocky projection and land spread-eagled on his back on the quarry floor a hundred feet below.
‘Get help,’ I shouted at Maudy. ‘Run to The Grange and tell my father.’
Maudy hesitated. ‘What will you do?’
But I did not have time to explain. I was ripping off some of those swaddling petticoats.
‘Go. Just go,’ I yelled.
Maudy headed back up the track, past Swandale’s – which was deserted now – and went out of view. It was probably two miles down the side of the quarries and back up to where Barney lay. The side was not quite sheer and there were ledges and a few jutting bushes, and a huge boulder to squeeze round.
A broken child lay on the quarry floor in more pain than I had ever seen. His eyes flickered and his pale lips parted.
‘Don’t leave me, Marchy,’ he sobbed. ‘Don’t let me die.’
I held his hand and swore, ‘I won’t.’
22
The Kidney Dish and the Ring
‘OUCH.’ I TOUCHED my brow and wished I had not.
‘Does it hurt very much?’
I knew that voice, but I did not know to whom it belonged and I could not see anything. I put my hand up again but gingerly this time.
‘Careful, March. They have bandaged your head and face.’
‘Who?’
‘The nurses.’
‘Where am I? Who are you?’
‘You are in University College Hospital, March, and I am George Pound.’
I remembered the hospital and the nurses, and of course it was the inspector, but it was he who should be in bed with me bringing him meat pies and jugs of beer after he was stabbed because of me.
‘What am I doing here?’
‘That’s what I hope to find out.’
‘Uncle Tolly!’ I tried to sit up.
‘You must lie down.’ He – at least I assumed it was him – restrained me with a hand to my shoulder. I touched that hand and knew it for his beyond doubt. He squeezed my arm and I sank back. ‘Who is Uncle Tolly, March?’
‘He is dead.’ The bandage slipped and I could see bits of the inspector through a slit.
He brought a telegram from the inner pocket of his overcoat. ‘Ptolemy Travers Smyth?’ He read and I nodded and realized that I had a headache, a bad one. The inspector clicked his tongue. ‘Was he your uncle?’
‘He said he was my second cousin and that you would vouch for him.’
‘I have never heard of the man. Where did he live?’
‘In Highgate, in a big modern house near the cemetery.’ My hand was still on his. ‘And I might have killed—’
The squeeze became urgent. ‘Don’t say anything else, March. Remember what I am.’
I knew what he did but I was not at all sure what he was – to me. The bandage slipped and I was blinded again.
‘You are supposed to be recuperating.’
‘I got your telegram.’ His voice still sounded weak, but I was pleased that he had recovered from my attempts to trim his moustaches when he was the patient and I the visitor.
He said something else but I was drifting again. I listened to strangers talking and a wheel squeaking and somebody crying noisily and being shushed, and I closed my useless eyes and when I woke up again he was still holding me.
‘Your mother’s ring,’ I said. ‘You gave it to me for safekeeping. Perhaps you should look after it while I am
here.’
The grip slackened. ‘I would rather risk it being stolen while you are asleep than have you return it.’
I put my right hand to my breast and felt the hard metal on the chain around my neck. It seemed to be the only solid thing I had. I did not know what else to say.
‘I have sent a telegram to Mr Grice,’ Inspector Pound told me. ‘He should be back soon.’
‘But he will be furious,’ I protested. ‘He is on an important case.’
‘Not as important as yours.’
‘I did not know I had a case.’
‘You must not overtire Miss Middleton,’ a woman scolded.
‘I shall go in a moment,’ he promised.
‘Very well. Then make yourself useful and hold this bowl.’ There was a tugging around my temple. ‘Raise your head.’ I did and felt the bandage being unwrapped. My vision was blurred on the right-hand side but I could see her face well enough, a nurse with a dry sunken face and a grim expression on her downy lips. ‘I think we need to let the air get to it.’ She tossed the bandage into a kidney dish.
I looked at the hand holding that dish and followed the dark grey sleeve up to the lapel and the white shirt and charcoal tie, and the face above with its neatly clipped moustaches was smiling reassuringly, but the clear blue eyes winced in undisguisable horror at what they saw.
23
Chimpanzees and Emetic Tartar
THERE WAS A fuss at the door but I could not see it because they had put a screen round the dead patient in the bed next to mine and it blocked my view.
‘You can’t come in here,’ a woman insisted.
‘My dear, yet dispiritingly dowdy Matron.’ I knew that voice and I had never been so glad to hear it. ‘You have no conception of my capabilities. I am perfectly able to walk into this fetid misconstruction of a hospital ward as I am about to demonstrate.’
‘Visiting time is at six o’clock.’
‘I shall file that information under ACICT for Almost Certainly Irrelevant and Certainly Tedious,’ he told her, ‘for I am not a visitor. I am me.’
‘Are you a doctor?’
‘I cure more ills than you can possibly imagine.’
‘Oh,’ the matron said. ‘I am sorry.’
‘Always apologize. Always explain,’ my guardian said, and after a short pause he appeared, hat in one hand and cane in the other, and tossed them both on my bed. ‘For goodness’ sake, March. I leave you alone for…’ he glanced at his watch and reeled out how many thousands of minutes it had been, ‘with strict instructions to stay out of trouble and what do you do? You go clodhopping into it up to your scrawny and unnecessarily elongated neck the moment I am out of the borough.’
‘Dom Hart,’ I remembered.
‘Oh that.’ Sidney Grice spiralled a hand above his head. ‘A simple matter. All men have their vices and the late Abbot was a secret drinker. One of the older monks, Brother Jerome, put potassium permanganate in his wine – hence the black vomit. It was not in my remit to discover his motive, though I should like to have had time to have done so.’
His eye slid inwards.
‘I am sorry.’ My tongue was dry and clicked on my palate.
‘Then stop grinning like a demented chimpanzee.’
‘I am pleased to see you.’
Mr G grimaced. ‘I shall decide whether I am pleased to see you or not after you have answered the first two of the eighty-nine highly intelligent questions with which I intend to confront you over the next two days. Who is or was Mr Ptolemy Travers Smyth?’
‘My second cousin.’
‘Is he dead?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you kill him?’
‘I do not know.’ The blanket was tickling my chin and I pulled it down a couple of inches.
Sidney Grice grunted, ‘Then I shall draw the provisional conclusion that you might not have.’ He pulled the blanket back up just below my mouth. ‘Let us hope for both our sakes that my investigations do not prove that conclusion wrong.’
‘Your sake?’
He unhooked his left cufflink. ‘Think what an embarrassment it would be for me if you were convicted as a murderess.’
The word murderess wrapped itself around me so tightly that I could hardly catch my breath, but Mr G was humming now, eight rapid random notes over and over, as he clipped his pince-nez on to his elegant thin nose, bending over me to scrutinize the damage.
‘Ummm,’ he said, as if appreciating a fine delicacy. ‘Ah-ha.’ He brought out a short steel ruler and held it close to my brow, turning his measure ninety degrees before tutting and scribbling something on the inner surface of his cuff.
‘Do you not have a notebook?’
‘Of course I have a notebook.’ He drew back indignantly. ‘Can you imagine me without one?’
‘Was that one of your questions?’
He sniffed. ‘It was rhetorical.’ He delved into his satchel. ‘Even in your more than usually befuddled state I think you will notice that the cover is brown whereas this case cries out to be bound in blue, and you could hardly expect me to waste a book which might be better suited to investigating the defenestration of a university don.’
‘Why blue?’
‘Blue is a recondite colour. It feels scratchy and smells of burnt gunpowder.’ He fell back to humming and made a few more measurements. ‘The next three questions are outside the scope of my agenda but pertinent to your inconvenient situation.’ He prodded my nose with his little finger. ‘Does that hurt?’
‘Not much.’
‘Pity.’ He whipped off his pince-nez. ‘What about that?’
‘Ow! Yes.’
‘Excellent. Who presented you with your injuries?’
‘Annie, Uncle Tolly’s maid.’ I closed my left eye but the lightning flashes continued. ‘With a poker.’
He rested one foot on the bedside chair as if expecting me to polish his boot. ‘Before, during or after the slaughter of her employer?’
‘Afterwards.’ I remembered some pigs.
He thrust his notebook back into the satchel still on his shoulder. ‘Time to come home, March.’
‘Has the doctor said I can go?’
He dusted the toe of his boot with an edge of the sheet. ‘I have no idea and little interest in what conversations he may have had, for he has had none with me.’
‘But surely—’
‘Tut-tut, March. You cannot spend your whole life idling in bed, especially when we have your alleged act of dynastic homicide to investigate.’ He glanced about. ‘Where are your clothes? And do not pretend you do not know. I can accept that you may not know if you have killed a man, but every girl always knows where her clothes are.’
‘If I were a girl that might be—’
‘No time for that nonsense.’ Mr G refastened his cuff.
‘In my bedside cabinet.’
‘Good.’ He pulled down his coat sleeve. ‘This screen will serve.’ He took hold of an upright pole.
‘There is a dead woman behind it,’ I protested.
‘Then she has no need of it now.’ He dragged the curtains out and round us.
‘I shall wait in the corridor for eight minutes.’
‘Eight minutes,’ the old woman whispered as she came though the screen. ‘That gives me plenty of time.’
I was surprised that my guardian had not noticed her as he stepped out, closing the gap behind him. There were sharp footfalls and the matron angrily demanded, ‘Have you no respect for the dead?’
‘None at all,’ he replied cheerfully, ‘and precious little for you.’
‘How dare—’
The old woman was pedalling a grinding stone. It creaked reluctantly at first but she soon had it turning.
‘I dare,’ Sidney Grice’s voice faded as he quit the ward, ‘because it is quite obvious from the most cursory glance that you are attempting to murder your father-in-law, and I would advise you to cease immediately as I have no more desire to waste time giving evidence at
his inquest than I imagine you have to dance your way to perdition on the looped end of a hempen cord.’
‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’
‘Emetic tartar.’ His voice carried from afar.
‘This is an outrage.’ But the matron’s voice faltered.
‘Time for what?’ I asked the old woman. She was pedalling hard now and the wheel was whirring.
‘To kill you,’ she said, though her lips had been sutured together. Her skin was pocked and discoloured like old orange peel and her hands were gnarled talons, but she held the carving knife dexterously enough as she ran the blade over the spinning stone, the steel squealing and the sparks flying as she worked. ‘Nice and sharp to cut out your heart, cut out your heart, cut out your heart,’ she sang as she worked. ‘Nice and sharp to cut out your heart on a cold and frosty morning.’
I thought that she was wearing smoked glasses, but as she turned her head to me I saw that they were pennies on her eyes. I tried to roll away but the terror bound me so tightly that I could not move.
‘Lovely.’ The old woman whisked round and ripped back my sheets.
‘What on earth are you doing?’ Sidney Grice demanded.
‘Get her away from me.’
‘Who?’ Sidney Grice glanced about the empty cubicle but I was not that easily fooled. I could smell the decay and the sparks still danced in my eyes.
24
The Amber Book
IT WAS JUST after midday when we left the hospital. Straight ahead and set well back was the imposing white dome of University College. We turned right and walked the hundred yards to number 125 with me leaning heavily on my guardian’s arm, for I was much more unsteady than I had realized. Sidney Grice rapped on the door with his cane.
‘Is the bell broken?’ I asked and he furrowed his brow.
Death Descends On Saturn Villa (The Gower Street Detective Series) Page 7