Death Descends On Saturn Villa (The Gower Street Detective Series)

by M. R. C. Kasasian

  ‘Be grateful that I did not press charges,’ my father said loudly but calmly.

  ‘They are my papers and I shall have them,’ Pillow bellowed, raising his stick like a cudgel.

  ‘Over my dead body,’ my father swore.

  Pillow brought the stick back as if to strike him but my father did not flinch.

  ‘As you wish, Middleton,’ Pillow scowled, ‘as you wish.’ And he stormed away.

  Georgina the hen ran flapping towards him and Pillow aimed a kick at her, but Georgie was too quick and Pillow stumbled on a stone. I giggled and he turned on me in a fury. ‘You’ll laugh on the other side of that pole face when you’re an orphan.’

  39

  Trombones and Liver Flukes

  SIDNEY GRICE BRUSHED the rim of his soft felt hat and tossed it on to the hall table.

  ‘I still do not understand what happened,’ I said once we were installed in the study.

  My guardian rang for tea. ‘I am in little doubt that a terrible crime has been or shall be committed,’ he said as he went to his armchair.

  ‘You are referring to the skull?’ I suggested and Mr G yawned behind a loose fist.

  ‘Let us hear whether or not the police can verify its alleged provenance before we get too excited about that discovery.’

  He bent to fiddle with his boot again.

  ‘Perhaps you should invent a new kind of bootlace,’ I suggested.

  ‘I had this footwear modified by the finest mousetrap manufacturer in England,’ he grumbled, ‘but the mechanism is sticking.’

  An omnibus came to a halt opposite our front window with a solitary passenger on top, trying to punch the dents out of his stovepipe hat.

  ‘Please do not tell me you are trying to catch mice in your boot.’

  The man gave up and hurled his hat furiously into the road.

  ‘An interesting idea.’ My guardian spread out his copy of the Bloomsbury Echo on the floor. ‘Though I suspect you were attempting – and failing, as always – to be humorous.’ He put his foot on the paper, jerked the lace and there was a click. ‘The heel of this boot has a compartment with a sliding, spring-loaded hatch in the base.’ He stamped and a pile of ash spilled out over an advertisement for stronger, longer-lasting moustaches wax. ‘At last.’

  ‘That was why you were doing that shuffly dance.’

  As if in hope of accompanying him, a trombone played outside – the opening bars of ‘You Can’t Take Your Donkey on the Bus’. I remembered Edward trying to entertain the mess with that song at a Christmas party and getting as far as It put its blinking hoof straight through the blinking roof before he fell off the table to wild applause.

  ‘I was collecting evidence.’ Mr G kneeled beside the newspaper. ‘Fetch me my brass-handled magnifying glass and the silver one for yourself. We shall also need the letter opener and the penknife.’ Mr G wrinkled his brow as he took the glass and knife from my hand. ‘I have divided the pile into two smaller yet nearly equal piles. The one furthest from me is for you.’

  I went on my knees opposite him, no easy feat in a bustle. ‘What are we looking for?’

  ‘I am looking for clues.’ He levelled his pile out with the blade of his penknife. ‘And I suggest you do the same.’

  I flattened my little heap with the letter opener and raked out the ashes – shapeless specks of grit and soot, smudging over the story of how a little boy’s tortoise was rescued by a quick-witted barber. Mr G began to hum with his usual lack of melody while the trombonist played the chorus with gusto.

  ‘Cement and coal,’ he remarked contentedly, and I was reminded of when Maudy, Barney and I had searched for gold nuggets in sludge from the banks of the River Douglas. Barney had made a special sieve – he was always making things in his father’s workshop – but the most exciting thing we found was a snail.

  Something caught my eye. I flicked the surrounding particles away, blew very gently to clear the rest, and examined it under my glass.

  My guardian stopped what he was doing. ‘What have you discovered?’

  ‘I am not sure. It is a bit—’

  ‘Blue,’ Sidney Grice finished my sentence and, before I could examine it any more, he had licked his finger and dabbed my find away to inspect it more closely. ‘Paint.’ He scraped it into an envelope and made a note on the flap. ‘And doubtless an important or irrelevant find. Now…’ He folded the newspaper around the rest of his sample and weighed it down with a copy of The Nine Plagues of Ashby-de-la-Zouch. ‘Let us examine that other sample of dust.’

  ‘Oh, do let us.’ I jumped up in mock delight and he eyed me balefully.

  ‘You seem to forget that a few hours ago you faced the prospect of judicial execution,’ he scolded.

  ‘I am sorry.’ I avoided his eye. ‘But now I do not even know what we are investigating.’

  ‘According to the Bible you lay so much stock by,’ Mr G climbed to his feet, ‘it was only man’s curiosity about the unknown that enabled him to escape from the Garden of Eden.’

  ‘I believe Adam and Eve were driven out as a punishment,’ I informed him.

  ‘Punishment?’ Mr G went to a wooden rack on his desk. ‘Is not the prospect of eternal happiness terrifying enough without having to endure it in this world?’ He lit a miniature oil lamp and placed it in front of his microscope, dipped a steel spatula into a test tube and sandwiched a pinch of its contents between two glass slides. ‘Interesting.’

  ‘Is anything not interesting?’ I queried.

  ‘Music,’ he responded without hesitation, ‘and there is a device manufactured in Rotterdam which is tedious beyond words.’ He tipped the mirror a fraction. ‘What do you make of that?’

  ‘Is this what you found on the statue’s hand?’

  ‘I do not find clues.’ Mr G frowned. ‘That conjures up images of me stumbling over them by mere happenchance. I detect them. That is what a good detective does and – and there is no point in being modest about it – I am the best.’

  I went over and adjusted the focus and the trombonist started ‘The Man Who Married Mary’.

  ‘Amorphous inanimate specks and tiny bundles of fibres – fine particles of wood – sawdust,’ I diagnosed and was rewarded with a mildly impressed pulling down of his lips. ‘I used to study all kinds of things under my father’s microscope until I broke one of his prize specimens of a sliced liver fluke.’

  ‘I am surprised he did not disinherit you,’ my guardian said gravely.

  The clock struck. ‘Anyway, it must be time for lunch.’

  Mr G winced. ‘What is lunch?’

  ‘An abbreviation of luncheon.’

  He put his microscope away. ‘Next you will be calling breakfast brek, supper sup or dinner din.’

  ‘And I trust you will remember who suggested it if I do.’

  He closed his eyes in despair.

  Luncheon was vegetable stew with a difference, the difference being that it was hot.

  40

  Pistols and Lies

  INSPECTOR POUND CAME that evening, tired and holding an arm protectively over his wound.

  ‘I sent a sergeant to see Dr Kershaw’s widow,’ he announced, ‘and she backed up Mr Travers Smyth’s account of purchasing a skeleton from her. It was written in her accounts book for eight guineas.’

  ‘Assuming it was the same skeleton,’ I pointed out and my guardian pursed his lips approvingly.

  ‘I am prepared to make that assumption for now,’ our visitor said as I fetched a mahogany chair.

  ‘I have a bone to pick with you, Inspector,’ I challenged as he lowered himself on to it. ‘Why did you not tell me you knew that Mr Travers Smyth was alive before I set off for his house?’

  Inspector Pound pinched his philtrum. ‘Mr Grice wanted to see your reaction.’

  I fiddled with the cording on the arm of my chair. ‘And so you went along with it.’

  The inspector’s clear blue eyes flicked away. ‘He made me promise.’

  ‘H
ow?’ I demanded. ‘Did he point his ivory-handled pistol at your heart?’

  ‘What a ridiculous question.’ Mr G plonked himself into his chair without offering our visitor one. ‘It is not a pistol. It is a revolver.’

  I refrained from reminding my guardian that he had recently blown his only friend’s brains out with that very weapon.

  Inspector Pound straightened. His finger and thumb parted, running along the lower edge of his neatly trimmed moustaches. ‘He told me that he needed to see how you and your uncle greeted each other.’

  A clump of soot splotted into the grate, bursting into a miniature black snowstorm over the hearth.

  ‘I hope I performed satisfactorily.’ I glared at Sidney Grice but he was serene.

  ‘Your performance has not been satisfactory,’ he told me, ‘from the day you clomped into my house dressed like an agricultural labourer in brown shoes and a coat he might wear to feed the geese.’

  I sat up. ‘That coat cost me five guineas.’

  Molly arrived with a loaded tray.

  And Mr G retracted his shirt cuff. ‘A horse blanket would have cost less and been smarter.’

  The inspector laboured to conceal his amusement. ‘Perhaps I should leave you both to quarrel about that later.’

  ‘I don’t not know why horses have blankets.’ Molly put the tray down. ‘They don’t not never go to bed.’

  ‘Get out, you blockheaded lumpen serving wench,’ her employer ordered.

  ‘Don’t not go to mine much neither,’ Molly mumbled as she departed.

  ‘You will stay for tea,’ I invited and Inspector Pound fetched an upright chair from the round central table, sucking in sharply as he lifted it.

  He sat down gingerly. ‘The important thing is that you are no longer in danger of being accused of murder.’

  ‘Sloppy logic,’ Sidney Grice snorted. ‘My ward might be accused of a different murder committed some time ago or on a future and interesting occasion, but I concede that she is unlikely to be accused of the killing of Mr Travers Smyth in the early hours of Friday last.’ He put a finger on his glass eye to control its inward drift. ‘Also, it is only the third most important thing. The second being that I may not have to be embarrassed by this affair much longer.’

  ‘And the first?’ I enquired and he tapped the pot.

  ‘This tea is doing two things that I prefer tea not to do. It is stewing and cooling and therefore presents us with our most urgent challenge.’

  ‘I think I can rise to that.’ I took hold of the handle, which was still quite hot, and poured three cups. ‘So what did my reactions tell you?’

  ‘That you were probably telling the truth.’ Mr G centred the tray.

  ‘Only probably?’ I splashed a little milk into my tea and a lot into our guest’s but Mr G put milk quite high in the long list of things he detested.

  He stirred his drink six times clockwise, though he abhorred sugar also. ‘You invariably exhibit three signs when you are trying to deceive me and, since none of them was evident, I shall assume that your surprise was genuine.’

  ‘What three signs?’ A long time ago I used to cross my fingers behind my back and Edward used to claim that I blushed, but I do not think I did.

  My guardian stirred vigorously anti-clockwise. ‘If I were to tell you that, you would change your habits and I should have to search for new ones.’

  Pound helped himself to the sugar. ‘Perhaps you could tell me some time.’

  ‘I have never lied to you, Inspector.’ I caught his eye. ‘Well, not about anything important.’

  ‘The truth is always important.’ Mr G gazed so intently past me that I wondered if he were seeing it somewhere behind my left shoulder.

  ‘I still do not understand what happened.’ I took the bowl back. ‘And please do not mention display cabinets, dear Godfather.’

  The inspector looked quizzically from one to the other.

  ‘Luckily we have a witness,’ Mr G reasoned. ‘That is to say, you.’

  ‘Yes, but I do not know what happened,’ I objected.

  ‘I suspect,’ my guardian dried his spoon as if shaking the mercury down in a thermometer, ‘and it is my job to suspect things – that you do know what happened but are confusing fact with fancy. What – apart from the usual female aberrations of your mental processes – do you suppose might have caused that?’

  ‘I was drugged by the pickled cactus.’

  ‘Was that what your uncle gave you?’ Inspector Pound asked.

  ‘He gave me two helpings of it.’

  The inspector rubbed his chin. ‘Perhaps I should pay this gentleman another visit.’

  ‘It is not actually an offence to feed someone with unusual vegetables unless you can prove intent to kill or cause bodily harm.’ My guardian closed his eyes.

  Inspector Pound sipped his tea. ‘Possibly not,’ he conceded, ‘but he must be guilty of something.’

  ‘I do not suppose it is an offence to pretend to be murdered either,’ I pondered, ‘especially as he did not even waste police time by summoning a real constable.’

  ‘Impersonating an officer is illegal,’ the inspector said, ‘though it is hardly worth pursuing the matter if it was just some kind of prank.’

  ‘Prank?’ I was incredulous. ‘I was terrified almost out of my mind.’

  ‘Hardly a prank to kill a man,’ Mr G said quietly.

  ‘But Uncle Tolly is still alive,’ I protested, splashing my tea over my wrist.

  ‘Yes, but is it not obvious even to you?’ Sidney Grice cried. ‘The evidence that no crime was committed lights our way so clearly that we are in peril of being blinded by it. We should be proud of Miss Middleton, Inspector.’ He put a finger to his eye. ‘She has been a witness to one of the finest murders not committed.’

  41

  Violins, Coffins and Toothache

  INSPECTOR POUND’S EYES widened fractionally but his expression remained impassive.

  Sidney Grice’s hair had fallen foppishly forward. He flicked it back with a jerk of his neck and inhaled heavily like a man enjoying the sea air.

  ‘At the risk of appearing to be the simple child you believe me to be,’ I said, ‘I should be grateful if you could explain that last remark.’

  Mr G blinked. ‘What did you not understand? Of the thirteen words I used in my last sentence only four of them were longer than one syllable.’

  ‘It is not the words but the way you assemble them that baffles me,’ I replied and my guardian huffed.

  ‘I hope you are not going to ask me to explain,’ the inspector lowered his cup and saucer on to his lap, ‘because I fail to see how you can witness something which has not happened. I would be laughed out of court if I gave that as evidence.’

  ‘You think Miss Middleton dreamed it all?’ My guardian clicked his fingers as a man might summon a waiter.

  ‘No, but I thought we had agreed—’

  ‘I have not agreed to anything.’ Mr G brought out a tiny coffin from his waistcoat pocket. It was a snuffbox, though he had only ever taken any once to clear a cold.

  ‘Heaven forbid that he should be agreeable,’ I muttered.

  Sidney Grice pressed a cross on the side of the coffin and the lid sprung open, though he did not dip into it. ‘I met a man today claiming to be Travers Smyth, but I have long found it a useful rule of life never to trust a man with a criminal record, a violin or a name which should be hyphenated but is not. First, we only have his word for it that he is who he claims to be, though I have an unfounded suspicion that he might be. I shall employ the services of Turpin, Turpin and Turpin, the genealogists, to investigate that. And, second, I did not say that nothing occurred.’

  ‘Then what do you think did happen?’ the inspector asked.

  ‘I have absolutely no idea.’ Mr G hinged the lid back down. ‘But I could give you an almost interminable list of things which did not.’

  ‘And you prefer this to scenery?’ I asked the inspector and his eyes
crinkled.

  My guardian drained his tea. ‘If you took as much interest in studying nature as you do in reading trite poems about it, you might be a bit more useful to me and yourself. Remember how my examination of cobwebs helped me to solve the Foskett case? And it was my detailed knowledge of the nocturnal habits of tapeworms that saved the ninth Earl of Rattingdon from a very long custodial sentence indeed.’

  Pound put a hand into his pocket. ‘I should quite like to have Mr Travers Smyth down at the station.’ He brought out his pipe, though he knew better than to light it. ‘He strikes me as a man who would crack quite quickly under pressure.’ He blew down the mouthpiece. ‘Though I can hardly take him in without any evidence of a crime.’

  ‘I could always allege one,’ I suggested.

  And the inspector smiled. ‘We’ll make a policeman of you yet, Miss Middleton.’ He clenched his pipe between his teeth and sucked on it wistfully.

  ‘No need for that.’ My guardian leaned back. ‘I have asked him every relevant question.’ He reached over his shoulder to grasp the skull on his bell rope and Pound tensed his arms.

  ‘You will stay for more tea,’ I urged as he began to rise.

  ‘I cannot.’ He struggled to his feet.

  ‘Good,’ Sidney Grice said.

  ‘I will show you out,’ I offered and went with him into the hall.

  ‘I have missed you,’ I whispered as I handed him his hat.

  He touched my face and I reached up to stroke his, taken aback at how hot it felt.

  ‘Can I see you?’

  ‘Of course you can see her.’ Molly appeared from nowhere with a dustpan in her hand. ‘It ain’t not that dark.’ She took his coat from the stand. ‘Blimey, have you both got toothache?’

  And our hands dropped guiltily away.

  42