Dying to Read

by John Elliott

  It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spirit of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way — in short. the period was so far like the present period that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

  Oh, Norma! she thought as she closed its pages and slipped it back into the vacant space. The pain of then, when Henrietta lay in pain, the recent pain of recounting that pain, yet seeking a moment’s solace in the paradox that, as ever, it was also the best of times. Paradox and duality. Light and darkness. The two contradictions contained in the one. There was something she had come across in reading Margery Allingham, a vague notion, something creeping beneath her consciousness, which she must get out and tell Norma, crazy as it might seem, and Hamish, who had used the same expression, when he turned up.

  She was still mulling over these future conversations when the door opened and, as if on cue, Norma entered. Far from being careworn and palely loitering, she positively strode forward like a robust, steely-eyed and rejuvenated Martina Navratilova, eager to dispense with any new upstart Russian glamour-puss in short straight sets. ‘Breakfast,’ she said breezily, ‘the best time and nourishment of the day. Nothing can sully its restorative grace. Not even you ascetic swallowers of hot lemon juice and nibblers of Swiss nuts and seeds. Young gels now wouldn’t know a devilled kidney from a takeaway doner kebab. Eggs are called for. I take it those of the hen variety are somewhere in the fridge. Huevos Rancheros — now they might be the spicy complement to today’s endeavour.’

  ‘Hamish is coming.’ Geraldine ignored the slighting reference to her supposed morning intake. She had no need to diet either for herself or for the aforementioned visitor whose remarks on her bodily contours had been more than satisfactory.

  ‘In that case porridge is called for. Porridge in the Bunny Carslake Scottish manner, cooked with salt then salted again and eaten standing up. Och ma hert is in the heilans. Ma hert is no here.’

  ‘Hamish is as English as you. Anyway surely no-one outside of books and old plays is known as Bunny. Who he?’

  ‘A remittance man of noble lairdy lineage, who even as we speak haunts the streets of Soho to gratify the tourists.’

  ‘Never mind the music hall act. Isn’t it too warm for porridge?’

  ‘True. True. Eggs should suffice. Poached, scrambled or lightly boiled is the question. Boiled, I think. If you rummage in the cupboard you should find twin egg cups on either side of a central branch. Henrietta and I loved them when we were kiddywinks. We had little pink and white cosies we stuck on the one we left for second gobbling. You do know how to boil eggs, I take it, since the blessed Delia instructed the nation?’

  ‘Luckily I escaped of all of that by being in Ireland, However, four minutes should be to your satisfaction as long as you’re not expecting Alison standards. Remember, I’m here as a book detective not a short order cook.’

  ‘Touché! You find me suitably contrite and appreciative. Some thin toast and strong coffee also might not go amiss. Cooking helps thinking, book detective. Digestion aids deduction.’

  Geraldine, with a brandished V-sign, accepted her fate and retired to the kitchen. Once there she rummaged as bidden and found the desired double egg cups, extracted butter and two eggs from the fridge — no doubt the learned Delia would have counselled leaving them out sufficiently sooner prior to immersing them in heating water — garnered sliced bread, rebelliously thicker than Norma’s recommendation, then switched on the kettle for the cafetière. Here she was in London, one of the two cities in Charles Dickens’ book, making English breakfast. Wouldn’t it be a lot easier to be in Paris, the other city, and simply have un express and a croissant or a jam smeared tartine. ‘Oh bugger!’ she said out loud as one of the eggshells cracked in the near to boiling water. Bugger Norma and her traditional eating habits. The salacious thought of someone actually physically doing so led her into a short fit of the giggles.

  ‘I’ll lay the table,’ said the, as far as Geraldine knew, unsullied imagined recipient of wanted or unwanted sexual practices. ‘I’m glad the prospect of shortly seeing your Young Lochinvar has put you in a jolly mood.’

  ‘I’ve cocked up one of the eggs.’

  Norma peered into the pan which was now off the heat. ‘Never mind. An egg is still an egg an egg as Gertrude Stein might have said. Both will be delish.’

  Seated across the table, while Norma fastidiously peeled away the remaining broken shell from the top of her first egg, Geraldine said, ‘I’ve been thinking about Margery Allingham.’

  ‘Not many do today.’ Norma gently prodded her spoon through the outer white to the still runny yolk beneath.

  ‘And Albert Campion in particular,’ continued Geraldine, ignoring the interruption. ‘Initials AC, just like Augustin Cox. He often adopted an alias during his investigations: Mornington Dodd, the ludicrous Hon Tootles Ash, Christopher Twelvetrees. There may be more. I haven’t read the lot.’

  ‘Trouble there, toots, forgetting the Ash,’ enunciated Norma now half eggified, partially toastified but as yet completely uncoffeefied, ‘is that Dorothy L Sayers, like Ms A, heavily hints that Albert Campion is also an alias for an aristocratic johnnie close to the royal family. Ergo AC is a bit of a blind alley.’

  ‘Do you want to help or hinder?’ Really, thought Geraldine, at times like this the old trout, as she sometimes refers to herself, can carry her pedantry to excess.

  Norma sliced the top off her second egg. ‘Done to perfection,’ she murmured approvingly. ‘Sorry. You were going to posit vis à vis Augustin Cox.’

  ‘Suppose there were two personalities, a split like an alias, within the same body. That would explain the differing way he was seen by Joan Oliphant and Gonçalo Pereira, for example.’

  ‘Blythe Fuller, too. A spanking Cox and a Cox who watches and records.’

  ‘Yes. But which one did the killer know? Which personality did they have to kill? If we get that sorted perhaps their identity will follow.’

  Norma laid down her spoon, the remainder of her second egg abandoned for the moment. ‘Good thinking, detective woman. What if, though, we are in more Germanic territory than the stultified England of Campion and his sidekick, Lugg?’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘The concept of the doppelganger. I wonder.’ Norma picked up her spoon again and tapped the outside of the two egg cups one after another.

  Geraldine’s eyes widened. ‘Surely it’s not possible.’

  ‘If it were we might have to head towards a much darker writer. An initiator of the murder mystery in fact. Namely the ineffable and tragic E A Poe. Coffee. I need a caffeine stimulation.’ She paused and took a capacious unmilked and unsugared mouthful. ‘Have you ever heard of one of his stories called ‘William Wilson’?’

  With a shake of her head, Geraldine poured the last of the coffee into Norma’s now once more empty cup. ‘I’m afraid my only knowledge of his works is Vincent Price and Peter Lorre hamming it up in old movie re-runs on Telefis Eirann.’

  ‘A sad deficit but soon rectified. The collection lurks somewhere in the library. He had an abhorrent fear of being buried alive, you know. Evidently it was a recurrent phobia of many in those times. Anyway, the basis of the story, as I remember it, is that the narrator, William Wilson, encounters a fellow schoolboy also called William Wilson. An intense and bitter rivalry grows up between them so much so that the narrator finally plunges his sword through his namesake. The settings, of course, are suitably Gothic. I forget the details, but you have the gist. Why don’t we go and lay our hands forthwith upon the possible, and I stress only possible, key book for the Augustin affair?’

  Be
fore Geraldine could form a suitable response to Norma’s evident excitement, the front door bell rang. ‘Hamish,’ she said.

  ‘Open it, but later today you and I must partake of another English tradition… Afternoon tea,’ she added to Geraldine’s enquiring look. ‘There’s something we must clear up, Poe or no Poe. Now go and greet your own private and desired filth. What larks, eh! It makes an old trout positively want to seize a crummach and head for the tangle o’ the isles.’ And with that parting shot, coming from whither Geraldine knew not, she disappeared, tacking larboard under full sail, into the library.

  Hamish stood patiently waiting, carefully holding a bunch of bronze and white chrysanths, blooms upwards towards his chin, when the door finally opened. ‘For you and Norma,’ he said, proffering them to a beaming Geraldine, who laid them unceremoniously on the hall table, grabbed him in a tight clinch, and kissed him passionately on the lips. He smelled of dampened pine resin with a lingering hint of cinnamon. Mentally she reserved the right to advise him of a change of after-shave.

  ‘Well,’ he said before kissing her back equally vigorously, ‘I’d have come round sooner if I’d known.’

  From within came disjointed snatches of Roamin’ In The Gloamin’ and Mary My Scots Bluebell delivered in a lusty baritone.

  ‘Norma,’ said Geraldine by way of explanation. ‘She’s in top form delving for the Augustin solution, but she does like to tease about your Scots ancestry. Come and meet her. Bring the flowers. She’ll be pleased to receive them.’

  Hamish dutifully gathered them up and followed behind, noting that the hips in front of him displayed an accentuated and newly stated wiggle. One of his hands was free, but any possible temptation was averted by their dual arrival in the library where quite a different posterior, although also clad in a skirt, loomed up to greet them as its owner bent down to reach the lowest shelf of a bookcase. ‘Tho’ you’re tired and weary, still journey on.’ A further stentorian selection from the Harry Lauder songbook issued from somewhere close to the floor.

  ‘Norma, this is Hamish. He’s brought us flowers.’

  ‘Till you come to your happy abode.’ Norma managed to complete the no-place-like-home sentiment before righting herself and giving their visitor a long and appraising look.

  Hamish extended the blooms towards her.

  ‘Chrysants. How pleasant. Quite Japanese. I’m afraid I don’t handle cut flowers myself. To tell the truth, they’ve always given me the heebie jeebies.’

  ‘Norma!’ Geraldine frowned.

  ‘It’s alright, my dear. I’ll behave. It’s just the Edgar Allan seems to have vanished down a rabbit hole for the nonce. No doubt it will re-appear when truly needed. Pleased to meet you, young DC. I generally loathe and execrate the law as an institution, but its individual officers. Well, I reserve judgement. Don’t simply stand there disapprovingly, Gerry. Take the flowers to the kitchen and water a vase, while Hamish and I compare Harry Lauder to the fab four. Go on, he’ll be as unsullied as now when you return.’

  ‘What’s up chucky, tiger got your unleaded. The writer did it. The writer did it.’

  Recently inured to Lacenaire’s general taciturnity, apart from the occasional ‘Fat, fat, fat,’ both Geraldine and Norma had failed to notice the bird’s excited hopping along his perch and tilting of his head whenever Hamish had entered the room. Now he was positively aflap and effusive in his outpourings. ‘Mine’s a large krepkaya and Weetabix. The reader did it. Sometimes the reader did it. Other times the writer.’

  ‘Ah! Bossy bird again you talk, but only it seems to the long arm of the law, while you ignore those who feed and house you.’ Norma sighed. Lacenaire gave her a glance of ornithological disdain.

  Geraldine rescued the bunch of chrysanthemums from Hamish, who had been looking more and more like a spare part at the annual conference of cut flower abolitionists and law enforcement refuseniks. He released them thankfully and managed to touch her hand for a moment. She withdrew reluctantly. The meeting was not going as well as she had hoped.

  ‘Come and sit down,’ said Norma. ‘Would you like a drink? We’ve got the usual.’

  Hamish shook his head. ‘No thanks. Oh, it’s not the old because I’m on duty cliché. It’s just I had a few last night. The grandparents came to town.’

  ‘Run them in, chucky. Tiger’s got their pension books. The writer did it.’

  ‘He does like you. You’re inspiring him to say new words. You know my history, I take it.’ Norma smoothed her skirt down to mid-calf.

  Hamish nodded. ‘It came out when Enfield contacted us. It wasn’t Geraldine. By the way, isn’t she taking a bit of time to put flowers in a vase? I wish I hadn’t chosen the dratted things.’

  ‘Your gesture was right. She’s being discreet. What you two get up to is none of my business. I’m not an interfering aunt or uncle for that matter. However, I do want to advise you to be careful. We appreciate your help re Augustin, and as far as we’re able we will help you, but don’t jeopardise your official position. Geraldine will still be here if she wants you with or without the Cox affair. And here she is. She obviously knew you were missing her. Yes, we were talking about you, and although the bird thinks we both should be arrested, Hamish as yet has not snapped the bracelets on.’

  ‘You do talk rot, and even worse, sing out of tune.’ Geraldine sat down beside Hamish on the sofa and took his hand. ‘Have you told him about initials and our theory of split personality or possibly even doppelgangers?’

  ‘Give us a break. I hardly know him, though if Lacenaire is an example he can certainly charm the birds from the trees and not only them it seems.’

  Geraldine gave Hamish’s thigh a tweak. ‘The real Pierre François was a rascal and finally a murderer, for all his prattling about culture and society’s ills. Perhaps your talent only applies to jailbirds. Oh, Norma! I didn’t mean it. My big mouth.’

  ‘Mine’s a large krepkaya and cough mixture,’ expostulated the parrot, plumage unruffled by her denigration of his namesake.

  ‘Doppelgangers,’ said Hamish, eager to steer the conversation away from what he perceived were choppy waters. ‘German, aren’t they?’

  ‘Yes, and if your pal, the over-excited chatterer, would only remember his recent Trappist vows, I’d be able to explain.’ Geraldine released her fingers from Hamish’s trouser cloth and shot a warning look towards the cage. Lacenaire loftily regarded the ceiling but did not squawk.

  ‘We’re still at the experimentation stage,’ said Norma, ‘The proposition is that there was not one Augustin alone, but two.’

  Hamish gave a nervous laugh.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ asked Geraldine. ‘I didn’t dig my nails in too much did I?’

  ‘No. I rather enjoyed it as a matter of fact. It’s just that last night, as I told you on the phone,’ he paused. ‘Last night I‘d this crazy idea, after something my granddad said, that as you’ve put it, there were indeed two Augustin Coxs. This morning I told myself it was far too fanciful, forget it. Now I don’t know what to think.’ He looked from Geraldine to Norma and back again.

  Geraldine re-grasped his hand, interlocking her fingers with his. ‘You see, sleuthing together, what it brings,’ she said triumphantly.

  ‘Caution, my pets. Don’t rush your fences.’ Norma rose. ‘I’ll play gooseberry no longer. Edgar Allan indeed might provide the right book if only I could locate it, but there are still others to be considered, and they have different solutions. Remember our afternoon tea assignation, Gerry. I’m going out now, but I’ll be back in good time. Gratified to meet you at last, Hamish.’

  ‘Afternoon tea?’ queried Hamish when the door closed. ‘She, he is definitely eccentric.’

  ‘Oh, never mind scones and sticky buns.’ Geraldine kissed him. ‘Fancy a tumble, or at least a grapple?’

  ‘Well a grapple might not stop there.’ Hamish eyed the still hopping Lacenaire. ‘What about his nibs?’

  ‘Nobody believes a parrot in court. The
y make lousy witnesses.’

  Far from retaining a dignified silence, during what could only be described as vigorous hanky panky taking place beneath his roost, Lacenaire ran the gamut and back again of his vocabulary with as much notice being taken of it as the act of Mike and Bernie Winters at the long gone Glasgow Empire.

  Chapter 21

  Missing You in Montevideo

  Their next scheduled Augustin Cox progress confab was still two hours away. Feltham nick sweltered in what the forecast had promised would be the hottest day of the summer so far. Already the auxiliary fan was proving itself not up to the task of keeping DS Pat Kirkland as fresh as a buttercup burgeoning beside a shampoo-ad sylvan stream. Old offenders sweat, she admitted to herself as she toiled before one scrolling database after another. If this kept up they’d be frying eggs on the car park tarmac until the weary baggage handler slung his hook towards an ice-cold Irish cider in the Doom and Gloom. Oh to be in air-conditioned Terminal 5 where balmy breezes lift the spirits even in the thick of the check-in queue, she pined, while here she was again holding the fort against the marauding bands of cowboy builders, Triad counterfeiters, criminally intentioned meter readers, not to mention the general besieging riff raff of the surrounding underclass.

  The men, as usual, had made their excuses and left: Jerzy to regional HQ, Hamish following up a hunch. His word not one she would have used. Librarian consulting, more likely. Discipline these days had gone out with the tide and had forgotten to come back when the boating pool attendant yelled out its number. Or was she mixing too many metaphors? Whatever. She was hot. Her brow was sticky, and to make matters worse, she’d come to a grinding halt in her Jerzy’s mystery seminar investigation. None of her sources had come up with a dicky bird. Train ’em. Transfer ’em. Groom ’em. Do ’em. She’d waylaid them all to no avail. Stumm, stumm and yet more stumm had been the firm of duty solicitors acting discreetly on behalf of the Met. In the face of this seemingly permanent wall of silence, rather than slit her wrists, or pour an ice bucket full of water into her unmentionables, she decided to take an early canteen break, but only managed to get to her feet when the phone rang. It was front of house.