by Alex Grecian
“What about the things outside this room?”
“I know virtually nothing of the things outside this room. Nothing that isn’t in a direct line to my home.”
“That seems a shame. Perhaps a nice dinner and a stroll along the . . .”
“Inspector, I don’t understand how you could possibly mistake my intent. I’m not the least bit interested in your company.” She held up her hand to be sure I saw the diamond ring. I decided not to point out that it was on the wrong hand. Custom dictates that a wedding ring be worn on the left hand, not the right. I didn’t need to consult Robert Cream’s book to know that. I had no idea what the ring signified to Veronica, but she clearly hoped it might ward off any Pringles who stumbled into her library.
“I see,” I said. “Well then, we were talking about a book. Marriage, Rot and Bother.”
She rose and walked to the far side of the room. I watched her carefully as she climbed a ladder and reached out. A moment later, she descended and held two books out for me to see. Her frown had become more pronounced and I tried to picture her with a smile. My imagination wasn’t up to the task.
“You said there were three copies,” I said. “This is only two.”
“Oh, so you’re one of those detectives who is also a mathematical genius. Yes, one of my copies is missing.”
“And you’re sure nobody’s borrowed it?”
“Quite sure. I’d know.”
“So someone has stolen it.”
“I don’t see how. I know everyone who comes in and . . .”
I watched her face as she broke off and stared out the big picture window. Pearly fog moved behind the glass.
“You know who has it,” I said.
“I don’t.”
I took out the sketch of the blue girl and held it out for her. “Have you seen her in here?”
“No. Never.”
“You’re sure.”
“Quite.”
I folded it again and slipped it back into the pocket of my waistcoat. “Do you know something that might help me?”
“Nothing.”
“I think you do.”
“I don’t like to say anything. It’s perfectly ordinary, nothing suspicious about it. Certainly nothing to warrant the attention of a detective.”
“Shouldn’t I be the one to determine that?”
“Do you know how a circulating library works, Detective?”
“Of course I do.”
She told me anyway. “Every resident of this district, upon paying a modest subscription fee, is eligible to borrow a reasonable number of books for a reasonable amount of time. Here, one might pay a pound and a shilling or one might pay as much as five pounds for a year, depending on how many books one would like at a time. I keep track of every book that comes in and out of this library.”
“And yet someone has borrowed Marriage, Foolishness and Folly without your knowledge.”
“Nobody has borrowed the book you mean. I’ve simply misplaced it.”
“I don’t think you’ve ever misplaced so much as an errant thought. Who else is employed here?”
“Nobody.”
“What about Robert Cream? Did he have relatives? I imagine they would be allowed to roam free here, graze where they like amongst the books.”
She returned to the ladder without answering and began to climb, the books in one hand. I held out my hand and stopped her.
“I’d like to borrow a copy, if you don’t mind. Brush up on all that custom and practice.”
“You’re not a member of this library, sir.”
“Let’s call it official police business then.”
She sighed and appeared to weigh the two copies of the book, deciding which to give me. To my eye they were identical, twin volumes with cheap blue bindings. Finally, she settled on one and handed it over. I tucked it under my arm and smiled.
Something borrowed, something blue.
“Thank you,” I said. “And not just for the book. You’ve been terribly helpful.”
“I certainly have not.” She kept her gaze on the shelves. “I haven’t said a word to you.”
“Of course. I may come back if I need more help. I’ll have to return anyway. To give back the book.”
“Please keep the book. I hope never to see you again.”
Sometimes they protest too much.
• • •
Dr Kingsley was in his laboratory when I returned to University College Hospital. He looked up when a white-collared nurse ushered me into the room.
“Ah, Constable, you’re just in time to see what there is to see.”
“I only came to return something your daughter lent me.”
“I thought perhaps you were here to learn more about the young lady you found.”
“Is there more to learn?”
Kingsley beckoned me forward. Sometimes the hazards of my job have nothing to do with physical injury. There are things people aren’t meant to see. But there was no way for me to leave without finding out what the doctor had discovered. I reluctantly followed him. The blue girl lay on her wooden table. She was small; the table stretched on beyond her feet and her long hair spread out over the other end of the table without draping over the edge. Kingsley had been at work on her body. Her chest cavity was open and many of her organs had been removed to shallow metal basins. I glanced at the body and looked away, swallowing hard as my gorge rose. But there was nowhere I could look without seeing something horrible. My gaze fell upon a mottled purple organ that rested on the table next to her. It looked like something that might be waiting for a butcher to wrap, some dense piece of freshly washed horse meat resting in a shallow pool of pink water. It glistened in the lamplight.
“The body is only a shell, Constable,” Kingsley said. “Only a machine that has wound down and ceased its work.”
“It all seems a terrible indignity.”
“Perhaps. But the true indignity was performed on her by someone else. That indignity ended her life and we have the opportunity to restore some of it to her memory.”
I imagine it was something he told himself every day as he worked at taking people apart and putting them back together. For me, the rationalization didn’t work. Whether she inhabited that broken machine anymore was a question for priests and philosophers. To my mind, she was still a girl and we men had not yet completed our bloody business on her body.
“You’re back already?”
I turned at the sound of a girl’s voice. Fiona was entering the room through the door at the far end, her sketchbook crushed to her slight bosom. I moved between her and the grisly sight on the table.
“I think you shouldn’t be in here,” I said. “Not right now.”
She smiled, but her eyes were bright and sad, and there was no amusement in them. “I’ve seen her already, Mr Pringle. But I thank you for your chivalry.”
“She wasn’t choked to death after all,” Kingsley said. But I didn’t turn around.
“How can you tell?” I said.
“Will you look at her lungs? I have one of them here on the table to show you.”
“I have seen it and would prefer not to see it again.”
“May I describe it to you?”
“Will you be discreet about it?”
“You are a strange sort of policeman.”
“I’ve finished being a policeman for the day. At the moment I’m just a man trying to finish some business before retiring somewhere warm with someone pleasant and drinking my fill of strong ale.” I thought of my shopgirl. She had blond curls that hung loose over her ears.
“They are spongy.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“The girl’s lungs. This is the left lung, if you will only turn around and look at it.”
I heard the sound of flesh smacking lightly against flesh, but I didn’t move. Fiona set her tablet down on an unoccupied table. She reached out and took my hand and held it. There was nothing romantic in the gesture; it was a simpl
e human thing. I relate this with a certain degree of shame, but I feel sure that decency and propriety are more important traits for a man than a hard heart and a cast-iron stomach. I closed my eyes.
“Very well,” the doctor said. “When I press on this lung, water gushes forth as if I were crushing a canteen. These lungs have absorbed a great deal more water than they would have done if she had been choked and her lifeless body thrown into that canal.”
“The marks on her throat?” I said.
“They are finger marks. But she went into the water alive.”
“Damn it all.”
“Yes. She was quite cruelly used by someone.”
I was surprised by the emotion in his voice. It was soft, but I heard it. I had the realization then that Kingsley took no great joy in his work. In his way, he was doing his duty for the girl. And, of course, I had my duty to do as well.
I opened my eyes and pulled my hand from Fiona’s grasp.
“Did you discover anything else?” I said.
“Only her teeth.”
“What about them?”
“They’re nearly perfect.”
“Good for her.”
“I mean she’s had quite a lot of expensive dental work.”
“Money, then?”
“I’d guess she had a good deal of it. Or her family did.”
“It didn’t help her in the end, did it?” I said.
I reached into my jacket pocket and produced the small blue book Fiona had given me. I placed it in her hand and nodded. “Thank you.”
“You’ve read it?”
“Parts of it. As I said, I’m not much of a reader and today has been a horribly bookish sort of day. But I have my own copy now.”
“You surprise me.”
“You sound like someone I just met.”
“Who?”
“Never mind.”
I left without saying good-bye to the doctor, and without seeing that desecrated blue body again.
• • •
The Cream residence was enormous, a sprawling castle set back from the road and surrounded by a high wrought iron gate. Shrubberies guaranteed a degree of privacy from passersby, but when I arrived the gate was standing open and I stepped carefully onto the crushed gravel path that led to the door.
I’d nosed about the neighborhood until I found an old woman who remembered where the writer had lived. She was certain he had died, and almost as certain that his house stood empty now.
The place did have the flavor of something long abandoned, but there were lights visible in the windows and so I pressed forward. I thought of The Robber Bridegroom and shivered. I pulled my jacket tighter around me, reminded of the girl on Kingsley’s table. The blue-grey fog still swirled about my ankles and crept along the hedges like a feral animal waiting for sufficient numbers to attack, and I could imagine a croaking voice from somewhere up ahead—Turn back, turn back, you pretty thing—but it was only the wind in the trees. Gas lamps were lit all along the path and I followed them to the massive front door, a single panel of oak that must have been imported at great expense. The brass knocker in the center of the door was in the shape of a wolf’s head. I rapped three times and waited, and after several long minutes I heard footsteps from within and the door swung open. A small, silent man in an inexpensive dark suit stood looking out at me. I handed him my calling card and he beckoned me inside. The door closed behind me and I was ushered through a vast entrance hall hung with a handful of colorful tapestries. Between the hangings were rectangular patches of dark bare stone. A chandelier dangled inches above my head and I noticed that the brass arches of it were coated with a heavy layer of dust. The place smelled as if it had needed a good airing out a year or two before and had now given up.
The man asked me to wait and went ahead of me into a dim room. I caught just a glimpse of dark wood and brown furniture before the door closed in my face. I waited. After a moment, the door opened again and the little fellow waved me in before disappearing back down the hall.
A man stood behind a desk across the room from me. He was surrounded by heavy floor-to-ceiling shelves, all stuffed with dusty books. A mirror in a gilt frame the size of a small carriage filled half of the wall to my right and magnified the effect of the books across from it. I took a quick inventory of those books. The old priest would have been shocked by the number of marbled spines among them. I recognized the well-worn cover of a book on his desk before the man started speaking and demanded my attention.
“Inspector Pringle?”
“Sir.”
“So good of you to come by.”
The man stepped around the side of the desk and held his hand out for me to shake. He seemed to have been expecting me. I noted the excellent tailoring of his earth-colored suit. He wore a cravat at his throat and his new brown shoes were stiff and polished to a high sheen. I took his hand.
“I’m sorry, but I didn’t catch your name,” I said.
“But you’re in my house. I assumed you knew who you were visiting.”
“You’d be Mr Cream, then?”
“Indeed, I am. Geoffrey Cream.”
“That book,” I said, “I recognize it.” I pointed at the familiar blue cover of Marriage, Custom and Practise on his desk. “Robert Cream, the author . . . was he related to you?”
“Our father,” he said. It sounded like the start of a prayer.
“Then you’re just the man I wish to speak to,” I said.
Geoffrey Cream took his hand from mine and smoothed the front of his waistcoat before leaning against a corner of the desk. “Yes?”
“I’d appreciate a few moments of your time, if it’s no trouble.”
“Of course. Please forgive me if I don’t seem awfully friendly. I’ve had a rather befuddling night and haven’t had a chance to catch up yet. I’m even wearing yesterday’s clothing.”
“I can’t imagine.” I really couldn’t.
He raised an eyebrow and nodded. If he hadn’t slept, he had at least taken the time to groom. His hair was oiled and brushed straight back from his wide brow, and his mustache had been waxed and shaped. He looked like an illustration from a men’s adventure magazine. Or something from that fairy tale about the wolf in human guise.
“Why such a hard night, Mr Cream?”
“My wife’s disappeared. Is that why you’ve come, Inspector? You have news about her?”
I took the blue girl’s portrait out of my pocket and unfolded it. I handed it to Cream. He swallowed hard and dropped the paper on the desk beside him.
“That’s her,” he said.
“What was her name?”
“Was? She’s dead?” He seemed, in that moment, like a man genuinely concerned about his wife. The moment passed. He started to fold his arms, then dropped them and looked at the portrait again. “Her name was Lily. Lily George. Well, Lily Cream now, I suppose.”
“How long were you married?”
“We were married yesterday morning. I brought her back here and when I checked on her before tea she was gone from her room.”
“Did you send for the police?”
Cream hesitated before answering. “My sister thought it best to wait. She thought Lily might come back.”
“But she didn’t come back.”
“I thought perhaps she needed some time to herself. To get used to the idea of marriage.”
“Was marriage so disagreeable for her, then?”
“Not at all.” That wolf smile flickered across his face. Of course not, it said, she was lucky. Then he remembered that he was supposed to be sad. His mustache bobbed up and down as he composed his expression.
“Mr Cream . . .”
“Please, call me Geoffrey.”
“Mr Cream, you were just married and you were already avoiding your spouse? Because your sister suggested it? Do you always follow your sister’s advice in personal matters?”
“My sister and I are very close. Our father died too early and we were left with no
family but each other, you understand.”
“And Lily.”
“Pardon?”
“No family but each other and Lily, correct? She had just married into the family.”
He waved his hand, dispelling my remark like a bad odor, and walked away from me around the side of the desk. He sat and leaned back and looked up at me.
I got the sense that my audience with him was nearing its end. I needed to draw him out. I had no evidence that he had committed a crime, but I didn’t like him.
“Why did you marry Lily George if you didn’t care for her? Money?”
“Why would you say such a thing? Yes, she had money, but what of it? I did care for her. Of course I did. She was my wife.” He covered his face with his hands, still trying to muster a human reaction.
“Did your sister care for her?”
“I never asked her.”
“But what do you think?”
“No,” he said. “I don’t think she did.”
“Why?”
“She said . . .” he stopped and I heard a soft gurgling noise coming from somewhere behind his hands. “She once told me we didn’t need Lily.”
“But you did need her, didn’t you?” I said. “Tell me, just how much money did Lily have?”
“Don’t be idiotic.”
“I noticed bare spots on your walls. You’ve sold your paintings. And from the dust everywhere, I imagine you’ve let most of your staff go. The little fellow who let me in the door, he’s all you’ve got left, unless I miss my guess. Lily George had the money you needed, but you didn’t love her. Your marriage was a sham.”
“That’s nothing but idle speculation. I was quite prepared to make Lily happy.”
“From what I see here, I very much doubt that. I’m going to have to send round to the Yard for an inspector, Mr Cream. Someone from the Murder Squad.”
He lowered his hands and looked at me. His eyes were dry.
“Send for an inspector? But my sister told me you were an inspector.”
“Why would she say that? I haven’t met her.”
“Haven’t you? I thought . . .” he broke off and glared at the wall.
“I’m only walking my beat,” I said.
“You’re nothing but a bluebottle? Why would they send you?”
“You weren’t important enough for anyone to send a detective.”