by Alan Bradley
I rifled the drawers of the dresser, fingering each item of clothing, and peered into the depths of the clothespress, plunging my hand into the deep pockets of the hanging bathrobes.
All to no avail.
I looked behind the curtains and under the carpet, behind framed pictures, and (against my will) into the flowered chamber pots.
I was about to turn my attention to the contents of the washstand when there was the creak of a floorboard: the sound of a footstep in the hall.
I froze.
Someone had paused at the top of the stairs. Another guest, perhaps, stopping to get their bearings in the dim, mazelike, up-again-down-again passageways of the old inn.
But then as I watched, the doorknob began—slowly—to turn.
I stepped back into the corner at the head of the bed. There wasn’t quite enough material in the drapes of the canopy with which to wind myself a shroud.
I pressed myself against the wallpaper, hoping, somehow, miraculously to blend into those dreadful water-stained pagodas.
The door opened. A shoe appeared…a leg…
“What the devil are you doing in here?”
Needless to say, it was Daffy.
“I might ask you the same question,” I told her, with a flick of my head so that my flying braids would give her a symbolic whip-lashing.
For a long moment, we stood there glaring at each other, both of us unwilling to give an inch.
De Luce v. de Luce, as the law liked to put it.
And not for the first time. Far from it!
There is an old scientific paradox: What happens when an irresistible object meets an immovable object? One solution to this stumper was proposed in a tale from Greek mythology in which an irresistible fox encounters an immovable hound—or vice versa. In that particular case, the great god Zeus turned both of them to stone, thus cleverly solving the problem.
And that was precisely what was happening here. My sister and I stood glowering at each other like a couple of calcified garden ornaments, a situation which persisted until I decided to give in. Otherwise, we would have still been standing there when we were gray-haired old ladies with hearing trumpets and china choppers.
“Looking for The Mussel Bed,” I said, catching Daffy by surprise.
“So am I,” she replied. “Let’s search together.”
I had begun listing all the places I had already looked when Daffy strode confidently across the room, climbed up onto the high mattress, and, standing fully upright, stretched her arm and felt along the top of the canopy.
“The spell for finding books,” she whispered, closing her eyes before pronouncing the incantation: “Abracadabra, Alakazam, Angela Thirkell, and Omar Khayyam.”
I had never seen my sister so excited.
Slowly Daffy retracted her extended arm, and—to my amazement—clutched in her hand was a slender book with yellow marbled covers.
“Eureka!” she said, for once not following the word with the usual offensive pun.
“How did you know it was up there?” I asked, not believing what I had just seen.
“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must indicate the four-poster.”
“Huh?” I said, perhaps for the first time in my entire life.
“Elementary,” Daffy said. “The Mussel Bed.”
Only slowly did her words seep into the thinking part of my brain.
“Oh! I see,” I said. “The Mussel Bed.”
“Wonderful,” Daffy echoed dryly, rolling her eyes up beseechingly to Heaven. “Now let’s amscray.”
Daffy had learned Pig Latin from Carl Pendracka and was inordinately proud of her ability to baffle Mrs. Mullet by lapsing into that tongue—or whatever you wish to call it—when she wished to convey a confidence, or deliver an insult.
“The eans-bay are urned-bay,” she would say. “My ummy-tay is urning-tay to ar-tay.”
Mrs. Mullet would beam upon her as if the king himself had complimented her on the glories of her cooking.
“Amscray,” of course, meant “Scram.”
“Ighty-ho-ray!” I said, and again Heaven was harrowed by my sister’s scorching gaze.
Daffy held the slender volume up to her lips and blew. A small atomic dust cloud appeared and dissipated.
Then she tucked the book into the folds of her woolen cardigan. She had for the past six months or so begun complaining of the cold, even when the summer temperatures were tending toward the tropical, and never went anywhere without an old brown baggy knitted jumper which I realized only now, with a sudden shock, had belonged to Father.
I wanted to hug her but I didn’t.
Hopping down from the bed, she gestured with her head and eyes that I was to follow.
—
Back in Daffy’s room, we huddled over the book.
“The dust dictates that it has lain undisturbed. No fingerprints other than mine,” she said.
“Which means that whoever is blackmailing her has their own copy,” I suggested.
“Unless, of course, they borrowed it from a friend or from a library—or read it in a bookshop. The latter seems unlikely, though. A blackmailing letter is no casual thing. Like tough beef, it requires a certain amount of stewing on the part of the writer.”
“Or cold-blooded calculating on the spur of the moment,” I added.
This was a situation of which I had considerable firsthand experience.
“Precisely,” Daffy said.
Precisely? Could this actually be Daphne speaking? To me?
To me?
Where were the razor words?—the acid accusations?
Had it come to pass that the fullness of time and a drowned dandy had finally brought my sister and me together? Was I witnessing a miracle?
And if that were true, was the miracle mine? Or was I merely caught in the crosswinds of someone else’s heavenly intervention?
There was no time now to worry about such things. I would sort it out later.
But miracles, I knew, above all, required acknowledgment. Some sign must be given before the bestowing angel took it into his or her head to throw in the towel; to wander off in a sulk and give the gift to someone else instead, out of sheer spite, such as the ruddy traveling wine salesman in the room across the hall.
Accordingly, I crossed my eyes at Daffy.
If we were to be colleagues in crime—even just this once—then priorities needed to be established at the outset.
“Open the book,” I commanded, perhaps a little too forcefully. “Let’s get on with it.”
She looked at me. I looked at her.
“I can’t wait to hear your professional opinion, Daff,” I improvised. “I’m a complete duffer when it comes to literary excellence.”
With all the cool confidence of a Mona Lisa with all the aces, she cradled the book in her left palm and opened it to the first page. She let out a whistle.
“Crikey!” she said. “Listen to this. It’s the dedication. There’s also a dedicatory poem:
“To Mine Own Leander.
The copper mare and
The brass stallion graze
In Flecker’s Field.
He paws the turf,
While she the wind tastes.
And when he trots to her
She turns tail.”
“I don’t understand it,” I said. “Does it mean anything?”
“Only to the discerning eye,” Daffy said.
“Then you’d better explain,” I told her. “I have no time to piddle about with poetry.”
“Pity,” Daffy said. “You might learn something.”
“Such as?”
I was already becoming impatient.
“To begin with, Leander was a character in Greek mythology. He fell in love with a nun named Hero.”
“Hold on,” I said. “Hero is a man’s name.”
“It is now, yes. But in those days, it was a woman’s. Before men reduced real history to rubble, th
en raked over the ruins, like a dog burying and digging up its…well, you know.”
“Bone,” I said, but Daffy ignored me.
“This Leander tried to swim the Hellespont at night, but a storm blew up and drowned him.”
Drowned? At night?
This was becoming intriguing.
“What about Flecker’s Field?” I asked. “I’ve never heard of the place. Is it around here somewhere?”
“Possibly,” Daffy said, “but James Elroy Flecker was the name of a poet who died during the Great War.”
“In battle?” I asked.
“In bed,” Daffy said. “Not in the field, but in bed. Of tuberculosis. In Switzerland.”
“I don’t see the point,” I said. I was glad I had taken up poisons, rather than poetry, which seems to me more baffling than belladonna.
“The point is,” Daffy said, “that Flecker’s Field—in one of its senses—was poetry. You know:
“…Have you heard
That silence where the birds are dead yet something pipeth like a bird?”
Invisible feathers tickled my spine. I was going to have to look into this Flecker chap. Perhaps I was even going to have to rethink poetry.
“Aha!” I said. “I understand!” Although actually, I didn’t.
“So obviously,” she went on, “the reference could be to some poet other than herself.”
“But wait!” I said. “If Flecker’s Field refers to poetry, then it might just as well be Mrs. Palmer’s own field, since she’s a poet herself.”
Daffy gave me a skeptical look.
“Or,” I said, holding up a forefinger to emphasize a brilliant idea, “it might be an actual field. Is there a field belonging to the Oak and Pheasant?”
“Hmmm, I doubt it.” Daffy frowned. “Modern poets are seldom literal—unless they live abroad in the colonies, of course. Still, I expect your idea might be worth looking into.”
“Do you think we might find a real copper mare and a real brass stallion? Maybe it’s a horse breeder we’re looking for—or a racetrack.”
“Or a railway,” Daffy added, clapping me on the shoulders. “The Iron Horse, and all that.”
Although I nearly fainted with surprise, I bore up remarkably well.
“And what about the rest of it?” I asked. “All that pawing of the turf and the tasting of the wind, and so forth?”
Daffy got up from the bed and went to the window, peering down into the sunken garden where Feely and Dieter were strolling round and round in circles, arm in arm.
She turned and gave me a long, cold, calculated look as if she were weighing whether to entrust me with some deep, dark secret. After what seemed to me like hours, but couldn’t have been more than a quarter of a minute, she said:
“Leave that to me.”
“Righty-ho,” I said.
We had agreed, Daffy and I, that each of us would follow her own lines of investigation.
Not that I intended to, of course. Not for a mayfly’s minute.
What Daffy didn’t realize was that we were aiming at two different targets. While her intent was to unravel the mysteries of a book of poetry, mine was to catch a killer.
I had no idea what she knew about Orlando Whitbread, and I didn’t want to ask her. With her nose forever in a book, Daffy was no great authority on today’s front page—or yesterday’s, for that matter.
In her estimation, the world had come to an end in 1870. Nothing worthwhile had been written or published since the death of Charles Dickens on the ninth of June in that year.
Although she read more modern works, it was simply to exercise her eyes—or so she claimed.
And so it was I who scanned the morning papers for the lurid crimes. I had begun, of course, with the avalanches of ancient newspapers that tumbled out of every cupboard at Buckshaw, many of which dated back a century or more. From their brittle yellowing pages I had read with fascination about the cream of the criminal element: Haigh, Armstrong, Crippen; the list went on and on.
Once begun, it was hard to break the habit, and I was already hungering for much more current news. Mrs. Mullet was only too happy to bring me the latest papers every day, after her husband had finished with them.
“Alf gets up with the sparrows every morning,” she told me, “so as to be at the newsagent’s when they rolls up the blinds. Alf says ’e can’t ’elp it. ’As to find out what they’re up to at Westminster. That lot needs keepin’ an eye on. Our Agnes says ’e’s what’s called an invertebrate reader.”
Agnes Mullet had left home some years ago to study Pitman Shorthand, and had since come to be considered—at least by Alf and Mrs. M—the world’s greatest authority on anything which involved printed matter.
Unlike the great Sherlock Holmes, I did not keep a commonplace book other than the one that was in my head. Who could ever forget, for instance, even the tiniest detail of the Acid Bath murders, in which John George Haigh dissolved as few as six and as many as a dozen bodies in vats of concentrated sulfuric acid?
At the risk of sounding ghoulish, I swear that these titbits were etched permanently into my brain.
To put it bluntly, I was more accustomed than Daffy to dealing with death, while she was more accustomed to dealing with Dickens—which is all right, I suppose, if you feel you might be seized suddenly by little red men from Mars in their flying saucers and transported back to Victorian times.
Which is why I decided to keep my intentions to myself.
By now, it was getting late in the day. If I got a move on, I might even be back at the Oak and Pheasant in time for tea.
·TWELVE·
SHADRACH’S CIRCUS & MENAGERIE, all in all, was rather a shabby affair. A half dozen ancient pantechnicons were drawn up in a rough circle round the market square, like a wagon train under attack. Although they had the appearance of military vehicles which had barely survived the First World War, these sagging vehicles were painted in gaudy colors with the name of the circus, as well as garish images and slogans: MAN-EATING TIGERS! LIONS! ELEPHANTS! SEE THE SAVAGE BEASTS!
All of these, and more, were portrayed on the panels with oversized heads, snarling mouths, and teeth the size of icicles. A crouching cheetah was preparing to bring down a white Arabian stallion, which was rearing up, red nostrils flaring and eyes rolling in terror.
What would Hob think of such a dramatic scene? I wondered. Or was it too unreal?
Nearby, in a wheeled cage, a rather moth-eaten lion was sleeping on its back with feet in the air. To one side of the cage, the lone elephant, still chained by its leg to a post in the ground, munched thoughtfully on a stray newspaper. There were no tigers in sight.
A steam organ, sadly out of tune and sounding like defective plumbing, was playing the opening theme song for the wireless program The Archers, which seemed especially pathetic: DUM-dee-DUMP-ity-DUM-dee-DUM, DUM-dee-DUM-dee-DUM-dee…and so on, almost to distraction. Every one of the piercing notes was a new assault upon my ears. It was like being under attack by a swarm of those wasps that drill through the skin of baby figs to lay their eggs.
On a raised platform, a tall, thin man with a bare chest, but wearing suspenders, was swallowing a sword for an audience of two small boys who were fighting over a bag of apples. The sword-swallower put down his blade and began juggling five metal rings, but it made no difference: The apple war raged on.
I was wondering where to begin my investigations when a voice behind me said, “Look who’s here again. Missed us, did you?”
I spun round to find myself face-to-face with the man in the polka-dot kerchief. This time, he was with his two friends. I stepped back instinctively.
All three of them had their hands in their pockets and all three had something in their mouths: one a toothpick, one a wooden matchstick, and Polka-Dot a cigarette.
“Come to see the menagerie, ’ave yer?” Matchstick asked. “Come to see the man-eating tigers?”
Polka-Dot snickered and blew a showy smoke ring.
That did it.
“Actually,” I said, “I’m looking into the death of Orlando Whitbread—the man who was fished out of the river this morning.”
I realized as soon as I said it that this was a hugely risky business. I was not only tossing away my anonymity but also, possibly, putting my life in jeopardy.
What if one of these bruisers was the killer? What if one—or two—or perhaps even all three of them had dumped Orlando into the water? Any one of these muscle-bound hulks could have overpowered his thin body with ease.
I watched their eyes carefully for the slightest sign of alarm, but there seemed to be no reaction other than amusement.
“Friend of yours, was he?” Polka-Dot asked, looking from one to the other of his pals as if he had made a capital joke.
“A relative, actually,” I lied. “A cousin. A distant cousin, to be sure, but a cousin nonetheless.”
“Nonetheless!” Polka-Dot coughed out the word in a cloud of smoke. “Hark her, Nigel! Nonetheless! Nonetheless, she says.”
“Nonetheless,” Matchstick replied with a grin, and I deduced that he must be Nigel.
“One of the Torquay Whitbreads,” I went on, ignoring their stupid banter. “On my grandmother’s side, obviously. My aunt Gregoria always predicted that Orlando would meet a watery death. ‘You can count on it,’ she used to say. And she was right. Of course, Aunt Gregoria had more than a little of the psychic about her, which might have given her a bit of an unfair advantage, don’t you think, Mister…?”
“Terence,” Polka-Dot said.
“How do you do?” I asked, sticking out my hand and trying not to gag.
Terence’s paw was black with circus grease and grime and knobbly with hardened calluses. To the touch it was like hand-wrestling with an engine-room oiler.
I would need to concoct a disinfectant as soon as I got back to the Oak and Pheasant.
“And you are?” I asked, offering my tainted hand to Matchstick.
“Nigel,” he said, taking my fingers in his fist, and I almost laughed. “You don’t look like a Nigel,” I said gaily. “More like a Pierre, or a Jean Baptiste. But perhaps it’s your neckerchief.”
His neckerchief was gaily striped with blue, white, and red, like the French tricolor flag. I suppose it could equally have been red, white, and blue, like the British, but I wanted to flatter him.