by Alan Bradley
I couldn’t help myself. I slipped my arm in his.
Could it be jealousy, this creeping in my throat? This almost imperceptible swelling of my brain?
Is this what the green-eyed monster looked like from the inside?
“Dogger has been of very great service to my family,” I heard myself saying. “He has been a rock.”
I wanted to say more but I didn’t. I wanted to quote one of Daffy’s favorite lines from Cyrano de Bergerac: “…A rock, a crag, a cape!…Say rather…a peninsula!”
But Dogger would have been embarrassed and so would I.
I was learning to keep my mouth shut.
“Miss Tetlock,” Dogger said, “may I introduce you to Miss de Luce.”
“Flavia,” I said, sticking out my hand and seizing hers, not caring about the agricultural debris with which it was covered. How very different, I thought, from the black and unpleasant handshake Terence had given me at Shadrach’s Circus.
This handshake was, by comparison, wholesome, and I beamed my approval toothily at this woman, in spite of the fact that we had only just been introduced.
“Claire,” Miss Tetlock said, tightening her grip to show she meant it. “Call me Claire.”
For a moment, we all of us stood there, as if in a tableau or a trance, waiting for the next word to come, and yet each of us reluctant to be the one to speak it.
“Well, then,” Claire said at last, “I expect you’ll be wanting to have a look through Orlando’s belongings. Such a tragedy.”
She saw my jaw drop open in disbelief.
“It’s all right,” she continued. “Orlando entrusted me with a key. I kept an eye on the place when he was away and he, in return, drove off invaders, human or otherwise, from my allotment garden.”
She waved in the direction of the stile.
“Constable Otter may not approve,” Dogger said. “But if you insist—”
“Hang Constable Otter,” Claire cut in, to my surprise. “I don’t mean that literally, of course, but there are times when, in order to be maintained, the law must be broken.
“Or at least bent,” she added.
I beamed upon her as she stepped up onto the creaking porch and pulled a key from her shirt pocket. This was a woman from the same mold as myself.
“All I expect is justice,” she said, as she turned it in the lock. “Orlando is going to need all the help he can get.”
What a curious thing to say about a dead man, I thought.
A moment later we were inside.
·SIXTEEN·
HANGING ALMOST OVER THE water as it did, Scull Cottage had a brackish smell, like an aquarium that belonged to an absentminded fish enthusiast.
I shivered as I recalled my fingers caught in the dead Orlando’s mouth: good experience, to be sure, but not one that I would care to have often repeated.
“I’m sorry there’s no electricity laid on,” Claire told us. “The place is really little more than a converted boathouse. If the truth be told, no one is supposed to be living in it. Orlando had his ups and downs with the authorities, but Orlando being Orlando…”
She let her voice trail off to end in a wry smile.
“What was he like?” I asked suddenly, taking advantage of the opportunity.
“He was a clergyman’s son, the son of a canon,” Claire replied, “which ought to explain everything, but doesn’t. That he enjoyed telling people he was a son of a gun is perhaps more revealing.”
I grinned because I knew she wanted me to.
“A joker,” I said.
“Not entirely. An attention seeker, perhaps, which is often the force driving those who seek the stage. His mother died when Orlando was a baby.”
“A very good actor, I understand.”
I did not bother mentioning where I had heard this, but Daffy had once told me that all actors and all murderers are attention seekers.
“The only difference,” she had said, “is that the one fulfills his fantasies in a darkened alley or a shabby room, while the other does it on a raised platform in full public view.”
“Astonishing,” Claire said, interrupting my thoughts. “Anyone who saw him as Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion, or as Hamlet, realized that Orlando was larger than the stage itself. He was not just touched with genius, but totally saturated with it.”
“Eliza Doolittle?” I asked. “He played the role of Eliza Doolittle?”
“And on less than an hour’s notice,” Claire told me. “Millie Plumb, who works part-time at the chemist’s, fell suddenly ill after rehearsing the part for months. Orlando stepped in and…well, the rest is—or ought to be—theatrical history. Those of us who saw the performance knew that something far more than greatness had been revealed to us. I still have to pinch myself to realize I didn’t dream the whole thing.”
“Genius is often accompanied by an inexplicable chill,” Dogger observed. “Professor Merlino of Mantua published some most suggestive notes upon the topic, but they have gained little attention outside of Italy.”
“Didn’t Orlando also help out occasionally at the chemist’s?” I asked. I didn’t want to interrupt Claire’s story, but the coincidence popped into my mind.
“Did he poison Millie to get the part, you mean?” Claire smiled. “Because Orlando’s name was involved in both cases, that very point was raised at the inquest into the deaths of three old ladies who died quite soon after his singular performance. The coroner, quite rightly, refused to hear it.”
“Canon Whitbread,” I said, wanting to let her know I hadn’t just fallen off a lettuce lorry.
“Canon Whitbread, indeed,” she said.
Dogger had all the while been standing quietly by, listening with great interest but saying little.
“As a trial run,” he said. “Both to secure the role for himself and to practice up his poisons.”
“Something of the sort,” Claire said. “It was later proven—by a chemical analyst employed by Scotland Yard—that Millie’s gastric catastrophe had been caused by a surfeit of green apples: the result of courting in an orchard with the wrong sort of person and the wrong sort of fruit.”
“The old, old story,” Dogger said.
“Yes, the old, old story,” Claire echoed, and for a moment there was silence.
“Listen,” she said abruptly, fidgeting with her collar. “How would you like to come over to my cottage for a cup of tea? Quite frankly, this place gives me the jimjams.”
She jabbed a thumb in the direction of Poppy Mandrill, who from her painted poster was grinning horribly over Claire’s shoulder.
“Very kind of you,” Dogger said. “But since we’re here, we’d like to have a look around, don’t you think, Miss Flavia?”
I nodded agreement, torn between the two of them, but drawn most powerfully to the prospect of having a good old rummage through Orlando’s goods.
“I’m sorry,” Claire said. “I was being selfish.”
“Not at all,” Dogger said. “It gives me the jimjams, as you say, also. But your assistance would be of immense help. Perhaps with the three of us, things will proceed more quickly.”
“What are we looking for?” Claire asked. “Is it something I may already know about?”
“Letters,” Dogger answered. “Address books, telephone numbers, bottles, books, and refuse. Anything that will give us insight into the life—if I may say so—of the deceased.”
Could this be yet another of what I took to be Dogger’s jokes?
He’s enjoying himself! I realized. In spite of the gravity of the situation, and of our many troubles, dear old Dogger was having the time of his life.
It did my heart good.
But at the same time it made me break out into a cold sweat, since in my pocket was the slip of paper I had removed from Orlando’s corpse.
Should I confess to withholding evidence and hand it over?
It was no wonder that so many of the ancient philosophers had spent so much time and ink chewing over—dige
sting and redigesting—moral issues.
Philosophy had always seemed to me like the four stomachs of a cow, but now I might have to rethink my position.
Was I guilty or was I not? And if so, of what?
I suddenly knew how poor old Plato must have felt, and in that moment, I made my decision.
“Look at this,” I said, pointing to a black-and-white photograph of the young Poppy Mandrill on a bicycle, her skirts raised to show a risky bit of ankle.
“It’s signed: ‘To my Pegasus, from Poppy.’ Inscribed with a Biro. Much more modern than the photo.”
“Good lord,” Claire breathed, shooting a look at Dogger.
Pegasus, I recalled from hearing Daffy read aloud some of the steamier passages from Bulfinch’s Mythology, was the winged horse in Greek mythology who sprang from the soil stained by the blood of the decapitated Medusa.
We British are far behind other countries when it comes to inventing stories.
Still, was it any accident that Poppy Mandrill handed out autographs to a horse, while Mrs. Palmer wrote poems to one?
Well, stranger things have happened. You never knew what you were going to run into in the English countryside.
As Dogger shone the light from wall to wall, the shadows dissolved, revealing poster after ancient poster, photo after curling photo, all of them of Poppy Mandrill.
“She must have been very famous,” I remarked.
“Incredibly famous,” Claire said. “She was the toast of the London stage. It was said that gentlemen drank champagne from her silk slippers and snippets of her hair were auctioned off to millionaires.”
“But what happened to her?” I asked, thinking of the old woman hunched in her bath chair, directing amateur plays in a backwater town.
“Poppy committed the deadly sin of growing old,” Claire said. “The gentlemen slunk away to sip from other slippers. Millionaires have no interest in gray hair.”
“Rather like Medusa,” I said. “Orlando was to be her winged horse, wasn’t he? The one who flew to new heights from her wreckage?”
“Flavia,” Claire said, “you fascinate me. You really do. You also frighten me.”
I tried not to look too smug.
“I have very clever sisters,” I said modestly, including both of them at the last minute for good measure. A handful of flattery, spread like seed, costs nothing.
As no one said anything, I continued snooping round the little cottage. Aside from a cubicle containing a WC, it was all one room, with a bed and books in one corner, and a small kitchen area with a primitive paraffin cooker, kettle, cup, and saucer.
The little larder, housed in a tin tea chest, consisted of bread, milk, cheese, and half an apple.
Had Orlando gone to his death hungry? I wondered.
This riverside shanty must have been a comedown from living in the vicarage.
“How did he get on with his father?” I asked. “Orlando, I mean.”
“Remarkably well,” Claire replied. “Canon Whitbread had sufficient knowledge of human nature to leave well enough alone. He knew that genius cannot be put in a box.”
“But sometimes in a bottle,” Dogger said, holding up a bottle with a glass stopper. He held it out toward my nose.
“Paraldehyde,” I said. I would recognize the sharp unpleasant smell of acetic or ethanoic acid from across a cricket pitch. It was vinegar with a chip on its shoulder.
“Where did you find it?” I asked Dogger.
“Behind the Bible on the bookshelf,” he said. “The hiding place most often chosen as the spot least likely to be searched.”
I rewarded him with one of Winston Churchill’s famous two-fingered “V for Victory” signs.
Now that the stuff had come to light, there was no further point in trying to hide my light under a bushel.
“I smelled it on the body,” I explained to Claire. “At the riverbank.”
“As did I,” Dogger said.
You could have knocked me over with a shadow! Whatever detailed observations Dogger had made as we were fishing Orlando out of the river, he had kept the specific details to himself.
But hadn’t we agreed to do so?
Although I was agog at his powers of observation, I decided not to draw attention to them.
“And what did you conclude?” I asked.
“That the poor young man had most probably been treated clinically for alcoholism, most likely in a private hospital. That a course of paraldehyde injections had been prescribed—perhaps something on the order of five to ten cc’s—but that, as is often the case, he had become addicted to the very stuff that was meant to cure him.”
“You deduced that based simply on the smell?”
“It is another old, but sad, story,” Dogger said. “One hypothesizes certain fixed outcomes.
“As if that weren’t enough,” he added, “there was also the evidence of the skin: the allergic rash and the yellowish discoloration, the latter appearing also, although to a lesser degree, in the eyes.”
“Drat!” I said. “I missed that entirely. I knew that certain people became addicted to it, but I didn’t know why.”
“It is much like a drawing room puzzle,” Dogger said. “The more pieces you put into position, the larger the picture becomes.”
“I think I can add a piece, too,” Claire said. “Now that Orlando’s dead—and because Arthur and I are old friends—I suppose there’s no harm in telling you…as long as you keep it confidential.”
She said this looking at me.
I crossed my heart and gave the Girl Guide sign of honor. Not that it counted: I was an outcast.
“Orlando did receive treatment at Dollylands for his drinking…difficulties. It’s a very discreet private hospital in Highgate, founded by Sir Ernest Dolly to treat wealthy Victorian…”
She paused.
“Unfortunates,” Dogger supplied.
“Thank you, Arthur.” Claire nodded. “Yes, unfortunates. A precise description of Orlando.”
“They’ll have wanted to keep that quiet,” I remarked, “what with his father being a canon, and so forth.
“But,” I added, my curiosity suddenly tickled, “how did you find out about it, then?”
“Because my profession required it,” Claire answered. “I was formerly a nurse.”
Eureka! I thought. As Dogger had said, the more pieces that fall into place, the bigger—and clearer—the picture becomes.
I slapped my stupid brow. How could I not have realized?
“Of course,” I said. “You’re Australian! You were in the Australian Army Nursing prisoner-of-war camp!”
Daffy had once scared me silly—beneath the blankets and well after lights-out—by telling me how Japanese soldiers had machine-gunned the brave Australian nurses at Bangka Island, off the coast of Sumatra.
It was a topic never again to be spoken of aloud: not then, not ever.
I glanced at Dogger to see how he was taking it.
I shrank inside.
Dogger’s eyes were in the past. They had taken flight at my words, and gone to another place.
Please, God, I prayed. Don’t let him have another of his episodes.
I reached out and took his hand—squeezed his fingers fiercely.
“Dogger,” I said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—I didn’t mean to—”
“Sit down, Arthur,” Claire said, pulling out a chair from under the rickety table. She took Dogger’s elbow and guided him into the seat.
She did not look at me.
Slowly, and with great gentleness, she began stroking the back of his hand.
“The trees are lovely this time of year,” she said, “don’t you think?”
Dogger looked up at her, seemingly dazed.
He opened his mouth and then, after what seemed like simply ice ages, said: “Yes…yes…So they are.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, forming the words silently.
It had all happened so quickly. One moment we had been
efficiently searching Scull Cottage and the next my impulsive mouth had flung Dogger into some deep hell of the past.
For someone like myself who is used to having her own way, there is nothing worse than the feeling of helplessness, of not knowing what to do.
All I could think of was to touch the back of Dogger’s neck. Perhaps the warmth of my fingers would calm his brain.
I noticed, as I made contact, how neatly barbered he was. When had he got a haircut, and where, I wondered? I supposed he had been clean-shaven back and front for as long as I could remember, and yet I couldn’t recall his ever visiting a barber.
There was so much I didn’t know about the man!
At the touch of my hand, Dogger turned his head slowly round, looked up at me, and smiled. Well, perhaps it wasn’t quite a smile, but the corners of his eyes wrinkled slightly.
“Thank you,” he said. “I shall be all right in a few moments.”
“Shall we take a little stroll?” Claire suggested. “Over to my place? It’s not far—just beyond the stile. I’ll make a nice cup of tea.
“This place is not conducive,” she added with a shiver.
Even though I didn’t know the meaning of the word, I knew what she meant.
“Besides,” she continued, “we don’t want to be caught tampering with the evidence, do we?”
I questioned the wisdom of having to move Dogger so soon after his “turn,” but wasn’t Claire, after all, a nurse? Mustn’t she have been accustomed to Dogger’s episodes, and how best to deal with them?
She was already helping Dogger out of the chair.
“A stroll in the fresh air will do us all some good,” Claire said, with a glance at me, and I felt a flush of shame arising.
“It’s such a lovely day,” she added, opening the door.
Outside, the sun had suddenly sprung up as it does in midsummer, as if night had never existed.
We stepped out onto the porch and she turned the key in the lock. “What is it Housman said about such beautiful summer weather?
“ ‘June suns, you cannot store them / To warm the winter’s cold…’ I forget the rest.”
“ ‘The lad that hopes for heaven,’ ” Dogger said, “ ‘Shall fill his mouth with mould.’ ”