Speaking From Among the Bones

by Alan Bradley

  “I expect you noticed that someone had written ‘Deceased’ after Mr. Collicutt’s name on his manuscript?”

  “And if we did?”

  The man was giving nothing away.

  “It was in a woman’s handwriting. There were no women in the Battle house except Mrs. Battle and her niece Florence. Mr. Collicutt was said to—”

  “Hold on,” the Inspector said. “Are you telling me that one of them—”

  “Not at all,” I said. “I’m simply pointing out a fact. George Battle’s handwriting was all over his account books in his work shed. Large and messy. It wasn’t him.”

  From a distant part of the house came the sound of the doorbell, and before we could get back to our duel of wits, Dogger was at the door.

  “Detective Sergeants Woolmer and Graves,” he announced. “May I show them in?”

  It was Feely’s place, as eldest member of the family present, to give her assent, but before she could open her mouth, I beat her to it.

  “Thank you, Dogger,” I said. “Please do.”

  Woolmer and Graves came into the drawing room and promptly melted into the Victorian wallpaper.

  “Six hundred pounds in a Players tin at the Battle residence,” Inspector Hewitt said to Sergeant Graves. “Did we note that? I don’t remember seeing it.”

  Sergeant Graves’s blush made words unnecessary but he spoke anyway.

  “No, sir.”

  Inspector Hewitt turned to a new page and made a note that did not promise a happy future for poor Graves.

  “Carry on, then,” he said after an agonizingly long time.

  “Well,” I went on, “six hundred pounds seemed like a lot of money for a poor country organist. The fact that it was hidden under his bed, rather than being put safely into the bank, suggested something fishy. It was only when I met Jocelyn Ridley-Smith that I put two and two together.”

  Inspector Hewitt couldn’t conceal his puzzlement. “The magistrate’s son?”

  “Yes. I believe Magistrate Ridley-Smith was doing research in the Public Record Office in London when he came across the marginal note by Ralph, the cellarer at Glastonbury Abbey.

  “Adamas, it said. ‘Diamond,’ in Latin. Ralph had seen it with his own eyes. He also said quite clearly that it was buried with Saint Tancred at Lacey. Which is here.”

  “Go on,” the Inspector said.

  “He believed that the stone would cure Jocelyn of his affliction.”

  Antigone gasped, and I loved her for it.

  “Mr. Sowerby says diamonds were once believed to be ‘a help to lunaticks and such as are posessed with the Devil.’ What else would an elderly magistrate want with a diamond?”

  “Jocelyn is not a lunatic!” I blurted. “He is lonely, he’s a captive, and he’s suffering from lead poisoning, which he inherited from his mother.

  “It’s too late for diamonds,” I went on. “Or for anything else. There’s nothing I can do about the lead poisoning, but I can help him with the loneliness—just as Harriet, my mother, did before she died.”

  The room filled slowly with silence and suddenly there was a lump in my throat. I covered it up by taking several unnecessary but deep sips of tea and blinking casually out the window.

  I pretended to scratch an itch that had suddenly arisen in my eye.

  “The magistrate,” I continued, “could easily have bought a diamond, of course, but it wouldn’t be the same as the Heart of Lucifer. It wouldn’t have the power of a stone that had been touched by a saint.”

  The Inspector was looking at me skeptically.

  “He’s dying of leprosy, you see. Even if I’m wrong about the magic, I expect he planned on fetching enough for the Heart of Lucifer to care for Jocelyn after he’s gone. I’m speculating, of course.”

  “I see,” the Inspector said, but I knew he didn’t.

  “Mr. Collicutt had been in on it from the beginning. As organist, he could be in the church in the middle of the night without attracting attention. Miss Tanty told me she sometimes heard him playing at strange hours. He must have been the first to enter the lower tomb when the tunnelers had broken through, and he would have crawled into the tomb alone. Neither the opening nor the tomb itself was big enough for two. He levered the lid off the sarcophagus, pried the diamond from the crozier, and pocketed it. He probably told the others that the tomb had already been vandalized. But as I’ve said, I’m speculating.”

  “Interesting,” Inspector Hewitt said. “And then he returned to the church on the morning of Ash Wednesday and concealed it in the organ pipe.”

  “Exactly!” I said.

  “Where Magistrate Ridley-Smith and Benson, or Haskins, or his workers—what were their names?” He flipped back through the pages of his notebook. “Thomas Wolcott and Norman Enderby,” he said. “Where Magistrate Ridley-Smith and Benson, or Haskins, or Tommy Wolcott and Norman Enderby, or some combination of the above killed him. Is that what you’re saying?”

  The Inspector was twitting me, but I no longer cared.

  “Yes,” I said. “But not intentionally. It was Miss Tanty who was trying to kill him.”

  I waited for my words to have their expected effect, and I was richly rewarded. You could, as Mrs. Mullet once said, have heard a pan drop.

  “Miss Tanty,” Inspector Hewitt repeated. “And her motive?”

  “Thwarted love,” I said. “He had spurned her advances.”

  Daffy and Antigone burst into laughter at precisely the same instant. Antigone had the good grace to stifle it at once and put her hand to her mouth. Daffy did not, and I shot her such a glare.

  “Even more interesting,” Inspector Hewitt said, and because I had trained myself to be so adept at reading upside-down, I saw him put down “thwarted love” in his notebook.

  “Perhaps you’d be so good as to explain.”

  “It was the handkerchief,” I said. “I knew as soon as I saw it sticking out from under the gas mask that Mr. Collicutt had not been murdered by a man. The frilly border gave it away.”

  “Excellent!” the Inspector said. “We had come to much the same conclusion ourselves.”

  I ventured a peek at Antigone to see if she was paying attention, and she was. She gave me a radiant smile.

  “The vessels of his neck were still darkened, even after six weeks.”

  “Hold on,” Inspector Hewitt said.“You’re getting ahead of me.”

  “It’s a well-known fact,” I said, “that the administration of ether vapor darkens the blood. The fact that his blood vessels were still black after six weeks shows that Mr. Collicut died after the ether but before his body could reoxygenate his blood.”

  “Quite sure of that, are you?” the Inspector asked, not looking at me.

  “Quite sure,” I answered. “You’ll find it in Taylor On Poisons.”

  I did not mention that I kept this gripping reference on my bedside table as a midnight comforter.

  “Let’s return to Miss Tanty for a moment,” the inspector said. “I don’t think I’ve quite grasped how she managed it.”

  I gave him a patient smile. “Miss Tanty had planned on having Mrs. Battle drive her to her opthalmological appointment in Hinley, but when Florence, the niece, telephoned to say Mrs. B was ill, and that Mr. Collicutt had offered to drive her instead, Miss Tanty saw her opportunity.

  “But—Mr. Collicutt, rather than going directly to Miss Tanty’s house, went first instead to the church to hide the diamond. She probably watched him drive past and stop at the church. She has quite a good view of both the road and the east end of the churchyard.

  “She took the bottle of ether—which I suspect she got from Miss Gawl, although I can’t prove it—it has ‘D.H.U.,’ which means District Health Unit, stamped on the bottom in red ink—I took the precaution of pocketing if it for evidence—don’t worry, the ether explosion vaporized the fingerprints anyway—it’s upstairs in my laboratory. You can have a look at it later, if you like.”

  “There’s o
ur missing bottle, then,” Detective Sergeant Woolmer growled.

  The Inspector nodded grimly as the sergeant gave me a look that I would not exactly describe as appreciative.

  “Go on, then.”

  “Well,” I said, “Miss Tanty cornered him in the organ casing and clapped the ether-soaked handkerchief over his nose. It doesn’t require great strength and it doesn’t take long. Ten seconds, I believe, may be enough to produce unconsciousness.

  “Miss Tanty, being much larger than Mr. Collicutt, would have overpowered him easily. In fact she gave him such a dose of the stuff that he had convulsions.”

  “Convulsions?” the inspector said, startled.

  “Yes, you’ll find the fresh nicks and gouge marks where his heels kicked the water pipe casing. They’re quite easy to see if you get down on your hands and knees.”

  The Inspector did not look up, but made another, and this time quite lengthy, entry in his notebook.

  “So,” he said. “She killed him by administering ether.”

  “No,” I said. “She didn’t kill him.”

  “What!”

  He said it with an exclamation mark and about six question marks, which I have not attempted to reproduce here.

  “She etherized him and left him for dead. She intended to kill him, but she probably didn’t.”

  The Inspector wrote that down and paused, his Biro hovering, waiting for me to go on.

  “Just after she had gone, you see, Magistrate Ridley-Smith and his henchmen came on the scene. You’ll find an interesting mixture of footprints in the corners of the organ chamber—workman’s boots, and the sole of an unusually small handmade shoe—the magistrate’s. They believed, of course, that Mr. Collicutt was dead, and if that were true, the diamond—if it were not in his pockets—might be lost to them forever. They must have spotted some slight sign of respiration. They had to revive him—and quickly!

  “Someone—could it have been Mr. Haskins?—who remembered the old ARP trunk in the ringing chamber went up to the tower and fetched down the gas mask, the stirrup pump, and the spare length of rubber hose.

  “But they soon found that the hose fitting on the old pump was rotted almost to crumbs. Actually, I spotted that the first time I saw it.

  “There wasn’t a second to waste. No time to lose fiddling with the bits and pieces. Someone strapped the mask onto his face. They didn’t even bother removing the handkerchief—not completely, anyway. Someone else thought of switching on the organ’s blower and connecting the hose to the manometer fitting. We know, of course, that at this particular instant, Mr. Collicutt was still alive.”

  I paused to let my words sink in.

  “Of course!” the Inspector said. He was slightly brighter than I sometimes thought. “The broken glass!”

  “Exactly,” I said. “He grabbed at the glass manometer tube and it broke off in his hand. He was still clutching it six weeks later in the crypt. It might even be that the hiss of the escaping air was what gave them the idea.”

  “Hmmm,” Inspector Hewitt said.

  “It must have been a madhouse in that little chamber,” I went on. “All they could think of was that they needed to get him talking. To hand over the Heart of Lucifer, or at least tell them where he’d hidden it. But they underestimated the power of air to kill. It required only a touch of the hose—under that great amount of pressure—to instantly rupture most of his internal organs.”

  “Hold on,” the Inspector said. “Where did you get that information?”

  “Well, it only stands to reason, doesn’t it?” I countered.

  “How much air pressure does the blower produce?” I asked, turning to Feely, whose face was growing more ashen by the minute.

  “Three to five inches,” she whispered, looking up from the floor for the first time.

  I stared at the Inspector triumphantly.

  “Good lord,” he said.

  “They probably thought they could pump air into his lungs through the gas mask. A similar thing is done in hospitals and in aircraft every day with oxygen masks. A strange idea, to be sure, but people do peculiar things under pressure. Adam—Mr. Sowerby, I mean—told me what unexpected effects diamonds can have on some people.”

  I shot another glance at Feely, but she was not looking at me. She was staring blankly once more at the carpet.

  “You’re telling me that Magistrate Ridley-Smith and company did not commit the murder, is that it?”

  “Yes,” I said. “In fact, quite the contrary—they were trying to save his life by applying artificial respiration—trying to resuscitate him. They knew nothing of Miss Tanty’s scheme, and she knew nothing about the Heart of Lucifer.”

  I could see the Inspector mulling this.

  “Rescuscitate,” he said at last. “Rather a big word, isn’t it?”

  He did not add “for a little girl,” but he might as well have.

  “It so happens that we were taught artificial respiration in Girl Guides,” I said. I did not feel it necessary to add that I had been sacked from that organization for having an excess of high spirits.

  “We were thoroughly instructed in the Silvester, the Shaefer, the Holger-Nielsen, and the Barley-Plowman methods.”

  The first three were true enough, but the Barley-Plowman method I had invented on the spot simply to put the man in his place.

  “I see,” the Inspector said, and I hoped he was humbled.

  “At any rate,” I continued, “the problem is this: At the time he seized the glass tube, Mr. Collicutt was alive. By the time they finally got him connected him to the air blower, he was already dead of suffocation from the mask.”

  “Was he, indeed?” the Inspector asked.

  “He was,” I said. “The blower did not reoxygenate his blood.”

  It was going to require the wisdom of Solomon to decide the precise moment of death, and hence the identity of the killer or killers. Was it the ether and the handkerchief, or the gas mask and the wind chest?

  In death, split seconds could make the difference between the gallows and a slap on the hand.

  “Still, I hope their lifesaving attempts will be found in their favor,” I added. “I’d hate to think I’d helped hang an innocent person.”

  “I shouldn’t worry,” the Inspector said. “You can be sure that if there’s anyone who knows how to get round the courts, it’s a magistrate. What are you grinning about?”

  It was true. I couldn’t help myself.

  “I was just thinking of the look on his face when you ask him how it is that Miss Tanty’s parrot calls him by his first name.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Hello, Quentin!” I squawked, in my best parrot voice.

  Now it was the Inspector’s turn to smile.

  “I see what you’re getting at,” he said, and another note went into his notebook.

  “One last question, if you don’t mind,” he added. “This business of the bleeding saint. It has nothing to do with the case, of course, but I must admit to having a certain personal curiosity. I understand from Mr. Sowerby that you took a sample of the stuff, and that he assisted you in performing a chemical analysis.”

  “That is correct,” I said, a little peeved at Adam for blabbing.

  “And? May we be favored with the results?”

  “Quite conclusive,” I replied. “CH4N2O. I subjected it to the nitric acid test for urea. It’s bat’s urine.”

  Everybody in the room except Feely was suddenly nodding wisely, as if they had known it all along.

  “Adam had already tasted it and come to the same conclusion.”

  Where was Adam? I wondered. It would have been ever so lovely if he’d been here to witness my triumph.

  “I’d be happy to turn over my notes if they have any relevance in this case.”

  “Indeed,” Inspector Hewitt said, getting up and putting away his notebook. “Well, thank you, Flavia. I believe that will be all, at least for now. I’d appreciate it if you’d
take Sergeant Woolmer upstairs to retrieve the bottle in question. Antigone?”

  He turned toward his wife and offered his hand as she rose from the chaise lounge.

  I was stunned! I had presented them the case on a silver platter. Where was the lavish thanks? Where was the praise? Where were the congratulations? The plaudits? The accolades, and so forth?

  Where were the trumpets?

  But suddenly Antigone was taking my hand, her smile shining like the Mediterranean sun.

  “Thank you, Flavia,” she told me. “I’m sure you’ve been of enormous assistance. I’ll ring you up next week and we shall go shopping in Hinley. A girls’ day out—just the two of us.”

  It was reward enough. I stood there at the window with a sappy smile on my face, not thinking, until long after I had watched her leave, long after her husband had driven her away down the avenue of chestnuts and out through the Mulford Gates toward Bishop’s Lacey, to look down at the wreckage of my skirt and sweater.

  There was going to be trouble. I could smell it coming.

  Just as fear has the taste of copper, so trouble has the smell of lead.

  And then, as my thoughts turned to poor Jocelyn Ridley-Smith, I was seized by a sudden idea.

  I would beg Antigone to take him with us! Shopping for dresses in Hinley and lunch afterwards at the ABC Tea Shop. The three of us would make a feast of buns and clotted cream!

  What an adventure for Jocelyn! I was sure we could arrange it. I’d telephone the vicar or even, if necessary, the bishop, just as soon as Father finished with his announcement, whatever it may be.

  Daffy and Feely had left without my noticing, and I found myself alone in the drawing room for the first time in ages.

  How much longer, I wondered, before strangers would be looking out of our windows and calling the place their own? How much longer before we were tossed out into a cold, uncaring world?

  There was a discreet tap—no more than a fingernail on the woodwork—and Dogger entered.

  “Pardon me, Miss Flavia,” he said.

  “Yes, Dogger? What is it?”

  “I wanted to say that I took the liberty of listening at the door. You were superb. Absolutely top-notch.”

  “Thank you, Dogger,” I managed, in spite of my eyes brimming suddenly with tears. “That means a lot.”