“Confirm,” he said, with memories of countless battlefield checks for life coming back to him. They had been devastating, but expected and dealt with methodically by firm, steady fingers. His current emotional state, faced with the warm but ominously still form in front of him, was washing this way and that. His instinct was pushing him, incongruously, to gather the girl up in his arms and hug her back to consciousness, murmuring, “There, there, little one, that was a nasty tumble,” as he had done many times for over-adventurous nephews and nieces. A potentially fatal manoeuvre. A glance into the challenging green eyes opposite him stiffened his spine. He resorted to soldierly brevity. “Pulse confirmed,” he repeated. “She’s alive.” He stilled his fingers and gently palpated her neck. “Nothing broken there, I’d say, wouldn’t you? Skull?” A further gentle exploration, then: “All in one piece. No bleeding of the scalp. No swelling yet. The dribbles of blood on her face are caused by scratches from the holly leaves, I think, nothing more sinister. Still oozing—another good sign. Abrasions to arms and shoulders.”
“Nothing a little arnica won’t cure . . . and her back?”
“I won’t risk an examination by turning her over—it might make a bad situation worse.”
“Of course. We should leave that to the medic to verify.”
Their hissed exchanges were interrupted by a polite cough. The gentleman with the stentorian voice who’d called up to the organist had been keeping an eye on proceedings, efficiently deflecting the public’s attentions. They appeared to accept his authority without demur. He inquired of Redfyre, “May I announce to all and sundry that Miss Proudfoot is still with us? The crowd is congealing, feet dragging—not out of morbid curiosity, but because they would like to be of assistance. I’ve collected offers of handkerchiefs, smelling salts and a lift home in a Rolls Royce. If I could reassure them that all is well, they might get a move on and clear the hall before the authorities arrive.”
“Good thought! Certainly say she appears unharmed by her . . . let’s call it a ‘tumble,’ and they may leave everything to us. Miss Stretton here is her friend—and a nurse,” he improvised, “and I’m Detective Inspector Redfyre with the Cambridge CID. You are Mister . . . ?”
“Doctor Henningham. Sadly not a doctor of medicine, but you seem to be managing quite well. Ladies! Gentlemen!” He turned a smile that beamed comfort on the people shuffling by. “All is well! And in good hands. We have professional staff in attendance. Miss Proudfoot will soon be up and tooting again after her tumble. Please hurry to clear the gangways now! The ambulance crew will be appearing at any moment.”
A wail from the loft distracted Redfyre from his attentions and he looked up, anxious and angry. Henningham read his thoughts and reacted at once. He turned and projected his fine voice up to the loft. “Doctor Coote! A little patience please! There may be a fault with the staircase. You would be most unwise to venture on to it before its structure has been checked. I will arrange for your rescue.”
Looking back at Redfyre, he added thoughtfully, “And perhaps when he descends he will be able to enlighten us as to why we have, playing Humpty Dumpty at our feet, a Miss Proudfoot rather than a Doctor Coote. I do wonder why he did not precede his partner down the stairs. Remind me of the etiquette, Redfyre. I was always taught to take the lead when escorting a lady up a staircase. For obvious gallant reasons. Checking the way is clear, avoiding glimpses of underwear and so on. But also to precede her when descending, to prevent just such occurrences as this evening’s. Or have I got that wrong?”
Redfyre almost smiled. “I shall enjoy hearing you put it to him. We’ll leave him where he is for the moment. There are many questions I have to ask that young man. Now—did you mention smelling salts? Any chance . . . ?”
Doctor Henningham turned out his pockets. “I thought you bobbies were supposed to carry supplies with you. Let’s see, they’ve thrust all sorts of goodies at me. Hankies, a tin of Wintergreen ointment, a hip flask of cherry brandy and—yes, here it is. Might be just the thing.” He produced a tiny silver bottle attached to a chain, twisted off the lid and sniffed the contents warily. His head jerked back in automatic revulsion. “Argh! Yes, that’s the stuff! Ammonia. A whiff of that—it takes your head off!” He handed it to Earwig. “Here, you’re meant to insert the pointed end into a nostril, I should imagine. Clever little device!”
Earwig took one look at it, snatched it from him crossly and put it away in her bag. “Exactly! More likely to kill than revive! An abrupt evasive movement in an unconscious person can do damage to muscles and bones. This chemical can burn the mucous membrane of the nose and the lining of the lungs. And that’s something she wouldn’t thank you for! Hand me the brandy.” She took her own handkerchief from her bag and poured a stream of brandy onto it, folded it into a point and pushed it into the girl’s mouth. No one tried to stop her. To Earwig’s great satisfaction, Juno stirred, moaned and began to flutter her eyelids. Earwig withdrew the brandy-soaked linen and began to murmur reassurance. The movements grew stronger and more purposeful as consciousness returned until the eyes opened fully and Juno looked about her in puzzlement. Redfyre thought he’d just witnessed a textbook recovery.
At this point, the professional lawman asserted himself, keen to hear the all-important first reaction to the plight she was in. “You’re safe, Miss Proudfoot,” he told her. “I’m with the police. What have you to tell me?”
Her mouth opened, but no sound came at first. After a deep breath, she tried again. “I’d like some more brandy.”
Earwig offered the flask and skilfully dribbled a further shot of the bramble-coloured life saver between the eager lips. A sigh of what sounded very like contentment followed this process and then: “Why am I lying under a fur rug? Fur makes me sneeze. I say, do move aside and let me get up. I can twitch my fingers and waggle my toes so I think there’s nothing broken. Though my head hurts.” She pushed aside the fur and brought one of her hands into view. “Hell’s Bells! What’s this?” she exclaimed, holding something towards Redfyre.
It was still tightly clutched in her hand, twining down her white arm like the asp on its way to Cleopatra’s bosom. A length of twisted dark green satin rope of the kind you’d use to make a curtain tie-back or a bell-pull, Redfyre judged. Three feet long with a loop at each end. He extricated it from her grasp, rolled it up and put it in his pocket. “Possibly the reason for your fall, Miss,” he said. “Thank you for hanging on to the evidence!”
The medical crew arrived with gratifying speed, to no one’s surprise since the hospital was just a quarter of a mile’s distance. Juno Proudfoot had been recovering at such a pace that Redfyre thought she might well spurn the stretcher, declare herself walking wounded and set off down Kings Parade under her own steam but after only the slightest hesitation, she smiled her gratitude and allowed herself to be lifted aboard. “No need to alert anyone,” she confided to the doctor in charge. “Miss Stretton here and I are acquainted. She will act as my representative, signing me in and out, making telephone calls. She’ll do whatever’s necessary—except pay the bill, perhaps!”
The doctor was glad to hear her make a joke, however feeble. He seemed to be warming to this girl. Provocatively clad in satin and rubies, bruised and bloodied in her battered head wreath and reeking fruitily of brandy, she looked like nothing so much as the survivor of a Saturnalian orgy and had made an unfortunate first impression on the young man, though the concerned chorus of detective inspector, college don and female companion in elegant evening attire had gone some way to reassure him.
“We’ll keep your friend in overnight for observation, Miss. Sometimes a blow on the head shows delayed symptoms. It’s not necessary for you to accompany her, but if you wish . . .”
Redfyre firmly drew the doctor aside and spoke to him quietly. “I’d rather she didn’t skip off. Miss Stretton will be staying with me for the moment. She’s a witness to what may well turn out to
be a crime.”
“A crime?” The doctor looked back at Juno in some puzzlement. “Falling down a dark staircase is hardly a crime, surely?”
“Attempted murder is a crime in my book,” said Redfyre. “This apparent accident will be investigated as such. A stair tread tampered with, a push in the back, a trip . . . not unfamiliar. I would be most grateful if you could bear that in mind when you carry out your more detailed examination at the hospital.”
“Indeed? Well, of course. A sort of ‘ante-mortem’ report? Understood.”
Doctor Henningham, still serenely in the role of master of ceremonies, approached to say goodbye to Juno as they prepared to cart her off, tucked up in hospital blankets against the cold. “Don’t worry, Miss Proudfoot. The College will do whatever it possibly can to see that this matter is accounted for and resolved.”
She gave him a meltingly lovely smile. “I’m so grateful, Mister, um . . .”
“Henningham. Doctor Henningham. Master of the College.”
“I might have guessed!” She spoke with the saucy grin of one who is confident that sickness grants a license for over-familiarity. “I say, Master—could you have my trumpet found and returned to me? I must have left it up on the platform.”
As soon as she was out of earshot, Earwig turned on him. “Now! Staying with you—a witness to a crime? What was all that nonsense about? I’m going home to Melford or to see Juno at Addenbrooke’s, as and when the fancy takes me. You will not try to stop me.”
“I’d prefer your cooperation, of course, but if necessary I’ll handcuff you to a pew,” he said in a playful tone intended to assure that he was joking for the moment, but that she would regret testing him. “The next hour or so is going to be boring for you as we set up a crime scene, and I don’t want you slipping off when my back’s turned. Here comes Sergeant Thoday, and—ah, good man!—he brings a police constable and my murder bag.”
Another desperate cry from above made them both raise their heads.
“Ah, yes, the essential witness to all this . . . Doctor Coote! Prepare to descend!” he yelled up to the organist. “Here comes your means of exit.” A vertiginously tall, scaffolding-like piece of equipment was being trundled towards the loft by a team of porters in aprons. “I think they use it to climb up and dust the candelabra,” Redfyre said. “I hope the chap has a head for heights. But regardless, I can’t have him trampling on evidence or putting his foot through a duff stair tread.”
“Impressive and ingenious,” said Earwig, dusting herself down. “And the spectacle of Coote in festal gown and polished Oxfords scrambling down promises to be entertaining! Almost sorry I have to miss the show. Well, you know where to find me, I think. Good luck, and please thank your aunt for an unforgettable evening, will you? I’ll be writing to her, of course.” She clicked shut the catch of her handbag with finality and turned to leave.
Redfyre had been prepared to be cast aside like a soiled glove all evening, but the arrogant finality of the gesture annoyed him. He felt that this girl had made use of him (and perhaps his aunt, as well) in the pursuit of schemes she had certainly not revealed to him, and he was determined to find out much more about little Earwig before she quick-stepped out of his life. Redfyre seized her arm and, beckoning to the advancing sergeant, told him, “Sarge, this is Miss Stretton who is an important witness. She’s under police protection and not allowed out of my sight. I want you to keep an eye on her, and if she tries to sneak off, use your cuffs to restrain her.”
The young sergeant appeared unsurprised by the order. He looked Earwig up and down coolly from his intimidating six-foot height and nodded. “Understood, sir. Cuffs it is.”
“Now listen.” Redfyre turned back to his witness, who was beginning to splutter and hiss like a kettle on the front burner. “I will hear what you have to tell me, including a full account of your presence here this evening, but, unlike a crime scene, you are transportable and do not decay. So, you must allow me to give precedence to the staircase. I’ll do what’s necessary here, and then we’ll leave to conduct the interview in more comfortable surroundings.”
He realized he’d unwittingly turned up the gas when his promise was greeted by what Redfyre considered a boiling-over.
“Comfortable surroundings? Huh! Police headquarters on Saint Andrew’s Street, I expect you mean! The Old Spinning House—is that what you have in mind for me? Good Lord! A night on the treadmill until I confess to something? How dare you. I refuse to go there!”
“You know as well as I do that the medieval torture that occurred in the Spinning House ceased when the Police Force took over the building twenty years ago.” Redfyre was trying for a patient reply to the insult, but his annoyance that he’d allowed her to trip him into a testy riposte broke through. Countering the often-repeated jibes—even only jokes—that came his way regarding the sinister origins of the local force had grown wearisome. He could well appreciate that a period of three hundred years of horrific and unjust punishment carried out in the forbidding prison building in Saint Andrew’s Street had so deeply etched itself into the town’s psyche that a mere two decades of change and improvement had not gone far to erase its memory.
The more so since the replacement public building failed to raise spirits. Squat, meanly appointed and insignificant though it was, it still managed to be threatening. Unsurprisingly, in most people’s minds it remained the hated “Spinning House,” and Cambridge women still crossed themselves when they hurried by in front of it. Redfyre crossed himself when he hurried into it.
His irritation led him to add, tight-voiced as any schoolmaster, “The treadmill and the spinning machines are long gone, Miss, and females are no longer swept up off the streets and punished for prostitution.”
“And I have your assurance that no police minion with dirty fingernails will shamble forward to ascertain the state of my virginity? Are you saying the Town Crier is no longer paid to discipline ladies of pleasure with his whip for ten bob a session?”
There it was again: the Stretton challenge. The unnecessary confrontation. But why? He decided to ascribe her bad manners to shock and concern for her friend.
Faced with her insistence on open warfare, he decided to reply lightly to her contrived and, he judged, deliberately provoking indignation. “Oh, these days, the bobby on the desk is more likely to give riotous ladies sixpence for a taxi ride home to their Mum’s and glad to be rid. I’m sure you know that. Please don’t waste precious time making feminist points that are so easily demolished. You devalue the currency of your argument.”
“Pompous prat!” Earwig said, voicing his own estimation of his performance. He grinned, unabashed, and continued, “I promised ‘more comfortable surroundings’ for our chat and you may hold me to that. Now, do you want to come and examine those stairs with me? Or will what we find up there be no surprise to you? Flashlight, Sarge? Thank you.”
While Sergeant Thoday set about assembling and taking down names of witnesses in his notebook under the supervision of the master, Redfyre undertook the first examination of the lethal staircase alone, his invitation to Earwig having been coldly rejected, as he calculated it would be. No woman in her senses would have agreed to a scrummage on a dark and dubious set of stairs with an equally dark and dubious police inspector. He dug about in the large Gladstone bag his officers referred to indulgently as his “murder bag” and took out a pair of thin rubber gloves, which he proceeded to slip on with no sign of awkwardness, though some curious looks were exchanged amongst those remaining in the hall.
The uniformed police constable directed the powerful beam of a police torch upwards from the base, and Redfyre held a smaller one in his hand as he climbed the stairs slowly, checking each step for stability and signs of tampering. The handrail was also a subject of his scrutiny, but he was careful to touch it as little as possible. When he descended, he addressed the sergeant. “Interesting! That’s all
I can do for tonight, Sarge. Too many shadows.” His eyes flashed around, checking his bearings, and located the south windows opposite the stair. “Order up the usual team, will you, for fingerprinting? Tomorrow—we want the best light on this. I’ll have a word with some of the witnesses right now. Got their addresses? Some I’ll have to visit later for statements. If, of course, this proves to be a crime of some sort. After a chat with Miss Proudfoot tomorrow, it may be we can all come off watch and go back to stirring our Christmas puddings.”
He ran an eye over the concerned half dozen men who had stayed behind. He was disturbed by a presence and an absence. He failed to spot the face he was looking for. “Master?” He caught the ready attention of Henningham, who was quietly talking with an agitated Christopher Coote. “The young gentleman whose job it was to arrange for the lighting of the stairs prior to descent—I don’t see him here. I didn’t see him at the moment critique, either!”
“Bunked off early, are we thinking? Deserted his post and left the lady in the dark?” The master frowned. “Not his style at all! Thomas Tyrrell. A most meticulous young man. One of our music scholars.” He looked about him and asked loudly: “Anyone seen Tyrrell?”
The general opinion, muttered in puzzled tones, seemed to be that young Thomas had been lost to sight immediately after he had ushered the performers up the stairs for the concert to restart after the interval. The sergeant flourished his notebook with eyebrow cocked and pencil poised.
“Note that he is a member of this college but, being in his second year, lives out in the town with a landlady. He’s in digs. His lodgings are somewhere out on the Newmarket Road I believe . . . Or was it Maids Causeway? Enquire at the porter’s office, will you? They’ll have all the details of domicile you need there.” He rested a large hand on Redfyre’s shoulder and said confidentially, “I say, can I leave all this in your capable hands, old chap? I’m not feeling too good. Bit wobbly, don’t you know! Should never have had that second glass of punch. There’s nothing much I can add, I think, so I’ll leave you to your witnesses and clear off back to my roost.”
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