Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew'd

by Alan Bradley

  How had he come to be strung up in that helpless position, hanging like a hawk from a tree in its tangled jesses, left to struggle helplessly until death freed him?

  Saint Andrew had been crucified in just such a spread-eagled way. I remembered that from an exchange visit we had paid several years ago to the Girl Guide troop at Hinley Presbyterian Church. Although the meeting itself had been pretty much of a washout—on account of snobbery—the great stained-glass window behind the pulpit and the “common table,” as the Presbyterians called their altar, had been most instructive.

  The center panel depicted Saint Andrew, who was, as I had expected he would be, fastened to his cross like a giant asterisk, arms and legs flung wide, as if he were a paratrooper whose parachute has not yet opened.

  But Mr. Sambridge was, as I have said, hanging upside down—unlike Saint Andrew, who had at least been put to death in an upright position.

  It was Saint Peter, I remembered, who, at his own request, had been crucified head downwards.

  This fact in itself was incredibly interesting. Surely such a bizarre death—and in such an interesting position—coming to a wood-carver who specialized in ecclesiastical subjects could be no coincidence. Was there a hidden message here, having to do with his past?

  My first thought, of course, had been to go for help. But it was clear—and it would have been even to someone less accustomed to death than myself—that Mr. Sambridge was beyond assistance.

  I was fairly certain, anyway, that there was no telephone at Thornfield Chase. I had not noticed one in my quick survey of the downstairs room. And surely, if there had been a telephone installed, Cynthia or the vicar would have rung up Mr. Sambridge, rather than sending me on this errand.

  Too late for doctors or ambulances. Too late for Mr. Sambridge.

  For the time being, at least, I had him all to myself.

  And I might as well say here and now that, at that very moment, a sudden sense of vast relief swept over me, as if a long-hidden and unexpected sun had risen. I felt as Atlas must have felt when some good Samaritan finally took pity upon him, and lifted the weight of the globe from his poor aching shoulders.

  For quite some time now, I had not been myself. Much as I hated to admit it, the events of the past several months had shaken me rather badly. I was not at all the Flavia de Luce I had once been. Whether that was a bad thing or a good one remained to be seen, but until I managed to work it out, the feeling was one of bearing an enormous invisible burden: the weight of the world.

  I want to know who I am before it is too late—before I am no longer the same person—before I become someone different. Although there are days when this seems a furious race against time, there are others when it seems to matter not a tinker’s curse.

  But now—suddenly—in a flash—an instant—a twinkling of the eye—everything changed.

  Somewhere in the universe, a cinder had fallen through the grate and bounced out onto the open hearth.

  And yet none of those tired old phrases—in spite of their suggestion of speed—manage to convey how quickly that change came over me.

  Before you could say “Jack Robinson!” or “Snap!” (I was ashamed of myself for using these tired old phrases, but for some reason I couldn’t seem to help myself), I felt as if I had been suddenly possessed by my former self—as if from some molten furnace, a new Flavia de Luce had been poured into my old shoes.

  No…not a new Flavia de Luce, but the old one, yet tempered now, and hard as steel.

  It’s amazing what the discovery of a corpse can do for one’s spirits.

  I licked the tip of my mental pencil and began to make notes.

  Age, I thought: about seventy, at a guess. We had been taught to estimate ages in Girl Guides, not only by physical characteristics but also by comparison. The latter method told me that the man was much older than Father, who was fifty, and younger than old Canon Eastlake, who, at ninety, had crept quavering back to St. Tancred’s last summer to be presented with a purse of money for his half-century of services to the Building Fund.

  I ticked off the main indicators: gray hair and bushy gray beard tending to white, wrinkled facial skin (dark as it now was and dragged down by gravity), faded gray eyes (yes, they were open, and staring at me), scandalously bushy eyebrows, and a profuse undergrowth of hair in the ears.

  I stuck a curious finger into the surprisingly warm mouth, remembering as I did so that fingerprints cannot be taken from dead lips. Mr. Sambridge possessed a remarkably good mouthful of natural teeth for someone his age, whether ritually maintained or expensively corrected I could not tell.

  As someone who has spent hours of agony strapped down in Dr. Frankenstein’s chamber of dental horrors in Farrington Street, I could only respect—and hate—anyone who still possessed such a spotless set of choppers.

  That would do for basics, but I knew that I could be much more thorough.

  My task was complicated, though, by the position of the body, and by the fact that much of its blood had settled in the head.

  Cutting him down was out of the question. If I had learned one thing from Inspector Hewitt in the past, it was not to meddle with dead bodies.

  At the very thought of my old friend, I felt my face flushing. How exciting it would be to call in the inspector: to be the one to break the news of Mr. Sambridge’s death. But before I could do so—and before I could receive the inspector’s generous and wholehearted praise with an entirely innocent heart—I needed to remove any traces of my own investigation.

  But before turning things over to the police, there was much to do, and I’d better get on with it. My time here was limited. I needed to get back to Buckshaw in time for the taxi to visit Father in Hinley; that was one thing that couldn’t be delayed.

  I also had to consider the possibility that someone—the postman, perhaps—would come to Thornfield Chase and find me there alone with Mr. Sambridge.

  Gladys, parked outside, would be a dead giveaway. There wasn’t time to go downstairs and move her to a hiding place, and to be caught doing so would be even more difficult to explain.

  No, the best thing was to get on with it, and hope for the best.

  Father had once lectured us: “In even the most desperate of situations, you must always put efficiency first. Efficiency is paramount.”

  And he was right. How wise my father was!

  Efficiency was everything.

  The problem at hand was in making a careful study of Mr. Sambridge’s features, hampered as I was by the fact that he was hanging upside down and cutting him loose, as I have said, was out of the question.

  The solution came to me at once. I stepped to one side, threw my hands above my head, bent sideways at the waist, planted my right hand down firmly upon the carpet, flung myself into a half cartwheel, and ended up in a handstand, face-to-face—nose to nose, almost—with the corpse.

  Much better!

  At once—and in spite of the grimace—it looked much more human. Everything seemed to snap into place.

  There must be a part of our brain, I thought, that is designed to recognize human features: a part of the brain that switches off when the face is upside down. I must remember to research this theory at a more convenient time.

  But for now—and with a sharp shock of recognition—I realized I had seen this face before.

  The ocean wave of gray hair, that large, bulbous forehead, the long ears, and the sad eyes had triggered some overgrown memory circuit. The only trouble was, I could not remember the where, the when, or the who of it.

  No time for that now, I thought.

  At this short range, my view of the dead man’s face was almost microscopic: I could see the pores on his nose (large, but clean) and the myriad of minute red blood vessels in his nose, broken and spreading in all directions like a map of the Amazon and its tributaries.

  Aha! I thought. He drinks.

  But wait! Although I had not yet searched the house thoroughly, I had come across no liq
uor bottles.

  Used to drink, I decided.

  Was it my imagination, or did the corpse’s face show a little relief at my change of mind?

  Around the clearly defined outline of his beard, the cheeks, chin, and neck were clean-shaven without the slightest sign of stubble, which seemed to suggest that he had died early in the day, soon after shaving, rather than later.

  I turned my attention to the hair again, which now, hanging down towards the floor, appeared to me, in my inverted position, to be standing on end in fright, but was otherwise a healthy bush, as if its owner had faithfully used a patent hair tonic from birth.

  “The hair of a much younger man,” said the voice of the Whisperer in my ear. “Is it possibly a wig?”

  Lowering myself to balance on my head and one elbow, I reached out carefully for a handful of strands and gave them a sharp tug, thinking as I did so that (a) you can’t hurt the dead and (b) as with lips, you can’t leave fingerprints on hair.

  But this was no wig. The hair was natural. And—I should have thought of this before—it matched perfectly the color of the hair in the man’s ears and nose.

  People who dye their hair, beards, mustaches, and eyebrows for nefarious purposes seldom think to include their earlobes and nostrils.

  I studied the skin. The cheeks and forehead were liver-spotted, as were the backs of the hands, which hung helplessly to the floor, the fingers turned in and clawlike—as if their owner had died clutching, like a drowning man, at the proverbial straw.

  I examined the fingernails. As I had suspected they would be, several of them—notably the first three on each hand—were broken. And under each of these, partly dried blood was caked. The fingertips themselves were raw and covered with abrasions, a word I had learned from Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit, in which the eldest Miss Pecksniff found abrasions on the knobby parts of her father’s anatomy after he had been knocked down the front steps. I had heard it again from Dogger as he dressed my wounds the first time Gladys shied and dumped me onto the gravel drive.

  The abrasions made it likely that the blood under the nails was the corpse’s own.

  If his wounds had been inflicted after Mr. Sambridge was hung up by his heels, the source of the damage could not have been more than an arm’s length away. It—or they—would have been within reach.

  I lowered my feet and sprang out of my headstand.

  I didn’t have far to look. The contraption by which Mr. Sambridge was suspended was a sort of windlass: an ingenious system of ropes and pulleys attached to the back of the door—not so very different from the rack upon which medieval torturers stretched their victims in the Tower. At the heart of all this was a hand-carved wooden gear assembly, which looked for all the world like a waterwheel in the millstream of some quaint Victorian village. In miniature, of course.

  A wooden pawl, or tongue, fell into the teeth of a ratchet gear, assuring that it could turn in only one direction, unless released. The device was a simple one: a mechanism I had learned to recognize when Dogger taught me the art of lock-picking.

  The pulleys had been beautifully hand-carved, apparently from single blocks of oak, and polished by someone who was proud of his work. They must have taken weeks of patient work. I could still smell the beeswax with which they had been lubricated.

  I could smell something else, too: a whiff of sulfur, or something very like it.

  Had the Devil been here in his horns and hooves, leaving behind the smell of brimstone? Had Mr. Sambridge met his end in some bizarre ritual, at the hands of a group of village Satanists?

  I shook off a growing shiver before it overcame me.

  If Mr. Sambridge had been murdered, it had been no spur-of-the-moment killing. Someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to rig up such an infernal device.

  A pair of hemp ropes ran up and through the wooden pulleys, ending in leather-padded loops which encircled his ankles.

  For a distance of a foot or more, both above and below the dead man’s knees, the fibers of the rope were stained with moist blood. It was obvious that, before dying, he had clawed at his bonds in a frantic attempt to free himself.

  But his struggles had been in vain. He was caught up like a fly in a spider’s web.

  His face, as I have said, was livid, as might be expected of someone who had died while hanging upside down. Whether or not the congestion was postmortem was something that would only be determined at the inevitable autopsy.

  I tried to put myself in his position: to imagine how he must have felt as he waited upside down for death to come.

  While I myself have never died, I have mastered the art of standing on my head for lengthy periods of time, in order to stimulate my thinking processes. Dogger had assured me that doing so should not be fatal: Only people with dicky hearts would be at risk during an extended headstand.

  Had Mr. Sambridge suffered heart troubles?

  If he had, his medicine cabinet might well hold the answer. A prescription for anything containing thiocyanate, nitroglycerine, or any of the veratrum alkaloids derived from the corn lily or false hellebore, for instance, would be highly suggestive.

  I’m sorry if I seem to digress, but that is precisely what I was thinking at the moment. It’s the way my mind works. Things are not the same in real life as they are in, for instance, the fictional world of Sherlock Holmes. Brains, in reality, do not go clickety-clickety-clickety-click from A to B to C to D and so forth, rushing like a train along the rails, until at the end, with a happy “Toot-toot!” they arrive at their destination, Z, and the case is suddenly solved.

  Quite the contrary. In reality, analytical minds such as my own are forever shooting wildly off in all directions simultaneously. It’s like joyously hitting jelly with a sledgehammer; like exploding galaxies; like a display of fireworks in which the pyrotechnic engineer has had a bit too much to drink and set off the whole conglobulation all at once, by accident.

  It was not until this point that the room itself began to attract my notice. I had been so occupied with the remains of the late Mr. Sambridge that I had not really—other than a quick glance—registered the contents of his bedroom.

  My first impression, now, was that I had been miraculously transported through time and space and dumped into the bedroom of Geppetto, the wood-carver in Pinocchio.

  I looked round in astonishment at the furniture, which was remarkable, to say the least.

  The four-poster bed, for instance, was made up of what seemed to be an entire squadron of carved angels: plump wooden cherubs that simpered and leered at one another as they swarmed to their mischievous task.

  What came to mind was that line from Hamlet:

  And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

  But these cherubs were not singing the terrified nightshirted figure to his rest, but rather, so far as I could make out, dragging him down relentlessly by his knobbly carved wooden knees towards the pit of carved flames which formed the foot of the bed. The victim’s mouth was open, his tiny teeth like bat’s teeth as he fell, in a silent scream of agony.

  Much like—I couldn’t help thinking—the real Mr. Sambridge.

  Two falling figures, tumbling headfirst into eternity: one of wood and one of flesh and blood.

  What was I to make of that?

  On the wall beside the bed was what seemed at first to be an eighteenth-century lady’s fan: a large, lacy, delicate semicircle which proved to be, upon closer inspection—or so I guessed—a large specimen of coral, which looked for all the world like a silhouette of an ancient tree in winter.

  A bedside table was decorated with carved serpent legs supporting a marble slab top, upon which had been placed two shillings and sixpence, a key, a silver pocket watch with chain and fob, a fist-sized gargoyle carved from some dark wood such as ebony, the stub of a pencil, a bit of gray fluff indicating that these objects had previously been in someone’s pocket, and a £1 ticket on the Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstake.

  I remembered with a pang
how Daffy and I had clubbed together last June to buy Father, as a birthday present, a ticket on this same race.

  “It’s the most valuable prize ever offered,” I’d told him, brimming over with excitement as I handed him what I prayed would be a winner. “More than £22,000.”

  Twenty-some thousand quid would go a long way, I thought, to easing Father’s money worries.

  Father’s brow had clouded and furrowed, and I was left standing awkwardly with the ticket in my outstretched hand.

  “I appreciate your thoughtfulness, Flavia,” Father had said. “It is very kind of you, but I cannot accept.”

  He seemed as embarrassed as I was.

  “You must never indulge in gambling,” he said. “Nor must you stand to profit from the frailties of others. Lotteries, as you very well know, are against the law.”

  “But—”

  “No, Flavia. That’s enough. I have spoken. You may go.”

  And with that, he had turned back to his stamp collection.

  I was too crushed to tell Daffy what had happened.

  Can you revoke a prayer? I wondered.

  In the following weeks I had then counter-prayed each night in bed that the ticket would be a loser. To win would be a calamity. While I was perfectly capable of keeping my own trap shut, I knew that the seller of a winning ticket was also awarded a sum of money. In my case, the seller was Tippy Hogben, who, under cover of her market stall at Malden Fenwick, did a brisk business in such black-market goods as tea, butter, and sugar.

  And if Tippy won so much as a shilling, I was as good as dead. Gossip would cook my goose.

  It wasn’t the giving of the ticket to Father that was a crime, but the buying of it, which was my responsibility alone. At the last minute Daffy had begged off our jaunt to Tippy’s stall on the grounds of having a ferocious headache, so that, in the end, I was left to do the dirty deed alone.