by Alan Bradley
“How vain you are, my twin,
’Tis me! ’tis me! the little lad
Has seized an interest in.”
It was all a matter of viewpoint, wasn’t it?
The motives for killing a village wood-carver would appear to be entirely different than those for murdering a much-beloved author. As would the suspects.
Who in their right mind would even dream of doing away with Oliver Inchbald—a man who had brought so much pleasure into the world?
The Death of a Household Name, I should call it, if I were writing up the case disguised as fiction, as Miss Christie has done.
It was far, far easier to think that a morose wood-carver and part-time tippler might have made a mortal enemy.
Which meant that my prime suspects should be the dead man’s present-day friends—mostly his acquaintances from church and village: those who knew him only as Roger Sambridge. As opposed, say, to those who had been acquainted with the blessèd Oliver Inchbald, who had been supposedly pecked to death by seagulls.
How had he managed to pull it off?
A death so sensational—so dramatic—could not have been enacted successfully without an enormous amount of planning. And—the hair at the back of my neck bristled at the thought—a great deal of assistance. One does not stage such a spectacle without planning the actual event with military precision.
Why hadn’t I thought of this before?
Why hadn’t I thought to question Lillian Trench about her neighbor? Had I been too intimidated by coming face-to-face with a would-be witch? Or had the sudden jack-in-the-box appearance of Hilary Inchbald from the sideboard thrown me off the track?
It wasn’t until that very moment that the penny dropped, but when it fell, it fell like a load of lead bricks.
Of course! How could I have been so feebleminded? Shame on you, Flavia de Luce!
What a colossal fool I had been! Like everyone else, I had been taken in totally by what was probably the most magnificent piece of stagecraft in recent memory.
Hang your head, John Gielgud! Sir Laurence Olivier, go stand in the corner in shame! Oliver Inchbald—alias Roger Sambridge—has bested us all.
At least he did until he was overtaken by Fate, who apparently has no sense of humor.
What were his last thoughts? I wondered. Had he, at the end, and alone with his killer, had even a moment to regret his life? Had there been time for a final “Dash it all!” before his eyes were closed forever?
His final years could not have been easy ones. I knew that he had suffered with arthritis, and that many of his hours had been spent alone in a pub—not spinning tales and making men laugh as you would expect, but sitting by himself. “Morose,” Rosie had called it, which meant, if I understand the word correctly, that he was a sour old crab apple.
What a comedown that must have been for the creator of Crispian Crumpet.
As my mind shifted into a higher gear, a new landscape of questions revealed itself. It was like riding Gladys to the top of the Jack O’Lantern and seeing, suddenly, a vast, fresh perspective of Bishop’s Lacey and vicinity laid out like a carpet at one’s feet.
A matter of viewpoint.
Castor and Pollux.
There was, for instance, the question of the wooden frame upon which I had found the dead man hanging. Who, among his acquaintances, could have constructed such an instrument of torture, and how had they brought it to Thornfield Chase and set it up? Who had the necessary woodworking skills?
Well, Boy Scout James Marlowe, of Wick St. Lawrence, I thought with a smile, was the first that came to mind. Boy Scouts were famous from pole to pole as being able to whittle up, upon demand, anything from a toothpick to a cantilever bridge. It had been he who made the grisly discovery of Oliver Inchbald’s first death, while I, Flavia de Luce, had been left to discover the second.
Had Oliver Inchbald stood idly by and watched as the fiendish device was hauled into his cottage and set up? Or was he already dead by then?
The latter seemed more likely. In spite of my own mental powers I could scarcely imagine anyone assisting at his own crucifixion.
Fiction. The word rang in my brain. Oliver’s first “death” had been a fiction, cleverly contrived and staged by himself, with the assistance of others yet to be discovered. The second, alas, had been all too real.
Had it been an accident?
Had some unspeakable ritual gone suddenly and horribly wrong?
With these unpleasant thoughts in mind, I rolled over in bed, wrapped the quilt around my shoulders, and fell into the deepest and most restful sleep I’ve had since the day before I was born.
—
When I awoke, a winter sun was already slanting in through my window, its low angle illuminating the peaks and valleys of the baggy Georgian wallpaper with which my room was covered.
I remembered that for simply ages I had intended to take further scrapings, for examination under the microscope, of the various mold colonies that flourished on its ancient paste, but now was not the time. Molds, when you stop to think about it, are really no more than large, happy families. If you could make yourself small enough—like Alice—you would probably be able to hear them laughing and singing their moldy songs, teasing one another, playing harmless moldy practical jokes, and swapping moldy ghost stories.
In rather an odd way, I envied them.
I have a confession to make: In spite of being as tolerant as the next person, I found myself unable to face my own family at breakfast. The very thought of spending even part of an hour under the eyes of Feely, Daffy, and Undine made my brain begin to dissolve. I could already feel it.
I leaped out of bed and scrambled into my clothes, my breath making absurd little puffs as if I were a character in the comics, saying nothing. Although the unheated east wing of Buckshaw was a trial in the winter, it was the price I was willing to pay for solitude. The only thing missing was dogsleds.
By a somewhat devious route, I made my way downstairs to the pantry. Mrs. Mullet was so busily fussing with the Aga, she did not notice as I tiptoed in behind her and made off with a liberal supply of uncooked bacon and eggs and several slices of bread.
As I lit the Bunsen burner, back upstairs in my laboratory, I sent up a brief prayer of thanks for not having been spotted.
Holding the bread to the flame with a pair of test-tube clamps, I toasted it to perfection. Eggs scrambled in a glass beaker and bacon sizzling on a stainless steel dissecting tray soon filled the room with the most delicious odors. Claridge’s and the Ritz—even the Savoy, I was willing to wager—had never smelled half so deliciously tantalizing on a cold winter morning.
I ate, as Daffy once remarked, with gusto. It was a word I hadn’t heard before, and I at once imagined her sitting at a linen-topped table on a terrace by the sea with an elderly, white-haired foreign gentleman—Greek, perhaps—with a red carnation in his buttonhole, passing her the kippers.
This was Gus Toe, and he lived on in my imagination long after I had been set straight about the word.
I was mopping up the last morsel of egg with the last bite of toast when there was a knock at the door.
“Come in, Dogger,” I said, knowing it would be no one else.
The door opened and Undine stuck her head into the room.
“Surprise!” she screeched.
“Go away,” I said.
I still hadn’t been able to work out why the child annoyed me so much. The fact that I could not had caused me to retreat behind a curtain of insults.
I had tried referring to her at every opportunity as Pestilence, but it had done no good. I had told her that when she dies, I would pray not to the Virgin Mary, but for the Virgin Mary.
All of which had bounced off Undine’s back like H2O off an Aylesbury duck.
“Go away!” I repeated, in case she hadn’t understood.
Undine raised her curled fingers to her lips, sticking a thumb between her teeth to form the mouthpiece of a makeshift trumpet:
“Ta-rah! Ta-rah! Ta-rah-ta-ta-rah-ta-rah!” she trumpeted. “A visitor is announced! Miss Flavia de Luce is desired at the door!”
I laughed in spite of myself.
“If the visitor has a butterfly net, it’s you they want, not me,” I said.
“The visitor has no net for the lepidoptera,” she said, dropping her voice into a lower register that was not only wonderfully done, but also spine-chilling.
“His name is James Marlowe,” she added. “And he has a knife.”
· EIGHTEEN ·
UNDINE WAS RIGHT. HE did have a knife. Or what seemed at first to be a knife.
“Go to your room, Undine,” I told her and, incredibly, she obeyed me.
Which left me alone with an armed man.
James Marlowe stood in the foyer, head thrown back, gaping at the ceiling as if he were studying the dome at St. Paul’s Cathedral. He was short and stocky, with a barrel chest, and by the way his arms hung out from his sides, I knew that he had developed the kind of biceps that are required for swarming up ropes and so forth.
He had unbuttoned his winter coat, and I could see that he was wearing a hand-me-down blue suit and a striped tie from one of the lesser schools. When he had finished with the foyer, he peered at me owlishly through a pair of round, black-rimmed spectacles.
More for show, I thought, than anything, since the lenses were of little, if any, magnifying power. I had to admire his brass, though, since I had used the same trick myself when I wanted to gain sympathy or suggest a certain nonexistent weakness.
I judged him to be about eighteen or nineteen, which would be about right.
“Miss de Luce?” he asked, sticking out a square hand.
I took it and I shook it, not trying to hide my glance at the object in his other hand, which was not at all what I had imagined. I’d been expecting the standard Boy Scout knife, with black checkered horn handle, and a blade for every occasion, such as a screwdriver, a corkscrew, a tin-opener, a button hook, and a prong for removing stones from horse’s hooves.
Far from it: This tool, which he held out to me on an open handkerchief, was a slender steel blade with a wooden handle: a blade that went from square in the center to round to a doubly sharpened wedge at the tip. It was more of a chisel than a knife, and I have to admit I’d never seen anything like it.
“It’s a wood-carving tool, called a firmer,” he said. “I found it beside what was left of Mr. Inchbald.”
I wanted to shout “Yarooo!” but somehow I managed to swallow the word.
“Put it in your pocket and follow me upstairs,” I said.
I was nervous, of course, about inviting anyone into my sanctum sanctorum, especially a stranger with a sharp-edged weapon, but I needed a place to talk to him without fear of interruption or of being overheard. It was too cold outside, which left the laboratory. I would simply have to risk it.
“Take a pew,” I told him, gesturing towards a wicker chair. It was something, I thought, that would be the sort of thing an associate of Edgar Wallace might say: hard-boiled but friendly. I didn’t want to appear too intimidating.
I sat myself down in Uncle Tarquin’s old oak office chair behind the desk.
Like the beam of a lighthouse, James Marlowe’s eyes scanned the room, widening as they went at the sight of the scientific equipment and the rows upon rows of chemical bottles. He was barely able to keep his mouth from falling open.
“I thought I’d deliver the photos personally,” he said, passing them across the desk. “Rather than sending them by mail. I thought Mr. Wallace might appreciate—”
“I’m sure he will,” I interrupted. “But first, I’d like you to set the scene for me. I like to form my own first impressions.”
Like Inspector Hewitt, I couldn’t help thinking.
“We can look at the photographs later.”
He looked at me rather dubiously. “You seem awfully young to be an assistant to Mr. Wallace,” he said.
I gave him a stern glare. “Scout Marlowe,” I said. “If Mr. Wallace had not placed his complete trust in me, I should hardly have been placed in this position.”
This made no logical sense, but it served its purpose.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You may call me James.”
“And you may call me Flavia,” I said, softening just enough to encourage him. “Tell it to me in your own words—from the beginning, if you please.”
I pulled an unused notebook from a drawer and picked up a pencil.
James opened and closed his mouth several times, his tongue clicking nervously as he licked his lips. But he said nothing. Had I been too forceful?
I raised an encouraging eyebrow. “Whenever you’re ready,” I said, doling out a little smile.
“The island of Steep Holm,” James said, “lies in the Bristol Channel, approximately five miles west of the town of Weston-super-Mare. About a mile and a half in circumference, it rises two hundred feet above the channel…”
He sounded like the narrator of one of those dreadful travelogues in the cinema that you have to sit through before you get to Boris Karloff, and I guessed that he had told this story more than once.
“Hold on,” I said. “It’s human interest Mr. Wallace wants. We’ll get to the geography later. Start with the corpse and work outwards.”
“It was horrible!” he said, and by his sudden pallor I knew that his mind had instantly flown back to the scene of his grisly discovery. “At first I didn’t know what it was, you see. A cluster of old rags—a discarded beef bone—I almost stepped on it.”
He stopped to swallow heavily. “I had gone there alone in a small sailboat to map the Victorian fortifications, and to observe the gray plover and the dotterel for my Bird Warden Badge. I had always been interested in the migratory—”
“The corpse,” I reminded him.
“It was horrible,” he repeated. “Gulls, you see—when they attack—the skull—the eyes were gone. Bits of gristle—connective tissue, I suppose—glittering in the sunlight. It was sickening.”
Connective tissue? This was more like it. Edgar Wallace would have been proud of me.
No wonder they hadn’t wanted the Inchbald family to view the corpse!
I wrote down James’s words in the notebook, taking great care to record them accurately.
“To be honest,” he added, “I vomited. They didn’t put that in the newspapers, though.”
I nodded sympathetically. And yet I remembered that at the time James had been interviewed by The Telegraph, he had been quite matter-of-fact about it all. Indeed he had positively rhapsodized about the habits of the carrion crow, and the madness of the birds in nesting season.
And to the London Evening Standard he had babbled on about Lord Baden Powell’s advice on mapping a corpse.
Hardly the words of a lad who has just tossed his cookies.
Or was I being too hard on the boy?
It was odd, the way in which I kept thinking of him as a boy. Although the James Marlowe who was at this very moment sitting in my laboratory was now nearly a man, he had been only fourteen at the time of his allegedly grim discovery.
Was there more to this man/boy than met the eye?
“Go on,” I told him, and he did:
“I tried to convince myself that the…remains…weren’t human. But the firmer, the pipe, the wallet, the…the wedding ring…”
Again he seemed on the verge of breaking down.
“Wedding ring?” I said. “I don’t remember a wedding ring being mentioned.”
“No,” James said. “They didn’t put that in the papers, either. The police thought it might be murder.”
“Did they say so?” I asked.
“Well, no. But I’m no fool. I was a bright boy. Inspector Cavendish told me to button my lip about it or he’d have my guts for garters.”
Inspector Cavendish was a man after my own heart. Even though the news of Oliver Inchbald’s death had gone round the world by wireless, they wanted
to keep quiet about the evidence by which his identity was established.
Which was interesting in itself.
Had Inspector Cavendish himself been in on the plot? It was uncharitable of me to think such a thing, but that’s how my mind works.
Heaven only knows the author of Hobbyhorse House had more than money enough to pay off a couple of trusted confederates. But where had he managed to find a dead body to substitute for his own? If, in fact, that is what had happened.
It may sound far-fetched, but in the annals of crime, far stranger things have happened.
“Tell me about the island,” I said. “Mr. Wallace will want to know about the geography. Setting is important in stories, you know.”
“Well, it’s desolate,” James said. “Yes, desolate, I should say. It’s only half a mile long and a quarter mile wide, and has just two accessible landing places. There’s not much on it, really, except for a few military remains, some old, others more recent. And the birds, of course. Birds by the thousands.”
His eyes lit up.
“You’re very fond of birds, aren’t you, James?” I asked.
“To be honest, I like birds better than people. I suppose Mr. Inchbald did, too, or he wouldn’t have gone there.”
This was an interesting thought. No one had mentioned—at least in my hearing—that Oliver was keen on birds. Or had he gone to Steep Holm for some other reason—a walking tour, perhaps—and recognized it as a perfect setting in which to fake his death?
Suppose he had planned it all from a cozy armchair in London?
Authors are known to have fiendishly clever minds, and the authors of children’s books are more fiendishly clever than most.
What if Oliver Inchbald had, in fact, staged his own death without ever leaving home? What if—like some shadowy puppeteer, or chess master moving his pieces on the board—he had planned and executed his devious plan without ever taking off his slippers?
The important question, though, was why?
Why would a man who has the world at his feet—a man who was read aloud from drawing room to nursery, a man beloved by old and young—wish to throw it all away, to vanish from the earth like a music hall magician, in a puff of smoke?