by Alan Bradley
Or a cloud of seagulls.
That, as Hamlet is supposed to have said, is the question.
I was proud of myself. I had finally managed to distill the entire case into a single word:
Why?
“Sorry,” I said, tapping my pencil on the notepad. “I was speculating. Getting back to the gulls—”
Slowly, almost reluctantly, I thought, he pulled from an inner pocket a white envelope, which he held out to me.
“These are quite gruesome,” he said. “You might not want to—”
“Gruesome is my game, James,” I said. “Mr. Wallace demands nothing less.”
I took the envelope, opened it, and removed an inner glassine envelope, in which were a number of photos and negatives.
As I thumbed through the prints I couldn’t help letting out a whistle. “Crikey,” I said. “These don’t half take the cake!”
The photos were, as James had warned me, gruesome. In fact, they were more than gruesome: they were ghastly.
There was the bundle of rags, badly mauled, with bits of bone visible through rips and tears; there was the toothless skull with its empty eye sockets.
“They go for the eyes,” James said. “They have a fondness for eyes.”
I nodded wisely, but wondered if the gulls had taken the teeth as well.
“Did the police see these?” I asked. “You mentioned the photos to the reporter from the London Evening Standard. You also mentioned making a sketch.”
“I gave them the sketch,” he said.
“And the photos?”
He looked away.
“And the photos, James?” I insisted.
“He seemed like a nice chap,” he said. “The reporter, I mean. Offered me a cigarette. I didn’t accept it, of course. I told him about the photos but I mentioned them to no one else.”
“Did he ask to see them?”
“No. He was in a rush to get back up to London for some kind of newspaper beanfest. Besides, I hadn’t developed them yet. The film was still in my camera. I have a folding pocket Brownie. It belonged to my father. He carried it all through the war—in spite of personal photos being forbidden.”
Like father, like son, I thought.
I leafed through the photographs, examining each one carefully.
“These are very nicely done,” I said. “You printed them yourself?”
“Developed and printed. I had already earned my Photography Badge, you see, so I was quite good at it.”
I returned the prints to the envelope and removed the negatives. At first glance, it seemed that each of them corresponded with one of the prints.
“Hold on,” I said. “There are eight negatives, but only seven prints.”
“Yes,” James said. “I spoiled one of them. I was fiddling with the aperture and overexposed a shot. I could have kicked myself. I had only one roll of film, and it was the last shot left.”
I took up the photos again and placed each on top of its corresponding negative.
There was one negative left over. I held it up to the light of the window: a dark and nearly opaque rectangle of about two and a quarter inches by three and a quarter.
“Not much to see, is there?” I asked. “What was it a photo of?”
“I don’t remember,” James said quickly. “At any rate, it didn’t turn out, as you can see.”
He didn’t remember? A Boy Scout drilled in the arts of observation?
What did he take me for?
I decided to say nothing. Instead, I beckoned him, with a wiggled forefinger, to follow me.
I took down two bottles from a shelf of photographic chemicals. “You are familiar with Farmer’s Reducer, I expect?”
The look on his face told me he was not. So much for his Photography Badge.
“Nothing to do with fat farmers,” I said, “but named for Ernest Howard Farmer, who published the formula in 1883. It’s a solution of potassium ferricyanide….”
I picked up the bottle of bright red salt crystals.
James was now crowding closely behind me, peering over my shoulder—a little too close for comfort, considering that he might still turn out to be a killer.
“We mustn’t ever mix this with an acid,” I said, “because it produces hydrogen cyanide gas. We’d be dead before we could say ‘coconuts.’ ”
This had the desired effect. James took a hasty step backwards.
I picked up the other bottle, which was half full of clear crystals resembling crushed ice.
“Sodium thiosulfate,” I told him. “Hypo. Ordinary fixer.”
“It’s not acid, is it?” he asked, taking another step backwards.
“No,” I said. “Actually, it happens to be the antidote to cyanide poisoning.
“God moves in mysterious ways,” I added, “His wonders to perform. Hand me that bottle.”
I stirred three quarters of a cup of the sodium thiosulfate into a quart of water.
“There’s our Solution A,” I said.
To a second half-cup of water, I added just over half an ounce of potassium ferricyanide. As the red crystals dissolved, the liquid became yellow.
“Solution B,” James guessed.
“You’re a fast learner,” I told him, and he glowed with pride as I prepared my trays and bottles.
“Now then—four parts Solution A…” I poured it into a tray. “And one part Solution B…”
As the solution turned to an even deeper yellow, I wondered vaguely if Lillian Trench was ever so happy gloating over her witchly brews?
“This is powerful stuff,” I said. “We’ll dilute it with a bit of water—to slow down the chemical action.”
I picked up the negative with a pair of photo tongs, immersed it in the liquid, and began swirling it gently but steadily beneath the surface.
“Nothing’s happening,” James remarked, after a few seconds.
I pulled the negative from the tray and plunged it into a tray of water.
I held it up to the light.
“Look again,” I told him. “There’s been a change in the transparency.”
Something had begun to appear.
Back into the reducer, now…swirling…swirling…
An image was swimming into being.
“This is the exciting part,” I said, but James was strangely silent.
“Now we stop it,” I said, plunging the negative into the hypo.
After a fix and a decent rinse, I cleaned up my chemicals, for the Lord abominateth a sloppy chemist.
“Hello!” I exclaimed, holding the negative up to the light. “What’s this?”
“I don’t know,” James said, far too quickly.
I thought I recognized the object, but I didn’t want to jump to conclusions. The image was a negative, of course: Whites were blacks and blacks were whites.
“Let’s make a print and find out,” I suggested.
“No, wait—it’s nothing. I remember now. It’s a photo of my Scout knife.”
Really, James? I thought. A photo of your Scout knife? You’ve just stumbled upon a mutilated corpse on a desolate island, and you choose that particular moment to take a photo of your beloved Scout knife? Come off it. I may be a girl but I’m not a mooncalf.
I was now, as Feely would have said, “on the horns of a dilemma.” Although I wanted desperately to make a print from the negative, I wasn’t so keen on locking myself into a darkroom with a possible killer.
The darkroom was at the back corner of the laboratory and was, as all darkrooms are, light-tight. I would not be able to keep an eye on him for the ten or fifteen minutes it would take to produce a positive image. Could I trust James enough to be left alone in the lab while I carried out the process?
“Come with me,” I said.
In the darkroom, I prepared the developer and fixer. Nothing new here: I had done it a hundred times.
I switched on the safelight and turned off the room light.
We were plunged immediately into a blood-red
gloom. I glanced over my shoulder at James, who was breathing down my neck.
How had the corpse at Steep Holm died? I wondered. Had he been strangled? From behind?
I slipped the negative into the enlarger and made the exposure.
I knew that I was rushing it somewhat but all I needed was a useable image, not a work of art to be hung by the Royal Photographic Society.
James was strangely quiet as I went about my work. The sound of his breathing now seemed to fill the room. Why was he so reluctant to have me make a print? Why had he lied about the photo? Why had he claimed it was no more than a snapshot of his knife?
I immersed the exposed paper in the developer and waited for the chemicals to work their magic. It didn’t take long.
“Look,” I said after just a few seconds. “It’s coming.”
Again, as with the negative, a faint image appeared on the photo paper, then gained rapidly in intensity.
I gasped.
James gasped.
It was a photograph of a knife—and a good one, at that.
“You see?” James said, breathing a hot cloud of relief onto the back of my neck. “I told you so.”
“So you did,” I said, plunging the print into the rinse water, then into the tray of fixer.
I switched on the overhead light with relief.
“Phew!” I said. “It’s hot in here.”
I led the way out into the blessed daylight of the laboratory.
“You didn’t believe me, did you?” James said. “I could tell.”
“Of course I believed you,” I told him. “But I have a scientific mind. My eyes need their own proof.”
I could tell that he was becoming sulky, as boys and men do when they’re caught bluffing. And I ignored him, as girls and women do when they catch them out.
I would wait only for a few minutes before removing the developed print from the fixing bath.
I have to admit that something else was on my mind: Sooner or later, Inspector Hewitt would see my handiwork. It would be entered as evidence. I wanted him to praise my photographic skills.
Silly, perhaps—but sometimes silly is all there is to grasp at.
“Someday, my prints will come,” I said, making a little joke to relieve the tension. It was not a brilliant one, but it did the trick.
“Haw! Haw! Haw!” James exclaimed. He had caught on to it, and his vanity was restored.
Thank heavens he had seen Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
“Now then,” I said. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”
I brought the tray from the darkroom out into the lab.
We both of us leaned over it, our heads together.
“You see,” James said. “I told you—it’s just a knife.”
“Yes,” I said. “A knife. A knife with initials engraved on the handle.”
I pointed, and read them aloud. “O. I.”
Oliver Inchbald.
· NINETEEN ·
I LET MY EYES rise slowly up from the submerged print to meet the gaze of James Marlowe.
There was no need to say a word.
Each of us could see in the eyes of the other that the jig was up.
“You disappoint me, James,” I said. “Have you already forgotten the first law of Scouting? A Scout’s honor is to be trusted. Mr. Wallace will be extremely disappointed in you, as well.”
This was laying it on a bit thick, but it did the trick. I had learned the ten Scout Laws by eavesdropping on the troop meetings in St. Tancred’s parish hall, never dreaming that they would come in so handy.
Tears welled up in his eyes. In an instant he was a boy again, taking—and breaking—his pledges.
“I didn’t mean—” he said. “It was just that—”
I held out my hand, but not in sympathy. “Let’s have it,” I said.
With a sly look, James reached hurriedly into his pocket and dropped something into my palm.
It was the wood-carving tool he had shown me downstairs.
I gave him my most reproachful look and handed it back. “Come off it, James. You know perfectly well what I mean.”
Unable to meet my stony stare, he dug into another pocket and extracted the object I wanted.
The knife was the one in the photo. The engraved initials O.I. proved there could be no doubt about it.
I walked slowly across the room, opening out the two blades, which glinted wickedly in the light from the window.
Was this the weapon that had killed the man on Steep Holm? No point worrying about fingerprints now. If this was the murder weapon, James had already been soiling it with his dabs for years.
I pulled a magnifying glass from the desk drawer, and examined the thing closely.
“Phew!” I said. “Cartier, London. You have exquisite taste, James.”
I could tell at a glance that the case was fourteen-carat gold, the owner’s initials elaborately engraved. I held the knife to my nose and sniffed, then tapped it on my hand.
A couple of dark strands fell out and into my open palm. I sniffed again. “Pipe tobacco,” I said. “And if I recall correctly, you don’t smoke. Right, James?”
James nodded.
“Let me guess…,” I said. Guessing was not permitted in the art of detection, but I was enjoying myself, so hang the rules.
“Correct me if I’m wrong. You came ambling along on your bird hunt, stumbled upon a corpse—or what was left of it—spotted the knife in the grass, picked the thing up, had a squint, saw the maker’s name, and pocketed it.”
James said nothing.
Law number eleven, I thought: A Scout is stubborn.
“Come on, James, I’d have done the same myself. It’s a Cartier, for heaven’s sake!”
I wasn’t sure if I would have done, to be honest, but let’s face it: Gold is gold.
Slowly and grudgingly, James nodded, unable to meet my eye. “I thought no one would know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
But I was barely listening. My thoughts had sprung ahead and left James Marlowe in the dust.
If this was Oliver Inchbald’s pocket knife—and there could be little doubt about it—how had it come to be found in the grass near the body of some as-yet-unknown victim?
One thing was perfectly clear: It was far too convenient.
I remembered what Carla had told me. I could hear her voice in my head: “Auntie Loo said there wasn’t much left of him but a few ribbons, his wallet, and his pipe.”
No mention of a knife.
Of course. There wouldn’t be, would there? James had already pinched it.
And Auntie Loo. Carla’s aunt Louisa. I had almost forgotten about her.
What role had she played in this deadly little drama? In due course, she would be called upon to identify the corpse—or what was left of it.
And so she had.
Wrongly.
Whether it was intentional or a simple mistake on her part—the stress must have been terrible—she had viewed the tattered remains and pronounced them to be those of Oliver Inchbald.
And not long afterwards, she herself would perish in the Mediterranean, in an Aqua-Lung diving tragedy.
“That day on Steep Holm, James…did you see anyone else? Anyone at all?”
It was a shot in the dark, and I knew it.
James shook his head. “I swear I was the only living soul.”
Of course he was. I knew in my heart that he was right. The body had obviously been there for some time before he stumbled upon it.
Long enough for the seagulls of Steep Holm to reduce the corpse to wreckage.
“By the way, James,” I asked. “You told the reporter, ‘I think it was the gulls got him.’ How did you know it was a man?”
James curled his lip as if he were puzzling over a mathematical calculation.
“By the pipe,” he said suddenly.
“And the penknife,” I added.
“Yes, of course—by the penknife.”
“Well, thank you,” I said.
“You’ve been very helpful. I’ll pass this information to Mr. Wallace, and I’m sure he’ll be in touch if there are any further questions.”
“Shall I leave the knife with you?” he asked.
“No, thank you,” I said. “I’ve seen quite enough.”
When he was gone, my thoughts flew like a bird back to Louisa Congreve.
—
“Hello, Mrs. Bannerman? It’s Flavia de Luce again.”
“Flavia! How lovely to hear from you. But it’s Mildred, remember? Compliments of the season, by the way. How’s your latest hobby coming along?”
Mildred was as sharp as a cutthroat razor, and twice as fast.
“Spool knitting? I think I’m getting the hang of it.” I fell into her game without batting an eyelash. “I’ve picked apart one of Father’s old cardigans, and I’m using the yarn to make Christmas wool dollies for Feely and Daffy.”
A somewhat exasperated click! on the line announced that Miss Runciman had thrown in her hand.
In spite of that, I did not let down my guard. “I’m coming up to London today. I’d like to make another visit to your friend, the canary breeder. What was her name…Congreve? I’m thinking of surprising Aunt Felicity with a young bird for Christmas. It was such a pity about her Orpheus, wasn’t it? She adores the Belgian birds, but I might surprise her with one of the German singers from the Hartz Mountains or the Tyrol.”
All that I knew about canaries had been learned from several forced viewings of a stale instructional film that was dragged out regularly for our church fêtes. It was called A Star is Hatched: Keeping Canaries for Fun and Profit.
“Wonderful. She’ll be so happy. I shall look forward to seeing you later, then.”
“Oh, and Mildred—” I added, “I’d like to visit that other gentleman—the one in Fleet Street—about a cage.”
“Finbar Joyce, you mean?”
“Roger. Roger. Over and out,” I said.
I couldn’t resist.
—
“Dogger,” I said, “I’m going up to London again. I shall be leaving straightaway. Mrs. Bannerman is meeting me, so you mustn’t worry. I shall be back at the usual time.”
“Of course, miss,” Dogger said. “Shall I ring for the taxi?”
—
As the train rolled through the winter landscape, I reflected upon what a true stick Dogger was. As an old soldier, nothing surprised him. He had quite willingly taught me how to palm the queen of spades when playing Black Lady with Feely and Daffy, and he had not begged off when I had asked him to help me extract, for a practical joke involving Feely’s Eau de Violet scent, certain of the volatile terpines from the caudal gland of a dead badger I had found in the woods.