by Alan Bradley
Truly a gentleman of the old school.
As we approached London, the winter landscape shifted subtly, mile by mile, from the white of angels’ wings to a relentless gray muck. It was hard to believe that Christmas was now only days away.
True to her word, Mildred was waiting for me on the platform.
“I have a taxicab waiting,” she said. “Cranwell Gardens awaits us.”
—
The street was indistinguishable from any other in Kensington: Tall white Georgian houses gazed down haughtily with closed faces upon a narrow street.
“If we’re not out in ten minutes, come back in an hour,” Mildred told the cabbie.
“Right you are,” he said, tipping his cap. We climbed out of the taxi and stood on the pavement.
Ionic capitals stared like a parliament of owls from the pillared face of number 47. A few steps up from the street found us on the porch. Mildred already had a key in her hand.
“I believe it’s flats,” she said. “But if it isn’t, we’ll pretend we blundered into the wrong house. They do all look alike, don’t they?”
She tried the door and found it unlocked; I followed her into a narrow hall with three doors, a staircase, and an aspidistra that seemed in need of artificial respiration.
The place had a stuffy smell, in which I could distinguish woodworm, old sofas, and tinned soup.
Mildred was right: The house was divided into five flats, and number 47 was right here at the bottom of the stair.
Mildred knocked. We waited. She knocked again. Nothing.
“Would you like to do the honors, or shall I?” she whispered.
I signaled her to be my guest.
She selected a hooklike wire on her keychain and applied it to the lock, and before you could say “housebreakers” we were inside.
If I had thought my own lock-picking skills to be excellent, Mildred’s were divine. Saint Peter, I thought, had better keep his eye on the Pearly Gates.
The room in which we found ourselves was unremarkable. Table, chairs, sofa, dresser, and desk seemed all to have been stamped from the same mold.
Mildred eased open a door that opened towards the back of the flat and peeked inside.
“Ditto,” she said. “Ugh.”
“It’s as if no one lives here,” I whispered. “As if it’s waiting for a boarder to turn up.”
“Spot on,” she said. “This is not the flat of a woman who taught Albert Einstein to tap-dance, or whatever it was.”
“She smoked his pipe,” I said, remembering Carla’s words. “Maybe they redecorated since she died.”
“I think not,” Mildred said. “This furniture looks to have been bought as a job lot in Tottenham Court Road. Late 1930s, I should say at a guess—all cheap veneer and scrollwork. Might as well have been knocked together by Cousin Claude in the cellar.”
I could see what she meant.
“Could we have the wrong flat?”
“Check the phone,” Mildred said. “Is that the number you called?”
I walked to the desk and glanced at the telephone. Its number, Western 1778, was printed on the dial.
“Yes,” I said.
“Are you sure?”
“Quite sure,” I said.
How could I forget 1778? It was the year that the great Antoine Lavoisier discovered oxygen and gave it its name.
There could be no doubt that this was the flat I had telephoned. Someone had certainly been here within the past few days: Miss Letitia Greene, who had picked up the handset and talked to me about the sweepstakes ticket held by her distant relative, the late Louisa Congreve.
Miss Letitia Greene, who had been a beneficiary to Louisa Congreve’s will.
“There must be papers somewhere,” I said. “People can’t live without papers.”
But a thorough search of the flat failed to turn up a single scrap. The place had the look of a film set, where all the furnishings were simply for show: the sad belongings of make-believe people.
Perhaps that was the point.
“Do you suppose this could be a front?” I asked.
Mildred laughed. “A bolt-hole? You might have a point there. It’s traditional, isn’t it, for those who have something to hide—such as Sherlock Holmes—to maintain a place for grabbing forty winks, or for putting on or taking off their various disguises?”
“Do you suppose Miss Greene might be a private detective?”
Mildred stroked her chin with a long forefinger. “A private detective,” she said, “…or a public criminal.”
I shivered. Something about the place was giving me the heebie-jeebies.
Snooping through someone else’s belongings is generally quite invigorating, but a place with an empty clothes-press, empty dresser drawers, and empty cupboards left me feeling somehow on edge.
“There’s not much to go on,” I said, looking round uneasily.
“No,” Mildred said. “But not much is much better than nothing.”
She saw the puzzled look on my face.
“That maidenhair fern, for instance,” she said, pointing. “One can see at a glance that it’s been well cared for. Note the lush growth. The maidenhairs, as you know, require coddling. Otherwise they have a tendency to sulk.”
She reached up and, having poked a finger into the pot, held it out for my examination. “Dry,” she said. “Not watered for several days. Conclusion? Householder left in a hurry. The fact that she cleared out her clothing lock, stock, and barrel might mean that she had no intention of returning. I’m assuming it’s a she, since men on their own don’t generally grow ferns.”
“The bird has flown,” I said.
“Precisely. The question is not Whence? but Whither? Let us gird up our loins, Flavia, and do likewise.”
The taxi was waiting at the curb, the driver craning his neck in all directions.
“These ’ere traffic wardens come at yer like carrion crows,” he said as we pulled away. “Oughtn’t to be allowed. Where to?”
“Fleet Street,” Mildred told him. “The Telegraph.”
“Thought as much,” the driver said.
· TWENTY ·
NOT FAR FROM ST. Paul’s Cathedral, the office of The Daily Telegraph was in a part of the city flattened by the Blitz. Even after ten years, blackened bombsites still remained scattered round the church like rotting teeth in the mouth of some ancient duchess.
We stared out at the passing narrow streets, silenced at the sight.
With a sudden swerve to the curb, our driver pulled up with a jerk and stared at Mildred in his mirror, waiting for her to pay the fare.
“Thank you, Bert,” she said, handing him a couple of notes. “You are truly a pearl among cabbies.”
Bert fought to hold back radiance, then tipped his cap.
We paused for a moment on the pavement, looking up at The Telegraph’s towering pillars.
“Designed by the same person who did the pylons for Sydney Harbor Bridge,” Mildred said with a sniff, and I nodded knowingly.
Inside, we asked directions and fought our way through hordes of people in a maze of brightly lighted corridors. The racket from regiments of typewriters and armies of shoes shuffling on marble was overwhelming.
“Here we are,” Mildred said, and tapped lightly with her knuckles on a glass-windowed door.
There was no answer.
She tapped again and then opened the door.
“Finbar Joyce?” she asked.
I had somehow imagined Finbar Joyce as an elderly, rumpled reporter in a reeking, wrinkled mackintosh with a cigarette in his mouth and a notebook and pencil clutched in his nicotine-stained fingers.
Instead, he turned out to be a large, youngish man in flannels, with an orange and blue silk cravat tucked into a creamy Fair Isle pullover. He looked more like a wealthy fisherman on holiday than a Fleet Street reporter. The only signs of dissipation were the faint red rims of his eyes and the curve of his belly, which reminded me of a sail full of win
d.
“Mildred Bannerman,” Mildred said. “We spoke on the telephone.”
“Ah, beloved Miss Bannerman,” Finbar said, without getting up from behind his desk—without even looking, in fact. “The Inchbald affair.”
He waved us to a couple of criminally hard-looking wooden chairs.
“You knew him, I believe,” Mildred said.
“I reported on his death,” Finbar said. “I should hardly say I knew him, no. Rubbed elbows with the Great Man once or twice, perhaps, in the clubs. Raised a glass or two on small occasions. The world of books and newspapers is not a large one—quite the contrary to what you may think.”
Although he was speaking to Mildred, he was looking closely at me.
“This is my friend Flavia de Luce,” Mildred said.
“Ah! Sylvia Silence, the girl detective.” Finbar grinned. “I know you by reputation of course. Your fabled name has crossed this desk on more than one occasion. The Case of the Purloined Penny Black, for instance. If I recall correctly, His Majesty the King was thinking of making you a Knight of the Garter.”
I blushed. I did not much care for such personal talk coming from the mouths of strangers.
“About Oliver Inchbald,” I said.
“Just so,” Finbar said. “I expect you were fattened in the nursery on Hobbyhorse House.”
It was an insult, and I recognized it as one instantly. I was not going to let this self-important scribbler get away.
“I was, Mr. Joyce,” I said. “And I suspect you were, also.”
“By the river Liffey, I sat down and wept!” Finbar exclaimed. “Touché! Hallelujah! You’ve smuggled in an unexploded bomb, Miss Bannerman. A veritable UXB in pigtails. More than I had bargained for.”
What had he bargained for? I wondered. Hadn’t Mildred said that the man would sell the souls of everyone in sight for a couple of quid and a pint of Guinness? What had she offered him in exchange for dishing up the lowdown on Oliver Inchbald?
“Mrs. Bannerman,” Mildred corrected him.
I beamed at her. We were on the same team.
“You were sent to the scene of his death?” I asked.
“Assigned,” Finbar corrected, “by old Bartleby, my editor. Dispatched, as it were. Thence wafted on the swift wheels of the Great Western Railway to Weston-super-Mare, where I proceeded to—”
“Tell us about the corpse,” I interrupted, at the risk of seeming obnoxious. I was growing tired of listening to this windbag.
“Ah, the corpse,” he said, and his face grew suddenly solemn as he drew in a deep breath.
“Bones, flesh, and feathers—as if an angel had crashed.”
Now, this was reporting! I couldn’t recall if angels actually had flesh, but otherwise this was journalism with real juice. I allowed my mouth to fall open in appreciation.
“But you didn’t say so in your article,” I said.
“No. One is not allowed a soul when the Proprietor is paying for the ink.”
I felt suddenly sorry for Finbar Joyce.
“The Proprietor?” I asked.
“Lord Ruffley. He who holds all of us in the palm of his hand, there to be fed like feasting flies—or flicked off into oblivion.”
“You are being very honest, Mr. Joyce,” Mildred said quietly.
Finbar’s eyes swept slowly round to her, like a lighthouse in the night. “There are occasions, Mrs. Bannerman,” he said, “when honesty is the only option left.”
“Are you telling us that Lord Ruffley intervened in your reporting of Inchbald’s death?”
“I am telling you that Fleet Street is a harsh mistress. No more, no less.”
“As I well remember,” Mildred said.
As in a blinding flash I recalled that Mildred had been subjected, as few humans before her, to the full glare of the newspapers’ headlights. As a convicted murderess, she had been shot and shamed by a hundred thousand cameras, all of her newspaper photos chosen to make her look cruel, haunted, gaunt, and guilty.
But why was she telling him this? It made no sense. I looked from her face to his, as if to find the answer.
“You know each other!” I exclaimed as the light dawned. “You’re old pals!”
That whole business of “Miss Bannerman” and “Mr. Joyce” had been a sham—a show put on for my benefit.
Why, then, had they suddenly dropped it?
“There was a time,” Mildred said, “when Finbar was…was…”
“A lifeline in a stormy sea,” Finbar said, grinning. “A rock…a rocket in the night…a comforter…a warm blanket…”
“Stow it, Finbar,” Mildred said, and we all laughed.
Now that their secret was out, the room became a warmer place: so much so that I removed my coat and hung it with Finbar’s on the nearby stand.
“What was he really like?” I asked. “Oliver Inchbald, I mean.”
“Glossy. Slick. ‘Brittle’ is the word that’s sometimes used. A walking mirror: a piece of cold glass that reflects all that it sees without ever giving of itself.”
“A bully?” I asked.
“Ah! You’ve heard that, too.”
“Who loved him?”
Finbar laughed—a short, barking noise like a fox. “What a question! Not the usual ‘Who hated him?’ asked by the men in wrinkled suits with a whiff of handcuffs and the river about them. Look after this girl, Mildred. She’s a menace to murderers.”
A menace to murderers? I quite liked that. If I ever have a business card I shall have that motto printed on it with an image of a never-sleeping eye.
“Was Mr. Inchbald murdered?” I asked.
“Who knows?” Finbar said. “The autopsy was inconclusive. The body had been too long on the island before it was discovered.”
“And the seagulls?” I asked.
“There was nothing to contradict such a theory,” Finbar said, “except that it had never happened before, which doesn’t make it an impossibility. The idea was actually floated by the Proprietor.”
“Lord Ruffley? Why?”
“It’s the way of the world,” Finbar said. “A famous man suffering a heart attack on an island sells thousands of papers, perhaps. The same man pecked to death by maddened seagulls sells millions.”
“That’s disgusting,” I said.
“Welcome to our wicked world, Flavia de Luce,” Finbar said. “Enjoy your stay.”
“Who loved him?” I asked, repeating my question.
“Well…nobody,” Finbar said. “Except perhaps that woman at his publishers. What was her name—?”
“Congreve,” I said. “Louisa Congreve.”
“Congreve! Yes, that’s the one. She was his amanuensis, his dogsbody, and his whipping boy, all rolled into one. Or so it seemed to me.”
How odd, I thought. Louisa Congreve hadn’t sounded like the type to be anybody’s dogsbody. And whipping boys were not noted for teaching the tango—or whatever it was—to Winston Churchill.
Or were they?
Could there be shadier sides of life of which I was not yet aware?
I didn’t like to think that there were—but at the same time I didn’t like to think that there weren’t.
By now I was feeling quite benevolent towards Finbar Joyce. Perhaps I had misjudged him. I found myself on the verge of blurting out that the body he had viewed on Steep Holm was not that of Oliver Inchbald. But I managed somehow to hold my tongue.
Detection is a game of cards, I had already decided. It is not necessary to show your hand to the other players—such as Inspector Hewitt, for instance. Not even to Mildred. For some reason which I could not yet explain, I hadn’t confided in her all that I had found out at Thornfield Chase.
I was thinking this when Finbar got up from his desk, looked out the window, then drifted to the door, which he opened and, after a glance outside, quietly closed again.
“Listen,” he told us. “I oughtn’t to be doing this, but since we’re all hail-fellows-well-met—and as long as you keep quie
t about it, at least until the papers are on the street—”
“You have our solemn word,” Mildred promised, without consulting me.
“It’s just come through this morning. The body found on Steep Holm was not that of Oliver Inchbald.”
He looked from one of us to the other to judge the impact.
I’ve learned in my short life that surprise is the most difficult of all the emotions to fake. By contrast, happiness, fear, anger, disgust, and sadness are a piece of cake.
But surprise takes some real acting skill. One must avoid shooting the eyebrows up in inverted Vs, like a circus clown, or throwing up the hands, palms outward, or widening the eyes until they are, like the dog’s in the fairy tale, as big as saucers.
Letting the mouth fall open is the mark of an amateur—even though I’ve occasionally done it myself for variety.
Instead, one must begin with a barely perceptible blink, followed, after a count of three, by another, this one more noticeable. Each of these must be accompanied by an inhalation of air, the first through the nose and the second through the mouth.
Only then is the hand allowed to make a slight movement towards the throat, but it must be stopped forcefully before it has gone half a foot.
“I beg your pardon?” I said.
Making a person repeat their surprising statement robs it of some of its power; gives you a little more time to go through your rigmarole.
“The body found on Steep Holm was not that of Oliver Inchbald,” Finbar repeated.
“No!” I said.
“It’s true.” Finbar nodded, and he seemed gratified by my response. “Someone in the pathologist’s office had an early pint with one of our lads and—well, by this evening it will have circled the world.”
I shook my head, as if in disbelief, and stared at him expectantly, like a dog waiting for the third biscuit.
“Turns out to be the remains of a tramp named Walter Glover. Spent his life driving wooden stakes into remote places to mark the spots to which the Holy Ghost and little men from Mars had both descended.