Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew'd

by Alan Bradley

  “At any rate, they didn’t find his marker on Steep Holm until a couple of days ago, so that there was no reason to connect him with the place. His family didn’t really bother keeping track of him, which explains why he was never reported missing.”

  “Men from Mars,” Mildred said. “It is very sad, isn’t it?”

  Finbar nodded. “Mr. Wells has much to answer for,” he said.

  As we put on our coats and made ready for the cold outdoors, Finbar stood up behind his desk.

  “Farewell, fair Flavia,” he said. “I shall mark this day with the traditional white pebble, so that in my latter years—”

  “What about the pipe?” I interrupted.

  “Pipe?” Finbar said, surprised.

  “Yes,” I said. “The pipe with O.I., or something similar, engraved on the stem.”

  Carla and James Marlowe had both mentioned the pipe that had been found beside the ravaged body. I’ll admit I was speculating about the monogram, but a man with money who monograms one thing will likely monogram everything in sight.

  “How could you possibly know that?” Finbar said, whitening noticeably. “Inspector Cavendish removed it from the scene with his own hands. Its very existence has been a most closely guarded secret. I was in on it myself only because I happened to be there.

  “How could you possibly know?” he asked again.

  “A lucky guess,” I told him.

  —

  “You really oughtn’t to do it,” Mildred said outside as she hailed a taxicab. “But I suppose you can’t help it, can you? I was much the same at your age.”

  I bit my lip visibly as a signal of remorse, but said nothing. We drove to the railway station in silence.

  As I stepped out of the taxi, Mildred reached across and took my hand.

  “Good luck,” she said, and I gave her fingers a squeeze.

  This time, there was no Dogger on the train, and I was left to sit alone, staring out at the ever-darkening countryside.

  At the last stop before Doddingsley a man and his young daughter came into the carriage, arms loaded to overflowing with prettily wrapped gifts. When they had settled, he began to explain to her in great detail how the surface tension of water kept certain insects from sinking.

  And I felt suddenly as if I had been plunged into a vat of sadness.

  I thought of Father, of course. Without meaning to, I had been keeping him at arm’s length in my mind for far too many days.

  Why? I wondered. Was it for his sake or for mine?

  Why didn’t I take a taxi to Hinley and to the hospital? Why didn’t I barge in and demand to see my father? It wasn’t as if I hadn’t done such things before.

  It was a failure on my part.

  A failure of what?

  Of love?

  Of trust?

  Of understanding?

  When it came to thoughts such as these, my mind became a tiny boat tossed on a vast, dark sea. With no compass to guide me—no stars, no oars, no sail, not even a bailing bucket—I was at the mercy of God…or Fate…or Chance…or Mrs. McCoo in the Sky, or whoever it was in cosmic charge of things.

  At such times I could only retreat for safety into the Castle of Chemistry: the only hiding place in the universe where relationships would never—could never—change.

  · TWENTY-ONE ·

  I SHOVED A NOTE under Dogger’s door, telling him I was safely home, then went to my room and shot the bolt. I fished out a stack of gramophone records from under the bed and sorted through them, blowing off the dust. The one I wanted was, of course, as always, at the bottom of the pile.

  Pavane pour une infante défunte, or Pavane for a Dead Princess, is a piano piece by Maurice Ravel, and I wished to hear it because it suited my soggy mood.

  Years ago, when I was younger, Feely had forced me to lie on a sofa in the drawing room with my eyes closed and a lily in my folded hands as she played the Pavane at a glacial pace from beginning to end.

  “If you move so much as an eyelash,” she had told me, “we shall have to start over from the beginning.”

  I wound up the machine, dropped the needle onto the record, and, as the sad music began to ooze from the horn, stood on my head on the bed with my heels against the wall and began to organize my thoughts.

  I had less than five minutes before the music ended.

  I would first gather the known facts, and they were these:

  I had discovered the dead body of Oliver Inchbald, who was living under the name of Roger Sambridge, in his cottage at Thornfield Chase. The author had apparently staged his own death on the remote isle of Steep Holm in the Bristol Channel. How he had done so, and with whose assistance—even the reason why—remained to be discovered, but it seemed reasonable to assume that he had happened upon a dead and badly bird-mauled body while on a hiking trip, and seen at once the opportunity to vanish without a trace.

  He was, after all, an imaginative inventor of tales, wasn’t he? The idea could have occurred to him in a flash. All he needed to do was rummage through the tattered clothing to make sure that no means of personal identification remained, and then dump his own belongings beside the body. It was all too easy.

  It was the woodworking tool—the firmer—that gave the game away. The firmer was the straw that broke the camel’s back: the unnecessary detail.

  Oliver had been so eager to have the body identified as his own that he had gone too far. How clever he must have thought himself! Who else would think to leave a token of some obscure hobby, such as wood-carving?

  How lucky he had been to have had it with him!

  He hadn’t counted, of course, on the acquisitive James Marlowe happening upon the scene and pocketing two key pieces of evidence.

  The skull, as I had observed from James Marlowe’s photographs, had been toothless. The tramp, Walter Glover, had evidently worn false teeth, which Oliver Inchbald must have removed from the remains, in order to foil identification.

  I couldn’t help wondering idly what he had done with them. It seemed more than likely he had ditched the dentures somewhere in a rubbish bin, and that they were now in some unknown tip for eternity, or until unearthed by some future archaeologist.

  As I had learned from my own inspection of his body, Oliver himself had possessed a full set of perfect—and quite likely very expensive—teeth.

  Had Inspector Cavendish of the Somerset Constabulary not wondered why or how the seagulls had managed to extract a perfectly serviceable set of teeth from the famous author’s mouth? Perhaps he had, but was still keeping that curious fact as the ace up his sleeve—even though several years had passed.

  The possibility still existed, of course, that James Marlowe had pocketed the teeth as a grisly trophy, as he had done with the pocketknife. For all I knew, there was a Boy Scout badge called Relic Collector.

  Stranger things have happened, as I know from personal experience.

  Who else had been at the scene of the discovery?

  Had Carla’s aunt Louisa been summoned to the barren rocks to have a squint, or had her identification of the corpse taken place in a proper morgue, with sliding slabs of stainless steel and dramatically pulled-back sheets and so forth?

  How, when it came to that, had she managed to identify the body—other than by its possessions—when there was so little left of it?

  Perhaps the police had decided that she was the only one of Inchbald’s family and acquaintances with a strong enough stomach to view the remains.

  It was too late to know. Auntie Loo had since joined Walter Glover and Oliver Inchbald somewhere in the Great Beyond, where they were probably looking down at this very moment, nudging one another in the ribs and cackling at my puzzlement.

  And then, of course, there was Finbar Joyce. Finbar had gone at once by train to Weston-super-Mare and then by boat to Steep Holm. By the time he arrived, the remains would have been under police guard, making souvenir hunting impossible.

  Had other reporters been on the scene? They must
have been, but Finbar, having received an early tip-off from his master, Lord Ruffley, must surely have been the first.

  What similarities had there been between the body on Steep Holm and that of Oliver Inchbald, alias Roger Sambridge?

  Very few, at first sight: One was not much more than a bundle of bones on a rock and the other a fully fleshed man hung up on a door: a healthy-enough-looking person except—of course—that he was dead.

  I allowed my mind to return to Hilary Inchbald, the dead man’s son. He had certainly been in the neighborhood—at the Thirteen Drakes, in fact—at the time of his father’s death.

  Or had he been even closer? It was obvious that he was more than just a casual guest at the home of Lillian Trench, less than a stone’s throw from the death scene.

  If anyone had a motive for killing Oliver Inchbald, it had to be his son who, as a boy, had been so horribly abused by his father. It would, in a complicated way, be tit for tat, or a case of turnabout’s fair play.

  And what about Carla?

  Other than the fact that the vicar and his wife had suggested she go apologize for mutilating the misericords, I could still not explain how her personal copy of Hobbyhorse House came to be in the bedroom of its dead author.

  The only reason that even remotely made sense was unthinkable.

  Even by me.

  And then, of course—inevitably—there was Lillian Trench herself, whose name kept bobbing to the surface like a rotten egg in ice water.

  And at that very moment, the Dead Princess ended. The phonograph needle went skrork-skrork-skrorking at the end of its groove, and I allowed my legs to fall with a thump down onto the bed.

  It is a well-known fact that standing on one’s head stimulates not only the brain, but also the digestive system, and—to put it delicately—I heard the sudden “Tally-ho!” of nature.

  I clattered down the stairs to the small closet on the landing and seized the knob.

  The door was locked.

  “ ’Oo is it?” called a startled voice from inside.

  It was Mrs. Mullet.

  “Flavia,” I said.

  “You mustn’t come in, dear,” she said. “I’m ’avin’ a vowel movement.”

  “All right,” I said. “Sorry.”

  One never knows quite what to say in such situations, but some of us have discovered a strategy that works as well as any.

  “I need to know about Lillian Trench,” I called out in much too loud a voice, as if she were in Africa rather than on the other side of a thinly paneled door. “How do you know she’s a witch?”

  There was a slight pause, and then Mrs. Mullet said, “ ’Cause I ’eard it from my friend Mrs. Waller, that’s ’ow.”

  “And how does Mrs. Waller know?” I persisted.

  “ ’Cause she ’eard it from the woman’s own lips, that’s ’ow.”

  “Lillian Trench told Mrs. Waller she was a witch? I mean that Lillian herself—not Mrs. Waller—was a witch?”

  “That’s right, dear,” Mrs. Mullet said. “Now walk away, please. I’m comin’ out.”

  It is from small encounters such as these that great feats of detection are born.

  —

  Having made my ablutions—as Feely says to Dieter when she’s trying to throw him off the scent—I made my way downstairs.

  Although it was now well after dark, there were things still to be done. I simply could not allow Inspector Hewitt to get there before me and take all the credit.

  But first, as they say in the cinema, I needed to make a clean getaway. The last thing I needed was to have that twerp Undine dogging my footsteps.

  I needn’t have worried. The house lay in perfect silence.

  To tell the truth, I was enjoying this new freedom to come and go as I pleased, and the slight sense of danger produced by prowling round the village alone in the dark simply added spice to the occasion, like curry powder to dumplings.

  “Come on, Gladys,” I whispered, easing open the greenhouse door. “There’s skulduggery at the crossroads. The plot is thickening and our services are craved.”

  —

  The wind was still well up, polishing the icy road to the glossy sheen of black crystal. The white, bright winter moon shone down, transforming the familiar countryside into a fantastic kingdom of cold glass.

  Freezing air is conducive to clear thinking, and as I rode, I reviewed in my mind the implications of Mrs. Mullet’s remark.

  Why would Lillian Trench put it about that she was a witch? According to Mrs. M, she had told Mrs. Waller that in so many words. Volunteered it, so to speak.

  A woman living alone in a country cottage would hardly risk the glare of village gossip without a powerful reason for doing so.

  There could be only one explanation: She wanted to frighten people off.

  And why, I asked myself, would she want to do that?

  To keep them away, of course. There was no other logical answer.

  And why would she want to keep them away?

  I thought I knew.

  But the only way to be certain was to confront the woman herself. A single question would do the trick. I would know in an instant from her reaction if I were right or wrong.

  In spite of the ice, I took my hands from Gladys’s handlebars for a moment and gave myself a good hug.

  I was proud of myself.

  Father would be proud of me, too.

  As I was passing St. Tancred’s, I dismounted and walked Gladys across the road. The surface was especially slick at this point and I didn’t want to risk a tumble. The de Luce family fortunes were at a low enough ebb already. A broken arm or a broken leg—or even worse—would be the last straw.

  As I picked my way across the icy surface, a pair of headlights swept the road to my right, towards the village high street. A car was approaching from the east.

  I don’t know what made me do it, but I picked up Gladys bodily and carried her quickly through the gate and behind the stone wall of the churchyard, where I crouched, scarcely daring to breathe.

  To be spotted and questioned would be to fail. I simply couldn’t risk it.

  As it approached, the car slowed as it shifted down through its gears, and my heart began to sink. Peering out between the loose stones on top of the wall, I could see that it was Inspector Hewitt’s familiar blue Vauxhall.

  Had he spotted me? Had his headlights picked me out? I couldn’t be sure.

  I huddled down in the darkness, trying to make myself as small as possible.

  The Vauxhall hadn’t come to a complete stop, but was still crunching slowly, carefully, inch by inch across the slick ice.

  Surely they could not see me in the darkness of the churchyard.

  I risked a peek.

  Although the car had gone too far past for me to identify the driver, the drawn, white faces of the two passengers in its backseat were clearly illuminated by the moonlight.

  Hilary Inchbald and Lillian Trench.

  Both of them looked like death warmed over.

  After what seemed like an eternity, the Vauxhall, having waddled its way slowly across the treacherous patch of ice, accelerated towards Hinley.

  “Blast it all!” I said. My opportunity was lost.

  There could be no questioning now of the would-be witch. Inspector Hewitt had beaten me to the punch.

  It was clear that he had come to his own conclusions about the death of Oliver Inchbald—alias Roger Sambridge—and had made his arrests.

  In spite of myself, I couldn’t resist a little smile.

  There was nothing left for me to do now but to return to Buckshaw and read about it in the morning papers.

  Did the inspector know the half of it? I wondered.

  I would have to wait upon the Hinley Chronicle to find out.

  As I rounded the gate, a faint sound came to my ears, blown on the wind.

  Something was groaning behind me in the churchyard, and it wasn’t the wind. Whether it came from a human throat I could
not tell.

  I am not normally nervous in country churchyards; in fact some of my most pleasant hours have been spent among the dead, who are, after all, harmless.

  Why, then, was my hair suddenly standing on end? Why was every nerve in my body shrieking at me to run?

  Was it the dark, tattered cloud which went suddenly scudding across the face of the moon? Was it my childhood memory of tales of terror told to me by Daffy before I could even walk? Edgar Allan Poe can have a powerful effect on the mind of a child.

  The wind moaned among the tombstones—hummed horribly among the bells in the tower overhead.

  The very air was electric. A storm was rapidly approaching. The moon vanished and reappeared—vanished again.

  The noise came again—closer this time—different than before.

  The sound of singing.

  Singing is not out of place at a church, especially two days before Christmas, but the church and the vicarage were both in darkness. This was no last-minute choir practice.

  Could it be Christmas carolers, I wondered, making their way from door to door in the village, in hopes of a bowl of hot cider or something stronger?

  But no, this was the sound of a single human voice, and it was coming clearly now to my ears, carried crisply upon the cold air by the north wind.

  “Hark the horn, the sound of winter

  Hark the hunter on the hill…”

  The song was the Horn Dance. And I recognized the voice.

  “Carla?” I called. “Is that you?”

  There was no reply. Only the weeping of the wind in the winter churchyard.

  “Carla?” I called again, louder this time. I didn’t want to risk arousing Cynthia and the vicar, although the chance seemed slight. They would be too exhausted from their pre-Christmas labors to hear anything less than the arrival of the Apocalypse.

  Besides, the wind was whipping Carla’s voice away to the south and away from the vicarage. She was unlikely to be heard by anyone but me.

  “It’s all right, Carla,” I called. “Don’t be frightened. It’s me, Flavia.”