Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew'd

by Alan Bradley

  “Became a witch,” Inspector Hewitt finished for me.

  I hugged myself. I couldn’t help it.

  For a moment we were partners, the inspector and I, and what a warm feeling it was! And for a moment, I wanted to share everything. I didn’t care if he took the credit.

  “Things went along well enough at first,” I said. “But they went sour quite suddenly. Last summer, I should say.”

  “Why last summer, particularly?” Inspector Hewitt asked. He couldn’t hide the hint of a smile.

  “Because that’s when he suddenly began paying visits to the Goose and Garter, in East Finching. The barmaid, Rosie, described him as ‘morose.’ ”

  “Any ideas why?”

  “Well,” I said, “I suspect it was because Hilary had turned up. As I’ve said, Louisa was like a mother to him—very protective. She and Oliver must have had words.”

  “Must have?” the inspector asked, with a sharp look.

  “Might have,” I corrected myself. “Sorry.”

  Blast! I had been too cocky for my own good. I needed to draw attention—discreetly, of course—to the excellence of my deductive skills.

  “As I see it,” I said, “Louisa had gone up to London the day of Oliver Inchbald’s death—perhaps to bring back some papers, since her flat was stripped bare. Did she know he was dead before she left? I don’t know. She told me I had been seen leaving Thornfield Chase, but perhaps it was Carla who saw me. I believe she left Carla alone in the cottage, and that Carla decided to go across to Thornfield Chase—both to apologize for her vandalism at the church and to ask Oliver to sign her copy of Hobbyhorse House. She found him suspended in that arthritis frame of his. He asked her to sing for him—possibly to reassure her; to keep her from being alarmed.

  “But when she did, he laughed at her. Laughed so hard that something slipped. He became trapped in his frame. He couldn’t reach the release. He begged her to free him. But he had laughed at her. She walked out and left him there, not caring if he died.”

  “Steady on,” the inspector said.

  I had not realized that my fingernails were slicing into my palms, and that my knuckles were bone white.

  “Was it murder?” I asked. “Will Carla be charged with murder?”

  “I can’t say,” Inspector Hewitt said.

  “Can’t say, or won’t say?” I asked.

  I couldn’t hide my look of scorn.

  “Listen, Flavia,” he said. “We are both of us bound by the same great restrictions. The Law demands that you tell me everything you know, and yet at the same time, the same Law demands of me that I tell you nothing.”

  “It isn’t fair,” I said, trying not to pout.

  “Of course it isn’t fair,” Inspector Hewitt agreed. “But it isn’t meant to be. It’s worth remembering that some of the greatest things in life are completely unfair.”

  He waited for a moment, fiddling with his notebook, giving me time to unruffle my feathers.

  Which reminded me of Esmeralda. That hadn’t been fair, had it? And yet her death had probably saved Father’s life.

  “I see what you mean,” I said. “And you’re quite right.”

  “Getting back to Louisa Congreve,” Inspector Hewitt said. “You telephoned her at her flat in London…”

  “Yes,” I said. “She pretended to be a Letitia Greene. I pretended to be a representative of the Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstake. I’m sorry—I shouldn’t have. But I knew that thinking the ticket a winner—whether it was hers or Oliver Inchbald’s—would lure her back to Thornfield Chase. And it did. When I went there next morning she had just been dropped off. I saw the tracks of the turning car. I was quite certain, by then, that Louisa and Lillian Trench were one and the same person.”

  Privately, I was thinking that I should simply have followed the cat across the road. It would have been so much simpler; would have saved so much trouble.

  The inspector, meanwhile, made another note, but said nothing.

  It was all about identities, wasn’t it? Oliver Inchbald was living under the name of Roger Sambridge; Louisa Congreve under the name of Lillian Trench. Even Hilary Inchbald had registered at the Thirteen Drakes as Mr. Hilary.

  Had any of it changed anything?

  When you come right down to it, we are each of us our own creations.

  Who, really, am I? Is Flavia de Luce the person everyone thinks she is? Is she who I think she is?

  We never know, I suppose, until we become someone else.

  It’s sad, I think, that Oliver Inchbald and Louisa Congreve had been so unhappy as to kill themselves—in a manner of speaking—and to invent new lives which turned out to be every bit as miserable as the old ones they had taken such pains to obliterate.

  “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” as Daffy was so fond of saying.

  But would it?

  Did names matter? Would I have been a better or a happier person if Harriet and Father had baptized me Brünnhilde? Or called me Cordelia?

  “What’s in a name?” Inspector Hewitt said suddenly.

  I’d almost forgotten he was there.

  “I beg your pardon,” I said, borrowing the words of the fictitious Letitia Greene. “I’m sorry. I was woolgathering.”

  “I was thinking of the inscription you said you found in Lillian Trench’s copy of Hobbyhorse House. To Elsie, I believe it said.”

  “Yes: To Elsie, with love and yarning. It’s so obvious, isn’t it?”

  “Not to me it isn’t,” Inspector Hewitt said. “Would you care to enlighten me? Who the devil is Elsie?”

  “Elsie is L.C. Louisa Congreve. Elsie must have been his pet name for her. To throw people off the scent, you see.”

  “Good lord!” the inspector said.

  “They were very good at camouflage,” I said. “I suppose they needed to be. That whole witchcraft business, for instance. She even tried to scare me off. ‘Mind the Auditories,’ she told me, as if there were trolls in her carpets. And I almost fell for it.”

  The inspector smiled an absentminded smile.

  “And with Louisa Congreve on the scene,” I said, “I knew that Carla couldn’t be far away. I had already caught a whiff of her throat spray in the bedroom at Thornfield Chase, but of course I wasn’t able to make the connection until I saw her use the same atomizer when she sang at the Horn Dance.”

  “Well done,” Inspector Hewitt said.

  “Sulfurous acid,” I explained, not wanting to let this moment of glory pass. “H2SO3.”

  “Yes, I seem to remember that from my college days,” the inspector said, and there was for a moment an unbreakable bond between us: the eternal bond of chemistry.

  I glowed with all the fire of a newborn galaxy.

  The inspector closed his notebook, put away his Biro, and got to his feet.

  “Come along,” he said. “It’s late and the wind is bitter. I’ll give you a lift home.”

  We said our goodbyes and offered our thanks to Cynthia, who seemed to be all hands and apron.

  “Merry Christmas,” she said. I had forgotten all about it.

  The snow was beginning to drift among the tombstones as we made our way to the car, the wind pushing at our backs.

  “How are you bearing up?” Inspector Hewitt asked suddenly. “It’s been quite a day.”

  I knew he was referring to my encounter with Carla.

  It was suddenly more important than anything on earth to show him I could cope, even if it called for a little deceit.

  “I’m all right,” I said.

  Would he notice if I changed the subject? A light bit of banter would show him what I was made of.

  “You told me once that His Majesty King George did not permit anyone but policemen and criminals to ride in official vehicles. Has he changed his mind?”

  Inspector Hewitt laughed—he actually laughed!—as he stowed Gladys in the boot and held open the door for me.

  He did not reply until we were
in the car and he had started the motor. And then he said: “His Majesty King George allows us to make an exception in the case of persons who have been extraordinarily helpful to his officers.”

  I think I fainted.

  I’m not quite sure, but for some indefinite amount of time I was definitely in a swoon.

  I became aware of the sound of the car heater—of the official tires crunching through the ice and snow.

  Suddenly the inspector said, “I was very sorry to hear about your father. How is he?”

  I was jerked back to reality. What was I to tell him? How could I say that I didn’t know?

  “He’s not been allowed visitors,” I said, which was only partially true. Everyone in Bishop’s Lacey—even the wretched Undine—seemed to have seen Father. I was the only exception.

  “I’m planning to visit him in the morning,” I said. “I shall tell him you were asking.”

  “Please do,” Inspector Hewitt said.

  And then, unaccountably, we were stopped at the door of Buckshaw. Time had jumped like a bad splice in a film at the cinema.

  The inspector and I were sitting there looking at each other in the way you do at the end of a journey, not knowing quite what to say when there’s only one thing left.

  “I hope you’ll go easy on Carla,” I said, taking advantage of the moment. “She’s not had the same advantages as some of us.”

  “Justice does not distinguish,” Inspector Hewitt said. “She wears a blindfold, remember.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, leaving him to decide what I meant by it.

  “Nevertheless,” he added. “I shall whisper in her ear.”

  Tears welled up in my eyes. I couldn’t help myself.

  “Antigone Hewitt has a very fine husband,” I said.

  “Hasn’t she, though?” Inspector Hewitt said, and we both laughed.

  The moment had passed.

  I had pulled it off.

  · TWENTY-THREE ·

  SOME SLEEPS ARE WASHED with gold, and some with silver. Mine was molten lead.

  I awoke feeling hot and feverish, my throat feeling stuffed with razor blades. I could tell from the shambles of my bed that I had tossed and turned all night, although I could not remember dreaming.

  Dreamless nights, I knew, can be the most troubling, since you come back not knowing where you’ve been or what you’ve done.

  As I swung my legs out of bed, I was shattered by a sneeze—and one of the worst kind.

  I mopped up and was reaching for my clothing when the door opened and Mrs. Mullet backed into the room carrying a breakfast tray.

  “Not so quick, miss,” she said. “Back into bed with you. I’ve brought you some nice toast and jam and ginger tea.”

  “But I’ve got to get up,” I said. “We’re going to the hospital to see Father.”

  “They’ve already left,” Mrs. Mullet said. “You need your sleep. You ought to ’ave ’eard yourself, ’awkin’ and ’ackin’ somethin’ wicked. You’ve got a stripped throat, you ’ave.

  “Worse ’an that,” she added, fixing me with a fierce glare, “you was whimperin’ in your sleep. What you been gettin’ up to, miss—and don’t tell me it’s nothin’. I may be a fool, but I’m not a new fool.”

  “Already left?” I echoed in my nutmeg-grater voice. It might have been funny if I hadn’t been so close to tears. “What do you mean, already left?”

  “Left. Gone, is what I mean,” Mrs. Mullet said, punching up my pillows with far more force than was strictly necessary.

  “Who’s gone?” I demanded.

  “All on ’em. Miss Ophelia and Dieter, Miss Daphne, Miss Undine. Dogger’s drove ’em.”

  What treachery! How could they do this to me?

  How could someone like Undine be allowed in to see my father—not once, but twice—while I was kept at bay as if I were some kind of pariah?

  “Dieter?” I said. “I thought Feely had tossed him over?”

  “Fmmmphh!” Mrs. Mullet said. “A temper in a teapot. Girls go all silly when they’ve got themselves a beau. You will, too, when your time comes.”

  I was too upset to pull even my standard gargoyle face.

  “Thank you, Mrs. M,” I croaked. “You’re right. I think I need my sleep.”

  And without another word, I rolled over, burrowed into the pillows, and pulled the eiderdown up to cover my head completely.

  I gave a few convincing twitches as I settled.

  After a moment, I heard the rattle of dishes and the sound of the door closing.

  She had taken away my breakfast.

  I counted slowly to four hundred, because you never know, and I’d been tricked before.

  I dressed quickly, pausing from time to time to suppress a cough with both hands. Although there was now no one else in the house but Mrs. Mullet, it wouldn’t do to be caught.

  Bundled to the eyes in coat, jumpers, mitts, and scarves and weighted down by heavy rubber galoshes, I looked to myself in the mirror like a World War I aviator about to take off on a high altitude reconnaissance flight.

  Which gave me an idea: I still had the goggled flying helmet I had worn when Aunt Felicity took me for a flight in Blithe Spirit, Harriet’s De Havilland Gypsy Moth. I hauled the thing on over my hair, strapped it under my chin, and was ready to go.

  I slipped quietly—or as quietly as one can when one is dressed like Sir Ernest Shackleton—out into the hall and into my laboratory.

  I raised the sash of one of the east windows overlooking the Visto—the same window, in fact, by which Carl Pendracka had made his entrance and his exit.

  Settling on the sill, I swung one leg out, and then the other. If the dead vines on the brick wall would support Carl, they would certainly support me.

  I worked the window closed and began my descent. The vines creaked and groaned dreadfully, as if I were climbing down a ladder of old bones. It didn’t much matter, though: The east wall of the house was far enough away from the kitchen that there was no danger of Mrs. Mullet hearing my clatter.

  After only a few slips and plunges, I reached the ground and made my way round the back of the house. The wall of the kitchen garden would hide me most of my way to the greenhouse, and as for the rest of it—well, I would simply have to be stealthy.

  It helped to know that Mrs. Mullet wasn’t much of a one for gazing idly out the window.

  “I keeps my nose to the Aga and my eyes on the pots,” she had once told me when I’d caught her peering out at the sky. “But it pays to know what kind o’ weather you’re goin’ to ’ave to walk ’ome in when your ’usband’s gone and lost your only umbrella.”

  Luck was on my side. I managed to reach the greenhouse without raising a siren voice from the kitchen door.

  “Come on, Gladys,” I urged. “No more lollygagging.”

  Not that she was. She’d know I was only teasing.

  We shoved off—literally—towards the west, with me pushing her like a battering ram through the dunes of snow, which varied from patches of drifts to little seas of glaring ice, with Gladys groaning all the while like an ancient dowager being dragged against her will across the fields.

  It was a private joke. Gladys loved to pretend she was being abducted. She was being amusing, I knew, and because it helped pass the time until we reached the road, I did not discourage her.

  Now, finally, after a mile or so, I was able to drag her across the last ditch and set her wheels upon what should have been the tarmac, but was in fact no more than a dark and hardened trail of snow and ice leading towards Hinley.

  Fortunately, there was very little traffic as we wobbled westwards. The occasional car coming from behind us to the east would give a little honk to indicate that they were overtaking, but aside from that, there was only the howling of the crosswind and the crunching of the icy mulch beneath Gladys’s Dunlop treads.

  What a week it had been!

  To keep from thinking about Father, I had allowed my mind to be consumed by the nasty b
usiness of Oliver Inchbald, alias Roger Sambridge. Although I was certain I had solved a crime, I still wasn’t quite certain what that crime had been.

  Would Carla Sherrinford-Cameron be found to be a murderess? If so, had her aunt, Louisa Congreve, been an accessory? Had Louisa known that morning, before she set out for London, that her neighbor—to be charitable—was dead?

  Why had Oliver Inchbald, showered with literary glory and years of success, decided to fake his own death and vanish from the world? Had he been threatened with some kind of exposure? Had it been, as I suspected, that his wife—Hilary’s mother—was still alive? That he had faked his death to avoid the shame of exposure? That he had tired of his own fame?

  My mind boggled. I could think of a score of reasons but I didn’t want to.

  In the same way, I suppose, that the perfect crime is extremely rare, so is the perfect solution. In real life, we are never able to dot every i, cross every t, or tease out every last strand of what we think of as the evidence.

  Real life is messy, and it’s probably best to keep that in mind. We must learn never to expect too much.

  It was a relief, in a way, to hand things over to Inspector Hewitt, and to have my own life back again—such as it is. Perhaps one day he and Antigone would invite me to tea at Maybank, and he would fill in the blanks about Oliver Inchbald.

  But even if he didn’t, I was satisfied. I had done my best.

  The temperature was plunging and the goggles of my helmet were frosting up. Could it be that warm air was leaking from my eyes? I scrubbed at the lenses with my coat sleeve, but it didn’t much help.

  My vision was so restricted that I was finally forced to raise the goggles and expose my frost-rimed eyes to the blowing snow.

  My every cough was visible on the freezing air: little explosions of white, like smoke from the rifle shots in a cinema western.

  And then, mercifully, Hinley came into view, the stony spine of its skyline like the bones of a dinosaur still half embedded in the earth, barely visible through the snow.

  I wobbled at last into the high street, Gladys’s wheels sliding sideways into the icy ruts. I wanted nothing more than to dismount, tear into the nearest tea shop, and gorge myself on hot toast and steaming tea. How I regretted leaving Buckshaw without breakfast.