Cold-Blooded Myrtle

by Elizabeth C. Bunce

  *Regrettably, according to legal and official records, I am technically Helena Myrtle Hardcastle. Aunt Helena and I see eye to eye on very few matters, and I have often wished I might have been the namesake of any other relative. Mum’s father’s name, for instance, was Algernon. And I believe there was a dog called Rusty.

  † Pierre de Fermat’s Last Conjecture, a frightfully pointless math problem scrawled in the margins of a book 250 years ago, which no one has since been able to solve, although for some reason people keep trying. (Why couldn’t he have left a note about something we wanted to know?)

  4

  Tidings of Discomfort

  Medieval lords appointed a “Lord of Misrule” to oversee their lavish Christmas celebrations. During the brief reign of Edward VI, the Lord of Misrule was a lawyer named George Ferrers, whose Christmas pageant of 1552 cost hundreds of pounds and involved music, feasting, masques, and the ever-popular mock beheadings. —H. M. Hardcastle, A Modern Yuletide

  Father set the book down, nearly missing the edge of the desk. Peony uttered an affronted burble and darted aside. “How did you say the professor was found? With a cup in his hand? Like he’d sat down, drunk something, and died?”

  I scarcely nodded, but my heart had started to bang, fierce and fast. “We need to tell somebody.” Father was Swinburne’s Prosecuting Solicitor, which meant if there was a murder, he would have to get involved.

  “Tell who? Say what? We don’t know anything.” Even as he spoke the words, I could tell he was starting to regret them.

  “Dr. Munjal,” I said simply. This was clearly a matter for the Police Surgeon.

  “Very well. I’ll drop by his office in the morning.”

  “Now.” My voice was firm.

  “Wait a minute—”

  I was ready for Father’s objections, and rose to my feet. Peony rose with me—a United Front. “Dr. Munjal was his student, too. If there’s any suspicion that this wasn’t a natural death”—I was proud of myself for circumventing the word murder—“you have to let him know what to look for in the post-mortem. He needs to know.” If I’d had to, I’d have stepped pointedly closer to Mum’s photograph, but there was no need.

  He was looking out the window, at the waning afternoon and restless wind, scattering beech leaves through the pale, pinkening sky. “It does look like a fine day for a walk,” he said dryly.

  “I’ll get my things.” I dashed off before he could object.

  Peony and I were waiting at the door by the time Father made it down the stairs—changed out of his morris dancing regalia, thank goodness. He merely raised an eyebrow, made no comment, and swung open the door.

  “After you.”

  It turned out to be after Peony, who bolted out the door as if her own message to the Munjals was even more urgent than ours. She disappeared into the neighbors’ hedges, but make no mistake, Dear Reader: she was stalking us, like a leopardess in the jungle.

  We set off across Gravesend Commons, the park that used to be a graveyard. The December wind whipped through the trees along the edges of the green­way, and more dry leaves skittered in the gutter. A hazy halo glowed round the gas streetlamp as we made our way over the former graves, past the old stone crypt that now housed a picnic table and the equipment for lawn darts and croquet. It was lovely and peaceful, everything dormant beneath the light snow, and we strolled along in companionable silence.

  The Munjals’ house sat across the park in a lofty circle of brick streets and tall houses with white façades. Set back from the curb, it had a large back garden and a carriage house for Dr. Munjal’s Police Morgue. I often wondered how their neighbors liked that, although they’d all moved in next to a former cemetery, so they’d really forfeited the right to complain about the proximity to dead people.

  The butler answered the door, but our arrival had alerted the rest of the household, and Caroline and Dr. Munjal appeared at the top of the stairs.

  “Arthur, Myrtle. What brings you by?” Although by the grim set of his dark features, it was plain the doctor knew exactly why we’d come. He descended to the foyer and shook Father’s hand. “I’m sorry Neenah’s not here to see you.”

  “I’m afraid it’s not a social call, Vikram. Can we speak in your office?”

  “Come upstairs.” Caroline waved me over. “We got our copy of The Strand today.” I heard both men sigh with relief as they headed for the morgue.

  “But I want to know what they’re saying,” I protested, as Caroline steered me firmly into her room and shut the door with a surreptitious click.

  “Did you really find another dead body?” she exclaimed. “Poor Mr. Leighton! Poor Mrs. Leighton!”

  “Why did your mother take you away like that this morning?”

  “I don’t know.” She dropped onto the bed—white lace heaped with more white lace. “Mother dragged me back home, but she wouldn’t say anything. She marched straight into Father’s office—which you know she never does—she hates the morgue!—but he left right after and was gone all day, and no one will tell me anything. What happened?”

  I felt a surge of fellow feeling and sat beside her. “Have you ever heard about a girl who disappeared when your father and my mother were at Schofield College? Professor Leighton was their teacher. She fell from the belltower—”

  “Campanile,” Caroline corrected me.

  “—and vanished into thin air.” I paused for Dramatic Effect. “Her name was Olive Blackwell. Just like the Display.”

  “How chilling!” Caroline’s eyes darted about the room, as if the ghost of Olive Blackwell might leap out from the shadows. Which was, I reflected, more or less what had happened this morning, in the shop. “What could have happened to her?”

  I filled her in on everything Father had told me about Olive Blackwell (practically nothing), along with our deductions about the mysterious note and its strange connection to Socrates. Her eyes grew wider and wider, and she twisted a long strand of hair around her fingers.

  “Hemlock? Then it was suicide?” She seemed unconvinced. “He was such a nice man. Why would he do something like that?”

  “Unless someone did it to him,” I said. “That’s what they’re discussing right now.”

  “Discussing without us, naturally.” She went to her window. “They’re still out there.”

  I joined her. We could see both men’s silhouettes against the lit-up window of the carriage house.

  “They’re taking an awfully long time for my father to tell your father that he should check for hemlock in the post-mortem,” I Observed. “I wish we could hear what they’re saying.”

  “We can,” she said. “There’s a spot above the stables where you can hear everything that happens in Father’s laboratory. Come on.”

  Have I mentioned that Caroline Munjal might very well be Irrepressible?

  Two minutes later, the three of us were tucked into position in the storage loft overlooking the carriage house, hidden behind a tidy stack of file boxes. The warm air was a not entirely unpleasant mixture of horse from one side and embalming chemicals from the other. Light filtered up through a gap where the wall met the floor, and Caroline, Peony, and I had a nearly unobstructed view of Dr. Munjal’s laboratory.

  I could see the top of Dr. Munjal’s head. He was seated at the desk, directly below us. Father’s ginger head was brighter; he’d doffed his hat and left it on the desk beside Dr. Munjal’s skull (the paperweight, not his own cranium).

  “I’m not doing the post-mortem,” the doctor was saying. “I had to recuse myself, of course. But Belden’s a good man, and I think we know what the results will show.”

  “Hemlock?” said Father. Dr. Munjal’s head bobbed slightly.

  “I wish I could say I was more surprised.” His hand came up to rub the bridge of his nose. “This whole business—dredging it all up. Neenah’s beside herself.”

  “Should we warn Henry?”

  Caroline an
d I exchanged glances. Who was Henry?

  “He’ll hear soon enough. I’m sorry to say it, Arthur, but I’m glad your Jemima’s not here to be dragged into this again.”

  Now I tensed, gripping Peony so tightly she let out a brrb of protest. Thankfully, nobody below seemed to hear. What would Mum be dragged into?

  “Vikram, if you know anything about Olive Blackwell’s disappearance, now is the time to say something. Before this situation gets any more out of hand.”

  Dr. Munjal’s head was bent, his spectacles discarded on the desk. “No, there’s nothing. And if I had known something, the time to speak up was twenty years ago.”

  “Who would want to bring this up again? Why now?”

  “I don’t know!” Dr. Munjal cried softly. “I was so busy then, with a new wife at home and my studies to see to—I wasn’t that involved in collegiate life, and truly, I had to be more careful than anyone else.”

  Caroline was nodding; it wasn’t any easier for an Indian doctor in England than it would have been for a woman—scandal was always ready to attach itself to you, even if you had nothing to do with it. If the police had needed a scapegoat* for Olive Blackwell’s disappearance, they wouldn’t have had to look far to find two suspicious-looking medical students.

  “Mr. Leighton must have been killed because it had something to do with Olive’s disappearance,” Caroline whispered, fiddling with Peony’s ears. (Peony showed Exceptional Forbearance in allowing this.) “Do you think he . . . did something to her?”

  “They know more than they’re saying,” I said, indicating our fathers. “We have to get them to tell us.”

  She gave me a tired look. “Confess secrets they’ve kept since before we were born, just because we’re curious?”

  “We’re more than curious!” I objected. “We deserve to know.” Only—we didn’t, really, I supposed. Unless there really was a murderer on the loose, in which case, the more intelligent people hunting for him, the better. It took me only a moment to decide what to say next.

  “Your father has a secret file in his office.”

  She wheeled round to stare at me. “What are you talking about?”

  Some months ago, Certain Circumstances had resulted in my being confined to Dr. Munjal’s morgue, alone, for a few hours, during which time I had availed myself of the opportunity to familiarize myself with its layout. And his possessions. Caroline knew this, but we’d never discussed what I’d found that memorable afternoon. I didn’t like the idea that the Munjals were keeping secrets from Caroline. Or that there might be something in there about Mum. “There’s a file—it says, ‘Decapitated?’ ”

  “Decapitated?” she echoed.

  “With question mark. I think he keeps records in there of cases he still has questions about—suspicious deaths he couldn’t prove were murders.”

  “But Olive Blackwell wasn’t his case,” Caroline pointed out. “He wasn’t even a doctor yet.”

  “It’s a place to start. Unless you think asking him might do the trick.”

  Caroline leaned against the carriage house’s cold brick wall with a sigh. “No,” she admitted. “We should get back before they get suspicious.”

  Now I sighed. “Oh, they’re suspicious already.” Our fathers knew us both too well.

  Our progress back to the house was interrupted, however, by a commotion in the dark street outside.

  “That’s LaRue’s carriage,” Caroline said, nodding at the glossy conveyance.

  As we watched, the coach pulled up not before the Spence-Hastingses’ old house next door, but right in front of the Munjals’. Caroline pulled me deeper into the shadows. The carriage door swung open, and a small figure tumbled out in a heap of red velvet robes. Mayor Spence-Hastings put a hand up to straighten the chain of office falling over the fur trim of his Mayoral regalia. An old-fashioned tricorn hat crowned with black feathers dwarfed his head, and his chin vanished in a fluff of white lace cravat.

  “What does he want?”

  Father and Dr. Munjal at last stepped outside. “Ah, girls, there you are.” Dr. Munjal held out his arm, and Caroline scurried to the safety of his embrace—but I could tell both his attention and Father’s were on Mayor Spence-Hastings, hastening up the brick walk.

  Now I realized exactly who “Henry” must be—Henry Fairbush Spence-Hastings, our new Mayor. And LaRue’s father.

  He was involved in Mr. Leighton’s death, too?

  *a most curious word, whose meaning today doesn’t match its origins. It was once an actual goat released into the wilderness to carry away the sins of the people, escaping unharmed (theoretically, anyway)—while another, more unlucky goat was sacrificed.

  5

  Holiday Spirit

  Theologians, historians, and scientists have long attempted to determine the precise date of the first Christmas, based on various Biblical clues. Several candidates have been proposed, including spring, summer, and fall. No agreement being reached, we therefore celebrate in December. —H. M. Hardcastle, A Modern Yuletide

  The next day was colder and snowier, “a proper English Christmas,” Father declared, tea in hand and gazing out the dining room windows with great satisfaction. Inside, however, Miss Judson looked weary and pensive, and I was fidgeting with all sorts of unspent thoughts and feelings.

  “I could do with a proper Guianese Christmas at the moment,” she remarked.

  “Like Père Fouettard?” I said.

  Miss Judson had tried to frighten me with this when I was younger. “Father Whipper” supposedly trails alongside St. Nicholas, threatening naughty children, as penance for a great crime he committed in life. She’d given up when she realized I was far more interested in the scientific details of how the wicked French butcher had killed and pickled three boys in brine, who were later resuscitated by the saintly Turkish bishop.* Every year, I refined my theory on how the solution had somehow preserved them in a deathlike state, only for them to revive naturally (my latest hypothesis involved electricity and a distillate of mercury), but since no one would allow me to conduct experiments, I suspected that it would remain, at best, unproven.

  “I was thinking more like sunshine and temperate weather.” She was plainly recalling the balmy tropics of her native French Guiana. I could hardly blame her. Swinburne didn’t usually get this much snow, but we certainly put in for more than our share of cold.

  Not that that stopped Father. “Humbug,” he said. “Christmas isn’t Christmas without snow.”

  “Jesus was probably born in April,”† I said sagely. “Or October.”‡

  “Don’t let Father Christmas hear you say that.”

  I eyed him levelly. “I’m twelve.”

  “Alas, far too grown up for presents, Christmas crackers, and fruitcake, then.”

  “No!” Peony appeared at the critical moment, voicing her alarm.

  “If I’m too old for presents, then so are you.” Which would save me the effort of finding just the right gift for Miss Judson, at least.

  “Well, this standoff could go all month,” Miss Judson said mildly. “I hereby declare that no one is too old for Christmas, least of all this family’s patriarch.” Whereupon she whisked a tissue-paper crown from the sideboard and popped it atop Father’s head.

  “Excellent,” he said. “Now I’m ready for court.”

  After that we sobered. Father didn’t have a case pending at the moment,§ which left us all plenty of time to brood about what had happened to Mr. Leighton. I knew better than to press him about it—Dr. Belden had barely had time to start the post-mortem—but that didn’t mean it was easy. I stirred at my jam with my knife, trying to think of something I could ask. Anything besides, How was Mum involved in this? and What had the Mayor wanted from Dr. Munjal last night? Father hadn’t let us linger long enough to find out, and he’d refused to speculate as we walked home.

  Which meant he’d also refused to countenance my speculation on the subject.r />
  Miss Judson came to my rescue. “Since it’s Sunday, I offered to help Mrs. Leighton with some things for her husband.”

  Father remained carefully indifferent to this remark, and for my part I studied her cautiously above the rim of my cup.

  “I thought I’d take Myrtle with me.”

  Dear Reader, it was all I could do not to leap up from my seat and dash for the door. Instead, I tried to look demure, and said—in a ladylike, not-at-all-thinking-of-murder voice—“Perhaps we could take her some gingersnaps?”

  Moments later, Miss Judson and I were bundled up and mounted on our bicycles, pedaling through fat, fluffy flakes into town. I had been eager to set out, but as we drew closer, I felt more and more uncertain.

  My silence, evidently, was suspicious.

  “You’re much quieter than usual today.” Miss Judson steered close enough for conversation, but I did not respond. All of my thoughts led to the inconceivable—the unutterable—notion that Mum was somehow involved in Professor Leighton’s death. Not directly, of course, but via some shared incident or secret from their past that must have contributed to his murder.

  “I had to ferret the details of Olive Blackwell’s disappearance from your father. What a mystery!” She continued, as if I’d replied to her first statement, “Combined with the curious note, it puts Mr. Leighton’s death in rather a different light.”

  “What are you saying?” I asked carefully. “Dr. Belden and Dr. Munjal said it was probably a stroke.”

  “And you, of course, believe that.”

  I ground my teeth before replying. “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Oh, perhaps the small matter of you and your father visiting the Police Surgeon to discuss hemlock poisoning? Myrtle, your father told me everything. But it fails to explain why you’re so pensive today. If there’s a murder afoot, you’d normally be champing at the bit to solve it!” She braked at the tram crossing, propping herself up with one jaunty boot. “Either you’re not feeling well—or something about this case has upset you. You know you can tell me anything.”