Snow White Red-Handed (A Fairy Tale Fatal Mystery) (33 page)

Gertie let out a roar and gave the wall a ferocious kick with her walking boot. Then she kicked the wall in another place, and another. Suddenly, a big section of marble wall gave way, swinging back on slow hinges. Blackness yawned beyond. Gertie hesitated, but only for a second. She grabbed her lantern and brought it to the door. A tunnel curled steeply down into the earth. The dirt walls were held back by ancient beams.

“Do not go down there,” Hansel called to Gertie. “The walls could collapse.”

“Stuff it,” Gertie said, and crawled through the hole on all fours.

Prue stared at Gertie’s retreating rump. “We can’t just let her go! She’s crawling down into the belly of the mountain!”

“She is a woman grown,” Hansel said. “We shall send men after her. But first, we must get help for Franz and bring him down to the castle. He must be looked after by a doctor—as should you. Your throat looks a sight. And there is no treasure here.”

*   *   *

Gabriel rose at
seven o’clock. He re-bandaged his shoulder wound, dressed, packed his valise and trunk, and left his chamber.

As he passed Winkler’s door, he slowed. Ought he say good-bye? No. He’d see him soon enough back in Heidelberg.

He drank a cup of coffee in the empty dining room. He arranged for his luggage to be brought down from his chamber and for a carriage to take him to the Baden-Baden railway station at eight.

He made his way along the cobbled village lane, ignoring Schloss Grunewald towering up into the fresh morning sky.

There was no utility in thinking of Miss Flax, of her messy little confidence scheme, of the pained expression in her eyes, of her shoulders in that evening gown. He and Miss Flax came from different worlds. It was better this way.

Gabriel came to a stop before the window of Horkheimer’s shop. Dark. He shaded his eyes and peered through the glass. The shop appeared somewhat . . . depleted. As though half of its stock was gone. Surely Horkheimer wasn’t going out of business?

“
Kann Ich Sie helfen
?” a man called, somewhere above Gabriel’s head.

Gabriel stepped back from the shop window and looked up. It was Horkheimer, leaning out of an upstairs window, a striped nightcap dangling from his head.

“Ah,” Horkheimer said. “It is you. Enjoying your cuckoo clock?”

“I’m awfully sorry to have woken you,” Gabriel said, “but as a matter of fact, I’d hoped to purchase another. The one I bought seems to have been . . . it was lost, I’m afraid.”

“I would like to fulfill your request, sir, but I am afraid all of those particular clocks have been purchased.”

“All of them? Those carved by Frau Herz, you understand.”

“
Ja
. All of them are gone. And I would direct you to the shops in Baden-Baden where Frau Herz sometimes sells her clocks, but yesterday a tourist told me that all of her clocks have been purchased in Baden-Baden as well. We seem to have a collector in our midst.”

“Who,” Gabriel said, “purchased them all?”

Horkheimer told him.

“But
why
?”

“That I could not tell you.”

“Martin?” a woman’s voice said, somewhere behind Horkheimer.

“My wife,” Horkheimer said to Gabriel. “Best of luck finding a clock.” He let the window sash fall.

G
abriel returned to the inn.

He pounded on Winkler’s door. When there was no response, he pushed it open.

The chamber was empty.

“Professor Winkler departed yesterday evening,” the innkeeper’s wife said. She’d followed him upstairs.

Gabriel went back to his own chamber. He tore through his trunk and dug up his revolver. He loaded it, rammed it into his breast pocket, and headed up to the castle.

Miss Flax needed to be warned.

*   *   *

Gabriel arrived, breathless,
at the castle, and pounded with both fists on the huge front doors. He was met with silence. Somewhere on the bluff, a lark twittered inanely.

He tried the door, but it was bolted fast. He strode across the forecourt, around the castle’s east side, and found the doors that led into the kitchens. There were people moving about in there, he saw through a window.

He burst in.

“Where is Miss Flax?” he said to no one in particular.

She wasn’t in the kitchen.

The other servants were breakfasting at a long plank table. They stared at him as though he’d appeared from the ether.

“Miss Flax?” the cook said, her porridge spoon poised midair.

The two maidservants glanced at each other.

The footman—Gabriel recalled he was named Wilhelm—said, “Miss Flax has, ah—vanished.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Wilhelm explained—with interjections from the two maids—that Smith, Miss Bright, Hansel, and Miss Flax had all disappeared during the night.

“Disappeared?” Gabriel said. “What do you mean by that?”

Wilhelm’s soft cheeks trembled. “Simply gone.” He described the scene of violence in Smith’s bedchamber and how Miss Flax, searching for Prue, had disappeared as well.

“But there are mad people on the loose. Murderers.”

“I am very sorry, sir,” Wilhelm said.

Gabriel raked a hand through his hair. “Where’s Schubert—is he still here?”

“Yes. He and his men began a thorough search of the
schloss
at daybreak—”

“At daybreak? Anything could have happened overnight.”

“—and they are now, having failed to find any clues as to the whereabouts of the missing persons, conversing in the library.”

“Conversing,” Gabriel said. “Have they searched the wood?”

There was a screeching sound.

Gabriel noticed for the first time an old crone hunkered on her stool in the chimney corner. She was writing with a stub of chalk on a slate.

Surely the old countess. Matilda.

“What is she writing?” Gabriel said.

No one answered.

He rushed to Matilda’s side, bent to read the slate. She had printed in German, in a shaking hand,
The gold mine
.

The gold mine!

How could he have been so bloody blind? It had
always
been about the gold. Every last detail.

Gabriel crouched and held out his palm, and Matilda dropped the chalk into his hand.
Where is it?
He wrote. He passed her the chalk.

The dwarf’s head
.

I know there is a dwarf’s head on the tapestry
, he scrawled,
but I could not find it in the wood
.

Matilda’s eyes twinkled as she took the chalk.

How delightful to see the old dame was enjoying herself.

The dwarf’s face crumbled long ago
, she wrote.

Gabriel sucked in a breath.

—
and all that remains is the cliff on top of his head, and an outcrop by the stream
.

Gabriel kissed the lady’s shrunken cheek and ran out of the kitchen.

*   *   *

The wood was
peaceful. Birds chirruped, squirrels skittered up tree trunks, and sunlight sloped through the treetops in long, luminous shafts.

Gabriel found the path he’d taken twice before. Little had he known that the mouth of the cave he and Miss Flax had hidden in had been, quite literally, the mouth of the giant dwarf’s head outcropping and the marker of the fabled gold mine. Perhaps the miners had carved it, long ago, as some fantastical monument to their industry. Or perhaps it was one of nature’s poetic caprices.

The path began its curving ascent away from the valley. Gabriel was just about to plunge down into the fern-filled ravine, towards the cave, when he stopped in his tracks.

A few paces ahead, there was a large rock—a boulder, really—at the side of the path. It was pale gray and had patches of lichen here and there. But there was something else on it, too.

His belly clenched as he approached the rock. On it, at hip’s height, was a two-fingered smear of blood. The blood had turned brown already.

He rushed further up the trail, scanning the loamy path and the rocks and tree trunks on either side. It was not long before he discovered another finger smear of blood, this time on the grooved bark of a tree.

Someone had left a deliberate trail.

He saw one last flash of Miss Flax’s beautiful dark eyes, and his belly lurched one last time. Then he shuttered that part of his mind. It never paid to be sentimental.

He moved quickly and efficiently, scanning the trees and rocks and finding, spaced at varying intervals, smears of blood to mark the way. The blood led him high onto a mountainside, off the path, and deeper into the wood. He was so intent on his task that when he found himself in the clearing of the abandoned hunting lodge he did not, at first, realize where he was.

The lodge was smaller than he remembered. It was built of stone, with pointed gothic windows and crumbling gargoyles in the shape of—he smiled bitterly—dwarves.

He crept towards the lodge and peered through one of the windows. The diamond-shaped panes were so filthy he could make out nothing but a dull glow of light, a blur of motion.

Someone, then, was still alive in there.

He drew his revolver from inside his jacket, checked the cylinders. He mounted the steps of the lodge. He pushed the door open.

*   *   *

The sight that
met his eyes was so strange he could not, for several dragging moments, comprehend it. There was the gaping fireplace, the mounted beasts’ heads, the bronze and antler chandelier. But also, in the center of the chamber, a large cage, made of gnarled sticks tied together with twine.

There was a person inside the cage, curled on his side on the floor, his short, bare arms wrapped around naked knees.

“Smith?” Gabriel said.

Smith opened his eyes. They were as dull as rocks.

Gabriel rushed to the cage. Smith was unclothed, save a pair of drawers. There was a nasty-looking gash on his left arm.

“Are you all right?” Gabriel said. “Who put you in there?”

Smith only stared.

“I’m getting you out,” Gabriel said. He started to circle round the cage. There appeared to be a door of sorts on the other side.

“Ah. Penrose. I was curious if you would turn up.”

Gabriel stopped and turned to face Professor Winkler, who hulked in a doorway that led to another part of the lodge.

“I’m afraid,” Gabriel said, “I must insist that you release this man.”

“Man? He is hardly a
man
. As you have probably deduced by now—because I do, Penrose, despite everything, have the most reverential respect for your intellect—Mr. Smith here, or, shall we say, Mr. Ghent, is not a man at all. He is a dwarf.”

“Is that why you’ve got him caged like an animal?”

“He is skittish, like most creatures, even the domesticated ones, and he would not allow me to study him. After he carelessly revealed to me yesterday that he’d been a California gold miner—a forty-niner, I believe he termed it—my suspicions were at last confirmed. I was forced to capture and cage him. Do not look at me like that, Penrose—I shall not
eat
him. I fully intend to release him when I am through.”

Gabriel scanned the chamber. Winkler’s black bag squatted on a table. Various unidentifiable items were arranged beside it. “I think, Winkler, that you’re already quite through with him.”

“Oh, but you are wrong. I have only just begun.” Winkler’s piggy eyes burned. “Do you not comprehend what an opportunity this is? I have waited and searched my whole life for a dwarf—a real dwarf! And at last I have succeeded.”

“I was given to understand that you were a dyed-in-the-wool skeptic,” Gabriel said. “As are all of our colleagues. As I am.”

“As
you
are? Now, that is a laugh. You had me fooled, I confess, until we began to study Snow White’s cottage. Your eyes were too bright, my dear professor. They held the gleam of the fanatic.”

“Which, I take it, is what you are?”

“I am far older than you, Penrose. I have had decades to perfect the ruse. We both know what is at stake if our colleagues discover that we are not cold, disinterested scientists, but believers.”

We
. Gabriel looked at Winkler, at Smith huddled in his cage, at the scientific instruments arrayed on the tabletop. Was this what he’d become? A fanatic with a hot gleam in his eye? He’d always felt his belief in the inexplicable, in the possibility of enchantment, had been something beautiful. But Winkler made it seem, suddenly, diseased.

“You shall come round,” Winkler said, studying his face. “If you truly believe, you will understand that, now and then, small sacrifices have to be made in the name of truth.”

“Sacrifices. Is that how you’d describe your murders of Homer T. Coop and Count Grunewald?”

“Coop was greedy, as you doubtless noticed. It was clear that he purchased the
schloss
only to gain access to the gold mine. He planned to cut those trees in his search for the mine, and he sent for me because the dwarf—”

“Smith.”

“—told him the cottage might contain clues to the location of the mine.”

“And because Coop knew about the mine, you killed him.”

“Well, yes. Of course. That, and because he had not the least respect for Snow White’s cottage. Philistine. He intended to have it razed. Surely you are able to sympathize with me, Penrose. I saw the way you touched that dwarf’s spoon. As though it were the Holy Grail.”

“How did you pull it off?”

“It was simple, really. At least, it was for me. I have always been two paces ahead of everyone else. It is lonely—”

“You overheard, I assume, Coop speaking to the scullery maid, Miss Bright, and alluding to his suspicions regarding the virtue of his wife and to his newfound knowledge that Miss Amaryllis was his wife’s daughter.”

“Indeed. I overheard that exchange by chance. When the same maid arrived at the library with the washing powder, and looking like such a stupid little parcel, I saw that I had been presented with a valuable opportunity. I had noticed Coop eating green apples, and before tea, I simply asked him for one. He gave it to me from his own pocket! Then I went to the kitchens to find the scullery maid. Unseen, of course. Servants, being of peasant stock, have no powers of observation. I hid myself in a cupboard filled with dried herbs. When I saw her, I followed her up to her chamber door. I concealed myself, and when she came out again—she had gone in for only a few minutes for a new apron, it seemed—I went into her chamber, poisoned the apple, and left behind the incriminating objects. At teatime, I took the apple from my pocket and placed it in the urn. Elegant.”

“What about the green-handled paring knife? The English book of fairy tales?”

“I took the knife when I was in the kitchens. The book came from the castle library.” Winkler beamed, as though Gabriel ought to give him a gold star.

“Why did you kill Count Grunewald?” Gabriel said. “Because you discovered he knew of the gold mine?”

“I always did believe Oxford recruited England’s best and brightest. Yes. When it came to my attention that the first footman was the disgraced count—”

“Who told you?”

“Miss Amaryllis. She was distraught that morning when I arrived to call on Mrs. Coop. I feigned sympathy, and she confided to me the circumstances of the previous evening’s masquerade ball. Both of those American ladies are credulous fools, you understand. Mrs. Coop accepted the laudanum I gave her without question.”

“You gave it to her, then? Whatever for?”

“To keep her out of the way.”

“Were those bottles not from America?”

“There was but one bottle, which belonged to Mrs. Coop, so I suppose she had indeed brought it from America—a quack cure, by all appearances. I refilled the bottle, twice, with something rather stronger that I had in my bag.”

“No one could accuse you of being ill-prepared, could they?”

Winkler smiled again. “Well. I ascertained that Miss Amaryllis knew nothing of the mine. But I decided Count Grunewald, his son, and his mother must all die to keep the secret safe. I could not kill them all at once, however. Recalling the herb closet I had hidden myself in a few days earlier, I decided I would do well to find my next batch of poison there. The mushrooms presented themselves. Imagine my delight when, later, I learned that the herb closet belonged to the old countess and that suspicion would eventually fall on her. All that remained, then, was killing the son. Hansel.”

“This gold mine,” Gabriel said, “was worth killing for?”