A Pocketful of Eyes (10 page)

His expression suggested that the thought of living in Australia since childhood was utterly repulsive to him.

‘Of course,’ murmured Toby. ‘Sorry.’

Featherstone installed them at adjacent workstations and curtly demonstrated how to input the information on each card into the online database. Then he stood ostentatiously over them and watched as Bee worked her way through the first card.

‘I think we’ve got it, thanks, Adrian,’ said Toby.

Adrian Featherstone raised his eyebrows and indicated that Bee should move on to the next card. Toby sighed.

There was a click of heels behind them, and they turned to see Akiko Kobayashi standing in the doorway. She looked startled to see Bee and Toby, and Bee thought she detected the faintest rosy blush on her cheeks.

‘Adrian,’ said Kobayashi, ‘I wanted to talk to you about the . . . meeting. At the . . . department.’

Featherstone practically ran across the room to where she was standing. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, yes. The meeting. At the department. Yes. Let’s discuss it in my office.’

He ushered Kobayashi out of the lab, leaving Bee and Toby alone. Bee replayed the last few moments in her head. There was something . . . odd about the way Kobayashi and Featherstone spoke to each other. Could they be having an affair?

‘
Surely
it was him,’ said Toby softly. ‘Did you hear him going on about death and decay?’

An affair was impossible, Bee concluded. Kobayashi was beautiful and immaculately presented, and Featherstone was a giant creep. There was no way she’d ever go for him. She dismissed the thought, and told Toby about Featherstone fiddling with a glass lizard eye in the taxidermy lab.

‘What kind of lizard eye?’ asked Toby. ‘Was the pupil a slit? Or round?’

‘Slit,’ said Bee. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘Reptiles with a slit pupil are usually venomous,’ he said. ‘Round pupil indicates they’re not dangerous.’

‘Useful.’

Toby shrugged. ‘Generally if you’re close enough to a snake to see the shape of his pupils, you’re already in trouble.’

‘I suppose. Anyway, it’s not like the snake or lizard that the eyes were for was still poisonous.’

‘Venomous,’ corrected Toby. ‘Snakes aren’t poisonous. They’re venomous. And the venom remains active after the snake is dead, if it’s kept under the right conditions.’

‘What’s the difference?’

‘Poison is ingested,’ said Toby. ‘Venom is injected. You can drink snake venom and it won’t harm you at all. It has to pierce your skin and enter your bloodstream. There are only two poisonous snakes, the Japanese grass snake and the common garter snake. And they’re only poisonous because they eat other things that are poisonous. Such as toads.’

Bee made a face.

‘Either way,’ said Toby, ‘there’s nothing venomous about snake or lizard eyes. Especially glass ones.’

‘But they’re still important,’ said Bee. ‘I
know
it.’

‘It totally points towards Featherstone as our key suspect, right?’

Bee thought about it. ‘I don’t know, I still think we’re missing something.’

‘What kind of something?’

Bee shook her head. ‘Not sure,’ she said. ‘Not something really big. I just feel that there’s a detail I’m overlooking. Something that’s going to make all these knots unravel.’ She clenched her hand into a fist. ‘I
wish
I could talk to Cranston! I’m
sure
I’d figure it out then.’

Toby didn’t reply. Bee flicked through the pile of cards they were supposed to be entering into the database.

‘You know,’ said Toby, as he gazed distastefully at the computer screen, ‘plenty of animals are immune to snakebites. The mongoose. Honey badger. Secretary bird. Hedgehog. Also maybe the pig and the garden dormouse. And there are some groups of Californian ground squirrel that are immune to rattlesnake venom.’

Bee tried not to think about whether Celestial Badgers, as well as honey badgers, were immune to snakebites.

‘Sorry,’ said Toby. ‘Not really relevant.’

Bee shook her head, and compiled a mental list of questions.

• Why had Featherstone been going through Gus’s drawer the other day?

• Why had he had a lizard’s eye in his hand?

• Why did he have the newspaper clipping about Gus and Cranston?

• And if he’d known Gus’s true identity, why hadn’t he said anything?

• Had it been Featherstone who’d taken the mercuric chloride from the display case?

• What had he been looking for when Faro Costa had seen him in the Red Rotunda?

Bee frowned. Who
was
Adrian Featherstone? His shabby, sloppy figure seemed so out of place in the Conservation labs, and the army of severe pregnant women clearly disapproved of him. Was Toby right: had he been a scientist in England before he’d come to the museum? Had he known Cranston and Gus before he came here? How did he even
get
a job as a conservator, if it wasn’t his speciality? Why did Kobayashi act so strangely around him? Maybe they
were
having an affair, and that’s how he got the job.

‘Come on,’ she said to Toby. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

‘But what about these?’ He indicated the pile of cards.

‘Just leave them,’ she said. ‘We’re not going to find out anything else here, and I’ll be damned if I’m doing the conservators’ admin for them. We’ve got enough work of our own to get on with.’

They made their way back to the preparatory studios in silence, Bee still trying to dredge that elusive key to the clues from the corners of her mind.

As they passed the maceration lab, Toby pointed at a large cupboard off a recess in the hallway. ‘What’s in there?’

Bee looked where he was pointing. There was a sign on the cupboard door that said Hotel Buggiato in blue biro. ‘Beetles.’

‘As in “A Hard Day’s Night”?’

‘As in dung. They’re dermestid beetles.’

She opened the door and a waft of warm air came out, along with a stench of decaying flesh.

‘Ew,’ said Toby. ‘You mean like a carpet beetle? But they’re not interesting at all. Are they for the Invertebrate Exhibit?’

He peered into the cupboard, which was very dimly lit by a low-wattage bulb covered in brown cellophane. ‘Are they
moving
? I thought there was a special department for live exhibits?’

‘They’re not for an exhibit,’ said Bee. ‘They’re for cleaning skeletons.’

‘We have
flesh-eating beetles
? In a
cupboard
?’

‘Some animals are too fragile for the maceration tank. They have such tiny delicate bones that they’ll just get lost. This is a better way of doing it.’

‘But they only eat dead flesh, right?’

‘Yep. So they could probably give you a nice pedicure, like those fish you read about.’

‘
Garra rufa
,’ said Toby. ‘Or doctor fish. They’re originally from Turkey.’

Bee glanced at him sideways. ‘How is it that you know everything’s fancy Latin name, but nothing about what they’re actually
for
?’

‘It’s my unique study method,’ replied Toby.

‘Which is?’

‘Wikipedia.’

‘Naturally,’ said Bee. ‘Heaven forbid you should actually crack a book and learn something
useful
.’

‘I know, right?’ said Toby. ‘Kids today. Newfangled technology. Disgusting. So tell me more about these flesh-eating beetles.’

‘They’re pretty picky. Sometimes they won’t eat whatever we put in there, so we have to spray it with Vegemite and beer.’

‘Vegemite and beer.’

Bee grinned. ‘They’re good Australian beetles.’

AS BEE WALKED THROUGH THE
doors of the museum on Friday morning, she wondered if she was making a giant mistake. It was one week exactly since she’d learned of Gus’s death. Was she crazy, looking for a murderer who didn’t exist? Could Adrian Featherstone really be a killer?

She supervised Toby while he skinned the partially thawed koala, and finished off the last few details on two of Gus’s projects. Then she and Toby trooped upstairs to the museum’s café for lunch.

Bee ordered a gourmet meat pie, and Toby asked for a ham and salad baguette with no beetroot.

‘They’re premade,’ said the woman behind the counter. ‘No special orders.’

Toby smiled charmingly at her. ‘Have you changed your hair? You’re looking smashing.’

She rolled her eyes, but blushed and sliced open a fresh bread roll.

They took a number for their table and sat by the window. A couple sat nearby holding hands and staring gooily at each other over a vanilla slice. Bee gritted her teeth. Fletch had never looked at her like that. Nobody had ever looked at her like that. Not that she wanted Fletch to look at her that way – the thought made her feel uncomfortable somehow. A sudden vision flashed in front of her, of Toby holding her hand and gazing into her eyes. She shook her head to dislodge the vision. She was crazy.

‘Don’t you love the way that all cafés smell the same?’ asked Toby. ‘Whether it’s a school or hospital or museum. Whether a ham and salad roll costs three-fifty or twelve dollars and comes with garnish.’

‘Yeah,’ said Bee, ripping open a sugar packet and letting the little white grains trickle onto the tabletop.

‘Are you okay?’

Bee nodded and trailed her finger in the sugar, swirling it into different shapes.

A waitress brought over a pie and a baguette on white plates.

‘Sauce?’ she asked Bee.

‘Yes, please.’

The waitress took away the number and returned with a tomato-shaped squeezy sauce bottle.

‘Classy,’ said Toby. ‘You’re lucky they didn’t charge you an extra twelve dollars for it.’

Bee stared at her pie.

‘You’re sure you’re okay?’ asked Toby again, lifting a decorative sprig of curly parsley from the edge of his plate with a look of distaste.

‘I still feel like I’m missing something,’ said Bee. ‘Something to do with Gus. Obviously.’

‘I’m sure it’ll come to you,’ said Toby, biting into his salad roll.

‘I hope so,’ said Bee. She picked up the tomato sauce and splodged some onto the pie. Then she frowned and narrowed her eyes, making the red blob go all fuzzy.

‘Wait,’ she murmured. ‘It’s almost there.’ She looked up at Toby. ‘What did you say?’

‘I didn’t say anything,’ he said, his mouth full.

‘No,’ said Bee. ‘Before. What did you say to the lady behind the counter?’

‘I asked her if she’d changed her hair.’

‘Before that.’

‘Can I have a ham and salad baguette?’

Bee snapped her fingers. ‘Beetroot.’

‘What?’

‘You asked for
no beetroot
.’

‘Yeah,’ said Toby. ‘I don’t like the way it gets into all the other ingredients. It’s like the George Lucas of salad vegetables. It turns once-fine vegetables into soggy pink nonsense.’

Bee had a flashback to Gus eating a salad sandwich on the day of his death. She saw the beetroot sliding out the bottom of the sandwich and falling onto his hoodie.

His green museum hoodie. All the staff were given a hoodie to help combat the chill from the museum’s regulated temperature. But most people thought they were daggy and didn’t wear them. Except . . .

‘Toby,’ she said quickly. ‘Think back to when they found Gus in the Red Rotunda. When we saw him. Can you remember if there was a stain on his hoodie?’

Toby blinked. ‘I don’t remember noticing one,’ he said. ‘But my mind was on other things, like, oh look, there’s a dead guy on the floor.’

‘We have to go back to Conservation,’ Bee said. ‘And I need you to get Featherstone out of his office for five minutes so I can go in and check something.’

‘Easy,’ said Toby, and stood up. ‘Wait here for two minutes, then go down.’

He walked briskly out of the café.

Bee waited, and then made her way to Adrian Featherstone’s office. She earned glares from three pregnant women, but smiled sunnily and told them Featherstone had sent her to collect a folder. She knocked softly on his office door, and when nobody answered, she slipped inside and closed the door behind her. She picked her way through the debris until she found what she was looking for: a green museum hoodie, tangled in the wheels of Featherstone’s desk chair. She untangled it and held it up.

There was a faint, pinkish-purple stain on the front.

Why did Adrian Featherstone have Gus’s hoodie? Did that mean that Gus had been found dead in Featherstone’s hoodie? If so, did the glass eyes belong to Featherstone?

Bee ran a finger over the stain. This complicated things somewhat. It certainly implicated Featherstone – he’d obviously had contact with Gus on his last day, enough contact for their clothes to be swapped around. But there were a million reasons why Adrian Featherstone might have glass eyes in his pocket, and most of them were entirely legitimate. But what if the eyes
were
some kind of vital clue?

It was just the kind of evidence to be found in a Miss Marple mystery. A pocketful of eyes. It spoke of mystery and intrigue and devilish plotting. It could have been the signature of a serial killer . . . or it could have been Gus’s last desperate attempt to explain who his killer was.

But, as Bee kept having to remind herself, real life wasn’t a Miss Marple mystery. The point was, even if the eyes themselves weren’t a clue, they must belong to Featherstone. So why had Gus been wearing Featherstone’s hoodie when he died?

Bee heard a telephone ringing outside, and sprang to her feet. Eyes were irrelevant. She didn’t want to be caught snooping around Featherstone’s office. She dropped the hoodie back on the floor and quickly made her way back to the taxidermy lab.

A few minutes later, Toby joined her.

‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘How did you get rid of him?’

He grinned. ‘I had a problem with the computer,’ he said. ‘The one I was inputting all that data on.’

‘What kind of a problem?’

Toby held up a power cord. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, wide-eyed and shrugging. ‘It just turned off, all by itself. I couldn’t figure out what had happened. I left Featherstone on the phone to the IT department.’

‘Good work.’

‘So did you find what you were looking for?’

Bee relayed her discovery of the beetroot stain on Gus’s hoodie.

‘So the glass eyes were a red herring,’ said Toby. ‘That’s a bit disappointing.’

‘Not entirely,’ said Bee. ‘They helped lead us to Adrian Featherstone.’

‘Maybe. But a Natural History Museum hoodie is not nearly so intriguing a clue as a pocketful of glass eyes.’

‘A clue is still a clue.’

‘I suppose. So what now?’

‘We need the dirt on Featherstone,’ said Bee. ‘There’s absolutely no doubt that he’s somehow involved in Gus’s death. I want to know where he came from, and what he did before he came to the museum. If conservation is “just a hobby”, I want to know what his
real
job is. I want to know what he has for breakfast every morning.’

‘Great,’ said Toby. ‘A research mission. What are you doing Saturday?’

Bee made a face. ‘I have to go on some kind of torturous outing with my mum and the Celestial Badger.’

‘He isn’t really a badger, is he?’

‘Sadly, no,’ said Bee. ‘I kind of think it would be better if he was. He’s an accountant.’

‘Oh.’ Toby looked disappointed.

‘I don’t want to go,’ said Bee. ‘How am I supposed to behave around my mum’s new badger boyfriend? Am I supposed to
bond
with him?’

Toby shrugged. ‘I recommend you line your shoes with eggshells.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘It’s a Scandinavian thing,’ said Toby in an infuriatingly offhand manner. ‘They put eggshells in their boots when they’re entering badger territory. Those little buggers have specially wired jaws that mean when they bite you, they
never
let go until the bones are broken. So they tend to hold on until they hear a
crunch
. Hence the eggshells. I wouldn’t want your mum’s new boyfriend to bite off your foot. Wouldn’t really be a good start for what I’m sure will be a beautiful friendship.’

Bee scowled at him. ‘I suppose you’re a goldmine of useless badger trivia.’

‘Maybe. Maybe I know that badger meat is a popular ingredient in the Russian shish kabob.’

‘Why did I ask?’ Bee shook her head. ‘I wish I could get out of it, but I promised. Mum’s trying to be all Happy Families.’

Toby grinned. ‘Leave it to me,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a hunch I know where to look to find out all about Featherstone. I’ll call you on the weekend if I find anything.’

He waved and strode off toward the train station. Bee sighed. A goodbye hug might have been nice.

She noticed Faro Costa smoking a cigarette by the bins. He nodded at her as she approached.

‘You are still in shadow,’ he said. ‘You must learn to turn your face to the sun.’

Bee smiled at him. ‘I will, I promise. But do you think you could help me? I’m trying to learn more about Featherstone. Can you tell me exactly when you saw him on the day Gus died?’

Faro thought about it. ‘Well, he was away from the museum for most of the day. He came back at seven, checked the new exhibition space and then went to his office and stayed there until eleven when he left. I did not see him after that until my next shift, which was the next night.’

‘And he definitely left the building?’ asked Bee. ‘And didn’t come back?’

Faro nodded. ‘There is a special alert for anyone who enters the building after closing,’ he said. ‘And nobody did.’

‘And you never saw Gus enter or leave the building?’ Bee demanded.

‘I did not see him.’

‘So Gus was here the whole time,’ she said. ‘I wonder where he went after he left the lab.’

‘I hope you will find out the answer to your puzzle,’ said Faro. ‘So that you can come out of the shadow, and so Gus’s spirit can be at peace. I fear he is trapped here until the answer is found.’

‘I just wish I could talk to Cranston,’ Bee muttered. ‘I’m sure it’d all fall into place.’

‘Cranston? The man in the photo you showed me? The man I saw with Gus? The man who cried?’

Bee nodded.

‘Why don’t you talk to him?’ asked Faro.

‘I can’t
find
him.’

Faro looked confused. ‘He is over there.’ He pointed.

Bee turned. Faro Costa was right. William Cranston was sitting on a park bench near the entrance to the museum, in exactly the same place she’d seen him the morning after Gus’s death.

‘He is there often,’ said Faro. ‘He reads the newspaper and feeds crumbs to the birds.’

Bee opened her mouth to say something, and then started to laugh.

‘Did I say a funny joke?’ said Faro Costa.

‘No,’ said Bee. ‘But I guess you were right. I did need to come out of the shadows into the light. What I was looking for was out here all along. Thank you.’

Faro Costa ducked his head in acknowledgement, and lit up another cigarette.

‘Excuse me,’ said Bee. ‘Dr Cranston?’

The old man looked up, startled. Bee hesitated, disconcerted by those pale blue eyes, then shook her head and introduced herself.

‘I worked with Gus,’ she said. ‘I just . . . I wanted to talk to you about him. I promise I won’t disturb you for long.’

Cranston seemed uncomfortable. ‘Why would you want to talk to me?’ he asked. His British accent wasn’t posh and plummy like Adrian Featherstone’s, but rather rougher and growlier – the accent of someone who had to work for a living.

‘I know that Gus was really Gregory Uriel Swindon,’ she explained. ‘I know he used to work for you.’

Cranston’s pale blue eyes were sharp and alert. He might be old, but he was certainly in full control of his mind. For a moment, Bee thought he was going to say something, but he just looked concerned.

‘Please,’ she said. ‘I’d really like to know more about him.’

The deep lines of Cranston’s face drooped, and Bee thought she had never seen anyone look so sad.

‘He was . . . a loyal employee,’ he said at last. ‘And a good friend.’

Bee shook her head. ‘So why would he kill himself?’ she asked. ‘Can you think of any possible reason?’

Cranston was silent for a long time, gazing into the distance. Bee wanted desperately to know what he was thinking, what memories were passing before his eyes.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Cranston at last. ‘I can’t help you. Gus hadn’t been a member of my staff for some time before he died. I hadn’t seen him for several years.’

Bee opened her mouth to tell him that she knew this to be a lie, but changed her mind. ‘Why did he stop working for you? Did you have a falling-out?’

‘Gregory had been in my employ for over forty years,’ said Cranston. ‘He was an old man, older than me. He deserved a long and happy retirement.’

‘So why go back to work? And why doing taxidermy at the museum?’