The Curious Case of the Copper Corpse (2 page)

“Well,” he said at last, “Lawson's father is a chemist, in Leeds. He could easily get his hands on copper sulfate. Besides, he's the biggest boy at Greyminster. His biceps are like farm fence posts. He could easily lift someone the size of Mr. Denning.”

“What makes you think copper sulfate was involved?” I asked casually. To tell the truth, I was a little peeved that he was getting so far ahead of me.

“It's a required subject here,” he answered. “We grow blue crystals in hot water and do another experiment with carbon rods and a battery. I say! You don't think—”

“Who's your chemistry master?” I asked.

“Mr. Winter. He's a good sport, old Winter is. Lets us drive his Jaguar at speed when he's in a good mood.”

“And when he's not?”

“He's a right tartar! Squabbles with everyone.”

“Including Mr. Denning?”

Plaxton furrowed his brow again. But before he could answer, there was sudden thunder on the stairs and the room was filled with shiny red faces and blue blazers.

“What's this?” one of them cried, a portly lad whose sheer size hinted of the sweet shop and regular picnic baskets from home. “A girl in your room? You surprise us, Plaxton!”

A general uproar followed. Surrounded by his nudging schoolmates, Plaxton looked at me helplessly. The place had suddenly become a boy's world and I needed to speak the language.

“Oh, grow up!” I said loudly. “I'm his cousin Veronica.”

The portly one stuck out a hand. “I'm Smith-Pritchard,” he said. “But you may call me Adrian.”

I ignored the hand. “I've heard the name before,” I told him. “On the wireless, perhaps. Isn't your father something or other in the government?”

“He's in Parliament—the member for—”

“No point in telling me,” I interrupted. “I have no head for that sort of thing. I'd rather hoped he raced Aston Martins, which would at least be worth talking about.”

“I say!” said the tall, good-looking lad on Smith-Pritchard's left. “Are you keen on cars?”

I recognized him at once: He was the spitting image of his father, George “Taffy” Wagstaffe, the celebrated Battle of Britain pilot who had shot down an enemy aircraft as it attacked Westminster Abbey and, after taking a direct hit himself from the rear gunner of the doomed bomber, parachuted into the Abbey's garden and stayed for tea with the dean and chapter. He was now, five years after the war, the director of his family firm, Wagstaffe Chemicals.

“Dead keen,” I replied. “I live on petrol fumes and swill motor oil for breakfast.”

There was a silence.

“What do you think of the Maserati 4CLT/50?” someone else asked in a quietly menacing voice.

I recognized that I was being tested.

“Not such a bad car,” I said, offering up thanks that I had kept my ears open while hanging round Bert Archer's garage in the village. “Though not quite up to the Alfa 158 in the ferocity of its engine.”

My questioner was a slender boy, so pale that he looked almost like a photographic negative. A whitish cowlick covered his forehead. I squirmed inwardly at his spectral stare.

“Who's that?” I whispered, turning to Plaxton.

“Wilfrid Somerville,” Plaxton whispered back. “They say he dabbles in the occult.”

“Does he?” I asked.

“I don't know. I keep clear of him anyway.”

“Is there anything else?”

“Not much. His father's a clergyman in Hastings and a keen amateur photographer. That's all I know.”

“What are you whispering about?” Somerville demanded, shoving the others aside with his elbows and moving menacingly toward us.

“Veronica was just telling me,” Plaxton said without batting an eye, “that her pater's going in for the Grand Prix at Monza this year.”

“Eh?” Somerville said, startled. “What's his name?”

“It's a name with which you're not yet familiar,” I said airily, “but one with which you soon will be, I assure you.”

An outbreak of laughter eased the tension.

“Good on you, Veronica.” Wagstaffe laughed. “That's giving him the old what for. You've met your match, Somerville. Time to retire the side.”

Somerville, scowling horribly, turned away and fell into a pretended and overly animated discussion with Smith-Pritchard.

A slightly embarrassed silence fell upon the rest of the boys. I shrugged, hauling my shoulders up to my ears, and turned my hands palms out, as if to say
Who gives a fig?
I wasn't frightened by the likes of Wilfrid Somerville. He was a bully, and it was written all over him.

I was about to make a joke when the door burst open again and another boy elbowed his way into the already crowded room.

“Hullo, Plaxton,” he said, jerking a thumb toward the landing. “Old Denning's holed up in the jakes again. He's hung his rotten great sign on the door. What say we roust him? Come on, Lawson—you're the son of a chemist. Surely you can raise a decent stink bomb on a minute's notice?”

Lawson licked his lips, looked round the room as if searching for another exit.

“Leave the old fellow alone, can't you, Henley?” he asked. “Don't you think he's been ragged enough?”

“Oh, don't go all pi on us,” the newcomer said. Presumably this was the Henley whose study shared the first floor with Somerville and Lawson. “Come on, then—who's in for a lark?”

“I am,” Somerville said loudly, as if being first to volunteer would make up for my shaming him. “Come on, lads…Henley, Cosgrave, Smith-Pritchard—what say. Let's give old Denning a rocket up the rear that he won't forget!”

There were several nods and a general movement of bodies toward the door. I couldn't allow this to happen.

Before anyone could stop me, I shoved my way through the pack of boys and out onto the landing. I flung open the door of the WC, darted inside, slammed the door behind me, and rammed home the bolt.

I turned round to see if Mr. Denning was still dead in the tub, which he was.

The door rattled, and from outside in the hall came a murmur of voices, Somerville's louder than the rest.

“I say, open up, Veronica,” he called. I did not reply. A minute passed.

“Put her out, sir,” Somerville said, apparently addressing the deceased housemaster. “She has no right to be in this house. Please remember that it's off-limits to females. Just put her out the door, sir, and I'll see her off the premises.”

Again I kept silent, only gradually realizing that here was a God-sent opportunity for a closer look at the crime scene. Somerville and his cronies could howl all they wanted at the door: There wasn't a schoolboy on the planet—or a man, for that matter—who would dare disturb a female locked into a WC. I knew that for a fact.

Perhaps they would tire and call in someone with authority: some roving housemaster, or even the headmaster himself.

But in the meantime, I had the late Mr. Denning all to myself.

Tucked knees-up in the tub, he reminded me of one of Mrs. Mullet's least successful poultry courses, brought cold and naked to the table in the
bain-marie
in which it had been steamed.

A closer look revealed that several small, irregularly shaped chips of copper had broken away from the body and fallen into the bottom of the tub—perhaps when I had moved it earlier. Small patches of the corpse's skin had been revealed: most of them fish-belly white, but one or two an angry red. And oddly enough, the copper around the red spots had rather a rough, raised surface, like little craters, while that around the white spots was quite smooth and flat.

I was reluctant to touch the corpse—not out of any fear of handling the dead, mind you, but because I didn't want to leave further signs of my examination. In due time, the police would need to see for themselves this copper-plated curiosity with an electrical cable clipped like a crab to its nose: surely one for the record books.

Using a washcloth to prevent fingerprints, I pried open Mr. Denning's mouth with a handy wire soap dish. As I had suspected they would be, the mouth and palate were ulcerated and the tongue and gums tinted a greenish blue.

A quick unclasping of the crocodile clip and a look up the nose showed old lesions and extensive erosion of the mucous membranes. I replaced the clip, taking great care to line up its teeth with their previous impressions.

It was then that I noticed for the first time the clothing draped over the sink behind the door: trousers, jacket, and waistcoat, all of navy serge; shirt and linen underthings all neatly laid out. On the floor beneath them, a small military kit bag of khaki color. Without unfolding the trousers, I worked my hand into each pocket and removed its sparse contents: a large ring of keys with a rabbit's foot charm and a change purse containing a few small coins, including a shilling, a sixpence, and a bent coin marked
C. 20,
with a female Italia on one side and bearing, on the other, the head of a mustachioed gentleman,
VITT. EM. III,
whom I took to be a king. The rest of the markings had been obliterated by a fierce fold in the coin, as if it had stopped a bullet.

Next was a worn black letter case that was coming apart at the seams. The contents were few. It was obvious that it belonged to a man of frugal habits. There was a five-pound note, a creased black-and-white snapshot of an Irish setter with “Brownie x/ix/39” penciled on the back, a prescription for Pentostam written by a Harley Street specialist, several prewar postage stamps bearing the image of King George V, and a worn newspaper clipping with a photo of the British Eighth Army landing on Sicily in 1943. The photograph had been handled so much that it looked like a hole-riddled snowflake cut by a child from a sheet of repetitively folded paper.

Overtaken suddenly by an inexplicable sadness, I glanced at the man in the tub as I laid aside the letter case.

Steady on, Flavia,
I thought.
Keep your mind on the business at hand. Harsh as it may seem, in detective work there's no place for feelings.

Right, then: now for the kit bag. I removed the contents one at a time, a little squeamish at handling a man's personal belongings, even if he
was
dead. Fortunately, they were pitifully few: hog-hair shaving brush, pewter mug, shaving soap, tin mirror, double-edge safety razor, nail scissors, toothbrush, tooth powder, and a tube of theatrical greasepaint makeup, Number 12 rouge.

I've always been amazed by the ease with which a stranger's life can be reconstructed by simply snooping through their belongings. Art and imagination combine to tell a tale that's more complete than even a fat printed biography could ever hope to equal. And Mr. Denning was no exception: His secrets were laid so bare that I felt I ought to be apologizing.

But I didn't, of course. The man was dead and I needed to get on with my investigat
ions.

Somerville and his herd were still shuffling and mumbling on the landing. I could not let them in to trample on the evidence. All but one of them, or two, perhaps, were still in ignorance of Mr. Denning's death.

They would not break down the door—of that I was certain. The British schoolboy may be many things, but he is not a beast. In spite of his outward shell of highly polished indifference, he is at heart a gentleman and a jellyfish. I had learned this from years of close observation of my own father, who was himself an old Greyminste
rian.

By the time the door was opened, I would be gone. I smiled at the thought of the looks on those boyish faces.

The window above the bathtub was like all the rest at Greyminster: diamond panes in a lattice of lead strips. It was but the work of a moment to haul myself up on the edge of the tub (begging the corpse's pardon, of course), lift the latch, and swing the opaque panes outward.

Scaling the exterior of the school was nothing new to me: Because I had done so during a previous investigation, I knew my way around. After a quick look outside to see that no one was in the quad, I squeezed through the open window and scrambled onto the network of vines which clung everywhere to the old stones.