Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew'd (14 page)

“I'm afraid there's no answer,” Miss Runciman said. “Shall I try again later?”

“No, please let it ring,” I told her. “I'm sure there's someone there.”

I wasn't sure at all, but I had learned long ago that if you don't take command, someone else will.

“Parties are often engaged in other pursuits,” Miss Runciman said briskly, half to herself and half to me. It sounded like a line from the
Telephonist's Training Manual
.

I could think of only one response.

“Exactly,” I said. “I was just thinking that myself.”

After what must have been at least fifty rings, the telephone was picked up and a voice said, “Well, what is it now?”

A woman's voice. A woman who was not at all happy about being disturbed while doing whatever she had been doing.

“Miss Congreve?” I asked, dropping my voice into the lowest register I could manage without making my uvula come unstuck.

There came one of those silences so awkward as to make you blush.

“Miss Congreve is dead,” the voice said at last. “Who is calling?”

I had to think more quickly than I've ever had to think before. The cogs of my mind sprang into action like a grandfather clock about to strike. If Western 1778 had, in fact, been reassigned to a complete stranger, they would have no way of knowing that it had previously belonged to Louisa Congreve, or that she was dead. Nor also would they have any interest in knowing who was calling.

Something was as fishy here as the stalls at Billingsgate market.

“I'm very sorry to hear that,” I said. “I had something of very great importance to communicate to her.”

The silence on the other end pinkened. I could feel it.

I was banking everything on something Dogger had once told me.

“Greed,” he had said, “drives everything from the stock exchange to the Engagements column in
The Times
. It's a sad fact, Miss Flavia, but true. Nobody is immune.”

“Well, perhaps I can help…,” the voice said, trailing off but wheedling just a little.

“Are you a relative of Miss Congreve's?” I asked, my mind changing in an instant from grandfather clock to bear trap.

“A distant one, but yes…a relative, to be sure. I was one of the beneficiaries to her will.”

I was pitting my wits against a mastermind. Within seconds she had ingeniously constructed a conduit between an anonymous telephone call and her purse.

“May I ask your name?” I said. “I'm sorry, but it's required.”

“Greene,” she said. “Greene with an
e
. Letitia.”

I spotted the lie at once. As a fibber myself, I could easily recognize the unnecessary detail, tacked on to add authenticity. Greene with an
e,
my aunt Fanny!

I could have done better with my tongue tied to my tootsies!

And Letitia! What kind of fool did she think she was dealing with? As if the added
e
weren't a dead giveaway, the exotic Christian name was a ploy as old as the Chilterns. As I have said, I have more than once myself appended a parasitic “Sabina” to my name for one reason or another—usually as a subtle warning shot to someone who has infringed upon my dignity.

“Thank you, Mrs. Greene,” I said. “I've made a note of that. I shall—”

“
Miss
Greene,” she interrupted. Even aliases have their unwritten set of rules.

“Sorry,” I said. “
Miss
Greene. Could you tell me, please, Miss Greene, if the late Miss Congreve held a ticket on last June's Irish Hospitals' Sweepstake?”

It was a shot in the dark, but a bull's-eye.

I don't know what made me think of Thornfield Chase and the dead man's bedroom, but I blurted it out anyway. Anything to keep the so-called Letitia Greene from ringing off.

If the silence had been pink before, it now became red-hot. The heat of it almost singed my ear.

“Miss Greene?”

“Sorry. I was woolgathering.”

Woolgathering?
What flesh and blood human could possibly let their mind wander off the instant a sweepstakes ticket is mentioned?

To give her credit, the woman recovered in half a tick. “Yes, I believe she did. Buy a ticket, I mean.”

But it was too late. My trap was sprung!

How could someone, dead for years, have possibly held a recent sweepstakes ticket? There was, of course, an out, but I was not going to suggest it. It was not my place in life to throw a lifeline to a liar.

“The ticket was mine,” the woman said. “I bought it in Louisa's name because…well…”

Because lottery tickets are illegal,
I thought.

“Because single ladies like to maintain their privacy,” she went on. “I'm sure you understand.”

“Of course,” I said, in that smarmy voice which single ladies use in talking to one another. “Of course I do.”

“Could you please read me the number on your ticket?” I asked.

I was now in top gear. There could be only one outcome to this conversation.

“I'm afraid I don't have it with me. It's in a safe-deposit box at my bank.”

“Oh, dear,” I said. “That's too bad. Can you retrieve it? Time is at a premium.”

I almost hated to do it to her: the old thumbscrew, time-is-running-out maneuver.

Time being at a premium was an idea I had picked up by eavesdropping on a conversation between Father and an insurance agent from the Prudential.

“Time, Colonel de Luce,” he had said, “is like the jaws of a vise. You and me and the little man in Notting Hill Gate, we are each and every one of us being squeezed out like paste between Past and Present.”

It had not seemed to me a very apt comparison, but his point was clear: The clock was ticking, the fuse burning ever shorter. Time was running out, and the only salvation was to sign on the dotted line before the clock struck twelve.

It was a useful technique, and this was my first opportunity to put it to the test.

“Twenty-four hours,” I said. “It's the best I can do. Our Mr. Merton would be furious, but what he doesn't know can't hurt him, can it? We single ladies must stick together, mustn't we, Letitia?”

I gave a damp little snort of defiance.

“I shall call again tomorrow at the same time,” I said.

And again, like a telephonic Grim Reaper, I dropped my finger onto the cradle and cut off the call.

A
S
I
STEPPED OUT
of the telephone cupboard, I collided with a body in the darkness. Both of us let out muffled
oof
s.

“Who is it?” I demanded. By the roughness of his clothing I knew that it was a man, but it wasn't Dogger.

“Dieter!” His voice hissed in my ear. “Shhh! Don't give me away.”

“Dieter!” I whispered back, hugging him with all my heart and strength. “What are you doing here? How did you get in? What's all this about you and Feely busting up? I don't believe it.”

“Neither do I,” Dieter said. “For a while we are hiring the church, then suddenly we are strangers. Women are curious creatures.”

“We only do it to annoy, because we know it teases,” I said, paraphrasing the Duchess in
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
. Although I was not yet a woman, I felt confident in my opinion. Based upon my close observation of the Divine Ophelia, I knew as much about womanly behavior as the most tortured of swains.

“But why?” Dieter asked.

I could hear the pain in his voice.

“I don't know yet,” I said. “But I expect that one of these days I'll find out.”

“When you do,” Dieter said, “let me know.”

“I will,” I told him. “I promise.”

Much as I wanted to, I did not quiz him about his row with Feely. There are some things that are sacred between a man and a woman, and which must not be pried into by outsiders.

Besides, I could read her diary whenever I wanted to. I simply hadn't got around to it yet.

As a former prisoner of war, Dieter did not have a wide circle of social acquaintances. He had remained in England to work as a farm laborer simply because he chose to. In a way, I suppose, men, also, are curious creatures.

Besides my sister, Feely, Dieter had one other love: the English language. He had once risked his life to drop a wreath from his swastikaed aircraft onto the Brontë family's home in Yorkshire.

“How's the teaching job coming along?” I asked as I steered him out of the narrow passageway and into the foyer. “Any news from Greyminster?”

Father had put a word in with somebody at his old school, and it was expected that Dieter would before long be putting on cap and gown to teach
Wuthering Heights
to a pack of howling schoolboys.

“There is some mix-up with the papers,” Dieter said.

I nodded sympathetically.

There was always trouble with papers. Father spent his entire life plodding through reams of the stuff with the Morlocks from His Majesty's Board of Inland Revenue Department: an ongoing game of cards called “Inheritance,” in which the shuffling and the dealing never ceased, and in which the only possible winner could be the stationer who sold blank paper to the players.

“And Culverhouse Farm?” I asked. “Hens laying well, and all that sort of thing?” I hated myself for making the kind of small talk that I normally despise, but what can you say to a man whose heart has been shattered, when you have no easy words?

“I heard you found another corpse,” Dieter said, breaking the deadly cycle of chitchat into which we had fallen. “Congratulations!”

I grinned happily. This was more like it.

Dieter was one of those rare persons who understood priorities.

“Thornfield Chase,” I said. “It's out in your neighborhood. Man called Sambridge. A wood-carver. Hung upside down on the back of his bedroom door. Cause of death unknown—at least to me.”

“Roger Sambridge? They say he was a bit of a ladies' man,” Dieter said.

“Really?” I said. “I hadn't heard that.”

“Well, it's what you might call farm talk. I don't expect the Altar Guild would have got wind of it.”

“Ho! Ho! Ho!” I said. “If you think those witches can't sniff out a ladies' man at a thousand yards, you've got another think coming.”

This was sheer speculation on my part. I didn't know much about the nonecclesiastical doings of the Altar Guild, but I had it on good authority from Mrs. Mullet that at least one or two of them “weren't no better than they ought to be.”

“Anything more specific?” I asked. “My mind is like a racing engine tearing itself to pieces for want of data.”

“No,” Dieter said. “Not for want of data but ‘because it is not connected up with the work for which it was built.' Sherlock Holmes, ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip.' ”

I stuck out my tongue at him. “Names, please.”

“Well, don't say I told you so, but the name Lillian Trench has been mentioned.”

“Trench? It doesn't ring any bells with me.”

I thought I was on a first-name basis with everyone in Bishop's Lacey and environs—and beyond.

“She lives near Pauper's Well,” Dieter said. “Bit of a recluse; she keeps to herself—or so I've heard,” he added hastily.

“Not directly across the road from Thornfield Chase?” I asked.

“I believe so, yes.”

Good lord! Could it have been Lillian Trench who had twitched the curtains at me as I made my getaway from Sambridge's house?

“Anything else?” I demanded.

“Well…you mustn't repeat this, but I've heard it said that she's a witch.”

“Dieter, you're a brick!” I shouted. I couldn't help it.

Dieter looked as pleased as punch. To him, being called a brick by an English native was probably more precious than a knighthood.

I didn't tell him that Carl Pendracka had already come calling, and I didn't think I needed to. Dieter was already miserable enough without news of a rival.

“You still haven't answered my question,” I said. “How did you get in?”

“I saw myself in by way of the front door,” he said. “As a former fiancé, I thought that—”

“Hold on,” I said. “Who said ‘former'? Was it you?”

“Well, no. It was Ophelia who put it that way.”

“Feely?” I laughed in scorn, like Errol Flynn in
Captain Blood
. “Ophelia? My idiot sister? What does
she
know about love and courtship? Nothing! She pounds the piano. Period! A to G-sharp. Seven octaves and a bit. Apart from that she's about as bright as a suet pudding.

“If you don't mind my saying so,” I added.

Dieter began to laugh, but not very heartily. He broke it off abruptly, looking up and over my shoulder.

I pivoted round and followed his gaze.

There on the staircase, a long strand of her hair wrapped round her fist, her face ashen, stood Feely.

I won't take the trouble to describe the scene that followed, other than to say that it was not pleasant. My sister is capable of flights of drama that would make Joan Crawford and Bette Davis crawl away whipped and whimpering into their lairs.

Without bothering to excuse myself, I trudged past the battling lovers and up the stairs to bed, leaving the two of them pleading and glaring like characters in one of the more high-pitched operas.

It had been a long day.

Next morning, I made a point of being first down for breakfast. Feely would be drained from her battle with Dieter, and Daffy had been sluggish at breakfast ever since she learned to read. Midday to her was three o'clock in the morning, tented beneath the blankets with her trusty Eveready torch and something fat by Dickens.

“Good morning, Mrs. Mullet,” I said cheerily, and probably too loudly.

The poor woman had troubles enough with Father ill and the household in disruption.

“Mornin', dear,” she said. “Did you 'ave a good sleep?”

“Topping,” I said. “I found another body—have you heard?”

“Course I've 'eard, dear. That sort of thing gets round like 'orses on fire. Can't say as I'm surprised. There's them what does and them what watches 'em doin' it, if you take my meanin'.”

I didn't, but I nodded knowingly.

“Like Lillian Trench,” I said, leaving the choice to Mrs. Mullet.

“ 'Er!” she said, slamming the sausages down in front of me. “ 'Er! Don't you go meddlin' with the likes of 'er!”

“No,” I said. “I haven't.” And that was the truth.

So far.

“There are some people best stayed clear of, an' she's one on 'em.”

“Because she's a witch?” I suggested.

“Oh? And where did you 'ear that?” Mrs. Mullet asked, too casually, but by the way she suddenly made herself busy with crumbs and a little brush, I knew that she had heard it, too.

“Oh, I don't know,” I said. “Daffy might have mentioned it.”

Daffy was not yet down for breakfast, and could not be questioned. In any case, Mrs. Mullet had been at Buckshaw long enough to know better than to become involved in the wars of the sisters de Luce.

“Were there cats, candles, and corpses—that sort of thing?” I asked innocently, skewering a poached egg with my fork.

My knowledge of witchcraft was limited to what I had learned from a book called
The Devil Rides Out
by Dennis Wheatley, which Daffy had read aloud to me last Christmas when I was recovering from a fall. It had frightened me so badly that I had been unable to close my eyes for a week.

“Worse than that!” Mrs. Mullet said. “But I shall say no more.”

“Worse than that”
meant sex. I was sure of it.

Although I wasn't well up on the topic of witchcraft, I knew enough to know that it was best left to people in books and others who had nothing better to do. Dancing round a bunch of moldy stones in a wet and windy field, naked, in the dark, was not exactly my idea of ecstasy.

“He was a wood-carver,” I said, steering the conversation back to Mr. Sambridge. “Churches, and so forth. Angels and gargoyles.”

I did not tell her about the leering cherubs Roger Sambridge had carved on his own bedstead; the ghastly wooden imps dragging him down into the flames of Hell.

And for the first time, I found myself wondering why he had done so. Did he think himself deserving of such a fate? Could he have committed so wicked a sin as to warrant eternal punishment?

But Mrs. Mullet was not to be drawn out by angels and gargoyles.

“They ought to be ashamed of themselves,” she snorted. “My friend Mrs. Waller says bonfires is all right for Guy Fawkes Night, but outside o' that there's no good comes of frightnin' the cows and wakin' the chickens. Alf says people needs to let out steam after what they seen in the war, and 'e says a good romp in the 'ills is better than a steak in the ear, but 'e was in the Army, mind, and 'as seen things 'e can't talk about on pain of death, not even with the vicar—
specially
with the vicar, Alf says. Still, I say it isn't right, and you'd better stay away from that lot, Missy, mark my words, there's never no good comes of meddlin' with the Black Carts—that's what Alf calls 'em—no good tryin' to see into next week when your feet is still all tangled up in yesterday. If all that nonsense worked, Alf says, why don't they use it at the racetrack? Why don't they use it on the stork exchange?”

“Quite right, Mrs. Mullet,” I said, pushing back my chair.

I was now more determined than ever to pay a visit to Lillian Trench's cottage. It would have to wait, of course, until after our hospital visit.

I found Dogger in the pantry. He was sitting on a wooden bench, his suit protected by a green apron, polishing Father's best boots.

“Are you taking those to him in the hospital?” I asked excitedly. “Is Father coming home today?”

“I'm afraid not, Miss Flavia. I've had a word with Matron this morning. She tells me he had rather a restless night. That is often the case. Pneumonia is an exhausting disease, not only for the patients, but also for their families.”

“Which means we might not see him at all today,” I said. Dogger's meaning was plain enough.

“Sometimes the greatest love can only be shown by staying away,” Dogger said. “It is a difficult truth, but a truth nonetheless.”

“I understand,” I said. “Thank you, Dogger.”

Although the snow had stopped, the stuff that had fallen overnight had frozen into a crisp crust. Gladys's Dunlop tires bit into it as eagerly as if it were no more than a few stiff egg whites. The road in front of St. Tancred's was especially hazardous where morning traffic had formed a maze of icy ruts. I was picking my way carefully across this mess when a rather disreputable American Army jeep, traveling in the other direction, went into a skid and came to a spectacular stop at right angles to the road.

“Hiya, kid!” called a familiar voice. It was, of course, Carl Pendracka.

“My name is not kid,” I said, as I dragged Gladys sideways across the jagged ruts and approached the jeep. “I'd appreciate if you'd refrain from using it.”

“Just
kidding,
” Carl said. “Just showing off a bit for Mordecai here.”

He waved to indicate the person sitting next to him. All I could see was a pair of enormous eyeglasses. Mordecai was bundled to the nose with a khaki scarf, and wore a knitted tuque or jeep-cap. His every breath was visible in the cold air, giving him the look of a teapot covered with a cozy.

“Got some gen for you,” Carl said. “You got a pencil?”

“I don't need a pencil,” I told him. “I have my brain.”

“Spunky little gal, ain't she?” Carl said, turning to Mordecai. “Almost as bad as her sister.”

I gave Gladys's handlebars a sudden twist and moved away.

“Hey! Hold on. Don't you want to hear what I have to tell you?”

“If you can do so without condescending to me,” I replied, stopping, but not looking back.

“I'm sorry,” Carl said. “Sometimes I'm so full of beans I get away on myself.”

I trudged slowly back to the jeep, letting the lesson sink in.