Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew'd (20 page)

Dogger put on his jacket and held the door open for me. I stepped up into the front passenger's seat.

“I hope you'll teach me to drive her one day, Dogger,” I said.

“I hope I shall, too, miss,” he said.

The Rolls started without a hitch. On almost the first turn she was trembling with silent life in the lamplight.

“Tally ho,” Dogger remarked.

“Tally ho,” I replied.

Even at walking pace, the journey into the village was a relatively short one. There was no time to waste.

“It turns out that the late Mr. Sambridge was actually Oliver Inchbald, the author,” I remarked.

Dogger nodded. “Interesting, but hardly surprising,” he said.

What did he know that I didn't?

“Meaning?” I asked.

“Meaning that it is interesting but hardly surprising,” he said, and I knew I was going to get no more out of him. If there was one thing Dogger was not, it was a gossip.

It was time to change the subject.

“What's a black thing that can be hung up as a wall decoration?” I asked. “Rather like a cross section of a brain—a silhouette—a fan with a distinct stem and various branches. It's hard to describe.”

“It sounds much like a gorgonian sea fan,” Dogger said. “And your description is a very good one.
Rhipidigorgia,
if I'm not mistaken. Polyps of the family Gorgonaceae, which are easily distinguished from their neighbors, you will recall, by their axes not being effervescent in muriatic acid. They are wrenched, sadly, from the sea-floor of the northwest Mediterranean and are lugged home to be pasted up until they return to dust on our parlor walls.”

A shiver ran through me. Hadn't Carla's auntie Loo met her fate while diving in the Mediterranean? Could it have been she who had brought a sea fan home as a gift to Oliver Inchbald?

They had, after all, been great pals. Or so I was led to believe.

Was Oliver's death somehow connected to hers—even though the two events were separated by several years? I needed to think this through, and to do so properly.

“You seem to know a great deal about natural history,” I said, and Dogger smiled.

“As a boy,” he said, “I was very keen—as we used to say. I suppose I had rather a crush on Mother Nature. I did a bit of botanizing.”

“Botanizing?”

“Plants and grasses and so forth. Thought it might come in handy someday.”

“And did it?” I was only partly serious.

“It did,” Dogger said, and left it at that.

And in that moment, a sudden dark image welled up in my mind, of Dogger and Father flushed from hiding at the edge of a steaming field somewhere in southeast Asia, leaping from cover in a ditch to twist garrotes of steel-sharp grasses around the necks of their ambushed hunters.

“And the sea fans?” I asked, wanting to change the subject as quickly as possible.

“A sideline,” Dogger said. “I gave my specimens eventually to the Museum of Natural History in Oxford.”

“Why?” I asked.

“So that they would be viewed by those who could enjoy them more than I did.”

“Ah,” I said, because I couldn't think of anything else.

By now we were pulling up outside Bert Archer's garage. In spite of the cold, Bert came out to greet us. He guided the Rolls in through the open doors with a series of elaborate hand signals.

“Magnificent piece of machinery,” he said as we came to a stop. “Had Lady Denniston's Silver Ghost in last month for a noisy clock.”

He grinned horribly, as if he had made a capital joke. “Now, then,” he said, rubbing his knuckles together in anticipation. “Let's get the old girl up onto the hoist and find out what's under her skirts.”

Dogger frowned, but ever so slightly.

“If you please, Mr. Archer,” I said. “Little pitchers have big ears.”

Bert took it lightly, but I had the distinct feeling that he had learned his lesson.

“Found another body, so I hear?” he said. It sounded almost as if he took personal pride in my accomplishments. “That Sambridge fellow, out at Thornfield Chase?”

“That's right,” I said quietly. I was trying to teach myself not to burble.

“I shall miss his custom. Regular filler-upper he was.”

How odd,
I thought. Roger Sambridge's old Austin had looked to me as if it had been parked since dinosaurs roamed the earth. I couldn't resist.

“Did he have a second car, then?” I asked.

“Ha!” Bert said. “Didn't need one, did he? Not with a neighbor like Lillian. Man who has a neighbor like Lillian, therefore shall he want for nothing, as the vicar likes to say.”

I hadn't seen a car at Lillian Trench's cottage, but that didn't mean she didn't own one. Even witches have to get around when brooms would be too obvious.

“Thank you, Mr. Archer,” Dogger said. “We shall leave you to your work.”

And so, with the Rolls in dry dock, as it were, Dogger and I were left to walk home across the moonlit fields to Buckshaw.

Halfway across a field that has been known, since the Middle Ages, as Breakplough, we stopped for a breather, and to look back at our own footprints, which receded in the direction of the village, our trail growing smaller and smaller in the distance.

“Rather like ‘Good King Wenceslas,' isn't it?” I said, ticking off the points on my mittened fingers (which isn't as easy as it sounds). “Snow lying round about, deep and crisp and even? Check. Brightly shining moon? Affirmative. Cruel frost? Check. It's just perfect, isn't it, Dogger?”

“Perfect,” Dogger said.

“Except, perhaps, for a poor man gathering winter fu-oo-
el
.”

At that very moment, a single headlight swept the field as a farm tractor came bumping out of a nearby lane, pulling a trailer full of firewood.

We both laughed.

No one would have believed it, and I knew that Dogger and I would keep this moment to ourselves. There is a kind of magic that cannot be shared. Even talking about it robs it of its power.

Oliver Inchbald had known that, hadn't he?

We saunter the shore, holding hands,

Sharing the silence of the sands…

He had written that in one of his books, about walking by the sea with his son. I could still remember the illustration: no living persons in sight—simply two pairs of footprints, one large, one small, vanishing in the distance.

How like they were to our own footprints in the snow, Dogger's and mine. A different season, to be sure, and a different setting, but still much the same: an adult and a younger person walking side by side in a sort of wilderness with no more than their footprints to tell us where they've been.

How could a man capable of writing those lines possibly be cruel enough to beat a child? Had Hilary Inchbald been telling the truth?

And if he hadn't, what else might he be lying about?

Overhead, the stars twinkled vividly. They don't care about humans, the stars, except in picture books.

“Have you ever wondered, Dogger,” I asked, “if wickedness is a chemical state?”

“Indeed I have, Miss Flavia,” he said. “I have sometimes thought of little else.”

We began walking again, silent for a while, save for the crunching of the brittle snow.

Although I was aching to talk to Dogger about Father, I found myself unable to do so. Dogger was burdened with enough grief of his own without my adding to it.

“Do you have any brothers or sisters, Dogger?” I asked. It was a thought that had never occurred to me before.

“Yes, I do, Miss Flavia,” he said at last, after a very long pause. “Do you wish me to tell you about them?”

“No,” I said.

“Thank you,” he replied.

Again we walked on in silence for a while: silent because there was far too much to say.

“Dogger, do you think it's right that some of us should live for ages while others are doomed to die?”

Dogger laughed. He actually laughed!

I had never heard him laugh before, and it was a strange and pleasant sound.

“It makes no difference what I think,” he said. “We had an old saying in our regiment:
‘It matters not if we march with the Marchmorts or the Mortmarches; our final destination is the same
.
' 
”

I nodded sadly, because I knew that this was true.

“On account of the chemistry,” I said.

“On account of the chemistry,” Dogger agreed.

I
COULDN'T SLEEP.
O
UTSIDE
my bedroom window, the winter stars were blazing even brighter—if that were possible—than they had while Dogger and I were walking home.

Beyond the Visto, Castor and Pollux, the Heavenly Twins, had risen well above the eastern horizon.

Oliver Inchbald had written something about the stars, hadn't he?

What was it? Of course! It wasn't from
Hobbyhorse House,
but its companion volume,
Bedtime Ballads:

Old Castor says to Pollux,

“A little lad I see,

A-strolling on the distant Earth.

Could he be watching me?”

Old Pollux says to Castor,

“How vain you are, my twin,

'Tis me! 'tis me! the little lad

Has seized an interest in.”

It was all a matter of viewpoint, wasn't it?

The motives for killing a village wood-carver would appear to be entirely different than those for murdering a much-beloved author. As would the suspects.

Who in their right mind would even dream of doing away with Oliver Inchbald—a man who had brought so much pleasure into the world?

The Death of a Household Name,
I should call it, if I were writing up the case disguised as fiction, as Miss Christie has done.

It was far, far easier to think that a morose wood-carver and part-time tippler might have made a mortal enemy.

Which meant that my prime suspects should be the dead man's present-day friends—mostly his acquaintances from church and village: those who knew him only as Roger Sambridge. As opposed, say, to those who had been acquainted with the blessèd Oliver Inchbald, who had been supposedly pecked to death by seagulls.

How had he managed to pull it off?

A death so sensational—so dramatic—could not have been enacted successfully without an enormous amount of planning. And—the hair at the back of my neck bristled at the thought—a great deal of assistance. One does not stage such a spectacle without planning the actual event with military precision.

Why hadn't I thought of this before?

Why hadn't I thought to question Lillian Trench about her neighbor? Had I been too intimidated by coming face-to-face with a would-be witch? Or had the sudden jack-in-the-box appearance of Hilary Inchbald from the sideboard thrown me off the track?

It wasn't until that very moment that the penny dropped, but when it fell, it fell like a load of lead bricks.

Of course! How could I have been so feebleminded? Shame on you, Flavia de Luce!

What a colossal fool I had been! Like everyone else, I had been taken in totally by what was probably the most magnificent piece of stagecraft in recent memory.

Hang your head, John Gielgud! Sir Laurence Olivier, go stand in the corner in shame! Oliver Inchbald—alias Roger Sambridge—has bested us all.

At least he did until he was overtaken by Fate, who apparently has no sense of humor.

What were his last thoughts?
I wondered.
Had he, at the end, and alone with his killer, had even a moment to regret his life? Had there been time for a final “Dash it all!” before his eyes were closed forever?

His final years could not have been easy ones. I knew that he had suffered with arthritis, and that many of his hours had been spent alone in a pub—not spinning tales and making men laugh as you would expect, but sitting by himself. “Morose,” Rosie had called it, which meant, if I understand the word correctly, that he was a sour old crab apple.

What a comedown that must have been for the creator of Crispian Crumpet.

As my mind shifted into a higher gear, a new landscape of questions revealed itself. It was like riding Gladys to the top of the Jack O'Lantern and seeing, suddenly, a vast, fresh perspective of Bishop's Lacey and vicinity laid out like a carpet at one's feet.

A matter of viewpoint.

Castor and Pollux.

There was, for instance, the question of the wooden frame upon which I had found the dead man hanging. Who, among his acquaintances, could have constructed such an instrument of torture, and how had they brought it to Thornfield Chase and set it up? Who had the necessary woodworking skills?

Well, Boy Scout James Marlowe, of Wick St. Lawrence, I thought with a smile, was the first that came to mind. Boy Scouts were famous from pole to pole as being able to whittle up, upon demand, anything from a toothpick to a cantilever bridge. It had been he who made the grisly discovery of Oliver Inchbald's first death, while I, Flavia de Luce, had been left to discover the second.

Had Oliver Inchbald stood idly by and watched as the fiendish device was hauled into his cottage and set up? Or was he already dead by then?

The latter seemed more likely. In spite of my own mental powers I could scarcely imagine anyone assisting at his own crucifixion.

Fiction. The word rang in my brain. Oliver's first “death”
had
been a fiction, cleverly contrived and staged by himself, with the assistance of others yet to be discovered. The second, alas, had been all too real.

Had it been an accident?

Had some unspeakable ritual gone suddenly and horribly wrong?

With these unpleasant thoughts in mind, I rolled over in bed, wrapped the quilt around my shoulders, and fell into the deepest and most restful sleep I've had since the day before I was born.

When I awoke, a winter sun was already slanting in through my window, its low angle illuminating the peaks and valleys of the baggy Georgian wallpaper with which my room was covered.

I remembered that for simply ages I had intended to take further scrapings, for examination under the microscope, of the various mold colonies that flourished on its ancient paste, but now was not the time. Molds, when you stop to think about it, are really no more than large, happy families. If you could make yourself small enough—like Alice—you would probably be able to hear them laughing and singing their moldy songs, teasing one another, playing harmless moldy practical jokes, and swapping moldy ghost stories.

In rather an odd way, I envied them.

I have a confession to make: In spite of being as tolerant as the next person, I found myself unable to face my own family at breakfast. The very thought of spending even part of an hour under the eyes of Feely, Daffy, and Undine made my brain begin to dissolve. I could already feel it.

I leaped out of bed and scrambled into my clothes, my breath making absurd little puffs as if I were a character in the comics, saying nothing. Although the unheated east wing of Buckshaw was a trial in the winter, it was the price I was willing to pay for solitude. The only thing missing was dogsleds.

By a somewhat devious route, I made my way downstairs to the pantry. Mrs. Mullet was so busily fussing with the Aga, she did not notice as I tiptoed in behind her and made off with a liberal supply of uncooked bacon and eggs and several slices of bread.

As I lit the Bunsen burner, back upstairs in my laboratory, I sent up a brief prayer of thanks for not having been spotted.

Holding the bread to the flame with a pair of test-tube clamps, I toasted it to perfection. Eggs scrambled in a glass beaker and bacon sizzling on a stainless steel dissecting tray soon filled the room with the most delicious odors. Claridge's and the Ritz—even the Savoy, I was willing to wager—had never smelled half so deliciously tantalizing on a cold winter morning.

I ate, as Daffy once remarked, with gusto. It was a word I hadn't heard before, and I at once imagined her sitting at a linen-topped table on a terrace by the sea with an elderly, white-haired foreign gentleman—Greek, perhaps—with a red carnation in his buttonhole, passing her the kippers.

This was Gus Toe, and he lived on in my imagination long after I had been set straight about the word.

I was mopping up the last morsel of egg with the last bite of toast when there was a knock at the door.

“Come in, Dogger,” I said, knowing it would be no one else.

The door opened and Undine stuck her head into the room.

“Surprise!” she screeched.

“Go away,” I said.

I still hadn't been able to work out why the child annoyed me so much. The fact that I could not had caused me to retreat behind a curtain of insults.

I had tried referring to her at every opportunity as Pestilence, but it had done no good. I had told her that when she dies, I would pray not
to
the Virgin Mary, but
for
the Virgin Mary.

All of which had bounced off Undine's back like H
₂
O off an Aylesbury duck.

“Go away!” I repeated, in case she hadn't understood.

Undine raised her curled fingers to her lips, sticking a thumb between her teeth to form the mouthpiece of a makeshift trumpet:

“Ta-rah! Ta-rah! Ta-rah-ta-ta-rah-ta-rah!” she trumpeted. “A visitor is announced! Miss Flavia de Luce is desired at the door!”

I laughed in spite of myself.

“If the visitor has a butterfly net, it's you they want, not me,” I said.

“The visitor has no net for the lepidoptera,” she said, dropping her voice into a lower register that was not only wonderfully done, but also spine-chilling.

“His name is James Marlowe,” she added. “And he has a knife.”