Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew'd (21 page)

U
NDINE WAS RIGHT.
H
E
did
have a knife. Or what seemed at first to be a knife.

“Go to your room, Undine,” I told her and, incredibly, she obeyed me.

Which left me alone with an armed man.

James Marlowe stood in the foyer, head thrown back, gaping at the ceiling as if he were studying the dome at St. Paul's Cathedral. He was short and stocky, with a barrel chest, and by the way his arms hung out from his sides, I knew that he had developed the kind of biceps that are required for swarming up ropes and so forth.

He had unbuttoned his winter coat, and I could see that he was wearing a hand-me-down blue suit and a striped tie from one of the lesser schools. When he had finished with the foyer, he peered at me owlishly through a pair of round, black-rimmed spectacles.

More for show, I thought, than anything, since the lenses were of little, if any, magnifying power. I had to admire his brass, though, since I had used the same trick myself when I wanted to gain sympathy or suggest a certain nonexistent weakness.

I judged him to be about eighteen or nineteen, which would be about right.

“Miss de Luce?” he asked, sticking out a square hand.

I took it and I shook it, not trying to hide my glance at the object in his other hand, which was not at all what I had imagined. I'd been expecting the standard Boy Scout knife, with black checkered horn handle, and a blade for every occasion, such as a screwdriver, a corkscrew, a tin-opener, a button hook, and a prong for removing stones from horse's hooves.

Far from it: This tool, which he held out to me on an open handkerchief, was a slender steel blade with a wooden handle: a blade that went from square in the center to round to a doubly sharpened wedge at the tip. It was more of a chisel than a knife, and I have to admit I'd never seen anything like it.

“It's a wood-carving tool, called a firmer,” he said. “I found it beside what was left of Mr. Inchbald.”

I wanted to shout “Yarooo!” but somehow I managed to swallow the word.

“Put it in your pocket and follow me upstairs,” I said.

I was nervous, of course, about inviting anyone into my sanctum sanctorum, especially a stranger with a sharp-edged weapon, but I needed a place to talk to him without fear of interruption or of being overheard. It was too cold outside, which left the laboratory. I would simply have to risk it.

“Take a pew,” I told him, gesturing towards a wicker chair. It was something, I thought, that would be the sort of thing an associate of Edgar Wallace might say: hard-boiled but friendly. I didn't want to appear too intimidating.

I sat myself down in Uncle Tarquin's old oak office chair behind the desk.

Like the beam of a lighthouse, James Marlowe's eyes scanned the room, widening as they went at the sight of the scientific equipment and the rows upon rows of chemical bottles. He was barely able to keep his mouth from falling open.

“I thought I'd deliver the photos personally,” he said, passing them across the desk. “Rather than sending them by mail. I thought Mr. Wallace might appreciate—”

“I'm sure he will,” I interrupted. “But first, I'd like you to set the scene for me. I like to form my own first impressions.”

Like Inspector Hewitt,
I couldn't help thinking.

“We can look at the photographs later.”

He looked at me rather dubiously. “You seem awfully young to be an assistant to Mr. Wallace,” he said.

I gave him a stern glare. “Scout Marlowe,” I said. “If Mr. Wallace had not placed his complete trust in me, I should hardly have been placed in this position.”

This made no logical sense, but it served its purpose.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “You may call me James.”

“And you may call me Flavia,” I said, softening just enough to encourage him. “Tell it to me in your own words—from the beginning, if you please.”

I pulled an unused notebook from a drawer and picked up a pencil.

James opened and closed his mouth several times, his tongue clicking nervously as he licked his lips. But he said nothing. Had I been too forceful?

I raised an encouraging eyebrow. “Whenever you're ready,” I said, doling out a little smile.

“The island of Steep Holm,” James said, “lies in the Bristol Channel, approximately five miles west of the town of Weston-super-Mare. About a mile and a half in circumference, it rises two hundred feet above the channel…”

He sounded like the narrator of one of those dreadful travelogues in the cinema that you have to sit through before you get to Boris Karloff, and I guessed that he had told this story more than once.

“Hold on,” I said. “It's human interest Mr. Wallace wants. We'll get to the geography later. Start with the corpse and work outwards.”

“It was horrible!” he said, and by his sudden pallor I knew that his mind had instantly flown back to the scene of his grisly discovery. “At first I didn't know what it was, you see. A cluster of old rags—a discarded beef bone—I almost stepped on it.”

He stopped to swallow heavily. “I had gone there alone in a small sailboat to map the Victorian fortifications, and to observe the gray plover and the dotterel for my Bird Warden Badge. I had always been interested in the migratory—”

“The corpse,” I reminded him.

“It was horrible,” he repeated. “Gulls, you see—when they attack—the skull—the eyes were gone. Bits of gristle—connective tissue, I suppose—glittering in the sunlight. It was sickening.”

Connective tissue? This was more like it. Edgar Wallace would have been proud of me.

No wonder they hadn't wanted the Inchbald family to view the corpse!

I wrote down James's words in the notebook, taking great care to record them accurately.

“To be honest,” he added, “I vomited. They didn't put that in the newspapers, though.”

I nodded sympathetically. And yet I remembered that at the time James had been interviewed by
The
Telegraph,
he had been quite matter-of-fact about it all. Indeed he had positively rhapsodized about the habits of the carrion crow, and the madness of the birds in nesting season.

And to the
London Evening Standard
he had babbled on about Lord Baden Powell's advice on mapping a corpse.

Hardly the words of a lad who has just tossed his cookies.

Or was I being too hard on the boy?

It was odd, the way in which I kept thinking of him as a boy. Although the James Marlowe who was at this very moment sitting in my laboratory was now nearly a man, he had been only fourteen at the time of his allegedly grim discovery.

Was there more to this man/boy than met the eye?

“Go on,” I told him, and he did:

“I tried to convince myself that the…remains…weren't human. But the firmer, the pipe, the wallet, the…the wedding ring…”

Again he seemed on the verge of breaking down.

“Wedding ring?” I said. “I don't remember a wedding ring being mentioned.”

“No,” James said. “They didn't put that in the papers, either. The police thought it might be murder.”

“Did they say so?” I asked.

“Well, no. But I'm no fool. I was a bright boy. Inspector Cavendish told me to button my lip about it or he'd have my guts for garters.”

Inspector Cavendish was a man after my own heart. Even though the news of Oliver Inchbald's death had gone round the world by wireless, they wanted to keep quiet about the evidence by which his identity was established.

Which was interesting in itself.

Had Inspector Cavendish himself been in on the plot? It was uncharitable of me to think such a thing, but that's how my mind works.

Heaven only knows the author of
Hobbyhorse House
had more than money enough to pay off a couple of trusted confederates. But where had he managed to find a dead body to substitute for his own? If, in fact, that is what had happened.

It may sound far-fetched, but in the annals of crime, far stranger things have happened.

“Tell me about the island,” I said. “Mr. Wallace will want to know about the geography. Setting is important in stories, you know.”

“Well, it's desolate,” James said. “Yes, desolate, I should say. It's only half a mile long and a quarter mile wide, and has just two accessible landing places. There's not much on it, really, except for a few military remains, some old, others more recent. And the birds, of course. Birds by the thousands.”

His eyes lit up.

“You're very fond of birds, aren't you, James?” I asked.

“To be honest, I like birds better than people. I suppose Mr. Inchbald did, too, or he wouldn't have gone there.”

This was an interesting thought. No one had mentioned—at least in my hearing—that Oliver was keen on birds. Or had he gone to Steep Holm for some other reason—a walking tour, perhaps—and recognized it as a perfect setting in which to fake his death?

Suppose he had planned it all from a cozy armchair in London?

Authors are known to have fiendishly clever minds, and the authors of children's books are more fiendishly clever than most.

What if Oliver Inchbald
had,
in fact, staged his own death without ever leaving home? What if—like some shadowy puppeteer, or chess master moving his pieces on the board—he had planned and executed his devious plan without ever taking off his slippers?

The important question, though, was
why?

Why would a man who has the world at his feet—a man who was read aloud from drawing room to nursery, a man beloved by old and young—wish to throw it all away, to vanish from the earth like a music hall magician, in a puff of smoke?

Or a cloud of seagulls.

That, as Hamlet is supposed to have said, is the question.

I was proud of myself. I had finally managed to distill the entire case into a single word:

Why?

“Sorry,” I said, tapping my pencil on the notepad. “I was speculating. Getting back to the gulls—”

Slowly, almost reluctantly, I thought, he pulled from an inner pocket a white envelope, which he held out to me.

“These are quite gruesome,” he said. “You might not want to—”

“Gruesome is my game, James,” I said. “Mr. Wallace demands nothing less.”

I took the envelope, opened it, and removed an inner glassine envelope, in which were a number of photos and negatives.

As I thumbed through the prints I couldn't help letting out a whistle. “Crikey,” I said. “These don't half take the cake!”

The photos were, as James had warned me, gruesome. In fact, they were more than gruesome: they were ghastly.

There was the bundle of rags, badly mauled, with bits of bone visible through rips and tears; there was the toothless skull with its empty eye sockets.

“They go for the eyes,” James said. “They have a fondness for eyes.”

I nodded wisely, but wondered if the gulls had taken the teeth as well.

“Did the police see these?” I asked. “You mentioned the photos to the reporter from the
London Evening Standard
. You also mentioned making a sketch.”

“I gave them the sketch,” he said.

“And the photos?”

He looked away.

“And the photos, James?” I insisted.

“He seemed like a nice chap,” he said. “The reporter, I mean. Offered me a cigarette. I didn't accept it, of course. I told him about the photos but I mentioned them to no one else.”

“Did he ask to see them?”

“No. He was in a rush to get back up to London for some kind of newspaper beanfest. Besides, I hadn't developed them yet. The film was still in my camera. I have a folding pocket Brownie. It belonged to my father. He carried it all through the war—in spite of personal photos being forbidden.”

Like father, like son,
I thought.

I leafed through the photographs, examining each one carefully.

“These are very nicely done,” I said. “You printed them yourself?”

“Developed
and
printed. I had already earned my Photography Badge, you see, so I was quite good at it.”

I returned the prints to the envelope and removed the negatives. At first glance, it seemed that each of them corresponded with one of the prints.

“Hold on,” I said. “There are eight negatives, but only seven prints.”

“Yes,” James said. “I spoiled one of them. I was fiddling with the aperture and overexposed a shot. I could have kicked myself. I had only one roll of film, and it was the last shot left.”

I took up the photos again and placed each on top of its corresponding negative.

There was one negative left over. I held it up to the light of the window: a dark and nearly opaque rectangle of about two and a quarter inches by three and a quarter.

“Not much to see, is there?” I asked. “What was it a photo of?”

“I don't remember,” James said quickly. “At any rate, it didn't turn out, as you can see.”

He didn't remember? A Boy Scout drilled in the arts of observation?

What did he take me for?

I decided to say nothing. Instead, I beckoned him, with a wiggled forefinger, to follow me.

I took down two bottles from a shelf of photographic chemicals. “You are familiar with Farmer's Reducer, I expect?”

The look on his face told me he was not. So much for his Photography Badge.

“Nothing to do with fat farmers,” I said, “but named for Ernest Howard Farmer, who published the formula in 1883. It's a solution of potassium ferricyanide….”

I picked up the bottle of bright red salt crystals.

James was now crowding closely behind me, peering over my shoulder—a little too close for comfort, considering that he might still turn out to be a killer.

“We mustn't ever mix this with an acid,” I said, “because it produces hydrogen cyanide gas. We'd be dead before we could say ‘coconuts.' ”