A battered wooden desk with an ancient telephone handset and a mechanical chair with protruding springs took up most of the space. On the back wall were shelves lined with ledgers bound in linen, most of them dated on their spines with a span of years: 1943–46, 1931–35, and so forth.
I pulled open the desk drawers, one by one. Of the six, two were empty and the remaining four contained a remarkably uninteresting lot of litter: rubber stamps, ink in a pad, the moldy remains of a cheese sandwich in waxed paper, a bottle of Jergens Lotion, aspirin, a pair of rubber gloves, a rubber finger protector, pencils (broken) red and black, and two dog-eared paperbacks: How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, and How To Stop Worrying and Start Living, ditto.
Not very encouraging.
But in the bottom right-hand drawer was a fat telephone directory, its curled cover jamming the sliding rail. I could not seem to free it, and could not look behind it without getting down onto my hands and knees on the unsanitary stone floor.
By bending my elbow at a scarecrow angle, I was somehow able to work my hand behind the bowed book. My fingers came in contact with something furry.
My first thought was that it was a dead mouse: one that had nibbled on the cheese sandwich, perhaps, and expired of penicillin poisoning, or anaphylaxis.
I fought down my girlish instinct to pull my hand away, or perhaps, even, to scream. I forced my fingers to close around the object and pull it into view.
It was a sock—a red wool sock. And I knew at once that I had seen its mate before.
I studied it carefully and shoved it back into the drawer. Fingerprints, I knew, could not be retrieved from most fabrics, least of all wool. But I had seen all that I needed to see, and I wouldn’t want to be accused of tampering excessively with evidence.
Besides, there was no point in taking it with me for comparison when its matching mate was in the morgue.
Turning my attention to the shelf of ledgers, I took down the right-most book, 1950, its ending date not yet lettered. Obviously the current volume.
The binding gave a dusty sigh and a brisk crackle as I opened the book, and the smell of sweat and old starch came to my nostrils. These were the laundry registers of Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy.
Would they be of any use in my investigations? I remembered something Mrs. Mullet had once told me when I had made a condescending joke about her galvanized tubs: “Don’t ever look down your nose at your laundry maid, miss,” she had snapped in a rare show of short temper. “We knows what you eats, what you drinks, and what you gets up to in between. There’s many a tale told on the scrub board.”
I hadn’t known what she meant, but it sounded like a handy bit of knowledge to keep up my sleeve for future reference, and now, it seemed, was the time.
I leafed through the pages of the ledger, each one ruled into five columns: Date, Name, Item, Notes, and Charge.
For instance:
Sept. 10, 1951 Scarlett, A. SW WL 2, BLM 2, ST 2, TUN, HNK 2, NGTN / $1.85
From which I deduced that Amelia Scarlett’s parents were to be charged $1.85 for the laundering of two woolen sweaters, two pairs of bloomers (a form of undergarment I thought existed nowadays only in rude poems and even ruder songs), two pairs of stockings, a tunic, two handkerchiefs, and a nightgown.
This was a recent entry, made not much more than a month ago.
What tales would be told by the entries from a couple of years ago: in the aftermath, for instance, of the Beaux Arts Ball? Surely such an extravagant event would never pass without a few spilled glasses of punch or lemonade.
I reached for the previous volume. Inside the front cover were pasted calendars for 1947, 1948, and 1949, with various dates ticked off in ink.
Yes—here we were in June 1949, which had four Saturdays, the 4th, 11th, 18th, and 25th. The Beaux Arts Ball must have taken place on one of them. The question was: which?
There were a flurry of entries before and after the 18th: people having their clothing cleaned before the ball and mopping up afterward, or so I guessed. I could check the actual date later with someone who knew.
I leafed on through the book, more out of idle curiosity than anything. Mrs. Mullet was right: The laundry staff knew everything. Here, in remarkable detail, were the rips and the tears, the spills and the stains of everyday life. Doxon, M., for instance, had spilled hydrochloric acid on her blouse in chemistry class; Johnson, S. had ripped her tunic on barbed wire during a hare-and-hounds chase; while some clown named Terwilliger, A. had fallen downstairs with two jam tarts in her pocket. It was all recorded in horrible, laughable, fascinating detail.
As my eyes swept across the 6th of July, a familiar name caught my eye: Brazenose, C.
Clarissa Brazenose.
But wait! Hadn’t she vanished weeks earlier? The night of the Beaux Arts Ball? And reappeared two years later—at least, according to Scarlett—the night before our trip to the training camp … the same day, coincidentally, as my walk in the churchyard with Miss Fawlthorne … and on the eve of my first class in the chemistry lab with Mrs. Bannerman?
Could there be a connection?
Where had she been for the past six hundred and some-odd days? For that matter, where was she now?
Assuming that Clarissa Brazenose was still alive and not a specter, it could hardly have been her body that had tumbled down the chimney.
Whose was it, then?
My mind was writhing with ideas like so many snakes in a pit.
For instance, I had not so far come across any entries for the teaching staff. Perhaps they were expected to see to their own laundry expenses, but was that likely? Any institution with such a great roaring steam laundry as Miss Bodycote’s would surely not deny its services to the faculty.
Another reach to the top shelf brought down an unmarked volume.
Aha! This was more like it: Fawlthorne, Puddicombe, Moate, Bannerman, Fitzgibbon—here they were, the faculty bigwigs, in all their laundered glory.
I was exalted for about six and a half seconds, and then I saw that there were no informative details given, as there had been for the students. The items cleaned were simply listed, which made sense, of course, since the owners were not being charged for the service.
But what had I expected? Cyanide stains on the frock of Mrs. Bannerman close to the date of her husband’s demise? It was too much to hope. Life didn’t work that way—nor did death.
The only item of interest was a recurring entry for “Overalls” under the name Kelly.
At last! Here was my missing “K”: that so-far invisible person who stoked the boilers—or whatever it was he or she did to require access to the laundry—whose key I had just used to gain entry to the place.
I saw at once that Kelly was subject to rips and grass stains, and once each to “tar” and “lock oil.”
I was standing there with the book in my hand when, from the corner of my eye, I caught a sudden movement.
I whipped round and found myself face-to-face with a cliff of hulking flesh. Where on earth had he come from? I had locked the door behind me when I came in, and the only other access to the laundry was by way of a pair of steel doors at the back which, as I could plainly see, were locked and barred.
He must have been here all along! The very thought of it made my toes curl.
“What are you up to?” he demanded in a wood-rasp voice.
The smell of alcohol almost bowled me over.
It didn’t take the brains of a Sherlock Holmes to deduce that this bruiser had been drinking behind the boilers. His red and crusted eyes told the rest of the tale: Here was a man who made the most of a quiet Sunday to have a nip and a nap. There were probably hundreds like him the world over.
“I found the door unlocked,” I said, with just a trace of recrimination in my voice, a trick I had learned from Feely. I waved the laundry book at him.