• FIFTEEN •
“THEY SAY ’E’S BLEEDIN’ cause ’is bones ’as been bothered!”
Mrs. Mullet ladled another dollop of her lavalike porridge into my bowl. Thoughts of being an Oliver Twist in reverse crossed my mind: “Please, ma’am, I don’t want any more.”
“Eat it up, dear, while it’s ’ot. There’s a good girl. Remember:
“Margaret Mullet tells no fibs
“ ’Ot porridge sticks to the ribs.
“ ’Ere! I’m a poet and I don’t know it.”
She giggled at her own wit.
The very thought of this gray guck sticking to my ribs—or anything else—was enough to make my stomach go into hibernation.
“Thank you, Mrs. M,” I said groggily, adding a generous slosh of milk to the oatmeal. Perhaps I could sip away at the liquid and leave the quivering horror hidden beneath the surface like the Loch Ness Monster.
I’d barely slept and wasn’t at my best. The cleaning of my coat had been more chemically complicated than I had supposed and had, in the end, required me to duplicate Michael Faraday’s famous 1821 experiment in which he had synthesized tetrachloroethylene by extracting it, by thermal decomposition, from hexachloroe-thane.
Consequently, I had been up all night.
“Actually, his bones haven’t been disturbed,” I told her. “They haven’t dug that deep yet.”
“Well, ’e bloomin’ well knows they’re on the way,” Mrs. Mullet said. “Mark my words. Saints aren’t like your ordinary people. They knows things. They can see and ’ear things at a distance just like the television. They ’ear when Mrs. Frampton is prayin’ to ’ave ’er Elsie’s Bert win the pools so’s she can send ’er mother to Blackpool on ’oliday come June and get ’er out of ’er ’air for a fortnight so’s she can scrub the floors and beat the rugs. Mind you, I’ve said nothin’.”
I was eating breakfast in the kitchen because, by the time I dragged myself out of bed, Mrs. Mullet had already cleared the table in the dining room.
“I ’eard all about it from my friend, Mrs. Waller. She says there was blood all over the place like a abbotory.”
“There wasn’t all that much,” I said. “I saw it myself.”
Mrs. Mullet’s eyes widened.
“No more than a couple of teaspoonsful if you collected it all together. Blood always seems greater in volume than it actually is.”
If it was blood, in fact. I could hardly wait to get upstairs to my laboratory and analyze the residue of the stuff into which I had dipped my white ribbon.
“Still an’ all,” she said. “Miss Tanty ’ad to be put to bed and the doctor called. A real fright, she ’ad, babblin’ on about Mr. Collicutt and the four ’orsemen of the pocket lips. Made no sense at all. Shock, if you ask me.”
“I think you’re quite right, Mrs. M,” I said, my plans changing even as I spoke. “I’ll take her some flowers. I’ll tell her they’re from all of us here at Buckshaw.”
“That would be nice, dear,” Mrs. Mullet said. “You’re always such a thoughtful child.”
Of course I was a thoughtful child. If Miss Tanty’s lips had been loosened by laudanum, I wanted to be among the first to hear what came spilling out.
Miss Tanty lived in a small house on the west side of Cater Street, which ran north from the high street, just west of the Thirteen Drakes.
I pulled up and parked Gladys at the gate just as Miss Gawl, the Treasurer of the Altar Guild, was coming out the front door.
“I’m afraid she can’t see anyone, child. Doctor’s orders. Here, give me those flowers. I’ll put them in a vase and bring them round later.”
I knew she wouldn’t. She would toss them out her back door and onto the rubbish heap. Not that it mattered. I had picked the wild bouquet in the same spot in front of the church as I had the first lot.
“That’s very kind of you, Miss Gawl,” I said, handing over the flowers and pulling a look of worried concern down over my face like a balaclava. “How is she?”
“She’s resting comfortably now,” she replied. “But she mustn’t be disturbed. We’ve given her an injection to help her sleep.”
We’ve given her an injection?
And then I remembered. Of course—Miss Gawl was the retired District Nurse. Which was why she had used the word “injection.” Anyone else would have said “We’ve given her something to help her sleep.” Or “given her a sedative to help her sleep.” And they wouldn’t have said we—they would have said “The doctor’s given her something to help her sleep.”
What wonderful things can be deduced from a simple four-letter word!
I gave the woman my best village idiot grin.
“I’d best be getting along then,” I said, resisting the urge to add, “to the Easter Cow Show.”
There is a limit even to sauciness.
I wheeled Gladys along toward the place where the street ended at the river. With elaborate stupidity, I picked up a handful of pebbles and, with tongue hanging out of the corner of my mouth, skipped them across the water’s surface.
One … two … three …
When I looked back, Miss Gawl was gone.
I walked quickly back to Miss Tanty’s house, looked both ways to be sure that no one was in sight—then opened the door and slipped inside.
The place was overheated—sweltering like a tropical jungle.
On the right was a dining room with an oversized table and more chairs than we had in all of Buckshaw.
To the left, a drawing room-cum-music room with all the usual fittings: small grand piano, music stands, plaster busts of Beethoven and Mozart and another I didn’t recognize—aha!—Wagner; his name was engraved on the base—all three of them as cold-looking as if they had been molded from moon rubble. Beyond the study was a small conservatory, overflowing with exotic-looking plants. A parrot sat hunched in an elaborate wire cage.
“Pretty Polly,” I said, trying to make friends.
The parrot gave me a surly look.
“Who’s a pretty bird, then?” I asked, feeling like a fool, but there are only so many topics of conversation one can have with a bird.
The thing ignored me. Perhaps it was hungry. Perhaps Miss Tanty had been so disturbed that she had forgotten to feed it.
I took hold of a chunk of suet which was jammed between the wires of the cage.
The bird made a sudden lunge and I jerked back my hand before I lost a finger.
I’m afraid I called Polly a nasty name.
“Starve, then,” I told it, and turned back to the front entrance.
The kitchen, at the back of the house, was the source of the high temperature. A great black stove was throwing off as much heat as the Queen Elizabeth’s boilers and the smell of cooking filled the air. I opened the largest oven and peered inside. An enormous roast of beef was basking in a bed of potatoes, carrots, onions, swedes, and apples.
The meat was well browned. It had been baking for at least an hour.
Miss Gawl had said Miss Tanty was resting, which probably meant upstairs.
I returned to the front hall.
“Hello, Quentin,” the parrot said conversationally from the conservatory. The stupid thing had probably realized I’d intended to feed it, and was now trying to suck up to me. But it was too late.
Forgiveness is not one of my better qualities.
To my left, the stairs had been painted to resemble the keys of a piano, the treads black and every riser white.
I climbed slowly up the sloping keyboard, glancing as I went at each of the many black-framed photographs which crowded the walls on both sides: a younger Miss Tanty singing onstage in a long evening gown, her hands clasped at her ample waist; Miss Tanty being given a trophy by a sour gentleman whose expression indicated that he thought someone else should have been the winner; Miss Tanty standing in front of a medieval half-timbered house that looked as if it might be somewhere in Germany; Miss Tanty conducting a choir of girls, all of them—including Miss Tanty herself—dressed in school uniform of jumper, blouse, and black stockings; Miss Tanty front and center in the choir stalls of St. Tancred’s, to one side, the back of Mr. Collicutt’s blond, curly hair just visible as he sits at the organ console. High in the background, just out of focus, is the carved wooden face of Saint Tancred.
He is not bleeding.
At the top of the stairs I turned to my right and made for the room at the front of the house. Miss Tanty would never settle for a back bedroom.
Most of the doors were standing open; only one, the bedroom at the very front of the house, was closed.