I twisted the knob and stuck my nose round the door.
Hands crossed on her breast, the mountainous Miss Tanty was lying motionless on the bed. Although her thick spectacles were perched on her nose, her eyes were closed.
I tiptoed across the room.
It worried me somewhat that she was not snoring. Miss Tanty struck me as the kind of person who did nothing by halves, and I guessed that she was not likely a quiet sleeper. But then, perhaps, trained singers were taught to control their uvulas—those little fingers of flesh that dangle like pink icicles at the back of one’s throat—even when they were asleep.
Was Miss Tanty asleep? Or had someone done her in? Had Mr. Collicutt’s killer returned for a repeat performance? Was someone killing choirs, one musician at a time? Would Feely be next?
All of these thoughts were milling round in my mind at the same time.
I had already spotted the dark bottle that stood on top of an overflowing bookcase which was wedged between the bed and the wall. I was leaning across the bed for a closer look when one of Miss Tanty’s eyes came slowly open.
I almost swallowed my tongue.
Magnified by the thick lenses, her watery eye was as large as the sudden rising of a bloodshot harvest moon.
She blinked and the other eye came open, which was even more alarming than the first. Her pupils swiveled, floating in their soupy liquid, and settled on me.
She seemed not at all surprised to see me. It was almost as if she had been waiting.
“I—I let myself in. To see if you were all right,” I said. “I was worried about you.”
Miss Tanty’s substantial body began shaking with silent tremors, beginning with her shoulders and her ample breasts, and working their way down to vanish at her ankles. It reminded me, if only for an instant, of one of Mrs. Mullet’s failed gelatin aspics.
“Did you,” she said, and it was not a question.
It took me a moment to realize that she was laughing. As her cheeks convulsed, she bit her bottom lip and her great wet eyes thrashed about in their sockets.
It was a gruesome spectacle.
“Ho!” she said. “Did you indeed.”
She rolled over toward the night table and picked up the bottle. She worked the cork out with her thumbs and poured an inch of reddish-brown liquid into a handy glass.
“For my vocal cords,” she said, and tossed it back with a single gulp.
She made a token gargling noise as if to convince me. I recognized at once the smell of sherry. Mrs. Mullet used it in Christmas pudding as well as in what she called her “Sinful Stew.”
“The vocal folds must be rewarded now and then,” Miss Tanty said, shoving the cork back into the bottle. “They must be treated like trained lions: the frequent whip tempered with the occasional reward.”
Could this be the Miss Tanty who had to be put to bed and the doctor called? The Miss Tanty who had been given an injection to help her sleep?
If that were true, she was the second woman in Bishop’s Lacey within a remarkably short time to require the needle. The first had been Cynthia Richardson, who’d had a fright in the churchyard. And now Miss Tanty, who’d had a fright in the church itself.
The same Miss Tanty who was now treating her vocal folds to a second slug of sherry.
“I’m sorry to walk in without an invitation,” I said, without mentioning Miss Gawl. “I knew what a great shock you’d had with the blood in the church, and so forth. I wanted to—”
“Codswallop!” she said, fixing me with her swivel eyes. “I was no more shocked than you were.”
“But—”
The woman was laughing again, her flesh forming whitecaps.
“Of course, I went to great pains to put it about that I was. A few words babbled from the Book of Revelation can be remarkably convincing. Well … not so much great pains when you come right down to it. In any village, a single telephone call is as good as a leader in the Times.”
“But—”
“It was a performance, dear girl. A performance! And a magnificent one, if I do say so myself. I was especially pleased that even you were taken in by it.
“ ‘Forgive me, O Lord.’ You were quite taken in, weren’t you? Admit it. And I must say that crossing myself with the drippings, as it were, was a touch of sheer genius—although I must tell you that I thought for a few moments you had seen through me.”
My mind was racing in circles. I felt like the last to cross the line in a sack race. This horrid old woman had beaten me at my own game.
“Taken in by it?” I managed. “Of course I wasn’t taken in by it. That’s why I’m here.”
It was a feeble recovery, but the best I could do under the circumstances.
Miss Tanty’s heaving billows had by now worked themselves up into a full-fledged tropical storm.
“Dear me!” she said, removing her spectacles and mopping at her streaming eyes with the corner of a mauve sheet. “Dear me!
“Why,” she asked, waving a hand at the bookcase, “should we leave all the glory of detection to Miss What’s-her-name?” and I noticed for the first time that her library consisted of nothing but green-covered paperback mysteries, like the ones Daffy kept hidden away from prying eyes at the back of her knickers drawer.
“I’ve always fancied myself a more than intelligent woman,” Miss Tanty went on. “Not brilliant, but not half bad. I’m always the first to work out who put the poisoned plums into the Christmas pudding; who left the backward footprints in the paddock—that sort of thing.
“Much like you,” she added with a withering and focused glare.
My heart sank.
I had a rival.
“There we were, the three of us, detecting away like billy-ho and no one the wiser.”
The three of us? What was the woman talking about?
“I was first out of the gate, I believe,” Miss Tanty said. “I was on my knees and had a sample of ‘the red stuff,’ as I believe Jack the Ripper called it, on my finger, on my collar and—you’ll have to admit it was a masterstroke, Flavia—in the sign of the cross on my forehead.”
Blast the woman!
“The man Sowerby almost beat me to it with his handkerchief. His tasting the stuff was a nice touch, although a trifle showy. And then, of course, there was you, dipping your white ribbon, hoping desperately that no one would notice.”
Blast the woman again!
“Like three great sleuths, we were, thrown together unexpectedly over a pool of blood at the scene of a crime. What a tableau it was! What an immortal moment. What a snapshot for a book’s dust jacket. I wished I’d brought my Kodak!”
Now here was a fine kettle of fish. I suppose I should have been happy to find a kindred soul in Bishop’s Lacey, but I was not.
Far from it.
How could I hope to get to the bottom of Mr. Collicutt’s unfortunate demise with someone like Miss Tanty muddying the waters?
To say nothing of the police.
“We could form a type of club,” she went on with increasing enthusiasm. “Call ourselves ‘The Big Three.’ Or a corporation: ‘TSD,’ we shall name it: Tanty, Sowerby & de Luce. With an ampersand, of course.”
That did it!
I was not going to spend the rest of my hard-earned life playing third fiddle to a couple of amateurs.
Or were they?
Miss Tanty had raised an interesting point.
I had completely overlooked Adam Sowerby.
I closed my eyes and tried to visualize his business card. What had it said?
Adam Tradescant Sowerby, MA., FRHortS, etc.
Flora-archaeologist
Seeds of Antiquity—Cuttings—Inquiries
Tower Bridge, London E. 1 TN Royal 1066
Inquiries!
I had missed that. Drat and double drat!
The man was a private detective.
Which put a whole new light on things. How much, for instance, did he already know about the death of Mr. Collicutt? And how was I going to worm it out of him?
Miss Tanty, too, if she had been snooping round the village in search of clues, might well be an even richer source of information than I had imagined.
I would need to remain on best of terms with her.
At least for now.