• TWENTY-ONE •
WHO COULD HAVE DONE such a thing?
The black word must have been added within the past few days—since the discovery of Mr. Collicutt’s body.
Unless, of course, someone had written it earlier as a warning.
Had Inspector Hewitt seen it? Surely he must have done. But if he had, why had he not taken it away with him as evidence?
I riffled quickly through the pile of pages. I guessed that there were five hundred of them. Yes, here it was—they were numbered. Five hundred and thirteen sheets, each one covered closely with Mr. Collicutt’s microscopic handwriting. He must have been working on this thing since he was a schoolboy in short trousers.
In spite of the density of his handwriting, thousands of additions and corrections crammed the margins of almost every page, each with a spidery line joining it to the place in the text where the change was to be made, “disarrangement” changed to “derangement,” “device” to “contrivance,” and so forth.
Very straightforward.
Were these scribbles what Adam’s friend Pole had called marginalia? Probably not. Marginalia were notes on everyday life, while these scribbles were Mr. Collicutt’s revisions to his own manuscript.
At least that’s what I was thinking until I noticed the word adamas.
At first I thought it said Adam. Was Mr. Collicutt making a note in his book about Adam Sowerby? Was adamas meant to stand for “Adam A. Sowerby”?
But no—it couldn’t be. Adam’s middle name was Tradescant. I had seen it on his calling card.
And then the penny dropped! Dropped so hard that I felt it hit the bottom of my brainpan!
Adamas was the Latin word for diamond. Adam had said so!
The word was circled and linked with an arrowed line to a listing of the various stops which had once been part of the ancient organ at Braxhampstead. He had meant to insert the word between “Gemshorn” and “Violin.”
“Have you found them yet?”
Mrs. Battle’s voice, and her heavy tread on the creaking stairs.
I sprang to the door and stuck my head out into the hall.
“I’m just coming, Mrs. Battle,” I called, and I heard her footsteps stop. Stairs were probably difficult for her, and she wouldn’t want to climb any more than were necessary.
“Would it be all right to use the WC while I’m up here?” I shouted, with sudden urgency. “I’m afraid I—”
I did not elaborate, nor did I need to. The human imagination is capable of anything when left on its own to fill in the blanks.
I prayed desperately that there was a loo up here. There had to be—it was a boardinghouse.
“End of the hall,” she muttered, and her footsteps retreated downward.
I turned back to my examination of Mr. Collicutt’s belongings. For a cluttered room, there were surprisingly few of them, aside from the scrapyard of organ parts.
Piles of music books, a metronome, a pitch pipe, a bust of Johann Sebastian Bach—who had been born and died in the same years as Cassandra Cottlestone, I remembered with a delicious shiver.
On a side table an upright toothbrush was stuck into a water glass, and nearby, a tin of tooth powder. A nail file and a pair of nail scissors were perfectly aligned side by side, as you would expect. More than anything, organists needed to look after their hands.
I thought of Mr. Collicutt’s shriveled fingers as I had seen them in the tomb at St. Tancred’s, and of the clean nails on the hand that clutched the broken bit of glass tubing.
He had been dead when he was dragged through the tunnel. He had not clutched at the soil of the graveyard.
I got to my knees and looked under the bed. It was too dark to see anything. I flattened myself with my cheek to the floorboards, edged forward, and reached as far as I could under the wooden frame. My fingers touched something—felt it—seized it—and pulled it slowly toward me.
It was a flat tin cigarette box. Players Navy Cut. One hundred cigarettes.
Surely the police had seen it. But if they had, why would they have shoved it back under the bed?
Perhaps they had only looked, rather than felt—relied on eyes rather than fingers. A large police sergeant would not be as accustomed as I was to slithering about under beds on his belly. A thin tin would be easy enough to miss in a dark corner.
I got to my knees and sat back on my heels. Judging by its weight, the box was not completely empty.
I fiddled with the hinge and the lid popped open.
Something fluttered into my lap.
Paper banknotes! Half a dozen of them—one hundred pounds each.
Six hundred pounds, in all. More money than I had ever seen in my entire life. I must confess that a number of ideas popped into my mind as quickly as the banknotes had spilled into my lap, but since every one of them involved theft I stifled the urge almost at once.
The notes had been folded double in an envelope which had sprung out like a jack-in-the-box when I opened the lid.
Six hundred pounds!
So much for Mr. Collicutt being as poor as a church mouse—this was no village organist who had to scrape by on fifty quid a year.
I picked up the notes one by one and was about to replace them in the tin when I noticed something odd about the envelope. The flap had been ripped off, leaving a raw edge.
“Are you finished up there?”
Mrs. Battle again. Impatient now.
“Yes, just coming,” I called out. “I’ll be right down.”