I tried to keep back a surge of saliva, but not with total success.
As I entered, I spotted Mrs. Bannerman at once. She was sitting in the far corner of the room watching the door.
My first thought was that she did not look like a murderess, even an acquitted one, which she was. Rather, this elfin-faced pixie might have just flown out of the pages of a fairy book by Cicely Mary Barker.
She got to her feet and flung her arms around me as if I really mattered. I’m afraid I stood there looking like a chump.
“Mrs. Bannerman—” was all I could manage.
“Let’s get something straight,” she said, giving my nose a mock tweak. “It’s Mrs. Bannerman no more. From now on it’s just plain old Mildred. Plain old Mildred and Flavia having a nice cuppa in the A.B.C., understood?”
“Yes, Mrs. Bannerman,” I said. “Oh, damn. I mean…Mildred.”
And we both laughed.
I firmly believe it is by sharing such stupid moments as these that we grow into someone other than who we used to be, and I was already feeling an inch taller.
“You’re looking very posh,” I said.
She was wearing a red tailored suit with a white ruffled blouse, a matching beefeater hat, and a sprig of holly berries at the throat.
“It’s rayon,” she said. “Nitrocellulose by another name. It makes me feel explosive.” She gave me a schoolgirl grin.
“Good old pyroxylin,” I said. “Hilaire de Chardonnet, and so forth.”
Like any accomplished chemist, I was quite familiar with the astonishing history of the flammable fabrics.
“Top marks, Flavia. I can see you’ve lost none of your chemical acuity.”
I’m afraid I preened a little, although in my dowdy overcoat I must have looked more like a street musician than a first-rate chemical mind.
Mildred pushed her chair back from the table and lifted a leg.
“Do you think my outfit matches my galoshes?” she asked, and she exploded with laughter.
It was not the kind of Tinkerbell laugh you might expect from such a delicate creature, but rather a full-bellied roar which caused a couple of net-hatted dowagers, dripping with pearls at a nearby table, to shoot daggers of disapproval at us from behind their menus.
“Don’t look now,” Mildred said, “but we’re being watched.”
This brought on even more laughter.
I wondered what these two old gorgons would think if they knew that Mildred earned her living by sifting through the residue that accumulates around hastily buried corpses. They would certainly be eating their tea cakes with less gusto if I told them Mildred had recommended to me Mègnin’s great work, whose title could be translated as The Wildlife of Corpses: a fascinating pioneer study of the insects that feed on dead bodies; a book best read behind closed—or even locked—doors.
Now, here we were, Mildred and I, sitting at one of the tables of the Aerated Bread Company in Oxford Street, under the very noses of these two outraged dowagers, as if butter—or anything else for that matter—wouldn’t melt in either of our mouths.
I gave them one of my supremely pleasant smiles, which involved a very slight crossing of the eyes: just enough to make it seem as if I might be suffering a slight and unfortunate hereditary defect.
It was too much.
The old ladies got to their feet and stalked out of the shop, their noses in the air. Unfortunately, they had forgotten to pay, so that the manageress was forced to follow them out into the snowy street, where a heated argument was now taking place, with much gesticulating and pointing and the waving of arms.
“Well done,” Mildred said, sipping her tea daintily.
It occurred to me that I was not the only one who was becoming a different person. This new Mildred Bannerman was not the one I had known in Canada. It almost seemed as if the two of us were changing places.
It was difficult, even for me, to realize that I was sitting across the table from a member of the Nide, that shadowy—no, not shadowy: invisible—branch of the secret service, of which my aunt Felicity was the so-called Gamekeeper.
As for Mildred, it was becoming evident that she was whatever she wanted to appear to be. Awkwardly put, I suppose, but what it meant was that she was a chameleon: a chameleon in black galoshes and red tailored suit, to be sure, but a chameleon nonetheless.
“How are you getting on?” she asked.
It had been only a couple of days since I had seen her last, and yet I could almost feel the force of her piercing gaze. I could tell by her eyes that she was Mrs. Bannerman again, looking out for my welfare.
“Well enough,” I said, and there were a rather rough few moments during which I fought back tears. I told her about Father’s illness, and she said all the right things. What else could she do?
“You mustn’t blame yourself, Flavia,” she said, and her words shot into me like the bolt from a crossbow. How could she possibly have known my innermost thoughts?
I did what I always do when the shot is too near the heart: I changed the subject, and I did it by blurting—yes, blurting—the entire story about Mr. Sambridge.
I felt better immediately. If I couldn’t trust Mildred, then who—?
“You’ve been busy,” she observed. “The days are so short this time of year. You’ll be needing to get back to Buckshaw, I expect.”
I nodded.
“What can I do to help?”
“Nothing,” I said politely, but wishing immediately I’d kept my mouth shut.
“Why did you ring me up, then?”
She had me there. My mind turned to mush. With most people I could talk my way blindfolded out of the Hampton Court maze, but not with Mildred.
“Well,” I said, “a newspaper archive might be helpful.”
“British Library, Colindale,” she said, glancing at her wristwatch. “Hats, coats, boots, on!—and off we go!”
Minutes later we were hurrying down the endless steps at the Goodge Street tube station, where the Northern Line would carry us through the underworld to Colindale.
—
“Newspaper Room,” Mildred said, handing over a card at the front desk. The bored commissionaire didn’t give me so much as a glance, but pointed with a bony finger, even though it was obvious to everyone but him that Mildred knew where she was going.
Mildred filled out the necessary requests and we sat back to wait for the newspapers.
“I have a pretty good idea of when Inchbald died,” she said. “But we’ll begin with the latest Who’s Who and go on from there. Louisa Congreve, I expect, won’t be in such august company, so in her case, we’ll need to do a bit more legwork.”
“Was Oliver Inchbald a member of the Nide?” I asked, shocked at my own boldness.
Mildred threw her head back and laughed—not as loudly as she had in the tea shop, since we were, after all, in a library, which contains its own holiness.
“Whatever makes you say that?” she demanded.
“Because you said you had a pretty good idea when he died.”
“Flavia! Surely you’re not suggesting—”
“It was just a thought,” I said.
“And a rancid one at that. Ten gold stars, though, for attention to detail. But no, nothing so romantic as that. I believe I read it in The Telegraph. Since I only read The Telegraph when I’m in the train, and since I seldom take the train, I’m reminded immediately of when it was—even where I was.”
“Yes?” I said, fascinated with the process. “You mustn’t have been very old. Oliver Inchbald has been dead for years.”
“I was old enough,” she said, and the tone of her voice signaled that that particular branch of the conversation had reached a dead end.
“Was Inchbald a spy?” I asked.
“Not that I know of,” she answered. “But it’s a good point. Being pecked to death by seabirds does smack a bit of Secret Agent 5, doesn’t it?”
“That’s what I thought,” I agreed.
“No, as
far as I know he was just another one of those English literary gentlemen: gardening, golfing—”
“—and girls,” I wanted to add, thinking of Carla’s auntie Loo, but I didn’t.
“…and grenadine,” she finished.
Grenadine was, I knew, a chemical concoction of pomegranate juice, often used as a camouflage for gin. One of our Buckshaw neighbors, Mrs. Foster, was an old hand in its deployment, and was seldom seen without a sample of the stuff in her hand. On one occasion, at their tennis court, I had tried to engage her in conversation about the fascinating chemical makeup of the pomegranate, such as the acids—caprylic, stearic, oleic, and linoleic—to say nothing of its rich potassium content, but she had seemed too vaporous to bother going on.
At that point, an attendant brought the papers Mildred had ordered, along with a fat bound copy of the London Post Office Directory for 1948, which she dumped in front of me.
“Congreve,” Mildred said. “I expect you’ll find it under ‘C.’ ”
Saucily, I showed her the tip of my tongue and opened the book, offering a silent little prayer to Saint Jerome, the patron saint of libraries and librarians. As so often happens when you’re in that Old Fellow’s good books, the directory fell open at the very page I was looking for.
“Found it!” I said. “Congreve, Miss Louisa G., 47 Cranwell Gardens, Kensington, S.W.7. She’s the only Congreve in the book. Western 1778. I wonder what would happen if we rang that number?”
“I should be very surprised if she picked it up,” Mildred said, “in view of the fact that she’s dead.”
“But we might reach one of her relatives.”
“You’ve already reached one of her relatives. Carla Sherrinford-Cameron. Or have you forgotten?”
“Yes, but we’d have an independent view of Miss Congreve’s connection to Oliver Inchbald.”
“True,” she said. “Provided they were willing to confide in a total stranger.”
“We could give it a try,” I said. “We’d have nothing to lose but the cost of the call.”
“Which means that you’re already planning to make it from the closest kiosk. I can see right through you, Flavia de Luce.”
There was silence for several minutes as she leafed through the bound newspapers, scanning each page at lightning speed before turning to the next. I noticed that she did so without licking her fingertips: a thorough professional.
“People who turn pages with licked fingers are as bad as those who wipe their noses on the table linen,” Daffy had once remarked, and I had stopped doing it.
“Here we are!” Mildred said suddenly, pointing to the page. “I remembered the photograph.”
In grainy black-and-white, a uniformed Boy Scout points to a pair of Wellies, which lie empty and askew, like the hands of a novelty clock pointing to four-forty.
“Nothing left of him but the bones,” said Scout James Marlowe, of Wick St. Lawrence, who made the grisly discovery while doing fieldwork for a Bird Warden badge. Marlowe, 14, a young man of remarkable initiative, sailed out to the desolate island alone in the early hours of Tuesday morning.
“Human remains have occasionally been found on the island,” Inspector Cavendish, of the Somerset Constabulary at Weston-super-Mare told our reporter, “but they’ve tended to be historical and haven’t been wearing Wellies.”
“I think it was the gulls that got him,” Scout Marlowe said. “They can go quite mad in nesting season, you know. They’ll eat anything. Besides,” he added, “the carrion crow, Corvus c. corone, also breeds on the island, and I expect they had a hand in mopping up.”
The investigation is continuing.
“Hmm,” I said. “I wonder how Scout Marlowe knew it was a ‘him’?”
“Good point,” Mildred said. “You might ask him.”
This, I knew, was much more than a suggestion. It might even have been a command.
“Can’t be too many Scouts named Marlowe in Wick St. Lawrence,” I said, and let my eyes shift back to the rapidly turning newspaper pages.
“Yes, here we are,” Mildred said. “Five days later: BONES BELIEVED TO BE THOSE OF BELOVED AUTHOR. STEEP HOLM BODY IDENTIFIED.
“Just as you’d expect. The usual chain of events. Man reported missing: the search and its shocking conclusion.
“DEATH COMES TO HOBBYHORSE HOUSE.
“You have to hand it to The Telegraph. When it comes to this sort of thing, they’re in a class by themselves. Listen…it goes on:
“ ‘The body was identified by a Miss Louisa Congreve, of Cranwell Gardens, Kensington, who is employed at the offices of a well-known London publisher.’
“Note the ‘well-known London publisher.’ Everyone in the civilized world from eight to eighty knows perfectly well who that publisher is, yet someone took the trouble to keep it out of the papers.”
“I wonder who,” I said.
“So do I. And what I wonder even more is how?”
I was not following her train of thought.
“I beg your pardon?” I asked.
“You must remember that every single word in every single newspaper article is—”
“Edited!” I said. “By an editor!”
“Well done.”
“But how do we find him?” I asked. “He wouldn’t tell us anyway. Even if you did track him down.”
“ ‘Elementary,’ as someone once remarked. No one knows better who edited a particular newspaper article than the reporter who wrote it, and whose name, Finbar Joyce, is staring us in the face. In reporters, feelings, blood, and ink run equally deep, and nowhere more so than in Irish veins. I’ll bet you a bob that Finbar Joyce would be willing to sell the soul of his editor and his editor’s mother and grandmother—anonymously, of course—for a couple of quid and a pint of Guinness.”
Ordinarily, I might have questioned such a generalization on the grounds that it was not scientific, but having met Wallace Scroop, a crime reporter in Canada who made weasels seem noble by comparison, I decided that Mildred might just be right.
Daffy had informed me that female intuition was not permissible in a sleuth, but as far as I knew, there was no rule against my making use of someone else’s.
“Elementary,” I agreed with a grin.
Once the date of Oliver Inchbald’s death had been established, it was easy enough to order up copies of The Times (NOTED AUTHOR DIES), Daily Express (OLIVER INCHBALD DEAD IN ISLAND TRAGEDY), the Daily Mail (CRISPIAN CRUMPET CREATOR DEAD IN SHOCKING ISLAND MISHAP), and News of the World (NOTHING LEFT OF HIM BUT HIS WELLIES).
None of them shed any further light on the story except the London Evening Standard, in which Scout Marlowe admitted to making a sketch at the scene:
“It’s in Scouting for Boys, sir. B-P”—Marlowe here refers to Lord Baden-Powell (1857–1941), the founder of the Boy Scout movement, and author of the standard handbook to which the boy alludes— “B-P tells us that we may one day be the first to find the body of a dead man, and if we do, we must draw a little map. I also took a couple of snapshots.”
“None of the other papers mentioned that,” I pointed out. “I wonder why?”
Mildred looked up from the paper. “It indicates, perhaps, that the London Evening Standard is not subscribed to by Inspector Cavendish of the Somerset Constabulary at Weston-super-Mare.”
I was instantly brimming with excitement.
“Could it be, do you think, that a clue might be hidden like that in plain sight—for years—without anyone spotting it?”
Even as the words tumbled out of my mouth, I was aware that the answer was Yes.
Human beings were imperfect. And the police, being human at bottom, were also, therefore, imperfect. In spite of all official efforts, there was always that last stray piece of the jigsaw puzzle that lay lost and undetected beneath the drawing room sofa, and I was a dab hand at crawling in on my belly where others feared—or at least, forgot—to tread.
“Great Scott!” Mildred said, glancing at her wristwatch and
leaping to her feet. “I lost track of the time. I’d better get you to your train or we’ll both be in hot water.”
I hadn’t the heart, or the stomach, to tell her that there was really no hot water for me to get into. With Father in hospital, no one gave a frying pan where I was, or what I was doing. Growing up is like that, I suppose: The strings fall away and you’re left standing on your own.
It was sad in a way that is hard to describe.
For that reason, and others, for all I know, we were mostly silent in the taxicab, and by the time we arrived at the station, a strange awkwardness had grown up between us.
“Keep in touch,” Mildred said as I climbed out and stood at the open window. “You have my number. Call if you need anything.”
I gave a nod that was too abrupt, too ill-mannered; ashamed, I turned and walked away.
Why is it, I wondered, that we can never plan a decent goodbye? Why do farewells always catch us by surprise?
The afternoon was drawing to a close as the train moved out of the station. At the end of the platform, where the snow had not yet been cleared away, what surely must be one of London’s last remaining gas lamps flickered bravely and forlorn against the growing darkness—and then it was gone.
· NINE ·
I WATCHED AS NIGHT came creeping in across the fields and pressed itself against the window glass.
There was only one other passenger in the carriage, a gentleman who thankfully was engrossed in his newspaper. Only his hat, his trousers, and his highly polished boots were visible, giving the comic impression that he had been plastered over with printed advertising, as if he were the remains of a blitzed brick wall in Farringdon Street.
It was just as well, I thought, that the fellow kept to himself. I did not feel in the least like being questioned by a stranger, no matter how interesting or well-meaning he might be. I had been warned, of course, about falling into careless conversations with gentlemen on trains, and that was before I had seen Mr. Hitchcock’s film on that very topic. I had already firmly resolved that, when taking the train in future, I would keep my lips zipped.
The rocking of the carriage and the clackety-clack of the wheels had an oddly hypnotic effect and I let myself be jostled from side to side by the movement. Railway travel always makes you think of the past, as if this beast of steam and steel, which is carrying you forward into some unknown future, causes your memories to travel backwards, at an equal speed, in the other direction. It has something to do, perhaps, with Professor Einstein’s theory of relativity.