A Pocketful of Eyes (8 page)

‘Charming.’

‘It’s quite extraordinary,’ Toby continued. ‘And possibly explains the snail’s place in folklore.’

‘What – being slow to get things going?’

Toby gave Bee a disappointed look. ‘I feel that you’re failing to fully appreciate the beauty of nature here. Snails have fascinated people for centuries. Girls used to persuade boys they fancied to carry snail shells around in order to win their love. And gypsies thought that a snail shell was a charm against witchcraft, because snails were lucky enough to be able to give and take pleasure at the same time.’

Bee shook her head. ‘Snails ate all our basil last summer. They are slimy and gross and not at all sexy.’

‘Patricia Highsmith might disagree with you,’ said Toby. ‘Or at least she would if she were still alive.’

‘Patricia Highsmith?’ said Bee. ‘The novelist? Who wrote
Strangers on a Train
?’

Toby chuckled. ‘I thought you might know her,’ he said. ‘She being such an excellent author of psychological thrillers. Right up your alley.’

‘What does Patricia Highsmith have to do with snails?’

‘Oh, she loved them,’ said Toby. ‘She used to carry a handful around with her in her handbag whenever she travelled. They were her tiny friends who made her feel less alone. When she travelled overseas she used to tuck them under her breasts to get them past security.’

Bee’s mouth fell open. ‘Are you . . . Is this supposed to be . . . Are you trying to
turn me on
right now?’

‘Is it working?’

‘I wish there were more letters in the alphabet to express the emphaticness of my
no
.’

Toby grinned at her. ‘What about if I told you that the Spanish word for “snail” is the same as their word for “vagina”?’

BEE PUZZLED OVER FINDING CRANSTON
as she carefully attached glass eyes to a stuffed platypus.

Toby was also unusually quiet, working on inserting structural wire and cottonwool into a koala. After an hour, Bee started to feel uncomfortable. Being alone in a room with Toby was . . . intense. She could feel his presence, hear his breathing. She flinched every time he bent down to get more cottonwool, sure that he was going to roll his chair over to her desk and say something flirty about the breeding habits of the platypus. But nothing. After two hours, Bee thought she might go crazy unless the silence was broken.

‘So,’ she said. ‘Platypuses. Is it true they have a poisonous spike?’

Toby looked up. ‘Venomous,’ he corrected. ‘The males have a venomous spike in their hind legs. They’re one of only a handful of venomous mammals. Most of the others are shrews, and then there’s some debate about whether the slow loris should be classed as venomous or poisonous. And some researchers say the skunk is poisonous, but most think it’s just gross.’

He turned back to his koala. Bee ground her teeth with impatience.

‘Platypi do have ten sex chromosomes, though,’ said Toby suddenly, and Bee breathed a sigh of relief.

‘Oh?’

‘We only have two, like almost all other mammals. So mine are XY and yours are XX. A male platypus has XYXYXYXYXY.’

‘What does that mean?’

Toby shrugged. ‘It’s complicated.’

Bee scowled at Toby. ‘Are you okay?’ she said. ‘You’re being very quiet today.’

‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘Just a bit tired.’

Bee stared down at the platypus. He’d probably been out at some undergrad party all night. With booze and girls. University girls, who were all experienced and confident and eager to explore the fringy boundaries of their sexuality. Bee hated every single one of them.

‘Damn,’ said Toby, and threw his pair of pliers onto his desk. ‘Damn you, stupid
Phascolarctos cinereus
! You damned thickset arboreal marsupial herbivore! I curse you and all of your extinct
Phascolarctida
relatives. May every gumleaf you pick shrivel in your paw.’

Bee felt something inside her wobble. Toby
was
a little bit adorable. She went over to his desk. A piece of wire used for shaping the koala’s jaw had unravelled, ripping its cheek open from eye to mouth.

‘Do you think I can sew it closed?’ Toby asked.

‘Not unless you want to frighten children with a koala that looks like the Joker,’ said Bee. ‘You’ll have to start over with a new skin.’

‘There’s another koala skin?’

Bee shook her head.

‘So how do I start over?’

‘Follow me.’

Bee took Toby down a corridor to a large metal door. She unlocked it with one of Gus’s keys, and pushed it open. There was a sucking noise and a gust of cold air.

‘This is the freezer,’ she explained. ‘It’s where we keep all the animals.’

Toby looked around, fascinated, as they walked between two shelves stacked with frozen bundles of fur. A box was marked Mice, another Toads and Frogs. Every animal had a small yellow tag hanging off it, marking its species, weight and the date it was brought in, along with its collection number.

As they rounded the corner of one shelved aisle, Toby yelped in surprise.

‘There’s a
lion
,’ he said, pointing.

Bee nodded and reached out a hand to touch the icy golden fur. ‘He came in the same week I started here,’ she said. ‘He’s from the zoo. When a lion gets really old, the younger lions tear him apart, which isn’t so nice for all the visiting kiddies to see. So they euthanased this one and sent him here.’

Bee remembered the way Gus had stroked the fur of the dead lion as he told Bee about the zoo and the other lions. There had been something incredibly respectful in his tone. Bee had gently touched the lion’s mane too, and seen how thick and wild it must have once been. She swallowed as she realised she missed Gus. She missed him sitting at his desk, working away in silence.

‘What will happen to him?’ asked Toby. ‘Will he go on display?’

Bee shrugged. ‘Maybe, if there’s an exhibition that needs a lion. Otherwise he’ll just stay down here until we need him. There are nearly seven million items in storage at this museum, and less than ten thousand on display at any time.’

She bent over at one of the bottom shelves.

‘Male or female?’ she asked.

‘Male,’ said Toby.

Bee hauled out a furry grey corpse and handed it to Toby. He nearly dropped it, not expecting it to be so heavy.

‘Um,’ he said. ‘Not that I am in any way weirded out by all this, but how exactly am I supposed to detach the inside of this koala from the outside?’

‘Don’t you know?’ Bee said. ‘I thought you were studying medicine?’

Toby blinked. ‘Yes. Well. Oddly enough there doesn’t seem to be much call for the removal of a patient’s skin these days.’

‘You haven’t done dissection?’

‘No. It’s complicated. Let’s say it’s one of the reasons why I’m here.’

Bee rolled her eyes. ‘There’s a manual you can use,’ she said. ‘We do it in the wet area of the lab, near the sink. You wait for a couple of hours so the very outside thaws, but not the inside because then things get too messy. You cut open its belly, not too deep because you don’t want it to bleed much. Then you loosen the skin with a blunt knife, and disarticulate the legs.’

‘
Disarticulate the legs?
’

‘Is there a problem?’

‘No,’ said Toby, looking a little grey. ‘What happens after the legs are no longer articulated?’

‘Well, a koala doesn’t have much of a tail, so you don’t have to worry about that. So once you’ve done the back legs, you hang him up on the pulley and pull off the rest of his skin.’

‘Hang him . . . on the
pulley
?’

‘Are you seriously going to repeat every word I say?’

‘No.’

Bee scowled at him. ‘Well, we might just start you on that. I’ll help you when you get to the head. It’s pretty complicated.’

‘Did Gus teach you all this?’

‘Yep. He was a good teacher.’

‘And you seem like a fast learner.’

Bee shrugged. ‘I like to learn.’

Toby regarded his koala. ‘So then what? Once I’ve . . . skinned him?’

‘We don’t need the skeleton, so we’ll chuck that away,’ said Bee. ‘Then you just have to preserve the skin so it stops decaying.’

Toby brightened. ‘Scary chemical time?’

‘Sorry,’ said Bee. ‘Just salt.’

‘Salt?’

‘Salt.’

‘Is it at least some kind of special salt? With a fancy name?’

‘Generic salt from the supermarket,’ said Bee. ‘We don’t use any of the nasty stuff . . .’ She trailed off.

‘Are you okay?’

‘We don’t use toxic chemicals for preservation! We don’t even
have
any.’

Bee turned and ran back to the taxidermy lab. Toby hefted his koala and came after her. She was already sitting at her desk and staring at a Wikipedia page on her computer.

‘I’m an idiot,’ she said. ‘A total idiot.’

‘What? Why?’

She turned to Toby. ‘The vial Gus was holding in his hand. The label said it was corrosive sublimate. That’s an old name for mercuric chloride, which is a preservative chemical. That’s why nobody questioned Gus’s suicide, because they all figured he’d have total access to all sorts of deadly chemicals. Except he didn’t. Museums haven’t used mercuric chloride for at least a hundred years. Nobody uses it anymore, because it’s so dangerous.’

Toby frowned. ‘Then how did he get it?’

‘Maybe someone else administered it. But where would anyone get it from?’

‘I think I might know,’ said Toby. ‘Come with me.’

Bee frowned. ‘You can’t just leave the koala on your desk. It’ll go stinky.’

‘He’ll be okay for ten minutes,’ said Toby. ‘Just come
on
.’

He led Bee out of the Catacombs, up the stairs into the museum and over to a case in a dingy corner near the Red Rotunda.

‘Oh,’ said Bee. ‘
Oh
.’

The case was an often-overlooked memorial to the museum’s history. It contained a few photos of the museum in the late 1800s, including one of Queen Victoria standing beside an Australian coat of arms made from a taxidermied kangaroo and emu; a mangy, moth-eaten platypus; and a line of quaint little bottles containing deadly chemicals. Next to the square card labelled Corrosive Sublimate or Mercuric Chloride, there was no bottle.

Bee looked up at Toby. ‘Well, that answers where it came from,’ she said. ‘But who took it?’

‘It
could
have been Gus,’ said Toby. ‘He’d have access to these cabinets.’

‘Anyone who works here could gain access,’ said Bee. ‘It’s not that hard to get the key to a cabinet from Security.’

‘So does that rule out Cranston?’ asked Toby. ‘He wouldn’t have been able to get in there without someone noticing and causing a fuss.’

‘Maybe.’ Bee studied the case, her head on one side. ‘But I don’t want to cross him off the list just yet.’

‘So now what?’

‘I think it’s time we talked to Security.’

Roy Cantwell was the head of Security. He seemed initially suspicious when Bee asked him who had been on duty the night of Gus’s death, but she flirted a little and became distraught whenever she mentioned Gus, and in the end Roy was so worried she was going to burst into tears that he told her. Faro Costa had been the security guard that night, and he would be on duty again that afternoon.

Bee and Toby found Faro, twenty minutes before his shift started, smoking a cigarette outside the museum.

Faro Costa was a well-built, good-looking man in his late fifties. He had broad shoulders and dark hair cropped close to his head. A snake tattoo coiled around his forearm, its forked tongue licking his palm. Around his neck was a bronze pendant that looked like a tree all twisted in on itself.

Bee knew Faro reasonably well – he’d let her into the building one morning when she had forgotten her smartcard, and he’d told her in his clipped European accent all about his theory of where the taxidermied animals’ souls went. He was . . . eccentric, but Bee liked him and had always found time to say hello whenever she saw him. There was something incredibly gentle about him, despite the snake tattoo, and Bee was tempted to drop him from the suspect list.

She explained that she wanted to know about what had happened the night of Gus’s death.

‘Why?’ asked Faro. ‘It is dangerous to dwell in the past. The past is full of shadows. They can snatch you up and steal your soul.’

Toby glanced sideways at Bee.

‘Stay in the light,’ said Faro. ‘In the land of the living. Gus has gone from this land. He is in a better place.’

‘I very much doubt that,’ muttered Toby.

‘But I think it would help
me
,’ said Bee. ‘With closure. I have so many questions.’

Faro inhaled deeply on his cigarette. ‘Some questions cannot be answered by men. You should come to my church. I find the answers to all my questions there.’

Toby gave an audible snort and Bee glared at him. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘But I really need to know.’

Faro shook his head sadly. ‘The land of shadows is thick about you,’ he said. ‘Come back into the light.’

‘Just tell him,’ said Toby. ‘Tell him the truth.’

Bee hesitated. She was sure Faro Costa couldn’t be the murderer . . . but could she really tell him all her suspicions? Poirot certainly wouldn’t, but Poirot was extremely irksome, so perhaps she
should
just tell Faro. Especially if he
had
seen something that might help them.

‘Fine,’ said Bee, and turned back to Faro. ‘We think Gus might have been murdered.’ She told him about Cranston and Gus’s relationship with him, and about the pocketful of eyes, the smartcard, the missing mercuric chloride and the noise they’d heard in the lab at twenty to one on the night of the murder. Faro listened carefully.

‘The police?’ he asked finally. ‘Have you told them?’

‘I tried,’ said Bee. ‘They said they’d look into it, but I doubt they will.’

‘Kobayashi?’

Bee shook her head. ‘The museum stands to benefit significantly from Cranston’s will,’ she explained. ‘Gus was the only thing standing between the money and Kobayashi – and she admitted that the museum was having money trouble.’

‘You think she is a murderer?’ Faro Costa tilted his head to the side. ‘I cannot believe this. Her soul is not  so dark.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Bee. ‘I still feel Cranston must be involved somehow. That’s why I need to find out more. If I have more evidence, then I can take it to the police and they’ll listen. But everything so far is just circumstantial. Will you help us?’

Faro Costa finished his cigarette and ground it out under his shoe. ‘Very well,’ he said finally. ‘I will tell you all I know.’

‘Thank you,’ said Bee.

Faro gazed off into the distance, thinking. ‘The night it happened,’ he said, ‘I saw nothing. I started at six o’clock in the evening. I saw nothing strange. I noticed no shadows gathering. I saw Adrian Featherstone go into his office at seven o’clock. He left just after eleven and he did not leave his office until then. The Museum Director also worked late, as did the two of you. I did not know about Gus until I was telephoned by the police the next day. The guard on duty after me found the body in the morning, when he opened the doors of the Red Rotunda.’