Lord Foxbridge Butts In (11 page)

“Yes, sir,” she gasped and rang off.

“Lord Foxbridge?” the old buster, whom I took to be Mr. Hardcastle, gaped at me, “Lord Vere’s son?”

“The same.  I’m
dreadfully
sorry to have barged in on you like this, but you understand — emergency and all that. I had better get back, I left an old man, I assume he’s the janitor, guarding the body.”

“You left that lazy fool Doyle
guarding
something?” Hardcastle followed me across the corridor, where he started berating the janitor for all the litter and dust and letting someone get murdered on the premises.  I tried to intervene on Doyle’s behalf, feeling a sort of loyalty to the old bird, but Hardcastle just rounded on me, taking everything I said as fresh evidence that I was just as barmy as the janitor.  It kept us fully occupied until the police arrived, at least.

“Lord Foxbridge, why are you here?” Chief Inspector Brigham strode purposefully into the office, fixing me with his gimlet eye and making me feel like a schoolboy caught out of bed at night.  Twister was right behind him, pretending he didn’t know me.

“I was in my sitting-room and heard people talking in this room, I mean that room over there, earlier this morning.  I came around to see what it was.”

“You heard voices through a
wall
?” his raspy voice dripped sarcasm, “In London?  Where every wall is slam up against another wall? You
surprise
me.”

“I hadn’t heard anything through that wall before,” I pouted defensively, “It struck me as odd.  So I wanted to find what was here.”

“And you found a corpse,” Brigham looked at me as if trying to decide if I was a villain or an idiot, and leaning heavily toward the latter, “This seems to have become a habit of yours, Lord Foxbridge.”

“A habit I would happily break,” I arched my eyebrow at him, offended.  I would grant that I am unnaturally inquisitive, but it’s not like I came there
hoping
to find a dead body.  An opium-den or a sinister brotherhood, perhaps, but not some poor bloke with his head on backward.

“If you gentlemen will all please step out into the corridor,” Brigham shooed me out through the door, along with Messrs. Hardcastle and Doyle, just as the Medical Examiner arrived, “Sergeant Paget will take your statements.”

“Well, I
never
!” Hardcastle harrumphed dramatically, “What a rude fellow!”

“And what is your name, sir?” Twister interposed himself between me and the old buster.  He got all of Hardcastle’s particulars — name, address, profession, age,
et cetera
— and asked if he’d heard anything odd outside of his office that morning.  His beard all aquiver with indignation, the solicitor gave Twister all that information, as well as his clubs, his college, and the name of his brother-in-law in the Home Office, who would be hearing about this damnable impertinence.  And of course he hadn’t heard anything, he was a busy man and had no time for listening at keyholes.

Doyle was a more cooperative witness, giving his information in order and unembellished, apparently an old hand at police questioning.  He’d been in his room on the ground floor much of the morning, until he was called up to the fifth floor to mop up a spill in the corridor; he’d arrived on the second floor about twenty minutes before I had, to work on a broken cart in the closet, and hadn’t heard anybody in the corridor before I came along.  He hadn’t seen anybody in that particular office since the would-be stockbrokers had decamped two months back, and hadn’t seen anybody in the building that shouldn’t have been there, certainly not in the last few days.  But the street door was always left open during business hours, and he was only one man in charge of seven floors, he couldn’t see
everyone
who came in.

Twister invited the two old men to return to their work, and cautioned them to not talk to the Press until the police were finished with the scene; I didn’t think the chirpy woman on the switchboard had kept news of a murder to herself, though, so it was rather a waste of breath.  Nevertheless, he induced them to leave us, whereupon he turned on me like an angry tiger.

“Why did you have to call me
again
?” he demanded in a harsh whisper.

“I don’t know,” I admitted, a little frightened, “I just panicked and your name was the only one I could think of.”

“You could have just said ‘Police,’ it’s extremely effective.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, cowed and repentant, “I didn’t mean to get you in trouble.”

“You didn’t,” he relented, going back to his normal voice, “But it doesn’t
look
good, Foxy.  Brigham’s going to want to know why you keep calling me directly instead of Dispatch.  I don’t need Brigham to be suspicious.  It really would have been better if you’d just called the central switchboard and let them assign someone in the usual manner.”

“I’ll remember, next time,” I promised, “Honest.”

“
Next time
?” he looked at me as if I’d made a terrible confession, “What makes you think you’re going to find
another
corpse?  What are you up to?”

“I mean, next time, I...” I stammered, startled by his accusing tone, “I mean I won’t call you directly.  I’ll call the front desk.  If this ever happens again.  Which I’m sure it won’t.”

“All right, then,” he narrowed his eyes at me as if not entirely sure he believed me, “Now, let’s go over the details.  I already know your name, address, profession, and age, so let’s just cut to what the hell brought you over here.”

I explained the whole thing as lucidly as I could, from the discovery of the extra-deep cupboard and the Slavic-sounding conversation I’d overheard and recorded, to finding Carfax Yard House and getting a tour from M.
 Alcide.  I related every single detail I’d noticed about the empty offices, as well as an exact description of the body and its position.  It took a good deal of telling, with Twister stopping me and making me explain things, but it got him over being angry with me; by the time I’d finished my statement, he was laughing at me under his breath and looking at me with a strange mix of admiration and exasperation.  It made me feel very warm and cozy.

“Well, it’s the most bizarre train of coincidences I’ve ever heard,” Twister finally said, closing his notebook and giving me a friendly smile, “And I’m very interested in this transcription of a conversation you couldn’t possibly under-stand.  I’ll call around later on and get the pages from you, if you don’t mind.”

“I never mind you calling around,” I murmured, flapping my eyelashes at him.

“You really have to stop talking like that in public,” Twister warned me, glancing around to make sure we hadn’t been overheard, “You’re going to get yourself into trouble.  And I’d really rather you didn’t get me into trouble while you were at it.”

“I can’t help it,” I shrugged and winked, “You’re so irresistible.”

“Oh, for crying out loud,” he grabbed my shoulders and turned me around, pushing me away down the hall, “Go do whatever it is you idlers do in the afternoon, and I’ll talk to you later.”

*****

I didn’t know what the
other
idlers were doing, but I had a little more shopping to do with M. Alcide, after which a spot of lunch would not go amiss.  I stopped at home to copy the sheets of phonetic writing twice, once for Twister and once for myself, making a few corrections as I went; the first copy was folded neatly into an envelope in case Twister called while I was out, and the other I took with me to the Oxford & Cambridge Club in Pall Mall, where I hoped to not only feed myself but to collar a linguist who could make sense of my scribbles.

To continue the bizarre chain of coincidences that had so far characterized the day,
whom
should I run into on the stairs but the handsome linguistics lecturer himself, Professor ffinchWinship.  I latched onto him like a limpet and wouldn’t let go, insisting almost rudely that he join me for lunch and discuss my phonetics with me.  After a brief resistance, no doubt remembering the pash I so clearly harbored for him at Oxford, he gave in when I proffered up my scribblings for his review.  Like any scholar, he was easily led by his own subject, and could be counted on to sacrifice his comforts in order to take apart an interesting puzzle.

“You say you wrote this while lying in a cupboard and listening against a wall?” he looked over the neat rows with surprise after we were seated in the coffee-room.

“Well, no,” I admitted, “This is a fair-copy I made afterward.  The original looked like a gang of mice got into some ink and performed a Morris dance over the pages.”

“Still, very impressive,” ffinch-Winship snapped the edges of the pages together and started reading without interrupting the flow of lamb-chop into his mouth, “Very good work for a novice.”

“I had a good teacher,” I smiled at him, but tried to make it sound like a compliment rather than a flirtation.  I was still a bit besotted by him, truth be told, and was having some difficulty concentrating on the topic at hand.

“This looks like Czech or Slovak to me,” he proclaimed after several minutes’ silent reading, “Though I can’t really be certain.  And I don’t know what it means, only that it’s definitely a Slavic language.  You’ll want to get old Beran to translate it for you, he’s an expert of Slavic languages.”

“Oh!” I exclaimed in disappointment, “I don’t know Professor Beran.”

“I’ll introduce you,” he grinned at my impatience, “He was in the north library just a bit ago, probably still there.”

“Would you? I’d be forever grateful.”

“What’s the great hurry?” he wondered, studying me closely.

“I’m just madly curious,” I admitted, though I decided to omit any mention of the corpse, “I overheard these blokes talking at the back of my cupboard, and I went around to the building that backs onto mine, to find out who they were.  But it was just an empty office.”

“It’s too bad you didn’t apply your curiosity in academia,” he sighed, “That kind of inquisitiveness, the search for knowledge for its own sake, is the prerequisite of the best scholarship.”

“I’m afraid none of the subjects really caught my fancy,” I leaned back in my chair as the waiter came around with the port, “I’m more interested in people than in history or languages.”

“History and languages
are
the study of people,” he corrected me, “But I take your meaning.  You’re a man of action rather than of study.”

“Exactly!  I am much too impatient for research in books.  I need to go and find out right away.”

“Well, let’s not test your patience any further, we’ll go chivvy Beran and find out what your mysterious Slavs were talking about.”

Professor Beran, like Professor ffinchWinship, was considerably younger and better-looking than your average run of Oxford dons, tall and dark and handsome (though not
quite
as handsome as ffinch-Winship); but unlike Professor ffinchWinship, Professor Beran looked at me with a
very
interested glitter in his eye while I explained my problem.

“Well, yes, I suppose it
is
Czech.  I’m not as fluent in this alphabet as you both seem to be,” he frowned at the papers in his hands, “Why don’t we try this: you two speak the transcript aloud, and I’ll transcribe it into the Czech, and see if we can make sense of it all.”

Retiring to a quieter corner of the library together, ffinchWinship and I read the transcript aloud, and Beran wrote down what we were saying, stopping us every now and then to ask for a clarification from me, whether or not I meant to record a sound that would make better sense than the sound I had written down.  Then he set to work translating the Czech into English while we watched, fascinated.  After about twenty minutes, he laughed in triumph and slammed his hand down on the finished transcript.

“Well, I think I owe you gentlemen a drink,” I flagged down a waiter and ordered a bottle and a syphon, “I bet we managed this faster than Scotland Yard could have done.  Twister will be green with envy!”

“Scotland Yard?” ffinch-Winship was startled, “You didn’t mention Scotland Yard was involved.”

“And who is Twister?” Beran asked, just as startled and suspicious as ffinch-Winship.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I apologized, realizing rather belatedly that both of them might have some ideological objection to doing police-work; and then there were a great many University intellectuals who subscribed to the communist cause, which might be what the Czech gentlemen were discussing, “I didn’t mention the Yard before because they asked me not to.  Twister is my friend who’s a sergeant at Scotland Yard.  Sir
 Oliver Paget?  A Cambridge man, but otherwise sound.”

“Why is the Yard involved?” ffinch-Winship pursued, “Is it a criminal matter?  Or a political matter? Is this transcription a betrayal of some kind?”

“I don’t know about
betrayal
,” I lowered my voice and leaned in so that they’d stop yelling, “But I wasn’t quite truthful when I told you the office was empty.  There was a dead man there.  It’s a murder investigation.  The victim was probably one of the men I’d overheard, and this might give us some clue as to the murderer’s identity.”