Maddie Hatter and the Deadly Diamond (14 page)

Talking all the while, he ushered them across a stretch of shingle and into a dim stone cellar below a fish salting plant. He threw open wide boat-doors that faced the water. Reflected sunlight streamed in, bouncing off arrays of mirrors, amplifying itself until it seemed, if possible, brighter than outdoors. In the glare lay Baron Bodmin.

Maddie, expecting a sodden corpse in a state of advanced decay, had her hand up to her nose. But all she smelled was fresh air with an undertone of rotting seaweed. She lowered the glove and looked upon the largely skeletal remains laid out upon a trestle table. They were clad in the rags of a once-elegant brocade smoking jacket over a battered leather waistcoat. Strong cord was lashed around each wrist. Hornblower peered at the body too, saying nothing. From head to foot—only one foot, Maddie noted—and back again he looked.

“You are sure,” he intoned, “that these bones are the remains of Baron Bodmin?” He managed to remain alert to finish the sentence, but by then Maddie had begun to recognize the slowed words and slump of the shoulders that preceded his lapses into upright slumber.

“Yes, sir.” The coroner, apparently unaware, pulled back the largest scrap of jacket. “See that rib there? I bound that up myself when he fell off a horse as a lad of eight. The right tibia was a flight experiment off a barn, do I recall aright, and this little finger here what’s all scarred together? That’s from the sound cannon he made to scare the crows off his first little airship. Always peckin’ and puncturin’ his balloon, they were. It’s him, right enough, even weren’t he carrying evidence in his pocket.”

“Evidence?” Maddie jumped in to cover Hornblower’s silence. The coroner pointed to a long bench across the rear of the boat shed. Likely in less grisly times it served for tools. Now it held, first, three papers spread out and held down at the edges by beach rocks, and second, a small trunk tipped on its side. The lid was open to display tight-packed books and papers, only a little wrinkled and mildewed around the perimeter.

Maddie bent over the sea-stained papers, tipping her hat brim to give TD a good line of sight. A laissez-passer from the British Protectorate in Egypt, wrinkled and ink-run, but still recognizable if you’d had one. A similar document printed under the Empire Explorers Club crest, of no official standing but serving as an introduction to other Explorers wherever encountered. The third was an image from a very good instrument, showing the baron’s elegant coat sleeve as he held up a mask.

The
mask?

Against the tanned hand, the life-sized mask gleamed darkly. White fragments of shell rimmed its mouth and filled its eyes. Mid-forehead was a chunk of crystal the size of a child’s fist, through which a faint light shone from a nearby candelabra. If that was the Eye, and it was truly a diamond rather than a quartz crystal with other mineral intrusions, it was of incalculable value. Maddie took the image over to Hornblower, jostling him gently as she held it out.

“That was taken in the baron’s library,” she told him. “And what he holds must be the Eye of Africa mask. We should take this image back to the house and see if Professor Plumb can confirm it.”

The coroner nodded reluctantly. “Seeing as it’s Mr. Hornblower requesting it.” He eyed Maddie sternly. “It’s still evidence, and you treat it as such.”

Wondering how on earth she could become a successful investigative journalist without a man to pretend to be her superior, Maddie placed the image carefully between two blank pages of her black notebook.

From the trunk she selected a hand-drawn map of a dune-marked desert—notable for the initials W and J in the upper right, by the compass rose—and a couple of notebooks. One was mostly undamaged and dealt with legends pertaining to the Eye, while the other, in a different hand and ink, dealt with the provisioning needed for one man for twelve weeks. A cursory glimpse showed the majority of the trunk’s contents were written in the first hand. The books were marked with the initials “W.J.” There were bits of sand and a few dead insects.

This, she was sure, was the trunk stolen from Professor Windsor Jones on his transatlantic crossing. All his painstaking research, probably a lifetime’s accumulation, had gone with the adventurous baron to the Nubian desert, a journey most likely made possible by Professor Plumb’s purloining. Then and there she made a vow to never mention again showing Plumb the photograph of the mask, although she did not see how she could prevent his seeing it if Hercule Hornblower commanded it. She turned back to the coroner.

“If he was only in the water at best a few weeks, why was the body so completely stripped of flesh? Surely a longer immersion would be required?”

“Shad,” said the coroner. “A couple of big runs a few days apart, eat everything in their path. Seagulls too, they’ll eat anything. Maybe they had a peck or two at what was left when he came ashore.”

Maddie shuddered. “And his hands were tied to the trunk, if I remember the newspaper reports correctly?”

“Aye.”

“Was death caused by drowning, or by the fall into the water?”

“Or . . .” The coroner looked expectantly at Hercule Hornblower, who looked blank. Maddie went back to the corpse. There was something about the skull, a piece actually missing from the back.

“Or perhaps by hitting his head on something in the water?” she asked. The coroner shook his head. She scanned the body again but could find no other wound.

“Allow me.” The coroner lifted the skull and tilted it backward in the beam from a mirror. Light flooded the interior. “Look in there.”

Fretting with impatience, Maddie had to wait until her boss had looked his fill. He only muttered into his moustaches, leaving, once again, Maddie to ask the questions as they occurred to her.

“Something hit the inside of the skull and forced its way out? How is that possible?”

The coroner nodded. At Hornblower, who had done and said nothing to the point. Was Maddie
invisible
? She set her jaw and leaned in again, turning her head this way and that, and finally saw, on the right eye socket, a tiny chip out of the bone.

“Something went in through the eye and out through the back of his head,” she said. Native tribes in the desert might chase off explorers by throwing spears at them. But could their spears be thrown hard enough to pierce a head like this? If one had, how could the baron get all the way back to England, only to die here with no sign of a spear either in his head or on his airship? The hole in the airship window, and the bloodstain there, did not fit either, not unless he’d brought a native all this way with him. Was a native, alive or dead, soon to be found roaming Cornwall? Incredible. “It was a bullet, wasn’t it?”

For the first time, the coroner looked at her. “Yes, miss, we think it was.”

Maddie could have danced on the spot. She had made a correct deduction and forced this man to acknowledge her. She smiled at him and bent over the skull again, tilting her head to allow TD to record the hole. Hercule Hornblower walked out of the boathouse onto the shingle beach and stood, surveying the pier, the water, and the boats.

Maddie asked the final question. “Where exactly was the body found?”

“You’ll need a boat for that, miss. Duty officer up above will be happy to take you along the shore. It’s a long trip, so you’ll be wanting lunch first. The pub up along the coast road does a nice Shad and chips this season.”

Shad? Maddie’s hollow stomach flipped right over.

RETURNING TO BODMIN
Manor much later that day, damp all over from sea-spray and particularly chilled about the feet, Maddie saw an airship approaching it from the other direction. The nose of the small craft grew in the sky, bathed pink by the setting sun, until the White Sky logo on the hull was plain to see. Surely only Mrs. Midas-White might requisition a White Sky administrative vessel to go to the wilds of a Cornish moor. Could she not give a full twenty-four hours to her detective without checking up on him?

When the Coast Guard steamer glided onto the uneven paving of the Bodmin Manor forecourt, the owner of the White Sky Line was being lowered to those same stones in a sturdy cage-lift that barely contained her voluminous skirt. A long-tailed traveling coat in a rich chocolate covered much of the skirt’s fine tangerine taffeta; both garments were trimmed with combed alpaca wool. The lady’s hands, despite the chill of the late afternoon, were bare to the brass claws that glittered in the last sunlight. If she felt the cold at all, she gave no indication, but swept to the front door and pointed to its knocker. The crewman who had escorted her down hurried to pound it.

The steamer, under a nudge from Hornblower, whooshed away to the stable-yard. There Hornblower leaped out like a much younger person, ordered Maddie to write out a fair report of the day for him immediately, and vanished through the kitchen door, leaving her to thank the Coast Guard driver.

She was hurrying toward the house when a small, brown sparrow dropped from the rooftop, barrel-rolled, and landed neatly on her shoulder. It twittered; TD hopped from the hat down to the same shoulder. She put a gloved hand up to hide the pair from eyes in the house, and heard TD mutter in her ear.

“Which is your chamber? Can I reach it from the roof?”

It was Obie’s voice, and of course the brown sparrow was TC. How and why they were here she would learn soon enough. Pausing only to count windows across the upper story, she gave the bird the direction. It spiraled upward as she slipped inside the kitchen door.

Her room was as dusty and chilled as she’d left it, although someone had shaken the bedclothes into order. She threw off her hat, unlatched the window, sat down by the cold grate, and began to copy out her day’s notes into an official-sounding report. When Obie crawled through the casement she waved him to silence and handed him the first page of the report to read while she completed the second.

“That should do it,” she said after a moment. “We now know the mask was in the manor at some point before the baron went into the sea. I wonder, should I tell someone official that Professor Plumb stole Professor Jones’ research for the baron, or leave that to Hornblower?”

“Leave it,” said Obie. “Jones is booked back to America on my next scheduled voyage; if he hasn’t thought to ask the Coast Guard by then, I’ll nudge him to telegraph back from the ship.”

“All right.” Relieved to have an echo for her reluctance to get further involved, she asked, finally, “What brings you here?”

“Dead-headed down thanks to a mate, when I found Mrs. Midas-White was coming. Since I’m on leave, Madame wanted me here to lend an eye on Lady Sarah. Is it really her?”

“Yes. At least, she’s the woman I saw in Cairo with the baron. And she was searching the parlour last night, in the dark, tapping for a secret hiding place. Do you suppose Baron Bodmin let something slip to her all those months ago, never thinking she would ever see his moldering manor herself?”

“Men will reveal almost any secret to a woman under the right circumstances.” Obie handed back her second page. “Who else is here?”

“Professor Plumb. Sir Ambrose; did Madame tell you Lady Sarah is married to him? Oh, and Colonel Muster, who claims to be in charge of the baron’s estate. He looks like he’d dispatch a human with no more consideration than a sparrow.” She rubbed TD’s beak. “I won’t let him near you, little friend.”

“It’s a far cry from killing in combat to murdering an individual in peacetime,” Obie said. “Most go peaceably back to their old life and never harm another soul. Now, this report says the baron was shot through the eye, inside his vessel. Nobody who knew about airships would dare fire a weapon inside that little cockpit. The whole machine could have gone up in a ball of flame.”

“Well, somebody did.” Maddie held up the sheets of her report side by side for TD to image. “I don’t know if Lady Sarah or Sir Ambrose can shoot, or the Professor.”

“Jones can. He gave an exhibition off the rear platform on the voyage to England. Hiram said he clipped a playing card at twenty paces in a sea wind. And he shot out the left lens of the second mate’s goggles, while they were on his hat. Scorched the hat, but not the hair beneath it. Drunk as a hound, he was.”

“Fine shooting indeed. But was he anywhere near Cornwall when Baron Bodmin died?” She clipped the papers together at the corner and shook out her skirts. “I’ve got to give Hornblower this report right away. Can TC send a copy back to Madame for insurance?”

“Sure thing. I know you too well to think you won’t go prowling around in the dark again, so send TD up to our airship if you run into trouble, and I’ll jump to your rescue.”

“As if I need you to rescue me.” Maddie grinned. “Which of us untangled who from that cargo net over Cape Town?”

“One little misstep,” said Obie, unabashed. “Mind your step with Lady Sarah. Madame said she’s been ruthless, although never killed anyone that the family could discover.”

“She’ll stay in her room for sure now, rather than risk being spotted by Mrs. Midas-White, her ex-employer.”

Maddie’s confidence was misplaced. In search of Hercule Hornblower, she found the lady of the house in the library, making polite conversation with Mrs. Midas-White over a tea tray. She stopped in the doorway, stunned to silence by a morass of conflicting emotions at the sight of the woman she had pursued so far from Shepheard’s Hotel. Both ladies glanced up, but neither gave any sign of previous acquaintance. Indeed, they appeared to regard each other as strangers too. Curious, if they had worked together over the winter. Likely Sarah had been using some other name then, and perhaps they had not met in person.