Speaking From Among The Bones (27 page)

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.”

I folded the banknotes and pressed them back into the cigarette tin. Getting down onto my stomach again, I shoved the box back into the far corner behind one of the legs of the bed.

I pocketed the envelope and made for the door.

I tiptoed silently to the far end of the hall, stepped into the loo, pulled the chain and flushed … waited … pulled it again … and again, then slammed the door and sauntered casually down the stairs trying to look grateful.

“Well?” Mrs. Battle demanded, hands on hips.

I shook my head grimly.

“Nothing,” I said. “Feely is going to be devastated. Please promise you’ll keep this confidential.”

Mrs. Battle glared at me for a long moment, and then suddenly she softened. What might have been a smile flickered across her face.

“Believe it or not, I was young once,” she said. “I’ll not breathe a word.”

“Oh, thank you!” I told her.

“By the way,” I added, “is your niece at home? I’d like
to thank her personally for her great kindness toward Miss Tanty. I know my sister greatly appreciates it, what with the choir, and so forth. Miss Tanty is such a treasure, don’t you think?”

“Florence is at work,” Mrs. Battle said, holding the door open for me. “I’ll give her the message.”

“Oh, yes,” I said, scrambling madly to gather every slightest scrap of information. “She’s housekeeper at Foster’s, isn’t she?”

It was a shot in the dark.

“Housekeeper?” She sniffed. “I should say not. Florence is private secretary to Magistrate Ridley-Smith.”

Home again, home again, jiggedy-jig. If it hadn’t been for Gladys, my feet would long ago have been worn down to the nubs.

In my laboratory, I took a torch from a drawer and went into the photographic darkroom which Uncle Tar had built in one corner.

Light-tight. Dark as pitch.

I flicked on the torch and pulled the envelope from my pocket.

In Mr. Collicutt’s bedroom, my fingertips had detected the faintest irregularity of the paper’s surface. Why, I had wondered, would someone remove a flap from an envelope used to carry money? The answer seemed obvious: to dispose of something that was written on it.

I placed the envelope faceup and laid the torch down flat on the worktable beside it. A bit of card narrowed the beam.

I now had a slit of light shining at a very low angle of illumination—a right angle, actually—across the paper. Any slight indentations should spring into view.

I took up a magnifying lens and bent closer.

Voilà!
as Daffy would say.

The paper was old and of high quality, the sort used before the war for personal correspondence. Not at all the kind of cheap, thin, glazed stuff in which Father’s creditors now sent him their frequent bills.

The missing flap had been embossed with a crest or a monogram, and long storage in a press, or box, had transferred a slight impression to the envelope’s blank front.

Slight, yes, and very faint, but the monogram was just decipherable in the oblique beam of the torch:

Q
R
S

Something Ridley-Smith.

Ridley-Smith
, I wrote in my notebook.
Ridley-Smith the father, not the son. What is the man’s first name?

Magistrate Ridley-Smith—
Chancellor
Ridley-Smith—had given, or sent, six hundred pounds in banknotes to Mr. Collicutt, who was said in the village to be too poor to have his handkerchiefs and surplices cleaned and pressed at the steam laundry.

Too much of a coincidence that Mrs. Battle’s niece, Florence, works for Ridley-Smith
, I wrote. Perhaps she was unwittingly mixed up in this, too.

Perhaps all of them were.

Why on earth, I wondered, would one of His Majesty’s magistrates, a chancellor of the Church of England, give
a village organist such an enormous sum, only to have it hidden under the bed? Whatever the money was meant for, why had Mr. Collicutt not deposited it safely in the bank?

The answer seemed obvious.

Someone was being secretly paid to do something.

But what?

I was just about to write down my suspicion when there was a light knock at the door. It was Dogger.

“Mr. Adam Sowerby wishes to see you, Miss Flavia. Shall I show him up?”

“Thank you, Dogger. Of course,” I replied, trying to keep my excitement in check until the door had closed. Adam Tradescant Sowerby, MA., FRHortS, etc., making a professional call upon Miss Flavia de Luce! Just fancy!

I closed my notebook and shoved it into a drawer, then flew to the darkroom to put away the torch and the envelope.

I had barely time to return to the window and hold a test tube of colored liquid up to the light—tea, as it happened—when the door opened and Dogger intoned, “Mr. Sowerby, Miss Flavia.”

I counted slowly to seven, then turned round.

“Come in,” I said. “How nice to see you again.”

Adam gave out a low whistle as he looked round at my laboratory.

“Good lord,” he said. “I had, of course, heard about your famous Closet of Chemistry, but I had no idea—”

“Very few do,” I said. “I try to keep it as private as possible.”

“Then I am very much privileged.”

“Yes, you are,” I told him.

No point in wasting time with false vanity when you possess the real thing.

He drifted over to my microscope.

“Ernst Leitz, by Jove,” he said. “And binocular, too. Very nice. Very nice indeed.”

I nodded graciously and kept my mouth shut.
Let’s wait and see
, I thought,
what the cat’s brought home
.

“I saw you at the church,” he said. “Quite ingenious, the way you rescued the vicar from those baying reporters.”

“You were there?” I asked, surprised.

“Lurking among the funerary entablature,” Adam said. Then when he saw the look on my face, he added quickly, “Hiding behind a tombstone, I mean. You were magnificent.”

I flushed slightly. This was twice I had been told I was magnificent—first by Feely, and now by Adam Sowerby.

I was not accustomed to dealing with such unexpected praise. I didn’t know what to say.

“I expect you’re wondering why I’ve come,” Adam said, rescuing the moment.

“Yes,” I said, although I hadn’t been.

“Reason the first …”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a test tube, in which something was twisted.

“Abracadabra,” he said, handing it to me.

I recognized it at once. “My hair ribbon!” I said.

“Stain and all.” Adam grinned.

“Where did you find it?”

“Where you dropped it. In the church porch.”

I am not a person given to blaspheming, but I came perilously close.

“Thank you,” I managed, setting it aside. “I shall analyze it later.”

“Why not do it now, so that I can watch?”

I was tempted to refuse, but the thought of glory did me in. Chemistry is such a lonely occupation that there is never an audience for its greatest moments.

“All right,” I said, with no further persuasion.

I put a bit of distilled water into a clean test tube, then carefully unscrewed the hair ribbon inch by inch from the glass container Adam had brought it in.

“Stolen from one of my germinating samples,” he said. When he saw my look of alarm he added, “I sterilized it first.”

With scissors, I snipped off the rather brownish-stained end of the ribbon and, with tweezers, immersed it in the water.

I lit a Bunsen burner and handed Adam the test tube and a pair of nickel-plated tongs.

“Hold it in the flame,” I instructed. “Keep it moving. I’ll be there in a jiff.”

I went to a row of bottled chemicals and took down the nitric acid.

“Take it off the flame,” I told him. “Keep steady.”

I added a few drops of acid to the water in the test tube.

“Thank you,” I said, taking over.

I heated the liquid slowly, swirling the test tube and watching as the water and the nitric acid quickly took up the stain.

I did this until the liquid had nearly evaporated, leaving not much more than a residue of sludge at the bottom of the tube. To this, I added a bit of alcohol, then filtered and set the mixture aside to cool.

“What kind of blood would you expect to get from a wooden saint?” I asked as we waited. “Blood from the arteries has more oxygen and less nitrogen, while blood from the veins is the opposite. Since a carved saint doesn’t breathe, what’s most likely to be the chemical composition of his blood?”

Adam said nothing, but he caught my eye and did not look away.

He had known at once that there was more to my question than chemistry.

When it was ready, I placed a drop of the residue on a clean glass slide and slipped it under the microscope. I was smiling even as the image came into focus.

Adam was breathing pleasantly over my shoulder.

“Look,” I said. “Four-sided prisms. Made up of acicular crystals. Like little needles,” I explained, in case he didn’t know the meaning of the word. “CH
₄
N
₂
O.”

“Clever,” Adam said. “Damned clever of you to think of it.”

I agreed with him totally.

“You said the hair ribbon was only ‘reason the first’ for coming. What was reason the second?”

“Reason the second? Oh, yes, I thought you’d like to
know. They’re hoisting Saint Tancred from his tomb even as we speak.”

“What?” I said it with several exclamation marks.