Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew'd (26 page)

“Well done,” Inspector Hewitt said.

“Sulfurous acid,” I explained, not wanting to let this moment of glory pass. “H
₂
SO
_3.
”

“Yes, I seem to remember that from my college days,” the inspector said, and there was for a moment an unbreakable bond between us: the eternal bond of chemistry.

I glowed with all the fire of a newborn galaxy.

The inspector closed his notebook, put away his Biro, and got to his feet.

“Come along,” he said. “It's late and the wind is bitter. I'll give you a lift home.”

We said our goodbyes and offered our thanks to Cynthia, who seemed to be all hands and apron.

“Merry Christmas,” she said. I had forgotten all about it.

The snow was beginning to drift among the tombstones as we made our way to the car, the wind pushing at our backs.

“How are you bearing up?” Inspector Hewitt asked suddenly. “It's been quite a day.”

I knew he was referring to my encounter with Carla.

It was suddenly more important than anything on earth to show him I could cope, even if it called for a little deceit.

“I'm all right,” I said.

Would he notice if I changed the subject? A light bit of banter would show him what I was made of.

“You told me once that His Majesty King George did not permit anyone but policemen and criminals to ride in official vehicles. Has he changed his mind?”

Inspector Hewitt laughed—he actually laughed!—as he stowed Gladys in the boot and held open the door for me.

He did not reply until we were in the car and he had started the motor. And then he said: “His Majesty King George allows us to make an exception in the case of persons who have been extraordinarily helpful to his officers.”

I think I fainted.

I'm not quite sure, but for some indefinite amount of time I was definitely in a swoon.

I became aware of the sound of the car heater—of the official tires crunching through the ice and snow.

Suddenly the inspector said, “I was very sorry to hear about your father. How is he?”

I was jerked back to reality. What was I to tell him? How could I say that I didn't know?

“He's not been allowed visitors,” I said, which was only partially true. Everyone in Bishop's Lacey—even the wretched Undine—seemed to have seen Father. I was the only exception.

“I'm planning to visit him in the morning,” I said. “I shall tell him you were asking.”

“Please do,” Inspector Hewitt said.

And then, unaccountably, we were stopped at the door of Buckshaw. Time had jumped like a bad splice in a film at the cinema.

The inspector and I were sitting there looking at each other in the way you do at the end of a journey, not knowing quite what to say when there's only one thing left.

“I hope you'll go easy on Carla,” I said, taking advantage of the moment. “She's not had the same advantages as some of us.”

“Justice does not distinguish,” Inspector Hewitt said. “She wears a blindfold, remember.”

“I'm sorry,” I said, leaving him to decide what I meant by it.

“Nevertheless,” he added. “I shall whisper in her ear.”

Tears welled up in my eyes. I couldn't help myself.

“Antigone Hewitt has a very fine husband,” I said.

“Hasn't she, though?” Inspector Hewitt said, and we both laughed.

The moment had passed.

I had pulled it off.

S
OME SLEEPS ARE WASHED
with gold, and some with silver. Mine was molten lead.

I awoke feeling hot and feverish, my throat feeling stuffed with razor blades. I could tell from the shambles of my bed that I had tossed and turned all night, although I could not remember dreaming.

Dreamless nights, I knew, can be the most troubling, since you come back not knowing where you've been or what you've done.

As I swung my legs out of bed, I was shattered by a sneeze—and one of the worst kind.

I mopped up and was reaching for my clothing when the door opened and Mrs. Mullet backed into the room carrying a breakfast tray.

“Not so quick, miss,” she said. “Back into bed with you. I've brought you some nice toast and jam and ginger tea.”

“But I've got to get up,” I said. “We're going to the hospital to see Father.”

“They've already left,” Mrs. Mullet said. “You need your sleep. You ought to 'ave 'eard yourself, 'awkin' and 'ackin' somethin' wicked. You've got a stripped throat, you 'ave.

“Worse 'an that,” she added, fixing me with a fierce glare, “you was whimperin' in your sleep. What you been gettin' up to, miss—and don't tell me it's nothin'. I may be a fool, but I'm not a new fool.”

“Already left?” I echoed in my nutmeg-grater voice. It might have been funny if I hadn't been so close to tears. “What do you mean, already left?”

“Left. Gone, is what I mean,” Mrs. Mullet said, punching up my pillows with far more force than was strictly necessary.

“Who's gone?” I demanded.

“All on 'em. Miss Ophelia and Dieter, Miss Daphne, Miss Undine. Dogger's drove 'em.”

What treachery! How could they do this to me?

How could someone like Undine be allowed in to see my father—not once, but twice—while I was kept at bay as if I were some kind of pariah?

“Dieter?” I said. “I thought Feely had tossed him over?”

“Fmmmphh!” Mrs. Mullet said. “A temper in a teapot. Girls go all silly when they've got themselves a beau. You will, too, when your time comes.”

I was too upset to pull even my standard gargoyle face.

“Thank you, Mrs. M,” I croaked. “You're right. I think I need my sleep.”

And without another word, I rolled over, burrowed into the pillows, and pulled the eiderdown up to cover my head completely.

I gave a few convincing twitches as I settled.

After a moment, I heard the rattle of dishes and the sound of the door closing.

She had taken away my breakfast.

I counted slowly to four hundred, because you never know, and I'd been tricked before.

I dressed quickly, pausing from time to time to suppress a cough with both hands. Although there was now no one else in the house but Mrs. Mullet, it wouldn't do to be caught.

Bundled to the eyes in coat, jumpers, mitts, and scarves and weighted down by heavy rubber galoshes, I looked to myself in the mirror like a World War I aviator about to take off on a high altitude reconnaissance flight.

Which gave me an idea: I still had the goggled flying helmet I had worn when Aunt Felicity took me for a flight in
Blithe Spirit,
Harriet's De Havilland Gypsy Moth. I hauled the thing on over my hair, strapped it under my chin, and was ready to go.

I slipped quietly—or as quietly as one can when one is dressed like Sir Ernest Shackleton—out into the hall and into my laboratory.

I raised the sash of one of the east windows overlooking the Visto—the same window, in fact, by which Carl Pendracka had made his entrance and his exit.

Settling on the sill, I swung one leg out, and then the other. If the dead vines on the brick wall would support Carl, they would certainly support me.

I worked the window closed and began my descent. The vines creaked and groaned dreadfully, as if I were climbing down a ladder of old bones. It didn't much matter, though: The east wall of the house was far enough away from the kitchen that there was no danger of Mrs. Mullet hearing my clatter.

After only a few slips and plunges, I reached the ground and made my way round the back of the house. The wall of the kitchen garden would hide me most of my way to the greenhouse, and as for the rest of it—well, I would simply have to be stealthy.

It helped to know that Mrs. Mullet wasn't much of a one for gazing idly out the window.

“I keeps my nose to the Aga and my eyes on the pots,”
she had once told me when I'd caught her peering out at the sky.
“But it pays to know what kind o' weather you're goin' to 'ave to walk 'ome in when your 'usband's gone and lost your only umbrella.”

Luck was on my side. I managed to reach the greenhouse without raising a siren voice from the kitchen door.

“Come on, Gladys,” I urged. “No more lollygagging.”

Not that she was. She'd know I was only teasing.

We shoved off—literally—towards the west, with me pushing her like a battering ram through the dunes of snow, which varied from patches of drifts to little seas of glaring ice, with Gladys groaning all the while like an ancient dowager being dragged against her will across the fields.

It was a private joke. Gladys loved to pretend she was being abducted. She was being amusing, I knew, and because it helped pass the time until we reached the road, I did not discourage her.

Now, finally, after a mile or so, I was able to drag her across the last ditch and set her wheels upon what should have been the tarmac, but was in fact no more than a dark and hardened trail of snow and ice leading towards Hinley.

Fortunately, there was very little traffic as we wobbled westwards. The occasional car coming from behind us to the east would give a little honk to indicate that they were overtaking, but aside from that, there was only the howling of the crosswind and the crunching of the icy mulch beneath Gladys's Dunlop treads.

What a week it had been!

To keep from thinking about Father, I had allowed my mind to be consumed by the nasty business of Oliver Inchbald, alias Roger Sambridge. Although I was certain I had solved a crime, I still wasn't quite certain what that crime had been.

Would Carla Sherrinford-Cameron be found to be a murderess? If so, had her aunt, Louisa Congreve, been an accessory? Had Louisa known that morning, before she set out for London, that her neighbor—to be charitable—was dead?

Why had Oliver Inchbald, showered with literary glory and years of success, decided to fake his own death and vanish from the world? Had he been threatened with some kind of exposure? Had it been, as I suspected, that his wife—Hilary's mother—was still alive? That he had faked his death to avoid the shame of exposure? That he had tired of his own fame?

My mind boggled. I could think of a score of reasons but I didn't want to.

In the same way, I suppose, that the perfect crime is extremely rare, so is the perfect solution. In real life, we are never able to dot every
i,
cross every
t,
or tease out every last strand of what we think of as the evidence.

Real life is messy, and it's probably best to keep that in mind. We must learn never to expect too much.

It was a relief, in a way, to hand things over to Inspector Hewitt, and to have my own life back again—such as it is. Perhaps one day he and Antigone would invite me to tea at Maybank, and he would fill in the blanks about Oliver Inchbald.

But even if he didn't, I was satisfied. I had done my best.

The temperature was plunging and the goggles of my helmet were frosting up. Could it be that warm air was leaking from my eyes? I scrubbed at the lenses with my coat sleeve, but it didn't much help.

My vision was so restricted that I was finally forced to raise the goggles and expose my frost-rimed eyes to the blowing snow.

My every cough was visible on the freezing air: little explosions of white, like smoke from the rifle shots in a cinema western.

And then, mercifully, Hinley came into view, the stony spine of its skyline like the bones of a dinosaur still half embedded in the earth, barely visible through the snow.

I wobbled at last into the high street, Gladys's wheels sliding sideways into the icy ruts. I wanted nothing more than to dismount, tear into the nearest tea shop, and gorge myself on hot toast and steaming tea. How I regretted leaving Buckshaw without breakfast.

But nothing, now, could keep me from Father. He was only minutes away and I had a plan.

What a scolding I was going to give him! I would show him that I was no longer the girl who had gone away to school in Canada; that I had grown up and come home a different person.

I would begin by giving him the very dickens for catching pneumonia; for not looking after himself. I would tear a strip off him that he would never forget.

I would tell him that I was only doing it for his own good, because I loved him so much. Yes, that's what I would do.

But that was nothing compared with what I would do next.

The idea had popped into my head as if by magic, and I suddenly understood how Saint Paul must have felt on the road to Damascus.

At the first opportunity, I would make an appointment with Father's solicitors. I would instruct them to draw up whatever papers were necessary for me to sign in order to return the estate to Father.

I would make him a gift of Buckshaw!

It was brilliant! Why hadn't I thought of it before?

My mother, Harriet, of course, had left Buckshaw to me: a loving and thoughtful act, I suppose, but one which had imposed an enormous and crushing burden on my mind.

Giving it to Father as an outright gift would solve all of our problems. I didn't know the ins and outs of inheritance tax, but surely we could sort it out together.

I chuckled, coughed, and laughed. Yes, that was it. We would sort it out together.

From the market square, the street to the hospital rose up so steeply that I was obliged to dismount and walk. The snow on the stone cobbles was treacherous, and only by clinging to Gladys's handlebars could I keep from falling on my face.

At the top of the hill, I stopped and stood staring up at the hospital's dark, stony face.

On the porter's lodge, as I knew it would be, was the sign
A
LL
V
ISITORS
P
LEASE
R
EPORT
. I had been here before, and knew my way around.

I couldn't run the risk of being stopped for any reason. My barking cough alone would be reason enough to be tossed out on my ear.

To one side was a grim stone archway, which led, I remembered, by way of a pinched and gloomy passage, to a small courtyard which was used mostly by undertakers and others whose secret work was carried out away from the public view.

Here was the loading dock, which would give unquestioned entry to the hospital.

I hoisted Gladys up onto the dock, leaned her against the stone wall, and promised her that we'd be going home with Dogger. No more struggling through the snow.

The wind tore the heavy door from my hands and slammed it shut.

But I was inside.

I flattened myself against the wall and waited to be caught. But the only sound was the growl of distant machinery.

The air was heavy with the smell of superheated laundry and somewhat less superheated institutional soup, both equally unappetizing.

I set off down the long corridor at a military pace, as if I were carrying important dispatches. A chin-up, shoulders-back posture and a brisk pace is generally enough to discourage any but the most officious doorkeepers.

Just let them try! I was gaining confidence with every yard I walked.

Father would be proud when I confessed. We would have a good laugh about it later.

I made it past the kitchen with no alarm, and then the X-ray department. Beyond lay the wards, and I glanced quickly into each as I passed.

No sign of Dogger, or of Feely or Daffy.

And then I remembered there were also wards upstairs on the second floor.

Of course! It made perfect sense that Father would be up there on the top deck—not down here in steerage, so to speak, with the kitchens and the laundry boilers.

I couldn't risk going into the foyer and inquiring at the desk, I thought, as I smothered a cough with both hands. When I got to Father's room I would wrap my scarf across my mouth to avoid contagion.

To my left was a door marked
STAIRS
and I took it, slipping through as silently as a ferret on the hunt.

At the top, I peered cautiously out into the corridor, but I needn't have bothered: There was no one in sight.

The hospital seemed to be in a dreamy daze, the hum of voices somewhere in the distance. At the end of the hall someone had even put up a Christmas tree, its colored lights and tinsel managing to make even the ghastly brown and green walls look cheery.

The wards were to my right. I stepped into the hall and walked confidently forward, yet fully expecting Matron to come bearing down upon me at any moment, like a pirate ship under full sail.

I must say, though, that I was not afraid. I would deal with her.

The new, stony Flavia de Luce would turn her away: send her scurrying with her tail between her legs.

The very idea delighted me.

As I glanced in at the third door, my heart lifted.

Dogger was sitting on a chair beside the bed in which Father was lying peacefully, his eyes closed.

How surprised they would be to see me!

There was no one else in the room—just the two of them. The others must have stepped out for a break.

As I entered the room and drew closer, I could see that Dogger's shoulders were shaking. Was he having one of his episodes? If so, I needed to get him out of here. It wouldn't do for Father to be disturbed by such a sight.

Hoping not to startle him, I reached out and touched Dogger, giving his arm a reassuring squeeze.