The Silver Ghost (19 page)

“If by ‘her’ you mean me, why don’t you address me directly?” snapped Boadicea Kelling. “I don’t want a doctor. A cup of hot tea and a wash, and I’ll be fine.”

She probably would, the old termagant. Nevertheless, Max wanted her examined.

“Listen to me, Boadicea. Bill’s going to drive you back to the house in the electric cart. He’ll telephone the state police and ask them to send somebody out here as fast as he can. There are things to be checked over that Chief Grimpen probably wouldn’t have the equipment for, even if he had brains enough to use it. Bill will also ask a doctor to examine you. If there’s nobody available, you’ll have to be taken to the nearest hospital as quickly as possible.”

“I shall allow no such liberty!”

“Oh yes, you will,” Max told her. “You’ve been the victim of an assault, and your condition has to go on the record.”

If by any chance Boadicea Kelling had not been the victim of an assault, that ought to go on the record, too, even if she was Sarah’s aunt. Or whatever. Sarah wouldn’t take it amiss; she hadn’t gone into that spate of genealogy on the phone just to make conversation.

Fortunately there was the expected side door to the ramp, so Bill was able to bring his cart around instead of having to steer Boadicea past that sheet-covered form in the front room. Between them, he and Bill supported her out to the cart and got her aboard.

“Are you coming with us, Max?” asked Bill.

He and Boadicea were already taking up the cart’s only two seats, but Max forbore to point that fact out. “No, I’d better stay here in case somebody happens along. You can manage all right, can’t you?”

Boadicea did her best to freeze him with a look, though the result was not one of her better efforts. “Drive on, Wilber-force,” she ordered.

She wasn’t likely to fall out of the screened cart unless she got funny with the door handle; still, Max didn’t envy Bill the ride back to the house. He strolled around to the front of the shed and stood looking up the path at the small heap of clothing they’d taken off the dead man. Bees were still crawling over the lush fabrics, brown against dull black, brown against glossy. Ufford had even been wearing black silk underwear, the old sybarite. Bill had been right about that outfit. It might be just the ticket for a coke-snorting party on the Lido or for lounging around one’s sumptuously decadent apartment sipping absinthe and reading
Les Fleurs du Mal,
but it sure as hell didn’t fit into the Billingsgate ambience.

What it suggested to Max was that Versey had emerged from his Giovanni Arnolfini period and decided to take a whack at being Raffles the Gentleman Burglar. Raffles would have known black would make him stick out like a sore thumb in the clover fields, but perhaps Ufford hadn’t thought of that. Or perhaps he’d come in the night and planned to be gone by daybreak. If so, what had kept him? Would the bees have attacked in the dark? And would they have stayed with their victim all this time? Or had new ones kept coming? Those flowering trees were a good deal closer to the honey shed than they were to the house. Max went back inside and shut the door against that nerve-wracking buzz.

There was no dearth of sugar here, certainly. Two fifty-pound sacks were lying under the bench he and Bill had preempted for a mortuary slab. A gap between them suggested that there’d been other sacks, used up during the winter feeding. The stainless steel sink on the wall beside the bench must be where they mixed the sugar and water.

Did they keep any syrup already mixed? Yes, a plastic bucket was standing under the sink. Its lid was ajar; Max could see the receptacle was only half full. Grainy dribbles down the outside struck an incongruous note in this impeccably maintained place. Somebody’d been in a hurry.

Not much would have been needed to douse a man. Anybody who’d ever dumped a cup of hot coffee into his lap would have known how far even a small amount of liquid could go toward achieving total saturation. Half a pailful would have been more than plenty.

If Ufford had got his lethal baptism inside the honey shed, though, there ought to be more of a mess around than these few dribbles. Max got down on hands and knees and crawled around the concrete floor, feeling for a sticky patch and not finding any. Then, most reluctantly, he uncovered the corpse’s head and touched the hair. That pageboy coiffure he’d supposed yesterday to be a wig had, after all, been Ufford’s own hair. Every strand of it was stiff and sticky.

So the syrup had probably come from this bucket, but had been poured over Ufford somewhere else. That was not to say Ufford hadn’t been inside the shed. Boadicea Kelling had alluded to a silly fellow who’d tied her up; no doubt she’d have thought the black turtleneck jersey and the Prince Valiant hairdo stagy and affected. That would have had to be before Ufford got into the syrup, though. Surely if he’d been anywhere near this big, deep sink at the time, he’d have stuck his head under the faucet and tried to wash himself clean. Unless whoever soaked him had marched him at gunpoint out to where the bees could get at him.

That would seem to have been an unnecessarily complicated and melodramatic procedure for a practical-minded killer to go through. Max decided that in the unlikely event he himself had decided to commit such an inhuman act, he’d have filled one of those quart-size honey jars with syrup, screwed the lid down tight so the bees wouldn’t get a premature whiff, and followed Ufford out into the pathway. When he was close enough to be sure of his aim, he’d have opened the jar and thrown the syrup over his victim, being darned careful not to spill even a drop on himself. Then he’d have heaved the jar as far as he could, and run like hell.

A paper cup dispenser was clamped to the wall beside the sink. One of those cups would have made a dipper adequate to fill a jar from the bucket without too much mess. A few of them lay in the trash container below, along with some crumpled-up paper towels. It was too much to hope there’d be a cup that was sticky on the inside and had a nice set of fingerprints on the outside, but Grimpen might as well have the fun of hunting for it, if the chief ever got through having the dart gun authenticated. He’d let Grimpen hunt for that hypothetical container in the field, too.

The chief ought to be sore when he found out Ufford’s body had been moved, but he probably wouldn’t have sense enough to know it should have been left where it fell. Anyway, he’d have hated squashing those dashing jodhpurs under a bee suit. Why the hell did Grimpen have to go tootling off like that, anyway? He might at least have left Myre. One thing Max hated about jobs like this was the waiting around for people to show up. Especially when they were people he didn’t like having to work with in the first place.

A
T LEAST MAX DIDN’T
have to wait long for Bill to get back. He was wandering around the back room, looking over the two Rolls Royces and shaking his head, when the electric cart poked its nose up the ramp.

“I didn’t feel like passing those clothes of Versey’s, so I came around this way,” Bill remarked. “Do you suppose we ought to go and bring them in? I got hold of Sergeant Myre and he says he’ll try to get some of the men moving as fast as he can. They’ve been haying an educational tour of the police laboratory. From his tone, I don’t think Myre enjoyed it much.”

“Grimpen ought to be stuffed and mounted,” Max grunted. “We’d better leave the clothes for him to deal with if he ever gets around it. Technically we could be in trouble already for having stripped and moved the body. Did you get hold of a doctor?”

“Yes, I had better luck there. Our friend Maude Addams has a practice downtown and she’s going to pop over right away. She was having office hours, but the two doctors she’s in with are going to cover for her.”

“Great. Did Boadicea say anything that made sense on your way to the house?”

“Only that she was hungry and thirsty and wanted a bath, which didn’t surprise me. Abigail and Drusilla are attending to her creature comforts now. The rest of Bodie’s talk was mostly about that imaginary car rally. She’s driven with us a few times, so I suppose she got the notion from waking up in the Silver Ghost. Reasonable enough, as delusions go. I didn’t tell them about Versey, Max. I just couldn’t, with Bodie in such a state. They were upset enough as it was. To think of her being right here in the shed all that time, and we never thought to look! I blame myself bitterly.”

“Why yourself more than anybody else?” Max pointed out. “This is Abigail’s end of the business, why didn’t she think of it? Why didn’t your daughter, when she and Sarah were riding around here in the cart yesterday? Why didn’t Tick? Why didn’t the helicopter pilot? They must have seen the shed from the air.”

“I suppose they each thought somebody else had searched it,” sighed Bill. “Thank you, Max. You have a good heart. I’ll save the sackcloth and ashes for when there’s nothing more urgent to do. Getting back to what Bodie might have said, I didn’t try to question her. I thought it was probably wiser to wait until after Maude has had a chance to look her over. Was I wrong?”

“No, you were being sensible. You could have sent her off the deep end, the shape she’s in. Or she might have told you something that sounded rational enough but sent us off on a false trail. What are these things for?” Max asked, mostly to change the subject.

He was talking about a couple of stainless steel machines that sat along the wall behind the New Phantom.

“They’re used to extract the honey from the combs,” Bill explained. “The honey then either gets bottled as it is or taken in buckets down to the house for the meading.”

“And what happens to the beeswax? Wait, don’t tell me. Are those things candle molds?”

“That’s right. Years back, we’d mold the wax into little cakes and sell it to cobblers. To wax their threads, you know. But now synthetics seem to have replaced the old linen thread and there aren’t all that many cobblers around. So we make pure beeswax candles for churches as an act of piety.”

“Nice of you,” Max grunted. “Look, Bill, if the police don’t show pretty soon, I’ll have to take off. There are several things that ought to be done as soon as possible. For one thing, I suspect Grimpen’s going to give Tom Tolbathy a thorough overhauling about that gun of Wouter’s and it would be better if Tom heard about it from us first, don’t you think? He’s already pretty upset about that door in the car shed.”

Bill nodded. “Tom minds so terribly about losing Wouter. It’s a further blow to him, I’m afraid, learning that his dead brother’s pranks have embroiled old friends like us in this dreadful situation.”

“I don’t think it was Wouter’s pranks that did the embroiling, Bill. I have a hunch his secret door and hippopotamus gun were used only because they happened to be available. If they hadn’t been, something else would have served the purpose.”

“But what is the purpose?”

“I’ll tell you when I know myself,” was the best Max had to offer. “Tell me, Bill, what happened to those records that were played over the air yesterday at the banquet? Do you still have them?”

“We never did have them, more’s the pity. That was one of the services Versey performed for us. He taped the complete two-hour program from his personal collection of Renaissance music recordings.”

“Is that so?” said Max. “Where would he have done the taping?”

“In his own apartment. He had one room fitted up as a recording studio. Versey was quite a capable sound engineer and over the years he’d acquired some first-rate equipment. He could do all sorts of things. For instance, he got hold of a few original Edison cylinders and a machine to play them on, don’t ask me where. Somebody’s attic, I suppose. Anyway, he taped the sound and filtered out the squeaks and squawks so that the result sounded far better than the original. Which still isn’t saying much, I’ll grant you. But some of the old 33’s and 78’s gave truly exceptional results by the time Versey got through tinkering with the tapes.”

“Other than yesterdays broadcast,” Max asked him, “did you use many of Ufford’s tapes in your stations?”

“Oh yes, a great many,” Bill replied. “Versey was awfully good at finding the right theme song to introduce a program, for instance, and supplying us with background music for our little homilies. He also made tapes of a good many commercials that Melly and Tick worked out—quite entertaining, some of them. They really have a flair for that sort of thing. Most importantly, every one of our regular weekly programs of Renaissance music for the past fifteen years has been taped in Versey’s studio. He did all the announcing himself. He’d put in snippets of interesting information about the different composers and the historical context within which they worked, and hand us the tapes as a fait accompli. All we had to do was play them.”

“How did that work?” Max wanted to know. “Did you pass the tapes along from one station to the next, or have some kind of inter-station hookup?”

“Neither. Versey always made a separate copy for each station, meticulously labeled as to which was for whom.”

“Why should that matter, if they were all alike?”

“Ah, but they might not be,” Bill explained. “They probably would be if Versey was off on one of his periodic stays in Italy because he’d have taped a series of programs in advance. If he was around, however, he’d read announcements of coming events or local news that Renaissance music devotees might want to know about. Like most stations, we got a good many publicity notices sent in. We do try to air as many as possible, but not all of them are of earthshaking importance to our entire network. If Lorista and her consort are putting on a recital in Wayland, for instance, we probably announce it over our Natick station, but not in Maine or Vermont.”

“I see.” Max wouldn’t have announced Lorista’s recital in Maine or Vermont, either.

“I don’t know how we’re going to manage the Renaissance music programs now,” Bill went on ruefully. “We can repeat some of the old ones for the time being, I suppose, but losing Versey is going to mean another big hole in our operation. It’s disgusting to be fretting about my own problems at a time like this, but when I think of the years of loving effort that have gone into our organization, and now to see it crumbling away from one day to the next—” Bill had to stop and recover himself. “It’s almost as if the Lord’s telling me it’s time to fold up and quit.”