Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew'd (11 page)

Crispian Crumpet Trumpets Cats Home,
said the caption, and the article went on to say nothing much other than that Hilary Inchbald (“the former Crispian Crumpet”) had declined to answer any questions not relating directly to his charity.

I had seen this man's face before. Was it because of his resemblance to his famous father? Perhaps it was, but somehow the rather timid-looking man in the clipping didn't look at all, as his father had, like someone who knew what he wanted and how to get it. Rather, he had the look of someone who had been ill for a very long time.

“Did Louisa Congreve know Mr. Inchbald? Hilary Inchbald, I mean.”

“Oh, indeed she did. Louisa was, until her death, our in-house liaison with the Inchbald estate. As I have mentioned, Hilary is an extremely reticent man.”

“And who is your in-house liaison now?” I asked boldly. Frank Borley didn't seem to mind.

“Well,
I
am.” He laughed. “But as I've said—or to be honest, as Sir John Falstaff said—‘the better part of valor is discretion,' although we now put it the other way round, don't we?”

I've always loved being with people who make you feel as if you know what they're talking about. Although it's a gift, I've been trying to cultivate it in myself.

“Right!” I said, tapping my mouth. “Stiff upper lip, and all that.”

Frank Borley tapped his, too, and for a fleeting moment we were best of friends.

“It was Miss Congreve who identified Mr. Inchbald's body, wasn't it?”

The moment of friendship passed. Borley looked at me for a long time before replying.

“Yes,” he said at last. “It was no secret at the time. It was in all the newspapers. I'm afraid that's all I can tell you.”

“Well, I'd better be going,” I said, getting to my feet. “Thank you. You've been most helpful.”

I was disappointed, of course, not to have found what I came to find: how a set of Oliver Inchbald's first editions—one of them bearing the name of Carla Sherrinford-Cameron—came to be found in the bedroom of a dead wood-carver.

The clock was ticking. There were only moments left. This was my last chance.

Then inspiration struck, as it often does when there's nothing else left.

“Did Oliver Inchbald have any interests other than writing?” I asked.

“Odd that you should ask that,” Borley said. “I was reminded of that just a few minutes ago in the other room.”

And without explaining what
that
was, he was gone again, but back in a jiff with a small wooden object, which he placed in my hands.

I thought at first it was a carved monkey, but upon rotating the thing and viewing it from all sides, I could see that it was a little gargoyle with a bare bottom, its fingers pulling down the corners of its mouth, its tongue protruding in what was probably meant to portray an obscene sound.

“Grotesque, isn't it? He made them for special friends.”

There is a feeling that sometimes comes upon you, which I think of as
ice-water heart
. It's like a pang, but wetter. Sometimes it's no more than a trickle and yet other times a gush, but it usually comes with panic, fear, or sudden remembrance.

This time it was remembrance. There had been a similar gargoyle on the bedside table in the room where Mr. Sambridge had died.

Had Oliver Inchbald been a special friend of Mr. Sambridge's? Or a relative? Had the author carved this dark little gargoyle as a gift for him? It would certainly explain the set of Crispian Crumpet first editions I had seen in the dead man's house.

“And were
you
a special friend, Mr. Borley?”

He looked at me as if I had suddenly sprouted three heads—and then he laughed.

“Good lord, no!” he said. “I'm a mere custodian. A Johnny-come-lately. Oliver Inchbald was mostly before my time.”

“And this?” I asked, indicating the ugly little gargoyle.

“He carved it for Miss Congreve,” he said. “It was overlooked somehow when her family came to take away her personal belongings.”

“After she died,” I said.

“Yes, that's right. After she died.”

“Was there anything else of interest?” I asked. “I'll need to know as much as I can before I begin writing.”

He gave me the kind of skeptical look I expect to see from Saint Peter on Judgment Day.

“As a matter of fact there is. The chair you've been sitting in. He made that, too.”

I looked more closely at the chair, which I had mistaken for a late Queen Anne by Chippendale. I had not noticed the carved vines.

“More gargoyles,” I said. I could now see that there were several of the little monsters' faces embedded in the lattice of Gothic tracery that formed its back.

“Any particular reason he may have given this to Miss Congreve?” I asked.

“Well,” Frank Borley said. “Other than that, as I have said, they were the greatest of friends…”

He left the thought hanging like a corpse from the gallows.

“Greatest of friends”
was a phrase with which I was already familiar.

I had once, after being exposed to
Madame Bovary,
asked Dogger what the author, Flaubert, meant when he said that the lady had given herself up to Rodolphe, the gentleman in the yellow gloves and green velvet coat.

“He meant,” Dogger had told me, “that they became the greatest of friends. The
very
greatest of friends.”

So there it was. Further proof, if any were needed, that Carla was right: Her auntie Loo—Louisa Congreve—and Oliver Inchbald had known each other.

“You've been very helpful, Mr. Borley,” I said. “I'll be sure to acknowledge your assistance in my book.”

“No need to do that,” he said, shaking his head. “In fact, it's much more gratifying to remain anonymous; to be one of those unsung heroes who helped keep history straight. Let's leave it at that, shall we?”

I stuck out my hand and he shook it.

“I quite like you, Flavia de Luce. I hope you'll let us have first chance to publish your manuscript.”

Was he twitting me? It was hard to tell. He seemed earnest enough, judging by the expression on his face.

I turned to go.

“Flavia—” he said, and I stopped.

He seemed to be fighting his conscience, as if to keep back the words that were trying to get out.

“It's customary, you know, to put in a teaspoon of tea for each person to be served, and then to add one for the pot.”

I couldn't count the number of times I had heard Mrs. Mullet repeat this ancient formula: “One for you, and one for me, and one for the pot.”

Without this invocation, tea just wouldn't taste the same.

“Yes?” I said, fearful of breaking whatever spell had gripped him.

“Louisa was a witch,” he said. “Don't say that I told you, as I shall deny it vigorously.”

I couldn't hide my astonishment.

“Let's just consider it one for the pot.”

A
S
I
MADE MY
way towards New Oxford Street, my mind was in a blaze. Why had Frank Borley decided to tell me, at the very last moment, that Louisa Congreve was a witch? It had seemed almost compulsive, as if he had blurted it out against his will while under a spell.

Could it be that Carla's aunt Loo, the late witch, had him under her control from beyond the grave? Or, in telling me, was Frank Borley simply settling some ancient score?

There's an old saying, “Murder will out”: a phrase which Daffy has often hurled at me as she glares balefully over her book whenever I have interrupted her reading. And it seems to be true. How many murderers have been undone by a blurt?

Murder
will
out—in the same way that one's sister's toothpaste squirts out of a tube when it's trodden underfoot—as if it has a mind of its own.

Murder,
I thought,
is also like steam—although less useful
.

It was steam that had transported me to London on this snowy winter morning, and steam that would haul me home again at the end of the day. And it was a hidden head of steam, I realized, that had made Frank Borley blurt out that Louisa Congreve was a witch.

All I needed to do was to find out what fired his boiler.

Oxford Street was swarming with scores of Christmas shoppers jostling, their faces filled with a kind of happy gloom. The falling snow and the half-light of the low-hanging, leaden sky made the street seem as if it were located in some far-off mythical underground kingdom, and I wouldn't have been at all surprised to see Dante, or even old Odysseus himself, trudging along the pavement with a gift-wrapped rocking horse on his shoulder.

I had no difficulty whatever in finding the A.B.C. tearoom, and I took pleasure, as I paused in front of it, in recalling the fact that the Aerated Bread Company—which is what the large A.B.C. painted on the window stood for—had been founded not by a chemist, but the next best thing, a medical man: a Dr. Dauglish, who had invented and patented a new method of causing dough to rise, not with yeast but by an injection of carbon dioxide: good old CO
₂
.

I shivered with happiness at the thought.

But the very thought of bread made me realize that I was feeling distinctly peckish. It would be hours yet before I could return to Buckshaw to feed.

I tried to keep back a surge of saliva, but not with total success.

As I entered, I spotted Mrs. Bannerman at once. She was sitting in the far corner of the room watching the door.

My first thought was that she did not look like a murderess, even an acquitted one, which she was. Rather, this elfin-faced pixie might have just flown out of the pages of a fairy book by Cicely Mary Barker.

She got to her feet and flung her arms around me as if I really mattered. I'm afraid I stood there looking like a chump.

“Mrs. Bannerman—” was all I could manage.

“Let's get something straight,” she said, giving my nose a mock tweak. “It's Mrs. Bannerman no more. From now on it's just plain old Mildred. Plain old Mildred and Flavia having a nice cuppa in the A.B.C., understood?”

“Yes, Mrs. Bannerman,” I said. “Oh, damn. I mean…Mildred.”

And we both laughed.

I firmly believe it is by sharing such stupid moments as these that we grow into someone other than who we used to be, and I was already feeling an inch taller.

“You're looking very posh,” I said.

She was wearing a red tailored suit with a white ruffled blouse, a matching beefeater hat, and a sprig of holly berries at the throat.

“It's rayon,” she said. “Nitrocellulose by another name. It makes me feel explosive.” She gave me a schoolgirl grin.

“Good old pyroxylin,” I said. “Hilaire de Chardonnet, and so forth.”

Like any accomplished chemist, I was quite familiar with the astonishing history of the flammable fabrics.

“Top marks, Flavia. I can see you've lost none of your chemical acuity.”

I'm afraid I preened a little, although in my dowdy overcoat I must have looked more like a street musician than a first-rate chemical mind.

Mildred pushed her chair back from the table and lifted a leg.

“Do you think my outfit matches my galoshes?” she asked, and she exploded with laughter.

It was not the kind of Tinkerbell laugh you might expect from such a delicate creature, but rather a full-bellied roar which caused a couple of net-hatted dowagers, dripping with pearls at a nearby table, to shoot daggers of disapproval at us from behind their menus.

“Don't look now,” Mildred said, “but we're being watched.”

This brought on even more laughter.

I wondered what these two old gorgons would think if they knew that Mildred earned her living by sifting through the residue that accumulates around hastily buried corpses. They would certainly be eating their tea cakes with less gusto if I told them Mildred had recommended to me Mègnin's great work, whose title could be translated as
The Wildlife of Corpses
: a fascinating pioneer study of the insects that feed on dead bodies; a book best read behind closed—or even locked—doors.

Now, here we were, Mildred and I, sitting at one of the tables of the Aerated Bread Company in Oxford Street, under the very noses of these two outraged dowagers, as if butter—or anything else for that matter—wouldn't melt in either of our mouths.

I gave them one of my supremely pleasant smiles, which involved a very slight crossing of the eyes: just enough to make it seem as if I might be suffering a slight and unfortunate hereditary defect.

It was too much.

The old ladies got to their feet and stalked out of the shop, their noses in the air. Unfortunately, they had forgotten to pay, so that the manageress was forced to follow them out into the snowy street, where a heated argument was now taking place, with much gesticulating and pointing and the waving of arms.

“Well done,” Mildred said, sipping her tea daintily.

It occurred to me that I was not the only one who was becoming a different person. This new Mildred Bannerman was not the one I had known in Canada. It almost seemed as if the two of us were changing places.

It was difficult, even for me, to realize that I was sitting across the table from a member of the Nide, that shadowy—no, not shadowy:
invisible
—branch of the secret service, of which my aunt Felicity was the so-called Gamekeeper.

As for Mildred, it was becoming evident that she was whatever she wanted to appear to be. Awkwardly put, I suppose, but what it meant was that she was a chameleon: a chameleon in black galoshes and red tailored suit, to be sure, but a chameleon nonetheless.

“How are you getting on?” she asked.

It had been only a couple of days since I had seen her last, and yet I could almost feel the force of her piercing gaze. I could tell by her eyes that she was Mrs. Bannerman again, looking out for my welfare.

“Well enough,” I said, and there were a rather rough few moments during which I fought back tears. I told her about Father's illness, and she said all the right things. What else could she do?

“You mustn't blame yourself, Flavia,” she said, and her words shot into me like the bolt from a crossbow. How could she possibly have known my innermost thoughts?

I did what I always do when the shot is too near the heart: I changed the subject, and I did it by blurting—yes,
blurting
—the entire story about Mr. Sambridge.

I felt better immediately. If I couldn't trust Mildred, then who—?

“You've been busy,” she observed. “The days are so short this time of year. You'll be needing to get back to Buckshaw, I expect.”

I nodded.

“What can I do to help?”

“Nothing,” I said politely, but wishing immediately I'd kept my mouth shut.

“Why did you ring me up, then?”

She had me there. My mind turned to mush. With most people I could talk my way blindfolded out of the Hampton Court maze, but not with Mildred.

“Well,” I said, “a newspaper archive might be helpful.”

“British Library, Colindale,” she said, glancing at her wristwatch. “Hats, coats, boots, on!—and off we go!”

Minutes later we were hurrying down the endless steps at the Goodge Street tube station, where the Northern Line would carry us through the underworld to Colindale.

“Newspaper Room,” Mildred said, handing over a card at the front desk. The bored commissionaire didn't give me so much as a glance, but pointed with a bony finger, even though it was obvious to everyone but him that Mildred knew where she was going.

Mildred filled out the necessary requests and we sat back to wait for the newspapers.

“I have a pretty good idea of when Inchbald died,” she said. “But we'll begin with the latest
Who's Who
and go on from there. Louisa Congreve, I expect, won't be in such august company, so in her case, we'll need to do a bit more legwork.”

“Was Oliver Inchbald a member of the Nide?” I asked, shocked at my own boldness.

Mildred threw her head back and laughed—not as loudly as she had in the tea shop, since we were, after all, in a library, which contains its own holiness.

“Whatever makes you say that?” she demanded.

“Because you said you had a pretty good idea when he died.”

“Flavia! Surely you're not suggesting—”

“It was just a thought,” I said.

“And a rancid one at that. Ten gold stars, though, for attention to detail. But no, nothing so romantic as that. I believe I read it in
The Telegraph
. Since I only read
The Telegraph
when I'm in the train, and since I seldom take the train, I'm reminded immediately of when it was—even
where
I was.”

“Yes?” I said, fascinated with the process. “You mustn't have been very old. Oliver Inchbald has been dead for years.”

“I was old enough,” she said, and the tone of her voice signaled that that particular branch of the conversation had reached a dead end.

“Was Inchbald a spy?” I asked.

“Not that I know of,” she answered. “But it's a good point. Being pecked to death by seabirds
does
smack a bit of Secret Agent 5, doesn't it?”

“That's what I thought,” I agreed.

“No, as far as I know he was just another one of those English literary gentlemen: gardening, golfing—”

“
—
and girls,”
I wanted to add, thinking of Carla's auntie Loo, but I didn't.

“…and grenadine,” she finished.

Grenadine was, I knew, a chemical concoction of pomegranate juice, often used as a camouflage for gin. One of our Buckshaw neighbors, Mrs. Foster, was an old hand in its deployment, and was seldom seen without a sample of the stuff in her hand. On one occasion, at their tennis court, I had tried to engage her in conversation about the fascinating chemical makeup of the pomegranate, such as the acids—caprylic, stearic, oleic, and linoleic—to say nothing of its rich potassium content, but she had seemed too vaporous to bother going on.

At that point, an attendant brought the papers Mildred had ordered, along with a fat bound copy of the London Post Office Directory for 1948, which she dumped in front of me.

“Congreve,” Mildred said. “I expect you'll find it under ‘C.' ”

Saucily, I showed her the tip of my tongue and opened the book, offering a silent little prayer to Saint Jerome, the patron saint of libraries and librarians. As so often happens when you're in that Old Fellow's good books, the directory fell open at the very page I was looking for.

“Found it!” I said. “Congreve, Miss Louisa G., 47 Cranwell Gardens, Kensington, S.W.7. She's the only Congreve in the book. Western 1778. I wonder what would happen if we rang that number?”

“I should be very surprised if she picked it up,” Mildred said, “in view of the fact that she's dead.”

“But we might reach one of her relatives.”

“You've already reached one of her relatives. Carla Sherrinford-Cameron. Or have you forgotten?”

“Yes, but we'd have an independent view of Miss Congreve's connection to Oliver Inchbald.”

“True,” she said. “Provided they were willing to confide in a total stranger.”

“We could give it a try,” I said. “We'd have nothing to lose but the cost of the call.”

“Which means that you're already planning to make it from the closest kiosk. I can see right through you, Flavia de Luce.”

There was silence for several minutes as she leafed through the bound newspapers, scanning each page at lightning speed before turning to the next. I noticed that she did so without licking her fingertips: a thorough professional.

“People who turn pages with licked fingers are as bad as those who wipe their noses on the table linen,” Daffy had once remarked, and I had stopped doing it.

“Here we are!” Mildred said suddenly, pointing to the page. “I remembered the photograph.”

In grainy black-and-white, a uniformed Boy Scout points to a pair of Wellies, which lie empty and askew, like the hands of a novelty clock pointing to four-forty.

“Nothing left of him but the bones,” said Scout James Marlowe, of Wick St. Lawrence, who made the grisly discovery while doing fieldwork for a Bird Warden badge. Marlowe, 14, a young man of remarkable initiative, sailed out to the desolate island alone in the early hours of Tuesday morning.

“Human remains have occasionally been found on the island,” Inspector Cavendish, of the Somerset Constabulary at Weston-super-Mare told our reporter, “but they've tended to be historical and haven't been wearing Wellies.”

“I think it was the gulls that got him,” Scout Marlowe said. “They can go quite mad in nesting season, you know. They'll eat anything. Besides,” he added, “the carrion crow,
Corvus c. corone,
also breeds on the island, and I expect they had a hand in mopping up.”

The investigation is continuing.