Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew'd (13 page)

It was enough to turn your stomach.

Hang the hour! I would call Antigone at once and kill two birds with one stone.

F
OR AS LONG AS
I could remember, and probably long before that, the telephone at Buckshaw had been off limits. Father had a horror of the thing, caused by certain experiences in his past of which he never spoke, and because “the instrument,” as he called it, had brought him news of Harriet's disappearance and, later, the discovery of her dead body. Consequently, the telephone was to be used in only the most dire emergencies: a rule that had been—with only a few exceptions on my part—strictly observed.

The instrument was contained in a small cubicle tucked away beneath the stairs in the foyer. Once inside, you could lower your voice and whisper away unobserved with no danger of being overheard (unless, of course, you applied your ear to the tread of the seventh step from the bottom, a phenomenon which no one knew about but me).

Against all expectations, Inspector Hewitt's number was listed in the directory.
How thoughtful of him
. How many other investigators of his rank would share his private number with the riffraff? Perhaps he found that it encouraged the phoning-in of anonymous tips.

At any rate, his address was listed simply as Maybank, Hinley.

So that was the name of the rose-covered cottage!
“Maybank!” I said it aloud and let the word escape from my mouth like a perfumed puff of jasmine scent as I dialed the number. “Maybank.”

It was picked up at once.

“Antigone Hewitt speaking,” came that soft, familiar voice, and I was nearly struck speechless.

“Uh, Mrs. Hewitt…Antigone…” (Dare I use her baptismal name?) “…this is Flavia de Luce. I understand Inspector Hewitt called in to see me today, but I wasn't home. I had to go up to London unexpectedly, you see, and…”

“Oh, yes, Flavia. Welcome home, by the way. How nice to hear your voice again.”

I wanted to thank her but my mouth had gone suddenly and unaccountably dry.

“My husband
did
mention that he planned to see you, but he's unfortunately not here at the moment. Shall I take a message?”

“N…no,” I managed. “I'll call him tomorrow—during working hours.”

“I shall tell him,” she assured me, and then she added, “Flavia, is everything all right?”

At least she had the good grace not to ask if anything was wrong.

“Yes,” I said. And then I said, “No.”

“Is there anything that I can do?”

“No, thank you. It's just that Father's in the hospital, and everything's a little muddled right now.”

“I'm sorry to hear that, Flavia.”

Her words should have comforted me, but they did not. Sympathy was not what I wanted. There are times when sympathy is not enough.

“How are
you
?” I asked, quickly turning the tables.

“Very well, thank you.”

This was going to be more difficult than I thought. I needed to be devious.

“Have you made any interesting shopping trips lately?”

Brilliant! Just girl talk.

“Am I pregnant, do you mean? Well, yes, as a matter of fact, I am. We're expecting a blessed event; the patter of little feet; the clang of the diaper pail—however you want to put it—next month. Hello? Flavia? Are you there?”

“Son of a sea cook!” I said. It just slipped out.

Not that there was anything wrong with the words. They had been spoken by the actor Cary Grant in
Arsenic and Old Lace,
a gripping film about a family of poisoners who, in order to relieve homeless men of their suffering, spiked their elderberry wine with arsenic, strychnine, and just a pinch of cyanide.

Antigone laughed. “Indeed!” she said.

How I wanted to add, “We must go out for a glass of elderberry wine,” but I restrained myself. She knew the film and I knew the film, and her single word, “Indeed,” had cemented the bond. Nothing more needed to be said.

Sometimes less is more.

“Congratulations,” I said. “You must be very excited.”

“Yes, we are. But you knew all along, didn't you?”

“Well…,” I said. “Yes.”

“I should have been terribly disappointed if you hadn't noticed.”

Was she twitting me?

“So should I,” I said, and after a second or two we both laughed.

Except for her saying that she would tell her husband I had called, that was pretty well the end of my conversation with Antigone Hewitt.

I had not really learned anything, except for the imminent arrival of a young Master—or Mistress—Hewitt, and I wasn't yet sure how I felt about the so-called blessed event.

I wasn't like Aunt Millicent, who believed that babies ought to be shellacked and framed at birth to keep them out of mischief, or like Daffy, who hated them because of the noise and fumes:

“Like smelly little motorcars,” she would say, sticking her little fingers in her ears and pinching her nose shut between her thumbs whenever she spotted one.

To me, a baby was a temporary nuisance: a mere metamorphosis on its way from egg to adult. Scientists once believed—wrongly, as it turned out—that we all of us repeat the history of our species, passing in form from simple water-dwelling creatures to air-breathing mammals, and growing, in nine months, through all the various phases of human development from single-celled organism through primitive invertebrate, fish, reptile, and so forth, and ending up being your auntie Mabel, or some other mammalian horror.

As I knew from his notebooks, my late great-uncle Tar had, as a student, gently corrected Darwin on several points relating to the evolutionary process.

“Based, I presume, upon close observation of his own nearest relatives,” Daffy had said when I'd told her this.

I returned the telephone receiver to its cradle, and waited for Miss Runciman, at the exchange, to work whatever wizardry was necessary with her plugs and jacks before another call could be made. She would be all agog when I requested another connection.

“Two calls from Buckshaw, and all within two minutes! Whatever is the world coming to? Tsk! Tsk!”
Etc., etc., etc.

It was commonly known that Miss Runciman listened in on virtually every call made or received in Bishop's Lacey.

“Flora Runciman's got more muck in 'er 'ead than Norah's Ark,” Mrs. Mullet had once told me, nodding knowingly.

Which meant that she knew where all the bodies were buried.

“Hello…Miss Runciman?” I said. “It's Flavia de Luce calling from Buckshaw. I'm terribly sorry to bother you again, Miss Runciman, but with Father in hospital, I'm afraid that everything is at sixes and sevens.”

“Ah, yes, Flavia. I was sorry to hear about your father. How may I be of assistance?”

I'd bet a pound to a penny she had known about Father's illness even before Dr. Darby did.

“I'm trying rather urgently to get in touch with an old family friend,” I said. “I'm afraid we don't have the proper directory here, but his name is James Marlowe, and he lives at Wick St. Lawrence, which I believe is near Weston-super-Mare, in Somerset. I hope you can help.”

I stifled a sob.

“Poor lamb,” Miss Runciman said. “Hold on a jiffy and I'll see what I can do.”

Goodness knows what kind of story was forming in her mind.

I hated to drag in Father's illness in aid of a fib, but I was sure he wouldn't mind. I knew that in his lifetime, my father had been forced to use his cunning every single day, simply to stay alive. The hurts and horrors that he and Dogger had been forced to undergo during the war were never spoken of, but were written clearly in their eyes.

A series of electrical cracklings, clicks, and buzzes told me that Miss Runciman was holding serious secret talks with her counterparts in cities, towns, and villages across the kingdom. I could picture their voices speeding through the night on vast spiderwebs of copper wires, linking here to there and back again, connecting all their little worlds at the press of a button.

“Hello, Flavia? Are you there?”

“Yes, Miss Runciman. I'm still here.”

“I've managed to locate your Mr. Marlowe at Wick St. Lawrence. I have him on the line. Shall I put him through? There will be the usual charge, of course.”

“Of course,” I said. We'd count the cost later.

There was an ominous crackle of static and then Miss Runciman said, “I have your party on the line. Go ahead, please.”

What do you say to a total stranger? Especially when you are being overheard by a nosy telephone operator who believes it to be a matter of life and death, and is hovering over your conversation like the spirit of God upon the Waters?

“Hello? Mr. Marlowe?”

I wasn't sure if he was a mister or not. He was certainly no longer the boy who found the remains of Oliver Inchbald.

“Hello? Yes…who am I speaking with?” The voice was boyish, but not completely.

“This is Flavia de Luce. I'm afraid my father has been taken ill and is unable to accept your kind invitation, but he's still quite interested in seeing some of the photographs of birds you took several years ago at Steep Holm. I've been told you made some remarkable snapshots of the seagulls.”

I crossed my fingers, praying that birds bored Miss Runciman to distraction—and my prayer was answered—just like that! A sharp click on the line signaled her departure for greener pastures of gossip.

“What did you say your name was?” James Marlowe's voice was suddenly guarded.

“De Luce. Flavia de Luce.”

“I'm afraid someone is pulling your leg, Miss de Luce. I took no particularly interesting photographs of the gulls.”

“What about the crows, then?” I asked. “
Corvus c. corone
. You mentioned them specifically to the reporter from the
London Evening Standard
.”

I could hear him breathing at the other end of the line, and knew instinctively that he was about to ring off. I needed to keep him talking at all costs.

“Listen…Mr. Marlowe. I'm going to be perfectly honest. I'm not supposed to tell you this, but I'm calling on behalf of Edgar Wallace. He's working on a new thriller based upon the Oliver Inchbald murder. But please don't breathe a word. It's strictly hush-hush.”

“Murder, you say?” James Marlowe asked.

“Shhh!” I told him. “It hasn't yet been made public.”

“Edgar Wallace, you say?”

“Yes,” I said. “But please don't repeat his name. We mustn't risk being overheard. You may refer to him as Horatio. That's his middle name. Only his closest associates are privy to that fact.”

I sent up a little prayer of gratitude that Daffy had shared that tidbit of Wallace information while reading
The Four Just Men
. I was also grateful she had taught me that particular use of the word
privy,
which before that I had always thought meant something else.

I have to admit that dragging one of the most famous of all crime novelists into the discussion was a stroke of sheer genius. There wasn't a Boy Scout alive who hadn't huddled under his blankets in the wee small hours, reading wide-eyed, by the light of a shaded torch, the ingenious and bloody mystery thrillers of Richard Horatio Edgar Freeman, known to the world as Edgar Wallace, who was as much a household name as Sunlight Soap and Oxo.

“Horatio wants to keep this project under wraps,” I improvised. “I'm sure you'll understand. Publishing is a cutthroat business. But if he succeeds in scooping the market, you'll be famous. I hope you don't mind.”

I had him. I knew it by the change in the quality of his voice as it came filtering along the line. It was suddenly older—more self-confident. More…famous: the voice of someone who, in his own head, was already speaking to the newsreel cameras.

“I understand, Miss de Luce. Tell Mr….uh…Horatio that he can count on me.”

“Thank you,” I said. “May I express his appreciation?”

“Of course. Tell him I'm happy to be of service.”

“Now about the photographs,” I went on. “I'm sure you know which ones he's interested in?”

“I believe I do,” he said. “The ones of the Wellingtons, and so forth?”

“Yes,” I said. “Especially the
so forth
. I think he'd be happy to pay extra for those.”

“I shall drop the photos in the post first thing tomorrow,” Marlowe said. “Where shall I send them?”

I gave him my address at Buckshaw.

“For safety's sake,” I told him. “Horatio's mail is not secure. It's often intercepted by certain powers—the you-know-who. Horatio is a man of
many
secrets.”

“I understand,” James Marlowe said. “Tell him he can count on me.”

“You've already said so,” I told him. “But thank you again. He will be very much in your debt.”

Although somehow I doubted it. Edgar Wallace had been dead for donkey's years; he had died before either of us was born. I was counting on the fact that Scout Marlowe hadn't yet heard the news.

I rang off suddenly and without another word. It would add a touch of mystery and urgency to my call.

I couldn't resist rubbing my hands with delight. I was proud of myself.

Now for Miss Louisa G. Congreve, of 47 Cranwell Gardens, Kensington.

Or what was left of her.

“Miss Runciman? It's Flavia de Luce again. I just wanted to thank you for locating Mr. Marlowe. It was most kind of you. I'll be sure to tell Father. Yes, he'll be absolutely delighted. Now then, I was wondering if you could connect me with London…Western 1778…?”

It was entirely possible, I knew, that the number had been reassigned, upon Louisa Congreve's death, to someone else. It was a chance I had to take.

I listened as the telephone rang in distant Kensington. Between rings, the lines crackled with electric excitement, as if they were as eager as I was to find out who would pick it up at the other end.