Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew'd (6 page)

I'm sorry if I seem to digress, but that is precisely what I was thinking at the moment. It's the way my mind works. Things are not the same in real life as they are in, for instance, the fictional world of Sherlock Holmes. Brains, in reality, do not go
clickety-clickety-clickety-click
from
A
to
B
to
C
to
D
and so forth, rushing like a train along the rails, until at the end, with a happy
“Toot-toot!”
they arrive at their destination,
Z,
and the case is suddenly solved.

Quite the contrary. In reality, analytical minds such as my own are forever shooting wildly off in all directions simultaneously. It's like joyously hitting jelly with a sledgehammer; like exploding galaxies; like a display of fireworks in which the pyrotechnic engineer has had a bit too much to drink and set off the whole conglobulation all at once, by accident.

It was not until this point that the room itself began to attract my notice. I had been so occupied with the remains of the late Mr. Sambridge that I had not really—other than a quick glance—registered the contents of his bedroom.

My first impression, now, was that I had been miraculously transported through time and space and dumped into the bedroom of Geppetto, the wood-carver in
Pinocchio
.

I looked round in astonishment at the furniture, which was remarkable, to say the least.

The four-poster bed, for instance, was made up of what seemed to be an entire squadron of carved angels: plump wooden cherubs that simpered and leered at one another as they swarmed to their mischievous task.

What came to mind was that line from
Hamlet:

And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

But these cherubs were not singing the terrified nightshirted figure to his rest, but rather, so far as I could make out, dragging him down relentlessly by his knobbly carved wooden knees towards the pit of carved flames which formed the foot of the bed. The victim's mouth was open, his tiny teeth like bat's teeth as he fell, in a silent scream of agony.

Much like—I couldn't help thinking—the real Mr. Sambridge.

Two falling figures, tumbling headfirst into eternity: one of wood and one of flesh and blood.

What was I to make of that?

On the wall beside the bed was what seemed at first to be an eighteenth-century lady's fan: a large, lacy, delicate semicircle which proved to be, upon closer inspection—or so I guessed—a large specimen of coral, which looked for all the world like a silhouette of an ancient tree in winter.

A bedside table was decorated with carved serpent legs supporting a marble slab top, upon which had been placed two shillings and sixpence, a key, a silver pocket watch with chain and fob, a fist-sized gargoyle carved from some dark wood such as ebony, the stub of a pencil, a bit of gray fluff indicating that these objects had previously been in someone's pocket, and a £1 ticket on the Irish Hospitals' Sweepstake.

I remembered with a pang how Daffy and I had clubbed together last June to buy Father, as a birthday present, a ticket on this same race.

“It's the most valuable prize ever offered,” I'd told him, brimming over with excitement as I handed him what I prayed would be a winner. “More than £22,000.”

Twenty-some thousand quid would go a long way,
I thought,
to easing Father's money worries.

Father's brow had clouded and furrowed, and I was left standing awkwardly with the ticket in my outstretched hand.

“I appreciate your thoughtfulness, Flavia,” Father had said. “It is very kind of you, but I cannot accept.”

He seemed as embarrassed as I was.

“You must never indulge in gambling,” he said. “Nor must you stand to profit from the frailties of others. Lotteries, as you very well know, are against the law.”

“But—”

“No, Flavia. That's enough. I have spoken. You may go.”

And with that, he had turned back to his stamp collection.

I was too crushed to tell Daffy what had happened.

Can you revoke a prayer?
I wondered.

In the following weeks I had then counter-prayed each night in bed that the ticket would be a loser. To win would be a calamity. While I was perfectly capable of keeping my own trap shut, I knew that the seller of a winning ticket was also awarded a sum of money. In my case, the seller was Tippy Hogben, who, under cover of her market stall at Malden Fenwick, did a brisk business in such black-market goods as tea, butter, and sugar.

And if Tippy won so much as a shilling, I was as good as dead. Gossip would cook my goose.

It wasn't the giving of the ticket to Father that was a crime, but the buying of it, which was my responsibility alone. At the last minute Daffy had begged off our jaunt to Tippy's stall on the grounds of having a ferocious headache, so that, in the end, I was left to do the dirty deed alone.

Now, six months later, the very thought of an Irish Hospitals' Sweepstake ticket still made me queasy, which was one of the reasons I didn't touch this ticket of Mr. Sambridge's.

The other reason was fingerprints.

I couldn't help wondering if the deceased had checked his ticket. It seemed unlikely. If he had, and if it were a loser, he'd have thrown it away; if it were a winner, he'd have handed it in and claimed his prize.

I needed to examine the back of the ticket to see if it had been endorsed, and it didn't take long to think of a solution. Leaning over the table, I touched the tip of my tongue to the thing and flipped it over.

“Necessity is the mother of invention,” Daffy had once told me, and as far as I knew, no one had yet come up with a system of tongue-print identification. I would put it on the list of clever innovations I intended to suggest some day to Inspector Hewitt.

But not during this case, of course.

To my disappointment, the reverse of the ticket had not been written on: no seller's name, no endorsement by the buyer.

I repeated the tongue trick and flipped the ticket back into its original position. A little damp, perhaps, but it would soon dry off.

But wait! Had I done myself in?

Would they test for saliva? Would Sergeant Woolmer think to do a spit test on this flimsy piece of evidence?

A German researcher named Mueller had, more than twenty years ago, suggested such a test: one in which the presence of an enzyme called alpha-amylase could indicate the presence of saliva. But to the best of my knowledge, Mueller's test could not distinguish the alpha-amylase found in human saliva from that found in certain bacteria and fungi, or, for that matter, in the saliva of certain apes.

A possible defense, if I were accused, might be that the ticket had come into contact with fungus, or some kind of earthy bacteria: that it might, for instance, have fallen out of Mr. Sambridge's pocket during a walk in the woods and landed in a mushroom ring.

Or been licked by a playful chimp at the zoo.

I smiled at the thought—smiled for the first time in many months.

It was the chemistry that caused this lifting of the spirits. Chemistry lifted you up out of the mud and flung you up among the stars.

Except, of course, when it didn't.

Things could so easily go wrong. Even the alchemists of the Middle Ages, deluded as they were, recognized that the Devil often inserted himself into chemical operations.

One had to be careful.

It would never do to second-guess the members of the detective police force.

Nevertheless, one didn't often hear of murder victims—if indeed Mr. Sambridge were one—being spread-eagled in a vertical position.

Could I have stumbled upon some bizarre act of human sacrifice?

A quick sniff of the air told me there was no lingering odor of smoke or candles; no stink of burning baby fat or anything like that, which was just as well. I don't think I could have dealt with it. While I'm blessed with an extraordinarily strong stomach, there are some things that are beyond bearing.

No, there was just that little whiff of sulfur, which might have just as well come from a lighted match.

I gave a sigh of relief as I confirmed that there were no traces in the room of soot or ash, no chalked pentagrams on the floor, or any of the other beastly things that Daffy delighted in reading aloud to me after dark from the spine-curdling novels of Dennis Wheatley.

But just as I was congratulating myself on my levelheadedness, there came a scratching sound from the direction of the corpse. I whipped quickly round and saw that it was moving.

I
PRACTICALLY SHED MY
skin.

The corpse's hands were moving slowly towards me. In fact, the whole dead body was in motion.

It swung slowly into the room as the door came open with a groan.

There was a breathless pause and then something began to ooze through the crack and into the room.

It was a cat. Not, as you would expect, a black cat, but rather a tortoiseshell. Still, you never knew, and I was taking no chances.

“Hello,” I said. “What's
your
name? Grimalkin? Grissel? Greedigut?”

The cat replied with a noncommittal “Meow.”

It makes no sense, I know, to be chatting to a cat while its probable former owner is dangling dead on the door, but that's the way things are in real life. We have a tendency to prattle away in the face of fear, as if pretending that things are normal will make them so.

Some people have gone to the chopping block saying, “I hope we're not too late?”

In any case, it didn't really matter. The cat wrote me off with a single glance, sniffed hopefully at the hair of its late master, then stalked across the room, jumped up onto the bed, and began to wash itself.

“Nice kitty,” I said, as one does.

Without the cat, I might not have thought to examine the bed. I dropped down onto all fours and had a look underneath.

Nothing. Not even dust balls. For a man, and an apparent bachelor, Mr. Sambridge was a remarkably good housekeeper.

Back on my feet, I ran my hands beneath the pillows. Nothing there. Not even pajamas.

At the head of the bed, and off to one side, was a hand-carved bookcase.

Life with my sister Daffy had taught me that you could tell as much about people by their books as you could by snooping through their diaries—a practice of which I am exceedingly fond and, I must confess, especially adept.

Mr. Sambridge did not have many books—perhaps a dozen in all. Several of these, such as the King James Bible and Robert Burton's
Anatomy of Melancholy,
were well thumbed, but the remaining volumes seemed unread: as fresh and crisp as if they had just arrived from Foyles in the morning post.

And, oddly, there were several copies of the same books, each in mint condition in a fresh dust wrapper.

I recognized them at once by their brightly illustrated covers:
Rainy Day Rhymes, Hobbyhorse House, The History of Crispian Crumpet,
and
Pirates in the Garden
: those immortal childhood classics by Oliver Inchbald.

Who, in England, or for that matter, anywhere else in the Empire or beyond, hadn't had these books read aloud to them even before they could manage bread and milk? I myself still had distinct memories of:

Splash! Sploik! Splonk! Splink!

Jumping in the rain

What a jolly mess, I think

Here I go again!

Or worse:

Captain Congleton's kangaroo

Is coming tonight for the Irish stew.

I still have several disjointed recollections of the unfortunate Miss Gurdy reciting this nonsense mechanically and without expression as she forced a spoon of gruel upon me in a high chair.

To someone like myself who had already been exposed to
real
poetry, these childish rhymes were an enormous letdown. I thought in particular of one rainy afternoon when I was very young that Daffy, in a far corner of one of the attics, had rehearsed “Westron Wind”:

“Westron wynde, when wyll thow blow

The smalle rayne downe can rayne.

Cryst yf my love were in my armes

And I yn my bed a-gayne.”

Outside, the small rain had raced down the leaded windowpanes, adding blurred but vivid images to her words.

Reminded of another song, Daffy went on:

“Marti'mas wind, when wilt thou blaw,

And shake the green leaves from the tree?

O gentle death, when wilt thou come?

For of life I am wearie.”

The words had touched something so deep inside me that I shivered at their sound. Although I did not know it at the time, the feeling was one of loneliness: a feeling I would later come to know—and later yet, to treasure.

Captain Congleton's kangaroo, my aunt Fanny!

Using my handkerchief to avoid leaving fingerprints, I picked up one of the copies of
Rainy Day Rhymes
and opened it to a random page:

Splash! Sploik! Splonk! Splink!

Jumping in the rain

What a jolly mess, I think

Here I go again!

There was no getting away from this stuff, even at the scene of a murder.

But then I thought,
Hold on!

Could it be that there was a message here for me? Had the book fallen open at that particular page for a reason? Was it like those cases I had heard about where people would seek solutions to their problems by sticking a finger at random into the Bible?

Prognostication, Daffy called it, and said it was a load of old horse hockey.

What a jolly mess, I think. Here I go again.

Were the words not meant to point up my present predicament? They could hardly have been better chosen. And besides, it was raining outside:
Splash! Sploik! Splonk! Splink! Jumping in the rain.

Gladys would certainly appreciate this weird reflection of our actual lives. The sounds perfectly described her progress along a puddle-filled lane.

“Stick to the facts,”
Uncle Tarquin said inside my head.

I leafed slowly through the pages: Here was Crispian Crumpet building sand castles by the sea, and here he was feeding a pony an apple over a wicket gate. Here he was gluing feathers to his forearms for a poem called
The Child Icarus,
and here, roasting a chestnut on a stick over an open bonfire.

I wondered if Oliver Inchbald's real-life son, upon whom the books were based, had actually done these things, or whether they were make-believe, the result of the author's overheated imagination?

I had never noticed it before, but in spite of his many messy doings, the boy was always pictured as crisp and clean, as spotless as any saint. No filth in the world of Crispian Crumpet. Sickness and sadness were unknown quantities, like
x
and
y
.

Why was this obnoxious child's life so filled with honey and sunshine when my own was rain and ruin?

With a sigh, I closed the book and returned Crispian to his shelf.

His life and mine were as unalike as noonday and darkness.

“Stop it!”
Uncle Tarquin snapped, and this time I obeyed.

Only then did the strangeness of my discovery strike me. Why on earth would a grown man—a grown
older
man at that—have a set of children's books at his bedside?

And multiple copies, at that?

Could it be a case of second childhood, like old Mr. Terry, the former verger at St. Tancred's? Mr. Terry, according to Mrs. Mullet, baked mud pies in the oven if he were not watched carefully, and chased robins round the vicarage garden with a salt cellar.

I had another look at Mr. Sambridge. Even dead, he didn't look like someone who had lost his marbles. Surely the vicar and his wife would have noticed: Cynthia Richardson would hardly have sent me alone, and without any warning or explanation, to the house of a man who was known to be utterly gaga.

Someone like that would hardly be able to make a living by ecclesiastical wood-carving.

Perhaps he was a book collector.

I know that there were people who are as barmy about books as Father is about postage stamps. My sister Daffy, for instance, can prattle on about flyleaves, colophons, and first editions not only until the cows come home, but until they have put on their nightcaps, gone to bed, switched off the lights, and begun snoring in their cowsheds.

Again using my handkerchief, I lifted the Oliver Inchbald books one at a time from the shelf and turned to the title pages: first editions, every single one of them. No inscriptions.

As I have said, as pristine as if they had just come fresh from the booksellers.

Below the title and the name of the author, each book bore the imprint of its publishers—Lancelot Gath, London—and the address in Bedford Square.

Nothing else: no bookmarks, underlinings, or tipped-in clippings.

Except for one: a rather grubby copy of
Hobbyhorse House,
lacking its dust wrapper, which, unlike its mates, was lying flat across the Bible and Shakespeare.

I opened it. This one, too, was a first edition. The owner's name was printed in crude and spidery block letters of green ink, which had bled horribly into the absorbent paper of the page:

Carla Sherrinford-Cameron.

My heart leaped with joy—and something else.

I
knew
Carla!

What in the name of all that is holy was Carla's copy of
Hobbyhorse House
doing in the bedroom of an elderly wood-carver who lived miles from her home in Hinley?

There was only one way to find out, and that was to question Carla. Even if she didn't have the answer, it would satisfy my need to ask.

Meanwhile, there was the question of Mr. Sambridge. Who had killed him and why?

Time was running out and I needed to get back to Buckshaw. There would be no second chance to view the scene of the crime. This would be my only opportunity, and I meant to make the most of it.

Before continuing with the corpse, I made what I thought was a professional examination of the room: swift, yet rich in detail.

I ran through a mental list even as I was inventing it: nothing overturned, nothing spilled, no dust marks to indicate that some object—a blunt instrument, for instance—had been moved, or taken away from the room. There was, in fact, no dust at all: further indication that Mr. Sambridge was an uncommonly good housekeeper.

Back to my list: nothing on the floor, no fresh scuff marks or abrasions, nothing under the carpet, nothing behind the pictures on the wall (a view of the sands at Margate, labeled as such, and a rather decent watercolor of a wooded glade: one of those works that captures the place so perfectly that you think you've seen it before).

A ewer, a pitcher, a water tumbler, and a toothbrush and tooth powder on a bedside table completed my survey. I had already satisfied myself that Mr. Sambridge still possessed almost all of his own teeth: an event so rare as to be remarkable in its own right, as I knew from my visits to Farringdon Street, with its framed warnings, and alerts inspired by the Blitz:

Gum disease is the silent enemy. It strikes while you're asleep!

Home defense. Lights out on tooth decay!

Avoid the blackout. Brush after every meal!

These placards had taught me that our precious English teeth were in short supply, relatively speaking, and that we ought to guard them like the Crown Jewels.

The cat, still grooming itself on the bed, seemed to sense that I was finished. It jumped down and, with its tail in the air like a flag, stalked to the door to be let out without so much as a glance at the inverted Mr. Sambridge.

I followed it out and shut the bedroom door behind me (handkerchief in hand, of course) making sure that the latch engaged. The thought of a cat being locked in too long with someone in Mr. Sambridge's condition was too much even for someone with
my
strong stomach. There were certain details that even Edgar Allan Poe hadn't dared write about.

Next on the agenda was to notify the police: a matter which required a great deal of thought. I mustn't be rash and yet, at the same time, must not seem ever to be anything less than cooperative. Inspector Hewitt would judge me on my professionalism, and I didn't intend to let him down.

Or myself, for that matter.

Outside, in the slackening rain and accompanied by the cat, I strolled casually over to where Gladys was waiting. There was a cottage directly across the lane from Thornfield Chase, and it was more than likely that whoever lived in it had seen me go into Mr. Sambridge's house. In the villages of England, there's precious little that escapes the neighbor's eye.

As if to illustrate my thoughts, a bit of lace fluttered at a window.

I had been seen.

Obviously, the cottager didn't know that Mr. Sambridge was dead. If he or she did, he or she should have been out to challenge me, or should, at least, have called the police.

It seemed to me that the best choice was to amble off with a casual air, as if I were just another girl with a bicycle, taking the country air. To reinforce that impression, I wheeled Gladys over for a closer examination of the holly hedge growing by the gate, remembering, as I did so, that the stuff was often planted in such a position to ward off lightning and witchcraft.

Which of the two had Mr. Sambridge feared?

With a quick and obvious glance over my shoulder, to give the impression that I was checking to see if anyone was watching, I snapped off a sprig of holly with a few colorful berries, and, with a spirited toss of my head, poked the holly jauntily—but carefully—into my hair behind the ear.

Flavia Sabina Dolores de Luce.

So I had once identified myself to a nosy librarian.

Although I refrained from kicking up my heels, you could almost hear the castanets.

Job done. The lace curtain settled too casually back into place.

The cat got up from where it had been sitting beside the gatepost and walked towards me, its tail in the air, as if it wanted to tell me something.

“Meow,” it said.

“Sorry, kitty,” I said. “I can't take you with me. Go catch a mouse. Be a good cat until someone comes for you.”

Gladys and I pushed off on the road home. There was still plenty of time to think.

From Pauper's Well, the road down Denham Rise is long, steep, straight, and tempting. With my chin down on the handlebars, I pedaled us up to speed, and then sat back to enjoy the mad downhill rush.