Speaking From Among The Bones (20 page)

“Did you,” she said, and it was not a question.

It took me a moment to realize that she was laughing. As her cheeks convulsed, she bit her bottom lip and her great wet eyes thrashed about in their sockets.

It was a gruesome spectacle.

“Ho!” she said. “Did you indeed.”

She rolled over toward the night table and picked up the bottle. She worked the cork out with her thumbs and poured an inch of reddish-brown liquid into a handy glass.

“For my vocal cords,” she said, and tossed it back with a single gulp.

She made a token gargling noise as if to convince me. I recognized at once the smell of sherry. Mrs. Mullet used it in Christmas pudding as well as in what she called her “Sinful Stew.”

“The vocal folds must be rewarded now and then,” Miss Tanty said, shoving the cork back into the bottle. “They must be treated like trained lions: the frequent whip tempered with the occasional reward.”

Could this be the Miss Tanty who had to be put to bed and the doctor called? The Miss Tanty who had been given an injection to help her sleep?

If that were true, she was the second woman in Bishop’s Lacey within a remarkably short time to require the needle. The first had been Cynthia Richardson, who’d had a fright in the churchyard. And now Miss Tanty, who’d had a fright in the church itself.

The same Miss Tanty who was now treating her vocal folds to a second slug of sherry.

“I’m sorry to walk in without an invitation,” I said, without mentioning Miss Gawl. “I knew what a great shock you’d had with the blood in the church, and so forth. I wanted to—”

“Codswallop!” she said, fixing me with her swivel eyes. “I was no more shocked than you were.”

“But—”

The woman was laughing again, her flesh forming whitecaps.

“Of
course
, I went to great pains to put it about that I
was
. A few words babbled from the Book of Revelation
can be remarkably convincing. Well … not so much
great
pains when you come right down to it. In any village, a single telephone call is as good as a leader in the
Times
.”

“But—”

“It was a
performance
, dear girl. A
performance
! And a magnificent one, if I do say so myself. I was especially pleased that even
you
were taken in by it.

“
‘Forgive me, O Lord.’
You
were
quite taken in, weren’t you? Admit it. And I must say that crossing myself with the drippings, as it were, was a touch of sheer genius—although I must tell you that I thought for a few moments you had seen through me.”

My mind was racing in circles. I felt like the last to cross the line in a sack race. This horrid old woman had beaten me at my own game.

“Taken in by it?” I managed. “Of course I wasn’t taken in by it. That’s why I’m here.”

It was a feeble recovery, but the best I could do under the circumstances.

Miss Tanty’s heaving billows had by now worked themselves up into a full-fledged tropical storm.

“Dear me!” she said, removing her spectacles and mopping at her streaming eyes with the corner of a mauve sheet. “Dear me!

“Why,” she asked, waving a hand at the bookcase, “should we leave all the glory of detection to Miss What’s-her-name?” and I noticed for the first time that her library consisted of nothing but green-covered paperback mysteries, like the ones Daffy kept hidden away from prying eyes at the back of her knickers drawer.

“I’ve always fancied myself a more than intelligent woman,” Miss Tanty went on. “Not brilliant, but not half bad. I’m always the first to work out who put the poisoned plums into the Christmas pudding; who left the backward footprints in the paddock—that sort of thing.

“Much like you,” she added with a withering and focused glare.

My heart sank.

I had a rival.

“There we were, the three of us, detecting away like billy-ho and no one the wiser.”

The three of us? What was the woman talking about?

“I was first out of the gate, I believe,” Miss Tanty said. “I was on my knees and had a sample of ‘the red stuff,’ as I believe Jack the Ripper called it, on my finger, on my collar and—you’ll have to admit it was a masterstroke, Flavia—in the sign of the cross on my forehead.”

Blast the woman!

“The man Sowerby almost beat me to it with his handkerchief. His tasting the stuff was a nice touch, although a trifle showy. And then, of course, there was you, dipping your white ribbon, hoping desperately that no one would notice.”

Blast the woman again!

“Like three great sleuths, we were, thrown together unexpectedly over a pool of blood at the scene of a crime. What a tableau it was! What an immortal moment. What a snapshot for a book’s dust jacket. I wished I’d brought my Kodak!”

Now here was a fine kettle of fish. I suppose I should
have been happy to find a kindred soul in Bishop’s Lacey, but I was not.

Far from it.

How could I hope to get to the bottom of Mr. Collicutt’s unfortunate demise with someone like Miss Tanty muddying the waters?

To say nothing of the police.

“We could form a type of club,” she went on with increasing enthusiasm. “Call ourselves ‘The Big Three.’ Or a corporation: ‘TSD,’ we shall name it: Tanty, Sowerby & de Luce. With an ampersand, of course.”

That did it!

I was not going to spend the rest of my hard-earned life playing third fiddle to a couple of amateurs.

Or were they?

Miss Tanty
had
raised an interesting point.

I had completely overlooked Adam Sowerby.

I closed my eyes and tried to visualize his business card. What had it said?

Adam Tradescant Sowerby, MA., FRHortS, etc
.
Flora-archaeologist
Seeds of Antiquity—Cuttings—Inquiries
Tower Bridge, London E. 1 TN Royal 1066

Inquiries!

I had missed that. Drat and double drat!

The man was a
private detective
.

Which put a whole new light on things. How much, for instance, did he already know about the death of
Mr. Collicutt? And how was I going to worm it out of him?

Miss Tanty, too, if she had been snooping round the village in search of clues, might well be an even richer source of information than I had imagined.

I would need to remain on best of terms with her.

At least for now.

“I’ve already heard, of course,” I said, “of how you solved the case of the missing knitting needles.”

Mrs. Mullet had told us the story as she served the fish. “Mind the bones,” she had said. And then she had told us about the village mystery solved.

“It’s true,” Miss Tanty was saying, preening a little. “Poor Mrs. Lucas. She was so
distrait
. Couldn’t for the life of her. Where had she left her knitting needles? They had completely vanished, you see. In a flash.

“ ‘Have you looked in your hair?’ I asked her. She’s always worn her hair bunched up in a great knot like those dreadful dancers in Toulouse-Lautrec.
La Goulue
, and so forth … 
The Queen of Montmartre
.

“Mrs. Lucas gave me ever so odd a look and reached up and, lo and behold! She had shoved them without thinking into her
coiffure
when the postman came to the gate. ‘You’re a regular Sherlock Holmes, you are,’ she told me.”

I gave Miss Tanty a professional courteous smile.

“About Mr. Collicutt—” I began.

But there was no need to prime
this
pump. One touch of the handle and the whole story came gushing out.

“It was on a Tuesday,” she said. “The Tuesday before Ash Wednesday, to be precise. It’s always so lovely to be
precise, isn’t it, dear? One finds it so helpful when one is involved in the art of pervigilation.”

Get on with it!
I wanted to shout. But I had to be on my best behavior. I gave Miss Tanty a weak smile.

“The Tuesday before Ash Wednesday, as I have reason to recall, since we were going to be singing the Chaillot setting of the
Benedicte
the next morning at Matins. We had been working it up for some time, but as your sister Ophelia will tell you, it’s a fiendishly difficult piece. It sounds easy, I know, as all great music does, but it is, in fact, a trap and a snare for the unwary.

“Because I had not had sufficient time to master the score—odd, isn’t it, how printed music is called a score, as if it were a game of cricket, which I suppose, in a way, it is: runs, and so forth—I knew that I should have to rely upon my sight-reading ability, which is generally considered, by those who have witnessed it, to be quite remarkable.

“The only difficulty—the fly in the ointment, if you will—was the fact that my eyes had been playing up. There were times—especially times of great emotion—when the notes on the page were little more than a wretched blur. I knew that either my lenses or my medication needed to be adjusted posthaste, and hence, my appointment with the good Mr. Gideon, in Hinley.

“Usually, whenever I found it necessary to make ‘the Pilgrimage,’ as I like to call it, Mildred Battle was kind enough to run me over in her Austin. A regular saint, she is: a most appropriate conductor to one on a Pilgrimage, don’t you think?”

I smiled dutifully.

“But on the morning itself, her niece, Florence, rang me up before breakfast. ‘Auntie Mildred’s sick,’ she said. ‘It must have been something she ate.’ ‘Oh, dear,’ I told her, ‘I’m sorry to hear that. I shall have to telephone for Clarence Mundy’s taxicab, although I shudder to think of the cost of keeping him waiting all day in Hinley.’

“I suppose I ought to have been more sensitive to Mildred’s predicament, but there it is. I suppose I was thinking of the keen disappointment of the parishioners, and yes, the vicar, too, should I be unable to lend my voice to the
Benedicte
. You do see my dilemma, don’t you?”

I said that I did.

“ ‘But don’t worry,’ Florence said, almost before the words were out of my mouth. ‘Mr. Collicutt’s offered to drive you, and Auntie Mildred’s kindly agreed to let him take her car. He’ll pick you up at twenty-five minutes to nine.’ ”

I had forgotten that Mr. Collicutt lodged with Mr. and Mrs. Battle. Thank goodness Miss Tanty had reminded me. That made two more people—three, counting Florence, the niece—to be questioned.

“Which couldn’t have been more perfect,” Miss Tanty went on. “My appointment with Mr. Gideon was set for nine-thirty, and although it’s only a ten- or fifteen-minute drive to Hinley, I always like to be well ahead of the clock. Sometimes, if one is early, and there should happen to be a cancellation, they’ll take one before one’s time and one will be home all that much earlier and save three shillings in the bargain.

“ ‘I shall be waiting at the gate,’ I told Florence. And so I was.

“When Mr. Collicutt hadn’t arrived by nine o’clock, I tried to ring Florence back, but the line was engaged. Miss Goulard at the telephone exchange said that, as there were no voices on the line, someone had likely left the receiver off its cradle. I was beside myself, I can tell you. But when I tried again at quarter past, the call went through with no trouble at all. Florence picked up at once and told me that Mr. Collicutt had left the house at eight-thirty sharp.

“I was furious, I can tell you. I could have killed the man—”

I must have looked shocked. Miss Tanty flustered.

“A figure of speech, of course. I’d no more kill dear Mr. Collicutt—or anyone else, of course—than sprout wings and fly. Surely you know that.”

“Of course,” I said, suddenly wary of the woman.

Dear Mr. Collicutt?
Could this be the same Miss Tanty who had told me not to waste my crocuses?

There was something strange at work here, and it wasn’t love.

“He was a very competent musician,” she went on, “but like all competent musicians, he tended to overwork himself. If he wasn’t teaching his private pupils, or working with the choir, or off adjudicating one music festival or another, he was in the throes of composition. Mildred says she and George used to hear him pacing back and forth in his room overhead no matter the time of night. They’d have had words with him if it weren’t for the fact that they needed the money. Lodgers are not as easy to
find as they were during the war, but one that creeps out to go walking in the dark of the moon is surely a sore trial to a stonemason who works long, hard hours and has to be up before the crack of dawn.”

“The dark of the moon?” I asked. “Why would he do that?”

“Restlessness, I suppose. Working out harmonies and counterpoint in his head. I know that he sometimes went to the church. At times, when the wind was in the west, I would catch snatches of organ music at odd hours. I more than once thought of taking the dear man a thermos flask of hot tea but I hated to intrude. Music can be such a harsh mistress, you know.”

She fixed me with a gigantic eye.

Was she trying to extract information?

Mistresses were a topic Daffy had sometimes spoken of, but they did not hold the same interest for me as they did her. Unless there was murder involved, or poison, such as in the case of Madame de Brinvilliers and the Chevalier de Sainte-Croix, I didn’t give a fig what people got up to in their spare time.

“I sometimes walk in the darkness myself,” Miss Tanty was saying. “Even though the night air is said by some to be deleterious to the voice. One simply walks with one’s mouth closed, breathing calmly through one’s nose.”

I shuddered at the very thought of Miss Tanty drifting about the village in the darkness with her mouth closed, breathing calmly through her nose.

No wonder people claimed to have seen ghosts!

Those mysterious lights the ARP members and the
fire-watchers had seen floating in the churchyard during the war were probably, in reality, no more than the glinting of the moon off Miss Tanty’s gigantic lenses.

Or were they something far more sinister?

“I’d better be getting along,” I said. “I’ll see myself out. I’m relieved to hear that you’re all right, Miss Tanty.”