Speaking From Among The Bones (35 page)

I couldn’t help thinking how much progress he had made since we had first met nine months ago, upon which occasion he had sent me to fetch the tea.

There was hope for the man yet.

“I expect you’ve had this figured out right from the starting gate,” he said, with a pleasant enough smile.

His wife, Antigone, touched her hair, and I recognized that a secret signal had flown between them.

“That is, I hope you won’t mind filling in a few of the blanks for us.”

“Of course not,” I said in a sort of humble, jolly-girl-well-met kind of voice. “I should be more than happy to assist. Where shall I begin?”

But don’t push your luck
, his eyes were saying.

“Let’s begin with suspicion,” he said, taking out his notebook and opening it flat on his knee.

I saw him write down “Flavia de Luce,” and underline it.

He had once, in an earlier investigation, added the letter “P” after my name and had refused to explain its meaning. There was no “P” this time.

“When did you first begin to suspect that something peculiar was going on at St. Tancred’s?”

“When the sexton—that’s Mr. Haskins—mentioned the mysterious lights in the churchyard during the war. Why would he tell me a thing like that unless he wanted to scare me away?”

“So you think Haskins was in on it?”

“Yes. I can’t prove it, but a gang of men could hardly tunnel in his churchyard without his knowing about it, could they?”

“I suppose not,” Inspector Hewitt said.

First point to Flavia.

“As Mr. Sowerby has told you,” I said, “they were after the Heart of Lucifer. They’ve been at it for ages—years perhaps. Magistrate Ridley-Smith was paying them off—”

This was the point where he had stopped me before, and I paused to see if he would let me go on.

Feely and Daffy were gaping like a pair of guppies and Antigone smiled upon me like a madonna who had just had a foot massage.

It gave me the boldness I needed. There are times when honesty is not just the best policy, but the only one.

“I have to admit I had just a quick look round Mr. Collicutt’s room at Mrs. Battle’s boardinghouse.”

“Yes, I thought you might,” the Inspector said. “Good job we’d been there before you.”

“I found six hundred pounds hidden under Mr. Collicutt’s bed. It was in a Players tin.”

I knew in a flash that I was in official hot water.

Exasperation was written all over the Inspector’s face, but to his credit, he did not explode. The presence of his wife might have had something to do with it.

“Six hundred pounds,” he said, and the words hissed out of his mouth like hot steam.

I smiled brightly, as if I thought I deserved a pat on the head. “It was in an envelope which had once had Magistrate Ridley-Smith’s initials embossed on the flap: QRS—Quentin Ridley-Smith. Hardly likely to have been anyone else’s. Not many people have three intials which are consecutive letters of the alphabet.”

I have to say that Inspector Hewitt was doing a remarkable job of keeping his temper in check. Only the color of his ears betrayed him.

I decided it was time to provide a diversion.

“I expect you noticed that someone had written ‘Deceased’ after Mr. Collicutt’s name on his manuscript?”

“And if we did?”

The man was giving nothing away.

“It was in a woman’s handwriting. There were no women in the Battle house except Mrs. Battle and her niece Florence. Mr. Collicutt was said to—”

“Hold on,” the Inspector said. “Are you telling me that one of them—”

“Not at all,” I said. “I’m simply pointing out a fact.
George Battle’s handwriting was all over his account books in his work shed. Large and messy. It wasn’t him.”

From a distant part of the house came the sound of the doorbell, and before we could get back to our duel of wits, Dogger was at the door.

“Detective Sergeants Woolmer and Graves,” he announced. “May I show them in?”

It was Feely’s place, as eldest member of the family present, to give her assent, but before she could open her mouth, I beat her to it.

“Thank you, Dogger,” I said. “Please do.”

Woolmer and Graves came into the drawing room and promptly melted into the Victorian wallpaper.

“Six hundred pounds in a Players tin at the Battle residence,” Inspector Hewitt said to Sergeant Graves. “Did we note that? I don’t remember seeing it.”

Sergeant Graves’s blush made words unnecessary but he spoke anyway.

“No, sir.”

Inspector Hewitt turned to a new page and made a note that did not promise a happy future for poor Graves.

“Carry on, then,” he said after an agonizingly long time.

“Well,” I went on, “six hundred pounds seemed like a lot of money for a poor country organist. The fact that it was hidden under his bed, rather than being put safely into the bank, suggested something fishy. It was only when I met Jocelyn Ridley-Smith that I put two and two together.”

Inspector Hewitt couldn’t conceal his puzzlement. “The magistrate’s son?”

“Yes. I believe Magistrate Ridley-Smith was doing research
in the Public Record Office in London when he came across the marginal note by Ralph, the cellarer at Glastonbury Abbey.

“
Adamas
, it said. ‘Diamond,’ in Latin. Ralph had seen it with his own eyes. He also said quite clearly that it was buried with Saint Tancred at Lacey. Which is here.”

“Go on,” the Inspector said.

“He believed that the stone would cure Jocelyn of his affliction.”

Antigone gasped, and I loved her for it.

“Mr. Sowerby says diamonds were once believed to be ‘a help to lunaticks and such as are posessed with the Devil.’ What else would an elderly magistrate want with a diamond?

“Jocelyn is not a lunatic!” I blurted. “He is lonely, he’s a captive, and he’s suffering from lead poisoning, which he inherited from his mother.

“It’s too late for diamonds,” I went on. “Or for anything else. There’s nothing I can do about the lead poisoning, but I
can
help him with the loneliness—just as Harriet, my mother, did before she died.”

The room filled slowly with silence and suddenly there was a lump in my throat. I covered it up by taking several unnecessary but deep sips of tea and blinking casually out the window.

I pretended to scratch an itch that had suddenly arisen in my eye.

“The magistrate,” I continued, “could easily have bought a diamond, of course, but it wouldn’t be the same as the Heart of Lucifer. It wouldn’t have the power of a stone that had been touched by a saint.”

The Inspector was looking at me skeptically.

“He’s dying of leprosy, you see. Even if I’m wrong about the magic, I expect he planned on fetching enough for the Heart of Lucifer to care for Jocelyn after he’s gone. I’m speculating, of course.”

“I see,” the Inspector said, but I knew he didn’t.

“Mr. Collicutt had been in on it from the beginning. As organist, he could be in the church in the middle of the night without attracting attention. Miss Tanty told me she sometimes heard him playing at strange hours. He must have been the first to enter the lower tomb when the tunnelers had broken through, and he would have crawled into the tomb alone. Neither the opening nor the tomb itself was big enough for two. He levered the lid off the sarcophagus, pried the diamond from the crosier, and pocketed it. He probably told the others that the tomb had already been vandalized. But as I’ve said, I’m speculating.”

“Interesting,” Inspector Hewitt said. “And then he returned to the church on the morning of Shrove Tuesday and concealed it in the organ pipe.”

“Exactly!” I said.

“Where Magistrate Ridley-Smith and Benson, or Haskins, or his workers—what were their names?” He flipped back through the pages of his notebook. “Thomas Wolcott and Norman Enderby,” he said. “Where Magistrate Ridley-Smith and Benson, or Haskins, or Tommy Wolcott and Norman Enderby, or some combination of the above killed him. Is that what you’re saying?”

The Inspector was twitting me, but I no longer cared.

“Yes,” I said. “But not intentionally. It was Miss Tanty who was trying to kill him.”

I waited for my words to have their expected effect, and I was richly rewarded. You could, as Mrs. Mullet once said, have heard a pan drop.

“Miss Tanty,” Inspector Hewitt repeated. “And her motive?”

“Thwarted love,” I said. “He had spurned her advances.”

Daffy and Antigone burst into laughter at precisely the same instant. Antigone had the good grace to stifle it at once and put her hand to her mouth. Daffy did not, and I shot her
such
a glare.

“Even more interesting,” Inspector Hewitt said, and because I had trained myself to be so adept at reading upside down, I saw him put down
“thwarted love”
in his notebook.

“Perhaps you’d be so good as to explain.”

“It was the handkerchief,” I said. “I knew as soon as I saw it sticking out from under the gas mask that Mr. Collicutt had not been murdered by a man. The frilly border gave it away.”

“Excellent!” the Inspector said. “We had come to much the same conclusion ourselves.”

I ventured a peek at Antigone to see if she was paying attention, and she was. She gave me a radiant smile.

“The vessels of his neck were still darkened, even after six weeks.”

“Hold on,” Inspector Hewitt said. “You’re getting ahead of me.”

“It’s a well-known fact,” I said, “that the administration of ether vapor darkens the blood. The fact that his blood vessels were still black after six weeks shows that Mr. Collicutt died after the ether but before his body could reoxygenate his blood.”

“Quite sure of that, are you?” the Inspector asked, not looking at me.

“
Quite
sure,” I answered. “You’ll find it in
Taylor on Poisons
.”

I did not mention that I kept this gripping reference on my bedside table as a midnight comforter.

“Let’s return to Miss Tanty for a moment,” the Inspector said. “I don’t think I’ve quite grasped how she managed it.”

I gave him a patient smile. “Miss Tanty had planned on having Mrs. Battle drive her to her ophthalmological appointment in Hinley, but when Florence, the niece, telephoned to say Mrs. B was ill, and that Mr. Collicutt had offered to drive her instead, Miss Tanty saw her opportunity.

“But—Mr. Collicutt, rather than going directly to Miss Tanty’s house, went first instead to the church to hide the diamond. She probably watched him drive past and stop at the church. She has quite a good view of both the road and the east end of the churchyard.

“She took the bottle of ether—which I suspect she got from Miss Gawl, although I can’t prove it—it has ‘D.H.U.,’ which means District Health Unit, stamped on the bottom in red ink—I took the precaution of pocketing it for evidence—don’t worry, the ether explosion vaporized
the fingerprints anyway—it’s upstairs in my laboratory. You can have a look at it later, if you like.”

“There’s our missing bottle, then,” Detective Sergeant Woolmer growled.

The Inspector nodded grimly as the sergeant gave me a look that I would not exactly describe as appreciative.

“Go on, then.”

“Well,” I said, “Miss Tanty cornered him in the organ casing and clapped the ether-soaked handkerchief over his nose. It doesn’t require great strength and it doesn’t take long. Ten seconds, I believe, may be enough to produce unconsciousness.

“Miss Tanty, being much larger than Mr. Collicutt, would have overpowered him easily. In fact, she gave him such a dose of the stuff that he had convulsions.”

“Convulsions?” the Inspector said, startled.

“Yes, you’ll find the fresh nicks and gouge marks where his heels kicked the wooden pipe casing. They’re quite easy to see if you get down on your hands and knees.”

The Inspector did not look up, but made another, and this time quite lengthy, entry in his notebook.

“So,” he said. “She killed him by administering ether.”

“No,” I said. “She didn’t kill him.”

“What!”

He said it with an exclamation mark and about six question marks, which I have not attempted to reproduce here.

“She etherized him and left him for dead. She intended to kill him, but she probably didn’t.”

The Inspector wrote that down and paused, his Biro hovering, waiting for me to go on.

“Just after she had gone, you see, Magistrate Ridley-Smith and his henchmen came on the scene. You’ll find an interesting mixture of footprints in the corners of the organ chamber—workman’s boots, and the sole of an unusually small handmade shoe—the magistrate’s. They believed, of course, that Mr. Collicutt was dead, and if that were true, the diamond—if it were not in his pockets—might be lost to them forever. They must have spotted some slight sign of respiration. They had to revive him—and quickly!

“Someone—could it have been Mr. Haskins?—who remembered the old ARP trunk in the ringing chamber went up to the tower and fetched down the gas mask, the stirrup pump, and the spare length of rubber hose.

“But they soon found that the hose fitting on the old pump was rotted almost to crumbs. Actually, I spotted that the first time I saw it.

“There wasn’t a second to waste. No time to lose fiddling with the bits and pieces. Someone strapped the mask onto his face. They didn’t even bother removing the handkerchief—not completely, anyway. Someone else thought of switching on the organ’s blower and connecting the hose to the manometer fitting. We know, of course, that at this particular instant, Mr. Collicutt was still alive.”

I paused to let my words sink in.

“Of course!” the Inspector said. He was slightly brighter than I sometimes thought. “The broken glass!”

“Exactly,” I said. “He grabbed at the glass manometer tube and it broke off in his hand. He was still clutching it six weeks later in the crypt. It might even be that the hiss of the escaping air was what gave them the idea.”

“Hmmm,” Inspector Hewitt said.

“It must have been a madhouse in that little chamber,” I went on. “All they could think of was that they needed to get him talking. To hand over the Heart of Lucifer, or at least tell them where he’d hidden it. But they underestimated the power of air to kill. It required only a touch of the hose—under that great amount of pressure—to instantly rupture most of his internal organs.”