To Say Nothing of the Dog (69 page)

“So you tried to take it back?” Verity said.

“Yes. And I went and saw Shoji and made him tell me as much as I could about incongruities without making him suspicious. It was all bad, but the worst was that he told me they’d been able to adapt the net to safeguard against them, and weren’t we lucky one hadn’t happened before we did, we could have caused the collapse of the entire space-time continuum.”

I looked over at Verity. She was watching Mrs. Bittner, her beautiful face sad.

“So I hid the swag, as they say in the mystery novels, and waited for the world to end. Which it did. The cathedral was deconsecrated and sold to the Church of the Hereafter and then turned into a shopping center.”

She stared into her sherry. “The irony is that it was all for nothing. My husband loved Salisbury. I had been so convinced that losing Coventry Cathedral would kill him, but it didn’t. He truly meant that about churches being only a symbol. He didn’t seem to mind even when they built a Marks and Spencer’s on the ruins.” She smiled warmly. “Do you know what he said when he heard Lady Schrapnell was rebuilding the old cathedral? He said, ‘I hope this time they get the spire on straight.’ ”

She set her glass down. “After Harold died, I came back here. And two weeks ago James telephoned and asked me if I could remember anything about the drops we’d done together, that there was an area of increased slippage in 2018, and he was afraid it was due to an incongruity. I knew then it was just a matter of time before I was found out, even though he had the wrong incongruity.” She looked up at us. “James told me about the cat and Tossie Mering. Did you manage to get Lady Schrapnell’s great-great-grandmother married to the mysterious Mr. C?”

“Not exactly,” I said. “She did marry him, but it was no thanks to us.”

“It was the butler,” Verity said, “under an assumed name.”

“Of course,” Mrs. Bittner said, clapping her veined hands together. “The old solutions are always the best. The butler, the case of mistaken identity, the least likely suspect—” She looked at us both meaningfully, “—the purloined letter.” She stood up. “I hid it in the attic.”

We started up the stairs. “I was afraid moving it might make things worse, she said, taking the steps slowly, “so I left the loot here when we went to Salisbury. I made certain it was well-hidden, and I took care to rent the house to people without children—children are so curious, you know—but I was always afraid someone would come up here and find it and do something that would change the course of history.” She turned back, holding onto the banister, and looked at me. “But it already had, hadn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said.

She didn’t say anything more. She seemed to be concentrating all her effort on climbing the stairs. When we reached the first floor, she led us down a corridor past a bedroom and opened a narrow door onto another, steeper flight of stairs. “This leads up to the attic,” she said, panting a little. “I’m sorry. I need to rest a bit before going on. There’s a chair in the bedroom.”

I ran to fetch it, and she sat down on it. “Would you like a glass of water?” Verity asked.

“No, thank you, dear,” she said. “Tell me about the incongruity I caused.”

“You weren’t the only person who considered the bishop’s bird stump indestructible,” I said. “So did the chairman of the Flower Committee named—”

“Delphinium Sharpe,” Verity said.

I nodded. “She had been there the night of the raid, standing guard by the west door, and she knew the bishop’s bird stump couldn’t have been carried out. When it wasn’t found in the rubble or among the things the fire watch had saved, she concluded it had been stolen some time before the raid and that the thief must have known about the raid in advance, knowing he could get away with it. She was quite vocal with her theory—”

“She even wrote a letter to the editor of one of the Coventry papers,” Verity put in.

I nodded. “This next part is only a theory, like Miss Sharpe’s,” I said. “The only evidence we have is Carruthers’s testimony, the list of ladies’ church committees for 1940, and a letter to the editor that wasn’t in either of the Coventry papers.”

Mrs. Bittner nodded sagely. “The incident of the dog in the nighttime.”

“Exactly,” I said. “The Nazis made it a practice to obtain and read Allied newspapers, looking for any intelligence information that might be inadvertently revealed. I think Miss Sharpe’s letter and the words ‘advance warning of the raid’ must have caught the eye of someone in Nazi intelligence who was worried about the Nazi code system being compromised, and that inquiries were subsequently made, inquiries that revealed the High Command had dispatched RAF fighters to Coventry that night and had attempted to jam the pathfinder beams.”

“And the Nazis realized we had Ultra,” Verity said, “and changed the Enigma machine.”

“And we lost the campaign in North Africa,” I said, “and possibly the D-Day invasion—”

“And the Nazis won the war,” Mrs. Bittner said bleakly. “Only they didn’t. You stopped them.”

“The continuum stopped them with its system of secondary defenses, which is almost as good as Ultra’s,” I said. “The one thing that didn’t fit in this whole mess was the slippage on Verity’s drop. If there hadn’t been any slippage, that might have meant the continuum’s defenses had somehow broken down, but there had been. But not enough to fit Fujisaki’s theory that incongruities occur when the slippage required is more than the net can supply. The net could easily have supplied fourteen minutes of slippage, or four, which would have been all that would have been necessary to keep the incongruity from ever happening. So the only logical conclusion was that it had intended for Verity to go through at that exact moment—”

“Are you saying the continuum arranged for me to save Princess Arjumand?” Verity said.

“Yes,” I said. “Which made us think you’d caused an incongruity and we had to fix it, which is why we arranged a séance to get Tossie to Coventry to see the bishop’s bird stump and write in her diary that the experience had changed her life—”

“And Lady Schrapnell would read it,” Verity said, “and decide to rebuild Coventry Cathedral and send me back to Muchings End to find out what happened to the bishop’s bird stump, so I could save the cat—”

“So I could be sent back to return it and overhear a conversation about mystery novels in Blackwell’s and spend a night in a tower—”

“And solve the mystery of the bishop’s bird stump,” Mrs. Bittner said. She stood up and started up the stairs. “I’m glad you did, you know,” she said, leading the way up the narrow stairs. “There is nothing heavier than the weight of a secret crime.”

She opened the door to the attic. “I should have been found out soon at any rate. My nephew’s been lobbying me to move into a single-floor flat.”

Attics in books and vids are always picturesque places, with a bicycle, several large plumed hats, an antique rocking horse, and, of course, a steamer trunk for storing the missing will or the dead body in.

Mrs. Bittner’s attic didn’t have a trunk, or a rocking horse, at least that I could see. Though they might easily have been there, along with the lost Ark of the Covenant and the Great Pyramid of Giza.

“Oh, dear,” Mrs. Bittner said, looking round in dismay. “I’m afraid it’s more
The Sittaford Mystery
than ‘The Purloined Letter.’ ”

“Agatha Christie,” Verity explained. “Nobody noticed the evidence because it’d been stuck in a cupboard with a bag of golf clubs and tennis rackets and a lot of other things.”

“A lot of other things” was putting it mildly. The low-raftered room was crammed from end to end with cardboard cartons, stacked lawn chairs, old clothes hanging from an exposed pipe, jigsaw puzzles of the Grand Canyon and the Mars colony, a croquet set, squash rackets, dusty Christmas decorations, books, and an assortment of bedspread-draped furniture, all stacked on top of each other in sedimentary layers.

“Could you reach me down that chair?” Mrs. Bittner said, pointing at a Twentieth Century plastiform atrocity perched on top of a washing machine. “I have difficulty standing for very long.”

I got it down, disentangling a trowel and several coat hangers from its aluminum legs, and dusted it off for her.

She sat down, easing herself into it gingerly. “Thank you,” she said. “Hand that tin box to me.”

I handed it to her reverently.

She set it down beside her on the floor. “And those large pasteboard boxes. Just push them aside. And those suitcases.”

I did, and she stood up and walked down the little aisle my shifting the boxes had made and into darkness.

“Plug in a lamp,” she said. “There’s an outlet over there.” She pointed at the wall behind an enormous plastic aspidistra.

I reached for the nearest lamp, a massive affair with a huge pleated shade and a squat, heavily decorated metal base.

“Not that one,” she said sharply. “The pink one.”

She pointed at a tall, early Twenty-First Century fringed affair.

I plugged it in and switched on the hard-to-find knob, but it didn’t do much good. It lit the fringe and Verity’s Waterhouse face, but not much else.

Apparently Mrs. Bittner thought so, too. She went over to the ornate metal lamp.
“The Masqued Murder,”
she said.

Verity leaned forward. “Evidence disguised as something else,” she murmured.

“Exactly,” Mrs. Bittner said, and lifted the pleated shade off bishop’s bird stump.

It was too bad Lady Schrapnell wasn’t here. And Carruthers. All that time we had spent searching for it in the rubble, and it was here all along. Removed for safekeeping, as Carruthers had suggested, and not a mark on it. The Red Sea still parted; Springtime, Summer, Autumn, and Winter still held their respective garlands of apple blossoms, roses, wheat, and holly; John the Baptist, his head still on the platter, still stared reproachfully at King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. Gryphons, poppies, pineapples, puffins, the Battle of Prestonpans, all of it intact and not even dusty.

“Lady Schrapnell will be so pleased,” Verity said. She squeezed down the aisle to look at it more closely. “Good heavens. That side must have been facing the wall. What are those? Fans?”

“Clams. Clams inscribed with the names of important naval battles,” I said. “Lepanto, Trafalgar, the Battle of the Swans.”

“It’s difficult imagining it changing the course of history,” Mrs. Bittner said, peering at Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace. “It doesn’t improve with age, does it? Like the Albert Memorial.”

“With which it has a good deal in common,” Verity said, touching an elephant.

“I don’t know,” I said, cocking my head to look at it sideways. “I’m beginning to feel a certain affection for it.”

“He’s time-lagged,” Verity said. “Ned, the elephant’s carrying a howdah full of pineapples and bananas to an eagle with a fish fork.”

“It’s not a fish fork,” I said. “It’s a flaming sword. And it’s not an eagle, it’s an archangel, guarding the entrance to the Garden of Eden. Or possibly the Zoo.”

“It
is
truly hideous,” Mrs. Bittner said. “I don’t know what I was thinking of. After all those trips, I was probably a bit time-lagged myself. And there was a good deal of smoke.”

Verity turned to stare at her, and then at me.

“How many trips did you make?” she said finally.

“Four,” Mrs. Bittner said. “No, five. The first one didn’t count. I came through too late. The whole nave was on fire, and I was nearly overcome by smoke inhalation. I still have trouble with my lungs.”

Verity was still staring at her, trying to take it in. “You made five trips to the cathedral?”

Mrs. Bittner nodded. “I only had a few minutes between the time the fire watch left and the fire got out of hand, and the slippage kept putting me later than I wanted. Five was all I had time for.”

Verity looked disbelievingly at me.

“Hand me down the bandbox,” Mrs. Bittner told her. “The second time I nearly got caught.”

“That was me,” I said. “I saw you running toward the sanctuary.”

“That was you?” she said, laughing, her hand on her chest. “I thought it was Provost Howard, and I was going to be arrested for a looter.”

Verity handed her the bandbox, and she took off the lid and began rummaging through the tissue paper. “I took the bishop’s bird stump on the last trip. I was trying to reach the Smiths’ Chapel, but it was on fire. I ran across to the Dyers’ Chapel and got the bronze candlesticks off the altar, but they were too hot. I dropped the first one, and it rolled away under one of the pews.”

And I found it, I thought, and thought it had been blown there by concussion.

“I went after it,” she said, digging matter-of-factly through tissue paper, “but the rafters were coming down, so I ran back up the nave, and I saw that the organ was on fire, it was all on fire—the woodwork and the choir and the sanctuary—that beautiful, beautiful cathedral—and I couldn’t save any of it. I didn’t think, I just grabbed the nearest thing I could find, and ran for the net, spilling chrysanthemums and water everywhere.” She took out a wad of tissue paper and unwrapped a bronze candlestick. “That’s why there’s only one.”

Mr. Dunworthy had said she was absolutely fearless, and she must have been, darting back and forth between crashing beams and falling incendiaries, the net opening on who-knows-what and no guarantee it would stay open, no guarantee the roof wouldn’t fall in. I looked at her in admiration.

“Ned,” she ordered, “bring me that painting. The one with the bedspread over it.”

I did, and she pulled the bedspread off a painting of Christ with the lost lamb in his arms. Verity, standing beside me, clasped my hand.

“The rest of the things are over there,” Mrs. Bittner said. “Under the plastic.”

And they were. The embroidered altar cloth from the Smiths’ Chapel. An engraved pewter chalice. A Sixteenth-Century wooden chest. A small statue of St. Michael. A mediaeval enameled pyx. A silver candelabrum with the candles still in it. A misericord carved with one of the Seven Works of Mercy. The capper’s pall. A Georgian altar plate. And the wooden cross from the Girdlers’ Chapel, with the image of a child kneeling at the foot of it.