·ELEVEN·

WHEN YOU’RE PLANNING MISCHIEF, it’s always a good idea to throw up a smokescreen in advance. Excuses made after the fact are seldom successful.

Which is why I made a point of mentioning to the Palmers that I was departing the Oak and Pheasant to pick up photographs. One would not ordinarily bother, or feel it necessary, to explain to a landlord where you were going or why. My real intent was to draw attention to the fact that I was taking myself elsewhere: which ought always to be your first concern when you plan to burgle someone’s bedroom.

The second step is timing. It is only logical to plan your attack while the burglee is away from the intended target.

Say, for instance, that you were planning to rifle the bedroom of a country publican’s wife in search of a certain book of poems. Logic would dictate that the best time to do so would be when the said publican’s wife, being up to her ears in sauces in the kitchen, would be least likely to return to her sleeping chambers.

Which was now.

There wasn’t a moment to lose.

Up the stairs I went, as if returning to my bedroom. At the first landing, I stopped to examine the shelf of books which Daffy had scoffed at.

Under Two Flags…The Sea Hawk…Piracy…Eric Brighteyes…

The titles alone made me seasick except the last one, which made me gag.

How could people waste their lives writing—or reading—such utter bilge?

There was no sign of anything slender enough to be poetry. Mrs. Palmer was not foolhardy enough to leave her explosive little book in plain sight where any commercial traveler might pick it up for a bit of bedtime reading. Hide in plain sight was a well-worn plot device used by legions of detective novelists, but not in this case.

Resuming my upward climb, I peered up through the old oak banisters and newel posts, but the landing above looked deserted. On tiptoe, I crept slowly up the last five steps.

The coast was clear.

The bedrooms rented out were at the front of the inn, facing the church, except mine and Dogger’s, which both overlooked the sunken garden at the rear. This left only one room unaccounted for: the one I had decided belonged to the Palmers.

The door of this room was painted with buttermilk emulsion in a peculiar shade of blue, a color which reminded me not of buttermilk, but watery milk of the thin, skimmed variety: the skin of a decrepit duchess.

I pressed my ear tightly against one of the door panels. The only sound to be heard was that of my own heart.

I seized the knob and twisted. The door opened and I stepped inside.

How often fortune favors the brave!

In spite of its tall four-poster bed—which surely must be the very one that Good Queen Bess had slept in—the room was surprisingly small and crowded: clothespress, dresser, chair, table with alarm clock, faded red Turkey carpet on the floor, washstand, sink, shaving gear, skin cream. Aside from those few personal belongings, it was as spare as if the landlord and his wife were transients themselves, stopping overnight at the inn on their way to visit an expiring aunt in Exeter: hardly the room of a longtime landlord and his churchwarden wife who had lived here since the year dot.

The ancient wallpaper—surely no newer than the eighteenth century—portrayed a smoke-darkened Chinese landscape with repetitive fishing boats, mountains, cranes, bamboo, and pagodas.

I began my search for The Mussel Bed in the most obvious place: under the mattress. The high bedstead itself was shaky and precarious. Its elderly bed slats clattered horribly, like old bones raining down on a slate roof, and I eased the bedding back into its original position, hoping the noise would not be heard in the kitchen directly below.

I rifled the drawers of the dresser, fingering each item of clothing, and peered into the depths of the clothespress, plunging my hand into the deep pockets of the hanging bathrobes.

All to no avail.

I looked behind the curtains and under the carpet, behind framed pictures, and (against my will) into the flowered chamber pots.

I was about to turn my attention to the contents of the washstand when there was the creak of a floorboard: the sound of a footstep in the hall.

I froze.

Someone had paused at the top of the stairs. Another guest, perhaps, stopping to get their bearings in the dim, mazelike, up-again-down-again passageways of the old inn.

But then as I watched, the doorknob began—slowly—to turn.

I stepped back into the corner at the head of the bed. There wasn’t quite enough material in the drapes of the canopy with which to wind myself a shroud.

I pressed myself against the wallpaper, hoping, somehow, miraculously to blend into those dreadful water-stained pagodas.

The door opened. A shoe appeared…a leg…

“What the devil are you doing in here?”

Needless to say, it was Daffy.

“I might ask you the same question,” I told her, with a flick of my head so that my flying braids would give her a symbolic whip-lashing.

For a long moment, we stood there glaring at each other, both of us unwilling to give an inch.

De Luce v. de Luce, as the law liked to put it.

And not for the first time. Far from it!

There is an old scientific paradox: What happens when an irresistible object meets an immovable object? One solution to this stumper was proposed in a tale from Greek mythology in which an irresistible fox encounters an immovable hound—or vice versa. In that particular case, the great god Zeus turned both of them to stone, thus cleverly solving the problem.

And that was precisely what was happening here. My sister and I stood glowering at each other like a couple of calcified garden ornaments, a situation which persisted until I decided to give in. Otherwise, we would have still been standing there when we were gray-haired old ladies with hearing trumpets and china choppers.

“Looking for The Mussel Bed,” I said, catching Daffy by surprise.

“So am I,” she replied. “Let’s search together.”

I had begun listing all the places I had already looked when Daffy strode confidently across the room, climbed up onto the high mattress, and, standing fully upright, stretched her arm and felt along the top of the canopy.

“The spell for finding books,” she whispered, closing her eyes before pronouncing the incantation: “Abracadabra, Alakazam, Angela Thirkell, and Omar Khayyam.”

I had never seen my sister so excited.

Slowly Daffy retracted her extended arm, and—to my amazement—clutched in her hand was a slender book with yellow marbled covers.

“Eureka!” she said, for once not following the word with the usual offensive pun.

“How did you know it was up there?” I asked, not believing what I had just seen.

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must indicate the four-poster.”

“Huh?” I said, perhaps for the first time in my entire life.

“Elementary,” Daffy said. “The Mussel Bed.”

Only slowly did her words seep into the thinking part of my brain.

“Oh! I see,” I said. “The Mussel Bed.”

“Wonderful,” Daffy echoed dryly, rolling her eyes up beseechingly to Heaven. “Now let’s amscray.”

Daffy had learned Pig Latin from Carl Pendracka and was inordinately proud of her ability to baffle Mrs. Mullet by lapsing into that tongue—or whatever you wish to call it—when she wished to convey a confidence, or deliver an insult.

“The eans-bay are urned-bay,” she would say. “My ummy-tay is urning-tay to ar-tay.”

Mrs. Mullet would beam upon her as if the king himself had complimented her on the glories of her cooking.

“Amscray,” of course, meant “Scram.”

“Ighty-ho-ray!” I said, and again Heaven was harrowed by my sister’s scorching gaze.

Daffy held the slender volume up to her lips and blew. A small atomic dust cloud appeared and dissipated.

Then she tucked the book into the folds of her woolen cardigan. She had for the past six months or so begun complaining of the cold, even when the summer temperatures were tending toward the tropical, and never went anywhere without an old brown baggy knitted jumper which I realized only now, with a sudden shock, had belonged to Father.

I wanted to hug her but I didn’t.

Hopping down from the bed, she gestured with her head and eyes that I was to follow.

Back in Daffy’s room, we huddled over the book.

“The dust dictates that it has lain undisturbed. No fingerprints other than mine,” she said.

“Which means that whoever is blackmailing her has their own copy,” I suggested.

“Unless, of course, they borrowed it from a friend or from a library—or read it in a bookshop. The latter seems unlikely, though. A blackmailing letter is no casual thing. Like tough beef, it requires a certain amount of stewing on the part of the writer.”

“Or cold-blooded calculating on the spur of the moment,” I added.

This was a situation of which I had considerable firsthand experience.

“Precisely,” Daffy said.

Precisely? Could this actually be Daphne speaking? To me?

To me?

Where were the razor words?—the acid accusations?

Had it come to pass that the fullness of time and a drowned dandy had finally brought my sister and me together? Was I witnessing a miracle?

And if that were true, was the miracle mine? Or was I merely caught in the crosswinds of someone else’s heavenly intervention?

There was no time now to worry about such things. I would sort it out later.

But miracles, I knew, above all, required acknowledgment. Some sign must be given before the bestowing angel took it into his or her head to throw in the towel; to wander off in a sulk and give the gift to someone else instead, out of sheer spite, such as the ruddy traveling wine salesman in the room across the hall.

Accordingly, I crossed my eyes at Daffy.

If we were to be colleagues in crime—even just this once—then priorities needed to be established at the outset.

“Open the book,” I commanded, perhaps a little too forcefully. “Let’s get on with it.”

She looked at me. I looked at her.

“I can’t wait to hear your professional opinion, Daff,” I improvised. “I’m a complete duffer when it comes to literary excellence.”

With all the cool confidence of a Mona Lisa with all the aces, she cradled the book in her left palm and opened it to the first page. She let out a whistle.

“Crikey!” she said. “Listen to this. It’s the dedication. There’s also a dedicatory poem:

“To Mine Own Leander.

The copper mare and

The brass stallion graze

In Flecker’s Field.

He paws the turf,

While she the wind tastes.

And when he trots to her

She turns tail.”

“I don’t understand it,” I said. “Does it mean anything?”

“Only to the discerning eye,” Daffy said.

“Then you’d better explain,” I told her. “I have no time to piddle about with poetry.”

“Pity,” Daffy said. “You might learn something.”

“Such as?”

I was already becoming impatient.

“To begin with, Leander was a character in Greek mythology. He fell in love with a nun named Hero.”

“Hold on,” I said. “Hero is a man’s name.”

“It is now, yes. But in those days, it was a woman’s. Before men reduced real history to rubble, then raked over the ruins, like a dog burying and digging up its…well, you know.”

“Bone,” I said, but Daffy ignored me.

“This Leander tried to swim the Hellespont at night, but a storm blew up and drowned him.”

Drowned? At night?

This was becoming intriguing.

“What about Flecker’s Field?” I asked. “I’ve never heard of the place. Is it around here somewhere?”

“Possibly,” Daffy said, “but James Elroy Flecker was the name of a poet who died during the Great War.”

“In battle?” I asked.

“In bed,” Daffy said. “Not in the field, but in bed. Of tuberculosis. In Switzerland.”

“I don’t see the point,” I said. I was glad I had taken up poisons, rather than poetry, which seems to me more baffling than belladonna.

“The point is,” Daffy said, “that Flecker’s Field—in one of its senses—was poetry. You know:

“…Have you heard

That silence where the birds are dead yet something pipeth like a bird?”

Invisible feathers tickled my spine. I was going to have to look into this Flecker chap. Perhaps I was even going to have to rethink poetry.

“Aha!” I said. “I understand!” Although actually, I didn’t.

“So obviously,” she went on, “the reference could be to some poet other than herself.”

“But wait!” I said. “If Flecker’s Field refers to poetry, then it might just as well be Mrs. Palmer’s own field, since she’s a poet herself.”

Daffy gave me a skeptical look.

“Or,” I said, holding up a forefinger to emphasize a brilliant idea, “it might be an actual field. Is there a field belonging to the Oak and Pheasant?”

“Hmmm, I doubt it.” Daffy frowned. “Modern poets are seldom literal—unless they live abroad in the colonies, of course. Still, I expect your idea might be worth looking into.”

“Do you think we might find a real copper mare and a real brass stallion? Maybe it’s a horse breeder we’re looking for—or a racetrack.”

“Or a railway,” Daffy added, clapping me on the shoulders. “The Iron Horse, and all that.”

Although I nearly fainted with surprise, I bore up remarkably well.

“And what about the rest of it?” I asked. “All that pawing of the turf and the tasting of the wind, and so forth?”

Daffy got up from the bed and went to the window, peering down into the sunken garden where Feely and Dieter were strolling round and round in circles, arm in arm.

She turned and gave me a long, cold, calculated look as if she were weighing whether to entrust me with some deep, dark secret. After what seemed to me like hours, but couldn’t have been more than a quarter of a minute, she said:

“Leave that to me.”

“Righty-ho,” I said.

We had agreed, Daffy and I, that each of us would follow her own lines of investigation.

Not that I intended to, of course. Not for a mayfly’s minute.

What Daffy didn’t realize was that we were aiming at two different targets. While her intent was to unravel the mysteries of a book of poetry, mine was to catch a killer.

I had no idea what she knew about Orlando Whitbread, and I didn’t want to ask her. With her nose forever in a book, Daffy was no great authority on today’s front page—or yesterday’s, for that matter.

In her estimation, the world had come to an end in 1870. Nothing worthwhile had been written or published since the death of Charles Dickens on the ninth of June in that year.

Although she read more modern works, it was simply to exercise her eyes—or so she claimed.

And so it was I who scanned the morning papers for the lurid crimes. I had begun, of course, with the avalanches of ancient newspapers that tumbled out of every cupboard at Buckshaw, many of which dated back a century or more. From their brittle yellowing pages I had read with fascination about the cream of the criminal element: Haigh, Armstrong, Crippen; the list went on and on.

Once begun, it was hard to break the habit, and I was already hungering for much more current news. Mrs. Mullet was only too happy to bring me the latest papers every day, after her husband had finished with them.

“Alf gets up with the sparrows every morning,” she told me, “so as to be at the newsagent’s when they rolls up the blinds. Alf says ’e can’t ’elp it. ’As to find out what they’re up to at Westminster. That lot needs keepin’ an eye on. Our Agnes says ’e’s what’s called an invertebrate reader.”

Agnes Mullet had left home some years ago to study Pitman Shorthand, and had since come to be considered—at least by Alf and Mrs. M—the world’s greatest authority on anything which involved printed matter.

Unlike the great Sherlock Holmes, I did not keep a commonplace book other than the one that was in my head. Who could ever forget, for instance, even the tiniest detail of the Acid Bath murders, in which John George Haigh dissolved as few as six and as many as a dozen bodies in vats of concentrated sulfuric acid?

At the risk of sounding ghoulish, I swear that these titbits were etched permanently into my brain.

To put it bluntly, I was more accustomed than Daffy to dealing with death, while she was more accustomed to dealing with Dickens—which is all right, I suppose, if you feel you might be seized suddenly by little red men from Mars in their flying saucers and transported back to Victorian times.

Which is why I decided to keep my intentions to myself.

By now, it was getting late in the day. If I got a move on, I might even be back at the Oak and Pheasant in time for tea.