“Someone you knew?”
“I’ve seen him about. Here and there, you know. In the village. That sort of thing.”
I was sewing an invisible seam between truth and untruth, a skill of which I was especially proud. One of the tricks of the trade when doing this is to volunteer fresh information before your questioner has time to ask another. So I went on:
“I had returned to the Palings, you see, because I was worried about Gry. Gry is the name of the Gypsy woman’s horse. I wanted to make sure he had food.”
This was not entirely true: Gry could have survived for weeks by nibbling the grass in the glade, but noble motives can never be questioned.
“Very commendable,” Inspector Hewitt said. “I had asked Constable Linnet to lay on some hay.”
I had a quick vision of PC Linnet producing an egg in the straw, but I banished it from my mind to keep from grinning.
“Yes, I noticed that when I got there,” I said. “And of course, I met Porcelain. She told me you had tracked her down in London.”
As I spoke, the Inspector produced a notebook, flipped it open, and began to write. I’d better watch my step.
“I didn’t think she’d be safe in the caravan. Not with whoever attacked her gram still wandering about. I insisted she come back with me to Buckshaw, and it was on our way here that we came across the body.”
I didn’t say “Brookie’s body” because I didn’t want to seem too chummy with him, which could only lead to more questions about our prior acquaintance.
“What time was that?”
“Oh, let me see—you were here when I got up, just around breakfast time—that was at about nine-thirty, I should say.”
The Inspector riffled back several pages in his notebook and nodded. I was on the right track.
“After that, Sergeant Graves came straightaway to take my fingerprints—ten-thirty—perhaps eleven?
“At any rate,” I went on, “Constable Linnet should be able to tell you what time I called to report it, which couldn’t have been much more than ten or fifteen minutes after we discovered the body in the fountain.”
I was stalling—treading water, delaying the time when he would inevitably ask about my so-called assault on Fenella. I decided to leap into the breach.
“Porcelain thinks I attacked her gram,” I said bluntly.
Inspector Hewitt nodded. “Mrs. Faa is very disoriented. It often happens with injuries to the head. I thought I’d made that quite clear to the granddaughter, but perhaps I’d best have another word—”
“No!” I said. “Don’t do that. It doesn’t matter.”
The Inspector looked at me sharply, then made another scribble in his notebook.
“Are you putting another P beside my name?”
It was a saucy question, and I was sorry as soon as I asked it. Once, during an earlier investigation, I had seen him print a capital P beside my name in his notebook. Maddeningly, he had refused to tell me what it meant.
“It’s not polite to ask,” he said with a slight smile. “One must never ask a policeman his secrets.”
“Why not?”
“For the same reason I don’t ask you yours.”
How I adored this man! Here we were, the two of us, engaged in a mental game of chess in which both of us knew that one of us was cheating.
At the risk of repetition, how I adored this man!
And that had been the end of it. He had asked me a few more questions: whether I had seen anyone else about, whether I had heard the sound of a motor vehicle, and so forth. And then he had gone.
At one point I had wanted to tell him more, just to prolong the pleasure of his company. He’d have been thrilled to hear about how I had caught Brookie prowling about our drawing room, for instance, to say nothing about my visits to Miss Mountjoy and to Brookie’s digs. I might even have confided in him what I’d found at Vanetta Harewood’s house in Malden Fenwick.
But I hadn’t.
As I stood musing in the foyer, the slight squeak of a shoe on tile caught my attention, and I looked up to find Feely staring down at me from the first-floor landing. She’d been there all along!
“Little Miss Helpful,” she sneered. “You think you’re so clever.”
I could tell by her attitude that she had not yet consulted her bedroom mirror.
“One tries to be of assistance,” I said, casually dusting a few stray smudges of French chalk from my dress.
“You think he likes you, don’t you? You think a lot of people do—but they don’t. No one likes you. There may be a few who pretend to, but they don’t—not really. It’s such a pity you can’t see that.”
Amplified by the paneling of the foyer, her voice came echoing all the way down from among the cherub-painted panels of the ceiling. I felt as if I were the prisoner at the bar, and she my accuser.
As always when one of my sisters turned on me, I felt a strange welling in my chest, as if some primeval swamp creature were trying to crawl out of my insides. It was a feeling I could never understand, something that lay beyond reason. What had I ever done to make them detest me so?
“Why don’t you go torture Bach?” I flung back at her, but my heart was not really in it.
It always surprises me after a family row to find that the world outdoors has remained the same. While the passions and feelings that accumulate like noxious gases inside a house seem to condense and cling to the walls and ceilings like old smoke, the out-of-doors is different. The landscape seems incapable of accumulating human radiation. Perhaps the wind blows anger away.
I thought about this as I trudged towards the Trafalgar Lawn. If Porcelain chose to go on believing that I was the monster who had bashed in her grandmother’s skull with—with what?
When I had found Fenella lying on the floor of the caravan, the inside of the wagon had been, except for the blood, as neat as a pin: no bloody weapon flung aside by her attacker: no stick, no stone, no poker. Which seemed odd.
Unless the weapon had some value, why would the culprit choose to carry it away?
Or had it been ditched? I’d seen nothing to suggest that it had.
Surely the police would have gone over the Palings with a microscope in search of a weapon. But had they found one?
I paused for a moment to stare up at the Poseidon fountain. Old Neptune, as the Romans called him, all muscles and tummy, was gazing unconcernedly off into the distance, like someone who has broken wind at a banquet and is trying to pretend it wasn’t him.
His trident was still held up like a scepter (he was, after all, the King of the Sea) and his fishnets lay in a tangle at his feet. There wasn’t a trace of Brookie Harewood. It was hard to believe that, just hours ago, Brookie had dangled dead here—his body a gruesome addition to the sculpture.
But why? Why would his killer go to the trouble of hoisting a corpse into such a difficult position? Could it be a message—some bizarre form of the naval signal flag, for instance?
What little I knew about Poseidon had been gained from Bullfinch’s Mythology, a copy of which was in the library at Buckshaw. It was one of Daffy’s favorite books, but since there was nothing in it about chemistry or poisons, it didn’t really interest me.
Poseidon was said to rule the waters, so it was easy enough to see why he was chosen to adorn a fountain. The only other waters within spitting distance of this particular Poseidon were the river Efon at the Palings and Buckshaw’s ornamental lake.
Brookie had been hung from the trident much like the way a shrike, or larder bird, impales a songbird on a thorn for later use—although it seemed unlikely, I thought, that Brookie’s killer planned to eat him later.
Was it a warning, then? And if so, to whom?
I needed to have a few hours alone with my notebook, but now was not the time. There was Porcelain to deal with.