“Not on the bed, sir,” Ben took over. “I’ll put it over here on the floorboards in case something’s in there as shouldn’t be. Cor! What a pong! That’s not mothballs!” He spread it out and held it down by the shoulders as though he expected it to leap up and resist arrest.
“The mistress’s riding-out-in-inclement-weather coat. But what’s it got in its pockets? Sorry about this, Ben.” Feeling rather like the Great Magnifico two minutes into his act, Joe took a pair of rubber gloves, Scotland Yard issue, from his trouser pocket and slipped them on. “Just in case we’re landed with poisons of some nature to deal with …” he murmured apologetically.
He felt in the right pocket and encountered a small hard lump. “Take my handkerchief from my breast pocket, Ben, and spread it here by me.”
The dark brown-grey, slightly crumbling mess he scooped out was greeted with a schoolboy’s exclamation of disgust by Ben. “Urgh! It’s sh—horse-excrement! What’s she doing with that in her pocket!”
“Not shit, Ben. No, something infinitely more evil! Horse-droppings are ambrosial in scent compared with this stuff.” Joe was beginning to feel queasy and recognised that without Adelaide Hartest’s sound talking-to, he would have been dashing straight for the jug and ewer on the toilet table. “Hard to believe, but that substance was once a slice of Mrs. Bolton’s excellent gingerbread.”
“Where did it get the stink, then? And why?” Ben wanted to know.
“I could give you the recipe for the very special frosting but you wouldn’t want to hear it. I’ll just say it’s a mixture of decayed animal parts—stoat’s liver being one. It’s a magic formula for scaring horses. Yes, scaring them. They’ll take fright and try to run away on catching scent of this.”
“Anyone offering a lump of this to a savage horse …” Ben had got there and his face froze into pale disbelief.
“Anyone standing in the entrance to the horse’s stall will be cleared out of the way in the horse’s instinctive effort to escape,” Joe confirmed Ben’s fears. “It will use its teeth and hooves and frantic strength to obliterate what it perceives as the horror that’s advancing on it.”
Joe reminded himself that it had been Ben, tip-toeing along in his patent-leather slippers, who had come upon the awful scene and had stood guard over the body with a raging stallion crashing about an open stable. “But you were there, Ben. You saw the results for yourself,” he said quietly. He’d noticed that the lad’s teeth were chattering at the memory.
“I was lucky then,” he said when he could get the words out. “Having smashed her up, he went backwards into his stall, shivering. People say I was brave to have stuck it out down there but—the honest truth is—I reckoned that big feller was more scared than I was. Poor devil! Poor lady!”
“Poor silly lady! Where, I need to know, did she come by her recipe? Perhaps she left it in the other pocket.” Joe pulled a hopeless face. “Well, we ought to check.”
“Good lord! What the hell’s this?… These?”
He placed a folded sheet of paper on the floor and opened it up.
“Shopping list? Recipe? ‘Cummin … Rose Mary …’ No, I never saw that handwriting before, sir. Scruffy. Pencil. Not what you’d call educated, is it?”
“Just lists the attractants. No nastiness here. But I’ll show you something that is quite stomach-churning. The second thing Grace had left in the pocket for us to find.” He placed it carefully beside the note.
“Chicken’s wish-bone? That’s for good luck, sir.”
A memory had stirred. Joe had heard of these things but he’d never seen one before. “No. The opposite of good luck. This is magic,” he said. “Black magic. It’s bone all right but it’s from a toad. Method: First catch your toad. Then you kill it and pound the flesh to a pulp and chuck it into a running stream at midnight. Of course, the flesh and most of the bones float away downstream with the current, but one bone—this one—perversely, swirls away upstream. This is the one you want. The piece that’s going to give you magic powers. Over horses. Or warts. Or sharp-tongued mothers-in-law. They do a similar bit of jiggery-pokery with frogs and ant-hills in India …”
Ben was prepared to scoff. “Floats upstream? Naw! How could it?” Gingerly, he picked it up and smoothed it between his fingers. “Light as a dry leaf. That scooped bit looks something like the bottom of a toy boat. That wouldn’t sink, but it would go along with the current.”
“Look at the shape. It’s like one of those Australian weapons that turn and fly back at you—a boomerang—don’t you think? Some winged things do move apparently against the forces of Nature as we know them—winged sycamore seeds … aeroplanes, for goodness sake! I don’t believe in magic, either, Ben. I think the shape must be special. No time to experiment but if we popped this onto the rippling surface of a stream it might well be caught by some rule of … shall we say … aquadynamics and sweep off in the opposite direction to what you’d expect. It would be fun to try. But the men who own one of these things don’t want to test out, cast light and explain. No—they want to believe without question and work in the dark. They also seek power by frightening and manipulating the credulous. ‘Toadmen,’ they call themselves where I come from.”
“Toadmen? I’ve heard of them. Down toward Stowmarket, there’s toadmen. Or used to be. Can’t say as I’ve heard of ’em since I were a lad.”
“Not since they were all given the keys to a shining new tractor,” Joe said, smiling. He took the piece of bone, held it between his finger and thumb and twisted it as he would have turned the starting key of a motor. “There’s more power in the turn of a piece of steel in a Fordson tractor engine than in a brittle bit of bone working inside a darkened mind. But, evidently, there’s still one hereabouts who has the knowledge—and the malice—to pass on this evil piece of equipment to an unsuspecting woman and cause her death.” Joe glanced at the open cupboard door. “We’ll just put it back where we found it for the moment. It seems to be safe there. Did you look in the bottom? Anything else Grace left behind for us to see?”
Ben took a slender house-man’s torch from his belt and shone it around the depths of the cupboard. “Yes, there is. Not much but we ought perhaps to take a look.”
He brought out four blue paper chemist’s bags and put them in front of Joe. “All empty. Shall I read the labels? Well, well! Cummin, coriander, cinnamon and …”
“Fenugreek,” Joe finished for him. “Those bags contained the substance she thought she was marching into the stables armed with. We’ll lock those up in the cupboard again too. But where did she get the bate that caused her death? You can’t summon up a stew of stoat’s liver and rabbit’s blood overnight.”
“G. R. Harrison, Purveyor of Pharmaceuticals. Estd. 1882, it says on the labels. You going to arrest him?”
“For the crime of purveying curry spices to a rich household? No, I don’t think so. Mr. Harrison is about as guilty as the horse in all of this. Which is to say—not in the slightest. But there is someone lurking, someone with very evil intent, working through his own agenda. I wonder how far along he’s got … and whether he can hear us scrabbling down the rabbit hole after him.”
CHAPTER 18
Joe was awake again at five. He bathed, shaved and dressed himself in the hooray-hurrah outfit of flannels, linen shirt and Hermès cravat that he felt a summer Sunday morning in the country called for. He had no wish to undertake his next task looking bleary and unkempt in a dressing gown. ‘Never frighten the upstairs maid’ was another rule of country house living he abided by.