Part 4 (1/2)

”He does not. He would have told me if he had. Perhaps the fiends found what they were looking for and took it with them, along with the poor woman's head.”

St. Ives was abruptly conscious that rain was drumming against the slates of the roof, and he found that he was sick of the smell of carbolic and decaying flesh. He considered revealing Mother Laswell's fears about her long-dead husband to Pullman, and of the man's head being taken, but he rejected the idea. She had asked to remain in the shadows, and in the shadows she would remain. ”Can you discern any similarity between the death of Sarah Wright,” he asked, ”and that of the old s.e.xton who pa.s.sed away some few days ago?”

”Yes,” Pullman said. ”Now you've hit upon something odd.” He drew the sheet over the corpse, and they walked out onto the covered stoop and into fresh air, the rain falling on three sides of them like a curtain. ”The ingestion of henbane was common to both of them,” he said. ”The smell of it was upon s.e.xton Peattie's mouth and in a gla.s.s that had a small amount of gin in it. It was the probable cause of the old man's death, although there was no autopsy, he being upward of ninety years old. I thought it odd, however, until I discovered in my reading that henbane is in fact steeped in various liquors as a flavoring, which satisfied me at the time that his death was at worst accidental, or that he was a self-murderer, which is no concern of mine.”

”But you discovered that Sarah Wright had been dosed with it also,” Hasbro said, ”and your opinion changed?”

”I detected it in a teacup sitting on the windowsill in her cottage. The strong tea left in the bottom of the cup masked the smell somewhat. If I hadn't been thinking of the s.e.xton, I would not have remarked upon it. It is now my suspicion that someone wanted something similar from both Sarah Wright and s.e.xton Peattie information and that they used a heavy decoction of henbane to promote truth-telling. It's quite possible that they succeeded with s.e.xton Peattie, who sent them into the wood where they treated Sarah Wright in a similar manner. Perhaps she resisted when they compelled her to drink the poisoned tea. A certain amount of it had splashed over her clothing.”

”Perhaps they found nothing beneath the floorboards,” Hasbro said, ”and so tried to compel her to say where the thing was hidden.”

”Perhaps,” said Pullman, ”although I'm not happy with a.s.sumptions. There was one other odd thing, gentlemen. I found this lying on the floor some distance from the body. It lay hidden by a broken section of floorboard.” He reached into his vest pocket and took out a flat piece of thin gla.s.s, round on the unbroken edge evidently a piece of a lens of some sort. ”Look through it,” he said, handing it to St. Ives, who held it up to the sky.

”Distinctly purple,” St. Ives said. ”A twilight purple, if you will.” He handed it to Hasbro, who also peered through it.

”It's quite dark,” Hasbro said. ”It would inconvenience a person to wear them.”

”That it would,” Dr. Pullman said, ”if in fact that person were walking about. I believe, however, that I know what such goggles are meant to do, although their existence on the floor of the cabin makes not a jot of sense to me. Have you heard of the work of Walter John Kilner, Professor? He's a medical electrician at St. Thomas' Hospital, Lambeth?”

”No, sir,” said St. Ives. ”I know very little of so-called medical electricity, and what I do know, I don't much like.”

”Nor do I. Kilner is an old friend, however. We were in school together. I last saw him a year ago when I was in London. He was busy fabricating goggles with chemically coated lenses much like this.”

”For what purpose?” St. Ives asked.

”His work at the hospital has led him into the study of the human aura light energy, if you will. We all emit invisible light, strange as it sounds, and Walter Kilner was hard at work to develop a way to make that light visible and to determine what it portends sickness or health, perhaps, or a disordered state of the nerves.”

”And you believe this to be a fragment of one of Kilner's lenses?” St. Ives asked. ”Surely you do not suspect him of the crime?”

”Yes to the first question and no to the second,” Pullman said. ”It's unthinkable that Walter John Kilner could have committed such a crime. I'd sooner suspect my own mother. I believe, however, that the murderer, or perhaps the murderer's accomplice, possessed a pair of Walter Kilner's aura goggles, so to call them, and that they were broken in the struggle. His work is very new, and such lenses must be tremendously rare. Why they were brought to Sarah Wright's cottage I can't say.”

”Yet another mystery,” Hasbro said. ”Here's something practical, although gruesome: if the villain wanted to keep the head fresh, Doctor, how would he go about it? Ice?”

”Ice or perhaps refined brandy in a large receptacle. Ice would make more sense, to be certain. The trick would be to keep the ice from melting particularly difficult given yesterday's fine weather. It could be done, however, if there were a sensible way to store it. If they knew in advance what they were after, it would have been simple to come prepared, ghastly as it sounds. But I'm weary of these speculations. I very much hope that this fiend is caught, gentlemen, and that I have nothing further to do with his depredations. You may keep that piece of lens if you fancy it, Professor. I have no use for it.”

”It's not... evidence, then? Constable Brooke has no interest in it?”

”Constable Brooke was confounded by it. He's a good man, as you know, but this sort of oddment is beyond his ken. Walter Kilner would be the man to ask if you happened to find yourself in Lambeth, but I'd lay odds on his being equally confounded.”

NINE.

THE LONDON METROPOLITAN POLICE.

”Another cup of tea?” Mother Laswell asked Alice.

”A half cup, perhaps,” Alice said. ”Unless you find my curiosity offensive, Mother, I'd like to ask one last question about Clara.”

”I can't imagine you offending anyone,” Mother Laswell said.

”She seems to have extraordinary abilities. I mean that in the old sense of the word, not merely rare or unusual her seeing with her elbow, for instance.”

”Yes, and certainly she has or had an extramundane ability to communicate with her mother, although that is not uncommon in children. Her powers, I believe, are prodigious. She keeps them to herself, however, and I don't press her. She came to Hereafter Farm a year after she was stricken with blindness, unable to bear living in the forest any longer. We had no idea that her presence here was anything other than temporary. I visited Sarah one afternoon, alone. Sarah asked me to give Clara a small owl, carved from chalk and painted, a mere trinket that had been purchased in a seaside shop in earlier, better days. When I returned to Hereafter, Clara met me at the stile on the meadow. She asked did I have it? I asked her what she meant, thinking that I did indeed have it, but that she could not possibly know. 'The owl,' she said. And so I gave it to her, and she went off quite joyfully.”

”You're certain she could not have known?”

”She could not not in the sense you mean. And yet she did know. That was the first of many such incidents. You'd be quite amazed.”

Through the window Alice saw a man appear in the Dutch door beside the mule; apparently he had come in through the front of the barn in the wagon. She recognized him just as Mother Laswell said, ”It's Bill,” and stood up out of her chair. Mother heaved a loud sigh and began to weep, perhaps with relief. ”We're all right now,” she said. ”Bill's home.”

Bill Kraken, betrothed to Mother Laswell and an old friend to the St. Ives family, was tall and lean, his skin worn like old leather, baked for years in the Australian sun on a sheep farm after he had been transported for smuggling, and hammered by being out in all weather during his time on the London streets selling pea-pods and sleeping rough. His hair seemed to be permanently laid over, as if there were a stiff wind blowing. He scratched the mule behind the ear and whispered something to it, and then he ducked through the rain and up onto the veranda, disappearing from view.

”I'll just step into the kitchen and speak to Bill,” Alice said, moving toward the kitchen door. It would be better for her to bear the news in order to spare Mother Laswell, who was already in a sad taking. The boy who had been called a cauliflower head stood on a stool at the kitchen counter, expertly sh.e.l.ling walnuts on a stone slab, cracking them open with one whack of a hefty wooden rod and putting the perfect halves into a wide-mouthed, stoneware jar. The girls were nowhere to be seen.

The boy had apparently just said something to Kraken, who stood stock-still in his damp coat, his face both disturbed and baffled. ”Is it true what the boy is going on about?” he asked Alice. ”That's why you've come along to the farm on such a day as this?”

”Yes, Bill,” she said.

”I know what's what,” the boy said, breaking another walnut. He put the two halves into his mouth and chewed on them, holding the wooden rod up as if it were an ill.u.s.tration. ”It's Clara's mum what's dead, sir, like I said. I heard it from John Peters, who saw her with his own eyes this very morning, a-sitting there without a head at all. Someone had did for her.”

”Clap a stopper over it, Tommy,” Kraken told him. ”Talk like that ain't genteel.”

”It's what I heard from John Peters, sir. It's what he seen. It was him as told Constable Brooke.”

”And now you've told us, Tommy,” Alice said to the boy. ”But Mr. Kraken is correct. Clara doesn't want to hear any such coa.r.s.e talk.”

”Yes, ma'am,” Tommy said.

”Then be off with you,” Kraken told him. ”Take a heap of them nuts with you. Keep your gob stuffed with 'em till you learn how to speak like a Christian.”

”Yes, sir,” Tommy said, scooping up a handful from the open jar and shuffling out onto the veranda, where the girls were evidently playing.

Alice could hear a top strike the deck and then the clatter of pins being knocked down.

”Langdon and Hasbro have gone into the village to speak to Dr. Pullman,” she said.

Kraken nodded. ”The Professor will see things right. But it's too late for me to be of any use. There's naught to do now that Sarah Wright's dead. I shouldn't have gone into Maidstone. I shouldn't have gone off over a few sheep, ancient sheep, too a fool's errand. Look what come of it.”

”Nonsense, Bill,” Alice told him. ”The crime quite likely occurred yesterday, in the middle of Boxley Woods, before you left for Maidstone. The lot of us were within half a mile of Sarah Wright's cottage at the time. There's nothing you nor anyone else could have done to prevent it.”

”Mayhaps,” he said. ”Still and all...” He was silent for a moment and then said, ”I'll look in on Mother. She'll have took it hard.”

Alice followed him into the parlor, wis.h.i.+ng now that Langdon and Hasbro were still here, if only to lend a semblance of order to the chaos of murder and its aftermath.