MARTHA RYAN HUGGED herself as if she were caught in a blizzard.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked inanely, for it was obvious that she was not.
She was trembling, her face was drained and she swayed worryingly.
‘I do feel a little light-headed.’
Agnust lumbered up saying, ‘Come you with Agnust, madam. I soon do set you aright,’ and took her by the arm along with the medical chest back towards Break House.
‘Her immortal soul has risen to join our heavenly father,’ a man in a butcher’s striped apron observed reverently. ‘Well,’ he sighed in wonder. ‘At least we can shift her now.’
‘Not yet,’ I insisted.
‘Give me a hand,’ he told the coachman.
‘Lay one finger on her and I’ll snap it off,’ Gerrund threatened and they hesitated, neither of them willing to put him to the test.
‘We should call a priest,’ somebody suggested.
‘Bound to be one about,’ a matronly woman in a patchwork shawl asserted. ‘This hot weather brings them out – like flies,’ she explained inexplicably.
‘Did anybody see what happened?’ I asked and a flower girl appeared. Her basket was empty so she had probably been to the Splendid Hotel. Many of the guests and staff liked to sport a buttonhole.
‘I do, lady,’ she volunteered. ‘You wrap up her head and she do die.’
‘I meant before that.’
‘What?’ she demanded. ‘Yisdee?’
I think she means yesterday, Ruby told Hefty who was making notes.
He had already put a pigeon feather into his cigar case in the hope that it might yield a vital clue, never having forgotten how a crushed berry in the British Museum had put him on the trail of the Mistletoe Murderer.
‘What caused her to collapse?’
‘You do be the quack,’ she declared, and I wondered if that were now so widely accepted that I would find people queuing at my door and, if so, I speculated how much I could charge for a consultation. ‘Got a fag?’
I carried cigarettes to offer as incentives or rewards sometimes, but she had not earned one yet.
‘I do not smoke,’ I answered truthfully.
‘Precious small wonder you do be such a runt.’
Talk about the pot, Ruby fumed, indignant on my behalf.
‘Did anyone hear a bang?’ I asked the assembly and they looked at each other.
‘Depends,’ a clodhopper, the bottoms of his trousers rolled halfway up his shins, told me. ‘If you want me to, I do. If you dint, I dint.’
‘Did anybody see what happened?’ I called.
‘What’s it wurf?’ a shaven-headed young woman asked.
‘Nothing,’ I said, unwilling to pay for people to invent stories and she spat on the pavement.
‘Nothin’?’ she checked incredulously for her time was immensely valuable. ‘Then tha’s ’xactly what I see.’
A constable arrived, truncheon in hand, though I had no idea what he thought he was going to need that for. He had a lean weather-beaten look about him and his helmet was too big, the rim resting on his shaggy eyebrows.
‘Move along now,’ he told me, ignoring everybody else.
‘This woman is dead,’ I declared.
‘Right then.’ He hung his truncheon back on his belt. ‘We best get her shifted.’
‘Is that it?’ I asked, taken aback by the speed of his investigation.
‘Course not,’ he reassured me. ‘We do get a cart to waggon her off.’
I was not sure he had got that the right way round, but I was fairly sure that I did not care.
I took a breath. ‘Is that the end of your enquiries?’
‘Well,’ he ruminated, ‘what else is there to enquiry ’bout?’
‘How did she die?’ I asked and he shrugged.
‘There’s somethin’ wrong with her. Anyone can see that.’
‘Yes but…’
‘Why else do she goo see a sawnbones?’ he reasoned.
Was I missing something? There was no doctor’s card clutched in her hand.
‘How do you know that she did?’
The constable snorted, doubtless wearied by a career wasted in explaining simple things to simpler women.
‘I use my policely trainin’ and notice wha’ goo on.’ He tapped the side of his forehead as if checking for woodworm and neither Ruby nor I would have been astonished if he had found any. ‘She do get bandaged she do.’
‘But I did that,’ I protested.
‘She do,’ a scrawny man wearing a fat man’s collar confirmed. ‘She wrap up her head and splosh ink all over it and she do die.’
The flower girl’s statement had become an established truth, along with the Madonna of Woolpit, who appeared to the daughter of a cheesemonger telling people to eat more Suffolk Crumble.
‘She do,’ rippled through the crowd like driftwood in the sea.
Was I being blamed and would I find myself being lynched like the beekeeper of Gorham village, accused of trying to set fire to the parish church when he was smoking a nest out of the bell tower? It was unlikely, I decided, since none of them seemed to be perturbed.
The constable looked at the mess I had created.
‘Ink?’ he checked incredulously.
‘Antiseptic,’ I told him.
‘Aunty who? Is she a witness?’
‘No,’ I said, not troubling to answer his first question about which he appeared to have forgotten anyway.
‘Then why mention her?’ he challenged.
‘She’s all confoosed, the buffle-headed mare,’ the clodhopper explained gallantly thereby resolving the matter to the constable’s satisfaction.
The postcard boy, his twisted legs temporarily cured, was inspecting an umbrella, the one the blind man had been carrying, I assumed, until I saw that it was broken and the cloth shredded.
‘What a shameful shame,’ a young woman in a tartan shawl sighed, so at least somebody cared. ‘That’s a good pair on two boots goo waste.’
Thank heavens for the education acts, Ruby sarcasmed.
‘And what about her?’ I cried.
‘Dint you fret and get the vapours,’ the constable advised me. ‘She do get a proper pauper grave.’
‘And it’s the like of us what pay for it,’ an ancient nut seller in a black beret complained at the beggar’s selfishness, though I doubt the old man had paid a farthing tax in his life and he would probably be disposed of in the same way.
‘Have you no human feelings?’ I asked the assembly. ‘What is wrong with you all?’
The crowd, which had been starting to disperse began to drift back, sheepishly I thought.
‘Well I goh a chesty cough,’ the butcher told me, bits of offal squashed and smeared over his striped apron.
‘And I’m a touch liverish,’ the gentleman added, tapping where his offal nested under his waistcoat.
‘I do get a broked nose,’ the man I had dobbined exaggerated.
‘Is that all you care about?’ a young lady with rather a nice blue bonnet scolded them. ‘I have an ingrowing toenail but you won’t hear me complaining about it.’
‘Oh you poor little goose,’ the constable commiserated.
‘I try to be brave but sometimes…’ She burst into tears. ‘It hurts.’
‘Sympathy,’ Miss Kidd had said when I had fallen off a summerhouse roof and broken my wrist, ‘comes from the Latin sympathia, which in turn comes from the Greek sumpatheia. Nobody is sure where it came from before that but, rest assured, Lady Violet Elizabeth Antoinette Cordelia Thorn, that it did not come from me.’
So many people shared Miss Kidd’s philosophy, I was to discover, that I was surprised they did not take over the world. Perhaps, I mused as I returned to Break House, they had already.