I TOOK TWO things – a step back and a handkerchief from my handbag to cover my mouth and nose.
‘What is it?’ I asked, slightly muffled and trying not to retch.
Light your pipe, I instructed Hefty and he did but even the foul Venezuelan Otter Dung tobacco he reserved for such occasions, could not camouflage the reek.
‘Speak up,’ Dolores commanded. ‘I detest this modern habit of mumbling. Oh, I have worked out what you said now.’ She huffed impatiently. ‘It is Colin of course.’
She never listens, Ruby told the woman who was not listening to her.
Yes, but what part of him? I asked, not sure that I wanted to find out for there were no bits of putrefying Colin that would be anything other than disgusting.
Look closer, Ruby, having a much stronger stomach than I, urged.
Not wishing to lean over whatever the thing was, I went around the chest and took hold of the right-hand curtain.
‘No!’ Dolores cried. ‘You must not!’
‘Just a crack,’ I promised and pulled it a quarter of an inch apart from its companion.
Did you really have to do that? my eyes, almost accustomed to the dark, demanded angrily.
Yes, I told them. Stop blinking and do your blinking job.
She is a hard taskmaster, Ruby sympathised, unwisely taking their side against mine. You have no idea what she puts me through. And, with a lot of grumbling they complied.
I went back to the drawer, steeling myself. I knew, of course, that Ruby had had to hunt human limbs all over Peru but as an Extraordinary Investigator, she had a certain devil-may-care swagger. As a lady novelist, I had a Violet-does-care squeamishness.
If you really want us to work you have to separate our lids, my eyes informed me. Was this the start of a trend? Would my stomach start nagging me about being too full or too empty? I do those things already, it said. Shut up! I snapped, vowing that, from now on, only I would be allowed to talk to me, though I could not guarantee that I would do so articulately.
Whatever the part of Colin was, it did not smell any better on reacquaintance.
I opened my eyes and saw it – pinned out like one of the dissections Romulus was always performing in his youth.
‘A bird,’ I said.
It had been split open straight down the middle, its guts splayed to either side and shimmering with slime. Was that the liver? I had no intention of poking it with my finger to find out.
I tried to close the drawer but it went sideways and jammed and I saw the surface of the putative hepatic organ move. It was crawling with maggots.
‘Yick.’
It does not matter how often you say the word, Ruby informed me frostily, though this was only the second time. It is not going to become a part of my vocabulary.
‘Colin,’ Dolores told me again. ‘My parrot.’ She triple-inhaled in a rapid whimpering snigger. ‘I taught him to say, Silly Edward,’ she squawked, ‘and Edward…’ She quadruple-exhaled as if blowing out a great many birthday candles. ‘Strangled him.’
The final exhalation broke into a sob.
Into how many pieces, approximately, can exhaling break? Ruby wondered.
‘Oh how…’ I began but, before I got to awful Dolores raised her already raised voice.
‘It was awful,’ she insisted as if I had shrugged it off with boys-will-be-boys tolerance.
‘But why would he do it?’
Many men killed animals for sport and I knew of incidences where it had been done in a rage or revenge. I myself had savagely battered a wasp to death once after it had scaled the inside of my dress without being invited to do so and stung me repeatedly on the knee. I did not further mutilate its corpse nor put it on display though.
I would have asked a hundred more questions.
I can only think of ninety-eight, Ruby mused, but I had no time to call her bluff for, as Dolores spoke, there were heavy footsteps on the wooden stairs.
‘Who was with you last?’ I asked urgently.
‘Why Tilly of course.’ Dolores’s voice was all at once so weak that I could hardly hear her.
‘If anybody asks you, you are alone and Matilda must have taken the key.’
Dolores smiled oddly, reminding me of my godmother when she had taken twenty fluid ounces of vintage strum in the hope of curing her Bell’s Palsy.
‘Is this a game?’
‘A very important game,’ I assured her, dropping to my knees.
There was a chamber pot under the bed halfway down. I pushed it towards the wall at the head of the bed, praying that I did not slop it because, being a major contributor to the stench, I discovered, it had been well used. As often my prayers were answered.
Thank you, Cuthbert, I said silently. I had adopted Cuthbert as my guardian angel when I was a child. Originally he was only supposed to protect against chimpanzees who – Miss Kidd threatened – would burst into my room and attack me if I did not practise harder at my needlework. Having kept the creatures at bay, his duties had expanded and he had looked after me on numberless occasions since then.
You never give me any credit, Hefty complained, forgetting that it was I who had made him famous or – to be honest – raised him from anonymity to obscurity.
I shuffled across the bare floorboards and under the frame, my head towards the foot of the bed. The mattress sagged in the middle, forcing me to lie with the side of my face in the dust.
‘Are you hiding?’ Dolores asked with an unerring knack of being loudest when she ought to be quietest.
The steps grew worryingly close.
‘Yes,’ I hissed and the steps stopped.
Whoever it was would be feeling for the key that was not there.
‘Not a word,’ I whispered.
‘Only one word,’ she said loudly enough to be heard at the back of a rowdy lecture hall, ‘and that word is mum.’
Dolores giggled at her own joke.
You have given me worse quips that that, Ruby informed me when I winced, but I let her comment pass as there was only just time to pull in the hem of my distressed dress before the door swung open.
I blinked. A man stood in the open doorway or, to be precise, his boots and trousers to just below the knee stood there, so it seemed a reasonable assumption that there was a man inside and above them.
Ever heard of Burlington Bertie? Ruby challenged, though it was me who had taken her to see Vesta Tilley performing the song.
‘Why was the door not locked?’ a deep voice demanded, confirming my rather obvious deductions.
Deductions may be obvious but they are never rather, Ruby spouted.
Leave the pontifications to Sidney Grice the Personal Detective, I told her touching on a very sore point indeed for, while the Gower Street Detective was flesh and blood, Ruby Gibson the Extraordinary Investigator, was not.
I bled enough when that cardinal shot me, she refuted my assertion aggrievedly.
Dolores cleared her throat and I only hoped that she had a good lie prepared.
‘Because we have an intruder,’ she declared simply.