I PEERED AROUND my brain for an idea to feed it, but the larder was not particularly well-stocked that morning.
Waffle, Ruby advised, like you do in your books.
This was good, if pejorative advice, I decided.
‘I was puzzled as to why Edwina was murdered in such a public place,’ I floundered, fumbling along the back of the bottom shelf of my cerebrum until the tips of my neurones felt something.
‘Perhaps it was an unfortunate accident,’ Poynder suggested, ‘and the gun went off by mistake.’
‘What gun?’ Ruby and I asked simultaneously and, for the first time, he was discomforted.
‘The one that shot her,’ he replied uneasily.
‘And how, exactly, did you know that?’ I pounced, for The Chronic had said that Edwina fell onto a spike, but the good doctor regained his composure rapidly.
‘I have contacts in the police force.’
Please say Inspector Stanbury, I urged, but he was not foolish enough to dig such an obvious trap for himself.
‘Before she died, Edwina warned…’ I struggled on.
‘So not in another séance?’ he mocked.
‘Edwina warned Martha that you would kill her if she did not stop interfering,’ I ploughed on.
Hold both your horses, Ruby objected. I thought she was talking about Anton Gervey.
So did I, I confessed, but she meant her own master.
‘Strange,’ Poynder commented, ‘how all your fantasies are backed up by alleged hearsay and witnesses who are dead.’
‘It is only strange because you killed them.’
‘Are you rehearsing one of your ridiculous novels?’
Ridiculous? Ruby fumed. You do not have to tolerate that. Stab him.
With what?
His paperknife.
I glanced at the desk and saw his letter opener – six inches of steel projecting from a deer’s foot. I had never understood why people described blades as wicked looking, but there was a distinctly evil glint in that cold metal point.
‘I am rehearsing the truth,’ I replied, not completely confident that that was what I meant to say. I had Dolores’s version of events, but her widower could dismiss them as the creation of a diseased mind.
Pretend that you have worked it out yourself, Ruby advised. It is about time you had some thoughts of your own.
‘For a long time I doubted that you, a well-known local figure, would take the risk of committing the crime yourself,’ I waded on.
‘Your doubts are well-founded,’ Poynder assured me.
‘And I believed that you employed the services of a professional assassin.’
‘Your fantasies might sell books…’
Not very many, Ruby inserted.
‘But they would not convince the most gullible of juries.’
‘But then I realised that the very unlikeliness of you committing a murder in public in broad daylight was your protection.’
Poynder laughed.
‘I have employed a great many servants who had only the most rudimentary education.’ He twiddled with his watch chain. ‘But even they never presented me with such convoluted illogicality.’
I half-suspected that this was true but, having alighted on the idea, I was not going to let it escape easily.
‘Not in the least.’ I struggled to hold it in my mental fingers.
Your mental what? Ruby glanced up from the fashion plates in her English Ladies’ Magazine.
‘The very idea is so incredible that no policeman would entertain it,’ I concluded.
‘The idea is incredible because it is pure fantasy.’ Poynder batted my suggestion away with a flick of his left hand.
‘You boasted to me that you have the protection of Anton Gervey,’ I reminded him, ‘and led me to believe that he might owe you more than that.’
‘What of it?’ He let go of his chain as if it were burning his fingers.
‘But you are not the only one to be acquainted with him,’ I said, ‘and he did not arrange that killing.’ I waited for Poynder to enquire how I had come to that conclusion, but he merely stifled a yawn. ‘I know that,’ I answered his unasked question, ‘because he enlisted my help to identify the killer and avoid a conflict with the Braise Shotten gang, and now I have identified him.’
The umbrella! Ruby shouted so loudly that I put a hand to my ear.
‘You left one crucial piece of evidence at the scene,’ I said and Poynder shifted his feet. ‘The umbrella,’ Ruby and I dueted. ‘You shot Edwina with it.’
‘Come now, Lady Violet…’ Poynder tried to look amused.
‘Your wife thought that it had been hit by the assassin’s bullet,’ I continued, ‘but I have seen that umbrella, Doctor, and it had not so much been shattered by a stray bullet as exploded and you dropped it, partly in surprise, but also because it was hot.’
For a moment I saw something resembling a flicker in those cool grey eyes but, instead of breaking down and confessing all as Hefty’s suspects could be relied upon to do, Poynder murmured, ‘And how do you work that out?’
‘The first time we met your left palm was burnt,’ I told Poynder.
You told us it was iodine, Ruby reminded Hefty.
Lady Violet put the idea in my head, Scotland Yard’s premier detective defended himself perfidiously.
‘I spilled some carbolic acid while I was sterilising my instruments.’
‘You did not tell your wife about the umbrella for fear that it could be traced from where you purchased it to you.’
Poynder pulled out his hunter. ‘I am a busy man, Lady Violet.’ He flipped the lid up. ‘I admitted you out of gratitude for allowing my wife to end her days peacefully and me to continue in my practice. As you are fully aware, Dolores confessed to the crimes of which you are accusing me so…’
So it is all right for him to rely on her evidence? Ruby threw up her hands, almost catching him on the chin.
‘That is as may be,’ I broke in. ‘But there are too many inconsistencies in her accounts to hold water.’
If an account holds water, Hefty pontificated, scratching his ear, an annoying habit of which I thought I had cured him. It is not an account. It is a bucket.
Has Scotland Yard’s premier detective really made an appearance just to tell me that? I checked but he had wandered off.
Poynder closed the lid, put his watch away and leaned back, arms folded, with an expression one usually reserves for tolerating irritating children.
‘For example,’ I said. ‘Dolores talked of raining blows down on that waitress in the Monastery Gardens and the unfortunate woman did have wounds on her crown, but she was taller than your wife and so, until she fell to her knees, the blows would have been on the back of her head, where there were none.’
Excellent observation, Hefty complimented me, but I had not forgotten his attempt to blame me for his mistake.
Excellent bluffing, Ruby complimented me, for she knew that I had not examined the waitress’s wounds and also that Poynder was probably no taller than the waitress but no man will admit to being short, unless he makes a living from it. Especially as it doesn’t make any sense.
Poynder shrugged.
‘Unfortunately my wife cannot give you an explanation of that.’
‘Danny Dixon the Diamond King,’ I announced and he shifted in his seat.
‘As you are all too aware, my wife confessed to that crime and disposing of the body.’ He brushed his shoulder down. ‘She thought the thunderstorms that were forecast at the time would wash it away but we have had an arid summer.’
Got you! Ruby crowed, but I had already reached the same conclusion.
‘How could you know when the body was put in the drain?’ I pounced on his claim prepared to destroy it. ‘The police do not.’
Far from being disconcerted by Ruby’s and my brilliance, Poynder piffed.
‘Dolores told me,’ he said simply as his claim slithered away unharmed.
‘She also said that she throttled Danny with a length of rope from the yard,’ I recalled, ‘whereas he was found with an electrical cord around his neck.’
Poynder put his hands together like a man in prayer, though his expression was far from devoted.
‘As you are doubtless aware, she was confused.’ He separated his palms as if releasing a butterfly, but they were all in my stomach. I was unused to confronting killers in their lairs – or anywhere else, on reflection.
‘She was lucid enough to give me detailed accounts of the crimes,’ I retorted.
‘Detailed but, as you have pointed out yourself, contradictory,’ Poynder reasoned smoothly.
‘The person I saw running away in the gardens had the gait of a man,’ I said. ‘Dolores would have had to be a very clear-headed and accomplished actress indeed to give such a realistic performance while absconding from the scene of the crime.’
‘As I have told you…’ Poynder tapped his waistcoat pocket over the bulge of his hunter.
‘I was misled into believing your wife’s claims,’ I stumbled onwards, ‘because she knew so much about the murders.’
Poynder treated me to a raised eyebrow.
Not my idea of a treat, Ruby commented, flicking over a page of her magazine.
‘But all of her information was second hand,’ I continued.
Pause for dramatic effect, Ruby urged.
Suck thoughtfully on your long-stemmed cherry-wood pipe, Hefty advised, but I did not want to give my suspect the time to formulate a response.
‘Courtesy,’ I paused for dramatic effect after all but decided against nipping out to the tobacconist’s, ‘of you.’
I think I swung my arm up to point at the accused man, but I was too busy watching his reactions to worry about my own actions.
The eyebrows rose a fraction more. They were so tidy that I wondered if he trimmed them himself, for nobody would trust Dolores with a pair of scissors near their eyes.
Men never do their own, Ruby asserted. Matilda does it for him.
Speaking of Matilda, Hefty began, and I hoped that he was not going to launch into an account of Matilda Mattingly, who poisoned all her classmates to be sure of getting a front seat because she did not wish to wear eyeglasses. If I might bring up a rather delicate matter. Hefty blushed. Where do you suppose she has a bedroom?
That was a good point actually. As he had already calculated, Susie the kitchen maid probably slept in the basement. Wormwood would have his butler’s room down there and Dolores had occupied the only bedroom in the attic.
Poynder lowered his eyebrows one at a time.
‘Every theory you have proposed is half-baked nonsense,’ he declared, but the hard edge in his voice convinced me that they were not, and it was only then that it occurred to me that he must have thought I knew something when he admitted me to Haglin House. ‘You have done nothing but sling mud but, as we all know, it sticks and like Caesar’s wife, a doctor must be above suspicion.’
‘Why did you let me into your home?’ I asked, before remembering that he had already told me that.
‘Because you intrigue me.’ Poynder leered, rejecting his own explanation. ‘A woman who looks like a beautiful child.’
He licked his lips and I made no attempt to hide my shudder of revulsion. That was a dangerous admission, and I had a horrible suspicion that I knew which of us was more imperilled by it.
I marched to the door, but I did not need Hefty to explain – as he did – that when Poynder had been pretending to be dealing with a faulty catch, he had been locking it.
‘Is that why you killed Dolores? She had found out about your predilections?’
‘My wife had not the slightest idea. She regarded me as the epitome of propriety,’ he said. ‘But she was getting old…’
‘She was thirty-six.’
‘A man needs young flesh,’ he said, ‘and I have found such a girl who, conveniently, comes with a substantial dowry…’
‘Adelaide Cotton,’ I realised. ‘The heiress to the traction engine company.’
‘You have done your research.’
‘I have a loud scream,’ I warned and Ruby Gibson, Extraordinary Investigator, groaned. She would never have made such a craven threat.
‘Which will not be heard below stairs from this end of the house,’ he assured me.
I still had my charm bracelet and, by pretending to adjust my hat, got the whistle to my lips and blew as hard as I could. It sounded even louder and shriller than usual in the confines of the room and Poynder winced, but the moment I stopped he composed himself and smiled sardonically.
‘If you imagine that will summon your man to the rescue,’ he told me airily. ‘I am happy to disabuse you.’
‘Gerrund has excellent hearing,’ I said almost as airily.
‘That is as may be,’ Poynder shrugged, ‘but Wormwood has him locked in the boiler room.’
Got anything clever to say about that? I challenged Ruby.
The French windows, she suggested.
They would be locked as well, I assumed, but with few options left to me, it was worth a try. I had only taken two steps though, when Poynder was upon me. He was not a big man but, at that moment, he seemed it. One hand wrapped around my throat comfortably – for him but not for me.
I told you he had strangler’s hands.
‘Let go of me,’ I protested.
That will do the trick, Ruby jeered. Throw him to the floor.
How?
Apply your jujitsu training.
I have not had any, I objected.
Use your opponent’s weight against him, she told me, which might have been helpful advice had she explained what it meant.
Poynder’s grip tightened and I remembered one piece of advice Ruby’s Japanese trainer had given her. Everyone being throttled fights their attacker’s hands, which are his least vulnerable part. I raised my right forefinger as one might to attract a waiter’s attention, levelled it and prodded him in the eye. I had imagined it squelching into the jelly but eyeballs, like women, are tougher than they are given credit for and it felt no different to me to poking him on the cheek. It must have felt very different to Poynder though, for he yelped, let go, clutched his face and glared at me monocularly.
‘Damn you, you damned little bitch!’ he cursed and, leaving his eye to the ministrations of his left hand, strode towards the desk.
Realising what he was after, I developed an instant aversion to the idea of having it inserted into my heart and I leapt alongside of him, sprawling over the desktop, but his hand closed over the paperknife, even as I sent his brass letter rack flying off onto the floor. I grabbed the matching brass inkwell with my left hand, turned it, spilling black ink all down my once-cerise sleeve as I crashed it into his temple.
Poynder grunted, more in anger than pain I suspected, and lashed out with his left hand, catching me with the back of it on my mouth, my parted lips hardly cushioning the blow to my upper incisors. I twisted sideways to face him and raised the inkwell again, splashing ink down the front of my already ruined dress, but he was ready for me that time and pulled back so that I smashed it onto the desktop, barking my knuckles in the process.
‘Ow!’ I yelped. Frebbit that hurt!
It will hurt a great deal more later, Hefty assured me. He had hardly felt his grenade injuries at first but they plagued him still, especially in damp weather.
Arrest him, I demanded, but Hefty shook his mighty cranium.
I fear I have no jurisdiction in your world, Lady Violet, he told me regretfully, a fine time for him to discover that.
Poynder got to his feet. He was clutching his eye again but, more alarmingly, he was also clutching the knife. I snatched up the blotting pad to cushion the blow, but he wrenched it from my grasp, tossed it aside, took his hand from his eye to claw at my throat again, raised the knife, daggerlike over me and laughed. Count Zugravescu would have been proud of that cackle and Poynder obviously liked it too for he did it again but, instead of stabbing me, pressed the point of his knife to that hollow at the base of my neck – the supraclavicular notch, I recalled proudly.
‘Well fought, little girl.’ He grinned though his appearance left little for him to be cheerful about.
His left eye was bloodshot, his usually immaculate hair hung over half the right eye like old seaweed on a rock. His face was splattered with ink and he would never be able to wear that shirt again.
‘Let’s see what’s inside that finery,’ he suggested, though I already knew the answer to that. It was me and it was private and I preferred it to stay that way for the time being.
Poynder had tugged open my top button when he stopped and cocked his head to one side to listen. There were footsteps in the corridor growing louder. He put a finger to his lips.
‘All right, miss, you can go now,’ a man’s voice said.
‘But you were supposed to wait in the hall and I’m supposed to announce you,’ another voice, Matilda’s I decided, argued.
‘That will be all thank you, miss,’ the man said firmly. ‘Now you go about your duties.’
Poynder looked as puzzled as I was.
‘Very well, sir.’
The maid’s footsteps had faded before the door handle turned. It rattled and there was a knocking.
‘Not now,’ Dr Poynder snapped at the impertinence of his caller, but the knocking continued.
‘I am a police officer,’ the man announced. ‘Open the door, Dr Poynder.’
‘What?’ Poynder cried in disbelief. ‘What do you want?’
‘Let me in and I will explain, sir.’
‘You will have to come back. It is not convenient,’ Poynder blustered, but the knocking recommenced.
‘One word and it will be your last,’ Poynder hissed at me, looking about his study as if he hardly knew it. ‘One moment,’ he called, grabbed a fistful of my hair, sending my almost new hat flying into the wall to flop dented onto the floorboards, and dragged me across the room to the cupboard, tossing the hat after me. ‘Get in.’
‘Your luck has run out, Dr Poynder,’ I told him. ‘Let me go and it will be one less crime for which you will have to answer.’
Poynder snorted contemptuously and pushed me inside.
‘I have nothing to lose,’ he told me grimly, ‘but you have everything and I will be sure to take you down to hell with me if I am arrested.’
The knocking became a pounding as he shut me in and slid the bolt home. It was dark in there, the only light coming through a knothole in a lower door panel and I crouched to peek through it.
‘Open up in the name of the law.’
Poynder strode to the French windows, the knife no longer in his hand, but I could not see what he had done with it. Surely he was not going to try to abscond? He threw both the windows open and marched back to admit the policeman.
‘Thank heavens you are here, officer,’ he cried. ‘They went that way.’
A constable stepped forward.
‘And who might they be, sir?’
I could not make out what I hoped would be my saviour’s face.
‘The burglars,’ Poynder said hoarsely. ‘I disturbed them and they attacked me. They tried to make me send you away and, when that failed, they made off across the lawn. They can’t have got far.’
The policeman stayed where he was.
‘What’s behind that door, sir?’ he enquired, and for a moment I thought I recognised that voice.
It cannot be.
‘What?’ Poynder snapped. ‘A cupboard. Books and stationery. What does that matter? There are two dangerous felons on the loose in my garden. You cannot let them escape.’ He pointed the way. ‘Quickly, man.’
‘Open that door please, sir,’ the officer said, turning towards it.
I still could not see his face clearly, but I had glimpsed enough to recognise him.
‘Oh, you fool,’ I whispered all too conscious of the danger that he was in.
Anthony Appleton looked every inch the part in his stage uniform and false moustaches. He stood erect with an air of authority that I had not suspected he had in him.
‘One moment. I feel unwell,’ Poynder breathed, stepping unsteadily sideways towards the fireplace and bending almost double as if in pain.
Anthony hurried to release me.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked anxiously, for I could not have looked anything of the sort, but it was then that I saw Dr Poynder taking a fire iron from its stand.
‘Look out!’ I yelled. ‘Behind you!’
Anthony spun round, his hand going to his truncheon, just as Poynder brought the poker sweeping down and struck him on the side of his face. I burst back into the room in time to see my friend crumple at the knees.
‘Oh, my dear!’ I cried as he toppled forward, his helmet flying off, but Anthony was not finished yet.
Jabbing his truncheon up, he caught Poynder under the chin causing him to stagger backwards. Anthony sprang towards him, almost knocking him off balance, but Poynder recovered surprisingly quickly and, with a great grunt, flung him aside and almost onto the floor. Anthony was made of sturdier stuff, however, than I had given him credit for. He regained his footing and closed in on his opponent again. I grabbed the arm that wielded the poker, but Poynder brought his elbow back, catching me on the jaw and sending me reeling to collide with his desk. I wrenched open a drawer in the hope of finding something I could use as a weapon, but there was only a sheaf of papers, and I turned back to see Poynder lash out with the fire iron, catching Anthony with a vicious thwack on the left temple. Anthony toppled twisting around, his brow striking the edge of the mantlepiece with a horrible thump as he crumpled to the floor.
I hurled myself at Poynder, but he took me by the throat in one hand and, tossing his weapon away, slapped me hard in the face with the other. I choked and tried to kick out, but he had me at arm’s length, grabbed a fistful of my hair again and produced his knife from a rolled copy of the Englishman’s Journal, which he had been using as a sheath, tucked into the back of his trousers.
‘Hold still damn you,’ he swore and leaned over the recumbent form of my friend.
‘Out cold,’ he announced as he straightened up. ‘Some policeman.’ He laughed thinly and I saw that one of Anthony’s moustaches was hanging loosely adrift.
‘Dear God,’ I said, though he did not feel very dear to me at that moment for allowing those things to happen.
Poynder drew back his foot and gave Anthony a sharp kick in the face. I heard a horrible crunch, but my friend did not even stir.
‘You vile…’ I began, lost for a strong enough epithet.
‘Sit in that armchair,’ he commanded, shoving me to stumble to the other side of the room.
Blood was pouring from Anthony’s nose.
‘If you try to escape I will slit his windpipe,’ Poynder vowed and I knew that he meant it.
He put the knife piratically between his teeth and grasped Anthony’s wrists to drag him with great difficulty into the cupboard, bolting the door and leaning heavily back on it, breathless from his exertions, the knife in his hand again.
‘I’ll deal with him later,’ he panted, hurrying to secure the doors into the garden and corridor.
Shakily Poynder poured himself a very large brandy and gulped it down, his breathing almost back to normal. I surveyed the room. There were ornaments which I could use as weapons. That onyx pot on a pedestal would make a good club. I might be no match for a man with a knife, but I would not give up without a fight.
Where were my characters when I needed them? It was not difficult to calculate the answer. This was the real world and there was no escaping into that of my imagination.
Poynder came over and grabbed my hair again to haul me to my feet and force me back to the desk. ‘Now then,’ he said. ‘Where were we before we were so rudely interrupted? Oh yes.’ He put the knife to my neck again. ‘I was about to enjoy you.’
I straightened my finger, but he would not fall for that move twice and I felt the tip of the blade press harder.
‘Try it,’ he snarled, ‘and I will skewer you to my desk. Do not imagine that I am bluffing.’
‘I know you will,’ I assured him. ‘Just as callously as you cut the throat of…’ I clicked my mental fingers. This was where I needed Hefty with his notebook, until I reminded myself that I did not need him at all. ‘Beryl Walker,’ I remembered.
Poynder greeted the name so blankly that I wondered if my shot had gone wide of its mark.
‘The little girl whose body was found in a derelict house in the Lowers,’ I explained and saw the realisation dawn on his damaged face.
‘I never knew her name,’ he said.
‘So you admit it?’ I pressed and he tipped his head sideways.
‘Why not?’ He shrugged and he did not need to add that I would not be getting out of there alive, but nobody had told him that so he added, ‘You will not be getting out of here alive.’