Three Bodies in London

by L. A. Nisula

  Miss Ferris gave him a look that said body viewing was very low on her list of preferred activities for the evening, but she said, “I suppose, if it will help.”

  “Thank you. Give me a minute, and I’ll have a viewing room set up.” He held the gate open so we could pass back into the restricted area and found us some chairs to wait for him. Once he’d disappeared down a staircase, we sat down to wait.

  “You saw the body, didn’t you, Miss Pengear?” Miss Ferris asked as we sat there.

  I knew what she was asking, but I’d seen the body when it was newly dead, and hadn’t needed to look closely, and hadn’t seen its face at all. “Only for a moment.”

  “And more than twenty-four hours ago,” Miss Ferris replied.

  Miss Shepherd patted her arm. “I do think viewing a body together puts us on a more familiar footing, don’t you, Cassie?”

  “I suppose it does, Ada.”

  Kate Ferris smiled. “Trying to distract me? It’s not working.”

  Ada shrugged without letting go of her arm. “I thought it was worth a try.”

  “I’m sorry I got you into this,” I said. If they hadn’t come to tell me the results of Miss Ferris’s—Kate’s investigating, they wouldn’t have been asked to view the body, after all.

  Kate shook her head. “It’s all right. If it is him, someone needs to let the police know so they can start looking in the right places.”

  “Do you know this Mr. Bennett well?” I asked.

  “Just to say hello as we pass in the hall. Well enough to identify him, not well enough to be particularly upset, not in a personal way.”

  I nodded. “Still bad enough though.”

  “Exactly.”

  Inspector Burrows returned before I had to think of something else to say that would distract Kate. “Ladies? Everything’s ready. If you’d come with me. Miss Pengear, you’re not needed.” It wasn’t a dismissal, more giving me the option to leave if I wanted.

  “It’s all right.”

  Inspector Burrows nodded and led us to the staircase. It was only one flight down, and then we were led into a small room with a gurney and the sheet-covered body. “This is Dr. Greer. He’ll manage everything. Whenever you’re ready.”

  Kate stared at the gurney. “Let’s just get it over with.”

  Ada was standing very near Kate and I saw her grab Kate’s hand as Dr. Greer went to arrange the sheet. I saw Inspector Burrows noticed too, but he quickly looked away. “Just tell me if you recognize him. Take as long as you need, but no need to prolong it. As soon as you’re done, we can cover him again.”

  Kate nodded.

  Dr. Greer pulled back the sheet, revealing the face. I noticed the top of the head where the wound was had been covered by a second sheet, so all that was really visible was the face and a bit of hair.

  “All right,” Kate said after a minute. Dr. Greer dropped the sheet at once.

  Inspector Burrows motioned for us to go back out into the hallway. Once we were away from the body, he asked, “Well?”

  “That wasn’t Bennett, but I’ve seen him around. He doesn’t work for the post office, but I think he’s friends with someone there. Maybe waits to go to a pub with them or something.”

  “Could that person be Bennett?” Inspector Burrows asked.

  “It very well could. That would explain why he disappeared.”

  “It would indeed. You wouldn’t happen to know where he lives?”

  “No, but he’s in the tinkering department at the main post office, and his direct supervisor is Silas Barlow. Someone there should have the information.”

  “And I’m going to try to find someone to get it for me now, just in case he’s in trouble. Thank you, ladies.” He opened the door to the staircase and waited for us to precede him upstairs.

  As we were coming out of the staircase and back into the main lobby, I heard Milly calling out, “Cassie, there you are.”

  “This is becoming a regular meeting place for you,” Inspector Burrows murmured.

  I ignored him, mainly because that was becoming true, and I definitely did not want Scotland Yard to be the place in London people came to look for me. A nice bookshop, or Ada’s store, or really anyplace but Scotland Yard.

  Milly hurried across the lobby to the counter where we were standing. I moved to open the gate that would let me get to the other side, only to find it required a key on both sides. Milly didn’t seem to mind talking to me across the counter. “I just came to let you know you won’t need to bring back the fish and chips. Mr. Radford called and is taking me out for dinner and perhaps the music hall. Isn’t that marvelous?”

  “Very nice of him.” I wondered why she hadn’t just left a note for me at the flat, but I supposed it was nice of her to let me know before I bought any fish and chips.

  “I’m supposed to meet him at the Scotland Place exit. Something about a bit of business he had there.”

  Inspector Burrows murmured something that sounded very like, “Paying a fine,” but Milly ignored him.

  “So I thought, since I was here already, I’d let you know before you went to any trouble about dinner. Don’t wait up. If we end up at the music hall, we might be very late.”

  “That was nice of you.” No questions about what we had found out in the case, which was probably a bad sign, particularly if Mr. Radford had been paying fines for something more serious than leaving his horse somewhere he shouldn’t have.

  “Have a good evening, then. If you get lonely without me, Mrs. Fitzpatrick always likes a chat.”

  And a good bout of fishing for gossip. I doubted I would ever be that lonely, particularly when I was a suspect in a murder.

  “Oh and Cassie, you were wrong about Mr. Farmington. I had a letter from Mother and they weren’t engaged at all.”

  So she had started opening her mother’s letters again, that was a good sign. “That’s a relief.” And I’d been so certain he was courting her for her money. I wasn’t sure how I could have gotten things so wrong. It all fit so neatly together.

  “He and your mother eloped last week.”

  “What?” Several thoughts ran through my head at once, the first being that him trying to kill me for my shares in Grandfather’s company was suddenly a depressingly real possibility.

  “I know. Isn’t that romantic? I have the letter... Oh, that’s right, I stuck it in the catalog that I left on the chair. Well, I’ll show it to you when I get home.”

  I watched her walk away, not sure if I should run after her and demand details, or go home and try to find the letter.

  “That’s the one you said was trying to kill you?” Inspector Burrows asked softly.

  “The same.”

  “I’d assumed that was a joke.”

  “It wasn’t. He prefers arsenic. Chocolates and face cream so far.”

  “I see.”

  “I should be going. I’ll have to find something for dinner.” It made as good an excuse as any.

  “Milk,” Inspector Burrows said.

  That had to be the oddest farewell I’d ever heard. “What?”

  “Milk. It buffers the body against arsenic. If you’re poisoned, drink some, or have ice cream, or custard, or something with milk, and get to a doctor quickly.”

  I realized he was serious. “Thank you.”

  “Enjoy your dinner.”

  I couldn’t help laughing at that. “I’ll try.”

  When I rejoined Kate and Ada, they were watching Milly hurry to the Scotland Place entrance. Kate nodded in her direction as I approached. “It sounds like your dinner plans were just ruined.”

  “Such as they were.”

  “Then why don’t you come with us?” Ada asked. “There’s a nice little pub not far from my boarding house, and it’s easy to find a cab from there.”

  After learning someone was actively trying to frame me for murder, even though it wasn’t working; and viewing the body, even though I’d already seen it once before; and finding out that
Mr. Farmington really did have a motive to kill me, even though he was on the other side of an ocean at the moment, it probably wasn’t the best idea to go back to the empty rooms on Nell Lane where I could brood about all of it. “If you two don’t mind.”

  “Not at all,” Kate said.

  Ada tucked her arm through mine, and we all set out to look for a cab.

  The pub near Ada’s boarding house was indeed a nice one, filled with office workers and shop clerks on their way home. We found a table and Ada offered to go to the bar and order for us, with a rather cryptic, “Then you can tell her the details.”

  “Oh,” Kate said, dragging the syllable out in a way that made it seem she’d forgotten something important.

  “Details?” I asked.

  Kate nodded. “Inspector Burrows distracted me with the body or I would have finished telling him while I was there.”

  “I’ll visit him in the morning and fill him in if you’d like.”

  Kate smiled. “If you don’t mind. Waiting in line there is getting a bit old. In any case, like I said, I got a look at the repair book this morning, and there’s definitely something up with Bennett. We list the repairs we’ve done and what was wrong, you see, and he has more than his share of birds listed, and some of the repairs made no sense. They were things that could be handled by the aviaries with no problem.”

  “So you think he lied about what was wrong?”

  “More likely he picked some smaller problem and listed it instead of the main cause. Like on your bird, it should have the map gear listed as the reason it was sent in, but if I had listed the dented side, it would still look like I’d done something, even though that wasn’t the real problem. But the damage on all of them was consistent with a reversed map gear; it was mainly the sort of thing that would happen if a bird crashed into a building like your one did. And a whole list of reversed map gears would raise suspicion at once, so it would be prudent to list something else when he could. Like I said, it would have to be deliberate.”

  “Could he just like repairing birds?” I wondered if that was a foolish question, but I didn’t think Kate would mind.

  “We all like repairing birds. It’s pretty straightforward, and they’re easier to deal with than the machinery upstairs. But he didn’t take all of the birds. And sometimes there would be days when he didn’t take any birds at all until he’d been in for hours. So that got me thinking. Why? What was the connection between those birds? I checked the log-in book, but they had all come from different aviaries, but the log-in book only lists what aviary sent them to us, not where they originated. So I checked the log-out book. That’s where we list them when we’re sending them back out to their original aviary after they’re fixed, or send a note if they can’t be. And that’s where the answer was. Almost every one of the birds he repaired came from the Mayton Street aviary. And no one else seems to have worked on one from there. He managed to get them all.”

  “So somehow this is connected to the Mayton Street aviary?”

  Kate nodded. “And what’s more, he had to know they were coming. When they come in, they’re only labeled with the aviary that sent them to us. We have to get the number from the inside panel and look it up to know where they originally came from so they can be sent back. So he had to know to be on the lookout for a bird from say the Covent Garden aviary, coming in on Monday, in order to get the right one. Whatever this is, he’s in on it.”

  I considered what she’d told me for a moment. It seemed to make more questions than it answered. “Did you know him at all? I mean, are you surprised that he’d be in on something like this?”

  Kate stared at a flaw in the wood of the table, thinking. “It depends on what this is. He didn’t strike me as the sort who’d be in on something too terrible, but he’s also not the most honest of people. If this is a murder ring, no, I wouldn’t think so. If it’s shoplifting, yes, I think he could stumble into something like that.”

  I nodded. “So we just have to figure out what’s been going on at the Mayton Street aviary.” That seemed slightly better than what we’d had before.

  Kate nodded. “It’s a small place. There can’t be that many people working there. And there’s still the cabbage. We should probably try to figure out what that meant. It’s quite the puzzle, isn’t it?”

  Ada returned with our fish and chips, and we all tried to think of anything to do with cabbages, but it proved to be a singularly uninspiring sort of vegetable.

  ~ * ~ * ~

  When I got back to the flat, I was too wound up from the events at Scotland Yard to sleep. I fixed a cup of tea and looked at the neglected stack of books near the couch. In one of those, the whole thing would have been wrapped up easily. A secret code, a password, a witness remembering something. Some little detail and the whole thing would fall into place.

  I froze with my hand on the cup. A secret code. There had been a piece of paper in the bird. We’d assumed the cabbage was wrapped in it, but it hadn’t been, had it? The paper had fallen out, so that had to mean it had just been in there loose. And blank. Why send blank paper? You wouldn’t, of course. So what if it wasn’t blank?

  I found the jacket I had been wearing that day. The paper was still inside the pocket. I smoothed it out and looked it over carefully, but there were no marks other than the prices Patty had written on it at the aviary. I brought it over to the lamp and held it up to the light. Nothing. No watermark or other useful markings. So what else could it be? I almost wished Milly were back. If there was one thing she excelled at, it was ridiculous ideas, and that seemed to be what I needed.

  All right, what else did I know about the note? Wellington. Could that be a clue to the recipient about how to decipher the note? Maybe there was some method he’d used for secret dispatches? Or the cabbage inside. Could that be the key to decode it? I needed to know more about codes. But as we didn’t have any books about them, it would have to wait until morning.

  ~ * ~ * ~

  The next morning, I told Milly I was going to go looking at bookshops but not what I was looking for. She told me to have fun and showed no sign of wanting to come along, which suited me fine. I went back towards Hopp Lane, as Milly had seemed to think there were several bookstores in the area, and wandered through the little streets until I found that there were indeed several small bookshops, if one knew where to look. I started in the largest of them. Asking about codes would have been the easiest solution, of course, but the gentleman behind the counter looked quite strict and not at all the sort you could ask something like that. I asked for the history section instead, on the theory that, if nothing else, I could go back to researching Wellington, then wandered through the shelves until I happened upon the section on historical espionage. That seemed the best I was going to do, and I started flipping through the books.

  By the time I’d gone through the first shelf of the small section, I was coming to the conclusion that I would have to purchase at least one of the books, possibly more, and read them cover to cover if I wanted to find anything useful. I flipped to the index and read through the entries, looking for anything related to Wellington, Napoleon, Nelson, Waterloo, or Trafalgar. I didn’t see any of those names, but I did spot something else. An entry for red cabbage water. And it was a long one, lots of page numbers to look at. I stuck my finger in the index page and flipped to the entry that seemed longest, pages 135-142. Hopefully that would explain what red cabbage water was, as I’d never heard of it before.

  It turned out to be exactly what it sounded like, red cabbage leaves boiled and strained. The important part was the fact that it changed the color of substances depending on how acidic they were and “reacts with many common forms of invisible ink, including vinegar and lemon juice.” So all we had to do was mix up some red cabbage water, and we’d have our code. Possibly. If that was what the cabbage had meant. I put the other books back on the shelf and brought the useful one with me to the cashier.

  When I got back to Nell Lane, Mi
lly was sitting at the table going through the morning’s newspapers in a slow sort of way that told me she’d already read anything she was interested in and was now filling time until she could find something she’d rather be doing. Me returning gave her an excuse to stop and ask, “Been to the bookstores again? What did you find this time?”

  I rather wished I’d thought to pick up a couple of novels while I’d been there. Then I could have shown those to Milly and she would have lost interest. But I’d been too excited about finding a possible key to the whole thing to think of anything but getting back and trying it out. As I knew Milly would wait until I showed it to her, I unwrapped the book and held it up.

  “So you solved the code! Wait, where was there a code in all this?”

  I hadn’t realized there were so many things I hadn’t told her while she’d been busy with Mr. Radford. “The blank piece of paper in the bird. I thought there might be something written on it in invisible ink.”

  “That’s brilliant. Didn’t I say so at the beginning? So how do we make it show up? Heat, usually, isn’t it? But you didn’t need to buy the whole book for that. Although I suppose it will come in handy the next time one of us is arrested. We can send each other secret notes right under Scotland Yard’s nose.” She seemed to expect us to get arrested on a fairly regular basis, something I hoped to avoid at all costs.

  “I was looking through the index and I saw a listing for red cabbage water, which is supposed to reveal invisible ink. And as there was a cabbage inside the bird...”

  “Wonderful. I’m sure Mrs. Fitzpatrick has some cabbage. I’ve smelled her cooking it now and again. She won’t mind using a bit of it to solve a murder.”

  I was quite certain she wouldn’t mind at all, not if it gave her something she could tell the other tenants and the rest of the block about. “We should do this with Inspector Burrows, otherwise he might think I wrote something on the paper myself.” As the paper had been in my possession for quite a while now, he would know it was still possible I had, but it seemed best to let him in on it at the beginning and at least attempt to show that any code on the paper wasn’t mine.