Chapter 4 #2
Daisy told them about Mary Anning and Mrs. Mantell. The girl, Jennifer, was thrilled.
“Who cares about stupid old fossils?” was Arthur’s reaction.
“My nephew thought the dinosaurs were pretty exciting, just because of their size,” Daisy said. “Have you looked at them properly?”
“Not much.”
“Did too! You were looking at the Megalosaurus.”
“The one with the big teeth? Well … I say, miss, what happened to the man who got hurt? Someone hit him over the head with a fossil?”
“Sort of. Did you see anyone cross the gallery?”
Daisy was sure she would have seen anyone going through the main entrance to the dinosaurs, straight across from the hall where she was when she heard the crash.
But halfway down the gallery, a door on the left led to the General Library, and an arch on the right to the fossil cephalopods (what were cephalopods?
She still had not found out). If Wilfred Atkins had been with Bert in the invertebrates beyond, the murderer could have fled unseen through
the mysterious cephalopods and crossed the dinosaurs to the library.
The children glanced at each other and shook their heads.
“No,” Arthur admitted, disappointed.
“But we might not’ve,” Jennifer insisted. “You were too looking at the Megalosaurus, like anything. He was, miss, honestly. And talking about its teeth. We might not’ve seen anyone, nor heard footsteps neither.”
“Here comes Gran.” The littlest child ran to meet Mrs. Ditchley. “Gran, I want to go home. I don’t like it here.”
“Well, no more do I, Katy. Such goings on, and in a museum, too. And all these bones, it’s not natural. I don’t hold with it. But the policeman says there’s nothing he can do till he gets reinforcements … .”
“I don’t like policemen.”
“They’re just doing their job, duckie, so we’ll have to make the best of it, won’t we? Let’s sing a nice, cheerful song.”
So Daisy found herself standing among the skeletons joining a rousing chorus of “I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside,” followed by “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit-Bag.” They were Smile, smile, smiling for all they were worth when the door to the General Library opened and Mr. Mummery burst forth.
“What the deuce is this horrible racket?” he howled.
His round face was red with fury, his wild hair and eyebrows bristling like an upset hedgehog.
Marching up to the silenced singers, he gabbled, “Madam, it is after six o’clock.
Peace and quiet should by now have descended upon this august institution.
Kindly remove yourself and these bra—children immediately.
If, as is no doubt the case, you find yourselves locked
in, the solution is not to caterwaul among the dinosaurs but to find one of our admirable police guards and request egress. Do I make myself clear?”
Katy buried her face in her grandmother’s skirt and burst into tears.
“Mr. Mummery, please!” said Daisy. “Let me explain—”
“Oh, it’s you, Miss Dalrymple. I had not observed you. Are these people in some way assisting you in your research? The effect of loud noises on a dinosaur’s otic ossicles, perhaps? I must say, I had thought better of you. I cannot—”
“Mr. Mummery,” Daisy interrupted, taking a firm hold of his sleeve and leading him, resisting, towards the gallery’s entrance arch, “you must listen to me. Mrs. Ditchley and the children can’t leave because the police won’t let them. There’s been a … an apparent murder. Dr. Pettigrew is dead.”
Mummery threw back his head and guffawed.
“Pettigrew murdered? He had it coming! If anyone did, I mean,” he said sobering.
“But you can’t be serious, my dear Miss Dalrymple.
True, we deal daily in death, but it is ancient death.
” His sweeping gesture embraced the dinosaurs and all the fossils beyond.
He turned tetchily reproachful. “I cannot believe this jape is your notion. It must be Pettigrew’s, of course, simply to bedevil me. Why you should support—”
“Come and see, then.” She had intended to warn him of the destruction of his pet reptile, but she was now too annoyed with him. “Come along.”
Two more uniformed police officers had joined Sergeant Jameson, another sergeant and a constable. Mummery scarcely spared them a glance as, with a screech of rage, he strode past them.
“My Pareiasaurus! He did this on purpose!”
Jameson and the constable caught his arms.
“Keep back, sir, if you please.”
“My Pareiasaurus! It will take months of work to stick those bones back together, if indeed it can be done. I’ll kill him!”
“He’s already dead, sir,” Jameson said reprovingly, and with a touch of suspicion, “if it’s Ol’ … Dr. Pettigrew you’re referring to. I can’t let you touch the skellington, and I’ll have to ask you to remain on the premises until you have given a statement to a detective officer.”
Mummery visibly deflated. “A detective? Miss Dalrymple mentioned murder.”
“Looks that way, sir, but it’s not for me to say. We’ll have a detective here soon as can be.”
“In the meantime, I suppose I may go back to the library and continue my work?” he asked with querulous dignity. “Miss Dalrymple, be so kind as to find some quiet diversion for those horrible brats.” With a last, desolate stare at his ruined Pareiasaurus, he stalked back into the dinosaur gallery.
“He might as well be there as anywhere,” said Jameson. “Well, Miss Dalrymple, do you think the old lady’ll be willing to bring the kids through here? If so, you can all go up to the refreshment room and wait in comfort, now I’ve enough men to guard all the exits.”
“Thank you, Sergeant. I’ll see.”
Past the dead Keeper, Daisy led a string of children with their eyes shut, while Mrs. Ditchley marched Arthur with her hands over his eyes. The newly arrived Constable Neddle went with them.
At the arch from the fossil mammals to the Central Hall, they found another constable on guard duty. A young couple stood nearby, hand in hand, looking disconsolate. A scrawny, bewhiskered man in horn-rims, vaguely familiar to Daisy, was arguing excitably with the guard.
“My dear chap, whatever the trouble is, it’s nothing to do with me. I don’t work here.”
“Then you’re a member of the public, sir,” the constable said patiently.
“No, no, not at all. I work at the British Museum.”
“This is the British Museum, sir, Natural History branch.”
“Exactly! And I’m from the main institution in Bloomsbury, so I haven’t a key to the back stairs. So just be a good fellow and let me through.”
“I can’t, sir. I’ve me instructions, haven’t I. And it’s no good going on asking me why, ’cause I haven’t been told, not proper, not so’s to be able to tell you.”
“Hello, Mr. ffinch-Brown,” Daisy intervened, recognizing him instantly when he pushed his spectacles up on his nose. “I don’t expect you remember me—Daisy Dalrymple. Mr. Witt introduced us. Did you come to see him?”
“I did,” said the anthropologist testily, “but I finished my business with him some time ago. Do you know what all this to-do is about? Why won’t they let me leave in peace?”
“I can let you leave the gallery now, sir,” said the guard, who had spoken briefly with Constable Neddle, “but I must ask you to go to the refreshment room upstairs and wait there. You two, too,” he added to the young couple.
With an air of utter bewilderment, they meekly followed Mrs. Ditchley and the children out into the Central Hall. Shepherded by Neddle, ffinch-Brown followed not at all meekly, with Daisy.
“The refreshment room!” he exploded. He really was remarkably like Mummery in temperament. His voice did not get quite as loud, perhaps because he worked off surplus energy by waving his arms. “Wait in the refreshment room? For what, may I ask, for what?”
Daisy glanced back at Constable Neddle, who rolled his eyes. Taking this as permission, she outlined the situation.
“No great loss,” said ffinch-Brown contemptuously. “Any fool can polish up rocks, but Ralph Pettigrew had the unmitigated gall to think he could make flint tools that I—I!—would be unable to distinguish from the genuinely primitive article.”
“The ones he claimed he found in a cave in Cornwall?” Daisy asked as they started up the main staircase towards the statue of Sir Richard Owen.
“No, no, those don’t remotely resemble worked implements.” He rubbed his hands in remembered glee. “You should have seen his face when I confirmed Witt’s verdict. That was when he swore he could deceive me with flints he had chipped and flaked himself. Ha!”
“Impossible?”
“Impossible,” affirmed ffinch-Brown, but with a trace of uneasiness. Then, cheering up, he said brightly, “Well, now we shall never know, shall we?”
Suppose Pettigrew succeeded in deceiving him, Daisy thought. The mineralogist would never have kept quiet about it. In that case, to what extent would the anthropologist’s reputation suffer? And what had he been doing since he finished his business with Witt? Quarrelling with Pettigrew?
Ascending the second flight, Daisy glanced up at the bronze bust of Captain Fred Selous, big-game hunter, bronze elephant-gun in hand. It was hard to believe primitive man had hunted big game with nothing but flint weapons.
“How is Mr. Witt’s experiment going?” she asked. “Has he duplicated the marks on the mammoth bones?”
“Not just mammoths, my dear young lady. I was contemplating certain grooves on the giant sloth’s tibia when—”
“Fr?ulein? It is Miss Dalrymple?”
Daisy swung round. The Grand Duke of Transcarpathia was coming up the stairs behind them.
“Hello, where have you sprung from?” she asked with a smile.
“I have not gesprungen! I walk.”
“It’s just an English expression. Where have you been?”
“I vas de Irish elk regarding. Irish, pah!” he said angrily, “In mine contry also vas once dis magnificent beast, but de English dey must all take to self, de elks, de jewels, everysing!”
“So you were in the fossil mammal gallery? I didn’t see you there.”
The Grand Duke turned sullen. “Dis de police also say. Lurking dey say, vhy you vas lurking behind de elk? Vhat is lurking, bitte?”
“Er, sort of hiding,” Daisy explained.
“Hiding? I not hide, but if I am not seen vhen de police come, I not at once rush out. To myself I remind, here in England I am not Grand Duke, only a damn foreigner!”
Rudolf Maximilian had a grudge against the world, Daisy thought as they entered the cafeteria, but also good reason to loathe Pettigrew. Having bumped him off, he could easily have nipped along the reptile gallery, through the hall at the far end, and into the mammal gallery.
Mr. ffinch-Brown, who had gone ahead into the refreshment room and was glowering disgruntledly at the CLOSED sign on the counter, claimed to have been in the end pavilion looking at the sloth.
He would not have seen the Grand Duke. What about the young couple, who had also apparently been among the mammals when Pettigrew was killed?
They were now ensconced at a corner table, heads close together, whispering, eyes for nothing but each other.
Add their self-absorption to the giant mammals and wide pillars,
and they would probably have remained unaware of anything short of a bomb blast.
They would not have noticed when ffinch-Brown went through into the pavilion, either. The Grand Duke just might have seen him, though, and might have some idea of the time. Daisy was tempted to ask.
She really must stay out of the investigation, she reproved herself.
True, she had been the first on the scene, but her alibi, along with Dr. Smith Woodward’s, was impeccable.
Though she had to give a statement, and would no doubt be called to give evidence at the inquest, the Chelsea district detectives would resent any attempt to add her twopenn’orth.
The detectives were a long time coming. Mrs. Ditchley, defiantly determined, went behind the counter and found milk and biscuits for the tired, hungry children.
“Put on a kettle for tea,” suggested Mr. ffinch-Brown. “I’ll pay for the lot.” He put a half-crown on top of the till.
Constable Neddle had left them. With main entrance closed, none of them could leave the building if they tried.
No one else joined them. Daisy wondered whether Mummery was the only member of the scientific staff, apart from Smith Woodward and Pettigrew, who had not gone home at half past five.
There might be others tucked away in offices, work rooms, and libraries, not yet winkled out, or left to work in peace until needed.
So far, Mummery, ffinch-Brown, and Grand Duke Rudolf were the only suspects Daisy knew of.
The only ones she was ever likely to know of, she tried to persuade herself. She was not going to get involved. She went to sit with Mrs. Ditchley and the children.
At last a tall young man appeared and announced himself
as Detective Constable Ross. “We’ll take Miss Dalrymple’s statement first,” he said. “Would you come this way, please, miss?”
Mrs. Ditchley arose in wrath. “What about my grandkiddies?” she demanded.
“And their mum come home from work and waiting for them and not knowing where they’ve got to?
I’m sure I’d have no objection to Miss Dalrymple getting to go first if it wasn’t for the kiddies, but you wouldn’t mind, would you, dear, if I took your turn? ”
“Not at all,” said Daisy.
D. C. Ross, with Mrs. Ditchley advancing upon him, caved in. “All right, madam, all right. I s’pose it won’t matter that much.”
“Come along, children.”
But there the constable drew the line. He hadn’t been told nothing about bringing no children along.
“I’ll take care of them,” Daisy offered.
Mrs. Ditchley was only gone a few minutes, fortunately, as Katy was growing tearful and Arthur obstreperous.
Upon her return she gathered her flock, wiped noses, and saw coats buttoned as Ross escorted Daisy from the room.
Daisy wondered whether she ought to mention that the children had told her Mummery could have crossed the dinosaur gallery without their seeing him.
She felt the detective in charge ought to have spoken to them himself, but perhaps he planned to at a later date, or maybe he already had information clearing Mummery.
In any case, she was not going to get involved.
She followed D. C. Ross through the Central Hall to an office at the front, tucked away to the right of the entrance as Smith Woodward’s was to the left. A sign on the door read SIR SIDNEY HARMER, DIRECTOR.
Ross opened the door and stood aside, announcing, “Miss Dalrymple, Sergeant.”
Behind Sir Sidney’s desk rose a very familiar figure, vast, suited in ghastly tan and yellow check, with a luxuriant greying walrus moustache counterbalanced by the shining dome of his hairless head.
“Mr. Tring!” cried Daisy.