Chapter 5
“Good evedig, Biss Dalrybple,” said Alec’s favourite sergeant, coming round the desk to shake her hand.”Do sit dowd, please. Excuse be a bobet.” He turned his back and harumphed hugely into a large white handkerchief.”Ah, that’s better.”
“So they did call in Scotland Yard.” Daisy sat down in one of the red leather armchairs before the desk. “But where’s the Chief?”
“Detective Chief Inspector Fletcher is out on another job and took young Piper with him. But seeing it involves some outdoor business and I’ve got this bit of a cold, he left me to clear up some paperwork at the office.”
“I expect you’d rather have gone with them than getting stuck with desk work,” Daisy said sympathetically.
His little brown eyes twinkled at her. “Isn’t that the truth! At least, it would be if it wasn’t for this affair coming up. The Chelsea division detectives are all out already, and my super hadn’t got an inspector to spare, so he sent me along.”
“I’m very glad he’s put you in charge.” Though bang went any chance of keeping it from Alec.
“He thought it was a simple little case I’d be able to clear
up tonight.” Tom Tring sighed gustily. “Don’t suppose he has any idea what a regular rabbit warren the place is. Well, Miss Dalrymple, what have you got to tell me? Stop staring, Ross, and get your notebook out. Yes, this is that Miss Dalrymple.”
Ross and Daisy both blushed, Daisy wondering whether she was notorious simply as Alec’s fiancée, or as the Assistant Commissioner for Crime’s bête noire.
“I’ve been doing some research here for an article,” she said hurriedly. “This evening at twenty to six I went to Dr. Smith Woodward’s office—he’s the Keeper of Geology—to ask him about Piltdown Man.”
“Exactly twedty to six? Excuse be.” Tring pulled out his hankie, turned his head, and produced another explosion.
“Roughly. You know how you look at a watch and you don’t so much notice the exact time as how long you have till … well, in this case till the museum closed. I saw I had about twenty minutes left and I decided it was long enough.”
Tring nodded. “And then?”
“We walked round to the Piltdown skull, just around the corner in the fossil mammal gallery. Dr. Smith Woodward looked at it for a minute and decided he’d much rather talk about fossil fish.
So we crossed the gallery—I didn’t notice anyone there, but I wasn’t really looking.
There was no one in the hall leading to the reptile gallery, I’m sure of that. ”
“That would be here?” The sergeant pointed to a large sheet of paper on the desk in front of him.
Leaning forward, Daisy saw it was a plan of the museum.
“That’s right,” she said. “We must have been about halfway along when we heard someone ahead speaking loudly, then a sort of roar, and then the most frightful crash.” She hesitated.
“Thinking back, I’m pretty sure it was Dr. Pettigrew’s voice, though I didn’t recognize it immediately. ”
“What did he say?”
“I couldn’t catch the words. This building’s so solid it muffles sounds. We would have seen, though, if anyone had entered the dinosaur gallery through this arch.” She showed him on the plan.
“Yes, that all agrees with Dr. Smith Woodward’s statement. That lets him out.”
“And me,” said Daisy.
Tring’s moustache waggled above a half-concealed grin. “And you,” he acknowledged. “What next?”
“I dashed into the reptile gallery, and saw Pettigrew lying … I’m afraid I was rather too aghast to notice if anyone was running off. I’m most frightfully sorry.” More affected by the memory than she had been by the actual event, Daisy suddenly felt cold and horribly sick.
Always light on his feet despite his size, Tom Tring was round the desk in a flash, his hand on her shoulder. “Here, put your head down on your knees. Ross, quick, pour a drop of whatever it is Sir Sidney keeps in that decanter. That’s the ticket. Take a good swallow, Miss Dalrymple.”
Head whirling, Daisy only half heard him. Expecting water, she gulped whisky. It hit the back of her throat like a lighted squib. As she choked and spluttered, tears pouring down her face, a comforting warmth spread through her middle. At least it had settled her stomach.
Tring thrust a handkerchief into her hand. “Here, it’s a clean one. The missus sent me out with half a dozen. Feeling better?”
“Yes, thank you,” Daisy croaked, mopping her eyes. “I think so. Gosh!”
“Cad you … Half a tick.” He found another hankie and trumpeted into it. “Can you go on? You sent Dr. Smith Woodward for the police?”
“It sounds frightfully pushy, put like that, but I suppose I did. Mrs. Ditchley turned up first, though. You’ve seen her.”
“I want it in your words, please. You know the Chief’s methods.”
Tears pricked at Daisy’s eyelids. How she wished for Alec’s comforting presence, even if he was angry with her. But Tom Tring, dear Tom Tring, was now enveloped in a rosy haze, like a mammoth cherub. He needed her help. Blinking away the tears, she suppressed a giggle and tried to concentrate.
“Mrs. Ditchley,” prompted the mustachioed cherub.
Daisy told him about Mrs. Ditchley’s failure to find a pulse, her return to her grandchildren, and the dinosaur commissionaire’s subsequent arrival on the scene.
At that point she got Wilf Atkins’s name hopelessly muddled, and she could not pronounce “Pareiasaurus” to save her life, though by articulating with extreme care she managed to substitute “skeleton.”
“Wolf Catkins—you know who I mean—said Mr. Flummery would have forty fits when he saw the smashed ske-le-ton. He did. He threatened to kill Pet-ti-grew, but he was too late.”
“Yes,” said the cherub, his face wavering in and out of her vision, “so Sergeant Jameson says. I think the rest of your statement had better wait till morning, Miss Dalrymple.”
“Sorry. Seem to be fearfully tired all of a sudden.” Daisy’s eyes closed of their own volition, and she couldn’t get them to open again.
Distantly, she heard the constable’s incredulous voice: “Sozzled?”
“A whacking slug of whisky on an empty stomach,” Tring rumbled. “Our Miss Dalrymple’s not one of these cocktail-bibbing
Bright Young Things, you know. I can’t escort her home now. Help me move the chair over into that corner.”
Briefly Daisy flew through the air. An overcoat was tucked around her, and she slept.
When she awoke, Daisy was sure she had not been dead to the world for more than a few minutes. She was still slouched in a leather armchair with a coat draped over her. No headache, thank heaven, but she felt decidedly lethargic.
It was not only lassitude that kept her immobile, her eyes closed. If Detective Sergeant Tring knew she was awake, he might think he ought to send her from the room. With Tom Tring in charge of the case, she abandoned her attempt to curb her curiosity.
Mummery’s strident outcry had roused her.
(Had she dreamt it, or had she really referred to him as Flummery?
Too shaming! She only hoped she could rely on Tring not to tell Alec she had been tiddly, and to silence Ross.) After that brief explosion, Mummery was now explaining, using a great many lengthy scientific terms, what he had been doing in the General Library after working hours.
Come to think of it, Flummery suited him rather well.
He sounded as if he was taking malicious delight in befuddling the poor uneducated coppers.
Daisy wondered how the note-taking Ross was coping.
Tom Tring was unruffled. After listening in massive silence until Mummery ran down like an underwound gramophone, the sergeant said politely, “Thank you, sir. It’s kind of you to take so much trouble to give me all the details when my Chief Inspector will likely be asking you to repeat it tomorrow.
Very particular he is. Now, what time did you go to the library? ”
Mummery claimed to have been there from shortly before five until he burst forth to rebuke Daisy and Mrs.
Ditchley for the singing. Several others were there when he arrived—he named a couple—but he thought all had left at half past five, at the end of the working day.
“I cannot be certain,” he said condescendingly. “No doubt you are unaware, Sergeant, that academic libraries contain a great many tall bookshelves, which tend to conceal the occupants from one another.”
“Is that so?” Tring spoke with such ponderous gravity that Daisy was sure he was amused. “Well, well, that’s a great pity, sir. Thank you, sir, that’s all then … for the moment.”
“For the moment?” squawked Mummery.
“Tonight, I’m just trying to get everyone’s movements clear, sir. You are at liberty to go home. Tomorrow, the Chief Inspector will no doubt have a number of questions to put to you, ’specially as Sergeant Jameson reports you threatened the victim.”
“But he was already dead!”
“Ah,” said Tring inscrutably. “Good night, sir.”
There was a blank silence, then a mutter from Mummery, the sound of a chair pushed back, and a door opening and closing.
“One up to you, Sarge,” Ross exclaimed. “But I didn’t get much of it down, the scientific stuff.”
“That’s all right, laddie. It was mostly obfuscation”—Mr. Tring was by no means the ignoramus some took him for—“and I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of asking him to spell out the long words for you. The Chief'll sort him in the morning.”
“You think the Super’ll give the case to Mr. Fletcher?”
“Bound to, when he knows who’s got herself mixed up in it. Right, let’s have Mr. Witt in next.”
Blushing, a tendency she deplored as positively Victorian but was unable to overcome, Daisy heard the door open and
close again. To distract herself from Superintendent Crane’s probable reaction, not to mention Alec’s and, eventually and inevitably, the A. C.’s, she pondered Witt’s appearance on the list of suspects.
“You can open your eyes now,” said Tom Tring.