The Grub-and-Stakers Spin a Yarn (12 page)

Osbert pondered. If, for instance, Quimper Wardle had got up in the night, as a man no longer young might well have felt a need to do, and had not been able to find his slippers because they’d been kicked under the bed, there would have been nothing remarkable about his thrusting his feet into the shoes that happened to be lying ready on the mat and letting the laces dangle. But Wardle could hardly be still in the bathroom; surely Mrs. Phiffer would have noticed by now. And the bed was made up, so perhaps he hadn’t been asleep at all.

And why would he have wrenched off his pajamas in such a hurry? Because Mrs. Phiffer had poured itching powder down the legs and back in a burst of creativity? But what would she have achieved by that unless she’d hung around to observe the effect when Wardle donned his pajamas? And if in fact she had hung around, and if she was so dad-blanged free a spirit as she cracked herself up to be, why hadn’t she come straight out and told Osbert what happened then? He hoped she’d finished her pinwheel by now because it looked as if he’d better haul her up here posthaste to answer a few questions.

Osbert went out into the hall and stuck his head over the stairwell. “Mrs. Phiffer, could you come upstairs a minute, please?”

“Just a second while I—ouch! Oh, it’s beautiful!”

Seconds later, Mrs. Phiffer came scampering up the stairs, holding her pinwheel by its pin. To Osbert’s practiced eye, her maiden effort wasn’t a patch on his own masterly achievement. She was happy with it, though; he supposed that was what counted. He made the polite noises she obviously expected, then got back to business.

“I wanted to check on a few details with you, Mrs. Phiffer. For one thing, did you make up Mr. Wardle’s bed that same morning you last saw him?”

She blew on her pinwheel and shook her head. “I’m not sure it was the last morning, but I know I made the bed sometime because the bed’s been made, as you can see for yourself, and it wasn’t made by him because he never did.”

“But you didn’t straighten the room? I notice his pajamas are still on the floor.”

“I noticed them, too,” she replied coldly, “and they can stay there for all I care. I don’t think it’s quite respectable for a landlady to be picking up her lodger’s pajamas. I’d have told him so, only the subject never came up before. Mr. Wardle’s usually quite neat in his habits.”

“So I gathered. What it looks like to me, Mrs. Phiffer, is that this time Mr. Wardle must have left here in a hurry. For one thing, he forgot his bridgework.”

“So he did.” Osbert was somewhat unnerved to catch the covetous glint in the landlady’s narrowed eyes. “One could do something terribly exciting with those,” she murmured.

“No doubt,” Osbert replied, “but I shouldn’t try it if I were you. Is Mr. Wardle generally in the habit of wearing all his teeth?”

“I assume he must be. I expect I’d have noticed the gap if he weren’t. The artist’s eye, you know. And Mr. Wardle’s a smiley kind of man.”

“What about his clothes?”

“Oh, he definitely wears those. I don’t know what sort of place you think I’m running here, Mr. Monk, but—”

“All I meant was, could you tell me if any of his clothes are missing from the closet? There are two suits hanging here; has he taken any away?”

“No, he only brought the two with him. He told me he’d traveled light when he left England because he wasn’t sure how things were going to work out at the mincemeat factory and he didn’t want to pay for extra luggage. Once he was properly settled, he said, he was going to have his brother ship the rest of his things over to him. He does have a pair of flannel slacks and a green jersey he likes to wear on weekends.”

“Then those must be what he had on when he left that last time.” Now, Osbert felt, they were getting somewhere. “Does Mr. Wardle have a car?”

“No, he rides a bicycle to work. Mr. Wardle says that in England everybody rides a bicycle to work. He doesn’t see why he shouldn’t go on doing so here in Lammergen just because nobody else does. Do you?”

“Heck, no,” said Osbert. “I think it’s a great idea. Where’s his bicycle now, I wonder?”

Mrs. Phiffer returned him a blank look. “To tell you the truth, I haven’t given that bicycle a moment’s thought. I try never to think about bicycles. There’s so little one can do with a bicycle, except ride it. Or not ride it, of course.”

One could take the bicycle apart and hang the pieces in the garage, Osbert thought, but he decided not to suggest it. Mrs. Phiffer’s garage was probably crammed full of artificial aardvarks, anyway. “Where does Mr. Wardle keep his bicycle when he’s not riding it?” seemed a safe enough question.

Moreover, this was one to which Mrs. Phiffer had a ready answer. “Out in the shed behind the kitchen. I had to move my duck mold to make room.”

“You mold your own ducks?”

“Naturally. Ducks offer a great deal of scope, you know.”

“I’m sure they do. You didn’t actually see Mr. Wardle riding off on his bicycle the day he disappeared, by any chance? Was that last Saturday?”

“Yes, Saturday. Or was it Sunday? Or possibly Monday? Not later than Monday, I’m positive, because that was the day I made up his bed fresh for the week. I always change my boarder’s bed on Monday. One simply must keep to a routine or nothing would ever get done. Don’t you find that to be so?”

“Oh yes, unquestionably. But you honestly can’t recall which day you last saw Mr. Wardle?”

“Perhaps it does seem a trifle dull of me, but you see Mr. Wardle’s not exactly inspiring, either. He’s like the bicycle, there’s just nothing much one can do with him. Except change his bed on Mondays, and he gets dreadfully upset if one tries to be creative about that.”

“I guess what we’d better do,” said Osbert, “is check out the shed and see whether the bicycle’s still there. By the way, does Mr. Wardle own a pair of brown shoes?”

Mrs. Phiffer perked up. “Indeed he does! Lovely ones with wing tips and little holes poked into the leather. I could look at them for hours.”

“You haven’t taken them somewhere to look at?”

“I’d never do that! I respect my lodger’s privacy.”

“You don’t remember throwing away part of a broken shoelace he may have left in the wastebasket or somewhere?”

“Heavens, no. Think of all the things one could do with a broken shoelace,”

“What about the outside help? You don’t have somebody who comes in to clean once a week, for instance?”

Osbert made the suggestion with no great degree of enthusiasm. Mopping and dusting did not appear to be part of Mrs. Phiffer’s routine. In fairness to her, he didn’t see how much cleaning would be possible in an establishment so rife with creativity. Mrs. Phiffer only gave him a pitying smile and shook her curls.

“Is that all, Mr. Monk? Not to hurry you off, but I’m simply itching to get back to my pinwheels.”

“And I mustn’t keep you,” Osbert replied courteously. “I think we’ve done about as much as we can here. Just one more question: when you made up the bed, did you happen to notice anything that might be considered unusual about the bedding?”

She pondered a moment. “No, I don’t recall a thing. Except, I suppose, for the suicide note on the pillow.”

“SUICIDE NOTE?” CRIED OSBERT.
“Did you keep the note? Where is it now?”

“Still on the pillow, of course,” the landlady replied. “I didn’t want to disturb Mr. Wardle’s arrangement any more than I could help. He’d done a positively superb job: the pillow askew, the pajamas thrown down in a dejected heap, the carefully disheveled bedclothes—all so dramatically understated. Grant you, I missed the fragment of broken shoelace. Subtle nuance just doesn’t cut the mustard with me, I’m afraid. My predilection is for the bold, sweeping effect, as you may have gathered.”

“I did have a feeling it might be, Mrs. Phiffer. Could you show me the note, please?”

“I’d love to. Shall I dishevel the bedclothes to give you the full effect?”

“But then you’d have to make up the bed again,” Osbert pointed out. “Why don’t you just skew the pillow a little, and let me visualize the rest?”

“Oh yes, that’s a far more creative approach.” Mrs. Phiffer drew down the spread and skewed the pillow a little. “Voilà!”

Osbert bent forward, careful not to touch the sheet of paper that lay—artistically, no doubt—on the clean pillowcase. Quimper Wardle had pinched a piece of Mother Matilda’s Mincemeat stationery, he noted with disapproval. Could this be a case of
falsus in uno
? Anyway, the note was simple and to the point, as might have been expected from a man of business.

“This has been a catastrophic debacle. I find myself unable to continue. Pray grant your forgiveness for the turpitude I have committed and for that which I am about to consummate.
Moriturus te saluto.
Yrs, Q.J.G.L. Wardle, B.A., P.T.O., Past Hon. Sec. R.S.A.B.”

“I wonder what ‘Past Hon. Sec. R.S.A.B.’ means,” said Osbert.

“Past Honorable Secretary, Royal Society of Anchovy Buyers,” Mrs. Phiffer replied briskly. “That’s perfectly obvious. What I’m wondering is what the rest of the note means.”

“Offhand and pending further study, I’d say it means Mr. Wardle found himself in the soup because of some awful thing he’d been up to and can’t go on doing whatever he did. He wants to be forgiven for that and for another crime he hasn’t committed yet.”

“But if he’s planning further perfidy, why does he say he can’t go on?”

“Good question. It’s what we in the field of literature call anon sequitur.”

“How cute. And what’s this last bit all about?”

“It means that he who is about to die salutes you. ‘You’ in this case meaning, presumably, you.”

“That was sweet of him. One does like being included.”

Osbert gazed at her in wonder. “Mrs. Phiffer, it never occurred to you that this note might have been genuine?”

“Well, naturally I realized at once that this was a genuine note, insofar as it was written on real paper with what I should say on cursory examination was a poorly functioning ballpoint pen. As for the text—Mr. Monk, by ‘genuine’ do you mean that Mr. Wardle was trying to tell me he actually meant to go somewhere on his bicycle and kill himself?”

“The bicycle would be inferential, but the general tenor of the note does indicate that what he had in mind was
felo de se,
also known as suicide.”

“You do have a marvelous eye for nuance, I must say, Mr. Monk. First the broken shoelace and now this! But my lodgers never commit suicide. They may throw tantrums and storm off in huffs—in fact, they always do, sooner or later—but they never kill themselves. Why should they? Why should he, if it comes to that? Can it be that Mr. Wardle’s turpitude was only something like having bought the wrong kind of peel? Maybe it wasn’t even his fault. He might have ordered the right peel and the peel people delivered the wrong kind. Cassava peel or manioc peel or something. These things happen all the time; he needn’t have taken it so dreadfully to heart. Oh, why didn’t he talk to me? I could have made cocoa and told him the race is not always to the swift.”

“That would have been kind of you.”

Osbert was touched by the landlady’s obvious sincerity, though he couldn’t help wondering what she might have put in the cocoa. “We’d better leave this note where you found it for the time being, and draw the covers back up the way you had them. I’d suggest you not show or even mention the note to anybody else until we find out what’s happened to Mr. Wardle. He may have changed his mind, you know, and it could be awfully embarrassing for him if the story got around. It’s quite likely he’d be so angry with you he’d go off in a huff without paying his rent.”

“Oh, say not so!” cried Mrs. Phiffer. “I’ll simply die if I can’t pay for those bow ties. What are we going to do?”

“I’d suggest we go downstairs and hunt for that bicycle. You say he generally leaves it in the shed?”

The shed was easily searched but unfruitful of result. The narrow niche reserved for Mr. Wardle’s use was empty, and Mrs. Phiffer’s penchant for mass arrangements left no other space where it could have been put. The backyard was full of multicolored plaster ducks. The garage contained only a great many crepe paper owls and a 1952 DeSoto painted in the MacDonald of Sleat hunting tartan and wearing a sporran on its radiator grille.

“So the logical assumption is that Mr. Wardle has in fact ridden off on his bicycle,” Osbert conceded at last. “Mrs. Phiffer, if you were looking for a likely place to commit suicide, where would you go?”

“Over to the mincemeat factory and eat myself to death.”

“But what if Mother Matilda wouldn’t let you?”

“Then I wouldn’t do it.”

The landlady’s reasoning was valid enough, Osbert supposed, but her reply was unhelpful. He tried another track. “What I mean is, do you know of any conveniently situated cliffs a distraught peel buyer could plunge from with a reasonable expectation of breaking his neck when he landed? Or perhaps a dark and dismal mere surrounded by weeping willows and suitable for self-induced drowning.”

“Oh yes,” cried Mrs. Phiffer, “I know the very mere. You can’t get to it by car, but there’s a footpath.”

“Which would also be navigable on a bicycle?”

“Easily. Children ride their bikes over there in the summer to swim. It’s rather far to walk.”

“How far? Two miles? Three? Can you show me the path?”

Mrs. Phiffer didn’t think it was much over four miles away. All Mr. Monk had to do was cut through the field across the way, continue on to the big water tower, and keep going until he found himself having to choose between stopping at the brink or falling into the water. She made no offer to accompany him; it was clear to see that she wanted to go back in the house and make some more pinwheels.

Osbert didn’t want to walk all the way to the mere either, but what else could he do? He might perhaps go back to the factory and see if anybody had a bicycle to lend. No, that would be likely to set the employees wondering whether he was in fact the Reginald Monk he pretended to be. Walking was his only course.

He paused at his car long enough to take his camera out of the glove compartment and sling it around his neck. This would indicate to watching neighbors, of whom there no doubt were several, that he was most likely some artistic friend of Mrs. Phiffer’s in quest of the picturesque. The camera would also come in handy should he find any sign of Mr. Wardle, such as the odd hand or foot, scattered along the way. There was also, he realized, the chance that Wardle’s alleged suicide might not have been self-induced.