The Pigeon Pie Mystery (24 page)

The Princess followed his gaze. “His novels, yes, though I’m
not quite sure about the man after he put out the word that his wife was suffering from a mental disorder when his marriage failed. Has your wife ever questioned
your
sanity, Inspector?”

“Not to my knowledge,” he replied.

Mink raised her eyebrows. “You do surprise me. Not even after that last case of yours when that poor innocent man was hanged? It was all over the papers. Goodness knows the damage it did to your career.”

The Inspector tapped his hat against his leg with agitation, then looked at the maid and jerked his head towards the door. She immediately got to her feet and showed him out. Returning to the drawing room, she stood by the grand piano. “I did not poison the General, ma’am,” she said quietly.

The Princess looked up from the sofa. “I know,” she said. “You would have strangled him.”

There was a pause.

“Ma’am?”

“Yes?”

“I have anxious forebodings,” she said, clutching the sides of her dress.

Mink got up and lit a cigarette from a tortoiseshell box on the mantelpiece. She walked to the window and stood staring at the view, taking nothing of it in. As she smoked, she thought of the day when Pooki first came to the family twenty-one years ago, after being rescued from an unsavoury death by the Maharaja. Born in Prindur during the rainy season, it was no surprise to the maid’s parents when she eventually took to the high seas. Working as a travelling ayah, a nurse who accompanied mothers and their children back to England, she made the return journey thirty-two times. She was so used to the rhythm of the ocean that whenever she reached dry land she instantly felt seasick, unable to tolerate the ground that remained irrefutably motionless below her. On one occasion she was shipwrecked, and found herself floating in
the Indian Ocean inside an empty tea chest. She cried so ferociously she feared the sea would rise, and such was her terror she had never shed a tear again.

It was from her thirty-third journey that she never returned home. Having safely escorted her charges back to the motherland in time for the school term, and nursed their mother, who had vomited herself dry in her cabin, she turned round in the docks and found that she had been abandoned. With neither the promised passage back to India nor the means to buy one, she wandered London’s backstreets uncertain of what to do. It wasn’t long before men with gin on their breath whispered suggestions to her from the shadows. She refused them all, punched one, and was eventually befriended by a woman who took one of her gold bangles in exchange for a position with a respectable family. But the job didn’t exist, and she resorted to eating the seeds that fell onto the pavement from the birdcages of the rich.

It was a single act of kindness that saved her. When the park-keeper found what he initially thought was a bundle of colourful rags, he carried her into his shed. Once the fire had warmed her, she was able to hold the cup he offered, and she drank the tea as if it were her last. He suggested that she take off her bracelets, and, lacking the strength to refuse, she handed them over with the self-recrimination of the duped. But he told her to hide them in her sari, and gave her the whole of his lunch.

She left him when she was able to walk, and took to the streets again. As night fell, she slipped into a back door to escape from the cold. When she woke, she found herself next to a pile of dead rabbits and was offered a job as a fur-puller. She sat on a stool and copied the family as they pulled the loose down off the skins to prepare them for lining jackets. Bootless children dared each other to go in and see the woman with an earring in her nose. The fluff got up it, and down her throat, but she kept on pulling in honour of the park-keeper who had saved her. But she was soon
dismissed, as her catastrophic sneezing made the family jump out of their own skins and fear for their hammering hearts.

Eventually she found her way to Soho, where newly arrived Turks, Persians, Russians, and Syrians in native dress carried their luggage to their lodging houses, their eyes raised in disbelief at a sky so stubbornly grey. Passing Cossack horse whisperers, Andalusian dancers, and Dutch diamond-cutters, she peered through the shop windows at frogs’ legs sold on long sticks, snails bred in Frenchmen’s gardens, and Italian cheeses that smelt of the dead. It was as she was crossing the road that she fainted again. When she opened her eyes, her head on the filthy ground, she saw the thundering hooves of an approaching horse pulling a hansom cab. Unable to move, she waited for death, her last thought for her mother so far away. The next thing she knew she was being pulled to the side of the road by a short, stout Indian in a black suit. The Maharaja carried her back into the bar he had just left, where he wiped the mud and blood from her face. He gave her a glass of brandy, which the absinthe drinkers watched her empty, never having seen a woman so thin. When he discovered she was from the state of Prindur he led her to his carriage and took her to the Old Cheshire Cheese, the steak and chop-house off Fleet Street. He marvelled at her appetite for beefsteak pudding, which matched his own, and showed her the preserved chair of Dr. Johnson, whom he explained was a distinguished lexicographer. Ignoring her blank look, he then offered her the position of nurse to his six-year-old daughter, adding that the woman currently holding the position had handed in her notice, unable to bear the silence of the little girl who hadn’t uttered a word since the death of her mother. Pooki simply helped herself to more custard, and when she had finished her marmalade pudding, said, “Your daughter will speak when she has something to say. It is the same for chickens.”

It was Pooki who blew a gust of happiness into that house of sorrow. After the first week, having witnessed the lay of the land,
she hid the key to the wine cellar. When the butler was summonsed to explain its disappearance, she told the Maharaja that it was she who had taken it, as a father drinking himself to death was no good for a child. When she found him reading his old love letters from his wife, tears smearing the words, she sent him up to the nursery, where he discovered his talent as a storyteller. Sitting Mink on his knee, he described her grandmother riding on top of an elephant while hunting tigers, and the gasp of the birds when they saw her dazzling jewels. Dressed in black, the girl listened in silence, her eyes never leaving him for a second, and each day he returned with another spectacular episode. Several weeks later, at the dining table no longer set for three, Mink spoke, asking the name of the elephant. It was then that the Maharaja realised how much he had rather than how much he had lost, and he abandoned the absinthe drinkers in Soho. Eventually there came a time when neither could remember Pooki being a stranger, and when the Princess grew up, she asked her to be her lady’s-maid, and never once did the servant allow her to wear rabbit.

Mink blew a final mouthful of smoke against the windowpane. “Don’t worry,” she said, without turning. “I’m going to find out who did it.”

Pooki remained by the piano, still clutching the sides of her dress. “Will you be able to, ma’am?” she asked, her voice uneven.

“You just watch me,” she replied, and went to the study to draw up her list of suspects.

DR. HENDERSON WOKE JUST BEFORE
lunchtime, happy in the knowledge that he would get through the day without seeing neither a boil nor his housekeeper. The previous night, he had put up a sign on the front door saying that he would attend emergencies only on Good Friday, and had given Mrs. Nettleship the day off, for his sake as much as hers. Not only was he unsettled by
the sudden onslaught of her ardour, which had continued with undisguised hints about the merits of mature widows, but he was still furious about the anti-masturbation device. He had left it out to give to one of the soldiers, but when he went to fetch it, it had disappeared. He eventually tracked it down to a kitchen drawer, next to the potato ricer. With no hint of an apology for the protracted search, she took it out and thrust it at him as if it were a lost umbrella.

The woman was clearly suffering from a sudden derangement, he concluded from his bedsheets, for it was the only tool of his profession that she normally refused to touch, claiming such proximity would sully the memory of her husband at the bottom of the North Sea. Turning onto his back, he wondered whether there was any way that he had encouraged her. Suddenly he remembered her coming into his bedroom while he was attempting to master the New York plastered look. Then there was his copy of
The Gentleman’s Guide to Politeness and Courtship
next to his bed, which doubtless she had seen and also misconstrued.

Unable to bear the harrowing thought any longer, he threw back his blankets and hunted for his new cycling costume. Lured by an advertisement bearing a gentleman in nifty socks, he had first visited the City branch of Isaac Walton & Co., the high-class tailors and colonial outfitters. But as soon as he walked in, the staff immediately reached for their instruments of humiliation hanging around their necks. “I’m after ready-made,” he hastily explained, backing out. “You’ll be needing the Newington Causeway branch, then, sir,” came the reply, and he closed the door and followed the directions. Such was his delight at not having to be subjected to the terrifying touch of a tailor, he returned home with knickerbockers, a Norfolk jacket, and a waterproof cape. He chose flannel lining, aware that cotton or linen damp from perspiration or rain chilled the bones. Only the previous week he had read of several bad cases of inflammation of the kidneys that had been traced
directly to the linen waistband of knickerbockers. But that wasn’t the end of it. Before he realised what he was doing, he had also picked out a matching cap, a sweater, a shirt, a belt, a tie, a silk sash, and two pairs of diamond-patterned hose. It wasn’t until he was presented with the bill that he was brought back to his senses, and the fantasy of the Princess seeing him charmingly attired while in command of his machine vanished as swiftly as the man at the cash desk took his considerable payment.

Once he was dressed, Dr. Henderson looked at himself in the mirror, trying not to see the extra inches on his waist and those that had vanished from his chest. But the more he ignored them, the more they presented themselves, and he decided to forgo breakfast. All misgivings vanished, however, the moment he put on the finishing touch. For there was nothing more satisfying than a new pair of stockings clinging joyfully to the calf, still too young to have developed the evil habit of sliding down the leg and producing ugly rucks. He rubbed a piece of yellow soap over the joins and edges to prevent them from rubbing, then padded downstairs, admiring his splendidly patterned shins. While making tea, he noticed the freak arrival of the sun, and decided not to delay any further. Slipping a meat biscuit into the pocket of his Norfolk jacket for emergencies, he then peered into his tool bag and checked that it contained an oil can, a wrench, a repair kit, a screwdriver, extra nuts, a piece of copper wire, a pair of bellows, and a yard of string. After removing his nose machine, which had mysteriously found its way inside, he debated whether to bring his cyclist’s tea satchel with its kettle that was guaranteed to boil in a gale. Deciding against it, he put on his shoes and headed to his bicycle in the garden shed with the happy anticipation of his last purchase, a Pattisson Hygienic Cycle Saddle. As he prodded it with eager fingers, he hoped that it would live up to the manufacturer’s claim and conquer the wheelman’s most troubling lament: perineal pressure.

He checked that the saddle was at the correct position, for too long a reach obliged the rider to depend upon momentum to carry him over bad spots, increasing the chance of a tumble. Carrying the bicycle through the house, he climbed on in the front garden and headed up Hampton Court Road. He glanced at the crowd of drinkers outside the King’s Arms, where the drunk woman had almost sold out of pig’s trotters, and just before the Greyhound Hotel turned left into Bushy Park. He pedalled down the famous avenue of stately horse chestnut trees, which would shortly be in full blossom, attracting hordes of annual admirers alerted by excited reports in the newspapers. Dodging the waggonettes plying their way through the park, he wondered how to adopt measures to bring himself to his fair one’s notice, as his courtship manual advised.

Eventually his path was clear and he shot off, the wind whipping the hair protruding from his cap into even tighter curls. He straightened up so as to avoid the unbecoming doubled-up, chest-contracted position assumed by so many, as his bicycling instructor had encouraged him. Alfred Bucket had been recommended by the shop where he had bought his machine. The doctor now realised that he should have taken the disfiguring blue marks on the man’s face, caused by falling on cinders, as a warning. As they stood in the shed behind the shop, the doctor’s initial query about how to use the brake, which he had read was often employed when descending hills, had been met with a distrustful look. Alfred Bucket then told his pupil with the solemnity of a sage that the most useful lesson in managing a machine was to jump ship the moment you felt it running away with you. “Spread your legs wide apart and throw yourself backwards,” counselled the teacher, who then proceeded to demonstrate the emergency rearward dismount.