The Pigeon Pie Mystery (28 page)

Slowly Pooki stood up, hitched up her dress and petticoats, and raised her knicker leg. Madam Sharkey shuffled round the table and bent down, both knees cracking.

“Just as I thought,” she muttered. “A stubborn character.” She peered even closer. “The shape and colour indicate someone who will fall in love, and ’er love will be reciprocated. However, this is a secret love, and there will be all ’ell to pay when it’s found out. Now, as for the question of ’airs …”

Pooki interrupted her. “I do not want my mole read after all, Madam Sharkey. I, like my mistress, do not believe in such nonsense. I would like my dreams interpreted. That is what I believe in.”

Madam Sharkey hauled herself up again, clutching the table. Returning to her chair, she unfurled her hand and looked at the Princess. Mink held her gaze through the tobacco smoke, and slowly dropped another coin.

“So, what do you dream of?” the woman asked, sitting back with her arms crossed over her collapsed bosom.

Pooki thought for a moment. “Last night I dreamt of milk,” she said.

“Love affairs,” replied Madam Sharkey.

“The night before it was myrtle.”

“Declaration of love,” she shot back.

“But most often of all I dream of nightingales.”

“An ’appy and well-assorted marriage.”

Pooki gripped the egg to almost cracking point. “I have just remembered that, like my mistress, I do not believe in the interpretation of dreams. It is just trickery. Tarot cards. That is what I believe in.”

The East End prophet looked at Mink, who returned her gaze, tapping a coin slowly on the table before sliding it to her.

Drawing a pack of grubby cards from her pocket, Madam Sharkey shuffled them, muttering what could have been a shopping list. As the woman cut them, she asked Pooki to think of the question she wanted answering. She then spread four cards on the table, and turned one over. All three women looked at the grim reaper.

“I don’t think you shuffled the cards correctly, Madam Sharkey. Would you mind doing so again?” asked Mink.

“That’s what I calls cheating, but if you insist,” the fortune-teller replied, scooping the cards towards her, and shuffling them into the pack. As she cut them, she asked Pooki to think once more of the question, then dealt again.

All three women stared at the same card.

The soothsayer adjusted her wig. “Best of three?” she asked, with scarcely a glimmer of gold.

When the skeleton and scythe appeared for the third time, Madam Sharkey quickly picked up the cards with trembling hands. Reaching into her skirt pocket, she pulled out the coins and handed them back to the Princess with an entreaty never to return.

“What stuff and nonsense,” said Mink, once they were outside. “Let’s see what else there is. I saw a booth of marvels earlier.”

But as they approached, Pooki had no interest in the five-legged pig, the tattooed couple having tea, or the perpetually sobbing man.

“How about a false nose?” asked the Princess, spotting the hawker. “They usually cheer you up. I still remember that All Fools’ Day when you woke me up wearing one, and I got you back by asking you to tell the cook I wanted some plaice without spots.”

“I do not want a false nose, ma’am,” said the servant, her head lowered.

Mink glanced at her. “Why don’t you tell me one of the butterman’s jokes?” she suggested, bracing herself for the torment.

The servant shook her head, and they continued wandering round the fair. It was a while before she spoke again.

“They will make a waxwork of me, ma’am, and put it in Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors with all the other murderers.”

The Princess glanced at her. “They would never find enough wax for your feet,” she joked.

But Pooki didn’t smile. “When will you find out who did it, ma’am?” she asked, her head still lowered.

“Soon,” replied Mink, looking away to hide her unease.

Pooki turned to her. “How soon is soon, ma’am?”

The Princess didn’t reply.

“If it is all right with you, ma’am, I would like to go home now,” said the servant.

As they started back towards the palace, passing the sherbet seller and the fire-eater, Pooki peered at a group of men. “There is that doctor who soaked your walking costume, ma’am,” she said. “I do not know whether it will ever recover.”

Mink looked over and saw Dr. Henderson at the try-your-strength machine. The mistress and the maid stopped to watch as he lifted the mallet and brought it down. The puck limped up without the slightest sound from the bell and fell. He tried again, but it rose even less high than before. The soldiers standing behind him, who had just come out of a drinking booth, started to jeer. Abandoning the hammer, he walked off to the neighbouring stand as the bell finally sounded, courtesy of one of the soldiers. Passing a coin to the showman, he picked up a rifle and aimed it at the display of clay pipes. But after several attempts they remained irrefutably intact.

“Excuse me for a minute while I put that man out of his misery,” Mink said to Pooki.

She walked over, took the gun from him, and aimed. Immediately the pipe in the middle of the top row shattered. The moment of silence that followed was soon drowned by rowdy applause and
calls for the Princess to have another go. She looked the doctor in the eye, handed him back the weapon, and disappeared into the crowd without a word. He watched her until she was out of sight, and was so lost in his thoughts he failed to hear Silas Sparrowgrass offering him a pair of spectacles for his next attempt.

CHAPTER X
The Impolite Shooting of Lady Montfort Bebb

EWS
spread as fast as one of the palace fires that Mrs. Bagshot had returned. After her carriage was spotted drawing up at Trophy Gate, word reached her neighbours at the back of the monument before her and her extensive luggage. Shortly afterwards, one of her maids was seen in the post office sending a telegram to Peter Robinson, Jay’s rival in Regent Street. Its black carriage duly arrived, bearing a chalk-faced female assistant sitting amongst a morose swamp of mourning paraphernalia, including ready-made dresses, gloves, mantles, and widow’s bonnets.

Glancing at the carriage, Mink climbed into the waiting fly and asked the driver to take her to Dr. Frogmore’s practice in Thames Ditton. As she settled back, she wondered again whether General Bagshot had said anything significant to him in his last moments alive. Perhaps he had confided in the doctor, telling him a secret that the medical man hadn’t revealed at the inquest with all the reporters there. Almost certainly he would be more reliable than Silas Sparrowgrass, whom, given his mendacity and dislike of the General, she had promptly added to her list of suspects,
his only saving grace being his adoration of his rabbit. Glancing back at the mourning carriage, she wondered whether she really would be able to discover who had killed the widow’s husband. Her stomach turned as she imagined what might happen if she failed to do so. She then thought of everyone else she had lost: her mother, her day-old sister, her father, and finally Mark Cavendish. As the tide of abandonment threatened to engulf her, she turned to face the front and contemplated the view to distract herself.

She didn’t have to wait to see Dr. Frogmore. Since his spectacular misdiagnosis had been reported in the newspapers, not even lowering his fees had enticed all of his patients back. His waiting room was as deserted as his bald head, and he sat with the haunted look of the ruined at his dusty desk, piled with dirty dishes. Wearing her most frivolous hat, and an extra dab of Penhaligon’s Hamman Bouquet eau de toilette, Mink lowered herself into the seat opposite him. She reached into her bag and drew out a box of Charbonnel et Walker chocolates, one of three rapid purchases she had made in the West End that morning. Placing it on the desk in front of her, she opened it eagerly, then gazed at the selection, a finger on her chin as she deliberated.

“I think I’ll try the Butter Fourré,” she declared. “All that butter and chocolate ganache …” She popped it in her mouth. “Oh, my,” she murmured, her eyes closed. “Such heaven!” The general practitioner swallowed, looking from her to the chocolates.

Suddenly she opened her eyes and trained them on her prey. “Dr. Frogmore,” she said, with a smile even sweeter than her lure. “I saw you at the General’s inquest and was struck by your integrity. I have no time for quacks or homeopaths, which, in my mind, are one in the same.”

The doctor beamed.

“I was wondering whether you possibly have a cure for corpulence?” she asked, her head tilted to one side.

The doctor scratched his stomach, which reached his desk long before the rest of him. “I recommend the Banting System, Princess, which you’ve no doubt heard of. It prohibits sugar, fat, and starch,” he said, in his high-pitched voice. “Don’t let the fact that Mr. Banting was an undertaker put you off. He moved in the right circles: he built the Duke of Wellington’s coffin. Of course I add a little twist of my own, which my patients find most beneficial. I advocate the drinking of vinegar and thorough mastication,” he said, his eyes flicking to the chocolates. “But the patient will have to come to see me in person.”

“I am the patient,” Mink replied coyly.

The doctor looked her up and down admiringly. “But, Princess, you are not in the least corpulent. Au contraire.”

Mink put a hand on the desk and leant forward. “Dr. Frogmore,” she said, her eyes wide. “I am on my way to being so, and when I get there I want to be ready. There are certain things in life that one cannot, and should not, resist, and Charbonnel et Walker chocolates are one of them.”

She lowered her eyes to the box and pondered. “It will have to be the English Violet Cream,” she said, picking it up and pushing it through her rouged lips. She chewed slowly, then murmured, her tongue thick with flowery fondant: “So traditional, yet so exotic.”

The doctor dabbed his forehead with his handkerchief.

“For years I’ve resisted their establishment,” the Princess continued. “Then one day I was buying a fan in New Bond Street and went in on a whim.” She held up a hand. “Do not venture through their door, doctor, if you wish to keep your comely figure. I have hardly been out of the place since, and my corsets are quite tight. We ladies must keep ourselves trim, trim, trim, unlike you gentlemen, who remain so utterly desirable whatever your size,” she added from underneath her lashes.

Dr. Frogmore lowered his numerous chins and smiled as he turned a faint shade of pink. He kept his eyes on her as he slowly opened a drawer, groped inside for a sheet explaining the diet, and
passed it to her. “Masticate thoroughly, and don’t drink anything during meals so when the food is swallowed it becomes mixed with undiluted gastric secretions,” he advised, with a glance at the open box. “And drink lots of vinegar, of course.”

The Princess handed him some coins, but he refused them with a waggle of a finger and a flash of his dimples. “There’s no fee for you, my Princess.”

She quickly folded up the sheet and stuffed it into her bag. “Thank God there’s always tomorrow,” she declared, and bit tenderly into her next selection. The doctor swallowed at the sound of the breaking chocolate. “The Crown, my favourite!” she oozed, her eyes half closed. “Chocolate, hazelnuts, butter, marzipan, and whisky. What bliss!” She turned her gaze on the doctor, holding the other half aloft. “Did you know that the Prince of Wales met Madame Charbonnel in Paris and was so impressed by her chocolates he encouraged her to come to London to make them here?”