"What would you do if someone had put powdered glass in your supper?” said the man who had put my supper in front of me ten minutes ago.
“Die, I suppose,” I said, and tried to laugh, but I was in the middle of a mouthful of mint sauce and it came out of my left nostril with a mournful sound.
I adjusted myself on the stool in the corner of the servants’ kitchen and tried to avoid catching his eye. He folded his arms and lent against the sideboard and stuck out his little potbelly at me. He was a butler and dressed like they all used to dress: pallbearer with a dash of opera singer. His name was Barleycorn.
“I mean,” said Barleycorn, “would you be able to tell?”
“Oh yes,” I said, pushing my forkful of lamb round the edge of the plate. “One usually notices oneself dying. Even ordinary private detectives like me tend to pick up on it.”
He sniffed at me. “I don’t see anything remotely amusing about it,” he said.
“Me neither,” I said, and gave a sad look at the lamb.
“I am merely trying to establish your bona fides,” said Barleycorn. He inspected his gloves. He thumbed his cummerbund. He flicked a fly from the sideboard.
He had intercepted me at the great house not a quarter of an hour ago, and led me to this corner of the kitchen, and this plate of cold lamb and mint sauce – with or without powdered glass – under the pretence of the master and mistress of the house being busy at a more freshly prepared dinner upstairs.
“I hope there’s no practical test,” I said, and sent the lamb round once more. The only thing more upsetting was the bolt in the door that led outside: he had drawn it across after seeing me to my seat. It was rusted, gigantic and firmly home.
“What exactly are your qualifications?”
I raised the lamb. There was nothing for it: I pushed it past my lips and swallowed. At least it gave me enough time to avoid answering his question.
“Mind your leg, won’t you?” Another servant in an outfit like a travelling magician – I think they called them footmen – came past my stool, making sure to take as much out of my ankle as had once been taken out of the venerable sheep on my plate.
I didn’t so much as wince. I wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction.
“Do you know what cyanide tastes like?” said the butler as the footman left the room.
“I won’t have any pudding,” I said.
“It’s poor taste to talk like that.”
“Someone around here knows a thing or two about poor taste,” I said. The French cook – he was stirring a pot so large it might have been borrowed from the cannibals of the South Sea Islands – said “Tcha!” and muttered something about pudding that only stiffened my resolve.
I stabbed the cold lamb again and waited to see what the other servants might attempt. A woman in a black servant’s dress by a mangle was glaring at me thoughtfully, as if trying to work out which precise jig to dance upon my grave. A second footman was picking his teeth by the window. A young serving girl was reading a copy of a fashionable magazine and slamming each page down like Moses dispensing with the first draft of the Commandments.
Given the circumstances, I could understand a certain amount of tension. I could endorse a fair amount of hostility. But I couldn’t see why a private detective should have been on the receiving end of it.
At that point the girl had been missing for almost three weeks.
*
On the night before her twentieth birthday a man had climbed into the house through the gardener’s storeroom.
I wasn’t hired because of that or what came next: the story told by footprints that were half flowerbed and half spilt varnish. He had walked through the kitchen, into the hallway, up the stairs, paused on the landing, hesitated by a bathroom, found a corridor, looked inside two bedrooms. And chosen hers.
He’d walked slowly to the bed. They said they could tell he had watched her sleeping for some time. But he’d done more than watching too.
He had pushed a pocket copy of Shelley’s poems into her mouth and tied her limbs with vegetable-patch twine and pulled her downstairs and out through the hall, down two corridors, and this time through a set of French windows and across the kitchen garden, to the edge of a small stream where the trail ended and as far as they knew – besides the footprints and the tooth-marked book and a trail of twine and blood – she had gone forever.
I was called by the Duke and Duchess of Pirbright after the letters came.
The first arrived a week after their daughter, Hattie, had been kidnapped. The second after another three days. Then others daily for the next week.
They were written in multiple hands and some of the language indicated the involvement of more than one person, though it was hard to say for sure.
They were the kind of letter that made you almost wish the end had come already. Most of all they made you wish that whoever had taken her could tell you they weren’t true – and make you believe it.
The duke knew the first was possible; there was every chance his daughter was already dead. The last was beyond him. He was too much a man of the world for that. Which was why he had gone for the only other option. He couldn’t get his daughter back – not in the truest sense – but he could try to get as much of her as was left before it was too late.
I had been hired after the letters – but not to find the duke’s daughter. Nor to find who was behind the kidnapping. Nor to protect his wife from the same fate.
I had been hired to make sure the money was safely exchanged for the girl that late August weekend. I was being paid to iron, fold and wrap the white flag.
And they’d paid me half my fee upfront. And I was wholly ecstatic.
*
The butler left me when I gave him an unsatisfactory answer to a question about garrotes, taking a cobweb-covered bottle of wine from the side and disappearing up the stairs.
When I thanked the cook for my food as I cleared my plate onto the side, he told me to do something highly unsanitary. He was French and must not have known that my French wasn’t bad, having – like most Englishmen my age – spent my formative years being shot at in large holes in French and Belgian fields.
“Experts first, monsieur,” I said.
Before the tip of his beard could stand on end, the second footman came by. I got a ladle-full of gravy down my trouser leg. I felt it burning the hairs beneath. But it was child’s play to pretend the sensation was pleasant. I told him to fill my bath with it if he wanted. He kept walking.
My last mistake was to ask the older woman, now with arms full of pearl-white unfolded napkins, what was wrong.
“Wrong? Where? Here? God forbid!”
She tried to make a dramatic gesture to accompany this sarcasm, but in the process lost half the napkins. I gathered as many as I could and deposited them on top of her pile till her face almost disappeared from view.
“Thank you,” said the old serving woman. A fraction of a smile appeared. “I suppose you may not be all bad.”
“That’s why I was hired, I assume.”
“Oh, we know why you were hired,” she said, and her smile fell to pieces. “You’re lucky we let you eat with us.”
“You didn’t,” I said. “I was given a cold supper in the corner.”
“And only because Mr Barleycorn has gone soft in the head.”
“With my help, Miss Pirbright will be back by Sunday night.”
“You should be proud.”
“Someone has to do it,” I said. “Wouldn’t you rather it was done well? I’m not sure I can take any blame.”
“There is blame and worse that belongs to your entire species.” “Men?”
“Detectives,” she said. “Police too.”
“What blame?”
“Of only being involved when there’s money at hand.”
“This is only a small part of the affair,” I said. “I could not have been involved in the rest if I’d wanted to; without the duke and duchess inviting me, it was really the police’s business.”
“You could have fooled the police,” she said.
“Are you telling me the kidnapping was never investigated?” “Don’t pretend you didn’t know.”
It didn’t matter now, and there was nothing I could do about it, but it was news to me.
I saw Barleycorn back in the doorway. He shook his head. “They’ll only see you after the coffee,” he said. “It’s no use looking at me like that.”
The service entrance; the stool in the corner of the servants’ kitchen; the bolt drawn across the door – at the very least I was being reminded of my station. At the worst I was being stalled whilst one hundred and fifty thousand pounds sat somewhere waiting for me to do my job.
A respectable private detective would be too embarrassed to do anything but wait. I was a private detective – but not the respectable kind.
The walking pile of handkerchiefs left the room. I sucked my clay pipe and paused till Barleycorn had his back to me. Then I leant against the range. The French cook’s cannibal pot bubbled and hissed.
I caught it with my elbow.
It turned out to be quite a solid pot. More solid, at any rate, than my bones. I had to catch it three or four times, like an old man digging someone in the ribs over a saucy joke.
The French cook – currently doing something in the corner with root vegetables – almost noticed.
But I felt it tip – and at that point didn’t look back.
I leapt to my table in the corner. There was an explosion on the floor behind me, followed by an explosion of exceedingly French French. I heard Barleycorn rush to help.
Then I turned to the door and threw the bolt. It made a sound like a steam brake. But no one noticed. I was out on the dusky lawns of Wealdcombe Manor and on the way to meet my client before any butler could stop me.
