Enter Pale Death Page 13

  Hunnyton frowned at the reference. “An old country trick. There’s more than one way to ruin a horse. To make it skittish and bad-tempered, they take a half-crown coin and run the bevelled edges along the soft part of the mouth. No outward sign it’s been tampered with. But it can drive a horse crazy when someone tries to put in the bit and then the poor animal gets an undeserved reputation for bad temper. It lowers its price dramatically in the sale ring, of course. There’s more than one scallywag groom who’s hit back at his master using that trick. Still, if ever I get my hands on the bloke who did that …”

  The cracking of the knuckles in his large hands as they suddenly became fists finished the sentence for him and won him an approving smile and a pat on the hand from Adelaide.

  “I’ll be there holding your coat, Superintendent,” she offered.

  “Father doesn’t say much in his statement about Lavinia—assuming her body would be dealt with by a medical authority, I expect. Quite proper. Not his place to comment. But he did note some oddities.” She reached for a small silver box lying on the table, a box Joe had taken for a cigarette container. “The wounds to her head, neck and torso were extensive and clearly lethal, but her hands were untouched. Hard to discern by torchlight in the falling rain and welters of blood but he smelled something strange on her right hand. It was clutching a mess of … he swears it was cake of some kind. He took a sample of it, left the rest in place to be inspected by others and brought it back to have a look under a light. He probably ought not to have done that but he always thinks he knows best and his interest in animals must have pushed him to do it. That’s what I say. You’re probably thinking: ‘Interfering old nuisance!’ ”

  “Not at all,” said Joe politely. “If he hadn’t taken the steps to preserve it, it would have disappeared with the remainder down the drainage channel on the autopsy table. Some solid evidence at last! May we see?”

  The metal box was strong and airtight and Joe struggled to get it open.

  “Lord, what a pong!” Hunnyton exclaimed as Joe removed the lid.

  “It’s not Sachertorte, I think we’d all agree,” Adelaide said, wrinkling her nose.

  Joe poked at the contents with a pencil end. “But it is cake. Was cake. It looks more like the sweepings of an ancient Egyptian mummy’s tomb. A sop to Cerberus? Some opiate in there, did your father assume? A little something to quieten the horse?”

  “You’ll need to take it to a laboratory in Cambridge if you want to find out. My father’s equipment was not up to the job. But I’ll tell you something. Pa’s not easily put off. He decided that if the cake was laced with something mysterious intended for use on the horse, it was probably acquired from the chemist. He went along and grilled old Mr. Morrison. Made him show his dispensing book.” Her eyes gleamed and she said apologetically, “No right to do that, I’m sure you’d be the first to tell him, but Pa can be very forceful and the local … country shyness”—she looked with smiling apology at Hunnyton—“ ‘foot shuffling’ he calls it—irritates him no end. Faced with all that ‘Don’t you be asking me, sir, twern’t none o’ my business,’ stuff he turns into a raging bully. Interesting, what he managed to extract, though. And no illegalities revealed, so no harm done. The day before the adventure, our innocent chemist had sold four bags of exotic culinary spices. To Grace Aldred, Lavinia’s maid.” She handed over a sheet of paper. “He took a copy: fenugreek, cumin, rosemary, cinnamon. Grace told him the cook had requested them to make up a curry.”

  “Sounds reasonable to me. Not sure about the rosemary,” Joe said, “but the others are all constituents of Indian dishes. They do, however, as I think you’ve guessed, have another quite different use.” He looked at Hunnyton, who understood the unspoken question and nodded imperceptibly.

  The superintendent undertook the explanation. “Horse magic! In folklore, those spices are all attractants. Horses have huge nostrils and a very sensitive sense of smell. If you want a horse to love you or just behave itself in your presence you can do it by magicking it with these scents, which it adores.” He grinned. “They tell me oil of cloves dabbed on a hanky works a treat too.”

  “That’s the refined way of doing it,” Adelaide said. “My father came upon a ploughman once, stripped to his skin in the shed, in the act of wiping down his armpits with a bit of stale bread. When Pa challenged him on his strange behaviour, he explained that he was taking on a new horse. This sweat business was a good way, known to all the horsemen, of making horses familiar with their handler’s scent.” She wrinkled her nose. “I must say, this bit of cake smells as though it’s been somewhere even less salubrious than a ploughman’s armpit at close of play on Plough Sunday.”

  Joe picked up the box, looked more closely, held it to his nose and inhaled deeply. For a moment his head reeled and his stomach churned. He couldn’t quite smother an exclamation of distress so visceral the other two turned a gaze of solicitous enquiry on him. He put the lid back on firmly and, gasping apologetically through gritted teeth, recalled: “Trenches. Pinned down. Holed up unable to clear out for a fortnight. Plague of rats feasting on the bodies we couldn’t dispose of. The men bayoneted them. Left them lying about in piles to rot. Same smell.” He stabbed an accusing finger at the silver box. “Rotten rat carcass. It’s the livers that go first … the stinkiest bit … Excuse me …”

  Joe dashed from the room and, thankful that the front door had been left open, he made his way quickly to the nearest rose bed. Through his unpleasant retching noises, he was aware of a clattering of clogs down the hallway. A moment later, a white cotton handkerchief was pushed over his nose.

  “Lavender. Breathe it in. Antidote.”

  A cool, professional hand ran lightly over his forehead. A warm, very unprofessional voice murmured in his ear, “That’ll teach you to go sticking that great conk of yours into unknown substances. Poisons can be inhaled, you know. But I don’t think it’s poison that’s provoked this reaction. It’s memory. Smell and taste—they can be very acute and the mind associates them with pleasure or pain we’ve experienced in the past. This is very real nausea you’re suffering but the brain will soon sound the all-clear and you’ll wonder what on earth that was all about. I’m sure you needn’t worry.”

  “Embarrassing, though! What do you prescribe, Doctor?” Joe managed to say, beginning to win the struggle with his heaving stomach.

  “Keep starching the old upper lip and stay away from dead rats, of course. Ready to come back inside? Your friend is anxious.”

  Hunnyton was standing by with a glass of water when they rejoined him.

  Adelaide exchanged a meaningful look with him and voiced the thoughts of both of them. “Just imagine, Superintendent—if it can do that to him—what must it have done for an animal with a hundred times the sensitivity?”

  “Terrified the poor beast to death,” said Hunnyton. “I think we understand now after that little demonstration. Is the commissioner all right?” He peered at Joe with concern. “Looks a bit seedy to me … Now listen. There’s not many who know and I ought not to be speaking out, but … oh, well. We all accept that it’s fear and its response, flight, that dominate in a horse? Fear is what’s kept the species alive through the millions of years they’ve been on earth.” Joe and Adelaide nodded. “Man has always tried to influence and tame horses to fulfil his own requirements. He’s worked out some subtle ways of doing that. There’s horse lure, like the curry spices, and then there’s horse bate. Nasty stuff that has the opposite effect. Smear a trace of it on the posts of a horse’s stall and it won’t pass between them even if it’s starving. Push a load of it on a bun close up to its nostrils and you’d send it out of its mind. Do that when you’re advancing on it in a narrow space, driving it backwards, blocking its escape route, and, mad with fear, it’s going to tear right through you. As its nature insists. It has no choice.”

  “Bate, you say? What is ‘bate’? Superintendent, what exactly do you think was smeared on that piece of cake?” Ad
elaide asked. “What’s the commissioner just breathed into his lungs? I insist on hearing.”

  “Decayed stoat liver, steeped until rancid in rabbit’s blood and cat’s urine, then dried out. Most likely,” he said with relish.

  “You can’t get that off the shelf at Mr. Harrison’s,” Adelaide said. “And how on earth do you get a cat to pee in a pot?”

  “Well, lacking a cooperative moggie, horse’s urine is more plentiful and does the job.”

  “You’re having me on!”

  “No indeed. Believe me—this is serious magic! Produced locally, I’d say, to an ages-old recipe by someone with the knowledge. The Horse Knowledge.”

  “It sounds like hogwash to me,” Adelaide said crisply. “Well, no, that’s about the one ingredient that didn’t feature in your little confection. Why do people think they need to have recourse to magic potions? My father’s been handling horses all his working life without benefit of fenugreek and cumin. Rabbit’s blood and stoat’s liver have never featured in his materia medica.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Horses hate stoats, even the live ones,” Joe remarked. “The sight and smell of one on the road will send them into paroxysms of fear or fury—you must have noticed?”

  “We certainly didn’t miss the paroxysms in the rose bed, I’ll grant you that,” she said thoughtfully and summed up for herself: “So, Lavinia bought the lure from Mr. Harrison, helped herself to a bun from the tea table and gave it a very special frosting. It’s this she must have thought she was using when she went down to the stable to make her overtures to young Lucifer. But somewhere along the way—where? and when?—the sweet spiced cake was … exchanged?—for a piece that had been ‘bated’ with a substance obnoxious and threatening to the horse. Am I getting this right?”

  Time for Hunnyton to show his cards, Joe decided. Professional etiquette told him he should wait until they were alone together before putting him to the question but a glance at the doctor’s face, good-humoured and quizzical, made this reticence seem unnecessary. “You’re getting it right,” he said. “But, Hunnyton, it’s time to come clean, I think. Son of a horseman of repute as you tell me you are, you must have acquired the knowledge of lures and bates—the ingredients must be as well known to you as the recipe for fruit scones. In Scotland this knowledge is passed down to a select few initiates, never more than one or two per district. The numbers of these have diminished drastically since the war and few remain on either side of the border. Now tell us, which local man would have had the skills to mark Lady Truelove’s card for her? Who would have the formulae for lures and bates off by heart?”

  If Adelaide Hartest hadn’t been present, turning her bright, concerned face on the superintendent, Joe would have added: “Starting with your own name …”

  Hunnyton replied at once. “Well, you can scratch my name from any list you’re drawing up. My pa was one of the Horsemen, no doubt about that, but they were so darned secretive no one but the members knew who they were, not even their families. Once a month on a Saturday, he’d put on his best suit with waistcoat and watch-chain. My mother would brush his hat and polish his boots and off he’d go to Bury. Sometimes Ipswich. Dad’s night out at the Whistling Ploughboy or the Great White Mare. I was a grown lad going about a grown lad’s business in Bury one Saturday when I came across him with his mates. Not a drinking outing—though much ale was drunk. I asked about, listened at locked doors and discovered the meetings were the monthly gatherings of the Horse Society. As hush-hush as any Masonic do. More so.

  “At home he kept his horse remedies, pills and potions in a locked cupboard in his shed. Those were the days when vet’s fees were high,” he said with an apologetic grin to Adelaide. “He’d dispense them to anyone needing them, but there were one or two items in there he kept for his use only. We kids never knew what the mixtures were. He had a clever way of keeping his secrets. Every now and again when supplies were running low, he give us three boys a scrap of paper. A shopping list. Never on the same day and never together. He’d send us off to local chemists. Different chemists in different towns. When he’d gathered in all the ingredients, he’d mix them up in his shed. To this day I’m not sure I could reconstitute any of his recipes.”

  “But someone in the village knows, evidently,” said Adelaide. “The knowledge was passed to—sold to—Lady Truelove, with awful consequences. Lure swapped for bate? Now that’s malice aforethought.”

  “I’d call it murder, Doctor,” Hunnyton said.

  “But murder that’s almost impossible to prove,” Joe warned. “I hardly like to think why we’re even bothering to attempt an enquiry.”

  He was shot down by two focussed glares. Uncomfortably, he tried to justify his pessimism. “No evidence … time delay … lack of witnesses … laughed out of court …” He heard himself bumbling.

  “All true, alas,” Hunnyton chimed in in reluctant support. “Give us some fingerprinting, footprinting, blood-typing and scene-of-crime forensic stuff to do and we’re your men.” He shook his head and glowered. “But this death by horse at arm’s length, weeks after the event … I dunno!” He sighed.

  Adelaide nodded in agreement. “You know, if this were a medical problem, I’d say Lavinia’s death was not a solution but a symptom. A symptom of a great malaise in the family. All is not well up at the Hall, that much is clear.” She got to her feet and looked at her watch. Consultation at an end. “Time you gents went off to hear what Gracie Aldred has to say for herself, I think. I say—do you mind if I tell this to my father? The curry spices and stoat’s entrails? Professionally, he’ll be very intrigued. Might even put some on his shopping list.”

  “Yes, Doctor, of course. Something may occur to him. He may, in spite of annoying Suffolky reticence,” Hunnyton gave her a cheeky grin, “be handed a confidence or two—something someone would rather not divulge to a policeman.” He rose to his feet. “Sadly, not everyone finds us congenial company.”

  She went to stand in front of him, eye to eye.

  Ouch! Not a good move, Doctor, Joe thought, knowing what he did of Hunnyton’s gentling powers.

  “Look, Mr. Policeman, reticence is all very well in its place, which would be somewhere in about the middle of last century. You may call me ‘Doctor’ when I’m attending to your ingrowing toenail. ‘Miss Hartest’ when you see me in church. When you’re teasing me in my parlour, you must call me ‘Adelaide.’ And your name is?”

  “It’s Adam. Adam Hunnybun,” he said without thinking.

  Her face lit up with delight as she repeated the name to herself and, for an awful moment, Joe thought she might take him for the teddy bear he much resembled and give him a hug.

  “And my name’s Joe,” Joe said, adding a silent, “As if anyone cared.”

  CHAPTER 11

  As they climbed back into the car Hunnyton grumbled, “How the blazes did she know I have an ingrowing toenail?”

  “It’s the way you walk,” Joe said kindly. “You favour your left foot. Not a particularly adventurous guess—most coppers have them.” He found he was reluctant to leave go of the image of the young woman they’d just encountered. “That’s a wonderful girl! I wasn’t happy to hear her call herself an ‘old maid.’ ”

  “Nor was I. She’s wrong on the first half anyway. Not what you’d really call old. She was twenty-seven last week.”

  “Now how would you know that?”

  “While you were being attended to in the rose garden I peeked inside the birthday cards lined up on the mantelpiece.”

  “So—hardly old then.”

  “No. And she was misleading us on the second half too, unless I mistake.”

  “Now how would you know that?” Joe said again but his voice now conveyed a chilly rebuke rather than a question. A woman’s honour would always be defended by Joe whatever the circumstances. Whoever the woman.

  Hunnyton picked up the warning and, as Joe had come to expect, backed away. Advance, retreat, concede territory, disarm, advance again
, eyes averted. Joe wondered if he’d recognise the moment the superintendent was ready to throw the saddle over his back. “I wouldn’t know that,” the horseman said easily. “Evidence not so readily available. You might well have a better insight, city gent that you are. It just occurs to me that a woman of her quality, working at her trade, with her chances, well, it would be a bit of a surprise if … Just choosy, I expect. Hard to tell when she comes in from the garden looking like a rook-scarer that’s been pulled through a thorn hedge, but there’s something about her … She’s friendly and yet she has a sort of shield around her. Get close and you’d bounce off.”

  “I noticed that, but she’s very unusual. I could swear I’ve seen her, or her like, somewhere before …”

  “You have. You pass her every day on your way to work. On the Embankment. She’s standing with a dirty great spear in one hand, chariot reins in the other. She’s hurling abuse at the Roman army and she’s made of bronze,” Hunnyton said, chuckling. “Boadicea! Corst, blast! You wouldn’t want to get the wrong side of that one! Doctor Hartest is a corker but those pruning shears she keeps in her pocket are as much of a warning as the scythes on Boadicea’s chariot wheels. ‘Keep off! You could lose a limb.’ ”

  This was a disappointing response. A crude cover to deflect the interest Joe was sure he’d noticed?

  “You’re too severe,” he said easily. “I’ve remembered now where I’ve seen her before! She’s not the Queen of the Iceni, she’s a Botticelli goddess … Flora’s her name and she takes centre stage in the painting of Primavera.”

  Hunnyton frowned, trying to recall it.

  “You know the one—there’s the three Graces on the left, sketchily dressed in diaphanous dresses, dancing about in a bosky dell, cupids and cherubs shooting each other and just to the right of centre, the only one who’s looking at the camera, so to speak, the most amazing girl with honey-coloured hair, a deliciously wicked smile and slanting eyes. She’s offering you a choice bloom from her pinny-ful of wildflowers. Or anything else you have in mind.” He sighed.