Rattle His Bones Read online

  Pettigrew always returned from his holiday laden with rock specimens. Until he had studied them thoroughly, he had little interest in anything already classified, catalogued, labelled, and locked away. Weeks, if not months, would pass before he discovered that the jewels in his display cases were all as false as the Cullinan “diamond.”

  Stepping off the train at the Whitechapel station, he went up to the noisy, anonymous street.

  The strass glass gems were ready. They looked to him just as good as the real jewels. Having—that night two weeks ago—taken photographs and minutely precise measurements of the originals, and matched the colours against dozens of samples, the old man swore he had made perfect copies.

  “Better qvality you vill novhere get,” he declared. “Vunce zese stones are beautifully set, only an eggspert can ze difference tell. Your vife vill be proud to vear. You vant I tell you ze address mine cousin’s, can make rings, necklaces, bracelets, vhat you like?”

  “No, thank you!” He lifted his attaché case onto the work table and opened it. “My wife has her own favourite jeweller. Here you are.”

  Peering through thick spectacles, the old man watched him count out every note. Then he tenderly tucked each of his creations into its own little chamois bag. The exchange was made. Another bridge crossed.

  He left it late, until even the most dedicated of his colleagues had surely gone home. It couldn’t be helped that that made his own presence the more questionable. He must not be seen!

  This time, he had to put the keys back in Pettigrew’s desk. The gods were assuredly on his side. As he left the Mineral Gallery, nothing moved among the giraffes and okapis. Nothing moved on the stairs. No footsteps echoed. Turning left, he sped to the Keeper of Mineralogy’s office.

  The key which had grated, he had taken to a locksmith to be smoothed. Now it rotated in the lock as easily as a spoon in a soft-boiled egg. He was in and out of the office in no more than ninety seconds.

  He intended to leave via the giraffes and the back staircase at the north end, but as he came abreast of the main stairs to the second floor, he changed his mind. If he was spotted, the farther from the Mineral Gallery the better. It would be safer to go along the far side of the Central Hall. The stairs tempted him, arching over the hall below, but he resisted—far too exposed. Back he went and around, past the iron gate and Pettigrew’s office, past the entrance to the Lower Mammals: stuffed everything from aardvark to zebra.

  The stairs rose on his right, now, and ahead four steps led down to British Nesting Birds.

  A shadow moved. His heart stood still.

  “I weren’t asleep, sir,” protested a thick voice. From his seat on the steps, a stout police constable lumbered to his feet. An elderly man, he blinked bewilderedly as he moved forward, straightening his jacket. “Jest resting me pins a minute. The knees ain’t what they was.”

  “I shan’t report you, officer.” He had to force the words through his constricted throat.

  His one thought now was to get away without doing anything which might fix him in the man’s memory. His head averted, trying not to scurry, he carried on between the glass cases, scrutinized as he passed by the beady eyes of plover and pigeon. The policeman would surely presume he had come from the Lower Mammals, or perhaps down the stairs from the second floor. Anyway, the fellow would not mention seeing him, for fear of his unauthorized nap coming to light.

  The door to the stairwell closed behind him. Down the stairs he ran, past the ground floor and on down to the basement.

  An old man, confused with sleep, the constable would not remember whom he had seen—probably had not recognized him. The police seconded to the Natural History Museum could not know every employee by sight. No prompt outcry would make him recall the incident, for the substitution of paste for precious stones would not be discovered for ages. Should not be discovered.

  With an effort, he slowed his stride. The gloomy corridor seemed endless. At last he reached the still-gloomier pillared cavern beneath the east wing. He was halfway across when he heard the approaching tramp of police boots.

  He froze behind a pillar. A regular patrol? Or had the constable upstairs reported his presence?

  The officer passed no more than ten feet from him, swinging an electric torch so that its beam probed the darkest corners. If it was a search, it was far from systematic—but nonetheless alarming.

  His heart pounding, palms sweaty, he ducked around the brick pillar. Suppose the old man was suspicious, had called down to his colleagues in the Central Hall. Suppose they put a guard on the basement exit? He dared not try to leave carrying the jewels.

  Better to lock them in his office overnight and take them home tomorrow at midday, at the end of the short Saturday workday, when he was one of a swarm of departing employees.

  No, he did not want to keep them at home. He did not know how long it would take to find a buyer, and when the paste gems were discovered, the police might search everyone’s residences. And what if the theft was somehow detected before tomorrow noon? It would be safer to hide the real stones somewhere in the museum until the furor died down. Then, if they were found, there would be nothing to link them to him.

  The torchbeam bobbed away, the footsteps faded. As he let out the breath he had unconsciously been holding, the answer came to him.

  Perfect! He could hide the jewels tomorrow morning, before the museum opened to the public, and no one who saw him would ask what he was doing. No one else would conceive of looking there, however long he left them. When the moment was right, he could retrieve them with ease.

  He should never have doubted himself. Not only was his plan brilliant to start with, but he was quite capable of improvising brilliantly when advisable. He was going to outwit the lot of them.

  2

  August 1923

  Through grey drizzle, Daisy peered up Brompton Road towards Knightsbridge. She was sure she felt her shingled curls frizzing in the damp air, in spite of the protection of her blue cloche hat and cheerfully pillar-box red umbrella.

  Among the drays and horse-lorries, taxi-cabs and ancient hansoms, chauffeur-driven motor-cars and damp errandboys on bicycles, towered at least half a dozen omnibuses. Like honeybees, they swooped to taste the queues of nectar-people at the flower-stops.

  A Number 30 bumbled towards the corner where she stood, closely followed by a 96. She stepped back to make room for descending passengers.

  Ah, there was a 74. Daisy hurried to meet it. Alec had assured her his daughter, Belinda, was perfectly capable at the age of nine of getting herself and Derek from St. John’s Wood to Kensington, but she was still anxious. They did not have to change ’buses, true. But brought up in the country herself, with occasional visits to London a matter of train and cab, she recalled her confusion over where to get off when she first came to live in town.

  The 74 stopped. Three or four people stepped down, the conductor assisting an elderly woman, who stood on the pavement struggling to open her black umbrella. Daisy suppressed an impulse to help, and addressed the conductor.

  “I’m meeting two children, two nine-year-olds. A little girl with ginger pigtails—”

  “Aunt Daisy!” Derek thundered down the winding stair. “Aunt Daisy, is it true a gentleman goes first down the steps?”

  “Yes.”

  “I told you so!” Belinda scampered down behind him.

  “And then he turns to help the lady down into the street,” said Daisy.

  “Oh!” Already on the pavement, her nephew swung round, grabbed Bel’s hand, and tugged her off the platform.

  Belinda landed safely, protesting, “Not like that, silly!”

  “That’s not quite it,” Daisy agreed, laughing. “We’ll practise later, but come along now. I’ve got an appointment with the Director of Geology. You had better both try to squeeze under my umbrella. Why on earth did you sit on top in this rain?”

  “You can see better,” Belinda pointed out, and Derek added, “It’s more fu
n. Besides, it’s not raining very hard and it’s warm—after all, it’s summer—and I’m not very wet, but I shall be if we all try to share the umbrella ’cause I’ll get drips down my neck. You ladies can have it,” he said grandly. “And I’ll carry that for you, Aunt Daisy. What is it?”

  “A tripod for the camera. Be careful, won’t you? It’s Lucy’s.”

  The ’bus moved on down Fulham Road. The policeman on point duty held up the traffic with white gloves and whistle, and they crossed the street toward the Brompton Oratory. Belinda, the Londoner, pointed it out to the provincial Derek.

  “It’s a sort of church,” she explained knowledgeably, “RC, I think. And that great big building next door is the Victoria and Albert Museum. We went there from school—not the church, the museum. Didn’t you write about that one, too, Aunt Daisy?”

  “That’s right,” Daisy assured her stepdaughter-to-be. “I’m doing a series of articles on London museums for an American magazine.”

  As they walked down Cromwell Road past the smoke-begrimed Italianate church and neo-Renaissance museum, she listened to the children’s chatter. Derek’s stay with the Fletchers seemed to be going well, in spite of Belinda’s grandmother’s antipathy towards the boy’s aunt.

  Old Mrs. Fletcher, in agreement with Daisy’s mother, the Dowager Lady Dalrymple, strongly disapproved of the daughter of a viscount marrying a middle-class Detective Chief Inspector. Daisy suspected that Alec had occasional qualms, fearing that she would regret stepping outside her own class.

  She herself had no doubts whatsoever. She was a working woman. Her father dead in the ’flu pandemic—like Belinda’s mother—and her brother killed in the trenches of Flanders, she had chosen not to sponge on the cousin who inherited the title and the Gloucestershire estate. As for living in the Dower House with her mother, nothing could persuade her. She and Lady Dalrymple had not seen eye to eye for years.

  So the Honourable Daisy Dalrymple worked for her living, and this morning she had a business appointment.

  “Come along, you two, don’t dawdle.”

  They crossed Exhibition Road. Behind the railings rose the long façade and towers of the Natural History Museum. The soot-blackened building was liberally adorned with murky terra cotta in elaborate friezes and tracery around the windows, the world’s flora and fauna petrified. Beastly gargoyles topped the downspouts, and statues of beasts posed between the windows of the topmost story.

  Climbing the steps to the entrance, Belinda asked, “May we go and see the birds and butterflies, please, Aunt Daisy?”

  “Butterflies!” Derek groaned. “We have plenty of birds and butterflies at home. Just like a girl! You’d be just like all the rest if your father wasn’t a Scotland Yard ’tec. You said there’s dinosaurs and whales here. Who wants to look at butterflies when there’s dinosaurs and whales?”

  “There’s all sorts of horrid insects, too,” Bel told him, “the kind boys like.”

  “You’ll have plenty of time for all of them,” Daisy promised. “You can go off without me, but stay together. Go to the butterflies first, and we’ll meet in the Dinosaur Gallery at quarter to one. I’ll treat you to lunch in the refreshment room.”

  “Gosh, honestly?” Belinda breathed, eyes shining. “Spiffing!”

  Accustomed to restaurant meals when his parents visited his prep school, Derek was less impressed. “Good,” he said with uncharacteristic brevity, taking off his damp cap and stuffing it into his pocket as they passed between bearded Darwin and bewhiskered Huxley, seated in marble majesty. “Bel, look, there’s stone monkeys climbing up those pillars.”

  “They go all the way up and over the arch,” said Belinda. “Come along, you can see from here.”

  “Oh yes!” Derek nearly fell over backwards craning his neck to look up at the vaulted roof, part glass, part flower-painted panels, seventy feet above. “Crikey, it’s big!”

  Like a cross between a cathedral and a mainline terminal, Daisy thought, but cleaner than the latter, at least. Inside, the ubiquitous terra cotta was the honey colour of Cotswold stone, patterned with a slate grey which matched the wrinkled skin of the huge African elephant looming in the centre of the hall.

  Derek had to take an admiring turn around the elephant. Then the children went off to the west wing to hunt for birds and butterflies, while Daisy presented herself to the Keeper of Geology.

  Dr. Smith Woodward’s neat, pointed white beard and moustache were no match for Darwin’s magnificent hirsuteness. A slight, elderly man, almost entirely bald, he looked up from a desk covered with papers to view Daisy with some perplexity through studious pince-nez. “Miss … ?”

  “Dalrymple. Daisy Dalrymple. I’m a journalist.”

  “Ah yes.” The paper he had been reading still in his left hand, he came around his desk to shake her hand. He walked with a limp, a relic—Daisy guessed—of one of his adventurous fossil-collecting expeditions.

  Until she rang up to make an appointment, Daisy had assumed geology was all about “rocks and things,” as she said to her house-mate, Lucy. At the Natural History Museum, the switchboard girl told her, rocks and things were the province of the Keeper of Mineralogy, and geology was all about fossils.

  “I’m delighted to meet a young lady who is interested in palæontology.” He spoke with a slight North Country accent. “I flatter myself I was instrumental in admitting ladies to the Geological Society. It was after all a lady, Mrs. Mantell, whose discovery of Iguanodon teeth led to one of the first important studies of dinosaurs, and Mary Anning found the first plesiosaur and ichthyosaur. What can I do for you?”

  Daisy had already explored the museum and framed her article, aimed at American travellers visiting London who had an odd afternoon to fill in. Now she all she wanted was to ask a few questions, and to request permission to take photographs of some of the more spectacular exhibits.

  Dr. Smith Woodward, plainly enamoured of his subject, answered the questions with such a flood of information that Daisy was hard put to it to take it all down in her idiosyncratic version of Pitman’s shorthand.

  He was particularly impassioned over the skull of Piltdown Man, Eoanthropus dawsoni, as he called it. Sure that Daisy must be eager to take a photograph, he took her to see it in the Fossil Mammal Gallery. Daisy did her best to produce murmurs of enthusiastic appreciation. To her, the controversial relic was no more than a couple of scraps of brown-stained bone.

  “I’ll mention it, of course,” she said doubtfully, “but I’m afraid a photograph wouldn’t quite—”

  “Mooning over your musty old bones as usual, eh, Woodward?” boomed an approaching figure, a tall, robust man who strode down the gallery as if he owned the place, scattering members of the public before him like autumn leaves in a brisk breeze.

  Smith Woodward uttered a muted groan.

  “You ought to let ‘em crumble in peace,” said the newcomer scornfully, eyeing Daisy with interest, “instead of fabricating imaginary creatures around ’em. Lot of balderdash, if you ask me.”

  “I didn’t,” pointed out the Keeper of Geology with slightly querulous dignity. As the man showed no sign of moving on, he continued resignedly, “Miss Dalrymple, allow me to introduce our Keeper of Mineralogy, Dr. Pettigrew. Miss Dalrymple is writing an article about the museum.”

  “She won’t want to write about fusty old fossils, my dear chap. They’re a waste of her time—and yours. Jewels are what the ladies are interested in. They know what’s truly valuable. I’m off to see the Director now, Miss Dalrymple, but I shall be in my office upstairs in half an hour. Come and see me, and I’ll show you precious stones worth a king’s ransom.”

  “Thank you, this afternoon, if I may?” Daisy put business first, though she had taken an instant dislike to the boorish Keeper of Mineralogy. “I’m rather concentrating on fossils this morning. Actually, I find these old bones simply fascinating.”

  “Well, it’s your funeral, dear lady.” With a contemptuous laugh, Pettigrew took him
self off.

  Daisy and Mr. Smith Woodward exchanged a glance.

  “Thank you,” said the Keeper of Geology simply. “I fear Mr. Pettigrew has a greater respect for worldly values than for the value of pure knowledge.” He sighed. “I expect the mammoths and the larger reptiles will be most suitable for your photography. Let us go and find the appropriate curators. Ah, there is Witt now.”

  Farther along the gallery, two men stood inside the rope barrier fencing off one of the mammoth skeletons. One was short and scrawny, his face fringed with a yellowish beard and whiskers, his tie askew. He was talking eagerly to his companion, with much gesticulation, and constantly pushing his horn-rimmed spectacles up on his nose.

  The other, younger, taller, slim rather than skinny, and nattily dressed, appeared to listen with calm courtesy. However, as Daisy and Smith Woodward approached the pair, she thought she detected a trace of hidden amusement behind the gravity of his decidedly good-looking face.

  “Ah, Witt, can you spare me a moment?” said Smith Woodward.

  They both turned. “Certainly, sir,” said the younger man politely, his voice pure public-school and Oxbridge. “Mr. ffinch-Brown is going to lend me several flints to make some experiments. Excuse me a moment, ffinch-Brown.”

  “Miss Dalrymple, this is Calvin Witt, our Curator of Fossil Mammals.” Smith Woodward explained Daisy’s project. “Her article is sure to bring us visitors from America, so I wish her to receive every facility. And when you have answered her questions, be so kind as to take her to see Mr. Steadman.”

  Witt bowed his dark, sleek head in acknowledgement. Dr. Smith Woodward departed, head bent to read the paper still in his hand, heedless of the people hastily stepping out of his way.

  “He’s going to have another accident,” said Witt with exasperated affection. “Break the other arm or leg, likely as not.”