Rattle His Bones Read online

  “Mr. Mummery,” Daisy interrupted, taking a firm hold of his sleeve and leading him, resisting, towards the gallery’s entrance arch, “you must listen to me. Mrs. Ditchley and the children can’t leave because the police won’t let them. There’s been a … an apparent murder. Dr. Pettigrew is dead.”

  Mummery threw back his head and guffawed. “Pettigrew murdered? He had it coming! If anyone did, I mean,” he said sobering. “But you can’t be serious, my dear Miss Dalrymple. True, we deal daily in death, but it is ancient death.” His sweeping gesture embraced the dinosaurs and all the fossils beyond. He turned tetchily reproachful. “I cannot believe this jape is your notion. It must be Pettigrew’s, of course, simply to bedevil me. Why you should support—”

  “Come and see, then.” She had intended to warn him of the destruction of his pet reptile, but she was now too annoyed with him. “Come along.”

  Two more uniformed police officers had joined Sergeant Jameson, another sergeant and a constable. Mummery scarcely spared them a glance as, with a screech of rage, he strode past them.

  “My Pareiasaurus! He did this on purpose!”

  Jameson and the constable caught his arms.

  “Keep back, sir, if you please.”

  “My Pareiasaurus! It will take months of work to stick those bones back together, if indeed it can be done. I’ll kill him!”

  “He’s already dead, sir,” Jameson said reprovingly, and with a touch of suspicion, “if it’s Ol’ … Dr. Pettigrew you’re referring to. I can’t let you touch the skellington, and I’ll have to ask you to remain on the premises until you have given a statement to a detective officer.”

  Mummery visibly deflated. “A detective? Miss Dalrymple mentioned murder.”

  “Looks that way, sir, but it’s not for me to say. We’ll have a detective here soon as can be.”

  “In the meantime, I suppose I may go back to the library and continue my work?” he asked with querulous dignity. “Miss Dalrymple, be so kind as to find some quiet diversion for those horrible brats.” With a last, desolate stare at his ruined Pareiasaurus, he stalked back into the dinosaur gallery.

  “He might as well be there as anywhere,” said Jameson. “Well, Miss Dalrymple, do you think the old lady’ll be willing to bring the kids through here? If so, you can all go up to the refreshment room and wait in comfort, now I’ve enough men to guard all the exits.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant. I’ll see.”

  Past the dead Keeper, Daisy led a string of children with their eyes shut, while Mrs. Ditchley marched Arthur with her hands over his eyes. The newly arrived Constable Neddle went with them.

  At the arch from the fossil mammals to the Central Hall, they found another constable on guard duty. A young couple stood nearby, hand in hand, looking disconsolate. A scrawny, bewhiskered man in horn-rims, vaguely familiar to Daisy, was arguing excitably with the guard.

  “My dear chap, whatever the trouble is, it’s nothing to do with me. I don’t work here.”

  “Then you’re a member of the public, sir,” the constable said patiently.

  “No, no, not at all. I work at the British Museum.”

  “This is the British Museum, sir, Natural History branch.”

  “Exactly! And I’m from the main institution in Bloomsbury, so I haven’t a key to the back stairs. So just be a good fellow and let me through.”

  “I can’t, sir. I’ve me instructions, haven’t I. And it’s no good going on asking me why, ’cause I haven’t been told, not proper, not so’s to be able to tell you.”

  “Hello, Mr. ffinch-Brown,” Daisy intervened, recognizing him instantly when he pushed his spectacles up on his nose. “I don’t expect you remember me—Daisy Dalrymple. Mr. Witt introduced us. Did you come to see him?”

  “I did,” said the anthropologist testily, “but I finished my business with him some time ago. Do you know what all this to-do is about? Why won’t they let me leave in peace?”

  “I can let you leave the gallery now, sir,” said the guard, who had spoken briefly with Constable Neddle, “but I must ask you to go to the refreshment room upstairs and wait there. You two, too,” he added to the young couple.

  With an air of utter bewilderment, they meekly followed Mrs. Ditchley and the children out into the Central Hall. Shepherded by Neddle, ffinch-Brown followed not at all meekly, with Daisy.

  “The refreshment room!” he exploded. He really was remarkably like Mummery in temperament. His voice did not get quite as loud, perhaps because he worked off surplus energy by waving his arms. “Wait in the refreshment room? For what, may I ask, for what?”

  Daisy glanced back at Constable Neddle, who rolled his eyes. Taking this as permission, she outlined the situation.

  “No great loss,” said ffinch-Brown contemptuously. “Any fool can polish up rocks, but Ralph Pettigrew had the unmitigated gall to think he could make flint tools that I—I!—would be unable to distinguish from the genuinely primitive article.”

  “The ones he claimed he found in a cave in Cornwall?” Daisy asked as they started up the main staircase towards the statue of Sir Richard Owen.

  “No, no, those don’t remotely resemble worked implements.” He rubbed his hands in remembered glee. “You should have seen his face when I confirmed Witt’s verdict. That was when he swore he could deceive me with flints he had chipped and flaked himself. Ha!”

  “Impossible?”

  “Impossible,” affirmed ffinch-Brown, but with a trace of uneasiness. Then, cheering up, he said brightly, “Well, now we shall never know, shall we?”

  Suppose Pettigrew succeeded in deceiving him, Daisy thought. The mineralogist would never have kept quiet about it. In that case, to what extent would the anthropologist’s reputation suffer? And what had he been doing since he finished his business with Witt? Quarrelling with Pettigrew?

  Ascending the second flight, Daisy glanced up at the bronze bust of Captain Fred Selous, big-game hunter, bronze elephant-gun in hand. It was hard to believe primitive man had hunted big game with nothing but flint weapons.

  “How is Mr. Witt’s experiment going?” she asked. “Has he duplicated the marks on the mammoth bones?”

  “Not just mammoths, my dear young lady. I was contemplating certain grooves on the giant sloth’s tibia when—”

  “Fräulein? It is Miss Dalrymple?”

  Daisy swung round. The Grand Duke of Transcarpathia was coming up the stairs behind them.

  “Hello, where have you sprung from?” she asked with a smile.

  “I have not gesprungen! I walk.”

  “It’s just an English expression. Where have you been?”

  “I vas de Irish elk regarding. Irish, pah!” he said angrily, “In mine contry also vas once dis magnificent beast, but de English dey must all take to self, de elks, de jewels, everysing!”

  “So you were in the fossil mammal gallery? I didn’t see you there.”

  The Grand Duke turned sullen. “Dis de police also say. Lurking dey say, vhy you vas lurking behind de elk? Vhat is lurking, bitte?”

  “Er, sort of hiding,” Daisy explained.

  “Hiding? I not hide, but if I am not seen vhen de police come, I not at once rush out. To myself I remind, here in England I am not Grand Duke, only a damn foreigner!”

  Rudolf Maximilian had a grudge against the world, Daisy thought as they entered the cafeteria, but also good reason to loathe Pettigrew. Having bumped him off, he could easily have nipped along the reptile gallery, through the hall at the far end, and into the mammal gallery.

  Mr. ffinch-Brown, who had gone ahead into the refreshment room and was glowering disgruntledly at the CLOSED sign on the counter, claimed to have been in the end pavilion looking at the sloth. He would not have seen the Grand Duke. What about the young couple, who had also apparently been among the mammals when Pettigrew was killed? They were now ensconced at a corner table, heads close together, whispering, eyes for nothing but each other. Add their self-absorption to the giant mammals
and wide pillars, and they would probably have remained unaware of anything short of a bomb blast.

  They would not have noticed when ffinch-Brown went through into the pavilion, either. The Grand Duke just might have seen him, though, and might have some idea of the time. Daisy was tempted to ask.

  She really must stay out of the investigation, she reproved herself. True, she had been the first on the scene, but her alibi, along with Dr. Smith Woodward’s, was impeccable. Though she had to give a statement, and would no doubt be called to give evidence at the inquest, the Chelsea district detectives would resent any attempt to add her twopenn’orth.

  The detectives were a long time coming. Mrs. Ditchley, defiantly determined, went behind the counter and found milk and biscuits for the tired, hungry children.

  “Put on a kettle for tea,” suggested Mr. ffinch-Brown. “I’ll pay for the lot.” He put a half-crown on top of the till.

  Constable Neddle had left them. With main entrance closed, none of them could leave the building if they tried. No one else joined them. Daisy wondered whether Mummery was the only member of the scientific staff, apart from Smith Woodward and Pettigrew, who had not gone home at half past five. There might be others tucked away in offices, work rooms, and libraries, not yet winkled out, or left to work in peace until needed.

  So far, Mummery, ffinch-Brown, and Grand Duke Rudolf were the only suspects Daisy knew of.

  The only ones she was ever likely to know of, she tried to persuade herself. She was not going to get involved. She went to sit with Mrs. Ditchley and the children.

  At last a tall young man appeared and announced himself as Detective Constable Ross. “We’ll take Miss Dalrymple’s statement first,” he said. “Would you come this way, please, miss?”

  Mrs. Ditchley arose in wrath. “What about my grandkiddies?” she demanded. “And their mum come home from work and waiting for them and not knowing where they’ve got to? I’m sure I’d have no objection to Miss Dalrymple getting to go first if it wasn’t for the kiddies, but you wouldn’t mind, would you, dear, if I took your turn?”

  “Not at all,” said Daisy.

  D. C. Ross, with Mrs. Ditchley advancing upon him, caved in. “All right, madam, all right. I s’pose it won’t matter that much.”

  “Come along, children.”

  But there the constable drew the line. He hadn’t been told nothing about bringing no children along.

  “I’ll take care of them,” Daisy offered.

  Mrs. Ditchley was only gone a few minutes, fortunately, as Katy was growing tearful and Arthur obstreperous. Upon her return she gathered her flock, wiped noses, and saw coats buttoned as Ross escorted Daisy from the room. Daisy wondered whether she ought to mention that the children had told her Mummery could have crossed the dinosaur gallery without their seeing him. She felt the detective in charge ought to have spoken to them himself, but perhaps he planned to at a later date, or maybe he already had information clearing Mummery.

  In any case, she was not going to get involved.

  She followed D. C. Ross through the Central Hall to an office at the front, tucked away to the right of the entrance as Smith Woodward’s was to the left. A sign on the door read SIR SIDNEY HARMER, DIRECTOR.

  Ross opened the door and stood aside, announcing, “Miss Dalrymple, Sergeant.”

  Behind Sir Sidney’s desk rose a very familiar figure, vast, suited in ghastly tan and yellow check, with a luxuriant greying walrus moustache counterbalanced by the shining dome of his hairless head.

  “Mr. Tring!” cried Daisy.

  5

  “Good evedig, Biss Dalrybple,” said Alec’s favourite sergeant, coming round the desk to shake her hand.”Do sit dowd, please. Excuse be a bobet.” He turned his back and harumphed hugely into a large white handkerchief.”Ah, that’s better.”

  “So they did call in Scotland Yard.” Daisy sat down in one of the red leather armchairs before the desk. “But where’s the Chief?”

  “Detective Chief Inspector Fletcher is out on another job and took young Piper with him. But seeing it involves some outdoor business and I’ve got this bit of a cold, he left me to clear up some paperwork at the office.”

  “I expect you’d rather have gone with them than getting stuck with desk work,” Daisy said sympathetically.

  His little brown eyes twinkled at her. “Isn’t that the truth! At least, it would be if it wasn’t for this affair coming up. The Chelsea division detectives are all out already, and my super hadn’t got an inspector to spare, so he sent me along.”

  “I’m very glad he’s put you in charge.” Though bang went any chance of keeping it from Alec.

  “He thought it was a simple little case I’d be able to clear up tonight.” Tom Tring sighed gustily. “Don’t suppose he has any idea what a regular rabbit warren the place is. Well, Miss Dalrymple, what have you got to tell me? Stop staring, Ross, and get your notebook out. Yes, this is that Miss Dalrymple.”

  Ross and Daisy both blushed, Daisy wondering whether she was notorious simply as Alec’s fiancée, or as the Assistant Commissioner for Crime’s bête noire.

  “I’ve been doing some research here for an article,” she said hurriedly. “This evening at twenty to six I went to Dr. Smith Woodward’s office—he’s the Keeper of Geology—to ask him about Piltdown Man.”

  “Exactly twedty to six? Excuse be.” Tring pulled out his hankie, turned his head, and produced another explosion.

  “Roughly. You know how you look at a watch and you don’t so much notice the exact time as how long you have till … well, in this case till the museum closed. I saw I had about twenty minutes left and I decided it was long enough.”

  Tring nodded. “And then?”

  “We walked round to the Piltdown skull, just around the corner in the fossil mammal gallery. Dr. Smith Woodward looked at it for a minute and decided he’d much rather talk about fossil fish. So we crossed the gallery—I didn’t notice anyone there, but I wasn’t really looking. There was no one in the hall leading to the reptile gallery, I’m sure of that.”

  “That would be here?” The sergeant pointed to a large sheet of paper on the desk in front of him.

  Leaning forward, Daisy saw it was a plan of the museum. “That’s right,” she said. “We must have been about halfway along when we heard someone ahead speaking loudly, then a sort of roar, and then the most frightful crash.” She hesitated. “Thinking back, I’m pretty sure it was Dr. Pettigrew’s voice, though I didn’t recognize it immediately.”

  “What did he say?”

  “I couldn’t catch the words. This building’s so solid it muffles sounds. We would have seen, though, if anyone had entered the dinosaur gallery through this arch.” She showed him on the plan.

  “Yes, that all agrees with Dr. Smith Woodward’s statement. That lets him out.”

  “And me,” said Daisy.

  Tring’s moustache waggled above a half-concealed grin. “And you,” he acknowledged. “What next?”

  “I dashed into the reptile gallery, and saw Pettigrew lying … I’m afraid I was rather too aghast to notice if anyone was running off. I’m most frightfully sorry.” More affected by the memory than she had been by the actual event, Daisy suddenly felt cold and horribly sick.

  Always light on his feet despite his size, Tom Tring was round the desk in a flash, his hand on her shoulder. “Here, put your head down on your knees. Ross, quick, pour a drop of whatever it is Sir Sidney keeps in that decanter. That’s the ticket. Take a good swallow, Miss Dalrymple.”

  Head whirling, Daisy only half heard him. Expecting water, she gulped whisky. It hit the back of her throat like a lighted squib. As she choked and spluttered, tears pouring down her face, a comforting warmth spread through her middle. At least it had settled her stomach.

  Tring thrust a handkerchief into her hand. “Here, it’s a clean one. The missus sent me out with half a dozen. Feeling better?”

  “Yes, thank you,” Daisy croaked, mopping her eyes. “I t
hink so. Gosh!”

  “Cad you … Half a tick.” He found another hankie and trumpeted into it. “Can you go on? You sent Dr. Smith Woodward for the police?”

  “It sounds frightfully pushy, put like that, but I suppose I did. Mrs. Ditchley turned up first, though. You’ve seen her.”

  “I want it in your words, please. You know the Chief’s methods.”

  Tears pricked at Daisy’s eyelids. How she wished for Alec’s comforting presence, even if he was angry with her. But Tom Tring, dear Tom Tring, was now enveloped in a rosy haze, like a mammoth cherub. He needed her help. Blinking away the tears, she suppressed a giggle and tried to concentrate.

  “Mrs. Ditchley,” prompted the mustachioed cherub.

  Daisy told him about Mrs. Ditchley’s failure to find a pulse, her return to her grandchildren, and the dinosaur commissionaire’s subsequent arrival on the scene. At that point she got Wilf Atkins’s name hopelessly muddled, and she could not pronounce “Pareiasaurus” to save her life, though by articulating with extreme care she managed to substitute “skeleton.”

  “Wolf Catkins—you know who I mean—said Mr. Flummery would have forty fits when he saw the smashed ske-le-ton. He did. He threatened to kill Pet-ti-grew, but he was too late.”

  “Yes,” said the cherub, his face wavering in and out of her vision, “so Sergeant Jameson says. I think the rest of your statement had better wait till morning, Miss Dalrymple.”

  “Sorry. Seem to be fearfully tired all of a sudden.” Daisy’s eyes closed of their own volition, and she couldn’t get them to open again.

  Distantly, she heard the constable’s incredulous voice: “Sozzled?”

  “A whacking slug of whisky on an empty stomach,” Tring rumbled. “Our Miss Dalrymple’s not one of these cocktail-bibbing Bright Young Things, you know. I can’t escort her home now. Help me move the chair over into that corner.”

  Briefly Daisy flew through the air. An overcoat was tucked around her, and she slept.