The Aylesford Skull

the papers.

“Baffling in what sense?” he asked, opening the creel. “Outwitted by a fish, were you?”

“Yes, but I expected that. He’s a wise old fish.” She told him about the man in the wood, the crying out, the battle of the weir, and the strange business of someone having meddled with the pike.

The kitchen door opened, and St. Ives’s factotum, Hasbro, walked in carrying lemonade on a tray. He and St. Ives had been through so many adventures together that neither factotum nor manservant quite applied, although it had at one time. Hasbro kept up his old habits, though, which had come to define a small part of him. Alice took a glass gratefully. Fishing was thirsty work. St. Ives pushed aside a mechanical bat that sat on the table – an automaton, built by Lambert in Paris, which was so perfectly contrived that it looked stuffed. He set his glass down and then peered into the creel again.

“You say that someone not only opened this, but examined the fish? And he didn’t simply pinch it?”

“Yes. It was the strangest thing, especially given the man hiding among the trees. I was never apparently in any danger, and the fish is comfortable enough, but someone had a highly suspicious interest in the creel and in my fishing. Absolutely nothing came of it, I’m happy to say, although I left my wading boots behind.”

“Should I fetch the wading boots, ma’am?” Hasbro asked. “I’m taking my afternoon constitutional shortly. I’d as soon walk along the river as elsewhere.”

“Thank you, Hasbro,” Alice said to him. “If you don’t mind. You won’t need to search for them.”

St. Ives had his head in the basket now, evidently smelling the fish. He looked up, frowning. “Do you detect an odor?” he asked Hasbro, holding out the creel. “Not the odor of pike, but something else, something musty? I don’t believe it to be the moss. Something quite distinct.”

Hasbro sniffed the open creel, thought for a moment and sniffed again. “Boiling parsnips,” he said. “Certainly neither the moss nor the fish.”

“Mouse filth, I was thinking, although parsnips emit the same odor.”

“If I were to make a hasty judgment, sir, I’d guess devil’s porridge.”

“Yes, and almost certainly distilled, not conveniently dredged out of a nearby ditch. There’s none of it mixed into the moss.”

“Devil’s porridge?” Alice asked. “You don’t mean to say…”

“Yes,” St. Ives told her. “Assuredly it’s hemlock. The demise of Socrates distilled into a clear liquid. Look here. The villain has sliced the fish open with something very sharp – a carefully honed knife or perhaps a scalpel – along the edge of the dorsal fin where the incision isn’t apparent. He wanted to make sure that the poison invaded the flesh, you see. It’s impossible to say how much he poured in or how potent the solution.” He picked the fish up by the mouth and tail and turned it over. “No doubt he dumped some here on the gaff wound, also, poisoning the adjacent meat. If you’d simply given this to Mrs. Langley to stuff and poach, we’d all of us be dead by bedtime, Eddie and Cleo included.”

“I’ll just take a fowling piece with me along to the river,” Hasbro said.

“Would you like company?” St. Ives asked.

“The rifle is company enough, I should think. I fear he’ll be far away by now.”

“Indeed,” said St. Ives. “An escaped lunatic, I’d warrant, except that he would have to be a tolerably careful chemist, not that chemists don’t run mad as often as the next man. Rather more often, quite likely.” He glanced at Alice, who was looking steadily at him.

“Shall I have Mr. Binger dispose of the fish, sir?”

“If you will, Hasbro. Ask him to hack it up and cover it with quicklime, then bury it deeply enough so that Hodge won’t get at it.”

FIVE

THE RETURN OF THE DEAD

The suggestion that the hemlock fancier had been an escaped lunatic had failed to impress Alice; St. Ives had seen as much in her face, although she hadn’t confronted him with it. The crime was too devious, too well thought out, too purposeful. He could think of only one man who might do such a thing, but why that man should be lurking in the environs of north Kent was a mystery to him. The man, an evil genius who called himself Dr. Narbondo, was well acquainted with their previous residence in Chingford. Indeed, Hasbro had chased him from the premises a little under a year ago when he’d come around at night intent on stealing St. Ives’s bathyscaphe, which, it had to be admitted, St. Ives had recently stolen from him. But their removal to Aylesford had been kept quiet – no fanfare at all – and in fact he and Alice still owned the farmhouse at Chingford-by-the-Tower, which they now leased to Tubby Frobisher. They weren’t hiding in Aylesford, but they weren’t conspicuous either.

St. Ives walked along the rows of hops, which reached above the top of his head now, his mind sorting through various possibilities. Idly he watched out for the long-winged flies and lice that were the bane of hops, but there was no evidence of such evils. He picked a leaf and crushed it between his fingers. It had a slightly bitter smell. He dropped it, brushing his fingers on his trousers. If the hemlock had simply been torn up and sprinkled onto the pike, he might convince himself that it had been a devilish prank, but this had been something more – the work of someone who had a decoction of hemlock about his person, a determined poisoner, not a prankish devil.

He strolled out into the wisteria alley, looking with satisfaction at the broad green lawn away to his right, where there stood a dozen or so hoppers’ huts. They would see considerable activity come September, when the hops were harvested, the grounds becoming a literal fiddler’s green during the celebration afterward.

In the distance now, Hasbro approached from the direction of the river, carrying the rifle and rubber waders. St. Ives walked out to meet him.

“Nothing out of the way?” he asked.

“A deepening of the mystery, perhaps.” Hasbro reached into one of the waders and drew out a piece of an oak branch, half the length of a cricket bat and stained with blood. “There were two distinct sets of footprints in the soil of the path. I’m persuaded that two men had come down separately from the direction of the village, one stopping near the weir and the other going on to the river’s edge where the missus had apparently submerged the creel with the pike in it. Then the single track – the man who poisoned the fish – reversed direction and returned toward the village again, running afoul of the man whom she saw lurking in the wood near where she fished. At that point there was an apparent struggle – a rhododendron trod nearly flat. The shout was almost certainly uttered by the man who was struck with this club. It has a considerable heft to it, and the bloody result argues that the attacker meant to do him a considerable mischief. There was evidence that the stricken man fled into the trees. I found his footprints again some distance away, doubling back toward Aylesford once more after he had eluded his attacker.”

“But who struck whom?” asked St. Ives.

“The man who fled into the wood was evidently the same man who had poisoned the fish.”

“Did his footprints put you in mind of Narbondo?”

“Quite possibly, or a man of similar size. Nothing certain in that, however.”

St. Ives stood silently for a moment, listening to the buzzing of an unseen fly. He heard Eddie’s laughter from the direction of the house. “The first man, the poisoner, might have been pursued surreptitiously by the second, I assume?”

“More likely it was mere happenstance,” said Hasbro. “If the second man had followed the first with some fell purpose, he wouldn’t have tarried near the weir, it would seem. His prey might simply have continued along the river and got away.”

“There’s no indication that they were companions?”

“No, sir, to the contrary. Their separate tracks led back to the village, where I discovered that they had started out by different routes – one of them from behind the Chequers Inn and the other from the path that runs up into what’s known as Hereafter Farm, or so I’m told by the publican at the Chequers.”

“Isn’t that a spiritualist commune?”

“Indeed, sir. Owned by a woman named Mother Laswell, who, I gather, is widely considered to harbor dark