That done, she dropped her hat on the table, her coat on the chair, and leaving luggage strewn about the hall, hurried to the tiny back parlour which was her study. She already had a rough draft of the stately home article, typed on the portable machine on semi-permanent loan from herTown and Countryeditor (How her mother had moaned at the evidence of her daughter’s occupation!). It wouldn’t take long to finish it up on the massive, ancient Underwood typewriter which sat incongruously on the elegant Regency writing table from Fairacres.
The Underwood saw a great deal of her that week. Each day she returned from the museum with reams of notes andtyped long into the evening. The museum’s business was far more complicated than she had realized.
In the private offices, studies, and work rooms where she was now introduced, the preparation of specimens for display was a minor aspect of the work in progress. From all over the world, unknown plants and creatures were sent to be classified. Daisy had never previously heard of Linnaeus, but she was soon as familiar with his system as with the map of the London underground. The museum staff produced not only minute descriptions but painstaking drawings and even paintings of each specimen.
That was in the Zoology and Botany Departments, where specimens normally arrived with all their parts intact. In the Geology Department, imagination played a greater part. As Mummery had explained to her, few fossils were found complete; the missing bits had to be guessed at. At least, it looked like guesswork to Daisy, though Mummery insisted it was educated deduction.
His position was undermined by the iconoclastic Ruddlestone, Curator of Fossil Invertebrates, a jolly North-countryman who rivalled Alec’s sergeant, Tom Tring, in size and baldness.
“Guesswork is more like it, though we have advanced a bit since Waterhouse Hawkins,” Ruddlestone admitted to Daisy.
“Waterhouse Hawkins?”
“He built life-size concrete dinosaurs for the Crystal Palace exhibition of 1851, all as bulky and firmly four-footed as elephants or hippos. Believe it or not, he gave a dinner party inside one half-completed model. Then there were the Americans, Cope and Marsh: bitter enemies, brilliant in many ways, but Cope stuck the skull of an Elasmosaurus onthe end of its tail! Marsh never let him forget it.” Ruddlestone roared with laughter.
“Mr. Steadman told me his Diplodocus has the wrong feet.”
“Poor Steadman, it rankles badly that his prize exhibit is made of plaster of Paris. A load of real bones the Americans sent over during the War was sunk by a German submarine. A great loss, whatever that ass Pettigrew said.” The curator was no longer amused.
“What did he say?” Daisy asked, though she had a good idea.
“That the loss of mere fossils was trivial. In his view, a cargo of munitions would have been a great loss. But munitions can be replaced and fossils cannot! I’m afraid affairs like the controversy over Dr. Smith Woodward’s Piltdown skull play into the hands of ignoramuses like Pettigrew.” Ruddlestone cheered up. “But it illustrates what I was telling you: They can’t all be right, so someone’s ‘educated deductions’ have to have gone far astray!”
Later that afternoon, shortly before the museum closed, Daisy asked Smith Woodward about the Piltdown Man controversy.
He took her to see it again, but this time he contemplated it in silence for a minute, before sighing, “It really is very troublesome. Fossil fish are really my field, you know. I believe I may say I am accounted something of an authority on fossil fish. Do let me show you my Arthrodire.”
He had been so kind that Daisy let him off the hook. She could always ask someone else about Piltdown. He limped at her side across the gallery, and they entered the hall leading to the fossil reptiles, with the dinosaur gallery beyond, wherein the fishes occupied their modest place.
Somewhere in front of them a voice rose in triumph andcontempt, the words indistinguishable. The bellow that followed held a note of surprised agony, like that of a wounded bull. Then came a tremendous crash.
With a gasp, Smith Woodward stopped, rooted to the ground. Daisy ran through the arch ahead.
Sprawled on his back, immobile amidst a litter of smashed Pareiasaurus bones, lay Pettigrew. Across Ol’ Stony’s white shirtfront and pale grey waistcoat seeped a crimson stain.
4
“Help!” squawked Daisy. She did not want to go near that bloody body, but unlikely as it seemed from this distance, Pettigrew might still be alive. Someone must check his pulse.
Someone must also go for the police, though surely it could not be murder, not in a museum of all places! The Keeper of Geology must have had some sort of fit, fallen against the Pareiasaurus, and been stabbed by a shard of bone.
Through the chest, when he was lying on his back?
“What was that?” A plump, grey-haired woman appeared under the arch to the dinosaurs. “Good gracious! Stay there, children, don’t come any further.” She spread her arms in a barricade, behind which bobbed five youthful, inquisitive faces.
“What’s happened, Granny?”
“Never you mind, Arthur Stubbs. Take the others to look at the dinosaurs, do.” She moved a few steps towards Daisy and asked in a lowered voice, “Is he dead?”
“I think so. I don’t know. I haven’t …”
“You leave it to me, dear. I used to be a nurse. If there’s a pulse, I’ll find it.” Bustling forward, she stooped to clear thebone fragments from a patch of floor and knelt at Pettigrew’s side.
“Don’t touch anything you don’t absolutely have to,” Daisy warned.
“What … what … ?” came a weak voice from behind her.
“Dr. Smith Woodward, will you please go and tell the police there has been a … an accident?”
