“That’s what we won’t know, Chief, till Dr. Renfrew tells us. Whatever it was must’ve bust off, not enough left sticking out to identify. If it is a bit of bone, we’ll never find the missing part. The place is full of ’em! For a start, the deceased crashed into a skeleton—not a dinosaur, some other kind of ruddy great monster—and smashed it half to pieces.”
“I assume you bagged the remains.”
“Got the lot, but if it was a bone he was stabbed with, I don’t reckon it’s among ’em. He was on his back, so the weapon didn’t bust off when he fell, and by then the murderer had scarpered, if you ask me, while Pettigrew was staggering about. By the by, there’s going to be trouble over them bones with the reptile man, Septimus Mummery by name.”
“Mummery? I’d better get to know thedramatis personae, and where they claim they were.” Alec pulled the file towards him. “Telephone Daisy—Miss Dalrymple—will you, Tom? Ask her if we can see her at home in an hour or so. Make sureshe realizes this is an official visit. All we want is facts, her actual observations, not her opinions and theories.”
“Ah,” said Tring enigmatically, coughed twice, and reached for his telephone.
Opening the file, Alec sighed. Daisy’s theories, though often misleading, were occasionally helpful. He couldn’t afford to ignore them, any more than he could prevent her uttering them. As for her opinions, they tended to lead her to take one or more suspects under her wing, which created all sorts of difficulties for a detective striving to be impartial. He could cope with that when her protégés turned out to be innocent, but if not, it was decidedly painful.
At least she was apparently not a suspect this time.
Alec read through the file, discussed the contents and his plans with Tring, then sent for Detective Constables Ross and Piper. With the sergeant beside him and the constables in the back, Piper reading the file, he drove his little yellow Austin Seven to South Kensington. At the Natural History Museum he dropped off Tring and Ross to talk to the commissionaires and museum police. He and Ernie Piper went on to Chelsea, stopping before Daisy’s little white house in Mulberry Place.
Mrs. Potter stood on the newly scrubbed doorstep, industriously polishing the front-door handle.
“Mornin’, Mr. Fletcher,” she said. “You’re up and about bright and early today.”
“Good morning, Mrs. Potter. Miss Dalrymple is expecting us.”
The daily noticed the detective constable behind him. “Well, if it isn’t Mr. Piper, too! Hello, ducks, how’s tricks?” Her eyes rounded. “Lawks, never say you’re on official business, sir?”
“It’s all right, I’m not going to arrest her,” Alec assured her, recalling the times he had been tempted to do just that, for hindering the police in the course of their duties.
“As though I’d think such a thing! Miss got herself mixed up in another p’leece case, has she?” Mrs. Potter asked, folding plump arms across her substantial bosom with an air of settling in to gossip. With discomforting perspicacity, she went on, “The Museum Murder what was in the papers this morning, is it? Always popping round there, she is.”
“Now you know I can’t talk about it, Mrs. Potter, and I hope you won’t either.”
“Never fear, I’ll keep it under me ‘at,” she sighed. Reluctantly she turned and pushed open the door for them. “There you go, sir. She’s in her study. You ’ang on a minute, young feller-me-lad. Let’s see you wipe your boots proper. I just done the hall.”
Whether on purpose or not, the charwoman delayed Piper long enough for Alec to enter Daisy’s study alone. It was just as well, since Daisy forestalled his carefully planned greeting—a judicious compromise between loving fiancé and interrogating officer—by flinging herself at him. She put her arms around his neck and kissed him, then laid her cheek against his chest and said, “Oh, Alec, I’m frightfully glad it’s you.”
“So am I,” he said ruefully, hugging her cuddlesome curves and dropping a kiss on her feathery curls, “but I could wish it wasn’t you.”
She looked up at him with a half-guilty smile in her deceptively guileless blue eyes. “Not me in the case, I hope you mean, not not me in your arms.”
So he kissed her again, properly.
“Er-hem.”
Daisy broke away, blushing delightfully. Ernie’s cheeks were equally pink, though Alec took no delight in them.
“Do come in, Mr. Piper,” Daisy invited as she put the desk between herself and Alec. “The Chief didn’t mention he’d brought you with him. How nice to see you. Oh, would you mind fetching yourself a chair from the dining room? Sit down, Alec, do, and stop towering over me.”
However hard one tried, Alec thought, taking a statement from one’s beloved was not quite the same as from a stranger.
“It’s official business, love,” he said.
“I know,” she said mournfully. “I’m most frightfully sorry, darling. I would never have taken on the job, let alone taken Belinda there, if I’d known Pettigrew was going to get himself murdered.”
“How could you guess?” said Alec, finding his plaint preempted. And it really was not fair to blame her … only how did she manage it? “At least Bel wasn’t with you when it happened this time.”
“She rather liked Dr. Pettigrew, I’m afraid. He was quite good with the children, like Mr.—”
Alec held up his hand. “Please, darling! Let’s stick to what you saw and heard yesterday.”
“I’ll try,” she promised, as Ernie came in with a chair, “only you’re always saying one never can tell what insignificant detail may be relevant.”
