He unlocked the nearest door for her, and she stepped into the cephalopod gallery. Passing through, she made one or two notes, rather half-heartedly. She still could not work up any enthusiasm for primitive squids and octopi.
Half way down was the arch to the dinosaur gallery. If Mummery was the murderer, he must have gone that way to the General Library.
Daisy went through. The Megalosaurus skull was to her left. She pictured the children gathered around it, with little Katy heading for the far entrance and Mrs. Ditchley suddenly noticing her departure. The children would surely have glanced towards their sister, momentarily distracted from the monster. But that moment had coincided with the murder, so the murderer could not have taken advantage of it, unless he was a sprinter, and Mummery hadn’t got the figure of a sprinter.
At best it would have been risky to cross the gallery with a family there, at worst downright foolhardy. Or would it? Mummery might well have reached the side arch when Mrs. Ditchley was joining Daisy and the children were clusteredjust inside the far arch, their attention fixed by the unseen drama beyond.
Alec had undoubtedly worked it out ages ago, Daisy thought with a sigh. Mummery was still on the list, or his house would not have been searched last night.
She turned right. Several spectators had gathered at the rope barrier around Mr. Steadman’s new exhibit. Within the barrier, a trestle table had been set up and the workmen had been replaced by a white-coated technical assistant. Steadman and O’Brien leant over the table. Behind them, framed by the towering ladders, the pedestal topped by its iron frame rose like an incomprehensible modern sculpture. Sergeant Atkins was keeping an eye on the spectators.
“The pedestal is rather high, isn’t it?” Daisy said to him.
“Kids,” he responded succinctly. “Give ’em half a chance and they pinch the tail bones off them little ones. I can’t be everywhere. There you go, miss.” He moved aside one of the posts holding the rope. Stopping someone who made to follow her, he uttered one word in an impressive tone: “Press!”
On the table Daisy saw several sheets of paper with drawings of bones, spread out around a large, shallow, wooden tray. The tray held the bones themselves, neatly arranged to depict a creature which looked rather like a wallaby. Daisy couldn’t help wondering how many people would ever know the difference if it really was a wallaby skeleton. Like the plaster of Paris Diplodocus with the wrong feet, beauty was in the eye of the beholder.
Steadman was telling O’Brien how a jumble of bones was transformed into a diagram of a plausible skeleton of a hitherto unknown animal. Daisy started taking notes, glad that he was talking to a layman.
He explained how ribs and vertebrae formed logical patterns. “Once we have a good notion of how the parts join, wehave to work by comparison and analogy,” he went on. “The Saltopus is in some ways similar to a kangaroo in form. We assume it sat on its haunches, with its forefeet in the air, and leapt along using both feet together to propel it. Hence the name.”
“Huh?” said O’Brien.
“Sorry! From the Latin for ‘jumping foot.’”
“Like octopus,” said Daisy.
“Say, that’s right!”
“And platypus?” said Daisy less certainly.
“Flat foot,” Steadman kindly confirmed.
“Oh yes,platis the French for flat.” However ignorant of Latin and science, she did know her French. “Andsauteris to jump.”
“Jumping foot.” Steadman returned to business. “That’s why we chose this particular mounting position. However, we can’t be sure. Actually, it might have run on the tips of its toes, for all we know.”
He was painfully honest about his beloved dinosaurs. Whether his honesty applied equally to the collections of the other museum departments—Mineralogy, to be specific—was another matter.
Daisy listened for a while longer, as Steadman moved on to mounting techniques. With a delicate touch, he started to hook two bits of spine together, but it was obviously going to be a very long process, even for so comparatively small an animal. She decided she had all the material she could use, though she would come back later to inspect his progress.
What she really wanted was to chat with him, to find out what he had to say about murder and theft. No hope of that while the Saltopus was under construction before a fascinated audience.
Not counting ffinch-Brown, who was beyond her reach,the only murder suspect she had not spoken to this morning was Ruddlestone. Not that she had had any more conversation with Rudolf Maximilian than with Steadman, and he had probably left the museum by now. Blast! She should have sought him out earlier.
Finding an excuse to approach Ruddlestone was not easy, as Daisy had already interviewed him for her second article. Then she recalled what she had overheard him telling Tom Tring about the Special Palæontological Collections. She had not asked him about them before, and the historical aspect might make an interesting digression. No need to give away how she had learnt about them.
She went to the Special Collections gallery first, to refine her questions. To get there she had to go out into the reptile gallery. By the Pareiasaurus, two men with cameras were arguing with Harry Boston, the reptile commissionaire, about removing the cover to take pictures.
The real Press, Daisy concluded, forerunners of tomorrow’s plague of locusts. She turned the other way.
In the end gallery she found one of Ruddlestone’s assistants, whom she had met before. Harbottle, a weedy, bespectacled young man, was going through the displays and drawers of specimens and checking them off against a list in faded ink bound in a large volume.
“Making sure the jewel thief hasn’t helped himself?” Daisy queried.
Harbottle grinned. “Not likely! No, Mr. Ruddlestone found some discrepancies and decided it was time to revise the catalogue.”
Surely if Ruddlestone was a thief and murderer, he wouldn’t be worrying about the inaccuracy of an ancient catalogue at this moment! “Do you know where he is? I have a couple of questions.”
