Alec was pretty good at holding the umbrella with one hand while hugging with the other. Quite some time passed before Daisy made use of her key.
Lucy was down in the kitchen, making cocoa. “Half an hour on the doorstep in the rain,” she observed dryly. “Why didn’t you invite him in, darling? I wouldn’t have interrupted the billing and cooing.”
“He didn’t mean to stay. He has to work tomorrow, and so do I.”
“Cocoa?”
In spite of cocoa, Daisy was too keyed up to fall asleep easily. One of the tunes from theNew Worldkept going round in her head like a ghostly gramophone record, and above it sailed Alec’s words. Not, alas, the sweet nothingshe had whispered in her ear, but the comment about the probability of the villain being a member of the museum staff.
Witt, Mummery, Steadman, Ruddlestone.
Harbottle said Ruddlestone could not possibly be a murderer. Though that jibed with Daisy’s opinion of the invertebrate curator, it was not evidence, of course, only a testimonial to his popularity as a boss.
But could any man keep up Ruddlestone’s obviously genuine joviality under the pressure of being hunted by the police? And, concerned for his own skin, would he have any thought to spare for recataloguing centuries-old collections of millennia-old fossils?
The last argument applied equally to Steadman, who was absolutely obsessed with Saltopus. Daisy had gone to look at progress on the little dinosaur after her appointment with the Creepy-Crawly man.
O’Brien had left for good, having learnt all he wanted, Atkins told her. The loss of the Hollywood incentive had not visibly dampened Steadman’s enthusiasm. Saltopus’s spine had grown by several inches.Sotto voce,Daisy observed to the commissionaire that the construction would go faster if the assistant was allowed to do more than merely stand ready to hand up the next vertebra.
“Not flippin’ likely, miss,” Atkins had whispered back. “Has to do it all himself, does our Mr. Steadman.”
Steadman was too obsessed with dinosaurs to care two hoots for a fortune in gems.
What about Witt? Daisy thought, turning over in bed and shaking her pillow, which felt as if it was stuffed with stones, precious or otherwise.
When she last saw him, Witt had been studying a primitivehorse, but he had not been too absorbed to spend quite some time talking with her about the crimes. He had introduced the subject, as far as Daisy could remember. She rather suspected he had tried to pump her about the progress of the police investigation, and he might have tried to divert suspicion to ffinch-Brown.
Though she quite liked Witt, she was not at all sure she entirely trusted him. He was by far the least candid and straightforward of the four curators.
Where could he have hidden the jewels? Was the Grand Duke right, after all, about the cave bear and its fellow shaggy mammals? Did one or more of them have precious stones in their heads, like the toad in the old tale? Alec agreed that it was improbable, but there might be other places no one but Witt was likely to disturb.
He also had the most obvious motive for killing Pettigrew.
Motives, rather: his humiliating exit in the Keeper’s grasp; the business of the flints; and, if he was the thief, the discovery of the theft.
Too much Witt makes the world rotten, Daisy thought, beginning to grow drowsy. Tennyson? If she had learnt nothing else at school, she had had English poetry drummed into her. Lines often roamed through her head, accurately or inaccurately, when she was falling asleep.
But she must not fall asleep yet. She had not considered the case against Mummery.
There was an old fellow called Mummery,
Who fell into a basin of flummery.
He swam to the side
Where he hung on, and cried,
“I’m a victim of jiggery-pokery!”
It didn’t quite rhyme, and anyway, Pettigrew was the victim. Mummery would never have killed him within reach of his fragile fossilized fools. Reptiles. Except that Mummery had a whale of a … aPareiasaurusof a temper, and when he lost it he was not apt to consider consequences.
Daisy drifted off with an image of the smashed Pareiasaurus in her mind. It metamorphosed into a Megalosaurus, strolling along on the end of a dog-lead, its ribs rattling. Bits of bone kept dropping off, all over the carpet.
“You mustn’t do that,” Belinda scolded. “Gran will be frightfully cross.”
“Who dusts the dinosaurs, I’d like to know?” Mrs. Fletcher demanded angrily. “Don’t you realize they have jewels in their heads, like the toad in the fable?”
In her sleep, Daisy smiled.
