Inspector Alleyn 3-Book Collection 8: Death at the Dolphin, Hand in Glove, Dead Water

‘What a common sort of job you’ve got. I can’t think how you do it.’ She gave one of her harsh barks of laughter.

He looked at her for a moment. ‘I expect that was a very clever thing to say,’ he said. ‘But I’m afraid it makes no difference. Goodbye. Thank you again for my lunch.’

When he was in the car he said: ‘To Ribblethorpe. It’s about five miles, I think. I want to go to the parish church.’

It was a pleasant drive through burgeoning lanes. There were snowdrops in the hedgerows and a general air of freshness and simplicity. Desirée’s final observation stuck in his gullet.

Ribblethorpe was a tiny village. They drove past a row of cottages and a shop-post-office and came to a pleasant if not distinguished church with a big shabby parsonage beyond it.

Alleyn walked through the graveyard and very soon found a Victorian headstone to ‘Frances Ann Patricia, infant daughter of Alfred Molyneux Piers Period Esquire and Lady Frances Mary Julia, his wife. She is not dead but sleepeth’. Reflecting on the ambiguity of the quotation, Alleyn moved away and had not long to search before he found carved armorial bearings exactly similar to those in Mr Period’s study. These adorned the grave of Lord Percival Francis Pyke who died in 1701 and had conferred sundry and noble benefits upon this parish. The name recurred pretty regularly up and down the graveyard from Jacobean times onward. When he went into the church it was the same story. Armorial fish, brasses and tablets, all confirmed the eminence of innumerable Pykes.

Alleyn was in luck. The baptismal register was not locked away in the vestry but chained to a carved desk, hard by the font. In the chancel a lady wearing an apron and housemaid’s gloves was polishing brasses. Her hat, an elderly toque, had been for greater ease, lifted up on her head, giving her a faint air of recklessness. He approached her.

‘I wonder,’ Alleyn said, ‘if I may look in the baptismal register? I’m doing a bit of extremely amateurish research. I’ll be very careful.’

‘Oh, rather!’ said the lady, jollily. ‘Do. My husband’s over at Ribblethorpe-Parva with the mothers or he’d help like a shot. I don’t know if I –’

‘Thank you so much but it’s really quite a simple job,’ Alleyn said hastily. ‘Just a family thing, you know.’

‘We haven’t been here long: only three months, so we’re not up to the antiquities.’ The rector’s wife, as Alleyn supposed she must be, gave a final buffet with her polisher, tossed her head at her work in a jocular manner, bobbed to the altar and made for the vestry. ‘I’m Mrs Nicholls,’ she said. ‘My husband followed dear old Father Forsdyke. You’ll find all the entries pretty erratic,’ she added over her shoulder. ‘Father Forsdyke was a saint but as vague as could be. Over ninety when he died, rest his soul.’ She disappeared. Somehow, she reminded him of Connie Cartell.

The register was bound in vellum and bore the Royal Arms on its cover. Its pages were divided into columns headed ‘When Baptized: Child’s Christian Name: Parents’ Names: Abode: Quality, Trade or Profession and By Whom Performed’. It had been opened in July 1874.

How old was Mr Pyke Period? Fifty-eight? Over sixty? Difficult to say. Alleyn started his search at the first entry in 1895. In that year the late Mr Forsdyke was already at the helm and although presumably not much over thirty, pretty far advanced in absence of mind. There was every sort of mistake and erasure, Mr Forsdyke madly representing himself by turns as Officiating Priest, Infant, Godmother, and in one entry as Abode. These slips were sometimes corrected by himself, sometimes by another person and sometimes not at all. In several places, the sponsors appeared under Quality, Trade or Profession, in others they were crammed in with the parents. In one respect, however, all was consistency. Where a male Pyke was in question the Quality was invariably Gentleman.

At the bottom of a particularly wild page in the year 1897, Alleyn found what he wanted. Here on the 7th of May (altered to the 5th) was baptized Frances Ann Patricia, daughter of Alfred Molyneux Piers Period and Lady Frances Mary Julia Period née Pyke, with a huddle of amended sponsors.

In another hand, crammed in under Frances Ann Patricia, a second infant had been entered: Percival Pyke. Brackets had been added, enclosing the word ‘twins’.

It would seem that on the occasion of his baptism, Mr Pyke Period had fallen a victim to the rector’s peculiarity and had been temporarily neglected for his twin sister who, Alleyn remembered from her headstone, had died in infancy.

He spent a long time over this additional entry, using a strong pocket lens. He would have been very glad to remove the page and give it the full laboratory treatment. As it was he could see that a fine-pointed steel nib had been used and he noted that such another nib was rusting in the pen on the desk which also carried an old-fashioned inkpot. The writing was in a copperplate style, without character and rather laborious.

Praying that Mrs Nicholls was engaged in further activities in the vestry, Alleyn slipped out to the car and took a small phial from his homicide kit. Back at the font and hearing Mrs Nicholls, who was an insecure mezzo, distantly proclaiming that she ploughed the fields and scattered, he let fall a drop from the phial on the relevant spot. The result was not as conclusive as the laboratory test would have been but he would have taken long odds that the addition had been made at a different time from the main entry. Trusting that if anybody looked at this page they would conclude that some sentimentalist had let fall a tear over the infant in question, Alleyn shut the register.

The rector’s wife returned without her apron and with her hat adjusted. ‘Any luck?’ she asked.

‘Thank you,’ Alleyn said. ‘Yes, I think so. I find these old registers quite fascinating. The same names recurring through the years: it gives one such a feeling of continuity: the quiet life of the countryside. You seem to have had a steady progression of Pykes.’

‘One of the oldest families, they were,’ said the rector’s wife. ‘Great people in their day by all accounts.’

‘Have they disappeared?’

‘Oh, yes. A long time ago. I think their manor house was burnt down in Victorian times and I suppose they moved away. At all events the family died out. There’s a Mr Period over at Little Codling, who I believe was related, but I’ve been told he’s the last. Rather sad.’

‘Yes, indeed,’ Alleyn said.

He thanked her again and said he was sorry to have bothered her.

‘No bother to me,’ she said. ‘As a matter of fact we had someone else in, searching the register, a few weeks ago. A lawyer I think he was. Something to do with a client, I dare say.’

‘Really? I wonder,’ Alleyn improvised, ‘if it was my cousin.’ He summoned the memory of Mr Cartell, dreadfully blurred with mud. ‘Elderly? Slight? Baldish, with a big nose? Rather pedantic old chap?’

‘I believe he was. Yes, that exactly describes him. Fancy!’

‘He’s stolen a march on me,’ Alleyn said. ‘We’re amusing ourselves hunting up the family curiosities.’ He put something in the church maintenance box and took his leave. As he left the church a deafening rumpus in the lane announced the approach of an antique motor-car. It slowed down. The driver looked with great interest at Alleyn and the police car. He then accelerated and rattled off down the lane. It was Mr Copper in the Bloodbath.

II

‘If there’s one thing I fancy more than another, Mrs Mitchell,’ said Inspector Fox laying down his knife and fork, ‘it’s a cut of cold lamb, potato salad and a taste of cucumber relish. If I may say so, your cucumber relish is something particular. I’m very much obliged to you. Delicious.’

‘Welcome, I’m sure,’ said Mrs Mitchell. ‘I’ve got a nephew in the Force, Mr Fox, and from what he says it’s the irregular meals that tells in the end. Worse than the feet even, my nephew says, and his are a treat, believe you me. Soft corns! Well! Like red-hot coals, my nephew says.’

Alfred cleared his throat. ‘Occupational disabilities!’ he generalized. ‘They happen to the best of us, Mrs M.’

‘That’s right. Look at my varicose veins. I don’t mean literally,’ Mrs Mitchell added with a jolly laugh, in which Fox joined.

‘Well, now,’ he said, ‘I mustn’t stay here gossiping all the afternoon or I’ll have the superintendent on my tracks.’

‘Here we are, acting as pleasant as you please,’ Mrs Mitchell observed, ‘and all the while there’s this wicked business hanging over our heads. You know? In a way I can’t credit it.’

‘Naturally enough, Mrs M.,’ Alfred pointed out. ‘Following as we do, the even tenor of our ways, the concept of violence is not easily assimilated. Mr Fox appreciates the point of view I feel sure.’

‘Very understandable. I suppose,’ Fox suggested, ‘you might say the household has ticked over as comfortably as possible ever since the two gentlemen decided to join forces.’

There was a brief silence broken by Mrs Mitchell. ‘In a manner of speaking, you might,’ she concluded, ‘although there have been – well –’

‘Exterior influences,’ Alfred said remotely.

‘Well, exactly, Mr Belt.’

‘Such as?’ Fox suggested.

‘Since you ask me, Mr Fox, such as the dog and the arrangement. And the connections,’ Mrs Mitchell added.

‘Miss Mary Ralston, for instance?’

‘You took the words out of my mouth.’

‘We mustn’t,’ Alfred intervened, ‘give too strong an impression, Mrs M.’

‘Well, I dare say we mustn’t, but you have to face up to it. The dog is an animal of disgusting habits and that young lady’s been nothing but a menace ever since the arrangement was agreed upon. You’ve said it yourself, Mr Belt, over and over again.’

‘A bit wild, I take it,’ Fox ventured.

‘Blood,’ Mrs Mitchell said sombrely, ‘will tell. Out of an orphanage and why there, who knows?’

‘As Mr Cartell himself realized,’ Alfred said. ‘I heard him make the observation last evening though he didn’t frame it in those particular terms.’