Alan Bradley - I Am Half-Sick of Shadows

Yes! Just as I thought—the actress had left half a bowl of fruit pieces uneaten on the night table. I helped myself to the dessert spoon and returned to Miss Wyvern.

Using the bowl of the spoon as a shoehorn, I managed to lever the boot back onto her dead foot.

Better check the other one, something told me, and I quickly pried it off. Could there possibly be more of the message in the other toe?

No such luck. To my disappointment the second boot was empty, and I quickly levered it back onto her foot.

So much for the lower extremities.

Next step was to give her a jolly good sniffing. I had learned by experience that poison could underlie all seeming causes of death, and I was taking no chances.

I sniffed her lips (the upper one, I noticed, painted larger than it actually was with scarlet lipstick, perhaps to mask the faint mustache that was visible only at extremely close range), followed by her ears, her nose, her cleavage, her hands, and as much as I could manage of her armpits without actually shifting the body.

Nothing. Except for being dead, Phyllis Wyvern smelled exactly like someone who had, just hours ago, stepped out of a bath of scented salts.

She must have come straight from her performance to her room, removed her Juliet costume (it was still laid out flat on the bed), taken a bath, and then … what?

I used my handkerchief again to collect from the nape of her neck a small sample of the stage makeup I had noted earlier. Smeared onto the white linen, the greasepaint had the appearance of finely ground red brick.

I gave special attention to her fingernails, which had been coated with a shiny scarlet polish to match the lipstick. The cuticles formed stark half-moons of grayish white where the color had not been applied. Feely did her nails in that way, too, and I had a sudden but momentary attack of gooseflesh.

Steady on, old girl , I thought. It’s only death .

Phyllis Wyvern certainly hadn’t been wearing these gaudily lacquered nails on stage. Quite the contrary—except for the slap, her interpretation of Juliet had been notable for its village-pump simplicity. The real-life Juliet, after all, had been no more than twelve or thirteen years old, or so Daffy liked to claim.

“If it weren’t for you lot,” she had once said mysteriously, “I could have Dirk Bogarde scaling my balcony even as we speak.”

Phyllis Wyvern, by contrast, was fifty-nine. She had told me so herself. How she managed to shed forty-five years under the lights was nothing short of a miracle.

Perhaps it was her size. She was really not that much bigger than me.

I’d better get on with it , I thought. The actresses could return at any moment from their wild-goose chase, and be hammering at the locked door.

But something was niggling away at the back of my brain—something that was not quite right. What could it be?

I stepped back from the body for a more general look.

In her peasant blouse and skirt, Phyllis Wyvern looked as if she had just dropped into the chair to catch her breath before setting out to a masquerade.

Was it possible she had simply had a heart attack, perhaps, or suffered a sudden fatal stroke?

Of course not! There was no blotting out the sight of that dark decorative bow of ciné film twisted fancily around her throat. And besides, Dogger had pointed out the petechiae. The woman had been strangled. That much was clear. Part of my mind must still be milling away trying to reduce the horror of what must have been a violent scene.

From her hair to her—

Her hair! That was it!

Like little colored stars twinkling in the winter sky, Juliet’s crown of flowers was still woven into her long, golden hair. They could hardly be real, I thought. If they had been, they’d have wilted by now, and yet they looked as fresh as if they had been picked just moments before I came into the room.

I reached out and pinched a particularly dewy-looking primrose.

Hard to tell by touch. I gave the thing a jerk and—good lord!—Phyllis Wyvern’s hair, posies and all, went tumbling off her head and onto the floor with the sickening whump of a shot bird falling dead from the sky.

It was a wig, of course, and without it, she was as bald as a boiled egg.

A boiled egg mottled with even more of the petechiae, or Tardieu’s spots, as Dogger had called them.

I stared, aghast. What kind of nightmare had I stumbled into?

I retrieved the wig from the carpet and replaced it on her head, but no matter how much I twisted it this way and that, it still looked ludicrous.

Perhaps it was the knowledge of what lay beneath.

Well, I couldn’t spend all day fiddling with her coiffure. I finally had to give it up and turn my attention to the dresser, which I found to be littered with a various assortment of bottles and tins: theatrical cold creams, glycerine and rose water, rank upon rank of skin cleansers and assorted toiletries by Harriet Hubbard Ayer. Although the dresser top was a veritable apothecary’s shop, a few things were obviously missing: one was red theatrical makeup; the others included scarlet lipstick and nail polish.

I had a quick rummage through her purse, but aside from a handful of paper tissues, a wallet containing six hundred and twenty-five pounds, and a handful of loose change, there was little of real interest: a tortoiseshell comb, a pocket mirror, and a tin of breath mints (of which I helped myself to one and pocketed a couple of extras for quick energy, should I need it later).

I was about to close the clasp when I spotted the zipper, barely visible against the lining, a careful camouflage by the purse’s maker.

Hullo! I thought. What’s this? A secret compartment!

Disappointingly, there wasn’t much in it—a set of keys and a small but official-looking booklet consisting of two gray pages with the same information repeated on each of them.

COUNTY OF LONDON

License to drive a Motor Car or Motor Cycle

Phyllida Lampman

“Tenebrae”

3 Collier’s Walk, S.E.

It had been issued on the thirteenth day of May, 1929.

Phyllida? Lampman?

Could this be Phyllis Wyvern’s real name? It seemed beyond belief that she would keep a stranger’s driving license in her purse.

But assuming that Phyllida was Phyllis or the other way around, what was I to make of the rest of it? Was she Val Lampman’s wife? Sister? Sister-in-law? Cousin?

“Cousin” and “wife” were distinctly possible. In fact, she could be both. Harriet, for instance, had been a de Luce before she married Father, and because of it had been spared having to give up her maiden name.

If Phyllis Wyvern hadn’t lied to me about her age—and why would she?—she must have been … let me see … 1929 had been twenty-one years ago … thirty-eight years old when this driving license was issued.

How old was Val Lampman? It was hard to tell. He was one of those gnomish creatures with tight shiny skin and pale hair who, with a silk scarf at his neck to hide the wrinkles, could pass for ageless.

What was it Daffy had said? That not since something or another—which I was too young to understand—had Phyllis Wyvern worked with any other director.

What could that something be? It was becoming plainer by the minute that, by fair means or foul, I needed to pry open my sister’s clammy shell.

I was having a second look at Phyllis Wyvern’s fingernails when the doorknob turned!

I almost had an accident!

Fortunately the door was locked.

I crammed the driving license back into the purse and pulled the zipper shut. I picked up the sheet from the floor and, trying not to make a rustling noise, hurriedly re-draped the body.