“I’m sorry, Feely,” I called softly, tapping at her door. “It just slipped out.”
Her sobs were muffled by the wooden panels. How long would she be able to resist begging for the gory details? I’d have to wait it out.
“I know you’re upset, but just think how Alberta Moon is going to take it.”
A long, shuddering sob ended abruptly in a hiccup.
I heard the sound of shoes on the carpet and the turning of a key. The door swung open and there stood Feely, damp and devastated.
“Alberta Moon?” she asked, her hand trembling in front of her mouth.
I nodded sadly. “Better let me come in,” I said. “It’s a long story.”
Feely threw herself facedown on the bed. “Tell me everything. Start at the beginning.”
Oddly enough, she used nearly the same words as Inspector Hewitt had, and I told her, as I had told him, my gripping tale, leaving out only those essentials which I wished to keep to myself.
“A gas mask,” she sobbed as I finished. “Why in heaven’s name would he be wearing a gas mask?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I said.
Actually, I did know—or at least I had a fairly good idea.
In the past eight or nine months I’d spent a good many hours poring over the pages of Taylor’s Principles and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence, whose photographically illustrated volumes I had been fortunate enough to find hidden away on a high shelf in the stacks of the Bishop’s Lacey Free Library. By a remarkable stroke of fortune, these were similar enough in size to Enid Blyton’s The Island of Adventure, The Castle of Adventure, and The Sea of Adventure that, through a clever bit of jiggering with the dust jackets, I was able to study them closely for as long as I pleased in a remote corner of the reading room.
“My goodness, Flavia!” Miss Pickery, the head librarian had said. “You are a bookworm, aren’t you?”
If only she knew.
“Perhaps there was a gas leak,” Feely said, her voice muffled by the comforter. “Perhaps he was trying to escape the fumes.”
“Perhaps,” I said, noncommittally.
Although a carbon monoxide leak from the iron monster in the church basement was a distinct possibility, the problem was this: Since the gas is odorless, colorless, and tasteless, how could Mr. Collicutt have been aware of its presence?
And it seemed unlikely that, after six weeks, there would be measurable traces of the stuff in whatever was left of his blood. In cases of carbon monoxide poisoning, as I had good reason to know, the gas (CO) bonded to the blood’s hemoglobin, displacing the oxygen it was meant to carry to the body’s cells, and the victim died of simple suffocation. As long as he remained alive (once dragged from the gaseous atmosphere, of course) the carbon monoxide would pass off fairly quickly from the blood, its oxygen being replenished by normal breathing.
Dead bodies were a different kettle of fish. With respiration at a standstill, carbon monoxide could remain in the body for a considerable length of time. Indeed, it was a fairly well-known fact that the monoxide could still be detected in the gases given off by a cadaver that had been dead for months.
With no easy access to the late Mr. Collicutt’s blood, or his inner organs, it would be nearly impossible to be sure. Even if there had been a pool of blood hidden beneath his body, it would long ago have been reoxygenated by exposure to the air of the crypt, however foul that may be.
I thought of the moment I first stuck my face into that abyss—of the wave of cold, acrid decay that was swept into my nostrils.
“Eureka!” I shouted. I couldn’t help myself.
“What is it?” Feely asked. She couldn’t help herself, either.
“The bat in the organ!” I said excitedly. “It got into the church somehow. I’ll bet there’s a broken window! What do you think, Feely?”
As an excuse, it was as stale as yesterday’s toast, but it was the best I could come up with on such short notice.
It’s just as well she couldn’t read my mind. What I was thinking was this: The cold draft coming out of what ought to have been a closed crypt reminded me of what Daffy had told me about the verse on Cassandra Cottlestone’s tomb.
I didd dye
And now doe lye
Att churche’s door
For euermore
Pray for mye bodie to sleepe
And my soule to wayke.