“No such luck.” Crouching low, I studied the impressions from Mr. Hamm’s boots and the unfamiliar print on the ledge. “But what’s happened to the flowers? Who could have done this—and why?”
“Mightn’t it have been Miss Wodehouse?” she said. “Clearing out the beds for some other purpose?”
I squinted at the ruined plots, trying to imagine it. Those flowers had been worth hundreds of pounds. “Can you see miserly old Miss Wodehouse doing something like that?” The decades of research, all her experiments and specimens, not to mention all the bulbs—
“Look around,” I said, with new urgency. “Did they dig everything up, or just destroy the plants?”
Miss Judson understood. She doffed her gloves (why was she wearing them, then? I didn’t understand fashion, I really didn’t) and plunged her hand into the freshly turned earth. “I can’t feel anything,” she said, “but it would take all day to search the whole place.”
I dug through the loose soil in my own corner of the bed, trying not to get any on the footprint. My fingers found not the fleshy, turniplike bulb of a lily plant, but cold metal. I pulled it out and shook off the dirt. “What is this?” It was embossed silver, about the length of my thumb, with a round end like a spoon handle and a sort of springy lever built in. I held it up, noting a faint reddish smear on one side.
“Oh, good for you,” Miss Judson said. “For not knowing, I mean. That is a cigar cutter. Is that blood?”
I frowned at it. “There’s no way to tell. But it looks like it.” I sat back on my heels, surveying the scene. The cat had disappeared again. “Mr. Hamm doesn’t smoke cigars, and I doubt Miss Wodehouse did, either.”
“Well, probably not while she was working. And Nephew Wodehouse doesn’t need a cigar cutter for his cigarillos.”
“Would someone smoke both?”
For a moment she looked torn. I recognized the expression—she was weighing the virtues of withholding information for my own good versus satisfying my thirst for knowledge. “No,” she finally said. “Probably not.”
“So there was another man here last night.” I rose and tugged a handkerchief from my pinafore pocket. The cigar cutter was too big to fit in one of my specimen jars. I was reasonably certain the “bloodstain” wouldn’t wipe off if I handled it carefully.
“How can you be sure it was last night?”
The cigar cutter safe in my bag, I recounted the evidence. “The stranger’s footprint was left here sometime after the rain stopped, or it would have been washed off the ridge. But the ground was too dry by morning to leave prints.”
“You don’t know that the cigar cutter was dropped then, or that it belonged to your so-called ‘stranger,’ ” she challenged.
“There was some kind of disturbance here.” I gestured toward the ruined plants, the scuffed-up path. “And we know it was last night, because the plants were intact yesterday when I had my lesson with Mr. Hamm.” I had seen enough through the gate to know that. “We know it’s not his cigar cutter, because he doesn’t smoke cigars, and he was the only other person Miss Wodehouse ever let in here.”
“Perhaps it was an heirloom,” she countered. “His father’s.”
I shook my head. “It’s new—you saw how shiny it is, and the blade was barely used.”
This was how we got on, and why I liked Miss Judson as a teacher so much. She let me figure things out on my own, asking challenging questions as I went.*
“Very well,” she said. “Last night, someone dropped his cigar cutter into Miss Wodehouse’s lily garden. What does that tell us?”
That was one question I had no answer for. Yet.
I wanted to search for more clues, but Miss Judson brushed off her hands on her apron. “I think we’ve done quite enough for one morning. Besides, we don’t want to be late to court.”
“If we leave now, they’ll have time to get rid of any other evidence.” Whoever “they” were.
Miss Judson did not look as sorrowful over this as she might have. “That is a risk we’ll have to take. Home.”
v
We rode our bicycles to the courthouse. They were the most wondrous modern conveyances, tremendously efficient, right down to the specialized attire they entailed. Miss Judson wore a suit with puffy bicycling bloomers,* although I only had a plain black split skirt. Pedaling past Swinburne traffic—what traffic there was, at any rate—felt deliciously urgent and dangerous.
We coasted down Swinburne’s cobbled streets, out from Gravesend with its new brick houses and postage-stamp gardens, past the schoolhouse I had never attended, along the tram tracks into town. As we rode, I imagined we were the heroes of my favorite penny dreadful adventures, Billy Garrett, Boy Detective, and his “side-kick” Franz, chasing down suspects through the Wild West. I knew the stories were preposterous—Billy solved his cases through luck and flights of fancy that owed nothing to logical deduction—but I found them splendidly inspiring. Once or twice I’d even caught Father reading one, when he was supposed to be studying his legal briefs.
Miss Judson pulled up next to the courthouse, a grim stone building with tall windows, iron railings, and statues outside. There was nowhere to park the bicycles, so she gave a man at the cab stand sixpence to watch them for us.
“Do you think that’s wise?” I asked as we made our way across the street. “Those bicycles cost twelve guineas apiece.”
“Who would steal a bicycle in front of the courthouse?”
“It’s full of criminals,” I pointed out.
We hadn’t had a chance to talk on the journey over, so as we hastened up the mountainous courthouse steps, I peppered Miss Judson with conversation. “How do you suppose Miss Wodehouse died?”
I was half expecting the answer to be that it was none of our business, but Miss Judson slowed down and turned back. “Well, she was old,” she said. “She may have simply passed away.”
“She has to have died of something,” I pressed. “There’s always a cause.”
“Mmm,” she said. “But the cause need not be nefarious.”
“Don’t you think it’s strange that she had her bath in the middle of the night?”
“Perhaps she was cold,” Miss Judson suggested. “It did rain last night. She may have had achy bones.”
That was logical, especially if she’d been out tearing up her own lilies. “Did she drown, then? Fall asleep in the tub and slip under the water?” Wouldn’t she have woken the second her face hit the water and she tried to breathe? Coughing and sputtering and splashing should have alerted anyone, particularly Trudy the maid, who presumably had a room adjacent to her mistress’s—so she could be at hand for peculiar requests like drawing hot baths at midnight. “Do you think the Coroner has had a chance to examine the body yet?”