A Red Herring Without Mustard

Daffy’s occasional pencil sketches usually began well enough but then, quite often, took a spectacularly wrong turn. The Virgin Mary would suddenly sprout buck teeth, for instance, or an impromptu cartoon of Father seated at the dinner table would turn into a man with no eyes. Whenever this happened, Daffy would set the drawing aside and go back to her reading. For weeks afterwards we would keep finding, stuffed into the crevices of the chesterfield and under the cushions of the drawing-room chairs, the pages she had ripped from her sketchbook.

“Perhaps,” Dogger said. “Perhaps not.”

I think it was at that moment, without realizing it, that I began to see the solution to the puzzle of the fire irons.

“Is Mrs. Mullet here today?”

I knew perfectly well that she was but I hadn’t seen her in the kitchen.

“She’s outside having a word with Simpkins, the milk-float man. Something about a wood chip in the butter.”

I’d have to wait until Dogger put away the cutlery before I tackled Mrs. M.

I wanted to be alone with her.

“Them tradesmen don’t give a flick,” Mrs. Mullet said disgustedly, her arms white to the elbows with flour. “Really, they don’t. One day it’s a fly in the clotted cream, and the next it’s a—well, you really don’t want to know, dear. But one thing’s as clear as dishwater. If you lets ’em get away with it, there’s never any tellin’ what they’ll bring round next time. Keep quiet about a toothpick in today’s butter and next thing you know you’ll be findin’ a doorknob in the cottage cheese. I don’t like it, dear, but it’s the way of the world.”

How on earth, I wondered, could I bring the conversation around from tradesmen to Brookie Harewood without seeming to do so?

“Perhaps we should eat more fish,” I suggested. “Some of the fishermen in the village sell it fresh from their creels. Brookie Harewood, for instance.”

Mrs. Mullet looked at me sharply. “Hmph! Brookie Harewood! He’s no more than a poacher. I’m surprised the Colonel hasn’t run him off the Palings. Them are your fish he’s sellin’ at the cottage gates.”

“I suppose he has to earn a living.”

“Livin’?” She bristled, giving the great mound of bread dough an extra pummel. “He don’t need to make a livin’ no more than Grace’s goose. Not with that mother of his over in Malden Fenwick sendin’ him reg’lar checks to stay away. He’s a layabout, plain and simple, that one is, and a rascal to boot.”

“A remittance man?” I asked.

Daffy had once told me about the black-sheep son of our neighbors, the Blatchfords, who was paid to keep well away in Canada. “Two pounds ten shillings per mile per year,” she said. “He lives in the Queen Charlotte Islands to maximize his pension.”

“Mittens man or not, he’s no good, and that’s a fact,” said Mrs. Mullet. “He’s managed to get in with a bad lot.”

“Colin Prout?” I suggested, thinking of the way Brookie had bullied the boy at the fête.

“Colin Prout’s no more than Brookie Harewood’s spare fingers, or so I’ve ’eard. No, I was talkin’ about Reggie Pettibone an’ that lot what ’as the shop in the ’igh street.”

“The antiques place?”

Pettibone’s Antiques & Quality Goods was just a few doors west of the Thirteen Drakes. Although I had passed it often, I had never been inside.

Mrs. Mullet sniffed.

“Antiques, my sitter!” she exclaimed. “Sorry, dear, but that’s ’ow I feels about it. That Reggie Pettibone give us two pounds six and three last year for a table me and Alf bought new at the Army and Navy when first we was married. Three weeks later we spots it in ’is window with silver knobs and fifty-five guineas on it! And a sign what says ‘Georgian Whist Table by Chippendale.’ We knew it was ours because Alf reckernized the burn mark on the leg where ’e raked it with an ’ot poker whilst ’e was tryin’ to fish out a coal what ’ad popped out of the grate and rolled under it when our Agnes was just a mite.”

“And Brookie’s in with Pettibone?”

“I should say he is. Thick as thieves. Tight as the jaws off a nutcracker, them two.”

“What does his mother think of that, I wonder?”

“Pfaw!” Mrs. Mullet said. “A fat lot she cares about ’im. ’Er with ’er paints and brushes! She does the ’orses and ’ounds crowd, you know—that lot o’ swells. Charges ’em a pretty penny, too, I’ll wager. Brookie and ’is under’anded ways ’as brought ’er nothin’ but shame. To my mind, she don’t rightly care what ’e gets ’isself up to so long as ’e keeps clear of Malden Fenwick.”

“Thank you, Mrs. M,” I said. “I enjoy talking to you. You always have such interesting stories to tell.”

“Mind you, I’ve said nothing,” she said in an undertone, raising a finger. “My lips are sealed.”

And in rather an odd way, there was truth in what she said. Since I first came into the room I had been waiting for her to ask me about the Gypsy, or why the police had turned up at Buckshaw, but she had done neither. Was it possible she didn’t know about either of these events?