A Red Herring Without Mustard

A smile crept over his face, as if he was recalling a cozy evening of darts and a couple of pleasant pints of half-and-half.

“And?”

“Well, let me see … there was the Red Bull on a Green Field, from Kim, which was the god of nine hundred devils … the Red Bull of the Borgias, which was a flag, and was on a field of gold, not green … the notorious Red Bull playhouse that burned in the Great Fire of London in 1666 … there was the mythical Red Bull of England that met the Black Bull of Scotland in a fight to the death … and, of course, in the days when priests practiced medicine, they used to hand out the hair of a red bull as a cure for epilepsy. Have I missed any?”

Not one of these seemed likely to be the Red Bull that had attacked Fenella.

“Why do you ask?” he said, seeing my obvious puzzlement.

“Oh, no reason,” I said. “It was just something I heard somewhere … the wireless, perhaps.”

I could see that he didn’t believe me, but he was gentleman enough not to press.

“Here’s St. Tancred’s,” I said. “You can let me off at the churchyard.”

“Ah,” said Dr. Darby, applying the Morris’s brakes. “Time for a spot of prayer?”

“Something like that,” I said.

Actually, I needed to think.

Thinking and prayer are much the same thing anyway, when you stop to think about it—if that makes any sense. Prayer goes up and thought comes down—or so it seems. As far as I can tell, that’s the only difference.

I thought about this as I walked across the fields to Buckshaw. Thinking about Brookie Harewood—and who killed him, and why—was really just another way of praying for his soul, wasn’t it?

If this was true, I had just established a direct link between Christian charity and criminal investigation. I could hardly wait to tell the vicar!

A quarter mile ahead, and off to one side, was the narrow lane and the hedgerow where Porcelain had hidden in the bushes.

Almost without realizing it, I found my feet taking me in that direction.

If her claim about Fenella had been a lie, she couldn’t really have been afraid of me, as she had pretended. There must, then, have been some other reason for her ducking into the hedgerow—one that I had not thought about at the time.

If that was the case, she had successfully tricked me.

I climbed over the stile and into the lane. It had been just about here that she’d slipped into the shrubbery. I stood for a moment in silence, listening.

“Porcelain?” I said, the hair at the back of my neck rising.

Whatever had made me think that she was still here?

“Porcelain?”

There was no answer.

I took a deep breath, realizing it could easily be my last. With Porcelain, you could always so quickly find yourself with a knife at your throat.

Another deep breath—this one for insurance purposes—and then I stepped into the hedgerow.

I could see at once that there was nobody hidden here. A slightly flattened area and a couple of trampled weeds indicated clearly where Porcelain had squatted the other day.

I crouched beneath the branches and wiggled myself into the same position that she must have assumed, putting myself in her shoes, looking out at the world as if from her eyes. As I did so, my hand touched something solid … something hard.

It was shoved inside a little tent of weeds. I wrapped my fingers round the object and pulled it into view.

It was black and circular, perhaps a little over three inches in diameter, and was made of some dark, exotic wood—ebony, perhaps. Carved into its circumference were the signs of the zodiac. I ran my forefinger slowly across the carved image of a pair of fish lying head to tail: Pisces.

The last time I had seen this wooden ring was at the fête. It had been on the table in Fenella’s tent, supporting her crystal ball.

There was little doubt that Porcelain had pinched the ball’s base from the caravan, and was making off with it when I had surprised her in the lane.

But why? Was it a souvenir? Did it have some sentimental attachment?

Porcelain was simply infuriating. Nothing that she did made any sense.

Finding the base reminded me that the ball itself, hidden safely away in plain sight among my laboratory glassware, was still awaiting careful study.

My intention had been to examine it for fingerprints, even though most traces had likely been washed away by immersion in the river. I remembered how Philip Odell, the wireless detective, had once pointed out to Inspector Hanley that the glandular secretions of the palms and fingers consisted primarily of water and water-soluble solids.