The Aylesford Skull by James P. Blaylock Read Free Book Online Page A

steadily at him.
    “Shall I have Mr. Binger dispose of the fish, sir?”
    “If you will, Hasbro. Ask him to hack it up and cover it with quicklime, then bury it deeply enough so that Hodge won’t get at it.”

FIVE
    THE RETURN OF THE DEAD
    T he suggestion that the hemlock fancier had been an escaped lunatic had failed to impress Alice; St. Ives had seen as much in her face, although she hadn’t confronted him with it. The crime was too devious, too well thought out, too purposeful. He could think of only one man who might do such a thing, but why that man should be lurking in the environs of north Kent was a mystery to him. The man, an evil genius who called himself Dr. Narbondo, was well acquainted with their previous residence in Chingford. Indeed, Hasbro had chased him from the premises a little under a year ago when he’d come around at night intent on stealing St. Ives’s bathyscaphe, which, it had to be admitted, St. Ives had recently stolen from him. But their removal to Aylesford had been kept quiet – no fanfare at all – and in fact he and Alice still owned the farmhouse at Chingford-by-the-Tower, which they now leased to Tubby Frobisher. They weren’t hiding in Aylesford, but they weren’t conspicuous either.
    St. Ives walked along the rows of hops, which reached above the top of his head now, his mind sorting through various possibilities. Idly he watched out for the long-winged flies and lice that were the bane of hops, but there was no evidence of such evils. He picked a leaf and crushed it between his fingers. It had a slightly bitter smell. He dropped it, brushing his fingers on his trousers. If the hemlock had simply been torn up and sprinkled onto the pike, he might convince himself that it had been a devilish prank, but this had been something more – the work of someone who had a decoction of hemlock about his person, a determined poisoner, not a prankish devil.
    He strolled out into the wisteria alley, looking with satisfaction at the broad green lawn away to his right, where there stood a dozen or so hoppers’ huts. They would see considerable activity come September, when the hops were harvested, the grounds becoming a literal fiddler’s green during the celebration afterward.
    In the distance now, Hasbro approached from the direction of the river, carrying the rifle and rubber waders. St. Ives walked out to meet him.
    “Nothing out of the way?” he asked.
    “A deepening of the mystery, perhaps.” Hasbro reached into one of the waders and drew out a piece of an oak branch, half the length of a cricket bat and stained with blood. “There were two distinct sets of footprints in the soil of the path. I’m persuaded that two men had come down separately from the direction of the village, one stopping near the weir and the other going on to the river’s edge where the missus had apparently submerged the creel with the pike in it. Then the single track – the man who poisoned the fish – reversed direction and returned toward the village again, running afoul of the man whom she saw lurking in the wood near where she fished. At that point there was an apparent struggle – a rhododendron trod nearly flat. The shout was almost certainly uttered by the man who was struck with this club. It has a considerable heft to it, and the bloody result argues that the attacker meant to do him a considerable mischief. There was evidence that the stricken man fled into the trees. I found his footprints again some distance away, doubling back toward Aylesford once more after he had eluded his attacker.”
    “But who struck whom?” asked St. Ives.
    “The man who fled into the wood was evidently the same man who had poisoned the fish.”
    “Did his footprints put you in mind of Narbondo?”
    “Quite possibly, or a man of similar size. Nothing certain in that, however.”
    St. Ives stood silently for a moment, listening to the buzzing of an unseen fly. He heard Eddie’s laughter from the direction of