Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew'd by Alan Bradley Read Free Book Online

smell something else, too: a whiff of sulfur, or something very like it.
    Had the Devil been here in his horns and hooves, leaving behind the smell of brimstone? Had Mr. Sambridge met his end in some bizarre ritual, at the hands of a group of village Satanists?
    I shook off a growing shiver before it overcame me.
    If Mr. Sambridge
had
been murdered, it had been no spur-of-the-moment killing. Someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to rig up such an infernal device.
    A pair of hemp ropes ran up and through the wooden pulleys, ending in leather-padded loops which encircled his ankles.
    For a distance of a foot or more, both above and below the dead man’s knees, the fibers of the rope were stained with moist blood. It was obvious that, before dying, he had clawed at his bonds in a frantic attempt to free himself.
    But his struggles had been in vain. He was caught up like a fly in a spider’s web.
    His face, as I have said, was livid, as might be expected of someone who had died while hanging upside down. Whether or not the congestion was postmortem was something that would only be determined at the inevitable autopsy.
    I tried to put myself in his position: to imagine how he must have felt as he waited upside down for death to come.
    While I myself have never died, I
have
mastered the art of standing on my head for lengthy periods of time, in order to stimulate my thinking processes. Dogger had assured me that doing so should not be fatal: Only people with dicky hearts would be at risk during an extended headstand.
    Had Mr. Sambridge suffered heart troubles?
    If he had, his medicine cabinet might well hold the answer. A prescription for anything containing thiocyanate, nitroglycerine, or any of the veratrum alkaloids derived from the corn lily or false hellebore, for instance, would be highly suggestive.
    I’m sorry if I seem to digress, but that is precisely what I was thinking at the moment. It’s the way my mind works. Things are not the same in real life as they are in, for instance, the fictional world of Sherlock Holmes. Brains, in reality, do not go
clickety-clickety-clickety-click
from
A
to
B
to
C
to
D
and so forth, rushing like a train along the rails, until at the end, with a happy
“Toot-toot!”
they arrive at their destination,
Z,
and the case is suddenly solved.
    Quite the contrary. In reality, analytical minds such as my own are forever shooting wildly off in all directions simultaneously. It’s like joyously hitting jelly with a sledgehammer; like exploding galaxies; like a display of fireworks in which the pyrotechnic engineer has had a bit too much to drink and set off the whole conglobulation all at once, by accident.
    It was not until this point that the room itself began to attract my notice. I had been so occupied with the remains of the late Mr. Sambridge that I had not really—other than a quick glance—registered the contents of his bedroom.
    My first impression, now, was that I had been miraculously transported through time and space and dumped into the bedroom of Geppetto, the wood-carver in
Pinocchio
.
    I looked round in astonishment at the furniture, which was remarkable, to say the least.
    The four-poster bed, for instance, was made up of what seemed to be an entire squadron of carved angels: plump wooden cherubs that simpered and leered at one another as they swarmed to their mischievous task.
    What came to mind was that line from
Hamlet:
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.
    But these cherubs were not singing the terrified nightshirted figure to his rest, but rather, so far as I could make out, dragging him down relentlessly by his knobbly carved wooden knees towards the pit of carved flames which formed the foot of the bed. The victim’s mouth was open, his tiny teeth like bat’s teeth as he fell, in a silent scream of agony.
    Much like—I couldn’t help thinking—the real Mr. Sambridge.
    Two falling figures, tumbling headfirst into eternity: one of wood and one of flesh