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

and blood.
    What was I to make of that?
    On the wall beside the bed was what seemed at first to be an eighteenth-century lady’s fan: a large, lacy, delicate semicircle which proved to be, upon closer inspection—or so I guessed—a large specimen of coral, which looked for all the world like a silhouette of an ancient tree in winter.
    A bedside table was decorated with carved serpent legs supporting a marble slab top, upon which had been placed two shillings and sixpence, a key, a silver pocket watch with chain and fob, a fist-sized gargoyle carved from some dark wood such as ebony, the stub of a pencil, a bit of gray fluff indicating that these objects had previously been in someone’s pocket, and a £1 ticket on the Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstake.
    I remembered with a pang how Daffy and I had clubbed together last June to buy Father, as a birthday present, a ticket on this same race.
    “It’s the most valuable prize ever offered,” I’d told him, brimming over with excitement as I handed him what I prayed would be a winner. “More than £22,000.”
    Twenty-some thousand quid would go a long way,
I thought,
to easing Father’s money worries.
    Father’s brow had clouded and furrowed, and I was left standing awkwardly with the ticket in my outstretched hand.
    “I appreciate your thoughtfulness, Flavia,” Father had said. “It is very kind of you, but I cannot accept.”
    He seemed as embarrassed as I was.
    “You must never indulge in gambling,” he said. “Nor must you stand to profit from the frailties of others. Lotteries, as you very well know, are against the law.”
    “But—”
    “No, Flavia. That’s enough. I have spoken. You may go.”
    And with that, he had turned back to his stamp collection.
    I was too crushed to tell Daffy what had happened.
    Can you revoke a prayer?
I wondered.
    In the following weeks I had then counter-prayed each night in bed that the ticket would be a loser. To win would be a calamity. While I was perfectly capable of keeping my own trap shut, I knew that the seller of a winning ticket was also awarded a sum of money. In my case, the seller was Tippy Hogben, who, under cover of her market stall at Malden Fenwick, did a brisk business in such black-market goods as tea, butter, and sugar.
    And if Tippy won so much as a shilling, I was as good as dead. Gossip would cook my goose.
    It wasn’t the giving of the ticket to Father that was a crime, but the buying of it, which was my responsibility alone. At the last minute Daffy had begged off our jaunt to Tippy’s stall on the grounds of having a ferocious headache, so that, in the end, I was left to do the dirty deed alone.
    Now, six months later, the very thought of an Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstake ticket still made me queasy, which was one of the reasons I didn’t touch this ticket of Mr. Sambridge’s.
    The other reason was fingerprints.
    I couldn’t help wondering if the deceased had checked his ticket. It seemed unlikely. If he had, and if it were a loser, he’d have thrown it away; if it were a winner, he’d have handed it in and claimed his prize.
    I needed to examine the back of the ticket to see if it had been endorsed, and it didn’t take long to think of a solution. Leaning over the table, I touched the tip of my tongue to the thing and flipped it over.
    “Necessity is the mother of invention,” Daffy had once told me, and as far as I knew, no one had yet come up with a system of tongue-print identification. I would put it on the list of clever innovations I intended to suggest some day to Inspector Hewitt.
    But not during this case, of course.
    To my disappointment, the reverse of the ticket had not been written on: no seller’s name, no endorsement by the buyer.
    I repeated the tongue trick and flipped the ticket back into its original position. A little damp, perhaps, but it would soon dry off.
    But wait! Had I done myself in?
    Would they test for saliva? Would Sergeant Woolmer think to do a spit test on this