Seven for a Secret Read Free

teak door, window boxes stuffed with pine that somehow had sprouted gilt cones, a decorative stone face everywhere they could find on the façade to slap one. Even the roofing tiles reeked of new money. The gryphons wanted nothing to do with the place, and neither did I.
    I tried the bell. It chimed like a gong summoning an emperor to dinner and the door swung open. The butler, when he saw me, looked as if he’d just glanced inside a slaughterhouse.
    Granted, my winter coat is of pedestrian grey wool and was once someone else’s. And granted, the upper right quarter of my face does resemble a hardened wax puddle. But he didn’t know a thing about the coat’s previous history. Or the face’s. So he ought to keep dark about it, is what I thought.
    I waited for him to say something.
    He stood there. Being altogether tall and silent and side-whiskered.
    So I swept my fingers toward the dented copper star pinned to my lapel.
    “Ah,” he said, as if discovering the source of a pesky smell. “You’ve been summoned to discover the whereabouts of the painting, I gather. A . . .
policeman
.”
    Despite myself, I grinned. I was used to the disgusted tone people took with the infant police force by then, if not used to the word
summoned
, but none of that mattered. I’ve listened to thousands of people from hundreds of cities in my years tending bar. It was a game of mine, before. Placing them. One of many games. And apparently the Millingtons hadn’t the ear to identify a Bristol man doing his level-best London accent and had hired a jack-tar for a snob butler. That kittled me. The barely visible hole where the ring had once pierced his ear kittled me too.
    “How’s the shipping industry back home?” I asked.
    If you’ve never seen a liveried sea dog turn purple and then an oysterish white, you’re missing something splendid. His muttonchops practically stood at attention.
    “This way, sir, and . . . do please let me know if my services can be of use to you.”
    We entered a foyer lined with portraits of unhealthy-looking women with their dogs and their children and their needlework. An active gentleman of about fifty-five burst through the opposite door, checking a gold pocket watch. Mr. Millington, it seemed clear.
    “The policeman is here to see you, sir,” the Bristol butler reported.
    “Oh, wonderful! What’s his name, then, Turley?”
    Turley’s mouth worked like a pike’s. The man was suffering so deeply, I solidified our new friendship with a rescue effort.
    “I’m Timothy Wilde. I’ll be happy to see what I can do about returning your property.”
    “My word,” Millington mused as he shook my hand. “Not what I’d expected from a note to Chief Matsell himself for help, but I suppose he knows his business.”
    Unsure of which side to take in this argument, I kept mum.
    “I’m due at the ’Change,” he fretted. “So I’ll just post you up on our way to the music room, the—well, how do you people put it? The stage of the crime, as it were?”
    “I really couldn’t tell you.”
    “I see,” he said, baffled.
    Mr. Millington informed me en route that, upon entering the music room the previous day at six a.m., their maid Amy had suffered a fright. The Millingtons were art lovers (the chambers we passed through were drowning in China vases and Japanned fire screens and oil paintings of cherubs at their never very strenuous occupations), and each morning the precious artifacts were cleaned.
Inventoried,
I supplied in my head. Unfortunately, Amy had discovered a gap in the miniatures hanging on the music-room wall. After a thorough search, Matsell was notified, and thus I was ordered to try my hand as an art bloodhound.
    Not my strong suit. I knew it sure as gravity.
    “My wife is
extremely
upset over this dreadful affair.” Mr. Millington’s pocket watch reappeared briefly. “Shall I tell you about Jean-Baptiste Jacques Augustin?”
    I grew up pickling my brains in an erudite Protestant