Archive of Our Own

February, 1931

Tuesday found the body. This was not, Jem afterwards reflected, the surprising thing. The surprising thing was that it had taken almost ten years for Tuesday to find a body in the first place. Heretofore he'd made a distinguished, some might even say respectable career of sniffing out evidence, crawling down wells and generally making a nuisance of himself to such persons as Judith Carlisle, but he'd never before found a body.

This went some way to explaining why Jem didn't immediately realise what had happened. They were traversing the park as was their usual midmorning routine for dog and master when there was no active case to assess or body to investigate, and Tuesday went haring off towards the duck pond. Jem let him run, half an eye on the little blue dachshund, body slung low to the ground, paws flying out at improbable angles, leathery ears flapping in the winter chill. Over the way several boys were playing at football, Toby Carlisle among them; Jem raised a hand in acknowledgement, reflected that this was probably unsolicited mortification and stuffed his mittened hand back into his coat pocket.

Then, back came Tuesday with…well, truth be told, Jem thought it was a ball, at first. A misshapen cricket ball mutated by cold, or maybe an overstuffed football that had been lost in weeks gone by. He bent down to retrieve it from Tuesday and only then realised that the thing was woolly, and possessed of fingers. Which was to say, it was a hand, and it was lying uncomplainingly in Tuesday's mouth. Tuesday wagged his tail, got up on his hind legs and tried to deposit the thing – the hand – in Jem's hands. Jem declined, being in that moment averse to severed stumps that glittered all marrow and metallic blood under shabby moss stitch. Tuesday, undeterred, began indignantly, even improbably, to bark and squeak around the hand and hared off towards the pond again. Nothing for it, Jem thought ruefully, than to go after him, if only because it was out of the common way for people to leave their hands lying around for Dachshunds to discover. And because where hands were, there were generally also bodies. So much for a leisurely morning ramble.

Down they went, into the muddy, reedy edges of the pond, smelling faintly sulphurous in the slush and snow, Jem moving stiffly at first because the cold disagreed his old war wound. Tuesday, unhindered by such unpleasantness, ran gamely ahead and stood with his tail waving like an antenna among the reeds where, sure enough and apparently asleep, was the body of a man. Tuesday put his paws on the man's chest, still with the hand in his mouth, and resumed barking furiously. It seemed a safe bet, given the vociferousness of the barking and the unresponsiveness of the man, that Jem was looking at a late departed someone or other. If nothing else, no one sane lay down in the long grass of the pond and went to sleep on a cold February morning. It just wasn't normal. And they definitely didn't detach their hands before falling asleep in the pond environs.

Jem knelt down gingerly, testing the weight of the ground and mostly finding the mud cold. It pooled around his knees and invaded his ankles, reminiscent in all the worst ways of wintery, wartime mornings. Quieter though, Jem gave it that. He stripped his own gloves and prodded cautiously at the body. It was a body. No pulse at all. It also had no hands. Well, there was the hand brandished by Tuesday, but discounting that there was nothing else to suggest the man had ever had hands, except that Jem hadn't studied anatomy for nothing. People had hands. They were appended to the wrists for added dexterity, and for reasons best known to some cosmic other, this man had had his removed. From the look of it, he'd had them removed badly. Probably inexpertly, almost certainly unwillingly, because what could possibly make a fellow sit down and decide the best course of action was to lop off his own hands? No, this was something else.

Jem prised the hand in evidence out of Tuesday's mouth and commenced to turn it over in examination. Five fingers, nothing particularly distinguishing about it, and clearly haphazardly severed from its owner, if the teeth of the injury were any indication. The moss stitch of the mitten had begun to disintegrate revealing a cold-ravaged skin. Also, it was inexplicably clutching something flimsy and white under the glove. For a horrifying moment Jem thought it was some piece of bodily detritus, but then he felt the waxiness of it and saw that this poor, worn-out thing was nothing but the ghost of a white tulip.

Jem was just about to commence a search of the perimeter for its stray mate when a ball sailed over his head, followed in short order by the wiry body of one Toby Carlisle. He jogged into view with a wave and cheery 'Hullo Uncle Jem!' and then, spotting Tuesday, and the body, 'Say, is that one of Dad's cases?' And before Jem could answer, 'Hold up, what happened to his hands? Is that his hand?' with a gesture at the hand still in Jem's possession. The white tulip fluttered dangerously in the wind, and Jem tucked it into a coat pocket for safekeeping.

Well, this was an unlooked for complication. Here stood Toby Carlisle bright and eager as Dachshund Tuesday, all but leaping for details of the case of the hour. It might have been fine except that Jem knew his mother and could foresee no version of events where Judith Carlisle was half as ecstatic over her son's discovery of a dead body as said son was in the circumstance. But the really vexing thing was that probably Mr No Hands would be Geordie's next case, and Jem ought to go and alert him to the fact, which meant leaving Toby with the body, because well, he couldn't leave it unattended, could he? Somehow Jem didn't see the station house superintendent counting Tuesday as much of a guard.

In short order, Jem got himself between boy and body, envisaging the ensuing conversation with Judith. Yes, I did knowingly let him sit alone with a body at an active crime scene. Yes, I knew you probably wouldn't like it. No, it didn't seem terribly important. Yes, it did occur to me he was probably too young. The thing of it was, Jem quite valued his existence. He liked rambles in the park with Tuesday, and being co-opted into Geordie's excursions to whatever the Gilbert and Sullivan Society were performing that month. He enjoyed listening to Teddy and Kitty bicker over the chess set and his daughter's entirely-too-accurate games of Medic as enacted on her siblings. He didn't much fancy losing all of that to murder at the hands of Judith Carlisle all because he'd seen fit to leave her son to keep interlopers out of his crime scene.

'Toby,' he said, 'Do me a favour and go fetch your Dad, will you? Tell him it's urgent.'

'Sure thing,' said Toby, and tucking the football under one arm, he was off running through the mud and the grass, cheeks pink with cold, as eager and keen and unhindered by war injuries as any Dog Tuesday. Jem just stood there, feeling the waxy white tulip in his pocket, wondering what it meant and what the hell had happened to its owner.

Geordie appeared in short order, Teddy at his heels and Kitty, unshakably behind him.

I did tell her, Doc,' an out-of-breath Teddy said before anyone could inquire, 'that we couldn't possibly give her the details of – '

'Oh, go away Teddy,' said Kitty, batting at his shoulder with a gloved hand, 'And let me look. I told him' – and Jem wasn't sure if she meant this for Geordie, Teddy, or indeed both of them – 'that he wasn't giving me the details of an active investigation if I happened to discover it in passing.'

'You're doing a terrible job of passing by,' said Teddy, darkly. 'Isn't she, Doc? Hadn't she better wander over there and loop round, or something, if she's really just – '

'Oh,' said Kitty, before he could finish, 'excellent idea! I hadn't thought!'

'Kitty,' said Geordie warningly, 'go away.'

Kitty made a noise of protestation, and Jem held up a placating hand. 'You'll get first crack at the story, Kitty, you always do,' he said. Kitty folded her arms, stuck out her tongue, obviously regretted the action in the wake of the cold and turned to go.

'You hold them to that,' she said over her shoulder to Jem as she took her leave.

The maddening thing was that there didn't appear to be a story. Jem duly arranged for the body to be taken to the station house morgue, where he went through the pockets of the deceased and came up with a crumpled bit of paper whereon was written a string of numbers. They might have been a date, a time, or even an address, less the street name for all Jem knew about it. He put it by for Geordie and Teddy, and turned over the man's coat. There was no tag in the lining. Nor were there tags, investigation revealed, in his shirt collar or trousers, either. Jem set these aside, too, exasperated and privately wondered where Nan's Lord Harrington, Detective Extraordinaire was when needed. He moved on, disgruntled, to the contents of the body, because at least in this he was on solid ground. But all that got Jem was a lungful of something smelling of bitter almond when he cut into the stomach, and a headache for his trouble. And there was still absolutely no explanation as to the loss of the man's hands.

'But you know how it happened, yeah, Doc?' asked Teddy, bobbing anxiously in the surgery doorway, as if afraid the handless state of the victim might be contagious.

'Not yet,' said Jem. Then, seeing Geordie materialising behind his sergeant, he picked up the severed hand, waved it in their general direction and said, 'Tell you what I can say, though; this man had both his hands when he died.'

Jem watched Geordie scrub both hands across his face. 'Confirming someone else did the severing.'

Teddy winced, squeaked, and said, 'That was ever up for debate?' Geordie shrugged.

'Did get these for you, though,' said Jem, and handed over the curiously unmarked clothes and the battered bit of paper. Geordie took them, frowned, and handed them on to Teddy, who struck Jem as only too glad to have something other than the handless corpse to focus on.

'Right,' said Geordie, 'That puts us further ahead than we were five minutes ago. You don't happen to have a name for him, do you?'

'Haven't you?' asked Jem, who had been on the verge of asking. He looked from blank, drawn face to blank drawn face and groaned. 'You must have something,' he said to the pair of them. 'We can't go on calling him Tuesday's Body forever.'

'Could,' said Teddy darkly. 'Benwick's looked, and by all accounts Tuesday's friend there doesn't exist.'

Jem frowned. Looked from the body to Geordie to Teddy. He had to call the poor man something. Something besides The Body, preferably.

'He's not in the records,' said Geordie, by way of elaboration. 'I made Teddy look when Benwick came up short.'

'And I made him look after that,' said Teddy, clearly exasperated and with a jerk of a thumb in his inspector's direction. 'In fact,' this ruefully, 'much as I hate to say it, Kitten might be our best bet after all. You know,' as Geordie looked patently unconvinced, 'Stick a photo in the paper, Do You Know This Man, etcetera, etcetera.'

'There's always the good doctor's bit of stationary, here,' said Geordie, desperately, extracting the crumpled sheet from whence it was pinioned between Teddy's hand and the unmarked coat.

'And there's this,' said Jem, suddenly remembering the white tulip. He crossed the room, fished in the pocket of his overcoat and produced it. 'It was in his hand when I – when Tuesday – found him. I sort of forgot about it, what with examining him. Doesn't exactly advance us much on who he is, though,' said Jem. 'Even if you can make sense of it.'

'Too much to hope you're well versed in the language of flowers, eh Doc?' said Teddy, trying for a smile. It came out stiffer than he probably intended.

'No,' said Jem and Geordie simultaneously. Teddy was undeterred. 'Faith? Kitty?'

'I dare you to ask them,' said Jem, which really did make them laugh.

'Where angels fear to tread,' said Geordie, holding up his hands in surrender. 'Judith might though – or Benwick might have nerves the rest of us haven't.' Geordie winked. Jem laughed. Teddy snorted. 'Not bloody likely,' he said.

Then, to a visibly disgruntled Geordie, because he couldn't not say it, Jem said, 'Look, never mind the flower for now. He needs a name. I need him to have a name. And God knows you can't begin looking into him unless he's got a name. Let Kitty have a go at finding it for us.'

Across the room, Jem caught the easing of Geordie's shoulders and the imperceptible nod of his head that said, Oh, go on then.So, Kitty got her story, and Teddy and Benwick got lumbered with the rousing job of waiting on the telephone, while Geordie undertook to trace the clothes and interpret their bit of rumpled paper. Jem scoured books and tried to work out just what he'd got a lungful of that had landed him such a splitting headache in the first place.

The latter was eventually answered by Helen, or more specifically Helen's cooking. They were still nowhere on the question of the paper, the clothes, the white tulip, or as it fell out, the dead man's name. This last owed to, as Teddy put it, an embarrassment of riches. No less than three different women had reached out since the paper's publication claiming knowledge.

'Which would be fine, said a vexed Teddy over tea and an almond tart, 'if they could agree on who he was. So far he's got three different names, at least two wives and one family that we know about, and the telephone is still ringing. Poor Benwick has the joyous job of untangling that lot tomorrow. Mind, not a one of our caller-inner-ers saw the man die.'

Jem grimaced sympathy, chewed a bit of tart, and said, apropos of nothing, 'Cyanide!'

'Sorry?' said Faith, not unreasonably. Helen blinked, as if to ask what about her creation was so dire as to warrant immediate dispatch.

'Tuesday's poor friend with no hands,' said Jem. 'Mr White Tulip.' Teddy yelped and tried simultaneously to clap his hands around the ears of three children at once while they squealed and giggled over this display of adult censoriousness. 'It was cyanide that did for him.' He jabbed a fork in the almond tart for emphasis and half-canted,' Bitter almonds run and hide/ that's the smell of cyanide. They said it to us back during the war. There were loads of them.' For emphasis he stuck a bit of tart under Teddy's nose. 'Almonds,' he said. 'Do you see?'

'No,' said Teddy, even as Kitty said, 'Loads of what?'

'What?' echoed Sophy from her chair. Helen had run away with the cyanide rhyme, apparently enchanted.

'Oh, let's think,' said Jem, swinging Sophy up onto a knee and beginning to bounce her. 'There was one…smell the scent of new-mown hay, 'phosgene gas is on the way.'

'That's quite good,' said Geordie, coming into the room. Faith gestured him into a chair. Geordie took it, and stretched out in leisurely fashion, so that his legs looked even longer than usual.

'What,' he asked, 'has it got to do with anything?'

'Daddy's solving your case, Uncle Geordie,' said Helen, scrabbling awkwardly up onto the older man's lap, and taking her desert with her. Geordie reached around her and broke a piece of tart off its crust to munch on thoughtfully, either not minding, or with the express intent of invoking Helen's caustic yelp. Now he said around the almonds, 'What has phosgene got to do with anything?'

'Almonds,' said Helen. 'In the tart, see?' causing her human chair to choke severely.

'No,' said poor Geordie. 'No, Miss Helen, I'm afraid I don't see at all.'

Simultaneously said several people at once, 'Cyanide.' Geordie blinked.

Jem shrugged, and poured the man a cup of tea.

'You missed that bit,' he said.

'Clearly.'

'The Doc thinks,' Teddy said, ever helpful, 'that someone dosed him with cyanide.'

'I said no such thing,' said Jem and passed Geordie the milk. 'I said cyanide killed him. That's entirely different.'

Geordie groaned. 'So, in fact,' he said, 'we are no further ahead than we were previously. Except to say what killed him.'

'No luck on our evidence, then?' said Jem. Geordie shook his head, much to say Don't ask.

'Though I did learn,' said Geordie, 'about your flower. Perfect love, apparently. Tulips stand for it. Not that I see how it relates to this case.'

Teddy snorted, clearly thinking of Mr White Tulip and his multiplicity of women.

'I've been thinking about that,' said Kitty, helping herself to a second slice of tart. 'About the case generally, I mean. And it strikes me Tuesday's found you a dead spy.'

It was Jem's turn to blink. Teddy said, not unreasonably in Jem's book, 'They've got you editing the serials again, haven't they, Kitten?'

'Well it fits, doesn't it?' demanded an indignant Kitty. 'You've got a man dead of cyanide with clothes no one can trace, numbers no one can make sense of, and multiple identities across – how many catchment areas did you say?'

'Three confirmed,' said Teddy, sounding mutinous. 'Large towns, too. All of them. The exasperating thing,' this very much not to Kitty, 'is that when she puts it like that, it halfway adds up.'

'And the hands?' asked Geordie. He was considering the scenario, though, Jem could tell. Probably so could Kitty at this stage in their acquaintance. Kitty shook her head, obviously brought up short. Christopher was not so deterred.

'Bet they've got a mark on them,' said that young man. 'Like in Biggles. There was this villain, see what you could recognise – sorry, that you could recognise – because he had…'Off ran Christopher with tremendous conviction and rapidity through the latest narrative adventure of Biggles. Jem did not much follow it. He was preoccupied with conjuring ways of gently explaining that the hand Tuesday had discovered was completely unmarked. Though – and here was a thought – they never had found that second hand. Perhaps someone had concealed it because of some tell-tale detail. Jem shook his head. Teddy had been right; the whole thing was getting entirely too like a serialised novel. And all that was leaving aside the fraught issue of the white tulip. And the numbers.

He must have said this aloud, because Geordie said thoughtfully, 'I suppose they could be a code. The flower might even be its key. I'll muck around with them this evening, see what I come up with.'

'But Sir,' said Teddy, 'you aren't seriously considering…'Then, eyes widening, 'Sir, how do you know about codes?'

'Much too late for that story,' said Geordie, which, if you asked Jem, explained exactly nothing. 'Very long. Very boring. Shall I put Gremlins to bed?' Having said this all in one breath, Geordie rose, Helen in his arms, still without explaining. 'What say?' Shrieks of glee from the children as Geordie slung Sophy under one arm, snugged the other around Helen, and set off in lumbering fashion towards the stairs. Christopher trotted, dachshund-fashion behind them, while Geordie intoned in deep and sonorous voice, 'I am the Guardian of Sleep …'

'You don't think…'began Faith, eyebrows rising.

'Can't very well ask, can we?' said Jem.

'I could,' said Kitty. 'It would be a terrific story. Police Detective Revealed as Spy.'

'If it's true they'd never let you break it,' said Teddy. He began to clear away the dishes. Jem went to help. 'We have got,' he said as he absent-mindedly handed Tuesday a scrap of pastry, 'to find that other hand.'

'Benwick will be thrilled,' said Teddy. 'Not only are odds on your corpse has got half a dozen other identities, it's a safe bet just about none of them have records.'

'Surely that makes his life easier,' said Jem. 'Fewer files to peruse.'

'Yes,' said Teddy, 'but more body parts to hunt down!'

They settled into the rhythm of the dishes, while Tuesday wove eagerly between their ankles, desperate to volunteer his considerable expertise and noteworthy nose to the cause of disappearing food remnants from existence. In the living room Faith took a late call from a patient and made an exit, leaving her apologies to Geordie in Kitty's excitable hands, which were then, judging from the clatter, full of the dominos set. Teddy undertook to join her at it, while overhead, sounds of gremlin-wrangling died away. This was followed by the hushed tread of good leather shoes on the stair and the re-emergence of Geordie. He settled himself at the newly-cleared table with pen, paper and the incomprehensible numbers, while Jem muscled his way into the dominos session.

'I'm losing anyway,' said Kitty, unconcerned, shoving available pieces towards Jem.

Geordie was still at the table, though Jem and company had long despaired of dominos by the time Faith came in. Now and then he muttered such caustic things as 'Bloody White didn't work, and Tulip clearly doesn't, so it's not a sodding substitution. Perhaps a playfair...'

Jem was very glad such things made sense to someone. He was more glad to see Faith. She stood in the living room doorway unburdening herself of coat and scarf and said 'You didn't all have to miss out on sleep just because Gloria Curdle's baby took ill.'

Jem shrugged and stretched his arms uncomplaining over his head. 'I think we sort of lost track of time,' he said. Somewhere to his left Teddy mumbled what sounded like 'Or were waiting on the Inspector to call it a day.'

'I heard that,' said Geordie, still scribbling. And to himself, 'And it's not a ruddy playfair, either. Numbers aren't even. Blast!'

Faith leaned over his shoulder, the better to take in the numbers.

'I tell you what it looks like,' she said.

'I'm thinking it's a square,' said Geordie. 'A fairly complicated one. One of those things that takes a substitution and shifts it six ways from Sunday and…'

'Or it's a Kingsport telephone number,' said Faith.

'No, no,' said Geordie. 'That can't be right. Now our chap…' He went on, but Jem didn't take it in. A bad combination, he supposed, of the lateness of the hour and Faith exiting the room. She was back seconds later though, declaring brightly, 'I've just had the library on the line.'

'At this hour?' asked Kitty, incredulous.

'Well, no,' said Faith. 'But I've just had the operator try to connect me.'

It was Jem's turn to be incredulous. 'Whatever for?'

'Your code,' said Faith. She reached over to tap the much-abused bit of paper. 'Leads to the daring and exotic Kingsport Library.'

As the days went on The Mysterious Case of Tuesday's Body, alias Mr White Tulip, began to come together. A parade of disparate personages filed through Jem's surgery to identify the body, which they did, and never with the same name twice. Benwick dutifully wrote the aliases down and grumbled that no one gave him the credit he was due. Which they probably didn't, Jem reflected, considering how many marriage licences, birth certificates, business records, train station lockers and ticket vouchers he had had to cross-reference since that day by the pond.

'And we still don't know,' poor Benwick said as if this was the most egregious of their problems, 'what he wanted with the library!'

'Course we do,' said Jem. He helped himself to the teapot poised alarmingly on its preferred perch of the communal filing cabinet at the front of the station house and poured out two cups worth.

'It's where I'd go,' he said, handing Benwick a mug, 'if I wanted to find information on the area. What interests me more is why Kingsport, and what was he doing, and why on earth did he die? And why the bloody hell was he holding on to that disintegrating white tulip?'

Benwick sipped his tea, tried to inhale the smoke while drinking and choked for his trouble. Jem walloped him smartly on the back. 'Inspector's recruiting you,' said Benwick, and grinned. 'Don't fancy doing my job, do you?'

'Depends how you are with bodies, Constable,' said Jem, and grinned when he was rewarded with a grimace.

Then a fire was started where there shouldn't have been a fire, and it wouldn't have been Jem's remit at all, except that they found pieces of what looked like bone among the detritus.

'Animal?' asked the unsuspecting constable who had placed the call, ever hopeful. Jem picked up a shard of bone, turned it between thumb and forefinger, and considered what a striking resemblance it bore to something out of the human hand.

'I'll need it all back at the surgery,' he said, and then spent an age reconstructing what was very much a human hand atop the surgery table. He spent even longer considering if it was their missing hand, or, more specifically, Tuesday's Body's missing hand, before deciding it probably was because otherwise it was one severed hand too many. There were no white tulips. Jem knew this because he asked the fire brigade. Some seriously odd looks he got for his trouble.

As Teddy told it, the good news was that the fire had garnered a witness. This in turn had led to a description of the fire-starter. The bad news, also as rendered by Teddy, was that the woman was so nondescript that 'she might have been anyone.'

'But it was a woman?' Jem wanted to know.

'Well,' said Geordie, 'whoever it was wore a woman's hat. And had a woman's build. So it seems a safe bet.'

'Right,' said Jem, considering.

'Doc?' said Teddy, 'Any ideas?'

'A sort of one,' said Jem. 'Mind, I can't be certain about any of this.'

Geordie folded his arms. Teddy looked queasily at the bones. Jem couldn't blame him; the smell of charred remains was seared into his own nasal passages, too. He'd taken for granted he couldn't forget a thing like that, but he'd been nursing a hope Teddy could go through life none the wiser. He hadn't bargained on fired bodies being part of run-of-the-mill investigations.

'Doc?' said Teddy again.

'Come on,' said Jem, 'The theory wants testing out of here.'

He led them out of the surgery and down the long, gloomy corridors of the station house. They smelled mercifully of damp wool and mud trekked in from outside. Then it was through the city centre, past butchers' shops and bakeries and the rustling, bustling of workaday people. Into the wood and down the well-worn path to the Larkrise turning. If the others wondered what Jem had in mind, no one asked. Faith was up at the hospital, and the children reluctantly in school, which left the girls' dollshouse unoccupied. Just asking for temporary requisition, to Jem's mind. Teddy never even murmured a protest when Jem convened them around its colonial splendour.

'Look,' he said, holding an unsuspecting doll aloft. 'Here's your spy. And this,' here holding up what Jem made the lady of the dollhouse, 'is your unnamed assassin.'

Here Teddy did protest. 'But Doc,' he said, 'we haven't been able to connect – '

'Half a minute Teddy,' said Jem and grinned at him. 'We're about to. The two things are inextricably linked, see? Now, where's a good place – ah! The windowsill. Lovely.' Cheerfully Jem crossed the room and set down his murder victim in a pool of white sunlight.

'The pond,' said Jem, rapping the windowsill by way of explanation. 'See, I think our chap sits down by the pond on some fine, wintery day. Probably not unlike this one. He's not doing anything much, probably minding his own business, perhaps contemplating the meaning of life as represented by that vexed white tulip, when along comes our favourite fire-starter, yes?'

'Yes,' said Teddy dutifully. 'Though I don't quite follow – '

'Patience,' said Jem, 'is a virtue, Teddy. Or so I'm told. Anyway. She sits down next to him,' here setting down the second doll, 'and puts her arms around him, so.' Jem extended the arms of the doll accordingly, so that they now sat interwoven.

'And to casual passers-by,' said Geordie, snapping his fingers, 'they're a pair of young things who have overlooked the cold in favour of the warmth of each other's arms. Of course!'

'Quite,' said Jem.

'Really?' Teddy said and blinked.

'Really,' said Jem. 'Look, she's now able to slip him the cyanide tablet, so.' Jem went through the motions of this performance with the dolls. Teddy's eyes widened.

'But wouldn't that lead to…convulsions, or something, Doc?' he asked.

Jem nodded. 'Well caught,' he said. 'But to the outside world, it's not going to look like convulsions, or spasms, is it? Not if she moves closer, and – '

Teddy held up his hands and franticly signalled an end to this line of thought. 'Got it,' he said as Geordie, to his left, stifled a smile. Tuesday stuck his nose up on the windowsill and sniffed vigorously at the dolls. Teddy pulled him away and bundled the mass of inquisitive canine into his lap.

'And with a kiss, she betrays him,' said Geordie. 'Quite poetic, that. But how do the hands come in?'

Jem shook his head. 'It occurs to me,' he said, 'that Biggles, and by extension, my son, were on to something. He probably had got a marking of some kind on one hand, not that we'll ever know what it was. It might have been a tattoo, or maybe just an especially interesting birthmark. Either way, I imagine our murderer here, lopped off the hands – rather badly you know, what with lacking medical expertise – and carted off the offending appendage. I'm presuming for the moment that Tuesday's trophy was deemed unimportant.'

Teddy nodded. 'They certainly took care not to leave anything interesting lying about, I'll give you that,' he said.

'Well,' said Geordie, 'give or take a tulip.'

'You know,' said Jem, 'I've been thinking on that.'

Geordie made a noise best interpreted as You don't say. Jem pointedly ignored both him and it. He said, 'See, when I went over there,' gesturing vaguely out the window as if the view somehow encompassed the War and all the terrain it traversed, 'I gave Faith a circlet of pearls. But she gave me a sheet of pressed flowers. Roses. And they were crooked, because it was Faith, and sort of squashed…but they were her, you know? And I could take them out, or maybe just touch a finger to them, and feel she was close. So I got to thinking that maybe – I mean clearly he couldn't sustain all these relationships – but maybe the white tulip was the same sort of thing. You said it was purity of love?'

Geordie nodded.

'So it could have been a kind of a touchstone,' said Jem. 'Something to keep him company on wet, wintry mornings and make him that bit less alone.' He hoped, anyway, he was right. The others must have too. They nodded.

'So the stray hand survives, Tuesday discovers it, and we enter into perhaps the most frustrating case of my career,' said Geordie. 'Meanwhile, we get side-tracked by a scrap of flower that was our corpse's last, oblique tie to the wider world. I'd throw good money after bad that our young murderess has by now changed her clothes, name and God alone knows what else. She'll crop up somewhere else, and no one will ever be any the wiser.'

'We've at least got to look, Sir,' said Teddy. This was punctuated from a squeak from Tuesday, as he took exception to what Jem made an atypically vigorous stroke from Teddy.

Look they did, but it was no good. Benwick circulated the witness description, Teddy rang round precincts, but nothing was forthcoming. Benwick groused, Teddy scowled, and Geordie bested them both by appearing one morning, ramrod straight and with a look like thunder about him, to announce that higher authority had been in touch to say the case was officially out of their hands. Jem couldn't decide if constable and sergeant looked relieved or offended by this verdict. He thought Geordie favoured offended, and knew he was right when presently the relentless strains of Princess Ida drifted out of the Inspector's office. And wouldn't life be extremely flat/ with nothing whatever to grumble at!

Jem put in a call to Rev Jo Blake to inquire exactly what the protocol was for unnamed, unidentifiable dead bodies left to sit in the police surgery.

'We can't leave him here,' he said, over the phone. Down the hall and around the corner, Gama the Jester was still insisting life would be extremely flat without things to grumble at. Gama was moronic.

'Send him to Martyrs',' said Jo. 'I'll bury him. We'll make a place somewhere.'

Uncle Jo was as good as his word. They made space under an oak tree, and on a cold, drizzly February morning, buried their unknowable dead. Jem was there, because he felt he owed it to this man with no name to see him buried at the very least. He tucked the white tulip into the pocket of the suit he had donated to this man for burial, and hoped he had been right about what it meant to him. He knew he would never now see a white tulip without a pang of longing for redemption, but his own or this man's was up for debate. Geordie was there, dressed to the nines as he was wont for funerals, death sentences and evenings out, and Teddy with him. Benwick, marooned at the desk of the station house telephone, wished them well. Faith came, Jem suspected, to be a bolster, and Judith was there with wee Nattie on her arm. The little girl groused in the misly, misty weather, but no one minded. It felt right under the circumstances. Even little Tuesday, long-nosed and shivering at Jem's ankles seemed right, because, after all, hadn't he been the one to discover the dead man's body? Jem scooped up the damp blue body and tucked it into his coat for warmth. He felt suddenly, keenly glad the little dog was there, all muddy white socks and cold, wet nose. Faith and Judith too. It meant that when Jo had finished speaking – very simply, very elegantly – on what it was to live and serve God and the world well there were people to protect them from talking work. To ask what the Gilbert and Sullivan Society were planning next, and when would they be going, because of course Geordie had the tickets.

Mara had come – this perhaps most surprising of all – because, she said to an unfeignedly surprised Jo, 'We couldn't bury Alec. I like to think someone could, and did, though. And if they did – well, it doesn't hurt to do the same by him, whoever he was.'

She nodded in the direction of the grave, and somehow in the rain and the mist, this was inarguable logic. Iain hovered at her elbow, but no one questioned this, either. Probably, Jem thought, stroking Tuesday's ears, they'd have got Iain without his mother just by virtue of Nattie Carlisle being in attendance. That thought garnered a smile, and somehow made the rain feel less driving, there on the ground of uneven Martyrs graveyard. Or perhaps it was only little Tuesday, snug against his chest that did that.

Aunt Phil came to find them and call them into the Manse for tea. No one had much appetite for it, but it was good to hold something warm, after all the cold of the pond mud and the rain, wind and weather. Jem fed finger sandwiches to an uncomplaining Tuesday, and gave half an ear to the gentle nattering of Iain and Nattie. They were embroiled in something vaguely churchy-sounding, or so Jem thought until they switched languages mid-thought and left Jem leagues behind them. He hid a smile in Faith's shoulder as Judith and Mara wrangled for Aunt Phil's teapot, Aunt Phil being, in this instance, all too happy to sit back and pass Jem finger sandwiches for Tuesday. It went a long way to chasing away the spectre of their unknown, unnameable dead. It made Jem feel damp on a soul-deep level, to never be able to say This was Mark Bishop, Paul Knight, Peter Gosling or any of the other myriad names they had been handed. That the stone would be able to say only, on the advice of well-meaning Uncle Jo, Servant of God, because he had the grace to see everyone that way. Doing the thing they were called, even gifted with doing, to the best of their ability until man or time struck them all down.

Someone – Mara at a guess – had opened a nearby window and the smell of slush and the dying gasp of winter crept into the room. The china chattered in the wind. Geordie hummed a scrap of Yeomen of the Guard. Aunt Phil said something complimentary to Tuesday about his appetite, so that Faith laughed her wonderful, ruddy laugh. Jem drank it in as Tuesday's granular tongue lapped at his fingers for crumbs. How rich and warm a scene, how easy to bask in it and be thawed inside-out of the cold and of ghosts. In the draughty Martyrs' Manse parlour, the fire crackled, Tuesday barked, and Jem named his people to himself, and was glad.

Nothing though, no haven endured forever. At length, the others departed, Jem took Tuesday in hand, and with Faith on his arm they stepped out into the grim grey weather. It should not have been a surprise, and yet it was, anyway, when looking across the garden, Jem's eye lighted on the brave, daring head of a white tulip come to early flower.