A Bitter Remedy by Alis Hawkins

Author:Alis Hawkins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canelo Digital Publishing Limited
Published: 2023-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 31

Non

Lily and I left the house not long after Tarley and Basil. It was a good twenty minutes’ walk to Christ Church College with Lily in her going-out stays, and she always added on fifteen minutes to the time we needed to get to any appointment, in case we were held up talking to people we knew. Well, people she knew. I never minded telling people I couldn’t stop but Lily seemed to think her acquaintances would be mortally offended if she didn’t exchange a few words with them.

Lily was still in a mood with me for getting Tarley Askew involved with the Sidney Parker investigations, so she just marched along by my side as we went down Walton Street. Suited me, I’d heard enough about my shortcomings.

As we walked past the University Press, I could hear the steam presses and wondered how loud it must be inside. I’d noticed that people in the city got cross about noise in a way that just didn’t happen back home. Just now, the iron rails had started being laid for the new horse trams, and to try and dampen the noise of the wheels on the rails, some sections of the tramway were going to be paved with wooden blocks. Sounded like a mad idea to me – how long would wooden bricks last with horses tramping up and down them all day? But that was the way the local board thought. Maybe they’d come under pressure from the colleges not to disturb the undergraduates’ labour.

Lily glanced at me, and I gave her my most innocent smile. She frowned. ‘Don’t you give me that butter-wouldn’t-melt look, my girl. You haven’t redeemed yourself yet.’ Then, after stomping on for another half a minute or so she looked at me out of the corner of her eye. ‘Are you going to tell Rev Dodgson what you’ve got his protégé doing?’

Lily’d recently learned the word protégé, when Elspeth Rhys had used it to describe my relationship to her husband, and she liked to use it whenever she could.

‘You know I’m not. And I’d ask you not to either,’ I said, speaking more calmly than I felt.

‘Oh, you would, would you?’

‘Yes. You can’t speak for Mr Askew,’ I said. ‘What he does or doesn’t get involved with is his business, not yours or Charles Dodgson’s. But I will talk to him about the code Sidney Parker used.’ To be honest, I still thought I could break it, left to myself, but I didn’t have unlimited time. The inquest was in four days.

If anybody could cut through the Gordian knot of Sidney Parker’s odd cipher it would be Charles Dodgson.

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