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of, but I knew from personal experience that there would always be time, before I was questioned, to concoct a more charitable version to make myself look good. That’s the way the human mind works.
    At least, mine does.
    Time had resumed, but still crawled as it tends to do in such circumstances. Miss Fawlthorne seemed to be moving across the room as slowly as a stick insect on a twig in a nature film. After an eternity, she switched on the lights.
    “Collingwood!” she demanded, in a voice that was far too quiet to be comforting. “What have you done?”—while Collingwood, black as Old Frizzle, her arms wrapped round her knees, had begun rocking herself back and forth on the hardwood floor, giving out a wail which I believe is called “keening”: a hair-raising howl that arises from some ancient banshee part of our brain.
    It was hardly human.
    If this were the cinema, someone would slap her face and reduce her to civilized sobbing, but I hadn’t the heart.
    I dropped to my knees and cradled her in my arms.
    “Fetch some water,” I heard my mouth ordering Miss Fawlthorne. “And brandy. Quickly! She’s going into shock.”
    Miss Fawlthorne began to say something, but thought better of it and strode out of the room.
    I yanked a quilt from the bed and threw it round Collingwood’s shoulders.
    I covered the cadaver and the skull with a sheet—but not before having a jolly good gander at the grisly remains.
    With Miss Fawlthorne gone, here was a Heaven-sent opportunity. I knew that I would have no second chance.
    The body was, as I have said, smoke-blackened. The flag in which it had been wrapped had acted as a container in the same way—or so it is said—that banana leaves are used by natives of some of the far-flung outposts of the Empire (such as India) to bake fish.
    The detached skull was as black as a bowling ball, bizarrely bare of hair and skin. The curled fingers of both hands were pulled up to where the chin should have been, as if Death had caught its victim sleeping. Clutched loosely in one of them was what appeared to be a small, tarnished medallion.
    I nestled it in my handkerchief and pocketed the thing immediately—before Miss Fawlthorne could return. All hail to the gods who had sent me to bed fully clothed!
    The garments in which the body was clad were too tangledand smoky to identify. They might once have been a pauper’s rags—or the robes of a fairy-tale princess.
    Death by cooking is not beautiful.
    Or had she met her end by some other means? Or perhaps in some other place?
    Like a police photographer, my mind began taking an efficient and methodical series of mental snapshots: close-ups of the skull, the blackened teeth, the hands, the feet (which were bare except for a single scorched woolen sock, half off).
    I peeled it back an inch or two from the shrunken ebony ankle, and saw by the inner surface that it had originally been red.
    This examination was not made any easier by the fact that Collingwood had now begun howling like an air raid siren, her voice rising and falling unnervingly.
    “It’s all right,” I kept telling her, all the while keeping my eyes on the dead body. “Everything is all right. Miss Fawlthorne will be back in a jiffy.”
    Did I imagine it, or did Collingwood now begin to ululate—as Daffy would put it—all the louder?
    Quite frankly, she was getting on my nerves.
    “Put a cork in it!” I said. “You’re drooling.”
    As anyone with older sisters will tell you, there’s no quicker way to make a female dry up, no matter her age, than to point out that she has slobber on her face.
    So I was not surprised, then, when Collingwood hiccupped to an abrupt halt.
    “What … is … that …
thing
?” she asked, hauling herselfon her bottom as quickly as she could across the floor and away from the sheet-draped body.
    “It’s a bird. Rather a large one. A stork, I believe. Or perhaps an ibis.”
    I’ll admit this was a bit of a stretch—even for me. It