The Case of the Late Capybara

The Case of the Late Capybara

Cecilia Peartree

Copyright Cecilia Peartree 2021

All rights reserved

Smashwords edition

This is a work of fiction and resemblances to any people, museums, universities or small villages near Blair Atholl are purely coincidental

Cover image:

Photo 118861622 / Capybara © Ondřej Prosický | Dreamstime.com

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

THE END

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Chapter 1

‘Is there any sign of the capybara coming back from conservation?’ said William. He seemed to be trying to sound casual, leaning against the door frame of Max’s office as if he had all day to spare, but there was something desperate about the way he asked the question.

Max gave a guilty start. He had completely forgotten about the capybara having to be sent away earlier in the year. He should probably have followed up on it before now, although to be fair the capybara was the least of his worries. Before William came along he had been trying to write a strategic plan for the Creatures of Land and Sea, which were his responsibility. His part of the plan would then feed into the departmental plan, which would in turn be absorbed into the organisational plan and then, for all he knew, into God’s eternal plan, if such a thing existed.

‘I haven’t heard from them for a while,’ he confessed. ‘I’ll give them a call.’

‘It’s just that it was on my personal forward plan for the year,’ said William. ‘Creating a display round the capybara, I mean, and working with one of the local primaries to research it. I’m having trouble doing that without the capybara. They need to come in and see it. Before the end of this month.’

He spoke apologetically, as if he was reluctant to make a fuss, but Max knew that one of the areas where spending cuts had been discussed was museum education, and since William was the only education officer in the museum, the axe might well fall on him if he wasn’t careful.

He shuddered at the thought of the axe, which brought back memories of Howard’s guillotine. The model had mysteriously vanished from its prime position in the showcase just outside the head of department’s office a few weeks before – and not before time, in Max’s opinion. They all suspected Colin the caretaker of having broken it while conducting some kind of bizarre experiment. There was no evidence to support this theory, but Colin could be considered a suspect in any kind of situation, with his furtive look and his habit of sneaking up on people for no apparent reason.

‘I’ll call them now,’ said Max, pulling the phone towards him as he looked for the number somewhere in his mailbox.

‘I’d better leave you to it.’

‘No, it’s fine. It won’t take a minute. Take a seat if you like.’

‘Haven’t you got it yet?’ said the woman at the other end of the line accusingly when he asked after the capybara.

‘Should we have?’ said Max.

‘I thought it had been dispatched ages ago… Hang on, I’ll check.’

She put him on hold. Their phone system was obviously set up to allow for delays, as jangly music began to play much too loudly. Max covered the receiver with his hand and said to William,

‘She’s just checking.’

‘What did you say it was?’ asked the woman at the other end of the line. ‘An iguana?’

‘A capybara. It had its own travelling case. There’ll be a barcode on it.’

‘We don’t have any record of it. I suppose I’ll have to raise a query on our system.’

She gave a long-suffering sigh.

After she had rung off, he realised he hadn’t caught her name, which might have come in useful. He didn’t really want to go through the whole thing again with someone else, although they would be hard-pressed to be less helpful than she had been.

‘She doesn’t have any record of it,’ he told William, whose face fell. ‘But that still doesn’t mean they haven’t sent it. It might just be that no-one’s recorded it.’

‘I thought it was all done with microchips and barcodes now,’ said William.

‘It’s meant to be,’ said Max. ‘But it still depends on people, unfortunately.’

There was a cough from the doorway, and one of the people Max would prefer not to have to depend on appeared.

‘Delivery for you, downstairs,’ said Colin the caretaker, his eyes sliding aside just before they met Max’s.

‘What kind of delivery?’ said Max suspiciously, wondering why Colin hadn’t just brought it up with him.

‘A big box.’

‘Could you bring it upstairs, please?’

‘Too heavy,’ muttered Colin. ‘Got to be a bit careful, with my back.’

‘Have you got the delivery note?’

Colin shrugged, and departed.

‘He wants you to go and get it,’ said William.

‘If it’s too heavy, we’d better find someone to help,’ said Max. It was a miracle Colin had kept his job for so long. He must have some sort of hold on Howard. It wasn’t the first time this thought had crossed Max’s mind.

‘Amanda would do it, if she didn’t have the day off. She’s beefy enough,’ added William with one of his sudden unnerving laughs.

‘All right, we’ll both go. Better do it now, before Colin puts it out for the bin-men or something.’ As they left the office and headed for the stairs, Max said thoughtfully, ‘This might be the missing capybara, if we’re lucky. Though it wouldn’t be as heavy as all that.’

‘Maybe they’ve used a lot of packaging,’ suggested William.

They arrived at the museum entrance, next to Colin’s little office. The narrow hall was mostly blocked by a large plywood packing case.

‘It’s about the right size,’ said Max. He frowned. ‘Something doesn’t look quite right, though. I might have to get back in touch with them.’

In spite of this possible discrepancy, his spirits rose a little. Perhaps he wouldn’t have to spend the next couple of weeks fending off William’s pleas for the return of the capybara after all.

Somehow or other, they managed to get it up the stairs. It wasn’t very heavy after all and would certainly have been even lighter without the packaging, but to be fair to Colin he probably couldn’t have managed it on his own due to its awkward size and shape. They paused for breath at the top and were thus sitting ducks for a tirade from the head of the department and of the museum, Professor Howard Baines-Fullerton, when he found he couldn’t get past.

‘Have you forgotten it’s Tuesday? I have to be at Holyrood at half-past for the committee! Anybody would think you wanted us to lose all our funding.’

‘Sorry,’ muttered William, and pushed the case a little to one side so that Howard could wriggle past, while making it clear that wriggling past obstacles was not something a head of department should be expected to have to do on his way to a vitally important meeting.

‘He shouldn’t have left it so late,’ said Max, glancing at his watch.

‘It’s only five minutes away,’ William pointed out.

‘But what if something happens to hold him up? A party of American tourists… falling masonry… extra security at the Parliament.’

‘Falling masonry?’

‘It does happen.’

During this pointless conversation they had succeeded in manoeuvring the case through the double doors into the only gallery where there would be enough space to open it.

Max had by now decided it must be the capybara. The case was large enough and the weight seemed about right. He peered at the rather small label. There was no sign of a delivery note. He’d better go and pester Colin for that later so that he could file it for the record. In the meantime, they might as well open the case and have a look at the newly conserved item. Having it safely on the premises should shut William up for a while, if nothing else.

‘How do we get it open?’ asked William, circling the case like a panther deciding where to attack its cornered prey.

‘I’ll do that,’ said Max. ‘Just a minute.’

He had begun his career in a small museum where he had to do most things himself, although he had to admit taxidermy had made him a bit squeamish until he got used to it, and he had never progressed much beyond voles and other small animals. He smiled as he went back to his office for a couple of tools he might need to open the case. Tricia, his ex-wife, had freaked out about the taxidermy too, when she had first found out about it by putting her hand on a vole skin that was drying out on the draining-board.

He remembered getting one of the conservation technicians from the studio to come to the museum to pack the thing in the first place, several weeks before. Perhaps he should have waited and asked for someone to come and help with the unpacking, but he sensed that if he didn’t do it right now William would rip open the case with his bare hands.

A few moments later, he had opened the case at the top and was carefully removing the layers of various kinds of packing material. He was hoping to uncover the animal’s head, to find out if it was indeed a capybara, apart from anything else.

‘Do they always use bubble-wrap?’ enquired William, peering over his shoulder.

‘It’s quite common,’ said Max absently. He had reached a layer of tissue paper and now he could discern something dark beneath it - the capybara’s hair? He knew he should remove it from the case altogether before excavating any further, and yet he still had the sense of something being wrong, and he wanted to make sure they had the right case with the right contents before they took an irrevocable step. Perhaps if he just tore the paper enough to…

His fingers moved before he could stop them, and a moment later he touched the dark hair – and took a step backwards in alarm.

‘Is that it?’ said William.

‘No, it isn’t,’ said Max. He found himself trying to replace the tissue and the bubble-wrap exactly as it had been before he started on it, although he knew that was almost certainly the wrong thing to do. Opening it in the first place had been wrong too. On the other hand, he told himself sternly, if he hadn’t opened the case he wouldn’t have known there wasn’t a capybara inside. And everything would have been simpler – but still wrong. ‘I’ll have to call the police,’ he said.

‘What do you mean, the police? What’s happened to the capybara?’ William’s voice rose an octave or so in panic.

‘It isn’t the capybara,’ snapped Max.

‘What, then?’

‘I think there’s been a murder,’ said Max, and stalked off to his office to make the call.

‘So what was it you were expecting to be in the case, again?’ said one of the police officers.

They had arrived rather quickly, almost as if they didn’t have enough to do that day, and they had been followed by a small crime scene team. Max and William had to persuade Colin to close the museum and then they had to kick their heels for a while in the room upstairs which was known as the library but which doubled as an education room whenever William managed to smuggle a whole class of primary school children past the ever-vigilant Colin. It seemed that the police had now reached some conclusion. Why didn’t the man just come right out and tell them they were under suspicion of murder? It couldn’t possibly be as much of a shock as when he had put his hand in the case and had touched human hair.

‘A capybara,’ said Max.

‘Not a live one?’

‘No.’

‘Where did you get that, then?’

‘It belongs to the museum. We’d sent it out for conservation work. I was worried about a couple of missing patches of hair.’

The officer regarded him steadily. Max told himself to stop talking in case he said something wrong and got himself arrested by mistake. No need to fill the silence. That was how the police operated.

There was a lengthy pause, and then the officer ended the suspense by starting to laugh.

‘So you thought there was a body in there, did you?’

‘There was a body. I recognised the hair as human,’ said Max irritably.

‘It was a wig!’ said the police officer, although he could hardly get the words out for laughing.

‘People do wear wigs sometimes,’ said Max.

‘I suppose they do, but there wasn’t a body in that box. It was one of those shop window mannequins like they have in the big stores on Princes Street.’

The police officer stopped laughing suddenly. ‘We don’t usually open murder enquiries when we find one of those.’

‘But – how did it get in there?’ said Max. ‘We were expecting a capybara. I told you.’

‘I can’t see that there’s been any crime committed here,’ said the police officer. ‘We don’t want to get in the papers for wasting police resources trying to track down a stuffed capybara. You’ll have to investigate that yourselves.’

He turned away towards the stairs, chuckling again as he did so.

Max looked at William, who didn’t seem to find the whole thing at all funny either.

‘Don’t look at me,’ said William. ‘You’re the one with previous experience of this kind of thing.’

‘Previous experience? I don’t think so.’

At the top of the stairs, the police officer had been joined by a man from the crime scene team, who was talking to him urgently and quietly. After a moment they both glanced back towards Max and William. Max experienced a feeling of impending doom.

He didn’t have long to tell himself how irrational it was before the police officer approached them again, frowning this time. Oh, well, at least he had stopped finding the situation funny.

‘We’re going to have to take the box and its contents away for forensic tests,’ said the policeman without preamble. ‘There may be – traces – inside.’

‘Traces of what?’ said Max.

‘If we knew that, we wouldn’t have to do any further tests, sir,’ said the police officer.

‘What about the capybara?’ said William.

‘The capybara isn’t our concern, I’m afraid.’

As the policeman clumped off down the stairs again, Max wished the capybara wasn’t his concern either. He just hoped the police would be off the premises before Howard returned from his committee meeting.

Chapter 2

The dog had been barking on and off all night. Fiona had heard it at two, when she got up and took some painkillers for her toothache, and again at four, when she woke up from a nightmare and lay in bed panicking for a while. Of course she could hardly have gone over to Mr Boyd’s house in her pyjamas in the dark to see if anything was the matter, even if they were very sensible flannelette pyjamas that wouldn’t have given anybody the wrong idea.

But when she got up at first light and put the kettle on, she heard it again, and this time it was, if anything, more frantic than before. She had no excuse not to go over there. It wasn’t even raining, for once. As soon as she got out of her front door she realised all her surroundings were blanketed in that mist that came down from the hills and would probably linger for most of the day.

She went round by the garden gate, although it would have been a bit quicker to have hopped over the fence between the two properties. As she walked up the path to Mr Boyd’s house she realised she had wanted to put off the moment when she would ring his door-bell and he would tell her to go away. Only not quite as politely as that. After one or two such experiences, one of which had involved a welcoming gift of a tin of home-made shortbread, she had become very wary of interrupting him in whatever outlandish pursuit that occupied him in that workshop of his.

She rang the bell, gently at first and then with a bit more pressure. Somewhere in the house, the dog barked even more frantically.

What if Mr Boyd had fallen and hurt himself and was unable to come to the door? What if he’d had a heart attack in the night and was lying dead upstairs?

Fiona told herself not to let her imagination run riot. It wouldn’t help her or Mr Boyd or the dog. She decided to ring the bell one more time and then take some kind of action. But all that happened was that there was a thud from somewhere, and then the scrabbling of paws on a hard surface, and then the dog sounded as if it was jumping up and down and barking right behind the door.

She found herself tiptoeing round to the back of the house, which was of course ridiculous. If Mr Boyd hadn’t heard the bell, he wouldn’t hear the sound of normal footsteps either. Something must be badly wrong. She didn’t know the man well – he had taken pains to make sure she didn’t – but she had seen him taking the dog up the glen in all weathers, and it always seemed to be well-nourished and would follow him about slavishly, even when not on the lead. He wouldn’t have just gone off somewhere and left it to fend for itself, would he?

There was the workshop, which might have been meant as a conservatory when it was first built on to the house. It stuck out at the back of the house and had big windows and two skylights. She paused to peer inside – and gave a start as she saw what was sitting on the big table. But of course, it couldn’t possibly be a real animal. It was sitting far too