I Am Half-Sick Of Shadows (14 page)

Closing the bedroom door quietly behind me, I retraced my steps through the house—on tiptoe across the foyer once again—to Dogger’s little room at the top of the kitchen stairs.

I gave three quick taps at the door, and then a pause … two more taps … another pause … and then two slow ones.

I had scarcely finished when the door swung open on silent hinges, and Dogger stood there in his dressing gown.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“Quite all right,” Dogger said after a barely perceptible pause. “Thank you for asking.”

“Something horrid has happened to Phyllis Wyvern,” I told him. “In the Blue Bedroom.”

“I see.” Dogger nodded and vanished for a moment into the shadows of his room, and when he returned, he was wearing a pair of spectacles. I must have gaped a little, since I had never known him to use them before.

The two of us, Dogger and I, made our way silently back upstairs by the quickest route, the foyer, which involved yet another trek among the sleeping bodies. If the moment hadn’t been so serious, I’d have laughed at Dogger’s long legs picking their way like a wading heron between Bunny Spirling’s distended stomach and the outflung arm of Miss Aurelia Puddock.

Back in the Blue Bedroom, I closed the door behind us. Since my fingerprints were on the handle anyway, it wouldn’t make any difference.

The projector was still making its unnerving
flap-flap
ping noise as Dogger walked slowly round Phyllis Wyvern’s body, squatting to look into each of her ears and each of her eyes. It was obvious that he was saving the bow of ciné film around her neck for last.

“What do you think?” I asked finally, in a whisper.

“Strangulation,” he said. “Look here.”

He produced a cotton handkerchief from his pocket and used it to pull down one of her lower eyelids, revealing a number of red spots on the inner surface.

“Petechiae,” he said. “Tardieu’s spots. Asphyxia through rapid strangulation. Definitely.”

Now he turned his attention to the black bow of film that ringed the throat, and a frown crossed his face.

“What is it, Dogger?”

“One would expect more bruising,” he said. “It does not occur invariably, but in this case one would definitely expect more bruising.”

I leaned in for a closer look and saw that Dogger was right. There was remarkably little discoloration. The film itself was black against Phyllis Wyvern’s pale neck, the image on many of its frames clearly visible: a close-up shot of the actress herself in ruffled peasant blouse against a dramatic mackerel sky.

The realization hit me like a hammer.

“Dogger,” I whispered. “This blouse, shawl, and skirt—it’s the same costume she’s wearing in the film!”

Dogger, who was looking reflectively at the body, his hand to his chin, nodded.

For a few moments, there was a strange quiet between us. Until now, it had been as if we were friends, but suddenly, at this particular moment, it felt as if we had become colleagues—perhaps even partners.

Possibly I was emboldened by the night, although it might have been a sense of something more. A strange feeling of timelessness hung in the room.

“You’ve done this before, haven’t you,” I asked suddenly.

“Yes, Miss Flavia,” Dogger said. “Many times.”

I had always felt that Dogger was no stranger to dead bodies. He had, after all, survived more than two years in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, after which he had been put to work for more than a year on the notorious Death Railway in Burma, any single day of which would have given him more than a nodding acquaintance with death.

Aside from Mrs. Mullet’s whispered tales in the kitchen, I knew little about Dogger’s military service—or, for that matter, my father’s.

Once, as I watched Dogger trim the rose bushes on the Visto, I had tried to question him.

“You and Father were in the army together, weren’t you?” I asked, in so casual and offhanded a manner that I hated myself for having bungled it before I even began.

“Yes, miss,” Dogger had said. “But there are things which must not be spoken of.”

“Even to me?” I wanted to ask.

I wanted him to say “
Especially
to you,” or something like that: something I could mull over deliciously in the midnight hours, but he did not. He simply reached among the thorns and, with a couple of precision snips, deadheaded the last of the dying roses.

Dogger was like that—his loyalty to Father could sometimes be infuriating.

“I think,” he was saying, “you’d best slip down and awaken Dr. Darby … if you wouldn’t mind, of course.”

“Of course,” I said, and letting myself out, made for the stairs.

To my surprise, Dr. Darby was not where I had last seen him: The spot where he had rested was empty, and he was nowhere in sight.

As I wondered what to do, the doctor appeared from beneath the stairs.

“Telephone’s bust,” he said, as if to himself. “Wanted to call Queenie and let her know I’m still respirating.”

Queenie was Dr. Darby’s wife, whose terrible arthritis had confined her to a wheelchair.

“Yes, Mrs. Richardson tried to use it last night. Don’t you remember?”

“Of course I do,” he said snappishly. “It’s just that I’d forgotten.”

“Dogger has asked if you’d mind coming upstairs,” I said, taking care not to give out any details in case one of the sleepers might be listening to us with their eyes closed. “He’d like your advice.”

“Lead on, then,” Dr. Darby said, with surprisingly little reluctance.

“ ‘… amid the encircling gloom,’ ” he added, extracting his first mint of the day from his waistcoat pocket.

I led the way upstairs to the Blue Bedroom, where Dogger was still crouched beside the corpse.

“Ah, Arthur,” Dr. Darby said. “Again I find you on the scene.”

Dogger looked from one of us to the other with something like a smile, and then he was gone.

“We’d better be having the police,” Dr. Darby said, after making the same examination of Phyllis Wyvern’s eyes that Dogger had already done.

He felt one of the limp wrists and applied his thumb to the angle of the jaw.

“Is life extinct, Doctor?” I asked. I had heard the phrase on a wireless program about Philip Odell, the private eye, and thought it sounded much more professional than “Is she dead?”

I knew that she was, of course, but I liked to have my own observations confirmed by a professional.

“Yes,” Dr. Darby said, “she’s dead. You’d better roust out that German chap—Dieter, is it? He looks as if he’d be good with skis.”

Fifteen minutes later I was in the coach house with Dieter, helping him strap the skis to his boots.

“Did these belong to your mother?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I suppose so.”

“They are very good skis,” he said. “Madshus. In Norway, they were made. Someone has looked after them.”

It must have been Father, I thought. He came here sometimes to sit in Harriet’s old Rolls-Royce, as if it were a glass chapel in a fairy tale.

“Well, then,” Dieter said at last. “Off we go.”

I followed him as far as the Visto, climbing in my rubber boots from drift to drift. As we passed the wall of the kitchen garden, I caught a glimpse of a face at the driver’s window of one of the lorries. It was Latshaw.

I waved, but he did not return my greeting.

When the snow was too deep to follow, I stopped and watched until Dieter was no more than a tiny black speck in the snowy wastes.

Only when I could no longer see him did I go back into the coach house.

I needed to think.

I climbed up into the backseat of Harriet’s old Rolls-Royce and wrapped myself in a motoring rug. Words like “warm” and “snug” swam into my mind.

When I awoke, the clock of the Phantom II was indicating a silent five forty-five A.M.

“What on earth—” Mrs. Mullet said, obviously surprised to see me coming in through the kitchen door. “You’ll freeze to death!”

I shrugged in my cardigan.

“I don’t care,” I said, hoping for a little sympathy and perhaps an advance on the Christmas pudding, which was one of the few dishes that she cooked to my satisfaction.

Mrs. Mullet ignored me. She was bustling busily about the kitchen, boiling a huge dented kettle for tea and slicing loaves of freshly baked bread for toast. It was obvious that Phyllis Wyvern’s murder had not yet been announced to the household.

“Good job I laid in so much for Christmas, isn’t it, Alf? Got an army to feed, I ’ave. Lyin’ in this mornin’ like so many lords and ladies, the lot of ’em—’ard floors or no. That’s the way of it with snow—couple of inches and they goes all ’elpless, like.”

Alf was sitting in the corner spreading jam on an Eccles cake.

“ ’Elpless,” he said. “As you say.

“What’s Father Christmas bringin’ you this year?” he asked me suddenly. “A nice dolly, then, p’raps, with different outfits, an’ that?”

A nice dolly indeed! What did he take me for?

“Actually, I was hoping for a Riggs generator and a set of graduated Erlenmeyer flasks,” I said. “One can never have too much scientific glassware.”

“Arrr,” he said, whatever that meant.

Alf’s mention of Father Christmas, though, had reminded me that it was now Sunday—that tonight would be Christmas Eve.

Before I slept another night I would be scaling Buckshaw’s roof and chimneys to set in motion my chemical experiment.

“
You’d better watch out …
” I sang as I strolled out of the kitchen.

Beyond the kitchen door, the place was a madhouse. The foyer, in particular, was like the lobby of a West End theater at the interval—scores of people pretending to have a jolly old chin-wag and everyone talking at the same time.

The noise level, for someone with my sensitive hearing, was nearly intolerable. I needed to get away. The police would probably not be here for hours. There was still plenty of time to put the finishing touches to my plans for Christmas Eve.

I had first thought of the fireworks long before Father had signed his agreement with Ilium Films. My original plan had been to set them off on the roof of Buckshaw, a display of fire and lights that could clearly be seen a mile away in Bishop’s Lacey: my Christmas gift to the village, so to speak—a gift that would be talked about long after Saint Nicholas had flown home to the frozen north.

I would send up showers of fire that would shame the northern lights: elaborate parasols of hot and cold fire of every color known to man. Chemistry would see to that!

That plan had expanded slowly over the months to include a scheme to capture the bearded old elf himself, to put to rest for once and for all the cruel taunts of my stupid sisters.

Now, as I prepared the chemical ingredients, I was suddenly subdued. It had only just occurred to me that it might be disrespectful to set off such a terrific celebration with a corpse in the house. Even though, in all likelihood, the remains of Phyllis Wyvern would be removed by the time Father Christmas came to call, I wouldn’t want to be accused of being insensitive.

“Eureka!” I said, as I set out in neat rows the flowerpots I had borrowed from the greenhouse. “I have it!”

I would manufacture a giant Rocket of Honor in Phyllis Wyvern’s memory! Yes, that was it—a dazzling and earsplitting finale to end the show.

I had found the formula devised by the wonderfully named Mr. Bigot, in an old book in Uncle Tar’s library. All that was required was to add the right amount of antimony and a handful of cast-iron filings to the basic recipe.

Twenty minutes with a file and a convenient hot-water radiator had produced the first of these ingredients—the other was in a bottle at my fingertips.

Wads of waxed paper and a hollow cardboard tube made an admirable casing, and before you could say “Ka-Boom!” the rocket was ready.

With the dessert prepared, it was now time for the main course. This was the dangerous part, and I needed to pay close attention to my every move.

Because of the risk of explosion, the potassium chlorate had to be mixed with exceedingly great care in a bowl that would not produce sparks.

Fortunately I remembered the aluminum salad set Aunt Felicity had given Feely for her last birthday.

“Dear girl,” she had said, “you are now eighteen. In a few years—four or five, if you’re lucky—your teeth shall begin to fall out and you shall find yourself eyeing the girdles at Harrods. The early girls get the most vigorous grooms, and don’t you forget it. Don’t stare at the ceiling with that vacuous look on your face, Ophelia. These aluminum bowls are manufactured from salvaged aircraft. They’re lightweight, practical, and pleasing to the eye. How better to begin your trousseau?”

I had found the bowls hidden at the back of a high shelf in the pantry and seized them in the name of science.

To produce the blue explosions, I mixed six parts of potassium nitrate, two of sulfur, and one part of trisulfide of antimony.

This was the formula used for the glaring rescue rockets at sea, and I reckoned these ones would be visible from Malden Fenwick—perhaps even from Hinley and beyond.

To one or two of the portions, I added a dollop of oak charcoal to give the explosions the appearance of rain; to others a bit of lampblack to produce spurs of fire.

It was important to keep in mind the fact that winter fireworks required a different formula than those designed for summer. The basic idea was this: less sulfur and lots more gunpowder.

I had concocted the gunpowder myself from niter, sulfur, charcoal, and a happy heart. When working with explosives, I’ve found that attitude is everything.

It was something I had learned at the time of that awful business with the unfortunate Miss Gurdy, our former governess—but stop! That catastrophe was no longer spoken of at Buckshaw. It was in the past and, mercifully, had almost been forgotten. At least I
hoped
it had been forgotten, since it was one of my few failures in experimenting with dualin—a substance containing sawdust, saltpeter, and nitroglycerin, and notorious for its instability.

I sighed and, banishing poor, scorched Miss Gurdy from my mind, turned it to more pleasant thoughts.