I Am Half-Sick Of Shadows (15 page)

Before packing the ingredients into earthenware flowerpots I’d borrowed from the greenhouse, I had added to some of them a certain amount of arsenious oxide (AS
₄
O
₆
), sometimes known as white arsenic. Although it was pleasant to think that a deadly poison should produce the whitest of aerial explosions, that wasn’t my reason for choosing it.

What appealed to me, what really warmed my heart, was the thought of suspending over our ancestral home, even if only for a few seconds, an umbrella of deadly poisonous fire that would fall—then suddenly vanish as if by magic, leaving Buckshaw safe from harm.

I didn’t care if it made sense or not. It was the
idea
of the thing, and I was happy that I’d thought of it.

Each of the flowerpots now needed to be sealed, like preserves, with a lid of onionskin paper to protect the chemicals against moisture. Later tonight, just before bedtime, I would lug them, one at a time, up the narrow staircase that led from my laboratory to the roof.

And then I’d begin my work among the chimney pots.

I was halfway down the stairs, hoping I didn’t smell too much of gunpowder, when the doorbell rang. Dogger appeared, as he always does, as if from nowhere, and as I reached the last step, he opened the door.

There stood Inspector Hewitt of the Hinley Constabulary.

I hadn’t seen the Inspector for quite some time and our last meeting had been one I’d rather not dwell upon.

We stood staring at each other across the foyer like two wolves that have come from different directions upon a clearing full of sheep.

I was hoping Inspector Hewitt would let bygones be bygones—that he would stride across the foyer, give me a chummy handshake, and tell me that it was nice to see me again. I had, after all, helped him out of a number of jams in the past without so much as a pat on the back or a “kiss my arsenic.”

Well, that’s not
quite
true: His wife, Antigone, had asked me to tea in October, but the less said of that the better.

Which is why I was now standing there in the foyer, pretending to check something that had become lodged between my teeth by examining my reflection in one of the polished newel posts at the end of the banister. Just as I decided to relent and give the Inspector a curt nod, he turned and, without a backward glance, walked away towards Dr. Darby, who had made an appearance suddenly on the west landing.

Blue curses! If I’d been thinking straight, I’d have welcomed the Inspector myself—shown him upstairs to the scene of the crime.

But it was too late. I had shut myself out of the Chamber of Death (that’s what they called it on the wireless mystery programs) and it was now too late to eat crow.

Or was it?

“Oh, Mrs. Mullet,” I said, barging into the kitchen as if I’d only just heard the news. “The most dreadful thing has happened. Miss Wyvern has met with a frightful accident, and Inspector Hewitt is here. I thought that, what with the awful weather and so forth, he’d be grateful for a cup of your famous tea.”

Flattery can never be overcooked.

“If you mean she’s dead,” said Mrs. Mullet, “I already knewed it. Word like that gets round like beeswax. Shockin’, I’m sure, but there’s no ’oldin’ it back, is there, Alf?”

Alf shook his head.

“I knewed it as soon as I seen Dr. Darby’s face. ’E goes all-over sobersides whenever death’s about. I mind the time Mrs. Tarbell was took in the bath. ’E’s always been like that an’ ’e always will be. Might just as well ’ave a sign plastered on ’is fore’ead sayin’ ‘She’s Dead,’ mightn’t ’e, Alf.”

“A signboard,” Alf said. “On ’is fore’ead.”

“I told Alf, I did, didn’t I, Alf? ‘Alf,’ I said. ‘Somethin’s not right,’ I said. ‘There’s
such
a face on Dr. Darby which I seen in the corridor just now an’ if I didn’t know better I should say as there’s a corpse in the ’ouse.’ That’s what I said, didn’t I, Alf.”

“ ’Er exact words,” said Alf.

I didn’t bother knocking at the door of the Blue Bedroom. I simply strolled in as if I’d been born at Scotland Yard.

I gave the knob a twist and pushed the door open with my behind, maneuvering the tray through the doorway in the way that Mrs. Mullet always did.

For a moment I thought I had annoyed the Inspector.

He turned slowly from Phyllis Wyvern’s staring body, sparing me no more than a rapid glance.

“Thank you,” he said. “You may put it on the table.”

Meekly, I obeyed—dog that I am—hoping desperately he wouldn’t order me to leave. In my mind, I made myself invisible.

“Thank you,” the Inspector said again. “It’s very kind of you. Please tell Mrs. Mullet we’re most grateful.”

“Bug off,” was what he meant.

Dr. Darby said nothing, but noisily extracted a mint from the bottomless bag in his waistcoat pocket.

I kept as still as a snake in winter.

“
Thank
you, Flavia,” the Inspector said, without turning round.

Well, at least he hadn’t forgotten my name.

There was a silence that grew more uncomfortable by the second. I decided to fill it before anyone else had a chance.

“I expect you’ve already noticed,” I blurted, “that her makeup was applied
after
she was dead.”

THIRTEEN

TO MY
SURPRISE
,
THE
Inspector chuckled.

“Another of your chemical deductions?” he asked.

“Not at all,” I said. “I simply observed that there was makeup on the upper surface of her lower lip. Since she has a slight overbite, she’d have licked it away in seconds if she’d been alive.”

Dr. Darby bent in for a closer look at Phyllis Wyvern’s lips.

“By George!” he said. “She’s right.”

Of course I was right. The endless hours I had spent being fitted and refitted with braces in Dr. Reekie’s chamber of tortures in Farringdon Street had made me a leading authority on jaw alignment. In fact, there had been times when I’d thought of myself as the Human Nutcracker. To me, Phyllis Wyvern’s mandibular displacement had been as easy to spot as a horse in a birdbath.

“And when did you make that observation?” the Inspector asked.

I had to give him credit. For an older man, he had a remarkably nimble mind.

“It was I who discovered the body,” I told him. “I went for Dogger at once.”

“Why would you do that?” he asked, instantly spotting the flaw in my account. “When Dr. Darby was no farther away than the foyer?”

“Dr. Darby came with Dieter in the sleigh,” I said. “I saw him arrive, and I knew he hadn’t brought his medical bag. He was also very tired. I noticed him dozing during the performance.”

“And?” he said, raising an eyebrow.

“And … I was frightened. I knew that Dogger was likely the only one awake in the entire house—he sometimes doesn’t sleep well, you know—and I just wanted someone to—I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

It was a lie, but a jolly good one. Actually, I’d been thinking as clearly as a mountain stream.

I made my lower lip tremble just a trifle.

“It was easy to see that Miss Wyvern was quite dead,” I added. “It wasn’t a question of saving her life.”

“And yet you had your wits about you sufficiently to spot the makeup where no makeup ought to be.”

“Yes,” I said. “I notice things like that. I can’t help it.

“Please don’t strike me,” I wanted to add, but I knew I was already slicing the bacon a trifle on the thin side.

“I see,” the Inspector said. “It’s most kind of you to point it out.”

I gave him my most winning smile and made a graceful exit.

I made directly for the drawing room, bursting at the seams to tell Feely and Daffy the news. I found them with their heads bent over a stack of back issues of
Behind the Screen
.

“Don’t tell us,” Daffy said, raising a hand as I opened my mouth. “We already know. Phyllis Wyvern’s been murdered in the Blue Bedroom and the police are on the scene.”

“How—?” I began.

“Perhaps, since you’re their main suspect, we shouldn’t even be talking to you,” Feely said.

“Me?” I was flabbergasted. “Where did you ever get such a stupid idea?”

“I saw you,” Feely said. “That woman and her infernal ciné projector kept Daffy and me awake again for hours. I finally decided to give her a piece of my mind, and was halfway along the corridor when guess who I spotted sneaking out of the Blue Bedroom?”

Why did I suddenly feel so guilty?

“I wasn’t sneaking,” I said. “I was going for help.”

“There are perhaps a small handful of people in the world who would believe you, but I am not among them,” Feely said.

“Tell it to the Marines,” Daffy added.

“As it happens,” I said haughtily, “I am assisting the police with their inquiries.”

“Horse hockey!” Daffy said. “Feely and I were talking to Detective Sergeant Graves and he wondered why he hadn’t seen you around.”

At the very mention of the sergeant’s name, Feely drifted towards the looking glass and touched her hair as she turned her head from side to side. Although not first on her list of suitors, the sergeant was not to be counted out—at least I hoped not.

“Sergeant Graves? Is he here? I haven’t seen him.”

“That’s because he doesn’t want to be seen,” Daffy said. “You’ll see him, right enough, when he claps the darbies on you.”

Darbies?
Daffy had obviously been paying more attention to Philip Odell than she let on.

“What about Sergeant Woolmer?” I asked. “Is he here, too?”

“Of course he is,” Feely said. “Dieter helped them shovel through the drifts.”

“Dieter? Is he back?”

“He’s thinking of going in for a police inspector,” Daffy said. “They told him they couldn’t have got through to Buckshaw without him.”

“What about Ned?” I asked, seized with a sudden thought. “What about Carl?”

Feely had more swains than Ulysses’s wife, Penelope, had suitors—I like “swains” better than “suitors” because it sounds like “swine”—all of whom, through some strange quirk of fate, had now turned up at Buckshaw at the same time.

Ned … Dieter … Carl … Detective Sergeant Graves. Every one of them, God only knows why, was smitten silly with my stupid sister.

How long would it be before they began slugging it out?

“Ned and Carl have volunteered to help clear the forecourt. The vicar’s organized a snow-shoveling party.”

“But why?” I asked.

It didn’t make sense. If all the roads were closed, what use was it clearing a way to the front door?

“Because,” said Aunt Felicity’s voice behind me, “it is a well-known fact that more than two men shut up together in an enclosed space for more than an hour constitute a hazard to society. If unpleasantness is to be avoided, they must be made to go outdoors and work off their animal spirits.”

I smiled at the thought of Bunny Spirling and the vicar taking up snow shovels to work off their animal spirits, but I kept my mouth shut. I also wondered if Aunt Felicity had heard about Phyllis Wyvern.

“Besides,” she added, “the hearse will be required to remove the remains. They can hardly drag her off by dogsled.”

Which answered my question. It also raised another.

The stairs from the laboratory were narrow and steep. No one had been up here for years, I thought, but me.

At the top, a door opened onto the roof—or, at least was
supposed
to open onto the roof. I struggled with the bolt until it suddenly shot free, pinching my fingers. But now the door itself was stuck shut, probably piled high on the other side with a drift of snow. I put my shoulder against it and pushed.

With the peculiar grunting sound that snow makes when it doesn’t want to be budged, the door opened grudgingly about an inch.

I was being resisted by millions of tiny crystals, I knew, but the strength of their chemical bonds was enormous. If all of us could be like snow, I thought, how happy we should be.

Another shove—another slow inch. And then another.

After what seemed like a very long struggle, I was able to squeeze myself between the door and its frame and step out onto the roof.

I was instantly up to my knees in snow.

Shivering, I clutched my cardigan up about my chin and waded to the battlements, the back of my mind ringing with all of Mrs. Mullet’s dire warnings about pneumonia and keeping one’s chest warm.

“She wasn’t outside more’n a minute,” she had told me, wide-eyed, speaking of Mrs. Milne, the butcher’s wife. “Just long enough to ’ang the baby’s nappies on the line—that’s all it took. By four o’clock she ’ad a cough, by seven ’er ’ead was as ’ot as the Arab desert, and by the time the sun come up she was in a box and stiff as a board. Pneumonia, it was. There’s nothin’ else as’ll snatch you off like pneumonia. Makes you drown in your own juices.”

From up here on the roof, I could look out to the east, the rolling countryside one vast unbroken blanket of snow, dazzling in its whiteness. Had there been footprints, I could have easily spotted them at once, but there were none.

In spite of the freezing wetness that was puddling in my shoes, I forced myself to clomp my way to the north front, where I stood shivering, peering down into the forecourt.

Dieter’s tractor stood, like Eeyore, covered with snow—a gray form huddled beneath a white blanket. Beside it was the blue Vauxhall, which I recognized at once as Inspector Hewitt’s.

In the forecourt, the vicar’s crew, in coats, gloves, and galoshes, were digging bravely away at the drifts, their every breath visible on the frigid air. They had managed to clear a parking area somewhat smaller than a tennis court, and even that, with the persistence of the wind, had begun to fill in again with blown fingers of the granular drifts.

There was also a narrow passage in the middle of the drive, packed tightly on either side with layers of snow. Here and there the prints of chains were still clearly visible, and in the middle of the path, tire tracks that led directly to the parked Vauxhall. It was easy enough to deduce that the police had commandeered a wrecker with a snowplow fastened to the front, to clear their way from the village.

Apart from the shadowy blue ribbon that was the plowed path winding away to the north, all of the approaches to Buckshaw were one vast expanse of untrodden white.