As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (15 page)

Yes—it looked
very much
like a wrapped body. It brought to mind the famous statue we had seen at St. Paul’s, of John Donne, its onetime dean, who was believed to have posed for it in his shroud on his deathbed. It was also said to be the only one of the cathedral’s statues that had survived the Great Fire of 1666. Even now, after nearly three hundred years, some of the soot smudges were still visible.

And like poor Donne’s effigy, this little winged figure had been subjected to heat.

Coincidence?

I surely hoped not.

I was so intent upon peering through the magnifying glass that I did not hear the door open. I had forgotten to lock the blasted thing.

I did not know Miss Fawlthorne was there until she spoke.

“What is the meaning of this?”

She said it in the same, slow, cold, slippery, sinister tones that the snake must have used when speaking to Eve in the Garden of Eden.

With lightning reflexes, I slid the medallion into the
pocket of my dressing gown and wrapped it in the depths of my handkerchief.

“What have you got there?”

“Nothing, Miss Fawlthorne.”

“Nonsense! What is it? Hand it over.”

It was an all or nothing moment: the moment of truth, as bullfighters call it.

Or, in my case, the moment of untruth.

“Please, miss, phlegm,” I said, pulling the handkerchief from my pocket and holding it out for her inspection. I arranged my features into a look of embarrassment. “I think I’ve caught rather a bad chill.”

As added insurance I brought up from the very depths of my gizzard a convincing cough, and spat an imaginary substance into the crumpled handkerchief.

Again I offered it.

It requires a certain nerve to play at this kind of game: a kind of steely bluff combined with the innocence of a baby lily, and I must say that I was rather good at it.

“Put that filthy thing away,” Miss Fawlthorne said with a look of disgust, before abruptly changing the subject. “Why are these lights turned on?”

I almost said, “I thought I was coughing up blood, and wanted to have a look,” but something told me to quit while I was ahead.

“I got up early to write my report on William Palmer,” I said, giving my mouth a final wipe and gesturing to my notebook and pen, which were—praise be!—lying on my desktop.

What a perfect title
that
would make for one of the volumes
of my autobiography when it comes time to write it:
Lying on My Desktop.
I must remember to make a note of it
.

Miss Fawlthorne said nothing, but stared at me steadily, the ruby pin at her throat rising and falling in slow, regular hypnotic waves. One breath after another.

“I cannot allow this to pass, Flavia,” she said at last, as if she had come to a sudden decision. “Do you understand?”

I nodded—suddenly Miss Humility herself.

“We shall have a talk,” she said. “But not here, and not now. Immediately after your gymnasium class this morning, I want you to go out for a long walk—alone—and reflect upon your disobedience. When you have done so to my satisfaction—well, we shall see.”

The gymnasium was an echoing canyon with a floor on several levels. It had once been a chapel, with towering stone arches, sunken aisles, gilded organ pipes, and quaint grottoes, but now the saints and martyrs in the stained-glass windows had nothing better to look down upon than a clutter of vaulting horses, parallel bars, climbing ropes, and rings suspended on chains: remarkably like the torture chamber in a castle I had once toured in Girl Guides.

I felt even more cold and naked and doltish in the square-necked navy gym slip than I had the first time, as if I were the village idiot in a smock—or a cowering pawn on someone else’s chessboard.

A shrill whistle blew as I entered and instructions were shouted. “Left arm upward … right arm forward … stretch! Right arm forward … left arm upward … stretch.
Head forward … bend … stretch! Head left sideways … bend … stretch!”

I must be honest about the fact that I’m made extremely uneasy by excessive noise, and that I do not care for shouted instructions. If I’d been meant to be a sheep, I reasoned, I’d have been born with wool instead of skin.

I swarmed up a wooden ladder; dropped heavily to the mat; gave out a little cry of agony; winced in the direction of Miss Puddicombe, the games mistress; hooked my leg at an awkward angle as if to check for a broken bone; massaged my calf; and limped off to my room to get rid of the clown outfit.

We’d deal with the paperwork later.

I was blessed to have been born with an excellent sense of direction so that, even in the bath or the WC, I always have a fairly good idea of which way’s north.

Standing in the street outside Miss Bodycote’s, I could have gone either north or south but decided to strike off north because it was my favorite direction. North lay the North Pole, which seemed so much closer here in Canada than it had at Buckshaw. Too far north, I knew, and you run out of trees and into polar bears, but there seemed little chance of that with trams—sorry,
streetcars
—clanging away at the end of the block.

But I soon reconsidered. I was supposed to be thinking about my disobedience, but instead I found myself realizing that in street upon changing street of nearly identical houses, I might well become lost. I was, after all, in a
strange city—face it, Flavia: in a strange
country
. Who knew what unsuspected dangers lurked just round the next corner?

A woman in a pink knitted hat came running out of a house whose windows upstairs were covered with bedsheets and an unfamiliar flag.

“Are you lost?” she called out, after no more than a glance at me.

Could it be so obvious that I was a stranger?

I smiled at her (no point in aggravating the natives), turned on my heel, and went back the way I had come.

It didn’t take much thinking to realize that there was much greater safety in sticking to the busier streets.

Follow the tram lines
, my instinct was whispering into my ear.

A few minutes later I found myself once more in front of Miss Bodycote’s, from which a buzz of busy voices floated to my ears. It was good to be outdoors. It was good to be alone.

I marched off to the south until I saw a Danforth Avenue street sign, at which point I turned my face toward the west.

It is a remarkable fact, and one not often commented upon, how hard it is to walk upon pavement after a lifetime of village streets and country lanes. Before I had gone a mile I made a pretext of stopping at what appeared to be a greengrocer’s shop for a bottle of ginger beer.

“Your money’s no good here, dear,” the elderly woman behind the counter said after examining and handing me back my shilling. “Tell you what—I’ll give you a bottle of
cold pop just for the pleasure of hearing you talk. You have such a lovely accent. Go ahead, say something.”

I did not like thinking of myself as having an accent: It was everyone else who had one.

“Thank you,” I said. But I knew, even as I spoke, that “thank you” was not enough to pay for a drink.

“No, something decent,” she said. “Give us a song—or some poe-try.”

Other than a couple of comic verses about chemistry, which didn’t seem appropriate to the occasion, the only poem that I could remember was one I had heard a couple of little girls chanting as they skipped rope in Cow Lane, back home in Bishop’s Lacey, which seemed now like a remembered scene from a previous life.

I launched into it before shame could make me change my mind, and bolt. Striking a demure pose with my hands clasped at my waist, I began:

“That’s lovely, dear,” the woman said, reaching into a cooling cabinet and handing over a frosty bottle of Orange
Crush. “I had a nephew Leo once. He wasn’t sunk by a torpedo, but he did move to Florida. What do you think about that?”

I smiled because it seemed the proper thing to do.

I was already on the street, strolling quickly away, when the words of the stupid rhyme came flooding back into my head: “They brought him back in a Union Jack …”

Why did they seem so familiar? It took a moment for the penny to drop.

Brought him back in a Union Jack
—just like the body that had fallen out of the chimney!

Could there possibly be a connection?

Was someone—some unknown killer—murdering his victims according to the skipping rhymes of schoolchildren, in the way that Miss Christie has written about?

Daffy had told me about the mysteries based upon nursery rhymes, railway guides, and so forth, but was it even remotely possible that a Canadian killer had decided to copy those methods?

The very thought of it both excited and chilled me. On the one hand, I might well have part of the solution already in hand, but on the other, the killer could still be at large, and not far away.

I’m afraid I wasn’t getting far with reflecting upon my disobedience. Miss Fawlthorne would almost certainly quiz me when I got back to the academy, and I’d need to have some kind of acceptable penitence prepared. But a body in the chimney isn’t something that falls into your lap every day, and I needed now to give it my undivided attention. All the nitpicking at Miss Bodycote’s had been so distracting
that the flag-wrapped corpse had been forced to climb into the backseat, as it were.

By now I was crossing a tall limestone bridge or viaduct, which crossed a broad valley. I hauled myself up by the elbows on the rail and peered over the side at the muddy brown water that seeped sluggishly along far below. It was a long way down, and the very thought of it made my stomach feel ticklish.

I walked on, unwilling or unable to turn round and go back to captivity.

Captivity!
Yes, that was it—I was the tiger caged in a zoo, longing to be returned home to its jungle. Perhaps I could escape, as tigers were occasionally reported to do in the newspapers.

In fact, I was already out, wasn’t I?

P
ERHAPS
I
SHOULD MAKE
a break for it. I could be well on my way to England before they even realized I was missing.

But other than the few useless coins in my pocket I had no money.

Perhaps I could ask a stranger for directions to the police station and throw myself, as a refugee, upon the mercy of Inspector Gravenhurst.

Or would he be obliged by law to take me into custody? The police station, however fascinating it might be, would be far less comfortable than Miss Bodycote’s, what with the drunken prisoners in the clink, the noise, the swearing, and so forth.

I still needed to find a quiet place to sit down and think this through.

I had now reached the far side of the viaduct and was walking along a broad and busy city street.

And just like that, as if by some Heaven-sent miracle, a churchyard appeared as if out of nowhere, and I made for it at once. It was not
quite
as good as being whisked back to Bishop’s Lacey, but for now, it would do.

No sooner was I safely among the gravestones than a great feeling of warmth and calm contentment came sweeping over me.

Life among the dead.

This was where I was meant to be!

What a revelation! And what a place to have it!

I could succeed at whatever I chose. I could, for instance, become an undertaker. Or a pathologist. A detective, a grave digger, a tombstone maker, or even the world’s greatest murderer.

Suddenly the world was my oyster—even if it
was
a dead one.

I threw my hands up into the air and launched myself into a series of exuberant triple cartwheels.

“Yaroo!” I shouted.

When I landed on my feet, I found myself face-to-face with Miss Fawlthorne.

“Most impressive,” she said. “But not ladylike, particularly.”

Joy turned to terror. My heart felt squeezed in an iron fist.

I needed to get the upper hand, even if only for a few moments before this woman killed me and shoveled me into a shallow grave. Who would ever think to look in a cemetery for a missing girl? She had planned this to perfection.

But how could she be sure that I would come to this place?

“You followed me,” I said.

“Of course I did.” She smiled.

“But I didn’t see you.”

“Of course you didn’t. That is because you failed to look in the right place.”

My face must have been as blank as the side of a barn.

“Most people who suspect they are being followed look behind themselves. Consequently, the superior tracker is always
ahead
of her quarry. Now, then, have you done as you were instructed? Have you reflected upon your insubordination?”

“No,” I said. “So you might as well go ahead and kill me.”

And I might as well die defiant
, I thought.

“Kill you?” she said, throwing back her head, laughing with delight and showing, for the first time, a complete set of small but perfect teeth. “Why on earth should I want to kill you?”

I shrugged. It was always better to let the killer do all the talking. In that way, you were able to gain much more information than you gave up.

“Let me tell you something, Flavia. You’re right about one thing. I
might
have killed you just then. At least, I
might
have wanted to. But only if you had answered yes: only if you tried to convince me that you
had
reflected upon your disobedience. Only if you had spouted off some meaningless twaddle about how sorry you were; only if you had promised improvement.

“But you did not. You stood firm. You proved that you are indeed the person I believed you to be. You are, indeed, your mother’s daughter.”

It was more words than I had heard her say since we met; it was, in a way, as if the Sphinx had spoken.