As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (25 page)

“Where’s Collingwood?” I demanded. “What have you done with her?”

“Confidentiality between doctor and patient forbids me from answering,” Ryerson Rainsmith said quietly. “Besides, I’m in charge here. This is
my
infirmary. It is I who should be asking the questions.”

“He’s right, you know,” said another voice behind me, and I spun round.

Dorsey Rainsmith had come up silently behind me.

I might have known.

Her dress was a sand-colored tent, its billows held in by a broad belt. Who knew what weapons were concealed beneath? There seemed room enough in it for racks of axes.

“You have no business being here,” she said. “Why aren’t you in church with the others?”

“Where’s Collingwood?” I asked again. “What have you done with her?”

“She’s had a very bad shock,” Rainsmith said. “She requires peace and quiet if she’s to make a full recovery.”

I was not going to be shaken off so easily. “Where is she? What have you done with her?”

“Dorsey—” he said, giving his wife a brisk nod.

I did not wait to be seized and clapped into a straitjacket. I did what any intelligent girl would do in the circumstances: I took to my heels.

I clattered out of the room and down the stairs with the sound of falling tiles.

“Stop her, Ryerson!” Dorsey shouted, but it was no use. I was younger, faster, and had a head start.

At the bottom, I looked up and caught a glimpse of their white faces, like twin moons, staring down at me from above.

I shot them an insolent grin like the runaway pancake in the fairy tale, swiveled on my heel, and ran straight into the chest of Inspector Gravenhurst.

I nearly knocked him over.

The inspector looked even more surprised to see me than I was to see him.

How long had he been standing there? How much had he seen and heard?

It seemed obvious—at least to me—that he had come to Miss Bodycote’s for a quiet Sunday morning snoop. After all, the doors were always left unlocked from dawn to dusk, and besides, who in their right mind would want to enter such a forbidding-looking fortress?

The question was this: Which of us was more embarrassed?

I was faced with a sudden choice and left with only an instant to make up my mind: Should I blow the whistle on the Rainsmiths for what they had done to Collingwood, or should I keep my trap shut and take my chances on gaining the upper hand?

Well, if you know Flavia de Luce as well as I do, you’ll know that it’s a mug’s question.

“Oh, Inspector,” I said, and I’m ashamed to admit that I allowed my eyelids and eyelashes to flutter almost imperceptibly. “I was hoping to see you again. Have you had any luck identifying the body in the chimney?”

Oh, Flavia! You puncturer of other people’s importance! What a saucy thing to say to the poor man. “Luck?” As if the Toronto Police were only capable of solving crimes by a toss of the dice—or by pulling lots from some plump constable’s hat
.

“As a matter of fact we have, Miss de Luce,” he said. “It was front-page news in all the papers. But I don’t suppose you see them at Miss Bodycote’s, do you?”

So. Wallace Scroop must have got his story after all.

Not knowing what to say, I glanced up at the two faces that were still staring blankly down from the landing like a masked chorus waiting to make their entrance.

The inspector, following my gaze, spotted the Rainsmiths.

“Ah, Dr. Rainsmith,” he said. “Good morning. Perhaps, as the pathologist of record, you’re in a much better position than I am to answer this young lady’s question?”

Pathologist? Ryerson Rainsmith the pathologist? Besides
being the academy’s appointed medical doctor and chairman of the board of guardians?

How improbably bizarre. How downright dangerous!

But it was not Ryerson Rainsmith who responded to the inspector’s words. In fact, quite the contrary: It was Dorsey Rainsmith, his wife, who began her slow descent of the stairs toward me.

“I shall be happy to, Inspector,” she said. “You may leave it to me.”

I
SUPPOSE
I
SHOULD
have screamed, but I didn’t. Instead, as if in a trance, I watched as the inspector, with no more than a quick nod, vanished out the door.

Caught red-handed in an unauthorized Sunday invasion of the empty premises, he couldn’t get away quickly enough.

Which left me alone with the Rainsmiths.

I didn’t have many options. Since recent circumstances had resulted in my becoming a backslider in the fingernail-biting department, I had nothing to count upon for self-defense but my fists and my feet.

How I wished I had taken the time to pump Dogger for more details about the Kano system of jujitsu, which he once admitted he had studied for a time. One or two of the Deadly Blows would have come in handy just about now: a
quick chop here and a clever thrust there, and it would be “nighty-night” to the abominable Rainsmiths.

But the sad truth is that I was so poleaxed at the thought of Dorsey Rainsmith—Dorsey Rainsmith!—being not only a doctor, but also the pathologist who had examined the body in the chimney, that my brain went into the kind of deep freeze that must have been experienced at the end by Captain Scott of the Antarctic.

“Huh?” was all I could manage.

Meanwhile, Dorsey was oozing down the staircase with slow, cautious steps, the way you might approach a rattlesnake that has been run over by a car and is writhing, injured, at the side of the road.

I had the most awful feeling that she was suddenly going to produce a blanket from somewhere about her abominable person and throw it over my head.

Her mouth was moving meaninglessly, but no sound was emerging.

And then I realized that she had been talking to me but I hadn’t been listening.

“… a very bad shock,” she was saying.

Shock?
Who was she talking about? Collingwood?… Or me?

Were they planning to bind me in wet bedsheets and pump me full of chloral hydrate? Was there a chimney waiting for Flavia de Luce?

It was only at that moment, I think, that my mind finally grasped how horribly far from home I was, and how off-balance and deprived of sleep. In ordinary circumstances
I would have dealt the Rainsmiths their comeuppance and be already dusting off my hands—but I was not. I was fighting for my life and I knew it.

I backed slowly away from the descending Dorsey, matching her step for step in a deadly tango, edging ever closer to the door.

“Wait,” she said. “You don’t understand.”

Oh, yes, I do, Miss Knockout Drops. I understand all too perfectly
.

The average person, I suppose, does not often stop to think about what can be done to one’s body by a pair of homicidal medical doctors. The very thought of it is enough to make the blood dry up like the Dead Sea.

They could, for instance, remove my organs, slowly and one at a time, until nothing was left on the dissecting table but my two eyeballs rolling wildly about in search of mercy, and my arms and legs.

Or they could—but enough!

I knew that I would have one chance—and one chance only—to get myself out of this scrape.

Should I run? Attack? Or use my brain.

The decision was an easy one.

“Daddy!” I called out with a glance toward one of the empty hallways. “Look who’s here. It’s Mr. and Mrs. Rainsmith.”

In real life, if I had ever stooped to calling Father “Daddy,” we both of us should have shriveled up and died from mortification. But this was not real life: It was a bit of impromptu theater I was staging to save my bacon.

And with that vile name “Daddy” on my lips, I slowly strolled casually off with open arms toward my invisible parent who was standing, so to speak, in the wings.

“I hope your flight wasn’t too tiresome?” I said loudly, once I was out of their sight.

And it worked!

The Rainsmiths, as far as I knew, had remained frozen on the staircase—hadn’t moved a muscle, in fact, until sometime after I had crept quietly out the back door and made my way round to the laundry.

The key I had pinched made it a matter of less than three seconds—I counted—before I was inside that hellish temple of cleanliness (a phrase I borrowed from Daffy, who always used it to describe Armfields, the only London dry cleaners to whom Father would entrust his threadbare wardrobe—except his linens, of course, which were permitted to be washed, ironed, stiffened with potato starch, and correctly folded by no one but Mrs. Mullet in the kitchen of her cottage in Cobbler’s Lane).

Again, a pang of something struck at my heart. I swallowed and looked round the cavernous laundry.

Lock the door!
my brain commanded, and I obeyed instantly.

Because it was Sunday, the place was cold and clammy and—with the machines shut off, the great boilers as quiet as a pair of landlocked submarines—the whole place was as silent as the grave.

I shivered. Never in my life had I felt more of a trespasser—and that was saying a lot.

For a minute or two, I stood motionless on the same
spot, listening. But there was not a sound. Surely, even if the Rainsmiths had the nerve to follow me, I would hear their footsteps. The gravel outside the door would guarantee it.

Meanwhile, I might as well make use of the fact that I was now locked into the laundry, and probably would be for some time.

What better excuse for a jolly good snoop?

On my first visit to this hellhole, I had glimpsed briefly, through the steam, a small room in one corner—no more than a cubicle, really—which appeared to be an office.

Might as well start there.

A battered wooden desk with an ancient telephone handset and a mechanical chair with protruding springs took up most of the space. On the back wall were shelves lined with ledgers bound in linen, most of them dated on their spines with a span of years: 1943–46, 1931–35, and so forth.

I pulled open the desk drawers, one by one. Of the six, two were empty and the remaining four contained a remarkably uninteresting lot of litter: rubber stamps, ink in a pad, the moldy remains of a cheese sandwich in waxed paper, a bottle of Jergens Lotion, aspirin, a pair of rubber gloves, a rubber finger protector, pencils (broken) red and black, and two dog-eared paperbacks:
How To Win Friends and Influence People
by Dale Carnegie, and
How To Stop Worrying and Start Living
, ditto.

Not very encouraging.

But in the bottom right-hand drawer was a fat telephone directory, its curled cover jamming the sliding rail. I could
not seem to free it, and could not look behind it without getting down onto my hands and knees on the unsanitary stone floor.

By bending my elbow at a scarecrow angle, I was somehow able to work my hand behind the bowed book. My fingers came in contact with something furry.

My first thought was that it was a dead mouse: one that had nibbled on the cheese sandwich, perhaps, and expired of penicillin poisoning, or anaphylaxis.

I fought down my girlish instinct to pull my hand away, or perhaps, even, to scream. I forced my fingers to close around the object and pull it into view.

It was a sock—a red wool sock. And I knew at once that I had seen its mate before.

I studied it carefully and shoved it back into the drawer. Fingerprints, I knew, could not be retrieved from most fabrics, least of all wool. But I had seen all that I needed to see, and I wouldn’t want to be accused of tampering excessively with evidence.

Besides, there was no point in taking it with me for comparison when its matching mate was in the morgue.

Turning my attention to the shelf of ledgers, I took down the right-most book, 1950, its ending date not yet lettered. Obviously the current volume.

The binding gave a dusty sigh and a brisk crackle as I opened the book, and the smell of sweat and old starch came to my nostrils. These were the laundry registers of Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy.

Would they be of any use in my investigations? I remembered something Mrs. Mullet had once told me when
I had made a condescending joke about her galvanized tubs: “Don’t ever look down your nose at your laundry maid, miss,” she had snapped in a rare show of short temper. “We knows what you eats, what you drinks, and what you gets up to in between. There’s many a tale told on the scrub board.”

I hadn’t known what she meant, but it sounded like a handy bit of knowledge to keep up my sleeve for future reference, and now, it seemed, was the time.

I leafed through the pages of the ledger, each one ruled into five columns: Date, Name, Item, Notes, and Charge.

For instance:

Sept. 10, 1951 / Scarlett, A. / SW WL 2, BLM 2, ST 2, TUN, HNK 2, NGTN / $1.85

From which I deduced that Amelia Scarlett’s parents were to be charged $1.85 for the laundering of two woolen sweaters, two pairs of bloomers (a form of undergarment I thought existed nowadays only in rude poems and even ruder songs), two pairs of stockings, a tunic, two handkerchiefs, and a nightgown.

This was a recent entry, made not much more than a month ago.

What tales would be told by the entries from a couple of years ago: in the aftermath, for instance, of the Beaux Arts Ball? Surely such an extravagant event would never pass without a few spilled glasses of punch or lemonade.

I reached for the previous volume. Inside the front cover were pasted calendars for 1947, 1948, and 1949, with various dates ticked off in ink.

Yes—here we were in June 1949, which had four Saturdays,
the 4th, 11th, 18th, and 25th. The Beaux Arts Ball must have taken place on one of them. The question was: which?

There were a flurry of entries before and after the 18th: people having their clothing cleaned before the ball and mopping up afterward, or so I guessed. I could check the actual date later with someone who knew.

I leafed on through the book, more out of idle curiosity than anything. Mrs. Mullet was right: The laundry staff knew everything. Here, in remarkable detail, were the rips and the tears, the spills and the stains of everyday life. Doxon, M., for instance, had spilled hydrochloric acid on her blouse in chemistry class; Johnson, S. had ripped her tunic on barbed wire during a hare-and-hounds chase; while some clown named Terwilliger, A. had fallen downstairs with two jam tarts in her pocket. It was all recorded in horrible, laughable, fascinating detail.