Flavia de Luce 1 - The Sweetness At The Bottom Of The Pie (8 page)

She gave a tight, nervous little laugh.

“Jacko,” I said.

Miss Mountjoy sat down heavily as if she'd been pole-axed. She stared at me with goggle eyes as if I'd just materialized from another dimension.

“Who are you, little girl?” she whispered. “Why have you come here? What's your name?”

“Flavia,” I said as I paused for a moment at the door. “Flavia Sabina Dolores de Luce.” The “Sabina” was real enough; “Dolores” I invented on the spot.

UNTIL I RESCUED HER from rusty oblivion, my trusty old three-speed BSA Keep Fit had languished for years in a toolshed among broken flowerpots and wooden wheelbarrows. Like so many other things at Buckshaw, she had once belonged to Harriet, who had named her l'Hirondelle: “the swallow.” I had rechristened her Gladys.

Gladys's tires had been flat, her gears bone dry and crying out for oil, but with her own onboard tire pump and black leather tool bag behind her seat, she was entirely self-sufficient. With Dogger's help, I soon had her in tiptop running order. In the tool kit, I had found a booklet called Cycling for Women of All Ages, by Prunella Stack, the leader of the Women's League of Health and Beauty. On its cover was written with black ink, in beautiful, flowing script: Harriet de Luce, Buckshaw.

There were times when Harriet was not gone; she was everywhere.

As I raced home, past the leaning moss-covered headstones in the heaped-up churchyard of St. Tancred's, through the narrow leafy lanes, across the chalky High Road, and into the open country, I let Gladys have her head, swooping down the slopes past the rushing hedges, imagining all the while I was the pilot of one of the Spitfires which, just five years ago, had skimmed these very hedgerows like swallows as they came in to land at Leathcote.

I had learned from the booklet that if I bicycled with a poker back like Miss Gulch in The Wizard of Oz at the cinema, chose varied terrain, and breathed deeply, I would glow with health like the Eddystone Light, and never suffer from pimples: a useful bit of information which I wasted no time in passing along to Ophelia.

Was there ever a companion booklet, Cycling for Men of All Ages? I wondered. And if so, had it been written by the leader of the Men's League of Health and Handsomeness?

I pretended I was the boy Father must always have wanted: a son he could take to Scotland for salmon fishing and grouse shooting on the moors; a son he could send out to Canada to take up ice hockey. Not that Father did any of these things, but if he'd had a son, I liked to think he might have done.

My middle name should have been Laurence, like his, and when we were alone together he'd have called me Larry. How keenly disappointed he must have been when all of us had come out girls.

Had I been too cruel to that horror, Miss Mountjoy? Too vindictive? Wasn't she, after all, just a harmless and lonely old spinster? Would a Larry de Luce have been more understanding?

“Hell, no!” I shouted into the wind, and I chanted as we flew along:

Oomba-chukka! Oomba-chukka

Oomba-chukka-Boom!

But I felt no more like one of Lord Baden-Powell's blasted Boy Scouts than I did Prince Knick-Knack of Ali Kazaam.

I was me. I was Flavia. And I loved myself, even if no one else did.

“All hail Flavia! Flavia forever!” I shouted, as Gladys and I sped through the Mulford Gates, at top speed, into the avenue of chestnuts that lined the drive at Buckshaw.

These magnificent gates, with their griffins rampant and filigreed black wrought iron, had once graced the neighboring estate of Batchley, the ancestral home of “The Dirty Mulfords.” The gates were acquired for Buckshaw in the 1760s by one Brandwyn de Luce, who—after one of the Mulfords absconded with his wife—dismantled them and took them home.

The exchange of a wife for a pair of gates (“The finest this side Paradise,” Brandwyn had written in his diary) seemed to have settled the matter, since the Mulfords and the de Luces remained best of friends and neighbors until the last Mulford, Tobias, sold off the estate at the time of the American Civil War and went abroad to assist his Confederate cousins.

"A WORD, FLAVIA,” Inspector Hewitt said, stepping out of the front door.

Had he been waiting for me?

“Of course,” I said graciously.

“Where have you been just now?”

“Am I under arrest, Inspector?” It was a joke—I hoped he'd catch on.

“I was merely curious.”

He pulled a pipe from his jacket pocket, filled it, and struck a match. I watched as it burned steadily down towards his square fingertips.

“I went to the library,” I said.

He lit his pipe, then pointed its stem at Gladys.

“I don't see any books.”

“It was closed.”

“Ah,” he said.

There was a maddening calmness about the man. Even in the midst of murder he was as placid as if he were strolling in the park.

“I've spoken to Dogger,” he said, and I noticed that he kept his eyes on me to gauge my reaction.

“Oh, yes?” I said, but my mind was sounding the kind of “Oogah!” warning they have on a submarine preparing to dive.

Careful! I thought. Watch your step. How much did Dogger tell him? About the strange man in the study? About the quarrel with Father? The threats?

That was the trouble with someone like Dogger: He was likely to break down for no reason whatsoever. Had he blabbed to the Inspector about the stranger in the study? Damn the man! Damn him!

"He says that you awakened him at about four A.M. and told him that there was a dead body in the garden. Is that correct?”

I held back a sigh of relief, almost choking in the process. Thank you, Dogger! May the Lord bless you and keep you and make his face to shine upon you, always! Good old faithful Dogger. I knew I could count on you.

“Yes,” I said. “That's correct.”

“What happened then?”

“We went downstairs and out the kitchen door into the garden. I showed him the body. He knelt down beside it and felt for a pulse.”

“And how did he do that?”

“He put his hand on the neck—under the ear.”

“Hmm,” the Inspector said. “And was there? Any pulse, I mean?”

“No.”

“How did you know that? Did he tell you?”

“No,” I said.

“Hmm,” he said again. “Did you kneel down beside it too?”

“I suppose I could have. I don't think so. I don't remember.”

The Inspector made a note. Even without seeing it, I knew what it said: Query: Did D. (1) tell F. no pulse? (2) See F. kneel BB (Beside Body)?

“That's quite understandable,” he said. “It must have been rather a shock.”

I brought to mind the image of the stranger lying there in the first light of dawn: the slight growth of whiskers on his chin, strands of his red hair shifting gently on the faint stirrings of the morning breeze, the pallor, the extended leg, the quivering fingers, that last, sucking breath. And that word, blown into my face… “Vale.”

The thrill of it all!

“Yes,” I said, “it was devastating.”

I HAD EVIDENTLY PASSED the test. Inspector Hewitt had gone into the kitchen where Sergeants Woolmer and Graves were busily setting up operations under a barrage of gossip and lettuce sandwiches from Mrs. Mullet.

As Ophelia and Daphne came down to lunch, I noticed with disappointment Ophelia's unusual clarity of complexion. Had my concoction backfired? Had I, through some freak accident of chemistry, produced a miracle facial cream?

Mrs. Mullet bustled in, grumbling as she set our soup and sandwiches on the table.

“It's not right,” she said. “Me already behind my time, what with all this pother, and Alf expectin' me home, and all. The nerve of them, axin' me to dig that dead snipe out of the refuse bin,” she said with a shudder, “. so's they could prop it up and take its likeness. It's not right. I showed them the bin and told them if they wanted the carcass so bad they could jolly well dig it out themselves; I had lunch to make. Eat your sandwiches, dear. There's nothing like cold meats in June—they're as good as a picnic.”

“Dead snipe?” Daphne asked, curling her lip.

"The one as Miss Flavia and the Colonel found on my yesterday's back doorstep. It still gives me the goose-pimples, the way that thing was layin' there with its eye all frosted and its bill stickin' straight up in the air with a bit of paper stuck on it.”

“Ned!” Ophelia said, slapping the table. “You were right, Daffy. It's a love token!”

Daphne had been reading The Golden Bough at Easter, and told Ophelia that primitive courting customs from the South Seas sometimes survived in our own enlightened times. It was simply a matter of being patient, she said.

I looked from one to the other, blankly. There were whole aeons when I didn't understand my sisters at all.

“A dead bird, stiff as a board, with its bill sticking straight up in the air? What kind of token is that?” I asked.

Daphne hid behind her book and Ophelia flushed a little. I slipped away from the table and left them tittering into their soup.

"MRS. MULLET,” I said, “didn't you tell Inspector Hewitt we never see jack snipe in England until September?”

“Snipes, snipes, snipes! That's all I hear about nowadays is snipes. Step to one side, if you please—you're standin' where it wants scrubbin'.”

“Why is that? Why do we never see snipe before September?”

Mrs. Mullet straightened up, dropped her brush in the bucket, and dried her soapy hands on her apron.

“Because they're somewhere else,” she said triumphantly.

“Where?”

"Oh, you know. they're like all them birds what emigrate. They're up north somewhere. For all I know, they could be takin' tea with Father Christmas.”

“By up north, how far do you mean? Scotland?”

“Scotland!” she said contemptuously. "Oh dear, no. Even my Alf's second sister, Margaret, gets as far as Scotland on her holidays, and she's no snipe.

“Although her husband is,” she added.

There was a roaring in my ears, and something went “click.”

“What about Norway?” I asked. “Could jack snipe summer in Norway?”

“I suppose they could, dear. You'd have to look it up.”

Yes! Hadn't Inspector Hewitt told Dr. Darby that they had reason to believe the man in the garden had come from Norway? How could they possibly know that? Would the Inspector tell me if I asked?

Probably not. In that case I should have to puzzle it out for myself.

“Run along now,” Mrs. Mullet said. “I can't go home till I finish this floor, and it's already one o'clock. Poor Alf's digestion is most likely in a shockin' state by now.”

I stepped out the back door. The police and the coroner had gone, and taken the body with them, and the garden now seemed strangely empty. Dogger was nowhere in sight, and I sat down on a low section of the wall to have a bit of a think.

Had Ned left the dead snipe on the doorstep as a token of his love for Ophelia? She certainly seemed convinced of it. If it had been Ned, where did he get the thing?

Two and a half seconds later, I grabbed Gladys, threw my leg over her saddle, and, for the second time that day, was flying like the wind into the village.

Speed was of the essence. No one in Bishop's Lacey would yet know of the stranger's death. The police would not have told a soul—and nor had I.

Not until Mrs. Mullet finished her scrubbing and walked to the village would the gossip begin. But once she reached home, news of the murder at Buckshaw would spread like the Black Death. I had until then to find out what I needed to know.

AS I SKIDDED TO A STOP AND LEANED GLADYS AGAINST a pile of weathered timbers, Ned was still at work in the inn yard. He had finished with the beer barrels and was now showily unloading cheeses the size of millstones from the back of a parked lorry.

“Hoy, Flavia,” he said as he saw me, jumping at the opportunity to stop work. “Fancy some cheese?”

Before I could answer he had pulled a nasty-looking jackknife from his pocket and sliced off a slab of Stilton with frightening ease. He cut one for himself and tucked into it on the spot with what Daphne would call “noisy gusto.” Daphne is going to be a novelist, and copies out into an old account book phrases that strike her in her day-to-day reading. I remembered “noisy gusto” from the last time I snooped through its pages.

“Been home?” Ned asked, looking at me with a shy sideways glance. I saw what was coming. I nodded.

“And how's Miss Ophelia? Has the doctor been round?”

“Yes,” I said. “I believe he saw her this morning.”

Ned swallowed my deception whole.

“Still green then, is she?”

“More of a yellow than before,” I said. “A shade more sulphuric than cupric.”

I had learned that a lie wrapped in detail, like a horse pill in an apple, went down with greater ease. But this time, as soon as I said it, I knew that I had overstepped.

“Haw, Flavia!” Ned said. “You're making sport of me.”

I let him have my best slow-dawning country-bumpkin smile.

“You've caught me out, Ned,” I said. “Guilty, as charged.”

He gave me back a weird mirror image of my grin. For a fraction of a second I thought he was mocking me, and I felt my temper begin to rise. But then I realized he was honestly pleased to have puzzled me out. This was my opportunity.

“Ned,” I said, “if I asked you a terrifically personal question, would you answer it?”

I waited as this sunk in. Communicating with Ned was like exchanging cabled messages with a slow reader in Mongolia.

“Of course I'd answer it,” he said, and the roguish twinkle in his eye tipped me off to what was coming next. “'Course, I might not say the truth.”

When we'd both had a good laugh, I got down to business. I'd start with the heavy artillery.

“You're frightfully keen on Ophelia, aren't you?”

Ned sucked his teeth and ran a finger round the inside of his collar. “She's a right nice girl, I'll give her that.”

“But wouldn't you like to settle down with her one day in a thatched cottage and raise a litter of brats?”

By now, Ned's neck was a rising column of red, like a thick alcohol thermometer. In seconds he looked like one of those birds that inflate its gullet for mating purposes. I decided to help him out.