Flavia de Luce 3 - A Red Herring Without Mustard (10 page)

Mrs. Mullet looked at me sharply. “Hmph! Brookie Harewood! He’s no more than a poacher. I’m surprised the Colonel hasn’t run him off the Palings. Them are your fish he’s sellin’ at the cottage gates.”

“I suppose he has to earn a living.”

“Livin’?” She bristled, giving the great mound of bread dough an extra pummel. “He don’t need to make a livin’ no more than Grace’s goose. Not with that mother of his over in Malden Fenwick sendin’ him reg’lar checks to stay away. He’s a layabout, plain and simple, that one is, and a rascal to boot.”

“A remittance man?” I asked.

Daffy had once told me about the black-sheep son of our neighbors, the Blatchfords, who was paid to keep well away in Canada. “Two pounds ten shillings per mile per year,” she said. “He lives in the Queen Charlotte Islands to maximize his pension.”

“Mittens man or not, he’s no good, and that’s a fact,” said Mrs. Mullet. “He’s managed to get in with a bad lot.”

“Colin Prout?” I suggested, thinking of the way Brookie had bullied the boy at the fête.

“Colin Prout’s no more than Brookie Harewood’s spare fingers, or so I’ve ’eard. No, I was talkin’ about Reggie Pettibone an’ that lot what ’as the shop in the ’igh street.”

“The antiques place?”

Pettibone’s Antiques & Quality Goods was just a few doors west of the Thirteen Drakes. Although I had passed it often, I had never been inside.

Mrs. Mullet sniffed.

“Antiques, my sitter!” she exclaimed. “Sorry, dear, but that’s ’ow I feels about it. That Reggie Pettibone give us two pounds six and three last year for a table me and Alf bought new at the Army and Navy when first we was married. Three weeks later we spots it in ’is window with silver knobs and fifty-five guineas on it! And a sign what says ‘Georgian Whist Table by Chippendale.’ We knew it was ours because Alf reckernized the burn mark on the leg where ’e raked it with an ’ot poker whilst ’e was tryin’ to fish out a coal what ’ad popped out of the grate and rolled under it when our Agnes was just a mite.”

“And Brookie’s in with Pettibone?”

“I should say he is. Thick as thieves. Tight as the jaws off a nutcracker, them two.”

“What does his mother think of that, I wonder?”

“Pfaw!” Mrs. Mullet said. “A fat lot she cares about ’im. ’Er with ’er paints and brushes! She does the ’orses and ’ounds crowd, you know—that lot o’ swells. Charges ’em a pretty penny, too, I’ll wager. Brookie and ’is under’anded ways ’as brought ’er nothin’ but shame. To my mind, she don’t rightly care what ’e gets ’isself up to so long as ’e keeps clear of Malden Fenwick.”

“Thank you, Mrs. M,” I said. “I enjoy talking to you. You always have such interesting stories to tell.”

“Mind you, I’ve said nothing,” she said in an undertone, raising a finger. “My lips are sealed.”

And in rather an odd way, there was truth in what she said. Since I first came into the room I had been waiting for her to ask me about the Gypsy, or why the police had turned up at Buckshaw, but she had done neither. Was it possible she didn’t know about either of these events?

It seemed unlikely. Mrs. M’s recent chin-wag at the kitchen door with the milk-float man was likely to have resulted in more swapping of intelligence than a chin-wag between Lord Haw-Haw and Mata Hari.

I was already across the kitchen with my hand on the door when she said it: “Don’t go wandering too far off, dear. That nice officer—the one with the dimples—will be round soon to ’ave your fingerprints.”

Curse the woman! Was she eavesdropping from behind every closed door at Buckshaw? Or was she truly clairvoyant?

“Oh, yes,” I replied lamely. “Thanks for reminding me, Mrs. M. I’d almost forgotten about him.”

The doorbell rang as I came through the passage beneath the stairs. I put on a sprint but Feely beat me to it.

I skidded to a stop on the foyer’s checkerboard tiles just as she swung open the front door to reveal Detective Sergeant Graves standing on the doorstep, small black box in hand and his jaw already halfway to the ground.

I have to admit that Feely had never looked more beautiful: From her salmon-colored silk blouse to her sage green mohair sweater (both of which, as I knew from my own snooping expeditions, she had pinched from Harriet’s dressing room), from her perfect honey-colored hair to her sparkling blue eyes (having, of course, left her black-rimmed spectacles, as she always did, stuffed behind the pillows on the chesterfield), she was a close-up from a Technicolor cinema film.

She had planned this, the hag!

“Sergeant Graves, I presume?” she said in a low, husky voice—one I had never heard her use before. “Come in. We’ve been expecting you.”

We? What in the old malarkey was she playing at?

“I’m Flavia’s sister, Ophelia,” she was saying, extending a coral-encrusted wrist and a long white hand that made the Lady of Shalott’s fingers look like meathooks.

I could have killed her!

What right did Feely have to insert herself, without so much as a by-your-leave, between me and the man who had come to Buckshaw expressly to take my fingerprints? It was unforgiveable!

Still, I mustn’t forget that I’d had more than one daydream in which the chipper little sergeant married my older sister and lived in a flower-choked cottage where I would be able to drop in for afternoon tea and happy professional chats about criminal poisoners.

Sergeant Graves had finally recovered enough of his wits to say “Yes,” and bumble his way into the foyer.

“Would you like a cup of tea and a biscuit, Sergeant?” Feely asked, managing to suggest in her tone that the poor dear was overworked, dog-tired, and malnourished.

“I am quite thirsty, come to think of it,” he managed with a bashful grin. “And hungry,” he added.

Feely stepped back and ushered him towards the drawing room.

I followed like a neglected hound.

“You may set up your gear here,” Feely told him, indicating a Regency table that stood near a window. “How dreadfully trying the life of a police officer must be. All firearms and criminals and hobnail boots.”

Sergeant Graves had the good grace not to slug her. In fact, he seemed to be enjoying himself.

“It is a hard life, Miss Ophelia,” he said, “at least most of the time.”

His dimpled grin suggested that this was one of the easier moments.

“I’ll ring for Mrs. Mullet,” Feely said, reaching for a velvet pull that hung near the mantelpiece, and which probably hadn’t been used since George the Third was foaming at the mouth. Mrs. M would have kidney failure when the bell in the kitchen went off right above her head.

“What about the dabs?” I asked. It was a term I had picked up from Philip Odell, the private eye on the wireless. “Inspector Hewitt will be dead keen on having a squint at them.”

Feely laughed a laugh like a tinkling silver bell. “You must forgive my little sister, Sergeant,” she said. “I’m afraid she’s been left alone too much.”

Left alone? I almost laughed out loud! What would the sergeant say if I told him about the Inquisition in the Buckshaw cellars? About how Feely and Daffy had trussed me up in a smelly potato sack and flung me onto the stony floor?

“Dabs it is, then,” said the sergeant, opening the clasps and flinging open his kit. “I suppose you’ll be wanting to have a dekko at the chemicals and so forth,” he added, giving me a wink.

If I’d had my way, he’d have been sanctified on the spot: Saint Detective Sergeant Graves. Come to think of it, I didn’t even know his given name, but now was not the time to ask.

“This,” he said, extracting the first of two small glass bottles, “is fingerprint powder.”

“Mercury-based, I assume? Fine enough to give good definition to the loops and whorls, and so on?”

This, too, I had learned from Philip Odell. It had stuck in my mind because of its chemical connection.

The sergeant grinned and pulled out the second bottle, this one darker than the first.

“Go on,” he said. “See if you can guess this one.”

Guess? I thought. The poor deluded man!

“Graphite-based,” I said. “More coarse than the mercury, but shows up better on certain surfaces.”

“Top marks!” the sergeant said.

I turned away as if to wipe a bit of grit from my eye and stuck out my tongue at Feely.

“But surely these are for dusting?” I protested. “… and not needed for recording prints?”

“Right enough,” the sergeant said. “I just thought you’d be interested in seeing the tools of the trade.”

“Oh, I am indeed,” I said quickly. “Thank you for the thought.”

I did not suppose it would be polite to mention that I had upstairs in my chemical laboratory enough mercury and graphite to supply the needs of the Hinley Constabulary until well into the next century. Great-uncle Tar had been, among many other things, a hoarder.

“Mercury,” I said, touching the bottle. “Fancy that!”

Sergeant Graves was now removing from its protective padding a rectangular sheet of plain glass, followed in quick succession by a bottle of ink and a roller.

Deftly he applied five or six drops of the ink to the surface of the glass, then rolled it smooth until the plate was uniformly covered with the black ooze.

“Now then,” he said, taking my right wrist, and spreading my fingers until they were just hovering above the glass, “relax—let me do the work.”

With no more than a slight pressure, he pushed my fingertips down and into the ink, one at a time, rolling each one from left to right on the ball of my fingertip. Then, moving my hand to a white card, which was marked with ten squares—one for each finger—he made the prints.

“Oh, Sergeant Graves!” Feely said. “You must take mine, too!”

“Oh, Sergeant Graves! You must take mine, too!”

I could have swatted her.

“Happy to, Miss Ophelia,” he said, taking up her hand and dropping mine.

“Better ink the glass again,” I said, “otherwise you might make a bad impression.”

The sergeant’s ears went a bit pink, but he soldiered on. In no time at all he had recoated the glass with a fresh film, and was taking up Feely’s hand as if it were some venerable object.

“Did you know that, in the Holy Land, they have the fingerprints of the angel Gabriel?” I asked, trying desperately to regain his attention. “At least they used to. Dr. Robert Richardson and the Earl of Belmore saw them at Nazareth. Remember, Feely?”

For nearly a week—before our recent set-to—Daffy had been reading aloud to us at the breakfast table from an odd volume of the doctor’s Travels along the Mediterranean and Parts Adjacent, and some of its many wonders were still fresh in my mind.

“They also showed him the Virgin Mary’s Kitchen, at the Chapel of the Incarnation. They still have the cinders, the fire irons, the cutlery—”

Something in the back room of my brain was thinking about our own fire irons: the Sally Fox and Shoppo firedogs that had once belonged to Harriet.

“That will be quite enough, thank you, Flavia,” Feely said. “You may fetch me a rag to wipe my fingers on.”

“Fetch it yourself,” I flung at her, and stalked from the room.

Compared with my life, Cinderella was a spoiled brat.

ALONE AT LAST!

Whenever I’m with other people, part of me shrinks a little. Only when I am alone can I fully enjoy my own company.

In the kitchen garden, I grabbed my faithful old BSA Keep-Fit from the greenhouse. The bicycle had once belonged to Harriet, who had called her l’Hirondelle, “the Swallow”: a word that reminded me so much of being force-fed cod-liver oil with a gag-inducing spoon that I had renamed her “Gladys.” Who, for goodness’ sake, wants to ride a bicycle with a name that sounds like a sickroom nurse?

And Gladys was much more down-to-earth than l’Hirondelle: an adventurous female with Dunlop tires, three speeds, and a forgiving disposition. She never complained and she never tired, and neither, when I was in her company, did I.

I pedaled southeast from Buckshaw, wobbling slowly along the edge of the ornamental lake. To my left was a somewhat flat expanse called the Visto which had been cleared by Sir George de Luce in the mid-nineteenth century to serve as what he described in his diary as a “coign of vantage”: a grassy green plain across which one was supposed to contemplate the blue enfolding hills.

In recent times, however, the Visto had been allowed to become little more than an overgrown cow pasture: a place where nettles ran riot and the contemplator’s clothing was at risk of being ripped to tatters. It was here that Harriet had kept Blithe Spirit, her de Havilland Gypsy Moth, which she had flown regularly up to London to meet her friends.

All that remained now of those happy days were the three iron rings, still rusting somewhere among the weeds, to which Blithe Spirit had long ago been tethered.

Once, when I had asked Father how Buckshaw looked from the air, he had gone all tight around the temples.

“Ask your aunt Felicity,” he’d said gruffly. “She’s flown.”

I’d made a mental note to do so.

From the Visto an overgrown path ran south, crossing here and there long-abandoned lawns and hedges, which gave way eventually to copses and scrub. I followed the narrow track, and soon arrived at the Palings.

The Gypsy’s caravan was as I had left it, although the ground bore signs of many “hobnail boots,” as Feely had called them.

Why was I drawn back here? I wondered. Was it because the Gypsy had been under my protection? I had, after all, offered her sanctuary in the Palings and she had accepted. If amends were to be made, I would make them on my own—not because I was made to do so by a sense of shame.

Gry was grazing contentedly near the elders at the far side of the grove. Someone had brought him back to the Palings. They had even thought to bring a bale of fresh hay to the clearing, and he was making short work of it. He looked up at me without curiosity and then went back to his food.

“Who’s a good boy, then?” I asked him, realizing, even as I said it, that these were words to be used in addressing a parrot.

“Good Gry,” I said. “Splendid horse.”

Gry paid not the slightest attention.

Something fastened to one of the tree trunks near the bridge caught my eye: a white wooden panel about six feet from the ground. I walked round the other side for a closer look.