Flavia de Luce 3 - A Red Herring Without Mustard (28 page)

Only if they had waded around in the shallows—and only then if they had stepped upon it by accident, as I had—would they have found the object of their search.

I would, of course, take it to Inspector Hewitt at once.

As I climbed the bank, I noticed that a silence had fallen upon the Palings, as if the birds were afraid to make even a peep.

The crystal ball was cold in my hands, refracting distorted images of earth, trees, and sky, its swirling colors like dye dropped into water.

If it hadn’t been for the glass, I might have missed the flash of blue among the trees—a color that didn’t belong there.

I stopped in my tracks as if preoccupied. Don’t look directly at it, I thought.

I twisted the hem of my dress uselessly, as if trying to wring it dry, then made a little hammock of the material in which to sling the crystal ball.

Would my wet hands leave fingerprints? Who knew? It was the best I could do.

“Blast it all!” I said loudly, more for effect than anything, but signaling that I thought I was alone.

With my peripheral vision, I could see that there was a swatch of color among the bushes. By shifting my gaze slightly, I could see that it appeared to be a scarf—a flowered scarf.

Could it be one of the pixies Daffy and Feely had told me about—one of those malevolent water sprites that stole babies? Perhaps it was the very one that had taken Mrs. Bull’s child! But no … pixies didn’t exist. Or did they?

I let my eyes drift slowly to the right.

Quite abruptly, as if by magic, an image snapped into place. It was like one of those optical illusions in The Girl’s Own Annual in which a silhouette of two faces in profile is suddenly seen to be an egg cup.

Gray hair … gray eyes, staring straight at me … a scarf at the throat … riding breeches—even the monocle hanging by a black cord round the neck.

It was Vanetta Harewood’s companion, Ursula, standing motionless among the bushes, counting on the camouflage of stillness to keep me from spotting her—Ursula who gathered willow withies from the riverbank to twist into her dreadful baskets.

I let my eyes meet hers, then drift away, as if I hadn’t seen her. I looked to her right—to her left—and finally above her, letting my mouth fall open slackly.

I scratched my head, and then, I’m afraid, my bottom.

“I’m coming, Gladys,” I shouted. “It’s only a squirrel.”

And with that, I made off across the bridge, muttering away to myself like the mad daughter of an eccentric squire.

Damn! I thought. I hadn’t had a chance to examine the police diggings.

Still, my day had been remarkably productive. In my pocket was the silver de Luce lobster pick that I was quite sure had been used to put an end to Brookie Harewood, and cradled in my skirt, the crystal ball that was almost certainly the object with which Fenella had been bashed. After all, if it wasn’t, then why would it have been tossed into the river?

An idea began to take shape.

Of course I would hand over these weapons at once to Inspector Hewitt—I had planned to do so all along, for various reasons.

But first, I wondered, was it possible to retrieve fingerprints from an object that had been immersed for days in running water?

I HAD CLIMBED NO more than a dozen stairs when Father’s voice, from somewhere below me in the foyer, said, “Flavia—”

Thwarted!

I stopped, turned, and came down one step out of respect. He was standing at the entrance to the west wing.

“My study, please.”

He turned and was gone.

I trudged down the steps and trailed along behind him, making a point of hanging well back.

“Close the door,” he said, and sat down at his desk.

This was serious. Father usually delivered his little lectures while standing at the window, gazing out into the grounds.

I perched on the edge of a chair, and tried to look attentive.

“I’ve had a call from Nurse Hammond on the—” He pointed in the general direction of the telephone, but could not bring himself to say the word. “… instrument. She tells me that you took Dr. Kissing out into the rain.”

The hag! I’d done no such thing.

“He wasn’t in the rain,” I protested. “He was sitting under an umbrella on the lawn, and he was already outside when I got there.”

“It makes no difference,” Father said, holding up a hand like a policeman directing traffic.

“But—”

“He’s an old man, Flavia. He’s not to be bothered with nonsensical intrusions upon his privacy.”

“But—”

“This gadding about the countryside must stop,” he said. “You’re making a confounded nuisance of yourself.”

A nuisance! Well!

I could have spat on his carpet.

“I’ve given this a great deal of thought recently,” he said, “and come to the conclusion that you have far too much time on your hands.”

“But—”

“Part of that is my own fault, I’ll admit. You’ve not been provided with sufficient supervision and, as a result, your interests have become rather—unhealthy.”

“Unhealthy?”

“Consequently,” Father plowed on, “I’ve decided that you need to be more among people—more in the company of your peers.”

What was he talking about? On the one hand I was wandering about the village excessively, and now, on the other, I was in need of human companionship. It sounded like something you might say about a rogue sheepdog.

But before I could protest, Father took off his glasses, very deliberately folded their black, spidery arms across the lenses, and put them away in their hard-shelled case. It was a sign that the conversation was nearing its end.

“The vicar tells me that the choir is in need of several extra voices, and I’ve assured him that you’d be happy to pitch in. They’ve laid on an extra practice this evening at six-thirty sharp.”

I was so astonished I couldn’t think of a single word to say.

Later, I thought of one.

“Don’t dawdle,” Feely said, as we marched across the fields towards the church. She had been summoned to sit in, as she sometimes did, for Mr. Collicutt.

“Where’s old Cockie, then,” I had asked, and waited for the inevitable explosion. Feely, I think, was half in love with the handsome young man who had recently been appointed organist at St. Tancreds. She had even gone so far as to join the choir because of the superior view of his bobbing blond curls afforded by a seat in the chancel.

But Feely wasn’t biting—in fact, she was strangely subdued.

“He’s adjudicating the music festival in Hinley,” she said, almost as if I’d asked a civil question.

“Do, re, mi, fa, so-what?” I sang loudly, and intentionally off-key.

“Save it for the sinners,” Feely said pleasantly, and walked on in silence.

Half a dozen boys in Scout uniforms, all members of St. Tancred’s choir, were shoving one another about in the churchyard, playing a rough game of football with someone’s hat. One of them was Colin Prout.

Feely stuck her first and last fingers into her mouth and let out a surprisingly piercing and unladylike whistle. The game broke up at once.

“Inside,” Feely ordered. “Hymns before horseplay.”

Since its scoutmaster and several of the boys were also members of the choir, the Scout troop would not meet until after choir practice.

There were a couple of anonymous groans and whispers, but the boys obeyed her. Colin tried to scuttle past, his eyes fixed firmly on the ground.

“Hoy, Colin,” I said, stepping in front of him to block his way. “I didn’t know you were a Scout.”

He put his head down, jammed his hands into the pockets of his shorts, and sidestepped me. I followed him into the church.

The older members of the choir had already taken their places, chatting away to one another as they awaited the arrival of the organist, the men on one side of the chancel, the women facing them, on the other.

Miss Cool, who was both Bishop’s Lacey’s postmistress and its confectioner, shot me a beaming smile, and the Misses Puddock, Lavinia and Aurelia, who owned the St. Nicholas Tea Room, gave me identical twiddles of their fingers.

“Good evening, choir,” Feely said. It was a tradition that dated back into the mists of Christian history.

“Good evening, Miss de Luce,” they responded, automatically.

Feely took her seat on the organ bench, and with no more than a “Hymn number three hundred and eighty-three,” barked out over her shoulder, launched into the opening bars of “We Plow the Fields and Gather,” leaving me scrambling to find the page in the hymn-book.

“We plow the fields and scatter,” we sang,

“the good seed on the land,

but it is fed and watered

by God’s almighty hand;

He sends the snow in winter,

the warmth to swell the grain,

the breezes and the sunshine,

and soft refreshing rain.”

As I sang, I thought of Brookie’s body dangling from Poseidon’s trident in the downpour. There had been nothing soft or refreshing about that particular storm—in fact, it had been one hell of a cloudburst.

I looked across the chancel at Colin. He was singing with intense concentration, his eyes closed, his face upturned to the day’s last light which was now seeping in through the darkening stained-glass windows. I’d deal with him later.

“He only is the Maker

of all things near and far;

He paints the wayside flower,

He lights the evening star;

the winds and waves obey Him—”

The organ screeched to a halt in the middle of a note, as if someone had strangled it.

“De Luce,” a voice was saying sourly, and I became aware that it was Feely’s.

She was addressing me!

“The voice cannot emerge through a closed mouth.”

Heads turned towards me, and there were a couple of smiles and titters.

“Now then, again—from ‘the winds and waves obey Him—’ ”

She struck a leading note on the keyboard, and then the organ roared back to life and we were off again.

How dare she single me out in that manner? The witch! Just you wait, Ophelia Gertrude de Luce … just you bloody well wait!

To me, the choir practice seemed to go on forever, perhaps because there’s no joy in simply mouthing the words—in fact, it’s surprisingly hard work.

But at last it was over. Feely was gathering up her music and having a jolly old chin-wag with Cynthia Richardson, the vicar’s wife, whose fan club did not count me among its members. I’d take the opportunity to slip away unnoticed and tackle Colin in the churchyard with a couple of interesting questions that had come to mind.

“Flavia—”

Drat!

Feely had broken off her conversation, and was bearing down upon me. It was too late to pretend I hadn’t heard her.

She seized my elbow and gave it a furtive shake. “Don’t go sneaking off,” she said in an undertone, using her other hand to wave a cheery good-bye to Cynthia. “Father will be here in a few minutes, and he has asked in particular that you wait.”

“Father here? Whatever for?”

“Oh, come off it, Flavia—you know as well as I do. It’s cinema night, and Father was quite right—he said you’d try to dodge it.”

She was correct on both counts. Although I had since put it out of my mind, Father had announced suddenly several weeks earlier that we didn’t get out enough as a family—a situation that he intended to rectify by subscribing to the vicar’s proposed cinema series in the parish hall.

And sure enough—here was Father now with Daffy, at the church door, shaking hands with the vicar. It was too late to escape.

“Ah, Flavia,” the vicar said, “thank you for adding your voice to our little choir of angels, as it were. I was just telling your father how pleased I was to see Ophelia on the organ bench. She plays so well, don’t you think? It’s a treat to see her conducting the choir with such verve. ‘And a little child shall lead them,’ as the prophet Isaiah tells us … not, of course, that Ophelia’s a little child, dear me, no!—far from it. But come away, the Bijou Cinema awaits!”

As we strolled through the churchyard towards the parish hall, I noticed Colin flitting from gravestone to gravestone, engaged apparently in some elaborate game of his own invention.

“I worry about that boy,” I heard the vicar confiding to Father. “He has no parents, and now, with Brookie Harewood no longer around, as it were, to look out for him—but I’m chattering—ah, here we are … shall we go in?”

Inside, the parish hall was already uncomfortably warm. In preparation for the pictures, the blackout curtains had been drawn against the evening light, and the place was already filling with that humid fug that is generated by too many overheated bodies in a confined space.

I could distinguish quite clearly the many odors of Bishop’s Lacey, among them the various scents and shaving lotions; of talcum powder (the vicar); of bergamot scent (the Misses Puddock), of rubbing alcohol (our neighbor Maximilian Brock); of boiled cabbage (Mrs. Delaney), of Guinness stout (Mr. Danby), and of Dutch pipe tobacco (George Carew, the village carpenter).

Since Miss Mountjoy, with her pervading odor of cod-liver oil, was nowhere in sight, I circulated slowly round the hall, sniffing unobtrusively for the slightest whiff of fish.

“Oh, hello, Mr. Spirling. It’s nice to see you. (Sniff) How’s Mrs. Spirling getting on with her crocheting? Gosh, it’s such a lot of work, isn’t it? I don’t know where she finds the time.”

In the center of the room, Mr. Mitchell, the proprietor of the photographer’s shop in the high street, was grappling with writhing snakes of black cine film, trying to feed them into the maw of a projector.

I couldn’t help but reflect that the last time I’d been in the parish hall, it had been on the occasion of Rupert Porson’s final puppet performance—on this same stage—of Jack and the Beanstalk. Poor Rupert, I thought, and a delicious little shudder shook my shoulders.

But this was no time for pleasantries—I had to keep my nose to the grindstone, so to speak.

I rejoined Father, Daffy, and Feely just as the front row of houselights was being switched off.

I will not bother quoting the vicar’s preliminary remarks about “the growing importance of film in the education of our young people,” and so forth. He did not mention either Brookie’s death or the attack upon Fenella, although this was perhaps neither the proper time or place to do so.