As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (21 page)

Somehow her lips attached themselves to the rim of the glass: like a bivalve trying to climb out of a swimming pool. She choked—gagged twice—and wrenched her head away.

All things considered, she was remarkably strong, but I was stronger.

I wedged her head back with the rim of the glass and dumped the liquid down her throat, struggling all the while.

It was not a pleasant task—something like trying to force-feed a bedridden grampus—but I persisted. In the
end, I managed to get about half the stuff into her stomach, with the other half splattered equally upon myself, the bed, and the floor.

She was coughing and choking and sobbing, and through it all, her eyes blazed at me as if they were weapons.

I stood by with the kidney dish: a pillar of strength dressed in a Bedouin’s tent. For just a moment I had a horrid flashback to being Balthazar in the Christmas pageant at St. Tancred’s and being made to sing:

At first it seemed as if nothing was going to happen: the darkness before dawn, the calm before the storm.

But it didn’t take long. Collingwood gave a couple of surprised hiccups, followed by a long sigh. Her face was almost placid, and then, suddenly, she gave a great gulp, her lips dragged themselves down at the corners, and up it all came.

I held her head as great gouts of the reeking stuff came gushing out of her and into the waiting kidney dish.

It was my own spur-of-the-moment vomiting at the camp that had given me the idea: that and the knowledge that a mustard-induced tossing of the cookies was the best—and perhaps only—antidote to poisoning by chloral hydrate.

Had Fitzgibbon administered a fresh dose of the stuff
under my very nose? Had she roused Collingwood enough to swallow a capsule or a spoonful of syrup, or, worse, to administer an injection by hypodermic needle?

I hadn’t heard anything—but that would argue for the syringe, wouldn’t it?

Why were they keeping this child asleep? Was it to guard her own sanity, or was there a far more sinister reason? Had she, for instance, seen too much? Was it because she had been caught making notes on the missing girls?

Collingwood fell back against the pillows, her face ghastly, her breathing only slowly returning to normal.

Whoops-a-daisy!

There was more where that came from. I barely had time to get the bowl into position when she was at it again.

“Sorry,” she wheezed, gasping horribly.

A good sign—an excellent sign, in fact. Anyone who could apologize while puking still possessed a brain able to function at the highest levels of decency.

I patted her on the back.

“More?” I asked, solicitously.

She shook her head.

“Good!” I said, and I meant it.

I went to the window, opened it, and emptied the kidney dish outside, apologizing silently to the groundskeepers as I did so. I rinsed out the bowl at the sink and replaced it in the medical cupboard, which I locked, and returned the key to its mate.

“Stay quiet,” I told her as I changed back into my school uniform. “Try to get some decent rest. But do me a favor: I wasn’t here. You haven’t seen me. You woke up, threw up,
and suddenly you were feeling much better, understand? Don’t let them give you any more medicine. If they try to, scream bloody murder—and keep it up: I shall hear you. All right?”

Her eyes were upon mine, huge now.

She nodded, and suddenly the tears welled up. I turned away. There wasn’t a moment to lose.

I was almost at the door when she called out to me:

“Flavia …”

I turned.

“The dead person in the chimney,” she said, “… the flag … wrapped in the flag. I know her.”

T
HERE IS AN ELECTRIC
silence that comes with shock: a silence which is intolerable yet which, in spite of that, you are powerless to break. I stood staring at Collingwood and she at me for what seemed like an eternity of eternities.

I walked slowly back across the infirmary, placing one foot in front of the other, plod, plod, plodding toward her like some relentless zombie.

“Tell me,” I said, perhaps too harshly, because Collingwood burst immediately into tears.

“I can’t,” she sobbed, “I simply can’t,” and in an instant I was catapulted back to that moment she and the corpse had come tumbling out of the chimney. How shockingly I had treated her!

“Put a cork in it,”
I had told her, and pointed out that she was drooling, and all the while the body had been lying there before us, decapitated on the floor.

And who had harvested all the sympathy? “Poor, dear, lonely, unhappy Flavia de Luce,” as Miss Fawlthorne had said, while poor, dear, lonely, unhappy Collingwood had been drugged and tossed into captivity.

Not only did it not make sense, it was rapidly becoming a nightmare.

By the time I reached Collingwood’s side I was feeling more dreadful than I ever should have thought possible.

“Tell me anyway,” I said, gripping her hands in both of mine, and now the two of us were quaking with tears.

“I can’t,” she whispered, squeezing tightly, and I saw in her eyes that she was telling the truth. In telling me that the dead body was someone she knew, she had already reached her limit. It had cost her dearly and there was, at least for the time being, nothing else to share.

What terrible kind of fear could so effectively silence the girl? Was the dead body an example of what happened to those who talked?

“What if I ask you questions?” I said, suddenly inspired. “That way you won’t be telling, technically.”

She shook her head and I knew that I was going to have to figure it out myself.

The sound of cheering girls in the distance indicated that the day’s hockey matches had come to a close. If I were to get back to my room unnoticed, I’d better be on my way.

There’s no better cover than a milling gang of rowdy winners.

I made my way back to Edith Cavell and locked myself
in. I was the fox gone to earth, and if they wanted me, they could jolly well dig me out.

I got out my William Palmer notebook, and by the simple method of turning it upside down and beginning at the back, created a new one.

The Characters in the Case
, I wrote at the top of the first page, and underlined it.

I would list them alphabetically, since it was more objective.

So there it was: my cast of characters—my dramatis personae—like the heroes, the villains, and the bit players with their exits and their entrances, all listed neatly on the first page of a play by Shakespeare.

Was there a killer among them?

Of course my list did not include Inspector Gravenhurst or his assistant, Sergeant LaBelle. It was probably safe enough to discount these two as suspects, but I added them for the sake of completeness. As Uncle Tarquin de Luce once wrote in the margin of one of his many notebooks of chemical experiments:
Consider also the container
.

Wise words indeed, and ones I intended never to lose sight of.

Something was nagging at me as I read and reread the list: something just below the surface; something that remained maddeningly invisible, like the crystal ball I had once found hidden in plain sight in a running stream.

It was time to make use of a technique I had invented, which I called “word fishing.” I would focus on one key word at a time, letting my mind fly wherever it might in search of associations.
Occult … chimney … Ouija board … cigarettes …

The bell did not clang, the whistle did not blow, the penny did not drop until I got to
Scarlett, Amelia … laundry
. Scarlett claimed to have seen Clarissa Brazenose—or her ghost—coming out of the laundry just last night.

Although my mental fingers were tickling the belly of the thought in the same way that the late Brookie Harewood had once tickled the trout he poached on our estate, I could not quite grasp it.

Scarlett, Amelia … laundry
.

Part of the technique of word fishing was to shift the attention somewhere else when the quarry was elusive: to think of something entirely different and then, when the unsuspecting thought nibbled again, to seize it by the throat.

And so I forced myself to think of Johann Schobert, the German composer who, with his wife, child, maidservant, and four casual acquaintances, died in agony after eating certain mushrooms which he had insisted were perfectly edible. Schobert had written the failed comic opera
Le Garde-Chasse et le Braconnier (The Gamekeeper and the Poacher)
, from which Aunt Felicity had insisted Feely play selections on the night of my departure.

Perhaps only Aunt Felicity and I, in all the wide, wide world, knew the reason why.

And it worked!

Laundry
.

The word poked its head out of its lair and I seized it.
Laundry
.

“Yaroo!” I wanted to shout.

Laundry
. It wasn’t that Scarlett had seen Brazenose major coming out of the laundry. No, that wasn’t it at all. It was that Scarlett had been awarded a prize for washing and ironing: a little silver-plated mangle.

Had Clarissa Brazenose also been presented with a silver award: a small, tarnished little creature with wings that was, at this very moment, burning a hole in my pocket?

I reached in and fished it out, shivering a little at the very thought of where it had been and what it had been through.

I examined it again through my magnifying glass, this time more carefully.

As I had noticed the first time, it seemed to have wings and a face, but the thing was so tarnished that it was difficult to make out the details. Gruesomely suggestive, though, of a fallen angel that had struck the earth at the blazing speed of an aviator whose parachute had failed to open.

At the top of the head was a tiny perforation, as if for a string or a ring to pass through.

It had been worn round the neck! A medallion. A religious charm. An angel. No, an archangel! Saint Michael the Archangel.

The chain of deductions came as quickly as that.

Why hadn’t I noticed it sooner? The folded apex of the wings extended well above the top of the head. Only an archangel had wings of such dimensions. I had seen them often enough in the moldering volumes of art with which Buckshaw was littered—a momentary pang here—and in the great stained-glass window at St. Tancred’s given in the Middle Ages by the de Lacey family.

Ordinary angels, I knew, all the way down to the seraphim and frankly incredible cherubim, had fluffy swans-down wings that sprouted from the shoulders: capable enough for domestic flight but nowhere near as powerful as the eagle wings of their superiors, the archangels.

This scorched relic, which I held in the palm of my now suddenly shaking hand, had belonged to one of the missing girls: Le Marchand, Wentworth, or Clarissa Brazenose.

Which of them had worn a Michael round her neck? Which had been presented with a medallion?

It would be child’s play to find out. I would pry it out of Jumbo, who, as head girl, would be most likely to know. But first I would need to catch her alone.

Fitzgibbon had not yet noticed I was missing from the infirmary—at least I didn’t think she had. There had been no hue and cry, no alarms, and no search parties. No one had even bothered to come to Edith Cavell in search of poor, sick, fevered Flavia. That, in itself, was annoying, in a way.

It was not easy trying to cut Jumbo from the herd (I’m quite proud of that little jest) particularly while keeping a low profile myself. I watched for a while from the window, hoping to catch her coming from or going to the hockey field, but no such luck.