Flavia de Luce 1 - The Sweetness At The Bottom Of The Pie (14 page)

This was a lie, but a first-rate one.

“What a good child you are,” she said, with a glance up at the curtained windows of an adjoining row of houses that overlooked her yard. “This is no place to talk. You'd better come inside.”

She led me through a narrow hallway, on one side of it her tiny bedroom, and on the other, a miniature sitting room. And suddenly we were in the shop, behind the counter that served as the village post office. Besides being Bishop's Lacey's only confectioner, Miss Cool was also its postmistress and, as such, knew everything worth knowing—except chemistry, of course.

She watched me carefully as I looked round with interest at the tiers of shelves, each one lined with glass jars of horehound sticks, bull's-eyes, and hundreds-and-thousands.

“I'm sorry. I can't do business on a Sunday. They'd have me up before the magistrates. It's the law, you know.”

I shook my head sadly.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I forgot what day it was. I didn't mean to frighten you.”

“Well, no real harm done,” she said, suddenly recovering her usual garrulous powers as she bustled about the shop, aimlessly touching this and that.

“Tell your father there's a new set of stamps coming out soon, but nothing to go into raptures about, at least to my way of thinking, anyways. Same old picture of King George's head, God bless 'im, but tarted up in new colors.”

“Thank you, Miss Cool,” I said. “I'll be sure to let him know.”

“I'm sure that lot at the General Post Office up in London could come up with something better than that,” she went on, “but I've heard as how they're saving up their brains for next year to celebrate the Festival of Britain.”

“I wonder if you could tell me where Miss Mountjoy lives,” I blurted.

“Tilda Mountjoy?” Her eyes narrowed. “Whatever could you want with her?”

“She was most helpful to me at the library, and I thought it might be nice to take her some sweets.”

I gave a sweet smile to match the sentiment.

This was a shameless lie. I hadn't given the matter a moment's thought until now, when I saw that I could kill two birds with one stone.

“Ah, yes,” Miss Cool said. "Margaret Pickery off to tend the sister in Nether-Wolsey: the Singer, the needle, the finger, the twins, the wayward husband, the bottle, the bills. a moment of unexpected and rewarding usefulness for Tilda Mountjoy.

“Acid drops,” she said suddenly. “Sunday or no, acid drops would be the perfect choice.”

“I'll have sixpence worth,” I said.

“. and a shilling's worth of the horehound sticks,” I added. Horehound was my secret passion.

Miss Cool tiptoed to the front of the shop and pulled down the blinds.

“Just between you and me and the gatepost,” she said in a conspiratorial voice.

She scooped the acid drops into a purple paper bag of such a funereal color that it simply cried out to be filled with a scoop or two of arsenic or mix vómica.

“That will be one-and-six,” she said, wrapping the hore hound sticks in paper. I handed her two shillings and while she was still digging in her pockets I said, “That's all right, Miss Cool, I don't require change.”

“What a sweet child you are.” She beamed, slipping an extra horehound stick into the wrappings. “If I had children of my own, I couldn't hope to see them half so thoughtful or so generous.”

I gave her a partial smile and kept the rest of it for myself as she directed me to Miss Mountjoy's house.

“Willow Villa,” she said. “You can't miss it. It's orange.”

WILLOW VILLA WAS, as Miss Cool had said, orange; the kind of orange you see when the scarlet cap of a Death's Head mushroom has just begun to go off. The house was hidden in the shadows beneath the flowing green skirts of a monstrous weeping willow whose branches shifted uneasily in the breeze, sweeping bare the dirt beneath it like a score of witches' brooms. Their movement made me think of a piece of seventeenth-century music that Feely sometimes played and sang—very sweetly, I must admit—when she was thinking of Ned:

The willow-tree will twist, and the willow-tree will

twine,

O I wish I was in the dear youth's arms that once had

the heart of mine.

The song was called “The Seeds of Love,” although love was not the first thing that came to mind whenever I saw a willow; on the contrary, they always reminded me of Ophelia (Shakespeare's, not mine) who drowned herself near one.

Except for a handkerchief-sized scrap of grass at one side, Miss Mountjoy's willow filled the fenced-in yard. Even on the doorstep I could feel the dampness of the place: the tree's languid branches formed a green bell jar through which little light seemed to penetrate, giving me the odd sensation of being under water. Vivid green mosses made a stone sponge of the doorstep, and water stains stretched their sad black fingers across the face of the orange plaster.

On the door was an oxidized brass knocker with the grinning face of the Lincoln Imp. I lifted it and gave a couple of gentle taps. As I waited, I gazed absently up into the air in case anyone should be peeking out from behind the curtains.

But the dusty lace didn't stir. It was as if there was no breath of air inside the place.

To the left, a walk cobbled with old, worn bricks led round the side of the house, and after waiting at the door for a minute or two, I followed it.

The back door was almost completely hidden by long tendrils of willow leaves, all of them undulating with a slightly expectant swishing, like a garish green theater curtain about to rise.

I cupped my hands to the glass at one of the tiny windows. If I stood on tiptoe—

“What are you doing here?”

I spun round.

Miss Mountjoy was standing outside the circle of willow branches, looking in. Through the foliage, I could see only vertical stripes of her face, but what I saw made me edgy.

“It's me, Miss Mountjoy. Flavia,” I said. “I wanted to thank you for helping me at the library.”

The willow branches rustled as Miss Mountjoy stepped inside the cloak of greenery. She was holding a pair of garden shears in one hand and she said nothing. Her eyes, like two mad raisins in her wrinkled face, never left mine.

I shrank back as she stepped onto the walk, blocking my escape.

“I know well enough who you are,” she said. “You're Flavia Sabina Dolores de Luce—Jacko's youngest daughter.”

“You know he's my father?!” I gasped.

“Of course I know, girl. A person of my age knows a great deal.”

Somehow, before I could stop it, the truth popped out of me like a cork from a bottle.

“The 'Dolores' was a lie,” I said. “I sometimes fabricate things.”

She took a step towards me.

“Why are you here?” she asked, her voice a harsh whisper.

I quickly plunged my hand into my pocket and fished out the bag of sweets.

“I brought you some acid drops,” I said, “to apologize for my rudeness. I hope you'll accept them.”

A shrill wheezing sound, which I took to depict a laugh, came out of her.

“Miss Cool's recommendation, no doubt?”

Like the village idiot in a pantomime, I gave half a dozen quick, bobbing nods.

“I was sorry to hear about the way your uncle—Mr. Twining—died,” I said, and I meant it. “Honestly I was. It doesn't seem fair.”

“Fair? It certainly was not fair,” she said. “And yet it was not unjust. It was not even wicked. Do you know what it was?”

Of course I knew. I had heard this before, but I was not here to debate her.

“No,” I whispered.

“It was murder,” she said. “It was murder, pure and simple.”

“And who was the murderer?” I asked. Sometimes my own tongue took me by surprise.

A rather vague look floated across Miss Mountjoy's face like a cloud across the moon, as if she had spent a lifetime preparing for the part and then, center stage in the spotlight, had forgotten her lines.

“Those boys,” she said at last. “Those loathsome, detestable boys. I shall never forget them; not for all their apple cheeks and schoolboy innocence.”

“One of those boys is my father,” I said quietly.

Her eyes were somewhere else in time. Only slowly did they return to the present to focus upon me.

“Yes,” she said. "Laurence de Luce. Jacko. Your father was called Jacko. A schoolboy sobriquet, and yet even the coroner called him that. Jacko. He said it ever so softly at the inquest, almost caressingly—as if all the court were in thrall with the name.”

“My father gave evidence at the inquest?”

“Of course he testified—as did the other boys. It was the sort of thing that was done in those days. He denied everything, of course, all responsibility. A valuable postage stamp had been stolen from the headmaster's collection, and it was all, 'Oh no, sir, it wasn't me, sir!' As if the stamp had magically sprouted grubby little fingers and filched itself!”

I was about to tell her “My father is not a thief, nor is he a liar,” when suddenly I knew that nothing I could say would ever change this ancient mind. I decided to take the offensive.

“Why did you walk out of church this morning?” I asked.

Miss Mountjoy recoiled as if I had thrown a glass of water in her face. “You don't mince words, do you?”

“No,” I said. “It had something to do with the Vicar's praying for the stranger in our midst, didn't it? The man whose body I found in the garden at Buckshaw.”

She hissed through her teeth like a teakettle. “You found the body? You?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Then tell me this—did it have red hair?” She closed her eyes, and kept them closed awaiting my reply.

“Yes,” I said. “It had red hair.”

“For what we have received may the Lord make us truly thankful,” she breathed, before opening her eyes again. It seemed to me not only a peculiar response, but somehow an unchristian one.

“I don't understand,” I said. And I didn't.

“I recognized him at once,” she said. “Even after all these years, I knew who he was as soon as I saw that shock of red hair walking out of the Thirteen Drakes. If that hadn't been enough, his swagger, that overweening cockiness, those cold blue eyes—any one of those things—would have told me that Horace Bonepenny had come back to Bishop's Lacey.”

I had the feeling that we were slipping into deeper waters than I knew.

“Perhaps now you can see why I could not take part in any prayer for the repose of that boy's—that man's—rancid soul.”

She reached out and took the bag of acid drops from my hand, popping one into her mouth and pocketing the rest.

“On the contrary,” she continued, “I pray that he is, at this very moment, being basted in hell.”

And with that, she walked into her dank Willow Villa and slammed the door.

Who on earth was Horace Bonepenny? And what had brought him back to Bishop's Lacey?

I could think of only one person who might be made to tell me.

AS I RODE UP THE AVENUE of chestnuts to Buckshaw, I could see that the blue Vauxhall was no longer at the door. Inspector Hewitt and his men had gone.

I was wheeling Gladys round to the back of the house when I heard a metallic tapping coming from the greenhouse. I moved towards the door and looked inside. It was Dogger.

He was sitting on an overturned pail, striking the thing with a trowel.

Clang… clang… clang… clang. In the way the bell of St. Tancred's tolls for the funeral of some ancient in Bishop's Lacey, it went on and on, as if measuring the strokes of a life. Clang… clang… clang… clang…

His back was to the door, and it was obvious that he did not see me.

I crept away towards the kitchen door where I made a great and noisy ado by dropping Gladys with a loud clatter on the stone doorstep. (“Sorry, Gladys,” I whispered.)

“Damn and blast!” I said, loudly enough to be heard in the greenhouse. I pretended to spot him there behind the glass.

“Oh, hullo, Dogger,” I said cheerily. “Just the person I was looking for.”

He did not turn immediately, and I pretended to be scraping a bit of clay from the sole of my shoe until he recovered himself.

“Miss Flavia,” he said slowly. “Everyone has been looking for you.”

“Well, here I am,” I said. Best to take over the conversation until Dogger was fully back on the rails.

“I was talking to someone in the village who told me about somebody I thought you might be able to tell me about.”

Dogger managed the ghost of a smile.

“I know I'm not putting that in the best way, but—”

“I know what you mean,” he said.

“Horace Bonepenny,” I blurted out. “Who is Horace Bonepenny?”

At my words, Dogger began to twitch like an experimental frog whose spinal cord has been hooked up to a galvanic battery. He licked his lips and wiped madly at his mouth with a pocket handkerchief. I could see that his eyes were beginning to dim, winking out much as the stars do just before sunrise. At the same time, he was making a great effort to pull himself together, though with little success.

“Never mind, Dogger,” I said. “It doesn't matter. For get it.”

He tried to get to his feet, but was unable to lift himself from the overturned pail.

“Miss Flavia,” he said, “there are questions which need to be asked, and there are questions which need not to be asked.”

So there it was again: so like a law, these words that fell from Dogger's lips as naturally, and with as much finality, as if Isaiah himself had spoken them.

But those few words seemed utterly to have exhausted him, and with a loud sigh he covered his face with his hands. I wanted nothing more at that moment than to throw my arms round him and hug him, but I knew that he wasn't up to it. Instead, I settled for putting my hand on his shoulder, realizing even as I did so that the gesture was of greater comfort to me than it was to him.

“I'll go and get Father,” I said. “We'll help you to your room.”

Dogger turned his face slowly round towards me, a chalky white mask of tragedy. The words came out of him like stone grating upon stone.

“They've taken him away, Miss Flavia. The police have taken him away.”

FEELY AND DAFFY WERE SITTING ON A FLOWERED DIVAN in the drawing room, wrapped in one another's arms and wailing like air-raid sirens. I had taken a few steps into the room to join in with them before Ophelia spotted me.