Flavia de Luce 1 - The Sweetness At The Bottom Of The Pie (4 page)

“Here,” I said, taking the instrument from his hands. “I'll do it.”

“Bishop's Lacey two two one,” I said into the telephone, thinking as I waited that Sherlock might well have smiled at the coincidence.

“Police,” said an official voice at the other end of the line.

“Constable Linnet?” I said. “This is Flavia de Luce speaking from Buckshaw.”

I had never done this before, and had to rely on what I'd heard on the wireless and seen in the cinema.

“I'd like to report a death,” I said. “Perhaps you could send out an inspector?”

“Is it an ambulance you require, Miss Flavia?” he said. “We don't usually call out an inspector unless the circumstances are suspicious. Wait till I find a pencil.”

There was a maddening pause while I listened to him rummaging through stationery supplies before he continued:

“Now then, give me the name of the deceased, slowly, last name first.”

“I don't know his name,” I said. “He's a stranger.”

That was the truth: I didn't know his name. But I did know, and knew it all too well, that the body in the garden—the body with the red hair, the body in the gray suit—was that of the man I'd spied through the study keyhole. The man Father had—

But I could hardly tell them that.

“I don't know his name,” I repeated. “I've never seen him before in my life.”

I had stepped over the line.

MRS. MULLET AND THE POLICE ARRIVED at the same moment, she on foot from the village and they in a blue Vauxhall sedan. As it crunched to a stop on the gravel, its front door squeaked open and a man stepped out onto the driveway.

“Miss de Luce,” he said, as if pronouncing my name aloud put me in his power. “May I call you Flavia?”

I nodded assent.

“I'm Inspector Hewitt. Is your father at home?”

The Inspector was a pleasant-enough-looking man, with wavy hair, gray eyes, and a bit of a bulldog stance that reminded me of Douglas Bader, the Spitfire ace, whose photos I had seen in the back issues of The War Illustrated that lay in white drifts in the drawing room.

“He is,” I said, “but he's rather indisposed.” It was a word I had borrowed from Ophelia. “I'll show you to the corpse myself.”

Mrs. Mullet's mouth fell open and her eyes goggled. “Oh, good Lord! Beggin' your pardon, Miss Flavia, but, oh, good Lord!”

If she had been wearing an apron, she'd have thrown it over her head and fled, but she didn't. Instead, she reeled in through the open door.

Two men in blue suits, who, as if awaiting instructions, had remained packed into the backseat of the car, now began to unfold themselves.

“Detective Sergeant Woolmer and Detective Sergeant Graves,” Inspector Hewitt said. Sergeant Woolmer was hulking and square, with the squashed nose of a prizefighter; Sergeant Graves a chipper little blond sparrow with dimples who grinned at me as he shook my hand.

“And now if you'll be so kind,” Inspector Hewitt said.

The detective sergeants unloaded their kits from the boot of the Vauxhall, and I led them in solemn procession through the house and into the garden.

Having pointed out the body, I watched in fascination as Sergeant Woolmer unpacked and mounted his camera on a wooden tripod, his fingers, fat as sausages, making surprisingly gentle microscopic adjustments to the little silver controls. As he took several covering exposures of the garden, lavishing particular attention on the cucumber patch, Sergeant Graves was opening a worn leather case in which were bottles ranged neatly row on row, and in which I glimpsed a packet of glassine envelopes.

I stepped forward eagerly, almost salivating, for a closer look.

“I wonder, Flavia,” Inspector Hewitt said, stepping gingerly into the cucumbers, “if you might ask someone to organize some tea?”

He must have seen the look on my face.

“We've had rather an early start this morning. Do you think you could manage to rustle something up?”

So that was it. As at a birth, so at a death. Without so much as a kiss-me-quick-and-mind-the-marmalade, the only female in sight is enlisted to trot off and see that the water is boiled. Rustle something up, indeed! What did he take me for, some kind of cowboy?

“I'll see what can be arranged, Inspector,” I said. Coldly, I hoped.

“Thank you,” Inspector Hewitt said. Then, as I stamped off towards the kitchen door, he called out, “Oh, and Flavia.”

I turned, expectantly.

“We'll come in for it. No need for you to come out here again.”

The nerve! The bloody nerve!

OPHELIA AND DAPHNE WERE already at the breakfast table. Mrs. Mullet had leaked the grim news, and there had been ample time for them to arrange themselves in poses of pretended indifference.

Ophelia's lips had still not reacted to my little preparation, and I made a mental note to record the time of my observation and the results later.

“I found a dead body in the cucumber patch,” I told them.

“How very like you,” Ophelia said, and went on preening her eyebrows.

Daphne had finished The Castle of Otranto and was now well into Nicholas Nickleby. But I noticed that she was biting her lower lip as she read: a sure sign of distraction.

There was an operatic silence.

“Was there a great deal of blood?” Ophelia asked at last.

“None,” I said. “Not a drop.”

“Whose body was it?”

“I don't know,” I said, relieved at an opportunity to duck behind the truth.

“The Death of a Perfect Stranger,” Daphne proclaimed in her best BBC Radio announcer's voice, dragging herself out of Dickens, but leaving a finger in to mark her place.

“How do you know it's a stranger?” I asked.

“Elementary,” Daffy said. “It isn't you, it isn't me, and it isn't Feely. Mrs. Mullet is in the kitchen, Dogger is in the garden with the coppers, and Father was upstairs just a few minutes ago splashing in his bath.”

I was about to tell her that it was me she had heard in the tub, but I decided not to; any mention of the bath led inevitably to gibes about my general cleanliness. But after the morning's events in the garden, I had felt the sudden need for a quick soak and a wash-up.

“He was probably poisoned,” I said. “The stranger, I mean.”

“It's always poison, isn't it?” Feely said with a toss of her hair. “At least in those lurid yellow detective novels. In this case, he probably made the fatal mistake of eating Mrs. Mullet's cooking.”

As she pushed away the gooey remains of a coddled egg, something flashed into my mind like a cinder popping out of the grate and onto the hearth, but before I could examine it, my chain of thought was broken.

“Listen to this,” Daphne said, reading aloud. "Fanny Squeers is writing a letter:

"'. my pa is one mask of brooses both blue and green likewise two forms are steepled in his Goar. We were kimpelled to have him carried down into the kitchen where he now lays.

"'. When your nevew that you recommended for a teacher had done this to my pa and jumped upon his body with his feet and also langwedge which I will not pollewt my pen with describing, he assaulted my ma with dreadful violence, dashed her to the earth, and drove her back comb several inches into her head. A very little more and it must have entered her skull. We have a medical certifiket that if it had, the tortershell would have affected the brain.'

"Now listen to this next bit:

“'Me and my brother were then the victims of his feury since which we have suffered very much which leads us to the arrowing belief that we have received some injury in our in-sides, especially as no marks of violence are visible externally. I am screaming out loud all the time I write—'”

It sounded to me like a classic case of cyanide poisoning, but I didn't much feel like sharing my insight with these two boors.

“'Screaming out loud all the time I write,'” Daffy repeated. “Imagine!”

“I know the feeling,” I said, pushing my plate away, and, leaving my breakfast untouched, I made my way slowly up the east staircase to my laboratory.

WHENEVER I WAS UPSET, I made for my sanctum sanctorum. Here, among the bottles and beakers, I would allow myself to be enveloped by what I thought of as the Spirit of Chemistry. Here, sometimes, I would reenact, step by step, the discoveries of the great chemists. Or I would lift down lovingly from the bookcase a volume from Tar de Luce's treasured library, such as the English translation of Antoine Lavoisier's Elements of Chemistry, printed in 1790 but whose leaves, even after a hundred and sixty years, were still as crisp as butcher's paper. How I gloried in the antiquated names just waiting to be plucked from its pages: Butter of Antimony… Flowers of Arsenic.

“Rank poisons,” Lavoisier called them, but I reveled in the recitation of their names like a hog at a spa.

“King's yellow!” I said aloud, rolling the words round in my mouth—savoring them in spite of their poisonous nature.

“Crystals of Venus! Fuming Liquor of Boyle! Oil of Ants!”

But it wasn't working this time; my mind kept flying back to Father, thinking over and over about what I had seen and heard. Who was this Twining—“Old Cuppa”—the man Father claimed they had killed? And why had Father not appeared at breakfast? That had me truly worried. Father always insisted that breakfast was “the body's banquet,” and to the best of my knowledge, there was nothing on earth that would compel him to miss it.

Then, too, I thought of the passage from Dickens that Daphne had read to us: the bruises blue and green. Had Father fought with the stranger and suffered wounds that could not be hidden at the table? Or had he suffered those injuries to the insides described by Fanny Squeers: injuries that left no external marks of violence. Perhaps that was what had happened to the man with the red hair. Which should explain why I had seen no blood. Could Father be a murderer? Again?

My head was spinning. I could think of nothing better to calm it down than the Oxford English Dictionary. I fetched down the volume with the Vs. What was that word the stranger had breathed in my face? “Vale"! That was it.

I flipped the pages: vagabondical… vagrant… vain… here it was: vale: Farewell; good-bye; adieu. It was pronounced val-eh, and was the second person singular imperative of the Latin verb valere, to be well.

What a peculiar thing for a dying man to say to someone he didn't know.

A sudden racket from the hall interrupted my thoughts. Someone was giving the dinner gong a great old bonging. This huge disk, which looked like a leftover from the opening of a film by J. Arthur Rank, had not been sounded for ages, which could explain why I was so startled by its shattering noise.

I ran out of the laboratory and down the stairs to find an oversized man standing at the gong with the striker still in his hand.

“Coroner,” he said, and I took it he was referring to himself. Although he did not trouble to give his name, I recognized him at once as Dr. Darby, one of the two partners in Bishop's Lacey's only medical practice.

Dr. Darby was the spitting image of John Bull: red face, multiple chins, and a stomach that bellied out like a sail full of wind. He was wearing a brown suit with a checked yellow waistcoat, and he carried the traditional doctor's black bag. If he remembered me as the girl whose hand he had stitched up the year before after the incident with a wayward bit of laboratory glassware, he gave no outward sign but stood there expectantly, like a hound on the scent.

Father was still nowhere in sight, nor was Dogger. I knew that Feely and Daffy would never condescend to respond to a bell (“So utterly Pavlovian,” Feely said), and Mrs. Mullet always kept to her kitchen.

“The police are in the garden,” I told him. “I'll show you the way.”

As we stepped out into the sunshine, Inspector Hewitt looked up from examining the laces of a black shoe that protruded rather unpleasantly from the cucumbers.

“Morning, Fred,” he said. “Thought you'd best come have a look.”

“Um,” Dr. Darby said. He opened his bag and rummaged inside for a moment before pulling out a white paper bag. He reached into it with two fingers and extracted a single crystal mint, which he popped into his mouth and sucked with noisy relish.

A moment later he had waded into the greenery and was kneeling beside the corpse.

“Anyone we know?” he asked, mumbling a bit round the mint.

“Shouldn't seem so,” Inspector Hewitt said. “Empty pockets. no identification. reason to believe, though, that he's recently come from Norway.”

Recently come from Norway? Surely this was a deduction worthy of the great Holmes himself—and I had heard it with my own ears! I was almost ready to forgive the Inspector his earlier rudeness. Almost… but not quite.

“We've launched inquiries, ports of call and so forth.”

“Bloody Norwegians!” said Dr. Darby, rising and closing his bag. “Flock over here like birds to a lighthouse, where they expire and leave us to mop up. It isn't fair, is it?”

“What shall I put down as the time of death?” Inspector Hewitt asked.

“Hard to say. Always is. Well, not always, but often.”

“Give or take?”

“Can't tell with cyanosis: takes a while to tell if it's coming or going, you know. Eight to twelve hours, I should say. I'll be able to tell you more after we've had our friend up on the table.”

“And that would make it.?”

Dr. Darby pushed back his cuff and looked at his watch.

“Well, let me see. it's eight twenty-two now, so that makes it no sooner than about that same hour last evening and no later than, say, midnight.”

Midnight! I must have audibly sucked in air, since both Inspector Hewitt and Dr. Darby turned to look at me. How could I tell them that, just a few hours ago, the stranger from Norway had breathed his last breath into my face?

The solution was an easy one. I took to my heels. I found Dogger trimming the roses in the flower bed under the library window. The air was heavy with their scent: the delicious odor of tea chests from the Orient.

“Father not down yet, Dogger?” I asked.

“Lady Hillingdons are especially fine this year, Miss Flavia,” he said, as if ice wouldn't melt in his mouth; as if our furtive encounter in the night had never taken place. Very well, I thought, I'll play his game.