The Flavia De Luce Series 1-4 (133 page)

I knew that the thirteenth tread from the bottom groaned alarmingly, and I took a giant step to climb over it in silence, hauling myself up by gripping the banister.

Past the top of the stairs, the corridor was in darkness, and I had to feel my way along by sense of touch. The baize door to the north front swung open without a sound.

This was the part of the house that had been assigned as billets, the dusty sheets that usually covered the furniture having been removed, and the multitude of bedrooms made ready for the visiting film crew.

I had no idea which bedroom had ultimately been allocated to Phyllis Wyvern, but common sense told me that it would have been the largest: the Blue Bedroom—the one usually occupied by Aunt Felicity on her ceremonial visits.

A crack of light at the bottom of the door told me that I was right.

Inside, something mechanical was running: a whirring, a whine, hardly louder than a whisper.

Slap! Slap! Slap! Slap! Slap!

What on earth could it be?

I tapped lightly on the door with one of my fingernails.

There was no reply.

Inside the room, the noise went on.

Slap! Slap! Slap! Slap! Slap!

Perhaps she hadn’t heard me.

I knocked again, this time with my knuckles.

“Miss Wyvern,” I whispered at the door. “Are you awake? It’s me, Flavia.”

Still no response.

I knelt down and tried to peer through the keyhole, but something was blocking my view. Almost certainly the key.

As I got to my feet, I stumbled in the darkness and fell against the door, which, in awful silence, swung inward.

On the far side of the room stood the great canopied bed, made up and turned down, but unoccupied.

To the left, on a tubular stand in the shadows, a ciné projector ground on and on, its steady white beam illuminating the surface of a tripod screen on the far side of the room.

Although the film had run completely through the machine, its loose end, like a black bullwhip, was still flapping round and round:
Slap! Slap! Slap! Slap! Slap!

Phyllis Wyvern was slumped in a wingback chair, her sightless eyes staring intently at the glare of the blank screen.

Around her throat, like a necklace of death, was a length of ciné film, tied tightly, but neatly, in an elaborate black bow.

She was dead, of course.

• TWELVE •

In my eleven years of life I’ve seen a number of corpses. Each of them was interesting in a different way, and this one was no exception.

Because the others had been men, Phyllis Wyvern was the first dead female I had ever seen and as such, she was, I thought, deserving of particular attention.

I noticed at once the way the illuminated ciné screen was reflected in her eyeballs, giving the illusion for a moment that she was still alive, her eyes sparkling. But even though the eyes had not yet begun to cloud over—
she’s not been dead for long
, I thought—something had already begun to soften her features, as if her face were being sanded down for repainting.

The skin was already on its way to taking on the color of putty, and there was a very faint but distinct leaden tinge to the inside of her lips, which were open slightly, revealing the tips of her perfect teeth. A few drops of foamy saliva were trapped in each corner of her mouth.

She was no longer wearing her Juliet costume, but was dressed rather in an elaborately stitched Eastern European peasant blouse with a shawl and a voluminous skirt.

“Miss Wyvern,” I whispered, even though I knew it was pointless.

Still, there’s always that feeling that a dead person is playing a practical joke, and is going to leap up at any moment and shout “Boo!” and frighten you out of your wits, and my nerves, although strong, are not quite ready for that.

From what I had read and heard, I knew that in cases of sudden death, the authorities, either police or medical, were to be summoned at once. Cynthia Richardson had reported that the telephone was out of order, so the police, at least for the time being, were out of the picture, and Dr. Darby was in a deep sleep downstairs; I had seen him during my passage across the foyer.

There was no question that Phyllis Wyvern was past medical help, so my decision was an easy one: I would call Dogger.

Closing the bedroom door quietly behind me, I retraced my steps through the house—on tiptoe across the foyer once again—to Dogger’s little room at the top of the kitchen stairs.

I gave three quick taps at the door, and then a pause … two more taps … another pause … and then two slow ones.

I had scarcely finished when the door swung open on silent hinges, and Dogger stood there in his dressing gown.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“Quite all right,” Dogger said after a barely perceptible pause. “Thank you for asking.”

“Something horrid has happened to Phyllis Wyvern,” I told him. “In the Blue Bedroom.”

“I see.” Dogger nodded and vanished for a moment into the shadows of his room, and when he returned, he was wearing a pair of spectacles. I must have gaped a little, since I had never known him to use them before.

The two of us, Dogger and I, made our way silently back upstairs by the quickest route, the foyer, which involved yet another trek among the sleeping bodies. If the moment hadn’t been so serious, I’d have laughed at Dogger’s long legs picking their way like a wading heron between Bunny Spirling’s distended stomach and the outflung arm of Miss Aurelia Puddock.

Back in the Blue Bedroom, I closed the door behind us. Since my fingerprints were on the handle anyway, it wouldn’t make any difference.

The projector was still making its unnerving
flap-flap
ping noise as Dogger walked slowly round Phyllis Wyvern’s body, squatting to look into each of her ears and each of her eyes. It was obvious that he was saving the bow of ciné film around her neck for last.

“What do you think?” I asked finally, in a whisper.

“Strangulation,” he said. “Look here.”

He produced a cotton handkerchief from his pocket and used it to pull down one of her lower eyelids, revealing a number of red spots on the inner surface.

“Petechiae,” he said. “Tardieu’s spots. Asphyxia through rapid strangulation. Definitely.”

Now he turned his attention to the black bow of film that ringed the throat, and a frown crossed his face.

“What is it, Dogger?”

“One would expect more bruising,” he said. “It does not occur invariably, but in this case one would definitely expect more bruising.”

I leaned in for a closer look and saw that Dogger was right. There was remarkably little discoloration. The film itself was black against Phyllis Wyvern’s pale neck, the image on many of its frames clearly visible: a close-up shot of the actress herself in ruffled peasant blouse against a dramatic mackerel sky.

The realization hit me like a hammer.

“Dogger,” I whispered. “This blouse, shawl, and skirt—it’s the same costume she’s wearing in the film!”

Dogger, who was looking reflectively at the body, his hand to his chin, nodded.

For a few moments, there was a strange quiet between us. Until now, it had been as if we were friends, but suddenly, at this particular moment, it felt as if we had become colleagues—perhaps even partners.

Possibly I was emboldened by the night, although it might have been a sense of something more. A strange feeling of timelessness hung in the room.

“You’ve done this before, haven’t you,” I asked suddenly.

“Yes, Miss Flavia,” Dogger said. “Many times.”

I had always felt that Dogger was no stranger to dead bodies. He had, after all, survived more than two years in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, after which he had been put to work for more than a year on the notorious Death Railway in Burma, any single day of which would have given him more than a nodding acquaintance with death.

Aside from Mrs. Mullet’s whispered tales in the kitchen, I knew little about Dogger’s military service—or, for that matter, my father’s.

Once, as I watched Dogger trim the rose bushes on the Visto, I had tried to question him.

“You and Father were in the army together, weren’t you?” I asked, in so casual and offhanded a manner that I hated myself for having bungled it before I even began.

“Yes, miss,” Dogger had said. “But there are things which must not be spoken of.”

“Even to me?” I wanted to ask.

I wanted him to say “
Especially
to you,” or something like that: something I could mull over deliciously in the midnight hours, but he did not. He simply reached among the thorns and, with a couple of precision snips, deadheaded the last of the dying roses.

Dogger was like that—his loyalty to Father could sometimes be infuriating.

“I think,” he was saying, “you’d best slip down and awaken Dr. Darby … if you wouldn’t mind, of course.”

“Of course,” I said, and letting myself out, made for the stairs.

To my surprise, Dr. Darby was not where I had last seen him: The spot where he had rested was empty, and he was nowhere in sight.

As I wondered what to do, the doctor appeared from beneath the stairs.

“Telephone’s bust,” he said, as if to himself. “Wanted to call Queenie and let her know I’m still respirating.”

Queenie was Dr. Darby’s wife, whose terrible arthritis had confined her to a wheelchair.

“Yes, Mrs. Richardson tried to use it last night. Don’t you remember?”

“Of course I do,” he said snappishly. “It’s just that I’d forgotten.”

“Dogger has asked if you’d mind coming upstairs,” I said, taking care not to give out any details in case one of the sleepers might be listening to us with their eyes closed. “He’d like your advice.”

“Lead on, then,” Dr. Darby said, with surprisingly little reluctance.

“ ‘… amid the encircling gloom,’ ” he added, extracting his first mint of the day from his waistcoat pocket.

I led the way upstairs to the Blue Bedroom, where Dogger was still crouched beside the corpse.

“Ah, Arthur,” Dr. Darby said. “Again I find you on the scene.”

Dogger looked from one of us to the other with something like a smile, and then he was gone.

“We’d better be having the police,” Dr. Darby said, after making the same examination of Phyllis Wyvern’s eyes that Dogger had already done.

He felt one of the limp wrists and applied his thumb to the angle of the jaw.

“Is life extinct, Doctor?” I asked. I had heard the phrase on a wireless program about Philip Odell, the private eye, and thought it sounded much more professional than “Is she dead?”

I knew that she was, of course, but I liked to have my own observations confirmed by a professional.

“Yes,” Dr. Darby said, “she’s dead. You’d better roust out that German chap—Dieter, is it? He looks as if he’d be good with skis.”

Fifteen minutes later I was in the coach house with Dieter, helping him strap the skis to his boots.

“Did these belong to your mother?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I suppose so.”

“They are very good skis,” he said. “Madshus. In Norway, they were made. Someone has looked after them.”

It must have been Father, I thought. He came here sometimes to sit in Harriet’s old Rolls-Royce, as if it were a glass chapel in a fairy tale.

“Well, then,” Dieter said at last. “Off we go.”

I followed him as far as the Visto, climbing in my rubber boots from drift to drift. As we passed the wall of the kitchen garden, I caught a glimpse of a face at the driver’s window of one of the lorries. It was Latshaw.

I waved, but he did not return my greeting.

When the snow was too deep to follow, I stopped and watched until Dieter was no more than a tiny black speck in the snowy wastes.

Only when I could no longer see him did I go back into the coach house.

I needed to think.

I climbed up into the backseat of Harriet’s old Rolls-Royce and wrapped myself in a motoring rug. Words like “warm” and “snug” swam into my mind.

When I awoke, the clock of the Phantom II was indicating a silent five forty-five
A.M
.

“What on earth—” Mrs. Mullet said, obviously surprised to see me coming in through the kitchen door. “You’ll freeze to death!”

I shrugged in my cardigan.

“I don’t care,” I said, hoping for a little sympathy and perhaps an advance on the Christmas pudding, which was one of the few dishes that she cooked to my satisfaction.

Mrs. Mullet ignored me. She was bustling busily about the kitchen, boiling a huge dented kettle for tea and slicing loaves of freshly baked bread for toast. It was obvious that Phyllis Wyvern’s murder had not yet been announced to the household.

“Good job I laid in so much for Christmas, isn’t it, Alf? Got an army to feed, I ’ave. Lyin’ in this mornin’ like so many lords and ladies, the lot of ’em—’ard floors or no. That’s the way of it with snow—couple of inches and they goes all ’elpless, like.”

Alf was sitting in the corner spreading jam on an Eccles cake.

“ ’Elpless,” he said. “As you say.

“What’s Father Christmas bringin’ you this year?” he asked me suddenly. “A nice dolly, then, p’raps, with different outfits, an’ that?”

A nice dolly indeed! What did he take me for?

“Actually, I was hoping for a Riggs generator and a set of graduated Erlenmeyer flasks,” I said. “One can never have too much scientific glassware.”

“Arrr,” he said, whatever that meant.

Alf’s mention of Father Christmas, though, had reminded me that it was now Sunday—that tonight would be Christmas Eve.

Before I slept another night I would be scaling Buckshaw’s roof and chimneys to set in motion my chemical experiment.

“
You’d better watch out …
” I sang as I strolled out of the kitchen.

Beyond the kitchen door, the place was a madhouse. The foyer, in particular, was like the lobby of a West End theater at the interval—scores of people pretending to have a jolly old chin-wag and everyone talking at the same time.

The noise level, for someone with my sensitive hearing, was nearly intolerable. I needed to get away. The police would probably not be here for hours. There was still plenty of time to put the finishing touches to my plans for Christmas Eve.