The Flavia De Luce Series 1-4 (19 page)

“I confessed just now,” I said.

“Yes, yes,” Father said, and went on pacing and mumbling to himself.

“I told Inspector Hewitt that
I
killed Horace Bonepenny.”

Father came to as dead a stop as if he had run onto a sword. He turned and fixed me with that dreaded blue stare which was so often his weapon of choice when dealing with his daughters.

“What do you know about Horace Bonepenny?” he asked in a chill tone.

“Quite a lot, actually,” I said.

Then, surprisingly, the fight went out of him all at once, just like that. One moment his cheeks were puffed out like the face of the winds that blow across medieval maps, and the next they were as hollow as a horse trader’s. He sat down on the edge of the bunk, spreading out the fingers of one hand to steady himself.

“I overheard your disagreement in the study,” I said. “I’m sorry if I eavesdropped. I didn’t mean to, but I heard voices in the night and came downstairs. I know that he tried to blackmail you … I heard the quarrel. That’s why I told Inspector Hewitt that I killed him.”

This time it filtered through to Father.

“Killed him?” he asked. “What do you mean, killed him?”

“I didn’t want them to know it was you,” I said.

“Me?” Father said, rocketing up off the bed. “Good Lord! Whatever makes you think I killed the man?”

“It’s all right,” I said. “He most likely deserved it. I’ll never tell anyone. I promise.”

With my right hand I crossed my heart and hoped to die, and Father stared at me as if I were some monstrous wet creature that had just flopped out of a painting by Hieronymus Bosch.

“Flavia,” he said. “Please understand this: Much as I should have liked to, I did not kill Horace Bonepenny.”

“You didn’t?”

I could scarcely believe it. I had already come to the conclusion that Father must have committed murder, and I could see that it was going to be hard cheese admitting I was wrong.

Still, I remembered that Feely had once told me that confession was good for the soul—this while she had my arm bent behind my back trying to force me to tell her what I had done with her diary.

“I overheard what you said about killing your housemaster, Mr. Twining. I went to the library and looked it up in the newspaper archives. I talked to Miss Mountjoy—she’s Mr. Twining’s niece. She remembered the names Jacko and Horace Bonepenny from the inquest. I know that he stayed at the Thirteen Drakes and that he brought a dead jack snipe from Norway hidden in a pie.”

Father shook his head slowly and sadly from side to side, not in admiration of my detective skills, but like an old bear that has been shot yet refuses to lie down.

“It’s true,” he said. “But do you really believe your father capable of cold-blooded murder?”

When I thought about it for a moment—actually thought about it—I saw how foolish I had been. Why had I not realized this before? Cold-blooded murder was just one of the many things Father was incapable of.

“Well … no,” I ventured.

“Flavia, look at me,” he said, but when I looked up and into his eyes, I saw, for an unnerving instant, my own eyes staring back at me and I had to look away.

“Horace Bonepenny was not particularly a decent man, but he did not deserve to die. No one deserves to die,” Father said, his voice fading out like a distant broadcast on the shortwave, and I knew that he was no longer speaking only to me.

“There is already so much death in the world,” he added.

He sat, looking at his hands, each thumb stroking the other, his fingers engaging like the cogs of an old clock.

After a time he said, “What about Dogger?”

“He was there too,” I admitted. “Outside your study …”

Father gave a groan.

“That is what I feared,” he whispered. “That is what I feared more than anything.”

And then, as the rain swept in sheets across the windowpane, Father began to talk.

fifteen

At first father’s unaccustomed words came slowly and hesitantly—jerking into reluctant motion like rusty freight cars on the railway. But then, picking up speed, they soon smoothed out into a steady flow.

“My father was not an easy man to like,” he said. “He sent me away to boarding school when I was eleven. I seldom saw him again. It’s odd, you know: I never knew what interested him until someone at his funeral, one of the pallbearers, chanced to remark that his passion had been netsuke. I had to look it up in the dictionary.”

“It’s a small Japanese carving in ivory,” I said. “It’s in one of Austin Freeman’s Dr. Thorndyke stories.”

Father ignored me and went on. “Although Greyminster was no more than a few miles from Buckshaw, in those days it might just as well have been on the moon. We were fortunate indeed in our headmaster, Dr. Kissing, a gentle soul who believed no harm could ever come to the boy who was administered daily doses of Latin, rugger, cricket, and history, and on the whole, we were treated well.

“Like most, I was a solitary boy at first, keeping to my books and weeping in the hedgerows whenever I could get away on my own. Surely, I thought, I must be the saddest child in the world; that there must be something innately horrid about me to cause my father to cast me off so heartlessly. I believed that if I could discover what it was, there might be a chance of putting things right, of somehow making it up to him.

“At night in the dorm I would tunnel under the blankets with an electric torch and examine my face in a stolen shaving mirror. I couldn’t see anything particularly wrong, but then I was only a child and not really equipped to judge these things.

“But time went on, as time does, and I found myself being swept up into the life of the school. I was good at history but quite hopeless when it came to the books of Euclid, which put me somewhere in the middle ranks: neither so proficient nor so stupid as to draw attention to myself.

“Mediocrity, I discovered, was the great camouflage; the great protective coloring. Those boys who did not fail, yet did not excel, were left alone, free of the demands of the master who might wish to groom them for glory and of the school bully who might make them his scapegoat. That simple fact was the first great discovery of my life.

“It was in the fourth form, I think, that I finally began to take an interest in the things around me and, like all boys of that age, I had an insatiable taste for mystification, so that when Mr. Twining, my housemaster, proposed the founding of a conjuring circle, I found myself suddenly ablaze with new enthusiasm.

“Mr. Twining was more kindly than adept; not a very polished performer, I must admit, but he carried off his tricks with such ebullience, such good-hearted enthusiasm, that it would have been churlish of us to withhold our noisy schoolboy applause.

“He taught us, in the evenings, to turn wine into water using no more than a handkerchief and a bit of colored blotting paper; how to make a marked shilling vanish from a covered drinking glass before being extracted from Simpkins’s ear. We learned the importance of ‘patter,’ the conjurer’s line of talk, as it were; and he drilled us in spectacular shuffles which left the ace of hearts always at the bottom of the pack.

“It goes without saying that Mr. Twining was popular;
loved
might be a better word, although few of us at the time had seen enough of that emotion to recognize it for what it was.

“His greatest recognition came when the headmaster, Dr. Kissing, asked him to get up a conjuring show for Parents’ Day, a happy scheme into which he threw himself wholeheartedly.

“Because of my prowess with an illusion called ‘The Resurrection of Tchang Fu,’ Mr. Twining was keen to have me perform it as the grand finale of the show. The stunt required two operators, and for that reason he allowed me to choose any assistant I wanted; that was how I came to know Horace Bonepenny.

“Horace had come to us from St. Cuthbert’s after a fuss at that school about some missing money—just a couple of pounds, I believe it was, although at the time it seemed a fortune. I felt sorry for him, I admit. I felt he had been misused, particularly when he confided to me that his father was the cruelest of men and had done unspeakable things in the name of discipline. I hope this is not too coarse for your ears, Flavia.”

“No, of course not,” I said, pulling my chair closer. “Please go on.”

“Horace was an extraordinarily tall boy even then, with a shock of flaming red hair. His arms were so long in the school jacket that his wrists stuck out like bare twigs beyond the cuffs. ‘Bony,’ the boys called him, and they ragged him without mercy about his appearance.

“To make matters worse, his fingers were impossibly long and thin and white, like the tentacles of an albino octopus, and he had that pale bleached skin one sometimes sees in redheads. It was whispered that his touch was poison. He played this up a bit, of course, snatching with pretended clumsiness at the jeering boys who danced round him, always just out of reach.

“One evening after a game of hare and hounds he was resting at a stile, panting like a fox, when a small boy named Potts danced in on tiptoe and delivered him a stinging blow across the face. It was meant to be no more than a touch, like tagging the runner, but it soon turned into something else.

“When they saw that the fearful monster, Bonepenny, was stunned, and his nose bleeding, the other boys began to pile on, and Bony was soon down, being pummeled, kicked, and savagely beaten. It was just then that I happened along.

“ ‘Hold up!’ I shouted, as loudly as I could, and to my amazement, the scuffle stopped at once. The boys began extricating themselves, one by one, from the tangle of arms and legs. There must have been something in my voice that made them obey instantly. Perhaps the fact that they had seen me perform mystifying tricks lent me some invisible air of authority, I don’t know, but I do know that when I ordered them to get themselves back to Greyminster, they faded like a pack of wolves into the dusk.

“ ‘Are you all right?’ I asked Bony, helping him to his feet.

“ ‘Faintly tender, but only in one or two widely separated spots—like Carnforth’s beef,’ he said, and we both laughed. Carnforth was the notorious Hinley butcher whose family had been supplying Greyminster with its boot-leather Sunday roasts of beef since the Napoleonic Wars.

“I could see that Bony was more badly beaten than he was willing to let on, but he put a brave face on it. I gave him my shoulder to lean upon, and helped him hobble back to Greyminster.

“From that day on, Bony was my shadow. He adopted my enthusiasms, and in doing so seemed almost to become a different person. There were times, in fact, when I fancied he was
becoming
me; that here before me was the part of myself for which I had been searching in the midnight mirror.

“What I do know is that we were never in better form than when we were together; what one of us couldn’t do, the other could accomplish with ease. Bony seemed to have been born with a fully formed mathematical ability, and he was soon unveiling for me the mysteries of geometry and trigonometry. He made a game of it, and we spent many a happy hour calculating upon whose study the clock tower of Anson House would fall when we toppled it with a gigantic steam lever of our own invention. Another time, we worked out by triangulation an ingenious series of tunnels which, at a given signal, would collapse simultaneously, causing Greyminster and all its inhabitants to plunge into a Dantean abyss, where they would be attacked by the wasps, hornets, bees, and maggots with which we planned to stock the place.”

Wasps, hornets, bees, and maggots? Could this be Father speaking? I suddenly found myself listening to him with new respect.

“How this was to be achieved,” he went on, “we never really thought through, but the upshot of it all was that while I was getting chummy with old Euclid and his books of propositions, Bony, with a bit of coaching, was turning out to be a natural conjurer.

“It was the fingers, of course. Those long white appendages seemed to have a life of their own, and it wasn’t long before Bony had mastered completely the arts of prestidigitation. Various objects appeared and vanished at his fingertips with such fluid grace that even I, who knew perfectly well how each illusion was done, could scarcely believe my eyes.

“And as his conjuring skill grew, so did his sense of self-worth. With a bit of magic in hand, he became a new Bony, confident, smooth, and perhaps even brash. His voice changed too. Where yesterday he had sounded like a raucous schoolboy, he seemed now, suddenly—at least, when he was performing—to possess a voice box of polished mahogany: a hypnotic professional voice which never failed to convince its hearers.

“ ‘The Resurrection of Tchang Fu’ worked like this: I decked myself out in an oversized silk kimono I had found at a church jumble sale, a beautiful bloodred thing covered with Chinese dragons and mystical markings. I plastered my face with yellow chalk and stretched a thin elastic round my head to pull my eyes up at the corners. A couple of sausage casings from Carnforth’s, varnished and cut into long, curving fingernails, added a disgusting detail. All that was needed to complete my getup was a bit of burnt cork, a few wisps of frayed string for a beard, and a frightful theatrical wig.

“I would call for a volunteer from the audience—a confederate, of course, who had been rehearsed beforehand. I would bring him onstage and explain, in a comic singsong Mandarin voice, that I was about to kill him, to send him off to the Land of the Happy Ancestors. This matter-of-fact announcement never failed to fetch a gasp from the audience, and before they could recover themselves, I would pull a pistol from the folds of my robe, point it at my confederate’s heart, and pull the trigger.

“A starter’s pistol can make a frightful din when it’s fired indoors, and the thing would go off with the most dreadful bang. My assistant would clasp his chest, squeezing in his hand a concealed paper twist of ketchup, which would ooze out horribly between his fingers. Then he would look down at the mess on his chest and gape in disbelief.

“ ‘Help me, Jacko!’ he would shriek. ‘The trick’s gone wrong! I’m shot!’ and fall dead flat on his back.