The Flavia De Luce Series 1-4 (89 page)

“Thank you, Flavia de Luce,” she whispered in my ear, as if we had been friends forever. “Thank you.”

Since I was still half expecting a dagger to be plunged between my shoulder blades, I’m afraid I did not return her hug, which I received in stiff silence, rather like one of the sentries at Buckingham Palace pretending he doesn’t notice the liberties being taken by an excessively affectionate tourist.

“You’re welcome,” I managed. “How is she? Fenella, I mean.”

Using the Gypsy’s first name did not come easily to me. In spite of the fact that Daffy and I have always referred to our own mother as Harriet (only Feely, who is older, seems to have the right to call her Mummy), it still felt excessively saucy to call a stranger’s grandmother by her given name.

“She’ll be all right, they think. Too early to tell. But if it hadn’t been for you—”

Tears were beginning to well up in her dark eyes.

“It was nothing,” I said uncomfortably. “She needed help. I was there.”

Was it really that simple? Or did something deeper lie beneath?

“How did you hear—about this?” I asked, waving at the glade.

“The coppers tracked me down in London. Found my name and all that on a scrap of paper in her handbag. I begged a ride off a bloke with a lorry in Covent Garden, and he brought me as far as Doddingsley. I walked the rest of the way. Got here no more than an hour ago.”

Four gold stars to Inspector Hewitt and his men
, I thought. Searching the caravan for Fenella Faa’s handbag had never crossed my mind.

“Where are you staying? At the Thirteen Drakes?”

“Blimey!” she said in a feigned Cockney accent. “That’s a larf, that is!”

I must have looked offended.

“I couldn’t rub two shillings together if my life depended on it,” she said, waving her hands expansively at the grove. “So I expect right here is where I’ll stay.”

“Here? In the caravan?”

I looked at her aghast.

“Why not? It’s Fenella’s, isn’t it? That means it’s as good as mine. All I have to do is find out who’s the nob that owns this bit of green, and—”

“It’s called the Palings,” I said, “and it belongs to my father.”

Actually it didn’t: It belonged to Harriet, but I didn’t feel that I needed to explain our family’s legal difficulties to a semi-ragamuffin stranger who had just threatened my life.

“Coo!” she said. “I’m sorry. I never thought.”

“But you can’t stay here,” I went on. “It’s a crime scene. Didn’t you see the sign?”

“ ’Course I did. Didn’t you?”

I chose to ignore this childish response. “Whoever attacked your gram might still be hanging about. Until the police find out who and why, it isn’t safe to be here after dark.”

This was a part, but not all, of the truth.

Every bit as important as Porcelain’s physical safety was the sudden gnawing need I felt to make amends to the family of Fenella Faa: to correct an old wrong committed by my father. For the first time in my life I found myself seized by hereditary guilt.

“So you’ll have to stay at Buckshaw,” I blurted.

There! I’d done it. I’d made the leap. But even as I spoke, I knew that I would soon regret my words.

Father, for instance, would be furious.

Even when his beloved Harriet had invited the Gypsies to stay at Buckshaw, Father had driven them off. If she had failed, I didn’t stand a chance.

Perhaps that was why I did it.

“My father’s quite eccentric,” I said. “At least, he has some odd ideas. He won’t allow guests at Buckshaw, other than his own sister. I’ll have to sneak you in.”

Porcelain seemed quite alarmed at the thought. “I don’t want to make trouble.”

“Nonsense,” I said, sounding like Aunt Felicity, the Human Steamroller. “It will be no trouble at all. Nobody ever comes into the east wing. They won’t even know you’re there.

“Bring your things,” I ordered.

Until that moment I hadn’t noticed how haggard Porcelain was looking. With her black crepe dress and the black circles under her eyes, she looked like someone made up for a masquerade party: “The Grim Reaper as a Young Woman.”

“I’ve nothing,” she said. “Just what you see.” She tugged apologetically at her heavy hem. “This is Fenella’s,” she said. “I had to wash out my own things in the river this morning, and they aren’t dry.”

Wash out her things? Why would she need to do that? Since it didn’t seem to be any of my business, I didn’t ask—perhaps I could find an excuse to bring it up later.

“Off we go, then,” I said, trying to sound cheerful. “Buckshaw awaits.”

I picked up Gladys and wheeled her along beside me. Porcelain trudged a few steps behind, her eyes downcast.

“It isn’t awfully far,” I said, after a while. “I expect you’ll be happy to get some sleep.”

I turned and saw her nodding in response, but she did not speak. She shuffled along behind me, drained, and not even the ornamental dolphins of the Poseidon fountain made her take her eyes from the ground.

“These were made in the eighteenth century,” I told her, “so they’re rather elderly. They used to spout water from their mouths.”

Again a nod.

We were taking a shortcut across the Trafalgar Lawn, an abandoned series of terraces that lay to the southeast of the house. Sir George de Luce, who planned it as a tribute to Admiral Nelson and his victory over the Spanish, which had taken place some forty years earlier, had laid it out at about the same time as the Visto.

By the simple expedient of tapping into Lucius “Leaking” de Luce’s earlier and extensive subterranean waterworks, Sir George had planned to activate his glorious fountained landscape as a surprise for his bride.

And so he had begun on a work of landscape architecture that would rival or even surpass the spectacle of the ornamental lake, but speculation during the Railway Mania had scotched his fortunes. With most of his capital gone, what had been planned as a noble avenue of fountains, with Buckshaw as its focal point, had been abandoned to the elements.

Now, after a century of rain and snow, sun and wind, and the nocturnal visits of the villagers who came at night to steal stone for their garden walls, the Trafalgar Lawn and its statues were like a sculptor’s scrapyard, with various bits of stone cherubs, mossy Tritons, and sea nymphs jutting up out of the ground here and there like stone swimmers from a shipwreck waiting to be rescued from a sea of earth.

Only Poseidon had survived, lounging with his net atop a crumbling base, brooding in marble over his broken family, his three-pronged trident like a lightning rod, sticking up towards whatever might be left of the ancient Greek heavens.

“Here’s old Poseidon,” I said, turning to haul Gladys up yet another set of crumbled steps. “His photograph was in
Country Life
a couple of years ago. Rather splendid, isn’t he?”

Porcelain had come suddenly to a dead stop, her hand covering her mouth, her hollowed-out eyes staring upwards, as wide and as dark as the pit. Then she let out a cry like a small animal.

I followed her gaze, and saw at once the thing that had frozen her in her tracks.

Dangling from Poseidon’s trident, like a scarecrow hung on a coat hook, was a dark figure.

“It’s Brookie Harewood,” I said, even before I saw his face.

NINE

One of the trident’s tines had pierced Brookie’s long moleskin coat at the neck, and he swung slightly in the breeze, looking rather casual in his flat cap and scarlet scarf, as if he were enjoying one of the roundabouts at an amusement pier.

For a moment, I thought he might have fallen. Perhaps in an excess of alcoholic high spirits he’d been attempting to scale the statue. Perhaps he had slipped from Poseidon’s head and fallen onto the trident.

That idea was short-lived, however. I saw almost at once that his hands were tied behind his back. But that wasn’t the worst of it.

As I came round full front-on, the sun glinted brightly on something that seemed to be projecting from Brookie’s mouth.

“Stay here,” I told Porcelain, even though I could see that there wasn’t a chance of her moving.

I leaned Gladys against the lower of the three seashell bowls that comprised the fountain, then climbed up her tubular frame until finally I was standing on her seat, from which point I could get a knee up onto the rough stone rim.

The bowl of the thing was filled with a disgusting broth of black water, dead leaves, and mold, the result of a century of neglect, and it smelled to high heaven.

By standing on the rim, I was able to clamber up onto the fountain’s middle bowl, and finally the highest one. I was now level with Brookie’s knees, staring up into his unseeing eyes. His face was a horrid fish-belly white.

He was quite dead, of course.

After the initial shock of realizing that someone I had spoken to just hours before was no longer in the land of the living, I began to feel oddly excited.

I have no fear of the dead. Indeed, in my own limited experience I have found them to produce in me a feeling that is quite the opposite of fear. A dead body is much more fascinating than a live one, and I have learned that most corpses tell better stories. I’d had the good fortune of seeing several of them in my time; in fact, Brookie was my third.

As I teetered on the edge of the sculptured stone seashell, I could see clearly what it was that had glinted in the sun. Projecting from one of Brookie’s nostrils—not his mouth—was an object that first appeared to be a round silver medallion: a flat, perforated disk with a handle attached. On the end of it was suspended a single drop of Brookie’s blood.

The image punched out of the disk was that of a lobster, and engraved on the handle was the de Luce monogram.

D L
.

It was a silver lobster pick—one of the set that belonged to Buckshaw.

The last time I’d seen one of these sharp-pointed utensils, Dogger had been rubbing it with silver polish at the kitchen table.

The business end of the thing, I recalled, ended in two little tines that stuck out like the horns on a snail’s head. These prongs, which had been designed to pry the pink meat from the cracks and crevices of a boiled lobster, were now lodged firmly somewhere deep in Brookie Harewood’s brain.

Death by family silver
, I thought, before I could turn off that part of my mind.

A little moan from below reminded me that Porcelain was still there.

Her face was nearly as white as Brookie’s, and I saw that she was trembling.

“For God’s sake, Flavia,” she said in a quavering voice, “come down—let’s get out of here. I think I’m going to throw up.”

“It’s Brookie Harewood,” I said, and I think I offered up a silent prayer for the repose of the poacher’s soul.

Protect him, O Lord, and let heaven be bountifully supplied with trout streams
.

The thought of trout reminded me of Colin Prout. I’d almost forgotten the boy. Would Colin breathe a sigh of relief when he heard that his tormentor was dead? Or would he grieve?

Brookie’s mother would be in the same quandary. And so, I realized, would almost everyone in Bishop’s Lacey.

I put one foot on Poseidon’s knee and hauled myself up by his muscular elbow. I was now slightly above Brookie and looking down at something that had caught my eye. In the notch between two of the trident’s prongs was a shiny spot the size of a sixpence, as if someone had given the bronze a bit of a polish with a rag.

I memorized the shape of the thing, then began to climb down slowly, taking great care not to touch Brookie’s body.

“Come on,” I said to Porcelain, giving her arm a shake. “Let’s get out of here before they think one of us did it.”

I did not tell her that the back of Brookie’s skull was a bloody mess.

We paused for a moment behind one of the rose hedges which, at this time of year, were in their second bloom. From the direction of the kitchen garden came the sound of Dogger scraping old soil from flowerpots with a trowel. Mrs. Mullet, I knew, had probably gone for the day.

“Stay here,” I whispered, “while I scout things out.”

Porcelain seemed barely to have heard me. White with fright and fatigue, she stood stock-still among the roses like one of Buckshaw’s statues, over which someone, as a joke, had flung an old black dress.