“Gry!” I called, and the old horse came shuffling towards me. Without further thought, I leapt onto his back, flung my arms round his neck, and gave his ribs a gentle kick with my heels. Moments later we were trotting across the bridge, then turning north into the leafy narrowness of the Gully.
In spite of the darkness, Gry kept up a steady pace, as if he were familiar with this rutted lane. As we went along, I learned quickly to balance on his bony spine, ducking down as overhanging branches snatched at my clothing, and wishing I’d been foresighted enough to bring a sweater. I’d forgotten how cold the nights could be at the end of summer.
On we trotted, the Gypsy’s horse outdoing himself. Perhaps he sensed a hearty meal at the end of his journey.
Soon we would be passing the tumbledown residence of the Bulls, and I knew that we would not pass unnoticed. Even in broad daylight there were seldom travelers in the narrow lane. In the middle of the night, the unaccustomed sound of Gry’s hooves on the road would surely be heard by one of the half-wild Bull family.
Yes, there it was: just ahead of us on the right. I could smell it. Even in the dark I could see the gray curtain of smoke that hung about the place. Spotted here and there about the property, the embers of the smoldering rubbish tips glowed like red eyes in the night. In spite of the lateness of the hour, the windows of the house were blazing with light.
No good begging for help here, I thought. Mrs. Bull had made no bones about her hatred of the Gypsy.
Seizing a handful of Gry’s thick mane, I tugged at it gently. As if he had been trained from birth to this primitive means of control, the old horse slowed to a shamble. At the change of pace, one of his hooves struck a rock in the rutted road.
“Shhh!” I whispered into his ear. “Tiptoe!”
I knew that we had to keep moving. The Gypsy woman needed help desperately, and the Bulls’ was not the place to seek it.
A door banged as someone came out into the yard—on the far side of the house, by the sound of it.
Gry stopped instantly and refused to move. I wanted to whisper into his ear to keep going, that he was a good horse—a remarkable horse—yet I hardly dared breathe. But Gry stood as motionless in the lane as if he were a purebred pointer. Could it be that a Gypsy’s horse knew more about stealth than I did? Had years of traveling the unfriendly roads taught him more low cunning than even I possessed?
I made a note to think more about this when we were no longer in peril.
By the sound of it, the person in the yard was now rummaging through a lot of old pots, muttering to themselves whenever they stopped the clatter. The light from the house, I knew, would cast me into deeper darkness. Better, though, to make myself smaller and less visible than a rider on horseback.
I waited until the next round of banging began, and slipped silently to the ground. Using Gry as a shield, I kept well behind him so that my white face would not be spotted in the darkness.
When you’re in a predicament time slows to a crawl. I could not begin to guess how long we stood rooted to the spot in the lane; it was probably no more than a few minutes. But almost immediately I found myself shifting my weight uneasily from foot to foot and shivering in the gloom while Gry, the old dear, had apparently fallen asleep. He didn’t move a muscle.
And then the racket stopped abruptly.
Had the person in the garden sensed our presence? Were they lying in wait—ready to spring—on the far side of the house?
More time leaked past. I couldn’t move. My heart was pounding crazily in my chest. It seemed impossible that whoever was in the Bulls’ garden could fail to hear it.
They must be keeping still … listening, as I was.
Suddenly there came to my nostrils the sharp reek of a safety match; the unmistakeably acrid odor of phosphorus reacting with potassium chlorate. This was quickly followed by the smell of a burning cigarette.
I smiled. Mrs. Bull was taking a break from her brats.
But not for long. A door banged and a dark shape fluttered across behind one of the closed curtains.
Before I could talk myself out of it I began moving along the lane—slowly at first, and then more quickly. Gry walked quietly behind me. When we reached the trees at the far edge of the property, I scrambled up onto his back and urged him on.
“Dr. Darby’s surgery,” I said. “And make it snappy!”
As if he understood.
The surgery was situated in the high street, just round the corner from Cow Lane. I lifted the knocker—a brass serpent on a staff—and pounded at the door. Almost instantly, or so it seemed, an upstairs window flew open with a sharp wooden groan and Dr. Darby’s head appeared, his gray, wispy hair tousled from sleeping.
“The bell,” he said grumpily. “Please use the bell.”
I gave the button a token jab with my thumb, and somewhere in the depths of the house a muted buzzing went off.
“It’s the Gypsy woman,” I called up to him. “The one from the fête. I think someone’s tried to kill her.”
The window slammed shut.
It couldn’t have been more than a minute before the front door opened and Dr. Darby stepped outside, shrugging himself into his jacket. “My car’s in the back,” he said. “Come along.”
“But what about Gry?” I asked, pointing at the old horse, which stood quietly in the street.
“Bring him round to the stable,” he said. “Aesculapius will be glad of his company.”
Aesculapius was the ancient horse that had pulled Dr. Darby’s buggy until about ten years ago, when the doctor had finally caved in to pressure from patients and purchased a tired old bull-nosed Morris—an open two-seater that Daffy referred to as “The Wreck of the Hesperus.”
I hugged Gry’s neck as he sidled into the stall with an almost audible sigh.
“Quickly,” Dr. Darby said, tossing his bag into the back of the car.
A few moments later we were veering off the high street and into the Gully.
“The Palings, you said?”
I nodded, hanging on for dear life. Once, I fancied I caught Dr. Darby stealing a glance at my bloody hands in the dim light of the instrument panel, but whatever he might have been thinking, he kept it to himself.
We rocketed along the narrow lane, the Morris’s headlamps illuminating the green tunnel of the trees and hedgerows with bounces of brightness. We sped past the Bulls’ place so quickly that I almost missed it, although my mind did manage to register the fact that the house was now in total darkness.
As we shot across the little stone bridge and into the grove, the Morris nearly became airborne, then bounced heavily on its springs as Dr. Darby brought it to a skidding halt just inches from the Gypsy’s caravan. Even in the dark his knowledge of Bishop’s Lacey’s lanes and byways was remarkable, I thought.
“Stay here,” he barked. “If I need you, I’ll call.” He threw open the driver’s door, walked briskly round the caravan, and was gone.
Alone in the darkness, I gave an involuntary shiver.
To be perfectly honest, my stomach was a bit queasy. I don’t mind death, but injury makes me nervous. It would all depend upon what Dr. Darby found inside the caravan.
I shifted restlessly in the Morris, trying to sift through these rather unexpected feelings. Was the Gypsy woman dead? The thought that she might be was appalling.
Although Death and I were not exactly old friends, we did have a nodding acquaintance. Twice before in my life I had encountered corpses, and each one had given me—
“Flavia!” The doctor was at the caravan’s door. “Fetch a screwdriver. It’s in the tool kit in the boot.”
A screwdriver? What kind of—
It was perhaps just as well that my speculations were interrupted.
“Quickly. Bring it here.”
At any other time I might have balked at his insolence in ordering me about like a lackey, but I bit my tongue. In fact, I even forgave him a little.
As Dr. Darby began loosening th
e screws of the door hinges, I couldn’t help thinking what remarkably strong hands he had for an older man. If he hadn’t used them to save lives, he might have made a wizard carpenter.
“Unscrew the last few,” he said. “I’ll take the weight of the door. That’s it … good girl.”
Even without knowing what we were doing, I was his willing slave.
As we worked, I caught glimpses of the Gypsy beyond, in the caravan’s interior. Dr. Darby had lifted her from the floor to her bed where she lay motionless, her head wrapped in surgical gauze. I could not tell if she was dead or alive and it seemed awkward to ask.
At last the door came free of the frame, and for an instant, Dr. Darby held it in front of him like a shield. The image of a crusader crossed my mind.
“Easy now—put it down here.”
He maneuvered the heavy panel carefully onto the caravan’s floor, where it fit with not an inch to spare between the stove and the upholstered seats. Then, plucking two pillows from the bed, he placed them lengthwise on the door, before wrapping the Gypsy in a sheet and ever so gently lifting her from the bunk onto the makeshift stretcher.
Again I was struck with his compact strength. The woman must have weighed almost as much as he did.
“Quickly now,” he said. “We must get her to the hospital.”
So! The Gypsy was alive. Death had been thwarted—at least for now.
Pulling a second sheet from the bed, Dr. Darby tore it into long strips, which he worked swiftly into position under the door, then round and round the Gypsy, fastening the ends with a series of expert knots.
He had positioned her so that her feet were closest to the empty door frame, and now I watched as he eased past her and leapt to the ground outside.
I heard the Morris’s starter grind—and then engage. The motor roared and moments later I saw him backing his machine towards the caravan.
Now he was clambering back aboard.
“Take this end,” he said, pointing to the Gypsy’s feet. “It’s lighter.”
He scrambled past me, seized the end of the door that lay beneath her head, and began sliding it towards the doorway.
“Into the offside seat,” he said. “That’s it … easy now.”
I had suddenly seen what he was trying to do, and as Dr. Darby lifted the head of the door, I guided its foot down into the space between the passenger’s seat and the instrument panel.
With surprisingly little struggle, our task was finished. With the Gypsy jutting up at a rigid angle, the little Morris looked like an oversized woodworking plane; the Gypsy herself like a mummy lashed to a board.
It isn’t the neatest of arrangements, I remember thinking, but it will do.
“You’ll have to stay here,” Dr. Darby said, wedging himself in behind the steering wheel. “There’s not room for the three of us in the old bus. Just stay put and don’t touch anything. I’ll send the police as soon as I’m able.”
What he meant, of course, was that I was in far less physical danger if I remained in one spot, rather than risking the possibility of flushing out the Gypsy’s attacker by walking home alone to Buckshaw.
I gave the doctor a halfhearted thumbs-up. More than that would have been out of place.
He let in the clutch and the car, with its weird cargo, began teetering slowly across the grove. As it crept over the humpbacked bridge, I had my last glimpse of the Gypsy, her face dead white in the light of a sudden moon.
FIVE
NOW I WAS TRULY alone.
Or was I?
Not a leaf stirred. Something went plop in the water nearby, and I held my breath. An otter, perhaps? Or something worse?
Could the Gypsy’s attacker still be here in the Palings? Still hiding … still watching … from somewhere in the trees?
It was a stupid thought, and I realized it instantly. I’d learned quite early in life that the mind loves nothing better than to spook itself with outlandish stories, as if the various coils of the brain were no more than a troop of roly-poly Girl Guides huddled over a campfire in the darkness of the skull.
Still, I gave a little shiver as the moon slipped behind a cloud. It had been cool enough when I’d first come here with the Gypsy, chilly when I’d ridden Gry into the village for Dr. Darby, and now, I realized, I was beastly cold.
The lights of the caravan glowed invitingly, warm patches of orange in the blue darkness. If a wisp of smoke had been floating up from the tin chimney, the scene might have been one of those frameable tear-away prints in the weekly magazines: A Gypsy Moon, for instance.
It was Dr. Darby who had left the lamp burning. Should I scramble aboard and turn it out?
Vague thoughts of saving paraffin crossed my mind, and even vaguer thoughts of being a good citizen.
Saints on skates! I was looking for an excuse to get inside the caravan and have a jolly good gander at the scene of the crime. Why not admit it?
“Don’t touch anything,” Dr. Darby had said. Well, I wouldn’t. I’d keep my hands in my pockets.
Besides, my footprints were already everywhere on the floor. What harm would a few more do? Could the police distinguish between two sets of bloody footprints made less than an hour apart? We shall see, I thought.
Even as I clambered up onto the footboard I realized that I should have to work quickly. Having arrived at the hospital in Hinley, Dr. Darby would soon be calling the police—or instructing someone else to call them.
There wasn’t a second to waste.
A quick look round showed that the Gypsy lived a frugal life indeed. As far as I could discover, there were no personal papers or documents, no letters, and no books—not even a Bible. I had seen the woman make the sign of the cross and it struck me as odd that a copy of the scriptures should not have its place in her traveling home.
In a bin beside the stove, a supply of vegetables looked rather the worse for wear, as if they had been snatched hastily from a farmer’s field rather than purchased clean from a village market: potatoes, beets, turnips, onions, all jumbled together.
I shoved my hand into the bin and rummaged around at the bottom. Nothing but clay-covered vegetables.
I don’t know what I was looking for, but I would if I found it. If I were a Gypsy, I thought, the bottom of the veggie bin would have been high on my list of hiding places.
But now my hands were thoroughly covered not only with dried blood, but also with soil. I wiped them on a grubby towel that hung on a nearby nail, but I could see at once that this would never do. I turned to the tin basin, took down a rose-and-briar ewer from the shelf, and poured water over my filthy hands, one at a time. Bits of earth and caked blood turned it quickly to a muddy red.
A goose walked over my grave and I shuddered slightly. Red blood cells, I remembered from my chemical experiments, were really not much more than a happy soup of water, sodium, potassium, chloride, and phosphorus. Mix them together in the proper proportions, though, and they formed a viscous liquid jelly: a jelly with mystic capabilities, one that could contain in its scarlet complexities not just nobility but also treachery.
Again I wiped my hands on the towel, and was about to chuck the contents of the basin outside onto the grass when it struck me: Don’t be a fool, Flavia! You’re leaving a trail of evidence that’s as plain to see as an advert on a hoarding!
Inspector Hewitt would have a conniption. And I had no doubt it would be he—four in the morning or not—who responded to the doctor’s call.
If questioned about it later, Dr. Darby would surely remember that I hadn’t washed or wiped the blood from my hands in his presence. And, unless caught out by the evidence, I could hardly admit to disobeying his orders by reentering the caravan after he had gone.
Like a tightrope walker, I teetered my way down the shafts of the wagon, the basin held out in front of me at arm’s length like an offering.
I made my way to the river’s edge, put down the basin, and undid my laces. The ruin of another pair of shoes would drive Father int
o a frenzy.
I waded barefoot into the water, wincing at the sudden coldness. Closer to the middle, where the sluggish current was even slightly stronger, would be the safest place to empty the basin; closer in might leave telltale residue on the grassy bank, and for the first time in my life I offered up a bit of thanks for the convenience of a shortish skirt.
Knee-deep in the flowing water, I lowered the basin and let the current wash away the telltale fluids. As the clotted contents combined with the river and floated off to God-knows-where, I gave a sigh of relief. The evidence—at least this bit of it—was now safely beyond the recall of Inspector Hewitt and his men.
As I waded back towards the riverbank, I stepped heavily on a submerged stone and stubbed my toe. I nearly went face-first into the water, and only a clumsy windmilling of my arms saved me. The basin, too, acted as a kind of counterweight, and I arrived breathless, but upright, at the riverbank.
But wait! The towel! The prints of my dirty and bloody hands were all over the thing.
Back to the caravan I dashed. As I had thought it would be, the towel was stained with a pair of remarkably clear Flavia-sized handprints. Rattling good luck I had thought of it!
One more trip to the river’s edge; one more wade into the chilly water, where I scrubbed and rinsed the towel several times over, grimacing as I wrung it out with a series of surprisingly fierce twists. Only when the water that dribbled back into the river was perfectly clear in the moonlight did I retrace my steps to the bank.
With the towel safely back on its nail in the caravan, I began to breathe normally. Even if they analyzed the cotton strands, the police would find nothing out of the ordinary. I gave a little snort of satisfaction.
Look at me, I thought. Here I am behaving like a criminal. Surely the police would never suspect me of attacking the Gypsy. Or would they?
Wasn’t I, after all, the last person to be seen in her company? Our departure from the fête in the Gypsy’s caravan had been about as discreet as a circus parade. And then there had been the set-to in the Gully with Mrs. Bull, who I suspected would be only too happy to fabricate evidence against a member of the de Luce family.