The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

  But this was getting nowhere. My thoughts were all higgledy-piggledy, like straws in a haystack. I needed to find a catalyst of some description as, for example, Kirchoff had. He had discovered that starch boiled in water remained starch but when just a few drops of sulphuric acid were added, the starch was transformed into glucose. I had once repeated the experiment to reassure myself that this was so, and it was. Ashes to ashes; starch to sugar. A little window into the Creation.

  I went back into the house, which now seemed strangely silent. I stopped at the drawing room door and listened, but there was no sound of Feely at the piano or of Daffy flipping pages. I opened the door.

  The room was empty. And then I remembered that my sisters had talked at breakfast about walking into Bishop’s Lacey to post Father the letters that each of them had written. Aside from Mrs. Mullet, who was off in the depths of the kitchen, and Dogger, who was upstairs resting, I was, perhaps for the first time in my life, alone in the halls of Buckshaw.

  I switched on the wireless for company, and as the valves warmed up, the room was filled with the sound of an operetta. It was Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado, one of my favorites. Wouldn’t it be lovely, I had once thought, if Feely, Daffy, and I could be as happy and carefree as Yum-Yum and her two sisters?

  “Three little maids from school are we,

  Pert as a schoolgirl well can be,

  Filled to the brim with girlish glee,

  Three little maids from school!”

  I smiled as the three of them sang:

  “Everything is a source of fun.

  Nobody’s safe, for we care for none!

  Life is a joke that’s just begun!

  Three little maids from school!”

  Wrapped up in the music, I threw myself into an overstuffed chair and let my legs dangle over the arm, the position in which Nature intended music to be listened to, and for the first time in days I felt the muscles in my neck relaxing.

  I must have fallen into a brief sleep, or perhaps only a reverie—I don’t know—but when I snapped out of it, Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner, was singing:

  “He’s made to dwell

  In a dungeon cell—”

  The words made me think at once of Father, and tears sprang up in my eyes. This was no operetta, I thought. Life was not a joke that’s just begun, and Feely and Daffy and I were not three little maids from school. We were three girls whose father was charged with murder. I leaped up from the chair to switch off the wireless, but as I reached for the switch, the voice of the Lord High Executioner floated grimly from the loudspeaker:

  “My object all sublime

  I shall achieve in time

  To let the punishment fit the crime—

  The punishment fit the crime …”

  Let the punishment fit the crime. Of course! Flavia, Flavia, Flavia! How could you not have seen?

  Like a steel ball bearing dropping into a cut-glass vase, something in my mind went click, and I knew as surely as I knew my own name how Horace Bonepenny had been murdered.

  Only one thing more (well, two things, actually; three at most) were needed to wrap this whole thing up like a box of birthday sweets and present it, red ribbons and all, to Inspector Hewitt. Once he heard my story, he would have Father out of the clink before you could say Jack Robinson.

  MRS. MULLET WAS STILL IN THE KITCHEN with her hand up a chicken.

  “Mrs. M,” I said, “may I speak frankly with you?”

  She looked up at me and wiped her hands on her apron.

  “Of course, dear,” she said. “Don’t you always?”

  “It’s about Dogger.”

  The smile on her face congealed as she turned away and began fussing with a ball of butcher’s twine with which she was trussing the bird.

  “They don’t make things the way they used to,” she said as it snapped. “Not even string. Why, just last week I said to Alf, I said, ‘That string as you brang home from the stationer’s—’ ”

  “Please, Mrs. Mullet,” I begged. “There’s something I need to know. It’s a matter of life and death! Please!”

  She looked at me over her spectacles like a churchwarden, and for the first time ever in her presence, I felt like a little girl.

  “You said once that Dogger had been in prison, that he had been made to eat rats, that he was tortured.”

  “That’s so, dear,” she said. “My Alf says I ought not to have let it slip. But we mustn’t ever speak of it. Poor Dogger’s nerves are all in tatters.”

  “How do you know that? About the prison, I mean?”

  “My Alf was in the army too, you know. He served for a time with the Colonel, and with Dogger. He doesn’t talk about it. Most of ’em don’t. My Alf got home safely with no more harm than troubled dreams, but a lot of them didn’t. It’s like a brotherhood, you know, the army; like one man spread out thin as a layer of jam across the whole face of the globe. They always know where all their old mates are and what’s happened to ’em. It’s eerie—psychic, like.”

  “Did Dogger kill someone?” I asked, point-blank.

  “I’m sure he did, dear. They all did. It was their job, wasn’t it?”

  “Besides the enemy.”

  “Dogger saved your father’s life,” she said. “In more ways than one. He was a medical orderly, or some such thing, was Dogger, and a good one. They say he fished a bullet out of your father’s chest, right next to the heart. Just as he was sewin’ him up, some RAF bloke went off his head from shell shock. Tried to machete everyone in the tent. Dogger stopped him.”

  Mrs. Mullet pulled tight the final knot and used a pair of scissors to snip off the end of the string.

  “Stopped him?”

  “Yes, dear. Stopped him.”

  “You mean he killed him.”

  “Afterwards, Dogger couldn’t remember. He’d been having one of his moments, you see, and—”

  “And Father thinks it’s happened again; that Dogger has saved his life again by killing Horace Bonepenny! That’s why he’s taking the blame!”

  “I don’t know, dear, I’m sure. But if he did, it would be very like the Colonel.”

  That had to be it; there was no other explanation. What was it Father had said when I told him Dogger, too, had overheard his quarrel with Bonepenny? “That is what I fear more than anything.” His exact words.

  It was odd, really—almost ludicrous—like something out of Gilbert and Sullivan. I had tried to take the blame to protect Father. Father was taking the blame to protect Dogger. The question was this: Whom was Dogger protecting?

  “Thank you, Mrs. M,” I said. “I’ll keep our conversation confidential. Strictly on the q.t.”

  “Girl to girl, like,” she said, with a horrible smirking leer.

  The “girl to girl” was too much. Too chummy, too belittling. Something in me that was less than noble rose up out of the depths, and I was transformed in the blink of an eye into Flavia the Pigtailed Avenger, whose assignment was to throw a wrench into this fearsome and unstoppable pie machine.

  “Yes,” I said. “Girl to girl. And while we’re speaking girl to girl, it’s probably as good a time as any to tell you that we none of us at Buckshaw really care for custard pie. In fact, we hate it.”

  “Oh piff, I know that well enough,” she said.

  “You do?” I was too taken aback to think of more than two words.

  “ ’Course I do. Cooks know all, they say, and I’m no different than the next one. I’ve known that de Luces and custard don’t mix since Miss Harriet was alive.”

  “But—”

  “Why do I make them? Because Alf fancies a nice custard pie now and again. Miss Harriet used to tell me, ‘The de Luces are all lofty rhubarbs and prickly gooseberries, Mrs. M, whereas your Alf’s a smooth, sweet custard man. I should like you to bake an occasional custard pie to remind us of our haughty ways, and when we turn up our noses at it, why, you must take it home to your Alf as a sweet apology.’ And I don’t mind sayin’ I
’ve taken home a goodly number of apologies these more than twenty years past.”

  “Then you’ll not need another,” I said.

  And then I fled. You couldn’t see my bottom for dust.

  twenty-one

  I PAUSED IN THE HALLWAY, STOOD PERFECTLY STILL, and listened. Because of its parquet floors and hardwood paneling, Buckshaw transmitted sound as perfectly as if it were the Royal Albert Hall. Even in complete silence, Buckshaw had its own unique silence; a silence I would recognize anywhere.

  As quietly as I could, I picked up the telephone and gave the cradle a couple of clicks with my finger. “I’d like to place a trunk call to Doddingsley. I’m sorry, I don’t have the number, but it’s the inn there: the Red Fox or the Ring and Funnel. I’ve forgotten its name, but I think it has an R and an F in it.”

  “One moment, please,” said the bored but efficient voice at the other end of the crackling line.

  This shouldn’t be too difficult, I thought. Being located across the street from the railway platform, the “RF,” or whatever it was called, was the closest inn to the station and Doddingsley, after all, was no metropolis.

  “The only listings I have are for the Grapes and the Jolly Coachman.”

  “That’s it,” I said. “The Jolly Coachman!”

  The “RF” must have bubbled up from the sludge at the bottom of my mind.

  “The number is Doddingsley two three,” the voice said. “For future reference.”

  “Thank you,” I mumbled, as the ringing at the other end began its little jig.

  “Doddingsley two three. Jolly Coachman. Are you there? Cleaver, here.” Cleaver, I assumed, was the proprietor.

  “Yes, I’d like to speak with Mr. Pemberton, please. It’s rather important.”

  Any barrier, I had learned—even a potential one—was best breached by pretending urgency.

  “He’s not here,” said Cleaver.

  “Oh dear,” I said, laying it on a bit thick. “I’m sorry I missed him. Could you tell me when he left? Perhaps then I’ll know what time to expect him.”

  Flave, I thought, you ought to be in Parliament.

  “He left Saturday morning. Three days ago.”

  “Oh, thank you!” I breathed throatily, in a voice I hoped would fool the Pope. “You’re awfully kind.”

  I rang off and returned the receiver to its cradle as gently as if it were a newly hatched chick.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” demanded a muffled voice.

  I spun round and there was Feely, a winter scarf wrapped round the bottom part of her face.

  “What are you doing?” she repeated. “You know perfectly well you’re not to use the instrument.”

  “What are you doing?” I parried. “Going tobogganing?”

  Feely made a grab for me and the scarf fell away to reveal a pair of red swollen lips which were the spitting image of a Cameroon mandrill’s south pole.

  I was too in awe to laugh. The poison ivy I had injected into her lipstick had left her mouth a blistered crater that might have done credit to Mount Popocatepetl. My experiment had succeeded after all. Loud fanfare of trumpets!

  Unfortunately, I had no time to write it up; my notebook would have to wait.

  MAXIMILIAN, IN MUSTARD CHECKS, was perched on the edge of the stone horse trough which lay in the shadow of the market cross, his tiny feet dangling in the air like Humpty Dumpty. He was so small I almost hadn’t seen him.

  “Haroo, mon vieux, Flavia!” he shouted, and I brought Gladys to a sliding stop at the very toes of his patent leather shoes. Trapped again! I’d better make the best of it.

  “Hullo, Max,” I said. “I have a question for you.”

  “Ho-ho!” he said. “Just like that! A question! No preliminaries? No talk of the sisters? No gossip from the great concert halls of the world?”

  “Well,” I said, a little embarrassed, “I did listen to The Mikado on the wireless.”

  “And how was it? Dynamically speaking? They always have an alarming tendency to shout Gilbert and Sullivan, you know.”

  “Enlightening,” I said.

  “Aha! You must tell me in what fashion. Dear Arthur composed some of the most sublime music ever written in this sceptered isle: ‘The Lost Chord,’ for instance. G and S fascinate me to no end. Did you know that their immortal partnership was shattered by a disagreement about the cost of a carpet?”

  I looked closely at him to see if he was pulling my leg, but he seemed in earnest.

  “Of course I’m simply dying to pump you about the recent unpleasantness at Buckshaw, Flavia dear, but I know your lips are thrice sealed by modesty, loyalty, and legality—and not necessarily in that order, am I correct?”

  I nodded my head.

  “Your question of the oracle, then?”

  “Were you at Greyminster?”

  Max tittered like a little yellow bird. “Oh dear, no. Nowhere quite so grand, I’m afraid. My schooling was on the Continent, Paris to be precise, and not necessarily indoors. My cousin Lombard, though, is an old Greyminsterian. He always speaks highly enough of the place—whenever he’s not at the races or playing Oh Hell at Montfort’s.”

  “Has he ever mentioned the head, Dr. Kissing?”

  “The stamp wallah? Why, dear girl, he seldom speaks of anything else. He idolized the old gentleman. Claims old Kissing made him what he is today—which isn’t much, but still …”

  “I shouldn’t think he’s still alive? Dr. Kissing, I mean. He’d be very old, though, wouldn’t he? I’m willing to bet everything I have that he’s been dead for ages.”

  “Then you shall lose all your money!” said Max with a whoop. “Every blessed penny of it!”

  ROOK’S END WAS TUCKED INTO the folds of a cozy bed formed by Squires Hill and the Jack O’Lantern, the latter a curious outcropping of the landscape which, from a distance, appeared to be an Iron Age tumulus but, upon approach, proved to be substantially larger and shaped like a skull.

  I steered Gladys into Pooker’s Lane, which ran along its jaw, or eastern edge. At the end of the lane, dense hedges bracketed the entrance to Rook’s End.

  Once past these ragged remnants of an earlier day, the lawns spread off to the east, west, and south, neglected and spiky. In spite of the sun, fingers of mist still floated in the shadows above the unkempt grass. Here and there the broad expanse of lawn was broken by one of those huge, sad beech trees whose massive boles and drooping branches always reminded me of a family of despondent elephants wandering lonely on the African veld.

  Beneath the beeches, two antique ladies drifted in animated dialogue, as if competing for the role of Lady Macbeth. One was dressed in a diaphanous muslin nightgown, and a mobcap which seemed somehow to have escaped the eighteenth century, while her companion, enveloped in a cyanide blue tent dress, was wearing brass earrings the size of soup plates.

  The house itself was what is often called romantically “a pile.” Once the ancestral home of the de Lacey family, from whom Bishop’s Lacey took its name (and who were said to be very distantly related to the de Luces), the place had come down in the world in stages: from being the country house of an inventive and successful Huguenot linen merchant to what it was today, a private hospital to which Daffy would instantly have assigned the name Bleak House. I almost wished she were here.

  Two dusty motorcars huddling together in the forecourt testified to the shortage of both staff and visitors. Dumping Gladys beside an ancient monkey puzzle tree, I picked my way up the mossy, pitted steps to the front door.

  A hand-inked sign said Ring Plse., and I gave the enameled handle a pull. Somewhere inside the place a hollow clanking, like a cowbell Angelus, announced my arrival to persons unknown.

  When nothing happened I rang again. Across the lawn, the two old ladies had begun to feign a tea party, with elaborate mincing curtsies, crooked fingers, and invisible cups and saucers.

  I pressed an ear to the massive door, but other than an undertone, which must have been t
he sound of the building’s breathing, I could hear nothing. I pushed the door open and stepped inside.

  The first thing that struck me was the smell of the place: a mixture of cabbage, rubber cushions, dishwater, and death. Underlying that, like a groundsheet, was the sharp tang of the disinfectant used to swab the floors—dimethyl benzyl ammonium chloride, by the smell of it—a faint whiff of bitter almonds which was uncommonly like that of hydrogen cyanide, the gas that was used to exterminate killers in American gas chambers.

  The entrance hall was painted a madhouse apple green: green walls, green woodwork, and green ceilings. The floors were covered with cheap brown linoleum so pitted with gladiatorial gouges that it might have been salvaged from the Roman Colosseum. Whenever I stepped on one of its pustulent brown blisters, the stuff let off a nasty hiss and I made a mental note to find out if color can cause nausea.

  Against the far wall, in a chromium wheelchair, an ancient man sat gazing straight up into the air, mouth agape, as if expecting an imminent miracle to take place somewhere near the ceiling.

  Off to one side a desk, bare except for a silver bell and a smudged card marked Ring Plse., hinted at some official, yet unseen, presence.

  I gave the striker four brisk strokes. At each ting of the bell, the old man blinked violently, but did not take his eyes from the air above his head.

  Suddenly, as if she had slipped through a secret panel in the woodwork, a wisp of a woman materialized. She wore a white uniform and a blue cap, under which she was busily poking limp strands of damp straw-colored hair with one of her forefingers.

  She looked as if she had been up to no good, and knew perfectly well that I knew.

  “Yes?” she said, in a thin but busy, standard-issue hospital voice.

  “I’ve come to see Dr. Kissing,” I said. “I’m his great-granddaughter.”

  “Dr. Isaac Kissing?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said, “Dr. Isaac Kissing. Do you keep more than one?”

  Without a word the White Phantom turned on her heel and I followed, through an archway into a narrow solarium which ran the entire length of the building. Halfway along the gallery she stopped, pointed a thin finger like the third ghost in Scrooge, and was gone.