Would my bones be found in some future England by a baffled archaeologist? Would I be put on display in a glass case at the British Museum, to be stared at by the masses? My mind raced through the pros and cons.
But wait! I’d forgotten about the stairs at the end of the pit! I would sit on the bottom step and go up backwards, one step at a time. When I reached the top, I would push up with my shoulders and lift the boards that covered the pit. Why hadn’t I thought of this in the first place, before I’d worn myself down to this state of quivering exhaustion?
It was then that something came over me, smothering my consciousness like a pillow. Before I could recognize my total exhaustion for what it was, before I could muster a fight, I was vanquished. I felt myself sinking to the floor amid the rustling papers: papers which, in spite of the cold air from the conduit, now seemed surprisingly warm.
I shifted a little as if to burrow into their depths, and pulling my knees up towards my chin, I was instantly asleep.
I DREAMED THAT DAFFY WAS PUTTING on a Christmas pantomime. The great hallway at Buckshaw had been transformed into an exquisite jewel box of a Viennese theater, with a red velvet curtain and a vast crystal chandelier in which the flames of a hundred candles bobbed and flickered.
Dogger and Feely and Mrs. Mullet and I sat side by side on a single row of chairs, while nearby at a wood-carver’s bench, Father puttered away at his stamps.
The play was Romeo and Juliet, and Daffy, in a remarkable display of quick-change artistry, was playing all the parts. One moment she was Juliet on the balcony (the landing at the top of the west staircase) and the next, having vanished for no more than a blink of a magpie’s eye, she reappeared on the mezzanine as Romeo.
Up and down she flew, up and down, wringing our hearts with words of tender love.
From time to time, Dogger would put a forefinger to his lips and slip quietly out of the room, returning moments later with a painted wheelbarrow spilling over with postage stamps which he would dump at Father’s feet. Father, who was busily snipping stamps in half with a pair of Harriet’s nail scissors, would grunt without so much as looking up, and go on about his work.
Mrs. Mullet laughed and laughed at Juliet’s old nurse, blushing and shooting glances at us one and all as if there were some message encoded in the words which only she could understand. She mopped her red face with a polka-dot handkerchief, twisting it round and round in her hands before rolling it into a ball and shoving it in her mouth to stop up her hysterical laughter.
Now Daffy (as Mercutio) was describing how Mab, the Fairy Queen, gallops:
O’er ladies’ lips, who straight on kisses dream,
Which oft the angry Mab with blisters plagues
Because their breaths with sweetmeats tainted are.
I took a surreptitious peek at Feely who, in spite of the fact that her lips looked like something you might see on a fishmonger’s barrow, had attracted the attentions of Ned who was sitting behind her, leaning forward over her shoulder, his own lips pursed, begging a kiss. But each time Daffy flitted down from the balcony to the mezzanine below in the role of Romeo (looking, with his pencil-thin mustache, more like David Niven in A Matter of Life and Death than a noble Montague), Ned would leap to his feet with a volley of applause punctuated by fierce two-fingered whistles as Feely, unmoved, popped Mint Imperial after Mint Imperial into her open mouth, gasping suddenly as Romeo burst into Juliet’s marbled tomb:
For here lies Juliet, and her beauty makes
This vault a feasting presence full of light.
Death, lie thou there—
I woke up. Damnation! Something was running over my feet: something wet and furry.
“Dogger!” I tried to scream, but my mouth was full of a wet mess. My jaws were aching and my head felt as if I had just been dragged from the chopping block.
I kicked out with both feet and something scuttered through the loose papers with an angry chittering noise.
A water rat. The pit was likely swarming with the things. Had they been nibbling at me while I slept? The very thought of it made me cringe.
I pulled myself upright and leaned back against the wall, my knees beneath my chin. It was too much to expect that the rats would nibble at my bonds as they did in fairy tales. They’d more than likely gnaw my knuckles to the bone and I’d be powerless to stop them.
Stow it, Flave, I thought. Don’t let your imagination run away with you.
There had been several times in the past, at work in my chemical laboratory or lying in bed at night, when I unexpectedly caught myself thinking, “You are all alone with Flavia de Luce,” which sometimes was a frightening thought and sometimes not. This was one of the scarier occasions.
The scurrying noises were real enough; something was rummaging about in the papers in the corner of the pit. If I moved my legs or my head, the sounds would cease for a moment, and then begin again.
How long had I been asleep? Had it been hours or minutes? Was it still daylight outside, or was it now dark?
I remembered that the library would be closed until Thursday morning, and today was only Tuesday. I could be here for a good long while.
Someone would report me missing, of course, and it would probably be Dogger. Was it too much to hope that he would catch Pemberton in the act of burgling Buckshaw? But even if he was caught, would Pemberton tell them where he had hidden me away?
Now my hands and feet were growing numb and I thought of old Ernie Forbes, whose grandchildren were made to pull him along the High Street on a little wheeled float. Ernie had lost a hand and both feet to gangrene in the war, and Feely once told me that he had to be—
Stop it, Flave! Stop being such a monstrous crybaby!
Think of something else. Think of anything.
Think, for instance, of revenge.
twenty-five
THERE ARE TIMES—ESPECIALLY WHEN I’M CONFINED—that my thoughts have a tendency, like the man in Stephen Leacock’s story, to ride madly off in all directions.
I’m almost ashamed to admit to the things that crossed my mind at first. Most of them involved poisons, a few involved common household utensils, and all of them involved Frank Pemberton.
My mind flew back to our first encounter at the Thirteen Drakes. Although I had seen his taxi pull up at the front door, and had heard Tully Stover shout at Mary that Mr. Pemberton had arrived early, I had not actually laid eyes on the man himself. That did not take place until Sunday, at the Folly.
Although there had been several odd things about Pemberton’s sudden appearance at Buckshaw, I really hadn’t had time to think about them.
In the first place, he hadn’t arrived in Bishop’s Lacey until hours after Horace Bonepenny had expired in my face. Or had he?
When I looked up and saw Pemberton standing at the edge of the lake, I had been taken by surprise. But why? Buckshaw was my home: I had been born and lived there every minute of my life. What was so surprising about a man standing at the edge of an artificial lake?
I could feel an answer to that question nibbling at the hook I’d lowered into my subconscious. Don’t look straight at it, I thought, think of something else—or at least pretend to.
It had been raining that day, or had just begun to rain. I had looked up from where I was sitting on the steps of the little ruined temple and there he was, across the water on the south side of the lake: the southeast side, to be precise. Why on earth had he made his appearance from that direction?
That was a question to which I had known the answer for quite some time.
Bishop’s Lacey lay to the northeast of Buckshaw. From the Mulford Gates, at the entrance to our avenue of chestnut trees, the road ran in easy twists and turns, more or less directly into the village. And yet Pemberton had appeared from the southeast, from the direction of Doddingsley, which lay about four miles across the fields. Why then, in the name of Old Stink, I had wondered, would he choose to come that way? The choices had seemed limited, and I had quickly jot
ted them down in my mental notebook:
If (as I suspected) Pemberton was the murderer of Horace Bonepenny, could he have been, as all murderers are said to be, drawn back to the scene of the crime? Had he perhaps left something behind? Something like the murder weapon? Had he returned to Buckshaw to retrieve it?
Because he had already been to Buckshaw the night before, he knew the way across the fields and wanted to avoid being seen. (See 1 above)
What if on Friday, the night of the murder, Pemberton, believing that Bonepenny was carrying the Ulster Avengers, had followed him from Bishop’s Lacey to Buckshaw and murdered him there?
But hold on, Flave, I thought. Hold your horses. Don’t go galloping off like that.
Why wouldn’t Pemberton simply waylay his victim in one of those quiet hedgerows that border nearly every lane in this part of England?
The answer had come to me as if it were sculpted in red neon tubing in Piccadilly Circus: because he wanted Father to be blamed for the crime!
Bonepenny had to be killed at Buckshaw!
Of course! With Father a virtual recluse, it was unlikely to expect that he would ever happen to be away from home. Murders—at least those in which the murderer expected to escape justice—had to be planned in advance, and often in very great detail. It was obvious that a philatelic crime needed to be pinned on a philatelist. If Father was unlikely to come to the scene of the crime, the scene of the crime would have to come to Father.
And so it had.
Although I had first formulated this chain of events—or, at least, certain of its links—hours ago, it was only now, when I was at last forced to be alone with Flavia de Luce, that I was able to fit together all the pieces.
Flavia, I’m proud of you! Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier would be proud of you too.
Now then: Pemberton, of course, had followed Bonepenny as far as Doddingsley; perhaps even all the way from Stavanger. Father had seen them both at the London exhibition just weeks ago—proof positive that neither one was living abroad permanently.
They had probably planned this together, this blackmailing of Father. Just as they had planned the murder of Mr. Twining. But Pemberton had a plan of his own.
Once satisfied that Bonepenny was on his way to Bishop’s Lacey (where else, indeed, would he be going?), Pemberton had got off the train at Doddingsley and registered himself at the Jolly Coachman. I knew that for a fact. Then, on the night of the murder, all he had to do was walk across the fields to Bishop’s Lacey.
Here, he had waited until he saw Bonepenny leave the inn and set out on foot for Buckshaw. With Bonepenny out of the way and not suspecting that he was being followed, Pemberton had searched the room at the Thirteen Drakes, and its contents—including Bonepenny’s luggage—and had found nothing. He had, of course, never thought, as I had, to slit open the shipping labels.
By now, he must have been furious.
Slipping away from the inn unseen (most likely by way of that steep back staircase), he had tracked his quarry on foot to Buckshaw, where they must have quarreled in our garden. How was it, I wondered, that I hadn’t heard them?
Within half an hour, he had left Bonepenny for dead, his pockets and wallet rifled. But the Ulster Avengers had not been there: Bonepenny had not had the stamps upon his person after all.
Pemberton had committed his crime and then simply walked off into the night, across the fields to the Jolly Coachman at Doddingsley. The next morning, he had rolled up with much ado in a taxicab at the front door of the Thirteen Drakes, pretending he had just come down by rail from London. He would have to search the room again. Risky, but necessary. Surely the stamps must still be hidden there.
Parts of this sequence of events I had suspected for some time, and even though I hadn’t yet put together the remaining facts, I had already verified Pemberton’s presence in Doddingsley by my telephone call to Mr. Cleaver, the innkeeper of the Jolly Coachman.
In retrospect, it all seemed fairly simple.
I stopped thinking for a moment to listen to my breathing. It was slow and regular as I sat there with my head resting on my knees, which were still pulled up in an inverted V.
At this moment I thought of something Father had once told us: that Napoleon had once called the English “a nation of shopkeepers.” Wrong, Napoleon!
Having just come through a war in which tons of trinitrotoluene were dumped on our heads in the dark, we were a nation of survivors, and I, Flavia Sabina de Luce, could see it even in myself.
And then I muttered part of the Twenty-third Psalm for insurance purposes. One can never be too sure.
Now: the murder.
Again the dying face of Horace Bonepenny swam before me in the dark, its mouth opening and closing like a landed fish gasping in the grass. His last word and his dying breath had come as one: “Vale,” he had said, and it had floated from his mouth directly to my nostrils. And it had come to me on a wave of carbon tetrachloride.
There was no doubt whatsoever that it was carbon tetrachloride, one of the most fascinating of chemical compounds.
To a chemist, its sweet smell, although very transient, is unmistakable. It is not far removed in the scheme of things from the chloroform used by anesthetists in surgery.
In carbon tetrachloride (one of its many aliases) four atoms of chlorine play ring-around-a-rosy with a single atom of carbon. It is a powerful insecticide, still used now and then in stubborn cases of hookworm, those tiny, silent parasites that gorge themselves on blood sucked in darkness from the intestines of man and beast alike.
But more importantly, philatelists use carbon tetrachloride to bring out a stamp’s nearly invisible watermarks. And Father kept bottles of the stuff in his study.
I thought back to Bonepenny’s room at the Thirteen Drakes. What a fool I had been to think of poisoned pie! This wasn’t a Grimm’s fairy tale; it was the story of Flavia de Luce.
The pie shell was nothing more than that: just a shell. Before leaving Norway, Bonepenny had removed the filling, and stuffed in the jack snipe with which he planned to terrorize Father. That was how he’d smuggled the dead bird into England.
It wasn’t so much what I had found in his room as what I hadn’t found. And that, of course, was the single item that was missing from the little leather kit in which Bonepenny carried his diabetic supplies: a syringe.
Pemberton had come across the syringe and pocketed it when he rifled Bonepenny’s room just before the murder. I was sure of it.
They were partners in crime, and no one would have known better than Pemberton the medical supplies that were essential to Bonepenny’s survival.
Even if Pemberton had planned a different way of dispatching his victim—a stone to the back of the head or strangulation with a green willow withy—the syringe in Bonepenny’s luggage must have seemed like a godsend. The very thought of how it was done made me shudder.
I could imagine the two of them struggling there in the moonlight. Bonepenny was tall, but not muscular. Pemberton would have brought him down as a cougar does a deer.
Out comes the hypodermic and into the base of Bonepenny’s brain it goes. Just like that. It wouldn’t take more than a second, and its effect would be almost instantaneous. This, I was certain, was the way in which Horace Bonepenny had met his death.
Had he ingested the stuff—and it would have been a near impossibility to force him to swallow it—a much larger quantity of the poison would have been required: a quantity which he would have promptly vomited.
Whereas five cc’s injected into the base of the brain would be sufficient to bring down an ox.
The unmistakable fumes of the carbon tetrachloride would have been quickly transmitted to his mouth and nasal cavities as I had detected. But by the time Inspector Hewitt and his detective sergeants arrived, it had evaporated without a trace.
It was almost the perfect crime. In fact it would have been perfect if I had not gone down into the garden when I did.
I hadn’t thought about th
is before. Was my continued existence all that stood between Frank Pemberton and freedom?
There was a grating noise.
I could not tell which direction it was coming from. I swiveled my head and the noise stopped instantly.
For a minute or more there was silence. I strained my ears but could hear only the sound of my own breathing, which I noticed had become more rapid—and more jagged.
There it was again! As if a piece of lumber were being dragged, with agonizing slowness, across a gritty surface.
I tried to call out “Who’s there?” but the hard ball of the handkerchief in my mouth reduced my words to a muffled bleat. At the effort, my jaws felt as if someone had driven a railway spike into each side of my head.
Better to listen, I thought. Rats don’t move lumber, and unless I was sadly mistaken, I was no longer alone in the Pit Shed.
Like a snake, I moved my head slowly from side to side, trying to take advantage of my superior hearing, but the heavy tweed binding my head muffled all but the loudest of sounds.
But the grating noises were not half as unnerving as the silences between them. Whatever it was in the pit was trying to keep its presence unknown. Or was it keeping quiet to unnerve me?
There was a squeak, then a faint tick, as if a pebble had fallen onto a large stone.
As slowly as a flower opening, I stretched my legs out in front of me, but when they met with no resistance, I pulled them back up beneath my chin. Better to be coiled up, I thought; better to present a smaller target.
For a moment, I focused my attention on my hands, which were still lashed behind me. Perhaps there had been a miracle; perhaps the silk had stretched and loosened, but no such luck. Even my numbed fingers could sense that my bonds were as tight as ever. I hadn’t a hope of getting free. I really was going to die down here.
And who would miss me?
Nobody.