Speaking From Among The Bones (26 page)

“Will they be having an open coffin?” I asked.

I was certainly hoping they would.
It would be better
, I thought,
to remember Mr. Collicutt without the gas mask
.

“Heavens, no,” Feely said. “The vicar does not approve of open caskets. In fact, he strongly discourages the practice. The Order for the Burial of the Dead emphasizes the resurrection, not the death.
‘I am the resurrection and the
life,
saith the Lord.’
”

“I expect it puts a bit of a damper on things to have a corpse lying there bang in the middle with a poker face,” I said.

“Flavia!”

“Speaking of poker faces,” I said, “I ran into Miss Tanty in the church.”

I did not mention that there had been blood dripping from the rafters.

“So I am given to understand,” Feely said.

Blast! Was there no privacy in this village?

But who could have told her? Certainly not the vicar, and even more certainly not Adam Sowerby. She didn’t even know the man. Mad Meg, of course, was out of the question.

Feely must have seen the look of puzzlement on my face.

“ ‘The successful organist,’ ” she quoted, “ ‘must have fingers long enough to reach the stops, legs long enough to reach the pedal board, and ears long enough to reach into the lives of every choir member.’
Whanley on the Organ and Its Amenities
, chapter thirteen, ‘Management of the Choristers.’

“Actually, I heard it from the lips of Jezebel herself,” she admitted.

“Jezebel?”

I had made a note to pry Miss Tanty’s details out of Feely, but had hardly expected them to come gushing out before I had even, so to speak, fingered the lock.

“Oh, surely you must have noticed,” Feely said. “Those two old harpies, Miss Moon and Miss Tanty, primping and preening, hurling themselves onto the ashes at the feet of poor Mr. Collicutt. It was like watching a Roman chariot race.”

“And the perfumes!” I said, eager to join in the game.
“Backfire
and
Evening in Malden Fenwick.”

“Jealousy,”
Feely added, and I wondered for a moment why I didn’t talk to my sister more often.

But our laughter faded quickly, as it often does when it is artificial, and we were left in an embarrassed silence.

“Why would Miss Tanty cry out, ‘Forgive me, O Lord,’ when she saw the blood?”

I was assuming Miss Tanty had told Feely about the blood.

“Because she needs to be the center of attention—even when a saint bleeds.”

“She told me it was a performance,” I said, not volunteering that I had heard this later at Miss Tanty’s house. “She fancies herself a detective and wants to become involved in the case—wants someone to think she may even be the killer.”

“The killer?” Feely snorted. “Horse eggs! She couldn’t see to kill an elephant if it were standing on her toes. And as for being a detective, why, the woman couldn’t find her own bottom if it weren’t buttoned on.”

“God bless her all the same,” I said. It was a formula we used whenever we had gone too far.

“God bless her all the same,” Feely echoed, rather sourly.

“Which leaves Miss Moon,” I suggested subtly.

“Why would Miss Moon kill Mr. Collicutt?” Feely asked. “She doted on him. She brought him bags full of her dreadful homemade saltwater toffee. She even took it upon herself to wash his surplices and handkerchiefs.”

“Really?” I asked, my mind flashing instantly to the white ruffle protruding from the gas mask.

“Of course,” Feely said. “Mrs. Battle has always drawn the line at doing her boarders’ laundry.”

Which gave me an idea.

“Your ears are already long enough to reach into the lives of every choir member,” I said with a grin. “You’re going to make a whizzo organist, Feely!”

“Yes, I expect I am,” she agreed. Then, pointing to the sooty bundle on the floor, she added, “Now clean up this god-awful mess before I tell Father.”

Mrs. Battle’s boardinghouse, an ancient structure of warped, weathered clapboards and peeling paint, stood in a rutted yard on the south side of the road, halfway between St. Tancred’s and the Thirteen Drakes. In earlier times it had been a public house, the Adam and Eve, its name and the words “Ales & Stouts” still faintly visible in faded letters above the door. The whole place sagged in the middle like a serpent and had a general air of dampness.

I knocked and waited.

Nothing happened and I knocked again.

Still nothing.

Perhaps, I thought, as with the butcher’s shop in Nether-Wolsey, the owner was in the garden.

I strolled casually round the back as if I were a rather dopey tourist who had lost her way.

The area behind the house was like an archaeological dig: heaps of sand like giant hedgehogs, their backs bristling with shovels. Everywhere were untidy piles of boards and bags of cement. Everywhere broken rocks were strewn about as if in a temper tantrum by a baby giant.

The home of George Battle’s stonemasonry business.

I peeped into a dim shed which stood to one side. More
cement, a wooden box of trowels, an old-fashioned sloping desk with accounting books and inkwells, a row of pegs upon which hung various pieces of black rubber rainwear, an electric ring and enamel teakettle, and a blanket flung into the corner which might once have been lain upon by a long-dead dog.

No point in snooping too much
, I thought.
Someone might be watching from a back window of the house
.

I shoved my hands into the pockets of my cardigan, looked up at the sky as if carelessly checking the weather, and sauntered, whistling, back round to the front door.

I knocked again … and again. A regular volley of knocks.

After what seemed like an hour, heavy footsteps came lumbering toward the door and a lace curtain fluttered in one of the side windows.

An eye peered out and then withdrew.

After another painfully long moment, the cracked china doorknob turned slowly through a few degrees and the door swung inward to reveal a long tunnel of darkness that led away almost to infinity, ending in a small scrap of distant daylight somewhere at the back of the house.

“Well?”

The voice came from somewhere in the gloom.

“Mrs. Battle?” I said. “I’m Flavia de Luce, from Buckshaw. May I come in?”

Ask and ye shall receive
, I had been told to believe, but it didn’t work. It’s difficult for the average person to refuse such a direct request, but Mrs. Battle was obviously not an average person.

“Why?” she demanded.

“It’s about Mr. Collicutt,” I said. “Actually, it’s rather private. I’d prefer to discuss it indoors where we can’t be overheard.”

Step two: Insinuate that your message is both secret and juicy.

“Well …” she said, wavering.

“I don’t want anyone to see me here,” I said, lowering my voice and looking back over both shoulders as if checking for eavesdroppers.

“Come,” she commanded, and a fleshy hand from the shadows behind the door beckoned me into the gloom.

After the bright light of the outdoors it took several seconds for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, but when they did, I found myself face-to-face with the lady of the house. Or at least half face-to-face. The other half was still hidden in shadows behind the door.

Although I had seen Mrs. Battle now and then about the village, it had always been at something of a distance, and I had never actually spoken to the woman. Up close, she was larger than I remembered, and more red-faced.

“Well?”

“Actually …” I said, using the word a second time.

The word “actually,” like its cousin “frankly,” should, by itself, be a tip-off to most people that what is to follow is a blatant lie—but it isn’t.

“Actually …” I said again, “it’s about my sister Feely. Ophelia, I mean.”

“Yes?”

The eye widened a little in the gloom. So far, so good.
I had rehearsed the entire conversation in my mind as I pedaled to the village from Buckshaw.

I shifted from foot to foot, glancing uneasily about the dark-paneled hallway as if in fear of being overheard.

“She’s … she’s getting married, you see, and there are certain letters …”

Daffy had once read us a French novel in which this was the plot.

I held my breath and strained to make my face red, although my effort was probably wasted in the darkness.

“Mr. Collicutt—” I began to explain.

“Letters, is it?” Mrs. Battle said. “I see. And you want them back.”

Just like that!

I bit my lip and nodded my head.

“For your sister.”

I nodded again, trying to remember how to look desolate.

“Very sweet,” she said. “Very touching. You must love her.”

I brushed away an imaginary tear and wiped my finger elaborately on my skirt.

That did it.

“Not that it will do much good,” she went on, waving a hand at the dark staircase. “The police have already had a good root through everything.”

“Oh, no!” I said. “Feely will simply
die
.”

I had an odd feeling even as I spoke the words.

Nobody ever simply dies.

Mr. Collicutt, for instance, had met his death at the
hands of a couple of killers—I was now sure of it—and had been dragged, gas-masked (or had the mask been put on later?) through the churchyard, through the much-trampled grave of Cassandra Cottlestone, through a dank and earthy tunnel, to be dumped in the tomb of a long-dead saint.

Nothing simple about that.

“Turned everything upside down, Inspector Whatsis and his lot. Haven’t had the heart to straighten up. Whole thing has been such a—”

“Frightful shock,” I put in.

“Taken the words right out of my mouth,” she said.

“Frightful shock.”

I let a few moments pass in silence so that we could bond to each other as sisters in sorrow.

“I hope you’re feeling better,” I told her. “Miss Tanty told me you’ve been a regular saint in driving her to her appointments. You have a very large heart, Mrs. Battle.”

“Yes. Since you put it that way, I suppose I do.”

Not even Saint Francis de Sales, whose dying word was “Humility,” could have refused a compliment like that.

“I had a touch of the megrims that day,” she went on without being prompted. “I hated to let her down but Florrie—that’s my niece—offered to run her over since she didn’t start work till noon that day.

“ ‘No, Florrie,’ Crispin—Mr. Collicutt, I mean—told her. ‘I need to have a word with the woman anyway. You deserve your half-day, and I shall be back well before noon.’ ”

“The woman?” I asked. “Did he always refer to Miss Tanty as ‘the woman’?”

Mrs. Battle’s eyes slowly came round and lighted on mine.

“No,” she said. “He didn’t. Not always.”

Was this, I wondered, “the rather odd comment” the vicar had mentioned?

“Gosh, it must have been a worry for both you and Florence—having your car go missing like that, I mean. As well as Mr. Collicutt, of course.”

“Car never went missing,” she said. “He never took it. Not far, anyway. Florrie found it parked in front of the church.”

“Huh,” I said in a bored voice.

Then I let out a sigh.

“The letters …” I said, almost apologetically.

She waved a hand toward the stairs.

“First door left,” she said. “At the top.”

I found myself creeping slowly up the dark staircase as if points were being given for silence, even though the fourth and seventh steps groaned horribly. The first door on the left was so small and so close to the top of the stairs that I almost missed it.

I turned the china doorknob and stepped into Mr. Collicutt’s bedroom.

I suppose I had been expecting something spacious. Having been accustomed to the stadium-sized bedrooms at Buckshaw, this tiny space beneath the eaves came as something of a shock. It was as if a few feet of attic had been banged into an extra bedroom for an emergency,
and no one afterward had ever quite got round to putting things back the way they were. An altogether peculiar room.

But what a room!

It was full to bursting with organ pipes. Like the rats in “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” they were everywhere: great pipes, small pipes, lean pipes, brawny pipes, brown pipes, black pipes, gray pipes, tawny pipes, grave old plodders, gay young friskers, fathers, mothers, uncles—a thicket of wood, tin, zinc, lead, and brass—a maze of leaning tubes and cylinders. Racks of stops, like ribs of beef in the butcher’s window, each with its name engraved on an ivory disk: Trumpet, Gemshorn, Violin, Nason Flute, Rohrflöte, Bourdon, and a handful of others. Wedged into a corner beneath a sloping ceiling was a pitifully small bed, neatly made.

For a sudden spinning moment I thought I was back inside the organ chamber at St. Tancred’s—the chamber where Mr. Collicutt had been murdered.

A wooden tea chest, standing on end, served as a desk, and on it was an untidy pile of papers. I climbed over something which might have been a diapason and picked up the top sheet, which was covered with tiny, antlike handwriting—what Daffy would have called “miniscule.”

The Coming-to-light of the 1687 Renatus Harris Organ at Braxhampstead With an Account of its Restoration
, it said. This was underlined twice in red ink, and beneath it was written,
by Crispin Savoy Collicutt, Mus. B., F.R.C.O
.

After that, in black, and in another hand, someone had added the word
Deceased
.

W
HO COULD HAVE DONE
such a thing?

The black word must have been added within the past few days—since the discovery of Mr. Collicutt’s body.

Unless, of course, someone had written it earlier as a warning.

Had Inspector Hewitt seen it? Surely he must have done. But if he had, why had he not taken it away with him as evidence?

I riffled quickly through the pile of pages. I guessed that there were five hundred of them. Yes, here it was—they were numbered. Five hundred and thirteen sheets, each one covered closely with Mr. Collicutt’s microscopic handwriting. He must have been working on this thing since he was a schoolboy in short trousers.