The Flavia De Luce Series 1-4 (15 page)

The willow-tree will twist, and the willow-tree will twine,

O I wish I was in the dear youth’s arms that once had the heart of mine.

The song was called “The Seeds of Love,” although love was not the first thing that came to mind whenever I saw a willow; on the contrary, they always reminded me of Ophelia (Shakespeare’s, not mine) who drowned herself near one.

Except for a handkerchief-sized scrap of grass at one side, Miss Mountjoy’s willow filled the fenced-in yard. Even on the doorstep I could feel the dampness of the place: the tree’s languid branches formed a green bell jar through which little light seemed to penetrate, giving me the odd sensation of being under water. Vivid green mosses made a stone sponge of the doorstep, and water stains stretched their sad black fingers across the face of the orange plaster.

On the door was an oxidized brass knocker with the grinning face of the Lincoln Imp. I lifted it and gave a couple of gentle taps. As I waited, I gazed absently up into the air in case anyone should be peeking out from behind the curtains.

But the dusty lace didn’t stir. It was as if there was no breath of air inside the place.

To the left, a walk cobbled with old, worn bricks led round the side of the house, and after waiting at the door for a minute or two, I followed it.

The back door was almost completely hidden by long tendrils of willow leaves, all of them undulating with a slightly expectant swishing, like a garish green theater curtain about to rise.

I cupped my hands to the glass at one of the tiny windows. If I stood on tiptoe—

“What are you doing here?”

I spun round.

Miss Mountjoy was standing outside the circle of willow branches, looking in. Through the foliage, I could see only vertical stripes of her face, but what I saw made me edgy.

“It’s me, Miss Mountjoy … Flavia,” I said. “I wanted to thank you for helping me at the library.”

The willow branches rustled as Miss Mountjoy stepped inside the cloak of greenery. She was holding a pair of garden shears in one hand and she said nothing. Her eyes, like two mad raisins in her wrinkled face, never left mine.

I shrank back as she stepped onto the walk, blocking my escape.

“I know well enough who you are,” she said. “You’re Flavia Sabina Dolores de Luce—Jacko’s youngest daughter.”

“You know he’s my father?!” I gasped.

“Of course I know, girl. A person of my age knows a great deal.”

Somehow, before I could stop it, the truth popped out of me like a cork from a bottle.

“The ‘Dolores’ was a lie,” I said. “I sometimes fabricate things.”

She took a step towards me.

“Why are you here?” she asked, her voice a harsh whisper.

I quickly plunged my hand into my pocket and fished out the bag of sweets.

“I brought you some acid drops,” I said, “to apologize for my rudeness. I hope you’ll accept them.”

A shrill wheezing sound, which I took to depict a laugh, came out of her.

“Miss Cool’s recommendation, no doubt?”

Like the village idiot in a pantomime, I gave half a dozen quick, bobbing nods.

“I was sorry to hear about the way your uncle—Mr. Twining—died,” I said, and I meant it. “Honestly I was. It doesn’t seem fair.”

“Fair? It certainly was not fair,” she said. “And yet it was not unjust. It was not even wicked. Do you know what it was?”

Of course I knew. I had heard this before, but I was not here to debate her.

“No,” I whispered.

“It was murder,” she said. “It was murder, pure and simple.”

“And who was the murderer?” I asked. Sometimes my own tongue took me by surprise.

A rather vague look floated across Miss Mountjoy’s face like a cloud across the moon, as if she had spent a lifetime preparing for the part and then, center stage in the spotlight, had forgotten her lines.

“Those boys,” she said at last. “Those loathsome, detestable boys. I shall never forget them; not for all their apple cheeks and schoolboy innocence.”

“One of those boys is my father,” I said quietly.

Her eyes were somewhere else in time. Only slowly did they return to the present to focus upon me.

“Yes,” she said. “Laurence de Luce. Jacko. Your father was called Jacko. A schoolboy sobriquet, and yet even the coroner called him that. Jacko. He said it ever so softly at the inquest, almost caressingly—as if all the court were in thrall with the name.”

“My father gave evidence at the inquest?”

“Of course he testified—as did the other boys. It was the sort of thing that was done in those days. He denied everything, of course, all responsibility. A valuable postage stamp had been stolen from the headmaster’s collection, and it was all, ‘Oh no, sir, it wasn’t me, sir!’ As if the stamp had magically sprouted grubby little fingers and filched itself!”

I was about to tell her “My father is not a thief, nor is he a liar,” when suddenly I knew that nothing I could say would ever change this ancient mind. I decided to take the offensive.

“Why did you walk out of church this morning?” I asked.

Miss Mountjoy recoiled as if I had thrown a glass of water in her face. “You don’t mince words, do you?”

“No,” I said. “It had something to do with the Vicar’s praying for the stranger in our midst, didn’t it? The man whose body I found in the garden at Buckshaw.”

She hissed through her teeth like a teakettle. “
You
found the body? You?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Then tell me this—did it have red hair?” She closed her eyes, and kept them closed awaiting my reply.

“Yes,” I said. “It had red hair.”

“For what we have received may the Lord make us truly thankful,” she breathed, before opening her eyes again. It seemed to me not only a peculiar response, but somehow an unchristian one.

“I don’t understand,” I said. And I didn’t.

“I recognized him at once,” she said. “Even after all these years, I knew who he was as soon as I saw that shock of red hair walking out of the Thirteen Drakes. If that hadn’t been enough, his swagger, that overweening cockiness, those cold blue eyes—any one of those things—would have told me that Horace Bonepenny had come back to Bishop’s Lacey.”

I had the feeling that we were slipping into deeper waters than I knew.

“Perhaps now you can see why I could not take part in any prayer for the repose of that boy’s—that man’s—rancid soul.”

She reached out and took the bag of acid drops from my hand, popping one into her mouth and pocketing the rest.

“On the contrary,” she continued, “I pray that he is, at this very moment, being basted in hell.”

And with that, she walked into her dank Willow Villa and slammed the door.

Who on earth was Horace Bonepenny? And what had brought him back to Bishop’s Lacey?

I could think of only one person who might be made to tell me.

As I rode up the avenue of chestnuts to Buckshaw, I could see that the blue Vauxhall was no longer at the door. Inspector Hewitt and his men had gone.

I was wheeling Gladys round to the back of the house when I heard a metallic tapping coming from the greenhouse. I moved towards the door and looked inside. It was Dogger.

He was sitting on an overturned pail, striking the thing with a trowel.

Clang … clang … clang … clang. In the way the bell of St. Tancred’s tolls for the funeral of some ancient in Bishop’s Lacey, it went on and on, as if measuring the strokes of a life. Clang … clang … clang … clang …

His back was to the door, and it was obvious that he did not see me.

I crept away towards the kitchen door where I made a great and noisy ado by dropping Gladys with a loud clatter on the stone doorstep. (“Sorry, Gladys,” I whispered.)

“Damn and blast!” I said, loudly enough to be heard in the greenhouse. I pretended to spot him there behind the glass.

“Oh, hullo, Dogger,” I said cheerily. “Just the person I was looking for.”

He did not turn immediately, and I pretended to be scraping a bit of clay from the sole of my shoe until he recovered himself.

“Miss Flavia,” he said slowly. “Everyone has been looking for you.”

“Well, here I am,” I said. Best to take over the conversation until Dogger was fully back on the rails.

“I was talking to someone in the village who told me about somebody I thought you might be able to tell me about.”

Dogger managed the ghost of a smile.

“I know I’m not putting that in the best way, but—”

“I know what you mean,” he said.

“Horace Bonepenny,” I blurted out. “Who is Horace Bonepenny?”

At my words, Dogger began to twitch like an experimental frog whose spinal cord has been hooked up to a galvanic battery. He licked his lips and wiped madly at his mouth with a pocket handkerchief. I could see that his eyes were beginning to dim, winking out much as the stars do just before sunrise. At the same time, he was making a great effort to pull himself together, though with little success.

“Never mind, Dogger,” I said. “It doesn’t matter. Forget it.”

He tried to get to his feet, but was unable to lift himself from the overturned pail.

“Miss Flavia,” he said, “there are questions which need to be asked, and there are questions which need not to be asked.”

So there it was again: so like a law, these words that fell from Dogger’s lips as naturally, and with as much finality, as if Isaiah himself had spoken them.

But those few words seemed utterly to have exhausted him, and with a loud sigh he covered his face with his hands. I wanted nothing more at that moment than to throw my arms round him and hug him, but I knew that he wasn’t up to it. Instead, I settled for putting my hand on his shoulder, realizing even as I did so that the gesture was of greater comfort to me than it was to him.

“I’ll go and get Father,” I said. “We’ll help you to your room.”

Dogger turned his face slowly round towards me, a chalky white mask of tragedy. The words came out of him like stone grating upon stone.

“They’ve taken him away, Miss Flavia. The police have taken him away.”

twelve

Feely and Daffy were sitting on a flowered divan in the drawing room, wrapped in one another’s arms and wailing like air-raid sirens. I had taken a few steps into the room to join in with them before Ophelia spotted me.

“Where have you been, you little beast?” she hissed, springing up and coming at me like a wildcat, her eyes swollen and as red as cycle reflectors. “Everyone’s been searching for you. We thought you’d drowned. Oh! How I prayed you had!”

Welcome home, Flave, I thought.

“Father’s been arrested,” Daffy said matter-of-factly. “They’ve taken him away.”

“Where?” I asked.

“How should we know?” Ophelia spat contemptuously. “Wherever they take people who have been arrested, I expect. Where have you been?”

“Bishop’s Lacey or Hinley?”

“What do you mean? Talk sense, you little fool.”

“Bishop’s Lacey or Hinley,” I repeated. “There’s only a one-room police station at Bishop’s Lacey, so I don’t expect he’s been taken there. The County Constabulary is at Hinley. So they’ve likely taken him to Hinley.”

“They’ll charge him with murder,” Ophelia said, “and then he’ll be hanged!” She burst into tears again and turned away. For a moment I almost felt sorry for her.

I came out of the drawing room and into the hallway and saw Dogger halfway up the west staircase, plodding slowly, step by step, like a condemned man ascending the steps of the scaffold.

Now was my chance!

I waited until he was out of sight at the top of the stairs, then slipped into Father’s study and quietly locked the door behind me. It was the first time in my life I had ever been alone in the room.

One full wall was given over to Father’s stamp albums, fat leather volumes whose colors indicated the reign of each monarch: black for Queen Victoria, red for Edward the Seventh, green for George the Fifth, and blue for our present monarch, George the Sixth. I remembered that a slim scarlet volume tucked between the green book and the blue contained only a few items—one each of the nine known variations of the four stamps issued bearing the head of Edward the Eighth before he decamped with that American woman.

I knew that Father derived endless pleasure from the countless and minute variations in his bits of confetti, but I did not know the details. Only when he became excited enough over some new tidbit of trivia in the latest issue of
The London Philatelist
to rhapsodize aloud at breakfast would we learn a little more about his happy, insulated world. Apart from those rare occasions, we were all of us, my sisters and me, babes in the wood when it came to postage stamps, while Father puttered on, mounting bits of colored paper with more fearsome relish than some men mount the heads of stags and tigers.

On the wall opposite the books stood a Jacobean sideboard whose top surface and drawers overflowed with what seemed to be no end of philatelic supplies: stamp hinges, perforation gauges, enameled trays for soaking, bottles of fluid for revealing watermarks, gum erasers, stock envelopes, page reinforcements, stamp tweezers, and a hooded ultraviolet lamp.

At the end of the room, in front of the French doors that opened onto the terrace, was Father’s desk: a partner’s desk the size of a playing field, which might once have seen service in Scrooge and Marley’s counting house. I knew at once that its drawers would be locked—and I was right.

Where, I wondered, would Father hide a stamp in a room full of stamps? There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that he
had
hidden it—as I would have done. Father and I shared a passion for privacy, and I realized he would never be so foolish as to put it in an obvious place.

Rather than look on top of things, or inside things, I lay flat on the floor like a mechanic inspecting a motorcar’s undercarriage, and slid round the room on my back examining the underside of things. I looked at the bottoms of the desk, the table, the wastepaper basket, and Father’s Windsor chair. I looked under the Turkey carpet and behind the curtains. I looked at the back of the clock and turned over the prints on the wall.