The Flavia De Luce Series 1-4 (38 page)

Inspector Hewitt stared at me for what seemed several aeons.

“All right,” he said at last, “let’s have a dekko.”

“At what?” I said, putting on my mask of injured innocence.

“Whatever you’ve done. Let’s have a look at it.”

“But I haven’t done anything,” I said. “I—”

“Don’t play me for a fool, Flavia. No one who has had the pleasure of your acquaintance would ever believe for an instant that you haven’t done your homework.”

I grinned sheepishly. “It’s over here,” I said, moving towards a corner table upon which stood a glass tank shrouded with a damp tea towel.

I whisked the cloth away.

“Good Lord!” the Inspector said. “What in the name of—?”

He fairly gaped at the pinkish gray object that floated serenely in the tank.

“It’s a nice bit of brain,” I said. “I pinched it from the larder. Mrs. Mullet bought it at Carnforth’s yesterday for supper tonight. She’s going to be furious.”

“And you’ve …?” he said, flapping his hand.

“Yes, that’s right. I’ve injected it with two and a half cubic centimeters of carbon tetrachloride. That’s how much Bonepenny’s syringe held.

“The average human brain weighs three pounds,” I went on, “and that of the male perhaps a little more. I’ve cut an extra five ounces to allow for it.”

“How did you find
that
out?” the Inspector asked.

“It’s in one of the volumes of Arthur Mee’s books.
The Children’s Encyclopaedia
again, I think.”

“And you’ve tested this … brain, for the presence of carbon tetrachloride?”

“Yes,” I said, “but not until fifteen hours after I injected it. I judged that’s how much time elapsed between the stuff being shot into Bonepenny’s brain and the autopsy.”

“And?”

“Still easily detectable,” I said. “Child’s play. Of course I used
p-Aminodimethylaniline
. That’s rather a new test, but an elegant one. It was written up in
The Analyst
about five years ago. Pull up a stool and I’ll show you.”

“This isn’t going to work, you know.” Inspector Hewitt chuckled.

“Not work?” I said. “Of course it will work. I’ve already done it once.”

“I mean you’re not going to dazzle me with lab work and skate conveniently round the stamp. After all, that’s what this whole thing is about, isn’t it?”

He had me cornered. I had planned on saying nothing about the Ulster Avenger and then quietly handing it over to Father. Who would ever be the wiser?

“Look, I know you have it,” he said. “We paid a visit to Dr. Kissing at Rook’s End.”

I tried to look unconvinced.

“And Bob Stanley, your Mr. Pemberton, has told us that you stole it from him.”

Stole it from him? The idea! What cheek!

“It belongs to the King,” I protested. “Bonepenny nicked it from an exhibition in London.”

“Well, whomever it belongs to, it’s stolen property, and my duty is to see that it’s returned. All I need to know is how it came into your possession.”

Drat the man! I could dodge it no longer. I was going to have to confess my trespasses at the Thirteen Drakes.

“Let’s make a deal,” I said.

Inspector Hewitt burst out laughing. “There are times, Miss de Luce,” he said, “when you deserve a brass medal. And there are other times you deserve to be sent to your room with bread and water.”

“And which one of those times is this?” I asked.

Hooo! Better watch your step, Flave.

He waggled his fingers at me. “I’m listening,” he said.

“Well, I’ve been thinking,” I told him. “Father’s life hasn’t been exactly pleasant lately. In the first place, you arrive at Buckshaw and before we know it you’ve charged him with murder.”

“Hang on … hang on,” the Inspector said. “We’ve already been through this. He was charged with murder because he confessed to it.”

He did? This was something new.

“And no sooner had he done so, than along came Flavia. I had more confessions walking in the door than Our Lady of Lourdes on a Saturday night.”

“I was just trying to protect him,” I said. “At that point, I thought he might have done it.”

“And whom was
he
trying to protect?” Inspector Hewitt asked, watching me carefully.

The answer, of course, was Dogger. That was what Father meant when he said “I feared as much” after I told him that Dogger, too, had overheard the scene in his study with Horace Bonepenny.

Father thought Dogger had killed the man; that much was clear. But why? Would Dogger have done it out of loyalty—or during one of his peculiar turns?

No—best to leave Dogger out of this. It was the least I could do.

“Probably me,” I lied. “Father thought I had killed Bonepenny. After all, wasn’t I the one who was found, so to speak, at the scene of the crime? He was trying to protect
me
.”

“Do you really believe that?” the Inspector asked.

“It would be lovely to think so,” I said.

“I’m sure he was,” the Inspector said. “I’m quite sure he was. Now then, back to the stamp. I haven’t forgotten about it, you know.”

“Well, as I was saying, I’d like to do something for Father; something that will make him happy, even for a few hours. I’d like to give him the Ulster Avenger, even if it’s only for a day or two. Let me do that, and I’ll tell you everything I know. I promise.”

The Inspector strolled over to the bookcase, fetched down a bound volume of the
Proceedings of the Chemical Society
for 1907, and blew a cloud of dust from the top of the spine. He leafed idly through its pages, as if looking for what to say next.

“You know,” he said, “there is nothing my wife, Antigone, detests more than shopping. She told me once that she’d rather have a tooth filled than spend half an hour shopping for a leg of mutton. But shop she must, like it or not. It’s her fate, she says. To dull the experience, she sometimes buys a little yellow booklet called
You and Your Stars.

“I have to admit that up until now I’ve scoffed at some of the things she’s read out to me at breakfast, but this morning my horoscope said, and I quote, ‘Your patience will be tried to the utmost.’ Do you suppose I could have been misjudging these things, Flavia?”

“Please!” I said, giving the word a gimlet twist.

“Twenty-four hours,” he said, “and not a minute more.”

And suddenly it all came gushing out, and I found myself babbling on about the dead jack snipe, Mrs. Mullet’s really quite innocent (although inedible) custard pie, my rifling of Bonepenny’s room at the inn, my finding of the stamps, my visits to Miss Mountjoy and Dr. Kissing, my encounters with Pemberton at the Folly and in the churchyard, and my captivity in the Pit Shed.

The only part I left out was the bit about my poisoning Feely’s lipstick with an extract of poison ivy. Why confuse the Inspector with unnecessary details?

As I spoke, he made an occasional scribble in a little black notebook, whose pages, I noticed, were filled with arrows and cryptic signs that might have been inspired by an alchemical formulary of the Middle Ages.

“Am I in that?” I asked, pointing.

“You are,” he said.

“May I have a look? Just a peek?”

Inspector Hewitt flipped the notebook shut. “No,” he said. “It’s a confidential police document.”

“Do you actually spell out my name, or am I represented by one of those symbols?”

“You have your very own symbol,” he said, shoving the book into his pocket. “Well, it’s time I was getting along.”

He stuck out a hand and gave me a firm handshake. “Goodbye, Flavia,” he said. “It’s been … something of an experience.”

He went to the door and opened it.

“Inspector …”

He stopped and turned.

“What is it? My symbol, I mean.”

“It’s a
P
,” he said. “Capital
P
.”

“A
P
?” I asked, surprised. “What does
P
stand for?”

“Ah,” he said, “that’s best left to the imagination.”

Daffy was in the drawing room, sprawled full-length on the carpet, reading
The Prisoner of Zenda
.

“Are you aware that you move your lips when you read?” I asked.

She ignored me. I decided to risk my life.

“Speaking of lips,” I said, “where’s Feely?”

“At the doctor’s,” she said. “She had some kind of allergic outbreak. Something she came in contact with.”

Aha! My experiment had succeeded brilliantly! No one would ever know. As soon as I had a moment to myself, I’d record it in my notebook:

Tuesday, 6th of June 1950, 1:20
P.M.
Success! Outcome as postulated. Justice is served.

I let out a quiet snort. Daffy must have heard it, for she rolled over and crossed her legs.

“Don’t think for a moment you’ve got away with it,” she said quietly.

“Huh?” I said. Innocent puzzlement was my specialty.

“What witch’s brew did you put in her lipstick?”

“I haven’t the faintest what you’re talking about,” I said.

“Have a peek at yourself in the looking-glass,” Daffy said. “Watch you don’t break it.”

I turned and went slowly to the chimneypiece where a cloudy leftover from the Regency period hung sullenly reflecting the room.

I bent closer, peering at my image. At first I saw nothing other than my usual brilliant self, my violet eyes, my pale complexion: but as I stared, I began to notice more details in the ravaged mercury reflection.

There was a splotch on my neck. An angry red splotch! Where Feely had kissed me!

I let out a shriek of anguish.

“Feely said that before she’d been in the pit five seconds she’d paid you back in full.”

Even before Daffy rolled over and went back to her stupid sword story, I had come up with a plan.

Once, when I was about nine, I had kept a diary about what it was like to be a de Luce, or at least what it was like to be this particular de Luce. I thought a great deal about how I felt and finally came to the conclusion that being Flavia de Luce was like being a sublimate: like the black crystal residue that is left on the cold glass of a test tube by the violet fumes of iodine. At the time, I thought it the perfect description, and nothing has happened over the past two years to change my mind.

As I have said, there is something lacking in the de Luces: some chemical bond, or lack of it, that ties their tongues whenever they are threatened by affection. It is as unlikely that one de Luce would ever tell another that she loved her as it is that one peak in the Himalayas would bend over and whisper sweet nothings to an adjacent crag.

This point was proven when Feely stole my diary, pried open the brass lock with a can opener from the kitchen, and read aloud from it while standing at the top of the great staircase dressed in clothing she had stolen from a neighbor’s scarecrow.

These thoughts were in my mind as I approached the door of Father’s study. I paused, unsure of myself. Did I really want to do this?

I knocked uncertainly on the door. There was a long silence before Father’s voice said, “Come.”

I twisted the knob and stepped into the room. At a table by the window, Father looked up for a moment from his magnifying lens, and then went on with his examination of a magenta stamp.

“May I speak?” I asked, aware, even as I said it, that it was an odd thing to be saying, and yet it seemed precisely the right choice of words.

Father put down the glass, removed his spectacles, and rubbed his eyes. He looked tired.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out the piece of blue writing paper into which I had folded the Ulster Avenger. I stepped forward like a supplicant, put the paper on his desk, and stepped back again.

Father opened it.

“Good Lord!” he said. “It’s AA.”

He put his spectacles back on and picked up his jeweler’s loupe to peer at the stamp.

Now, I thought, comes my reward. I found myself focused on his lips, waiting for them to move.

“Where did you get this?” he said at last, in that soft voice of his that fixes its hearer like a butterfly on a pin.

“I found it,” I said.

Father’s gaze was military—unrelenting.

“Bonepenny must have dropped it,” I said. “It’s for you.”

Father studied my face the way an astronomer studies a supernova.

“This is very decent of you, Flavia,” he said at last, with some great effort.

And he handed me the Ulster Avenger.

“You must return it at once to its rightful owner.”

“King George?”

Father nodded, somewhat sadly, I thought. “I don’t know how you came to have this in your possession and I don’t want to know. You’ve come this far on your own and now you must see it through.”

“Inspector Hewitt wants me to hand it over to him.”

Father shook his head. “Most kind of him,” he said, “but also most official. No, Flavia, old AA here has been through many hands in its day, a few of them high and many low. You must see to it that your hands are the most worthy of them all.”

“But how does one go about writing to the King?”

“I’m sure you’ll find a way,” Father said. “Please close the door on your way out.”

As if to cover up the past, Dogger was shoveling muck from a wheelbarrow into the cucumber bed.

“Miss Flavia,” he said, removing his hat and wiping his brow on his shirtsleeve.

“How should one address a letter to the King?” I asked.

Dogger leaned his shovel carefully against the greenhouse.

“Theoretically, or in actual practice?”

“In actual practice.”

“Hmm,” he said. “I think I should look it up somewhere.”

“Hold on,” I said. “Mrs. Mullet’s
Inquire Within Upon Everything
. She keeps it in the pantry.”

“She’s shopping in the village,” Dogger said. “If we’re quick about it, we may well escape with our lives.”

A minute later we were huddled in the pantry.

“Here it is,” I said excitedly, as the book fell open in my hands. “But wait—this was published sixty years ago. Would it still be correct?”