The Flavia De Luce Series 1-4 (5 page)

“He was probably poisoned,” I said. “The stranger, I mean.”

“It’s always poison, isn’t it?” Feely said with a toss of her hair. “At least in those lurid yellow detective novels. In this case, he probably made the fatal mistake of eating Mrs. Mullet’s cooking.”

As she pushed away the gooey remains of a coddled egg, something flashed into my mind like a cinder popping out of the grate and onto the hearth, but before I could examine it, my chain of thought was broken.

“Listen to this,” Daphne said, reading aloud. “Fanny Squeers is writing a letter:

“ ‘… my pa is one mask of brooses both blue and green likewise two forms are steepled in his Goar. We were kimpelled to have him carried down into the kitchen where he now lays …

“ ‘… When your nevew that you recommended for a teacher had done this to my pa and jumped upon his body with his feet and also langwedge which I will not pollewt my pen with describing, he assaulted my ma with dreadful violence, dashed her to the earth, and drove her back comb several inches into her head. A very little more and it must have entered her skull. We have a medical certifiket that if it had, the tortershell would have affected the brain.’

“Now listen to this next bit:

“ ‘Me and my brother were then the victims of his feury since which we have suffered very much which leads us to the arrowing belief that we have received some injury in our insides, especially as no marks of violence are visible externally. I am screaming out loud all the time I write—’ ”

It sounded to me like a classic case of cyanide poisoning, but I didn’t much feel like sharing my insight with these two boors.

“ ‘Screaming out loud all the time I write,’ ” Daffy repeated. “Imagine!”

“I know the feeling,” I said, pushing my plate away, and, leaving my breakfast untouched, I made my way slowly up the east staircase to my laboratory.

Whenever I was upset, I made for my sanctum sanctorum. Here, among the bottles and beakers, I would allow myself to be enveloped by what I thought of as the Spirit of Chemistry. Here, sometimes, I would reenact, step by step, the discoveries of the great chemists. Or I would lift down lovingly from the bookcase a volume from Tar de Luce’s treasured library, such as the English translation of Antoine Lavoisier’s
Elements of Chemistry
, printed in 1790 but whose leaves, even after a hundred and sixty years, were still as crisp as butcher’s paper. How I gloried in the antiquated names just waiting to be plucked from its pages: Butter of Antimony … Flowers of Arsenic.

“Rank poisons,” Lavoisier called them, but I reveled in the recitation of their names like a hog at a spa.

“King’s yellow!” I said aloud, rolling the words round in my mouth—savoring them in spite of their poisonous nature.

“Crystals of Venus! Fuming Liquor of Boyle! Oil of Ants!”

But it wasn’t working this time; my mind kept flying back to Father, thinking over and over about what I had seen and heard. Who was this Twining—“Old Cuppa”—the man Father claimed they had killed? And why had Father not appeared at breakfast? That had me truly worried. Father always insisted that breakfast was “the body’s banquet,” and to the best of my knowledge, there was nothing on earth that would compel him to miss it.

Then, too, I thought of the passage from Dickens that Daphne had read to us: the bruises blue and green. Had Father fought with the stranger and suffered wounds that could not be hidden at the table? Or had he suffered those injuries to the insides described by Fanny Squeers: injuries that left no external marks of violence. Perhaps that was what had happened to the man with the red hair. Which should explain why I had seen no blood. Could Father be a murderer? Again?

My head was spinning. I could think of nothing better to calm it down than the Oxford English Dictionary. I fetched down the volume with the
V
s. What was that word the stranger had breathed in my face? “
Vale
”! That was it.

I flipped the pages: vagabondical … vagrant … vain … here it was:
vale
: Farewell; good-bye; adieu. It was pronounced
val-eh
, and was the second person singular imperative of the Latin verb
valere
, to be well.

What a peculiar thing for a dying man to say to someone he didn’t know.

A sudden racket from the hall interrupted my thoughts. Someone was giving the dinner gong a great old bonging. This huge disk, which looked like a leftover from the opening of a film by J. Arthur Rank, had not been sounded for ages, which could explain why I was so startled by its shattering noise.

I ran out of the laboratory and down the stairs to find an oversized man standing at the gong with the striker still in his hand.

“Coroner,” he said, and I took it he was referring to himself. Although he did not trouble to give his name, I recognized him at once as Dr. Darby, one of the two partners in Bishop’s Lacey’s only medical practice.

Dr. Darby was the spitting image of John Bull: red face, multiple chins, and a stomach that bellied out like a sail full of wind. He was wearing a brown suit with a checked yellow waistcoat, and he carried the traditional doctor’s black bag. If he remembered me as the girl whose hand he had stitched up the year before after the incident with a wayward bit of laboratory glassware, he gave no outward sign but stood there expectantly, like a hound on the scent.

Father was still nowhere in sight, nor was Dogger. I knew that Feely and Daffy would never condescend to respond to a bell (“So utterly Pavlovian,” Feely said), and Mrs. Mullet always kept to her kitchen.

“The police are in the garden,” I told him. “I’ll show you the way.”

As we stepped out into the sunshine, Inspector Hewitt looked up from examining the laces of a black shoe that protruded rather unpleasantly from the cucumbers.

“Morning, Fred,” he said. “Thought you’d best come have a look.”

“Um,” Dr. Darby said. He opened his bag and rummaged inside for a moment before pulling out a white paper bag. He reached into it with two fingers and extracted a single crystal mint, which he popped into his mouth and sucked with noisy relish.

A moment later he had waded into the greenery and was kneeling beside the corpse.

“Anyone we know?” he asked, mumbling a bit round the mint.

“Shouldn’t seem so,” Inspector Hewitt said. “Empty pockets … no identification … reason to believe, though, that he’s recently come from Norway.”

Recently come from Norway? Surely this was a deduction worthy of the great Holmes himself—and I had heard it with my own ears! I was almost ready to forgive the Inspector his earlier rudeness. Almost … but not quite.

“We’ve launched inquiries, ports of call and so forth.”

“Bloody Norwegians!” said Dr. Darby, rising and closing his bag. “Flock over here like birds to a lighthouse, where they expire and leave us to mop up. It isn’t fair, is it?”

“What shall I put down as the time of death?” Inspector Hewitt asked.

“Hard to say. Always is. Well, not always, but often.”

“Give or take?”

“Can’t tell with cyanosis: takes a while to tell if it’s coming or going, you know. Eight to twelve hours, I should say. I’ll be able to tell you more after we’ve had our friend up on the table.”

“And that would make it …?”

Dr. Darby pushed back his cuff and looked at his watch.

“Well, let me see … it’s eight twenty-two now, so that makes it no sooner than about that same hour last evening and no later than, say, midnight.”

Midnight! I must have audibly sucked in air, since both Inspector Hewitt and Dr. Darby turned to look at me. How could I tell them that, just a few hours ago, the stranger from Norway had breathed his last breath into my face?

The solution was an easy one. I took to my heels. I found Dogger trimming the roses in the flower bed under the library window. The air was heavy with their scent: the delicious odor of tea chests from the Orient.

“Father not down yet, Dogger?” I asked.

“Lady Hillingdons are especially fine this year, Miss Flavia,” he said, as if ice wouldn’t melt in his mouth; as if our furtive encounter in the night had never taken place. Very well, I thought, I’ll play his game.

“Especially fine,” I said. “And Father?”

“I don’t think he slept well. I expect he’s having a bit of a lie-in.”

A lie-in? How could he be back in bed when the place was alive with the law?

“How did he take it when you told him about the—you know—in the garden?”

Dogger turned and looked me directly in the eye. “I didn’t tell him, miss.”

He reached out and with a sudden snip of his secateurs, pruned a less-than-perfect bloom. It fell with a plop to the ground, where it lay with its puckered yellow face gazing up at us from the shadows.

We were both of us staring at the beheaded rose, thinking of our next move, when Inspector Hewitt came round the corner of the house.

“Flavia,” he said, “I’d like a word with you.”

“Inside,” he added.

four

“And the person outside to whom you were speaking?” Inspector Hewitt asked.

“Dogger,” I said.

“First name?”

“Flavia,” I said. I couldn’t help myself.

We were sitting on one of the Regency sofas in the Rose Room. The Inspector slapped down his Biro and turned at the waist to face me.

“If you are not already aware of it, Miss de Luce—and I suspect you are—this is a murder investigation. I shall brook no frivolity. A man is dead and it is my duty to discover the why, the when, the how, and the who. And when I have done that, it is my further duty to explain it to the Crown. That means King George the Sixth, and King George the Sixth is not a frivolous man. Do I make myself clear?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “His given name is Arthur: Arthur Dogger.”

“And he’s the gardener here at Buckshaw?”

“He is now, yes.”

The Inspector had opened a black notebook and was taking notes in a microscopic hand.

“Was he not always?”

“He’s a jack-of-all-trades,” I said. “He was our chauffeur until his nerve gave out …”

Even though I looked away, I could still feel the intensity of his detective eye.

“The war,” I said. “He was a prisoner of war. Father felt that … he tried to—”

“I understand,” Inspector Hewitt said, his voice gone suddenly soft. “Dogger’s happiest in the garden.”

“He’s happiest in the garden.”

“You’re a remarkable girl, you know,” he said. “In most cases I should wait to talk to you until a parent was present, but with your father indisposed …”

Indisposed? Oh, of course! I’d nearly forgotten my little lie.

In spite of my momentary look of puzzlement, the Inspector went on: “You mentioned Dogger’s stint as chauffeur. Does your father still keep a motorcar?”

He did, in fact: an old Rolls-Royce Phantom II, which now resided in the coach house. It had actually been Harriet’s, and it had not been driven since the day the news of her death had come to Buckshaw. Furthermore, although Father was not a driver himself, he would permit no one else to touch it.

Consequently, the coachwork of this magnificent old thoroughbred, with its long black bonnet and tall nickel-plated Palladian radiator with intertwined
R
s, had long ago been breached by field mice that had found their way up through the wooden floorboards and nested in its mahogany glove box. Even in its decrepitude, it was sometimes still spoken of as “The Royce,” as people of quality often call these vehicles.

“Only a ploughman would call it a Rolls,” Feely had said once when I’d momentarily forgotten myself in her presence.

Whenever I wanted to be alone in a place where I could count on being undisturbed, I would clamber up into the dim light of Harriet’s dust-covered Roller, where I would sit for hours in the incubator-like heat, surrounded by drooping plush upholstery and cracked, nibbled leather.

At the Inspector’s unexpected question, my mind flew back to a dark, stormy day the previous autumn, a day of pelting rain and a mad torrent of wind. Because the risk of falling branches had made it too dangerous to hazard a walk in the woods above Buckshaw, I had slipped away from the house and fought my way through the gale to the coach house to have a good think. Inside, the Phantom stood glinting dully in the shadows as the storm howled and screamed and beat at the windows like a tribe of hungry banshees. My hand was already on the door handle of the car before I realized there was someone inside it. I nearly leaped out of my skin. But then I realized that it was Father. He was just sitting there with tears running down his face, oblivious to the storm.

For several minutes I had stood perfectly still, afraid to move, scarce daring to breathe. But when Father reached slowly for the door handle, I had to drop silently to my hands like a gymnast and roll underneath the car. From the corner of my eye I saw one of his perfectly polished half-Wellingtons step down from the running board, and as he walked slowly away, I heard something like a shuddering sob escape him. For a long while I lay there staring up at the floorboards of Harriet’s Rolls-Royce.

“Yes,” I said. “There’s an old Phantom in the coach house.”

“And your father doesn’t drive.”

“No.”

“I see.”

The Inspector laid down his Biro and notebook as carefully as if they were made of Venetian glass.

“Flavia,” he said (and I couldn’t help noticing that I was no longer “Miss de Luce”), “I’m going to ask you a very important question. The way in which you answer it is crucial, do you understand?”

I nodded.

“I know that you were the one who reported this … incident. But who was it that first discovered the body?”

My mind went into a tailspin. Would telling the truth incriminate Father? Did the police already know that I had summoned Dogger to the cucumber patch? Obviously not; the Inspector had only just learned Dogger’s identity, so it seemed reasonable to assume they had not yet questioned him. But when they did, how much would he tell them? Which of us should he protect: Father or me? Was there some new test by which they would know that the victim was still alive when I discovered him?