Flavia de Luce 1 - The Sweetness At The Bottom Of The Pie (9 page)

“Just suppose she wanted to see you but her father wouldn't allow it. Suppose one of her younger sisters could help.”

Already his ruddy crop was subsiding. I thought he was going to cry.

“Do you mean it, Flavia?”

“Honest Injun,” I said.

Ned stuck out his calloused fingers and gave my hand a surprisingly gentle shake. It was like shaking hands with a pineapple.

“Fingers of Friendship,” he said, whatever that meant.

Fingers of Friendship? Had I just been given the secret handshake of some rustic brotherhood that met in moonlit churchyards and hidden copses? Was I now inducted, and would I be expected to take part in unspeakably bloody midnight rituals in the hedgerows? It seemed like an interesting possibility.

Ned was grinning at me like the skull on a Jolly Roger. I took the upper hand.

“Listen,” I told him. “Lesson Number One: Don't leave dead birds on the loved one's doorstep. It's something that only a courting cat would do.”

Ned looked blank.

“I've left flowers once or twice, hopin' she'd notice,” he said. This was news to me; Ophelia must have whisked the bouquets off to her boudoir for mooning purposes before anyone else in the household spotted them.

“But dead birds? Never. You know me, Flavia. I wouldn't do a thing like that.”

When I stopped to think about it for a moment, I knew that he was right; I did and he wouldn't. My next question, though, turned out to be sheer luck.

“Does Mary Stoker know you're sweet on Ophelia?” It was a phrase I had picked up at the cinema from some American film—Meet Me in St. Louis or Little Women—and this was the first opportunity I'd ever had to make use of it. Like Daphne, I remembered words, but without an account book to jot them down.

“What's Mary have to do with it? She's Tully's daughter, and there's an end of it.”

“Come off it, Ned,” I said. “I saw that kiss this morning as I was. passing by.”

“She needed a little comfort. 'Twas no more than that.”

“Because of whoever it was that crept up behind her?”

Ned leapt to his feet. “Damn you!” he said. “She don't want that getting out.”

“As she was changing the sheets?”

“You're a devil, Flavia de Luce!” Ned roared. “Get away from me! Go home!”

“Tell her, Ned,” said a quiet voice, and I turned to see Mary at the door.

She stood with one hand flat on the doorpost, the other clutching her blouse at the neck like Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Close up, I could see that she had raw red hands and a decided squint.

“Tell her,” she repeated. “It can't make any difference to you now, can it?”

I detected instantly that she didn't like me. It's a fact of life that a girl can tell in a flash if another girl likes her. Feely says that there is a broken telephone connection between men and women, and we can never know which of us rang off. With a boy you never know whether he's smitten or gagging, but with a girl you can tell in the first three seconds. Between girls there is a silent and unending flow of invisible signals, like the high-frequency wireless messages between the shore and the ships at sea, and this secret flow of dots and dashes was signaling that Mary detested me.

“Go on, tell her!” Mary shouted.

Ned swallowed hard and opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

“You're Flavia de Luce, aren't you?” she said. “One of that lot from up at Buckshaw.” She flung it at me like a pie in the face.

I nodded dumbly, as if I were some inbred ingrate from the squire's estate who needed coddling. Better to play along, I thought.

“Come with me,” Mary said, beckoning. “Be quick about it—and keep quiet.”

I followed her into a dark stone larder, and then into an enclosed wooden staircase that spiraled precipitously up to the floor above. At the top, we stepped out into what must once have been a linen press: a tall square cupboard now filled with shelves of cleaning chemicals, soaps, and waxes. In the corner, mops and brooms leaned in disarray amid an overwhelming smell of carbolic disinfectant.

“Shhh!” she said, giving my arm a vicious squeeze. Heavy footsteps were approaching, coming up the same staircase we had just ascended. We pressed back into a corner, taking care not to knock over the mops.

“That'll be the bloody day, sir, when a Cotswold horse takes the bloody purse! If I was you I'd take a flutter on Seastar, and be damned to any tips you get from some bloody skite in London what don't know his ark from his halo!”

It was Tully, exchanging confidential turf tips with someone at a volume loud enough to be heard at Epsom Downs. Another voice muttered something that ended in “Haw-haw!” as the sound of their footsteps faded away in the warren of paneled passages.

“No, this way,” Mary hissed, tugging at my arm. We slipped round the corner and into a narrow corridor. She pulled a set of keys from her pocket and quietly unlocked the last door on the left. We stepped inside.

We were in a room which had not likely changed since Queen Elizabeth visited Bishop's Lacey in 1592 on one of her summer progresses. My first impressions were of a timbered ceiling, plastered panels, a tiny window with leaded panes standing ajar for air, and broad floorboards that rose and fell like the ocean swell.

Against one wall was a chipped wooden table with an ABC Railway Guide (October 1946) shoved under one leg to keep it from teetering. On the tabletop were an unmatched Staffordshire pitcher and ewer in pink and cream, a comb, a brush, and a small black leather case. In a corner near the open window stood a single piece of luggage: a cheap-looking steamer trunk of vulcanized fiber, plastered over with colored stickers. Beside it was a straight chair with a missing spindle. Across the room stood a wooden wardrobe of jumble-sale quality. And the bed.

“This is it,” Mary said. As she locked us in, I turned to look at her closely for the first time. In the gray dishwater light from the sooty windowpanes, she looked older, harder, and more brittle than the raw-handed girl I had just seen in the bright sunlight of the inn yard.

“I expect you've never been in a room this small, have you?” she said scornfully. “You lot at Buckshaw fancy the odd visit to Bedlam, don't you? See the loonies—see how we live in our cages. Throw us a biscuit.”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” I said.

Mary turned her face towards me so that I was receiving the full intensity of her glare. “That sister of yours—that Ophelia—sent you with a message for Ned, and don't tell me she didn't. She fancies I'm some kind of slattern, and I'm not.”

And in that instant I decided that I liked Mary, even if she didn't like me. Anyone who knew the word slattern was worth cultivating as a friend.

“Listen,” I said, “there's no message. What I said to Ned was strictly for cover. You have to help me, Mary. I know you will. There's been a murder at Buckshaw.”

There! I'd said it!

“. and nobody knows it yet but you and me—except the murderer, of course.”

She looked at me for no more than three seconds and then she asked, “Who is it that's dead, then?”

"I don't know. That's why I'm here. But it makes sense to me that if someone turns up dead in the cucumbers, and even the police don't know who he is, the most likely place he'd be staying in the neighborhood—if he was staying in the neighborhood—is right here at the Thirteen Drakes. Can you bring me the register?”

“Don't need to bring it to you,” Mary said. “There's only one guest right now, and that's Mr. Sanders.”

The more I talked to Mary the more I liked her.

“And this here's his room,” she added helpfully.

“Where is he from?” I asked.

Her face clouded. “I don't know, rightly.”

“Has he ever stopped here before?”

“Not so far as I know.”

“Then I need to have a look at the register. Please, Mary! Please! It's important! The police will soon be here, and then it will be too late.”

“I'll try.” she said, and, unlocking the door, slipped from the room.

As soon as she was gone, I pulled open the door of the wardrobe. Except for a pair of wooden coat hangers it was empty, and I turned my attention to the steamer trunk, which was covered over with stickers like barnacles clinging to the hull of a ship. These colorful crustaceans, however, had names: Paris, Rome, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Stavanger—and more.

I tried the hasp, and to my surprise, it popped open. It was unlocked! The two halves, hinged in the middle, swung easily apart, and I found myself face-to-face with Mr. Sanders's wardrobe: a blue serge suit, two shirts, a pair of brown Oxfords (with blue serge? Even I knew better than that!), and a floppy, theatrical hat that reminded me of photographs I'd seen of G. K. Chesterton in the Radio Times.

I pulled out the drawers of the trunk, taking care not to disturb their contents: a pair of hairbrushes (imitation tortoiseshell), a razor (Valet AutoStrop), a tube of shaving cream (Morning Pride Brushless), a toothbrush, toothpaste (thymol: “specially recommended to arrest the germs of dental decay”), nail clippers, a straight comb (xylonite), and a pair of square cuff links (Whitby jet, with a pair of initials inset in silver: HB).

HB? Wasn't this Mr. Sanders's room? What could HB stand for?

The door flew open and a voice hissed, “What are you doing?”

I nearly flew out of my skin. It was Mary.

“I couldn't get the register. Dad was—Flavia! You can't go through a guest's luggage like that! You'll get both of us in a pickle. Stop it.”

“Right-ho,” I said as I finished rifling the pockets of the suit. They were empty anyway. “When was the last time you saw Mr. Sanders?”

“Yesterday. Here. At noon.”

“Here? In this room?”

She gulped, and nodded, looking away. “I was changing his sheets when he come up behind me and grabbed me. Put a hand over my mouth so's I shouldn't scream. Good job Dad called from the yard just then. Rattled him a bit, it did. Don't think I didn't get in a good kick or two. Him and his filthy paws! I'd have scratched his eyes out if I'd had half the chance.”

She looked at me as if she'd said too much; as if a great social gulf had suddenly opened up between us.

“I'd have scratched his eyes out and sucked the holes,” I said.

Her eyes widened in horror.

“John Marston,” I told her. "The Dutch Courtesan, 1604.”

There was a pause of approximately two hundred years. Then Mary began to giggle.

“Ooh, you are a one!” she said.

The gap had been bridged.

“Act Two,” I added.

Seconds later the two of us were doubled over, hands covering our mouths, hopping about the room, snorting in unison like a pair of trained seals.

“Feely once read it to us under the blankets with a torch,” I said, and for some reason, this struck both of us as being even more hilarious, and off we went again until we were nearly paralyzed from laughter.

Mary threw her arms round me and gave me a crushing hug. “You're a corker, Flavia,” she said. “Really you are. Come here—take a gander at this.”

She went to the table, picked up the black leather case, unfastened the strap, and lifted the lid. Nestled inside were two rows of six little glass vials, twelve in all. Eleven were filled with a liquid of a yellowish tinge; the twelfth was a quarter full. Between the rows of vials was a half-round indentation, as if some tubular object were missing.

“What do you make of it?” she whispered, as Tully's voice thundered vaguely in the distance. “Poisons, you think? A regular Dr. Crippen, our Mr. Sanders?”

I uncorked the partially filled bottle and held it to my nose. It smelled as if someone had dropped vinegar on the back of a sticking plaster: an acrid protein smell, like an alcoholic's hair burning in the next room.

“Insulin,” I said. “He's a diabetic.”

Mary gave me a blank look, and I suddenly knew how Archimedes felt when he said “Eureka!” in his bathtub. I grabbed Mary's arm.

“Does Mr. Sanders have red hair?” I demanded.

“Red as rhubarb. How did you know?”

She stared at me as if I were Madame Zolanda at the church fête, with a turban, a shawl, and a crystal ball.

“A wizard guess,” I said.

“CRIKEY!” MARY SAID, FISHING UNDER THE TABLE and pulling out a round metal wastepaper basket. “I almost forgot this. Dad'd have my hide for a hammock if he found out I didn't empty this thing. He's always on about germs, Dad is, even though you wouldn't think it to look at him. Good job I remembered before—oh, gawd! Just look at this mess, will you.”

She pulled a wry face and held out the basket at arm's length. I peeked—tentatively—inside. You never know what you're getting into when you stick your nose in other people's rubbish.

The bottom of the wastebasket was covered with chunks and flakes of pastry: no container, just bits flung in, as if whoever had been eating it had had enough. It appeared to be the remains of a pie. As I reached in and extracted a piece of it, Mary made a gacking noise and turned her head away.

“Look at this,” I said. "It's a piece of the crust, see? It's golden brown here, from the oven, with little crinkles of pastry, like decorations on one side. These other bits are from the bottom crust: They're whiter and thinner. Not very flaky, is it?

“Still,” I added, “I'm famished. When you haven't eaten all day, anything looks good.”

I raised the pie and opened my mouth, pretending I was about to gobble it down.

“Flavia!”

I paused with the crumbling cargo halfway to my gaping mouth.

“Huh?”

“Oh, you!” Mary said. “Give it over. I'll chuck it.”

Something told me this was a Bad Idea. Something else told me that the gutted pie was evidence that should be left untouched for Inspector Hewitt and the two sergeants to discover. I actually considered this for a moment.

“Got any paper?” I asked.

Mary shook her head. I opened the wardrobe and, standing on tiptoe, felt along the top shelf with my hand. As I suspected, a sheet of newspaper had been put in place to serve as a makeshift shelf liner. God bless you, Tully Stoker!

Taking care not to break them, I tipped the larger remnants of the pie slowly out onto the Daily Mail and folded it up into a small neat package, which I shoved into my pocket. Mary stood watching me nervously, not saying a word.