As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (30 page)

The inspector and Sergeant LaBelle were standing just inside the door. They had not removed their hats, so they didn’t intend to stay. Facing them was Miss Fawlthorne, and beside her, stiff as a marble statue, was Mrs. Bannerman.

The two women had obviously been awaiting the police, since they had opened the front door at once.

The inspector stepped forward and said something in a low voice, which I could not quite catch, and then Miss Fawlthorne opened the door for the others to step outside.

Not wanting to miss the least detail, I tiptoed back to my room as quickly as possible without giving myself away, and flew to the window.

Inspector Gravenhurst, with a firm grip on Mrs. Bannerman’s elbow, was easing her into the backseat of the car.

In spite of the outward appearance of manners, I knew
that Inspector Gravenhurst was no Prince Charming, and Mrs. Bannerman no Cinderella.

It was no candlelight ball they were off to in a pumpkin coach, but rather a cold car ride to some dank, sour cell in a draughty police station.

Mrs. Bannerman was under arrest.

I
FELT AS IF
my heart had been shot down in flames and crashed into the sea. Primarily, of course, for poor Mrs. Bannerman, but also, I must admit, for my own lost chances.

It was entirely my fault. I should have taken the opportunity to question her earlier about all those goings-on at Miss Bodycote’s in years past. She had certainly been there long enough to know where all—or at least most—of the bodies were buried, if I may put it in such a coarse way.

Those early morning hours in the chemistry laboratory before the academy was awake had allowed us to form bonds that could never have developed in a classroom or on the playing field.

Squandered
, I thought.
Utterly wasted
.

Without putting myself in even more of a jam than I was in already, there was no way of questioning students or faculty.

But that had never stopped Flavia de Luce before.

“Trust no one,” Gremly had typed out on the Morse code sender. And Miss Fawlthorne had said the same—at least before she had contradicted herself.

Gremly, at least, was a member of the Nide, or so she had claimed. It was she, also, who had tipped me off about the first Mrs. Rainsmith. But she had distanced herself from me on the bus, and I knew, even without being told, that she did not want us to be seen together.

Who, then,
could
I trust?

Scarlett? I had asked her the cryptic pheasant question, but she, like Gremly, had recoiled with something that could only be fear.

Inspector Gravenhurst, I supposed, but it seemed unlikely he would share the results of his confidential investigations with a mere schoolgirl such as me.

Wallace Scroop came to mind, but I wrote him off almost immediately. He had spilled the beans about the ancient skull, but nothing more. If the truth be told, I had given him more information than he had given me—even if mine
had
turned out to be untrue. If Clarissa Brazenose, Wentworth, and Le Marchand were still alive, the information I had fed him was no more than a load of old horse hockey. I wondered if he knew?

At any rate, Wallace wouldn’t likely be in much of a mood to share further confidences.

Outside, it had begun to rain: not a downpour, but a cold drizzle which almost at once, due to condensation and the dropping temperature, began to fog the window.

I breathed heavily upon the glass, obscuring my view of
the street, and creating a blank canvas upon which I could draw a whole new world with my forefinger.

I did it without even thinking: It came from somewhere deep inside.

Here was Bishop’s Lacey, and here, St. Tancred’s, with its churchyard. I sketched in a couple of little tombstones with my fingernail. Over here was the High Street, and Cow Lane, and Cobbler’s Lane, and Mrs. Mullet’s cottage.

Lord, how I missed her!

A warm tear ran down my cheek, matching to perfection a racing raindrop on the outside of the cold glass.

Here was her picket fence, and here her old rosebushes, which Alf kept trimmed to military standards. I almost began to sob as I etched in the clothesline, with someone’s shirts—Father’s, I realized with a shock—flapping wildly, sadly, in the fresh English breeze.

Laundry! Of course! What a fool I had been! I felt a stupid grin crawling like a fly across my face.

I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand and the wet window with my palm. No point in leaving clues behind, even if they
were
drawn in dampness.

Who was it—Daffy would know—that wanted “Here Lies One Whose Name Is Writ in Water” carved on his tombstone? Keats? Yeats?

I couldn’t remember—which was precisely what he wanted, wasn’t it?

It was Monday morning: washing day. The laundry would be opening early and I would be there—with bells on!

* * *

I let myself in and locked the door. In the early morning darkness, the laundry clanked and groaned as if it were a sleeping beast.

Kelly must have turned up late last night, or earlier this morning, to stoke the boilers, which were now hissing like a basket of angry asps. Already, the heat was almost unbearable. By midday, it would be killing.

I took the note I had written and placed it dead center on the table where Marge worked. She could hardly miss it.

It had caused me a considerable amount of thought and a considerable amount of blood. I hoped it was worth it.

Guided by the beacons of glowing pilot lights, I felt my way in the near darkness round the back of the main boiler to the ladder I had spotted on my earlier visits. Putting one hand on each rail and a foot on the bottom rung, I hauled myself up and began to climb.

A false dawn broke as I neared the frosted window at the top of the wall, where the sickly orange glow of a yard light seeped in among the panting pipes. I inhaled the acrid smell of hot steam.

At the top of the ladder I stepped off onto a walkway of perforated metal which spanned the room behind and above the boilers. Great valves—some painted red—sang away to themselves, like colorful barnacles on the hulk of a sunken liner.

An enormous duct, wrapped like King Tut in some kind of insulating material (asbestos, I hoped—otherwise it would be too hot) ran in an “L” shape down and across the laundry. I hauled myself cautiously up onto it, creeping
wormlike along its length until I was directly above Marge’s worktable.

From this “coign of vantage” (as Shakespeare would have called it) I could not possibly be seen. I was tucked away, safely out of sight, high above my enemies like one of the swallows in the battlements of Macbeth’s castle.

And here I would nest.

Daffy would be proud of me.

I tucked myself in and waited. The warm humidity and the gentle hissing of the steam duct made it seem as if I were a baby animal—a hippopotamus, perhaps, or an elephant, tucked up in contentment against her mother’s leathery skin, listening to her distant heartbeat and her long, slow breathing.

The heat must have caused me to fall asleep. I was jolted awake by a scream which began as a screech, then rose and fell, wailing in the air.

My eyes flew open, my blood already well on the way to curdling.

“What is it, Marge? What’s the matter?”

Sal’s voice.

“You look as if you’ve seen a ghost. Sit down, I’ll get a chair.”

I didn’t risk peering over the edge of the duct upon which I was lying. My uncanny powers of hearing would tell me all I needed to know.

A nauseating scraping of wood on concrete followed by a plump thump told me that Sal had fetched the chair and that Marge had dropped heavily into it.

A rustle of paper confirmed that Marge had handed my note to Sal.

There was a silence in the steam as words ceased, and a low moan began.

I was enjoying this, actually.

I pictured Sal’s eyes tracking hesitantly across the page, her lips moving as she read.

“What does it mean?
One of you knows my killer?
”

After hours of pondering, I had decided to crib the message of the Ouija board word for word. I could hardly have bettered it.

“Christ! It’s written in blood, Sal.” Marge had regained the power of speech.

“Fresh blood, too,” she added. “Hasn’t gone brown yet.”

I rubbed my thumb against the still-raw end of my forefinger, which I had pierced again and again with one of the despised embroidery needles from the personal kit I had been issued. It’s surprising how much blood it takes to write half-a-dozen words.

I had signed the message
Francesca
—a long, smudged signature that leaked horribly off the edge of the page.

“Could it be—
her
—do you think?” Sal again, her voice trembling.

“Has to be. No other dead Francescas around here—not that I know of.”

“Put it down, Marge. It’s haunted. It’s bad luck. Take my word for it.”

“Wasn’t here Friday when we locked up. Place is tighter than a drum. How did it get in here?”

Sal’s voice had begun to develop a quaver. “What’s it mean, ‘One of you knows my killer’? She wasn’t killed, she fell off a boat and drowned—or so they said.”

“Never found her, though, did they? Maybe somebody bumped her off.”

“Bumped her off?” Sal said indignantly. “Who’d do a thing like that?”

“Beats me. She was like a kid, really. Loved dressing up. Can’t imagine anyone wanting to do her any harm. I found one of her famous red socks a couple of months ago behind the sorting table. Made me sad. Remember how she used to sneak us bags of her home laundry? ‘The chairman would like a little more starch in his white collars,’ she used to say, didn’t she? ‘The chairman would like to have his cuffs turned and leather patches on his elbows.’ Remember? Well, the rich must have their little perks, mustn’t they? Lord love her. I wish her well wherever she might be.”

“Do you think she’s listening to us—right now, I mean?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Sal. There’s no such thing as ghosts.”

“But what about this note?”

Marge gave out a laugh that was a little too confident. “Dollars to doughnuts it’s one of our dear sweet girls. One of our dear, sweet, innocent little darlings that hopes to
give us a heart attack. She’s probably hiding behind the boiler at this very moment with her fist shoved in her mouth.

“AREN’T YOU, DEARIE?” she shouted. “Hand me the broom, Sal. I’ll give her what for.”

There came a wild whacking on the wall and I caught a glimpse of Marge’s hairnet. I could almost have reached down and touched her, but I thought better of it.

“Come out, come out, wherever you are!” Sal cackled.

It had become a game, and I was the quarry.

“Ready or not, you must be caught. First caught’s
it
!”

These two grown women had, in a matter of seconds, reverted to the kind of primitive urge that once made gentle housewives willingly assist in hauling old women off to the village green to be burnt or drowned as witches.

Drowned—was that what her killers did to Francesca Rainsmith?
It didn’t make sense. My mind was reeling.

For the first time since coming to Miss Bodycote’s I was genuinely frightened.

“We’re coming to
get
you!” they began chanting, one at first and then the other. “We’re coming to
get
you!”

They began banging on the steam pipes, presumably with brooms, or whatever else was handy. The din was ferocious.

Fear, Dogger had once told me, is often irrational, but is nevertheless real because it is generated by the reptile part of our primitive brain: the instinctive part that is designed for dodging dinosaurs.

It was this uncontrollable reflex that caused me to do what I did: Instead of clinging to the duct and trying to
hide, I scrambled to my feet and came clattering down the ladder—into their very midst, like a flushed rat.

The effect upon Marge and Sal was electric. They were as surprised as I was.

Marge put her hands on her hips and took a step toward me; Sal put her hands behind her back and stepped cautiously away. Both of them went red in the face like Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

“I told you,” Marge said. “I told you she was up there, didn’t I?”

Sal nodded wisely.

“What are you up to?” Marge demanded.

I looked from one to the other, pausing as long as I dared so that my words would have their maximum effect. When I judged the moment to be precisely right, I said: “I’m investigating the murder of Francesca Rainsmith.”

There are times when truth is the simplest and the most effective weapon, and this was one of them. It’s risky, but it sometimes works.

“Investigating?” Sal scoffed—almost spat. “A girl like you?”

I looked her in the eye. “Yes,” I said. “A girl like me.”

Utter silence.

“I hope you’ll be able to assist me,” I added, just as a way of oiling the cuckoo. The word “assist” is so much more civilized and lubricating, I find, than “help.”

“Depends,” Marge said, her voice cracking.

Hallelujah! I was halfway home!

“How well did you know Francesca Rainsmith?” I asked. “Did she come here often?”

“She used to bring her laundry in—his, too. Said she didn’t have time, and she used to give us a plant at Christmas—a poinsettia, generally, in colored foil.”

“Was she a medical doctor?”

Sal blew out air. “Her? No. I don’t know what she did. Nothing, I think. I saw her one time on a Wednesday afternoon—I remember because it was my day off—at the Diana Sweets, having tea in the middle of the afternoon. Shopping bags everywhere, on the chairs, on the floor. She nodded at me, I think, sort of.”

“Did they have any children?”

Facts, again. I needed facts. I was trying desperately to piece together out of thin air a detailed portrait of a woman I had only seen once, and even then, dead and decapitated.