I Am Half-Sick Of Shadows (24 page)

I hugged myself, partly in glee and partly from the cold.

I would begin with the Royal Salute, a genteel but impressive aerial display whose recipe I had found in one of Uncle Tar’s notebooks. It had been formulated originally by the famous Ruggieri brothers for King George II in 1749, and designed to accompany the music that Mr. Handel had composed especially for the Royal Fireworks display.

Since the large wooden building constructed to house the king’s musicians had been set ablaze by the fireworks and gone up in flames, and the sheer number of spectators had caused one of the spans of London Bridge to collapse under their weight into the river Thames, that first performance had not been entirely successful.

Who was to say? My re-creation of a few of those famous explosions might make up, if only a little, for what must have been at the time something of a national embarrassment.

Let the show begin!

I swept away the snow from my waterproof flowerpots and reached into my pocket for the igniter. If the wind let up even for a few seconds, one good spark would be all that was needed—a single spark to set off a display of fire they would still be talking about when I was an old lady, cackling over my chemical cauldrons.

I stepped back for one last look at my lovingly crafted explosives.

Perhaps it was because my eyes had been squeezed half shut against the blowing snow that I had not immediately noticed the second set of footprints stretching back towards the door.

Father Christmas!
I thought at once.
He’s parked his sleigh, walked across the roof, and gone into the house by the same door I’ve just come out
.

But why? Why wouldn’t he have climbed immediately down the chimney, as he had been doing for hundreds of years?

Of course! It was suddenly as plain as a pikestaff. Father Christmas was supernatural, wasn’t he? He’d have known about my glue and steered clear of it! Did supernatural beings even
leave
traces in the snow?

Why hadn’t I thought of this stupidly simple point sooner and saved myself all the trouble?

But wait! Hadn’t I been up here myself, earlier, to set up my pots of fireworks?

Of course! What a little fool you are, Flavia!

I was looking at my own footprints.

And yet … almost before that thought came to mind, I knew it could not possibly be true. It had been hours since I was last on the roof. With the blowing wind and the drifting snow, my own earlier footprints would surely have been filled in within minutes. Even my fresh-made prints were already losing their sharply defined edges.

A couple of leaps brought me to the trail of tracks, and I could see at a glance, close up, that they led
away
from the door, not towards it.

Someone besides Flavia and Father Christmas had been up here on the roof.

And quite recently, if I was not mistaken.

Furthermore, if I had read the signs correctly, they were
still
up here, hiding somewhere in the snowy wastes.

“Run for it, Flavia!” the ancient, instinctive part of my brain was shrieking, and yet I was still hovering—frozen by the moment, reluctant to move even an inch—when a dark figure stepped silently out from behind the chimney pot of Harriet’s boudoir.

It was dressed in a long, old-fashioned leather aviator’s coat that reached halfway down its riding boots, the high collar turned up above the ears. Its eyes were covered with the small, round green lenses of an ancient leather helmet of the sort Harriet had worn in her flying days, and its hands gloved in long, stiff leather gauntlets.

My first thought, of course, was that this specter was my mother, and my blood froze.

Although I had longed, all of my life, to be reunited with Harriet, I did not want it to be like this. Not masked—not on a windswept roof.

I’m afraid I whimpered.

“Who are you?” I managed.

“Your past,” I thought the figure whispered.

Or was it just the wind?

“Who are you?” I demanded again.

The figure took a menacing step towards me.

Then suddenly, somewhere inside my head, a voice was speaking as calmly as the
BBC
wireless announcer reading out the shipping forecasts for Rockall, the Shetlands, and the Orkneys.

“Keep your head,” it was saying. “You know this person—you simply haven’t realized it yet!”

And it was true. Although I had all the information I needed, I hadn’t put together all of the pieces. This specter was really no more than someone who had dressed themselves up from the film studio’s wardrobe—someone who did not want to be recognized.

“It’s no good, Mr. Lampman,” I said, standing my ground. “I know you murdered your mother.”

Somehow it didn’t seem right to call him “Val.”

“You and your accomplice did her in and rigged her up in the costume she wore in
Dressed for Dying
—the role you had promised to your—what do you call it?—your mistress.”

It was almost comforting to hear the words of that old formula coming out of my mouth—the final exchange between a cold-blooded killer and the investigator who had cracked the case. It had taken a great deal of poring over the pages of
Cinema Secrets
and
Silver Screen
to dig out that final incriminating tidbit. I was proud of myself.

But not for long.

The figure made a sudden lunge, taking me by surprise, almost knocking me backwards into a snowdrift. Only by windmilling my arms and making a blind and off-balance leap backwards was I able to stay on my feet.

With my attacker blocking the way to the staircase, there was no point in making a dash for it. Better to find safety in height, like a cat.

I scrambled, slipping and sliding up onto one of the chimney collars—one that I hadn’t slathered with glue. From up here I could hold on with one arm while kicking the killer in the face, should the need arise.

It didn’t take long.

With a hiss like an infuriated snake, my attacker pulled from one of its large coat pockets a stick which I believe is called by the police a truncheon, or a billy club, and brought the thing crashing down just inches from my feet.

Whack!
it went—and
whack!
again, the blows raining down on the brick ledge of the chimney pot with a series of sharp, sickening sounds, like bones being broken.

I had to leap like a highland dancer to keep my toes from being pulverized.

Behind me, I remembered, on the drawing room chimney, were the fuses for the fireworks—perhaps no more than ten yards away. If only I could reach them … touch the striker to the fuse … summon help … the rest of it would be in the hands of Fate.

But now the gauntlets were grabbing at my ankles, and I was kicking back at them for all I was worth.

This time I was rewarded with the sound and the feel of shoe leather on skull, and the figure reeled back with a hoarse cry of pain, clutching at its face.

Taking advantage of the moment, I edged my way round to the far side of the chimney. From there, I could leap down unseen, I hoped, onto the roof.

I had to risk it. There was no other choice.

I landed more lightly than expected and was already halfway to the drawing room chimney when my attacker spotted me and, with a cry of rage, came charging across the roof, its boots throwing up clods of snow as it came.

Out of breath, I threw myself at the chimney, this one larger than the first, and pulled myself up to safety, my hand already digging into my pocket for the igniter.

The fuses were now just below me at shoe level. With any luck, just one click would do the trick.

I ducked down and squeezed the spring handle.

Click!

And nothing more.

Too late now. My attacker was already clawing at the ledge like a maddened animal, preparing to haul itself up beside me. If that happened I was finished.

I swung at its goggled face with the torch—and missed!

The torch slipped out of my hand and fell, as if in slow motion, tumbling end over end down onto the roof, where it lay half buried in a snowdrift, shooting a crazily angled beam up into my attacker’s eyes, half blinding it.

I didn’t waste a single instant. I ducked down and flicked the igniter again.

Click! … Click! … Click! … Click! …

Infuriating! I should have coated the fuses with candle wax, but one can’t think of everything. Obviously, they had become damp.

The clutching gloves were coming uncomfortably closer. It was only a matter of time before they managed to seize my ankle and drag me down onto the roof.

With that disturbing thought in mind, I shimmied a little higher up the clay chimney pot, again working my way, as I climbed, fully round to the east side of the structure.

On the roof, my attacker followed me around, perhaps half expecting me to slip and fall. High above its horribly helmeted head, my every breath visible on the cold air, I clung like a limpet to the upper section of the chimney.

A moment passed—and then another.

I became aware of a growing warmness. Had the wind let up, or had summer suddenly come? Perhaps I was running a fever.

I thought of the thousand warnings of Mrs. Mullet.

“Sudden chills fills the ’ills,” she never tired of telling me. “The ’ills meanin’ them little ’ills in the churchyard, of course. Dress up warm, dear, if you want to get your ’undred years birthday letter from the king.”

I clutched my cardigan closed beneath my chin.

Below me, the figure had turned abruptly and was walking off towards the battlements of the west wing. It seemed like a peculiar thing to do, but almost instantly I saw the reason.

At a point on the roof directly above the drawing room, the aerial for our wireless was stretched between a pair of slender vertical bamboo poles.

Seizing the closest pole with its gauntlets, my attacker put a boot against the socketed base and gave a sharp tug. Perhaps more than anything because of the cold, the bamboo snapped off as easily as if it had been a matchstick. It was now attached only to the copper wire. A quick twist of the wrist and that, too, had broken away, leaving my assailant holding a bamboo pole with two wickedly jagged ends. From one of these dangled a white china insulator that had somehow remained attached by a twist of wire.

Again I found myself staring straight down into the upturned face of my assailant. If only I could reach out and rip the goggles from that face—but I couldn’t.

Those mad eyes stared up me through the green goggles in cold dead hatred, and a shiver shook my frame—a kind of shiver I had never known before.

Those eyes, I realized, with a sudden sickening jolt, were not ringed by their usual horn-rimmed glasses. My attacker was not Val Lampman.

“Marion Trodd is killing me!” I heard my own voice screaming, and the realization must have surprised her as much as it surprised me.

It might have been less frightening if she’d said something, but she didn’t. She stood there in the silence of the drifting snow, still glaring up at me with that look of quite impersonal hatred.

And then, as if taking a bow at the end of a play, she lifted the goggles, and slowly removed the flier’s helmet.

“It was you,” I gasped. “You and Val Lampman.”

She made a little hiss of contempt, rather like a snake. Without a word, she extended the pole and, placing it in the middle of my chest, gave a vicious shove.

I let out a cry of pain, but somehow managed to twist my body in the direction of the thrust. At the same time I dragged myself a little higher.

But I might as well have saved the effort. The end of the stick with its dangling insulator was now hovering directly in front of my face. I simply couldn’t allow her to poke me in the eyes, or to catch the corner of my mouth with the wire, like a hooked fish.

Almost without thinking I seized the end of the pole and slammed it hard against the chimney. At the shock, Marion let go of the handle, and the pole fell away silently into the snow.

Now, suddenly infuriated, as if wanting to tear me apart personally with her bare hands, she launched herself directly at me, this time managing to get a firm grip on the bricks of the ledge. She had already pulled herself halfway up when she seemed to lurch, then suddenly stall in midair like a partridge hit on the wing.

A muffled curse came to my ears.

The birdlime! The birdlime! Oh, joy—the birdlime!

I had given the downwind ledge of the drawing room chimney pot an extra slathering of the stuff on the theory that Father Christmas would choose the sheltered side to climb out of his sleigh.

Marion Trodd was tugging away fiercely, trying to rip her hands free of the stuck gloves, but the more she struggled, the more she became entangled with her riding boots and long coat.

I had wondered, idly, while preparing the stuff, if my glue would be weakened by the cold, but it was obvious that it had not. If anything, it had become stronger and stickier, and it was becoming more evident by the minute that only by undressing completely could Marion hope to escape.

I seized the moment and bent to the fuse again:

Click! Click! Click!

Curses and counter-curses! The blasted thing refused to ignite.

In the ghastly silence that followed, as Marion Trodd tried in vain to free herself, her movements becoming ever more restricted, the sound of singing came floating to my ears:

“The hopes and fears of all the years

Are met in thee tonight.”

I don’t know why, but the words bit at my bones.

“Dogger!” I shouted, my voice hoarse and broken in the cold air. “Dogger! Help me!”

But I knew in my heart that with everyone singing about Bethlehem, they couldn’t possibly have heard me. Besides, it was too far from the roof to the foyer—too many of Buckshaw’s bricks and timbers lay between us.

The wind had torn the words from my mouth and whipped them uselessly out and away, across the frozen countryside.

And it was then that I realized there was nothing keeping me from escape. All I had to do was leap clear of Marion Trodd, and run for the stairs.