A Red Herring Without Mustard

SIXTEEN

“YOU’RE IN MY LIGHT,” Daffy said.

I had intentionally planted myself between her book and the window.

It was not going to be easy to ask my sister for assistance. I took a deep breath.

“I need some help.”

“Poor Flavia!”

“Please, Daff,” I said, despising myself for begging. “It’s about that man whose body I found at the fountain.”

Daffy threw down her book in exasperation. “Why drag me into your sordid little games? You know perfectly well how much they upset me.”

Upset her? Daff? Games?

“I thought you loved crime!” I said, pointing to her book. It was a collection of G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown mysteries.

“I do,” she said, “but not in real life. The antics you get up to turn my stomach.”

This was news to me. I’d file it away for later use.

“And Father’s almost as bad,” she added. “Do you know what he said at breakfast yesterday, before you came down? ‘Flavia’s found another body.’ Almost as if he was proud of you.”

Father said that? I could hardly believe it.

The revelations were coming thick and fast! I should have thought of talking to Daffy sooner.

“It’s true,” I said. “I did. But I’ll spare you the details.”

“Thank you,” Daffy said quietly, and I thought she might actually have meant it.

“Poseidon,” I said, taking advantage of the partial thaw. “What do you know about Poseidon?”

This was throwing down the gauntlet. Daffy knew everything about everything, and I knew she couldn’t resist showing off her uncanny power of recall.

“Poseidon? He was a cad,” she said. “A bully and a cad. He was also a womanizer.”

“How can a god be a cad?”

Daffy ignored my question. “He was what we would call nowadays the patron saint of sailors, and with jolly good reason.”

“Which means?”

“That he was no better than he ought to be. Now run along.”

Ordinarily I might have taken umbrage at being dismissed so high-handedly (I love that word, “umbrage”—it’s in David Copperfield, where David’s aunt, Betsey Trotwood, takes umbrage at his being born), but I didn’t—instead, I felt rather an odd sense of gratitude towards my sister.

“Thanks, Daff!” I said. “I knew I could count on you.”

This was shoveling it on, but I was honestly pleased. And so, I think, was Daffy. As she picked up her book, I saw that the corners of her mouth were turned up by about the thickness of one of its pages.

I was half expecting to find Porcelain in my room, but of course she was gone. I had almost forgotten that she’d accused me of attempted murder.

I’d begin with her.

PORCELAIN (I wrote in my notebook)—Can’t possibly be her grandmother’s attacker since she was in London at the time. Or was she? I have only her word for it. But why did she feel compelled to wash out her clothing?

BROOKIE HAREWOOD—Was likely killed by the same person who attacked Fenella. Or was he? Did Brookie attack Fenella? He was on the scene at the time.

VANETTA HAREWOOD—Why would she kill her own son? She paid him to keep away from her.

URSULA ?—I don’t know her surname. She mucks about with bleaches and willow branches, and Vanetta Harewood said she was fiercely protective. Motive?

COLIN PROUT—was bullied by Brookie, but what could Colin have had against Fenella?

MRS. BULL—threatened Fenella with an ax—claimed she’d been seen in the neighborhood when the Bull baby vanished years ago.

HILDA MUIR—whoever she may be. Fenella had mentioned her name twice: once when we saw the Bull child perched in a tree in the Gully, and again when I cut the elder branches in the Palings. “Now we are all dead!” Fenella had cried. Was Hilda Muir her attacker?

MISS MOUNTJOY—was Brookie’s landlady. But why would she want to kill him? The theft of an antique plate seems hardly a sufficient reason.

I drew a line and under it wrote:

FAMILY

FATHER—very unlikely (although he once drove Fenella and Johnny Faa off the Buckshaw estate).

FEELY, DAFFY, DOGGER, and MRS. MULLET—no motive for either crime.

But wait! What about that mysterious person whose fortune Fenella had told at the church fête? What was it she had said about her?

“A regular thundercloud, she was.” I could almost hear her voice. “Told her there was something buried in her past … told her it wanted digging out … wanted setting right.”

Had Fenella seen something in the crystal ball that had sealed her fate? Although I remembered that Daffy scoffed at fortune-tellers (“Mountebanks,” she called them), not everyone shared her opinion. Hadn’t Porcelain, for instance, claimed that her own mother, Lunita, had such great gifts of second sight that the War Office had funded her crystal-gazing?

If Lunita had actually possessed such great powers, it wasn’t too great a stretch of the imagination to guess that she had inherited them from Fenella, her mother.

But wait!

If Fenella and Lunita both had the power of second sight, would it be unreasonable to assume that Porcelain, too, might be able to see beyond the present?

Was that the real reason she was afraid of me? She had admitted that she was.

Could it be that Porcelain saw things in my past that I could not see myself?

Or was it that she could see into my future?

Too many questions and not enough facts.

My shoulders were seized by a shudder, but I shook it off and went on with my notes.

THE PALINGS

There is a feeling about this place that cannot be easily explained. To my ancestor, Lucius de Luce, it must have seemed like the Great Flood when the river was diverted to form the ornamental lake. Before that time, it had been no more than a quiet, isolated grove where Nicodemus Flitch and the Hobblers came for baptisms and beanfests. Later, the Gypsies had adopted it as a stopping-place in their travels. Harriet had encouraged this but after her death, Father had forbidden it. Why?

Another solid line, under which I wrote:

FISH

(1) When I surprised Brookie in the drawing room at Buckshaw, besides alcohol, he (or his creel) reeked of fish.

(2) There was also a fishy smell in the caravan when I found Fenella beaten on the floor. By the time I discovered Porcelain sleeping there the next morning this odor had vanished—but it had been there again today, this time on the outside of the caravan. (Q): Can odors come and go? Like actors in a play?

(3) Miss Mountjoy smelled of fish, too—cod-liver oil, judging by the vast quantities of the stuff that she keeps about Willow Villa.

(4) Brookie was killed (I believe) by a lobster pick shoved up his nostril and into his brain. A lobster pick from Buckshaw. (Note: Lobster is not a fish, but a crustacean—but still …) His body was left hanging on a statue of Poseidon: the god of the sea.

(5) When we found him hanging, Brookie’s face was fish-belly white—not that that means anything other than that he had been dangling from the fountain for quite a long time. Perhaps all night. Surely whoever had done this thing had done it during the hours of darkness, when there was little chance of being seen.

There are probably people abroad on the earth at this very moment who would be tempted to joke “There’s something fishy here.”

But I am not one of them.

As any chemist worth her calcium chloride knows, it’s not just fish that smell fishy. Offhand, I could think of several substances that gave off the smell of deceased mackerel, among them propylamine.

Propylamine (which had been discovered by the great French chemist Jean-Baptiste Dumas) is the third of the series of alcohol radicals—which might sound like boring stuff indeed, until you consider this: When you take one of the alcohols and heat it with ammonia, a remarkable transformation takes place. It’s like a game of atomic musical chairs in which the hydrogen that helps form the ammonia has one or more of its chairs (atoms, actually) taken by the radicals of the alcohol. Depending upon when and where the music stops, a number of new products, called amines, may be formed.

With a bit of patience and a Bunsen burner, some truly foul odors can be generated in the laboratory. In 1889, for instance, the entire city of Freiburg, in Germany, had to be evacuated when chemists let a bit of thioacetone escape. It was said that people even miles away were sickened by the odor, and that horses fainted in the streets.

How I wish I had been there to see it!

While other substances, such as the lower aliphatic acids, can be easily manipulated to produce every smell from rancid butter to a sweaty horse, or from a rotten drain to a goat’s rugger boots, it is the lower amines—those ragged children of ammonia—that have a most unique and interesting characteristic: As I have said, they smell like rotten fish.

In fact, propylamine and trimethylamine could, without exaggeration, be given the title “The Princes of Pong,” and I knew this for a fact.

Because she has given us so many ways of producing these smelly marvels, I know that Mother Nature loves a good stink as much as I do. I thought fondly of the time I had extracted trimethylamine (for another harmless Girl Guide prank) by distilling it with soda from a full picnic basket of Stinking Goosefoot (Chenopodium olidum), an evil-smelling weed that grew in profusion on the Trafalgar Lawn.

Which brought me back to Brookie Harewood.

One thing I was quite certain of was this: that the riddle of Brookie’s death would be solved not by cameras, notebooks, and measuring tapes at the Poseidon fountain, but rather in the chemical laboratory.

And I was just the one to do it.

I was still thinking about riddles as I slid down the banister and landed in the foyer. Nursery rhyme riddles had been as much a part of my younger years as they had anyone else’s.

Thirty white horses upon a red hill

Now they tramp, now they champ

Now they stand still.

“Teeth!” I would shout, because Daffy had cheated and whispered the answer in my ear.

That, of course, was in the days before my sisters began to dislike me.

Later came the darker verses:

One’s joy, two’s grief,

Three’s marriage; four’s a death.

The answer was “magpies.” We had seen four of these birds land on the roof while having a picnic on the lawn, and my sisters had made me memorize the lines before they would allow me to dig into my dish of strawberries.

I didn’t yet know what death was, but I knew that their verses gave me nightmares. I suppose it was these little rhymes, learned at an early age, that taught me to be good at puzzles. I’ve recently come to the conclusion that the nursery rhyme riddle is the most basic form of the detective story. It’s a mystery stripped of all but the essential facts. Take this one, for instance:

As I was going to St. Ives

I met a man with seven wives.

Each wife had seven sacks

Each sack had seven cats

Each cat had seven kits.

Kits, cats, sacks, wives

How many were going to St. Ives?

The usual answer, of course, is “one.” But when you stop to think about it, there’s much more to it than that. If, for instance, the teller of the rhyme happened to be overtaking the man with the traveling menagerie, the actual number—including sacks—would be almost three thousand!

It all depends upon how you look at things.

Mrs. Mullet was having her tea at the window. I helped myself to a digestive biscuit.

“The Hobblers,” I said, diving in with both feet. “You said they’d have my blood for sausages. Why?”

“You keep clear o’ them lot, miss, like I told you.”

“I thought they were extinct?”

“They smells just the same as everybody else. That’s why you don’t reck’nize ’em till somebody points ’em out.”

“But how can I keep clear of them if I don’t know who they are?”

Mrs. M lowered her voice and looked over both shoulders. “That Mountjoy woman, for one. God knows what goes on in ’er kitchen.”

“Tilda Mountjoy? At Willow Villa?”

I could hardly believe my good fortune!

“The very one. Why, it was no more than this morning I saw her in the Gully—headed for the Palings, she was, just as bold as brass. They still go there to do things with the water—poison it, for all I know.”

“But wait,” I said. “Miss Mountjoy can’t be a Hobbler—she goes to St. Tancred’s.”

“To spy, most likely!” Mrs. Mullet snorted. “She told my friend Mrs. Waller it was on account of the organ. The ’Obblesr got no organs, you know—don’t ’old by ’em. ‘I do love the sound of a good organ well played,’ she told Mrs. Waller, who told it to me. Tilda Mountjoy’s an ’Obbler born and bred, as was ’er parents before ’er. It’s in the blood. Don’t matter whose collection plate she puts ’er sixpences in, she’s an ’Obbler from snoot to shoes, believe you me.”

“You saw her in the Gully?” I asked, making mental notes like mad.

“With my own eyes. Since that Mrs. Ingleby come into her troubles I’ve been havin’ to stretch my legs for eggs. All the way out to Rawlings, now, though I must say they’re better yolks than Ingleby’s. It’s all in the grit, you know—or is it the shells? ’Course once I’m all the way out there, it makes no sense to go traipsin’ all the way back round, does it? So it’s into the Gully I go, eggs and all, and take a shortcut through the Palings. That’s when I seen her, just by Bull’s bonfires, she was—no more’n a stone’s throw ahead of me.”

“Did she speak to you?”

“Ho! Fat chance of that, my girl. As soon as I seen who it was I fell back and sat on a bank and took my shoe off. Pretended I’d got a stone in it.”

Obviously, Mrs. M had been walking in the same direction as Miss Mountjoy, and was about to overtake her—just like the person who was walking to St. Ives.

“Good for you!” I said, clapping my hands together with excitement and shaking my head in wonder. “What a super idea.”

“Don’t say ‘super,’ dear. You know the Colonel doesn’t like it.”

I made the motion of pulling a zipper across my lips.

“Oon ewdge?”

“Sorry, dear. I don’t know what you’re saying.”

I unfastened the zipper.

“Who else? The other Hobblers, I mean.”

“Well, I really shouldn’t say, but that Reggie Pettibone, for one. His wife, too. Reg’lar stuffed hat, she thinks she is, at the Women’s Institute, all Looey the Nineteenth, an’ that.”

“Her husband owns the antiques shop?”

Mrs. Mullet nodded her head gloomily, and I knew she was reliving the loss of her Army and Navy table.

“Thank you, Mrs. M,” I said. “I’m thinking of writing a paper on the history of Buckshaw. I shall mention you in the footnotes.”

Mrs. Mullet primped her hair with a forefinger as I walked to the kitchen door.

“You stay away from them lot, mind.”