The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

25

THERE ARE TIMES—ESPECIALLY WHEN I'M CONFINED—that my thoughts have a tendency, like the man in Stephen Leacock's story, to ride madly off in all directions.

I'm almost ashamed to admit to the things that crossed my mind at first. Most of them involved poisons, a few involved common household utensils, and all of them involved Frank Pemberton.

My mind flew back to our first encounter at the Thirteen Drakes. Although I had seen his taxi pull up at the front door, and had heard Tully Stover shout at Mary that Mr. Pemberton had arrived early, I had not actually laid eyes on the man himself. That did not take place until Sunday, at the Folly.

Although there had been several odd things about Pemberton's sudden appearance at Buckshaw, I really hadn't had time to think about them.

In the first place, he hadn't arrived in Bishop's Lacey until hours after Horace Bonepenny had expired in my face. Or had he?

When I looked up and saw Pemberton standing at the edge of the lake, I had been taken by surprise. But why? Buckshaw was my home: I had been born and lived there every minute of my life. What was so surprising about a man standing at the edge of an artificial lake?

I could feel an answer to that question nibbling at the hook I'd lowered into my subconscious. Don't look straight at it, I thought, think of something else—or at least pretend to.

It had been raining that day, or had just begun to rain. I had looked up from where I was sitting on the steps of the little ruined temple and there he was, across the water on the south side of the lake: the southeast side, to be precise. Why on earth had he made his appearance from that direction?

That was a question to which I had known the answer for quite some time.

Bishop's Lacey lay to the northeast of Buckshaw. From the Mulford Gates, at the entrance to our avenue of chestnut trees, the road ran in easy twists and turns, more or less directly into the village. And yet Pemberton had appeared from the southeast, from the direction of Doddingsley, which lay about four miles across the fields. Why then, in the name of Old Stink, I had wondered, would he choose to come that way? The choices had seemed limited, and I had quickly jotted them down in my mental notebook:

If (as I suspected) Pemberton was the murderer of Horace Bonepenny, could he have been, as all murderers are said to be, drawn back to the scene of the crime? Had he perhaps left something behind? Something like the murder weapon? Had he returned to Buckshaw to retrieve it?

Because he had already been to Buckshaw the night before, he knew the way across the fields and wanted to avoid being seen. (See 1 above)

What if on Friday, the night of the murder, Pemberton, believing that Bonepenny was carrying the Ulster Avengers, had followed him from Bishop's Lacey to Buckshaw and murdered him there?

But hold on, Flave, I thought. Hold your horses. Don't go galloping off like that.

Why wouldn't Pemberton simply waylay his victim in one of those quiet hedgerows that border nearly every lane in this part of England?

The answer had come to me as if it were sculpted in red neon tubing in Piccadilly Circus: because he wanted Father to be blamed for the crime!

Bonepenny had to be killed at Buckshaw!

Of course! With Father a virtual recluse, it was unlikely to expect that he would ever happen to be away from home. Murders—at least those in which the murderer expected to escape justice—had to be planned in advance, and often in very great detail. It was obvious that a philatelic crime needed to be pinned on a philatelist. If Father was unlikely to come to the scene of the crime, the scene of the crime would have to come to Father.

And so it had.

Although I had first formulated this chain of events—or, at least, certain of its links—hours ago, it was only now, when I was at last forced to be alone with Flavia de Luce, that I was able to fit together all the pieces.

Flavia, I'm proud of you! Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier would be proud of you too.

Now then: Pemberton, of course, had followed Bonepenny as far as Doddingsley; perhaps even all the way from Stavanger. Father had seen them both at the London exhibition just weeks ago—proof positive that neither one was living abroad permanently.

They had probably planned this together, this blackmailing of Father. Just as they had planned the murder of Mr. Twining. But Pemberton had a plan of his own.

Once satisfied that Bonepenny was on his way to Bishop's Lacey (where else, indeed, would he be going?), Pemberton had got off the train at Doddingsley and registered himself at the Jolly Coachman. I knew that for a fact. Then, on the night of the murder, all he had to do was walk across the fields to Bishop's Lacey.

Here, he had waited until he saw Bonepenny leave the inn and set out on foot for Buckshaw. With Bonepenny out of the way and not suspecting that he was being followed, Pemberton had searched the room at the Thirteen Drakes, and its contents—including Bonepenny's luggage—and had found nothing. He had, of course, never thought, as I had, to slit open the shipping labels.

By now, he must have been furious.

Slipping away from the inn unseen (most likely by way of that steep back staircase), he had tracked his quarry on foot to Buckshaw, where they must have quarreled in our garden. How was it, I wondered, that I hadn't heard them?

Within half an hour, he had left Bonepenny for dead, his pockets and wallet rifled. But the Ulster Avengers had not been there: Bonepenny had not had the stamps upon his person after all.

Pemberton had committed his crime and then simply walked off into the night, across the fields to the Jolly Coachman at Doddingsley. The next morning, he had rolled up with much ado in a taxicab at the front door of the Thirteen Drakes, pretending he had just come down by rail from London. He would have to search the room again. Risky, but necessary. Surely the stamps must still be hidden there.

Parts of this sequence of events I had suspected for some time, and even though I hadn't yet put together the remaining facts, I had already verified Pemberton's presence in Doddingsley by my telephone call to Mr. Cleaver, the innkeeper of the Jolly Coachman.

In retrospect, it all seemed fairly simple.

I stopped thinking for a moment to listen to my breathing. It was slow and regular as I sat there with my head resting on my knees, which were still pulled up in an inverted V.

At this moment I thought of something Father had once told us: that Napoleon had once called the English “a nation of shopkeepers.” Wrong, Napoleon!

Having just come through a war in which tons of trinitrotoluene were dumped on our heads in the dark, we were a nation of survivors, and I, Flavia Sabina de Luce, could see it even in myself.

And then I muttered part of the Twenty-third Psalm for insurance purposes. One can never be too sure.

Now: the murder.

Again the dying face of Horace Bonepenny swam before me in the dark, its mouth opening and closing like a landed fish gasping in the grass. His last word and his dying breath had come as one: “Vale,” he had said, and it had floated from his mouth directly to my nostrils. And it had come to me on a wave of carbon tetrachloride.

There was no doubt whatsoever that it was carbon tetrachloride, one of the most fascinating of chemical compounds.

To a chemist, its sweet smell, although very transient, is unmistakable. It is not far removed in the scheme of things from the chloroform used by anesthetists in surgery.

In carbon tetrachloride (one of its many aliases) four atoms of chlorine play ring-around-a-rosy with a single atom of carbon. It is a powerful insecticide, still used now and then in stubborn cases of hookworm, those tiny, silent parasites that gorge themselves on blood sucked in darkness from the intestines of man and beast alike.

But more importantly, philatelists use carbon tetrachloride to bring out a stamp's nearly invisible watermarks. And Father kept bottles of the stuff in his study.

I thought back to Bonepenny's room at the Thirteen Drakes. What a fool I had been to think of poisoned pie! This wasn't a Grimm's fairy tale; it was the story of Flavia de Luce.

The pie shell was nothing more than that: just a shell. Before leaving Norway, Bonepenny had removed the filling, and stuffed in the jack snipe with which he planned to terrorize Father. That was how he'd smuggled the dead bird into England.

It wasn't so much what I had found in his room as what I hadn't found. And that, of course, was the single item that was missing from the little leather kit in which Bonepenny carried his diabetic supplies: a syringe.

Pemberton had come across the syringe and pocketed it when he rifled Bonepenny's room just before the murder. I was sure of it.

They were partners in crime, and no one would have known better than Pemberton the medical supplies that were essential to Bonepenny's survival.

Even if Pemberton had planned a different way of dispatching his victim—a stone to the back of the head or strangulation with a green willow withy—the syringe in Bonepenny's luggage must have seemed like a godsend. The very thought of how it was done made me shudder.

I could imagine the two of them struggling there in the moonlight. Bonepenny was tall, but not muscular. Pemberton would have brought him down as a cougar does a deer.

Out comes the hypodermic and into the base of Bonepenny's brain it goes. Just like that. It wouldn't take more than a second, and its effect would be almost instantaneous. This, I was certain, was the way in which Horace Bonepenny had met his death.

Had he ingested the stuff—and it would have been a near impossibility to force him to swallow it—a much larger quantity of the poison would have been required: a quantity which he would have promptly vomited.

Whereas five cc's injected into the base of the brain would be sufficient to bring down an ox.

The unmistakable fumes of the carbon tetrachloride would have been quickly transmitted to his mouth and nasal cavities as I had detected. But by the time Inspector Hewitt and his detective sergeants arrived, it had evaporated without a trace.

It was almost the perfect crime. In fact it would have been perfect if I had not gone down into the garden when I did.

I hadn't thought about this before. Was my continued existence all that stood between Frank Pemberton and freedom?

There was a grating noise.

I could not tell which direction it was coming from. I swiveled my head and the noise stopped instantly.

For a minute or more there was silence. I strained my ears but could hear only the sound of my own breathing, which I noticed had become more rapid—and more jagged.

There it was again! As if a piece of lumber were being dragged, with agonizing slowness, across a gritty surface.

I tried to call out “Who's there?” but the hard ball of the handkerchief in my mouth reduced my words to a muffled bleat. At the effort, my jaws felt as if someone had driven a railway spike into each side of my head.

Better to listen, I thought. Rats don't move lumber, and unless I was sadly mistaken, I was no longer alone in the Pit Shed.

Like a snake, I moved my head slowly from side to side, trying to take advantage of my superior hearing, but the heavy tweed binding my head muffled all but the loudest of sounds.

But the grating noises were not half as unnerving as the silences between them. Whatever it was in the pit was trying to keep its presence unknown. Or was it keeping quiet to unnerve me?

There was a squeak, then a faint tick, as if a pebble had fallen onto a large stone.

As slowly as a flower opening, I stretched my legs out in front of me, but when they met with no resistance, I pulled them back up beneath my chin. Better to be coiled up, I thought; better to present a smaller target.

For a moment, I focused my attention on my hands, which were still lashed behind me. Perhaps there had been a miracle; perhaps the silk had stretched and loosened, but no such luck. Even my numbed fingers could sense that my bonds were as tight as ever. I hadn't a hope of getting free. I really was going to die down here.

And who would miss me?

Nobody.

After a suitable period of mourning, Father would turn again to his stamps, Daphne would drag down another box of books from the Buckshaw library, and Ophelia would discover a new shade of lipstick. And soon—too painfully soon—it would be as if I had never existed.

Nobody loved me, and that was a fact. Harriet might have when I was a baby, but she was dead.

And then, to my horror, I found myself in tears.

I was appalled. Brimming eyes were something I had fought against as long as I could remember, yet in spite of my bound-up eyes I seemed to see floating before me a kindly face, one I had forgotten in my misery. It was, of course, Dogger's face.

Dogger would be desolate if I died!

Get a grip, Flave… it's just a pit. What was that story Daffy read us about a pit? That tale of Edgar Allan Poe's? The one about the pendulum?

No! I wouldn't think about it. I wouldn't!

Then there was the Black Hole of Calcutta in which the Nawab of Bengal had imprisoned a hundred and forty-six British soldiers in a cell made to hold no more than three.

How many had survived a single night in that stifling oven? Twenty-three, I remembered, and by morning, stark raving mad—every last one of them.

No! Not Flavia!

My mind was like a vortex, spinning… spinning. I took a deep breath to calm myself, and my nostrils were filled with the smell of methane. Of course!

The pipe to the riverbank was full of the stuff. All it needed was a source of ignition to set it off and the resulting explosion would be talked about for years.

I would find the end of the pipe and kick it. If luck were on my side, the nails in the soles of my shoe would create a spark, the methane would explode, and that would be that.

The only drawback to this plan was that I would be standing at the end of the pipe when the thing went off. It would be like being strapped across the mouth of a cannon.

Well, cannon be damned! I wasn't going to die down here in this stinking pit without a struggle.

Gathering every last ounce of my remaining strength, I dug in my heels and pushed myself against the wall until I was in a standing position. It took rather longer than I expected but at last, although teetering, I was upright.

No more time for thinking. I would find the source of the methane gas or die in the attempt.

As I made a tentative hop towards where I thought the conduit might be, a chill voice whispered into my ear:

"And now for Flavia."