The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

6

WE WERE HAVING TEA. MISS MOUNTJOY HAD EXCAVATED a battered tin kettle from somewhere, and after a dig in her carry-bag, come up with a scruffy packet of Peek Freans.

I sat on a library ladder and helped myself to another biscuit.

"It was tragic," she said. "My uncle had been housemaster of Anson House forever—or so it seemed. He took great pride in his house and in his boys. He spared no pains in urging them always to do their best; to prepare themselves for life.

"He liked to joke that he spoke better Latin than Julius Caesar himself, and his Latin grammar, Twining's Lingua Latina—published when he was just twenty-four, by the way—was a standard text in schools round the world. I still keep a copy beside my bed, and even though I can't read much of it, I sometimes like to hold it for the comfort it brings me: qui, quae, quod, and all that. The words have such a comforting sound about them.

"Uncle Grenville was forever organizing things: He encouraged his boys to form a debating society, a skating club, a cycling club, a cribbage circle. He was a keen amateur conjurer, although not a very good one—you could always see the ace of diamonds peeping out of his cuffs with the bit of elastic dangling down from it. He was an enthusiastic stamp collector, and taught the boys to learn the history and the geography of the issuing countries, as well as to keep neat, orderly albums. And that was his downfall."

I stopped chewing and sat expectantly. Miss Mountjoy had slipped into a kind of reverie and seemed unlikely to go on without encouragement.

Little by little, I had come under her spell. She had talked to me woman-to-woman, and I had succumbed. I felt sorry for her… really I did.

"His downfall?" I asked.

"He made the great mistake of putting his trust in several wretched excuses for boyhood who had wormed themselves into his favor. They pretended great interest in his little stamp collection, and feigned an even greater interest in the collection of Dr. Kissing, the headmaster. In those days, Dr. Kissing was the world's greatest authority on the Penny Black—the world's first postage stamp—in all of its many variations. The Kissing collection was the envy—and I say that advisedly—of all the world. These vile creatures convinced Uncle Grenville to intercede and arrange a private viewing of the Head's stamps.

"While examining the crown jewel of this collection, a Penny Black of a certain peculiarity—I've forgotten the details—the stamp was destroyed.”

"Destroyed?" I asked.

"Burned. One of the boys set it alight. He meant it to be a joke."

Miss Mountjoy took up her tea and drifted like a wisp of smoke to the window, where she stood looking out for what seemed like a very long time. I was beginning to think she'd forgotten about me, but then she spoke again:

"Of course, my uncle was blamed for the disaster."

She turned and looked me in the eye. “And the rest of the story you've learned this morning in the Pit Shed.”

"He killed himself," I said.

"He did not kill himself!” she shrieked. The cup and saucer fell from her hand and shattered on the tile floor. “He was murdered!”

"By whom?" I asked, getting a grip on myself, even managing to get the grammar right. Miss Mountjoy was beginning to grate on my nerves again.

"By those monsters!" she spat out. "Those obscene monsters!"

"Monsters?"

"Those boys! They killed him as surely as if they had taken a dagger into their own hands and stuck him in the heart."

"Who were they, these boys. these monsters, I mean? Do you remember their names?"

"Why do you want to know? What right have you coming here to stir up these ghosts?"

"I'm interested in history," I said.

She passed a hand across her eyes as if commanding herself to come out of a trance, and spoke in the slow voice of a woman drugged.

"It's so long ago," she said. "So very long ago. I really don't care to remember. Uncle Grenville mentioned their names, before he was—"

"Murdered?" I suggested.

"Yes, that's right, before he was murdered. Strange, isn't it? For all these years one of their names has stuck most in my mind because it reminded me of a monkey. a monkey on a chain, you know, with an organ grinder and a little round red hat and a tin cup."

She gave a tight, nervous little laugh.

"Jacko," I said.

Miss Mountjoy sat down heavily as if she'd been pole-axed. She stared at me with goggle eyes as if I'd just materialized from another dimension.

"Who are you, little girl?" she whispered. "Why have you come here? What's your name?"

"Flavia," I said as I paused for a moment at the door. "Flavia Sabina Dolores de Luce." The "Sabina" was real enough; "Dolores" I invented on the spot.

UNTIL I RESCUED HER from rusty oblivion, my trusty old three-speed BSA Keep Fit had languished for years in a toolshed among broken flowerpots and wooden wheelbarrows. Like so many other things at Buckshaw, she had once belonged to Harriet, who had named her l'Hirondelle: "the swallow." I had rechristened her Gladys.

Gladys's tires had been flat, her gears bone dry and crying out for oil, but with her own onboard tire pump and black leather tool bag behind her seat, she was entirely self-sufficient. With Dogger's help, I soon had her in tiptop running order. In the tool kit, I had found a booklet called Cycling for Women of All Ages, by Prunella Stack, the leader of the Women's League of Health and Beauty. On its cover was written with black ink, in beautiful, flowing script: Harriet de Luce, Buckshaw.

There were times when Harriet was not gone; she was everywhere.

As I raced home, past the leaning moss-covered headstones in the heaped-up churchyard of St. Tancred's, through the narrow leafy lanes, across the chalky High Road, and into the open country, I let Gladys have her head, swooping down the slopes past the rushing hedges, imagining all the while I was the pilot of one of the Spitfires which, just five years ago, had skimmed these very hedgerows like swallows as they came in to land at Leathcote.

I had learned from the booklet that if I bicycled with a poker back like Miss Gulch in The Wizard of Oz at the cinema, chose varied terrain, and breathed deeply, I would glow with health like the Eddystone Light, and never suffer from pimples: a useful bit of information which I wasted no time in passing along to Ophelia.

Was there ever a companion booklet, Cycling for Men of All Ages? I wondered. And if so, had it been written by the leader of the Men's League of Health and Handsomeness?

I pretended I was the boy Father must always have wanted: a son he could take to Scotland for salmon fishing and grouse shooting on the moors; a son he could send out to Canada to take up ice hockey. Not that Father did any of these things, but if he'd had a son, I liked to think he might have done.

My middle name should have been Laurence, like his, and when we were alone together he'd have called me Larry. How keenly disappointed he must have been when all of us had come out girls.

Had I been too cruel to that horror, Miss Mountjoy? Too vindictive? Wasn't she, after all, just a harmless and lonely old spinster? Would a Larry de Luce have been more understanding?

"Hell, no!" I shouted into the wind, and I chanted as we flew along:

But I felt no more like one of Lord Baden-Powell's blasted Boy Scouts than I did Prince Knick-Knack of Ali Kazaam.

I was me. I was Flavia. And I loved myself, even if no one else did.

"All hail Flavia! Flavia forever!" I shouted, as Gladys and I sped through the Mulford Gates, at top speed, into the avenue of chestnuts that lined the drive at Buckshaw.

These magnificent gates, with their griffins rampant and filigreed black wrought iron, had once graced the neighboring estate of Batchley, the ancestral home of “The Dirty Mulfords.” The gates were acquired for Buckshaw in the 1760s by one Brandwyn de Luce, who—after one of the Mulfords absconded with his wife—dismantled them and took them home.

The exchange of a wife for a pair of gates (“The finest this side Paradise,” Brandwyn had written in his diary) seemed to have settled the matter, since the Mulfords and the de Luces remained best of friends and neighbors until the last Mulford, Tobias, sold off the estate at the time of the American Civil War and went abroad to assist his Confederate cousins.

"A WORD, FLAVIA,” Inspector Hewitt said, stepping out of the front door.

Had he been waiting for me?

"Of course," I said graciously.

"Where have you been just now?"

"Am I under arrest, Inspector?" It was a joke—I hoped he'd catch on.

"I was merely curious."

He pulled a pipe from his jacket pocket, filled it, and struck a match. I watched as it burned steadily down towards his square fingertips.

"I went to the library," I said.

He lit his pipe, then pointed its stem at Gladys.

"I don't see any books."

"It was closed."

"Ah," he said.

There was a maddening calmness about the man. Even in the midst of murder he was as placid as if he were strolling in the park.

"I've spoken to Dogger," he said, and I noticed that he kept his eyes on me to gauge my reaction.

"Oh, yes?" I said, but my mind was sounding the kind of "Oogah!" warning they have on a submarine preparing to dive.

Careful! I thought. Watch your step. How much did Dogger tell him? About the strange man in the study? About the quarrel with Father? The threats?

That was the trouble with someone like Dogger: He was likely to break down for no reason whatsoever. Had he blabbed to the Inspector about the stranger in the study? Damn the man! Damn him!

"He says that you awakened him at about four A.M. and told him that there was a dead body in the garden. Is that correct?”

I held back a sigh of relief, almost choking in the process. Thank you, Dogger! May the Lord bless you and keep you and make his face to shine upon you, always! Good old faithful Dogger. I knew I could count on you.

"Yes," I said. "That's correct."

"What happened then?"

"We went downstairs and out the kitchen door into the garden. I showed him the body. He knelt down beside it and felt for a pulse."

"And how did he do that?"

"He put his hand on the neck—under the ear."

"Hmm," the Inspector said. "And was there? Any pulse, I mean?"

"No."

"How did you know that? Did he tell you?"

"No," I said.

"Hmm," he said again. "Did you kneel down beside it too?"

"I suppose I could have. I don't think so. I don't remember."

The Inspector made a note. Even without seeing it, I knew what it said: Query: Did D. (1) tell F. no pulse? (2) See F. kneel BB (Beside Body)?

"That's quite understandable," he said. "It must have been rather a shock."

I brought to mind the image of the stranger lying there in the first light of dawn: the slight growth of whiskers on his chin, strands of his red hair shifting gently on the faint stirrings of the morning breeze, the pallor, the extended leg, the quivering fingers, that last, sucking breath. And that word, blown into my face… “Vale.”

The thrill of it all!

"Yes," I said, "it was devastating."

I HAD EVIDENTLY PASSED the test. Inspector Hewitt had gone into the kitchen where Sergeants Woolmer and Graves were busily setting up operations under a barrage of gossip and lettuce sandwiches from Mrs. Mullet.

As Ophelia and Daphne came down to lunch, I noticed with disappointment Ophelia's unusual clarity of complexion. Had my concoction backfired? Had I, through some freak accident of chemistry, produced a miracle facial cream?

Mrs. Mullet bustled in, grumbling as she set our soup and sandwiches on the table.

"It's not right," she said. "Me already behind my time, what with all this pother, and Alf expectin' me home, and all. The nerve of them, axin' me to dig that dead snipe out of the refuse bin," she said with a shudder, ". so's they could prop it up and take its likeness. It's not right. I showed them the bin and told them if they wanted the carcass so bad they could jolly well dig it out themselves; I had lunch to make. Eat your sandwiches, dear. There's nothing like cold meats in June—they're as good as a picnic."

"Dead snipe?" Daphne asked, curling her lip.

"The one as Miss Flavia and the Colonel found on my yesterday's back doorstep. It still gives me the goose-pimples, the way that thing was layin' there with its eye all frosted and its bill stickin' straight up in the air with a bit of paper stuck on it.”

"Ned!" Ophelia said, slapping the table. "You were right, Daffy. It's a love token!"

Daphne had been reading The Golden Bough at Easter, and told Ophelia that primitive courting customs from the South Seas sometimes survived in our own enlightened times. It was simply a matter of being patient, she said.

I looked from one to the other, blankly. There were whole aeons when I didn't understand my sisters at all.

"A dead bird, stiff as a board, with its bill sticking straight up in the air? What kind of token is that?" I asked.

Daphne hid behind her book and Ophelia flushed a little. I slipped away from the table and left them tittering into their soup.

"MRS. MULLET,” I said, “didn't you tell Inspector Hewitt we never see jack snipe in England until September?”

"Snipes, snipes, snipes! That's all I hear about nowadays is snipes. Step to one side, if you please—you're standin' where it wants scrubbin'."

"Why is that? Why do we never see snipe before September?"

Mrs. Mullet straightened up, dropped her brush in the bucket, and dried her soapy hands on her apron.

"Because they're somewhere else," she said triumphantly.

"Where?"

"Oh, you know. they're like all them birds what emigrate. They're up north somewhere. For all I know, they could be takin' tea with Father Christmas.”

"By up north, how far do you mean? Scotland?"

"Scotland!" she said contemptuously. "Oh dear, no. Even my Alf's second sister, Margaret, gets as far as Scotland on her holidays, and she's no snipe.

"Although her husband is," she added.

There was a roaring in my ears, and something went “click.”

"What about Norway?" I asked. "Could jack snipe summer in Norway?"

"I suppose they could, dear. You'd have to look it up."

Yes! Hadn't Inspector Hewitt told Dr. Darby that they had reason to believe the man in the garden had come from Norway? How could they possibly know that? Would the Inspector tell me if I asked?

Probably not. In that case I should have to puzzle it out for myself.

"Run along now," Mrs. Mullet said. "I can't go home till I finish this floor, and it's already one o'clock. Poor Alf's digestion is most likely in a shockin' state by now."

I stepped out the back door. The police and the coroner had gone, and taken the body with them, and the garden now seemed strangely empty. Dogger was nowhere in sight, and I sat down on a low section of the wall to have a bit of a think.

Had Ned left the dead snipe on the doorstep as a token of his love for Ophelia? She certainly seemed convinced of it. If it had been Ned, where did he get the thing?

Two and a half seconds later, I grabbed Gladys, threw my leg over her saddle, and, for the second time that day, was flying like the wind into the village.

Speed was of the essence. No one in Bishop's Lacey would yet know of the stranger's death. The police would not have told a soul—and nor had I.

Not until Mrs. Mullet finished her scrubbing and walked to the village would the gossip begin. But once she reached home, news of the murder at Buckshaw would spread like the Black Death. I had until then to find out what I needed to know.