Flavia de Luce 1 - The Sweetness At The Bottom Of The Pie (17 page)

“We were having a discussion—actually a row—about it last night at supper.”

This was one of the ways to optimize a lie: shovel on the old frankness.

“Ophelia thought one would embark from London; Father insisted it was Hull; Daphne voted for Scarborough, but only because Anne Bronte is buried there.”

“Newcastle-upon-Tyne,” Maximilian said. “Actually, it's Newcastle-upon-Tyne.”

There was a rumble in the distance as the Cottesmore bus approached, waddling along the lane between the hedgerows like a chicken walking a tightrope. It stopped in front of the bench, wheezing heavily as it subsided from the effort of its hard life among the hills. The door swung open with an iron groan.

"Ernie, mon vieux,” Maximilian said. “How fares the transportation industry?”

“Board,” Ernie said, looking straight ahead through the windscreen. If he caught the joke he chose to ignore it.

“No ride today, Ernie. Just using your bench to rest my kidneys.”

“Benches are for the sole use of travelers awaiting a coach. It's in the rule book, Max. You know that as well as I do.”

“Indeed I do, Ernie. Thank you for reminding me.”

Max slid off the bench and dropped to the ground.

“Cheerio, then,” he said, and tipping his hat, he set off along the road like Charlie Chaplin.

The door of the bus squealed shut as Ernie engaged the juddering gears and the coach whined into reluctant forward motion. And so we all went our separate ways: Ernie and his bus to Cottesmore, Max to his cottage, Gladys and I resuming our ride to Hinley.

THE POLICE STATION IN HINLEY was housed in a building that had once been a coaching inn. Uncomfortably hemmed in between a small park and a cinema, its half-timbered front jutted beetle-brow out over the street, the blue lamp suspended from its overhang. A cinder-block addition, painted a nondescript brown, adhered to the side of the building like cow muck to a passing railway carriage. This, I suspected, was where the cells were located.

Leaving Gladys to graze in a bicycle stand that was more than half full of official-looking black Raleighs, I went up the worn steps and in the front door.

A uniformed sergeant sat at a desk shuffling bits of paper and scratching his sparse hair with the sharpened end of a pencil. I smiled and walked on past.

“'Old on, 'old on,” he rumbled. “Where do you think you're goin', miss?” he asked.

It seems to be a trait of policemen to speak in questions. I smiled as if I hadn't understood and moved towards an open door, beyond which I could see a dark passageway. More quickly than I would have believed, the sergeant was on his feet and had seized me by the arm. I was nabbed. There was nothing else to do but burst into tears.

I hated to do it, but it was the only tool I had with me.

TEN MINUTES LATER, we were sipping cocoa in the station tearoom, P. C. Glossop and I. He had told me that he had a girl just like me at home (which, somehow, I doubted), name of Elizabeth.

“She's a great 'elp to her poor mother, our Lizzie is,” he said, “seeing as 'ow Missus Glossop, the wife, that is, 'ad a fall from a ladder in the happle horchard and broke 'er leg two weeks ago come Saturday.”

My first thought was that he had read too many issues of The Beano or The Dandy; that he was laying it on a bit thick for entertainment purposes. But the earnest look on his face and the furrowed brow quickly told me otherwise: This was the real Constable Glossop and I would have to deal with him on his own terms.

Accordingly, I began to sob again and told him I had no mother and that she had died in far-off Tibet in a mountaineering accident and that I missed her dreadfully.

“'Ere, 'ere, miss,” he said. “Cryin's not allowed in these 'ere premises. Takes away from the natural dignity of the surroundin's, so to speak. You'd best dry up now 'fore I 'ave to toss you in the clink.”

I managed a pale smile, which he returned with interest.

Several detectives had slipped in for tea and a bun during my performance, each one of them giving me a silent thumbs-up smile. At least they hadn't asked any questions.

“May I see my father, please?” I asked. “His name is Colonel de Luce, and I believe you're holding him here.”

Constable Glossop's face went suddenly blank and I saw that I had played my hand too quickly; that I was now up against officialdom.

“Wait 'ere,” he said, and stepped out into a narrow passageway at the end of which there appeared to be a wall of black steel bars.

As soon as he was gone I had a quick look at my surroundings. I was in a dismal little room with sticks of furniture so shabby that they might have been bought directly off the tailgate of a peddler's cart, their legs chipped and dented as if they had suffered a century of kicks in the shin from government regulation boots.

In a vain attempt to cheer things up, a tiny wooden cupboard had been painted apple green, but the sink was a rust-stained relic that might have been on loan from Wormwood Scrubs. Cracked cups and crazed saucers stood sadly cheek by jowl on a draining board, and I noticed for the first time that the mullions of the window were, in fact, iron bars only halfheartedly disguised. The whole place had an odd, sharp odor that I had noticed when I first came in: It smelled as if a jar of gentleman's relish, forgotten years ago at the back of a drawer, had gone off.

Snatches of a song from The Pirates of Penzance flashed into my mind. “A policeman's lot is not a happy one,” the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company had sung on the wireless and, as usual, Gilbert and Sullivan were right.

Suddenly I found myself thinking about leaving. This whole mission was foolhardy, no more than an impulse to save Father; something thrown up from the prehistoric part of my brain. Just get up and walk to the door, I said to myself. No one will even notice you've gone.

I listened for a moment, cocking my head like Maximilian to turn up my already acute hearing. Some where in the distance bass voices buzzed like bees in a far-off hive.

I slid my feet slowly one in front of the other, like some sensuous señorita doing the tango, and stopped abruptly at the door. From where I stood, I could see only one corner of the sergeant's desk outside in the hallway and, mercifully, there was no official elbow resting upon it.

I ventured a peep. The corridor was empty, and I tangoed unhindered all the way to the door and stepped outside into the daylight.

Even though I was not a prisoner, my sense of escape was immense.

I strolled casually over to the bicycle stand. Ten seconds more and I'd be on my way. And then, as if someone had thrown a pail of ice water into my face, I froze in shock: Gladys was gone! I almost screamed it aloud.

There rested all the official bicycles with their officious little lamps and government-issue carriers—but Gladys was gone!

I looked this way and that, and somehow, frighteningly, the streets seemed suddenly different now that I was on foot. Which way was home? Which way to the open road?

As if I hadn't problems enough, there was a storm coming. Black clouds were boiling in the western sky, while those scudding directly overhead were already unpleasantly purple and bruised.

Fear filled me, and then anger. How could I have been so stupid as to leave Gladys unlocked in a strange place? How would I get home? What was to become of poor Flavia?

Feely had once told me never to look vulnerable in unfamiliar surroundings, but how, I found myself wondering, does one actually go about doing that?

That was what I was thinking about when a heavy hand fell onto my shoulder and a voice said, “I think you'd better come with me.”

It was Inspector Hewitt.

"THAT WOULD BE HIGHLY IRREGULAR,” the Inspector said. “Most improper.”

We were sitting in his office: a long narrow room that had been the saloon bar of this onetime coaching inn. It was impressively neat, a room that needed only a potted aspidistra and a piano.

A file cabinet and a desk of quite-ordinary design; a chair, a telephone, and a small bookshelf, atop which was a framed photograph of a woman in a camel-hair coat perching on the rail of a quaint stone bridge. Somehow I had expected more.

"Your father is being detained here until we are in receipt of certain information. At that time he will likely be taken elsewhere, a place which I'm not at liberty to disclose. I'm sorry, Flavia, but seeing him is out of the question.”

“Is he under arrest?” I asked.

“I'm afraid so,” he answered.

“But why?” This was a bad question, and I knew it as soon as it was out of my mouth. He was looking at me as if I were a child.

“Look, Flavia,” he said, “I know you're upset. That's understandable. You didn't have a chance to see your father before. well, you were away from Buckshaw when we brought him here. These things are always very difficult for a police officer, you know, but you must understand that there are sometimes things which I would very much like to do as a friend, but which, as a representative of His Majesty, I am forbidden to do.”

“I know,” I said. “King George the Sixth is not a frivolous man.”

Inspector Hewitt looked at me sadly. He got up from his desk and went to the window where he stood looking out at the gathering clouds, his hands clasped behind his back.

“No,” he said at last, “King George is not a frivolous man.”

Then suddenly, I had an idea. Like the proverbial bolt of lightning, everything fell into place as smoothly as one of those backwards cinema films in which the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle jump each into its proper place, completing itself before your very eyes.

“May I be frank with you, Inspector?” I asked.

“Of course,” he said. “Please do.”

"The body at Buckshaw was that of a man who arrived in Bishop's Lacey on Friday after a journey from Stavanger, in Norway. You must release Father at once, Inspector, because, you see, he didn't do it.”

Although he was a little taken aback, the Inspector recovered quickly and gave me an indulgent smile.

“He didn't?”

“No,” I said. “I did. I killed Horace Bonepenny.”

IT WAS ABSOLUTELY PERFECT. THERE WAS NO ONE who could prove otherwise.

I had been awakened in the night, I would claim, by a peculiar sound outside the house. I had gone downstairs and then into the garden, where I had been put upon by a prowler: a burglar, perhaps, bent on stealing Father's stamps. After a brief struggle I had overpowered him.

Hold on, Flave, that last bit seemed a little far-fetched: Horace Bonepenny was more than six feet tall and could have strangled me between his thumb and forefinger. No, we had struggled and he had died—a dicky heart perhaps, the result of some long-forgotten childhood illness. Rheumatic fever, let's say. Yes, that was it. Delayed congestive heart failure, like Beth in Little Women. I sent up a silent prayer to Saint Tancred to work a miracle: Please, dear Saint Tancred, let Bonepenny's autopsy confirm my fib.

"I killed Horace Bonepenny,” I repeated, as if saying it twice would make it seem more credible.

Inspector Hewitt drew in a deep breath and let it out through his nose. “Tell me about it,” he said.

“I heard a noise in the night, I went out into the garden, someone jumped out at me from the shadows—”

“Hold on,” he said, “what part of the shadows?”

“The shadows behind the potting shed. I was struggling to get free when there was a sudden gurgle in his throat, almost as if he had suffered congestive heart failure due to a bout of rheumatic fever he suffered as a child—or something like that.”

“I see,” Inspector Hewitt said. “And what did you do then?”

“I went back into the house and fetched Dogger. The rest, I believe, you know.”

But wait—I knew that Dogger had not told him about our joint eavesdropping on Father's quarrel with Horace Bonepenny; still, it was unlikely that Dogger would tell the Inspector I had awakened him at four in the morning without mentioning the fact that I had killed the man. Or was it?

I needed time to think this through.

“Struggling with an attacker is hardly murder,” the Inspector said.

“No,” I said, “but I haven't told you everything.”

I riffled at lightning speed through my mental index cards: poisons unknown to science (too slow); fatal hypnotism (ditto); the secret and forbidden blows of jujitsu (unlikely; too obscure to explain). Suddenly, it began to dawn on me that martyrdom required real inventive genius—a glib tongue was not enough.

“I'm ashamed to,” I added.

When in doubt, I thought, fall back on feelings. I was proud of myself for having thought of this.

“Hmm,” the Inspector said. “Let's leave it for now. Did you tell Dogger you had killed this prowler?”

“No, I don't believe I did. I was too upset by it all, you see.”

“Did you tell him later?”

“No, I didn't think his nerves were up to it.”

“Well, this is all very interesting,” Inspector Hewitt said, “but the details seem a bit sparse.”

I knew that I was standing at the edge of a precipice: one step more and there would be no turning back.

“There's more,” I said, “but—”

“But?”

“I'm not saying another word until you let me speak to Father.”

Inspector Hewitt seemed to be trying to swallow something that wouldn't go down. He opened his mouth as if some obstruction had suddenly materialized in his throat, then closed it again. He gulped, and then did something that I had to admire, something I made a mental note to add to my own bag of tricks: He grabbed for his pocket handkerchief and transformed his astonishment into a sneeze.

“Privately,” I added.

The Inspector blew his nose loudly and went back to the window, where he stood gazing out at nothing in particular, his hands again behind his back. I was beginning to learn that this meant he was thinking deeply.

“All right,” he said abruptly. “Come along.”

I jumped up eagerly from my chair and followed him. At the door he barred the way into the corridor with one arm and turned, his other hand floating down as gently as a feather onto my shoulder.

“I'm about to do something which I may have grave cause to regret,” he said. “I'm risking my career. Don't let me down, Flavia. please don't let me down.”