Flavia de Luce 3 - A Red Herring Without Mustard (29 page)

We were then plunged into a brief darkness, and a few moments later the first film flashed onto the screen—a black-and-white animated cartoon in which a chorus of horribly grinning cats in bowler hats bobbed up and down in unison, yowling “Ain’t We Got Fun?” to the music of a tinny jazz band.

Mercifully, it did not last long.

In the brief pause, during which the lights came up and the film was changed, I noticed that Mrs. Bull had arrived with Timofey and her toddler. If she saw me among the audience, she did not let on.

The next film, Saskatchewan: Breadbasket of the World, was a documentary that showed great harvesting machines creeping across the flat face of the Canadian prairies, then rivers of grain being poured into railway hopper cars, and the open hatches of waiting cargo ships.

At the end of it I craned my neck for a glimpse of Colin Prout—yes, there he was at the very back of the hall, returning my gaze steadily. I gave him a little wave, but he made no response.

The third film, The Maintenance of Aero Engines: Part III, must have been something left over from the war—a film that was being shown simply because it happened to be in the same box as the others. In the light reflected from the screen, I caught Father and Feely exchanging puzzled glances before settling down to look as if they were finding it terrifically instructive.

The final feature on the program was a documentary called The Versatile Lemon, which, aside from the narrator’s mentioning that lemons had once been used as an antidote to a multitude of poisons, was a crashing bore.

I watched it with my eyes shut.

The new moon was no more than a sliver of silver in the sky as we made our way homeward across the fields. Father, Daffy, and Feely had got slightly ahead, and I trudged along behind them, immersed in my own thoughts.

“Don’t dawdle, Flavia,” Feely said, in a patient, half-amused voice that drove me crazy. She was putting it on for Father.

“Squid!” I said, warping the word into a sneeze.

MY SLEEP WAS TORN by images of silver. A silver horse in a silver glade chewed silver grass with silver teeth. A silver Man in the Moon shone in the sky above a silver caravan. Silver coins formed a cross in a corpse’s hand. A silver river glided.

When I awoke, my thoughts flew back at once to Fenella. Was she still alive? Had she regained consciousness? Porcelain claimed she had and the vicar said she hadn’t.

Well, there was only one way to find out.

“Sorry, old girl,” I said to Gladys in the gray dishwater light of the early morning, “but I have to leave you at home.”

I could see that she was disappointed, even though she managed to put on a brave face.

“I need you to stay here as a decoy,” I whispered. “When they see you leaning against the greenhouse, they’ll think I’m still in bed.”

Gladys brightened considerably at the thought of a conspiracy.

“If I look sharp, I can hare it cross-country and catch the first bus for Hinley this side of Oakshott Hill.”

At the corner of the garden, I turned, and mouthed the words, “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” and Gladys signaled that she wouldn’t.

I was off like a shot.

Mist hung in the fields as I flew across the plowed furrows, bounding gracefully from clod to clod. By catching the bus on a country road, I wouldn’t be seen by anyone except those passengers who were already on board, none of whom would pose much risk of reporting me to Father, since they were all heading for destinations away from Bishop’s Lacey.

Just as I climbed over the last fence, the Cottesmore bus hove into view, clattering and flapping its wings like a large, disheveled bird as it came jolting towards me along the lane.

It stopped with a rusty sigh, and a tendril of steam drifted up from its nickel radiator cap.

“Board!” said Ernie, the driver. “Step up. Step up. Mind your feet.”

I handed him my fare and slipped into a seat three rows from the front. As I had suspected, there were few other riders at this time of day: a pair of elderly women who huddled together at the rear, too much in the grip of their own gossip to pay me the slightest bit of attention, and a farm worker in overalls with a hoe, who stared sadly out of the window at the darkly misty fields. Sunrise would not be for another quarter of an hour.

The hospital at Hinley stood at the end of a steep street that rose up precariously from behind the market square, its windows staring down glumly onto the black cobbles, which were still wet from the night’s rain. Behind the high wrought-iron gate, a porter’s lodge bore a sign written in no-nonsense letters: All Visitors Please Report.

Don’t loiter, something told me, and I took its advice.

To the left, an archway of stained stone led to a narrow passage in which a couple of square gas lamps flickered with a sickly light.

Hearses Only, it said on a discreet plaque, and I knew I was on the right track.

In spite of my trying to walk in silence, my footsteps echoed from the wet cobbles and the seeping brick walls. At its far end, I could see that the passage opened into a small courtyard. I paused to listen.

Nothing but the sound of my own breathing. I peered cautiously round the corner—

“Beck!” said a loud voice, almost at my ear. I shrank back and flattened myself against the wall.

“Beck, get yourself out here. Quench’s man will be along directly, and we want to have her ready to hand over. You know as well as I do what happens when we keep them waiting.”

Ellis and Quench, I knew, was Hinley’s largest and oldest undertaking firm, and was known far and wide for the shininess of its Rolls-Royce hearses and the gleam of its Daimler mourners’ cars.

“When Ellis and Quench buries you, you’re buried,” Mrs. Mullet had once told me. I could easily believe that they would not like to be kept waiting.

“Old Matron gets her knickers in a knot,” the voice went on, “if we’re not all shipshape and Bristol fashion on the loading dock. And when old Matron’s not happy, I’m not happy, and when I’m not happy, you’re not happy. Beck? Get yourself out here, will you?”

There came the sound of boots shuffling on the timbers of the dock, and then a voice—a surprisingly young voice; perhaps a boy’s voice—said: “Sorry, Mr. Martin. I forgot to tell you. They rang up about twenty minutes ago. Said they’d be round later. Had a call out to the Old Infirmary, they did.”

“Oh, they did, did they? The buggers! Think nothing of leaving the likes of us twisting in the wind, whilst they go larking about the countryside in their bloody Bentleys. Well, I’m going down to the boiler room for a cup of tea, Quench or no Quench. Matron’s up on Anson Ward with the latest crop of nursing sisters. Poor wee things—I hope they remembered their asbestos uniforms!”

I waited until I heard the heavy doors close, then quickly, before I could think better of it, scrambled up onto the loading dock.

“Blast!” I said under my breath, as a sliver of wood pierced my knee. I pulled the thing out and shoved it into my pocket so as not to leave any evidence behind. I dabbed at the oozing blood a bit with my handkerchief, but there was no time for compresses. It would have to do.

I took a breath, pulled open the heavy door, and stepped into a dimly lighted corridor.

The floors were marble, and the walls were painted—brown for the first four feet, then a ghastly green from there all the way up to the ceiling, which appeared to have been whitewashed in another century.

On my right were three small cubicles, one of which was occupied by a wheeled cart, upon which lay a sheeted figure. It took no great stretch of the imagination to guess what lay beneath. This was the real thing: the genuine article!

I was dying to undo the buckles on the straps and have a peek under the sheet, but there wasn’t time.

Besides, there was part of me that didn’t want to know if the body was Fenella’s.

Not just yet. Not in that way.

From where I stood, I could see the full length of the corridor, which stretched away from me into the distance. It seemed endless.

I began to move slowly, putting one foot in front of another: right foot … left foot. On one side of the corridor was a double door marked “Laundry.” From behind it came the muffled rumble of machinery and a woman laughing.

Left foot … right foot … toe to heel …

The next door was the kitchen: dishes clattering, voices chattering, and the powerful, clinging smell of greasy cabbage soup.

Soup for breakfast? I realized that I hadn’t eaten since yesterday, and my stomach gave a heave.

For the next dozen paces, the walls were inexplicably moss green, and then, just as quickly, a queasy mustard yellow. Whoever had chosen the paint, I decided, wanted to ensure that anyone who wasn’t sick when they entered the hospital jolly well would be before they left.

The next set of doors on the left, judging by the bracing whiff of formalin, belonged to the morgue. I gave a little shiver as I passed: not one of fear, but rather of delight.

Another room was marked “X-Ray,” and beyond that point, open doors on both sides of the corridor, with room numbers on every one. In each room, someone was sleeping, or rolling over. Someone was snoring, someone moaned, and I thought I heard the sound of a woman crying.

These are the wards, I thought, and there must be others on the first and second floors.

But how could I find Fenella? Until then, I hadn’t given it a moment’s thought. How does one quickly find a needle in a haystack?

Certainly not by examining one straw at a time!

I had now arrived at a doorway that opened into a sort of large foyer, in the center of which a woman wrapped in a black woolen sweater was staring intently at a spread of playing cards on her desk. She did not hear me come up beside her.

“Excuse me,” I said, “but you can put the five of diamonds on the black six.”

The woman nearly fell out of her chair. She jumped to her feet and spun round to face me.

“Don’t ever—” she said, her face going the color of beets. “Don’t you ever dare—” Her fists clenched and unclenched spasmodically.

“I’m sorry if I startled you,” I said. “I didn’t mean to, really …”

“What are you doing here?” she demanded. “No visiting until one-thirty this afternoon, and it’s only just gone—” She shot a glance at her watch, an impossibly tiny lump strapped to her wrist.

“I’m waiting for my cousin,” I explained. “She’s just slipped in to bring our grandmother some …”

I took a deep breath and wracked my brains for inspiration, but the only thing that came to mind—to my nostrils, actually—was the nauseating odor still leaking from the kitchen down the corridor.

“Soup!” I said. “We’ve brought our gram some soup.”

“Soup?” The woman’s voice—and her eyebrows—went up into an inverted V. “You’ve brought soup? Here? To a hospital?”

I nodded meekly.

“Who’s your grandmother?” she demanded. “What’s her name? Is she a patient here?”

“Fenella Faa,” I said without hesitation.

“Faa? The Gypsy woman?” she asked, sucking in her breath.

I nodded dumbly.

“And your cousin, you say, has brought her soup?”

“Yes,” I said, pointing haphazardly. “She went that way.”

“What’s your name?” the woman asked, snatching up a typewritten list from her desk.

“Flavia,” I said. “Flavia Faa.”

It was just implausible enough to be true. With a snort like a racehorse, the woman was off, down a wide corridor on the far side of the foyer.

I followed in her wake, but I don’t think she noticed. Still, I kept well back, hoping she didn’t turn round. I was in luck.

Without a backwards glance, she vanished into the second room but one on the left, and I heard the sound of curtains being swept open. I didn’t stop, but continued on past the open door. A single glance revealed Fenella in the farthest bed, her head swathed in bandages.

I ducked down out of sight behind a draped cart that was parked against the wall.

“All right, come out of there!” I heard the woman say, followed by the click of a door being opened—probably the room’s W.C.

There was a silence—then a low, muttered conversation. Was she talking to Fenella—or to herself?

The only word that came clearly to my ears was “soup.”

Another brief silence, and then the sound of the woman’s shoes went echoing away down the corridor.

I counted to three, then flitted like a bat into Fenella’s room, closing the door behind me. A whiff of ether told me that this must be the surgical ward.

Fenella was lying motionless on her back, her eyes closed. So frail, she looked—as if the bedsheets had absorbed the last ounce of her juices.

“Hello,” I whispered. “It’s me, Flavia.”

There was no response. I reached out and took her hand.

Ever so slowly her eyes came open, fighting to focus.

“It’s me, Flavia,” I said again. “Remember?”

Her wrinkled lips pursed, and the tip of her tongue appeared. It looked like the head of a turtle emerging from its shell after a long winter at the bottom of the pond.

“The … liar,” she whispered, and I grinned as stupidly as if I had just been awarded first prize at the spring flower show.

Licking her lips feebly, Fenella turned her head towards me, her black eyes now suddenly fierce and imploring in their sunken sockets.

“Sret,” she said quite distinctly, giving my hand a squeeze.

“Sorry,” I said, “I don’t understand.”

“Sret,” she said again. “Puff.”

A light went on at the back of my brain.

“Cigarette?” I asked. “Is that what you’re saying?”

She nodded. “Sret. Puff.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I don’t smoke.”

Her eyes were fixed upon mine, imploring.

“Tell you what,” I said. “I’ll go find you one, but first, I need to ask you a couple of important questions.”

I didn’t give her time to think.

“The first is this: Do you really believe I did this to you? I’d die if you did.”

Her brows knitted. “Did this?”

“Put you here—in the hospital. Please, Fenella, I need to know.”

I hadn’t meant to call her by her given name—it just slipped out. It was that kind of moment. Daffy had once told me that knowing and using someone’s name gave you power over them.