Speaking From Among The Bones (31 page)

“A hot breakfast is indispensable, if not mandatory,” he used to tell us. “You never know when, or if, you might eat again.”

It was a piece of wisdom he had apparently formulated during his military service, but we knew better than to ask questions. In discussion with the vicar, he had settled on a time of three hours as being sufficient to satisfy both tummy and spirit of the law.

Father, I must say, is years ahead of his time. He sees nothing wrong with receiving Holy Communion at the altar of the Church of England rather than driving to Hinley for Holy Eucharist at Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows.

“It is one’s bounden duty,” he never tires of telling us, “to trade with local firms.” Well, so be it, I suppose.

We would be in our pew for the eight o’clock service, then return for the eleven o’clock service, the one with all the stops pulled out: choir, organ, the Psalms and responses chanted, a bang-up sermon—the whole McGilicuddy.

I dug out from under my bed the set of recordings I had pinched from Feely’s bedroom, Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A Minor which, according to Feely, was descriptive of sunlight and shadows on the icy fjords of Norway, with cakes of ice like diamonds the size of Buckshaw breaking away and crashing down into the sea.

I wound up the crank of my gramophone, lowered the needle into the grooves of the spinning disk, dived under the covers, and pulled the quilt up to my ears as the music began.

With the strings of the London Philharmonic singing me asleep, I was dead to the world before the spring ran down.

I dreamt I was in St. Tancred’s churchyard where tables—perhaps a dozen of them—had been set up here and there among the tombstones. At the tables were seated the people of Bishop’s Lacey and surroundings, dressed all of them alike in harlequin suits of a diamond pattern. The rich colors of their silks made them seem like figures from a stained-glass window.

On the table, in front of each player—or contestant, I wasn’t sure which—was an identical jigsaw puzzle, unopened, and behind each player stood a referee with a harlequin flag.

O what great fun
, I thought,
a jigsaw tournament
.

A whistle was blown, the flags came swishing down, and the players tore open the boxes and began sorting like madmen. Already one or two of them were fitting flat-edged pieces into the border.

A judge in powdered wig and pince-nez strolled among the tables, pausing to watch over the shoulder of each player for a few moments before scribbling notes in a great and ancient ledger.

As I moved in for a closer look at the puzzles themselves (which seemed to depict either a saint with a golden glow around his head or a moonlit rock protruding from a midnight sea) I was warned off by a dark figure in clerical garb (could it be the vicar?) who, by hand gestures, made it quite clear that any interference would be punished at once by the man with the shovel.

I spun round and found myself face-to-face with the punisher—the man with the shovel. Miss Tanty.

I awoke instantly and sat up in bed, my heart pounding.

If I had not known it before, I now knew how Mr. Collicutt had been killed and why.

The clock showed that it was ten minutes to five. Too late to catch another forty winks.

I jumped out of bed onto a cold floor, dashed cold water from the ewer onto my hands and face, and climbed
into the starched frilly white frock Mrs. Mullet had laid out for me, like a railway driver climbing onto the footplate of his engine.

Esmeralda’s egg, steamed, and a couple of pieces of bread toasted over the Bunsen burner made for a hearty breakfast.

I took a cork from a drawer and charred it in the burner’s flame. When it had cooled, I applied it to my eyelids with special attention to the lowers, then rubbed at the soot until it had faded to a realistic purplish gray.

As a finishing touch, I twisted my hair into a tangled rat’s nest and sprayed cold water from an atomizer onto my brow.

I looked at myself in the mirror.

With clots of egg still clinging to my lips, the effect was remarkably convincing.

Father, Daffy, and Feely were already at the table as I stumbled into the dining room and looked around dazedly.

I took my seat without a word and sat motionless, my hands folded dismally in my lap.

“Good God!” Feely said. “Look at you!”

Father and Daffy looked up from their dry toast.

“I—I—I’m afraid I’m going to have to be excused,” I managed. “I’m sorry. I’ve hardly slept. I think it must have been something I ate.”

I put my cupped hand to my mouth and puffed out my cheeks.

“Have a piece of toast,” Father said. “Then go straight
back upstairs to bed. I’ll look in on you when we get home.”

“Thank you,” I said. “But I’m not hungry.

“A good long sleep will do me the world of good,” I added, echoing Mrs. Mullet.

Back upstairs I changed from Easter frock to skirt and sweater, and from my Goody Two-shoes into plimsolls.

Minutes later I was crawling—quietly, carefully—out the window of the portrait gallery on the ground floor.

It had rained in the night and Gladys was wet. I gave her a good shaking, and the drops of cold condensation flew like a shower of diamonds in the moonlight.

In less than ten minutes we would be at St. Tancred’s.

A
FRAIL FOG DRIFTED
up from the river behind the church, floating like gray smoke among the graves, muffling the sound of the running water.

A churchyard in the March moonlight should be enough to give anyone the ging-gang-goolies, but not this girl.

After all, I had been here before.

I pounded my chest with both fists and breathed deeply of the morning’s damp air—a mixture of dank earth, wet grass, and old stone, with a slight aftertaste of fading flowers.

I could see why clergymen loved their jobs.

The ladies from the Altar Guild would soon be here, so I’d have to be quick about what I’d come to do. With any luck, I’d have perhaps an hour, or at most an hour and a half before they arrived with armloads of Easter lilies.

Not that I would need that long. My dream had helped the last bits of the puzzle to fall into place. Before the dream, although I’d had all the facts, I hadn’t seen how they fit together.

But now, as sure as shandygaff, I knew what I was going to find, and where I was going to find it.

I stepped into the porch and flicked on the torch, taking care to keep the beam focused on the floor. Seen from outside, the slightest glimmer on the stained-glass windows would make the church glow like a Tiffany lamp in the graveyard.

I opened the inner door and passed from the porch into the main body of the church, or, as Feely would have said, from the narthex into the nave. When it came to ecclesiastical architecture, Feely loved to toss around technical terms as if she were chatting over tea and lady-fingers with the Archbishop of Canterbury, or perhaps even the Pope. Did the Pope drink tea? I didn’t know, but I was sure Feely would be able to hold forth upon the subject until the cows came home with the cream.

I stood in the center aisle and listened.

The place was filled with that utter silence which only churches can have—a silence so vast, so timeless, and so loud that it hurts the ears, an echoing vacuum of negative sound.

Could it be the crying-out of the dead who lay stacked within the walls and in the crypt below? Were they lying in wait, as Daffy had once told me, to seize the midnight visitor and drag you down with them into their coffins where they would munch on your bones until the Last
Judgment at which time they would spit them out and make haste for Heaven?

Stop it, Flavia!
I thought.

Why did I allow my mind to fill with such utter rubbish? I had been here before in the night and had seen nothing worse than Miss Tanty.

Miss Tanty and Cynthia Richardson.

Now that I stopped to think about it, St. Tancred’s in the wee hours was almost as busy as Victoria Station at midday.

The boat train to Heaven.

Stop it, Flavia!

I was allowing the place to get on my nerves and I didn’t like it at all.

I moved up the aisle a step at a time—a slow procession of one.

Then suddenly, in my mind, perhaps to keep me company, Daffy was pacing along behind me, chanting in a solemn, hollow voice, “ ‘Let’s talk of graves, of worms and epitaphs …’ ”

Stop it, Flavia! Stop it at once!

With any luck I was just minutes away from success. Mere moments away from—

Something creaked.

Something wooden, by the sound of it.

I froze.

Listened …

Nothing.

This is ridiculous
, I thought. Besides their stones, old churches are full of oak and elm. The timbers of the roof
which arched above my head, the pews, the pulpit, the railings were all, once upon a time, trees in an English forest. They had once been alive—were, perhaps, still alive, settling, stretching their sinews in their sleep.

I moved up the aisle toward the organ, not daring to raise the torch’s beam to see if Saint Tancred was still dripping.

Splotches of colored moonlight came angling in through the windows, making the shadows all the darker.

Now I had reached the organ, its three keyboards gleaming in the darkness like a triple set of teeth.

Something creaked. Again.

Or was it something else?

I shifted the beam of the torch and the carved wooden imp grinned at me in the gloom.

I pressed my ear to the wooden panel and listened, but there was not the faintest sound from the organ chamber.

A twist of the imp’s chubby cheeks and the panel slid open.

I stepped inside.

Here I was again. The spot where Mr. Collicutt died—the spot where, unless I was sadly mistaken, Mr. Collicutt had hidden the Heart of Lucifer.

It was simply a matter of threading the facts together in the right order, like pearls on a string. Once that was done, the solution was not difficult. I could hardly wait to explain it all to Inspector Hewitt—to deliver it up as a goodwill offering with every last bow and every blessed ribbon tied beautifully in place.

He would, of course, share the details with his wife,
Antigone, who would ring me up at once and invite me round to tea once again, in spite of my past social blunders.

She would remark on the brilliance of my solution and I would say that it was nothing.

The organ pipes rose all around me—thousands of them, it seemed, rank after rank like mountain peaks of tin and wood.

Each pipe had its mouth, a horizontal slit near the bottom through which it spoke, and I was as sure as I could be that into one of these, Mr. Collicutt had shoved the Heart of Lucifer.

The question had been:
Which one?

I had spent hours sitting on the organ bench with Feely, watching as she pulled out the stops which gave the organ its voice: the Lieblich Bourdon, the Geigen Principal, the Contra Fagotto, the Gemshorn, the Voix Céleste, the Salicet, the Dulciana, and the Lieblich Gedact.

In which set of pipes would Mr. Collicutt have hidden the Heart of Lucifer?

Oddly enough, it had been the cast-off row of stop knobs in his bedroom that had first put the question into my head.

“Where would an organist hide a diamond?”

It was like a riddle, and like a riddle, the answer, once you saw it, was laughably obvious.

“In the Gemshorn!”

Feely had explained that the Gemshorn pipes were the ones that were meant to sound like flutes made from animal
horns—the ones that looked to me like pygmy blowguns.

There must have been two dozen of the things, ranging in length from several feet to a couple of inches. The smallest ones were too small to conceal anything, their slots too narrow to shove anything inside.

I decided to begin with the largest pipe.

I inserted my first two fingers into its metal mouth and felt both upward and downward—above the slot and below it.

The inside of the pipe was as smooth as a tea canister.

Very well, then—on to the next.

I couldn’t hold back a smile as I worked. Feely had complained that the organ had been out of sorts for weeks but she had mistakenly blamed it on the weather.

But I knew otherwise.

Who would have thought that a hidden diamond was giving the poor, tired old instrument a frog in its throat?

Flavia de Luce, that’s who!

“Flavia, you rascal, you,” I whispered, and shoved my fingers into the mouth of the next pipe.

There’s an unwritten law of the universe which assures that the thing you seek will always be found in the last place you look. It applies to everything in life from lost socks to misplaced poisons, and it was certainly at work here.

The only pipe I hadn’t yet checked of the Gemshorn rank was the one farthest from the sliding panel through which I had entered the organ chamber.

I made a mighty stretch to reach it—said a silent prayer—and slid my hand into the slot.

My fingers touched something!

There was a lump inside the pipe—a dried lump, like a petrified prune.

I felt the thing, gently outlining its size and shape with my fingertips.

It was, perhaps, the size of a walnut, and about the same texture.

I wiggled it and with a hollow
snap
the thing came free and dropped into my hand.

Careful
, I thought.
Don’t let it fall down inside the pipe
.

I worked the object slowly, carefully toward the slot until at last I was able to draw it out into the light of the torch.

What bitter disappointment!

It was nothing but a lump of old putty.

I wedged the torch between two of the organ pipes and, using the thumbs of both hands, dug my nails into the lump and split it open as if cracking an egg.

The Heart of Lucifer!

My heart gave a bound and I’m afraid I said something quite unsaintly which I would not be proud of later.

Brought to life by the torch’s beam, the huge diamond lay in my hand, shooting off sparks of light into the surrounding darkness like a new sun hatching.