A Red Herring Without Mustard: A Flavia de Luce Novel - Alan Bradley

As I retraced my steps to the central corridor, a car door slammed in the lane outside.

Crackers! It could well be Inspector Hewitt.

I ducked down and waddled my way towards a window, where I pressed myself flat against the back of a massive ebony armoire, round which I could peek out without being seen.

But it was not Inspector Hewitt who was coming towards the door: It was a walking bulldog. The man’s shirtsleeves were rolled to his elbows, revealing arms that, except for their excessive hairiness, might have been a pair of Christmas hams. His shirt, open at the neck, revealed a forest of black, springy chest hair, and his fists clenched and unclenched as he strode purposefully towards the door.

Whoever he was, it was clear that he was unhappy. The man was powerful enough to tear me open like a packet of cigarettes. I couldn’t let him find me here.

It was unnerving to work my way back through the maze of furniture. Twice I startled at a movement close by, only to find that it was a reflection of myself in an uncovered mirror.

The man was already opening the door as I reached the caged cubicle. I slipped inside—thank goodness for bare feet and straw on the floor!—then lowered myself to hands and knees, then flat on my face, and began to crawl through the narrow hole to the outside.

The rooster was on me like a champion fighting cock. As I crawled, I tried to keep my hands up to protect my face, but the bird’s spurs were razor sharp. Before I was even halfway through, my wrists were bleeding.

Up the wire wall I swarmed, the rooster throwing himself again and again at my feet and legs. There was no time even to think of what the wire mesh was doing to my toes. At the top, I threw myself over the wooden bar and dropped heavily to the ground.

“Who’s there?” Inside the coach house, the man’s voice sounded as if he was no more than a few feet away. But unless he got down on his belly and crawled, he could not follow me—could not even see me in the outside pen.

He would have to return to his car, then come round behind the coach house in the lane.

I heard his footsteps retreating on the wooden floor.

Again I made a crouching scuttle along the crumbling fence—but wait: I’d forgotten my shoes and socks!

Back again I went to retrieve them, my breath now coming in quick painful gasps. Once more along the fence and I ducked behind the hedge where I had left Gladys.

Just in time. I froze behind the box hedge—trying not to breathe—as the human bulldog went lumbering past.

“Who’s there?” he demanded again, and I heard the rooster throw himself at the wire mesh with a wild crowing.

A few more coarse oaths and my pursuer was gone. I cannot bring myself to record his exact words, but will keep them in mind against the day I can put them to good use.

I waited for a minute or two to be sure, then dragged Gladys from behind the hedge and set off for home.

As I pedaled along I did my best to look like a respectable English girl out for a bracing bicycle ride in the fresh air.

But somehow I doubted that my charade would convince anyone: My hands and face were filthy, my wrists and ankles were bleeding, my knees were scraped to the bone, and my clothing would have to be tossed in the dustbin.

Father would not be amused.

And what if, in my absence, they had discovered Porcelain in my bedroom? What if she had awakened and wandered downstairs? Or into Father’s study!

Although I had never before cringed on a bicycle, I cringed.

“I caught her crawling in at one of the windows of the picture gallery,” Feely said. “Like a common housebreaker. Can you imagine? I’d gone there to study the Maggs painting of Ajax, and—”

Maggs was a ruffian painter who had lived in the vicinity of Bishop’s Lacey during the Regency, and Ajax a horse that had been bought on a whim by one of my ancestors, Florizel de Luce. Ajax had rewarded his new owner by going on to win enough races that Florizel was able to have himself elected to a rotten borough.

“Thank you, Ophelia,” Father said.

Feely cast down humble eyes and drifted out the door, where she would sit on the chair in the hallway to eavesdrop comfortably upon my humiliation.

“Do you know what day it is, Flavia?” Father began.

“Sunday,” I said without hesitation, although yesterday’s fête at St. Tancred’s seemed as far removed in time as the last ice age.

“Precisely,” Father said. “And what have we done on Sundays since time immemorial?”

“Gone to church,” I replied like a trained macaw.

Church! I’d forgotten all about it.

“I’d thought to let you lie in this morning to recover from that nasty business in the Palings. Next thing I know, there’s an inspector at the door and you’re wanted for fingerprinting.

“Now I’m informed that there’s a dead body on the Trafalgar Lawn and that you’re nosing about the village asking impertinent questions.”

“Miss Mountjoy?” I ventured.

Give a little, learn a lot. That was going to be my Motto of the Month. I would have to remember to jot it down in my notebook.

But wait! How could Miss Mountjoy have known about the body on the lawn? Unless—

“Miss Mountjoy,” Father confirmed. “She telephoned to ask if you’d got home safely.”

The old harpy! She must have got up from her settee and been peering out through the trailing seaweed fronds of the willow tree, spying on my encounters with the rooster and the bulldog-man.

“How very kind of her,” I said. “I must remember to send her a card.”

I’d send her a card, all right. It would be the Ace of Spades, and I’d mail it anonymously from somewhere other than Bishop’s Lacey. Philip Odell, the detective on the wireless, had once investigated such a case, and it had been a cracking good story—one of his best adventures.

“And your dress!” Father went on. “What have you done to your dress?”

My dress? Hadn’t Miss Mountjoy described to him fully what she’d seen?

Hold on!—perhaps she hadn’t after all. Perhaps Father was still unaware of what had taken place at the coach house.

God bless you, Miss Mountjoy! I thought. May you live forever in the company of those saints and martyrs who refused to tell them where the church plate was buried.

But wasn’t Father going to remark upon my cuts and abrasions?

Apparently not.

And it was at that moment, I think, it began to dawn upon me—truly dawn upon me—that there were things that were never mentioned in polite company no matter what; that blue blood was heavier than red; that manners and appearances and the stiff upper lip were all of them more important, even, than life itself.

“Flavia,” Father repeated, fighting to keep from wringing his hands, “I asked you a question. What have you done to your dress?”

I looked down at myself as if noticing the damage for the first time.

“My dress?” I said, smoothing it down and making sure he had a good view of my bloodied wrist and knees. “Oh, I’m sorry, Father. It’s nothing. I had a bit of a prang with my bicycle. Jolly bad luck, but still—I’ll rinse it out at once and mend it myself. It’ll be a piece of cake.”

My acute hearing detected the sound of a coarse snicker in the hallway.

But I’d like to believe that what I saw in Father’s eyes was pride.

TWELVE

PORCELAIN WAS SLEEPING THE sleep of the dead. I had worried in vain.

I stood looking down at her as she lay on my bed in much the same position as when I had left her. The dark swatches under her eyes seemed to have lightened, and her breathing was almost imperceptible.

Two seconds later there was a flurry of furious motion and I was pinned to the bed with Porcelain’s thumbs pressing into my windpipe.

“Fiend!” I thought she hissed.

I struggled to get free but I couldn’t move. Bright stars were bursting in my brain as I clawed at her hands. I wasn’t getting enough oxygen. I tried to pull away.

But I was no match for her. She was bigger and stronger than me, and already I could feel myself becoming languid and uncaring. How easy it would be to give in …

But no!

I stopped trying to fight her hands and instead took hold of her nose with my thumb and forefinger. With my last remaining strength I gave it a most vicious twist.

“Flavia!”

She seemed suddenly surprised to see me—as if we were old friends who had met unexpectedly in front of a lovely Vermeer in the National Gallery.

Her hands withdrew themselves from my throat, but still I couldn’t seem to breathe. I rolled off the bed and onto the floor, seized with a fit of coughing.

“What are you doing?” she demanded, looking round in puzzlement.

“What are you doing?” I croaked. “You’ve crushed my windpipe!”

“Oh, God!” she said. “How awful. I’m sorry, Flavia—really I am. I was dreaming I was in Fenella’s caravan and there was some horrid … beast! … standing over me. I think it was—”

“Yes?”

She looked away from me. “I … I’m sorry. I can’t tell you.”

“I’ll keep it to myself. I promise.”

“No, it’s no good. I mustn’t.”

“All right, then,” I said. “Don’t. In fact, I forbid you to tell me.”

“Flavia—”

“No,” I said, and I meant it. “I don’t want to know. Let’s talk about something else.”

I knew that if I bided my time, whatever it was that Porcelain was withholding would come spilling out like minced pork from Mrs. Mullet’s meat grinder.

Which reminded me that I hadn’t eaten for ages.

“Are you hungry?” I asked.

“Starving. You must have heard my tummy rumbling.”

I hadn’t, but I pretended I had, and nodded wisely.

“Stay here. I’ll bring something from the kitchen.”

Ten minutes later I was back with a bowl of food nicked from the pantry.

“Follow me,” I said. “Next door.”

Porcelain looked round wide-eyed as we entered my chemical laboratory. “What is this place? Are we supposed to be in here?”

“Of course we are,” I told her. “It’s where I do my experiments.”

“Like magic?” she asked, glancing around at the glassware.

“Yes,” I said. “Like magic. Now then, you take these …”

She jumped at the pop of the Bunsen burner as I put a match to it.

“Hold them over the flame,” I said, handing her a couple of bangers and a pair of nickel-plated test tube clamps. “Not too close—it’s exceedingly hot.”

I broke six eggs into a borosilicate evaporating dish and stirred them with a glass rod over a second burner. Almost immediately the laboratory was filled with mouthwatering aromas.

“Now for toast,” I said. “You can do two slices at a time,” I said. “Use the tongs again. Do both sides, then turn them inside out.”

By necessity, I had become quite an accomplished laboratory chef. Once, just recently, when Father had banished me to my room, I had even made myself a spotted dick by steaming suet from the larder in a wide-neck Erlenmeyer flask. And because water boils at only 212 degrees Fahrenheit, while nylon doesn’t melt until it is heated to 417 degrees, I had verified my theory that one of Feely’s precious stockings would make a perfect pudding bag.

If there’s anything more delicious than a sausage roasted over an open Bunsen burner, I can’t imagine what it might be—unless it’s the feeling of freedom that comes of eating it with the bare fingers and letting the fat fall where it may. Porcelain and I tore into our food like cannibals after a missionary famine, and before long there was nothing left but crumbs.

As two cups of water came to the boil in a glass beaker, I took down from the shelf where it was kept, alphabetically, between the arsenic and the cyanide, an apothecary jar marked Camellia sinensis.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s only tea.”

Now there fell between us one of those silences that occur when two people are getting to know each other: not yet warm and friendly, but neither cold nor wary.

“I wonder how your gram is doing?” I said at last. “Fenella, I should say.”

“Well enough, I expect. She’s a hard old bird.”

“Tough, you mean.” Her answer had surprised me.

“I mean hard.”

She deliberately let go of the glass test tube she’d been toying with and watched it shatter on the floor.

“But she’ll not be broken,” she said.

I begged to differ but I kept my mouth shut. Porcelain had not seen her grandmother, as I had, sprawled in a pool of her own blood.

“Life can kill you, but only if you let it. She used to tell me that.”

“You must have loved her awfully,” I said, realizing even as I spoke that I made it sound as if Fenella were already dead.

“Yes, sometimes very much,” Porcelain said reflectively, “—and sometimes not at all.”

She must have seen my startled reaction.

“Love’s not some big river that flows on and on forever, and if you believe it is, you’re a bloody fool. It can be dammed up until nothing’s left but a trickle …”

“Or stopped completely,” I added.

She did not reply.

I let my gaze wander out the window and across the Visto and I thought about the kinds of love I knew, which were not very many. After a while I thought about Brookie Harewood. Who had hated him enough to kill him, I wondered, and hang him from Poseidon’s trident? Or had Brookie’s death come about through fear rather than hate?

Well, whatever the case, Brookie would be laid out on a wheeled trolley in Hinley by now, and someone—his next of kin—would have been asked to identify the body.

As an attendant in a white coat lifted the corner of a sheet to reveal Brookie’s dead face, a woman would step forward. She would gasp, clap a handkerchief to her mouth, and quickly turn her head away.

I knew how it was done: I’d seen it in the cinema.

And unless I missed my bet, the woman would be his mother: the artist who lived in Malden Fenwick.

But perhaps I was wrong: Perhaps they would spare a mother the grief. Perhaps the woman who was stepping forward was just a friend. But no—Brookie didn’t seem the type to have ladies as friends. Not many women would fancy spending their nights sneaking about the countryside in rubber boots and handling dead fish.

I was so wrapped up in my thoughts that I hadn’t heard Porcelain begin speaking.

“—but never in summer,” she was saying. “In summer she’d chuck all that and take to the roads with Johnny Faa, and not a penny between them. Like a couple of kids, they were. Johnny was a tinker when he was younger, but he’d given it up for some reason he would never explain. Still, he made friends easily enough, and his way with a fiddle meant that he spoke every language under the sun. They lived on whatever Fenella could get by telling the fortunes of fools.”

“I was one of those fools,” I told her.

“Yes,” Porcelain said. She was not going to spare my feelings.