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

“Don’t touch anything,” Dr. Darby had said. Well, I wouldn’t. I’d keep my hands in my pockets.

Besides, my footprints were already everywhere on the floor. What harm would a few more do? Could the police distinguish between two sets of bloody footprints made less than an hour apart? We shall see, I thought.

Even as I clambered up onto the footboard I realized that I should have to work quickly. Having arrived at the hospital in Hinley, Dr. Darby would soon be calling the police—or instructing someone else to call them.

There wasn’t a second to waste.

A quick look round showed that the Gypsy lived a frugal life indeed. As far as I could discover, there were no personal papers or documents, no letters, and no books—not even a Bible. I had seen the woman make the sign of the cross and it struck me as odd that a copy of the scriptures should not have its place in her traveling home.

In a bin beside the stove, a supply of vegetables looked rather the worse for wear, as if they had been snatched hastily from a farmer’s field rather than purchased clean from a village market: potatoes, beets, turnips, onions, all jumbled together.

I shoved my hand into the bin and rummaged around at the bottom. Nothing but clay-covered vegetables.

I don’t know what I was looking for, but I would if I found it. If I were a Gypsy, I thought, the bottom of the veggie bin would have been high on my list of hiding places.

But now my hands were thoroughly covered not only with dried blood, but also with soil. I wiped them on a grubby towel that hung on a nearby nail, but I could see at once that this would never do. I turned to the tin basin, took down a rose-and-briar ewer from the shelf, and poured water over my filthy hands, one at a time. Bits of earth and caked blood turned it quickly to a muddy red.

A goose walked over my grave and I shuddered slightly. Red blood cells, I remembered from my chemical experiments, were really not much more than a happy soup of water, sodium, potassium, chloride, and phosphorus. Mix them together in the proper proportions, though, and they formed a viscous liquid jelly: a jelly with mystic capabilities, one that could contain in its scarlet complexities not just nobility but also treachery.

Again I wiped my hands on the towel, and was about to chuck the contents of the basin outside onto the grass when it struck me: Don’t be a fool, Flavia! You’re leaving a trail of evidence that’s as plain to see as an advert on a hoarding!

Inspector Hewitt would have a conniption. And I had no doubt it would be he—four in the morning or not—who responded to the doctor’s call.

If questioned about it later, Dr. Darby would surely remember that I hadn’t washed or wiped the blood from my hands in his presence. And, unless caught out by the evidence, I could hardly admit to disobeying his orders by reentering the caravan after he had gone.

Like a tightrope walker, I teetered my way down the shafts of the wagon, the basin held out in front of me at arm’s length like an offering.

I made my way to the river’s edge, put down the basin, and undid my laces. The ruin of another pair of shoes would drive Father into a frenzy.

I waded barefoot into the water, wincing at the sudden coldness. Closer to the middle, where the sluggish current was even slightly stronger, would be the safest place to empty the basin; closer in might leave telltale residue on the grassy bank, and for the first time in my life I offered up a bit of thanks for the convenience of a shortish skirt.

Knee-deep in the flowing water, I lowered the basin and let the current wash away the telltale fluids. As the clotted contents combined with the river and floated off to God-knows-where, I gave a sigh of relief. The evidence—at least this bit of it—was now safely beyond the recall of Inspector Hewitt and his men.

As I waded back towards the riverbank, I stepped heavily on a submerged stone and stubbed my toe. I nearly went face-first into the water, and only a clumsy windmilling of my arms saved me. The basin, too, acted as a kind of counterweight, and I arrived breathless, but upright, at the riverbank.

But wait! The towel! The prints of my dirty and bloody hands were all over the thing.

Back to the caravan I dashed. As I had thought it would be, the towel was stained with a pair of remarkably clear Flavia-sized handprints. Rattling good luck I had thought of it!

One more trip to the river’s edge; one more wade into the chilly water, where I scrubbed and rinsed the towel several times over, grimacing as I wrung it out with a series of surprisingly fierce twists. Only when the water that dribbled back into the river was perfectly clear in the moonlight did I retrace my steps to the bank.

With the towel safely back on its nail in the caravan, I began to breathe normally. Even if they analyzed the cotton strands, the police would find nothing out of the ordinary. I gave a little snort of satisfaction.

Look at me, I thought. Here I am behaving like a criminal. Surely the police would never suspect me of attacking the Gypsy. Or would they?

Wasn’t I, after all, the last person to be seen in her company? Our departure from the fête in the Gypsy’s caravan had been about as discreet as a circus parade. And then there had been the set-to in the Gully with Mrs. Bull, who I suspected would be only too happy to fabricate evidence against a member of the de Luce family.

What was it she had said? “You’re one of them de Luce girls from over at Buckshaw.” I could still hear her raw voice: “I’d rec’nize them cold blue eyes anywhere.”

Harsh words, those. What grievance could she possibly have against us?

My thoughts were interrupted by a distant sound: the noise of a motorcar bumping its bottom on a stony road. This was followed by a mechanical grinding as it shifted down into a lower gear.

The police!

I leapt to the ground and made for the bridge. There was enough time—but just barely—to assume the pose of a faithful lookout. I scrambled up onto the stone parapet and arranged myself as carefully as if I were sitting for a statue of Wendy, from Peter Pan: seated primly, leaning slightly forward in eager relief, palms pressed flat to the stone for support, brow neatly furrowed with concern. I hoped I wouldn’t look too smarmy.

Not a minute too soon. The car’s headlamps were already flashing between the trees to my left, and seconds later, a blue Vauxhall was chuddering to a stop at the bridge.

Fixed in the spotlight of the powerful beams, I turned my head slowly to face them, at the same time lifting my hand ever so languidly, as if to shield my eyes from their harsh and unrelenting glare.

I couldn’t help wondering how it looked to the Inspector.

There was an unnerving pause, rather like the one that occurs between the time the houselights go down, but before the orchestra strikes up the first notes of the overture.

A car door slammed heavily, and Inspector Hewitt came walking slowly into the converging beams of light.

“Flavia de Luce,” he said in a flat, matter-of-fact voice: too flat to be able to tell if he was thrilled or disgusted to find me waiting for him at the scene of the crime.

“Good morning, Inspector,” I said. “I’m very happy to see you.”

I was half hoping that he would return the compliment but he did not. In the recent past I had assisted him with several baffling investigations. By rights he should be bubbling over with gratitude—but was he?

The Inspector walked slowly to the highest point in the middle of the humpbacked bridge and stared off towards the glade where the caravan was parked.

“You’ve left your footprints in the dew,” he said.

I followed his gaze, and sure enough: Lit by the low angle of the Vauxhall’s headlamps, and although Dr. Darby’s footprints and the tire tracks left by his car had already lightened somewhat, the impressions of my every step lay black and fresh in the wet, silvery grass of the glade, leading straight back to the caravan’s door.

“I had to make water,” I said. It was the classic female excuse, and no male in recorded history had ever questioned it.

“I see,” the Inspector said, and left it at that.

Later, I would have a quick piddle behind the caravan for insurance purposes. No one would be any the wiser.

A silence had fallen, each of us waiting, I think, to see what the other would say. It was like a game: First one to speak is the Booby.

It was Inspector Hewitt.

“You’ve got goose-bumps,” he said, looking at me attentively. “Best go sit in the car.”

He had already reached the far side of the bridge before he turned back. “There’s a blanket in the boot,” he said, and then vanished in the shadows.

I felt my temper rising. Here was this man—a man in an ordinary business suit, without so much as a badge on his shoulder—dismissing me from the scene of a crime that I had come to think of as my very own. After all, hadn’t I been the first to discover it?

Had Marie Curie been dismissed after discovering polonium? Or radium? Had someone told her to run along?

It simply wasn’t fair.

A crime scene, of course, wasn’t exactly an atom-shattering discovery, but the Inspector might at least have said “Thank you.” After all, hadn’t the attack upon the Gypsy taken place within the grounds of Buckshaw, my ancestral home? Hadn’t her life likely been saved by my horseback expedition into the night to summon help?

Surely I was entitled to at least a nod. But no—

“Go and sit in the car,” Inspector Hewitt had said, and now—as I realized with a sinking feeling that the law doesn’t know the meaning of the word “gratitude”—I felt my fingers curling slowly into involuntary fists.

Even though he had been on the scene for no more than a few moments, I knew that a wall had already gone up between the Inspector and myself. If the man was expecting cooperation from Flavia de Luce, he would bloody well have to work for it.

SIX

THE NERVE OF THE man!

I resolved to tell him nothing.

In the glade, across the humpbacked bridge, I could see his shadow moving slowly across the curtained window of the caravan. I imagined him stepping carefully between the bloodstains on the floor.

To my surprise the light was extinguished, and moments later the Inspector came walking back across the bridge.

He seemed surprised to see me standing where he had left me. Without a word, he walked to the boot, took out a tartan blanket, and wrapped it round my shoulders.

I yanked the thing off and handed it back to him. To my surprise, I noticed that my hands were shaking.

“I’m not cold, thank you very much,” I said icily.

“Perhaps not,” he said, wrapping the blanket round me once again, “but you’re in shock.”

In shock? Fancy that! I’ve never been in shock before. This was entirely new and uncharted territory.

With a hand on my shoulder and another on my arm, Inspector Hewitt walked me to the car and held open the door. I dropped into the seat like a stone, and suddenly I was shaking like a leaf.

“We’d better get you home,” he said, climbing into the driver’s seat and switching on the ignition. As a blast of hot air from the car’s heater engulfed me, I wondered vaguely how it could have warmed up so quickly. Perhaps it was a special model, made solely for the police … something intentionally designed to induce a stupor. Perhaps …

And I remember nothing more until we were grinding to a stop on the gravel sweep at Buckshaw’s front entrance. I had no recollection whatever of having been driven back through the Gully, along the high street, past St. Tancred’s, and so to Buckshaw. But here we were, so I must have been.

Dogger, surprisingly, was at the door—as if he had been waiting up all night. With his prematurely white hair illuminated from behind by the lights of the foyer, he seemed to me like a gaunt Saint Peter at the pearly gates, welcoming me home.

“I could have walked,” I said to the Inspector. “It was no more than a half mile.”

“Of course you could,” Inspector Hewitt said. “But this trip is at His Majesty’s expense.”

Was he teasing me? Twice in the recent past the Inspector had driven me home, and upon one of those occasions he had made it clear that when it came to petrol consumption the coffers of the King were not bottomless.

“Are you sure?” I asked, oddly fuddled.

“Straight out of his personal change purse.”

As if in a dream, I found myself plodding heavily up the steps to the front door. When I reached the top, Dogger fussed with the blanket round my shoulders.

“Off to bed with you, Miss Flavia. I’ll be along with a hot drink directly.”

As I trudged exhausted up the curving staircase, I could hear quiet words being exchanged between Dogger and the Inspector, but could not make out a single one of them.

Upstairs, in the east wing, I walked into my bedroom and without even removing His Majesty’s tartan blanket, fell facedown onto my bed.

I was gazing at a cup of cocoa on my night table.

As I focused on the thick brown skin that had formed upon its surface like ice on a muddy pond, something at the root of my tongue leapt like a little goat and my stomach turned over. There are not many things that I despise, but chiefest among them is skin on milk. I loathe it with a passion.

Not even the thought of the marvelous chemical change that forms the stuff—the milk’s proteins churned and ripped apart by the heat of boiling, then reassembling themselves as they cool into a jellied skin—was enough to console me. I would rather eat a cobweb.

Of course by now the cocoa would be as cold as ditch water. For various complicated reasons reaching back into my family’s past, Buckshaw’s east wing was, as I have said, unheated, but I could hardly complain. I occupied this part of the house by choice, rather than by necessity. Dogger must have—

Dogger!

In an instant the whole of the previous day’s events came storming into my consciousness like a wayward crash of thunder, and like those fierce sharp bolts of lightning that are said to strike upwards from the earth to the sky, so did these thoughts arrive in curiously reversed order: first, Inspector Hewitt and Dr. Darby, the Gully, and then the blood—the blood!—my sisters, Daffy and Feely, the Gypsy and Gry, her horse, and finally the church fête—all of these tumbling in upon one another in tattered but nevertheless sharply etched detail.

Had I been hit by lightning? Was that why I felt so curiously electrified: like a comb rubbed with tissue paper?

No, that wasn’t it—but something in my mind was evading itself.

Oh, well, I thought, I’ll turn over and go back to sleep.

But I couldn’t manage it. The morning sun streaming in at the windows was painful to look at, and my eyes were as gritty as if someone had pitched a bucket of sand into them.

Perhaps a bath would buck me up. I smiled at the thought. Daffy would be dumbstruck if she knew of my bathing without being threatened. “Filthy Flavia,” she called me, at least when Father wasn’t around.