The Curious Case of the Copper Corpse Read online

  The Curious Case of the Copper Corpse is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  A Bantam Books eBook Original

  Copyright © 2014 by Alan Bradley

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  BANTAM BOOKS and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  eBook ISBN 9781101884911

  Cover design: Joe Montgomery

  www.bantamdell.com

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  The Curious Case of the Copper Corpse

  By Alan Bradley

  About the Author

  In which eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce, chemical connoisseur, is immersed in her element.

  I was peering through the microscope at the tooth of an adder I had captured behind the coach house that very morning after church, when there came a light knock at the laboratory door.

  “Excuse me, Miss Flavia,” Dogger said, “but there’s a letter for you. I shall leave it on the desk.”

  And with that, he was gone. One of the things I love most about Father’s jack-of-all-trades is his uncanny sense of decency. Dogger knows instinctively when to come and when to go.

  Curiosity, of course, got the better of me. I switched off the illuminator and reached for the butter knife I had pinched from the kitchen, which doubled for crumpets and correspondence.

  The envelope was a plain one, with no distinctive markings: the sort sold in any stationer’s shop at eleven pence per hundred. There was no postmark—there wouldn’t be on a Sunday—which indicated that it had been shoved through the letter slot at the front door.

  I sniffed it, then sliced it open.

  Inside was a letter written in pencil on lined paper. That and the horrid scrawl suggested that the sender was a schoolboy.

  Murder! it said. Come at once. Anson House, Greyminster, Staircase No. 3, and it was signed J. Haxton or Plaxton. The writer had pressed so hard that the pencil had snapped in the middle of his signature, which seemed to have been hastily completed with the broken bit of graphite squeezed between a grubby thumb and forefinger.

  Murder, urgency, frenzy, fear: Who could resist? It was my cup of tea.

  —

  Gladys’s rubber tires hissed happily along the rainy road. My rapid pedaling had transformed the inside of my yellow mackintosh into a superheated tent, and I was now so soaked with perspiration that I might as well not have bothered: The rain would have been cooler.

  Greyminster School was shrouded in mist. Acres of green lawns produced a ghostly, floating fog which gave only brief, unnerving glimpses of ancient stone and staring windows.

  Father’s old school seemed to exist simultaneously in both past and present, as if all of its Old Boys, back to the year dot, were hovering somewhere in the wings. More dangerous than phantoms, however, was Ruggles, the nasty little porter who had accosted me on my last visit. I had not forgotten him, and it was unlikely that Ruggles had forgotten me.

  I parked Gladys beneath a sign that said Faculty Bicycles Only, and went round the end of the building. The staircases, I remembered, were also accessible from the rear.

  Staircase No. 3 was at the farthest corner of the building: a dark, narrow climb with black paneling and no windows. I made my way upward, trying to ascend in silence. The studies on the first landing were marked with white cards in holders: Lawson, Somerville, Henley. A fourth door revealed a cramped WC and bathtub. On the second floor, the doors were marked Wagstaffe, Baker, and Smith-Pritchard.

  Up I climbed, into an increasing cloud of smells: boots, jam, ink, and unwashed shirts mingled with the unmistakable odors of brilliantine, leather dressing, and mislaid bits of baking, all with an underlying whiff of tobacco smoke.

  The staircase ended at the top in near darkness. Only by putting my nose to the doors could I read the names of the last three occupants: Cosgrave, Parker, and Plaxton.

  I had found my man—so to speak.

  Before I could knock, the door came open just enough for a reddened eyeball to look me up and down. “Flavia de Luce?” a cracked voice asked, and I nodded. The opening widened to allow me to squeeze inside, and the door was closed instantly behind me.

  I’ve seen frightened people in my life, but never one so terrified as the boy who stood before me. His face was the color of mildewed bread dough, his hands were trembling, and he looked as if he had been crying. “Did anyone see you?” he demanded.

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I said no, didn’t I?”

  He nodded in obvious misery, and we were right back where we had started. Murder is not an easy subject to broach, and I realized that I needed to take it easy on this boy. He was, after all, not much older than me. “Where’s the corpse?” I asked.

  He flinched, then brushed past me into the hall. The WC on this landing had a hand-printed note pinned to the door: OUT OF ORDER! NO ENTRY! which seemed excessive for a busted loo.

  Standing well back, Plaxton mimed that I was to open the door. I held my breath and turned the knob.

  The room was dim, lighted only by a small stained-glass window, whose diamond-shaped panes of violet and yellow gave to the scene a curious carnival air. Directly under the window was a bathtub, and in it was what I took at first to be a statue. “Is this a joke?” I asked. But the look on Plaxton’s face, and the way he covered his mouth with his hand—not to hide a mischievous grin, but to keep from vomiting—gave me my answer.

  The thing in the tub was not a statue, but a man—a dead man, and a naked one at that. Save for his face, he seemed to have been carved out of copper.

  “I’m sorry,” Plaxton whispered, averting his eyes. “This is probably no place for a girl.”

  “Girl be blowed!” I snapped. “I’m here as a brain, not as a female.”

  Plaxton actually took a step backward.

  “Who is this?” I asked, still scarcely able to believe my eyes.

  “Mr. Denning,” he replied. “The housemaster.”

  I opened my mental notebook and began recording the scene.

  The deceased reclined in the tub, as if—except for one remarkable detail—he had dozed off during a long, comfortable soak. Several inches from the top of the tub was a regular ring of blue scum, and at the foot, a cracked rubber stopper was still jammed into the drain hole. Whatever liquid had filled the tub had leaked out, and the porcelain was now completely dry.

  I touched a finger to the residue and sniffed it. Copper sulfate: CuSO4. Unmistakable.

  A look round the back of the tub showed me what I was already half expecting to see: an automobile battery. One of its lugs (the positive) was connected to a black rubber wire, its farther end bared and coiled in the bottom of the tub like a sleeping snake. The other lug (the negative) was connected to a similar length of wire, terminating in a large crocodile clip, which was clamped firmly to the corpse’s nose.

  The chemical and electrical action had electroplated the man. Electrodeposition, to be precise.

  Although I knew it was useless, I felt with two fingers for a carotid pulse, but there was none. Mr. Denning was decidedly defunct.

  “Give me a hand,” I said, seizing the shoulder and pulling the body away from the back of the porcelain. It crackled, and a few chips fell int
o the bottom of the dry tub. A glance at the expanse of flesh, plated as it was with copper, told me that there were no bullet holes or knife wounds.

  Plaxton hadn’t moved a muscle.

  “Is he dead?” he asked, almost blubbering, his lower lip trembling terribly. I could have made any number of witty retorts, but something told me to control myself.

  “Yes,” I said, and left it at that.

  “I thought so,” Plaxton said. “That’s why I wrote you.” Which seemed an odd thing to say until you considered that the boy was still in some degree of shock.

  “But why me?” I asked. “Why write instead of telephoning? For that matter, why didn’t you call the police?”

  Plaxton went even pastier, if possible. “They’d think I killed him. I needed someone who could prove I didn’t. That’s why I wrote to you.”

  “And did you? Kill him, I mean?”

  “Of course I didn’t!” Plaxton hissed, getting a bit of color in his cheeks at last.

  “Then who did?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I sent for you.”

  Plaxton was beginning to sound like a broken phonograph record. I took one long, last, lingering look at the body in the bathtub.

  “Can we talk in your room?” I asked. Fascinating as it might be, discussing the details of its own murder within earshot of a corpse seemed to me not in the best of taste. Besides, I wanted to have a discreet peek at Plaxton’s study.

  “Tell me,” I said, when I was seated in his best basket chair, “about the other boys on Staircase Number Three, beginning with Parker and Cosgrave.”

  “Cosgrave’s all right,” he replied. “He’s the captain of the first eleven. His father’s a professor of chemistry, at Cambridge.”

  “Not Harrison Cosgrave?” I asked. “The author of Sidelights on Thiocarbanilide?”

  The book had a permanent place on my bedside table.

  “It could be, I suppose. He’s a queer old duck. Comes up for Founders’ Day.”

  “When’s Founders’ Day?”

  “It was yesterday. The seventeenth.”

  “And Harrison Cosgrave was here?”

  “Yes.”

  Confound it! I thought. I’d have given my liver to have met him.

  “And Parker?” I asked.

  “Keeps to himself. Plays American jazz on his gramophone in the middle of the night.”

  I made a mental note that gramophone music might well mask the sounds of murder and its aftermath.

  “Whyever would they think you killed Mr. Denning?” I asked, hoping that a question out of the blue might startle the truth out of him.

  “Because of the flaming great row we had a couple of days ago.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m listening.”

  “I threatened to kill him,” Plaxton blurted.

  “Good lord!” I said. “Did anyone hear you?”

  “Everyone on Staircase Number Three, I expect. We were making the most frightful uproar. It ended in his slapping my face. I’m afraid I lost my head for a moment.”

  “What was the row about?” I asked.

  Plaxton wrung his hands so hard that I was expecting water to dribble out. “The bath,” he said. “Rather than using his own facilities, Mr. Denning preferred to come up here, away from it all, and soak in silence. He’d put a sign on the door and stay in the tub for hours, reading.”

  “Did he place the OUT OF ORDER! NO ENTRY! sign on the door, or did you?”

  “I did,” Plaxton admitted. “Although it was the same wording as the one he always hung out. I thought he might take the hint.”

  “Ha!” I said. “And now, because it’s in your handwriting, you think the police will suspect you posted it to keep anyone from discovering the corpse.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Why didn’t you remove it?”

  “Because it’s evidence,” Plaxton said. “And no matter what you may think, I am not a killer.”

  “All right, then,” I said, as if it didn’t matter. “Who is?”

  Plaxton had a habit of furrowing his brow when he was thinking intently, and he furrowed it now.

  “Well,” he said at last, “Lawson’s father is a chemist, in Leeds. He could easily get his hands on copper sulfate. Besides, he’s the biggest boy at Greyminster. His biceps are like farm fence posts. He could easily lift someone the size of Mr. Denning.”

  “What makes you think copper sulfate was involved?” I asked casually. To tell the truth, I was a little peeved that he was getting so far ahead of me.

  “It’s a required subject here,” he answered. “We grow blue crystals in hot water and do another experiment with carbon rods and a battery. I say! You don’t think—”

  “Who’s your chemistry master?” I asked.

  “Mr. Winter. He’s a good sport, old Winter is. Lets us drive his Jaguar at speed when he’s in a good mood.”

  “And when he’s not?”

  “He’s a right tartar! Squabbles with everyone.”

  “Including Mr. Denning?”

  Plaxton furrowed his brow again. But before he could answer, there was sudden thunder on the stairs and the room was filled with shiny red faces and blue blazers.

  “What’s this?” one of them cried, a portly lad whose sheer size hinted of the sweet shop and regular picnic baskets from home. “A girl in your room? You surprise us, Plaxton!”

  A general uproar followed. Surrounded by his nudging schoolmates, Plaxton looked at me helplessly. The place had suddenly become a boy’s world and I needed to speak the language.

  “Oh, grow up!” I said loudly. “I’m his cousin Veronica.”

  The portly one stuck out a hand. “I’m Smith-Pritchard,” he said. “But you may call me Adrian.”

  I ignored the hand. “I’ve heard the name before,” I told him. “On the wireless, perhaps. Isn’t your father something or other in the government?”

  “He’s in Parliament—the member for—”

  “No point in telling me,” I interrupted. “I have no head for that sort of thing. I’d rather hoped he raced Aston Martins, which would at least be worth talking about.”

  “I say!” said the tall, good-looking lad on Smith-Pritchard’s left. “Are you keen on cars?”

  I recognized him at once: He was the spitting image of his father, George “Taffy” Wagstaffe, the celebrated Battle of Britain pilot who had shot down an enemy aircraft as it attacked Westminster Abbey and, after taking a direct hit himself from the rear gunner of the doomed bomber, parachuted into the Abbey’s garden and stayed for tea with the dean and chapter. He was now, five years after the war, the director of his family firm, Wagstaffe Chemicals.

  “Dead keen,” I replied. “I live on petrol fumes and swill motor oil for breakfast.”

  There was a silence.

  “What do you think of the Maserati 4CLT/50?” someone else asked in a quietly menacing voice.

  I recognized that I was being tested.

  “Not such a bad car,” I said, offering up thanks that I had kept my ears open while hanging round Bert Archer’s garage in the village. “Though not quite up to the Alfa 158 in the ferocity of its engine.”

  My questioner was a slender boy, so pale that he looked almost like a photographic negative. A whitish cowlick covered his forehead. I squirmed inwardly at his spectral stare.

  “Who’s that?” I whispered, turning to Plaxton.

  “Wilfrid Somerville,” Plaxton whispered back. “They say he dabbles in the occult.”

  “Does he?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I keep clear of him anyway.”

  “Is there anything else?”

  “Not much. His father’s a clergyman in Hastings and a keen amateur photographer. That’s all I know.”

  “What are you whispering about?” Somerville demanded, shoving the others aside with his elbows and moving menacingly toward us.

  “Veronica was just telling me,” Plaxton said without batting an eye, “that he
r pater’s going in for the Grand Prix at Monza this year.”

  “Eh?” Somerville said, startled. “What’s his name?”

  “It’s a name with which you’re not yet familiar,” I said airily, “but one with which you soon will be, I assure you.”

  An outbreak of laughter eased the tension.

  “Good on you, Veronica.” Wagstaffe laughed. “That’s giving him the old what for. You’ve met your match, Somerville. Time to retire the side.”

  Somerville, scowling horribly, turned away and fell into a pretended and overly animated discussion with Smith-Pritchard.

  A slightly embarrassed silence fell upon the rest of the boys. I shrugged, hauling my shoulders up to my ears, and turned my hands palms out, as if to say Who gives a fig? I wasn’t frightened by the likes of Wilfrid Somerville. He was a bully, and it was written all over him.

  I was about to make a joke when the door burst open again and another boy elbowed his way into the already crowded room.

  “Hullo, Plaxton,” he said, jerking a thumb toward the landing. “Old Denning’s holed up in the jakes again. He’s hung his rotten great sign on the door. What say we roust him? Come on, Lawson—you’re the son of a chemist. Surely you can raise a decent stink bomb on a minute’s notice?”

  Lawson licked his lips, looked round the room as if searching for another exit.

  “Leave the old fellow alone, can’t you, Henley?” he asked. “Don’t you think he’s been ragged enough?”

  “Oh, don’t go all pi on us,” the newcomer said. Presumably this was the Henley whose study shared the first floor with Somerville and Lawson. “Come on, then—who’s in for a lark?”

  “I am,” Somerville said loudly, as if being first to volunteer would make up for my shaming him. “Come on, lads…Henley, Cosgrave, Smith-Pritchard—what say. Let’s give old Denning a rocket up the rear that he won’t forget!”

  There were several nods and a general movement of bodies toward the door. I couldn’t allow this to happen.

  Before anyone could stop me, I shoved my way through the pack of boys and out onto the landing. I flung open the door of the WC, darted inside, slammed the door behind me, and rammed home the bolt.