The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches Page 16

  Adam Tradescant Sowerby, MA., FRHortS, etc.

  Flora-archaeologist

  Seeds of Antiquity—Cuttings—Inquiries

  Tower Bridge, London E.1 TN Royal 1066

  He was, of course, something of a fraud. While working in the guise of an archaeological botanist, retrieving and coaxing back into germination the seeds of plants and flowers thought to be long extinct, the man was actually an inquiry agent, or—to put it more plainly—a private detective.

  When he learned of my recent successes, he had tried to recruit me as his partner in criminal investigation, but I had quickly discovered that the man took more than he gave. Worse than that, he had point-blank refused to tell me whom he was working for.

  Since Adam was an old friend of Father’s, there wasn’t much that I could do to keep him off my pitch, but there was no law that said I had to cooperate.

  “It must have been a very great shock,” he said, still talking, even though I hadn’t been listening.

  I nodded and headed for the staircase.

  “As must have been that poor bloke at the station.”

  I stopped in my tracks. How did Adam know about that? Had he been there?

  I thought he had only arrived last night. Had he already been in consultation with the police?

  I could hardly believe that Inspector Hewitt would confide in a private inquiry agent—and a private inquiry agent from London, at that!

  Of course, by now, the circumstances of the stranger’s death must be the talk of the village. Perhaps that was why some of the mourners had looked at me so oddly. Adam might well have stopped and been given the goods at Bert Archer’s petrol station or at the Thirteen Drakes. Or might he have heard the grisly details from someone here at Buckshaw?

  If that was the case, the burning question was—from whom?

  Who else in the house had seen what happened on the railway platform? If Inspector Hewitt, out of sympathy for the family, had delayed his questioning of the household’s inhabitants, who else had witnessed the murder?

  Who else was keeping silent?

  “All right,” I said, turning round reluctantly. “Tell me what you know.”

  There are people who are able to deflect direct questions as easily as a duck sheds water, and Adam, I knew, was one of them.

  “Terence Alfriston Tardiman, bachelor, of 3A Campden Gardens, Notting Hill Gate, London, W8, aged thirty-seven.”

  Adam’s frankness surprised me.

  “How do you know that?”

  “No magic involved,” he said. “I’d been following him for five days. This time.”

  “What do you mean ‘this time’? Have you followed him before?”

  Adam nodded. “Off again, on again, gone again, Finnegan. It’s been going on for years.”

  I hadn’t the faintest idea what he was referring to, but I pretended I did.

  “Who was he?” I asked. “Other than his name.”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to discover,” Adam said. “As Mr. Churchill once so aptly put it, Tardiman was a riddle inside a mystery wrapped in an enigma. And now that he’s dead, more so than ever.”

  “Mr. Churchill was at the station,” I found myself saying. “He spoke to me.”

  Oh, fluff! I had blurted it out without thinking.

  “Winnie quite often likes to insert himself at the heart of the action,” Adam told me. “Rather like Alfred Hitchcock’s cameo appearances in his own films, but somewhat more risky.

  “What did he have to say?” he added casually.

  “Just that he was sorry,” I said.

  I was certainly not going to tell him that Mr. Churchill had asked: “And have you, also, acquired a taste for pheasant sandwiches, young lady?”

  With Inspector Hewitt and his men of the Hinley Constabulary and Adam Tradescant Sowerby (Inquiries) on the case, I knew instinctively to keep certain information to myself.

  That I had let slip the fact that Mr. Churchill had spoken to me was troubling. I would need to be far more discreet in future.

  I was trying to think of a way to remove myself from this dangerous conversation when someone laid a large hand on my shoulder.

  It was the vicar, Denwyn Richardson, and behind him stood his wife, Cynthia.

  “Dearest Flavia,” he said. “We’ve been looking for you everywhere. I’ve spoken to your father, of course, but—I told him we were sorry not to have traveled with you to Buckshaw from the station yesterday, but what with poor Mrs. Dainty being taken so suddenly, and everything being consequently at sixes and sevens, to say nothing of the fact that our telephone at the rectory chose that moment to—well, how very, very sorry we are that things have come to such a—”

  Cynthia brushed past him and wrapped me in such a tight and quaking hug that I thought my bones would surely shatter.

  We had had our battles, Cynthia and I, and it was only recently that I had learned of the tragic death, seven years ago Christmas, of their daughter, Hannah.

  Hannah had been four years old, my exact age at the time, when she fell beneath the wheels of a train at Doddingsley station. She had been laid to rest in a so-far unmarked grave in the churchyard of St. Tancred’s, and the villagers had begun a conspiracy of silence to shield the Richardsons from grief and guilt. The little girl had darted away from her father on that tragic long-ago Christmas, and he had blamed himself.

  The trembling of Cynthia’s embrace became a chill as I realized what a harsh reminder the death of Terence Tardiman must be to them: that whole ghastly nightmare on the railway platform brought back to life and shoved in their faces, as it were.

  I felt my tears coming, and before I could stop them, they were dribbling down Cynthia’s neck. Rather than pulling away, though, she was now hugging me all the harder.

  How sorry I suddenly felt for this poor little woman: this poor unfortunate little creature upon whom I had wasted so much hatred over the years. What kind of life did she have, when you stop to think about it? All of her days and nights were given over to visiting the sick, arranging flowers for the church, chairing meetings of this committee and that, booking the parish hall, cooking three meals a day for her husband, typing up and printing handbills and posters on a hectograph or churning out church bulletins on a Banda machine, to say nothing of managing her husband’s timetable, mending his clothes, starching his surplices, running the church library, and listening to the troubles of everyone in Bishop’s Lacey.

  Being married to a man who dressed himself in vestments was no holiday camp.

  She didn’t seem to want to let me go. The hug went on until I thought to say, “Oh! I’m sorry, I must be hurting you.”

  At that point we both gave a little laugh and released our life-and-death grip on each other.

  Adam, meanwhile, had wandered away and was critically inspecting the funeral flowers. I was dying to ask him what he thought, but I didn’t dare.

  Dogger had now admitted those from the head of the queue, and the long trudge up the stairs to Harriet’s boudoir had resumed. It would go on until just after noon, when preparations for departure would begin.

  I could only hope and pray that those officious creatures from the Home Office had thought to stop the dripping.

  I took my leave of the Richardsons and climbed the stairs to the east wing. In the top corridor, I knew instantly that I was not alone.

  There is a vibration in the air that is not a sound and not a smell but more a feeling in the atmosphere that signals without fail the presence of another.

  I flung open the door of my bedroom and marched inside, but no one was there. Then the laboratory. Except for Esmeralda, it, too, was empty.

  Down the hall I crept on tiptoe, taking great care to avoid the squeaky floorboard in front of the nook. I put my hand on the knob of Angels—and threw open the door.

  Undine was standing on the laboratory stool, the oilcloth wallet in her hand. She had fished it out of its hiding place behind the baggy wallpaper.


  “You lied to me,” she said, wide-eyed with indignation. “You told me you were watering plants.”

  I have to give the girl credit. Not only had she found the hidden wallet, but she had manufactured a remarkably good response when I caught her red-handed. It was exactly the kind of thing I might have thought of myself. Someday I might even tell her that—but not now.

  I marched smartly across the room and snatched the packet from her hands. “You little beast!” I said. “Is this how you repay kindness?”

  “You crept up on me,” Undine pouted. “Ibu said you were devious.”

  “Ibu did, did she? Did she say anything else?”

  “Yes. She told me to keep an eye on you.”

  Keep an eye on me! That was the last straw.

  “Tell me something, Undine,” I said. “Do you know how to say ‘buzz off’ in Malay?”

  “Berambus.”

  “Excellent! Berambus!”

  “Are you dismissing me?” she asked.

  “You’re a very perceptive child,” I said, shoving her out the door. “Now tallyho, and don’t come back.”

  “Brute!” Undine said, getting in the last word, as I somehow knew she would. “Ibu was right.”

  I gave her the response she deserved: I crossed my eyes horribly and stuck out my tongue at her.

  “Ain’t you beautiful!” She giggled, and then she was gone.

  Beautiful? It was the first time anyone had called me that—even as an insult.

  I examined my image in one of the dusty, peeling mirrors that hung in the dim hall.

  If I were a painting, I thought, it would be called Girl in Black and would probably be by one of those artists such as the American Whistler.

  I was little more than a white face staring out at myself from a gloomy background, the only spot of color my eyes.

  It made me feel so old, so sad, so much a part of the house, so much a de Luce.

  The face was, of course, Harriet’s face. Father had told me recently that I wasn’t just like Harriet, but that I was Harriet.

  I didn’t even have a face to call my own.

  It was in that moment, looking at myself staring back at myself, that something somewhere deep inside went click—as if the universe, and I with it, had, like a grandfather clock, moved on to the next cog of a clunking wooden gear.

  I can’t explain it any more clearly than that. One instant I was plain old Flavia de Luce, and the next instant—click—I was plain old Flavia de Luce, but with a difference. For all the tea in China, I couldn’t say what the difference was, but only that a distinct change had taken place.

  And I knew in that instant what I must do.

  With my heart in my mouth—this wasn’t going to be easy; in fact, it was going to be the most difficult moment of my entire life—I made my way to the west wing. The long line of mourners was still shuffling slowly across the foyer and up the stairs. Most of them averted their eyes as I pardoned my way through the queue and made for Father’s study.

  There could be no half truths, no excuses, no evasion. No appeals to sympathy, no claims of ignorance, no sweeping of inconvenient facts under the carpet.

  It was that breathtakingly simple. Really, it was.

  I did not knock. I opened the door and walked in.

  Father was standing silhouetted at the window, and how old he looked: how very, very old.

  He had heard me come in, of course, but he did not turn. He might have been a carving in ebony of a dark shadow looking out over the lawn.

  I went to his side and, without a word, handed him Harriet’s will.

  And without a word he took it.

  For a moment we stared at each other. It was the first time, I think, that I had ever looked my father in the eye.

  And then I did what I needed to do.

  I turned and walked out of the room.

  Of course I had wanted to tell Father exactly how Harriet’s will had come to be in my possession. I had wanted to make a clean breast of it—the whole scheme: my plans for Harriet’s resurrection and my surprise presentation of her, newly restored to life, to her grieving husband, to my grieving father.

  What a scene it would have been!

  But my well-meaning plan, alas, through no fault of my own, had been thwarted by those interfering killers from the Home Office.

  Because of them, Harriet would now remain dead forever.

  Father would realize from the document what I had done. I wouldn’t need to say a word.

  I had no right, of course, to read my mother’s will, and I was glad I had not done so. I had realized that while staring at my own reflection in the looking glass. Her will was not mine to read.

  I had removed it from its rather unpleasant wallet and put it into Father’s hands.

  For better or for worse, I had done what I had done, and now there was no going back.

  I had done the right thing and I would jolly well have to live with it.

  TWENTY-THREE

  HARRIET’S FUNERAL WAS NOW just hours away. There wasn’t a moment to lose.

  I sauntered off across the Visto as if I was going for an aimless walk.

  At the far corner of the ancient, overgrown lawn, Tristram Tallis, in blue coveralls and almost invisible in a cloud of blue smoke, was tinkering with the idling engine of Blithe Spirit. He waved a spanner in the air.

  “If you’ve come for another hop, I’m afraid you’re out of luck,” he said as I reached his side.

  “ ‘And he opened the bottomless pit,’ ” announced a loud, dramatic, and rather familiar voice, “ ‘and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace.’ ”

  Adam Sowerby popped round from the other side of the aircraft. I hadn’t noticed he was there.

  “ ‘And the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.’ The author of the Book of Revelation, whoever he might have been, was doubtless thinking of recalcitrant aero carburetors when he wrote those words.”

  Adam was always spouting poetry. It oozed out of him like jam from a squeezed bun.

  “Spare the child,” Tristram said, as if I wasn’t there.

  The whole scene had an air of dreamlike unreality: the three of us standing on a ruined lawn in the blowing smoke of a ticking aero engine, and Adam all the while spewing poetic nonsense that would have made even the author of the Book of Revelation, whoever he might have been, fall gasping to the ground in helpless laughter.

  Only Tristram seemed remotely real, even though, in his baggy coveralls and with the spanner in his hand, he reminded me of a court jester with a bladder on a stick.

  Who was he, anyway? Beyond the fact that he had once come to Buckshaw to buy Blithe Spirit from Harriet, that he claimed to have fought in the Battle of Britain, and that Mrs. Mullet doted upon him, I knew nothing whatsoever about the man.

  Was he really who he pretended to be? It had been my experience that strangers were not always truthful about their identity. Some seemed able to shrug it off as easily as a wet raincoat.

  I was simply dying to ask Adam about his visit in the early hours to Rook’s End, but to risk doing so in front of Tristram could well turn out to be a bad mistake.

  As if he were reading my mind, Adam gave me a sly wink behind the pilot’s back. I ignored it.

  Tristram reached into the cockpit, and the propeller clattered to a standstill. “Fouled plug,” he announced. “Nothing to do with the carburetor. So much for Revelation, Sowerby.”

  Adam shrugged. “I’m afraid the Apocalypse of John is rather slender on the subject of sparking plugs, unless of course, his ‘lightnings and thunderings’ and ‘seven lamps of fire burning before the throne’ foresaw the rotary aero engine, although that won’t quite do, will it? This old girl has four cylinders, not seven, and besides—”

  I gave him such a look! Foolishness in a grown man, no matter how lighthearted, is disgusting.

  There was more here than met the eye. I was sure of it. Why, on the morning o
f a funeral, would two houseguests be fiddling with an aeroplane on an out-of-the-way lawn and burbling bits of Revelation? It didn’t make any sense.

  Was Tristram Tallis the tall man I had glimpsed at the window of my laboratory in the ciné film? Or could that man have been the one who was pushed under the train?

  It might have been neither, and I could hardly ask. One of them was dead, and the other—well, the other, if he was who I suspected he might be, would hardly blurt out the truth to a mere girl, even if she was almost twelve years old.

  And Adam Sowerby. It all came down to this: What was he doing in Bishop’s Lacey and for whom was he working? Was he here as a private investigator? Or as a friend of the family?

  Until I knew the answers to these questions, I could trust neither of these two men.

  As usual, I was on my own.

  “If you’ll excuse me,” I said, “I have things to do.”

  South I walked, towards the ornamental lake, until my direction was hidden by the brick wall of the kitchen garden. Then, slowly, I made my way back towards the east, working round the ornamental lake until I was safely hidden by the trees of the Palings. Then, across the little bridge to the Gully, and it wasn’t long before I was climbing Goodger Hill.

  If it hadn’t been for the steepness of Goodger Hill and the Jack O’Lantern, I’d have brought Gladys. I thought of her sitting alone at home, wondering why I had forsaken her. Although Gladys loved nothing better than whizzing hell-for-leather down hills, she loathed being shoved up them. It made both of us cranky.

  With a sigh, I trudged on towards my destination.

  Set among acres of moldy grass and ancient beech trees, Rook’s End was a damp, subsiding monstrosity consisting on the outside of countless gables and on the inside of stale endless corridors.

  A mushroom farm for humans, I thought.

  It was not the first time I had visited the place. I had, on several occasions in the past, found it necessary to consult with Dr. Kissing, and I must admit I was quite looking forward to seeing the old gentleman again.