The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie Read online

  "Get out," Father said, his voice not angry, but in that level, controlled tone that told me he was furious. In my mind I could see his furrowed brow, his clenched fists, and his jaw muscles taut as bowstrings.

  "Oh, come off it, old boy," said the oily voice. "We're in this together—always have been, always will be. You know it as well as I."

  "Twining was right," Father said. "You're a loathsome, despicable excuse for a human being."

  "Twining? Old Cuppa? Cuppa's been dead these thirty years, Jacko—like Jacob Marley. But, like said Marley, his ghost lingers on. As perhaps you've noticed."

  "And we killed him," Father said, in a flat, dead voice.

  Had I heard what I'd heard? How could he—

  By taking my ear from the door and bending to peer through the keyhole I missed Father's next words. He was standing beside his desk, facing the door. The stranger's back was to me. He was excessively tall, six foot four, I guessed. With his red hair and rusty gray suit, he reminded me of the Sandhill Crane that stood stuffed in a dim corner of the firearm museum.

  I reapplied my ear to the paneled door.

  ". no statute of limitations on shame," the voice was saying. "What's a couple of thousand to you, Jacko? You must have come into a fair bit when Harriet died. Why, the insurance alone—"

  "Shut your filthy mouth!" Father shouted. "Get out before I—"

  Suddenly I was seized from behind and a rough hand was clapped across my mouth. My heart almost leaped out of my chest.

  I was being held so tightly I couldn't manage a struggle.

  "Go back to bed, Miss Flavia," a voice hissed into my ear.

  It was Dogger.

  "This is none of your business," he whispered. "Go back to bed."

  He loosened his grip on me and I struggled free. I shot him a poisonous look.

  In the near-darkness, I saw his eyes soften a little.

  "Buzz off," he whispered.

  I buzzed off.

  Back in my room I paced up and down for a while, as I often do when I'm thwarted.

  I thought about what I'd overheard. Father a murderer? That was impossible. There was probably some quite simple explanation. If only I'd heard the rest of the conversation between Father and the stranger… if only Dogger hadn't ambushed me in the dark. Who did he think he was?

  I'll show him, I thought.

  "With no further ado!" I said aloud.

  I slipped José Iturbi from his green paper sleeve, gave my portable gramophone a good winding-up, and slapped the second side of Chopin's Polonaise in A flat Major onto the turntable. I threw myself across the bed and sang along:

  "DAH-dah-dah-dah, DAH-dah-dah-dah, DAH-dah-dah-dah, DAH-dah-dah-dah."

  The music sounded as if it had been composed for a film in which someone was cranking an old Bentley that kept sputtering out: hardly a selection to float you off to dreamland…

  WHEN I OPENED MY EYES, an oyster-colored dawn was peeping in at the windows. The hands of my brass alarm clock stood at 3:44. On Summer Time, daylight came early, and in less than a quarter of an hour, the sun should be up.

  I stretched, yawned, and climbed out of bed. The gramophone had run down, frozen in mid-Polonaise, its needle lying dead in the grooves. For a fleeting moment I thought of winding it up again to give the household a Polish reveille. And then I remembered what had happened just a few hours before.

  I went to the window and looked down into the garden. There was the potting shed, its glass panes clouded with the dew, and over there, an angular darkness that was Dogger's overturned wheelbarrow, forgotten in the events of yesterday.

  Determined to put it right, to make up to him somehow, for something of which I was not even certain, I dressed and went quietly down the back stairs and into the kitchen.

  As I passed the window, I noticed that a slice had been cut from Mrs. Mullet's custard pie. How odd, I thought; it was certainly none of the de Luces who had taken it. If there was one thing upon which we all agreed—one thing that united us as a family—it was our collective loathing of Mrs. Mullet's custard pies. Whenever she strayed from our favorite rhubarb or gooseberry to the dreaded custard, we generally begged off, feigning group illness, and sent her packing off home with the pie, and solicitous instructions to serve it up, with our compliments, to her good husband, Alf.

  As I stepped outside, I saw that the silver light of dawn had transformed the garden into a magic glade, its shadows darkened by the thin band of day beyond the walls. Sparkling dew lay upon everything, and I should not have been at all surprised if a unicorn had stepped from behind a rosebush and tried to put its head in my lap.

  I was walking towards the wheelbarrow when I tripped suddenly and fell forward onto my hands and knees.

  "Bugger!" I said, already looking round to make sure that no one had heard me. I was now plastered with wet black loam.

  "Bugger," I said again, a little less loudly.

  Twisting round to see what had tripped me up, I spotted it at once: something white protruding from the cucumbers. For a teetering moment there was a part of me that fought desperately to believe it was a little rake, a cunning little cultivator with white curled tines.

  But reason returned, and my mind admitted that it was a hand. A hand attached to an arm: an arm that snaked off into the cucumber patch.

  And there, at the end of it, tinted an awful dewy cucumber green by the dark foliage, was a face. A face that looked for all the world like the Green Man of forest legend.

  Driven by a will stronger than my own, I found myself dropping further to my hands and knees beside this apparition, partly in reverence and partly for a closer look.

  When I was almost nose to nose with the thing its eyes began to open.

  I was too shocked to move a muscle.

  The body in the cucumbers sucked in a shuddering breath… and then, bubbling at the nose, exhaled it in a single word, slowly and a little sadly, directly into my face.

  "Vale,” it said.

  My nostrils pinched reflexively as I got a whiff of a peculiar odor—an odor whose name was, for an instant, on the very tip of my tongue.

  The eyes, as blue as the birds in the Willow pattern, looked up into mine as if staring out from some dim and smoky past, as if there were some recognition in their depths.

  And then they died.

  I wish I could say my heart was stricken, but it wasn't. I wish I could say my instinct was to run away, but that would not be true. Instead, I watched in awe, savoring every detail: the fluttering fingers, the almost imperceptible bronze metallic cloudiness that appeared on the skin, as if, before my very eyes, it were being breathed upon by death.

  And then the utter stillness.

  I wish I could say I was afraid, but I wasn't. Quite the contrary. This was by far the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life.

  three

  I RACED UP THE WEST STAIRCASE. MY FIRST THOUGHT was to waken Father, but something—some great invisible magnet—stopped me in my tracks. Daffy and Feely were useless in emergencies; it would be no good calling them. As quickly and as quietly as possible, I ran to the back of the house, to the little room at the top of the kitchen stairs, and tapped lightly on the door.

  "Dogger!" I whispered. "It's me, Flavia."

  There wasn't a sound within, and I repeated my rapping.

  After about two and a half eternities, I heard Dogger's slippers shuffling across the floor. The lock gave a heavy click as the bolt shot back and his door opened a couple of wary inches. I could see that his face was haggard in the dawn, as if he hadn't slept.

  "There's a dead body in the garden," I said. "I think you'd better come."

  As I shifted from foot to foot and bit my fingernails, Dogger gave me a look that can only be described as reproachful, then vanished into the darkness of his room to dress. Five minutes later we were standing together on the garden path.

  It was obvious that Dogger was no stranger to dead bodies. As if he'd be
en doing it all his life, he knelt and felt with his first two fingers for a pulse at the back angle of the jawbone. By his deadpan, distant look I could tell that there wasn't one.

  Getting slowly to his feet, he dusted off his hands, as if they had somehow been contaminated.

  "I'll inform the Colonel," he said.

  "Shouldn't we call the police?" I asked.

  Dogger ran his long fingers over his unshaven chin, as if he were mulling a question of earth-shattering consequence. There were severe restrictions on using the telephone at Buckshaw.

  "Yes," he said at last. "I suppose we should."

  We walked together, too slowly, into the house.

  Dogger picked up the telephone and put the receiver to his ear, but I saw that he was keeping his finger firmly on the cradle switch. His mouth opened and closed several times and then his face went pale. His arm began shaking and I thought for a moment he was going to drop the thing. He looked at me helplessly.

  "Here," I said, taking the instrument from his hands. "I'll do it."

  "Bishop's Lacey two two one," I said into the telephone, thinking as I waited that Sherlock might well have smiled at the coincidence.

  "Police," said an official voice at the other end of the line.

  "Constable Linnet?" I said. "This is Flavia de Luce speaking from Buckshaw."

  I had never done this before, and had to rely on what I'd heard on the wireless and seen in the cinema.

  "I'd like to report a death," I said. "Perhaps you could send out an inspector?"

  "Is it an ambulance you require, Miss Flavia?" he said. "We don't usually call out an inspector unless the circumstances are suspicious. Wait till I find a pencil."

  There was a maddening pause while I listened to him rummaging through stationery supplies before he continued:

  "Now then, give me the name of the deceased, slowly, last name first."

  "I don't know his name," I said. "He's a stranger."

  That was the truth: I didn't know his name. But I did know, and knew it all too well, that the body in the garden—the body with the red hair, the body in the gray suit—was that of the man I'd spied through the study keyhole. The man Father had—

  But I could hardly tell them that.

  "I don't know his name," I repeated. "I've never seen him before in my life."

  I had stepped over the line.

  MRS. MULLET AND THE POLICE ARRIVED at the same moment, she on foot from the village and they in a blue Vauxhall sedan. As it crunched to a stop on the gravel, its front door squeaked open and a man stepped out onto the driveway.

  "Miss de Luce," he said, as if pronouncing my name aloud put me in his power. "May I call you Flavia?"

  I nodded assent.

  "I'm Inspector Hewitt. Is your father at home?"

  The Inspector was a pleasant-enough-looking man, with wavy hair, gray eyes, and a bit of a bulldog stance that reminded me of Douglas Bader, the Spitfire ace, whose photos I had seen in the back issues of The War Illustrated that lay in white drifts in the drawing room.

  "He is," I said, "but he's rather indisposed." It was a word I had borrowed from Ophelia. "I'll show you to the corpse myself."

  Mrs. Mullet's mouth fell open and her eyes goggled. “Oh, good Lord! Beggin' your pardon, Miss Flavia, but, oh, good Lord!”

  If she had been wearing an apron, she'd have thrown it over her head and fled, but she didn't. Instead, she reeled in through the open door.

  Two men in blue suits, who, as if awaiting instructions, had remained packed into the backseat of the car, now began to unfold themselves.

  "Detective Sergeant Woolmer and Detective Sergeant Graves," Inspector Hewitt said. Sergeant Woolmer was hulking and square, with the squashed nose of a prizefighter; Sergeant Graves a chipper little blond sparrow with dimples who grinned at me as he shook my hand.

  "And now if you'll be so kind," Inspector Hewitt said.

  The detective sergeants unloaded their kits from the boot of the Vauxhall, and I led them in solemn procession through the house and into the garden.

  Having pointed out the body, I watched in fascination as Sergeant Woolmer unpacked and mounted his camera on a wooden tripod, his fingers, fat as sausages, making surprisingly gentle microscopic adjustments to the little silver controls. As he took several covering exposures of the garden, lavishing particular attention on the cucumber patch, Sergeant Graves was opening a worn leather case in which were bottles ranged neatly row on row, and in which I glimpsed a packet of glassine envelopes.

  I stepped forward eagerly, almost salivating, for a closer look.

  "I wonder, Flavia," Inspector Hewitt said, stepping gingerly into the cucumbers, "if you might ask someone to organize some tea?"

  He must have seen the look on my face.

  "We've had rather an early start this morning. Do you think you could manage to rustle something up?"

  So that was it. As at a birth, so at a death. Without so much as a kiss-me-quick-and-mind-the-marmalade, the only female in sight is enlisted to trot off and see that the water is boiled. Rustle something up, indeed! What did he take me for, some kind of cowboy?

  "I'll see what can be arranged, Inspector," I said. Coldly, I hoped.

  "Thank you," Inspector Hewitt said. Then, as I stamped off towards the kitchen door, he called out, "Oh, and Flavia."

  I turned, expectantly.

  "We'll come in for it. No need for you to come out here again."

  The nerve! The bloody nerve!

  OPHELIA AND DAPHNE WERE already at the breakfast table. Mrs. Mullet had leaked the grim news, and there had been ample time for them to arrange themselves in poses of pretended indifference.

  Ophelia's lips had still not reacted to my little preparation, and I made a mental note to record the time of my observation and the results later.

  "I found a dead body in the cucumber patch," I told them.

  "How very like you," Ophelia said, and went on preening her eyebrows.

  Daphne had finished The Castle of Otranto and was now well into Nicholas Nickleby. But I noticed that she was biting her lower lip as she read: a sure sign of distraction.

  There was an operatic silence.

  "Was there a great deal of blood?" Ophelia asked at last.

  "None," I said. "Not a drop."

  "Whose body was it?"

  "I don't know," I said, relieved at an opportunity to duck behind the truth.

  "The Death of a Perfect Stranger," Daphne proclaimed in her best BBC Radio announcer's voice, dragging herself out of Dickens, but leaving a finger in to mark her place.

  "How do you know it's a stranger?" I asked.

  "Elementary," Daffy said. "It isn't you, it isn't me, and it isn't Feely. Mrs. Mullet is in the kitchen, Dogger is in the garden with the coppers, and Father was upstairs just a few minutes ago splashing in his bath."

  I was about to tell her that it was me she had heard in the tub, but I decided not to; any mention of the bath led inevitably to gibes about my general cleanliness. But after the morning's events in the garden, I had felt the sudden need for a quick soak and a wash-up.

  "He was probably poisoned," I said. "The stranger, I mean."

  "It's always poison, isn't it?" Feely said with a toss of her hair. "At least in those lurid yellow detective novels. In this case, he probably made the fatal mistake of eating Mrs. Mullet's cooking."

  As she pushed away the gooey remains of a coddled egg, something flashed into my mind like a cinder popping out of the grate and onto the hearth, but before I could examine it, my chain of thought was broken.

  "Listen to this," Daphne said, reading aloud. "Fanny Squeers is writing a letter:

  "'. my pa is one mask of brooses both blue and green likewise two forms are steepled in his Goar. We were kimpelled to have him carried down into the kitchen where he now lays.

  "'. When your nevew that you recommended for a teacher had done this to my pa and jumped upon his body with his feet and also langwedge which I will not poll
ewt my pen with describing, he assaulted my ma with dreadful violence, dashed her to the earth, and drove her back comb several inches into her head. A very little more and it must have entered her skull. We have a medical certifiket that if it had, the tortershell would have affected the brain.'

  "Now listen to this next bit:

  "'Me and my brother were then the victims of his feury since which we have suffered very much which leads us to the arrowing belief that we have received some injury in our in-sides, especially as no marks of violence are visible externally. I am screaming out loud all the time I write—'"

  It sounded to me like a classic case of cyanide poisoning, but I didn't much feel like sharing my insight with these two boors.

  "'Screaming out loud all the time I write,'" Daffy repeated. "Imagine!"

  "I know the feeling," I said, pushing my plate away, and, leaving my breakfast untouched, I made my way slowly up the east staircase to my laboratory.

  WHENEVER I WAS UPSET, I made for my sanctum sanctorum. Here, among the bottles and beakers, I would allow myself to be enveloped by what I thought of as the Spirit of Chemistry. Here, sometimes, I would reenact, step by step, the discoveries of the great chemists. Or I would lift down lovingly from the bookcase a volume from Tar de Luce's treasured library, such as the English translation of Antoine Lavoisier's Elements of Chemistry, printed in 1790 but whose leaves, even after a hundred and sixty years, were still as crisp as butcher's paper. How I gloried in the antiquated names just waiting to be plucked from its pages: Butter of Antimony… Flowers of Arsenic.

  "Rank poisons," Lavoisier called them, but I reveled in the recitation of their names like a hog at a spa.

  "King's yellow!" I said aloud, rolling the words round in my mouth—savoring them in spite of their poisonous nature.

  "Crystals of Venus! Fuming Liquor of Boyle! Oil of Ants!"

  But it wasn't working this time; my mind kept flying back to Father, thinking over and over about what I had seen and heard. Who was this Twining—“Old Cuppa”—the man Father claimed they had killed? And why had Father not appeared at breakfast? That had me truly worried. Father always insisted that breakfast was “the body's banquet,” and to the best of my knowledge, there was nothing on earth that would compel him to miss it.