The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

by Alan Bradley

  "What do you make of it?" she whispered, as Tully's voice thundered vaguely in the distance. "Poisons, you think? A regular Dr. Crippen, our Mr. Sanders?"

  I uncorked the partially filled bottle and held it to my nose. It smelled as if someone had dropped vinegar on the back of a sticking plaster: an acrid protein smell, like an alcoholic's hair burning in the next room.

  "Insulin," I said. "He's a diabetic."

  Mary gave me a blank look, and I suddenly knew how Archimedes felt when he said “Eureka!” in his bathtub. I grabbed Mary's arm.

  "Does Mr. Sanders have red hair?" I demanded.

  "Red as rhubarb. How did you know?"

  She stared at me as if I were Madame Zolanda at the church fête, with a turban, a shawl, and a crystal ball.

  "A wizard guess," I said.

  eight

  "CRIKEY!" MARY SAID, FISHING UNDER THE TABLE and pulling out a round metal wastepaper basket. “I almost forgot this. Dad'd have my hide for a hammock if he found out I didn't empty this thing. He's always on about germs, Dad is, even though you wouldn't think it to look at him. Good job I remembered before—oh, gawd! Just look at this mess, will you.”

  She pulled a wry face and held out the basket at arm's length. I peeked—tentatively—inside. You never know what you're getting into when you stick your nose in other people's rubbish.

  The bottom of the wastebasket was covered with chunks and flakes of pastry: no container, just bits flung in, as if whoever had been eating it had had enough. It appeared to be the remains of a pie. As I reached in and extracted a piece of it, Mary made a gacking noise and turned her head away.

  "Look at this," I said. "It's a piece of the crust, see? It's golden brown here, from the oven, with little crinkles of pastry, like decorations on one side. These other bits are from the bottom crust: They're whiter and thinner. Not very flaky, is it?

  "Still," I added, "I'm famished. When you haven't eaten all day, anything looks good."

  I raised the pie and opened my mouth, pretending I was about to gobble it down.

  "Flavia!"

  I paused with the crumbling cargo halfway to my gaping mouth.

  "Huh?"

  "Oh, you!" Mary said. "Give it over. I'll chuck it."

  Something told me this was a Bad Idea. Something else told me that the gutted pie was evidence that should be left untouched for Inspector Hewitt and the two sergeants to discover. I actually considered this for a moment.

  "Got any paper?" I asked.

  Mary shook her head. I opened the wardrobe and, standing on tiptoe, felt along the top shelf with my hand. As I suspected, a sheet of newspaper had been put in place to serve as a makeshift shelf liner. God bless you, Tully Stoker!

  Taking care not to break them, I tipped the larger remnants of the pie slowly out onto the Daily Mail and folded it up into a small neat package, which I shoved into my pocket. Mary stood watching me nervously, not saying a word.

  "Lab test," I said, darkly. To tell the truth, I didn't have any idea yet what I was going to do with this revolting stuff. I'd think of something later, but right now I wanted to show Mary who was in charge.

  As I set the wastepaper basket down on the floor, I was startled at a sudden slight movement in its depths, and I don't mind admitting that my stomach turned a primal hand spring. What was in there? Worms? A rat? Impossible: I couldn't have missed something that big.

  I peered cautiously into the container and sure enough, something was moving at the bottom of the basket. A feather! And it was moving gently, almost imperceptibly, back and forth with the room's air currents; stirring like a dead leaf on a tree—in the same way the dead stranger's red hair had stirred in the morning breeze.

  Could it have been only this morning that he died? It seemed an eternity since the unpleasantness in the garden. Unpleasantness? You liar, Flavia!

  Mary looked on aghast as I reached into the basket and extracted the feather and the bit of pastry impaled upon its quill end.

  "See this?" I said, holding it out towards her. She shrank back in the way Dracula is supposed to do when you threaten him with a cross. "If the feather had fallen on the pastry in the wastepaper basket, it wouldn't be attached.

  "Four-and-twenty blackbirds, baked in a pie," I recited. "See?"

  "You think?" Mary asked, her eyes like saucers.

  "Bang on, Sherlock," I said. "This pie's filling was bird, and I think I can guess the species."

  I held it out to her again. “What a pretty dish to set before the King,” I said, and this time she grinned at me.

  I'd do the same with Inspector Hewitt, I thought, as I pocketed the thing. Yes! I'd solve this case and present it to him wrapped up in gaily colored ribbons.

  "No need for you to come out here again," he'd said to me in the garden, that saucepot. What bloody cheek!

  Well, I'd show him a trick or two!

  Something told me that Norway was the key. Ned hadn't been in Norway, and besides, he had sworn he didn't leave the snipe on our doorstep and I believed him, so he was out of the question—at least for now.

  The stranger had come from Norway, and I had heard that straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak! Ergo (that means “therefore”) the stranger could have brought the snipe with him.

  In a pie.

  Yes! That made sense! What better way to get a dead bird past an inquisitive H. M. Customs inspector?

  Just one more step and we're home free: If the Inspector can't be asked how he knew about Norway, and nor can the stranger (obviously, since he is dead), who, then, does that leave?

  And I suddenly saw it all, saw it spread out before me at my feet the way one must see from the top of a mountain. The way Harriet must have—

  The way an eagle sees his prey.

  I hugged myself with pleasure. If the stranger had come from Norway, dropped a dead bird on our doorstep before breakfast, and then appeared in Father's study after midnight, he must have been staying somewhere not far away. Somewhere within walking distance of Buckshaw. Some where such as right here in this very room at the Thirteen Drakes.

  Now I knew it for certain: The corpse in the cucumbers was Mr. Sanders. There could be no doubt about it.

  "Mary!"

  It was Tully again, bellowing like a bull calf, and this time, it seemed, he was right outside the door.

  "Coming, Dad!" she shouted, grabbing the wastebasket.

  "Get out of here," she whispered. "Wait five minutes and then go down the back stairs—same way as we came up."

  She was gone, and a moment later I heard her explaining to Tully in the hallway that she just wanted to give the wastebasket an extra clean-out, since someone left a mess in it.

  "We wouldn't want somebody to die of germs they picked up at the Thirteen Drakes, would we, Dad?"

  She was learning.

  While I waited, I took a second look at the steamer trunk. I ran my fingers over the colored labels, trying to imagine where it had been in its travels, and what Mr. Sanders had been doing in each city: Paris, Rome, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Stavanger. Paris was red, white, and blue, and so was Stavanger.

  Was Stavanger in France? I wondered. It didn't sound French—unless, of course, it was pronounced “stah-vonj-yay” as in Laurence Olivier. I touched the label and it wrinkled beneath my finger, piled up like water ahead of the prow of a ship.

  I repeated the test on the other stickers. Each one was pasted down tightly: as smooth as the label on a bottle of cyanide.

  Back to Stavanger. It felt a little lumpier than the others, as if there were something underneath it.

  The blood was humming in my veins like water in a millrace.

  Again I pried the trunk open and took the safety razor from the drawer. As I extracted the blade, I thought how lucky it was that women—other than the occasional person like Miss Pickery at the library—don't need to shave. It was tough enough being a woman without having to lug all that tackle everywhere you went.

  Holding the
blade carefully between my thumb and forefinger (after the glassware incident I had been loudly lectured about sharp objects) I made a slit along the bottom of the label, taking great care to cut along the precise edge of a blue and red decorative line that ran nearly the full width of the paper.

  As I lifted the incision slightly with the dull edge of the blade, something slid out and, with a whisper of paper, fell to the floor. It was a glassine envelope, similar to the ones I had noticed in Sergeant Graves's kit. Through its semi-transparency, I could see that there was something inside, something square and opaque. I opened the envelope and gave it a tap with my finger. Something fell out into the palm of my hand: two somethings, in fact.

  Two postage stamps. Two bright orange postage stamps, each in its own tiny translucent jacket. Aside from their color, they were identical to the Penny Black that had been impaled upon the jack snipe's bill. Queen Victoria's face again. What a disappointment!

  I didn't doubt that Father would have gone into positive raptures about the pristine perfection of the things, the enchantment of engraving, the pleasures of perforations, and the glories of glue, but to me they were no more than the sort of thing you'd slap on a letter to dreadful Aunt Felicity in Hampshire, thanking her for her thoughtful Christmas gift of a Neddy the Squirrel Annual.

  Still, why bother putting them back? If Mr. Sanders and the body in our garden were, as I knew they were, one and the same, he was well past the need for postage stamps.

  No, I thought, I'll keep the things. They might come in handy someday when I need to barter my way out of a scrape with Father, who is incapable of thinking stamps and discipline at the same time.

  I shoved the envelope into my pocket, licked my forefinger, and moistened the inside edge of the slit in the label on the trunk. Then, with my thumb, I ironed it shut. No one, not even Inspector Fabian of the Yard, could ever guess it had been sliced open.

  My time was up. I took one last look round the room, slipped out into the dim hallway and, as Mary had instructed me, moved carefully towards the back staircase.

  "You're about as useless as tights on a bull, Mary! How the bloody hell can I stay on top of things when you're letting everything go to hell in a handbasket?"

  Tully was coming up the back way; one more turning of the stairs and we'd be face-to-face!

  I flew on tiptoe in the other direction, through the twisting, turning labyrinth of corridors: up two steps here, down three there. A moment later, panting, I found myself at the top of the L-shaped staircase that led down to the front entrance. As far as I could see, there was no one below.

  I tiptoed down, one slow step at a time.

  A long hallway, hung profusely with dark, water-stained sporting prints, served as a lobby, in which centuries of sacrificed kippers had left the smell of their smoky souls clinging to the wallpaper. Only the patch of sunshine visible through the open front door relieved the gloom.

  To my left was a small desk with a telephone, a telephone directory, a small glass vase of red and mauve pansies, and a ledger. The register!

  Obviously, the Thirteen Drakes was not a busy beehive: Its open pages bore the names of travelers who had signed in for the past week and more. I didn't even have to touch the thing.

  There it was:

  NO OTHER GUESTS HAD REGISTERED the day before, and none since.

  But London? Inspector Hewitt had said that the dead man had come from Norway and I knew that, like King George, Inspector Hewitt was not a frivolous man.

  Well, he hadn't said exactly that: He'd said that the deceased had recently come from Norway, which was a horse of an entirely different hue.

  Before I could think this through, there was a banging from above. It was Tully again; the ubiquitous Tully. I could tell by his tone that Mary was still getting the worst of it.

  "Don't look at me like that, my girl, or I'll give you reason to regret it."

  And now he was clomping heavily down the main staircase! In another few seconds he'd see me. Just as I was about to make a bolt for the front door, a battered black taxicab stopped directly in front of it, the roof piled high with luggage and the wooden legs of a photographer's tripod protruding from one of its windows.

  Tully was distracted for a moment.

  "Here's Mr. Pemberton," he said in a stage whisper. "He's early. Now then, girl, I told you this would happen, didn't I? Get a move on and dump those dirty sheets while I find Ned."

  I ran for it! Straight back past the sporting prints, into the back vestibule, and out into the inn yard.

  "Ned! Come and get Mr. Pemberton's luggage."

  Tully was right behind me, following me towards the back of the inn. Although momentarily dazzled by the bright sunlight, I could see that Ned was nowhere about. He must have finished unloading the lorry and gone on to other duties.

  Without even thinking about it, I sprang up and into the back of the lorry, lay down, and flattened myself behind a pile of cheeses.

  Peering out from between the stacked rounds I saw Tully stride out into the inn yard, look round, and mop his red face with his apron. He was dressed for pumping pints. The bar must be open, I thought.

  "Ned!" he bellowed.

  I knew that, standing in the bright sunlight as he was, he could not see me in the lorry's dim interior. All I had to do was lie low and keep quiet.

  I was thinking that when a couple more voices were added to Tully's bellowing.

  "Wot cheer, Tully," one said. "Thanks for the pint."

  "S'long, mate," said the other. "See you next Saturday."

  "Tell George he can hang his shirt on Seastar. Just don't tell 'im which shirt!"

  It was one of those stupid things men say simply to get in the last word. There was nothing remotely funny about it. Still, they all laughed, and were probably slapping their legs, at the witticism, and a moment later I felt the lorry dip on its springs as the two climbed heavily into the cab. Then the engine grated into life and we began to move—backwards.

  Tully was folding and unfolding his fingers, beckoning the lorry as it reversed, indicating with his hands the clearance between its tailgate and the inn yard wall. I couldn't jump out now without leaping straight into his arms. I'd have to wait until we drove out through the archway and turned onto the open road.

  My last glimpse of the yard was of Tully walking back towards the door and Gladys leaning where I had left her against a pile of scrap lumber.

  As the lorry veered sharply and then accelerated, I was beaned by a wheel of toppling Wensleydale and followed it, sliding, across the rough wooden floor. By the time I'd braced myself, the high road behind us was flashing by in a blur of green hedges, and Bishop's Lacey was receding in the distance.

  Now you've done it, Flave, I thought, you might never see your family again.

  As attractive as this idea seemed at first, I realized quickly that I would miss Father—at least a little. Ophelia and Daphne I would soon learn to live without.

  Inspector Hewitt would, of course, have already jumped to the conclusion that I had committed the murder, fled the scene, and was making my way by tramp steamer to British Guiana. He would have alerted all ports to keep an eye out for an eleven-year-old murderess in pigtails and sweater.

  Once they put two and two together, the police would soon set the hounds to tracking a fugitive who smelt like an Olde Worlde Cheese Shoppe. I would need to find a place to take a bath, then: a meadow stream, perhaps, where I could wash my clothes and dry them on a bramble bush. They would, naturally, interview Tully, grill Ned and Mary, and find out my means of escape from the Thirteen Drakes.

  The Thirteen Drakes.

  Why is it, I wondered, that the men who choose the names of our inns and public houses are so desperately unimaginative? The Thirteen Drakes, Mrs. Mullet had once told me, was given its name in the eighteenth century by a landlord who simply counted up twelve other licensed Drakes in nearby villages and added another.

  Why not something of practical value, like th
e Thirteen Carbon Atoms, for instance? Something that could be used as a memory aid? There were thirteen carbon atoms in tridecyl, whose hydride was marsh gas. What a jolly useful name for a pub!

  The Thirteen Drakes, indeed. Leave it to a man to name a place for a bird!

  I was still thinking about tridecyl when, at the open tailgate of the lorry, a rounded, whitewashed stone flashed by. It had a familiar look, and I realized almost at once that it was the turnoff marker for Doddingsley. In another half mile the driver would be forced to stop—even if only for a moment—before turning either right to St. Elfrieda's or left to Nether Lacey.

  I slithered to the lip of the open box just as the brakes squealed and the vehicle began to slow. A moment later, like a commando being sucked out the drop-hole of a Whitley bomber, I slipped off the tailgate and hit the dirt on all fours.

  Without a backwards glance, the driver turned to the left, and as the heavy lorry and its load of cheeses lumbered away in a cloud of dust, I set off for home.

  It was going to be a fair old trudge across the fields to Buckshaw.

  nine

  I EXPECT THAT LONG AFTER MY SISTER OPHELIA IS dead and gone, whenever I think of her, the first memory that will come to mind will be her gentle touch at the piano. Seated at the keyboard of our old Broadwood grand in the drawing room, Feely becomes a different person.

  Years of practice—come hell or high water—have given her the left hand of a Joe Louis and the right hand of a Beau Brummell (or so Daffy says).

  Because she plays so beautifully, I have always felt it my bounden duty to be particularly rotten to her. For instance, when she is playing one of those early things by Beethoven that sounds as if it's been cribbed from Mozart, I will stop at the drop of a hat, whatever I may be doing, to stroll casually through the drawing room.