by Alan Bradley
On the raised wicker seat, Daffy sat hunched over a book—Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy—oblivious to the glorious English landscape sliding slowly by on either side.
Father’s sudden and unexpected death had knocked our family into a kind of coma, brought on, I believe, by the fact that we de Luces are constitutionally incapable of expressing our grief.
Only Dogger had broken down, howling like a dog in the night, then silent and impassive in the long and tortured days that followed.
It was pitiful.
The funeral had been a shambles. Denwyn Richardson, the vicar and one of Father’s oldest and dearest friends, had been seized at the outset by uncontrollable sobbing, unable to continue, and the service had to be halted until a stopgap clergyman could be found. In the end, poor old Canon Walpole was located in the next village, dragged from his sickbed, and rushed to St. Tancred’s, where he finished what his colleague had begun, barking from a rattling chest cold at the graveside like a hundred hounds.
It was a nightmare.
Bent on taking charge, Aunt Felicity had (as I have said) swooped down from London, the death of her only—and younger—brother having driven her into a frenzy, during which she treated us all like particularly dim-witted galley slaves, slinging orders about like a grill cook:
“Straighten those magazines, Flavia. Put them in alphabetical and then in chronological order, right side up, in the cupboard. This is a drawing room, not a jackdaw’s nest. Ophelia, fetch a mop and pull down those spider’s webs. The place is like a tomb.”
Then, realizing what she had said, she went all fretful with suppressed shame, and made even more hurtful remarks, which I will not report here for fear of her reading them someday and taking revenge.
Am I overdramatizing the situation? Not entirely.
“You look like a school of slugs,” Aunt Felicity had told us. “You need something to burn away the slime.”
And so it was decided—I’m still not entirely sure by whom—that we all of us needed a holiday: something with charabancs and gaily striped deck chairs by the sea, or at least exposure to the great outdoors.
It was Dogger, I think, who had come up with the idea of a boat trip: of lazy days on the river, of cold-meat hampers with flasks of lemonade and ginger beer from Fortnum & Mason, of goose-down mattresses at night and hot beef roasts in an ever-changing string of country hotels.
“Think of Huckleberry Finn,” Daffy had said. “Who knows, Flavia? You might even be fortunate enough to find a dead body in a floating house.”
It seemed unlikely, but anything was better than staying at Buckshaw, which now seemed likely to remain in mourning until the last day of the last month of the end of time.
There now seemed to be a sudden damp dustiness about the house that I had never noticed before: a certain staleness of the air, as if the ashes of generations of de Luces had been shaken from the bag of a hoover and allowed to settle wherever they wished. In fact, it was Daffy who had pointed this out to me:
“It’s like the moldy little church in the park in Bleak House,” she had said with a shiver, pulling her cardigan closer about her shoulders, and referring to the book which she claimed to have been reading obsessively again and again since she was in a pram, beginning anew each time she finished. “ ‘There is a general smell and taste as of the ancient Dedlocks in their graves.’ Gaak!”
The “Gaak!” was Daffy’s, not in Dickens’s original.
Feely’s marriage to Dieter Schrantz, which had been planned for June, was postponed out of respect to Father. There had been scenes of dinnerware thrown, wallpaper ripped, upholstery gutted, and so forth, but all of it had been in vain.
“For the death of a parent, a heavy mourning period of six months is laid on,” Aunt Felicity said, betraying her military attachments, no matter how top secret they were supposed to have been. “And not a day less. And all your shrieking cuts no ice with me.”
And that was that.
What should have been a time of bliss now became a nightmare as Feely’s nerves, fear, and anger seized reason by the throat and shook it dead. The result was a spectacular series of split-ups and reconciliations with Dieter, followed by suddenly renewed outbreaks of hostility that would have put even Genghis Khan to shame.
Through it all, Dieter had been a brick, but had at last, as all heroes must sooner or later do, retired to lick his wounds.
And so it came to pass that we had packed up with little ado—except on the part of Dogger, who was never ill-prepared—and set out on what was hoped would be a time of healing.
But things didn’t turn out that way.
By the time we were finally able to make our first escape from Buckshaw, Father had been dead for nearly six months, during which it had seemed, at least in the beginning, as if Dogger had lost some essential part of his soul. But as the days went on, it became ever more apparent—to me, anyway—that he was gaining something greater.
In the past several weeks especially, Dogger had been acquiring a glow. It’s hard to describe, but I’ll do my best.
It was not a superficial effect, as if he had just shaved and patted his face with a bay rum lotion, for Dogger would never stoop to such artifice.
No, it was as if he had begun to grow a nimbus: that pale radiance which, in paintings of the medieval saints, is portrayed as a gold halo about the head, as if the saint in question were wearing an inverted brass kettle.
There are, in fact, no halos in the Bible—just as there are no cats or accordions. If it’s halos you’re after, you’ll have to look them up in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, where they come between “Hallucination” and “Halogens.” Physical halos, such as those observed around the moon or sun, are caused, as everybody knows, by the reflection and refraction of light by ice crystals suspended in the atmosphere. But for the halos of saints, no cause is given—although one can easily imagine. At least, I can.
In Dogger’s case, it was a kind of glow, or glory, which was coming upon him only gradually. I had made a point of going into the kitchen first thing every morning to observe him closely, although I was, of course, discreet about it.
There was a rather growing pinkness of the cheeks, and I had worried at first about stramonium poisoning, or plague. But since Dogger knew better than to handle the potted Datura plant (Datura stramonium) that grew in my chemical laboratory, and because the Black Death had been extinct in England since a last reported case near Ipswich had taken the life of a Mrs. Bugg in 1918, I decided that Dogger’s growing radiance could be only for the good.
And so it was. On this particular morning in June, sitting dead center in the skiff, digging the blades of the sculls firmly into the warm muddy river water, Dogger was as handsome and as healthy as I had ever seen him: like a cinema star, in fact. If this were a film, rather than real life, he would be played perhaps by John Mills, squinting knowingly with a slight smile into the morning sunshine as if he saw already what lay just round the next bend. And perhaps he did.
“Have you ever been here before, Dogger?” I asked. “On this particular stretch of the river, I mean?”
“Many years ago, Miss Flavia,” he answered, “but that was in another life.”
And I knew enough to leave it at that.
I gazed across the water at the rich and comforting shades of the churchyard.
Most people probably never stop to think about why our burial places are so green. But if they ever did, their faces might turn the very shade of that graveyard grass, for underneath the picturesque moss and lichen, and beneath all those weathered stones, is a slowly simmering chemical stew, bubbling and burbling away in the dark earth as our ancestors and neighbors, with the help of a little chemistry, are returned to their Maker.
“For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return,” the Bible tells us.
“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” says The Book of Common Prayer.
But both of these books, having been written mostly in good tas
te, fail to mention either the stinking jelly or the oozing liquids and the gaseous phases through which each of us must pass on our way to the Great Beyond.
The average churchyard is a first-rate meat tenderizer.
Shocking, perhaps, but true.
In an issue of The Illustrated London News from several years ago—which I found abandoned under a sofa in the drawing room at Buckshaw—it was reported that an extract of the humble papaya fruit was now being marketed to soften the squire’s steak.
What a colossal waste! I had thought. A faster and much more powerful and effective product could be easily manufactured simply by bottling—
By now, we were drifting along just feet from the edge of the churchyard, and St.-Mildred’s-in-the-Marsh loomed above us, the shadow of its square tower blocking the morning sun. A sudden chill came into the air, and it wasn’t just from the light wind which had suddenly sprung up, signaling a change in the weather.
“It was just there by the old dock, wasn’t it, Dogger, that Canon Whitbread chucked the poisoned chalice into the river?”
I knew perfectly well that it was. I had pored for ages over the photographs in News of the World, memorizing the details: the path, the dock, the sloping riverbank, the reeds…all helpfully labeled, with arrows, for the convenience of the bloodthirsty reader.
He had thrown the vessel into the river in the belief that it would sink to the bottom and remain there in the mud until Judgment Day. He hadn’t counted, however, upon the villainy of some earlier churchwarden who had replaced the original silver with a thinly plated alloy replica which, unfortunately, floated and remained bobbing among the reeds for a farmer’s boy to find.
“He oughtn’t to have dumped it on a moonless night,” I said aloud.
“Just so, Miss Flavia,” Dogger said, easily able to read my thoughts. “He might have seen that it hadn’t sunk.”
“It might have, though,” I said excitedly. “It could have been brought back up by some punter’s pole or a heavy oar.”
“Could have,” Dogger said. “But not likely. I believe the police rejected that theory on the grounds of fragility. The rather frail replica would almost certainly have been dented by such an instrument, but it was not.”
“Odd, then,” I said, “that Canon Whitbread had never noticed the lightness of the substitute chalice.”
“Unless it was he himself who swapped it,” Dogger said.
I slapped the surface of the water in excitement, my heart thrilling at the idea that it was here, at this very spot, that the traces of cyanide and strychnine had been washed away. Perhaps some of the molecules still remained—vastly diluted, of course, but still, if the homeopathic theories of Samuel Hahnemann were to be believed, deadly effective.
“Flavia!” Daffy shouted. “You flaming idiot! You’ve soaked my book!”
Daffy’s magnificent vocabulary always failed her when she was genuinely angry.
She slammed the volume shut and jammed it into the wicker picnic basket.
There was a blessed—but slightly tense—silence along the river now as we drifted beneath the arches of the willows. Now and then the glassy surface would be broken by a fish’s bubbles. (Do fish break wind? I idly wondered.)
We were not far from one of the great universities. Surely someone there would know: some famous scientist—some ichthyologist, to be precise. Some young up-and-coming ichthyologist with a square jaw and curly blond hair, a pipe and blue eyes. I could drop in to consult with him about some rarefied chemical question…one that would make him realize instantly that I was no rank amateur…The Dispersal of Cyanide and Strychnine in Riverine Fish Habitats. Yes! That was it!
Roger, his name would be. Roger de something-or-other, to suit my own…from an ancient Norman family with enough arms, crests, flags, banners, and blazons to shame a secondhand automobile mart.
“Roger,” I would say—
No, wait. Roger was too commonplace. Something you might call a dog. His name needed to be Llewellyn, pronounced the proper way: Thew-ETH-lyn, the way they do in Wales.
Yes, Llewellyn.
“Llewellyn,” I would say, “if ever you have a case of piscine poisoning to solve, I should be happy to help.”
Or was that too forward?
I had never actually performed an autopsy on a fish, but it couldn’t be all that different from dissecting bloaters at the breakfast table.
I sighed with pleasure and let my hand dangle languidly over the side.
Something touched it. Something grazed against my fingers and I instinctively made a grab.
Was it a fish? Could I possibly have caught a fish by hand?
Had some dim-witted chub or stupid pike mistaken my trailing fingers for a bit of floating food?
Not wanting to lose the opportunity to go down in history as “Fishhook Flavia,” I hung on for dear life, hooking my fingertips firmly behind the hard ridge of bone I could now so easily feel. I planted my thumb for a firmer grip. This catch was not going to become “the one that got away.”
“Hold on, Dogger,” I said, trying to keep my voice level and matter-of-fact. This story was going to be handed down for generations, and I wanted to make sure that my coolheadedness was properly noted. “I believe I’ve caught something.”
Dogger stopped rowing and let the skiff drift. I could feel the dead weight of the thing dragging at my arm. It must be one of those gigantic fish—famous in local lore—that lives for centuries at the bottom of a pool. “Old Moldy,” or some such name, the villagers would call it. Would they be outraged to hear that I had caught their beloved monster with my bare hands?
I smiled at the thought.
Whatever it was, it wasn’t putting up much of a fight.
Although Daffy and Feely were pretending to be disinterested, both had turned toward me.
Holding on with all my strength, I gave my extended arm a good shake, taking care not to let go of my prey—whatever it might be.
I had seen photographs in the picture magazines of the American author Mr. Hemingway battling a giant marlin on the end of a ridiculously slender pole. Even he, I’ll bet, had never landed such a fish by hand.
Flavia, I thought, you’re about to become famous.
As the boat slowed and the water cleared, a shadow—and then a brighter patch—appeared just beneath the surface. A fish’s belly? It was certainly light enough.
I hauled it in for closer inspection.
Although the object was upside down, it was now easily recognizable.
It was a human head—and attached to it was a human body.
My fingers were inserted firmly in the corpse’s open mouth, locked behind its upper teeth.
“We’d best make for the pier, Dogger,” I said.
·TWO·
BRINGING THE SKIFF ALONGSIDE the pier behind the church was not so easy a task as it might have been.
For one thing, Daffy was busily disposing, over the gunwales, of every bite she had eaten since last Thursday fortnight. If you’ve ever seen those cinema newsreels in which a trawler dumps its nets, you’ll know what I’m talking about. To say that her gorge was rising would be a gross understatement. Hurling her guts out was more like it. To be honest, it was awe-inspiring.
If it hadn’t been for the seriousness of the situation, it might even have been amusing.
Dogger, to his great credit, said not a word. A single glance over his shoulder told him all he needed to know, and he reacted accordingly. Slowly, but steadily, we edged in silence—except for Daffy’s retching, of course—toward the riverbank.
Nearby boaters, of whom there were several, would assume that a young lady had been taken ill. Paste sandwiches that had gone over, perhaps, or a bit of bad tongue. It would not do to stare, and no one did. None of them could see, of course, what I was dragging by its open mouth.
As the skiff bumped against the wooden dock, Dogger handed me the tartan picnic blanket we had intended to sit upon for tea. I knew at once what he wanted m
e to do, and I did it.
Without attracting attention, I took the blanket with my left hand, unfolded it, and spread it casually over the floating corpse. Having made fast the skiff, Dogger stepped out into the shallow water, took hold of the shrouded figure, lifted it gently in his arms, and waded to the grassy bank beside the pier.
In another moment he had laid the body in the grass at the edge of the churchyard.
I couldn’t help noticing the bruise on the back of the neck, as if the man had somehow stumbled, banged his head, and fallen into the water. Dead men don’t bruise, I remembered.
“Artificial respiration?” I asked, trying to think logically.
Dogger had once told me of his studies in the Kanō system of Jiu-Jitsu, in which drowning victims had been restored to life by a sharp blow across the soles of the feet.
“I’m afraid not, miss,” Dogger said, lifting a corner of the blanket. “It’s too late for that. The fish have already been at this poor fellow.”
And he was right: The earlobes and the nose had certainly been nibbled.
As for the rest of the face, the dead man had been handsome enough. Those long, lank red locks, now plastered down by the wet, must once have curled fetchingly enough about the lace collar of his ruffled silk shirt.
I am not making this up: It really was silk, as were the blue trousers, which were fastened by buttons and silken ribbons at the knee.
I had the strange impression that I was looking at someone from the eighteenth century: some time traveler who had slipped playfully beneath the surface of the water in the days of King George III, perhaps, and decided just now that enough was enough.
My next thought was this: Had anyone gone missing from a masquerade? Or from the cast of a cinema film?
Surely such a thing would have been widely reported, and yet here was this healthy young specimen (aside from being dead, of course) laid out like a trout on the riverbank as if it were the most natural thing in all the world.
