The Grave's a Fine and Private Place

by Alan Bradley

  She didn’t answer, so I asked it anyway.

  “Who hated Orlando enough to kill him?”

  Mrs. Dandyman spun round and dropped her brush, splattering the hem of her dress and the legs of the easel with an ax-murderer scarlet.

  “Nobody!” she exclaimed. “And don’t you dare suggest otherwise. Don’t you dare even think about it.”

  “What about Poppy Mandrill?” I asked brazenly. If I were to be tossed out on my ear I desperately needed one last morsel of information.

  “Out!” Mrs. Dandyman shouted. “Out with you before I call the police.”

  I wondered idly how she could carry out this threat with no telephone in the pantechnicon, but it was no time to anger the woman further.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and walked out the door, down the folding steps, and into the sunshine, my head in the air, not sorry in the least.

  —

  On the far side of the market square, Constable Otter was engaged in conversation with the three roustabouts, Terence, Nigel, and Cornell.

  I put on a carefree expression and, with a careless whistle, became absorbed in kicking an empty ginger-beer bottle ahead of me as I walked. The greatest thing about being twelve is that you can turn it on and off as the situation requires.

  The instant Constable Otter spotted me, he touched the front of his helmet with a long forefinger and made a beeline toward me. I angled away slightly—not too obviously, I hoped—and began to tack back toward the Oak and Pheasant.

  It was no use. The blasted man had me on his radar and changed course even as I did. He reminded me of Inspector Bucket in Bleak House, that relentless hound who seemed to be everywhere at the same time.

  “Miss de Luce,” he called out.

  Picking up speed slightly and changing direction again, I pretended I hadn’t heard him.

  “Miss de Luce!” he called again, more persistent this time.

  I couldn’t possibly evade him without breaking into a full gallop.

  By now he was at my heels, and with my peripheral vision, I could see that he was reaching for my arm. I did the only thing I could think of: I stopped dead in my tracks.

  Constable Otter crashed into me at speed, and down I went, ark over teakettle into the dust.

  Intentionally, of course.

  I lay there looking dazed—allowing the man to scramble to his feet, pick up his helmet, dust himself off, and regain his dignity. Meanwhile, I began, slowly and painfully, contorting my limbs into the most bizarre angles I could conjure up on a moment’s notice from my monkey ancestors.

  Laboriously, I hauled myself to my knees.

  I set my drooping head to vibrating at high speed, like the clanger on an alarm clock, as if I were on the verge of a seizure, all the while groping for my elbows, knees, shoulders, and giving off a few pitiful moans.

  “Are you all right?” he asked. “I’m sorry, but—”

  “Shappened?” I said, slurring the word and letting my tongue thicken and loll out the corner of my mouth. “Hoss hit me?”

  It wasn’t a bad plan to raise the specter of concussion right at the outset.

  “I’m sorry,” the constable said again, reaching for my elbow to help me up, but I shook him off.

  A small crowd had begun to gather. I gaped at them blearily, letting my eyes roll a little, as if I had never seen human beings before.

  I grasped Otter’s hand and hauled myself agonizingly to my feet.

  “What’s she done, then, Constable?” a man in rubber boots called out. “Broke into the Bank of England?”

  In spite of my grave injuries, most of the onlookers laughed at this sudden flash of wit.

  “He attacked her!” called out a small birdlike woman with white hair and spectacles the thickness of railway signal lamps. “I saw it with my own two eyes!”

  Another laugh went up.

  “Pick on someone your own size, Jimmy!” the rubber-booted man called out.

  I could see that, round his official police collar, Constable Otter was turning red as rubies. I decided that he had had enough.

  “Sorright,” I said. “My fault. I tripped. I shurrna stopped so…so…”

  I rolled my eyes again, fishing for an elusive word.

  “Fasht,” I concluded triumphantly.

  There! I had done it!

  Constable Otter was suddenly beaming upon me like some pagan Sun God of beaten gold.

  “Are you all right?” I asked, reaching out a solicitous (but trembling) hand toward him for extra points.

  I shook my head to clear it and then I took his arm.

  “I’m still a little shaky,” I said. “Perhaps you could walk me back to the Oak and Pheasant, and you can question me over a nice cup of tea.”

  That’s how it’s done.

  At least in my books.

  —

  And so it came to pass that PC Otter and I were alone at last in the saloon bar of the Oak and Pheasant, safely away from any danger of being overheard.

  “Please have a seat, Constable,” I said. The place was my residence, after all, even if only temporarily. Besides, it cost nothing to be polite.

  “Thank you, miss,” he said, pulling his inevitable notebook from his pocket. “But I’m on duty.”

  “I hope you won’t mind if I sit,” I said. “I’m sorry to be so much trouble. I expect your wife will be wondering what’s become of you.”

  “No, she won’t,” he replied, “as I don’t have a wife. Now then, about the…uh…deceased, which you discovered in the river this morning.”

  “Orlando Whitbread?” I asked, as if I had an endless string of corpses up my sleeve, which I suppose in a way I did.

  “How did you know his name?” he pounced, his pencil poised.

  “Poppy Mandrill was screaming it. You could hear her a mile away. Besides, everyone in the county knows it by now.”

  Constable Otter made a brief scribble in his notebook as he arranged his features into a look of Official Gravity.

  “You’re not withholding anything from me, are you, miss?”

  “Withholding?”

  I wanted to add “What could I possibly be withholding?” but with the slip of paper from Orlando’s trousers still soggy in my pocket, I didn’t want to say too much.

  I was beginning to learn that in criminal investigation, as in chair design and poetry, less is more.

  At that moment, the landlord appeared with the tray of tea I had ordered on the way in.

  “I’ve brought a few shortbread biscuits,” Mr. Palmer said. “Some people like a few shortbread biscuits with their tea.”

  Since neither I nor the constable said anything, he gave the table a quick wipe and left us to our discussion.

  I took a biscuit and dipped it into my tea. Etiquette be hanged.

  “I expect Scotland Yard will be arriving at any moment,” I remarked pleasantly. “And I shall be grilled again. It’s such a bore, isn’t it?”

  “Scotland Yard?” Constable Otter said, not touching his tea. “Why would we bring in the Yard? They’re not called out for every little accident, you know.”

  He shook his head and gave me a rueful smile.

  “What would they think if we bothered them with every bruise—every skinned knee?” he said, glancing pointedly at my own knee which was scraped raw from my tumble. I hadn’t even noticed.

  So he still believed Orlando’s death to be an accident, did he? Not worth reporting.

  Investigation wrapped up in ribbons by the local constable. A discreet inquest which would find that the victim met his death through misadventure. A trip in the dark. Nobody’s fault. Case closed.

  Which left the field to me.

  If I played my hand properly, I would get to the bottom of this affair, and present it myself—solved—to the appropriate inspector at the Yard. Providing I could discover who he was.

  And perhaps—yes, perhaps—I could ring up Inspector Hewitt and lay the whole thing at his feet much as a dog brin
gs a bone.

  The important thing was to lie low; to say nothing to anyone.

  From here on in, I would be as silent as the tomb.

  I took a last sip from my teacup, and set it back on the saucer, taking great care to let my hand shake enough to produce a noticeable clatter of chinaware.

  “I’m afraid I’m not as well as I thought I was,” I said to Constable Otter, summoning up a sickly, insipid smile. “I still feel quite shaken. If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go to my room and lie down.”

  I could see the relief on his face.

  No more competition, he was thinking. No more interference from that de Luce brat.

  In his eyes, I was already a dead duck.

  Well, “Quack! Quack! Quack!”

  I had just reached the top of the stairs when Mrs. Palmer came suddenly out of her room. She seemed surprised to see me.

  “Oh, there you are,” she said. “Did the undertaker find you?”

  “Undertaker?” I asked, genuinely puzzled.

  “Mr. Nightingale. He was looking for you. Arven told him you were in the saloon bar with Constable Otter. Didn’t he look in?”

  “No,” I said. “Perhaps he didn’t want to disturb us. Did he say what it was about?”

  “He was looking for his son. Thought you might have been the last to see him.”

  My heart gave a leap.

  “Is he missing?” I asked.

  “Only in a general sort of way,” Mrs. Palmer replied. “Hob is not your usual boy. Without a mother, and his father busy with the graves and so forth, he comes and goes when he pleases. He wouldn’t if he were my son. I’d put a string on him.”

  I was reminded instantly of Hob and his kite. And his camera. Perhaps I could kill two birds with one stone by locating the little boy—probably gone back to Shadrach’s Circus, I thought—and by retrieving his processed film from the chemist’s shop.

  But here was a pretty kettle of fish: Why would Mr. Nightingale keep clear of me when he knew I was with Constable Otter? Wasn’t the constable, after all, the official eyes and ears of Volesthorpe, who probably knew to within a square yard the location of every single inhabitant at any given moment—as well as what they were up to?

  It simply didn’t make sense.

  I vowed then and there to ask Mr. Nightingale that very question as soon as I was able to locate him. I was confident that he would give me a frank answer.

  Undertakers were, I had discovered, decent men. Once you had got past the black crepe, the polished ebony, and the closely shaven chins, they were a tribe of hail-fellows-well-met, who enjoyed a joke as much as the next fellow, and sometimes more.

  But aside from that, and perhaps more importantly, they knew—not to put too fine a point upon it—where all the bodies were buried.

  I needed to buff up my acquaintanceship with Hob’s Da, I realized, and I needed to do so immediately.

  And this was the perfect opportunity.

  “Thanks, Mrs. Palmer,” I said. “Hob can’t be far away. I saw him just a while ago. He’s probably gone back for another squint at the elephant.”

  —

  Outside, in the garden bower, Feely and Dieter were still clutching both of each other’s hands, each gazing into the eyes of the other as if they were about to burst into song, like Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy in Maytime or one of those boring but unsettling films featuring advanced wrestling holds.

  They didn’t even see me.

  Which was just as well, because I didn’t wish to be seen.

  An older sister in love is an unexploded bomb (UXB) at the best of times, but when she’s just been reunited with her intended mate after a nerve-shredding separation of more than half a year, she’s as touchy and unstable as a rusty bucket of old nitroglycerine (C3H5O9N3), and consequently best steered clear of.

  I made my way back to the high street and to the premises of Wanless & Sons Dispensing Chemists, taking great care by stopping to gape like a tourist at the half-timbered shops and the tiny leaded windows of the adjoining houses.

  I dawdled on the pavement for a couple of minutes, shaking my head at the quaintness of it all.

  And then I stepped casually into the dimness of the shop.

  “We’re closed,” said the man in white behind the counter. He looked as if he hadn’t budged since I was here hours ago.

  “I’m sorry,” I replied. “But I wondered if there’s the slightest chance my prints are ready? I don’t mean to bother you, but there’s been a family emergency and we’ve been summoned home immediately.”

  “Summoned” was a perfect choice of words, I thought. It added such great gravity to the situation.

  He gave me that stare that chemists have.

  “I don’t know,” he said, “but I doubt it. I had to step out for a while, you understand. We’re very busy.

  “Howland!” he bellowed, but this time there was no reply from the underworld.

  He stamped on the floorboards. “Howland!”

  “Would you mind checking?” I asked. “I’m afraid that it’s…it’s…”

  I stifled a sob. Pressure works best when applied at precisely the right moment.

  The chemist clicked his tongue with that sound which is usually written “Tch,” and which suggests martyrdom: “Give me the strength to suffer this fool gladly.”

  Bending down, he pulled at an iron ring that was inset into the trapdoor and lifted it, revealing the top of a steep and narrow set of stairs—more of a ladder than anything.

  I leaned round the wicket for a better view, but the chemist, with that crablike secrecy natural to his profession, scuttled down the hole, pulling the hatch closed behind him, and I, tiptoeing as silently as I could, stepped onto it.

  I’d have to be quick.

  A lightning scan of the counter did not reveal what I was hoping to find. An apothecary’s pill roller of wood and marble and a brass balance were on one side and a paper-dispensing roll on the other.

  No, it wasn’t here. It would be put away somewhere out of sight, as official objects often are.

  I pulled out one of the two deep drawers in which were a surprising number of loose coins, bills, and a few slips of scribbled paper which I guessed to be IOUs.

  Don’t touch, Flavia, I thought. Fingerprints and so forth.

  I closed the first drawer and pulled out the second.

  “Fortune favors girls with guts,” some ancient Roman had once written, or ought to have written, because it was true.

  I was instantly rewarded: There before my very eyes was a tall, black slender volume. Sale of Poisons Register Book was stamped on the cover in gold letters.

  I hauled it out and opened it, fingerprints be hanged. It couldn’t possibly be a crime to examine an official document. Could it?

  I turned the pages with trembling fingers, beginning at the back, where the latest entries were written in a black and official-looking ink.

  Each page had space for four entries, each detailing the date, the name and address of the purchaser, the name and quantity of the poison sold to them, the purpose for which it was required, and their signature, along with the name of the person who had introduced the purchaser to the chemist, which, in most cases, had been signed or initialed by the chemist himself: E. B. Wanless, presumably the name of that white-jacketed gentleman who was presently rummaging around somewhere in the depths beneath my feet.

  My eyes widened as the secrets of Volesthorpe were laid bare. Here, in page after page, among the purchases of lead and opium to treat spasms, were the names and addresses of everyone who had bought sixpennyworth of rat poison and mouse poison; arsenic for psoriasis, or—four pounds of it at a time!—to tan or cure skins; potassium cyanide to destroy wasp’s nests, or for photographic purposes.

  As I leafed back toward the entries of two years ago, a notation fairly leapt at me off the page: HCN.

  Prussic acid!

  An ounce of the stuff had been sold to the Volesthorpe Constabulary. My
pulse leapt as I read the reason given for the purchase: “Poison injured dog,” it said.

  And it had been signed for by J. R. Otter, Constable 997.

  A wooden clatter beneath my feet indicated that the chemist was coming back up the ladder.

  There was no time to waste: I shifted my brain into its speed-reading setting, tuning my eye for any occurrence of HCN, prussic acid, or cyanide.

  And there were, I’m sorry to say, many—most requiring an ounce to poison a dog or a cat. And Hob’s photographer brother, Pippin Nightingale, had, in an entry dated 1st November, 1949, signed for two ounces of “Cyanide of Potash,” his given reason being “Silver Bath.”

  And in August of the same year, Canon Whitbread, of “The Vicarage, St. Mildred’s” had bought two ounces of potassium cyanide for the purpose of “destroying wasps’ nests.”

  I touched the dead man’s signature with my forefinger. I pictured him standing here at this very wicket as the cyanide was handed over. What was in his mind? What was in his heart?

  I remembered, too, that according to Mrs. Palmer, Orlando had worked part-time at the chemist’s shop, but as far as I could see, he had never signed this register, either as a buyer or a dispenser of poison. Which made sense, I suppose, since he was not licensed as a pharmaceutical dispenser.

  The floor was now beginning to quake beneath my feet as the chemist applied his shoulder to the trapdoor. A string of muffled, but still clearly naughty, curses filtered up through the heavy floorboards.

  “Hello?” I called out, injecting a note of surprise into my voice as I slipped the poison register back into the drawer and shoved it shut with my hip. “Is something wrong?”

  At the same moment, with both feet still firmly on the trap, I bent down, seized the iron ring, and gave it a jolly good rattling.

  “Blast!” I said in a frustrated voice, kicking at the ring. “I think it’s stuck.”

  More chemical profanity floated up from under the floorboards.

  “Hold on,” I shouted. “I need to get something to lift it.”

  A few more heavy but useless heaves from below convinced my captive that I was telling him the truth.

  I smeared a bit of dust from the floor onto my cheekbones, tousled my hair, then bent and threaded one of my pigtails through the ring. Then, in one single and continuous motion, in a fluid movement that would have delighted both Sexton Blake and Philip Odell, the BBC wireless detective, I stepped off the trap and pulled open the hatch, using my hair as a rope.