by Alan Bradley
WITH A DEAFENING WOODEN-SOUNDING Bang! I shot up out of the pew like an overcharged skyrocket, my feet tangling with the kneeling bench.
“Are you all right?” inquired an unfamiliar voice.
“What the blue blazes do you think you’re doing?” I shouted, church or no church. “You might have given me a heart attack!”
I added a couple of other choice words which I will not quote here, as I am not proud of them.
I spun round to face the intruder, who withdrew his hand from my shoulder instantly. His pale face stared back at me, mouth hanging open in disbelief. Except for the white dog collar which completely encircled his neck, he was the spitting image of Humpty Dumpty.
It was the vicar: the same roly-poly gentleman I had seen talking to Constable Otter as I waited with Orlando’s body on the riverbank. A Mr. Clemm, if I remembered rightly.
He had cut himself shaving, I noticed. A small scrap of bloodied tissue peeped out distastefully from his wilted white clerical collar. What could it mean?
Was he careless? Distracted? Shortsighted? Lazy? Forgetful?
These and other possibilities flashed through my mind. It’s amazing what even the slightest glimpse of animal blood can do to the human brain.
On the one hand, I felt sorry for the vicar in a complicated way. I wished I hadn’t seen his careless toilet habits. At the same time, I wished he hadn’t let me see them.
Which of us was guilty of this small—but important—breach of good manners?
I couldn’t possibly know. I wasn’t old enough and hadn’t enough experience.
So the fault must be his.
We stood there, the two of us, staring at each other with bug eyes, like rival dogs, each of us unwilling to be the first to speak. I could feel my hackles rising at the back of my neck, feel my nostrils flaring.
I wanted to bite him.
Mr. Clemm was as astonished by my ferocity as I was.
“I…I’m sorry, young lady,” he began. “I thought you might have been in some distress.”
You clever old hound, I thought. Some distress indeed!
This was a game, and both of us knew it. The next move was mine.
Hadn’t Mr. Clemm been the assistant to Canon Whitbread at the time of the murders? Where had he been that fateful morning? Surely he must have been among the suspects. Until this very moment, that thought had never crossed my mind.
I pressed my wrist—first the back of it, then the front of it—to my forehead, then lowered myself gingerly into the pew.
Mr. Clemm sank slowly down beside me. He placed his hand on my shoulder.
“Here,” he said, offering me a white linen handkerchief. “Wipe your nose and tell me all about it.”
I was about to give him a piece of my mind when I realized my nose was running.
“Thank you,” I whispered, and put the cloth to work with a surprisingly loud honk. When I was finished, I handed it back to him with a weak but appreciative smile.
“You may keep it,” he said, with a glance at the thing. “You might need it later.”
Was this a threat? Was I sitting here cheek to cheek in a pew with a mass murderer?
A mass murderer? That’s a good one, Flavia. Even in the heat of the moment I made a mental note of my little joke. I would tell it to Dogger, and he would smile—perhaps even give a little whistle—at my brave wit even in the face of peril.
“It’s just, you see,” I whispered confidentially, “that I need to be able to lay the ghost of my great-auntie to rest. I thought that if I could see the spot where she…”
“I understand,” Mr. Clemm murmured, patting my hand. I resisted the urge to pull away.
He had probably been made to take classes at divinity school in the art of Sucking Up to Survivors.
I gave a frail smile and went on, just to encourage him a little.
“I couldn’t believe it when I found that we had landed our punt almost at the very spot where…where—I thought it wouldn’t hurt to come inside and say a little prayer for Great-Aunt Grace.”
I raised my eyes to the stained-glass windows, as if to Heaven.
Don’t whimper, Flavia, I thought. She was supposed to be, after all, only a great-aunt, a distant twig on the family tree…
I did what any intelligent girl would do: I batted my eyelashes becomingly and lowered my gaze modestly toward the floor.
When God has given you a great brain and long lashes, they may sometimes be the only weapons you have at your disposal, and it is best to know how to use them effectively.
“God hears all prayers,” Mr. Clemm said. “Prayers both great and small.”
“Thank you,” I whispered, dabbing furtively at my eyes with his handkerchief, which was still clutched in my hand.
“You must have been shaken by your discovery,” Mr. Clemm said, referring, I assumed, to Orlando’s corpse laid out like a salmon in the grass.
“You can’t imagine,” I said, nodding frantically with rolling eyes, covering my mouth with the handkerchief and stifling what I hoped he would mistake for a sob.
Like most men of the cloth, Mr. Clemm had no idea how to deal with a damp and distressed female.
Round one to Flavia.
“Actually—” I said.
All great lies begin with the word “actually,” and this one was no exception.
“Actually,” I said, “one of the three ladies who died so dreadfully here was a relative of mine: my great-aunt Grace.”
“Grace Willoughby?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Grace Harcourt,” I told him.
I’d better tread carefully, I thought. I must remember that this man, after all, had known each of the deceased personally. The fact that he had mentioned Grace Willoughby’s name first probably meant that he had known her better than Grace Harcourt.
Which is why I plumped for Grace Harcourt.
Rather than volunteering any information, as I hoped he would, Mr. Clemm gave up only a sad, knowing nod.
I needed to prime the pump.
“Anything you can tell me about her last moments will help ease the pain,” I said, touching his sleeve to reinforce my pleading eyes.
“I’m afraid I can’t be of much help. You see, I was rather…ah…indisposed myself that morning.”
Indisposed? What did he mean by that? Had he been tippling the sacramental wine the night before? Not very likely, I thought, otherwise he’d be out in the churchyard pushing up petunias rather than sitting here evading my questions.
Unless, of course, the cyanide had been introduced just minutes before the Communion, which would have pointed to Canon Whitbread as the killer—or to one of the Three Graces, all of whom might have assisted in the vestry before the service.
Hard to believe, though, that any one of them would have poisoned herself. Unless, of course, it was murder/suicide.
My head was spinning.
“Indisposed?” I echoed solicitously, letting the word hang in the air.
One has to be careful about inquiring too closely into another’s indisposition. You never know what torrents of ucky and disturbing detail might be spilled.
Mr. Clemm looked away—looked back—then looked away again.
“Loss of faith,” he admitted, biting his lip. “I had been at that time suffering a very great loss of faith, you see. It wasn’t right that I should administer Holy Communion in such a state. George was very good about it. Canon Whitbread, I mean. He told me I must confront it head-on: chin up, stiff upper lip, talk to God, ‘man to Man to Man to Man,’ as he put it.”
“Oh?” I asked with raised eyebrows, a response which is nearly impossible to ignore.
“Yes…well, you see…”
His words trailed off in a mumble as he looked away.
“Love, was it?” I blurted, taking a shot in the dark. Still, I reckoned I had a less than fifty-percent chance of being wrong. Clergymen do not come undone over football, for instance, or even money. Jealousy, greed, reven
ge, and love were the usual motives, judging by the newspapers, but the greatest of these is love, as Saint Paul so wisely foresaw.
And when you boiled them down, jealousy, greed, and revenge went usually hand in hand with love.
Quod erat demonstrandum, as Archimedes said, except that he said it in Greek.
Mr. Clemm gasped.
“How could you possibly know that?”
“Feminine intuition,” I replied. Which was an outright lie. Feminine intuition is no more than an acceptable excuse for female brains.
I turned the famous de Luce blue eyes upon him with full force.
Suddenly he laughed.
“All right, it was love. You have a very persuasive way about you, Miss…?”
“De Luce,” I said. “Flavia.”
He had thrown in the towel with surprisingly little effort on my part. I needed to be wary. I continued my stare.
“George was an understanding man. He told me I needed not to condemn myself, but only to amend my ways.”
“Surely this must have come out at his trial?” I blurted. I couldn’t help myself.
“It did—in a way,” Mr. Clemm answered. “However, the coroner was one of our sidesmen here at St. Mildred’s. And so, of course, he didn’t want to add unnecessarily to the scandal.”
“But why are you telling me this?” I asked, suddenly suspicious.
“Ah,” Mr. Clemm breathed. “We are taught to confess, to bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, and what better way than to confess them to an innocent child such as yourself?”
I restrained a snort and favored him instead with a smile.
“Go on,” I encouraged.
“Sorry,” he said. “No names, no pack drill. Forgiveness,” he said with a little wink, “does not demand the dirty details.”
I was shocked. How could he possibly keep back the interesting bits? It wasn’t fair!
“I understand,” I lied, returning to the game.
All in due time, I thought.
“Come,” he said. “Allow me to show you round the church. We can talk as we walk. Quite frankly, I find the atmosphere of this particular pew oppressive.”
I was actually relieved to have him move. I hadn’t realized how uncomfortable it had become having my escape route to the aisle blocked by a rather large clergyman.
And yet, if I wanted information, I was going to have to talk to him. Time was running out, and I was still baffled about so many points.
“This stone,” I said, pointing. “It seems rather new. Stands out in such an old church. I wondered who it was?”
“A former rector,” Mr. Clemm said, and began to move away.
“G.L.O.W.,” I read aloud from the stone. “George L. O. Whitbread.”
There was a silence of several centuries before Mr. Clemm said, “George Lancelot Orlando Whitbread. I am being very honest with you, Miss de Luce. I hope you’ll not let me down.”
Was he still holding me under the Seal of Confession?
“Wark! Wark!” I remembered Daffy barking, as she flapped her flippers together.
“But he was hanged!” I said. “How can he possibly be buried here?”
Mr. Clemm gave me such a long, sorrowful look that I almost forgave him his razor cuts and his shabby collar.
“Vanity,” he said. “Mistakes are made. But as Jeremiah the prophet tells us, ‘They are vanity, and the work of errors: in the time of their visitation they shall perish.’ ”
As if that explained everything.
Whom was he referring to? Who would perish? Those who made the mistakes? Or those who were their victims?
“Then it wasn’t Canon Whitbread who killed the Three Graces?”
It was as blunt a question as I’d ever dared ask in my life.
Mr. Clemm stared at me as if he was torn between two answers. And then:
“Come,” he said. “There’s something I want you to see.”
And without another word, he turned and walked briskly away from me down the aisle. And I, without giving it another thought, followed him.
At the front of the church he turned sharply to the right and vanished up a steep stone staircase.
“Mind your head,” his voice came echoing back between the walls of the narrow passage.
In spite of the summer heat outdoors, the staircase had a dank, musty, tonsil-clogging smell, as if it were a chimney for the churchyard.
I set my foot on the bottom step and began to climb: up and up and round and round. Because these early churches had also served as fortresses, the towers were designed to be defended. The circular staircase, with its tall risers, made fighting far more difficult for an attacker coming up the stairs, and easier for the defender fighting downward and backward, since it gave him the advantage of height and a free sword hand.
It reminded me of the mistaken belief that water went down the drain counterclockwise in the northern hemisphere and clockwise in the southern, as well as the doctor’s symbol of a serpent twisting round a pole: the Staff of Asclepius, Dogger had told me it was called, and I wondered idly, as I climbed, if snakes slithered up trees counterclockwise in the northern hemisphere and clockwise in the southern.
“Are you coming?” Mr. Clemm’s voice echoed from somewhere far above. He sounded impatient.
“Yes,” I called up to him, wondering what he wanted to show me.
When I reached the top of the staircase and stepped out onto the flat roof, Mr. Clemm was nowhere in sight.
A dilapidated wooden structure, rather like a misplaced garden shed, stood in the very center of the roof, blocking my view of half the horizon.
I peered over the crumbling parapet at the scene below.
To my right, the river, slow and silent, glided like a lazy brown snake through the landscape, its lush willow-lined banks giving it the appearance of wearing an exotic green feather boa which had been flung aside perhaps, by some aging music hall star.
Poppy Mandrill came to mind.
From this altitude, the view was similar to the one taken by Hob Nightingale with his homemade kite camera.
A shock of remembrance rushed through my brain: the photograph!
I had shoved the snapshot into my pocket when Hob handed it to me in the tree, and with all the excitement, I had, quite frankly, forgotten about it.
Was it still there?
I shoved my hand carefully into my pocket and felt with my fingers.
Yes! I could feel the crisp edges and shiny surface of the photographic paper, still safely nestled where I had placed it.
Careful, Flavia, I thought. You don’t want to drop it over the edge and into the churchyard.
Not that it would harm the photo, but I wanted to keep its existence to myself.
“Are you coming?” Mr. Clemm called again. “I’m round the other side. Round the back.”
The back of the tower, I remembered, faced another stretch of the river with a view of the fields and a distant wood. More immediately, although I could not at the moment see them, it loomed directly over the lead roofing slates of the body of the church: the nave, the transept, and the chancel.
“As soon as…I catch…my breath,” I called out, panting for effect like a dog in the desert.
What I needed to do needed to be done now, and I had to be quick about it. With Mr. Clemm breathing down my neck, I couldn’t possibly compare Hob’s snapshot with the view from the tower.
As I put my elbows on the parapet, a bit of Norman brick sheared off and went plummeting end over end into space.
“Watch out below!” I wanted to shout, but I didn’t. If Fate had decided to clobber some deserving character in the churchyard below, who was I to interfere?
Besides, until I had examined the photograph, I needed to maintain silence.
As we had been taught to do in map-reading in Girl Guides, I rotated the photograph until it aligned with the landscape below.
Yes—here it was: Beyond was the dock where we had landed, and the grassy
edge of the graveyard where Orlando’s body had lain. The path along which Constable Otter and Mr. Clemm had come was clearly visible, a gash of gravel in the grass.
And here it was in Hob’s photo. And here was our punt. Feely’s sun hat was clearly visible in the bow. The pages of Daffy’s open book caught the light amidships, and there was Dogger, poling us toward the riverbank.
The huddled lump in the stern was me, one arm outstretched. The ripples which trailed from my hands were due to the corpse of Orlando Whitbread. If I squinted, I could just make out his dark outline beneath the surface of the water.
I glanced rapidly back and forth from landscape to photograph. To my left—but hidden by one of the transept walls—would be the market square and Shadrach’s Circus and, further along, Scull Cottage.
If I leaned over and out a bit, I could see—another stone dislodged and fell.
No time to look.
In my mind, there had been something else—
Aha! Just out of sight from where I now stood, hidden by one of the stone walls of the transept, the path began a long and gentle curve, through the churchyard, among the tombstones, toward the door.
In the photograph, a dark shape showed clearly against the light gray of the gravel.
A wicker bath chair!
And not just a bath chair, but an empty bath chair!
And just there, in the snapshot, look: lurking among the tombstones, the unmistakable form of the crouching Poppy Mandrill. Even from the kite’s altitude, her Norfolk jacket was easy enough to see, and the bun of her white hair might as well have been a signal flag.
From behind a tall tombstone, she was watching us land the body of Orlando Whitbread.
Was her presence a coincidence, or had she herself been searching for Orlando?
On the path beside the church stood Hob, looking expectantly upward, the string of the kite and its release cord clutched tightly in his hand.
“What have you got there?” demanded a voice at my ear, and I spun round to find Mr. Clemm sticking his neck over my shoulder, trying to get a gander at Hob’s photograph.
“It’s just a snapshot,” I said, shoving the thing quickly back into my pocket. “What did you wish to show me?” I asked, taking the offensive.
“You’ll have to come round the other side of the tower,” he said. “You can’t see it from here.”
