by Alan Bradley
“No. Apparently no one did. He claimed to have been lying in Scull Cottage in a stupor until the Monday morning after the murders.”
“Thank you, Greta,” I said. “You’ve been a great help.”
And I meant it.
“I’m glad of that,” she said. “And now I want you to drop the whole thing. Orlando is dead but there are still many secrets in Volesthorpe. Some of them will come out and some will not. None of us need the trouble. Take this, go home, and forget about us.”
Again she held out the roll of banknotes.
“Keep the money,” I said. “I don’t take bribes. I’m not that kind of person.”
“What kind of person are you?” she asked, and I could see that she was offended.
“I’m the kind of person who is going to make a difference in the world,” I told her. “As soon as I get rid of my braces.”
Greta began to laugh a low, slithery laugh, like a snake in the grass. But the laugh died in her throat like a shot pheasant.
A man’s voice, nearby, was calling out “Greta?”
She seized me by the arm and pulled me roughly down behind a weathered tombstone.
“It’s Arven!” she hissed. “My husband. He’s come after me. He’s going to kill me!”
“Why would he want to kill you?” I whispered.
“You don’t want to know,” she whispered back, clutching my elbow to her chest as if it were a life jacket.
I did not bother telling her that I already did.
I peered round the edge of the tombstone. Arven Palmer was standing about thirty yards away, looking round, scratching his head.
“Can you see him?” she whispered.
I nodded yes.
“Just keep still,” she pleaded. “Arven has no patience. He’ll give up and go away before he’ll search the churchyard.”
“You know him very well,” I said.
She shot me a grim grin.
“Too well,” she said. “He may have no patience but he never forgets a wrong…
“Ever!” she added.
We sat for perhaps ten minutes in silence, our backs against the tombstone, before Mrs. P scrambled to her feet.
“I’m leaving now,” she said, brushing off her skirt. “I’ll go the long way round. But promise me this, Flavia…”
She waited until I met her eye.
“When Constable Otter gets round to questioning you, don’t mention my name. Please. I beg you. I thank you. Goodbye.”
She touched my hand and then she was gone. I lost sight of her before she reached the river.
·TWENTY-FOUR·
I HAD HOPED THAT Hob would be at his father’s shop. It would have made things so much easier.
As things turned out, it was probably as well he wasn’t.
I stood in the street gawking for a few minutes, as I always do when I want to be taken for a tourist. There were no funeral notices in the window of the Nightingale shop, which came as no surprise; a set of faded and threadbare purple curtains hid whatever lay behind the plate glass. I cupped my hands against the window and peered through them, hoping to somehow see what lay inside.
Nothing but a brace of dead flies.
I tried the door, but it was locked. No point in going round the back, then. I didn’t want to be seen trespassing upon private premises.
What was I to do?
As so often happens when you are a girl of intelligence, the answer was already right there in my head, ready for immediate use, like a celestial screwdriver.
I remembered sitting once, only half attentive, through one of Denwyn Richardson’s lazy summer sermons on the Book of Matthew. Perhaps it was because Denwyn often recirculated his winter preachings that they were sometimes so memorable. In any case, it was a message I had heard more than once:
Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.
What a wonderful text it was—and how appropriate. I closed my eyes, folded my hands, and asked.
It was in that instant that I remembered the wool shop just down the street. I turned away and strolled casually toward it.
The bell over the door rang, and I stepped into the shop.
“Good day to you,” said the woman behind the counter. She was sitting in a chair, knitting. I couldn’t help thinking that she was vaguely familiar until I realized that she looked uncannily like a sheep herself.
I pretended to interest myself in her balls of wool.
“Do you knit?” she asked.
“Not myself, no,” I said. “But my aunt Felicity does. She’s a wizard knitter. She’s promised to knit me a Fair Isle pullover if I can find some wool of my favorite color.”
“Which is?” the woman asked.
“Peacock,” I said.
The woman put down her knitting and began to haul herself out of her chair.
“Peacock?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said enthusiastically, “it’s one of my school colors.”
“And your school is?” she asked skeptically.
“Miss Bodycote’s,” I said.
“It’s Canadian,” I added, as if that explained everything.
Without another word, she shuffled off toward a little back room, as I had desperately hoped she would.
In a flash, I had seized a couple of crochet hooks from a display on the counter and rammed them into my pocket.
I could have paid for them, of course, but I didn’t want to leave such an easy trail of evidence, should I happen to be caught. I would balance the books later.
The woman—blast her—was back in a jiff. She dumped half a dozen balls of wool on the counter.
“Peacock,” she said proudly. “It’s on sale. I can let you have the lot for six shillings.”
I picked up a ball and fingered the wool.
“Oh, dear,” I said. “I’m afraid this is Indian peacock. Miss Bodycote’s is Javanese peacock. Miss Bodycote herself, you see, was brought up in Batavia. The Javanese peacock is said to have derived its unique green color from the volcanic nature of the soil there.”
I gave her my most horrid, know-it-all leer, as if to confirm this mixture of fact and fiction. At the same time—although I could hardly believe I was doing so—I offered up silent thanks to my obnoxious cousin, Undine, for her endless prattling about wildlife in Singapore and the former Malaya.
“That’s fine, then,” the sheep-woman said in that voice which means that it isn’t, really. She stuffed the wool under the counter and resumed her knitting.
“Thank you,” I called loudly and cheerily as I walked out the door. “Lovely shop.”
I took my time walking back along the street to the Nightingale establishment.
Pausing again to look at nothing in the window, I stood with one hand idly in my pocket, bending one of the crochet hooks into a letter L.
When it seemed about right, I took it out and applied it to the lock, using the other hook as if the two of them formed the jaws of a pair of pliers.
Dogger had given me extensive training in the art of picking locks. This was just one of the many accomplishments he had picked up in his earlier life. I would have loved to ask where, and how, and why, but of course one doesn’t do that sort of thing. One merely listens and observes.
As if by magic, there was a deeply satisfying click and the knob turned easily. After a quick glance up the street and down, I stepped inside the shop.
This was not the first time in my life I had reconnoitered an undertaker’s shop. The trick of it was, of course, to find out what I needed to know without being caught. Although it might seem like a good idea at the time, meddling with corpses is difficult to explain in the cold light of day.
First thing, then, was to determine if Orlando’s body was actually here.
An arched doorway to the right led to a small chapel in which several rows of straigh
t-backed chairs faced an empty wall.
Nothing here. To the left were a pair of double doors which caused my heart to beat a little faster: double doors are made for the wheeling in and out of things that cannot walk themselves.
I tapped lightly on the paneling just in case someone was inside. I could still explain my way out of this. I was looking for Hob. I had found the front door ajar, and so forth…
I pushed the door open and peered inside. This was more like it! The inner sanctum: the control room for the Empire of Death.
Two tilted slabs of porcelain with drains stood side by side, both of them, unfortunately, empty. Glass reservoirs of what I knew to be embalming fluid were close at hand, their contents tinted the shade of candy floss to restore in the subject what was believed to be a healthy complexion.
On a wall, stainless steel surgical instruments—one of them a colossal syringe with a snout like some prehistoric mosquito—stood ready to extract stomach contents, and so forth.
I gave a thought to the dead Orlando, and to the contents Dogger and I had analyzed from his stomach. What were they called? Diatoms! Yes, that was it, diatoms: those microscopic creatures whose sandy skeletons had told us whether Orlando had been dumped dead or alive into the river.
In any case, he wasn’t here, as I had half expected he wouldn’t be. I was beginning to get that familiar feeling at the back of my neck: not out of fear, but out of a sense that your hunches are more than hunches.
I backed out of the room and turned to face the remaining door which must lead, I knew, to the workshop, which I had already seen on my previous visit.
Again I knocked out of courtesy, as I make it a point never to startle a man with a hammer in his hand.
The same dark and beautifully polished coffin stood as it had before, on trestles in the middle of the workshop. I flicked the finish with my fingernail. Mr. Nightingale had certainly put a lot of work into this masterpiece of the carpenter’s art. Again, I wondered who it had been made for.
In a far corner of the room was a desk, bulging with papers and letters, which spilled out of its many pigeonholes in a most haphazard manner.
As I took a step toward it, I brushed against a chisel which had been left lying atop a wooden trestle. It went clattering to the floor—and I froze.
The Nightingales’ living quarters were probably upstairs over the shop.
Had I been heard?
I stood listening for several endless moments, but all I could hear was the pounding of my heart.
I tiptoed my way to the desk.
By their dry, faded paper, I could see that these documents stretched back over many years. It appeared as if Mr. Nightingale had begun filling the top left pigeonholes in the early days of his business and moved on from side to side, over the years, and down.
The freshest-seeming envelopes were in the bottom right compartment, spilling over onto the desktop. I pulled the drawers out, one by one. These, too, were jammed with bills and invoices.
I pulled one out at random. It was three years old.
The next drawer down was a complete surprise. It was filled—almost to overflowing—with loose race cards: cheaply printed greyhound racing programs from Wimbledon, Harringay Arena, Southend Stadium, and the White City—certain dogs in each race checked off in pencil, presumably to win, and every one of these, I realized, purchased with the wages of death.
With races on weekdays and at weekends, afternoons and evenings, and the sheer amount of travel involved, his commitment in time must have been colossal, to say nothing of the money wagered.
And suddenly I knew. Mr. Nightingale was no angel. He was also in deep trouble.
It was just then that something caught my eye: a fat, solemn-looking ledger that lay flat on the top shelf.
I reached for it and took it down, my hands trembling.
Inside the front cover, on the flyleaf, in a remarkably ornate hand, was written in businesslike black ink (oak gall, I thought) F. T. Nightingale.
The first entry in the book was dated thirteenth September, 1922, and had to do with the funeral of an infant named Margaret Rose Cawfee.
In meticulous copperplate script were written the details of the transaction:
Attendance at The Laurels, 10/, pine coffin, £8, shroud 7/, ribbon, 2/, motor hearse and driver, £2, opening grave, bearers & sexton, £2, undertaking, £1.
All of it coming to about £14.
Poor little Margaret Rose Cawfee. Had anybody loved her? They surely must have: The ribbon told the tale.
I turned toward the back of the ledger which was not quite filled. There were only a few blank pages left.
The last entry had been made two years ago.
I whistled.
Canon G. L. O. Whitbread!
The bill had been paid in full by H. M. Prisons. The cost had been five hundred and sixty pounds.
There were no details.
And there hadn’t been a single entry since.
With fingers flying, I leafed back to the previous page, and there they were—the Three Graces: Miss Willoughby, Miss Harcourt, and Miss Cray.
All on the same day.
It must have been a bumper season for Mr. Nightingale. But why, then, had his business so suddenly failed? Why had he only carried out four funerals in the past two years?
I needed to dig deeper into his personal papers. If only I could find his checkbook, or perhaps his diary. Even the mail that he had received might well shed some light on his most peculiar business.
I was trying to decide where to begin on this mountain of papers when I spotted something on the floor: something which had been flung carelessly toward the wastebasket but had fallen short, almost hidden behind the leg of the desk.
I picked it up with my fingernails.
Unfortunately, it was blank. Just a piece of blue-lined paper from which a portion had been torn.
Sometimes, out of the heavens, the Great Gods will drop something unexpectedly into our laps. It’s their way, I suppose, of saying “Thank you for your custom. Thank you for believing in us.” It is their way of throwing us a bone.
The only word that can adequately describe our feelings when this happens is “thrill,” which ought to be spelled with a couple of Z’s instead of L’s, since it has the same effect as sticking your finger into an electrical receptacle.
I put the scrap on the desk and reached into my pocket, smoothing as I pulled out the piece of paper I had found in Orlando’s pocket.
54 6 7 8 9, I read.
Same ink, same written numerals as those in Mr. Nightingale’s ledger.
I pushed the two torn edges of the papers together. It was a perfect fit. I pocketed both pieces.
Well done, Flavia! I thought.
There was a step and a stir behind me, and as I whirled, something rough was clapped over my face, covering my nose, my mouth, my nostrils. I was filled instantly with a sickeningly sweet, stinging, and pervasive odor which I recognized at once as diethyl ether. Oddly enough, I even managed to remember the chemical formula of the stuff—(C2H5)2O—and the fact that it could be obtained by distilling a mixture of ethanol—common drinking alcohol—and sulfuric acid.
I struggled to break free, but it was no use. Whoever had seized me was stronger than I was.
I clawed at the wrists that were pressing against both sides of my neck, realizing even as I did so that it was a lost cause. Carried by the breath, diethyl ether, like those poisonous clouds in a cheap thriller film, swirls up the nose and goes directly for the brain. There is nothing subtle about the stuff. Its smell is so powerful that the odor of a single drop can fill a room, and I remembered reading somewhere that a cat would refuse to eat the flesh of an etherized rabbit, even after it had been boiled.
I knew that there were just a few seconds left before I lost consciousness. The telltale buzzing in my ears—like a swarm of invisible insects—had already begun.
Half in a haze, I felt myself being lifted bodily in someone’s a
rms, lugged across a crazily spinning room, and dumped heavily like a bag of bones into what looked, to my burning bulging eyes, like a large wooden box.
That—and then something that seemed to sound like coffin screws biting into wood.
On the one hand, it was the most terrifying thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life and yet, on the other, the most strangely satisfying.
Here I am at last, I thought. Now I know what it is actually like.
It was, in one sense, as if I had crossed some mystic finish line and had come home at last in a blaze of great glory, but yet in another, as if I were back at the beginning, tensed, waiting for the starter’s pistol: about to die, yet about to be born again.
What would I be, I wondered, if it turned out there really was such a thing as incarnation: a dweller in a grass hut, perhaps, like one of those carefree tribal beauties I had seen in the cinema travel films, whose only desire in life was to pull the most frightening faces for the white man’s camera?
Or a slave, perhaps, in ancient Egypt, milling corn on a slab for the flatbread which would feed the hordes of sweating slaves who were hauling stones to build the pyramids?
But perhaps not. The world was changing and I, whatever I was, was changing with it. By the time I came around again I might well be a famous scientist—a chemist, of course—calibrating the controls of some new and, as yet, undreamt-of device, which would permit me to peer into the most secret heart of the universe.
But first I had to suppress the feeling of panic that was rising in my chest. I fought frantically to swim to the surface of my senses. The first of these to return was memory.
It is a fact that oxygen deprivation begins damaging the brain after less than five minutes. I had learned this by studying the notebooks of my late uncle Tarquin, who had participated in several experiments with John Scott Haldane, the renowned Scottish physiologist. Haldane had famously sealed himself inside specially constructed glass chambers in order to observe, firsthand, the effects of certain gases—including ether—upon his own brain.
Haldane had come to the conclusion that lack of oxygen does not stop the machinery—meaning the brain—but destroys the whole apparatus.
