by Alan Bradley
“I detect your disagreement,” said Miss Mandrill. “It’s written all over your face. Oh, well. I suppose there are people you can talk sense with, and others whom you can’t.”
How was I going to deal with this woman? One moment she was confiding in me like an old pal, and the next she was shooting at me with flaming arrows.
I couldn’t afford to stalk off in “high dungeon,” as Mrs. Mullet once put it, nor could I waste time playing on-again-off-again with such a wandering mind. It was like playing at bowls on a teeter-totter. Of course the woman was upset. Who wouldn’t be to find their protégé dragged drowned from the drink and spread-eagled on a patch of grass?
“Had he any relatives?” I asked. “Anyone who ought to be informed?”
“Ha!” she barked.
And left it at that.
Feely by now had reached one of the quieter parts of The Art of Fugue, and the organ’s notes, rather than flying and fluttering about, now roosted, whispering, up among the ancient timbers. In the near-silence, I heard the sound of approaching footsteps on the wooden floor.
And it wasn’t the sidesmen bringing the collection plate to the altar rail.
It was the police.
“Constable Otter, miss,” said an onion-scented voice at my ear. “A word outside, if you please.”
I gave an eye-shrug to Miss Mandrill, crossed myself ostentatiously (you never knew), got to my feet, and followed the constable up the aisle and out into the sunshine, blinking madly at the glare.
I noted at once that the constable had had the good sense to come for me alone.
“Now then…” Constable Otter said, flipping open the pages of his notebook and licking the end of an indelible pencil, and I knew that I was, so to speak, home free.
·FOUR·
I CANNOT PRETEND THAT it was unpleasant to be questioned by the police. I had in the past become quite accustomed to occasional quiet chats with Inspector Hewitt: chats during which, as often as not, I was able to set the inspector straight on some of the finer points of chemistry and even, on one or two occasions, certain other matters as well.
Although I would have preferred to be grilled by the Detective Branch, I was nevertheless quite gracious to the uniformed Constable Otter. I put him at his ease at once.
“Ah! You’ve tracked me down at last,” I said in an admiring voice. “Nothing like a mysterious death to liven up a lazy summer day, eh, Constable?”
I’d show him that I was an old hand at this sort of thing.
He gave me rather an odd squint. Is it the sun? I wondered. Or have I misjudged the man?
“Mysterious, miss?” the Constable asked.
Careful, Flavia! I thought. This man was quicker on the uptake than I had given him credit for.
“Well, you know what I mean,” I improvised. “Drowned but not reported missing.”
“And how do you know that?”
I could tell at once that Constable Otter was far from being the dullest blade in the drawer. In fact, I was already foreseeing great things for him in the future.
“By deduction,” I said. “One would expect to find searchers on the banks, the river being dragged, and so forth.”
Constable Otter scratched the tip of his chin with the point of his pencil. It left a small indigo mark, but I didn’t point it out to him.
“Well, miss,” he said, “I expect we ought to leave such deductions, as you call them, to the professionals: the chaps with the brains and the microscopes.”
The constable was being witty, but I pretended not to notice.
He must have misread the look on my face, because he added: “A microscope, miss, in case you didn’t know, is a device for magnifying small or minuscule objects. It makes a flea’s eye look as broad as a barn.”
Obviously, he did not realize that he was speaking to a person who had at home, in her own personal chemical laboratory, one of the finest binocular microscopes ever crafted by Ernst Leitz of Wetzlar, and that she bloody well knew how to use it! Idiot!
“No! Really?” I asked, letting the words writhe out of my mouth like a snake from a basket, and letting my jaw fall open the regulation three inches.
“Hmmm,” he said, giving me that narrow look of his again. “Are you a professional, miss?”
His unexpectedly perceptive question caught me off guard.
“Well…yes,” I said. “In a way, I suppose, you could say I am.”
My reply was greeted with silence. This man had all the makings of a chief inspector. I’d better watch my step.
More important, I’d better get on the right side of him.
“You’re very good at what you do, you know,” I said.
Better not butter him up too much, though, I thought, otherwise I might slip and fall on my face.
He was giving me that look again, but I was saved from embarrassment by a cry from the water’s edge.
“Constable! Constable Otter!”
It was the vicar and he was waving his arms in rather an unholy manner: more like a railway guard, I thought.
With great deliberation, Constable Otter returned his notebook and pencil to the breast pocket of his uniform. He was not a man to be stampeded.
With one last quizzing look at me, he turned and strode off purposefully along the path, his police boots crunching without mercy on the gravel.
Naturally, I followed. He had not instructed me to stay where I was.
Although our skiff was still at the riverbank, Dogger and Daffy were nowhere in sight. They must be still at the Oak and Pheasant, where Dogger would be doing his best to distract Daffy: to keep her mind—and eyes—away from the corpse. In spite of her steel-hard exterior, my sister was the tenderest of us all. She simply hated to show it.
When the cards were down, Daffy was always the first to fold. Anything truly gruesome, such as an arm or a leg broken in a tumble from a tree, or a toad speared on the tines of a garden fork, would reduce Daffy to a quivering, helpless jelly. The sight—or even the smell—of blood caused her to drop her dinner on the spot: as if her brain and belly were connected by a string.
But books were another matter. As long as it was only described in print, with no pictures, my sister could stomach anything.
Hadn’t she read aloud to me with great enthusiasm, when I was still a child, the scene from Crime and Punishment in which Raskolnikov hacks two women to death with an ax? And she had positively burbled with delight at the death by pistol of Vladimir, in Eugene Onegin, in which his blood gushed, smoking, from the wound.
Books served Daffy as an insulation between the real world and her tender heart.
As for me, I was not like that at all. No, not in the least.
To me, an unexamined corpse was a tale untold: a knotted ball of a tale that was simply crying out to be unraveled until the last strand had been picked free. The fact that it was also a study in progressively putrid chemistry simply made it all that much more lively and interesting.
My point is that although there were obviously certain similarities between Daffy and myself, there were also insurmountable—in this life, at least—differences.
The vicar was still making wigwag signals with his arms as I approached, just a few steps behind Constable Otter.
“I thought you ought to see this,” he was saying, holding out a sodden slipper.
It was red: a perfect match for the single one the corpse was wearing.
“Where did you get this, then?” the constable demanded in rather a gruff voice. It had been my experience that the police do not like evidence to be discovered by anyone but themselves.
“There,” said the vicar, pointing a semi-accusing finger at a rather ragamuffin lad who stood nearby beside the wreckage of a sodden kite. I hadn’t even noticed him.
“Hob Nightingale,” the vicar said.
I turned my attention to this grubby child who was staring attentively down at his oversized boots. Just a couple of years younger than me, he might well have been a po
rter at Covent Garden market; an orphan waif from one of Daffy’s Dickens novels. From his peaked cap and baggy rumpled trousers, I knew at once that he almost certainly had an older brother—and no mother.
“What you starin’ at, then?” he asked, looking up and meeting my eye aggressively.
“Sorry,” I said, and I meant it. I have a tendency to gawk when I’m fascinated.
He tossed his head and looked away. People who have been offended are entitled to a short sulk, as long as it doesn’t drag on too long. I would have to wait a while to see if my apology had been accepted.
“Young Hob, here, was flying his kite,” the vicar said. “A little gust brought it down among those reeds.”
He pointed to a brackish bit of riverbank where a stretch of reeds and pondweed lined an indent in the river’s course.
“Just over there,” the vicar said, pointing.
“Floating, was it, the slipper?” Constable Otter asked. “In the water, like?”
The vicar nodded.
“And who fished it out, then?” the constable asked slyly.
“Why, I did,” the vicar replied sheepishly, and I noticed for the first time that his trouser legs were rolled up to reveal a stretch of white ecclesiastical legs and a pair of fish-white feet. “Hob pointed it out. I waded in to retrieve it.
“He’s just a child,” he added. “I didn’t want him to tumble in.”
“I see,” Constable Otter said, weighing the dripping slipper in his hand. “So you fished it out yourself? With your own hands?”
The vicar nodded meekly, and the constable, producing pad and pencil with the flourish of a stage magician, made a note in his book. There would be no catching out this stickler for detail at the inquest.
“Now then,” the constable said, turning to the scowling Hob Nightingale. “What were you up to? No fibs, mind, else I’ll tell your dad. He’ll know what to do with you.”
I blanched on the boy’s behalf. I knew all too well what it felt like to be on the receiving end of a naked threat.
But I needn’t have bothered.
“Go ahead and tell him. I don’t care,” Hob said, staring Constable Otter in the eye. “I wasn’t doing anything wrong. Since when is it a crime to fly a kite?”
The constable was as taken aback as I was. He removed his helmet and scratched the back of his head with his pencil. I wondered idly if he’d placed an indelible mark up there, as well.
“Since when?” Hob persisted, his voice rising slightly: just enough to threaten a full-scale tantrum.
“Now then, little laddie,” the constable said. “No need to get your nappies in a knot.”
He turned to the vicar, expecting a smile at such rapier wit, but his little joke died on the vine. The vicar stared at him as blankly as if he were one of Einstein’s equations on a blackboard.
“Well, then,” Otter said. “Run along home now. If I need anything else, I know where to find you.”
And suddenly I saw the way. As if the sun had popped out from behind a black cloud and lighted a path through the woods.
“I’ll take him home,” I said. “I can help carry his broken kite.”
I almost stressed the word broken, but was able to suppress the urge before it passed my lips. I had spotted a shape beneath the rumpled paper that was certainly not part of the flying apparatus.
“You don’t even know where I live,” Hob protested.
“Never mind, sweetie,” I said, hating myself as I said it. “You can show me the way. I’m a wizard with broken kites.”
I bent and gathered up the soggy bundle of balsa wood, paper, and string (of which there seemed to be an exceptional mess), taking care to keep the object beneath it out of sight. As a safeguard, I wrapped the long tail of paper bows around my forearm to seal the bundle shut.
“Lead on, then, Hob,” I said, in a mock dramatic voice.
Tossing his head up and his shoulders back, as if he were leading an army out of captivity in one of those stirring war films, Hob strode off through the churchyard, and I, with the shattered kite bundled awkwardly in my arms, followed him humbly.
No one would ever suspect me of removing evidence from the scene of a crime.
Hob did not so much as glance back at me. I might have been a mere servant carrying the train of his robe.
We made our way past the church, into the high street, and then into a narrow passageway that ran between a greengrocer’s and an undertaker’s. On the right was a brick wall and on the left a tall wooden fence.
“In here,” Hob said, speaking for the first time since leaving the churchyard.
I stopped in my tracks, staring up at the painted sign on a weathered board above an open gate.
F. T. NIGHTINGALE, it read. FUNERALS ETC.
“Wait—” I said, but Hob shushed me with a finger raised to his lips.
“Keep it down,” he whispered. “I don’t want Da to hear us.”
“Da?” I whispered back.
“My father,” he said, pointing up to the sign. “The undertaker.”
You could have knocked me over with an ostrich feather. It’s not often that Fate deals you a winning hand, but I’d just been given four aces and a joker up my sleeve.
“The undertaker,” I murmured. “Fancy that!”
“Nothing to be afraid of,” Hob said, miming the words in an exaggerated manner with his lips.
“Are you sure?” I mimed back.
He did not reply, but, beckoning me with a curled forefinger, led the way into the fenced area.
Inside was a broad cobbled courtyard and I found myself in another century. From the gas lamp above the back door of the premises to the cast-iron hitching posts, it was clearly a place where funerals had been marshaled before their procession to the graveyard.
I could imagine the black horses standing patiently as they were harnessed for the hearse, which would have been a shellacked and solemn thing on slender wooden wheels, with unnerving slabs of glass all the way round, so that those fortunate enough to be still alive could have a jolly good gawk at the coffin as they envisioned its grisly contents.
There would have been cockades attached, of black-dyed ostrich feathers, designed to ruffle in the breeze like the feathers of dead birds—which they were—to generate a primitive shudder in the spectators and remind them of their own mortality; there would have been mutes in tall black hats to pace numbly alongside the hearse and catch the eye of anyone they could, as if to say, “You! You there! Yes, you—You Who Might Be Next.”
Oh, for the good old days, I thought, when Death was an everyday equal and not to be padlocked away like some dim-witted relative whom nobody wanted to see or spend time with.
Today, at the door where once the horses were persuaded not to prance, stood a rather elderly and down-at-the-heels motor hearse. An Austin, I noted, which had apparently served in a former life as a London taxicab.
Looking round, it was obvious to me that this courtyard was the rear of the undertaking premises and not meant for public viewing. Wooden coffin cases leaned heavily against the fence, and boxes full of empty bottles were stacked in every corner. Embalming liquids, I noted appreciatively.
I leaned over for a closer look at one of the weathered labels.
Aha! Just as I suspected: formaldehyde, mercury chloride, arsenious acid, with a pinch of good old sodium chloride (table salt) plus a couple of drops of thymol, oil of cinnamon, and oil of cloves, to mask the stink.
I recalled with a delicious shiver that arsenious acid, in the form of arsenic trioxide, is one of the deadliest of poisons, and is often used to dispatch rats.
“Hurry up!” Hob hissed.
He was standing in an open doorway fanning frantically with his hands. I followed eagerly.
I let out a low whistle. We were in a large workshop, at the far end of which was a raised loft or gallery. Coffins and parts of coffins in various stages of construction were everywhere: resting on wooden trestles, leaning against walls, pile
d in corners. Planes, hammers, saws, and chisels covered every level surface, and the air was sweet with the smell of sawdust and wood shavings.
To a girl of my interests, the place seemed like Heaven.
It was like being in on the Creation!
Hob was already halfway up the ladder that led to the loft.
“Up here,” he said. “Hurry up. Hustle your bustle.”
I obeyed, dragging myself unsteadily up, rung by rung, with the crumpled kite pressed against my bosom. I must have looked like an apprentice paperhanger.
Hob reached out a hand to help me up onto the platform.
Without any further ado, he took the crashed kite from my clutches and threw it into a corner, revealing a black and boxy object, which he placed carefully atop a highly polished coffin.
I gave the hard finish a couple of sharp taps with my fingernail. Shellac, dissolved in methylated spirits: a coffin of the highest quality. Certainly not one of the cheaper finishes of linseed oil and lampblack to which a bit of gold size in turpentine has been added.
This box was meant for someone important.
From my own personal experience I knew a thing or two about the various varnishes and their qualities. An emergency repair of a seventeenth-century refectory tabletop at Buckshaw—ruined by my roller-skating on its polished surface—had once needed to be completed and invisible before Father got home from London.
At the thought, a twinge touched my heart.
“I hope this camera’s not busted,” Hob said, “or Pippin’s going to slaughter me when he comes home.”
Pippin? Who was this Pippin? I wondered. I raised my eyebrows.
“My brother,” he said. “He’s a pilot. Photo reconnaissance. He’s mapping northern Canada for the Geological Survey. He used to fly a Spitfire. It’s his camera. I nicked it for an experiment.”
I could see the pride in Hob’s eyes as the words came bubbling out of his mouth.
Reflected in the polished gloss of the coffin, the camera had rather an unearthly look: a strange scientific instrument from another planet sent, perhaps, to spy with its single, ever-open, all-seeing eye upon our backward world.
