by Alan Bradley
Tristram Tallis was now halfway to the aircraft. There were just seconds left before he was upon us.
“You’re the Gamekeeper, aren’t you?” I asked.
Aunt Felicity stared at me, her face a mask. I had never been so bold in my life. Had I said too much? Had I gone too far?
And then my aged aunt’s mouth opened just wide enough to allow one small word to escape.
“Yes,” she said.
TWENTY-SIX
AUNT FELICITY AND I spoke not another word as we entered the house from the kitchen garden. To an observer, it might have appeared as if we were a couple of casual acquaintances returning from an afternoon stroll on the lawns of Buckshaw.
Things were beginning to make sense; pieces were falling into place. Aunt Felicity, I knew, had rather a peculiar and unlikely circle of acquaintances. As far as I could deduce, she seemed to have been some kind of Queen Bee at the BBC during the War but had always refused to discuss it.
Had the MI department—the one with a number so high that not even the Prime Minister was aware of its existence—been quartered at Broadcasting House? It was a distinct possibility.
By “the Prime Minister,” she had obviously meant the present Prime Minister. Winston Churchill, the former PM, as everybody knew, still had certain secrets which he kept even from God.
And Tristram Tallis had seemed not at all surprised at our sudden departure in Blithe Spirit. He must have had some prior understanding with my aunt, since, when we landed, he had done no more than inquire pleasantly if “the old girl,” as he put it, had behaved herself.
As Aunt Felicity went silently to her room, I walked slowly through the narrow passage to the front of the house.
The foyer was empty. The last mourners had gone, and the place was now steeped in utter silence. It was the dramatic pause in the moment before the curtain goes up on a different and as yet unknown world.
The scent of flowers hung heavily in the air. What was the word Daffy had once used to describe it? Cloying. Yes, that was it: cloying.
It felt as if your sinuses, your nostrils, and your adenoids, all at the same time, were about to vomit.
Perhaps I was coming down with a cold.
In spite of the fine weather, my laboratory, too, seemed unusually cold. Had I caught a chill during one of my flights in Blithe Spirit? I shrugged into an old brown bathrobe I kept hanging on the back of the door for just such emergencies and bundled myself as tightly as if I were setting out for the Pole.
I must have looked like a medieval monk or an alchemist fussing over his flasks as I prepared my experiment.
From the bottom drawer of Uncle Tar’s desk, I brought out the oilskin wallet which had contained Harriet’s will, placed it on one of the benches, and lit a Bunsen burner.
I have to admit that I wasn’t yet quite sure what I hoped to discover, but most objects, analyzed both visually and chemically, will eventually give up whatever secrets they hold, however incidental they may at first have seemed.
I began with the outside surface. The wallet was made from a kind of yellowish oilcloth: cotton or linen, perhaps, which had been varnished with several coats of linseed oil and pipe clay.
Aside from a few mottled stains—which I would leave for later analysis—the packet presented no remarkable features. I brought it to my nose and sniffed gently: a brackish odor of oily fungus, as if the wallet had been brought not long ago from the underworld, which I suppose, in a way, it had.
I pried it gently open and looked inside, turned it upside down and tapped it. A few particles of debris fell out onto the bench.
Lint? Dust? Soil? It was difficult to know. I brushed them carefully onto a piece of filter paper for later examination under the microscope.
Next was the taste test. I stuck out my tongue and, touching its tip to the packet, inhaled gently, waiting for the warmth of my body to release whatever essential oils might remain after all these years to be sensed by my taste buds and my olfactory system.
Linseed oil, definitely—as I had supposed.
For an advanced analysis of the material, I would snip off a sample and subject it to steam distillation, which would reveal any of the less obvious ingredients that might have been used in the wallet’s manufacture, or to which it had later been exposed.
Body fluids, such as sweat, were a distinct possibility, and I couldn’t say I was much looking forward to their discovery. On the other hand, the packet had been preserved for ten years by freezing and might well be a treasury of hidden chemical clues.
But first I would carry out the simplest and least destructive test: a gentle warming over the flame of the Bunsen burner while watching intently for any physical change. The volatile oils heated and combusted at varying degrees of temperature depending upon their chemical structure, and the first changes, however slight, were often visual.
By starving it slightly for air, I adjusted the burner for its coolest flame and began by holding the oilskin packet several inches off to one side. It wouldn’t do to have the oily wallet catching fire.
Keeping it in constant motion and waving gently back and forth, I gradually brought the wallet closer to the flame.
After a minute or so, there had been no perceptible change.
I increased the flow of air and watched as the flame changed instantly from orange to blue.
Again I began waving the wallet: to and fro … to and fro.
Still nothing.
I was about to give it up when something caught my eye. It was as if parts of the oilcloth were darkening ever so slightly.
I held my breath. Was it—could it be—?
Yes!
A pattern was becoming visible on the oilcloth: at first no more than a mottled appearance—tiny rivers of black similar to thin, dark veins on marble.
But even as I watched, they began to blur. The heat was causing these stains—whatever they might be—to spread and absorb into the fabric of the oilcloth.
There wasn’t a moment to waste! I needed to outline this twisting shape before it could blur beyond all recognition.
I shut off the burner, pulled a pencil from a drawer, and sketched quickly on the warm surface, trying to trace each part of the pattern before it could disappear.
Some far corner of my brain recognized the shape even before I became consciously aware of it.
Look, Flavia! Look! Think!
It was handwriting.
Letters. A word.
Invisible writing! A black word brought to light by heat—brought to light by the flame of the burner in the same way that the invisible images on the ciné film had been made visible by the chemicals of the developer.
A word resurrected. A word presumably written by Harriet, trapped in a glacial crevasse, knowing that she would never escape alive.
Why would she leave a message in invisible ink? Why wouldn’t she have written it on the paper, and in pencil, as she had done with her will?
The answer seemed obvious: She wanted the will to be legible to anyone who found it—found her—but the two words scribbled on the oilskin wallet to remain invisible to everyone but a person who was looking for them.
But how on earth could a woman trapped in a glacier contrive to leave a message in invisible ink? It could easily be done in a country manor house with access to even a few common household chemicals. But in the Himalayan ice?
Any acid could be used to produce invisible writing. It was only necessary to take care that its strength was not so great as to burn the paper.
But invisible inks? They were everywhere: lemon juice, vinegar, milk—even spit could be used in a pinch.
Spit? Saliva?
Of course!
Like all great simple solutions, the answer had been there all along.
Urine! How clever of her.
One’s urine was a rich stew of chemical constituents: urea, sulfates of potash and of soda, phosphate and muriate of soda, ammonia, lactic acid, and uric acid, to name just a few. A bette
r invisible ink could hardly be concocted if it had been prepared by an apothecary and bottled in the back room at Boots!
Besides that, the stuff was readily available and free.
In ordinary circumstances, I would have begun my analysis by examining the wallet under ultraviolet light, but the bulb in my UV lab lamp had recently snuffed it, and I hadn’t had an opportunity to manage a replacement. Bathed in ultraviolet light, the urine would have fluoresced at once, saving me the trouble of using the Bunsen burner.
I stared at the squiggly lines, straining to make sense of their twistings and turnings. It is a fact that any unfamiliar pattern takes a certain amount of time for the brain to recognize. One moment it is garbled nonsense, and the next—
And then I saw it.
“LENS PALACE” it said.
Lens palace? Whatever could that mean?
If I remembered correctly, there was a place in France called Lens. Our neighbor Maximilian Brock, the retired concert pianist, told me he had once been pelted there with lumps of coal by miners in the audience when he absentmindedly began his performance with a patriotic piece by Percy Grainger rather than the Debussy which had been listed on the program.
Was there a palace in Lens? I hadn’t the foggiest notion. If Max was at the funeral, I could ask him.
Or had I misread the word? Because the letters had blurred so quickly as they were heated, it might originally have read “Linz,” which was a city in Austria. I was quite sure of that because Feely had mentioned that Mozart wrote one of his best symphonies there at white heat—in just four days—for some old count or another. Was there a palace at Linz? It seemed more likely than Lens, but I would have to ask Daffy, who was more or less our household Inquire Within Upon Everything.
But what connection had Linz or Lens with Harriet? What possible message could those words contain?
It was evident—at least to me—that Harriet, having fallen into a glacial crevasse and knowing that all hope of rescue was gone, scrawled her last words in urine on the oilskin wallet in which she had placed her penciled will.
The treated surface would keep her writing crisp and sharp, at least until such time as some future investigator—I shivered at the thought that it was me—should warm the wallet and retrieve her message to the world.
But Lens palace?
It didn’t make sense.
Could it be a reference to a cinema? And if so, which one?
The Gaumont in London? The shabby little cinema off the High Street in Hinley could hardly be described as a picture palace, and besides, when you came to think of it, every cinema in the world had lenses in its projection machines.
It wasn’t likely that Harriet would leave so vague a clue as that, and although it was cryptic, it must have been meant to be decoded by somebody—somewhere.
The message must have been important to be worth going to so much trouble.
If you had only a couple of words left to you before you died, what would they be?
One thing was for certain: They would not be frivolous.
Perhaps it was an anagram—a simple rearrangement of letters: l-e-n-s-p-a-l-a-c-e.
I jotted down a few of the more obvious ones with my pencil: “claps an eel,” “canal sleep,” “lance leaps,” “sea nap cell,” and so on. It was easy to see that there were hundreds of possibilities, but none seemed promising. “Acne lapels,” for instance, was outright ridiculous.
I thought for a moment that it might be a simple substitution cipher, one of those parlor games in which A equals B and B equals C that our governess Miss Gurdy used to force us to play on rainy afternoons before the Troubles. But if Harriet’s message was worth writing in code, it would not be one so easily broken.
The obvious solution, of course, would be to show it to Aunt Felicity—the Gamekeeper herself. She would know how best to handle it.
And yet something was keeping me from doing so. I had handed over Harriet’s will to Father because it was the right thing to do. But this message from my mother was a different thing entirely.
Why?
It’s hard to put your finger on it. For one thing, the will was personal. It was meant to convey Harriet’s wishes—whatever they might have been—to her family. But an invisible message on the outside of a packet was aimed at someone else entirely.
That, at least, was my thinking.
And then, of course, there was the undeniable fact that I wanted to keep something for myself. I could easily give the packet to Inspector Hewitt and let him bask in the glory of cracking the code—if he was able to.
But wouldn’t that be, in a sense, giving away what little remained of my mother?
Quite honestly, I didn’t want to share Harriet’s last two words: not with Father, not with Aunt Felicity, not with the police—not with anyone. I felt that, in some weird way, the words, as they had taken form from nothingness in the heat of the Bunsen burner, were meant for me, that they were mine alone.
It may sound idiotic, but there it was.
I would tell no one.
I turned off the gas to the Bunsen burner and watched as the flame went out, leaving the room colder and somehow sadder than ever.
I pulled the bathrobe tightly round my neck and sat with my heels hooked on one of the stool’s rungs, thinking about what Aunt Felicity had told me.
Harriet had been making her way home by way of India and Tibet. Someone had betrayed her. She was followed.
On the glacier, she had fallen.
Or had she been pushed?
It was uncomfortably like what had happened to the man on the railway platform at Buckshaw Halt. Could it be a coincidence?
Or was it more than that?
Was Harriet to go to her grave a murder victim?
There was a polite knock on the door. I knew who it was even before I said “Come in.”
Dogger came slowly into the room.
“It’s time, Miss Flavia,” he said quietly.
I took a deep breath.
This was it.
The moment I had been dreading all my life.
TWENTY-SEVEN
FATHER WAS NOT A person who wore his heart on his sleeve. In fact, I sometimes used to wonder if he kept it anywhere about his person at all. Perhaps, I thought, his heart was preserved in some icy cave: in some frozen glacier of his mind.
But now, as I perched on the jump seat of Harriet’s Rolls-Royce, I could tell by Father’s face the agony he was in.
The more pain he felt on the inside, the less he showed on the outside.
Why hadn’t I realized that years ago?
His face was like a photographic negative of his soul: White was black and black was white—exactly like the ciné film I had developed. He had been trained to be utterly impassive, and how very, very good at it he had become!
He was staring blankly out the window at the passing hedgerows as if he was no more than someone in the city, going up to London for another day of boredom at a varnished desk in some ghastly office. Seated between Feely and Daffy, he did not notice that I was studying him.
How gray he was, and how pale.
Sometime within the next hour, I thought, this man is going to watch his beloved put into the earth.
Harriet, at this very moment, was ahead of us in the hearse, in a box, which had been draped once more with the Union Jack.
She would be brought briefly into the church, a few words would be said, and that would be that.
I had attended enough funerals to know by now that all the comforting words of the vicar could never be enough, that the vivid imaginations of the mourners would more than cancel them out. All the sober words of John and Job and Timothy could not put Harriet de Luce together again, and I could only hope that our Lord Jesus Christ would have better luck resurrecting my mother than I had had.
I know it sounds bitter, but that is what I was thinking.
Daffy was clutching the Book of Common Prayer from which stuck out at every angle a messy sandwich
of papers. She had been asked by the vicar to speak briefly about our mother, and although she had at first protested, she had finally come round and grudgingly agreed. I could tell by the smudges that her penciled writing had been erased again and again in an attempt to bring it up to the standards of Dickens, say, or Shakespeare.
I pitied her.
Feely had a folio of organ music on her lap. She, at least, would have the distraction of remembering to hit the right keys and pedals and would not be left, as the rest of us were, with nothing to look at but the coffin. That’s the beauty of being an organist, I suppose: Business first, no matter what.
Adam and Tristram were following us with Lena and Undine in Lena’s Land Rover. Adam had offered to drive, and Lena had accepted. Adam’s old Rolls with its roof stripped away and overflowing with potted seedlings was not fit to be seen parked outside the church during a funeral, and so it had been left behind at Buckshaw.
Mrs. Mullet and her husband, Alf, were following in Clarence Mundy’s taxicab. Mrs. M had draped her face with a black veil before setting out and would not remove it “until,” she said, “Miss ’Arriet is laid to rest proper like.”
“Bishop’s Lacey ’as never seen Margaret Mullet cry,” she had whispered to me fiercely, “nor will they.”
Alf, wearing full medals, had put his hand on her arm and said, “Steady on, old girl,” and it was only then I realized that beneath her black pall, his wife was already quaking with tears.
The churchyard and the road in front of it were simply crawling with people, so Dogger was forced to slow the Rolls to a snail’s pace. We were fish in a tank with faces staring in at us through the glass.
Puffy white clouds floated solemnly overhead, dappling the landscape with shadows of sadness.
It was dreadful. Simply dreadful, and the tolling of the great bell in the tower somehow made it even worse.
All eyes were upon us as we stepped down from the Rolls, and a murmur swept like a wave through the crowd, although I couldn’t make out what they were saying.
“That’s Dame Agatha Dundurn,” Daffy whispered, swiveling her eyes repeatedly in the direction she wanted me to look.
