Alan Bradley - A Red Herring Without Mustard: A Flavia de Luce Novel

I pedaled southeast from Buckshaw, wobbling slowly along the edge of the ornamental lake. To my left was a somewhat flat expanse called the Visto which had been cleared by Sir George de Luce in the mid-nineteenth century to serve as what he described in his diary as a “coign of vantage”: a grassy green plain across which one was supposed to contemplate the blue enfolding hills.

In recent times, however, the Visto had been allowed to become little more than an overgrown cow pasture: a place where nettles ran riot and the contemplator’s clothing was at risk of being ripped to tatters. It was here that Harriet had kept Blithe Spirit, her de Havilland Gypsy Moth, which she had flown regularly up to London to meet her friends.

All that remained now of those happy days were the three iron rings, still rusting somewhere among the weeds, to which Blithe Spirit had long ago been tethered.

Once, when I had asked Father how Buckshaw looked from the air, he had gone all tight around the temples.

“Ask your aunt Felicity,” he’d said gruffly. “She’s flown.”

I’d made a mental note to do so.

From the Visto an overgrown path ran south, crossing here and there long-abandoned lawns and hedges, which gave way eventually to copses and scrub. I followed the narrow track, and soon arrived at the Palings.

The Gypsy’s caravan was as I had left it, although the ground bore signs of many “hobnail boots,” as Feely had called them.

Why was I drawn back here? I wondered. Was it because the Gypsy had been under my protection? I had, after all, offered her sanctuary in the Palings and she had accepted. If amends were to be made, I would make them on my own—not because I was made to do so by a sense of shame.

Gry was grazing contentedly near the elders at the far side of the grove. Someone had brought him back to the Palings. They had even thought to bring a bale of fresh hay to the clearing, and he was making short work of it. He looked up at me without curiosity and then went back to his food.

“Who’s a good boy, then?” I asked him, realizing, even as I said it, that these were words to be used in addressing a parrot.

“Good Gry,” I said. “Splendid horse.”

Gry paid not the slightest attention.

Something fastened to one of the tree trunks near the bridge caught my eye: a white wooden panel about six feet from the ground. I walked round the other side for a closer look.

Police Investigation—No Admittance by Order—Hinley Constabulary

The signboard was facing east—away from Buckshaw. Obviously it was meant to deter those hordes of the idly curious who flock to places where blood has been shed like crows to a winter oak.

I was, after all, on my own property. I could hardly be trespassing. Besides, I could always claim that I hadn’t seen the thing.

I put a foot carefully onto one of the caravan’s shafts and, waving my arms for balance like an aerialist, made my way slowly, heel to toe, up the slope to the driving board. To my surprise, the door had been replaced.

I paused to prepare myself—took a deep breath—then opened the door and stepped inside.

The blood had been cleaned up—I saw that at once. The floor was newly scrubbed and the sharp clean smell of Sunlight soap still hung in the air.

It wasn’t dark inside the caravan, but neither was it light. I took a step towards the rear and froze in my tracks.

Someone was lying on the bed!

Suddenly my heart was pounding in a frenzy, and my eyes felt as if they were about to pop out of their sockets. I hardly dared breathe.

In the gloom of the drawn curtains I could see that it was a woman—no, not a woman—a girl. A few years older than me, perhaps. Her hair was raven black, her complexion tawny, and she was wrapped in a shapeless garment of black crepe.

As I stood motionless, staring at her face, her dark eyes opened slowly—and met mine.

With a quick, powerful spring she leapt from the bed, snatching something from a shelf, and I suddenly found myself wedged sharply against the wall, my arm twisted behind my back and a knife at my throat.

“Let go! You’re hurting me!” I managed to squeeze the words out through the pain.

“Who are you? What are you doing here?” she hissed. “Tell me before I slit your gullet.”

I could feel the knife’s blade against my windpipe.

“Flavia de Luce,” I gasped.

Damn it all! I was beginning to cry.

I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror: her arm beneath my chin … my bulging eyes … the knife—the knife!

“That’s a butter knife,” I croaked in desperation.

It was one of those moments that might later seem amusing, but it wasn’t now. I was trembling with fear and anger.

I felt my head jerk as she pulled back to look at the blade, and then I was being pushed away.

“Get out of here,” she said roughly. “Get away—now—before I take the razor to you.”

I didn’t need a second invitation. The girl was obviously mad.

I stumbled towards the door and jumped to the ground. I grabbed Gladys and was halfway to the trees when—

“Wait!”

Her voice echoed in the glade.

“Did you say your name was Flavia? Flavia de Luce?”

I did not reply, but stopped at the edge of the grove, making sure that I kept Gry between us as a makeshift barrier.

“Please,” she said. “Wait. I’m sorry. I didn’t know who you were. They told me you saved Fenella’s life.”

“Fenella?” I managed, my voice shaking, still hollowed out by fear.

“Fenella Faa. You brought the doctor to her … here … last night.”

I must have looked a perfect fool as I stood there with my mouth open like a goldfish. My brain needed time to catch up as the girl flip-flopped suddenly from holding a blade at my throat to being sorry. I was not accustomed to apologies, and this one—probably the first I had ever received in my life—caught me off guard.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“Porcelain,” she said, jumping down from the caravan. “Porcelain Lee—Fenella’s my gram.”

She was coming towards me through the grass, her arms extended in biblical forgiveness.

“Let me hug you,” she said. “I need to thank you.”

I’m afraid I shrank back a little.

“Don’t worry, I won’t bite,” she said, and suddenly she was upon me, her arms enfolding me in a tight embrace, her chin resting sharply on my shoulder.

“Thank you, Flavia de Luce,” she whispered in my ear, as if we had been friends forever. “Thank you.”

Since I was still half expecting a dagger to be plunged between my shoulder blades, I’m afraid I did not return her hug, which I received in stiff silence, rather like one of the sentries at Buckingham Palace pretending he doesn’t notice the liberties being taken by an excessively affectionate tourist.

“You’re welcome,” I managed. “How is she? Fenella, I mean.”

Using the Gypsy’s first name did not come easily to me. In spite of the fact that Daffy and I have always referred to our own mother as Harriet (only Feely, who is older, seems to have the right to call her Mummy), it still felt excessively saucy to call a stranger’s grandmother by her given name.

“She’ll be all right, they think. Too early to tell. But if it hadn’t been for you—”

Tears were beginning to well up in her dark eyes.

“It was nothing,” I said uncomfortably. “She needed help. I was there.”

Was it really that simple? Or did something deeper lie beneath?

“How did you hear—about this?” I asked, waving at the glade.

“The coppers tracked me down in London. Found my name and all that on a scrap of paper in her handbag. I begged a ride off a bloke with a lorry in Covent Garden, and he brought me as far as Doddingsley. I walked the rest of the way. Got here no more than an hour ago.”

Four gold stars to Inspector Hewitt and his men, I thought. Searching the caravan for Fenella Faa’s handbag had never crossed my mind.

“Where are you staying? At the Thirteen Drakes?”

“Blimey!” she said in a feigned Cockney accent. “That’s a larf, that is!”

I must have looked offended.

“I couldn’t rub two shillings together if my life depended on it,” she said, waving her hands expansively at the grove. “So I expect right here is where I’ll stay.”

“Here? In the caravan?”

I looked at her aghast.

“Why not? It’s Fenella’s, isn’t it? That means it’s as good as mine. All I have to do is find out who’s the nob that owns this bit of green, and—”

“It’s called the Palings,” I said, “and it belongs to my father.”

Actually it didn’t: It belonged to Harriet, but I didn’t feel that I needed to explain our family’s legal difficulties to a semi-ragamuffin stranger who had just threatened my life.

“Coo!” she said. “I’m sorry. I never thought.”

“But you can’t stay here,” I went on. “It’s a crime scene. Didn’t you see the sign?”

“ ’Course I did. Didn’t you?”

I chose to ignore this childish response. “Whoever attacked your gram might still be hanging about. Until the police find out who and why, it isn’t safe to be here after dark.”

This was a part, but not all, of the truth.

Every bit as important as Porcelain’s physical safety was the sudden gnawing need I felt to make amends to the family of Fenella Faa: to correct an old wrong committed by my father. For the first time in my life I found myself seized by hereditary guilt.

“So you’ll have to stay at Buckshaw,” I blurted.

There! I’d done it. I’d made the leap. But even as I spoke, I knew that I would soon regret my words.

Father, for instance, would be furious.

Even when his beloved Harriet had invited the Gypsies to stay at Buckshaw, Father had driven them off. If she had failed, I didn’t stand a chance.

Perhaps that was why I did it.

“My father’s quite eccentric,” I said. “At least, he has some odd ideas. He won’t allow guests at Buckshaw, other than his own sister. I’ll have to sneak you in.”

Porcelain seemed quite alarmed at the thought. “I don’t want to make trouble.”

“Nonsense,” I said, sounding like Aunt Felicity, the Human Steamroller. “It will be no trouble at all. Nobody ever comes into the east wing. They won’t even know you’re there.

“Bring your things,” I ordered.

Until that moment I hadn’t noticed how haggard Porcelain was looking. With her black crepe dress and the black circles under her eyes, she looked like someone made up for a masquerade party: “The Grim Reaper as a Young Woman.”

“I’ve nothing,” she said. “Just what you see.” She tugged apologetically at her heavy hem. “This is Fenella’s,” she said. “I had to wash out my own things in the river this morning, and they aren’t dry.”

Wash out her things? Why would she need to do that? Since it didn’t seem to be any of my business, I didn’t ask—perhaps I could find an excuse to bring it up later.

“Off we go, then,” I said, trying to sound cheerful. “Buckshaw awaits.”

I picked up Gladys and wheeled her along beside me. Porcelain trudged a few steps behind, her eyes downcast.

“It isn’t awfully far,” I said, after a while. “I expect you’ll be happy to get some sleep.”

I turned and saw her nodding in response, but she did not speak. She shuffled along behind me, drained, and not even the ornamental dolphins of the Poseidon fountain made her take her eyes from the ground.

“These were made in the eighteenth century,” I told her, “so they’re rather elderly. They used to spout water from their mouths.”

Again a nod.

We were taking a shortcut across the Trafalgar Lawn, an abandoned series of terraces that lay to the southeast of the house. Sir George de Luce, who planned it as a tribute to Admiral Nelson and his victory over the Spanish, which had taken place some forty years earlier, had laid it out at about the same time as the Visto.

By the simple expedient of tapping into Lucius “Leaking” de Luce’s earlier and extensive subterranean waterworks, Sir George had planned to activate his glorious fountained landscape as a surprise for his bride.

And so he had begun on a work of landscape architecture that would rival or even surpass the spectacle of the ornamental lake, but speculation during the Railway Mania had scotched his fortunes. With most of his capital gone, what had been planned as a noble avenue of fountains, with Buckshaw as its focal point, had been abandoned to the elements.

Now, after a century of rain and snow, sun and wind, and the nocturnal visits of the villagers who came at night to steal stone for their garden walls, the Trafalgar Lawn and its statues were like a sculptor’s scrapyard, with various bits of stone cherubs, mossy Tritons, and sea nymphs jutting up out of the ground here and there like stone swimmers from a shipwreck waiting to be rescued from a sea of earth.

Only Poseidon had survived, lounging with his net atop a crumbling base, brooding in marble over his broken family, his three-pronged trident like a lightning rod, sticking up towards whatever might be left of the ancient Greek heavens.

“Here’s old Poseidon,” I said, turning to haul Gladys up yet another set of crumbled steps. “His photograph was in Country Life a couple of years ago. Rather splendid, isn’t he?”

Porcelain had come suddenly to a dead stop, her hand covering her mouth, her hollowed-out eyes staring upwards, as wide and as dark as the pit. Then she let out a cry like a small animal.

I followed her gaze, and saw at once the thing that had frozen her in her tracks.

Dangling from Poseidon’s trident, like a scarecrow hung on a coat hook, was a dark figure.

“It’s Brookie Harewood,” I said, even before I saw his face.

NINE

ONE OF THE TRIDENT’S tines had pierced Brookie’s long moleskin coat at the neck, and he swung slightly in the breeze, looking rather casual in his flat cap and scarlet scarf, as if he were enjoying one of the roundabouts at an amusement pier.

For a moment, I thought he might have fallen. Perhaps in an excess of alcoholic high spirits he’d been attempting to scale the statue. Perhaps he had slipped from Poseidon’s head and fallen onto the trident.

That idea was short-lived, however. I saw almost at once that his hands were tied behind his back. But that wasn’t the worst of it.

As I came round full front-on, the sun glinted brightly on something that seemed to be projecting from Brookie’s mouth.

“Stay here,” I told Porcelain, even though I could see that there wasn’t a chance of her moving.

I leaned Gladys against the lower of the three seashell bowls that comprised the fountain, then climbed up her tubular frame until finally I was standing on her seat, from which point I could get a knee up onto the rough stone rim.

The bowl of the thing was filled with a disgusting broth of black water, dead leaves, and mold, the result of a century of neglect, and it smelled to high heaven.