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

“Even if the lightning misses you,” she’d added, “the breath will be sucked from your lungs by the sound of the thunder, and you’ll be turned inside out like a red sock.”

The lightning flashed again and the thunder roared, and now the rain was coming down in sweeping sheets, pounding on the roof like the roll of kettledrums. A sudden wind had sprung up, and the trees in the park pitched wildly in its gusts.

Actually it was quite exhilarating. Daffy be damned, I thought. If I practiced a bit, I could even come to love the thunder and the lightning.

I straightened up, adjusted my balance, and raised the glasses to my eyes.

What I saw was like a scene from Hell. In the watery green light, blown by the wind and illuminated by erratic flashes of lightning, the three policemen were removing Brookie’s body from the trident. They had looped a rope under his armpits, and were lowering him slowly, almost tenderly to the ground. Towering above them in the rain, Poseidon, like a monstrous stone Satan with his pitchfork at the ready, still stared out across his watery world as if he were bored stiff with the antics of mere humans.

Inspector Hewitt reached out to touch the rope and ease the body’s descent, his hair plastered flat against his forehead by the rain, and for a moment, I had the feeling that I was watching some horrific passion play.

And perhaps I was.

Only when Sergeant Woolmer had fetched a bit of tarpaulin from his kit and covered Brookie’s body did the men seem to think of sheltering themselves. Although it provided precious little protection, Dr. Darby held his black medical bag above his head and stood there motionless, looking miserable in the rain.

Inspector Hewitt had unfolded a small transparent raincoat and slipped it on over his saturated clothing. It seemed like something that a chambermaid might wear, and I wondered if his lovely wife, Antigone, had slipped it into his pocket for emergencies such as this.

Sergeant Woolmer stood stolid in the downpour, as if his bulk were protection enough against the wind and rain, while Sergeant Graves, who was the only one of the four small enough to do so, had tucked himself comfortably under the lowest bowl of the fountain on the downwind side, where he squatted as dry as a duck.

Then suddenly, as quickly as it had begun, the storm was over. The dark cloud was now drifting off to the east as the sun reappeared and the birds renewed their interrupted songs.

Sergeant Woolmer removed the waterproof covering with which he had draped his camera, and began photographing the fountain from every imaginable angle. As he began his close-ups, an ambulance came into view, teetering its way across the rough ground between the Palings and the Trafalgar Lawn.

After a few words with the driver, Dr. Darby helped shift Brookie’s shrouded body onto a stretcher, then climbed into the passenger’s seat.

As the ambulance bumped slowly away, swerving to avoid the half-buried statuary, I noticed that a rainbow had appeared. An eerie yellow light had come upon the landscape, making it seem like some garish painting by a madman.

On the far side of the Trafalgar Lawn, at the edge of the trees, something moved. I swiveled a bit and refocused quickly, just in time to see a figure vanish into the wood.

Another poacher, I thought, watching the police; not wanting to be seen.

I made a slow sweep of the tree trunks, but whoever had been there was gone.

I found the ambulance again with the binoculars, and watched until it vanished behind a distant hedge. When it was lost to view, I climbed down from the stool and locked up the laboratory.

If I wanted to search Brookie’s digs before the police got there, I’d have to get cracking.

TEN

THE ONLY PROBLEM WAS this: I hadn’t the faintest idea where Brookie lived.

I could have made another visit to the telephone closet, I suppose, but in Buckshaw’s foyer I was risking an encounter with Father, or worse—with Daffy or Feely. Besides, it seemed most unlikely that a ne’er-do-well such as Brookie would be listed in the directory.

Rather than risk being caught, I slipped stealthily into the picture gallery, which occupied nearly the entire ground floor of the east wing.

An army of de Luce ancestors gazed down upon me as I passed, in whose faces I recognized, uncomfortably, aspects of my own. I wouldn’t have liked most of them, I thought, and most of them wouldn’t have liked me.

I did a cartwheel just to show them that I didn’t care.

Still, because the old boy deserved it, I gave Uncle Tar’s portrait a brisk Girl Guide salute, even though I’d been drummed out of that organization, quite unfairly I thought, by a woman with no sense of humor whatsoever. “Honestly, Miss Pashley,” I’d have told her, had I been given half a chance, “the ferric hydroxide was only meant to be a joke.”

At the far end of the gallery was a box room which, in Buckshaw’s glory days, had been used for the framing and repair of the portraits and landscapes that made up my family’s art collection.

A couple of deal shelves and the workbench in the room were still littered with dusty tins of paint and varnish whose contents had dried out at about the same time as Queen Victoria, and from which brush handles stuck up here and there like fossilized rats’ tails.

Everyone but me seemed to have forgotten that this room had a most useful feature: a sashed window that could be raised easily from both inside and out—and all the more so since I had taken to lubricating its slides with lard pinched from the pantry.

On the outside wall, directly below the window casing and halfway to the ground, a brick had half crumbled away—its slow decay encouraged somewhat, I’ll admit, by my hacking at it with one of Dogger’s trowels: a perfect foothold for anyone who wished to leave or get back into the house without attracting undue attention.

As I scrambled out the window and climbed to the ground, I almost stepped on Dogger, who was on his knees in the wet grass. He got to his feet, lifted his hat, and replaced it.

“Good afternoon, Miss Flavia.”

“Good afternoon, Dogger.”

“Lovely rain.”

“Quite lovely.”

Dogger glanced up at the golden sky, then went on with his weeding.

The very best people are like that. They don’t entangle you like flypaper.

Gladys’s tires hummed happily as we shot past St. Tancred’s and into the high street. She was enjoying the day as much as I was.

Ahead on my left, a few doors from the Thirteen Drakes, was Reggie Pettibone’s antiques shop. I was making a mental note to pay it a visit later when the door flew open and a spectacled boy came hurtling into the street.

It was Colin Prout.

I swerved to avoid hitting him, and Gladys went into a long shuddering slide.

“Colin!” I shouted as I came to a stop. I had very nearly taken a bad tumble.

But Colin had already crossed the high street and vanished into Bolt Alley, a narrow, reeking passage that led to a lane behind the shops.

Needless to say, I followed, offering up fresh praise for the invention of the Sturmey-Archer three-speed shifter.

Into the lane I sped, but Colin was already disappearing round the corner at the far end. A few seconds more, having taken a roughly circular route, and he would be back in the high street.

I was right. By the time I caught sight of him again, he was cutting into Cow Lane, as if the hounds of Hell were at his heels.

Rather than following, I applied the brakes.

Where Cow Lane ended at the river, I knew, Colin would veer to the left and follow the old towpath that ran behind the Thirteen Drakes. He would not risk going to ground anywhere along the old canal for fear of being boxed in behind the shops.

I turned completely round and went back the way I’d come, making a broad sweeping turn into Shoe Street, where Miss Pickery, the new librarian, lived in the last cottage. I braked, dismounted, and, leaning Gladys against her fence, climbed quickly over the stile and crept into position behind one of the tall poplars that lined the towpath.

Just in time! Here was Colin hurrying towards me, and all the while looking nervously back over his shoulder.

“Hello, Colin,” I said, stepping directly into his path.

Colin stopped as if he had walked into a brick wall, but the shifting of his pale eyes, magnified like oysters by his thick lenses, signaled that he was about to make a break for it.

“The police are looking for you, you know. Do you want me to tell them where you are?”

It was a bald-faced lie: one of my specialties.

“N-n-n-no.”

His face had gone as white as tissue paper, and I thought for a moment he was going to blubber. But before I could tighten the screws, he blurted out: “I never done it, Flavia! Honest! Whatever they think I done, I didn’t.”

In spite of his tangle of words I knew what he meant. “Didn’t do what, Colin? What is it you haven’t done?”

“Nothin’. I ’aven’t done nothin’.”

“Where’s Brookie?” I asked casually. “I need to see him about a pair of fire irons.”

My words had the desired effect. Colin’s arms swung round like the vanes on a weathercock, his fingers pointing north, south, west, east. He finally settled on the latter, indicating that Brookie was to be found somewhere beyond the Thirteen Drakes.

“Last time I seen him ’e was unloading ’is van.”

His van? Could Brookie have a van? Somehow the idea seemed ludicrous—as if the scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz had been spotted behind the wheel of a Bedford lorry—and yet …

“Thanks awfully, Colin,” I told him. “You’re a wonder.”

With a scrub at his eyes and a tug at his hair, he was over the stile and up Shoe Street like a whirling dervish. And then he was gone.

Had I just made a colossal mistake? Perhaps I had, but I could hardly carry out my inquiries with someone like Colin drooling over my shoulder.

Only then did a cold horror of an idea come slithering across my mind. What if—

But no, if there’d been blood on Colin’s clothing, I’d surely have noticed it.

As I walked back to retrieve Gladys, I was taken with a rattling good idea. In all of Bishop’s Lacey there were very few vans, most of which were known to me on sight: the ironmonger’s, the butcher’s, the electrician’s, and so forth. Each one had the name of its owner in prominent letters on the side panels; each was unique and unmistakeable. A quick ride up the high street would account for most of them, and a strange van would stand out like a sore thumb.

And so it did.

A few minutes later I had pedaled a zigzag path throughout the village without any luck. But as I swept round the bend at the east end of the high street, I could hardly believe my eyes.

Parked in front of Willow Villa was a disreputable green van that, although its rusty panels were blank, had Brookie Harewood written all over it.

Willow Villa was aptly named for the fact that it was completely hidden beneath the drooping tassels of a giant tree, which was just as well since the house was painted a hideous shade of orange. It belonged to Tilda Mountjoy, whom I had met under rather unhappy circumstances a few months earlier. Miss Mountjoy was the retired Librarian-in-Chief of the Bishop’s Lacey Free Library where, it was said, even the books had lived in fear of her. Now, with nothing but time on her hands, she had become a freelance holy terror.

Although I was not anxious to renew our acquaintance, there was nothing for it but to open her gate, push my way through the net of dangling fronds, squelch through the mosses underfoot, and beard the dragon in her den.

My excuse? I would tell her that, while out bicycling, I had been overcome with a sudden faintness. Seeing Brookie’s van, I thought that perhaps he would be kind enough to load Gladys into the rear and drive me home. Father, I was sure, would be filled with eternal gratitude, etc., etc., etc.

Under the willow’s branches, lichens flourished on the doorstep and the air was as cool and dank as a mausoleum.

I had already raised the corroded brass knocker, which was in the shape of the Lincoln Imp, when the door flew open and there stood Miss Mountjoy—covered with blood!

I don’t know which of us was the most startled to see the other, but for a peculiar moment we both of us stood perfectly still, staring wide-eyed at each other.

The front of her dress and the sleeves of her gray cardigan were soaked with the stuff, and her face was an open wound. A few fresh drops of scarlet had already plopped to the floor before she lifted a bloody handkerchief and clapped it to her face.

“Nosebleed,” she said. “I get them all the time.”

With her mouth and nose muffled by the stained linen, it sounded as if she had said “I give them all the twine,” but I knew what she meant.

“Gosh, Miss Mountjoy,” I blurted. “Let me help you.”

I seized her arm and before she could protest, steered her towards the kitchen through a dark hallway lined with heavy Tudor sideboards.

“Sit down,” I said, pulling out a chair, and to my surprise, she did.

My experience with nosebleeds was limited but practical. I remembered one of Feely’s birthday parties at which Sheila Foster’s nose had erupted on the croquet lawn and Dogger had stanched it with someone’s handkerchief dipped in a solution of copper sulfate from the greenhouse.

Willow Villa, however, didn’t seem likely to have a supply of Blue Vitriol, as the solution was called, although I knew that, given no more than half a teacup of dilute sulfurie acid, a couple of pennies, and the battery from Gladys’s bicycle lamp, I could whip up enough of the stuff to do the trick. But this was no time for chemistry.

I grabbed for an ornamental iron key that hung from a nail near the fireplace and clapped it to the back of her neck.

She let out a shriek, and came halfway out of the chair.

“Easy now,” I said, as if talking to a horse (a quick vision of clinging to Gry’s mane in the darkness came to mind). “Easy.”

Miss Mountjoy sat rigid, her shoulders hunched. Now was the time.

“Is Brookie here?” I said conversationally. “I saw his van outside.”

Miss Mountjoy’s head snapped back and I felt her stiffen even more under my hand. She slowly removed the bloody handkerchief from her nose and said with perfect cold clarity, “Harewood will never set foot in this house again.”

I blinked. Was Miss Mountjoy merely stating her determination, or was there something more ominous in her words? Did she know that Brookie was dead?

As she twisted round to glare at me, I saw that her nosebleed had stopped.

I let the silence lengthen, a useful trick I had picked up from Inspector Hewitt.

“The man’s a thief,” she said at last. “I should never have trusted him. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“Can I bring you anything, Miss Mountjoy? A glass of water? A damp cloth?”

It was time to ingratiate myself.