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

I stepped into her bedroom and closed the door.

It was a room not totally unknown to me, since I often came here to filch chocolates and to have a good old rifle through her drawers. In design, it was much like my own: a great old barn of a place with high ceilings and tall windows; a place that seemed better suited to the parking of an aeroplane than the parking of one’s carcass for a good night’s sleep.

The greatest difference between this room and my own was that Feely’s did not have damp paper hanging in bags from the walls and ceiling: bags that during heavy rainstorms would fill up with cold, dripping water that turned my mattress into a soggy swamp. On those occasions, I would be forced to abandon my bed and spend the night, wrapped in my dressing gown, in a mousy-smelling wing chair that stood in the one dry corner of the room.

Feely’s bedroom, by contrast, was like something out of the cinema. The walls were covered with a delicate floral pattern (moss roses, I think) and the tall windows were bracketed with yards of lace.

A four-poster with embroidered curtains was dwarfed by the room, and stood almost unnoticed in a corner.

To the left of the windows, in pride of place, was a particularly fine Queen Anne dresser, whose curved legs were as slender and delicate as those of the ballet dancers in the paintings of Degas. Above it, on the wall, was fastened a monstrous dark-framed looking glass, too large by far for the dainty legs that stood beneath. The effect was rather Humpty Dumpty–ish: like an obscenely oversized head on a body with leprechaun legs.

I used Feely’s hairbrush to prop open the Bible on the dresser top. From the tire repair kit, I extracted a tin of magnesium silicate hydroxide, better known as French chalk. The stuff was meant to keep a freshly patched inner tube from sticking to the inside of the rubber tire, but this was not the application I had in mind.

I dipped one of Feely’s camel-hair makeup brushes into the French chalk and, with one last glance at the Bible for reference, wrote a short message across the mirror’s surface in bold letters: Deuteronomy 28:27.

That done, I pulled a handkerchief from my pocket and gently dusted away the words that I had written. I blew the excess chalk from where it had fallen on the dresser top, and wiped up the few traces that had drifted to the floor.

It was done! The rest of my plan was guaranteed.

It would unfold itself through the inexorable laws of chemistry, without my having to lift a finger.

When Feely next parked herself in front of the mirror and leaned in for a closer look at her ugly hide, the moisture of her warm breath would make visible the words that I had written on the glass. Their message would spring boldly into view:

Deuteronomy 28:27

Feely would be terror-stricken. She would run to look up the passage in the Bible. Actually, she might not: Since it had to do with personal grooming, she might already have the verse off by heart. But if she did have to search it out, this is what she would find:

The LORD shall smite thee with the boils of Egypt, and with the emerods, and with the scurvy, and with the itch, whereof thou canst not be healed.

As if the boils weren’t bad enough, “emerods” were hemorrhoids, the perfect added touch, I thought.

And if I knew my sister, she wouldn’t be able to resist reading the rest of the verse:

The LORD shall smite thee with madness, and with blindness, and with astonishment of heart; and thou shalt grope at noonday, as the blind gropeth in darkness, and thou shalt not prosper in thy ways: and thou shalt be only oppressed and spoiled alway, and there shall be none to save thee.

Feely would toss up her marmalade!

Having seen the message materialize before her very eyes, she’d believe it to be a telegram from God, and—by the Old Harry!—would she be sorry!

I could see it now: She’d fling herself down and grovel on the carpet, begging forgiveness for the rotten way she’d treated her little sister.

Later, she would appear at the dinner table, haunted, haggard, and shocked into silence.

I chortled as I skipped down the staircase. I could barely wait.

At the bottom, in the foyer, stood Inspector Hewitt.

FIFTEEN

THE INSPECTOR DID NOT look happy.

Dogger, who had only just let him in, closed the door silently, and vanished in the way he does.

“You should think about opening an auxiliary police station here at Buckshaw,” I said affably, trying to cheer him up. “It would certainly save on petrol.”

The Inspector was not amused.

“Let’s have a chat,” he said, and I had the impression that he was not entirely attempting to put me at my ease.

“Of course. I am at your disposal.”

I was capable of being gracious when I felt like it.

“About your discovery at the fountain—” he began.

“Brookie Harewood, you mean? Yes, that was awful, wasn’t it.”

The Inspector seemed startled.

Damn! Ten seconds into the game and I had already made a serious misstep.

“You know him, then?”

“Oh, everyone knows Brookie,” I said, recovering quickly. “He’s one of the village characters. At least—he was.”

“Someone you knew?”

“I’ve seen him about. Here and there, you know. In the village. That sort of thing.”

I was sewing an invisible seam between truth and untruth, a skill of which I was especially proud. One of the tricks of the trade when doing this is to volunteer fresh information before your questioner has time to ask another. So I went on:

“I had returned to the Palings, you see, because I was worried about Gry. Gry is the name of the Gypsy woman’s horse. I wanted to make sure he had food.”

This was not entirely true: Gry could have survived for weeks by nibbling the grass in the glade, but noble motives can never be questioned.

“Very commendable,” Inspector Hewitt said. “I had asked Constable Linnet to lay on some hay.”

I had a quick vision of PC Linnet producing an egg in the straw, but I banished it from my mind to keep from grinning.

“Yes, I noticed that when I got there,” I said. “And of course, I met Porcelain. She told me you had tracked her down in London.”

As I spoke, the Inspector produced a notebook, flipped it open, and began to write. I’d better watch my step.

“I didn’t think she’d be safe in the caravan. Not with whoever attacked her gram still wandering about. I insisted she come back with me to Buckshaw, and it was on our way here that we came across the body.”

I didn’t say “Brookie’s body” because I didn’t want to seem too chummy with him, which could only lead to more questions about our prior acquaintance.

“What time was that?”

“Oh, let me see—you were here when I got up, just around breakfast time—that was at about nine-thirty, I should say.”

The Inspector riffled back several pages in his notebook and nodded. I was on the right track.

“After that, Sergeant Graves came straightaway to take my fingerprints—ten-thirty—perhaps eleven?

“At any rate,” I went on, “Constable Linnet should be able to tell you what time I called to report it, which couldn’t have been much more than ten or fifteen minutes after we discovered the body in the fountain.”

I was stalling—treading water, delaying the time when he would inevitably ask about my so-called assault on Fenella. I decided to leap into the breach.

“Porcelain thinks I attacked her gram,” I said bluntly.

Inspector Hewitt nodded. “Mrs. Faa is very disoriented. It often happens with injuries to the head. I thought I’d made that quite clear to the granddaughter, but perhaps I’d best have another word—”

“No!” I said. “Don’t do that. It doesn’t matter.”

The Inspector looked at me sharply, then made another scribble in his notebook.

“Are you putting another P beside my name?”

It was a saucy question, and I was sorry as soon as I asked it. Once, during an earlier investigation, I had seen him print a capital P beside my name in his notebook. Maddeningly, he had refused to tell me what it meant.

“It’s not polite to ask,” he said with a slight smile. “One must never ask a policeman his secrets.”

“Why not?”

“For the same reason I don’t ask you yours.”

How I adored this man! Here we were, the two of us, engaged in a mental game of chess in which both of us knew that one of us was cheating.

At the risk of repetition, how I adored this man!

And that had been the end of it. He had asked me a few more questions: whether I had seen anyone else about, whether I had heard the sound of a motor vehicle, and so forth. And then he had gone.

At one point I had wanted to tell him more, just to prolong the pleasure of his company. He’d have been thrilled to hear about how I had caught Brookie prowling about our drawing room, for instance, to say nothing about my visits to Miss Mountjoy and to Brookie’s digs. I might even have confided in him what I’d found at Vanetta Harewood’s house in Malden Fenwick.

But I hadn’t.

As I stood musing in the foyer, the slight squeak of a shoe on tile caught my attention, and I looked up to find Feely staring down at me from the first-floor landing. She’d been there all along!

“Little Miss Helpful,” she sneered. “You think you’re so clever.”

I could tell by her attitude that she had not yet consulted her bedroom mirror.

“One tries to be of assistance,” I said, casually dusting a few stray smudges of French chalk from my dress.

“You think he likes you, don’t you? You think a lot of people do—but they don’t. No one likes you. There may be a few who pretend to, but they don’t—not really. It’s such a pity you can’t see that.”

Amplified by the paneling of the foyer, her voice came echoing all the way down from among the cherub-painted panels of the ceiling. I felt as if I were the prisoner at the bar, and she my accuser.

As always when one of my sisters turned on me, I felt a strange welling in my chest, as if some primeval swamp creature were trying to crawl out of my insides. It was a feeling I could never understand, something that lay beyond reason. What had I ever done to make them detest me so?

“Why don’t you go torture Bach?” I flung back at her, but my heart was not really in it.

It always surprises me after a family row to find that the world outdoors has remained the same. While the passions and feelings that accumulate like noxious gases inside a house seem to condense and cling to the walls and ceilings like old smoke, the out-of-doors is different. The landscape seems incapable of accumulating human radiation. Perhaps the wind blows anger away.

I thought about this as I trudged towards the Trafalgar Lawn. If Porcelain chose to go on believing that I was the monster who had bashed in her grandmother’s skull with—with what?

When I had found Fenella lying on the floor of the caravan, the inside of the wagon had been, except for the blood, as neat as a pin: no bloody weapon flung aside by her attacker: no stick, no stone, no poker. Which seemed odd.

Unless the weapon had some value, why would the culprit choose to carry it away?

Or had it been ditched? I’d seen nothing to suggest that it had.

Surely the police would have gone over the Palings with a microscope in search of a weapon. But had they found one?

I paused for a moment to stare up at the Poseidon fountain. Old Neptune, as the Romans called him, all muscles and tummy, was gazing unconcernedly off into the distance, like someone who has broken wind at a banquet and is trying to pretend it wasn’t him.

His trident was still held up like a scepter (he was, after all, the King of the Sea) and his fishnets lay in a tangle at his feet. There wasn’t a trace of Brookie Harewood. It was hard to believe that, just hours ago, Brookie had dangled dead here—his body a gruesome addition to the sculpture.

But why? Why would his killer go to the trouble of hoisting a corpse into such a difficult position? Could it be a message—some bizarre form of the naval signal flag, for instance?

What little I knew about Poseidon had been gained from Bullfinch’s Mythology, a copy of which was in the library at Buckshaw. It was one of Daffy’s favorite books, but since there was nothing in it about chemistry or poisons, it didn’t really interest me.

Poseidon was said to rule the waters, so it was easy enough to see why he was chosen to adorn a fountain. The only other waters within spitting distance of this particular Poseidon were the river Efon at the Palings and Buckshaw’s ornamental lake.

Brookie had been hung from the trident much like the way a shrike, or larder bird, impales a songbird on a thorn for later use—although it seemed unlikely, I thought, that Brookie’s killer planned to eat him later.

Was it a warning, then? And if so, to whom?

I needed to have a few hours alone with my notebook, but now was not the time. There was Porcelain to deal with.

I wasn’t finished with Porcelain. As a token of goodwill, I would not be put off by her childish behavior—nor would I take offense. I would forgive her whether she liked it or not.

I can’t claim that Gry was happy to see me arriving at the Palings, although he did look up for a moment from his grazing. A fresh bale of hay strewn nearby told me that Constable Linnet was on the job, but Gry seemed to prefer the green salad of weeds that grew along the river’s edge.

“Hello!” I shouted to the caravan, but there was no answer. The delicate instrument that was the back of my neck told me, too, that the glade was deserted.

I didn’t remember Porcelain locking the caravan when we left together, but it was locked now. Either she had returned and found the key, or somebody else had done so.

But someone had been here and—if I could believe my nose—quite recently.

Warmed by the sun, the wooden door was releasing an odor that did not belong here. As I would do in my laboratory with a chemical, I used my cupped fingers to scoop air towards my nostrils.

No doubt about it: A definite odor lingered near the door of the caravan—an odor that most certainly had not been on the outside of the caravan before: the smell of fish.

The smell of the sea.

SIXTEEN

“YOU’RE IN MY LIGHT,” Daffy said.

I had intentionally planted myself between her book and the window.

It was not going to be easy to ask my sister for assistance. I took a deep breath.

“I need some help.”

“Poor Flavia!”

“Please, Daff,” I said, despising myself for begging. “It’s about that man whose body I found at the fountain.”

Daffy threw down her book in exasperation. “Why drag me into your sordid little games? You know perfectly well how much they upset me.”

Upset her? Daff? Games?